unique timeline mostly based off Joker movie + elements from the comic Batman: Secrets
i. Hush Little Baby, Don't Say a Word
The Wayne factories were huge, shimmering things, filled with the continual rattle of moving conveyor belts and the rushing throng of men doing quick, precise work. They were an entrance into the underpinning of the world, an inside-out space, and Bruce was thrilled to know that he had finally, finally been allowed to visit. It was very, very loud, almost too loud, and he pinched the inside of his wrists to a purpled bruise to stifle the jittery screamy feeling filling up his chest, because this was the most interesting place he had ever been, and he wasn't going to be escorted out like a child and he certainly wasn't going to have a tantrum, not here in front of his father's people. So Bruce focused on the excited butterflies hopping through his toes and tried to ignore everything else, looking up, up, up to the empty, cool tones of the rafters, which were bathed in sunlight from the huge side windows casting their sparkling light onto the catwalks above.
"Bruce, don't dawdle," Thomas said, and Bruce hurried after him, listening intently to his father. "All men," Thomas explained to Bruce, as they passed the workers whose hands moved so fast they were almost a blur, "are like cogs in a machine, and that machine is Society. When each part works together, in efficient cooperation, we get Progress."
Bruce nodded. Just like a gear, the men's hands moved in breathtaking, powerful arcs, piecing together something immense.
"When they grumble or complain—the work stalls. Progress is lost. There's nothing but chaos. Without cooperation, without the cogs, the machine won't work."
"And the baby bottles won't get shipped," Bruce observed, astutely, staring up at the gleaming glass, each one a shining light of the Progress his father was talking about; each one a help for overworked women, for small, crying infants who would otherwise go hungry. Bruce understood.
His father beamed appreciatively, and Bruce knew he had done Well. His father gave him a clap to the shoulder, and Bruce felt the warmth of it sprinkle all the way down to his toes. "Someday, Bruce, all this will be yours."
/
The Waynes and the Elliots were in business together, and so in consequence Bruce knew Tommy Elliot more than just about any other kid his age. Bruce and Tommy had hours upon hours, some days, to hang around their respective manor houses. And Tommy—of course—would invariably say 'let's go outside' and Bruce would agree and then they were off like a shot.
Tommy didn't like it inside, Bruce thought. It was, perhaps, understandable. Inside they always had to sit upright and not fidget, be polite, never speak unless spoken to, and yet seem charming when cooed upon, somewhat like a sentient piece of furniture, or the Ambassador's wife. Inside, Tommy was all smiles, in contrast to Bruce's sober, quiet demeanor, and had an upright, attentive look to his gaze and posture that made people remark what a good boy he was.
Outside, Tommy rarely smiled. He smirked, quite frequently, with a cruel sort of mischief to it that reminded Bruce of firecrackers. Tommy liked to play hide-and-seek, only when he played it, there was a further twist that whoever won got to whip the other one with a switch, as an enemy of war.
Bruce was very proud of his ability to hide. When he searched, he usually managed to find Tommy. But when Tommy searched, he could never find Bruce.
That wasn't too much of a problem, though, because Bruce always came back when the time was up so they could play again. Sometimes he tried to grab the stick and take his rightful place as the one to thrash Tommy, which Tommy would allow willingly for a few moments with an insolent sort of smirk, using his scant inch on Bruce to look down on the skinnier boy. Then, all of a sudden, he would grab the switch from Bruce's hands and give chase, first in a grim silence and then, as they tumbled over the fields and the woods of their estates, wading through brambly patches and creeks, darting around deadfalls and brushing through tall grass that reached up to their heads, with a chorus of breathless shrieks and laughter and taunts that filled the otherwise still air with childish enthusiasm. And when Tommy had, inevitably, caught up with Bruce, he would use his right as conquering army to beat the hide off Bruce.
"No fair," Bruce would say. "I won."
"You won the first game. I won the second."
"Whatever," Bruce said, and conceded with a show of ungratefulness to Tommy's unassailable logic. The truth was it worked out well for both of them, since as much as Tommy had a simmering anger that nothing but rough play seemed to satisfy, Bruce had a craving for touch. It didn't really matter what touch, or how, either. He knew full well that getting whipped with a switch stung. He had hated it, the one and only time he'd had to suffer the humiliating experience at school. But with Tommy it was different, because Tommy didn't want to make him cry. Not from humiliation, anyway. Tommy just liked hearing the noise and watching the switch in his hand, and Bruce liked the zingy, buzzing feeling that it gave him as the switch hit home, and he liked most of all watching Tommy shaking in a kind of rage, eyes darkened, while Bruce felt a kind of fake-pretend fear in return. It was a superior type of pretend, Bruce thought, being the enemy to Tommy's conquering army, seeing the bright flare of a regard so focused it was almost unbearable, like a living buzzing wire against the trapped inside of his own ribs and beating—beating—within his heart like wings, like flight itself had inhabited him.
/
At dinner in the Elliot manor, Bruce and Tommy sat next to each other but did not speak. Misters Elliot and Wayne and the Ambassador would talk about business, while Martha would exchange a few pleasantries with Missus Elliot in the lulls, and talk about overseas fashion. The Ambassador's wife would smile and answer in a whisper a few times, if she was approached with conversation, which she really never was, on account of how quiet she was and the forbidding way her husband looked at anyone who tried.
Under the table, Bruce would write out his arithmetic homework with his fingers on his legs, over and over, until he could get lost in the loops and swirls of pressure.
Tommy was—perfect. Of course. But he was not Tommy. He was, Bruce had observed, never actually Tommy except when he was alone with Bruce. He was a Very Nice version of Tommy to his teachers and a rakish but good natured Tommy to his friends, but in the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Elliot he was not a Tommy at all, but an Ambassador's wife, so that when sitting in a dinner with both of them, Bruce had to continually remind himself not to stare in consequent amazement from one to the other: smartly-dressed not-Tommy with his hands barely grasping his fork, the Ambassador's wife with her doll-like expression and her fine dress and the elaborate concoction of her hair.
Bruce thought he knew why. There was just something… weird about Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, although he could never speak a word of it to his parents, on account of them being business partners and good friends.
When the men had gone off to one room to smoke and the women had retired to another and Bruce and Tommy were finally alone again, they would sneak out to the spot under the back porch, where there was a little gap that would allow you to wriggle into a wide, dark, underground sort of place—a real inside-out place. Only there, as they lay side by side staring up at the thin cracks of light from the porch slats above them but bathed in shadows, would Tommy say, "you have such wonderful parents, Bruce. Do you think—if something were to happen to mine—your parents would adopt me and we could be brothers?"
"I don't know," Bruce would say. "I hope so."
"They'd have to," Tommy would say, a little softer. "We look enough alike. We could be related already. I could be you, if I tried."
"You don't want to be me, Tommy," Bruce would say. He didn't know why Tommy, infinitely cooler and more worldly Tommy, would want to be Bruce. No one ever said, of Bruce, 'he is such a good boy.'
Instead, they said: 'are you sure there isn't something off about him? You know…' and sometimes, 'his poor family,' in hushed whispers, as though Bruce couldn't hear.
/
Bruce had been convinced, actually, that the Ambassador's wife was a real, living, mechanical doll and not a person, until he crashed into her one day outside the lavatory. He could be forgiven for crashing into her there, he thought, because it was out of the way on the top floor, near Tommy's room, and nowhere near any of the places reserved for guests.
He had been surprised to find she was actually made of skin, soft in their headlong collision, and he looked up into her painted unreal face which was for the first time contorted in emotion and not staring vacantly into space. Even more surprised at her harsh words: "get up, you horrible fucking creep, don't you have any manners—"
"I'm sorry, ma'am." Bruce pulled himself to his feet but did not stop staring at her in excited curiosity at the puzzle she'd just presented to him, a whole new version of the Ambassador's wife, an entire person that had been hiding in plain sight!
"Sorry—what a joke. This whole goddamn city. What the world even sees in its continued existence,"—he hadn't, before, even known the sound of her voice—
She had one hand curled around a cigarette butt and he realized she hadn't gone to the lavatory to powder her nose or relieve herself but to smoke. Seeing him looking she tipped it into her purse and zipped the bag up.
"They've got a plan, you know," she said. Bruce didn't know who They were but he could tell by the way she said it that They were important and powerful. "A way to cut Gotham from the rest of the country, boot it out with the rest of the filth, and good riddance—"
She almost shoved him. She might have, only whoever They were, They were obviously not powerful enough, because They weren't here. Here, in Gotham, in Elliot Manor, she was too terrified to strike the son and heir of a billionaire's fortune.
She stared down at him, face contorted, drawn up into a coiled presence of her entire body, legs and arms and core all one and trembling with suppressed movement, as though he encapsulated everything she hated about the world. As though he was Gotham Incarnate. Bruce was shaking. But, he realized, it wasn't at all fear. There was something like fear to it, but more powerful. He had all. Her. Attention.
He didn't think he'd ever had that from an adult before.
To his parents and the rest of the world he was a little boy. To her, the Ambassador's Wife, he was Everything.
She sneered at him, but turned and left first, as though facing something insurmountable in his own unmoving presence. And as she walked down the corridor, it was as though she faded, becoming the Ambassador's wife again right before his eyes like a disappearing act, before she'd even turned the corner.
/
Martha Wayne's favorite pearl necklace was one she wore every day, barring the need to dress up fancy in something that wouldn't match. That was how Bruce always pictured her: his mother, smelling a little, dustily, like the powders on her dressing table and with those pearls around her neck. Each one almost completely round. The necklace was worth a fortune, but even if Bruce had some vague idea of that, it wasn't why he liked it. He liked it because, when his mother tucked him to sleep at night, she would let him curl up beside her while she read him a story; and while she read, she would take off her necklace and let Bruce play with it. Each round smooth pearl. So soft under his fingers. So shiny, in an intriguing way. Passing his fingers from one pearl to the other they went bump bump bump… and back the other way, bump bump bump, with the nicest sensation and the prettiest colors under the opaque surface.
"Did you know," Martha said once, "why this necklace is my favorite?"
Bruce shook his head, eyes wide. She pointed down at the string. "A pearl necklace made of real pearls always has a little knot in between each pearl," Martha explained. "That way, if it breaks, you don't lose them all. It's how all necklaces with real pearls are made."
"But there aren't any knots in this necklace," Bruce said. He'd spent enough time peering at every detail of it to know.
"Exactly," Martha said, and smiled conspiratorially. "It was made for me by my sister when we were young, from an old dress of our grandmother's that was no longer wearable. She gave it to us, and my sister took off each pearl and strung them together to make two necklaces. One for me and one for her. She didn't know how pearl necklaces were usually made. It didn't even have clasps until I had them put on later… at first we just tied the ends by hand, every time we wanted to wear them."
Bruce looked down at the necklace. "But why didn't you have the string replaced when you did the clasps?" he asked.
"Because," Martha said, "this is the way my sister made it. And the fact that it isn't like all the others is why it's my favorite; and why it reminds me of her."
Bruce spooled the necklace into a swirl on his palm, watching it turn into a sea of cool, shining stones.
"I know you'll never wear it, but when you're older, Bruce, I want you to have it," Martha said. She kissed the top of Bruce's head. "My beautiful boy. I love you so much."
/
The game was called Being Bruce Wayne. Tommy had explained it to Bruce, once, and Bruce had only stared at him, dark eyes unreadable. Tommy didn't mind, though. He hadn't told Bruce to get a reaction, he just thought it was important that Bruce know. It was a game he played all the time; when he was around Bruce he played it by watching Bruce as carefully as he could and finding something to mimic…
At home, though, he mostly played it in his head.
"You took your time, Tommy," Marla said. "Didn't you hear your father say we were going to be late? What were you doing?"
Buttoning my shoes, mother, Tommy didn't say. Instead he just hurried up next to her in the entrance. I'm Bruce Wayne, he said to himself, and I don't care. I'm Bruce Wayne, and we're all going to see the movies together. It was what Bruce and his parents did every weekend. Tommy wished desperately that's what they were going to do. Instead, they were going driving. Every weekend during the summer father would drive out of Gotham so they could stay at the lake house. At the lake house there was no one around and nothing to do. Father would listen to the radio all day, drinking steadily as he did. In the mornings Tommy would swim in the lake—not because he wanted to, but because his mother would watch, frowning, from the porch, making sure his form was good, with his clothes folded up in a pile next to her. He could never stop swimming until she said so. When he took breaks, she would say, "recite your lessons to me." She didn't mean his school lessons, she meant his private ones, the ones she had taught him. (Said Aristotle: First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures…) Marla was a great proponent of philosophy. If someone is smart enough they can do anything; and she would sometimes talk about how it was because of her cleverness that she'd worked her way up from a nothing of a girl to a rich and powerful woman…
But Tommy never did say, that's not how you got where you are. You got there using your legs.
After that, they would go back into the lake house. The skeleton staff (only a cook and a housekeeper) would have come and gone, leaving the place spotless, and a white tablecloth over the table, which was piled with food. Sometimes, if things went well, Roger Elliot wouldn't take much note of him.
Things did not always go well.
"What are you looking at, boy?" The fly that landed on your collar.
"I'm sorry."
"Are you trying to be insolent?"
"No, I'm sorry."
He could feel his mother's gaze boring into him. I taught you better than this, it said. You know you did the wrong thing. I know. I'm sorry.
…and through imitation learns his earliest lessons…
Father dragged him into the other room, throwing him on the floor and reaching for his cane, and Tommy screwed his eyes shut and played Being Bruce Wayne.
Bruce Wayne had wonderful parents. Bruce Wayne was never scared or cowardly. Bruce Wayne never pretended to be someone else. He was always Bruce; just Bruce. If I were Bruce Wayne, Tommy thought, I wouldn't cry.
/
ii. I Shall Become A Bat
Things break upon the lines they are made. Another pearl necklace, one like all the other real pearl necklaces, would have broken in two where the mugger yanked it with his gun; but this one scattered. Bruce didn't hear anything past the ringing of the gunshot, not at first, but somehow in his head he could still hear the plink, plink, plink of the pearls falling. He caught a glimpse of a clown mask, staring at him horribly, before the mugger pulled it off, threw it on the ground and ran. There were sirens on the streets, and screams. Fires racing their way through Gotham. No one but Bruce heard the gunshot, and when all the sound in him shriveled up to a small tight space in his chest, like a piece of grit had been lodged there, and he fell to his knees, no one spoke to him. His mother was already dead. His father looked at him, and tried to speak over the horrible rattle in his lungs. Blood pooled and bubbled from his open mouth. And with a small, aborted spasm, as though he had been reaching for his son, Father died too.
It smelled. But Bruce didn't notice the smell after a while. Through the blur of tears over his eyes, all he saw was little round bubbles of pearls floating in a sea of red. He staggered to his feet, picked them up one by one.
Things break as they are made. An ordinary child might break along the pull in their life's string: right here. Bruce… shattered. Pearls in his slippery hand, he shoved them into his pocket and thought about walking into the mob and letting happen what would. He thought about calling for help. He thought about the pearls, and the clown mask that he stepped carefully around. He thought, and thought, and thought, and when he walked back in between his parents' bodies and curled up, drifting into a fitful sleep in their embrace, he was still thinking. But his thoughts were not the ordered things they used to be. Instead, they were a buzzing river, encompassed by the darkness of that fitful underworld, the night.
James Gordon, known as Jim to everyone who knew him, was the only one who stayed. The other cops took note of the bodies, on that long and endless morning After, under a grey and morbid sky. When they realized Bruce was alive, at four o'clock under a seething drizzle, the other cops had dragged Bruce, screaming, from his parents' bodies. He was like a wild thing, they said. They pushed him into the back of a squad car and left him there, where the door locked from the outside, while he screamed and beat his hands upon the glass. Then, like a mirage or a reflection, Jim Gordon stepped closer. Bruce noticed, first, his strong and steady build, and the way he tilted his head down to look at Bruce. Bruce blinked the tears from his eyes, his throat scratched hoarse, and looked at the cop outside the glass. Jim looked back. Slowly, the cop held out his hand and pressed it against the window, and the warmth of his hand melted the frost mist that had built up over the surface. He stayed there. He didn't ask Bruce any questions. He just stayed.
/
Bruce had nothing but Bad Days for a while after that. It was out of the question that he would go to school. Even Alfred couldn't control him. Bruce's few friends dwindled. Bruce did not grieve gently. He did not, as Society expected, cry into his pillow. He was not the perfect orphan. If anyone thought to pity him, they soon changed their minds, upon having to be in his presence. It was really for the best that Alfred let everyone else go. And Bruce, like a poltergeist, would tear through the entire manor, as though he was running from something, but the something was inside him. That piece of grit that had gotten lodged in his stomach when he saw his parents die. He broke things. He broke many things, and then cried bitterly about them. He vowed never to break things again when he broke his mother's vase and realized suddenly that mother would never be able to buy a new vase, because mother was dead. He had a screaming fit on the floor, when he realized it. He tried to put the pieces together and cut himself, bloody red furrows across his hands.
Alfred did not even know he'd been injured until, days later, he found the pile of broken shards, with blood along their edges.
/
Tommy, though, was different. He didn't take warnings. He came against Alfred's injunctions. He sat on the floor across from Bruce in one of the empty ballrooms. Light from the French doors careened into the solemn, quiet space, across the geometrics of the floor.
"I'm sorry, Bruce," he said. Bruce didn't say anything, but only stared at him. The hollow pit of his life had swallowed up any need for company. He wanted Tommy to go away.
Perhaps, if he stayed still and quiet enough, the way he had once been able to do so well, he would turn into another statue, and Tommy would leave.
Tommy chattered along in the silence, his words bouncing off the pit around Bruce's life. It did not deter him.
/
During the next summer, Tommy got a growth spurt. He was suddenly spindly, too big and clumsy for his own limbs, and his temper got short. It was summer, and outside they played in the grasses, but their games had become darker. Now, instead of chasing each other, they played Tracking Prey. Bruce was never sure which of them had invented it. It seemed to have come to pass in the middle of their own back and forth, words tumbling over each other until their thoughts were appearing between them like a new thing, a Bruce-and-Tommy thought that didn't belong to either of them. But they both agreed immediately that whichever one of them had first voiced it, it was a brilliant idea.
They practiced creeping up on mice and birds. Tommy bragged he could catch one, one of these days, he could catch one in his hands, and he did, and they fought over it. The bird got away.
The next bird Tommy caught, they fought over, and the bird got away.
Bruce was not as good at Tracking Prey as he'd been at hide and seek. It was the only game they thought about any more, and he became convinced that he needed to beat Tommy at this. But he wasn't sure how. Each time Tommy beat him at it fair and square, he could feel the buzzing, horrible ANGER. It had not gone away since his parents' death and it told him he should kick Tommy as hard as he could. The only time he had tried, Tommy had kicked him, back, and punched him, and slapped him until there was a red mark upon his face, and spit at him. It wasn't fun, the way hide and seek had been. They nursed their bruises and gave each other wounded expressions. But by the end of the day they had made up.
Still. Bruce knew he had to beat Tommy by any means necessary. That was why he sneaked into the house and found his father's gun.
They played with it in jest, at first, but Bruce insisted he could shoot a bird with it.
"Yeah? So do it. Show me, then, if you aren't a scaredy cat."
"I'm not a scaredy cat."
"Chicken."
"Not a chicken."
Bruce aimed the gun to prove it. They crept into the long grasses, and Bruce—shot. The. Bird.
BANG
It was the same loud nothing as in the alley. The bird was in blood and the gun in his hands felt suddenly hot. He swayed. He felt sick. The bird was dead. It lay in blood. It was broken and dead.
"Give me a turn!"
"No," Bruce said.
"Hey, no fair, you got to kill one, I want to!"
"No!" Bruce screamed. He swung around, and somehow the gun was pointing at Tommy. Something was buzzing and screaming in him. His arms and legs felt dis-attached. He wanted to pull the trigger again just to make Tommy stop but the blood, the blood—the bird was dead. He felt guilty, as though he had been the one to send those pearls flying. He threw the gun down and ran.
/
He tripped, and fell. The old cave systems sometimes came close to the surface, especially after a rain. Bruce was good at avoiding the uncertain ground, but he was not thinking. He fell, broke his arm, and lay in the cool darkness of a cave while the bats shrieked around him. He felt something, for the first time in a long time, that wasn't the ANGER. It was almost like fear, but it wasn't fear, because it was as chilling and fresh as cold lemonade and at once Bruce recalled that he was alive. That he cared that he was alive. The bats screamed around him and beat their wings, and it was like the pounding of his heart, a crawling, spiraling force. It was horrible and he needed it. He hated it and he wanted it. He felt as though a piece of himself that had gotten shot off in the alley like a lost pearl had come back to him with wings.
He cried. Great, terrible, gulping, heaving things. Sad, snotty, horrible, wrenching things. Ugly, angry, bitter, nasty things. Cold, tired, clean, restful things. He cried for hours, and the too-muchness of his grief that had been festering in him for half a year was pulled into the cave walls, which were encompassing enough, and did not judge. Then he pulled himself to his feet and climbed, gritting his teeth against the pain in his broken arm which made him almost faint as he used it to grab handholds, and before sundown he had pulled himself from the ground, covered in dirt. The detailing the sun's last, orange rays made on the grasses were like liquid metal. The whole grounds swayed softly in an encompassing silence. He sat and watched, just being another creature waiting in the twilight.
And then, the beam of a flashlight caught his eyes. Flinching, he startled back; it was Alfred and Tommy, searching for him; and their voices were worried and hoarse. He felt dizzy again, and suddenly remembered the pain in his arm. He retched, and didn't protest being dragged to his feet between them or the hug they both put around him.
He hadn't thought any tears were left, but still, he sobbed, quietly, into their arms; and as the sun dipped into the hollows around them and left the whole group in a clear moonlit darkness, Alfred carried him back home, while Tommy's hand curled in Bruce's own.
.
.
.