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When Bruce first saw the shadow creeping at the mouth of the alley, his sheltered, childish brain was certain that it must be Zorro. He tightened his hold on Mother’s hand and pointed gleefully at the figure slowly stalking closer to them. Bruce was excited. Zorro looked just as he had in the play they'd just watched: dark clothing, tall figure, air of mystery.
Bruce was just a boy. He didn’t know any better. No one had told him yet to be afraid of the dark.
The attack itself took less than a minute. The creature moved with inhuman speed and inhuman sound. It growled like a bobcat and lunged for Bruce’s father first. It was a clean kill. Predator versus prey. Thomas Wayne probably didn’t even have time to be afraid before he was gone.
The creature—not Zorro, Bruce knew now—barely had time to lap up more than a drop of fresh blood before Martha’s scream forced his hand. She went next. It seized her by the neck, snapping it cleanly with one flex of its pale hand. Her necklace chain broke from the pressure. The sound of pearls clinking down the sewer drain was deafening.
The only living thing left in the alley after her body fell was Bruce. With two-thirds of its victim pool for the night taken care of, it only made sense that Bruce would be next. This monster didn’t play with its food. Children’s blood tasted better, Bruce would learn later. It was cleaner—unpolluted by alcohol and high cholesterol.
The creature pounced like an animal on the hunt. It had him on his back in seconds, scraping the back of his skull on the dirty pavement. Bruce was too small to fight and too terrified to try. Its fangs sank into his jugular. Bruce couldn’t find the oxygen to scream. He felt the ice-cold tongue on his throat as the creature suckled, drinking down his blood in sickening gulps from the twin punctures on his neck.
Slumped between his parents’ corpses and feeling his body weaken with every pint it fed the monster, Bruce pondered dizzily to himself, Is this fair?
The Waynes were not cattle. They weren’t criminals deserving punishment. They were just people. They were a family, and Bruce was a child. Why them? Out of all the bad people in this bad city, why did it have to choose Bruce’s family to feed upon? Was its thirst really so uncontrollable, or did it just not care? Maybe humans were little more than barn animals to a vampire—unimportant, undignified. They were only food.
Bruce’s body lost feeling quickly as he was drained. In no time at all he became too weak to move, to blink. Was this what dying felt like? He knew it must be, for then an angel called his name.
“Bruce! Get off of him, you sick beast!”
The vampire was so deep in its frenzy—yet another thing that Bruce would come to learn about vampires over the following years; once a feed has started, it’s all but impossible to stop until you’re sated—didn’t unlatch from Bruce’s neck until a sudden weight fell upon it, forcing it to release its jaws. The beast fell to the side, keening and clutching its shoulder.
Behind it stood Alfred, holding a splintered plank of wood from the piles of rubbish lining the alley. The other end of the plank was skewered through the vampire’s shoulder, snapped off from the force of the strike. It bled Bruce’s blood through the wound.
The creature hissed and—for a heart-stopping moment—Bruce waited for it to bite Alfred’s head clean off. But with Alfred holding out the sharp plank like a cutlass, the creature slowly backed away, back into the shadows it came from. It would retreat to its lair and lick its wounds, but it wouldn’t die. A wooden stake only kills a vampire if it pierces the heart, but Alfred had wounded it. That was enough.
Alfred drove the bleeding boy home in the car he was scheduled to bring the family home in after the play. A random citizen would stumble upon the crime scene sooner or later and call the police. When they showed up at Wayne Manor to deliver the bitter news, Alfred would play the part of a shocked butler who had no idea how something like this could happen, though it wasn’t uncommon in this vampire-infested city. Thank goodness the young Master Bruce was safe at home with him all night. Thomas and Martha went to see the play alone. It was their date night.
There was nothing more for Alfred to do but wait while the venom did its work. The only alternative was to stake the boy through the heart before the transformation was complete, and Alfred couldn’t bring himself to do so, even while he knew it was entirely possible that he was unleashing a new scourge on the world by allowing the transformation to take place. But…it was Bruce. The boy he raised. He couldn’t do it.
The process took hours. Bruce screamed himself hoarse as the venom seared his nerve endings and dissolved his organs. It felt like being burned alive, only his body wouldn’t surrender and let him die.
When the transformation finally ended and the agony made its way out, Bruce already felt the changes before he opened his blood-red eyes. He knew intrinsically that something was different. He felt stronger. He could hear the distant chitter of bats down in the caves beneath the manor, all the way from here in his bedroom. His heartbeat, frantic through the killings and through the transformation process, had fallen silent.
And he was thirsty.
“Master Bruce?” a tentative voice called. Bruce could smell him. He heard the anxiety in Alfred’s skittering pulse and felt the warmth of his blood radiating from his veins. God, his blood. Just thinking about it made Bruce’s throat burn like a lit torch.
A warm bag was shoved into his hand. Bruce could smell it from here, and before he'd made the conscious decision, he was already sinking his newly grown baby fangs into the plastic sack and gulping down the thick O-negative blood.
“Oh, my,” Alfred marveled, no longer fearful. More…fascinated. “I’m going to have to make another run to the blood bank. I was unsure how much you needed, so I only stole three bags. We may have to rely more on animal blood if your thirst stays so…fervent.” He handed over another bag as soon as Bruce finished off the first, and Bruce gulped that one down, too. He felt better after that.
“You should kill me,” Bruce said with a slight lisp as he adjusted to the fangs cramming up his mouth. Even his voice sounded different, like there was a growl hiding in his windpipe.
“Never. I would never do that to you.”
“Why not? I’d let you. I’m too dangerous to leave alive. I could eat you. That’s what monsters do.”
“I don’t believe that.” Alfred wiped a tear from Bruce’s cold cheek. His hand felt like a sunbeam. “You are not a monster, my boy.”
“But my mom and dad,” Bruce whispered, his mouth trembling around the fangs. “He…It…”
Alfred gathered Bruce’s cold, bloodless body in his arms and held him tightly under his chin while he cried.
Bruce’s parents were dead, and now Bruce had become the same breed of monster that killed them. He had the same abilities and the same thirst. What if he couldn’t control it and he devoured someone else’s parents in a dark alley? What if he hurt Alfred?
And yet, despite his new unquenchable thirst and the power he now held, Bruce somehow felt it in his bones, in his bloodless veins. He knew with every fiber of his being that he would never follow in his creator’s footsteps because it hurt too much. It felt like Bruce’s heart was being cleaved in half as he remembered the fear in his mother’s shriek, the emptiness in his father’s eyes after he died. Bruce would never bring this agony upon anyone else. He wouldn’t allow himself to.
Bruce knew it as certainly as he knew that nothing would ever be the same again. He would never become anything like the vampire who slaughtered his parents. He would learn to control his thirst. He would sustain himself on animal blood and donor blood for as long as he could, and he would never turn another human into a monster against their will. Death was surely a better fate than this.
That day, Bruce made a vow.
"I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my afterlife killing all vampires."
Over the years, Bruce learned exactly what being a member of the undead entailed. His skin blistered in direct sunlight, but that wasn’t a problem in Gotham City where the sun hardly shined anyway. It was what caused the vampire population to become so high in the first place.
No garlic could touch Bruce’s skin without causing significant pain, and the scent nauseated him. Crosses burned him as well. He needed no food, nor any beverage that wasn’t blood. At his strongest, a quart of blood could sustain him for days. Human blood was best. Animal blood didn’t keep him full for as long, but it was the easiest to get ahold of. There was no shortage of bats to feed on in the cave system beneath the manor that soon became Bruce’s sanctuary.
Bruce grew up, but his aging hastened with the years. By seventeen years of age, he had the appearance of a fully grown adult. It was as grown as he would ever get.
He did not sleep. He did not breathe. He could be weakened and harmed with great effort, but nothing besides a wooden stake to the heart would kill him. Bruce would know—he tried everything he could think of to kill himself those first few years, ranging from pills to poisons to dragging a silver knife across his throat. Not a scratch. He was forever trapped in a stasis between life and death. He was no longer alive, but he would not die.
Instead of letting himself marinate in his lack of mortality or the fact that his soul was undoubtedly damned now, Bruce became laser-focused on his mission. It was the only thing he had left. Not needing to sleep meant he could spend every night training to hunt down the vampire who killed his parents. He dug up every scrap of information he could find on the undead. He built weapons specifically crafted for the act of hunting vampires.
On Bruce’s eighteenth birthday, he ripped Joe Chill’s throat out with his fangs, just so he would feel a fraction of the pain the Waynes felt as they died. Then he staked him through the heart and tossed the bloodless body into the Gotham sound.
Bruce didn’t waste valuable time celebrating. Joe Chill was gone, but Gotham was still plagued by monsters just like him—monsters who hunted the innocent and broke apart families without sympathy, without mercy. They would learn what it meant to be hunted. They would learn what it meant to be afraid.
The Batman, as Gotham’s headlines had started calling it, became the most prolific vampire hunter in Gotham. Some people claimed he was an urban legend, like the vampires themselves. It was all hogwash, they said. Those who did believe in the Batman were convinced it was a dark angel or a phantom sent by Heaven to save this hellish city from itself.
Whatever it was, it struck fear into Gotham’s criminals—living and undead alike—and became a beacon of hope to the innocent. Children sketched chalk drawings on the sidewalk of a dark shadow rescuing them from monsters. People went on news channels to share their stories of being saved from certain death by a creature with a dark cape and fangs.
As the vampire population started to dwindle now that their reign was challenged, the Batman broadened his horizons and began targeting human criminals as well. He took advantage of his superior strength and speed to kill only the worst of the worst: murderers, rapists, pedophiles. He refused to drink their swampy blood. He was a monster, but he would not allow himself to be evil. He swore to himself anew every day that he would persist in his mission until the only monster left in Gotham was himself.
Tony Zucco was a monster. The Batman had been tracking the mobster down for several days now, following his seedy deals all across Gotham to end up at Haly’s Circus. Zucco and his men had been sniffing around, trying to extort money out of the ringmaster who refused to be threatened. Zucco would retaliate, that much was certain. The Batman didn’t like powerful men who took advantage of the powerless. Mobsters and monsters—it was all the same.
The Batman was too late, though. Zucco got away with one last act. Haly’s star aerialists, the Flying Graysons, fell fifty feet without a net. All three of them.
The man and woman were lucky. They died on impact. The child’s shattered-but-still-miraculously-breathing body was rushed to Wayne Memorial. Severe spinal injuries, Bruce heard the paramedics mutter to each other grimly. Broken legs. Bleeding in the brain. Internal bleeding everywhere else. Bruce could smell it.
The Batman shattered Tony Zucco’s legs. He slammed his head against the ground until it bled on the inside. Snapped his ribs and pummeled his body until he bled internally everywhere else. Only then, after Zucco felt every inch of the agony that little Richard Grayson felt, did he end the monster’s suffering by ripping out his heart.
Bruce retreated to his cave after the deed was done. He washed the blood and viscera off of his body. Begrudgingly drank the pint of pig’s blood Alfred forced on him. He dressed in a clean suit, and he drove to Thomas Wayne Memorial Hospital.
Bruce was granted access to the ICU with little effort. It’s easy to get clearance anywhere when one’s name is on the building. He slipped in effortlessly with a cheeky smile, telling the fawning head nurse he was just stopping in for a quick meeting regarding Wayne foundation donations in this wing. “Oh, and to check in on that boy from the circus. What a terrible tragedy. How is he doing, by the way?”
She sugarcoated it for him. No use in burdening the Wayne family’s playboy heir with the inherent tragedies that befell the intensive care unit on a good day, but Bruce knew from the grim set of her mouth that “hopefully” was an empty offering. It would be a miracle if Richard—Dick, the boy murmured in those brief windows of lucidity—made it through the night.
The Batman was surrounded by death, day in, day out. He saved innocent lives and ended evil ones. He’d stared death in the face more times than he could count. He was virtually dead in all the ways that mattered. There was no reason for this impending death to be hitting him so hard. Maybe because this boy lost both parents at once the same way Bruce had. More likely because he knew exactly how to save him from joining them.
Bruce would never have wished this undeath on anyone else who had another option. He would have chosen death over vampirism in a heartbeat if he’d been able to decide as much for himself. Bruce couldn’t imagine taking that autonomy away from another person.
But…this boy was dying. It was the Batman’s fault he lay in this hospital bed with splintered bones and failing organs.
It wouldn’t be saving his life, to turn him now. It would be dooming him to a fate like Bruce’s. A fate of being a monster.
Bruce would no longer be a monster alone. Maybe…maybe it would be better if he had a companion to accompany him on his crusade. Bruce hated himself and hated being a vampire because he was completely isolated in this life. Alfred loved him and stayed by his side no matter what atrocities he committed, but Alfred would never understand the pain of losing one’s humanity. He would never understand the thirst Bruce fought every second of every day. If he turned Dick now, maybe they could be happy, eventually. They were both orphans now, but they would have each other.
Alfred always lamented his lost chance of being a grandfather one day.
It was selfish to consider it in the first place. Selfish to come to the conclusion that Bruce could make this boy happy enough that their curse might not be so much of a curse after all, given time. Exceedingly selfish that Dick Grayson mysteriously vanished from his hospital bed before the overnight nurse’s next round.
Bruce would have Alfred make the necessary bribes later to avoid news of the boys’ disappearance from getting out. Anything can be swept under the rug in Gotham.
This would be good for them both, Bruce reassured himself as he carried the fragile, broken child to his cave. He didn’t stir once due to the morphine. Best to keep it that way for as long as he could, for once the transformation started, no amount of painkillers would help.
The process would be unpleasant, but Dick would have a fresh shot at life. Sort of. Bruce was too late to stop the tragedy before it could happen, but he could make the best of the damage after. And now Bruce wouldn’t have to be alone anymore. He would have a companion. A son, perhaps.
Bruce brought the boy straight to the cave, avoiding the manor entirely. Alfred was going to be furious, but forgiveness is easier to get than permission. He lay the boy down on a medical cot, avoiding jostling his broken limbs as much as possible. They would heal by tomorrow, but he would not put Dick through any more pain than necessary. And for this process to work, it would, unfortunately, be necessary. Shattered legs and collapsed lungs are nothing compared to the agony of the transformation.
Dick would forgive Bruce eventually, give or take a few decades.
There was no time for explanations or speeches. Dick was barely lucid enough to hear Bruce’s apologies, but he had to say it before he started. “This is going to hurt,” Bruce told the boy, brushing hair off his bandaged forehead, “but you’ll be okay. I’ll teach you how to live this life. I’ll protect you. It’s all going to be okay, son.”
He didn’t give himself time to reconsider. He couldn’t risk seeing sense and changing his mind. He bit down. Dick screamed.
As soon as the blood touched Bruce’s fangs, he felt the frenzy start. He’d never drunk human blood straight from the source before. Bagged blood had a stale flavor, like old pennies. It lacked the natural body heat of blood sucked from an artery. Bat blood had nothing on this.
It took every ounce of Bruce’s self-control to force himself to unclamp his jaw and throw himself to the other side of the room, slapping a hand over his bloody mouth. He would not lose control. He would not screw up his one—and only—chance at having something to live for besides a grueling mission and endless violence.
It took a day and half for Dick’s injuries to mend themselves as the venom spread. Bruce didn’t leave his side the entire time.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Alfred said sorrowfully while he cleaned dried blood from the boy’s neck. It took hours for him to be able to look Bruce in the eye again. “It would have been better to let him pass peacefully.”
“I couldn’t let him die. His parents would have wanted him to have this chance.”
Alfred just shook his head. “Whatever makes you feel righteous.”
For days, Dick wailed in agony. He sobbed and shook and pleaded for someone, anyone to kill him. Did it really take this long when Bruce was turned? He stayed by Dick’s side every minute, stroking the boy’s forehead and murmuring apologies.
Bruce heard it when the boy’s hummingbird heart finally stopped. His screams quieted. Bruce waited.
Dick opened his blood-red eyes and sat up slowly. He had no pulse, no need to breathe, but Bruce still felt his fear. It was like…like a tether had formed between them as soon as the child’s heart stopped. A creator and his creation. Bruce felt the burn in the boy’s throat. He felt the absolute terror that filled Dick’s new body when those red eyes landed on Bruce. “Where…Where am I?”
Bruce didn’t step forward yet or make any sudden movements. “My home.”
“Where’s Mom and Dad? We…had a show tonight. The act—”
“I’m so sorry, Dick. Your parents didn’t make it.”
The boy released a sob. He clutched his throat, choking on grief and his new thirst. “I’m—my throat hurts. I don’t— What did you do to me?”
Bruce smiled reassuringly, laying a hand on the boy’s cold shoulder. “I saved you.”
Tears poured down Dick’s face. “I’m so thirsty. It hurts.”
“Don’t worry, son. I’ll teach you how to hunt. I’ll teach you everything I know.”