TDK: We Who Were Living

Summary: That impossible anger strangling the grief.
Category: Drama, gen
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Bruce, Rachel
Warnings: Spoilers for The Dark Knight.

Challenge: Written for knightfest. Prompt: “God takes time to explain how it's wrong to want a city like this one to burn. ...But you'll be left with the question: why your city's been spared when nobody's different." -Carl Dennis.

Rachel didn't have many close friends; you'd learned that much from her death. You and Alfred, her mother and Harvey: her family, you'd like to think, at least.

Her father had died before you met her, all of those lifetimes ago. Your own father had adored her; you, the same. Back then, the Wayne family had been more than the Waynes, in a way you’d never been able to replicate. 

For so long, your family had included no one more than Alfred; Rachel had become a distant sort of memory, one which you saw infrequently. Different schools, different lives, different childhoods, and, in many ways, different cities.

It was her, not you, who saw your father’s dream of Gotham; she knew enough to fight for it early. And she was good, in so many ways. She was so good that you managed to find something of it, too. Enough of it, at least, to stand against Ducard in those early days, to try to prove the injustice of setting cities to burn.

She told you, before she knew about your gun, what had become of Gotham in the fourteen years since your parents had been killed. She explained to you the difference between good people and bad people, and you told her…

You told her that you weren’t one of those good people.

You’d never used Batman as a way to show her how wrong you’d thought yourself to be. Now, you’re very glad for that: you’re still right, and she’s still dead.

--

Rachel didn’t have many close friends; you’d learned that much from her death. You and Alfred, her mother and Harvey: another dead family. And so it’s up to you to go to her apartment, collect her belongings, and promise her mother that you’ll be kind to her daughter’s memory.

“She always liked you, you know. My mother,” Rachel had maybe said, after you’d come home. “She really does still miss you.”

You start with her car. In 1996, when she’d bought it off a dealership’s lot, the car had been almost brand new. Seven years later, after you’d come home from chasing the world’s shadow, you couldn’t believe how well she’d kept it.

She didn’t like your cars, didn’t like how inheriting billions at eight years old had rubbed off on you. When you think back, she never gave up trying to snap you to her level. You were never vocal enough to make Gotham better; when you showed her how you’d become more, your face hadn’t been an acceptable loss.

So you had let her drive you, when you had driven together, and you never stopped thinking of the one time you sat in that seat with a gun in your hand.

Only she’s dead now, and you’re sitting in the same seat, only in the parking space behind her building. “My mom adores you, you know,” she’d really said, that half-smirk of hers clueing you in to the rest of her sentence before she’d probably even thought it. Her eyes had never left the road. “Hasn’t picked up a tabloid in a while. She still thinks you’re eight years old.”

She’d meant to be joking.

Now, sitting in this car again, in this seat, in this car so unlike you, you’re not holding a gun. You feel like you should be.

“Poison in your veins,” Ducard had said. He’d been right, then, about that. But this? This is everything else you’d feared when coming back into Gotham with a dream of a symbol. You never wanted her to become poison; you never wanted this city to become it, either. But there it is.

--

Rachel didn’t have many close friends; you’d learned that much from her death. Maybe her ideals and her passion – as subdued as it had been – kept her removed. After all, when Batman called her his best friend and her boyfriend was Harvey Dent, where else was there really to go? What other chances were there?

“What chance does Gotham have when the good people do nothing?”

She’d meant to inspire you. Maybe she had. Maybe she hadn’t. For all the good she did, for all the barbs directed toward your uselessness, it hadn’t really been her that had driven you to chase the world’s shadow.

Her question had been very naïve and so, so easy. You’d always known the answer; it’d just taken you nearly a decade to realize it.

Your parents had been good people; they had done something. After they were dead, apathy and fear overtook the city again, until Batman weaponized terror and polarized beliefs. It only took Dent a year to rise and fall. It only took Rachel standing in the middle, between them. It only took your choice to kill Batman – and Ducard’s philosophy that a manmade symbol could ever truly be incorruptible. It only took a year for the good people to die again.

The cycle is just as rigid as that of the League of Shadows; what the latter hadn’t realized was how unneeded they were to achieve their goals. When the good people lose, as they inevitably do, the downfall is natural.

Gotham has shown itself, proved the Joker and Ducard wrong. People can be inherently selfless, just as rampant injustice does not have to be abiding. But when the good people are dead, what chance does Gotham really have at all?

It all comes back to you being unable to see the difference between saving Gotham and saving those you used to love. After all, what chance does Gotham have when it’s a city that deserves to die?

--end

llethe / November 2008