It was two o'clock in the morning when Carla's eyes pulled open at the sound of her intercom buzzing from the hallway. She hadn't stayed hanging around at the fundraiser that evening, suddenly not caring about whether people saw her there or not after she felt as though a gaping hole of emptiness had been blown straight through her chest.

Maybe naïve, but Carla had expected Bruce to follow her, or at least grab hold of her hand when she turned her back on him. Her skin stayed untouched however, and her name uncalled by his voice while she made her way out of the hotel and straight into the back of a cab.

She hadn't cried when she'd gotten home but it was the first time that she'd wanted to because of something Bruce had done. Carla didn't like to let men get the better of her emotions and so far she'd done a good job at beating them all by being stronger than their nasty words or foul tempers.

When she arrived back into her apartment however, it was only then that she realised just how deeply Bruce had rooted himself into her life. His shoes were by the door and a couple of his jackets were hung up beside her own, food she knew he liked was stocked up in the kitchen and his cologne and cufflinks were scattered on the dressing table amidst her own perfumes and rings. His razor was in the bathroom and his boxers in her laundry basket, the pillow on his side of the bed flatter than the one on her side and a pair of slippers she made fun of him for wearing sat idly by the foot of the couch.

Carla couldn't recall when exactly herself and Bruce's lives had intertwined and perhaps she hadn't even realised just how tightly they were now threaded together. Returning home alone with a pain in her heart put there by him, however, was the biggest wake up call she'd ever received.

There was a reason she was closed off and cold, a reason why she didn't invite in friendships and a reason why she turned down the advances of men. Carla hated vulnerability and most of all she hated loss, her entire life seeming as though trust ended up with everybody she loved being buried. If Carla had no faith, she had no trust, and no trust meant no love and if she had nobody to love, she had nobody to lose.

That had never been a problem for her when she first moved to Gotham and for the most part she'd stuck to her guns, but love worked in mysterious ways and had caught her off guard, snatching pieces of her cold heart and gifting them to a small handful of people that she called her friends.

She fell asleep surprisingly easily once returning home, her phone having not a single missed call or unanswered text from Bruce or anybody else, and she didn't wait up to see if she'd get one, either. So to be jolted awake in the premature hours of the dark morning was quite a shock to say the least, but Carla had no second guessed at who was waiting to be let in.

She buzzed Bruce in and waited by the door, pulling it open when she heard his footsteps from down the hall and frowning with wide eyes when she saw the state of the man walking towards her.

Blood stained half of his white shirt and his nose was streaming with red, his bottom lip cut and his knuckles bleeding down to his wrists. His eyes were pooled with helplessness and his lips were parted, tired, desperate pants to catch his laboured breath drawing her attention to the hand resting against sore ribs.

"Did anybody see you come in here?" She said, quickly stepping aside and closing the door after him.

"No," he said with a grunt, shaking his head.

"What the Hell are you doing here? What happened?"

He sighed heavily and wandered painfully slowly into the kitchen, resting his hands on the counter to steady himself. Carla followed him, eyes scanning his body for more injuries and hoping that there wouldn't be any more hiding beneath his clothes.

"The Joker tore apart another bar in The Narrows looking for Carmine. He wasn't there but that didn't stop him from trying to kill a few people that looked at him the wrong way. We ended up on the railway tracks and took a fall instead of a train to the face and I lost him."

Carla didn't know what to say or how to feel. The upset she'd felt earlier on that night still resided inside of her heavy heart, but had been outshined by the shock of seeing him so broken.

"Here, get this off."

She didn't waste any more time standing uselessly in the kitchen, instead reaching out and helping him slide his tuxedo over his shoulders and discarding it on the floor. The blood staining his shirt was coming from a deep cut on his left arm just beneath his shoulder, still seeping the vicious red liquid across his skin.

She unbuttoned his shirt and left it by their feet, grabbing a first aid box from the cupboard and beginning to clean the wound, not easing the pressure when she heard him wince with a sharp inhale.

"You should've gone home," she said as she applied pressure to stop the bleeding, "Alfred could've helped you more than I can. You need stitches."

Bruce looked down at her, noticing that she avoided looking at his face even though she was doing nothing more right then than pressing gauze to his wound.

"No, I should've come here hours ago. I tried to come here hours ago but then things started happening in the Narrows and I..."

"You don't have to explain yourself to me."

"I do," he snapped quickly, "I absolutely do. I shouldn't have let you walk away and I'm sorry for leaving it like that. You know I'd never want to upset you."

Carla stayed quiet and pulled the gauze away from his arm. The bleeding had stopped and after making sure it was properly cleaned, Carla glued the wound closed and secured it with a tight bind of bandages. She said nothing while she picked up his hands and wiped his knuckles clean either, though left a cloth pressed into his palm when it came to helping his face.

"Where did you learn to patch people up like this?" Bruce asked while he stood in front of a mirror on the wall and attempted to wipe away the dried blood from his nose and lips.

"My father wasn't always the man he is now. He was once somebody that taught me how to ride a bike, how to swim and how to read. He told me how to clean and dress a wound and how to defend myself, how to hold a knife and fire a gun...how to swing a golf club."

It had been difficult for Bruce to comprehend that Carmine Falcone was in fact Carla's father, the revelation feeling like more of a stone cold fact than something he felt he could believe in. She'd never mentioned much about her childhood or the reasons why she and Carmine were estranged and so for the most part, it seemed to make sense in Bruce's head to believe that Carla had never really had a father at all.

He knew what loss felt like but had never considered what it would be like to mourn somebody that was still living, to have to grieve a relationship with somebody you could still look in the eye. It was a solemn and quite frankly sickening thing to think about, to imagine going from loving a father like a daughter would to despising him with every fibre of her being, something that Bruce had selfishly never even thought about.

Carla washed her hands and cleaned the kitchen, standing in a pair of satin pyjamas that she'd pulled on to answer the door with her hands resting on her hips, only a dim glow from beneath the cabinets providing any light into the room.

"I'll drive you home," she reached for her keys.

"No," Bruce interjected, finally meeting her gaze when his abrupt answer took her by surprise, "I came here to talk to you, Carla. I'm not going home."

In that moment, Carla had nothing to say to him. She felt foolish standing in front of him, embarrassed for wanting him in a way that he didn't want her. Bruce could sense her hostility and her resentment towards him, her standoffish nature and the way he hadn't felt any warmth from her since she'd let go of him in that ballroom a few hours before.

He hadn't had much time to think about what he wanted to say to her and truth be told, Bruce's answer probably hadn't changed. It was the way he'd witnessed a shift in her soul that had carried him to her door, not because he wanted to say something false that he knew she wanted to hear, but because he couldn't bare to live with himself knowing that he'd hurt her.

Carla looked him up and down, eyes trailing across his bare torso and the bruises scattered across his ribs, old and new. His broad shoulders were helplessly slumped and his breathing still ragged, a tiredness weathering his eyes and pulling his chest deeper in on itself.

Bruce didn't look like the strong, charming man that she'd left standing alone earlier that night, not anymore. He looked beaten and broken and in pain that she could tell he was trying to kick aside to stay standing for her, to fix what he'd broken inside of her even if it meant what was broken inside of him stayed that way.

Though despite the sadness he'd bestowed upon her, Carla wouldn't let that happen.

"You can stay here tonight. We'll talk tomorrow, you need to rest."

She trudged into the bedroom and Bruce followed her, watching through the darkness as she slipped back into bed still wearing her pyjamas when usually, she pulled the covers over her bare skin when they were together. It wasn't much but it felt like another kick in the teeth to Bruce, a small action that told him something had changed.

Nevertheless, he lie down beside her and tried his best to not groan in pain as he did so, though Carla could hear his deep breaths even when she had her back to him. There was a thick silence between their bodies and a space that wasn't usually there. They very rarely slept with their bodies tangled together but Carla usually drifted off with her head on his chest at the very least, even if they did wake up on opposite sides of the bed.

It felt wrong but Carla didn't have it in her to make it feel right. Bruce had given her his answer and she wouldn't beg for him to change his mind, she would never beg him for anything. He had made it clear that he would never ask a single thing of her and so in turn, she wouldn't ask another thing of him.

It hurt, God it hurt more than any pain she'd ever felt and Carla didn't want to imagine leaving Gotham behind if it meant leaving Bruce behind too, but she'd been tortured enough by that place, by it's living and it's dead, and knew she couldn't stay any longer than her duties bound her to.

"Carla?" Bruce whispered.

She heard him cut through the silence but didn't respond. Her eyes were wide open staring at the curtains and she forced herself to swallow a sickness rising in her throat, eyes stinging as she blinked back tears, eventually closing them for good.

Bruce didn't remember falling asleep that night, staring at the minutes tick by on the clock before he eventually stopped counting somewhere after three-thirty. He woke up just after seven, wincing in pain when he pushed himself up onto his elbows and lifted a fist to rub his tired eyes.

Carla snapped out of her dream when she felt him stir beside her, turning over to face him with wide eyes and parted lips, the expectation of hearing her ask where are you going? hurting so much more when she said nothing at all.

Bruce stared at her with sleepy eyes, wishing, even praying for her to ask him to stay, to tell him to stay. He wanted her to take hold of his hand and pull him back down beside her, to kiss his lips and to fall back to sleep together instead of apart.

Tell me to stay, he thought, hazel eyes and a soft frown pleading with her, tell me to stay, and I'll stay.

But Carla didn't. She forced herself to look away and pushed the covers from her body, padding across the bedroom floor and disappearing across the hall into the bathroom.

Bruce reluctantly hauled himself out of bed, digging around in the wardrobe to find some clean clothes that were hanging up alongside Carla's own dresses and suits. There was an ominous feeling that consumed him as he pulled out a pair of track pants and a t-shirt, believing somewhere inside of him that he'd probably never be lucky enough for her to let him hang his clothes there again.

He waited for her in the living room, two cups of hot coffee sitting untouched on the table between the couch and two chairs opposite. The blinds were open and sun shining, though it had never felt colder inside Carla's apartment than it did that morning.

She eventually wandered in dressed in yoga pants and a sweater, one that belonged to her instead of his oversized ones that reached her thighs that she wore sometimes. Carla sat down on the couch and took a sip of the coffee before setting it back down on the coaster, saying nothing as she pulled her legs beneath her body and waited for him to speak.

Bruce looked at her first, admiring her bare face and hollow cheeks, strong nose and piercing eyes. She looked intimidating sitting opposite him, scary, almost. There was nothing comforting about her and no hint of a smile or reassuring curve of her eyes, no remnants of the woman she'd been before he'd struck her down with his own sword.

"I'm sorry for last night. I just didn't expect you to say what you said."

"You don't need to apologise to me. You have your own life and I have mine, or at least I hope to at the end of this."

Bruce would break the ties that bound her to Carmine Falcone, that much he was certain of. He would do whatever he needed to do to make sure Carla could be free to live her life without restriction, exactly the way she wanted to. She never deserved the life she'd been dealt and while Bruce still didn't know all the details, he knew enough to want to give her that fresh start.

"You will, I'll make sure of it," he nodded, "But that won't be the end for me. There are things I have to do here, criminals I have to help the Commissioner bring in to make this city safe. Falcone isn't the last of them but even if he was I..."

Carla swallowed that same lump in her throat, the silence of his trailed off words reminding her just how cold the pain had been last night, feeling so much colder a second time around.

"You wouldn't want to leave."

"I can't leave."

Carla picked apart people's minds for a living and although she'd always tried her best to refrain from psychoanalysing those closest to her, it felt impossible to not dive inside Bruce's head right then.

She understood what he'd lost and his loneliness, a struggle to find belonging and meaning with an empire to his name that had never truly felt like his own. Carla knew that Bruce found purpose in what he did for Gotham, trying to turn a bad place good and bring back some of the happiness that his parents gave to its people. He was good, and Carla believed that down to her core, but she knew that Bruce didn't.

There was an urge to prove himself, a desire to achieve and to keep on achieving until there was nothing left. The only problem was, Carla knew that when people like Bruce searched for situations to become heroes, they often created them themselves. And so even if the day came when Gotham was a flourishing green paradise of safety and freedom, it would still never fill the void inside of Bruce, or tame that desire to prove that he was something more than an orphaned billionaire.

The thing was, Bruce was more than that. He was worth far more than everybody in Gotham put together and Carla could see that, she could feel it in his soft hands and his charming smile, his polite manners and the way he laughed. He was generous and kind and doting, dedicated and funny without having to try. It made her regret holding back on her compliments since meeting him, wondering if Bruce would have viewed himself differently if she'd just been a little nicer.

"You don't owe this city anything. You don't owe its people anything, you've given them enough. You think you owe it to yourself, like you have to prove to yourself what you're capable of but you don't. I understand, I do, it's my job to understand but Bruce...the more you rely on this, the more likely it is to kill you."

He furrowed his brows, not expecting to have his brain turned inside out and splayed across the table for Carla to sift through.

"Wh-what are you even talking about?" He said bitterly, stuttering over a slight burn of discomfort and anger.

"I'm not saying this because I'm trying to change your mind or to get you to come back home with me," she replied calmly, looking into his hazel eyes and seeing an enraged flame flicker, "I'm saying it because I-"

"Because you love me?" He interrupted with a patronising stare and sour tone, "If you loved me you'd stay. You'd understand that this is my home and these people are the same people my parents wanted to help. These families gave my parents a purpose and a life and-"

"And these same people took away mine."

The silence was deafening and her words struck him light hot lightening, freezing him blue and rendering him speechless. Carla still looked unforgiving but he noticed then her small frown and a weak, thin veil of water shrouding her ferocious gaze and an unstable break in her tensed jaw.

Mad, yes, but she was hurt, too.

"I'm sorry if I got it wrong," she continued with a lift of her chin, "If I asked you to do something you weren't willing to do. I won't ask again, but I will ask you to think about why you're staying and if it's worth it. Not for me, but for yourself."

Her apology sent a shiver down his spine, hating the fact that the only time she'd ever said sorry and actually meant it had been over something he wished had never been said in the first place. Remorse had never fitted her and Bruce didn't want her apology, he didn't want her to fall at his feet in submission or admit that she was wrong because she wasn't.

Bruce knew deep down that without Batman, his life felt like it had little purpose. Before he'd put on that suit, he'd felt directionless and lost, like a man wandering aimlessly around the earth with more money than he knew what to do with and a mind full of grief and angst with nowhere to channel it.

Being the Dark Knight had saved him, but he couldn't deny that it had almost killed him too many times for him to count. Despite that, he still chased the high of being a vigilante and doing something good for a place that needed it, being a symbol of hope and of change that people could believe in. Bruce didn't want Gotham to need Batman forever, but he wasn't sure what he'd do with himself when that day came, and Carla had seen straight through that fact.

"I thought I told you that apologies didn't suit you?" His tone was timid, words anxious to leave his lips.

Maybe it was regret that forced Bruce to not counter Carla's silencing argument, but that didn't make a difference to her anymore. Of course she wanted him to go to Sicily with her, to spend their days on beaches and in vineyards. She wanted to cling to him in the ocean and make love on the sand but more importantly than any of that, she wanted to not have to worry about him still breathing.

She'd never wanted to force Bruce to give up being the Batman and while she knew his allegiance to what he did ran deep, Carla had never quite understood just how deep until then.

"I won't take back saying something that might save your life, Bruce. And yes, I said all of that because I love you."

She stood up then and Bruce did the same, wanting her to walk into his arms but feeling his skin remain untouched as she headed for the door instead, unlocking it and pulling it open ajar.

Carla stood waiting with her fingers wrapped around the handle, staring at her feet with her throat bobbing every time she forced herself to swallow instead of saying something else.

Bruce's footsteps were heavy as he edged his way towards the door, not wanting to step through it for the last time. He paused in front of her, just a whisper between their bodies with a presence that pulled Carla's eyes up from the ground to meet his face.

He was heartbreakingly handsome with dark eyes that were mellowed and deep, pooled with sadness and a glaze of tears she remembered seeing when he'd walked out of her apartment before he knew her dark truth, only that time, she was convinced he wouldn't come back.

Bruce let out a soft gasp and shook his head slowly, "I'm sorry."

Carla blinked back her tears and chewed on her bottom lip, holding herself steady though giving up on trying to pretend like she wasn't falling apart right in front of him.

"You don't owe me anything, you should know that by now."

He tensed his jaw and found the bravery to touch her face with his hands, thumbs brushing delicately across her soft skin before he kissed her lips just once. It was gentle and honest, though hurt more than any blade or gunshot wound ever could, feeling her tears melt into his cheeks before she pulled herself away from him for the last time.

Bruce just swallowed as he looked down at her, hating the way she looked when she cried and hating even more that he knew she despised it too. She hated seeming weak but the truth was, Carla was perhaps the strongest person Bruce had ever met, and that made walking away from her beautiful face all the more gut wrenching.

"I love you," he whispered, the confession coming out like a choke over his own words that he didn't want to be his last to her.

Carla's skin burned as she gazed at him, those three words carrying the weight of a heart that didn't belong to her anymore.

"Maybe we'll get lucky in another life, Bruce."