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The knowledge comes to him first in the personnel file he hacks before he starts his life’s great work - Sergeant James Gordon is a military veteran.
The file has nothing important to say about injury, leadership, deployment, action seen or unseen. It mentions nothing beyond rank and number and impersonal statistical data.
He notes it somewhere at the back of his brain and then turns his attention to Gordon’s career with the GCPD.
This is where the most important information is.
But still, when it’s all over and the dust has cleared, there’s a part of him that allows himself to enjoy the irony of letting a veteran drive a vehicle that started life as a military prototype to save a city that was unknowingly at war.
The second clue is hearsay.
The city they’re watching while dusk rolls in doesn’t yet know that the last of the Waynes has come home so he stands there with John looking out at the lights while they catch up on lives that have run parallel ever since a kid in a police uniform turned up uninvited on the steps of Wayne Manor.
“We’re lucky Bane didn’t take Gordon out before he took the streets,” he says.
John looks at him – “Who says he didn’t try?”
He hears about Bane’s men – enemies, mercenaries, assassins – dropped by a man with a bullet hole in his stomach. A man who was discredited, disgraced, dishonoured before the whole world, and who still got back up and ran the resistance single-handed.
The third piece of the puzzle he sees when he finds the Commissioner unconscious on the floor of an otherwise empty apartment.
He loosens the man's tie and collar and the thin line of metal catches his eye. The dogtag is a visible reminder of an ignored part of Gordon’s history and one he hasn’t expected to find, though he isn’t surprised in hindsight.
Gordon doesn’t carry himself like a soldier, doesn’t have the manner or movement reminiscent of formidable soldiers Bruce has trained with in his murky youth. Though the men he trained with were, perhaps, beyond the skill set of what he believes Gordon capable of.
He picks at the dogtags with curiosity and the metal catches against the burred surface of his gloves.
The information is the same impersonal statistical data he passed over the first time all those years ago.
He tucks the chain back beneath Gordon's collar.
The fourth unaccountable incident occurs a week later. That is how long they take between the attempt on Gordon's life and an ill-advised excess of emotional dependence.
“This isn’t right,” Gordon whispers.
Very little in the world is, he believes, but at least this isn’t wrong.
He tries to be as gentle as he can, given his lack of prior experience, and he keeps hands and mouth careful as he settles for simple orgasm without exploration.
Still, his fingers unerringly find two scars – one the bullet wound he expects to find, and then a shrapnel scar that he doesn’t.
The fifth and final note of the reveal is given to him.
He doesn’t look for it, doesn’t ask, and certainly it isn’t a topic they ever cover. There are so few of those topics in any case, and very few of those topics are broached in this space where they are not primarily police commissioner and vigilante. Not much talking in general gets done in this space.
“I tried,” Gordon says wretchedly, and there is a second set of dogtags that Bruce hasn’t seen because Gordon keeps them in a drawer in his home.
The chain runs over his bare fingers in a slither of light, cool metal.
He doesn’t know exactly what the effort was for – for trying to save a life, or keep a secret, or bear the burden of expectation – but he feels it’s safe to assume ‘all of the above'. And his ignorance does not negate Jim’s remembered pain.
So he lets the metal slither through his fingers back into the drawer and he does not look at the name and impersonal statistical data that belongs to another man entirely.
If nothing else, they both serve as examples of how the past can shape unexpected weapons, and complicated alliances.