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

[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. ]