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“How are you doing that?” Superman demanded, eyes cast down around the floor.
“Hmm?” Batman grunted. “I’m not doing anything.”
“But how is that-?” Superman looked concerned, and well and truly baffled as he pointed downward. Bruce looked down at himself. What was bothering Superman so much? He couldn’t possibly be so disturbed about the scuffs on his boots. They weren’t even that big, Alfred had polished them just the other day. “Your - your cape.”
For a writer, Bruce thought, Clark was being very undescriptive. He flicked his gaze from his shoes to the edges of his cape, which were fluttering, writhing like black flames, just barely brushing the ground.
“I don’t see-”
“How is your cape moving like that!?” Beneath the cowl, Bruce blinked. Wow. Who knew Superman was so easily distressed? He shrugged.
“It does that sometimes.”
Superman stared at the ceiling and ran a broad hand despairingly down his face. When he seemed to be done with that, he stared into the white lenses of Batman’s cowl. Bruce knew there was nothing to see. Even if he dipped his gaze lower, beyond the disguise of the cowl, Batman’s face was impassive and stony as it always was.
Superman’s stare lasted an uncomfortably long time.
Finally, he said, tentatively, “capes aren’t supposed to do that. Right?” For a moment he sounded like he was doubting his own knowledge of how capes worked with the laws of physics. He seemed to decide his knowledge was sound. “You know that, don’t you?”
Batman shrugged again. He offered no verbal comment. He wasn’t sure how to answer that. It had been a long time since he had put much thought to the way his cape…existed.
Bruce had been 25 when he first donned the cape, along with the cowl and the rest of his batsuit. He was sure, then, that the cape had been completely ordinary. It was one part of the batsuit he had been determined to make himself, and, so, after many long nights and failed attempts and sleep-deprivation fuelled breakdowns over sewing machines, he had been thrilled to have a dramatic, billowing, bat-wing-inspired cape to hang over his shoulders and complete his fearsome suit of armour suitable for what would become Gotham’s Dark Knight.
It was a little over a week later, when he was fighting a gang of street thugs, that he heard a gun go off and was sure he was about to get shot, that his return to the cave tonight would be with a bullet in his side. His cape flicked out as he spun to face the shooter, and though he saw the slim guy with his gun raised, he never felt the impact of a bullet against his armour or anywhere else. He leaped forward and redirected the guy’s gun to the sky with one hand as the other, curled into a fist, rammed into the guy’s jaw. He must have overestimated this guy’s aim.
An hour later he found himself on a nearby rooftop, looking out over the city, his city. The night air was oddly still, only the barest of breezes whispering over the small amount of exposed skin of his lower face, yet his cape billowed around him, the corners curled up into the sky high above his head. He frowned at it — or frowned deeper, the Batman wore a near-perpetual frown — trying to understand how it could be. He reached up and touched it, running a gloved hand over the heavy fabric that drifted, inexplicably, upward, and it fluttered downward, allowed itself to be smoothed down to a normal cape shape. Batman let out his grapple line and headed for the ground. If he was seeing things like this, maybe those thugs had hit him harder than he’d thought.
Bruce was sure that the cape, originally, was completely ordinary. He’d used all the same materials, same fabric, same thread, on his failed attempts, and when he had seen one strange thing too many, when the paranoia got too much, he had tried them on, too, as best he could when they were really just scraps, and they had all been completely benign. Which meant there was something about The cape, his cape, the batcape.
After nearly two years of wear, after the rest of the batsuit had been mended and replaced countless times, the cape still looked just as it had the first night he’d worn it. He was sure he’d seen it torn, though he had no evidence of this; every time set about finding and mending any tears, he found none, the cape perfectly whole, with not so much as a loose stitch.
He ran experiments on it, trying to determine what it could do and how and why. He tried to compare how it moved to other fabrics, and all the results, when weight was accounted for, were the same. By all accounts the cape should have been completely benign, inane, ordinary, whatever word you wanted to use; there was no explanation for any of the strange experiences Batman knew he wasn’t imagining.
At some point, he stopped trying to understand it. He still wasn’t sure when. When he had stopped questioning, or when he had started using and trusting the cape as he did. Trusting. That made it sound like a person, but he was relatively sure that, for all the things it could do, at least it wasn’t sentient. No, he trusted it the same way he trusted all his equipment, the way he trusted his grapple line not to snap or his batarangs to cut.
He trusted his cape to hide him, when he wanted, to let him melt into the shadows. Trusted it not to get in the way when he struck out a kick or threw something low.
He wasn’t sure when he started using it as a shield, why he trusted so thoroughly in a scrap of fabric that he knew should’ve been torn to rags by now, how he had come to the conclusion that it was fine to jump through a rain of bullets so long as he had his cape drawn around him.
It shouldn’t have stopped the bullets, but as long as his cape was in the way, he was never, ever shot.
By the time he got Dick - got Robin, his partner - he’d mostly forgotten how strange his cape was. It was just another part of his gear, nothing to be said about it. For his part, Dick never seemed to notice that anything about it was strange. In a moment of worry, Bruce had thought Dick might be scared of it, of the darkness and the way it moved like a living thing.
Fortunately, Dick had no such qualms. When Robin was not flying over the Gotham rooftops, his short yellow cape like a flag, he could usually be found hiding and content in the shadow of Batman’s cape, which seemed to extend just further than it logically should, and turned Robin’s bright yellow, red, and green into shadowy shades of charcoal. (And, thank goodness, Robin’s cape did seem to be genuinely normal. No weird floating or changing in state of matter to worry about there, which Bruce was eternally grateful for. He didn't know how he'd handle Dick if he had any semblance of powers on top of everything else.)
Batman watched the members of the Justice League as they filtered into the main meeting room on the Watchtower. None of them acknowledged him as they stood and sat around the table, chatting with each other. The room was darker than usual, since Batman had arrived early and not bothered to turn on the lights, and since then only one person seemed to have found the light switch, but only for half of the room, so Batman, in his seat, was mostly in shadow.
The meeting start time came and went and everyone settled around the table.
“Should we start?” Barry asked, tapping his fingers on the table and glancing anxiously at Batman.
“Not without Batman,” Diana answered, also glancing in Batman’s direction.
Neither of them really seemed to see him.
Even Superman looked around, and Bruce could tell he was using his x-ray vision to see if he was anywhere nearby. Even with his enhanced senses, Superman still seemed oblivious to Bruce’s presence.
Bruce suppressed a smile and cleared his throat. Everyone at the table, despite being hardened heroes, jumped.
“B-Batman,” Barry stammered. “How long have you been there?”
Batman glared blankly in return, then settled his gloved arms on the table. “I believe we have a few important issues to discuss-”
Bruce truly had no idea how the cape had gained its unique and peculiar properties. He wasn’t even sure he knew all of what it could do. One time, when he had wondered if it was magic, he had given it to Zatanna. She hadn’t even finished her spell before she shoved it back at him. She never offered any explanation.
Batman was used to people trying to grab his cape in a fight, trying to yank him around. He had never once known them to succeed. He’d seen it happen a million times — a goon would grab at the thick material, thinking they could use it to pull him around, but their fingers would close over smoke and shadows, the cape slipping away like water. Bruce had tried to recreate the effect for himself, but no matter what he did, the cape always remained solid. Even when he sparred with the Robins in the Cave, deliberately in the cape to see what would happen, it acted like a completely normal cape, and his kids would use it to drag him around. After the fifth time he tripped on it, he gave up on wearing it during sparring.
Bruce wasn’t sure why or how, as such a naturally paranoid and suspicious person, he had so readily and easily accepted the peculiarities of his cape. He didn’t know how it had come to be like this, but now all that mattered was that it was. At this point, the cape was as much Batman as he was. When he fought, when he moved, when he hid, the cape was a part of him; it knew what he needed and it was there. The urban legend that was the Batman was as much, if not more, the cape’s doing than his own; an indestructible shadow of the night, able to appear at will to rain down vengeance on the criminal and cruel.
Batman stood on a roof, staring down over Gotham city. His city. Below and around him, people went about their nights, finishing work, watching one more episode of their favourite show, turning into bed, eating late dinners. Somewhere, across the city, someone, maybe the Joker or the Riddler or the Penguin, maybe just a street-level thug or gang, was doing something nefarious, preparing some terrible plot. All of them were unaware of who, or what, watched over them.
The light of the moon disappeared behind a dark cloud, and in the second of darkness, the Batman disappeared.