Chapter Text
Bruce Wayne watched his parents fall, fall, fall. Pearls skittered across the dirty, wet pavement and into the shadows, but Bruce only had eyes for the bodies in front of him. The moment the light had left their eyes, something had changed. They weren't Martha and Thomas. They were bodies. Limp, husks of human beings with no more potential. Lost. Like dolls thrown out when a child grows up.
Something changed in Bruce that day. Something wormed its way into his head, into his chest. It had to have happened between the moment the gun had gone off, and the moment Bruce had made a bargain with the man standing there to spare his life.
Suddenly, the city was thrumming all around him. It was like, like walking into a fine restaurant and all around him was the smell of food. It was like he was suddenly fed, full, satiated. It was instantaneous, as quick as sucking in a breath full of air. Bruce Wayne exhaled oxygen and inhaled pure, undiluted fear.
Bruce Wayne didn't die that day, but he ceased to exist all the same.
Bruce Wayne reached a hand into his pocket, knowing somehow that something was there. It was as easy to know as his own name. His fingers - too thin even for a child's hand - closed around something cold, and Bruce pulled a chess piece from his pocket. It was the king. White marble, first side to move on the board, last piece to fall in the end.
There was a constant weight in his hand as he slowly put the piece back into his pocket, then removed it again. Now it was a pair of dice, carved from bone. They would be there, in his pockets, for whenever he needed them. They would be be what he needed, too.
Suddenly, the bodies at Bruce's feet were not to shocking. They were just bodies - like fruit left unpicked, rotted and dropped from it's boughs - just the end of the story. They were more boney than they had been just a few minutes ago, and Bruce cocked his head.
He tried just once to raise them. He lifted a hand over their still forms and focused, sensing some kind of force within his own veins, pulling, yanking, gripping. Neither body moved, and Bruce gave in to what he was now.
~~~
Alfred knew the moment Bruce had stepped through the threshold of the house. It was like recognizing like, a sense of both coming home and the hairs on the back of Bruce's neck standing up.
The older man had taken Bruce's shoulder in a vice grip and sat him down, and through cold, unemotional words, Bruce told Alfred what had happened. Through it, Alfred kept his own face impassive and unexpressive, but his hand would clench over Bruce's shoulder every now and then, as if he couldn't bring himself to remove his hand but he did not want to hold the boy.
And then Alfred had spoken. "Oh, my dear boy. You are changed now."
Bruce remembered the way Alfred's eyes shifted to his own hand on Bruce's shoulder. There was a sharp, bitter taste there, like the air when you've opened the fridge and something has gone bad, and just as quickly as it came, it was gone again. In it's wake there was Bruce's own fear - a spike of something he hadn't felt before. Not fear that he would die. No, he wouldn't ever fear his own End again. No, it was the fear of blood and violence, of a fight that would never end. It was the sudden fear that one day, very soon, Bruce would be torn apart, and he would beg for the release of his own existence, but his wishes would go unanswered. He wouldn't End, he would only bleed.
Alfred gave Bruce a small, sad smile. The fear was gone.
"You and I must talk," Alfred said, and then he'd told his own story. It was no secret that Alfred had, in his youth, been in the army. He'd been a special operations soldier, infiltrating places, and then later a medic, hands soaked with scarlet he would never wash away. It was during his last tour, his last few assignments before he would be honorably discharged when he hear it. Over the hills of the battlefield came a thin, reeding noise. A near whistle. it was impossible to ignore, something so piercing and so foreign and so head-splitting.
Alfred said he didn't notice it right away. All around him, there was noise. Soldiers crying out, equipment banging into things, nurses and doctors alike shouting orders to one another. The shelling and the rapt-rapt-rapt of gunfire. The cacophony of noise drowned out the whistle in the moment, and Alfred assumed maybe it was some kind of machine, something churning and spluttering and dying on the battlefield. Maybe it was just a whistle, someone calling for help, or giving a signal Alfred couldn't hope to decipher. It was there, but Alfred didn't notice it.
He only noticed it after he'd been asked to take care of a soldier screaming. Night was falling, and they needed to move, to hide, to make sure no one in the night would strike their tent of wounded soldiers. The poor boy - and he was a boy - he was screaming. He wouldn't stop, not even when Alfred pumped him with as much morphine as they could spare.
The boy had a shattered, torn, lost leg. It was barely holding on when they'd first brought him in. The viscera around his knee had been just about the only thing intact between the thigh and the shin, and even that was generous. His femur had been snapped off above the joint, fragments of bone ground into the muscle around it.
The amputation had been messy.
The screaming wouldn't stop. The boy just screamed and screamed, begging Alfred to help him, to give him something for the pain, to make it stop.
Finally, in a moment of clarity, the boy had said "the pipe. Make it stop, make it quiet."
Alfred didn't know what that meant, he only knew he needed to stop the screaming if they were going to make it through the night. Alfred did not carry a gun as a medic, and he didn't have the same resources he'd had as a soldier. He didn't have anything to make this easier, quicker, kinder. The last thing the boy saw was Alfred, standing above him and the glint of a knife coming down again and again on his chest.
The rest of the tent was silent then, but Alfred still heard that thin, reedy, high noise. The pipe. He was changed, then, too. The boy had no time to anticipate the pain, no time to expect the violence that he had seen and would still be shown. Alfred had delivered it, no warning. No remorse. The Slaughter did not care for the dire circumstances.
"Gotham," Alfred said. "Is one such rare place where fear is bred by those things not serving a master as we must. I spent a long time finding a place here, where I can feed my master and myself without inflicting fear myself. This city, forgotten by so many, is a place of normalcy for us beings. You can still have a life here, Bruce."
Alfred didn't understand yet that Bruce didn't have a life to live. He was the antithesis of life. The End rather than a beginning.
~~~
Gotham was a hub of fear. As Bruce grew up, so did his powers. He fed on the near-constant fear of death, on the way people across the city seemed to fear their own ends. It wasn't just an abstract fear of what they knew they'd never escape, it was the fear they would die now. That one of the rotating cast of villains in the city would kill them immediately, that every day was their last.
It was delicious.
It was easy, too. He and Alfred were kept well enough fed to live together without hurting one another. The End was a fascinating master. It neither had an effect on the others, nor was it rendered entirely ineffective. There was, of course, no death for the ultimate entities served. There was not a traditional End. That being said, Alfred did worry from time to time about The Hunt, about his inevitable End. Even those super-natural beings outside the realm of this world were not immune to death. Apprentices, avatars, servants, they had all changed over the eras of this world. They had ended, been reborn, molded into something new.
So Bruce not having to inflict fear, not walking through Alfred's dreams, not conjuring images of death in his wake - it was very convenient. It was conducive to Bruce finding some semblance of his humanity again.
Bruce didn't need to feed. He did need to protect his city.
It had happened on accident. Alfred was clear that he was not the only servant of The Slaughter, and so his absence in the world was not as noticeable as it might have been if he were the only one. No, there were others. A man overseas sometimes brought the music to people himself, and there were some artifacts that could compel the right kind of action. War had created a number of them, of men like Alfred. The power of The Slaughter was already split, divided and shared. Alfred's serving wasn't large enough to deny others.
Alfred wasn't so missed to draw attention to his little half-life here in Gotham.
Bruce, too, benefitted from being a servant to a Master with many followers, to being a duplicate. And, frankly, the End came for everyone in the end. They did not need an all-powerful, singular being to bring about the reckoning of The End. No, Bruce was neither noticed nor missed. They were supposed to be the only ones here.
But the others. The others were greedy little things. The Corruption, The Stranger, The Web. They were all greedy, hungry things, looking to take, take, take. To feed until their very being was engorged.
Gabriel stepped foot on Gotham soil early in the wet season. He wasn't there for anything other than an art exhibition. He was teaching again, searching for more clay. The city was similar to the work of Smirke, but on a much larger, much more industrial scale. Bizarrely, it reminded Gabriel of a spider's web, the streets meeting at odd angles, bisecting one another like the supportive strands between the main spokes of a wheel. A spider's web indeed.
The art exhibition was a three day event. There would be an auction of course, but Gabriel wouldn't be participating in that event. Only the teaching, the public lessons. Gabriel twisted the truth of the events - it was at 9am, in the basement, when the sun was high in the sky, and the skylights were illuminated with stars. It was maddening and the more mad it got, the more his students seemed to give into the clay.
It was at the exhibition that Gabriel met Bruce Wayne.
The man was tall, dark, and gaunt. Piercing blue eyes, too bright to be human here in this city, with dark, black curls. An imposing suit that reminded Gabriel of someone he had not seen in many, many years. He wasn't phased by the madness Gabriel had already twisted around himself. He saw through it all, right into Gabriel's soul. He wasn't so easily tricked. He wasn't tricked at all.
"What are you doing here?" the man asked, and Gabriel recoiled. Images of being held down, red mud all around him, sinking into the earth. The End of The Spiral as it existed currently, and Gabriel took a step backwards. He tripped, falling over the box of pottery tools he had carried with him, and stared up at the man.
"Who are you?" Gabriel asked, but he already knew. The End.
"Leave." Bruce Wayne said simply, and Gabriel was caught between his instincts. He needed the clay, he needed to finish his sculpture. He needed to bring The Great Twisting to fruition. He needed to leave this city and never return, he needed to escape this man, this Death of all he was.
Gabriel left Gotham not 24 hours since he'd stepped foot into the city, and he was never going to return.
Bruce wondered idly if maybe, the creation of secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and so forth avatars and servants, maybe it could be used to his advantage. If Gabriel had been the primary servant, the one of greatest power, if that was why he was responsible for bringing forth The Great Twisting. Was there a primary servant for every entity, each one striving for more and more of their share of power? Striving to bring forth their fear more than any other?
Bruce wondered if the only way to stop these rituals was to End the power of the others. Divide it into so many pieces, each one strong and capable alone.
It was an idle thought, nothing more, until Bruce heard about Nikola, about The Unknowing, and about a circus in town.