April Seventeenth – Chapter 3 – Bruce 2

The Batman existed as a paradoxical being. He was a man devoted to keeping order, to suppressing those parts of society that should never flourish in a lawful, functioning world, yet, at the same time, most of his life was spent in the middle of those anomalies and aberrations. Bruce Wayne lived in chaos to preserve order.

Except that wasn’t quite true, because, even as most of his time was devoted to the latest menace, the latest peril to threaten his loved ones, Gotham, the world, or even the cosmos, where Bruce Wayne actually lived was at a manor under Alfred Pennyworth’s supervision, and, thus, in absolute, perfect order.

That is, until Selina moved in.

He loved the Cat; he could admit that to himself (and to her) readily enough, and now more than ever after she had seemingly decided to commit herself. He would never be able to put in words how he had felt that first time he woke up in his bed, noon’s light filtering through his curtains, and found her curled up around his left arm, completely defenseless, still asleep after a night’s joint patrol.

He was world-class in many things, but poetry had never been his forte.

Still, it was undeniable that the changes Selina brought had taken some… getting used to.

Mostly, having his father—butler suddenly get into a romantic entanglement that Bruce would swear till the day he died had come out of nowhere and had never been hinted at in any way whatsoever throughout his childhood during Leslie’s frequent visits to the manor that—

Focus.

Changes. Changes were not necessarily bad. Selina staying was definitely not bad. Dick leading the Titans had been (after some… teethingissues) a good thing. Tim learning their identities had been a boon in disguise. Yes, he could deal with changes.

Just… maybe not all of them at once?

It’s not like anybody could begrudge him a slight note of nostalgia—at least, not anybody familiar enough with him to know how much time he spent perched on top of Gotham’s gargoyles with the heavy rain falling upon his shoulders. He had never been precisely subtle about his moodier tendencies.

Clark could shut his goddamn mouth about sunny Smallville from time to time, too. They didn’t have gargoyles even in their church. That was just wrong.

So, given his tendency toward bouts of melancholy and clinging to the past, the deluge of changes sweeping through what he had come to think of as his routine, and his own tendency to isolation when the mood struck him, it should have come as no surprise that Bruce was currently admiring Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. Not because the 43rd aquatint in Los Caprichos was a favorite of his. Not because he admired the masterful use of the monochrome, or because he felt appropriate the implicit critique of a corrupt city abandoned to madness by sleeping reason—and certainly not because he liked the shadowy swarm of bats. No, Bruce Wayne was admiring the engraving on loan to the Gotham Museum of Art because it was the centerpiece of its thematic exhibit of the month.

Fear in Art Through the Ages.

Really, sometimes Bruce wondered if the multiple museums in the city wouldn’t benefit from regularly checking for their directors’ hypothetical suicidal urges…

In this particular instance, though, he had been happy enough to read about the likely disastrous inaugural gala he had been invited to. Really, just taking some Scarecrow’s gas’ antidote a couple hours beforehand and hiding a spare Batsuit in the gentlemen’s toilet’s ceiling should be more than enough preparation to deal with Crane’s latest deranged scheme. The psychologist rarely poised any actual threat when one was properly prepared, and this was looking to be a relaxing evening spent in the company of his own thoughts while waiting for cathartic violence the likes of which would have both Crane and Strange criticize him for.

If their jaws were unbroken, that is.

So, all in all, this certainly was the excuse he needed to decompress and process in solitude the current upheaval his private life was going through without any undue guilt at leaving—

There was a woman crying.

Wearing a white gown with a matching wide sun hat with a lace veil covering her features, the tall, voluptuous woman in front of Munch’s The Scream had gone from quietly sniffling over the past twenty minutes to finally bawling her eyes out.

…

This was not relaxing. At all.

With a resigned sigh, Bruce headed to the lonely woman to see whether he could offer any kind of assistance that wouldn’t take too long. Crane would be making his move anytime now, if his experience with Gotham’s villains’ sense of timing was anything to go by (it was nearly noon, the hour without shadow, and Crane was certain to extensively monologue about Jung with that paper-thin excuse), so it wouldn’t do to be unduly distracted, but nobody seemed keen on helping the (likely beautiful) woman, and, well, he was pretending to be a playboy at the moment.

Yes. Keeping up his public persona. That seemed like a good excuse to help the crying woman. It wasn’t because he was a big softie who never learned to deal with a woman’s tears, no matter what Talia said.

“Excuse me, Miss? Is anything the matter? Would you like me to call someone?” Please, say yes, please, let there be someone else who could take care of this for him…

A slender, gloved hand lifted the white veil, and Bruce was met by two very striking green eyes framed by crimson tresses.

Pity about the green skin surrounding them.

“Bruce?” Poison Ivy’s tremulous voice asked.

“Huh… I think you may have me mistaken with another playboy trillionaire?” Bruce said, not at all panicking and kicking himself.

Unfortunately, that was precisely when the cloud of pheromones that had been brewing beneath Pamela’s veil hit him, and his mind slowed down, leaving him with one last, plaintive thought:

‘Of course I would prepare for the wrong kind of supervillain gas…’

***

Waking up in restrains after getting caught by a mind-altering drug had long been part of Batman’s routine. As previously stated, he had the proper procedure down to an art form, yet, in this particular instance, he found himself slightly hesitant to go with it.

Not because he was in his tuxedo with precious few gadgets to resort to, or because Poison Ivy’s lingering influence made him reticent to act against her obvious designs, but because…

“It’s all my faaaaaault!” said woman was crying out at the top of her lungs, her voice wracked with sobs that made it hard to understand the actual words, if not for the constant repetition.

Really, pitying his gallery of rogues was not thatunusual of a circumstance. Plenty of them had tragic stories that explained, if not justified, how they became monsters in the first place, and Pamela herself was such a tragic victim of circumstances.

Still, said pity usually was a vaguely abstract thing, born of knowledge rather than the very visceral experience of seeing a woman who could be a credible threat to the survival of the human species tear at her hair, tears streaming down her face, eyes as red as said hair…

“Pamela?” he finally asked, not quite able to bring himself to fish for any kind of pesticide up his sleeves while witnessing the supervillainess’ breakdown.

“You! Even you pretended not to know me!”

“Ah… Well, one meets so many green redheads—”

“I wasn’t even asking for a Greenpeace donation!”

“I… am already a donor? And pretty sure I am in the board of—”

“Money can’t solve everything!”

“I… agree? Proper resource allocation is—”

“Stop mansplaining things to me!”

Bruce Wayne shut up.

If asked, he would say it was due to Pamela Isley’s lingering mental influence. If not asked, he would say absolutely nothing, as was his standard procedure, though he may add a grunt or two.

To himself, he may, under the right circumstances (that is, when thoroughly drunk) admit that even Batman himself knew some battles just couldn’t be won.

But if she accused him of manspreading when her mutated plants were keeping him aloft and spreadeagled in the middle of Gotham’s abandoned Botanical Garden, he may be tempted to give her a piece of his mind.

Batarangs counted. He had invented them, and, thus, they were a piece of his mind, no matter how Dick groaned the first time he heard his impeccable reasoning.

Now, if he could find the motivation to muster his usual aggressive approach while held captive despite said captor being a woman crying disconsolately…

“Pam… Tell me what’s wrong?”

She abruptly shut up and frantically wiped her eyes with the back of her wrists. Which he guessed wouldn’t do much good, seeing as her sleeves were no more than bright, dark green leaves which shouldn’t act in any way as an absorbent tissue—unless manipulated by a world-class florakinetic with genius-level intellect and the biology Ph.D. to match, that is.

Everybody cheated with their equipment. He couldn’t see why Clark got so upset at his belt.

“Oh, so now you remember my name?” she finally said when she deemed herself presentable enough to throw him a scathing glare from where she was sitting on the floor, her back to an oak that probably wasn’t as ancient as its size suggested.

Bruce sighed. Really, things were so much easier when it was Alfred dealing with irate, spurned women…

…

All right, that sounded bad. Maybe now he understood why Clark was mad at that particular issue.

“Would it be too much to ask for you to charitably consider why I would try to avoid someone who has repeatedly kidnapped me?” he finally settled on.

There. Logical and polite. Surely she wouldn’t begrudge him—

The vines on his ankles tightened. For some unfathomable reason.

“I was crying my eyes out,” she growled as spiraling, viridian creepers trailed up her body before engorging on pulsing sap and lifting her off the ground so she was above him, green eyes blazing despite the redness in her sclera.

“Are you trying to suggest that visibly emotionally unstable supervillains are less dangerous?”

“I’m saying that you know me.”

Bruce clenched his jaw, trying to think of the proper retort to—wait a second.

He was Bruce. Not Batman.

He shouldn’t be escalating.

… Arguably, against a meta of Pamela’s strength, maybe he shouldn’t escalate even as Batman, but some habits were hard to break.

Like Clark’s jaw.

Heh.

“Why are you smirking?” Pamela asked in about the same tone as Alfred may ask why there was an untouched sandwich on the platter beside his keyboard.

It… wasn’t a nice tone.

“Sorry. Nervous habit.”

“You… smirk as a nervous habit.”

“I do.”

“When captured by a ‘visibly emotionally unstable supervillain?’”

“That sounds like a good time to have a nervous habit.”

Pamela closed her eyes and carefully, deliberately, and with a grace usually reserved for violinists about to execute a career-defining concerto, rubbed the bridge of her nose.

“How have you survived in this city for so long is a mystery that baffles me…” she grumbled.

“I suspect the lack of incentive to pay a ransom for a mangled corpse may have played some part in it.”

She opened her eyes, but didn’t stop rubbing.

“Bruce… have you ever wondered if maybe you are as insane as the rest of us?”

He briefly pondered his frequent detours over Gotham’s assortment of gargoyles during rainy nights, his tendency to try to punch demigods in the face, and his dating prospects.

“Never in my life,” he said, completely sincerely.

For some reason, this caused Pamela to sigh, her shoulders sagging, and a very polite vine considerately patting her shoulder.

Dick was never that polite or silent when he tried to comfort him (not that he needed him to). And people wondered why he thought metas cheated…

“And you’ve never consulted a qualified therapist because…?” she trailed off.

“Oh? You mean like Strange? Crane? Harley—”

Suddenly, the vines supporting the back of his neck lashed out and gagged him.

Ah. Should’ve guessed it.

Pamela looked down at him, a scorn in her eyes that was usually reserved for those on the receiving end of one of her ‘Now you face the wrath of Gaia!’ speeches. Maybe he should introduce her to Ra’s? What could go wrong with that idea?

“How many times have you been my… guest, Bruce?” she asked, her tone suddenly dangerous.

So he abstained from communicating, through his masterful use of the grunting language, that maybe she shouldn’t ask him anything right after gagging him.

“To tell you the truth, I’ve lost count. Yet… We keep getting interrupted, don’t we? It’s like, no matter how… enthralled you become, there’s always something that gets in the way…”

She leaned forward, graceful fingers quickly undoing the buttons on his jacket before toying with the one on his collar. He didn’t even notice when she untied his black bowtie, but it was nowhere to be found.

Pity that. He had a Canary Cry knockoff hidden in it.

Admittedly, it didn’t do much more than burst a few eardrums (his included) but it was always nice to feel he had something up his sleeve. He blamed Zatara.

He didn’t know who to blame for his tendency to focus on absurd details when a beautiful woman decided to slowly strip him, but, if he had to guess, he would say it was because of Alfred. It seemed like the kind of British stiff upper lip (or an approximate facsimile) that he may have absorbed by mere osmosis.

That, or he was nervous.

…

No, he blamed Alfred. Definitely.

“And it’s a pity, isn’t it?” Pamela continued. “Because… just think of all the fun we’ve been missing one. All the times we’ve been interrupted before I could see.. this,” she said as she pulled his shirt open, his chest bare to her roaming eyes as a crimson tongue poked out of her mouth for a brief moment that nonetheless left a glimmering patch of wetness on her plush lips.

Selina was going to murder him.

Because here he was, captured by a very attractive supervillainess, not even a month after she captured him on his birthday, and he was definitely not supposed to be looking at her lips, much less the expanse of green cleavage pushed together by leaves that should never be half as strong as to be able to offer support to that magnitude of…

…

He really shouldn’t have been looking.

Mostly, because now Pamela was smirking.

“See something you like?” she purred.

Which… was a very bad thing to do.

Purring was Selina’s thing.

And Selina seemed to agree, going by the snap of her whip wrapping around Pamela’s throat as the redhead’s eyes widened in panic before she was pulled away from the support offered by her vines.

Bruce would’ve sighed in relief, but, really, he was just hoping his girlfriend (or whatever the Cat deemed to call herself) wouldn’t notice his uncomfortable erection.

“Pam… Sweetheart, honey, my favorite florist… what have I told you about playing with my toys?” Selina, dressed yet again in her old, purple costume, said in fake cheer as she stood above Pamela, one heel firmly planted in the middle of the prone woman’s cleavage.

“Ah… Selina? I was just… you know… catching up with dear old Bruce? Reliving old times—”

Pamela Isley, strictly speaking, didn’t need to breathe. The chlorophyll in her skin was more than up to providing an analogous function, and so she would never choke as long as she was in an oxygen-rich atmosphere and in direct sunlight.

What her skin did not do, was to provide air to her vocal folds, and so she was very capable of being too out of breath to speak when, for instance, a dangerously sharp heel pressed down on her sternum.

Most people said fighting in high heels was a very bad idea. Bruce tended to agree, but Selina had never cared for a majority vote on anything.

“Pam, I’m going to give you just one chance to tell me what you thought you were actually doing,” the Cat said before, torturously slowly, lifting her boot.

“I… Selina, I can tear you both to shreds without—”

“I am going to interrupt you, so this won’t count as you wasting your chance. While you tried to play at the femme fatale seducing the hero in her clutches, I’ve been planting incendiary devices all over the garden, paying particularly close attention to that horrid rafflesia you always insist isn’t an abomination against everything flowers should stand for. So, this time for real, and with no rehearsals, what the Hell is this all about?”

As Pamela Isley, demigoddess of nature, quivered beneath Catwoman’s boot barely touching her breasts, Bruce Wayne could only think one thing:

‘It’s not fair for her to be so sexy when she does this.’

Quite possibly, it wasn’t the same thing that Pamela was thinking. Mostly because she was sobbing once again.

“I… I just wanted to feel wanted…” the ecoterrorist sobbed.

Right. Harley.

He’d say he hated to be right, but, really, he was above such paltry self-deception.

His self-deception was at a far higher level, after all.

Selina, on the other hand, seemed to melt out of her dominatrix persona and quickly knelt beside the other woman to gather her into a comforting hug.

“She’s with the clown yet again?” she murmured, barely loud enough for Bruce to catch it.

Pamela nodded and went from sniffling to loudly crying yet again as Selina rocked her back and forth, the light of the Sun going through broken glass shimmering across the waves of her black hair.

…

Yes, he had memorized it. She was a person of interest, after all.

With an internal grunt, he bid Inner Dick to knock it off. The brat never learned when to shut up, even when he wasn’t present.

“Sweetie…” Selina said, caressing the taller woman’s red hair in as soothing a manner as she would with a distressed panther, “it’s not your fault. I know it’s hard to accept, but when she does this, it’s not about you. It’s about her and her… issues.”

“Bu—but… But she… We’d been… She’d moved in! And then, just… he calls, and she just…”

“Shush. She’s not well, Pam. You know this better than anyone.”

Pamela’s hands clutched at Selina’s back, the purple fabric of her costume bunched in her fists, and she buried her crying face in the other woman’s bosom.

“I just… I just thought this time… We had sex! Regularly! And then she—she just said it doesn’t mean anything! That it’s just for fun when it’s between girls!”

“I’d be far more sympathetic to your Sapphic woes if you weren’t motorboating me, sweetheart.”

“Ah… Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

Selina tenderly kissed her brow, Pamela’s eyes still wide and fearful at the reassuring contact before she allowed herself to relax into the hug.

“Don’t worry. Look… I don’t think Harley’s being honest, least of all with herself, but… you both still need to work on your issues. You can’t upend your whole life just because you think she’s making progress and then get destroyed when she backslides.”

“But… But I really thought…”

“Pam… Your brain cannot be trusted when it comes to Harley.”

At that, Pamela leaned back, still in Catwoman’s hold, and fearfully raised a hand to return the caress, to just run her fingers on midnight black locks as she stared into reassuring green eyes.

“I just… I just wanted to feel wanted. To feel good. To… to not feel… like… You understand, don’t you, Selina?”

Catwoman took the hand that was caressing her hair and, with careful tenderness, laid a kiss on the tip of her green fingers.

“Of course I understand, Pam,” she said, a gentle smile on her lips.

That contrasted quite a bit with the sudden noise of bathandcuffs clicking around Pamela’s wrists.

… Bruce was not surprised, but only because some part of his brain had, long ago, decided that anything that went beneath the ‘Catwoman’ header no longer qualified as a surprise. It was just not a proper allocation of mental resources.

Pamela, on the other hand, must have not adopted such a wise policy, because he could feel his restraints weaken at her utter shock. The gag, at the very least, was no longer acting as such.

“I really understand,” Selina continued. “But I also want you to understand one thing: I’ve let you play with him when he and I haven’t been together, but you know we’ve been patrolling—”

“Ah… Miss Kyle, I haven’t been patrolling with anyone—”

“Shut up, Bruce. Just how many times do you think a woman can see your and Batman’s naked chest without connecting the dots?”

Bruce blinked. Then blinked some more. Then looked at Pamela, who was refusing to meet his eyes.

“What?” he finally settled on.

Selina sighed.

“Tell him.”

“I mean, I—”

“Tell him, Pam.”

Pamela gave him an apologetic shrug.

“It’s kinda… I mean, if you didn’t hook up with so many of us, we wouldn’t have known—”

“I—! I don’t hook up with—”

“Talia,” Selina said.

“Midnight,” Pamela continued.

“White Rabbit,” Selina stabbed him.

“Harley,” Pamela twisted the knife.

“Nocturna.” Now that was just rubbing it in…

“Me,” Pamela almost smugly added.

“Me,” Selina growled.

Bruce blinked.

“Well, everything sounds bad when you put it like that…” he defended himself. Mostly, because he was stubborn.

Clark agreed.

Selina stared at him in a way that promised the conversation wasn’t so much over as adjourned until there were no witnesses, and then turned back to Pamela with a glare that was no less scathing.

“As I said: you know he’s off-limits when he and I are together.”

“I… I mean, is it really that big of a deal—?”

Selina stared, then settled Pamela against a young fir before turning toward Bruce and striding toward him in that way of hers that somehow turned simply walking into a spectacle of rolling hips that could make even his much-vaunted intellect stumble.

Maybe he could weaponize it against Luthor? Clark may appreciate it, but Lois may not…

Then she stood in front of him, that steel claw of hers once more tracing the line down the middle of his body until she reached his belt. And then she licked her lips.

“Lower him,” she whispered, and, when the vines holding him aloft didn’t move, she turned her head to look at Pamela over her shoulder, offering him a mesmerizing view of the way the muscles on her neck stood out when she did. “Lower him, Pamela. I’m going to show you why he’s mine.”

“What are you—you can’t be serious—”

Selina, yet again, and still in that way that defied all known laws of physics, fished a remote out of her cleavage.

“The incendiary bombs around your garden are on a timer. This thing works on a password. A password I’ll only input once Batmanhas ejaculated in front of you. Think about it as a… death trap.”

Till the day he died, Batman would refuse to acknowledge the part of him that, when he heard the line, automatically thought in reply: ‘Tish, you spoke French!’

He blamed Dick.

“Are you… Really?!” Pamela tried to gesticulate despite her bathandcuffs. Which had been designed for the likes of Bane, so she wasn’t about to have much luck with them.

“Really. He’s mine. This,” she said, groping his not at all willing erection clearly outlined down his pants, “is mine. And you’re going to see me mark him, and then you’ll finally learn to respect that.”

For a moment, the green woman just gaped at the two of them even as Bruce tried to convey an apologetic grimace despite Selina’s touch making it quite an unlikely feat.

And then the vines holding him captive lowered him.

And Selina smiled.

And Bruce knew that, one way or another, he was screwed.

She undid his pants and slowly dragged them down his legs, licking her lips in that way she had that he’d never managed to determine whether it was deliberate. His silk boxers were doing a very poor job of protecting his modesty, and he was poking out of the left leg like he was a Rob—a teenagerrather than an adult with some modicum of self-control.

And Selina was looking at him, and smiling, and her eyes were lidded, and he could’ve been any place on Earth or outside of it, and that would’ve been enough to make him feel the way he was now feeling.

It always had been.

“Enjoy, you manwhore,” she said.

And then she grabbed the waist of his boxers and dragged them down as she slowly sunk to her knees.

The vines holding him obediently maneuvered his body, pulling him upright at just the right height for Selina to stare straight at his member even as Pamela looked between the two of them, her eyes wide, her cheeks a darker green than usual.

Her hands nervously fiddling with the leaves that protected her own sex.

And then Selina flicked the tip of his cock, and he could only flinch and look down at her.

“Eyes on me. Always keep your eyes on me.”

Some may have interpreted that as an admonishment, a warning.

It wasn’t.

She leaned forward, gently kissing his tip before grasping the base of his cock and smearing his precum across her shiny lips in as soft a caress as she could manage, her eyes closed as her nostrils flared.

Then she opened them, checked that he was really looking at her, and the green eyes looking up at him glimmered and made his heart race.

“I love you,” he blurted out.

Selina’s cheeks darkened as a pleased smile fluttered across her lips before she forced it aside with a smug, satisfied grin that kept wavering into something softer.

“I know. I know, but please, keep reminding me,” she told him.

Before he could answer, Selina almost bashfully swallowed his cock. Probably so he couldn’t answer.

She was used to him, and she kept pushing forward. Slowly, because they were just starting, but still advancing, conquering him inch by inch as her tongue lazily wagged from side to side inside her warm mouth. Her hands stopped holding him, spreading up his pelvis, her fingers tracing the outline of his abdomen, making his muscles quiver at her barely-there touch.

And she kept pushing until her nose pressed against his pubic bone and her throat rhythmically clenched around him.

And Bruce just stared at her. At the woman he loved, on her knees, devoted to bringing him pleasure, to mark him as hers in front of another woman. Bruce would’ve stayed there for as long as she wanted.

Batman, on the other hand, had been fiddling with his cufflinks.

Because he may have been prepared for the Scarecrow, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been prepared for being in Gotham.

Selina slowly drew back, too focused on his eyes to notice what his hands were doing, and then…

…

Right. That was new.

“I… Didn’t realize it was so… stretchy,” Bruce commented as Selina pulled her cleavage open until the purple fabric went around her breasts, pressing them together in a way that almost made him drop his left cufflink before he got a hold of himself.

“It’s… Something I’d been saving for a special occasion,” she bashfully admitted.

Bruce’s eyebrows shot up, and he looked toward Pamela, who—

“Eyes. On. Me,” Selina said, her hold on his member suddenly uncomfortably tight.

Bruce swallowed.

“Is… Is she the special occasion?”

Selina blinked up at him before a surprised giggle (that made his heart flutter) escaped her lips.

“And they call you the Detective…” she (unfairly) mocked him.

A detective needed clues, after all.

He also needed some time to think and process, something that Selina seemed intent on not allowing him, seeing how she had shifted her grip on his member and insistently tugged on Pamela’s vines until they lowered him so he was…

Right beneath her breasts.

She leaned forward, laid a last kiss on his very wet tip that made his knees quiver… and grabbed her breasts before enveloping him with them.

She… had never done that for him before.

Bruce wasn’t used to asking for things. He just… went along with the flow of things, tried to please his lovers, often enough more as a matter of pride than passion. But when it came to his own needs, he was… reticent about imposing them on others.

So he had admired and studied every stretch of Selina’s skin, memorized what were the right spots, the right touches, to bring her as much pleasure as he always wanted to give her, and enjoyed every minute of intimacy they had stolen throughout the years.

But he had never once thought to tell Selina about how he had always looked at her breasts and…

Well. It looked like she had guessed.

“You impossible man…” she whispered with a tender smile.

“It… was that obvious?” he tried not to grunt as she pressed tighter before dragging her body up until only his tip remained between her (hopefully free of dangerous remotes) cleavage.

She giggled yet again, that far too feminine sound, more innocent than she allowed herself to be with anybody else.

“Not at all, or I’d have done it years ago.”

He smiled ruefully down at her, and she winked before sinking down and licking all over his tip as his hands clenched until the skin on his knuckles strained.

And then she did it again, faster, rougher, and his hips jerked forward.

And she laughed, delighted at his loss of control, at his desire for her.

As if she could have ever had reason to doubt that.

He remembered an esoteric breathing technique, the same one that allowed him to avoid the lethal effects of the Leopard Blow, and discarded it.

A fight to the death was a less trying environment for complicated breathing exercises. With Selina on her knees, trying her best to make him lose control by offering him years of accumulated fantasies, breathing deeply was about the best he could do.

So he did.

His eyes clenched shut when she, once again, fished him out of her cleavage and sucked on him with enough strength to make him go cross-eyed, but he had already pointed his cuffs at the vines around his wrists, and, with a last flick that he almost talked himself out of, he discharged the cryonic burst that made the vines easy to break just by twisting his forearm.

And, just as Selina looked up to see what the noise had been, he grabbed her from beneath her armpits and, with a grunt of effort that she felt offended by, he lifted her into the searing kiss he’d wanted to give her since she walked in, wearing her costume, her thighs showing through the side slits.

“You—” he interrupted her, his tongue rushing into her mouth and tangling with hers until she moaned and threaded her fingers through his hair, pulling him down to her until they both felt out of breath, and she pulled away, her forehead resting on his, her eyes on his. “You impossible man…” she finally said in a breathy whisper.

“Only someone impossible could ever hope to keep up with you,” he answered, and her smile melted into something that he would never dare tell her looked dopey and silly.

Mostly, because he feared mutually assured destruction.

He pulled her up higher, and she guessed his intentions as she rolled her panties off, her flexibility allowing her to pull her left leg out of them as they were left hanging from her right knee.

And then she surrounded him with her legs and let him slowly drag her down his body until the tip of his cock prodded her entrance, and she bit her lip.

“Do it,” she whispered. “Take me. Make me yours.”

He stared up at her, almost paralyzed just by the sheer wonder of Selina accepting being anyone’s, let alone his.

And, as he tried to suppress his own silly grin, he pushed up with his hips as he lowered her just enough to go past her tight opening and reach that place past her entrance that he always needed to insistently soften with repeated advances and retreats as she kept clenching around him and he kept trying not to push all at once, maddened by the soft curves, the entrancing scent, the eyes that always mesmerized him with denied promises, and…

And the woman he had loved for so long he didn’t even know when it was that he hadn’t loved her.

Selina squirmed in his grasp, her arms going around his neck, resting on his shoulders as her body undulated, as her hips corkscrewed around him, her legs tensing around his waist.

And before he could think to do anything about it, Selina fucked herself on his cock, her head buried in the crook of his neck as a low wailing came from her throat.

His hand went from his armpits to her ass, to the part of her he had literally chased far too many times, and lifted her until she stopped shivering.

And then he pushed in, farther than she herself had reached.

“Ah! You bastard!” she protested.

And he slapped her ass.

“Wha—Bruce!”

“You wanted to mark me?” he asked, looking straight into her eyes, cocky grin fully in place. “I want to mark you as well, Cat.”

“You—”

Another slap, another lift, another thrust, faster and deeper.

Another moan, and she threw her head back, her long hair flying around her.

So he did it again.

And she kissed him.

Rough, the contact between their lips interrupted again and again as she kept trying to impose her own rhythm and he fought her off in a way that managed to be more harmonious than anything else as she clung to him and he to her. The kiss went on, yet again, until their breathing got to rough, until they needed to take mouthfuls of air to keep up with their excitement and exertion as their eyes were still on each other, as her hand went from behind his neck to his jaw, her forehead moving against his, up and down, in shorter, faster thrusts that reverberated through their bodies.

“You… Already marked me, you idiot…” she gasped out.

And… there was something about her tone that told him this wasn’t just a romantic way of saying any of the myriad things they’d often left unsaid. Selina was…

What…?

“What are you… No,” he looked at her, astonished, his mouth gaping.

And she smiled, still moving up and down his body, and yet again with that open, almost innocent thing that made his heart clench.

“I… Yes. I missed it two weeks ago,” she said, her voice something lighter than he’d heard in years.

“But… Two weeks? Why didn’t you—”

“I did the test today, Bruce. Missing my period isn’t—oh God! What are you—”

Father.

He would be a fa—a biological father.

His fingers clenched Selina’s round, firm ass, and he held her still as he drove inside her.

“Bruce!”

Selina. His. The mother of his child.

“Bruce! Ah! Just—hn!”

Selina.

His love.

“Bruce! Bruce, tell me—”

“Marry me!” he yelled.

And then he came inside her, in a way mere minutes ago he would’ve thought would mark her.

Selina clenched around him, her head thrown back, her hair hanging behind her as she trembled while her fingers dug into his shoulders, and his vision went completely white as his own orgasm continued beyond what he expected, as his body kept pulsing against hers, the pleasure and sheer release wiping out any remaining thoughts after the revelation had already wrecked his mind.

When he came back, she was curled against his chest, catlike as ever, kissing his chest.

“Did you… mean it?” she asked, her tone vulnerable, almost lost.

He gathered himself enough to stroke the back of her head, thankful for the support of Pamela’s vines—

Pamela.

Dreading what he’d see, Bruce forced himself to look away from Selina and searched for—

A redhead who was very embarrassedly squirming as a wet, thick vine slithered behind the fir she was resting against.

They looked at each other, eye to eye, and, without even grunting, Batman managed to convey that this wouldn’t be a conversation they would ever have, to which Poison Ivy frantically nodded.

So, with that bit of dignity salvaged, he went back to the beautiful woman cradled against him—

And the old brick wall of the garden to his right exploded.

Nightwing’s bike rushed through the cloud of pulverized red brick, the headlights drawing visible cones even in the daylight as he skidded into a sharp turn that Bruce’d always scolded him for, because brakes were there for a fucking reason, Dick, and yes, he needed to wear his helmet, and no, Batman didn’t, because the cowl was—

“Mister Wayne! I’ve come to rescue you—what the Hell?!”

Oh. That.

“Dad?!” Dick exclaimed, taking in his nudity and situation with all the grace and composure one usually reserves for things that have survived in the fridge for too long. “Mom?!” he added, his expression that of someone who may consider Hugo Strange’s therapy worthwhile.

Selina blinked up at Bruce, then to the side at Dick, then to Pamela.

“Tell you what, Pam: you erase the past five minutes from our minds, and I don’t put actual incendiary devices in your garden.”

Pamela blinked, Dick gagged, and Bruce wished his wife-to-be would keep her bluffs up at least until after they had fled the supervillain’s lair.