Fic: Delhi Under The Ground

Title: Delhi Under The Ground
Author: linaerys
Rating: R
Pairing: Bruce/Ducard
Summary: an AU where Bruce makes a different decision up in the mountains.
A/N: Almost a year ago I wrote Gotham Razed, an intro to a Batman Begins AU, and never continued it. Then temve said something that prompted this. Another chapter of a sort, but it also stands on its own.


“Why Gotham?” Bruce asks. The air is cool, although no fan stirs it here underground, and the heat of a Delhi summer presses in from above.

“The Mughal Emperors retreated to their summer palaces during the worst of the heat,” Ducard told Bruce when they arrived, and he nearly fainted under the onslaught of air like a furnace turned on at full blast. “Some trusted viziers were left behind, and they lived as much as possible in these chambers below ground. Away from the heat. There is no shame in hiding from such an implacable enemy.”

Always teaching. Bruce didn’t ask, but he half-wondered if Ducard had been there, then, four hundred years ago. His features were anything but Persian, but Ducard was a chameleon when it suited him. A little bootblack in his hair and beard—yes, Bruce believed Ducard could pass for anyone, anywhere.

Even underground, Bruce has only a tenuous grasp on this coolness. The air is still heavy with years, redolent with a dark mustiness. Dust and something worse. If he moves too much, the cool will dissipate and leave a prickly clamminess in its wake. Bruce lies naked and motionless on the mattress, resisting the urge to look over at Ducard, see if there is something more than amused indifference in his expression. So often there is not.

Ducard does not answer. “Why not Delhi?” Bruce asks.

“Why not Bombay?” asks Ducard back. “The crime there is as virulent as Gotham, the poverty worse.” Bruce knows this is true, although he avoided Bombay in his travels because of the mafia there. In that city, built on islands of garbage, the mafia controls everything, so much that it has taken over for the government in many respects.

And now the air of Delhi is in his lungs again, with its pungent, smoky scent, pollution so thick from cook fires that from the tops of tall buildings the ground is obscured. It brings back memories of those times. He served an apprenticeship with a man who made fake passports for a time, then used one to slip over the border to China.

Ducard stirs on the mattress next to him. This intimacy is odd—after months of craving every bit of contact with Ducard, drinking it down as parched ground drinks up water, this familiarity should have inured him somewhat—but he still knows the moment Ducard’s gaze comes to rest on him. His skin responds to it with a shiver that owes nothing to the temperature of the air.

And he knows, why Gotham, why not any of the other sin-choked cities of the world. Why his father’s train must fall from its tracks. This is a test, just as killing the condemned man was, a test he has neither passed nor failed, not yet.

The quality of the light in their chamber fades and finally fails. Outside the night will still be hot and close. Outside the footpaths will be filling with the indigent, the families too poor even to live in the tent slums along the railroad tracks, for even that has a cost. Outside young men who are their families’ sole support will walk the street arm in arm, hand in hand. Their mournful faces tell a story of doors slammed in their faces, of work and food too scarce.

“We wait until midnight,” says Ducard. Bruce rolls onto his side and looks at him. Ducard has told him next to nothing about his plans, another reason for Bruce to think Ducard still doesn’t trust him. And why should he? Bruce was a hair’s breadth from deciding differently, up in the mountains, and Ducard of all people knows that a decision isn’t made once, but a million times, with every footstep tread along a path.

The tang of the scent in Bruce’s nose makes him think of dark cults of Shiva, many arms waving, barefooted dancers drinking the blood from human skulls—images that probably owe more to horror movies than anything that actually took place. Ducard would tell him that evil’s face is much more mundane, more prosaic than that.

For Ducard there is no constant, except total dominance. Fighting or fucking, every encounter ends with Bruce baring his throat for Ducard’s teeth, as a pack member does for the alpha wolf. Still Bruce tests his bonds, and thinks that one day it will be him pinning Ducard to the bed, to the floor. Not today. Today Bruce is still the Ducard’s sword, the gauntlet around his wrist, the supple leather glove Ducard’s hand goes into. Bruce loves that, too.

Ducard will take him or not, as his whim pleases. For now he runs his gaze over Bruce’s naked torso, and Bruce almost feels a breeze passing there, disturbing the sluggish air. He becomes hard, just from the pressure of those eyes in the darkness. I am still the master, say Ducard’s eyes. Still.

Then what? Will he crush Bruce into this old mattress—still a more pleasant surface than some they’ve been on—take without asking what is always offered? Will he leave Bruce in this agony of anticipation, through their midnight meeting and beyond? He left Bruce alone for a month while the brand on his chest healed, and the winter storms shook their mountain. In those days of silence, Bruce sniffed every passing breeze for Ducard’s scent.

Midnight will come in two hours. “Know the sun, the stars, everywhere you go,” Ducard told him once. “Know them in your blood, even in places where you can’t see them.” Bruce remembers the misty hills around Wayne Manor, and what the summer looked like there, the buttery sunlight dispelling the morning mist.

“Gotham’s destruction is but half-finished,” says Ducard. And now he reaches out to touch Bruce, running his hands over the hard muscle he helped to sculpt. There is invitation now in his eyes, but Bruce doesn't move; he wants to hear the rest. “It is a wounded animal, and must be put out of its misery.” Ducard is above him now, a dark shape against and even darker background, only the panes of his face visible, and the glint of his eyes.

“The fault is ours,” Ducard continues. His conversational tone never alters as he presses his finger into Bruce, and Bruce arches and shifts to accomodate him. “We should have known better. You must never show mercy.”

Next: Less than full year elapsing between the next part and this.
Meeting a man at midnight.