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Jim supposes it might plainly be how those things are supposed to start in vigilantism circles. But to him, it seems seriously odd at first.
It’s late, and it’s cold and raining, and he’s at the latest crime scene—the third in a row with the same MO—and he shouldn’t be there, pacing in the gravel and inspecting the remaining traces of blood, but he is. Batman is there in the shadows, doesn’t step forward, doesn’t say anything. Eventually, Gordon wonders what’s going on. He clears his throat. “Something we missed?”
Batman does step forward then, slow and deliberate. He considers Gordon for a few seconds. “No. Your men got everything.” And he leaves.
He can only say that this is when it started in retrospect though. Because at first, he didn’t think anything of it—Batman lies sometimes, even to him, he figures. It’s human. Maybe his men had missed something, or maybe Batman wanted to see if Jim would show up. But if something happens once, it’s a fluke; if it happens a couple times, it’s a pattern.
It does happen a few more times. Gordon is at some crime scene, or perimeter, or other, and Batman is there—not to talk, not for information. He’s just there.
Even though it does get his attention then, there are explanations for Batman doing that too. Maybe he enjoys hanging around at crime scenes. Maybe it’s his way to show Jim he’s still here. After all he’s never there when other officers are—Gordon knows, because if Batman is sighted now, a report is filed and shots are fired.
Jim does his best to dismiss the whole thing. It works about fine—he already has his hands full. One night comes when he may be a bit more tired than usual. It’s a robbery that makes no damn sense, and his officers have been in and out of the place all day and they still can’t figure out how the robbers came in in the first place. So yeah—his fuse might be a bit short.
He says to the shadows, “You know, I’ll start to think you like my company…”
Batman voice comes from somewhere behind him, a tad closer than Jim expects: “What if I do?”
Gordon huffs. Batman’s jokes are so rare, he has enough of three fingers to count them in as many years. But then he turns around. The first very surprising thing is that Batman hasn’t left. The second, equally astonishing thing is that Batman is standing there, out of the shadows in white moonlight, and there’s so much earnestness in his eyes, it’s almost awkward.
Jim’s phone rings. Batman gives an imperceptible sigh, and he’s off with a flutter of the cape.
Jim is pretty sure he knows what’s going on at this point.
It’s been quite some time. All of it was before Barbara, and it seems distant to him, like souvenirs buried in shoe boxes at the bottom of a closet. His body, it turns out, has a much better memory. The next morning, he wakes up to an insistent erection, and comes in seconds in the shower thinking of hands on him in the shadows.
There’s a bit of a gap after that.
Loeb wasn’t lying about Commissioners getting a lot of threats—Jim gets them too, and he learns to live with it, because it’s what is both the best and the worst in him: he can learn to live with a lot, and he doesn’t change his mind easily. So he’s going for a cup of coffee one morning, and between his car and Dan’s Café, a bullet enters his shoulder from where it’s fired from a rooftop above, breaking the collarbone, travelling all the way down through muscle, grazing the lung, and exiting through his side.
Shock being what it is, he only remembers getting out of his car, thinking of getting coffee. There are vague echoes of two shots being fired. But then there is only the hospital room he wakes up in, the oxygen mask on his face, the patrolmen posted outside the door, and Barbara, watching him anxiously by the bed. If they were still married, she would have asked him to quit.
He doesn’t expect Batman to come at all. There’s a difference between the two of them meeting at crime scenes, or in deserted alleys, and Batman stopping by to check on him in his hospital room. So when he wakes up on the third night, and the unmistakable silhouette stands near, a deeper dark outlined in the shadows, he thinks something is wrong. “What’s going on?”
“You've been shot,” Batman says. He steps forward, and sits by the bed. His fingers close over Jim’s. Jim presses back.
He must fall asleep again like this: all he knows is that his hand is eventually given one firmer squeeze, and Batman gets up. Jim doesn’t remember asking him out loud to stay. Either way, Batman says, “I have to go.”
The next day, Stephens marches in the room. Jim looks up from the morning’s papers he’s not really reading.
“We found him, Jim.”
The story is hard to piece together. His detectives’ best guess is that the sniper—ex-special ops turned killer for hire—pissed off someone he shouldn’t have, or that he got severely punished for his failed hit on the Commissioner. He’s been found on the backseat of a car, unconscious, with two cracked ribs and his right hand smashed—a passer-by called it in. The rifle was in the trunk.
Gordon reads the reports on the last day he spends in the hospital and congratulates his officers for their work. Once he’s left alone, he stares at where he’d seen Batman come out of the shadows by his bed.
It’s two weeks before he sees Batman again. It’s a long night and he climbs up to the MCU rooftop to get some fresh air, and finish reading his evidence report in peace by the broken floodlight.
Batman steps out of the shadows in the one spot of the roof which the surveillance camera doesn’t cover. It’s not that Jim expected him, but he isn’t surprised at all. In fact, he does have something to say: “At this point, I’d offer you a drink, but it’s not like we can go to a bar.”
Batman cocks his head in agreement, then nods to the file in Jim’s hands. “When do you think you’ll be done?” Jim tells him—there are autopsy results he should get by 11, then there’s a budget request to file in. An hour, maybe two. “Your place?” Batman asks, as matter-of-fact as ever. Jim nods.
After all, it’s not like they can go to Batman’s place.
Batman waits for him on his back porch. Jim understands dimly that it took some time, these past weeks, for Batman to settle some internal struggles, that maybe he wanted to make sure Jim was on the same page—but now he is fairly direct about what he wants. In the kitchen, he says, “Turn off the lights.” He even explains, pointing to his mask: “It’ll get in the way.”
Once they are in the dark, Jim hears the cowl being removed. Then Batman kisses him. Jim kisses back more hungrily than he suspected he might.
They do drink one glass each of Jim’s whisky, but only after Batman blows him in the corridor on the way to the bedroom. And then they fuck as elaborately as they might without condoms and lubricant, Batman’s cock tucked between Jim’s thighs.
Batman stays the night, or most of it. Jim sleeps like the dead, the other man spooned behind him, Batman’s arm against his chest. He wakes to a kiss being pressed to his wounded shoulder, a crack of faint dawn light coming in at the edge of the curtain and the sound of armor plates being reassembled. There’s a melancholy to it, even though Jim doesn’t really know where the feeling comes from.
“Everything okay?” he asks the darkness around him.
A pause. “I’ll be in touch.”
The week that follows is the longest Jim has known in some time. One moment, it feels as though it shouldn’t be so bad. They work together. They slept together. These things apparently happen. The next moment, it’s entirely different. Batman is not just someone he works with. And they didn’t just sleep together. And maybe this shouldn’t have happened at all, should it?
His shoulder starts hurting again.
To top it off, it’s possibly the slowest week in recent GCPD history: no drug bust, no breaking and entering gone bad—that is, no crime scene to hang around.
Maybe Batman was waiting for some crime to take place too. Because when there fails to be any and the week has passed, Jim comes into his MCU office one evening after an afternoon at City Hall, and finds a post-it note on his computer. It says, “My place”, and there are coordinates, and a small key taped at the back.
The coordinates lead him to the docks, past a tall fence, and in front of a rusty metal crate. The key opens a padlock, and the inside of the crate looks like what Jim imagines is a regular, empty crate, a bit dusty, with a box or two in the corner. Then the ground sinks under him.
He arrives in a place so completely dark, he cannot tell the ground from the walls, if there are any. The faint echo of a few careful steps forward tells him it’s a very large space.
“Jim,” Batman’s voice says. He’s close enough that he doesn’t need to speak loudly. Jim doesn’t start, but his heart has been beating up a storm since he left his office: it couldn’t beat any faster.
A hand closes over his wrist. There’s no suit, no armor, no mask attached to it, Jim realizes. It’s a man in jeans and a t-shirt. The anguish of the last few days collapses like a wave breaking, and Jim kisses this man ferociously.
He’s kissed back in kind, and Batman backs him up into a wall. It’s moments before a door opens beside them, and they stumble into a small room. Jim is then half-guided and half-pushed onto a small, cot-sized bed, Batman leaning over him. They don’t take the time to undress properly. It takes some fumbling for Jim’s hand to find his way into Batman’s pants. Batman’s eyes must be more used to the dark, because one of his hands is wound into Jim’s hair, and the other undoes his belt. They jerk each other off in turns, each pausing their stroking when the other quickens the pace. Batman comes first with a gasp, pushing into Jim’s hand. He shifts down on the cot and before Jim finishes, he takes him roughly in his mouth.
They catch their breath, Batman’s head on Jim’s uninjured shoulder. Batman gets up to fetch a wet cloth, and while Jim cleans up as best he can, effectively blind as he is in this obscurity, Batman takes Jim’s phone from his suit jacket. It’s not particularly surprising that Batman knows the pin to unlock his phone—what Jim does notice is that the clear blue light illuminates two forearms, and a sliver of chest. Batman just turns off the phone: it’s more like a lightning bolt in the night, too quick for Jim to see anything.
“There’s some more work I have to do,” Batman says. “Get some sleep.”
Jim sets his head down on the pillow, not sure he feels tired at all. But endorphins work their magic. As he falls asleep, he thinks, for the first time, that Batman doesn’t make his voice rougher anymore. Jim can’t remember at what point it happened.
He wakes in what is only relative darkness. The walls around him are grey concrete, and a dim glow comes from paler tiles in the ceiling above. His clothing has been folded neatly on a chair, with his glasses on top.
The door leads directly to the large space Jim arrived in first. The lights are on there too. The Batpod is parked off to the side, the armor is on a stand, and a man is working at a desk, in front of columns of monitors.
His back is turned to Jim. But Jim can tell who it is before he reaches him.
Bruce Wayne turns around to face him. The first thing Jim notes is how tired he looks, and then he sees the large bruise on his left arm, shades of purple turning yellow.
“You should know who you’re sharing your bed with,” Bruce explains. But Jim isn’t sure explanations are needed at this point.
He huffs. “You lied to my face about catching that light.”
Bruce smiles back, somewhat sheepish. “I had to improvise.”
Being with Batman may sound like it’s the most complicated part, but really the playboy façade is what’s more of a problem. It’s not like the GCPD Commissioner and Bruce Wayne can just start seeing each other overnight: if not for Batman, they’re mostly strangers. Not that it’s impossible—these things happen. But if Bruce breaks character too quickly, tabloid reporters might get suspicious.
Alfred Pennyworth is, Jim discovers, the one who comes up with these kinds of plans. (Seeing his rather bewildered air at the discovery, Bruce tells him, “Alfred looks every bit like a respectable English gentleman. But in fact, he’s pretty much the most devious person you’ve ever met.”)
The Jim Gordon half of it is the one Alfred takes care of most quickly. The butler assesses him from head to toe, then declares: “It’s entirely understandable for a recently divorced, middle-aged man, who’s just come into a new important job to have an identity crisis of some sort. Including a risqué relationship with a younger man. It’s quite perfect.”
Now the question is how to make sure the affair even plausibly began in the first place. Sure, Bruce Wayne can go from sleeping around to having actual relationships, but it does require pacing.
They are two months in. Jim does have to attend a lot more public events than he ever meant to. He also sees both a lot more and a lot less of Batman than he used to. And of course, Barbara and the kids know who he’s really with, because they deserve to, and because they would never buy the midlife crisis story Alfred crafted for the paparazzi.
Tonight’s soirée is the annual Wayne Foundation fundraising ball. It’s at the recently rebuilt Manor, and Bruce has only just located Jim in the crowd. He stays a bit longer at his side than he probably should, so much so that Jim has to remind him: “Don’t forget to mingle.”
Bruce smiles with his eyes, like Batman would, and says, “You’ll know that I find you to be excellent company, Commissioner.”
Jim nods in his glass. “Looking back, I should have noticed that earlier.”
Bruce’s eyes stay on Jim, but the room dissolves around them, and they’re not in the warm Wayne Manor ballroom, full of clinging glasses and swirling gowns. They’re in some shabby building in the Narrows, at night, or maybe on some rooftop or other. It takes them a full minute to snap out of it.
Jim clears his throat. Bruce focuses again: “Yes. Mingling. Got it.”