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

[caballero]

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.

Comments

[caballero]

"What with how busy they've been." An implication of a shrug, in his tone - might as well do something nice for the woman. (That's as close to crude as he gets, for the record.)

On that subject (... Hellsing, not Seoraj flashing anyone) he continues, "I'll probably be doing something a bit more worthwhile with my time, soon."

Something more worthwhile than whatever makes him show up with bruises all the time? Hm.

[serjeant]

“I reckon that's plenty worthwhile,” Seoraj returns, amiably, and he does mean flashing his knees (...yes) at Integra, because clearly he is performing an important stress relief service to an overworked civil servant. That's right. ...anyway: “Give, then. What's it to be?”

Since he's assuming - perhaps generously - that Bruce hasn't brought it up just to get enigmatic and wiggle his fingers mysteriously.

[caballero]

Not much of a finger wiggling guy, this one, no. Bruce is quiet for a moment, attempting to put together how to phrase it. (What a good sign.)

Instead, he tries a different tactic- "You know what I do." Here. In Baedal. Unrelated to his engineering job. Seoraj isn't stupid.

[serjeant]

“I've known enough,” Seoraj concedes; he is not stupid, and there's a time and a place for playing Big Dumb Arum-- this is not it, not least of all because successfully pulling the wool over this one would probably need the assistance of an entire barrel of something stronger than ale. He's curious, but he's bided his time about it - asked the questions that were welcome, the ones that'd get him answers, and made himself patient for the things he needed an invitation to know. “You keep your own counsel on that.”

[caballero]

"It's a little safer that way." Wry, not ominous. But they'd both be stupid to pretend otherwise - it's as much protecting their varied interests as it is protecting people, the way Bruce keeps his business private and compartmentalized.

"I did it at home, too. On a larger scale."

Distantly, he wonders about himself, and why he keeps trusting people he sleeps with. (Sleeping with people he trusts? Surely something greater happened first, with Seoraj.)

[serjeant]

Silence is sometimes about trust, and not the lack of it; that's something Seoraj understands, even if his tendency to get a stranger's life story out of genuine curiosity and willingness to listen doesn't suggest that about him. He's conscious of which questions he should and should not ask, when's the right time and when isn't.

Like now: “Home's different. You know your space, mm?”

[caballero]

He nods, agreeing. He definitely knows Gotham; so much that he still feels spikes of uncontrollable possessive irritation when he sees other people wearing his symbol. "I'm two people there," he admits. And it shouldn't be difficult to figure out what he means - the man who does things and the man who pretends not to, the habit he keeps even in Baedal where he doesn't quite have to. "Now I'm three people."

[serjeant]

“That's Tom, and the man who likes to take walks,” that is incredibly dry, from the man formally known as 'the man who isn't going to forget to ask what the terrain is going to be like, next time', “and...?”

[caballero]

It's strange to think that Tom and that guy who goes on walks are one and the same; he doesn't think the monster inside of him would be so whimsical. Maybe that was just, for him, something resembling a normal moment. (How concerning.) He smiles, faint.

"The person I pretend to be at home, so no one suspects anything about the other two."

[serjeant]

It merits some thought, as alien to him as it is - Seoraj is many things, but though he isn't the simple man he claims to be, he is a straightforward man. There's only one of him at any given time, and he's only obliged to make decisions based around that one identity. It's strange to imagine putting pieces of himself in boxes like that; it's strange to think it can be done, but he's encountered all sorts of strange things.

The strangest thing is imagining Tom (Bruce) as someone who no one would think of as competent. It's the first thing he noticed about him.

“How do you remember who you are?”

[caballero]

Bruce does not actually flinch - he's potentially incapable - but there's a brief look in his eyes that's uncharacteristically cornered. It's unfair of Seoraj, to be this emotionally pragmatic.

"With occasional difficulty."

[serjeant]

“Who are you to me?”

Speaking of emotional pragmatism. He doesn't hesitate before he asks, though that unkindly honest question had come before it because it took a bit of a psychological run up to achieve; it feels like a strange thing to want to know when being told something of this magnitude, the size of it something he can feel the edges of with his fingers and his part of this landscape so small, but then again it strikes him as exactly the most appropriate question when being trusted with that information.

That the question is, essentially, who is my friend and not is this real is a form of trust that he doesn't even think about, because it doesn't occur to him it wouldn't be.

[caballero]

The answer is simple in Bruce's head but ultimately difficult to articulate; me isn't simple when he often can't keep who he is straight. Baedal has been both easier and more difficult - he can breathe easier in his personal life, being free of having to split it again and again, but he can feel himself losing his grip without Batman.

"Someone I'd like to be," he says finally, and wonders if that's the right thing to say.

(Emotional honesty is a new concept.)

[serjeant]

His answer prompts a small, lopsided smile; it's an odd thing to say, but it seems like the right thing from where Seoraj is sitting (across from him in the outdoor tub, yes). It seems like meeting in the middle somewhere, a little messy, something new - and that's the way he lives his life, isn't it.

“Well,” he says, philosophically, “I like him.”

[caballero]

Something like relief happens at that. Bruce still just doesn't know what buttons to push to produce the results he wants, when it comes to things like this; he doesn't feel any pressure with Seoraj (nor Hasibe, or Vanessza), which he appreciates.

"Thanks." Faintly amused, in a self-depreciating way. "I think I have more friends here, actually." He doesn't think, he knows. "It's..."

Stuck again. He leans forward a bit, fingertips brushing one of Seoraj's knees, his expression looking like he's trying to puzzle something out. "People know who I am, and I hate it, but it's useful. No one knows who Tom is." (Except them.)

[serjeant]

Seoraj watches him with an interest that feels more participatory than cold scrutiny; he rests thumb and forefinger against the side of his face, elbow on the side of the tub, lifting his knee slightly under Bruce's hand. “You get to choose,” he says, making his translation of that train of thought almost a question. “Who knows, and who knows what.”

[caballero]

"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.

[serjeant]

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

“What'd you have in mind, then?”

[caballero]

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

[serjeant]

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.

[caballero]

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.

[serjeant]

“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.

[caballero]

"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.

[serjeant]

“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.

[caballero]

"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."