Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.” Henry Rollins.

Bruce Wayne-8 years old: December 15, 1992

Bruce remembers that night in the alley as though it were yesterday. Footsteps, laughter, gunshots. In his dreams, and he thinks once upon a time, his father had thrown himself at the gunmen, had fought with him, but Bruce got shot anyway. He remembers a bullet going into his chest and gut, knows the feeling of it slicing his skin, even months after it’d happened, but Alfred, Gordon, Leslie- everyone says it was nothing but a bad dream.

He knows though that he saw his father get shot, feels his mother’s brain splatter across his father, his clothes, his cheek, as pearls rain down from the sky and his father breathes out her name like a final prayer.

The gunman looks at him like he’s seen a ghost before running back the way he’d come. All the while Bruce is left in the midst of his own parent’s blood, in his blood, staining Crime alley forever. He does not remember screaming, or the sirens. It’s Gordon’s coat on his shoulders that wakes him up. Calm and soothing and strong Detective Gordon was there to save the day.

But there’s no one to save, only a ghost boy and his dead parents. That’s what he is now, right? A ghost? A shadow of what once was.

His parents are dead and he can still feel a bullet flying, ripping, through his chest, but somehow, he remains, uninjured and breathing.

It hurts to think about.

To talk about.

No one listens anyway.

He remembers days, weeks, months later scrubbing blood and brains off his hands, his cheek, his heart that no longer exist. He remembers choking himself awake on his own tears, remembers scrubbing until the skin of his hands and arms and cheeks are cracking and blood is flowing on clean sheets and Alfred is trying to keep him from getting the blood off, from getting his parents off of him. He remembers days spent bracing himself over the sink, the bathtub, picking up pieces of himself by shaving off the broken bits, remembers trying to slice away the rotten pieces of skin, the burnt flesh, the old used pieces and trying to throw them away into oblivion. He remembers hiding the brain stained shirt from that night under the floorboards of his bed, remembers taking it out some nights and trying to feel, see, know his mother once more, know that rage that came with that night, knowing that pain.

He wants to die. And they won’t let him, well the board would, but Alfred refuses.

He remembers dancing on rooftops and the hunger of his stomach and Gordon dragging him back inside and shoving food down his throat time and time again.

It has not even been a year yet and he cannot picture going on any longer.

He’s introduced to people and he hates it, misses the solitary of being the only heir to Wayne Enterprises, misses his parent’s overbearing protectiveness, being sheltered and secluded. He misses being a nobody, because then he could disappear into the city as anyone, but now he is always Bruce Wayne and that shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.

They show him the company, but people tell him they’ll run it for him. They show him his father’s hospital and say it’ll move on without him. They show him his mother’s campaign for mayor and say they’ll find a new candidate. They show him his parents’ worlds from another side and it makes missing them all that much harder, because they were good people. They knew how to get their hands dirty without staining them forever, knew how to save lives without paying their own souls to the devil.

They introduce him to all the richest ladies, explains to him that this is how it works. He must find a wife, have kids, and continue the bloodline. They explain his parents were an oddity, a rare coupling from two families that hate each other.

They say this is what you do.

And Alfred says its bullshit.

He meets the Kane family and learns what it means to be an abomination.

He meets the Kane household and understands why his mother left as soon as she could. He meets his Uncle Jacob and Cousin Kate. She’s sad and pale and is missing her other half and he thinks she might understand, but their meeting is so fleeting it really doesn’t matter in the end.

The courts ask if any of them want him and of course they say no. Alfred takes him.

He pities the man.

But the world keeps turning.

And all the adults seem to know exactly what to do. They say ‘hey we see these shattered remains of you drawn out over the bathtub, across the kitchen sink, and on our rooftops. We see the pieces of you strewn across our city and on our lawns, but don’t worry we will put you back together, we’ll glue the tatters of you back to fit as well as we can make it. You’ll be as good as new, better even.’ Only he was anything, but better, because the glue is a cheap farce for a fix, it only goes so far, only reaches so deep, but he lets them put him back together anyway, because it made them feel better and helped him be left alone. He lets strangers pick him off the sidewalk and push him into the limelight.

Every day he sits at his desk, that something stirring deep in his soul, unsettled and anxious, pacing like a caged animal waiting to attack, for an opening to act. He pours himself into his schoolwork, hoping to bury the monsters of his dreams in equations, French literature and Marshall Thurgood. He pushes himself, staying up late for a caregiver that he’s worn to the edges, for a man who has sacrificed everything for a son that is not his own, one he did not want. He stays up late for the man who kept him, who never gave up on him.

He keeps moving.

There’s an article that makes it onto his desk. One of the other boys, Maxwell Lord, a whole eighteen years old practically throws it at him one morning. It’s one of many. It is not new. It is one of the reasons Alfred keeps him away from newspapers and news stations. People have speculations. People talk without facts or make facts up or try to make connections where none lay. They try to burn his family name, his name. It is a fact of life.

He keeps going.

He keeps going as boys with low self-esteem and familial problems and evil hearts push him down, dig up the devil in his heart and let him cut loose. He keeps going when Alfred makes him promise never to fight anymore, to use his head, let his words turn into the real weapon. He keeps going when they beat him until his blood leaves a permanent stain on his lips, when Thomas Elliot dragged his limp body down to the parking lot and shoved his fist into Bruce’s face. He gets back up when the hot roaring sound of blood consumes him, as it flows down his face- a call to action that he cannot go to. He keeps getting back up when they think he’ll never be able to again. He keeps going with a shut mouth when he hears the other boys making deals with mobsters to make a better life for themselves. He keeps his mouth shut against the building rage bleeding underneath his raw skin, because he knows once he starts talking, screaming, he’ll never be able to stop. So, he keeps the pure agonizing fear under a locked lid and observes.

He studies his city, sneaks out at night to see it in all its primal, primitive state, watches as it deteriorates, collapsing in on itself without the Wayne family to push it forward, to give it hope. He forces himself to watch, to learn, to witness crimes too horrible to speak of, before going home and trying to sleep.

He takes the beatings, let’s Thomas Elliot, pound him into the ground day after day, reminds himself there are worst things than this and remembers a bullet in his chest.

He lets people touch him even when he does not want it, keeps his mouth shut tight, just to make it through the day. He knows, knows he’s just a puppet for them now, knows that he has no legal rights as a minor.

To them he’s just some rich kid with issues, a rich kid being turned into a wealthy influential man of higher standards.

To them, they’re doing him a favor.

In sleep, he closes his eyes and the same thing flashes in front of them. In sleep, all his walls come crumbling down and all he is left with is a bitter symphony, a hard-broken cacophonous melody of what never should have been. In sleep the bat climbs out, reveling in a world Bruce so desperately wants out of. The bat makes a home, curling up around his heart, barricading Bruce from others. It tears him into two, the world suddenly too much and too little all at once. Screams of the dying, of the suffering, of the battered and bruised fill the night air, as he tries to sleep, as he does nothing but listen. He closes his eyes and waits, for the morning sun to rise, for him to begin the same day again, for his life to start, as it always does, on repeat.

He keeps going, until he wants to carve his own heart out.

He learns a lot, unenrolls from Gotham Academy after beating Thomas Elliot into the ground for insulting his parents and makes his world small again, finds his home as hellish as it is heaven, spends nights staring at the painting of his parents and trying to learn how to breathe again.

And now, not even a year after his parent’s death, Alfred crushes him to his chest and whispers in this broken voice, “I’m glad you’re still here.”

And Bruce declines to say he is not, he is anything but glad, or happy. He’s just dead, hollowed out to the core. He’s quiet and angry and only finds escape through work and learning and pain and disappearing into the backdrop of society.

Hal Jordan – 10 years old

The plane falls from the sky, well pieces of it come crashing down, and he knows. He knows without a doubt that his dad is not coming back, but he’s never been one to fall over and cry about it, no he runs out into the field, slips under his uncle’s arms, past his mother’s screams, his brother’s grabbing hands and moves.

Security eventually nabs him, but he doesn’t care, because he’s screaming for his dad even though he knows it’s far too late.

He stands still.

His world crumbles to nothing. It crumbles and falls into nothing. There are ashes on the kitchen table that mix in with Wednesday’s dinner and Jack is shooting looks at him from across the table, as Jim shuffles towards him. They eat, not quite done mac and cheese (the best Jack could do) and mom is just, well she is just gone.

Remnants of Martin Jordan are everywhere and that night, Jack takes Hal by the scruff, tears all his model planes down, all his posters, looks him in the eye, while Jim hides on the corner edge of the door and says, “promise Hal, no planes, never.”

And Hal just stands there, big mouth already declaring that he’s going to be just like his dad, Kentucky accent forming the words before his brain can shut up.

Jack never looks at him the same. Jim follows him like a ghost that does not quite know where to step yet, and they don’t see their mom for days. Jack’s the only one allowed in her room.

It’s months before he sees his mother again. Months, after that until she hugs him, because he’s too much like his dad, and Jack is just glaring and glaring, and Jim is just melting into the floorboards.

It’s a year, almost to the day the first time she comes home with god knows what in her system. He’s used to the alcohol by now, but whatever else is making her sing and laugh. It’s too good to be true he knows. It’s far too good to be allowed.

Bruce Wayne: 9- July 30, 1993

It’s probably why he likes Selina so much.

She understands. She lets people touch her too even when she does not want it, because it’s what is expected of her, it’s what brings out people’s vulnerabilities.

She’s his first friend. (Tommy is no longer on this short list)

She was pretty and sweet, with layers hiding a rotten core. She’s harsh and extreme and everything Bruce has been looking for, because she knows what the world is really like. She is unafraid of the dark, fearsome and brave, always afraid of the night, but craves to live there too. She pulls him in, they gravitate towards one another in this weird almost dance. And before he knows it, he’s out on the streets, living with her, being in the world he so craves.

There’s no glory, no fame, no spotlight.

It’s all crime and gritty and pain and lies.

He loves it.

They dance in another’s blood, leaves chunks of themselves all over the city and refuse to come back for it. She’s wicked and flirty, batting her eyes at a blank face. He never gets it, at least not until she explains it to him, explains what flirting is, and shows him the moves, teaches him a new dance for a more mature game.

They grow up fast, Bruce an old soul and Selina born from a life of madness. They dance in the rain, and watch the city burn in the aftermath of the Wayne’s murder. They build statues and skyscrapers with their names on it, but it means shit to him.

They grow up fast, Bruce with his silent intellect and Selina with her sensual cleverness. They are friends, family, brother and sister of the streets of Gotham.

But times change.

Bruce leaves, disappears in a blink of an eye, like he always feared she one day would.

Hal Jordan- 11

He does not like his mom’s new whatever, like at all. He’s mean and likes to smack him around, tried to smack Jim the other day, but Hal has never been more grateful for his mouth, than he has at that moment. Of course, Jack is the golden child, does everything right. But Hal, no Hal must take care of his own, and now that only includes him and Jim. Fuck the rest of them. Fuck Amber too, because she’s supposed to be his mom, but instead she just watches, eyes glassed over in the way that says she’s had way too much. He’s eleven. He does not need the shit. Their what fifth house of the year is finally still but, at least he has Jim. Jim, who slips in when the house is finally quiet, snuggling up under the worn blankets and pressing close.

Jim who he goes out on the streets for to batter things for cash.

He is used to be used by now.

He is used to being someone else’s punching bag.
He is used to not getting what he needs, or what his brother’s need. He used to looking at the before and the now in high definition, at the man the wants to be versus what reality forces him to be. And so, what if he gets high occasionally? So, what if he makes sure his world doesn’t have to hurt as much as if should.

It’s not great, it’s not even close to great, but it’s what he has. It’s all he has.

They grow up fast, Hal bold, and brash, Jim smart and small. They grow up under harsh street lamps and trashy neighborhoods with kids from their third school who know they are nothing, but garbage the second they lay eyes on them.

It’s not perfect.

It never will be.

But times won’t change.

And Hal just stands still.

Selina- June 15, 2001

Bruce becomes a shadow.

And when she sees him again, he’s older, but still just as beautiful. He’s damaged and rigid and burnt around the edges like she remembered him, only worse, because he does not come to her anymore, bottles it all up until it bleeds out onto the sidewalks. She’s a world away and Bruce is lost, turned inward. He’s Batman and she’s Catwoman, and she always knew that this would one day happen, maybe with less spandex of course, but she knew he would be a hero and she would walk the line of villainess. They were just as different as they were the same.

The first time they run into each other again, she’s on Harvey’s arm, looking for a score from the mayor’s wife. He’s been back a year now and only here at this fancy ball with more people than she knows how to deal with, but has had enough time to learn how to fake it. He is lurking in a corner, head lowered, eyes downcast in this strangely submissive position that she can’t picture on him. He’s quiet, the little boy who used to question everything had quieted, voice lost to the wind and rain of Gotham City, eyes even more haunted than before. But when someone walks up to him, there’s a smile, bright and wide and pretty and empty. He looks so hollowed out and used that when their eyes meet her stomach turns in on itself and almost cries itself to pieces.

She does not see him again until a month later. He’s in leather and she’s in spandex and they are speaking a language they are used to. He lets her get away and she takes the opportunity to give him a scratch.

The next time they meet it’s not really a meeting more of; she walks in on Harvey and him, namely Harvey roughing him up. Of course, he laughed it off, said they were just playing around. Of course, Bruce turns turgidly on two shaken legs and silently disappears into the shadows. Later that night he crawls in through her bedroom window and curls himself into her. He’s changed, but the same at the core and she thinks they both are. They are hardened by their experiences rigid and aching for something that she’s not sure she’ll ever find, but at least they have each other.

He’s still looking for love and she’s still seeking fulfillment.

They never really get what their looking for, except from each other.

Years pass and she’s used to him clamoring into her window, a Harvey shaped bruise somewhere on him. She’s used to him seeking her out at his lowest. And she’ll always be waiting with ice cream in her fridge and too many movies he’s personally subjected her to. But maybe that’s what kills her the most even after all these years, all the fights, and drama of Gotham he’ll always come back, just like she always seeks him out, like some force ties them to one another they always find themselves back to the other sometimes whole and bored, others with pieces lost and broken. They’ve gotten used to sewing each other back up and tumbling back out into the world.

She should be in jail. Logically she knows she should be in jail. He could have, probably should have, thrown her in the slammer, or worse Arkham, a long time ago. But she’s learned a lot about the big bad bat. She knows he’s not perfect; he walks the lines of villainy day in and day out. She knows him, like she knows his capacity for bad, just like he knows her capacity for good.

She knows how much of himself he hides under layers and layers of masks that only get wiped off on her couch with mint chocolate chip ice cream and the Grey Ghost. She knows him probably better than anyone on Earth and it should not sadden her that he does to her as well. He’s her only friend, until Ivy and Harley crawl in, like weeds grow in a garden and a stubborn child that keeps coming back. She’s surprised really, but then again not, because they understand. They get the whole doing bad things in the name of good intentions; a lot like Bruce, not so much like her. She does it for the thrill, Harley understands that more than Pamela, but they keep coming back, so she must be doing something right.

She actually-kind-of tolerates a lot of Gotham Villains, mostly because they all have this sort of understood notion that they are a family, even the big bad Batman has his place in this fucked up charade. Penguin and Riddler kind of must be one her favorites; she knows they’re Bruce’s too in some way or another. Whether it’s because they know he’s Batman and do not say anything, or because they have known and befriended them when they were kids, well, who’s to say.

Gotham’s a big place, and you know if sometimes she gets woken up by a very angst-ridden Eddy dragging a half dead Bat through her window some nights, well who’s she one to blab, or a very greedy Ozzy looking for dirt on people, for saving said Bat well, who’s she to deny an opportunity to stir up trouble.

She draws a line with Harvey and the Joker though, because if she crosses their paths, they’re not leaving her sight without something more than a scratch. She does not stand for abusive assholes.

I know I'm unloveable
You don't have to tell me
I don't have much in my life
But take it, it's yours

Years pass and Carol is used to cleaning up after Hal. But even after all this time…his messes are still her messes. She loves him, yet the love she once held so fiercely has died, in its place a pink heart and a green ring, shunning one another for all of eternity. Her love burns fierce. It is a dying ember on a sea of the most unforgiving tides in a never-ending eternity. Love twists and bends. She is tired of fighting him, resigned to loving from a far. Ready to love a man who will never truly love her in return, or in truth loves her, but never enough, never how she deserves.

He is changed she knows, from the young, cocky man that once swept into the base and stole her heart. He tries to keep up the charade, but sometimes she sees it, in the circles under his eyes, and the heaviness to which he walks, to the way his smile drifts down, and his muscles jump at small noises.

It is easy, she remembers briefly, to forget Hal is hurting inside, that behind that smarmy charming smile is someone that doesn’t remember where to put his heart anymore.

Things have changed now. But despite the changes, despite the pain and anger and fear, she finds herself alone in hollow apartment. Pays for the rent and calls Tom to help with the laundry and keep the fridge stocked. They clean up after him and though maybe they are enabling him in some ways, in many she finds herself leaving even the smallest reasons to come home, to come back to this horrible rock of a planet that has only given that poor man more and more grief. It’s the best they can do.

And with every trip into space, a little bit of the man she loves dies. With every life saved here on Earth a little shine comes back into his eyes. So, if she loses some money and time and effort, then so be it. Her heart glows pink and she has lost a lot, but it glows on for a reason.

Bruce: November 4, 2011

Harvey Dent shows up.

It’s not completely out of the realm of possibility, but an idea Bruce has been fighting to think about for years. It is illogical of him, but he’s never found Bruce to be all that logical. In fact, he’s rather sloppy when he thinks about it. Hal was right when he said that Bruce was a dud when it came to these emotional moments in his life. They always managed to keep him on his toes and away from his brain.

So, Bruce attempts to ignore the way his stomach is a raging storm, pushes to stop his fingers from turning to jello, tries to stop the mountaintops of his shoulders from crumbling in on themselves, tried to make himself stand tall, immovable, stoic.

He tries to remember what it means to be a man. And when Harvey walks towards him, the parking the lot stretching between them, he remembers what it means to be a man, not as in a man, but in the sense of human.

All his life he’s allowed himself to remain as play dough for the people who think they know better than he does, but as Harvey strides over to him, he remembers the lessons he’s learned from this part he’s allowed himself to make his own decisions.

He’s met people, met men who are still looking for their manhood behind bottles and in faceless bodies, men who shoot off their mouths and leaves holes in the women left in their wake. He’s a white rich man in America and the men in his life are men who don’t know what it means to be a man, they are guns waiting to go off, wearing their masculinity as a trophy case and the women on their arms the trophy. And he’s allowed the memory of his family to end here, with the man people want him to be. So, when Harvey walks up to him with all his charms, he’s just tired, saddened that not only has he allowed himself to be this person, but also allowed himself to be the victim once more.

He would have thought that after years of being the victim that he’d have learned by now how to put that behind him. He looks at his hands and cannot get the feeling of blood out of his mind. He has broken more bones than promises in his life. And he’s still learning how to control the violence beat into him by his city.

So, when Harvey walks up and he tells him, “get out of here Harvey, before I call the police,” and the man snaps out a growl, moves to get into his space he cannot stop the fist that flies through the air, hurtling towards him like a meteor. He’s faced worse. He tells himself this as he ducks, dodging the punch. He says this and that’s where it ends. He let Harvey hit him the next time, fist on his face, a growl escaping past his lips. And he wonders what it says about him that this is the closet he’s felt alive in years.

Happiness is so rare that he’s forgotten what it tasted like, has seen glimpses of it in the spaces between parenting and saving lives, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to save his own.

He throws a punch and almost vomits, feels the way muscles freeze, because that’s not who he’s supposed to be.

But Harvey’s exactly who he wants to be and he’s on his feet faster than Bruce can shake himself from his mind. “I knew I shouldn’t have wasted my time on some rich prick,” he growled as he slammed Bruce into the cement walls of his parking lot.

He does not know exactly why it hurts when David from the third floor says; “I guess I should call the cops,” as Julie, from accounting, who likes daisies more than roses, kneels next to him. He knows their stories. They will never know his.

He hears a door open in the background of David and Julie’s hushed words, glances up to see Marli from HR gripping her purse closer to herself, walking stick tapping softly as she walks. She’s tiny, but strong, grew up on the lower side of Gotham, and has six misdemeanors on her record, mostly for assault and theft. Even blind she’s a powerhouse, a force to be reckoned with. She reminds him of Selina with her fierce green eyes. Cherry blond hair held in a loose ponytail, jeans and red shirt causing her to stand taller. “The fuck happened,” she asked, voice on the rougher side of the spectrum. Her walking stick held fast, tiny fingers gripping it so tightly her knuckles turn white.

David, who used to steal cars and is now one of his lead engineers, has a smile on his face. Julie, who used to sell herself to get a decent meal rolls, her eyes.

He cocks an eyebrow at her, looks over at the man unconscious at his feet and back at her, well this looks bad.

“I swear he’s most likely alive,” David raises his hands up, instinct from a black man living in a place like Gotham.

“If you hadn’t of said anything she wouldn’t have noticed,” Julie whispers softly, hazel eyes roving over towards the body, “she’s blind remember.”

“Who can forget, the way she keeps reminding everyone.”

“Oh, I’m sorry is my disability shitting on your parade asshole,” She grumps walking carefully towards them, “but don’t worry bitch-tit, I know a place we can hide the body,” she states, “I have connections, don’t worry Mr. Wayne, we can handle this,” she’s fierce and sure and he knows he should be more concerned about what she says, but his lips twitch upwards and he can’t help, but feel immensely satisfied with his employees.

“Damn it’s like you just smell trouble,” David laughs.

“Kent sent me,” she dismissed him, eyes looking out into nothingness. Bruce kept his features schooled, trying to find Brucie in the depths of his scattered mind.

“You okay Mr. Wayne,” Julie was like a delicate flower, soft spoken and tall, true and sure and a little broken around the edges.

“I’m fine Mrs. Moore,” he brushed off his suit, trying to straighten himself up.

“Where’s security,” Marli made a good point, looking around they were nowhere to be seen, as if she could magically see again.

It’s quiet now, with the way that admission falls in the air. Security is not here, because Harvey made sure they would not be here. Bruce is positive it is not betrayal on their part, rather a miscalculation on his own. Most likely they are dead or injured.

This is the version of events police see. This is how they see it happen on the video tapes.

They do not see the truth, the way Bruce beat Harvey into the ground until Kent Newsworth from the technology department, David Nightly, Julie Moore, and Marli Soto walked in on the events taking place as they walked to their cars for the evening. They do not know how hard it was for Kent and David to rip him from Harvey, how he sat shaking on the pavement eyes on the ceiling as they spoke around him, all hushed whispers and quick movements.

They do not know how easily they rewrote the story.

They will never know what those four employees heard that night. The way Harvey laid out their history for the world to see, how Bruce had struggled to find some way to make it seem not as bad as it really was.

How Bruce had spoken out when he knew better, because for once he was sick of people misjudging him, sick of Harvey making conclusions about who he was.

“You shouldn’t have edited them,” he stated calmly, later that evening.

A snort left the man beside him, “you’re welcome Mr. Boss man.”

“I could have you fired for tampering with evidence of an ongoing crime,” he states, voice level words serious.

The man just raises an eyebrow his way, shrugging slightly, “but you won’t B-man.”

He restrains a sigh, “Have that report on my desk by five Newsworth.”

“You got it bats.” Or was it boss? Was it a trick of his ears? He does not want to know. He does not ask questions.

Why don’t you speak it out loud instead of living in your head?

Bruce Wayne: November 5, 2011

It’s been a long time since he’d ever felt so out of control, since he felt as if the fabric of his life was once more being pulled out from underneath his strong, sturdy feet. It’s been too long since he’d felt as if he really belonged somewhere, since he could remember the sweet warmth that came with knowing another, and in return being known by someone else. It’s been far too long since he let himself be seen as Bruce. Since he’d donned the masks that have ultimately served to hide who he really was from the ugly faces of reality, hiding has been all he’s known, all he’s wanted to know. There is a divine comfort in being someone else, in camouflaging the truth in plain sight, right under everyone’s noses. He’s been content to disappear. He’s been perfectly fine with allowing Bruce to wither and die in the recesses of his own psyche. But now…Now was different. Clark had shaken the edifice of his being, had forced the part of Bruce who craved contact to seek it. Dick had forced that need to comfort and heal to reverberate throughout his daily life. Jo’nn had forced that side that cherished the little things to bubble up to the surface, had made him grateful for the defining experiences in his life. Jason had made those lost pieces of him hidden away in his study to thirst for life, pushing him back into those creative ventures he had secluded from humanity for most of his life. Hal had pushed boundaries, had forced him into the sun, and forced him, Bruce, out of hiding. Hal made breathing easier. He was direct, brutal, comforting, kind, blunt, and loud and everything Bruce was sure once he never wanted. But sitting here, laying here he no longer knows what exactly he’s ever wanted, because he’s told himself that what he wanted was what needed, that necessity and want were intertwined on a cosmic scale. He never once thought about what he wanted, had always just assumed that it was the same as needing something. He thought he needed Harvey to keep him in check. He thought he needed to be alone to function properly. He thought so many things that now no longer fit in this life that has sprung up out of nowhere, out of an existence forged by the little events of random, spontaneous decisions.

He’s sure that Hal was not the person he was supposed to be with. He is sure that Hal was never written into his life plans by fate or whatever it is out there supposedly calling the shots. He has always called his own shots and he is sure Hal was never figured in. Hal swept in like he walks into a room. Hal does what Harvey once did only not, because Hal doesn’t act like he owns the room, only acts like he knows that it’s not his, but it’s okay. He acts like sometimes things are okay, even in the darkest moment Hal just shrugs and says that they can do it, that he can do it, despite the statistics, despite the standards and idealisms of those around him, Hal is confident in his failings and in his winning. He hides his humility to act braver than he is. He is courageous where most are not. He is truly one of a kind.

Still he cannot erase years of training, years of silencing himself in the name of the mission, in the name of everything he’s ever done to protect Gotham, himself. Laying here next to Hal, once more frolicking in his failures he says exactly what he says every time they do this. It’s pretty much all they see of each other now, this and whatever it is they are doing. He says, “This can’t happen again,” because it’s true, because if he allows himself this, if he does this then…

His fingers find the bruises on his neck, tracing them up to his temple.

He does not say that Harvey sought him out again last night, found him on his way to his car after a long day at Wayne Enterprises. He does not say he did not fight back. He did not say that he did fight back. He did not say he almost lost control.

He focuses on the ceiling, staring at empty white, trying to block out the world.

This time is different, this time their fully naked and raw and open.

This time he does not keep an article of clothing on when he fucks Hal, because this time Hal takes them off, before Bruce can push him away like he should have. This time Hal tries to touch more than he has in the past.

Then…

His fingers find the foot shaped stamp on his stomach.

Then somehow, he can’t-

His fingers dance across a million different scars.

He-

His throat feels like lead. He can’t seem to breathe. It’s like this every time. He can’t even have sex like a normal human being. He can’t even lay here for a few minutes naked and raw and bare without over thinking all the downsides to this. Without worrying that he’s over thinking this, without worrying that maybe this was all just some giant mistake. Without worrying that Hal thinks this is all just a mistake.

He says, “We can’t do this again.”

He’s not used to this. This casual touch, that lazy half smile looking at him, that stupid glimmer of hope dancing in Hal’s eyes. He’s not used to those light touches on his face, his chest. In his world things are brutal and sure and angry and fast. In his world things hurt. They hurt and ask for hurt in return.

And Hal, unlike all the other times where he just agrees, just says, “what if I want to?”

A hand falls on his bare chest. Hal comes to tower over him, naked and powerful. There are hands on his chest. “Huh Spooky, don’t I get a fucking say in this.”

Hands on his chest

They are soft and sure.

Hands on him

They are firm and kind.

And Bruce can’t think, “Hal,” he grinds out, pushes out, struggles to let out.

There’s a finger forcing his chin up in a twisted memory of the touch he’s used to.

“No, shut up,” he snaps, and Bruce’s lips slam shut.

Because that’s what Har-

Because that’s what P-

That’s what-

Stop

Shut up

“Hal-“

“Shut up, it’s my turn okay…”

Shut up

Hands on his chest

Shut up

Can’t speak

Shut up

Don’t talk

Shut up

Shut up

Shut up

He can’t speak, the air has been sucked out of the room and Bruce can’t deal with that, with this, with what this could possibly mean, with hands on him and… His eyes turn cold.

Hal sees this, sees the moment where Bruce ends and Batman begins. He sees the layers he’s managed to peel out fade from view. He sees the change so quickly he wonders how the man doesn’t have whip lash from it. Batman is there in a second, but instead of staying like he usually does, there’s a flash of hurt that skitters across his eyes like a wounded man running through the night. It’s there and gone. Bruce is back, but something is wrong.

He moves so that Bruce has no choice, but to look at him, keeps his grip steady, “Just fucking listen to me for a minute.” He whispers, trying not to choke like a coward, tries to fight off the pressure building in his own chest.

Bruce shifts under Hal’s weight, feels the world crashing down around him. Feels Harvey’s eyes glaring at his neck. So, he runs, like the coward he is, he runs, and Hal, brave and sometimes stupid, follows. Hal follows him, stares at the door slammed in his face, while Bruce watches the door, back on the wall away from it, trying not to fuck this up more than he already has. He is trying not to let Bruce out, trying to shove him down as far as he can, bury him and let the bat take his place, but Bruce has his nails in, has gotten a taste of freedom and wants to be let out.

He sinks to the ground let’s his mind fall, let’s himself fall into that jargon that has lead him down this path. He has to be alone. He can’t turn Hal into Harvey. He can’t-

Stop
Do not process
Compartmentalize

He feels like he’s going to be sick.

He can’t-

Stop

He can’t let Hal be like T-

Stop

Nails dig into hair, scalp burns

Stop

Stomach churns, but he tries to swallow it down, tries to center himself.

Stop

The buzzing is getting louder, choking out the world around him, fading out the edges between what he should and should not do. His skin is burning. His hands tighten in his hair, mouth dialed down into a thin line. His chest feels like it was on fire, scorching itself from the inside out, mind melting.

There’s a bright light bursting in.

There are hands on him again, hands on him, prying fingers from skin, tugging limbs towards a warm body. There’s a blanket on his shoulders and someone wrapping strong arms around him. His world is in tatters. He pushes against them, finds his fight, “fuck off,” he snaps despite himself, finds himself trying to bite back the words as soon as they leave his lips. People of his stature do not curse. He should know better. His parents are weeping in their graves.

Cry him a river.

Arms find their way back around him as he quiets himself.

“So, the other day,” someone speaks from what feels like miles away, “I was trying out this new fighter jet, and I gotta tell ya Spooky, it was a beauty, pure gold, flew like a dream…” Someone was talking, there were arms around him, and warmth overtaking, melting out the ice hardening around his chest.

He could hear a heartbeat, warm and strong and sure. There’s warm breath on his cheek and rumbling from the timber of Hal’s voice.

Hal

It was just Hal. Fingers slide through his hair, the world coming into view.

He breathes in, long and deep, finds Hal in the air, finds cinnamon and jet fuel and leather and something he can’t quite place. He smells sex too, but it’s lingering softly in the air, reminds him that he isn’t okay, but Hal somehow makes things okay.

It hurts to move. It feels like lead is in his skin and chalk has stuffed his mouth, but he scrubs his face anyway, let’s Hal’s arms tighten around him, moves so that his face rests in the groove between the man’s head and neck, makes sure he doesn’t have to see the disappointment in brown eyes. He finds himself turning, moving so that all there is in the world is just Hal. His hands land on tan skin.

Hal quiets down for a moment and Bruce can feel his nose in his hair, can feel a hand slide down to the small of his back, another moving to his cheek. He breathes out, centers himself before he does something stupid.

“It’s going to be okay Bruce,” he whispers.

“I got you,” he says.

And Bruce feels his heartbeat level out, feels his nerves finding peace, finds he’s just heavy now.

“I got you,” and Bruce believes him, let’s himself believe it, can feel Bruce spurring to life, jumping to the forefront of his brain, shoving down everyone else.

He breathes out, closes his eyes, and tries not to think about the scene he’s made. He tries not to think about what Hal must think of him.

“I’m fine,” he grits out, makes to push Hal away, but moves to pull him impossibly closer.

“Yeah and I’m Indiana Jones,” Hal snorts, that hand on his cheek dipping down to his chin, trying to make him look at Hal, look his failure straight in the eyes.

“I’m fine,” he growls, hands tightening around soft flesh.

Hal pushes and he gives, because Bruce is weak. He’s weak and Hal’s eyes are soft, “I’m in this for the long run Spooky,” he says sure and confident. Bruce bites back his pride, moves to bury back into Hal’s neck, let’s his arms slide around said neck and just stays there, because it’s better there. It’s better here with Hal and the warmth he brings.

“So, uh…” he speaks again into Bruce’s hair, “we just not gonna talk about that,” his voice is tinged with that Kentucky twang he’s beat out of it. Bruce likes it.

“B?”

“We can’t do this anymore,” he whispers, when his mind says, ‘I don’t want this to end.’

Fingers digging into flesh

“The fuck does that even mean,” Hal’s voice is laced with his frustration, with his annoyance, with his concern that this was it.

“It’s for the best,” he whispers as his mind says, ‘I can’t live without you anymore.’

“So, you get to decide what’s best for me, why am I not even fucking surprised.” Hal huffs into the air around them, arms still curled around Bruce, “Well news flash douchebag I’m not going anywhere and if the last couple of weeks have been anything to go by this is going to happen again, because I’m handsome as fuck and you’re the most gorgeous thing that’s ever walked the Earth, so you’re just gonna have to get used to it,” he’s ranting again as he refuses to let go and Bruce says nothing about it, lets him, let’s Hal set the rules, because Bruce wants him to, wants him to deep down.

He doesn’t nod, just remains quiet, because they both know that’s the closet he will ever get to agreeing with anyone, but it’s fine because Hal moves until their noses find each other and then lips, he moves until Bruce is melting against Hal and the world seems right.

“This is a bad idea,” he breathes out, before moving back to Hal, his lips finding him.

“What happened,” Hal asks moves to remind Bruce of why they are sitting on his Penthouse bathroom floor and not the luxurious bed.

He stands on wobbly legs and Hal tries to steady him, but Bruce shakes him off, looking for his pride somewhere between the bed and here. He stands like he already has it though, like he’s never lost it. The businessman was taking hold, like always- proud and firm, but Bruce was fighting back again, refusing to go back into the safe room built into the house in his head. The bat couldn’t even hold him anymore.

At least that’s how it maybe should have gone, and in another life, it is exactly what did happen, but in this reality, there are hands on his chest and a crushing weight in his gut. In reality, he’s scrambling to throw anything on, in this world he winds up in the alleyway behind his penthouse, panicking, desperate for air, legs giving out. He finds himself just sitting next to the trash for god knows how long, staring off into the distance, waiting for his life to come back together again.

It's dark when he finds himself back in that Penthouse, everything cleaned up from their earlier activities. It’s dark and to his surprise Hal is sitting on his couch watching his old copies of the Grey Ghost, filling out paperwork lazily. He’s still here and Bruce is left speechless for once. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t know what he would say, just finds himself next to Hal, sitting calmly as his laptop finds its way into his lap so he can work on some WE reports he needs done.

It’s quiet and lazy, but neither of them breaks the silence. Sometime in between their work and the cartoon in the background, Hal’s arm winds up around his shoulders, soft and careful, but not at all timid. He’s worked himself back into Hal’s space, just as Hal’s voice fills in the deafening silence. He makes fun of the cartoon, laughs at the goons, fingers brushing through Bruce’s hair every now and then.
It’s…nice.

He keeps quiet, reminds Hal who he is and what he does. He keeps quiet and Hal pushes forward. They are the immovable object and an unstoppable force. Hal will never stop and Bruce never gives if he doesn’t want to. Lately he’s wanted to.

And they don’t talk about it. Hal fights, pushes and never lets up on it, but Bruce refuses to budge. They get dirty, Hal talks to Alfred and Dinah about it, Bruce refuses to comment. It’s an old story, Hal is pushing and Bruce is standing and at the end of the day nothing will be accomplished because that’s just how they work. Only it doesn’t really work. It never really works, which is probably why not even a few days later everything explodes like it does. When he says explodes. He means it literally.

Hal is thrown from the sky and Bruce is forced to the ground, legs disappearing beneath him, body soaring back. Something explodes and neither of them saw it coming, only knows that it’s not an unusual thing. This is just how their world works.

To be clear it was not by any means their fault, but for some reason his brain connected the two events as a cause and effect, somehow like so many other times, his mind cascades a string between two memories that do not necessarily lead into the other, like Harvey and Hal. It was however still a fuckcluster of events that had both spiraling out of control and back to each other.

The sky feels like it is falling as monsters rain from the sky. They were just talking on a roof, well arguing and maybe if they hadn’t been arguing they could have seen the beginning twinges of red in the sky, the beam coming down, maybe they could have done something, and maybe they couldn’t.

All he knows is that the world was falling apart and he was tumbling towards Hal, thoughts clouding with the dread that comes with an injured loved one. He abandons his post throws himself towards Hal and away from the battle, mind narrowed down to only this, to only Hal.

He digs through gravel as Stewart yells at him to answer, to come in, check in, do something, but he’s frozen in the thought that Hal was gone and he hadn’t told him. Hal was gone and he hadn’t told him anything. Hal was gone and he would not be okay. He pushes through, fights to keep himself breathing as he digs and digs and keeps digging even as his brain tells him to stop. He digs, Batman buried in his mind, Bruce fighting to keep sane, his house tumbling down.

He does not know how long exactly he spends digging, only knows that it feels like an eternity until green light pulses out from the ground and the world quakes again as the man drags himself up from his premature grave.

There is a tremor in his hands and a shift in his mind, but Hal is there. Despite the chaos around them Hal is there. Hal is there and he is fine.

They give each other a look, small nod bubbling up between them before Batman is off, Green Lantern by his side as they set into sync, fighting off monsters and saving the world, Gotham, Coast City, their families, themselves- Each other.

Somewhere along the lines it stopped being about Thomas and Martha Wayne and pearls raining from the sky. Somewhere along the lines it stopped being about them and started being about this, this thing that sprouted between the two of them. He’s not sure how he feels about that, only knows it makes his heart flutter and his mind set in place. It aligns something that’s been broken in Bruce’s mind for far too long.

He knows Hal was never the one he was supposed to be with. He understands that Hal was never written into his life plans, just like Dick and Jason and Clark and all the other people he’s come to know as Batman. But somewhere along the lines his mission had grown far beyond the walls of Gotham, had expanded in ways he’d never fantasized about. Batman had become more than a lone man, or a meager symbol for a lost city. It had become a protector of more than one doctor’s dream and one women’s hope, it had become about the world unified in preservation, in saving hope and giving it back, about finding love and pushing back.

He propels himself off of one of Hal’s projections, soars through the air to latch onto the leader activating a sonic blast to propel the treacherous creature back to where it came from. He falls too, through the air, out of grappling hooks, falls and knows Hal will get him, like he knows that maybe things will be okay.

Because somewhere along the lines it stopped being about Thomas and Martha Wayne and more about this, about moving on and facing the horizon better and stronger. Somewhere along the lines it became about Hal and Jason and Dick and Clark and Selina and Wally and Barry and Oliver and Jo’nn and Dinah and Jason Blood and Zatanna and Shayera and Stewart and Kord….

Somewhere along the lines he stopped being alone.

He does not know how to feel about that.

Ted Kord: November 8, 2011

“You okay,” his voice stretches out between them, vast and quite unsure, but solid in its hopefulness for an answer.

Of course, there wasn’t an answer, but maybe it was the possibility of an answer that he was hoping for. But he set out the hope just to remind the man next to him that he was still holding out for something.

Their friendship (at least he thinks it’s a friendship, he wants it to be one, there’s a possibility for greatness here he doesn’t want to let go) was one built on science. Since that night so long ago, or not quite long ago, but too long in Ted’s fast paced mind. The questions purposed, the ideas sent following through his mind. He moves towards him, watches as the man fiddles with the device in his hand.

His apartment was a mess, from the papers decorating the floors and walls to the old bags of chips and laundry both dirty and clean strewn over everything; he wondered briefly how this looked to someone as neat and orderly as the Bat himself.

“You are…quite accurately an awkward unfashionable teenager,” the man had stated upon seeing his apartment for the first time. “I would know, I have two,” he said with such a monotone voice that Ted wondered whether he was supposed laugh or hide or what.

That was Bruce for you, all serious, no chill. Sometimes he forgot what he was supposed to do around the man. Even when they were younger, those brief glances he would get of the boy said too much, too much of the hollowness that comes from losing a loved one. To say he was shocked that Bruce Wayne was Batman would be a lie, but to say he was shocked that Brucie Wayne was the boy he’d seen so sparingly that sometimes he forgot the kid was even still alive would be a definite answer of, of course.

Frowning he took note as the man, all pressed suits and turtlenecks and perfect features work with such immense concentration, such meticulous precision that it was kind of hard not to do anything, but look, but study and learn and grow from whatever the man was willing to hand over, which wasn’t much of course. Brucie Wayne did do meticulous. He was sloppy and loud and a little ditzy, all things the man before him is not.

Booster, Michael, still thinks he’s insane for allowing the Bat into his life, but what can he do. The man’s onto his next big squeeze, so best friends be damned. That was Michael, always trying to catch the next woman in his sights, forgetting him completely in the whirlwind of could be’s and maybe’s.

“We need something with more power,” the dark man beside him stated calmly.

“We could text Holt, see what he can get us.”

“No,” the man growls out, “this stays between us.”

“But it’d be better if we had other people helping us, this tech is centuries ahead of anything we have currently.”

“We’ll make do,” he states, “you have seen the cave correct?”

He was hunched over his laptop now, typing brutally as he tried to understand whatever it was that had his brain on the fritz. Of course, technically he knew, the man had told sparse details of the other world and the Justice Lords, and Ted knew his fair share of what horrors other dimensions could unfold to others. He just didn’t know why the man before him was obsessing over it like one of his cases, because Barbra has told him about what Bruce was like on the hunt.

“Yes, and despite how awesome and ahead of the times it is, this stuff is even more advanced!”

“I can do this,” he murmured, eyes narrowing onto something he was trying to fuse together.

Sighing loudly, he let his hand drop onto the man’s shoulder, “dude, what are you trying to prove?”

He moved from the touch, and suddenly the action registered in Ted’s mind, and he was very aware of what kind of damage the Batman could inflict, what Bruce Wayne could inflict, stories and rumors and hard truths all floating through his mind. He’d touched the untouchable.

However, it also registered in Ted’s mind the kind of action that was, the way it almost seemed as if he’d burned the man in front of him. It registered how badly the man next to him seemed to avoid touch in total.

“Sor-“ he started, but Bruce was on his feet, face unreadable, as his fists clenched the prototype in his hand.

“I’m not fucking glass,” he snapped, blue eyes chilling him to the core.

The Batman just cursed at him.

Oh, he was so dead.

“I never said, - “ the man was twirling on his heels heading for the door, and Ted didn’t know what to do, because what do you say to that, to Batman when he was mad.

Maybe it was the soft click of the door that gave away the fact that maybe the man wasn’t mad at him, or just the lack of drama that usually accompanies the man in all his shapes and forms, or maybe Ted’s just a softie, but as he looked at the prototype left on his floor, he let himself set to work despite all the ways it could, will, go wrong if he just gives in and helps.

This is powerful stuff, this is scary stuff, stuff he’s tried to stay away from, because he’s seen what messing with time can do to people, but what about alternate dimensions, what about how that can hurt people.

What can that do to someone’s head?

Fuck them up, that’s what.

Bruce Wayne- November 10, 2012

Today he wakes up anew. Blinking slowly, eyes blurry with sleep, heavy with…nothing. Sitting up slowly he, takes stock of his own body, finds quiet where once was loud, finds calm where once chaos was. He’s not sure what’s going on what’s real and what’s not, but he takes his pills like he has for the past couple of months, takes his pills and gets out of bed. Stumbling to the bathroom he comes to a halt.

He waits, waits for that feeling, for his muscles to clench and his stomach to twist in on itself, and the heaviness to lie on his chest, for that anxiety and fear and need to hurt something. He waits for the hurt to come back, but it never does.

He looks forward and does not recognize the person in front of him.

He looks ahead and finds himself lost in the eyes of a stranger.

“It’s going to be okay,” he repeats his head, eyes on the man in front of him.

“You’re going to be okay,” he gasps, trying to piece together the man in the mirror with the one he feels squirming around in his chest.

It’s new, strange, weird. There’s change marked by this morning, change so surreal and unknown he shifts in his stance, as if preparing for a fight he didn’t want to have. He’s different and he knows he shouldn’t be as relieved about it as he is. He shifts as he moves, gets dressed in this weird light haze, mind quieted by the pressure of drugs.

He gets dressed slowly, gets dressed surely

Wally West- November 12, 2011

He found someone today.

Or he met a villain today and he doesn’t know why it’s stood out in his brain, but she was beautiful and sassy. He swears he knows her, even though he’s knows he’s never met her.

She went by Tigress, but some called her Artemis, and he doesn’t know why that’s prominent, only knows it’s still with him.

He found her, and he called her his in his head, but she’s not his. She might have never been his, but his brain is doing funny things.

He brushes it off, focuses on the debrief, on Clark talking and smiling. Right, he’s supposed to smile. So, he does- feels Bats’ eyes on him as a smile lights up his face.

He doesn’t feel a smile inside him, but he smiles anyway.

He doesn’t want to be heard, he wants to be listened to. The words, however, never come, they die before they are born and his heart is still beating despite his best efforts.

He feels like love has died.

There’s no funeral, just a bleeding heart on the sidewalk. His love has gone cold. It was a lie that intertwining your soul with somebody else could heal the worst wounds, because now all he feels is broken. He wants to see her again, but she’s not his. She’s a stranger that his mind is pushing him towards.

Hal Jordan: November 16, 2011

“So, wait,” blue eyes squint at the ceiling, “you and Bats?”

They’re back in the café, Sherri shuffling to and for, grumpy and exhausted and a mess of a human being.

He squirmed in his seat.

“I’m saying,” he threw up his hands, eyes on the ceiling, fingers carding through his hair.

“Whaaa, when did this happen,” Green eyes sparkled in the light.

“Why are you smiling, why are you so happy about this?”

“Because Hal, it’s about damn time,” blue soft eyes lit up, watching him frown and struggle under the frustration of not knowing, what the fuck was going on through that idiot’s brain.

Laughter fills his ears, as Oliver laughs into the booth, “Oh my god I fucking called it! I won! Oh, my god I have to text Roy, maybe this will get him to talk to me again.” his laughter turns into wheezing as his shaking fingers try to type on his phone, not even noticing Hal’s fuming form.

And Barry, oh Barry’s just as bad. He was fucking snorting at Ollie’s display, head shaking even as a smile twitches onto his face. He snapped, slapping Oliver’s phone out of his hand, satisfaction at the crunch of it as it meets the floor, is too much.

“Hey,” the man starts, even as Barry’s laughter gets louder.

“Oh, go buy a new one,” he snapped.

Bruce slides in next to him, as silent as ever, eyes on the front door, cautious as always. And Hal can’t help it, can’t help but melt a little looking at him. His hand was sliding on the man’s thigh in a slight show of affection automatically, brain stuck on that mantra of ‘he’s mine’ ‘I’m his’ now that it was finally, somewhat official.

“So finally, the question that’s been plaguing me, who’s the bottom,” Oliver leans forward mischief in his eyes, as Bruce’s hands balls into tight fists under the table, and Hal forces himself to remain cool, because really, they’ve been avoiding this subject.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Hal smirks in time to Barry slapping the man on his shoulder, as a blush was working its way down his entire face, neck, ears.

“What,” the blonde billionaire groans, “I just needs to know,” he whines loudly as he slides down to pick up the wreckage that was now his phone.

Bruce growls next to him, and Hal should keep the laugh out of his voice as he rants at the man. It’s only mid rant that he notices the way Barry and Bruce are sort of talking telepathically between them, Barry trying to convey something as Bruce silently makes his want for no attention to be known.

His hand finds Bruce’s, grips it under the table, sure and solid. It’s then that the door chimes to alert someone’s entering. And sure, enough there’s someone there, just not who he expected.

Bruce doesn’t even react quite like he expects, there’s a warmth there that startles Hal. It’s not something to be jealous about he knows that look, has seen it when Bruce looks at Barbra or Jim or Alfred. It’s something so purely familial and knowing that Hal does a double take. The man settles next Oliver, skirting in between Barry’s wheelchair and the chair, a nervous smile in his voice, all abashed, but soothingly calm.

“Hello, my friends,” the man, all dark skin, tan trench coat and dark fedora, waves.

They might need a bigger booth.

“John,” Bruce nods towards the man across from him, shuffling closer into Hal’s space, hand still clasped tightly in his.

And it feels like it once was, plus some, all of them squeezed into the other, laughter and talk of old times warming the world around them.

“Ugh, look at this bullshit,” Oliver speaks over his phone, holding it out firmly for everyone to see, or well squint over the cracked lens “Lord’s threatening to buy stocks from Luthor Corp.”

“Oh damn, just what we needed, a jackass fighting with a bald jackass,” Hal whined.

“What’s Lord done,” Barry asked over his fries.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Bruce shrugged, as Jo’nn smirked devilishly at him.

“Oh, my god what did you do?” Oliver leaned forward, snagging a piece of bread as he goes.

Bruce shrugged noncommittally looking away.

“This is the circle of trust; tell us your deepest darkest secrets,” Barry speaks as he always does, a smile in his voice, all rugged good looks and cheeky tone.

“No,” Bruce’s face is so serious it almost hurts to look at, as his eyes bore deeply and piercingly into Barry’s, “it is a rectangle.” It is said so calmly above the rim of his glass of coffee, blue eyes darting towards the man in the fedora him, who’s sneaking Chocos from his pocket.

Ah…he’s the Martian

“Ass,” Hal teased, bumping him on the arm, before sliding his cautiously around his boyfriend, the man not even batting an eye at the display, just giving him a look that’s screaming ‘what the fuck do you think you’re doing, this is a public place?” Which (to be noted for all eternally) he graciously ignores it in favor of tugging him closer, much to Oliver and Barry’s loud excitement.

The following mess of arguing over who ‘shipped’ what first has Hal groaning into Bruce’s neck, and the man just humming into his coffee as if nothing happened at all. Then again after living with Dick for so long this must be a common occurance.

They are such fangirls.

The Martian on the other hand just does a short ‘congratulations’ in his head followed by a ‘hurt him and I shall make you wish you were dead’ which, the hell did that come from. He almost chokes on his coke at that.

Bruce Wayne- November 20, 2011

“You say I’m not alone, but I’m petrified,” he whispered in the darkness of his room, the burn of sweet scotch on his tongue, words whispered out into nothingness, fear coursing through his chest like a disease, filling his veins and threatening to take over his entire being.

Fear what a weakness.

He wasn’t afraid of dying, or the danger that came with his lifestyle. He was afraid of something more organic, something more chilling. With death came a release, came a freedom that is so unnatural in this world. With danger came the rush, the promise of feeling alive for once; with pain came something tangible to feel, to latch onto. Pain is truthful; it does not lie to you like love does, like happiness does. Pain makes mean honest.

He did not want friendship. He wanted to be alone, locked up in his big old house away from everything that has the potential to latch onto him and make him feel that lie that love tells. He told Clark he did not want friends. He told Alfred he wanted to be alone. He told them. He told himself, made himself believe it with such surety, such conviction that he would preach it to anyone that would listen. But now Dick is gone and Clark is gone. Hal and Jason are near, but they are not replacements, they are new parts of his life that fit just right, but just because they fit does not mean he forgot about the other two.

But here he is with a platitude of friends, and a multitude of people claiming to be family and they all expect something from him. They expect him to be strong and unmoving. They expect him to be functioning.

He’d let them into his life.

Love lied to him again. Happiness laughed in his face.

Clark was gone in a flash.

He was gone and the world didn’t make sense.

He was gone and Bruce was left with words still dancing on his tongue.

He was gone, but he couldn’t be dead, Bruce just needed to find him. He just needed to be better, needed to prove love wrong.

He just had to do something.

Falling off his bed he clamored in the darkness, feeling the confining walls of freedom licking at his skin, the sharp pangs of grief trying to swallow him whole all over again.

The porcelain was too cold, freezing chilled skin, as the wild buzzing noise continued in his head. Something was telling him Clark was fine, just lost. Something was telling himself this, but his heart was screaming that he dead, that they saw him die, just like they his parents.

And he remembers so dully what it was like to watch people die, remembers last week when a little girl died in his arms because her father beat her to death. He remembers Afghanistan, remembers broken limbs falling off the bone, and remembers being told from both parties that it was all going to be worth it, because their cause was the right cause. He remembers a lot of things about death, but death does not ask questions. Death does not care who you are, she’ll take you whether you’re black or white or Asian or Latino. Death does not care if you are straight or gay or lesbian or asexual. She does not mind if you are cisgender or transgender or nonbinary. Death does not mind who you are or what you do and she comes for you whether you are ready or not.

And Clark was gone, died heroically, again, of course.

He sits in his bathtub, let’s the chill drive into his bones. He sits and he’s stuck here, he’s stuck here. Alfred wants him to sleep, it’s been weeks since he’s slept, been weeks even before Kal died. His eyes flicker towards his razor, mouth burrowing into a thin line.

Stop

A shaky hand reaches out and he wonders why his subconscious is always trying to kill him. He clasps it tight, wondering why he’s been trying to find ways to do himself in since that night. The will to live is here, breathes life into himself, pushes him to make a difference, to be the best, to be better.

This is so unsanitary he thinks as he set the blade to his wrists, eyebrows furrowing slightly. “I just want to feel something,” he breathes out through gritted teeth, head falling to his knees, as he thinks of Jason, of Alfred, of Dick, of Hal.

“I just need to feel,” his voice come out ragged, all sharp edges and rough plains, “something,” he grinds out through his teeth. “I just-“

“Bruce,” he hears the gasp at the door. It’s been picked open so beautifully that it escaped his hearing. He would be proud of the young woman in front of him if he was not already so uneasily disappointed at being caught.

He drops the razor, hands on the sides of his head as the buzzing gets louder and his shoulders tremble, and the world begins to lose its meaning.

She snatches the razor away, throwing it across the room, red hair falling in front of her features, which she brushes back so elegantly. Her hands find his shoulders, trying to loosen him up, but all he does is tense. Barbra is calm and stern and stubborn. She is too much like Jim Gordan, too much like the man that stuffed him in that oversized coat and told him things were going to be fine when they both knew the truth was far less satisfying here in Gotham. She was a woman with the biggest dreams, but a practical mind.

She does not know his story.

There are new hands on his shoulder, hands turning him around and pressing him tightly into another’s chest. “Oh, my dear boy,” comes a soft voice, and something precious shatters in his chest, something cracks and he kind of just goes limp, let’s himself fall forward, whether in shame or something worse he’ll never know.

“Bruce,” the voice speaks softly, fingers carding through his hair as he continues to tremble.

Mouth slammed shut.

The quiet is his form of tears.

And his silence cries out into the night.

But if that’s the case, then his words are piercing screams of agony.

“I don’t know what to do Alfred,” his voice is small, and he knows Alfred knows, knows something is wrong, but for once he can’t bring himself to care.

“I’ve got you,” Alfred whispered into his hair, arms tightening around his shoulders mouth dialed down in a mirror image of Bruce’s own habit.

“I have to,” he starts to get out on his own, limbs scrambling up and away, but Alfred pushes him close, nudging him away from his door.

“Go to sleep, yes I agree,” the butler hummed pushing him back to his bed.

“Dad there’s-“And he slams the words down, cuts himself off at that word, that word he promised not to use, not to put out as if to replace the man that gave him this house, his name, his legacy.

“All the time in the world for your crusade,” the man who raised him whispers into his hair, “Now you promised me you wouldn’t let it destroy you.”

“Well we both knew that was a lie,” he snapped back, hands forming fists at his side, mind running off its tracks. His words were weapons that he wielded with the intent to damage.

“Which is why I have stayed so long,” he stated coolly, moving back into Bruce’s space, “Master Bruce,” his voice lowers, “You need rest, even the Batman cannot function without sleep.”

“I’m fine,” he snaps.

“To put it mildly sir, you bloody well know you are the exact opposite,” he’s still calm, cool like the tides the ocean crashing into the wilds of a volcano on the edge of erupting.

“Now tea?”

“You’ll just spike it,” he bites as he takes the cup Alfred must have set down on his way to the bathroom.

“Perhaps,” the man replied.

And Barbra comes back into view, kneels beside him and looks him into the eyes, hands grasping the cup and putting it to his lips. “Drink,” she says and by this point he would be suicidal not to do it (no pun intended). She watches him drink it all in one go, not even bothering to taste it really, just trying to go to sleep, to be anything but what he is now.

Bruce Wayne: November 28, 2011

Sitting here, among the peeling cracks of the walls, stuffed behind the cowl, blue eyes the only part of him peeking through; it feels like pieces of him are coming undone, pouring out of his own cracked skin. There are parts of him coming apart here, seated on worn booths and reality beyond denial in front of a man who’s known him longer than his parents ever could makes the cowl shift just not right. The walls are faded blue and sad red, the sharp edges of the world around him makes him sit out of place.

Barbra is crippled. Gordon is a mess. And it is all his fault.

He chases the clown down, dancing and running across rooftops, Dick’s shattered voice echoing through his ears. Barbara was paralyzed for the rest of her life, because he made her feel like she had to prove herself to him.

He pushes himself to work harder, be better, ignore everyone. Jason tries to push him out of the cave, but Bruce just tells him he’s not allowed on patrol anymore.

Dick takes him out.

Bruce is stuck.

December 6, 2011

And then the man was back and he didn’t feel hollow again. Clark was back and filling the space beside him, deep blue eyes trying to meet his own. He couldn’t look at him, because all he could see in return was an empty grave. There was a ringing in his head and burning in the back of his throat and Clark was resting a hand on his shoulder, patting it awkwardly as he moved to chat with Diana.

‘My friend,’ J’onn filled his brain, ‘would you li-‘

‘I’m fine’ he snapped back, head bowing down. He knew the Martian could feel the emotions wafting from him today of all days, knew he was out of sorts, which was probably why he could actually hear the other one. Usually it was just a feeling nudging at his barriers, but today all he could hear was J’onn. All he could sense was J’onn and his silent offer.

Clark’s laugh distracted him briefly and his mind went crazy.

Life was cruel like that.

‘No. I do not believe you are.’ J’onn was like death, honest, blunt, to the point, so sure in his decisions.

J’onn was on the other side of the room from him, but he still felt too close, too close to something treasured.

‘Let me help you,’ there was weakness in needing help.

He turned on his feet, head finding the sky in a show of confidence, feet moving on their own accord as he sought out truth, searched for something that felt real in the pits of Gotham’s Underworld.

He never found it, but he’d like to think Gotham has her own form of truth.

Still he never can find what he’s looking for.

Life was a lie like that.

Selina sought him out this time. She was warm and calm. She was strong when he wanted to fall apart. She found him later that night. She found him in his bathroom. Hal galaxies away, Jason down the hall, Alfred down in the kitchen- she found him on the floor, with the ringing in his ears and a blade in his hand. She found him and she knocked it out of his hands, even as his body went to seek it back out.

The screams that followed weren’t necessary, but he was seeking death out tonight, the buzzing getting the louder and the pressure in his chest so unsure, so overwhelming it promised a release if he just let go, but he was so unaware of how to let go after years of training himself to never let go.

So, she pushed and he pulled away. It was a familiar dance, one they’d spent years practicing. And when she left, the door slamming resolutely behind her, he tried to pretend like that was exactly what he wanted to begin with, tried to pour out the pressure in his chest and move on.

It was Hal inevitably, as usual that pulls him out of himself. He makes Bruce snap at him, while he drabbles on about something completely irrelevant and irritating. He cracks the most inappropriate jokes and makes Bruce both want to pull his teeth out and laugh like a madman on crack.

They sit watching shitty re-runs of the failed live action Grey Ghost sitcom from the 60’s, where everything in his hide out is labelled. It’s ridiculous and completely stupid when compared to the animated series from the 90’s.

Jason eventually makes his way to the room, Selina slinking in to sidle up next to them. It’s…strange, but soothing in the way that pressure eases off of him.

December 8, 2011

He’s sitting at a table with Lois Lane sitting across from him. She is true to her name, beautiful and fierce. He can see why Clark loves her.

He does not know why he is here, well he has his suspicions, but most include emotional issues that he’s really hoping are not the cause of the meeting. Missing the meeting altogether was an unwise decision as this was Lois and she was a bloodhound.

Still his misgivings are confirmed the second he sees her. She doesn’t pose herself the way she does when she’s trying to get an exclusive, rather she was dressed down, slumping slightly in her seat, eyes tilted down at her phone, probably working on getting ahead of some other story than the one she currently wants to discuss.

“Cut the small talk,” he says as a greeting, eyes sharp in the café light.

“Well look who woke up on the wrong side of the cave, what Alfred forget to lay down the red carpet on the way to the bathroom?” He does not acknowledge her, instead focusing on a menu they both know he’s not really reading.

He raises an eyebrow as if to say, ‘really’

“You can do better than rich jabs,” he states, flipping through the pages, catches the slight twitch of her right eye. Lois hates being ignored almost as much as she does missing out on a big story.

“True, I guess for once I can cut to the chase,” she smirks as she talks, all charm and hardly any grace.

“Thank you.” She says it with such sincerity, such earnestness that it throws him off, because god damn the emotions wafting from her and the undercurrent of a talk that will definitely go deeper than the state of the weather makes him want to go beat someone into the ground for a misdemeanor.

He cuts a glare her way, suspicion of an ulterior motive has him at the edge of his seat.

“Thank you for letting me have him,” she sets her hand on his own, lets him none too subtly pull it back. She sits up straight violent eyes studying him carefully. “We both know that if you’d really put in the effort he’d chosen you.”

It’s rare for a woman as proud as Lois to admit something like that about herself, surprising more for Bruce to think that she thinks that he could possibly beat her out of something like this.

There’s no point in denying the subject, Lois is too smart to degrade her to such a level, especially after everything they have seen each other go through.

“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” he says, “He loves you.”

“Oh, I have no doubt about that,” she says with a shrug, “but he loves you as well, in his own way I suppose. And to be honest I don’t actually have a clue whether he’d have chosen me or you. So, I wanted to thank you for letting me have him.”

“There was not a competition.”

“Are you coming to the wedding?”

It’s next year. In one year, they will be married and he’s actually decently content for them. Despite everything, he wants this to work out for them. He wants them to be that disgustingly cute couple that always manages to work. She keeps him grounded, sure and strong. She is not afraid to challenge him in a way most shiver at the thought of. She is determined and stubborn and brave. She is confident where he lacks it, he is strength when she breaks. He wants it to work. He wants it to work, just like everyone wanted Barry and Iris to work despite Hal. He wants them to be happy in a way that takes him by surprise.

He shrugs, “May as well.”

“Do you love him?” Once more she cuts to the heart of things, just as she does in her interrogations. She’s observant, clever in a way that makes her a great journalist and formidable appointment. “Hal, I mean.”

He looks down at the tabletop, frown burning on his face.

“Well that’s a yes.” He shoots up to meet her eyes, “you have that look I get when I think about Clark.”

“Now how good is he in bed?”

He almost slouches back in his chair in exhaustion. This was why he avoided these conversations, it always comes down to two things: love and sex, like the two had to go hand in hand, like he had to conform to both for his entire nonplatonic relationship to go somewhere. Love and sex; sex and love, like those two things had to have a specific place in his life for him, as a person, to be whole.

Sex wasn’t even that great.

Sometimes it was enjoyable, but most of the time it had gone hand to hand in pain, or humiliation, or manipulation.
“I would not know,” he admitted out loud, head leaned back at an awkward angle so that he can look at the ceiling, as if he was truly invested in knowing every single part of it.

“I would not know,” the admittance left his lips before he could stop it and he forced himself to stay looking up, away…avoiding inevitable blow out that came with something like this.

Briefly, he remembers an admittance like this, when he was fourteen, remembers the way everyone had been so appalled that he had simply gone to get drinks and that had been the end of it. Remembers later that week coming home disgusted and sticky and gross, because he gave them what they wanted and it was one of the most unsatisfying things he’s ever done. He remembers the way she’d been so happy with him, with herself. He doesn’t even remember her name, just that it was the first time he’d ever had sex and it was just so weird that he’d never known what to do about it, except accept it as a piece of life that one just had to suck up and deal with.

“Okay so you guys are taking it slow?” She inquired, leaning forward, trying to meet his gaze.

Looking her in the eyes and nodding has never been so difficult.

Bruce Wayne: December 11, 2011

‘It’s been awhile’ he thinks, as his shoes brush against familiar carpet space, his fingers ghosting over antiquated memories and lonely spaces, and he’s sitting here, just as vulnerable here as he was the first time he sat in this seat.

‘It’s been awhile’ he thinks, as he takes the offered cup and the man before him smiles, like the sun, like someone who’s never had a single bad day in his life, despite the horrors he’s seen. He sits here and he’s just as lost as he always is under those unnatural blue eyes, as he always is in the face of pure curiosity for who he is and it never gets easier and maybe that’s the thing, maybe that’s why today feels harder than the rest, maybe that’s why today makes him want to scream, maybe that’s why the ringing in his head is piercing through his reality, maybe that’s why today he wants to die.

He waits under that stare mind tumbling through his thoughts and he’s reminded of all those little facts he’s let slip out under that stare, because he’s weak, and when he’s weak he’s selfish and cruel and sometimes the words slip out without permission.

It shouldn’t feel like such a violation but it does, because today the words want to bubble up like water bubbles over, like lava tipping over the side of a volcano and its hard, to swallow lava back down, hard to feel the way it burns and boils under his skin, at the back of his throat.

“We’ve been friends for a while,” Clark states, and those glasses are tilted slightly in that way they sometimes do, and his head is sitting firmly on those strong solid shoulders.

He’s weak, he reminds himself, ‘I have to be better, be stronger, be smarter’ it’s why he has to keep Hal away, why he has to keep everyone away.

He’s keeps himself calm, looks at all the wedding pamphlet and portfolios on the table before him, watches as Clark sheepishly pretend they aren’t his, because even Superman conforms to society’s idealism of masculinity.

Today he’s a pristine image of masculinity in America, suit and tie, rough air style, strong jaw, nothing that could set him apart in a world that frowns upon the sort of betrayal that comes from being unique, from being different, or rather a more accurate term, or rather a harsher tone, or rather a more common word, freak, weirdo, evil, that’s what they say isn’t it? That’s what they say when it gets too hard to let your mind widen its frame of knowledge.

He chews on the inside of his cheek, reminds himself he’ll never get married.

His mother will never get to see him in that tux, someone on his arm willing to say yes to something like him.

His father will never give him the talk, the walk through on married life.

He’s sure Selina would say yes, and they’d be together in this strange kind of dance where they dance around the whole sex thing, but at least they’d be a family, at least they’d make people happy. Alfred would be ecstatic, his parents would clap in their grave and he would still be a dress up doll, made perfect.

Maybe that’s why his rouges feel more like family than anything he’s tried to make for himself.

Maybe that’s why his heart warms when Dick throws something sparkly on and parades proudly in public.

Maybe that’s why Jason makes him proud when he speaks openly about who he wants to be.

Maybe that’s why he always feels out of place.

Stop.

Shit, when did he start psychoanalyzing himself?

“I just want to say that I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me,” Clark is all shy farm boy, unafraid to state his feeling, kind of like Hal in his own strange way.

The words are on the tip of his tongue and he’s sure it would be so easy to let them spill over into the real world.

“But you know, I don’t really know a lot about you,” he states, head tilting, glasses sliding further down, “I mean I know you, but I don’t know a lot about you as a person.”

Who does, he wants to say, wants to ask, because that’s the point. No one knows him, no one gets to know him, no one wants to know him…

Except Hal for some reason.

Hal who wants to know what it’s like to draw through his eyes, who wants him to play music and talk to him and be with him and understand him.

It’s all very stupid, but Hal has gotten the closet somehow, right next to Clark.

Hal has managed to barrel past his defenses and its only recently that’s he’s took notice to how dangerously close he is to finding out just how broken Bruce really can be.

“I don’t know your middle name,” Clark says, suddenly thoughtful.

He stands, makes his way to the door, but its Clark grabbing his arm tightly, Bruce’s heart still.

“Let go of me,” he growls out, low and sure and calm.

“No why are you so insistent of running away every time things get too personal,” those eyes are on him, trying to pick him apart and suddenly it’s not his friend standing before him, rather it’s doctors and businessmen and Waller’s people all trying to understand him, trying to break past the surface of who he is

“You are wasting my time,” he snaps, feels the way his body readies for a fight, feels the way he welcomes it as a method to get out of whatever it is Clark wants from him.

And maybe it’s a tribute to Clark as a person, but he let’s go and steps back, a sigh leaving his lips. “What’s so bad about opening up to people B?”

“I am not going to dignify your ignorance with a response,” his words bite just as they always do and he leaves without a goodbye, leaves so he can hide behind his masculinity and the world’s materialistic bullshit, leaves to go meet up with Lex Luthor, all bright smiles and dumb comments, leaves to go into the limelight.

Just like they taught him

Shayera Hol: December 20, 2011

“You do not trust me,” she grumbled eyes facing forward, looking out into the universe, eyes searching for her home world.

“I do not trust anyone,” he grunts, eyes hidden behind white lenses, but she’d like to think he was gazing out into the universe as well, “do not disillusion yourself into thinking you are better than anyone else.”

“No, you just specifically dislike me,” she huffed, more grounded out, cold eyes searching him out.

He didn’t even have the nerve to tell her she was wrong merely giving this half-hearted shrug. He was always quiet like this, in a strange almost creepy way, and while the rest of the league seemed sold on him she was unsure. Yes, he was tactically equipped, yes, he was strategic and calm and brilliant and strong, but he was always weak in many ways. He was only human, small and fragile both in heart and in mind. He was more concerned with Gotham than the rest of the universe, wrapped up in his own little world.

Growling softly, she watched as he disregarded her; choosing instead to focus on the monitors, eyes being torn from the stars beyond, back into the little world he’s created here in space.

“What did I ever do to get on your wrong side?”

“Have you done anything to warrant my ‘good’ side?”

“I’ve-“

“Been a basic level hero,” he turned sniffing into the air as he went, the way Shayera really hated.

“Excuse you,” she growled, hand tightening around her mace. There was a threat there, a threat he wanted, a fight he needed to have with someone.

“Been barely above average then, my apologies,”

“Batman,” Jo’nn snapped from beside him. The glare he received said it all, and the startled look from Shayera must have described something he couldn’t place, but Jo’nn was challenging him here on some level he did not quite want to consider, but it’s not usual, because usually the man backs down, but this time their looking at each other straight in the eyes, almost daring the other to say something back.

Bruce: December 21, 2011

Bruce frowned at her, eyes finding the top of her desk especially interesting today, fingers twitching as he spoke.

“You don’t look so good.”

“Who does,” his voice is mere whisper all soft clouds in a thunder storm.

“When’s the last time you took you medication?”

“Why does it matter,” he asks, eyes finding the top of the desk.

“You have to talk to me, because if this is the medication, then we can always change it and try something new.” She was calm, when his brain was flittering all over the place, snapping in places he couldn’t fix.

“Is this about Clark dying, Hal being gone or a combination of both?”

His eyes are on the ground, mouth dialed down into a frown. He’s not sure what to say or do anymore. He’s not sure what he wants to say or do. He’s not sure anymore. He doesn’t know what to say, to be. He just.

He walks out.

December 23, 2011

It’s two days later that he walks back in, sits down in that chair and stares out the window. He knows she doesn’t have another meeting until about four, so he can sit here for five hours. He can sit here and pay her while he thinks about why he’s here. He can sit here until the world makes sense again.

He sits and she stares at him, her lips tilting into that familiar frown that says she’s trying to puzzle this out. He is, like always at a loss for words, stuck in the constant battle of who and what he has to be.

The closet is a place for death they say. He remembers being locked in one for hours on end, maybe weeks, minutes. He remembers the door locking and the lights disappearing and suffocating silence.

Stop.
Compartmentalize.
Store.
Do Not Process.

He frowns again, as his mind hides from him once more. He frowns, making a fist tightly.

CRUNCH

Jerking up, his eyes lock with Dinah as she digs into the biggest sandwich he’s possibly ever seen in his life.

“What? Just because you want to sulk in my office for hours means I have to put my life on hold?” She laughs cruelly and another’s laugh echoes it vehemently. Growling softly, he shakes his head.

“I knew this fight would be difficult-“

“Don’t call it a fight when you know it’s a war.”

That stops him cold. It stops him and he’s lost once more.

“I-,” he clears his throat, eyes on the floor as he tries to fit the words together just right, tries to get her to see what he needs to be seen, said what needs to be said.

“Look Bruce,” she sighs leaning forward, eyes set to go to battle, “it’s obvious you need help and I believe you want it, but you have to be willing to meet me in the middle here. You must be willing to open up to me, or at least to someone you trust.”

He shifts, glancing down at him hands, eyebrows drawing in.

“You want to tell me why you’re here today?” She worked to meet his gaze, trying to find his eyes

“I have not been myself recently,” he spoke, looking her straight in the eyes. “I need you to fix me.”

“Bruce,” her voice dropped a vocal or two, eyes almost betraying some emotion he could not clearly decipher, “you do not need to be fixed, you’re fine just how you are. You just need some help working and coping with some things.”

“No something is wrong with me,” his face breaks its careful mask momentarily, allowing his face to scrunch in on itself.

“What do you mean Bruce,” she speaks carefully, eyes looking him over. “I don’t-“ he shakes his head, “I don’t know,” it comes out a whisper, just barely there, let loose upon the world.

“When was the last time you took your meds?”

“Two days, six hours, and thirty-two minutes before Clark was thought to have died.”

“Okay let’s start with that. Why did you stop taking them?”

“I was doing better. I thought I was better, that I was fine. It was an inane thought.” He frowned, stilling his movements.

“You have a preconceived idea of what normal is and to want to achieve that is not inane. It’s human. You feel that in order to fit in you should not be taking medicine. That in some way having it is a crux that makes you weak, or less than those around you.” She takes another bite, chewing loudly, “you need to face the notion that your normal is not exactly the same as everyone else’s. And in turn that what they conceive as normal does in no way define you. You are your own person and should not be in any way defined by another’s definition.”

He raises an eyebrow at her bluntness, almost appreciates the fact that it burns to hear it so forcefully laid out. “Yes, but there are standards that I have to live by, there are some things that are best kept in the dark, for everyone’s sake.”

“Maybe, but you do not have to be ashamed of taking medicine.”

“I am a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company, Dinah. No matter how many people tell you that when you are rich you can do anything, that’s all a lie, because when you are rich and responsible for a company you inherited, it is imperative that people see something that’s not broken. Being a drunk and womanizer is one thing, because most men in power are like that, but to come out as bisexual, or to have a mental disorder that is taboo. It will not matter how many of the masses you win over for diversity or for being a role model to other’s like you, because ableism exists and people in the social circle I have to keep more likely than not want only people who look perfect, who are perfect. I do dealing with businesses and countries that would not allow business to flow with someone who does not fit into their heteronormativity. There is a reason you are just starting to hear celebrities coming out. Despite what the twenty-first century preaches about equality, hardly anything has really changed, just no one talks about it anymore.”

There was more in there than she thought she would get out of him in a lifetime. Where does she even begin?

“Bruce your company can survive to lose that business from Oliver tells me, and I am not saying you have to announce it to the world. I am saying you have to put aside what people think, what the company needs for a second and focus on you. Sometimes the most unselfish thing to do is to be selfish, because if you self-destruct then how many lives are you costing? You have the power to make a change in people, but without you in it, that chance is gone.”

“There are more and more heroes every day that can do a better job than I can.”

“Then why haven’t you quit?”

She pauses looking him over as he thinks.

“Bruce,” she takes a bite carefully chewing as she weighs her words, “there are tons of people in this world suffering from a mental illness, who are degraded for being on the LGBTQA or something or another spectrum. You are not alone. And if they do find out then just say fuck them, make your life something you can live with, not a lie to impress a world you don’t owe anything to.”

“I am different to them,” Bruce snapped, eyes wide. mouth suddenly down into a thin line, “I am different, and I am wrong to them. I do not mind what they think of me. I mind what it does to my parent’s legacy, their work, their memory.”

The silence that sounded out between them could have rip time and space apart, could have shook the ocean beneath their feet. It carved a hole into the air and mocked his family name.

“Well,” she swallowed around her latest bite, forcing it down her throat, coughing slightly as she choked a chunk of bread that just didn’t want to cooperate, “how long have you been holding that in?”

He looked down, “years,” he stated seriously.

“Is it because you prefer men over women, or because it sucks to make a fool of yourself for a good cause?”

“All of the above.”

It was progress. And that was the point of this day, today there was progress in what was once a hopeless cause.

December 23, 2011

There is a point when the truth is as sullen and bitter as coffee, just a black fluidity that has no particular hope for a good outcome. It sits in the air, dances before one’s eyes as a ballerina does across the ballroom floor, with such unrestrained grace that entertains the eyes to watch that draws you in until not even oxygen can satisfy the lungs. Such destructive beauty stirs the world around us, makes it seem far more fragile than we are used to witnessing, far more desperate for good to flourish freely, for a desperate man cannot find reason. A desperate man leads to foolish actions, foolish actions leads to chaos, despair, death.

A foolish man in a catastrophic state of desperation will not find what he is looking for. He will only find that at the end of his vengeful, needy journey, at the end of the petty string he has been following is no nirvana, no utopia, only a river of crimson. A foolish man on a desperate path will find the end with high hopes, with wide eyes full to the brim of wonder and curiosity, merely to see a river of blood. His family. His friends. Everything he has worked for will be floating clouds in a scarlet sky. There will be no more passion or life, only a dead heart and bitter stream of truth.

The truth with all its complexities can be such a tricky bastard to deal with. At a table of gamblers, you can assume that everyone is lying. Everyone is a pile of bluffs and fallacies, but at the end of the game, it is the honest man that finds the most to gain. The truth however bitter and beautiful it may seem, however graceful and foolish is may come, is not a friend to play with rather it is a cup full of liquid gold. Hold the glass with care, and you will be a rich man, but be careless and reckless, tip the glass just right and everything comes crashing down.

To place trust in a foolish man under desperate times the glass will break, your fortunes will crumble as the Berlin Wall, will meet its get in a fury of cheers and celebration, your life will most surely end.

But he was no foolish man, and maybe things didn’t have to be so bad, pausing he takes the pill, lets it slip into his mouth, before swallowing. And this time, it does not feel like a loss. His hands twist at his sides, Hal coming to settle there, draping over his shoulders like he belongs there. Hal hovers lightly, kissing his cheek as he whispers, “good morning beautiful.”

December 24, 2011

Of course, it’s Barbra that makes the lasting cause.

“No, because I know who you are and why you are here. I know, but even despite that you chose to help people instead of just follow people around and investigate from a distance. That is very telling of you.”

“Despite what people may think, despite what you may think Barbra I am not a saint. And I do not do as much good as you think-“

“Bullshit,” she snaps, fierce blue eyes glaring at him, “I have seen you out there in the field. I fought beside you Bruce so cut the bullshit. Every night you slave away to save just one life, to try to make just a little bit a difference, no matter how hurt or how hard it is. Yes, I’m paralyzed and it’s sad and traumatic and I’m taking a little break because that bastard did some shitty things to me, but just because you have a bad day doesn’t mean you don’t get up. You taught me that.” A tear falls down her cheek and she glances at the picture in her hands, at Dick and Bruce and Gordon and her at one of those galas. “So just, don’t give up on yourself yet. I haven’t told Dick about you slicing your wrists open or the scars that show a pattern, but you should. He deserves to know. We are family, even if not a little broken around the edges.”

“I haven’t given up yet, so you’re not allowed to.”

There was a reason she is Batgirl.

“It’s better to walk alone than with the crowd walking in the wrong direction.”

“It’s the little things that keep us going, right?”

Collapsing down beside the man, Batman almost shifts, but stays rigid, as the Pale man laughs and laughs and laughs.

“You don’t get it, do you Bats,” Joker laughs loud and bright and deafening in the throughout the air, “You still don’t get the joke,” he pushes the gun close, shoving it into Bruce’s face.

“There is no joke, just a sad man trying to force the world to conform to his own sick-“

“Awe Bats,” the laughter gets louder, “so oblivious,” he clicks his tongue, snapping his finger, towards the screen for him to see Jim rustles in his seat beside his own daughter in the Batgirl suit, Nightwing shifting beside him, and Robin still passed out. They were here yet so far away, trapped behind a one-sided glass wall, him trapped here with the mad man.

“You’ve been exactly what I’ve been waiting for; all those years of silence, all those glorious years spent watching, waiting for exactly what they promised me!” He danced, twirling of his toes, Harley frowning from beside him. “It’s always been you. I have spent my entire existence waiting for you.

“What are you talking about,” he snaps.

“Who,” he pauses mid rant, eyes suddenly wide, “little ol’ me?” He’s mad, insanity dripping from him with every step, every word. He steps closer and Batman must stop himself from taking one back, stands his ground as the monster stares him in the eyes. He can see himself there, catches his own reflection in the way he talks. “I’m talking about this. You and me sweet cheeks, two sides of the same coin. I’m talking about the legacy we will burn into the city.” His laughter fills the night air. His voice drains his blood, lights a fire under his skin, makes him want to break his rules.

He beats him into the ground that night, puts him in a cast and sends him back to Gotham, imagining what it would be liked to just let New Jersey legalize criminal executions and be done with it all.

Wally West December 25, 2011

“Merry Christmas Wally,” he whispered to himself. The presents were delivered; the children were happy, hell, even the Ultrahumanite got a Christmas this year.

He’s missing something but he doesn’t know what.

He feels so young sometimes, but his mind is so heavy, so…old.

He walks down familiar streets, but everything feels off, like a photocopy of the original, it’s right, but never quite true. And at this point he’s starting to wonder if maybe…he’s what’s wrong. There’s a woman next store who feels out of place. She smiles too much and laughs loud like sunshine and she’s smart and funny, and her boyfriend’s kind of an ass. Her kid’s crazy, but hey who’s he to judge.

There’s a man on the other side of him who says he’s a doctor, but Wally swears he’s a lawyer. Time’s been kind of strange. He’s so sure he was a kid, but the memories are too fuzzy, things blurred out.

His sixteenth birthday was done by himself in the orphanage, a cupcake stolen from the store down the street and an off chance to sneak into the movies.

Friends- none

Family- logically he knows Barry and Iris, but he’s not sure why. There are no memories to confirm it, no surety to be quite right about it.

Snow falls lightly, dusting his shoulders, freckles standing bright against his reddening face, shoulders hunching in on themselves, as the ocean in his chest expands, trying to make space for his mind.

He doesn’t know what to say.

He’d like to leave this city, just leave, but his feet stay firm, heavy from responsibility, heart stuck in the cement cracks of this old town. Dreams are lost, a life forgotten and he doesn’t know what to make of that.

His house is a steal, gifted to him by the graces of god and his lack of ability to actually spend money. If it doesn’t go to food then it usually doesn’t go to anything else except bills, and that might seem like not much, because of his metabolism, but hey it adds up. It’s his, with his forest green couch and his big old fridge (he made sure it was big) to the white kitchen tiles. It was his, and for some reason that really made a difference. Owning something, putting his name to it and saying it’s his, shouldn’t matter as much as it does.

It’s Christmas and he hasn’t a clue what to do, except curl up in his bed, hot chocolate tucked in his hands as a Grey Ghost marathon plays out in front of him. Villains are tucked away, disasters currently avoided, shoulders pleasantly dipping down into his pillows. Fluffy socks warm his toes, eyes fluttering in and out from warmth and the idea of sleep.

It’s nowhere near perfect, but it’s something.

And that has to count for something.

It has to.

Bruce Wayne: December 25, 2011

It’s Christmas and Jason looks so ecstatic, or as ecstatic as a teenager

There’s a Christmas tree and everything, huge, like the ones Dick would pick out, like the ones his father would insist on putting up, even though it was impractical, even though his wife was Jewish and he cared not for religion.

It’s Christmas and there’s warmth here, toes curling into cloud like carpet. It’s Christmas and Dick’s walking (more prancing) into the room with cookies, Alfred following with carefully balanced mugs of hot cocoa.

It’s Christmas and Hal is with his family in Coast. He kissed him before he left. It’s all too nice, too sweet. Bruce is waiting for the shoe to drop. After Joker it’s been nothing, but calm. It’s strange to think of Gotham as calm.

It’s stranger to see his family getting along. Even Jason seems content, when usually he was all growls and swears.

James Gordon- December 25, 2011

“Your cigars,” Batman growls, as he holds them up before pushing them across the table and towards Gordon.

“Mmmhhhmm….” He hums sipping his coffee, looking at the tall man before him. “You look like shit,” the commissioner states blandly, eyeing him up and down the way he used to when Bruce was just a kid running on rooftops, trying to keep secrets and make himself into something special.

He doesn’t respond, does not even try to dignify that with some form of response.

“You been sleeping,” the man asks instead, which is strange, he knows, because he’s not supposed to sound like he cares with Batman.

He grunts into his mug, keeps his eyes downcast.

“How’s Barbra?”

“I think you already know.”

There is silence and the unspoken truce laying heavy in the air, because he is her father, and of course he knew. He’s a cop and his teenage daughter cannot fool him.

They do not say much after that. The silence does it for them.

It’s New Years Eve and he doesn’t know what to say. What do you say to someone like Batman, to someone like the boy behind the mask?

Somewhere he’d like to leave this city, put behind him all the pain, the despair, the fear and just go, somewhere safe and whole, but it wouldn’t be the same. He’s put too much work into this city to leave now.

He may not have been born to this city, but it’s chosen him, burned its brand into his skin and kept him in for the thrills.

“I’ve been told conversation works better when it’s a two-way street, but” he shrugs, raising an eyebrow at him.

“You’re not usually one for small talk,” he finally gives in, curious of the sudden need in Gordon to connect.

It’s New Years and he knows, finally admits to himself that Bruce is Batman that Batman is Bruce Wayne and Barbra, his Barbra is Batgirl.

It’s New Years and he’s finally being honest with himself.

There’s no cause, just a sudden need brought out of himself by chance.

Bruce, Batman, the kid before him, the man before, the person before him is looking down into his glass, blue eyes honed on dark black liquid. Jesus, what was he when he started his little crusade, eighteen?

He was just a kid, a kid who brought more kids in on his battles, a kid who recruited more kids to win a never-ending war.

Bruce Wayne- December 31, 2011- January 1, 2012
The night air whispers through his hair, blue eyes dancing in the breeze. A sigh pushes out of his lips, a soul moves out, traveling with the skyline. He is unaware of what to do. Shoulders breaking down, eyes cast down, mouth drawing a thin line, back tingeing in a reminder of his time broken, confined, lost. There’s a sketchpad within reach, a memory tugging at his fingertips, something wanting out. But he’s too sluggish, too unsure, too bubbled up in some emotion that threatens to swallow him whole. It’s not the buzzing, possibly depression, but less heavy more…maybe anxiety couple with hazy paranoia- a worry for some invisible thing that threatens the life he’s made.

Hal Jordan: January 13, 2012

There had been bruises on him. They were harsh faded navy blue and dark purple, but they had been there. He remembers them, dusting beautiful features, discoloring porcelain skin. They’d lain in plain sight sometimes, sometimes covered up like Bruce was trying to cover up a blemish. They sit now and then in plain sight, and Alfred has been sending his son worried glances, and Bruce had been avoiding those sage eyes in a cowardly way that is most definitely not like Bruce at all. Jason said he’s quieter these past few days, whether from their own fight or something else, Hal doesn’t know, isn’t sure he wants to know. Still, there had been bruises on his face and arms and stomach. There had been bruises on him in November and Hal knows they couldn’t have been from crime fighting. And like always the stick up his ass bat doesn’t even try to talk about it. Hal sighs as he walks, moving carefully up his stairs, trying not to jostle his bruised ribs and hurting heart. Things would be fine if Bruce just talked to him, but then again that wouldn’t exactly make him Bruce anymore. It’s been a couple months and he still cannot let that go.

Making his way down the hall towards his apartment, he shifted his bag. Today had been long. The jet he was testing was the best thing on the planet, but the owner was a chauvinistic ass nugget that can’t get his head out of his butt for more than five seconds. Lord was obnoxious and friendly in a Lex Luthor kind of way, with a little too much of arrogant on the side. He spent the whole day condescending Hal and making every little mistake seem like his fault when Hal knew for a fact it was anything, but his.

Needless to say, he’d had a shit week, and knew it was going to be a very long month.

“Look the faggot’s coming home,” he heard growl out in front of him.

Smiling with bright teeth he replies back to the intrepid old hag who he hopes will forever burn in hell, “Good evening Mr. Cardenas, what do I owe the honor of your…” he looks him up and down, a grimace clouding his features, “lovely company?”

“Your cocksucker’s in there,” he motioned towards the door, as Hal tried to remember to breath and stay halfway rational.

“What’s with the hostility,” Hal asked pretending this wasn’t a normal thing, “What did you not kick enough puppies today?” He pursed his lips.

He wonders why Bruce was here. They weren’t exactly on good terms at the moment, in fact ever since the bruises appeared a couple months ago, Bruce has been distant and angry and cold. Ever since the penthouse incident he was withdrawn, quiet, almost broken. He still wondered about that freak out a week or so ago, still worried about the fact that during that alien invasion those months ago, Bruce had, according to Wally, flipped his shit when he thought Hal was down for the count. He was worried and annoyed and frustrated.

The old man grumbles, as Hal slithers into his apartment. The Lantern had given up a long time ago even trying to make peace between them, in fact he was kind of fine with the whole thing, except for days like this, when he was already fed up to the bone with people’s shit.

The second his door opens, he’s assaulted with this alluring aroma, this amazing smell that captures his attention and draws him into the apartment. His eyes find lilacs on the table and something in his mind seems to crack, as images of Amber floated in and out of mind, of Amber and her strange number of boyfriends, of hard times, and fucked up dinners.

“I didn’t know you cooked,” he says lamely, watching the man put a spoon in to taste the sauce, before holding it out for Hal himself to taste. It’s good, way too good. He keeps going back to those lilacs.

Bruce shrugs softly, “there is still a lot you are unaware of about me.” He states as he moves to pick up some random herb Hal has never heard of before.

“How did you even get in here,” Hal asked, something in his chest beating abnormally, something in his heart not quite ticking how it should.

“Picked the lock,” the man shrugged over the stove top, a shrug thrown his way, “I would have just used the window; however, I had to carry in the groceries.”

“What even is this stuff,” he pokes at the bottle of herbs Bruce just sat down.

Bruce frowns softly, before looking carefully back up at Hal, “You are upset,” he states, as he hands a glass of water towards him, eyes narrowing carefully, in that studious, analytical way he does sometimes, and usually it’s kind of enduring, but today it makes Hal’s skin crawl, sets something out of place in his chest.

“No really, I couldn’t fucking tell,” he snaps and he doesn’t even know why he’s angry, or mad, or frustrated, or anything like that, because at the moment he’s with Bruce, not being scrutinized by Kord, or under some kind of watch by the League and Guardians. He was safe here in his apartment with Bruce, who was finally entrusting him with something close to his heart, but for some reason Hal wasn’t seeing any of that.

“I was under the assumption that learning new things about your partner was a part of working relationships,” Bruce is shifting, his stance taking on a more defensive side, as he turned carefully towards the man in question, moving the sauce off the heated stove top as he went.

“How would you know what working is,” Hal snapped, his voice ringing out in throughout the entire room, bouncing walls and driving knives into Bruce’s chest.

“I-“

“You are a shit of person who only knows how to be a fucking machine, you got that jackass, you know absolutely nothing about what a relationship fucking should be like.”

“And who the fuck said we were in a relationship?”

“I am unaware of what I did to offend you, however,” Bruce is still, muscles tensing up.

“Shut up you damn robot for a fucking second,” Hal’s hands are shaking, there is trembling coursing throughout his frame, a ferocious rage circulating throughout his entire person.

“Can you not just be so fucking nonexistent for once in your god damn life,” he didn’t mean to slam the glass down, didn’t mean for that feeling of helplessness to over take him, or for images to flash across his mind. He didn’t mean to break down in front of Bruce, because he’s been so careful, so far. He’s been so good about hiding his freak outs.

Bruce’s eyes were suddenly very distant, his grip on the wooden spoon tightening to the point Hal was pretty sure it was going to break. There was a look, almost fear or maybe there was something broken in those crystal blue eyes, before this slate of no emotion fell across beautiful features, almost as if Bruce wasn’t even really here anymore, Batman and something else flickering in his gaze.

He didn’t speak and Hal’s gut flipped on itself, because he knew. He knew he fucked up, destroyed something vital here, something important right in this second.

All he knows is that anger is building up in him and he can’t stop it. He doesn’t remember really throwing the glass across the room, near Bruce’s head and there’s something to say about how he manages to keep that blank look up, how he suddenly seems so withdrawn like he’d always seemed before Hal went away for five years, before they’d started kind of hanging out, before they started hooking up, fucking whatever you want to call this.

He was sick of not knowing what this was, what they were doing, of going away and coming back to a changed world, of leaving and fighting and seeing people die, families lost. He’s sick of never knowing what he was coming back to, of knowing no one was going to be waiting for him, if Bruce would bother waiting for him, because he has a whole life here, he could move on if he wanted to, like Hal wants to move on, but he doesn’t. And Hal never really knows where all this comes from, or why it’s coming up now, only knows that he’s breaking things, and his ring has left his finger somewhere along the lines, flew off by itself, maybe to protect himself, or maybe because it knows Hal would never forgive himself if harm came to Bruce because of him, only knows he’s trying to throw his television to the ground, and his hands are shaking and muscles are soar and adrenaline is roaring in his ears, riding along to his violent outburst next to his raging heartbeat.

And Bruce leaves, let’s the door click behind him softly.

And the rest is kind of a blur, a whirlwind of anger, and a raging pulse, of bulls stampeding in his chest and his heart screaming at his brain, and broken tables and television sets and god knows what else. All he knows is that he fucked up. He’s fucked up big time and Bruce will never want him back.

But when he does wake up, Bruce was by his side, grumbling in protest. His head is aching, but he finds pain killers on his bedside with a glass of water that’s still cold and has the remains of ice trying to stay afloat. He downs them sliding out of bed, trying to get himself back together. He finds his living room spotless, a new (better) television in its place, the remains of a broken dinner gone, his apartment looking as if nothing had happened except an update on his furniture and kitchen table and things he’d demolished. He did however find those lilacs in kitchen trash, finds himself picking up the strange bittersweet phenomenon, looking attentively at the letter delicately attached to them that said ‘I want to try.’

And Hal’s legs are moving, the flowers falling on his new dining table, his bare feet echoing throughout the house, his heart beat thundering, as his brain short circuits, and his gut drops and the guilt floods back into him.

He’s falling into bed, onto Bruce, his lips finding the man’s as he kisses his ‘sorry’ into porcelain skin. “I’m sorry,” he whispers on cold lips, “I’m so fucking sorry,” he whispers in the space between them, his nose brushing Bruce’s as those eyes flicker open to look him in the eyes. “I’m going to make an appointment with Dinah,” he whispers.

“Its fine,” he whispers back, and Hal has to kiss him again.

“No, it wasn’t, I’m fucking surprised you don’t ask what triggered me,” he huffs.

“The Lilacs,” Bruce answers.

“How the fucking hell-“

“You would not stop staring at them. I’m guessing something to do with Amber,” he cards fingers through Hal’s hair, so gently it almost hurts.

“I- I-“

“It’s fine.”

I’d be your anchor but I’m scared you’d drown.

“How was that shit show fine, but every time you have a break down, it’s the freaking end of the whole god damn world?” Hal chuckles lightly, hands curling around Bruce’s knuckles as the man’s hands find his face, and god this feels amazing, ten times better than the detached no touching thing Bruce had been doing for so long. It feels good to touch and be touched in return, to be one instead of apart.

“Double standards are a bitch,” he huffs, tilting back up to find Hal’s lips again, letting Hal’s laughter tumble into his mouth, and god Hal was in love. He was somehow in love with this irrational, arrogant, asshole that was just so frustrating sometimes Hal kind of wanted to pull his hair out because of just how unruly the man could be. But he was also patient and forgiving and sometimes too kind, and good. He kissed him again, Bruce’s mouth sliding open for him, letting him, for the first time since that night they made out on his couch, lick his way into that smirking sexy mouth.

He pushes Bruce into his sheets kissing his way down those bruises, down his neck, tugging at the collar of that turtle neck so he could touch skin, hands sliding up under that fabric, Bruce arching into his touch, blue eyes hidden behind squeezed shut eyelids. And somewhere he knows, has known this whole time in the back of his mind. He knows what this is, has been. His mind just sort of clicks the pieces together and Hal kisses him gently, pulling up slightly, before whispering, as his fingers ghost over those cheekbones, “Look at me beautiful.”

And Bruce just does that frown thing he does when he’s confused, breath falling heavy in the space between them, blue eyes opening wide, and there’s that darkness in those blue eyes, there’s that lack of trust, or maybe something else. But Bruce’s breath is heavier than usual, and his hands are tightening in the sheets, and he’s maybe too tense, so Hal slides off, finds his mind making connections he doesn’t want to know about, finds answers where he wants none to lay.

Bruce was never a part of his life plans, not that he had many life plans, or you know planned for much exactly. It’s just whenever he’d thought about his future, it usually included Barry, or eternal loneliness, or an early grave, not whatever this is.

Bruce was never really apart of his dreams, never even decently accounted for. But now that everything’s settled down and they’ve just let whatever the fuck this is really truly start coming into being he finds all kinds of new things to love. He finds himself entranced in this.

But he reminds himself that Bruce is fucked up too. He moves so he’s sitting up, eyes on Bruce and the slight trembling of his shoulders and the way his frown has slide down too far on his face, and how sad his eyes look.

Bruce sits up and they spend a moment looking at each other through sad smiles and heartache. Bruce is looking at him, like he never wants to leave, with this newfound tenderness added to those careful lines of indifference. He spends a moment looking at those lines he’s been studying for too long, before reaching out cautiously, almost as if Bruce would duck and run at any moment, not sure if he himself would duck and run at any moment, and let’s his own slender fingers slide down a soft cheek, tracing those clear cut cheek bones, until he settles his hand on the back of Bruce’s neck, pulling him closer, as he tries not to think about the who, or the how, or the why Bruce was hurt, how someone had hurt Bruce more than he needed them to, wanted them to, should have let to color such clear skin.

“I’ve got you Spooky,” he whispers, waiting for Bruce to come back to him, from wherever he’d let his mind take him this time. “I’m in this for the long haul.” He breathes out, let’s their foreheads touch as Bruce’s eyes flutter and he seems to focus once more on Hal.

“I want to try,” Bruce whispers back, breathes out into the space between them.

‘I don’t know how to handle this’ they think, but don’t say, because they can’t, or do not know exactly what words should fit now in the space between them, they aren’t good at formulating words, aren’t good at expressing what exactly they should be saying.

‘I love you’ they don’t say, because once more they aren’t sure how to fit the words in the space between them, they can’t get those three little words past their cold lips, so Hal fills in the spaces between, leans in and captures Bruce’s lips in his own, let’s the man either establish dominance, like usual, or let Hal take the lead, just let’s Bruce decide, let’s Bruce know he has a choice in what happens between them, that he has a voice.

“I don’t know who,” he whispers when they break away, because he’s still himself and he can’t just let something like that stay tucked away, but Bruce shuts him up with another kiss, and its filthy, open mouthed and all teeth, and he’s climbing onto Hal’s lap and being utterly distracting and unrelenting, even as Hal tries to set boundaries here.

“Bruce we have to set some-“He breaks off as Bruce’s teeth graze the underside of his jaw.

And he moves again, finds himself distracted by the way Bruce seems to slide against him, into him, on him, and the man’s perfect ass is sliding right on top of where his dick lays hidden under cotton sweatpants, and God it’s hard to focus.

“Sweetheart, I nee-“

“Don’t call me that,” he hisses, draws back eyes lowered head tilting to rest on Hal’s shoulder, “Don’t,” he chokes out, arms around Hal’s neck tightening.

“Bruce,” he whispers out, “Bruce what do you need?” Hal tries to keep the panic out, tries to understand and he sort of does, tries not to let that chill his blood more than it already is, tries not to focus on the fact that some asshole has done this to his bat, to his Bruce.

“I’m fine,” he grits out, tries to growl out into the space between them and Hal tries not to focus on how weak it sounds, how utterly broken it sounds. And he finally thinks back to last night and the way Bruce’s eyes went distant and his mouth had dialed down, and he thinks that some asshole’s hurt Bruce in more way than one before him and he’s not going to stoop down to that level, he won’t let himself be that to Bruce. “I’m fine,” he repeats and Hal knows that Bruce is just trying to convince himself it’s true, because Hal can think of a thousand times curled up into himself outside of shady bars after giving a little something extra for his next hit, remembers whispering that phrase as many times as it took to get him back on his feet.

He kisses Bruce’s temple, holds him tighter, “tell me the bastard’s name, just,” he grips even tighter, tries to keep himself under control, tries to keep himself together, tries not to fall apart.

“It’s not a big deal,” Bruce mumbles in his shoulder, “I’m fine.”

“Yeah and I’m Darth Vader,” Hal moaned, hands trailing to grip at Bruce’s thighs, trying not to make this about sex, because Bruce doesn’t need that, even if he wants it, Bruce doesn’t, not right now anyway.

“Look we need to set some rules,” Hal leaned back slightly trying to make some space between them.

Bruce sits back, frowning as he goes, setting a hand gently to Hal’s forehead, “Are you feeling alright,” he asks seriously, causing Hal to growl and push the hand away.

“This is about you asshole, now who-“

“He’s not really a part of my life anymore,” Bruce murmurs, eyes on him, Batman eyes on him, “And considering how you were last night, this is most certainly about you.”

“Geeze getting an answer out of you is like trying to get a straight answer from Yoda,” Hal groaned, tightening his hold on the man in front of him.

Bruce sat quietly for a minute and though it pains Hal to leave such silence in the air, he’s learned that Bruce needs these moments of quiet to come to an understanding with himself. And soon crystal eyes have darkened into this stormy kind of hue that has Hal on edge, has a knife cutting through his chest and he knows, has known, but that look gives him all the confirmation he needs. So, Hal kisses him, kisses him like he’s never kissed anyone before, with pain and love and a kind of apology that Hal has never known how to give out loud. He leans forward and presses his lips to cold soft lips in this sort of bittersweet kiss that has him tugging Bruce even closer than he was before, has him crushing them together, his hands-on Bruce’s thighs, Bruce’s arms coming to wrapped around his neck, eyes squeezed shut and he doesn’t know what to do, but kiss him and try to say what he’ll never be able to say aloud.

Noses brush and Bruce seems to breath him in, takes his breath with him, so he whispers, “Come back to me beautiful,” pulls Bruce from his mind, cajoles him into the present and nudges their noses together once more, tries to get those eyes on his own.

There’s a promise here, as he notices his ring on Bruce’s left hand for the first time, hanging in the air, electrifying the world around them.

I will never hurt you, like that.

His fingers trace the ring on his boyfriend’s hand, finds he kind of likes the idea of Bruce having it on him when Hal’s too unstable, kind of likes the way his symbol looks on Bruce period. (He’s human okay.)

“She came to me,” Bruce whispers, as he watches Hal trace his ring.

“You know she’s a she?” Hal asked, “Or was it just a lucky guess?” There was a smile in there a kind of nudge away from all this emotional crap because honestly it was rare and far between that things got this deep with them, not to say they were shallow people, just people who speak more without words, even if Hal does have a tendency to word vomit every five minutes.

“No. She spoke to me,” he cocks his head at her, “Ava that is, she spoke to me. It is quite fascinating; I never imagined your ring had a form of sentient personality. It would be-“

“Wait, you’re shitting me, right?” Hal choked, eyes finding his ring, feels the familiar presence of his ring practically humming with this sort of happiness that Ava rarely gets unless she’s done something she wasn’t supposed to.

He hummed, giving Hal that look that says, ‘don’t be idiotic I never shit on people.’

“She- that’s not supposed to happen,” and Bruce has the nerve to give him the look that says, ‘well it did, let’s figure it out’ and Hal just flusters about, “I mean no one’s ever…I mean, I asked around after you stole my ring and that’s rare enough as it is, namely because the rings don’t generally fucking allow that, but,” he paused, “I’ve never fucking heard of this kind of shit before.”

He glared down at his ring on Bruce’s hand, tugging at her to tell him what the fuck was going on, but only got that stupid laugh she gets when Hal’s being clueless and it’s actually kind of annoying.

Bruce shrugged, “she told me she likes me,” as if that answered all Hal’s questioned, but he also said it in this way that was so soft, so tenderly, so openly raw that Hal had to stop himself from kissing him again, had to choke down those three words that desperately want out.

Ava wasn’t very chatty today, usually she was always yammering at him, but now she was quietly chilling on Bruce’s finger and completely driving Hal madder than he usually is with her.

“Is she saying anything right now?” He poked at her, trying to annoy her enough to get her attention.

Bruce hummed gently, a small twitch of a smile, “No.”

“You fucking liar, what the hell is that cheating bitch saying!”

“That if you’re going to be rude she’ll just stay with me,” the god damn smirk on that man’s face drove him insane, made him want to pull out all of his hair and scream.

Instead he lets a laugh fall past his lips, pushes the confusion out and kisses Bruce harder because he thinks his ring just gave him permission to be with Bruce, has given him permission since the moment they’d met.

He kisses Bruce and Bruce kisses back, let’s Hal lick his way into that delicious mouth, let’s Hal slip a hand up and under his shirt, “God you’re so fucking beautiful,” Hal whispers into his mouth, kisses into his neck. “Tell me when you need to stop,” he breathes into Bruce ear, feels his lover shiver into him, “Just say like, Peanut Butter or something.”

“Peanut Butter?” Bruce questions as he noses Hal cheek, before nipping at his ear, at his chin.

“Yeah peanut butter,” he says as his hands finally get free rein to explore, are free without Bruce holding him down and away, and Hal’s sure he likes this more.

“Talk,” Bruce whispers, as his fingers curl into Hal’s hair, “you always talk.”

“You’re so fucking beautiful Spooky,” He tugs at the shirt, let’s Bruce tug it off the top of his head, while Hal struggled to strangle his own off him. “Is this okay,” he whispers as their bare skin brushes against each other and Bruce almost growls at him.

“I’m fine,” he snaps, and Hal snorts, nips at the man’s neck, finds himself getting lost in Bruce all over again, in a whole new way, because this is different from letting Batman fuck him, different from the almost rushed passion from that night on his couch. This is different.

Bruce arches into his touch, breathes into him and takes his breath with him. They are moving together, Bruce hands in his hair, and Hal’s sneaking up his bare back then back down and they collide in this show of light and shadow, daytime and nighttime. Bruce is moonlight and Hal is sunlight. They collapse into each other, Bruce content to sit in his lap, Hal content to grope.

And it’s good, until he notices Bruce’s eyes are squeezed shut again and he’s forgotten to speak for once in his life, finds himself letting up, hands snapping off the man before him, trying to get him back to him. “Princess,” he murmurs, “I got you,” there’s another kiss to the forehead, and Bruce’s breath is slowing and his eyes are flickering open and he looks like someone just pissed on his favorite puppy.

“I’m fine,” he snaps, “I’ll push through it,” and Hal’s stomach drops, because that’s probably what Bruce has been doing this entire time, forcing himself to have sex because he thinks it’s what he has to do, for Hal or for society he’s not sure.

“No, you fucking don’t,” the words are rushed, a memory from Jim pulling his ass off the sidewalk, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t fucking want to and if any shit head tells you differently than their obviously some sick bastard who needs to learn a thing or two the hard way.”

“This was a bad idea,” he whispers whether to Hal or his ring or to himself, the Green Lantern may never know, what he does know is that that is the biggest load of shit he’s ever heard.

“You are never a bad idea,” he states boldly gently settling his hands tentatively back on the man’s back, eyes finally taking in the scarred flesh, bruised spots and the entirety of the man before him.

“Damnit Hal, stop it,” Bruce hissed, shirt being pulled back on, eyes daring him to speak out of turn.

He’s never been one to refuse a dare, “stop what, caring? Trying to be there for you?”

“Stop treating me like I’m broken,” he snapped, “I-“ he looked away, falling silent like he always does when things get too hard, too much, too emotional. He slams his own mouth shut, hollows himself out into a set line, back straightening, heart turning to stone, turning probably to leave, to run like he always does.

“I never said you were broken,” he states lowly, trying to keep his voice somewhat reasonable, somewhat leveled.

“I’m saying you have to communicate with me. You can’t just fucking expect me to know what you need, what you want, what has to be a thing, so you don’t have a fucking panic attack, just because I touch you,” and Christ the man flinches so slightly that Hal almost misses it, almost, but not quite.

“You said you want to try,” he takes a step closer, sure the man can tell what he’s doing, “that’s how you try. You take your meds, you go to therapy, you talk about the shit that hurts you, even if it hurts to talk, because that’s how it gets better.”

Bruce is refusing to look at him, back facing him, eyes probably doing that thing where they glare at nothing in order to get something out of nothing. “it’s not like you communicate with me either.”

And well he supposes getting called out by his blunt boyfriend was overdue.

He hums, this low almost growl thing he does when he’s thinking, when he knows he’s won the argument, because really how can Hal fight that. Hal steps forward, sliding his arms slowly around the man’s waist, trying to take things as slow as possible.

“What if I may not have the…skills necessary to do that,” there’s something raw in the way he says that, something so soft and almost sad that makes Hal squeeze him closer softly.

“Then we figure it the fuck out I guess,” he shrugs, “or ask Dinah.”

“What if I am incapable of…” he trails off and Hal distinctly remembers that day in the man’s backyard, him in some freaky yoga position, wrists bandaged telling him it’s okay for him to leave, because that’s what people do, that he can’t love right anyway so it’s all okay, that he understands. He’s always, despite his stubborn general dickheadedness, understood about everything in the league and outside of it. He understood why Barry messed with time. He understood Hal’s drug problem. He understood Clark getting mind controlled. He’s understood Oliver’s drinking problem. He’s understood almost too much. He’s almost too nice, which weird, because Batman.

“It’s all good,” he shrugs, “like I said, we’ll figure it out.”

“What about Barry,” he asks with a hoarse voice and lead muscles.

“He’s an old friend.” Hal responds calm for once, nearly quiet, “Plus we both know that was always a dead end, just like Clark was for you.”

“You deserve--”

“I deserve you, just like you deserve me. I think we’re both fucked up enough to handle this shit, or at least to handle each other.”

He looks away again, unsettled, and unsure.

“I can’t--” He paused, meeting Hal’s gaze, steady and intense.

“It’s okay Bruce we’ll figure it out.”

“I still do not understand why you have been doing this. I do not- Why would you want to be with me,” he is cautious, off balance in a way that makes Hal smile, loud and broad and too satisfied that he’s managed to throw Bruce, the Batman off his game.

“Oh, I don’t know Spooky, maybe because you have pretty eyes,” Hal lets a smile shrug onto his face, lets himself enjoy the way Bruce fiddles with that piece of information, as he tries to process it the best Bruce Wayne is capable of processing such delicate information. So, Hal does something else, just to solidify exactly what he’s trying to say, because he’s never been good at words, always one for action, and reaction. He turns the man around, brings the billionaire’s hand to his lips, kisses it as if he were kissing cracked glass, moves down until his lips are hovering over the man’s wrists, wavers in the air, until he’s sure about what he’s doing, looking up into wide eyes, “I’m in this for the long haul remember Spooky, or did you hit your head somewhere along the line enough to forget everything, and we can have one of those epic amnesia stories.”

“Hal,” Bruce groaned, reaching out to grab the front of Hal’s shirt to pull him closer.

“Yeah Princess,” Hal smiled softly, coming closer, ready for what he was sure to be a kiss of the ages.

“What the fuck is wrong with you,” the curse has Hal laughing, eyes almost rolling into the back of his head, smile outstretched too wide and too content and too everything all at once.

“Oh, you know the usual for your average space cop.”

“What the hell is usual Hal, for anyone anymore?”

Bruce pulled him close, till they were nose to nose, eyes getting lost in each other, worlds almost colliding once more, “Quiet flyboy,” the billionaire whispered, nudging the pilot away, smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Okay, okay,” Hal laughed, coming closer once more, he kisses a scarred wrist, he kisses soft chapped lips. He kisses a smooth forehead, gently, whispering lightly, “we’ll figure this out. I promise we’ll figure this out.”

“You are strangely sensitive when it comes to situations like this. Did you learn all this from movies, or-”

“Quiet asshole,” he growled, shoving the man lightly, watching the soft smirk shift stone like features.

“That’s my line,” Bruce frowned.

“You do not own a line that’s like owning a planet,” Hal threw himself back onto his bed, muscles stretching lazily.

“I own an island, does that count,” Bruce settles beside him, touching but slightly distant.

“You own an island, since when, you know what, I can’t even be surprised after the satellite literally nothing surprises me,” Hal rolled his eyes, lost in the past, lost in those first few days of knowing Bruce Wayne, of meeting the obnoxious arrogant man that was the Batman.

“What if I told you when I went back in time, I took over the leading clan in the-”

“No, stop now,” Hal moaned, “I don’t think I can take much more of this shit from you,” he laughed, loud and clear, and so sure of himself. “Christ beautiful, you know what you do to me?”

“No,” Bruce stated seriously, eyes roaming over the room around him. He was rolling his eyes, frown trying not to flicker into a smile.

“And you’re the hopeless romantic, so shut up.” He shoots back, because it’ll tick Bruce off, the man hates being told to shut up, it’s a thing.

He kissed him, Hal leaned forward, lips brushing Bruce’s gently.

“Oh shit,” he gasped, “I need to go to work,” he started to get up, but Bruce pushes him down, one arm over Hal’s chest and he falls back down to the bed.

“I already called in for you,” Bruce stated calmly, looking up at the ceiling.

“Oh great now Lord will just think-“

“That you are aiding one of his sworn enemies in testing a new line of jets that may beat his in the market, yes,” Bruce states calmly, toying with a loose string on Hal’s blanket.

“You didn’t,” Hal’s eyes were widening, a wide grin threatening to overtake his features.

“Ask one of the best pilots in the world to test a new line of jets in-order-to backstab an inconceivable asshole,” Bruce paused, frown overtaking his features, “yes, I did.”

“Are there really jets, do I get to fly your motherfucking super jets?”

“Super jets, no, Mark 59 Wayne-“His lips were covered and wide eyes were locked onto a blissful looking Hal Jordon, as the world seemed to rewrite itself to accommodate them.

He almost got distracted again too, until his mind caught up with himself, “Wait, you fucking distracted me. I’m supposed to be sucking up, Wayne get your hot ass back here.”

January 20, 2012

He didn't question, when Hal blinked himself awake, eyes fluttering open to find Bruce Wayne in his arms. He was entranced by the man before he could shake the warm fuzzy feeling tugging in his gut, was pulled in by the man’s gravity, captivated by his beauty before he could put some kind of barrier between them, before he could pull himself back to his senses and shake the images bubbling up into his mind. The billionaire was curled up tight, head nuzzled in the frame of his arms, fingers curled tight around his shirt, yet he was tense even in sleep, alert even in his dreams. Bruce, who was sometimes kind, and mostly damaged, and trying constantly to fit in with a world that pushed away the different, was still here. Bruce who was dressed in only Hal’s old air force t-shirt and black boxers, Bruce who seemed too human, too sexy, and too fragile in Hal's slightly ragged clothing. His heart thumped in his chest, clouding out everything he could hear, right hand gliding to the revealed shoulder in front of him, before making its way to exposed scarred thighs. He ghosted over Bruce's left strong powerful leg, letting his hand waver before making contact, left hand finally sliding up to the man's hair simultaneously he leaned forward, lips meeting pale cold skin, lips meeting the man's forehead so timidly it hurt.

He felt on fire, excitement bubbling in his stomach, nerves tingling at every newly discovered piece flesh. He tipped the man's head back, Bruce shuffled closer in his sleep, small whine pulling its way out of his throat. "What are you doing," Bruce growled out, voice rough with sleep, hair a wild mess. Rather than answer, he did the only thing he could think to do- he kissed him, soft and comfortable and lazy in the early morning haze. When Bruce kissed back, sharp tongue and widened eyes, he was sure and solid and bold and everything Hal imagined and more. He was the ocean, crashing on Hal's shore line, calm yet a mess of give and take, not enough but too much all at once. Bruce curled in his arms, strong hands finding their way around his neck, deft fingers gripping his hair. A sigh grabbing hold of Hal's attention and honey eyes meeting azure.

He didn't question when Bruce just curled back into him, falling back to sleep as if it had all been a dream, maybe to him that was all it ever would be.

Hal looked up into the darkness of his room, a sigh huffing past his lips, a ghost of a laugh dancing on his tongue.

God, he was screwed.

January 31, 2012

“I have an idea,” she stated, blue eyes bright, widened by whatever idea she had swirling around in her head. “You don’t like talking, and this week’s been pretty rough all around the table, so here’s what we’re going to do,” she motions him towards her and he moves so carefully that even she expects something bad to happen, but eventually he’s next to her standing on the tarp carefully laid out on the soft earth, a wall to the manor covered by a huge canvass, several paint cans set out with paint brushes sitting idly by them. “Hal mentioned you paint.”

“You want me to paint my feelings away,” he frowned softly, nose almost scrunching up in distaste.

“Oh no, nothing so controlled,” she stresses the word for him, as if poking fun, causing him to frown at her softly, “No you’re going to platter this,” she pushes a paint brush into his hands, the tips dipped in the deep red already, “like this,” she sweeps her hand through the air making a mess on the canvass.

He frowns, scowling slightly at the mess before him, mind revolting against the idea.

“You got this Spooky,

There was almost a sort of violence to it, something he could appreciate. It wasn’t the same as bruised knuckles and broken ribs, but it was something. There was a loud heavy thick slap of paint to canvass, sounding out like a slap to the face, but without the bright blossoming gasps of pain ricocheting through his frame. He frowns down at it again, eyes narrowing as he glared down at the brush. “What is the point of this?”

“You need coping mechanisms, for when you’re feeling anxious, angry, or unsteady, this is an easy viable coping mechanism for you to utilize rather than hurting yourself or someone else.” She looks at him expectantly as he growled down at the stupid thing.

This was a waste of time. He should be doing something productive, not playing with paints, like a child. Jason smiled at him from the side throwing him a thumbs up as he passed the ball over to Hal.

He swallows a growl and swings again.

February 1, 2012
Bruce was practically in Hal’s lap, sloppy kisses leading to something more. Hal’s hands danced up thick, muscled thighs, threatening to go higher, before settling on his hips. He shifts let’s himself get lost in the sensation of being touched and touching another. Hal rocks his hips as he nips at a delicate spot on Hal’s neck. It’s quiet in the cave with Jason out, with the computers powered down.
It’s...nice to lazily kiss Hal without any threat, without feeling like he was going to have to flee on a moment’s notice. This is nice, slow sloppy kisses in dim lights, just rocking against one another, no mask, no yelling, just them.

There were good days, like there always were, but somehow it was magnified by the fact that they were more than friends now, modified by the way Hal can so easily slide in next to him, a soft kiss pressed to a cold cheek on a winter morning. And most days, Bruce wondered why he even tried, most days he is lost. Still there are nights that hang so nicely in his heart that he wants to bottle up the memories of those fuzzy warm evenings in the manor wrapped up in Hal, the taste of caramel and cinnamon and chocolate dancing on his tongue. He wants to keep those sacred afternoons by the firelight with Hal curling around him, or him pulling Hal into his chest. He wants to lock away nights curled into Hal’s abysmally small truck with the heater, all the while Hal blares a mix of their favorite songs through a stereo they bought haphazardly at the Walmart three minutes and fifty-five seconds away from Hal’s apartment. He wants to hold those hazy mornings at his penthouse making pancakes with a man who barely knows how to crack an egg properly.

Some days it was just so domestic and homey and heartwarming, with Jason and Dick by his side, Hal’s arms around his shoulders, Alfred sipping tea by their side as they watched silly movies at 3:00 in the morning, just because some days were hard, but this simple mediocre task made it all the easier to breathe through the day, to push back the noise bursting through his head.

But where good days twinkle in the infinity of forever, bad days lurk for the best times to strike you where it hurts the most. So, like with every family and every person that lives and breathes and acts, there were good days as there were bad days. There were days when Bruce did not know how to get out of bed, where the pressure in his chest seemed too much and the buzzing ringing in his ears had him waking up to find he once more tried to hurt himself. Then there were days when he could not sit still, when the world seemed to land lopsided on his shoulders and he would jitter through days with no sleep and little food, kept alive by coffee and his own insistent need to know, to just solve the mystery, to learn something new. But the harshness of those days had decreased, as sessions with Dinah turned from looking blankly at a clock to learning to trust. But there were also days when Hal was broken, when Bruce would walk, more so stumble into a situation where Hal just wanted a fight, wanted to vent and hash and just be angry at someone, and Bruce was okay with it being him. Bruce was okay with being hated, even by Hal, because at this point in his life, he at least knew he could take it. He could take it, and Hal needed it, so he’d let him vent, let him throw things and yell and push, would catch the ring as it flew to him, and like with most arguments with Hal went, he’d stand still, tall and sure and immovable, because this he knew how to do. This was the easy part. The hard part came with walking into Hal’s apartment to find shattered pieces of him on the floor, to tiptoe around the floor so he did not step on stray piece of his man discarded on the burgundy carpet. He would tuck the man back together; try to glue missing pieces back into place and settle in for the rough patch ahead. And there are times where Hal took his stoic features as indifference, his silence for dismissal, and Bruce would take Hal’s emotions as an overreaction, his abrasiveness for disdain.

There were good days and there were bad days. There were sunsets and there were sunrises. And more times than not where bad days outnumbered the good ones and they just wanted to find a common ground to stand upon. In many ways they managed to work, because where Bruce’s silence rang out like a winter’s knife, Hal’s ear bursting volume filled in the space with a summer’s flame; where Bruce was hard edges, Hal was soft touches; where one lacked the other made up for. Bruce was the night and Hal was the light; finding a way to function in and around one another in a dance that was new, yet all too familiar in the way they worked. And yes, bad days outnumbered the good, but there was something about the way Hal sleepily curled into his side that made it all worthwhile.

But duty calls.

“I have to go,” he whispered, and Bruce tried not to clasp tighter, tried to keep his eyes firm and cold and sure, but Hal knew better now, Hal knew more than he should. The Green Lantern let tan fingertips brush over moonlight kissed flesh, let himself lean into the Dark Knight of Gotham, as said knight attempted to make himself more machine than man, tried to reconstruct his entire being to lessen a pain that can never go away. The act of leaving a loved one, of letting a loved one go, even if not for a short time does something funny to the soul, burns out edges that were once wholesome and full, makes heat into ice and freezes the heart.

“Yes,” Bruce states, hating how his heart beat out of tune, how it sounded like a bad song on the radio, reminding him that all of this had been a huge mistake, a terrible idea born from loneliness, “You should have left exactly ten minutes ago, if you were to make adequate time.”

“Oh really,” Hal quirks a small smile, rolling his eyes over the sound of the television.

“Now eleven minutes,” he adapts his time, trying …

February 7, 2012

“You need to take the god damn pills, stop being a fucking baby and just do it,” Hal’s tone is all bite, harsh edges to a soothing voice, heart trying to reach out towards him despite its physical confines.

“Leave it alone,” he snaps, features schooled, so as not to betray his need to run, to get out, to try and calm the storm in his chest, the storm pushing him to do something he shouldn’t.

“Alfred’s worried again, hell I’m worried again. Is it because I left that you suddenly feel the need to be a fucking child?” Hal’s stepping into his space, challenging him in a way that he should know not to do by now.

“Get out,” he growls, stepping almost hungrily to the challenge, because fight he can do, hurt he can do, be something he doesn’t want to be is almost too easy to allow.

“Make me,” he quips back.

“Surprise, it’s not always about you,” he replied without a single inflection, or sign of emotion, just that stupid blank face.

If there’s anything that’s ever infuriated him about Hal it was this. If there was anything he loved about Hal it was this. If there was anything he needed from Hal it was this. He knew how to push boundaries, to force Bruce to be better, but also to be worse.

He’s almost desperate in the way he pushes Hal, in the way he wants Hal to push him back, to do something, to hurt him, to make him feel anything except this constant gnawing in his chest, fluttering about in his heart.

There’s a storm on the rise here and he knows he needs to stop it. He knows he needs to stop being so illogical, so irrational, so utterly and heartbreakingly emotional.

But the thing is…

When you go for years smothering down everything, every broken heart, every crack, every scratch, every tear that could have, maybe even should have, fallen that something never truly goes away. It eats away like acid to your veins. It breaks you down to the core, hollows out your bones until it still comes flooding out in a tidal wave of disaster, a catastrophic event ready to rip your world up from the very seams.

He pushes and Hal stands still, their roles suddenly very, starkly reversed in the way that one moves and the other stays, in the way Hal stands strong as Bruce’s bones threaten to crumble in on themselves.

He refuses to ask for help.

He won’t ask for help.

Hal won’t offer.

He pushes.

Hal stands still.

He remembers those first few months Hal hung around him, remembers the hostility in the air, the fire licking at Hal’s bones. He remembers being punched. He remembers the desperate way Hal asked for help in the only way he knew how, how destroyed the lantern had been, how utterly broken and destroyed he’d been.

He remembers a bright smile and a despairing face, as the man’s soul cried out to an uncaring universe.

He remembers having to carry that strength, how easy it was to hide the pain back then. But Hal started to strip layers, wanted more from him, wanted something he wasn’t sure he could give him.

He wanted something Bruce wasn’t sure he could give anyone.

He didn’t love right, couldn’t.

It was a simple fact, one his parents learned the hard way.

So, he pushes and Hal crosses his arms, because at the end of it all he’s not Harvey.

He has to know that by, now right?

Hal is not Harvey.

Hal is not some bomb waiting to explode and this feeling in his chest, this thing that tells him that the world is about to implode in his face and he should get out as fast as he can could just be that, a feeling, something idiotic born of human nature to trick his mind into believing something that’s not true.

Hal is not him.

And Harvey could never be Hal.

Still there’s a voice in his head telling him to stop feeling. There’s a voice in his head goading him to end it all. There’s a voice in his head pushing him to hurt someone. There’s a force in his head that wants someone he isn’t and he is painfully unaware of how to fight it. He knows it’s unhealthy. He knows. He knows he cannot keep this up for long, but words fail him, his mind cannot bring out anything he’s feeling into coherent sentences.

You see when something becomes habit, when you’ve become so used to hiding and lying and living that lie…well the lie becomes you. So, he moves and runs and Hal stands still.

He runs and Hal waits for him return.

Only this time he doesn’t know if he will. Because as good as this thing is between them, no matter what Hal says, it still doesn’t make sense, and he’ll never be good enough, he’ll never be what Hal needs.

He keeps his mouth shut, turns his back and walks away, washes his hands of whatever this was and tries not to think about why it feels like another piece of him has died in an alleyway.

He’s never been good at words anyway. Speaking to others has always felt so unnatural.

He leaves and pretends he doesn’t look back.

February 8, 2012

The next session lasts a whole ten minutes. Bruce walks in, domineering and agitated, going straight into a rant, no usual small talk, or dance around from the topic on hand, just straight into what’s eating him. Not that Dinah’s complaining it’s better than last time’s awkward silence for an hour and half.

“When we put on these costumes we forfeit our rights as human beings. I knew this going in, knew how much I would need to sacrifice in order to make a difference.”

“Bruce calm down, what’s going on,” she tried, but he was still going on, stuck on whatever his mind had dredged up to plague him with this week.

Hal mentioned Bruce was avoiding him, that he was acting and she quotes ‘out of his god damn mind, the bastard just wouldn’t listen.’ But that was normal for the two, with all their differences of course they would fight, but with Bruce’s rationality and Hal’s determination they usually always worked it out on their own, didn’t matter whose pride was put under the bus for the week, they always managed on their own.

Apparently, something ran deeper than usual.

“We must transcend the laws of man, become a myth in order to protect the humans around us. Every day we walk down the street, with every person we meet there is a chance they are just like us, that they are a superhero, or super villain and we are completely unaware, vulnerable to what they can and will do. It is my job to decrease that vulnerability, to acknowledge the constant danger surrounding myself and those I seek to protect and prevent the imminent attack, when I fail to do so, it is on me.”

She frowned, “We also have to remain human. We have to remind ourselves that we are flesh and blood. We bleed just like everyone else.”
“No, Dinah Lance bleeds. Bruce Wayne bleeds. Black Canary, Batman they cannot degrade themselves to that level, they must be better than that.”
“There is nothing wrong with being human.”
“No, but we live in a world of gods, when the supernatural mixes with the natural. In order to prevail we must sacrifice our humanity.”
“Can we not have both?”

He leaves after that, just straight out the door as fast as he can. He doesn’t really talk about what was wrong with him that day. Dinah’s not sure she wants to know.

Hurt myself today, and the worst part is there’s no one else to blame.

Bruce Wayne: February 14, 2012

It’s Valentine’s Day and Hal looks like the world is all rainbow hearts and roses, judging from his snapchat. He breathes out, fighting the pressure that threatens to make him laze the day away in bed. He pushes himself up, reads an annoying text from Clark and pushes to keep going, to keep moving.

It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does, but he finds a way to keep pushing on. Dick mentioned to Alfred that he’d stop by to see Jason, so he’ll have to make himself scarce for a few hours. It’s fine he needs to stop by the tower anyway.

Work hurts more than it probably should. He sits through board meetings and runs numbers, avoids his secretary’s curious gaze and locks himself away in his office, away from the world.

He doesn’t want to be doing this, but he does it anyway, finds his hands itching to build something, but his mind focusing on the task at hand. The pressure sits heavy in his chest, just as his mind keeps focusing on his world, and his hands are shaking. He breathes out slowly, trying to level himself, distract himself.

This is ridiculous.

His head hurts, the buzzing is getting louder and he tries not to poke at it, to focus on the real world, but it calls and he’s trying, really he’s-

Blink

The tower is quiet, a soul sucking silence that sets the nerves on end, keeps one on their toes, eyes wide, skin prickling at the slightest of sounds. He sets to work, let’s his fingers type out what he needs.

There are bandages around his wrists that prickle as the suit chafes them. The stupid letter opener had had to be cleaned, his office scrubbed down twice.

He breathes out heavily as his hands tremble lightly from overexertion, he’s pretty sure he injured something slightly vital, but he’ll have to wait to have it checked out when he gets to the cave, which will be a nightmare, because Barbra will probably be there to flirt with Dick, before heading out together for the night.

He could always wait until the morning. It’s not that important anyway.

Blink

“You need a ride,” Kent, all blond hair and blue eyes, the American dreamboat wrapped up in an angry bitter man.

“I’m fine Mr. Newsworth,” he looks around trying to figure out where the hell he was. The last he remembered he was in his office working on…

The back window rolled down, a smooth voice coming from the depths of the car, “Well we all know that’s a lie,” David snorted brown hair falling in his face, “where’s your butler anyway doesn’t he always give you a lift back to the big bad manor?”

He looked around, wondering slightly where the man was. He was several blocks away Wayne tower, heading to the ocean, heading towards Crime Alley. Funny how the mind works, how madness brings the worst memories to the surface.

“You getting in the car, or is Kent going to have to drag you in,” Red hair peaked around Kent’s frame. She rolled her eyes, a long-suffering sigh spilling past her lips, “look you’re wasting Jules’ gas man, some of us aren’t billionaires okay.”

“Marli,” a soft voice snapped, Julie peeking into view from the driver’s seat, “play nice.”

His fingers tightened on his brief case, turning to look at the long stretch of Gotham before him, “I’m fine,” he states a smile widening over his features, playful shrugged, “just needed some air.”

“Dude if you don’t get in the car I swear to god you’ll be mugged,” David slouches back, eyeing him uneasily.

“What kind of idiot wears a watch like that down these streets,” his fingers ghost over his father’s watch: remembers a bullet and falling pearls. These are old wounds, nothing he’s not experienced before, but they hurt all the same.

“Guys his parents died in a mugging,” Julie hisses.

“So, he wanna end up like them,” Kent grounds out and Bruce has to stop himself from saying ‘yes.’

Stop

“You’re hurt,” Julie states calmly, eyes locking onto him.

“Oh my god, I’m fucking surrounded by dumbasses. Kent get him,” the man is tall and sometimes Bruce forgets that, because of his quiet demeanor. The man towers over Bruce and he’s six foot three on a good day.

Glancing down he scowls at the blood cascading down his hand, dropping slowly onto the sidewalk. “I’m fine,” really, he smiles at them holding his hands up in mock surrender, “really must of just cut my arm on something.”

“Both of them, yeah right even I’m not that clumsy,” David shakes his head, getting out of the car to stand beside his coworker. David is shorter, easier take, and Bruce knows he can take both of them, but Brucie can’t and that’s who he has to be.

“I’m fine,” he urges out, the businessman clouding his tone, rough eyes as he takes a small shift away from them, distributing his weight better. “Now get back in the car and go home, before I fire the lot of you.”

“You won’t,” Kent states large hand coming down onto his shoulder and it’s a struggle to keep from flinching. His frame is a lot like Harvey’s bulky and large without having to work out, muscled without lifting weights.

“Come on Mr. Wayne, we just don’t wanna be left without a boss when morning comes,” David wraps a hand around his bicep and he had to fight to keep from tensing.

“Let’s go boss.” They steer him into the car, squishes him in the space between Kent and the door. He feels ambushed, as if he were preparing for a war he was never meant to fight. They do not ask questions and for that he is grateful. They simply take him to Marli and Julie’s apartment. It’s quaint and simple, art on the walls, knick-knacks on every available surface.

He moves quietly finds Kent’s steady hand on his shoulder guiding him through unknown territory. They sit in the bathroom then, Julie and Kent undoing poorly done bandages, redoing what he fucked up.

“How long?” She asks so softly he almost missed it.

He shrugs softly, watches her careful work. There is nothing to say. He does not owe them anything to begin with.

And afterwards he leaves hides himself behind the cape and cowl and goes to work.

blink

“What wrong with you,” the voice sets him on edge, jaw setting firmly, as he looked towards the Thanagarian standing in the doorway.

He shifts, more angered that he hadn’t heard her than the fact that she’s glaring at his slightly trembling hands. Frowning he moves away from her, eyes narrowing, “shouldn’t you be working on-“

“Taken care of, as you would have known if you’d bothered showing up to the meeting,” she snapped, eyeing him carefully.

“I was trying to say the Grundy case, which was brought up at said meeting,” he stated calmly, moving to continue typing at the monitors.

She rolled her eyes, “need some coffee I’m making a run.”

The grunt she received must tell her something it doesn’t usually tell people, for she makes her way back to him with two coffees in hand one black and the other a rich mocha.

Eyeing it carefully, she rolls her green eyes at him, “what, it’s not like I poisoned it.” She might have.

He chooses the hard life as he accepts the black hard coffee from her hands, reveling in the burst of caffeine that shoots through him, as he tries not to grunt at the bitter taste. He was Batman after all.

“GL’s away on a mission for the guardians, both of them,” she careful in how she moves around him, dancing around his space, like everyone does.

“I am aware Jordon informed me on his way out,” he makes to add something to the configuration.

She raises an eyebrow in his direction, “Jordon actually did something responsible?”

“We have an agreement,” he’s off balance today, mind not fully back online from his earlier attack, if that’s what he’s calling them these days.

“Must be some agreement for him to go to you,” she moves back into his space fixing an error he’d made, causing him to growl slightly at the smirk on her face. “You’re tired,” she noted. And so, what, maybe he was, but that wasn’t going to mean he was just going to pass out in front of a could be spy.

He frowns at the screen in front of him, as she puts her hands on her hips, “out.”

He glared at her, causing her to back off slightly, so that he could continue his work, adding another swig of coffee to aid in the work ahead.

“Stubborn,” she muttered under her breath, as she trudged away, much to Bruce’s pleasure.

Or so he’d thought. Not even five minutes later she was back and this time with J’onn in tow. He’d long gotten over his initial fear of the Bat, so now the glare bounced off of him, instead proving to solidify the Martian’s cause, “My friend you are exhausted,” he moves carefully.

“I’m fine,” he snaps, “I have to finished these calculations-“

“I shall do it,” Jo’nn was firm, rock solid, hard pressed, not budging and he had to restrain himself from sending a harsh, yet totally warranted glare at Hawkgirl.

There’s a hand clasping around his shoulder, pushing up. Jo’nn is persistent when it comes to his friends, probably because of his dead race, a thing he is more than willing to use as a persuasive method.

“I’m fine,” he growls out, moving back towards the council, but there’s Hawkgirl, strong and smirk, “move,” there’s a darkness to his voice that he usually reserves for Gotham’s worst criminals and he can see the brief moment she falters, but she’s a warrior and a warrior always steps up to the challenge.

He should know.

“Batman,” Jo’nn moves to take his wrist, pulling him back from the woman in front of him, from the challenge that she presented for him to take.

The wince comes as a surprise, barely there, missing Hawkgirl completely, but Jo’nn must sense the outcry from his mind, must see it despite his best cover-ups. He lets go too quickly, drawing Hawkgirl’s attention.

“You are injured,” he states, and this must be what Dick means about sounding so emotionless in high stress situations, because Jo’nn sounds like he’s talking about the weather, and if he didn’t know the Martian so well by now he would have missed the light note of concern flashing across his features.

“I’m fine,” he almost hisses back, deep tendrils of pain racing up his arms, as he fights the urge to hold them to his chest. He moves to head back to the monitor, but Jo’nn has him again, using his Super strength, “apologies my friend, but I let one family down. I shall not let another.” And there it is.

“You do that on purpose.”

Jo’nn is on the edge of his mind asking for permission and Bruce wants to keep him out, wants to fight him, wants a fight, wants a way to establish control over something again. Jo’nn is strong though. He respects the privacy of Bruce’s mind, but he’s still physically strong. With ease, he wrestles Bruce through the hallways of the tower, Shayera sentenced to stay at the monitors.

He could use the matches in his belt, but they both know he won’t. He never will unless he really, absolutely has to. There’s a trust between them, not easily broken.

But there’s dread sitting thickly at the bottom of his stomach, thick and unsettling as it flops so ungracefully inside him. There’s a part of him with the words on his lips and a piece of him that wants to reach out, wants to scream out to the world that he’s not okay, that maybe he is broken that there are pieces of him lying across his city, across the globe lost and shattered beyond repair. Somewhere inside him, he wants to let someone know that he’s maybe not okay, but that doesn’t mean he’s not functional.

Sighing slightly as they reach med bay he stands firmly in front of Jo’nn, this moment inevitable. He has a speech practiced too, one he’s memorized for every person that might find out about this. It’s not something he’s looked forward to, but it’s a necessity he’s planned for.

“I appreciate your concern,” he states calmly, “but there is nothing you can assist me with, nor is it something you should be burdened with. I have the situation under control-“

Jo’nn interrupts him, breaking their unspeakable promise for the third time today, take his hand slowly, brows furrowed slightly, “I was aware something was amiss, but…”

“Jo’nn-“

“I do not understand,” he whispered, red eyes cast down upon Bruce’s red stained clothed covered wrists, “no…maybe I do,” their eyes met softly, Jo’nn’s eyes upon his, his mind nudging against Bruce’s consciousness, seeking permission.

And maybe…

“No going where I do not want you to be,” he growled as the shield around his mind, for the first time, opened for the Martian.

There’s almost something therapeutic in the way Jo’nn fills his thoughts, without judgment or pity, just curiosity and a simple desire to understand. He breathes out as Jo’nn breathes in with his own life of pain and loss. There’s an understanding here, something he’s not been able to find elsewhere, a kinship discovered amidst the ruins of old wounds, marked by new ones.

And when he leaves there’s the remains of his being left behind, when he leaves those red eyes meet his and they understand, maybe not fully, because he doesn’t even understand fully, but he gets it to an extent.

“It’s loud in there,” he states after a minute of silence.

His lip quirks up slightly, reveling in the relief that had come with Jo’nn’s presence. He frowns slightly, mind pushing against his mind again and it’s almost too easy to give in once more.

There’s Harvey here, there’s My’ria’h, a monastery burns to the ground and mars in flames, there’s blood staining desert sand and empty red plains. There’s a beginning and an end. A gunshot echoing through the sky, a brother lost to madness. There’s old battles fought and won as one. Jo’nn was giving just as much as he was taking.

Without warning, Hawkgirl appears by their side. Her curiosity must outweigh her own need for self-protection, because she walks on steady legs. She knows what is happening here, what this means. Yet despite all the knowledge about the risks and the dangers, she too sets a hand on his shoulder, and suddenly the world sways as his mind comes into view. She’s not Hawkgirl now, she’s Shayera and there’s pain and structure and duty.

There’s confirmation here that she is a spy. There is a list of things he can use against her, laid out in the palm of his hands and he’s made sure there is nothing of him, but his name that she can find, only ghostly feelings the mix between them. Jo’nn is open, lays everything on the table as they hide from each other’s sights.

There are a lot of things that could, probably should come from this moment, but as they stand there in their own form of showdown, neither backing down he’s sure that everything will be fine. He has to be, because if not then he’ll have about twent- no…fifty-six new contingency plans to come up with tonight alone.

Though they may not always agree, though there’s that constant suspicion surrounding her background and who she is, she’s still technically one of them.

None of the go too deep in one another, it’s all surface stuff, but there’s a new understanding here. He removes his mask that night, as does Shayera, as does Jo’nn. They look at each other with their own eyes, without any form of misgivings or misunderstandings.

It’s Valentine’s Day. Hal is gone. My’ria’h is gone. John is gone. But they remain. Two to solider on as they wait for their space cops and one to be left waiting for his life to start again.

They work on those calculations as Shayera watches the monitors, easy conversation flowing between them.

It’s only after the calculations that things get strange, because chess is involved with some of the best. Shayera wins, Bruce wins, Jo’nn wins and maybe there’s a couple of broken chairs from an angry and too competitive Thanagarian, but it’s a pretty good Valentine’s day to say the least.

He manages to just barely get by.

Home is quiet, he curls up on the roof, a blanket around his shoulders and stares at the stars, wonders what Hal does all the way out there in the stars.

“They tell me to be something I’m not and I let them, because it’s better than being myself,” he confesses to the stars, blue eyes trying to find something out there in their depths.

“And I am unaware of how to fix myself, so that-“he pauses a shaky breath coming in and out, “I do not know if I am capable of loving someone else like what you want. You do not tell me how I can love you and I do not know what to do with that.” He curls himself tighter, “with Alfred it’s easy, as long as I’m functional he’ll take me. With Clark, it’s as long as I am useful. With Selina, it is support. With Dick it is caring, which I am bad at,” he sighed, “with Jason it is strength, being strong for him. But you never tell me.” He frowns up at the stars, a groan falling past his lips as he stretches out on the roof. “I don’t know what to be, so that you’ll love me.”

“Damn Spooky, how long did it take you to write all of that in your head?”

“Did you really want an answer or are you toying with me.”

“No, I’m actually genuinely curious how long it took you to make up that bullshit.” He laughs as he sits, arm moving around Bruce’s tense shoulders. “We love you, because of who you are, which I know insane right, but who said we were sane?”

“I mean, look at you, look at me,” he laughs into Bruce cheeks, laughs this hollow sounding thing, “We aren’t exactly functional, normal, all that shit, but you’re strong and caring and funny on occasions. We love you cause you are you, crazy bat suit and all.”

Their eyes meet, Hal head tipping in to meet his lips softly.

The moon is full in the sky, the sun disappeared past the horizon line, and he knows in an hour or so he’ll have to go out, to be the hero Gotham needs. He’ll slip on the mask and go out to war once more, but for now…for now he’ll watch the stars, let a pencil move across paper and set his mind to ease, if only for a few hours.

For now, he’ll be content with just being himself for a few hours, and see where that takes him.

February 19, 2012

Bruce was falling between his legs, mouthing his dick through his pants, and god, if those eyes weren’t pretty before. He groans as his head falls back into the wall. “Bruce,” he moans into the sky.

And the man just moves to nose up his shirt, nuzzling his navel. He’s silent like usual, but this silence is less oppressive, more open curiosity.

There’s innocence in silence.

In innocence, there is truth.

He moves to pull the man back up, kissing him like he deserves to be kissed, pulls him into his lap and makes his need for this known, kisses Bruce like this might be the last time, because with Bruce, with their jobs, with their lives any second could very well be the last time.

“God you’re beautiful,” he breathes out into Bruce’s neck, mouths the pulse there, kisses him again.

“Clothes on?” He asks, and Bruce growls softly as he nods, eyes down and if it weren’t Bruce he’d call it embarrassment, but he knows better. It’s shame he’s seeing, shame for thinking himself weak for something he can’t help.

“It’s okay,” he breathes into his neck, nuzzling the skin there so he can be surrounded in the smell of Bruce, so he can feel the man’s lively pulse.

Hal moans, a low kind of sound that escapes as Bruce mouths at him again through his pants, fingers tugging at his waistband. “You don’t have to,” gasps out, a breathy moan falling past his lips, “fuck.”

Bruce smirks up at him, mouth around his cock, pretty baby blues staring up at him, and Hal’s done for, gasping out into the air, hand finding Bruce’s hair, tugging slightly, mind lost. “We-well damn,” he breathes out, “spooky.”

“Man I..mhh..I knew you would look good on your knees, bet you ah…like..i..it..do-uh..dow-ah-down there too,” he couldn’t look away, entranced by the sight before him, by Bruce, by everything he’s wanted given to him in an instant. The man bobbing on his cock, doing everything just right, perfectly, reading all his likes and dislikes, still in control of Hal, still making Hal lose control. There’s a hint of teeth scrapping down him, a wicked tongue claiming him, soft hands clenching his thighs, bright eyes on his, and he can’t tell up from down, because that’s, this, is all he’s probably ever wanted.

He comes hard and without warning. Bruce chokes lightly, some of it getting all over his face and hair, and it shouldn’t be as attractive as Hal finds it. He kisses the man hard, pulling him up into his lap, kisses him like the sky kisses the space above, like the ocean meets the earth. He kisses and Bruce meets him back with just as much intensity. Bruce is cool like ice and Hal’s skin is slick with the fire burning its way out from his core.

It’s a fight with himself, not to slide his hands under cloth, not to feel and touch and know Bruce like he’d like, but he’s just able to keep it in mind, as he keeps the man pulled close. They kiss like they’re fighting, all teeth and tongue. But like most of their encounters where it just feels like Bruce and not Batman, the man gives in, lets Hal take the lead, lets his arms wrap around his neck, nose nuzzling into him as he lets Hal kiss bruises into his neck, as he keeps Hal pulled close, rubbing himself off on him. Through it all he’s talking, voice coming in and out between kisses, trying to fill the spaces he knows Bruce can’t reach. And it’s okay. He’s learning and Bruce is growing…and maybe it’ll be okay.

Okay well that’s probably bullshit, because it’s him and Bruce and by next week they’ll be broken up again, but as long as they find each other again it’ll be alright.

At least he knows Bruce will always be waiting for him.

Hal Jordan- March 13, 2012

Sliding into his room, he blinked widely, finding Bruce curled up on his bed, a million and one blankets (more than he’d had on there before leaving) and an ass ton of pillows added to his once meek collection, a pillow between his legs, wearing only Hal’s extra, extra-large sweatshirt from college (it’d been the last one okay he procrastinated and got what was left). Depositing his own shirt and pants he slid into bed as well, moving to carefully sneak the pillow out from Bruce’s grasps. He thought it’d wake the beast, but to his delight it merely caused a grumbled to slip past his lips, soft sigh replacing it when Hal intertwined their legs gently, his arms coming around Bruce as the man settled to curl back up into him.
It took maybe two minutes or less to realize what a fucking mistake this had been, because Bruce’s knee was rubbing against his crotch in this agonizing way that had him getting hard, and he really needed to leave because honestly he still wasn’t sure if they could do that yet, but Mr. Sleeping beauty over here already had his claws in for the night which meant he was going nowhere. Grumbling he tried to think of nonsexual things like dead puppies and marmalade, but Bruce kept distracting him. The way their hips fit snuggly the slight friction and motion, not enough to get off, but enough to get hard was way too much. His hands found bare thigh and he realized the sweatshirt was literally all that Bruce was wearing. God help him.
He breathes out, okay, he’s an adult. He can do this. All he has to do is stop thinking about his boyfriend’s amazing hips and cock and powerful naked thighs and moonlit face. Shit he needs a shower, preferably cold at this point.
He shifts tries to find a break in Bruce’s hold when he catches it, just a slight twitch.
“You son of a bitch,” he yelled, rolling on top of Bruce, “you’re fucking awake!”
And there’s that shady quirk of the lips that Hal’s becoming increasingly aware of. And suddenly Bruce is kissing him hot and open mouthed and dirty, but strange because he chuckles darkly into Hal’s mouth and Hal practically swallows down the sound, because it’s the only sound Bruce has ever made in bed.
But Bruce rolls on top of them and pushes into Hal sheets and blankets and pillows, lips meeting his in this sort of devilishly sweet kiss that’s teeth and lips and perfection. Bruce kisses him deep and wholly and Hal clings to him, finds his hands gripping those sinful hips that were slightly humping him.
“You okay,” he whispers, “because it’s fine if you aren’t” Bruce shuts him up with another kiss, and a good thrust on Hal’s own part, throwing the bat off a little, sends a small groan from the raven hair’s lips, a sound that scatters all thoughts from Hal’s mind, leaving him with nothing but blank need.
He groans in response, hands gripping Bruce’s ass, loving the way the man’s fingers kneaded his shoulders. “Fuck,” he gasps.
“Spooky,” he gulps for air, “I need you to talk to me.”
“Hal,” Bruce breathes/groans into his shoulder as he mouths it, this obscene sucking sound filling the room as Bruce continues, “Hal,” he says again as if it were a prayer and Hal’s heart does this weird fluttering and he’s pushing Bruce into his sheets, looks at Bruce in his sweatshirt in his apartment, on his bed, and he’s kissing him, hands sliding from his ass to his thighs, tugs them on either side of him, pushing Bruce into the bed, claiming his mouth, as Bruce calls out his name again.
Fingers grip his shoulder blades as Bruce arches into his touch, as Hal slides up that sweatshirt to kiss his way down to Bruce’s navel, hand gently laying on Bruce’s happy trail. “You better say something now,” he murmurs into cold skin, “stop me now.”
“Hal,” Bruce whispers, “Please,” he says, “I need.”
“What do you need,” he kisses into the man’s exposed neck, kissing and sucking until he’s focused only on the man’s wrists, kissing them tenderly, gently.
“I need you,” Bruce grits out, frustrated and annoyed and broken and torn, “I need-“ he breathes out, “I just want you to touch me.”
“We don’t have to have sex to do that.”
Bruce is glaring holes in his chest, mouth trying to form words, “it’s not always bad, I just want this now.”
Hal fumbles for his bedside table, fumbling to get the lube and put it on his fingers.
“What do you need,” he gasps.
“Get inside me now,” he growls out all Batman and Bruce and sure and confident and needy and gosh who’s Hal to argue with that voice.
I love you, he thinks the first time he slides into Bruce, the first time he kisses the inside of the man’s thighs, the first time he touches Bruce, truly touches him. And yes, the man freaks out, and it’s sloppy and still a little unrefined because sometimes they have to pause to bring Bruce back to the present, but it’s fine, because they’re here, together and Hal can feel Bruce around him, is inside him and he feels whole for the first time since his father’s plane blew up and Bruce is with him, on him and it couldn’t be better than this, to feel love and to love in return.
He knows it will never truly be fine either, and they don’t have to be. Bruce will always have these problems, will probably never truly be okay with having sex again, and Hal will always have his problems too and he’s starting to learn that’s okay as well.
“I’ve got you,” He speaks into Bruce’s neck as he comes, hard, and Bruce’s hands find his hair, tugs softly, he’s already come and it sticks to his stomach.
“I’m trying,” Bruce says afterwards, turned away from him, hands clenched in the sheets.
“And I’ve still got you,” he cleans them up, runs the cool cloth over smoot scarred skin, kisses the ones that could have been fatal, wraps arms around him as they fall asleep.

Dinah- April 4, 2012

“You once mentioned that I have surrounded myself in a life that I can control. That control is everything to me,” Batman looks out over his city, eyes cast away from her. “But I know I cannot control anything that happens in my life.” Pausing he looks up at the sky, finds the moon hitting his face, illuminating features usually lost to the darkness. “From Joker wreaking havoc on Gotham, to the Riddler playing his games, aliens falling from the sky, meta-humans crawling out of the shadows,” he stopped, “and a government that only seeks to meet its own ends- I am well aware that I cannot control anything. My job, as Batman and Bruce Wayne, is merely to see those things that I cannot control and find ways to prepare all scenarios. My job is to do damage control, whether that be in crisis or outside of crisis.”

Dinah paused, looking at the man in front of her in a new light. Every time she figured him out, he’d reveal something completely new to throw her off balance.

“It’s never really been about control,” he looked down at his hands, eyebrows clashing together almost as if he were in pain, and in many ways he was always in pain, attempting to channel it one way or another. “It’s been about weakness in mind, body, and spirit. It has always been about turning what once was weakness into strength. It has always been about showing people that the easy way isn’t necessarily the right way.”

“In Gotham, so many take the easy route, so many allow themselves to be swayed by the money and gains of doing the wrong thing. In Gotham, so many are just in it for the thrill, but at the end of the day they all just want to teach a lesson. The Riddler wants people to see that mind really is over matter. Poison Ivy just wants to teach people that the environment is more important than we think, that we have to cherish it rather than destroy it. Joker just wants to show people how he sees the world. They may not be doing the right thing, but they are doing something which is more than I can say for a lot of people I know.”

She studies him, watches the frown of concentration take over his features, the way his frame is tense, but he looks almost drained. “Bruce what is this all about?”

He sits down beside her, pulling up his mask in one single practiced move, handing her as he moves one of the wrapped pieces of papers in his hands. She opens it carefully, diamond blue eyes widening as she does, “this is-“

“The Paradisian Diamond, yes,” he nods lightly, eyes still on the city below them.

“How did you find-“she begins, but once more he cuts her off.

“My best friend is Catwoman,” he states without fear of judgment or disdain, pride more than anything seeping through.

“I thought-“

“She is a villain in most circumstances; she has always been a thief. It was one of the many things I initially liked about her.”

“I was going to say, I thought you didn’t have friends,” she replied with a slight smirk, watching as he leaned back, letting his arms take his weight.

“Not a lot,” he states with a shrug, “but I’ve known Cat for a long time.”

“Cat?”

“Before she was Catwoman, she was just Cat, and to me she will always be Cat. Just as I am quite aware,” he stated with a little annoyance and good humor seeping into his voice, “that I will always be B to her.”

“And you two never…”

“We enjoy letting people believe we’re more than friends, but no, nothing of that nature has really ever occurred between us.” He looks back over his city, probably reliving a million different memories that she could never even imagine coming to life.

“Do you ever wish things turned out differently,” she asks, before she can stop herself, stuck just thinking about her own crazy world and less on this.

“No,” he says with such conviction, it nearly throws her for a loop. “Once I did. When I was still young and angry and lost, I felt cheated of the life I was supposed to have. Now though, I see it as a gift.” He leans back fully on the Gargoyle, looking up at the murky Gotham sky, “If that night in the alley hadn’t happened I would never have met Cat or Dick or Jason or any of my family. I would have grown up good, I think, but I never truly would have known what I was meant to be or become.”

She looked at him carefully, eyes set on watching him as he looked out over his city, over his life, his dedication, his job, his heart. “Then why is it that you are still driven to hurt yourself?”

Bruce frowned softly, a small shrug thrown her way, “I have not known the answer to that question.”

“You sound like you’ve thought about it for a long time.”

“I have been thinking about it, since I was eight years old and tried to jump off the roof for the first time.” He sits back quietly, toying with something on his belt, “Alfred never knew about that one.”

“I have a feeling Alfred is unaware of a lot of things, concerning your little suicide attempts,” Bruce shrugged in response, eyes looking out towards Wayne Tower in the distance.

“It was to keep him safe,” he stated calmly.

“Or was it to keep him around,” She asked, as she herself studied the looming tower ahead, blue and silver streaking out into the unknown.

“Possibly both,” he stated solemnly. “Sometimes things just happen- Sometimes I just do things without meaning to do them.”

“Like the suicide attempts,” she filled in carefully.

“Yes,” he murmured, “for a time they stopped all together and it was quiet, but-“ he stopped, eyes suddenly snapping to something in the distance, something even she couldn’t see, and he was off, throwing himself off the side of the building all together, not even a word, just a sudden toss off the side of the building.

He was off again, out into the world to save lives, lost to the storm of crime and punishment, good versus evil. He was off again, out protecting unknown faces and lost causes. He was out on a case.

She sat there for a long time then, just thinking about everything he’d confessed to her, for it was the most honest thing she’s ever heard come out of his mouth, and she’s quite proud she even got that out of him, or maybe a little bitter about the fact that he was the honest he’ll probably ever be only when he’s Batman.

Jason Todd- April 20, 2012

“That’s it I give up.” He gasped, fingers aching, mind numb, heart pounding, even as the dull edges of frustration’s knife digs into the very fibers of his being.

“You cannot simply give up when things get tuff Jason,” Bruce’s voice was a cool as ever, deep baritone humming out into the air between them, dancing in his very breath. Jesus, Jason wished he could be like that one day, strong and sure, and confident. His eyes wander down to the scars peaking out of the man’s sleeves and forces himself revise that thought.

He needs to be better.

“Not forever, just...I think I’ll take a few days off. Get some inspiration.” He shrugs, frowning down at his lazily written music notes, sighs as he looks at the unfinished ending, at his unfinished work, grits his teeth as his mind comes up with nothing.

Again

“From Roy,” he watches as Bruce lets the smirk overtake his features, the man taking pleasure, from the reddening of his face, and boy the old man just gets his kicks from making them all embarrassed.

“Not like that,” he snaps, standing to see whatever it was the old man was working on this time. He muttered lowly, as he crossed the room, hands deep in his pockets, “damn a kid can’t even have one goddamn friend now a days.”

“Like what?” Bruce gives him that innocent little cock of the head, eyes widening, as he makes to look more like Brucie, than the actual man Jason has come to know.

“Oh, fuck you,” he grits, cheeks flaming, “you’re such an ass sometimes.”

“Is that what it’s called?” The twitch of his lips gets wider.

“You’re doing it on purpose,” he exclaims throwing an eraser at the man chuckling at him under his breath, “fucking mocking me.”

“Language.”

“Oh, now you’re really asking for it.”

“Dick is coming by today for your training lesson,” Bruce reminds him, eyes trained down on the papers in his hand, “so it’d be best to be back by at least five if you still want to make patrol,” Bruce flips the paper over, scanning it intensely. It was almost scary how intense the man can get in his work. Where he is passionate, Bruce is just stubbornly determined. It makes them work a lot of the time.

“Yeah, yeah, I got it old man, be there or be square and all that jazz. I’ll be there and Dickie bird can do his thing, show off.”

Bruce frowns at him, just a slight tilt of the eyebrow, “jealousy is unbecoming on you.”

Rolling his eyes, he slouches back, “I’m not jealous B, just annoyed.”

“Jealous.”

“Where’s Hal so he can bug you,”

“Working, something you should be doing on your homework, before you leave,” he tosses a book back towards him and Jason barely catches it, a frown already dragging his features down to exasperated.

“Oh, come on, I work all the time, just one night off,” he threw the book

“Hmm…fine, just be sure to get it done,” just as he spoke Jason was off, a laugh dreading up from the pits of his stomach, “on time this time, I do not want another parent teacher conference!”

“I mean I guess,” he looks down, suddenly quieted.

“What is it,” he forces out, moved by the sudden change in mood.

“He has a girlfriend.”

“Roy?”

“Yeah some freaky ninja lady. Her name’s like Jade or whatever. He won’t shut up about her, even Dick is getting annoyed by it. Just thought you should know, so you can stop planning our wedding.”

“No.”

“Excuse the fuck out of me, but I could’ve sworn I just told you he has a girlfriend.”

“It won’t last.”

“B.”

“He’ll be back for you.”

“Let me get this straight, you want me to be a homewrecker.”

“I want you to be anything, but straight right now, but I have not actually told you anything, that would-be incrimination.” He picked up his papers, carefully turning his back to his son.

“So, what second best?”

“Harper needs to level up,” he stated so seriously Jason’s jaw met his piano, as laughter bubbled up and out as Bruce walked out of the room.

“You are so fucked up.”

“Language”

He didn’t know it would be the last time he talked to Jason.

Bruce Wayne: 30- April 27, 2012

It’s funny really, how it only takes a week to ruin your life.

When he finally thinks everything is finally, for the first time since that alley way coming together in a way that might make some sense, a week is what it takes to shatter everything.

The explosion ripped through what felt like time and space, its force throwing him back, propelling him through the air faster, harder than he ever thought possible.

Jason

There are pieces of him buried in the snow, hidden under debris, and snagged on the edges of shattered wood.

Boots hit broken bits of metal and wood, storming through the fire, praying in the fire that his son, that Robin wasn’t hurt, wasn’t in the warehouse when the explosion went off. But there was something in his gut telling him he was, telling him that all hope was lost, that despite all Bruce’s effort, it hadn’t been enough, he hadn’t been enough, and now Jason was dead. He was dead and Bruce didn’t know what to do, who to turn to, what to say, to-

He dug through debris, flames scorching his face, eyes, wherever it could reach and he reveled in it, the pain, the lack of mercy, he let them swallow him whole.

The fire licks at his skin, reminds him of something he can’t put his finger on, but it does not matter, all that matters is that the flames are getting bigger and Jason is still missing, and the world is still moving.

A hand peaked out, bloody and bruised and burned, and his teeth clenched, fighting the pressure building in his chest, leaking into his bones. His son was dead because he could not protect him. His son was dead and there was nothing he could do.

He failed.

He failed.

He failed.

His breath comes out shaky, legs giving slightly. He has to keep, has to get justice, has to-

He has-

Bruce Wayne: May 3, 2012

Someone would pay. Someone had to pay, if not him, if not the Joker, then who? The dance continues, the dance between him and the clown prince of crime, the dance between who would win and who would die- comedy and tragedy. He learned it wasn’t a game a long time ago, knows this dance isn’t one he wants, but the Joker pushes, knows how to tip Batman right to the edge, just enough, just enough, so that he has a choice whether or not the madness takes a hold of him.

But Batman was done, done playing.

Bruce was done.

He lost himself and he is nowhere to be found. He had given up. He didn’t know who to trust. So he designed a shell that kept him from both heaven and hell.

The man who killed his son had diplomatic immunity, if that wasn’t the cruelest joke he’d ever known and he didn’t know how to deal, how to- he had to kill him. He had to end this.

The crime rate dropped, every beat of his fist was a thrum through the discord of his brain, the foggy hum blurring the lines between what was right and what was wrong, every criminal was left in tatters, body casts their new home for the next few months to come if they’re lucky.

The first time he sends someone to the hospital in a coma, all he can think is not enough. He hasn’t done good enough, if he had, Jason would be upstairs playing video games, if he had Jason would be upstairs playing the piano, or sitting next to him humming as he drew, or worked, or did something, anything. There would be no more with Jason, Jason would never get to have a life of his own, make a name for himself like Dick is doing. Jason was just wiped from existence as if he were nothing and it never was enough. It couldn’t be enough.

They tell him to stay away, stay out of the way, Clark, no Superman tells him he’s not allowed to touch Joker, to leave this alone, but he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what that monster did, he doesn’t understand.

Blink

His hand is numb, no process- rework: his hand is in pain.

Stop
Process
Replay the last five minutes
Stop

He punched Clark, the man of steel.

His hand is nearly shattered.

It doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters except getting the Joker.

Bruce Wayne: 30- June 17, 2012

Joker detonates his bomb and escapes.

Another mistake.

Why does Joker always leave the dance before its unfinished?

Bruce Wayne: 30- July 18, 2012

He doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore.

It’s funny really.

Truly hilarious.