@vspertilian
It’s been three days. Three days of not knowing where he is--asking Alfred, who rebuffs her as he always does with his appalling gentility, and even stooping so low as to ask that Diana woman, combing TMZ and any other rag she can think of, hoping to find a picture of him, oh, on a yacht somewhere, or coming out of a club with some slut on his arm, anything to suggest that he’s alive and will come stumbling boozily back to her, even if she’s furious, even if he’s disgusting, even if, even if.
There’s been some drama, some altercation, at an industrial office in Gotham. One of their strange local criminals and a bomb and the Batman. She thinks he’s probably dead in the explosion. He must have been there at a meeting, or driving by in the company car, and when she says as much to Alfred, voice rising, frantic, all she gets is another set of denials, another round of--and she cries that night, frantic with it, desperate, and too afraid to call the police or anybody else, too afraid that, at the last, that will make him unquestionably dead.
Bruce reappears when she’s already cried out everything she has, finds her withered, hollow, crumpled in a chair by the fireplace on the third evening, a glass of wine nearby, Anastasia and Drisella hiding from her, as they so often do now. Everyone hides from her, even her own husband. He’d rather her think he was dead, wouldn’t he? She looks at him with dry eyes, taking in the bruised face, the butterfly closure on his forehead, the wrapped arm, the way he favors one side. He looks disheveled, his graying hair ragged in front of his eyes.
“Do clean yourself up,” she says, and turns away.