Chapter Text
Stranger things had happened, Bruce supposed.
Presently, he was crouched under seat 14C on the 9:42 to New Coast City, pressed into the dark with a stolen timetable spread on the floor in front of him. His Rolex sat beside it, turned face-up and just about visible in the shadows. 9:59pm. He was cutting it close if he wanted to take the cable car to the strip.
His tail, because he had a tail now, wanted to swish. Bruce was personally against that idea. Letting it swish freely meant conceding, both to himself and to whatever high power had decided to ruin his day. It meant that he had less control over his own body than he was accustomed to.
He was a cat.
What a weird thought that was. Weirder still to sit inside it, to feel it in his paws and a heartbeat that ran far quicker than his own ever had. This operational reality was…difficult to accept, he had to admit, but Bruce was a pragmatist. He would adapt.
He was large by feline standards. He’d caught a glimpse in a terminal window before creeping aboard the train, and he’d been arrested by the unfamiliarity of himself that he'd nearly missed the departure window. Long face. Dense paws. A coat so extravagant it crossed from remarkable into excessive, and a tail that compounded the offence.
If Bruce had ever seriously entertained the possibility of becoming a cat – which, to his frustration, he hadn’t – he would never have predicted fluffy. He would have assumed the sleek glide of a Bombay alleycat, deft enough to slither through gaps and meld seamlessly into the dark. And if not an alleycat, then a panther. Because panthers were cool.
Practically speaking, all this fluff was a problem. Not for any tactical reason he could yet quantify, but because every time his eyes dropped to the ridiculous ruff of fur that had colonised his throat, something instinctual stirred at the base of his skull. To his horror, it was something that was suggesting, with increasing insistence, that he should be grooming.
Mortifying, truly.
These new instincts were entirely unwelcome.
He recognised some of them, if he squinted. There was an aversion to wide open spaces, for instance. Also a pull towards shadows to sit and hide and plan his next move. He also had the familiar, cellular certainty that if he stayed still enough, he would cease to be visible. Those were the kind of things he could map onto Normal Bruce quite easily.
Others were less familiar.
There’d been a bird on the platform in Sacramento. A fat pigeon pecking at something near the base of a waste bin. Bruce had looked at it, and then something happened to his hindquarters. A slow, involuntary lowering to the ground, shoulders back, ears flat. A subtle, horrifying wiggle of his ass.
He’d stopped the behaviour the second he’d identified it, but the moment happened and Bruce had to live with that forever now.
The aforementioned grooming was worse, because he had no warning for that. It happened as naturally pushing up his reading glasses at home. One moment he’d been reviewing the timetable, certain he was on the wrong bus to the station, and the next he’d found his paw raised and his tongue rasping along it in delicate little laps.
Once he caught himself, somewhere along the fifth stroke, he’d set the paw down and stared into the middle distance for far too long.
Bruce really had no idea what happened to him. Magical intervention was the obvious hypothesis, but investigation in this new form had proven to be difficult. All of his senses arrived all at once and far too loud, and somewhere beneath the onslaught, his higher reasoning disappeared. For the better part of an hour, all he'd wanted was to find something dark to press himself into until his nose stopped twitching.
That had been back in Sacramento. The morning belonged to a conference room on the eleventh floor, where the principals of a solar-tech firm spent four hours trying to convince him their patent portfolio was worth triple what Wayne Enterprises had valued it at. It wasn't. Looking at their expenditure figures, Bruce had begun to suspect his team had overvalued it to begin with
Regardless, Bruce nodded in the right places, smiled when he was supposed to, and signed absolutely nothing.
By the time they released him, promising to take him around the city later on (which he’d been dreading), he wanted air badly enough that he crossed directly to their private terrace without waiting for permission. It was a postage stamp of concrete bolted to the building's south face, barely large enough for Bruce and the potted olive tree beside him.
Bruce closed his eyes for one second, maybe two. Then he wasn’t himself anymore.
Which was just his luck, really. Bruce had an awful habit of getting into situations, even when he wasn’t looking for them. He had a private theory that being Brucie Wayne had imprinted some sort of cosmic bullseye on his ass for the universe to kick whenever it thought he needed humbling.
Fine. He was humbled.
Gotham would have been better. In Gotham he could have slunk through familiar ground, found one of his children inside an hour, and communicated his situation through a series of feline charades and object interaction until someone ran the DNA. Enough weird shit happened to his family, that Bruce being turned into a cat ranked fairly low on the Incident Scale. (Which was a real scale in the Batcave, currently dominated by the time Steph and Jason were magically merged into one person and decided to become a comedian.)
But alas, Gotham was almost three thousand miles away. He was constrained to California, which was too bright and smelled overwhelmingly of things he couldn't yet categorise while his olfactory system adjusted to its new and excessive sensitivity.
He wasn’t without allies, at least, and the nearest one was traceable. Green Lantern, Coast City, findable by any of the many methods Bruce had catalogued for exactly this kind of contingency. None of those methods had anticipated cat, but the destination held.
Hence the timetable.
This was his last resort, he wanted that to be clear.
His instinct was to find Diana instead. She had made a home in Gateway City, which was just a little further out than Coast City. Bruce would have been perfectly happy to sit on the train for forty minutes longer if it meant he didn’t have to deal with Hal Jordan.
It wasn’t long since Hal was their enemy. It wasn’t long since Hal had flung himself into the fire for the greater good. It wasn’t long since Hal became an entity of Redemption.
He was better now. Back to life and back in the Lantern Corps, along with a tentative welcome back into the Justice League – though not as their main Lantern, as some liked to put it. John Stewart was now their go-to, with a side of Guy Gardner if they were really desperate.
It wasn’t that the team hated Hal for what he did when he was Parallax. It was just so hard to forget. Bruce had been among the more wary to accept hims back into the fold, even after the Spectre entity chose him. If Bruce was being honest, he really did understand that Hal was a good person who wanted to continue to do good things. It would just take a little longer for him to trust again.
Not like he had a choice right now.
While Diana was the preferable option, Bruce knew that she was spending more and more time in Thermesciaya. She could hardly be blamed for that. It was, after all, her home long before she ever settled in Gateway City, but Bruce found himself feeling a little petty. If he could trust Diana to be in California, he would have this…this cat incident resolved within the hour.
Hal was the closest person he knew who would be able to help, and even then Bruce had tried alternative methods first. He had spent forty minutes on a Sacramento street corner attempting to operate his Rolex with paws that weren’t built for fine motor tasks. There was a Justice League communicator integrated into the crown mechanism. Elegant engineering, he’d thought at the time.
The plan had been to raise the Watchtower and meow with as much dignity he could muster until someone on base remembered Diana's affinity with animals. She would translate. He would be retrieved. The whole affair would be logged somewhere classified where none of the more immature members would ever think to look.
Annoyingly enough, the mechanism required two fingers and a specific lateral pressure. Bruce, meanwhile, had kitty paws that were entirely useless for anything smaller than a door handle.
When this was over, he would add a failsafe. The oversight was embarrassing in retrospect.
Three buses and a train followed, with a cable car in his near future.
“Is that a cat?” someone exclaimed as Bruce sank deeper into the shadows under 14C. “How’d the hell a cat get on here?”
How indeed.
In all of the rumination, he’d lost track of his tail. The traitorous little bastard had emerged from beneath the seat and was swishing in full view of the aisle. Very expressive, this tail. By the time he noticed, he had an audience. Three passengers were crouched and various distances from him, each of them making that vaguely condescending pss-pss–pss noise.
Bruce hunched further into himself and became a pair of eyes in the dark.
He stayed that way through two stops and a tunnel. The audience eventually lost interest, as audiences did when you gave them nothing to work with. Unless, of course, you were a toddler.
The little girl appeared from beneath 15A, making direct eye contact and reaching for him with both hands. Oddly terrifying, when you were three quarters the size you were supposed to be. Her mother was somewhere above, engaged in a phone argument with her hairdresser.
Bruce retreated toward 13C, which bought him ninety seconds before the little followed with a cheerful, “Kitty!”
As much as he loved children, he didn’t particularly want to be handled. He wasn’t comfortable enough in this body to receive the enthusiastic physical attention of a stranger's three-year-old. But he also wasn't going to leave her crawling unsupervised between seats while her mother litigated a haircut.
He led her back and sat very visibly beside the woman's ankle until she looked down, registered the child, and ended the call. Just in time for the tannoy to fire: “The next stop is: NEW COAST CITY CENTRAL.”
Bruce kept low, swept out through the gap between disembarking legs, and hit the platform with his Rolex clamped between his teeth.
Within thirty minutes – during which he was required to board a cable car without a fare and spend six of those minutes avoiding a drunk man in too-small shorts – he was sitting on the sidewalk outside of Hal Jordan’s apartment complex, glaring up at the buzzer.
He sat with it for a moment, deciding what he wanted to do.
It had been a very long day. He’d been transformed somewhere around eleven in the morning, which meant he'd now been a cat for the better part of eleven hours. Now, there was all this frustration accumulated with nowhere to go. He wasn't sure he could absorb Hal’s particular brand of bullshit tonight without saying something he'd probably have to apologise for later. It was, he figured, something of a mercy that he currently lacked the apparatus for speech.
Despite…everything (which was a loaded term, considering), Bruce genuinely didn’t dislike Hal. It was complicated. He didn’t like to think about it.
What he knew personally about him was enough: Hal was good at his job, but reckless in ways that should’ve gotten him killed a million times over. He also had an open mind that didn't require much coaxing to accept the implausible. And he was attractive. That last point was incidental. Bruce, after all, wasn’t blind.
(Any attraction Bruce may or may not have had towards Hal Jordan was no longer a factor. The whole Parallax situation had rather soured him on the idea of ever trying to pursue something – not like he would have before. Hal had clearly never been interested.)
If he remembered correctly, and Batman always remembered correctly, Hal lived on the sixth floor of this very building. For Batman, that would be a trivial problem. He wouldn’t have even needed the grapple. For Bruce the Cat, it was potentially a little more difficult. Especially as he was still getting used to his quadrupedal body.
He gave the entrance another few minutes, just in case someone decided to barge their way in at – he checked the Rolex – 10:43pm. Nobody came. Even if the front buzzer wasn’t visibly broken, he probably wouldn’t have tried it anyway. He didn’t think Hal would let in a random cat meowing over the intercom.
The fire escape, then. It ran up the building's east face with a drop ladder retracted to about eight feet off the ground. A standard deterrent, easy enough to defeat under normal circumstances. Bruce studied it from the alley below, made several calculations, factored in what he'd observed of his own body over the course of the day, and concluded he could make the jump.
He was wrong.
He got perhaps two-thirds of the way up his intended arc before the physics of the situation presented a counterargument. There was a moment at the apex of the jump where he understood completely what was about to happen and had no remaining ability to influence it. He hit the ladder's base with his front paws, scrabbled, and found nothing to purchase on the cold metal. He dropped back to the alley in an ungainly heap.
That was clearly just a diagnostic jump. Bruce tried again, putting a little more power in his hind legs, but found the results were the same. This time, he managed to land elegantly on his feet. He was learning.
Plan B. Batman always had a Plan B.
There was a dumpster close enough to the ladder’s base that it looked workable. He was tempted to jump onto the edge of it, but after two failed attempts at jumping already, and the open mouth of the dumpster waiting to receive him, Bruce decided to climb it more carefully instead. The last thing he wanted was to fling himself straight into the trash.
He had better elevation on the dumpster. Good. He could work with that.
This time, he gathered himself, calculated the arc needed, and made contact on his first jump. His front upper body caught on the fourth rung with a grip that was more desperate than controlled, and he hung there, back legs cycling against nothing, while he considered what came next.
The problem presented itself immediately. It turned out that holding the rung and climbing the rung were entirely separate propositions. How the hell was he supposed to climb up a ladder when it was taking literally everything in him to simply stay afloat?
Unless he could do some kind of acrobatic flip. He thought of his own cat, who would frequently perform unhinged Cirque du Soleil shit to reach a particular alcove in the cave wall. Not for any real reason. Just for the satisfaction of sleeping somewhere inconvenient
He’d watched Alfred the Cat do it hundreds of times without once thinking he'd need to take notes. Surely he would be able to do something similar, right?
Bruce hefted his weight. He curled himself tighter around the rung, swung outward, and made a committed leap for the next one up.
CRASH!
Ah. He ended up in the dumpster after all.
He lay there for a moment in the dark among the refuse, the Rolex still somehow in his mouth. The stench in the godforsaken box was extraordinary – and not in a good way. Bruce was going to be smelling trash for weeks.
“Mrrow,” Bruce said. Loosely translated to: “Fuck.”
Still, he couldn’t exactly give up and let the garbage men come and collect him. He hopped back out onto the edge and tried to work out where he went wrong.
He must’ve overcooked the outward swing and undercooked the upward. That was a correctable error, he thought. And he would correct it. The fact that he wasn’t already on that damn fire escape, trotting up the stairs to find Hal was an insult to all his decades of training.
Distantly, Bruce knew he ought to extend himself some patience. This was not his body, and the learning curve might as well have been a mountain – but Bruce had never been quite so kind to himself, and he wasn’t about to start now.
This time, instead of trying to wrap around the rung, he gripped it from below and let his body hang. Dead weight, momentum, the familiarity of a controlled swing. He'd done the same thing with grappling lines more times than he could count, under considerably higher stakes, in a body he actually understood.
(Hang in there, Baby. He'd seen that poster in a veterinarian's waiting room once, accompanying a photograph of a kitten in exactly his current situation. At the time, he hadn’t anticipated the personal relevance.)
It worked. Imperfectly, and with far less dignity than he'd like, but it worked. He built momentum in small increments, flinging himself rung by rung up the drop ladder until he finally arrived at the fire escape stairs. Breathing harder than he'd expected, which was fairly embarrassing. He’d have to take more consideration towards his smaller lungs.
The stairs were straightforward by comparison. Four paws managed stairs well enough – better than the ladder, better than the dumpster, better than most of the preceding hour. He went up quickly, keeping to the inside edge where the metal was least likely to ring underfoot, and counted floors as he climbed.
Sixth floor. He came off the stairs onto the landing and stopped.
A row of windows and doors looked back at him. He consulted his memory. Apartment 612, east-facing, the layout filed away from a set of building plans he'd reviewed around three years ago for reasons that were entirely unrelated to this. He liked to keep track of his colleague’s living arrangements – and no, that wasn’t weird, no matter what his children said.
Of course Hal would make Bruce’s life more difficult by not living in the apartment right by the landing. His place was two windows across, which left Bruce with the pressing need for creativity.
“Mrrr,” Bruce said. That one meant, “Hm.”
There was a string course, fortunately. A decorative ledge, maybe three inches wide, running the building's face at the floor level of each storey. It was purely ornamental and completely useless to a human. But, Bruce reminded himself, right now he wasn’t human.
He was also still unclear on the precise capabilities of this body. What he had established was that certain things arrived without instruction – like those silly involuntary grooming responses he was doing his best not to think about. Balance was presumably in the same category.
Cats walked on ledges. Bruce was a cat. You’d assume that those two things could be extremely relevant to his current situation.
If he fell, there was also a reasonable probability he would land correctly. The physics of feline righting reflex were well documented, and six storeys was within survivable parameters if he identified his orientation early enough and didn't panic. He might break a few bones on landing, but Batman wasn’t scared of a few broken bones. He just simply wasn't going to fall.
Bruce set his front paws on the string course, tested his weight, and stepped up.
In a new-parent panic fourteen years ago, Bruce had purchased a great deal of equipment for a ten-year-old boy he’d inexplicably acquired from the circus. It was a perhaps misguided effort in trying to make him feel at home.
He ended up with a full trapeze, balance bars, a Wheel of Death (that one was strange, he could at least acknowledge that), and a tightrope rig strung across the east wing of the manor.
Dick had cried, then he laughed in the way he laughed at things that moved him, which Bruce hadn't yet learned to distinguish from ordinary laughing. Once it settled, he proceeded to call Bruce ‘the weirdest weirdo’, before flinging himself onto the rope
He’d been extraordinary, but what Bruce remembered most was standing on his own first reluctant attempt, when Dick dropped down beside him to reposition his feet with small hands. Like this, B. Don’t look down, ‘cause looking down is a choice that you don’t have to make. And then, once Bruce had found something like steadiness, Dick had flipped onto his shoulders in a handstand.
There was a certain terror of holding your kid for the first time, especially when the first time included a tight-rope, a long drop, and a wriggly acrobat with no fear. Bruce had grabbed his wrists in a terror so instinctive that he lost his balance and they'd gone down into the netting together in a heap, Dick shrieking with laughter the whole way.
That was pre-Robin. Bruce had learned since then to trust himself with the weight of his children.
He thought of Dick's little hands repositioning his feet. Don't look down.
He was at Hal's window box before he'd consciously registered crossing the distance. So, it seemed his feline-instincts worked better when he wasn’t consciously acknowledging them. That was useful to know.
Bruce made a mental note to remind Dick he loved him – or, in failing that (which he likely would, because Bruce was terrible at expressing himself even when it was easy), he made a note to send a cryptic text that implied fatherly affection if you tilted your head and read it under a full moon.
In the meantime, Bruce glared upwards. From this new vantage point, he could hear the thump-thump-thump of techno music through the wall of one of the adjacent apartments. It was loud enough that it would have registered without the feline hearing, which meant it was loud enough to be someone else's problem on at least three sides.
Not Hal’s apparently, thankfully. He would have had thoughts about arriving at the end of a cross-city journey to find that Hal Jordan was the asshole of the complex. He had quite enough material on Hal already without adding noise complaints to the file.
Bruce peered through the glass into the kitchenette. It was dark inside, but not entirely. The television threw its blue flicker from somewhere deeper in the apartment, and because his vision had apparently been significantly upgraded along with everything else he hadn't asked for, he could see quite clearly. The cluttered kitchenette counter. An aviator jacket over a chair. The white of a cast, resting over the arm of the couch.
Three fractures, Hal had grudgingly told the League after the Corps benched him from active duty. Tibia, fibula, and something that had required a surgical consult – which he’d at least had the sense to put on the Justice League Health Insurance. That was progress. When Bruce first structured the plan over a decade ago, he hadn’t communicated it well and several of the more prideful members had looked at the terms (no deductible, no copay) and concluded he was lording his wealth over them in some Bat-power move.
He wasn’t. It was a healthcare structure subsidised by a carefully assembled portfolio of investors who believed they were funding something else. Hal had been among the most suspicious. Apparently the absence of a copay read as condescending if you didn't know where the money was going.
At some point Bruce had stopped explaining that he just thought people putting their lives on the line deserved free healthcare. Eventually, people started coming around when their bills really started piling up. Bruce made a point never to mention it. The ‘told-you-so’ was implied.
The fractures had grounded Hal indefinitely. He was theoretically cleared for monitor duty since the role required nothing more physically demanding than sitting upright and pressing a button when something flashed red, but nobody had rostered him for it and Hal hadn't pushed.
Bruce knew he had no intentions of trusting Hal with anything beyond what was necessary, but he was surprised that nobody else had picked up the slack in his wake. Everyone expected Batman to keep his distance, but the others?
Hm. A problem for later. For now, ‘necessary’ had arrived, and Bruce was forced to trust him.
He pawed at the window.
No response. Unsurprising. Either Hal was asleep or the bass line from upstairs was swallowing the sound of Bruce’s weird cat-hands entirely
Oh god. He was going to have to meow.
Embarrassment was one thing. Bruce was good at embarrassment, because he’d long evolved past the need for it. When your civilian identity required you to strip down and dance on an illuminated pedestal at the Ice Lounge, or waltz with a decorative fern at a New Year's gala because it was funnier than dancing with the hostess, or get discovered in a coat cupboard with another man because it was more fun to come out to the world as bisexual that way, embarrassment became a tool rather than a feeling
When you had done all of those things, and done them deliberately, embarrassment all sort of lost its purchase.
There was something specifically new about crouching at a window box six floors above Coast City, pawing at the glass like a stray begging for a tin of sardines. It occupied a different register entirely. He couldn't explain the distinction. He simply felt embarrassment for the first time in a very long time.
“Meow,” he said.
God, that was pathetic. It was the flattest, most uninhabited sound he'd produced in recent memory. Barely a vocalisation and more the shape of the word, as though he'd phonetically approximated the sound rather than committed to it.
He let the stupidity of his situation wash over him for another thirty seconds. Maybe if he stared hard enough at Hal's feet, he'd sense something amiss in the world and sit up. Hal was usually good at realising when Bruce was staring at him, usually because it preceded some kind of Stop being reckless, Lantern lecture.
Bruce thought again of Alfred the Cat. In the few years that cat had been a resident of the Wayne family, he had perfected a precise vocalisation, deployed whenever he’d been without attention for longer than ten minutes. It was a sound of such operatic suffering that it could penetrate three floors of the Manor, with all the connotations of someone wailing, ‘I am dying, I have always been dying, and you are the reason.’
With as much dignity as he could muster, Bruce set down his Rolex, opened his mouth and made the sound.