Title: Sideshow
Author: Annie Oates
Fandom: Batman Begins(x-over w/Carnivàle)
Pairing: Bruce, Jonesy
Rating: PG
Archive: Ask.
Disclaimers: Not mine, I'm a nasty little law-breaker.
Warnings: Alternate reality (timeline shift to the Great Depression Era).
Summery: ...to learn to fall.
Feedback: Is welcome, in all forms.
It was the height of the Depression and the words and images were inescapable. People starving, children dying, entire families blown away with the dust of their farms. They were abstracts, these iconic figures Bruce’s parents held up as Saints of their Faith. Bruce didn’t really believe in a greater power – certainly not one who would let one child die and another live over something as arbitrary as money. But he didn’t think on it too much. For whatever reason, thoughts of God were always followed by thoughts of demons – and those, he knew, were all too real. The wings that scattered and scuttled behind his closed eyes every night were reminder enough of what lived in the World’s shadow. He put it out of his mind and listened with a deaf ear to his parents’ sermons on the Plight of the Unfortunate. Thomas Wayne was a railroad tycoon, building the means to shuffle people from one pointless end to the next. His mother – well, Martha Wayne smiled her pretty, tolerant smile whenever the foundation needed a more pleasant image to put in ink. She showed her gleaming pearls and her gleaming teeth at every charity ball, his father polished bright beside her. But the images of the people – the ones so covered in dirt they could have been made of it – theirs was a beauty of desperation, of hopeless resignation, a plea for a merciful and painless end. Bruce could see it in their eyes. No, he didn’t believe in God. Not until the day he saw His face, filled with those eyes and yellow teeth, thunder bolts in his hand. That day, the day he saw, Bruce learned that pearls were made to fall.
“We fall so we can learn to pick ourselves up.” We pick ourselves up to learn to fall.
Bruce didn’t understand. Oh, he knew the mechanics of it all right, but… why? Alfred didn’t know, only tried to assure Bruce that he was not the cause. So Bruce put thoughts of pearls in with the demons and they clattered and rattled at him, but only from the shadows. He rummaged around for answers without looking until it came time for him to become a man, to take the reigns of his father’s legacy. But the answers still eluded him and Bruce was afraid he wouldn’t be able to see it with that mantle on his shoulders. He knew something fearsome awaited him in the dark, but that not facing it would bring darkness much worse. So he set out for parts unknown, letting Fate guide his steps, rows of boxcars and shanty towns until he saw a sign. A rubbed out painting of a moon and sun on the side of a truck. That was it, Bruce thought. The everdance of the Rise and the Fall.
Bruce thought he might recognize the driver, somewhere under the grit and the sweat. He liked the way the man wrestled the wheel off the shaft, the way he cursed and spit in the dirt. Bruce especially like the way the man limped over to him and asked what the hell he was looking at. It all so… honest.
“Give ya a hand?” Bruce asked.
The man narrowed his eyes at Bruce and whipped a handkerchief across his face that left more grime than it took off. “Yeah, appreciate it.”
“No problem. Name’s Tom.” Bruce offered his hand with his father’s name.
“They call me Jonesy. Tire’s worn through, I gotta spare if you wanna take the bar.” Jonesy tilted his chin towards the lame truck.
Bruce followed Jonesy and hefted the pry bar. It was somewhere between Jonesy questioning the tires ancestry and the rubber finally coming loose that Bruce realized he did know Jonesy from somewhere. Jones maneuvered the new ring onto the wheel and began working it on when he caught Bruce’s look.
“Yeah, kid, I used to play. Used to. As in ‘it’s in the past and I don’t care to speak on it’.”
Bruce kept the bar steady. “Fair ‘nuff.”
They got the tire back on the truck and Jonesy stepped back. “Thanks, kid. Look, I don’t got nothin’ much to offer ya. Coin’s hard to come by these days.”
“I’m not looking for money.”
“Heh, that’d make you one in… well, it’d make you one. So what are you lookin’ for?”
“Answers.”
Jonesy cracked a smile at that. “Don’t got none of those, neither. Aw, hell. You need a lift or somethin’? I can drop you at the next town, I’m headin’ west.”
Bruce looked out at the horizon, “West’s good.”
“Well alright. Shake dust, kid.”
They drove in silence, towards the setting sun and Bruce thought if Jonesy didn’t have the answer, he might just know the question.
End.