Chapter Text
John Doe had never received a visitor, not before one man, and what a significant man he was indeed. He wasn’t even sure if there had been people in his forgotten life to mourn his confinement and care about coming up to visit him, which was quite possibly more upsetting than the fact he’d never been visited alone.
He was no younger than twenty, no older than thirty, surely; he was a grown man that had gone through the process of childhood and surpassed it – however, much like a child, he couldn’t remember anything before gaining consciousness in a dingy room (in his case, an Arkham holding cell) with severe-looking doctors dutifully recording his progress on colourful clipboards, covering up their frowns. He’d adjusted to his new life with remarkable speed, despite all deterring circumstances; he wasn’t stupid, and, even then, freshly getting used to the swing of things in Arkham Asylum, he’d known good behaviour would get him further than lashing out like he’d wanted to at the time, but he’d been in a constant state of turmoil – had no one cared? What was his real name? Did not even his parents care he was sick and locked away somewhere, the people that had made him with their own flesh and blood? How old was he? What kind of a man had he been? Why did he look different to everyone else?
To this day, he liked to pretend to doctors he knew about his past and that it was a secret locked and buried with no key. Maybe, one day, he’d start to believe it himself, he liked to tell himself. Truthfully, it was a mystery to not just those around him but to him himself.
Over time, the questions had grown less important, like the sharpness of a critical wound dulling into a gentle ache through the process of healing, but sometimes he still wondered. He’d found coping methods – ways to reign in his savage temper and ways to quell the questions that only killed him a little bit more every time he thought about them – and, with the help of Joan Leland, most of these coping methods he practised inflicted no harm on himself or others.
The fuzzy Arkham lights were one thing he found himself indulging in from time to time, even now. The way they hummed, like there were live insects embedded in the ceiling, encouraged him to close his eyes and imagine he was inside a remote field, listening to the content buzz of wildlife, each soft grass blade around him as bright as glowing paint in his imagination back when he’d first stayed in Arkham; the real outside world was something he had never indulged in before at that point. The other thing he’d relaxed himself with was not a figment of his imagination – it was something that was, conveniently, sitting right in front of him, staring attentively at a hand of cards, oblivious to John’s incredulous scrutiny. Sometimes, John did wonder if it was his imagination that conjured up someone so beautiful and fascinating and surreal and socially important – someone that seemed to care about him, impossibly, as much as he cared about him. Days of cutting out newspaper clippings were over; he had the man in front of him, close enough to touch, someone he, at times, felt like he needed to pinch to make sure he was actually real.
He did.
“Ow.” Bruce Wayne looked up from his cards to him, his silver eyes, like bottomless midnight water, mirroring harassment and perplexity. John eyed him intently while he still could without question: he looked better than he had for the past couple of weeks, more colour in his face and less colour around his eyes. His visits had become more infrequent and jumbled recently; to John’s knowledge, he was (still) trying to rebuild his family business again. John and his ex-girlfriend, Harley Quinn, had killed all of Bruce’s workers and poisoned the halls with toxic gas, and it had left its lingering damage. To his understanding, the building had been blocked off for a few weeks to be thoroughly cleansed and examined, but, hollowed of life, it hadn’t circled back to its former glory upon reopening, and that had left an insufferable weight on Bruce’s shoulders.
Joker and his ex-girlfriend, John reminded himself dispassionately as he reflected on what had happened. Joker was another darker entity entirely, and Harley was a girlfriend from a separate lifetime. It had never felt right with her; kissing her, claiming he loved her, had felt like expecting to walk over smooth ground only to plunge suddenly into a cold abyss, the exact opposite of what he had thought kissing her and owning her would feel like. He wanted to think it was only because he didn’t actually love her and that he’d mistaken respect and fear for love, which was true; but the whole reason, he thought as he looked at Bruce’s stern mirror-like eyes and his fine, slashed eyebrows and his puckered moon of a mouth, was that–
Well, John thought solemnly. There was no need to dwell on that. Bruce had... forgiven him, per say – given him another chance to redeem himself and rekindle their relationship – but he couldn’t expect much more; he’d never truly forgive him for killing not just his workers but one of his family friends, and John found it in him to respect that. He’d rather have Bruce in a more detached way than before than not at all. Bruce was his only friend, really, and the thought of a world without him filled his mouth with a sour, ashy taste that made him want to spit. It was simply too agonising to bear.
“What?” Bruce asked now, eyeing him curiously over his cards. He looked so... uncharacteristically unguarded. Since he’d started juggling Arkham visits, his patrols and rebuilding Wayne Enterprises, he’d usually been too sullen and exhausted to put an effort into communication, even the drab, small kind, but today, on an uneventful, dreary Tuesday night, he’d shown up jovially with an unopened pack of cards with the price sticker still on them, looking... different, putting it quite mildly. Instead of being regally thrown together with his hair styled sideways impeccably, the silk hung over his face now, brushing his chipper eyes, and he just seemed so much lighter, somehow, but John couldn’t explain it. They were playing cards in the rec room on a chipping white table, and Bruce was the subject of unavoidable attention. Although he never smiled, Bruce radiated such positive energy that he barely seemed to notice the cluster of glares around him. The inmates were restless in his presence, not forgetting his father, Thomas Wayne, and what he’d done. “Your go.” He slapped down a card.
John looked mournfully at his crappy hand. He had half the mind to surrender, but unfortunately that wasn’t how the game worked; instead, he shook his head, signalling he didn’t want the top card on the face-up pile, and watched Bruce pick it up and tuck it into his hand before slapping his spare card onto the face-down pile in between them, face-up. He’d won. Unsurprised, John watched Bruce spread his flush of cards over the table. 2, 3 and 4 of Diamonds; 7, 8, 9 and 10 of Spades. John slapped down his inferior hand and shuffled the entire deck, puckering his lips irritably. “You got good, buddy,” he observed suspiciously. “Were you holding out on me before?”
Bruce shrugged sheepishly and accepted the cards that he was dealt quietly. Conversation had never really been Bruce’s strong suit, especially when he was either pensive, tired or miserable; John had observed and mentally recorded that. He wondered which of the three he was right now – maybe all three of them – but he was certainly one of them.
Bruce looked thoughtfully at his cards before he looked at him over them. Then, suddenly, he grinned. There was something inexplicably feral about the gesture, like a lion sniffing the air for its prey. It was the first time he’d ever grinned in front of him – a wholesome display of curling lips and flashing white teeth, very boyish, very pure, very unlike him. John had to tell himself not to fall off his chair in astonishment. Bruce tucked his un-styled hair behind his ear with a soft swipe of his wrist and leaned closer reticently. “That girl over there thinks you’re cute,” he murmured in a pouty, resigned voice.
The girl in question? That was unclear. ‘Over there’ could refer to anywhere; there were girls specked sporadically around the room.
“Where?” John asked curiously, but, as he scanned the room for the accused girl to have a brief look at her, he felt warm fingertips press against his pulse, which, quite inconveniently, chose that moment to start sprinting athletically. He looked up, startled. Bruce was touching his wrist; he was leaning closer. John could see himself reflected in the other man’s irises, like a reflection set on the surface of water, and Bruce’s eyes seemed to have the same dreamy ripple, the same elegant movement... He resisted the natural urge to recoil from the gesture; after all, it was shockingly unfamiliar. His skin prickled with electricity where he was being touched.
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Bruce asseverated, rubbing his thumb in distracting circles. “Buddy,” he added tenderly, and John almost literally melted into his chair. The nickname, his nickname for Bruce, sounded so endearing on Bruce’s tongue, so sweet, like deliquesced sugar. John didn’t know how he’d managed to make a platonic term sound so sensual, but he had, and his bones gave way to liquid.
“Yeah?” John rejoined quietly. The tender synapses in his brain were frayed. “I mean – really? What about, buddy?”
“I think I like the old you much better.” Bruce’s fingers were creeping up his wrist casually: his exploring fingertips were sliding with feathery pressure against his pale skin without a slither of shame, following the branches of his blue-purple veins, hitching up his ripped Arkham sleeve.
“What?” John mustered ineloquently, because, well – surely not? Bruce’s fingers had found the crease of his inner elbow now, and John’s mouth dried up, his tongue fluffy all the way down his throat. Maybe he was misinterpreting things – it wasn’t exactly an uncommon mistake of his – or – or – well, anything, really. Anything sounded more sane than Bruce (Batman) trying to tell him he preferred the monster he had been that had killed a friend of Martha and Thomas Wayne with so many innocent people on the side. It was just too bizarre.
“You know, Alfred once told me I have bad taste in men,” Bruce said quietly as he stroked his inner arm. John doubted Alfred had ever said anything of the sort, but his synapses were beyond frayed and were now dissipating, “but I think I just have a taste for bad men.” He chewed his lip. “That pink eyeshadow, slicked-back hair, I want-to-kill-you look? It was kind of hot. Bad-boy hot.”
“Oh, I get it.” John smiled. The gesture was edged with tension. “Dr Leland set this up, right? To make sure I won’t succumb to temptation under pressure and slip back into The Joker? Always thinking, that woman!” He moved his wrist; he didn’t want to be touched by anyone for the sake of a social experiment, but tried to diffuse the hurt in his voice and expression generously as Bruce shot him an inquisitive look. “That’s kind of clever, buddy.”
Bruce shook his head like he was physically trying to remove the assumption from his hippocampus. “Joker, I’m being serious,” he insisted. He was using that voice he used on women at social events to charm them stupid, all in the name of his playboy mask, and it stopped John short: husky and persuasive and smooth, it sounded remarkable inside John’s befuddled head. “Do you have any idea what we could do together? What we could be?”
“I’m not allowed to hear that name,” John murmured evasively while the name tauntingly tolled in the back of his head like an opulent clock.
“What, your name?” Bruce laughed fleshly. “That’s stupid.”
“Bruce, what are you trying to-”
But Bruce suddenly swivelled his head around, staring unseeingly at the door, and John broke off to follow his gaze in surprise. Nothing.
“Bruce,” John said in vexation. “Buddy. Are you listening to me?”
“I need the toilet.” Bruce stood up abruptly, and, with an unfair flourish, he set off at a brisk pace to the toilet, leaving John feeling discombobulated and alone.
Bruce was acting strangely. John was still woolly with medication, but he wasn’t drugged enough to miss that. Everything was just obscurely off about him, and not just in his attitude but his physical appearance. John wondered. Bruce wouldn’t take drugs – John knew he wouldn’t. He rarely drank; he was Batman, and drinking was about as doltish as decisions could get. Somehow, John felt the difference went beyond any kind of intoxication – somehow, he sensed something was just completely, terribly wrong. He tried to muster an idea of what could possibly be wrong with his best friend, but Bruce took that moment to re-enter, looking more wild than before. He was being escorted by a burly, flesh-headed worker who looked bored and underpaid.
Bruce sat down, flustered. The high colour in his cheeks didn’t flatter the pouchy circles around his eyes. John noticed with a keen, icy interest that his hair was styled again, swept sideways, not a strand out of place.
“That was quick,” John remarked, addled. “Which toilet did you go to, buddy?”
Bruce gave him a perplexed look as he leaned his briefcase, made of rich brindled leather, against his chair. John wondered distantly if it was his father’s. All he knew was that Bruce hadn’t left with it, or come in with it originally. “Sorry I’m late, John,” he said breathlessly as he adjusted his wet sleeve cuffs. He himself looked wet, and John could hear rain on the rooftop now, striking it like tiny pebbles. “I didn’t keep an eye on the time – I’ve been at Wayne Enterprises, filing job applications.” He looked up at John’s expression, did a double-take, and looked dully puzzled. “Is something wrong?” he asked, the muscles under his muted skin unconsciously pulled taut and alert. It was The Bat wearing through the man.
“But, buddy,” John drawled, befuddled and aching from the inside of his skull to his stomach, “you were right here.”
Bruce looked worried now in a way John hated; it took a lot to make Bruce Wayne look worried, certainly, and Bruce was looking at him now like he had blood on his fingers or was an amnesia patient who had just confessed he didn’t know who he was. There was a spark of careful intelligence in his eyes, a sort of distorted understanding. He thinks I’m hallucinating or I’m confused or something. “John,” he said slowly, like he was giving John time to process and understand, “I only just got here.”
John considered that, then opened his mouth to protest decidedly, but a slither of movement caught his attention from the corner of his eye. He looked and there, stood in the doorway, was Bruce Wayne, staring dispassionately at his twin. On the other hand, the Bruce opposite John was suddenly wan, bleaching the colour of his eyes in contrast. And the confusion managed to somehow overcome the apprehension, drawing his train of thought to a fuzzy blank.
Finally, as the guards, inmates, John and Bruce alike stared, the figure in the doorway sighed like there was a great inconvenience and pocketed a plastic phone. “Oh, you, you, you,” he exhaled disdainfully, practically tutting at Bruce like a chiding guardian. “You are a real inconvenient pain in the ass.”
Bruce stood up quickly, knocking over his chair which skidded a small distance away, but in the blink of an eye, the man in the doorway was gone. Instantly, he sprinted after him, and John followed without thinking about it. He was slow – too slow – and he lost sight of Bruce before the chase had really even begun. A guard caught up with him in the end, but even she looked too stumped to do much besides take John almost tenderly by the elbow.
“Did I take too much cocaine or did I really just see Bruce Wayne run after Bruce Wayne?”
John looked at her but he didn’t say anything. He was suddenly enervated.
Looking distinctly upset, Dr Leland appeared. Her hair was scraped to the back of her head in a knot; it had grown somewhat since he’d last been in the asylum, no longer a bob framing her shoulders, but she wore it up almost always anyway. The tightness of the bun seemed to be pulling back her scalp and pinching her face, which was an almost blanched colour, as blanched as it could be. Her eyes stood out unattractively in contrast. “John,” she said softly. He was her favourite patient and she was his favourite doctor. She was the only sane one with compassion intact, frankly, and John had taken to her the day she’d started working in the asylum. “Come on.” She held her hand out, beckoning him to her. The guard let go of him immediately. “You must be in shock. We can go to my office and practise your breathing exercises, okay?”
John wasn’t in shock, and he certainly didn’t want to practise his breathing exercises. Physically, he was in that corridor, staring at his favourite doctor, but mentally he was with Bruce Wayne, The Batman, on a wild goose chase, air in his eyes and hair, eyes on the target. Thousands of possibilities about what had just happened came and went, but left one common question: Who had that man been?
Dr Leland was looking at him patiently, and, finally, he looked back and saw her, really saw her. That was when he (finally) forced a smile and a chuckle. “Coming, Doc!”
***
“Perhaps you could go in something less drab this time, sir?” said Alfred, not without humour.
Bruce turned to face him, his lips twitching. He faced away from the mirror in his bedroom, gilded, that had showed him the shadow of a man in cladded black. Today, even his shirt was black. Sometimes, people liked to jest his clothing shade tended to reflect his mood, and, for the first time, he considered that. He was certainly in a fouler mood than he had been for a while. He had been ever since that night two weeks ago when a man had walked in donning his face. Quite cowardly, he’d not visited John since, dreading what the creature of manipulation had told him or even asked him while assuming his character. Bruce had chased the mysterious man out into the night, but, with the rain shedding so thickly, like a bleary lens of tears frosting his vision, he’d lost him almost instantly to the shadows. He’d never been so frustrated at a failed chase – this was personal. Just the thought that a man was going around wearing his face, impersonating everything from his voice to his speech, having so much power over Bruce’s image, was enough to make Bruce feel caged in his own skin with rage. He wanted to peel the skin back from his bones and escape.
“Are you sure I can’t get out of it?”
Alfred looked outside at the guests dribbling inside the manor, colourful umbrellas bobbing over their heads like bursting flowers. It was raining again, just like that night. Bruce turned away from the thought. “It would be rude to not show up to your own charity gala, Master Wayne,” he pointed out, not unreasonably. “Perhaps, if you dropped unnecessary nightly activities, you would not be so drained.”
“Alfred,” Bruce warned, too horribly exhausted for arguing. To his credit, Alfred turned away before an argument could rouse and pretended to be folding already folded clothes draped over the end of Bruce’s bed. Namely, they were white shirts Bruce had felt too glum to wear.
“Your guests will expect you downstairs soon,” Alfred commented, still folding the shirts. There were lines of tension cording his shoulders. “Perhaps you should be on your way, sir.”
“Perhaps,” Bruce agreed quietly, mostly to just roll the word around on his tongue for the sake of doing something. He felt terribly estranged. He’d never felt this way about anything before. “Are you coming?”
Alfred smiled the ghost of a smile at him, a smile that assured him that, eventually, they’d be okay. “Eventually,” he promised.
That was all the assurance he needed. With a polite smile, Bruce turned and walked out the door.
***
Bruce spent a good hour greeting guests, offering them champagne more expensive than their month’s rent and offering around a few courteous dances. Of course, he was also asked, mostly by young women, and, graciously, he accepted every time. No sooner had he started to dance with a brunette was he dancing with a petite blonde girl with drawn-on eyebrows, emphasised black lips and a skimpy Gothic dress paired with clunky leather boots. He wouldn’t look at her, and not because he was being discriminative against her sense of dress. She was young, maybe too young to have alcohol on her breath, and she was getting very strange with her hands.
“Excuse me? Please can I cut in?”
Bruce turned to look at the man who’d spoken in surprise. He was tall, though no taller than Bruce: probably six foot or so. He had tawny skin and dark brown hair and was wearing an unstylish brown suit that looked cheap and worn past its youth. “Yes, of course,” he said politely, but the man wasn’t looking at him; he was looking at the woman.
“I was talking to you, sweetheart.”
The woman looked both confused and harassed. Her cheeks flamed up with colour under her pasty makeup. “I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, baby, please. If you were begging, you’d be on your knees.” The man took one of Bruce’s hands, assuming a dancer’s stance, and a dominant one at that. Bruce was too surprised to reject the casual contact. “Hello, darling,” he greeted quietly, steering him away from the woman who stared after them in amazed puzzlement. “Have you been having fun?”
Speechless, Bruce stared at him. There was something familiar yet unfamiliar about his voice, his long jawline, his wild eyebrows, even his hands, one folded firmly around his. There were scars randomly speckling his spidery fingers, Bruce observed despite himself, that were very similar to his own. Under the spicy, cheap smell of aftershave, Bruce could detect a hint of smoke and cinnamon.
“The champagne is absolutely phenomenal,” the man continued, undeterred by his silence. People were starting to stop dancing in favour of staring, and Bruce felt a very distant and very quickly receding sliver of alarm scorching the lining of his stomach. He wondered what people would say about the fact he was dancing intimately with another man, but, in a more forward part of his mind, he wondered what was so familiar about the delicate arch of the man’s throat, peeking out from a pink collar. There was a splotch of either blood or wine on the fraying rim of it. “You must simply introduce me to your dealer, darling. The taste reminds me of Paris, you see, and the pastel azure of the sky in the afternoon-”
“John?”
The man’s eyes glittered in his browned face like poisonous water. Pretence of normalcy forgotten, he leaned closer like a secret. His breath smelt sour, so different from John’s own. “Guess again,” he murmured, his voice as silky as satin and wrapping Bruce as delicately as so. “Better than John,” he hinted assuredly.
It clicked. This wasn’t John, no; he believed that. Standing in front of him was the very man that he had lost in the rain, the one that had sported his face in Arkham Asylum; the man that had tried to manipulate himself into John’s darkest desires that had been cleverly hidden with the help of medication and Dr Leland. Bruce could almost feel rage and disgust as a live thing inside him as he stared at the creature now donning his best friend’s face. Everything else fell away into a camera-lens blur, the man coming into a sharper, more detailed focus, and he forgot how to function, how to breathe, shutting down completely. He’d imagined plenty of things he would do when finally getting his hands on this man, and now the time had come he didn’t know which or what to do. Nothing violent – Bruce Wayne shouldn’t have a violent part of him, he reminded himself sternly.
Don’t make a scene. You are Bruce Wayne, a stupid, weak businessman. You cannot make a scene.
Bruce tightened his hand around his, stilling. The man’s brown suit seemed so strange on John’s skin, so bleached of colour, so harsh against a backdrop of chalk-white, and Bruce tried not to think about how he might have acquired the outfit. It didn’t help the burning sensation in his midriff. “You,” he spat.
The man – the creature – tutted at him disapprovingly. He was using John’s voice in a way John never used it, with silky, cloy, cocky smoothness and something akin to careful seduction. “Such impolite savagery,” he taunted. “I thought you would be pleased to see me. I’m hurt. Weren’t you scouring for me day and night as though hopelessly in love with me like in Cinderella, Bruce Wayne?” He said his name like it was fine, powdered poison, through a straight set of teeth – John’s teeth. “Well, here I am. Your own beautiful nightmare in the flesh. Your own devilish Cinderella.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Bruce forced out through his teeth. The urge to haul him outside by the flesh pouching the back of his neck, like a kitten, was so powerful his hands shook. Instead, he focused on dancing again; them standing motionlessly in the centre of a gaggle of dancers was earning a few stares, or maybe that was a matter of their gender. “Assuming another man’s face during conversation... Are you really that cowardly?” he sneered now, wanting to destroy this man in the only way he could. Personal. This was still personal. And now he was wearing John’s face...
The man’s hand tightened around his with surprising strength. Bruce’s skin thrummed with pain. He hid his grimace expertly. “Don’t assume,” the man said, slowly, softly, “to understand, Mr. Wayne.” He flattered him with a brilliant smile, the anger dissipating from his eyes like tepid water from a pierced water bottle, just like that. “Aren’t you going to ask me?”
“What?”
“The obvious questions!” the creature rejoined cheerfully. “‘Who are you?’, ‘What do you want?’, ‘Where are you hiding?’, ‘What are you?’, ‘How did you get here?’”
Feeling like he was being made a mockery, Bruce snapped, “Would you tell me?” without hope, more to prove a point than anything else.
“Well, no,” the creature admitted with the same assured cheer woven around his voice, and Bruce gave him a pointed look, “but what’s a vocal first meeting between villain and hero without unanswered questions? I need to be a mystery.”
“Get to the point.”
Now it was the creature’s turn to blink. “What?”
“Don’t tell me you came here to dance with me and indulge in my champagne.”
An equal mixture of amusement and bitterness etched the creature’s face. “Oh, very well,” he sighed lightly. “Though dancing with Gotham’s most eligible bachelor was a pleasant bonus, and the champagne really was marvellous.”
Bruce stared. He wondered if this man was human, or had been human once, with extraordinary circumstances; he also wondered if this was a creature born to both the art of shape-shifting and manipulation, which barely seemed possible. He could process giant men and purple-skinned men in tubes, because, really, that was just science. He couldn’t blame shape-shifting on science, though, which was all he knew. He felt suddenly very tired.
“Oh, relax.” With a slender thumb, the man traced his eyebrow softly, which was apparently warped in distress. “Soon, I’ll be out of your hair, and then you can go back to melting zippers and panties for miles over glasses of flowery champagne.”
Incredulously, Bruce said, “I can’t just let you leave.”
“You’re going to have to, I’m afraid.” The creature’s eyes flashed. “Do you like puzzles?”
Bruce paused. “What?”
“Puzzles. Do you like them?” He didn’t wait for a response, tripping over his own words in his haste to get them out. “Because our time together, sweetheart, will be a puzzle, and an arcane one at that: no picture on the front of the box, no single idea what the finished product will look like, the finale at the end. The puzzle of my life, in fact – the puzzle that shows how deeply you wronged me, divided in sections that once broke my heart. Can you handle that?”
“And if I refuse to... to play?” Bruce muttered through numb lips.
The man pressed his mouth against Bruce’s ear, and Bruce had the savage, alarming thought that this was what it would feel like to have John so close, and hot blood seared him from his ears to his cheekbones to his throat. His hands shook violently now. They’d always been as steady as a heartbeat. “Then I can’t promise you the next time you see Tiffany, Alfred or John, even Selina Kyle, they’ll have a heartbeat.” He leaned back calmly, like he hadn’t just threatened Bruce’s entire family, and stuck out his hand. “So – do you assent to play with me?”
Then he smiled, and Bruce thought it was what a spider’s smile would look like every time another naive insect fell tangled into their intricate web. He was the insect, thrashing against the sticky silk listlessly, and, somehow, in such an abrupt space of time, the man was the spider, staring at him devilishly from his position of his superiority. Bruce was, in fact, so deeply tangled he didn’t know where the exit was. He knew one thing: the man wasn’t bluffing. If he didn’t build the puzzle, play the game, everyone he loved would turn up dead.
The man’s hand was clammy and soft with makeup.
“So, the game begins,” he purred, and then he disappeared, leaving Bruce alone with a memory card in his curled fist.
***
His vision was starting to blur, words dancing onscreen like they were alive. He’d plugged the memory card given to him by the strange man into the computer in the cave a few hours ago, but so far he’d run into countless errors and no idea of how to crack them. Nothing he did seemed to wheedle the contents of the card out. In red block letters, ‘ERROR’ striped over the screen again, flashing in a way that drove pain behind his eyes, and he had to turn away.
Alfred was approaching him, a tray of tea balanced precariously in his wizened hands. “Tea, sir?”
Bruce almost smiled. Alfred insisted most things could be made better with tea. With a sharp pierce of longing, Bruce thought how he desired that to be true at the moment. “Thank you, Alfred.” He heard the weariness in his voice as he reached out for the tea and took a grateful sip. It had the rich essence of alcohol. Then he really did smile. “I needed this.”
“Have you made any progress yet, Master Bruce?” Alfred asked, obviously trying his best to push aside his conviction against Batman for Bruce’s sake. Bruce seriously could have cried; he was so tired.
“No. The Computer keeps saying ‘error’, again and again, like clockwork. I haven’t figured out a way to get past it.”
“Perhaps,” said Alfred, “it would be best to just buy the camera it belonged to.”
Bruce blinked at him in surprise. “Do you think that’s all I can do?”
“It would be the most simple way to get around the problem, Master Bruce,” Alfred confirmed, putting the tray down. On it was also a plate of homemade cookies, fluffy and moistened by melted chocolate chips. Bruce’s childhood favourite. The cold stone in his gut thawed. “Are you sure doing what this man says is a good idea, Bruce? You don’t know the first thing about him.”
Bruce sighed and turned back to the computer. He’d been asking himself that since the gala, but he knew he couldn’t run the risk of casualties, not innocent ones, not loved ones. “You know I have no choice, Alfred,” he said. “He said this puzzle will teach me about him and – and how I wronged him.”
“Maybe it was something your father did,” suggested Alfred, sounding resigned. “Many hold grudges against you for that.”
“Maybe,” agreed Bruce, his heart not in it. “I’ll ask Tiffany to try crack this while I go to the closest electronic shop and try buy a camera that matches the card.”
“Someone called you, Master Bruce, while you were working. They left a voice mail.”
“Mm?” Bruce didn’t turn around. He suspected it was business, something drab he’d attend to later, and held no interest in it.
“It – It was John, Bruce. He... He was released from Arkham earlier this morning.”