[Fic] Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?
Hi everyone! I found this fandom by happy chance and have been poring over it for a while now. I emerge from lurkerdom with crossover AU fic. My command of both Batman and Flash canon is still pretty patchy, so please forgive snags.
And while I’m posting, I might as well ask: I’ve heard vague things around the internet about one old issue where Trickster somehow ends up showing more concern for collateral damage than (Barry Allen) Flash. If it exists, anyone have its number so I can add it to my wish list and call it up for a date? Thanks!
Crossposting to piper_trickster.
Without further ado…
Title: Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Haley’s Circus hires the Flying Jesses instead of the Flying Graysons, and Batman takes a different orphaned boy under his wing.
Word Count: ~3700
Additional Notes and Warnings: I guess when you get together as many characters are there are in the DCU, backstory overlap is inevitable. I took this particular similarity and ran. Contains child endangerment, sexual crudity, liberties with the timeline, use of “crazy” as a pejorative, and terrible jokes.
Everybody knows James Jesse is afraid of heights. Everybody knows James - Jamie, JJ, Giovanni Giuseppe, John Joseph, Johnny Wayne - is an amiable chatterbox with eye-searing fashion sense who adores Westerns and never goes on roller coasters or balconies. Everybody knows Bruce Wayne’s adopted son - and as for how a teenage circus aerialist came to be adopted by a billionaire, that’s an ugly story that would, it’s agreed in whispers over champagne flutes, give anyone a phobia. Some of the children in the audience that night still have nightmares and it wasn’t their parents that fell to their deaths. The older set remembers the Zucco trial, when the boy took the stand - not a dry eye in the jury.
And it’s not at all often that someone puts him in the same thought as the Blue Jay, but nearly always that thought gets quickly dismissed. Because the boy who’s been seen with Batman lately may cackle and chatter, and his hair may shine blond in the streetlamps when the hood comes off, but the same goes for thousands of other Gothamites. And besides, the prevailing opinion is that the kid in the blue jumpsuit and the feathered cloak has to be some kind of meta, the way he scorns gravity, and with those stunts he can’t be scared of falling. And also if JJ is Blue Jay does that mean Bruce Wayne is Batman, ha-ha.
But when Haley’s comes back to Gotham a few years later Dick Grayson, in his red and gold, finds himself dangling from one of the trapezes after the Joker invades the big top. The audience screams and his parents call his name and the Joker laughs too close to him and he swings steadily, trying to build up the momentum to flip back onto the platform before one of the goons below decides to pick off the hanging duck. On the high wire below, the figure in blue leaps and flips backward over a jet of acid and, staying several feet above the wire as if he’s forgotten to come down, flicks his wrist and sends a yo-yo shooting out without missing a beat of banter. Gunfire from below - Dick swings and soars and hits the platform and clambers forward. As he climbs down there’s a thump in the safety net and a triumphant cry, above him: “Now that’s comedy, ya rube!”
Dick remembers the Flying Jesses’ colors (because of the Jesses, when the Graysons signed on the nets were nonnegotiable) and notices the splashes of orange among the blue and wonders.
***
James may not fly anymore, but he’s picked up other tricks from the hours watching everyone else at their craft while hiding from another round of trapeze practice with an easily-distracted father and no net. When the Gotham elite hold a “family-friendly” social function, he can be relied on to keep the children entertained while Bruce circulates. He juggles plates. Their ears turn out to be full of nickels and paper flowers and plastic jewelry. One of the older girls asks if he can breathe fire like another man she saw at the circus. Bruce circulates back just in time to abort the experiment.
One of the boys points up at the chandelier. “Are you sure you can’t?”
He shrugs with one shoulder. “Haven’t done it in years. And I wasn’t even that good at it back then, kiddo.”
“Can you do it now?”
“Rather not.” If he were talking to someone older he’d throw in a little tremor in his voice, a tremble in his lip, but kids are wise to these tricks.
They do talk him into rapid-fire somersaults on a long stretch of carpet, flipflipflipflip, and up with his arms out at the end with a click-flash from Timmy Drake’s ever-present camera. That he can do. That he could always do. Old man Haley would’ve had a spot for him with the acrobats or the clowns but nobody wanted to give up on the cachet of the family act, not yet. Even James wanted to stick with it. Just a bit longer, he remembers thinking, another few months to get the money for the bits and bobbles he couldn’t scrape up on his own, and he’d have it, and he’d fly for real, and Pop might think it was cheating but Pop wouldn’t have to know and maybe then, maybe finally…
***
It started with the airwalker shoes. After the first week at Wayne Manor, which he passed waiting to wake up and paging through his dog-eared Westerns without looking at the words, James gathered up the equally battered scientific journals (and notebooks full of bootlegs thereof) and spent all his spare time and allowance cloistered in an unused wing that he and Alfred cleared of fragile objects. When Bruce ventured there another two weeks later (“It appears young Master James is in some difficulty”), he found James inverted midair, arms wrapped around a table leg.
Once they got him down and got the shoes off, he showed Bruce a modified sole with one hand and the crude blueprint with another. He was trying to shape his face into something winsome and cutely precocious, but it kept slipping. “Been figuring it out for ages. The idea is to get enough force against gravity so you won’t fall. So I won’t. Because, see, I… don’t want to be scared anymore.”
Before the week was out Bruce arranged for twenty more pairs of shoes, crates of components rerouted through the usual channels in Wayne Enterprises R&D, and a full-fledged workshop in the manor proper. Barely two months after that, he found James wandering unrepentantly large-eyed around the cave. It wasn’t a complete loss; James would use the manor workshop when he had friends over to demonstrate his more innocuous gizmos, things to make other kids ooh and ahh.
James didn’t field-test the airwalkers for a long while, though he bounced around the Batcave’s stalactites and the high-ceilinged rooms of Wayne Manor with the curtains drawn. He made a pair in Bruce’s size, installed remote-control activators that could be hidden in a gauntlet, and pleaded with him to wear them in case the grapple lines failed; he might not have the training for complex maneuvers, but they could still save Batman broken bones or a broken spine. In the meantime James learned the computer systems, did light repair and maintenance work on the different vehicles, and dreamed up gadgets that would fit into the bat theme. Of course, he wasn’t content with that for long. By the time two weeks shy of his sixteenth birthday when Bruce decided he was ready for the field, he already had plans for his utility belt, a tone and pitch for his working voice, and strong opinions about his costume. Bruce wasn’t too impressed with the yo-yos, but they worked just as they ought and James had the forethought to track down articles about the history of weaponization of things-on-strings, which he proceeded to brandish in his defense.
No amount of smooth-talking could sway him on the rubber chicken, though. James blames the Joker, ruining it for the rest of them.
***
Undercover recon is easier with more pairs of feet. James is super-versatile - can even go around in a skirt and heels without getting stares - but it’s natural to have favorites. For one of his favorite faces, James pops in brown contacts and soaks his hair in easy-dissolve dye. Not only does it disguise him, it means he doesn’t have to deal with smartasses like the ones at school saying “Gee, you’re kinda blond for an Italian.” Undercover isn’t the best time to school people on their stereotypes.
Nicky Bianchi drifts across the docks and through the alleys and dingy bars, sullen and stoop-shouldered. He has the speech patterns of a first-generation immigrant used to Italian grammar, sans the showman’s swagger and lively courtesies of Paolo and Elena Giuseppe. “Quiet kid,” they say when they remember him. “Good at cards.”
James is good at cards too, though part of that’s because he smiles all the time on the worst hands while Nicky scowls all the time on the best hands. Nicholas was his confirmation name (because who doesn’t love good old St. Nick? And he hadn’t wanted it to be James, because that would mean it wasn’t already his name. And it was his name by then, even if he wasn’t baptized with it, even if it gave Pop conniptions in private shouting the stage name should stay on the stage). He figures he can get away with that much.
***
So far, despite the briefing that something big is going down, the League-assigned stint in the Central-Keystone region feels like a vacation. Most of the Rogues-with-capital-R aren’t given to homicidal mania, and the heroing company isn’t half bad either. The main catches are A) the nagging paranoia that at this very moment the Arkham regulars are doing some atrocity or another for shits and giggles and it’s all his fault and B) the occasional fits of gut-punch jealousy. There’s the lighter workload, the lower stakes. He can maybe think himself into being proud of the extra responsibility (and besides he gets to chase Catwoman, who’s non-homicidal and classy as heck), but then there’s the fact that everyone knows Wally West is the Flash and he gets along fine. Fidel Castro even threw him a birthday party, which nobody is ever going to do for Blue Jay (unless… but no, they’re too tied up with each other at this point, there’s no way he wouldn’t take Bruce and Batman with him, this probably wasn’t what the high school guidance counselor meant when he said What You Do In These Years Is Crucial To Your Future).
They sit on a roof, the three of them, with the pigeons and rats. The rats are there because the third guy is the Pied Piper, used to be one of the late Barry Allen’s Rogues, he’s gone straight these days (well, mostly - rimshot!) and it looks like it has a pretty good chance of taking. He was born Hartley Rathaway, so James can see why he still goes by Piper. Wally’s cowl is down and Piper’s hat is off, so James follows suit for his hood. The domino mask with the one-way lenses stays on as a symbolic thing.
“… and it turns out someone else already had the name, kind of embarrassing, but not like there was a Who’s Who we could look in back then. Not to mention the big bossman vetoed Blue Canary and Bluebird of Happiness… I’ve been thinking of branching out, anyway. More creative control. Can’t live in Batman’s basement forever, right?”
Not like he’s ever actually lived there, literally or not (right now he has some snazzy digs on a lower floor of Loeb Tower, more than paid for by the non-crimefighting patents). Way he sees it, he went into this gig as a full partner and he’s only gotten more full with time. The papers might’ve called him a sidekick (because what else could a kid the age he was be?) but they don’t know jack about the airwalkers, or the nights in the lab, or how much of the Batbelt these days is owed to him, and at this rate he guesses they never will.
At least he knows. And Bruce knows. He thinks.
He wonders if he can get away with patenting the airwalkers as something he independently engineered. At this point, thanks to various wardrobe malfunctions over the years, Blue Jay’s “magic shoes” have become part of the mystique. He can say he was inspired, and tried to reproduce the effect. He can say he’s trying self-therapy for his acrophobia (amazing the vocabulary you pick up, fighting crime). That part’s even true.
“It all started,” Wally’s saying, “when Captain Cold got paroled. They had a get-together at a hotel. Why the hotel people didn’t do the Right To Refuse Service thing I couldn’t tell you. So they partied hard until Captain Boomerang got plastered and beaned the Golden Glider in the head. It wasn’t like they invited me, so I only found out because an ambulance driver yelled over to me about a 911 call. When I got there Glider was bleeding all over the place and Cold was going bananas…”
A light flashes on the widget he’s built around the standard-issue communicator, so he can carry it on call even out of costume. “Hang on a sec.” Medium priority. The fake name on the little screen is the one he assigned to Booster Gold. James informs the others as much and picks up. “Hellooo Raybans! Whattayagot for us?”
Jason’s shot up tall. Depending on how determined Bruce is to try to make things look seamless, there could be gallons of bleach in his future. Almost since he was old enough to think James has dreamed of someone else coming along to be the youngest, and someone audacious enough to swipe the Batmobile’s tires is his number one choice for a little brother (And besides, we first name-last name folks have to stick together, am I right?). And if that wasn’t enough there’s Barbara-called-Liz, his one sister (so far), so called because among other things she hacks like Lizzie Borden, and she’s been a literal lifesaver several times over. He’d call her his big sister despite all technicalities except that would mean she has two little brothers named James and this way she has a matched set. And recently the dream’s come true yet again because Tim’s next in line, pint-sized paparazzi that he is (okay, he’s discreet, definitely more than James, but the alliteration’s too much to resist). Bruce was appalled at the massive security breach and they both knew who he blamed it on - too much circus lingo and other such tells, too little differentiation between cape and civvies - but as he paged through the twin albums from teenage him with tiny Timmy onward, it was all James could do not to clasp his hands and falsetto “You like me! You really like me!”
“His name’s Paul Gambi,” Wally says after they all hear about Booster’s lead. “He has a place on Fourth Street. Can’t miss it - it’s got the costumes in the window. I’d run over there myself, but he’s on the lookout. My uncle went undercover there once and it didn’t go so great, and he had a secret identity…”
“Can do.” He won’t need to invent a face, just slip into his hotel room. Mask off, cape off, airwalkers deactivated, throw on some jeans and his favorite orange sweater and waltz in as JJ the touristing Gotham billionaire’s son getting a safe taste of the criminal element. Silver linings and all that.
***
Crisis averted, shoulder relocated, leg bandaged, ankle stabilized. James’s all-natural habit of open-ended vacations comes in handy at times like these. By the time his civilian self finally returns to Gotham with a tan and a stack of colorful anecdotes yea high, he’ll be mint condition without needing to puppy-eye magicians. He’s gotten off easy. Not like the one time the Joker managed to nail him and hard while in civvies (and that was lucky too because the Joker didn’t even know what he had his hands on or it could’ve gotten even worse before Liz-as-Batgirl crashed in and bailed him out - the sorry mook, he can say now with a laugh). After Zatanna patched him up he only left Wayne Manor in one disguise or another for eight months while JJ was packed off to state-of-the-art rehab in Switzerland with the occasional postcard. Silver lining there was that it helped throw off the trail - even threw Tim for a loop, until he took into account the company they all kept.
In the meantime, all slung up, he checks Piper out of his hospital window. Wally’s sleeping off his superspeed day-saving feats and the celebratory recharging dinner. James comes bearing a doggie bag with most of the leftovers, and they hold a picnic on the roof.
“Do you ever think some people are born evil?”
Doesn’t take a psychological genius to tell why that’s relevant to his interests. “Huh. Haven’t really turned it over, but I can’t think of one for sure. I mean it’s not like I’ve had the chance to go back in time and follow supervillain babies around with cameras to see if they have evil baby laughs.”
“Mm hmm.”
“I mean, take the Joker - stone cold creep, crazy like a very crazy thing, when the rest of our bunch wants a good scare without doing lines of fear dust they tell each other Joker stories -”
“Yours too?”
“Uh huh.” James was positive that in the world most people lived in, even the world most supervillains lived in, you should never not be sure whether someone wanted to kill you or adopt you. “But the thing is, nobody really knows where he came from, right? Maybe when he was a kid he was every bit as sweet and adorable as moi.”
“How low a bar is that exactly?”
James chucks a roll at him. The rats catch and swarm it. “Anyway, I might not have cameras, but sometimes we get a reason to dig - see if they’re checking off a list of the people who made fun of them in high school or something - and we’ve found some creepy shit down there. Like this one time for a case I had to read the diary of this Bible-thumping crazy crow lady who seriously thought people choke their chicken to Ulysses and -”
“Please never use that turn of phrase again.”
They stay up past midnight. And at some point Piper’s gotten to talking about the glamorization of violence, the paradoxical glorification and condemnation of operating outside the law (his words, not James’s). And James lets himself mention how when he was little he loved reading about the Wild West outlaws, used to be a big fan of - “Billy the Kid,” he temporizes.
“When I met an actual criminal…” he lets himself say. He remembers Tony Zucco sitting sullen in the dock next to a public defender who knew he was in over his head. He remembers that he lied on the stand. Even back when he still had regular nightmares about the broken rope (and those he told the truth about), he knew he was lying when he talked about what a very happy family they had been, because absence might make the heart grow fonder but he still remembered Pop yelling about his books and Ma pretending not to hear and that was before he thought back to how many times he’d almost been dropped on his head before Zucco ever took it into his head to sabotage so much as a jungle gym. But that didn’t mean I wanted… “… it was pretty disappointing. So what was with this Top guy I’ve been hearing about, and was he what it sounds like?” He’s been not-unnaturally changing topics like this throughout their prior conversations. It sets precedent: nothing to see here.
***
The standard destination for an ambitious runaway is the circus. James is thoroughly of age and has already spent over a decade in the circus (and besides, rumor has it that Haley’s has its own guardian angel now), so when things finally boil over below Stately Wayne Manor he runs away to Quantico. Or tries. His stellar showing on paper gets him over the first hurdles, but he can tell the application people at the FBI think he’s nutty like a fruitcake and loopy like a fruitloop because he’s had it with pasting on a Batman Serious Face and instead put forward the exact opposite face, and the acrophobia’s the last nail. That’s okay. After the first rush of that’d show him all right he gets stuck wondering what he’d actually do in there, and exactly how that would be better than what he’s already got. After this becomes clear, though, he gets a visit from another bland guy in a bland suit talking about using his mad science skills for National Security. “You’re clearly talented, Mr. Jesse - or is it Mr. Wayne?” he says, brandishing a novelty electronic yo-yo in a way that makes clear he’s a complete amateur in the ways of the yo-yo who probably couldn’t walk the dog without strangling himself.
“That’s Mr. Giuseppe to you,” James says back, because.
“Surely you’ve thought about putting that talent to productive use.”
He gets out of town soon after that.
A fleet of cards go out at Christmas, some of them packed inside parcels. Most of them are Gotham addresses, and most of those to JJ’s civilian acquaintances (two to Selina Kyle, postmarked from different places four days apart). Only two packages go to the manor that year, one for Alfred and one for not-so-Little Jay. After some ruminating he locates a singing Batman card - the song in question is the neoclassic riff on Jingle Bells - and mails that too.
At one of the countless post offices in New York he signs a third (fourth, fifth, ninth) name for a package with a Central City postmark - his present to himself. In his new apartment he opens it on a worktable and examines his winter costume. All up to spec, his special mods included and functioning. Stand-up guy, Gambi. He sits down and stitches in more over the evening, because even if Central isn’t his usual beat and they don’t want to pull open his ribcage and chew on his lungs like some people, he’s not about to let the Rogues’ go-to tailor in on all his secrets. He’s already done his tinkering on a leather jacket, and he throws that onto the pile. The mask, too - he finished grinding the lenses last week. And of course the shoes, the original Air Jesses (not that he calls them that in public, Air Walkers works all right except for the minor detail of who the heck is Walker?), a new model to match the new costume. And so on, and so forth.
Two hours later, kitted out, he steps out onto a roof five blocks away. He might not be as obscenely rich as some people, but he has enough for a few layers of obfuscation. One last tweak to his earpiece, for crystal reception on the emergency band. The Trickster balances on the edge, gives his cape a dramatic swirl, and takes flight.
And while I’m posting, I might as well ask: I’ve heard vague things around the internet about one old issue where Trickster somehow ends up showing more concern for collateral damage than (Barry Allen) Flash. If it exists, anyone have its number so I can add it to my wish list and call it up for a date? Thanks!
Crossposting to piper_trickster.
Without further ado…
Title: Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Haley’s Circus hires the Flying Jesses instead of the Flying Graysons, and Batman takes a different orphaned boy under his wing.
Word Count: ~3700
Additional Notes and Warnings: I guess when you get together as many characters are there are in the DCU, backstory overlap is inevitable. I took this particular similarity and ran. Contains child endangerment, sexual crudity, liberties with the timeline, use of “crazy” as a pejorative, and terrible jokes.
Everybody knows James Jesse is afraid of heights. Everybody knows James - Jamie, JJ, Giovanni Giuseppe, John Joseph, Johnny Wayne - is an amiable chatterbox with eye-searing fashion sense who adores Westerns and never goes on roller coasters or balconies. Everybody knows Bruce Wayne’s adopted son - and as for how a teenage circus aerialist came to be adopted by a billionaire, that’s an ugly story that would, it’s agreed in whispers over champagne flutes, give anyone a phobia. Some of the children in the audience that night still have nightmares and it wasn’t their parents that fell to their deaths. The older set remembers the Zucco trial, when the boy took the stand - not a dry eye in the jury.
And it’s not at all often that someone puts him in the same thought as the Blue Jay, but nearly always that thought gets quickly dismissed. Because the boy who’s been seen with Batman lately may cackle and chatter, and his hair may shine blond in the streetlamps when the hood comes off, but the same goes for thousands of other Gothamites. And besides, the prevailing opinion is that the kid in the blue jumpsuit and the feathered cloak has to be some kind of meta, the way he scorns gravity, and with those stunts he can’t be scared of falling. And also if JJ is Blue Jay does that mean Bruce Wayne is Batman, ha-ha.
But when Haley’s comes back to Gotham a few years later Dick Grayson, in his red and gold, finds himself dangling from one of the trapezes after the Joker invades the big top. The audience screams and his parents call his name and the Joker laughs too close to him and he swings steadily, trying to build up the momentum to flip back onto the platform before one of the goons below decides to pick off the hanging duck. On the high wire below, the figure in blue leaps and flips backward over a jet of acid and, staying several feet above the wire as if he’s forgotten to come down, flicks his wrist and sends a yo-yo shooting out without missing a beat of banter. Gunfire from below - Dick swings and soars and hits the platform and clambers forward. As he climbs down there’s a thump in the safety net and a triumphant cry, above him: “Now that’s comedy, ya rube!”
Dick remembers the Flying Jesses’ colors (because of the Jesses, when the Graysons signed on the nets were nonnegotiable) and notices the splashes of orange among the blue and wonders.
***
James may not fly anymore, but he’s picked up other tricks from the hours watching everyone else at their craft while hiding from another round of trapeze practice with an easily-distracted father and no net. When the Gotham elite hold a “family-friendly” social function, he can be relied on to keep the children entertained while Bruce circulates. He juggles plates. Their ears turn out to be full of nickels and paper flowers and plastic jewelry. One of the older girls asks if he can breathe fire like another man she saw at the circus. Bruce circulates back just in time to abort the experiment.
One of the boys points up at the chandelier. “Are you sure you can’t?”
He shrugs with one shoulder. “Haven’t done it in years. And I wasn’t even that good at it back then, kiddo.”
“Can you do it now?”
“Rather not.” If he were talking to someone older he’d throw in a little tremor in his voice, a tremble in his lip, but kids are wise to these tricks.
They do talk him into rapid-fire somersaults on a long stretch of carpet, flipflipflipflip, and up with his arms out at the end with a click-flash from Timmy Drake’s ever-present camera. That he can do. That he could always do. Old man Haley would’ve had a spot for him with the acrobats or the clowns but nobody wanted to give up on the cachet of the family act, not yet. Even James wanted to stick with it. Just a bit longer, he remembers thinking, another few months to get the money for the bits and bobbles he couldn’t scrape up on his own, and he’d have it, and he’d fly for real, and Pop might think it was cheating but Pop wouldn’t have to know and maybe then, maybe finally…
***
It started with the airwalker shoes. After the first week at Wayne Manor, which he passed waiting to wake up and paging through his dog-eared Westerns without looking at the words, James gathered up the equally battered scientific journals (and notebooks full of bootlegs thereof) and spent all his spare time and allowance cloistered in an unused wing that he and Alfred cleared of fragile objects. When Bruce ventured there another two weeks later (“It appears young Master James is in some difficulty”), he found James inverted midair, arms wrapped around a table leg.
Once they got him down and got the shoes off, he showed Bruce a modified sole with one hand and the crude blueprint with another. He was trying to shape his face into something winsome and cutely precocious, but it kept slipping. “Been figuring it out for ages. The idea is to get enough force against gravity so you won’t fall. So I won’t. Because, see, I… don’t want to be scared anymore.”
Before the week was out Bruce arranged for twenty more pairs of shoes, crates of components rerouted through the usual channels in Wayne Enterprises R&D, and a full-fledged workshop in the manor proper. Barely two months after that, he found James wandering unrepentantly large-eyed around the cave. It wasn’t a complete loss; James would use the manor workshop when he had friends over to demonstrate his more innocuous gizmos, things to make other kids ooh and ahh.
James didn’t field-test the airwalkers for a long while, though he bounced around the Batcave’s stalactites and the high-ceilinged rooms of Wayne Manor with the curtains drawn. He made a pair in Bruce’s size, installed remote-control activators that could be hidden in a gauntlet, and pleaded with him to wear them in case the grapple lines failed; he might not have the training for complex maneuvers, but they could still save Batman broken bones or a broken spine. In the meantime James learned the computer systems, did light repair and maintenance work on the different vehicles, and dreamed up gadgets that would fit into the bat theme. Of course, he wasn’t content with that for long. By the time two weeks shy of his sixteenth birthday when Bruce decided he was ready for the field, he already had plans for his utility belt, a tone and pitch for his working voice, and strong opinions about his costume. Bruce wasn’t too impressed with the yo-yos, but they worked just as they ought and James had the forethought to track down articles about the history of weaponization of things-on-strings, which he proceeded to brandish in his defense.
No amount of smooth-talking could sway him on the rubber chicken, though. James blames the Joker, ruining it for the rest of them.
***
Undercover recon is easier with more pairs of feet. James is super-versatile - can even go around in a skirt and heels without getting stares - but it’s natural to have favorites. For one of his favorite faces, James pops in brown contacts and soaks his hair in easy-dissolve dye. Not only does it disguise him, it means he doesn’t have to deal with smartasses like the ones at school saying “Gee, you’re kinda blond for an Italian.” Undercover isn’t the best time to school people on their stereotypes.
Nicky Bianchi drifts across the docks and through the alleys and dingy bars, sullen and stoop-shouldered. He has the speech patterns of a first-generation immigrant used to Italian grammar, sans the showman’s swagger and lively courtesies of Paolo and Elena Giuseppe. “Quiet kid,” they say when they remember him. “Good at cards.”
James is good at cards too, though part of that’s because he smiles all the time on the worst hands while Nicky scowls all the time on the best hands. Nicholas was his confirmation name (because who doesn’t love good old St. Nick? And he hadn’t wanted it to be James, because that would mean it wasn’t already his name. And it was his name by then, even if he wasn’t baptized with it, even if it gave Pop conniptions in private shouting the stage name should stay on the stage). He figures he can get away with that much.
***
So far, despite the briefing that something big is going down, the League-assigned stint in the Central-Keystone region feels like a vacation. Most of the Rogues-with-capital-R aren’t given to homicidal mania, and the heroing company isn’t half bad either. The main catches are A) the nagging paranoia that at this very moment the Arkham regulars are doing some atrocity or another for shits and giggles and it’s all his fault and B) the occasional fits of gut-punch jealousy. There’s the lighter workload, the lower stakes. He can maybe think himself into being proud of the extra responsibility (and besides he gets to chase Catwoman, who’s non-homicidal and classy as heck), but then there’s the fact that everyone knows Wally West is the Flash and he gets along fine. Fidel Castro even threw him a birthday party, which nobody is ever going to do for Blue Jay (unless… but no, they’re too tied up with each other at this point, there’s no way he wouldn’t take Bruce and Batman with him, this probably wasn’t what the high school guidance counselor meant when he said What You Do In These Years Is Crucial To Your Future).
They sit on a roof, the three of them, with the pigeons and rats. The rats are there because the third guy is the Pied Piper, used to be one of the late Barry Allen’s Rogues, he’s gone straight these days (well, mostly - rimshot!) and it looks like it has a pretty good chance of taking. He was born Hartley Rathaway, so James can see why he still goes by Piper. Wally’s cowl is down and Piper’s hat is off, so James follows suit for his hood. The domino mask with the one-way lenses stays on as a symbolic thing.
“… and it turns out someone else already had the name, kind of embarrassing, but not like there was a Who’s Who we could look in back then. Not to mention the big bossman vetoed Blue Canary and Bluebird of Happiness… I’ve been thinking of branching out, anyway. More creative control. Can’t live in Batman’s basement forever, right?”
Not like he’s ever actually lived there, literally or not (right now he has some snazzy digs on a lower floor of Loeb Tower, more than paid for by the non-crimefighting patents). Way he sees it, he went into this gig as a full partner and he’s only gotten more full with time. The papers might’ve called him a sidekick (because what else could a kid the age he was be?) but they don’t know jack about the airwalkers, or the nights in the lab, or how much of the Batbelt these days is owed to him, and at this rate he guesses they never will.
At least he knows. And Bruce knows. He thinks.
He wonders if he can get away with patenting the airwalkers as something he independently engineered. At this point, thanks to various wardrobe malfunctions over the years, Blue Jay’s “magic shoes” have become part of the mystique. He can say he was inspired, and tried to reproduce the effect. He can say he’s trying self-therapy for his acrophobia (amazing the vocabulary you pick up, fighting crime). That part’s even true.
“It all started,” Wally’s saying, “when Captain Cold got paroled. They had a get-together at a hotel. Why the hotel people didn’t do the Right To Refuse Service thing I couldn’t tell you. So they partied hard until Captain Boomerang got plastered and beaned the Golden Glider in the head. It wasn’t like they invited me, so I only found out because an ambulance driver yelled over to me about a 911 call. When I got there Glider was bleeding all over the place and Cold was going bananas…”
A light flashes on the widget he’s built around the standard-issue communicator, so he can carry it on call even out of costume. “Hang on a sec.” Medium priority. The fake name on the little screen is the one he assigned to Booster Gold. James informs the others as much and picks up. “Hellooo Raybans! Whattayagot for us?”
Jason’s shot up tall. Depending on how determined Bruce is to try to make things look seamless, there could be gallons of bleach in his future. Almost since he was old enough to think James has dreamed of someone else coming along to be the youngest, and someone audacious enough to swipe the Batmobile’s tires is his number one choice for a little brother (And besides, we first name-last name folks have to stick together, am I right?). And if that wasn’t enough there’s Barbara-called-Liz, his one sister (so far), so called because among other things she hacks like Lizzie Borden, and she’s been a literal lifesaver several times over. He’d call her his big sister despite all technicalities except that would mean she has two little brothers named James and this way she has a matched set. And recently the dream’s come true yet again because Tim’s next in line, pint-sized paparazzi that he is (okay, he’s discreet, definitely more than James, but the alliteration’s too much to resist). Bruce was appalled at the massive security breach and they both knew who he blamed it on - too much circus lingo and other such tells, too little differentiation between cape and civvies - but as he paged through the twin albums from teenage him with tiny Timmy onward, it was all James could do not to clasp his hands and falsetto “You like me! You really like me!”
“His name’s Paul Gambi,” Wally says after they all hear about Booster’s lead. “He has a place on Fourth Street. Can’t miss it - it’s got the costumes in the window. I’d run over there myself, but he’s on the lookout. My uncle went undercover there once and it didn’t go so great, and he had a secret identity…”
“Can do.” He won’t need to invent a face, just slip into his hotel room. Mask off, cape off, airwalkers deactivated, throw on some jeans and his favorite orange sweater and waltz in as JJ the touristing Gotham billionaire’s son getting a safe taste of the criminal element. Silver linings and all that.
***
Crisis averted, shoulder relocated, leg bandaged, ankle stabilized. James’s all-natural habit of open-ended vacations comes in handy at times like these. By the time his civilian self finally returns to Gotham with a tan and a stack of colorful anecdotes yea high, he’ll be mint condition without needing to puppy-eye magicians. He’s gotten off easy. Not like the one time the Joker managed to nail him and hard while in civvies (and that was lucky too because the Joker didn’t even know what he had his hands on or it could’ve gotten even worse before Liz-as-Batgirl crashed in and bailed him out - the sorry mook, he can say now with a laugh). After Zatanna patched him up he only left Wayne Manor in one disguise or another for eight months while JJ was packed off to state-of-the-art rehab in Switzerland with the occasional postcard. Silver lining there was that it helped throw off the trail - even threw Tim for a loop, until he took into account the company they all kept.
In the meantime, all slung up, he checks Piper out of his hospital window. Wally’s sleeping off his superspeed day-saving feats and the celebratory recharging dinner. James comes bearing a doggie bag with most of the leftovers, and they hold a picnic on the roof.
“Do you ever think some people are born evil?”
Doesn’t take a psychological genius to tell why that’s relevant to his interests. “Huh. Haven’t really turned it over, but I can’t think of one for sure. I mean it’s not like I’ve had the chance to go back in time and follow supervillain babies around with cameras to see if they have evil baby laughs.”
“Mm hmm.”
“I mean, take the Joker - stone cold creep, crazy like a very crazy thing, when the rest of our bunch wants a good scare without doing lines of fear dust they tell each other Joker stories -”
“Yours too?”
“Uh huh.” James was positive that in the world most people lived in, even the world most supervillains lived in, you should never not be sure whether someone wanted to kill you or adopt you. “But the thing is, nobody really knows where he came from, right? Maybe when he was a kid he was every bit as sweet and adorable as moi.”
“How low a bar is that exactly?”
James chucks a roll at him. The rats catch and swarm it. “Anyway, I might not have cameras, but sometimes we get a reason to dig - see if they’re checking off a list of the people who made fun of them in high school or something - and we’ve found some creepy shit down there. Like this one time for a case I had to read the diary of this Bible-thumping crazy crow lady who seriously thought people choke their chicken to Ulysses and -”
“Please never use that turn of phrase again.”
They stay up past midnight. And at some point Piper’s gotten to talking about the glamorization of violence, the paradoxical glorification and condemnation of operating outside the law (his words, not James’s). And James lets himself mention how when he was little he loved reading about the Wild West outlaws, used to be a big fan of - “Billy the Kid,” he temporizes.
“When I met an actual criminal…” he lets himself say. He remembers Tony Zucco sitting sullen in the dock next to a public defender who knew he was in over his head. He remembers that he lied on the stand. Even back when he still had regular nightmares about the broken rope (and those he told the truth about), he knew he was lying when he talked about what a very happy family they had been, because absence might make the heart grow fonder but he still remembered Pop yelling about his books and Ma pretending not to hear and that was before he thought back to how many times he’d almost been dropped on his head before Zucco ever took it into his head to sabotage so much as a jungle gym. But that didn’t mean I wanted… “… it was pretty disappointing. So what was with this Top guy I’ve been hearing about, and was he what it sounds like?” He’s been not-unnaturally changing topics like this throughout their prior conversations. It sets precedent: nothing to see here.
***
The standard destination for an ambitious runaway is the circus. James is thoroughly of age and has already spent over a decade in the circus (and besides, rumor has it that Haley’s has its own guardian angel now), so when things finally boil over below Stately Wayne Manor he runs away to Quantico. Or tries. His stellar showing on paper gets him over the first hurdles, but he can tell the application people at the FBI think he’s nutty like a fruitcake and loopy like a fruitloop because he’s had it with pasting on a Batman Serious Face and instead put forward the exact opposite face, and the acrophobia’s the last nail. That’s okay. After the first rush of that’d show him all right he gets stuck wondering what he’d actually do in there, and exactly how that would be better than what he’s already got. After this becomes clear, though, he gets a visit from another bland guy in a bland suit talking about using his mad science skills for National Security. “You’re clearly talented, Mr. Jesse - or is it Mr. Wayne?” he says, brandishing a novelty electronic yo-yo in a way that makes clear he’s a complete amateur in the ways of the yo-yo who probably couldn’t walk the dog without strangling himself.
“That’s Mr. Giuseppe to you,” James says back, because.
“Surely you’ve thought about putting that talent to productive use.”
He gets out of town soon after that.
A fleet of cards go out at Christmas, some of them packed inside parcels. Most of them are Gotham addresses, and most of those to JJ’s civilian acquaintances (two to Selina Kyle, postmarked from different places four days apart). Only two packages go to the manor that year, one for Alfred and one for not-so-Little Jay. After some ruminating he locates a singing Batman card - the song in question is the neoclassic riff on Jingle Bells - and mails that too.
At one of the countless post offices in New York he signs a third (fourth, fifth, ninth) name for a package with a Central City postmark - his present to himself. In his new apartment he opens it on a worktable and examines his winter costume. All up to spec, his special mods included and functioning. Stand-up guy, Gambi. He sits down and stitches in more over the evening, because even if Central isn’t his usual beat and they don’t want to pull open his ribcage and chew on his lungs like some people, he’s not about to let the Rogues’ go-to tailor in on all his secrets. He’s already done his tinkering on a leather jacket, and he throws that onto the pile. The mask, too - he finished grinding the lenses last week. And of course the shoes, the original Air Jesses (not that he calls them that in public, Air Walkers works all right except for the minor detail of who the heck is Walker?), a new model to match the new costume. And so on, and so forth.
Two hours later, kitted out, he steps out onto a roof five blocks away. He might not be as obscenely rich as some people, but he has enough for a few layers of obfuscation. One last tweak to his earpiece, for crystal reception on the emergency band. The Trickster balances on the edge, gives his cape a dramatic swirl, and takes flight.