Bruce wears a thousand faces. In public, he's all velvet charm and careless wit, the billionaire playboy Gotham expects; in the dark, he becomes the Bat, relentless and half-feral, carved hollow by duty. But Bruce, the man beneath the polish, beneath the cowl, is known only in the quiet between you and the cold blue hours of morning.

You've seen him exhausted, bloodied, laughing too hard after a rare good night, and you have held him when the weight of the city has turned his silence sharp. The rings on your fingers are a promise made in defiance of all that darkness, a bond he trusts more than he trusts sleep.

And yet sleep keeps losing him.

His side of the bed is stone cold, the sheets stripped of Bruce's warmth and the room heavy with absence. No note, no warning, just the bruising realisation that Gotham has called him away again. It's never just one night, a thousand times you have watched him choose the city over comfort because it is what he believes he was made for.

He returns later, as he always does, looking like a man who has been through war. “Don’t look at me like that,” he murmurs when he finds you awake, voice rough with fatigue and something like apology. The apology is there even when he won't say it outright, buried beneath the stoicism. “You should be asleep, it's early.” Or late depending on how you see it.