I'm glad you all were honest about your thoughts regarding the last chapter. For those that didn't enjoy it, I hope that the upcoming chapters will restore some of your faith in me. For those that liked the chapter, and the character of Mac, I'm so glad you did. Mac is a figure that we will see more often and learn much about.

Oh, Moony, it's funny you should mention the Joker...

Remember, those words in italics are in japanese

I was still recovering from my strange dream as I walked down the stairs to the ground floor of Wayne Manor. I was so engrossed with my inner-thoughts that I failed to see Alfred standing in the middle of the foyer with a garment bag.

"Miss Serena," He called my name, causing me to notice him. "I believe your dress for Saturday's event is here." He lifted the bag to show it to me.

"They finished it already?" I asked, surprised at the speed which the tailor had managed to do the alterations.

"They tend to do things faster when Master Wayne is involved," Alfred explained to me as I walked up to him to take the bag and place it in my room. However, Alfred moved the bag so that I was not able to reach it.

"You don't need to take it Miss Serena; I'll go and place it in your room while you begin your breakfast. It's laying out for you in the dinning." He proceeded to walk past me and up the stairs. Shrugging my shoulders, I walked on into the dinning room, where I saw Bruce sitting at the head of the table, reading the morning paper. Looking up, he smiled at me and got up to hold out my seat for me.

"Why thank you." I told him sweetly as I sat down. Pushing in the chair, he leaned down so he was right next to my ear.

"You're welcome" He said before leaning back up and going back to his seat. Taking a sip from my glass of orange juice, I saw that Alfred had made pecan waffles this morning.

"I love these things" I exclaimed as I started to dig into the deliciously warm food. I heard Bruce laughing and I looked up at him, curious at what he was laughing at.

"You're eating like you haven't had a meal in years." He explained, still chuckling.

"You think this is bad?" I asked him, gesturing to myself eating, "You should've seen the way I ate back in Japan. You would've found that hilarious!" I told him.

"Hey, you used contractions in that sentence! Good job, they're one of the hardest parts of the English language." As soon as he said that, my mind flashed back to my dream where Mac said the exact same thing. I must have stopped laughing and eating at the point, because Bruce went from jovial to concern as I started to go over everything that had happened in my dream.

"Serena?" Bruce calling my name and his hand on my arm brought me back to reality.

"Hmm…" I looked at Bruce, noting the look on his face. "Sorry, I was just thinking about something… it's nothing." I said, waving away his concern. He didn't seem convinced, so I quickly improvised a reasonable explanation. "I was just… thinking about things back in Japan. How I was always yelled at for my appetite." I hated lying to him, but I didn't think that telling him I was having dreams where a strange man visited me claiming to have been sent to help me from something "other then natural" would be such a good idea. That would open up the whole "Sailor Moon" issue, and that was not something I wanted to deal with at the beginning of a new relationship.

"You really seemed to have had a hard time in Japan." Bruce said sympathetically, his hand that was once on my arm now intertwined with mine.

"It wasn't that bad, but at the same time it was," I couldn't think of what to say, as this was no where near the topic I thought I would be talking about. "You know, I really don't want to talk about this now. So many good things are happening in my life, and I just want to relish in them for now…" I looked at him, silently begging him to lay off the subject. Thankfully, he took the hint and nodded his head, agreeing to let the subject go for now. In what was a rather sweet move, Bruce shyly moved my hand up to his lips and gave the back of it a kiss before returning it to the table and letting it go. Smiling brightly at him, I reached for my silverware and gestured to the waffles. "It's time to be happy; I have waffles on my plate"

"Is that the only thing you have to be happy about?"

"Let me think…" Pretending to think for a moment, I looked at Bruce and said, "Oh there is this other thing…" I signaled him to move in closer to me, and when he was only a few inches away I spoke again, "I've got… a really pretty dress upstairs." I finished quickly, leaning back and laughing at the look on Bruce's face. He had obviously been expecting something very different then a comment on my dress.

"You're horrible" Was all Bruce said as he leaned back to his normal position. Smiling, I placed the piece of waffle I had just cut into my mouth. Rolling his eyes at me, he went back to reading the paper, and it was then that I caught a glimpse of the front page. It immediately grabbed my attention.

"Can I see the front page please?" I asked, not thinking about the fact that I had reverted back to my native language. Bruce, while he looked at me a bit funny, handed over the paper and went back to reading the business section. I quickly read the headline, which stated that Batman had once again helped police bring to justice members of the local crime syndicate that had been plaguing Gotham for the past few months. The article itself was just a rundown of the events that had occurred during the major arrest, but it made mention of the fact that the overall crime rate in Gotham had declined in the past two years since Batman began patrolling the night sky.

I couldn't help but think that from the things Mac had said, I needed to do some research into the history of Gotham's Caped Crusader. Still focusing on the article, trying to pick out things that seemed important, I asked Bruce if I could use one of the computers later on. Again, I was speaking in Japanese when I said it.

"Why are we speaking Japanese?"

"We're speaking in Japanese?"

"I see we are back to Japanese again. What a pity, I was beginning to enjoy knowing what everyone was saying." Alfred said as he entered the dinning room from the kitchen with a plate with another waffle, which he placed on the table in front of Bruce. His entrance gave me a moment to replay in my head what I had been saying and, sure enough, it was in Japanese.

"I was speaking Japanese, wasn't I? Sorry, I got a little distracted and wasn't putting any thought into the language I was speaking." I explained.

"What had you so distracted?" For some reason, I didn't want to tell Bruce that it was the article on Batman that had caught my attention, but I couldn't come up with anything else. Looking at Bruce and Alfred's expectant faces, I glanced again at the newspaper and saw my saving grace.

"Elvis! I saw this article with Elvis in it and I just had to read it." Bruce and Alfred looked at me like I had grown a second head. "What? Elvis is very popular in Japan…the former Prime Minister happened to be a huge fan. Why are you two looking at me like that?" Bruce and Alfred soft of glanced at each other before returning to what they had been doing before.

"By the way, there is a computer you can use. I'll have Alfred bring up one of the laptops to your room. We have wireless internet, so feel free to use it anywhere in the house." Bruce told me. He went on to say that he was going to have to go into Wayne Industries for the morning, but that we would have time later to go over some things before the Delane's gala the next day. He was telling me the things he had to get done when the door from the kitchen opened.

"Master Wayne, there is a phone call for you in the study," Alfred said as he came back in the room. "It's from Mister Cohen at the bank."

"This is a call I need to take." Standing up, he looked at me and smiled, "I'm going to go on to the office after this, so I will talk to you later." He walked over and kissed the top of my head before he walked out of the dinning room with Alfred behind him. Feeling deliriously happy, I looked back down at my plate, ready to finish my waffle, when I saw that I had already finished it. Pursing my lips, I looked to the left of me to Bruce's untouched waffle.

"There's no use letting it go to waste," I muttered to myself as I moved the waffle to my plate and started to dig in. A few moments later, Alfred came back into the room.

"I thought I would prepare Master Wayne's waffle to eat in the car." He told me, heading towards where Bruce had been sitting. He stopped dead when he noticed that the waffle was not there.

"I… didn't want it to go to waste?" I embarrassingly asked. Alfred didn't say anything else, he just smiled and walked into the kitchen.