Caped Transvestite

The boy was eight years old when the bats came for him.

Not the ones in the cave. Those had been there for centuries, hanging like wet rags from the limestone, and he'd walked among them with a flashlight and a stolen key, daring himself to stand still while they screamed and wheeled around his head. His father had found him down there once and hadn't yelled. Just stood at the mouth of the cave with his arms crossed, watching his son learn something about fear. That was the kind of man Thomas Wayne was. He let you find your own lessons.

The other bats came later. The ones with names.

I'm getting ahead of myself. I do that. Thirty years of living in the dark will scramble a man's sense of sequence.

My name is Bruce Wayne. You've probably heard of me. If you haven't, you've been living under a rock, which, honestly, I respect. I've spent a fair amount of time under rocks myself. Metaphorically speaking. Though there was that one week in the catacombs beneath the old cathedral, and that was literal enough.

I'm writing this down because the doctors say it helps. Not the ones at Gotham General. The other ones. The ones who don't write anything down themselves, which tells you something about how much they trust the system. Dr. Crane sends his regards, by the way. He's still in Arkham. Still asking about me. I don't ask about him.

Where was I?

The bats. Right.

So I was eight, and my parents were alive, and the city was a different kind of rotten back then. The kind you could still pretend was just a bad smell. My father ran the hospital. My mother ran the foundation. They ran this city, really, though neither of them would've said so. They believed in the slow work. The kind that takes decades. Building things. Funding things. Showing up at galas in uncomfortable shoes and shaking hands with men whose money came from places you didn't ask about.

I hated the galas. I hated the shoes. I hated the way my father would kneel down to my level in the coatroom and say, *Twenty more minutes, chum. Then we go home and you can read.*

Twenty more minutes.

I've had a lot of twenty more minutes since then.

The night they died, I was wearing a blue blazer with brass buttons. I remember the buttons because I was fidgeting with them in the alley, twisting them, trying to unscrew them from the fabric. My mother had told me to stop. My father had laughed. Then the man with the gun stepped out from behind the dumpster, and the laughing stopped, and the buttons didn't matter anymore.

I won't describe what happened next. You've seen it. Everyone's seen it. It's the most famous alley in America, and I've spent my whole life trying to make it mean something else. Trying to make it a beginning instead of an end.

The pearls. Everyone always talks about the pearls.

Here's what nobody talks about: the sound my father made when he fell. Not a scream. A kind of exhale. Like he'd been holding his breath his whole life and finally, in the worst possible way, he let it go.

I heard that sound for years. Every time I closed my eyes. Every time I didn't.

I'm not going to tell you the story you think I'm going to tell you. The one where the boy grows up into a man in a cape, swinging from rooftops, punching lunatics in the face. That story's real, but it's not the whole story. It's not even the interesting part.

The interesting part started when I was twenty-six, and I came home from a trip abroad, and I found a letter on my desk that shouldn't have been there.

I'd been gone seven years. Seven years of learning from people who taught me how to fight, how to disappear, how to read a room full of enemies like a menu. I came back to Gotham with a plan and a costume and a hole in my chest the size of a boy's blue blazer. I came back to burn the city down and rebuild it clean.

The letter was on my desk. In the manor. In a room I'd locked before I left.

It was written on paper so old it cracked when I unfolded it. The handwriting was a kind of elegant scrawl I'd never seen before, looping and theatrical, the letters leaning into each other like dancers at a party where everyone's had too much to drink.

*Dear Mister Wayne,*

*I've been watching your career with tremendous interest. You have flair, darling. Real flair. The cape, the car, the brooding. It's all very dramatic. I appreciate drama. I've built my entire life on it.*

*But you're going about this all wrong, and I think you know it. You're trying to fix a city that doesn't want to be fixed. You're trying to save people who'd rather be entertained. And you're doing it all alone, which is, frankly, the saddest part.*

*I have a proposal for you. Not the kind you're used to. Something more... theatrical.*

*Come to the old Monarch Theatre. Friday. Midnight. Come as yourself. I want to see the man under the mask. I want to see what's left of the boy in the alley.*

*We have so much in common, you and I. We both lost everything. We both built something impossible out of the wreckage. And we're both, if I may be so bold, absolutely fabulous.*

*Don't bring the bat. Bring Bruce.*

*Yours in anticipation,*

*F.*

I read it three times. Then I read it again. Then I did what any sane man would do: I checked the security footage, ran the paper through every database I had access to, and found absolutely nothing. The cameras had all gone dark for eleven minutes. The paper was a kind of vellum that hadn't been manufactured since 1910. The handwriting matched no known sample in any archive on Earth.

And the signature. That single letter, that F, curling into itself like a question mark made of smoke.

I should've burned it. I should've ignored it. I should've done any of the hundred sensible things a man in my position would do.

Instead, I found myself standing in front of a mirror at eleven o'clock on a Friday night, trying to decide whether to wear the black suit or the gray one, and realizing, with a kind of horror that felt almost like relief, that I hadn't been this curious about anything in years.

My butler, Alfred, found me there. He's been with me since before the alley. He's seen me through everything, and he's never once told me what he actually thinks, which is how I know he loves me.

*Going out, sir?*

*Yes.*

*Shall I prepare the car?*

*No. I'll drive myself.*

He paused in the doorway. He has a way of pausing that's louder than most people's shouting.

*Might I ask where you're going?*

*The Monarch.*

Another pause. Longer this time.

*The Monarch has been closed for thirty years, sir.*

*I know.*

*And you're going there at midnight.*

*I am.*

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, the way he does when he's decided not to argue.

*Will you be requiring the cape, sir?*

*No,* I said. *Not tonight.*

I don't know why I said that. I don't know why I went at all. But I did. I drove through the wet streets of Gotham with the radio off and the windows down, and I felt something I hadn't felt since I was eight years old, fidgeting with brass buttons in a dark alley.

I felt like the night was about to teach me something.

And it was. God help me, it was.