Chapter 3: The Confession
There was something inside the glove.
You found it after you hung up on Thomas Elliot, sitting on the edge of your bed with your heart going like a trapped bird. You were turning the glove over in your hands, trying to think, and something small and hard slid out of the cuff and dropped onto your sheet. A flesh-colored bead about the size of a lentil, with a tiny wire stub.
You held it up to the light. Then, because you'd seen enough movies, you put it in your ear.
"Good morning, Doctor," said a crisp English voice, as if you'd walked into a drawing room. "Alfred Pennyworth. Master Bruce asked me to apologize for leaving without breakfast. He also asked me to tell you that he heard every word of that call and that you are under no circumstances to meet Dr. Elliot alone."
You stared at the wall. "He bugged the glove?"
"He left the glove. I bugged it. He's not as sentimental as he'd like you to think." A dry pause. "Or rather, he's far more sentimental than he'd like you to think, which is why I had to do the practical part. When is Dr. Elliot expecting you?"
"Nine. His office. He said it was about a mutual friend."
"Then you will go at nine," said Alfred, "and you will not be alone, though it will very much look as if you are. Wear something you can run in, Doctor. And do try to keep him talking."
Thomas Elliot's office was on the top floor of the neurosurgery wing, a corner room with a view of the river and a wall of framed diplomas and a glass case of antique surgical instruments, bone saws and trephines and a row of old ivory-handled scalpels laid out on velvet. He stood up when you came in, and smiled, and came around the desk to shake your hand. His grip was warm and dry and perfectly steady. Surgeon's hands.
"Doctor. Thank you for coming. Coffee? I have a machine. It's obscene, really, it cost more than a car."
"I'm fine."
"Of course." He sat back down. He was handsome in a polished way, auburn hair combed neat, wire-rimmed glasses, a cashmere sweater under his white coat. He looked like a man who'd never once had a hair out of place in his life. "I'll be direct, since we're both busy people. You've been reading Bruce Wayne's films."
"I've read a lot of people's films."
"Nineteen times in eighteen months." He smiled. "I read compliance too."
In your ear, very softly, Alfred said, "Charming."
"So have you," you said. "Forty-one times in six weeks. Always between two and four in the morning."
The smile stayed exactly where it was. "Bruce and I go back a long way," Elliot said. "Our fathers were friends. We grew up together on the same hill in Bristol. Same tutors, same parties, same everything. Except his parents died in an alley and became saints, and mine just died." He tilted his head. "And somehow, everyone always felt sorry for Bruce."
You said nothing. You were very aware of the closed door behind you.
"I've been studying him for a long time," Elliot went on. "The injuries. The excuses. The way he disappears from parties. I'm a neurosurgeon, Doctor. I notice patterns in people. And then I noticed someone else noticing. A night-shift radiologist with no family, no connections, who'd figured out the same thing I had and kept it to herself." He leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk. "I find that fascinating. What does a woman like you want with a secret like that?"
"Nothing."
"Everyone wants something." He opened a drawer. You tensed. He took out a folder and slid it across the desk. "Chief of Radiology opens next spring. That's yours. All you have to do is give me your notes. Your timeline. Everything. And then forget it ever existed."
"What would you do with them?"
"Help an old friend," said Thomas Elliot, "finally take off his mask."
He said it softly, kindly, and his eyes behind the glasses had something flat and patient in them that made every hair on your arms stand up. You thought of the glass case behind him with its ivory scalpels. You thought of the way he'd said the alley.
"No," you said.
"No?"
"I'm not giving you anything, Dr. Elliot. There's nothing to give. I'm a radiologist. I read films. I read Bruce Wayne's films because he's a frequent flyer in our ER and I wanted to make sure nobody had missed anything." You stood up. "And if you access his chart again without a clinical reason, I'll report you to compliance myself."
For a moment, nothing happened. Then Thomas Elliot stood up too. He came slowly around the desk, smiling, and you found yourself backing up, one step, two, until your shoulders hit the door. He was taller than you'd realized. He reached past your head and turned the lock with a quiet click.
"I don't think you understand," he said pleasantly, "how much I want this."
"Doctor," said Alfred in your ear, very calm, "do take one step to your left."
You stepped left.
The door you'd been leaning on swung open, which was impossible, because Elliot had just locked it. It swung open because someone on the other side had a key card, and that someone strolled into the office in a perfectly cut gray suit with his tie loosened and a paper coffee cup in each hand and a dazzling, idiotic smile.
"Tommy!" cried Bruce Wayne. "There you are! They told me at the desk you'd be up here. God, has it been a year? The foundation gala, wasn't it? You looked so sad at that gala." He handed Elliot a coffee, which Elliot took automatically. "And Doctor! What a coincidence. Tommy, did you know she fixed my shoulder? Popped it right back in. Polo, again. I really should give it up. Alfred says I'm too old." He turned the full wattage of the smile on you, and only you could see the steel underneath it. "I came to take you to breakfast. To say thank you. You did say yes, didn't you?"
"I did," you said, a little faintly.
"Wonderful." He slung an arm around your shoulders. It was heavy and warm and very, very steady. "Tommy, we must have lunch. Call my assistant. Actually don't, she hates me."
Thomas Elliot stood in the middle of his office holding a paper cup of coffee he didn't want, with his face perfectly composed and his knuckles white around the cup.
"Of course, Bruce," he said. "It's always lovely to see you."
"Isn't it, though?" said Bruce Wayne, and steered you out the door.
He didn't let go of you until you were in the back of the car, and the door was shut, and Alfred, in person this time, silver-haired and immaculate behind the wheel, had pulled out into traffic. Then the arm came off your shoulders and the smile came off his face, and he turned and looked at you, and he was shaking.
You'd never seen him shake. Not with a dislocated shoulder. Not bleeding on your fire escape.
"He locked the door," Bruce said. His voice was barely a voice.
"You were there."
"I was on the other side of it." He reached out, slowly, and touched your face like he was checking you for fractures. "Thirty seconds. I couldn't get the card to read for thirty seconds."
"Bruce. I'm fine."
"I know." He closed his eyes. "I know. That's not the point."
Wayne Manor was enormous and cold and full of clocks. He took you upstairs, past paintings of dead Waynes and a grandfather clock you didn't look at too closely, into a bedroom with tall windows and gray light and a bed the size of your kitchen. Alfred had lit a fire. There was tea on a tray. There was a sling for his shoulder folded on the chair, which you suspected was Alfred's idea of a joke.
Bruce stood by the window for a long time with his back to you.
"I have to tell you something," he said finally.
You waited.
"That first night. I told you I came to make sure you'd keep quiet." He turned around. "That wasn't true. Or it was, but it wasn't all of it. I'd known about you for a year. Since the third time you pulled my films. I could have had Oracle scrub your access. I could have had you transferred to a clinic in Metropolis with a raise and you'd never have known why." He swallowed. "I didn't. I watched you read my scans and not tell anyone. Month after month. And I kept thinking, who does that? Who finds the biggest secret in Gotham and just... keeps it? For a stranger? For nothing?"
"I told you why."
"You told me about the oath." He came toward you. "But I watched the logs. You didn't just look at my films. You looked at them on nights after the news said I'd been hurt. You were checking on me." He stopped in front of you. "For a year, you were the only person in this city, besides Alfred, who checked on me. And you'd never once said my name out loud."
The fire popped. You couldn't speak.
"That's my confession," said Bruce Wayne. "I didn't come to your door to contain a breach. I came because I wanted to meet the one person who knew everything about me and didn't want anything for it. And then you yelled at me about my shoulder, and I've been in serious trouble ever since."
You reached up and took his face in both hands.
"Schedule the surgery," you said.
He blinked. "What?"
"The shoulder. Schedule it. With a surgeon I pick. Not Tom Elliot." Your thumbs moved over his cheekbones. "That's my price. For keeping the secret."
"You said there was no price."
"I lied. I'm in serious trouble too." And you pulled him down and kissed him.
It was different from the first time. Slower. Nobody was bleeding. He kissed you like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it, his good hand moving down your back, his mouth on your jaw, your throat, the hollow of your collarbone. You undressed him this time without any clasps, just buttons, and when the shirt fell away you kissed the new bruise on his shoulder, and he made a low sound and lifted you, one-armed, which you told him was a terrible idea, and carried you to the bed anyway.
"Doctor's orders," you warned.
"Left arm stays still," he promised, laying you down. "The rest is negotiable."
He was very thorough with the rest. He took his time like he was solving something, mapping you with his mouth and his good hand until you were twisting against the sheets and saying his name. Bruce. Only Bruce. When he finally moved over you, braced carefully on his right forearm, and asked, "Yes?" with his eyes on yours, you said, "Yes," and pulled him down, and he pushed into you slowly and stopped there, forehead to forehead, both of you breathing like you'd been running.
"Hi," he whispered, of all things.
You laughed, and he felt it, and groaned, and started to move.
The fire burned down. The gray light moved across the bed. He made love to you the way he'd been waiting to, slow and deep and devastating, watching your face, learning what made you gasp and doing it again until you couldn't think at all. When you came it was with your arms locked around his neck breathing his name against his ear, and he followed a moment later with his face buried in your hair, saying your name over and over like he'd just learned how.
Afterward you lay tangled together under the heavy covers, your head on his good shoulder, listening to the house tick around you.
"You're going to make me stop," he said after a while. Quiet. "The surgery. Six months off a rooftop."
"Four, if you do your physical therapy."
"Gotham won't wait four months."
"Gotham has a lot of people in capes these days. I've X-rayed half of them." You lifted your head. "You can't keep putting yourself back together alone, Bruce. Not anymore."
He looked at you for a long time, in the gray light, in his enormous cold house full of clocks. Then he reached for the phone on the nightstand and pressed a button.
"Alfred," he said. "Clear my calendar for March."
There was a pause on the other end. Then, very faintly, in the voice of a man who had waited twenty years to hear it:
"With pleasure, sir."
Bruce put the phone down. He turned back to you and pulled you closer, careful of his shoulder, and you settled against him.
Outside the tall windows, far off across the river, the Bat-Signal was still burning faintly against the morning clouds where somebody had forgotten to turn it off. He looked at it. Then he looked at you.
"Let it burn," said Batman, and kissed you, and stayed.