BATMAN: Fall Of The Dark Knight #Wattys2016

Epilogue: THE "NEW" BATMAN? (& THE WORLD ACCORDING TO JANE)

Jane Marie Grayson snuck into her bedroom window the same way she had been doing almost every night for about the last week. It had been nearly a couple of months since Uncle Bruce had passed away. He had died peacefully in his sleep with Aunt Selina lying right next to him. They said his old butler Alfred Pennyworth had also passed away in his sleep. Jane stepped into her adjacent bathroom and gazed at herself in the mirror above her sink. Only it wasn't her face staring back at her.

It was Batman.

Shortly after Bruce Wayne's death, Jane recalled the time she had watched him take off his Batsuit on the night before Grandpa Gordon had passed. She was hiding in the darkened hallway where he couldn't see. She never said anything about what she saw to anyone, much less her parents. She didn't understand what she saw at that young age since by that time the people in Gotham had all but stopped talking about the Batman whereas years before he was almost always front-page news. By that time, he was beginning to be a distant memory. She did some research online about Batman. She found old newspaper articles from the Gotham Gazette detailing many of his exploits. A lot of these stories had been written by veteran news reporter Vicki Vale who had been shot and killed by a known gangster named Joe Malone she was doing an expose on a few years ago. Joe, in turn, was shot and killed by then-Police Commissioner Harvey Bullock. The video of the shooting showed up on YouTube. People cried police brutality since you couldn't see Joe holding a gun in the video, although Bullock swore he was holding one and threatening to kill him with it. In spite of all the protests, the shooting was ruled as "justified" and that was that. Harvey Bullock retired as Commissioner over a year later and Detective Renee Montoya took his place as the new Commissioner much to the relief of many people in Gotham who regarded Bullock as some trigger-happy dinosaur who shot first and asked questions later.

Along with the newspaper articles, Jane found a number of handmade YouTube videos showing the Batman in action, including, to her surprise, the short clip showing Batman murdering a criminal who called herself Harley Quinn. (Geez, she thought, where did some of these creeps get their names anyway? A freakin' comic book?) She remembered hearing the story from Aunt Selina how Uncle Bruce had shot and killed this Harley's psychotic boyfriend who called himself The Joker after he had broke into his place, his mansion. She also remembered how pissed off her Mom Barbara got when Selina told her that story. But that was one thing she loved about Aunt Selina, how she never held anything back. Not like her lame, uptight Mom who probably never did a cool thing in her whole entire life.

Intrigued, Jane decided she'd try the whole Batman thing out for herself. It wasn't like she had anything else going on in her life. She didn't even have a boyfriend thanks to her overprotective parents who wouldn't even get her her own car as she drove around on a crappy Moped. Copying what she saw on the Batman videos she watched, she sowed her very own Batman costume with the sewing skills she learned from Homec class (which was one of the few classes in school where she actually learned something). She also picked up a few self-defense techniques from some other YouTube videos she watched just in case.

Thanks Heavens for YouTube!

The first few times she went out wearing her Batman costume were pretty uneventful. She wasn't sure what she was expecting since Gotham wasn't the cesspool of crime it apparently was during the original Batman's heyday thanks to her father who was the former mayor who, to hear her Mom (and Aunt Selina) tell it, cracked down pretty hard on crime with the help of former Police Commissioner Harvey Bullock.

The first time Jane confronted an actual criminal was one night when she was driving around on her Moped and saw this creep snatching a woman's purse. She quickly hopped off her Moped and started chasing him down the sidewalk. Her heart was racing. Her adrenaline was pumping. Before she was hard-pressed to understand why Uncle Bruce would go out and fight criminals while dressed up in a Batsuit. Now, as she was chasing down this criminal, she was beginning to see the allure of along with the rush that Uncle Bruce must have felt. She caught up with him and, before she was able to grab him, he all of a sudden turned around and took a swing at her. The punch caught her square in the jaw. That was the very first time someone had ever hit her, and it hurt like hell. The force of the punch nearly caused her to fall over, but she was able to keep herself from falling down and she took a swing at the purse-snatching thug. To her surprise, the punch connected right in the middle of his face and he started to fall backwards. She thought he was going to fall down but then he suddenly stood back up and pushed her. Hard. She started to fall back again, but he grabbed her by her cape as he reared back his fist. However, before he had a chance to hit her a second time, she kneed him in his crotch as hard as she could. As she expected (as she hoped anyway), he immediately let go of her and doubled over, holding his wounded crotch. He fell down to his knees, still clutching his injured nethers. He glared up angrily at her, his lower lip quivering and his eyes watering.