(Present)
Bruce Wayne was at Wayne Enterprise, holding a multinational conference call regarding the latest company project. Usually, he would make an effort in looking involved, but at the moment, his cousin Van Jr. was speaking. Babbling, more like it.
His uncle, Van sr., had asked him to make Van participate more, and this was the result. Van just needed to talk, no matter whether or not he knew what he was saying.
Thankfully, Bruce got distracted by his phone, not that the message was a good one.
"Whenever you're ready, Bruce." Van mocked.
"Sorry, it's Alfred," Bruce lied. "Continue."
His relatives didn't approve of his relationship with his butler, but they liked his wife even less.
Thomas Wayne was the anomaly of the Wayne family. The rest of them were your average, money hungry power mongrels, but Thomas was different. He wasn't a socialite, he was a social worker. Not to mention, he was Patrick Wayne's only child from his first wife; Philip, Agatha, and Van sr. were Thomas Wayne's half siblings.
Bruce had never met uncle Phil. Aunt Aggie was a sickly lady; and uncle Van was the businessman. Van's family never got along with Thomas; they especially didn't like Selina.
Van continued speaking, but as usual, Bruce wasn't listening. His thoughts were on the alarm. Not too later, an explosion went off in the city.
Please don't be you, Bruce thought as alarms now rang in the Wayne office.
"Sorry, Van." Bruce mocked, "I'm gonna have to cut you short."
Before his cousin could protest, Bruce hung up.
"Ooh! Is that the Bat signal?" The president of the French branch announced through her screen, directing Bruce's attention out the window.
"It's safer to call it a night," Bruce suggested to his board members that were physically present as he impatiently waited for Fox to escort them out.
As soon as the last person was gone, Bruce ran to his secret entrance and took the elevator to the Bat cave located under his offices.
The jet parked on the roof behind the search light and Batman eagerly jumped out.
"Selina?" He called out for his wife over the noise of the fire engines.
"Gone," he registered a fading voice.
Batman tracked the voice around the light, which he turned off, and found his wife's roommate.
"Jen! Stay with me!" He said gravely as he pressed down on her major bleeds.
"Selina," Jen rasped again.
"We'll find her. Let's get you to the ambulance."
"R-Reach."
"Uhun," Batman ignored as he picked her up.
"N-no. Reach. Reach! Girl. Reach!" Jen repeated the name again and again.
Batman carefully glided down with the girl in his arms, and handed her over to paramedics.
"Bats!" He waited for Detective Yin to walk up beside him.
"She's not here," he answered before Yin could ask about Selina's whereabouts.
"Anything you got?"
"Not much to salvage in there. Jen said something about reach."
Ellen seemed to recognize the word.
"Been hearing that name a lot around the stations. I'll look into it."
"Let me know what you find."
Batman walked off into an alley, from which the Batmobile sped away a moment later. As he drove back home, he phoned the hospital as Bruce Wayne.
"A female victim's being brought in from the East End explosion. She's a friend of the family. I'd appreciate it if she were taken care of as such."
Alfred was waiting at the cave as the vehicle drove in, and its rider jumped out before it parked.
"Where's Selina?" The butler asked as Batman marched towards to the computers.
"I don't know, but she wasn't there."
"That's some good news, then."
"Would be better if we knew where she was," Bat said as he sat on the chair, quickly getting to work.
"I tracked her phone after the alarms were set. She took a train heading out, but I lost the signal somewhere before the train finished its route," as he spoke, the phone tracker pulled up on one of the countless screens on the bat computer.
"I wanna see the footage from the apartment when I get back," Bats ordered as he got off the chair, heading out to pick up the phone.
Batman drove out again, this time tracking the last known location of his wife's cellphone. He stopped where the tracker disappeared and got out of the car, using a different scanner to find the physical phone. He found it somewhere under the monorail track, with a severely shattered screen, covered in blood.
Bruce growled as he picked up Selina's discarded phone, its condition making him more concerned about hers.
He took the phone home and put it in a scanner to analyze the blood or any other prints on it, while he finally sat down for the night to watch the apartment footage that Alfred had set up for him.
It began when the person he assumed to be Reach took a dining chair into Jen's room, waiting for her. Fast forward to when Jen came home, and was jumped by Reach, who beat her up for no apparent reason. The meta then tied the girl to the chair, and waited for Selina.
He watched the fight, and Selina's escape, before the video switched to outside cameras, when the building blew up. The next recording was from the search light, where Reach had again ambushed them, and chased Selina to the monorail. The city cameras then followed Reach throughout the night, including when she was ambushed by Nightwing as she was making a money run.
Bruce stopped watching and returned to the fight in the apartment. He'd taught his wife well, on top of what she already knew. But the other woman was a meta. Selina couldn't stand a fair chance.
As he was watching for the nth time, the phone analysis was complete. He rolled his chair over to view the printed out results. There were just Selina's prints on it. Her fingerprints; her blood. Her blood with high levels of estriol and hcG.
The next day, the hospital called Bruce, letting him know that Jen was awake. He left at the first opportunity to visit her.
"Hi," he said softly with a kind smile as he held her hand.
"Why are am I here?" Jen asked him.
"You don't remember? You got hurt in a fight yesterday, and your apartment blew up."
"No, I remember that. Why am I here? Why are you taking care of me?"
"You're my wife's best friend. Why wouldn't I care about you?"
Jen got emotional at his concern for her, and started crying.
"Hey, it's okay! You're gonna be fine. They're gonna take good care of you."
"I'm sorry! I'm really sorry!"
Bruce stroked her hair, comforting her.
"What for?"
"I hated you, so much. All these years, I hated you."
"What did I do to make you hate me?"
"You took Selina from me."
"Um..." Bruce didn't know what to say.
"N-no, nothing like that. You took my friend from me. Back when we were kids."
She took a minute to save her breath.
"That day, when she first met you on that roof. She was supposed to come back for me. But she got busy distracting you, and I followed her, and I got caught. My first trip to juvie."
"I'm so sorry I caused any of that."
"It wasn't your fault. I just needed someone else to blame."
"Well, if we can put it behind us, I'd like us to be friends going into the future."
Jen smiled.
"We can do that," she said as her eyes got droopy.
"Get some sleep. I'll be here."
Jen slept and Bruce stayed as promised. He sat on the couch by the window, watching the sunset as yesterday's medical reports echoed in his mind.
"Bruce?"
Someone said his name and he turned, expecting it to be Jen. But instead it was his cousin, Kate Kane, peeking in from the door.
"Hey," Bruce whispered invitingly as Kate came in.
"I went by the manor and Alfred said you were at the hospital."
"Yeah," Bruce crossed his arms as he stood watching the patient.
"How is she?"
"Pretty broken. But nothing that can't be healed."
"Uhun," Kate answered, uninterested in the answer. "And how are you?"
Bruce turned towards her.
"Why would I be anything?"
Kate sighed and took him to the window.
"I saw the report, Bruce." She cupped her cousin's face, trying to tell him she was there for him.
"It's okay to be broken, to be hurt. You're not made of stone, as much as you'd like to think that."
Bruce undid his arms, hanging them by his sides. Kate held his hands, being the stronger one of the two.
"It's okay to mourn your loss."
Bruce Wayne, prince of Gotham, the Batman, the dark knight, the prevailer of justice. The man who boasted beating up Superman, fell to his knees, and he cried.
