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2018-11-21
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count the beats of leather wings

Summary:

It's 1943, London. Office of Strategic Services Captain Jim Gordon has been assigned a new Second Lieutenant.

On an unrelated note, his top freelance asset has been out of contact for almost two months.

Notes:

The Office of Strategic Services was a branch of the US Armed Forces that was split off in WWII, after we noticed we had shit-all foreign intelligence capability. It grew into the CIA, just as the intelligence apparatus of the Civil War had become the FBI, but during the war it was still Army. The OSS worked closely with the British Strategic Operations Executive, and both got up to some absolutely bonkers spy shit.

...Happy Turkey for my US peeps!

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Jim found he preferred the OSS to Army Intelligence. He had to collaborate with the SOE to get almost anything of value accomplished, but still.

Army Intelligence was, as the saying went, an oxymoron.

Also, here no one was constantly interfering with his tiny command. (Trying to get it shut down, yes. But not poking their fingers in every second. General Donovan knew how to delegate.) Enough got done every day to keep him from feeling that nagging, itching sense that he was somehow failing to do his part, that it was a betrayal of the boys out there fighting, to be drawing a captain’s pay for doing work that risked other people’s lives almost exclusively.

Jim had volunteered expecting a soldier’s life, ready to endure hardships like those his father had lived through in the last Great War. The job he had instead wasn’t easy, but the danger and discomfort was no worse than what anyone else living or stationed in London had to put up with.

Police work had probably prepared him better for this than for the front lines, if he was honest—the rest of the necessary skills had come to him easily enough.

If he kept up like this, the General had confided one evening, after calling him to his office to talk over his current projects and give him some advice, he was likely to make Colonel before the war was up.

It was bad luck to think too much about after the war, and whether he’d be able to retire back to his life in Gotham by then, so Jim didn’t. He met with informants and coordinated dead drops, shuttled information between the codebreakers and the spies, and oversaw the training of special operatives even though he personally couldn’t infiltrate his way into a Catholic mass on Christmas.

He could keep his mouth shut and was a good judge of character, and he had the knack of engaging in skullduggery without losing track of his core principles; that was more useful in an officer with his responsibilities than being a qualified spy himself.

That the current crop of trainees were almost all German—half of them prisoners of war who’d confessed under examination to hating the Nazi regime that had sent them out to kill and die—was making the enemy uncomfortably human. If he’d had anyone left who thought there was anything glorious about their part in this war when the Fritzes arrived, he thought they’d have stopped by now.

Or maybe he was just thinking that way because it had been a bad month. One of their most reliable go-betweens to partisan groups from everywhere east of Poitiers and west of Vienna had warned he might be out of contact, then vanished for seven weeks with no word yet; half the Fritzes were hopeless, and the Nazis had caught and killed three of their women in France.

And then, they’d assigned him Bruce Wayne.

It was an insult, he couldn’t help but feel. A gesture from Army Intelligence to say we all know you aren’t a real intelligence unit, so take the pretend intelligence officer.

He tried not to glare at Wayne where anyone could see. It was bad command policy. His uselessness was a problem, but not as much of one as the rest of the unit hating him would be. As it was, he failed to fit in, but he was genial and witty in a shallow way, and generous with the little luxuries he was clearly buying at exorbitant markup even for the black market, and thus an overall bonus to morale even as he idled hours away at his desk.

That wasn’t really fair, either. When Jim gave him something to do, he did do it. Not quite as fast or as well as most of his fellows, but much better than the worst of them—it was more the way he never seemed to be making any real effort that stuck in people’s craws.

The other two who’d been assigned with him said he’d done surprisingly well in Basic—“Well, I went to boarding school,” Jim overheard Wayne explaining easily, slouched in his chair with his pen idly spinning in one hand. “It’s amazing what they charge for hard beds, no privacy, and food almost as bad as what we get here.”

Everyone laughed. It was admittedly impressive how he could turn his privilege into charm.

Jim really shouldn’t have to make such an effort not to glare at the man.

The damnedest thing was, Wayne owned a company that was up to its eyes in war production. Sure, he didn’t run it much by all accounts, but he could have gotten a II-A deferral with a fraction of the effort he had to have used to wind up here, a draftee in a noncom role. He could be relaxing on a beach right now, legally recognized as doing his duty for the war effort because his factories were turning out the things the boys at the front needed to win.

He could even have gotten himself assigned to Washington, or somewhere else the war couldn’t have ruffled his hair unless they lost completely. And he hadn’t.

Which meant that, as much of a coward and an idiot as he might be, Wayne actually did want to be here. Maybe just because he wanted to get credit for service without actually risking his life too much, but all the same he had clearly chosen to be here, on British soil, dealing with rationing and air-raids and doing about three hours’ worth of actual work every day.

Jim wasn’t going to give him a lot of credit for that, because he didn’t deserve a lot. But he did deserve a little.

Wayne was one of the officers working a night shift with Jim when the orders came in—technically the Intelligence offices didn’t need to be staffed the night through, but Jim’s usually was. Not only did it help the men buckle down in the mornings to have other members of the unit already hard at work when they came in, it made sure the most urgent things didn’t stall out for ten hours of every twenty-four.

And it meant someone was always there to field new developments, like this one. War never stopped throwing new things at you, and good reaction time could make all the difference for the men and women in the field.

A British private had been coopted as a runner, but Jim knew the man, he wasn’t a plant. He read through the whole dispatch twice, to make sure he hadn’t missed any details, then emerged from his office and glanced around at the tired officers, two of them half-drowsing at their desks.

“Chapman, Donahue, Priss, the General’s assigned us a rescue mission in Normandy. Our agent’s had his cover blown, and if we don’t want to lose him we need a plane behind enemy lines in the next two hours, get it organized. Rogers, find a pilot crazy enough to volunteer. You have twenty minutes. O’Riley, get Frances out of bed and then help him and Priss get their kit ready. Wayne…finish that analysis, would you?”

Wayne pouted a little at being excluded from the rush, but Jim didn’t have time to deal with him, and he yes-sirred with everybody else and picked up his pen again. Jim promptly forgot him.

Once the rescue mission was away, Jim made his way back to his unit’s offices in the OSS. The morning shift should be here in less than an hour, and he’d let the men who’d gotten the rescue together off duty a bit early, rather than asking them to tamp down the excitement and anxiety of this abrupt drama and return to doing nonessential tasks for another forty minutes.

Wayne had vanished from his desk—skiving off after being left here alone, Jim guessed. Couldn’t let him get away with that. Worry about it later, after he’d wrapped up the things he’d dropped earlier in favor of the rescue, and caught a little sleep.

The lights in his office were off when he opened the door, and he frowned. He knew nobody was allowed in the building without security vetting, but he still didn’t like it when the cleaning staff came in while he was gone.

He realized there was a presence in the darkness an instant before it spoke.

“Capitaine,” greeted the familiar deep Parisian purr.

It took Jim longer than usual to get his heart back into his chest. He’d lost the habit. When he spoke, though, all he sounded was aggravated. “Where have you been for the last two months?”

“Detained.”

Exactly what he’d been afraid of. But if the Wing was here, he had gotten away more or less in one piece. “By the Germans?”

“Not…exactly.”

Jim’s hand found the light switch, and to his surprise, it worked. His office erupted out of darkness, to reveal: close white walls; a narrow, dark desk piled with papers for processing, files Jim had not yet put away, a canteen, and four paperweights not doing their jobs; the US flag tacked to the wall taking up space he needed for bulletins; the decorative print of Gotham seen from the harbor that Barbara had helpfully sent, to cheer the place up.

And Second Lieutenant Bruce No-Middle-Name Wayne, in full uniform, sitting behind the desk, hands steepled on the desktop, smiling an odd, narrow, knowing smile. “By my obligations to the U.S. Army.”

“You,” Jim said.

It would make sense to suppose that L’Aile had disguised himself as Bruce Wayne for some inscrutable reason, either just now or for Wayne’s entire OSS career thus far.

He was a master of disguise. He'd never shown up with the same face more than twice. It would certainly explain why Wayne was here. Except that wouldn’t explain the partisan’s two months’ absence, and in itself such an extended pantomime would need a whole lot of explanation, because a spy with skills like that was needed in France, where L’Aile Nocturne belonged, infiltrating the Germans. Not the Allies.

A shrug—deep, rolling, very much L’Aile’s gesture even in the fitted Army greens. “I apologize for the deception,” said that equally rolling, accented voice out of Bruce Wayne’s mouth.

Jim groaned, and passed a hand over his eyes. Stood there blind for a few seconds, letting his brain absorb the new configuration reality had taken on, and then looked up. Wayne was still sitting behind his desk. Looking rather amused. “You’re L’Aile Nocturne.”

Forget how unlikely it was. Forget how angry he was going to be in a minute. Focus on the fact that one of their best intelligence resources had been out of the game for two months because his draft number had come up and he had been going through boot camp.

Wayne looked faintly sardonic. “I’m afraid so.”

The French accent was gone as if it had never been. Jim glared at him. Somehow, that was the most infuriating part. “You really convinced me you were with the Free French.”

“I have extensive contacts with them,” said Wayne. Obviously, or he’d never have pulled off any of those coordinated operations. “De Gaulle trusts me as much as any spy he does not personally know.”

Which if true was unsettling, because L’Aile had been perpetrating a complex deception on De Gaulle as much as anyone. Jim frowned. L’Aile Nocturne had joined the French war effort in 1940, soon after the Fall of France. Between ’36 and ’39, there had been a well-funded, highly-trained vigilante operating in their shared hometown, becoming very high-profile for a while before abruptly disappearing.

Jim narrowed his eyes. “And you were the Batman too, weren’t you.”

“Still am,” said Wayne calmly.

Jim ground his teeth and wished for a cigar.

First things first.

“First of all, get out of my chair, Lieutenant.”

Wayne blinked, once, and then stood up with a smooth alacrity that fitted the Resistance fighter but looked utterly out of place on the bumbling junior officer he’d been saddled with for the last week. “My apologies, captain.”

“Hmph,” Jim acknowledged, and stumped behind the desk, waving Wayne aside.

Their places exchanged, Jim checked to make sure his papers hadn’t been rifled through (as if he’d be able to tell) and looked his newly categorized strangest soldier up and down. Wayne was standing at parade rest, his weight distributed patiently as if he was prepared to wait all night, and it was as much a contrast to L’Aile’s usual slinking indirectness as it was to Wayne’s lackadaisical incompetence. He suspected this was merely another mask.

All his practice working with spies, and this man remained inscrutable.

He laced his own hands together and sat back. “Alright. Talk to me, Wayne. What are you doing here?”

“In your office?”

“In my office, in my unit—you could’ve gotten a deferral, two months without you on the ground has been murder, so why let yourself be drafted?”

“…I left the States over two years before we joined the war,” was the reply. It sounded as though he would have shrugged, had he been at ease. So, what, he hadn’t even thought about the possibility of the draft until it happened? He’d forgotten America even existed?

How had nobody at home noticed Bruce Wayne had gone missing, anyway? How had he gotten his mail to even find out he’d been called to service?

Jim resisted the urge to rub his forehead, wished for a drink. “And dodging the draft once your number came up was against your principles, fine,” he ground out. Decided to leave aside for now the issue of how Bruce Wayne had gotten through what should have been six months’ training to become a Second Lieutenant in six weeks. “But obviously you pulled strings to wind up in my command, so. Why are you in my office?”

“I thought you might be amenable to letting me back into the field.”

Of course. Why not?

“Well, we certainly need you. There. And we definitely don’t need you here.” Wayne had spent a week under his command being practically useless while all the time they could have used him in France. Jim was going to spend a long time fuming over that. “But I can’t just wave you off into the night unless you want me to tell Command that Wayne deserted, which would kind of ruin the point of your…charade, I’m thinking.”

The Wing shrugged. “The hardest part will be coming up with believable assignments for Lieutenant Wayne, yes.”

Lieutenant Wayne was clearly a mask. Jim wondered if there was anything that wasn’t. It was one of the harder parts of his job, trusting people who wrapped themselves in layers of lies—especially because it was also his job to notice when he should stop. “It’s a shame you’ve made yourself so impressively useless,” he said. “No one would believe it if I gave you a solo post handling agents.”

Wayne’s mouth quirked. “We could set up a relay,” he suggested. “I can report to you occasionally on behalf of L’Aile Nocturne.”

“The problem being,” Jim said drily, “that this would require you to cross the Channel and disguise yourself as yourself on a regular basis.” Not that L’Aile hadn’t been appearing in London every month or two anyway. He must have resources here besides just OSS contacts. Jim sighed. “But you know your work. If that’s the best we can come up with, it may have to do.”

Wayne shrugged. “I’ll work on it,” he said. Nothing more.

Jim contemplated the lieutenant. It was bizarre, having the Wing pinned down like this, even to this extent. He’d long since accepted it was never going to happen. He drummed his fingers on a report. “You once mentioned De Gaulle wanted you to try assassination.”

“He did. I refused.” The tone made it fairly clear he planned to refuse Jim, too, if he tried.

“Why?”

“First of all, their plan wouldn’t work.” Jim wouldn’t want to risk burning an agent like L’Aile on anything less than a nearly-sure thing himself, but then the French were more desperate and L’Aile as it turned out wasn’t really theirs. “Also,” Wayne continued, “I am not a murderer.”

Jim stared. “This is war.” Wayne looked unmoved. “You are telling me, with all this death and horror, fascism advancing in all directions, so many lives lost, you refuse to take a shot at, at Adolph Hitler because you are not a murderer?”

“I’ll do almost anything else to see this war ended and Nazi power broken, but even if it’s him, for that you have to ask someone else.”

“…this isn’t some bizarre aristocratic code of honorable combat, is it?” Jim asked without much hope.

Wayne shook his head. No, it wasn’t that. Of course it wasn’t that. L’Aile had carried information that enabled the deaths of many Germans, he had rigged explosions to destroy materiel and release prisoners, he had hit people over the head from behind and slipped weak poisons into their food that would be mistaken for a natural illness so he could move unseen into tents and buildings where orders were kept.

He had at least once gotten back to London from behind German lines by overpowering a bomber pilot and taking off with the rest of his blitz unit. He impersonated anyone he pleased. He didn’t scruple about looking his enemies in the eye like an honest man. There was nothing honest about him.

Jim had always assumed the Wing avoided conflict like any good spy, but killed when it was called for. Taken it for granted. But he’d never had any confirmation. He boggled.

“You’re a pacifist.”

“Well. Not exactly,” was the dry response from the man who had thrown himself into the second great war of the century years ahead of his own country, like his own private French Foreign Legion. Then the humor was gone, and Wayne said, “I swore an oath. A long time ago.”

He was dealing, Jim acknowledged, with a crazy person. He’d known that all along, really. But now he knew it was a fabulously wealthy, American crazy person who believed normal rules did not apply to him, and who was under Jim’s command.

“Lieutenant,” he repeated, flatly, and looked Wayne in the eye. Wayne looked back. “You swore an oath when you joined this military, as well. I need to be able to count on you, or I can’t take responsibility for your actions in the field. This is war, not whatever game you used to play on the rooftops with that woman in a cat costume.”

Never mind that Wayne had been in the thick of this war for longer than Jim had held military rank, never mind that he’d counted on L’Aile Nocturne for all forms of subterfuge and subtle sabotage. Now he was Jim’s soldier, and he needed to be in control. “I need to know. If a Nazi or a collaborator had one of your comrades-in-arms at gunpoint, and the only way you could save them was to kill the enemy, would you shoot?”

Wayne hesitated for a long time, his face nearly blank but moving with strange deep currents that looked bizarre on a face Jim had grown to associate with shallow good humor, and occasional equally shallow dismay.

It was almost as strange to know he was seeing L’Aile’s undisguised face.

“If it was the only way,” Wayne said at last, and that was the Wing’s voice without the French accent. “Then yes. I would.”

Jim couldn’t pretend he was thrilled by the risks gaping where Wayne would try to find this other way, but then he couldn’t pretend that a crazy person keeping himself on a tight leash wasn’t preferable to one with no ability to leash himself at all. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t relied on L’Aile Nocturne heavily for a year and a half despite knowing he was mysterious, capricious, and answered to no one.

“And you’ll take orders.”

“All reasonable ones.”

Jim bit his tongue before snapping that that was not how military discipline worked, that an agent in the field had to be willing to do what his handler said even without knowing why, that Wayne had given up the privilege of acting on his personal discretion—because all that was true, but he also didn’t entirely believe in it. Discipline was important, yes, and agents following the plan, even if it led them to their deaths, but sometimes the agent did know better.

And there was some hypocrisy in saying that by following the law that required his service a man had freely given up his rights, more hypocrisy than he wanted to bring on himself if he could help it.

And maybe he was every inch a fool, trying to remain an honest man while running spies, but…well, that sort of fool he’d be, if he could do it without betraying his country.

And what Jim needed Wayne to be was the Wing, and no matter how much the ground under Jim’s feet had shifted in the past ten minutes, he knew better than to think having joined the Army was going to have changed that enigmatic free agent enough to make him truly anyone’s soldier.

Jim allowed himself a small sigh. “Alright, Sir Percy.” Wayne actually grinned at him. Of course. The maniac had probably been making Scarlet Pimpernel jokes to himself since he first got involved in France.

“I’m going to trust you. This conversation never happened. Write up a description of the assignment you want as Lieutenant Wayne for cover, and get back out there. The Allies need you. But I’m going to be expecting reports.”

Notes:

Look, he can't call himself Batman when he's pretending to be French, and he can't call himself 'Batman' in French because subtlety aside nobody will ever take Naked Mouse Man seriously, ever. Nightwing it is.

No, he hasn't picked Dick up yet. Dick may be French in this universe. He, uh. Shit. He's Romani. This just went a darker than usual direction. o_o

Anyway the Scarlet Pimpernel is an important figure in the history of wealthy-wastrel-as-cover-ID trope, and was a major enough pop culture icon during WWII that a lot of the top refugee and POW smugglers got 'The [X] Pimpernel' nicknames.