Chapter Text
I am not a good man.
There is silence beneath the pale sky. Is it silence? No, it is deafness-- there are things that should be producing sound and they do not cross the barrier of sensory processing into my brain.
I know this, despite what Alfred tries to tell me. Good men do not do things I do, they do not act the way I act. I consider myself necessary, perhaps, but not good. I used to want to be, I think. I used to need to see myself that way. But I’ve had to let that go, over the years, because I cannot accept it anymore. I can accept that what I do is useful and even vital, but there are many things I’ve had to resign myself to relinquishing.
His eyes are so blue. They’ve always been like that, clear and bright.
I know good men. I work with them, fight alongside them, but I am not one of them. There is a certain purity in motivation that I lack. My drive is muddled by chaotic emotion, and I do not deny this.
The world has changed so much around me.
It is the kind of world that needs men who are no longer good, I think.
Once, it was simple. But doesn’t everything start that way? And for all the grief it brought me, I wish to god we could go back to that simplicity.
Two people dead in an alley and a petty thief, mere bullets and a metal gun, graves that stay occupied.
I never could blame him now. The universe is too complicated and boundless to put it on his shoulders. I wonder if he knows? I don’t know if I’ve ever told him, but I’m not positive it would even occur to him. He looks so frightened, sometimes.
My world changed that night but maybe it was a mercy to them. My parents were spared what the world would become, what the world was already becoming. We didn’t know or see it for years after, but it had already been set in motion, the changing tide.
Long had we suspected ourselves alone in the universe, and for many years before and after my parents’ deaths the only humans who knew for certain any different were a couple on a Kansas farm. They were just trying to do the right thing, they couldn’t have known that the sleek rocket cradled not just an alien infant but the dawn of a new age.
All I wanted to do was save Gotham. That in itself seemed a big enough task. But it was manageable. The last year or two of training felt like overkill, really. I felt over-prepared. The first time I went out in the cowl, it was so unsettling to the drug pushers I interrogated that I barely even needed to hit anyone.
I wasn’t what turned the tides, though. I don’t think of myself so highly. I was just there, working, thinking of myself as a good man stopping bad men from profiting off of Gotham’s suffering. I did hit people, eventually, but they were just men themselves. All I was up against was crime. It was simple. Frustrating but simple.
The whole world changed when he flew across the sky, cutting above city buildings. He’s always been alien, he’s always had the capacity to comprehend a world outside of this one. I don’t think he realizes how much he changed.
Madness is on the rise. I won’t say it’s a direct result, but I have reservations about dismissing the correlation. It is deeply unsettling to find we are not alone, to find we are not the ones with the upper hand.
When Dick came along, I took him with me because I understood the need to rage against something, to have a purpose. I saw the same darkness in him that I saw in myself and from the day I brought him home I was afraid I’d lose him to that darkness. I wanted him to have purpose, to learn to live with his grief through protecting others from the same.
I was also, at that point, completely confident in my ability to keep him safe. After all, I had training and experience and he had his own skills. He was a fast learner and the criminals we fought, at best, were loosely skilled in one field of combat if even that. We left a lot of people tied up.
But things changed.
Gotham. That was all I wanted to save. I never meant to be part of the frontline against the assault of the universe, but we don’t always get to choose which battles we fight, despite clever adages. They brought the fight to me and with all my training, with all my resources, it would have been irresponsible to back down and leave it to metas. If humans were going to be worth saving, we needed to be part of the war. So it became more than Gotham. It became places like this one, off-world.
When Jason came along, I already could see the way things were going. There were things we fought that were the stuff of nightmares, the sort of terror previous generations could not have fathomed. That was the first time I had serious qualms about what I did and involving young men in the fight.
Ever since the atmosphere had been breached, the universe seemed to treat earth as open for traffic and conquest. We were not prepared. No one was.
When Jason died, everything changed again. There was a line that had been crossed that could not be uncrossed and that was the first time I came to terms with the fact that I was not a good man.
Good men did not allow the things I allowed.
They did not live the way I live.
It is ironic, I suppose, that the best man I know is an alien. It doesn’t bode well for earth that the best among us is not one of us, but it shouldn’t be surprising. We’re a miserable people and it’s no wonder that our boldest examples of purity or selflessness are foreigners here. It’s my deepest fear that one day we will corrupt him. We could never hold against the combination of our greed and his power. Lex knows it. It’s why he’s so jealous.
His face has that way of frowning when he’s displeased, where it’s both open and disapproving at once. But I don’t see panic on his face that often. I wonder what’s wrong? He’d tell me if I asked, but I’m not good at asking.
Jason came back. So did I.
So did Clark, and Damian.
So many of us. The world has changed again.
I’m not certain of anything anymore if I cannot be certain of death. It troubles me, worries me, just as much as it used to and that is a frightening prospect. I do not fear it for myself and I only fear it in others as much as it causes suffering in its wake.
Was this what was brought to us, when we made contact with the rest of the universe? Was this what we brought on ourselves? The impermanence of death?
But I am not a good man.
I am surrounded by evil.
What does it mean, if we must suffer the deaths of those we love not just once but over and over? I have relived my parents’ deaths in memory the whole of my adult life, but they themselves only bore it once.
What does it mean if evil cannot be put to rest?
It is too soon for immortality. We are not ready.
I am afraid men want to be angels and will find themselves vampires. I already see it in Jason. Once, he was lonely and angry and broken by the crime around him. He was a symbol of what I wanted to save in Gotham. He wasn’t just a symbol; I loved him. I still do.
But he has made choices that, professionally, I cannot align myself with or even appear to align myself with, without endangering all the work I’ve done and the leniencies Jim Gordon has allowed us.
I suspect, though, that the further we get from his resurrection, the closer we are to a world at war with the world outside of it. We’ve already fought these battles once, but I fear they are the barest hint of what is to come.
And police will be nothing but bodies in the way.
The military will be minimally helpful at best.
One day, soon, we will need men who are not good. Maybe one day it will be necessary that I am more like Jason. Maybe if enough of us hold the line, we can absolve the next generation and they will be worthy of a world where death isn’t absolute.
I see it in Clark.
I am not a good man.
Why is he yelling? Maybe I said something to upset him, but it’s not like him to argue like this unless something is very, very wrong.
He is a good man.
But he is not a man.
Maybe the ending to this story is that we don’t inherit earth. Maybe after everything, it really is that simple.
Maybe a species that produces men who kill strangers over strings of pearls and cash in wallets is not the kind of species that deserves to stay here.
Something is very, very wrong.
Still, I will fight. I will fight to save Gotham because there is nothing else I know how to do. I will fight at home and abroad and beyond our own skies because I have prepared myself and it would be a waste to not use it.
I am not a good man.
But at least I have a reason.
And if I can live with that, maybe other men after me will have a world where they can be good.
Or I’ll help hasten the end and it won’t matter anyway.
I suspect the latter, but I like to err on the side of caution in such cases. It makes the final blow easier to take. It is easier when it is less surprising, when it doesn’t catch one so off-guard.
The final blow.
I have no idea what the hell is going on.
I just wanted to save Gotham.
That’s what I told myself.
But no, it wasn’t Gotham.
I just wanted to fight.
I think my chest hurts.
I have no idea where I am.
Fight.
I’m off-world. I remember.
Clark looks so mad.
No. Not mad. Upset.
Dying seems not worth the effort when it’s not going to last, and I’m so tired, I don’t want to keep repeating the same events. Humans weren’t meant for this sort of thing.
Fight.
I am not a good man. Is this the consequence? Is this the price for my failure? Corrupt immortality is worse than almost anything; I only have to look to Ra’s and what he’s done to Talia and Damian to see that.
So, do I fight?
Fight.
I am not a good man.
I do not do what others want or expect.
But I do it because someone has to.
Because if the world is going to be torn to pieces by monsters and alien gods, there should at least be a man fighting alongside our defenders, even if he isn’t a good man. We should not give up so easily that we leave the battles to others.
And if youth fight alongside me, it is only because other men were not willing. It is a deep and damning mark against me that I allow it, that I need them, but perhaps it’s a mark against all of us, that we leave the fight to outsiders and children.
Clark’s eyes are so blue even when he’s crying.
Maybe especially when he’s crying.
Have I ever seen him cry before?
I can’t remember.
I can’t.
Fight.
I think I’m dying.
BOOM