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Bruce’s wings come in when he is fourteen. At first, they are little nubs of bone breaking skin next to his shoulder blades. His wings push out further every night and he wakes up each morning with his wings grown another inch and skin, swollen and tender to the touch. He gets used to sleeping on his stomach soon.
The only things that help with the discomfort of his wings emerging are cold showers and ice packs. And Jim.
Jim wipes off the dried blood from his back every night with a cool towel. In the morning when the pain is the worst, Jim is there with a fresh ice pack right after he wakes up. His wings are in an inconvenient location to press an ice pack against himself, but Jim helps hold it against his budding wings, moving it back and forth until he sighs in relief. The wet coldness is a balm for the rawness of his skin, temporary but welcomed.
“It’s just like teething,” Jim soothes him. “It’ll be over before you know it.” He moves the ice packs in twin circles around the base of his wings, stopping when Bruce winces or his breath hitches in pain and only continues after Bruce’s signal. And when the ice pack melts, all he has to do is fetch a new pack from the freezer. He keeps a stock of ice packs in his freezer so Bruce is never without comfort.
When the pain gets particularly bad at night, Jim stays at his bedside. He runs a hand through his hair, soothing, and hums a melody until he falls back asleep. “You’ll be alright, son,” he promises and ruffles his hair. He whispers, “It’s okay,” again and again, until Bruce starts to believe it.
His wings are fully emerged a few months later. Like bat wings, they are with thin finger bones and a thick skin membrane spread between them, dark as night. Spread out, they span about half of his arm span, but Jim tells him that he wouldn’t be surprised if they grew until they matched his arm span.
It’s not like there is any precedent for this before — a human growing the wings of a bat. That’s not all that’s changed, though. Bruce can see in the dark now, better than he has ever been able to, and his hearing becomes more sensitive. Bruce sometimes wonders if he even can be considered a human anymore.
Jim takes it all in stride. “I will always love you, and nothing’s going to change that,” he vows, first and foremost. And then he asks questions, questions like “How’s this noise level when I speak — too loud? How about now? Better?” and “Are these lights too bright?”
With Bruce’s wings, he is so, so careful. For a week, he asks for permission before touching his wings until Bruce laughs and says, “Jim, go ahead, you don’t have to ask. It’s okay.”
“Is this sensitive?” Jim asks and moves his fingers to trace alongside the finger bones. Curious, but never judgemental. He ghosts his touch around the edges of his wings, rubbing the texture in between his fingers. “How about here?”
Bruce shivers and breathes out. He lies, his first one about his wings. “A little.” Or a lot.
Then for a while, Bruce’s wings are out, but likely not fully grown yet. And so as the bones grow to their full size, Bruce is left with bones that ache from time to time — growing pains. The pain is a dull ache that radiates deep into his backside. It leaves him shifting from side to side in an attempt to alleviate the pain.
Jim of course notices right away. He offers to give him a massage, anything to help him with the discomfort and pain.
“It’s worth a try,” Bruce agrees, and that is how he finds out just how good Jim is at massages. He arranges himself on the bed, lying on his stomach while Jim straddles his legs for easy access to his back. Jim spreads massage oil over his back, and then digs his fingers into his backside with just the right amount of pressure, cathartic without being painful. The touch is like bliss trickling over him after a day’s worth of pent up tension in his body.
Jim rubs around Bruce’s shoulder blades and up and down along his spine without letting up the pressure. “Let me know if I’m pressing too hard,” he says, but Bruce just hisses and lets his body untense further. “No, this is perfect.”
It gets even more perfect as Jim focuses his attention on the base of Bruce’s wings, where the skin is sore and tender. He rubs back and forth until Bruce feels himself going limp against the bedsheets. He could get addicted to the feeling of Jim’s hands on him, he realizes. The light scratch of the calluses built up on Jim’s hands after years of working in the field is satisfying, and the warmth of the friction from the skin contact feels right.
Jim ghosts his hands upwards, gently in the spot where Bruce’s skin transitions into leathery membrane, and then Bruce feels warm for an entirely different reason. His wings are sensitive, but the sensitivity is even more so concentrated in the area where his wings and skin meet.
Jim murmurs, “Is touching here okay?”
Bruce swallows. With Jim’s hands on his wings, his blood sings like the way he feels when he tries to fly and for a moment, becomes weightless. He feels invincible and brilliant and free like storm lightning. Every little movement of Jim’s fingers registers as a shiver down his spine. “Yeah,” he stammers out.
It feels wrong to lie like this, but is it really a lie if Bruce is okay with, no, wants Jim to touch him like this?
A few years later, Bruce is seventeen and much more accustomed to his wings. He grows used to the sensation of having his wings neatly tucked into his back and hidden behind a layer of clothing. After a day of being outside though, his clothing rubs against his wings, sometimes chafes against it.
He and Jim have a routine now. He doesn’t even have to say much for Jim to know what he wants. He just goes up to Jim as he’s reading the paper or winding down after a long day of work and hands him the tub of unscented massage oil, mixed with aloe for soothing his skin. Jim sits on his bed, and then he sprawls himself across his lap, giving Jim free access to his back.
Then, Bruce closes his eyes and waits for the touch of Jim’s hands to coax all the tension out of him. He cannot get enough of Jim’s touch; he craves it while he’s away from Jim. He cannot stop thinking about Jim’s fingers touching every inch of his back and then over every crevice of his wings. He wonders if Jim craves this too — the way Bruce yields to Jim’s touch and lets himself become pliant under Jim. Selfishly, he hopes so.
For Jim and Jim only, Bruce unfolds his wings and lets him touch all he likes. His wings practically flutter at the thought of Jim’s attention focused on them. In private, when Bruce lets his wings fan out freely, all it takes is for Jim to walk into the same room as him for Bruce’s heart to race.
Bruce’s wings know Jim — they know his touch. They expect it and crave it. They were molded by it. First the soothing touch as his wings first emerged, and then the more exploratory touches, the more daring ones.
So the wings have always come first. Batman only comes along later.
Bruce is twenty-one when his wings are fully grown. Jim was right; they span his entire arm span when fully spread out, and then some.
The wings scare people, and Bruce knows this. In the night, he hears whispers of “It’s inhuman” and “He’s a monster.” The difference is not something he’s ashamed of, though. He plays up the threat of his wings, flaring them when he wants to be frightening — a true creature of the night. And if anyone ever threatens the police commissioner, so what if a winged monster comes after them in pitch dark and makes them regret even thinking of hurting the police commissioner?
“Devil’s wings,” people call his wings. Bruce couldn’t care less.
Because at the end of the day, he goes back home to Jim, where his wings elicit another sort of reaction — a hitch of breath followed by a long, ravenous kiss if Jim is feeling hungry enough. And when they go to bed, Bruce finds that he likes to drape his wings over Jim. Once Jim is resting under his wings, the last piece of himself settles into place.
On well moonlit nights, Bruce’s wings cast a shadow outside their bedroom window and onto the row of apartments across from them. There are rumors — the Bat has a human he keeps. A human warms the Bat’s bed. People call the human “The Bat’s human.”
Really though, Bruce likes to think of himself as Jim’s.