0000. PROLOGUE
— through a child's eye

CHILDREN HAVE A PARTICULAR WAY OF LOOKING AT THE WORLD, IT'S ONE FILLED WITH OPTIMISM AND THE COLOR YELLOW. They have that youthful innocence adults wish to have. Children make promises with no care if they complete them; because nothing is holding them to their words. When children grow up, they begin to read into the things they say, the things others say. Promises become something that can be broken, a reason to mistrust someone. But a child will throw out their pinky finger, saying they swear to something they don't even understand. It's innocence you can never regain once it's lost — once you stop viewing the world with the shade of yellow and those rose-colored glasses, the world turns to a shade of gray. Harlow Finley couldn't remember a time when the world was in color for her. Things existed in a medley of grays now that color was almost, overwhelming? That sense of positivity and hope was almost too much for Harlow Finley to have. To expect anything good out of life. It was too much at one time to deal with. A world existed around her, she knew that. People saw colors all the time, but certain ones were too much. When colors are vibrant, they shift the way people view the world. But when the colors are gone? The world is void of anything, hopeless, where all people see are the bad things.

And Gotham City had plenty of bad things for Harlow Finley to focus on.

She grew up in the city, surrounded by the people who once made it a much better place. Her heart bled vibrant colors, she had hopes and aspirations to take that color and paint the entirety of Gotham City with it. But as she grew up, the more she noticed how the color faded away. After the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne, Gotham City changed, it became even more void of color. And she understood it, they were two people dedicated to helping the city. To make it a better place. To bring Gotham City back to what it once was. Her parents tried, they did something, but it was never enough. No one did enough to change Gotham. No one wanted to. Especially after Thomas and Martha, their deaths served as a reminder of why no one wants to change Gotham. Fight against the system set in place and you'll end up right where they are, six feet underground. Gotham City was nothing more than a cover for the crime that ran it, the few good people that existed in the city were practically kicked out. Or, in the Finley family's case, kept in so the city could look nice from an outsider's perspective. Two booming companies (Finley Incorporated and Wayne Enterprises) practically provided the city with its economy, half of the people living in Gotham worked a job under one of the companies or their many shell companies. The criminal underworld of Gotham couldn't lose the people that brought new customers into the city.

So, Harlow Finley stayed put as a child in a city that snubbed her of her colors. A city that only knew how to take and take, but never give anything back. It's why she wanted to get the hell out of Gotham City the first chance she had. It didn't matter to her that she would be leaving people behind, including her best friend who only had a few people he spoke to. She had to do something to put herself first, that meant leaving Gotham City. But, then again, Bruce Wayne had a similar idea. He told her that the night of their graduation day, how he planned on leaving for college. Getting out of the city. Trying to leave the shadow of his parents, and give himself a chance to breathe outside of the city limits. Harlow confessed a similar ideology, telling him of her plans to attend Princeton in the fall. That was her way of escaping, Princeton was only an hour and a half from Gotham, and she would be close enough for her parents to visit. For Bruce to visit. But far enough away she would be able to remove the shackles that Gotham City had put around her.

Harlow Finley never looked back. Not when she got the hell out of Gotham, not ever. When she moved into that apartment in Princeton, it was like she could breathe for the first time. Like the weight of being something more, being someone who tried to do the right thing all of the time, left her. She had a moment where she realized the rest of the world was a completely different place from the city she had grown up in. From the city that had set roots inside of her soul. But she never let herself think about going back. Not after she finished the four years of undergrad, not when Bruce called her (practically begging her) to come back. No, Harlow Finley was out and she was going to stay out for however long it was possible. So when she found herself in Oxford for medical school, she told no one except for her family. Not even Bruce. Because, deep down, she knew he was the only person who could break her. The only person who could convince her to come back to Gotham. He always had a way with her, something she could never quite describe. He was alluring and her soul missed him. She missed him. And she knew all it would take was a call, a beg, a simple request and she would be on the next plane back to the United States. On the next plane back to a city that hated her almost as much as she hated it.

It wasn't until she was done with her first year of residency at Johns Hopkins that she had a reason sound enough to draw her back into Gotham City. She couldn't ignore the frantic call from her mother, the sobs and cries were the only things she could think of for a week as she applied for a residency transfer to a city she dreaded returning to. A city that has changed her and she worked her ass off to undo those changes, knowing that the minute she stepped back into the city limits, those changes would undo themselves. She'd go back to being the same girl who was afraid to step onto the streets of Gotham. Even if she had supernatural powers (don't get her started on how the Finley family genes harbor alien DNA, it threw her in for a loop too), the streets of Gotham would always be the place where people died. The place where people got hurt. The place you can never be on alone and a place you still don't want to be in even with a group of people next to you.  And judging from the things she had heard, Gotham City had only gotten worse.

Finley Manor was something out of a book, at least that's how Harlow described it to the friends she made in college and beyond. She liked to explain that it wouldn't be any of the happy books that most people read, but the manor came directly out of gothic fiction. One of the older mansions people avoided in Halloween movies because it was supposed to be haunted. It wasn't haunted, at least Harlow didn't believe it to be haunted. But it was eerie. Perhaps it was because the home was obnoxiously large and often empty, she blamed her parents for that one (she always said she wanted a sibling, it would have made the home a lot louder and a lot less creepy) (or maybe it would have been creepy, she just wouldn't have been alone). The inside of the manor was less gothic, or at least parts of it were, Harlow found many of the rooms to remind her of the architecture she loved in England. It was older, some would explain it simply as dark academia. But Harlow had always seen it as something more, a bit different but similar enough she could nod when someone used that descriptor. Seeing the manor again, after almost eight years of being away from it, made her heart wrench with a pain she had never felt before. In her years of being away from home, she was never homesick. Not in the way many college students get, with the yearning to be back with their family in the home they know like the back of their hands. Harlow yearned to be in her mother's embrace or to feel her father's hand rest gently against her shoulder. She wanted to see Margaret again, to have her wake her up with a cup of coffee done exactly the way she's always loved it (she's had her coffee with the same ingredients, in the same way since she was twelve), to have Margaret be there for her whenever she needed to speak. Most of all, Harlow Finley was homesick for a person that wasn't even in her family. For a person that didn't even live with her. Bruce Wayne was her best friend, he was the person she knew like the back of her hand, not the home.

Bruce Wayne was the closest thing to a home she could remember having. Which is why she found it funny he wasn't the one that got her back to Gotham City (or, in actuality, she didn't find it funny because he hasn't spoken to her in a few years, there was no way he would be the one to convince her to come back).

The front doors to the manor were aged, the color of the wood lightening over the years with the brief sunlight that hit it (Gotham City wasn't well known for having the sun shine on it). Harlow pressed on it with her shoulder as she opened it, it had always been heavier than it looked. But, then again, what else did she expect from a twelve-foot wooden door? The foyer was darker than it had been when she was a teenager, Harlow dropped her carry-on bag next to the front door. Her rolling suitcase followed behind her for a couple of feet before she reached the circular table sitting in the middle of the room, the suitcase being placed in front of the table. Her jacket was the next thing to go, being gently set down on the table before she walked further into the house. Eyes scanning over the walls, she noticed nothing had changed over the time she was gone. The paintings were still the same, the vases and books still in the same spot they had before, it was like she walked into a time capsule back to what her life was like eight years ago. She ran her hand across the spines of the books on the shelf in the corridor leading to the dining room, it was about six in the evening, and she figured if her parents were to be anywhere they would be there.

Leaning on the ornamental doorway to the dining room, Harlow felt a smile form on her lips as she watched her parents interact. She had never seen two people more in love before she met them before she watched them with bright eyes. Leaving home only deepened her view of their love, it was pure and full of something she couldn't quite explain. Harlow had tried dating, once with an American guy who was on base in England (ironic that she would live in England for four years and come out having dated an American, isn't it?) named Hal. It wasn't anything like the books, not in the way that she wanted it to be. Hal was nice, respectful, and everything someone would want in a guy. But after a while they both agreed that Harlow wasn't into it fully, her heart wasn't just hers to give away. She had given away a part of it to Bruce Wayne long before she could even really think about the fact that she was in love with him.

Maybe that was why she was homesick for him, just a thought.

"Shouldn't you two be over all of that newlywed crap by now?" Harlow let the words slip past her lips before she could even really think about them. Her mother's head snapped towards the direction of the voice, eyes growing wider when she saw her daughter standing there. Harlow watched her father carefully, he was tired (more so than usual at least) and his reaction to her being there was delayed in comparison to her mother. Not to mention he just looked weak, he looked like someone who was sick. Like someone who was trying to fight and had almost nothing left in him, someone who was ready to give up. And that broke Harlow to see the man she had always held up as her image of the strongest man out there to break like that. Her father smiled at her (she figured it was a smile, he was so exhausted he had almost no control of his facial muscles anymore), raising his hand to beckon her into the room. She walked further into the room, raising her arms as she did a little twirl, "Your favorite child has returned to the nest."

"You're our only child, Harlow," Her mother replied lazily, a hum leaving her lips.

"Exactly," Harlow sat down next to her, leaning her head onto her mother's shoulder. "It's why I'm your favorite child."

"Of course you are, sweetheart," She turned to her father with a smile, patting him on the hand.

"See, this is why dad's my favorite," Harlow pulled her head off of her mother's shoulder, a giggle leaving her lips at her mother's mock-shocked expression. The mood changed in the room quickly as Harlow glanced back over to her dad, "How are you feeling?"

"Like I'm dying." Harlow bit the inside of her cheek at his reply, a rush of air coming from her nose. Joshua's eyes didn't fall from her face as she looked away, "I'm okay, for right now. I go back in a few days to get some blood drawn and to have some more tests run. But nothing has spread as of right now, that's the most we can ask for."

"Has it shrunk?" Harlow raised a brow. Her father didn't have to respond for her to know the answer, the way that his head and her mother's head both dropped slightly gave her the information she was searching for. And she knew what that meant, she knew it better than anyone in that room. She studied cancer in medical school, she had seen it upfront during her intern year. She had assisted in cases of removing it from various parts of the body. Harlow Finley knew that his cancer not shrinking after two months of chemo and radiation wasn't good. It wasn't giving much hope to the idea that it could ever shrink, at least not with the two most basic ways that people treat cancer. "Are there any trials you can enter? I can make some calls, and get you into one that has good results."

"Don't you think there are people more deserving of a spot in those than me?" Joshua questioned, a brow raised.

Harlow shook her head, "You're my dad."

"Exactly," Joshua nodded. "I've lived a good life, if I get to spend my last few months with my two favorite women by my side, that sounds pretty damn good to me. Plus, I've gotten to see you during most of the big milestones. You've graduated high school, college, and medical school. I get to brag that my daughter is an up-and-coming surgeon, not many others around here can do that, can they?"

A fleeting smile passed across her face as she thought about everything her dad spoke about. It was true, he had gotten to see her in almost every important milestone. He watched with bated breath as she came down the staircase in her prom dress, giving Bruce the lecture about what time she was expected to be home and how he could not (under any circumstances) let a guy even breathe on her (and boy did he follow that instruction word by word). He was the first one on his feet as she walked across all three of the stages towards a degree, screaming and shouting her name. It wasn't to embarrass her, not at all, it all came from a place of pride. But everything like that was small compared to the one big thing a father looks forward to when it comes to their daughter (and vice versa is true as well). He hadn't walked her down the aisle. Joshua Finley had the chance to watch his daughter grow up for 28 years of a magnificent life, but knowing that he was dying, there was a sense of urgency for Harlow. A bell rang saying 'you should have pushed harder in that relationship or pushed for one with Bruce' screaming, crying, she should have done something to give her that chance. That opportunity.

Because she had been entranced with love for as long as she could remember. And she had always thought about a big wedding, her wearing a poofy white dress. She never thought that she would run out of time to have everything she wanted at one time. Her father walking her down the aisle was a given, something she had never thought twice about. But now? Now she knew it was something she could lose in a second, a minute, an hour. Her entire dream could crumble away with nothing to bring it back to what it once was.

"What's got your mind in a frenzy, Harlow?" Harlow turned to her mother, picking at her nail polish.

"There's one milestone dad hasn't had the chance to see or do with me yet."

"Are you hiding a fiancé somewhere sweetheart?"

"No," Harlow shook her head. "But I don't want to think about there being a time that you're not here to walk me down the aisle."

"So we're going to what? Throw a fake wedding so he can walk you down the aisle?"

Leaning back into her seat, Harlow let out a hum. No, she wanted it to be something real. She wanted it to be something that mattered to her and her father. If he was going to walk her down the aisle, she wanted it to reach something real. To have a purpose. She wanted it to be real, and there was only one person she could think of at the end of the aisle waiting for her. It was the same person who had been there for everything else, the one man who never smiled for anyone else except for Harlow Finley. The same man who had asked her to tie his tie before they went to prom, the same man who had them leave prom early just to go through a drive-thru and go back to his home for the night. The man who had taken Harlow Finley's heart long before she knew she could even give it away. No, Harlow Finley didn't want a fake wedding. She wanted a real one. And she knew exactly who she wanted to be the groom, she just hoped it wouldn't be too much to ask of him. She could imagine it now, his shocked expression as she explained why she wanted him to marry her. Trying to convince her best friend to be at the other end of the altar.

Best friends don't just get married because one of their dads is dying and they want to be walked down the aisle, right? That's not something best friends do.

"Harlow? I can see those gears turning hard in your brain," Her mother waved a hand in front of her face. "Penny for your thoughts?"

"What if it's not a fake wedding?"

"Again, you're not in a relationship, Harlow. Who would you be marrying?"

Harlow picked at her nail polish again, "I have an idea."

Her dad perked up at that, "Am I going to like this idea?"

"I think you and mom knew I liked him long before I ever admitted it to myself," Harlow shrugged. "If there's anyone in this world that I want you to give me away to, it would be him."

"Bruce?"

Harlow nodded. "Bruce."

AUTHORS NOTE

So anyways ... I got right here to the end of this chapter and started writing then the idea of the fake marriage (that's legally real but only happens bc of a dying parent) came into my brain and poor Alana, Lindsay, and Angel all had to listen to me as I vent about it. Anyways, I pretty much came up with that idea and said "yeah imma use it" in two seconds because it's sexy. Also two childhood best friends who are completely and utterly in love with each other but are terrible at communication and can't say that they are getting married just so her dying father can walk her down the aisle only to actually fall in love with each other while married is something that is so special to me.

And the way that they're going to be married to each other BEFORE they find out about each other's secret night life (ie Bruce being batman and Harlow having powers). I'm not even counting me saying they actually get married as spoilers bc it's very obvious what I was going for in the above work. And the next chapter is going to be Harlow groveling to Bruce like "pls marry me, it'll be worth it, pls" and Bruce just being a simp and going "okay."

So, leave your thoughts below! Let me know how we're feeling besties. Are we enjoying this dynamic I'm setting up for this universes harlowbruce? Are we enjoying the pain I'm already starting off with? Can we imagine the drama the riddlers going to cause when he finds out Gotham's it couple only got married so her father could walk her down the aisle? So much drama. So much tea. God, it's like crack. I really should be stopped, it's way too early in the morning (it's like 12 am), someone take my phone and rights (whatever I have left as an afab in America) away please.