Fic: A Year Without Batman (1/4)

Jan 21, 2007 15:44

“Brucie.”

A flirtatious giggle. A tug on the lapel of his tuxedo.

“Hmm?”

Reluctantly, Bruce Wayne tore his eyes away from the stars and focused on his date. Her name was something with a “D”-Delia? Delilah? They were standing outside on one of the manor’s balconies, enjoying a spring breeze that kept blowing wisps of D’s short black hair into her brown eyes. A part of him wished that she had blue eyes, although he couldn’t have said why.

“You’re not listening to me,” D pouted.

“Darling, I’m riveted,” Bruce assured her. Just then, something flashed in his peripheral vision. He raised his eyes again, just in time to catch sight of a meteor as it streaked across the night sky.

“What’s so fascinating up there, anyway?” D asked.

“Nothing,” Bruce murmured, which was partly true. From Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, you couldn’t see the area of space in which Krypton was thought to lie.

“C’mon, you’re looking for something,” D nudged him playfully. “Tell me.”

“Thought I saw a shooting star,” Bruce finally said. He took a sip from his glass of champagne, then allowed his gaze to lazily settle on D’s face.

“Did you make a wish?” she asked, sidling closer to him.

“Perhaps,” Bruce forced his voice into a low purr, and positioned himself for the impending kiss.

“Do you think it‘ll come true?”

No.

“That depends on you,” Bruce lied.

From somewhere out on the manor grounds, an owl hooted. D started, and Bruce felt an inexplicable sense of relief at being spared from kissing the girl.

“Sorry,” D laughed nervously, hand held to her chest. Her eyes kept sliding sideways, stealing glances of something nearby. “I’m a little jumpy tonight.”

Bruce followed her gaze, and saw that the owl which had interrupted them was sitting in a tree right next to the balcony. Its eyes glowed gold, two small suns piercing the gloom. Bruce shivered. The temperature must have dropped.

:-:

This was not happening.

Clark Kent stumbled down the front steps of Wayne Manor. He made it halfway to the main gate before ducking behind one of the spruce trees that lined the drive. He needed to catch his breath, to get his bearings. He sank into the prickly branches of the tree until he fell back against the trunk. Even with the support, it was surprisingly hard to stand. And all he could think was that this. Was not. Happening.

While talking with Alfred, he had somehow managed to keep his composure. When the butler had informed him that Bruce had gone missing a few days ago, Clark had somehow managed to promise that he would find him, even as he had listened for his friend’s heartbeat and heard-nothing. Somehow, he had kept himself together, because Superman did not fall apart. Superman gave hope to other people. Despair-that he kept for himself.

After a few more moments of hiding in the shadows of the spruce tree, Clark started heading down the driveway again. It was an effort to put one foot in front of the other. He couldn’t believe that, just the other day, he had been upset by the discovery that Lois had gotten engaged and started a family in his absence. He had thought that that was the worst thing that could have happened while he was gone. Now, he was reminded that things could always be worse. And they were.

For a long while, Clark aimlessly wandered the streets of Gotham. He could barely see where he was going, and he could hear everything, but he couldn’t hear Bruce. If only he had come back from Krypton earlier. If only he had never left. He berated himself until eventually, he found himself in an alleyway, held at gunpoint, a masked man demanding that he hand over his wallet. No Caped Crusader swept down to save him and call him an idiot in the same breath. As for Clark, he couldn’t even muster up the energy to act scared. He tossed his wallet at the mugger’s feet, and watched as the man ran away with it.

:-:

Upon awakening, the first thing Bruce noticed was that nothing felt ... right. He wasn’t experiencing any pain, but at the same time, he didn’t feel as though he was in one piece. He felt much smaller than usual, as if the boundaries of his body ended long before they should have. At that thought, a part of his mind panicked at the possibility that he might be paralyzed, but he clamped down on his fear. It was a waste of energy to panic over mere assumptions.

For a moment, he simply lay still and listened. If there were any hostile agents nearby, he didn’t want to alert them that he had regained consciousness until it was absolutely necessary. He couldn’t hear anything that posed an immediate threat, though-just a barrage of high pitched clicks, and a tumult that made him think of capes flapping in the wind. Unbidden, his mind’s eye conjured up a vision of red silk. He shoved that aside along with his earlier anxiety.

That sound-like cloth beating against the air. It reminded him of wings, too-of the bats in the Batcave, flying out into the night in search of their evening meal. That plus the clicking and chirruping was almost enough to make Bruce think he was back in the Batcave. He couldn’t hear the rushing of the waterfall, though, so he squashed that hope as quickly as it arose.

When no other sounds reached his ears, he decided that it was time to let the rest of his senses do some work. He opened his eyes, and was greeted by the sight of slender golden bars. They were narrowly spaced, and they arced upwards to meet at a point directly above him. Beyond the bars, there was a rocky surface to which this shining prison seemed to be attached.

Part of Bruce felt relieved at this. Escaping from a prison made out of metal bars should be no sweat, right? The rest of Bruce ignored that sentiment, though. Optimism wasn’t Batman’s thing; that was Superman’s arena. And Superman wasn’t here.

As Bruce turned his head to get a better view of the cage, he was treated to a masochistic kind of vindication. Oh yes. He had been right to be pessimistic, because instead of his left arm lying beside him, there was a leathery wing. Bruce stared. He willed himself to wriggle his fingers, which he knew had to be somewhere around here ... and the wing moved. Bruce stared for a second longer, then turned to look for his other arm. There was a wing in its place, too.

Scrabbling to his feet-which seemed to have become claws, Bruce observed-the Dark Knight did a completely-not-frantic inventory of the rest of his body, only to realize that not one piece of human anatomy remained. Feeling dizzy, he stumbled sideways and collapsed against one side of his prison. Balancing in this new body seemed to be difficult; he hoped that it wouldn’t take him too long to adjust.

From the corner in which he had slumped, Bruce had a much better view of his surroundings than when he had been lying on his back. Now, he could see that his prison was actually something of a bird cage-one of hundreds, all of which were dangling from the ceiling of a huge cavern. And each cage housed a bat. A bat. He had been turned into ... into a ...

Crap.

:-:

At first, the disappearance of Bruce Wayne had been front page news, a story that was second only to Superman’s sudden return. Now, though, the missing Wayne scion was lucky to get a blurb on page eight. The headlines were all about Luthor these days. His trial. Whether the charges against him would finally stick. Perry had assigned Lois and Clark to cover the whole ordeal. Lois was impassioned, and Clark-well, Clark should have been impassioned. For the most part, though, his emotions had invested themselves elsewhere.

“Kent, let’s get a move on it,” Lois yelled at her partner from the entrance to the bullpen. “We’ve got twenty minutes to make it to the courthouse.”

“Uh, just-just a second, Lois,” Clark waved at her before returning to his phone call. He ignored her exasperated sigh. After all, he wouldn’t have heard it had it not been for his super-hearing.

“Sorry, Commissioner, I was, um … could you run that by me again? Please?” Clark requested. He tapped at his notepad with a pencil. The pencil tip broke. Silently cursing himself, he began to rummage through his desk drawers for another writing implement while Police Commissioner Gordon relayed the GCPD’s latest findings on Bruce’s case.

“The girl he was with the night of the charity ball,” Gordon was saying. “Odile Rothman-”

“You found her?” Clark banged one drawer shut and threw open another. He was a writer. He wrote for a living. So how was it that he had nothing to write with?

“No,” Gordon sighed, sounding somewhat defeated. Clark tried not to feel disheartened by that, reminding himself that Gordon always sounded somewhat defeated. “But we now have even more reason to believe that she was involved in Mr. Wayne’s disappearance.”

Clark jabbed a finger at his computer’s power button. He could take notes on a word processor.

“So you … you really think she kidnapped him?” Clark asked.

“Four other Gotham residents disappeared during the week Mr. Wayne vanished,” Gordon explained. “Two of them were also last seen with a woman matching Ms. Rothman’s description.”

“One second has elapsed.”

Clark jumped at the sound of Lois’s voice, banging his knee against a file cabinet with a resounding clang. Lois was standing on the other side of his desk, leaning forward, bracing herself with both arms. A predatory gleam shone in her eyes, and she looked very much like a lion about to pounce on an oblivious gazelle.

“Commissioner Gordon, could I, um … could you hold on? Sorry, I … thank you, um …” Clark cradled the phone against his shoulder before Gordon had the chance to respond. “Lois, why don’t you go ahead, and I’ll-”

“Meet me there? Again?” Lois arched an eyebrow at him.

Clark opened his mouth to say something, but Lois barreled on.

“Clark, why do you care so much about this?” she demanded. She pushed aside some papers and his name plate so that she could sit on the edge of his desk.

“Um, about … what?” Clark blinked at her.

“This!” Lois grabbed his notepad, which was currently covered in scribbles about Bruce Wayne, and slammed it against the desk. “You barely even knew the man. Why does this mean so much to you?”

Through the phone, Clark had heard Gordon typing, but now, the typing stopped. Apparently, the Commissioner was interested in the motivation behind Clark‘s obsession as well.

“Tell me why this story means so much to you, and I will leave you alone to chase after it for as long as you want,” Lois promised, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. Curiosity-naked hunger-flashed in her eyes. “I‘ll even cover for you with Perry. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

She swung her legs around so that she was sitting Indian-style on Clark’s desk, hands draped over the edge of her crossed ankles. Clark

“Mr. Wayne is a good man,” Clark finally said. “He’s done a lot for Gotham. He deserves-”

“Don‘t feed me bullshit, Smallville,” Lois interrupted. She jumped off of his desk, landing beside him. “I can smell it from a mile away.”

“Lois, I-”

“If you don’t want to tell me, then just say so. But I better see you at that courthouse in,” Lois glanced at her watch. “Fifteen minutes.”

On the other end of the phone line, Gordon was typing again. Lois began to stomp away, then stopped to rifle through her purse. A second later, she tossed a pen at Clark. He fumbled it on purpose, allowing it to fall into his lap.

“Fifteen minutes!” she shouted as she left the newsroom.

:-: tried not to feel intimidated.

Bruce hung upside down from the roof of his cage, wings wrapped around him like a dark blanket. During his time as a bat, he had found that hanging upside down was much more comfortable than sitting or standing. Pulling his wings a bit tighter, he closed his eyes, and tried to meditate.

It was going to be his turn this time. He knew it. Ever since he had arrived here, an owl had been visiting the cavern at regular intervals-the same owl that had interrupted his private moment with D all those nights ago. The same owl whose golden eyes were the last thing he’d seen before waking up in this hellhole.

Each time it came to the cave, the owl would release one of the bats and spirit it away somewhere. A short while later, the bat would reappear in its cage. If Bruce had read the pattern right, the cavern’s feathered patron should be fetching him next. He had no idea what lay in store for him, but he did know that this would be his best-and maybe only-chance to escape.

He had already tried everything else-not that there were many other things to try. The damn cage he was in must have been enchanted-it didn’t have a door, and he hadn’t been able to find any other mechanism that would open it. He had tried shaking it loose from the cavern roof, hoping that the fall would break it open, but that had proven to be futile. And at one point, he had even lubricated the bars with his own blood, thinking that that might allow him to slide between them. The more he had tried to push through the bars, though, the closer they had drawn to each other, forcibly squeezing him back into his little prison.

So now, Bruce waited. It was difficult to meditate as a bat, but he gave it a shot anyway. He needed to be as alert as possible. If the magician behind this was as powerful as he suspected, Bruce would be a poor match for him-or her. The only things he had on his side were quick thinking, and the element of surprise.

:-:

Clark lifted his glasses so that he could rub at his eyes. He was the only one still at work, his desk lamp the only source of light in the otherwise dark newsroom. Perry had already put the paper to bed, and even Lois was gone-she and Richard had left early to sample cakes for their upcoming wedding.

As he flipped through his notes again, Clark told himself that he would head out in another five minutes. After all, he wasn’t getting anywhere. Over the last couple of months, he had come across several other missing persons reports that somehow involved Odile Rothman. They hadn‘t yielded any leads, though. The people who had been taken had a few things in common-they were all young and attractive, and none of them had any close family. But aside from that, there were no other threads connecting Odile’s victims to one another.

As for Odile herself, she seemed to be something of a phantom. Although she always went by the first name Odile, she never used the same last name twice. She had no paper trail to speak of, no point of origin. If Alfred hadn’t told him that he’d seen her with his own two eyes, Clark

Clark glanced at his watch. Five minutes had passed. He pulled on the chain of his desk lamp, plunging the room into an inky gloom. A moment later, he clicked the light back on. Ten more minutes, he told himself this time. Ten more minutes and he would let it go for the night. might not have believed that she really existed.

:-:

Even with a bat’s sensitive ears, Bruce could barely hear the owl as it approached his cage. It glided forward with just the faintest whisper of feathers against air, its eyes pulsing yellow.

For his part, Bruce began to act frightened. He fluttered about his cage wildly, banging into the bars, ricocheting about like a loose pinball. As far as he knew, he had been taken as Brucie, and would therefore have to act like Brucie no matter what form he was in. Getting transformed into a bat was an unusual coincidence, to say the least.  Considering that the entire cavern was filled with captive bats, though, Bruce felt that it was safest to assume that it was only a coincidence, and that his kidnappers did not know about his dual identity.

“Pots!”

The owl swept up to Bruce’s cage, and perched on its lip. At the same time, Bruce found himself frozen in mid-air. He could have sworn that the owl had uttered some kind of incantation, although he hadn’t actually heard anything at all.

“Nepo.”

There it was again. A word without sound. It never met Bruce’s ears, but it reverberated within his mind nonetheless. As it echoed, the bars of the cage began to melt away like smoke dissipating in the wind.

“Em htiw emoc,” the owl ordered, and even though he hadn’t moved a muscle, Bruce began to float after the bird with the golden eyes.

:-:

“I’ll give you money,” Brucie promised. “Name your price, and I’ll meet it. Hell, I‘ll top it.”

Bruce had been taken to what he assumed were the owl‘s private quarters. They seemed to be part of the same cave system as the main cavern, but they were richly furnished, and reminded Bruce of a medieval castle. Oriental rugs lined the rocky floor, tapestries hung from the walls, and a four-poster canopy bed stood in one corner of the chamber. An iron chandelier dangled from the ceiling as well. Candles flickered in its holders, casting ghastly shadows that quivered like gnarled tree branches in a storm.

Bruce was back in human form, too. He wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened. One minute, he had been a bat, perching on the back of a chair. Then, the owl had spoken his name, and suddenly he was a man again. He would have been happy about that development (in spite of the fact that he also happened to be naked), but he didn’t have time to be happy. He had to concentrate.

“Is that what you believe I want?” the owl was asking, although he wasn’t an owl anymore, either. He had transformed into a man as well-his eyes were still golden, but a faint smirk played about human lips now.

“Just a guess,” Brucie chuckled nervously, and rubbed a hand through his hair. “What else is a billionaire good for, Mister … ?”

“Von Rothbart,” the owl-man supplied. “You may address me as Von Rothbart.”

“Ah, that’s German, isn’t it?” Bruce clicked his tongue. “Or is it Dutch? Deutschland. Dutchland. Never can keep those two straight.”

Von Rothbart gave a low laugh. “You are an amusing man, Mr. Wayne.”

“Does that mean you won‘t kill me?” Bruce spoke with a tone that bordered on hysteria, and shifted from foot to foot. The magician just stared. “So, Mr. Von Bart-”

“Von Rothbart,” the owl-man corrected patiently.

“Right,” Bruce nodded, gulping audibly. “Sorry, I’m terrible with names. In one ear, out the other. Anyways … if you don’t want my money, what do you want? Someone to chat with? A shoulder to cry on?”

“Close, but no cigar,” Von Rothbart said, looking momentarily pleased with himself. “That is a saying in your world, is it not?”

“Yep, I’ve heard that one before,” Bruce grinned. He was doing a good job of sounding like a man who was trying a little too hard to mask his fear. “You’re a sharp one, Mr. Von Ross-”

“Von Rothbart.”

“Right. My bad. Von Rothbart. Got it,” Bruce held up his hands in apology.

“Oh, you are not like the others,” Von Rothbart suddenly gasped. He swept forward, his robes flowing about him, advancing on Bruce until the playboy was forced to fall back into the nearest chair. Von Rothbart hovered over him, so close that Bruce could smell his breath.

“I have searched for so long, and I have found so many beautiful people to add to my collection,” Von Rothbart continued, his voice a low murmur. “But I have never been satisfied. I am so fickle. My daughter tells me that it is my worst trait.“ Von Rothbart chuckled, his eyes glowing with lust. “You, however-you are fantastically exquisite. You-yes-you will be the last. You will quench my thirst. I know it, Bruce Wayne.”

Bruce cringed at the way the magician savored his name, and it wasn’t entirely an act. The owl-man began to move his hands along the contours of Bruce’s body. Thankfully, he didn’t touch Bruce-yet. Just repeatedly traced his shape in the air, as if the Dark Knight was surrounded by some kind of impenetrable energy field. But it still made the hairs on the back of Bruce’s neck rise up.

Von Rothbart’s eyes were hooded now, heavy with desire and shining brighter than ever. Bruce wanted to close his own eyes, to shrink away and shield himself from that blinding light. He resisted the urge, though. This was his chance to get away. He couldn’t let this moment pass without taking action.

The owl-man ran one long fingernail down Bruce’s cheek. He tilted his head to the side, contemplating the man he was about to enjoy.  The gesture exposed one side of his neck. The window of opportunity couldn’t have been opened wider. All Bruce had to do was grab a pressure point, and the magician would be out cold.

And after that? After that, Bruce would run. It wasn’t an ideal plan. He still had no idea where he was in this underground complex, or where the exits were-assuming there were any at all. But he wasn’t about to sit here and be assaulted for the sake of coming up with a better strategy.

Von Rothbart was angling even closer to Bruce now, obviously intent on kissing the other man.

“Tell me that you want me,” he ordered Bruce.

“I want you,” Bruce choked out. Von Rothbart closed his eyes, their light temporarily extinguished, and Bruce reached for his neck. Squeezed. The magician collapsed in Bruce’s lap, as limp as a rag doll.

And after that? After that, several things happened at once. Before Bruce could even push the owl-man’s body off of him, the playboy realized that he was dwindling, shrinking, shriveling.

Not again, Bruce groaned to himself as he realized he was changing back into a bat.

He was stuck in a shape somewhere between man and bat when the walls began to shake. It was like an earthquake was taking place. A rumbling filled the room. A full-length mirror that was propped against one wall fell over, its glass shattering. Candles toppled from the chandelier, and the chandelier followed soon afterwards. It crashed to the ground, narrowly missing Von Rothbart’s legs, clouds of dust billowing up from the carpets it had landed on.

A second later, the door to Von Rothbart’s chamber burst open, and a young woman came running in.

she shouted in what Bruce recognized as an old German dialect.

Bruce recognized her voice as well. Fully bat now, he crawled to the top of the chair he’d been sitting in and poked his head over the top of it. The girl who had entered the room was D-dressed in a Renaissance gown, and with a circlet in her dark hair. Bruce would have cursed himself for letting his guard down around her, but for now, he had to focus on getting out of this place.

D had spotted Von Rothbart now, unconscious and draped over the chair. She threw herself at him, shaking him. In her panic, she didn’t notice the bat that swooped over her head, and out the door.

slash, batman, without, fanfic, superman

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