Work Text:
Bruce bolts awake to the sound of an alarm. It’s not the soft chines of his morning wakeup. This is the sharp beep beep beep of an emergency. The kind of emergency that requires him to be up immediately.
He’s rolled out of bed before he’s even fully awake, already pulling open the hidden compartment in his dresser. He’s pulling on his under-clothes body armor before he’s even fully awake, movements quick and precise.
His brain is focused on the tone of the beeps. Extra long to start the sequence. Two long, three short.
Identity compromised. Maybe his. Maybe one of the boys, and Bruce grabs his cellphone off the desk right as it gives him a text alert. He reads it on his way down to the cave, wasting no time.
Dick: Bruce, stay in bed.
Bruce doesn’t have time to stay in bed. He has an emergency on his hands.
He makes it to the computer, sliding into the seat before anyone calls him. He silences the alarm with a touch of the button, already awake and alert.
“Give me the situation,” he says, and the artificial voice of the computer doesn’t even pause.
“Batman Bruce Wayne is currently trending on social media for the Gotham area.”
Bruce feels sick. He’s lived for years with the secret, and now it’s been blasted across the entire internet for everyone to see. What gave it away? He racks his brain, trying to come up with a mistake, but there’s nothing. Anything minor was months ago.
“Find the original source,” he says. “Newspaper articles preferred.”
His phone rings. The display tells him that it’s a newspaper. He has no idea how they got his number.
He turns the phone off. Anyone important can call him over the comms if needed.
Bruce flips to his social media setup, the thing that lets him see exactly what’s going on in Gotham. It’s a sleek system, intended to give him the best view of all the most important things, and allowing him to narrow it down as needed. Broad is what he wants right then. How far has it spread?
Bruce stares in confusion, unable to process what he’s seeing.
There is a photo of him kissing Batman.
Not as Batman. No, this is something else entirely. This is a photo of him in the middle of a passionate kiss with Batman.
Bruce wonders if he’s hallucinating.
It takes him a moment to realize he recognizes half the pose. The him that isn’t in a cowl is in the exact same pose he was when the paper took the picture of him kissing Miss January for the charity calendar. He has to pull it up to check, but it’s identical.
Someone has photoshopped a photo of him kissing Batman.
Bruce makes a small noise.
“I have identified the source,” the computer says.
“Show me.”
Bruce wishes he hadn’t said it.
The story, as he discovers, starts with a mural. Bruce has no idea who commissioned it, or who the artist is, but someone on the east end of Gotham thought it would be a nice idea to put up a mural. On one side, Batman, Gotham’s Knight. On the other side, Bruce Wayne, Gotham’s Elite.
The mural isn’t bad, but the comments are all pretty universal: It sure looks like the two are staring longingly into each other’s eyes.
It is, in the words of most commentators, ‘pretty gay’.
But the mural is hardly a wave. It’s the news article which Bruce is pretty sure has just ruined his life.
A news article by the Gotham Globe.
A newspaper that he owns.
The top of the article starts with a standard enough disclosure that Bruce Wayne owns the paper. It ends with an editors note.
Sorry, Bruce. - PW
The article seems custom made to test Bruce’s promise that the newspaper would remain independent, and that he wouldn’t bias their coverage. He’s pretty sure the editor planned the entire thing specifically to prove that.
But the entire thing has blown wildly out of proportion. Bruce can see retweets from countries on the other side of the world, laughing hysterically about the entire thing.
About the fact that a newspaper owned by Bruce Wayne wrote an entire article about the steamy world of Batman ‘shipping’, and put forward their own suggestion: Bruce Wayne and Batman.
Every successive paragraph somehow makes it worse.
There is fanart. There is fanfiction. Someone has pulled out a photo of him being carried bridal style by Batman, staring up at him. The photo is not a photoshop. Bruce remembers that exact situation. He’d just fallen off a roof after being kidnapped. He’s pretty sure it’s Dick in the suit, covering for him.
The computer alerts him there is a new article.
He opens it, heart filled with dread.
The article poses a simple question: What color is Batman’s hair?
Several people speculate that it must be black, because otherwise it might peek out from under the cowl. Several people are insistent he should be blond.
The article includes a variety of sample images, highlighting possible different looks.
In several of them, Bruce is featured, held lovingly in Batman’s arms.
Bruce goes back to his social media hub. There are more pictures. Some are well done photoshops. Some are not so well done photoshops. There is a lot of art. Some of it is very explicit.
Alfred finds him in the cave with his face buried in his arms as he leans against the desk. He pats him gently on the back, the picture of support.
“Think of the positives, Master Bruce,” he says. “The only time anyone’s going to say that Bruce Wayne is Batman is in reference to that twenty thousand word fanfic where you’re forced to take up your lover’s cowl after he’s kidnapped.”
Bruce wonders if he can will himself out of existence.