Lots of love to the reviewers for the thoughtful comments! I sometimes get carried away with the plotting but it is great to know that it makes for an engaging read. I have two chapters to offer you today; they were meant to be the same one, but by the time the 250-word intro summary in my plot treatment became a 2000-word scene, I knew I had to split it off.

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Damn you, Wayne.

It is 12:30 AM.

She stands on the narrow balcony of her suite peering down at the soft sparkle of lights a couple of hundred metres below. That's what Bruce's view of life must have been, for years; from his Gotham penthouse and from countless city rooftops. He is probably fast asleep now; he took his leave from the three of them shortly after 10 pm, yawning and quoting his 6 am wake-up call that morning, when they kept their Mitchum watch, as the reason for calling it an early night, besides the obvious reason of needing to get all the rest he can get before the day ahead. If only she had his ability to instantly fall asleep. With the adrenaline dancing under her skin like electric current, she'll be lucky if she gets to snooze for a couple of hours.

It would have been so much easier if it were her walking into that meeting tomorrow.

But his damned flawless logic left no space for argument.

Naturally, their first reactions to his idea went more or less along the lines of you're fucking nuts. Even Jamie, a relative stranger, asked him cautiously if he was sure he wanted to blow his cover, and pointed out that Newell's most likely tactic if anything went wrong, or seemed to be going wrong, would be to take him hostage… to which Bruce replied lightly that he knows a thing or two about fighting from having spent months at a ninja retreat in his youth. And went on to calmly talk them through the logic behind his idea, starting from Theo's argument that catching Newell at the time of the transaction was their only sure bet, to the point that it could only be guaranteed if the highest bidder was one of them, and the only one of them who was plausible as a last-minute buyer was he, with a face and a name Newell was sure to recognise and a Swiss numbered account to back up his claim; his motive for buying the database being, in an ingenious blend of reality and invention, a desire to keep the CIA at bay following their discovery of his survival by flipping around their blackmail attempt into a promise of mutually assured destruction.

All reasonable, and none of it any help to her now, when she is standing here wondering if he will be standing next to her on this balcony tomorrow night; or crouching, bound, drugged, and beaten, in some dark shithole; or lying in a hospital bed; or stretched out on a steel slab with a sheet over him. He says he will just buy the damn thing and leave it to the MI6, or to the Singapore police SWAT team, to get Newell afterwards; but what if something, or everything, goes wrong? What if Newell has armed backup; what if he has a reason to shoot at Bruce from a distance where he cannot be easily disabled? Or if, on learning that he is dealing with a rich loner rather than a terrorist organisation, he decides to keep both the money and the Matrix and brings along a syringe of pure heroin, and it takes too long for medical help to arrive? Twice she has seen Bruce go to his death, and continued in the belief that she had outlived him; and twice he came back… but there is no guarantee that his luck will last forever, and the prospect of outliving him a third time for real freezes her blood with icy dread. Somehow, when it was larger-than-life villains and momentous battles, the sense of danger was not as unshakable, as insidious; maybe it was the fact that he inhabited a superhuman persona, or maybe it is the closeness that magnifies the fear of loss, the simple fact that she did not know him and love him as much as she does now.

12:40 AM. Damn, damn, damn, damn. She slams her fist into the balcony railing and gets back into the room.

Her only sure chance of getting a few hours' sleep is to go downstairs to the gym and tire herself out until she has to crawl into bed. But that will give her sore muscles and stiff legs on a day when she may need to be in top shape. As an alternative shortcut, she can pop into the upstairs bar before it closes at 1 AM for a drink; just one, to make sure it does not mess with her reaction time in the morning, something transparent, a sake or a gin and tonic or a shot of vodka, to cut down on the risk of hangover. It may not help, but it is worth a try.

The top-floor CitySpace bar greets her with the subdued reddish glow of its concealed lighting, a warm contrast to the gold-flecked deep black-blue of the city rising up beyond the glass wall of its three-storey windows like a sea shimmering in the moonlight. The waitresses are clearing away empty glasses and snack mini-trays from the scattered tables, the last patrons are signing their bills, and the barman has already started dimming the lights; at a quarter to one, he is ready to go home. Selina walks up to the bar – and decides, at the last moment, that getting a stiff drink is a risk she cannot afford. She will go run a couple of miles on the treadmill instead, and hope it helps, after all.

"I'll have a Perrier, please."

The look the barman gives her on handing her the bottle and glass is not so much flirtatious as conspiratorial; and as she wonders about the reason, she sees, out of a corner of her eye, Bruce turning to face her from the tall armchair he has been sitting in, next to the window, his hand holding a glass in a salute, an identical green bottle on the table in front of him.

"Hello stranger."

"Couldn't sleep either?" She pushes away from the bar and saunters over to him. Even to her own ears, she sounds grumpy, especially compared to his easy good cheer.

"I woke up," he explains readily when she has sat down in the chair next to his. "Should've stayed awake longer."

Right; and tomorrow's showdown has nothing to do with it. "And drinking mineral water at the hotel bar is the best cure for insomnia."

"Obviously." He shifts his eyes from her bottle and glass on the table to give her a mischievous look. She declines the bait and says nothing. "I like this place," he continues. "Reminds me of my old penthouse."

"Miss it?" she asks, as gloomily as before.

"No, not really. I did like the view, though. And it's the right setting to remind me how to act the rich egocentric bastard."

This, finally, gets her to smile. "Is it working?"

"Can you tell?"

She glances sideways at him, still smirking "Not really."

They sit in silence for a few seconds. The barman at the back is putting away the bottles and stacking glasses into a dishwasher; he must have decided to leave them in peace while he is closing down, probably mistaking them for lovebirds reconciling after a tiff.

"You really sure about all this?"

She knows it to be a pointless question, but it may be her best shot at getting him to admit to any niggling worries; if she cannot stop him, perhaps she can at least help him iron out the potential glitches.

But he takes her question in a different light. "I can't let people die out of greed. If this database gets to any other buyer, there's bound to be blood."

She shrugs, not from doubt or disbelief but out of frustration at getting a philosophical answer when she was angling for a practical one. "We're talking about a lot of cash," she comments matter-of-factly. His plan was to offer to buy the Matrix for fifty million.

"I can't put a price on lives," he insists.

"Your call, Bruce, it's your money." She cannot argue with his priorities, or his motivation; but what angers her is the sneaking suspicion that the CIA knew his priorities too, and bet on him to put up the cash to pay for their blunder.

"I would have spent it anyway," he counters.

"On what?" From what she has seen, he doesn't make a habit of pointless spending. Outside of business, his three most valuable – admittedly, very expensive – possessions are the Ligurian boat, the villa, and the Sesto, in that order; and his most expensive purchase she has indirectly witnessed was her engagement ring, which costs more than the other three put together. He did finally buy the San Salvatore restaurant, though that one only cost him a couple of million francs and is a business acquisition, of sorts, what with it being profitable and all. But other than these, he will pick an adrenaline rush over a lavish purchase anytime.

"This and that," he answers evasively. "What would you have done?"

"I don't know." She does know, but it reluctant to admit it when he is not fighting fair, banging on about taking the high road to draw attention away from the fact that he is risking more than money. "I'm afraid your crazy attitudes are beginning to rub off on me… but you know there'll be no way to keep it all a secret." Remembering how closely he used to guard his identity, she hopes he does not come to regret his present decision.

He looks away at the distant lights, but his expression as he ponders his answer, and his voice when he speaks, is calm and steady.

"It's ironic, isn't it? I thought the best way to make peace with my past life was to leave it behind and start from scratch. And it really helped, it put the necessary distance between the present and… all that. But the more time passed, especially after we finally went back to Gotham, the more it occurred to me that the only way I can really, completely move on and be free is not by running away but by accepting it, embracing it even, the person I was and was known to be, the good and the bad, and still going on with my current life the way I want it to be now. And the even greater irony is, our friends who made the deal with us thought that the best way to get my cooperation was to blackmail me with who I am and promise to bury my old self as a reward, and instead I can be most useful to them by openly announcing it."

She does not like this sort of philosophical musings… not least because she can see the truth in them, and all this deep significance is making her sentimental and even more worried than before. Bruce is reckless enough at any time; when he starts thinking and talking about destiny and freedom and past and present lives, he becomes a mortal danger to himself.

He sees her upset expression, and misreads the cause, at least partly. "Don't worry, I'm not thinking of moving back there… and doing things."

It is somewhat reassuring, but not nearly enough. "In order to move back there and do anything, you'll need to make it alive to this time tomorrow."

"I treat it as a certainty."

"To me it still seems like an open question." She is stubbornly looking away.

"Bullshit." He leans in close to her. "The only open question right now is…" She shivers as his fingers brush her neck as his other hand gets hold of hers. "…how we're going to get to sleep tonight. More specifically…" he whispers right in her ear, "your place or mine?"

Now here is a prospect worth smiling at.

"Yours," she mutters, with a sideways glance at him as she disentangles herself from his hands and gets up. "I don't know if that woman is still staying in the room next to mine, and I wouldn't want us to find out the hard way."

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TBC

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