Chapter Text
The first time they meet, Bruce is only twelve years old.
His parents had been invited to the opening of the new Gotham Orphanage – staged in what used to be their home. He had felt strange that whole day, it was odd that they were giving away the home that he had grown up in, but his father had told him that the poor orphans of Gotham needed it far more than they did. So he understood.
Besides, they were moving into a penthouse in the city, that would be their new home and while Bruce would miss the manor he hoped that it would be a good home for the orphans and clergy that it would be going into the care of. In order to thank his family, the church had offered to put on a show for them.
Bruce stood with his mother and father and watched as a group of orphans sang Ave Maria to show them their appreciation. He watched the choir with as much interest as he could manage, though the strange feeling he had been feeling all day dully persisted.
About halfway through the song he noticed that there was a girl in the choir staring at him. She had stopped singing entirely, just kept on looking at Bruce with her mouth set in a grim line. She had shoulder length hair and a round face – she was kind of cute, he thought. The thing that really stuck out to him about her was her eyes. They were slightly obfuscated by her big round, aviator style glasses but he could still see them clearly. They were bright green and blazing as they stared into him. There was an almost haunted look in those eyes, like she had seen some terrible things in her life and she couldn’t help but reflect them when she looked at you.
She kept on staring at him and he stared back. He couldn’t stop himself from looking at her. He was terribly intrigued by her. At some point he started smiling at her, she didn’t smile back at him but that was okay. He was pretty sure that he liked her and he wanted to talk to her when the show was over.
He doesn’t get the chance to, though. His fathers’ campaigning efforts drag him away before he has the opportunity to slip away and see her. A week later he watches his parents get killed in front of him and nothing makes sense anymore. He feels like his insides have been scooped out and left him raw and empty inside. Nothing makes any sense.
The last time things had made sense was that show at the orphanage. So he sneaks out of his home and takes a trip to the orphanage. He walks around the edges of the grounds for a while, searching for some kind of meaning in the halls of the home he used to live in when he sees her again. She’s surrounded by a group of older kids that were terrorizing her.
One of them had a notebook in their hands and they were holding it above her head as she tried to grab it away from them. “Give it back!” She shouted at them, getting more and more upset by the moment. “It’s mine, give it back!”
“You want it? Come and take it from us, freak.” One of the boys says as he throws it to another. Bruce slowly approached the group, having made the decision that he’s going to do something to stop them from bullying her.
“Hey, leave her alone.” He said as soon as he was close enough to be within hearing distance of them.
The bullies did stop messing with her for a moment, only to turn towards Bruce. One of them, a blonde kid with a missing front tooth, sneered at him. He must have recognized him. “What are you doing here, rich boy?” He asked. “Shouldn’t you be back at your mansion?”
Bruce set his mouth in a thin line. “I said leave her alone.” He said again, a little firmer this time as he built up his courage. He balled his hand into a fist and some of the boys oohed in a mocking matter at him.
It was enough to direct their attention from the girl back to Bruce. “Make me.” The blonde kid, who seemed to be the ringleader, goaded. The next thing that Bruce knew his fist went flying and so did the kid. There was a bit of gasping as the other boys spread out and scattered, none of them were prepared for actual violence.
The blonde kid was on the floor, his mouth was bloody. “Gah, you fucking psycho! I think you broke my tooth loose.” He spit out some blood onto the grass. Bruce kept his expression blank as he looked down at the other kid.
“Give her her stuff back.” Bruce said blithely, uncaring for the dull ache in his knuckles. Alfred would probably be angry when he caught him, but he would deal with that later.
The blonde kid looked ruefully at Bruce before throwing the journal at the girl. “Your psycho boyfriend isn’t gonna be there to stop me next time, weird girl.” He openly threatened before he ran away.
Bruce rolled his eyes at him and moved to help the girl up. “Are you alright?” He asked. The girl shrugged and leaned down to pick up her journal. She clutched it to her like she was afraid that her bullies were going to come back and take it from her again. “That was messed up. Boys shouldn’t hit girls.” He said awkwardly.
She shrugged. “They didn’t hit me. They were just playing keep away.” She spoke so softly that Bruce had to strain to hear her. He didn’t mind though. She looked at Bruce through her lashes, “What are you doing here? This is a bad place, you don’t need to be here.”
Bruce rubbed the back of his head, ruffling his hair a little. “I uh, I guess it’s kind of stupid but I wanted to… I wanted to see something familiar. After my parents died-” He stopped himself, not wanting to get emotional. “Then I saw you and I…I wanted to tell you I liked your singing that day when the orphanage opened up? It was really pretty.” ‘You were really pretty’ He thinks, but doesn’t dare say.
“Everyone had to sing.” She said, staring down at the grass with a sour expression spread across her face. “For you and your parents. Your rich family.” She added bitterly, so quietly that Bruce almost couldn’t hear her speak.
“I liked the way that you sang it though.” He says and his face heats up, because that’s probably the dumbest thing he could have said.
The girl looks at him oddly for a moment, clutching her journal to her chest. For some reason that he can’t quite understand, she looks upset. Like she’s going to start crying any moment now and he doesn’t know why. “Well… thanks for getting my journal back. I have to go.” She speaks a little too quickly, before running off.
He watches her leave, feeling like an idiot the whole time. God, how could he have messed this up so badly? He doesn’t know how long it will take to work up the courage to speak to her again, maybe he’ll never have it because he’s just embarrassed himself so badly.
For the rest of the summer he watches her from afar and chases off her bullies when he can, which is the next best thing. He feels a little too shy to speak to her directly again, but he just finds her so interesting that he cannot bring himself to stay away. It’s only when summer ends and he’s forced to go to boarding school out of the city that he leaves her alone. Not by his own choice.
Even after he’s sent away he doesn’t stop thinking about her – the girl with the wild, haunted eyes who looked at him like he was piercing into his soul. As he got older the feelings of intrigue did not go away, but they were accompanied by other feelings; attraction and lust and something warm and romantic that leaves him with butterflies in his stomach.
He keeps thinking about her for years, as he grows older the idea of her persists in his head. He doesn’t even know her name and she’s made a permanent home in his heart. When he graduates from high school and he’s finally given access to his fortune he decides he’s going to find her.
They were going to be so good together.
The next time they meet, he’s nearly thirty and far less shy. After he got control of his fortune he had put in money looking for her, but she had run away from the orphanage when she was fifteen and there seemed to be no trace of her anywhere
He gives up hope that he’ll ever see her again until the day that he’s dragged into a meeting with several accountants and some consultants from KTMJ. The moment that their eyes meet, he knows that it’s her. He’d recognize those eyes anywhere. He can’t stop himself from blurting out, “It’s you.” When they shake hands because he just can’t believe it. He thought she was dead.
The only thing is, she’s not a ‘she’ anymore. He’s a young man with a shy disposition and mousy brown hair with clear framed glasses on his face, slightly obfuscating his expression. Bruce doesn’t think that he’s ever seen someone so lovely, especially not a man. He doesn’t meet Bruce’s eyes when they shake hands and he introduces himself as Edward. But he looks at him, a little confused, when he hears what Bruce says. His mouth opens just a tic and Bruce can see his little pink tongue wetting his lips as he tries to wrap his head around what he thought he just heard.
Bruce just smiles in what he hopes is a disarming manner, a charm offensive that might just backfire because he’s not as charming and personable as someone in his position should be. “It’s nice to meet you, Edward.” He says. Edward smiles nervously, and lets out a strange little giggle – one that sounds almost like a nervous tic – before he turns away to take a seat.
It’s very cute, Bruce thinks, and he can’t stop himself from watching him as he walks away. His eyes trail down to watch Edward’s hips and ass as he walks away to take his seat. Edward’s clothing is baggy and loose on his body, but he’d bet that he had a nice body underneath it all. He’d like to strip away the baggy layers of his ill fitting suit and see him bare and open for him.
They’d have to get to all of that later. For now, he needed to figure out a way to make their paths cross again. It had taken over a decade for him to find Edward the first time, he wasn’t going to let him slip away ever again.
Throughout the meeting, Bruce kept his eyes on Edward – it was as if he thought that Edward would just up and disappear if he stopped looking at him. At some point during the meeting, Edward got up and presented a case for Wayne Enterprises budgetary goals.
He was shy and soft spoken and he had a tendency to trip over his words. Bruce found it endearing, but he couldn’t help but wonder if his co-workers had made him do the presentation just to cause him emotional distress. Because he seemed incredibly distressed to be standing up there, explaining everything to Bruce and his board of directors.
Edward tapped his foot nervously as he spoke. “Um, well. I don’t really know how to put this nicely, so I’ll just go ahead and say it.” He said, though he seemed remiss to do it. “Wayne Enterprises profits are… what’s the opposite of skyrocketing?” He asked.
“Taking a nosedive?” Lucius Fox interjected.
“Yes, that. Exactly. That’s what’s happening. In the last year alone you’ve seen stock fall by thirty two percent. That’s indicative of something worse than a budget issue. You can’t move money around to fix this. That tells me that there isn’t faith in your company and that needs to change.”
“So what do you think I should do?” Bruce asked.
One of Edward’s colleagues interjected, “You should probably look into downsizing. Selling off one of the more experimental branches of Wayne Enterprises – like biotech. I know your uncle offered to take it off your hands.” He said.
Bruce’s gaze hardened a bit. “I wasn’t asking you.” He said, a bit of venom in his voice. “I was asking Edward. It’s his presentation, I want his advice.” He turned back to where Edward awkwardly stood, with his hands in his pockets – clearly uncomfortable with the situation. “Go on,” He encouraged and he couldn’t stop himself from smiling at him as he spoke. “What were you going to say?”
Edward straightened up a little, surprised by the attention. “Um, well. One option to maintain profits would be to downsize. You could sell off one of the branches of Wayne Enterprises to your competitors and liquidate the assets in order to keep the rest of the company afloat. Which is what my colleague would suggest you do.” He frowned, “The thing with that is that often these buyouts lead to mass lay offs, which means people losing their jobs. Which is horrible, morally no one wants to be responsible for someone losing their livelihood, but also it would just make your image look worse. You’d look incompetent and that would cause stocks to fall even more.”
Bruce folded his fingers underneath his chin, “What would you suggest I do?” He asked. It was true that Bruce had not been attentive to the company that he had inherited. He’d been… busy with other pursuits. His work as Batman could be utterly consuming and it took up all of his time. Alfred told him the same thing all the time – that he was throwing away his parents legacy.
Edward set his mouth into a thin line, “I guess you’d have to make the public believe in you again. A lot of this stuff is mysticism, anyways. Economics is based on the feelings of rich people more than anything concrete a lot of the time.” He giggled nervously and Bruce smiled. He really liked Edwards laugh. He wanted to make him laugh like that all the time. “Wayne Enterprises stocks are falling because people don’t believe in you in the same way they believed in… your parents.” He sounded regretful that he even needed to bring them up.
“I’m sorry this isn’t…it’s just that they look at Bruce Wayne and think that he’s a reclusive weirdo who isn’t involved in the welfare of the city. And maybe they have a point!” Edward cringed inwardly at himself, “So, so, so… you have to make an effort to make the people believe in you again. If you can do that you could probably get things back on track within the next few years. Everyone believed in your parents, they wanted to believe in them so it was like they could do no wrong.” He sighs, “I can’t really… I’m not the person who could give you specifics on how to do that though. I’m not a social person.”
“Yeah that’s for sure.” One of the other accountants from KTMJ muttered. Bruce decided to just ignore him, he couldn’t deal with Edward’s bullies by punching them this time – no matter how much he would like to.
“That’s really good advice.” Bruce replied, looking intensely at Edward. Edward was matching his gaze, though it seemed like he had trouble maintaining eye contact. “Would you consider taking a position here? I’d love to have more people who aren’t afraid to be honest with me.” And it would give him the opportunity to have an excuse to see him, if he was one of Bruce’s employees. He could send him flowers to his desk and buy him coffee. He’d have an actual reason to bother coming in, if it meant he would have the chance to see Edward.
“Oh, I usually work in forensics.” Edward replied, shaking his head a little. “I mean… forensic accounting. You know, investigating fraud and embezzlement. I just do consulting sometimes when they need an extra hand. I, wouldn’t be a good fit working for you.” He said, “Thank you though. For the offer. That’s very kind.” He said that last part like he wasn’t used to kindness, which broke Bruce’s heart a little.
Bruce didn’t falter at the response. He should have expected that Edward wouldn’t make it so easy for him. That was fine though. He could be patient about this. “I don’t think that’s true. We’d be lucky to have you here. But it’s your choice.” He said, focusing on sounding friendly as possible. Bruce was not normally a very friendly man, but he was willing to project that image for Edward’s sake.
Edward was his already, but Bruce knew he would have to make the choice to come to him. And he was willing to put in the work to make that happen. By the time that he was done with him, Edward wasn’t going to know anything other than loving him.
The moment that the meeting ended, Bruce got himself suited up and decided to stake out the little apartment where Edward apparently – at least, according to his employee file at KTMJ – lived. It was an awful little motel room across the street from the Iceberg Lounge. Terrible neighborhood with seemingly no bright spots to living there – it was loud and dangerous, right around the corner from all the dropheads.
Bruce decided that when Edward was finally his, he wouldn’t live there anymore. He’d set him up with a nice apartment – maybe a condo or a high-rise – uptown. He would take good care of Edward, he’d make sure that he never needed to worry about anything again.
But for now, the nice thing about the awful place that Edward lived in was that there was absolutely no security. Edward’s window didn’t even fully close, which made it easy for him to slip into the place once he was sure that Edward was asleep.
The first thing that he discovered about Edward was that he was a heavy sleeper. It made installing the cameras and microphones in his apartment incredibly easy. He wanted to keep an eye on Edward all the time, so he would have a live feed to his home connected to his personal computer and his phone.
He had to make sure that Alfred wouldn’t catch wind of it, he wouldn’t understand.
The next thing that he did was move over to where Edward lay sleeping. He slept on his back, barely dressed in a loose fitting tank top and his underwear. He had a slightly chubby body, he was all soft curves and love handles that Bruce wanted to touch and grope – especially his full, round breasts and thick thighs.
The more that Bruce looked at him, the more beautiful he found him.
Bruce leaned down and stroked Edward’s cheek. “This next part is going to sting a bit. I’m sorry, baby. I hope you don’t wake up, that would just complicate things.” He whispered to Edward’s pliant, sleeping body. He procured a tracker from his back pocket and injected it into the meat of Edward’s forearm. Edward whimpered at the sting, but did not rouse. “Just gotta make sure that I can keep an eye on you. I don’t want you slipping away from me, ever again.”
He moved down to the side of the bed, on his knees. He had to touch Edward, he couldn’t stop himself when he was laying there so sweetly for him. He didn’t want to do too much, just yet. He had to be careful. So he moved very slowly as he pitched up Edward’s tank top, pulling it up to his shoulders to reveal his soft stomach and round breasts. With one hand, he cupped one of Edward’s breasts, his thumb brushed gently over his nipple and Edward gasped in his sleep.
He was so responsive. Bruce wondered how loud he’d be when he was fully awake, how he would moan and whine for him when he finally had him underneath him. The next thing that he did was an incredibly risky move, almost self-sabotaging, but he did it anyway. With his other hand he pushed Edward’s underwear down just past his hips to reveal his neatly trimmed pussy.
“God, so beautiful.” He whispered, growing hard at the thought of sinking inside of him right now. He couldn’t. Edward wouldn’t be happy if he woke up to him like this. But he desperately wanted to. He settled for the next best thing though, which was to taste him. He slid his fingers between Edward’s folds, pleased to find him wet and responsive to his touch even in his sleep.
His fingers brushed underneath Edward’s engorged clit, gathering up slick onto his fingers before he withdrew them. Edward moaned again, almost sounding forlorn that Bruce wasn’t touching him anymore. “It’s okay, baby, I’ll give you what you need soon enough.” He promised, before sliding his slick covered fingers into his mouth to taste it.
He was pleased to discover how sweet his cunt tasted. He couldn’t wait to bury his face between Edward’s thighs and eat him out until he cried. Soon, he told himself. With that, he put Edward’s clothes back on and slipped away into the night. He and Edward would meet again soon enough and Bruce couldn’t wait to have him by his side. For good this time.