A/N: I'm back! And alive, even!
5.) Waking up to the wind
James Gordon is a quiet man, a good man. He loves his wife. He loves his son. There are worse lives to have.
It is his night off, one of the few, and he sleeps soundly, careful not to wake Barbara. It has been a rough week for him, after all. Lots of work to be done; the tricky negotiations between him and the rest of the force never gets easier.
James Gordon needs more sleep.
Except for that he can hear the wind rustling the leaves, and he knows he closed the window earlier, because Barabara had complained that it was too cold.
He sits up. There are very few reasons for why the window would be open right now, and none of them are particularly good, especially in Gotham. There's a gun under the nightstand, all he has to do it reach down and grab it...
"It's me," a raspy voice says, and Gordon relaxes, though only slightly. He nods and puts on his glasses, ushers his surprise guest into the next room, so that they won't wake Barbara. She's had enough to deal with as it is.
Batman moves like a shadow, fluid and unsubstantial. A thing and not a person.
The door closes quietly enough behind them, and there they are together, alone in another room. "Yes?" Gordon asks. He feels old, tired, worn out.
"I wanted to see if you had anything new on the Joker case. You weren't at the office." When Batman stops moving, he really stops moving, almost becoming a statue in the corner of the room.
Gordon sighs, rubs his eyes. He wants to know how late it is, though it's probably not as late as it feels. "It's my night off," he says. "You know what that's like?"
Batman just stares for a moment, eyes dark and blank, and Gordon considers that maybe the concept is completely foreign to him.
"Yes," he says eventually. "I do."
Gordon smiles wryly. "Let me get dressed and I'll meet you at the..." He turns to walk back into the bedroom and change.
He's interrupted suddenly. "No. It can wait until tomorrow."
Gordon turns to look back, surprise evident, but Batman is already gone, disappeared into the night. The smile finds its way back onto his face. "Well, I'll be damned," he mutters. "He might actually be a human being after all."