closed

[pearlstrings]

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.]

Comments

museum

[evulsed]

[ Coming back from the dead isn't exactly routine, but the most morbidly intriguing thing about it is how everything just seems to keep going on. Death waits for nobody. Vanitas is familiar with loss, but experiencing it first hand in a different way— losing something he covets— the way the world keeps marching on is almost brutally fascinating. Riku said Bruce had lost someone, and where Vanitas normally would have found this wound to rub salt into he— stops.

They go back to the museum. Bruce explains what happened, what he saw underneath the church. Vanitas has no answers, and only more questions. Was she one of those cloaked figures? Was she not down there when he saw this vision? The truth is the museum is still there, and all that darkness is gone, and nothing really changes.

Well, almost nothing.

There's something different in Bruce, now. Something deep and dark. Vanitas can sense his grief, can feel it like a cat rubbing up against his leg, like claws in his shin demanding his attention. But Vanitas isn't his keeper, he's nobody's keeper, so if he wants to go out into the woods to do whatever it is he does— why should Vanitas bother to care?

It doesn't stop him sitting out in front of the museum, staring into the woods. Waiting.

He isn't sure what he's waiting for, but he knows it's coming. Like black clouds building on the horizon, threatening thunder and rain. Like the taste of ozone right before that first lightning strike. ]

[pearlstrings]

[He goes looking.

He meets Riku at the church and they find Vanitas there. They make their way back to the museum and slowly fall into their old patterns, their other obligations. He doesn't fuss over Vanitas- Bruce surrenders space, makes something to eat and watches Riku go. He tells Vanitas about the things he saw in the church and asks what he was listening for when they'd come to find him. And through it all he remains aware of the passage of time. How many minutes, how many hours. There isn't enough information about the deaths and resurrections in this place for Bruce to settle on an estimate; some people never return at all, some are gone for a significant stretch at a time, some are spotted in town before grief and worry even get a chance to settle.

Jim Gordon has been in mortal peril many times throughout his career, in his time serving Gotham. Bruce has been sick with fear more nights than he could count- had been compelled to go to the station, to reach out and touch just to be sure. They aren't family but he's more than a friend. Whatever they are to one another it would never be simple; Jim had appeared from the ether while the bodies of his parents were still cooling on the asphalt. Long before he needed a heading to steer by, he needed to be seen- he needed to be cared for. With age and experience Bruce can understand how much it cost, not simply on a professional level, but a personal one. How many people in the GCPD wanted to turn away from the case, avoid the publicity and the scrutiny that would come with it? How many times did Jim see the risk and accept it anyway?

Bruce goes looking.

He searches the most obvious places first; he revisits the church and makes his way to bonfire square. He combs the beach, goes to town hall, goes to the village. And then he begins to search the woods. It isn't reckless, he doesn't stray too far from the paths, he doesn't put himself in the path of danger because he has a purpose. He's doing this for a reason. And when it comes up empty he repeats the circuit.

The rise and fall of his chest comes quicker, a damp shuddering he pushes through. He calls Jim's name now and again, he stops short surrounded by trees and just listens- waits for the telltale sound of his feet. Waits for a reply. The waiting becomes an agony in and of itself.

But it is nothing compared to the moment of discovery.

Bruce steps and he hears something creak underfoot.
Everything becomes quiet in his head.

There's a pane of glass under the toe of his boot, splintered at one corner and separated from anything else. Bruce stops breathing. He stands very, very still- and when he bends to reach for it, to be sure that it's real, he stops short. The rest of Jim Gordon's lantern- smashed against the forest floor, gone cold and dark, lays less than a foot away.]

[evulsed]

[ Vanitas doesn't feel it first— his Unversed do. But that makes sense— they're the most raw version of emotion. They're untempered in some ways, pure in their feeling, and the pit of their darkness wants to consume even more voraciously than Vanitas himself. The Floods jerk up, like rabbits with their attention caught, beady red eyes going to the woods— and Vanitas hasn't even pushed to his feet yet before they start sprinting.

It's so dark that they disappear into the treeline long before they ever reach it. Even with the waxing moon above, their very nature means they flicker and vanish— but Vanitas doesn't need to see them to know where they're going.

He takes two slow steps forward, the gravel crunches under his feet and gives way to the soft crush of grass as he keeps moving, and picking up speed. He's running when he crosses the trees into the forest, and isn't even sure where the urgency comes from— he just lets instinct carry him forward. Tied to his belt, his lantern swings, casting uneven shadows all around him through the trunks of the trees when the canopy eats up the light of the moon. ]

[pearlstrings]

[Bruce has been cleaved in half; he exists in two places at once, here in the forest where he is almost-but-not-quite touching a pane of glass, and in a dark alley, surrounded by the wet, shallow rattle of his father's last breaths. There is no comparing it. Bruce has never stopped mourning because the pain has never paused. There are new things in his life, there are new people and new causes, new dangers- but the person he was and the future he might have had was murdered that night too. It was put in the ground between them.

Mostly he feels rage. It is a constant, eternal fire inside him. Time hasn't healed him, it hasn't turned the wound into a scar. Bruce wraps it in bandages and covers it in armor, but it never stops bleeding. The way this will never stop bleeding.

He stops thinking. Whatever Bruce might be able to parse or discern about the scene is lost around the primal surge of anger, agony, disbelief. He is hyperventilating and shock has closed over his head like a wave- swallowed up sight and sound. There is what he needs to be the truth: Jim Gordon cannot be dead, Jim Gordon cannot be gone- and there is what he's seeing. Bruce sounds like he's drowning. The breaths come too fast and he isn't, in the end, able to touch the pieces just as he hadn't been able to touch his mother or his father. His entire body starts to shake, not a fragile shiver. A violent quake.

Bruce's mouth is open, saliva tracks down his chin as he pants for air, suffocating on horror alone. He's had a panic attack before but is beyond recognizing the signs. He feels like he's dying. His heart is going to explode in his chest, the muscles in his throat are contorted, clamped down like a vice and Bruce reaches reflexively for his face as if he's trying to clear it, to open his own mouth. He starts to scream instead- sheer terror, an animal.]

[evulsed]

[ If it were a light, it would shine like a beacon. Like the lighthouse out there over the water, when it blinks slowly into the night. Vanitas doesn't hear the scream as such— he hears the echo of it on the tail of the sensation. An explosion of utter horror. Brutal, screaming agony.

His heart slams in his chest, a mallet taken to his ribcage that crashes over and over again until the thump of it smothers the pounding of his boots against the forest floor.

The feeling hits the Unversed first, flowing over them, engorging them to make them swell twice, three times their normal size. Vanitas brings up his keyblade as he comes upon them and cuts each one in half in two clean, practiced hits. They shatter outward, a burst of darkness that swirls into the night and rushes into Vanitas like a wave breaking against a cliffside.

It's then that his gaze goes down to Bruce, his crumpled form, and he can connect what he's feeling to the sight of it, then. The utter anguish, the way his heart feels like it will explode out of his chest— burst free from him and leave him to hemorrhage all over everything. His breath catches, mimics the rapid pace that Bruce's moves at. It floods out of Bruce, like a shattered dam, filling up the immediate area, water uncontrollably rising. Vanitas can taste that scream in his own throat, the way the muscle contracts. He's made this sound before. He knows it: That terrible realization of losing everything you need. Of your heart being cleaved, jagged, down the middle.

The keyblade vanishes from his hand and he stares, his yellow eyes like enormous lamps in the darkness.

Truthfully— he didn't think anyone else could feel this the way he could. ]

[pearlstrings]

[It's a floodgate- a dam that breaks and leaves nothing else in the way. There isn't anything to slow it down, to blunt the edges or redirect it. Bruce starts screaming but it isn't the single note it once was. It's every note left- it's the smell of blood on the pavement and the gunshot ringing in his ears, it's Alfred's broken back, it's Selina's glassy stare turned to the ceiling. It's the people he's watched die, the buildings that have been set on fire, that have been detonated while full of civilians.

He chokes on it, screams himself hoarse as his body bows forward so far that his forehead nearly touches the dirt. One hand reaches reflexively for the ground, desperate for something to hang onto and tilling empty earth instead- gouging at dirt, tearing leaves up. He reaches again, again, ripping up the ground around him as the sound mutates inside him. It's a shriek in the beginning because all he can think is no. No it isn't possible. No he's wrong. No this hasn't happened. No it's someone else. Until it becomes no I can't do this again, and no I refuse. No I won't let it.

Bruce has no weapon on him, there's nothing to lash out at or against or with. There's only this empty space where someone he loves is supposed to be and now isn't, the knowledge that he's responsible and that it doesn't change anything because the pain is never going to stop. The rage contorts him, makes him ugly and inhuman and Bruce feels all over again how much he wants to be dead too. How much he doesn't want to feel anything, how much he wants to burn everything to the ground, how much he wants revenge and doesn't care what he'll become in the process.

He doesn't know when he picks up the shard, only that it's in his hand, squeezed so tightly that it bites into the skin of his palm, the juncture between his fingers. He beats at the ground with the opposite, so wretched with pain that his body threatens to vomit- that he brings dirty knuckles to his face to smother the sound, cover his mouth when he can't seem to close it.]

[evulsed]

[ Vanitas isn't tender.

He doesn't know how to be. Or maybe, if he had, the ways and means were ripped from him when he was riven from the person he was supposed to be. When he was whole, and not the abomination that he is now, in a constant cycle of crippling pain.

If Riku were here, or Sora. Gene or even Quentin— any of them might know the right thing to say. The right thing to do. They would know how to take Bruce up, gather him in and give him a shore to break against. They could be a stabilizing force to a storm that rages and rages, spinning outward and inward and downward all at once— a supernova. A collapsing star.

But Vanitas isn't any of those things. He is what Bruce is feeling, that negative, black void made into a person. Bruce wails, as broken as the lantern he hunches over, and Vanitas doesn't try to stop it. He lets it rush into him, opens up to all that darkness, and lets it build and build until it's hard for him to tell where his own anguish ends and where Bruce's begins.

Whether his legs give out under the shocking revelation, or whether he chooses to do it, Vanitas won't be able to say in retrospect. But he comes to his knees in front of Bruce, with the shattered lantern between them. He doesn't try to stop him beating his fist to the earth, he doesn't pull the glass shard from his hand.

Instead, he puts his hands on Bruce's shoulders— riding the cresting wave of his body as he heaves. He leans forward, the way the spirit in the church had done for him, and puts his forehead against Bruce's crown. There's no shushing, no attempt to soothe him from his unfettered anger— Vanitas just breathes heavily, sucking a rattling breath in every time Bruce gasps for air, and pulls all that darkness into himself—

only to let it bleed out of him, changed, into the shadows that surround them.

The Unversed that flex and roll in the darkness, then aren't his own. ]

[pearlstrings]

[Nothing changes. The pain doesn't get smaller or duller for all the voice Bruce gives it- for the mangled sound of his voice and the raw tissue in his throat and the spittle that leaves him. Pieces of Jim's lantern are here around him, half buried in the dirt and Bruce wonders if he'd been alone, if there was anyone to help him only to have the thought chased up by the knowledge that he should have been here. He should have helped. Years of training, of single-minded devotion, and he couldn't even protect this one person.

He doesn't sound human, he doesn't feel human.

Two hands come to rest on each of his shoulders and Bruce barely feels that either; it's an announcement of presence but it doesn't stabilize or comfort. It just exists there, inside this hurricane with him. A weight presses against the crown of his head and Bruce finds an immediate desire to push it off- like an animal protecting a wound, the desire to isolate himself, to be alone with his pain and nurse it even if it kills him. But there's also the instinctive desire to stay afloat- to lift his head up and try to suck in a breath, find a still point around the bottomless well he recognizes. He'd had Alfred once. And Selina, and Jim.

It loops on repeat, the tiny glass pieces that he needs to scoop up and protect, that this is all he has left of someone who cared about him. About someone he cared about in turn. And the more recent revelation that Bruce will experience the incredible highs all over again, that one day he would have a family again. And that the cycle will repeat. New faces, new loves, new losses.

It will never be enough. It will never stop.

Like the drowning, Bruce lashes out with one arm and grabs hold, fingers tightening in the fabric at Vanitas's shoulder blade and covering his open mouth with the curve of bone- a guttural wail muffled by his body.]

[evulsed]

[ Vanitas doesn't expect anything, and so can't be surprised by what Bruce does— grabbing him like a life raft, as if Vanitas has any kind of skill to keep a person from drowning. But when he leans in, it means his forehead isn't against his crown anymore. Vanitas shifts with him, turns his forehead to Bruce's temple, keeps both hands on his neck and jaw. When Bruce puts his mouth against his shoulder and wails, it feels to him like Bruce is screaming right into his body, filling the void in him with the intensity of his anguish.

It claws up his throat, cinches it tight, rises as a garbled sound like a mirror to the sobbing. Vanitas' edges smudge as the darkness floods out of him in earnest, roiling like smoke, and the Unversed pull themselves up like disfigured birds. Little things covered in oil, disjointed and collapsing in on themselves as they try to flee into the woods.

Bruce heaves under the strength of his sadness and Vanitas doesn't realize when he starts echoing the sound, turning into a feedback loop of the animal pain of loss. He presses his face against Bruce's, close enough his tears are on Vanitas' cheeks, his eyelashes a wet pattern on his own skin.

Vanitas isn't tender. Instead, he swallows all that grief up and makes it his own, because he too knows what it means for a life to be destined for misery. To know it will never end. To want something so desperately and have it taken away.

Time loses meaning in that hurricane and Vanitas stays there in the eye of it until it blows itself out. ]