this sudden stop

[bossymarmalade]

Bruce smooths his hand against Kate’s hip, stepping up from behind her as he reaches around her to grab a coffee mug. He doesn’t speak, but kisses the side of her neck, under her ear, as he pours her, and then himself, a fresh cup.

Kate smiles a little, faintly, still a bit dozy, as she accepts the kiss, the coffee, and settles onto the not-that-comfy sofa. They really need to get better furniture up here. Bruce takes a sip and then clears his throat; he hadn’t spoken in a while. “Pass Ollie on your way here?”

"Not yet, but I assume he’ll be nearby." Kate waits for her coffee to cool a little, get to just-drinkable-without-b​urning-her-tongue. It’s an imprecise science. "I don’t have any good ideas, Bruce."

Bruce reaches out, and his hand is implacably hot, just from holding the coffee. He folds it, wraps it around the back of her neck, thumb smoothing down the tendon on that side, as he takes a seat besides her. The furniture, beside being uncomfortable, isn’t built for his bulk and frame: he looks a bit ridiculous, taking up a large portion of it without even trying. “We’ll figure something out.”

Kate shifts and leans naturally into his shoulder—it comes easily now, easier than she ever thought it would—before furrowing her brow in thought. “I guess with all three of us trying at once, working thoughts off each other, it might be easier, true.” She cocks her head slightly at him, though it’s probably easier to feel than to see the motion. “I’m glad you were able to talk.”



Ollie bangs his way back into his quarters, dishevelled and rumpled, and tosses a couple bags of fletching feathers in a corner before throwing himself on the bed. “Somebody fan me,” he demands. “I’m hot.”

"Do I look like your wench?"

Bruce arches his eyebrows a bit, as he takes another sip of his black coffee, mouth opening to speak.. before Ollie walks in. His mouth curls into a jagged smirk. “Take your clothes off,” he suggests, playfulness dancing through the darkness of his natural baritone. Kate snorts, kicking back with her coffee in a lazy sprawl of her own.

Ollie groans and kicks off his jeans and tugs off his hoodie, sprawling out in his boxers and t-shirt. “Fine. Don’t do anything to help me. Just eat my corpse when I die of being overheated.”

Bruce takes a sip of his coffee, replying easily: “Not a fan of white meat.” The edges of his mouth curl, just the tiniest bit, and while he doesn’t want to, looking over at Kate, back at Ollie, he understands that he’ll be forgiven for breaking the levity of their mood because.. because it’s what he does. It’s what he’s always done. “Shado’s recovery is nearly totally complete.”

Kate snorts again before her general demeanor shifts drastically with the statement. She doesn’t give Bruce hell about it, though, not this time. The topic had to come up at some point.

Ollie groans again and hauls himself up to sitting, looking dull and obstinate as he slumps on the edge of the bed. “Yeah. So what.” It’s a sullen teenaged pout of a comment, since Ollie damn well knows they need to come to some decision about Shado, has been saying it himself all this time.

Kate decides it’s Bruce’s job to fan Ollie, as he brought it up. “So we can’t keep her indefinitely and we can’t let her loose upon the planet. Rock and a hard place.”

Bruce takes another sip of coffee, before he leans over and across Kate—he kisses the edge of her mouth as he comes back down to sitting, a loving and gentle press of his mouth—and folds his hands in front of him, elbows on his knees, as he speaks. “And there’s the matter of your son.” He looks up at Ollie, holding his eyes, expression open—as open as he gets with them—as he inhales, letting the words sit for a moment.

Kate offers, “He seems to like it here.”

Ollie blows out a hard, sharp breath that stirs the strands of hair loose around his face, then scrubs his hands against his cheeks and eyes as if physically getting into the headspace required for this discussion. “Yeah,” he says again, “okay. There’s Tak, and I’m keeping Tak. He seems happy here for now, he’s getting along with everybody. He’s making friends. He’s never had any fucking friends.” Ollie digs his thumb and forefinger into the bone below his eye sockets. “As for Shado … I dunno. Maybe we can just deport her somewhere. Help her get lost. Tell her Tak wants to stay here and have a family and it’s what’s best for him.”

Kate considers this. “We’d need to mitigate her reaction to that,” she notes, lips pursing around the rim of the mug, as she pulls her legs up onto the sofa and leans up against Bruce’s side. “Is there any way we can help her get lost but keep an eye on her?”

"Sure," Ollie says flatly. "We could microchip her."

Bruce ‘s dark blue eyes flicker once towards Kate, as it had been her there, when the situation had unfolded at the penthouse, before he looks at Ollie. His mouth, expressive of his mood more than any other of his features, it seems—a residual effect of the cowl, perhaps?—flattens, the color draining as he draws in his own deep breath, leaning back and moving an arm around Kate. “I’m not sure how well that ultimatum will go with her; she’s as zealously protective of him as any mother is of her son,” his hand slips under his partner’s shirt then, for some reason unknown to anyone but Bruce, and he continues: “..with the weight of the dark narrative she has about what he means to her, because of you.” A beat. “And the derivative victimized psychology the League of Assassins gave her as an added bonus.”

Bruce exhales, and nods, lamely. “..but we could microchip her.”

"In a way she wouldn’t be able to track down and remove?" says Kate, slightly dubious. Even with Bruce’s skills, she was never going to underestimate anyone who’d managed to be a member of the LoA. She tenses, shifts into Bruce’s hand for a second even so, then slurps some more of her coffee before shifting off the sofa and picking up a lightweight (QT, duh) tablet to use as a fan. Ollie’s pathetic expression was generating sympathy in her, even though he looked like the Dude with his new hair.

Bruce opens his mouth, then shuts it, and then opens it again, noting, with hesitation: “I could imbed it along her spinal column.” Kate doesn’t really like this idea, and her expression shows it.

Ollie looks from one to the other, then barks a laugh. “I was joking! But hell, if you think it’s more viable than any other solution, go ahead. Chip away.” He leans slightly towards Kate’s fanning him with the tablet, patting her knee gratefully. “Maybe if I tell her straight-up. That Tak’s happier here, and he’ll do better than being on the run with her, never having any friends or family.”

"Well, it’s either that or pen her up, and I get the impression that’d be far worse an idea. But if she’s out…she’s going to try to get back at you, Ollie, and at all of us as part of it, Tak too even, though she wouldn’t hurt him."

Ollie mumbles, “She wouldn’t do that,” although he seems embarrassed by his own defense of Shado, falling silent after the sentence is out, offering no backup to the claim.

Bruce ‘s expression darkens as Kate speaks, and his fingers lift to touch the scar over his heart, unconsciously—which is an odd thing, really, as all of Bruce’s motions are conscious, even when he’s sleeping—before he speaks, and there’s a viciousness in his words that isn’t tempered by the normal rage. It is fresh and bright red, rather than the dark arterial blood he chooses to bolster his speech. “If she does attack you, or any League member, we have our reason for locking her away given to us without our needing to lift a finger.”

Kate does not point out how well people tend to STAY locked away in their experience.

Ollie lifts his head when Bruce says this, a spark in his eyes that chases out the pained confusion. “Hey,” he says, sitting forward, “hey! That’s true — she attacked /you/, Bruce, and that’s reason enough to consider her put-awayable. We don’t need to find anything else! We just need to figure a place to put her. Blackgate or Iron Heights or something. She /already/ tried to attack a League member, she /gave/ us a reason to do this!”

Kate sighs. “We were keeping her against her will, Ollie, how well would THAT hold up?” Kate adds, “Bruce is right. We give her one chance, we track her, and if she fucks up, that’s it.”

Ollie spreads his hands. “Hold up against what? Who? She came here of her own volition, used our resources, and then tried to attack Bruce. I don’t see how that would look like we were the instigators of anything, in anyone’s book.”
Bruce answers, automatically: “The rest of the League.”

"You’re using that as an excuse to take the easy way out, Ollie. I get the feeling if we do anything here, it’ll bite us in the ass, but that locking her up DEFINITELY will." Kate frowns, switching hands to fan with. "She came to you for aid, she then attacked Bruce for a very obvious reason—to try to get to her son. It’s not hard to see how that narrative could go even further south if we fucked her over even more than she feels she’s already been."

Bruce looks at Kate, something else pinging in the ever-running processes working in his mind. “She’s never filed any paperwork on his birth records, but that isn’t to say that she couldn’t, now. It might serve us well to get a foot in the door that way.” His gaze rests on Kate, looking for her counsel here in a way that cannot be painted in any other way than pure partnership.

Ollie gives an angry growl, lurching up from the bed to pace across the room. “What exactly would be a fucking /easy/ way out of any of this? Why do we have to act as if there’s some standard of … of /fairness/ that we need to live up to? We didn’t do anything wrong! WE didn’t do anything to cause this!” Ollie isn’t really listening anymore, that much is clear, and his voice has climbed up into a shout by the time he yells, “SHE’S the one who fucking did something WRONG!”

Kate makes a soft little choked sound before she can respond to Bruce’s query about paperwork, and it’s not because Ollie’s yelling. It’s because of what he means underneath it. “She did,” she agrees, quietly, voice catching ragged on shards. “I know, Ollie.”

Bruce rises up, because he can’t watch Ollie pace from a distance. Not anymore. Years ago, it would have been a battle that Bruce would watch from a the impassive and untouchable distance he put everyone in the League at. Understanding the pain and the motivation behind it, doing everything to support him behind the scenes, and perhaps, in the heat of battle, providing a word of sustenance, meeting up with Ollie in the shadows to let him know that he had been heard. But things are different now, and they are different now, and more than anything else.. they’re older. The heaviness and the burdens haven’t lessened with time, but grown heavier, and Bruce has seen it, witnessed the evaporation of the hurt from Ollie’s eyes, the corners of them, the down set turn of his mouth. So, he doesn’t make a sudden movement—feral animals, injured tactics— but steps over to the other man, both hands reaching out slow enough that Ollie could back away or move them or say ‘no’, and wraps the palm, his fingers, around the archer’s sharp elbows—not his shoulders—using the pivot point of the joint to pull him in close, eyes never leaving his face.

Ollie tenses for a moment — tenses /more/, with the muscles in his back and shoulders already bunched up — but when Bruce’s palms cup his elbows and tug, Ollie breathes out and moves with that tug. He bumps his forehead up against Bruce’s face, not wanting to look anybody in the eyes right now (not wanting, he tells himself, not that he /can’t/ because he’s too ashamed and it’s too damned hard) and mutters, “I don’t even care. Whatever works. I just want her gone, and I don’t want her to come back. Ever.”

Bruce nods, and moves his hands from the other man’s elbows around his waist, to hold him there. Blindly, Bruce kisses along Ollie’s collar line, and nods, even as Kate drops her mug off to join them both. “We’ll make it happen,” Bruce utters, and Kate barely needs to nod—the promise is there, fierce and strong in the darkness of her own gaze—before they move apart, not necessarily breaking the moment but ending it with the promise of more. Kate admits to needing a nap, the caffeine doing nothing to stave off a migraine, and despite themselves, they linger, watching her strip down, climb into Ollie’s bed. Ollie joins her, laying on top of the covers, as Bruce tidies and when the other man emerges from the darkened corner (God bless multi-point light fixtures) where his bed and sleeping wife are, Bruce states, in a low tone: “..haven’t eaten today.” He tilts his head in the direction of the door, indicating that they should take care of it, and watches Ollie’s expression for careful signs that he might agree with the statement: his eating is always finicky in times of high emotional duress.

Ollie blinks at Bruce, curling his toes down against the covers; for a moment it seems like he’s going to just lie there, pressed against Kate. But then he rolls over and his feet thump against the floor, one first and then the other, and he unfolds up to his full height. “Should put on pants,” Ollie says, then sighs like this is too onerous a chore to manage. He instead picks up a folded length of red-and-teal fabric that’s hanging on the back of a chair and unfurls it, laps it around his waist and knots it on his hip. “There. Let’s go.”

Bruce says nothing as Ollie dons the strip of fabric, and even says nothing as he walks right out of the room with it on, but when they are in the corridor, he leans over and utters, in a dark tone: “..if the Headmaster sees you, he’s going to give you the cane.” The sharpening of his gaze is an utterly feral one and he even manages a short, hard flash of his teeth as they walk together: Bruce, in Wayne Enterprises wear: black shirt and slacks, easily a few thousand dollars and Ollie.. Ollie.

Ollie keeps walking next to Bruce, the edges of the fabric flapping against his calves, and he snickers a little at the other man’s comment, the way that Bruce’s expression dips into the depraved, the mysterious, their shared experiences and the more recent intimacy between them. “I’m not afraid of getting caught,” he says boastfully, bumping against Bruce as they head through the corridors. “I’ve been caned before. No, wait, not caned — strapped.” He laughs, grabbing up Bruce’s hand to plant a swift kiss against the back of it before letting go again.

And this is, perhaps, where the chink in the whole mystery behind them unravels for Bruce, as he watches Ollie bump up against him: that the joke, the shared history behind it, and how it is mirrored and echoed for both men now drives them together, rather than apart. Before, when they were younger, how both of them would have chafed at their similar experiences, how it would have brought to the forefront all the issues borne from them. Bruce would have wondered if Ollie had felt the same emptiness and sorrow woven in starved, bleached linens, miles from what-had-once been home; Ollie could have pondered the monsters that had lurked for Bruce in the edges of darkened corridors, and if they had smelled like his own, if they’d used the same chalky white toothpaste, ate the same shepherd’s pie at mess hall. Now, he looks at the other man and instead of being afraid at what might lay between them, he catches Ollie’s hand in his own, squeezing the tips of his fingers.

"So whaddyou feel like eating, hmm?" Ollie switches the subject, but perhaps his mind is running along the same lines because the foods he suggests: "Spaghetti? Creamed chicken and biscuits? Bread pudding?" — they’re all dining hall standards, the loveless meals Ollie’d grown up eating and gotten accustomed to. He notes, "The other day I noticed they replaced the tater tots with fried smashed nugget potatoes, and there was almost a riot. I dunno what it is about tater tots that gets people nuts, but seriously, Bruce. You should look into that. Tater tot mind control."

Bruce isn’t one for public displays of affection, but breaks from that to move his fingers along the inside of Ollie’s wrist, steadying the tendons and bones there—it’s alright, now—before he answers, “..I’ll add it to my to-do list,” and he moves them towards the fresh fruit cart: honeydew, boysenberries, peaches, cantaloupe. He picks up a slice of the latter, and then, adds a few berries, and of all the fool-things, of everything ridiculous thing he’s ever done for the man besides him, this one takes the cake: a rather deranged looking face looks up at the archer. A cantaloupe smile, misshapen berry eyes and..

"Nostrils," he indicates, pointing at the two single raisins in the middle of the plate. "To breathe."

Ollie glances at the plate, then briefly up at Bruce and looks again as Bruce’s finger highlights the nose area. He’s always known (well okay not /known/, but suspected even before he was actually in a position to find out for real) that there was a certain oddball whimsy to Bruce Wayne that came out in the most peculiar ways. But there’s knowing that when you realize that Bruce has actually put little bat-symbols on the soles of his Batman boots, and then there’s /this/, the deranged fruit-face grinning up at him from the plate, and Ollie laughs and tugs at Bruce’s ear, kissing his temple. “Baby, you’re so /weird/,” he says, mimicking the tone that Damian uses when he levies this accusation at people. “And you’re eating those raisins.” Ollie stacks some more crescents of cantaloupe onto the smile, extending it up from the plate.

Bruce scowls, a Damian like expression if there ever was one, and states: “No, I don’t like raisins.” But he seems to warm under being called weird, making his own plate of available food and coming up with this: a few pieces of fruit, more than enough raw sashimi, a pile of hemp hearts and a strange, alien looking beverage with tiny stars floating in it: when they hit the surface of the liquid, they explode into flurries of light, making it look like fourth of July in a glass.

Ollie dips the tip of his pinkie finger into the glass of liquid, watching the little starbursts ricochet off his fingernail before he extracts his finger and sticks it in his mouth. “Tastes like mango ice cream,” he reports, then scrunches up his face at the hemp hearts. “What the hell, B? How can you even eat those? They’re not food, they’re rope that never achieved its destiny!” Ollie himself has also added some of the vaunted tots, and a scoop of mashed potatoes with a well of gravy in the middle to which he has added an obscenely large chunk of butter.

Bruce ignores Ollie, successfully, and guides them both to a booth by the largest observation window, taking a seat and adheres to his normal eating patterns: the consumption of the majority of the meal happens while there is no one to watch him.