Author's Note: *Looking at palm* Mom said the best way to make friends was to give them gifts. Give all the gifts! Here's a gift @roshanina! You're my friend now and can't get rid of me! :) -Thorne
He's got about twenty minutes, give or take thirty seconds before the pain meds kick in to the point that he’s going to have to collapse on a flat surface somewhere and sleep off the ache sprawling out from his side. Diana had fussed at Bruce the entire time they were in the med-bay to keep himself out of the way of attacks that normal humans couldn’t survive. Of course, Bruce’s reaction was to ignore the urge to roll his eyes and merely let a sigh out of his nose and keep quiet as they wrapped his ribs and slotted an ice-pack in between two slips of the wrap.
Bruce steps outside the med-bay doors and starts the trek to his room when he catches sight of Hal standing at a parade rest in front of one of the massive foot-thick glass windows, an unreadable look on his face. Quietly, he stands beside him, keeping his hands at his sides. “It makes you feel small when you see it like this, doesn’t it?”
Hal nods, eyes flitting across the blue of the water below beneath the white of his mask. “My dad used to tell me what it was like to be up in the clouds as a kid, but I never imagined I’d see the world like this, let alone the universe.”
“My father got a chance to go on an atmospheric trip a few years before I was born,” Bruce murmurs, wondering himself what his father would say if he were standing beside him at this very moment. Probably a look of amazement, admiration, reverence. “He said it was like nothing he’d ever seen in his entire life. Nothing compared but when he married my mother.”
He feels Hal’s pause, knows the man is pondering the question on the tip of his tongue, rolling the words around his mouth to see if they’ll be accepted by the man beside him; he goes for it in the end. “You said you saw them die in front of you?”
Bruce nods. “Yes. I was eight.” He shifts his gaze over the arc of the globe. “Gunned down in a robbery gone wrong.”
“I didn’t know,” Hal empathizes. “When I was ten, I—”
“You watched your father go down in a plane crash at Ferris Air Field,” Bruce finishes for him.
Hal turns, brow arched in a look that screams suspicion but his voice not so much as it speaks its surprise. “You knew?” he doesn’t let Bruce finish, huffing a laugh that doesn’t seem so bitter as he makes it out to be. “Of course, you do. You’re Batman.”
“The name on your flight suit opened the doors to your history.” He didn’t stray his eyes from the window. “It’s not surprising you followed in Martin’s footsteps and became a pilot yourself.”
The pilot laughs again, this time a bit lighter and jokes rather deprecatingly, “No wonder we’re both screwed up, huh?”
“Speak for yourself,” he replies matter-of-factly, knowing Hal’s eyes are on the side of his face as the words come out of his mouth. “I’m a picture of perfect normality.”
Inside though, he can’t help but know the pilot is right. Both of them are driven by their own grieving losses, both the loss of parents, both people they looked up to, loved more than anything in the world. Hal took that loss and let himself fall into the grace of the light, let himself push past the barriers of fear and never let himself be held back by constraints, lived his life like it was his last because that’s what Martin Jordan did every time he went up in the air, and Harold Jordan was going to be damned if he didn’t live his life the same, trying to be something his father would be proud of if he could see Hal now.
Bruce on the other hand, let himself step into the embrace of the darkness. He let the loss of his parents define the life he was going to live. One where he shunned the light coming to him in favor of shadows and frigidness that kept everything at arm’s length. He let himself be pushed back by the barriers he couldn’t break through and lived his life in a revolving cycle of life, death, suffering, and anguish. Bruce didn’t want to know what his parents would think of him if they stood before him now, but he hoped, deep in the back of his mind and in the depths of his heart that it would be some semblance of pride.
He would never admit it to Hal, but he was jealous of the pilot. Envious that their sufferings were merely two sides of the same scarred coin and yet Hal came out as the one who seemed more wholly put together than Bruce had. Hal could stand open, being himself, even if that self was annoyingly arrogant; Bruce couldn’t.
“Whatever you say, Spooky,” Hal humored, turning his eyes back to the earth. “Whatever you say.”
There seemed to be something else that Hal wanted to say, but he didn’t voice it, and Bruce, knowing that the pain killers were going to be setting in soon, simply turned his head, looked at him, and said, “Have a good night, Hal. I’ll see you sometime soon.”
As he walked off, he heard rather cheekily, “What? Expecting me to creep through your bedroom window for a midnight tryst?”
Bruce didn’t bother to look over his shoulder as he called back, “If you can make it past the defenses around Wayne Manor, you’re welcome to try.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Well, let’s just say if you get caught, I’ll feed you to my family.”
“See! There’s that vampire joke again!”
He paused near the next doorway and shot a smirk over his shoulder, causing Hal to falter.
“Wait, it’s just a joke, right?” Hal chuckled nervously. “Right?”
Bruce merely winked in return and disappeared between the sliding doors, leaving the pilot stunned and vaguely worried that his coworker was a blood-sucking, creature of the night. But that did also open up a whole new avenue of very shameless scenarios that had Hal wondering if sneaking into Wayne Manor was worth the price of finding them out.
