Starting off this post with a massive TRIGGER WARNING: This contains mpreg, unsafe pregnancies on account of there being little to no proper prenatal care, kinda graphic depictions of birth, a character going through stillbirth and postpartum depression. It's dark. It's meant to be dark. BE WARNED.
Bruce Wayne who is 20-something, still in the late stages of his training, still filled with the rage of a thousand suns and guilt enough to drown a man, who falls pregnant after a one night stand with a random man.
This can be Trans Bruce or magic or whatever logic you want it to be. I personally subscribe to Trans Bruce so yeah.
He falls pregnant. He's unaware of this until he suddenly falls violently ill somewhere around the end of his first trimester. It's a cryptic pregnancy, there's no bump to show off, and the pain that it brings with it is harsh but bearable, and Bruce doesn't want to terminate it. It's crazy, he knew it would be crazy, because he's literally roaming around the world training under the harshest climates and situations and that would certainly not help the baby in any way. Really, it would make more sense for him to terminate it, both for himself and the unborn child.
But he has been so lonely.
His crusade has left him the sole walker of his path, and sometimes the darkness is too oppressive, sometimes nothing helps the pain go down, but this new life... family, something he never expected to have, after the Wayne murders all those years ago (he still remembered like it was yesterday-), Alfred was close but he wasn't, not really (he never seemed like he wanted to be-), and now there's this budding life in him. Maybe, just maybe...
Would it be worth it to quietly retreat and start a life with a new addition to his family of (two) one? Just him and his child, and Alfred, because he would follow Bruce to the end of the world, just them. He could build them a beautiful and happy life. He could be a good parent.
So despite everything in him, every rational part that ever existed screaming at him to not go through with the pregnancy, he did. He carried that child, gingerly documenting his pregnancy progress, using his sparse knowledge of prenatal care from the few gynecology and reproduction classes he took back in med school. Some days it was alright, and Bruce could almost forget that he was pregnant, and then other days it was so bad he wanted to claw the child out of his body. But he endured it, like he always did. For a child he wanted to meet.
When the day finally came for the birth, Bruce holed up in a cheap motel bathroom, hands curled around his abdomen as he leaned back against the stained white of the bathtub. He had done his best to clean it and make it safe, but there was only so much one could do while actively contracting. It was a long, arduous process, and Bruce felt like his whole body was spliting in two, but he endured it, doing his own checkups and pushing when he deemed fit.
Maybe if he actually had someone help him through the pregnancy, maybe if he had gone to a doctor like he was supposed to, he would have realised something was wrong before the birth.
The room stayed silent after the child finally slid free. There was no gasp of air or a guttural cry, things that all women said their children did at birth. Alfred had called him an anomaly once, in a moment of fond recollection, for being the most silent babe in that hospital. But even he had gasped for air, as quiet as it had been. But his child...
His child was cold. Slick from the blood and amniotic fluid still covering their body, and oh so cold. No matter what he does, how long he holds the child against his chest, hoping some of the warmth of his sick body leaches into the baby, it doesn't work. His baby stays cold.
There's Bruce in a bathtub all alone during his travels around the world, having just given birth to a child who's father he barely remembers, but the baby is unmoving and cold in his arms. So small, so frail, with a full head of dark hair just his own baby pictures, and he's just holding the bloody child in his arms and weeping.
I've always imagined Bruce as a silent crier, like his tears are so silent you wouldn't know he's crying unless you look at him, really look at him. Like snowflakes falling, tiny drops of rain hitting the ground after a drought, so silent, so devastating. So just him, weeping quietly, tears pouring onto bloody skin and cleaning away streaks of red. His once impassive face contorted into sadness so great, a grief so hollowing that it was a wonder it didn't swallow everything around him like a black hole.
He sat there in his own blood and tears, cuddling the body tight against his naked chest, whispering apologies into the soft shell of an ear that will never listen to his mother's Russian lullabies, wiping away fluid from eyes that will never open. There's a hole in his chest that was supposed to be filled by new life, but now stays glaringly empty and barren.
He almost doesn't feel the rest of the birth in his grief, but his body does him no such good thing, and he feels everything. When it's all over, he doesn't move from his position, blindly staring at the eggshell walls in muted horror. It was settling in now, reality was dawning on him. Maybe he wasn't meant to have a drop of happiness. Everything he touched was cursed to die. Everything he loved was doomed to end in tragedy. It was a reaffirmation of every self depreciating thought he had ever had, a confirmation, a bloody stamp that just screamed absolution.
When he finally got himself together, he cleaned himself and the child off with the freezing cold water, because who was there to complain about it? He deserved every hint of discomfort, and it wasn't like the child (dead, dead, dead-) would feel the temperature anyways. Still, he gingerly wiped the baby clean with the towels he had brought, cleaning strands of dark hair and just. Holding the child to himself as much as he could. As much as he dared to. He checked their gender out of morbid curiosity, because he was nothing if not a beacon of self flagellation, and the baby deserved a name.
If it was a boy, it was going to be James. For a girl, it would would have been Martha.
James Thomas Wayne. Martha Joanne Wayne.
It was a girl. Bruce was going to bury his daughter.
He went about cleaning himself and tending to the wounds in a daze, using the supplies he had gotten with the meagre amount of money he had left from his travels. A kind older woman had seen him loitering in the area and had helped him with his shopping under the assumption that he was tending to his pregnant wife. He was happy to let her have her thoughts as long as she helped him, and he was glad she did, because he wouldn't have know how to deal with himself afterwards otherwise. He wrapped little Martha in a swaddle, and oh, she looked like she was just asleep under all that soft pink cloth, Bruce wanted to breakdown all over again. But no tears fell, his eyes had run dry.
He donated all the baby supplies he had collected to an orphanage down the street, they would need it more than him. Gathering up the courage, he dialed Alfred’s number for the first time in years, feeling like his entire life was ripped from the foundations and thrown asunder. The butler answers with a hope in his voice that drives Bruce’s cold heart further into the ground, and it kills him to tell Alfred that he won't be home for longer. He asks the older man for just some money in his account, not a lot (just enough to buy a small coffin), and the man hangs up to the sound of the same silent sobs that echoed in Wayne Manor. The next day, there's money put into the account Bruce had been using for his travels, he doesn't know how Alfred found it, but he's thankful all the same.
He buries Martha in that same city, her pale swaddled self in a little tiny coffin that had no business being made for tiny children, and spends another day weeping in front of her tombstone that just reads 'Martha' so nobody would connect it back to him. And then he vanishes back into his travels, because what else was left for his life but the vengeance he swore that fateful day?
I imagine he goes to the LoA next and he's so attached to the nursery there that the midwives of the league teach him what to look for in a pregnancy and how to safely deliver a baby. Things that would have tremendously helped him during his own experience, but at least now he knows in case he needs to do it on the field. Khoa remarks on how soft he is, Talia is hopelessly endeared by the sight of him walking around with a baby resting against his chest, even Ra's leaves this one haven of innocence free for him, letting him go to the nursery after every brutal training session just so he can reaffirm to himself why he is doing all of this.
No children left crying in the alleyways of Gotham. No babies in tiny coffins that shouldn't be made at all.
He visits her grave every year on what would've (should've) been her birthday, even if he has to fly over from the most remote parts of the world to do so. He never stops doing so till the day he dies.
(He then goes on to adopt a circus child, a Robin with broken wings, and he helps the child fly again. A street-rat, so rambunctious, so eager to soar, who was beat down but built himself back up. A little curious bird who delved in places he had no business going and the cuckoo he brought with him, who fought with Bruce but still created a place for themselves in his heart. A little bat, so similar to him, so similar to Martha that it burned to look at her, but he did, and she made him proud every time. A little lion cub, a remnant of his time with the LoA, a piece of Talia and him condensed into the sweetest child he ever had the joy of knowing. A songbird, so brave and bright, shining a light come dawn for Gotham to see and feel safe. His children, his wards, his biggest successes. His entire life.)
(Eventually he opens up to a few people about it (Khoa, Talia, Selina, his kids, Clark-) and a few of them visit too, just to give him support. It lightens the weight of his failure a little more when they do.)
