More Band Candy at: [link] You're right, Deb. Couldn't top that last part...this is more comic relief or something.

There will be more Sunrise tonight, sometime after Sunset.

Annnnnnnd.... I'm in the home stretch. It'll be between 31000-35000 words completed, I think.

Will need a couple betas.

Plei, I'll beta for you, and gladly.

Will need a couple betas.

Plei, I can beta for general grammar and readability, but I wouldn't be able to start until tomorrow morning. Does that work for your nefarious purposes?

Plei, you want beta, you got beta.

Plei, I can beta for general grammar and readability, but I wouldn't be able to start until tomorrow morning. Does that work for your nefarious purposes?

Oh, it's not going to be done until the end of the week, so no hurry worries.

Ai'ight. I'll email you from my work addy, which is the useable one right now....

For Plei, who is so very bored. It's one of five things that never happened. I think you can guess to whom.

ASYLUM

Some nights, when the hero thing gets to be too much, Bruce escapes downtown.

Even Alfred doesn't know. On Bruce's orders, he always leaves one anonymous old car untouched and unwashed -- sometimes, you need a car you won't be noticed in. When he sees the jaw so squarely clenched that it almost gives away Batman's secret, he knows better than to ask where Bruce is going. He just hands over the keys to the dusty Civic and goes about his business.

Nobody looks up when he walks into the club. There's no Bruce Wayne, Billionaire Playboy here -- just another middle-aged businessman out for a walk on the wild side. A couple of Batboys check him out as he passes by.

Every time he comes here, there are more of them hanging around the corners of the club in cheap imitations of the costume. Gotham's latest kink. Most of them want to play hero. A few of them would rather play dark and tortured.

A slight young man in a cape and a cowl catches his eye. He's young -- very young -- and lean, all wiry fast-twitch muscle; much too slender to fill the shoulders of his suit. But his costume stands out from the rest -- all molded rubber and hard-boiled leather, an armor, designed to show off as much as it disguises.

Bruce runs his fingers across a latex simulacrum of straining intracostal muscles, pumped veins, hardened nipples. But the rubber is too cool, too smooth, too unscarred, so he reaches for the boy's well-stocked tool belt and finds a blade.

The tough skin of the costume resists the knife at first, but the skin underneath does not: A fine line of red follows his hand as he splits the costume open from the throat down. The boy flinches away from the sharp steel, his flesh-and-bone body suddenly human, alive and straining and sweat-salty.

Maybe it is time to update the suit, he thinks, and then he whips the boy harder.

gah......

blinks

Wow, amych. Just ... wow.