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There was a memory playing in the back of Bruce’s mind… A recent one. His body was burning. His fingers were numb. And the bloody memory was clear as day.
It happened about a week ago, Bruce recalled. He had taken a nap in some corner of the garage, trying to recharge his exhausted body before patrol.
As his luck was, he barely made it to the eight-minute mark before a dream woke him up. The images escaped him as soon as he woke up, but he remembered enough to know it had something to do with his children bleeding out on his arms. He couldn’t recall if it was Dick’s body he was holding in the dream, or Jason’s. Maybe it had been Damian or Cass… Perhaps Tim.
Or all of them. God knew Bruce had done it for all of them time and time again.
He pulled himself off the gurney he had used as a bed, accepting the fact he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again.
His mind was still reeling when he stood up again, so much so he was almost caught by surprise when Khoa asked, “Bad dream?”
“Yeah.” He straightened up his body, trying to get rid of the heavy feeling in his gut. “Just the usual.”
Khoa put his helmet down on the work table he was using. The front glass had been replaced and fortified after it cracked during last night’s patrol. He had been so entranced by the task he had forsaken any covering for his face.
Bruce felt short of breath for completely different reasons when Khoa’s brown eyes turned to him.
Maybe someday he would become used to the unguarded beauty of his features, but not today. No… Today, Khoa was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Today, he felt like a man lost in the desert, parched for water, being welcomed home with his very own waterfall.
Except Khoa wasn’t his. Not truly, not fully, not ever.
His presence might have become an expected one since he accepted Bruce’s offer to stay in Gotham, but it still felt awfully fragile. One particularly awful patrol had turned into a late-night dinner, which had led to more dinners and, somehow, to Khoa waking up in his bed more often than not. Still, Bruce felt like they were on borrowed time, like it would only take one misstep for the hard-earned peace between them to fall apart.
Awe and pain battled for control for a beat, and, as he had expected, awe won over. Bruce walked to Khoa until he was close enough to lean his head on his shoulder.
Khoa’s fingers found the way to his neck and massaged the tight muscles there, undoing the knots of tension with ease.
For a moment, they said nothing, just breathed in and out in sync. The images of his nightmare were fading away, but there was also a curiosity looming underneath it. Bruce lifted his face from Khoa’s shoulder and asked him, “Do you ever dream?”
“What?”
“I have always wondered if you did,” he explained. “Back when we were training, I’d sometimes wake up from a nightmare and find you were sound asleep, no matter what had happened that day.”
Khoa took a moment to consider his question, his hand a welcoming weight against the back of his neck. “I do. It’s rare, but I do. Just not nightmares. Usually they’re memories twisted into something different.”
Bruce felt his curiosity peak at the answer he didn’t expect to get.
He longed to ask, “Did you ever dream of me?”
But that would be a waste of breath. It was delirious to assume he mattered enough to color Khoa’s dreams, even more so to think he’d dignify such a question with a response.
“That’s… Not what I expected,” Bruce told him dumbly. Khoa shrugged and pulled his hand away. The absence of his touch burned Bruce’s skin like hot iron, sudden and piercing.
“What did you expect me to say? That I only hear static in my dreams when I fall asleep?” There was a mocking tone to Khoa’s reply, but Bruce had long ago learned to listen to what Khoa didn’t say.
Khoa hated it when people assumed he simply felt nothing. He particularly despised it when Bruce made that assumption. Back when they were younger and angrier, it had been an easy conclusion to reach, which Bruce regretted deeply but couldn’t have avoided. Bruce feared he might have given him that impression once again, but despite their conversation having ended there, abruptly and uncomfortably, they had returned to their familiar rhythm by the end of the night.
Bruce had never met anyone like Khoa before. Not as single-minded or quite as maddening. His whole life, most people had tiptoed around him, ready to fulfill his every whim. Khoa, on the other hand, didn’t regard anyone as worthy of devotion.
Quite the opposite. When it came to him, you either earned his respect or you didn’t. Bruce had had it once, well earned and seemingly eternal, only to have it ripped away by the path they had chosen themselves.
Now, he had it once again. Bruce just wished he knew what to do with it.
And why was he thinking about it now, of all times?
Bruce tried to make himself remember.
There was a case… There was always a case. Something he needed to get done. A lead to follow into the night… An abandoned building and its decay… A bright light and impossibly putrid smell invaded his being, numbing his whole body in a matter of seconds.
Fear toxin? Ivy’s pollen? Joker gas?
None of those had ever brought forth memories of Khoa before. Khoa had always been a secret, even to Bruce’s own mind. Layers of rage, longing, and loss kept him under its power.
Except for now.
Now, Bruce could have sworn he was making out the outline of Khoa’s suit in the distance, white and silver lines dancing in the distance. His mind was too worn out to put them together and paint the picture of Bruce’s Ghost, but he still knew exactly who was haunting him.
Was this the last thing he would see before his mind couldn’t take another second of consciousness? Just the blurred shape of Minhkhoa, forever kept away from him?
But the shadow continued to move, faster by the second, until it solidified right in front of Bruce’s eyes.
“Get up, you idiot,” Khoa’s altered voice cursed out through his suit’s modulators.
“Oh,” Bruce whispered, reaching his gloved hand until he could touch Khoa’s helmet. “You’re real.”
“Of course I’m fucking real. What happened? Did you get hit with something?” Khoa asked, immediately starting to assess the extent of damage to Bruce’s body. He distantly thought Khoa should be more worried about his brain. It seemed like it had melted away, leaving nothing but a sense of loss and dread in its wake.
He couldn’t see Khoa’s face. God, he wanted to see his face. He needed to. Bruce’s fingers acted of their own accord. He clicked on the hidden lock on the back of his helmet that Khoa had shown him how to find in case of an emergency.
Bruce felt like he might die if he didn’t see Khoa right that second. What emergency could be greater than that?
Khoa spat out obscenities when his face was revealed. Bruce would ask for his forgiveness later, if there was ever a later. “You’re… So beautiful, Minhkhoa. I should have told you that before. I should have said it that night on the bridge.”
The muscle on Khoa’s jaw jumped under Bruce’s fingers. “You’re not making any sense. I’ll get you home, and we’ll fix whatever this is.”
Bruce didn’t know how to tell Khoa he had already fixed him. That, on the day Khoa left him bleeding in the snow in Canada, he had somehow brought Bruce’s heart back to life by breaking it. What words could he possibly use to explain that it wasn’t until their paths crossed that Bruce began to believe there was any part of him that could be worth giving away to someone?
Instead of wasting his rapidly decreasing consciousness on that fruitless task, he allowed himself to be pulled into Khoa’s arms and carried away.
Surprisingly, Bruce woke up again in his own bed.
His only clue to how he got there was the blurry shadow looming over him when he hesitantly opened his eyes.
“Finally,” a voice muttered, and, despite his muffled ears and piercing headache, Bruce could tell it was Khoa’s. No one else in the world sounded quite like him. “I was starting to think I’d have to call one of your brats over.”
Bruce forced his eyes to stop blurring and fixed them on Khoa, who was hovering over him. “Is this your way of saying you were worried?”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re harder to kill than that,” he mocked. “I’d know… I’ve tried.”
“We both know you never tried that hard,” Bruce managed to smirk, despite the pain the gesture shot up through his whole face.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Khoa snapped back, but still helped him sit up.
He ran his fingers through his tousled hair and grunted. “I feel like I was hit by a truck.” Bruce took a moment to consider the life he led and then cautiously asked, “Was I hit by a truck?”
Khoa rolled his eyes and turned his back to him so he could reach a shirt lying on a nearby chair.
“I wish. That would have been easier to fix,” Khoa complained under his breath as he helped Bruce tug the shirt on. “What hit you was a patch of fear toxin mixed with Joker gas the Triad was experimenting with. You remember you were looking into it, right?”
Bruce squinted, trying to pull the faint memory to the forefront of his brain. “Reports of confused, hysterical individuals coming out of an abandoned edifice… I thought it could be Scarecrow plotting something from Arkham.”
“I checked and he’s still locked up. It was really an independent move from the Triad,” Khoa easily reassured him, sitting by the side of Bruce’s bed. He handed Bruce a cup of water and some pills, which he eagerly took.
“It took forever to measure the right dosage of both antidotes to get you healed, but I managed. You were hallucinating when I found you. I couldn’t understand what you were saying for the most part,” Khoa said casually.
Too casually, Bruce couldn’t help but notice.
God, just what nonsense had he said in those crucial moments his mind couldn’t recall? How much of a fool had he been?
“Is that so?” Bruce asked, settling the cup on top of his nightstand. Khoa shot him an unimpressed look. “I really don’t remember much from last night.”
Khoa didn’t say anything, just remained very still. “Like I said, it didn’t make any sense.”
“Can you tell me anyway?” Bruce asked, wishing to understand the discomfort that was clear in Khoa’s features.
“You said, ‘You’re real’,” he answered after a long moment of silence, “and sounded surprised about it, like you didn’t expect me to be.”
Bruce took his words in, weighing them against the worries that had taken over Bruce’s mind since their talk last week. Unfortunately, the pieces came together very quickly.
“I’m assuming that makes more sense to you than it does to me?” Khoa asked, trying to sound disinterested and failing.
“Yeah,” Bruce conceded, “it does.”
For all the curiosity Khoa was clearly harboring, he still showed remarkable strength by refraining from asking any more questions. For a few minutes, Bruce just ignored the tension settling into the room as he tried to decide whether he should say something or not.
His impatience won in the end. He needed to lay the truth out for Khoa to decide what to do with it. If he left, it would wreck Bruce, but it would also free him from the burden of being the only one who cared for this fragile thing between them.
“I was probably thinking of the conversation we had about dreams last week. I didn’t want you to think I was assuming things about you. I only asked you about it because I had just had a nightmare about my children. I have dreams like that about everyone in my life… Including you.”
Khoa’s face did a complicated thing, somewhere between a wince and a grunt, as realization dawned on him even before Bruce was done talking.
“I was wondering if you had dreams like that as well.”
Khoa asked, “About you?”
Bruce felt a strange sense of humiliation as he nodded. He had fought monsters four times his size and stood face to face with the ugliest side of humanity, so why did saying those words out loud make him feel so weak?
Khoa shuffled, the bed creaking under the weight of his body’s movements. “I don’t feel things the way you do, so I don’t really have that type of dream,” he stated matter-of-factly. Bruce fought the urge to wince. He already knew that, but hearing it out loud still hurt. He didn’t think it would ever stop hurting to have the truth thrown at his face like that. Whatever he felt was his problem, and he was alone in it.
Khoa continued talking, eyes fixed on Bruce even though he couldn’t make himself stare back. “For me, there are two types of people in the world. Those who are mine and those who aren’t. That is how it is both when I’m awake and when I’m asleep.”
Bruce lifted his eyes. He crossed his arms over his chest as if he could protect his heart from Khoa’s next words. “And which type am I?”
Khoa smirked, the same way he did when Bruce made a stupid decision mid-sparring. The type that would end up with him landing face first on the tatami.
“I see you in my dreams too, Bruce,” he said. “Even when I’m asleep, I can’t escape the fact I’ve built a whole life around you.”
The strength of that confession knocked all the air out of Bruce’s lungs. It was impossible. More than that, inconceivable. And yet here was Khoa, admitting to something Bruce had never even allowed himself to consider within the realm of reality.
“You… You take everything from me, and I let you. You complicate things. You’re stubborn and idealistic. A fool. The most unbearable man I’ve ever met, but you’re mine.”
Bruce tried not to smile, and he failed monumentally. He bent forward until his face was impossibly close to Khoa’s. “And you’re mine, too?” He whispered, feeling every bit like the lost kid Khoa had met and decided to stick with a lifetime ago when they were just two teenagers with missions larger than themselves.
“Since that stupid fucking day when I decided to follow you out into the snow,” Khoa answered.
Bruce grabbed hold of Khoa’s neck, his fingers tangling with the smooth locks of his hair, bringing him forward so their lips would finally touch and end this torture, but Khoa held still, completely unmoving.
“That’s all I can offer you,” he stated, once more in control. He didn’t ask Bruce to accept it, nor did he provide any further explanations. Bruce didn’t expect him to.
“I know,” he conceded. “I wouldn’t be here if I couldn’t live with that, would I?”
Very slowly, Khoa leaned forward until his mouth was on Bruce’s, hot and strong and violent to the perfect degree.
Bruce could die from it alone. He could be reborn from the ashes of his desire, time and time again, until there was nothing else on his mind except Khoa and his perfect mouth.
But, for now, Bruce decided having him by his side would do.