This fic is an ambitious undertaking, in terms of what I hope to encapsulate and in how I intend to portray it. I've never really tried anything like this before but the concept would not rest. Like a sommelier pairing wine with a meal I have paired each chapter of this work with a song by Florence+TheMachine. It is not a songfic as such or how tradition dictates. Rather each chapter takes it's inspiration from the lyrics of the song it is named for and while I would never presume to tell you what music to enjoy your fanfiction to, listening to the songs given is highly recommended.
Disclaimer: I do not own DC or any of their associated characters
How Big How Blue How Beautiful
What are we gonna do?
We've opened the door now it's all coming through
Tell me you see it too
We opened our eyes and it's changing the view
Diana of Themyscira was no stranger to lurking at funerals.
In fact she felt certain that were she to tally them up the number she had lurked at would far outweigh those she had officially attended.
Such was the fate of an immortal.
But standing at a distance and watching the burial of Kal El she felt not like a lurking unwelcome guest but rather a guard. Of what she couldn't entirely say.
The man beside her, she knew, felt like a murderer.
The first time Diana laid eyes on Bruce Wayne had been in 1981.
The Wayne murder had not made the headlines in Europe as it had in America but it still got into the papers. And Diana, staying in England at the time had opened the Telegraph on a dreary February morning to the photo of a young boy standing in a trash strewn alleyway, a police jacket hanging off his small frame.
He didn't look sad, he didn't look scared. Instead his wide eyes held a haunted, emptiness Diana had seen in countless others.
Orphan's abounded across Europe in the wake of the war.
Somewhere back in England was Etta and a room in a boarding house. It was small and the landlady was a nosy busybody who didn't allow male callers and they didn't have a water closet or electric. But there was a bed and Diana was welcome to it for as long as she needed.
But no matter how many of Etta's telegrams found her and they somehow always did, Diana couldn't bring herself to go to it.
So she drifted, a stranger in a strange, strange land.
Through empty towns and torn up fields, through cities welcoming home men who were and could never be again the ones who had gone away. Across boarders and countries that had not been there before the 11th of November.
And there were orphans, orphans in the thousands. They sat on muddy roadsides with stretched out hands, huddled in the doorways of bombed out buildings and slept amongst the rubble. They barely spoke, they never cried, they just stared at the world without seeing it through haunted, empty eyes.
And now 63 years later Diana saw that exact same blank and distant, haunted look in the eyes of another.
That blank look came to be what she recognised Bruce Wayne for over the years. She never actively sought him out but whenever he did something outrageous enough to land a spot in the European tabloids that crossed her path there it was. Concealed almost completely under a dopey, carefree expression and too white teeth.
It hadn't been there the night they met. She couldn't say when it had disappeared, he had vanished almost entirely from the international gossip columns years before and she had even less time for them than usual.
The night they met Bruce's eyes had been far from blank. Anger sat in them; in his whole body,
held back by an all encompassing gravity of hate that near as Diana could tell was the only thing holding him together. She had felt it radiating from him as though it were a physical force and had nearly been cowed.
Her feet just a little faster on the stairs than they had to be.
The anger was there when they met again but reined in this time. It didn't make him any less dangerous, in fact having been in both their company Diana believed the calmer, smoother Bruce to be the deadlier beast. His words were easy, his movements polished, he almost managed to corral her. Might have if she wasn't wise to him but she was and she wasn't lying; he'd never met a woman like her.
The pieces fell into place on the battlefield but Diana felt in a way she couldn't explain that she had known Bruce was the fabled Gotham Bat from the moment they met. Seeing him in the armour and cowl had only made it click.
Bruce wasn't angry now. He still didn't look sad or scared. Instead he looked like Diana felt Atlas must. Heavy, weighed down upon.
Burdened.
She wanted to believe herself free of whatever rested so heavily upon him but knew she wasn't. It shackled her too.
It should have been bitter, Diana thought, being chained to something.
She had kept herself untethered for so long. Drifting from place to place, settling when and where she liked and shifting the moment people began to notice. It wasn't as easy as it had once been however. In recent decades technology had proven to be a noose. Ever tightening around her neck and finally hitching when Luthor came into possession of her photograph.
Perhaps that was what made the invisible chains easier to bear, the encroaching inevitability of her anonymity and the freedom it provided ending. Today it was a photo from 1918, who knew what it could be tomorrow?
She wanted to pretend she had lived apart, beyond the view of man; passing like night from land to land but that wasn't true. No one went truly unnoticed in this world any more and anyone with the inclination to dig deep enough could find evidence of her unchanging existence.
The light was beckoning and Diana supposed it was thanks to the man next to her that she had been given the choice to step into it rather than being dragged. Although if what they both feared was true all she may have been offered was the choice between a rock and a hard place.
Still a choice was a choice and better to be shackled with Bruce Wayne than to Lex Luthor.
Diana recalled a saying Etta had often found cause to quote as her position as a secretary had seen her assigned to men up through the ranks of government in the years after the war and privy to more state secrets than any of them believed a woman capable of understanding, about the choice between devils you knew and devils you didn't.
And with a startling clarity Diana realised she did know Bruce. She had known him as that little boy in a police jacket, known him as he said she didn't and known him as a Bat on the battlefield.
Whatever had been done, whatever had been started, whatever was coming; if she was going to fight as Bruce said she and others like her would need to, she was happy it would be beside him.
And so begins a new project from me. The DCEU has provided me with a nice new stomping ground to explore and ship Wonderbat in.
I intend to do both and you get to enjoy the fruits of that exploration.
Or y'know not enjoy as the case may be, either way I'd love to hear your thoughts. I accept criticism of my work I only ask that it be constructive.
Ari Out!