Chapter Text
Gotham was a strange city. Darkness crept around the corners quickly as the day ended, the shadows growing longer faster than they should have. At dawn and dusk, the sky bled crimson, leaving the buildings to stand as black silhouettes.
The gargoyles in particular were a point of curiosity for those who came to visit the city. They stared at the rooftops and the gothic arches decorating City Hall and various other buildings in Gotham’s Old Town, each of them housing its own crouching, snarling creatures.
Crossing the rivers to reach Gotham, some felt almost as though that they were entering into another country; something separate from the continental United States. The tourists were not alone in that feeling. Many of Gotham’s residents considered themselves Gothamites first, and Americans second.
The people nurtured by this strange, shadowed city tended to be equally strange and shadowed. Crime rates in Gotham were higher than nearly anywhere else in the country – even as the glamorous parties of Gotham’s elite hosted dozens of old money families worth billions.
And the crimes themselves were strange. There were the pickpockets and muggings, and the crimes of passion and greed; but there was also a glut of serial murders and strange, occult killings. The Asylum on the outskirts of the city housed more mad scientists than one could reasonably expect – and, occasionally, their experiments.
Martha Wayne knew the darknesses of her gilded city well. Her mother had whispered them to her as a child, the old tales and legends.
The realm of the dead lies in the direction of the setting sun, Elizabeth told her daughter. Never enter the Swamp to the west.
Darkness rises up between the cracks in the cement in the Old City, because the Gates of Hell lie sealed there. Elizabeth whispered the name of the demon who had come through the open gates once, and only once: Barbatos, she breathed.
The Court of Owls rules this city, Elizabeth warned. Never cross them. Never speak their name.
Guard your shadow well, for it hides all that you would never speak aloud; and you can never be free of it.
Guard my shadow? Martha had asked. How am I supposed to guard a shadow? It’s nothing more than a bit of blocked light. A silhouette.
Silly girl, Elizabeth sighed. Your shadow is the silhouette of your soul.
Martha doubted her mother’s eccentric tales as a child. Oh, the stories were real enough. The other girls at school whispered about the tales of zombies in the swamps and gargoyles coming to life.
But to think it was real? Plants and statues that came to life? The curse that killed people who did forbidden things? The vampires living in the basements of churches?
Ghost stories, Martha derided in her mind. She preferred her detective novels and scientific treatises, those things with proper, logical explanations. She nodded along to her mother’s absurd little lessons, and occupied her time in the library, dreaming of a future at university – in forensic science, maybe.
And so it was, until the day Martha’s father accepted a contract to drain a section of Somerset Swamp, in order to collect and research some of the unusual compounds found in the flora and fauna there.
Somerset Swamp, also known colloquially as Slaughter Swamp, where the dead rose and the trees walked.
*
Martha walked in through the back door, passing through the empty kitchen before heading upstairs to her room.
The sound of raised voices stopped her in her tracks. She stepped closer to the crack in her father’s office door, her school bag slung over her shoulder.
“ – are a damn fool, Roderick.”
“Watch how you speak to me, woman.”
“You’ll leave us ruined!”
“For God’s sake, Elizabeth – this contract could be worth millions. We’ll have our fortune back!”
“We wouldn’t need it back if you didn’t gamble it all away in the first place – ”
“Elizabeth!”
“ – leaving us to take out loan after loan on the fucking house, putting Martha in public school – ”
“Elizabeth!” Roderick’s voice rose, sounding well and truly angry.
Martha had gathered bits and pieces of this before, of the dwindling Kane fortune as business went badly, again and again.
The kitchen wasn’t always empty in this house. There had been a staff, a housekeeper named Mrs. Florescu. She used to sneak Martha sweets. She had told Martha once as a young child that her surname meant ‘flowers’ in Romanian, and from then on, Martha had called her Mrs. Flowers. She had vanished one day when Martha was eight.
“ – and now you would leave your wife and daughter destitute!”
“Stop with your damn dramatics, Elizabeth. I don’t have time for your idiotic superstitions. This deal is going through whether you like it or not, so I suggest you get over it.”
Martha pressed against the wall by the door’s hinges as she heard footsteps draw near.
“Three days, Roderick.”
“What?” Roderick sounded exasperated.
Elizabeth’s voice was eerie, flat and intense at the same time. “In three days, at the stroke of midnight, death will come for you.”
Roderick’s voice shook. “Elizabeth, I swear to God – ”
Martha didn’t hear anymore. She fled up the stairs. In her room, she sat and listened to her own breathing, wondering why her mother’s absurd pronouncement left her feeling so sick to her stomach.
*
The next morning, Martha came down after her father had left for work, only to find her mother surrounded by boxes and piles of their belongings. She had torn down the curtains and folded them with all the nice tablecloths, pulled out all the silverware and what was left of the nice china.
“Mother, what – ”
“Good,” Elizabeth interrupted. “You’re here. You can strip the bed in the spare room, then start on the attic. It’s a bit cramped up there for me.”
Martha stared at her.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Elizabeth looked up, and met her daughter’s eyes straight on. “I know you were listening last night. We won’t be able to keep the house. Better to pack now and set aside what we can sell.”
Martha’s mouth opened and closed, speechless. Finally, she found her words. “You’re insane!”
Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. “Be that as it may, you’re going to help me pack.” She pointed. “Spare bed. Now.”
Martha’s lips quivered in anger and consternation. She thought about walking out on this idiocy, but – some part of her was oddly convinced that Elizabeth was right somehow.
She took a breath, and stomped off to do as her mother said, thinking to herself that it was better than going to school for the day, at least.
*
They spent the next two days stripping the house to a skeleton of its former self. Roderick walked in and out, scoffing in disgust at his wife’s antics.
On the third day, Elizabeth waved Martha off, holding a bottle some of the only good wine they still had in the house.
“The rest of it tomorrow, love,” she said, a hint of resigned sadness spilling through the determined mania of the past few days. “You should see your father off to work.”
Martha watched silently as Elizabeth took a pull of the bottle, then left to tell her father good-bye.
It wasn’t really the last time she would see him, she told herself. He would come home, and in the morning he would be fine, and that would be the end of her mother’s delusion.
She went and said good-bye anyway, and gave him a hug. He hugged her back, distracted, and told her to be good in school that day.
Martha watched from the window as he left.
Everything would be fine.
*
The evening came and went. Roderick didn’t come home, but it wasn’t unusual for him to work late.
The darkness outside the windows grew deeper. Martha sat in a silent vigil with her half-drunk mother.
It was all quite stupid. But the pit in her stomach grew and grew as the night went on.
Midnight came. Roderick had still not come home.
Elizabeth sighed deeply as the clock struck twelve, and polished off what was left of the bottle in her hand. She stood and held her hand out to her daughter. “Come on,” she said softly. “They’ll be here soon.”
Martha took her mother’s hand, and followed her to the front room.
Within the hour, there was a knock on the door.
Elizabeth opened it, and two police officers waited there to tell her the news.
Roderick Kane was dead. A heart attack, they said. If Mrs. Kane wanted to come to the hospital to make arrangements for the body…? In the morning, perhaps?
“No,” Elizabeth said. “We’ll go now.”
*
The hospital was quiet, this late at night. Roderick lay in an empty room, covered by a sheet.
While her mother talked to the other adults, Martha snuck a peek at the papers left near her father’s bedside.
There. The time of death was recorded as…12:00 AM. Midnight exactly.
Martha stared at the lump under the sheet.
How had she known?
*
They returned home hours later, the world outside still shrouded in darkness. Martha felt her lack of sleep keenly. Coupled with the buzzing something in her veins, it left her feeling unbalanced.
Martha shut the door behind herself. Her ears rang as her mother toed off her shoes.
“How did you know?” Martha said, her voice too loud in the silence. “How did you know?”
Elizabeth looked at her with that expression that was so frustrating, the one that condescended even as it asked, ‘Isn’t it obvious?’
“You knew too, didn’t you?” Elizabeth asked.
Martha shook her head. “What? No.”
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “Did you know that the words ‘witch’ and ‘wise’ share a common origin?”
Martha’s brow furrowed at the strange tangent.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Witches, wise women – same thing. Women who knew more than was good for them. Women with the fire of knowledge in our blood, the kind stolen from gods.”
“…Our blood?”
“You’re thirteen years old. Do you still not know what you are?”
Martha shook her head in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”
“You’re a witch, Martha. As I am, and my mother was, and her mother, and her mother, and her mother. Witches have been in Gotham since the beginning. We built Gotham. I’ve told you the stories.”
“About – about demons, and cults and – and swamp zombies, not – ”
“How do you think you summon a demon, girl? You need witches to summon a demon, and to seal one away.”
“Then do some magic. If you’re a witch, prove it. Do some magic.”
“That’s not how it works, Martha.”
Martha threw her hands up in disbelief. “What do you mean, that’s not how it works?!”
Elizabeth sat down in one of the chairs they’d moved into the front hall. “I told you, it’s in the blood. We don’t do magic. We are magic.”
Against her will, Martha felt tears burn in her throat. It was just all too much. It was too absurd. Her father was dead, and her mother was sitting here insisting they were witches, of all things.
“Don’t you know things, Martha?”
Martha looked up, to find her mother looking straight into her eyes. “You know things. You know things you have no reason to know. You know that everything I’ve said is true. You just don’t believe it.”
Elizabeth hoisted herself up. “Women like us will always be left to stand on our own in this world. The best thing you can do for yourself is learn to trust yourself.”
Martha watched her, silent, as Elizabeth climbed the stairs to the bedroom.
*
Within the next week, they’d had to move out of the house and build a new life for themselves. A much harder life.
Over time, Martha learned that her mother was right. She had to trust herself above all, trust the instinct inside her that could see the world clearly. She learned that she knew when people wanted to hurt her, and when they wanted her. She knew when bad things were coming, and knew if they could be avoided. Most times, they couldn't.
Sometimes, she could see people’s fates hanging around them like a cloud. Fate, she learned, was less a predetermined outcome, and more the inevitable result of a person’s own nature. Eventually, a person’s own choices trapped them into futures that could never be escaped, because people could never escape themselves.
Martha went to university, exactly as she had once dreamed.
Her mother was dead, by then. Martha was left to stand on her own, to carve out a life for herself. She earned her Master’s degree in Chemistry, with a concentration in Forensic Science.
She might have made a career of it, too, except in her last year at her prestigious and pretentious Ivy League school, she met Thomas Wayne.
In the instant she met this man’s eyes, Martha knew she had met the man she was going to marry. There was that cloud of fate on it all.
It meant going back to Gotham. Martha had hoped she could leave the city behind forever.
(Her mother would have laughed. It was a fool’s dream. Gotham was in their blood, and they were bound to the city in more ways than one. She was already feeling the itch to return.)
But Thomas was a good man, and he dreamed of making Gotham better. He was old money, the scion of one of Gotham’s founding families, the heir to a fortune of ridiculously large proportions, and yet, he was going to medical school to become a surgeon. He had all these plans and visions to build hospitals, and parks, to save the city and its people.
Thomas was a good man, and he loved her. She loved him.
So Martha married him. She went home to Gotham, and said ‘I do,’ and felt her fate be sealed.
*
For all his goodness, Thomas belonged to Gotham just as much as Martha did. Gotham owned his family too, the claim of it twined in his blood and bones and history.
Martha told him nothing of demons and witchcraft, because that was not the world Thomas lived in. He just knew he had a duty to the city and its people.
They lived their picture-perfect lives, the doctor-billionaire and his beautiful, charming, charitable wife, striving to make the city better day by day.
(Martha kept a chemistry lab in the backyard, and every so often, her findings were sent as an anonymous tip to the GCPD. She needed something to occupy her besides all the galas and balls, after all.)
Years later, when their son was born, Martha smiled and cried as she looked at him, because he was beautiful and perfect and fate shrouded his shoulders in a way she had never seen before. She didn’t know what he might become, but she knew the city would claim him. Bruce belonged to Gotham, just like both his parents.
In this, the blood would always run true.
Still, Martha hoped she could protect Bruce from his future as long as possible. She didn’t tell him the stories that she herself had been raised on, instead encouraging his interests that so mirrored her own as little girl.
Detective novels, and that Gray Ghost superhero, and an intense fascination with the little crawling creatures that lived outdoors. (The number of times that boy brought home frogs.)
But then.
*
When Bruce was six years old, he came crying to his parents’ bedroom, with the family butler, Alfred, on his heels.
In tears, Bruce haltingly described his nightmares of a strange bat-creature with no face, and claws, and enormous leathery wings.
Martha’s blood ran cold.
Bruce had been having these nightmares for more than a month, he admitted. The creature had been – watching him. But tonight, it…
Though he tried, Bruce couldn’t find the words to describe what it was about tonight’s nightmare that had shaken him so.
Thomas soothed their son, assuring him that it was just a dream, that there were no bat-creatures out to get him. That bats were really quite fascinating, actually! Did Bruce know about echolocation, yet? Or that bats could catch thousands of insects in a single night?
Martha sat in silence, as Thomas coaxed little smiles out of Bruce and Alfred watched with a relieved look on his face. Her eyes drifted to the wall, to the shadows cast there by the bedside lamp.
And Bruce’s shadow – it shifted.
The faint, fuzzy outline of a child deepened, growing darker as though ink pooled in its center. Martha watched in horror as the points of bat-like wings unfolded halfway, then tucked in as though they were settling into place.
Her mother’s words came back to her: Your shadow is the silhouette of your soul.
*
“Why don’t we just leave this place?” Martha cried out, frustrated. She was sixteen, feeling suffocated by a city rife with darkness that she was still learning to see. “The curse took Father, and it’s left us with nearly nothing – why in the world are we staying?!”
Elizabeth looked up at her daughter, unimpressed. “Try to leave, then,” she offered. “See how it goes.”
Martha stared at her mother, nonplussed.
Elizabeth turned her attention back to the seam she was fixing. “It’s part of the curse, girl. We belong to Gotham. You can leave if you want. But you’ll be back before long.”
Martha lifted her hands in frustration. “But why? Why us?”
“I told you once, Martha,” Elizabeth said, not looking up. “It takes witches to seal a demon away.”
“You also said that witches can’t even do magic, so I don’t see what good we’d do against any demon,” Martha said, reproachful. “And what does that have to do with anything?”
Elizabeth nodded, ignoring her question. “And what else did I say?”
“That we are magic. It’s in our blood. Yes, I remember, Mother. So what?”
“Think about it, Martha.”
Martha inhaled, closing her eyes in frustration.
And then she thought about it.
The pieces shifted around in her mind. Blood, magic, a demon sealed away, and witches who couldn’t leave the city.
And then, with a flash of insight, she understood, and the knowledge settled in her like she'd always known it.
Martha opened her eyes, horrified.
“Our blood is the seal,” she whispered. “That’s why we can’t leave.”
*
The shadow on the wall faded, becoming something perfectly ordinary once more.
But still, Martha sat frozen, watching the space where the wings had been.
Her lips silently formed the name that she had never dared to speak.
Barbatos.
*
Your shadow is the silhouette of your soul, and you can never be free of it.