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and rescue from the grey
my air, my sound, my substance
my fate, my path, my inner
my frozen labyrinth
-blessed, diorama
---
Even as his consciousness ebbs with the flow of blood from his many, many perforations Jeremiah comes entirely alive at the sound of Bruce's voice.
He slumps in Selina’s throttling, claw-tipped grip. The knife blade descends to round up the tenth strike and send it towards his face or jugular, something a little more certain than a gutting, a killing target to be sure. All the while the surface of Jeremiah’s skin positively buzzes at the realization of who has just touched him, who has just arrived with intent to save him.
There is disappointment to be sure, that he isn’t at his best. And, oh my, yes that...painful...feeling. The one that ebbs and flows, like a lense coming into focus. A howling desperate part of himself that wants to be anywhere but here, that does not want Bruce to look at what he has become. Because it is pervaded and twisted, such an utterly ugly parody of everything the ten year old who ran away from the circus hoped to become. So far from where a twenty-five year old engineer dreamed of being when he met his idol and felt something real pass between them.
High above those feelings is a makeup plaster cast of hilarity, an ego trench of vanity that holds with tragic drama to the wound of embarrassment. How he can't bear to be seen looking such an awful wreck, how frustrating the sting of failing Bruce yet again. The tunnel isn't done, and Jeremiah knows this is no way to go about convincing anyone of any kind of worldview.
In another moment he forgives all because when it come down to it, what does embarrassment, failure, a mess of blood or the rapid loss of consciousness have on Jeremiah’s joy when Bruce is here!
The sound of his voice, deep but still leaking an innocent hysteria, some frantic desperation seeping through, telling the cat bitch enough. The pressure of his arm, knuckles pressing over the space of Jeremiah's chest for the briefest of moments as he hauls Selina away, his eyes blue and grey and colored all kinds of interesting with anger, with horror, with guilt, always guilt.
It's fitting that guilt and religion are such close bedfellows.
Jeremiah is absolved in the knowledge that Bruce saw the church, and that Bruce came seeking him out with faith.
Bruce is looking at Jeremiah right now, right. now. He opens his mouth to speak, to draw Bruce's focus in on him, where it ought to always be. Or at least thinks he does, he can not feel his face. Jeremiah's body is cold even in the swelter of the tunnels. Curse it all, he's losing too much blood. Of course he is, his gut is but a canvas of crimson holes, nine times for nine cat lives, clever Curls.
Jeremiah will have to pay her back in kind.
He tries to drag a hand over the leaking wounds in his abdomen but he can't move. His breath is reedy and whistling, he coughs and his mouth fills with copper coffee grounds. Like earth in the throat of a body to match his, like death translated across a bond Jeremiah never asked for. He thinks he might laugh, or is it Jerome who wants to, Jeremiah never learned genuine mirth, he never learned the separation that other siblings know from birth...
His mind is wandering.
Somewhere in the tunnel behind Jeremiah a pressure valve opens and a white powdery gas escapes with hot steam. It trickles down against gravity and coils in snaking waves low to the ground, heavier than oxygen, like mist on the moors.
It cloaks Jeremiah, swallows him from the soles of his shoes upwards like earth come to claim a wayward son and settle him in a bed of loam next to his mirror image.
And oh, mind’s drifting again.
The last coherent thought that Jeremiah has before he is eaten in white is how lucky he is to have moored the vessel of his life to the pillar of Bruce Wayne. How blessed to be eternally worthy in the eyes of one’s love, to be saved and damned and yet still saved at the very last moment, again and again in every way a man can be saved. He looks across the floor and worships silently at the feet of his boy god.
---
the air silks like snow,
moth wings crumble by a daylit fire
ash of dead wood pile higher
pyre for false gods, blazing mires
welcome to the afterlife
-after the afterlife, cocorosie
---
Bruce cannot fathom his death.
He holds fast to Selina, not for comfort but because he can sense the desire in her to keep going, in the trigger hair coil of her enhanced muscles, faster and stronger and more violent than before. Bruce clings to her not because he is upset, but because the defacement of Jeremiah's corpse isn't something Bruce can abide, no matter what he's done.
He catches just one vermillion eye, rolling up in its socket like a coy greeting before the gas flows over Jeremiah's entire form and renders him a featureless cocooned body in the river Styx.
Bruce has the urge to kneel down and gather him up. His innocence in death, his slack face, probably peaceful for the first time in months...it pulls at Bruce, it urges him to act because Jeremiah deserves more than this.
More than to die reviled in what amounts to a horizontal hole in the ground, an old corpse no better than his brother.
Bruce does not examine his sentiments for Jerome, that is not something he will ever give mind to. He shouldn't even be feeling what he’s feeling for Jeremiah to begin with. Let go, he reminds himself. He is on Selina's side. Remember what he did, to her, to you.
But how fickle his loyalties when they are founded in his irrational heart. He just watched Selina kill, and yet Bruce does not love her less. He is shored up next to the lioness, consort of Sekhmet goddess of war, whose rampage could only be quelled in trickery, who drank the crimson wine filled Nile only because she thought it was blood.
Selina is a changed woman, he loves her regardless. Despite everything, Bruce loves Jeremiah still, too.
He mourns for the memory of who they both used to be. Things won't stop changing, and Bruce hates it. All around Bruce, falling cities and falling souls, the value of a life is cheap in new Gotham, the pressure of the shift is what hurts most, because Bruce can not change to match their killing pace.
Bruce is so tired of blood and death, knives and claws, pale bodies and unnatural green-eyed monsters, but they seem to find him and cling to his life, and caress and dig the love out of him regardless.
“He’d better stay dead,” Selina hisses at Bruce's ear. Her hackles are up, her energy bristling. She really does sound feline.
Bruce thinks the vapors from the white gas pooling at their feet might be getting to him because he finds it funny, in a way, in whatever way humor can be found these days.
Feral girls, mad boys, cats and snakes and bats. Plants that strangle corpses, seeds that repair vertebra. Bags of bombs, tunnels of tricks and gaudy religions, gaudier manifestos all in Bruce’s name. Gotham is so far gone already, why not a resurrection, four lives granted to two serpent sons, maybe something in the awakening will change Jeremiah for the better. Probably not, but Bruce can cling to faith in the light, can't he? He's allowed that much hope.
He’d better stay dead. Says the girl with nine lives.
Bruce doesn't voice his contrary prayer. He hopes the false gods are listening, they're the only ones who ever answer.