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It used to be a joke.
Started with Green Lantern, one of the many occasions when he huffed and grumbled about the unfairness of Batman being regarded as such a badass when he didn’t have any actual powers. To which, without missing a beat, the Dark Knight rumbled, “There is one thing.”
Barry remembers sitting up straight in his chair, startled. Superman and Wonder Woman both paused, surprised, gazes going to where their most stoic member stood at the computer console with his back to the rest of the monitor room. “...well are you going to tell us?” Lantern gripes, after the dramatic pause.
Batman hummed. Hummed. As if to wordlessly say, where’s the fun in that?
“You yourself have insisted it’s good tactics to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, Batman,” Wonder Woman points out, deadpan, but with one eyebrow raised high enough to indicate she’s as much amused as curious.
Another small hum. And then: “I don’t die.”
A startled snort from Lantern. “Seriously? That’s the best you’ve got? You ‘don’t die’?”
“More accurate to perhaps describe it as, I don’t stay dead.”
Barry’s brief moment of bemusement came to a jarring halt. Because that? While he could have assumed three bland words were just an attempt at needling Lantern, which seemed to be pretty good fun for Batman, Barry heard something else in how the guy elaborated. Something that made a shiver crawl down his spine.
Still. It stayed in the realm of a joke. Batman never actually explained further, or offered any kind of proof (“I’m not going to hold still and let myself be shot purely for your benefit, Lantern,”) and thus. Running gag. Something to dryly bring up in front of other heroes working with the Justice League, in the face of their astonishment that Batman didn’t have powers: “Actually, there is one: he doesn’t stay dead.” Followed by assorted zombie references, just to see who could first trigger an exasperated sigh from their resident cryptid.
Granted, none of them started doing that on their own; it took Robin’s first visit to the Watchtower, a cheeky “Yep, same goes for me!” when Barry tentatively brought up the ‘not staying dead’ thing. He offered a story. A horrifying account of falling for a trap set by one of their recurring villains, Two-Face, of getting beaten with a baseball bat until Batman freed himself and put a stop to it - of a terminal diagnosis that lasted all of two minutes until his heart began working again of its own accord.
“But the regeneration doesn’t work with unrelated injuries,” the teenager huffed, still hopping from one piece of gym equipment to the next. “My ribs healed up overnight, but it took ages for the cast to come off my arm.”
Barry is very certain that if he’d looked in a mirror at that moment, there’d have been an honest to goodness green tinge to his cheeks. Robin spoke of the incident so casually, indicating it happened years ago - when he couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen on that visit, practically the same age as Barry’s nephew with brand new superspeed.
Didn’t take a detective to be able to tell, a few months later, after the ‘Teen Titans’ began fighting crime together, when Robin dropped that very same bombshell on the other kids. Wally sought Barry out after coming home, pale and wide-eyed, to demand if the League had ever actually seen Batman or Robin die in front of them.
“No,” Barry had to admit. Stories. It was all still just stories, in those days, still in the realm of a joke if not taken too seriously. “But honestly? I hope I never have to. And the same goes for his kid.”
It used to be a joke.
Batman couldn’t stay dead.
Neither could Robin, first or second.
And then-
Ethiopia.
“What happened to you and your boys not staying dead, huh?”
“...only in Gotham.”
It’s the first time any of them have seen Batman in person in months. He’s dropped pretty much all League responsibilities, refused to attend meetings, dodged the first attempt at an intervention from Superman and it’s only now, here, caught in Diana’s lasso on a Wayne Enterprises rooftop that their friend’s mask finally cracks, and the wretched grieving creature that is Bruce staggers out into the open.
“It only works in Gotham,” he croaks again, standing but only barely, hunched so far into himself that he fully resembles one of the city’s gargoyles. “I didn’t- know- it only works here, in Gotham, thanks to Gotham, it- she- I can’t- there is something in my city, she is the city, she won’t- I can’t-”
They’re all alarmed. Diana, Clark, Barry and Hal, they wanted to come put a check on how fast Bruce has been falling from grace, but not this.
And then it gets worse.
It finally, after all these years, stops being a joke.
When Bruce turns away from them, pulls a batarang from his utility belt, and stabs himself.
It’s not that he does it quickly. It’s that he does it silently, hidden by his cape, Barry doesn’t know it’s happened until they all hear the impact, the grunt of pain, and then he’s leaping forward to yank the big hunk of dark fabric away to see the wound and the blood gushing out of his friend’s thigh. Barry may work in the forensic lab rather than a morgue, but he knows a severed femoral artery when he sees one, “Wrap it, quickly, I can still get him to a hospital in time-!”
“No.” Bruce’s grip is bone-creakingly tight around his wrist, but only for a moment, before the blood loss takes its toll and he starts to collapse. “Just- let it. See. You’ll see.”
Diana is the one who holds them steady. The literal divine figure among their ranks. She holds onto Barry’s hand and Clark’s shoulder, stares down Hal with every anxious twitch, until maybe a minute has gone by since the blood stopped gushing.
Clark sucks in a sharp breath first. “His- his heartbeat-”
Still kneeling next to Bruce’s fallen form, Barry has a front row seat to how his flesh and skin knits back together under the hole torn in his suit. To the ragged shudder that shakes Bruce from head to toe. To the sound of utter despair he makes upon waking back up, looking at them, and saying yet again:
“It only works in Gotham.”