Chapter Text
“Marry me,” Bru blurts out in a moment of uncharacteristic passion, and doesn’t back down in a moment of characteristic obstinance.
Selim laughs at her, as he’s wont to do, but then he crawls over her with a smile that’s all teeth and says “Yes,” so Bru decides that regret can wait, at least until they’ve both come their brains out again.
The luxury of being on a bed with Selim in the penthouse, soaked in warm sunlight on a rare lazy day in Gotham, well. It could drive anyone batty.
(She doesn’t take it back).
-
“You need to take it back!” Jason’s shouting, mad and thunderous, but while he’s imposing and he can be downright frightening, Bru is Extremely Aware that nothing can be scarier than Jason dead still in her arms, so she just goes on buttering her toast.
“You’re allowed to be unhappy with me,” Bru tells him calmly, “but you don’t get to decide this for me.”
“But he’s a piece of shit! He’s unreliable, and an asshole, and he’s a thief, and-”
“I’m well aware of Selim’s character, Jason, thank you. I don’t need him to be anything more than he is.“ She doesn’t say, you’re a murderer, and I love you. “I know you’ve never been his biggest fan, Jason, but it isn’t as though Selim will be moving in, or try to become your father-”
“You are NOT my mother!”
It isn’t like Bru’s surprised that Jason doesn’t think of her that way, since he didn’t act much like it even as a child. Didn’t seem to want to think of her at all, after, in those dark early days. He’s softened since, he’ll come by for the twice-monthly lunch once in a while, spends time in the kitchen with Alfred sometimes, but there’s a line in the sand that got drawn by his death and it’s one that has left Jason and Bru cut adrift from how they were Before.
The vehemence of the proclamation is... unpleasant, and Bru wants to stay calm even as she feels her hackles rise rise rise. “What does it matter then, who I’m marrying?”
Jason is taken aback by that, snarls and stutters and goes blood-red mad, but before Bru can de-escalate or do anything, Jason’s gone, right out the second-storey window.
Alfred manifests by her elbow with a warm pot of tea, as Bru rests her face in her hands and breathes herself into a calm.
“That.... did not go well.”
“It most certainly did not, miss, but better out than in, I always say.”
Bru just groans into her hands, and peers out to her side from between her fingers. “You’ve been terribly diplomatic about my decision, Alfred.”
“Of course, miss. You’re an adult, and I respect the choices you make. I may not necessarily be the largest fan of Mr. Kyle myself, but whatever measure of happiness he gives you is something you would not have had without him, and that’s enough for me.”
There’s a quiet sloshing, and her cup is filled up.
“That said, if he brings you any harm, miss, ah, well. The boys will be mighty upset that I will be getting to him first.”
“Alfred.”
-
So with responses ranging from mildly enthusiastic (”Oh, B, that’s great! Selim’s a bad influence, god, maybe he’ll even get you to skip work once in a while,” says Dick) to openly threatening (”If he treats you with any less respect than you deserve, Mother, I will take his hands off,” says Damian), they stagger towards the wedding.
Jason hasn’t been around since their little blow-out, and it’s unfortunate, but Red Hood’s still plenty active and Bru really needs little more from Jason than for him to be alive, so she can’t complain.
They decide to make it a little rooftop affair, just her and Selim, Alfred as a witness, a judge who’ll be given a glass of celebratory champagne that will blow his memories out, and that’s it. She’s sure if she’d requested it, Dick at least would have come. Tim, maybe, if he’d been in the mood for it.
But she’s stood on the rooftop where she’d first met Selim, dressed in a white she doesn’t feel, and though there’s lace from neck to wrist and the hem drags on the ground she’s rarely ever felt so exposed. Too exposed to have her sons see her, so the three of them are prepping for a celebratory brunch at the Manor.
She and Selim will swing by for a quick meal and a quicker change of clothes, and then they’re off for a whole 3-day (Bru’s maximal give) honeymoon somewhere warm and sunny (Selim’s preference).
They would time it for the sunrise. It’s a little more romantic and sentimental than either of them fundamentally are, but it works out good anyways because it means that Bru didn’t need to miss a night of patrol as the Bat of Gotham before her wedding.
There’re bruises up-down her arms, and stitches in her neck waiting to come out after an altercation with a bullet come too close, but her dress hides all, and as the sun starts to pinken the sky and a breeze picks up and musses her hair, Bru allows herself a deep inhale of the terrible Gotham air, imagines Selim’s dark glossy hair aglow in the loving morning light, and lets herself believe that, just once, this will be good.
-
“I will kill him myself,” Alfred says very calmly after he’s forcefed Judge Carver his special little champagne.
It’s 9 o’clock in the morning, they’ve been here for hours and hours and hours, and Selim.... is not. The air’s gotten humid and petrol-laden and Bru is a little certain that there’s now a thin patina of Gotham grime on her formerly white dress.
“It’s fine, Alfred,” she tells him, as she drops her stupid bouquet of stupid wildflowers so that she can reach her own stupid wrist to unbutton the stupid lace overlay of her stupid dress. “Selim made his decision. We’ll respect it.”
“He’ll respect my boot up his arse, is what he’ll do,” Alfred grumbles not-so-silently as hes tarts dragging the limp body of the drugged judge behind some ducts.
“Alfred,” Bru says with a warning in her tone, and they look at each other and Alfred softens, softens the way he does when he’s sad because she’s sad and neither of them know what to do about it.
“My apologies, miss,” he tells her, but in his eyes it’s still all murder.
“It’s fine.” Bru looks away, ostensibly to focus on the mother-of-pearl buttons at her wrist. They’re small and delicate and were, presumably, designed to have a partner do the taking-off for you. She wants to rip it off, rip it all off, but that feels like admitting defeat and if she admits defeat to that there’s too many other things she’ll need to admit to.
“C’mon, god, just let me do it.”
Bru has fist cocked for a brutal blow before her brain registers the voice in front of her, the hand on hers. “Jason?”
If he’s come to say I told you so there’s nothing she can do but to accept it gracelessly, but right now she still kind of wants to throw a punch.
“Yeah, yeah. Not exactly the face you wanna see, I know, but it’s the one you’re gonna get.”
He’s dressed in casual wear, warmer than she is in his leather jacket, and she doesn’t know how to describe to Jason than even when she’s on edge and she’s so filled with anger it might come out her teeth, getting to see him still cannot end as a net negative.
“Better than I deserve, I imagine,” she says to the top of Jason’s head, where he’s bent forwards to focus on tiny buttons and delicate lace.
“Haha,” he intones at her. “I swung by the Manor, and when you guys weren’t back for Alfred’s classic 8 AM pre-brunch breakfast I figured something was wrong.” The buttons get fed through the loops, and her left wrist is free. Jason takes a second to look up at her, and he’s got a mean tilt to his mouth but his eyes are unfairly concerned. “Are you okay?”
Bru shrugs. “Been better, been worse.”
That baits a laugh out of Jason, who drops her left hand for her right. “B, your range for worst-case to best-case scenario is so big that sentence has no meaning.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe nothing. Look, don’t be too cut up on Selim being a dick, okay? I’d say I told you so, but picking on you right now’ll put me on the same team as that shithead, so I’m not gonna. You’re just so bad at looking after yourself, holy shit.”
“I get plenty of support.” She wonders if she can get away with a quick hair ruffle, when Jason’s hair gets ruffled anyways, because the wind’s picking up, because-
A chopper from Channel 7 News has scaled the side of the building, and the camerawoman is dangling perilously from her seatbelt to get a close-up shot of the tableau of Bru in her wedding dress, a mystery man holding her hand.
“For God’s sake,” Bru says. “What a-”
-
“-scandal! Billionaire heiress Brunhild Wayne found on a rooftop in a wedding dress with a mystery man. Was this an elopement? Did the Ice Queen of Gotham thaw out in her old age? Find out more in our exclusive hour-long expose!”
-
It takes far, far more effort than Bru actually wanted to expend to stop Jason from launching himself at the helicopter. Even Alfred had made eyes at the blades, and Bru knows Alfred tends to have all sorts of petty weapons on him whenever he leaves the Manor for anything more serious than a grocery run.
It’s a mess all the way through, running down the emergency fire escape in a $20,000 gown and heels that provide minimal traction. Jason had tried to hoist her over his shoulder even as he shouted abuse at the helicopter tailing them, and she still hasn’t figured out why all her boys default to this, other than perhaps they’re getting their own back from a childhood of being picked up like a sack of potatoes while their on patrol.
(It’s absurd how it’s a tic even for Tim and Damian, both of whom have not a chance in hell of getting up to any type of speed with all every single foot and inch of Bru’s 5′11, but she commends them even as she recommends an improved weight training regime.
After all, she can hit a pretty good speed with an unconscious Dick in her arms, so there’s always room for improvement.)
They make it to the bottom of the building and scatter, Jason heading right for the street where a bunch of news vans are arriving, Alfred disappearing to fetch the car, while Bru tries to look regular and unhurried despite the murmurs and whispers and flashing cameras as she does her best to look like she’s just out for a walk.
Oh, she hates this, she hates this so much, but she’s already smiling at curious onlookers, tucking loose hair behind an ear, distantly thankful that she had foregone the humiliation of a veil.
“Is privacy too much to ask for?” she says to no less than 4 smartphones livestreaming her misery. “A girl can’t even go out to have a good time without being hounded.”
Someone snorts loudly at ‘girl’, and she had aimed for that response, of course it’s all calculated, but it stings something awful on this awful day.
She keeps walking, like it’s a regular event for her to wander around downtown Gotham in a wedding dress but no groom, and already she’s calculating how to become more Obvious, more Attention-Grabbing, so that there are less eyes on Jason and Alfred.
Perhaps a drunken stumble into a fountain? And then as she’s fished out, a tearful breakdown about being left by some man she’d met in a club last night?
It’s a pretty good strategy.
Mind made up, Bru laughs and struts along with false delight, wishing she had a comm unit to figure out how the other two are faring, doing ridiculous little finger waves whenever someone laughs and yells ‘Good morning!’ at her.
There’s a fountain right in front of the Gotham One Bank, and she’s so close. Bru rolls her ankle in preparation for faking a fall, and it’s humiliating but it’s still, somehow, not the worst thing to have happened to her today.
She hits a gap in the brickwork with pinpoint accuracy, and starts flailing her arms to really sell this. More eyes, more eyes, if you have to look somewhere look at the strange, sad sight of eccentric Brunhild Wayne falling into a fountain in a dress that’s more than the downpayment for a house.
She closes her eyes, peace made with this horrible day, but the water doesn’t rush to meet her because there’s an arm around her waist, holding her tight.
“Babe, it’s big rude to leave the store while I was still trying out my tux,” Jason tells her, chiding but more affectionate than she’s earned from him in years. “C’mon, I know you said that this was the dress you wanted for the wedding, but it’s still a little extreme to just wear it home. It’s freezing, too, c’mon.”
Bru is so taken aback that she just stares at him quizically, tipped sideways in a half-fall and only saved from the fountain by the careful hold he has on her. “What’s going on?”
She means, why are you still here?
Jason sets her back on her feet, shrugs off his leather jacket, and drapes it across her shoulders. “Shit ass future husband I’d be, if I left you to go dress shopping alone. Especially when you haven’t actually said yes yet,” he says cheerfully, tone warm and intimate but still professionally pitched to be crystal clear on any recording taken within 20 feet of them. “C’mon, I’ve asked for the car to come round.” His voice goes heated, goes low like a growl, but still is perfectly audible to all their audience. “Let me help you get that dress off, yeah?”
Bru laughs in a way that might be coquettish in a younger woman, but it sounds enough like an agreement that Jason starts walking and tugging her along behind him to where Alfred has the car double-parked in a congested street, a single Bentley holding up 30 cars behind him.
She’s ushered into the car, Jason sliding it next to her, and finally there’s blessed peace and tinted windows.
“What,” she says through gritted teeth, “the hell is going on?”
-
It all comes out to at the breakfast-brunch table, with Damian, Tim, and Dick’s active participation as they all expound on the various ways they’ll bring hell upon Selim’s pretty little head, as well as run Channel 7 into the ground.
Alfred whips up waffles in a second and a half flat, and everyone’s ire melts like butter on something Belgian, but it all gets roused up all over again when Alfred sets down the jug of maple syrup and decisively says “Selim is, of course, to be left to me, young masters.”
“The hell he is,” Jason roars, hands twitching at his empty holsters. “No way, I called it from the start he was gonna be a piece of shit, so I get first dibs.” Dick opens his mouth to argue, presumably, but something in Jason’s face has him lapsing back into thoughtful silence.
From across the way, Tim leans towards the table so everyone can see him better as he does an eyeroll so involved he’s likely given himself a migraine. “You guys are way too slow. I’ve already flagged every single alternate identity Selim has and, like, 7 he doesn’t know I know about. Oh my god, I’m tanking his credit rating so bad right now, he’s gonna wish he was dead.”
“No one should be using Cave resources to go after an ally,” Bru says, growling into her cup of coffee.
“Ally my ass,” Tim grumbles, while Damian imperiously points out that “My sword isn’t a Cave resource.”
It devolves into a loud shouting match, all machismo and bravado as Tim, Damian, and Jason promise increasingly inventive vengeance on Selim, and Bru snaps as she slams her coffee cup into the table.
“Enough!”
That gets them quiet, almost has them at attention. It’s not a tone Bru uses very commonly outside of patrol because without the costume she’s no one’s commander, but she’s had enough of decisions involving her being made without her. It’s barely forgivable from Selim, a capricious Cat at the best of times, but it’s not acceptable from her family, because here in her own damn home she deserves better.
(Surely she does.)
“No one is to take any action against Selim. This is not your problem. It’s a non-issue. I will make a statement to address this morning, and this will blow over, and that’s it. Do you understand me?”
She doesn’t actually wait to hear a response, and gets up and gets out instead.
(God, she wishes she was in costume, wishes there was armour and a cape to keep her held in, instead of too-delicate lace and a leather jacket that isn’t hers).
-
Dick finds her in the little nook between a chimney stack and a gable that faces out towards the lily pond large enough to be most of a lake. She’s finally rid of the accursed gown, had pulled on a soft sweater and dress pants to sulk in private.
“Don’t even pretend you don’t want me here,” Dick says as he grunts and slides into a space that fit him much better at 8 than at 28. “Could’ve teleported to the Watchtower instead of hiding out in my old hiding spot, so keep that pout to yourself.”
“I wasn’t pouting,” Bru says, teeth bared, even as their shoulders knock companionably.
“Of course,” Dick says charitably. “You doing all right?”
“Been better, been worse.”
Dick laughs. “That’s way up there in terms of the world’s most unhelpful responses. Look, don’t get too upset with everyone, okay? You know better ‘n anyone else that this family’s full of overprotective weirdos.”
“I don’t need any protection,” Bru points out, because she is in fact the big bad Bat of Gotham, the ghost in the night that strikes fear into the heart of criminals far and wide.
“Sure, sure. Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve any, B. Plenty of times you’ve done things for me I sure didn’t need, and half of those things were straight up things I didn’t even want, but that’s what family is, isn’t it? There to give you things no one else can or will.” He nudges her shoulder again. “Like a weird, loving home for suddenly-orphaned circus kids, street rats with stolen tyres, chronically uncared-for nerds, and half-feral demon children. ”
“This and that are different things,” Bru says gravely, even as she preens, just very slightly, at the description of the home she tried to provide them as loving. “I am an adult.”
“And God love him, but Alfred’s older than dirt. You’re gonna tell me that if anyone ever did him dirty the way Selim did you dirty, you wouldn’t be tempted to rip their teeth out and make ‘em swallow?”
There’s a mutinous silence, the sort Bru makes when she doesn’t want to admit she’s wrong but also isn’t in the mood for a bald-faced lie.
“That’s what I thought. Another thing, too. Uhm. Alfred says you probably missed it, because you were trying to lead the dogs away, but.” Dick winces, and Bru stays quiet, gaze trained on him. “Uhm. Jason went a little crazy trying to chase reporters off of you, and while he was shouting at them and having like a thousand pictures of him being taken, he kindof..... got real offended when they were saying that if he isn’t the groom, that must mean you got jilted, got left. So he told them to fuck off, told them that you two had been together for a while and you were trying a dress on, told them that they, uhm.”
God, Dick can’t even keep a straight face, bursting into laughter.
“That they want you to pay attention to them so bad it makes them look stupid. Jay got up to some real knight-in-shining-armour shit, B, and the court of public opinion went from being,” and here Dick sobers up, because he’s seen how Bru’s been treated as she got older and older and still remained steadfastly unmarried and eccentric, “being happy to laugh at you, to thinking the media hounding you and your ‘nice young man’ are the assholes here. So you could issue a statement, and air out as much of your dirty laundry as you want, or.....”
Bru raises a brow. “Or?”
Dick grins. “Or you pretend that you two are in a serious, committed relationship, enjoy having people crashing Channel 7′s website with complaints about harassing you, and then just quietly dissolve your fake relationship a few months on. Live a little, B. We’ll come up with a cover for Jay, you can go out without people hounding you ‘bout when you’re gonna find someone, and since Jason’s the one who dug this hole, he’s got no right to complain if you insist he come over more often, or something.”
That gets Bru to smile, face turned back to the yard. It’s nearing noon now, and it’s rare for her to get this much sun. Already she can feel the bridge of her nose peeling, and she hasn’t slept in, ah, 36 hours or so? Everything’s been... heavy, and unpleasant, and as close to overwhelming as Bru lets herself feel for anything that’s not directly contributing to something apocalyptic, but wedged between Dick and a shingle that’s jutting out oddly in a position they’ve both visited over and over again over the past 2 decades is a steady, solid reminder that there is inarguably more good than bad in her life.
“Your suggestion is blackmailing?”
“Oh, no, my top suggestion is dropping violence on Selim’s head,” Dick tells her, full of good cheer. “But while I can’t speak for the dumbasses brawling over brunch, I know you’re not gonna appreciate us stepping in to defend your honour when you could just roundhouse kick Selim unconscious if you wanted to. So this is the next best thing, like a pseudo-holiday for you.”
Bru hums, and mulls it over. “I’ll check in with Jason first,” she says, at long last.
“No problem there,” Dick says, as he climbs to his feet, “since he’s skulking around within earshot two gables back. I’ll leave you two to talk, B. Just don’t forget that there are actually an insane number of people who’d be willing to come through for you on a rooftop at dawn, okay? In all sorts of ways.” He leans down for a quick peck, and then Dick’s off and away, leaping off the rooftop with a whoop and a holler as a shame-faced Jason clambers towards her, sighing long and loudly.
“Hello, Jason.”
“Whatever,” Jason says acidly, but he’s careful as he comes to sit by her to avoid shoving her into the rood with the breadth of his shoulders. “Dick’s such a loose-mouthed asshole.”
“That’s quite the mental image.”
“Shut up,” Jason says, shoving her very, very gently on a shoulder that was last dislocated 2 weeks ago. “You’re both horrible, fuck me, why the hell did I think I should come over here and apologise anyways?”
“You tell me, Jaybird,” she tells him, amused despite herself. “You’re the one deciding we were getting married out of the blue.”
That has him groaning and hiding his face behind his knees, and it’s funny how this tic of his lasted through childhood, through death, through till now. “Shut up,” he says again. “Didn’t like ‘em picking on you,” he says after, much more quietly.
It’s too much to resist; Jason’s deep passionate dislike for any type of bullying is one of his many, many admirable qualities. She reaches over and carefully cards her fingers through his hair, frankly finding more comfort than she thinks she’s able to give. “The whole point of both the Bat and Brunhildy Wayne is to be a target. That’s for better or for worse, and I’m used to it. It’s unfortunate that things with Selim ended up the way they did, but I didn’t need saving.”
A squinty, flinty Pit-green eye peers up at her from behind arms and knees. “World is full of things that don’t need saving. ‘s not about need.”
“Then what is it about?”
Jason doesn’t answer, but does uncurl, back straightening as he knocks her hand away. “Your hair’s getting long,” he says instead, and reaches over to tuck a lock behind her ear.
Bru draws back a little, but not far enough to break this tentative touch. “It’s getting unruly,” she says in a displeased grumble. God knows why but her hair seems to grow faster over winter, which means that she often greets the New Year with a tangled, damp mess of hair at her nape under the cowl.
Were the image of Billionaire Socialite not so important to maintain, she would have just had Alfred keep it cropped nice and neat. No use in keeping it almost to her shoulders for errant, heated touches, after all. A long, long break’s coming in the on-again-off-again relationship with Selim, if it isn’t already irreparably cracked.
Jason huffs at her, openly mocking and mildly affectionate. “Look at whose head it’s growing on.” He pulls back, and his expression goes serious, which on Jason makes him look very, very angry. “I know Dick gave you the full run-down, and straight up I’m just gonna say I don’t regret anything, except maybe not punching a pap or twelve. I shot my mouth off in the moment, a little, so for once I am gonna ask you what your play is, and just this once I’ll follow your lead. So call it, B. What do you want to do?”
She looks at his earnest, angry face, at this, this man who’d chosen to step up in an occasion he absolutely had not needed to, and is surprised by the echo of the thought of this will be good.
Driven by the impulse that had driven her to propose, the same one that had looked at the last Flying Grayson and very fiercely thought mine, the one that had created the cowl and the bat to win a fight, Bru just grins with too much teeth, and goes “Sure, why the hell not.”