#brucecanon

[dramatisperscnae]

Headcanon - Bruce Wayne

Morality

Bruce’s sense of morality can seem extremely black and white at times, and to be fair it often is. But living in a city like Gotham, even the blindest of men eventually has to admit that there are shades of grey. Bruce has been – and still is, when necessary – willing to work with those whose morals are far more chaotic than his own in order to accomplish what he needs to. This was far more true in his youth than it is in the present day, when he was driven by urgency and anger and impatience and was more willing to think that the ends could justify a lot of means, but it remains true even now.

I have said before and I will continue saying it: Bruce’s standards are much higher and much stricter for himself than for those around him. Not to say that he doesn’t hold his family and colleagues to a high standard, because he absolutely does, but if he considers those standards lenient just imagine what he expects of himself.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his absolute refusal to kill. To murder, I should say, since Batman has killed in the past; he regrets every instance and goes to arguably insane lengths to avoid doing so, but when it truly is down to the enemy’s life or his there really is only one choice. There exist individuals whose death would only benefit Gotham City and the world in general, Bruce knows this. He has come a hair’s breadth from taking those lives himself on more than one occasion, only being called down by others who respect him and who he is too much to let him fall – and he is grateful to each one of them for doing so.

Bruce cannot ever – ever – let himself kill in anything other than absolute last-ditch no-other-option self-defense, because it truly would be too easy. He knows how he would justify it, and he knows that he would. Not. Stop. He will even – and has – freely admitted this.

To phrase it as Sir Terry Pratchett once did, if you do something for a good reason then you will do it for a bad one. To further draw on [and paraphrase] Sir Terry’s writings, who watches the Batman? He does. Every minute of every day. Because he knows how easy it would truly be for him to fall; he’s felt it. On one occasion he briefly ended up with Superman’s powers[Superman/Batman2003, #53-56], and to this day he is ashamed of how he behaved with them. Everything he did was in the name of justice, of finally winning his war and ending crime and evil, but his actions nearly cost him his son Dick, when the lad tried to pull him back and Bruce beat him down.

Meanwhile, for others he is moderately less strict, and can be rather more pragmatic. While he never had any real intent to use it, he had devised a plan that would end up putting all of Gotham’s organized crime under a single leader that would be allied with him; had Black Mask not interfered during the War Games in Gotham, he might even actually have succeeded. His willingness to work with known rogues when necessary also shows this; if there is clear good being done, particularly if there is more good than harm being done, then the Bat can often be convinced to look the other way, at least for a time. Drawing once again on the writings of Sir Terry, sometimes good and bad don’t matter so much as which way you face.

So yes, Bruce’s morality often seems extremely black and white – for himself, because it has to be, especially when it comes to his Code – but for others he can allow at least a few shades of grey here and there.

[dramatisperscnae]

Headcanon - Bruce Wayne

The Code

Batman’s no-kill code is well known – and occasionally scoffed at – among the cape-and-cowl brigade. It is an ideal he strives to live by, and one he encourages – and usually expects – others to hold to, particularly those he trained and those he actively works with. He holds to this code for several reasons, among them being:

he does occasionally require the assistance of the GCPD, and if he – as a vigilante and thus technically a criminal himself – actively kills in the line of duty he will lose any and all goodwill he has earned from them

he does not want to stoop to the methods of his enemies. There is, on occasion, only a very fine line that separates the Bat from those he fights; not killing is a part of that.

Most, if not all, of the martial disciplines he has studied and mastered often come with cultural philosophies regarding the sanctity of life. To betray those philosophies would be to stain the legacies his masters left him.

If his hands become stained with blood, what makes him any better than the man who gunned down his parents in that alley?

That said, there is a well-known book in which is written ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’. For Bruce to demand no killing, ever, for any reason, would be the height of hypocrisy; he has taken life in the past, though seldom willingly and always in self-defense. [for canonical evidence of this, see this post by The Real Batman Chronology Project] He is well aware of this, and aware that there are times when his code may well cause more harm than it avoids; after all, Bruce himself will freely admit – and has admitted –that the world would indeed be a better place if the Joker was dead.

Killing is, and always will be, a hard line for Bruce. He knows how easy it would be for him to become a killer, how simple. How all it would take for him to become the villains he fights is to allow himself to pull the proverbial trigger on the basis of helping, of trying to do good and removing major threats like the Joker or other shown-to-be-irredeemable villains from the world for good. The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.

Nowhere has he seen this most clearly than in the fall of Hal Jordan in the wake of Coast City’s destruction. Watching a man Bruce had come to respect and trust – and even, though he might never admit it, to see as a better man than him – become something like Parallax, willing to tear the entire universe apart in the name of trying to fix things, was a sobering experience, and pushed Bruce to hold even tighter to his code and demand others do the same.

Even so, as idealistic as Bruce can be at times, he is nothing if not a realist. In his line of work, in the kind of battles he fights, there will be death. It’s unavoidable; no matter what he does people will die, and if it comes down to the choice between his life and his opponent’s Bruce will choose himself. He has to; it’s pure instinct. He can, will, and does try to avoid that choice as much as possible, tries to mitigate the damage and prevent death with all the skill and power he has, but, well.

Sometimes even the Batman can’t avoid lethal force in self defense.

It will always – always – be a last resort, when literally all other options have been exhausted, and it will never – ever – be in cold blood. It may simply be – and often is – a mere chance of fate, the luck of being the one on top when two men fall off a roof in mid-grapple.

Because of this, he will allow certain compromises, if one can call them that: those who work with him, while actively working with him, are expected to maintain and uphold his no-kill code; likewise, any hero or vigilante who wants to work in Gotham City is also expected to do so. Outside of his city, and when not actively on a team-up? He’ll expect them to try, but will be less exacting about the degree of success. In either case, a death during a mission is not necessarily a deal-breaker; self defense is a thing, and while Bruce holds himself to extremely strict standards he can be surprisingly lenient with others even on hard-line matters such as this...so long as the killing was not done with active intent or malice aforethought.

Straight-up murder someone, though, and you best pray he never finds out. No matter who they are.

[dramatisperscnae]

Headcanon - Bruce Wayne

Age and Appearance

Bruce is in his early to mid-40s; he’s seldom specific about his age on the rare occasions he’s asked, mostly because he doesn’t think it’s important. And some part of him never really thought he’d live this long anyway.

Short black hair, generally combed back when in public but left to its own devices otherwise, with piercing blue eyes.

6’2” tall, 210lbs, with a highly toned, muscular build.

Absolutely covered with scars, most of which have been publicly explained away as the result of car crashes and skiing accidents.

Favors quiet, practical clothing when not needing to maintain his public persona; muted colors, greys, and blacks rule his wardrobe.

Rarely if ever seen with short sleeves in public, largely due to the aforementioned scars; needing to maintain the image of a CEO helps there, with its ready-made reason for him to wear suits and sport coats.

Personality

Bruce Wayne has, at his core, enough compassion to fuel the sun for the next thousand years at least. He is incapable of not caring.

He tries very hard to hide the above fact from everyone. Occasionally he’s even successful.

He knows how easy it would be for him to become the villains he fights. ‘One bad day’ is a very valid taunt; if things had gone otherwise at several points in his life he could well have become a villain himself, and some part of him lives in fear of that happening still. It’s one of – if not the primary – reason for his no-kill code.

No one is more critical of Bruce Wayne than the man himself, in either life. Bruce holds himself to standards far more rigorous than he holds anyone else to – and considering the standards he holds others to, that’s saying something.

As much as Bruce is driven by compassion, he is also still – even to this day – driven by fear. Fear of becoming that which he hates, fear of losing those he cares about; he chose fear as a weapon in his personal war because it’s something he knows intimately.

Bruce has a distinct tendency, especially during times of stress, to isolate himself and push everyone away. This is partly a misguided attempt to protect them from whatever danger may be looming, but it is also the only way he knows to protect himself. If he pushes them away, then he’s the one in control and has made the choice to remove them from his life, rather than losing them through more tragic, potentially more permanent, means. Given the choice, he would rather someone he cared for be alive and absolutely hate him than be dead no matter how they felt about him. As long as they’re alive and healthy, that’s the important thing.

Behind the myriad walls he maintains between himself and the world, Bruce is genuinely a kind, caring, soft man who – in another life – would have made an excellent doctor or teacher and a wonderful husband and father.

He trusts more easily than he will ever let on, though he is still cautious and careful about where he bestows that trust and there are still levels of trust to be worked through. It honestly doesn’t take him as long to make up his mind about someone as he makes it seem; just one more way for him to keep others at arm’s length, really.

He respects far easier than he trusts. Even some of his rogues have his respect, albeit grudgingly in some cases.

Bruce is an absolute skeptic. Yes, he knows magic exists – he’s known Zatanna since they were children – and he knows gods exist – he’s met some of them – but he is always, always, going to exhaust all mundane options before allowing himself to believe something metaphysical is going on. There may be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in various philosophies, but when you hear hooves you expect horses not zebras, and certainly never unicorns.

Miscellaneous

He collects first edition books. Perhaps not as avidly now as he did in his youth, but it’s still a hobby he enjoys.

As a boy he dabbled in art, growing quite skilled for his age. That hobby died along much of his youthful exuberance and cheer that night in Park Row, though the skill remains useful for sketches of locations or suspects or other such things.

He is at least conversational in every major language on the planet – fluent in most of them – plus many less-spoken languages and dialects, as well as a handful of alien and even fictional languages.

He has mastered quite a few martial arts disciplines, and has trained in several more; he often combines these into a unique style all his own.

He intensely dislikes being called ‘Brucie’, but endures it because it maintains a necessary degree or five of separation between Civilian Life™ and his work as Batman.

Bruce is not religious; what belief he might have had in any kind of higher power was lost in a dark alley when he was eight. Yes he has since met literal gods and angels, but that gives him even less reason to believe in them. It’d be like believing in the mailman.

He is still culturally Jewish through his mother, however, and maintains a few of the habits and traditions he learned from her; there aren’t many of them, given Martha was all but entirely estranged from her family the Kanes and, to all appearances, embraced her husband’s more Christian beliefs and traditions, but they’re still there.

Bruce’s resting heart rate is somewhere around 26-30 bpm; this is largely due to his extensive physical training meaning his body has learned to optimize circulation and oxygenation.

Despite what his physician and most of Gotham’s elite are led to believe, Bruce is in fact an excellent skiier, horseman, and driver; it just so happens that all of those hobbies make for convenient excuses for those injuries he ends up forced to explain in public.

He is absolutely hopeless in the kitchen, even when following a recipe; left to his own devices with a stove this man can barely boil water. That said, he is incredible at cooking over a campfire or a charcoal/wood-fired grill. Not even he can explain why the disconnect between cooking over an open fire and cooking on a gas stove, but here we are.