multiversallogs | someone's mouth said, "paint them all red"

Who: ~~Bruce Wayne~~ "Tom" and you?
What: Some new stuff and some old stuff; there are a couple of thread starters but otherwise it's totally open.
Where: Various places - default starter is Bonetown, but if you'd like to bump into Kermit elsewhere, ping me to wrangle an idea, the world is our oyster.
Notes: I want your CR and I want your revenge. Tho I apologize ahead of time - Bruce is not really proactive socially so if you want to hurl your character at him you might have to be the one to poke him with a stick. Also his permissions post has been updated, so if you haven't interacted with him before it's worth a read. I'M SORRY THIS CHARACTER IS SO DIFFICULT.
Warnings: TBA.

Bonetown, despite all political hardships and polarized status compared to other cantons - hell, much of the city - has managed to carry on relatively securely. Bruce appreciates the population of paranoid hermits, nonpowered nonEarthlings, and scientists and alchemists working to fail-safe their material, locked in a bubble free of interference. The salves and bandages he can pick up near his flat, made from all natural products originating from planets he's heard of and ones he hasn't, fill his medicine cabinet to overflowing; sometimes these old mothers look at him over the rims of their glasses and inspect the bruises on his hands with something like skeptical judgment, and he doesn't begrudge them that. He doesn't look like a hippie and never will, feelings deep in his heart aside.

Today's a mystery tea day. He can't pronounce what he got (yet), but the donut in the accompanying bag is laughably mundane (rainbow jimmies). The riverbank that overlooks the three-way split is good for the view, and also scoping out chaos at the arena across the way. He'll sit there for a while, then melt back into the crowds.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"That was the plan," he agrees, palm resting against Seoraj's knee now, and he's not entirely sure how he got used to that. "But my name is one that a lot of people in a lot of realities know."

His face as well, as logic follows. "So I'm.. thinking of doing something more worthwhile."

Back to that. Because his act is nearly blown, because he's going stir crazy.

Arum knees are very appealing, Bruce, just go with it.

“What'd you have in mind, then?”

"I'm not sure yet." ... Bruce. "But I thought you should know."

Seoraj ducks his head forward as he laughs, quiet, affectionately rueful. “There's anything I can do on that end, you let me know.” And it'll be as easy as that, as it tends to be where he's concerned. It's not unfair to suggest that a good portion of the time, he is just following Bruce around to see what this madman does next.

Curious nature.

It's moments like these, when Seoraj is a painfully, inexplicably, endlessly decent person that the guilt starts to set in and Bruce thinks he should get up and leave. He doesn't think he'll ever rid himself of that impulse, not with anyone.

For now, all he does is settle back, hand remaining outstretched. Like he's decided 'All right, that went fine, it's time to be satisfied with this exchange' but isn't entirely sure how to emote it.

"My real name is Bruce Wayne."

Huh.

“Your famous name,” he says, contemplatively, sinking lower in the water. It means something, he thinks, that he knows this now. He's not sure what, exactly-- but he likes it, he decides, both the shape of the name and the implied trust. Intimacy. It's comforting, to find connections in this place; Seoraj isn't used to being alone.

"Yes." Feeling - fidgety, perhaps, something like restless - Bruce sits up again and since Seoraj is taking up more space now, he slinks a bit closer. "Barely anyone uses it, anymore." He's been Tom for a long time; he doesn't know what it'd feel like to be Bruce and be himself, too.

“Bruce,” Seoraj says, like he's testing the way it feels in his mouth; the shape of it, the way it sounds in his accent, if it feels more or less right than 'Tom' when applied to the man getting progressively closer to him in the bath. “Bruce, Tom. And then surnames.”

There's an almost marveling aspect to the way he says that, like it's not just Bruce's personal weirdness but also that Seoraj doesn't quite grasp the notion of discussing family names at all. A moment later-- “We don't share those, where I'm from. Clan names; you don't give those to outsiders. They differentiate by our chiefs, by our clan tartans. But the names, we don't share them.”

Bruce takes it to alien extremes, but there are a few things about private identity that he does get, if he thinks about it.

"The whole thing is actually Bruce Anthony Wayne," he says, ever helpful. Surprise, Earthlings have middle names, even. Bruce settles against Seoraj because there's room, and because he's not sure what to do with the bizarre feeling of having actually had a more-or-less emotionally sound moment with someone who was not lecturing him about his death wish. It's either this or bolt.

"I can't imagine anyone mistaking you for some other Seoraj, anyway."

“That has yet to happen,” he concedes, with a rough, quiet laugh. “I'm an odd one and no mistake, so say my cousins.” Of which he has many.

"It must be strange without that community around you." It doesn't sound like an inquiry, but speculation; Seoraj by now has surely picked up on the complete lack of familial references from Tom barring a slim handful of stories about his mother, shared with only the utmost care.

“People seem a bit fleeting 'round here,” he says, a bit quieter; coming and going from the cohort in strange ways. The little artist. Meg, who'd been the only one to say goodbye; he can't complain about the way she went about that, mind, but he's getting tired of the back of people. He wonders, sometimes, if this is what it was like in his wake - if this is only how it is to be the one watching strangers become familiar and then not so much any more.

There are other things he'd rather wonder about than that.

“Not so many children underfoot.”

Bruce sort of wishes he could be fleeting. 'Sort of' because he's in so deep now that he knows the notion of Baedal going unsolved, or the likes of Hasibe and Seoraj being left here, will nag at him. But it's slight.

"I wouldn't mind." Children underfoot. He always sounds so watered-down about these sorts of things, like he also wouldn't mind going for a coffee, or something; it's hard to tell if he's trying to make a joke or if he just recognizes the utter futility of such ideas in context with his own life so clearly that he only glances at them in an abstract fashion.

“Always thought, sooner or later.” ...he'd have children of his own. He's less sure of that ultimate fate in Baedal than he was in his own home - things are different here. People live differently. He lives differently. He'd never given it much in-depth thought, at home; it's just the way things go. The way his life would probably go, and he'd never minded that. He'd liked the idea, having his own family. His own children underfoot, his own wife to worry about. “Family, the way it goes.”

He prefers it, he thinks, to the idea of leaving nothing behind when he dies.

"My parents wanted a dozen." No clarification of but, no further data there; Bruce is an only child and Seoraj knows it. "I think it's best if I let it end."

A thought with crushing finality, though the context is lost on the other man. The Wayne Dynasty, dissolved into thin air and taxes. Bruce is all right with that.

The specifics, but not the implications; he thinks of it like a clan passing into history, and it leaves him momentarily cold in the same way, that empty space where history used to be people.

“We'd a dozen almost, between my brothers, my sister, my cousins. One short. Two, after the war.” Two short.

"People who are good at that sort of thing should do it to excess," he says, which might be a hilarious kind of entendre for two guys in a freaking bath tub, but he seems... sincere, in his own way. 'Yes, if you are good at having babies and raising them, go forth.' Bruce Wayne, maybe not.

someone's mouth said, "paint them all red"

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