Bruce Wainright has (onerule) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2014-03-01 02:03:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, door: dc comics, huntress |
Who: Bruce and Helena
What: Grief.
Where: An alley in Gotham.
When: Backdated to after this.
Warnings/Rating: Feels, sads, violence.
Bruce wasn't hard to find once Selina gave her the general area to find him in. That conversation had been the most she'd said to anyone in weeks, certainly since Damian's death.The silence even concerned Gray a bit, but as she didn't go hunting down any knives or lingering for too long on the edge of rooftops he didn't push her back to his side before she was ready to come, like he had the last time. If he hadn't -- she shook her head against what might have happened if she had been left alone in her room instead of him driving her to cross back to the desert.
Dressed in all black -- not her suit, she hadn't worn that in months, and the thought of putting it on right now made her belly feel unpleasantly like it was trying to climb up her throat -- she walked the streets of Gotham. Rubber soled shoes kept her footsteps muffled to the unattentive and she passed through the rest like a shadow cloaked ghost. Maybe she was. Maybe she was a ghost more now than ever, because none of this felt real. Her brother didn't die, his body didn't lie in rest in the Cave, and his wasn't a gravestone she was supposed to visit. The stone wasn't up yet, but it would be soon, she knew. A piece of granite in tribute to a life that could never be measured in the span of man made creation.
It was never going to be enough, but then, what was? She forced her feet forward, one in front of the other. If she stopped now, if she stilled, then she'd think about their last conversation, about how Damian wouldn't even talk to her. She swallowed as her stomach threatened evacuation, paused, just for a moment, shoulder to the brick wall of a building. Muffled sounds of fighting, not far away then. One foot in front of the other. Find Bruce.
As Selina had said, Bruce hadn’t wandered far from the rooftop after she left. Home wasn’t an option, not yet. He was angry, full of self-loathing and frustration, and though it wasn’t her fault their encounter had only made things worse. Somehow he needed to find another outlet, one that wouldn’t leave him wracked with guilt, otherwise what he felt inside would suffocate him. It would tear him apart. He stayed in the shadows, grappling soundlessly from building to building as he searched for a way to make it so that he could breathe again.
He found it within minutes. Or, he found them. A low-level gang prepared to execute one of their own, a young boy who hadn’t measured up, hadn’t been able to stamp out his humanity, and now kneeled on the filthy cement as a gun was held to his head. In the shadows, Bruce saw Damian and Firefly. He saw an innocent and the monsters who threatened to consume him. Bile rose in his throat, and he stepped off the side of the roof, a rustle of his cape and heavy kevlar rushing down to crush the gunman’s bones like twigs snapping beneath his feet. The gun went off, once, before it was dropped, but the bullet was fired too high; harmless. One or two of the thugs saw it was the Bat and fled, a wise choice, but the rest chose to stay, to fight. The glint of metal in the dark and he wanted to laugh. He did, without realizing it, the sound similar to the hysterics that had seized him on the rooftop with Selina, and he was brutal. Merciless. More bones snapped and shattered, wrists and legs and ribs, skin ripped and tore, and one by one the gang fell at his feet until there was only one left. The boy, their victim, had long since fled, and the remaining thug smiled to reveal bloodstained teeth as Bruce pinned him against the brick by his throat. “Go ahead,” he rasped, taunting. “Everyone knows the Bat doesn’t kill.”
Behind the cowl, his gaze narrowed, lips drawing back into a snarl. “Are you sure?” he hissed, gloved hand tightening around his throat. The thug’s grin faltered and his eyes widened as he wheezed, fighting for air.
Everyone knows the Bat doesn't kill. That was what she heard. None of them killed until they were pushed to that point. She'd almost killed the man that framed her mother and maybe, if she was in her suit now, letting her anger boil up inside her until her lid flipped (again) she'd help the Bat leave a bigger mess. More broken bones and rent bodies, anger and loss written in blood across the city.
But. Bruce wouldn't want that. Beyond the pain, beyond the grief, beyond the anger and the self-loathing, he wouldn't, and Helena knew it. She slid into the shadows of one building as she rounded the corner. The thug might be able to recognize her later if he saw her, but he didn't need to, and she was sure that Bruce would recognize her voice before he saw her features. "Everyone knows the Bat doesn't kill, but it might not be such a good idea to keep trying that particular limit. And when he sets you down, I suggest you run, as far and as fast as you can. Find a new career. This is your lucky night and you won't get another one."
Her voice interrupted his internal struggle, and the familiarity of it was enough of a jolt to momentarily loosen his hold. The thug gasped, making the most of his temporary reprieve, but Bruce had no intention of letting him go yet. He didn’t need to see Helena to know it was her and a wave of irrational anger washed over him as he realized Selina must have sent her; how else would she know where to find him? It made him feel like a child, and shame tightened his throat again as it had on the rooftop when he’d realized what he’d done, how he’d used her, how she’d let him. His jaw tightened as he turned his head, just enough to catch a glimpse of her from the corner of his eye before returning his attention to the man still caught in his grasp. “Why should I let him live?” It was a pained question, and he was having a hard time maintaining his composure. His fingers tightened on the thug’s throat again, eliciting a high whine. He was asking Helena, yes, but he was asking himself, too. Once others had asked him the same thing and he’d always had an answer but now, now it was harder to remember.
“He won’t change. They never change,” he snarled. “It’s always the same. It doesn’t matter what they do, or who they kill, they stay the same and the Bat lets them live.” Self-loathing was audible in his tone, and his lips curled into a grimace. “They live, and he dies,” he whispered, more to himself than to anyone present, and after a moment he shook his head to refocus. “You shouldn’t be here,” he told her, glancing over his shoulder.
Two. That was the number of times she'd seen this Bruce break. The first was when she'd been on his lap, fingers reaching for her IV so she could end it all right there while he watched. The second time was now. (It had only been once for her dad, when he had held her mother's broken body in his arms.) Two pale hands reached up, flipped her hood so it covered most of her face as she slid out of the shadows as easily as she had gone in. And once she was out, her hands curled around his wrist, not pulling or tugging, fingers not digging in to break his grip as he had taught her to do, but resting lightly on the tough weave of his suit.
"The Bat doesn't kill because he's not the criminals that he faces. They will kill, and torture, and burn and he won't, because he is above that. He's Gotham's Dark Knight. He's the Bat that Gotham needs." Then, very quietly, "He's the Bat his family needs. Don't you know? First come the Bat, and then come all his little birds, because they would follow him anywhere. Because they believe in him. Because they love him. Because he's the only father some of us have ever had."
Like he had with Selina, Bruce wanted Helena to leave as much as he wanted her to stay. He was a mess of contradictions and looked away as she approached, as though breaking eye contact would make a difference. If he couldn’t see her, she wasn’t there. It might have worked if she hadn’t come so close, if she hadn’t touched him. Try as he might he couldn’t ignore the feel of her fingers on his wrist however slight the contact was, and though he kept his face turned away, gaze fixed on the thug with a half-snarl, he heard every word she said. He listened. The man he had pinned against the wall had already begun to weaken, his struggles fading, but his fingers didn’t tighten further around his throat; they kept him there, but he let him breathe. Enough to survive.
His composure didn’t crack right away. It was when she spoke of his family, of her and the others, that he began to falter. He hadn’t been there for any of them; he knew that. Just as he hadn’t been there for Damian when he’d needed him most. His chest grew tight beneath his kevlar, and he found it hard to breathe, just as he had on the rooftop with Selina. He knew what was coming and he tried to fight it, but he couldn’t. With an anguished cry he let go of the thug, shoving him back against the brick once before he released his grip on his throat to let the man fall heavily, gasping and wheezing, to the filthy cement. He leaned his weight forward, hands pressed against the now-unoccupied expanse of brick, and he turned to look at Helena, though he didn’t quite meet her gaze. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, hoarse and so very quiet.
They weren't the type of family that touched much, at least not here. Helena had learned that, felt it in the rigid way they held themselves when they were first hugged, as if it was something unexpected. And maybe here it was. Maybe there, wherever they had come from it was, but touch anchored. It was the finish line, a job well done, a huge whenever she had completed whatever trial her father had set before her and her hands stayed there, loose around his forearm. To the thug now on the ground, she said only, "Go." Urgent and low. This wasn't his to take back to the streets and ears desperate to hear of some weakness that the Bat had.
She waited until he stumbled to his knees, wheezing and gasping, and made his hunchbacked way out of the alley before her attention turned fully to Bruce. "For what?" She asked, head cocked. Secrets didn't spill easily from him and his emotions less so, but if she was going to help, if she was going to be able to do anything for him, he had to talk.
He didn’t watch the thug leave. It was as though he’d ceased to exist as soon as his hand was no longer closed around the other man’s throat, and the alley seemed to shrink and constrict to encompass only the two of them, nothing more. The wall was solid beneath his fingertips, and Bruce tried to focus on that. What was solid was real, and ever since Damian’s death the world had seemed more a nightmare than reality.
Saying those two words, I’m sorry, was much easier than explaining them .What was he sorry for? “Everything.” That seemed appropriate. He drew in a deep, shuddering breath, and tried to elaborate. “I’m sorry for-- for letting him die. For not being there for you. For them.” He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the brick. Everything. There was so much to apologize for, and so few words.
It was understood that Waynes understood one another in ways that non-Waynes couldn't. They spoke to each other differently, achieved things that others simply couldn't. Maybe because they all had the same blood and stubbornness had been inherited with the color of their hair and eyes. "Bruce," she whispered, hands shifting, moving to his forearms as she ducked beneath them, crouching so she could look up into the face that her father and this man shared.
"Bruce," she whispered again, hands leaving his arms, bare fingertips against his equally bare jaw. "Tell me what you could have done differently. Tell me how you would have kept Damian alive." Her words didn't hold the edge of cruelty, but a slight detachment, as if they were discussing a mission gone wrong that hadn't ended in the death of one of their own. It had to start here, beyond his pain or hers, where guilt and reason grated salt into an already bleeding wound.
Again he averted his gaze, a childish reaction that didn’t make her go away any more than closing his eyes would have. His jaw tightened as he attempted, desperately, to regain some semblance of control, but it was a hopeless effort. The simple truth was that there were very few people who could reach him as Helena could; they’d come so far, and he had refused to give up on her time and time again. He knew she would do the same for him. He stared downward, and he breathed, in and out and trying to focus on her question. His eyes closed ever so briefly when her fingers found his jaw, and he whispered her name to himself, Helena, a reminder to keep himself grounded.
“I was right there,” he told her, a hushed confession. “I told him to stay back, I told him, but-- but he didn’t listen. And I-- I was so close, I should have moved faster. If I had, I could have stopped Firefly and he’d-- Damian would still be alive.” He drew in a deep, shuddering breath, and finally managed to meet her gaze. “He was my responsibility. My son. I was supposed to save him.”
She understood grief and guilt, what it meant to survive when those closest to you died and it could have been stopped. Her own eyes closed in the face of his confession, the points of her fingers digging slightly into his jaw before she forced them to relax again. "You told him and he didn't listen," she said quiet, hushed. "How much faster should you have moved? Would it have been fast enough to get you both out of danger? Or would we be mourning the loss of brother and father?"
Harsh questions to be asked but there were harder ones still as Helena opened her eyes and held his gaze. He wouldn't let her fall, even when that was all she wanted, and she couldn't let him fall now. "You can't hold yourself responsible for what they chose to do," she whispered to him. "Is there any way you could have known what Firefly was going to do? You know now, but then, did you know? In that moment, did you know Damian wasn't going to listen?"
It was so very Bruce, that he hadn’t even considered the possibility of Firefly killing him on that rooftop. He would always put the lives of others before his own and if it had come to a choice between himself and Damian, well, of course he would have saved his son. “Fast enough to save him,” he whispered, emphatic. “Fast enough to stop Firefly from-- from--” He shook his head, the end of his sentence catching in his throat and staying there. “He wouldn’t have killed me. He didn’t kill me.” Somehow, he would have managed it. He was supposed to. Wasn’t Batman always supposed to save the day, to do the impossible? Save himself, save Damian, and capture the criminal; that was what should have happened.
Hard questions made him think, even though he didn’t want to, and the more he tried to fight it the more he failed. How could he not hold himself responsible? If he hadn’t been there, maybe, but he had. He looked at her for a long, long moment, gaze searching, almost desperate, even though he didn’t know what he was looking for. And he knew, he knew what the truth was, and a sob escaped. “No,” he admitted. “No, I didn’t-- I thought he would stay back. I didn’t think Firefly would-- if he’d just listened, I could have-- it would have been fine.” And that was hard, it was so hard to admit, but it was true. Damian had reacted impulsively, he’d placed himself in the line of fire unnecessarily. He hadn’t listened.
It was hard, Helena knew it was. It was as hard for him to face the truth as it was for her to keep it together right now, to focus, to help put him back together before she fell to pieces. Her eyes filled at his sob, but she had to keep going, just for a little longer. "You couldn't have known what Firefly was going to do. And you couldn't have made Damian listen." There was enough guilt without adding those two things to it, enough grief in all their lives that it didn't need to be compounded further.
"You couldn't have known," she whispered fervently as she wiped at his cheeks with her thumbs. It was so like Bruce to blame himself for what happened, but he shouldn't take responsibility for what he couldn't control -- Damian and his lack of his listening, and Firefly for setting the fire. "And you did everything in your power with the knowledge you had." She knew that. "You would never let him die. You'd never let any of us die, not even momma cat." But death happened and they weren't in the safest line of work. "You wouldn't ever and we know that. All of us do."
She kept saying that he couldn’t have done all these things, but he thought that he should have been able to. Accepting that there were things beyond his control was difficult, it always had been, and he was better at blaming himself than he was admitting that there was nothing more he could have done. “But I should have, Helena,” he insisted. “I should have known. I should have made him listen. Don’t you see?” He took hold of her wrists, careful not to grip too tight, no, not like he had with Selina. “What I did, it wasn’t enough. You say-- you say I wouldn’t let any of you die, but I couldn’t save Damian.” Deep, shuddering breaths, and he had to make her understand, somehow. “What good am I, if I can’t even save my own son?”
"You should have known that Damian wouldn't listen and that Firefly would set him on fire?" She repeated dully, all vibrancy lost as she stared up into his face. "Because you're what? Clairvoyant?" And once the words started, she couldn't stop them as her mouth set into a tight line. "Stop it! Stop it! You can't make any of us do something we're not going to do! You can't make me want to live and you can't make Damian listen because we're not all puppets!" She twisted her wrists within his grip, the closeness too stifling as she jerked away from him. "We're not and you're not responsible for our choices. Do you understand that?" Helena demanded, coming in close, balled broad sides of her fists aiming for his chest. "Do you? Do you fucking understand that? Damian chose not to listen and that asshole chose to set him on fire and you can't make our decisions for us!" By the end the she was screaming, tears streaming out of her eyes as she tried to pound her words into him.
Bruce had barely begun to piece together a response, more baseless insistence, when something inside her snapped and the words started coming faster than he could keep up with. Surprise flared in his gaze, expression hidden by the cowl, and when she twisted her wrists in his hold he let go without hesitation. He would have taken a step back had he been able to, but the wall was at his back and there was nowhere to go. “I know you’re not puppets,” he began, a weak protest, but her voice just grew louder and he winced, more from the volume than the feel of her fists against his chest. All he could think was that he wanted her to stop, just stop, and dug his gloved fingers into the wall because he would never, ever raise against her. Not Helena.
“I don’t know what you expect me to do!” The words burst forth unbidden, pained and desperate as he lost the battle to remain in control. “Am I supposed to stand by and not try? Because I can’t do that! I can’t do nothing, I can’t just watch while you make choices that get you hurt or killed, I-- I have to try. I tried to make Damian listen, I’m trying to keep you alive, because I have to.” He took hold of her shoulders, desperate to make her understand. “I didn’t give up on Damian and I won’t give up on you. Not any of you, so you-- you have to deal with that!”
"Trying doesn't always mean succeeding!" She screamed at him. After all, she'd jammed a piece of mirror into her own throat in an attempt to end her own life and failed absolutely miserably. "It doesn't! I tried! You tried! He was a stubborn little asshole and I loved him! He was my brother and your son and you did everything you fucking could and you know it! You'd keep trying until we're all dead and then you'd haunt around the fucking afterlife until you found us all because you don't know how to stop! But it's not going to bring Damian back!" She shook in his grip as if she was a boiling pot threatening to explode. "It's not! It's not!" She panted, nostrils flaring as she tried to get more and more air into her lungs. Why was it so hard to breathe? And why couldn't he understand? Yes, he was the goddamn Batman, but he was Bruce too. And Bruce was human.
"It isn't," her head shook back and forth. "And it fucking hurts. But you have to get back up again, you have to, cause we all learned it from you. We need you before we're all lost." And where she had screamed earlier, she was quieter now, almost whispering. "Please. Please."
She was right, he didn’t know how to stop. He never had. In Bruce’s mind stopping went hand in hand with failure and he’d never accepted that easily, even when it was wise to do so. He didn’t back down willingly. He had difficulty knowing when to fight and when to stand down. Damian was dead and nothing would bring him back, but he still couldn’t stop. “I know nothing can bring him back. I know,” he insisted, but his voice was losing its volume. He only had so much energy left. “But you’re right. I-- I don’t know how to stop.” He watched her shake, watched her struggle to breathe, and the desire to make things better cut through everything else.
Her screaming had been hard, but this? This was worse. Her quiet pleading broke something inside him and, without thinking, his hands on her shoulders became an embrace, and he kept thinking that he couldn’t lose her too, not her, not now. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry,” repeated over and over as he held her.
For a moment, when the arms following hands became an embrace, she just stood there, marionette still, the contact more than she'd had in weeks. How strange it was to feel now, warmth and strength beneath the suit, a younger version of her father beneath the mask of Batman. She swayed forward, unsteady as her face connected with his chest. It didn't make it any easier to breathe, not even when she wrapped her arms around his waist and held on to his belt. It only made her little gasps more pronounced, her whole body working for little shocks of air, only to forcibly expel them like they'd gone down the wrong pipe.
"You have to come back, you have to," she whispered. "It wasn't your fault, we all know it, you did everything that you could with the knowledge that you had and we'd all change it if we knew what was going to happen." Was there a single one of them that wouldn't have been on that rooftop if they had known that Firefly was going to make an attempt on Damian? No, they all would have been there. All of them would have stopped it. She had no reason to doubt that. "Don't you understand? We all miss him too," she added, voice finally cracking as she rubbed her tears against his suit.
Focusing on her made it easier to forget his own pain. Regardless of whether Selina had sent her or not, she clearly wasn’t coping any better than he was and that gave him a reason to fight, rather than submitting to his grief and pushing her away. Bruce might not have been able to help her breathe in a literal sense but he sought to do what he could, to calm her through touch, and while he wasn’t all that good at physical affection he was even worse with words. Maybe being there was enough. And she’d been in a bad place before this, before losing Damian, and how could he have been selfish enough to not think of that immediately? But that just fed into the same cycle he was trapped in, and he’d already upset her enough by blaming himself. He couldn’t repeat himself all over again.
“I thought-- I thought you would all blame me,” he admitted. “I thought that’s what I deserved.” Maybe he should have known better. The only one blaming him was himself, at least so far. He kept expecting anger from someone, but it hadn’t come. “I know you all miss him. I know.” He swallowed down another apology. He couldn’t come back for himself, but he could do it for her. For them. Putting others before himself was what he did. “I wasn’t there. I haven’t been. But I will be,” he vowed, a rush of words that he didn’t really think about, but he didn’t need to.
She only shook her head at his belief that they'd blame him. As far as she could tell, they hadn't, but she hadn't talked to anyone but Selena either. It was better that way and better this way, trying to drive Bruce back home where everyone did need him. "It's not what you deserve," she whispered, eyes clenching tight as a fresh set of tears rolled out and down her cheeks. "It's not. You deserve so much more than you get from us." All the times they'd ever told him that he wasn't their Bat, that he was wrong, that they wanted more from him, something different from him, all those times they'd left him alone.
Yeah, he deserved more. And maybe, maybe the rest of the family could finally give it. She shuddered through the next breath, fingers tightening around one of the pouches on his belt. Batarangs. Nothing at all to flip the lid up and touch one, cool metal under her fingertips. A little wiggle out that distracted her before she clenched her hand tight around it, the pain making her gasp as the tail poked through her palm. It hurt, it hurt, fresh tears skipping down her cheeks like happy kids down a hill. "We need you to come home." Just a little bit longer, the pain would help keep her focused enough to get him to fly home.
Bruce couldn’t recall anyone having told him that he deserved more than he’d gotten. Maybe Selina had, once, but it had likely been long ago, when she was much younger than she was now. Still, things had changed since then. They’d all come so far and he didn’t think he deserved more, not from them. They already gave him so much. “No,” he insisted, though it wasn’t in him to agree even if she had been right. “What you give is enough. You’re all enough. It’s more than I ever thought I would have.” Family hadn’t been a possibility for him back home, in his Gotham. He’d resigned himself to being alone. Now, he had more people he cared about than he’d ever had in the entirety of his life.
At first, for a few moments, he didn’t notice her fingers tightening around his belt, pulling a batarang free like it was nothing. His attention was wrapped up in trying to soothe her without having any idea of how to do so, and he looked down at her when she gasped, half-formed words faltering as he noticed her hand clenched into a fist. He frowned, confusion clouding his gaze, but then she was saying that he needed to come home and his gaze returned to her face. “I will,” he assured her, hoping that his agreement would somehow fix things. “I’ll come home.” She needed him more than he’d realized; they all did. An arm went around her shoulders, as though he was afraid to let her go. “Let’s go, Helena. Let’s go home.”
The pain in her hand was stunning, a shock back to her semblance of life. The tears came easier, with less shaking as if they were being ripped from her, every last one of them. She nodded, then stilled. Home. "I'll, I'll meet you there, okay? There's something that I have to take care of." Bandaging up her hand for one.
And then they'd all be there, wouldn't they? People she should have recognized, people that were supposed to be family but were nothing more than strangers. She gave a little shake of her head. No, no, that place wasn't home. It was a house on a hill and if she went now it'd be nothing more than a mockery of an IV bag, full of Gotham tinged madness and she'd already been dosed enough. "I have to, I have to go back to the penthouse first. Then I'll be there, okay?" Her words were said too fast, almost tripping over one another. "You go. They need you there."
Once, Bruce had been blind. Recently, too, when he’d wrapped himself in grief and loss and closed his eyes to everything else. But the sharp memory of a white, white room and a girl covered in blood, the blood of another. He remembered another room, more familiar, where darkness cast shadows and life was caught in a tug of war between one who wanted to save it and one who just wanted it to end. Maybe it was nothing, maybe she did have something to take care of. But Damian’s loss had hit everyone hard, and they had been relatively stable beforehand. She hadn’t been. One child was dead because, whatever else she or the others might say, he hadn’t done enough. And one was too much.
“What do you have to take care of?” He searched her face, as though he might find answers there. “I’ll come with you.”
Too late, she realized she'd been much too fast because now he was suspicious, watching her for answers. Never in her life had she been good at lying to him, no matter which version of Batman he was, lying was impossible. She couldn't quite give the truth, but it wasn't nearly as bad as he thought it might be. An answer still needed to be given though as the seconds ticked by and she said not a word. That was going to look just as suspicious. Goddamnit. "Just -- things. I think I'm going to sell the penthouse," she finally said. "Things need to be packed up. I can handle it."
What she wanted to do was to douse the whole place in gasoline and watch it burn and burn and burn like the rest of her life. But she couldn't stay there anymore, not in the place where her Kara had been, and this Kara had been, and where she almost died. No, it had to go. It was nothing more than a box for all her darkest things, words written on the walls that she could never let Bruce see. Her fingers curled tighter around the Batarang, forcing it deeper, her eyes widening with the sudden shot of pain etched sharpness. "I'll be okay. I'll be back at the house later." Staying there wasn't an option either, not with what she'd done to her room.
The last time she'd actually spoken to Damian had been there too. If the rest of the family was there, they wouldn't want her there. They needed Bruce; they didn't need her. She knew that. "You need to go home," she whispered.
Selling the penthouse seemed a valid enough reason, and Bruce saw no reason to suspect she was lying in that regard. Whatever Helena needed to do for herself, he wasn’t going to stand in the way, but there was a pervasive sense of worry that he just couldn’t shake. “Oh,” he said, uncertain. "If you’re sure, Helena, but… I don’t mind helping you pack.” He wondered where she planned to stay; he assumed the Manor, of course. Where else would she go? He had no idea she thought she wasn’t wanted there. He certainly did, and he didn’t think anyone would tell her to leave. He wouldn’t stand for it, if they tried.
It wasn’t what she said that caught his attention, her whisper that he needed to be home or the vague assurance that she would come to the Manor later. No, it was the way her eyes widened in pain, the way her fist tightened, and his fingers found her wrist in alarm. “What are you doing?” He tugged, once, and then tried to uncurl her fingers with his. “What are you doing?” he repeated, louder this time, more urgent.
Why couldn't he have just let it alone? Fighting wasn't an option; he'd never let her go. She froze when he came at her, his hands on her wrist and then at her bloody fingers, fat little pellets of blood dripping down her fingers to smack on the pavement. And there was the Batarang, coated now as her fingers finally unfurled to reveal it in her palm, the 'tail' still in her flesh. "It just happened. It's fine, I can patch myself up." Patches on top of patches and nothing was stemming the flow. "I can take care of it." Really, what was one more injury to her hands?
The cuts on her knuckles were healing, the oldest ones already faintly pink between the valleys and mountains of bones. "It's not a big deal," and now she was shaking, jerking as she tried to step back from him, her other hand twitching as she rubbed at the tears on her cheeks. "It's fine. I'll be fine. It was just an accident. I can take care of it."
His mind worked slowly, too much so, and he pushed it with almost manic desperation to speed up, to comprehend, so he could do more than stare down at the bloody Batarang in her palm. Not now, he thought, selfish as it was. She couldn’t do this now. Bruce knew she wasn’t okay, he knew she was so very broken, but he had no idea how to fix her and he couldn’t lose her so soon after losing Damian. There was no coming back from that, and the fear he normally would have felt was amplified to the point where it made him dizzy and turned the world into smear and smudge, a blur. “No,” he said, voice too quiet. “It’s not fine.” Maybe she could patch it up. Maybe she could stop the bleeding, maybe it would just become another scar, but it wouldn’t be fixed.
“It wasn’t an accident, Helena.” When she tried to step back he moved with her, not letting her claim the distance she sought. “Please,” he said, tugging on her wrist again. “Please, don’t.”
His single thought was selfish, but this, too, was selfish of her and she knew it. But knowing didn't mean she could stop, that she had a little switch inside of her that she could suddenly hit so she'd stop feeling so depressed and alone. It didn't work that way and not even Damian's death had been enough to shake her from it; it only gave her one less reason to stay.
She took another step back, but Bruce was following her. Didn't he understand? He had to stay. He couldn't follow. He had to be here for the rest of them. For Damian, if he ever came back. For all the hers that would follow once she left. She gave a little shake of her head, uncomprehending as her fingers tried to curl around the Batarang again. "No, no, it was." Why couldn't he understand? Her eyes began to dart, looking everywhere but at him as she continued to try and back up, arms twisting as she tried to break his grip. "Please, please you have to go home. I'll be fine!"
She was desperate, but so was he. All Bruce wanted was to believe her but he couldn’t, he couldn’t turn a blind eye and wrap blissful ignorance around himself like a safety blanket. Not anymore. “Promise me,” he said, and it was more of a plea than a question, because he wasn’t even sure that he would trust her word if she did give it to him. He only loosened his hold, just a little, because he didn’t want either her to hurt herself or him to unintentionally hurt her in her struggles to break free. “Give me your word that you’ll be fine, that you’ll come back to the Manor.” And just this once, surely, he was permitted to be willfully, intentionally selfish. “You have to, Helena. I can’t lose you, do you understand? I can’t.”
That plea made her still, caught her and made her stop struggling, just for a moment. Her mouth opened, tongue pushing at her teeth as she tried to make the words come out, tried to give him the promise he wanted and failed. She couldn't promise that she'd be fine, only that things would be. Eventually. And she couldn't promise she'd come back to the Manor, not because it wasn't home, but because it was. She should belong there, but instead she fit there like a round peg into a square hole. "I," she started, the single syllable stuttering over her tongue. "I…" And then her gaze met his and she gave a little shake of her head. There could be no promise, because she wasn't fine, she hadn't been fine in months and things weren't getting better.
Her mouth closed and she blinked once, a second lazy time as cooling blood dripped from her knuckles. Damian wanted to live and she wanted to die and it would have been right, it would have been okay if she had been the one to go and he had been the one to stay.
"It should have been me," she whispered. And as soon as the words were gone, as soon as they were free, her gaze dropped and her knees gave out, tears running hot and fast down her cheeks.
As much as he wanted her to promise, part of him knew she wouldn’t. He knew, and that was the source of his desperation, that knowledge, what he hadn’t wanted to face before but couldn’t turn a blind eye to now. “Say it,” he demanded again, but even as the words fell past his lips Bruce knew she wouldn’t. And even if she did it would be a lie, and he’d know that too. Lies and silence, and he didn’t know how to fix her. He wished he did.
Her words pained him in a way that was nothing physical; it went deeper than that. He shook his head, wordless denial, and when she fell to her knees he followed. His arms went around her shoulders and he held her close, as though he could somehow protect her, shield her from the desire to die. “No,” he told her, whispered and fierce. “No, Helena, it shouldn’t have. Don’t say that. Please.”
She'd kept it together as long as she could. If he'd gone home earlier, when she told him to go, if he hadn't stayed to see what was in her hand he would have been home now and he wouldn't have to listen. "Yes, yes, yes," she whispered, low and pained, a counterpoint to his denials of who it should have been. She hadn't been there, but it still should have been her in place of her brother. There was so much Damian hadn't gone through yet, so much more for him to see and experience. He wasn't tired of this life like she was, there were still things for him to live for.
It should have been her and the fact that it wasn'tr, that she couldn't have saved Damian and taken his place ate at her like the belief of not having done enough ate at Bruce. Her body curled inward, teeth sinking into her lips to keep the words inside as she shook against Bruce's chest and warmth ran down her cheeks.
Bruce didn’t regret not leaving. He was where he needed to be, right here, with her. She didn’t deserve to be alone. She deserved so much more than this, than wishing she’d died in Damian’s place, and if he had to remind her of that every second of the day then so be it. If he had to stand between her and death for the foreseeable future then he would do that, too. He’d do anything and everything within his power and beyond to keep her alive. “No,” he insisted. “No. Damian loved you. I love you. There are so many people who do, Helena, and none of us wish you were in his place. None of us,” he repeated. He wished Damian had survived with every fiber of his being but not at her expense. Never at hers, or anyone else’s save for himself. He held her as she shook against him, and he found the strength he couldn’t find for himself for her instead.
She wanted to deny it, to say that yes, she should have been. It shouldn't have been Bruce, or Selina, or anyone else, just her, but the words caught before they went past her teeth. They jammed up there until they tasted like ashes in her mouth and salt water ran from her cheeks to his suit. And what finally came out, what finally broke through was nothing more than a fervent whisper, as harshly uttered as any plea for her own death, "I want him back." Even if they fought, if they threatened each other with knives or worse, he was her brother. How many more deaths and funerals and good-byes would she have to live through before she finally got her turn?
And maybe it was selfish but maybe it was loneliness too. Her free hand, her unbloodied hand crept up, curled over the hump of his trapezius where it ran from neck to shoulder, closeness sought here, on the dark dirty streets of Gotham where too few cared.
There was no hesitation, no consideration before he spoke of what he should or shouldn’t say. “I want him back too,” he said, and it was honesty, what he wished he could scream over and over until someone listened and gave him what he wanted. There were times when, though he’d never admit it, Bruce wished he had used the Pit, regardless of what Death had told him of Damian’s last wishes. It was selfishness, but he wanted his son back and he second-guessed his decision not to make that happen. “I want him back too,” he repeated, quieter, and the closeness she sought was a tether and a comfort in a world where there was so little of either. He didn’t tell her it was going to be alright, because he hated baseless reassurances, but there was something he could tell her. “You’re not alone.”
It didn't surprise her that Bruce wanted the same as she did. And maybe, if there had been less people around the Manor when she'd first seen him, she would have been the one to take his body from the Cave to the Pit. She'd thought about it, as much as she'd never admit it to anyone, and of course she hadn't done it, just stayed still and quiet as people moved around. She faded into the long shadows of the Manor went she wanted to cry and ventured a little closer to the light when they stopped.
All of her life now was lived in the dark. The outskirts of recognition, like she was just a ghost hovering on the edge of the landscape, soon to fade into nothingness. It was not something that should have brought comfort, but it did, and her tears slowed as she remained against him. But I am alone. It wasn't something she gave voice to as her hand slid from his shoulder to her lap and curled protectively around her injured hand. It would only lead to more protests, his conviction against her lack of it. "No, of course not," and her smile then was wan like watered down broth that no longer held any flavor. The smile dropped as her head did, given up as easily as it had been adopted. He couldn't help her, that much was obvious now, a spot of clarity within the mud. No words, not even the honest phrases were enough. "It's time for you to go home."
He didn’t expect her to agree with anything he said, and so her assurance that no, she wasn’t alone, only worried him further instead of soothing his fears. There was nothing Bruce wanted more than to believe that Helena really did believe that, but it was too swift a reversal for him to take seriously. Her smile wasn’t very convincing either; he knew. He’d smiled like that, too, and it hadn’t been any more convincing. “You’re not,” he repeated, but it was quiet, a whisper, nothing he expected would do any good. But she was right in one regard; he did need to go home. He couldn’t stay out here all night, however much he wanted to. Neither could she. “Yes,” he sighed. “I suppose it is.” His hold on her loosened, the embrace softening. “You still won’t come?”
There was no immediate, vehement denial, but there was no agreement as brightly lined eyes lifted to regard him. She was, and his words couldn't change that. Nothing could change that. She reached up slowly and rubbed bloodied fingers over his cheeks, beneath the mask where she could feel stubble and the warmth of his skin. "No," she murmured with a small shake of her head as she moved away from him, forcing distance between the two of them. "Some of us have to find our own way home." If she went now, she would only leave again and it would take that much longer to come back, if she ever did. She rubbed at her cheek, tears soaking into the sleeve of her hoodie. "You need to go."
He didn’t care about the blood. For a moment he lifted his hand to meet hers, instinct spurred on by the contact, but he let it fall back to his side before his fingers could meet hers and then it was lost. Bruce felt the distance she put between them by way of a deep physical ache, but he knew no matter how he insisted, how he fought, she would always pull away. He couldn’t keep dragging her back-- well, he could, but there came a point when she had to choose to come with him. It had to be her choice. He’d tried so hard to control the actions of others, to an almost obsessive point, and it still didn’t do any good, Damian was proof of that.
“Alright.” It was a concession, albeit a reluctant one. He got to his feet slowly, watching her all the while. “I’ll check on you later.” It was a reminder, maybe, that while he’d let her go, he wasn’t going to forget.
Helena knew what he meant, but she had no doubt that he'd forget eventually. Something would happen. He would get delayed, and then delayed again, and again, and eventually asking would be forgotten and she'd slide into the shadows and then into that gray fog where nothing really existed and where all tarnished things were forgotten. She smiled a little then, a little blink of happiness. He and Selina were the last things keeping her here and if she faded from him, it was only a matter of time before Selina would too.
"Okay." If he didn't remember, this might be the last time she talked to him, but she couldn't force herself to say that other word. The one that began with a G. She nodded instead, pulled her hoodie up a little higher over her head and walked away from him, letting the dark of Gotham's streets fold up around her. Around a corner, another, her feet leading her in zigzags and angles and the occasional straight line, until she couldn't see Bruce or smell kevlar and ozone. She'd kept it together long enough to get him to go home. That had been the goal.
Only then did she lean against a stone wall, home of a thousand shoulders and as many backs and maybe a few heads, and grind the Batarang into her hand until her vision lit up like fireworks on the broken surface of a pond and she could barely breathe past the influx of pain. Fresh blood patterned the asphalt and she bit back the scream that wanted to burst free, kept it in like she tried to do with so many other things. It stayed, and it felt a lot like success. A victory; one for the little broken purple bat. She closed her eyes and rolled in the pain until it was nothing but a dull throb in her hand, her senses deadened to everything but the brightness in her palm. Her footsteps were heavy and slow as she made it back to her Penthouse, everything else ignored. The people, the voices, the sounds of Gotham: all ignored. Pleasantly separated from her until she was back in her little box of truth. Four walls covered with all the things she wanted to say, all the things she wanted to scream but never did. She didn't make it past the living room, just fell on the hard floor, barely feeling the thud of her knees before she stretched out, warm cheek to cool marble, and stopped fighting the call to rest.