Title: 1/3 Dime Novels and Secret Rooms
Fandom: Gotham
Pairing: Bruce/Selina
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I own nothing
Bruce
It wasn't that Bruce Wayne didn't enjoy Calculus it was easy work and he liked the simplicity of numbers, but he believed his mind could have been better off engaged elsewhere. Dragging his pen, its use an oddly rebellious move on his part, he quickly finished the last formula on his last worksheet and tucked the paper into the appropriate folder. Looking at the small pile of correspondence work he was responsible for he let out a silent but certainly maudlin breath. He didn't see the point, it was just busy work, all of it.
Deciding he needed a mental break before he started Russian History after the Revolution he relaxed against the high back chair his father had always favorited. Slowly he propped a single elbow on one of the ornate arms and rested his cheek against the knuckles of his closed fist as he studied the girl sprawled on his couch. A small brown leather book was open on her stomach as she lay in her favorite spot, a small space that at the right time of day caught nothing but sunrays streaming through the study's floor to ceiling French doors. Unfortunately, today like every other day, the sky was overcast not even allowing a stray sunbeam through its tight knit of clouds and fog.
He watched as her perfect snub nose scrunched at something she had just read and he felt the side of his mouth quirk at her apparent dislike. She quickly turned a page and let out what he could only describe as a sigh of displeasure. His curiosity more than piqued now, he sat up watching as her bright green eyes moved quickly over the small pages.
Two years ago, when he had met Selina, he would have never taken her for a reader. It wasn't that he didn't think she was intelligent enough, he had been on the receiving end of her cunning mind one too many times for that, he had just thought her too practical. Selina simply didn't waste her time, much less waste her time on something so frivolous as fiction.
Suddenly she sat up slamming her back into the leather upholstery and propping her bare feet onto the coffee table. He could see the banded bottoms of his old sweatpants bunched around her slim ankles. As she lifted her hand to worry at the nail on her thumb, peeking out from the cuff of a sweater that had seen better days, he could see a strip of black leather.
It had been mid-week when he had found the old pair of driving gloves buried in his wardrobe and he had known without thinking what he was going to do with them. He had tried his hardest to appear nonchalant when he had given them to Selina, but despite his best efforts she had given him a wary look, the same one she always wore when he had the gumption to give her a present, as if she was some kind of beaten animal that feared a touch of kindness. But to his surprise, she accepted his offering much quicker than usual and together he and Selina had managed to cut off the fingertips to an almost perfect length. He could still remember the buttery feel of the leather as he had held her hands and measured out how much material to cut and the rough but shallow scar on her wrist when she had allowed him to button them closed.
The scar was new and despite its shallowness was most likely permanent. Her bruises had faded weeks ago, and her fresh scars were always covered in wool and cotton, leaving her slight limp the only evidence of the trauma that she had endured that night. But Bruce knew scars were never just skin deep. The dark half-moons beneath her eyes were still there, a pair of reminders he had of the night she had stumbled and crawled her way across his yard, reminders that no matter how badly he wanted to let whatever had happened to her go he couldn't.
Something had happened to her.
Someone had done that.
Someone had tried to kill her and Selina was acting as if nothing had happened, acted as if she hadn't shown up on his doorstep half-dead. The memory of her telling him she didn't want to die still made him angry and nauseous and filled with the overwhelming need to hit something.
She might not remember it, or at the very least act as if she didn't remember it, but he had known that look in her eye, had recognized her awareness that she was close to death, that she was running out of time. It had been a naked look, one that had laid her bare, one that had told him that she would do anything, give anything, for another day, another hour, another minute. He had only ever seen that look once before but it was something he would never forget.
As much as Selina tried to keep her business of picking pockets and the occasional breaking and entering to herself he had gleaned for the most part that she shied away from the big hits and that she tended to work alone. He imagined this had a lot to do with Selina's inability to trust anyone farther than she could throw them. It was this inherent lack of trust and her defiance to anyone even appearing in an authoritative role, that had Bruce concluding that Selina most likely kept to her 'independent endeavors' as she had once called them.
But he also knew that when times were bad enough or if she felt the gain outweighed the risk that she would and had taken up with a crew. She had never come out and told him, but sometimes when she was distracted enough – which was easy to do when there was food around- she would unwittingly offer him a tidbit of information that she most likely wouldn't have offered him before.
She had once explained to him that no job was perfect and if someone tried to sell you that they had a 'sure thing' they were a liar. A million and one things could go wrong on a job, so thieves always needed luck on their side or as much as they could carry. That was why they were such superstitious creatures.
When he had been bold enough to tease her about this new revelation in her character, she had immediately claimed that she was different, she wasn't an idiot, she didn't believe in fairies and bad juju. But he could easily remember times when she had dodged the underside of a ladder, or questioned him about the sounds the manor made and had anyone ever died in her room, or once when they had been taking a shortcut through the park he'd seen her stop and study a patch of clover. When he had asked her what she was doing he had had to hide his grin as she had turned pink and snapped, "Nothing!"
Nevertheless, he didn't believe that this had been a job gone pear-shaped as Alfred would say. Selina was too smart for that. She wouldn't have let someone take advantage of her like that. Not again.
He'd been by her side that night when her fence had betrayed her and sold them out to the assassins. He had seen the way she had read the room, had read the situation, had read the dealer in front of her. He had a suspicion that had he not been with her she would have probably read it better, gotten herself out quicker. Selina listened to her instincts, she trusted them, so he didn't think she was likely to compromise herself like that again. But just because she hadn't been running with a crew didn't mean she hadn't been caught thieving from the wrong people.
Or that she hadn't been thieving at all.
Selina was for the most part pragmatic, there were very few things that she did that he would consider impractical. Now that wasn't saying that there weren't things she did that he didn't find slightly bizarre, she did. Her complex thoughts, when spoken freely, frankly had the power to baffle and sometimes terrify him to some degree. Her actions were always efficient and for the most part simple, but her motives never were, so when she had stolen that newspaper from his desk his interest had been beyond piqued. It was like she had taken his tiny seed of suspicion and had unknowingly watered it.
He knew it should have unnerved him the ease in which he could purchase what should probably have been classified documents, but if he had learned one thing in the last few years - besides how to avoid a haymaker - it was that almost everything had a price and when dealing with the GCPD it wasn't even a very steep one.
It was fairly inexpensive to obtain the files he needed, the ones on Rana Vandergood and Tyrese James, the missing students that had graced the cover of the newspaper she had stolen. Neither of their cases or even the cases before them had showed any of the usual signs of Gotham's random violence or any of the classic signatures of a mob style crime, the victims didn't have any connection to any of the families, no ransom had been asked for and their bodies had as of yet not been found.
So… the police knew about as much as he did. He was disappointed, but was far from surprised. The GCPD wasn't exactly known for their proficiency or even their productivity.
He had gone to his notes next and scoured every newspaper clipping that he had kept on the two kids that had disappeared the same time as Selina. He had kept the crime reports and the op-ed pieces and even the interviews they had done with their parents and their classmates. According to their loved ones neither of them had any enemies or ties to anything that could be considered uncouth. That information did nothing to help him and Bruce had discarded it. It was actually something mentioned in one of the op-ed pieces that had originally caught his attention. The article had mentioned that both of the students had been reported missing on the night of the full moon, as had the missing college students and the marathon runner before them. At first, he had thought it was just sensationalism, something to sell the story as more than just one of Gotham's run of the mill murders, but when he had been sitting in the solarium with her the moon so big and bright behind her it had slid to the forefront of his thoughts.
Well, if he was being honest with himself, and he always tried to be honest with himself, it had certainly not been in the forefront. Not by far. With her head tilted back and her arm wrapped tight against her stomach as she had laughed that tinkling laugh of hers at his reaction to her inappropriate suggestion he had felt…
Stupefied.
He knew he should have grown accustomed to her by now. Outside of Alfred she was his closest friend and he shouldn't be reacting to her the way that he did. He shouldn't feel so agitated when she was out of the room or feel as if his chest had momentarily stopped working if she returned.
He understood some of it was simple biology. He had given the subject some thought: he was a heterosexual male only weeks shy of his sixteenth birthday, it only made sense that he would be attracted to a female companion. But he had been around other females his age, not many, but enough to know that it didn't feel the same. He felt attracted to them in the basest of ways, but he had failed to be drawn to them, connected in a way that he didn't fully comprehend.
If he had been asked to put his thoughts into words, to explain what he meant by a connection, he knew that he would fail miserably. If pushed the only explanation, the only comparison, he could give was that he felt… Entangled with her. As if there was a rope that kept them bound together, like mountaineers, and just like mountaineers that if one of them happen to fall that the other would be there to pull them up.
Since that night in the solarium, he had begun to feel as if that rope was knotting, thickening, drawing them closer.
But did she feel it the way he did? What if this was entirely one-sided? He didn't consider himself to have a fanciful personality, he was analytical by nature but despite his constant observations Selina still proved to be harder to read than Mandarin. Nearly all of her actions were wrapped in bravado and affectation, but he knew there was more there. It wasn't beyond her to call him weirdo or freak, but she never actually treated him like one. She treated him like…
She moved again, pulling him from his thoughts as she pushed herself up to perch on the headrest of the couch. Her pale green eyes never having left the book she held open with one hand. In the last few days, she had truly begun to remind him of a large cat, pacing and prowling inside its cage, its tail twitching in aggravation. From her new position her sweater had risen up and he could see she had rolled the waistband of the sweatpants down exposing the slight shadow and dip of her hipbone-
He shook his head as he slowly sat up. He needed to study. He needed to learn about Russia after the Revolution. He needed to stop staring at her. If she had caught him, he would have had no excuse for having been watching her for so long. She was his best friend and he had been…
Damn it, had he been actually leering at her?
Waynes most certainly did not leer.
With a renewed interest in the rise of the Soviet Union, Bruce reached for his school work.
Author's Note: Sorry, I had to break the chapter up. If anyone's still reading this, I am so-so very sorry I haven't updated in forever and that I came back with an admittedly super weak chapter. As always Constructive Criticism welcome.
Claire-loves-music, DragonsCreset13, honeylove90, xSilentFoxx – Thanks so much, I hope you got my PMs.
Annie C- Ahhh, thank you so much. I agree, Barty turned out to be quite the creep. MissKyle- Thank you, I'm glad you're enjoying it.