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Minhkhoa Khan lay flat on top of his rickety bed, staring at the sagging ceiling of the terrible motel he and Bruce were staying at. His left hand cushioned his head, his elbow out to the side. The sheets were unused under him, the weather in Spain far too hot and humid for them.
Bruce was laying in the other twin bed right next to his, curled up on his side and facing away from Khoa. By his breathing that was just ever so off, Khoa could tell he was faking being asleep. Honestly, why did Bruce bother? Khoa knew him too well for that old trick to work.
Khoa himself didn’t want to go to sleep. In his opinion, it was reprehensible that a human body needed to shut down for 8 hours to function properly. Good technology didn’t need to do that, so why did the most complex biological system on the planet?
“Do you dream, Bruce?” asked Khoa, still looking at the flaky paint of the ceiling.
Bruce shifted on the bed, the mattress springs groaning as he did so. “Huh?” he replied, staying on his side.
“Do you dream?”
Bruce rolled over towards Khoa, elbows bracing himself on the mattress. He wore no shirt, and Khoa found himself fighting to not ogle his muscles.
“Uh, yeah. I have dreams,” he mumbled, squinting at Khoa. His hair was sweaty and all lopsided on his head. Disgusting. He should really take a shower.
“Tell me about them.”
“Anton, I’m tired. I’m going back to bed.” His voice was deep and scratchy, the kind of sound that wouldn’t go away until he drank a full glass of water.
“It’s a simple request, Bruce.” Khoa glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. Bruce was still squinting at him, mouth slightly agape and looking like a handsome idiot.
“Why?”
“Because I’m curious.”
“Do you? Dream, I mean? I’ve never seen you… you know, talk in your sleep or anything,” Bruce stated.
“No.”
“Oh.”
Khoa had often heard of the phenomenon known as dreaming. Apparently, when most people went to sleep, they experienced hallucinations and illusions. Some were realistic, some were vivid, some were muddled nonsense, and some, supposedly, told the future or revealed some quality hidden in the subconscious.
Frankly, it sounded extremely unpleasant.
“Maybe it’s an ASPD thing,” Khoa lied drily, gaze flicking aimlessly over the textured ceiling above him.
“It’s not,” Bruce replied confidently and a little too quickly.
Khoa raised an eyebrow, a smirk finding its way onto his face. “Oh? And how would you know that?” He turned over onto his side so he could face Bruce, smiling flirtatiously.
Bruce’s face turned red with embarrassment. Khoa loved it when he did that. It was so easy, too. He didn’t even have to try. “I, uh. I read, you know.”
Khoa smiled wider. “Sure.”
“Only 6.5% of the world don’t dream, you know,” Bruce said, like some kind of fun fact dispenser. “Or at least claim to.”
Even within his own small subgroup of people “like him”, Khoa was still a freak. Most psychopaths dreamed, if of more violent images than normies.
The corners of Khoa’s smile turned downwards. “Lucky me.”
“Wait, Anton, I didn’t mean—”
“Relax, Bruce. I’m just messing with you.” Khoa slipped his signature smirk back on his face. “Now are you going to indulge me or not?”
Bruce rubbed his free hand over his face. “Uh, I don’t know. My dreams are usually more like nightmares.” His expression became pinched, his breathing picking up almost imperceptibly.
“Then tell me about a good one.”
“Don’t put me on the spot like this, Anton,” Bruce said, rolling his eyes.
“Fine, then. We can go back to wallowing in our beds in silence while we both know the other is awake and has no intention of sleeping.” Khoa began to roll onto his back and close his eyes, calling his bluff.
“Fine with me,” Bruce responded, sounding exasperated.
Khoa didn’t hear the telltale signs that Bruce had shifted back away from him in some attempt to feign sleep. He waited a few moments.
Three… two… one…
“Anton.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. I’m too busy sleeping,” Minhkhoa said distractedly.
“Anton.”
Success.
Khoa flipped over on the mattress once more, smiling wryly and propping his head on his hands. “Yes, dear friend?”
Bruce huffed out a laugh. His hands had disappeared under his pillow, his face lit up with a bemused sort of joy. Cute. “I remembered a dream I had. A good one.”
“Well, then, stop wasting time. Explain. I want great detail.”
“Anton, I don’t think I’m that great of a storyteller…”
“Oh, come off it. Stop being a coward and just do it.”
If there was one thing Khoa and Bruce had in common, it was being unable to turn down a challenge.
Bruce rolled his eyes again. “Okay, okay.” He squirmed around on the bed, apparently trying to get comfortable but mostly looking like a worm in the process. “I dream about you, sometimes,” he said quietly, his bright blue eyes meeting Minhkhoa’s deep brown.
Khoa’s interest was piqued. “Really?” He did his best to ignore the flutter in his chest. Bruce, dreaming about him.
“Yeah.”
“Any plot points you care to share? I do hope you haven’t been mischaracterizing me.”
“Well, once, I had this particularly good one. Last year, a little bit before we got stuck in that prison and met Avery.”
Bruce paused for a second, looking at Khoa strangely.
“What? Go on.”
Bruce’s smile came back. “Right. We were both older, in the dream, I think. Maybe. Hard to tell. But we had just arrived in Gotham. There wasn’t a big fanfare or anything—everything was quiet when I came back. There weren’t any gossip columns talking about me. Everything just felt… normal, I guess. Like how it is now, but better. And you, you moved into the Manor with me. We slept in the same bedroom, like we do now. By day, we would practice and spar and talk and train. But then at night, our mission would begin.” His voice nearly became giddy at the end of his sentence.
Gotham, blah blah blah, mission, blah blah blah, crime, blah blah blah. It was all quite boring. Khoa liked the parts that involved himself. Of course, he found their art important. But Bruce tended to talk about it in such a way that sucked all the fun out of it.
“It’s just—it was perfect, Anton. It was everything I could ever want. We didn't even have to wear our masks or anything, we just… did what we were meant to do. Instead of Wayne Enterprises, there was Anton Holdings or something like that. There wasn’t any spotlight on me, just how I like it, and you were the one getting all the attention, just how you like it. It was like… we were two sides of the same coin, you know? Wherever I lacked in acting and bravado, you made up for it tenfold. And wherever you—”
“I’ll stop you right there. I don’t lack in any area,” Khoa interrupted, brushing his fingers through his hair and grinning slyly.
Bruce grinned at him innocently, clearly amused by Khoa’s “antics”. “Sure. Anyways, I haven’t told you the best part.”
Took you long enough. Khoa prepared himself. He was sure Bruce would say something about how they fit together so well. How they were the only ones in the world who understood. How Khoa knew him like no one else. How nobody could ever replace him. Perhaps, in the dream, Khoa did something heroic for Bruce, or the other way around. Even if it was clearly nonsensical, seeing as Khoa would never sacrifice himself for anyone, it was interesting to think about. Khoa didn’t love or fear, but Bruce didn’t quite seem to understand that. He was sentimental in that way.
“One night, in the dream, we were doing our patrol route. I was on one end of the city, and you were on the other. And I was in this alleyway. And I saw this man, with his back to me. He had a gun, and there was a lady on the ground. And of course I had to do something about it, so I took the guy down. And when I saw his face…” Bruce took a breath, a terrible gleam of happiness mixed with sorrow mixed with a hundred other emotions Khoa couldn’t sus out appearing in his eyes. “It was him, Anton. The man who killed my parents. I got him. I stopped him, put him behind bars for life. I did it!”
Oh.
Of course.
A sneer made its way onto Khoa’s face before he could quite stop it. The mission. It was always the mission. Everything—everything else came second.
Khoa would never be able to fill the parents-shaped hole in Bruce’s heart.
“Anton?”
“Great dream, Bruce. Really great,” Khoa replied, trying and failing to keep the pain out of his voice. He turned onto his back.
“What, Anton? What’d I do?”
“Nothing.”
“If I said something wrong, just tell me!” Bruce was glaring at him now.
How far could Khoa push him until he left? Until he realized Khoa didn’t quite fit into his grand plan like he imagined?
“Jesus, Bruce, you didn’t do anything. I’m just irritable and tired.”
Bruce’s brow furrowed out of Khoa’s peripheral vision. “Hmph.”
“Don’t grunt at me. You know I hate it when you do that.” He loved it, actually. It was sexy.
“Hrn.”
Khoa lolled his head to look at Bruce. He was, unfortunately, very handsome when he was upset. He had these cute wrinkles in his forehead, and his bottom lip jutted out just a little bit.
“Ha. Ha,” Khoa said sarcastically.
“You don’t hate me for any ambiguous mistake I’ve made in the last five minutes?”
Hate.
Hate? Oh, Khoa hated him. He hated him so, so much. He hated him more than he had ever hated anything or anyone else in his entire life. He hated how he looked, how he acted, how naturally adept he was at everything he tried, his asinine morality. Khoa hated him for making him feel this way, for giving him something he’d never experienced before, for not recoiling from his psychopathy. Bruce was everything he hated.
Khoa thought it might be love.
“No, Bruce. I could never hate you.”
But it would only be so long before Bruce hated him. He knew it, deep in his bones. This wouldn’t last. It wouldn’t, and it couldn’t. Minhkhoa couldn’t live like this. Bruce was getting too close—slowly but surely drilling holes through the walls that Khoa had so meticulously put up around himself.
And yet, Khoa couldn’t leave. Bruce was downright intoxicating. His presence was magnetizing. Every time they touched, Khoa felt every molecule of his body sing in unison. Bruce knew him. Bruce understood him. Bruce… liked him. Khoa didn’t want to live without him.
Was this fear?
Bruce was none the wiser to Minhkhoa’s internal monologue. “Well, that’s good. We already paid to stay here tomorrow, I didn’t want to have to leave. You’d owe me about $40.”
“Pricey.”
“For this dump? I know.”
And, there they went. Right back to normal, as if Khoa’s small, cold, and shriveled heart hadn’t been ripped out of his chest and severed into tiny pieces. Khoa donned his mask once more, one that screamed nonchalance and coolness and amusement and apathy. He was quite good at masking, always had been. It was necessary for his type of work to pretend he had empathy around most people. He couldn’t very well draw attention to himself while seducing some bastard or gleaning information from an air-headed simpleton, could he? But this mask, the one that was usually just his true, unfiltered self? That only became necessary around Bruce.
Khoa rotated to his side, letting his head rest on the pillow this time. Bruce’s eyes were large and owlish.
“Tell me about another dream, Bruce.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Okay… give me a minute to think. Um, one time, before my parents… you know… I think I was 6? I’d have this repeating dream where I was in my house…”
“Fascinating,” Khoa cut in, doing his best to sound bored despite his racing heart.
Bruce threw a pillow at him, and Khoa almost let it hit him before catching it just before it made contact with his face. “Ooo, too slow. Work on that aim, Brucie,” he teased, hoping his voice didn’t sound strained.
“How am I supposed to tell a story if you keep interrupting?”
Khoa flicked his hand in a go-on motion, rolling his eyes dramatically.
“Right. So, I was at home, but the Manor was also my school for some reason. Gotham Academy.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can your house be your school as well?”
Bruce laughed again, the sound bright and cutting straight through the humming of the air conditioning unit. It made Khoa’s blood thrum.
He hated him.
“I don’t know how dreams work, Anton. It just—it just felt like it.”
“This all sounds very fishy.”
“You sound fishy.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Be quiet. As I was saying, I was at home. Or school. Or whatever you want to call it. And I was heading to class—but not really, since class was in my living room and there were random teachers in my kitchen…”
<<<<……….>>>>
That night, Khoa dreamed for the first time ever that he could remember. Of one thing—just the one. A young man, with black hair, piercing blue eyes, the most hideous smile, and a personality certainly not worth writing home about.
Yes, Khoa was sure he hated him. That fabled love that everyone spoke about so passionately? That unending desire, that overflow of emotions, that je ne sais quoi, that innate feeling that every human being was supposed to experience? No, no, this was not it. Love was not what forced him to spend every second of the day thinking about him. Love was not what compelled him to follow him to the ends of the earth. Certainly, love was not what drove Khoa to distract his partner with idle talk and stories of good dreams after he woke up shaken from a nightmare about his parents.
No. Love could not possibly be this cruel.