I wrote this and the next chapter as one, but when I hit 6,000+ words, I knew I was going to split it. I kind of prefer a 24-chapter total to a 23-chapter total, anyway. This means that there still will be one left after the three I am posting today.
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The worst thing about having a leg broken in two places isn't having wires and pins around the kneecap holding it together and a metal plate and screws in her ankle; after the first few days of painkillers, she does not often feel pain now. It is not even being unable to bend her knee or move her leg at all below the right hip for now; the original one-piece cast bothered her, true, but by the time they got to Lugano, Lucius had sent her a pair of titanium crutches and separate carbon fibre splints for the ankle and knee that lock securely in place but are lightweight and adjustable to take into account the subsiding swelling, and as soon as the doctor replaced the cast with these, life became easier and she started learning to move, or at least hobble, around. The worst thing, she now knows, is getting to sleep in a king-size bed alone.
It is not that Bruce stays out of bed to keep his distance; after their rollercoaster of a conversation on the way back, he has been unfailingly thoughtful and caring, thinking ten steps ahead about what she might want or need and doing his best to anticipate her every request and make her life less uncomfortable, and treating the requests she makes explicitly as an uncontested priority… when he is around. Which, as it happens, is not a lot. It seems that every other day he has to go to Rome or Lyon or somewhere else a short flight away but far enough to keep him away for hours, leaving her to the kind but unexciting care of the housemaid who he is now paying extra for extended hours. The fallout from the Tessuti Varese affair has brought a deluge of demands on his time, from the Italian, Chinese and Interpol authorities who are still investigating the events, from existing clients and partners who were put on the back burner while he and Theo were up to their ears in dealing with Chinese boxes, and from newly interested parties who are now circling the company with offers and orders. She mostly stays upstairs, between the bedroom and the terrace; there is no way she'd try going down the stairs on crutches even if he'd let her, and while he is happy to carry her there, she is less than happy with what it may do to his back if repeated too often. He has set out a new rattan couch and a swing seat and a big canvas umbrella on the terrace for her to sit on, and under, during the day, has shown her how to monitor the gate camera on the bedroom TV screen, and has clamped down on his aversion in favour of safety and given her a gun to keep by her side when he is not there, asking to please not shoot to kill if it can be helped.
To his further credit, when in Lugano he has been trying to handle as much business from the villa as he can, leaving Theo to hold the fort at the company office, but there are still daily meetings that require his attendance and stacks of documents that need to be read, reviewed, and answered, and endless phone calls that keep his ear glued to the phone even when he is around. She has done her best to keep herself busy too, fashioning herself a library from among the books – mostly textbooks – she found in the study and spends her days highlighting pages of financial and technical texts, unlikely but unexpectedly interesting reading, though she is glad that she is doing it as an optional pursuit. By the end of their second day back in Lugano, seeing her wistful look every time he walked over to her asking if she needed anything, he gave up and pushed the study couch over against the bedroom wall opposite the bed, put the large coffee table from downstairs next to it, and set up camp in this improvised office where he can be near her regardless of whether she is indoors or outdoors, working on the couch.
Trouble is, he now also sleeps on it. Most of the time it isn't even intentional; he is so tired by the end of each day that he just falls asleep reading documents, often with his head resting awkwardly on top of a stack of paper. Once or twice when he stayed awake, he sat next to her on the bed for a few minutes, then kissed her good night and walked back to his perch when she seemed sleepy enough to be drifting off, he unaware that it stirred her wide awake again and she too embarrassed at herself to admit it. The obvious reason is to leave her maximum space in bed and avoid accidentally bumping or putting pressure on her leg, but after three or four days of this, she wonders if there is such a thing as being too careful.
xxx
She is sure that it must be past midnight already; he fell asleep sometimes around eleven and she has been half-sitting in bed, propped up against a cushion and surrounded by a landscape of assorted pillows, staring into the darkness. She should have at least told him to fetch her night vision goggles from downstairs; that way she could watch him sleep in lieu of entertainment. The couple of times that he fell asleep with the lights on, she was reluctant to turn them off, sitting there watching his face, the peaceful expression wiping years off his age to make him look almost like a teen. She wonders if she could wear the goggles to read; it would probably be too much hassle. But after another half hour or so, she has had it. Either she is going to spend a miserable sleepless night, or she will make a needy fool of herself by waking him up and asking him to come over, or she needs something to keep her occupied. After all, he does not seem to have any trouble sleeping with the lights on. She slides the dimmer switch for the bedside light just enough for a dim glow, picks up her latest reading – a navigation manual so that they can later take turns steering the Falcon in Liguria if need be – and tries to memorise the rules.
She is not sure when exactly he woke up; one minute he is there with his eyes closed and that curiously angelic expression, the next she looks up from the page to see him looking at her in something between confusion and worry.
"Anything wrong?"
She shakes her head. "Nope. Just reading."
"Leg bothering you? Shall I bring you water for the painkiller?"
"I'm OK, really. Woke up, that's all." She still does not want to admit that she was never asleep in the first place, let alone why.
"Is there anything I can do?"
Get into this bed, now, and not get out again until morning. But thinking it and saying it apparently require varying degrees of resolve. She'd have no trouble saying it, really; it's hearing his worried protestations about not troubling her with the leg that she'd rather not deal with.
"No, I'll just keep reading for a bit, if the light doesn't bother you."
Whether from guessing her thoughts or from a similar wish or from common sense finally prevailing, he takes it as a cue to get up, walk over, and sit down next to her, craning his neck to peek at the book.
"Planning to become a sea captain?"
She smirks. "Planning to do my share of steering that obscene boat of yours. Unless you'd rather have me sitting in the hot tub while you're doing all the work."
His expression at hearing this is best described as playful. "Don't know about you, but my tentative plans for what we'd be doing back on the boat didn't feature long voyages."
Nice to hear that; she may have scared him off the bed for now, but it is good to know that the condition is not permanent. "We should probably steer it out of the harbour, though. For your sake, mind you." For all his prowess in private that gives a new meaning to the term uninhibited, and for all his famously relaxed attitude to public displays of a quasi-sexual nature in his Gotham days, she was thrilled to discover that he was both self-conscious about and very turned on by anything approximating the real thing outside of the house; in the latest instance, she followed up her theft of the car keys on the highway lay-by on the way back to Lugano by successfully reducing him to a state of helpless mewling against her shoulder with a simple handjob, with the de facto public setting driving him so far out of his mind that it took him almost a quarter of an hour to stir from his spaced-out state and another five minutes before he could even think of starting the engine. It would be a shame not to exploit it, but Portofino harbour is too small and, worse, full of regulars.
He probably gets both the same memory, if his half-closed eyes are any indication, and the same conclusion. "Good point. I'd probably manage to steer it on my own, but it will be nice to have company on the bridge."
"Company would be dangerous," she counters. "Can you imagine what sort of damage we could do if we get distracted? I say we take turns. But I agree in principle that we keep actual travel to a minimum." She tries to go back to reading the manual, but it is tricky to balance the conflicting priorities of keeping the book upright and keeping his arm where it is around her shoulder. Which it does not take him long to notice.
"I could read it for you if you want."
The offer makes her grin. It is tempting for sure, but while it may – or may not – help her get to sleep, it would completely defeat the object of learning anything from the manual; all she would do is listen to the voice. "No, it's OK. Could you hold it for me?"
"Sure." He punctuates his consent with a kiss against her ear that threatens to shut down any brain cells that may be needed for reading. "Just tell me when you want me to turn the pages."
For a few paragraphs, she manages to maintain her concentration; but the effect of him back in bed next to her is to get her too relaxed to care about reading on, so much so that after two mumbled page-turning requests, she feels her eyes slip closed halfway down the fifth page.
xxx
She does not so much wake up as a discrete event; rather, she slowly drifts awake. It is still dark; he is still sitting next to her; and it seems that he is still awake as well. Which would have worried her if the way he is holding her did not feel too damn nice. He still has his arm around her shoulders, but has now turned to her kind of sideways, with his face buried in her hair; she would have thought he was asleep if it weren't for his other hand stroking her arm, from shoulder to wrist; though stroking is perhaps too strong a word for what is really just running his fingertips over her skin, so lightly she can barely feel the touch, as if she were made of finest glass instead of flesh and would shatter at the slightest hint of pressure, all the pent-up tenderness he does not want, or dare, to show when she is awake coaxed from him when he thinks she is sleeping. She is still not sure she likes the idea that he may have sat awake next to her all this time, but the sensation is too delicious for the thought to linger; all she can do is pretend to still be asleep so that he keeps on doing it. A memory comes into focus, distantly but distinctly; the Italian nurse in Florence raving about her boyfriend who holds her like that, that same girl having told her earlier that he was there, in the hospital, the night after she arrived; he must have kept vigil by her side while she was out on medication. Che la tiene così, indeed; the girl knew what she was talking about, after all.
Still, it turns out that pretending to be asleep is not as easy as she might think, as a particularly light caress makes her shiver and stir, and thus blows her cover.
"You're awake," he observes, in a quiet but very awake voice himself.
The words send her back to the first insane night they spent at the villa, the morning - almost afternoon – after, when she woke up and did not initially notice him watching her. "That depends on whether you're real," she says his old quip back at him, and is rewarded with a kiss on the cheek – not of the San Giovanni hospital variety but of a much more electrifying kind.
"Real enough?"
"Seems like it." She stretches on the cushions, tired of her half-sitting pose, and tries to slide down to a more horizontal position, but the problem is that it makes him instantly shift away; he might not be getting out of it but he seems determined to stay as close to the edge of the bed as is humanly possible. Well, after catching him being really sweet to her a minute ago – there is no other way of describing it – she is not about to play coy anymore. "Don't go away… please," she entreats him, reaching out to pull him back to her, and this time he forgets about the splint-related arguments and just does as she asks him.
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Apologies in advance for the endless ramble that follows; I would have replied by PM if I could!
To the guest reviewer who commented on Ch 20 Selina being relatively OOC: I largely agree with your observation – in fact, she *was* relatively OOC at that point within the context of the fic. This caught her at a vulnerable moment, both physically, being hurt and on painkillers, and mentally (which applies to both of them; they each had just been through one of their very worst nightmares, he thought he saw her die, and she thought she saw him about to be killed. It is the *expression* of their trauma that was different, with him regressing into PTSD-fuelled anger and her dipping into relative neediness). So there was an intentional element to the OOC-ness…or else, being their usual guarded selves, neither of them would have confessed what they really feel for each other.
Plus she did not realise that he was hurt by what he had (accurately) read as her implying that she was second best to Rachel (which, for the record, he disagreed with as coherently as he could when he could trust himself to talk again: the reason he was so hurt by her words in the first place is that he saw that she (wrongly) thought him to be less-than-completely in love with her) – instead she imagined that he was offended "on Rachel's behalf".
This ties in with my overall (probably questionable) reading of their interaction in the film post-Bane. It seemed that Selina was more personally invested in him than he in her after that moment. The telling scene to me is when he gives her the CleanSlate; he appeals to her better self and asks for her help but is certainly no starry-eyed suitor; she talks tough but looks and acts much more vulnerable than her words suggest. Then she begs him to escape with her, then comes back for him, kills Bane, stays in a likely-doomed city, and kisses him with no ulterior motive (unlike the first kiss when she stole the tag for the Aventador keys). For all practical purposes, it seems like post-Bane TDKR Selina is clearly into him, while he has other things to worry about.
I took it from there; apart from my giving him an assortment of injuries that made him less than convinced that he is not too much of a has-been, not to mention bad luck, for her, there is the fact that as a more or less typical guy, he does not present his feelings on a plate and we only see his behaviour through her eyes – perceptive as she is, she can't always read his mind (viz. the Rachel exchange). And, unlike him with his Rachel history (which he is over now, but something that had him messed up for eight years is bound to have after-effects) that taught him to suppress his feelings, the way I set it up here was to suggest early on that she had grown out of romantic love stories in her teens and used men cool-headedly ever since, so when she fell for him, or acknowledged it by the time they were in China, it hit her full force, like a pendulum swing. Not to mention that she had believed him dead twice while he had always known, or at least expected her to have survived. In the end, I take them both to be interested and ultimately in love, but rightly or wrongly I make it *less ambiguous* in her case, unless you count his jealousy as a giveaway.
That said, all this is nothing more than my interpretation. I make absolutely no claims to a 100% accurate Selina portrayal; from a quick look, I've seen a few that seemed far superior to mine, and I hope to eventually, finally, get around to reading and commenting on those when I am done writing.