Fanfic / Part of the Night

An Alternate Universe and Sequel Fic to The Dark Knight Rises by KLCthebookworm.

The story is a two part fic, available here.

• The One Rule: Batman has one rule he will never break, and there is one thing Selina Kyle will never steal. An AU depicting how the second and third acts of The Dark Knight Rises would've gone if Selina had decided to warn Bruce that Bane was setting a trap for Batman.
• The Wayne Legacy: Batman is dead and everyone else must pick up the pieces of Gotham City.

Tropes

Tropes featured in The One Rule

• Adapted Out: Owing to the investigative work as well as getting his equipment out of Applied Sciences, Bruce's showdown with Bane happens a day later than it did in the movie. Since Bane's plan for laying siege to Gotham is on a schedule, and the explosions have been timed during the football game, he loses the day that he had in the movie to have Bruce flown out to the Pit for imprisonment. Coupled with needing to find an alternate armory since Bruce stashed it away, Bane needs to get his plans back on schedule. So he settles for imprisoning Bruce and Selina in Dr. Pavel's old cell. This is lampshaded by Bane as his men are bringing in the TV for the cell:
  "There can be no true despair without hope. I had looked forward to giving you the same lesson I had been given, imagining the climb to freedom, but we have a schedule to keep." He shrugged. "This will have to suffice, buried where no one will even guess to search for you, with no opportunity to escape."
  • A related consequence of this is that the prison doctor who provided Bruce with the necessary exposition about Bane doesn't appear in the story at all. Barsad takes up the role of relaying the story of the warlord's daughter. While the job of figuring out Bane's mask and weakness ends up going to Selina.
• Adaptational Context Change: Like in the movie, Fox compliments Selina's skills, says to Bruce, "I like your girlfriend, Mr. Wayne," and Selina retorts, "He should be so lucky." In the movie, this exchange is happening in the context of Bruce and Selina's Trojan Prisoner gambit to liberate Fox from Bane's kangaroo court. In the fic, this exchange happens while Selina is testing the stability of the Applied Sciences floor for evidence that proves what Blake's map work is suggesting about Bane tunneling under Wayne Enterprises.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • New storylines are created that show other civilians, the press, and the cops trapped in the sewers.
  • Selina's background and how she got involved with Daggett is explored. Daggett had recruited Selina to spy on Wayne Enterprises board members and gather dirt on four of them, Veronica Vreeland, Daniel Mockridge, Karl Rossum, and Douglas Fredericks; dirt that Daggett later used to blackmail them. He blackmailed Vreeland and Rossum into giving him their Wayne Enterprises shares, while Mockridge was driven to suicide.
  • The workings of Dr. Crane's Kangaroo Court are slightly expanded on. Before the river freezes over, those who are sentenced to "death" are transported to West Chelsea Park, where Bane's men proceed to shoot them and throw their bodies into mass graves.
• Adaptational Heroism: Selina is depicted with much more of a spine than in the actual movie. Rather than let herself be intimidated and manipulated by Bane, and be complicit in murder or terrorism, she chooses to help Bruce with stopping Bane so she can get herself and her sister out of the criminal life.
• Big Sister Instinct: Selina's attitude towards Jen, and why she sends Jen to live in hiding with Oswald.
• Big "WHAT?!": Bane's reaction when he blows out the floor of Applied Sciences after defeating Bruce...and there's no armory for his men to steal.
• The Bus Came Back: Several of the minor side characters from The Dark Knight who were still alive at the end of that, and didn't feature in The Dark Knight Rises, reappear.
  • GCN reporter Mike Engle, who lost his job at the network after being held hostage by the Joker as part of his final "social experiment", bears witness to Bane's men stacking cars to barricade the tunnels, watching as they execute a man who tries to confront them. He later reports on the initial "trials" at Crane's tribunal.
  • Gerard Stephens, one of the few trusted cops in Gordon's unit during the Joker spree, and who'd helped him fake his death at Commissioner Loeb's funeral, reappears as one of the few cops left on the surface to aid Gordon's small resistance movement.
• Call-Back:
  • When Bruce and Selina go to rescue Fox from the tribunal, Bruce trusts Selina with the micro-EMP emitter he used to disable the press' cameras at Miranda Tate's charity gala.
  • The cab driver that takes Bruce, Selina and Jen to the airport as part of a plan to distract the men Bane has watching them recalls the time Bruce took the Russian ballet to party on his yacht while he was dating the prima ballerina, which was a stunt Bruce pulled to give himself an alibi so he could travel to Hong Kong to extract Lau.
  • Bruce brings up Rachel Dawes several times, including her death at the hands of the Joker, Alfred withholding the letter in which she'd mentioned planning to marry Harvey Dent, and even a time where Bruce got protective of her when Richard Daniel became condescending towards her. Rachel's uncle Ben has a trucking company that Bruce uses to hide his armory when he realizes Bane is looking for it.
  • It even turns out that Rachel's death, and the politicians' lack of acknowledgement of her importance in Batman's crusade, was at least partially a reason why Bruce was opposed to the Dent Act, as shown by a flashback:
    Gordon hadn't expected Bruce Wayne at a private meeting with the Mayor and the City Council. Garcia had a marble-teeth smile for the somber man in a black suit.
    "Mr. Wayne, I thought you—out of all the citizens of Gotham—would support this Act. After all, Harvey was your friend."
    "I'm here for Rachel Dawes, the other murdered member of the District Attorney's office who you are forgetting about in this indecent rush to capitalize off their deaths. She was my oldest friend. This Act you are proposing is a travesty of the justice system she believed in."
    One of the Council members spoke up. "With all due respect to your loss, Mr. Wayne, but the Dent Act finally closes loopholes that allowed criminals freedom to do what they pleased on our city streets."
    "Any convicted felon with any organized crime activities on his or her record shall be denied parole." Wayne's icy glare swept over the room. "Parole isn't a loophole; it's rehabilitation."
    "We covered those statistics in the public debates over the Dent Act, Mr. Wayne," Garcia smoothly interjected. "Yes, it increases the population of Blackgate Prison for years, but no one will be able to fill the gangland power vacuum left by the Joker's murder spree."
    "In fact, it would be irresponsible of us not to protect the citizens of Gotham for the civil liberties of murderers and rapists." The Councilman gulped when Wayne stared at him.
    "And it's all a moot point. The Dent Act was signed into law yesterday," Garcia added.
  • After witnessing the tunnels being barricaded, and Bane's men shooting a passerby who confronts them, Mike Engle recalls Batman rescuing him from the Joker's hostage situation and wonders where he might be. It's also revealed that he lost his job at GCN as a result of the ordeal with the Joker, and has been living off his severance and the proceeds from a tell-all book he wrote about the Joker's rise to power, Terror With a Smile: The Clown Prince of Crime's Reign of Gotham City.
  • It's established just who Gordon was referring to by his "five dead, two of them cops" remark to Batman after Dent died. While watching Bane liberate the Blackgate prisoners, Bruce tells Selina that Dent was unofficially responsible for the deaths of the two police officers who were posted outside his door at the hospital, plus Detective Mike Wuertz, as well as Salvatore Maroni, his driver, and his bodyguard. His information is not entirely accurate, though, as the two cops at the hospital were actually killed by the Joker (although since their bodies were destroyed in the explosion, and there were no witnesses who saw Dent leave the hospital, no one was able to positively link those deaths to the Joker). Bruce and Gordon considered Wuertz too crooked to be an actual cop, so is the reason they didn't count him among the dead cops. Ramirez, meanwhile, survived Dent pistol-whipping her, and Gordon made her resign from the force in disgrace afterwards.
  • The bedtime story Blake tells Ross's daughter Tara in chapter 14 is Blake retelling the events of Ra's al-Ghul's attempted bioterrorism on Gotham, in the style of a medieval fantasy. In doing so, Blake reveals that he was the boy that stumbled upon Ra's when he initially activated the microwave emitter to release his hallucinogens into the Narrows, and who was subsequently rescued by Rachel.
• Composite Character: Jen an Expy of Holly Robinson is revealed here to also be an adaptation of Selina’s sister Maggie Kyle.
• Chance Meeting Between Antagonists: Blake has no idea Selina is in league with Bruce, so is completely surprised when he turns up at Wayne Manor looking for Bruce's input on what Bane is up to underneath Gotham.
• Chekhov's Gun: While collecting pieces of Bruce's Batsuit after killing Barsad and escaping from their cell, Bruce finds a box of empty micro-canisters for a chemical with an unpronounceable name which have provisions on them to be attached to a nozzle. The chemical turns out to be the anesthetic that gives Bane his higher threshold of pain tolerance.
• Chekhov's Skill: Selina's safecracking skills prove just as useful at cracking safes as they are at testing the floors of Applied Sciences to find evidence of Bane's tunneling.
• Dark and Troubled Past: When Selina was 12, her parents were killed in a car accident. She and her sister Jen (back then using her birth name Magdelene "Magpie" Kyle) ended up in the Willowwood Home for Children, a group home that was notorious for child sexual abuse. After two years of protecting her sister, Selina decided to do something about it and stole evidence from the group home's director to take to the police, who shut down the home and arrested everyone involved. Selina then parted ways from her sister for several years. Magpie was thrown into foster care, one bad home abused her, and she fell in with a pedophile ring. When Selina found out, she used whatever savings she had built up to shut down the pedophile ring and get its victims the help they needed. Magpie changed her name to Jen Robinson to cut herself off completely from that life. Selina wants to help Jen further by using the CleanSlate program to completely erase anything else that connects her to those days.
• Decomposite Character: For the duration of Bruce and Selina's imprisonment, different characters take over the role that was played in the movie by the prison doctor. The exposition about the warlord's daughter is given to Barsad. Selina figures out Bane's weakness when she and Bruce find some discarded canisters that store the anesthetic that is pumped into his mask, and she does some Internet research.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Barsad dies much earlier in this story than in the movie. Here, Bruce and Selina kill him once Bruce's back has been able to heal. Selina holds him by the legs while Bruce breaks his neck. In the movie, he lasts all the way to the final battle, where Foley guns him down with a rifle taken off of one of Bane's other soldiers.
• Eagleland: Lampshaded when Bane is ordering Dr. Pavel be moved to Daggett's old penthouse so that his cell can be taken over by Bruce and Selina.
  "You two move Dr. Pavel." Bane chuckled and Selina suppressed a shudder. "Take him to Daggett's penthouse. Let the good Doctor have a taste of fine American living while he can."
• Everyone Has Standards: Selina makes this clear multiple times during her initial recruitment by Bruce. Among other rules, she doesn't sleep with clients to protect her reputation. She also doesn't do things like lead people to their deaths, although she's not afraid to kill in self-defense when necessary (she killed two of Stryver's men in the bar shootout, and she kills Bane). When explaining to Bruce and Blake her use of Congressman Gilly as her leverage, she has to clarify that she didn't sleep with him at all.
  "Daggett promised the CleanSlate after the fifth job—"
  "My prints," Bruce said.
  "Right, but he had been giving me the just-one-more-job dance for so long; I figured I better take out my own insurance."
  "Congressman Gilly," Blake said.
  "Was frightfully rude." She turned to Bruce again. "Maybe you should actually attend the parties you give to keep sleazy men from goosing the help."
  "Gilly only got shot in the leg?" Bruce shook his head.
  "Not my idea."
  "Did you sleep with him?" Bruce saw Blake's eyes widened and knew he shouldn't have asked that. It was fine if she turned him down, but he hated the thought of that adulterous politician's hands all over her smooth skin.
  Selina smirked. "Not that it's really any of your business, but I do have standards. I didn't even vote for him. Now he might remember quite the party, but that was all dirty talk and the pill he took."
  "Trust me, he remembers something different." Blake rubbed his face. "Didn't make his wife happy either."
  "Aw, he's still in love?"
  "And pressing charges."
• Five-Finger Discount: Selina makes a remark about this being what Bane seems to be going for in targeting Bruce's weaponry.
  "In my professional opinion, Bane's going to a lot of trouble for the five-finger discount."
• Flashback: In the fallout from Blake learning the truth about the Dent Act and Harvey Dent's death, Gordon has a flashback whilst in conversation with Stephens where he remembers Bruce showing opposition to the act.
• For Want Of A Nail: Everything in the second half of the movie changes because Selina decides to offer Bruce a bit more advice when he comes to visit her after Bane bankrupts him, rather than just arranging for Batman to be sent into Bane's planned trap.
  • Because of Selina's tip, Bruce puts off going to confront Bane by about a full day. He instead spends the day opening a new line of credit at the bank so he can get the electricity turned back on at Wayne Manor and the money from his real estate dealings coming in while his main accounts are frozen pending resolution of the fallout from the Stock Exchange robbery.
  • The next day, things change further as Bruce is at Wayne Manor along with Selina when Blake shows up looking for Bruce's input on Daggett's permits for underground construction. After reading through the information, Bruce realizes that Bane is planning to steal his armory from Wayne Enterprises, and confirms that by having Selina conduct tests on the Applied Sciences floor, which confirm the presence of explosives underneath and a hollow cavity indicative of the new room. Bruce arranges for Rachel's uncle and Fox to relocate the Applied Sciences weapons to a safe place where he can access them and which Bane is unaware of, while letting Bane think he had the arsenal sunk.
  • Bruce still has sex with someone the night before he goes to confront Bane, only it's with Selina in a hotel suite instead of with Miranda Tate in Wayne Manor.
  • Bruce goes to confront Bane a day later than in the movie. The fight plays out beat by beat like it does in the movie, until Bane blows out the Applied Sciences floor and finds out that Bruce was a step ahead of him. While his men don't have access to the Tumblers or any of the other Batman arsenal, they do capture Selina, who had followed Bruce.
  • Bane is working on a schedule, since he's timed the explosions to happen around and during the football game. Bruce showing up 24 hours late means Bane doesn't have any time to have Bruce flown to the Middle East and thrown in the Pit. Instead, he makes do by having Bruce and Selina thrown in Dr. Pavel's old cell and has a TV brought in from Daggett's penthouse so they can watch the stadium destruction. And to get the ship back on schedule, Bane also has his men raid military armories to steal weapons and vehicles as a last minute replacement for Bruce's armory, ensuring that they can still lay siege to Gotham. This means that instead of the Tumblers, Bane has to settle for Hummers.
  • Barsad, Bane's right hand in the movie, is assigned to be Bruce and Selina's jailer. He regularly subjects Selina to prison rape until Bruce's back has healed, at which point Bruce and Selina kill him and make their escape.
  • Miranda Tate's betrayal is less out of left field for Bruce. Prior to Bane laying siege to Gotham, Selina observes that Miranda is tailoring herself in a calculated act to come off like the kinds of women Bruce is drawn to. Then, before the battle for Gotham, when Selina goes to City Hall to figure out how to free Miranda from Bane, she catches Miranda ditching her guards and speaking to Bane alone.
  • An indirect consequence of all this is that Blake becomes Nightwing prior to the climax.
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex:
  • Bruce and Selina's one-night stand in the Carlyle before Bruce goes off for his showdown with Bane.
  • Bruce and Selina once they kill Barsad, escape their prison cell, and make their way to Bruce's inner city Batcave.
• He Had a Name: Bruce strongly opposed the Dent Act being named in Harvey Dent's honor, given he and Gordon knew the truth about Harvey's fall from grace and the murders he committed after the Joker brainwashed him. He also felt that calling it the Dent Act ignored the many sacrifices Rachel made, an important thing for him seeing as Rachel was his childhood best friend.
• Honest Corporate Executive: Douglas Fredericks was one of the board members that Daggett had Selina investigate. Selina was more than impressed that she couldn't find anything bad about him.
• How Did You Know? I Didn't: Blake shows up at Wayne Manor hoping to talk to Bruce about the underground construction Daggett has been doing on Bane's behalf, only to be greeted at the door by Selina...who he's already looking to bring in for questioning relating to Congressman Gilly's kidnapping. Selina understandably calls for Bruce to come diffuse the situation and talk Blake out of arresting her. Bruce has to ask if Blake was looking for her as a test to see if Selina's managed to throw Bane off her scent.
  "Did you know she was here?" Bruce asked. If Blake had deduced it, Selina and Jen were not as safe as he thought.
  Blake's glance bounced between Bruce and Selina. "No. What is she doing here?"
• If I Do Not Return: Bruce leaves such a note for Selina before he goes to confront Bane. Selina sees the note, realizes what he's doing, and follows him there, getting captured herself when Bane's men blow out the floor of Applied Sciences. Blake later finds the note when he shows up at their room in the Carlyle looking for them.
  I know this will piss you off, but I promised Jen I would keep you safe. And I can't stand the thought of anything happening to you. If it is the last thing I do, Gotham will be safe for you in the morning. Take what you need out of my wallet.
  Yours, Bruce
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite the curveball thrown when Bruce gets his armory removed from Wayne Enterprises, Bane is still able to lay siege to Gotham. He just has his men raid Army depots and procure Hummers in lieu of Tumblers.
• It Makes Sense in Context: The reason Blake is in Gordon's hospital room when Foley barges in to tell them about Bane kidnapping the Wayne board members is because he's just come from the hotel room where Bruce and Selina were staying and found it vacant, and correctly suspects Bane got to them.
• Kansas City Shuffle: Bruce pulls one on Bane when it comes to protect his armory. He lets Bane think he had his Applied Sciences toys taken out of Wayne Enterprises and sunk at sea, but the containers that sunk were completely empty and the real ones were moved to near Bruce's temporary Batcave.
• The Lost Lenore: As Selina observes, Bruce's dating life petered out after Rachel Dawes died. Part of the reason she's suspicious of Miranda Tate is that her behaviors makes Selina think she's tailoring herself to fit the kind of personality Bruce might want to go out with.
  "Let's examine your dating record: airhead supermodels, actresses, and debutantes; sometimes all at once. That tapers off to one at a time for a year after Rachel died until you quit dating after the first Harvey Dent Day celebration. Miranda has brains, read between the lines, decided you prefer idealistic crusaders, and adjusted her behaviors to give you that."
• My God, What Have I Done?: Selina is horrified when Blake reveals that Daggett blackmailed Daniel Mockridge, one of the Wayne Enterprises board members she dug up dirt on for him, into committing suicide.
  "I never should've swallowed my pride for those jobs."
• Mythology Gag:
  • Richard Daniel, a bank official from the Batman comic The Long Halloween, is the banker with whom Bruce and Selina take out a loan to restore electricity to Wayne Manor. Bruce is not too fond of him, in light of an incident during their childhoods where he and Rachel went on an outing with Richard, which ended in Bruce getting physical with Richard because he felt that "associating with children of the help was beneath him" and insulted Rachel. He's later executed after being hauled before Dr. Crane's Kangaroo Court.
  • Renee Montoya, a member of the Major Crimes Unit in the comics, is one of the cops tasked by Foley with rescuing the Wayne Enterprises executives alongside Simon Jensen and Kelly, the two cops from the car chase following the Stock Exchange robbery who were the first to witness Batman's return. When Bane traps the cops underground, the three find themselves stuck in the general area of Bruce and Selina's cell.
  • Selina uses the name Catwoman to introduce herself to Montoya.
  • Blake, whose full name was established to be Robin John Blake at the end of the movie, takes up vigilantism and uses the codename Nightwing, the name Dick Grayson used when he moved on from being Robin.
    • Selina calls Blake "Boy Wonder" while they're testing the Applied Sciences floor for evidence that Bane is tunneling underneath.
    • Blake uses the Robin name when telling Ross's daughter Tara about Ra's al-Ghul's attack on Gotham in the form of a bedtime story.
  • Vicki Vale is the reporter who tries to ask Mayor Garcia about the police raids on the sewers before the football game.
  • Dr. Leslie Thompkins, one of Thomas Wayne's closest friends at the hospital, makes an appearance here, before taking a larger role in The Wayne Legacy.
    • The doctor Bruce saw as pretext for visiting Gordon at the hospital in the first act of the movie is revealed to be Thompkins' great-nephew Matthew Thorne, named after a lesser known Batman villain known as "The Crime Doctor".
  • Selina is in debt to Oswald Cobblepot, aka "The Penguin," who agrees to protect Jen while Selina works with Bruce to stop Bane. When she's on the phone asking him to hide Jen, she says at one point, "I'm going to pretend you didn't say that and you're going to pretend to be a decent human being! Or so help me, I'll ram your favorite umbrella up your ass!" a nod to the Penguin's most iconic weapon.
  • Veronica Vreeland, Daniel Mockridge, and Karl Rossum appear as former members of the Wayne Enterprises Board.
  • Selina and Jen ended up in Willowood Home for Children where Lincoln March/Owlman aka “Thomas Wayne Jr” was raised.
  • One of the cops in Gordon's resistance movement is Chuck Dixon, one of the most prolific Batman comics writers of the 1990s and early 2000s.
• Neck Snap: How Bruce and Selina kill Barsad.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: While Bane is clearly the one giving orders to the mercenaries who help him lay siege to Gotham, his reaction to learning that Bruce has anticipated and thwarted his efforts to acquire the Wayne Enterprises arsenal leads Selina to realize that Bane's a middleman and there's someone else calling the shots.
  "How can someone be in charge yet act like a flunkie?"
  He paused against the floor. "You want to play with riddles now?"
  "That's what's bothering me about Bane. You say he's Ra's kid and that's why these Ghulites are following him. And he's throwing his weight around when there's an audience." She waved her hand at the television. "But when you told him you sank all your toys, he acted just like a flunkie."
  Bruce paused on the floor again. "What did he do?"
  "Maybe I'm reading too much into it." She squirmed against his legs. "But he left, just like a flunkie does when I've thrown them a curve ball the boss didn't prepare them for. They always need a few minutes for a conference."
  He performed a few more crunches while he tried to remember. That night was fuzzy with pain, fear, and rage. "Dealt with a lot of flunkies?"
  "Like I'm too stupid to figure out who really wants the shiny they sent me after. You were the first to hire me without a middleman in years."
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Selina's reaction when being told of Daggett's death by Blake, as his broken neck is the very sort of fate that Bane's men have threatened her and Jen with. She also has a moment when she realizes Bruce has left her in the Carlyle and gone to confront Bane in the tunnels.
  • Blake when he realizes Bruce and Selina have gotten captured by Bane, upon Fox calling him to mention that they aren't answering their phones.
  • Bruce's reaction while reading the maps Blake has been using to map Daggett's underground construction, and he realizes that Bane is trying to tunnel into Applied Sciences.
• One Degree of Separation: Before Selina was tasked with stealing Bruce's fingerprints from Wayne Manor, Daggett hired her to dig up dirt on other Wayne Enterprises board members to blackmail them into giving him their shares: Veronica Vreeland, Daniel Mockridge, Karl Rossum, and Douglas Fredericks. Mockridge is revealed to have been driven to suicide thanks to Daggett's machinations, and Blake turns out to have been the investigating officer in that case.
• Open Secret: Selina points out that it's not exactly a big secret that Bruce had a fondness for Rachel Dawes.
• Prison Rape: Selina is regularly prison-raped by Barsad while she and Bruce are being held captive.
• Replacement Goldfish: Selina regards Miranda Tate with a lot of suspicion, which Bruce initially mistakes for jealousy until she points out Miranda is trying to get close to him by channeling Rachel Dawes' idealism.
  "Do you not like Miranda Tate, Selina?" His hands went back into his pockets as he smirked.
  "When did approving your girlfriends get added to my job description?"
  "She's not my girlfriend."
  Now she crossed her arms. "She wants to be," she muttered and didn't look at him.
  "I feel like I had dinner with a ghost tonight." He turned back to the window.
  "A ghost?" When he didn't turn back to her, she shifted her legs again rather than close the curtains in front of his nose. "What did she say?"
  "Nothing I haven't heard before. Bruce Wayne can do so much good for Gotham, the world, so get to it."
  "And Rachel brought it up the most."
  Before she blinked, he whirled and took one step closer to her. His fists stopped at his sides as intensity from him pushed her back toward the wall. "What do you know about Rachel?!"
  Now she wanted to kick Miranda's ass. "How 'bout you save that righteous indignation for the woman copying your dead sweetheart! Fox and I talked while we packed up your toys, and he said Miranda reminded people of Rachel. He also said you haven't been the same since Rachel died." His narrowed eyes widened with pain. She didn't want to hurt him, but she wouldn't make Fox a target either. "Now before you get all pissy with Fox, it's not that big of a secret. I ran across society gossip speculating the same thing in my research, but I didn't use it against you."
  He matched her glare with one of his own. "No, you just beat up a cripple and dropped me on my ass."
  "You need someone around to drop you on your ass."
  Bruce's hands uncurled as he blinked. His stare softened, but she dropped her gaze to the floor. "Why would anyone want to pretend to be Rachel?" The angry bite lifted from his voice.
  How in hell did she end up the one to explain this to him? But Batman wasn't subtle when interrogating criminals and these grifting games were all about subtle. She shifted on the cabinet before looking at him. He leaned against the wall next to the picture window and watched her. She took a deep breath. "Let's examine your dating record: airhead supermodels, actresses, and debutantes; sometimes all at once. That tapers off to one at a time for a year after Rachel died until you quit dating after the first Harvey Dent Day celebration." His gaze dropped to the floor. Selina sighed, but continued. "Miranda has brains, read between the lines, decided you prefer idealistic crusaders, and adjusted her behaviors to give you that."
  "That makes sense. She has been trying to meet with me since she invested in the reactor."
  "Way to test her persistence."
  "Also explains why she offered to run away from Gotham with me."
  Her mouth fell open again. "And why on Earth didn't you take her up on it? Bane wants to kill you!"
  He looked at her with the hopeful and resolute expression he had last night. "I can't let him hurt the innocent of Gotham." He smirked, "And you didn't leave."
• Resigned in Disgrace: Ramirez was forced by Gordon to quit the force once her involvement in Rachel's death came to light.
• Secret Secret-Keeper: The other Major Crimes detectives knew all along that Gordon was lying when he claimed Batman killed Harvey Dent. They said nothing because they correctly figured that Gordon and Batman had come up with that cover story to ensure that Dent's case against the Gotham mafia didn't get thrown out. Stephens ultimately confirmed this was exactly what was going on from talking to Ramirez after Gordon made her resign in disgrace for her role in Rachel's death.
• Textual Celebrity Resemblance: Richard Daniel is illustrated as if he were portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio.
• Trapped in Villainy: Daggett has been controlling Selina by using the promise of "one last job before you get the Clean Slate" to get her to do his dirty work for him. After digging up blackmail material on four of the Wayne Enterprises board members (driving two of them to hand their shares over to Daggett, and a third to suicide), she decided when it came to stealing Bruce's fingerprints that she needed 'insurance' for her meeting with Stryver to try to force Daggett's hand, hence her kidnapping Congressman Gilly.
  "You want to know how I know he is...was a cheapskate?" He nodded, even though she didn't need a response to continue. "He used that damn, just-one-more-job routine on me, and the first four jobs were getting dirt on people. What you hire a private detective for."
• We Need a Distraction: Bruce takes Miranda out to dinner to keep her occupied while Selina and Fox are removing his gadgets from Applied Sciences to a safe location.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In The Dark Knight, Anna Ramirez's fate after Harvey pistol-whipped her was left ambiguous. A conversation between Gordon and Stephens after Bane begins his revolution establishes that she survived, and was forced by Gordon to resign in disgrace afterwards.
• Would Hit a Girl: Bane tries torturing Selina with his bare hands to get Bruce to give up his armory, but Bruce is defiant and says enough that Bane is forced to retreat and reformulate his plans.
• Wrong Side of the Tracks: When Jen points out to Selina that Bruce is smitten with her, Selina denies her feelings, insisting that "the only time a guy like Wayne ends up with a girl from our side of the river is in romance novels. No, it'll be Miranda Tate next to Bruce Wayne in the engagement announcement pages."

Tropes featured in The Wayne Legacy

• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In the comics, Stephanie Brown was a relatively distant member of the Bat-Family at best, but here she is Bruce and Selina's adopted daughter.
• Babies Ever After: Selina realises that she is pregnant with Bruce’s child, and eventually gives birth to Helena.
• The Bus Came Back: Alfred returns to Wayne Manor once he learns that Bruce has survived and Batman is officially retired.
• Canon Immigrant: Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, Edward Nygma and Amanda Waller appear, with Nygma an FBI profiler attempting to ‘prove’ that Bruce is/was Batman while Stephanie is adopted by Bruce and Selina around the time the Drakes return to the re-opened Gotham (Waller is still the head of Cadmus, although this version appears less blatantly amoral than some interpretations).
• Happily Adopted: Bruce and Selina end up adopting Stephanie Brown once they confirm that her parents died during Bane’s control of the city.
• It's All About Me: Nygma has no problem shooting an innocent woman just to create a scenario where he can learn Batman's identity.
• Mythology Gag: Trying to get Nygma to leave them alone with his demands for Batman's true identity, Jen claims that Batman was Jean Paul Valley.
• Rebuilt Pedestal: In a roundabout sense; having moved on from his 'obsession' over Rachel as his one chance at a normal life, Bruce finds himself reflecting on how she would have gotten along with Selina and asked his children to call her 'Aunt Rachel'.
• Textual Celebrity Resemblance: Edward Nygma is illustrated as if he were portrayed by Guy Pearce, and Barbara Gordon by Molly Quinn.