Work Text:
“Waller.”
“Wayne.”
She says it without even missing a beat, without even looking up from the dossier.
“What happened to your tenant?”
The words are deceptively light. The tone, the gaze, the demeanor are most certainly not.
Amanda Waller deigns to glance up at Bruce Wayne for the first time since he confronted her in the hotel's waiting area while her security detail to pull the car around. Public place. He must not want to cause a scene.
She'd like to, but she'll play ball.
“She checked out last week. Didn't like the continental breakfast. And to think, the staff went to all that trouble to install a new espresso machine.”
“She checked into a hotel in Gotham,” he says, keeping up the ruse.
“How's she doing?” she feigns interest.
“She's a terrible house guest.”
Wayne emphasizes his point by dumping a newspaper across the table in front her. Tales of ghastly, rictus-grinning death leer up at her in newsprint and lurid photos.
“She always did make a mess, that one. I can't say I'm sad to see her go.”
“She wasn't supposed to go anywhere. Not while she was under your roof.”
“Did you catch a plane all the way from Gotham to cry about some spilt milk, Mr. Wayne?”
The question is deceptively light, even casual in its disregard, and it's enough to draw out the Batman. Just a little. Just around the edges. The way he squares his shoulders and narrows his eyes and furrows his eyebrows in that heroic grimace of man-pain.
To think, there are actually grown men who live in terror of that look. It's almost enough to make Waller laugh.
“Six bodies, Waller,” he says, pretense rapidly falling away alongside his patience. “Six bodies because you couldn't keep her under wraps.”
“Six bodies is less than forty-five.”
The Batman pauses.
She'll spell it out for him.
“In the last month, our mutual friend's boyfriend has been responsible for six vacancies,” she says, pausing just long enough to see the curling lip of disgust at her euphemism, “but if we wind back the clock to this time four years ago, to a time when her boyfriend wasn't anyone's boyfriend, he was responsible for forty-five in the same month.”
Batman isn't as stupid as she likes to think. The implication has already dawned on him, but he doesn't want to face it. The revulsion at her fatal arithmetic is splashed across his chiseled features as plain as day.
So she'll give him one more hard shove into the cold, harsh light of reality.
“She keeps him under control—as much as someone like that can be kept 'under control.'”
“You call six murder—”
“Six vacancies is less than forty-five. Maybe you want to sit here and argue that six is higher than zero, but we don't have that luxury. If our choices are six or forty-five, which one do you think we should take?”
His lips are pressed into a thin line of petulant denial. He doesn't want to admit she has the right of it in her stone cold assessment, but he can't bring himself to say the words aloud.
She smiles.
The last time they spoke, she was on the back foot. It's good to be back on familiar territory with big boys who think they can push her around.
“Like it or not, Mr. Wayne, she's lodging in your city again, but that might not be such a bad thing. You've gained another lunatic, but you've traded his brand of lunatic for a slightly more predictable mobster. You're bound to have vacancies either way, but you are bound to have fewer of them and a better chance to relocate the lovebirds to their usual rooms at Arkham now that she's back in Gotham.”
“Shouldn't that be your job? They're a threat to national security.”
“Shouldn't they be yours? They're a threat to Gotham's security as long as you don't give either one of them a reason to go sniffing around somewhere else.”
The remark lands like a javelin.
So the psych eval held some water.
The Batman creates his own monsters or at least feeds their madness in some way, and he knows it. The Joker never would have hijacked a military helicopter if Harley hadn't left “home.” The Joker might never have felt the need to make a Harley Quinn if he hadn't seen the Batman had a Robin and a Batgirl. More to the point, the Joker might not have gone out of his way to take his Robin away if Batman hadn't tried to take his Harley away by sending her to a rehab program out west to break her of her conditioning.
Maybe the Joker is all his fault.
The thought rankles him, and it shows.
Waller isn't one to pull her punches, but there's no point in antagonizing the bat any further. She'll be late if she keeps at it.
“Maybe I was wrong about you,” Waller says, stashing her files in her bag as she rises to meet him eye-to-eye. “Maybe you should keep working nights. Jones and Lawton made themselves useful in our last field trip. I can always use more freaks for my freak show.”
She brushes by him like an unpaid intern rather than one of the wealthiest men in the world.
“I don't do it for you.”
She doesn't even bother turning as she throws her parting shot over her shoulder.
“No, you don't, but I don't really care.”