#afterpale

up this high above gotham, the wind is vicious. it does not blow so much as it bites. he’s designed the suit to be a lot of things: protective, reinforced, a seal to keep himself away from the world, and even warm, but it can’t prevent the way that the cold chews on you. he’s not sure how selina puts up with it, but she does. 

november 25th. i could say that selina’s better at letting things pass her by. but that’s not true. she’s just as bad as it at i am. falcone is absolute proof of that. but we’ve had to live in different places growing up. she was down there. in the seething mass of hatred and bile. i was up here. looking down at it.

it’s a matter of perspective.

“maybe.” his voice is steady, even, the syllables dropping neat and measured in between them. “but that has to change. eventually.” 

in the recording i almost sound like reál. if our new mayor means what she says, then maybe we agree, but i’m not sure anything will last.

he closes his eyes for a moment and leans closer to the edge of the building, just a little. his boots are mere centimeters away. a single step and he would be in freefall. bruce’s stomach pitches at the memory of it. he hasn’t tried it again since escaping from the precinct. for a moment, he imagines the crash into salt water below. or maybe in one of the places where some of the damage has been repaired, the crash and tumble into asphalt and concrete. 

“now is an opportunity for everyone. whoever’s willing to take it.”

the guy fired the shotgun a few feet away from him. people don't realize how loud a shotgun is. there's a reason that you wear protection in shooting ranges. the impact right against the middle of his spine made him almost stagger forward a step or two before he spun on the spot to face the three guys spilling in through the door. confusion. terror. all aimed at him as they scrambled for their weapons.

bruce's first thought wasn't for him. it was to get in the way of gunfire. he can always take the bullets. he can always take the hits. she doesn't have the benefit of all his kevlar.

he couldn't hear her behind him. not well. did the only thing he could and surged forward, getting there first, hitting harder. he's seen selina fight. he knows where she thrives in, which isn't direct conflict. one-on-one, or weaving in and out of the fight. this isn't her with a gun — it's both of them with their limbs and what weight they can throw behind them. another shot pinged off of his shoulder. he's used to the feeling of a pistol by now. it barely registers. he'll only notice the bruises tomorrow morning, looking in the mirror and counting which ones are new and which ones are healing.

the fight melted into movement, into action and reaction. at some point his hands folded around the barrel of a gun and the stock slammed into the guy's skull, again and again. he knows how hard to push. not enough to kill, but enough to send the man sprawling across the floor.

it ended like this, bruce crouched over a man on the ground, hitting him again and again. the man's nose is a mess of blood. his cheekbone is shattered. one eye is swelling up. he isn't even making noise any more, head lolling to one side, chest heaving.

the sound came back in at some point. he wasn't sure when, but now it’s almost clear.

selina's voice cuts through the haze.

@afterpale : babe, you’re a cold-blooded slaughter. ( selina @ bruce )

bruce closes his eyes for a minute. lets the weight settle as he brings one leg over the man's torso.

he can't think about that. can't think about how this is the easiest part for him, the thing he lapses into when the rest of his mind empties.

his breath steadies. "you're alright?" because that’s what matters.

it has to be the only thing that matters.

"so did i," he says.

even before what happened. even before his parents died. it was a game before then, because he liked monsters and goosebumps books and he lived in a place that he might even call haunted. wayne manor was ancient before it became the orphanage, and then it crumbled further and further until the fire turned it into ash.

after they died, he used to imagine he could change into someone that could do something in that moment. maybe he never stopped.

( gotham project. day 0. the presupposition is that criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot. if i can make fear my tool, then i can be everywhere at once. it won't matter that i'm one person. they won't know where i am. i am no longer a human being. i am anything but bruce wayne, gotham's orphaned prince. )

the fact is that it's easier to be the batman than to be bruce wayne. he has no natural business acumen. his father mainly became a businessperson through a series of small decisions that snowballed; after all, he was a surgeon first.

does that make bruce a vigilante first, now? maybe. he's always been detached from the heights of gotham. outside of the suit he's barely a person. he drifts through wayne tower like a ghost. anywhere can be haunted, even in the middle of gotham. it doesn't even have to be old. it just has to be home to a person who isn't a person.

he stares out of the window. out at the city. it's getting dark now, enough where he folded up the sunglasses and slipped them back into his pocket. below, the element is beginning to stir from its daily slumber. they will slip out onto the streets under the cover of night, illuminated by sodium streetlight, yellow and infected.

they will make prey of people. of innocent people.

"it's easier," bruce says. "to imagine yourself in the dark, i mean. you can be anyone. you can be no one, if you need to be. or if you have to be. you can walk out as someone else."

close your eyes and disappear inside yourself. isn't that what he's always doing? isn't that what he's already done?

the bulletproofing is to keep him from getting hurt. yes. it's also because if he absorbs a full blast of shotgun pellets to the chest and gets up, and keeps going, then he is no longer human. not to them. not to himself.

"i don't want that," says eve, shoving clumps of bloody gauze into the too small trash can. "you almost died. do you realize that?"

she can't help it. she should be angry. furious. outraged, even. the way that dasha wanted her to be furious with villanelle when she stabbed nico with that pitchfork and tried to make it look like it was villanelle's work. but her tone can't quite get there, not with this. at most she's hitting exasperation. looking at villanelle feels like someone's hitting her in the sternum, like she was taught how to relatively recently. it pushes the breath out of her and when she pulls it back in, all she can manage is this. a weak protest.

it doesn’t even feel real. it feels like lip service. it’s the tone she might have used when placating nico about how far she was willing to go to catch this assassin.

eve closes her hands into fists. tight. so, so tight. she can feel the edges of her nails digging into her palms. "isn't the whole thing that you were changing? no more killing? emerging from some chrysalis like some... some good bible-thumping butterfly? i mean, clearly that's not true. look at yourself." she throws out a hand towards villanelle's outfit, bright and obnoxiously patterned. it's a little bloody along the spine still, and it's definitely not the outfit of some good christian girl. 

they're separated just slightly by the barrier of the bathroom door. villanelle is sprawled out on the bed, halfway tilted onto her side in order to peer at her. 

eve stares harder at the trash can. her hands are red. like when she stabbed villanelle for the first time in that paris apartment. the first time they ever really saw each other, exactly as they were. almost separate from her brain, her hands shake a little, miniscule repetitive tremors that she can't even feel. "everything’s broken," eve says, and she means herself and the world and villanelle, too, mere feet away after she tried so hard to push them apart.

her eyes sting. she shuts them tighter.