The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne/Harvey Dent, recovery
The first of four stories that are, um, one story.
At first Harvey won’t speak. On the occasion that he’s awake he only cries from one eye and stares with the other, out the window, at the door, the ceiling. Never the mirror.
He doesn’t speak until Bruce visits and that’s only to shout invective at the man until the well-paid and very discreet nurses come in along with the big men in white coats and even when he’s so doped up a wet stain of drool forms on his pillow, the one eye, that familiar villain glare, fixes Bruce with blame.
Bruce stays away until he can’t and he finds a different Harvey altogether. Docile with the nurses, pleasant to staff, joking a little about the predicament he’s in, remarking on the fragility of the political mind. Joking.
He speaks to Bruce like they are old friends and Bruce needs it so much, aches for forgiveness, needs it to be okay, that when Harvey touches his face he leans in gratefully for a kiss.
On his next visit he locks the door on a not-so-whim and after the kissing Harvey’s hand traces Bruce’s cock through slacks and Bruce pushes aside hospital gown to take Harvey into his mouth. It feels like amnesty, like absolution, the white behind his eyes when he comes and when Harvey comes for him and when Harvey kisses him with patience and understanding. And every week he comes back for this, sometimes more often when the need is too great. Not for release, for repentance.
And then Harvey is gone.
There’s a little blood on the sheets but not enough, and a note on construction paper, written in crayon that says, “Get your own, Wayne. This Pinocchio’s mine.”
He’s shaking when he washes his hands, his face, in the sink in the bathroom in the room in the asylum which he thinks should probably be his room and his sink, and in the mirror when it fogs from the steam is the word, “killer,” and he isn’t sure that he’s not the one who put it there.