Fic: July 15th 2010
“He can’t be trusted.” Bruce says to Talia. It’s offhand the way he says it, a mere statement of fact, a fact said with such confidence that it’s clearly self-evident, unquestionable, the only conclusion he could possibly have come to. “The pity of it is he so wants to be, he wants to be worthy, and he wants to be loyal. But he can’t. He is who he is. Norman Osborn’s son.”
“He loves you.” Talia says.
Perhaps she’s softened over the years, they say motherhood does that to a person, brings forward your latent tenderness, but Bruce reads the words as a test.
“He doesn’t know me.” He replies. And that is true, even now Harry doesn’t know him, even as Harry tries to reconcile the Bruce he had imagined with the Bruce he’s now faced with, he doesn’t really know him. Bruce suspects he doesn’t want to.
To know Bruce Wayne isn’t to love him.
And somewhere in the back of his mind Bruce remembers Vesper’s fury; he remembers her angry words at the point at which she’s pieced it all together.
”Everything about you is a lie.” Vesper had said.
To know him was not to love him.
And Talia is smiling a gentle smile, that smile is not a test, that smile is a sedative. Bruce knows that smile well.
“Not many people do, beloved.”
This is what she wants, what she needs. To be his trusted confidant. To be the one he turns to, the one he relies on, the one person who can hold him together and propel him forward. She is that person, she believes that and perhaps he’s now moving past his childish tantrums, beyond his self-imposed purgatory and perhaps he’s now realising that as well.
They sit there, together, in a car that cost less than even one of Bruce Wayne’s shoes, a car that smells of sweat and dogs and Tabaco, they sit there parked in a back alley and they wait together for one of Matches Malone’s contacts and while they sit there in the business of being other than who they really are, Talia thinks, that they are in so many ways more themselves than either has been in years.
He’s silent. But she can trust his silence. It is who he is and it is who she loves.
“He can’t be trusted - “ She finally prompts.
And she sees Bruce’s jaw tighten, she sees his distaste for the very conclusion he’s come to.
“He’s an unpredictable drug addict.” He says to her. “Insecure. Weak. Always trying to fit in, always looking to be loved. One day a family man, the next a doctor - he has no clue who he is, he has no idea what he stands for - and people who have no idea what they stand for…”
He lets the thought hang there. He waits for Talia to continue it.
“They’re easily swayed, easily tempted. Their loyalty can be bought.” She finally says.
“Right.” He agrees. “Not with money - that’s too blatant, he wouldn’t like what that said about him, it wouldn’t fit with his notion of himself. And the way a person sees himself is a powerful force.”
Talia, encouraged, perhaps by this confidence, closes the gap between them, leans into him, leans into his words.
“I know you care for him, Bruce.” She says, gently, oh so gently. Beware of The Demons Daughter when she shows her softer side. You’d be better off letting the Trojan horse through your gates.
“Yes,” He shrugs, the voice is so cold and Talia finds it comforting in a way. This is the man he was meant to be. This is the son her father had wanted, this was the potential, the ruthlessness he had seen in him. “But there’s no room for it in the life I’ve chosen. He is who he is - and I can’t blame him for it, but he’s a liability now.”
“What will you do?”
“What is necessary.” He replies.
Years later - after Jason has come and gone, and come back again (it took that long for Bruce to really understand what he had done, it took so much for him to realise it, death itself wasn’t enough) - years later he’ll realise how close Harry came to being Jason. Not Dick and not Tim, but Jason. How easily it could have been Harry who felt the force of that crowbar (felt the force of that failure). If Harry had been a little younger when he realised what Bruce was, just a little younger, a little more alienated and a little less sure of his own path, perhaps it would have been him, perhaps it would have been Harry who became so caught up in the mess of -
But it wasn’t.
And this is a long time before the rest of it. This was a time before Dick and before Jason - before the idea of a Robin even seemed like a possibility. And if told that is how it would all unfold Bruce wouldn’t believe it. How could he believe it? Believing as he always did that he walked this road to protect others from a burden only he could carry - how could he believe how it would end and how the mantle of the Batman would become something people fought for the right to hold? How it became something deserved and something earned - how The Batman became something more than him. And how, in a way, he had infected the people around him.
Which is what he’d always wanted, the Batman to be more than the sum of Bruce Wayne, the Batman to stand for more than the sum of one man. The Batman to be immortal, to be of legend, to be an ideal that could not die, that could not be killed. It was what he had always wanted and yet, if told what would happen, later, so much later, then he could not imagine it. Then again, who could ever really imagine their own end?
And it isn’t Harry that ends that way, at the Joker’s hand. Harry has found his own path and so if, years later, he does feel anger towards Bruce, at least he’ll feel that anger from a position of independence, not from the futility of always struggling to prove that. If, years later, he cannot forgive the lies and world Bruce pushed him into, well at least he will hold his grudge as a man. And, if years later, Harry finds his life is a mess, his world is a shambles and his reality is skewed to the point where all he can see is the world the rest of us steadfastly ensure remains below the surface, then if that is the life finds himself in, then at least it will be his own mess. At least he will not live perpetually trapped in a mess of Bruce’s making always wondering why it doesn’t quite fit, always wondering why he was never quite what was needed. At least the mess will be Harry’s own - and anyone who has made a mess of their life will know that in a way that isn’t such a small consolation.
Years later it will be Jason that breaks Bruce’s heart a little. Harry will never do that. Harry will have his own life, for better or for worse.
But this is not years later.
“Harry may no longer be of use.” He says. “But OsCorp’s another matter.”
And Talia smiles.
This is what she’d always wanted, to be his confidant, his right hand man. All she ever wanted. And from here, from this point, from this decision - which has to be the point of no return - perhaps then it will be the time to explain things. To explain her own betrayal, to look not only for forgiveness but for a future for all three of them. In the end, she thinks, they will both get what they always wanted. All three of them.
“Wayne may no longer be a viable option - “ She says.
“But OsCorp remains a wealth of untapped potential.” He agrees. He finally returns the smile.
And later, that night, he smiles at Harry. A different smile this time. An entirely different one.
“Let’s go for a drive.” Matches Malone says.
Harry looks at him and perhaps in that look there is a moment of suspicion. A premonition of the danger he is in. An understanding, finally, that he’s never known this man at all.
And Matches just smiles.
“It’s better for us,” And it’s the us that gets to her, it’s the us that makes her vulnerable. There had been a time, not really as long ago as it felt like, that everything had been couched in an idea of us, “for our interests, if Osborn is just.. away. Somewhere remote, isolated, an impromptu vacation - rehab - aid work - I like that, doing aid work - somewhere remote - somewhere dangerous. Somewhere that he can still conduct urgent business, make high level decisions, but he can’t be easily reached, not easily contacted.”
And then he reaches across her into the glove box and pulls out a set of papers.
“Keep him busy today.” He says to her. “I need you to keep him busy today.”
And Talia watches Bruce sign the forms with a perfect imitation of Harry’s hand. He does it so easily; it flows as if he’s been doing it for years. Talia has to wonder if this is the first time Bruce has done this, or if, perhaps, he’s been taking the liberty ever since Harry became involved in his life.
“Keep Talia busy tonight.” He says.
He, Bruce, not Bruce - Bruce is there and he’s not there, he’s in a strange state between being Bruce Wayne - whoever that is, it’s becoming increasingly uncertain if anyone knows - and becoming Matches Malone. Tight jeans are pulled on, grease is pushed through hair, and scars appear. It’s a methodological, painstaking process, the creation of identities, this ridiculous and never-ending Halloween.
And the look Harry gives him seems to say: how am I expected to do that? Or at least that’s how Bruce reads it.
“You could try a medical emergency,” Bruce says, tone mild. “But I’m not sure that would hold her interest and, don’t sell yourself short, it’s not your only forte.”
And there you have it, Harry. There it is, in that remark that’s the closest he’s going to come to expressing any injury felt. It’s there though, in that remark, in the cattiness of it, it’s a cattiness out of character, not part of his demeanour or his act, it’s against the grain. And isn’t in just those moments that the cracks show? The cracks are showing that’s for sure, they’re becoming more and more apparent with every day that passes. The constant irritation, the nightmares, the absurd inability to see any way other than he’s own. Or perhaps these cracks aren’t new, perhaps they’re just the Bruce Harry has always been shielded from.
“You’re a talented guy, Pumpkin.” And the tone is still mild, controlled, no hint of venom, all that anger that Harry must realise by now just sits right below the surface, all that fury, all that heat, it doesn’t rest in his voice, it doesn’t rest in the casual way he sits on the bed slipping each contact into and over blue eyes. “Why not put those God given talents to some good use?”
But the anger sits in those words. The words are unkind and they’re hard and they’re unforgiving.
Bruce, not Bruce, laughs.
“It’s a little too late for moral objections, Kiddo. They didn’t seem to bother you before.”
And the voice is already changing, the slight accent, broader and thicker than his own refined elocution, Bruce Wayne is slipping away, you can barely see that little boy who wanted to be Zorro, who ran through Wayne Manor, who loved dinosaurs and always had hated clowns, who sometimes laughed at jokes he didn’t understand because he could tell he was supposed to. You just can’t see that boy anymore. But really, how long has it been since that boy was around?
“Just keep her busy today.” Matches Malone says. And then he’s out the door.
They drive out, that night, Bruce and Harry, way out past the city, past the suburbs that surround it, to the edge of the city.
“My mother had a sports car.” He says to Harry. “It was, would you believe it, fire engine red. It makes anything Stark drives look like a little kid’s toy.”
It seems such a careless remark, nothing more but a faded memory, nothing important. But how often has Bruce mentioned her in the time Harry’s known him? Maybe a handful, four or five times at best. And usually in a way that is not somehow connected to the franchise she’s become, The Martha Wayne Foundation, not a person, not a memory, just a label used to invoke sympathy in others, a certain type of sympathy, a sympathy that is tied to their purse strings? Has he ever mentioned her in this way? Has he ever referenced her as a living breathing person filled with life?
“It wasn’t a family car, two seats, no roof. She’d drive it with the top down even when the weather looked to turn bad. She loved that car. And some days she’d take me driving in it and we’d drive for so long I’d never be sure when she was going to turn back - we weren’t going anywhere, we were just driving. She loved that car. She loved to drive.“
They drive through the gates to Wayne Manor and it stands there, destitute and abandoned and not the home either of them knew. It’s lonely and it’s isolated and Bruce has come to see it as an extension of himself and he hates this place and he loves it and he hides from it, even as he has it rebuilt, he hides from it in his apartment above the city that isn’t a home but at least isn’t this.
Harry’s quiet beside him.
And the next morning before even the early risers, the gym junkies and the hassled mothers are up, Talia meets him in the Narrows and they pay a man called Skid to get rid of the car. There’s a stain on the seat. Skid doesn’t mention it. Neither does Talia. They’ve both seen worse, they both know that’s how it goes, how life is, how it ends. And in the end the car is reduced to a small scrap of metal and they pay the guy and they go and they eat Chinese food in a small place with dirty tables and great food where all the taxi drivers go at the end of the nightshift. They joke about something that happened over ten years ago, they pass over something they’ve seen on the news and they don’t mention Harry. Not even once.
He and Harry drive to the docks, they pass the club Falcone used to frequent so many years ago, the windows are boarded, the walls covered in graffiti and Bruce stops for a moment outside as he sees a shadow, a ghost, fall out of the club, pushed, and stumble into the world knowing nothing more than the fact he cannot stand it anymore.
They drive to the docks.
“This is it.” Bruce says. He leans across him, opens the door.
Bruce places a hand on his arm; it’s an order, just as everything from Bruce is a command. Once he’d taken Vesper’s arm like that, it wasn’t a hard grip, barely a grip at all, it wasn’t tight, it wasn’t harsh, it would have been easy enough for her to shrug off. To shrug off iteratively and figuratively. It could have been interpreted as an affection almost, a way of bridging a gap between two people in the way we do it best, by touch, because after all we are of the tangible, we crave it and are lost without it - it could have been interpreted in so many other ways. But she saw it for what it was, she saw it for the violence that it was and she did not let it slide.
“Ever touch me like that again, Bruce.” She said. “Ever lay your hand on me like that again - and that will be the last time you touch me at all.”
And in that one moment he saw it for what it was as well and he’d felt shame.
“I’m sorry.” He’d said. How many times had he said that in his life? How many times would he? Not as many as you’d think all things considered.
“I know.” She’d said but the cool wasn’t gone. When a man laid hands on you there was no room left for a gentle self, for sympathy or consideration for them. She’d realised that a while ago.
He stops Harry, then, a hand on his arm; it’s an order, just as everything from Bruce is a command.
“I owe you this.” He says. “If you have something to say to me, something to ask - do it now.”
He’s not sure what he’s expecting. The ultimate question, perhaps. The Why? The immense and all-encompassing why. Perhaps he wants that question, even though he wouldn’t know how to answer it.
"You don't owe me anything, Bruce.” Harry says, finally. “You've never owed me anything. I just hope you know if you'd decided to tell me about this instead of my finding out the way I did, I would have tried to understand.”
And there it is, Harry Osborn, still, at this point, being so appallingly understanding, so trusting that Bruce’s motives were pure even if his actions had not been. In the end perhaps Harry would never have been Jason at all.
“I’ll be seeing you.” Bruce replies.
“For whatever it's worth,” Harry says. “I get why you didn't want me to know."
In the end perhaps Harry Osborn would never had ended up like Jason did. Or in the end, perhaps, it would have been his endless faith and trust that made that bitterness and anger and resentment and destruction truly possible.
Harry walks towards the dock, towards the cargo ship, and Bruce watches him go, and for a moment it feels as if time has done a savage loop, as if time doesn’t just progress inevitably in one direction but as if it trips over itself constantly refusing to let the past be the past refusing to be forgotten refusing to let the future be fresh and new.
“He loves you.” Talia says.
Perhaps she’s softened over the years, they say motherhood does that to a person, brings forward your latent tenderness, but Bruce reads the words as a test.
“He doesn’t know me.” He replies. And that is true, even now Harry doesn’t know him, even as Harry tries to reconcile the Bruce he had imagined with the Bruce he’s now faced with, he doesn’t really know him. Bruce suspects he doesn’t want to.
To know Bruce Wayne isn’t to love him.
And somewhere in the back of his mind Bruce remembers Vesper’s fury; he remembers her angry words at the point at which she’s pieced it all together.
”Everything about you is a lie.” Vesper had said.
To know him was not to love him.
And Talia is smiling a gentle smile, that smile is not a test, that smile is a sedative. Bruce knows that smile well.
“Not many people do, beloved.”
This is what she wants, what she needs. To be his trusted confidant. To be the one he turns to, the one he relies on, the one person who can hold him together and propel him forward. She is that person, she believes that and perhaps he’s now moving past his childish tantrums, beyond his self-imposed purgatory and perhaps he’s now realising that as well.
They sit there, together, in a car that cost less than even one of Bruce Wayne’s shoes, a car that smells of sweat and dogs and Tabaco, they sit there parked in a back alley and they wait together for one of Matches Malone’s contacts and while they sit there in the business of being other than who they really are, Talia thinks, that they are in so many ways more themselves than either has been in years.
He’s silent. But she can trust his silence. It is who he is and it is who she loves.
“He can’t be trusted - “ She finally prompts.
And she sees Bruce’s jaw tighten, she sees his distaste for the very conclusion he’s come to.
“He’s an unpredictable drug addict.” He says to her. “Insecure. Weak. Always trying to fit in, always looking to be loved. One day a family man, the next a doctor - he has no clue who he is, he has no idea what he stands for - and people who have no idea what they stand for…”
He lets the thought hang there. He waits for Talia to continue it.
“They’re easily swayed, easily tempted. Their loyalty can be bought.” She finally says.
“Right.” He agrees. “Not with money - that’s too blatant, he wouldn’t like what that said about him, it wouldn’t fit with his notion of himself. And the way a person sees himself is a powerful force.”
Talia, encouraged, perhaps by this confidence, closes the gap between them, leans into him, leans into his words.
“I know you care for him, Bruce.” She says, gently, oh so gently. Beware of The Demons Daughter when she shows her softer side. You’d be better off letting the Trojan horse through your gates.
“Yes,” He shrugs, the voice is so cold and Talia finds it comforting in a way. This is the man he was meant to be. This is the son her father had wanted, this was the potential, the ruthlessness he had seen in him. “But there’s no room for it in the life I’ve chosen. He is who he is - and I can’t blame him for it, but he’s a liability now.”
“What will you do?”
“What is necessary.” He replies.
Years later - after Jason has come and gone, and come back again (it took that long for Bruce to really understand what he had done, it took so much for him to realise it, death itself wasn’t enough) - years later he’ll realise how close Harry came to being Jason. Not Dick and not Tim, but Jason. How easily it could have been Harry who felt the force of that crowbar (felt the force of that failure). If Harry had been a little younger when he realised what Bruce was, just a little younger, a little more alienated and a little less sure of his own path, perhaps it would have been him, perhaps it would have been Harry who became so caught up in the mess of -
But it wasn’t.
And this is a long time before the rest of it. This was a time before Dick and before Jason - before the idea of a Robin even seemed like a possibility. And if told that is how it would all unfold Bruce wouldn’t believe it. How could he believe it? Believing as he always did that he walked this road to protect others from a burden only he could carry - how could he believe how it would end and how the mantle of the Batman would become something people fought for the right to hold? How it became something deserved and something earned - how The Batman became something more than him. And how, in a way, he had infected the people around him.
Which is what he’d always wanted, the Batman to be more than the sum of Bruce Wayne, the Batman to stand for more than the sum of one man. The Batman to be immortal, to be of legend, to be an ideal that could not die, that could not be killed. It was what he had always wanted and yet, if told what would happen, later, so much later, then he could not imagine it. Then again, who could ever really imagine their own end?
And it isn’t Harry that ends that way, at the Joker’s hand. Harry has found his own path and so if, years later, he does feel anger towards Bruce, at least he’ll feel that anger from a position of independence, not from the futility of always struggling to prove that. If, years later, he cannot forgive the lies and world Bruce pushed him into, well at least he will hold his grudge as a man. And, if years later, Harry finds his life is a mess, his world is a shambles and his reality is skewed to the point where all he can see is the world the rest of us steadfastly ensure remains below the surface, then if that is the life finds himself in, then at least it will be his own mess. At least he will not live perpetually trapped in a mess of Bruce’s making always wondering why it doesn’t quite fit, always wondering why he was never quite what was needed. At least the mess will be Harry’s own - and anyone who has made a mess of their life will know that in a way that isn’t such a small consolation.
Years later it will be Jason that breaks Bruce’s heart a little. Harry will never do that. Harry will have his own life, for better or for worse.
But this is not years later.
“Harry may no longer be of use.” He says. “But OsCorp’s another matter.”
And Talia smiles.
This is what she’d always wanted, to be his confidant, his right hand man. All she ever wanted. And from here, from this point, from this decision - which has to be the point of no return - perhaps then it will be the time to explain things. To explain her own betrayal, to look not only for forgiveness but for a future for all three of them. In the end, she thinks, they will both get what they always wanted. All three of them.
“Wayne may no longer be a viable option - “ She says.
“But OsCorp remains a wealth of untapped potential.” He agrees. He finally returns the smile.
And later, that night, he smiles at Harry. A different smile this time. An entirely different one.
“Let’s go for a drive.” Matches Malone says.
Harry looks at him and perhaps in that look there is a moment of suspicion. A premonition of the danger he is in. An understanding, finally, that he’s never known this man at all.
And Matches just smiles.
“It’s better for us,” And it’s the us that gets to her, it’s the us that makes her vulnerable. There had been a time, not really as long ago as it felt like, that everything had been couched in an idea of us, “for our interests, if Osborn is just.. away. Somewhere remote, isolated, an impromptu vacation - rehab - aid work - I like that, doing aid work - somewhere remote - somewhere dangerous. Somewhere that he can still conduct urgent business, make high level decisions, but he can’t be easily reached, not easily contacted.”
And then he reaches across her into the glove box and pulls out a set of papers.
“Keep him busy today.” He says to her. “I need you to keep him busy today.”
And Talia watches Bruce sign the forms with a perfect imitation of Harry’s hand. He does it so easily; it flows as if he’s been doing it for years. Talia has to wonder if this is the first time Bruce has done this, or if, perhaps, he’s been taking the liberty ever since Harry became involved in his life.
“Keep Talia busy tonight.” He says.
He, Bruce, not Bruce - Bruce is there and he’s not there, he’s in a strange state between being Bruce Wayne - whoever that is, it’s becoming increasingly uncertain if anyone knows - and becoming Matches Malone. Tight jeans are pulled on, grease is pushed through hair, and scars appear. It’s a methodological, painstaking process, the creation of identities, this ridiculous and never-ending Halloween.
And the look Harry gives him seems to say: how am I expected to do that? Or at least that’s how Bruce reads it.
“You could try a medical emergency,” Bruce says, tone mild. “But I’m not sure that would hold her interest and, don’t sell yourself short, it’s not your only forte.”
And there you have it, Harry. There it is, in that remark that’s the closest he’s going to come to expressing any injury felt. It’s there though, in that remark, in the cattiness of it, it’s a cattiness out of character, not part of his demeanour or his act, it’s against the grain. And isn’t in just those moments that the cracks show? The cracks are showing that’s for sure, they’re becoming more and more apparent with every day that passes. The constant irritation, the nightmares, the absurd inability to see any way other than he’s own. Or perhaps these cracks aren’t new, perhaps they’re just the Bruce Harry has always been shielded from.
“You’re a talented guy, Pumpkin.” And the tone is still mild, controlled, no hint of venom, all that anger that Harry must realise by now just sits right below the surface, all that fury, all that heat, it doesn’t rest in his voice, it doesn’t rest in the casual way he sits on the bed slipping each contact into and over blue eyes. “Why not put those God given talents to some good use?”
But the anger sits in those words. The words are unkind and they’re hard and they’re unforgiving.
Bruce, not Bruce, laughs.
“It’s a little too late for moral objections, Kiddo. They didn’t seem to bother you before.”
And the voice is already changing, the slight accent, broader and thicker than his own refined elocution, Bruce Wayne is slipping away, you can barely see that little boy who wanted to be Zorro, who ran through Wayne Manor, who loved dinosaurs and always had hated clowns, who sometimes laughed at jokes he didn’t understand because he could tell he was supposed to. You just can’t see that boy anymore. But really, how long has it been since that boy was around?
“Just keep her busy today.” Matches Malone says. And then he’s out the door.
They drive out, that night, Bruce and Harry, way out past the city, past the suburbs that surround it, to the edge of the city.
“My mother had a sports car.” He says to Harry. “It was, would you believe it, fire engine red. It makes anything Stark drives look like a little kid’s toy.”
It seems such a careless remark, nothing more but a faded memory, nothing important. But how often has Bruce mentioned her in the time Harry’s known him? Maybe a handful, four or five times at best. And usually in a way that is not somehow connected to the franchise she’s become, The Martha Wayne Foundation, not a person, not a memory, just a label used to invoke sympathy in others, a certain type of sympathy, a sympathy that is tied to their purse strings? Has he ever mentioned her in this way? Has he ever referenced her as a living breathing person filled with life?
“It wasn’t a family car, two seats, no roof. She’d drive it with the top down even when the weather looked to turn bad. She loved that car. And some days she’d take me driving in it and we’d drive for so long I’d never be sure when she was going to turn back - we weren’t going anywhere, we were just driving. She loved that car. She loved to drive.“
They drive through the gates to Wayne Manor and it stands there, destitute and abandoned and not the home either of them knew. It’s lonely and it’s isolated and Bruce has come to see it as an extension of himself and he hates this place and he loves it and he hides from it, even as he has it rebuilt, he hides from it in his apartment above the city that isn’t a home but at least isn’t this.
Harry’s quiet beside him.
And the next morning before even the early risers, the gym junkies and the hassled mothers are up, Talia meets him in the Narrows and they pay a man called Skid to get rid of the car. There’s a stain on the seat. Skid doesn’t mention it. Neither does Talia. They’ve both seen worse, they both know that’s how it goes, how life is, how it ends. And in the end the car is reduced to a small scrap of metal and they pay the guy and they go and they eat Chinese food in a small place with dirty tables and great food where all the taxi drivers go at the end of the nightshift. They joke about something that happened over ten years ago, they pass over something they’ve seen on the news and they don’t mention Harry. Not even once.
He and Harry drive to the docks, they pass the club Falcone used to frequent so many years ago, the windows are boarded, the walls covered in graffiti and Bruce stops for a moment outside as he sees a shadow, a ghost, fall out of the club, pushed, and stumble into the world knowing nothing more than the fact he cannot stand it anymore.
They drive to the docks.
“This is it.” Bruce says. He leans across him, opens the door.
Bruce places a hand on his arm; it’s an order, just as everything from Bruce is a command. Once he’d taken Vesper’s arm like that, it wasn’t a hard grip, barely a grip at all, it wasn’t tight, it wasn’t harsh, it would have been easy enough for her to shrug off. To shrug off iteratively and figuratively. It could have been interpreted as an affection almost, a way of bridging a gap between two people in the way we do it best, by touch, because after all we are of the tangible, we crave it and are lost without it - it could have been interpreted in so many other ways. But she saw it for what it was, she saw it for the violence that it was and she did not let it slide.
“Ever touch me like that again, Bruce.” She said. “Ever lay your hand on me like that again - and that will be the last time you touch me at all.”
And in that one moment he saw it for what it was as well and he’d felt shame.
“I’m sorry.” He’d said. How many times had he said that in his life? How many times would he? Not as many as you’d think all things considered.
“I know.” She’d said but the cool wasn’t gone. When a man laid hands on you there was no room left for a gentle self, for sympathy or consideration for them. She’d realised that a while ago.
He stops Harry, then, a hand on his arm; it’s an order, just as everything from Bruce is a command.
“I owe you this.” He says. “If you have something to say to me, something to ask - do it now.”
He’s not sure what he’s expecting. The ultimate question, perhaps. The Why? The immense and all-encompassing why. Perhaps he wants that question, even though he wouldn’t know how to answer it.
"You don't owe me anything, Bruce.” Harry says, finally. “You've never owed me anything. I just hope you know if you'd decided to tell me about this instead of my finding out the way I did, I would have tried to understand.”
And there it is, Harry Osborn, still, at this point, being so appallingly understanding, so trusting that Bruce’s motives were pure even if his actions had not been. In the end perhaps Harry would never have been Jason at all.
“I’ll be seeing you.” Bruce replies.
“For whatever it's worth,” Harry says. “I get why you didn't want me to know."
In the end perhaps Harry Osborn would never had ended up like Jason did. Or in the end, perhaps, it would have been his endless faith and trust that made that bitterness and anger and resentment and destruction truly possible.
Harry walks towards the dock, towards the cargo ship, and Bruce watches him go, and for a moment it feels as if time has done a savage loop, as if time doesn’t just progress inevitably in one direction but as if it trips over itself constantly refusing to let the past be the past refusing to be forgotten refusing to let the future be fresh and new.