Chapter Text
Though legal niceties prevented him from admitting to being in the company of people who drank, Bruce Wayne had certainly heard of people who didn’t drink alcohol for the taste. When he was very young, he had snuck into a few of his parents’ parties, those that were held at Wayne Manor, anyways. Then, it was a matter of crawling under the table without being kicked or otherwise found out. He usually found his mother’s legs (recognizable from her shoes—well, apart from that one time one of the guests had come to a party wearing the same shoes as her) and sat by them. His father would have scolded him if he had known Bruce was out of bed, but if his mother found him hiding there, she just might sneak him some of the food from the party table. Bruce learned a great deal from listening to people talk, though later experiences would tell him that he’d not learned nearly as much as he needed to.
When he was considered old enough to stay up a while at those parties, occasionally someone spoke more freely in his hearing than his parents would have liked. One guest would look at the other knocking back glasses of champagne or wine or in some cases hard liquor and comment on their liking for it. “I’m not drinking it for the taste!” the second guest, who had been growing increasingly loud and rambunctious as the night wore on, would reply.
Bruce understood the concept. Some people drank for the taste. They appreciated the veritable cornucopia of flavors available to them—sweet, fruity, chocolate, smoky, earthy, hard, bitter. They were looking for something they could appreciate in and of itself—something that could love for the flavor, rather than the affects.
Some people drank for what it did to them. Bruce was honestly unsure whether he fit both categories, or just the second. He couldn’t actually remember what most of what he had drank, since he had begun drinking, tasted like. When he spent so much time, as Tommy would have put it, blitzed out of his skull, little things like what he’d been drinking actually tasted like tended to seep out of his mind by the following morning.
…And with that, yes, Bruce recognized that he was probably merely the second category, rather than any kind of combination. He didn’t care. He did not care. There was nothing left to worry about, nothing at all.
(He was finding, albeit only hazily, given how little he tended to remember the following morning, that he was at his happiest when there was so much alcohol coursing through his veins to make even remembering his name somewhat beyond his reach. When the letters and syllables dropped off the ledge into the abyss, he was truly free.)
There was nothing left to worry about.
Someone—Bruce had never asked who—had decided to throw a party in a warehouse on the outskirts of the Narrows. Said party had lasted late into the night and had only fizzled out when the sound system for the host’s music had suddenly died. Without music, the warehouse lost what charm and warmth it had had. Shadowy, cavernous, and entirely too large, party-goers stared into the darkness with unease dripping in beads from their foreheads. Plastic cups still half-filled with beer were left overturned on the floor; someone’s jacket had been abandoned, dangling over the edge of a countertop.
Plastic cups and jackets might have been forgotten, but whoever had brought the beer had remembered to pack it up and take it with them. With the taps run dry, the party was well and truly over. Bruce left last of all, lingering in the dark for what felt like an eternity upon wobbly feet, wondering fuzzily if he might not sleep on the floor and spare himself the trouble of having to drive home. Staring into the yawning dark, increasingly consumed by the idea that something was waiting for him, just out of sight, until he found himself driven out to the street.
He couldn’t remember where he had parked his car. Come to mention it, Bruce couldn’t remember which car he had driven to get here. He had the keys in his hand, was fumbling with them as he tottered down a sidewalk, but he couldn’t remember which of his cars they went with. Why did he have so many cars again? He had so many that it would have been impossible to drive them all in the space of a week.
Bruce frowned. That was an odd thought. He’d never stopped to wonder about all those cars before. It was… They’d been his parents’. They had… Why should he wonder about all those cars, anyways?
As he made his way into the night, the streets constricted, growing narrower and narrower, and all the time more crowded. Central arteries teemed with throngs of people who walked huddled close together for warmth, while solitary travelers stepped out from veins and capillaries so narrow that they must have struggled to press through. Everywhere Bruce looked, there were people who were trying to get… he wasn’t sure where. He couldn’t quite remember why anyone would be going anywhere in the Narrows, the answer dancing just out of reach; certainly, no one looked particularly happy to be here, faces drawn in frowns, shoulders hunched, noses buried in fraying, threadbare scarves.
Bruce’s nose was assaulted with a concoction of so many different smells—burgers cooking in a food stall, soba noodles cooking in another food stall, motor oil, sweat, acrid smoke, fetid garbage in overflowing dumpsters and a faint but unmistakable odor of human excrement. His stomach lurched, his gorge rising in his throat. Even after swallowing down, his stomach still felt like a crucible for molten steel, the taste of bile lingering on the roof of his mouth. Dazzling lights burst and twinkled in his eyes, street lamps and neon signs and car headlights that struck his eyes like lightning. The wind cut into his face like a clumsily wielded razor, though Bruce was only distantly aware of it.
He couldn’t take two steps without bumping into someone, realizing that he was about to collide with them half a second before he could have stopped or stepped aside. Most skittered away without giving a muttered “Excuse me” or even acknowledging that he had been there at all. A few glared, but said nothing, and kept on walking, reaching their destination being more important than starting a fight.
The more it happened, the more Bruce’s head began to spin. Their faces… He was peering into their faces and they looked… They looked… He was drawing hard, gasping breaths, straining to find any air at all in his lungs. These people… He didn’t know these people. He’d never seen them before; he wasn’t so drunk as to forget that, too. But their faces, their faces…
At last, the inevitable happened: he walked into someone who wasn’t substantial enough to stay upright when a drunk teenager stumbled into them.
As the crumbling sidewalk lurched up to meet him, everything went dark, all sensation lost. Consciousness returned to him in the form of a jolt of pain when he hit the sidewalk, but everything was blurred and too-bright, and sound came to him as if he had plunged underwater.
Someone was clutching at his arm, pressing their hand to the middle of his back. They were saying something to him, but all he could see was a blurred face, and he couldn’t hear a word of it.
-0-0-0-
His head felt like someone had been beating it with fists covered with boxing gloves. That was the first thought that arose in Bruce’s bleary mind when next he came to: he felt as though a boxer had gone to town on his head, all night long.
His second thought was that he was neither at home, in his car, nor waking up in a GCPD drunk tank.
Bruce tried to sit up, but too sharply; the world spun on its axis, and he collapsed with a groan back onto whatever it was he’d been lying on. Not a bed, to his relief; waking up in a strange bed had, the last time it happened, been about as comfortable as diving into a swimming pool fully-clothed. (Tommy joked. Bruce smiled, and couldn’t see anything funny about it.) No, he was lying on a couch, a couch that sagged dangerously under his weight and smelled faintly of mothballs.
Slowly, with more care to his head, Bruce sat back up, leaning heavily against the back of the couch and trying to get a better sense of his surroundings—which would likely be easier if he could move his head in either direction without feeling like he was being stabbed, but he’d just have to work with what was in front of him. Which wasn’t much; if Bruce had to guess, he was in somebody’s living room, but there was no television, no other furniture, no lamps, no potted plants, nothing between him and the wall on the far side of the room. The carpet was some pale color that Bruce didn’t have enough light to give a name to. It was stained and torn, buckling at the point where it met the wall. The wallpaper was slashed and rippling, giving the impression of being underwater. All was dark but for a patch of golden light on the wall carved into quarters by the shadow of a window frame.
Bruce dug around in his pockets for his key, his phone and his wallet, and to his relief found them all, and found that nothing had been taken out of the latter. At least whoever had taken him off the street wasn’t a thief.
(There was a thief he knew, but he was trying not to think about her right now. Thinking about her was like thinking about--)
But who had taken him off the street? If Bruce had to guess, he was still in the Narrows; this place had the same scrabbling desperation, so omnipresent as to soak the very walls, as what he’d grown accustomed to after all his visits to the Narrows. Not one of his friends’ houses or penthouse apartments; none of his friends lived in accommodations like this. The whole place had a hospital smell to it, stale air and musty formaldehyde, with an undertone of something Bruce had no name for, but recoiled from on reflex.
He nursed his screaming head in his hands, hissing through his teeth. Why hadn’t he just called for a cab? He could have been home by now, and sent—
The thought shriveled to dust in his mind before it could reach completion, Bruce swayed in his seat, taking a thick, gasping breath.
“If you’re gonna puke, use the bucket.”
At the sudden rise of an unfamiliar voice, Bruce whirled around, for which his head did not thank him, and neither did his eyes, for he was met with light so bright as to blind him. When Bruce’s eyes refocused and his brain stopped screeching long enough to process what he was seeing, he was looking into a kitchen space. There were warped cabinet doors and a deeply scratched countertop. A very old microwave and an equally Paleolithic toaster oven sat side-by-side, and a mini-fridge sat where, judging by the gap, a much-larger refrigerator was supposed to be.
There was a small, rickety kitchen table, and at that table sat a boy. He was pale and thin, with shaggy brown hair that curled around his jaw. He was eating out of a bowl of cereal and staring at Bruce like he’d just threatened to break all of his windows.
“What?” Bruce asked stupidly, struggling to blink unforgiving sunlight out of his eyes.
The boy narrowed his eyes. “The bucket, the one right by your feet.” Gingerly, Bruce turned his head long enough to catch sight of a bright blue industrial bucket, the kind you saw in janitors’ carts. “I put that there so you’d throw up into it instead of the couch or the carpet,” he said sharply.
“If you’re so worried about keeping this place clean, why did you bring me here at all?” Bruce snapped. “And why would you be worried about one more stain on this carpet, anyways? It’s already filthy.”
The boy regarded him in chilly silence, his mouth pressed tightly shut. He pointed towards a door off to Bruce’s right. “If you want to leave, the way out’s right over there,” he told him, cold and quiet. “Nothing’s stopping you. If you’d rather sleep off your hangover in an alley, that’s fine by me.” He went back to eating his cereal, acting for all the world as though Bruce wasn’t there.
As quickly as he had puffed up, Bruce deflated, sagging into the couch. He had the distinct feeling that he wouldn’t be in a position to complain if the boy had let him go on his way and he’d wound up sleeping in an alley.
When Bruce stood up, he felt as though the contents of his skull were trying to tie themselves into knots, but his legs weren’t as wobbly as he’d been afraid they’d be. He went and sat down at the only other chair at the table, noting as he did so the spots of rust on the faucet of the kitchen sink and on the eyes on the stove. The surface of the table wasn’t level, slanting a little to one side. The boy didn’t look up, continuing to eat his cereal (dry Cheerios) as if he was alone. He stirred the dry cereal with his spoon; when his long, bony fingers caught the light pouring in through the window, the skin looked translucent, veins showing clear as day.
“I’m sorry,” Bruce said awkwardly, staring at the top of the boy’s head. Despite his current difficulties, he sat as straight as his spine would allow. “I… get irritable when I’m hungover.”
“Obviously,” the boy replied, with a mostly-even tone that nonetheless carried a noticeable bite.
It was warmer here than it had been by the couch. The heat was making Bruce’s head spin, his gorge starting to rise in his throat. He swallowed hard, took a breath that did nothing to either calm him or make him feel less like he was going to vomit, but despite that, he tried, “I… I know you didn’t have to do what you did. …Thank you.”
His friends had scattered once the party was over. Fair enough; it was late and it was cold, and they must have wanted to go home. But he had still been alone when he wandered deeper and deeper into the Narrows.
At that, the boy looked up, fixing Bruce in a silent stare. He had bluish-gray eyes, too-bright and piercing, knowing to an unnerving extent. Finally, he ducked his head and mumbled, “Yeah, well, you look like you’re younger than me. You don’t want to be out too late by yourself.” He gestured at Bruce with a wave of the hand—cautious, arm tucked close to his chest. “Not when you’re wearing clothes anyone’s gonna know are expensive.”
“Right.” Unsure of what else to do, Bruce stuck his hand out over the table for the other boy to shake. “I’m Bruce.”
The boy stared at Bruce’s hand, brow furrowed. “It’s…” He licked his lips. “It’s… Jonathan.” He raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure your name’s Bruce?”
Bruce pulled his hand back. “Yes.” He frowned, just a little defensive. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Jonathan shrugged, the shadow of a smirk hovering over his seemingly perpetually-downturned mouth. “Last night, when I tried asking you your name, you kept telling me you didn’t have one. You were pretty insistent about it, actually.”
Bruce’s face burned. “That’s… That’s just…”
“Weird shit people say when they’re drunk?” Jonathan supplied. There was an odd glimmer in his eyes that was something like snow on a sidewalk, right before a car rolled by and dirtied it with muddy water.
Relieved to have been supplied an easy explanation, Bruce nodded. “Yeah, stupid things I say when I’m drunk. My name’s Bruce. Bruce Wayne.” His head began to throb anew.
Jonathan peered into his face. “Rich kid Bruce Wayne?” he asked skeptically.
“Yes.” Nodding proved to be a mistake. Stars burst in Bruce’s eyes, accompanied by pain that seemed nearly to cleave his skull in two. He clutched at his forehead, groaning, fingernails digging into flesh. He hissed. He’d never had a hangover this bad before; had he really drank so much last night?
Without a word, Jonathan got up from the table and disappeared down a hallway curtained with black shadow. Bruce heard a door open, then silence.
He stared into the darkness, feeling increasingly light-headed. The longer he was alone, staring into shadow, the more his heart began to pound. It was foolish to think the way he was, he knew, (regretfully) sober, that he was entertaining fantasies. But he kept expecting the darkness to take on form and animation, expected something lean and hungry to rip out his throat, and he had seen so many fantastical things over the last couple of years that he wasn’t willing to discount anything anymore.
(His flesh had withered and crumbled as if he had aged thousands of years in a day, millennia worth of desiccation catching up with him all at once. His wasted jaw yawned open, until the bones themselves must have crumbled—but Bruce still dreamed of being there again, still caught himself imagining those bones still lying entombed beneath Blackgate, waiting for the moment of his return. The empty eye sockets bore into his face, ripping apart like tissue paper every mask Bruce put up to keep his secrets hidden away. Even after death, even after he’d crumbled to dust, he still knew him, as if he could peer directly into his mind.)
When the shadows shifted, Bruce started, his blood roaring in his ears. For a moment, he saw something in the shadows that seemed barely human, unnaturally long and stretched, but a moment later his eyes cleared and it was only Jonathan, restored to human flesh and normal proportions. He held a glass of water and a small bottle that rattled in his hand. “I’m afraid rich kid Bruce Wayne,” he mumbled, wrestling with the bottle cap until it finally gave and he was able to tap two white pills onto the table, “is just gonna have to settle for plain old Tylenol.”
After taking a discreet look at the bottle (it really wouldn’t have done to be slipped Ecstasy or something stronger than that), Bruce couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank you,” Bruce murmured, quickly swallowing back the pills. He took a few more gulps of water after that. The water was hard and bore an unattractive copper undertone, but for the headache, it helped alleviate the pain, even if only a little. At the very least, he felt a little less like he was going to vomit at any moment.
Jonathan blinked rapidly, his face contorting. “Don’t thank me.” The words came out fast, almost stumbling over each other. “If you died in here the cops would be all over this place. I don’t want cops in here,” he added darkly.
Bruce might have protested, but he’d heard about what some members of the GCPD had been doing in the Narrows, especially when Professor Pyg was still on the loose. Much as he might be loath to admit it, he could understand why Jonathan didn’t want the police in his home.
Something about what he’d said had pulled on another thread, one that had Bruce looking around the kitchen and living room for a sign, any sign, that someone else lived here with his ‘host.’ “So…” His pulse jumped in his throat. “…Are you here by yourself?”
A soft, shaky, bitter laugh escaped Jonathan’s mouth. “Yeah.” He looked away, jaw clenched and eyes like glass. “We…” He peered back at Bruce’s face, head slightly bowed. “…We moved up here from Georgia when I was seven; my mom got a job offer. Things… things didn’t work out like we’d thought they would.”
Unbidden, Bruce remembered Selina claiming her mother was a secret agent and would be coming back for her someday, what felt like an eternity ago. He was remembering the first time he had seen her home, that poor, ramshackle place. Briefly, he had wondered how anyone could bear to live here, let alone go back to sleep there every night. He had wondered how anyone could survive living like that by themselves.
(What he couldn’t remember, though, was just what sort of face Selina had worn when she had first shown him her home. Had she been defensive, defiant, ashamed, utterly uncaring of his reaction? There were cobwebs where her face should have been. Why, why couldn’t he remember?
How long had it been since he’d last seen her? Weeks, months? She had been, at the time, ultimately working to further… his interests, but Bruce had gotten the impression that Selina hadn’t exactly known who her boss’s employer was. Where was she now, anyways? What was she doing, nowadays?)
“…I’m sorry.”
Jonathan’s face twisted. “Why?” he demanded, narrowing his eyes as he stared searchingly into Bruce’s face.
“I just am.”
Jonathan regarded him in silence, suspicion etched into his face, something sharp and overly bright in his eyes. He drew back in his chair and said nothing.
They sat in silence for Bruce wasn’t sure how long. He was struck by how quiet it was, actually. They were in an apartment building, they had to be. Buildings in the Narrows tended to have poor sound insulation. Around this time of morning, he should have been able to hear the myriad sounds associated with the people in the surrounding apartments waking up. Slamming doors, water coursing through the pipes, footsteps overhead, he heard none of it, only a silence that grew more yawning with each passing moment. It was especially jarring after so many consecutive nights spent at parties with music so loud it made his teeth rattle.
Jonathan stared down into his half-eaten bowl of cereal, stirring it with his spoon, but never lifting the spoon to his mouth. Trying to decide whether to eat any more of it was apparently so engrossing that he didn’t care that he was under scrutiny (Or, more likely, he just didn’t care). The silence made little difference to him, it seemed.
At last, Bruce stood, wincing, but not in as much pain as he had been in—the Tylenol was starting to take effect, even if only a little bit. He tried, in vain, to straighten his rumpled shirt and jacket. “I have to be heading home.” He stared down at the top of Jonathan’s head, his stomach starting to churn, but somehow, Bruce didn’t think that was due to what he had drank last night. “Thank you again.”
“Hmm.” Jonathan didn’t look up. “Try not to get mugged,” he said, in a slightly milder tone than he had used before.
“I don’t think that will be a problem.” Alfred had thought he was getting rusty, but Bruce still remembered the basics, and Alfred wasn’t here, was he?
As comfortable as Jonathan seemed to be with ignoring Bruce while he was sitting right in front of him, Bruce could feel his eyes boring into his back as he left. His skin prickled.
As he was exiting the building, Bruce took stock of his surroundings. The hallway and narrow, badly lit stairwell had the same air of neglect as the interior of Jonathan’s apartment, torn wallpaper and battered doors and stained, ripped-up carpet. The floor was littered with empty bottles, torn-up newspaper and magazines, and dead cockroaches that made a sickening crunch underfoot. A miasmic odor of mildew, discarded garbage and spoiled food permeated the air; Bruce felt as though his stomach was trying to crawl out of his body through his mouth.
He wondered how much effort it must take to keep an apartment relatively clean in a place like this. He wondered how much effort it took to live in a place like this. He heard Selina practically going into raptures about the water pressure in Wayne Manor, he saw Ivy wandering around town pale and sick and glaring, he remembered being hungry all the time when he was living in the Narrows with Selina. It just… Memories were the constant companions of his sobriety. It shouldn’t have surprised him.
-0-0-0-
Around a week later, Bruce found himself back there again. Not drunk, not at night. He’d needed to figure out where he was before he could figure out how to get to his car, and that had given him a good idea of how to come back.
The building was condemned; why anyone would stay here, Bruce didn’t know. He knocked on the door, and for so long heard only silence that he wondered if Jonathan wasn’t staying here anymore after all. But after several minutes, he heard a faint shuffling sound by the door, and the clink of a chain being unlatched.
Jonathan opened the door just enough for his face to be fully visible. He stared incredulously down at Bruce. “What are you doing here?”
Bruce held out a plastic bag. “I brought you this.” He grimaced. “It’s not much, but I don’t really cook, and I don’t know how much room you have in that fridge.”
Jonathan took the bag, but so gingerly that Bruce might as well have told him the bag was full of live grenades. When he stared down at the bag’s contents, he went very still, his face frozen. Bruce watched for any sign of a stronger reaction, feeling increasingly as though this might not have been such a good idea, after all.
Why had he done this, anyways? He really hadn’t gotten the impression that Jonathan wanted him back around here, and it was hardly a pleasant place to hang out. But something had just pulled him back here. A stray urge, something that needed to be pursued, something that wouldn’t stop tugging at the back of his mind until he listened to it. And the only person here didn't seem to care who he was. That helped.
At last, Jonathan murmured, in a tone of abject confusion, “…Thank you?”
He wandered further inside, still staring down into the bag. Quietly, Bruce followed him inside, through the open door.