Divination (Joker x Batman x OC)

Chapter 187

"That was..." Adriana said to Bruce and kissed him. "Surprising."

"Hopefully in a good way," Bruce told her as they rested in bed.

"Well, I wasn't expecting you to come home with so much...passion," she said. "Especially after what I told you last night. And then you were gone all day and you didn't pick up when I was calling you. I thought you were..."

Bruce touched Adriana's cheek quietly.

"Though I was what?" he asked.

"Well...you looked sick when you left our bed last night after we talked," she said. "Like...disgusted."

Bruce thought about what he had done. Taking Twyla's potion's, the invasion of privacy, the things he couldn't unsee. None of it had made him feel any better. If anything, it made him feel sicker. He saw what had happened. 

He saw what Twyla's concoctions had started. And he saw that Adriana very clearly wanted what had happened. He heard and saw her sounds and facial expressions when she was with the most hideous man in existence, and he wished he had never seen it. He wanted to forget it.

He needed to forget it. 

"None of it matters now," Bruce said. "I love you. All of that...what happened...it is plenty far in the past. If I gave you the impression that I was disgusted, I apologize for that. I am not disgusted with you. I was just surprised."

Adriana could tell he was trying to convince her, as well as himself, that the words he was saying were true.

"Bruce I know that...he wasn't a good person," Adriana said. "To say the least. And at the time I just.."

Bruce felt horrible guilt, since she was opening up to him and he had already betrayed her trust by using Twyla's potion as a result of his impatience. 

"You don't have to talk about this if you don't want to," Bruce told her instead of waiting for her to say anything else.

"I want to," she said before speaking more.

"Okay," he told her.

He had wanted for weeks for her to open up to him. And now she was doing it, and he didn't want to hear about it.

"We didn't like each other," Adriana said to Bruce. "Not at first...I hated him, and he always seemed annoyed with me. Probably because I messed things up...I was sabotaging his operations, even though he didn't know that. He started to see me as bad luck."

"I see.." Bruce said.

He could tell, in that hotel bathroom, that neither of them started with any particular affinity for each other. It was obvious that neither of them saw each other in that way at all. But he could see that their attitudes had changed. All because of Twyla.

"Anyways...I know I told you about the night at the masquerade ball.." Adriana said and rubbed her forehead. "What I didn't tell you was that we were both under the influence of a potion of sorts. I didn't know what it was, and we both drank it and...long story short...I know this is going to sound crazy, but we needed to be intimate. We didn't have a choice."

Bruce didn't know if he should fake surprise. He was gradually hating himself more and more. If he would have only waited, she would have told him everything he had seen, and the visual of it wouldn't be likely permanently burned into his memory forever. She was being honest and was not hiding anything from him.

"Okay," Bruce said plainly, hoping his shame was not showing.

"You believe me?" she asked, knowing how ridiculous it sounded.