SHELL OF A SINNER → BRUCE WAYNE (c.s)

shell of a sinner

AND JUST LIKE A FOLK
SONG, OUR LOVE WILL
BE PASSED ON.

Here's the bitter truth about life — it never gets any easier. When you're a kid, you're constantly told that certain conversations are only for adults or you'll understand something better when you're older. But in reality, no one really understands what they're talking about. It's just reassuring to say that when you get older you'll understand it. In the long run, though, no one truly understands what they're talking about. As you age, you come to realize all of the things that no one around you can explain fully. Things that once seemed far off and unimaginable as a child are no longer far off or unimaginable, but they still don't feel real. When you're young, the toughest thing you can think about is a spelling quiz you had or the spat you had with your best friend on the playground. As the years tick by and the clock hurls itself forward, those priorities change. Suddenly that spelling quiz you once worried about turns into standardize tests that dictate your entire life's plan and that spat you had with best friend on the playground turns into friendship breaking arguments between you two. Life is unfair, that much is for certain.

Relationships are forged from the same materials as life — they never get any easier as you get older, either. Contrary to popular belief, you can get to understand your partner better over the years, but you still have to put in effort with the relationship. You still have to put in the time to make it feel like what it was in the beginning. To make it feel like a relationship. People get comfortable in relationships, that's when they start to change. The minute people stop trying to allow change, the moment people stop themselves from growing. People have to grow, they have to be capable of allowing that growth in a relationship in order for it to prosper. In order for the relationship to stay the same with the same amount of intimacy it began with.

At least, that's what Harlow Finley Wayne had found out when it came to her own relationship. She and Bruce Wayne had known each other their whole lives, they changed with each other. Growing from the best friends who confided in each other to the high school sweethearts constantly seen with one another, to where they were now. Married. Which, is exactly where Harlow expected them to be by their age. It was expected. But she couldn't say they were much more than that. On paper, by the eyes of the media, they were a married couple. Two people who loved one another. Two of the most prominent people in Gotham, hell, outside of Gotham even. The Wayne name carried a punch with it, as did the Finley name. They were well known for things that they might not have even done. Harlow Finley Wayne was many things — a doctor, a daughter, an activist, a vigilante even, but she would never truly consider herself a wife. Not now. Not when she barely had a relationship to hold on to.

Not when the man that she had fallen in love with was long gone.

Bruce Wayne used to be many things — he used to be a good partner: caring, devoted, loving. He used to want to spend his time with his wife (or girlfriend, or fiancé, it didn't matter their titles at that time). But as the bat persona began to take over his entire being, he lost hold of how important his relationship was to him. Batman was a symbol, something that incited fear in the criminals of Gotham City. Bruce Wayne was the mask at this point, the bat was truly who he was. It was everything Bruce Wayne couldn't be. Someone who protected the people around him — someone who could have saved his parents. By this point, the lines between Bruce Wayne and Batman were blurred. He had already lost his way, the original moral code he began this journey with. The same moral code that his wife tried to uphold, the same moral code she tried to give back to him. Bruce Wayne used to be the person Harlow Finley Wayne craved to have next to her — now, he was the shell of man that she could barely stand to see.