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In his dream tonight, Jack watches the strange star expanding over the roofs of Gotham, black and bright like the heart of an angel. A heavenly darkness. It’s quiet, in his dream, and the sky seems to sigh above him. It’s pure in a way that he aches for, a destructive force that will burn the world to clean dry ashes. He watches it from the roof of the library, his heels swinging over the ruined streets below. When he wakes he will remember that this is his view from the night of Bloom’s terror, the first night that he spoke to Bruce, the first great Gotham Catastrophe since his awakening in the foam of sludge dragged up from that stygian cave.
It different from his usual dreams, which are murky and chaotic and bring him to the brink of a nausea so intense that it can push him gasping up from the depths of sleep. This dream is clean. This dream is quiet. He looks down on the city and it is as peaceful as it is ruined.
He wakes up blinking. He lifts a hand towards the phantom of the black star, fingers cold and bloodless in the darkness. The neon outside his window flashes, lighting up the heavy edges of his curtains. Is this a good omen or a bad omen? Should he be worried that the most peaceful dreams he can remember are the memories of the worst cataclysm he’s lived through?
He rolls over. Practicality wins out; he’ll take whatever sleep he can get.
“Who was it,” Jack asks the next day, as he bags a roast for Mrs. Calligan, “who took down Bloom? I mean, at the end of it?”
If Mrs. Calligan has noticed that he’s marginally perkier than usual today, she hasn’t commented on it. She looks up from her phone and gives him an uncertain once-over. “Well Commissioner Gordon did, of course. There was an award ceremony and everything, don’t you have cable?”
Jack has this lingering dissatisfaction even after getting his answer, so he asks the next customer too. Mr. Ballinger tells him it was Superman, but Mr. Ballinger also tells him it was a big cover up and not to trust the media and Jack decides that doesn’t sound quite right either. So, he asks Bruce.
They’re in the park at the foot of Wayne Enterprises HQ, which will belong to Bruce once more just as soon as he finishes the paperwork he’s currently filling out. Jack is learning that his boyfriend is kind of a workaholic—there’s only one sort of person who will go from filling out paperwork in an office to filling out paperwork in the park below the office and call it a lunch break.
“It was one of the robins, as I understand it,” Bruce says. His lips twitch, unhappily, reflecting for a moment some memory beyond Jack’s reach. “And the Commissioner, of course, but I have a feeling you wouldn’t be asking if that was all you meant.”
“Which Robin?”
“Would you know the difference?” Bruce asks, smiling briefly. It’s a relief to see that disconcerting little frown wiped away again.
“No,” Jack admits. Still, this answer feels right in a way that the other answers didn’t, and so he lays it to rest. It’s become a Robin’s city in the last month or two anyways. There’s a flash of red on every corner.
“Looks like I’ve got a CEO for a boyfriend after all,” Jack remarks instead, watching Bruce’s pen scratch across the signature line for yet another incomprehensible form. It looks tax related. “And after I’d just managed to resign myself to a future in exiled royalty.”
“A working prince is a bit less romantic than an exiled prince,” Bruce says, without looking up. “Are you disappointed?”
Jack tilts his head and looks Bruce over. When he’s working he seems fuller—not exactly happier, because he’s usually a happy guy, but more… himself. Like there’s more of himself to fill the body that he wears, the body that seems to have so many pockets sewn shut for good. Motion suits him.
“Like I said,” Jack answers, “I can think of a couple good uses for a CEO.”
Bruce smiles.
In truth, Jack is uneasy. Bruce has his secrets, and Wayne Enterprises sure seems like it’s at the dark heart of those secrets. Whoever Bruce was before the accident, that distant unhappy specter, his life revolved around something behind those gilded doors. It makes Jack nervous to see another Bruce disappearing behind them once again.
Another frown, this one more pronounced, draws Jack out of his musing. He nudges Bruce and gives him a curious look.
Bruce tips the sheet of paper towards him so he can scan the contents. It’s a deed of inheritance, in case of Bruce’s death.
“Richard Grayson?” Jack reads.
“He’s a young man who lives in Bludhaven,” Bruce says, rolling his shoulders as if he can’t quite get comfortable against the park bench. “I took him in after his parents were killed. Apparently. He’s the one in the photo at the manor. I asked Alfred about it—actually I lost my temper a little bit, which wasn’t fair of me. He said that Dick—the kid goes by Dick—was presumed dead at the time of our accident. I guess he didn’t know how to tell me to mourn a child I don’t even remember.”
It seems to Jack that every month he knows Bruce, the circle of people who were waiting for him to return grows exponentially. A sort of father, a sort of girlfriend, a sort of son—Bruce has a whole life behind him. A whole family around him, even now. Jack tries not to be petty about it, but his fists clench in his pockets even still. There was no one waiting for him.
“All that time I was working with Jules’s kids,” Bruce murmurs, lost to his own gnawing thoughts, “and I had kids of my own out there.”
Jack has been with him to the center, once or twice, because for the first month they knew each other it had seemed to be such a big part of his life. Lately, with the backlogs of unspoken conversations with Julia Powers—which Jack couldn’t begin to unweave—and the newly reappointed executive office, and the strange distraction that comes more and more over Bruce as he goes about the city, Jack hasn’t been back in a while. He watches the lines in Bruce’s forehead deepen, and thinks of the children that Bruce absolutely dotes on. It’s probably hard to go back there, knowing that he has a son of his own now, wondering how much of this he’s already done for a boy he can’t remember.
“That’s… not the end of it, either,” Bruce admits. He looks over at Jack, chewing his lip like he’s trying to decide whether it’s safe to share a secret. For a man who claims to have so little to hide, Bruce has an inordinate amount of secrets. “There was another one—he’s still on some of the paperwork.”
Bruce shuffles out what looks like the photocopy of a very old document. Listed under Richard Grayson there is a Jason Todd.
“Jason is dead,” Bruce says, turning the paper back around. He runs a thumb over the faded signature , without seeming to notice himself doing it. “I checked. Accident abroad. I wouldn’t even know what he looked like, if it weren’t for the yearbook photo on his school’s website. And there’s a Tim Drake involved, somehow, as far as I can tell he’s alive but unreachable, and I worry—I’m sorry,” Bruce says, shoving the photocopy deep into the stack of forms. “I don’t want to unload on you. You have enough on your plate.”
Jack watches him, taking him apart piece by piece. The hunched set of the shoulders say that he’s afraid he’s shared too much. The way his fingers move over the papers say that he wants to do something about it all, only there’s nothing he can do.
“Lotta dead kids,” Jack says, at last.
Bruce nods grimly. “I had—” he says, “a son. A biological one. If he’s not here then—I don’t know who his mother was but I hope—”
Jack whistles. “Lotta dead kids.”
“Statistically…” Bruce starts, and then he shakes his head. “If I hadn’t been in their lives, I’m sure they’d all still be alive and whole. I’m responsible for hurting these boys that I haven’t even met.”
Jack tsks. “B-man, I’m not saying it isn’t unlucky, but you’re not any kind of serial childkiller. I think we’d know about that by now.”
The late summer air goes dead and cold around Bruce, a wind from the north sweeps unseasonably over them. How long has Bruce been turning this over in his head? Surely he’s not that good at shutting Jack out, it can’t have been more than a week, can it?
“I’m the common denominator,” Bruce says. “I took them up into my life and—”
“Bruuuuuce,” Jack says, flopping over the back of the bench. “Come on. What, you think they smothered themselves in those huge fluffy beds you have? Maybe they overdosed on caviar? Golly, maybe they gave themselves heart attacks over how safe your security system is.”
“No,” Bruce says, for once not rising to the bait. Usually that kind of absurdity would get at least a flicker of a smile. Today Bruce seems to be made of stone, and it’s that more than anything that sobers Jack.
“Do you think you hurt them?” Jack asks, all the sarcasm draining out of his voice.
“I—” Bruce says. He digs the heel of a palm into his eye. “No, that’s not it. I don’t think I did anything to them, I just—I put them in danger, I let things happen to them. I didn’t protect them. What kind of father…”
Jack’s elbows are over the back of the bench, his left hand is just a finger’s width from Bruce’s shoulder. He almost reaches out. But he’s afraid to startle the man.
“I don’t remember my parents,” Jack says. “You remember yours, a little. I guess you’d know better than me, but as far as I’m concerned—if I had to pick a father, I’d want a man like you.”
Bruce manages to raise an eyebrow at him, a ghost of a smile somewhere in there. Jack rolls his eyes. “Yes, it’s very Freudian, please let me give you a somewhat creepy compliment in peace as is my custom.”
The ghost smile dissolves. Bruce returns his faraway gaze to the far edge of the park, where the headless statue of Thomas Wayne is cheerfully collecting migratory birds. “I wouldn’t want a man like me. Not a man like whoever I was.”
“Hey,” Jack says, “self pity isn’t cute.”
He turns, catching Bruce’s cheek in one hand. He leans in close, searching the familiar lines of that body, the striking blue of those eyes. From nowhere in particular, his broken memory decides to remind him that all irises are blue underneath the layers of dark muscle above. Blue eyes are honest eyes.
“Brucie, honey, you’re not a cruel man. No amount of missing memory is going to change that. You’re fundamentally a good man. Whatever mistakes that guy made, big as they might have been, I don’t think any version of you would have done something you didn’t honestly believe was the right and kind thing for another person.”
Bruce looks away. Through the glove, Jack can’t feel whether his skin is hot or cold.
“People look up to you,” Jack says. “Those kids you volunteer with. Gotham. Me. You know right from wrong. A lot of us aren’t that lucky.”
Bruce doesn’t look convinced, but he does lean into Jack’s hand.
“Didn’t you say the first one is still alive? See if he’ll talk to you.”
“Maybe I’d rather not know,” Bruce says. He grimaces, his pretty features forced into a frown that looks both wrong and right on his face—wrong for the brightness of his eyes, for the kind of man he is. Right in a strange inevitable way, as if his face is anticipating wrinkles that haven’t yet burst to the surface.
Jack brushes a loose strand of hair back off Bruce’s forehead and then lets go. “If you don’t wanna know then you don’t have to know. Decide which one it is and then own that. You and me, if there’s one good thing that came out of all this—” he gestures to both of them, the sky, the late summer afternoon, “—we get to decide who we are. Most people never get that chance. Most people wouldn’t know what to do with that choice if they did get it.”
“Doesn’t it ever worry you?” Bruce says. “That the life you left behind—the you that you left behind—might have been terrible?”
Jack tugs the hem of his glove down, tighter over his fingers. For a moment he can feel the cold walls of his apartment cinching down around him, with their nightmare shadows. “Sure,” he says. “Sometimes, I guess.”
The way that Jack eventually meets Robin is the same way that he meets everyone these days, that is, because of Bruce. In celebration of Bruce finally getting the company back under his own name, six hundred of his closest friends (and Jack) are all invited to wander the newly renovated top floor of the headquarters, glittering in evening-wear. Jack sticks close to Bruce wherever possible. Every time he tries to have a conversation of his own, he says something that makes the other guests grimace into their wine. One nice young woman went positively white when he made an offhand joke about the who’s who of who’s getting robbed tonight. You’d think in a city like Gotham folks would be used to it. Maybe he’s missing some kind of social subtext here.
Parties aren’t getting any easier. He’d walk over a landmine barefoot if it was where Bruce wanted to go, but the magazine-glossy smiles and the glittering chandeliers and Bruce’s canned laughter still run a nail up the easily-spooked knots of his spine. Bruce bought him a new outfit for these events, but he still feels glaringly out of place here, as if everyone can see the penniless outsider wearing through at the elbows of his sharp white suit.
It’s the first Wayne Enterprises Gala since the Batman disappeared months ago. Bruce confided in him earlier, as he was tugging the knot of his tie closed, that he expected there to be some trouble before the night was out. Historically, there always was. Jack is finding it easy to pick the veterans out from the new blood—the veterans look very nice, but their glitter has the slightly plastic look of costume jewelry.
He suspects that Bruce is actively testing his luck, trying to get a feel for the city as it is now by throwing himself and his company right into the chum-littered depths. Jack can’t imagine being anywhere else, while the man he loves is deliberately placing himself in such danger, but he also can’t stop looking up into the green glare of the parlor lights and remembering the last time he was in real physical danger. The scrape of metal along glass, the bleach and blood taste of fear toxin—when Bruce taps him on the arm to get his attention, the glass he’s holding tumbles and smashes on the carpet.
Alfred gives him a terrible glare.
Bruce catches his cheek in one broad hand, just briefly, as he checks for signs of an oncoming panic attack. Jack just shakes his head and gives him a weak smile. They’re getting good at reading each other now, but in all modesty, Jack was always pretty good at it.
“Relax,” Bruce says, softly, “everything is going to be fine.”
“I wish I had your confidence,” Jack mutters, but he waits until Bruce has already squeezed his arm and walked off to say it. Alone again in the glittering mass, Jack decides that he needs to retreat before he can start to feel anxious about letting one of the staff members clean up his ruined wineglass. He whips a rag off the belt of a passing waiter and presses it into the carpet, cranberry stains seeping up into the crisp white fabric. They look like mouths opening up, dark red mouths, sucking cancerous mouths—
Another pair of white gloves gingerly but firmly peels his hands away from the stains (just stains again, all at once, only harmless stains), and Jack startles up to find himself face to face with Alfred. As usual, around Jack, his mouth is twisted into the faintest moue of distaste.
“Please, Master Doe,” he says, and in his mouth the name always sounds a little like an accusation, “you’ll stain your gloves.”
Jack snatches back his hands, where lo and behold pinpricks of red are spreading across the seams. Jack blushes with embarrassment and shoves them deep in his pockets as he stands. “Uh,” he says, “thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” says Alfred. He glances up at Jack for barely the fraction of a second, his gaze like a stone drill, relentless and cool. What is he looking at when he looks at Jack—into Jack, deep into places that even he can’t seem to pry open? Jack scans the room, and then he leans down, close enough to unspool a secret.
“Did I—” he swallows, “Look. Did I know you, back before?”
Alfred’s back stiffens, but his fingers continue to delicately free shards of glass from the carpet. “Why in the world would you think that?”
Jack rocks back on his heels, looks at anything but Alfred. “I know, I know, what would I have been doing in a place like this, with people like these? But every time you look at me I feel like, heh, you’re peeling my skin off? Like maybe you’re looking for something in particular.”
Alfred stands, and stands to attention. Folded in his gloved hands like the downy corpse of a bird is the stained white napkin, full of shattered crunchy glass. “This would have been a better conversation to have two months ago,” he says.
“So you did know me,” Jack says. His tongue is dry in his mouth. The question that leaps to his cracking lips, as he steps closer, is, “When you knew me, before, were Bruce and me—were we—”
There’s the faintest crunching sound from between Alfred’s hands. “You,” he says, “were obsessed. You were—dangerous. Deluded.”
The lethal cocktail of anxiety and self loathing strikes him right between the ribs before he can even take a breath, with enough force to turn his stomach, to bring water to the corners of his eyes. He remembers the night under the overpass, the recognition like a meteor strike, the frightening outpour of love for a total stranger, so much sudden and endless love. He remembers Alfred’s shock and horror the night they were introduced. All the ugly jagged pieces click together into a hideous whole.
“You were toxic,” Alfred is saying, with the same stone-faced stillness, but the undercurrent of his voice is growing more savage, more urgent, as he says, “You were a poison. You tore people apart to feed your own selfish obsessions; people that I loved, people that Bruce loved, and although I’m willing to pretend for his sake that a leopard might in fact change its spots, Master Doe, do not for one moment believe that I am ever more than a breath away if you take so much as one step out of line.”
Jack is clutching his forehead, fingers threaded through his hair, looking at nothing now, at the floor maybe, at the blotches of cancerous red in the dead white thing Alfred is holding (Jack killed that too, with his clumsy broken hands—)
The glass clinks and crunches against itself, and then there is the weight of Alfred’s hand on Jack’s shoulder. It’s not quite comforting, not quite; it’s distant, like the hand of a mostly absent father, but it is solid.
“Come now,” Alfred says, the savage bitterness gone as quickly as it came, leaving not much behind. “Breathe. I don’t have any intention of talking about the past with Bruce.” With a sigh, he guides Jack back upright, pulling his own handkerchief from his pocket to wipe bubbles of panicked tears from Jack’s cheeks. “There’s a good man. Come on now. You may prove me wrong yet,” he murmurs.
Jack absolutely despairs of everything; if he tried, he couldn't bring himself to so much as open his mouth. When Alfred is gone, he drags himself to a balcony and hangs over the edge, taking deep gulps of city air. He stays out there for a long time, the same loathsome wordless loop playing again and again. He should have known it was too good to be true—a thing like him, an apple rotting from its core out? Loved? He feels like a kidnapper who has woken to find his victim tightening their own ropes, like a thief who has gotten away with too much. The nausea doubles.
Below him the lights of Gotham glitter green and gold. The perpetual sirens wail far away. This changes everything. Jack’s not deluded enough to imagine it doesn’t. He watches the headlights below march along their staggered way, slumping further and still further, his toes barely scraping the stone now.
There’s a light thump on the ledge beside him. He pulls back far enough to see a hooded figure perched there, head tilted just so. It’s a boy.
“You had better not jump,” the boy says. “I won’t catch you,” he adds, eyes narrowing behind his domino mask.
“I wasn’t,” Jack says, a buzz of guilt down the back of his spine. Was he? He’s not sure. “Are you a robin?” Jack asks him, sliding down until his heels are once again flat to the ground.
The boy snorts. “I am Robin,” he says. “There’s only one real Robin.”
Jack gets the distinct impression that this is not an argument he had better get involved in if he likes all his knuckles to remain where they are in his body. “Well,” he says, “what brings Robin up here on a night like tonight?”
Robin folds his arms over his crouched knees, gaze sliding to the world of warmth and light beyond the double doors. “Wayne,” he says. “Throwing this party is like hanging a slab of meat over an alligator tank.”
“I was thinking that too,” Jack says quietly. For a moment they watch the hectic glow of the party from their dark perch in silence, sharing a single wordless dread, until Jack physically shakes it off. “But Bruce says we’ll be perfectly safe, as long as we go with the flow.”
“You’re his boyfriend,” Robin says, as if he’s just remembering something important. “Why in the world would he let you into a party that’s bound to be sieged?”
It doesn’t surprise Jack much that the Robins know about his relationship with Gotham’s most valuable billionaire. It’s something of an open secret anyways. “Let me?” Jack echoes. He cracks a smile, although it still feels a little sick with acid. “He couldn’t keep me out if he tried.”
From the pockets of his coat Jack draws his pistol, spinning it between his thumb and forefinger like a gunslinger from a western, and he turns his grin on Robin who, to his credit, does a pretty good job of pretending the throwing star suddenly in his fist has nothing to do with any of this.
The grin fades. What right does he have to be pleased with himself now, knowing what he knows about them both, knowing what Bruce doesn’t yet know?
Robin is eyeing him. “Don’t you think about it,” he says. “You take one step towards that ledge and I’ll break your knees.”
“I wasn’t,” Jack sighs, but he puts his hands up anyway.
“What’ve you got to be sorry about, anyways?” Robin sniffs. “Most of the females in Gotham would kill to be you right now. Even with the inevitable robbery tonight.”
“I don’t think you’re old enough to understand.”
Robin bristles. “Is it a sex thing?” he says. “Because I know about sex thank you very much. And it’s certainly not worth throwing yourself off a building for.”
Jack slumps until his shoulders are level with his ears. “That I could deal with.”
Robin rolls his eyes. “So whatever it is,” he says, “go talk to him about it. You’ve only got a couple minutes before something goes spectacularly wrong, so you had better talk fast.”
The small hand that thumps Jack across the shoulders has enough force behind it to propel him across the balcony and through the doors, into the chatter and shine of the party, which carries on all around him like a wind up tableau. He ducks between the guest’s glittering paths. They are strange, ghostly—or maybe he’s the ghost, a whisper of cold wind blowing through a hall. He gets as far as the steps where Bruce is standing, laughing with a stranger; he gets just far enough to see Bruce look up and begin to smile, and then the doors are blown in.
Guests scatter, falling across the floor and ducking into alcoves, clutching their heads like children from a nuclear safety PSA. Jack falls to a knee, covering his eyes in the crux of his elbow as shards of wood batter the floor around him. In the lavender smoke that pours through the newly opened door, Black Mask adjusts his cufflinks. A flood of his goons spill into the room, armed to the teeth and visored above that, a wall of perfectly anonymous armor plated meat. Black Mask flicks splinters from his shoulders.
“Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,” he says, strolling up the wide steps and onto the floor. “It’s good to see you all again after so long. I seem to have lost my invitation on the way here, but I think you’ll find me an unobtrusive guest all the same.”
Around the edges of the room, a fair number of figures sigh and unclasp their earrings, dutifully unstrapping their Rolexes and slumping against the wall to wait. Jack doesn’t get up. The energy that propelled him across the floor thus far, borrowed from the boy on the sill, sputters and evaporates, and Jack falls back across the carpet about as energetic as a corpse.
The window bangs open as Robin dives through it. Jack watches the vague shadow play of action on the ceiling, half tuned into the sounds of evacuation and a panic for once not his own. A throwing knife embeds itself in the floor beside his head. There’s gunfire, Robin crowing as he swoops down from the chandelier, Black Mask howling orders at his men—Jack only half notices any of it. It’s only when he feels a heaviness against his shoulder that he finally turns his head enough to notice Bruce, trench-crawling on his elbows to Jack’s side.
“Hello again,” Jack says. “You should take cover.”
“I could tell you the same thing,” Bruce hisses. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
Jack absently reaches up and pulls free the throwing knife embedded beside his ear. “B-man, have you considered that maybe you wouldn’t like me if you hadn’t lost your memories?”
Bruce groans, even as he carefully places his own back between Jack and the smoking, popping chaos of the room. Jack has this inane urge to boop their noses together.
“If you want to talk about this,” Bruce says, “let’s at least do it somewhere out of the line of fire?”
Whumph. The chandelier crackles. The floors shake. Bruce buries his face in Jack’s neck, his hand quickly wrapping around the back of Jack’s skull. Black Mask shouts, rapid fire now and urgent, not dramatic. It’s hard to tell where Robin is. Jack can’t see anything over Bruce’s shoulder, but he can hear the click-thump of machinery, and then the deafening roar of suppressing fire.
His ears are still ringing when Bruce is jerked off of him. He watches it like a silent movie, barely comprehending the change. It takes three henchmen to pry Bruce free. Jack watches him straining in their grip, his mouth drawing back into a snarl. His perfect white teeth. His broad shoulders, pushing the limits of his beautiful dinner jacket.
What an odd view…
They pull Jack to his feet too, after a ringing mute moment, iron grips and professional disinterest. He can kind of make out what Bruce is saying, snapping terse as he struggles against the men pinning his shoulders back. He’s saying they had better leave Jack out of this. It occurs to Jack that he’s especially beautiful when he’s roiling with anger—he burns like the sun, his charisma goes thermonuclear. Jack smiles dreamily, resting his cheek on the shoulder of a nearby henchman.
Someone must answer Bruce, because he throws himself forward, talking loud enough now that Jack can hear every word out of his mouth. It’s so sweet that he’s worrying. It honestly makes Jack feel like someone has stuffed his chest with powdered sugar.
“Hey,” Jack says, with a reassuring smile. His voice is faint in his own ears. “I’m fine. Take it easy, big guy.”
At last, as Bruce is cooling off infinitesimally, Jack gets his first look at the villain. She’s kitted up in a flak jacket and a long coat, spirals of white teeth painted around the visor of her round helmet. As she comes to a halt in front of him, she reaches out and jabs his soft middle with one of her long black nails. He giggles nervously.
She’s too muffled by her helmet to make out, but whatever she says, it takes the fight right out of Bruce. The henchmen drop Jack. He stumbles a step, collects himself, and pauses to wiggle a pinky in his ear. “Did you do something heroic?” he asks Bruce, a little amused despite himself.
“You’ll be fine now,” Bruce says. “I’m cooperating.”
Jack considers this. He shoves his hands in his pockets. As much as he’s enjoying this outpouring of affection, he can’t stop himself from thinking of the conversation that awaits them both, after all this is done. He can’t bear the thought of Bruce putting himself in danger for Jack’s sake without even knowing—with the very real possibility that he’ll come to regret this by the end of the night. Jack doesn’t deserve any of this. He feels like a parasite, like a cuckoo bird in the nest of a sweet foolish robin.
The woman in the visor with the gaping painted maw has already lost interest in him—she’s snapping at her employees, directing the clean-up as they drag Black Mask off into a coat closet, presumably still alive. Jack winks at Bruce. Bruce has just enough time to widen his eyes in the space between Jack drawing his gun and spinning the chamber, just long enough to begin to shout before the firing pin drops.
It was a good try, but unfortunately, Jack forgot to account for the flak jacket.
In a cavern underneath the edge of town, chair tied to the back of Bruce’s chair, Jack lets out a chagrinned little sigh.
“Sorry about that,” he says to the darkness, “I guess I’m not used to heroics.”
There’s a surprised little laugh, a breath in the emptiness. “We sure fumbled that one,” Bruce agrees, sounding tired but no worse for the wear. “Next time, let me follow through on my big sacrifice.”
“But you’re already so good at it,” Jack says. “Come on coach, put me in the game.”
He can hear Bruce smiling as he says, “Do you think next time we should flip a coin to see who gets to be the hero?”
In the silence that follows Bruce’s soft laughter, Jack’s grin begins to fade. “Look, darling,” he says, “we gotta talk about something.”
There’s a creak as Bruce slumps or settles into his own seat. “You sure you don’t want to wait until Scylla is in jail to do this? Or at least until someone unties us?”
“Honestly, Bruce? I’m having trouble thinking about anything else. I’m not gonna be good company.”
“Alright. Go ahead then.”
Jack contemplates the darkness for a moment, turning the words over in his head. The faint green glow of the tech in the next cavern over is giving him an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.
“It’s just,” he says. “Alfred said we knew each other before the accident.”
The cavern is quiet. “Did he?” Bruce murmurs.
“I have to wonder—” Jack swallows, “—what are the chances of a guy like me and a guy like you having anything to do with each other?”
He can feel Bruce shrugging. “Statistically, lightning is much more likely to strike the same target twice. We like each other now, and I’m sure we haven’t changed that much.”
Jack huffs. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
“Alfred didn’t make it sound pretty. And I’m just some—some nobody, some vagrant, not even a real butcher. And you’re a celebrity? You gotta hear how that sounds.”
“You think you were my stalker, Jack?”
“What if all—this—” Jack wiggles his fingers in his bindings, “isn’t head trauma? What if I’ve always been a headcase? Jeeze, what if I used to be worse?”
“Jack, I think this is the paranoia talking here. If you were stalking me, there would be records. Police files. Restraining orders. We’d at least have turned up your identity by now.”
“Unless you didn’t know it,” Jack says, grimly.
Water is dripping somewhere in the anterior chamber. Was the cavern that the rescue teams dragged them up from like this one? Jack tries to imagine the conversation they might have had in that dire darkness, the two of them, after the earth fell in. What the people they had been would have talked about. He’s never before considered that they might have been in that park for the same reason, that they might have been found in the same place together by more than cosmic coincidence.
“Alright,” Bruce says, at last. “We’re going to lean into the curve here. Let’s assume you’re right. What do we do about it?”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“Jack. I love you.”
Jack shivers.
“I know you worry that you’re not a good person, or that your mental illness is going to get someone hurt. Okay, I know about all that. And let’s say maybe you’re not, and maybe it will. But maybe I’ve hurt people too, and maybe I’m not a good person either.”
“That’s not the same,” Jack mutters.
“I love you,” Bruce pushes on, “and if you loved me before then I’m certain that I loved you too. I know you, Jack, and when you love something you throw your whole self into it. It’s the best part of you. No matter who we were, or what we meant ourselves to be, I know I couldn’t watch you loving me without loving you in return.”
In the distance, warped by echo and reverb, there’s a pop as if something electronic has been doused in water, and then distant cacophony.
“That’ll be the robins,” Bruce notes. “They made better time than I hoped, sooooo either they’re extremely interested in Scylla or extremely interested in me, which is a little bit intimidating.”
Jack is still trying to rub tear tracks off on his shoulder, with little luck.
A shadow appears at the barred iron gate. It whistles. “Wow,” it says, “I know it’s hard to beat the classics but this security system is practically medieval.”
“Is that good?” Bruce calls out.
The robin at the gate shakes their head, more amused than worried. “Kind of hard to hack an iron gate, except in the literal sense. Hang on a tick, I need to find a chainsaw.”
“Take your time,” Bruce says. There’s a shift of cloth, and then the back of his head meets Jack’s, with a tired but companionable pressure. “I’m just going to rest here a little while,” he says, “with my friend.”
They’re leaving the cavern, trailing a ways behind the leaping figures of a couple dauntless robins, when the earth starts to shake. Pebbles skitter free from the ceiling. Without thinking, Jack grabs for Bruce’s hand.
“That’s not good,” one robin says to the other, eyeing the stalactites that loom all down the length of the corridor. The second robin holds his wrist to his mouth and says, “Duke to Damian, what’s going on with Scylla?”
The tiny small voice comes through after a moment, “Code names! And she’s not doing anything. I’ve got her right here.”
The robin—Duke, presumably—looks back at Bruce. He looks urgent, expectant, and then all of a sudden it’s as if a shutter falls over his expression. “10-4,” he says into the communicator. “Keep her secure. I’m heading up to assess the situation.”
Over the static grumbling that comes through in response, the first robin aims her flashlight at the ceiling and says, “You remember what I was saying about Scylla and Charybdis being a matched pair?”
“I remember,” Duke says grimly.
The next shudder through the earth brings down a buckshot scattering of stalactites, plowing up clouds of cold shrapnel. Bruce drags Jack back into the curve of a wall just in time to avoid the collapse. His arm is up over Jack, his hand clutching the back of Jack’s head again—automatically, precisely the same motion as before, like something drilled. From below them, back the way they’ve come, there is an alarming amount of slithering and rattling going on.
“I don’t think I want to know what that is,” Bruce says, breathing hard.
“I’ll pass too,” Jack says.
Bruce takes his hand and pulls him over the wreckage of the collapsing cavern, effortlessly lifting him up onto the rubble when the wreckage grows too thick to bypass. At his side, as Bruce scans the floor for a solid place to put their feet next, Jack scans the darkness behind them like a sailor in an old cartoon, a hand to his forehead. He whistles at something in the far darkness, moving up laboriously into the light. “Thar she blows,” he remarks.
At the first sight of a huge knotted hand scrabbling up through the rubble, Jack turns on his heel, loops his elbow under Bruce’s, and takes a running leap at the next lump of shadow. They land in a stumble, sliding over loose stone shrapnel—Bruce catches him by the lapel, just before his heel can slip off the side, and reels him back in.
“We can’t keep doing that,” Bruce says, worry creasing his forehead. “One of us is going to slip.”
Jack takes another look at the thing pulling itself up from the deeps behind them. “You catch me,” he says, “I’ll catch you.”
“I don’t think—”
“Come on!” He slaps a palm to the ruined breast of Bruce’s dinner jacket, flashing a roguish grin. “I’ll bet that body of yours remembers a thing or two about base jumping!”
Bruce looks like he’s about to protest, but at the wretched howl of the thing behind them, he gives up. They take a running leap. Yard by yard, they scramble to gain ground, shedding shoes and jackets as they go. Bruce gets a loafer stuck in a crack and abandons it with barely a pause to swear at the loss. The weird part is that even coated in dust and sweating through his dress shirt, this is probably the best Jack has felt in months. He lands first on the one ahead and takes Bruce’s hand in mid-fall, swinging him down into the embrace of a waltz, laughing as they go around again, laughing as he disengages for the next leap.
Charybdis claws at the walls below with her huge claws, glittering bands around fingers as blue and heavy as the stone itself.
The light of the foremost cavern is growing as they close the distance. Ahead they can hear robins shouting, the sound of gunfire. It won’t be much safer up there, but at least they’ll be able to see the floor. Bruce isn’t laughing but he is bright again, as he allows himself to be pulled into the steps of Jack’s increasingly reckless tread, into the flourishes and the staged gaffes. They dance out from underneath falling wreckage as smoothly as the figures of a clockwork music box, and straight into the arms of robins reaching down to them, hands outstretched.
They emerge into green light and gunfire, sliding along the curve of the wall, behind the sparking remains of some old fashioned super computer.
“The other one’s down there,” Bruce whispers to the robins. “It’s big.”
“How big,” the robin ahead of them asks.
“Have you seen killer croc?”
“Briefly, sure.”
“Bigger.”
Bruce is eyeing the cave through each gap in the circuitry. He seems far away, far away in the same way the sun is—thermonuclear and awesome, just close enough for you to feel the force of it. He points at the billowy stone deposits along the rim of the high ceilings. “If those come down they’ll block the entrance. Get two robins up there to knock it loose, and have someone cut the line to the electronics. They’ve got to be using a generator, this tech is too old to be wireless. They’re using semi automatic weapons which means they have to aim. How many of you have night vision?”
“Damien,” the robin says, immediately.
“Damien leads the charge. Get him on coms and have him orient the team. At close quarters it should be difficult but possible to subdue blind targets. Best if you can turn the lights back on afterward. Warn Damien and have them pull the plug rather than cutting the wire if at all possible.”
The robin who, in the light, Jack can identify as Duke again, gives Bruce a wry little smile. It’s not quite pleasant on his lips. He glances down at his communicator. “You get all that?”
“10-4,” a tiny voice answers.
“Gee, Bruce,” Jack says, throwing an elbow over his boyfriend’s shoulder, “you’re a natural, huh?”
Duke’s wry grin becomes a grimace. “You two stay here,” he tells them. “Civilians to the back.”
“Hmmm,” Jack says, watching the kid retreat. “I’m sensing some familiarity here.”
“Just another person I’ve disappointed,” Bruce mutters. “Come on, let’s keep moving forward.”
“Rebellious. I like it.”
Bruce takes his hand, although it’s not the most efficient way to move, and they advance.
“I feel like we could do more of this,” Jack muses. “Adventuring. Venturing? I mean, you’re a wealthy orphan and I’m your goofy but loveable companion, we’re a recipe for syndication. We’d never run out of caves in this town, I’ll tell you that much.”
The lights cut out. In the ensuing blackness there is only the muzzle flash of firing guns, the faint blinking lights of dying circuits, and—most worryingly—a faint glow from the cavern behind them.
“They haven’t brought down the ceiling yet,” Bruce mutters. “Yes, they could catch more of the enemy unaware with the rock fall in the dark, but the chance of injuring an ally—”
Jack doesn’t catch the rest. He’s watching the growing glow behind them, green green green, watching as the liquid bioluminescent eye of Charybdis emerges above the rubble.
“Too late!” he says. He tightens his grip on Bruce’s hand and rushes ahead, one hand against the wall to keep from getting too lost. The robins are noticing what he’s noticed, all at once, and the sound of it is ugly. He trips over some mechanical guts in his haste, dragging Bruce down with him, and they tumble through a nest of wires still hot with loose sparks. Edges of warm metal tear through Jack’s gloves and pop the skin underneath.
“Remind me to schedule a tetanus shot,” Jack mutters, as he works his hands free. He’s in pain, but the pain is coming to him like a shadow thrown against a curtain.
Charybdis levers herself into the room one monstrous shoulder at a time. Her green eyes roll, taking in the darkness and settling at last on the two figures closest to her reach. Jack swallows thickly. Bruce is still on the ground. From the sound of it he’s trying to pry something much more painful from the wreckage than just his hand. As he struggles against the mess, Jack stands alone underneath the blazing attention of the creature before him. He is barely taller than her bent forearms, glittering and clinking with bangles. He peers up into her eyes, quick shuttering down the middle like double doors, and he thinks of shouting. Help would come. Those kids are fast ones. He’s ninety percent sure they’d get to him before the enraged monster did, and he’d take that chance if it was just him, but as long as Bruce is on the ground—
He’s unarmed. He kind of doubts bullets would make her anything more than angry, anyways.
The moment lasts a hundred years, as he stands below her, looking up into her mad alien eyes. It’s crazy to feel kinship with a ten foot tall glowing predator, but that’s what he feels. He has no idea what she wants. He has no idea where she comes from. But the monster in him recognizes her, her size and her power and her aloneness, and her mad green eyes.
“Good evening, madam,” he says, taking a deep old fashioned bow.
Her sideways eyes blink-shutter. There’s nothing for the most awful moment, and then like a switch flipping on, there is comprehension.
“Yess,” she says, as if she is heaving words up from the depths of her lungs. “It— is.”
When the lights come on again, she has found somewhere else to be.
Much later, in the ambulance parked below the cave entrance, Bruce accepts a shock blanket from a nervous EMT. Jack already has his tied around his neck like a cape, and his head laid in Bruce’s lap. He holds his hands above his face, watching the blood spots that have spread over the ragged white cloth. He’s reminded of Alfred’s wine-stained napkin.
“Alfred said it was pretty bad,” Jack says, quietly. “Me. Us.”
Bruce runs a hand through the tangles in Jack’s hair. He’s watching the clean up with interest, his eyes particularly drawn to the confident figure of Duke the Robin, who spends as much time debriefing the commissioner as he does bodily dragging wounded henchmen out of the earth, throwing his hand in with the GCPD uniforms.
“Toxic,” Jack adds, grimacing.
Bruce pauses.
A few feet away, someone is bagging the shattered remains of Scylla’s helmet as evidence. Something tells Jack that Gotham hasn’t seen the last of her or her monster yet. He wonders how loyal her henchmen are.
“This is really bothering you,” Bruce says, in that thoughtful voice he uses to outline business problems.
“It oughta bother you too.”
“I’m more bothered that Alfred told you and didn’t bother to tell me. I don’t know, Jack,” Bruce says, “I don’t know what to make of it either.”
“I know what to make of it,” Jack says. He peels his gloves off one by one, breaking the seal of dried blood. “I’ve hurt you before. I don’t want to hurt you again. I’m—Bruce, I’m terrified of hurting you again. I’ve always been so afraid of hurting, and now I’m starting to understand why…”
The thing is, he knows he should leave. He should leave before he does something he’ll regret forever, but he’s not selfless enough. He’s not good enough, not brave enough to inflict that kind of pain on himself. He presses his thumb to the wound in his palm, squeezing until blood starts to roll onto the caked dust. Bruce gently pries his hands away from each other.
“You don’t want to hurt me,” Bruce says. “So don’t,” he says.
“You know it doesn’t work like that,” Jack says, pulling a face.
“I know it works like this,” Bruce says. “You hurt me, I tell you so, and you stop doing it. You do the same for me. Like real people, Jack. You and me.”
“Real people,” Jack echoes. Are they real people? Sometimes they feel like the only two real people in the world, and that’s so dangerous. That’s where madness starts.
“We get to decide who we are,” Bruce reminds him. “We’re not those people, if we don’t want to be.”
Jack says nothing for a while. It’s hard to take your own advice.
“Hey. You were amazing with that monster,” Bruce says, changing the subject. “How did you do that? You’re the dragon whisperer.”
“I think,” Jack says, “with some monsters, they just want someone to see them.”
“That so?”
Jack carefully folds his ruined gloves, and lays them beside his head. “Sure,” he says. “It’s hard to be alone in the world.”
“I know,” Bruce says, seriously. Then, leaning in, “But hey, that’s why we’ve got each other, huh?”
Love overwhelms Jack, as fresh and bottomless as the first night he spotted Bruce in the yellow light of that overpass. I’m in love, he thinks. I am in love again, and again, and again. How could I know you and not love you? How could anyone? How could any me?
“Lucky thing,” he agrees.