The Ghost Beside The Bat
A batman x vigilante!reader
Summary: He missed everything. So yes. Bruce Wayne did what any completely rational, entirely sane man would do.
-> Bruce Wayne x vigilante!reader , Dc x Marvel crossover, recounting of old memories, , reunion, description of violence, Bruce being a wee bit obsessive and yearning, Ayy I can finally sleep. I think
V->VI->VII
It had been months.
Months of Gotham rain. Months of patrol routes that kept overlapping. Months of near-misses and stolen glances and the kind of unbearable silence that came from two people who had once known each other too well to pretend it had never happened.
Months of Bruce Wayne going slowly, painfully insane.
Because everyone else had gotten her.
His kids.
Alfred.
Gordon.
The city.
Even strangers on the street, half the time, seemed to have found some tiny piece of her before he had managed to say a single word.
He heard about her constantly.
Dick told stories with the helpless fondness of someone who had always considered her family.
Barbara mentioned her with practical affection, as if her return to Gotham had simply slotted some missing piece back into place.
Tim talked about her like she was a tactical miracle with excellent instincts and concerningly bad sleep habits. Yeah he's the one saying that out of all people.
Steph said she gave the best advice and the worst warning looks.
Cass liked her enough to start showing up at her apartment for ballet practice corrections.
Duke liked that she listened before she answered.
Damian—Damian, of all people—had started calling her “adequate” in that deeply insulting way that somehow meant he approved.
Jason still looked like he was carrying some impossible mixture of grief, guilt, and relief every time her name came up, like he had not expected to get any kind of family back and was still trying to understand how to breathe around it.
And Bruce?
Bruce had not managed to speak to her properly once.
That was his fault.
That made it worse.
He knew exactly why she had not come to him.
He knew what she was waiting for.
A confession.
An explanation.
An apology.
Maybe all three.
Maybe all at once.
He knew it because he had watched her carefully enough on patrol to see the way her shoulders tightened whenever she sensed his presence nearby and never turned first. He knew it because Barbara had quietly made sure she was connected to secure comms and Bruce had spent an unreasonable amount of time listening to her voice in the background of other people’s transmissions, just to know she was okay.
He knew it because the whole arrangement was intolerable.
He missed her in ways he refused to say aloud.
He missed the old rhythm of their lives.
The way they used to sit in silence that never felt empty.
The way she would drag him toward a couch or a cot or even a floor if she thought he was one second away from collapsing.
The way he had done the same for her.
The way she had touched wounds with such practiced gentleness that he had once come to rely on the feeling.
The way she’d made him laugh while he was bleeding.
The way she’d tucked a blanket over his shoulders in the cave and pretended she was doing it out of annoyance.
The way she had helped him sleep after Scarecrow once pushed him too far and the past had clawed too loudly at his mind.
He missed everything.
So yes.
Bruce Wayne did what any completely rational, entirely sane man would do.
He let himself be kidnapped.
.
.
.
The girl wanted one good patrol night.
One.
Just one.
The kind where the air stayed quiet, the city kept its ugliness to itself, and the worst thing she had to deal with was a couple of idiots trying to move product in an alley with terrible lighting and worse life choices.
Apparently Gotham took that personally.
The patrol had started well enough.
Too well, really.
She had intercepted a drug trade behind an abandoned warehouse in East Gotham, dropped in from a fire escape, and broken up the deal in under ten minutes. Three men were already in police custody, two had bolted the second they saw her, and the rest had scattered like rats into the nearest alleyways the moment she’d stepped into the light.
One of the new officers at the scene had actually been shaking as he walked past her while cuffing the last suspect.
Poor guy.
She had almost told him she wasn’t that scary.
Almost.
But then she’d remembered that this suit, unlike her old Batwoman costume, was more subtle than terrifying. In the old days people had seen the cowl, the red accents, the silhouette beside Batman, and immediately decided they would rather be literally anywhere else.
Now? Now she was just a woman in black and red tactical gear with a hood and a domino mask and the sort of posture that made people unconsciously step out of her way.
Still intimidating, apparently.
Just not enough to make a rookie police officer stop visibly vibrating.
She had been about to head back toward the GCPD when it happened.
Every billboard.
Every side screen.
Every emergency display in the district.
All of Gotham went green.
Her eyes narrowed as the nearest giant monitor flickered to life.
Then Riddler’s face filled the screen.
Again.
Of course.
His voice came through in that smug, theatrical cadence he seemed to believe was his greatest weapon, along with bad lighting and a pathological need for attention.
“Oh, Gotham,” he purred, “don’t you look delighted to see me?”
The girl stopped in the middle of the street and looked up at the billboard with a flat expression that had very little patience left in it.
“Absolutely not,” she muttered.
Riddler kept talking, of course he did.
He always talked.
He loved the sound of his own voice almost as much as he loved making everyone else miserable.
He rambled about patterns. Order. The city’s blindness. Batman’s failures. His grand design. The usual mess of riddles and delusions that usually meant she had a headache before the night was halfway done.
Then his tone changed.
“Now,” he announced, “because I am a generous man, I have a very special audience invitation for Batwoman.”
The girl went still.
“Batwoman?” she repeated under her breath.
She glanced up again, suspicion already forming. She hasn't been called that for years now,
Riddler leaned toward the camera with a grin that made his face look even more unhinged than usual.
“I know you’re active again,” he said, voice bright with terrible satisfaction. “I know you’ve returned to the city. And I know you won’t be able to resist a little… public interest.”
Her jaw tightened.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
“Come out,” Riddler continued, practically vibrating with glee, “and face the consequences of your glorious return—”
The billboard cut.
The monitor shifted.
And for one horrible second the screen showed a live overhead feed from somewhere deep in the city.
A warehouse.
Chains.
A cage.
And Bruce Wayne hanging over an acid pit.
The girl’s eyes widened sharply.
“What the fuck,” she said flatly.
The image zoomed in.
Bruce.
Tied up.
Suspended.
Of course he was.
He looked infuriatingly calm for a man hanging above corrosive death by the mercy of a lunatic with a microphone problem. She stared at the screen in a mix of outrage and absolute disbelief.
You have got to be kidding me.
Her comms crackled immediately.
The others who had been out of patrol heard it too.
Of course they had.
She barely had time to inhale before the voices came flooding in over the channel, each one reacting in its own distinct, chaotic way.
“B?!” Dick barked, sounding instantly sharp now.
“What the hell?” Tim said in the background, already moving. “Is that the Riddler? He kidnapped Bruce?”
“Oh, this is so incredibly stupid,” Barbara muttered.
“Father is what?” Damian sounded horrified on principle. “Is he trying to die?”
Jason’s voice cut through next, low and rough and utterly furious. “I leave Gotham for one minute—”
Cass said nothing, but she made a small, sharp sound of alarm.
Steph, somewhere else on the line, was already swearing.
Duke sounded like he was half running and half panicking. “Where is he? Tell me where he is.”
The girl stared at the screen, then at the nearest camera as if Riddler could somehow see her through it.
He probably could.
That man had the sort of ego that would make him try.
Then Dick’s voice came back into her ear, quieter than the others, but immediately steadying in the way it always had when everything else felt like it was spiraling.
“Mom,” he said, and there was an edge in his voice now that meant he was trying very hard not to sound too worried. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
She let out a long, tired sigh while already moving.
“That your father is giving me major PTSD for what I’m about to do to save his ass?”
Dick snorted through the comms despite himself.
“Yeah,” he said. “That one.”
She stared at the screen one more second.
Bruce looked irritatingly intact.
Which made the whole thing worse.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and kept walking.
“Tell Alfred not to panic,” she said.
Barbara cut in immediately. “Alfred is absolutely already panicking.”
“Then tell him to panic politely.”
Tim let out something between a choke and a laugh. “That’s not how panic works.”
“It is in this family,” she muttered.
Jason, still clearly angry, said, “Need backup?”
She already had her grappling line in hand.
“No.”
“Wrong answer.”
“Jason.”
“Not accepting that answer.”
She adjusted the hood over her head and started moving faster, cutting down the nearest alley with purpose. Gotham’s streets flashed past in streaks of wet pavement, chain-link fences, and neon reflections. She could feel the city around her like pressure in her bones. The screens were still alive with Riddler’s broadcast. People were shouting. Police were moving. Somewhere in the distance sirens had already begun to rise.
Riddler wanted her.
Fine.
He could have her.
But first she was going to ruin his entire evening.
The suit felt like memory as she ran.
The layered armor. The weight of the belt. The pull of the hood. The familiar flex of the gloves when she curled her fingers. She had fought in a dozen different cities, in a dozen different ways, but Gotham always changed the way she moved.
Gotham had taught her to think before she struck.
To look twice.
To expect traps in the walls, beneath the floor, in the walls themselves if necessary.
Riddler loved traps.
That was the thing about men like him.
They thought intelligence meant complexity.
They forgot that the smartest people in a room usually didn’t need to make themselves obvious.
She cut across a rooftop and landed in a crouch beside an HVAC unit, already scanning the route ahead.
The broadcast had given her the rough location, but Riddler wasn’t stupid enough to leave the exact path open. He’d buried himself somewhere in the old industrial quarter, probably in one of the abandoned maintenance complexes near the river where old tunnels, utility corridors, and forgotten underground routes all intersected in a messy web.
Convenient.
For her, at least.
The thing about having spent years as a detective, a vigilante, an Avenger, and Bruce Wayne’s partner in chaos that was protecting Gotham was that she no longer approached a location like a normal person.
Normal people looked for entrances.
She looked for patterns.
She slowed at the edge of a rooftop overlooking three abandoned warehouses and one construction site with its lights still active despite the hour. A crane stood half-finished against the skyline, lit by harsh white floodlights. Too bright. Too intentional.
Her eyes moved across the scene.
Then narrowed.
There.
A service access road leading behind the construction site had fresh tire tracks leading in and no tracks leaving.
Two of the utility sheds had been recently unlocked, then relocked badly.
One floodlight on the north side of the structure was angled a few degrees too far left, as if it had been used to obscure a camera rather than illuminate a work zone.
And the loudspeaker on the pole by the entrance—
wasn’t mounted to the city network.
It was a rerouted line.
Riddler had used construction infrastructure to hide his external control systems.
She smirked to herself.
“Of course he did.”
Her comm crackled again.
“Did you find him yet?” Tim asked, voice strained.
“Not yet.”
“We’re coming,” Dick said.
“No.”
“Mom—”
She cut in immediately, already hopping down to the lower roof. “No. He wants a crowd, and he wants you all making it dramatic.”
Jason muttered, “That sounds like him.”
“Exactly.”
Barbara came on the line next. “You’re going in alone?”
She ducked behind a stack of wooden pallets and watched a pair of armed goons pace near the construction entrance.
“For now.”
“‘For now’ is not comforting,” Barbara said.
“That’s because it’s Gotham.”
Duke’s voice came through, worried. “You sure you don’t want support?”
She glanced at the armed men below, one of whom was currently looking directly at a security camera that was obviously fake.
“I’m sure I don’t want to hear the entire family talk over each other while I’m trying not to get shot.”
There was a brief silence.
Then Steph said, “Fair.”
Jason said, “Insulting, but fair.”
Damian, sounding deeply offended, snapped, “I am not known for talking over others.”
Every single person on the channel said, in near-perfect unison, “Yes you are.”
The girl smirked and moved again.
She dropped off the roof onto a lower ledge, then into a shadowed gap between two stacked shipping containers. Her boots landed silently. She paused just long enough to study the entrance to the construction site.
Riddler’s men were positioned wrong.
Too visible.
Too confident.
He wanted her to think he was relying on force, which meant the actual trap was probably hidden in the floor line or the overhead grid.
She tested the doorframe with the tip of one glove.
Metal.
Recent weld.
A pressure plate if someone used the main entrance.
She knelt, pressed two fingers against the hinge seam, and immediately noticed the fresh paint over a sensor wire.
“Cute,” she murmured.
“Talking to yourself?” Dick asked.
“Thinking out loud.”
“That’s worse.”
She ignored him and moved around the side instead.
A narrow access staircase led down beneath the construction site, into what used to be an old municipal service corridor before the city had abandoned it years ago. She reached the door and found it locked electronically.
Not a problem.
The panel was new.
The wiring inside was not.
A quick glance told her enough.
The whole thing had been installed too fast and too arrogantly. Riddler had prioritized theatrics over efficiency.
A man like Bruce would have solved it in seconds.
So did she.
She opened the panel, bypassed the current with a stolen paperclip she’d been carrying because of course she still carried things like that, and forced the lock to cycle without triggering the alarm.
Tim hissed into her ear. “You are absolutely not supposed to know how to do that in that amount of time.”
“Mm.”
“That was not a compliment.”
“I know.”
She slid inside.
The first corridor was narrow and dark, lit only by blinking amber lights and the distant hum of generators. Pipes ran overhead. Old concrete walls were painted with giant question marks in dripping green.
Of course they were.
Riddler’s sense of subtlety remained a disease.
The air smelled like dust, wet metal, and something chemical under it all.
She moved carefully, head turning slightly as her eyes measured the corridor.
Tripwire near the second support beam.
Motion sensor in the vent above.
Camera in the corner, but not active.
She glanced at it.
Then at the tiny reflection in the metal edge of a pipe.
It was active only when the beam broke.
She stepped around it without touching the light cone and continued down the corridor.
“That man is so annoying,” she muttered.
Dick sounded delighted. “You say that like you’re surprised.”
“I’m not.”
“Then why are you still so offended?”
“Because he had the audacity to kidnap Bruce Wayne and then do it with the emotional range of a raccoon in a tuxedo.”
That made Jason cough-laugh over comms.
Barbara said, “I hate that I understand that.”
She moved to the next junction.
Three doors.
Two real.
One fake.
She ran her fingers over the hinges of the middle one and felt the vibration pattern.
Alarm relay.
Fake.
The left door had a faint chemical burn near the lock plate.
Trap residue.
The right door was older and had been reinforced recently, likely as the actual entry point.
She took the right door.
The corridor beyond widened into a chamber filled with hanging cables and multiple split pathways.
She stopped.
Looked up.
Then down.
Then to the left.
Riddler had set his maze around logic.
Not just with machinery.
With ego.
Every corridor was designed to make the intruder think the obvious route was the wrong one.
But the visible trap on the left was too clean.
That meant the right path was the decoy.
She smirked.
“Got you.”
Barbara’s voice sharpened. “Found something?”
“Riddler’s being predictable.”
Tim sounded offended on Gotham’s behalf. “That should not be possible.”
“And yet.”
She went left.
The floor clicked once beneath her boot.
She froze.
There it was.
Pressure plate.
She looked down, then lifted her foot slowly and crouched. The mechanism was old-school, almost insulting in its simplicity.
A wire rigged beneath the tile would have triggered a collapsing section if fully depressed.
She clipped the wire with one of her blades and moved on.
“Wait,” Duke said. “How did you know?”
'Because he did this in the past' she wanted to say. Because she knew how the Riddler worked because she was there from the start. But instead of saying all that she replied with:
“Because Riddler likes puzzles more than he likes engineering.”
Jason muttered, “Thank God somebody said it.”
She passed through the second chamber and found herself at an intersection where the hall split into four directions.
One path led upward.
One downward.
One forward.
One was a dead-end with a camera in the corner.
She stared at the dead-end, then turned toward the camera and gave it a flat look.
“Really?”
She reached into her belt and flicked a tiny disc toward the ceiling.
The camera fizzed, sparked, and died.
“Nice,” Steph said.
“Thanks.”
She took the upward path.
The corridor climbed into a secondary access level filled with old server racks, broken monitors, and a bank of blinking control panels. Someone had cleared the room recently, but not well enough. She could still see footprints in the dust.
Three people had passed through here.
One dragging a heavier step.
She knelt and touched the floor lightly.
Clay residue.
Construction site on the outside.
Underground lair hidden beneath it.
Riddler had built his tunnel network into the bones of the old utility system, which meant there were multiple internal levels connecting the lair to the surface.
Which also meant—
She smiled to herself.
“Of course you built it like a stupid video game,” she murmured.
“Found the lair?” Jason asked.
“Found the architecture.”
“Is that good?”
“It means I’m almost there.”
She climbed over a half-dead server rack and reached the next door. This one was mechanical, not digital. Old lock. New bolt.
Too new.
That meant someone had reinforced it after the original build.
She listened.
Quiet on the other side.
Then—
the faint creak of chain.
Her body went still.
Bruce.
She exhaled once and entered.
The next room was the first real chamber.
Large. Circular. Industrial.
Riddler’s aesthetic had fully committed itself now. Green light strips lined the upper walls. Metal question marks had been welded into the railing. Monitors flickered around the room with static-heavy feeds, all of them looping different angles of the same grim little set piece.
Bruce hanging above acid.
Her jaw clenched.
The sight sharpened every thought she had been carrying into a single, very focused point of rage.
Riddler was talking somewhere ahead, not yet visible from her angle, his voice echoing through the chamber from hidden speakers.
“I do so adore an audience!” he was saying. “And here she is, Gotham’s little mystery! A hero? A vigilante? A phantom in a hood? The city simply cannot decide!”
She stepped farther into the room.
The floor below her was a mess of metal grates, cables, and trap panels.
She looked up.
Bruce was there.
Tied up.
Suspended over the acid pit with all the infuriating dignity of a man who had apparently decided that being kidnapped would count as a productive use of the evening.
He glanced down at her.
The look he gave her was, impossibly, almost amused.
“About time,” he said.
She put one hand on her hip and looked up at him.
“You’re welcome.”
He looked down at the acid.
Then back at her.
“I was starting to think you’d let me die out of spite.”
“Tempting,” she said.
She heard the tiniest possible sound in Bruce’s throat that might have been a laugh if Gotham were feeling generous.
Riddler’s voice cut in, irritated now that his stagecraft was being interrupted.
“You! You’re not supposed to be here yet!”
She turned slowly toward the hidden speaker system.
“What part of ‘kidnapping Bruce Wayne’ gave you the impression I’d be polite about scheduling?”
Riddler scoffed. “You think you’ve solved anything by walking in here? You’re still just one more piece—”
She glanced around the chamber.
Her eyes tracked the layout in a single sweep.
The acid pit below Bruce. The support cable to the left. The maintenance panels under the catwalk.
The camera nodes tucked inside the railing supports.
The grated vents on the upper wall.
The hidden bolts in the floor in a pattern too regular to be decorative.
She smiled slightly.
And that smile was not kind.
Riddler kept talking, of course.
He always did.
She stopped listening.
Because now she had the full map in her head.
This level was built as the public-facing stage.
Riddler wanted her focused on Bruce.
Which meant the actual route to the control room had to be above or behind the chamber, somewhere the security would assume no one could reach without solving the obvious floor puzzle.
She looked up.
There.
A narrow maintenance ledge, partially hidden by the light strip and the suspended catwalk.
Accessible if she used the support beam and a cable line.
She was already moving.
One of Riddler’s goons stepped out from a side door before she reached the beam.
She didn’t even look at him.
A blade snapped into her hand.
The man tried to lunge.
She pivoted, hooked his arm, and slammed him face-first into the rail hard enough to send his weapon skidding across the floor.
Another came from the opposite side.
She ducked and sent a kick into his shin.
He screamed and dropped.
Bruce watched all of it with the same severe concentration he used on a battlefield and the same impossibly quiet familiarity that made her throat tighten just a fraction.
She caught the beam, swung herself up, and landed on the narrow ledge above the chamber.
“Really?” Bruce called up from below. “You’re going to climb the vent route?”
She looked down at him.
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
He gave her a look.
She returned it.
Then she grinned.
“Didn’t think so.”
She moved along the ledge, one hand on the wall for balance, while below her Riddler became increasingly furious at the fact that his carefully arranged stage was being dismantled by a woman who had apparently developed a personal hobby of ruining his ego.
“This is unacceptable!” he shouted. “You are not supposed to be this competent!”
She paused only long enough to glance toward the ceiling camera and call back, “Thanks Eddie! You are making me feel real competent right now.”
She reached the vent cover, pried it loose with her blade, and dropped into the access shaft beyond.
It was narrow.
Dark.
Full of stale air and old dust.
She crawled through it with the confident ease of someone who had spent years navigating places designed to kill her.
Below, Riddler’s voice echoed into the shaft from the chamber behind her.
“You think you’ve won? You think rescuing Bruce Wayne changes anything? My design is bigger than one pathetic little trap!”
She muttered, “You really do love hearing yourself talk.”
Then she heard Bruce’s voice over the comm. Of course he still had some line of communication on him. Son of a Bitch-
“North access?”
She paused for a second and angled her head down toward the microphone hidden beneath her cowl.
“You figured that out already?”
“Yes.”
She huffed a soft laugh and kept crawling.
Of course he had.
He was Bruce. Still an annoying idiot.
The shaft opened above a side platform overlooking the chamber’s back wall.
She looked down.
Control room.
One floor up from the main chamber, hidden behind a false panel and two decoy doors.
Riddler had built the whole interior around a central deception hierarchy.
She almost admired it.
Almost.
Then a goon popped up from the platform below her and pointed a rifle upward.
She moved first.
Dropped.
Hit the man with her shoulder.
Sent him down hard.
He tried to raise the weapon again and she kicked it free with enough force to send it clattering into the wall.
“Your security is embarrassing,” she told the room at large.
Riddler screeched from somewhere below. “IT IS NOT EMBARRASSING!”
Bruce, still suspended and now clearly thoroughly done with the entire evening, muttered, “It is.”
She almost laughed.
Then she found the control panel.
And Riddler, unfortunately for him, had made one final mistake.
The panel used a logic lock.
Puzzle sequence. Pattern recognition. Symbolic input.
A man like Riddler would assume anyone trying to solve it was matching his style.
She wasn’t.
She was matching his ego.
She keyed in the sequence backward.
The panel unlocked immediately.
The room below went dead silent for half a second.
Then Riddler screamed, “NO!”
She yanked the panel open, cut the main relay, and the acid pit mechanisms below groaned as the cage’s support system began to stabilize.
Bruce’s chains were still in place, but the drop angle had stopped shifting.
She looked through the opening in the floor and called down, “Try not to sound so insulted by basic competence.”
His reply came instantly. “I’m starting to think you enjoy this.”
“I do.”
That got a quiet, very real huff of amusement out of him.
She felt it more than she heard it.
Then the remaining goons rushed in.
So much for the quiet part.
She moved through them in a blur.
One down.
Two.
Three.
She used the wall for leverage, the support beam for momentum, and the edge of the control desk for a throw that sent one of the men into a stack of monitors.
Her breathing stayed steady.
Her focus narrowed.
Every trap Riddler had built became a solution once she saw it clearly enough.
A swinging blade? She timed it and stepped under.
A floor burst panel? She triggered it on purpose to force his goons into a bottleneck.
A camera cluster? She shattered the nearest lens and used the blind spot to disappear behind a doorframe.
She was already halfway through the room by the time Riddler realized the fight had left his control again.
“You cannot just do that!” he yelled.
She flung a baton into the wall beside his last active camera. “Watch me.”
By the time the last man went down, the room had turned into a mess of busted screens, sparking wires, and Riddler’s increasingly unhinged noise in the background.
Bruce was still hanging over the acid pit, but the support chain had fully stabilized now.
She crossed back to him in a quick, clean line, stopping directly beneath him and looking up.
“You look very annoying from this angle,” she informed him.
He arched a brow. “And yet you came anyway.”
She climbed the support beam in two swift movements and reached the cage mechanism.
“Don’t get smug,” she muttered while disengaging the lock. “You’re still tied up over a pit of acid.”
“Minor details.”
“Insufferable.”
“You were the one who came.”
She snorted and released the main restraint.
The cage mechanism locked into place with a hard metallic click, and Bruce dropped safely enough onto the lower platform below.
She landed beside him a second later.
For one long second they stood there in the wreckage, both breathing slightly hard, both covered in the dim green wash of Riddler’s remaining screens.
Then Bruce looked at her, and the ridiculous calm in his voice was back.
“Well,” he said, “that was dramatic.”
She stared at him.
Then gave him a flat, exhausted look. “To think I hoped my night would end peacefully.”
Bruce snorted.
“Your fault,” he said. “You jinxed yourself.”
She tilted her head, clearly rolling her eyes behind the cowl. “Of course I did.”
Then both of them looked up at the monitors.
Riddler was still talking, somewhere farther in the facility, his voice full of outrage and wounded ego and the sort of monologue energy that suggested he had not yet accepted defeat.
“I will win,” he snarled over the speakers. “You can’t stop the larger plan! Gotham will understand my genius in time!”
She crossed her arms and looked at the nearest camera.
“No,” she said. “Gotham will be suing you in time.”
Bruce’s mouth twitched.
She turned to him immediately.
“And now,” he said, already knowing what was coming, “we have to go get him.”
She looked at him with pure disbelief.
“I’m sorry,” she said slowly. “We?”
He gestured at himself.
“Well, he did kidnap me.”
She stared for a second.
Then huffed a dry laugh. “That’s your argument?”
“It’s a good one.”
“It’s a terrible one.”
“It worked.”
“It worked because I’m here, not because of you.”
Bruce folded his arms. “You’re here.”
She gave him a look.
He gave one back.
And there it was again.
The old bickering.
The old rhythm.
The thing that had once made their partnership feel impossible to separate from instinct.
She looked away first, annoyed and tired all at once.
But not leaving.
Not yet.
Bruce noticed.
Of course he did.
The corridor beyond the chamber still hummed faintly with Riddler’s escape route.
Riddler had gotten out.
Again.
But she had saved him.
Bruce looked at her for a long second and found himself thinking that whatever came next would probably be worse than the acid pit, the goons, or the clown with the microphone problem.
Because now he had her here.
Close.
Annoyed.
Alive.
And still furious enough to make the whole cave feel too small.
He decided he could work with that.
She glanced toward the exit tunnel Riddler had used, then back at him.
Her shoulders shifted. Like she already knew what he wanted to ask.
“I’m not going to the Batcave,” she said flatly.
Bruce’s expression did not change much, but internally everything tightened.
“Why?”
She turned toward him fully.
“You know why.”
He did.
And he knew he would have to answer it properly soon.
Not tonight.
But soon.
She watched him closely, as if waiting for him to lie.
He didn’t.
Instead he said, quietly, “Because of Jason.”
Her jaw tightened immediately.
“Because of Jason,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“And because you thought you could keep that from me.”
Bruce said nothing.
She took a breath, visibly irritated now, and pinched the bridge of her nose beneath the cowl.
“I’m going to be very clear,” she said, “I am not dealing with that conversation in a sewer-shaped basement after fighting a clown on the wrong side of a power complex.”
Bruce felt a flicker of something too warm to be safe.
“Fair.”
She blinked, thrown off by the lack of argument.
Then she narrowed her eyes at him again. “Don’t make me regret this.”
“I won’t. You have my word.”
“You don’t get to be an annoying prick right now.”
“I wasn’t trying to be.”
“That’s somehow worse.”
Bruce almost smiled.
Almost.
She looked away first, then muttered, “Fine.”
He lifted a brow. “Fine?”
She sighed in exaggerated annoyance and jerked her head toward the corridor leading back to the surface.
“Fine. I’ll go.”
Bruce let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
She pointed a finger at him immediately, as if to make sure he knew who had won the argument.
“But if you make this worse, I’m leaving you in the cave. Preferably hanging upside down”
He gave her the smallest nod.
“That sounds like a threat.”
“It is.”
“I accept.”
She huffed a laugh despite herself and turned toward the exit.
Bruce fell into step beside her.
And for the first time in months, the silence between them did not feel like punishment.
It felt like the beginning of something he had been waiting too long to fix.
A/n: Unironicly I rewrote this to many dam times. Most of the times at three am but uh. I still sleep. I think. Sorry for late post kinda I had a lot of things going on TT. ALSO BRUCIE WAYNE CORE GETTING KIDNAPPED. Any suggestions for next chapter?
Taglist:@crys4l @cantbecreative @whimsiecat @ilocuras24, @throughmylifetimesiwatchtheworld , @baileybae05 @lunarwisteria @calista-lad @diseasedclitoris @jvanilly @xirquen
