Chapter 9: Bacon for the Bat
He found the communicator, a sleek black disc, in a shielded drawer of his bedroom study. His fingers moved over it with precise, familiar motions. “Diana,” he said into the device, his voice a flat echo of its former warmth. “I need you. The Manor. It’s… an incursion. I can’t explain over an open channel.”
Circe watched from the doorway, her form draped in one of his robes. She sipped a glass of his oldest whiskey, her smile a thin blade. “She’ll come running,” she murmured into the rim of the glass. “The hero’s fatal flaw. That bleeding heart.”
“The cave systems are on a localized lockdown,” he stated, placing the communicator down. “The incursion fiction will explain the security protocols. She’ll sense magic. She’ll be on guard.”
“Let her,” Circe shrugged, the robe slipping from one shoulder. “Suspicion makes the fall so much sweeter. The higher the pedestal, the harder the impact.” She finished the whiskey, the amber liquid catching the low light. “Take me to your workshop, lover. I want to see where you build your little toys.”
The Batman was not Bruce. He led her downstairs, past the grandfather clock that no longer hid a secret entrance. That was for the other man, the ghost. He took the main staircase instead, down into the newer, public galleries of the manor’s east wing. His mind, now a crystal lattice of cold logic, had already rerouted every security feed, every sensor. The cave was inaccessible, but the sub-basement archive, a sterile white room lined with dormant prototype cases, would serve.
He keyed in a code. The heavy door hissed open.
Inside, under the flat, surgical light, stood a skeletal framework of black alloy and glowing blue nodes. Brother Eye. It hummed with a low, dormant energy. Circe approached it, her fingers hovering inches from its central lens. “Oh, it’s hungry,” she whispered, her green eyes reflecting the cold machine light. “I can feel it. A blind, infant god. We’ll give it sight.”
“The power requirement is immense,” he said, standing beside her, his gaze analytical. “Thermonuclear or a sustained magical source.”
“Thermonuclear is so… indelicate,” she crooned, turning to him. She pressed herself against the hard plates of his chest. “Magic is a river. We just need to dig a new channel.” Her hand slid down his torso, over the taut muscle of his abdomen, and into the loose waistband of his trousers. Her fingers closed around him, finding him already half-hard. The corruption was a living thing in his blood, a constant arousal to her presence, to the power she represented. “I’ll need a focus. An anchor point in this realm. You.”
She dropped to her knees before him, the white floor cold beneath her. She didn’t ask. She took him into her mouth in one swift, deep motion, her head bobbing with a ruthless rhythm. Her tongue worked the sensitive underside of his cock, her throat relaxing to take him deeper with each thrust. He grasped a handful of her violet hair, not guiding, just holding, his other hand braced against the cold chassis of Brother Eye. The machine’s hum seemed to sync with the wet, slapping sounds she made.
He looked down, watching her. There was no tenderness in her eyes, only a voracious, technical glee. She was a craftsman at work. She pulled off with a lewd pop, her lips slick and swollen. “I can taste it on you,” she rasped, her breath hot. “The last traces of her. Like cheap perfume on a whore.” She took him back into her mouth, sucking fiercely, her hand working the base of his shaft in a tight, twisting motion.
He came hard, his release jetting down her throat in thick pulses. She swallowed, every drop, her eyes locked on his, a challenge and a celebration. When he was spent, she rose, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “There,” she said, her voice hoarse. “A covenant. Your essence in the machine’s heart. Now it will know its master.”
A soft chime echoed in the sterile room. The manor’s security feed, redirected to a wall screen, showed the front gates. Wonder Woman stood there, rain plastering her dark hair to her shoulders, her posture taut with readiness and concern. She was beautiful, a statue of worried virtue.
“Showtime,” Circe purred, her magic already coiling around her fingers like violet smoke.
They met Diana in the grand foyer, under the cavernous, shadowed ceiling. Bruce stood just a step ahead of Circe, his posture the familiar, rigid line of Batman, but his face was too still, his eyes holding a flat, unfamiliar cast.
“Bruce,” Diana said, her voice layered with relief and immediate caution. Her eyes flickered to Circe, then back to him. “You said an incursion. Are you hurt? What is she doing here?”
“The incursion is contained,” he said, his voice devoid of inflection. “Circe… assisted.”
“Assisted?” Diana took a step forward, her lasso faintly glowing at her hip. “Bruce, look at yourself. Your eyes…” Horror dawned on her features. “What has she done to you?”
“He’s become what he always needed to be,” Circe said, moving to stand beside him, her shoulder brushing his arm. “Unburdened. Efficient. Real.”
“Stay back,” Diana commanded, her hand going to her lasso. “Bruce, fight it. Whatever spell she’s cast—”
“It’s not a spell, Diana,” Bruce interrupted, the use of her name sounding like a quote from a dead man. “It’s a clarification.” He moved then, not with the shadow-born grace of the Batman, but with a terrible, direct economy. He wasn’t trying to subdue; he was channeling.
Diana raised her bracelets to cross, but he was inside her guard. He drove a fist into her solar plexus, not to injure, but to expel air. As she doubled over, gasping, he pivoted, his arm snaking around her neck in a chokehold perfected over a thousand nights in the cave. He squeezed, cutting off the carotid arteries, his bicep a bar of iron against her throat.
She struggled, her strength legendary, but the hold was perfect, and his resolve was absolute. He was using her own compassion, her reluctance to truly hurt him, against her. Her vision began to tunnel.
Circe stepped forward as Diana’s thrashing weakened. She placed her palms on Diana’s temples. Violet energy, thick as tar and humming with a malevolent sentience, crawled from Circe’s fingers and into the Wonder Woman’s skin.
“Let’s peel back the goddess,” Circe whispered, her voice a venomous hymn. “Let’s see the silly little clay girl underneath.”
Diana’s body went rigid in Bruce’s hold, then began to convulse. A choked, guttural sound escaped her lips. Her form… wavered. The majestic armor seemed to melt, reshaping into a simpler tunic. Her stature diminished slightly, the divine light in her eyes guttering like a dying candle.
Bruce released the hold, letting her crumple to the cold marble floor. She coughed, trying to push herself up, but her limbs were not her own. She looked up at him, her expression a shattered mosaic of betrayal and dawning, unspeakable fear. “Bru…ce…?” The word was slurred, her tongue thick.
“Watch,” he said, and there was nothing in his voice.
Circe snapped her fingers. The room darkened, the only light coming from the stained-glass window, casting them all in a sickly, colored gloom. Then Circe turned to Bruce, her hands moving to the belt of his trousers. She undid them, letting them and his briefs fall to his ankles. His cock, still wet from her mouth, sprang free, hard and ready.
“No…” Diana slurred from the floor, a tear tracing a path through the dust on her cheek.
Circe backed herself against the edge of a heavy, ornate table, hiking up the silken robe she wore. She was bare underneath. She guided him into her, sighing as he filled her in one deep, smooth stroke. Then she began to ride him, her hips rocking back and forth against the table’s edge, each motion accompanied by the wet, rhythmic sound of their joining.
Bruce’s hands gripped her hips, his knuckles white, his face a mask of cold concentration. He fucked her with a relentless, mechanical rhythm, driving up into her with each of her downward grinds. Circe threw her head back, moaning, one hand tangling in his hair, the other braced on the table. “Yes… just like that… fuck your witch… fuck me while your goddess watches…”
Diana tried to look away, but she couldn’t. Her neck was stiffening, her spine beginning to curve with a dreadful, audible popping. Her fingers, splayed on the marble, thickened, the nails darkening into hard, black hooves. A pained, strangled squeal forced its way from her changing throat.
Circe’s moans grew louder, more theatrical. “Oh god, Bruce! Right there! Your cock feels so much bigger now… so much better than hers ever could…” Her words were daggers, each one twisting in Diana’s diminishing consciousness.
Bruce’s breathing became ragged, the only sign of his building climax. His thrusts grew sharper, deeper, pounding Circe against the table with a force that made the ancient wood groan. “Come inside me,” Circe demanded, her voice a raw gasp. “Fill me up! Mark me as yours!”
With a final, brutal drive, Bruce shuddered, his release pulsing into her depths. He groaned, a low, animal sound of completion. As he did, Diana’s transformation completed. Her human cry faded into a final, confused porcine squeal. Where the Warrior of Themyscira had lain, now a small, scared pig rooted feebly at the cold floor, its eyes wide with a fading, animal terror.
The last thing those human eyes had seen was Bruce Wayne, his head thrown back in ecstasy, buried inside the sorceress. The last thing her human mind had processed was the sight of her love, happily, triumphantly, fucking her enemy.
Panting, Circe slid off the table, Bruce slipping from her with a lewd, wet sound. She looked down at the pig, a smile of pure, unadulterated victory on her face. She touched Bruce’s cheek, directing his gaze downward. “See?” she whispered, her own scent and his mingling in the air between them. “No more complications.”
Bruce looked at the pig, then at the violet energy now permanently etched in the veins of the Brother Eye prototype across the hall. He felt nothing. A clean, empty silence. He nodded. “Now we begin.”