Fic - Man, Indivisible (1/1)
Oct. 8th, 2017 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99Title: Man, Indivisible
Author: Red Fiona
Disclaimer: I don't own Batman, it's all DC's. Or Warner Brothers for the bits I've pinched from the Nolan-verse. No money is being made from this.
Fandom: Batman
Characters: Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent
Pairings: Bruce Wayne/Harvey Dent, Bruce Wayne/Rachel Dawes, Harvey Dent/Rachel Dawes
Ratings/Warnings: PG-13, off-screen canonical child abuse.
Notes: Written for an lgbtfest or queerfest prompt, but sort of spun away from the point of the prompt in the context of the fest. The prompt was "Batman, Harvey Dent/Bruce Wayne, when they've both spent their whole lives dividing things in two, is it any wonder one of them snapped? Bruce just never thought it would be Harvey." It's set somewhere between the Animated Series and the Nolanverse. Because I have pinched Rachel and a couple of scenes from the Nolan films.
Summary: When they've both spent their whole lives dividing things in two, is it any wonder one of them snapped? Bruce just never thought it would be Harvey.
~~~~
There was a time when Bruce was very jealous of Harvey Dent.
Harvey was clever, athletic, popular for himself and not his wealth, and he had a family. It was before Bruce really got to know Harvey, before he knew how much all of those things cost him, and the pressures a scholarship boy was under. Not to mention Harvey's father. But Bruce had been young, and dumb, and missed his family so much.
The young Apollo, as one of their teachers called Harvey, and the Wayne boy, as everyone called Bruce, were not friends. They weren't enemies either. They had that strange sort of enmity that you got when two boys are told to be more like each other when their personalities just didn't work that way. Even before Bruce turned being Bruce Wayne, gadabout millionaire, into a full time identity, he'd never been the most studious of people, and Harvey had to work hard because he needed excellent grades to justify his scholarship.
But subjects Bruce was interested in, math, chemistry, physics, those he'd read up on, running ahead of lessons. Harvey found him in the library one day, pouring over an algebra textbook.
"Wayne, there's no way you can actually understand that."
Bruce was never going to live down that D in history. "Math I can do. There's right answers and wrong answers, and no opinions." That was how Bruce liked things - right and wrong.
"But it's so abstract. It doesn't affect people."
"Math is in everything. It's your heartbeat and the weather and the bricks of the building we're in."
"For you, that was practically poetry."
Bruce doesn't swear. Because the school has a no-tolerance policy for swearing. They all do it constantly, but not in the library because the librarian had ears like a bat. The librarian's eyes were another matter, so Bruce flipped Harvey the bird.
Harvey laughed, quietly. "Aren't you just full of surprises?"
Bruce rolled his eyes, and Harvey left, but they got on better after that. Bruce saw that Harvey was a human being, not yet another idol he was never going to live up to, and Harvey, Bruce didn't know what changed on Harvey's side, just that it had. Harvey let Bruce be in on the jokes, not outside them. Bruce hadn't ever been the butt of the jokes, but he'd normally been left out of the laughter.
It didn't mean that they weren't still competitive. That kind of got worse because now there was a person to beat, not an idea, and while Bruce didn't like losing, Harvey hated it. Now, years later, some part of Bruce still believes that Harvey's ridiculous winning record as an attorney was because of that. Cases that he should have lost, that anyone else would have lost, but Harvey didn't because Harvey Dent does not lose.
It made judo training interesting. At school they had to do an extra-curricular sport, and Bruce hated team sports. That didn't leave much. Swimming, which he could do, but got boring after the tenth length, running, see previous, sailing, where okay, he enjoyed match racing but there weren't ever enough racing boats at school to actually develop tactics, and judo. Judo he liked. Judo was you against someone, bodies on the line, physical and mental exercise.
Harvey took judo because ... that was something else Bruce didn't know. It wasn't like Harvey needed the extra credit. Harvey got his sports extra-curricular credit by being on the school basketball team, he would have been quarterback for the football team but it clashed with the debating society, which guess what, Harvey was also captain of, because Harvey was the best at anything he did. Bruce gave him hell about it, because Bruce was a bad friend and Harvey kept him around because all Harvey had was good friends and he liked to even up the score. Or so Harvey said.
They got paired together because, while Harvey looked like the Apollo nickname he so hated, Bruce was almost as tall as him and was finally starting to put some weight on his frame so they were evenly matched. Which was good since they seemed to spend most of the time in judo sessions trying to kill each other. Because sparring was more like fighting when they did it. Bruce only ever tapped when he thought Harvey might actually break one of his bones, and he hoped Harvey had the sense to do the same. He was never certain that Harvey would tap. Harvey was fearless, and might let Bruce snap his elbow, just to prove a point.
Similar macho bullshit nearly stopped Bruce from helping Harvey one of those rare times he could in school. Or rather, it nearly stopped Harvey from accepting the help.
Harvey got a B in math. Not a big deal, if you weren't Harvey. Bruce didn't know why it mattered to Harvey. It wasn't like a B in one class test would knock his GPA any. But only As were ever good enough for Harvey.
By then Bruce knew Harvey well enough to wait till he'd stopped walking around like someone about to throw a thunderbolt. It didn't help, Harvey still refused to take the help. "No. I don't need your help. I don't need anyone's help."
"Call it me saving up favours for when I fail English Lit because I don't catch the metaphors."
That stopped Harvey mid-rant. "Wait, you actually didn't get it. I thought you were playing dumb for Mrs. Miller."
"I wasn't playing dumb." Bruce really wasn't, he didn't understand why the author couldn't say what they meant, instead of hiding it behind something else. "Things are, or they aren't, and I don't get why this thing is supposed to make me think of that thing. I help you out with math, you help me out with English." Bruce made it a trade and that makes Harvey okay with it for some reason. Bruce understands it now, but didn't then.
There are a lot of things about Harvey that come under that heading.
Bruce only saw Harvey once outside of school, and that was by accident. The new chauffeur had got lost and the car ended up in all the wrong parts of town. Bruce wouldn't have recognised Harvey if the-kid-he-didn't-quite-recognise-until-he-looked-really-hard hadn't looked quite so determined not to be noticed.
Bruce sees Harvey on the Monday after. He doesn't say anything. He watches Harvey closely instead. Because it's so easy to forget that Harvey is a scholarship boy. The way he dresses, the way he sounds, the way he acts, is every bit as much prep school, money born and raised, as the rest of them. It's much later that Bruce asks which of them is the real Harvey, the boy he saw or the boy in school.
"They're both me. Or I'm both of them. I'm always Harvey Dent." Bruce understood that now, the things that made him the Bat, they'd always been there, he just hadn't used them. He's always been the Bat, as much as he's always been Bruce Wayne.
They fall into a fling.
Almost literally, when Harvey comes whooping up the stairs and along the corridor into Bruce's room at the school when the basketball team win some match or other. Bruce suspects he's supposed to know and care about the match but he really doesn't. Harvey all but knocks Bruce out of the chair he's sitting in in his excitement. Somewhere in the "we won, we won"s Harvey kissed him.
It was never going to be more than a fling. They both knew it, and knowing that made it easier somehow. There wasn't any of that awkwardness, or obsessiveness you got with teenage relationships. They were glad to avoid it because they'd all survived the fallout from Bobby Miller and his undying love for Jennifer last term.
It couldn't be anything more, not if Harvey wanted to be Gotham's DA. And, as usual, nothing but being the best would do for Harvey. He knows the children wouldn't understand, Tim would think it was stupid, but that's because they don't know how much the world has changed, and Bruce is glad they don't.
Bruce was careful, discreet and delicate, and all the things Playboy Bruce Wayne isn't, because he'd rather have cut off his own hand than hurt Harvey. That's still true twenty years later.
That's when Bruce first noticed the bruises. He was lying against Harvey, they weren't doing anything more vigorous than reading even if there was no reason to be doing the reading together, half-naked in bed. There was a bruise, running all down the left side of Harvey's ribcage. Looking at it, it must have been more than one bruise, but the damage was so extensive that it had all merged into one. Bruce didn’t think anything of it, because neither of them had been all that careful when they had judo matches, but he didn't remember hitting Harvey *that* hard *there*.
A few weeks later there was another horrible bruise, and there really was no reason for Bruce to have hit Harvey where the bruise was. Bruce looked for other possible answers and couldn’t find any. Sure, school basketball could get rough but, again, the bruise wasn't anywhere you'd think basketball contact could explain. So Bruce, because he was seventeen and had all the tact God gave a rooster, asked Harvey about it.
Harvey could have lied, but he chose not to. Bruce doesn't know why Harvey chose the truth that time when Harvey normally liked to pretend that everything was fine, even when it really wasn't. He didn't explain straight away. No, Harvey gave that Cheshire cat grin he used when things weren't fine, and said, "don't worry about it."
Bruce hadn't, not really, not as much as he should have done, until Harvey said that. Bruce had always had a morbid streak, even before everything, and so he immediately assumed some sort of clotting disorder or leukaemia and was building whole mountains of fear from nothing.
"My Dad gets frustrated when I don't do as well as I should. It's no big deal, really." Bruce was trying to come up with a way to say, actually, yeah it was a big deal, but Harvey wasn't going to listen to that. "I know what it sounds like, what it looks like," Harvey indicated the bruise that Bruce had noticed, and now he looked hard, Bruce saw the fading edges of a fair few more, "but he does love me. You don't know, you can't know, how hard he's worked to give me these opportunities. He wants to make sure I make the most of them."
Bruce suggested that Harvey ought to tell someone, someone that wasn't Bruce, someone who had some idea how to help. Harvey said he didn't need to, and that if Bruce told anyone, Harvey would say they were all bruises from judo and everyone would believe him. Which was true, the judo coach would have to say that yeah, the two of them never listened to the whole "minimal contact" bit of training. Bruce tried to argue that telling someone would be better, because then Harvey or Harvey's Dad could get help, but it was pointless arguing with Harvey. Somehow, Harvey even talked him into promising not to tell anyone.
Bruce tried to think of a way round the promise, thinking of a way to tell Alfred that won't blow up in Harvey's face. He couldn't think of one, because he knew Alfred would do something and then Harvey would lie and then Harvey's Dad would hit him more.
He didn't stop trying or giving Harvey information about organisations he could speak to because Bruce knew that no part of this situation is right.
He even tried fixing it himself, in his own way. Bruce knows better than most people that money doesn't buy happiness. It can't bring people back from the dead for a start. But it does help cushion some blows. Bruce used a shell company to set up a bursary for non-boarding students to become temporary boarders. The way Bruce saw it, if he could get Harvey into school accommodation for the rest of his time in school, there would be less chance for his father to hit him.
The logic was sound. The plan just ran into reality.
Harvey came into Bruce's room one day, carrying a duck egg blue envelope. "I appreciate the offer. I appreciate you trying to hide that it was from you even more." Harvey put the envelope with the letter containing the bursary offer down on Bruce's desk, corner giving the satisfying smack that only expensive card did. "I can't accept it though. I would, if it were just me, but Dad would flip his lid. It'd be all, 'what, you think you're better than me now'." Harvey turned to leave, "I know you mean well, but leave it alone Bruce. I get to the end of this year and then I'll be fine. I'll go to Harvard, and everything will be alright." Bruce knew what Harvey's grades were like, he'd make Harvard easily. Bruce wasn't so sure that everything else would be as easy as Harvey thought it would be.
Bruce didn't say anything. He knows he should have done, but even now, years later, he's no idea what he could have said.
The money went to good use anyway. The mother of a boy two forms down was sick in hospital and having him stay at the school overnight took some of the weight off his Dad.
Harvey went to Harvard, like everyone knew he would. Bruce meant to keep in contact but events and Falcone intervened.
Because of that, he was completely unprepared to meet Harvey when Rachel organises the meal for him to meet her new boyfriend.
Bruce went to see Harvey the next day, sweeping into the ADA's office with no notice because there's advantages to being a Wayne. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see people gossiping. The DA's staff who are Gotham natives were whispering to their out-of-town colleagues that this is going to be good, because don't they know, Wayne is the boss's girlfriend's ex. He wasn't sure what they expected, maybe a knockdown fight, but they weren't going to get it.
Bruce sat down, knowing that they could talk safely in the office. Like every other important building in Gotham, Bruce knew the blueprints of the One Taylor Place by heart and the office was soundproofed. Unlike most of the other buildings, One Taylor Place was actually built to specifications.
They didn't talk about their thing, they didn't need to, their history was there in their smiles and their easy acceptance of the ridiculous situation.
"When she told me that she was dating an ADA, I didn't think of you." Harvey didn't look impressed. "There's five hundred of you!"
"When she told me that her ex was rich with no day job, I should have guessed it was you." That would have been pretty harsh from anyone, never mind Harvey. "I mean it Bruce, you are better than this. What happened to you?" Apparently there were three people living who could make Bruce feel bad about what he was doing, Alfred, Rachel and Harvey.
It was as close as Bruce ever got to telling someone just to explain himself. Because he found out that day, that he'd do almost anything to avoid Harvey's disapproval, and if he couldn’t get his approval, he could at least gain Harvey’s understanding. He didn't want Harvey thinking so poorly of him, even if Bruce Wayne wasn't all of who he was. But he couldn't tell Harvey because he is Gotham's protector and that matters. So he told Harvey something that is almost the truth instead.
"I went to college, found out that I had no idea who I was, ran away to find myself like every other trust fund kid, and found out there wasn't anyone there to find. I eat, I sleep, I survive. I'm a man like any other." He ran to find out what sort of man let his parents's murderer get away when given the opportunity for revenge, and found out he was nothing special. If you took away everything Bruce Wayne was, you'd find an absence. Except one thing. The thing that saved him. He had to protect Gotham.
"Bullshit, Wayne. I know you well enough to know you're lying about something."
"Huh?"
"It's the same look of fake stupid you used to use on Mrs. Miller. I will figure out what you're lying about." And Harvey might have done. "Promise me it's not drugs, you've not joined a cult and whatever it is won't land you in my office in cuffs."
"It's not, it's not and it won't." Bruce knew, even then, that that wasn't how it was going to end.
"Well that's a relief," said Harvey, smirking.
They freaked out Harvey's colleagues by coming out of Harvey's office joking and laughing. The fact that they got on so well threw everyone, because people forget what school you go to, if one of you then vanishes off the face of the Earth for a while.
Bruce dealt with Rachel dating Harvey as well as he could. If he couldn't have Rachel, because of the Bat, then he'd rather she had Harvey, because he knew Harvey was kind, decent and honest. Harvey was a better man than any version of Bruce. Harvey was the kind of man his father would have wanted Bruce to be, he was what Bruce should have been, what Bruce wasn't despite his advantages.
He was good and didn't do any of the stupid, futile, ultimately self-harming things that Playboy Bruce Wayne would do when he's frustrated, and the Bat doesn't take it out on criminals because that would be wrong, and if Bruce maybe knocks a kick bag off its chains in the cave, then well, that's the least worst option and at least it’s something that can be repaired.
Bruce Wayne supported Harvey Dent's campaign to be Gotham's District Attorney. He tried to rally society types, Harvey can win the general populace over on his own, but a campaign's got to have money and that's where Bruce comes in.
Gotham high society was more disturbed by this than Harvey's co-workers were, possibly because they remembered when Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes were the "it" couple, and wasn't it a shame that they broke up. The latest Wayne was a much better catch than Dent, for all of Dent's ambition and Wayne's complete and utter lack of it. Wayne had money and a pedigree. People danced around the question of why Dent, until someone, three-cocktail-drunk, finally asked, "Harvey Dent stole your girl. Why are you stumping for him?"
"Because if Rachel trusts him, I know I can. He's got ideas. That's rare in Gotham. He's honest, hard-working and actually cares about the city. I think that makes him unique. I believe in Harvey Dent." And apparently that was enough, because Bruce Wayne doesn't believe in anything, but he believed in Harvey Dent so Dent must be worth it. There are times when Bruce hates Bruce Wayne.
Harvey wins, of course, because Harvey doesn't lose.
It's brilliant for Gotham. Corruption and crime actually go down. Batman still can't retire because evil lurks around every corner, even in a golden age. It always will. Even back then, Bruce was never sure he believed himself when he said that Batman would retire one day. Now he knows he won't. Bruce will, because dying in the suit because he's too old and slow to be Batman anymore is pointless, but the Bat will live on.
Bruce kept expecting Harvey to find out, to put the pieces together and guess who is under the mask. Rachel knew, and that's okay because he knew he could trust Rachel. No power in the world could compel her to tell his secret. Not hate, not love, not anger or fear. Because Rachel was as good as she was beautiful and he loves her and always will.
Bruce still thinks about her, when he doesn't stop himself. Bruce doesn't like to think about her and Batman finds it makes him hard, makes him angry and that's not good either.
In much the same way, Bruce still loves Harvey. Teenaged Bruce would be very annoyed by that, finding it unnecessarily sentimental, but teenaged Bruce hadn't been there the day Harvey risked his life by pretending he was the man under the mask. Harvey is like Rachel, he's beautiful and good and Bruce is still astonished either of them loved him.
It was too good to last. Bruce should have remembered what happened to the last people called Gotham's golden couple.
~~~~
Harvey is having one of his better days.
Yes, that means that he's calling himself Two-Face, and probably plotting his escape from Arkham and his next crime wave. But Bruce will take that over the days were Harvey doesn't call himself anything, and can't make a decision as simple as getting out of bed without the coin.
Batman is on the window ledge outside of Harvey's cell in the asylum. Dick sometimes jokes that he ought to get a window cleaner's gantry and set it up outside of Harvey's window, he spends that much time there.
Dick isn't wrong.
Batman wants everyone in the asylum to be cured, for Gotham's sake if nothing else. Bruce is desperate for Harvey to be cured. He owes him. The Wayne Foundation pay for the best psychiatrists to work at Arkham, because that's the best way he's thought of to hide which patient matters the most to him.
Batman has rifled through Dr. Meridian's files. She says Harvey is making progress. Bruce believes her. But they've been down this road before. They will probably walk along it several more times. That's okay, as long as Harvey gets better.
They're playing checkers tonight. Two-Face prefers games with two sides, Harvey and Batman like strategy games and Bruce doesn't mind what they are as long as they're not games of chance, because those have a tendency to set Two-Face off. Batman has made a good move, one which doesn't ensure success but makes it pretty likely. Harvey is going to have to use his brain to get out of this one.
"Good move, Bruce." If Bruce hadn't wanted to give away his secret, he wouldn't have stiffened. But it was an automatic reaction. Two-Face continued, "I've always known. Harvey guessed the day he said *he* was Batman. It was afterwards, when the adrenaline faded, and he realised that whoever Batman really was had to look something like him, since people believed him. So who else in Gotham was a similar height and build and had access to the kind of tech Batman had. With that knowledge it was simply, really." Two-Face rolled his eyes and said, "there was a reason we were paired together for judo, you know." Harvey had had this habit of raising his left eyebrow while keeping the right flat when he was indicating that the person he was talking to was being dumb. Bruce was used to it, and Batman was shocked to see the flattened eyebrow that was so Harvey on Two-Face's face.
“The coin came up heads for you when I needed to know whether to tell the others or not.” Bruce knows that if Two-Face had wanted to, he could have tossed the coin for each person he wanted to tell, but he didn’t.
Harvey's still in there.
It's why he spends so much time up here. Bruce is still trying to help Harvey.
Twenty years ago when they both full of potential, it wasn't just the potential for success. Bruce was already Bruce and Bruce Wayne at the same time, and now he's Batman, and Bruce Wayne, and Bruce when he remembers to be, and the possibility of Two-Face always lurked underneath Harvey's smile and demeanour and Bruce worries sometimes that Harvey without that wouldn't have been Harvey Dent.
Bruce still believed in Harvey Dent.
Author: Red Fiona
Disclaimer: I don't own Batman, it's all DC's. Or Warner Brothers for the bits I've pinched from the Nolan-verse. No money is being made from this.
Fandom: Batman
Characters: Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent
Pairings: Bruce Wayne/Harvey Dent, Bruce Wayne/Rachel Dawes, Harvey Dent/Rachel Dawes
Ratings/Warnings: PG-13, off-screen canonical child abuse.
Notes: Written for an lgbtfest or queerfest prompt, but sort of spun away from the point of the prompt in the context of the fest. The prompt was "Batman, Harvey Dent/Bruce Wayne, when they've both spent their whole lives dividing things in two, is it any wonder one of them snapped? Bruce just never thought it would be Harvey." It's set somewhere between the Animated Series and the Nolanverse. Because I have pinched Rachel and a couple of scenes from the Nolan films.
Summary: When they've both spent their whole lives dividing things in two, is it any wonder one of them snapped? Bruce just never thought it would be Harvey.
~~~~
There was a time when Bruce was very jealous of Harvey Dent.
Harvey was clever, athletic, popular for himself and not his wealth, and he had a family. It was before Bruce really got to know Harvey, before he knew how much all of those things cost him, and the pressures a scholarship boy was under. Not to mention Harvey's father. But Bruce had been young, and dumb, and missed his family so much.
The young Apollo, as one of their teachers called Harvey, and the Wayne boy, as everyone called Bruce, were not friends. They weren't enemies either. They had that strange sort of enmity that you got when two boys are told to be more like each other when their personalities just didn't work that way. Even before Bruce turned being Bruce Wayne, gadabout millionaire, into a full time identity, he'd never been the most studious of people, and Harvey had to work hard because he needed excellent grades to justify his scholarship.
But subjects Bruce was interested in, math, chemistry, physics, those he'd read up on, running ahead of lessons. Harvey found him in the library one day, pouring over an algebra textbook.
"Wayne, there's no way you can actually understand that."
Bruce was never going to live down that D in history. "Math I can do. There's right answers and wrong answers, and no opinions." That was how Bruce liked things - right and wrong.
"But it's so abstract. It doesn't affect people."
"Math is in everything. It's your heartbeat and the weather and the bricks of the building we're in."
"For you, that was practically poetry."
Bruce doesn't swear. Because the school has a no-tolerance policy for swearing. They all do it constantly, but not in the library because the librarian had ears like a bat. The librarian's eyes were another matter, so Bruce flipped Harvey the bird.
Harvey laughed, quietly. "Aren't you just full of surprises?"
Bruce rolled his eyes, and Harvey left, but they got on better after that. Bruce saw that Harvey was a human being, not yet another idol he was never going to live up to, and Harvey, Bruce didn't know what changed on Harvey's side, just that it had. Harvey let Bruce be in on the jokes, not outside them. Bruce hadn't ever been the butt of the jokes, but he'd normally been left out of the laughter.
It didn't mean that they weren't still competitive. That kind of got worse because now there was a person to beat, not an idea, and while Bruce didn't like losing, Harvey hated it. Now, years later, some part of Bruce still believes that Harvey's ridiculous winning record as an attorney was because of that. Cases that he should have lost, that anyone else would have lost, but Harvey didn't because Harvey Dent does not lose.
It made judo training interesting. At school they had to do an extra-curricular sport, and Bruce hated team sports. That didn't leave much. Swimming, which he could do, but got boring after the tenth length, running, see previous, sailing, where okay, he enjoyed match racing but there weren't ever enough racing boats at school to actually develop tactics, and judo. Judo he liked. Judo was you against someone, bodies on the line, physical and mental exercise.
Harvey took judo because ... that was something else Bruce didn't know. It wasn't like Harvey needed the extra credit. Harvey got his sports extra-curricular credit by being on the school basketball team, he would have been quarterback for the football team but it clashed with the debating society, which guess what, Harvey was also captain of, because Harvey was the best at anything he did. Bruce gave him hell about it, because Bruce was a bad friend and Harvey kept him around because all Harvey had was good friends and he liked to even up the score. Or so Harvey said.
They got paired together because, while Harvey looked like the Apollo nickname he so hated, Bruce was almost as tall as him and was finally starting to put some weight on his frame so they were evenly matched. Which was good since they seemed to spend most of the time in judo sessions trying to kill each other. Because sparring was more like fighting when they did it. Bruce only ever tapped when he thought Harvey might actually break one of his bones, and he hoped Harvey had the sense to do the same. He was never certain that Harvey would tap. Harvey was fearless, and might let Bruce snap his elbow, just to prove a point.
Similar macho bullshit nearly stopped Bruce from helping Harvey one of those rare times he could in school. Or rather, it nearly stopped Harvey from accepting the help.
Harvey got a B in math. Not a big deal, if you weren't Harvey. Bruce didn't know why it mattered to Harvey. It wasn't like a B in one class test would knock his GPA any. But only As were ever good enough for Harvey.
By then Bruce knew Harvey well enough to wait till he'd stopped walking around like someone about to throw a thunderbolt. It didn't help, Harvey still refused to take the help. "No. I don't need your help. I don't need anyone's help."
"Call it me saving up favours for when I fail English Lit because I don't catch the metaphors."
That stopped Harvey mid-rant. "Wait, you actually didn't get it. I thought you were playing dumb for Mrs. Miller."
"I wasn't playing dumb." Bruce really wasn't, he didn't understand why the author couldn't say what they meant, instead of hiding it behind something else. "Things are, or they aren't, and I don't get why this thing is supposed to make me think of that thing. I help you out with math, you help me out with English." Bruce made it a trade and that makes Harvey okay with it for some reason. Bruce understands it now, but didn't then.
There are a lot of things about Harvey that come under that heading.
Bruce only saw Harvey once outside of school, and that was by accident. The new chauffeur had got lost and the car ended up in all the wrong parts of town. Bruce wouldn't have recognised Harvey if the-kid-he-didn't-quite-recognise-until-he-looked-really-hard hadn't looked quite so determined not to be noticed.
Bruce sees Harvey on the Monday after. He doesn't say anything. He watches Harvey closely instead. Because it's so easy to forget that Harvey is a scholarship boy. The way he dresses, the way he sounds, the way he acts, is every bit as much prep school, money born and raised, as the rest of them. It's much later that Bruce asks which of them is the real Harvey, the boy he saw or the boy in school.
"They're both me. Or I'm both of them. I'm always Harvey Dent." Bruce understood that now, the things that made him the Bat, they'd always been there, he just hadn't used them. He's always been the Bat, as much as he's always been Bruce Wayne.
They fall into a fling.
Almost literally, when Harvey comes whooping up the stairs and along the corridor into Bruce's room at the school when the basketball team win some match or other. Bruce suspects he's supposed to know and care about the match but he really doesn't. Harvey all but knocks Bruce out of the chair he's sitting in in his excitement. Somewhere in the "we won, we won"s Harvey kissed him.
It was never going to be more than a fling. They both knew it, and knowing that made it easier somehow. There wasn't any of that awkwardness, or obsessiveness you got with teenage relationships. They were glad to avoid it because they'd all survived the fallout from Bobby Miller and his undying love for Jennifer last term.
It couldn't be anything more, not if Harvey wanted to be Gotham's DA. And, as usual, nothing but being the best would do for Harvey. He knows the children wouldn't understand, Tim would think it was stupid, but that's because they don't know how much the world has changed, and Bruce is glad they don't.
Bruce was careful, discreet and delicate, and all the things Playboy Bruce Wayne isn't, because he'd rather have cut off his own hand than hurt Harvey. That's still true twenty years later.
That's when Bruce first noticed the bruises. He was lying against Harvey, they weren't doing anything more vigorous than reading even if there was no reason to be doing the reading together, half-naked in bed. There was a bruise, running all down the left side of Harvey's ribcage. Looking at it, it must have been more than one bruise, but the damage was so extensive that it had all merged into one. Bruce didn’t think anything of it, because neither of them had been all that careful when they had judo matches, but he didn't remember hitting Harvey *that* hard *there*.
A few weeks later there was another horrible bruise, and there really was no reason for Bruce to have hit Harvey where the bruise was. Bruce looked for other possible answers and couldn’t find any. Sure, school basketball could get rough but, again, the bruise wasn't anywhere you'd think basketball contact could explain. So Bruce, because he was seventeen and had all the tact God gave a rooster, asked Harvey about it.
Harvey could have lied, but he chose not to. Bruce doesn't know why Harvey chose the truth that time when Harvey normally liked to pretend that everything was fine, even when it really wasn't. He didn't explain straight away. No, Harvey gave that Cheshire cat grin he used when things weren't fine, and said, "don't worry about it."
Bruce hadn't, not really, not as much as he should have done, until Harvey said that. Bruce had always had a morbid streak, even before everything, and so he immediately assumed some sort of clotting disorder or leukaemia and was building whole mountains of fear from nothing.
"My Dad gets frustrated when I don't do as well as I should. It's no big deal, really." Bruce was trying to come up with a way to say, actually, yeah it was a big deal, but Harvey wasn't going to listen to that. "I know what it sounds like, what it looks like," Harvey indicated the bruise that Bruce had noticed, and now he looked hard, Bruce saw the fading edges of a fair few more, "but he does love me. You don't know, you can't know, how hard he's worked to give me these opportunities. He wants to make sure I make the most of them."
Bruce suggested that Harvey ought to tell someone, someone that wasn't Bruce, someone who had some idea how to help. Harvey said he didn't need to, and that if Bruce told anyone, Harvey would say they were all bruises from judo and everyone would believe him. Which was true, the judo coach would have to say that yeah, the two of them never listened to the whole "minimal contact" bit of training. Bruce tried to argue that telling someone would be better, because then Harvey or Harvey's Dad could get help, but it was pointless arguing with Harvey. Somehow, Harvey even talked him into promising not to tell anyone.
Bruce tried to think of a way round the promise, thinking of a way to tell Alfred that won't blow up in Harvey's face. He couldn't think of one, because he knew Alfred would do something and then Harvey would lie and then Harvey's Dad would hit him more.
He didn't stop trying or giving Harvey information about organisations he could speak to because Bruce knew that no part of this situation is right.
He even tried fixing it himself, in his own way. Bruce knows better than most people that money doesn't buy happiness. It can't bring people back from the dead for a start. But it does help cushion some blows. Bruce used a shell company to set up a bursary for non-boarding students to become temporary boarders. The way Bruce saw it, if he could get Harvey into school accommodation for the rest of his time in school, there would be less chance for his father to hit him.
The logic was sound. The plan just ran into reality.
Harvey came into Bruce's room one day, carrying a duck egg blue envelope. "I appreciate the offer. I appreciate you trying to hide that it was from you even more." Harvey put the envelope with the letter containing the bursary offer down on Bruce's desk, corner giving the satisfying smack that only expensive card did. "I can't accept it though. I would, if it were just me, but Dad would flip his lid. It'd be all, 'what, you think you're better than me now'." Harvey turned to leave, "I know you mean well, but leave it alone Bruce. I get to the end of this year and then I'll be fine. I'll go to Harvard, and everything will be alright." Bruce knew what Harvey's grades were like, he'd make Harvard easily. Bruce wasn't so sure that everything else would be as easy as Harvey thought it would be.
Bruce didn't say anything. He knows he should have done, but even now, years later, he's no idea what he could have said.
The money went to good use anyway. The mother of a boy two forms down was sick in hospital and having him stay at the school overnight took some of the weight off his Dad.
Harvey went to Harvard, like everyone knew he would. Bruce meant to keep in contact but events and Falcone intervened.
Because of that, he was completely unprepared to meet Harvey when Rachel organises the meal for him to meet her new boyfriend.
Bruce went to see Harvey the next day, sweeping into the ADA's office with no notice because there's advantages to being a Wayne. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see people gossiping. The DA's staff who are Gotham natives were whispering to their out-of-town colleagues that this is going to be good, because don't they know, Wayne is the boss's girlfriend's ex. He wasn't sure what they expected, maybe a knockdown fight, but they weren't going to get it.
Bruce sat down, knowing that they could talk safely in the office. Like every other important building in Gotham, Bruce knew the blueprints of the One Taylor Place by heart and the office was soundproofed. Unlike most of the other buildings, One Taylor Place was actually built to specifications.
They didn't talk about their thing, they didn't need to, their history was there in their smiles and their easy acceptance of the ridiculous situation.
"When she told me that she was dating an ADA, I didn't think of you." Harvey didn't look impressed. "There's five hundred of you!"
"When she told me that her ex was rich with no day job, I should have guessed it was you." That would have been pretty harsh from anyone, never mind Harvey. "I mean it Bruce, you are better than this. What happened to you?" Apparently there were three people living who could make Bruce feel bad about what he was doing, Alfred, Rachel and Harvey.
It was as close as Bruce ever got to telling someone just to explain himself. Because he found out that day, that he'd do almost anything to avoid Harvey's disapproval, and if he couldn’t get his approval, he could at least gain Harvey’s understanding. He didn't want Harvey thinking so poorly of him, even if Bruce Wayne wasn't all of who he was. But he couldn't tell Harvey because he is Gotham's protector and that matters. So he told Harvey something that is almost the truth instead.
"I went to college, found out that I had no idea who I was, ran away to find myself like every other trust fund kid, and found out there wasn't anyone there to find. I eat, I sleep, I survive. I'm a man like any other." He ran to find out what sort of man let his parents's murderer get away when given the opportunity for revenge, and found out he was nothing special. If you took away everything Bruce Wayne was, you'd find an absence. Except one thing. The thing that saved him. He had to protect Gotham.
"Bullshit, Wayne. I know you well enough to know you're lying about something."
"Huh?"
"It's the same look of fake stupid you used to use on Mrs. Miller. I will figure out what you're lying about." And Harvey might have done. "Promise me it's not drugs, you've not joined a cult and whatever it is won't land you in my office in cuffs."
"It's not, it's not and it won't." Bruce knew, even then, that that wasn't how it was going to end.
"Well that's a relief," said Harvey, smirking.
They freaked out Harvey's colleagues by coming out of Harvey's office joking and laughing. The fact that they got on so well threw everyone, because people forget what school you go to, if one of you then vanishes off the face of the Earth for a while.
Bruce dealt with Rachel dating Harvey as well as he could. If he couldn't have Rachel, because of the Bat, then he'd rather she had Harvey, because he knew Harvey was kind, decent and honest. Harvey was a better man than any version of Bruce. Harvey was the kind of man his father would have wanted Bruce to be, he was what Bruce should have been, what Bruce wasn't despite his advantages.
He was good and didn't do any of the stupid, futile, ultimately self-harming things that Playboy Bruce Wayne would do when he's frustrated, and the Bat doesn't take it out on criminals because that would be wrong, and if Bruce maybe knocks a kick bag off its chains in the cave, then well, that's the least worst option and at least it’s something that can be repaired.
Bruce Wayne supported Harvey Dent's campaign to be Gotham's District Attorney. He tried to rally society types, Harvey can win the general populace over on his own, but a campaign's got to have money and that's where Bruce comes in.
Gotham high society was more disturbed by this than Harvey's co-workers were, possibly because they remembered when Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes were the "it" couple, and wasn't it a shame that they broke up. The latest Wayne was a much better catch than Dent, for all of Dent's ambition and Wayne's complete and utter lack of it. Wayne had money and a pedigree. People danced around the question of why Dent, until someone, three-cocktail-drunk, finally asked, "Harvey Dent stole your girl. Why are you stumping for him?"
"Because if Rachel trusts him, I know I can. He's got ideas. That's rare in Gotham. He's honest, hard-working and actually cares about the city. I think that makes him unique. I believe in Harvey Dent." And apparently that was enough, because Bruce Wayne doesn't believe in anything, but he believed in Harvey Dent so Dent must be worth it. There are times when Bruce hates Bruce Wayne.
Harvey wins, of course, because Harvey doesn't lose.
It's brilliant for Gotham. Corruption and crime actually go down. Batman still can't retire because evil lurks around every corner, even in a golden age. It always will. Even back then, Bruce was never sure he believed himself when he said that Batman would retire one day. Now he knows he won't. Bruce will, because dying in the suit because he's too old and slow to be Batman anymore is pointless, but the Bat will live on.
Bruce kept expecting Harvey to find out, to put the pieces together and guess who is under the mask. Rachel knew, and that's okay because he knew he could trust Rachel. No power in the world could compel her to tell his secret. Not hate, not love, not anger or fear. Because Rachel was as good as she was beautiful and he loves her and always will.
Bruce still thinks about her, when he doesn't stop himself. Bruce doesn't like to think about her and Batman finds it makes him hard, makes him angry and that's not good either.
In much the same way, Bruce still loves Harvey. Teenaged Bruce would be very annoyed by that, finding it unnecessarily sentimental, but teenaged Bruce hadn't been there the day Harvey risked his life by pretending he was the man under the mask. Harvey is like Rachel, he's beautiful and good and Bruce is still astonished either of them loved him.
It was too good to last. Bruce should have remembered what happened to the last people called Gotham's golden couple.
~~~~
Harvey is having one of his better days.
Yes, that means that he's calling himself Two-Face, and probably plotting his escape from Arkham and his next crime wave. But Bruce will take that over the days were Harvey doesn't call himself anything, and can't make a decision as simple as getting out of bed without the coin.
Batman is on the window ledge outside of Harvey's cell in the asylum. Dick sometimes jokes that he ought to get a window cleaner's gantry and set it up outside of Harvey's window, he spends that much time there.
Dick isn't wrong.
Batman wants everyone in the asylum to be cured, for Gotham's sake if nothing else. Bruce is desperate for Harvey to be cured. He owes him. The Wayne Foundation pay for the best psychiatrists to work at Arkham, because that's the best way he's thought of to hide which patient matters the most to him.
Batman has rifled through Dr. Meridian's files. She says Harvey is making progress. Bruce believes her. But they've been down this road before. They will probably walk along it several more times. That's okay, as long as Harvey gets better.
They're playing checkers tonight. Two-Face prefers games with two sides, Harvey and Batman like strategy games and Bruce doesn't mind what they are as long as they're not games of chance, because those have a tendency to set Two-Face off. Batman has made a good move, one which doesn't ensure success but makes it pretty likely. Harvey is going to have to use his brain to get out of this one.
"Good move, Bruce." If Bruce hadn't wanted to give away his secret, he wouldn't have stiffened. But it was an automatic reaction. Two-Face continued, "I've always known. Harvey guessed the day he said *he* was Batman. It was afterwards, when the adrenaline faded, and he realised that whoever Batman really was had to look something like him, since people believed him. So who else in Gotham was a similar height and build and had access to the kind of tech Batman had. With that knowledge it was simply, really." Two-Face rolled his eyes and said, "there was a reason we were paired together for judo, you know." Harvey had had this habit of raising his left eyebrow while keeping the right flat when he was indicating that the person he was talking to was being dumb. Bruce was used to it, and Batman was shocked to see the flattened eyebrow that was so Harvey on Two-Face's face.
“The coin came up heads for you when I needed to know whether to tell the others or not.” Bruce knows that if Two-Face had wanted to, he could have tossed the coin for each person he wanted to tell, but he didn’t.
Harvey's still in there.
It's why he spends so much time up here. Bruce is still trying to help Harvey.
Twenty years ago when they both full of potential, it wasn't just the potential for success. Bruce was already Bruce and Bruce Wayne at the same time, and now he's Batman, and Bruce Wayne, and Bruce when he remembers to be, and the possibility of Two-Face always lurked underneath Harvey's smile and demeanour and Bruce worries sometimes that Harvey without that wouldn't have been Harvey Dent.
Bruce still believed in Harvey Dent.
