ands snippet: fast and furious
Summary: Vivienne delivers on a promise and expected only the self-satisfaction of a “job well done.” His Dark Grace decides otherwise.
or tldr: the batmobile's first, official iteration gets its christening 😏 (making out + some d/s vibes) this is a write up of this post on how bruce (the batman, really) and vivienne "get together," originally written to entertain @rozaceous (and here's the link to the og concept) the gist is that it's pre-NYE party debacle, ros and vi are practically u-haul lesbians but it's no one's business (not even their authors') how involved they are with each other, and ros and bruce have not resolved their UST yet.
“—and there might be tolerance issues with the panels, but they should be resolved by next month.” Neel Singh, the Experimental Manufacturing lead, concludes his briefing and falls half a pace back.
“We’re not racing the clock, Neel.” Vivienne jots down her thoughts in her notepad, and adds, “The winter holidays are coming up. I don’t expect anything more until February, the earliest.”
“Y-Yes, of course.” After pressing him for continuous updates for the past few months, of course he’d feel discombobulated by the sudden release of the gas pedal, so to speak. Neel pulls out his phone to type a message. “Should I call anyone else to show you around, Vivienne? Someone from Facilities for the test track?”
Vivienne looks up and out past the glass, into the indoor test track where the subject of their discussion sits parked. All aerodynamic sleekness and curves, the diffused polish of a practical matte black coating, and the intuitive physical sense of power and nimbleness in its form…
Now that—that is her son, midwifed by the hardworking and circumspect members of her handpicked team.
A thought comes to mind. “We’re dealing with carbon fiber, yes? RTM process?”
Neel nods warily. “The team assessed it to be the best fit for purpose…”
“Let me see the molds. And I may have some thoughts on the trickier shapes.” At this point, it’s better to do things right than to play coy with knowledge. There aren’t any patents on the line, or papers to publish.
Bless Neel—he’s not the most inspirational team lead out there, but the man can get things done, keeps track of his flock, and does not put them in the line of fire if he can help it. It takes the entire hallway’s length to convince him that no, Vivienne isn’t here to take heads and draw blood. And yes, she does have some experience with composites. Thankfully, what she knows and has retained is relevant enough for their use case.
The setup tour and the technicians present are all of acceptable quality. There’s nothing wrong with their process, per se…
“I appreciate the team’s rationale in using vinyl ester. However, in application, the easier forming and mechanical properties with using epoxy should make it an appropriate trade-off,” she declares her verdict. No one is impolite enough to interrupt her (or they’re not green enough to), but the manufacturing team does exchange serious side eye among each other.
When dealing with technical experts, care must be taken to speak their language. Always acknowledge someone’s hard work, and give good faith that they’ve made their decision with good judgment behind it.
And, of course, one should give explicit reasoning when suggesting an alternative. “We won’t be seeing the same type of corrosion nor UV exposure on average, or most of the expected causes of catastrophic failure”—here, Vivienne meets their gazes directly, pausing deliberately so they get her gist— “will render long-term considerations, hm, superfluous.”
Various noises of scoffing and muffled chortles come from the team before her. “It’s likely to explode, GTA-style, before we care about actual sunlight in Gotham,” someone mutters. “Got it.”
Bonus: appeal to their good humor, show that you’re on their side. Show that if they work with you instead of against you, everyone benefits.
“Then, we’ll put the order in for epoxy instead?” Neel announces to the group.
“Let me liaison with the Testing guys, see which specific one they recommend,” one of the technicians answers while the others debate quietly between themselves. “And we need to check the MSDS for any changes needed.”
“Shouldn’t be much—I think we can relax some of the workflow, too,” another one calls out. “It’ll go a lot faster this round.”
Neel turns towards Vivienne, implicitly waiting for her approval.
“Go ahead,” she confirms. “No rush. You should have enough budget; if not, CC me on any requests.” She waits for Neel to nod before turning back to finish her notes.
One of the technicians whistles low and, undeterred by his coworker’s elbow to the gut, asks out loud, “How the hell are we getting the funding for this? It can’t be government.”
Vivienne pauses, looks up to raise an eyebrow at him. She gives it two seconds—enough to make it awkward but not enough to be aggressive—before answering nonchalantly, “Does it matter? As long as we can all go about our day without the mob brazenly shaking people down in public, or an attention-seeking wack job gassing the streets and locking down the expressway, I do not care.”
The emphasis nets her a “fair enough” gesture and no further questions, with the general atmosphere being one of jocular compliance and satisfaction.
Very good.
She turns to Neel, while announcing to the group at large, “That will be all. Everyone should make sure to confirm with my PA on their way out, so you all can receive your bonuses in a timely manner. Have a happy Thanksgiving.” Then, more directly at Neel: “I’ll meet with Facilities before closing the site for the holiday. Official half-day.”
He gets her unspoken “clear everyone out” order and turns to usher the technicians along, all while starting a phone call with other leads in the testing facility.
---
Vivienne takes the scenic route towards the direction of the Facilities Management suite, walking leisurely to keep her baby in her sights the entire time. She returns absent hums of acknowledgment to the people that greet her along her way, dismissing them when they try to ask if she needs anything, and eventually, the facility is empty.
Instead of turning into the Facilities suite, she goes to the nearby elevator to scan her card and wait.
The building lights dim to their low-occupancy standby state. Then, one of the shadows in the empty hallway distends into a vaguely humanoid form, stalking forward until there’s a glint of whited-out eyes.
Ever the dramatic. His Dark Grace’s penchant for positioning is comically perfect.
“I assume you’ve looped the cameras?” Vivienne tilts her head towards the Facilities suite.
The Batman gives a little, “Hm,” and continues towards her and the elevator.
Yes, duh. Vivienne doesn’t roll her eyes. It’d be wasted on this bat-shaped mime.
She instead flips her notepad to a later page, where she’s noted down the information received from Facilities via email a week ago. Meeting with them was entirely unnecessary. Her mind runs through what would be the most efficient loop of comprehensive testing—and if they waited until sunset, she could set up and open the outdoor portion of the track for “realistic conditions.”
It’s rather easy to ignore the looming shadow next to her—she’s had practice and more important things to think about. Normally, anyone impolite enough to look over her shoulder at her notes would be told to back off, but here she can hope that he’d absorb some proper methodology for fucking once. To be fair, any thought of “proper” leaves her head upon reaching the ground floor of the track.
The so-called “Batmobile” is gorgeous. If not in her heels, Vivienne would have sprinted over to him.
Her beautiful baby boy.
She tucks her notepad and pen away into her handbag, and loops the shoulder strap across her torso. All hands are needed for properly admiring this work of art.
“Ah—the slight ripples Neel mentioned,” she talks His Dark Grace through the visual inspection. “Project Lead Neel Singh,” she adds for clarification, letting him know who and what to satisfy his paranoia. “Yes, the matrix voids will be easier to mitigate with the modifications to their vacuum assistance setup, the tooling support, and of course, not using vinyl ester. More workable.”
She walks around the car, eyeing the front and back tires, noting the height of the chassis, and internally debates the optimum between aesthetics, performance, and practicality.
“Hm. This tire size is special order, but still commercial-off-the-shelf. The concern is that typical road conditions won’t allow for anything lower, but we need to balance the handling with the overall weight…especially since the chassis will be so lightweight.” She backs up and takes in the whole of the car’s form. “I…I’m actually a bit worried—we might not have the right balance between the aero and weight for the CG, being not for track purposes, so we can’t go as low as actual motorsport designs—”
“—then let’s test it,” Batman cuts through her fretting. He’s been following along with her inspection, practically hovering over her the entire time. The fingers of his gauntleted hand carefully trace where she was pointing out, trailing behind her hand’s path. “That’s why we’re here.”
Credit where credit is due—that’s true. At least he didn’t immediately demand to do so; his interjection is a polite ask, the bat and all things considered. And Vivienne wouldn’t have let him within a zip code of her new son if he wasn’t ready to handle. She can allow His Dark Grace some fun, for once.
She takes out the prototype key fob—slow enough to rile up the menacing furry next to her—and clicks. The doors unlock and pop slightly ajar before she dangles the fob in front of Batman.
He’s finally trained enough to be polite during their handovers; he takes the fob from her possession without force, and waits for her to situate herself in the passenger side before getting in himself.
“No helmets. Well, you better not get me killed,” Vivienne says blandly when Batman starts up the car. He purrs, lovely and smooth like a spoiled cat. “Or I won’t offer custom hubcaps. Ones with little bat decals.”
There’s a faint smirk on His Dark Grace’s face. “I’m better than that.” He teases with a brief revving of the engine.
The test track comes into hyperfocus in front of Vivienne; on a whim, she clicks an additional control up top near the rearview HUD of the car that opens up the gate to the outdoor track. She can recognize the adrenaline building up—it’s what follows a good challenge, either mental or physical, and she welcomes it with relish.
“Let’s see it, then,” she nods towards the gate, unable to help her toothy grin in return.
---
Her baby boy “handles,” is what Vivienne can say for now. She didn’t expect the response to be buttery smooth on first iteration, and for something experimental. The seeds of something are present—His Dark Grace pulled them into two hairpin turns in sequence—and coupled with the snappiness, she thinks they have an unpolished gem in their hands. The car is like having a barely tamed big cat, leashed up and ready to let loose on one’s orders.
It’s fucking exhilarating.
The stupid showoff figures out how to manage the car quickly enough. He pulls another turn that lets them slide perfectly against the side of the track into the bay that’s meant to be a small pit area. The uncovered half of his face is not as expressive as he pretends to be, day-to-day, but the expression present is full-on cocky as hell.
(Honestly, Vivienne can admit to liking it—or at least, this is much more tolerable than the public-facing himbo she needs to politely shake hands with whenever he deigns to muck around at the office.)
“Proven enough?” His typical growl is less forced, and more of a pleasant rumble that harmonizes nicely with the idling engine. In the full furry get-up, subtle side glances and all that aren't really possible. His Dark Grace turns to stare at her, goading for a response.
The cowl and the whited-out effect of the lenses are eerie up close, but dealing with the devil is much less intimidating when one has leverage. In Vivienne’s case—he knows she’s capable and motivated enough to possibly add something like a kill-switch to the car, just to fuck with him if he pisses her off. His Dark Grace wants her baby real bad, and with proof of concept she can probably get him to do anyt—
Hold up, Vi, say that again? Her inner Ros stops that train of thought.
“Differential adjustment shou—well. Acceptable,” she gives him the compliment, leaning back into the seat with a more relaxed posture. They never make the ergonomics of them fit for anyone of average height; her hairpin has slightly loosened from how the back of the seat rubbed against her updo, and she pulls the pin free to restyle her hair. She feels the Batman’s stare as he waits, and she keeps him waiting. “You’re competent and quick on the uptake. Adaptive.”
Wrangling the Batman was the equivalent of wrangling a division of egotistical engineers working at the cutting edge of everything—all very competent people that will step on each other’s toes, get in each other’s way, and are too used to being correct that they forget their purpose. The balance was slightly off here, becoming the classical joke of “one horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses.”
But everyone has their leverage points, and all are susceptible to The Carrot versus The Stick in personalized ratios and applied judiciously. Vivienne didn’t aim to do anything as Machiavellian as put the Dark Knight of Gotham under her thumb, but that’s where he somehow ended up. She, by sheer grit, found the winning combo of getting him to listen to her—at least when it came to nonsensical designs—and actively soliciting her opinion. She’s not dumb enough to lose that leverage when she sees it in her hands. Maintaining it requires work: showing agreeableness to an extent, with the occasional reminder that he’s in her territory and he would do well to remember it. A little flick to the ego, occasionally.
It helps to put into perspective that, at the end of the day, Bruce Wayne the Batman is nearly five years younger than her. Engineers and technicians under her, the ones ranging from two to ten years younger, with a plethora of tertiary degrees between them—her mind can’t help flagging them as “children” until they temper themselves with a real project, from bid to deliverable.
So, of course her brain demoted the fucking CEO of her company and its parent conglomerate to being a “boy” as soon as he called her Lucius’s PA. She has found no evidence contrary to that ever since. With him neatly categorized, accounting for unique attributes and handling, Vivienne knows very well how to deal with “boys,” because she wouldn’t have gotten this far otherwise.
“Hah. If you had wrecked my shit, as with your typical M.O., maybe I could’ve gotten a nice dinner out of you tonight.” Her tone is intentionally sharper, diction and accent more crass with the habitual New Jersey attitude rather than her usual featureless cosmopolitan speech pattern. Dusk was here, steadily eating away the evening hours as autumn progressed. They’ve stayed later than she anticipated, but…
…for once, in a very long time, she was having fun. The evidence is on her teeth—she was grinning wide enough to catch some of her lipstick on her canines, which her tongue can clearly feel the slick of it.
“Well. We’re done here. Keep up with”—she gestures at the whole of him with a dismissive hand— “that well enough, don’t piss me off, and maybe you’ll earn your new toy by the end of next quarter.”
That whole posturing—after prolonged proximity and the hot-and-cold of seemingly hard-won praise versus snide dismissiveness—is supposed to make His Dark Grace harrumph and skulk away.
Today, he grabs her hand. It’s not violent or anything, but he doesn’t touch her. She’s lost her temper enough to jab her finger in his cowled face, and he’s been taken aback enough and in the position to let her. He’s never touched her.
That—that’s not in the script.
His Dark Grace continues to stare at her, his exposed jaw not quite clenched enough to denote a possible temper tantrum incoming. So, she minutely cocks her chin up, adding a slight challenging tilt to her expression with a raised eyebrow and the slight baring of her teeth in a sneering smile. What are you doing? Are you really—really?
He has her wrist with his left hand, and his full attention and facing is towards her. The right hand comes closer. And because he doesn’t pull her that she lets him, it’s so much closer until—of all fucking things—she feels the gauntlet leather past the corner of her mouth and pressure on her teeth.
The thumbpad has her lipstick stain on it from him wiping it away.
She scoffs, half-between a laugh and an incredulous squawk, and tries to tug her hand away. It doesn’t budge. “How badly do you want this car?” The tone isn’t right—wrong mix of scathing versus levity. And yet, it seems to draw him in closer, the tireless masochist that he is. “Didn’t I say ‘don’t piss me off’?”
“I’m hoping to do the opposite.” This close, he doesn’t bother with the growl at all. He’s almost inaudible over the engine. The lipstick-stained gauntlet cups her jaw, the thumb carefully avoiding her skin, and he leans in when she doesn’t resist.
What the fuck. What is happening. Did he bug the apartment, overhear the sleepover-bullshit talks with Ros?
It’s fascinating, clinically speaking. From what Vivienne’s heard of local gossip, especially among the secretary pool and their particular brand of romantic fantasizing, the Batman is expected to be rough. Wild. He’s supposed to fulfill all sorts of “tall, dark, and handsome” daydreams and lonely imaginings at night, along with fighting crime—what a busy guy.
So, to have him soft and insistent at her mouth, but more like asking for permission than forceful, is a fascinating gap between expectation and reality. He’s not a shabby kisser at all; the playboy types usually have something else going on that makes everyone else do the work for them, and they get to reap all the pleasure. That is apparently not the case here.
Eventually, he pulls back so they can breathe and reassess.
Vivienne looks. She really looks—his face may be mostly covered, he’s still staring, but he’s flushed, visibly steadying his breathing, and her lipstick stains his mouth in a viscerally appealing way that makes her want to lick her teeth. He’s paradoxically much more exposed than she is.
And with that, His Dark Grace is really such a pretty boy—something Vivienne has constantly lamented with Ros over for his pissy attitude. He’s perfectly amenable now, though.
“You really want this,” she says this again, her free hand coming down to pat the console between them and leaning closer.
He’s still a cheeky shit, though. “I want it,” and tilts his head again, ready to close the distance at her say-so.
She means the damn car, but— “Then you’ll have to work for it,” and she closes the distance herself.
