fic: Chinese Boxes 9 /11

[01cheers]

20. On the mend

She wakes up to an unusually fuzzy world. Her body feels weightless and heavy at the same time; she must be on drugs. She cracks an eye open; there is muted light, reflected sunshine seeping through slanted Venetian blinds, there are muted sounds from somewhere outside the room, but the room itself - a private ward in a hospital, by the look of it - is shaded, still, and quiet. Beyond the blinds, she can just about make out the clean white lines of a modern glass-walled atrium building flanked by slim white columns; a memory floats up from a while back, of walking into that same atrium late in the evening. San Giovanni di Dio, where they went to find out the truth about Giacomo Varese’s autopsy results. Seems like yesterday, or years ago; at least she isn’t in the mortuary. Thank heaven for small mercies.

Her eyes are sore and disobedient when she tries to swivel them to take in more of the room, not that there is much to see. There are no IV drips attached to her arms; so she probably did not get a gunshot wound, after all. Recent events resurface piecemeal in her mind, the confusion likely the effect of the drugs she is under. She cannot recall the exact sequence that has brought her here, but her memory offers her an array of out-of-order snapshots. Three of them in a meeting room with the Triad gang; herself pacing the corridor outside listening in to conversations while pretending to be engaged in phone calls; standing on a steel beam high up in a room filled with a noxious chemical mist; Bruce looking at her as she is being wheeled into an ambulance in an oxygen mask, unable to say a word and barely able to open her eyes, his face set and grim like a gargoyle’s, his eyes unseeing with the fear still frozen in their dark depth; Gianfranco lying in Wu’s office, a bloody patch on the carpet under his face; herself jumping down on a black roof amid the eerie green glow of the night-goggle vision. She knows, more or less, what has brought her here, but it will probably take more time to get the memory straight.

She tries to get a sense of the extent of her injuries, not an easy thing with the painkiller blocking out most sensation, though she should probably be grateful for that. Her best bet must be moving her eyes enough to see, or moving her hands to feel where the bandages are. She remembers Wu’s gun digging into her stomach, the explosion of pain robbing her of breath. But when she runs her hand over the hospital gown, she can feel no bandage underneath. Carefully she brings up her hand to hold up the fabric so she can glance down the neckline; all she can see is skin and an ugly purple bruise a couple of inches below her solar plexus. That’s what it was, then; the gun knocked out her breath and inflicted some blunt damage, but the shot was never fired; given the height she had jumped from, she probably broke Wu’s wrist on impact so he could not fire that shot no matter how much he wanted to. Still, that sort of injury, nasty as it is, should not have kept her in a hospital bed; she would have been given painkillers, sure, perhaps an ice pack, perhaps she would have been told to stick to liquid food for a few days to let her bruised stomach recover, but surely they wouldn’t have kept her here - if there had been any internal ruptures, there would have been a bandage to cover up operation stitches. But before she has time to get really confused, she shifts in bed, and the hot, heavy weight on her right leg answers her question.

The leg is in a solid cast from mid-thigh to the tips of her toes. It must have taken the brunt of her landing, which broke whatever bones have now been left to set under that cast. In all likelihood, it was bad enough to have required an operation, maybe more than one. She is definitely grateful for the painkiller now; who knows how bad it would be otherwise. But the good thing is, she still has the leg attached, in fact both legs and both arms, she can still move her left leg, which means no spinal injuries, and can still turn her neck, and in a bigger-picture sense of things, she is still alive. Now that her disjointed recollections of the past three days’ events are slowly settling into place, she is aware that a while ago - a few hours, a day, whatever - she was less than sure she would live to see this day.

And much as it pains her to remember Bruce looking at her with that frozen expression before the ambulance doors block the view, the memory means that he is definitely alive and most likely unhurt.

***

She must have drifted off because the nurse wakes her up when she comes in, and puts up the usual concerned-carer fuss at seeing her awake. Does signorina need anything, how is she feeling, what a shame it is that she is in this condition, it will get better eventually, all of it an attempt to be solicitous and none of it terribly helpful. Minimal answers combined with pointed enquiries soon yield a fuller picture; she has a displaced kneecap fracture and compound ankle fracture, both of which had to be operated on, but no other serious injuries save for the stomach bruise. She has been in the hospital for about 24 hours, give or take a couple, having been brought in an ambulance from Prato. She is the only in-patient admitted from there; a question about the whereabouts of Gianfranco Varese results in a call to the matron that in turn results in the nurse telling her that he is recovering at Santa Maria Novella, another hospital that also sent an ambulance to the site, and that signor Wainwright was never admitted to either but if he is the tall dark-haired serious gentleman, he was here last night. So far, so good. It would be even better if she had a working phone, but she can’t have it all at once. Best of all, the nurse says that the matron will now call him to tell him that she is awake.

Worst of all, the call produces exactly nothing. At least for a while. She has coaxed the nurse into switching on the TV and stared without really watching at a stupid game show and a news broadcast, has been given a glass of water with an assortment of pills, and has watched the sunlight outside shift until it has given way to pre-dusk shadows; and Bruce is nowhere to be seen. She is on the verge of begging for a phone and is already trying to remember the exact sequence of Theo’s mobile number so she can ask him to track Bruce down on whatever phone he is using at the moment, which on balance is less embarrassing than getting the matron to call Bruce again for her, when the nurse steps back in, announcing his arrival.

But when he walks into the room, she is paralysed with dismay.

It seems that she is looking at a stranger. The face is familiar, but the way he pulls up a chair to within at least two feet of the bed, sits down and looks at her, it is as if she did not know him. Worse, it is as if he did not know her... or didn’t want to.

“How are you?” he asks, his voice cold, almost harsh.

“Fine,” she smiles faintly, her courage out on a limb. “You?”

“Good,” he replies before they descend into a terrifying silence.

She wants to say a dozen things at once, do something to break this scary spell, wishing she could wake up and see the man she knows instead of this cold newcomer who seems uncomfortable in the same room with her to the point of being desperate to leave. Surely she hasn’t changed so much in the space of a day for him to find her repulsive?

“I’m sorry,” she starts.

“Don’t,” he cuts her off. And then he sits and stares again.

“So... what have you been up to?” she ventures in a faltering voice. If she doesn’t say something, he will end up either breaking down in tears or kicking him out, and neither is particularly productive. The way things look, he will be out of here before long in any case.

The question revives him somewhat; it is really not much, but it is a start. Probably. Hopefully. “All sorts of things, it’s been really busy since yesterday. Both the Carabinieri and the State Police are all over the place, asking questions, and between you and Gianfranco in hospitals, I’ve been the only one out of handcuffs they could talk to. Then the Interpol liaisons arrived from Rome and wanted to know what I knew about the Chinese connection. Then the fucking journalists showed up and I had to hide away from them and beg the police and others to keep our faces and names out of the media. I’m going to Rome tomorrow to talk to the head of the Interpol NCB and the Carabinieri officers,” he finishes with a hint of relief that sends a spike of pain through her chest; he seems happy to have an excuse to be away from her. “I’ll try to stop by on my way there, but I’ll probably be there until late.” She is so angry that she almost wants to tell him not to bother, but knows that if she says it she will regret it tomorrow if not tonight. Best to keep her options open; there is no telling how much she may end up missing him. Worst of all, of course, is that she is missing him right now.

“Hey, you started this,” she reminds him, trying desperately and unsuccessfully to sound light-heartedly snarky. “You wanted to get to the bottom of this and you did, don’t blame the cops now for being all over you.”

He sounds almost normal again. “I don’t mind the cops so much as the journalists. They don’t really get a lot of sensational news here, and this has brought everyone from the Corriere della Sera to five different TV channels to the local Prato bloggers and the weekly tabloid queuing to talk to anyone involved. And since the ROS team are off-limits and their bosses and the cops didn’t know much as of yesterday, it kind of left me as the target of choice. I had to book a hotel room in the centre of Florence just to lose them.”

“Get them to talk to Gianfranco,” she suggests. “He shouldn’t mind.”

“I tried,” he admits. “The doctors at Santa Maria Novella wouldn’t let anyone talk to him yesterday with the medication and all and while they needed to set the bones. They probably got through to him today, there were certainly fewer of them outside the Carabinieri office just now.”

“How’s he doing?” She hopes he does not see this as a jealousy-inducing query. The ground between them is shaky enough as it is.

“About the same as you,” he answers. He does not sound happy, but does not sound jealous, either. “Broken bones but he’ll live. I haven’t seen him today, but his girlfriend is finally back from Bali, last thing I heard yesterday was that she was going straight to the hospital from the airport.”

Well, it is good someone has a significant other who wants to spend time with them, she thinks sourly, and has to bite her tongue to keep the thought to herself. The conversation peters out again after this, they sit and wait for nothing, he looks around the room and avoids her eyes, the silence stretches.

“I should be going,” he mutters when the tableau has gone all the way past awkward into unbearable. “I’ll have to take an early train into Rome tomorrow, can’t take the car, there’s no way to find parking in that city. I can stop by on my way if you want -”

She wonders if she should spare him the misery and tell him not to bother, but neither her anger nor her willpower is strong enough, as it turns out. Besides, she doesn’t want to make it easy for him. “Sure. I’ve been asleep so long in the past twenty-four hours, I’m pretty sure I’ll be awake early tomorrow.”

“See you in the morning, then,” he offers, the visible relief in his face making her want to take back her words. He stands up and finally takes a step toward her...

...to kiss her on the cheek.

By the time he has closed the door behind him and she is sure he has walked far enough down the corridor, she can finally let the bitter tears run free.

***

In retrospect, she is lucky she slept through the morning, she figures when the nurse has brought her breakfast the next day, for two reasons. First, she is not really sure she would have withstood another encounter with Bruce like the one the day before with her composure and her dignity intact. Second, she was just awake enough, or had woken up enough, to catch him sitting next to her in the pre-dawn dusk, on the edge of the bed and not in a chair a safe distance away, his fingers light on her forearm, his lips on her forehead. Not much, but a hell of a lot better than a peck on the cheek that was a split second longer than an outright insult. Still, not enough to justify the nurse’s remark, behind the door where she must have assumed she was out of Selina’s earshot, in response to the matron who commiserated with the povera ragazza con la gamba tutta spaccata, that she was nonetheless lucky di avere un fidanzato che la tiene così. She can see sense in the matron’s words about her leg being all in pieces, but she is damned if anything that has happened, or not happened, between her and Bruce in the past forty-plus hours can justify her being considered lucky to have a boyfriend who, literally, holds her like that. The nurse must have very low expectations of men’s affections, if she is that easily impressed.

By the next morning, having spent the remainder of the previous day on her own with the insipid TV for company, she has really had enough. The doctor and nurses are all kind to her and she should not really be complaining, but she has had enough of being confined to a hospital room, nothing to do, no one to really talk to, the unfamiliar surroundings amplifying her sense of enforced helplessness, the drab gown, the fucking bedpan, the bland food, and she can’t really begin to imagine what it must have been like for Bruce to have spent six weeks like that, and when his injuries were more grave and his overall condition was much worse. Not to mention the months he spent in prison with a broken back... but she can’t go there yet in her fragile mental state. Still, she can understand now what he meant by saying that being in a coma had its advantages, and by saying that she didn’t miss much by not being by his side. Much as she is missing him, part of her is also glad that he is not there to fully witness her pitiful state. Maybe that’s what it is, he is avoiding her because of the hospital setting bringing back unwelcome memories of his own stay. Maybe once she is out of there and they are once again out of Florence, things will get better.

It looks like she is about to see her theory put to the test, because later that morning, the doctor tells her that her stay is over and Mr Wainwright is taking her back.

***

She has the deepest sympathy for Theo, who will be picking up humongous Italian speeding fines through no fault of his own, what with the maniac next to her driving twice over the speed limit. She is surprised to see that they are not yet being chased by the police; had they been in the States, they would have had a county’s worth of black-and-whites providing escort. Here, they have probably cottoned on to the fine-generating potential of Bruce’s little trip and are rubbing their hands in anticipation of the windfall it will provide. At least the highway traffic is relatively light so with any luck, fellow drivers will survive sharing the road with him without a heart attack.

Which is not necessarily the case for her. The driving speed has nothing to do with it; she is not among the faint-hearted. But the way he sits there, looking at the road - probably a good thing at that speed, but still - without saying a word, with her unable to even see his face as her seat is pushed all the way back to accommodate her leg that is encased in the cast practically straight with just the tiniest hint of a bend at the knee, makes her think that the most terrifying version of Bruce is not the one with the mask on, nor the openly furious one, but this. She is beginning to sympathise with Gianfranco and his struggle to cope with Bruce just sitting and staring at him. In her case, he isn’t even staring, just completely ignoring her, and if anything, it is worse.

By the time they are twenty miles south of Milan, having covered the distance from Florence in an undoubtedly record-breaking hour and a half, she cannot take it anymore. In less than an hour they will be back in Lugano, and the thought of sharing the house with him in this state is frankly blood-curdling. Not because she really has anything to fear, but because she knows that he will spend as much of his time as possible in whatever parts of the villa that she is not in. And even apart from that, the tension is breaking her; it is as if he’d rather be anywhere than near her.

She slaps her hands against the glove compartment door; it gets his attention though he does not slow down. “Whatever it is you want to say, say it. Call me whatever you want, get it over with. I can’t take it.” She exhales with marginal relief; speaking out loud has helped her somewhat in itself. She can only hope he will follow suit.

She had no idea that a car doing 120 mph can veer off into the emergency lane and stop in three seconds flat, and is amazed that the other drivers have not ganged up on their car to murder him for that manoeuvre. Theo will undoubtedly want to murder him for leaving half the tyre rubber on the road, but that is not yet an immediate risk. Unlike Bruce, who, in that instant, seems to have finally and suddenly lost it.

“You can’t take it?!” he growls at her; she is almost afraid to look in his direction, preferring to stare straight ahead, but it looks to her like his hands are shaking where they are holding the steering wheel. “Do you… How could you do that? How could you even think of doing that? I told you to get out!” He is absolutely furious, and if she weren’t strapped into her seat she would have flinched; but somehow she still thinks that this is better than the silent treatment she has seen thus far. “How the fuck did I end up with a suicidal maniac?”

She cannot help it. “Look who’s talking,” she retorts; probably proving that she really is a suicidal maniac. But it is a relief not to hear him talk like a stranger anymore; and while his voice is pure Batman, the oddly defenceless expression is pure Bruce. He does not reply to her barb, just sits there fuming, and she dares to continue in a more serious vein; maybe they will end up discussing things in a reasonable way. “I couldn’t watch you die a third time,” she says simply. “You didn’t hear it, but Wu was telling Xiao to get you out and shoot you. I couldn’t let that happen.”

This shuts him up again, which she is not happy about. Just when she is about to go on and say that she was never in that much danger, which frankly is contrary to what she thought at the time but none of his business, he answers. “And you think I could watch you die? You think I could get over it when the two most important women in my life died because of me, my mother because I was a scared kid and Rachel because I was too desperate to stay with her?”

It hurts, not only because of the two women. She cannot believe how he can still keep blaming himself for events that were clearly not in his power to influence. And part of her is stupidly jealous of a dead woman who never wanted to be with him anyway. “I’m not Rachel,” she retorts in a quiet, stubborn voice. “I’m not this perfect innocent angel you’ve been mourning. It’s just me.” She may not have Rachel’s exalted status in his mind, but being second best should have the benefit of not being irreproachable.

And at that moment, he really loses it.

He does not shout, or say anything at any volume, or even turn to her. He flinches as if struck, and turns away, and gets out of the car. She wonders with a vague sense of dread if he will walk away and leave her alone here, but he stands leaning against the hood on his side, facing away from her, and it looks as if he has no intention of ever getting back in.

After a couple of minutes of this, she could not possibly feel any more useless or stupid... or guilty. OK, he is overdoing it with the Rachel-worship, but she really had no business talking about her like that. On somewhat more sober reflection, her words, meant only to highlight the difference between her and Rachel, if anything to Rachel’s relative advantage, must have sounded like mockery. If she could get out and walk up to him she could have tried to explain, but instead she is stuck inside without so much as a pair of crutches; they brought her up to the car in a wheelchair and she cannot take a single step unless she is holding on to something with both hands, and even then it would not so much be a step as an awkward hop. But the way things stand, she is going to have to go with that option.

She opens the door on her side, lifts her right leg by holding the cast with both hands, and sets the foot down on the ground before swinging her good leg over and standing up grabbing the door frame, careful not to put any weight on the injured leg. He sort of shudders when he hears her open the door, but does not turn to look at her. This is really bad; if she cannot make him listen, there is no way she can get closer to him with the car door in her way, without potentially toppling over.

“Bruce - “

He turns to her then, and if she thought she had seen the worst of him that day already, she is in for a surprise. There is no trace of anger or hostility in his face, just an infinity of pain. He is still not looking at her, and she is struck by the thought that between the Bane betrayal and this, short of actually doing a Rachel and getting herself killed, she has probably hurt him more than any other woman if not any other person, save for the likes of Joe Chill and the Joker and Bane himself, in two very different ways but to a comparable degree of suffering. To say that he looks crushed would be an understatement.

She is about to stumble into a hasty and haphazard apology about how she never meant to insult Rachel’s memory when he speaks in the quietest voice she has heard from him since before the hospital.

“What makes you think I feel any different about you now than I did about her then? When I said two women I meant the two in the past. The fact that I’ve been stupid enough not to make it clear to you doesn’t mean that it’s not true - ” he looks at her then, and it is her cue to look away, not because she wants to but because all she can really do is try to squeeze her eyes shut against the flood of tears at his anguish and at the admission alike, which in the end achieves absolutely nothing because she is still standing there crying.

“Forgive me,” is all she can think of saying; sorry is perhaps too petty a word in this case. “I couldn’t let you die,” she adds helplessly, unable to think of anything else to say beyond the plain and pure truth.

She isn’t exactly in a condition to mind her surroundings, or else she would have noticed that he has walked over to her side by then and it would not be such a surprise to end up with him holding her. She lets him get her back into the passenger seat but holds on to his hands, and is pleased, in spite of her otherwise distraught state, that he is still there, now sitting on the door step next to her; she is embarrassed about her crying fit but when she takes a closer look at him, before he hunkers down to press his face against her thigh above the cast, she notices that his eyes are every bit as red as hers must be.

“Stupid girl,” he mutters against the flimsy fabric of her dress, a last-minute purchase by the nurse before sending her off, as there was no way she could fit her cast-encased leg into the tailored pantsuit. “What would I do with myself if you’d got yourself killed, what would be the point...” She does not want him to finish the sentence; in an attempt to distract him, she runs her fingers through his hair, strokes his cheek, and finally pulls him up and slides down in the seat until they are almost level.

“Guess what, I thought the same thing,” she says shakily. “I need you alive. I need to go to sleep knowing you’ll be alive when I wake up in the morning. I couldn’t hear them talk about killing you and betray you again by doing nothing.”

Of all the possible reactions, an eye roll is not, perhaps, the one she expected. “You more than made up for that when you came back for me in Gotham,” he argues, quietly but persistently. This time he is looking at her. “You didn’t have to do it all over again.”

Absolutely ridiculous. “I did have to do it and I will do it again as many times as it takes.” Another of her stray thoughts on their fateful China trip slips back into her mind. “If what I have to do is save you from yourself, that’s what I’ll be doing from now on and nothing you say will stop me.”

She was wondering if this would make him argue with her, but what it does is make him chuckle. “I don’t suppose you’ve had time to notice... but I’m not exactly a damsel in distress, you know.”

She cannot help laughing; touché indeed. But she does have a backup weapon up her sleeve. “And still, after your admittedly spectacular ass-kicking back there, that scumbag Xiao took you out with a rifle butt and they ended up beating you senseless.”

He is rather indignantly, and absurdly, dismissive. “It was nothing worse than a few bruises.” Conveniently forgetting what she has just told him about Wu’s shooting order.

But he should know that she is no easy opponent. “Define bruise.”

He unbuttons one of his shirt cuffs and rolls back the sleeve to expose a purple blotch. Ugly, but probably no worse than the one on her stomach. Still...

“Define a few.”

“If you’re looking for a pretext to get me to strip for you, you should wait until we’re in a less public place,” he retorts, smirking. She could probably try to continue this sparring match, but her brain has rather unhelpfully stopped working after the word strip. “I’m OK, really,” he assures her.

She has recovered from the mental image enough to at least try to respond. “I don’t ever want to watch you get beaten up again, do you hear me?” she insists, slipping both hands to the back of his neck to pull him closer.

And, oh blessed relief, the bastard kissed her, at last... but not for long, because apparently he foolishly wants to talk more than kiss. “You have - “ another kiss; OK, so he is giving in. “Unrealistic - expectations - ” now he punctuates every word, or every other word, with brushing his lips over hers; what a cruel tease. “Of how much - I can improve - my fighting skills.”

She pulls away from him just far enough to attempt to skewer him with a critical stare. “Your fighting’s fine,” she insists. “It’s not your fighting skills but your self-preservation skills that you need to work on. I mean, you trusted me to take you to Bane after I’d just helped him steal a few billion from you; how much more reckless can you get -”

He starts shaking his head as soon as the word Bane leaves her lips, and never stops until he cuts in, as soon as she has paused to catch her breath. “Will you ever stop blaming yourself?” It is his turn to sound impatient, it seems. “You’re forgetting that I was actively seeking him out. I would have followed any lead I got. If it hadn’t happened to be you, it could have been anyone.” He sounds unshakably convinced, and she remembers another argument two weeks ago where they held the exact opposite viewpoints.

“But it was me,” she quotes his words back at him, remembering how he rushed to take the blame for Giacomo Varese’s death.

Perhaps recognising the argument, he sidesteps rather than engaging her directly. “You said you wouldn’t apologise for that.” He injects an excessive amount of reproach into both his voice and the look he gives her. “And I meant it when I said it wouldn’t suit you.”

“I’m not apologising,” she says gloomily. Technically, she isn’t.

Her miserable face makes him instantly give in. “All right; if I say I forgive you a thousand times over, will it make you feel better?” Maybe, or maybe not; but the way he is saying it right against her lips surely helps.

“For Bane, or for this?” she questions, wiggling her cast just enough so he knows what she is talking about.

He sits back, and she cannot quite tell how serious his next words are. “For Bane,” he says in a level voice. “I still need to think about this. You scared me to death back there,” he continues, quietly. “Not many people can claim that achievement.”

“You survived,” she argues. Not least thanks to her intervention, but she won’t rub it in now.

“Barely,” he counters, with enough of a hint of a grin to assure her that she is, indeed, mostly forgiven. Instead of trying to pull him to her, this time she leans forward in the seat to kiss him; at the rate they are going, it’ll probably get dark before they make it to Lugano, even if it is about lunchtime now. But as ever, his comfort-seeking practical approach gets in the way.

“Let’s get out of here and go home,” he mutters after one final kiss. Granted, the emergency lane of a highway is neither the most romantic nor the most convenient place for a heavy duty makeout session, but well, it is a sort of emergency.

“OK,” she pretends to agree. Still, when he gets into the driver’s seat to find out that she has swiped the key in the meantime, he does not seem at all upset.

___________________________________________

Notes to Ch 20

Before you condemn Bruce for an utter ass for avoiding her in hospital and then being tough on her, I must say a few words in his defence. The key words are you scared me to death; this is typical PTSD behaviour, and we know he has had PTSD three times over already, first with bats, then with his parents' death, and finally with Rachel, so a fourth time would be plausible and no fun at all. In particular, it makes the sufferer anxious to avoid the cause of suffering, be it a situation or a person, no matter how otherwise dear (I should know, I've had it). He is lucky, of course, that this time his fear of losing a loved one did not materialise, but it still would take him at least a few days to get over the worst of it. If anything, I made him get over it in record time.

My main narrative is told, as of the end of this chapter; and if I were a real writer I would have stopped here. But I would not be a fangirl worth my Christian Bale DVD collection if I did not also enjoy occasional bits of fan service in the guise of tying up loose ends (well, Nolan did it ;) ) Hence the final three chapters after this one. Think of them as fluffy icing on the cake, or perhaps more appropriately, the bow on top of the box ;)

21. Sleepless in Lugano

The worst thing about having a leg broken in two places isn't having wires and pins around the kneecap holding it together and a metal plate and screws in her ankle; after the first few days of painkillers, she does not often feel pain now. It is not even being unable to bend her knee or move her leg at all below the right hip for now; the original one-piece cast bothered her, true, but by the time they got to Lugano, Lucius had sent her a pair of titanium crutches and separate carbon fibre splints for the ankle and knee that lock securely in place but are lightweight and adjustable to take into account the subsiding swelling, and as soon as the doctor replaced the cast with these, life became easier and she started learning to move, or at least hobble, around. The worst thing, she now knows, is getting to sleep in a king-size bed alone.

It is not that Bruce stays out of bed to keep his distance; after their rollercoaster of a conversation on the way back, he has been unfailingly thoughtful and caring, thinking ten steps ahead about what she might want or need and doing his best to anticipate her every request and make her life less uncomfortable, and treating the requests she makes explicitly as an uncontested priority… when he is around. Which, as it happens, is not a lot. It seems that every other day he has to go to Rome or Lyon or somewhere else a short flight away but far enough to keep him away for hours, leaving her to the kind but unexciting care of the housemaid who he is now paying extra for extended hours. The fallout from the Tessuti Varese affair has brought a deluge of demands on his time, from the Italian, Chinese and Interpol authorities who are still investigating the events, from existing clients and partners who were put on the back burner while he and Theo were up to their ears in dealing with Chinese boxes, and from newly interested parties who are now circling the company with offers and orders. She mostly stays upstairs, between the bedroom and the terrace; there is no way she'd try going down the stairs on crutches even if he'd let her, and while he is happy to carry her there, she is less than happy with what it may do to his back if repeated too often. He has set out a new rattan couch and a swing seat and a big canvas umbrella on the terrace for her to sit on, and under, during the day, has shown her how to monitor the gate camera on the bedroom TV screen, and has clamped down on his aversion in favour of safety and given her a gun to keep by her side when he is not there, asking to please not shoot to kill if it can be helped.

To his further credit, when in Lugano he has been trying to handle as much business from the villa as he can, leaving Theo to hold the fort at the company office, but there are still daily meetings that require his attendance and stacks of documents that need to be read, reviewed, and answered, and endless phone calls that keep his ear glued to the phone even when he is around. She has done her best to keep herself busy too, fashioning herself a library from among the books - mostly textbooks - she found in the study and spends her days highlighting pages of financial and technical texts, unlikely but unexpectedly interesting reading, though she is glad that she is doing it as an optional pursuit. By the end of their second day back in Lugano, seeing her wistful look every time he walked over to her asking if she needed anything, he gave up and pushed the study couch over against the bedroom wall opposite the bed, put the large coffee table from downstairs next to it, and set up camp in this improvised office where he can be near her regardless of whether she is indoors or outdoors, working on the couch.

Trouble is, he now also sleeps on it. Most of the time it isn't even intentional; he is so tired by the end of each day that he jut falls asleep reading documents, often with his head resting awkwardly on top of a stack of paper. Once or twice when he stayed awake, he sat next to her on the bed for a few minutes, then kissed her good night and walked back to his perch when she seemed sleepy enough to be drifting off, he unaware that it stirred her wide awake again and she too embarrassed at herself to admit it. The obvious reason is to leave her maximum space in bed and avoid accidentally bumping or putting pressure on her leg, but after three or four days of this, she wonders if there is such a thing as being too careful.

***

She is sure that it must be past midnight already; he fell asleep sometime around eleven and she has been half-sitting in bed, propped up against a cushion and surrounded by a landscape of assorted pillows, staring into the darkness. She should have at least told him to fetch her night vision goggles from downstairs; that way she could watch him sleep in lieu of entertainment. The couple of times that he fell asleep with the lights on, she was reluctant to turn them off, sitting there watching his face, the peaceful expression wiping years off his age to make him look almost like a teen. She wonders if she could wear the goggles to read; it would probably be too much hassle. But after another half hour or so, she has had it. Either she is going to spend a miserable sleepless night, or she will make a needy fool of herself by waking him up and asking him to come over, or she needs something to keep her occupied. After all, he does not seem to have any trouble sleeping with the lights on. She slides the dimmer switch for the bedside light just enough for a dim glow, picks up her latest reading - a navigation manual so that they can later take turns steering the Falcon in Liguria if need be - and tries to memorise the rules.

She is not sure when exactly he woke up; one minute he is there with his eyes closed and that curiously angelic expression, the next she looks up from the page to see him looking at her in something between confusion and worry.

"Anything wrong?"

She shakes her head. "Nope. Just reading."

"Leg bothering you? Shall I bring you water for the painkiller?"

"I'm OK, really. Woke up, that's all." She still does not want to admit that she was never asleep in the first place, let alone why.

"Is there anything I can do?"

Get into this bed, now, and not get out again until morning. But thinking it and saying it apparently require varying degrees of resolve. She'd have no trouble saying it, really; it's hearing his worried protestations about not troubling her with the leg that she'd rather not deal with.

"No, I'll just keep reading for a bit, if the light doesn't bother you."

Whether from guessing her thoughts or from a similar wish or from common sense finally prevailing, he takes it as a cue to get up, walk over, and sit down next to her, craning his neck to peek at the book.

"Planning to become a sea captain?"

She smirks. "Planning to do my share of steering that obscene boat of yours. Unless you'd rather have me sitting in the hot tub while you're doing all the work."

His expression at hearing this is best described as playful. "Don't know about you, but my tentative plans for what we'd be doing back on the boat didn't feature long voyages."

Nice to hear that; she may have scared him off the bed for now, but it is good to know that the condition is not permanent. "We should probably steer it out of the harbour, though. For your sake, mind you." For all his prowess in private that gives a new meaning to the term uninhibited, and for all his famously relaxed attitude to public displays of a quasi-sexual nature in his Gotham days, she was thrilled to discover that he was both self-conscious about and very turned on by anything approximating the real thing outside of the house; in the latest instance, she followed up her theft of the car keys on the highway lay-by on the way back to Lugano by successfully reducing him to a state of helpless mewling against her shoulder with a simple handjob, with the de facto public setting driving him so far out of his mind that it took him almost a quarter of an hour to stir from his spaced-out state and another five minutes before he could even think of starting the engine. It would be a shame not to exploit it, but Portofino harbour is too small and, worse, full of regulars.

He probably gets both the same memory, if his half-closed eyes are any indication, and the same conclusion. "Good point. I'd probably manage to steer it on my own, but it will be nice to have company on the bridge."

"Company would be dangerous," she counters. "Can you imagine what sort of damage we could do if we get distracted? I say we take turns. But I agree in principle that we keep actual travel to a minimum." She tries to go back to reading the manual, but it is tricky to balance the conflicting priorities of keeping the book upright and keeping his arm where it is around her shoulder. Which it does not take him long to notice.

"I could read it for you if you want."

The offer makes her grin. It is tempting for sure, but while it may - or may not - help her get to sleep, it would completely defeat the object of learning anything from the manual; all she'd do is listen to the voice. "No, it's OK. Could you hold it for me?"

"Sure." He punctuates his consent with a kiss against her ear that threatens to shut down any brain cells that may be needed for reading. "Just tell me when you want me to turn the pages."

For a few paragraphs, she manages to maintain her concentration; but the effect of him back in bed next to her is to get her too relaxed to care about reading on, so much so that after two mumbled page-turning requests, she feels her eyes slip closed halfway down the fifth page.

***

She does not so much wake up as a discrete event; rather, she slowly drifts awake. It is still dark; he is still sitting next to her; and it seems that he is still awake as well. Which would have worried her if the way he is holding her did not feel too damn nice. He still has his arm around her shoulders, but has now turned to her kind of sideways, with his face buried in her hair; she would have thought he was asleep if it weren't for his other hand stroking her arm, from shoulder to wrist; though stroking is perhaps too strong a word for what is really just running his fingertips over her skin, so lightly she can barely feel the touch, as if she were made of finest glass instead of flesh and would shatter at the slightest hint of pressure, all the pent-up tenderness he does not want, or dare, to show when she is awake coaxed from him when he thinks she is sleeping. She is still not sure she likes the idea that he may have sat awake next to her all this time, but the sensation is too delicious for the thought to linger; all she can do is pretend to still be asleep so that he keeps on doing it. A memory comes into focus, distantly but distinctly; the Italian nurse in Florence raving about her boyfriend who holds her like that, that same girl having told her earlier that he was there, in the hospital, the night after she arrived; he must have kept vigil by her side while she was out on medication. Che la tiene così, indeed; the girl knew what she was talking about, after all.

Still, it turns out that pretending to be asleep is not as easy as she might think, as a particularly light caress makes her shiver and stir, and thus blows her cover.

"You're awake," he observes, in a quiet but very awake voice himself.

The words send her back to the first insane night they spent at the villa, the morning - almost afternoon - after, when she woke up and did not initially notice him watching her. "That depends on whether you're real," she says his old quip back at him, and is rewarded with a kiss on the cheek - not of the San Giovanni hospital variety but of a much more electrifying kind.

"Real enough?"

"Seems like it." She stretches on the cushions, tired of her half-sitting pose, and tries to slide down to a more horizontal position, but the problem is that it makes him instantly shift away; he might not be getting out of it but he seems determined to stay as close to the edge of the bed as is humanly possible. Well, after catching him being really sweet to her a minute ago - there is no other way of describing it - she is not about to play coy anymore. "Don't go away… please," she entreats him, reaching out to pull him back to her, and this time he forgets about the splint-related arguments and just does as she asks him.

(end of Ch 21) - continued in part 10