"Does anyone know where Counselor Wayne came from?"
That's a question more than a few people have over a mounting few days, that would've gone on longer if it weren't for the myriad of other problems going on and if t weren't for the fact that he's pitched in to help with almost all problems. Sometimes that was being the one on hand to fix a pipe right before dinner, sometimes it was helping change a tire on one of the cars to go into town for supplies and sometimes it was helping a kid find their things. There's no problem to be found when you're being helpful.
Or maybe useful is the better term.
Whatever it is, by day four, no one's asking where he's come from so much as they're offering SPF, straw hats, or pointing him towards an unstaffed activity. Some people notice immediately that he tends to disappear when some of the higher ups come around while others don't ever notice at all. Most people do notice, at one time or the other, that he and counselor Warren sometimes are gone around the same time.
Maybe only a handful will ever connect as to the real reason why. Most don't think too much of it, given how popular counselor Warren is with everyone. Well, Joe for a fair few.
No one knows that Counselor Wayne had never, at any point, signed up for anything. He wasn't being paid by the hour, he wasn't even supposed to be at Camp. In all fairness, he should've been attending college in Gotham City.
There's just one little problem, one tiny secret that Michael has been keeping to himself this whole time as he slips into the cabin after Joseph one evening. Something he knows he should tell his boyfriend even though he's much more content to pick a few errant leaves from the day from his wings as they talk. Something that he knows is probably going to piss almost everyone off, yet he holds onto as he plucks the last leaf and says, "You wanna go into town?"
"Sure," Joe smiles at him, and Michael knows he should probably be upfront about the fact he dropped out of college three weeks into it.
And that he intends to do something much, much more dangerous with his life the moment camp is over.
By the time he gets re-accepted to Gotham Academy, Michael is past the stage where he's been expelled from any school he touches. Not so much due to mastering his anger—Alfred thinks that, but in truth? Michael has just learned to pick his battles better now, be sneaker with what he does.
He doesn't hate Alfred—no part of him could truly hate the man who's raised him after his parents died. Still, he and Alfred simply don't agree on things whether it was how Michael chose to spend his spare time or how Alfred disapproved of how Michael didn't care about how people thought about him whenever he disagreed with them or stood up for the kind of kids who had no one to stand up for them or how sometimes he had to get creative to get back at the kind of people who think that the only way to be was cruel.
Not that it's always noble—even if Alfred doesn't like acknolwedgeing it, there are some kids who respect him because of the rumors of what his family was mixed up in before they died, and Michael has never turned those kids away. He's never thought them helping him out sometimes is bad, and he's never thought they're any lesser than himself. Sometimes, the fights are more for them than himself.
It just doesn't settle with him, the idea that in time he'll have to don on suits, have to run board rooms, have to take over an empire that as far as he could tell, was running itself. The Wayne empire had been the one thing that hadn't seemed to shatter after they died and Michael is content with leaving things alone. What interests him isn't that kind of future, it's one that he gets to shape himself. The kind of future he thinks about all the time, where a kid doesn't have to wakeup without their parents, where a child doesn't have to worry about being around adults, where the streets are safe.
Alfred admonishes him at times, keeping track of reports of crime, or looking at crime scene photos on his own to try and find a tip. Michael understands he's trying to help him—
And he doesn't at the same time.
How can Alfred just live like this, just stand to not think about other people who might be like this? Who might feel no one is there to help them when someone could?
It comes to him around fourteen years old that he shouldn't be a cop or a detective, caught up in the laws and rules around them. Not when he understands why you have to cover your cup up at a party, why sometimes his older classmates wound up on the news with broken bodies or worse. The cops fail them all the time and detectives, in Gotham? Half of them he remembers hardly ever did anything at the station and the other half he was pretty sure were taking bribes.
Something else. He needs to be something else.
He doesn't have that sorted out by the time he windsup in the tail end of high school. By that point, he's making the grades that Alfred needs to see out of him, that his parents expected out of him. When he has time to himself, he gets his driver's license as soon as he can, mapping out Gotham entirely in the car as much as he can. There are party invitations to almost any party that are offered to him less because people want him there, but because they want to be seen with him—tagged on their accounts, gossiped about, and Michael learns quickly how much he hates it.
One of the few things Alfred is completely right about is staying off of social media.
Michael takes it a step further though, as he begins to take his car out of Gotham and into neighboring cities. No one cares about Gotham's Orphan in Metropolis and no one cares about him in any part of New York City that doesn't have a huge Gothamite prescence. The parties aren't always wild, some aren't even interesting at all—Michael just goes for the relief it gives to him when he gets inside and no one's staring at first. And then he goes for the girls that are there and sometimes the guys that are there. Sometimes it's a dumb game of spin the bottle that is played to get things going—other parties are more of the drinking kind that go on too late that he leaves as soon as he can, alcohol untouched.
The one in New York he goes to one night, before senior year starts, is one of those that are mostly populated by the rich kids, those seeking to be seen by rich kids, and college kids who didn't care about mixing in with some of the seniors and seniors to be. There's not a single adult in sight when he drives up there on the borrowed motorbike he has, music is thumping out in the rooms, and Michael can see a couple sprawled out on the lawn, cars all over the street, people with beer kegs set up on the lawn, and when he setps inside it's not too much better.
The air of weed is thick and choking, the alcohol is flowing so much that it stuns him a little bit and there are who's who of rich kids he's either heard or seen over the years, mingled with enough new faces that he doesn't get picked out in the throng of people. There are three floors of people packed up there, the music is so loud that he can't think much through it, and another throng of kids pushing through seems to stretch the place to the limits to contain them all. There are kids here who are able to make fireworks with their fingers while another one keeps teleporting with a BAMF! sound that is more distracting than his blue skin.
In other words, it's not too bad at all when they get down to it. At some point he has a pull from a joint that turns into a bong being passed over to him that turns into the kind of lazy high that has him agreeing to one of the games being played. Something about the set up feels a little calculated, sitting in some stranger's office while they gather around it. One of the mutant kids is hanging around with a thick German accent while another one is telepathically spinning the bottle in her boredom, her eyes flickering as it spins and spins. Michael finds himself seated so he can face the main door, watching as more kids file in.
The last is a blonde guy coming in with a shorter guy who's half ice. The one who's half ice looks like he should be a freshman at best, middle school if Michael was being generous. The blonde guy has enormous white wings that take time to tuck into the door and his wings seem to give a tenative little stretch before settling once he sits down. Of the two? He's the handsome one, with pretty blonde hair that Michael thinks accentuates his looks. He gives him a slight grin from his position, one that the blonde readily returns.
They all settle down, twelve of them. They all know how this is played, and the bottle stops spinning as the ruls are explained. Michael doesn't pay attention, taking the joint from his left, passing it along without taking a hit. All he cares about is that when the rules are done being explained, he reaches for the bottle first, hand hovering over it.
Then he decides: I don't trust a bottle.
He gets up instead, crosses through the circle, to say to the blonde, "You wanna just come with me instead for maybe more than seven minutes?"
Michael is very sure he makes a few people mad. The one who doesn't get mad is the one who matters, mouth turning up. "Not even gonna ask my name first?"
"You've got time to tell me," Michael grins at him.
And he does, even though it's at least three minutes into the kiss they share down the hallway in a spare room that they lock: Joe.
He's in the middle of helping the kids with a banner when he sees the car drive up and Mr. Warren gets out of the car. Michael feels a sliver of real nervousness slide down his spine when he sees that familiar coat and hair—for a second he thinks he's been caught.
Of all the things he could be caught for, why this? For once he wasn't being a nuisance on purpose—more than once Mr. Warren had caught him too close to Joe too many times to count or climbing out of the window to Joe's room after an actual study session as much as they were just them fooling around or trying to pull Joe out of those stuffy, boring events he insisted Joe attend even though he must know his son gets easily bored of.
That's usually how they did things, Michael showing up in his car to pick up Joe over the waning summer days and then coming around as much as he could during the school year. But they'd graduated over a year ago, and thing had diverged since. But not enough that Michael isn't feeling concern when the man strides inside of the camp to maybe do what Michael thinks he's been on the verge of doing for a long time: making an ultimatum. Demanding Joe drop him for his future, the one he knows the Warrens sketched out a long time ago for him, the sort of future he thinks Alfred wants for him.
"Counselor Wayne?" One of the kids says, and Michael turns to the voice of the girl waving to him in her purple hoodie. "We need the glue sticks!"
Michael hurries up with the bags of supplies he'd gotten out of one of the cabins. They're all supposed tobe making a banner for the night's events, and almost no one cared to know where the good supplies are. So he's done his best to get them all for them, going into the nooks and crannies to get the stuff that didn't look like it'd been stuck there for ten years. The cabin he's attached himself to are the kids who are between eight and ten, a mix of kids from Gotham who are too young to know who he is and kids from other places who don't even really know what Gotham was before camp.
Strangely? While the other counselors tend to have trouble, it isn't for him. While everyone else seems to be scared of him a bit or find him odd, these don't. They don't mind that he tends to have a plan first thing, that he has them all hold hands when they go places, or that sometimes he allows them to ramble during their tasks. They seem to like that he's okay with them crying, that he's always trying to get them back up on their feet, to like that he'll take five minutes to comfort a little girl and fix her pigtails as easily as he'll fix one of the boys' toys for them with glue and a mission.
It feels... good to help them. To be useful. To know that he's doing well when one of the shyer kids is able to say something during an activity after a little encouragement, to know that no effort here is waste.
It's better when evening comes around and Joseph comes back, his wings pulled behind him, his gait easy and relaxed. He isn't being pulled out by his Dad, at least. Which means for at least another day or two, Michael is safe here too, without Alfred knowing.
Orphans can find each other pretty easily in some places—whether it's through something like an invisible string between them or if it's just little clues that one puts together, it's been easy for Michael since he was eight years old. Something in him recognizes himself in the kid in front of him who thinks Michael can't understand his mumbling in Korean, with a bloody nose and stubborn set to his face.
He remembers during the intial first days where everyone introduced themselves, he never mentioned his parents, just his uncle. Connor Hwang, a little more awkward for the older campers, sometimes off by himself, sometimes with the older kids. Not exactly sullen sometimes, but certainly someone who seemed to be used to being on the sidelines, the fringes. Except today, where Michael had broken up a fight between him and one of the older troublemaking campers. He isn't sure what was said or done, only that something in Connor's facial expression and shaking hand tells him that the kid hit below the belt.
This must be how Alfred felt sometimes, trying to figure out what to say or do for a kid like this, clearly hurting like this.
Michael swallows, and he knows he should tell him that he's in trouble, that he's got to calm down. That he's got to... apologize.
Instead looking at how Connor's face sets, like he's waiting to be reprimanded or have a blow land, he says, "You want some ice cream? You're gonna need it before I show you how to actually deliver a punch without hurting yourself."
Connor looks up at him, suspicious. "...What kind of counselor shows someone how to punch?"
"The kind of counselor who knows how to break into the ice cream fridge in less than a minute," Michael grins at him. "Are you gonna come with me or not?"
Connor clearly thinks he's odd, and still. He nods and follows Michael.
It's rare for Michael to be able to say that there's someone in his life that he met before his parent's died—yet Tsunetomo is one of them.
He was six years old when he met the older man; even though he can't fully remember it, it had been a frighteningly cold day in Gotham. Still, his mother had wanted to take him out, thinking that most of his cold had gone away. She hadn't known that not only was he still sick and feverish but that there would be an accident at the intersection of the department store she'd taken him to. It had been a bad one, and all it took was his mother trying to assist with the police for him to slip out of her arms and walk around in the feverish cold. Michael hadn't heard her screaming for him, nor had he seen any of her dark hair as he'd wandered around feverish.
Mostly he remembered chasing after a fox. A big one, with a huge tail had guided him onto the grounds of the snow laden dojo that Tsunetomo ran. The older man had always told him he'd seen Michael, flush and unfocused, standing at the very edge of his garden, carpeted in snow to the point that he'd thought the child was a ghost until he collapsed. Tsunetomo had only lived in Gotham for a handful of years then, not quite sure of who or what the Waynes were. He hadn't known the child he took in with an awful fever and a rough cough, only that he was about the age of his son when he had died years before.
By the time he realized who was in his care, Michael might as well have been his son to the old man.
When his parents were contacted, well. Tsunetomo more or less appointed himself a grandfather to Michael and the Waynes, grateful, hadn't pushed. Not at all—Michael and Tsunetomo bonded quickly, to the pont that sometimes Michael forgot the man hadn't been there his whole life.
He's the one who he listens to more than Alfred, though they never say it outloud. It's Tsunetomo who not only teaches him the martial arts he so loves but it's Tsunetomo who scolds him when he says a too cruel of a remark to Alfred, it's Tsunetomo who comforts him sometimes when missing his parents to the point that he can't get out of the despair, it's Tsunetomo who brings up over and over again that the idea Michael has isn't a bad one. It just needs polish, to come to a good idea.
Michael tries in school for him, tries to be a little more normal for him but sometimes, despite the training, he sees something else in his mentor's eyes. Sees something that he thinks Tsunetomo has always seen in him, even before his parents died and Michael would collapse in his arms in pain. He thinks he's done well when he is at the top of his class and Tsunetomo tears up at the graduation, and more so when Tsunetomo gifts him the motorbike he's always kept up with Michael.
Still, Alfred seems surprised when Michael announces the day after he turns eighteen that he'd like to live with Tsunetomo for awhile. Someting in Alfred seems betrayed, even though Michael doesn't understand it when all they have is friction and he and Tsunetomo don't. When he mentions it to Joe, over one of their last dates before Joe is going to Basic, he thinks Joe maybe sees something he doesn't even though he says, It does make sense. I've never seen you and Tsunetomo argue like you and Alfred.
We don't argue at all, is what Michael groused, bumping into Joe's shoulder. Never seriously.
Tsunetomo is the one he calls from the camp phone, his Japanese comforting to Michael's ear, "You found him, then? Where was he?"
"At Camp Knowhere. I drove all the way here, and I'm staying 'til the end of summer," Michael cradles the phone against his cheek, voice stubborn in the cabin. Connor's asleep on the counselor couch they have, blanket pulled up over him as the air conditioning blows through. "Did Alfred suspect anything?"
"He came over, yes," Tsunetomo is definetely smoking, Michael can tell. There's a baseball game being played over the radio he can pick up with a tinny—it's always been his favorite sport. Even more than the martial arts he taught, and Michael misses hearing him talking about the games, throwing the ball with him. "I told him I didn't know anything and reminded him that you're of age now. Seems to me that he and Mr. Warren are in on it, even if they won't admit it." In the background, Michael can hear one of his movies playing. "Are you still going through with it, your trip?"
"Yeah," he doesn't dare hesitate over the line. "As soon as Camp is over, I'm telling Joe. I don't—I don't know how he'll take it. I'm going to be gone a long time."
Silence drifts down between them.
"You keep being afraid that he'll break up with you," Tsunetomo's voice is a drawl over the line, "Have you ever considered he might go with you?"
No. Michael thinks to himself. No, he hasn't because Joseph is living an entirely different life than he is. Joseph has board rooms and executive meetings and a neat path. Michael is the one thinking of training to be a better fighter, a better detective, one able to take on Gotham all by himself if he has to.
"Maybe you should," Tsunetomo says.
It's quiet, after they've talked. Really, really quiet in the cabin even if the camp is going on and on. Michael doesn't dare move on the bed, doesn't want to do anything now that he's put it out there: that he wants to travel the world, that he wants to learn how to think like a criminal, how to move like one, how to be the thing that stops the kind of people who changed his life when he was just eight years old. That being a cop isn't want he wants to do or be, that being a detective isn't enough, that the idea he would just take up the Wayne Enterprise reigns is—
It's the years, that's the issue. It's nowhere near a lack of love as he feels Joseph's fingers trail down his face, as he looks at his eyes that aren't clouding with tears or confusion. That's almost worse, that Joe isn't crying or fighting him—he understands Michael. He truly does, as much as Michael understands him, knows that he's got his hand wrapped around what he's said, knows that Joe wouldn't stop him from this.
But he knows what those fingers have felt like when they've been in the dark and Joe has clung to him. Knows how tightly his arms are wheneever he holds him. Knows that his own too have sunk into his skin, knows that he's never liked someone lingering too long.
He doesn't want to give him up.
But five years is too long to force someone to wait.
And still he says, "I love you."
He doesn't see Joe for six years, three months, two days, and seven hours—not that he's keeping too hard of a track. Truthfully, he should've stayed in training for another six months.
Only he couldn't ignore the headline the moment he heard it on the small radio of the village he was staying in. Katherine Warren was dead and Warren Joseph, Jr. in critical condition.
It had come through loud and clear. Michael had hurried after that, apologizing to his teacher, gathering his things. Ignored her saying, You're letting your attachments distract you again as he had slung up his pack and started out. After that, it was a matter of showering, booking his flights, eating, and making sure he was at the airstrip when it needed to happen. The sleep he got was more than enough after years of barely subsisting on it.
He's never been good about using a doorbell—Michael takes the car to the one place he knows Joe is still showing up to whether he should or not: the Warren Enterprises building, the glow of the logo bright on the street. He takes the elevator up to the main top floor, where he knows that even though his father is in critical condition and his mother gone? Joe will feel responsible, obligated to keep things running. To try and put on a good face, be the golden child they wanted.
When it comes to matters of Joe, he's not wrong, either: he's there, the last one up there for tonight. Even if Michaael can't see him, he can feel him, hear him even though Joseph can't do either of those things. Michael makes no sound as he moves closer, to the main office where he can see Joseph pinching the bridge of his nose, his wings taut. His wings have grown with him, even though Michael can see the spots of tension, can see where Joe has gripped them a time or two in frustration.
Even in pain, he looks beautiful, looks like the man he's thuoght of for years in the office as he walks towards the balcony they have for him, the sight of him making Michael hungry to know what's happened in the past six years, to see the differences, to see what hasn't changed at all.
Michael slips inside of his office, setting down his bag. Doesn't turn on the lights, just goes for the kitchen they have here that he's sure Joe has never cooked in. It doesn't take much from his bag to start brewing tea, washing his hands over the sink. The door squeaks as Joe walks back inside, and Michael chooses that moment to say, "You had better not take another phone call tonight. Not when I'm here."
He turns around, aware of what he looks like with his shorn hair, the piercings in his ears that weren't there before, the height and good form he's gotten over the years. Joe seems to second guess for a moment until Michael points towards his hand. "I knew you'd take good care of my rosary."
That's all it takes for Joe to cross over the threshold, to pull him close to him.
It's coming home. Coming back to the one man who he couldn't give up, who he thought about even though he was supposed to let go of things, who he thought about returning to even though some told him he shouldn't have anything or anyone to return to.
He doesn't say the words (not yet, so soon, so fast, all that grief), just hopes that Joe can feel that he still loves him as he clings to him, his wings coming around him just like they used to.