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I. NOW
“What do you mean, of course I was your first,” Minhkhoa says and rolls over, his sleepy cock warm and soft on his thigh. “You told me as much in Oman.”
The penthouse in July, already sweltering with sunlight. The air conditioner breathes out a chilled breeze as Minhkhoa watches Bruce dress, a practiced and methodical ritual. Last night, they’d clawed off their suits after patrol and ended up drinking scotch with just dawn-tinted stars and the city to illuminate them. He fucked Bruce like that in the half-dark, and god, was it good to be able to have Bruce whenever he wanted, no secrets or motives between them.
Bruce shrugs on his waistcoat. He’s chosen a three-piece suit in storm gray, tailored to the juts and angles of his body. Shirt over undershirt, suspenders over shirt, slacks over sock garters, layers wrapping him up. A slut in business formal, Minhkhoa thinks and says as much to Bruce.
“I’m not the one with my cock out,” Bruce points out. “And I never said you were my first. What I said was that I didn’t have much experience.”
“By which any rational person would conclude that you meant you were a virgin. Are you telling me you were not a virgin when we were in Lazarus?”
In Lazarus, in those final months in the jaws of the Demon’s Head, when, during one intense sparring session, they let their blows lead where Minhkhoa always knew they would: Bare skin and bruises and Bruce under him with a knife to his gut and his hands ready to snap Bruce’s neck and they held and held and held like that, death one movement away, held for the longest time, before they broke and, finally, kissed. And Bruce’s room after, and his tiny bed and a shattered oil burner—not the smoothest Minhkhoa’s ever bedded someone, but Bruce had made such noises, he’d had to cover his own mouth with the sheets to muffle them.
Minhkhoa smoked after, on the roof, looking over the ravine and the desert beyond, hating how he felt like a green boy, like his life had changed after one fuck—but it had. He’d made Bruce cry and held him, and he knew he would never be the same. And he’d hated it.
“In Lazarus?” says Bruce, and Minhkhoa knows he's thinking about it too. “No, I wasn’t.”
“Bullshit.” Then Minhkhoa sits up, inexplicably fearful. “Talia?”
If Talia had him first—Minhkhoa hadn’t been blind to the way she’d look at Bruce back then, mostly because he was annoyed that she wasn’t looking at him like that. But Bruce had never acted on it, he had been certain. Back then, Bruce couldn’t fuck someone and not blush about it later; it was why Talia looked at Minhkhoa so knowingly in those last few weeks: She knew what they’d done and what it had meant.
Bruce assesses him, fastening his buttons with quick precision. “Jealousy looks like shit on you,” he says.
“So you fucked Talia? And you didn’t tell me.”
“It wasn’t Talia,” Bruce says. “It was before we went to Lazarus.”
Minhkhoa backtracks in his mind. Before Lazarus, but certainly after Canada; that was when they first kissed, in a cold cabin huddled together for warmth. Bruce had zipped their sleeping bags together so Minhkhoa wouldn’t freeze his balls off in the middle of the night. He’d thanked him with a kiss, and they’d both pretended not to notice the other one getting hard from it. Romance at its finest.
“I swear to god if you’re building this up just to tell me you fucked Skyspider too, I’ll burn your hideous manor down.”
Bruce’s mouth quirks up a fraction. “It was no one, if you want to know. A man in New York. I saw him looking at me across the bar, and I thought—well. I’d learned a lot that year already, what was one more lesson?”
Minhkhoa sprawls back across the pillows and Bruce’s measly 1000 thread count sheets, staring at the ceiling. The conditioned air has turned too cold for his liking.
“Are you really malfunctioning because of something that happened two decades ago?” Bruce’s voice says from somewhere on his left.
“I’m planning a murder.”
“Of a random man whose name I forgot? Good luck.”
“I could do it,” Minhkhoa says. “I could find him. If anyone could, it would be me.” He hauls himself up again and watches as Bruce slicks his hair in the mirror with Brilliantine, like a man born in the wrong era. “What was he like?”
Bruce’s face in the mirror travels through several telling microexpressions and settles on something fond, which makes Minhkhoa even more annoyed. “Tall, dark, handsome. Older; silver in his hair. Eyes like ice chips, I remember thinking. Built like someone in the business, now that I think about it.”
“You fucked someone you knew could have been a vigilante? Jesus, you could have been a mark,” Minhkhoa snaps. “He could have—” He cuts himself off; if Bruce had been stupid enough to let a stranger in the business take him to bed, he’d have deserved it if it got him killed.
Bruce turns to face him, thoughtful. “I’ve considered it. He did pursue me, pretty intently. He might have wanted any number of things from me.”
“But you went with him anyway.”
Bruce shrugs. “It was after Canada. I did a lot of stupid things after Canada.”
After Minhkhoa broke his heart and almost killed him, he means. Well. Bruce wasn’t the only one who left Canada broken-hearted.
Minhkhoa rolls away, taking half a sheet with him.
“What?” asks Bruce.
“Nothing. Who do I have to do to get a coffee around here?”
“You already earned your coffee,” Bruce says. “Khoa. What.”
Why would you let a stranger be your first? he wants to ask. Why would you put yourself in that kind of compromising position? What for? Just to spite me, just to make sure there was something of you I could never have, never hope to touch?
“Was it good?” he asks instead, rolling back over. He lets the sheet fall away and his regrets along with it.
Bruce laughs. “You want the blow by blow? Or are you just angling for a blow, singular?” He glances down at Minhkhoa’s mildly interested nakedness.
“I’m trying to decide how much I should mangle him before I kill him,” Minhkhoa explains. “Indulge me.”
Bruce sits on the bed, shoes tied, hair shining. He’s shaved, his face smooth and youthful without the shadow of scruff—all Bruce Wayne, none of the Batman. “It was,” Bruce says, “and I don’t say this lightly, the fuck of my life, if I’m being honest.”
Minhkhoa flops back down. “A lot of mangling, then.”
Bruce just laughs again, and god, if that doesn’t turn him on.
“I suppose you’re going to say something saccharine now about how I wasn’t your first but I will be your last. I’ll vomit if you do.”
“My last?” Bruce makes a face as he straightens his cufflinks. “God, I hope not.”
If Bruce goes down under Minhkhoa in two seconds flat, it’s because he allows it; Minhkhoa knows this, and it annoys him, and he gets his revenge by wrenching Bruce’s wrists above his head. Bruce winces—the impeccably tailored storm gray suit is close to splitting under the arms. Minhkhoa tightens his grip.
“If only everyone knew what a brat you are,” he says, kneeing apart Bruce’s slacked thighs. “If only your silly nemeses and your league of justice cronies and your precious Superman knew the things you say just to get under me. Maybe I’ll tell them, yes? I’ll tell them all the things you say to me when I’m fucking you, all of the dark desires of your heart.”
“I have a meeting in an hour,” Bruce says.
Minhkhoa presses all of his weight down, half on Bruce’s wrists—just shy of dislocating them, and Bruce’s body sings with the tension under him, the sweet thrill of pain he loves. “Say it, and I’ll let you go. Say no one fucks you like I do.”
“He did,” Bruce says, not even gasping as Minhkhoa presses down. “He fucked me like you do. Like he knew exactly what I needed before I did.”
“You’re lying.” But he can feel Bruce getting hard against him, the tightening of Bruce’s legs around his hips. Sunlight streams through the window like neon, and Minhkhoa shivers, irritatingly turned on.
“He fucked me,” Bruce says, “like I was his.”
Bruce ends up being late to his meeting.
II. THEN
The bar on 14th Street isn’t what Bruce intended. Zatanna said, “Let’s go out, Bruce, I’m tired of seeing you so depressed. When was the last time you had any fun?” And he said okay, because he did feel bad about being so depressed—then again, he's pretty much always been this way and Zee has known him since they were kids, so does he really have anything to feel bad about? But he hasn’t seen Zatanna in years, and he’s been spending most of his time in New York training with John, and he doesn't want her to think that this is all there is to him—this being the mission, the obsessiveness, the training, the meditating, the research, the hunting. Doesn't matter that it is all there is to him, that he's got nothing else in him worth giving to someone else; he just would like maybe one person who knows him, really knows him, and who doesn't think he's a pathetic wet blanket, is that so bad?
So he said, “All right, there's a bar on my block, let's get drinks,” because it seemed doable and normal, and he'd figured they would have a few drinks, maybe dance, and if he was lucky, he'd get drunk enough to not have to think for a few hours. But now he's realizing, too late, that it was a mistake.
“Bruce, my father would drink at this bar,” Zatanna says, and it's clear by the way she says it that she doesn't mean it as a compliment. “Oh my god, Bruce. They have a jukebox. Those guys are playing gin rummy, Bruce.”
So it's an old Irish bar, emphasis on old. From the outside, it looks cozy, relaxed, a little inebriated like most of the occupants. The kind of place Bruce could let his guard down long enough to have a conversation that didn't end with him reliving a traumatic memory or bursting into tears. On the inside, Bruce does have to admit it looks like it's living twenty years in the past, and so are most of the people.
“God, it stinks like—magic and the inside of a grandfather clock in here. Come on, Club Culture is like, four blocks uptown,” Zatanna says. “You still remember how to party, right? We’ll get you laid.”
“Can’t we do that here?” Bruce tries.
She gives him a look. “Not unless you want to fuck an octogenarian.”
He likes this bar; it reminds him of Alfred somehow, the acrid scent of smoke and old wood bringing back memories of knocking on Alfred’s door after a nightmare and smelling the remnants of a late-night cigar, being wrapped in an old blanket and falling asleep in an armchair and waking up in his bed. There are more than a few patrons over the age of sixty, that probably has something to do with it too.
“It’s got character,” he says to Zatanna. “It’s got beer. It’s three minutes from my apartment.”
She makes a face. “None of that will get you laid, though. Not even by me.” Which is depressing, seeing as Zatanna is one of the only people Bruce knows who genuinely seems to like him. “At CC, all of the magicians get high and cast spells in the loft until the dance floor starts to notice. It's fun! You could practice your disappearing act, what do you say?”
He knows he should say yes, for multiple reasons. He stares into the amber foam of his beer. He should say yes, for Zatanna, whom he loves and wants to make happy, and for the mission—for the mission most of all, for the magic and his skills and all of the years he's spent away from home and Alfred. He should be practicing now, training right at this moment. He doesn't deserve this quiet bar or Zatanna’s smile if not for the mission.
But the only disappearing act he wants to do is one that will get the rotting, aching heart out of his chest.
“Okay,” Zatanna says before Bruce can even drum up something to reply. She downs the rest of her cosmo in one burning slide, lipstick unsmudged. “So. Are we at least going to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“About whatever it is that's made you look so sad.”
Bruce squints at the dart board across the room—double bull needed to win. “Well, you see, when I was eight years old—”
“Very funny, sad boy. Give you a hat and a rabbit and you'd kill at the Apollo.”
“Yeah, I've seen your shows, no thanks.”
“Bruce.”
Bruce sighs. “Zee.”
She’s leaning against the bar, chin on her hand, looking at him. She’s gorgeous, all dark hair and shrewd eyes and that deep red, almost black lipstick that he wants to see on his skin, rubbed across his mouth. Bruce thinks that if he wanted to be really unkind, he could do it—he could kiss her and imagine she was someone else and it just might work.
But she’s too smart for that, and he’s not unkind enough to do it.
“I worry for you,” Zatanna says. “Out there on your mission. I know I’m not the only one, and I know you can take care of yourself—barely—but it would make me feel better if someone had your back. I’m just sorry it can’t be me.”
Bruce’s glass is still full to the brim; he hasn’t had more than a swallow. He swallows and swallows and swallows—and clenches his jaw to stop the swallowing. It’s too pathetic to cry in an old Irish bar over a beer, but it’s all he wants to do. His mind is cracked in half, one hemisphere stuck in the snow in Canada with Anton in his sleeping bag, kissing him as a joke, then kissing him dead serious.
“I had someone,” he says finally, every word fighting him. “Someone to watch my back.”
“Had,” Zatanna repeats. “Oh, Bruce.”
Bruce shakes his head. “It’s not like that. H—they’re still alive. I didn’t lose them, not really. Actually,” and he laughs bitterly, “it’s worse. It’s so much worse.”
“A broken heart’s a broken heart,” says Zatanna, and isn’t that the truth? His broken heart’s been broken again, and it keeps getting broken, halved and halved again. Soon all that’s left will be sand. “Bruce, are you safe?”
Bruce cracks up at that. “What kind of a question is that?”
She frowns at him. “Don’t be an asshole. I just want to know, when you inevitably leave this city for the next one and learn how to, I don't know, stop your fucking blood from flowing in your veins or whatever it is you need to learn to convince yourself you’re ready—”
“Jesus Christ, Zatanna—”
“—and you’re out there saving your city on your own, that this person,” she continues, “won't come back to make things harder for you. Or worse.”
“I don't know,” Bruce says, as much to Zatanna as it is to himself. “I don’t know if he’ll come back. The way things happened—I’m not sure.” If Anton ever came back, chances are it would be to do worse. To kill Bruce, maybe. Or maybe not. He grimaces. “I don't even know his real name.”
Zatanna sighs and pushes her empty glass away from her. “Bruce. What am I going to do with you?”
He shrugs. “You could always take me to bed, I guess.”
It was a joke, but when she looks at him, her eyes are serious and sincere. “I like you too much for that,” Zatanna admits. “If we had sex and we stopped talking, I don't know what I’d do. There’s not a spell for that, you know? You're too important to me. Is that okay?”
Bruce smiles and pulls her close so she can rest her head on his shoulder. “Yeah, that's okay.”
He sends her home two rounds later; by home, he means he sends her out into the night on her own, the way she insists, and it's only because he knows how lethal she is with her magic, even when drunk, that he lets her go.
“I’m off to have fun,” she says and then winces. “Not that you’re not—you know what I mean.”
Harsh but true. Bruce has been nursing the same beer all night, still so sober it hurts. He’s never been able to let himself unwind enough to drink properly in public. It makes him a pretty shitty date.
“Hey.” Zatanna leans in close to his stool as she tosses her fur jacket over her shoulder. She smells like perfume that’s soaked into skin. “Promise me something.”
“Anything.”
Her grin is fierce. “Don’t let him win. Okay?”
When Zatanna’s gone and it’s just him at the bar, Bruce prepares to leave. A few strangers have drifted in over the last hour or so; a man in a top hat sits in the corner smoking a pipe. There are a couple of leather-clad neon punks crowding the jukebox like it’s a rare antique in a museum, and he’s pretty sure he saw a woman in a corner booth knitting and drinking absinthe. What was it Zatanna said, magic and a grandfather clock? Bruce smells a dozen odd strangers and cheap pub food and acrid cold air swishing inside through the door. His same beer grows flat in its grimy glass.
“You don’t want that,” says someone to his left, the mirror of where Zatanna was.
For a moment—for a terrible moment, Bruce thinks Anton, but the man to his left isn’t Anton. He is too old, dark hair gone silver at his temples and nape, small crows feet framing his eyes like lashes. Sleek suit in dove gray, too trim to be in fashion. There’s a bit of Anton in his shoulders, in his confident stance and his sharp smile, in his wide hands that have all the calluses Bruce has worked hard to earn, but that’s just wishful thinking. That’s just stupid. He nods at Bruce’s beer and stubs out a cigarette in an ashtray.
“Thanks, but I do,” says Bruce, turning away. The man, though, settles at the bar next to Bruce. Right next to him.
“Scotch,” the man says to the bartender. “Neat. And another for him.”
The man smiles, effusive and warm and easy, looking at Bruce like a long lost friend. Those eyes travel up and down and up again—so maybe friend isn’t the right word.
“I don’t like scotch,” Bruce says, almost as an apology.
The man still smiles. “Trust me,” he says, “I know what you like.”
III. NOW
Minhkhoa doesn’t realize that something is off until he sees the snow. He’s too busy with his research, his wild goose chase. When he told Bruce that he was maybe the only person who could find the stranger who’d taken his virginity, he was telling the truth—and he was just petty enough to try it.
He started with what he knew, and what he knew is that it happened in New York City, and it happened after the disaster that had been Canada. It gave him a range of years and a location, and from there he had to peel back the skin of history to search for the signs of Bruce. Minhkhoa wouldn’t have been able to do it back then, and he’d tried—after Canada, after his chest stopped aching so damn much and he realized that he hated when he turned to say something to Bruce and found himself addressing empty air, he’d tried to look for him. Eventually, they would find the same teachers because they both wanted the best instruction, but in the meantime, Minhkhoa dug into travel records and camera footage, and he couldn’t find anything.
Now he knows where to look. He knows Bruce with a knowledge that only years could give him. When he starts tracing Bruce’s steps after Canada, he knows which aliases to track. He knows which accounts Bruce would draw on while he’s on the move. It doesn’t take him long to find the connection between Giovanni Zatara and Bruce Wayne. From there, it’s just a matter of narrowing down Bruce’s location through his preferences; he always liked slumming it in the way rich kids found empowering, and he’d live near the Zataras—which is how he finds it, a dingy studio near a historic bar on the cusp of Greenwich Village, rented under the name Wayne Thomson for six months back when they still played Pearl Jam on the radio.
It’s meant to be a joke. It’s meant just to prove that he can do it. But every time he thinks above Bruce’s subtly gleeful face saying “It was the fuck of my life”—he goes temporarily insane, and that’s how he ends up in New York, breaking into the back room of an old bar to rifle through years of receipts. It’s a dingy place, the kind where the tables and surfaces are sticky from a thousand hands and spilled drinks, sleepy and dusty in the late afternoon when he arrives and muscles his way into the back room to the cardboard boxes of records.
“Icon,” he says as he begins pulling files, and he hears the corresponding chime in his comm that says she’s listening, “scan each document and alert for possible aliases of Bruce Wayne.”
“Of course, sir,” comes Icon’s voice. “Though if you told me what you are looking for, I might be of more assistance.”
“Nope.” Minhkhoa draws it out and flips through a file. “Why did I code you to be so nosy?”
Icon chimes mockingly.
His phone rings just as he’s cracked into the box from 2001.
“What,” he says around the penlight in his mouth when he picks up.
“New York, huh?” It’s Bruce, and he sounds amused, which is supremely irritating.
He pulls the penlight out. “I’m on a case,” Minhkhoa snaps. “If this is a booty call, you’ll have to wait until I’m back in your horrible state.”
“Tell me about the case.”
Minhkhoa grimaces. “It’s nothing to do with Gotham, which means it’s outside of your purview.”
“You’re pissy—must mean a lot of research. That never was your strong suit.”
“You’re right, my talents mostly revolve around getting results. Was there a point to this call, or were you just looking to annoy me?” Minhkhoa says, trying not to sound as peeved as he is.
“I just wanted to know what your plan was. I’m interested in your method. Interrogate every 60-year-old man south of the Flatiron?”
His method, currently, is to find Bruce’s receipt from twenty years ago and then, having confirmed Bruce was here, write down the names of any man who was there on the same night and narrow it down from there. You know, like a crazy person.
Instead of explaining this batshit approach, he says, “I’m sure you can think of something better to do than to cast aspersions on my detecting abilities.”
“Just promise me,” and Bruce’s voice has changed a little, lost a bit of its playfulness—or maybe he just sounds more distant, like he’s going through a tunnel, “that you’ll come back.”
Minhkhoa frowns. “We don’t do that, you and me. We’ve been down this road too many times—we own this road. If I come back, I come back, that’s it.”
“I know. Just—spare a warning, if you can. If you go.”
“Where is this all coming from?” Minhkhoa asks, against his better judgment.
“Nowhere. And try not to hurt anyone.”
Minhkhoa still hasn’t decided if he’s going to kill the man when he finds him or not. Either way, it’s no longer Bruce’s business. “There you go again, always thinking the worst of me. I’ve already made you that promise,” Minhkhoa replies. “Rude of you to belabor the point.”
“That’s not what I mean—” But Bruce’s voice is fading like worn fabric. “Khoa? Don’t—”
“You’re breaking up,” Minhkhoa says, but it’s not true—the line doesn’t crackle and break, it just dwindles and disappears, like a sound passing into the distance. Like Bruce is floating away downstream. He hangs up, pinches the bridge of his nose. He needs to be wearing those stupid reading glasses of Bruce’s to be looking at so many analog documents; already he has a headache.
“Sir, I have found no match to recorded aliases of Bruce Wayne in the document you have seen,” Icon says in his ear. “Perhaps if this were a digital venture—”
“Forget it,” Minhkhoa snaps. “Go offline.” The past is gone already. Minhkhoa has already lost. He hates losing.
The bar is busier when he leaves than it was when he entered, swinging out of the back door like he was just in the bathroom for a few hours. There are several people at the bar now, and crowded into the shoddy little booths, and an old jukebox is trilling in the corner like something out of a movie. The windows are velvety dark even though it was only 2pm when Minhkhoa arrived; there must be a summer storm rolling in.
Minhkhoa doesn’t realize something is off until he sees the snow—until he shoulders open the door to exit and is suddenly drowning in cold. Real cold, proper frigid air, the kind that makes your teeth ache. The sky is black, the city toasting lanterns and neons to the clouds like glowing drinks, and a sharp wind tosses snow into his face. He catches a handful and lets it ache, freezing in his palm. It’s July; it’s that hideous swampy kind of hot in Gotham that makes Bruce intolerable, heavy and humid in a way that reminds Minhkhoa of his childhood in Singapore. But somehow, it’s snowing in New York.
“Icon, what’s with the snow?” Minhkhoa asks, pinging his comm. There’s no chime in reply. “Icon?”
Behind him, the door to the bar swings open, something nudges his back.
“In or out, dude,” a woman’s voice says, and when Khoa turns around he sees a shock of wild black hair and bold lipstick, and it’s a face he’s seen before but can’t place. The woman sizes him up and then moves around him, pulling on a fur-trimmed coat that’s definitely a few decades out of fashion—it begins to coalesce, slowly. Slower than it should have.
The woman is gone, probably having waved him off as just another lunatic in the city, but it’s starting to creep up on Minhkhoa like a full-body shiver. The door to the bar swings open again, this time to expel a pair of oddly dressed men—and Minhkhoa sees him at the bar.
“Oh, you are fucking kidding me,” Minhkhoa says to the cold empty air.
A dark head bent over a half-finished beer, hair grown too long, long enough to curl around the backs of his ears and the top of his neck. His clothes are forgettable, but a little too nice for someone so set on slumming it. There’s half a day’s growth of scruff on his chin, enough that it would feel like a handful of needles against the skin; Minhkhoa remembers the year when his beard came in fully, how jealous he was of that coarse dark hair, so thick when all Minhkhoa could manage was a few feeble patches. In Canada, they shaved on the same day and made a competition of it. By day three, he always had a thick black beard that made Minhkhoa want to kiss him into the ground.
Bruce sits at the bar, sadness seeped in every bone. I did a lot of stupid things after Canada.
Minhkhoa steps back into the bar.
IV. BEFORE THEN
“Where were you last night?” Bruce asks Anton, swallowing his pride.
Anton’s been sneaking out. It’s a phrase that implies that he and Bruce have a curfew, or an understanding about telling each other where they go and what they do. They don’t; in the way of newly grown adults traveling the world, they do what they want and they answer to no one for it, not even each other.
But ever since the night mission at the American embassy, Anton has been sneaking out, and Bruce has tried his hardest not to care. Anton plays it beautifully, with that ease Avery is always praising him for when he dons a disguise like a second skin, or a new name, a history, a personal code. Every night, Anton transforms into someone else, all for the sake of practice, and then he slips out the window or the door, and then Bruce is alone. When Anton comes out of his room the next morning, it’s with his usual sly smile and a face that dares Bruce to ask him where he was.
So he asks.
“Oh, did you wait up for me? I don’t even know what time I came in.” Anton quirks his mouth at Bruce over his black coffee, daring him even more.
“Quarter past four. But that’s not the point.” Bruce tosses an arm over the back of his chair, going for nonchalant. “Did Avery send you out?”
Anton grins outright. “Why, are you worried you’re falling behind in your studies?”
Answer the question, you insufferable bastard, Bruce wants to say. Instead, he takes the cup of coffee Anton has poured for him. They sit in silence for a few minutes, watching sunbeams creep steadily longer on the floorboards. They were always good at silence—at talking too, though that’s gotten a little strained between them lately.
“If this is about the embassy,” Bruce starts to say.
A cup smacks the table. “Don’t. Christ.”
“I’m trying to clear the air.”
“Why? The air is clear. We both played the game, and you won.” Anton sounds only mildly tortured saying it.
“It wasn’t a game,” says Bruce. “It was a mission.”
“Sure.” Anton’s coffee is down to the dregs now. “You still won. Not fair or square, but won all the same.”
“Like you’re ever fair about your wins,” Bruce says, irritated. “You don’t see me getting sore about it.”
Anton turns on him sharply. “You don’t know what I’m sore about. And that’s the problem.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that. The silence that fills the room is the same as it’s been between them since that night, tense and awkward in a way it’s never been. Bruce wants things as they used to be, easy and free, and for Anton to smile at him without that tightness he doesn’t understand.
“Look,” Anton says after the silence goes on almost too long to bear. “You can come with me tonight, if you’re so curious about it. As long as you promise to not be, you know, you about it.”
Bruce nods. “Game or mission?”
“Oh, it’s a game,” says Anton with a slow creeping smile that promises trouble. “The best kind of game.”
That night, he follows Anton into the city.
No disguises this time, which should have been the first clue. Maybe that part of the deception had always been for Bruce’s benefit only, but Anton coaxes Bruce into an Anton-approved outfit by way of bitching, and calls them a cab. Bruce’s need to control, to predict, has him on edge as they leave the cab and backtrack down some seedy alleyways. Perhaps Anton has found a new teacher, or is teaching himself something. Dread mixes with his own cologne to make an unpleasant cocktail.
“I can hear your brain going like a jet engine,” says Anton, mist clouds puffing out with his laughs. “We ought to hook that thing up to a generator, cut down on carbon emissions. Power the whole city.”
“Not your strongest quip.” Bruce hunches into his coat. Winter in Moscow is somehow even worse than in Gotham.
“The cold’s cutting off my circulation, give me a break.”
They're walking close enough that every other step, their shoulders bump and their elbows connect, a jolt of warmth come and gone. They could huddle together against the wind, and Bruce pictures it in his mind—but the two boys doing it in his imagination aren't him and Anton. He can't see them doing it.
“Relax. You think I’d drag you into the city freezing my balls off, just to kill you? After all our years traveling together?” Anton smirks. “Give me a little credit.”
“I give you plenty of credit,” Bruce says. “But I'm waiting for the gotcha.”
“Huh?”
“The ‘I got you’ moment,” he explains. “After the embassy, when I—you know. That was a gotcha.”
“Ah,” says Anton, mouth twisting. “Well. You did indeed get me.”
Bruce doesn’t want to talk about it, but apparently it needs to be talked about. “Anton,” he says, with purpose, with feeling.
Anton walks ahead. “We’re here.”
From the outside, it looks like any number of industrial-style warehouses, whitewash over layers of accumulated soot. Bruce follows Anton through a side door, down a maintenance corridor, into a dingy elevator that lurches down like it’s on its last legs. Maybe Anton is going to murder him after all.
“Remember,” Anton says as the elevator ticks lower, “try not to be you about this. Keep an open mind.”
“What does that even mean?”
When the elevator doors slide open, Bruce understands.
Music throbs through the bones of the building, subwoofer sending the bass straight to Bruce’s kidneys. The lights are dim and sultry, just bright enough to catch on skin and cast everything else into shadow, and all Bruce can see are bodies, bodies—dancing and drinking and shoved up together against the brick walls, grinding and kissing, moans lost to the music; nude forms crucified on St. Andrew’s crosses, blindfolded and writhing under flogs and feathers, public sadomasochism made religious, pills passed from mouth to mouth like unholy communion. Everything is obscene. Everything is—leather.
Anton turns to walk backward into the room, just to watch Bruce’s face. He cackles, cheeks turned ruddy under scarlet floodlights.
“Is this a joke,” Bruce shouts, and the music swallows his voice.
Anton shouts back. “What?”
“Is this a joke.”
“No, but your face is,” Anton bellows into his ear, close enough to feel his breath. “You wanted to know where I was going at night.” He gestures widely, jaunty and confident like they aren’t surrounded by people fucking openly, like this is all enormous fun.
Something cold kisses his neck, and time fractures down to increments: A hand touching his skin, right under his collar, and his body reacts like it’s been taught to react at any threat—he spins, grabs the offending wrist and twists back to wrench the arm around and lock the elbow joint, hand pressing the shoulder down hard enough to discourage, not hard enough to snap anything.
Distantly, he’s aware of someone screaming.
And then Anton is there, dislocating him from the woman who shoved her hand down his shirt.
“Back off,” Anton snarls at her. “He’s not yours.”
The woman cradles her arm, half naked and furious. “Motherfucking crazy piece of dogshit! You’ll get bounced for this!”
“You assaulted him.” Anton’s arm is around his shoulders, angling him away from the main chaotic room and toward a set of curtained alcoves. “No consent, no touching. Fuck off, or we’ll see what management has to say.”
The shadows deepen the further they go, maneuvering around bodies entangled in ecstasy over leather sofas.
“You okay?” Anton asks. “She won’t say anything. This place is illegal; no one wants to call attention to it.”
“It's a sex club,” Bruce says, slightly stunned. “Anton. What the fuck are you thinking?”
“People get high, get touchy, that's all.” He’s leading Bruce toward a short hallway, a curtained room at the end lighted from within. “She probably thought you weren't picky, being a first timer. I don't care for the main room anyway, it’s back here that—”
Bruce wrenches himself out from under Anton’s arm. “I mean, what have you been doing here?”
Anton levels a gaze at him. “Come on, Bruce. What do you think I’ve been doing?”
And then he ducks behind the curtain. After a moment, Bruce follows—and inside, it's much more bearable. The music from the main room is slightly muffled, and it doesn't smell like sex and cleaner and desperation in here. It's a small rounded room, a low ceiling casting purple light across a circular hybrid between a bed and a sofa. On it, two people are crumpled together, kissing passionately, fully clothed but still filthy. Somehow it’s more of an intrusion than seeing all of the naked bodies on display.
Behind him, Anton draws the curtains shut.
“Got started without me?” says Anton, breezing past Bruce like he’s not even there. “I’m wounded.”
The pair on the bed break apart: A man built like a Viking with fair hair and light eyes to match, tangled around a small woman with skin turned jewel-dark in the purple light, black hair and a hungry face that she turns to Bruce.
“You’re late, Emil,” she says. “Thought you weren’t coming. You brought the boyfriend?”
There’s a moment of blank comprehension before, gut-punched, Bruce realizes she’s talking about him.
“As promised. They’ve been wanting to meet you,” Anton tells Bruce, like this is normal, like this is just another mission, a test set out by Avery—let’s see how you adapt when things take an unexpected turn, she might say. Pretend to be a couple. Make me believe it. Maybe that’s why Anton’s arm comes around him to take off his coat, intimate and easy like he’s done it a hundred times before; it’s some absurd challenge Anton has set for them. “I told them you might be curious, but I made no promises about your participation, so don't worry.”
Anton tosses their coats aside and settles next to the Viking. “This is Mari and her fiancé, Simón. They've been…keeping me occupied recently. Darlings, this is—”
“Tom,” says Bruce, before he's stuck with whatever name Anton has concocted. “Nice to meet you.”
“American?” asks Simón, clearly disappointed.
“Unfortunately.”
Mari waves a hand. “Oh, stop it. Tom, sit next to me. Get comfortable.”
“Thanks.” Bruce sits, because what else is there to do. Anton has already cast himself down next to the Viking, limbs sprawled and at ease—with the particular kind of ease someone has when they’re in a familiar place, Bruce realizes. How many times has Anton been here? Has it always been with these people? He feels Anton watching him, a cool appraisal.
Mari is watching him too. Her eyes rake him over, looking to catch sparks. “Emil was right,” she says, picking up a martini glass from a low table. “You are lovely.”
Bruce tries not to think about Anton talking about him, calling him lovely. “How did you all meet?”
“At the university. I’m doing a PhD in nuclear physics,” she explains. Bruce tries not to let his surprise show. “Simón is in condensed matter. Emil caught our eye after attending my guest lecture, isn’t that right? I was very impressed with his questions.”
Bruce catches Anton’s eye; Anton is grinning, accepting a lighted cigarette from the Viking and taking a deep drag. Two weeks ago, Avery tasked Anton with retrieving data from a lab at a local university. He came back nine hours later dressed like a forgettable undergrad, disheveled and smug. Anton shrugs at Bruce and blows out a cloud of smoke, turned silver-violet under the lamps.
“What is it you do, Tom?” Mari asks, patient and watchful. “Oh, right, Emil said you were in culinary school.”
“That’s right,” says Bruce gamely. “I’m a chef.” God, he’s so bad at this. Avery would weep to see him fail so spectacularly.
Mari winks across the sofa to the Viking, who has begun unbuttoning Anton’s shirt, to Anton’s amusement. “Simón barely knows how to make coffee. Must be nice to have a boyfriend who cooks.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Bruce says, and Anton laughs.
“Sweetheart, you know I do my best.” Anton smirks at him, raises an eyebrow in challenge. The best kind of game, he said. Bruce hates this game. He feels like he’s six steps behind everyone else—there is no mission here, no objective, just a plush empty surface between them on the large sofa like a no man’s land. He’s out of his depth.
Bruce tries anyway. “I—”
“Are we doing this or not?” snaps the Viking.
Anton turns to him. “All right, go on then.”
Simón takes Anton’s mouth; they’re kissing, the kind of kissing that makes Bruce feel stripped bare and humiliated even to see. The Viking makes war on Anton’s mouth, on his unbuttoned shirt, his bare chest. His large hands claim Anton’s ribs, his neck, the front of his pants—and Anton lets him. Anton battles back with obvious enjoyment, tugs on the Viking’s stupid hair, bites down on his lip. There’s violence to the way they demand of each other, and trust too.
Bruce looks away. When he casts his eyes around for somewhere safe to gaze at, Mari is there. She watches, watches. She seems to know it all.
“Sorry about him,” she says. “He gets impatient.”
Bruce doesn’t know what to say to that; he can hear the wet sounds of mouths meeting, the rustle of clothing, deep intimate breaths.
“Have you ever done this before?” she asks him gently.
“This?”
“With more than one person.”
It feels beyond pathetic to explain that he hasn’t done it with even one person. He’s had opportunities; Dana, who had been so sweet and patient with him when all he was really capable of was surviving, the closest thing to a girlfriend he ever had. But even though he had cherished her, he never desired her, not in any way he could identify. He hasn’t felt that for many people, that clear, undeniable hunger. He felt it for Lucie, even knowing it could never happen, even if she did ever see him as something more than a weak, desperate child longing for connection.
He felt it, the small beginnings of it, that night at the embassy, when Anton put an arm around him and pulled him close and was kind to him when he didn’t need to be—and in the moment when Anton paused, before Bruce lifted the book, something uncomfortable fluttered through his blood. There was a chance that Anton meant to kiss him then, or a chance that he thought about it, and of course now Bruce would never know, but the seed of something was planted, something the roots of which now writhe furiously inside him, listening to Anton kiss another man.
“No,” he tells Mari. “It’s—new to me.”
She smiles at him, and her hunger has a little gentleness to it now. “That’s okay. We can do whatever suits you. I quite like watching; when they get going, they are both insatiable.”
Behind him, he hears the clink of a belt buckle, a soft breathy laugh; it would be very easy to look.
“I am sometimes insatiable too. We can do whatever you want,” Mari says again, closer to him now. “Would you like to kiss me as a start?”
Bruce kisses her, and finds her welcoming and warm and generous. The smell of her hair and skin is unfamiliar to him, and it creates a benevolent dissonance, to be doing this with someone he knows so little. He kisses her and obligingly licks into her mouth when she offers, and he waits to feel that seed in him growing—but he feels nothing, just a physical compulsion to reciprocate, like keeping the balance of movement when dancing.
Over his shoulder, Anton moans. An obscene, wet sucking noise encroaches on their kiss, and suddenly, like a flash of radiation, Bruce flushes. Heat flares under his skin, and this close, he knows Mari can feel it. She responds positively, kissing him deeper and clutching his hair, but all he can hear are the low throat calls from Anton, who is presumably getting his dick sucked. Bruce is hard in his pants now, a strange kind of betrayal.
Mari pulls back and grins. “Mmh, you’re pink all over. Delicious.”
Anton laughs at that, throaty and delighted. The flush takes on a different kind of tinge, and Bruce pulls away.
“Sorry,” he says to Mari, who lets him go.
“Everything all right?” she asks, bemused.
“I’m going to go,” he says, snatching up his coat. “Sorry. And thanks. This just isn’t—”
“Hey, hey,” comes Anton’s voice, and Bruce has to look at him: Shirt off, pants open to a clutch of dark hair and a thickening cock, all of him flushed and ruddy and panting. Anton levers himself up on one elbow while the Viking magnanimously pauses his sucking. “Hey, what? Are you—”
“It’s fine,” Bruce manages. “Stay. I’ll see you back h—I’ll see you.”
Bruce leaves. Anton forgets him.
The next morning when Bruce emerges from his room, Anton is waiting at their kitchen table, drinking coffee. The radiator whistles and clanks in the corner, happily filling the silence. Anton pushes a mug in his direction and looks out the window.
“You asked,” he says.
Bruce slides into a chair. “I know.”
“You wanted to know what I was doing. You came along.”
“I know.” Bruce scrubs at his face. He didn’t sleep all night, and he feels exhaustion coat his skin like grime. “I know I did, I just didn’t expect—”
Anton laughs into his mug, bitter as his black coffee. “You thought I was, what? What did you think, Bruce? That I was training without you, maybe. Gaining an edge, getting better than you—then what? Were you scared I’d leave you behind?”
Bruce shakes his head. “Don’t do that. Don’t make this about some sort of competition.”
“Of course it’s a competition!” Anton has that dagger-sharp look he gets when he’s angry, when his anger powers up inside him and ratchets forward on malice. “You didn’t even want me here in the first place, remember? You wanted to be on your own, to become the best on your own. You think there’s room for both of us in this life? We’ll end up killing each other.”
“We won’t,” says Bruce, and again as Anton turns away, shivering with fury. “We won’t. Anton. I asked because I—because—” What can he say that’s true and still protects the raw, vulnerable flesh that last night clawed open to the air, aching and terrifying. Between his palms, his coffee leeches warmth, cooling slowly. “Because I want to keep up with you. I’m trying to keep up with you. That’s why I stole the book at the embassy. That’s why I asked where you went. I didn’t know what to expect, I’m just—I’m doing my best to follow you. You don’t make it easy.”
It’s Anton’s turn to rub at his face. He looks tired, and not quite what Bruce thought he might after the night he presumably had. He looks haggard, a little gray around the edges.
“All right,” Anton sighs. “All right.”
The silence then is how it used to be between them, easy and comfortable as they breathe and listen to the symphony of the radiator.
“You could have just told me,” says Bruce eventually. “You didn't have to be so…practical about it.”
“Who said anything about practical? I was trying to embarrass you,” Anton admits, and that stings a little bit. “Or—I don't know. Thought you might end up enjoying yourself.”
Bruce forces down a mouthful of lukewarm coffee. “Why would I enjoy myself having sex with strangers?”
Anton has an odd look on his face. “All sex is sex with strangers.”
That doesn’t sound true. Bruce hopes it isn’t true.
“Well. I wouldn’t know,” Bruce says deliberately.
Anton looks at him, shock blatant on his exhausted face. Then he slumps a little, runs his hands through his disheveled dark hair. “Right. Fuck. I’m sorry. Okay? For springing them on you like that.”
Bruce thinks about Mari calling him the boyfriend, saying Anton called him lovely, telling them he was in culinary school. He wonders, briefly, if Anton planned to ease him into it, if maybe he had accidentally ruined everything unnecessarily. It’s moments like this that Bruce seriously questions Anton’s assertion that he lacks no empathy, that he's all selfishness and arrogance. Maybe a little empathy, just a little.
“They seemed nice,” Bruce offers; Anton levels a look at him. “Enough,” he adds, “Mari, at least. The—Simón doesn’t have much going for him though, in my opinion.”
Anton pulls an arm across his chest to stretch it, lazy and lax. “What he has going for him is a good ten inches when stiff,” Anton says. “Or rather it’s what he has going for me.” Bruce flushes all over again, same as last night, like the blazing and sudden heat of a spotlight. But if Anton notices, he doesn’t say anything.
“So what happens to them,” Bruce asks after a moment, “when we’re done here?”
Anton blinks quizzically at him.
“When we leave? After we’ve learned all we can from Avery. Will you—I don’t know, want to stay with them?”
There’s a moment of incredulous choking before Anton barks out a laugh. “Bruce,” he says, eyes bright and pointed, “I’m not in love with them. Let’s make that crystal fucking clear.”
“Fine,” Bruce says, confused.
“Did you—you thought I was in love with them?” Anton shakes his head, still chuckling. “It’s not like that. If it were like that, I wouldn’t be fucking them in a sex club, for one thing. I wouldn’t have made you—it’s just not like that.”
Bruce hates that he feels relieved. “Okay. I believe you.”
“Good.”
Sweetheart, you know I do my best, Anton said. Last night, Bruce spent his sleepless hours working; Avery made good on her promise after the embassy and began the meticulous instruction of creating real-to-life masks. He hovered over his third attempt at a passable mask last night and worked until his eyes felt dry as cotton balls, worked until he was no longer able to replay Anton’s moans and gasps in his mind, until he couldn’t see his own hands, much less Anton’s bare hips and agape jeans. The words come back to him now, stark and throbbing.
“The things you told them about me,” Bruce starts, but he can’t seem to finish what he wants to ask.
But he doesn’t need to. Anton is standing, swinging off his jacket and heading for his room. His shirt is uneven and missing a button; there’s a small mottled bruise on his neck that Bruce didn’t see before, where the Viking lavished much of his attention. Bruce feels hollow. “It was a good cover, right? I told them I was, ah, researching for myself and my boyfriend. I think they believed me, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Bruce says to the empty room. “I think you fooled them.”
V. NOW
"Trust me, I know what you like."
“If that's meant to be a line, you should probably fuck off now,” says Bruce to Minhkhoa and turns back to his pitiful beer.
Minhkhoa laughs. He smothers his laugh in a hand, absent of purpose now that he’s stubbed out his cigarette. It feels like dreaming underwater; this is Bruce, same dark hair and stubborn face, same deft hands wrapped around his pint glass—but while the knuckles of his left are bruised and wrapped from training, his right hand is missing the sharp white scar over his thumb that he got when Minhkhoa raked a tanto blade across it during training in Lazarus. This Bruce’s voice has less gravel and fewer years in it, his shoulders less broad. His hair is longer, lying against his neck in what Minhkhoa can only describe as baby curls. Bruce must be barely twenty-two. It’s like a memory has clocked him over the head. Minhkhoa can’t get enough of it.
“Not a line,” Minhkhoa says, “just a fact. You haven’t touched that beer all night, have you?”
Bruce glances at him, quick and sharp.
“The foam’s thinned down,” Minhkhoa explains. “There’s no mist on the outside of your glass, so it’s reached room temperature, but it’s still full to the top.” He grins as Bruce’s eyes narrow. “So either you just like looking at it, or you don’t drink. Which is it?”
Bruce turns away with that same single-minded stubbornness he’s always had. “I drink,” he says shortly, and he chokes down a gulp of what has to be warm, piss-flavored beer just to prove it.
“Do you.” Minhkhoa leans forward and watches as all of Bruce’ defenses stack up around him in response. “I don’t think you do. I think you probably find it very difficult to let yourself do something that might leave you vulnerable in public. Most people like to get inebriated around friends or strangers, but you—you probably can’t think of it as anything other than a risk. So when someone invites you out, you order a beer, something weak and pale, and you barely sip at it, but no one notices once they’re a couple of drinks in themselves. Leaving you, sober and safe, with your own company while everyone else gets to escape for a while.” He grins at Bruce. “How’d I do?”
“Who are you,” Bruce says in a low voice, careful not to draw attention. “What do you want.”
“No, no, it’s much less fun that way. You have to guess,” Minhkhoa replies, enjoying himself. “Go on, I’m sure you have some detective capabilities. Tell me what you see when you look at me.”
Bruce’s sadness is gone, and it makes a change to see him sharp and upright and on edge. It’s not the way Minhkhoa wants to see him, but a little danger always did wonders for Bruce.
“Did Kirigi send you?” he asks, hands tightening around his glass, pushing the color from his knuckle bruises.
Minhkhoa smiles sweetly. “Who?”
“Or his benefactor?” Bruce muses, beginning to catalog Minhkhoa visually, gaze flicking from one feature to the next with precision.
“I don't think you understand this game, darling. The point is to make assumptions from observations, not to ask silly questions. You clearly think I’m a wolf disguised as a sheep, so tell me what you see.”
Take the challenge, Minhkhoa wills. You could never resist me when I challenged you, Bruce. Don't let me down.
Bruce relaxes his hands, and his bruises flush deep purple as he sits back; young and impulsive, but never, ever stupid. Minhkhoa drums his fingers pleasantly on the bar and waits.
“You're one of Kirigi’s students,” Bruce says, low and measured. “You knew his name, and you didn't care if you gave it away or not. But you're not here to kill me. You wouldn't approach me in public if that was your intent.” His eyes narrow. “You're an assassin, and a good one. Given your age—”
Minhkhoa grimaces. “Let’s call it experience.”
“—and experience, you have to be good. Calluses on your palms below your thumbs, so you favor twin swords, probably East Asian blades; you have the physique for it. But you haven't brought them with you. There’s not even a knife in your suit, so—so this isn't a hit. You’re gathering intel.” Bruce regards him, and Minhkhoa knows he’s voiced only a fraction of what he’s detected; it’s what he would do. “Not for Kirigi, but maybe you work for his benefactor, the one who’s been tracking me for years.”
Minhkhoa splays his hands. “Impressive. You’re a little off on one or two details, but you’re young—you’ll get better at that.”
He gets to watch all the small, tamped-down reactions to that play out across Bruce’s face. Back then—or now, really, it’s getting muddled in his head—when he was Bruce’s age, he hadn’t known how to read those delicious little tells, the minute muscle movements of someone strongly in control of his reactions. Now he reads them like a mystic reads tea leaves: Bruce is pissed off.
“If you’re not here to kill me, then what intel are you looking for?” he snaps, flexing those sore knuckles again.
“That’s one of those things you got wrong, actually. I really am just here for a drink before I leave the city. And speaking of which—about time.”
The bartender finally proffers up two tumblers with a finger each of scotch whisky. Minhkhoa takes his and lets the smoky liquid hit the back of his throat, burning smoothly down to his belly and leaving a searing lifeline in its wake. Bruce doesn’t take up his glass, but neither does he suck down any more of his tepid beer. He’s half-turned toward Minhkhoa, which feels like a victory, even to have half of his attention worriedly on him at all times.
“Oh, will you relax,” Minhkhoa says after a second sip. “I’ve got nothing to do with Kirigi or his master.” That whole business feels like such ancient history now; Minhkhoa has completely forgotten what it was like those first few months after leaving Korea, always looking over each other’s shoulders in case someone caught up with them.
“Then why approach me,” asks Bruce with a jerk of his chin, like a challenge, “if you don’t have some sort of aim here?”
“I never said I don’t have an aim.” He’s down to the crystal bottom of the glass, Bruce’s grim face distorted through the rim.
“What then? Recruitment? I’m not interested in joining whatever organization that has you killing people for money.”
Minhkhoa indulges in a laugh, motions to the bartender for a second pour. “Now you’re making assumptions without any observation. Sometimes, the sheep is just a sheep. Sometimes, when a man in a bar walks up to you and offers to buy you a drink, it’s because he just likes the look of you.”
And predictably, Bruce turns pink. Minhkhoa takes it in, the slow flush along his cheeks, tinting his ears. He was always so easy to embarrass at this age, so sweetly surprised when anyone expressed genuine interest in him, as if he thought he could stay invisible in the shadows and you just flipped the light on above him. Minhkhoa remembers how far that blush grows when Bruce is pressed, when he’s really pinned down and made to take it; his fine, pale skin glows pink under the scattering of dark hair, pink all down his back and his stomach, like he’s been fully dipped in a sunrise.
“You're teasing me. I'm—you've had your fun.”
“I’m currently having it,” Minhkhoa says, grinning as he watches the pink deepen and spread like an infection down Bruce’s neck. “Doesn’t mean I’m not serious. Don’t tell me you’ve never brought a woman home from this place, hm? A man?”
“No.” Bruce turns away, but it’s not sheepishness that has him looking down at the bandages over his purple knuckles. There’s that sadness again; Minhkhoa thought he’d seen the last of it. “Sorry. I’m—not interested. But thanks.”
Minhkhoa smothers a fond smile. “That’s as kind of a letdown as I’ve ever heard. I’m touched. Though,” and if he's an asshole for this, so be it, “if you were interested, even in just forgetting whoever it is that's made you so sad—well. You're allowed to reconsider, and I'm still here.”
Bruce doesn’t answer; instead, he palms his glass of scotch for a moment, holds it up to his nose in a gesture that is so reminiscent of the man he will become that it gives Minhkhoa vertigo.
“Who was it? The one who broke your heart?” Minhkhoa asks conversationally. “The stunning brunette I saw leaving earlier? Tough luck.”
“What? No. He—nevermind.” Bruce takes a sip, finally, and manages not to cough after the burn.
“Hm? Who’s this he, then?” He’s pushing his luck.
Bruce levels a stare at Minhkhoa. “I don’t make a habit of talking about that with strangers. I’m not going to start now.”
“Maybe you should. Opening up to a stranger can be very…cathartic.” He takes his time with his second glass, savoring every hot wash across his tongue. “You can pour your heart out to them and never hear about it again. You can talk all you want, or you can shut up and get on with it. You can pretend they’re someone else, or pretend that they’re the only one you’ve ever wanted. It’s very freeing, really.”
This time, Bruce laughs: a low chuckle, a fierce, brief grin. “I suppose that’s you making an offer.”
It excites him, boils low in his gut like the whisky, the same feeling he gets when he’s closing in on a mark, that vicious, mate-in-one thirst for blood so close at the end of a game.
He leans forward again, and Bruce doesn’t shift away. “Sweetheart, I’ve been offering since I walked in.”
Bruce watches him, brows low. After a few aborted tries, he says, “What you’re offering. I—I don’t know what that would look like.”
He’s quiet and serious, and that’s how Minhkhoa knows he’s considering it. Shit, he's really considering it. He’s waiting to be convinced.
There’s a line here, Minhkhoa knows. He's always been able to see the lines around him set by other people, but he's never been very good at not crossing them. There's no telling what magic or science brought Minhkhoa to this moment in the past, but he’ll have the future to answer to when the night is done. I saw him looking at me across the bar, and I thought—well.
With a herculean effort, he chokes out, “We can stay here, if you like. Just talk.”
“You don't want to just talk,” Bruce says.
“No, I don't want to just talk.” Fuck. This is what he was aiming for, but somehow it’s not what he intended. Bruce blinks at him, very young and very lost, hand clenched around his scotch with his beer completely forgotten.
“What would it look like?” Bruce asks.
“Whatever you want it to look like,” Minhkhoa answers, knowing it’s inadequate. Then, when Bruce shows small signs of floundering, he continues: “Look. You don’t have to know something to want it. You want to be somewhere private? Take me home. You want me to try some things, you just have to ask; you want me to stop, say so. Or if you just want me to take you to the back alley and blow you until you can’t stand straight and call it good, I can do that too. It’s your call.”
Very sexy. Great seduction. Any other night, any other person, Minhkhoa would cut his losses and run, pretending he’d never been so classless and fumbling. But Bruce is—running from Bruce is the same as running to Bruce, he’s found.
And that color is back on Bruce’s face, glowing pink now, hand tightening reflexively around his glass. He’s not looking at Minhkhoa. He’s looking everywhere but at Minhkhoa.
Definitely not kindly, Minhkhoa asks, “Is that what you want?”
“I—” Bruce heaves a breath and chokes down the rest of his drink. “I want it to be—easy.”
Minhkhoa scrubs a hand over his face. He doesn’t make a habit of analyzing his emotions, but there’s something slowly rising in him like the sluggish swallow of quicksand: The realization that in digging through the past, he’s found himself fucking around with the future. Or was this always what was going to happen?
“Fine,” he mutters to himself. “Fine. Fuck it. I need a smoke anyway.” And without another word, because this is the best he can really do in this completely batshit situation, he pushes off from the counter and leaves, heaving open the door into the cold.
In the alley, finally some fucking blessed relief. He’s alone as he fishes out a cigarette and lights it, his fingers quickly going numb in the cold. He started smoking when he was fourteen and thought it was cool, but before long he quit it—the health of his lungs was regrettably more important than how hot he looked smoking a fag. But ever since, he’s had this anxious, adolescent habit of striking one and sucking it down when he has a moment to breathe.
He’s doing this. He has to do it. It was the game, wasn’t it? Bruce dangled the bait in front of him that morning in Gotham, and he has chased it here to the past, and discovered that the man Bruce spoke of, the one Minhkhoa wanted to kill for having something he could never have—the man is himself. The thing he could never have is in the palm of his hand. No one throws the game this close to the end. He’s going to do it. But he might never forgive himself if he does.
He leans against the brick wall and is struck by a sudden memory. He remembers how, during the first time—the first time for him, that eruption in Lazarus, he was startled by Bruce’s sweetness. He thought it would be all rage between them, pleasure by way of violence. He pushed Bruce down and pressed harder still, kissed like a punishment; he expected to come out of it black and blue. Instead, when he dropped down to suck Bruce’s cock, Bruce said, “Wait. Wait,” and tugged the pillow from off his own bed to tuck underneath Minhkhoa’s knees. It took the breath out of him. He let himself be gentler after that.
Minhkhoa doesn’t hear Bruce as much as he senses him. He is down already to half a cigarette as he turns to face Bruce, whose face is shadowed and gilded with small snowflakes.
Bruce hesitates then walks toward him. In the alleyway, as promised, if this is what he wants. His bruised hands are tucked into his jacket pockets, and you wouldn’t know he was nervous if you didn’t know him. But Minhkhoa does know him, and he knows—Bruce is half out of his mind with nerves.
It makes it all the more of a shock when Bruce, in fits and starts, nudges into Minhkhoa’s space and kisses him. Clumsy, bumping, no hands, not the right angle. Just the press of lips and lingering, warmth and whisky, and a boy trying to forget his heartbreak. I did a lot of stupid things after Canada. The cigarette butt flares brightly once as it falls to the ground.
Minhkhoa has him pressed against the brick wall between heartbeats. He shoves his knee between Bruce’s legs until it connects with the wall with a jolt. He uses his matured height and build to pin him, feels Bruce’s instincts react, analyze the threat, and deactivate, putting himself in Minhkhoa’s hands entirely. Whatever Minhkhoa is feeling—he doesn’t want to think about what he’s feeling. He holds Bruce’s face in his hands to adjust the angle, prods his lips open with a tongue, and shows him how to kiss properly. His cock throbs, and he punishes Bruce for it, licking the roof of his mouth, reaching for his throat. Bruce writhes, trying to free his trapped hands from his pockets, and Minhkhoa punishes him for that too.
When he finally pulls back, Bruce is breathless and hard in his jeans.
“I changed my mind,” Minhkhoa says. He’s going to do this very bad, very wrong thing, but he’s going to do it right. “Not here. Okay?”
Bruce regains his breath and answers, “Okay.”
VI. THEN
This is a bad idea. Bruce knows it’s a bad idea; he knew it when the man sat next to him at the bar, when he offered Bruce a drink, when he looked him up and down like a hungry predator. He knows it now as he shoulders open his apartment door, still breathing hard.
The man steps inside behind him. The door shuts with a thunderclap, leaving them in the dark. For a moment, they breathe in the dark. This is a bad idea. This is a stupid, avoidable risk. This is the worst decision Bruce has ever made.
“Don’t chicken out on me now,” says the man.
Bruce squares his shoulders. “What happened to ‘if you want me to stop, say so’?”
The man saunters forward. He moves like a panther; he’s like Anton in that way, and the sudden reminder hits like a punch, kicking up another intense spike of the hot lust Bruce felt in the alley. But this isn’t Anton. This is another beast entirely.
“You don’t want me to stop,” the man says.
“I might, how do you know?”
“I told you.” The man grins, a passing headlight illuminating a single, devastating dimple. “I know what you like.”
Bruce wants it to be easy, and it’s easy enough when the man crowds him against the wall and takes his mouth again. It’s easy to give it up, let himself be pressed and captured, open his mouth when prompted. He’s had a few kisses before; Dana let him kiss her once, behind the gymnasium at school where they used to go to talk, though it was clear it didn't do much for either of them. And Lucie in Paris—just a kiss, thought he’d wanted more, maybe for the first time in his life. Mari in Moscow, an unbearable humiliation. And with Anton—but this is different. The man has Bruce’s wrist in his hand, scraping it against the exposed brick of the wall, and there’s a knee between his legs again. Bruce feels smelted, turning slowly molten.
Every instinct fights for dominance when the man maneuvers Bruce to the bed. Every piece of him is screaming to break away, to avoid the trap, to be safe and solitary and put an end to it. Instead, he falls back and hits the mattress, looking up to admire the man’s marbling scars and wishbone hips, striped with shadow from the blinds. When hands come to take away his shirt, then his pants, he lets them; skin to skin, the heat increases, and Bruce allows himself to burn.
When he surges up for the next kiss, a hand comes to his throat and holds him to the mattress, pressure and the prickle of his own stubble keeping him pinned in tension. Bruce opens his eyes like shaking himself from a dream, shivering as he registers fully his nakedness.
“Stay with me,” the man says, kissing Bruce’s neck around his own fingers. “Mm? I want your eyes open. I want you to see all of it. Are you paying attention?”
He’s trying; it's too much. He feels like he's been turned inside out, every secret corner of him open to the air and waiting for its turn to be touched. Desire rises inside him like a sharpened claw, raking against his soft interior until he aches; his cock twitches and jumps in his boxers, too eager for its own good. Bruce hasn't felt like this since—Anton—
A sudden, acute pain at his neck cuts through the pleasure—the man bites down hard enough that Bruce shoves him away with a hiss. The man laughs and pulls back, incisors gleaming.
“What was that for?”
The man’s mouth twists. “For calling me by what I presume is the name of your old lover.”
Bruce hadn’t realized he said anything. “I didn't—he wasn't my—”
“Anton’s not here,” says the man, a hand still pinning Bruce’s throat. He straddles Bruce, warm skin and the tangle of hair, legs over legs, a pleasant gravity over his waist. “Let’s make that very clear.”
Bruce swallows, and he knows the man can feel the movement under his palm. “What should I call you then?”
A pause; “What do you want me to call you?” the man asks instead of answering.
“Jack,” says Bruce, because it's the first thing to come to mind, and it's what Anton used to call him.
“Jack,” the man echoes. He loosens his grip on Bruce’s throat and laughs, long and low and rumbling. Bruce feels it vibrating through the warm points where their skin meets, his knees on either side of Bruce’s waist, a palm over his heart. He desperately wants to grind his hips upward against the imminent pressure on his cock, but he holds himself still. “Jack. Fine. If that's what you want.”
The man takes Bruce’s face in his hands and kisses him, breathes into him, thumbs stroking his cheeks like a lover. When he pulls back, his eyes gleam strong and sharp in the pallid light from the window. More than ever Bruce feels peeled and naked and vulnerable.
“My true name,” says the man, “is Minhkhoa Khan. You call me Khoa. Remember that, all right? You've won. You won't know it for a while, but you've won. God fucking damn you for it.”
“What are you talking about?” Bruce chokes out, but the man—Khoa—is already kissing his way south, stopping briefly to test the mettle of a nipple and tug on some chest hair with his teeth. Bruce is aware of a flushed, sweaty glaze spreading over his chest and stomach, maybe the fault of the whisky, just as Khoa licks a line down in a singular, pointed direction.
“I said, you won,” says Khoa, and he tugs down the waist of Bruce’s boxers and tucks it under his balls, quick and deft. “But you have to earn your victory first.”
And then he swallows Bruce’s cock down like a shot of scotch.
Years of training have beaten a habit into Bruce like a hammer into hot metal; when his body becomes overwhelmed with strain or pain or emotion, he leaves it. It’s as simple as stepping back, like walking across the room to sit in the chair in the corner, leaving him a vantage to watch and take stock and get control before coming back. It’s kept him maybe not sane but at least alive.
Now, with Khoa’s mouth on him, he has to fight to stay present. He can hear his own ragged breaths, straining as he tips his head down to watch, but his vision blurs at the edges, no matter how hard he tries to keep his eyes open. Khoa nurses just the tip of Bruce’s cock with a prodding tongue, eyes mischievous. It sends a marathon of sparks through his whole system—he never realized what a whole-body experience it would be. He feels it in his spine, in the sweating heat of his scalp, in the tension of his stomach. Bruce clamps down on a moan, clenching his jaw until he goes light-headed.
Khoa must notice; he pulls off to give Bruce a break. “Is this your first time?” he asks in a tone that suggests he knows the answer already. “You look like you’re about to explode already. I only just got started.”
“I’m fine,” Bruce bites out, seeing sparks.
“Sure,” says Khoa, and slides down to the root again. Bruce is fully, painfully hard, balls tight and tingling as Khoa fondles them and begins to move in an earnest rhythm at last. He’s sucking in gasps without taking in any air, heat spiraling tighter and tighter in his gut; it’s instinct that has him planting his heels into the bed to give his hips some leverage, trying to hasten the rhythm with short thrusts. “No you don’t,” Khoa says, pulling back to grip Bruce’s hips and force them to the mattress. Bruce is pierced and paralyzed, and just as Khoa gets to sucking properly, the spiraling becomes something more urgent.
“I’m—wait, I'm—going to—” Bruce’s voice is guttural, wrenched from his throat.
Slick heat disappears: “Oh, go on then,” Khoa says, pumping Bruce with a hand, and Bruce comes. The room blanks white like a flashbang’s gone off, and when he can see again, the mattress is tilting beneath him slowly, rocked with vertigo. There's a sound like a radiator releasing air—it's him, gasping, under a faint tinnitus ring.
Khoa is talking as his hands graze the hair on Bruce’s thighs. “That was quick,” he says mildly. “It's all right, you’ll get better at it. But I was planning on using you a little more before I let you come. I can improvise.”
Bruce tries to speak and only manages an embarrassing choked sound. His limbs feel weighty and deliciously leaden, and the one clear corner of his mind sounds off a warning bell. Khoa just laughs as he crawls up Bruce’s body until he looms over Bruce’s face.
“You're new to this, so I’ll give you a free lesson and you can count yourself lucky. When you're fucking someone, reciprocity is important; it's only polite.” Khoa’s knees are fitted snugly into Bruce’s armpits, and he's reaching to tuck a pillow under Bruce’s head. Bruce doesn't understand the purpose until Khoa sides his thumbs into his waistband and frees his cock—dusky brown and curved and pleasingly slim. It's close enough to kiss. “Open up.”
“What?”
“Consider it part of your education,” says Khoa, and nudges forward in an unmistakable fucking motion.
“Oh,” Bruce says.
“Well?”
Bruce opens up.
The first bump of Khoa’s cock against his parted lips leaves a wetness and the taste of salt, and something muskier, and the tang of skin. The second homes in on its target, sliding over his tongue to prod the roof of his mouth, where Khoa stops to rub it. Bruce becomes aware of a thumb at the corner of his mouth, coaxing his jaw wider. The taste grows with the weight on his tongue.
“That’s it,” Khoa breathes, somewhere above him. “Mind your teeth. Good.”
And Khoa pushes in, and in. And suddenly there’s an insistent touch at the back of his throat and a total fullness, his jaw dropped open completely and every space in his mouth filled. Khoa cups the back of his head, fingers deep in his hair. There’s drool leaking from the corner of his mouth, and something—something about it stokes the feeling up again. Blood smarts in his cheeks and rushes to his cock, spent and soft.
“You like this, don’t you? Of course you do. You’re taking it very well.”
Bruce mumbles a sound around his mouthful and nearly chokes. He sucks in air through his nose, smelling body and sex and the spice of Khoa’s skin.
“Careful,” says Khoa, and Bruce feels the rumble of his voice in his own jaw. On his belly, his cock twitches awake. “You’re always overwhelming yourself with too much, hm? Now, take a breath, and try sucking.”
Bruce does—and Khoa moans, breathy and small and clearly repressed. But it ignites something roaring strong in Bruce; he sucks again and swallows, narrowly avoiding choking again, and reaches up to grip Khoa’s thighs; he blinks, water leaking out of his eyes, and gives himself over to the champagne tingling consuming his whole body, down the the backs of his knees, the clench of his toes.
“Yes,” says Khoa, beginning to thrust, “yes. God, B—be careful.”
Fuck that. Bruce opens his throat and closes his eyes and feels it. It’s like fighting a current and giving up to float downstream, sensation taking over his body to overwhelm him with bliss. Khoa fucks his mouth in increments, and Bruce gives in to it, feeling stretched and used and short of breath. His own cock is hardening again, miraculously, jutting against the air, already sensitive. He reaches to stroke it and finds his wrist trapped and pinned, and Khoa laughs above him. He’s always laughing, just like Anton—Bruce sucks hard to punish him, and feels a tremor in the thighs around his sides. He tries shuffling his head forward to take more, and Khoa lets out a loud groan.
“Enough,” comes in a growl, and suddenly Bruce is empty, jaw slack and mouth wet. Khoa is kneeling next to him, gripping his cock hard, his teeth clenched. Another ribbon of pleasure ripples through Bruce, just watching.
“What?” Bruce asks, recognizing his turn to tease. “Did I do something?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Khoa says viciously. “Shut up. Turn over.”
“Wh—”
“I’m going to fuck you now. Turn over if you want it.”
And this is what Bruce was waiting for, wasn’t it? The chance he didn’t take in Moscow or Canada, but the one he’ll take now. Khoa’s mouth is set, his gaze furious, and Bruce tingles with anticipation and a little fear. Dazed with it, he turns over, baring his back. It shouldn’t feel more vulnerable than having his cock in Khoa’s mouth, but somehow it does; he hugs the pillow and presses half his face to it, and wills his body to relax.
“This is the part where you back out,” Khoa says. Hands on his boxers, tugging them down and off his legs completely. Hands on his thighs, nudging them apart. Bruce shivers, hard, and then again, as Khoa settles behind him.
“’M not backing out,” Bruce mumbles into the pillow. There’s nowhere to look at like this. He compensates with his hearing, detecting the rustle of legs against the sheets, the pop of a bottle opening, the slick report of liquid on skin. “I can take it.”
“You’ll take what I give you,” comes the reply, closer than Bruce expected. He heaves himself onto an elbow, straining to see, and then he’s pushed back into the sheets and kept there with a hand between his shoulder blades.
“We’ll get this bit over with,” says Khoa, and then there’s a wet prodding at his hole that becomes a pressure and then asserts itself inside him. It’s not exactly pleasant, the finger going in and out in a way his body immediately identifies as wrong and foreign, but he clutches the pillow and takes it. “I’d tell you to relax, but we both know you’re not very successful at that.”
The finger retreats, then returns, wetter and more purposeful, crooking inside him in a way that makes his hips jut into the mattress like he’s a marionette on a line. When a second finger slowly pushes in, Bruce bites the inside of his mouth and forces himself still. It burns, and there’s an uncomfortable, trickling wetness between his cheeks.
“Relax,” Khoa says, though he doesn’t sound very reassuring, even with the thumb on Bruce’s back stroking back and forth. “Try breathing.”
Bruce breathes; it’s all he can do.
“Not what you expected?”
“Call me crazy, but I did think it would feel good,” Bruce grits out.
“Well. Don’t speak too soon.” And then the fingers are seeking something, delving deep, prodding until—a shock of sensation crashes through him, and he yelps. Again, and again, until he’s heated and jittering, hips jolting to get away. “There we go,” says Khoa, sounding pleased with himself. “How’s that?”
Like sticking his arm in an electrical socket. Like being punched in the gut. Bruce garbles something into the pillow and writhes, trying not to mewl like fucking baby, but Khoa keeps hitting his prostate. Trapped against the mattress, his cock weeps precum.
Bruce doesn’t know the moment when Khoa drapes himself across Bruce’s back, sliding his thighs apart and puzzling their hips together. Suddenly, he’s gathered up, still shaking, and the pressure abates—and then Khoa is pushing inside, slowly, agonizingly. Bruce makes a sound and barely registers it. It’s too late to relax, but he tries, and it doesn’t help. He’s speared through and held fast, like an insect pinned to felt and gawked at.
“Wait, wait wait wait—” he hears himself say.
“You’ve waited long enough,” Khoa answers.
He’s split open. Any moment, now he’ll spill out, traveling in every direction at once. Any moment, the pressure will stop.
Khoa starts to move. Bruce cries out—he’s torn through the pillowcase with his hands, and he tears it some more. There’s a hissing sound like a gas leak coming from somewhere. His whole body jolts with every intentional thrust Khoa gives him, sensation rippling through him and feeding back and rippling more and feeding back—
Arms over his arms, a hand clamping over his mouth, and the hissing sound quiets—his own breath and noises, muffled and trapped. He’s leaving his body again, too overcome to stay present. He needs more.
“That’s it. That’s it.” Khoa’s harsh breaths in his ear have become an aspirated rhythm. The bed creaks beneath them with each percussive fuck.
Bruce groans around the hand over his mouth—and it’s good, the pressure there, eating up his sounds, the prick of his beard crushed to the skin. But he knows more of what he wants now, though he doesn’t have the capacity to ask. He grabs the wrist, manhandles the palm to his scalp, and lets out another moan, this one bare and unmuffled.
The fingers clamp around his hair, no hesitation. “A little pain?” Khoa asks, tightens his handful. “Mmh? A little more? Just enough, ahh, to sweeten the edge?”
The warmth of pain skitters like fire ants across Bruce’s scalp, and it’s like a whetstone to the pleasure. Head angled back by the grip, neck straining and exposed, and if this were all a ploy to get him bare and vulnerable, now would be the time to cut his throat. And he doesn’t care, as long as it doesn’t stop. It would be an orgasm too, of a kind.
Instead, Khoa’s other arm circles his neck, pulling him snug as he hums in Bruce’s ear. Like that, like that. He grinds into Bruce’s prostate relentlessly, each blind connection releasing a whole-body wave of warmth that builds and compounds, over and over. Bruce sobs without shame. Khoa is uncompromising, punishing in his tenderness, each fuck an earthquake, each arm a grounding tether. It’s like Khoa knows that Bruce can take more, take worse, but he wants to spoil him with gentleness all the same.
“You’ll remember this,” Khoa breathes raggedly. “You will never forget this.”
Bruce can’t answer, even as the hand releases his hair and captures his head, angling it for a kiss. He comes like that, with Khoa’s tongue in his mouth and Khoa’s cock in his ass, wrapped up in Khoa’s arms and ground into the bed like dust beneath a boot. He comes into the sheets with a vicious, violent clamping of muscle and a fireworks of neurons, and if he cries, he doesn’t feel the tears as darkness washes over him like a lover, like a friend.
Later, he swims back to consciousness through black honey. He’s pitched on his side, a thousand scattered pieces of a person knitting back together. A wet brushing licks his thighs, and he blinks until he can see—Khoa, naked and sweat-dampened, wiping him with a cloth. He’s cast in bronze with the yellow glaze of a traffic light outside.
It takes all Bruce’s energy to move one leg, to make Khoa look at him.
“Who are you,” Bruce croaks, because he’s alive, and this is still his apartment, and something should have gone wrong. Every sign pointed to it all going wrong.
Khoa tips his head to the side. “Do you like what you like because of you or because of me,” he says quietly. “Or is the universe just fucking with me.”
“What?”
“Nevermind. Thanks for joining us, I wouldn’t want you to miss the next part.”
Bruce blinks and tries to sit up. “The next part.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” says Khoa, grinning a wolf smile in the dark. “Did you think that was it? No. I’m not through with you yet.”
VII. NOW
When Minhkhoa returns to his time, he snaps back to the present like a taut rubber band: Suddenly, and with a little bit of pain. He’s on the street below Bruce’s apartment among shivery gusts of fine snow, smoking one final anxious cigarette and contemplating the conflicted possibility that he might be stuck in this time—that he might never get to go back to the rotgut and steel belly of Gotham and his own real Bruce—when a tight nausea grips the back of his throat. The heat of the cigarette between his fingers blooms outward until it covers all of him and reaches a blistering pitch. He drops it, and when it hits the concrete, there is no more snow. In his bones, he knows he’s back.
“Icon,” he says to his comm. She chimes back at him.
“Was your mission a success, sir?”
He ignores that. “How long have I been gone?”
“You have been out of contact for seventeen hours, fifty-four minutes, sir. Batman has attempted to contact you six times in that period.”
Well. That’s that.
He makes his way back to Gotham and refuses to let any feelings take hold of him; he has let himself grow so sentimental in the last few months. He hasn’t lost anything—in fact, he has won the game, and arguably he had won it from the very beginning. There ought to be some satisfaction there. But a strange bleakness lodges inside him that he can't understand; all he knows is that he will never see Bruce, that Bruce, ever again, and the realization hollows him.
By the time he reaches the city, Gotham is almost beautiful. It’s eight in the morning and a bluish, wet fog has crept around the city’s shoulders like a humid shawl, soaking up the pollution and leaving the skyscrapers gleaming. By force of habit, he drives himself to the penthouse, and only when he is in the private express elevator shooting up to the top floor does he realize—the penthouse will be empty. Bruce will be at the manor, sleeping off his bat antics from last night, caring for his kids. It’s just as well, he thinks as he kicks off his shoes inside the door. He has had a whole night of Bruce, if not his Bruce.
In the darkened bedroom, he tugs his shirt off his head and tosses it to the floor. He scrubs a hand over his face and turns on a lamp to deal with his pants; he didn't sleep last night. There was the sex, and then there were the periods where Bruce slept in his arms. Minhkhoa spent those hours awake and thinking, until Bruce roused again. Before dawn, he fucked Bruce until he fell asleep, then kept going until Bruce startled awake with a sweet, final cry that seemed to wring all the remaining tension from his body. It was the keenest pleasure Minhkhoa has ever felt, but god, if he didn’t feel old and tired from it.
He unbuckles his belt and makes to sit on the bed—and then he freezes.
“Turn off the light,” a voice grunts behind him.
Bruce’s head is half-shoved under a pillow, bare shoulders barely visible above the sheets. It's in the middle of the night for him, after all.
Minhkhoa doesn't turn off the light. He sinks onto the bed and watches Bruce's shoulders undulate, considering for the first time the conversation they’ll have to have about the events of twenty years ago and last night simultaneously. “What are you doing here?” he says.
“Not sleeping, apparently.” It comes out muffled from under the pillow.
Minhkhoa rips the pillow away savagely. “What,” he repeats, “are you doing here? Hm? Keeping tabs on me?”
Bruce lifts himself up onto an elbow, awake and clearly not pleased about it. But something in his face relaxes after a moment, sleep-sandy eyes turned soft.
“How was New York?” Bruce asks.
It hits Minhkhoa then. “You knew,” he says. “Before I went. Before you even told me, you—how?”
“I don't know the hows,” says Bruce, sitting up further, naked to the waist of his pajama bottoms. “Or the when. I didn't even put it together for years. But you gave me your name. Khoa. Did you think I would forget?”
It was no one, Bruce said, a man in New York.
“Bastard,” Minhkhoa spits. “Of course you were supposed to forget! You insufferable—” And he’s laughing, because it hits him what an insane day it's been, and just a day, to have sent him back in time and brought him back again, to have touched the same single person at two points in time. Minhkhoa clutches his hair and laughs again. He must be losing his mind.
“If it makes you feel better, you were my biggest mystery for a while,” Bruce offers wryly. “I knew it mattered, I knew you were someone; I just didn't know what I needed to do to find you.”
“Yeah? And what else is new.” That earns him a look at close quarters. “You didn’t recognize me,” Minhkhoa points out. “I thought you would.”
“This will break your heart, but you’ve changed over twenty years,” Bruce says dryly. “Still. I should have suspected something.” He looks thoughtful, or maybe just sleep-deprived. “I’ve only ever felt like this for—very few people. I used to think it was just something else that was broken about me. But I always felt that with you.”
Minhkhoa doesn’t know what to say to that. After a moment: “You said it was the fuck of your life. Before.”
Bruce blinks sleepily. “Yes.”
He stares at the dark wall of blackout curtains, at the gold thread edges that hint at the sunlight outside. He has been so selfish, as always. It's all he knows how to be. He can't bring himself to ask if he has ruined everything; instead, he adds it to the list of questions he’ll never ask.
“Twenty years,” he says. “Can you even remember it after that long?”
Bruce raises an eyebrow. “Don't you remember your first?”
The truth is, Minhkhoa doesn't, not with any significant detail. It was a woman, a mark during a mission, and his mind wasn’t fully there with her during the act. He hadn't cared—he had enjoyed it, and more importantly, he finished the mission. It was later that he learned how to enjoy sex, and learned what it was to long for something more. All he really remembers, in the end, is that his first was not Bruce, but it could have been, if he had only waited.
“Remember,” Minhkhoa says slowly, “that one time in Russia when you said you were trying to keep up with me, and I didn't make it easy?” He huffs a small laugh. “Twenty years. I've been trying to keep up for twenty years.”
“Hey,” says Bruce, and Minhkhoa turns to him. Bruce lays a hand flat to his cheek, sleep-warm and firm. They are both too old to be so tender to each other, but Bruce’s thumb smooths over the lines on his cheek. “You were good to me.”
The kiss, when it happens, is a fragile thing, a bird shaking its wings before flight. Bruce holds his face and kisses him, gentle until he’s not. Minhkhoa gives back what he can manage and feels a small appetite unspool inside him, despite his exhaustion. All night he taught Bruce what he likes, but this is a Bruce who knows what Minhkhoa likes in return.
“Turn off the light,” Bruce says again, and this time he does.
Bruce folds under him onto the mattress, greedy and intent. He smells like sandalwood shampoo and cool sheets, while Minhkhoa still reeks of old New York. Bruce’s hands push at Minhkhoa’s pants, seek out his regretfully soft cock.
“I can’t,” Minhkhoa admits with a chuckle as Bruce’s hands get more demanding. “You wore me out already.”
Bruce’s grin is fierce and fond. “All right, old man.”
He lets Bruce fuck him in the darkness, on his back with his legs to his chest while Bruce thrusts against him. It's lazy and languid, and more than once they lose themselves just to kissing and almost to sleep, and it’s meant to be for Bruce: He offers himself up for use since Bruce is clearly desperate for it, while his own body is spent. But Bruce knows what Minhkhoa likes, god fucking damn him, and before long, he fucks him brutally, hand to his throat and a tongue in his ear. In the end, Minhkhoa does manage one final, weak orgasm, still mostly soft. It wrenches a horribly vulnerable sound from him and flushes him hot down to the bottoms of his feet. Like a call and response, Bruce matches him and moans when he comes, pulling out to paint Minhkhoa’s stomach instead of his insides. How considerate.
He’s laughing to himself when Bruce comes down, slumping to his side on the bed, his eyes already closing.
“What?” says Bruce, voice slurred. “What’s that face?”
Minhkhoa smirks into the pillow. They are jumbled together, sated and soft. “You were waiting for me to come home, weren’t you,” he says. “Pathetic.”
“Mmh. And what else is new.”
END