Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Master Bruce,” Alfred said, “there’s a matter I thought might be worthy of some attention in this morning’s paper.” Never being a man to enter a situation unprepared, he had already folded the particular section of note face-up on Bruce’s breakfast tray. As he and Bruce had spent the last forty years negotiating conflicts by elevating the pretense of ignorance into an art form, however, Alfred knew that was no guarantee. He swept his hand pointedly over the paper as he set the tray down.

“Alfred,” Bruce said, “why is there a shirtless picture of me on the front of the arts section of the Gazette?”

“I must admit that was a question that also crossed my mind this morning, Master Bruce. However, I am not a trained investigator.”

“I haven’t even had any coffee yet,” Bruce said, plaintively.

Alfred was already lifting the steaming silver pot at the corner of the tray. He pressed a mug into Bruce’s hands. “Now,” he said, “with fortification, perhaps you might see fit to investigate, to search your soul as it were, whether it was strictly necessary to remove your shirt during a benefit event for the Gotham Symphony.”

“It… made sense at the time,” Bruce said.

“I await your reasoning with bated breath.”

“Well, there was a woman--”

“There usually is.”

“—and a fire—”

“Less common.”

“—and it seemed like a better idea than tossing my champagne on it. Also there weren’t supposed to be any cameras at that point in the night.”

“And yet.”

“And yet.” Bruce’s shoulders slumped, and for a moment he looked every inch the eight-year-old Alfred remembered. Unfortunately, the picture of him emblazoned across Gotham’s foremost journalistic output looked anything but. The aforementioned woman, a chemicals heiress Alfred vaguely remembered from Bruce’s downstairs work, was hanging off of Bruce’s arm as though auditioning for a part on a romance novel cover. Bruce had been captured half-turning toward her, in a twist that showed off the oblique muscles Alfred had spent far too much of his life sewing up. Due to the heat of the fire, perhaps, or some spilled alcohol, Bruce was also—though Alfred hated to use the word—glistening. No wonder the Gazette had put the photo on the cover of the arts section. They were lucky it hadn’t made the front page.

“Dare I ask whether the shirt survived unscathed?”

“That’s going to have to go under the umbrella of ‘and yet,’ I think,” Bruce said.

“Very good,” Alfred sighed, and removed himself to field yet more calls from Bruce’s PR manager Anjali. It really wasn’t Bruce’s fault that he was always getting himself into these situations, but Alfred couldn’t help but wish that he would apply whatever skill he used to avoid being photographed as Batman to his life as Bruce Wayne. Or at least try to prevent all of the pictures coming out as images better suited to the walls of a hormone-addled teenager than a major metropolitan news outlet.

Lylia loved her job. I love my job, she told herself, when she had to fly out before 5 to set up a shoot on less than a day’s notice. I love my job, she repeated, when a client canceled after she and fifteen other people had been baking under studio lights for almost an hour. I love my job, she reminded herself through gritted teeth, when talent came in so hungover that not even her kindest fill lights could eliminate eyebags too big to qualify as carryons. This morning, she was on her eighth repetition of her mantra, because this morning’s photoshoot was not just a reputation or a suit but a suit with a reputation, and also the most infuriatingly sexy man she had ever photographed.

Bruce Wayne was meant to be the subject of some professional headshots to update the company website and soothe some skittish board members. According to the memo, the headshots were meant to convey power, responsibility, and steadiness. Kind of a boring brief, but easy enough-- simple lighting, straightforward angles, a few power poses with Wayne’s hands in his pockets or folded across his desk.

And it wasn’t that Wayne wasn’t punctual-- in fact, he’d made her drop her coffee by melting out of the wall by the elevator at 10 on the dot. He shook her hand with a firm but not crushing grip, apologized for startling her, and gave her an entirely unexceptional smile. He went where Kimia put him, allowed hair and makeup’s bustle of spritzing and dusting without fuss, and didn’t even complain about the lights, which had to be boiling someone dressed in that much expensive wool.

It was a dream shoot until Lylia focused her camera. Then Bruce’s legs fell apart, he slouched in his seat, and his hooded gaze burned a hole through her lens. Oh no, she thought, watching her dreams of getting home in an hour and a half swirl down the drain like a bad bottle of developer. He’s sexy.

“Could you straighten up a bit more in your chair, please? And maybe keep your legs more level, as well. Tilt your head.”

“Like this?” Bruce asked. He sat up and stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankles. In combination with the head tilt, the pose turned him into a cigar baron about to light up. He gave her a helpful little smile that through the lens managed to be both sinister and smoldering.

“Well,” Lylia said, bleakly, “not quite. Let’s try a standing pose instead.”

“Whatever you think is best, Ms. Leung,” Bruce said, cheerfully. She propped him against a window, gestured for Andy to grab a fill light, hoisted her camera, and nearly wailed. What had seemed an entirely unexceptional pose-- professional man gazing out over the city his company had helped build!-- had somehow transformed into the cover of one of the CEO billionaire pregnancy fantasies Lylia’s sister-in-law kept gushing about. Beholden to the Billionaire Alpha Mate, or whatever. Maybe it was the lights. Maybe she needed to adjust her frame. Maybe she needed to throw her camera off a building.

“Maybe a blank backdrop next,” Lylia said. Surely if she just did a normal corporate headshot it couldn’t possibly turn out sexy.

Two hours later, Lylia had about 300 photos of Bruce Wayne, four of which were even slightly usable. He was visibly sweating, vacuous smile still firmly in place. Outside of the camera, he looked sort of like a wet dog. Behind her lens, he looked like either an ad for extremely expensive moisturizer, or the cover of a porno. Half of her team were openly texting the group chat she wasn’t supposed to know about, and the other half were taking bets on when she’d crack.

“Okay!” she said, with forced cheer. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Wayne! I’ll send these over to your team, and you can pick the ones you like best.” With any luck, by the time his PR people realized what had happened, she could move to Metropolis and start a new career.

“Thanks for meeting me, Bruce,” Lois said, shoving a coffee across the booth.

“Anything for my favorite Planet reporter.” Bruce slid into his seat like it had been greased for him, which knowing the sanitation of this diner, might in fact be true. Lois liked the hash browns, though, and Bruce liked that it didn’t have any windows.

“You know I hate when you do that weird toothpaste commercial smile,” she said, and pulled out her notebook. When she looked back up, Bruce was smiling the normal way, with his eyes and not much else. Much less disconcerting.

“Aw, Lois,” he said, with an exaggerated clutch at his heart. “You wound me.” So he was still a little bit “on,” even in this mostly empty diner.

“Good. Maybe then you’ll tell me what Wayne Enterprises is planning with the acquisition of MemCo?”

“Something about diversifying our portfolio, Lois, you know I don’t pay attention to that kind of stuff.”

“The shtick where you expect me to believe that you’re actually stupid has got to be the most annoying thing you do.”

Bruce lit up. “Really? I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“I notice you’re still not answering my question.”

“Lois, if you wanted real answers about business, you should have called up Lucius or Anjali. You know I can’t give you the quotes you want about stuff like that.”

The “can’t” would have been telling to someone who didn’t know Bruce particularly well, but it was, at least, honest. “I know,” Lois sighed, taking a sip of the diesel fuel that masqueraded as coffee at this place. “Can’t I just call up an old friend for lunch?”

“Of course you can,” Bruce said. The “you usually don’t” was unspoken.

“I did want you to explain this,” Lois said with a sigh, shoving her phone across the table.

“Ah,” Bruce said, his triumph in making her break first fading as he looked at her phone screen. “Well, I was getting the paper.”

“In a robe?” Lois knew-- and Bruce knew she knew-- exactly how long the Manor driveway was.

“Many people wear bathrobes in the morning.”

“In just a robe?”

“I was wearing briefs!”

“You can’t tell from the photos.”

“They wouldn’t be able to publish them if you could,” Bruce pointed out.

“I didn’t know you were such a fan of pink,” Lois said. “It’s not really your color.”

“I think it brings out the warm tones in my skin,” Bruce said, with a wink. He looked down at the tabloid gallery, which was open to a shot of him bending to pick up the paper. His robe had fallen strategically open, exposing one extremely muscular thigh and also both nipples. Lois wondered, as she often did, how he’d managed to fill in the worst of the scars. “I think they’re fairly flattering. There aren’t a lot of men in their early 40s who can pull off getting papped in a frilly pink dressing gown. You don’t like them?”

“That’s not really the point, is it?”

“No,” he said, letting the last of the Brucie slip from his manner. “I guess it isn’t.”

“I wish you’d find a different way of convincing the public that you’re an idiot,” Lois said.

Bruce straightened. “Is this an intervention?”

“No,” Lois admitted. “But you’re giving Clark ideas, and pink really isn’t his color.” She was rewarded with a sight she rarely saw, which was Bruce Wayne with his head back in a full-body laugh. Not the plummy chuckle he saved for Brucie, but the weird wheezing cackle that was his real laugh. “There you are,” she said, and he flipped her off, still laughing.

“Selfie for the road?” he asked, waving her phone. “You’ve got to have something to show Perry for your working lunch.”

Lois sighed. “Fine,” she said. Perry didn’t give two shits what she did with her lunch as long as she turned in copy on time, but it would piss off Cat, which was worth having a cursed object on her phone.

Bruce leaned in and angled her phone in a way that somehow erased the bags under his eyes and the sickly fluorescent lighting completely. He was doing something with his lips that made him look both pensive and also like he’d never had a single thought in his life. Also while she wasn’t looking he’d unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, and his collarbones were, inexplicably, gleaming.

“This is my least favorite part of our lunches,” Lois said, obediently ducking under the arm he wrapped around her shoulders.

“Tilt your chin a little,” Bruce told her, and snapped the photo. As always, it looked disturbingly good. Also as always, Lois wished she had a photo of five minutes earlier. She had easily a hundred pictures of Brucie and could get thousands more with a simple search. But she could count on one hand the number of photos she’d ever seen of Bruce.

“One more,” Bruce said, unbuttoning another button.

“Stop having fun with this,” Lois groaned.

“A man’s got to have hobbies, Lois,” Bruce said, unflappable, which was so infuriating that they had to take several more because the first three featured Lois spluttering incoherently and also trying to hit Bruce with her purse, and the second set featured Bruce and Lois getting kicked out of the diner.

“I liked that place,” Bruce said, looking back at the entrance and tugging at his cuffs ruefully. “Do you think they’d let us back in if I offered to buy it?”

“Bruce Wayne,” Lois said, trying to get her hair out of her face. “I will kill you.” When she scrolled back through her gallery later that night, she found to her surprise, amidst the glossy pursed-lip shots, one photo of Bruce laughing. He had his hands folded over his head, her purse flying towards his face.

Well, there was more than one way to get what you wanted from a source. She just wished she hadn’t had to burn a perfectly good diner to do it.