Work Text:
Dating a rich guy was strange. That wasn’t the best place to start summarizing a relationship with Bruce Wayne, but it made a good enough entry point for late night thinking. Dating a rich guy was strange. Stranger still when the rich guy himself was somehow normal-brand weird.
Leo worked in philanthropy and hated it. That was thankfully something Bruce had already known when they met. He had followed the anonymous work vent account Leo had made on twitter, and when he had told him that the faceless account with gibberish for a name was him, Leo had laughed until he nearly cried, mostly out of panic. So Bruce knew.
Leo hated philanthropists because by and large they were real estate speculators looking to buy a good reputation for them and their friends. When he felt like prodding the boundaries of Leo’s cyncism, Bruce reminded him that there were philanthropists who gave out of a deep sense of justice and right, but he had still laughed when Leo had said they all donate through Donor Advised Funds. They both knew the kinds of values organizations that made both ends of the political spectrum’s dreams come true could be counted on for. Any company that felt comfortable throwing its progressive clients under the bus as “woke” to appeal to its conservative clientele couldn’t be trusted to make a values-based assessment. But that’s not what you went to DAFs for. You went to DAFs to not think about things. Or as a cheaper form of wealth management.
The thing was, the Waynes of Wayne Enterprises were a severe outlier, and that was due entirely to the strong messaging of the CEO and the people he had hired to run the company. Admittedly, some predated him, but for some reason it was easier to understand that, an insane sprawling multiindustry conglomerate dynasty falling into the hands of its insanely progressive single son and following his death, his one even more progressive kid. The Waynes hadn’t ever used wealth management services. They handled their own money, and pushed the spending capacity of multi-billion-dollar portfolios to their limits. And, whatever happened, they never moved their money out of Gotham.
Cynics (Leo, before he knew Bruce) said this was because it was better to be a big fish in a small pond, but the Waynes could have been reasonably sized fish, even in New York, even in Los Angeles. These days the Rockefellers less wealthy than the Waynes. Hell, even branches of the Medicis were less solvent.
Bruce emailed Leo the Wayne Family Foundation’s 990 every year as soon as it went through, and every year, there were dozens of grants in the tens of millions of dollars helping organizations crawl out of their building debt. And that was just for the ones whose mortgage compnies couldn’t be softened into more lenient terms. If an organization was so much as passingly affiliated with a Wayne Philanthropies employee, doors would start falling open for them. Especially if you were fundraising for living wage or salary increases.
Where Thomas Wayne had made civic infrastructure and medical care his white whale, Bruce had made livable wages and insurance coverage his chosen battlefields. When Bruce Wayne had showed up on a picket line the first time, the city had known what it meant. Between the shareholders jumping ship overnight and the immediate citywide blacklisting of the picketed product, the message beamed across loud and clear that the unions of the city had a nuclear option in the form of Bruce Wayne. He had more enemies than Batman in the boardrooms of the city, but the thing was, he would negotiate with you ten times out of ten in good faith, only escalating when you were hostile or disingenuous with him. He was easy to work with, happy to play a civil game of “scratch my back and i’ll scratch yours,” and was a perfect host and a generous guest. But what he was not, at any point, was a conservative.
Conservative philanthropists drove themselves to distraction trying to get a piece of the Wayne Family Foundation pie, but found themselves consistently politely rebuffed. Bruce never stooped to joining the board of an organization he didn’t like to try to change it, and was very careful that the governance of his own organizations stayed securely within trusted spheres. He attended galas if they were sufficiently notable, or if they were fundraising for an organization that he cared about. Bruce Wayne had his most dedicated and sharp on the task of understanding everything there was to know about the organizations related to causes he cared about. And it was widely known that, however much Brice Wayne would be civil with a fundraiser or donor, the only people he trusted were their experts.
Because Leo had come to understand that there were few people in Bruce’s position who paralleled his understanding of what the threat of scarcity could do to a person’s willingness to lie. And Leo saw in that both a long family history of corruption and a two-generation-long refutation of it, a committment to defusing as many bombs as possible from the human psyche.
Because there was only so much that Bruce could do. The running of his many companies required nonstop attention, and even with the very real Wayne Brain Drain Effect that was felt across the eastern seaboard. (The best worked for Wayne Enterprises, and the rest of the best got granted millions to their organizations from the WFF.) Bruce had the unenviable task of being an executive actually capable of conceptually grasping nearly all elements of his business, and so delegated far less than usual for someone in his position. aside from standard responsibilities like meeting with the board and significant shareholders, he spent enormous chunks of his time on candidate interviews, performance reviews, nitty-gritty granular financial models, reviewing research and development, accounting compliance, advice to organizations he favored, meeting with elected officials, personally handling grievance procedures, and shamelessly trying to poach progressive talent from conservative organizations. he had three PAs; one for his Wayne Enterprise business, one for his WFF business, and his personal PA who reported to Alfred, his butler and general majordomo and who calendared his free time and travel and the travel of friends and personal guests of WE and WFF.
Because Wayne Household was its own small army. Aside from keeping a PA, a butler, a cook, and a small cleaning staff on retainer, Bruce also had a travel agent, a charter plane service, a tailor, and a catering company on call 24/7, along with the family doctor whose practice has been serving the family for generations. There was also a floating pool of money and resources for any of the many people who would fall into Bruce’s orbit for a given period of time.
Leo had started out as a person in Bruce’s orbit, a friend of a friend of a lover, drawn in by the name and the ease of access for the people associated with trusted judges of character. it had been easy to accept that trust as being from a man who could replace anything that got broken, but when Leo had wandered off in the vast Gatsbyesqueness of one of the Wayne multistory penthouses, he had quickly become aware of the way that the man invited no incursions into his personal life beyond that which was offered. The whole place had been wheelchair accessible, a pleasant surprise, but pulling on the doors of what seemed to be an office gave no give, not even the give of a latch, just the magnetized sticking of a doorway that may as well have been carved from stone. Everything was beautiful and tasteful and when Bruce had caught his gaze curiously later, Leo just firmed his jaw and jutted his chin slightly, as if questioning Bruce’s right to call him rude when he fell for the charade that had been so carefully cultivated. There had been humor in Bruce’s eyes and what was the start of a mutual fascination. Although, Bruce had been liking his tweets from anonymity for months by then, so maybe it was just the first moment Leo was on board.
They slept together for the first time at a WFF New Year’s party in the Gotham opera house and it was ludicrous, the two of them (Leo sans wheelchair because it was work and overextending himself was part of his helljob) quickly blowing each other and jerking off in the wheelchair accessible stall, kissing messy and heated and barely doing more than panting, two quiet men fucking near-silently in the least-used public part of the building, and afterwards they tucked each other in and each noted how the other was equally careful with come and smoothed each other back into place and Leo invited Bruce back to his apartment after the party, because Leo had to stay until the end as staff, and because he knew Bruce’s apartments were just for show, and Bruce had agreed with the false-careless smile that was always seemed so true, so Leo had kissed one of his dimples to show he knew then flushed at the overt sweetness of the gesture, and Bruce had been genuine when he said he would try. Leo put his number and address into Bruce’s phone and stepped back into the event, as if he didn’t have the taste of the guest of honor’s come in his mouth, only to be swept up into resolving technical difficulties and dessert catering issues and mandated circuits of small talk with VIPs and then it was midnight and then it was 2am and then he was stepping outside in the frigid cold with an aching back and cramping legs and pulling up a rideshare app only to see a car already called for him with a text from bruce giving the license plate and driver’s name. the service had the gentle professionalism and the understated luxeness of an insanely expensive and intentionally casual service, but Leo made it to his apartment without aggravating his body anymore, and the driver had humored him by accepting the last wrinkled twenty from Leo’s wallet.
When Leo texted that he was home safe, it was only twenty more minutes before Bruce sent back “Finally extricated myself. Still ok to come over?” And Leo had smiled to himself and sent a thumbs up.
So now, many months later, living not on his shitty ground floor apartment of a gotham not-tenement but in an accessible and newly-rent-controlled high rise with a rent that Leo has to assume Bruce negotiated down for him, things are… better. Much like many other people who have found himself in Bruce’s orbit, he sometimes feels like he’s walking in a dream. Hell, the five-year rental contract even waived the first three years’s right to raise his rent, there on paper, signed and filed. His boyfriend’s good friend’s subsidiary owned the property management company. It was a gorgeous apartment filled with salvage yard furniture, shitty thrift store wall art, and Target cutlery. And Bruce seemed more at home than in any art deco setpiece Leo had ever seen him live in.
Bruce hadn’t poached him for Wayne, knowing without having to ask that Leo wouldn’t go for it with as many entanglements between them as there already were, but Bruce had found him a job with a company he felt safe using his wheelchair at, felt comfortable being out at, and liked and trusted what they did. It was still arts philanthropy, but it was amazing what not working for conservatives could do for you. His salary was better, Bruce had talked him into getting fitted for a gorgeous custom wheelchair that packed down smaller and lighter than seemed possible, and overall it was lovely. Curled up with Bruce on the enormous bed in his room, he did however sometimes let his mind keep wandering. Bruce, the irrepressible cuddle fiend, would let him sit in silence and stillness for a long time before kissing his temple and asking what he was thinking about. It was frequently about their shared field, but Bruce didn’t seem to mind. His insights were always surprising and disarming. That was, in a way, part of his charisma. He would always be different than what you were expecting, whatever it was that you were expecting. When he turned on the charm it was versatile as a fencing foil or a shield, but at rest it just made him a perennially odd duck, and master of the eventually related non-sequitor.
Dating a rich guy was strange. But somehow, the weirdest thing about dating Bruce Wayne was that it felt like the most natural thing of all.