Officer Wayne: Dinner Date

[jeriendhal]

Scene: The Chez Ritz, the fanciest restaurant in Gotham City. Harvey Dent is sitting at a table with a raven haired woman at his side. Harvey gets up to greet Bruce as he approaches.

Harvey: Bruce! Good to see you. Out of uniform for once?

Bruce (smiling): I'm off duty, Harvey. For once. Who's this?

Harvey: Let me introduce you. Bruce Wayne, this is Selina Kyle, the socialite and environmental advocate. Selina, this is Bruce Wayne, the best uniformed cop in the GCPD.

Selina: A pleasure.

(They all sit.)

Bruce: Selina Kyle? Ah, the sponsor of the new panther reserve down in Florida. I thought I'd heard of you.

Selina; I should hope so. The Wayne Foundation contributed 20% of the funding for that project.

Bruce: I think you're right. Sorry, I'm afraid my police work keeps me from being directly involved in the Foundation's decisions.

Harvey: Don't believe him, Selina. Bruce keeps his hand in. Actually between being a cop, CEO of Wayne Corp. and and watching over his family's charity foundation, I'm not sure when he sleeps.

Bruce (looking concerned): I'm not the one who needs to worry about his sleep. You look ragged out, Harv.

Harvey (frowning and rubbing his temple): I've been getting headaches when I sleep. Bad ones. My doctor says I need to reduce my stress. I told him I'll be a lot less stressed when Sal Moroni stops sending hit men after me.

Bruce: Hmm. I'll snoop around a little. Maybe if I can "persuade" one of Moroni's goons to make a move on me, I can arrest him and get some information about his boss's next move.

Harvey: Jesus, Bruce. Don't do anything like that. The GCPD has few enough good cops as it is. I can't afford to lose you.

Bruce: We can't afford to lose you, Harvey. I'm just a beat cop. You're the first clean DA Gotham has had in decades.

Harvey: You're more than just a beat cop, Bruce. I wish you'd stop pretending otherwise.

Bruce (irritated): You think I'm wasting my time with this?

Harvey (holds up a hand to stop Bruce): I'm saying that I know two cops in this city that are completely clean, you and Lt. Gordon. And maybe Bullock, depending which day of the week it is. I can't trust anyone else, Bruce. (turns to Selina) Sorry, dear. I mean on the force.

Selina (concerned): I know what you meant. (checks her watch) Ah! I have to meet with panther reserve's board of regents. I'm sorry, love.

Harvey (kisses her briefly): Go on, sweetheart. I'll talk to you later.

(they watch her go)

Bruce: Lovely woman.

Harvey: Yeah. I'm going to ask her to marry me next week, after we wrap up the Fries trial.

Bruce: Really? Congratulations!

Harvey: She hasn't said "yes" yet. (beat) I'm scared to death.

Bruce: That she might turn you down?

Harvey: That she agrees to marry me. I've got a target on my forehead, Bruce. She will too if we're together.

Bruce: Don't worry about that. I've got you're back, Harv.

(he holds out his hand, They shake.)

Harvey: Same here, Bruce. Same here.

Comments

[seawasp]

See, THIS is the kind of thing Gotham should have done: an alternate timeline, not trying to juggle the prequel timeline. Both it and Smallville suffer from the limitation that they're trying to prevent changes that would transform the future that we expect; Clark has to become Superman, Lex Luthor has to become a supervillain, Bruce Wayne has to become Batman.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Never going to happen. Even in the Elseworlds there's always a Batman. :(

I realize much of the appeal of the Batman comics is watching Bruce dress up in the suit and beat the crap out of people with amazing gadgets, but I wish there was more about what he does as Bruce Wayne. I always enjoyed those parts in the early seasons of Batman: TAS

[seawasp]

Oh, I could see them doing it. I would expect that *EVENTUALLY* something would happen to push Officer Wayne over the edge into being the Goddam Batman, but you could do several seasons of Officer Wayne before you had to let the inevitable course of history take over.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Actually one scene I haven't written yet has Unnamed Love Interest or Alfred finding a notebook in Bruce's drawer with lots of Bat symbol and Bat suit sketches. He ends up snatching it back and explaining when he was wandering through Asia he "A lot of silly ideas...".

[seawasp]

Which shows that the template is there, and when X is killed horribly by Y villain, it would be easy to justify the appearance of the Batman.

Or mix it up with someone ELSE becoming the Batman...

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Well the intent was to show Bruce had thought about being Batman and rejected it as not the best use of his time. (not that "Billionaire Beat Cop" makes much MORE sense).

OTOH an impressionable and grieving Dick Grayson might find something useful there...

[seawasp]

I was looking at what would be *practical* to do. As you point out, there's pretty much no way that you could publish such a story where there was NEVER a Batman, but one could explore a lot of the potential of Officer Wayne and changing a lot of history before having the Batman (with whoever you wanted behind the mask) show up. In a way, that's an ideal story design. You have a ready-made way to "change it up" whenever you feel that the Officer Wayne material is starting to run thin. And if Bruce DOES go there, there's a whole SLEW of conflicts -- with himself, with others -- that he never had previously, because he never tried DOING it a different way before.


As you say, also Grayson as the original Batman might make sense. And then there'd be a lot of conflict when Bruce figured it out. Of course, the problem there is that if Bruce doesn't tacitly agree with the need for a Batman, even if he won't do it himself, he can really put a crimp in Batman's style just by making sure that Grayson doesn't have access to the resources to really DO "Batman".

Unless Grayson ends up independently wealthy somehow.

[seawasp]

I also have a terrible foreboding that something Bad is going to happen to either Harvey himself, or Selina, and either way that headache's not going away in a good way.