Down the rabbit hole and into Xanadu.
As a child Bruce had always imagined himself, re-imagined himself, as an adventurer. Solitary of disposition, these adventures, more often than not, were pursued alone. He’d disappear into the grounds that surrounded their home (he was young enough then just to call it home) or perhaps into the basement or the attic and he’d emerge hours later,
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He's long believed in charm, some call it flirtation,as a means to an end. The objective, and there's always an objective, every interaction has a set of objectives on both sides of the exchange whether the participants are aware and admit it or not, and the objective is always best obtained by ensuring the other person wants you to have your way.
Sure, you can use force (brutality), or fear (the threat of brutality), or plain old deception (just take what you want and get out of there before they realise it's gone) and sure all those have their place. But if you can make the other want to give you your way it's far more effective in the long run. The thing people don't seem to realise is that for The Batman brutality is the last solution in a world gone mad. It is what you turn to when all else has failed you.
And charm is what October gets now.
"I'm... " And he smiles again, eyes flicking to her fangs and back. "Edward. Edward Jakobs. It's a pleasure to meet you."
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The name makes her laugh again- "You poor thing," -but she's still amused so this is still a game she's willing to go on playing, at least for a while. Besides, he's cute and he has got to be ballsy to try and sell that one; she's not immune to a pretty face with a big set of brass ones. Sure, he's a little rough, but she's never objected to that in a man. (...girl.)
"All right, I'm up for it. But only 'cause I feel bad for you-" she's kidding, the last time October felt bad for somebody was 'never', "-you must be like catnip to the Twimoms."
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He laughs as well and there's nothing threatening, nothing aggressive about it, for a guy as big as his is (and as roughed up as he is) he comes across as strangely harmless.
"I'm not against pity if it pays for my coffee."
Falling into pace with her he continues:
"I am quite popular with the Twi-Mom demographic - though those Harry Potter fans just walk right past, barely look twice. I'm not sure what that's about. ... Can I use your phone?"
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October eyes him for a second, assessing - but she doesn't know he's fucking Batman and she does know that he almost certainly wouldn't see it coming if she tore out his throat with her teeth. (Not that she plans on doing anything unprovoked in Xanadu - or anywhere, Val's got all these fucking rules - but sometimes a girl needs to know she can handle her shit.)
She tosses her phone up in the air for him to catch, digging out her cigarettes in the process (she has a profound indifference to whether or not anyone minds her smoking, and doesn't ask if he'd be bothered). "You're running up a bill here," she says, flicking her zippo. "I'm October, by the way."
The phone's background is a snapshot in a bar of four girls (one of them October) somewhere around their late teens or early twenties; two blondes, two brunettes. The other blonde (Mo) looks so sweet-natured she's out of place with the other three - one of the brunettes (Astrid) looks like she might knife a guy in the dick for existing and the last (Val) is...well, she's something else entirely.
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"A pleasure, October." He says as he catches the phone. "I've always liked those names on women - though you never meet anyone called December. I wonder why that is."
He gives the picture on the front, her posse - he thinks to himself, just a cursory glance. Nice girls, he thinks. Even Astrid. They're just girls. Life is hard for girls. It's not bad if they know how to take care of themselves.
But then, considering the women Bruce has known, actually, the people Bruce has known, he's not much of a judge of nice.
He dials Alfred first but the connection won't go through. He tries Lucius. Same deal. Out of habit and a sort of sentiment he can't really place he then tries Julie - still the same robotic line says the number is not connected.
Beneath the shadow growing on his face the jaw is starting to set. He's holding the phone with a little more tension than is necessary. He tries Alan in the end and has the same result.
He deletes the recent call logs from her phone before handing it back.
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Looks like bad news. October wonders about that, but only in passing - a catlike kind of curiosity that will slide away when something else catches her notice - and she tucks her phone back into her coat (nails are black but it's chipping, there was silver underneath, maybe she just paints over instead of redoing sometimes) and blows smoke out through the gap between her fangs.
"Lost, huh?" She's not...sympathetic, per se, but it's not unkind, at least. She's good company until she's not any more, this one.
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It takes effort to unset his jaw, the relax the grip his fingers have found around his hand.
"It's fine." He says, but the words come out hard and a little too resolute.
He tries again.
"It's nothing."
The voice sounds easy again.
"But I could do with that coffee."
He suddenly realises how cold he actually is. And has to wonder how the rain and the elements are barely registering on this October at all.
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At a closer examination (should he care to take one) it's not so much that she's unaffected as she doesn't seem to care that she's cold and a bit damp. Maybe it's the alcohol in her system (and there's definitely alcohol in her system - she's not drunk, but she's warm and buzzy), maybe it's just that she picks and chooses what she intends to give a fuck about and when.
"C'mon," she says, swinging around to twirl her next step away, "I know a place."
She's barely known about Xanadu for a few weeks, but of course, she already knows a place.
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He follows, hands in pockets, hood around his face, his feet are freezing, perhaps he should have kept the suit after all - though, when you're The Batman there's no chance of subtlety, really. You can't just ask a girl to coffee or the like. For all the avenues The Batman opens up (and they're invaluable) there's others he cuts off.
Sometimes it's better to be Bruce Wayne.
Edward Jakobs.
"Where are you from? What part of England?"
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"East Dulwich - in London, yeah?" East Dulwich, with its clubs and nightlife and unfortunate criminal statistics, knows October and those girls he saw on her phone as the wolf pack, an informal girl gang you best not consider fucking about with. She's from Reading, where she lived in a nice house with nice parents who had a nice daughter...and then this, this girl who didn't need to be born anything but human to be a monster inside. "C'mon, Eddie-" she just does things, sometimes, "-it's just around here."
'It' is a hole-in-the-wall bar and café; whatever it's built out of, she isn't sure, looks like red ceramic or something but isn't, circular with no edges, burning lamps set in alcoves in the walls and tables with armchairs. It's the kind of place that appeals to October's old school attitudes, and she leans over the counter while she's ordering them both coffee (she bets he takes it black) like she's right at home.
She can't know them that well here, so maybe it's just how October rolls.
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He's surprised to find a place like this open in the middle of the night, he'd been expecting a diner, the kind of place where a matronly woman who would have been gorgeous in her day wore a tag near her breasts that says 'Marge'.
Bruce, Eddie sits down on a chair, his legs crossed underneath him, in a yoga-like pose not the staple of most grown people, not the staple of men at all - but it's warmer this way, his feet, he realises with a tinge of detachment, are a pale shade of blue.
There's funky little tea-lights on the tables, mismatched, deliberately mismatched, he suspects. The whole place is deliberately mismatched down to the cups themselves.
"The only thing I remember about London was the cocaine was cheap."
This is, of course not true, well, not entirely. The coke had been cheap in the day and in his youth, before he had ran, he'd spent his brief stunt in the UK, riding the tube, not attending class, he'd never been a Tony Stark, his wild child antics were more contained, his breakdowns never public, but he does remember a few months spent surrounded by a lot of beautiful people coking their tits off.
It is not, of course, the only thing he remembers.
"That and the tube. When the tube made you homicidal my girlfriend would say it was the time to get the hell out of London, right?"
He remembers other things. He remembers everything. And he's been back since. Sometimes as Bruce Wayne. Other times as Matches Malone. More often as Hemmingford-Grey. Once or twice as The Batman.
But what can he tell her about any of that.
"She was right. Some days you'd just feel it inside you - time to get out of there."
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A slow afternoon at work makes October homicidal, but that's not the kind of thing you tell cute men who want you to buy them coffee and talk about your new hometown (at least not the first time you meet them...), so she takes her coat off and wraps her hands around her coffee mug (so she did notice the cold) and laughs, because when isn't she laughing?
She suits this place.
"This place is all the way out. Me and the girls, we crashed this Christmas party-" it was all very genteel until they got there, and then they adopted Ben Kenobi and used him as the focal point for a distraction that Stelios promised he'd take all the blame for, "-which is one fuck of an introduction, yeah? It's like being high all the time around here."
She was a little high that time, actually; not now, and the buzz from the shots she did earlier is already hitting its come down. Coffee will help, but it's not like she gets civilized.
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He leans back in his chair and brings his legs up against him, it's not a defensive posture, it's purely functional - directing all the warmth of his body to it's core.
The arms will take care of themselves.
"One fuck of an introduction, indeed."
He drinks from the mug.
"High all the time? You must be right at home."
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"Sassy. Yeah, well - not complaining, am I?" No, quite the opposite. Besides, they've got all sorts of interesting things lined up around this place; it's a place worth cultivating, even if the pods of roving sky whales (and that one guy who rides around on one? what's with that?) are trippy the first time.
After a while you can get used to just about anything. Normal is a relative concept.
(October is nobody's definition of normal.)
"London, though- I like London. It gets in under the skin." Sort of like how he said.
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"I've been called worse."
Much worse.
"You been through Asia? I prefer Asia. I could have hidden out there forever."
Except, in the end, he couldn't.
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"What, you really antisocial or something?" she teases him - as if she can't tell that yeah, he certainly seems like the type. October's not exactly living on the same, sane plane of reality as everyone else around her, but she's not so far out in her own world that she can't pick up on anything. He seems like the kind of guy who never thinks it's your business. "No, I never got that far - yet!"
She's going to Rome, soon, but not on holiday.
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