Fic: 26th June 2010
It’s now close to two months that Bruce Wayne has been on the run, two months in which his social status has shifted from Bruce Wayne: Most Wanted Bachelor to Bruce Wayne: Most Wanted Fugitive. And don’t think that little quip hasn’t been abused mercilessly by the press, Lacy Kane (no relation to the Gotham Kane’s that Martha Wayne had come from, but if people assumed Lacy saw no reason to correct them) stood just outside Wayne Enterprises one sunny Friday morning and smiled with her big white teeth at the camera in front of her:
“Bruce Wayne has always hit those top ten lists and never failed to be hot, hot, hot and in demand but now he has swapped his most eligible bachelors title for most wanted fugitive and it’s no longer swarms of Gotham’s Single Women clambering for a glimpse of the billionaire, instead he’s now top of the list of Gotham PDs most wanted and it’s our own boys in blue who are after him.”
But mostly the headlines have died down, there’s other news, fresh news, fresh meat to take his place. Gotham is a place where something is always happening and more often than not it’s not something nice.
Victor Zsasz is doing his thing - everyone has a talent, or so Martha Wayne once told Bruce -
“What’s your talent, Mommy?” He’d asked, still young enough to call her Mommy, still young enough to fit so easily on her lap.
“Being your mother.” She’d replied.
And Victor Zsasz’s talent seemed to be his ability to carve up an extraordinary number of people in the most sadistic way possible (and without anything close to regret). The press loved Zsasz (as did Gotham’s leading security provider) - his ridiculously grotesque signature of carving a notch into his own body for each and every victim turned tragedy into circus - as did the fact that Zsasz himself, once upon a time, a long, long time ago, had been one of Gotham’s elite, heir to one of her richest families and head of a multi-national with almost the reach of Wayne Enterprises itself.
Who could go past such a riches to rags story? A tragedy is all the sweeter when it’s one of those pampered princes that fall. Shame this one likes to take sweet little co-ed on the ride with him.
And, of course, Zsasz was now even more of a fixture in the consciousness of Gotham what with him providing such a convenient analogy to the latest billionaire gone bad.
Bruce Wayne the next Victor Zsasz? Suggested more than one editorial, linking the privilege, the excessive privilege these men had enjoyed to their now evident and appalling moral decay. And for all the voices that pointed out that even if Mr. Wayne had killed his girlfriend there was a gulf of difference between one murder in the heat of the moment and a serial killer with near twenty cold blooded murders under his belt - well, there were ten more who would declare Victor and Bruce were cut from the same cloth and they both deserved to fry.
But as time passed the immediacy of Zsasz’s crimes placed him in the spotlight and then there was Maroni’s upcoming trial and finally the new guy on the scene who seemed to be eclipsing them all - eclipsing even the Batman - indeed only a chance spotting of Robert Pattinson in a downtown Coffee Bean Café had been able to knock the new star off the front page.
The Joker was the talk of Gotham and so Bruce Wayne and Vesper Fairchild barely hit the papers at all.
Victor Zsasz carves another notch into his arm. The Batman interrupts a drug deal in downtown Gotham. The Joker looks at his craftsmanship and smiles in a grotesque mask of pleasure. The Gotham PD and the Russian Mob are fraternising like old friends. A local newsreader gets a blowjob in an alley from a girl who says she’s fifteen but she’s at least two years younger. A Judge waits in a car on the corner waiting for his turn.
Just another night in Gotham City.
“I used to watch this as a kid.”
He’s sitting on the floor at the end of the bed they share (but don’t share) and he’s sitting there flicking through channels, searching to see if the drug bust has made the news or if it’s been buried before it can surface, just another of Gotham’s dirty little secrets - except they’re not little and as they fester in their shallow graves the smell becomes harder and harder to conceal. Sometimes, he thinks, it’s more telling the news that doesn’t hit stands in this city than the news that actually does. In every story not told you can see who is really controlling the city, where the balance of power truly lies.
Sometimes it seems that more bad news than ever has hit Gotham in the years since the Batman has emerged. In a strange way it’s testimony to the way in which The Batman has challenged that balance of power, the way in which the people who used to control the city have started to lose control. Those dirty little secrets seem harder and harder to bury these days. Falcone doesn’t have many friends left (even in the nuthouse) and Maroni is being prosecuted, by the shiny new DA, for his crimes.
There’s nothing but bad news in Gotham these days - but that’s almost the best news the city has had in years.
He’s sitting on the floor at the end of the bed they share (but don’t share) after a night out away doing what he does, living this life that Talia can’t understand. In the bed across the room Harry is sleeping or he’s pretending to sleep and so the lights are off and the room is only illuminated by the glow of the box Bruce sits in front of.
It is a box, one of those old style boxes, and so sitting like this, in front of it, on the floor, it perhaps makes him more nostalgic than he would otherwise be. Thirty years before he would have sat like this in front of a similar box, although thirty years earlier he would have been a very different person, in a very different room. Thirty years earlier he would not have sat there in the glow of the television and meticulously stitched the wound on his own arm, he would not have sat there and wrapped his own ribs as tightly as he could.
He’s sitting there flicking through channels and he stops, suddenly, at the sight of Samantha and Darren arguing (for eternity) over the use, misuse, of magic.
“I used to watch this as a kid.”
He has to be speaking to Talia, but sometimes Talia isn’t sure.
“I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world aside from my mother - and I never could understand what she saw in him. In Darren. I thought I’d be so much nicer to her. I remember thinking I’d let her use magic as much as she liked, whenever she liked. I had this idea that we’d just magic up - ”
He isn’t looking at her; he’s staring at the TV while he talks. Sitting on the floor, back against the end of the bed, he’s talking more to the TV than to her. And he’s talking in a way he doesn’t usually talk, in sentences that flow on, not with words that are short and clipped. He’s talking about his childhood, about the Bruce that was, acknowledging that person as part of him. He’s talking about that lifetime thirty years ago as if it were yesterday.
“I remember thinking I would love to be married to a witch.”
He sounds so sad. He sounds so tired.
Talia sits behind him, cross-legged on the end of the bed. Finally, after minutes of hesitation, she lets her hand stretch out and trail through his hair, then down his neck. He doesn’t acknowledge the touch, he doesn’t lean into it as he once would have, but he doesn’t move either.
“I’ve never seen it.” She says.
And, then, Vespers voice seems to come from the corner of the room:
“Even on TV,” Vesper says. “Women, inevitably, settle for men not worthy of them.”
But when he turns to the sound, of course, she’s not there.
He’d never really understood why people watched television but Vesper loved it - she watched it with an enthusiasm that belied his belief that it was a force for the passive and the idle. And so, for the first time since he’d been a small child - and even then television had not been encouraged - he had started to watch TV. Only with her, but still, in the first month of their relationship (specifically the first month of their first relationship, after he would realise that technically they had three) he had watched more TV with Vesper than he’d watched in the entire year past.
And it surprised him that he, well, he hadn’t hated it, sometimes he may have actually enjoyed it, not the shows so much as the fact that it gave you an excuse to just sit there, to relax, to not have to make conversation, to not have the pressure of someone always looking at you, gauging your reactions, to not always have the burden of being the performance. When you watched TV you’d be staring straight ahead, being together but also being alone somehow in that togetherness - and that singularity was, in this situation, acceptable.
Perhaps that was the reason he’d always loved cinema, it offered the same release, but TV made that release seem acceptable in the day to day of a relationship. And then he understood it a little, why people had their shows, why people turned the TV on and ate their dinner in front of it, why people, families, were ruled by this box.
Perhaps they didn’t want to be alone but they were no better at togetherness than he was.
“Why are we watching this?” Vesper had said, suddenly, apropos of nothing it had seemed. Perhaps it was the umpteenth resurrection or the emergence of another angel gone bad or perhaps it had finally gotten to her that in this show there would never be any space for her, for a woman to survive.
“I don’t know.” He replied. But he did know. He knew why he watched it. It was for the excuse to sit beside her in silence and to smell her hair, to run his hand up and down her leg, to just be with her without the need for him to be anything.
“This is so… stupid. All this male bonding, homoeroticism - ”
He looks at her, surprised, perhaps.
“You think I don’t know anything about anything.” She says as she rolls her eyes. “I’m more educated than you are, dropout.”
And he laughs and she laughs and they fuck in front of the television and when he walks out the door that night they’re both smiling if only for a little while.
She kisses him on the shoulder and he doesn’t react. It would be kinder, in a sense, if he actually pulled away, if he recoiled, but instead her touch seems to have no effect at all.
“Sometimes I think you take more of a beating than you need to.” Talia says to him.
She’s dressing the wounds that he can’t reach, the ones on the back and on the side. One of them has ripped apart again and she puts the stiches in. She presses alcohol over it and holds down tight. Another one has started to seep, the mucus is unattractive but the smell is worse. The skin around it is red and the colour is spreading. She doesn’t wince, she doesn’t worry, she isn’t concerned - this is the way life is, the way it has always been and the way it will always be.
"Just enough." He replies.
She’s surprised he answers her, most of the time he doesn’t bother, she talks and he says very little. It doesn’t bother her, he’s always been quiet, and he’s always been solitary. He’s not the performing monkey they know him as - she remembers days when he’d go without speaking at all.
“You need to stop this, Beloved. You need to let yourself go home.” She says.
And he doesn’t respond, not that time, the silence continues and sometimes she’ll try to break it with a comment, sometimes with a question. She doesn’t expect him to answer; he was never much of a conversationalist -
Though sometimes, such a long time ago, in what feels more than thirty years past, she’d sit with them and listen and they’d talk, and sometimes in those moments neither man seemed so solitary, or so silent. In those moments she’d wondered if she’d ever known her father at all, if she really knew her lover.
“You’ve got an infection.” She says.
“I’m aware.” He replies.
And on the television Darren and Samantha kiss.
Across the city The Joker plays with what is left of his new friend and The Scarecrow watches the shadows dance across the wall and shudders at the sight of them and Victor Zsasz sleeps and dreams of a girl he saw yesterday and he dreams of her as she will be soon, he dreams of her broken and bloody and nothing but his and on the television Samantha and Darren kiss.
And for a moment Bruce Wayne smiles.
“Bruce Wayne has always hit those top ten lists and never failed to be hot, hot, hot and in demand but now he has swapped his most eligible bachelors title for most wanted fugitive and it’s no longer swarms of Gotham’s Single Women clambering for a glimpse of the billionaire, instead he’s now top of the list of Gotham PDs most wanted and it’s our own boys in blue who are after him.”
But mostly the headlines have died down, there’s other news, fresh news, fresh meat to take his place. Gotham is a place where something is always happening and more often than not it’s not something nice.
Victor Zsasz is doing his thing - everyone has a talent, or so Martha Wayne once told Bruce -
“What’s your talent, Mommy?” He’d asked, still young enough to call her Mommy, still young enough to fit so easily on her lap.
“Being your mother.” She’d replied.
And Victor Zsasz’s talent seemed to be his ability to carve up an extraordinary number of people in the most sadistic way possible (and without anything close to regret). The press loved Zsasz (as did Gotham’s leading security provider) - his ridiculously grotesque signature of carving a notch into his own body for each and every victim turned tragedy into circus - as did the fact that Zsasz himself, once upon a time, a long, long time ago, had been one of Gotham’s elite, heir to one of her richest families and head of a multi-national with almost the reach of Wayne Enterprises itself.
Who could go past such a riches to rags story? A tragedy is all the sweeter when it’s one of those pampered princes that fall. Shame this one likes to take sweet little co-ed on the ride with him.
And, of course, Zsasz was now even more of a fixture in the consciousness of Gotham what with him providing such a convenient analogy to the latest billionaire gone bad.
Bruce Wayne the next Victor Zsasz? Suggested more than one editorial, linking the privilege, the excessive privilege these men had enjoyed to their now evident and appalling moral decay. And for all the voices that pointed out that even if Mr. Wayne had killed his girlfriend there was a gulf of difference between one murder in the heat of the moment and a serial killer with near twenty cold blooded murders under his belt - well, there were ten more who would declare Victor and Bruce were cut from the same cloth and they both deserved to fry.
But as time passed the immediacy of Zsasz’s crimes placed him in the spotlight and then there was Maroni’s upcoming trial and finally the new guy on the scene who seemed to be eclipsing them all - eclipsing even the Batman - indeed only a chance spotting of Robert Pattinson in a downtown Coffee Bean Café had been able to knock the new star off the front page.
The Joker was the talk of Gotham and so Bruce Wayne and Vesper Fairchild barely hit the papers at all.
Victor Zsasz carves another notch into his arm. The Batman interrupts a drug deal in downtown Gotham. The Joker looks at his craftsmanship and smiles in a grotesque mask of pleasure. The Gotham PD and the Russian Mob are fraternising like old friends. A local newsreader gets a blowjob in an alley from a girl who says she’s fifteen but she’s at least two years younger. A Judge waits in a car on the corner waiting for his turn.
Just another night in Gotham City.
“I used to watch this as a kid.”
He’s sitting on the floor at the end of the bed they share (but don’t share) and he’s sitting there flicking through channels, searching to see if the drug bust has made the news or if it’s been buried before it can surface, just another of Gotham’s dirty little secrets - except they’re not little and as they fester in their shallow graves the smell becomes harder and harder to conceal. Sometimes, he thinks, it’s more telling the news that doesn’t hit stands in this city than the news that actually does. In every story not told you can see who is really controlling the city, where the balance of power truly lies.
Sometimes it seems that more bad news than ever has hit Gotham in the years since the Batman has emerged. In a strange way it’s testimony to the way in which The Batman has challenged that balance of power, the way in which the people who used to control the city have started to lose control. Those dirty little secrets seem harder and harder to bury these days. Falcone doesn’t have many friends left (even in the nuthouse) and Maroni is being prosecuted, by the shiny new DA, for his crimes.
There’s nothing but bad news in Gotham these days - but that’s almost the best news the city has had in years.
He’s sitting on the floor at the end of the bed they share (but don’t share) after a night out away doing what he does, living this life that Talia can’t understand. In the bed across the room Harry is sleeping or he’s pretending to sleep and so the lights are off and the room is only illuminated by the glow of the box Bruce sits in front of.
It is a box, one of those old style boxes, and so sitting like this, in front of it, on the floor, it perhaps makes him more nostalgic than he would otherwise be. Thirty years before he would have sat like this in front of a similar box, although thirty years earlier he would have been a very different person, in a very different room. Thirty years earlier he would not have sat there in the glow of the television and meticulously stitched the wound on his own arm, he would not have sat there and wrapped his own ribs as tightly as he could.
He’s sitting there flicking through channels and he stops, suddenly, at the sight of Samantha and Darren arguing (for eternity) over the use, misuse, of magic.
“I used to watch this as a kid.”
He has to be speaking to Talia, but sometimes Talia isn’t sure.
“I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world aside from my mother - and I never could understand what she saw in him. In Darren. I thought I’d be so much nicer to her. I remember thinking I’d let her use magic as much as she liked, whenever she liked. I had this idea that we’d just magic up - ”
He isn’t looking at her; he’s staring at the TV while he talks. Sitting on the floor, back against the end of the bed, he’s talking more to the TV than to her. And he’s talking in a way he doesn’t usually talk, in sentences that flow on, not with words that are short and clipped. He’s talking about his childhood, about the Bruce that was, acknowledging that person as part of him. He’s talking about that lifetime thirty years ago as if it were yesterday.
“I remember thinking I would love to be married to a witch.”
He sounds so sad. He sounds so tired.
Talia sits behind him, cross-legged on the end of the bed. Finally, after minutes of hesitation, she lets her hand stretch out and trail through his hair, then down his neck. He doesn’t acknowledge the touch, he doesn’t lean into it as he once would have, but he doesn’t move either.
“I’ve never seen it.” She says.
And, then, Vespers voice seems to come from the corner of the room:
“Even on TV,” Vesper says. “Women, inevitably, settle for men not worthy of them.”
But when he turns to the sound, of course, she’s not there.
He’d never really understood why people watched television but Vesper loved it - she watched it with an enthusiasm that belied his belief that it was a force for the passive and the idle. And so, for the first time since he’d been a small child - and even then television had not been encouraged - he had started to watch TV. Only with her, but still, in the first month of their relationship (specifically the first month of their first relationship, after he would realise that technically they had three) he had watched more TV with Vesper than he’d watched in the entire year past.
And it surprised him that he, well, he hadn’t hated it, sometimes he may have actually enjoyed it, not the shows so much as the fact that it gave you an excuse to just sit there, to relax, to not have to make conversation, to not have the pressure of someone always looking at you, gauging your reactions, to not always have the burden of being the performance. When you watched TV you’d be staring straight ahead, being together but also being alone somehow in that togetherness - and that singularity was, in this situation, acceptable.
Perhaps that was the reason he’d always loved cinema, it offered the same release, but TV made that release seem acceptable in the day to day of a relationship. And then he understood it a little, why people had their shows, why people turned the TV on and ate their dinner in front of it, why people, families, were ruled by this box.
Perhaps they didn’t want to be alone but they were no better at togetherness than he was.
“Why are we watching this?” Vesper had said, suddenly, apropos of nothing it had seemed. Perhaps it was the umpteenth resurrection or the emergence of another angel gone bad or perhaps it had finally gotten to her that in this show there would never be any space for her, for a woman to survive.
“I don’t know.” He replied. But he did know. He knew why he watched it. It was for the excuse to sit beside her in silence and to smell her hair, to run his hand up and down her leg, to just be with her without the need for him to be anything.
“This is so… stupid. All this male bonding, homoeroticism - ”
He looks at her, surprised, perhaps.
“You think I don’t know anything about anything.” She says as she rolls her eyes. “I’m more educated than you are, dropout.”
And he laughs and she laughs and they fuck in front of the television and when he walks out the door that night they’re both smiling if only for a little while.
She kisses him on the shoulder and he doesn’t react. It would be kinder, in a sense, if he actually pulled away, if he recoiled, but instead her touch seems to have no effect at all.
“Sometimes I think you take more of a beating than you need to.” Talia says to him.
She’s dressing the wounds that he can’t reach, the ones on the back and on the side. One of them has ripped apart again and she puts the stiches in. She presses alcohol over it and holds down tight. Another one has started to seep, the mucus is unattractive but the smell is worse. The skin around it is red and the colour is spreading. She doesn’t wince, she doesn’t worry, she isn’t concerned - this is the way life is, the way it has always been and the way it will always be.
"Just enough." He replies.
She’s surprised he answers her, most of the time he doesn’t bother, she talks and he says very little. It doesn’t bother her, he’s always been quiet, and he’s always been solitary. He’s not the performing monkey they know him as - she remembers days when he’d go without speaking at all.
“You need to stop this, Beloved. You need to let yourself go home.” She says.
And he doesn’t respond, not that time, the silence continues and sometimes she’ll try to break it with a comment, sometimes with a question. She doesn’t expect him to answer; he was never much of a conversationalist -
Though sometimes, such a long time ago, in what feels more than thirty years past, she’d sit with them and listen and they’d talk, and sometimes in those moments neither man seemed so solitary, or so silent. In those moments she’d wondered if she’d ever known her father at all, if she really knew her lover.
“You’ve got an infection.” She says.
“I’m aware.” He replies.
And on the television Darren and Samantha kiss.
Across the city The Joker plays with what is left of his new friend and The Scarecrow watches the shadows dance across the wall and shudders at the sight of them and Victor Zsasz sleeps and dreams of a girl he saw yesterday and he dreams of her as she will be soon, he dreams of her broken and bloody and nothing but his and on the television Samantha and Darren kiss.
And for a moment Bruce Wayne smiles.