Work Text
Colour is the first thing to fade, almost undetectable at first under the cover of night but when he wakes at midday for the first time in a week, Bruce can tell the difference.“It’s been happening all over, sir.” Alfred serves up off-orange marmalade and coffee more grey than brown. He himself is still bright and bold against the paling walls of the manor.Bruce squints at the paintings that line the walls of the gallery as he passes through, on his way out for the afternoon. His parents are colourful blobs that he has spent his life re-interpreting as recognisable figures. “Huh.”First in Midtown, then spreading up to Amusement Mile and down to the Diamond District, the streets of Gotham begin to mimic each other. The definite edges of neighbourhoods Bruce had known like the back of his hand vanish overnight. The thugs he chases down start to share a face, all claiming to be brothers.“I’ve got my eye on it.” Oracle crackles in his ear. She goes right back to rattling off coordinates like they have bigger fish to fry, always something more important to do.Nightwing laughs. “We’ve been through everything else. I guess it just gets harder to shake things up the more times we’re sent through the ringer. We’ll be fine, you’ll see.”Barbara and Dick, both still picked out in thick ink lines and the best colour printing that can be afforded to so much pulp and paper. Tim and Jason are much the same, though Stephanie and Duke are starting to look pale. Helena collapses into the Batcave and she’s little more than an outline, inked boundaries with nothing of substance to fill the gap.Damian scowls at the clear, white skies with a fury fast losing its bite. “Curse you! I haven’t even been here that long.”Without complaint, Kate starts to adapt, falling back on the black and red contrast of her batsuit and her hair to keep her vibrant as her colour starts to leech away. Bruce stares down the endless array of black and grey suits that do nothing more interesting than keep him looking tidy and wishes they could become something brighter as he watches his children go running to his cousin for advice on how to keep the light alive. Harper’s hair practically glows turquoise with the new dye she’s found and the streamers of Jean Paul’s cape paint a vanishing rainbow that keeps him hooked into the story a while longer.The night still compensates for the worst of it, though vigour is bleeding from the neon. Arkham Island moves daily and within six months, Tricorner has vanished all together. Some mornings Bruce wakes to find Wayne Manor within the city limits.Professor Pyg flickers out right before his eyes and from then on, their fate is sealed.“They’re getting bored of us.” The Joker’s laugh grates on his frazzled nerves. One of the last few left in his original technicolour and reveling in the special treatment by drenching himself in rainbow accessories. “But hey, they finally made a call on my sexuality.”“He often looks washed out.” Alfred argues, weakly, as he fusses over curtains that most likely will not exist in three days’ time, casting furtive glances in the direction of Damian’s room.They got the colour wrong, all the time. Not the same thing as having it taken away. Damian is a ghostlike thing with little connection to the work Batman does. Over family dinner, Stephanie and Helena vanish in a puff of graphite.“Oswald went last night.” Selina shakes her head, sat next to Bruce on the roof of a warehouse in the East End that she’s been defending for the past week. It feels like paper beneath Bruce’s hands. “He’s been through four redesigns in three months. I guess it was just a matter of time but…” She sighs, looks to a sky with too many starts. “I dunno, Bruce. He was an ass, but he was our ass.”Bruce hasn’t caught wind of Talia in more than a year. She’s busy, he tells himself. Running an evil empire is hard enough without your stooges peeling away to reveal blots of paint on a fraying canvas. Damian doesn’t ask about his mother any more, doesn’t talk about the force and fury and love with which she raised him, as if he’s forgotten.The bluebirds in the garden look more like pigeons, or gulls; whatever you call the nondescript birds that sit at the edge of Bruce's every stroll through the grounds. Harper goes out birdwatching and never comes home, the search party they send after her dispersing with their growing apathy for a friend whose face has been plucked from their collective memory.Full colour to vague sketch in the blink of an eye. Bruce watches Dick watching Tim vanish and all three of them have to share the same fear. Alfred asks about Casandra and the three of them break concentration in confusion, trying to remember who she is.Who she was, what was broken down to pencil lines and scrubbed away. Wayne Manor was built three hundred years ago in a place that used to be Chinatown and the city of Gotham now straddles just two islands. No one’s heard of Blackgate and Arkham is an outline in the distance on weekends and bank holidays.Downsizing, they decide, is the best way to ride out the storm. Packed in close together, everyone feeding off Bruce’s light. His full colour, bold lines, endless speech bubbles and boring bland suits. So long as they don’t stand too close and see that their skin is the colour of papyrus and his is still tinged pink.Moving into one of the increasing selection of spare rooms in the Manor, Kate comes down in the morning to find she has changed her hair. Her hair has changed for her. Staring down the bathroom mirror with quiet rage, electric razor in hand and a sink full of red hair that has grown right back to a neat little bob that doesn’t do the fire in her eyes justice.The razor hits the porcelain with a shriek. “We have to do something.”Bruce is trying, but all his years of training and self-discipline haven’t prepared him for this. He nods. “Ok.” He suits up like Kate asks, follows her lead like she asks, forgets the kids for a few nights, like she asks.Stares longingly after Selina, moving quick through an alleyway below and doesn’t follow her. Because Kate asked. He regrets his stoicism for a minute, he regrets it forever.“Is it helpng?” The red latex of Kate’s gloves shimmers in the light of a streetlamp and everything looks alright in the dark and no one feels good about their life at three in the morning on a Gotham street corner.It’s easiest not to lie. They go back to hitting Waylon Jones in whatever squishy parts they can reach, to ripping the hats from Jervis Tetch’s head and together, Batman and Batwoman are silent. The hair in the sink starts to wash away.“Bye.” Maybe Tim means to smile, but he’s been reduced to blocking circles and he doesn’t have any features left. He takes Damian’s hand and together they vanish.Two hours later, they’re forgotten. Barbara finds an old photo with Jason front and centre and no one recognises him.“Are you gonna deal with Harley Quinn tonight?” Dick asks as he and Bruce get dressed for the evening. The Batsuit has had some upgrades recently, the armour strengthened and several new attachments added to the grapple. The Nightwing suit has lost its strip of blue and the edges are starting to look fuzzy.Harley Quinn is no problem, still inked though no one’s bothered to shade her in weeks, let alone colour her in. Bruce passes her as she busks outside Wayne Tower and throws her a couple of dollars. He suspects that her demise is a mistake, a mistreatment of the writers, not what was originally marked down on her storyboard. A brief stint as a roadside comedienne is all she gets and the next time Bruce sees The Joker, the clown has trouble remembering where she came from.“You made her.” Bruce growls. They’re mid-battle but the stakes aren’t that high. Joker’s gear gets more outrageous each time they run into each other, rocket launchers and fighter jets and none of it much fun save the garish outfits he wears for the occasion.Joker frowns, blows up a building that will be back in three issues time and thrusts himself forward. “Hold my hand.”It’s out of character, but the two of them have to carry Gotham on their backs these days. Bruce obliges, black glove sliding over purple and nothing is supposed to feel this solid anymore.The Joker squeezes Batman’s hand. “They’re gonna have a hard time getting rid of us.”Night and day no longer matter because the ink has drained out of the sky along with the clouds. Riddler’s circular thinking has him collapsing in on himself. Ivy is uprooted from Robinson Park to be dragged kicking and screaming off the page. Two Face wades out to sea, into the great white beyond and is lost before Bruce can save him.There is a ghost in The Manor with long red hair that wishes Bruce would notice her but his attention is swallowed up by more recent tragedies. The family tree hanging in his father’s study counts down from four hundred years of history to three distinct points. And one day it will be him and him alone.Selina cuts increasingly faint arcs through the background of his more dynamic panels but Bruce can’t chase after her because The Joker occupies his every waking hour. They defrosted Freeze, fired Clayface, sent Szasz to the electric chair. There’s no one else left.“Oracle?” Bruce mutters into the microphone, pressing his hand down on his earpiece. It’s pointless, she’s been hoisted out of her wheelchair and back into her old Batgirl uniform in the hope of saving her life. The yellow of her under-cape looks like a coffee stain and she has to hold onto his arm to keep from crumbling to nothing, exhausted. Done.The only thing Bruce will remember about her is how bright she smiled when her hands started to turn transparent, right there in the foyer of Wayne Tower. When he goes to tell her father, he’s greeted by a young man he’s never seen before who swears blind his name is Jim Gordon.“Would that time could be so gracious to me.” Alfred grumbles. The Manor has been subsumed into the tower and there’s so little detail that he’s largely without work during the day. He reads, he makes the two of them unnecessarily complex meals that taste like cardboard, he hints at an exciting and ever changing backstory.Gotham is a city on a single island and the mainland is much too far to swim to. A main thoroughfare cuts right down the middle, the last place left with any real colour and everyone misses the days when it felt like the skyline would carry them to eternity.On their off days, Batman and The Joker go for coffee, just to look at something that remembers how to hold its shape. They touch fingertips reaching for the sugar and sigh at the feel of something real and three dimensional beyond themselves.“Perhaps this’ll be the night I kill ya, eh Bats?”What else is there to do? Bruce shakes his head. “They wouldn’t let you.”Dick flickers between the grown man he should be and the small boy he was, his costumes mismatched and always the wrong size. His features are no longer his, just another copy in a city full of copies, just another broken stick figure who has been told his story no longer matters.“You go.” Dick waves Bruce away rather than drag himself out on patrol. “S’just Joker now. No one cares about me fighting him.”Nothing left to care about but the constant blows traded backwards and forwards without need to hold back. Broken bones that fix in a heartbeat, internal bleeding that doesn’t matter so long as you grit your teeth hard enough when you pull yourself back to your feet. Sometimes they’re scheduled to die, but they bounce right back from it every time. It’s impossible to keep track of all the resurrections and resets and bad writing.Alfred pulls back the covers of the bed Dick vanished from in the night, leaving a pile of pencil shavings on the pillow. “They might have let us go with some dignity.” He throws the soiled linen into a wash basket and it goes up in a cloud of dust to join the rest of the nothing.Still the third brightest thing in the city. Alfred turns to Bruce with apprehension. “If you don’t mind, master Bruce.” He holds out a hand to shake and the weight of thousands of pages falling shut on them forces Bruce to his knees. They shake, and the hand in his is insubstantial and discomforting.“It’s been an honour.”No one hears from Bruce Wayne’s butler again, though they do sometimes ask. It must be nice to be remembered. Bruce gets a pet cat called Selina to keep him company, her sleek black fur like graphite under his palms.Bold lines drain of ink to become pencil drawings that fade to sketches and will eventually be erased entirely. It happened every day, the space in which they move shrinking, forcing them towards each other with less of a refractory period each time. The Joker pulls out a knife and swipes at the Batman’s neck, trying to get in close like his particular form of hell demands and screaming bloody murder when the blade is swapped out for a detonator he’s never seen before in his life.His hands shaking; Bruce wants to hold them, to remember how real they both are. The Batsuit is all black now, the blue and yellow cleaned right off it and he wishes he had some colour. It’s not fair that he’s one of the last thing’s left allowed to be more than ink and paper and he can’t even manage to stand out.“Your eyes are blue.” Joker reminds him. “Ridiculously blue. Do you remember the ocean?”The Atlantic Ocean as it pertained to Gotham city was never blue. It was a living, ever changing thing that swallowed stories and carried heroes to shore. Even now it can still take you, just like it took Harvey, carrying you out into the clear white of a blank page to sigh no more.That same hole will swallow them soon enough. All they have left is a tightrope from which they can balance or die. Joker looks into the expanse below him and his face flickers with fear. He doesn’t want to go.Bruce doesn’t want to go, not like this. Not by someone else’s design. He drops the grapple and watches it fall away for the writers to pick up later. “Hold my hand.”Wide green eyes meet his. Ridiculously green. Remember the forests? The tightrope is spun from the indent of a pencil pressed too hard to the page that Bruce can just feel through his boots.Joker wraps his hand around Bruce’s and together they find their centre of balance. Down, up, side to side. Everything is the same impenetrable white.The only thing left to fear is whatever lies at the end of the tightrope, but Joker is still shaking like a leaf. Unwilling or unable to let this end.So it falls to Bruce to make the final call for both of them, the thrill of falling overwhelming him as he steps forward, leaving the rope behind and dragging Joker along with him into obscurity. Into whatever lies beyond, into the white, into the ocean. The pulped building blocks of their home closing in around them, becoming something new.The page is blank. The book falls closed.