absolutely losing my mind over brujim again.
early on in his tenure as batman, bruce using the brucie wayne persona as an excuse to flirt with jim. jim thinking he’s a complete idiot and not taking him seriously. but eventually they strike up a real conversation about something that matters to the both of them, crime reduction policies, new mayoral initiatives, gotham infrastructure, etc. and jim is completely taken aback about how much genuine interest and passion bruce has for their city. they slowly start to become actual friends, despite jim’s initial misgivings about bruce. meanwhile jim and batman’s relationship is becoming stronger. they become partners against crime who trust each other deeply. they don’t have many actual conversations, but their belief in each other has solidified into something unshakable. they both believe the other to be gotham’s most staunch defender, and that’s something that neither take lightly.
this is when jim’s marriage starts to really fall apart. it wasn’t in great shape as is, him and barbara had agreed to try to work through his affair, but it hadn’t really worked, and the frequency with which he visits bruce isn’t helping matters. bruce, good friend that he is, does his best to help jim through the divorce. this definitely does not lead to ill advised nights of passion. nuh uh. bruce is a good friend who has absolutely no stake in jim’s divorce.
they’re very… awkward about it. especially jim. he views his sexual encounters with bruce as lapses in judgement made due to the stress and misery of losing his marriage and mostly refuses to discuss it. bruce won’t initiate a ‘what are we?’ conversation under any circumstances, and anyways he’s worried about jim discovering his secret identity if they were to become any more involved. so they just stew over it individually, inventing the other persons position on the matter without actually discussing it with them.
jim eventually puts a stop to things between him and bruce and they go back to being entirely platonic, bruce mostly backs off with the flirting (but not entirely), and is too focused on Not Thinking About It to be hurt. jim stews on it in his own mind, he has so many reasons as to why he and bruce should not be together, age (i am tentatively giving them a 15+ish year age gap here and putting bruce in his mid/late twenties. not weird enough to be Actually Weird but definitely weird enough for jim to be in his head about it), gender, their jobs, etc, but none of them really stick.
eventually jim and sarah make it official. she is Less Than Enthused about batman and this drives a wedge between her and jim from the outset (like in the comics, except this time jim’s basically on the verge of an affair with a man he knows nothing about so) bruce is Not Mature about the whole thing, worst part is that he genuinely likes sarah, but he’s also always five seconds away from trying to ruin her relationship. so he definitely doesn’t feel great about that. he lays it on a little thicker with jim than he had been, feels desperately like he probably missed his chance and is trying to hold on to what things were like before.
eventually bruce and jim do have an affair, and it is long and arduous and neither of them are very happy. bruce gets to know sarah more and more since he’s spending so much time around jim and it’s eating him alive, meanwhile jim is growing more and more frustrated with bruce because he’s just about on the edge of ruining his second marriage and bruce is very clearly unwilling to commit.
i think things are made worse when babs visits gotham, not only does jim feel disgusting over the fact bruce is closer in age to his daughter than he is to jim, but he just feels guilty over cheating on barbara all over again whenever he sees babs. one time could be written off as a bad decision but he’s very clearly establishing a pattern here.
when sarah is killed jim breaks it off with bruce. he can’t handle the guilt that plagues him. he can’t find it in himself to even look at bruce for a long time, he becomes isolated, only really speaking with people for work and with babs when she visits. babs is older now, lives in gotham, and he’s pretty fucking sure she knows what he did, he could just be paranoid but he swears to god he can see it in her eyes.
bruce misses jim. a lot. and he knows he needs to keep his distance as batman, knows the whole reason he wouldn’t let himself really be with jim was to keep his identity safe, but god he misses him. so he starts hanging around a little more often as batman, not enough to be noticeable at first, but eventually he’s finding excuses to show up on jim’s porch and listen to him grumble about how fucked up to hell everything is. and it just makes him miss jim more. that he’s right there and he can’t really talk to him.
bruce’s behaviour really starts to grate on babs, she feels like bruce is just yanking her dad around, and blames him for a lot of jim’s general unhappiness. wants him to stay away from him. it begins to create tension in the team, babs is short with him, and he is in turn short with her, they both want the others to pick sides, while everyone else is trying to stay out of it.
bruce and jim start things up again while bruce is batman. bruce is careful to never show enough skin to reveal himself through the scars that trace his body, and it’s cold and distant and leaves jim feeling a little hollow and empty inside. he’d always thought that he and the bat had an understanding, a connection, this doesn’t feel like that.
babs thinks bruce needs to tell jim who he is. says that he never would have let things get so far if he’d known who bruce was, that bruce should’ve gone about things properly, and that maybe if he hadn’t been one half of an affair his image wouldn’t be forever branded by guilt in jim’s mind.
bruce knows she’s right, god does he know, but he doesn’t for a long time, because god is he scared, even if he won’t admit it to even himself. even if he can never have more than what he does now, it’s too precious to him, too fragile, and he’s scared that he’d shatter to pieces right along side it.
but more than he is scared, he is tired. he and jim have been partners for over fifteen years at this point, and they have been through so much pain and so much suffering, but there has also been good. and mostly he just misses his friend.
he’s going to tell him, really he is.
then bruce gets lost in time.
when the kid takes up the mantle, that’s when it finally clicks for jim. the bruce wayne on TV isn’t the man that jim knew inside and out, and he knows the years will do that to a person, but he saw that man come through his sons death, and he still recognized him after the fact, so he knows, as much as he knows the lines on his own hand, that that man is not bruce wayne. the kid is obviously robin, and after that it seems to shift into place for him, that the kid is obviously grayson back from ‘haven, is the kid he used to watch run around the living room while he and bruce caught up.
he’s not quite sure how he didn’t see it before. maybe he needed the distance. but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s clearly too late now.
when bruce comes back he is busy, he has so much to sort through and figure out, and he doesn’t have time to worry about his personal affairs, so it is jim who seeks him out, waiting by the bat symbol like a man saying his prayers, hoping, knowing, that it will be his partner who answers his call.
as soon as he touches down on the roof jim knows that he was right, and he missed him, felt like a piece of him was missing while he was gone, so he leads him into a shadowy corner of the roof where prying eyes won’t see and cameras couldn’t reach, and he reaches up to push back the cowl, bruce helps, jim has no clue how the thing works, but it comes off, and it reveals bruce, older, with little lines decorating the corners of his eyes and the space on his forehead.
bruce feels then, finally, with the batsignal reflecting light off of jim’s eyes, that he is back in gotham. that he is home.
