Chapter Text
He wakes abruptly with the echo of a scream dying in his ears.
His heart is pounding in anticipation of danger. Dumping adrenalin into his bloodstream. And his face is pressed into… something soft.
Pillows.
He’s in bed.
He’s in bed and the pillows are soft and downy, and they’re causing his rapid, shallow breaths to blow back hot and clammy against his face.
Nightmare, his mind quickly tells the part of itself that’s still in overdrive. Just a nightmare. Perspiration coats his skin, unpleasantly sticky. He raises a hand to wipe at his face, his neck, and grits his teeth at the sharp spike of pain that lances down his spine. Suddenly, his whole body aches. Everything feels wrong. The room is too bright.
Wincing, Bruce rolls gingerly over onto his back. He forces himself to breathe, to relax into the mattress, squinting against the stabbing assault of unfiltered light streaming through unfamiliar windows, blinking groggily at an unfamiliar ceiling. A name rises to his lips, instinctive as breath, but he bites it back.
Alfred’s not here, a voice in his head reminds him, chiding.
No, Alfred is not here – this much, he knows to be true. He should also know why, but he can’t quite remember in this moment. Just like he can’t remember, he realizes with a mounting tightness in his chest, exactly where here is. The light soaking into the room past flimsy linen curtains is bright and soft and glowing. The angle at which it enters the room, the way it reflects off of the ceiling suggests early morning.
Not the penthouse then, no. Not by a long shot. In his bedroom in the starkly minimalist penthouse of Wayne Tower, custom-made, remote-controlled blackout blinds would have barred the slightest intrusion of the morning sun through the massive plate-glass windows. Not the Manor, either. Although his bedroom in the East wing was graced with the most beautiful morning light in the building, he’d still preferred the dark; the heavy drapes that covered the windows had often remained firmly drawn till well into the afternoons, when Alfred would finally stride in to yank them open. During the refurbishment of Wayne Manor after the fire, they’d argued about the drapes. Alfred had tried to suggest he lighten up, quite literally, but Bruce had put his foot down.
Bats are nocturnal.
He rolls onto his side now, trying to ignore the second twinge of pain in his back as he does so. Trying to push away the unwelcome memories of Alfred, fumbling for the pills he now remembers are at his bedside. Of course he knows where he is. Of course. The memory lapse was a momentary thing, just a flicker of disorientation, nothing more. It’s the dreams – the nightmares, that is. They can be extremely confusing.
Propped up awkwardly on one elbow, still squinting against the light, Bruce curses softly under his breath as he pops the cap off his prescription bottle.
This is not Gotham.
Gotham is gone for good, and he needs to start remembering that when he wakes up in the morning.
~
He feels much better after washing up. The cool water from the faucet rinses away the clinging remnants of his nightmares, his disorientation. He runs damp hands through his hair, over his throat, and makes himself look in the mirror, meeting his own eyes for a long moment. Then he quickly looks away, splashes some more water on his face.
He pads barefoot to the bedroom door, stands for a long minute leaning into the doorjamb, gazing across the living room of the hotel suite through the open French doors leading to the terrace. The sky beyond is a vivid, cloudless blue, deep and clear. The white curtains flanking the door flutter in a slight breeze. He listens for the soft clink of a teacup being set down on its saucer, exhales with something like relief when he hears it.
He’s not sure if he will ever stop expecting her to have vanished in the night.
~
“You really should stop sneaking up on me.”
She has her back to him, but the wry smile in her voice is clearly audible.
“Now, why would I want to do that?” he murmurs, coming up behind her to lay his hands on her slender shoulders.
Her dark hair is gathered into a messy topknot, exposing her long neck, held in place by a pencil shoved carelessly through. The pencil is sharpened to a deadly point; she could injure him badly with it if she wanted to. She’s wearing only his slightly wrinkled, powder blue linen button-down from the day before. Her long, pale legs are propped up on the white-painted wrought iron chair in front of her.
Her toenails are lacquered a dark rose, and he commits the color to memory. Just in case.
“Because we’re both slipping, Wayne,” she murmurs, “Getting sloppy. And one of these days, you might actually catch me off guard.” As she says this, she leans backward into him, tilting her face up to lock eyes with him upside down. “And if you do, there’s no telling how I’ll react.” The business end of the pencil presses lightly against his abdomen.
He chuckles, brushing a stray hair off her forehead. “Sweep me off my feet again, will you?” He still remembers every detail of their first meeting, right down to that awful, solid crunch with which his body had hit the floor when she kicked his cane away. Embarrassing; felled like an old tree.
“Who knows?”
He trails the pad of his thumb down over her cheek, tracing her jaw. Leisurely, contemplative. “I’ll take my chances,” he tells her.
He waits for the inevitable retort but it never comes. She is quiet, pressing her head against him, content and cat-like as she stretches, as she lets him continue to stroke her cheek, her neck.
He’s aware he’s being a bit more hands-on than usual, a tad more touchy-feely. He’s also aware that she’s not complaining – usually she’ll draw away, affecting her usual cool, blasé demeanor, after indulging him for more than a few seconds.
Maybe they are getting sloppy, he muses, in more ways than one.
Maybe sloppy is a good thing.
She replies belatedly. “I thought you were done taking chances.”
“Exceptions always exist, Ms. Kyle,” he points out, and even as he says them, the words feel like an echo.
He bends to press a kiss to her brow, trying not to wince as the motion sends another twinge sparking up his spine. She catches it, of course; he sees her eyeing him sharply as he settles into the chair opposite hers. His ongoing aversion to any medical intervention more permanent than prescription painkillers is a contentious topic, and one they frequently lock horns on.
But not today, it seems.
Today, she pours him some coffee and they sip from their cups in companionable silence.
~
The vista from the terrace is spectacular. Their cliffside hotel is situated to make the most of the view, and naturally, they’ve taken one of the penthouse suites – so, a real bird’s eye view.
Directly across the vast azure expanse of the Gulf of Naples sits Mount Vesuvius, squat and stolid and impassive. Some days, when it’s slightly hazy, a little cloud cover will creep across its gentle, gradual slope, obscuring part of it from view. But today the atmosphere is starkly clear and the mountain feels unbelievably close, as if you could almost reach out and touch it.
But Bruce doesn’t want to touch it.
There’s something troubling about Vesuvius, something almost sinister. He never would’ve expected the placidly dormant peak to strike such a powerful chord of disquiet in him. But it did, the very first time he laid eyes on the volcano from their terrace, and the feeling has stuck. Every time he comes out here, it almost feels like Vesuvius is… mocking him.
It’s absurd, he tells himself, a self-indulgent, childish notion to entertain. It’s one thing to have a healthy respect for nature, and yes, there’s something about the raw, untamable majesty of the mountains that is rightly capable of striking fear into the hearts of men. He remembers feeling that fear all those years ago, half certain he would freeze to death on the treacherous Himalayan slopes as he attempted an arduous, impossible climb.
But this – here? The gentle incline of Mount Vesuvius? The same Vesuvius that sits so patiently on the horizon, that hundreds of tourists flock to yearly to scramble clumsily over, laughing and squealing and taking dozens of photographs that will be forgotten soon after vacation ends? it doesn’t add up. There should be nothing threatening about Vesuvius in the least.
And it isn't, exactly - threatening, that is. Perhaps what bothers Bruce about the peak is its indifference.
The volcano has existed for millennia, outliving millions. Of course it would be unimpressed by him and his futile little human existence, the emotional baggage he’s lugged across continents. He imagines it was similarly pitiless the day it awoke abruptly from its centuries-long slumber to belch smoke and fire over Pompeii, killing hundreds while uprooting thousands more.
One death or one thousand – what difference did it make in the bigger picture? Human life is, by its very nature, transient, fleeting. No more than the blink of an eye, compared to how long the peak has existed. It has sat there since the dawn of time, borne witness to unimaginable triumph and tragedy – to history. And it has sat there all of the years of Bruce Wayne’s life – the night his parents were murdered, the night he fled from Gotham, and the night he finally returned. It has been there every night of the long, lonely years he kept endless vigil over the failing city. And it’ll be there still when his bones are in the ground, slowly turning to dust.
Your existence is meaningless, it tells him. Your life amounts to nothing. Everything the Batman was, everything Bruce Wayne wanted to be – it amounts to nothing.
Then a voice rings out in his head, sharp and clipped.
Right, that’s enough wallowing. Get ahold of yourself.
The voice is startlingly clear, almost an auditory hallucination, and Bruce shakes his head, shaking it off. It had sounded eerily like Alfred.
He is well aware he needs to get a grip, in more ways than one. And he’s aware he has a long road ahead of him, a tedious process of unpacking, of coming to terms. With lots of things. With a lifetime of traumas and losses and regrets.
He knows he’s got a long way to go. And he’s in no hurry to get into it. His mind is a dark place, only it's not the kind of darkness he usually favours; he has no desire to dwell there more than he absolutely has to.
So yes, he's aware he has a lot to work through. But all things considered, Bruce thinks, he must really be fucked up in the head if he’s letting a mountain get to him.
~
Of course, he’s not the only one dealing with demons.
The day they arrived in Sorrento, Selina had been very quiet. And after they checked into their suite, she’d stood out on this very balcony a long time.
He’d busied himself unpacking his things – setting out toiletries, hanging up clothes, pottering around in the bedroom to arrange small details to his liking. Inhabiting the hotel suite in a way he hadn’t bothered to inhabit even his own bedroom for many years. He’d been meticulous about it, setting his things in the kind of order Alfred would’ve approved of, had he been there.
Between trips from his suitcases to the closet and back, Bruce had glanced through to the terrace and noticed her standing there. She was so still, completely unmoving as she stared out over the water, obviously deep in thought. His first impulse had been to go over to her, but then he’d hesitated.
They were still learning each other’s rhythms and cadences, still observing the ebb and flow of moods and emotions. And Bruce himself hated nothing more than to be crowded, intruded upon, when what he craved was solitude. The least he could do was give her this moment by herself.
~
“You know, I’m not sure going to Pompeii is the best idea,” he tells her a while later, dusting the crumbs of breakfast from his t-shirt. “It’s supposed to get really hot today.”
It’s simpler to object to the weather than admit that, now that they’re here, he finds he doesn’t really care to see the remnants of the lost city. This leg of the trip was his idea, after all: Pompeii and Herculaneum and the trek up Vesuvius. He’s wanted to see Pompeii since he was a boy. But somehow that trip never materialized during his parents’ lifetime. There was always a more compelling holiday destination on the horizon, another summertime plan in the works for the Waynes. And as an adult himself, well, for all his travels throughout Italy, he simply never found himself on the Sorrentine coast long enough to visit the historical sites. As Bruce Wayne billionaire playboy he’d been compelled to frequent the more popular hotspots and luxurious party destinations along the Amalfi coast instead.
And now that they’re here, he’s strangely unsettled by the idea of it. He's too embarrassed to tell Selina the truth about the way the thought of the ruins – monuments to the inevitability of death and the helplessness of man in the face of uncontrollable forces – affects him.
When he thinks of the souls that perished under the smoke and the fire, their bodies preserved in ash to this day, he can’t help but draw a parallel. How close Gotham had come to sharing the fate of the ruined city, he thinks – or rather, tries not to think.
(He has tried to picture the long-dormant volcano as it must have been so many hundreds of years ago, a sleeping beast come roaring to life, spewing fire and ash and fury – a terrifying sight to behold, no doubt. Given a choice, he wonders which he’d take: a volcano or a ticking time bomb? The indiscriminate violence of nature or the deliberate, targeted brutality of man? It’s hard to say.)
Selina ignores his objection and puts on a sundress.
It’s light as a breeze, white with cheery yellow flowers, and thin, delicate straps that accentuate her lovely shoulders, drawing his attention to the dusting of freckles across them. She steps into a pair of wedges and tops the ensemble with a wide-brimmed straw hat, one they’d bought from a street vendor in Rome for a couple of Euros. A cheap, touristy throwaway. But on her, with that dress underneath, it looks expensive, opulent. She models the outfit for him, swirling theatrically, slipping a pair of oversized sunglasses down the bridge of her nose to raise an eyebrow questioningly at him, and he laughs in genuine delight.
He wants to tell her, sincerely and without irony, that she is gorgeous, that she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. But he doesn’t think that sort of saccharine sentiment will go over well with her.
“It’s hard to believe you ever existed in the gloom of Gotham,” he tells her wryly instead, “You look like you were born to bask in the sun and eat gelato.”
This pleases her. “And drink limoncello?” she prompts.
“And drink limoncello,” he concedes.
“Well,” she says archly, angling a graceful shoulder at him, “I told you a long time ago, Mr. Wayne. I’m nothing if not adaptable.”
~
She is adaptable.
But she’s not the only one.
On mornings like this one, when he wakes with the echoes of troubled dreams reverberating in his head - exhausting him before the day has even begun - when he looks at himself in the mirror, he can barely recognize his own face.
The face of the man in the mirror is a deception, a blatant lie – all sun-kissed skin and elegant features and easy charm. Crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiles. This is not the face of a man who’s known darkness most intimately his whole life – whether suffering it himself or inflicting it on others. The man in the mirror stands taller and straighter than Bruce Wayne should be able to, his body appearing strong and whole and – at least when clothed – unmarked.
A falsehood if ever there was one.
The man in the mirror has never languished in the squalor of a Tibetan prison. He has never been utterly broken in body and spirit alike – never suffered the foul dark of the Pit, where the days run together in endless, bottomless agony.
But he can hardly blame his reflection. Sometimes, it’s hard for Bruce to believe that it was actually him that lived through that hell. Survived those hardships.
Still somehow, with everything else he’s been through, worst of all were the dark, windowless years following Rachel and Harvey’s deaths. When he shut himself up in tomblike rooms, deliberately cutting himself off from a world he didn’t want to belong to anymore. The emotional damage he sustained following their deaths – and his subsequent self-exile from life – is impossible to accurately assess. He’s not sure how much of the man he was before survived, and who exactly it is that came out on the other end.
But whoever he is now, whatever parts of him made it through – that’s what Bruce is left with.
And so is she, a voice in his head reminds him. This one doesn’t sound like Alfred.
It was Selina, of course, who finally lured him out of the dark and back into the light. She challenged him, tantalized him, piqued his curiosity, to the point where his need finally overcame his apathy.
And against all odds, here they are now, in sunny Italy, and how easy moving on looks on the outside. How effortlessly they’ve slipped into their new roles – adapting, always adapting. Like shape-shifters, like the chameleons they both are, they’ve settled into their new skins, blending into their new environment seamlessly. Shedding their past, they’ve eagerly embraced the shiny new.
Everywhere they go, there are eyes on them; the looks cast their way are surreptitious, envious. Bruce catches sight of their reflections unexpectedly in a shop-front window one day and understands with startling clarity.
They’ve adapted too well.
What he and Selina are doing now is no less than playing make-believe. Two creatures of the night, frolicking in the sun like innocents. They move through the world with effortless ease, with a confidence that speaks of privilege, of the assurance of comfort and the fulfillment of desires at every turn. They carry their affluence carelessly, like an afterthought; it shimmers around them like a cloud of subtle perfume.
They are beautiful and carefree.
They are whole and unbroken.
Their disguises here, Bruce thinks, on the Sorrentine Coast, are more complete than those of their alter-egos in Gotham could ever have been.