Work Text:
He doesn’t know why he does this.
It’s dark and it’s cold. His jacket is not nearly heavy enough, even with a sweatshirt under it. It rained earlier, and the grass is damp. It’s soaking through his jeans. They’re not sturdy enough. He could get frostbite. He could get hypothermia. He could get mugged on his way home. He’s not sure he cares.
There are rows and rows of tombstones before him. Gray, foreboding, almost oppressive. Perhaps taunting him about the fact that he’s never found one with his own surname on it, much less one also bearing a death date within the first few years of his life. Even the pastel flowers and teddy bears and the like, meant to soften death’s crushing blow, only taunt him further. He knows he’ll never be able to do that—to pay his respects to the people who gave him life, or to find where they lie and curse them for it. He has read the inscription on every one of these tombstones, every single grave marker in Gotham, and not once has he found his answer.
He never will. He knows that. He is nothing if not a thinker, a solver of puzzles, and for as much time as he has spent trying to solve this particular puzzle, he has spent equal time thinking of a million reasons why it is wholly unsolvable. The lack of his surname means nothing, for instance. It’s entirely possible and perhaps even likely that his parents weren’t married. It would have been a fitting beginning for him to have come into this world by a woman who was utterly, despairingly, alone. In that case, his mother’s surname was not his own, but something he’d never even think to look for. Perhaps she’s been hiding in plain sight all these years. Perhaps he’s stopped at her grave and read her name and thought nothing of it. Perhaps it’s tortured her. Perhaps she wishes he would move on faster. Really, he knows she doesn’t think anything, because she is dead, and death is final.
He knows it’s possible his surname isn’t even his father’s, but something assigned to him by the city when he turned up at the orphanage. A construction. An artifice. Tied to no family but Gotham itself. Perhaps he has it all wrong—perhaps she is his mother, or his father. A cold, cruel, unfeeling one. Perhaps that’s all he deserves.
But he knows he’s still human. He feels the winter wind stinging his skin. He feels it wrenching tears from his eyes. He cries sometimes. He is flesh and blood and feeling. He knows he must have had real human parents once, to bestow on him this flesh and blood and feeling and life, given to him raw and real and ugly without any guidance on what to make of it. Perhaps they’ve been in front of him this whole time, whether right next to each other or separated for the rest of eternity, just as alone as he is. Perhaps they’ve been watching him pass by under a fake name, their own flesh and blood living a lie. Perhaps they hate his name. Perhaps they wish they could tell him the truth. Perhaps they’re relieved they didn’t pass their name on to someone like him. They are dead. He doesn’t know what they would think.
He doesn’t like when he doesn’t know. He likes to solve puzzles. He likes to put the pieces together. He likes closure and he likes answers. But he will never have an answer.
So he knows why he does this. He’s sitting on the ground, staring at the gravestones in front of him and letting the rain seep into his bones like it does to the bones of those underground, because he knows nothing else but that his parents are under that ground. He will never know their names or their stories or whether their names or their stories were even worth knowing in the first place, but he knows they are under this ground. They are dead, and death is final, but this is the only thing he knows. This is where he comes from. This is who he is. It’s comforting to focus on what he knows. In a way, he’s in communion with them. He’s touching them. He knows their existence—non-existence, that is—is just as empty as his own. He supposes it’s the circle of life. It’s what he knows.
He tries not to think about the possibility that he doesn’t know. That they aren’t under this ground, in a karmic cycle in which hollow people are begotten by hollow people, hollowed out by death’s scythe in a gesture of gruesome fairness. That their son sits, shivering, on the wet ground of a graveyard communing with strangers while they are out in the world living a life entirely separate from the one they gave him. That they gave him life and immediately thrust him into unimaginable hell. That they gave him up. That he is entirely unwanted. That he doesn’t cross their minds while he spends nearly every day imagining who they might be.
That they know. That he doesn’t.
It’s cold and it’s dark. He has to catch the train.