logsinthenight

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characters: Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd, Riku, Vanitas
location: The museum + the church
date/time: Post Sandman event- from the point that the dreamers wake +4days
content: Jason tips his hand and some complicated truths are revealed + Bruce goes to the church to wait for familiar faces to be resurrected
warnings: violence, gore, character death

museum | jason todd
[He's dreaming until he isn't. It's a difficult thing to describe as dreaming in the first place when Bruce doesn't remember falling asleep. They're before and after images- he had been there, at the dinner. And then he'd been looking up at the church, squinting through barely remembered sunlight.

His body feels stiff and that's perhaps the first sensation to occur to him. The muscle in his stomach and arms is tight from disuse, his back feels like one solid shape that's been locked together. Everything is dark and cold. Bruce tries to flex his toes but he isn't sure if it follows through- if it's an idea of if it actually carries. He tries his fingers. And slowly he becomes aware of his face- the muscle around his mouth and the space between his brows. There's no corona behind his closed eyes and Bruce is sure he must be back where he started, but he isn't vertical anymore. Everything around him feels strange and muted- as if his hands are over his ears.

A small noise comes out of him, not quiet a grunt, but more than a breath. And slowly Bruce is able to open his eyes for the first time in two weeks.]

church | riku + vanitas
[Jason leaves. This is not unexpected because in the time they've known each other, if it could be called that, Jason leaving has become a sort of constant. Their paths intersect from time to time, and then they are forcibly diverted. Bruce doesn't blame him; he suspects that Jason would have fled while he was still smouldering if he could. It was necessity that had kept them together, reversed their positions.

But alone in the museum once more Bruce hears his tablet respond, an incoming message. It's reassuring to see that Riku is present and accounted for, that he's already trying to get on top of things, to organize. Bruce understands this reaction because it's one that they share.

And that changes as soon as the tablet chimes again. The bulletin.

If he is honest (and Bruce tries to be honest) he isn't take aback to find Vanitas's name on the obituaries. He has been listed before, but there is a chaotic recklessness in him that Bruce has long since been aware of. A kind of fearlessness in regards to his own limits, to whatever pain his actions might incur. There is a moment where he considers how this might change his demeanor and what Bruce might be able to learn about his motivation. But that moment is subsumed by Jim Gordon's name on the list. It strikes Bruce like a glancing shot- that makes his ears ring and makes his body feel hot with urgency and nausea.

The James Gordon he knows has always been part of the GCPD and by extension his life has always been close to danger. Sometimes that danger is more present than others, sometimes it's more personal. He has been targeted more than once and Bruce has lost sleep for worry before. He has has practice clamping the lid down on what might have happened, on his worst fears. He tries to remind himself of this now, as he climbs to his feet and tears out the door without bothering for a jacket or even his shoes. The dead do not stay dead here. He knows this to be fact, he has seen it, Vanitas himself is a testament.

But the fear persists.

Bruce races to the church like a man possessed, along dirt trails and through trees, until the building looms ahead of him- a strange twin to the place he'd just woken from.]

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[ Riku had more ground to cover and a few stops to make, but unlike Bruce, he wasn't going on foot. He's not a cook, a fact Quentin and Prompto swiftly learned meant stretching rations included a lot of thin, bland soup if Riku was left in charge of their meals. So when he pulls up to the general store, he heaps canned goods - vegetables, fish, beans, whatever other proteins he can find and, by force of habit, even a couple of cans of peaches - into a canvas bag.

He fills up jugs of water. Finds a bottle of antibiotics hiding under and behind a rack, right up against the wall. It's dusty and out of date. Riku takes it anyway, along with whatever passes for disinfectant. That last part might mean risking the Invincible and its almost assuredly raided bar.

Riku checks there anyway. Talks to people briefly, and makes his way back to the armory to drop things off.

He doesn't stay to chat. Just leaves them inside the door and goes, trusts they'll understand that while Riku will keep his word, he has priorities that don't shift much. Prompto and Quentin are alive, wounded like... everyone is, he leaves them the antigrav cart and the other bike.

The trip is really a lot faster with transportation, even if the lack of a headlight requires care.

He's worried about others, too. Bruce hasn't told him where he is, and when Riku returns to the square he has a few options -- he could try the museum, but the church is right here, and Vanitas...

Moments later, he decides, pushing through the church's large doors, his lantern high. He's haggard, his hair dull and disheveled and the clothes he's wearing ill-fitting but warmer than the usual. A scarf, recently taken from the general store, keeps the cold off his healing throat and the gauze wrapped around it. He, like just about everyone else, could probably do with a hot meal and a shower, but first things first.

He's alive. He has the luxury of time to deal with those things. Vanitas doesn't. Bruce... deserves to know, and a sinking pit in his stomach whispers that he probably read the bulletin because he's always reading. He has an appetite for knowledge that's limitless.

That's something he shares with Vanitas, a hunger that manifests itself in different ways. They burn. Vanitas might want something none of them can give him, and yet he keeps coming back. There's something ugly and selfish that would wish this place on someone, but Riku thinks- he thinks he wants him back.

He's sure he does. ]

Edited (I'm a dumbass) 2019-12-04 01:52 (UTC)

[It is perhaps the most disheveled that Bruce has ever allowed himself to appear while in Beacon. Later, when the urgency and terror are no longer swallowing him whole, deafening him to the world, Bruce will reflect on this moment that he allowed himself to succumb to impulse and he will say that he is only human. It was a human reaction. It was also an opportunity to do better, be better. To suffocate the impulse for a higher calling.

There was a time that he sat beside Selina and said I wonder if my parents dying made me a little insane. It doesn't feel untrue. Even, perhaps most especially now.

Bruce comes through the woods and feels a perverse sense of deja vu to find himself at the church again. This building has never meant much to him in the way that faith and religion have never meant much. They are subjects he can understand from an objective perspective- the attraction and appeal aren't unfathomable things. But they hold no comforts or ghosts for him. How much of that has changed now? It doesn't bear dwelling on.

There's a bike a short distance away, an unmistakable sign that he is not alone. In other circumstances this would be enough to redirect him. To convince him to alter his course. It does not.

Bruce comes to the church door instead and pushes it open. This t-shirt has short-sleeves and the material is thin, it's meant for training, pushing himself through his exercises. His hair is mussed and there are a few piece of brush in it, twigs and leaves. Mud clings to his feet and ankles, the skin pinched pink in the places that cold hadn't made him stark white. He doesn't feel it. There is no wet slap of skin on the floor as Bruce enters, slips inside, but then he has always been quiet. The rise and fall of his chest comes quick, betrays the race he'd made to get here- but worse is the thready sound of his voice.

He is not afraid for Vanitas, who has routinely defied odds, who is not quite human and perhaps never was. His fear is for-]

Jim-?

[ It's human, that's true. Bruce's will is, indeed, strong enough to resist many of the heart's impulses, he has the bearing of one older than his years, but there are times when the heart is too loud, when it can crowd out thoughts and doubts and fears and hopes. It's a sword that cuts both ways, can arm one to take on insurmountable odds for the sake of something important, can cripple one under the weight of its own pain.

Bruce seems well acquainted with both aspects.

The booted tread that thumps the wooden floorboards, the glow of the lantern on the approach is not Gordon's. Nor does his silhouette blot out the light like Vanitas does. Riku says nothing and the light of his lantern sways over the greasy black of his coat, the dull cascade of his hair and the hollows fatigue have carved into his face.

Riku can say he's seen a lot of Bruce.

He can't say he's ever seen him afraid. No- afraid for someone, that's what this is. Jim. Hadn't there been a name starting with J on the list of the fallen? He can't be sure without looking, and what he's looking at right now is Bruce.

Riku shakes his head and leans over, sitting his lantern down on a pew, then wordlessly shrugging out of his bomber jacket. Beneath it, he has a gray hoodie he's pulled on over his other clothes, extra layers against the cold. He has enough to spare. Riku doesn't hold this out to wait for Bruce to decide if he'll take it. He shakes it out, advances with it, like he means to put this around his shoulders. ]

...

[ He's not here. ]

[His immediate reaction is denial.

This is not to say that he doesn't know how to trust, or that he distrusts Riku in particular. But there are things that Bruce is unwilling to believe until he can see and touch and test them for himself. It had never been enough to just hope that Jim would survive before. Bruce had always made his way to the city, had always needed to see him with his own eyes. It's no different now.

His gaze lands on Riku and the momentary non sequitur answers itself a beat later: he is here for Vanitas. An interesting development in its own right. Bruce isn't yet able to appreciate it. His eyes move frantically over the scene itself- the four walls, the altar, the candles. It requires him to overlook the generous shift of Riku's weight and the jacket that slides from his shoulders. Instead of staying still for the advance, for the offering, there is something naked and primal on Bruce's face as he pushes out of the way, moves himself from the trajectory of Riku's kindness and further into the church.

It's too close to touch, to even think about.

The shape of his mouth is feral, his pulse thunders in his ears.
It happened when his parents died too. It was Jim Gordon who wrapped a coat around his shoulders, who promised that his world wasn't ending when they both knew that it was. His breaths are coming too fast.]

How long have you been here? [A demand, perhaps an accusation.]

You can't have checked everywhere. You don't know.

[ Grief can be ugly. Riku knows it well and he's not about to hold Bruce accountable for how it manifests. He bore the brunt of Riku's own, he wore the bruises and wears the scars of that awful night.

He doesn't know, he can't know that his well-intended offer of his jacket has a certain association that lies so close to memories of grief and loss that are still a wound on his heart. It could be that Bruce just hurts or worries too much to accept, that he can't get through the cloud of distress. Riku doesn't take it personally, but he's pragmatic enough to know that Bruce has been running, that his sweat must be cooling him quickly, and his feet are probably freezing under all that mud.

He wonders if Bruce is even in a state to notice, or if he'll be shaking hard enough to make his back ache before he realizes his temperature has dropped dangerously low. Tracking his expression, the direction his gaze goes in, how they break in different but not unassociated ways. ]

...

[ Riku shakes his head, his answer again a refusal, or maybe a denial. He hasn't checked everywhere, he can't know, he hasn't been here long, but he's been alive long enough to know he might hyperventilate, that he might be looking at the start of a self destructive spiral if he doesn't do something.

Bruce might hate him for it, might mistake this for unwanted or unwarranted pity.

The jacket is traded into his other hand and it's the right that reaches out for his shoulder, that jerks him, to command his attention. Even if he had any answers for him, Riku can't say them; he steps in to close the distance and, unless Bruce wrests himself away, he means to put that jacket on the hanger of his shoulders.

It hurts, but not as badly as if he managed actual speech. This word he can hiss without making many demands on his injured throat and mangled voice: ] Sit.

[Bruce is not in a state to notice. He's been numb to his own body and it's needs since the moment the bulletin was published. Color had long since leeched from his skin and what isn't stubbornly pink with cold is now a ghostly white. His arms. His hands. His feet. Like a racehorse the rise and fall of his chest remains a frenetic rhythm, a response outside of his awareness and by extension his control. Bruce doesn't care. He needs Jim Gordon more than he needs to be warm, to have shoes, to have a home.

But instead of turning his fear outward as Riku had been prompted too, Bruce resembles a collapsing building instead- ceilings and columns buckling, crashing in on one another. A man who refuses to leave the one thing that makes him feel safe. That is his own.

He doesn't register the second movement Riku makes, the hand that reaches for his shoulder so much as his honed reflexes make up for it. His own arm raises, an instinctive block, redirection, that's stopped short by the sound of Riku's voice. By the sound that was once Riku's voice and now is something- wrong.] You're- [Bruce's face swings around, no less hunted but now drawn. Heavy with worry, cloudy with confusion. It still manages to sound like an accusation as his eyes drop to the other's throat.]

What happened?

[ It's not a sure fire thing, but Riku finds there are certain sounds he can still make that make little to no demands on the parts of him that were damaged while defending the armory and the people in it with him. He thinks for a moment, finds one words he manages at a whisper, doesn't try to force his breath. Just lets the sound form around his exhale. ]

Spirits.

[ If they were still around, Bruce might have been torn to pieces before he even made it halfway to the church. Pursing his lips, eyebrows drawn together, Riku allows the partial redirection. Instead he catches him by the wrist, and although his jacket is tucked into the bend of his elbow, he can still briskly pass his hands over one of Bruce's, trying to coax warmth back to icy fingers.

A part of him feels like their location and Bruce's state leaves them dangerously exposed, the part of him that isn't totally convinced the danger is past them, that maybe the spirits will come back to finish off the ones that got away.

He wouldn't be able to protect Bruce if he's not able to run, or maybe, to control the bike. ]

[It's perhaps like watching the sunrise- the way that the thought slides over Bruce's face and changes the contours of it. The way that disapproval and confusion become slow understanding, a connecting of the dots. Riku continues reaching for him, the jacket tucked into his elbow and rapidly becoming an afterthought while Bruce reaches out in turn. Two fingers hook in the fabric at Riku's throat and pull it down, just a little. It's a gentle but precise movement, something that might better suit a doctor or nurse.

He's lucky he wasn't killed.

The observation slides through him like a warm knife in the pit of his stomach. It never matters how good someone is- how capable or how strong. People die every day. There's nothing fair about it.]

After we were unconscious. [He fills in the blank, fingers sliding away from the fabric, hand returning to his side.] You protected us.

Do we know how many are missing?

[ He's aware of how close he came to dying, when he reeled back with eyes wide, feeling his own blood course down his throat like it couldn't choke him fast enough. He's lucky. Prompto and Quentin may have a tendency to surrender to their fear, but one of their best attributes is how they rise above it anyway. Their quick thinking saved his life.

Riku won't fool himself into thinking he knows what Bruce needs, but he knows what he doesn't - another thing to worry about. Bruce's fingers come away from the collar of his shirt, Riku seeks it out from Bruce's side, meaning to warm this one between both of his.

There's a complicated expression on Riku's face, like he doesn't quite agree with Bruce's summary of what happened, but he'll explain later. As for the other question, he shakes his head.

No. He's not sure anyone but Robin could give an accurate count, and if he were the type, maybe it would have occurred to Riku that this is a useful potential feature for their tablets, a way to check in and be accounted for after an attack.

Something a smarter person could come up with. ]

Sit. [ Riku mouths another word: please. ]

[The moment he lets go of the fabric he ceases to consider that the hand is his own- to feel any attachment to it. This isn't the first dissociated state he's fallen into and Bruce is aware of it the way he'd been aware of sound when he first practiced holding his breath underwater. How it became dull and insubstantial. Separate.

He sees more than feels the moment that Riku reaches for him, catches his thin, calloused fingers with his own- and he sees more than feels the friction that follows, an attempt to warm the skin, loosen the joints. Another time, perhaps, he might have seen the merit in it- nodded with gratitude and offered his opposite hand for the same treatment. This Bruce, in this moment, seems to barely notice at all. He's somewhere outside his own body already.

The trouble is that despite the strangeness within him, the daze that he wears as a shroud, even in the depths of his grief Bruce has never done well with stillness. Sit, for the kindness it intends, for the grace with which it's offered- is a difficult thing to consider. How can he sit? When would he have time to when he needed to be looking for-

The urgency curdles within him, barely contained beneath the surface of his skin, and though Bruce doesn't jolt, doesn't jerk away or stalk off and begin to pace- it's clear in his eyes. They're too bright, too sharp. They move too fast. Riku's mouth forms the word that this voice doesn't and Bruce sits. Barely.]

[ As for Riku, he kneels. He goes about the thing briskly, trying to rub some amount of color back into his pale fingers before Riku trades that hand for the other. An islander, born and raised, he understands hypothermia but not things like frostbite. He knows that someone swimming too long can become chilled in deeper, darker water, and that the chill can make them sick, or weaken them. Drowning is a greater risk.

He doesn't know that the cold can do things like chip away at and deaden one's flesh. He's aware of the cold, has seen snow and ice, but he doesn't have the experience with it someone would if they lived in a world with a cold winter.

After a time, he tries to get the jacket around his shoulders, stealing glances at Bruce's face. If he could speak, he thinks, maybe it would be easier to pull him from his thoughts, the way Bruce had helped him rationalize. Back then, he didn't try to force him to doubt what Riku believed was true, he just guided him there.

The spirits have stolen from him something he was already not that great at using. Now, Riku would give a lot to have it back. ]

You don't need to do that.

[This too seems to come from nowhere- a statement that isn't quite reassurance or redirection, but instead something that perhaps simple politeness demands. Bruce has not always been very good at taking care of himself. Some of is was a burden that had been unfairly placed on Alfred's shoulders- that had made him responsible for making sure a young boy ate and slept, that he had a home and an education. But it later became a decision between helping Bruce arm himself for the battles he wouldn't stop choosing, or spending both of their lives trying to put him in a cage to protect him from himself.

Bruce excuses Riku now for reasons that are tangled into one another. He is not Riku's responsibility, he barely feels the cold, but also perhaps more uncomfortably: he doesn't want it. Bruce has always been more comfortable holding onto his pain. He carries it when every voice around him encourages him to put it down and though he's learned how to look past it with the passage of time, it never leaves his side. Bruce knows that he is a broken person, but instead of trying to repair the seams he's filled them with steel, immortalizing the cracks in the same move that fortifies them.

His fingers flex beneath the contact and his brows draw together. The jacket comes back around his shoulders and Bruce hates it, but makes no move to shake it off. After all, it suits him, doesn't it? He will always be burying people. He will be an orphan like this, over and over again.

His eyes are hot and his face lifts.
He doesn't cry, but he thinks that if he opened his mouth to he might just start screaming instead.]

Have you seen Vanitas yet?

[ You don't need to do that.

No, Riku supposes if this had been just anyone, he wouldn't have to and, in the absence of necessity or personal desire he wouldn't have. But in it he hears the not so distant echo of his bleak surprise, shaken by what he had believed he saw and full of the knowledge of how he had returned Bruce's concern with violence and fury. Bruce had been generous. He never needed to.

He is, if nothing else, capable and intelligent. He is not Riku's responsibility, nor is he the subject of pity. Strong people can be left staggered by grief and overwhelmed by loss, neither of them are an exception, but leaving that statement without an answer doesn't sit well.

Riku again shakes his head. The pew creaks when he leaves it, he stoops and searches his bag for his tablet. He stands to type, he doesn't return to his seat until he's shown Bruce the screen. ]

want you to get better. however long that takes.
I haven't seen him.

[It reads as a nonsequitor. Want you to get better; Bruce doesn't know what that means. It doesn't feel connected to something tangible, to a hypothesis that can be tested. He isn't sick. He isn't wounded. He'd been sleeping like so many others, and he'd stayed with Jason until the other had decided he'd had enough, had left. Riku is the one with the bandages, the one unable to speak- and by his own admission he'd been a drop in the bucket. Plenty of people had died. So Bruce does what he always does in the face of something he can't, won't take to heart. His disregards it.

His hands are still at his sides, limp and empty after Riku leaves the task and goes for his tablet- dutifully types out a reply. Bruce feels like he might be made of lightning- a collision beneath his skin that doesn't stop, that makes his body feel too small for what's inside it. Alfred would remind him to focus, not to let his emotions have the better of him. What was the point of any of it if he couldn't even do that?

Bruce's brows come together and his head lifts, turns towards the far end of the church- the trap door. The altar.]

Then he hasn't come back yet.

[ There's nothing in Bruce's expression that makes what he wrote any more or less notable than a remark about a hypothetical drizzle predicted next year. Why wouldn't it be? When he lost Kairi and then Dawn and thought he had lost Sora forever, too, his whole world was in a state of inevitable collapse, like the glue holding it all together had come undone.

Next to the enormity of his own loss, how little must everything else seem, how inconsequential. Riku lets it go, because words don't need to make the difference; as he sits back down, tipping and turning the tablet in his own palms, he finds himself staring at the emptiness in his.

Would it even be a comfort if he filled the space? Or would it be smothering, something Bruce might resent if he wants to be alone? A leaf caught in brown hair or a sticky smudge of ice cream on a cheek and being just young enough that it seems okay to preen your best friend but being just old enough to notice people laugh when you do.

Then he hasn't come back yet.

He glances at his profile and Bruce looks straight ahead at the front of the church and its candles, and from where he's sitting, he doesn't see their light at all in his eyes.

Riku glances away and puts down his tablet, his answer - that he might as well settle in for a wait - is in how he carefully eases himself into something like a slouch, some kind of position that won't pull at the sloppy stitches he sewed into the line a spirit cut across his chest, or the burned ruin in his side. ]

[The words are huge in the air, leave a space that needs to be filled and nothing to fill it with. With each passing second the syllables stretch and fade until they're eaten by the stones around them. Bruce hasn't yet hit a place of true grief because there are too many possibilities still left- still questions to be answered, locations to be checked. Coming here was impulsive, a moment of panic and adrenaline that has yet to recede, but it isn't a waste of time. He might yet appear. How many times had he feared the worst, rushed into the city, shoved his way through crowds, and found Jim standing- worn and pale against the rubble?

He can't close his eyes, he can't even exhale entirely. Riku turns away and puts his tablet aside, slowly eases his body into the pew at his side and it nudges him just off of center- steps him out of himself.

Bruce hasn't yet experienced the worst. But Riku has.

There was no disguising the ugly horror and pain that had contorted his face that night- that had compelled him to rush into the forest chasing a ghost only he could see. That turned his rage on the person committed to holding him back. Bruce recognizes his equal in it because he doesn't think he's ever really left that place. He hadn't been old enough back then, to have the strength or presence to surge into action as his parents fell. But in the years that have come after Bruce finds himself leaning into those desires, as if he could rewind the moment and live through it again, live through it correctly.

Riku's losses are more recent- more wound than scar.
And Bruce has been selfish.]

Thank you.

[The words are rough as stone, but quiet too- meant for the two of them, not for the whole of the church. Bruce's chin lifts just an inch, and his eyes land on the man beside him.]

For staying.

[ Bruce was young when he experienced how ugly and cruel people's hearts could be, but he also learned that kindness and compassion could exist in a world grown cold and dark. Riku doesn't know the connection between Gordon and Bruce or the tale of how that began, but he recognizes that Bruce's reaction reads like the fear of something experienced before. It doesn't read like the shock-denial of a loss come sudden and unexpected and brand new.

People don't generally spring into the dark early, Vanitas, too, is unique in that he's been darkness from the beginning. Bruce wears it like an old familiar coat and he recognizes that he may have for years. They all have their ghosts and their skeletons in their closets, and Riku suspects Bruce has had his long enough to be both used to them and the behaviors to hide their presence ingrained by long familiarity with how others might note the difference. He acts a part, like Riku used to and now does only out of habit.

Riku reclines but it wouldn't be accurate to say he relaxes. He's still hypervigilant of every creak and whistle of wind, exhausted by two weeks of pain and danger, of staying brave in the face of loss and an ever-increasingly hopeless situation. He feels it, the gnawing thing that whispers he won't be back and that the last memory he'll ever have of Vanitas is--

But the feeling, like a lot else, feels shaved down and blunted, like he's a sputtering engine with a tank full of fumes. At least it's slowed the constant racing of his thoughts a little.

He turns his eyes over to Bruce, lips parting - like he wants to say something, or like he's been blindsided a little by his gratitude. Turning his eyes thoughtfully away, he closes them. For a beat, his breath puffs out of his nostrils ad his mouth curves into a smile.

When he looks again at Bruce, he lifts a finger from where he's laced his hands, pointing at him and mouths out: You stayed.

His arm lifts, a lazy swing that bumps his knuckles and the back of his hand against Bruce's shoulder, cushioned by the jacket he placed there. It stays, just one point of contact leaning against his frame. ]

Edited 2019-12-18 11:39 (UTC)

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