Chapter Text
It had been quite some time since the name Bruce Wayne was on so many people's lips. He's standing by one of the many drink tables littered around the hall, a champagne flute in his limp hand that he idly brings up to his lips. The last time had been just after the death of his parents, two people killed in the street, yet all people talked about was the fate of their eight-year-old son. Perhaps it would have been different if it was rooted in empathy or concern rather than nosiness and morbid curiosity. In truth, Bruce could have survived another seven years in solitude, away from false niceties, uncomfortable suits, and just as uncomfortable conversation. But just as Batman is a mask he has to mold, so is Bruce Wayne.
He was still debating where he was taking the whole thing. He felt a bit like a child again, picking who he would be in order to be anything but the scared little orphan he truly was. He was considering the soft-hearted philanthropist root, a man so kind he could not possibly be that hooligan running around at night- causing all that trouble. However, his physiology directly countered that. He could portray himself as the gentle giant type, but it still didn't feel quite right. It's still too close to the truth.
Bruce was glad that such an occasion had arisen; this gala, in particular, was the perfect one for him to reintroduce himself into society. David Mizoguchi was an older man who had been a vague friend of his father; as a child, Bruce remembers him as a quirky forty-year-old man everyone gossiped about due to his lack of a wife and eccentricity. Bruce remembers his father being kind to David, and Bruce remembers him being kind in turn. Bruce's return to Gotham had only come in whispers, but even so, the man included his name on the list of guests. He had just won a highly accredited award for one of his short stories, Bruce himself had read a handful of them before attending and they were pretty good- if not just as odd as the man.
A gentle tug on his pant leg brings him from his thoughts. His first instinct is to kick, but he stops himself just in time after looking down and seeing a tiny head poking out of the tablecloth beside him. The girl looking up at him was small, with round dark eyes, choppily cut short black hair, and a grin curled onto her expression. Bruce was unnerved that he had not noticed her but didn't let it show. He crouches down and tilts his head at her cheeky smile.
"What are you doing down there?" He asked.
"Hiding, I hate grown-up parties," she told him with a pinched face that made his lips twitch. "There's no colourful streamers and balloons, no magicians, no presents, and no fun music. We can't even play musical statues!"
"I find them quite boring, too, " he admitted, perhaps a little too honestly, but the girl just grinned.
"I know. I could tell," She brags a little.
"You did?" He asked curiously.
"Uh-huh. I thought you might want to play with me," She lifts more of the tablecloth and reveals a litter of papers scattered on the floor.
"Are those maps?" He wondered aloud.
"Yep! I made them!" she beamed, and Bruce glanced between the papers, the various tools, and the pencils and blinked.
"That's very impressive; it's Gotham, right?" He asked. They weren't dissimilar to his own maps, and his eyes narrowed on the blank spot she had next to where the various entrances of the Batcave were. It makes sense that she hasn't filled them in; of course, no one apart from Bruce and Alfred knew of their existence, and he was confident about that. But it was odd that she had left it blank. It was as if she knew something was there but not what. He's just about to ask when he hears a voice behind him.
"Mia, what are you doing under there? Goodness me, I'm sorry if she's troubling you, Mr Wayne. " Bruce looked up to see a young woman standing before him. She had light brown hair, a slight Russian accent, and was quite pretty. He recognised her as David Mizoguchi's wife. He glanced at the child under the table again.
Ah . He thought before pushing himself up.
"It's no trouble at all, Mia was just showing me-"
"You can call me Maps! Everyone calls me Maps except Mum!" She interrupts as she crawls out of the table. Her mother says something to her in Russian, telling her off for being rude. Bruce pretends he doesn't understand and extends his hand to the girl.
"It's nice to meet you, Maps. I'm Bruce." She looks at his hand with excitement and grasps it very confidentially. It's almost comical how small her hand is and how thin her arm looks next to his. She shakes it very enthusiastically, causing her mother to laugh a little and Bruce's lips to twitch again. He extends his greeting to the woman as well.
"It's nice to meet you too, Mrs Mizoguchi," he tells her, and she smiles.
"Please, call me Sandra, and the pleasure is mine." It makes sense; he knows she is twenty-eight, only two years older than him, but he wanted to be polite because he imagined that not many people in this room show her manners, let alone common decency.
"Forgive us for our departure, but I do believe it is someone's bedtime,"
"Mum! No! Bruce and I wanted to play, he said he would help me with my maps!" The little girl groaned, causing Bruce to raise a brow, unaware he would be doing such a thing, not that he would have minded. Although he wondered why she assumed he would know anything about cartography, he once again thought of those empty spaces.
Sandra whispers some more Russian lowly, sending Bruce an apologetic smile before telling her daughter to pick up her things. The two walk away together, and Bruce watches them ascend the grand staircase. Over the next hour, he keeps an eye on it, but Sandra Mizoguchi has yet to emerge. Perhaps she, too, had gone to bed. Bruce remembers her looking quite pale before she left, and out of the corner of his eye, he notices her shaking hands.
"-and it's not that I don't think the poor sods need the help, but I worked for my money and I can't just go around giving it all away!" Bruce nodded along placatingly to the ramblings of Geoffry Banks; he was careful not to be too agreeing to the man's bile but couldn't afford to cause a scene by disagreeing. Currently, he was desperately searching for a way out of the conversation.
While looking for an excuse to leave, it's then that his eyes fall on a woman a few meters away. She was striking, with long white hair, pale grey eyes, and a vibrant gold dress. She lounged against a table by herself, watching the people around her, unassuming behind a glass-like Bruce had once been doing before. Before his arrival Bruce had been sure to find out the guest list of the evening's event and do a thorough background check, but no such woman had come up in his findings.
"Oh god. Her." Geoffrey scoffed when he seemed to notice where Bruce's gaze had wandered.
"I'm afraid I don't recognize her," Bruce said idly.
"No, you wouldn't, boy. Sybil Silverlock. She's new blood. Her father was a rather successful surgeon; when the hospital caught fire and he died inside, she was the sole inheritor. Got the lot and wormed her way in." Geoffry leaned in as if to tell a secret, but his voice didn't drop a single notch.
"She caused an absolute mockery of herself two months ago, drunker than you can imagine. It's a wonder she feels as if she can show her face around here again,"
The conversation shifts, but Bruce's attention doesn't. He almost sighs in relief when the old man excuses himself to go to the restroom. With him gone, Bruce makes his way over to Sybil Silverlock.
"Well, well, well. If it isn't Brucie Wayne," Bruce noticed, her voice had a strange infliction. Her eyes, too, had something simmered in them that had alarm bells ringing inside his head. But there was something about her—her dropped lids, sly grin, and the delicate hand that extended out to him—that made him feel that this danger was perhaps very, very worth it. He brought the hand to his lips and pressed it against them softly.
"Sybil Silverlock, it is a pleasure to meet you." He found his smile to be a reflection of hers. Bruce was good at being a mirror, a mirror where the looker sees precisely what they want to.
"Brucie," He mused a second later. "I've never heard that one before,"
"Do you dislike it?" She wondered coyly. "I know so little about you, Mr Wayne, but you are quite the enigma. Such debate over what you were doing all those years,"
"I'm afraid I was hit with a nasty case of wanderlust," he tells her, plucking two glasses of champagne from a passing waiter; he passes one to her waiting hand. "When one grows up in Gotham, it does some good to see what the rest of the world is like,"
"I'm afraid I disagree. You see, I'm a bit of a home bird," She hums, tapping her glass. Bruce's eyes dart to her finger and back to her eyes. "My whole family is from Gotham from as far back as possible; I don't think there has been a Silverlock who left the city since we arrived,"
"Adventure is not suited for all," he says, and Sybil grins wickedly.
"Now, now, Brucie. No one said I wasn't adventurous," She throws her drink back and places a simple hand on his chest.
The two share more drinks, and he hears an old woman a few feet away scowl about drunken youths. He can feel the eyes on him when he and Sybil depart from the main hall, his hand on her lower back. He notices the way some poor woman blushed when she got lost looking for the restroom and stumbled upon him and Sybil undressing each other, how her eyes linger for too long, and she goes from pink to red when he winks at her, and she leaves like hell is on her heels. He notices that when they return, the stumble he puts into his step, along with his forced drunken grin, has some people rolling their eyes and shaking their heads with amused smiles.
Brucie Wayne, huh? He thinks he can work with that.
Sybil's pupils have enlarged, and the adrenaline high from their escapades has seemingly yet to drop. Bruce watches her and wonders if she had taken something before they left. Her hands shake when she excuses herself to go to the bathroom this time. If she does not return soon, he will go check on her.
"Hello, Bruce. It's wonderful to see you again." This is the first time in the night that Bruce has seen David Mizoguchi. He is a sight for sore eyes and brings back a sense of nostalgia in him.
"David! What a marvelous night! Congratulations!" He beams widely, clapping a hand on his shoulder.
The man's eyes shifted to his glass, but when he looked at Bruce again, his head tilted to one side as if curious. This made Bruce uneasy, but David didn't say anything about the issue; instead, he just smiled softly.
"I have so much to ask about your travels. I, too, have caught the travel bug once or twice in the past, but I'm afraid we must discuss it another time. I'm searching for my partner, Sandra. Have you seen her?"
Bruce had momentarily forgotten that he was meant to keep an eye on the stairs. "I'm afraid that I haven't for a while. The last I saw, she was taking your daughter upstairs to bed. Is everything alright?"
"I'm worried she's forgotten her medication, you see," A sad look consumes his expression; it looks out of place on his usually whimsical face. He notices Bruce's curiosity and forces himself to smile weakly. "She was diagnosed with leukemia a few weeks ago,"
"Oh, David, I'm so sorry to hear that," Bruce told him, squeezing his shoulder.
"She'll be fine," David said faintly. "If you excuse me…" He trailed off, and Bruce watched him wander off, most likely in search of his wife.
It was more challenging, spending the rest of the night pretending to be a carefree drunk when his mind was stuck on Sandra Mizoguchi as well as her daughter; he wondered if Maps had been told yet of her mother's illness. He has chosen a problematic mask for himself, but the best things tend to be.
It's only twenty minutes later when Bruce feels something settle in his stomach; there's an odd smell in the air. A second passes and one of the housekeepers comes sprinting into the hall.
"Fire!" She screamed at the top of her lungs, the violinists screeching to a halt. "Everyone out!"
There's a sudden shrill alarm, and people scream as they rush out of the room. Brucie Wayne melts away from existence. Something else moves throughout the crowd—something darker. He grabs the arm of the woman who announced the fire once they are all outside, waiting for the fire services to arrive. He moves his face next to her head so she can't see him. Even so, she is far too frazzled to notice details such as identities.
"Where is the fire?" he asks firmly. "Upstairs, sir! But all the guests are downstairs. Hugh did a count!" She shakes.
"Just the guests? What about the hosts? Their daughter" Bruce watched out the corner of her eye as her face shifted into horror.
"Oh god! Oh god, no!" she begins to scream, people swarm her, but Bruce is already gone.
It was almost as if he was never even there...
Maps tried to touch the stove once, but her mother snapped at her to remove her hand from the open flame. She asked why, and her mother said that fire burns.
She's seen other people touch fire. Her father used to do a trick where he would lick his fingers and pinch a candle wick. When she tried to do it, too, he batted her hand away. She asked why, and her father said that fire burns.
She even watched a movie in class once, near the end of term, where a firefighter saved a cat from a burning apartment. Everyone laughed when the cat was left with a hairless tail. She asked why, and her teacher said that fire burns.
They were wrong, of course. Maps knows that now. Fire doesn't burn, it consumes.
The flames before her are not like any she's seen before; they are violent and wild and have a mind of their own. She pressed her back against the wall her bed was against, screaming as the flames licked up her sheets. All her life, she thought that fire was just a thing, a thing people touch and get burnt by. This fire is not a thing, not just sitting there waiting for someone to get too curious. It was actively coming for her. It didn't want to burn her; it wanted to kill her.
The door slams open, and Maps doesn't know how to feel when her mother stumbles into the room. She should feel relieved; she was saved, but when her eyes land on her mother, she feels anything but. Patches of her body were gone, chunks burnt out of her. Her hair and clothes were gone; Maps could see her bones beneath the blood, beneath the flames that were eating her alive.
"Mummy!" She screams, hot tears pouring down her face; they are almost as hot as the flames licking around her toes.
Her mother moves as fast as her broken body will take her. She walks through the flames, screaming in pain, but she doesn't stop. Her arms wrap around her, and she is hot to touch, hotter than the flames; the smell of her flesh and the smoke hit Map's nose, and she throws up down her mother's scorched back. She doesn't seem to notice as she lifts Maps with strength she cannot possibly possess and carries her out of the room.
The fire was everywhere.
"Maps! Maps! Sandra! Is that you?"
"Daddy!" She cried, her eyes landing on her father. He's not as burnt as her mother; he still looks human. But he is propped up against a wall, clutching his chest with flames curling up his legs. Her mother can't speak, but she calls out a guttural cry to her husband, a sound that if Maps survives, she will never forget.
"Keep going! This way-"
A rumbling cuts off her father, and Maps has just enough time to look up at the sagging ceiling before it collapses.
"NO!" She screams so loud over the crashing she can feel her throat tear. Everything goes black for what feels like a single second.
"Maps! Sandra! Are you okay?! MAPS!" Her father's voice wakes her. It is faint and distant from the other side of the rubble, but it means he is alive.
"Daddy! Please, Daddy!" She sobs back from the floor. It's strange. She can see the fire burning the flesh off her knees. She has enough sense to take her hands off the floor but can't feel its heat anymore. She can't feel anything.
"You're going to be okay, Maps! You're going to be…" Maps knows her father keeps yelling at her, but she stops hearing him at the sight of her mother.
She is still on the ground, the only thing moving is her chest. Up and down, up and down. Maps has never seen someone breathe so fast, so heavily. The smoke makes her choke.
"Daddy!" She screams. "Mummy needs help, Daddy! Please!" Her father yells something back, but Maps crawls to her mother, ignoring the creaking underneath her.
"Mum? Mum? Can you hear me?" She claws at the flesh on her mother's face desperately, clinging onto her.
"My little Magpie," She whispers, eyes glazed over. Maps doesn't know who she's talking to, she's never called her Magpie before.
"You follow me everywhere-" Her mother hacks, and her chest trembles. "Everywhere I go,"
"Mum," Maps begs.
"Always alone, why? Don't you have a…friend?" Her voice grew quieter and quieter.
"Mum?" This time, it's a question that sends a cavernous crack down her heart.
It finally shatters when she gets no reply.
Her father's screams increase, but Maps can't bring herself to yell back, even when she hears him start to thrash desperately against the rubble, trying to claw his way through to her. Maps just stares down at her mother's body, watching as the fire finally consumes it. Will she have to bury just the bones? Or would they turn ash, too? Her father's screams go silent.
It could have been hours; it could have been seconds.
Maps hardly even notice heavy arms draped in black armor wrap around her. She looks up at him, the man who is carrying her. He is large, and his presence is all-consuming yet, at the same time, non-existent. She wonders if she is floating just for a second, but no, she can feel his arms tightening around her, cradling her like a babe. She looks at him because it's better than looking at the bones. He wears a mask that looks like leather; it covers his whole face except his mouth, which is pressed into a thin, serious line. This close to him, she can see his bright blue eyes.
He carried her out of the window, and they ascended to the ground. She can see the lights from the fire truck's siren blare against his suit, casting a red shadow on him. Hands take her off him, and she is placed on what she suspects is a stretcher.
Her eyes stay on him as she is rushed away, he doesn't leave, he remains in her gaze right up until the ambulance doors close.