Chapter Text
The last of the trauma patients had been airlifted out and the water levels had receded enough that some of the rooftop evacuees were slogging off on foot instead of being ferried off by volunteers in boats. It was...it had been a very long time.
He was wearing a watch, built into the inner wrist of his glove, but something had knocked it dead partway through the night. Probably the electric shock, or the water. Bruce was still ticking along, but he could feel himself slowing, like a watch’s second hand spluttering towards its eventual failure. He needed to get out of here before that happened.
He made his way down the stairs, between the families camped out and waiting, wrapped up in foil blankets and eating chips and granola bars the national guard had been handing out earlier. Someone had given Bruce one of those granola bars...before. Earlier. It had been awful, pure sugar and full of textures and so chewy his jaw hurt from choking it down. He had never understood the appeal of granola bars.
The evacuees on the stairs waved at him as he passed by, and he had no idea what to do with himself. But they weren’t as bad as the reporters circling the lobby, beady-eyed sharks who’d clearly been flown in from some neighboring suburb after a decent night’s sleep. They’d arrived arrived wearing rain boots and were scenting the air for stories, like they were hungry for something more to happen after everything. The local reporters had packed it in already, Bruce didn’t see a single face he recognized.
That didn’t make it any easier to push through the feeding frenzy when they noticed him at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t have the energy to deal with them, so he left the Garden with them still gnawing at the edges of his cape.
He’d left his bike parked at street level and it had been washed away in the flooding. Presumably it was as dead as his watch, wherever it was. He’d hunt it down some other day–currently his destination was the backup bike that he kept in the upper level of a parking garage. He was trying to figure out a route from the Garden to there when he noticed the crowd waiting in the street and stopped short.
These were definitely locals. Waterlogged residents of the Boroughs, still in their work uniforms or clubbing clothes or pajama pants, anxiously scanning the streets for whoever they were waiting for. And even more folks from uptown, dressed for Gotham’s typical dismal autumn and carrying signs scrawled on pieces of cardboard or printer paper.
Room for three, cats okay
Sleeper sofa at my place
Shelter at HS, I can drive you
Spare bedrooms can host family
It took longer than it should have to figure out what was happening (he’d always thought he was clever but he was learning over and over today that he could miss the obvious like a champion) but it finally hit him like a wave. The city’s main shelter space in emergencies was a disaster zone and the outer boroughs all had to be evacuated till they declared the seawall safe again. Where were people supposed to go? How were they supposed to get there? All of these people had apparently figured that out before him and stepped up to volunteer their homes to strangers.
“That is who you should be reporting on,” he said, slowly, the words feeling dragged out of him with a hook. In his mind a second hand on a watch twitched and lurched, running out the clock. Need to get out of here.
He steeled his spine and pushed forward towards the crowd, pathetically grateful as people began to move aside for him so he didn’t have to weave between them. Then crowd closed in behind him, cutting off the mob of journalists.
“He’s done enough, let him get the fuck home,” a woman said loudly over their protests.
“Hey, you need a ride?” A guy with white hair and a biker jacket asked. Bruce staggered to a stop again (have to keep moving, keep moving or you’re going to collapse on the street) and stared at him. The guy was at least in his sixties, wiry as a pipecleaner. He grinned at Bruce: “Well I know you’re not letting any of these fools get you in a car. Lemme take you partway, kid?”
He’d already broken all of the rules he’d set for himself as “Vengeance”. He let the stranger give him a ride, sitting on the back of his Harley and probably ending up on camera from at least a dozen cell phones. At least they lost the reporters who’d been tailing him. At the entrance of the parking garage he give the man a graceless thank you. He didn’t seem to mind, just waved Bruce off before making a u-turn on the empty street and roaring off back towards the convention center.
The power was out at the parking garage, so Bruce had to hop up onto the sidewalk to get around the security gate on his way out. The impact going over the curb sent a bolt of pain from his hip up to his neck, cutting through the haze that had swallowed him since the adrenaline injection had worn off. Fuck, tomorrow was going to suck. He wasn’t going to take the bike down the stairs to the cave, that was for sure.
He traced a route home that was as smooth as Gotham’s streets would allow, swinging wide around potholes and rerouting around the worst streets on his route. The world narrowed into the tunnels, the bike’s engine echoing around him in a way that had him gritting his teeth and missing his regular helmet. At least the power was still on, the automatic gates opening smoothly ahead of him.
Gloves. Gauntlets. Helm. Body armor. He shed his second skin with none of the care it deserved, left it strewn on a path between his bike and the elevator. He stopped long enough at the desk to get his contact lens out and seated in the reader before stumbling on. The night was already twisting and fading in his mind and he itched to sit down with his journal and piece it back together again. Some of it would be beyond salvaging by the time he woke up again, it always was. But he had to prioritize being ready to go back out again when it got dark.
The laces of his boots had swelled and squeezed the knots so tight he nearly gave up and cut them off off, sitting down on the floor of the elevator and scrabbling ineffectually at the damn things. He forced himself to stop. Traced the outside of his left hand with his right–breath in and out, one circuit–until he could drag himself back under control. Alfred was still at the hospital, but he’d been so disappointed last time Bruce tracked Gotham’s muck across the hardwood floors. Repeating the mistake was not an option.
He got the left boot untied, but resorted to his pocket knife to get free of the right one. He left them in the elevator along with the socks, still soaked through. Not wanting to leave wet footprints down the hallway, he dragged off his undershirt and used it to dry off his feet. He walked, shivering, to his bedroom through the dark hallway.
His cell phone was blinking on his bedside table: two messages from Dory. She must have been looking for him when it all went to hell, he was going to have to think of an excuse. He set the voicemails to play.
“Mr. Wayne, I’m sorry, I tried to find you and ask but–it’s my daughter Elizabeth. Her apartment’s been evacuated and she needs somewhere to go with Jeremy and the kids. I’m going to drive them over to my apartment. I’ll try calling again soon.”
“Mr. Wayne, it’s Dory again. I do apologize, I meant to head right back to the tower. I don’t know if you remember that both my daughter and her husband work at Gotham General, but they’ve both been called in on account of all this. I told them I would stay and watch the children. Please, just call if you need me and I’ll figure something out. Please–let me know you’re okay. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
That was more than she’d said to him in years. She must have been worried, though of course Bruce would never retaliate for someone needing to take care of their family instead of his empty husk of a house. He didn’t think he could manage a phone call where he reassured anyone, so he sent her a text message. Thankfully, Dory knew not to expect much of him.
In the bathroom, the galaxies of bruises across his reflection brought him up short. It was worse than he’d thought, the shape of his body armor driven into his chest by each shotgun blast, spilling red beneath his skin. His back and hip were the worst, a deep purple that sank into black from his crash landing with the wingsuit. But there was no angle he could turn and not look gruesome.
He was too exhausted to wipe off the greasepaint, so he resigned himself to ruining another pillow. He filled up a glass of water from the bathroom sink and went to bed.
His heart was racing, rattling in his chest like a car roaring down a cobblestone street. Doom, inescapable, pressed him down against the bed and held him there. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t escape. His heart, hammering away in his chest was going to give him away–they were going to find him and then–
His eyes flew open. He cataloged the room and its shadows. His hoodies hanging from the hooks on the back of the door. The blackout curtains drawn tight over the window, motionless. The stacks of books on his desk, the clothes piled beside the hamper. Nothing moved. It was utterly silent, except for the roaring sound of his heart and the ragged shallow gasps of him breathing. You’re not dying, you’re hyperventilating.
He forced himself to take a deep breath, slowly, and the pain in his chest burst across his ribs like a strike from a baseball bat. He gasped shallowly a few times, squeezing his eyes tight. Fractured ribs, then. Fuck, that was going to slow him down.
Bruce was good at pain. He’d gotten it under control, he really had. Some nights he didn’t feel a thing, even as gunshots sank bruises beneath his armor. When he’d hit the ground after the disaster with the wingsuit he’d been half shock and half fury at himself, the pain lost somewhere under all that. All of a sudden he wasn’t sure if he was good at pain or if he’d just lost track of it somewhere in the nights since the Riddler killed Mayor Mitchell. Because it was definitely back now and he couldn’t seem to push it away.
He had to breathe normally to get enough oxygen to stop his heart from racing and he tried–he tried. He squeezed his eyes tight, tears leaking out anyway as he tried to pull himself back under control.
He leveled out his breathing with the kind of effort it would normally take him to scale the side of a building. There was a sob threatening to spill out of him and he couldn’t because his ribs would kill him if that happened. Not good. Not good.
Bruce had gone to enough medical school to know that painkillers weren’t a thing you took because you were weak. They were necessary to let the body relax enough to heal, to reduce inflammation. A big fucking problem with chest injuries, because if you didn’t breath deeply it encouraged fluid accumulation in the lungs. When Alfred insisted he take something, he didn’t fight him. (Even for that sprained ankle that had barely needed anything, he could have managed fine without)
But that was exactly the problem. He’d let himself get reliant on Alfred being there. Looking him over and deciding what they needed to do to get him back on the streets as soon as possible. (He’d sigh and look at Bruce with that disapproving stare but he knew getting back out was the only thing he cared about. And he let him do it.) Bruce didn’t know where any of the supplies were kept, outside of the ones he kept in the pouches of his belt and the ibuprofen he kept in his bedside table for headaches.
He was pretty sure ibuprofen wasn’t recommended this soon after getting shot in the chest at point-blank range, body armor or no. There was always the risk of internal bleeding, and NSAIDs increased that risk. But it was that or stay awake, grinding his teeth together and struggling to breathe. Ibuprofen it was.
He dragged his arm out from under the sweat-soaked sheets and reached for the drawer of his nightstand. His arm felt clumsy and leaden, struggling to grasp the brass pull for the drawer. It wasn’t just the soreness from abused muscles, though he could feel his right shoulder throbbing from when he nearly dislocated it catching himself. It was like his arm was barely strong enough to lift itself and his hands didn’t understand what he was trying to make them do.
Remember grabbing onto a live wire yesterday, idiot? It hadn’t hurt at the time, but he knew it should have. It had been worth it, worth it to stop all those civilians from being electrocuted in the rising floodwaters. But any electric shock injury carried a risk of nerve damage, sometimes taking days or weeks before symptoms showed up. If he was lucky it would heal on its own. No–if he was lucky he would have escaped unscathed. But luck had never been on speaking terms with him, so this shouldn’t have been a surprise.
This time he did sob with the frustration of it all and the baseball bat of pain to his chest left him gasping.
“I have control,” he said to the darkness. “It’s my body and I am in control.” He wasn’t but god he wished he was. “You’re not going to die, you’re just going to suffer.” There. That was true. That was a good mantra.
He slid out of bed in a heap of limbs and let his injuries fight for supremacy. The ribs won. His hip protested the ranking system. He used his useless arms to push himself up against the bedside table and caught the drawer pull between his teeth. The brass was metal and sweat on his tongue.
Fighting his numb hands the whole way, he got the bottle of ibuprofen out of the drawer. It had a childproof cap. He fought the damn thing for what felt like a decade before giving up. You are a child, aren’t you? Always needing someone to take care of you.
On the floor next to his bed, Bruce tried to strategize. He was too weak to get the damn cap off a pill bottle, there was no way he could lift a glass of water without spilling it all over him. Eventually he was going to need to drink. He was always dehydrated in the suit–there weren’t a lot of places in Gotham you could take a piss outside normal business hours except on the street and Bruce just couldn’t make himself do that. So he just...didn’t drink water when he was out. He’d had a little during the recovery effort at the Garden, but not enough. His tongue was paper dry in his mouth.
Nobody was coming to help him. Alfred was in the hospital. Dory was with her grandchildren. He was completely alone, and he would be for days. He wasn’t going to die of dehydration lying on the floor of his bedroom, useless to everyone forever. He was going to recover. He was going to get back out on the streets. He was going to make things right, somehow, even if everything he’d ever tried to fix only made things worse.
He dragged himself to the bathroom like a worm, lying on his side and legs scrambling behind him. He brought the comforter with him, hugged to his chest, along with the pill bottle his stupid hands couldn’t open. He tried walking first, vision filling with black before he got off his knees. Blood loss? Dehydration? Either way, getting upright was apparently out of the question.
He made his nest inside the bathtub, wrapped up his comforter. The Gotham tap water was sweet like honey, drunk from the tub faucet like a dog.
You’re not going to die, you’re just going to suffer.