He avoids the MCU for a while.

There are plenty of good reasons why -faceless is a busy man- but as the nights pass Bruce has a harder time ignoring the nagging little voice in the back of his head that tells him he's being a coward. It's got a suspiciously British-sounding accent, that voice.

The designer drug has hit the streets, called, simply and unimaginatively, Freeze. Forty cases in Gotham's ERs in two days, mostly young men, arriving with dazed eyes and awful wounds from all sorts of stupidity. Robberies and street fights are rising. The night has barely started and he's broken up three already, tied one raving boy completely unaware of his shattered nose and knuckles to a fire escape for the GCPD to find. I'm a god, the boy had babbled, not even struggling as Batman bound his wrists. It doesn't hurt. Nothing hurts. Do you have any idea what that's like? Then, blinking into temporary awareness, eyes widening at the sight of the cowl: The fuck have you been, man?

The tone of betrayal is endearingly naïve and more than a little stupid, coming from someone he's just punched repeatedly in the face, but he can't find it funny. It stings, actually.

If he hadn't vanished in the month after Dent's (Rachel's the nagging little voice corrects) death; if he hadn't taken the first flight out of the country he could find, bearing nothing but the clothes he'd woken up in and a false passport, fleeing the endless reminders of everything he'd lost, everything he'd given, everyone he'd failed. If he hadn't told himself Gotham needed to lick its wounds in peace exactly as much as he did, then maybe.

-If he'd never come up with the goddamned lie in the first place, as the only way to salvage a disaster, as the only way left to win - but there are hundreds of criminals that would be on the streets then, Maroni's henchmen, Falcone's: there are thousands of people who believed in Harvey, who deserve to keep believing.

There are reasons, good reasons.

But maybe this kid would be home playing World of Warcraft instead of lying on beer-stained pavement chained to a fire escape, bleeding and high and looking at 4-6 months for armed robbery.

It's too hypothetical an if for Batman, who mostly deals in now and the moments immediately following now. But it sticks in his head like a burr, and when he finds himself crouching above a familiar porch in the early hours of the morning, he's not entirely surprised.

The windows are dark. It suits him: he doesn't want a conversation. He has an ampoule of Lucius' antidote on his belt, and Gordon can get this where it has to go, see that it's duplicated. The balcony door is appallingly easy to open, the lock barely needing any effort. Not even a deadbolt. He's irritated all over again, because Gordon's job comes with threats and he doesn't live in the best part of the city and he knows better, or he should.

The kitchen is lit by nothing but distant streetlight, making the pale countertop and the fridge glow sallowly. His boots creak softly on linoleum. He can smell stale cigarette smoke and the sweet-sharp tang of whiskey, the fading ghosts of hundreds of pots of coffee. As he sets the ampoule on the counter with a note, he sees a figure slumped at the table in the dining room beyond, and he's moving before he knows he's going to, pressing gloved fingers to Gordon's neck, blood roaring in his ears. Gordon makes a startled noise and Batman jerks back, breathing shallowly, the cowl pressing too hard against skin suddenly hot with mingled relief and fury.

"You making house calls now?" Gordon mutters, voice gravelly and dragging with sleep and possibly a little too much of the whiskey sitting in the glass by his left hand. Batman shifts another step backward, then forces himself still, his breathing slow.

"When I need to."

"How's the cut on your side?" Gordon is remarkably calm for a man waking up to find the Bat in his kitchen. He pushes himself upright, rubs his forehead, puts his glasses on. His hair is sticking up on one side where his head rested on his arm, and it makes him look too much like his little boy. His right hand slides off the papers, and NOTICE OF DIVORCE comes clear at the top of the sheet.

Shit. Shit.

"What time is it? -God. I need coffee. What are you here for?"

The man looks like he hasn't slept in days. But his eyes are clearing, taking on the familiar look of the cop thinking about the cop's job, and Batman's certainly not in a position to criticize someone using work as a distraction from other things less easy to contemplate.

Words are trying to crawl up out of his throat, and none of them make any sense, or are of any use.

He turns and strides back into the kitchen. Gordon keeps his coffee in the freezer, like most civilized people. The filters are a little harder to find, and he opens three cupboard doors before he locates them, and then discovers peeling one from the stack is impossible in gloves. Gordon pads in barefoot to lean against the threshold and watch, blinking and bewildered; and he can grant that this is probably a pretty strange sight, Batman making coffee, hands bare and very pale against the matte black of the suit.

"This is a new service," Gordon remarks, humor beginning to push the gravel out of his tone.

He still can't think of anything to say, and not just because he's aware of how absurd this moment has gotten (that much seems to be par for the course with the GCPD these days, or at least the handful that aren't trying to shoot him as soon as they see him). When he bothered to think about it, he always assumed that Gordon's wife would come back eventually; that she only needed time to allow the terror of that night to fade out of their lives.

Divorce is very final.

There are a host of ifs crowding his thoughts again. If he'd been faster, been smarter; if he'd turned himself in before Dent had a chance to make his stupid sacrifice; if he hadn't saved Dent. If he had saved Rachel. If he'd taken the chance he'd been given, run the Joker down like the mad dog he'd proved himself to be. Broken his rule.

If he'd never put the mask on, never showed up in Gordon's office armed with a stapler and his blind, consuming certainty that he was doing something necessary. That he could make things better.

Is this better? The city reeling in the aftermath of loss and appalling violence, a madman's obsession with the man in the mask? The man he chose for an ally standing alone in the ruin of his life, sleeping in stolen moments at a kitchen table? Is this what he was hoping to achieve?

The fuck have you been, man?

He has no idea.

A hand appears at the edge of his vision, startling him badly enough that he jerks sideways, nearly lashes out with a fist. Gordon's grip closes carefully over his arm above the elbow, just above the blades on his gauntlet. "Have a cup," Gordon says, and edges him out of the way to grab two mugs out of the sink. "I'm assuming you take it black."

"I'm sorry."

He hears the words before he realizes he is speaking, and thinks This right here is why Batman doesn't deal in hypotheticals, jackass. Gordon straightens, half-turns, brows raised: and then his gaze moves to the dining room and the table, the paper sitting there. His jaw knots. He turns back to pour.

This would be another excellent moment to disappear, and he can't do it.

"That for me?" Gordon grunts, aiming an elbow at the ampoule where it's waiting by the toaster oven.

"Antidote. Get it to Gotham General: they have the equipment to synthesize it. Your people ought to carry some with them. Rugetti's men are using Freeze on their weapons."

"Which is why you nearly bled out on my carpet the other night," Gordon surmises, and passes him a chipped blue mug. Batman takes it against his better judgment, because coffee, and Gordon leans his hip against the fridge in the dim yellow streetlight. "I'll do my best to see my people have it on hand. Most of us don't try to finish out the night once we've been stabbed, though: we go to a hospital."

The mug in his hand says WORLD'S BEST DAD. Batman tips his own mug to his lips to hide a wince, and Gordon's mouth quirks on one side at the faint sound of the cup clinking against his cowl.

"I let her think I was dead," Gordon says, when the silence is starting to feel like it might crush them both. "There were good reasons, but the truth is they're never good enough. A cop's life isn't an easy one to be part of. And Jimmy and Babs…"

He trails off, acknowledging with a small shrug that he knows he doesn't need to explain potential hostages to a man wearing a mask to do his night's work. There's too much effort in that gesture. The coffee is cooling rapidly, and it's too strong, probably, though Gordon gives no evidence that he thinks it tastes like caffeinated paint thinner. He still can't think of a single thing to say. The Bat's tendency toward terse commentary and uninformative silence is usually a comfort, but it's strangling him now.

"It's not your fault, son," Gordon says gently.

It is, goddamn him.

"It's not," Gordon says again, and for a second Bruce thinks he must have spoken that last thought aloud, but no: Gordon's just reading whatever expression he has on his face, in his eyes. He tends to think of the cowl as rendering him invisible, swallowed by the symbol, but Jim Gordon can remind him in half a second that he's still in the world, part of it, still giving signals.

He works with detectives, for god's sake: people trained to read other people. It's a stupid mistake to make, and somehow he can't learn from it, keeps making it.

"Dawes wasn't your fault either," Gordon adds, much softer, almost like he'd rather not be heard. But Bruce does hear, and can't do anything about the fist of anger and guilt and bone-deep, brutal grief that shoves up from his guts into his throat. A month wandering Jakarta penniless, losing himself in the basic struggle for survival, losing Wayne, losing Batman, losing Gotham, and he hasn't beaten it down yet.

Gordon looks at the cup he's turning in his hands, and then finds something important to do at the sink, so he knows much of that made it past the mask too.

He sets the chipped mug gently down on the counter.

When he turns Gordon's holding his gloves, which he left on the counter (jesus fuck, he might as well have left his brain there). Gordon runs a thumb over the filaments on the palms, the plates on the knuckles, brow furrowing with curiosity. "We've been working on something that might be connected to all this," he says, handing the gloves over with a look that says he knows perfectly well that he's letting Batman off the hook by changing the subject. It make Bruce feel about ten years old. "Assassination attempt. A Czech group was hired for it, pretty well known in certain circles. They didn't manage it, and it looks like the hit was put back out there, may have been taken up by some local talent."

Bruce feels a sense of impending doom fall over him like a shadow, and fights the urge to stalk into the dining room and finish off the glass of bourbon Gordon left at the table. "Who," he grates, and doesn't manage to keep the resignation out of his voice: Gordon flicks a startled look at him.

"Bruce Wayne."

Of course.