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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Xanadu at night is almost utterly foreign to him--he prefers to limit his excursions to daylight hours, or perhaps has more occasion to wander during those times. In any case, he selects a cluster of lights and heads for them, pausing beneath awnings for a brief respite from the rain.
Alan nearly walks by the man, huddled as he is in a darkened doorway. Even when he does register the man's presence, the more sensible portion of his decision-making apparatus urges him to continue on. He wouldn't approach a stranger on an abandoned street on a rainy night in Boston--to do so here, in a city where the lines between realities blur, is beyond folly.
But instead he hesitates, steps closer. What had been a nagging sense of familiarity becomes recognition; he has to stop himself from greeting Bruce by name.
(He's acquainted enough with the Nexus by now to know someone can look like a Bruce, talk like a Bruce, even answer to 'Bruce' without being the Bruce he knows.)
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"Alan,"
He says in that Bruce-like way that, when unfiltered, unchecked, somehow turns every sentence, every word, into a quasi-command as if his will knows no other way to conduct itself. In a way it's a compliment, this lack of filter, lack of pretence, but Alan might be forgiven for not finding it flattering.
"I'm surprised," He says. "That it's you. I thought maybe Alfred, or Lucius. Or Henri - I thought maybe Henri. But it's you."
Bruce stands up, looks Alan over for a sign of what he signifies. For something different. Some layer of meaning. He finds none.
"I'm glad it's you. I never would have thought I would be. But I'm glad it's you."
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"Bruce." He smiles, tentative but genuine, and moves too late to offer Bruce a hand up (not that Bruce would have availed himself of it anyway). "I, on the other hand, am always less surprised than I should be to find you a bloody mess. Here." He begins to remove his coat.
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Knights. Practitioners of magic. Clowns. Sounds like a regular day on the streets of Gotham.
“That’s hardly fair. I’m usually better presented than you.”
This might be true, by a margin, Alan is well groomed but Bruce can be bordering on fastidious - and with less of a flair for the ridiculous.
… Oh, the irony.
“Keep your coat.” He says. “It’s cold and you’re - more in need of it than I am.”
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He holds the coat out expectantly.
"Something's bound to be open, even at this hour." Stigmata almost certainly is, but Stigmata is not the sort of place one wants to enter without benefit of shoes. Call it a last resort.
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"You're always unmoved by my reasoning."
He barely misses a beat.
"And monorails."
And when he takes the coat her doesn't put it on, he puts it around Alan instead.
"We have the overweight lawyer who is pushing fifty and drinks far too much and faints at the sight of blood - and we have... me. I think the lawyers more likely to have a compromised immune system. That is reasoning that cannot be argued with."
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The coat sits on his shoulders like...well, like a cape, or a mockery thereof. Alan doesn't shrug it off, but neither does he thread his arms through the sleeves.
"The fact that I refuse to argue something while standing in the freezing rain does not render it inarguable. What's more," he adds, lapsing into a familiar refrain, "I do not faint at the sight of blood. And even if I did, that's hardly relevant to our present circumstances."
Slowly, grudgingly, he pulls the coat back on. "Shall we?"
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Super!Alan - the Lawyer-Man. If Alan has the cape does this make Bruce his side kick? Bruce, who hasn't been a side kick since he was a small child (and even then as he'd let the others be the leaders, he'd never managed, not really, to be a suitable follower, as resistant as he was to having his will truly comprimised), really can't see how that arrangement would work.
It had worked with Henri for a while.
For a while.
At any rate, the cape doesn't make the man, it just makes the costume. And he smiles at the thoughts in his own head, a smile that doesn't much acknowledge Alan at all.
"You've done wonders to deflate my exagerated sense of self, Alan."
And finally he smiles at Alan as Alan puts the coat back on.
"We shall."
He sounds agreeable enough as he continues:
"I've never been prone to fainting. What does it feel like to swoon?"
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"Somewhat."
He replies, evenly.
"Though, there's more humiliating things that that I'd say."
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He tilts his head toward the empty, rain-slick street. "Come on."
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"I'm not as competitive as you all think I am."
And Alan does get a reproachful look.
"And I'm not entitled."
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