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She’s a psychologist, but she’s not prepared for this.
Amy remembers how she came into her field of study; the feeling as she held her mother as she cried, the way her own tears tracked marks down her face. The emptiness, the anger, the mocking way the note stared up at them, offering empty condolences.
I love you, it says, loopy handwriting and tear-blotched paper. It’s burned into her brain, the image, and she can’t ever forget it. It catches her on unexpecting days; late night grocery runs on a Wednesday night, morning coffee breaks at work.
No you didn’t, she thinks some days, angry and guilty and hurting. If you did, you would have tried. You wouldn’t’ve left.
She knows that it’s an unfair thought. She knows what it’s like to get that low. But it never stops the part of her that aches at the loss, that never forgot. It never leaves her.
She gets angry, and that never leaves her, either.
She supposes that she wanted to understand why.
Why she ever came to find that note. Why she came so close to writing her own, still hidden in the back of her wardrobe a decade later. She’s too afraid to unearth it and see the reflections, what it mirrors back at her. She wants to throw it away, burn it to ashes; she keeps it anyway as a reminder.
She wanted to understand the lows of life, the empty sand beaches and reproaching shorelines. She wanted to understand herself, and maybe the people who wrote those notes as well. The Amy who was so stuck in static, and her tired, exhausted brother. She wants to understand the rage that colours her life, paints the sky behind her eyes red.
The feeling never goes away. She extends hands of compassion; wraps arms around people in comfort. Her movements are kind, gentle, while lava boils under her skin. She dedicates her life to others, to the tears and pain and heartache. She smiles through the blood, ignoring how it smears her teeth. She loves and wishes she could burn the world down.
She gets this case, one day. She’s approached for it specifically. They tell her it’s confidential, they need the upmost privacy as they work with the victims.
She says yes. The word victims incite something in her.
They tell her this.
Bruce Wayne is Batman.
Not a lot of people know. It’s very hush, confidential. A secret held in the tight grips of over-qualified government officials and the blotchy ink of NDA’s. Her fingers are stained black from the text.
Apparently, someone came to the FBI directly, with enough evidence to incriminate Bruce Wayne in an unravellable web of truths. A small data pack, anonymous and completely clean. They don’t know who sent it.
It’s never going to see the light of day. Once this ordeal is over, all these secrets will disappear. Locked up in an airtight vault, left to gather time and dust. Left to be forgotten, underneath the archives and endless, labyrinthian sub-levels of the Pentagon. Because.
Because.
Bruce Wayne is Batman.
And.
Bruce Wayne has seven children.
Richard, Jason, Cassandra. Carrying his weight, with closed mouths and tired eyes. His children knew.
Tim, Stephanie, Duke. Growing bodies and broken bones, blood and pain and willingness. His children helped.
Damian. A war that was never theirs, a cause that never cared. His children fought.
His children were not children. They were soldiers. She aches for them. She angers for them.
They confer with the Justice League; liaisons bring and carting news and information. Bureaucratic nonsense, red tape tying them up in knots. She wants to take the children, spirit them far away. The Justice League wants to take them into their own custody instead. She doesn’t care what happens to Bruce Wayne. She has a million oppinions anyway.
The Justice League knows of Batman’s soldiers. They claim that they operate outside of the government, and that their methods aren’t subject to US law. They are an international organisation and operate under different legislations. They claim that this is none of their business, that they should keep their noses out of their business.
That it’s perfectly normal that they have children giving up their own lives for adults twice their age.
Amy gets in a shouting match with Wonder Woman. She says they are children. How can you justify sending children off to war. How can you fucking justify this? She thinks she cried but she just can’t remember; the emotions are too much. She doesn’t know if she has ever felt this much fury, this much sorrow, before. She overflows in it, drowns in it.
She thinks of notes. Thinks of the fact that these children are ready to die. Maybe not in the same way she wanted to once, the same way her brother went, but the difference doesn’t matter. Death doesn’t change for anyone; it’s still the end
Except, one Jason Todd says, much later. Sometimes you don’t ever catch a fucking break. You wake up in your own coffin, choking on air, and wishing you were still dead. You dig your way out anyway, because you don’t know anything else out of surviving and sacrificing.
Wonder Woman looks at her sadly, glowing lasso hanging off her hip. It casts her face in golden shadows, and Amy would think it was beautiful if she didn’t know any better. Wonder Woman tells her, I’m glad they have you on their side, before walking off.
How dare she think that she can just walk away.
Ever since she found that note, loopy writing and tearstains and all, Amy has been furious. At her brother, at herself, at the world. Every day she gets more angry.
Every day, she finds things to be angry for. And she’s angry for these children.
Bruce Wayne, Wonder Woman, the Justice League. Batman. The list grows.
She never actually sees Bruce Wayne. She’s glad, on both their behalf’s. It wouldn’t end well.
Broken teeth and dislocated bones, nails marks raked down his cheek. She imagines a wound for every scar she can see on the children’s bodies, and a hundred more for the invisible pain they carry in between their shoulders. She imagines what his body would look like bent under the force of her anger. A metal pole warped by the raging floodwaters of her heart. She is overfilling.
They say He’s a good man. She doesn’t say, where have I heard that before, because it never helps with these types. They say he’s a hero. They are heroes. They’ve done so much good. She tells them, simply, they are children.
Where were their heroes?
Screams never reach closed ears, but she screams anyway. She can’t contain her heart.
The Justice League doesn’t acknowledge what is wrong. They can’t or they won’t. Are they silenced by their guilt, or by their ignorance. Do they even care? She wants to tear down their organisation, brick by brick, raze everything to the ground until nothing is left.
Amy cares. Sometimes she wishes she didn’t.
Tim Drake tells her about notes. Every six months, he confides, I write one for each of my family members. Contingencies, just in case. I want them to get their closure, you know?
She thinks that she doesn’t. Notes don’t give closure. Look at her now, twenty years later, fire and lava and ice-cold determination. She hates, fiercely and horribly, and that list grows and never shortens with time. At the top of her list is herself, and her brother.
She feels guilty for it. She loved him, loves him, will never stop loving him. She understands him, almost. She sees herself in his broken pieces. But she hates what he did, what he did to himself and her mother and her.
It couldn’t be fixed with a note. She knew this only after she was staring down the barrel of her own, scribbled and messy and torn. She had taken the paper from the back of the shopping list, the pen from her friend’s purse. Alone for days, whaled up in that apartment that she will never return to. When she finished, she thought about who would see it.
She saw her brothers note first. She saw it and almost tore it up. And she has never been the same since. It fixed nothing for her. It didn’t make up for what had been done.
She tells Tim Drake, burn those notes. They don’t need them. They need you to live.
Tim Drake shrugs at that. She wants to shake him until he sees what he sees. She wants to kill him.
The Justice League doesn’t see this. Bruce Wayne never sees this. They never see the acceptance in his sons face as he talks about his death. The inevitability of it, the non-existent hope he has.
All his children see it. Not far away, but up close, caressing the strands of their hair. They dance with death, up on the rooftops and down on the streets. They live side by side with it, laughing and crying and living in its presence, embracing the cold as an exciting new adventure. Their hands never shake, and it scares her. They reach out in a steady embrace and Death meets them in kind.
None of them talk about their future. They live one day at a time, revelling whenever they live to see sunrise. Every new morning is a surprise, a gift, and none of them expect to die old. None of them expect to die quietly.
Jason Todd dies at age fifteen in an explosion, beaten to death by a lunatic and betrayed by his blood mother. He comes back and never seeks another path. He doesn’t take the way out, the second chance. Instead, he goes right back up to that line, that thin line, and looks Death in the eye.
None of them walk away. Her brother didn’t walk away.
She walked away, left that note in the bottom of her closet, that apartment in the dust of her wake, and never looked back. She’s alive.
He’s not. The children are somewhere in between.
She’s angry. The feeling never leaves.
They are tied up in red tape, binding her hands and her mouth. The children can’t move forward, but they can’t leave either; stuck in this in-between. They are kept right here at the base, sleeping in some old army barracks. They stick together and keep close, guarding each other from external threats.
She tries to protect them as well. She knows the Justice League would never dare take them from here, never dare make themselves criminals of one of the most influential Western governments. She has thoughts about it anyway; hot-red laser eyes, bullet-proof skin and arms stronger than steel. A golden white lasso, strength far above her own, wounds that heal in double time.
Worst of all, a black cape shrouded in shadows, a deep gravelly voice, a monster, a hero, a man, a father.
She keeps them in the loop, because it’s their futures that are being decided, their futures that are being gifted into light. She tells them about the legalities and the loopholes and the fights. They deserve to know.
She doesn’t tell them about the words. When Green Lantern roars, they’re his children. He loves them. When she screams back, love isn’t enough.
Love doesn’t make up for anything. You can hurt the people you love; sometimes so much more than anyone else. Everything cuts deeper, takes twice as long to heal. It’s been two decades for her.
Love doesn’t make up for the scars it leaves. Bruce Wayne may love his children, his children may love him, but nothing changes. These children still have bodies that are decorated with scars, bodies that will stop working before they turn sixty. These children have been hurt by love, and nothing is excusable.
She loves deeply, and it hurts. Fishhooks drag over her heart, and she rebuilds her walls every month. She loves and it gifts her nothing but anger, hot and cold and impossible to contain. These children love, are loved, and they hurt so much she could never feel how deep. She would fall down a rabbit hole of their pain, and it would never end. It will never end, because the damage is done.
The scars are irreversible. You could take makeup to the skin, concealer and foundation and a million other products, but the core remains. You can’t take away the raised, stretched skin the wound leaves. You will always feel the contours under your fingertips, no matter how invisible they can become.
Bruce Wayne loves his children, and that means nothing. Love doesn’t mean he knew best, it didn’t mean he treated them well. He cared and he caused pain, and if he was better, he would have never let his children think about putting on that mask.
Damian Wayne tells her; my mother loved me. She made me invincible, a warrior stronger than any other. She also made me a monster. He stared down at his hands like the blood is still there. She imagines that, for him, he sees the red every day. She didn’t know any better. It was how she loved
It’s a judgement far more mature than any other thirteen-year-old could ever come up with. She wants him to tell her how he came to that conclusion. She wants to forget the pattern the scares make on his arms. They’re spiky, raised, and angry, a horrible reflection of her own heart.
Damian Wayne says, I was loved by my father as well. He didn’t know how to do it right. But I loved him back anyway.
The love leaves stains, marking them. You see it on each child. She hates for them, because they don’t have the capacity to do it themselves.
Love is never enough. Her brother loved her and her mother, and the love was never enough the cushion the chasm she feels in herself today. She loved her brother, and it wasn’t enough for him to stay. That’s an unfair thought.
She loved, and she wrote that note too, hoping it would be enough. She loves, and she knows the pain and burden it carries. She knows how twisted, how round about love can be. She knows how it feels like as a shelter, how it feels like as a weapon.
She knows what it leaves behind, and anger so deep it never leaves.
She wonders what Bruce Wayne’s screams would sound like. She wonders if she is a horrible person. She wonders if she cares, when she has millenniums of anger to fuel her. If life was dictated by spite, she would live through the ages.
If life was dictated by spite, these children would be long dead. They’re not angry enough.
It’s what we chose, Cassandra Wayne tells. She doesn’t speak much, often tripping up on her words and grammar. It was my… saving. Salvation. I made up for my sins.
You have nothing to make up for, she wants to scream. She wants to carve the words into her brain. You are a child.
I wanted to do this. Cassandra says. It was my choice.
No, it wasn’t, her brain whispers. You were a child.
And they still are. Children, that is. Damian Wayne al Ghul likes animals. He talks all the time about the different types of turtles, and what his cow likes to get up to. He makes sure that Titus and Ace are being looked after while he is here, with such aggression and seriousness that doesn’t suit a boy his age. He is demanding and mean and sincere and is just learning how to be kind.
Duke Thomas cries at night, about his parents and his siblings, about his life. He’s kind and gentil and insanely determined about what he wants. He likes collecting cards and slam poetry, and he is just discovering how horrible life can be. He’s a child in every sense of the word.
Stephanie Brown is a fighter. She hates her dad, and it colours her interactions. She screams and yells and laughs when she wants to cry. She holds so much anger, so much love, and you can see it spill over her. She likes waffles and glitter and the colour purple and never fully understands that she doesn’t have anything to prove. At seventeen, she is still a child.
Tim Drake is serious. He likes plans and being in charge, likes motorbikes and cars and skateboards like a normal teenager. But unlike a normal teenager he loves too heavily, silent and from afar. He writes notes and doesn’t understand the impact of his life on those around him, doesn’t value himself the way his family does. For someone so smart, he will never know, and for that he is a child.
Cassandra Wayne likes dancing and laughing. She does it in the rain, in the sun, and doesn’t bother to cover up the scars that wind their way around her body. She carries her sins, and every day she tries to make up for them. She is quiet, but her body is loud; it says a thousand words she never will. At nineteen, she still believes that she must atone for her sins, for the mistakes of all the adults in her life made. She shouldn’t have to carry them. She is a child.
Jason Todd is loud and brash, but his eyes are heavyset and sad. He likes guns and the feeling of adrenaline, and all his emotions feel deep into his heart. He carries around the same anger, the red-hot lava that boils under his skin. He was murdered at age fifteen, and it shows; he never gets to regain what was taken from him. He was murdered a child and came back a child.
Richard Grayson, the oldest. He smiles and laughs and likes gymnastics and cereal. His charm never quite hides the burdens her bears under his skin, the weight of the world. He has six younger siblings, and he loves them to destruction. He will bend his body under the force of the current, pull it apart piece by piece if that’s what he needs to do. He grins and snarls at anyone who comes too close and will never understand that he is a child too.
God, they are all children, and it makes her blood boil.
Children don’t fight in wars. Children don’t break their own bones, spill their own blood, for a man that will never fully understand the impact. Children don’t go out every night, under the moon and the glittering stars that you can’t see from the fog, and make the choice to put their lives last, every single time.
Children should be fought for. So that’s what she does, every day. She fights and screams and yells, because that’s what she was born to do. Every morning, every night, every fucking meeting that she attends in their stead. She refuses to smile, to play nice, and they hate her for it. Someone on the Justice League liaison team calls her a bitch and she shows her teeth, and bites. They can see the bloodstains that paint the pearly white and know that she won’t back down.
She says, I’m sorry, are you fucking with me. Her voice is sore and cracked most days, because she will scream. Her superiors sometimes tell her to tone it down, to be diplomatic. She tells them, these people don’t listen unless you make them. She tells them, why should we negotiate for the safety of these children. Why is that even a fucking question.
Because there are some people who will listen, and there are some people who will close their ears and turn the other way. She is not a fucking coward.
Some people don’t care about what their actions leave behind. Some people don’t understand it. But they will always leave their mark, their stain of love or hate or indifference. They will always leave something behind, and it usually hurts.
Bruce Wayne loved his children. He was so caught up in his never-ending war, but he loved for them. He never saw the destruction he left, though.
If he did, Richard Grayson should have always slept through the nights at Wayne Manor. Richard Grayson should never have left home at sixteen. Richard Grayson should have clear skin and a bubbly attitude; an egocentric view of the world that most people never grow out of.
Richard Grayson should be spoiled, a little bratty. He should worry about to get his siblings for their birthdays, or about nothing at all. Money can do wonderful things.
Richard Grayson should be happy. Instead, he’s not.
Robin shouldn’t exist. Instead, it does.
I never meant for Robin to become… this, he tells her one day, after the tears have stopped. I never meant for it to become this legacy, this horrible, destructive thing.
I look at my siblings every day, and I think, Robin has done this to them. I have done this to them. Some days I can’t live with myself.
She holds him as he implodes, crushed under his own weight. She tells him, because it’s important, you were a child. You didn’t make Robin. He did.
But she does see what he means. Robin has torn these children’s lives up, taken their love and care and hope, and left them to pick up the pieces. Each former Robin, unable to quite bring their lives back together again.
She sees the way they look at Damian. The fear, the horror, the love. They bundle him up tight in their bullet proof capes, all the while he spits and yells and says you don’t have to coddle me. He doesn’t understand yet why they do it; why they don’t want him to grow up. They protect him the best they can, with fists and weapons and their very own bodies, because it’s all they have left, now. They don’t want him to become like them, and yet they know it’s inevitable.
She doesn’t ask, why did you never quit. Why don’t you make him quit, because that’s an unfair question. It’s all these children have known, all they have left of themselves. If they quit, it’s an admission that it was wrong, that they are broken.
They all resist. They say, it’s not all that bad. I found a family. I was happy.
She says, with all the kindness her body can offer, it can be both. She takes her anger out on the adults, the people who deserve it.
The bureaucratic red tape ties her hands together, and there is not a lot she can do. Her voice scrapes on the inside of her throat, and she forces it out anyway. The pain only fuels her; the spite makes her stronger. They hate her and she laughs and spits in their faces. They call her crazy, unhinged, and maybe they are right, but she doesn’t stop. She thinks, you have never felt anger like mine. You’ve never felt like them. They don’t understand her, and they never stop to. They don’t understand what they did, and they never stop to. She tells them, but only half the words ever make it through to their ears.
She thinks of her brother and the way he loved her, and the way he left her. Sometimes these ideals conflict in her head, but other times she understands. It can be both. She thinks of her own love, her own fall. It can be both. Two things can exist, two opposing ideals, and they can come together. Two things, that she barely understands, can fight and merge and separate, intangible but too real. Two things can exist, and she is still angry.
She doesn’t think that she will ever stop. She can’t now.