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Clark Kent looked down at the blanket-wrapped lump on the sofa and sighed. “Why aren’t you in bed?” he asked, torn between exasperation and concern. The lump muttered something, and Clark dropped into the chair next to the sofa to make sure he’d heard right. “What?”
Bruce rolled over, shifting the blankets away from his face, leaving him messy-haired and vaguely sweaty. “You heard me,” he grumbled.
“I thought I heard you say ‘I’m not that sick,’ but I’m hoping I was wrong.” Bruce just huffed. Unbelievable. “Unbelievable,” Clark said, because it had to be said. “’I’m not that sick,’ honestly. Says the man with pneumonia after being drowned in a sewer.”
“Nearly drowned,” Bruce corrected. “And it was a storm sewer, it hardly counts.”
“In what way— No, nope, never mind, I’m not having this conversation with you.”
“It was mostly groundwater run-off,” Bruce was already explaining, voice hoarse. “If it had been actual sewage, with a component proportion of human waste above, say, 40%, I might have just let myself die.”
“Bruce.”
“I don’t really want to know what E. coli would do in the lungs.”
“Bruce.”
“Aspirating vomit is already a risk, I don’t think there’s any—”
“I said I’m not having this conversation with you!”
Bruce sniffed wetly. “And you’re not. I’m having it with myself.”
“Would a healthy person say that, Bruce?”
Instead of answering, Bruce ducked back down into the cocoon of blankets and coughed, long and harsh and deep. Clark scanned him without really thinking about it, automatically checking for bruised or broken ribs. He didn’t find any, but he couldn’t stop himself from wincing at the sight of the lungs themselves. Even he knew they weren’t supposed to look like that.
“Does Dev know?” Clark asked quietly once it had stopped. Bruce was even more flushed now, but pulled the blankets tighter around himself as he caught his breath.
“No,” he admitted after a few beats, eyes closed. “He’s on vacation. Visiting his sister. Planned for a while.”
“Who’s seen you, then? Leslie?”
“Yeah.” Bruce cleared his throat and coughed again, though not as worryingly as before. “Ugh.” He sniffed. “This is disgusting.” There was a box of tissues on the floor next to the couch – Clark lifted it up, and Bruce reached one hand out of his blanket wrap to take a tissue. He blew his nose, made a face, took another. Rinse and repeat.
“Please tell me you’re not just piling those up in there with you,” Clark said after the fourth tissue vanished into the blanket.
“I forgot to bring a trash can,” Bruce muttered, and then sneezed.
Half a second later, Clark was back with a wastepaper basket from the nearest office. “Toss ‘em,” he ordered, and Bruce pulled a truly alarming number of crumpled tissues out of god knows where and dropped them listlessly into the basket. “Bruce,” Clark said, pained.
“I might also have a sinus infection,” Bruce admitted wearily, discarding what was hopefully the last of his horrifying litter.
“Still not sick enough to be in bed, though, huh?”
“No.” Bruce wrapped himself up again and sort of burrowed into the cushions. “I don’t...sleep well, when I’m sick,” he said after a bit. “Couches are. Easier, somehow.”
“And bed is where you’re stuck when you truly can’t go anywhere else,” Clark added. “I get it.”
Bruce coughed, short and sharp. “Do you?”
“I mean, I’ve heard.”
“Hmm.”
They sat in silence for a bit, Clark listening to the sound of Bruce’s wet breathing and rapid heartrate and Bruce, well, lying rather than sitting for one, but probably also listening to those things.
“Thanks for telling me,” Clark said eventually. “Or, you know, letting Alfred tell me. I still think you should tell the others, too, but I’ll take what I can get.”
Bruce just hummed, apparently sinking back towards sleep. Clark touched his shoulder gently, and when he didn’t react, stood quietly and slipped out of the room.
An hour or so later, he was having tea with Alfred in the kitchen. It wasn’t uncomfortable, necessarily, but it wasn’t entirely familiar, either. He had the sense that Tea with Alfred, as an Event, mostly occurred with Dev and Damian, and that he was a bit of a stand-in. Still, though, Alfred was a friend, and it was good to catch up for a bit. He was obviously run down, what with Bruce sick and none of the others currently home to help out – missions and school and alternate living arrangements and the like, from what he gathered – but as much as he hated to admit it, they’d been through worse. Alfred had been through worse. It was unfair, but it meant that odds were good that this, too, would pass and not leave much of a mark.
That didn’t comfort him too much when he caught the dizzily mumbled, “Clark?” coming from several rooms away, though. He was back in the den quicker than a thought, watching Bruce clumsily try to extricate himself from the tangle of blankets he’d made, and his worry peaked.
“I’m here,” Clark said. “What is it? Are you going to be sick?” He’d seen that look before, and returned with a sturdier bin before Bruce had even drawn the breath to answer.
“No,” Bruce said, still a bit slurred. “No, I’m. Think the fever’s higher. Might need.” Sitting up now, he swayed forward, and Clark caught him. “I don’t know. Just. Seemed...hmm.”
“Yeah, it seems ‘hmm’ to me, too.” He didn’t really need to, not with Bruce already leaning against him, but Clark still pressed his free hand against Bruce’s cheek, then his forehead. “Don’t know how high it was before, but you’re pretty warm right now. Alfred?” he called back over his shoulder.
“Yes, Master Kent?” Alfred arrived in the room as if on cue, having taken only slightly longer to make the trip.
“Did Leslie leave instructions for fever-management?”
“Not as such,” Alfred said, a bit tightly. “But perhaps bed is in order now, Master Bruce?”
For someone pushing delirious, Bruce managed to convey an incredible amount of disgruntlement at the suggestion. Clark could practically feel him gearing up to argue, however ludicrously, that he still wasn’t that sick, but then he started coughing instead and ended up needing the sturdier bin after all. He spat, after, and coughed again but didn’t gag that time. “Sorry,” he panted, breathing hard. “Sorry, that’s—”
“It’s okay,” Clark said, trying for soothing. He handed Bruce a tissue and rubbed his back, the heavy fabric of the sweatshirt faintly clammy under his hand, as Bruce wiped his mouth. Clark kept a hold of the trash can in the other, just in case, but the danger seemed to have passed. “You done?”
“Think so. Fuck.”
Alfred reappeared with a damp cloth and crouched to wipe Bruce’s face a second time. Bruce didn’t resist, just sagged against Clark. “Sorry,” he said again. “It’s okay, Al. Just the fever.”
“And the pneumonia, and the antibiotics,” Alfred said evenly, folding the cloth and passing a clean side over Bruce’s forehead. “I’m hardly surprised, but I’m afraid that now I really must insist: Bed, for a few hours at least. If you would, Master Kent?”
Clark lifted Bruce easily, trailing blankets and all. Rather than try to tuck them out of the way, he just hovered off the floor and flew them slowly through the house up to the master bedroom.
There was an IV stand set up next to the bed, and an oxygen tank sitting unobtrusively under a coil of tubing. Clark sighed again and set Bruce down on the edge of the mattress. “‘Not that sick?’” he asked, more pointedly this time. “Seriously? You supposed to be hooked up to these?”
“No.” Bruce started shucking the blanket like a corn husk.
Clark helped peel him out of it and tried not to be irritated by the terse dismissal. “Don’t be surly, I’m worried.”
Together they got it mostly unwound, and Bruce tugged the final corner out from under himself. “Not being surly,” he muttered, then went a shade paler and swayed forward a bit. “Clark,” he said, eyes closed, but Clark had already scooped him up and headed for the bathroom.
He got them there in plenty of time for Bruce to puke again, then flushed the toilet for him and propped him up while he rinsed his mouth, splashed his face, then, after a moment of consideration, stuck his whole head under the faucet. The cold water seemed to help; he still leaned heavily on Clark to get back across the room to bed, but he was mostly moving under his own power and he seemed more alert.
Well, relatively. Alert in this setting should have quickly translated to annoyed, and though he wasn’t as limp and uncoordinated as he had been downstairs, he just got himself into the newly turned-down bed with a quiet noise of discomfort and sank back against the stack of pillows. Alfred settled the sheet and light blanket back up over his legs, which Clark now saw were clad in flannel pajama pants with cartoon alligators on them, and coaxed Bruce into helping remove his sweatshirt. When it came off, Bruce’s wet hair was even messier than before, and he looked far paler against the dark grey of his t-shirt than he had against the lighter heather of the sweatshirt.
“The laundry hamper is in the second closet,” Alfred said softly, and Clark took the sweatshirt and bundled up blanket over to it. When he turned around again, Alfred was taping a small piece of gauze over the IV line in the back of Bruce’s hand. Finished, he straightened with a sigh that even Bruce might not have heard, worry or stiffness or simple fatigue just a bit too big to hold in. Clark stayed back while Alfred checked his temperature and held a glass of water for him to sip at, chasing down a small pill that Clark guessed was probably for the nausea, but quietly put himself between Alfred and the door to the ensuite when Alfred turned toward it with a basin in hand.
“You’re exhausted, Alfred,” Clark said quietly, hopefully too quietly for Bruce to hear, should he still be awake. “I’ll stay with him for a bit, try to get the fever down a little. I’ll keep him here until dinner, if I even have to, and you can sit down or lie down or whatever it is you need to do because you’re dead on your feet.”
Alfred met his gaze easily and held steady. Clark was simply himself here, somewhere between Clark Kent and Kal-El, neither meek reporter nor unmasked hero, and lots of people seemed to have trouble meeting his eye when he wasn’t wearing Kent. Not Alfred, though. Never Alfred. After a long few moments, Alfred acquiesced. His posture relaxed ever so slightly, though he didn’t do anything as dramatic as fold and he certainly didn’t do anything so ill-mannered as slump.
“He’s much better today than he has been,” Alfred said at last, even more quietly. He let that sink in, and Clark felt a curling wrench of worry as it did. If this was better...
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” he promised. “And an ear. Both of each, actually. Anything changes, I’ll let you know, but please. Go get some rest. You need it almost as badly as he does.”
“I should hope the situation isn’t quite that dire,” Alfred said dryly, but he handed the bowl to Clark nonetheless. “Thank you, Master Kent. I’ll be only a room away should you need me, and should you need me, I expect you to fetch me.”
“Of course,” Clark promised. He meant it, too. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but if it did, he’d do what he must.
“Good man.” Alfred gave him a tired smile, then slipped quietly – and not a little stiffly – out of the room, pulling the door mostly shut behind him.
Clark took the bowl into the bathroom and turned on the cold tap, hunting through the cupboards for a few washcloths and a towel while the bowl filled. Both objectives completed, he headed back into the main bedroom, and cleared a space on the bedside table.
Bruce stiffened slightly at the touch of cold water against his forehead, then let out a sound halfway between a sigh and a groan and went limp again. “That good, huh?” Clark asked with a smile. Bruce just hummed, but the relief was obvious in every line of his being. “Good. Here, I’m gonna move your arms a little.” He arranged two more of the cloths along the insides of Bruce’s wrists, careful not to disturb the IV line, and used the last one to dab at his throat and around the back of his neck.
By the time he was done, Bruce was completely boneless, and his heartbeat was a little closer to its usual rhythm.
“How’s the fever been?” Clark asked softly. “Honestly. What should I treat as normal, here?”
“102,” Bruce answered without opening his eyes. “Yesterday... Worse than that. Day before, also worse. Leslie was...concerned. Today’s been a good day.”
“Low bar,” Clark pointed out, and Bruce snorted. “Seriously, though, do you need the oxygen? I’d rather you tell me now than have to go wake Alfred up because your fingernails are turning blue.”
“You wouldn’t have to wake him up for that.”
“I promised I’d let him know if anything changed.”
“Why?”
“Yes or no, Bruce.”
Bruce sniffed, then cleared his throat, coughed a little, and sniffed again. At no point did he open his eyes. “No,” he said finally. “I think I just overheated. And overreacted.”
Clark heaved a sigh. Overreacted. “Because god forbid you ever give anyone actionable information about your health.”
“I’ll be fine in ten minutes.”
“Sure,” Clark said. “Because a baseline temperature of 102 is just peachy.”
“Shut up.”
Clark refreshed the cloths a couple of times after that, but stayed quiet. Mostly Bruce just breathed – still wet, still rattling, but easing as his temperature came down a little – and after the promised ten minutes, he was asleep.
Half an hour later he was up again, cranky and disoriented. Twenty minutes after that, he’d fallen back asleep, only to start awake in another hour or so.
Once he’d fallen asleep for the third time, Clark ducked out of the room and returned with a stack of books. It was going to be a long afternoon.
Bruce woke up to blurred vision, a thick mental fog, and heavy aches in every inch of him. And Jason, frozen next to the bed.
Wait.
“Jay?” he rasped, trying to blink some of the gunk out of his eyes.
“Shit,” Jason whispered, looking like a comic-strip burglar caught mid-sneak with a bag full of money. “Did I wake you up?”
“What’re you doing here?” Blinking wasn’t working, so he dragged a hand up to his face. God, his chest hurt.
“Uh. Nothing? This is a dream?”
“Jay.” He managed to clear one eye, then the other. Things were still a little fuzzy, but he blamed it on the darkness of the room and the lingering exhaustion.
“Fine. Alfred said you were pretty messed up, and I’m a sap so I came to check on you. Sue me. But I gotta say, I think he undersold it a little because gorram, B, you are wrecked.”
In answer, Bruce coughed. He’d been wrong, earlier – now his chest hurt, and the liquid concrete in his sinuses yesterday had apparently been allowed to set. “Fuck. Ow.”
“Seriously, what happened? Alfred didn’t get a chance to go into details, but you look like death.”
“Pneumonia. Fight went sideways. Sewers. Almost drowned.” He coughed again, harder, curled onto his side with the force of it. Did he have broken ribs? If he hadn’t before, he might now. Zygomatic bones would be next, at this rate.
“Shit,” Jason said over the sound. “B, you absolute lunatic. Why didn’t I know about this?”
“No need,” Bruce managed between wheezing breaths once he’d stopped. “Was fine.”
“Hang on, let me google something real quick,” Jason said acidly, and pulled out his phone. “Is...it...fine....if...you.....can’t......breathe...period question mark. Hey, look at that!” He held his screen up six inches away from Bruce’s face. There was a large NO YOU IDIOT on a white background.
Bruce blinked. “Did you just. Have that.”
“It’s an email. I’m sending it. Whoop! You’ve got mail,” he said à la MSN messenger.
“Did Alfred tell you not to bother me.”
“No, he told me not to wake you up.”
“Could you go back downstairs and ask him to tell you not to bother me.”
“Way to get through a full sentence with your lungs still on the inside, champ. I’m proud of you.”
Bruce sighed and started pushing himself up.
“Hey, no,” Jason said, startled, and reached out a hand as if to hold him down. “Bruce, no.”
Bruce got more or less upright and tried to ignore how badly it made his face ache. And his chest. And his back. And also his right leg, for mysterious and presumably unrelated reasons.
“B, I’m serious. If you get out of bed, I’m going out the window. There’s no way Alfred will believe I didn’t wake you up, and I’m too pretty to die again.”
“You did wake me up,” Bruce reminded him.
“That’s why he won’t believe it,” Jason hissed.
Instead of trying to sit up further, though, Bruce just dropped his head back against the headboard and tried to catch his breath. It eluded him, spurred to a gallop by his pounding heart. He patted the mattress with a heavy hand, the one without the IV still attached. “Sit.”
“Uh, no, I think I’ll take the chair. You reek.” Jason nudged the IV pole with his boot as he dropped into the chair pulled up by the bedside. “Any of that actually doing anything before you sweat it out?”
“Haven’t showered in a few days,” Bruce admitted, rubbing at his face. Or shaved, for that matter. “Hasn’t really been a priority.” Hadn’t really been a possibility. “How’s school going?” he tried, and Jason barked a startled laugh. It wasn’t friendly. Bruce ignored that. “You have that project coming up, right?”
“Yeah, the social use of space thing. Finished it early, so now I’m done for the semester. Thought I’d come back, make an entrance, you know. Blow kisses to my adoring fans, that sort of thing.” His posture was all casual slouch, leaned back in the chair, limbs sprawled out, but his eyes were piercing. Bruce knew what was coming, knew there was no way to evade it without losing face.
“But then I roll up here,” Jason went on, voice getting colder, “to find Alfred looking like he’s been in the trenches, and he says you’ve been knocked on your ass hard and the only person you deigned to tell was Clark Kent, who took the night shift here so Alfred could frigging sleep for the first time in two days because you’ve been literally bedridden and would rather make him deal with it alone than admit to any of us that you screwed up and needed help. So yeah, Bruce, school’s fine. How’s your day going.”
Bruce closed his eyes while he counted out three even breaths, willing the cough to keep quiet. “Almost as badly as I deserve,” he said at last, opening his eyes.
“Wow, you think?”
“Sometimes,” he said, deadpan, and Jason snorted. Crossed his arms, started jiggling one of his legs. “It’s not about pride,” Bruce said after a bit. “It’s about boundaries. Your boundaries,” he added, as Jason’s glare snapped back to him. “You all needed time off. You all asked for time off. Time off is time off. I’m trying to respect that.” The truce broke, then, and he had to cough again. Sitting up made things a little easier, but left his ears ringing and his vision overexposed.
“And Alfred?” Jason asked. “Doesn’t he get ‘boundaries’ like the rest of us?”
“I asked,” Bruce ground out through the raw furrows in his throat. “Had a cover story. Could’ve gone to the hospital as Bruce Wayne. Alfred said no.”
“Probably because your cover story was aerated baloney.”
“I’ll tell Dev you think so.”
“And Dev!” Jason said heatedly, making a broad, searching gesture. “Where’s Dev in all of this?”
“With his family,” Bruce snapped without thinking. “Taking a break from this circus.”
“Wait,” Jason said, dropping his arms as surprise replaced anger. “Really? You let everyone call off at the same time?”
“What do you mean ‘let,’ since when have I ever let any of you do anything?”
“Absolutely everyone?” Jason went on, ignoring him. “And then, what, we all clocked out and you were immediately like ‘great, prime time to do something stupid’?”
“Jason.”
“You’re never gonna live this down. You know that, right?”
“Jason.”
“You’re gonna be hearing about this until you die, old man. You crashed and burned so hard without us, oh my crumbs.”
Words were clearly not getting through, so Bruce did the only thing he could. He sat up and peeled back the tape on the back of his hand, then pulled out the IV needle and calmly taped the gauze back down over the tiny drop of blood that welled. Almost immediately, the faint sound of footsteps could be heard climbing the stairs.
“No! No no no no no,” Jason was saying, and scrambled back, nearly overturning the chair in his haste. “Bruce, B-man, it doesn’t have to be like this.” Bruce pushed back the blankets and swung his legs off over the edge of the mattress. He couldn’t actually see anything, because his vision was whiting out from the change in elevation – and, probably, the whims of a vagus nerve that never bothered him unless he was already struggling – but he fixed his attention on the spot that Jason had last occupied and did his best to look placidly unbothered.
The footsteps reached the landing halfway up.
“You sick son of a gun,” Jason hissed, somewhere off to his left, and then there was the schwing of a curtain being pulled back and the heavy creak of old wood as the window was pried open.
A few moments later, his vision had cleared enough to let him see the room again. Jason had apparently made good on his threat, leaving the window open and the cold December air swirling in.
Well.
That could have gone worse.
Bruce coughed again, just barely managed to stop before it turned to retching, and decided the safest thing to do at this juncture was go back to sleep. He got back under the covers, pulled them up over his chin, and curled up again with a weary sigh.
A strategic retreat was a sound tactic. As was catching sleep in the lulls between tides of battle. So really, chasing Jason off with threats of Alfred was just basic martial logic. Jason wouldn’t see it that way, of course; he’d only delayed his chewing out, and Jason generally charged criminally aggressive interest rates. But he’d worry about that later. For now, sleep.
A heavy thud cut through the silence of the room and jolted him to full awareness.
“Terribly sorry, Master Bruce,” said a slightly winded voice in response to his sharp breath and aborted startle. Alfred. “The window was quite stuck.”
Window? Oh, right. Jay. “Leave it,” Bruce croaked. “So Jay can come back in.”
“Master Jason is in the kitchen,” Alfred assured him, coming into view and dusting his hands. “Everything’s all right, I simply feared the room would grow too cold. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s fine,” Bruce managed. He blinked away some of the haze, and found the room brighter than it had been before. “Time is it?” The words scraped out harshly, but he swallowed against the cough before it could rise.
“A little after ten,” Alfred said. A cool hand brushed against his cheek, and Alfred tsked. “You’re still quite warm, I’m afraid, but I think no worse than yesterday. How are you feeling?”
Bruce let his eyes fall closed again and settled back into the mattress, out of the tension of sudden waking. “Not great.”
“No, I don’t suppose so.” Alfred took his wrist and felt his pulse. Bruce let him. With a sigh, Alfred let go and settled on the edge of the mattress next to him, his slight weight only barely dipping the surface. “Oh, my dear boy,” he said softly. “I am so very sorry. I know you’re miserable, and I regret that the only thing to do is rest and wait this out.”
“Don’t. It’s been hard on you, too.”
“Hush. I needn’t remind you we’ve all had worse, and besides, Master Kent was an enormous help yesterday.”
Right. Clark had been there. “When’d he leave?”
“Late last night. He was called away on League business, but promised to return as soon as he was able.”
“And Jason?”
“Arrived a few hours ago,” Alfred said, and Bruce opened his eyes in surprise.
“Hours? I thought he just got here.”
“No,” Alfred said simply. “I came in a time or two to check on you, but the room hadn’t cooled so much that I wished to risk waking you coming in and closing the window.”
Bruce sighed, frustrated. He could have sworn he’d only just lain down when Alfred came in, but apparently he’d slept for hours. This shifting, unstable grasp on time was one of his least favorite things about this – a single hour could seem to stretch for days, and what felt like moments often turned out to be large windows of time in a world he knew nothing about. “I barely know what day it is,” he admitted, closing his eyes again. “I hate— Nothing feels real.”
“I know you don’t believe it, but you really are dreadfully ill,” Alfred said lightly, paper kindling in a dry wind. “I think last night was the longest you’ve slept at a stretch since becoming so.” There was a hand in his hair, softly stroking. “You’re going to need a great deal more rest, and other aid besides, to which end I’m going to have to insist you let me replace the IV you so pointedly removed.”
It wasn’t really a question, but Bruce nodded anyway. It was the least he could do – let Alfred make things easier for himself, take a worry or two of weight off his shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he said, belatedly. “Not just for...” he twitched his hand, where his skin itched under the tape. “Jay said you haven’t been sleeping. I should’ve realized.”
“And had you been lucid enough to notice, I might perhaps feel even the slightest inkling of resentment for it, but you were not, and so I do not.” Alfred’s voice was calm, and his hands steady as he cleaned Bruce’s hand with an alcohol wipe before reinserting the needle, but he didn’t deny it, and that spoke volumes more than either.
“Al.”
Alfred sighed. “Yes, Master Bruce, it was extremely ill-mannered of you to demonstrate such a lapse in omniscience, and I shall nurture this bitterness in my heart for years to come. Is that better?”
“Somewhat.”
“You needn’t berate yourself, you know.”
“Someone should.”
“That may indeed be the case, but it needn’t be you, my dear boy. I am given to understand that Master Jason ‘put you on blast,’ or so says Miss Stephanie.”
Bruce froze. Slowly, like a lake icing over. “He told Stephanie?”
“And Miss Cassandra,” Alfred said pleasantly. “It seems that Master Timothy elected not to return early, but has also been informed.”
Oh, god. He should have stayed in the sewer.
A couple of weeks after racing across two states with Cass to drop-kick Bruce’s dumb ass into the sun, Steph paused the clip she was editing and looked up. “Does it feel disingenuous to use this as a plug for flu shots?”
She and Bruce were both in the den with their computers. There was a lot more clicking than typing coming from Bruce, and she was pretty sure he was playing solitaire.
“No,” Bruce said, without looking up.
“Okay.”
She went back to editing.
A slightly shaky camera zoomed in on Bruce Wayne, who was sprawled on a recliner, wearing a dark blue dressing gown over a sweatshirt and flannel pajama pants. His hair was a disaster, he hadn’t shaved in several days, and his face was pale except for the dark smudges under his eyes. His eyes were closed, and his hand was up like he’d been rubbing them or pinching the bridge of his nose and then gotten too tired to keep moving and just left it there.
“I’m not doing a video, Steph,” he said. His voice was hoarse and scratchy. The camera zoomed in more, getting shakier and blurrier.
“But you promised!” said a closer voice, presumably the one behind the camera.
“I’ll do it,” Bruce said, “but not today.” The camera zoomed in even further until only his head was in the shot. The quality of the picture worsened considerably, and the lighting went weird, making everything washed out and overexposed. He still hadn’t moved his hand.
“Come onnnnn,” Steph wheedled.
“Steph, look at me,” Bruce said flatly. “I’ll ruin your viewership. You put me in the thumbnail and sure, you might get clicks, but as soon as actual footage of me comes up, it’s over. I look like a week-old corpse you pulled out of a canal to sell to a hospital. The sheer sight of me is almost guaranteed to violate YouTube community guidelines. Your ad revenue will be toast.”
The video zoomed out again to put his whole slouching form into the frame, but it still wasn’t very good quality.
“I don’t monetize my videos, Bruce,” Steph said, sounding scandalized. “I make them for the love of art and community.”
“Good on you,” Bruce said, still with no inflection. “Resist the urge to commercialize every second of your life. The constant drive to generate profit is a poison to the soul. What’s the internet saying that’s like three things that start with G.”
“Gaslight, girlboss, gatekeep?”
“The real world version of that should be ‘monetize, privatize, advertise.’”
“As in, those are bad things?”
“The worst,” Bruce agreed. He started to cough, and the video cut off with a television error message and a loud beep.
When the footage returned, the camera was on selfie mode and showed Stephanie Brown holding up her phone as she walked through Wayne Manor. She was dressed casually, not wearing makeup, and her hair was messily pulled back in a floppy bun. “So,” she said, looking into the camera, “the first lesson of this video is get your flu shot, because Bruce caught it and it’s no joke. He’s been messed up for weeks. He’s not contagious anymore, so a bunch of us have been hanging around the Manor helping out with stuff and trying to cheer him up because he’s been super grumpy. A few days ago I asked if he’d do another make-up video with me, since the last one did really well, and he said ‘eventually.’ I asked when ‘eventually’ would be, and he said, quote, ‘when I can sit up for five minutes without wanting to die.’”
The camera switched to rear-facing. “I think he’s been feigning weakness to avoid it, though,” Steph continued, “so I’m trying to catch him out. Wish me luck.”
In The Hall of the Mountain King started playing over a montage of footage of Bruce in various places around the house.
Bruce lying on a couch listlessly playing a video game with someone whose face was out of the frame.
Bruce curled up under a blanket on a different couch with a mug dangling from one hand.
Bruce trudging through a hallway with the same blanket wrapped around him like a cape, filmed from the staircase above. He was still holding the mug.
Bruce slumped over at a table with his head pillowed on his folded arms.
Bruce in a fluffy turquoise bathrobe, half reclined on still another couch, reading a newspaper. The shot slowly zoomed in to show the pattern of penguins on the robe.
As the tempo of the song increased, the clips became shorter and shorter until they were just snapshots.
Bruce on the floor, apparently asleep, with a stack of towels inexplicably balanced on his chest.
Bruce on another floor, this time on his front and reading a magazine with his chin on a pillow.
Bruce in armchair with his arms around his bent-up knees, glaring murderously at the camera like the close-up from Cabanel’s “Fallen Angel.”
Bruce lying face-down on one of the earlier couches, this time in a grey sweatsuit, with a scattering of used tissues spread out over the floor next to him.
Bruce stretched out on a Victorian-style fainting couch and surrounded by surprisingly realistic animal-headed canopic jars.
Bruce looking dazedly at something out of sight with his hair insanely tousled.
Bruce, asleep in a chair, a handlebar moustache drawn on in what was either body paint or a charcoal face mask.
A selfie with Bruce that he appeared not to notice, with Steph holding up a peace sign and someone else giving Bruce bunny ears.
A picture taken of Bruce’s reflection in a mirror – he was midway through shaving, and looked scandalized at the sight of the camera.
When the song ended, the screen cut to black for a moment before returning to a steadier shot of Bruce sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. He was stoically ignoring the camera, and although his chin was propped up on his hand, he looked a little better than he had in the earlier clips. There was no background music or narration, but small sounds of activity came through: doors closing, footsteps moving about, the sips of coffee, the occasional sniff or throat-clearing from Bruce. A timer suddenly went off, and Bruce sighed, staring flatly into the middle distance for a long moment before turning to look at the camera – or, rather, a bit over the camera, to the person behind it. “Can I at least wash my hair first?” he asked tiredly. Off-screen, Steph clapped excitedly.
The video then cut to the same room that the previous video had been shot in. Bruce had clearly showered – his hair was damp and unstyled but relatively tamed, and he was once again clean-shaven – and he was wearing a long-sleeved Henley instead of a sweatshirt or a bathrobe, but that seemed about as much as he was willing to dress up for the event. He was sitting on a couch, behind a low table, slumped against the backrest and generally presenting an air of exhaustion. After a short while, Stephanie entered the shot and sat next to him on the couch. She was still dressed comfortably, but her hair was in a neat ponytail and it looked like she’d done a little bit of make-up.
“So, Bruce,” she said cheerfully. “Why don’t you explain what we’re doing today?”
Bruce sighed, and rubbed at one of his eyes. “Sometimes,” he started, then trailed off, staring into the middle distance. One second of silence, then two. Three. Four. “Sometimes,” he said again, “things are just bad.” Steph snorted, trying not to laugh. Bruce kept going. He still had his hand up. “Maybe you’re hungover, maybe you got in a fight. Maybe you walked face-first into a concrete pillar at a Home Depot. Maybe you’ve been deathly ill and someone has been following you around in your own home making a mockumentary of your recovery. We’ve all been there.” His voice was still rough, though less so than in the first clip, and Steph had started making a choked sort of squeaking sound as she attempted not to burst out laughing.
“So sometimes things are bad,” he went on. “But. They can always be worse. Because sometimes, when things are already bad, you have to go into an office or sit in front of a camera and subject yourself to the agonies of being perceived in a professional capacity.”
“Is that something you have to do a lot?” Steph asked, trying and failing to bite back a grin. “Subject yourself to the agonies of being perceived in a professional capacity?”
“Sometimes, Stephanie, it feels like that’s the only thing I do.”
“Aw, is it hard being a billionaire?” she teased.
“It’s actually extremely easy.” He coughed a little. “All you have to do is sit there while the exploited labor of others is amassed into a gross pool of profit that then flows obscenely uphill through the institutional salmon ladders of a deeply inegalitarian society that perpetuates inequality and rewards pre-existing privilege almost as relentlessly as it reinforces pre-existing disadvantage. You literally accrue wealth just by passively existing. It’s dystopian. If a billionaire ever says it’s hard to be a billionaire, they’re a liar and you should knee them in the groin. What is hard is trying to be a good person despite being a billionaire. Philosophically, some would argue that this is impossible, and frankly I’m inclined to agree, but you have to keep trying.”
Bruce still hadn’t moved his hand away from his face, and had conveyed no emotion in the speech, but Steph was staring at him in obvious surprise. She glanced over at the camera, perplexed, then looked back at Bruce. “Are you, like... Okay?” she asked slowly.
“No. Every day I confront the horrors of a society that has been built on the backs of stolen lives, and either my sinus infection is coming back or someone broke into the house last night and filled all my craniofacial fossa with tar. I don’t know which would be preferable.”
“Do you want to lie down?”
“Yes, but that would make me look like a corpse. There’s no way to do make-up on a lying-down person that doesn’t immediately recall mortuary cosmetics, and I’m not sure that’s the angle you want for this.”
“Oh my god, wait, that would be perfect!” Steph exclaimed. “Because, like, we never quite got there, but the theme of this video is doing make-up to hide the fact that you look like shit, ergo, you looking dead as [bleeped out] would be a very appropriate starting point. And then we can do an ‘after’ shot of you, I don’t know, pretending to work, to show off the final result.”
“Pretending to work,” Bruce said flatly. Then, after a long pause, “Why do I agree to things.”
The shot changed again. He was now lying down on the couch, and the camera angle showed Stephanie sitting on the floor next to him and an array of cosmetic products spread out on the table.
“You good?” Steph asked.
Bruce closed his eyes. “Get your [bleeped out] flu shots. Now stop talking to me. I’m pretending to be dead.”
