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Bruce's dreams always start the same way.
He's perched on the highest vantage point at the docks, looking over the bay, his beloved city at his back. The fetid stench of the polluted ocean water is comforting, making it almost seem real. There's a soft smudge to the lights sparking off the water, the moonlight made hazy with smog. It makes Bruce feel far away. Indistinct.
And then there is a grounding touch on his shoulder.
He doesn't startle. This is the only dream he has where he knows, without a doubt, that he is safe.
‘My faithful Knight,’ the woman says. Her voice sounds like police sirens, brick-on-brick. Her laughter sounds like a scream. Her scream sounds like laughter.
She is an enigma. A woman Bruce has known since the day he was born, but he has never seen her face with waking eyes - except, of course, for all the ways he sees her every day.
‘Gotham,’ he says, with aching fondness, for she has no other name than this.
‘You grieve tonight,’ she murmurs and a long-fingered hand cards through Bruce's unruly hair.
He never wears the cowl in these dreams. Most of the time, he doesn't wear the batsuit at all. There's no need here. Gotham knows who he is no matter which mask he wears. He stopped wearing any in these moments a long time ago.
‘I'm always grieving,’ he answers her non-question.
Gotham chuckles, a fire-escape rattle. ‘Tonight, you grieve for the living.’
Bruce sighs and concedes the point. ‘Dick is staying with his new hero-friends,’ he says.
‘I know,’ Gotham hums. ‘He is... beyond my reach.’
‘And mine,’ Bruce admits. ‘He's growing up. In a matter of months, he will graduate high school and then...’
Gotham cups his face in her stone-coloured hands, directing his gaze to her face. ‘And then?’
Bruce swallows. He studies her marble features, inhumanly perfect but run through with cracks and fissures deep into the stone. Her eyes are chips of onyx, lit from behind by a green glow. Bruce thinks, as he does every time he looks upon her, that he has never seen anything more beautiful.
Her hands are the warmest thing he has ever touched.
‘I'll be alone again,’ Bruce murmurs, closing his eyes against the sharp stab of fear. ‘I'll be empty.’
Dick. His protegé, his partner in the Mission they both swore to uphold, his son. The time is coming for Bruce to let his little Robin fly free. He doesn't know if he has the strength.
‘Would it be easier?’ Gotham asked, her onyx eyes inscrutable and familiar, ‘Could you let him go if you knew you would not be alone? I could find you another.’
Bruce shook his head. ‘I can't replace him. He's my son.’
Gotham smiled. ‘Plenty of sons have brothers.’
Bruce... blinked, surprised. As an only child himself, and the father of an only child, the thought hadn't occurred to him. Fathers and sons were a one-to-one ratio at Wayne Manor. From Thomas- and then Alfred- to Bruce, then Bruce to Dick, there was never any competition for fatherly attention at the Manor. No second source of filial love.
Dick was seventeen, but Bruce was only thirty-three. It hurt to think that his days of being a father to a boy were almost over, as much as he relished the experience of being father to the man Dick was growing into.
Dick wouldn't like having a brother, Bruce thought. At least, not at first. But Dick was about to move away for college. Bruce could give him time to get used to the idea.
Bruce opened his eyes and smiled up at the only woman who could truly claim to hold his entire heart in her hands. ‘Yes,’ he breathed. ‘I'm not ready to let go of being the father of a child. I want...’
Someone to nurture. To care for. To love and be loved by. Someone to teach, to encourage and watch grow into a person they could be proud of. A partner. A light in the darkness that shrouded so much of Bruce’s life. A reminder of the goodness that still existed in the world. The impure purity and flawed perfection that was Gotham. He wanted - needed - hope.
He didn't need to say anything more out loud. Gotham heard him as she always does. Completely and without judgement.
‘Then that is what I will give you,’ she promised. ‘A gift for your faithful service, and a boon to help you through the years to come.’
And she kissed him. Bruce didn't hesitate to open his mouth, accepting her into him as she embraced him fully. This was not the first time they had done this in a dream. Despite her appearance, Gotham’s lips were soft and welcoming, as if the city could do nothing but devour him whole in the most blissful of ways.
Without hesitation, he followed her lead, blindly trusting as she pressed him down onto his back on their secluded rooftop. It should have been uncomfortable, nothing between his bare skin and the crumbling tar of the roof, but Bruce only felt safe, the press of the hard, uneven surface into his back only served to ground him, to reduce his awareness to only his body and the weight of the love of his life bearing down on top of him. Such was the comfort of a dream.
He sighed as she scraped broken teeth down the column of his throat, dragging polished-smooth fingers over his pebbling nipples as her hands travelled further down. The loose black pants Bruce had worn to bed that evening parted like water under her touch, leaving him bare in moments. She knelt between his trembling thighs, tracing soothing patterns - bat shapes, Bruce realised with a shudder - on the skin of his abdomen.
‘Will you accept my gift?’ she asked, pinning him with her eyes, splaying him open and immobile with nothing but a feather-light touch.
‘Yes,’ Bruce gasped, unable to deny her anything. ‘Please, I need this. I want nothing more.’
Some things about Gotham were eternal, but no two of Bruce's encounters of this kind with the city-entity were the same. Sometimes her body was all sharp angles and edges, like the Gothic spires that adorn her skyline.
Sometimes she was softer, her flesh rippling like reflections on water. Most of the time, she was distinctly female, with breasts and an entrance that led deep inside to warmer, wetter places. Tonight, however, something was different. Bruce couldn't suppress a full body shiver.
Gotham's hands bypassed his own throbbing erection, trailing down the inner crease of his thighs to a more intimate place. She pressed against his entrance with one finger and it slid inside him without friction. Perhaps it was the logic of a dream, that he required no preparation. Perhaps his body simply found it antithetical to his existence to deny her anything. He was no one's and nothing if he was not hers.
Bruce rumbled, a pleased sigh that released all remaining tension inside him. He opened for her without hesitation, without pain or fear. When she removed her fingers, he clenched desperately on the aching nothingness they left behind, until a protrusion of a different kind brushed against his hole.
Tonight's Gotham apparently saw fit to deliver his gift, his new child, through traditional means and had manifested a cock with which to do so.
Bruce's breath hitched as she entered him, as he greedily swallowed all that she saw fit to give. She stretched him wide, to the point of pain, but that paled in comparison to the pleasure sparking up his spine, warming every cold inner part of him. She shifted inside and her cock head brushed against something that sent a cascade of fizzing warmth down every nerve.
Gotham folded his legs up at the knees, forcing his body open wider. She leaned forward until when Bruce blinked open bleary eyes, her face was right above his, moving rhythmically in time with her thrusts, her dark hair falling in curtains around them, further shutting out the world.
‘I cannot carry your child for you,’ she said with a hint of regret. ‘Not in the true world where I have no human form. But if you ask with enough sincerity, with true intention, you may be able to carry mine.’
Bruce threw his head back and moaned at the words, as she ground down on something deep inside him that made him see stars.
‘I want that!’ he gasped, the words forcing themselves from his chest even as he thought them. ‘Please! Let me carry for you. Let me create something good! I need-’
Tears sprung from his eyes, not at the physical sensation but at the sudden, fierce swelling of hope, of joy, that exploded in his chest. It was every time he flew across rooftops with Dick, every time he watched the sun rise over the Gothic spires of Gotham Cathedral, how the light obliterated everything for that first moment of dawn. It was more, it was impossible, but the pure, indescribable rightness he felt was nothing short of a supernova.
‘Let me have this,’ he sobbed, tears streaming down his face into his hair. ‘Let me keep this part of you safe! Let me do something good! Please! I want to be good- I- I want to grow something beautiful for once!’
Gotham’s rhythm was increasing, a rooftop chase nearing its conclusion, the goal in sight. Bruce thrashed, his head thrown from side to side as he fought to match her punishing pace with his hips, meeting her at every thrust with a complimentary one of his own. His body was on fire. He was drowning. He was flying through the air scant moments away from the apex of a swing-
His stomach clenched in anticipation of the fall. As with every grapnel swing, just as he reached an unfathomable height, he prayed to his City to catch him, and tumbled over the edge.
Bruce awoke with his sweat soaked sheets tangled around his ankles. He came back to himself little by little. His black sleep pants were wet and sticky with his come, his hole aching and empty as if he really had taken a cock last night. The tears were still drying on his cheeks.
And deep inside him, in a tiny spot nestled safely under his navel, something warm fluttered like butterfly- or bat- wings.
Bruce pressed his hand to the spot gently and smiled to himself.