KNOCK. KNOCK.

“ No. ” Her features bend in some attempt to knot together at the centre of her face. Her head continues to shake, loosening blonde and black extensions so that they roll over her shoulders on the next wet wind. The rest he’s trapped under his jacket, lain across her shoulders.

“ No. ” Her teeth flash. Arthur doesn’t flinch. He might not even be able to see through the fog occluding his vision. Cyan paint bleeds down toward his chin, barely smearing the vizard he’s used to hide his face from the world, from her by proxy. “ No, stop it. Stop it. ”

Adamance whets her tone more than she’d like, but her nerves are shot to nothing. She feels them screaming beneath her skin like an open wound so clearly that every pull of her spine is masked by that full-body pang. Arthur can’t see how her skin peels and rends the raw tissue, wriggling like a knot of insects exposed to open air for the first time. Her feet shits against the tile, the scrape of her heel effective punctuation while she juts her chin and cranes her neck so far forward she almost bashes their faces together.

Vexation curls her upper lip; something close to insult or betrayal’s sharpened the bones of her already long face. She shakes.

“ You… think I wanna run away with you because I’m ‘disappointed’?! ” She reels back just enough to watch his painted face. Comma-like red brows mask his own, and Nix has always had to work a little harder to gauge his expressions beneath. Gotham thrives on that mystery, to her it’s a counted loss. She works her jaw, affirms her grip on his hair. “ How’d you do that math? ”

Arthur breathes heavy enough that the taste of his last cigarette overrides the cocktail her fingers shake for, abandoned on the piano lid.

A glance left repaints the scene. Riktor’s body’s just out of view, but she can smell him. Resisting the urge to wrinkle her nose, Nix blinks and tries to clear away to fog of frustration, but that blanket is too stubborn to lift. It’s tied to the allegorical thorns gripping the organs in her chest.

“ It’s beautiful because, ” She palms her husband’s chest with more force than she realises, “ It’s… fucking you. ”

Blood threaded between her teeth’s all them more prominent when she bares them for their audience of a dead or dying city. It’ll get them too. It’s already had him by the throat for years. Any notion of abandoning this beartrap, even if he says the words himself, are a pipe dream. She’s going to die in this hole just like everyone else. Just like they always told her she would.

She can’t get him out.

“ Don’t guess with me. ” Quieter now. “ You know me – you’re meant to know me. ” Her eyes roll upward, though there’s no stars to guide her attention. The only allusion to a constellation drifts across the neighbouring building and buzzes like a nest of waiting wasps.

Her fingers splay over Arthur’s heart. It jumps with all the terror of a little boy.

“ It’s not safe. None of it. He, ” She doesn’t gesture past the piano to whatever’s left of her former owner. Corrects herself instead to disguise their company. “ It’s all I hear. It’s not safe, not here, you’re not– ” A deeper breath lures her husband closer. Her fingers curl against his shirt. She clenches her teeth. “ It doesn’t stop. This fucking place. ” A whisper shapes her heartbreak, “ It keeps winning. They, ” Gotham, the drones, Harvey Dent, the Court, his brother. Nix’s bones shake with useless energy. “ – keep winning. ”

A breath. She haunts his eyes with her own. She loosens the fingers of her hand and snakes them up his neck until she cradles his chin and holds him to her.

Nix’s grip on his nape could rival that of a tigress’ jaws. It condenses until she swears she might’ve punctured skin.

He hasn’t breathed whilst panning the smog for a single winking star or sliver of moonlight. Nothing. Not even the satisfaction of unending blackness. Just a charcoal soupy smear that churns like sand under the tide. He fails to follow the strings with his body, yet angles his shoulders and searches the smog until Melpomene cannot contain herself any longer. He doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t blink even when the rain stings.

Nix sniffs. Vexes her jaw until she feels her teeth grind hard enough to crackle, then commands his attention with a pulpy, “No!”

That splinter snaps his bleary eyes onto her. She’s diffused at every edge, dappled with rain and light from the fairy strands and towering ‘HOTEL EMPIRE’ signage. Its scarlet glow illuminates puddles. He drapes a shaking hand above the small of his wife’s back and finally forces a breath that’s more a laugh than actual expulsion. It canes the back of his throat. He grimaces ere he tastes bile, then glances behind her to search for the staff he owes checks to just for her.

Only the bartender really had to put an ounce of effort forward. The rest will have their hands out anyway — ding Mr. Wayne for their time.

He shakes his left leg, then bobs his head along with that motion so she won’t think he’s ignoring her. He isn’t. Arthur guides her away from the nearest pool, then tries to take stock of who’s behind the rainbow curtain.

Yellow, blue, red, and orange drapes riffle from NCB Studios’ air conditioning. It was frigid even though those bug lamps make everyone sweat.

Nix would’ve been toasty were she onstage with him or in the crowd. She’s always cold.

He rubs his bright red blazer over her arms to keep her warm, brushing out her hair extensions so they don’t snag on a button or yank from her head. She won’t believe she’s beautiful. Not when her makeup’s running and her hair’s lost any suggestion of volume.

Arthur fastens his grip on her lower back, then kisses her forehead and whispers, “Why don’t you go inside?” His real eyebrows lift, making those comma-like red marks disappear, “I need to pay.”

His Looper’s still leading a waltz for no one.

Arthur attempts a deep breath, grimaces once it lodges in his throat, then braces when her head shakes. 

“No,” another small protest won’t be caught by the drones. Nix can hardly move her head enough to signal beyond lip reading, but releases his neck to weave her arms around his waist and tuck herself beneath his right arm even though she's taller than him. She shivers. 

Frowning, he taps his lower face to her forehead and tries guiding her toward the curtains so she can leave the stage, “Phoenix…”

“I’m not letting go!” her refusal’s outright juvenile, yet her pout downturns enough to rival Melpomene. She half-burrows her face in his collar so one blue eye stares into the night. 

Air fractures on its way into his shattered chest, but Arthur avoids forcing it through his mouth — leaves him more lightheaded than usual as he tries guiding his wife away from the terrace and closer to the multicolored-drapery concealing the backstage. 

“You’re gonna get pneumonia — then what?” he softens his tease enough for traces of a boyish laugh to surface…then slip beneath the tar. Arthur cradles her face with his left hand.

She revels in the sting from his cratered wedding band kissing her skin.

“How are you gonna hang out in court? You know they…” as he pivots and ignores his own Looper, a few laughs from the live studio audience arise. He pauses. Goes too rigid for her comfort.

Nix strokes his ribcage with her thumb, then urges him to keep going across the tiles.

His footsteps leave no trace upon stone — not even when striking water. He glides over every surface. No impression that he was ever there.

She waits for the first sarcastic round of applause to end. At least, he thinks that’s what’s resonating with her. Arthur closes his eyes as the seats etch from shadow.

Nix knows that’s what he’s minding his step for without Arthur needing to announce it. How a man so gentle that deer flock to him is so repulsed by them at the same time never ceases to amaze her. 

“I have wet wipes in the car,” Nix mutters with her mouth screwed up to one side, anticipating the kiss he plants on that pucker.

Muscle memory keeps his fore and middle fingers extended around an imaginary cigarette once his left hand slips into her hair. His other hand plucks the rabbits’ party bucket from her so he now holds Evelyn’s riding helmet, her N-95 mask, and the rabbit treats or whatever the hell they paid for.

Nix squeezes her eyes shut, squeals once he kisses her again, then taps her nose with his cheek and lays his forehead over hers with minimal pressure so she doesn’t faint. She adjusts her hold on the stowaway who absolutely wasn’t part of the plan tucked under her arm.

The rabbit's held like a football, tucked against the cinch of her waist so its fat head and ears hang. It’s certainly comfortable enough.

She lolls her head onto her husband’s shoulder. Splays her bad hand under the Lop's chest as best she can so it can be lifted between them.

Finally the lilac rabbit wins Arthur’s attention. He tilts his head so it lays atop his wife’s, then makes a delicate 'C' shape with his fingers so he somehow caresses around the animal’s ears in rhythmic strokes.

The Lop closes its eyes into the caress. 

Arthur smirks, then kisses Nix’s forehead and points to the grayish-purple rabbit, “The kids are gonna freak.” 

“And to think…” Nix makes her eyes bulge, tutting at the rabbit, “You could’ve been dog food.”

“Or stew,” Arthur adds, wrinkling his forehead, “Or a um…A coat.”

“Jerky,” Nix kisses the Lop’s cheek.

Arthur uses his own face to nudge her cheek, then half-turns to find Evelyn pivoted to crouch by her new Holland Lop. He frowns, glances at the bucket in his hands that was handed to Nix, then clears his throat. 

“Evelyn…?” his timbre’s gentle.

Arthur pinches his brow and waits for their eldest to turn, thick blonde dragon braid hanging over her left shoulder. Nix glances between her husband and their daughter.

He reminds Evelyn, “It was Mommy’s idea to take you here.” Without disciplining their daughter on her own birthday, he drops his free hand into his wife’s hair and cossets her scalp in languid circles, “She and I built the hutch, you know,” the corner of his mouth quirks, “Sure, we…” a glance out the side of his eye prompts Nix to play along, “Could’ve done the normal thing and just bought one-”

Nix smiles so hard, her upper lip almost curls back, “But Daddy’s a carpenter.”

“Was,” Arthur kisses her cheek’s apex. 

With a peck to the edge of his nose, she says, “Don’t…be modest.” 

Werewolf play-bites Nix's cheek, then soothes her nape and feigns correcting her, “What Mommy means…” an awning covers them, yet he still needs to squint, “Is that she’s was holding up different types of wood and stained fifty different floorboards until she found one she liked.”

Shifting her focus to Nix, Evelyn rolls off her knuckles and approaches her mother with a diffidence that knots her father’s stomach.

He braces, but otherwise doesn’t show it.

Nix kisses his throat’s hollow, then grins at Evelyn and accepts their eldest daughter's hug with her good arm.

“ You’re welcome, Sprog. ” She says, and her lips press too tightly together because there had been no vocal thanks to prompt it.

A longer breath hastens her heart in her chest and lifts her shoulders awkwardly. Jodie’s been pretending not to watch the encounter by sifting her fingers through the sawdust between her boots and picking pallid flakes of it out of the nearest rabbit’s fur. Despite her best efforts, Nix knows the awkward exchange sits prominently in their tour guide’s periphery. Once her fingers reach the end of Evelyn’s hair, tied sweetly in a bow the same colour as her riding gear, Nix releases her from her duty.

“ Why don’t you, um, ” Her eyes lift. She avoids her husband’s gaze and instead seemingly takes to counting the animals surrounding them. They’ve followed the ‘party bucket’ as its been passed around almost as diligently as Pancake follows Arthur’s heel at home. That dumb cat wouldn’t even be a threat to the prey now surrounding them. “ Make sure they all get a snack, yeah? The we can go see what other creatures Daddy can fit in the trunk. ”

Evelyn receives her cue. Her skinny arms slip from around Nix’s waist and she smiles up at her father, full-cheeked and bleary eyed still. She bounces on the balls of her feet whenever he looks at her, Nix swears she’s seen it on more than one occasion. She plucks the bucket from the hook he’s had to make of his little finger to carry everything, then dutifully spins on her heels, to face the lilac rabbit still tucked to her mother’s side.

“ Here you go… ” A carrot stick’s proffered forward. Evie’s eyes flash a moment as she assesses the animal’s velveteen nose twitch, dubiety lacing her tone, “ Flops. ”

The transition from the crook of Nix’s arm to the ground so that the Lop can actually eat without being suspended mid-air is awkward, but to Evelyn’s credit she doesn’t raise a brow at her mother’s awkward crouch. Her eyes stray briefly to the pair of inked fairies atop her mother’s breast, just above her heart. It’s she and Lilac, but Nix is so overcome with ink that nobody ever thinks to ask.

She lays a lettuce leaf in front of the rabbit’s nose, “ And for seconds. ” Then dodges past her father with a gasp, toward some albino fluffball at the enclosure’s corner.

Saving face works only when Nix succumbs to an impish twist of her features. She knots her lips to one side, steering herself back against Arthur until she can wrap one arm around his waist with all the tenacity of a python clutching a kill, careful not to step on what is now their rabbit sat on the ground between them. She finds herself looking over his shoulder toward the empty farmyard in search of an audience indulging in the strange sense of deep embarrassment knotting itself below her ribs.

Riktor’s disappeared. Vanished like he was only ever built from shreds of cloud, or the dark grey slashes of the rain now battering the windows across from them. Her eyes roll from one side to the other, searching from pillar to pillar for any shadow too long or flash of movement she might otherwise miss. She can still hear him breathing. The racket of broken bone and teeth shuddering in the hollow cavern that now remains of his chest. Inside him’s a dark pit, the same bleak penumbra that’s eaten the empty, wet sockets of his eyeballs. He’s claimed the light on what she knows to be his fleeting retreat, dampened the sconces lining the dining rooms walls and killed the glow of the underlighting. Even from her husband’s eyes, he’s claimed the light; left behind wet, shimmering pools.

Nix blinks again. The green verglas remains. It cuts her.

Her jaw drops. The fingers he draws against her collarbone might as well be the promise of a noose, but she grasps at it with her own shaking hand anyway. Her dead fingers bend awkwardly against his knuckles as she wraps what she can around his own. It’s a miracle her nails don’t sink past the skin. She’d add another scar to the countless others already besmearing him and he would thank her, as if she hasn’t done enough already. Nix’s chin trembles, locked south of the rest of her face like her jaw’s hinges have cracked open and gone stiff as death. Her head shakes, but she can’t steer it as far as she’d like. What accumulates is barely a shudder.

“ No. ” She manages, but her voice is frail as the broken ends of her hair hanging at her back. No amount of extensions, dyed or otherwise, can hide the frayed edges of her, made tired by addiction and brutality. Arthur’s fingers are kissed with more teeth than she realises. “ No. ”

The wound cracks his beautiful face in two, then shatters it. Nix watches it dissolve into bloody bricks, crumbling as another long wheeze wrenches itself from his chest. He’d double over if he could, were she not in the way as the cause of the agony.

Phlegm breaks her voice at first. She crackles like static and reaches suddenly for her husband’s face. Long fingers she’s always thought fit against him perfectly now fumble for an efficient hold. He slips between them, sloughing away the same way Riktor had under the butt of a hunting rifle. But Arthur – Arthur won’t come back. He’ll fall to ribbons right in front of her until even the barest breeze would steal him away.

He doesn’t belong here, or to her. He’s not rooted. He’s above and beyond and sometimes it’s like his body remembers.

There isn’t a tether beyond the chain she’s become, and selfishly will continue to be.

Riktor was wrong only once. There’s no remorse. She only regrets not tightening her hold sooner on the boy opposite her at the checkers table. She should have nailed him in place in the exact way the stories say she did – it would make no difference now, but to save her from the fear of him turning to sand in her hands.

Irene Degraves burned so she could keep him. Nix’s own mother and brother, the sensation of their flesh sloughing from their skulls, their lungs scalded black by smoke and terror. They choked and they didn’t die. Didn’t die until they were dry and awake and alert enough to grow familiar with the sensation of desiccation. All at Nix’s will. She chews on it now like she did the taste of that immolation. Twists until she sits only on one of her husband’s thighs and can reach the poured glass of red wine.

The Burgundy’s profile is supposed to be spice and deep red fruit. For four-figures a bottle, she should be counting the black cherries and notes of truffle and pine on her tongue. All she gets is the iron. Right at the back of her throat. It’s now, the same as then.

“ If it’s that bad, ” He remains unseen, but she can hear him. He must’ve curled his body like a dead spider underneath their table. Nix takes another gulp that does nothing to rescue her from the tongue curled at her ear. “ Just take the steak knife, and finish it. Right in the neck. Easy. ”

Her eyes bloom wide. Not for horror, but because he’s right.

Riktor’s exasperation climbs up her thighs, “ Do it, pussy! ”

Her free hand curls against Arthur’s crown. She strokes again and again until she’s sure she’s dirtied the curled ends of his brown hair. “ I love you, ” She says, and it feels like the confession again. She exhales acid into her wine, and it spits back at her as an intangible plume. She stares down at her contorted reflection in the Burgundy pool, and accidentally twists her fingers against Arthur’s scalp. “ You didn’t… do anything. It was me. ”

In comparison to her own thick voice, choked by the viscous fluid she can’t swallow, her previous owner’s timbre relates to song, “ Us. ”

She speaks from far afield.

Werewolf curves his paw and slots her glass’ stem between claws.

Nix’s berry-bitten lips part, though she doesn’t protest her husband guiding the glass behind her. Beyond the ceramic dishes so she doesn’t inadvertently knock it over or dip a lock of hair inside. All the while the fog thickens over her eyes.

He’s there, but blurred. Moisture she doesn’t think to swipe away gathers under her nose.

Arthur raises his hand from her thigh to glide a thumb beneath each nostril and collect what he can. The residue’s dragged over the napkin that belongs across his lap.

Hers is on the other side of the table. He’d draped his against the table’s edge, duly aware of the glowers he’s receiving to partake in quiet propriety. Contrary to popular belief, the penury does know to place napkins across their laps. He always knew to without instruction.

Nix sniffs. Hooks her fingers around her husband’s naked wrist where his cuff rides up and kisses his warm skin.

His left hand burrows in his jacket until a cigarette carton’s produced. One flick produces a single cigarette. He doesn’t offer her poison. He won’t. She’ll have to thieve his secondhand fumes or steal that stick for herself.

Another failed attempt to clear her eyes and nose leaves Nix like she was just served divorce papers — perhaps that’s what the press will run with.

Arthur lifts his bloodshot eyes to search for those black orbs between decorative luggage tags. Doubtless someone in security is screen recording. He braces at the notion. For her sake, he flashes his ugly teeth and cradles her nape before thinking of pinching that filter between his teeth.

Nix wilts on his lap, shoulders buckled for shame. Everything the Wayne legacy seeks him to embody is tarnished by her presence. She knows it. That tattooed, shriveled spider beneath the white tablecloth knows it. New York knows it. All the world waits for her public breakdown to share. Determine her motives, what led to it, how the story will be spun to curry favor with the masses once again…

“Phoenix…” congestion blunts the fracture in his tone.

A tear runs from what should be Melpomene’s eye once he blinks. He sniffs. Fails to clear his sinuses and permanently clogged chest, which leads to a shorter and drier cough that burns from the inside.

Nix’s fingers settle where they can: his clavicle, his scalp…and they curl. He’ll let her puncture him. Shred him if she wills it.

Long, dark hair pools below his shoulder as he taps their damp noses and kisses her stained lips until the same bitter wine that gives him a headache clings to his scarred mouth.

Wet, albeit clumpy mascara scrapes his olive skin when her eyes lift to focus on him…though he isn’t convinced.

His head shakes. The mustard-yellow armchair he’s seated on jostles each time his leg bounces.

She stumbles to keep up with her own ailing heart. The absolute last thing she needs is more wine.

Arthur steals her fingers, keeping his other hand curled around her nape.

Nix looks through him.

To twist his torso and assess the espresso machine’s frothing would be to indulge her. He lengthens his spine as best he can to block her view of the aperture leading to the kitchen.

Silverware clinks even though they’re the only pair in the restaurant.

Aimless patters blur and snake rain across the window-wall, occluding Manhattan from its most exclusive guests.

He’d admire the fuzzy orbs of red and white drifting through neon were his wife not wavering where she sits, legs akimbo and her skirt riding up more than it should. Arthur lifts his napkin and drapes it across the plaits, shielding her inner thighs should any staff member desire a show. A gnarled root somewhere between his shoulders further extrudes. He fights to breathe. His fault. Piano fingers curve around his wife’s cheek and settle.

She leans into it, albeit wooden.

Cocaine nails hook into her lower back one by one from beneath the tablecloth.

Nix inclines her chin until an involuntary chill cracks her molars. If it wasn’t for Arthur, she wouldn’t have seen a dentist since she was seven. Still all but refuses to go. Arthur chaperones routine cleanings to try and save her mouth from three years too many of battery. 

“Ph…” he looks down. Settles his fingers on her thigh once again without wandering too far, though his fingers slip beneath her skirt and bend over her backside — she’s too taut and bent too awkwardly. The tension in her glutes isn’t making any sense. He drums something meaningless against her backside, then uses his own face to try and win her focus back, “Who are you talking to? Because it’s not me.”

Eyes of a broken doll droop south. He hasn’t touched the cigarette. If she could get her hands to stop shaking, she’d fish his lighter engraved with their children’s names and flick that spark wheel a few times until a vermilion flower bloomed between them. She tries anyway, pinning her focus on his lap and his trousers she’s no doubt dampened. He won’t care.

Arthur cups her backside and pushes her a little farther down his thigh until her knee roves over his groin and the swell she’d kneel and take in her mouth if he’d let her. He wants her to. She can tell by the catch in his breath, the tremble of his lower jaw…even his slightly misaligned teeth reveal just enough to convey the bedlam in his head. Nix falls forward until her nose all but bashes his cheek.

Arthur gripped a fistful of blonde and black hair extensions to stop her from giving herself a deviated septum.

Nix sweeps her tongue between her husband’s lips and keens into his next breath. He’s warm despite not being able to nurse a cigarette. Nix splays a hand across his narrow left pectoral and curves as if he has any definition whatsoever. Her free hand roams along his button-down until his high waistband halts her path. Nix brushes her fingers where the fabric draws too tight and grins upon tasting the groan in his exhale. 

“You wanna fuck me, Baby…” she states a fact neither spouse denies, though Arthur doesn’t move his hands.

"Always," his hips rise just enough for the ridge she’s tracing to fill her palm, though he doesn’t oblige a step further. Arthur's fingers soothe her nape. Her backside’s secure in the event she becomes faint.

She pouts her lips so he’ll recall how they feel snug around his cock, then moans, “I need you to.”

Leaning in even as Arthur makes to retreat prolongs the cosset at the corner of her mouth. She twists her lips to a lopsided smile so that he’ll linger even longer. Over her shoulder, she’s half-convinced she can hear the roll of Evelyn’s eyes, Ivaylo will be too focused on his popcorn to even notice. Adorned in the same red waves as the team on the pitch below, the little boy kicks his legs to the same tune both his father and uncle appear to have been siren songed by. Every now and then, because he’s sweet, he offers his eldest sister a fistful of his corn. They’ve been sharing quietly while she attempts to describe the rules of the game to him. This isn’t Evelyn’s first visit to what is essentially a Royal box. The World Cup has seen her face peering through the glass more than it’s seen her mother’s. No one knows if Thomas Wayne’s line are truly supporting the US, or England. They’ve been sighted cheering on both.

Beyond those plush seats, a hive of anticipation ebbs and flows, depending on the drinks being handed out and the surging of the crowd beyond the box. Nix remembers, mid-sip of her drink, to drop her attention and check Clementine hasn’t been roused from sleep or almost stepped on. Her eyes are closed, her too-small fist still white-knuckling the American flag. With any luck, she’ll sleep through the whole thing. It’ll be Nix on duty if she doesn’t, else she’ll be the bitch wife who couldn’t even let her husband enjoy a game for ninety minutes.

From the corner of her eye, she watches the allegorical sea of bodies that have joined them since their arrival. Suits with faces Nix recognises, but can’t be bothered to name bustle about and murmur with one another, pretending to keep an eye on any scant few children they’d deigned to bring with them, their wives all far more polished than the Mrs. Wayne could manage herself. Nix has seen more Botox injection sites and filled cheeks than there are players on the pitch. She’s only considered once or twice asking a leggy blonde who’s spent her entire time here mingling as to who her aesthetician is. Subconsciously, she’s stilled her brows, for her forehead’s sake.

The sea parts once security allows someone in. Nix splays her fingers between her husband’s shoulders as suit number seven guides a long, blond shape into the room.

More than once she’s seen him, either adorning posters outside of theatres or in trailers shown on T.V. And she swears they once met at some Disney premiere she can’t remember. She’s never caught his name, but doesn’t need to. His face is one that she’s sure few forget. A mop of sandy blond hair curls atop his brow, and eyes that appear slightly wider-set betray a boyish nervousness she’s sure he’s carved his cheekbones like that to avoid portraying. They settle on her first.

Phoenix Wayne is in red leather. Which hardly seems fair given the weather, even if the dress barely seems to kiss her thighs. Valentino like her, though a very vocal group on the internet can’t fathom why, and it seems they weren’t quite prepared to dress their Gotham flagship in a soccer jersey. A single team colour serves well enough.

From her, to the back of Arthur’s head, his eyes flit like wasps, trying to discern their direction. He blinks twice, clears his throat, and has to duck his head to listen to the executive talk to him. The suit’s hand waves from Nix, across the line to Bruce. As if any of them need an introduction. Still, she clears her throat, and patters her hand against Arthur’s back.

A quick sip of her drink before she answers the question Arthur hasn’t even voiced yet. She doesn’t know exactly how many iced Stars and Stripes she’s had, but her husband can likely figure somewhere between three and four, given the subtle sway to her voice and impish pinch of her mouth.

Ava’s got a hand extended. 

“Mama, grill cheese,” the baby reaches across her mother’s profile, "Mama!"

Nix has softened enough to slacken her jaw and place a hand over her heart while thanking the three-year-old in a Balogun jersey.

America's striker has been cleared to play. Never should’ve been red-carded in the first place.

Ivaylo proffers his arms until his mother squats so she doesn’t give the Wayne Investments clowns a show. She squeezes him. The toddler squeal-laughs, then closes his eyes as she sweeps her spiky acrylic nails through his hair so his face is clear of dirty blonde ringlets. Once his mother frames his face with her hands and kisses him three times hard on the cheek, Ivaylo heads back to the grilled cheese porcelain platter to grab another finger sandwich and return to his leather armchair.

Evelyn rolls his eyes. The corner meant for her was given to their mother. Her brother offers her the one he'd just pilfered for himself, but she slips off her own chair. Evelyn strides over to the platter, grabs two finger sandwiches and a fry cone, then side-eyes the actor who she doesn’t recall working for her father and uncle on her way back to the armchairs.

Lilac hooks an arm around her uncle’s shoulder upon noticing the stranger. She cups a hand around Bruce’s ear and whispers, “Who’s the weirdo?” in the least subtle manner possible.

Thomas Wayne’s spare creases his brow, turns, and freezes upon spotting…someone. Someone he’s apparently supposed to know. Someone being ushered toward the Wayne family like a thoroughbred before Belmont.

Arthur exchanges glances with Nix, then bites the inside of his cheek and looks to Bruce for guidance.

He doesn’t fucking know either.

The brothers square their shoulders, lengthen their postures simultaneously, and turn their backs to the stadium.

Nix takes a bite out of her grilled cheese with little regard for an A-lister whose fame burns white-hot…for now. Knowledge of each camera’s placement slows her chewing some. She has a care to keep her mouth closed in spite of what she’s eating.

A server wearing all black and a white apron plucks her drained Stars & Stripes cocktail…only to replace it with another.

Nix lifts the new frozen drink’s glass to thank the server without having to remember a name or the correct phrasing.

Bruce adjusts his hold on Lilac. Stares at the five-year-old like she, through her star-shaped sunglasses, is supposed to know who this uninvited guest is.

“You think I know,” Lilac chides him, tossing her fine platinum blonde pigtails so the star charms on her elastics jiggle, “Make some friends.”

“I’ve already got a best friend,” Bruce tilts his head so a few dark strands stray in front of his eyes, “My birthday twin.”

“Don’t forget it!” Lilac reminds him with a sigh, turning back to face the team’s warmups as if she has any idea what the formations mean, “I’m all you have in the world.”   

Arthur catches the tail-end of that. His shoulders kick forward before his dry, breathy laugh can catch up. He doesn’t want to face the alien-looking actor being trotted out before them for a photo op, but further turns his back to the game and hooks his free arm around Nix’s waist.

She takes another bite of grilled cheese — it’s pinched between the same fingers nursing the stem of her Stars & Stripes. 

Though his brother’s back is turned, Bruce leans over and reminds him, “I’ve got Belgium jerseys under the seats if things go south.”

Arthur coughs so hard it becomes a bark.

Bruce, too, dissolves into mirth that never quite announces itself beyond jagged breaths and a need to face the field instead of the open box.

Arthur squeezes his eyes shut to hide how sorely he needs to wince, then drives his elbow into his brother’s kidney with little regard for their approaching audience.

Nix gnaws on the inside of her cheek, wondering if there’s a way to get whiskey and grenadine into her own cocktail should the score tilt the wrong way.

Arthur sweeps his fingers over his wife’s hip from behind to try and remember there’s a stranger in what he was told would be a giant living room for their family and the Wayne Investments Board of Directors. Not that he necessarily knows them by name — by smell for some, by face for others. Arthur settles his focus on the face sharing magazine covers with Chalamet.

Clementine wants her bottle. Arthur set it on the massive farmhouse table. A nick from Lilac thieving a steak knife from her mother’s plate and plunging it into the reclaimed wood so she could become Daniel Day Lewis from Gangs of New York helps the baby’s bottle remain in place even as Evelyn climbs onto a chair to fluff the flowers.

Arthur’s attention shifts beyond his wife only for a moment to make sure their eldest doesn’t break her neck or bash the back of her head through a terrarium wall. 

“Noodle on the run!” Lilac thrusts her pointer finger behind her mother’s head.

Spaghetti slithers across his gold-lit bioactive terrarium, pothos and philodendron rustling behind his apricot and porcelain body.

Evelyn gasps and about-faces, almost whipping her mother’s shoulder with her Rumi dragon braid to watch their albino corn snake slip into one of the many caves Nix constructed for him. Soon only a pair of pink eyes will gleam, terrified of the chaos yet used to it all the same. Likely hiding from the barn owl whose silent flight landed on the chair that would be Arthur’s. He hates sitting at the head of the table. Clementine takes that place — her high chair is enormous and tucks beneath it.

Jareth preens, flips his head upside-down when Nix's ugly smiling axolotl swims close to the glass, then snaps his beak and shrieks at Nix for a cull. 

“Блять!” Arthur rolls his eyes, yet doesn’t scold the barn owl. Both hands are occupied, too.

Nix lolls her head onto her husband’s shoulder and ‘adjusts’ so her breasts form a hard ridge when pushed up against his chest.

Arthur noses her forehead, strokes her backside with his thumb, then focuses on her soft features—

“Daddy just said ‘fuck,’” Lilac announces, reaching for the spatula to help herself to a breakfast enchilada. 

Arthur rolls his eyes, then corrects her, “It doesn’t mean anything, actually.”

Nix’s lips purse, “It doesn’t?” 

“Not…directly…” he kisses the corner of her mouth, then her philtrum, and the side of her nose.

Nix pokes her tongue between her teeth and bends since his grip on her backside’s firm.

Arthur spreads his feet shoulder-width apart, narrowly avoiding Ava’s stacking rings that are precariously close to his feet. The Persian rug absorbs what would be even the faintest tell, though more than one misstep has taught him to very carefully set his bare heels down.

Nix patters her fingertips over her husband’s mouth, then reaches onto her own plate and smears some cheese and homemade sauce on her finger. She’ll be scrubbing under her nails for days — or holding her hand out for Yellowcake as each of their small children tend to do and have the dog lick her fingers clean. Domino certainly will pick up whatever slack the radioactive mutt would leave behind.

Arthur kisses her finger, but does so in a manner that allows the faintest film to sit on his tongue. He shouldn’t have cheese. His stomach wrenches at the thought of dairy fermenting in it. He flashes his teeth and shifts from foot to foot so any gurgle in his oversensitive gut’s masked.

Evelyn notices her father’s discomfort. She frowns and hops off of her antique bentwood chair.

No two seats at this table are alike. Lilac insists on the one that wobbles. Ivaylo prefers the spindle-back. Evelyn likes the bentwood. Arthur barely sits. He doesn’t rest.

Evelyn takes a deep breath, rounds the table to help Lilac hold her butter knife and cut her enchilada properly, then observes her mother splaying her bony fingers across her father’s lips.

Arthur kisses each pad, minding her sharp acrylic nails. 

“Daddy…?” Ivaylo calls over the score that swells around him. Arthur snaps upright and half-turns so the three-year-old caged in a standing tower has his full attention, “We have to make pancakes.”

Grinning so hard his ugly face might crack in half, Arthur assures him, “You’re absolutely right,” in a softer timbre than he gave Lilac, “You want to add the cannoli filling for Mommy, don’t you...?”

Ivaylo holds up his wooden spoon and nods.

Evelyn watches her mother stiffen, the muscles in her thighs clench the same as the soft tissue encasing her spine. Through the soft cotton of her t-shirt, her mother’s shoulders hike, betraying any semblance of a cool, comfortable exterior she wishes she’d exude. She never settles, not really, and unlike her father, it doesn’t mean her mother gains a perpetually honed focus. Those eyes, though in the room, are often somewhere further away. The rest of her is even farther.

Nix turns on her bare heels back toward her chair, and flashes a smile at the three girls now flanking her on her right, backs to the windows. Habit forces her eyes up and over those three blonde heads to watch for any movement in the yard. She doesn’t trust the shadows, even in the morning when they’ve bloomed pallid grey and translucent. Their yard is overlooked as it is, several townhouses surrounded them on the back end, each with at least two storeys of windows looking down from above their fence – they don’t need the further audience of the Court and their beasts, yet they have it anyway.

Pursing her lips and locking her knees together, Nix sits back down. Her eldest daughter releases a breath which confuses, like she’d been holding it back. She watches her mother claim her next bite of enchilada with her hands while she finishes cutting Lilac’s up into bitesize chunks. Nix draws her fingers beneath her lips to clear any residue, then reaches for her drink.

“ … What’s the game? ” Evelyn steers herself back around the table, hoists herself up into her seat, and nods toward the ribboned bundle beneath that goth bouquet.

“ Um, ” Nix swallows, then follows their eldest’s eye. “ Old. ” That makes the girl laugh, only quietly. It’s quickly hushed as though it were a betrayal, but Nix pretends not to notice.

Even while using a fork, Lilac somehow manages to smear enchilada sauce on her chin. “ Is it gory? ”

“ They didn’t have the pixels… for gore back then. ”

“ So we can play? ” Lilac kicks her older sister under the table.

Her mother’s eyes bloom a little wider at the question, then lift across from her toward the kitchen where Arthur bends over the stove. Clementine sleeps, her chin shelved on his shoulder. Nix can hear her snoring from here. They all snore – only Evie and Ava have been saved from the ill-working lungs their mother’s inhospitable womb’s gifted the other three.

“ I mean… probably? ” Arthur senses the eyes boring into his naked back. He twists too balletically for the scene and meets his wife’s eyes. “ Right? ”

In the low light of her office, bleeding deep blues from the night outside, and the Gotham skyline trapped in the surface of the water below, he is caressed. It doesn’t matter that his insides crawl with the vibration of the base below, or that the headache behind his eyes has grown fingers like branches, burrowing into the soft tissue under his face, he looks untouched. Even Nix could have him here, until they’re nothing but one tangled body and a sheen of sweat and mussed paint, and he’d still walk out the room as though entirely undisturbed. It aggravates her. But they both know she’ll try to leave some mark again, the way he does on her.

She claims his bottom lip, plumped by her teeth and the warmth of shared proximity. The Chromacake dries his skin some, but cannot make him hard or brittle. He’s soft in spite of her, draped like a blanket of ice over him, humming into the proscenium of his mouth. She can’t poison him even when trying so hard that she feels starved.

Arthur crosses their mouths, steering his face to avoid their noses knocking. Their height different guides his chin upward, parting her lips so that her tongue slips past his teeth again. The bag that’s thrice the size of Clementine rests against Nix’s desk, slumped, waiting. He’d brought the date. An evening spent curled into his side or draped across his lap is within reach, she just needs to listen.

“ Nixie… ” Her name’s shaped against her open mouth. She swallows it like she would a hitch in his breath. Arthur’s bright eyes open. He drops his chin to pin her through his painted lashes. “ The baby. ”

Clem’s been watching the shape of her mother above her with an indifference Arthur would deign patience. Beneath her goggles her eyes seem to have grown. They’ve always looked too big for her head, her body. Like they were the only part of her that had any time to develop in the womb ere whatever outside forces ripped her free weeks too early. She’s smaller than any of her siblings were at this age, like Ivaylo before her – it’s a pattern Nix wonders if only she has noticed. When they saw Ava for the first time, Nix was sure she was over-sized.

“ Oh. ” Her brows jump like he’d surprised her, and she purses her lips at the baby in her seat. “ She needs a warm climate. I can turn this place into Morocco real quick. ”

The flood got up here. Had to pick and choose what was salvaged. Look closely enough and one can spot mineral deposit from the waterline. It’s faint. Now just decoration and preservation. A reminder of how combustible this powder keg of a city truly is.

Arthur sets Clementine’s convertible car seat down on a magnificent dark wood desk that must have belonged to an oligarch in another life. Instead of crushing the coils of charging cables, lipstick tubes, and hair ties, he chooses to set the baby’s seat down on half-signed ledgers and receipts. Some wrist band prototypes are scattershot around the surface. Perhaps Nix couldn’t decide on a new design and meant to close her eyes and point at one. Arthur makes that decision for her. He selects magnetic LED bands that aren’t easily snapped or swapped engraved with the Lounge’s logo and tosses it across the room.

Nix catches the loop on her finger, swings it, then pops her uneven hips to the beat that manages to thump through her ice-veined frosted glass floor like a heartbeat. 

GET!

BACK!

TO!

WORK!

GET!

BACK!

TO!

WORK!

Each pulse demands in a loop.

Arthur, too, catches the tempo in his left foot first. It flows up his leg to his hips. His shoulders and head sway and swing in oscillations that match the DJ’s mix. It’s just noise. He couldn’t put a name to this anymore than he can understand how anyone can dance to it…while bobbing along to it himself.

Nix mirrors her husband’s subtle undulations with a playful edge. She casts an imaginary net and ‘pulls’ it in while sliding her heeled feet across the floor.

Arthur pauses mid-unbuckle, waits for his wife's arms to circle his waist — purple-glowing strobe bracelet and all, then turns and kisses what he can reach of her crown.

Nix rests her head on her husband's shoulder and watches rain vein over the glass. Fractured colors from exterior signage seep through the panes, tinting Gotham funky hues. Traffic and swinging light bars float like fairies in the distance. If she pinches the air, they vanish.

Storms hide the moon or any suggestion of stars. Bruce’s ugly symbol’s crushed into a cloud somewhere. She doesn’t want to search the smog for it, but knows Arthur will.

It’s easy to think Gotham beautiful while largely floating above it. The bay’s murky depths are actually nurseries for Great White Sharks. That was a recent discovery she wishes she could forget. Arthur will never go near the ocean ever again now. 

“Musical master…” Arthur sings like wet moonlight; slow, dreamy, swept in the same gossamer as the baby basket’s canopy while removing Clementine’s goggles and combing out her hair, “Play harder and faster.”

Nix lifts an eyebrow, but closes her eyes as his chest-rooted serenade soothes her — she’d lift a fountain pen and stab her own neck if she knew his mother wrote it.

“Spinning me up in your silky cocoon!”

It must be how the six-monitor wall behind her desk projects pale light onto the baby’s bed…and the delicate moths and stars rotating around the bassinet’s mobile.

The noise-cancelling ear muffs come off next. Arthur sets those on Nix’s desk, then ensures the takeout bag’s still on her desk before pressing his lips against their daughter’s brow and holding her close until her convertible car seat’s on the floor.

Her own canines lock against her lower gums, tight until she tastes blood. Nix lays a hand over Arthur’s forearm, the same that cradles the baby, and dodges around him to get a clear view of the back of the house. Twin windows look out onto a modest yard that’s being systematically destroyed by two rabbits and their roaming run. It’s dark out. Evelyn has already tucked the family’s newest additions away in their hutch, but Nix suddenly finds herself lacking trust for the bolt keeping them ‘safe’ inside.

Her husband’s fingers curl and lock around Clementine’s feet. The Marie-Chantal sleepsuit blankets her toes in cable-knit cashmere and cost more than Nix has admitted, but she’s still in suits meant for a nine-month old, despite almost being one – in Nix’s head that deems the purchase one of good value. Arthur’s thumb sweeps the baby’s heel through the soft knit, comforting a child that just barely startled at the call in the air. Her parents are the ones who freeze; her mother’s the one who traps the handle of her gun  against her palm. When Nix has the time, she’ll ponder that.

Without grazing the trigger, Nix curls the finger that’d fire it. One glance over her shoulder reveals the empty street through the bay window. The Talon is behind the house, blanketed in the greyish night that swamps the lawn. She can’t see those molten eyes through the glass. She’s left to picture those bent limbs, like spider’s legs propped at right angles, ready and waiting; the wet mouth drooling beneath a mask, tendrils of viscous spit loping down the throat to the emaciated chest, naked fingers capped with black, whet nails curled into their turf.

Nix’s own palate’s flooded with acrid saliva. Her heart hangs between her ears, a willing participant of her body’s sudden rush to energy. Nix sniffs back the mess within her nose, fails to clear her airways and has to resist the urge to spit between her own feet like she once would have to begin a match.

“ They’re still watching. ”

Arthur doesn’t need the reminder. He’s already cut a path to the foot of the stairs, Yellowcake all but glued to his heel. Above him, Hawk’s sat upright, those ice-blue eyes scan the empty landing, then lift to the floor above them.

THUD.

“ Fuck. ”

Arthur chokes suddenly on his own lungs. They lock eyes. She throws him a nod even through reluctance.

He takes the first two steps with one stride, and bounds upward without his arms to steady him – Clementine is strapped to his chest within his arms. Nix watches this for just a second, the acrobatics she’d fail to perform were she to try, then takes instead toward the back door. She hasn’t locked it, doesn’t know if Arthur had. There’s still a body, or what used to be a body, lurking around in the dark beyond the glow of the fairy lights. She sees it now upon entering the kitchen, rolling the slates of its shoulders like a starved feline and working its jaw beneath the bloody coverings. It’s tried to chew its way out. It’ll chew through her if she gives it the chance, in spite of the Court ordering it otherwise. No feral Talon will crawl beneath the illume of bumblebee fairy lights, or none has yet, but she doesn’t trust in knowing their behaviour. She doesn’t trust the walls anymore.

THUD.

Two floors up. Something’s clearing through her office. It hasn’t taken the clear route up the fire escape to Evelyn and Lilac’s bedroom. It’s avoided them… and likely knocked the sound-proofing right off the glass in her streaming room.

That. Fucker.

The backdoor is locked. Arthur’s better at this than her: responsibility. Remembering their own fucking children are in the house with them. Under Nix’s care they’d be facing those molten, glowing eyes that she is right now. The Talon, the child. It sits back on its haunches and watches her rattle the doorhandle. Watches her press her face into the glass. Watches her lip curl, the snarl. Watches her perform for the audience she’d forgotten were watching until this evening. The lie of seclusion, of safety, slips away through the same fingers cupping the doorknob. It’s gelid against her skin. Biting. She doesn’t need the thing watching her from outside to latch its jaws across her neck – she’s already clutched within another maw. All for the sake of the same fucker that’s wrenched her office door near-off its hinges two floors above.

Arthur pauses in Ivaylo’s doorway, head tilted like a dog to try and focus his hearing.

The three-year-old is awake, albeit groggy. He reaches for his plush Skye and hugs the cockapoo while he waits for his father’s silent footfalls.

When Bruce moves, Evelyn and Lilac’s floorboards tremble.

Arthur smirks from a floor down when those weighty goth combat boots pause. He must’ve knelt by someone’s bedside.

Clementine babbles at her older brother, bottle taut in her chubby fist. She waits for her father to bend and lift the boy from his bed.

Window’s closed. No sign of entry. Doesn’t mean those balls of molten mercury aren’t floating outside his rain-smeared panes, though.

Werewolf throws his own predatory lower beyond the glass. Sodium vapor flood lamps from their neighbors illuminate his pupils like a moon-mad coyote. He’s gaunt like one, yet long and solid despite his ill-fitting joggers. 

“Uncle Bruce is here…?!” the sweet lift in Ivaylo’s voice stokes a hearth within Arthur’s chest. 

“Yeah,” he brushes his mouth over his son’s temple, “Let’s go say hello.” 

Long, dirty blonde locks that Nix will never cut stray into Ivaylo's green eyes. Arthur uses his own nose to try and comb them away from the toddler’s periphery. He sleeps with Domino. The German Shepherd mix whines, lifts his head, then stands and follows his master out the door.

Arthur’s steps leave no audible trace.

Ava doesn’t hear him coming next door, but rolls over and stands in her crib upon spotting her father's silhouette at the threshold. 

--

Bruce’s cowl is already off.

Lilac drops it over her own head and practically smothers herself. 

“Lil-y!” Evelyn snatches her uncle’s famed cowl off of her younger sister’s head…only to drop it on her own, but reposition it so the eye holes allow her to experience her uncle’s surprisingly limited field of view, “How do you even see in this thing?”

With the kohl liner wreathing his eyes, Evelyn and Lilac’s glowing taxidermy butterfly cluster bouncing off his white-blue lenses is all the more ghoulish. 

Bruce smirks, then agrees, “It's harder than it needs to be.”

Evelyn giggles, folding her arms over her uncle’s broad Kyoto leather cape now that he’s knelt at Lilac’s bedside and half-turned to let his eldest niece huddle closer. He smells like a wet dog, but Evelyn won’t tell him. Lilac will. Give it time.

Lilac tuts at her uncle’s messy dark hair and works her Monster High dolls' hairbrush through it. It’s about the size of a thimble, yet she works it through her uncle’s sweaty, tangled hair from the roots.

Bruce takes stock of the pig, Gavin, Tuna, Pearl, and Pooka.

No sign of forced entry. No sign of entry at all if what his heat lens’ heat signatures are picking up mean anything. One of the girls certainly would’ve noticed or felt the slightest bit frightened.

He tilts his head, brushes his fingers over Lilac’s chin, then reels her in by the back of the head for a kiss that leaves his lips shaking more violently than intended. A thick, briny film stings his bloodshot sclera as he continues surveilling the room. 

“You’re safe,” he promises his five and eight-year-old nieces, then scoops Lilac up and tries his best to flip his hair from his eyes.

Lilac takes care of any strays. 

Evelyn’s held taut to his side once he stands, though she pinches her blonde brow and reminds him, “We weren’t in trouble.”

Her uncle’s pale, wide-eyed expression unnerves her. He uses Nix’s hand-spun cotton clouds that the mummified butterflies swarm as a nightlight to continue surveilling their bedroom. Bruce glances under each bed, behind standing mirrors, and even in their closet for boogeymen. 

“Don’t…” Lilac sighs, elbow slung over her uncle's broad shoulder and her head rested against his, “Tell me there’s a Deadite in the closet!”

“Who the hell told you about the Deadites?” Bruce’s pace is measured, almost as if he’s bracing for whatever might wait beyond their bedroom door. 

“Mommy,” Evelyn finks on her mother, squeezing her uncle’s hand and hugging his armored waist, “It’s always Mommy.”

“No…! Daddy hates scary movies, Evie,” Lilac corrects her sister. Platinum blonde hair forms a silken pile on Bruce’s broad shoulder, “It was Uncle Bruce.”

Bruce grimaces, then steps in front of Evelyn and angles his shoulders so his kevlar suit can shield them if need-be, “Way to rat me out.”

“Don’t wake me up at stupid o’clock,” Lilac’s reprimand cuts him to the core, though he shouldn’t and can’t laugh yet, “What happens if you don’t have your Batman hat?”

“Hat?!” Bruce almost fumbles opening their bedroom door.

Evelyn giggles so hard she has no choice but to bury her face in her uncle’s cape.

The handle to Evelyn and Lilac’s door turns before Bruce can get it open, but he hadn’t heard anyone coming. He releases the breath he’d been holding.

Arthur. 

“Uncle Chase is on the case!” Ivaylo, standing at his father’s side so Arthur can cradle Clementine and Ava, cheers.

Bruce half-smiles without teeth at his only nephew, but after he’s appraised the third floor beyond his brother’s naked shoulders. Arthur is narrow enough to see the entire landing around. Nix’s office was already assessed. Arthur’s music room hasn’t been. 

“Uncle Chase is on the case,” Bruce’s echo is so slow; like a space alien learning English, “That’s right.”

Arthur doesn’t have any hands free to reach for his only sibling — getting a door open was impressive all things considered, but the eldest living Wayne must be a professional at having limited dexterity. 

“Bruce!” Ava’s enunciation leaves much to be desired. The one-year-old giggles at her sister wearing their uncle’s cowl. She extends an arm towards him.

Bruce leans and lets her squeeze his nose. He angles his head so his lips sweep over her chunky forearm’s underside. Then Ava's hand drops onto his mouth, expecting the kiss he indulges her with.

Neither brother has a hand free.

Arthur takes advantage of his baby brother being bent over to rise onto his tiptoes and drape his chin over Bruce’s shoulder.

And for what? His brother’s safety? Bruce swings from the city’s powerlines in pointed ears and a cape, shattering small-time criminals to dust and building some gothic parade for himself across the city, yet she is somehow made responsible for his security? She has been dragged into one cult after having only just escaped another? She’ll never voice it, the embittered wound that’s been torn open by a sacrifice she was never actually willing to make.

Nix guides her hand from the stiff ridge at the apex of his thighs in only half-retreat, splaying her long fingers atop his leg. One finger slots in the narrow valley at his hip joint, tracing tendons and sinew that sit far too close to the surface of his skin. She’d need only apply a little pressure to bruise the bone, she thinks, and Arthur almost causes the blemish himself with how hard he’s begun to shake in the driver’s seat. He wouldn’t want her to realise; would want her to believe him the stalwart and immovable pinnacle he wishes he was, because otherwise he thinks he can’t protect her. He can. He does. Just as she does him.

Neither can escape what’s waiting for them among these trees, but they could delay it.

Nix’s knees lay splayed beneath the Continental’s glove compartment – a big car like this, and she thinks it probably was used to store gloves at some. For ladies far sweeter and more delicate than she would ever be. The car itself feels like just another form of mockery in this context. When kept with the collection beneath Wayne tower, it’s just another shiny relic, family history polished and postured until it resembles something akin to pride for a life that is otherwise forgotten. Thomas Wayne likely made this trek more than once, up into nowhere where the trees move of their own accord and the shadows grow eyeballs with which to leer, but he likely wasn’t so openly afraid as his son.

She doesn’t believe her husband’s father was willing as the world would think she is to give away her blood and soul… to whatever devil the stories claim inhabit the wilderness. If Arthur is anything like his father, and he is in a multitude of ways, then the allegorical fist throttling his heart is no stranger to his family. Thomas, however, likely didn’t hunt through the darkness with eyes wide as his son’s now are. They bleed blue tears that pull on the paint he wears as a second face. Those cyan diamonds beneath his beautiful eyes grow legs that extend all the way to his chin. No amount of patting her fingers against his cheeks can clear those runnels. He’ll be loathed to be seen by the Court as the weeping boy.

Small stones and broken tree limbs crack beneath the Lincoln Continental’s tyres as the metal beast begins to roll forward. Arthur has to abandon the hot valley between her thighs in favour of the gearstick – not that she’s sure he’ll ever progress up a gear, given the lethargic manner with which they crawl forward. The engine grinds and vibrates from somewhere beneath them. Ribbed walls clench, washing the passenger seat of a King’s car with the same pearlescent wetness that, up until now, has only stained the tulle of her skirts.

“ I think, um, ” An involuntary roll of her hips snags a loose bundle of tulle between her thighs. “ I think we’re… in it. ” A short, shallow rut against it parts her plush outer lips with a touch that’s so barely-there she must close her eyes not to succumb to the scarcity that wills her to curl into herself. “ Baby, ” It’s supposed to comfort but comes as more of a plea when she tenses her thighs and turns her hips to try and find some crease of knot in the fabric to ride.

Nix draws his hand from the stick, parts his fingers from his palm, and drops a kiss to the trough of his palm. She can smell herself, and the remnants of him. A morning spent peeled apart by his tongue.

Her teeth scrape his skin. She watches the flash of orange and blue as it slides past her window in her periphery. They abandon the sign that triggered his heart’s fleeing at a pace suited more to reluctance than fear. Because he’s fighting both, above the tightness of his trousers. She swallows what feels like a rock. It plummets far into her chest and below, adding its weight to what is already a heavy tangle of nerves between her hips. She wishes she’d calcify, grow numb to the coiled ribbon tying itself in knots at the core of her, or ignore it, so that she could actually help.

“ We’ve been in it. ” Her jaw drops, chin knocking at her husband’s wrist. A fractured breath warms his skin. “ Since we crawled out of that hole in the ground, ” She can’t remember the word ‘oubliette’, “ S-since we ate at that table down there. ”

She ate. He’d wanted her to. Arthur blinks at her.

“ You were pregnant. ”

“ And drugged up to my fuckin’ eyeballs. ” Her laughter pinches in her throat. The culmination of a too-tight corset and the ache in her cunt claims pieces of her. “ I always wondered what that was… ” She muses. Because it felt good.

Nix doesn’t need to turn in her seat to see they’ve cleared the sign that frightened him so much. Hope lays the flat plane of her tongue at his hands heel, and paints a line up toward his middle finger. She kisses that tip, the same he’d dipped against her entrance through her g-string, then lays those fingers against atop her knee. Her other hand reclaims his thigh, fingertips soothing his cock’s head through the fabric. Some darker stain betrays him and reminds her they’re both done for anyway, arriving like this – they might as well be late, too.

Nix keens, drapes herself across the centre console as best she can manage in a dress that’s only functioning as a cage. “ They’ll wait for us, ” She says, shaping each word against the hinge of his jaw. “ You’re… you. They’ll wait. And if they’re watching, ” Lifting her eyes snags the glow of his own through her lashes. Beneath his nerves, something wolfish resides. It always does. Those jade beams watch her face, then dip to where he can smell heat between her thighs. He could eat her. She’d beg him to. “ Then they can watch with the whole fucking forest, can’t they? ”

A long line’s drawn from his collar to his jawline with her tongue. She cranes her neck to taste more and more of him, the pull at the base of her spine a silent scream. She strokes him through his trousers, tip to root, then curls her fingers beneath him to cup his sac.

She’s lush. Cool to the touch on a balmy summer night.

He’d crack the window open were he not afraid of some demonic ectoplasm seeping in and choking them. It would. He’s certain of it.

The desolation’s all too manicured. For every branch that hangs too low, a section of road’s too manicured: freshly painted and paved for a stretch so short, he forgets the Continental glided over it to begin with. Darkness swallows those quiet touches faster than they can register.

Part of him wonders if it’s gotten into her. A chill rolls the length of his spine. Arthur adjusts in a leather seat much too large for him. His frail frame is swallowed by his late father’s toy.

The wheel’s circumference makes his hands look childish. He can hardly see over it. Pushing the seat up until his dark mane almost grazes the roof doesn’t help either.

One shoulder rolls back. Arthur’s thighs straighten, then lengthen just enough for Nix to tuck her spindly fingers further beneath him so the bulge swells in her hand. Werewolf snaps his teeth. Lifts his chin so he doesn’t choke on the drag he just took off his cigarette.

A noxious finger has nowhere to drift. He should crack a window, but won’t. Instead a pale cloud drifts throughout the cabin.

Nix is too used to poison to care. She grins, sinks her teeth into his earlobe where a piercing hole closed up, then nuzzles the shell. Wispy blonde hair slips from her loose style and tickles his throat.

The Beast should turn and kiss her. Needs to, but his heart won’t let him pull his focus from the road.

There is no shoulder to pull over. No maintenance lane. No pullout. No driveway or clearing. Rogue woods encroach on a road that narrows whenever it chooses. The old headlights aren’t meant for this kind of travel. They illuminate what feels like the entire forest, then nothing happens.

Nix is gelid to the touch, yet always runs hot.

The air conditioner’s pumping as cool as the antique can get.

Nix squares her shoulders into that steady reprieve from her wedding gown’s bulk, then rolls her hips over a seam in her thong and kisses a notch beneath her husband’s ear. He tastes of amber. It’s earthy, rich, woody, yet caramelized. Another kiss to that tender patch. She cups him even harder.

His breath hitches.

Nix grins upon watching his Adam’s apple leap.

Arthur drives with both hands on the wheel. One would think he’s captaining a cruise ship. Arthur probably feels like he is. Out the corner of his eye he notices the trees push closer.

Then the forest exhales.

The trees push out.

Shadow spills like bridal veils between boles, occluding any wisp of sky until the ceiling’s pure nettle.

The suspension shifting alerts him. This thing doesn’t turn easily.

Arthur vexes his jaw and pans the road for somewhere — anywhere he can pull over and kiss her until she forgets her own name. She’s aching for it. He can’t help shifting his attention to the dip in that Alexander McQueen ivory skirt where she grinds nothing but fabric.

Doubtless the leather under her’s damp and sticky. Nix still drips from lying beneath him before they left Suite 712. The same demons who forced them into manufactured isolation also cloaked the same trap in fine linen and brass. Result’s the same. Nix keens for touch she isn’t presently receiving. She hasn’t the range to bend over the console and unbutton his trousers immediately.

The smallest gravel turnout’s sprayed by high beams.

Arthur grimaces at the prospect of Nix so little as grazing those jagged stones. It’s not even a clearing. Maybe enough for a ranger’s utility Explorer. He still flips on his turn signal.

Nix snorts, then drops her face into her husband’s collar with zero regard for makeup transfer. She doesn’t care if he ends up wearing foundation, bronzer, blush, and contour. Some sparkle from her highlighter might just leave the Parliament guessing.

Watermelon and a thicker, more lactonic note incense him. Werewolf takes a drag off his cigarette even though his hand shakes, then turns and stamps a hard kiss between his wife’s eyes. 

“You know,” his crooked smile stretches across her brow, “You’re gonna be the death of me.”

“You love me,” she tucks her hand as far under him as she can manage, ignoring the road’s lazy curve that hides what’s beyond it. 

“More than life,” he braces, both hands on the wheel and his left leg restless.

Arthur mars his brow when the Lincoln’s headlights illuminate an embankment.

Gravel protests beneath the ocean liner of a vehicle. Wet leaves cling to the tires. Branches snap — it’s the first sign of life that’s registered beyond the engine’s rumbling.

He can’t see the road.

The brakes need to be babied into halting the car before it's halfway up the embankment with no chance of being able to back out or be rescued by anyone but their captors. Then they wouldn’t be able to drive home.

Nix doesn’t care for the darkness that lacks any contrast. Does the forest sprawl into eternity beyond her window? Is it a clearing? A bog? She lifts her face and grins when her husband shifts gears into park.

Won’t turn off the engine, though.

Nix tucks her bottom lip between her teeth and flicks at her heels to try and kick them off.

He hasn’t removed his hands from the wheel, but turns his head once she bends and adjusts in her seat.

She’s going to impale herself on rocks or step on broken glass. Likely wouldn’t be the first time. Doesn’t mean it’s happening on his watch.

Arthur hasn’t remembered to breathe. One yank and push heaves that driver’s door open. It swings wide enough to creak on its hinges.

A piece of Nix’s soul dies. She’ll fix the hinges.

Arthur’s foot lands on the gravel without a sound — though Whiskey Hollow itself appears to have gone silent.

The Continental’s engine hasn’t stopped humming. Metallic knocks settle once Nix’s door swings open with the same gusto, but doesn’t whine the way his door had.

Arthur curves his right hand over the frame of the roof and faces the asphalt.

Another honeypot for Gotham’s heart.

He swallows ashes. Makes him cough. Arthur grimaces, then notices the road’s no longer painted with double yellow lines.

Nothing.

One lane.

No one can drive past them — they’d collide head-on if not for the utility pocket allocated to them.

Insects and night birds are too terrified to make their presence known. No rustling. No babbling streams. Not even a sough from the wind. There’s nothing. Perhaps by design. Manufactured silence to terrify him into reciting prayers in Slavonic.

Arthur singes himself while flicking his lit cigarette. His pulse thins to gossamer. His legs won’t carry him at first. Instead his shoulders turn on a diagonal. He inclines his chin to make himself as large as possible. 

BEEP-BEEP!

Arthur’s left hand thrusts behind his blazer to swipe his revolver from his waistband. Safety’s unlatched with one flick. He pivots…to find enormous blue eyes gleaming at him from inside the vehicle.

Her smile’s far too wide for their predicament, yet the Lincoln’s interior lighting is warm against her face.

Arthur rolls his eyes, half-splays a hand over his heart while catching his breath, then mutters, “Bitch,” while rounding the car’s enormous hood.

Nix slings back into her seat and preens herself, slipping one foot outside the vehicle.

He catches her chin. .38 in hand, Arthur lunges inside the cabin until his mouth solders to his wife’s.

Nix keens at first, shoulders relaxed and her thighs turning so they can spread wide enough for him to gather tulle and reveal her to the open woods.

Arthur’s feet remain rooted to the earth, yet his back’s to the open.

Nix grins when the feathered ends of his hair tickle her cheeks. She skims her fingers through them, then tilts her head and eases her lips apart.

His tongue dips past hers in one curve. He’s warm to the touch despite how pale his olive complexion’s become. The edge of his nose drags up her cheek until the first kiss ends in a groan. Arthur latches his left hand to the car’s frame to keep himself supported. The other tucks between his wife’s thighs and teases her inner lips under twelve layers of tulle.

She gasps, wilts into his next kiss, then slings her legs outside the car and reaches for his trousers to start unbuttoning them.