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Something jangles deep within the belly of the warehouse, the sound tumbling through the stolid air at irregular intervals, striking off mirrors too faded to reflect much else and the brightly polished backs of furniture turned dusty through years of neglect. Bruce steps forward and his hackles rise unbidden, unfamiliar with magic but unable to fight the animal instinct that set his heart racing.
There’s very little in here that will ever be allowed to touch him, supposedly. John assures him that Wayne manor has more hauntings than hinges and he’s already immune to the worst as a result. Bruce would laugh it off, but the fact that he’s never seen a ghost in the mansion in his forty six years means very little when he’s seen John pull demons out of Chinese takeaways and trap genies in coke bottles.
“Stay put. Just gotta pick up a couple of things, won’t be a minute.” John calls back over his shoulder before vanishing behind a pillar Bruce could swear didn’t exist ten seconds ago. He blinks and John’s brown trench coat materialises on a dilapidated velvet armchair that looks like it’s grown out of the floor.
Far off, something cracks and snaps back into place. Bruce stiffens, straining his ears for any sign of more human distress amongst the shifting architecture. He bites back the urge to scream in frustration at the absurdly high ceilings, they have no right to make things this hard. The Avice Line of the Gotham Metro should run right through the back of the building, just past the statue of a Sphynx with unsettlingly human eyes, but instead the trail through the stacked piles of junk that populate the warehouse glitters invitingly onwards and the trains sound distant and unreal.
Bruce freezes for all of a minute before curiosity gets the better of him. His breath shallow and silent, he takes a step forward. “John?”
One step turns into five and by then there’s no point in subtlety, his dress shoes hitting the marble floors with a satisfying patter. He eyes the dust falling across the shoulders of his suit, daring it to settle and tries to peer between the mess stacked higher than his head. Nothing moves, everything is silent and he cannot see his boyfriend.
Unease weighs heavy on Bruce’s shoulders. John can handle himself. Probably. But if he can’t there’s not much Bruce could do to help him. He moves on with purpose, past what is now a line of roman columns stretching off into the distance, curving up at an impossible action that suggests they are little more than reflections of themselves, unable to hold back from repeating into infinity.
Bruce stands at the foot of the Sphinx, looking up at it’s human face. It looks right back at him and cold sweat prickles up his spine as he realises that it’s not made of stone.
“Get back!” John’s voice sounds urgent and close. Bruce springs back and sets off at a healthy speed walk towards the point that he’s sure he saw John vanish beyond.
Nothing. Alone. Bruce doesn’t like it, not one bit.
Devoid of rhyme of reason it may be, but the warehouse has no shortage of shadows to hide in. Bruce forces himself into the space between two wardrobes each twice as tall as himself and finds comfort in the dark. He wishes John has told him they would be doing this before they left the Manor.
They’re supposed to be at the theatre, and if he were in a good mood once they were done Bruce might have consented to being dragged into one of the grimy dive bars that John is so fond of. Instead, he had been urged to pull up to what appeared to be an abandoned industrial block just south of the East End and had been dragged through the door of a squalid little storage office that was no more than two stories tall and ten metres deep. Someone, it would seem, is hiding another dimension on his front lawn.
Hoisting himself up atop one of the wardrobes, Bruce ruins his suit in pursuit of a decent vantage point. He grimaces, already dreading the endless fitting sessions he’s going to have to go through to replace it. He looks out over the assembled junk, little more than a random collection of Victorian knickknacks, most so worn as to be unsalvageable. Magic baffles him at every turn but he has to give it credit for maintaining a clear aesthetic.
Across the nearest alley carved between the detritus, a stuffed owl is poised to land on unsuspecting prey that has been lost to the warehouse. An old tawny that even at a few metres, smells like it wasn’t preserved right. When he reaches for his hip and finds his grapple missing, Bruce stretches out like he might be able to touch it from here.
“Ridiculous animals.” He growls in his best Batman voice.
“Don’t touch that.” A shrill whisper replies.
“I won’t!” Bruce snaps at thin air. “Where are you?”
He gets no reply, so starts easing himself further into the mess, balancing on furniture stacked at improbable angles that is always just strong enough to hold his weight. He peers down into the alley and sees nothing but a clear coast. The pillars are still endless, the ceiling still high, the wardrobe and the Sphinx still back the way he came. Everything in it’s proper place as far as he’s concerned.
There is a strange singing echoing up ahead, just round the corner the alley has created as it guides him into the depths of the warehouse. Bruce slinks forward just far enough to be sure there’s nothing hiding up ahead that he should be concerned by then dismounts the piled furniture to the floor. He moves forward till the singing reaches a fever pitch, bursting forth from a glass cabinet set into the wall of junk.
Every instinct he has developed as Batman tells him not to touch it. At least not till he’s run a full battery of tests on it to determine that it’s not dangerous. But magic refuses to be bound by his science, it slips around his reasoning, fitting neatly into the holes of the incomprehensible. Laughing in his face.
He wants to understand. Bruce reaches out a hand, laying a hand on the cabinet door. He’s barely touched it before it bursts open in a cacophony of squeaks and beating sings.
Bats. Of course. Magic is unforgiving like that. Bruce can’t swallow his shriek of alarm as he falls back, running back the way he came and trying very hard not to look at the Sphinx, convinced it has turned it’s head to laugh at him. There are warm bodies battering his head, displacing the air as they pass. He’s getting out of her now, past the pillars and to the door.
Only as soon as he’s out of the alley, the bats vanish into smoke.
Bruce frowns, risks a peak behind him and everything is calm. The infinite nature of the warehouse has shrunk around him, becoming plausible once again. He looks up at the Sphinx and it winks at him.
By the armchair still playing host to John’s coat, a collection of bottles have been assembled atop a table sprung from the marble beneath. Bruce pauses by it, eyeing them up and hoping that he can find it in himself to move on before John gets back and catches him snooping.
There’s a pink bottle, the smallest of the lot, sat atop a clean streak along the varnish that betrays that it has been moved recently. He picks it up to examine it closer, bringing it up to eye level and seeing nothing within. Despite the dust on the table the bottle is bright and clean, at odds with the air of dilapidation that permeates the warehouse.
“Please…just put it down.”
Bruce whips round to see John standing at his elbow, grin half cocked and hand held out to take the bottle. He adjusts his jaw, breathes out to settle his shoulders and hands it over. “What’s inside.”
“Demon, I think.” John shrugs, sliding the bottle back into the table. “Or worse. Probably best not to dwell on it.”
“You don’t remember which bottles you put your demons in?”
“In my defence, I’ve put away a lot of demons in my time.”
Bruce shoots him a look of despair which John laughs off without blinking, eyes running down Bruce’s dust covered suit. “Looks like someone went exploring.”
“You vanished. I was worried about you.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that you have more to be worried about in a place like this than I do?” John rolls his eyes. “Didn’t do yourself any permanent damage, I hope.”
“The suit will have to go, which Alfred may kill me for, but otherwise I’m fine.”
“Great! Let’s get cracking on that date then. You wanted to take me to some crumby play by a trashy American playwright, yeah? What’s wrong with Shakespeare, that’s what I want to know.”
“It never hurts to vary your diet.”
“Don’t gimme that! I’ve been living off fast food most of me life and I turned out just fine.”
Shrugging on his coat, John makes for the door. Bruce pauses for a second, seeing the brown trench coat still folded on the back of the velvet chair but he doesn’t ask.
Outside the rain is coming down in sheets that they can’t escape even as they huddle together under one umbrella on their way back to the car. John hooks his arms into Bruce’s and swears loudly every time his foot catches the lip of a puddle.
“I appreciate that I will never understand the finer points of your profession, but I would have thought you might have some say over the weather.” Bruce says, pulling out his car keys. “Or at the very least, that you might have a better handle on your pet Sphinx.”
“The Sphinx isn’t mine.” John waves him down, tumbling into the car.
Bruce’s thumb hovers over the ignition. “What?”
“That ain’t my warehouse. Place is almost as old as this city. Why’d you think I wanted you to be so careful in there?”
“Because magic is a dangerous force that I do not understand but my obsessive need to maintain control of my surroundings will inevitably lead me to explore it in manners likely to get myself killed if done so unsupervised and you didn’t want me meddling in your affairs?” Sometimes Bruce wishes that John weren’t built like a dry twig so he could be shaken without snapping in half.
John snorts. “That too, but mostly I just don’t have a fucking clue what’s in there.”
“You are ridiculous. I just had a near Sphinx encounter, we’re both covered in dust. Shall we skip the theatre and head home?” Bruce lets his head fall back against his seat and casts a long glance in John’s direction.
“Not a chance.” John beams, rolling down the window and pulling a cigarette out of nowhere that lights itself against his lips. “You promised me a show.”
The car roars into life beneath them, a nice little Audi that Bruce Wayne purchased three years back. Like every car in the Wayne Manor motorcade, it packs more of a punch than it's supposed, and if Bruce hits the accelerator a shade too hard, jogging John hard enough that he loses his cigarette to the murky evening, it could only be chalked up to a happy accident.