Fic: Le Petit Mort, 6
Disclaimer: 6 parts later and still not mine. Damn.
Rating: Mature
Summary: It started with Bruce thinking of Selina in the pearls and nothing else.
6: Penitents
Realization like a fever rose in him: he hadn’t escaped the flames. Heat panted down the nape of his neck, licked the small of his back, rolled over his body in waves, welling up through him and from him. He fought the weight of blankets that had closed over him like war tunnels, like sewers, like vertical miles of desert sand.
He knew he was in a hospital, knew by the smells, the sounds, the swarms of unfamiliar faces backlit by the flashbulb burn of fluorescent light. Gloved hands that shook him awake at all hours. The therapeutic inquisition, a headache of endless questions about who he was, what had happened, was he in pain, was he in pain, was he in pain.
He didn’t answer. He clamped dry lips around a tongue thick and textured with disuse that sat heavily in his throat. He’d felt that unique discomfort before, the razed aftermath of a breathing tube, the sticky feeling of a body scrubbed sterile and sewn back together, it’s parts still fraying at the hems. Something had happened to him. Something substantial.
Maybe his city had burned down. Maybe he had died a little.
He couldn’t remember. That didn’t stop them asking.
He let silence fall for long stretches, weighing heavily on the conventions of comfort and conversation. What had happened to him? He didn’t answer. Images shivered behind his eyes, swallowed him while half awake. Miranda, dead. Bane too, Selina Kyle appearing like a Cheshire grin to punch him through a wall.
He could remember the Pit. Terror, heat, pain. He could remember the fire that licked Harvey Dent’s face, the grainy images of a darkened Gotham hulking under a slick of ice and snow. He could remember the sound of his back breaking, of a knife sliding into the hollow beneath his ribs, of steel tumblers clattering into place as Selina Kyle locked a door like a cage behind him.
Selina Kyle. He remembered her voice too well, its affected purr, velvet padded over claws. “Mr. Wayne,” it said flatly, a tone that wasn’t paid to care. “Open your mouth.” It sounded closer than memory, looming out of the dark, ethereal and full of teeth.
He could remember Selina Kyle. He could almost, almost remember deciding to live.
He pushed his eyelids open past the dulled pain, curious. But the room swam blurrily at a narcotic distance. He knew he knew her and he knew there was pain. But that knowledge stood separate from him by the filmy glass ceiling of opiate haze. He knew. He knew. But he couldn’t figure out how to care.
“Bruce,” her voice said, clipped now with a familiar annoyance. It dropped through his mind like a lodestone “Open your goddamned mouth, I have other patients, I don’t have all night.” Then there was a hand on his jaw. Not gentle, not exactly, but gloveless, a modern medical taboo. He jerked his chin back clumsily, the touch somehow profoundly intimate on skin languid with morphine.
“Suit yourself,” said Selina Kyle. “I can take your temperature the other way if you insist. Roll over.”
He didn’t answer. But he laughed.
**
It had only been two weeks but she was a quick learner. If it had up to her, she wouldn’t take him as a patient every shift. To waylay suspicion, to save him some dignity, and just maybe to surprise herself with how good he looked after a few days away. But John Doe or not, Bruce Wayne had friends in low places. There was a small rotation of staff dedicated his case, no cops, no cameras, and he’d never said anything but “HIPAA no,” those magical medical words that make the outside world out of bounds. So she’d been assigned to him every shift and she’d picked up over time.
The jargon was already hitting a familiar cadence, the slang of the overeducated falling into a discernible patter of connections and meaning. Innocent words rearing up with brass knuckles. Strong drugs ravaging bodies like purging fire.
A few days in, Bruce had been coming around, not talking, not even opening his eyes if he sensed her in the room but coming around. He was still pissing everyone off, refusing to speak, to eat, to move any more than was absolutely necessary. The gaggle of young nurses and medical interns who’d at first leapt at the chance to care for the dreamy albeit battered patient in room 17 soon gave way under his long silences and hard stares.
But still, he was getting better. Everyone said so, the nurses who stood vigil, examining him with instinct and science, the hive mind of doctors who swarmed in to pronounce judgment at the crack of dawn. The numbers she herself collected: rate, pressure, saturation…the careful, improving patterns of his lungs and heart. Once, just once, he’d laughed. Despite his entirely absent efforts, Bruce Wayne was healing.
Then the patterns started to shift.
That Tuesday night two veteran nurses, lifers in the trauma center, stood in his doorway while Selina went through the strangely satisfying tedium of blood draws, a skill, it seemed, traditionally learned in trial by fire. She was tourniquetting the bicep of the man who had been Batman, watching veins flare up on a well-muscled arm, mapping them with her fingertips.
“He’s going to crump on us,” said Dana’s voice from the hallway. Selina could just see the nurse’s profile out of the corner of her eye as she, Selina, finessed a butterfly needle into a likely vessel.
“Shhh,” Ray hissed, the same hiss he used when a newbie mentioned the night was slow or a notorious patient was fast asleep.
Blood flashed into the catheter and Selina held her hand steady, smoothly switching out one sample tube for another as they filled, a science that looked more that ritual sacrifice, like blood letting in tribute to hungry gods.
“I’m just saying,” Dana argued, brazen but apologetic. “He’s refusing to work with Physical Therapy, he should have been up and walking by now. His white count’s been creeping up. His heart rate’s way off baseline.”
“His rate’s still normal,” Ray said, echoing Selina’s own thoughts. But the senior nurse spoke with a shrug in his voice, a lack of conviction that settled coldly in Selina’s gut. “Technically.”
“He came in with a rate in the 80s and that’s when he was hypovolemic and in pain. Guy was clearly in good shape before all this, his baseline is probably like Lance Armstrong low, like, resting in the 40s at highest,” Dana’s tone took on a lecturing quality Selina was already familiar with, the tone that said, look, we’ve both done this shit long enough to know how it’ll go. “There’s no reason he should be asleep and in the high 90s.”
Selina had released the tourniquet and was bagging her labs when Dana asked, as if already knowing her point would be made, “Selina, what’s his latest temp?”
Selina suppressed a hiss of her own, finding the collective superstitious unconscious of those who care for the sick setting up camp at the edges of her native logic. “He’s running a low grade fever.” The words came out in a mumble that was foreign to her ears and she understood she was acting on some baser instinct, trying to catch the words behind her teeth, keep them inside, unheard and unreal.
“He’s already on IV antibiotics,” Dana said like a judge passing a sentence she regretted. “He’s going to crump.”
**
It was 3am, just shy of 24 hours later, when Selina heard the hint of a plea in her own mocking tone. “It was a stab, you ass,” she chided. “You run around in a rubber suit defending the downtrodden and beating up mobsters and you’re going to let a stab to gut get you? Jesus Christ, Bruce, I know a guy who took 13 bullets and walked out of the hospital two and a half weeks later and he was a goddamn street punk.” She knew just enough by now to know she was full of shit. Gut wounds were some of the worst, though Bruce had gotten lucky, his intestines hadn’t been so much as nicked which would have been a whole other level of catastrophe.
“What do you want?” Bruce was facing away from her, lying on his side as she’d pushed and cajoled him to do so she could pound on his back with cupped palms and break up the fluid that had begun to settle in his lungs after days of stubborn immobility. He’d been seen by psych, by pastoral care, by every nurse on the unit. He’d speak to none of them. He wouldn’t even look at Selina.
“Cough.” She commanded.
He coughed, a thick, wet sound. But not, she noted, as thick or as wet as it could have been.
“Again.”
He complied.
“Good, now stand up.”
“Why?”
There was an odd lack of color in the question, a gray apathy. She pulled off her gloves with a snap, tossing them into his rumpled sheets and walked around the broad hospital bed. His eyes were closed in a determined, stubborn grimace, the way a teenaged boy sleeps through any efforts made to wake him before noon. She put a hand on his shoulder, his skin was hot and unfamiliar, the touch taboo in more ways than one. “Up,” she said again, shaking him.
“Why?”
This time it was a child’s question, one that could go on forever, skating over trivialities, burrowing into the depths of the human soul. Why should he get up, why go on, why had he come back to save them? Why did it matter? Why did it matter to her? He was asking all that. And more. It was just like him, 0 to 60, all or nothing.
She ignored him.
“Because I haven’t been able to measure your weight since you got here and the nurses are getting on my case about it. Now get your ass up so I can zero the bed scale.”
“Like you care,” he said but held out his hand to grip hers, opening his eyes just a sliver.
She gripped his left with hers, stretching the right to shut off the bed alarm. She braced him with a firm grip and he heaved his tattered torso to a sitting position. “Stronger than you look.” His voice was quiet but it didn’t rattle, hadn’t quite fallen into the elective antiquity she’d heard that first night as he looked at her down the site of a bow.
“You already knew that,” she said, maintaining her grip but rolling her eyes dramatically at the weak attempt at wit so wouldn’t think she’d gone soft. “Dizzy?”
He nodded. “Can’t blame me at such close proximity to a well dressed woman.” He cut his eyes at her scrubs, threadbare and powder pink, cut for men so the crotch hung low and the shoulders too broad, despite the overwhelming majority of women in the profession.
“You’re one to talk,” she said, not at all above mocking the infirm. “You’re about to flash your ass at whoever’s in this hallway.”
“Lucky them,” he retorted, very nearly surprising her.
“Maybe a few weeks ago, killer. But hospital is not a good look for anybody.”
“You’re really not going to tie this gown for me, are you?”
“I’m really not.”
“Selina.”
“A name!” She crowed, laying the faux drama on thick. “Would you look at that he remembers something! Hallelujah!”
“Selina.”
“Now just say your own damn name when Dana comes in here and I’ll get a promotion.”
“Who’s Dana?”
“Seriously, rich boy? Your nurse. For the past three days. Damn, Bruce, half-dead and stuck up as ever.”
“You’re not my nurse?” he said, blatantly ignoring her.
Selina’s laugh was more of a snort. “I’m your tech. If I were your nurse I’d have killed you by now. Maybe by accident. I’ve got a walker for you right here, old man. Now get up.”
All witty banter and genuine annoyance aside, she’d wanted him to sit on the side of the bed for a while before he tried to stand. It was wildly against the rules for her to walk a patient alone and for the first time but Bruce Wayne had lost enough of the good will of the staff with his abysmal attitude that she was reasonably sure she wouldn’t catch much flak (or, more importantly, get fired and banned from his care) as long as he didn’t crack his skull on the floor.
Bruce lurched to his feet all at once, forgoing the walker but still gripping her hand. Selina’s other hand shot out to steady him. She cursed creatively. “You have staples holding your guts together, Wayne.”
He swayed on his feet for just a moment, leaning lightly on the shoulder she’d wedged on his. “Staples,” he shrugged. “A few months ago a prison doctor hung me from the ceiling of a cave with a rope to reset my vertebrae.”
Never having heard him exaggerate, Selina was lost for a clever reply. “What?”
“I’ll tell you all about sometime over dinner, Ms. Kyle.”
He took step.
“Is that appropriate dinner conversation where you come from, Mr. Wayne? Or are you just poorly socialized?” He took another step. “And does that mean you plan to start eating again, then?”
He took another step and she could see the edge of a smile even from her too myopic view.
“How’s the stomach feel?” She asked, supporting him as he took slow, steady steps toward the hallway.
“Oh, are you playing nurse again? Is that harder or easier than social climber?”
“Please.” She clicked her tongue to further illustrate the stupidity of the question and briefly considered tripping him.
“How’s your stomach?”
“Hurts.”
“Knives will do that,” Selina offered helpfully. “And French women.”
Bruce laughed but quickly seemed to think better of it, one hand drifting to his abdomen.
“Need a break?” Selina asked casually, eyes locking on a tiny damp spot on the front of his hospital gown.
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me to push through the pain?”
“Fuck if I know,” Selina replied, scanning the slice of hallway she could see through the door for a convenient chair, or better yet, a nurse. “I’m just pretending to do this job, remember?”
“Didn’t you draw my blood last night?”
“I’ve got a soft touch. Excellent with my hands.”
“I bet.”
The stain was growing, not blood, but definitely wet and it definitely occupied the patch of gown over the staples in his abdomen. “Stop.”
“What?” He reacted to the alarm in her voice like he might have that night in the tunnels f she’d offered it, bending his knees to spring, turning to seek out the attack.
“Just stop.” She shifted her stance so she could still support him with her shoulder and pull his gown aside, disregarding his protests entirely. “Help!” She shouted, the cry of distress she’d perfected over years of cons failing so her voice croaked on the first syllable. “Help!”
The staples at the center of his belly had burst open.
Rating: Mature
Summary: It started with Bruce thinking of Selina in the pearls and nothing else.
6: Penitents
Realization like a fever rose in him: he hadn’t escaped the flames. Heat panted down the nape of his neck, licked the small of his back, rolled over his body in waves, welling up through him and from him. He fought the weight of blankets that had closed over him like war tunnels, like sewers, like vertical miles of desert sand.
He knew he was in a hospital, knew by the smells, the sounds, the swarms of unfamiliar faces backlit by the flashbulb burn of fluorescent light. Gloved hands that shook him awake at all hours. The therapeutic inquisition, a headache of endless questions about who he was, what had happened, was he in pain, was he in pain, was he in pain.
He didn’t answer. He clamped dry lips around a tongue thick and textured with disuse that sat heavily in his throat. He’d felt that unique discomfort before, the razed aftermath of a breathing tube, the sticky feeling of a body scrubbed sterile and sewn back together, it’s parts still fraying at the hems. Something had happened to him. Something substantial.
Maybe his city had burned down. Maybe he had died a little.
He couldn’t remember. That didn’t stop them asking.
He let silence fall for long stretches, weighing heavily on the conventions of comfort and conversation. What had happened to him? He didn’t answer. Images shivered behind his eyes, swallowed him while half awake. Miranda, dead. Bane too, Selina Kyle appearing like a Cheshire grin to punch him through a wall.
He could remember the Pit. Terror, heat, pain. He could remember the fire that licked Harvey Dent’s face, the grainy images of a darkened Gotham hulking under a slick of ice and snow. He could remember the sound of his back breaking, of a knife sliding into the hollow beneath his ribs, of steel tumblers clattering into place as Selina Kyle locked a door like a cage behind him.
Selina Kyle. He remembered her voice too well, its affected purr, velvet padded over claws. “Mr. Wayne,” it said flatly, a tone that wasn’t paid to care. “Open your mouth.” It sounded closer than memory, looming out of the dark, ethereal and full of teeth.
He could remember Selina Kyle. He could almost, almost remember deciding to live.
He pushed his eyelids open past the dulled pain, curious. But the room swam blurrily at a narcotic distance. He knew he knew her and he knew there was pain. But that knowledge stood separate from him by the filmy glass ceiling of opiate haze. He knew. He knew. But he couldn’t figure out how to care.
“Bruce,” her voice said, clipped now with a familiar annoyance. It dropped through his mind like a lodestone “Open your goddamned mouth, I have other patients, I don’t have all night.” Then there was a hand on his jaw. Not gentle, not exactly, but gloveless, a modern medical taboo. He jerked his chin back clumsily, the touch somehow profoundly intimate on skin languid with morphine.
“Suit yourself,” said Selina Kyle. “I can take your temperature the other way if you insist. Roll over.”
He didn’t answer. But he laughed.
**
It had only been two weeks but she was a quick learner. If it had up to her, she wouldn’t take him as a patient every shift. To waylay suspicion, to save him some dignity, and just maybe to surprise herself with how good he looked after a few days away. But John Doe or not, Bruce Wayne had friends in low places. There was a small rotation of staff dedicated his case, no cops, no cameras, and he’d never said anything but “HIPAA no,” those magical medical words that make the outside world out of bounds. So she’d been assigned to him every shift and she’d picked up over time.
The jargon was already hitting a familiar cadence, the slang of the overeducated falling into a discernible patter of connections and meaning. Innocent words rearing up with brass knuckles. Strong drugs ravaging bodies like purging fire.
A few days in, Bruce had been coming around, not talking, not even opening his eyes if he sensed her in the room but coming around. He was still pissing everyone off, refusing to speak, to eat, to move any more than was absolutely necessary. The gaggle of young nurses and medical interns who’d at first leapt at the chance to care for the dreamy albeit battered patient in room 17 soon gave way under his long silences and hard stares.
But still, he was getting better. Everyone said so, the nurses who stood vigil, examining him with instinct and science, the hive mind of doctors who swarmed in to pronounce judgment at the crack of dawn. The numbers she herself collected: rate, pressure, saturation…the careful, improving patterns of his lungs and heart. Once, just once, he’d laughed. Despite his entirely absent efforts, Bruce Wayne was healing.
Then the patterns started to shift.
That Tuesday night two veteran nurses, lifers in the trauma center, stood in his doorway while Selina went through the strangely satisfying tedium of blood draws, a skill, it seemed, traditionally learned in trial by fire. She was tourniquetting the bicep of the man who had been Batman, watching veins flare up on a well-muscled arm, mapping them with her fingertips.
“He’s going to crump on us,” said Dana’s voice from the hallway. Selina could just see the nurse’s profile out of the corner of her eye as she, Selina, finessed a butterfly needle into a likely vessel.
“Shhh,” Ray hissed, the same hiss he used when a newbie mentioned the night was slow or a notorious patient was fast asleep.
Blood flashed into the catheter and Selina held her hand steady, smoothly switching out one sample tube for another as they filled, a science that looked more that ritual sacrifice, like blood letting in tribute to hungry gods.
“I’m just saying,” Dana argued, brazen but apologetic. “He’s refusing to work with Physical Therapy, he should have been up and walking by now. His white count’s been creeping up. His heart rate’s way off baseline.”
“His rate’s still normal,” Ray said, echoing Selina’s own thoughts. But the senior nurse spoke with a shrug in his voice, a lack of conviction that settled coldly in Selina’s gut. “Technically.”
“He came in with a rate in the 80s and that’s when he was hypovolemic and in pain. Guy was clearly in good shape before all this, his baseline is probably like Lance Armstrong low, like, resting in the 40s at highest,” Dana’s tone took on a lecturing quality Selina was already familiar with, the tone that said, look, we’ve both done this shit long enough to know how it’ll go. “There’s no reason he should be asleep and in the high 90s.”
Selina had released the tourniquet and was bagging her labs when Dana asked, as if already knowing her point would be made, “Selina, what’s his latest temp?”
Selina suppressed a hiss of her own, finding the collective superstitious unconscious of those who care for the sick setting up camp at the edges of her native logic. “He’s running a low grade fever.” The words came out in a mumble that was foreign to her ears and she understood she was acting on some baser instinct, trying to catch the words behind her teeth, keep them inside, unheard and unreal.
“He’s already on IV antibiotics,” Dana said like a judge passing a sentence she regretted. “He’s going to crump.”
**
It was 3am, just shy of 24 hours later, when Selina heard the hint of a plea in her own mocking tone. “It was a stab, you ass,” she chided. “You run around in a rubber suit defending the downtrodden and beating up mobsters and you’re going to let a stab to gut get you? Jesus Christ, Bruce, I know a guy who took 13 bullets and walked out of the hospital two and a half weeks later and he was a goddamn street punk.” She knew just enough by now to know she was full of shit. Gut wounds were some of the worst, though Bruce had gotten lucky, his intestines hadn’t been so much as nicked which would have been a whole other level of catastrophe.
“What do you want?” Bruce was facing away from her, lying on his side as she’d pushed and cajoled him to do so she could pound on his back with cupped palms and break up the fluid that had begun to settle in his lungs after days of stubborn immobility. He’d been seen by psych, by pastoral care, by every nurse on the unit. He’d speak to none of them. He wouldn’t even look at Selina.
“Cough.” She commanded.
He coughed, a thick, wet sound. But not, she noted, as thick or as wet as it could have been.
“Again.”
He complied.
“Good, now stand up.”
“Why?”
There was an odd lack of color in the question, a gray apathy. She pulled off her gloves with a snap, tossing them into his rumpled sheets and walked around the broad hospital bed. His eyes were closed in a determined, stubborn grimace, the way a teenaged boy sleeps through any efforts made to wake him before noon. She put a hand on his shoulder, his skin was hot and unfamiliar, the touch taboo in more ways than one. “Up,” she said again, shaking him.
“Why?”
This time it was a child’s question, one that could go on forever, skating over trivialities, burrowing into the depths of the human soul. Why should he get up, why go on, why had he come back to save them? Why did it matter? Why did it matter to her? He was asking all that. And more. It was just like him, 0 to 60, all or nothing.
She ignored him.
“Because I haven’t been able to measure your weight since you got here and the nurses are getting on my case about it. Now get your ass up so I can zero the bed scale.”
“Like you care,” he said but held out his hand to grip hers, opening his eyes just a sliver.
She gripped his left with hers, stretching the right to shut off the bed alarm. She braced him with a firm grip and he heaved his tattered torso to a sitting position. “Stronger than you look.” His voice was quiet but it didn’t rattle, hadn’t quite fallen into the elective antiquity she’d heard that first night as he looked at her down the site of a bow.
“You already knew that,” she said, maintaining her grip but rolling her eyes dramatically at the weak attempt at wit so wouldn’t think she’d gone soft. “Dizzy?”
He nodded. “Can’t blame me at such close proximity to a well dressed woman.” He cut his eyes at her scrubs, threadbare and powder pink, cut for men so the crotch hung low and the shoulders too broad, despite the overwhelming majority of women in the profession.
“You’re one to talk,” she said, not at all above mocking the infirm. “You’re about to flash your ass at whoever’s in this hallway.”
“Lucky them,” he retorted, very nearly surprising her.
“Maybe a few weeks ago, killer. But hospital is not a good look for anybody.”
“You’re really not going to tie this gown for me, are you?”
“I’m really not.”
“Selina.”
“A name!” She crowed, laying the faux drama on thick. “Would you look at that he remembers something! Hallelujah!”
“Selina.”
“Now just say your own damn name when Dana comes in here and I’ll get a promotion.”
“Who’s Dana?”
“Seriously, rich boy? Your nurse. For the past three days. Damn, Bruce, half-dead and stuck up as ever.”
“You’re not my nurse?” he said, blatantly ignoring her.
Selina’s laugh was more of a snort. “I’m your tech. If I were your nurse I’d have killed you by now. Maybe by accident. I’ve got a walker for you right here, old man. Now get up.”
All witty banter and genuine annoyance aside, she’d wanted him to sit on the side of the bed for a while before he tried to stand. It was wildly against the rules for her to walk a patient alone and for the first time but Bruce Wayne had lost enough of the good will of the staff with his abysmal attitude that she was reasonably sure she wouldn’t catch much flak (or, more importantly, get fired and banned from his care) as long as he didn’t crack his skull on the floor.
Bruce lurched to his feet all at once, forgoing the walker but still gripping her hand. Selina’s other hand shot out to steady him. She cursed creatively. “You have staples holding your guts together, Wayne.”
He swayed on his feet for just a moment, leaning lightly on the shoulder she’d wedged on his. “Staples,” he shrugged. “A few months ago a prison doctor hung me from the ceiling of a cave with a rope to reset my vertebrae.”
Never having heard him exaggerate, Selina was lost for a clever reply. “What?”
“I’ll tell you all about sometime over dinner, Ms. Kyle.”
He took step.
“Is that appropriate dinner conversation where you come from, Mr. Wayne? Or are you just poorly socialized?” He took another step. “And does that mean you plan to start eating again, then?”
He took another step and she could see the edge of a smile even from her too myopic view.
“How’s the stomach feel?” She asked, supporting him as he took slow, steady steps toward the hallway.
“Oh, are you playing nurse again? Is that harder or easier than social climber?”
“Please.” She clicked her tongue to further illustrate the stupidity of the question and briefly considered tripping him.
“How’s your stomach?”
“Hurts.”
“Knives will do that,” Selina offered helpfully. “And French women.”
Bruce laughed but quickly seemed to think better of it, one hand drifting to his abdomen.
“Need a break?” Selina asked casually, eyes locking on a tiny damp spot on the front of his hospital gown.
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me to push through the pain?”
“Fuck if I know,” Selina replied, scanning the slice of hallway she could see through the door for a convenient chair, or better yet, a nurse. “I’m just pretending to do this job, remember?”
“Didn’t you draw my blood last night?”
“I’ve got a soft touch. Excellent with my hands.”
“I bet.”
The stain was growing, not blood, but definitely wet and it definitely occupied the patch of gown over the staples in his abdomen. “Stop.”
“What?” He reacted to the alarm in her voice like he might have that night in the tunnels f she’d offered it, bending his knees to spring, turning to seek out the attack.
“Just stop.” She shifted her stance so she could still support him with her shoulder and pull his gown aside, disregarding his protests entirely. “Help!” She shouted, the cry of distress she’d perfected over years of cons failing so her voice croaked on the first syllable. “Help!”
The staples at the center of his belly had burst open.