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The first time Gordon touches Bruce doesn’t count. At least, not to Gordon.
“It’s the whole reason I came to you in the first place, Jim,” Bruce says.
But there’s touching, and then there’s touching, and Gordon refuses to count the first time he touched Bruce’s cheek because Bruce was eight years old at the time and newly orphaned.
Jim’s struggled enough with the twenty year age difference. There are still moments when Bruce seems so young in spite of everything, and times when he feels unforgivably old, and he doesn’t need to feel like a dirty old paedophile while he’s at it.
And yet there are also times when he touches Bruce’s cheek and says, “It’s alright,” and thinks he can see the boy in the man’s face.
He doesn’t count it, but Bruce does.
The first time Gordon counts is the second time he touches Bruce’s cheek.
Ironically, it’s twenty eight years after the first time that doesn’t count. It’s eleven years since he met the Batman, ten years since the Batman was framed for murder, and two years since the Batman died to save Gotham City. Two years, in fact, since a casket was lowered into the ground and a tombstone erected to Bruce Wayne.
Appropriately enough, his first touch after all these years is a punch.
He catches Bruce on the cheekbone in the middle of a fight.
Four against one is overkill on the part of the mob, even for Gotham’s Hero Cop and Commissioner, but he’s too old and bitter to go down without a fight, so he fights and rages and he’s so caught up in the red haze of making the bastards pay for his death that he doesn’t notice the cavalry arrive until he’s knocked Bruce to the ground and gone for his throat.
Bruce is many things but stupid isn’t one of them.
So Gordon ends up face-first into the ground, a warm weight pinning him immobile and an old, familiar voice rasping in his ear.
“It’s me, Jim. It’s me. Calm down. It’s me.”
He couldn’t forget the Batman’s voice. He hears it sometimes, in dreams and nightmares and alcohol-fuelled gazes into the abyss.
“It’s me.”
Weeks later he’ll say, “If you weren’t so goddamn quiet, I’d have realised you were there sooner.”
At the time, he just goes limp into the muddy, filthy, rain-soaked ground. He has two fractured ribs, a chipped tooth, a black eye, a lip split in two places, a stab wound in his back and all he feels when he closes his eyes is Bruce’s cheek against his own.
The third time he touches Bruce’s cheek is very soon after the second time that is really the first time.
He wakes twelve hours later to vague memories of a fight, an ambulance, Stephens’ face, the doctor’s hands, and over it all, Batman’s growl.
He wakes to find a burly veteran in GPD blue reading a golfing magazine in a chair by his hospital bed.
From the moment he opens his eyes, his life isn’t his own.
The burly cop hollers for nurses, doctors, and Stephens – in that order – and his back feels like he’s been carved open like a Halloween pumpkin.
When night falls, however, he rouses himself to order everyone out of the room.
He spends the next three hours lying on his side, fingers curling and uncurling rhythmically into the sheets for something to hold onto.
He is privileged to hear the window open. He’s even more privileged to feel the shadow the moonlight throws across him.
Bruce circles the bed to crouch where they can look at each other eye to eye. He isn’t wearing his mask.
“Thank you,” Gordon says.
Bruce isn’t happy about that. He isn’t happy about a lot of things. He isn’t happy that he was almost too late.
Gordon suspects he isn’t happy about being dead and therefore limited in his ability to act.
Jim’s heavily drugged, as he was once before, so he uncurls his fingers from the sheets and reaches out in a dreamlike haze. He touches the livid red bruise on Bruce’s cheek, and then gentles it with the rough pad of his forefinger.
Hazel eyes darken, lashes lower, nostrils flare.
He can see it. He put his glasses on to make sure he could see it. Bruce’s face is so close to his own. In the moonlight blazing through the window, Bruce looks young and vulnerable and unhappy.
Gordon continues to brush his thumb over the crest of Bruce’s cheekbone.
“It’s alright,” he says calmly, “It’s alright.”
The important thing, he thinks distantly, is that they’re both alive.
Thirty six hours later, Bruce Wayne emerges alive and well and living in Berlin.
His return to Gotham is triumphant.
He is older, harder, and he’s been through the wars. He’s a changed man, he says sombrely, having lived through the atrocities Bane perpetuated on Gotham. His own suffering is evident; he has a titanium knee from his second botched escape attempt.
He comes back to Gotham and starts a slew of community campaigns.
He pours money into Wayne Foundations, which pours money into Gotham General, the orphanages, homeless shelters, soup kitchens and medical clinics for the poor. He pours his energy into Wayne Industries and jobs open up on the docks and in the factories that haven’t been available for decades.
Then he announces a personal investment in Gotham’s police department.
“Gotham’s had its share of legends and heroes,” he says, “But the true legends, the true heroes, are the police who stood between the terrorists and the people of this city.”
Gordon squirms beneath the rhetoric and his barely healing knife wound itches beneath the bandages and his best suit.
He watches with tired sympathy while the world nods and nods and smiles and fails to be set alight.
The projects continue for eight months, and Bruce Wayne is tireless. Seems tireless.
Gordon watches and waits patiently, standing on the sidelines, and one evening he finally catches the wash of lost hopelessness in those eyes just before Bruce smirks at his date and excuses himself. Gordon finds the man outside in the garden, leaning against a tree, rubbing circles into his temples with his fingertips.
“It was a good try, son,” he says.
Neither of them needs to clarify what he means, or why he’s there.
Bruce is immeasurably exhausted and when Gordon reaches out hesitantly in the moonlight, he leans into the touch as if he’s hungry for it. Starved for touch – any kind at all.
Bruce is gaunter, his face thinner, but his skin is still soft.
“You did your best,” Gordon says firmly, “And you’re making a difference.”
“Doesn’t help much if I’m doing this alone.”
“You’ve always worked alone.”
Bruce’s eyes are oddly bright in the moonlight, his smile small and close-mouthed and genuine. “Not always.”
“Well, if it makes you feel better, you’re not working alone on this either.”
The kiss is unexpected, and tastes of mint and champagne.
It’s over almost before it begins, and Bruce lets out a groan and whirls away. He isn’t wearing a cape or an armoured suit but the gesture is old, familiar, and Gordon blinks at the retreating back as it strides back to the house, shoulders hunched and head down.
Bruce avoids him for six months.
The fifth time Gordon touches Bruce’s face is when he’s panting, heart thundering, adrenaline fuelling anger and fear and churning it into a nauseating ball in his stomach.
The Batman is unsteady on his feet, trying to regain his dignity and balance after wrapping an arm around the Commissioner’s waist and swinging them out of an exploding drugs lab into freefall out of the upper window of a warehouse.
Gordon wraps a furious, shaking hand in the dark cape still caught between him and the ground and he yanks.
Bruce slips to one knee, and Gordon growls, catches him by the point of his chin and stares at him eye to eye.
“What the hell were you doing in there?” Gordon starts, “We cleared the building! You’re done with this! You’re dead! You’re not...”
And then he gives up and kisses him.
It’s the only thing that makes sense when his ears are ringing and he’s sick with relief and terror after the fact.
If he hadn’t seen the shadow, he panics, if the old itch of suspicion hadn’t been too loud to ignore.
He thinks of the fire crew going in after the flames go out, finding things that they expect and one body that they don’t. Finding a twisted wreck of a man splattered with melted plastic and metal, flesh burned and broiled under the armour plating.
Bruce’s mouth is warm and alive beneath his, and his tongue flicks uncertainly against Gordon’s.
Gordon’s grip on the cape gentles as the spike of terrified anger eases beneath relief, and he lets go of the cloth in favour of skin.
The only skin available is Bruce’s mouth, and chin, and the slope of his cheek.
Gordon trails careful fingertips over Bruce’s cheek and nips at his lower lip and he has no clue whether Bruce is actually interested or simply holding still. He’s still sitting on the Batman’s cape. Has no clue if there is any physical reaction on Bruce’s part at all, because the suit isn’t built for sexual escapades.
Until Bruce opens his eyes.
Bright hazel, edged out by widening black, blink of dark lashes and kiss-swollen lips pink and slightly parted.
It’s practically sinful.
It’s absolutely honest. And open. And vulnerable.
“The next time you’ll get yourself killed,” Gordon rasps, throat tight, “If you’re coming back, work with me.”
The feel of a leather gauntlet against his face is strange but Bruce says, “We’ll have to negotiate the terms of this contract in a more suitable location.”
And Gordon is startled into laughter.
Bruce’s mouth curves into a smile. One leather-covered finger taps Gordon’s cheekbone. “It’s alright, Jim,” he whispers half mockingly, “It’s fine.”
Gordon stops counting touches after that night. It isn’t practical to keep up the practise.
He spends the whole night touching Bruce, and being touched in return, and it’s... odd. Embarrassing, even. But like most of the things they do, they’re willing to persevere for a better future.
He’s really too old, he thinks, but then again Bruce is too damaged. They’re neither of them candidates for healthy relationships and the women they loved, the families they wanted, belong to lives they’re not allowed to have.
In the meantime, they have each other, and that’s far more than they had alone.