FIC: Mercy
Mercy
by eggblue
April 2005, Batman comics fandom, Bruce (Batman)/Jason (Robin 2), 1/1, R, DC owns so don’t sue
Notes: After Batman 638 but kind of timeless. Jason is always Jason to Bruce. And Bruce quotes Rimbaud. Since they both kinda keep diaries in canon, I figure they have personal stuff to say. The only person I can imagine finding and reading their diaries is Dick. He is good in the confessor role. And while I figure Jason would only want to confess to himself, and while Dick probably shouldn’t read either one, I imagine Bruce talks to Dick in his head and writes to him in his diary just to make more sense of things and feel less alone. Because he’d do that. I imagine them both having terse, romantic writing styles. Comic book style. Think panels in the white spaces. Not that I can really write that, but I try. This is just Bruce loving Jason, which or every Jason I’m not sure. And Bruce admits to being lonely plenty of times in canon. It’s his biggest fear. The old sap.
Feedback is the best! Here or eggblue @ hotmail
*
I value privacy. The Cave has a purpose. So do masks. Because of memories. Because of my human heart, my apartness. Because of Jason and the loneliness he wrought.
The gaping hole and blinding brightness of him in my memory.
Taking a bath and a hand, so dangerously graceful, dipping under the water and seeking out…
Sure lips from above me…
White muscles around my neck, the thigh, don’t bite hard, remember the uniform he wears
When you look at him and what that means
Why you both once existed.
But no longer.
Robin wears a new uniform now. Robin was once broken and some things I cannot bear (yes, Dick, that is true) or admit that even my heroes can break and I break too, so easily.
Of course we are partners…
Everything. He says meant to be. I believe him. He says love. I believe him. He says forever and always and true. And it is. It is. My child. Like Mother. Her burning red hair and the glint in her eyes (the same way Alfred looks while dressing my injuries). I can burn like that, all the way down. Burn like her. All over the world. Only thinking of…
The red flowing over and coming out of him (hope is stupid, denial is stupid) because
His body I’m holding
Desert heat, fire and the despair of smoke, everywhere, the way all death everywhere mocks me and nature mocks me and my love for this boy because
Now he will never leave me, now he will never grow coarse hair over the scars on his legs, now he will never find a woman who loves him and he loves more than us, now he will never leave Gotham
never leave me
(and isn’t that what you wanted, Bruce, all along?)
If he’d only stop loving me. If he’d only believe less in us. If we’d be less desperate for each other. Taking our fights as a sign for what they are. How we are part of that cruel joke that makes up our worldview. But I am his savior. For all his cruelty and jealousy and anger, he chose me for his savior. And I can blame him for that.
But how he leaves me speechless with how right he is. He laughs at you and Harvey. At the way I’ve felt and won’t dare and he swears I’m wrong. He says the Joker is probably the only person who thinks I’m bent.
How angry he can make me…
And then he clings to me as if I were the only solid thing he could see…
Clinging to my shoulders, his hands on my back. His cheek to mine and his calm breath in my ear, like stone speaking to stone, reciting a plan between us and
I feel eyelashes brush my skin and
I want to break things and
I want giant butterfly pins and
I want a room to wall him up behind and never come out and
I dream of impossible perfect mutual suicide and he can read all this in the tremble of my hands on his back but knows me and isn’t afraid and
we pledge our trust in the squeeze of my hand on his shoulder, the light and shading of his eyes…
We go to work.
Doubt is the hardest. When I can’t remember. When I can’t feel anything at all. When it’s easier to deny him than to remember what I’ve lost. When Jason is just a boy who found me, who got in over his head and who I couldn’t save in time. Not the only person I’ve ever known who could have possibly understood me in this life. Not the only one who saw me as a man who loved him, nothing more. Not the one I wanted (who wanted to be) beside me every moment in the day and night, until the end.
So I deny him. Until he’s a suit in a case. Until he’s a ghost, a casualty, a sad lesson.
But memory mocks.
And Jason mocks.
And I remember and I howl inside and I want to be the trapped butterfly in the case,
the mounted beast,
the death trophy for him. I want him to drag my bleeding body through Gotham until it knows his strength, our strength, and weeps for us and lets our love die with impossible mercy. Impossible, impossible mercy…
I want to make it up to him.
Jason crossing his arms and scowling around his eyes. Leaning against brick. Impatiently waiting for me to come around, to let go and come to him and share his faith and accept it. But I don’t.
He uncrosses his arms and looks down more often and smiles less and fights just as mean but behind it there’s nothing there. Just contempt for me.
I sometimes think he is immune to shame. And that is why he can’t see it in me. He can’t know that is where all of this ends for me. He can’t see the mask that covers all others.
He wears his love in bright colors and wide eyes.
And the way we are together…
Both pleasure and shame,
impossible love and inevitable death
dying youth and stubborn childish age.
And our enemy is everyone who doesn’t understand, who threatens us, who throws us back at ourselves as lies…
The way he comes to me silent in the night and doesn’t say a word. My bed is his favorite. He smells the pillows. He says kissing is too domestic in the house…
Then does it anyway. Even kissing him is deathly. I’ve never wanted to kiss anyone else. I know that. I feel like we’re breaking…
Our uniforms are soaked. The rain washes the alley clean below us.
On the roof we are alone and the city is ours and the night is ours alone and we take it.
I take him and only bite beneath the collar.
I take him and pull out black hair with my gloves and watch his bared teeth.
I take him and he opens up deep for me and grunts low and moans high and my hardness locks with his body, tight, slick, and he is shaking for me and pulling and dragging us forward, deeper, a lost breakable thing trying to kill me, kill me, and his seed disappearing on the concrete…
When Jason starts something, even I cannot stop him. He is sharp before we meet. He grows sharper. I see conclusions behind his eyes. He questions me because he believes that is what partners do. His convictions are strong. His justice hinges on love and revenge. He has no loyalties to institutions or society. It rejected him, he says. Only you and me, he says. And I believe it’s enough. And I believe he would kill for my love. It’s not an excuse. It is who he is. Just as it is my job to make sure he does not have to.
He makes me believe so much.
Or maybe I am just far gone. It’s as if… ”J’etais dans son ame comme dans un palais qu’on a vide pour ne pas voir une personne si peu noble que vous: voila tout.” That’s all.
[“I lived in his soul as if it were a palace that had been cleared out so that the most unworthy person in it would be you: that’s all.”]
He and I don’t understand happiness. It lights upon us like the sun in winter. We learn to accept its fragility. We take it as a gift from a benevolent stranger. We don’t ask it to stay. I don’t tempt fate any more than is necessary.
He stares out the rain-spattered window, his eyes far away and so very... curious. He doesn’t acknowledge my words with anything more than a twitch of the cheek or a sigh. I cannot stop myself. I trace his pulse and the bones in his neck so close, so thin like a bird’s. I want to distract his thoughts, to focus them on myself, on the pump of my blood and thoughts of another night in the rain.
“Bruce?” To the window.
“Hmm?” The look in his eyes…
Have you ever gone hungry?
Did your parents ever hit you when you’d done something bad?
Have you ever done anything bad?
“Have you ever had to do something you really didn’t want to do? But you didn’t have a choice?”
Jason. My boy. “I always believe there is a choice.”
“Yeah. I thought so.”
“But you don’t agree.”
“Well. We’re all different. I guess.” He folds himself up and puts himself away in a place I cannot find.
Night after night. He looks for me watching from the shadows. I collect memories that were and what could never be.
He lives for a time in a shoebox apartment in a condemned building on Crime Alley. He likes death metal and action heroes. He owns: two pairs of ripped jeans which still fit him, three faded t-shirts, twenty-four cassette tapes, one battered stolen stereo, a dozen magazines with cars on the cover, a worn, stained mattress and remains of a pillow, a sharpened metal stick with masking tape on one end, a plastic lighter and a last pack of cigarettes. He also owns a folded picture of his dead parents, two marijuana joints, and a small box underneath a loose floorboard which contains thirteen articles, four photographs and a sketchbook of me. For years before we meet, he smokes and sketches alone and falls asleep next to a stranger and does it all thinking of the rubbery heat of my uniform and the hard flesh underneath and what I will look like when he finds me.
We live together. We share a home.
We go to baseball games and he brushes his leg against mine.
At the movies, he likes to hold hands in the dark. He likes these things because I don’t reject them.
Every night, when we return in the Car, he makes me swear an oath to him. He makes me swear we will always be partners. He convinces me he is right. I know he thinks my money, my hope for the city, my vow on my parents’ grave, that it is all a naïve lie. I do not blame him. That he believes in me, in us, is enough. Though he does not admit it, I know he has vows of his own.
Our vows are true. We try to believe that.
Belief in his body, ready and open for me. It sharpens my need to hurt, to inflict, to cause. My body is a shadow that negates, takes, controls. Seeking out something stronger than shame. He knows me like Alfred doesn’t, like Dick can’t, like my parents will never.
He knows me like a villain. He knows the world like a villain.
I am another flawed man too weak to save him. His failed love burns. We frighten each other more than the world. I need him to crawl and he cannot. I need him to beg and he cannot. We are sour and cruel. Weak inside. We can convince each other we are stronger.
We used to be able to. Before…
The end of that season, the ugly season when this city finally starts to go to a hell it can’t redeem. The season of the Deacon and the serial killers and every night a rapist and every night a child.
And Jason doesn’t say a word. Jason takes my shame and looks at the city and sees the future and his smirks turn to snarls and his laugh is icy. I feel dirty in his mouth.
Jason also has a journal. I never read it. I believe what I know.
How he looks in the suit, how right.
How he asks questions as if I already agree with him. How in sync we are. In the darkest night when dawn seems uncertain. In the silent possibility of every day. I cannot breach his trust in me. I won’t convince myself that I need to, for the cause. I won’t use the same false justification I use with you, Dick. You live in the gray, as I do -- the fog of your emotions and the judgment of your heart. Jason is strict. His judgments often harsher than mine. Our stubbornness. The stone underneath our hearts calcifying like bone.
This is also what I know.
Jason lives for a time above a rotted-out dive bar on Crime Alley. He works there during the day, a short-order lunch cook for the tourists who don’t know better and the regulars who don’t care. He puts gray meat on soggy bread and doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t speak at all. Not even to the drunken owner who shares his apartment and bed with him. Sleep just causes never-ending nightmares. He wakes up sobbing, screaming, laughing till it hurts. Those he meets do not want to know. He owns a long black raincoat, an extra pair of boots, a folded picture of his parents, a picture of his birth mother, a long, sharp, twisty knife, a torn piece of paper with a phone number on it, a few changes of dark clothes, eight crates in storage filled with weapons and costumes and gadgets and other things he doesn’t always like to remember, two extra jackets because he is always cold, and two red masks.
He hunts and we work. Always working. I see the worst in humanity. He has the need to destroy it. I cannot ever blame him. Because I let him down so completely.
I know that. I remember conversations. Moments.
We’d talk in bed:
“You know, capes are for protection. Cover.”
“And distraction. See? You’re the one that noticed.”
“Because you are constantly flashing me.”
His smile. Drawn out so sweetly so sweet… slick skin and heavy breath… so close
“Yeah, talk it up, Bruce. Tell me about the war.”
Dark thoughts. Dark intentions always with him. Focus and purity, his will alone. Temptation and distraction.
“It was a nice party tonight.”
“I don’t want to hear about your women…
Dead birds. No guts. Hollow, hollow…”
He gasps and gasps at me.
“They weren’t brats… babies.”
“…Spineless, spine, spine…
What do you feel anyway?”
His hands hooking onto scars. Hard softness riding my hip. Hard, pliant body, needing to be told. Shown how very much…
“I feel you. Here. Inside here.” Touch him.
Delirium. “…plug your heart with my thumb…”
His voice reveals. Catches. Too intense, too much.
“In practice yesterday. With the pellet gun. You were magnificent.”
“It’s yours.”
“I know how much. You like the toys.”
“… Harder. Just a little, just a little…”
His body between my lips and my thumb.
“Your skin. So warm…my lips. Nightmares again?”
“… yeah.”
I must make it better. I must give him everything. I must find…
“I find. Your violence. Thrilling. Beautiful. You are a good. Soldier.”
My hard thumb and sosoft sosoft there
“Hunh, oh better. Better. Better.”
“Mm. Turn around.”
“Find it again, Bruce. Fuh…”
“Shh, I have you, partner. I have you… Right with me, just with me.”
His back, so open, muscles moving against skin… I see bare legs kicking, kicking, and the red before my eyes…
“Bruce”
through the red, the flesh, the fallen ones, the men the dust going through me, floating in me… flesh so deep I couldn’t find my way out…
“Bruce”
the end of the world I cower behind a box… searching for the smell of my mother, the taste of Jason’s skin, Alfred’s voice…
“Jason…”
and I can’t find Jason, I can’t find Jason… oh my god, baby, oh godgodgod…
“… Listen. Listennowhow I’m howling throughyou.”
bitingwhispering into his ear
walking his spine walking home coming home climbing climbing
he’s calling me
“Yes… B-bat bat bat bat bat…”
Is this faith?
Is this enough?
THE END
by eggblue
April 2005, Batman comics fandom, Bruce (Batman)/Jason (Robin 2), 1/1, R, DC owns so don’t sue
Notes: After Batman 638 but kind of timeless. Jason is always Jason to Bruce. And Bruce quotes Rimbaud. Since they both kinda keep diaries in canon, I figure they have personal stuff to say. The only person I can imagine finding and reading their diaries is Dick. He is good in the confessor role. And while I figure Jason would only want to confess to himself, and while Dick probably shouldn’t read either one, I imagine Bruce talks to Dick in his head and writes to him in his diary just to make more sense of things and feel less alone. Because he’d do that. I imagine them both having terse, romantic writing styles. Comic book style. Think panels in the white spaces. Not that I can really write that, but I try. This is just Bruce loving Jason, which or every Jason I’m not sure. And Bruce admits to being lonely plenty of times in canon. It’s his biggest fear. The old sap.
Feedback is the best! Here or eggblue @ hotmail
*
I value privacy. The Cave has a purpose. So do masks. Because of memories. Because of my human heart, my apartness. Because of Jason and the loneliness he wrought.
The gaping hole and blinding brightness of him in my memory.
Taking a bath and a hand, so dangerously graceful, dipping under the water and seeking out…
Sure lips from above me…
White muscles around my neck, the thigh, don’t bite hard, remember the uniform he wears
When you look at him and what that means
Why you both once existed.
But no longer.
Robin wears a new uniform now. Robin was once broken and some things I cannot bear (yes, Dick, that is true) or admit that even my heroes can break and I break too, so easily.
Of course we are partners…
Everything. He says meant to be. I believe him. He says love. I believe him. He says forever and always and true. And it is. It is. My child. Like Mother. Her burning red hair and the glint in her eyes (the same way Alfred looks while dressing my injuries). I can burn like that, all the way down. Burn like her. All over the world. Only thinking of…
The red flowing over and coming out of him (hope is stupid, denial is stupid) because
His body I’m holding
Desert heat, fire and the despair of smoke, everywhere, the way all death everywhere mocks me and nature mocks me and my love for this boy because
Now he will never leave me, now he will never grow coarse hair over the scars on his legs, now he will never find a woman who loves him and he loves more than us, now he will never leave Gotham
never leave me
(and isn’t that what you wanted, Bruce, all along?)
If he’d only stop loving me. If he’d only believe less in us. If we’d be less desperate for each other. Taking our fights as a sign for what they are. How we are part of that cruel joke that makes up our worldview. But I am his savior. For all his cruelty and jealousy and anger, he chose me for his savior. And I can blame him for that.
But how he leaves me speechless with how right he is. He laughs at you and Harvey. At the way I’ve felt and won’t dare and he swears I’m wrong. He says the Joker is probably the only person who thinks I’m bent.
How angry he can make me…
And then he clings to me as if I were the only solid thing he could see…
Clinging to my shoulders, his hands on my back. His cheek to mine and his calm breath in my ear, like stone speaking to stone, reciting a plan between us and
I feel eyelashes brush my skin and
I want to break things and
I want giant butterfly pins and
I want a room to wall him up behind and never come out and
I dream of impossible perfect mutual suicide and he can read all this in the tremble of my hands on his back but knows me and isn’t afraid and
we pledge our trust in the squeeze of my hand on his shoulder, the light and shading of his eyes…
We go to work.
Doubt is the hardest. When I can’t remember. When I can’t feel anything at all. When it’s easier to deny him than to remember what I’ve lost. When Jason is just a boy who found me, who got in over his head and who I couldn’t save in time. Not the only person I’ve ever known who could have possibly understood me in this life. Not the only one who saw me as a man who loved him, nothing more. Not the one I wanted (who wanted to be) beside me every moment in the day and night, until the end.
So I deny him. Until he’s a suit in a case. Until he’s a ghost, a casualty, a sad lesson.
But memory mocks.
And Jason mocks.
And I remember and I howl inside and I want to be the trapped butterfly in the case,
the mounted beast,
the death trophy for him. I want him to drag my bleeding body through Gotham until it knows his strength, our strength, and weeps for us and lets our love die with impossible mercy. Impossible, impossible mercy…
I want to make it up to him.
Jason crossing his arms and scowling around his eyes. Leaning against brick. Impatiently waiting for me to come around, to let go and come to him and share his faith and accept it. But I don’t.
He uncrosses his arms and looks down more often and smiles less and fights just as mean but behind it there’s nothing there. Just contempt for me.
I sometimes think he is immune to shame. And that is why he can’t see it in me. He can’t know that is where all of this ends for me. He can’t see the mask that covers all others.
He wears his love in bright colors and wide eyes.
And the way we are together…
Both pleasure and shame,
impossible love and inevitable death
dying youth and stubborn childish age.
And our enemy is everyone who doesn’t understand, who threatens us, who throws us back at ourselves as lies…
The way he comes to me silent in the night and doesn’t say a word. My bed is his favorite. He smells the pillows. He says kissing is too domestic in the house…
Then does it anyway. Even kissing him is deathly. I’ve never wanted to kiss anyone else. I know that. I feel like we’re breaking…
Our uniforms are soaked. The rain washes the alley clean below us.
On the roof we are alone and the city is ours and the night is ours alone and we take it.
I take him and only bite beneath the collar.
I take him and pull out black hair with my gloves and watch his bared teeth.
I take him and he opens up deep for me and grunts low and moans high and my hardness locks with his body, tight, slick, and he is shaking for me and pulling and dragging us forward, deeper, a lost breakable thing trying to kill me, kill me, and his seed disappearing on the concrete…
When Jason starts something, even I cannot stop him. He is sharp before we meet. He grows sharper. I see conclusions behind his eyes. He questions me because he believes that is what partners do. His convictions are strong. His justice hinges on love and revenge. He has no loyalties to institutions or society. It rejected him, he says. Only you and me, he says. And I believe it’s enough. And I believe he would kill for my love. It’s not an excuse. It is who he is. Just as it is my job to make sure he does not have to.
He makes me believe so much.
Or maybe I am just far gone. It’s as if… ”J’etais dans son ame comme dans un palais qu’on a vide pour ne pas voir une personne si peu noble que vous: voila tout.” That’s all.
[“I lived in his soul as if it were a palace that had been cleared out so that the most unworthy person in it would be you: that’s all.”]
He and I don’t understand happiness. It lights upon us like the sun in winter. We learn to accept its fragility. We take it as a gift from a benevolent stranger. We don’t ask it to stay. I don’t tempt fate any more than is necessary.
He stares out the rain-spattered window, his eyes far away and so very... curious. He doesn’t acknowledge my words with anything more than a twitch of the cheek or a sigh. I cannot stop myself. I trace his pulse and the bones in his neck so close, so thin like a bird’s. I want to distract his thoughts, to focus them on myself, on the pump of my blood and thoughts of another night in the rain.
“Bruce?” To the window.
“Hmm?” The look in his eyes…
Have you ever gone hungry?
Did your parents ever hit you when you’d done something bad?
Have you ever done anything bad?
“Have you ever had to do something you really didn’t want to do? But you didn’t have a choice?”
Jason. My boy. “I always believe there is a choice.”
“Yeah. I thought so.”
“But you don’t agree.”
“Well. We’re all different. I guess.” He folds himself up and puts himself away in a place I cannot find.
Night after night. He looks for me watching from the shadows. I collect memories that were and what could never be.
He lives for a time in a shoebox apartment in a condemned building on Crime Alley. He likes death metal and action heroes. He owns: two pairs of ripped jeans which still fit him, three faded t-shirts, twenty-four cassette tapes, one battered stolen stereo, a dozen magazines with cars on the cover, a worn, stained mattress and remains of a pillow, a sharpened metal stick with masking tape on one end, a plastic lighter and a last pack of cigarettes. He also owns a folded picture of his dead parents, two marijuana joints, and a small box underneath a loose floorboard which contains thirteen articles, four photographs and a sketchbook of me. For years before we meet, he smokes and sketches alone and falls asleep next to a stranger and does it all thinking of the rubbery heat of my uniform and the hard flesh underneath and what I will look like when he finds me.
We live together. We share a home.
We go to baseball games and he brushes his leg against mine.
At the movies, he likes to hold hands in the dark. He likes these things because I don’t reject them.
Every night, when we return in the Car, he makes me swear an oath to him. He makes me swear we will always be partners. He convinces me he is right. I know he thinks my money, my hope for the city, my vow on my parents’ grave, that it is all a naïve lie. I do not blame him. That he believes in me, in us, is enough. Though he does not admit it, I know he has vows of his own.
Our vows are true. We try to believe that.
Belief in his body, ready and open for me. It sharpens my need to hurt, to inflict, to cause. My body is a shadow that negates, takes, controls. Seeking out something stronger than shame. He knows me like Alfred doesn’t, like Dick can’t, like my parents will never.
He knows me like a villain. He knows the world like a villain.
I am another flawed man too weak to save him. His failed love burns. We frighten each other more than the world. I need him to crawl and he cannot. I need him to beg and he cannot. We are sour and cruel. Weak inside. We can convince each other we are stronger.
We used to be able to. Before…
The end of that season, the ugly season when this city finally starts to go to a hell it can’t redeem. The season of the Deacon and the serial killers and every night a rapist and every night a child.
And Jason doesn’t say a word. Jason takes my shame and looks at the city and sees the future and his smirks turn to snarls and his laugh is icy. I feel dirty in his mouth.
Jason also has a journal. I never read it. I believe what I know.
How he looks in the suit, how right.
How he asks questions as if I already agree with him. How in sync we are. In the darkest night when dawn seems uncertain. In the silent possibility of every day. I cannot breach his trust in me. I won’t convince myself that I need to, for the cause. I won’t use the same false justification I use with you, Dick. You live in the gray, as I do -- the fog of your emotions and the judgment of your heart. Jason is strict. His judgments often harsher than mine. Our stubbornness. The stone underneath our hearts calcifying like bone.
This is also what I know.
Jason lives for a time above a rotted-out dive bar on Crime Alley. He works there during the day, a short-order lunch cook for the tourists who don’t know better and the regulars who don’t care. He puts gray meat on soggy bread and doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t speak at all. Not even to the drunken owner who shares his apartment and bed with him. Sleep just causes never-ending nightmares. He wakes up sobbing, screaming, laughing till it hurts. Those he meets do not want to know. He owns a long black raincoat, an extra pair of boots, a folded picture of his parents, a picture of his birth mother, a long, sharp, twisty knife, a torn piece of paper with a phone number on it, a few changes of dark clothes, eight crates in storage filled with weapons and costumes and gadgets and other things he doesn’t always like to remember, two extra jackets because he is always cold, and two red masks.
He hunts and we work. Always working. I see the worst in humanity. He has the need to destroy it. I cannot ever blame him. Because I let him down so completely.
I know that. I remember conversations. Moments.
We’d talk in bed:
“You know, capes are for protection. Cover.”
“And distraction. See? You’re the one that noticed.”
“Because you are constantly flashing me.”
His smile. Drawn out so sweetly so sweet… slick skin and heavy breath… so close
“Yeah, talk it up, Bruce. Tell me about the war.”
Dark thoughts. Dark intentions always with him. Focus and purity, his will alone. Temptation and distraction.
“It was a nice party tonight.”
“I don’t want to hear about your women…
Dead birds. No guts. Hollow, hollow…”
He gasps and gasps at me.
“They weren’t brats… babies.”
“…Spineless, spine, spine…
What do you feel anyway?”
His hands hooking onto scars. Hard softness riding my hip. Hard, pliant body, needing to be told. Shown how very much…
“I feel you. Here. Inside here.” Touch him.
Delirium. “…plug your heart with my thumb…”
His voice reveals. Catches. Too intense, too much.
“In practice yesterday. With the pellet gun. You were magnificent.”
“It’s yours.”
“I know how much. You like the toys.”
“… Harder. Just a little, just a little…”
His body between my lips and my thumb.
“Your skin. So warm…my lips. Nightmares again?”
“… yeah.”
I must make it better. I must give him everything. I must find…
“I find. Your violence. Thrilling. Beautiful. You are a good. Soldier.”
My hard thumb and sosoft sosoft there
“Hunh, oh better. Better. Better.”
“Mm. Turn around.”
“Find it again, Bruce. Fuh…”
“Shh, I have you, partner. I have you… Right with me, just with me.”
His back, so open, muscles moving against skin… I see bare legs kicking, kicking, and the red before my eyes…
“Bruce”
through the red, the flesh, the fallen ones, the men the dust going through me, floating in me… flesh so deep I couldn’t find my way out…
“Bruce”
the end of the world I cower behind a box… searching for the smell of my mother, the taste of Jason’s skin, Alfred’s voice…
“Jason…”
and I can’t find Jason, I can’t find Jason… oh my god, baby, oh godgodgod…
“… Listen. Listennowhow I’m howling throughyou.”
bitingwhispering into his ear
walking his spine walking home coming home climbing climbing
he’s calling me
“Yes… B-bat bat bat bat bat…”
Is this faith?
Is this enough?
THE END