[ Still water, soft music. The interior of the penthouse suite is a revelation in tasteful extravagance, vertigo-inducing view and all: an incoming early summer thunderstorm clouds the Gotham skyline, splitting the light-polluted night into two weighted tiers, precarious on the edge of its potential weeping.
Bruce is a broken-off piece of that distant rain, sweeping over carpet and marble with the grace of a natural disaster, if more focused than one. He doesn't look twice at the jewelry or the accoutrements that comprise the entirety of the space, even if he notes the choices with the distant curiosity of a man who likes to play I Spy; he takes his chances with the open-doored bedroom and the sleeping behemoth that would, he knows, beeline for his jugular if given the chance, given the silence of the suite everywhere else.
Inhabited, but unoccupied. First impressions don't bode well.
It is an eventuality, then, that the Bat finds Gwenaëlle Wynne-York submerged in the pit of her pool-turned-bathtub, hair like vines winding over mosaics, a revelation in beauty and morbidity. Limbs curled in repose, toes relaxed in cold (he assumes, without having the insane inclination to touch to make sure) water like a butterfly cast in amber. The serenity of the tub's surface never breaks; Bruce watches for minutes that stretch like eons for pockets of air to drift from the corner of Gwen's shapely mouth, and understands, distantly, that they won't.
Alright, he thinks, because he is a man who knows that irrationality of the world waits for no one to adjust to it. Alright, he thinks, because he knows that things aren't alright.
Dead, then, he thinks, because so many people are.
He does not move to pull the body out of its tomb, nor does he start thinking of the declension of events that led to a young woman's untimely demise, not yet; the first thing he does is walk back out to the balcony, lean the small of his back against the balcony landing, and call Jim Gordon on a burner phone.
Penthouse suite, he murmurs. Gives an address to the groggy-sounding detective on the other side, who Bruce can hear between shifting sheets, sleep-slow breath breaking the ambient noise of an otherwise peaceful night. Who is this?, Jim Gordon asks, and Bruce terminates the call. Breaks the cell phone in half, pocketing both pieces in his utility pouch to dispose of later.
The Bat doesn't do well with tragedies. Jim Gordon is Gotham PD's finest, whose work is unimpeachable by virtue of his empathy; Bruce, heels teetering along the edge of round-carved railings, looks over his shoulder into the warm light of the hotel room, and is hit with the olfactory memory of Que Sais-je.
He jumps. A siren wails nearby. Suspended between heaven and hell, Bruce thinks about water (it's always water now, rain and harbors and bathtubs), and opens up his investigation into the Wynne-Yorks, their enemies and their detractors. ]
or, rather, the commotion that fully wakes putinka, harried out of the last of his dregs of sleep by the sound of an argument in the penthouse foyer — gotham's finest, the wynne-york's personal security, the former winning but not quickly — and roused into vocal outrage that pulls gwen surging to the surface, sweeping her hair back from her face, bewildered. the voices filter in, then, and by the time the door has burst open (at least it hasn't been burst through) she's pulled on a robe and is knotting it closed as she emerges, demanding in the most strident tones she has at her disposal,
alright, maybe not the most strident tones she has at her disposal,
what the fuck they think they're playing at.
her appearance renders the exercise— somewhat farcial. gotham pd is not one hundred percent sure what they were looking for, only that it had been considered urgent and even moreso after being informed at the front desk to whom the suite belonged; gordon, delivered an urgent warning about a foreign socialite whose philanthropic efforts locally have made waves? no one had said body, yet, but they hadn't really needed to up until the point at which she wanted an explanation.
she lets them search the place, looking for signs of intrusion, of surveillance; she asks pointed questions about why they're there and who gave them the address and if anyone in this godforsaken city has heard of knocking.
(they did knock. putinka was already barking, by that point.)
apologies are rendered to her, but hand-in-hand with the apologetic news that it would probably be best if she came down to the station in the morning, just for a conversation, she's not in any trouble, of course — someone either had reason for concern, or wanted people to think there was, and that in itself can't just be ignored. gwen, who would certainly like the police to stay out of her business, would love to pretend to ignore it,
she agrees, before closing the door behind them and letting her security detail do their own sweep before leaving her alone. )
Okay, ( she says, quietly, sinking her fingers into putinka's thick fur, ) okay. How about I stay in here with you, tonight.
( no formal report was ever filed with the metropolitan police, but rumours of something happening to her in london have dogged gwen for years, now; missing for less than 24 hours but still, long enough to be remarkable, especially when she'd been a recluse for months afterwards. the mid-point of 2015, gwen had been in the wind as far as public appearances went; it coincided with the wynne-yorks tightening their personal security substantially.
the team she travels with now, hand-picked by felix guilfoyle, are a staple since then. not before. the rumours were fueled by further murmurings that her godfather, septimus beauchamp, had reached out to a private investigator friend of his...but that had gone no where, too, and in the absence of answers there had been newer, more interesting gossip to question, instead.
in contrast to his daughter's ability to go dark for months at a time, emeric wynne-york is too easy to look into; most people like him, unless he's recently fucked their wife, and even most of the fights (physical, usually, but occasionally in the press) he's got into over the years have been made up sooner than later, though he's remained notably cool towards his daughter's highest profile ex-boyfriend, a UK installation artist and short film director about fifteen years her senior with a Twiggy-era supermodel for a mum and an assault charge from the time he took to one of mum's beaus with a tire iron.
wes lode signed a contract with gwen last year to use some of the poetry she wrote about him and several photoshoots they did together in an upcoming project of his; he and gwen still follow each other on instagram, though her account is impersonal and sparsely used. it might not mean much. who's to say.
gwen, maybe. to gordon personally, possibly, because the very wealthy don't like to be woken up in the dead of night by the police. she does text a selfie she took behind one of them rifling through her closet, throwing up a peace sign by her cheekbone, to a friend: )
GPD going through my knicker drawer. I'm a real Gothamite now.
ーhas fucked things up, somewhere. Breaking news. Call it growing pains, call it oversight, call it whatever; a fuckup is a fuckup, and it occurs to him sometime between the hours of 5 to 7 am, deep in his insomnia-driven investigation in a sea of files and dossiers, fingers poised over the sunken keys of his mania-worn keyboard.
The flat-panel television behind him starts playing the Gotham morning news. Painted smiles, filed nails, kitschy mugs reading "I ♥ GOTHAM". Bruce listens to pleasant tenors drone on about Bella Reál ("she's really been stepping up!"), joke about the waterlogged state of the city's downtown ("too soon?"), list names and operations linked to the now-deceased Carmine Falconeー
ーand never discuss, in hushed or theatrically melancholy tones, the untimely demise of a young socialite in her uptown hotel suite.
Unusual.
Bruce always has a low-grade connection to Gotham's tossing and turning: if Batman is how he establishes direct communications with the details of the city's secrets, Bruce Wayne is how he steps back and sees them in broader strokes. Cramped fingers gripped against the edge of his work desk, Bruce stretches his legs and watches the goings-on fade in and out of the news cycle, hollowed eyes reading headline after headline, until he decides...
...that he doesn't have sufficient information to make any cogent call.
(She wasn't breathing, he thinks to himself. There was water, and it was still, and everything felt, without touching anything, so fucking cold.)
Alfred follows Bruce's quick trot up from basement to ground level, offering breakfast just to hear his ward refuse it. The only semblance of normalcy they've managed to maintain.
Bruce asks for Alfred to call Miss Wynne-York, and this time, instead of raising a brow, his surrogate father looks at him with tired, resigned affection. It says everything that Alfred never needs to say out loud: "You're doing that thing to yourself that you're not going to like, again."
Of course, is what Alfred concedes, and Bruce looks over his shoulder, still remembering the burn-sears that cut across Alfred's skin.
Thank you, Bruce says like a prayer, and retreats into the safety of his room, leaving the man he trusts most in his life to make his awkward phone call for him. ]
( it's a brief phonecall — gwen answers it herself, harried and audibly irritated, though she makes a point of assuring mr pennyworth that she isn't annoyed with him, of course, it's just— would he mind terribly if she called him back—
her morning is just really not what she expected it to be. he understands, doesn't he. here, guilfoyle has just arrived, he'll take the call, pass a number on, she'll be in touch just as soon as she can.
it's a popular hotel — one of the few unaffected by the flooding damage — so while gwen does not, in and of herself, necessarily generate headlines now that she definitely isn't a corpse, several photographs are captured of her in the morning being hustled out of the lobby, her great dog's leash in hand, a security detail in a tight phalanx around her, and all of her luggage being removed to decamp immediately from this location. a text pings through to whatever number alfred had been convinced to give up by felix: )
Hi, I won't be reachable at the hotel any more. This number is fine.
( the office space, she complains to guilfoyle; he arranges for the rental of a townhouse with its own private office, a location that feels easier to control and secure than a hotel, although it's closer to the ground than either of them would strictly speaking like. a compromise. she leaves it with him, spending more of her day than she would like drinking shitty police coffee in a shitty police precinct, listening to what is increasingly sounding to her like after-the-fact justification for harassment.
she can't tell if the sincere concern — and it is sincere concern — is for her, or the prospect that she's going to rain hell down on them for wasting her time. or some mixture of the two: that she's going to lawyer up and demand all of their badges, only for them to turn out to have been right to worry in the first place. it's that that holds her off, although she texts a friend in the UK, )
Do your brother or your husband speak American cop?
( and gets back the prompt response, )
Sweetie, Bel and Monty barely speak London cop. What's going on?
That seems like an unfair assessment. Nothing. Don't tell your sister I texted you. Thanks, anyway, Lo.
Don't talk to the filth without a lawyer, sweetie. Call me if you change your mind.
( it's good advice, if weird to get from the wife of a detective inspector, little sister of a brother in homicide — but lo was from gotham before the morrays adopted her, gwen remembers, so maybe she will call her. later. later.
she does not allow the officers to convince her that her dog doesn't need to be there. she convinces them that he does, and they let it be. )
[ The entirety of Gotham PD is caught in a bureaucratic clusterfuck, and Jim Gordon bears the brunt of the publicity-and-paperwork-related nightmare. A martyr for the cause, an example of what happens when a man and his heart takes one too many midnight calls too seriously. He runs the usual gauntlet, is dressed down in the same utilitarian police patois that boils down to "when are you going to get your head out of your ass" (Gordon, wisely, parrots the same question in his mind, and keeps the reciprocal derision in his pocket); the tabloids will have a field day with this one, he thinks, but whether they'll run with the incompetency of an already fragmented system or go with "visiting socialite may be caught up in more hidden agendas unearthed in Gotham" is for them to find out in the span of a very short time.
Bruce listens to the hubbub through an earpiece, awake from his 2-hour morning sleep cycle. (What, you think he doesn't have at least half of the precinct wired?) Barely had to ask Alfred to call Ms. Wynne-York to come to the conclusion that she really isn't dead.
Which is bizarre.
He scratches MEDICAL CONDITION on a piece of paper, and tucks it into his quickly-expanding dossier full of clippings, printouts, photographs. In all his research, he doesn't find a single thing about mysterious drownings in Gwen's periphery, or, in fact, much in the way of the family's medical histories at all. Bruce does not have to consult with WebMD about conditions which inspire people to sleep in water without breathing for prolonged periods of time; no quick Google search will give him anything meaningful about that particular abnormality.
(Maybe he should read a book. Indulge in literature. Think outside of the strict confines of logic and reason.
He isn't quite there, yet.)
Bruce receives Gwen's message, but he leaves her, impossibly, on read. As if the entire city isn't humming with news of her, and as if his attention shouldn't, very rightly, be on her safety or on concepts adjacent. First red flag: is he just ignorant, or does he not give a fuck?
It's long after the sun's begun to set and Bruce has started to prune his insane conspiracy board that he finally sends a message back. ]
Long day for you.
[ Yeah, Captain Fucking Obvious. He is sitting, cross-legged, on the floor of his study, with MEDICAL CONDITION circled 5 times on the crumpled paper next to his knee.
( it has been a long day, and gwen's been so focused on dealing with it that by the time her phone buzzes with a text back from bruce wayne she's nearly forgotten that she texted him in the first place. the scrutiny on her is not familiar — she's used to existing at the edges of that kind of attention, not merely content to be in someone else's public shadow but preferring it, and navigating it as something in any way relevant to her does not come naturally.
it doesn't seem strange to her that she's not at the top of his priority list. she's pretty sure she has no idea what that guy's priorities look like, and that he prefers it that way; they've met a handful of times and she's obviously fine. probably, he assumes that she has it under control.
not that someone assuming that has never bothered her—not that she hasn't been unwarrantedly petulant in the face of having her competence assumed when what she wanted was to be fussed over regardless—
but whatever's going on with bruce and whatever interest she has in whatever's going on with bruce is complicated, and she's found herself unexpectedly with kind of a lot on her plate. she'd set it aside as a less pressing issue she could get back to later (what, the guy who haunts wayne tower and is physically pained by interpersonal interaction and facial expressions is going to go somewhere?), and assumed he'd done much the same about her. besides, he doesn't seem like the type to fuss over anyone. it's probably not one of the, generous estimate, five things his face can do if pressed.
and while everyone else has been tripping over their dicks to get in her way and make getting to the bottom of this harder, now that she looks down at her phone she has the equal parts affectionate and uncharitable thought that it probably took him all day to figure out how to express whatever it is he thinks he's expressing. concern, maybe, or interest. she tucks her foot beneath herself on the sofa, taking her stylus out of her mouth where she'd been zoned out into space to tap out a reply, and discards the idea that he might have agonized over whether or not it's his business. that also doesn't seem like something that bruce wayne really concerns himself with. maybe he had to pitch drafts to pennyworth, does this sound normal to you?
she is not entirely aware that she's smiling as she responds, )
Finally, a proper welcome to the city.
( yes, she does think she's hilarious, thanks for playing. )
I meant to get back to you and Mr Pennyworth sooner, but as I understand half the fucking city is now aware, something came up.
[ Armor is censure, almost as much as a name and a title and a legacy is; Bruce has been sitting here for the past however-the-fuck-many hours, hunched over the outlined sketch of Gwenaëlle Wynne-York written in paper and print, trying to seeー really seeー the shape of her in all of these blank spaces.
Invasive. It occurs to him between sending the text and receiving her reply, that this entire ordeal is a massive infraction on an individual's privacy, and that there are appropriate emotional repercussions to it, some of which may contribute to future patterns of anger and resentment stamped into the strings of Gwen's cello.
She may think she's hilarious, yes. But Bruce thought she was dead (let it fucking go, Bruce). He is aware that she is not aware, and that this playacting requires a lot of bullshitting on both sides.
They are both far too tired for this. And yet. ]
I heard rumors that you were dead.
[ There are Layers to this statement. (Definitely not proofread by Alfred, who would've deleted it and told him to try again, dumbass.) On one hand: he is the one that fucking started this rumor. One the other: she is not dead, and ha ha, isn't this a funny and morbid thing to say to someone who's spent the entire day in the illustrious company of the GPD? On the hypothetical third hand: "ok, but why aren't you dead, and don't ask me why I'm asking."
Whatever dimension they're playing this game of chess on, Bruce doesn't like it. He's also the one that set the pieces up, so. Eat shit, Bruce Wayne. He stretches on the floor of his sitting room, still wearing the same pajama sweats and T-shirt he slept in during the morning, rubbing tension out of his cramped shoulders. ]
So did I, and if I find the cunt that started that rumour I'm going to have incredibly stern words with them.
( when.
she means when.
whether or not stern words is a euphemism remains to be seen, but hey: appearances have been well-established, at this point, to be deceiving. and when was the last time someone led with 'cunt' and followed it up with 'to whom it may concern'. maybe, at best, 'to the cunts it may concern'.
actually, gwenaëlle might start a letter like that, so nevermind— )
The worst part is, I've always slept terribly and I was actually managing to get a decent night here lately but nothing will fuck that quite like having half a dozen incompetent wankers in uniform barge through your door at three in the morning.
[ Papers shift, and Bruce skids back, shoulderblades to the flat of a wall. Gwen's hypothetical threat to his wellbeing is earned; he's not worried about it. Insteadー
ー"A decent night", he reads, and rereads. ]
Sorry to hear that. Especially since your hotel's known for updating their mattresses regularly.
[ Harmless banter, "sorry for your lack of sleep". Implicit, though, is his assumption that she should've been sleeping on those ridiculously-luxe mattresses, which is a weird as fuck thing to point out? Maybe? What do normal people talk about when they're not trying to surreptitiously gather intel about them, but in a well-meaning way?
(It's not that he doesn't care; he does. People are allowed to exist beyond his notice, beyond the realm of his understanding, because god forbid he deny anyone their secrecy, their masks. Butー
ーhe thinks of water and her pale limbs, her music, her bare-boned life history. How much of Gwen's life is hers, and not a footnote for something, someone else?) ]
you know, it's not as if bruce has thus far given the impression of someone with a lot of social deftness. frankly, he hasn't given the impression of a guy who wants to spend a lot of time texting anyone back and forth; he gives the impression of someone who would like to communicate primarily in pained expressions or through his butler. he just doesn't seem like someone who googles hotel reviews in order to make smalltalk, and he certainly doesn't seem like someone who makes enough smalltalk with anyone else for it to just come up.
people have weird interests. maybe he stayed here, once, and someone enthusiastically pitched the quality of the mattresses and their regular replacement to him, and that nugget of information just sat in the back of his head pointlessly until it seemed, this very moment, relevant to the conversation at hand. and maybe there's absolutely nothing more to it than that. and maybe it'd be really fucking paranoid to think that there were,
someone started a rumour that she was dead, hours after she had been sleeping in her bathtub. )
Yeah, they were really nice beds.
(someone was in that room. that is not paranoia, she's certain, that's—
someone thought she was dead. it sinks in as she worries these thoughts between her hands, that the likelihood of someone prank calling the cops is not that high in this very specific instance, that wherever that rumour originated, it probably wasn't a laugh.
suppose then that it isn't the worst thing, that whoever it was tried to get something done about it. but still—
she feels exposed in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact she'd been naked. )
The rental now is fine. I've been thinking of getting something more permanent here, anyway.
[ The funny thing is that Bruce does have an arsenal of insanely specific facts about every fucking establishment in the entirety of Gotham, from where certain motels get their linens to the specific imported sugar that the downtown coffee shop uses for their donuts' glaze. Bruce's esoteric knowledge of his city borders on paranoia, a child's fear of not understanding everything about the one thing that they think, erroneously, that they have under their control; it has never been about cultivating topics of smalltalk, or ways to relate to people.
Gwen is correct. Bruce is not the type.
He is also not the type to text, which is mostly his undoing, here. Very difficult to read the patterns of discomfort or suspicion over the dispassionate relay of words on a screen. No inflections, no body language to make him course correct. Insomnia and the mania that comes along for the ride have likely dulled his judgmentー he shouldn't have done any of these things, shouldn't have reached out. He never does. Why start now?
MEDICAL CONDITION? flutters by his side again, picked up on an errant breeze coming in through the thin sliver of his open study window. Outside, Gotham spreads like a nuclear spill: neon, pulsing, waterlogged.
He thinks of cello strings and his footsteps on tile. He almost doesn't respond. ]
The real estate market's in shambles. Now's as good a time as any to buy.
[ Literally no one wants to be here but the absolute shittiest the city has to offer. Apartment high-rises are selling for a fraction of their usual cost. Gwen is fucking crazy. (He's drawn to that, probably.) ]
( maybe there's no interesting reason why he doesn't get a reply. it's shadowing late into the night, there were delays between answers, who knows what's occupying her that made her set down her phone. a hundred and one things could have side-tracked her. by now, the news of her legal difficulties in gotham has certainly made it back to europe, which means any number of people could be checking in with concern that more urgently requires her attention to reassure—
maybe she's just not the kind of person who says, oh, by the way, I'm headed for bed, we'll pick this up later. all of those things could be true.
they don't pick it up later, but she's got a lot going on, and he has a lot to look into. it isn't even hard to find her; now's a great time to buy, if you don't mind literally everything about everything. increasingly as she nails down what needs to be in place for the wynne-york project she's able to hand off its component parts to the people who'll do the leg-work to make it happen, leaving her free to spend her time securing a realtor and ignoring GPD's calls.
two nights later, the bat signal hangs in the wrong part of the sky. the angle of it is off, and so is the floodlight at gordon's disposal; he checks. it sits dark and idle and above gotham the signal lights up the overcast nightsky anyway, orienting back to a rooftop. one of those penthouses that are up for a pittance in comparison to what they were worth a few years ago, the entire top two floors of a high-rise building and private use of the roof as well with hanging gardens, a pool, even a helipad. gwenaëlle had viewed it earlier in the day, a little spontaneous but who's going to protest the interest or the speed.
it hadn't been difficult, smiling, to see the agent drop the keys into her hand at the end of the tour. she'd locked up as they left, memorised the codes, made a note of which areas were staffed with security. it's a promising prospect, actually, she's seriously considering making the purchase. the ease with which she, specifically, moves through the building like a hot knife isn't in and of itself a worry to her, not when the way she does that is so specific, but it does merit taking some extra precautions in the future for the people whose abilities might also be. interestingly specific.
gwenaëlle sits by the pool, her high heels on the ground next to her, her feet in the water. she lights a cigarette, figuring she has absolutely no idea how long it typically takes this guy to answer his hails and she's only assuming he'll be able to locate the position of where this light seems to be coming from—
it orients to her precise location, but there's no obvious source to find. just gwen, trailing her feet through the water, her purse beside her, smoke curling into the night air. )
[ Gwen makes assumptions; they only happen to be correct. The aforementioned encyclopedic knowledge of Gotham's minutiae means that the Bat triangulates the beacon to a specific highrise in the questionably "good" part of town, to the penthouse of an apartment lightly touched by gentrification and modernization. Vaguely, he entertains the notion of this being a trapー Riddler's quiet hiss still settled in his subconscious like silt, with the pitch of his name, Bruce Wayne, rendered corrosive and acerbic.
He wishes those memories, still fresh and raw, would make him second-guess.
(They don't.)
When the Bat appears, he's heralded by dust floating up from concrete to air, hovering through the diffuse angle of light that the beacon casts. A displacement that speaks to the passage of someoneー something. Squint, and Gwen should be able to make him out between two unlit deck chairs, a questionably-human inkblot.
He doesn't speak. (Bruce has a feeling that opening his mouth would blow whatever cover he may or may not possess; a musical ear is adept at identifying close cadences. Oh well.) Instead, the Bat tips his chin towards the streak of yellow bisecting the dark of the night sky, and inquires, without inquiring, what the hell this is about. ]
( miss wynne-york is slight in the first place — athletic but petite, looks like she might blow away in a strong breeze — and when she pulls her feet up out of the pool and stands, barefoot, she's all the slighter for not having the heels she is never otherwise without. she extinguishes her cigarette before she's all the way up, and lifts her hand up,
closes it into a fist and the signal winks out. she takes a breath, studying him, unsettled by his silence and not sure if that's the point of it or something else. she stops, just within her arm's reach of him, one eyebrow raised.
the outfit is a lot, in person. )
In some literature on the subject of nymphs,
( is almost certainly not how he expected this conversation to start, )
the men writing these books dutifully record that they are, as a species, known for killing men who watch them bathe.
( gwen jabs him in the chest with her finger. she misjudges both her hand and his armor, very slightly, but she's working herself up to the kind of mood where jolting her joints harder than she expected to really doesn't make a blind bit of difference— )
It is my personally held belief that this reflects less on my kind and more on the fact that men have been fucking perverts since the dawn of mankind and women of every species have always known they were going to have to deal with that themselves. It's interesting to me, the gulf between what is seen and what is understood.
I think you were in my bathroom earlier this week. I would like to know why. We may be revisiting point one in this conversation.
[ Is it the bat ears? It's probably the bat ears. A guy in kevlar is imposing, but a guy with two little protrusions on his head is just unnervingly weirdー surely he's not looking to be taken seriously with those nubs growing from his mask.
And yet.
He doesn't move. Doesn't flinch, either, even when the floodlights go off and he's left, chillingly, to contend with nymphs and the possibility that he's in over his head, whichー well. He is, a majority of the time. Even with preparation, even with two decades of self-training, he keeps finding himself stumbling over these outliers that he fails (fails, every fucking time) to anticipate. It makes him feel like a child again, heels of his polished dress shoes buried in a puddle, watching bodies fall.
Gwen jabs him like a gunshot. "My kind", she says, and his mind races with the impossible possibility that he is contending with someone who is
not human.
(water, the chill of her skin, her song stringing his nerves raw. context clues.)
His silence is less about upholding the mystique of a grown-ass man who masquerades as fuzzy winged vermin, and more about letting his synapses breathe. Instinct tells him he should keep his fucking mouth shut, to give away less than he already has, butー ]
Not to watch you bathe.
[ Answering her question, without actually saying anything. Implicit: "we don't need to revisit point one, as I had no idea you would be sleeping underwater in the first place. What the fuck is that about?"
His chin angles to the side; he's done this before. Some obvious averting of gaze, a comfort in tracing shadows instead of meeting expectations in eyes. It's only his posture that's different, more comfortable in his armor than his suit or civilians. Bruce Wayne wore his designers poorly, but Batman wears his ridiculous excuse for a costume with ludicrous dignity. ]
( from the narrowing of her eyes, gwenaëlle has maybe not immediately ruled out revisiting point one—oh, you're not a pervert, leather-furry?—but the look lingers too long for that to be all. the slight tilt of her head. the way she is listening to him, very fucking closely. )
Great,
( flatly, )
then you won't mind explaining what you were doing. I realize Gotham is really going through it at the moment, but I promise you philanthropy isn't always a fucking crime.
( would she have made the dig if she knew she were talking to thomas wayne's son?
—maybe. gwenaëlle isn't known for pulling her punches, especially not when she's annoyed. in his periphery, her eyes are larger and darker than they were a moment ago; the shape of her pupil odd, different, and then gone. ordinary. easy to have missed, when and if he refocuses on her. )
I intend to spend time in this city. If that's going to be a problem, I'd like to work it out ahead of time.
[ Bruce blinks, under his mask. An errant wind weaves through the space between them on this unnecessarily high rooftop, moving matter and particulate around them, leaving dust to glitter over the too-turquoise water of the lit and heated swimming pool to their right.
Silent, again. Gwen's forward propulsion and would-be aggression slips over the Bat, catching in the ink-black of his mental armor for a breath of a moment before sliding and pooling by his feet. He, after all, agrees with her: philanthropy is not always synonymous with mustache-twirling villains and their hairless pets, and she is owed, to some degree, an explanation for why a strange man in a bat costume would invade the privacy of her space.
It's too bad that he doesn't have a good excuse. (Never does.) Observe the vigilante in his natural habitat, chewing over unarticulated words before he can spit out the ones that taste the least unsavory.
Gloved hands flex and unflex, once, twice. ]
Organizing a fundraiser is a transient act of good, [ he finally manages. In the vague, oblong lighting of this isolated space, Gwen seems fuzzy and obscure; no less lovely for the way shadows cut across her features, asymmetrical and serrated, but unknowable. Impenetrable.
(He does not wonder what will happen if he surges forward and tips her balance towards the water's edge; even he doesn't have that particular death wish.) ]
You decided to stay here, in Gotham. [ Which is what Gwen just corroborated, and which is the root cause of his curiosity. He voices it: ] Why?
[ Like. Literally Why. In this day and age, a GoFundMe from the other side of the world can do just as much, soー
ーwhy? Who is she indebted to, or what's holding her attention? (If she's not human, then even more so: what could a nymph want from a city like this?) ]
( it's a sort of telling narrowing of her eyes as she studies him more closely— the familiar, the strange. the familiar in the strange, gwenaëlle hyper-attuned already, restless energy thrumming her nerves. she exudes a confidence she doesn't feel, an animal backed into a corner and coming out with her teeth bared.
he has no idea about her teeth. but she hasn't tested them, either— )
That's a great question.
( it's a distinct voice he asks it in. )
Here is the thing, you have invaded my privacy for apparently no reason except having no concept of what is and is not your fucking business, ruined a perfectly good hotel suite and tied me up in overly-anxious police officers who are more likely to shoot themselves in the dicks than do anything useful if I am threatened.
So I do not feel obligated to answer your questions until I'm satisfied with the answers to mine.
( probably she doesn't actually mean it when she says, )
If you want to make it even and get a straight answer without giving me anything for it, I should get to see you naked, too.
( which isn't to say she would stop him if he took her up on it. it's a joke! unless it works, in which case she's a strategic genius.
she is not a strategic genius, she's just pissed off. )
[ "You have invaded my privacy", Gwen says to him, and he stares at her with a blankness that says yes, I do weird things, can't you tell? A mindset he'll never quite ameliorate, even on the heels of his latest caper.
Batman is not a Good Person; neither is Bruce Wayne. "Virtuous" is not a trait listed in his frankly sparse list of positive attributes on his CV, which means that he, in fact, believes that he doesn't owe Gwen an explanation despite him wanting oneー
ーwhich is fucked, morally. Hm. Bruce, seeing Gwen's fangs out (metaphorically), considers his options. ]
I could show you my ankles.
[ He says, dryly. Humor! Very Victorian of him, to imply that uncovering a sliver of skin on his otherwise entirely covered body is the same as getting undressed. For an insane half-breath, it seems like he'll leave it at that, butー
ーwell. Off goes one glove, peeled like carbon snakeskin. There is a human hand underneath all that armor, and it flexes with bruised knuckles, a cut on the side of it bisecting the skin.
The same cut that Bruce had in the cafe, if Gwen noticed. ]
( it's all the small things, all at once. the voice. the way that he holds himself. the pointed hotel trivia and odd balance of distance and interest. why had she come to batman's attention? he's spending his nights pursuing criminals and he ends up in her bedroom, why, what had she done—
gwenaëlle seizes his hand between both of her own and studies it more intensely than really seems necessary. when she looks up, her eyes are
different.
bigger than they were before, and not only because they're open so wide. blue-black where they had been white, but only at the very edges; her slit-pupils blown out wide, dazzling as a prism, like stars. distracting. they'd be lovely, maybe, if she weren't narrowing them at him that way. when she speaks, there is a command in her voice that reaches past the part of him that decides what he does or does not do and bypasses it entirely— )
Take off your cowl.
( what, she's just going to ask the guy who clearly doesn't give a shit about answering her questions if he's bruce wayne?
[ Midnight, encased in the hollows of two eyes. Instinct grabs Bruce by the spine, tries to tug on nerves that will inspire him to look away, but it's too little too late: the command has already crawled past his tympanic membrane, slithered into his brain, made a nest in his hindbrain.
Take off your cowl.
He doesn't have an antivenom for this brand of compulsion. It spreads through him, noxious and affectionate; invisible arms wrapped around him from behind, whispering. Take off your cowl.Take off your cowl.
Fingers hook under the space where the mask segments under his chin. The wrongness of it all is nauseating, but the freefall anxiety isn't enoughー
ーthe cowl slips off. Under the armor of kevlar and carbon, Batman is just A Man.
He's Bruce Wayne. Sunken eyes, dark circles. The reveal makes him sick. ]
( gwenaëlle is capable of great subtlety — in this, if in few other things at all — capable of weaving her own emotions into song and spirit as if they belong to the heart that beats time to them. capable of winding her fingers through someone's heart like she's tangling them coaxingly in their hair; of making a command feel like a desire.
who wouldn't want to give her what she wants? how natural, for the want to be his own—
this, her eyes cold diamonds more unsettling for being set in the human-seeming of her face, is not that. it is not meant to be that. she shows her hand, deliberately, in forcing him to show his,
she doesn't think he'll see the equity for what she means it to be, or care much for it, but it matters to her. and even as he'd lifted his hands, she hadn't been one hundred percent certain what she'd find beneath it.
but there he is. )
Huh.
( she smudges the black around his eyes with her thumb, and tilts her head, studying him, stepping back out of easy reach of his hands as she relinquishes her grip upon him, physical and figurative. )
That makes sense. I didn't know what kind of fire I was playing with, did I. Then again, you thought everything you felt when I played for you was your own, so we were both in the dark.
( this is—
exposure, she thinks. truly. more than nakedness, which is the least of her own concerns. and she feels a little more at ease, rendering them both vulnerable if anyone has to be, which is fucked up but in a way she's already decided she's accepted about herself. a hum, just a sound without a pull, a placeholder for a thought, )
[ Oily eyeliner, listing on a pale face. Bruce-Bat-Wayne is both taller and smaller like this, unmasked in full regalia, black makeup pulled down from under his eye to the sharp knife of his cheekbone.
He cools from the molten heat of that proffered command; shame starts to corrode him from where his face is exposed, so at odds with the ironclad security of his costume. Bruce Wayne is a construct that people like the Riddler speak about with disdain, that he himself regards with distant contemptー it unnerves him, to be associated with that particular part of his identity at this time of night.
Even under the poor lighting of the rooftop, Gwen should be able to see how Bruce flinches at the word even, as if the double-edged sword has cut a fraction too deep this time. Dark eyes flitting to the side, venting discomfort. His hands furl into fists by his side, and bloom again with long fingers grasping at nothing in particular. ]
You didn't know, [ "what kind of fire she was playing with," ] and I knew less.
( her jaw works as she considers that, considers him— )
You can put it back on.
( implicit: if it makes him more comfortable. that she doesn't say that, out loud, is mostly because she wonders if he might dig his heels in against his own comfort if she were to lampshade it—resist the accommodation just to prove he doesn't need it. maybe he won't like the idea she gives him permission, either way, but
she got what she wanted. he can put it back on. the in-between of it is strange, like he's neither one nor the other, which is...familiar. that's the problem with bruce wayne, so far, his familiarity.
at length, )
I don't owe you an explanation, for the record, but equally you already fucking have one because I've consistently been informing you of everything I do in Gotham and why since we met. You can look up everything to do with—
( that's where she stops.
it clicks, in an instant: the foundation, the programmes, her father. there is information readily available at the fingertips of even someone with fewer resources than bruce wayne, if they're dedicated and interested. flick through all the getty water-marked professional event shots, read the financial transparency reports, the interviews. there is a wealth of information,
but not about her. increasingly, she's made sure of that; limited her footprint, her public profile. it exists, because it's unavoidable, but she's a private person and it isn't actually that difficult for her to maintain that privacy.
[ Right, on all accounts: even the hint of consideration towards his comfort curdles him. But the mask pulls back on, obscuring the half of him that might act as more common identifiers, even if it really does shit-all now: his jaw's too distinctive, his mouth is too Bruce Wayne.
But, reciprocally: Gwen's inwards-facing exasperation. Bruce, if he were pettier, might've smiled at her outburst, understanding it for what it is. Sometimes, it's the obfuscation that gives creatures like them away.
Doesn't it fucking suck, looking into a mirror? ]
Yeah.
[ He says, for "oh fuck's sake". Asshole. It's really too bad that he genuinely gets no satisfaction from this, and "yeah" winds up sounding more like "don't worry, I'm just as bugfuck nuts for relating".
His cape whips in the wind. Just to add more surrealism to the ever-growing pile. ]
Your fans gave me more insight on you than your own social media did.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Bruce is a broken-off piece of that distant rain, sweeping over carpet and marble with the grace of a natural disaster, if more focused than one. He doesn't look twice at the jewelry or the accoutrements that comprise the entirety of the space, even if he notes the choices with the distant curiosity of a man who likes to play I Spy; he takes his chances with the open-doored bedroom and the sleeping behemoth that would, he knows, beeline for his jugular if given the chance, given the silence of the suite everywhere else.
Inhabited, but unoccupied. First impressions don't bode well.
It is an eventuality, then, that the Bat finds Gwenaëlle Wynne-York submerged in the pit of her pool-turned-bathtub, hair like vines winding over mosaics, a revelation in beauty and morbidity. Limbs curled in repose, toes relaxed in cold (he assumes, without having the insane inclination to touch to make sure) water like a butterfly cast in amber. The serenity of the tub's surface never breaks; Bruce watches for minutes that stretch like eons for pockets of air to drift from the corner of Gwen's shapely mouth, and understands, distantly, that they won't.
Alright, he thinks, because he is a man who knows that irrationality of the world waits for no one to adjust to it. Alright, he thinks, because he knows that things aren't alright.
Dead, then, he thinks, because so many people are.
He does not move to pull the body out of its tomb, nor does he start thinking of the declension of events that led to a young woman's untimely demise, not yet; the first thing he does is walk back out to the balcony, lean the small of his back against the balcony landing, and call Jim Gordon on a burner phone.
Penthouse suite, he murmurs. Gives an address to the groggy-sounding detective on the other side, who Bruce can hear between shifting sheets, sleep-slow breath breaking the ambient noise of an otherwise peaceful night. Who is this?, Jim Gordon asks, and Bruce terminates the call. Breaks the cell phone in half, pocketing both pieces in his utility pouch to dispose of later.
The Bat doesn't do well with tragedies. Jim Gordon is Gotham PD's finest, whose work is unimpeachable by virtue of his empathy; Bruce, heels teetering along the edge of round-carved railings, looks over his shoulder into the warm light of the hotel room, and is hit with the olfactory memory of Que Sais-je.
He jumps. A siren wails nearby. Suspended between heaven and hell, Bruce thinks about water (it's always water now, rain and harbors and bathtubs), and opens up his investigation into the Wynne-Yorks, their enemies and their detractors. ]
no subject
or, rather, the commotion that fully wakes putinka, harried out of the last of his dregs of sleep by the sound of an argument in the penthouse foyer — gotham's finest, the wynne-york's personal security, the former winning but not quickly — and roused into vocal outrage that pulls gwen surging to the surface, sweeping her hair back from her face, bewildered. the voices filter in, then, and by the time the door has burst open (at least it hasn't been burst through) she's pulled on a robe and is knotting it closed as she emerges, demanding in the most strident tones she has at her disposal,
alright, maybe not the most strident tones she has at her disposal,
what the fuck they think they're playing at.
her appearance renders the exercise— somewhat farcial. gotham pd is not one hundred percent sure what they were looking for, only that it had been considered urgent and even moreso after being informed at the front desk to whom the suite belonged; gordon, delivered an urgent warning about a foreign socialite whose philanthropic efforts locally have made waves? no one had said body, yet, but they hadn't really needed to up until the point at which she wanted an explanation.
she lets them search the place, looking for signs of intrusion, of surveillance; she asks pointed questions about why they're there and who gave them the address and if anyone in this godforsaken city has heard of knocking.
(they did knock. putinka was already barking, by that point.)
apologies are rendered to her, but hand-in-hand with the apologetic news that it would probably be best if she came down to the station in the morning, just for a conversation, she's not in any trouble, of course — someone either had reason for concern, or wanted people to think there was, and that in itself can't just be ignored. gwen, who would certainly like the police to stay out of her business, would love to pretend to ignore it,
she agrees, before closing the door behind them and letting her security detail do their own sweep before leaving her alone. )
Okay, ( she says, quietly, sinking her fingers into putinka's thick fur, ) okay. How about I stay in here with you, tonight.
( no formal report was ever filed with the metropolitan police, but rumours of something happening to her in london have dogged gwen for years, now; missing for less than 24 hours but still, long enough to be remarkable, especially when she'd been a recluse for months afterwards. the mid-point of 2015, gwen had been in the wind as far as public appearances went; it coincided with the wynne-yorks tightening their personal security substantially.
the team she travels with now, hand-picked by felix guilfoyle, are a staple since then. not before. the rumours were fueled by further murmurings that her godfather, septimus beauchamp, had reached out to a private investigator friend of his...but that had gone no where, too, and in the absence of answers there had been newer, more interesting gossip to question, instead.
in contrast to his daughter's ability to go dark for months at a time, emeric wynne-york is too easy to look into; most people like him, unless he's recently fucked their wife, and even most of the fights (physical, usually, but occasionally in the press) he's got into over the years have been made up sooner than later, though he's remained notably cool towards his daughter's highest profile ex-boyfriend, a UK installation artist and short film director about fifteen years her senior with a Twiggy-era supermodel for a mum and an assault charge from the time he took to one of mum's beaus with a tire iron.
wes lode signed a contract with gwen last year to use some of the poetry she wrote about him and several photoshoots they did together in an upcoming project of his; he and gwen still follow each other on instagram, though her account is impersonal and sparsely used. it might not mean much. who's to say.
gwen, maybe. to gordon personally, possibly, because the very wealthy don't like to be woken up in the dead of night by the police. she does text a selfie she took behind one of them rifling through her closet, throwing up a peace sign by her cheekbone, to a friend: )
GPD going through my knicker drawer. I'm a real Gothamite now.
no subject
ーhas fucked things up, somewhere. Breaking news. Call it growing pains, call it oversight, call it whatever; a fuckup is a fuckup, and it occurs to him sometime between the hours of 5 to 7 am, deep in his insomnia-driven investigation in a sea of files and dossiers, fingers poised over the sunken keys of his mania-worn keyboard.
The flat-panel television behind him starts playing the Gotham morning news. Painted smiles, filed nails, kitschy mugs reading "I ♥ GOTHAM". Bruce listens to pleasant tenors drone on about Bella Reál ("she's really been stepping up!"), joke about the waterlogged state of the city's downtown ("too soon?"), list names and operations linked to the now-deceased Carmine Falconeー
ーand never discuss, in hushed or theatrically melancholy tones, the untimely demise of a young socialite in her uptown hotel suite.
Unusual.
Bruce always has a low-grade connection to Gotham's tossing and turning: if Batman is how he establishes direct communications with the details of the city's secrets, Bruce Wayne is how he steps back and sees them in broader strokes. Cramped fingers gripped against the edge of his work desk, Bruce stretches his legs and watches the goings-on fade in and out of the news cycle, hollowed eyes reading headline after headline, until he decides...
...that he doesn't have sufficient information to make any cogent call.
(She wasn't breathing, he thinks to himself. There was water, and it was still, and everything felt, without touching anything, so fucking cold.)
Alfred follows Bruce's quick trot up from basement to ground level, offering breakfast just to hear his ward refuse it. The only semblance of normalcy they've managed to maintain.
Bruce asks for Alfred to call Miss Wynne-York, and this time, instead of raising a brow, his surrogate father looks at him with tired, resigned affection. It says everything that Alfred never needs to say out loud: "You're doing that thing to yourself that you're not going to like, again."
Of course, is what Alfred concedes, and Bruce looks over his shoulder, still remembering the burn-sears that cut across Alfred's skin.
Thank you, Bruce says like a prayer, and retreats into the safety of his room, leaving the man he trusts most in his life to make his awkward phone call for him. ]
no subject
her morning is just really not what she expected it to be. he understands, doesn't he. here, guilfoyle has just arrived, he'll take the call, pass a number on, she'll be in touch just as soon as she can.
it's a popular hotel — one of the few unaffected by the flooding damage — so while gwen does not, in and of herself, necessarily generate headlines now that she definitely isn't a corpse, several photographs are captured of her in the morning being hustled out of the lobby, her great dog's leash in hand, a security detail in a tight phalanx around her, and all of her luggage being removed to decamp immediately from this location. a text pings through to whatever number alfred had been convinced to give up by felix: )
Hi, I won't be reachable at the hotel any more. This number is fine.
( the office space, she complains to guilfoyle; he arranges for the rental of a townhouse with its own private office, a location that feels easier to control and secure than a hotel, although it's closer to the ground than either of them would strictly speaking like. a compromise. she leaves it with him, spending more of her day than she would like drinking shitty police coffee in a shitty police precinct, listening to what is increasingly sounding to her like after-the-fact justification for harassment.
she can't tell if the sincere concern — and it is sincere concern — is for her, or the prospect that she's going to rain hell down on them for wasting her time. or some mixture of the two: that she's going to lawyer up and demand all of their badges, only for them to turn out to have been right to worry in the first place. it's that that holds her off, although she texts a friend in the UK, )
Do your brother or your husband speak American cop?
( and gets back the prompt response, )
Sweetie, Bel and Monty barely speak London cop. What's going on?
That seems like an unfair assessment. Nothing. Don't tell your sister I texted you. Thanks, anyway, Lo.
Don't talk to the filth without a lawyer, sweetie. Call me if you change your mind.
( it's good advice, if weird to get from the wife of a detective inspector, little sister of a brother in homicide — but lo was from gotham before the morrays adopted her, gwen remembers, so maybe she will call her. later. later.
she does not allow the officers to convince her that her dog doesn't need to be there. she convinces them that he does, and they let it be. )
no subject
Bruce listens to the hubbub through an earpiece, awake from his 2-hour morning sleep cycle. (What, you think he doesn't have at least half of the precinct wired?) Barely had to ask Alfred to call Ms. Wynne-York to come to the conclusion that she really isn't dead.
Which is bizarre.
He scratches MEDICAL CONDITION on a piece of paper, and tucks it into his quickly-expanding dossier full of clippings, printouts, photographs. In all his research, he doesn't find a single thing about mysterious drownings in Gwen's periphery, or, in fact, much in the way of the family's medical histories at all. Bruce does not have to consult with WebMD about conditions which inspire people to sleep in water without breathing for prolonged periods of time; no quick Google search will give him anything meaningful about that particular abnormality.
(Maybe he should read a book. Indulge in literature. Think outside of the strict confines of logic and reason.
He isn't quite there, yet.)
Bruce receives Gwen's message, but he leaves her, impossibly, on read. As if the entire city isn't humming with news of her, and as if his attention shouldn't, very rightly, be on her safety or on concepts adjacent. First red flag: is he just ignorant, or does he not give a fuck?
It's long after the sun's begun to set and Bruce has started to prune his insane conspiracy board that he finally sends a message back. ]
Long day for you.
[ Yeah, Captain Fucking Obvious. He is sitting, cross-legged, on the floor of his study, with MEDICAL CONDITION circled 5 times on the crumpled paper next to his knee.
Seriously, what the hell. ]
no subject
it doesn't seem strange to her that she's not at the top of his priority list. she's pretty sure she has no idea what that guy's priorities look like, and that he prefers it that way; they've met a handful of times and she's obviously fine. probably, he assumes that she has it under control.
not that someone assuming that has never bothered her—not that she hasn't been unwarrantedly petulant in the face of having her competence assumed when what she wanted was to be fussed over regardless—
but whatever's going on with bruce and whatever interest she has in whatever's going on with bruce is complicated, and she's found herself unexpectedly with kind of a lot on her plate. she'd set it aside as a less pressing issue she could get back to later (what, the guy who haunts wayne tower and is physically pained by interpersonal interaction and facial expressions is going to go somewhere?), and assumed he'd done much the same about her. besides, he doesn't seem like the type to fuss over anyone. it's probably not one of the, generous estimate, five things his face can do if pressed.
and while everyone else has been tripping over their dicks to get in her way and make getting to the bottom of this harder, now that she looks down at her phone she has the equal parts affectionate and uncharitable thought that it probably took him all day to figure out how to express whatever it is he thinks he's expressing. concern, maybe, or interest. she tucks her foot beneath herself on the sofa, taking her stylus out of her mouth where she'd been zoned out into space to tap out a reply, and discards the idea that he might have agonized over whether or not it's his business. that also doesn't seem like something that bruce wayne really concerns himself with. maybe he had to pitch drafts to pennyworth, does this sound normal to you?
she is not entirely aware that she's smiling as she responds, )
Finally, a proper welcome to the city.
( yes, she does think she's hilarious, thanks for playing. )
I meant to get back to you and Mr Pennyworth sooner, but as I understand half the fucking city is now aware, something came up.
no subject
Invasive. It occurs to him between sending the text and receiving her reply, that this entire ordeal is a massive infraction on an individual's privacy, and that there are appropriate emotional repercussions to it, some of which may contribute to future patterns of anger and resentment stamped into the strings of Gwen's cello.
She may think she's hilarious, yes. But Bruce thought she was dead (let it fucking go, Bruce). He is aware that she is not aware, and that this playacting requires a lot of bullshitting on both sides.
They are both far too tired for this. And yet. ]
I heard rumors that you were dead.
[ There are Layers to this statement. (Definitely not proofread by Alfred, who would've deleted it and told him to try again, dumbass.) On one hand: he is the one that fucking started this rumor. One the other: she is not dead, and ha ha, isn't this a funny and morbid thing to say to someone who's spent the entire day in the illustrious company of the GPD? On the hypothetical third hand: "ok, but why aren't you dead, and don't ask me why I'm asking."
Whatever dimension they're playing this game of chess on, Bruce doesn't like it. He's also the one that set the pieces up, so. Eat shit, Bruce Wayne. He stretches on the floor of his sitting room, still wearing the same pajama sweats and T-shirt he slept in during the morning, rubbing tension out of his cramped shoulders. ]
no subject
( when.
she means when.
whether or not stern words is a euphemism remains to be seen, but hey: appearances have been well-established, at this point, to be deceiving. and when was the last time someone led with 'cunt' and followed it up with 'to whom it may concern'. maybe, at best, 'to the cunts it may concern'.
actually, gwenaëlle might start a letter like that, so nevermind— )
The worst part is, I've always slept terribly and I was actually managing to get a decent night here lately but nothing will fuck that quite like having half a dozen incompetent wankers in uniform barge through your door at three in the morning.
no subject
ー"A decent night", he reads, and rereads. ]
Sorry to hear that. Especially since your hotel's known for updating their mattresses regularly.
[ Harmless banter, "sorry for your lack of sleep". Implicit, though, is his assumption that she should've been sleeping on those ridiculously-luxe mattresses, which is a weird as fuck thing to point out? Maybe? What do normal people talk about when they're not trying to surreptitiously gather intel about them, but in a well-meaning way?
(It's not that he doesn't care; he does. People are allowed to exist beyond his notice, beyond the realm of his understanding, because god forbid he deny anyone their secrecy, their masks. Butー
ーhe thinks of water and her pale limbs, her music, her bare-boned life history. How much of Gwen's life is hers, and not a footnote for something, someone else?) ]
no subject
gwen stares down at her phone, and—
you know, it's not as if bruce has thus far given the impression of someone with a lot of social deftness. frankly, he hasn't given the impression of a guy who wants to spend a lot of time texting anyone back and forth; he gives the impression of someone who would like to communicate primarily in pained expressions or through his butler. he just doesn't seem like someone who googles hotel reviews in order to make smalltalk, and he certainly doesn't seem like someone who makes enough smalltalk with anyone else for it to just come up.
people have weird interests. maybe he stayed here, once, and someone enthusiastically pitched the quality of the mattresses and their regular replacement to him, and that nugget of information just sat in the back of his head pointlessly until it seemed, this very moment, relevant to the conversation at hand. and maybe there's absolutely nothing more to it than that. and maybe it'd be really fucking paranoid to think that there were,
someone started a rumour that she was dead, hours after she had been sleeping in her bathtub. )
Yeah, they were really nice beds.
( someone was in that room. that is not paranoia, she's certain, that's—
someone thought she was dead. it sinks in as she worries these thoughts between her hands, that the likelihood of someone prank calling the cops is not that high in this very specific instance, that wherever that rumour originated, it probably wasn't a laugh.
suppose then that it isn't the worst thing, that whoever it was tried to get something done about it. but still—
she feels exposed in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact she'd been naked. )
The rental now is fine. I've been thinking of getting something more permanent here, anyway.
no subject
Gwen is correct. Bruce is not the type.
He is also not the type to text, which is mostly his undoing, here. Very difficult to read the patterns of discomfort or suspicion over the dispassionate relay of words on a screen. No inflections, no body language to make him course correct. Insomnia and the mania that comes along for the ride have likely dulled his judgmentー he shouldn't have done any of these things, shouldn't have reached out. He never does. Why start now?
MEDICAL CONDITION? flutters by his side again, picked up on an errant breeze coming in through the thin sliver of his open study window. Outside, Gotham spreads like a nuclear spill: neon, pulsing, waterlogged.
He thinks of cello strings and his footsteps on tile. He almost doesn't respond. ]
The real estate market's in shambles. Now's as good a time as any to buy.
[ Literally no one wants to be here but the absolute shittiest the city has to offer. Apartment high-rises are selling for a fraction of their usual cost. Gwen is fucking crazy. (He's drawn to that, probably.) ]
no subject
maybe she's just not the kind of person who says, oh, by the way, I'm headed for bed, we'll pick this up later. all of those things could be true.
they don't pick it up later, but she's got a lot going on, and he has a lot to look into. it isn't even hard to find her; now's a great time to buy, if you don't mind literally everything about everything. increasingly as she nails down what needs to be in place for the wynne-york project she's able to hand off its component parts to the people who'll do the leg-work to make it happen, leaving her free to spend her time securing a realtor and ignoring GPD's calls.
two nights later, the bat signal hangs in the wrong part of the sky. the angle of it is off, and so is the floodlight at gordon's disposal; he checks. it sits dark and idle and above gotham the signal lights up the overcast nightsky anyway, orienting back to a rooftop. one of those penthouses that are up for a pittance in comparison to what they were worth a few years ago, the entire top two floors of a high-rise building and private use of the roof as well with hanging gardens, a pool, even a helipad. gwenaëlle had viewed it earlier in the day, a little spontaneous but who's going to protest the interest or the speed.
it hadn't been difficult, smiling, to see the agent drop the keys into her hand at the end of the tour. she'd locked up as they left, memorised the codes, made a note of which areas were staffed with security. it's a promising prospect, actually, she's seriously considering making the purchase. the ease with which she, specifically, moves through the building like a hot knife isn't in and of itself a worry to her, not when the way she does that is so specific, but it does merit taking some extra precautions in the future for the people whose abilities might also be. interestingly specific.
gwenaëlle sits by the pool, her high heels on the ground next to her, her feet in the water. she lights a cigarette, figuring she has absolutely no idea how long it typically takes this guy to answer his hails and she's only assuming he'll be able to locate the position of where this light seems to be coming from—
it orients to her precise location, but there's no obvious source to find. just gwen, trailing her feet through the water, her purse beside her, smoke curling into the night air. )
no subject
He wishes those memories, still fresh and raw, would make him second-guess.
(They don't.)
When the Bat appears, he's heralded by dust floating up from concrete to air, hovering through the diffuse angle of light that the beacon casts. A displacement that speaks to the passage of someoneー something. Squint, and Gwen should be able to make him out between two unlit deck chairs, a questionably-human inkblot.
He doesn't speak. (Bruce has a feeling that opening his mouth would blow whatever cover he may or may not possess; a musical ear is adept at identifying close cadences. Oh well.) Instead, the Bat tips his chin towards the streak of yellow bisecting the dark of the night sky, and inquires, without inquiring, what the hell this is about. ]
no subject
closes it into a fist and the signal winks out. she takes a breath, studying him, unsettled by his silence and not sure if that's the point of it or something else. she stops, just within her arm's reach of him, one eyebrow raised.
the outfit is a lot, in person. )
In some literature on the subject of nymphs,
( is almost certainly not how he expected this conversation to start, )
the men writing these books dutifully record that they are, as a species, known for killing men who watch them bathe.
( gwen jabs him in the chest with her finger. she misjudges both her hand and his armor, very slightly, but she's working herself up to the kind of mood where jolting her joints harder than she expected to really doesn't make a blind bit of difference— )
It is my personally held belief that this reflects less on my kind and more on the fact that men have been fucking perverts since the dawn of mankind and women of every species have always known they were going to have to deal with that themselves. It's interesting to me, the gulf between what is seen and what is understood.
I think you were in my bathroom earlier this week. I would like to know why. We may be revisiting point one in this conversation.
( that is definitely a threat. )
no subject
And yet.
He doesn't move. Doesn't flinch, either, even when the floodlights go off and he's left, chillingly, to contend with nymphs and the possibility that he's in over his head, whichー well. He is, a majority of the time. Even with preparation, even with two decades of self-training, he keeps finding himself stumbling over these outliers that he fails (fails, every fucking time) to anticipate. It makes him feel like a child again, heels of his polished dress shoes buried in a puddle, watching bodies fall.
Gwen jabs him like a gunshot. "My kind", she says, and his mind races with the impossible possibility that he is contending with someone who is
not human.
(water, the chill of her skin, her song stringing his nerves raw. context clues.)
His silence is less about upholding the mystique of a grown-ass man who masquerades as fuzzy winged vermin, and more about letting his synapses breathe. Instinct tells him he should keep his fucking mouth shut, to give away less than he already has, butー ]
Not to watch you bathe.
[ Answering her question, without actually saying anything. Implicit: "we don't need to revisit point one, as I had no idea you would be sleeping underwater in the first place. What the fuck is that about?"
His chin angles to the side; he's done this before. Some obvious averting of gaze, a comfort in tracing shadows instead of meeting expectations in eyes. It's only his posture that's different, more comfortable in his armor than his suit or civilians. Bruce Wayne wore his designers poorly, but Batman wears his ridiculous excuse for a costume with ludicrous dignity. ]
no subject
Great,
( flatly, )
then you won't mind explaining what you were doing. I realize Gotham is really going through it at the moment, but I promise you philanthropy isn't always a fucking crime.
( would she have made the dig if she knew she were talking to thomas wayne's son?
—maybe. gwenaëlle isn't known for pulling her punches, especially not when she's annoyed. in his periphery, her eyes are larger and darker than they were a moment ago; the shape of her pupil odd, different, and then gone. ordinary. easy to have missed, when and if he refocuses on her. )
I intend to spend time in this city. If that's going to be a problem, I'd like to work it out ahead of time.
no subject
Silent, again. Gwen's forward propulsion and would-be aggression slips over the Bat, catching in the ink-black of his mental armor for a breath of a moment before sliding and pooling by his feet. He, after all, agrees with her: philanthropy is not always synonymous with mustache-twirling villains and their hairless pets, and she is owed, to some degree, an explanation for why a strange man in a bat costume would invade the privacy of her space.
It's too bad that he doesn't have a good excuse. (Never does.) Observe the vigilante in his natural habitat, chewing over unarticulated words before he can spit out the ones that taste the least unsavory.
Gloved hands flex and unflex, once, twice. ]
Organizing a fundraiser is a transient act of good, [ he finally manages. In the vague, oblong lighting of this isolated space, Gwen seems fuzzy and obscure; no less lovely for the way shadows cut across her features, asymmetrical and serrated, but unknowable. Impenetrable.
(He does not wonder what will happen if he surges forward and tips her balance towards the water's edge; even he doesn't have that particular death wish.) ]
You decided to stay here, in Gotham. [ Which is what Gwen just corroborated, and which is the root cause of his curiosity. He voices it: ] Why?
[ Like. Literally Why. In this day and age, a GoFundMe from the other side of the world can do just as much, soー
ーwhy? Who is she indebted to, or what's holding her attention? (If she's not human, then even more so: what could a nymph want from a city like this?) ]
no subject
he has no idea about her teeth. but she hasn't tested them, either— )
That's a great question.
( it's a distinct voice he asks it in. )
Here is the thing, you have invaded my privacy for apparently no reason except having no concept of what is and is not your fucking business, ruined a perfectly good hotel suite and tied me up in overly-anxious police officers who are more likely to shoot themselves in the dicks than do anything useful if I am threatened.
So I do not feel obligated to answer your questions until I'm satisfied with the answers to mine.
( probably she doesn't actually mean it when she says, )
If you want to make it even and get a straight answer without giving me anything for it, I should get to see you naked, too.
( which isn't to say she would stop him if he took her up on it. it's a joke! unless it works, in which case she's a strategic genius.
she is not a strategic genius, she's just pissed off. )
no subject
Batman is not a Good Person; neither is Bruce Wayne. "Virtuous" is not a trait listed in his frankly sparse list of positive attributes on his CV, which means that he, in fact, believes that he doesn't owe Gwen an explanation despite him wanting oneー
ーwhich is fucked, morally. Hm. Bruce, seeing Gwen's fangs out (metaphorically), considers his options. ]
I could show you my ankles.
[ He says, dryly. Humor! Very Victorian of him, to imply that uncovering a sliver of skin on his otherwise entirely covered body is the same as getting undressed. For an insane half-breath, it seems like he'll leave it at that, butー
ーwell. Off goes one glove, peeled like carbon snakeskin. There is a human hand underneath all that armor, and it flexes with bruised knuckles, a cut on the side of it bisecting the skin.
The same cut that Bruce had in the cafe, if Gwen noticed. ]
no subject
gwenaëlle seizes his hand between both of her own and studies it more intensely than really seems necessary. when she looks up, her eyes are
different.
bigger than they were before, and not only because they're open so wide. blue-black where they had been white, but only at the very edges; her slit-pupils blown out wide, dazzling as a prism, like stars. distracting. they'd be lovely, maybe, if she weren't narrowing them at him that way. when she speaks, there is a command in her voice that reaches past the part of him that decides what he does or does not do and bypasses it entirely— )
Take off your cowl.
( what, she's just going to ask the guy who clearly doesn't give a shit about answering her questions if he's bruce wayne?
no. )
no subject
Take off your cowl.
He doesn't have an antivenom for this brand of compulsion. It spreads through him, noxious and affectionate; invisible arms wrapped around him from behind, whispering. Take off your cowl. Take off your cowl.
Fingers hook under the space where the mask segments under his chin. The wrongness of it all is nauseating, but the freefall anxiety isn't enoughー
ーthe cowl slips off. Under the armor of kevlar and carbon, Batman is just A Man.
He's Bruce Wayne. Sunken eyes, dark circles. The reveal makes him sick. ]
no subject
who wouldn't want to give her what she wants? how natural, for the want to be his own—
this, her eyes cold diamonds more unsettling for being set in the human-seeming of her face, is not that. it is not meant to be that. she shows her hand, deliberately, in forcing him to show his,
she doesn't think he'll see the equity for what she means it to be, or care much for it, but it matters to her. and even as he'd lifted his hands, she hadn't been one hundred percent certain what she'd find beneath it.
but there he is. )
Huh.
( she smudges the black around his eyes with her thumb, and tilts her head, studying him, stepping back out of easy reach of his hands as she relinquishes her grip upon him, physical and figurative. )
That makes sense. I didn't know what kind of fire I was playing with, did I. Then again, you thought everything you felt when I played for you was your own, so we were both in the dark.
( this is—
exposure, she thinks. truly. more than nakedness, which is the least of her own concerns. and she feels a little more at ease, rendering them both vulnerable if anyone has to be, which is fucked up but in a way she's already decided she's accepted about herself. a hum, just a sound without a pull, a placeholder for a thought, )
Now we're even.
no subject
He cools from the molten heat of that proffered command; shame starts to corrode him from where his face is exposed, so at odds with the ironclad security of his costume. Bruce Wayne is a construct that people like the Riddler speak about with disdain, that he himself regards with distant contemptー it unnerves him, to be associated with that particular part of his identity at this time of night.
Even under the poor lighting of the rooftop, Gwen should be able to see how Bruce flinches at the word even, as if the double-edged sword has cut a fraction too deep this time. Dark eyes flitting to the side, venting discomfort. His hands furl into fists by his side, and bloom again with long fingers grasping at nothing in particular. ]
You didn't know, [ "what kind of fire she was playing with," ] and I knew less.
You're right. This makes us even.
no subject
You can put it back on.
( implicit: if it makes him more comfortable. that she doesn't say that, out loud, is mostly because she wonders if he might dig his heels in against his own comfort if she were to lampshade it—resist the accommodation just to prove he doesn't need it. maybe he won't like the idea she gives him permission, either way, but
she got what she wanted. he can put it back on. the in-between of it is strange, like he's neither one nor the other, which is...familiar. that's the problem with bruce wayne, so far, his familiarity.
at length, )
I don't owe you an explanation, for the record, but equally you already fucking have one because I've consistently been informing you of everything I do in Gotham and why since we met. You can look up everything to do with—
( that's where she stops.
it clicks, in an instant: the foundation, the programmes, her father. there is information readily available at the fingertips of even someone with fewer resources than bruce wayne, if they're dedicated and interested. flick through all the getty water-marked professional event shots, read the financial transparency reports, the interviews. there is a wealth of information,
but not about her. increasingly, she's made sure of that; limited her footprint, her public profile. it exists, because it's unavoidable, but she's a private person and it isn't actually that difficult for her to maintain that privacy.
under her breath, ) oh, for fuck's sake.
no subject
But, reciprocally: Gwen's inwards-facing exasperation. Bruce, if he were pettier, might've smiled at her outburst, understanding it for what it is. Sometimes, it's the obfuscation that gives creatures like them away.
Doesn't it fucking suck, looking into a mirror? ]
Yeah.
[ He says, for "oh fuck's sake". Asshole. It's really too bad that he genuinely gets no satisfaction from this, and "yeah" winds up sounding more like "don't worry, I'm just as bugfuck nuts for relating".
His cape whips in the wind. Just to add more surrealism to the ever-growing pile. ]
Your fans gave me more insight on you than your own social media did.
[ Dryly. ]
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)