Chapter Text
He walks, and he walks and walks and walks. His ankles ache, and some God must be protecting him because he’s drunk, and he’s Bruce Wayne, and he’s all alone, but no one mugs him. No one shoots him. He wanders unseen, part of the darkness, but then again, it’s not really true wandering. His feet know where they are taking him. They ache and swell, and more than once, he twists his ankle stepping wrong off a city curb, but his body knows where to pilot him, his heart its compass.
He walks, and he walks. He steps on glass and bottle caps, and each time, it feels fitting. Sharp things suited for his flesh. His flesh longing for sharp things. It’s what he gets for endangering Selina. For wanting a man so badly it drove that man mad. For still loving him, even after he becomes a mad man. Desire is ugly, and now, so are his feet. Bruised and swollen, bloody footprints left by grit-black soles. When he stumbles, he drags himself back up. Sometimes he cries, and it feels like throwing up—great heaving sobs that move his whole body, wrack his insides. When he finally does retch, his vomit is black with wine. He spits in the gutter and remembers what his first kiss felt like. He had been crying then, too.
The candles are the first glow for miles. They sit inside a brick alcove and light it with fluttering yellow, flames like canary wings. Jeremiah’s face beams back at him from every surface. His head tilted back, beautiful cherry-red mouth parted. I know what he looks like under those vestments, Bruce thinks, hardly able to stand on his ruined feet—not because they hurt, but because they have gone entirely numb. It’s like standing on a vacancy, on air, on ice. He is nothing from the knee down. A legless monster.
Jeremiah’s love is no longer a secret. He has told everyone who will listen that he loves Bruce. He had to go insane in order to admit it. He had to lose his mind to cave to his want. This is the only way they can have one another, it seems—in endless, cyclical, raving madness. This is the only place devotion can exist: at the heart of the city’s rubble, in a church he built to repent.
Bruce thumbs over the portrait on the candle, more sober by the minute. Then—he goes inside.
—
There’s an echo, a faint and distant drip, but mostly, it is quiet. Bruce feels instantly exhausted as the stillness settles over his body like a blanket of snow. Jeremiah stares down at him with passive, holy benevolence from a stained glass window above an altar. He looks so different, yet entirely the same. Glass-smooth. Immaculate. Sixteen all over again, pale against Bruce’s dark bed sheets. A halo around his head.
Bruce leaves a bloody trail of footprints down the breezeway before he lays down on the altar. There, he sleeps. Feet throbbing now he is off of them, sobs still bubbling up from his throat, tasting of wine. He dreams of nothing at all.
—
When he wakes, someone is touching him. Gentle hands on his aching ankles, smoothing a wet, warm washcloth up his calves. He hisses, reaches up to find his cheeks wet, sticky, as if he’s been crying in his sleep. The soap stings in his open wounds, but it’s a satisfying sting. He knows who he will see when he looks down, but it still guts him like a knife when he does it.
The face from the candle, the face from the stained glass. Black-pinned pupils in a ring of dove white. Ivory skin, a carved jawline, a painted mouth. Hair that flickers kelp-green under the soft, lit glow of the church lamps. “Oh, darling,” Jeremiah says, letting go of Bruce’s feet to cup his cheeks, thumbs still wet. “With eyes this pretty, you shouldn’t have to cry.”
Bruce should kick him. He should free his city from this man’s clutches right now. He should make him pay for Selina, for the bridges, for the blood.
But instead, he lets himself be washed. Bruce knows—he knows they are alone here, and no one can save him. Which, maybe, means that he is already saved.
—
Jeremiah bends his head and kisses from ankle bone to knee, eyes shut in reverence. He is so gentle, even as he scrubs the grime and caked blood away from Bruce’s damaged skin in careful layers. Eventually the bowl of water is dark, a pink-tinted gray that reminds Bruce of puddles after a rainstorm, when the clouds have parted, and the sun is setting, its colors reflected in the gutter water. He’s lightheaded as he watches his own blood flow in diluted rivulets down his ankles, disappearing under Jeremiah’s tongue as he licks them up. “Why are you doing this?” he asks thickly, though he already knows the answer. It’s because you love me. It’s because we’re in love. After everything, we are still in love, and it wasn’t the right time six years ago, and it’s still not the right time now, so there is nothing to do, but this.
“Why? Do you remember, Bruce, back at Wayne Enterprises after your daddy died? You asked me, ‘Jeremiah, why are you so nice to me?’ and I didn’t know what to say?”
Bruce nodes helplessly. He’s miserable. He doesn’t want this. Or he does, but he doesn’t want it like this. Or he does, and he does not want to want it. “You kissed me,” he admits.
“Right. I kissed you,” Jeremiah says, lifting Bruce’s foot and kissing the arch with slow, open-mouthed precision. It hurts. “I should have never stopped kissing you is the thing. You were mine. Nothing in the whole of the world has ever been so mine, you see, but I was a coward back then, and so I ran and wasted six infernal years underground hating myself for something as pure, and wonderful, and rare, and natural as true love. So what am I doing—I’m making up for lost time, Bruce. I’m fixing it.”
Over the course of this explanation, his face morphs, becomes unrecognizably pinched with hysteria, painted brows drawing into clownish exaggeration over eyes wide enough to trip and fall into. Desperation transforms him, distorts him. And he is still so beautiful, all Bruce can do is shake his head. It’s so quiet, here. For the first time in months, he can hear himself think. “You broke my heart, Jeremiah. Your brother tried to kill me, and you didn’t come save me. You left me. You went insane. You left me.”
“Shh, shh, shh,” Jeremiah says, tongue clucking against the roof of his mouth as he advances on Bruce, covers his body, boxes his legs in between his knees, vestments tented between their bodies in drapes of silk. “Listen, Bruce, my love, my best friend, listen,” he breathes, pressing palms to cheeks. His hands are warm, his breath metallic. When he licks his lips, something inside Bruce surges, cracks. “Don’t be afraid. I found God,” he explains, freeing one hand to gesture to his church. All the candles, all the glass, his image refracted a hundred times, like Jerome’s laughter in the hall of mirrors. “And his son is watching over you.”
—
They end up sprawled out on the tile, kissing as they kissed when they were kids. The same frantic messiness, the same lack of grace, the same hunger, the same danger. Part of Bruce wants Jeremiah’s insanity to have changed his body chemistry—he wants him to smell different, to feel different so he can be free from his own desire. But instead, it is memory after memory, wheedling under his skin like thorns. Those careful tremoring hands. The tenderness, treating Bruce like he’s breakable.
They kick over the bowl, and bloody dirty water goes spilling everywhere. Miraculously, Jeremiah pauses only to mop it up with the vestment he pulls over his head. “Everything has to be perfect,” he urges, as he lays Bruce out on the newly clean floor and mouths down his neck. “I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
“Wait,” Bruce breathes out, remembering the weight in his pocket. He reaches down, finds the beads, and chokes out an astounded laugh as he pulls them out, the pearls glittering in the candlelight. He loops them around Jeremiah’s neck like the matching explosive collars Jerome built for them. The crucifix swings between their bodies. No blessing, just memory—pendulum slow, a ticking clock, liturgical incense.
“You remembered,” Jeremiah breathes.
“I remember everything,” Bruce huffs out between kisses. Stories cannot be unwritten, the birth of the world cannot be reversed—but some things can be reborn. Maybe tomorrow, Bruce will return to his senses. Maybe he will kill Jeremiah. Maybe his feet will heal, or maybe they will not. But for now, he’s been walking so long. He’s tired. He knows the meaning of surrender, and he curls his fingers around God’s son’s neck, beads clicking between his fingers. “Perfect,” he says.