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Batman, in contrast to the many rumours surrounding his existence, is unforgivingly human. This fact is what allows Batman to keep himself firmly away from the line of no return, this muted sense of inability that comes with being nothing but a man.
He possesses no feature that may benefit or disadvantage him in any way by being something as simple as a person, allowing both Bruce Wayne and Batman the courtesy of understanding — of empathy. It is easy to put yourself in someone else's shoes when you have nothing to compare their strange inhumanity to. After all, you yourself, are nothing but a person.
This is perhaps why it is so easy for Bruce to understand that his son is not human.
Dick is not his son, not really. The boy has been very clear at his bright age of eight and a half that he has no desire to replace the father he still remembers. Bruce understands, thinking back to when he was just a boy as well, protective and hesitant to let the legacy of his parents leave his grasp in the slight chance he wakes up one morning to forget everything about them, their faces slipping through his fingers like grains of sand.
(And he had let them slip away, eventually. He can't pinpoint when it was exactly, but one day, years after that night in the alley, Bruce forgets the smell of his mother when she slept next to him during a fever. He forgets the deep rumbling of his father's voice at the breakfast table. He forgets the texture of their hands holding his.)
Dick Grayson is only a few months into being an orphan, and clasps the memories of his parents so fiercely that there is no time to pretend Bruce has the capabilities to be half the father John Grayson previously had been.
But Bruce Wayne is human, and he thinks that makes him rightfully selfish. Humans are always looking to be someone they're not.
So no, Dick Grayson is not his son, not really.
He is also not human, not that it's something so important.
Bruce comes to the realisation that his ward is more than he seems when he finds himself waking up gradually at around three in the morning, and then all at once when the familiar prickling sensation of someone watching you snaps him into wakefulness. He sits up immediately, eyes wide but completely useless as they strain to see anything in the darkness around him.
He hears a childish sniffle somewhere in the room, and Bruce feels his stomach tie itself into knots.
"Are you alright?" Bruce whispers into the darkness of his bedroom, the hair on the back of his neck standing on edge. There's not a single sound other than his own breathing to suggest someone else is in here with him.
But Bruce knows. He can feel the harsh and stalking gaze somewhere in the darkness, pressed against the paper of his walls and the lines of gloss on the hardwood floor. There's a predator in the room, watching him intently, searching for something in the silence of Bruce's words.
Suddenly there is a barely perceptible movement somewhere across the floors, like someone is dragging a thin sheet of paper towards his bed. It's sharp on the ground, slicing into the quietness.
Something hisses, not angrily, and then, a quiet voice asks, "Bruce?"
Bruce shifts on his bed, pulling the cover off so he can twist to look around into his dark room, eyes finally adjusting. Although he sees nothing but the blurred shadows of his furniture, semi-blackout curtains allowing very little light from the outside into the room, Bruce knows now that Dick Grayson is somewhere in the darkness.
"Dick?" He whispers, not moving to get off the bed, "What's wrong, chum?"
"I — I didn't —" the boy gasps, and Bruce marvels at the way it sounds like there are three people in the room. Him, Dick Grayson, and a quiet hissing creature. Though, he knows that two of those are one of the same, "I'm sorry, I — I couldn't sleep."
"That's alright." Bruce tells him gently.
He narrows his eyes as he scans the expanse of the master bedroom, eyes trailing across every muted colour and shadow and — there.
Hidden under a table near the door that holds a vase of fake ornamental flowers, Bruce sees two eyes.
Blue. So, unrelentingly blue. But they're different tonight. Instead of bright sapphire irises and childishly round pupils that make him seem so much younger than he is, Dick Grayson's pupils are sharp. Thin elongated cuts from one side to the other, vertically slicing down the middle of his wonderfully bright eyes.
For a second, Bruce blanches. He'd think he might be dreaming if he can remember ever having one.
He's reminded of Selina, eyes more golden than brown and a similar feline sharpness of her pupils. She's not human, and Bruce thinks she never really has been. There's less humanity to be hidden in the arching of her body into tight spaces, the unlimited height in which she can jump and survive — such sharp and precise movements to ever see her for something less than different.
Then, ridiculously, he thinks of Talia. Beautiful and dangerous. There's no words to truly describe the unimaginable existence of Talia Al Ghul. Humans aren't supposed to think of them so freely without some sort of ridiculous retribution, and maybe that's why Bruce quickly moves on from envisioning her cracked emerald eyes. Talia hadn't been human, and nothing about her ever suggested you'd mistake her for one in the first place.
"Come out from under there," Bruce whispers to the boy gently, feeling choked, looking right at him.
Dick Grayson thinks about it for a moment, and then he moves — and Bruce understands.
Dick isn't like Talia, which is as relieving as it is troubling. He isn't like Selina, either, but he's different in the same way she is. He moves slowly, but with a calculated level of strength and dexterity. His time at the circus makes him more flexible than children his age already are, but as he slides across the floor, Bruce wonders if the boy ever had bones at all.
The floor is wood, but as Dick Grayson moves, he's almost melting into the ground. He doesn't make a single sound as he does so, and if not for the shining of his eyes, Bruce would have lost sight of him.
A snake, Bruce makes a mental note just as he moves towards the edge of his bed.
The bed is high, a custom frame older than him and his father combined — that is so tall that even Bruce needs to climb onto it. It would be impossible for Dick, who reaches just above Bruce's thigh, to even reach the top.
Or it would be impossible for any other eight year old. But Dick Grayson isn't like the other eight year olds in Gotham. He never has been.
The boy reaches about a foot away from the bed before he stops, and blinks. Bruce sees it then, this second layer of sheen skin that passes over his eyes in a delayed movement to his actual facial muscles. It's so obvious that Bruce wonders why he hadn't ever seen it before. Dick had been living at the manor for almost three months, and double eyelids seem like something one should notice in their wards.
So he's not a snake, exactly. Snakes don't have eyelids at all. Dick Grayson is not his son, not really, and he's not a snake, precisely. Something snake-like then.
"Did you have a nightmare?" Bruce asks carefully instead of asking questions about scales under his skin and brille over his eyes, because he's not Batman at this moment. Bruce Wayne has always been more human, more foolish, than the man in the cowl will ever achieve to be.
Dick watches him for a moment, before moving closer to the bed, nodding shyly, "I'm sorry."
The s in sorry drags itself out, almost unwillingly, like there is an overlap in the room and under Dick Grayson's tanned complexion. Bruce finds that it doesn't itch at his chest in a way that it probably should, causing a sensation of abnormality and… unfamiliarity to make him panic.
It doesn't scare him because Dick Grayson reaches the edge of his bed and hesitantly holds his small hands up to be held. He's too small to climb onto the bed on his own.
"It's okay, you're okay now," Bruce tells him as he reaches over to grab the boy under his arms, and pulls him right into his chest, "You're safe now."
Dick is inhumanly still for a moment, heavy and unmoving like a glass statue in his lap. Bruce still can't see the outline of his body in the darkness, but he feels the boy finally tremble out of his stillness, shaking as he begins to cry.
Bruce sits up and leans back against the plush headboard, folding the boy until he lays across his chest, somehow small enough to fit perfectly into the dip of his sternum. The boy cries, and Bruce holds him tightly, wondering if he was doing this all wrong. Bruce's parents had been human, and it was their greatest weakness, perhaps, but it was also their deciding responsibility. This was how Bruce was held as a child, scared of flying creatures in the basement and the owls in the attic.
Dick Grayson is not human, and his parents probably weren't either. They'd still died.
The boy's small fingers dig sharply into Bruce's side, not enough to bleed, but enough that the pain quickly becomes numb. He hiccups quietly, rubbing his face into the depression above Bruce's collarbone, trying to burrow into the skin and make a home inside of his chest. Does he feel safe to do so? Trust Bruce will look after him if he does?
"I'm sorry." He whispers again, and Bruce squeezes the boy in his arms just a little.
"You're okay," Bruce tells him, closing his eyes and letting his head roll back until it hits the back of the headboard, "I've got you now. You're safe with me, chum."
They stay like that for hours until Alfred comes in to open the curtains and give him his breakfast tray. Somehow, without even being prompted to do so, Alfred comes into the bedroom with two trays of food, one mug of coffee and one glass of milk.
He doesn't say anything when Bruce raises a brow in surprise, and doesn't say anything when he sees Dick blinks awake with sharp pupils in his eyes. Alfred smiles like he'd known along, and maybe he had, before tells Bruce his schedule for the day.
Dick Grayson takes one look at his old gymnastics leotard that he had worn the day his parents died and throws up all over the kitchen table.
The police have officially closed the case of the Grayson Murders, having worked closely with Batman for the last six months to figure out not only who'd cut their lines, but following the trail all the way back to the head. It's rather cruel to think of such an imagery, but Bruce had found the head of the snake, and cut it off instead of simply snipping its rattlesnake tail.
Tony Zucco had only been one part of the travesty, and Bruce made sure everyone involved would not soon repeat their actions.
With the case closed and prison cells fuller than before, the police returned most of the things they'd taken as evidence. Documents, both Dick's and his parents, as well as photos and letters. Bruce didn't show Dick his parent's leotards, washed and bagged in plastic; it would have been heartless.
He had thought Dick might have been ready to see his own uniform. Bruce had been wrong.
Alfred is prepared, as always, and easily pulls the boy towards him with a bucket in his hands. Dick wretches into it until there's nothing left to give, and when Bruce feels as though he might be trying to throw away heart and lungs, he finally intervenes.
Alfred passes the boy to him, and silently leaves the room with the bucket, and Bruce presses Dick's face into the space between his neck and shoulder. But Dick wriggles, trying to break free, and once he does, he glares up at Bruce.
His eyes are bright, pupils sharp, and once Dick collapses from exhaustion and sickness right in his arms — Bruce takes the red, green and yellow uniform and puts it into storage, along with whatever little Dick had come to him with. He places it in a box with colourful and tattered story books written in different European languages, and a stuffed elephant with a missing ear.
"Mama used to call me Robin," Dick says when Bruce shows him the cave a few days later, allowing him to meet Batman, "Because I was tiny and could fly. Bright. Happy."
Although Dick is fluent and passable in nearly as many languages as Bruce, the boy is still not used to communicating so extensively in English. He and his parents, and their extended family at the circus, were performers not tied to any one place, and so Bruce imagines much of what his mother actually meant with the nickname Robin is lost in the translation of many different languages. Dick's eyes are huge and shining as he speaks of his mother and the name she gave him, and Bruce is upset he'll never understand the true beauty of it.
"Robin is like Batman," Dick then suddenly tells him, fiddling with a batarang Bruce had given him to hold, "A name that is not my name. Bruce and Batman. Robin and me. I — I wonder if anyone will call me Robin again."
Bruce holds his breath, "And will they?"
Dick Grayson is not Bruce's son, not really, but it seems he doesn't think he belongs with anyone anymore.
"No," Dick says, gripping the batarang tightly once before letting it go lax in his hands, almost slipping out of his tiny palms, "I do not want to be Robin anymore. Robin was for mama, but my mama is gone now."
Bruce gently pries the weapon out of the boy's hands, replacing it with his hand instead. Dick's hands are so small, even with both hands he can't cover Bruce's palm.
(He didn't know it then, and perhaps he'll never truly know, but Bruce Wayne feels a huge weight lift off his shoulders. Dick Grayson never wears the golden badge of Robin, and he will never have a mantle to pass down. Bruce doesn't know it yet, but Batman is the only name covered in blood and grief that will follow their family for generations to come.)
Dick blinks down at Bruce's hand in his, and the sharp pupils begin to bleed into something more human, less reptilian. But not all is gone, as the second skin passes over his eyes, and the sharpness of a growing row of venomous teeth push against his cheeks as he breathes in and out harshly.
He blinks again, muscle and skin, as frustrated tears build in the corner of his eyes. Bruce watches carefully.
Robin dies that day.
But Dick Grayson lives on.
On Dick Grayson's ninth birthday, he sheds his skin.
Bruce nearly has a heart attack.
Alfred wakes Bruce up early, and he helps set up a large birthday breakfast. Bruce gathers some presents he wants to give him in the morning, and organises them around the boy's seat. The food, most of which consists of meat and dishes that seem far too heavy for breakfast (who eats roasted duck before 10am? Dick Grayson), is piled up high on the special blue and white plates.
Bruce finds he's rather excited. Then, Dick walks into the kitchen, yawning and scratching angrily at his elbow.
Bruce nearly drops the plate of boiled eggs.
Dick's usual tanned and sun kissed complexion is a terrible and ghostly pale. He looks like someone dipped him into a lifesize bowl of flour, and then left him out to bake in the sun. His skin is cracking around the joints, dry and… flaky?
"Morning…" Dick mumbles tiredly, the peeling skin around his mouth making the movement tight. He's lacking his usual excitement about breakfast.
Bruce is so horrified that he can't even muster a reply, let alone start singing happy birthday. Alfred is similarly silent, though has managed to hide his surprise much better than Bruce has.
"Master Richard," Alfred starts casually, walking over with a bright yellow and blue birthday hat held in his hands, "Are you quite alright?"
Bruce stares as the boy cringes and scratches at his cheek, uncomfortably wiggling in his seat, "I don't — I feel hurt. Everywhere. And itchy."
Alfred blinks at him, and then, "Do you mind if I…"
Bruce is still trying to understand why on earth his ward is looking more and more like someone's tried to paint him grey and then threw him into a paper shredder that he doesn't process what Alfred is doing until it's too late. The butler puts down the party hat and gently reaches out, movement confident and elegant in a way only Alfred Pennyworth can muster.
He grabs the peeling skin around Dick's mouth and pulls.
Bruce grabs the side of the kitchen table, lightheaded, "Alfred!"
"Oh!" Dick suddenly cries in plesant surprise once Alfred's ripped a huge chunk of his skin off his face, gently patting the new soft skin underneath, "That — that felt good! Can you do it on the other side too? And on my arm?"
"Oh," Bruce echoes, unable to stand any longer and dropping himself onto a nearby seat. His head spins at the adrenaline crash.
"Perhaps you should take a bath," Alfred offers, uncaring or ignoring Bruce's three seconds of horrified panic, reaching out to peel the dead skin off the other side of Dick's face, "Soaking your skin should make it easier to shed throughout the day."
Dick beams, being able to smile brightly now that the skin wasn't tight around his mouth, "Bruce! Bruce, can we play in the pool? Please!"
He's shedding, Bruce sighs in relief. His heart is still beating miles ahead of where it should.
"Of course," he manages, smiling back with much less excitement, feeling like he'd just lost ten years off his life, "Happy birthday, chum."
Dick grins, pupils sharp, teeth sharper.
Bruce is sure Dick doesn't actually want to kill him.
The boy is nine and still a little too small for his age, but Bruce thinks it might just be genetics. The Grayson's were of average height, and when standing next to Batman, or "gym-addict" Bruce Wayne, everyone seems small in comparison.
He's not weak, and it would be foolish to assume so — just as it would be foolish to assume that simply because Dick Grayson is small, that his hunger would be of similar size. Bruce has watched Dick mercilessly dig into an entire roast chicken by himself, and he probably would've eaten the bones as well if Bruce hadn't practically begged him not to. Dick's eyes are sharper nowadays, less round and less human, not that it matters much to anyone.
He still sneaks into Bruce's room without making a single sound, and hides in impossibly small spots around the manor. Bruce is worried he'll wake up one day to find the boy under the floorboards, but accepts for now that the boy seems to be quite taken with the attic and chandeliers. Bruce is still not sure how he gets up there.
There's strength in his small hands, though not because of muscle. Dick is skinny and tiny and it's not ridiculous to assume he'll remain that way even into adulthood, because it makes sense. He doesn't need muscle to survive.
Bruce realises this when they're at a gala.
Dick Grayson is Gotham's favourite celebrity. He's a born performer, and charity events held by Wayne Enterprises is not any less deserving of impromptu acrobatics performances, according to Bruce's ward. The boy jumps and flips and spins and dances with anyone who reaches out to hold his hands, not stopping until they're exhausted to the bone.
Although he may have a seemingly endless supply of energy, Dick Grayson is still a child. He's only nine, and Bruce's chest feels tight with fondness and sadness when he's randomly reminded of the fact.
He holds Dick, one arm around his waist and the other cradling his head as Bruce balances the boy on his hip. His ward snores loudly into his ear, much to everyone's amusement, and Bruce smiles as he bids them all a hurried goodnight. It was way past the boy's bedtime as it is.
They're walking down the empty corridor, the muffled orchestra of music still playing in the event hall behind him, when Bruce feels it.
Dick Grayson, in his sleep, begins to coil. His legs wrap around Bruce's waist, sharp dress shoes digging into his back that makes Bruce stagger to a stop. He tries to pry the boy's feet away, but then Dick starts to tighten the hold he has around Bruce's neck.
Bruce waits, air getting caught in the empty space in his chest, unable to make it past his throat. He doesn't react. He can hold his breath for more than five minutes if he really has to, maybe less since he didn't have time to fill his lungs beforehand. His instincts are telling him to let go of the child, drop him and get some air — but Bruce can't help it when he shifts his arms to hold Dick closer. He was not going to drop the boy in his sleep.
Dick begins to squeeze his arms together, testing his ability to strangle Bruce with nothing but his bare hands and determination.
And then, suddenly, he relaxes. His arms stop choking him, and the boy snores loudly once more as they fall weightlessly to his side.
Bruce waits a few more seconds before he takes in a deep breath of air, feeling his eyes sting. There's a phantom weight around his neck from where Dick had been strangling him without even realising, and from the throbbing pain that builds as he begins the walk back to the car, Bruce imagines he'll have a bruise tomorrow.
"Bruce…" Dick mumbles in his sleep when they reach the cool outside air, snuggling into Bruce's aching throat, "M'cold."
Bruce walks a little faster, running a hand through his ward — his son — Dick Grayson's black hair, "Let's go home."
Clark Kent had known Batman was nothing but human since the day they met.
It's not as though Superman possesses any sort of ability to tell that sort of difference. He could probably deduce some of the inhuman characteristics about someone if he really tried, like the speed of their heart or the smell of their hair. There had to be some sort of defining trait that separated human and nonhuman.
For example, Barry always smells sort of burnt, like electricity. His heart is constantly vibrating, almost imperceptibly. Diana smells like strength, something that is impossible to explain in human terms even if he tried.
But he never had to try with Bruce, because somehow he'd always known.
The rest of the league wouldn't believe him if he told them that Batman was nothing but human, not that Clark has any desire to discuss Bruce with any of them behind the man's back. Maybe Diana would believe him, because she is a friend who has faced the impossible and found rationality in it. Perhaps Hal, but only so he could use it in their next disagreement. Definitely not Barry.
They all seem to think he's somehow less -human as opposed to not human at all. Like a failed natural experiment, somehow stuck halfway between nothing but darkness and everything with flesh and blood. They're not in their theories to be malicious, since perhaps no one commands more respect in the League than he does — but their accusations are unfounded.
There is nothing about Batman to suggest he is inhuman. In fact, almost everything about him suggests he is too human. He feels everything, knows too much, cares too late and too less or far too much before anyone else can. Everything needs to exceed the minimum requirement of predictability and understanding.
Like now, for example.
"Can you hold this?" Bruce asks without even looking, throwing a small plastic square in his general direction, before immediately going back to fiddling with some sort of upgrade on his suit.
Clark catches it with no problem, but he's not even looking at it. Or Bruce. Instead, he's staring at the workbench behind Bruce.
Sitting around a pile of papers and photos that look like some sort of crime scene, is a little boy. Only he's not a boy at all. Clark doesn't need to smell or hear anything to understand that, not when he's got eyes.
The boy glares menacingly at him, but it quickly becomes something adorable rather than threatening. Clark thinks if he squints, the boy sort of looks like those small, viciously angry little dogs people carry in their purses — only with large and distinctly reptilian blue eyes.
"Read the report." Bruce states when he realises Clark is not paying attention to the stack of papers he'd given him earlier, "Ignore him."
"I don't think I can," Clark replies, not even bothering to hide that he's staring at the strange not-human-boy, "He's eating a screwdriver."
The child pulls the appliance out of his mouth like it was a chicken drumstick and not a sharp, metal tool, scandalised, "I'm not eating it!"
"He's teething." Bruce offers in retaliation like it was some sort of explanation, and then proceeds to offer absolutely nothing else. There's an uncomfortable metallic crack when the boy bites into the screwdriver, but he looks more disappointed than in pain, so Clark resigns himself to another six months of secrets before everything crashes and burns.
He lasts about ten minutes and reads exactly one paragraph about how Green Arrow nearly got squashed by a spaceship on their last mission before Clark looks back over to the boy.
The child has dropped the (broken) screwdriver next to him and is kicking his legs back and forth over the edge of the table, staring at Clark as well. He blinks, and Clark remains unphased as a second strip of skin passes over his eyes.
The boy raises a brow at Clark's lack of reaction, and something about the familiarity in his patronising behaviour makes Clark grin. The boy smiles back, amused by Clark's mirroring amusement, and he thinks he can hear Bruce sigh in defeat.
"Hey buddy," Clark starts, pushing the report away from him and ignoring the way Bruce rolls his eyes fondly, "Have you ever flown above the clouds?"
Dick's pupils sharpen and his eyes go bright blue. He jumps off the table without making a single sound when his feet touch the stone floor and slips through the mess of equipment to get to Bruce.
The boy tugs at Bruce's shirt, and the man sighs, glaring halfheartedly at Clark through his long dark lashes, "Make sure he's wearing a coat. Only ten minutes."
Before he's even finished with his conditions, Alfred is walking over to them with a small coat and scarf in his hands, mouth twitching into a smile.
Clark is not sure exactly what Alfred is, he's not sure Bruce knows either, but he can't help but smile back. Dick's constantly cold blood is rushing with adrenaline as he trips to put his coat on, and he smells excited. His eyes are so wide, that they seem to have grown almost double in size, and when the boy smiles and lifts his arms for Clark to pick him up, he sees a second row of dangerously sharp teeth.
Teething, Bruce had said. Clark snorts.
Dick Grayson, who is not human, is Bruce Wayne's son, who happens to be very human, and Clark has absolutely no one he can tell who will believe him. He grins.
How ridiculous.