Chapter Text
Kiran Devabhaktuni almost regrets agreeing to slice open Bruce Wayne’s scalp, drill into his skull, and dig around in his brain. Not that it was as simple as agreeing, really, when one’s boss calls one in for a meeting with himself and the senior neurosurgeon to say, “Bruce Wayne has requested you personally, and since he’s a major source of hospital funding, we’re going to let Tony sit this one out and go with what Wayne wants.”
And when the senior surgeon, Anthony Fabriello, MD, looks relieved at this rather than irritated he is being passed over, it should maybe function as a bloody warning sign. And Tony, honestly? Tony had no fucking idea.
The scans should have been reason enough. When Dev sat in front of his computer, looking at them again and again before his appointment with Wayne, he knows a wiser man than he would have had the exact same reaction Tony surely did: My hand to God, I will not be responsible for that.
But Dev is a glutton for punishment. Dev is maybe a bit mental. Because Dev? Dev looked at the scans for the fifth time, the six time, studying the curve of the tumor around the upper portion of the medulla and Dev saw a challenge.
He also saw a brain that should not be. It was a disaster zone, a minefield of contradiction. The fact that the tumor was the only thing he was being called in to take care of seemed a little ridiculous. Dev had never seen such scars. And Dev was curious.
Still, he knew the limits and requirements of his profession and when the billionaire playboy sat in his office with his upper crust gentleman’s gentlemen like a pair from sodding Downton Abbey, he had not sugar coated it in the least. He went down the whole list.
The risks included damage to nearly all systems: respiratory, sleep cycle, cardiac, crude touch, fine touch, pain processing, motor, and nervous. And the slight downward spiral of the end of the tumor meant it would be, even with the best instruments, akin to slicing the minuscule seeds out of a kiwi with a blunt spoon and hoping not to damage the fruit.
In other words, it couldn’t be done.
Dev was professional and honest except on that one final point:
He said that he bloody well could.
There was something then in Wayne’s eyes that should have stopped him. It should have sent him sprinting the kilometers back across the ocean into his old, dim, underfunded lab at Oxford.
Because right there, right in front of him, like a man stepped down from the theatre stage at the end of Hamlet, Wayne changed.
The billionaire was gone and in his place was this creature, this hard man who reminded Dev of his military-career father, his face and body like stone as he processed just how bad it really was. And he looked determined enough to rip time apart from space if that’s what it was going to take.
Dev was used to people-- grown-arse construction workers, timid old teachers, young tired mothers, icy female lawyers-- crying in his office. He had seen them all weep.
Wayne looked like the sort of man who made tears cry instead.
Dev should have refused right then.
But no, Dev was addicted to challenge and Dev was curious and Dev was stupid. So he stayed.
He should have never let him go home after, either. Or he should have let him go home and washed his hands of it, been done with him forever.
But Dev had finished that surgery on Cloud 9, felt a brief murmur of doubt when the man didn’t come to as fast as he had hoped, and then he had proved himself a fucking miracle worker.
He had written his name among the scars on the tissue of the impossible brain. And he wanted to see what would happen next.
Also, he had been offered a cuppa.
A really fine cuppa, too.
And Dev? Dev, for all his bravado and talk, for all his posturing…was lonely. He was fucking homesick, still in culture shock after five years of excellent funding he could not bring himself to close the book on. He loved his research. The money was easy to find here in the States. He had published papers that had saved lives, restored quality of living.
But Dev was not all research.
Dev was a man who needed his mates.
And Dev was sodding bad at making new ones.
He was shite at American bar culture, too profane and distracted for book clubs, too mouthy at film screenings, hopelessly inept at any foray into dating and a little uninterested anyway to be bloody honest, too self-conscious for gym classes, and mostly just surviving on chatting with the grocery clerk for a few minutes a week.
So he had been playing video games. He bought himself some consoles, set a timer so he wouldn’t overexhaust himself on days before surgeries, and he button-mashed and trigger-squeezed his way though the landscapes of Skyrim and Fallout 3 and Far Cry 4 and Uncharted and Left 4 Dead 2 and Star Wars: Battlefront and LEGO Harry Potter and Shadow of Mordor and even, for a few harrowing weeks, Call of Duty Black Ops. But that reminded him too much of his father in the end and he pitched it in the rubbish bin.
So, when Alfred Pennyworth had invited him for tea on the day Wayne went home only thirty-six hours after brain surgery that should have killed him, it took all Dev had to not hug him. And Dev needed mates, but he was not a hugging kind of person.
And it was a bloody fine cup of tea.
Also? Also, also, also.
The reason Dev let himself sit in his boss’ office the next morning while his boss and the coward surgeon Anthony Fabriello lit into him and tore him to pieces for letting Wayne go home— when they should by all rights have been thanking him for saving Wayne and saving the hospital from blemish— was that when Bruce Wayne came to after surgery, his finger had been moving. The nurse called it a tremor, but Dev had a father who had made him memorize Morse code and learn to operate a radio just in case the world goes to hell, and Wayne had been tapping when he shouldn’t have been able to put two thoughts together:
No. No. No. No. No.
Then he had opened his mouth and said
“Bat.”
And that was the reason Dev let him go home.
Now, sprinting up the steps of Wayne Manor at three in the morning, for the sixth time in as many weeks, after getting a text that just read [SOS D bad shape]?
Dev almost regrets the whole thing.
But not quite.