Work Text:
“Are you sure this is what you want?”
You don’t think Bruce would hit you, really, but your brain screams at you that he’s about to. That his gloved fist is about to come down and rain holy fire upon your face. His stance says he’s thinking about it. The subtle movement of his feet tell you the same. He’s about to punch you and that’ll be it. Your toxic relationship will go down the drain and everything you two worked towards will be gone. You can almost feel the punch before it happens. The way it’ll split your lips, break your nose, how you’ll fall to the cold vats of acid below. How you’ll stumble, break the platform you two stand on, how you’ll take him with you, two damned hands held together.
It almost makes you smile.
He waits for your response. He watches as you think, letting his proposition fall over your mind. It’s tempting, you admit to yourself. He’s offering you a way out. The answer here is obvious. A worm wiggles at the back of your mind, berating you for thinking his proposal is serious. It’s not, you know this, but then he smiles at you — a crooked, awkward upturn of his lips from the years of misuse — and every issue you have seems to fall away.
Words fail to fall from your lips. They have you in a chokehold, sentences tied around your throat. You want to say something — anything, you urge your vocal chords — but the only sound that breaks free is a soft laugh. A laugh, a chuckle, a chortle, the already cut smile seems to widen somehow farther. It spreads ear to ear and for a moment you’re afraid the scars are bleeding again. That the long healed cuts are open, waiting for you to add another scar. The hand not holding the bomb’s control remote comes up to scratch, to feel the outline of the scars.
It’s a good proposition, you think. Bruce would never lie to you. He’d never—
When you finally look up, Bruce’s dark eyes seem to tell another story entirely. One that sobers you up quickly. His smile says “It’ll be okay, we’ll go home and everything will be back to normal.” But his eyes — you blink to make sure you’re seeing it right. His eyes yell, scream, tell you everything his smile says is wrong. The words that form from his lips are lies. They’re all sweet nothings. He's lying to you.
No matter what you say, you know the outcome will be the same.
You take another step back on the platform. It creaks under your combined weights. He’s not Bruce, you realize with another quick look into his eyes. He’s not. This isn’t the lover that held you on dark nights — at the thought, another chuckle escapes you — and he’s not the one that got you into trauma therapy. This isn’t the Bruce you know. This is someone else entirely, the bat that Gotham’s underworld fears. His cape billows from behind him. You ask yourself momentarily where the breeze is even coming from. It seems like it travels with him.
Another laugh, another chuckle. He raises a brow under his mask.
“Well?” He asks.
“I’m fucked either way, aren’t I?” You reply. It’s the first full sentence you’ve said to him the entire night.
“We can go home,” He says your name softly, like a whisper of a prayer. “We can pretend this never happened. I don’t want to lose you.”
You don’t want to lose me? Your brain stutters. The madness is gone in a blink for a temporary second. You remember the nights he held you. The mornings he and you sat, drinking coffee, talking about everything there was to talk about. The fake life you tried to make. The love you tried to lie about which slowly turned into truth.
“Please.” He takes another step. His claws reach out for you, black as the night, asking for the remote. You tear it away from him before he can get it, holding it as far as you can.
“I don’t think so,” You lick at your lips. They taste like cherry chapstick and smoke. The divots under your tongue feel rough. “See, I know you’re lying to me.”
“I’d never lie to you.”
“That’s not true, Batsy.”
He flinches back. It’s not the first time you’ve called him that, not the last either. You had switched over to Brucey while you two were dating, but this isn’t Bruce, so he doesn’t deserve to be called that. The Bat takes yet another step forward which is met with your own feet pulling you back. There’s not much platform left behind you, you think. Soon enough, he’ll push you far enough that you’ll fall and — hopefully — take him with you.
He says your name again. Creaking overtakes it as the platform swings ever so slightly. You grab onto the cold railing to steady yourself, not wanting to face a premature death. Not yet, you think. He can’t kill you yet. You need him to see. You need him to understand why you’re doing this. You need him to turn into what you are — someone who can see the world for what it truly is. The laugh that comes from you burns.
It’s the one distraction he needs. As you stumble from the swinging, he balls his fist and sends it in the direction of your face. One moment, you’re steadying yourself, the next your nose burns, your face bruises, cartilage and bone crack as something breaks. As predicted, your lips split, adding yet another scar to your collection. This one joins its brothers in a triumphant spray of blood.
The remote falls from your hands, clattering against the metal grating. You yelp and crawl for it as it teeters on the edge of the platform, threatening to fall and ruin everything. Vapors rise from just below it. Plumes of smoke and chemicals push up like hands vying for the remote. Yours reached it first, but not without consequence. The vapors burn, you realize quickly. They grasp onto your fingers as they enclose around the box. White bleeds into your skin, turning it a sickly pale scar across your fingers.
You almost scream. It hurts, you think, it burns and it’s awful and terrible and your hand will never work the same again. The aching turns into something else as your fingers close shut and it feels permanently like your hands are now claws. They only let go of their clawed positions when a boot meets them. His boot, to be exact. It crunches down, breaks fingers and metal. Jagged tips of scrap dig into your already crying palms. They ask for relief and you mentally apologize to your fingers.
“It’s over,” He says. It’s hushed and you can barely hear it over your own howling screams. “Give up,” He says your name once more.
“Don’t fucking call me that,” You sob through clenched teeth. “Don’t fucking—“ The next laugh is more painful than the last. You pull your broken hands out from under his boot, much to his cringed expression. They’re hard to work with, but they’ll still work for their purpose. You gently push one against the bar of the platform. It burns, a cold seemingly unending pain, but you still manage to push yourself up. “I’m not that person anymore.” You hiss.
Another step back takes you to the edge of the platform. It’s almost time, you realize. It’s almost about to end. Everything will be over. You’ll be free. You’ll both be free.
Batman follows every step you take. When your feet are hanging over the edge of the platform, he growls out your name.
“You don’t want to do this.”
You laugh. Of course you want to do this. You’ve wanted to do this since day one. Your smile grows and with it your split lip spills blood down your neck. It stains the front of your shirt a deep red until it reaches your pants, then your feet, then drips off into the vats. Chemicals hiss as the blood hits them.
“I do,” You say. One more step and you’ll fall. It’s like a twisted wedding vow in a way. “I really do.”
“Joker,” Batman warns. It sends a shiver up your spine as you realize there’s really no going back now. “Don’t.”
“Too late.” You shrug at him. Your broken hands move as if to say “ Sorry, you can’t stop me.”
When you fall, your feet feel like you’re floating on air. It’s unreal for a moment and everything in your body screams that you’ve made a mistake. You’ve fucked up, you’re wrong, you didn’t want to do this, you didn’t want to—
A sound zips by your ear. A line reaches out to grab you and it misses. It instead hits the vat of acid and incinerates. Batman cursed behind you, but his one trick is gone. He’s not going to catch you. You’re all on your own and you twist to look back at him before you hit the acid, holding his stare. He looks broken, more so than usual. His hand reaches out to catch you, as if he’ll stop you with some invisible power he doesn’t have.
Time slows as he tears at the air. You blink and capture the moment of his desperation, a Polaroid printing in your mind. An image you want captured forever.
This is how you want him, you think. You want him desperate, crying, begging for you. Asking for you to stop, to slow down. You won’t, of course, you’ll never stop.
When your back hits the chemical vat, you can’t help but laugh. All around you, white clouds your vision. You take in a deep breath and shut your eyes as your skin burns and changes. It morphs into pleasure after a while as your nerves get used to the pain. Your brain repeats that moment on repeat, Bruce’s desperate eyes, his clawed hands reaching for you, his scream of your name.
When you finally resurface, you can barely remember his real name or the memories or the love you two shared. But that image is a permanent reminder of the feelings that brew just under the surface of your newly dyed skin.