[fic] Cage Match (Bruce/Jason) for inlovewithnight
Title: Cage Match
Characters: Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd
Summary: The appreciation and preservation of precious things are important parts of the Wayne legacy.
Disclaimer: None of this belongs to me. This is entirely a work of fiction that in no way endorses the activities described herein.
Setting/spoilers: Jason is Robin. There's a slight contradiction with DitF canon, so this could be pre-DitF or an AU from "Under the Hood".
Rating/warning: Adult. Sexual content involving a (possible) teenager as well as sublimated class warfare.
Notes: For my dear Samantha/inlovewithnight on her birthday, with *much* love and hopes for an excellent coming year. A good bit of the conversation in the first scene is directly transcribed from an IM improv with her; the whole story was inspired by that conversation. Beta by jubilancy; any remaining gratuitousness and clumsy missteps are my own.
Avant le verre, le cage.
The carpet in the library is two centuries old. Woven by a tribe now blown to dust across the steppes of the Silk Road, sold to tradesmen in Venice, then Pisa, stolen from an overturned cart outside Lyon, traded for there for food to an Englishman who, fourteen years later, brought it with him to Boston, it came to the manor with Martha Wayne. Its blue blossoms matched her eyes all the Wayne men had brown eyes, ordinary as mud, going back three hundred years as its twisting red vines echoed the mysterious curves of her smile.
Care and conservation, the love for precious things, have preserved the carpet. It has survived generation after generation, thousands upon thousands of miles and years.
It may well not last the night. Not under Jason's furious pacing.
Where Jason is all violent movement, Bruce remains still; their fights are Newtonian, irresistible violence against immovable calm.
"Would you just fucking *listen* to me?" Skidding, Jason throws himself into a backspring and lands on his hands. His toes point at the ceiling beams and the carpet bunches under his palms as he approaches Bruce. His nails are dirty; ten half-moons of grime from God-knows-where dig into the carpet. Inverted, his face is nightmarish, open mouth black and wet, eyes squinting above beetled brows. "Well? Huh?"
Bruce recrosses his legs and tugs up his cuff. "I'm not hard of hearing."
Jason's legs scissor against the air. They move fast enough that the current gusts over Bruce, lifts the hair from his forehead. "Funny fucking ha-ha."
"Although I could make an appointment with Dr. Thompkins, if you think it's necessary..." Bruce's bangs settle back against his forehead, slightly more widely fanned than usual.
The muscles in Jason's left arm clench and bulge as he moves his weight there and lifts his right hand from the carpet. Its grain, imprinted on his red palm, is speckled, dark as iron filings.
"You're not listening," Jason says through gritted teeth. His balance wavers, tilting five degrees before it catches. "Do you ever fucking listen?"
"Do you?" Bruce occupies the chair with ease, hand curved over his knee, head tilted toward the dying fire. When Jason doesn't answer, he adds, "For example, I seem to recall asking you to behave yourself tonight."
Right arm folded behind his back, dress shirt slipping loose from his waistband to expose the dark hair below his navel, Jason barks out a laugh as he flips down. He lands in a crouch, both posture and expression monkey-like and avid, before Bruce's chair. "Held up my end of the bargain, big guy."
Bruce passes his hand over his face. The gesture suggests, but does not in fact denote, weariness. "That would be an extraordinarily liberal reading of the night's events."
"That so?" Jason bounces, his sock-clad toes digging into the carpet. He slaps Bruce's thigh for emphasis. "You're the scumsucking limousine liberal here."
*
Earlier that night, the party was well on its way toward being a success. Thousands had been raised via silent auction for breast-cancer research "old hags and their sick, saggy tits", as Jason insisted on calling the cause, frequently adding, "what? Junkies and HIV too *gross* for you people?" and now the attendees had retired to the large dining room for light refreshments and mutual admiration of the latest ("butt-ugly") fashion. Bruce was deep in conversation with Clayton Lefebvre and Happy Harbington III when Jason stole upstairs with Pamela Post and Astrid Westergaard.
Accounts of what the young people got up to in the third-floor games room differed. When she discovered them, Astrid's aunt could do no more than shriek and drag the Junior Leaguers from the boy's clutches. She shook off all inquiries, the whites of her eyes gone rooster-red, her jowls trembling.
The gossip spread as quickly as any pregnancy rumor, ramifying and burgeoning as it traveled. They may have been playing strip pool, smoking reefer, perhaps fondling each other in a decidedly non-Euclidean geometrical arrangement. It was possible, though not probable, that Bruce's latest urchin discovery was sodomizing the girls with pool cues while they passed a needle.
*
"So you can see my difficulty," Bruce concludes. He rests his cheek in his hand and gazes down at Jason with hooded eyes. "I asked you to wait here while I bade our guests goodnight and attempted to make amends with Padget Westergaard."
If Bruce had hoped that Jason would nod and offer an apology Dick, after all, found himself in any number of scrapes when he was younger then he was a fool. Jason explodes from his chimp crouch; his arms spread, his mouth hangs open, shiny and wet. "*Your* fucking difficulty? What have been I trying to tell you, motherfucker? That old bitch wouldn't know a threesome if she got sandwiched between John Holmes and Ron Jeremy!"
"I see," Bruce says.
Jason vaults over a club chair, bringing it down with him. The crystal in its cabinet shivers in delicate revulsion. "Did you ask the chicks?"
"Well " Bruce's immobility slips for a moment as his voice trails off.
Jason whirls, slipping on a bare patch of carpet. It bunches over his toes, but he turns the trip into a barreling somersault and springs back to his feet. "I bet nobody's fucking interrogating *them* right now," he says. In a voice gone reedy with mockery, he adds, "'oh, you poor dears, I am *so* sorry you fell into that creature's hands, whatever will you do, will you dare wear white on your wedding day?'"
"I'd simply like to know what happened," Bruce says. Having regained his composure, his tone is as even as his gaze.
"And *I*," Jason says, kicking the stem of a Fabergé lamp, "would like you to fucking *take my word* for once."
"And what is that?" Bruce shades his eyes. "Your word, that is."
Jason's shoulders pull toward his ears as he stalks forward. "Stupid little street trash, isn't that right? Grubby hands all over their ugly daughters, so I'm the one who gets grounded." He grabs at the air now, taking great chunks of it into his hands. "You really want to know what happened?"
"Yes." Bruce flicks an invisible piece of lint from his cuff. "Yes, very much."
Jason squints at him for the length of seven heartbeats. Assured of something, impossible to identify, in Bruce's expression, he drops to one knee next to Bruce's chair. Folding his arms over the chair's arm, he plants his chin on his wrist. "C'mere," he says softly. A smile steals over his face. "C'mere, and I'll tell you."
Bruce regards him. That he will drop his head, let Jason whisper to him the night's secret history, is a foregone conclusion. So, too, is his analytical hesitation, his study of Jason's bright eyes and enigmatic smirk.
"You'll never believe what Hap told me," Bruce says. Prevarication, like capitulation, is one more element in their fraught, anxiously haphazard attempts to communicate. That communication occurs most readily as *argument* seems, by now, nearly natural. A fight is more comprehensible than a conversaton.
Jason bats his lashes and puts on the mocking matronly tone. "Oh, *do* tell."
"There is, according to Hap, who is not, admittedly, the most credible of sources, some sort of underground fighting circuit in the city." Bruce's hand strays over the back of Jason's hair. "No-holds-barred, extreme fighting, Hap said. The betting is for very high stakes."
His hand falls empty, thumping against the side of the chair, as Jason lunges to his feet. "Oh, *man*! Oh, Bruce, baby, I gotta do it!"
"Pardon?"
Jason resumes pacing, his shoulders back up. He punches his palm, again and again. "I've got to fight. I could *wipe the floor* with them!"
"Jay " Bruce straightens his posture. The argument had begun to dwindle, dimming like the fire, but their fights are anything but predictable. "It's dangerous."
Jason's laughter is sharp as breaking porcelain. He flutters his fingers against his throat. "Oh, Mr. Wayne, good sir, *do* protect me, please, from the night-time flying and gunshots and beatdowns in various and sundry alleyways, I beg of you."
"Point taken." Bruce's lips thin down and pale. "However "
Jason leaps over an eighteenth-century side table, its cherry-and-beech finish recently restored. His handprint smears the polish, but he is already across the room, spinning and hugging himself. He stops suddenly, pointing at Bruce. "I'm going to do it. I'm gonna *win* and take 'em all for everything they've *got*."
"Is " Bruce's jaw tightens. "Is your allowance not meeting your needs?"
Jason, after all, still "liberates" food from Alfred's pantries, stowing cans all over the manor and stuffing his pockets, his mouth. Any spare change left in plain sight where, that is, plain sight includes jacket pockets, wallets, and drawers is sure to disappear.
Jason shakes his hair from his eyes. "It's not about *money*, you dolt. Not everything is about money."
"Is that so?"
"It's about *kicking ass*." Jason punches the air, then brings his fist down on the back of an Eames chaise. "Don't you see that?"
Bruce blinks rapidly. When he speaks, his voice is hoarse. "Is the...our night work not meeting your needs, then?"
As Robin, Dick carried joy into the night. Bright as a lady's handkerchief, he laughed as he swung and hit, drowning out the sounds of flesh on flesh. He transformed fights into performances, bowing afterwards, always smiling. Jason has, if anything, inverted that phenomenon. He brings the city's violence with him wherever he goes; he wears that potential as easily as his own skin, every flat vowel of his accent crows with it. It is difficult not to compare the two, to judge Dick's presence as alchemy and Jason's as destructive.
Straddling the back of the chaise, Jason rocks back and forth. The effect falls somewhere between "obscene" and "disconcertingly playful". He shakes his head as he says, "Bruce, please try to focus for just two minutes. Just one, even."
Jason's eyes gleam in the low firelight while the shadows scrape at, hollow out, his cheekbones. Bruce shifts in his seat. "Perhaps Lady Shiva might be persuaded to do some training with you? Under supervision, of course, as the woman is highly unstable..."
Jason slides off the chaise and pads over to Bruce's side. "Okay, you clearly don't get it. That's okay. Never mind." He pauses to shove his hands into his back pockets. His former manic energy has dwindled down to a slow rock back on his heels. He glances at Bruce from beneath his lashes. "Can I have Friday night off?"
"Hmm. No." Bruce steeples his fingers before his lips. "We have several investigations coming to fruition and..." He looks away. "No, I'm sorry, can't spare you."
Jason pinches Bruce's chin and pulls him back. He tugs, and Bruce follows, until their noses are nearly touching. "Funny man."
"Thank you." Bruce presses his forehead to Jason's.
Index finger on Bruce's carotid, Jason whispers, "Can you smell them on me?"
"The girls."
"Yeah."
Bruce wets his lower lip. "Perhaps...?"
The carpet's grain is complex, illegible as Braille to the sighted, against Bruce's hands and knees, as he slips out of the chair, down to Jason's level.
*
A series of municipal budget cuts have slashed the funding for arts programs, after-school activities, even the school board's maintenance and operations. If one were a leading citizen, a Lucius Fox or Kenneth Kane, one might wring well-manicured hands and bemoan the state of the city. Such complaints pepper the op-ed pages and the keynote addresses at charitable functions. All the while, such citizens send their own children to the day schools that cluster around Finger Avenue. Some go out of the city altogether, upstate to rolling green pastures better suited to grazing cattle than educating the rich, bored and energetic.
It would require a superior mind and generous heart to connect the sad state of the city budget with the spectacle here PS 276 has stood at the corner of Duffy and Devin for nearly a century, so long that it sports separate entrances for boy and girls. Closed in the last wave of cuts, the building is empty and dark as a rotten tooth. The high-mullioned windows have been bricked over, the doors locked with loops of razor wire.
The curious thrillseeker creeps around to the back, following a path underlit by Christmas lights. Glass crunches underfoot, difficult to see. At the door to the old gymnasium, a wall of a man, named Pinky, once in the employ of Cobblepot, assesses the financial potential of the hopeful visitor. Pinky employs the time-honored, eminently direct method of checking labels in coats and opening billfolds.
If Pinky judges you fit, he tosses his head, the motion sending tremors through his jowls and the rolls of fat on his neck. Having paid your fee, you step inside.
If you're rich in Gotham, you're probably here tonight. Staying in, avoiding both villains and vigilantes, tends to foster a reckless boredom that edges on hysteria. Last season, the fad was for tableaux made up of nude East End youths; next year, there might well be cockfights or a resurgence of enthusiasm for MDMA.
Tonight's entertainment is not advertised anywhere. Strictly word-of-mouth and under-the-radar, the illegality and secretiveness of this enterprise contribute to the audience's anticipatory frisson and high-pitched chatter.
That anticipation is challenged, to various degrees, by the smells that linger in this place. Generations of children played here, wrestled and battled; their ghosts are olfactory now.
Vestiges of old sweat, bleach and rubber soles twine through the air, mixing with the more recent vintages of the ladies' French perfumes and the rain on men's overcoats.
An easel, retrieved from the basement of the main building, display the night's line-up, written with scrolling care in white chalk on a jagged fragment of blackboard. There are four matches, featuring the kind of names not found in any edition of the Social Register, names like De La Cruz and Pignowski, Jaleed and O'Herlihy. The last match, a welterweight cage match, will be between Jimenez and Malone.
The night's heavy money is on Erasmo Jimenez, 153 pounds of spitting-mad Dominican; he's won his last seven matches here in Gotham and, word has it, more on the road. The contender, Little Dickie Malone, is an unknown. He's fast, you hear, but untested. "Came outta nowhere," the money men say around the ends of their cigars, taking bets as rapidly as birds peck up breadcrumbs, "and he's heading back there fast."
The crowd occupies sagging bleachers, their muted evening finery in sharp contrast to the ghosts of squeaking rubber soles and lumbering young bodies. The depilated basketball hoops and the championship banners grimed into illegibility disappear in the dark when the portable spot-lights switch on around the makeshift ring. Women clutch their dates' knees, their rings glinting; men slide consoling arms around bare shoulders and murmur into expensive hairdos.
Bruce Wayne is here, a blonde beauty on each arm; they may be sisters, as they claim, or merely cousins, as their birth certificates indicate. They share rose-and-honey complexions and matching stoles of white ermine. Wayne watches the opening match with open mouth and squinting eyes, rearing back in his seat like a half-broken horse, whenever the fighters kick and thud toward his side of the ring.
His tie has come slightly loose; his dates bury their faces against his broad shoulders. At each blow, he twists in his seat, as if horrified by the violence.
And it *is* violent down there. Each fighter wears a snug singlet and loose shorts; his fists and ankles are taped and, if he's some kind of pussy, he might have a mouthguard over his teeth. The rounds last two minutes each, and the man left standing or sagging, or bent over, puking up his early lunch of jerk chicken and dirty rice after five rounds is the winner.
Within those ten minutes and the thick ropes, anything goes. Unlike wrestling, which is fake, and boxing, which is not, there are no rules in the ring. Their absence strips away the pretense of sport, flays the fighters' movements down to brute athletic force.
Lacrosse, Bruce's pal Happy observed, also lacks any boundaries. This is nothing like lacrosse, except in terms of the broken noses and spraying sweat, the arcs of blood from mouths and grunts as bodies fall. This is not a *sport*, but a bloodbath.
In the bleachers, the audience shrieks and cheers. They might be winning money they don't need, or losing sums they'll never miss; either way, they're having a grand old time. Their disgust, merged with exhilaration, erupts into a frenzy.
The lights dim low as a jury-rigged cage, welded from steel bars and chicken wire, jerks down over the ring. The crowd sucks in its breath as one. Jimenez bounces on his toes in one corner, a towel around his neck. His white singlet and shorts glow eerily.
In the other corner, Malone stands stockstill. He wears green shorts and a red singlet. His hair is a strange shade of auburn, one which the ladies in the crowd recognize as Miss Clairol, frequently sported by their graying maids. In the pop and spatter of flashbulbs, his colors warble nauseatingly while he remains still.
The blood, sweat, and occasional tooth left by the previous fighters is mopped away. The referee, a sallow little man who is, coincidentally enough, Pinky's cousin Goldy, claps his hands, then scrambles out of the way.
Jimenez circles, feinting and jabbing at the air around Malone. Malone rocks a little, easily dodging. The crowd's hush revs up.
When the noise is a moment from cresting, Malone starts to move. He jumps and kicks, uses the cage as a partner and ally rather than anything like a constraint.
Erasmo Jimenez is putting his big sister through law school with his winnings. It might have been better if Lalia had chosen medical school; he's going to need reconstructive surgery and a close watch for early onset Parkinson's.
Bruce watches with hot eyes. Tension thrums through his frame, palpable enough that one blonde reaches for the other's hand across his lap.
Malone cannot see the crowd, save as layers of smeared color, but its noise and scent wash around him, slap his face and speed him on. Jimenez fights like the street tough he is; he keeps low, fists raised as he spits and snarls. But Malone fights like something else entirely, a different species. An avenging angel, tumbled, rebellious, from above, his hits thump, crack, and jolt Jimenez's body. With fists and pointed feet, he moves, less a dance than an electrified contortion; gravity shies away from him, though less sensible entities, like the crowd and Jimenez, do not.
Jimenez starts to stumble as the second round opens; by the end of the fourth, he sags asymmetrically, one shoulder sloping six degrees lower than the other, one hand curled over his face.
Before there was a Robin, Batman worked alone. He was then a single slice of rage, a shadow that peeled itself free from the others and, animated by yet darker needs, flew over the city to claim it as his own. That fury, beating its black wings, never faded, though the wings were folded back with each dawn. Its wrath, however, did retreat and recede in the presence of a laughing, bright-eyed child.
Reborn, that shadow now parades around the ring. Brighter now, younger, and all the more dangerous for that, he raises fists in victory and tosses taunts back to the crowd. The crowd shouts at him, bewildered by the loss of (inconsequential) sums and aroused by the furious violence. Bruce, silent, watches longer than anyone. Malone is defiant despite the cage; stained with color, he is some venomous specimen, caught at last, then pinned and preserved.
He has fought, and fought well; his usefulness now expires.
As far as the crowd knows, Malone might be caged for the night, forever. Murmuring and arguing, the audience turns its back on him and files out of the gymnasium. Trailing at the end of the crowd, Bruce escorts his companions to the car. The one on the left wobbles, sickened down to her soul by the spectacle. Making some vapid excuse about a cufflink, Bruce sees them safely on their way.
When the audience has dispersed and even the thugs are wandering down the street, lighting dollar cigars for one another, Bruce returns to the gym.
In the doorway, Pinky alternates between bites off a meatball sub and thumb-counting the door's take. He grunts and nods when the rich asshole stutters a story about losing his date's stole.
The gymnasium is dark, filled with blocky shadows of varying depths. The cage has been retracted to the ceiling; its anchor ropes run taut under Bruce's hand. The bleachers rise into the shadows, steps to an unknown temple. Water runs splashing and murmuring, somewhere in the distance. After it shuts off with a creak, the back door bangs closed behind Pinky, sub in one hand, lockbox under his arm.
At the far end of the gym, one shadow narrows, Arctic-cold light spilling into the gap.
"You coming or what?" Jason yells from within the light.
Bruce crosses the echoing space. Gradually, as he nears, the brightness resolves around a slim figure. The hood of Jason's red sweatshirt is up, peaked like a girl's in a fairytale. He dodges and feints, backing up even as Bruce closes the gap, his untied sneakers squeaking on wet tile.
"Girl's locker room," Jason says as Bruce pulls the door shut. "Bet you always wanted to get into one of these, huh?" He tosses his head, letting the hood fall back. His hair is wet; steam from the shower still curls in the corners of the long room. "Nah, what'm I saying? Stud like you, probably seen a hundred of these places."
Antic energy sparks and courses through Jason's movements. Behind his back, Bruce locks the door. The fluorescent lights sputter above them.
"Huh?" Jason dances closer, shoelaces dragging in the puddles. "Haven't you?"
"Your interest in my relationship history is..." Bruce crosses his arms. "Misplaced."
Jason jerks his thumb at the wall of lockers and, beyond, to the gym. "Saw your date. Sorry, *dates*, multiple. Sure you wouldn't rather be in a golden-blonde sandwich right about now?"
"Faith took ill," Bruce says and loosens his tie against the humidity. "Charity thought it best to accompany her home."
Jason spins on one foot and kicks at the row of lockers. "Didn't answer the question."
"That's right." Bruce reaches out and catches Jason's sweatshirt at the elbow. "I didn't."
"Too personal?" Jason shakes free his arm, jogging backward. Hopping in place, he scowls as he slaps his own cheek. "Oh, am I *prying*? Such a nosy parker, I don't know what gets into me, however shall I tender my apologies?"
"Jay..." Bruce opens his hand, then closes it in mid-air. He clears his throat. "You sound, if anything, jealous."
Jason swipes at the air with an uppercut. "Where're my congratulations, huh?"
"Congratulations," Bruce says.
"I fucking *won*," Jason shouts, bending backward, grasping one ankle and walking the other leg over his head. He lands on the low bench that runs parallel to the lockers. "Told you I could do it."
"I do recall you saying as much, yes."
Jason smacks his lips together, making the Alfred priss-face.
Squatting there, bouncing gently, he spreads his arms. His sweatshirt, unzipped, swings open and exposes the white undershirt clinging to his chest. "Said it, did it, won the fucking thing."
"Yes." Bruce runs his palm over his own cheek, then his forehead, to remove the sweat. "You showered."
Jason snorts and sniffs his left armpit. "Disappointed?"
"Merely an observation."
"Merely an observation," Jason parrots. He twists around, yanking the red singlet from his jeans' back pocket and tossing it at Bruce. "Saved it for you, you fucking perv."
Bruce catches it one-handed. "How thoughtful."
"That's me." Jason bounces more rapidly; any moment now, he looks about to kick out his legs in a Cossack dance. "Always about the other guy. So, how much?"
"Pardon me?"
"How much did you win?" When Bruce doesn't reply, Jason's eyes narrow. "Don't tell me you fucking bet *against* me."
Bruce smiles. Everything about him is sharp, black and white; only his cheeks, mottled red, and eyes, shining blue, seem alive. "No, I'm not quite *that* stupid. Not yet."
"So " Jason bounces once more, then jumps back to the floor. "How much?"
Bruce's fingers twitch at his sides. "A good sum, I'd say."
Jason stares at him, just out of reach. "You're such an asshole."
"Ah," Bruce says and squints slightly. "And you are "
"Don't fucking say it." Jason digs in the sweatshirt's pouch who knows what wonders he carries with him? and tosses a small notebook at Bruce. As it arcs upward, its pages open like a broken wing. "Names and descriptions, all the money guys and shit." Rising to his feet, he crosses his arms. "Jaybird did *his* homework. What's he get?"
The sweat shining on Jason's face, as he steps up to Bruce and pushes him back, is new, born of the shower's heat and post-fight excitement. It is difficult, however, not to see the reflection of the fight's exertion there, stinging-hot and -wet. His left cheek is purpling with a wide bruise; a butterfly bandage covers a cut, inexpertly darned, over his right eyebrow. His pupils are blown, deep and rootless. Bruce slides the notebook into his jacket pocket and exhales slowly.
Jason shoves at Bruce's shoulders. "Huh? C'mon and pay up, Mister Wayne."
The fluorescents play tricks, blanching Jason's face to bone one moment, guttering the next and flinging him back to the shadows.
He is relentless. Licking the corner of his mouth, crowding even closer, he punches Bruce's shoulder. "Liked the fight, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Nice little slumming date," Jason says and yanks at Bruce's lapel. "Of course you liked it."
"Easy, easy " Bruce squeezes Jason's arm.
Jason laughs. "Nothing's *easy*, motherfucker. All those assholes out there, they think it's easy. Get their rocks off, keep the rough trade in its cage, go home and fuck like animals? Easy as custard-cream *pie*."
"Jason." Bruce presses his palm against Jason's pectoral, curling his fingers over the reckless rattle of his heartbeat. "That isn't how "
"How much?"
Bruce shakes his head once. "A lot. But "
"You're all the same." Jason smells like institutional soap, gritty and heavy with bleach, and sweat. He tilts his head and screws up one eye. "Want a piece, too, don't you, Brucie?"
"Just you," Bruce says. His face twists, helplessly. "You're not " Jason has worked his knee between Bruce's thighs, denim dragging over gabardine, and his arm around Bruce's waist.
"Pay up."
Beneath the red of his cheeks, Bruce's face tightens and pales to the shade of parchment. "You're not a whore."
Jason's laughing at that. The sound breaks against the tiles and scatters madly as he tugs open Bruce's belt and fly. "I'm not? You sure? Don't you " He cocks his head and bats his lashes. " *want* me?"
Bruce's body goes rigid as his eyes close. "No, not like "
Jason's hand pushes down the back of Bruce's pants, shoving the shirttails out of the way; he squeezes the top curve of Bruce's ass and pauses to shrug off his sweatshirt. It swings from his arm like a matador's flag, beckoning and threatening. "Oh, Brucie," he lisps breathlessly, "what a fine body you have! We just can't keep our *hands* off you "
"Jason, no." Bruce twists, but Jason pins him, arm against Bruce's throat. When Bruce stills, Jason drags his hand down Bruce's shirtfront, all the way down.
"Except you're here. Not there." Jason rocks forward against Bruce's erection, stroking it slowly with thumb curled beneath the head's ridge, as he slides two fingers down Bruce's cleft. "And you know what?"
Bruce bites his lower lip. "What?"
"Think you want it just like this." Jason's strokes speed up as his fingers probe and curl. "Want it rough, want me up your " The pad of his fingertip circles Bruce's hole. " *ass*. With my mouth first, right? Eat you out, tongue up your hole "
Bruce's breath speeds to match the rhythm of Jason's hand. "I want "
Jason's touches twist and press, pull out breath and sweat. "And when you're good and wet, I know what you want *then*. Want to bend over, grab your ankles, and open right up for me. Don't you?"
"Yes." Bruce is hoarse as he clutches at Jason's forearms and smears a kiss down the bruise on his cheek, cuts his teeth over Jason's swollen mouth. "Yes, but ." His eyes open and flash under the flickering lights. "I think that's what *you* want."
Jason's hand spasms on Bruce's ass. He chokes on a miscarried laugh. "Really."
"Really." Bruce's hands drop like cement blocks on Jason's shoulders. Theirs is negotiation in a new tongue, crude and sidewise, always under revision and development, always about to abandoned for the more plainspoken language of bodies and movement. Thumbs on the base of Jason's throat, he turns Jason around, pressing him against the damp tile. "And what I want "
"What?" Jason shivers, pressing his cheek to the wall, as Bruce strips his jeans down to his ankles. "What?"
"To give you *everything*." Bruce's hands move back up Jason's legs, warming up the gooseflesh, squeezing the musculature. His mouth finds the top of Jason's spine. "Everything, whatever you want."
"Yeah, right." Disbelief scours his tone as Jason rolls his forehead against his folded arm. Bruce spreads his ass with both hands, as he'd crack a fruit. His tongue moves forward without preliminaries. It swipes down the length of the crack, sucking up musky sweat and fresh secret skin, whorls around the hole and flattens out its pleats, pressing and pressing harder until Jason's knees lock and his thighs quiver. Jason's breath gusts out on a whine.
Bruce has done this for any number of women; the closest Jason has ever come to cunnilingus was watching a video. They both know the truth of the former, but as for the latter it's anyone's guess.
When Jason bites his wrist and thrusts against the wall, Bruce folds his arm around Jason's waist, digging his fingers into the hipbone. His mouth moves, tongue working, cheeks hollowing. Jason gives up a single moan.
At that, Bruce's smile is tight and hidden.
Jason's cock drags through the hair on Bruce's arm, smearing it stickily. He mutters and curses, twitches skipping up his back, as he shoves backward, onto Bruce's face. When his hips pump and balls tighten, Bruce pinches at his sac and eases back on his heels after a final long swipe.
"Everything," he whispers, resting his cheek in the small of Jason's back, still pinching off the orgasm. "Just wait."
On his feet again, the knees of his trousers clinging wetly to his calves, he drags Jason upright, until Jason is on his toes and Bruce is biting the back of his neck.
"Can't wait," Jason says raspily. "Show me what you got, mother" His voice breaks into something close to a sob when Bruce's fingers claw open his cleft again, hold him open as he pushes forward with a roll of the hips. Jason exhales. "That all you got?"
"Everything." Bruce thrusts and Jason jumps. "You've got it all."
"More, then," and Jason's fingernails scrabble against the tiles as he pushes back; when he finds Bruce's hip with his hand, he clutches and rocks. He steals food and money, takes everything on offer. "Give me more."
"Everything," Bruce says, and if Dick brought him hope, then this is what Jason has shown him. This reckless hunger, opening wide and yearning deep, pulling him deep, was not Jason's *gift*. Jason simply revealed it, found it deep, in the shadows, answered it.
Jason bounces, his toes curled against the front of his sneakers. He lifts one leg, catching it under the knee, and rocks harder against Bruce's thrusts. His head has dropped forward; the crown bangs the wall, his chin hitting his clavicle, with each thrust. "Fuck, Bruce "
Bruce's nails rake down Jason's chest as he pulls him back, presses his mouth to the cut on his brow. "What you *do* to me "
Jason's smirk is lopsided, his voice creaking. "Fucking perv."
"Beautiful." Bruce drives deeper, wrapping his hand around Jason's cock and pulling him off fast and tight. "Love "
The words, whispered, probably drown against Jason's wail, the sound of something resembling despair at his wracking orgasm. It pulls Bruce deeper until he is pinned, quivering, irrevocably caught.
*
Dick was inviolable. Dick is what Bruce hopes, but doubts, he could be. Jason, arrayed in anger and spitting a rapid Tommy-gun fire of words and moods, is what Bruce fears, knows full well, he *is*.
What, then, to make of this?
Hours later, Jason is still wakeful. He raids the pantry for yet more food, then makes his way back upstairs. He stops near Bruce's room, where the door is ajar. He pads inside and helps himself to a painkiller from the bottle on the bedside table before sitting cross-legged on the bed. He munches a peanut butter and banana sandwich greedily, his free hand in Bruce's hair. The dark hair twines around his fingers; his skin appears blue in the moonlight.
Jason's rage, like his hunger, is easy to see.
Nonetheless, no one can subsist on anger alone not a millionaire in his late twenties, certainly not a kid. It may preserve, even animate, but it cannot explain everything.
His sandwich demolished, Jason wipes his mouth on his sleeve and shifts to get comfortable. When Bruce turns over, Jason says, "Asshole," and strokes the hair from Bruce's brow. "You poor fucker."
His moods and angers are frequently inexplicable, he is ferocious and defiant, yet the inexplicable thing is just this simple: Jason remains here. Without apparent regret, he is not going anywhere.
[end]
Characters: Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd
Summary: The appreciation and preservation of precious things are important parts of the Wayne legacy.
Disclaimer: None of this belongs to me. This is entirely a work of fiction that in no way endorses the activities described herein.
Setting/spoilers: Jason is Robin. There's a slight contradiction with DitF canon, so this could be pre-DitF or an AU from "Under the Hood".
Rating/warning: Adult. Sexual content involving a (possible) teenager as well as sublimated class warfare.
Notes: For my dear Samantha/inlovewithnight on her birthday, with *much* love and hopes for an excellent coming year. A good bit of the conversation in the first scene is directly transcribed from an IM improv with her; the whole story was inspired by that conversation. Beta by jubilancy; any remaining gratuitousness and clumsy missteps are my own.
Avant le verre, le cage.
The carpet in the library is two centuries old. Woven by a tribe now blown to dust across the steppes of the Silk Road, sold to tradesmen in Venice, then Pisa, stolen from an overturned cart outside Lyon, traded for there for food to an Englishman who, fourteen years later, brought it with him to Boston, it came to the manor with Martha Wayne. Its blue blossoms matched her eyes all the Wayne men had brown eyes, ordinary as mud, going back three hundred years as its twisting red vines echoed the mysterious curves of her smile.
Care and conservation, the love for precious things, have preserved the carpet. It has survived generation after generation, thousands upon thousands of miles and years.
It may well not last the night. Not under Jason's furious pacing.
Where Jason is all violent movement, Bruce remains still; their fights are Newtonian, irresistible violence against immovable calm.
"Would you just fucking *listen* to me?" Skidding, Jason throws himself into a backspring and lands on his hands. His toes point at the ceiling beams and the carpet bunches under his palms as he approaches Bruce. His nails are dirty; ten half-moons of grime from God-knows-where dig into the carpet. Inverted, his face is nightmarish, open mouth black and wet, eyes squinting above beetled brows. "Well? Huh?"
Bruce recrosses his legs and tugs up his cuff. "I'm not hard of hearing."
Jason's legs scissor against the air. They move fast enough that the current gusts over Bruce, lifts the hair from his forehead. "Funny fucking ha-ha."
"Although I could make an appointment with Dr. Thompkins, if you think it's necessary..." Bruce's bangs settle back against his forehead, slightly more widely fanned than usual.
The muscles in Jason's left arm clench and bulge as he moves his weight there and lifts his right hand from the carpet. Its grain, imprinted on his red palm, is speckled, dark as iron filings.
"You're not listening," Jason says through gritted teeth. His balance wavers, tilting five degrees before it catches. "Do you ever fucking listen?"
"Do you?" Bruce occupies the chair with ease, hand curved over his knee, head tilted toward the dying fire. When Jason doesn't answer, he adds, "For example, I seem to recall asking you to behave yourself tonight."
Right arm folded behind his back, dress shirt slipping loose from his waistband to expose the dark hair below his navel, Jason barks out a laugh as he flips down. He lands in a crouch, both posture and expression monkey-like and avid, before Bruce's chair. "Held up my end of the bargain, big guy."
Bruce passes his hand over his face. The gesture suggests, but does not in fact denote, weariness. "That would be an extraordinarily liberal reading of the night's events."
"That so?" Jason bounces, his sock-clad toes digging into the carpet. He slaps Bruce's thigh for emphasis. "You're the scumsucking limousine liberal here."
*
Earlier that night, the party was well on its way toward being a success. Thousands had been raised via silent auction for breast-cancer research "old hags and their sick, saggy tits", as Jason insisted on calling the cause, frequently adding, "what? Junkies and HIV too *gross* for you people?" and now the attendees had retired to the large dining room for light refreshments and mutual admiration of the latest ("butt-ugly") fashion. Bruce was deep in conversation with Clayton Lefebvre and Happy Harbington III when Jason stole upstairs with Pamela Post and Astrid Westergaard.
Accounts of what the young people got up to in the third-floor games room differed. When she discovered them, Astrid's aunt could do no more than shriek and drag the Junior Leaguers from the boy's clutches. She shook off all inquiries, the whites of her eyes gone rooster-red, her jowls trembling.
The gossip spread as quickly as any pregnancy rumor, ramifying and burgeoning as it traveled. They may have been playing strip pool, smoking reefer, perhaps fondling each other in a decidedly non-Euclidean geometrical arrangement. It was possible, though not probable, that Bruce's latest urchin discovery was sodomizing the girls with pool cues while they passed a needle.
*
"So you can see my difficulty," Bruce concludes. He rests his cheek in his hand and gazes down at Jason with hooded eyes. "I asked you to wait here while I bade our guests goodnight and attempted to make amends with Padget Westergaard."
If Bruce had hoped that Jason would nod and offer an apology Dick, after all, found himself in any number of scrapes when he was younger then he was a fool. Jason explodes from his chimp crouch; his arms spread, his mouth hangs open, shiny and wet. "*Your* fucking difficulty? What have been I trying to tell you, motherfucker? That old bitch wouldn't know a threesome if she got sandwiched between John Holmes and Ron Jeremy!"
"I see," Bruce says.
Jason vaults over a club chair, bringing it down with him. The crystal in its cabinet shivers in delicate revulsion. "Did you ask the chicks?"
"Well " Bruce's immobility slips for a moment as his voice trails off.
Jason whirls, slipping on a bare patch of carpet. It bunches over his toes, but he turns the trip into a barreling somersault and springs back to his feet. "I bet nobody's fucking interrogating *them* right now," he says. In a voice gone reedy with mockery, he adds, "'oh, you poor dears, I am *so* sorry you fell into that creature's hands, whatever will you do, will you dare wear white on your wedding day?'"
"I'd simply like to know what happened," Bruce says. Having regained his composure, his tone is as even as his gaze.
"And *I*," Jason says, kicking the stem of a Fabergé lamp, "would like you to fucking *take my word* for once."
"And what is that?" Bruce shades his eyes. "Your word, that is."
Jason's shoulders pull toward his ears as he stalks forward. "Stupid little street trash, isn't that right? Grubby hands all over their ugly daughters, so I'm the one who gets grounded." He grabs at the air now, taking great chunks of it into his hands. "You really want to know what happened?"
"Yes." Bruce flicks an invisible piece of lint from his cuff. "Yes, very much."
Jason squints at him for the length of seven heartbeats. Assured of something, impossible to identify, in Bruce's expression, he drops to one knee next to Bruce's chair. Folding his arms over the chair's arm, he plants his chin on his wrist. "C'mere," he says softly. A smile steals over his face. "C'mere, and I'll tell you."
Bruce regards him. That he will drop his head, let Jason whisper to him the night's secret history, is a foregone conclusion. So, too, is his analytical hesitation, his study of Jason's bright eyes and enigmatic smirk.
"You'll never believe what Hap told me," Bruce says. Prevarication, like capitulation, is one more element in their fraught, anxiously haphazard attempts to communicate. That communication occurs most readily as *argument* seems, by now, nearly natural. A fight is more comprehensible than a conversaton.
Jason bats his lashes and puts on the mocking matronly tone. "Oh, *do* tell."
"There is, according to Hap, who is not, admittedly, the most credible of sources, some sort of underground fighting circuit in the city." Bruce's hand strays over the back of Jason's hair. "No-holds-barred, extreme fighting, Hap said. The betting is for very high stakes."
His hand falls empty, thumping against the side of the chair, as Jason lunges to his feet. "Oh, *man*! Oh, Bruce, baby, I gotta do it!"
"Pardon?"
Jason resumes pacing, his shoulders back up. He punches his palm, again and again. "I've got to fight. I could *wipe the floor* with them!"
"Jay " Bruce straightens his posture. The argument had begun to dwindle, dimming like the fire, but their fights are anything but predictable. "It's dangerous."
Jason's laughter is sharp as breaking porcelain. He flutters his fingers against his throat. "Oh, Mr. Wayne, good sir, *do* protect me, please, from the night-time flying and gunshots and beatdowns in various and sundry alleyways, I beg of you."
"Point taken." Bruce's lips thin down and pale. "However "
Jason leaps over an eighteenth-century side table, its cherry-and-beech finish recently restored. His handprint smears the polish, but he is already across the room, spinning and hugging himself. He stops suddenly, pointing at Bruce. "I'm going to do it. I'm gonna *win* and take 'em all for everything they've *got*."
"Is " Bruce's jaw tightens. "Is your allowance not meeting your needs?"
Jason, after all, still "liberates" food from Alfred's pantries, stowing cans all over the manor and stuffing his pockets, his mouth. Any spare change left in plain sight where, that is, plain sight includes jacket pockets, wallets, and drawers is sure to disappear.
Jason shakes his hair from his eyes. "It's not about *money*, you dolt. Not everything is about money."
"Is that so?"
"It's about *kicking ass*." Jason punches the air, then brings his fist down on the back of an Eames chaise. "Don't you see that?"
Bruce blinks rapidly. When he speaks, his voice is hoarse. "Is the...our night work not meeting your needs, then?"
As Robin, Dick carried joy into the night. Bright as a lady's handkerchief, he laughed as he swung and hit, drowning out the sounds of flesh on flesh. He transformed fights into performances, bowing afterwards, always smiling. Jason has, if anything, inverted that phenomenon. He brings the city's violence with him wherever he goes; he wears that potential as easily as his own skin, every flat vowel of his accent crows with it. It is difficult not to compare the two, to judge Dick's presence as alchemy and Jason's as destructive.
Straddling the back of the chaise, Jason rocks back and forth. The effect falls somewhere between "obscene" and "disconcertingly playful". He shakes his head as he says, "Bruce, please try to focus for just two minutes. Just one, even."
Jason's eyes gleam in the low firelight while the shadows scrape at, hollow out, his cheekbones. Bruce shifts in his seat. "Perhaps Lady Shiva might be persuaded to do some training with you? Under supervision, of course, as the woman is highly unstable..."
Jason slides off the chaise and pads over to Bruce's side. "Okay, you clearly don't get it. That's okay. Never mind." He pauses to shove his hands into his back pockets. His former manic energy has dwindled down to a slow rock back on his heels. He glances at Bruce from beneath his lashes. "Can I have Friday night off?"
"Hmm. No." Bruce steeples his fingers before his lips. "We have several investigations coming to fruition and..." He looks away. "No, I'm sorry, can't spare you."
Jason pinches Bruce's chin and pulls him back. He tugs, and Bruce follows, until their noses are nearly touching. "Funny man."
"Thank you." Bruce presses his forehead to Jason's.
Index finger on Bruce's carotid, Jason whispers, "Can you smell them on me?"
"The girls."
"Yeah."
Bruce wets his lower lip. "Perhaps...?"
The carpet's grain is complex, illegible as Braille to the sighted, against Bruce's hands and knees, as he slips out of the chair, down to Jason's level.
*
A series of municipal budget cuts have slashed the funding for arts programs, after-school activities, even the school board's maintenance and operations. If one were a leading citizen, a Lucius Fox or Kenneth Kane, one might wring well-manicured hands and bemoan the state of the city. Such complaints pepper the op-ed pages and the keynote addresses at charitable functions. All the while, such citizens send their own children to the day schools that cluster around Finger Avenue. Some go out of the city altogether, upstate to rolling green pastures better suited to grazing cattle than educating the rich, bored and energetic.
It would require a superior mind and generous heart to connect the sad state of the city budget with the spectacle here PS 276 has stood at the corner of Duffy and Devin for nearly a century, so long that it sports separate entrances for boy and girls. Closed in the last wave of cuts, the building is empty and dark as a rotten tooth. The high-mullioned windows have been bricked over, the doors locked with loops of razor wire.
The curious thrillseeker creeps around to the back, following a path underlit by Christmas lights. Glass crunches underfoot, difficult to see. At the door to the old gymnasium, a wall of a man, named Pinky, once in the employ of Cobblepot, assesses the financial potential of the hopeful visitor. Pinky employs the time-honored, eminently direct method of checking labels in coats and opening billfolds.
If Pinky judges you fit, he tosses his head, the motion sending tremors through his jowls and the rolls of fat on his neck. Having paid your fee, you step inside.
If you're rich in Gotham, you're probably here tonight. Staying in, avoiding both villains and vigilantes, tends to foster a reckless boredom that edges on hysteria. Last season, the fad was for tableaux made up of nude East End youths; next year, there might well be cockfights or a resurgence of enthusiasm for MDMA.
Tonight's entertainment is not advertised anywhere. Strictly word-of-mouth and under-the-radar, the illegality and secretiveness of this enterprise contribute to the audience's anticipatory frisson and high-pitched chatter.
That anticipation is challenged, to various degrees, by the smells that linger in this place. Generations of children played here, wrestled and battled; their ghosts are olfactory now.
Vestiges of old sweat, bleach and rubber soles twine through the air, mixing with the more recent vintages of the ladies' French perfumes and the rain on men's overcoats.
An easel, retrieved from the basement of the main building, display the night's line-up, written with scrolling care in white chalk on a jagged fragment of blackboard. There are four matches, featuring the kind of names not found in any edition of the Social Register, names like De La Cruz and Pignowski, Jaleed and O'Herlihy. The last match, a welterweight cage match, will be between Jimenez and Malone.
The night's heavy money is on Erasmo Jimenez, 153 pounds of spitting-mad Dominican; he's won his last seven matches here in Gotham and, word has it, more on the road. The contender, Little Dickie Malone, is an unknown. He's fast, you hear, but untested. "Came outta nowhere," the money men say around the ends of their cigars, taking bets as rapidly as birds peck up breadcrumbs, "and he's heading back there fast."
The crowd occupies sagging bleachers, their muted evening finery in sharp contrast to the ghosts of squeaking rubber soles and lumbering young bodies. The depilated basketball hoops and the championship banners grimed into illegibility disappear in the dark when the portable spot-lights switch on around the makeshift ring. Women clutch their dates' knees, their rings glinting; men slide consoling arms around bare shoulders and murmur into expensive hairdos.
Bruce Wayne is here, a blonde beauty on each arm; they may be sisters, as they claim, or merely cousins, as their birth certificates indicate. They share rose-and-honey complexions and matching stoles of white ermine. Wayne watches the opening match with open mouth and squinting eyes, rearing back in his seat like a half-broken horse, whenever the fighters kick and thud toward his side of the ring.
His tie has come slightly loose; his dates bury their faces against his broad shoulders. At each blow, he twists in his seat, as if horrified by the violence.
And it *is* violent down there. Each fighter wears a snug singlet and loose shorts; his fists and ankles are taped and, if he's some kind of pussy, he might have a mouthguard over his teeth. The rounds last two minutes each, and the man left standing or sagging, or bent over, puking up his early lunch of jerk chicken and dirty rice after five rounds is the winner.
Within those ten minutes and the thick ropes, anything goes. Unlike wrestling, which is fake, and boxing, which is not, there are no rules in the ring. Their absence strips away the pretense of sport, flays the fighters' movements down to brute athletic force.
Lacrosse, Bruce's pal Happy observed, also lacks any boundaries. This is nothing like lacrosse, except in terms of the broken noses and spraying sweat, the arcs of blood from mouths and grunts as bodies fall. This is not a *sport*, but a bloodbath.
In the bleachers, the audience shrieks and cheers. They might be winning money they don't need, or losing sums they'll never miss; either way, they're having a grand old time. Their disgust, merged with exhilaration, erupts into a frenzy.
The lights dim low as a jury-rigged cage, welded from steel bars and chicken wire, jerks down over the ring. The crowd sucks in its breath as one. Jimenez bounces on his toes in one corner, a towel around his neck. His white singlet and shorts glow eerily.
In the other corner, Malone stands stockstill. He wears green shorts and a red singlet. His hair is a strange shade of auburn, one which the ladies in the crowd recognize as Miss Clairol, frequently sported by their graying maids. In the pop and spatter of flashbulbs, his colors warble nauseatingly while he remains still.
The blood, sweat, and occasional tooth left by the previous fighters is mopped away. The referee, a sallow little man who is, coincidentally enough, Pinky's cousin Goldy, claps his hands, then scrambles out of the way.
Jimenez circles, feinting and jabbing at the air around Malone. Malone rocks a little, easily dodging. The crowd's hush revs up.
When the noise is a moment from cresting, Malone starts to move. He jumps and kicks, uses the cage as a partner and ally rather than anything like a constraint.
Erasmo Jimenez is putting his big sister through law school with his winnings. It might have been better if Lalia had chosen medical school; he's going to need reconstructive surgery and a close watch for early onset Parkinson's.
Bruce watches with hot eyes. Tension thrums through his frame, palpable enough that one blonde reaches for the other's hand across his lap.
Malone cannot see the crowd, save as layers of smeared color, but its noise and scent wash around him, slap his face and speed him on. Jimenez fights like the street tough he is; he keeps low, fists raised as he spits and snarls. But Malone fights like something else entirely, a different species. An avenging angel, tumbled, rebellious, from above, his hits thump, crack, and jolt Jimenez's body. With fists and pointed feet, he moves, less a dance than an electrified contortion; gravity shies away from him, though less sensible entities, like the crowd and Jimenez, do not.
Jimenez starts to stumble as the second round opens; by the end of the fourth, he sags asymmetrically, one shoulder sloping six degrees lower than the other, one hand curled over his face.
Before there was a Robin, Batman worked alone. He was then a single slice of rage, a shadow that peeled itself free from the others and, animated by yet darker needs, flew over the city to claim it as his own. That fury, beating its black wings, never faded, though the wings were folded back with each dawn. Its wrath, however, did retreat and recede in the presence of a laughing, bright-eyed child.
Reborn, that shadow now parades around the ring. Brighter now, younger, and all the more dangerous for that, he raises fists in victory and tosses taunts back to the crowd. The crowd shouts at him, bewildered by the loss of (inconsequential) sums and aroused by the furious violence. Bruce, silent, watches longer than anyone. Malone is defiant despite the cage; stained with color, he is some venomous specimen, caught at last, then pinned and preserved.
He has fought, and fought well; his usefulness now expires.
As far as the crowd knows, Malone might be caged for the night, forever. Murmuring and arguing, the audience turns its back on him and files out of the gymnasium. Trailing at the end of the crowd, Bruce escorts his companions to the car. The one on the left wobbles, sickened down to her soul by the spectacle. Making some vapid excuse about a cufflink, Bruce sees them safely on their way.
When the audience has dispersed and even the thugs are wandering down the street, lighting dollar cigars for one another, Bruce returns to the gym.
In the doorway, Pinky alternates between bites off a meatball sub and thumb-counting the door's take. He grunts and nods when the rich asshole stutters a story about losing his date's stole.
The gymnasium is dark, filled with blocky shadows of varying depths. The cage has been retracted to the ceiling; its anchor ropes run taut under Bruce's hand. The bleachers rise into the shadows, steps to an unknown temple. Water runs splashing and murmuring, somewhere in the distance. After it shuts off with a creak, the back door bangs closed behind Pinky, sub in one hand, lockbox under his arm.
At the far end of the gym, one shadow narrows, Arctic-cold light spilling into the gap.
"You coming or what?" Jason yells from within the light.
Bruce crosses the echoing space. Gradually, as he nears, the brightness resolves around a slim figure. The hood of Jason's red sweatshirt is up, peaked like a girl's in a fairytale. He dodges and feints, backing up even as Bruce closes the gap, his untied sneakers squeaking on wet tile.
"Girl's locker room," Jason says as Bruce pulls the door shut. "Bet you always wanted to get into one of these, huh?" He tosses his head, letting the hood fall back. His hair is wet; steam from the shower still curls in the corners of the long room. "Nah, what'm I saying? Stud like you, probably seen a hundred of these places."
Antic energy sparks and courses through Jason's movements. Behind his back, Bruce locks the door. The fluorescent lights sputter above them.
"Huh?" Jason dances closer, shoelaces dragging in the puddles. "Haven't you?"
"Your interest in my relationship history is..." Bruce crosses his arms. "Misplaced."
Jason jerks his thumb at the wall of lockers and, beyond, to the gym. "Saw your date. Sorry, *dates*, multiple. Sure you wouldn't rather be in a golden-blonde sandwich right about now?"
"Faith took ill," Bruce says and loosens his tie against the humidity. "Charity thought it best to accompany her home."
Jason spins on one foot and kicks at the row of lockers. "Didn't answer the question."
"That's right." Bruce reaches out and catches Jason's sweatshirt at the elbow. "I didn't."
"Too personal?" Jason shakes free his arm, jogging backward. Hopping in place, he scowls as he slaps his own cheek. "Oh, am I *prying*? Such a nosy parker, I don't know what gets into me, however shall I tender my apologies?"
"Jay..." Bruce opens his hand, then closes it in mid-air. He clears his throat. "You sound, if anything, jealous."
Jason swipes at the air with an uppercut. "Where're my congratulations, huh?"
"Congratulations," Bruce says.
"I fucking *won*," Jason shouts, bending backward, grasping one ankle and walking the other leg over his head. He lands on the low bench that runs parallel to the lockers. "Told you I could do it."
"I do recall you saying as much, yes."
Jason smacks his lips together, making the Alfred priss-face.
Squatting there, bouncing gently, he spreads his arms. His sweatshirt, unzipped, swings open and exposes the white undershirt clinging to his chest. "Said it, did it, won the fucking thing."
"Yes." Bruce runs his palm over his own cheek, then his forehead, to remove the sweat. "You showered."
Jason snorts and sniffs his left armpit. "Disappointed?"
"Merely an observation."
"Merely an observation," Jason parrots. He twists around, yanking the red singlet from his jeans' back pocket and tossing it at Bruce. "Saved it for you, you fucking perv."
Bruce catches it one-handed. "How thoughtful."
"That's me." Jason bounces more rapidly; any moment now, he looks about to kick out his legs in a Cossack dance. "Always about the other guy. So, how much?"
"Pardon me?"
"How much did you win?" When Bruce doesn't reply, Jason's eyes narrow. "Don't tell me you fucking bet *against* me."
Bruce smiles. Everything about him is sharp, black and white; only his cheeks, mottled red, and eyes, shining blue, seem alive. "No, I'm not quite *that* stupid. Not yet."
"So " Jason bounces once more, then jumps back to the floor. "How much?"
Bruce's fingers twitch at his sides. "A good sum, I'd say."
Jason stares at him, just out of reach. "You're such an asshole."
"Ah," Bruce says and squints slightly. "And you are "
"Don't fucking say it." Jason digs in the sweatshirt's pouch who knows what wonders he carries with him? and tosses a small notebook at Bruce. As it arcs upward, its pages open like a broken wing. "Names and descriptions, all the money guys and shit." Rising to his feet, he crosses his arms. "Jaybird did *his* homework. What's he get?"
The sweat shining on Jason's face, as he steps up to Bruce and pushes him back, is new, born of the shower's heat and post-fight excitement. It is difficult, however, not to see the reflection of the fight's exertion there, stinging-hot and -wet. His left cheek is purpling with a wide bruise; a butterfly bandage covers a cut, inexpertly darned, over his right eyebrow. His pupils are blown, deep and rootless. Bruce slides the notebook into his jacket pocket and exhales slowly.
Jason shoves at Bruce's shoulders. "Huh? C'mon and pay up, Mister Wayne."
The fluorescents play tricks, blanching Jason's face to bone one moment, guttering the next and flinging him back to the shadows.
He is relentless. Licking the corner of his mouth, crowding even closer, he punches Bruce's shoulder. "Liked the fight, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Nice little slumming date," Jason says and yanks at Bruce's lapel. "Of course you liked it."
"Easy, easy " Bruce squeezes Jason's arm.
Jason laughs. "Nothing's *easy*, motherfucker. All those assholes out there, they think it's easy. Get their rocks off, keep the rough trade in its cage, go home and fuck like animals? Easy as custard-cream *pie*."
"Jason." Bruce presses his palm against Jason's pectoral, curling his fingers over the reckless rattle of his heartbeat. "That isn't how "
"How much?"
Bruce shakes his head once. "A lot. But "
"You're all the same." Jason smells like institutional soap, gritty and heavy with bleach, and sweat. He tilts his head and screws up one eye. "Want a piece, too, don't you, Brucie?"
"Just you," Bruce says. His face twists, helplessly. "You're not " Jason has worked his knee between Bruce's thighs, denim dragging over gabardine, and his arm around Bruce's waist.
"Pay up."
Beneath the red of his cheeks, Bruce's face tightens and pales to the shade of parchment. "You're not a whore."
Jason's laughing at that. The sound breaks against the tiles and scatters madly as he tugs open Bruce's belt and fly. "I'm not? You sure? Don't you " He cocks his head and bats his lashes. " *want* me?"
Bruce's body goes rigid as his eyes close. "No, not like "
Jason's hand pushes down the back of Bruce's pants, shoving the shirttails out of the way; he squeezes the top curve of Bruce's ass and pauses to shrug off his sweatshirt. It swings from his arm like a matador's flag, beckoning and threatening. "Oh, Brucie," he lisps breathlessly, "what a fine body you have! We just can't keep our *hands* off you "
"Jason, no." Bruce twists, but Jason pins him, arm against Bruce's throat. When Bruce stills, Jason drags his hand down Bruce's shirtfront, all the way down.
"Except you're here. Not there." Jason rocks forward against Bruce's erection, stroking it slowly with thumb curled beneath the head's ridge, as he slides two fingers down Bruce's cleft. "And you know what?"
Bruce bites his lower lip. "What?"
"Think you want it just like this." Jason's strokes speed up as his fingers probe and curl. "Want it rough, want me up your " The pad of his fingertip circles Bruce's hole. " *ass*. With my mouth first, right? Eat you out, tongue up your hole "
Bruce's breath speeds to match the rhythm of Jason's hand. "I want "
Jason's touches twist and press, pull out breath and sweat. "And when you're good and wet, I know what you want *then*. Want to bend over, grab your ankles, and open right up for me. Don't you?"
"Yes." Bruce is hoarse as he clutches at Jason's forearms and smears a kiss down the bruise on his cheek, cuts his teeth over Jason's swollen mouth. "Yes, but ." His eyes open and flash under the flickering lights. "I think that's what *you* want."
Jason's hand spasms on Bruce's ass. He chokes on a miscarried laugh. "Really."
"Really." Bruce's hands drop like cement blocks on Jason's shoulders. Theirs is negotiation in a new tongue, crude and sidewise, always under revision and development, always about to abandoned for the more plainspoken language of bodies and movement. Thumbs on the base of Jason's throat, he turns Jason around, pressing him against the damp tile. "And what I want "
"What?" Jason shivers, pressing his cheek to the wall, as Bruce strips his jeans down to his ankles. "What?"
"To give you *everything*." Bruce's hands move back up Jason's legs, warming up the gooseflesh, squeezing the musculature. His mouth finds the top of Jason's spine. "Everything, whatever you want."
"Yeah, right." Disbelief scours his tone as Jason rolls his forehead against his folded arm. Bruce spreads his ass with both hands, as he'd crack a fruit. His tongue moves forward without preliminaries. It swipes down the length of the crack, sucking up musky sweat and fresh secret skin, whorls around the hole and flattens out its pleats, pressing and pressing harder until Jason's knees lock and his thighs quiver. Jason's breath gusts out on a whine.
Bruce has done this for any number of women; the closest Jason has ever come to cunnilingus was watching a video. They both know the truth of the former, but as for the latter it's anyone's guess.
When Jason bites his wrist and thrusts against the wall, Bruce folds his arm around Jason's waist, digging his fingers into the hipbone. His mouth moves, tongue working, cheeks hollowing. Jason gives up a single moan.
At that, Bruce's smile is tight and hidden.
Jason's cock drags through the hair on Bruce's arm, smearing it stickily. He mutters and curses, twitches skipping up his back, as he shoves backward, onto Bruce's face. When his hips pump and balls tighten, Bruce pinches at his sac and eases back on his heels after a final long swipe.
"Everything," he whispers, resting his cheek in the small of Jason's back, still pinching off the orgasm. "Just wait."
On his feet again, the knees of his trousers clinging wetly to his calves, he drags Jason upright, until Jason is on his toes and Bruce is biting the back of his neck.
"Can't wait," Jason says raspily. "Show me what you got, mother" His voice breaks into something close to a sob when Bruce's fingers claw open his cleft again, hold him open as he pushes forward with a roll of the hips. Jason exhales. "That all you got?"
"Everything." Bruce thrusts and Jason jumps. "You've got it all."
"More, then," and Jason's fingernails scrabble against the tiles as he pushes back; when he finds Bruce's hip with his hand, he clutches and rocks. He steals food and money, takes everything on offer. "Give me more."
"Everything," Bruce says, and if Dick brought him hope, then this is what Jason has shown him. This reckless hunger, opening wide and yearning deep, pulling him deep, was not Jason's *gift*. Jason simply revealed it, found it deep, in the shadows, answered it.
Jason bounces, his toes curled against the front of his sneakers. He lifts one leg, catching it under the knee, and rocks harder against Bruce's thrusts. His head has dropped forward; the crown bangs the wall, his chin hitting his clavicle, with each thrust. "Fuck, Bruce "
Bruce's nails rake down Jason's chest as he pulls him back, presses his mouth to the cut on his brow. "What you *do* to me "
Jason's smirk is lopsided, his voice creaking. "Fucking perv."
"Beautiful." Bruce drives deeper, wrapping his hand around Jason's cock and pulling him off fast and tight. "Love "
The words, whispered, probably drown against Jason's wail, the sound of something resembling despair at his wracking orgasm. It pulls Bruce deeper until he is pinned, quivering, irrevocably caught.
*
Dick was inviolable. Dick is what Bruce hopes, but doubts, he could be. Jason, arrayed in anger and spitting a rapid Tommy-gun fire of words and moods, is what Bruce fears, knows full well, he *is*.
What, then, to make of this?
Hours later, Jason is still wakeful. He raids the pantry for yet more food, then makes his way back upstairs. He stops near Bruce's room, where the door is ajar. He pads inside and helps himself to a painkiller from the bottle on the bedside table before sitting cross-legged on the bed. He munches a peanut butter and banana sandwich greedily, his free hand in Bruce's hair. The dark hair twines around his fingers; his skin appears blue in the moonlight.
Jason's rage, like his hunger, is easy to see.
Nonetheless, no one can subsist on anger alone not a millionaire in his late twenties, certainly not a kid. It may preserve, even animate, but it cannot explain everything.
His sandwich demolished, Jason wipes his mouth on his sleeve and shifts to get comfortable. When Bruce turns over, Jason says, "Asshole," and strokes the hair from Bruce's brow. "You poor fucker."
His moods and angers are frequently inexplicable, he is ferocious and defiant, yet the inexplicable thing is just this simple: Jason remains here. Without apparent regret, he is not going anywhere.
[end]