Bruce really thought that the paramedics had gone a bit overboard in their caution, even if it was protocol to strap a neck brace on him and tie him down to the stretcher so securely that he couldn't have moved an inch if he wanted to. But, when they'd arrived and asked about prior injuries and he'd told them about his broken back, they'd gotten a bit quiet and had taken every precaution possible to keep him from moving any part of his body.

The ride to the hospital took all of five minutes, and despite the pulsing, sharp, disturbing pain in his lower back, Bruce kept quiet until he was transferred from the ambulance into his very own emergency room. He watched out of the corner of his eye as the ER staff did double takes and all flocked to his stretcher, all apparently eager to take care of their stricken employer.

A few nurses helped the medics get him off of the stretcher on to a perfectly flat bed without actually moving him, and when a doctor flew into the room looking a little too excited, Bruce stopped him before he could finish his first question.

"Mr. Wayne, I see that you -"

"Thompkins," Bruce said flatly. "Get me Thompkins. And Martinez and Roberts for my nurses. And I need my phone from the medics."

The doctor looked a little forlorn, but nodded. "Right away, sir."

The nurses arrived first, and as one of them grabbed a chart and started taking down what the medics were telling her, Bruce instructed the other to take his phone and compose a text.

"I need you to say that something came up at the hospital and that I'm going to be here a little bit longer," Bruce said as the nurse nodded. It technically wasn't a lie, and he sure as hell wasn't going to tell Selina that he was strapped down to a bed in the ER with no idea of how bad he'd just been injured.

"Can't be hurt too bad if you're thinking up white lies to keep your woman at bay," the nurse grinned after sending the text.

He was about to retort when he heard the sound of more footsteps, and then the sound of Leslie's voice groaning, "Oh, dear Lord - what happened?"

Bruce stared at the ceiling, the only thing he physically could stare at, as the medics started rolling off the facts to Leslie. The doctor listened quietly, then equally quietly instructed a nurse to page doctors that Bruce recognized as being an orthopedic surgeon and a neurologist, respectively. She also muttered about ordering X-rays and a CT scan before approaching Bruce's side and peering down over him.

"How do you feel?"

"Honestly," he groaned, "like I broke my back all over again."

"I'd be surprised if you did," she said, "but I'm sure you've reinjured yourself. Does anything else hurt?"

"My head," he replied. "And knees. But the knees always hurt."

"Well, I won't know much until I can get some films," Leslie sighed, taking a pen out of the pocket of her lab coat. Then started poking him with it, starting from his feet and working upwards. "Can you feel this?"

"Yeah."

She continued to poke and ask with each try, and each time he answered yes. Then she checked him for signs of a concussion, and just as an X-ray tech arrived with a portable machine, one of the nurses said, "Your fiancee's calling, Mr. Wayne."

"Just... don't answer, for now."

Leslie gave him a pointed look that Bruce chose to ignore, then shooed everyone out of the room other than herself and the X-ray tech.

"Mind telling me why you're ignoring Selina's calls?" Leslie ventured as the machine was angled over Bruce.

"I don't want to worry her until I know for sure that I'm fine and that she doesn't have to freak out."

"And if you aren't fine?"

Bruce's heart nearly sunk at the thought - not for his own sake, because he could handle whatever physical issues he'd have to deal with if that were the case, but for the sake of his family. This was horrible, horrible timing. He couldn't afford to be laid up in bed for weeks recovering from a stupid accident, not while Selina wasn't quite herself and while Thomas was still requiring extra care.

"Then I'll cross that bridge when I come to it."

One of the perks of owning the whole damn place was the fact that when the radiology department saw Bruce's name on the tests they were sent to process, they got done a heck of a lot faster than they would have otherwise. Bruce wildly disapproved of this and tried to insist that they process results in the order that they were received, but Leslie quietly usurped him. Thanks to her, she was showing him his X-rays and reading his CT results in only another forty-five minutes after the tests were completed.

"Now," Leslie said, holding up the films to the bright overheard light so that Bruce could see, "what we see here is the fact that you never came close to healing properly. I don't know how you've been walking around this whole time, I really don't. And you did reinjure yourself, quite badly - you need surgery, Bruce."

"Can't... can't you just give me a brace or something to realign everything?"

"No," Leslie sighed, actually sounding a bit irritated, which was odd for her. "You'll need a brace after your surgery, but it won't help you right now."

"I really can't afford to -"

"Bruce. You can't put it off any longer. I told you to get your back worked on a long time ago, when you woke up from the coma I put you in back in Gotham. You don't have a choice this time. I've paged an orthopedic surgeon. He'll be in here to talk to you in a matter of minutes." When Bruce clenched his jaw in despair, Leslie added, "You've got two little babies, Bruce. The sooner you get this over with, the sooner you can get better and start chasing them around again. You owe it to them to take care of yourself."

"But Selina... she's..." Bruce sighed, "she's having a hard time dealing with everything that happened."

"And she's got us to help her while you recover," Leslie pointed out. "Me, Alfred, Molly. You two aren't alone. And you'll be no good to her, or your kids, until you're healthy, anyway."

Bruce pressed his lips into a thin line as Leslie leaned down and finally removed his neck brace, then elevated the bed slightly so that he wasn't completely flat and utterly uncomfortable anymore. "I'm going to need my phone."

"Indeed. The surgeon's already got the OR booked," Leslie said, grabbing his phone off of a tray and handing it to him. "You might ask him to throw in a couple of knee replacements while he's at it."

Bruce gave her a side-glare as he dialed Selina's number.

"Come on, Thomas," Selina muttered, fighting with her crying son to get a bottle into his mouth. She'd been trying for the last ten minutes, and although she knew he was starving, he was fighting the bottle with everything that he had.

Helena had gone down for a nap, and Molly was sitting across from mother and child in the living room, watching the struggle with a frown.

Beside Selina, on the arm of the couch, her cell phone rang. She sighed and stuck the phone between her ear and shoulder, and went back to fighting with Thomas. "Yeah."

"Hey, it's me."

"Are you on your way home yet? Thomas is being -"

"No, I'm not. Listen -"

"What?" Selina asked, unable to hear a word Bruce was saying over her son's wailing. "I can't hear you."

Then Molly appeared in front of her, and without a word she took both Thomas and the bottle, and went back to her place opposite Selina.

"Sorry," Selina muttered into the phone. "What did you say?"

"I've got something to tell you, Selina, and I don't want you to freak out."

Selina's eyes instantly widened - those words did nothing but freak her out, which he should have anticipated. "What? What happened?"

"I got rear ended," Bruce's tired-sounding voice said. "I was at a red light and this car was flying and couldn't stop, they told me the driver's brakes went out, but -"

"Where are you?" she interrupted. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," he replied. "But I reinjured my back. It's bad enough that I don't have a choice but to let them do surgery."

Selina's jaw dropped open a little bit. Molly was asking her what was going on, but Selina barely noticed. She hardly had enough wits about her in that moment to notice that Thomas was now utterly quiet and happily taking his bottle in Molly's arms.

"It's not a big deal," Bruce quickly assured her. "They're just going to fix some old damage and take care of what happened today."

"How is that not a big deal?"

"I just... I don't want you to worry. The surgeon's coming in to talk to me in a minute and -"

"I'm coming up there," Selina said decisively.

"You don't have to," Bruce replied. "Really, I'll be fine. You can stay home with the kids and -"

"And what? Sit around and wait? Are you kidding me?"

She could almost hear Bruce pinching the bridge of his nose and sighing. "I just want to make this easy on you."

"Easy on me isn't making me sit at home while you get your back cut open."

"What?!" Molly suddenly exclaimed.

"Fine," Bruce conceded. "See if Alfred or Molly will take the kids."

"Fine," Selina replied through gritted teeth. "I'll be there soon."

Once Selina hung up, Molly exclaimed, "Hello! What's going on?"

"Bruce had an accident," Selina said, getting up to start gathering her things. "Can you take Helena for a few hours? Or the day? I don't know how long I'm going to be up there. Alfred knows how to work the CPAP so I'm going to ask him to take Thomas."

"Sure," Molly nodded, "anything you need. Is he ok? Why's he getting 'cut open'?"

"He... has an old injury that never healed, and I guess the accident aggravated it, so they're doing surgery."

"Oh, man, I'm sorry," Molly said. "Yeah, anything you need, just let me know. I'm happy to take Helena for the day."

Selina nodded and thanked her, then muttered to herself about calling Alfred and ran to the bedroom to quickly change out of her sweats to something slightly better looking. Her mind was racing a mile a minute, yet the two things that kept creeping to the forefront was the inevitable wave of guilt that would crash over her any moment, since she was responsible for Bruce's broken back in the first place, and also the sight of Thomas calming down within seconds of being nestled into someone else's arms. For the sake of her own sanity, however, she pushed down the thoughts and continued to make arrangements for the day, hoping that Bruce really hadn't been downplaying things for her sake.

Selina arrived in Bruce's room just as the orthopedic surgeon was giving him a rundown of what he planned to do to Bruce's back. Their eyes met but Selina stayed silent, nodding the only other person present in the room, who was Leslie.

Selina listened in silence as the doctor detailed all of the ways in which Bruce's back never quite healed, how shocked he was at the state of it, and why Bruce never sought real treatment for it until now. He pointed out parts of Bruce's x-rays that were still on the wall over lights, and though Selina didn't quite understand all of the terminology used, she was far from dim and could translate the point of it all. And the conclusion made her heart sink.

It was abundantly clear why she'd spent the last two years watching Bruce take bottle after bottle of pain relievers, waking up some days so stiff that she wondered how he could manage to function, let alone exercise like he insisted on doing. It was all laid there in front of her, in films of black and white, his worst injury he'd sustained in his life, thanks to her.

The surgeon said he'd be sending Bruce to pre-op soon, and that the surgery was scheduled for three o'clock. He also told Bruce that after the surgery, recovery would involve a heavy-duty back brace and four to six weeks of very little to no activity, effectively placing him on bedrest. The time was 1:30 when the surgeon left the room.

Selina didn't want to think about a month of Bruce being bedridden, probably in pain as well, suffering the consequences of fixing what she helped to break. She especially didn't want to think about the more selfish aspect of things, of how that left her to take care of both the kids and Bruce on her own during his recovery.

It was all far too much, far too terrible of timing, but this was her doing, she reasoned. She could find nobody to blame but herself.

Leslie excused herself to give the couple a moment, and when she did, Selina let her eyes take Bruce in fully. Seeing him like this, lying in a hospital bed, exhausted-looking, his jaw clenched in pain that he was trying to hide, was almost enough to make her lose her precarious hold on things.

"I hope you let them give you pain meds," Selina remarked, her voice coming out a little feebler than she'd hoped.

He shook his head. "I didn't want to be making decisions about surgery with a... clouded head."

Selina sighed and turned her eyes towards the floor. "Of course."

"Did you come here so you could stand on the opposite side of the room as far away from me as possible?"

Selina looked up to find a very strained, very faint grin on his face. She put one foot in front of the other, without a word, until she was at his side and within his reaching distance.

"I know what you're thinking," Bruce said gently, one of his hands reaching out to take her own. "Please don't do that to yourself."

She laughed humorlessly. "You're wasting your breath."

Bruce was quiet for a moment, running his thumb along her hand comfortingly until he said, "Maybe this was all a good thing, in the end. I'll have the surgery and recover and hopefully, this issue will be behind us and I'll have a better quality of life."

Selina pulled her hand back a bit sharply then, shaking her head and closing her eyes as she took a step back and said, "No, don't you try to turn this into some kind of silver lining shit right now, Bruce. Seriously, I can't take hearing it right now. You said the same crap with Bane, and it was just as stupid then as it is now."

"Selina..."

"No, because you know what?" she interrupted, her voice getting louder, "Sometimes there really isn't a silver lining. Sometimes there isn't a reason - sometimes things just suck, and bad things happen to good people, people who don't deserve shit like this. You don't deserve this, you never have and never will, and I'm sick of you acting like it's fine that I'm the reason it happened. It's not fine, Bruce. It'll never be fine. I don't care how forgiving you are, it doesn't make it all right. And you sure as hell shouldn't be trying to comfort me while you're the one laying in a hospital bed."

Bruce stared at her for a moment, seemingly unsure of what the hell to say until he closed his eyes briefly and said, "I'm really sick of this."

"Sick of what?" she asked, her tone almost challenging.

"Sick of you hanging on to guilt that you should have let go a long time ago. I really have no idea what to do to make you see that none of that matters anymore."

"Maybe it doesn't matter to you," Selina said, "but you're not the one who did something horrible and has to live with it."

Bruce stared off towards the door, not sparing her a glance as he muttered, "I have plenty that I have to live with."

"Then why is it so hard for you to get that I can't just let go?"

He turned his eyes back to hers and replied in a low voice, "Because you let it eat you alive. You let it get between us during times like this when I need you to be here and not five thousand miles away in your head."

Selina averted her gaze, knowing full well how true his words were, except she felt worlds away, rather than mere miles. Guilt was only a piece of the puzzle now, now that everything else in her life felt like it was hanging by a thread and ready to snap at any moment. Her mind was still racing, still confused and troubled, and she wondered if this would be the thing to make her collapse upon herself.

The sound of footsteps got her attention a moment later, when several nurses came inside the room to transfer Bruce to pre-op. Selina followed them, though a part of her was nearly too frightened to want to.

They weren't left alone again after that, and Selina kept quiet as nurses and doctors came and went with questions and quick exams. It was all very straightforward and routine feeling, but Selina felt a numbness settling over her as the time came closer. She knew it was a defense mechanism, and right now she didn't care. Feeling nothing was better than hurting, physically and emotionally both, along with Bruce.

When the time came and nurses arrived to take him back to the operating room, Selina leaned down to give him a kiss and braved another look from him that she knew was meant to be reassuring. She could hardly stand it, hating that she couldn't seem to comfort him for one damn minute - instead, she'd all but yelled at him moments ago for no real reasons.

She followed as far as she could, and once he was gone and the doors to the OR were closed, she pulled out her phone and went about calling Molly and Alfred to both check up on the babies and give them updates. She walked and walked as she spoke, feeling very robotic about it all, and when the calls were done and she put her phone away, she realized she didn't even know which part of the hospital she was in.

It was a wing full of private rooms and signs pointing to different labs and treatment rooms, but she needed to get to the waiting room down in surgery and wasn't sure how to get there from here. She headed to the nearest nurses' station to ask, but ended up stopping just short and listening carefully from the other side of a wall when she heard her name being spoken.

"... that Selina chick. Aren't they married?" one nurse asked the other.

"No, they're engaged. Two kids though, so they may as well be married. Just makes that Russian chick all the more gutsy."

"And pathetic. What exactly did Mary say she saw, though?"

"She told me that Wayne's office door was open, and that she was about to walk past it when she heard their voices. Mary's a nosy bitch -"

"Understatement."

" - So of course she had to eavesdrop. She said they had this weird conversation where Aleksandrov tried to quit, and he tried to get her to stay, but she said, like, cryptic things about the real reason she wanted to leave, which Mary interpreted as meaning that she's like in love with Wayne but knows she can't have him."

"Not surprising, the woman follows him around with big puppy dog eyes every day he's here."

"No kidding. But anyway, she heard Wayne start to walk towards the door, so Mary started to panic and was about to run, but then she heard a weird sound."

"Don't tell me she looked inside the damn office."

"She did. Just in time to see him pushing Aleksandrov off of him - actually, she said it was more like a violent shove - and then he basically fired her."

"I can't believe she had the audacity to actually kiss him. I mean, really! Who does that?"

"Skanks. Skanks do that."

"Hey, I wonder if she's the one who rammed into him and put him in here today."

"Already wondered that myself. But the driver's here too, with some broken ribs and a concussion or something. Some guy who was putting off fixing his brakes, apparently."

"Hmm... well, there goes my conspiracy theory."

Selina had heard enough. She slunk away and started walking again, nearly as aimlessly as before, but this time she managed to find her way to the correct waiting area.

She sunk down into one of the small, uncomfortable chairs, ignoring the other folks and families also waiting there, and tried to decide how to process the information she'd just inadvertently discovered.

Naturally, her first reaction was to be furious at Bruce for keeping something like being kissed by another woman from her. Then the urge to hunt the Russian down and tear her limbs off of her one by one came next.

She thought back to how ridiculously jealous Bruce had been of Eric during his unexpected visit last year, and she suddenly had the highly irrational thought that a car accident, excruciating pain, and back surgery didn't excuse Bruce for not mentioning the kiss to her. To find out by overhearing two gossiping nurses was serving as great fuel to her already flailing mind, and destroying the numb that had settled over her less than an hour ago.

She sat there in the chair, staring up at a clock on the wall, and watched the minutes tick by. Somewhere in between all of the runaway, chaotic thoughts, she decided to wait and see how long it would take Bruce to tell her about the kiss himself.

Bruce felt like he floating when he slowly began to open his eyes, coming back to reality under a cloud of swirling painkillers that he was instantly aware of. He hated the feeling, but there was nothing he could do about it.

When his eyes opened fully, he avoided looking directly at the lights overhead and instead looked first to his left. He saw a dull green curtain, separating his space from another one, and a beeping monitor. Then he looked to his right, and there sat Selina, looking tired and worried but wearing a small smile for him.

Then there was a young man in his face, smiling warmly. "Hey there, Mr. Wayne. Everything went great. You're in recovery now while we monitor you a bit longer. Let me know if you need anything."

Bruce managed a nod, then was relieved when the other man's face left his vision and allowed Bruce to see his fiancée once more.

She scooted her chair up closer to him, and in his drug-induced haze, he could only string together two words to utter from his slightly hoarse throat. "You're beautiful."

"And you're on drugs," she grinned. "How do you feel?"

His eyes moved from hers to the ceiling and then back again. "High as a kite."

"Better than being in pain," she replied.

He tried to move, to sit up a little bit, but his movement felt suddenly restricted. Selina explained quickly, "They've already got you in the brace. Thing looks kind of brutal."

"Oh," Bruce muttered, giving up and slumping back against the bed. His head was spinning anyway. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry?" Selina asked, her tone amused. "Sorry for what?"

"I don't know," he grinned. "Seemed like the thing to say."

"I want a hit of what you're on," Selina chuckled.

"I want a hit of you."

Selina snorted. "I shouldn't be surprised that Bruce Wayne would wake up from major surgery feeling horny, of all things."

"You can't blame me," he said, lacing his fingers through hers and closing his eyes. "It's been awhile."

"Three weeks," Selina pointed out. "And you've got three more to go."

He then made a sound that sounded like a cross between a groan and a whine, and when taken into account with his current state, it was almost cute. "Why can't we cheat a little? Just this once..."

His voice was trailing off, his words a little slurred, and Selina replied, "Well, for one, I don't think you'll be in shape for that sort of thing until this brace comes off. So we're really looking at four to six weeks."

"I could just lay here... let you do the work. I wouldn't feel em.. emas... demas... unmas... uh..."

"Emasculated?" Selina guessed.

"Yeah. That."

"I'm sure you wouldn't," Selina said, thinking he might be starting to fall back asleep. "I'm going to enjoy teasing you about this later when you can't remember a word you're saying."

The corners of his lips turned up in a small grin, though his eyes stayed closed. "Don't let them give me any more morphine after this."

"You really need it," Selina said gently.

"I don't like drugs."

"But right now you need them."

He tried to scoff, but instead started nodding off. Then he caught himself, mumbled something, and then drifted off again.

Selina let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding and gently untangled her hand from Bruce's, relieved that he had fallen asleep. She'd felt like she was acting the whole time, plastering a smile on her face when her heart was aching at the sight of him in the brace and fresh out of surgery. She had no intention of relaying his wishes on the morphine, because the only comfort to be had was for the fact that at least he wasn't in pain.

She took a deep breath and distractedly watched Bruce's monitor, hoping the road to his recovery wouldn't be as hard as she expected it would be.

A/N: thank you to everyone for the continuing reviews, feedback, and general awesomeness! :D I do believe this story is about to hit 500+ reviews, which is amazing, and even though the word count exceeded that of its predecessor like ten or more chapters ago, it's now up to the same chapter count as YLBIP. And the funny thing about that this story is nowhere near the realm of being over. Its not even halfway over. So, lets go for 25 more chapters and 500 more reviews! :p