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hollandorks · 7 months

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haven

battinson! bruce wayne x f! reader

chapter six

Summary: After the sudden deaths of your mother and grandmother, you’re forced to return home to Gotham…and to the man who broke your heart three years ago. Back in Bruce Wayne’s inescapable orbit, you vow to get to the bottom of your former best friend’s new cold personality. But Bruce’s secrets aren’t what you’re expecting. a

a/n: Slowing down a little in this chapter and giving a fun bit of insight into their relationship! With angst, of course. This fic is so much fun to write, I'm glad to see that others are enjoying it too! Also not to beg but I'm begging you to comment, reblog with comments/ comments in the tags, or message/ send an ask if you like this fic. I literally live off of feedback and have been getting mostly likes and maybe 5-6 people commenting. Anyways, enjoy!

Series Masterlist

word count: 2.7k

She might be able to expose a mob conspiracy and the Batman’s identity in one fell swoop.

It was all she could think of as Gordon drove her home.

Y/n was fourteen years old when she realized that she wanted to kiss Bruce Wayne. She had only recently realized that she wanted to kiss anyone at all, and for some reason, her mind kept going back to Bruce.

She still remembered the exact moment.

It was in that moment, too, that she realized she loved Bruce as a bit more than her best friend.

They were doing homework in the study under Alfred’s watchful eye. It had only been a few years since the death of his parents and Bruce was slowly but surely shifting into the anger stage of grief. He’d gone from shy and scared and emotional to angry and sullen and withdrawn.

As they worked, Bruce nudged her knee with his and nodded to where Alfred had dozed off. They shared a secret smile and immediately quit working–they’d start again once Alfred woke. They hadn’t needed to say a word to communicate. Almost ten years of being friends had given them a silent language.

And as the buttery golden afternoon light poured through the window and lit Bruce’s face, she felt it.

Bruce was just going through puberty, his voice cracking and deepening, his body growing to that gangly, awkward height of teenage boys. She knew he was becoming a man. The thought always made a little swoop go through her stomach.

As he smiled that secret smile, she studied him. His lips looked chapped but, at fourteen, she’d never seen anything more alluring.

She realized that he never smiled at anyone, even Alfred. Especially Alfred. And not her sweet, patient grandmother either, who easily coaxed smiles from y/n even when she was in the worst of teenage moods.

Bruce only smiled for her.

It was that realization that made her heart want to lay a claim to him. Quietly yet suddenly, her love for Bruce shifted into something more. And she wanted to kiss the smile from his lips like the bold women in the romantic comedies she liked.

But it wasn’t until she was sixteen that she had her first kiss with a boy. And he hadn’t been Bruce Wayne.

Two weeks after that, she had her first kiss with a girl to see if she liked that better.

But the girl hadn’t been Bruce Wayne either.

And every kiss after that, boy or girl or otherwise, was not Bruce Wayne, and it never measured up. She’d never kissed him, ever, in their entire lives together, but her heart knew that it would never want anything or anyone else.

Kissing Bruce wasn’t what y/n dreamt that night, though, after she got home from her secret meeting with a cop and a vigilante.

No, it was the last time she had slept in Bruce’s bed.

As children, they had been almost like security blankets to each other. She had been only five years old when her mother had abandoned her for good and she had come to live at Wayne Tower with her grandmother. Her first nightmare woke her to a tiny face with bright blue eyes surrounded by wild, dark hair.

“I have scary dreams too,” he’d whispered and then scooched up on her bed. They played with the dinosaur toys he’d brought with him until they fell asleep, side by side. It was as easy as that. She and Bruce became inseparable. Often they would sneak into each others’ rooms and play with various toys until falling asleep.

And after the murder of the Waynes…most nights they spent together, two children seeking safety and comfort with each other in the way only children knew how. For three years, Bruce couldn’t sleep without her.

But, as they grew older, Alfred and Dory forbade it, saying it wasn’t proper. They’d each, separately, gotten the birds and the bees talk.

They were eighteen, a week from graduation, the last time it happened. By that age, y/n had harbored her secret crush for four years. She struggled to maintain that fine line between remaining his best friend and acting normal, and soaking up all of the attention he would give her like a plant left in the dark for too long searching for sunlight.

That was back in his street racing days, where he invented new ways to make cars go faster then took to the streets to test them out. Alfred had caught him sneaking out that night and Bruce was angry. Too angry. She listened to them argue until she heard Bruce’s bedroom door slam and then slam again.

So she’d ordered one of every kind of pizza (with his card of course, nice and new for his eighteenth birthday) and dug out all of the soda and snacks both salty and sweet she could find. They were going to have a movie night, and all of Bruce’s favorites would be featured. She had found over the years that Bruce could be cheered by unhealthy snacks and quiet company. Her other option was to create a distraction so he could actually sneak out, but she was selfish and wanted to spend time with him before college changed their lives.

It took him a while to settle down and stop pacing and cursing, but finally, finally, he got sucked into the movie. Within an hour, he had given in and relaxed.

It was one of those moments, frequent throughout her life, where he smiled just for her, and she fell a little bit more in love.

The dream she was having at that moment wasn’t exactly right with the details. In the way of dreams, everything was slightly off, the proportions wrong, the specifics muddled. The food was blurry, incorporeal, the TV too close to the ceiling. The bed took up most of the room when in reality the room itself was huge.

But the feeling? The feeling was the same.

She was in Bruce’s arms. He was a clinger when he slept, like she was a teddy bear that soothed him. In a way, she was, simply because of the habit formed in childhood.

In the dream, she was safe once more in the haven of his arms. His breath tickled the hairs on the back of her neck and he was so, so warm. In life, she had rolled away because being too close to him had been almost painful in how right it felt.

In the dream, she curled closer.

She had missed their easy closeness. Even after they stopped sharing a bed, they had hugged or spoken in nudges or touches like the best friends they were. It was another of those things like his smiles that he reserved only for her.

All that had stopped three years ago.

Now, safe in the dream, y/n burrowed into Bruce’s comforting warmth.

She felt whole.

The grief, the pain, all of it was gone as his arms tightened around her.

When she woke, her cheeks were wet.

She and Bruce would never share that closeness again. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, she could see that that final night was the beginning of the end. College had further separated them, though the years after had made them close again.

So close that she had felt confident in spilling her biggest secret.

Only to have her heart broken.

She was struck with the sudden need to see Bruce, to tell him she was sorry, to tell him she missed him, to tell him she forgave him for those awful words spoken between them. She wanted to be friends again. Even if it hurt. Even if he never loved her like she loved him.

I don’t love you, and I never will.

But he had loved her as a friend, once, and maybe still did. Maybe things weren’t ruined–maybe, with enough time, enough effort, they could be patched.

Any alternative was better than her current reality. She couldn’t live next to him like strangers, ignoring their shared past. She couldn’t stop loving him, even if she only ever got to do so as a friend.

She shoved her blankets away and rose unsteadily to her feet. She was still half-asleep, her brain sluggish, her eyes heavy.

She couldn’t stop crying.

She wanted, for a moment, to not feel so alone.

She wandered to Bruce’s room first, but it was dark and empty. She couldn’t bring herself to enter completely the site of her heartbreak, so she searched the study next, where he could sometimes be found curled up with a book or tuning his guitar. Then she looked in the kitchen and all of the guest rooms.

His parents’ room was still padlocked, as it had been for two decades, and she knew he wasn’t in there.

Nothing in the library or gym, either, or the room with a desk he had named his office but never used.

Nothing but dust and ghosts in the entire place.

She just needed to see him. Just needed to tell him that she forgave him. Just needed him to tell her they could be friends again. Just needed him to tell her that he didn’t hate her.

There was only one place left to search.

She hadn’t been in Bruce’s private elevator in a long time. His elevator was for his use only, more private than even the private residential elevator. There were three destinations–the residence, a private exit to the parking garage, and the basement.

In their late teens and early twenties, when Bruce was into modifying cars and racing them illegally, he had converted the abandoned Wayne Terminus station into a garage of sorts. Last she had seen it–maybe eight or ten years before–he had three cars all in varying stages of disarray.

She pressed the button to take her down into the very depths of Wayne Tower.

Nothing happened.

She pressed it again. And again.

She frowned.

As far as she knew, this was the only way into that garage except for a secret tunnel that had been part of the old subway line. It opened miles away, though, and she had never been out that way. She wouldn’t even know where to start looking if she decided to try to find the end of it.

She thumped a closed fist beside the panel and cursed colorfully.

Could nothing go her way? It was thing after thing after thing the past few days and it all caught up with her when that stupid elevator button didn’t work.

She didn’t fight the tears.

It was all too much. Too much pain, too much loss, too much fear, too much everything. It had been the worst fucking week of her life and even the potential of her article wasn’t enough to temper it. She had survived, but at what cost? To have no one, nothing? To be murdered at some future date? To have a fucking mob hit out on her?

The worst part was that she didn’t want to die, even though it would have been so much easier.

Y/n sobbed and slid to the cold metal floor of the elevator.

“Fuck,” she mumbled as she tapped the floor with her knuckles. She remembered the pain of the night Bruce broke her heart, as if it had been carved out, how she’d had to wrap her arms around her middle so as not to fall apart. That pain was back, but worse this time, because her grandmother wasn’t there to put her back together.

She just wanted–she didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted things the way they used to be, before that night three years ago. She wanted her grandmother alive and her whole life ahead of her and Bruce to still be her friend.

But she knew it was naive. Everything had changed and there was no way out except through.

Yet how could she get through this? She drew up her knees and tucked her head down. How could she get through this without her best friend? Without her grandmother? Her life was at risk and she had nothing but the flimsiest bit of protection that Wayne Tower provided. She had no one to talk to, no one to make her feel better.

The only thing she could do was investigate things herself. She could only get herself out of this mess. She only had herself to rely on now.

The thought hurt. She cried on the floor of that small, dingy elevator for a long time. She cried for the girl she used to be. She cried for her grandmother. For her mother. For the loss of Bruce as a friend. For the fear that haunted her now.

Her eyes fluttered open later as she felt herself moving through the air.

It must have been a dream, because she was in Bruce Wayne’s arms. He glanced down at her with tired blue eyes. His dark hair was lank with sweat and plastered to his forehead, halfway in his eyes. Her eyes slid closed before she could focus on the darkness around the blue.

It was a nice dream, especially after the overwhelming grief that had crippled her in the elevator. Her subconscious needed the comfort.

She nuzzled her head into Bruce’s warm neck and hummed. He smelled like sweat and motor oil and Bruce. His heart thumped steadily in her ear where she rested her head.

“I miss you,” she murmured, content in the fact that it wasn’t real. She could tell dream Bruce anything she wanted.

But he was so warm, and she was so tired.

She drifted off again.

–

When y/n woke again, she was in her own bed.

She stretched languidly. She could immediately tell she’d slept deep and well for once.

Then she sat bolt upright.

She had fallen asleep in the elevator, not her bed.

Hadn’t she?

She frowned. Maybe getting up and searching for Bruce had been the dream. The entire night had edges fuzzy with grief and exhaustion. Maybe she had searched for Bruce and fallen asleep in the elevator, only to walk back to bed half asleep.

The only thing she knew for sure was that Bruce Wayne hadn’t carried her to bed. There was no way that had been real. Because only someone who still cared for her would carry her back to bed, tuck her in gently. And Bruce didn’t care for her anymore.

Her heart ached all over again.

She missed him.

To keep her mind off of it, she decided to go ahead and get together an update and outline for her new editor Jansen. She didn’t have much, but she included the new knowledge of one suspect’s supposed suicide. After a quick search, she saw that the news hadn’t been released to the press yet. Score one for Gordon as an informant.

The word informant rang a bell in her mind and she quickly searched her personal email for a response from Officer Martinez.

Dear y/n,

Thank you for reaching out. I’m real sorry you haven’t been doing well. I can promise that Lieutenant Gordon is the best there is for this case and he’ll do everything he can to catch the guy.

One suspect committed suicide rather than tell us anything about the one who got away. But another one seemed scared by that and told us that the Gallo family had sent them. Maybe you’ve heard of them–New York mobsters.

If you feel scared at all or see anything suspicious, here’s my cell number. I’ll also include Lieutenant Gordon’s in case you can’t reach me.

We’ll keep you safe.

Best,

Officer Martinez

It was a professional but sweet response.

And it scared her.

Confirmed ties to the Gallo family didn’t bode well for her. For Gotham, either. That meant they were reaching into the city, trying to fill the holes that Falcone left behind.

She cursed quietly and added that to her list of clues.

She rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t even had coffee yet.

First, she needed caffeine.

Then she needed to make a plan to figure out what the hell was going on.

If only it were that simple. She had no contacts or sources in Gotham–at least none that would be able to tell her about the Gallo family.

All she had was an eager cop, a detective, and the detective’s vigilante best friend.

She hoped it would be enough.

Next Chapter

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#bruce wayne x reader #battinson x reader #batman x reader #the batman x reader #the batman 2022 #the batman #battinson #bruce wayne #robert pattinson #haven #haven fic #PS ch 8 has literally my favorite line I've ever written and I just need you to know that #it literally makes me laugh so hard every time I see it and it's so dumb

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