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He’d been foolish.
He’d been- so foolish.
And so played for a fool.
They experienced nothing out of ordinary with the pregnancy, the birth. A perfectly normal, healthy, bouncing baby boy - adored by his parents, their right hand man, and all others allowed within a select circle of friends.
He learned to walk, to speak, to run. How to read, how to write. He learned of love, and anger, and sadness. One afternoon that involved falling down into a black cave full of chittering shrieks and flapping wings caused him to learn of bone-deep, irrational fear. But aside from the odd moments of deviation, he lived a fairly ordinary, well-provided for childhood.
And then.
Laughter in the darkness, a flash of bone white skin dancing closer to his domain. “My dear Knight of Night, why so serious?”
“I am busy.”
“Preoccupied, certainly, but not BUSY. You do nothing but watch the little mortals, night in and night out!”
“As I said. Busy.”
He always tried to brush off the God of Laughter and Tears. Nothing useful ever came of indulging the mad-eyed deity, too tightly wound as he was with the fickleness of mortals. The Night existed long before them; it would exist long after. This god did not appear until humankind began telling stories, until they began to truly explore the concepts of comedy...
...and tragedy.
“~Watch watch watch, busy busy busy~” Went the laughing, sing-song voice , flitting around where he stood over his domain. “Don’t you ever want to live a little, Nighty Knight?” Chimes. Chimes, hidden by the laughter, not just flitting, but circling- Too late, he tried to step away, to get out of reach, but the circle snapped shut instead.
Chimes turned to bells. High-pitched laughter spiraled into insane, gleeful cackling. And the spell pulled, inescapable, dragging the entirety of his essence down, d o w n, d o w n. . .
An ordinary life.
Three ordinary bullets.
And the joke ended early, along with three mortal lives.
But Bruce Wayne wasn’t entirely mortal, now was he?
It took several moments for him to reform on the divine plane. Hardly any time at all, compared to the eons he’d existed, but a jarring disconnect from the human life he’d just lived. Eight short years. A small eternity.
Bruce felt- torn. Operating at two different levels. Able to see, and understand without issue, the vastness of his form and power and responsibilities. His normal state of awareness. And yet- part of him still felt very much a child, one who’d just witnessed both his parents fall lifeless to the ground, before a burning impact ripped him apart as well.
Light shimmered in the dark.
He didn’t bother to turn. Only one deity could cast such a shine in the pitch black that formed his domain. Sure enough, the brilliant, blazing figure of Day soon emerged, floating down to stand beside him. “You’re back!”
Bruce simply grunted.
“I know, I know, you’ve been ‘gone too long’ and ‘need to get back to work’,” his counterpart said with a small laugh. “But I just had to come see you, as soon as I felt your essence here again. None of us were terribly happy with Laughter and Tears, once we realized the joke he pulled-”
“It wasn’t,” Bruce snapped, “A joke.”
Silence.
He’d sounded angry.
He wasn’t- supposed to sound like anything.
“Are you... alright?” The God of Day asked, with clear concern. He always spoke with clear emotions. It was- part of their deal. Long before, in the primordial age, when nothing had yet been decided or assigned. Two powerful entities, each desiring to claim a swath of territory, butting heads in an eldritch sort of way. Equally matched. Equally stubborn. So, without really knowing what they were doing, they divided their claims, half and half.
Day, and Night.
Emotion, and Logic.
Action, and Observation.
The domains didn’t mean much of anything, back then. Not until stories. Not until belief - the heady sustenance that could spin a new god out of nothing but tall tales, or cause an entity older than time itself to fade from all existence. When humans first grasped with their fragile thoughts and minds, first began to believe in more, everything changed; and the God of Night found himself locked into the role of impassive observer. Uncaring. Unsympathetic. Able to do things, to change things, but lacking any desire whatsoever to extend himself.
Not until a capricious trickster gave him a hard shove, and all the lessons learned by young Bruce Wayne exploded into a deity’s mindscape.
“I need to sit down,” he muttered. Day’s concern rocketed up into genuine alarm. “Stop that.”
“Stop- what?”
“Stop feeling at me.” There was so much Bruce already needed to process, without the other god projecting. A swift gesture solidified some of the void into a generously padded armchair, and he dropped into it with a sigh. He didn’t really possess a face in this form, only an empty expanse beneath the hood of his cloak, but Bruce quickly made one solely in order to pinch the bridge of his nose.
Day made a startled noise. “That’s, uh. That’s new.”
“I’m dealing with a lot of new things at the moment.”
“Right, of course. Understandable.”
“Shut up.”
Another noise, bordering on hysterical, but at least the other deity stopped talking. Bruce needed a moment of quiet to just- think. To figure himself out. To sort through the overwhelming memories. And- out of them, as a bit of order began to organize it all, a single, solitary face made itself known. Not one of his mortal parents, but a third, just as loved- along with all its moments of contentment, and concern, and amusement and annoyance and-
“Alfred,” he whispered.
“What?”
Day retreated a step when Bruce stood. “I need to go back. I need to get to Alfred.” It wouldn’t be hard - anyone else would require ritualized power to force him over to the mortal plane, but Bruce could travel there of his own volition just fine, provided the place he wanted to go was under the cover of darkness. Only a few minutes had passed, he should be able to get back to the alley with his parents, form a new mortal shell to replace the one that fell apart from the bullet’s impact-
“Night!” Hands grasped his shoulders. He blinked. His counterpart got in right up close, the glowing, sun-like expanse of his own face shifting, morphing, to form human features of his own.
He looked worried.
“You’ve been gone for several years,” Day said slowly, once he’d gotten Bruce’s attention. “You’re still adjusting to being fully divine again, instead of trapped in a human body. Give yourself some time to readjust-”
“I don’t have time,” he growled. “Someone will find the bodies sooner or later, and when word gets to Alfred that his employers are dead, he’s going to be devastated. Even worse, they won’t have my body, do you understand? It faded with my essence. Alfred’s going to assume I’m missing, or kidnapped, and he’ll wear himself into the ground trying to find me if I don’t go explain the truth.”
Day stared, expression saying very clearly he thought Bruce was nuts. “Let me get this straight: you’re going to go back, form a new body, and try to convince a mortal that you’re a god in disguise.”
“Yes.”
“You do realize it’s been centuries since any of us did that regularly? The mortal world is different now, Night. Most of the modern civilizations don’t believe in gods anymore!”
Bruce gave him a flat stare. “How many people still set up shrines in your honor on the summer solstice?”
“That’s not the point!”
“No, you’re right: the point you are trying to make is that this is a fool’s errand.” Even so, Bruce yanked himself out of the other deity’s grip, pulling the power of the void around himself as he did so. “My point is that I don’t care. I’m not leaving Alfred to spend the rest of his life full of grief and uncertainty.”
“This isn’t going to go well, Night!” Day called after him, pushed further and further away by the swirling darkness. “Even if he does believe you!”
Three ordinary bullets.
Three mortal lives lost.
But one godly soul came back.
Multiple overpowering emotions tried to take control when he landed once more in the dark alley. When he landed in a pool of blood. Bruce forced them back down, seizing onto the strength of his domain in order to maintain control.
I am logic. I am reason. I am darkness and shadow, the impassive observer, vigilant and cold. I am the Night, and the Night bows to no one.
Breathing deeply through a newly made nose, Bruce focused on taking one step at a time down the length of the alley, away from the bodies. The bit of himself that still felt like a mortal child wanted nothing more than to drop back to his knees, to remain small and quiet, empty. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t.
So he walked, instead.
Someone on the divine plane apparently felt inclined to toss a bit of luck his way, because Bruce only needed to make it to the main street before crossing paths with a policeman. The young patrol officer called out, alarmed, and the sound made Bruce burst into tears.
Alfred came and picked him up from the station.
Alfred then took him home, got him changed and cleaned up, settled him at the kitchen table with a mug of hot cocoa. When the man also sat, hands shaking until they clasped his tea, Bruce finally spoke.
“He shot me too.”
It took a moment, but Alfred’s head shot up, eyes going wide with alarm.
“Shot at me, I mean,” Bruce hastily corrected. But then he saw again the image of Day forming a face of his own, purely to better express his worry, and the boy sighed. “No. No, I meant what I said. He shot me too, Alfred, and- and it killed me too. Except I couldn’t die, not like- like- M-mom and, and Dad.”
“...Master Bruce,” the man across from him gently said, “We’ve had a long night, the two of us. I daresay it’s time to get some sleep-”
“Alfred,” he interrupted. “I’m not human. I’m not- mortal.”
They stared at each other, man and boy. Silent. Assessing. And then Alfred took a deep breath, slowly letting it out again. “Not, mortal. That’s... not something a lad of eight years often says.” He paused to take a sip of tea. When the mug settled back onto the table, “Did you- did you meet a, a godly parent, I didn’t know about?”
Well. On the one hand, he wasn’t dismissing Bruce’s words out of hand. On the other... “No. Mom and Dad are my- were my, my parents. But I’m- I’m the one who’s a god.” He copied Alfred’s lead, taking several gulps of hot cocoa while steeling himself to go on. His mug came back down with a much louder thunk. “I’m a god. I was tricked- ambushed. Pulled across planes, to create a mortal shell and- live here. Unaware of my power, unable to access any of it. Not until the shell was broken.”
“By a thief with a gun.”
“Yes.” Bruce hesitated. “I- I went back to the divine plane. Talked to my counterpart. I could have, stayed there, but- I couldn’t abandon you. I didn’t leave a body behind.”
Alfred made a noise of comprehension. “I would’ve thought you’d merely gone missing.”
“Not technically untrue,” the boy said, “But you wouldn’t ever find anything, no matter how much you looked.”
After a beat, the man got up, came around the table, and knelt. He wrapped his arms entirely around Bruce’s body, and hugged for all he was worth. “In that case, my boy- I am very glad you decided to come home again.”
Belief. The unprecedented, entirely human power that could raise up new gods or tear down old ones. Adventurers achieving fame and immortality alike; heroes defeating monsters they should not have been able to touch. And yet, sometimes, there could exist a thread of something even more powerful than belief.
The love between boy and butler, for example.
“Will you need to leave? For good?”
Bruce... considered. From a mortal standpoint, it could be awkward for Alfred, the child placed in his care disappearing so soon after the deaths of his employers. No story they came up with would be anywhere near as convenient as Bruce simply vanishing the same night his parents died. The man might even get into legal trouble, which would be an awful way to repay a decade’s worth of loyal service. And then, to consider it from the divine side of things...
“I don’t really want to,” Bruce admitted, curled up in a ball on the window seat. Alfred turned down the heat on the stove, moved aside a few of the breakfast ingredients he’d been using, and came over to set a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’ve never- felt so much, as I have these last eight years. I didn’t- I didn’t really do, emotions, before. And I don’t- I don’t want to go back to that, to just watching but not caring.”
Alfred hummed. “Then it sounds to me, young man, like you might wish to add to your godly portfolio.”
Bruce blinked.
“He what?”
“He went back!”
“...do you know why, precisely?”
The God of Day huffed, throwing both hands up in a very human gesture. “As if I know. He might be my counterpart, but I barely understand how that entity’s mind works - less than usual, now, since he’s apparently been changed by his time in a mortal shell.”
“I suppose we can hardly claim that’s surprising,” the Other murmured, extending an aura of calm. “The confines of so compact an existence do tend to leave a mark on any psyche, even a divine one.”
Day glared at him, solar flares rippling out of his cape. The manifestation of mind over matter replied with the intangible impression of a shrug. “We have to do something.”
“Do we? The universe continues to spin. The laws that govern physical reality continue to function. My power is all but gone with the death of Martian civilization; yours continues to wane with every passing century.” Another shrug. “Whether the Night returns to this plane immediately or spends a few decades with his human companion first, his domain and yours continue to remain in balance. Nothing he does in the mortal realm will affect that.”
“I wish I could believe you,” the shining god muttered, “But somehow, I just can’t shake the feeling of something being off.”
“Perhaps you might reach out to the Oracle; she operates closer to the Night’s domain than either of us.”
“...that’s not a bad idea.”
Additions. Additions.
Bruce hadn’t added anything to his domain since he first formed it. But that hardly meant the idea was without merit.
Seeking inspiration, he went out into the backyard, extending a trace of power to find the way down into darkness. The entrance he’d fallen through two years prior remained boarded up, courtesy of his father, but there were others, further afield, and in the woods. When Bruce found one such tunnel, he couldn’t help but shiver, even as he called out to his domain and the shadows gathered around him like armor.
He was scared of the dark, even though it was his to wield. He felt afraid of bats, too - so how better to best that fear, than by claiming it for his own?
Perhaps not the entire animal itself (certain gods of nature might get huffy with him) but certainly... aspects of it.
The boy wandered, nerves easing as he grew used to the pitch black. It felt almost like being surrounded by void in the divine plane, if he ignored the distinct sensations of stone beneath his feet, or water dripping and flowing in the distance. Eventually, Bruce emerged from the myriad tunnels into a massive open space, full of chittering creatures. He closed his eyes and tipped back his head, power rushing to obey. The mortal shell of an eight year old boy vanished, swallowed up by enveloping shadow, a larger, more intimidating form taking its place.
He couldn’t quite copy his exact form from the divine plane, but he could mimic it just the same. Tall, and fearsome, but nearly shapeless when wrapped completely in his cape. The outside absorbed all light, featureless as the void - but when revealed, the inner panels gleamed, speckled with stars of far distant galaxies, a thousand and one colors shining from the vastness of space.
His deep hood was reduced, pulled flat to his face, hiding all but Bruce’s chin and mouth, so that he could still smirk or scowl as needed. Two white lenses served as his eyes, nearly glowing when surrounded by so much solid black. And his many-horned crown, twin to the spired circlet the God of Day wore, was displaced in favor of two triangular panels, giving the impression of otherworldly ears.
As if sensing the monumental changes at play, a group of the overhead bats dropped from their perches and swooped low, circling around the spot where he stood. Steadying his terrified inner child, Bruce stretched out a hand in invitation.
One bat accepted. The tiny creature clung to his fingers, more curious than alarmed. Even when Bruce brought it in close to his chest, there was no attempt to flee. He studied it, noting every physical component, every association that echoed across from the divine realm.
The inspiration of fear. Sudden appearances from the dark. Predators and opportunists.
But there were softer echoes, too. Bruce sorted through each aspect of the mythos of the bat, and decided, yes.
He gently traced a simple outline onto his chest, and the void rumbled.
Elsewhere, shining rays of daylight shuddered, and another god nearly fell to his knees.