Work Text:
4am and Gotham has quieted, hunkered down into a subzero stupor. And it has snowed. You’d been working for hours in the living room before you glanced out and saw it; clean and untouched. Arthur had looked up from the couch when he heard the rustle of your coat. “Come on,” you’d said, “just for a minute.”
A sky cleared of snowclouds mirrors the blank field of snow below. Arthur is trying to shrink inside his jacket. He watches you with solemn, sleepless eyes over his upturned collar as you make the first footprints in the expanse. It’s scary-cold. The night is absolutely empty. You turn back and it’s as if Arthur’s gotten farther away from you. A stiff figure in the dark. There’s nothing but white all around and from this distance, he looks like any stranger on the sidewalk. He looks like someone you’ve never met.
He could live behind any of the thousands of windows in this city, with a kitchen floor that’s brown or cream or yellow. Maybe his closet is full of suits or a roommate’s sweatshirts. You don’t know what it smells like. Or what he’s holding in his pocket. His face is worn and his hair is unkempt and his mouth is gruff and did you actually see him that day on the subway because the shadows beneath his eyes seem almost dangerous and you’ve always been warned not to trust the men in this town. All the news stories of women hurt by strangers or hurt by men they thought weren’t strangers. What is this man’s history and what is he doing in Gotham? What is Gotham doing in him?
Arthur isn’t looking at you, anymore. He’s looking down, stepping carefully into the snow. Or, no, waddling into the snow. There’s a slight bouncing in his toes. He angles his hips to the left, then to the right. Just a little.
Everything else slowly falls away. The night is frozen and the wind stands back to watch. Even you stop breathing for a second. He begins to sway, tilting his shoulders into it.
He looks small.
Very, very small.
Like a little boy, dancing to amuse himself, to keep himself warm in the biting winter, in front of the anonymous building, before the vast plain of snow, under a dead-eyed sky. He puts a foot out and twirls.
You laugh. It echoes suddenly in the courtyard and Arthur looks up, embarrassment plain on his face. You curtsy. His features soften. He bows. And while the snow is not deep, there’s enough to slip on as you waltz with him and the wind. There will always be a part of him that will be strange and out of reach. But tonight it’s so quiet it’s like the entire city has left so it’s just you and Arthur.