Chapter Text
It’s a cheap necklace.
The beads aren’t knotted in between to prevent erosion, like on a genuine pearl necklace. Charlotte knows, because she’s played in her mom’s jewelry box before; Mom loves pearls. Bruce had bought it for her birthday when they had gone antiquing with Alfred. It had cost $75.
The man, one of two, who isn’t holding Charlotte goes to rip off Mom's favorite necklace. Bruce, her brave, fierce, stupid little brother tries to do something to stop it.
A string of cheap, freshwater pearls go scattering across the alley.
A gun is pulled, and then Dad is dead.
And then Mom is dead.
And Charlotte thinks this might be a bad dream, because she’s seen this before, right? She knows she has. Seen it so many times before.
(It’s always the pearls, isn’t it? Such good imagery, for this nightmare. Suspended in midair as a mother and father die and a hero is born.
But there are no heroes.
There is Charlotte, with a knife at her throat.
There is Bruce, standing still, stunned and shaking.
There is Thomas and Martha Wayne, dead on the concrete.)
The man, the one holding the knife to her throat, is shaking. Charlotte isn’t. She’s seen this before. He is shaking , his grip on the knife looser than it should be.
I can get away if I’m fast, Charlotte Wayne thinks, and tenses to make a break for it-
The blade burns as it drags across her throat.
It feels like dying.
It feels familiar.
-:-
The dead are not supposed to wake up.
Charlotte Wayne does, because she did not die.
The knife missed her arteries, only cut through her vocal chords. All the doctors agree that she’s oh so very lucky to have survived it.
(Bruce had pressed his hands against his sister’s open throat hard enough to bruise.)
The dead are not supposed to wake up.
Charlotte Wayne certainly doesn’t.
Oh sure, her heart beats and her brain thinks, but that’s not what makes a person when you really get down to it.
(Memories are, and there are too many careening around in their skull for them to be Charlotte Wayne anymore.)
The dead are not supposed to wake up.
Sometimes they do, and it’s just like waking anyone else up. The closer they are to being awake, the easier it is. The deeper they sleep, the harder it becomes, unconsciousness pulling them further into the quiet.
The deeper they sleep, the more drastic the measures to wake them up need to be.
Sometimes it needs to be cruel: a bucket of ice water, an air horn blast to the ear, being dumped out of the bed entirely into a dazed lump on the floor.
(Reincarnating into Batman’s mute twelve year old sister is pretty fucking drastic, if you ask them.
And really, you can’t get much crueler than life as a superhero’s loved one.
Can’t get much worse than feeling like you’re puppeteering someone else’s corpse.)
-:-
Charlotte Wayne isn’t gone, exactly.
There’s overlap between them and the girl who died in an alley with her parents as her little brother watched. More than overlap, really. They’re the same person, almost, just-
Expanded upon.
Added to and added to until the shape of them is all wrong.
(They have all her memories, all her loves, all her dreams, all of her.
But now, the universe has broken open and piled them on top of her like grave soil.
The little girl is buried under the weight of their knowledge and the fear it brings.)
Charlotte Wayne is there, but illfitting. Skin too small to fit around them. They are her, but she isn’t them. She has been dissolved into them, in a way that feels like a murder. An odd, eerie sort of cannibalism they didn’t choose to commit.
Still-
“Charlie!” a young, familiar voice cries out.
They might not be Bruce Wayne’s big sister anymore, but he is still their brave, stupid little brother. They don’t turn their head to the door (don’t want to move for another thousand years if they can help it, actually, fuck, getting their throat cut fucking sucks) but they strain their eyes as far to the side as they can. Bruce has already sprinted to their bedside and is leaning so close to them that he’s halfway in it with them, but he’s so gentle, as if trying to get as close as physically possible without actually touching them.
Well, fuck that.
It hurts to move, and their limbs feel detached and fuzzy, but they bring up their too-small, IV-riddled arm to pull their brother into a hug.
Bruce seems to almost shatter at the touch, curling in on himself as his shoulders start to shake. They can’t talk; it was the first thing they tried when they woke up, and it had hurt . They don’t know what to say, even if they could.
(That’s a lie.
“I’m sorry,” they’d say, so many times, and for so many things.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry,” until their lungs gave out, because he is their little brother, but they are not his big sister. Because he doesn’t know it yet, but his whole family is dead and he is left with the thing that ate his sister and took her place. Because they know Bruce Wayne, in countless iterations across countless universes, and his life is never the easy, happy one they desperately wish it could be.)
Charlotte Wayne cannot speak.
Will never speak again, even if her vocal chords heal, because she is gone.
But Charlie has always been there for Bruce, and so they dig their shaking fingers into the ten-year-old’s hair, combing it gently like Mom does when they get nightmares. The boy cries, hard but quiet, a louder sensation than it is a sound. His head buries into their stomach, his hands wrapped hard around himself in a hug Charlie doesn’t have the strength to give him.
They glance up, after a while. Alfred is in the doorway, looking older than he had however long ago it had been since he had seen them off at the door that night. It couldn’t be longer than a week, could it? But there’s something about the way he carries himself, still as stately as ever, that seems ancient.
They smile, weakly, and his expression quivers slightly.
Charlie takes their hand off of Bruce’s head to beckon the butler over.
(And it is only with Alfred’s shaking hand on their shoulder that Charlie starts to cry too.)
-:-
The cops come to ask questions.
Two of them, one who looks like he feels doing this is beneath him, and one who looks sad and tired, but is nice. Asks how they and Bruce are doing, which neither of them respond to.
(But Bruce does wave at him, minutely.)
Alfred looks like he’s considering ten different ways to kill the officer questioning them while making it look like an accident. Bruce is on the bed with her, where he hasn’t moved from since he got there, no matter how much the nurses try to insist. Charlie is tired.
“We’ve already questioned your brother, but any bit you can remember helps,” says the nice officer. An younger black man, with glasses and a bushy mustache. His hair is reddish when the light hits it the right way.
Officer Gordon, he’d introduced himself.
(Charlie doesn’t like cops. They never have. Answering questions about that night is the last thing they want to do, and they’re tired, and they want Dad because the world feels like a giant mouth splitting open to eat them and they’re scared.
But Jim Gordon is a good person, and Charlie wants their parents to be avenged.
If anyone is going to do that any time soon, it’ll be the future commissioner.)
They take a notepad from him. Their fingers tremble around the pen. Jim Gordon asks, “Can you write down the events, as you remember them, from the time you left the theater?”
Bruce flinches into their side, but doesn’t leave when Alfred suggests it.
Charlie nods, and does their best to make sure Bruce doesn’t see what she writes.
We couldn’t get a cab. Dad took us through an alley. Someone grabbed me from behind and put a knife to my throat, and another one pulled out a gun. They wanted Mom’s pearls.