Re: Near the entrance: Bat/Cat
"I know you chose to go, Bruce, but distance isn't everything. You can be a thousand miles and five centuries away, if you still feel like you owe them answers? Then you haven't really left." She didn't add that he had, in so many ways, been run out. She didn't think she needed to and, more importantly, she didn't think he'd take her saying those words well. And that was old habit, measuring her words and she was out of practice. She watched him ground his teeth together, the sound familiar, and she knew he was frustrated; it hadn't been her intention, but she was made of loud opinions, thoughts, and she wasn't very good at not saying things.
And she was pushing, she was. It was a habit born of need, which she understood now in a way she hadn't before. If she didn't push, he didn't talk, and he didn't say, and asking him didn't net the same result. Anger and scorn, and she recognized it before he reigned it in. It was familiar, but there were words with it, and they weren't polite wedding reception conversation, and she craved things that were real. "Harley doesn't care, Bruce. She's incendiary. She just wants to make you angry enough, passionate enough, something enough to drag feelings out of you. It's how the good little shrink with the bubblegum pigtails works." She swallowed back her question: better for who, because she knew there was only so far she could push when he was like this. She'd learned that in a heap on the floor in Gatsby, and she was consciously aware of that sharp ledge, lest she fall off it.
She had no idea what all that silence meant, and the only thing she had to go on was that it hadn't been accompanied by a shove. She looked back at him, a million questions in those mossy green depths, and she waited for him to talk. She would've pushed harder in the past, but she didn't. His use of her name was unexpected. Oh, they both played that particular distance game. "I'm not Gotham," she said once he was done rambling. She knew he associated her with the city, logically she knew that. "Or are you saying you're not ready to come back to me?" Because why pretend this conversation was about anything else? She'd be mortified after, so it might as well be with good reason.
"It won't be the same when you come back," she repeated, no ire, just thoughtfulness in the words that were unaccented, nothing like lower Gotham at all, and she'd been weened of that early, young, before either of then wore a cowl. "What won't? This city?" she motioned to it. "Who cares? Us?" she motioned between them, graceful wrist and long fingers. "We never were us, Bruce. We never tried. I know you think we did, but we didn't. I pretended not to care, and we never tried. Trying comes with risks neither of us ever took. We almost did, but we never actually made it there. Both too scared, I think." Candor, and maybe she shouldn't have said it, but it was too late to take it back now.
And his question about Robert, that was unexpected; she didn't think the man cared. "What about Iris?" she asked, because salvos were her thing. They were her fallback. "Or are you really asking about the man you seem hellbent on handing me over to?" She exhaled, and she relented. "I'd probably say he's the best friend I've ever had. You had Steph and Eddie. You and I, we were never really friends. When you had problems, you talked to them. I don't think I really had that until he came along. He knows I love you. He probably wants me not to." She gave him an honest look, a curious look. "Iris?"