A week later he's still trying to figure out how it happened.
More importantly how to make it stop, as Gordon's idea of a protective detail isn't uniforms but detectives, and so far they're proving sharp enough that he was actually trapped in the penthouse on one intensely frustrating occasion. Rugetti dock workers were receiving a shipment of ephedrine on Pier 12, and Batman couldn't get past two junior detectives on babysitting duty. Embarrassing.
He's had to rely heavily on Wayne since, which means the press is back in love with him and two local models have been catapulted to far larger careers than they were probably ready for as a result. Wayne drops a hustler's wink at Detective Something, who he's started thinking of (uncharitably) as Tweedle, and ushers Candi -surely not the name she was born with- through the penthouse living room and into the bedroom. Not his, but the one he uses for guests he wants to both impress and keep at a discreet arm's distance.
"This is quite a place you have here," Candi murmurs, throaty and low, which would almost be sultry except she can barely stand on those five inch heels. They look a bit like crossbow quarrels, and that thought makes him smile. Candi takes that for a cue and moves in, kicking the door shut.
Candi sank a battleship's worth of kamikazes at the bar, and her breath is a high-proof combination of lime and mints. Bruce leans into the kiss, which is messy but pleasant, and her fingers wind into his hair with unexpected force. His mind is already on the night ahead. He blinks when she bites his lower lip. She grins. Her blue eyes are blurry. He peers into them in concern, and hopes she doesn't need a trip to the ER.
No: the pulse at her neck is slow and steady, her skin is warm, and she's focusing, just not very well. She'll have a hell of a headache tomorrow, but she's okay.
"Lie back," he says gently, which gets him another, surprisingly crooked grin: it makes her look much younger, much less polished, and much more likeable. She collapses backward onto the bed, getting immediately lost in the resulting up-puff of feather duvet on either side of her, and spends a goofy, unscripted minute laughing and batting ineffectually at the blankets. Watching, Bruce feels a startling twinge of genuine fondness for her. She is twenty three if she's a day, in a high-pressure world of glitz and backstabbing, yet somehow she is still hanging onto a thread of belief in the goodness of her fellow humans: it was this that drew him to her out of all the women at the bar he could have brought home, and he's still not sure that impulse was a kind one. She looks like a smooth-skinned, sleepy kitten in Gucci on his bed, playing with pillows, her hands moving ever more slowly and her eyelids fighting the weight of all those kamikazes. He feels cold and faraway, a statue of himself made of some ancient metal, frozen forever in the same moment.
"I'll be right back," he says, having to work this time to keep his voice gentle, and slides into the open door of the bath with his hands twitching toward fists. The man that meets him in the full length mirror has the wildly rumpled hair and red-rubbed mouth of a debauched playboy and the flat, empty eyes of a hit man. He leans against the wall and breathes.
What I do that defines me, he thinks, because that is what he has, that's what he always had, even before he knew what he needed to do with it; and he settles his knotted muscles strand by strand. Rachel's ghost is painting the air in purples outside the window. Her voice is all the goad he needs.
Candi is out cold when he tiptoes back into the bedroom, arms outflung, snoring faintly.
In the morning Alfred will feed her and usher her out with flawless courtesy, and she'll hint at a wild night of sex if the tabloids corner her, because even if she remembers differently, she knows how this game is played. Bruce hopes she sleeps through the night: she looked tired, under the kittenish smile and the make-up.
His bedroom is down a hall hidden from the view of the living room and Tweedle's gaze, and the door to this room only opens by thumbprint. Alfred is inside, a faint figure in the corner, hands casually in pockets and white head tilted, looking out the windows. Bruce starts, then wonders if he's interrupted a rare moment of personal time, because his butler doesn't acknowledge him right away.
That hair used to be seal-brown, but not much else about the man has changed in the last twenty years.
"Will she be needing a ride home, master Wayne?" Alfred says, and Bruce doesn't think he's imagining the faint note of accusation. He pauses, running through the events of the last few days, not finding what might have pissed Alfred off: it's been business as usual, with the exception of a pack of detectives following him around in shifts.
"I think she'll probably sleep through," he replies, choosing to answer the question and not the tone. There's too much memory in him tonight, too much violence hiding under his skin. Too many bad people doing bad things that deserve to be the target of it, and Alfred doesn't, never will. "I'll be out late."
"Of course, sir."
Definitely accusation. He'll worry about it later. The only suit out of a thousand tailored clothes that really fits him is in the closet, which opens on another thumbprint and a 17-digit code; and he's got a lot to do, if he wants to get the GCPD out of his apartment.
He's got a lot to do anyway, with Rugetti stalking the streets looking for a way to own them, and a whole police force more interested in nabbing Batman than taking down the new mob in town.
Alfred offers a silent nod to the Bat and opens the door out onto the balcony
The night washes over him like a benediction, clean and uncompromising, filtering out everything but useful rage. He picks a point and a moment and drops, hearing the line sing behind him. The dark catches him.
The dark always does.