Chapter 2: Clinical Setting
He kept his word about the clinical setting for exactly four days.
On the fifth night, at 3:40 in the morning, you woke to a sound at your bedroom window. Not a knock. Something heavier, a dull thump against the glass, and then a scrape, like something large dragging itself across the iron slats of the fire escape.
You lay very still in the dark. You were an adult woman alone in a Gotham apartment, and you knew exactly what you should do, which was get the baseball bat out from under the bed and call 911.
Instead you got up, and pulled on your robe, and pushed the curtain aside.
Batman was sitting on your fire escape.
He was slumped against the brick beside the window with one leg stretched out in front of him and the long black cape pooled around him like spilled ink, rain beading on the armor. The cowl turned toward you. The white lenses of the eyes caught the glow from the street below. His left arm hung against his side at an angle that made every clinical part of your brain sit up and start screaming.
You shoved the window open. Cold wet air poured into the room.
"You absolute idiot," you said.
"Evening, Doctor." The voice through the cowl was the one from the news clips, a low scrape of gravel. Then, quieter, in a voice that was almost his own: "Clinical setting was closed."
"Get inside before somebody sees you."
"Nobody sees me."
"I'm seeing you right now, bleeding on my geraniums. Get inside."
He had to duck nearly in half to get through the window. Then he was standing in your bedroom, enormous in the dark, dripping on your rug, and you could hear his breathing behind the cowl, slow and controlled in the way of somebody who is in a great deal of pain and has decided not to mention it.
You flipped on the lamp.
In the light he was worse. There was a long slash across the armor over his ribs where something had cut through the outer layer, and the gauntlet on his right hand was split across the knuckles. The left shoulder was wrong in a way you could see from across the room: the round of the joint gone flat, the arm hanging forward and turned slightly in.
"Anterior dislocation," you said. "How long ago?"
"Forty minutes."
"Forty... Bruce. Why didn't you put it back yourself, like on the docks?"
He was quiet a moment. "Tried," he said. "Twice. It won't stay."
That frightened you more than anything else had so far. "Sit," you said, pointing at the edge of the bed. "And take that thing off your head. I'm not doing this with a bat."
He sat. The bed creaked alarmingly under him. He reached up with his good hand, found something at the base of his skull, and the cowl came loose with a soft pneumatic hiss. He pulled it off and set it on your nightstand next to your alarm clock and a half-finished paperback mystery.
His hair was damp and flattened. There was a smear of grease paint around his eyes, black, making them look even bluer. There was a bruise coming up along his jaw. He looked about a thousand years old and very tired and completely unlike any photograph of Bruce Wayne you'd ever seen.
"Who did this?" you asked, kneeling in front of him and starting to work at the clasps of the chest plate. Your hands were steady. They were always steady for this part. It was the rest of you that was shaking.
"A man named Zsasz. With a knife." A pause. "And a fire escape on Crime Alley that wasn't bolted to the wall."
"So, gravity."
"Gravity got involved."
You got the chest plate off. Underneath was a fitted black undersuit, soaked through with sweat, and under that, when you'd peeled it down to his waist with his help, there was him. You'd seen him in black and white a dozen times. Femurs and ribs and the long knots of old fractures. You'd never seen him in color. You'd never seen the scars.
There were a lot of them. Silver lines and puckered starbursts and one long surgical seam down his right side that you recognized from a set of films two years ago. A burn on his left forearm. Bruises in every stage of healing, black and purple and yellow, like a map of the last month of his life. He was built like a man who had spent twenty years making his body into a weapon and twenty years letting other people try to break it.
You put your palm flat on his chest. Clinical, you told yourself. Assessing. His heart was going hard and fast under your hand.
"Lie back," you said. "This is going to hurt."
"Everything hurts."
"This is going to hurt in a new and exciting way."
He made a sound that, in a different man, might have been a laugh.
You talked him through it. Lie flat. Let the arm hang off the edge of the bed. Breathe. You took his wrist in both hands and leaned back slowly, steadily, letting your own weight do the work, the way you'd done it a hundred times in the ER during residency. You felt the muscles of his shoulder fighting you, clenched and spasming, and you said, "Bruce. Let go. Let me," and after a long second, you felt him do it.
The joint went home with a deep, solid clunk.
He swore, once, low and vicious, and all the breath went out of him. Then he lay there on your bed with his eyes closed and his chest heaving, and you sat back on your heels, still holding his wrist.
"That," he said, without opening his eyes, "is the first time in ten years it's gone back on the first try."
"That's because you never let anybody help you do it." You let go of his wrist. You didn't move away. "You need a sling. And an MRI. And surgery. And probably about six months of not jumping off things."
"No."
"I know. I'm saying it for the record."
He opened his eyes and looked at you. You were kneeling on the rug between his knees, in your robe, with your hair coming out of its knot and his blood on your hands. You became aware of all of that at once.
"You're shaking," he said.
"Adrenaline."
"Is it."
"Yes. It's very common. It's a physiological response to..."
He sat up. Carefully, keeping his left arm close against his side, but in one smooth movement, and suddenly his face was very close to yours. Close enough to see the gray ring around the blue of his eyes. Close enough to feel his breath.
"I told myself I'd stay away," he said quietly. "After that night. I went home and I told Alfred you weren't a threat, and that I'd keep watching the logs, and that was all. I told him I wouldn't come back."
"What did Alfred say?"
"He said, 'Very good, sir,' in the voice he uses when he thinks I'm lying."
"Were you?"
"I've driven past your building every night for four days," said Batman, sitting on your bed with his cowl off and his armor on your floor. "Twice on Thursday."
You couldn't breathe.
"I'm not a good idea," he said. "You should know that. People close to me get hurt. Sometimes they get worse than hurt. I came here tonight because I trusted you with my shoulder. That's all I should be trusting you with." He was looking at your mouth again. "Tell me to leave and I'll go back out the window and you'll never..."
You kissed him.
You'd thought about it. Of course you had. For four days, every time you closed your eyes. You'd imagined it would be careful. It wasn't. He made a rough sound against your mouth and his good hand came up and slid into your hair, cradling the back of your head, and he kissed you back like a man who'd been starving and hadn't let himself notice.
When you finally broke apart, both of you were breathing hard. His forehead dropped against yours.
"That wasn't me telling you to leave," you said.
"I noticed."
"Bruce." You put your hand on his chest again, over his heart. Not clinical. Not even pretending. "Do you want this?"
He was quiet for a second. When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper, and it wasn't Batman's and it wasn't the playboy's.
"More than I've wanted anything in a long time."
"Then stay."
He couldn't use his left arm. You told him so, in your best attending voice, standing in front of him and untying your robe.
"Doctor's orders," you said. "You lie back. You don't lift anything. You don't put weight on that shoulder. Understand?"
He looked up at you from the edge of your bed, and his eyes went dark and moved down over you slowly, every inch, as the robe slid off your shoulders and fell to the floor. You'd been looked at before. You'd never been looked at like that. Like he was memorizing a crime scene. Like he'd be thinking about it on rooftops for years.
"Understood," he said, hoarse.
You helped him out of the rest of the suit. It took a while; there were a lot of clasps, and you kept getting distracted. You kissed the bruise on his jaw, the burn on his forearm, the long surgical scar on his side, and you felt every one of them make him shiver. You pressed him back onto the bed with one hand flat on his good shoulder, and he went, slowly, his eyes never leaving your face.
Then you climbed over him, and took your time.
You'd spent eighteen months studying his body in shades of gray. You learned it again now, in the warm light of your bedside lamp, by touch and by taste. The hard plane of his stomach. The ridge of his hip bone. The way he went utterly still and then arched when you took him in your hand, and the low, broken sound he made when you followed with your mouth. His good hand fisted in your sheets. He said your name like it hurt.
"Come here," he begged, finally. Batman, begging. "Please. I need..."
"I know."
You sank down onto him slowly, inch by inch, your hands braced on his chest, and watched his face come apart. His head pressed back into your pillow. His good hand found your hip and held on, not guiding, just holding, like you were the only solid thing in the world.
You moved. Slow at first, rolling your hips, finding the angle that made your breath catch, and then the one that made his. He watched you the whole time. He didn't look away once. When you leaned forward to kiss him, your hair falling around both your faces like a curtain, he groaned into your mouth and his hips came up off the bed to meet you, and you gasped and pinned him back down with a hand on his chest.
"Doctor's orders," you reminded him, breathless.
"I'm a terrible patient."
"I noticed."
He laughed, a real one, shaky and astonished, and his hand slid from your hip to between your legs, and his thumb found exactly the right place on the first try, the way he found everything. You stopped being able to give orders after that.
You came first, hard, your nails digging into his chest, his name tearing out of you loud enough that your neighbor would certainly have opinions. He held you through it, his thumb gentling, his eyes on your face. Then he followed, your name low and ragged in his mouth, his good hand gripping your hip hard enough to leave marks you'd find in the mirror tomorrow and touch on purpose.
For a long time afterward you lay on his chest, listening to his heart slow down under your ear. The rain had started up again against the window. His fingers moved slowly up and down your spine.
"Stay till morning," you murmured.
"Can't. Sun comes up at six-forty."
"Then stay till six-thirty."
He was quiet. Then his arm tightened around you. "Six-thirty," he agreed.
When you woke, the light through the curtains was gray and the bed beside you was empty. The armor was gone. The cowl was gone. The only sign he'd been there at all was a dent in your second pillow and a single black glove, the split one, folded neatly on your nightstand.
You were holding it, smiling at it like an idiot, when your phone rang.
Unknown number. You almost let it go. Then you answered.
"Doctor," said a warm, cultured voice. A voice you'd heard over the PA at Gotham General a hundred times, paging the neurosurgical team. "This is Tom Elliot, upstairs in neurosurgery. I'm so sorry to call so early. I hope I didn't wake you."
The glove went still in your hand.
"I've been going over some old imaging," Dr. Elliot said pleasantly. "A mutual friend of ours. I think it's time you and I had a talk about Bruce."