Just some fic I thought of when I couldn't sleep one night. Not planning much of a plot, so I most likely won't finish it and even end up scrapping it... but whatever. I'm writing it out of pure, sole enjoyment and I apologise greatly if you think any characters are acting OOC. If I get enough positive reviews and comments, then maybe I'll start thinking this plot through a little more seriously and invest more into it?

Cool. :)

Chapter 1: Two's Company

"Dang it."

Stella gave a careless glare to her report card grade and sighed. Her slight groans and incoherent noises of disappointment were barely audible over the grumbling of the bus engine. She did art in school because she was good at it, at least she thought so. What she wasn't good at was writing, reading consciously for more than five minutes about things she needn't know and give in a pile full of essays and masterpieces worth A grades by the next week. Stella supposed she really bit off more than she could chew when she thought her options through.

She'd have to hide her grade from her mom. God, she'd kill her so bad, Stella thought, and even though her mom barely gave a care about anything she did in all honesty, at the very least her mom didn't want her to be stupid. And Stella understood that. She thanked God she wasn't stupid.

Her steel eyes gazed away from the report card and around the bus and out the windows. The seat next to her was the only spare on the whole bus. All of the other passengers were either students from her college or workers from the office building nearby. All of the students huddled up in groups, laughing loudly together or ignoring one another, blandly texting anyone else.

That's a little pointless.

It was raining outside. Everything had a dull white tint thanks to the boring grey clouds and the boring humidity and the boring weather that bore boredom. Stella couldn't remember the last time the flower gardens she drove past photosynthesised actual, pure sunlight. Only smoggy energy bulb worth light.

The bus passed Wayne Enterprises and she'd found herself staring. She wondered why some rich guy with dead parents needed such a tall building for a workplace. She didn't really know what they did there, but she'd never heard the Enterprises' name in the press much, except for when Bruce Wayne did something unimportant- like walking out of the back of a store or something. She wondered why a billionaire would sit there on his ass all day being fed from a silver spoon to just be payed more money; it was a waste. All for a hopeless cause.

Stella supposed that was what money really was, just a hopeless cause to keep humanity in a single form line from desperation and rebellion.

Her mind drifted from her thoughts and back to the here and now as she was once more snidely greeted with the failing grade of her art degree. Stella wasn't paying much attention to her surroundings as the bus ground to a halt; her mobile phone slyly slid off her lap and under the seat in front, and she helplessly tried to bend down and grasp it without either falling or looking like an idiot. As the bus set into motion again, it just swam further down the row of seats. Dammit.

Stella shrank back into her seat and heaved a heavy breath of exasperation. She supposed she couldn't get her phone until her stop, and that was if nobody picked it up first.

There came a man onto the bus, although tall and dressed quite obviously, the light haired girl didn't bat an eye over to him. Not out of ignorance or awkwardness, but because her mind was stressing too much over her failing grade and how sad the weather made her feel to barely pay attention to his presence. The man, dressed in a deep purple suit, looked immediately to the spare seat beside her. He watched how her brows furrowed in worry and how her ankles kept crossing one over the other, how she squirmed and shifted uncomfortably. He liked the squirmers.

"Excuse me, can I, uh, sit here?"

Stella didn't look up to the purple-clad man who questioned her just out of sheer social awkwardness and instead just continued to smile and nod and say, "Yeah, sure.", whilst looking at the empty seat before it was filled with a man maybe four of five years older than her (just judging by the length of his legs). Her head instantly connected the fact that his trousers were purple. Why purple?

She pretended as though the man wasn't sat there just to make herself feel and look more relaxed. She didn't dare look at him in case he caught her peeking, and that'd be embarrassing. So with her head bent, she glanced over to what she could see of him without moving her head.

The man knew. He was watching her every move, yet he said nothing, did nothing, only allowed her curiosity to be satisfied, while he satisfied his own.

Long, strong legs, and upon his knees were two, large masculine hands. But at the same time, they looked soft and tame. There was something artistic and aesthetically pleasing about hands Stella couldn't get her head around. Perhaps it was the fact that all hands were different, and all graced with different fingers. Maybe how flexible and what hands could do was what appealed to her. She wasn't sure.

She looked down at his feet. Classic, sleek black shoes, fancy enough to wear to a party. But what really stole her attention was the fact that he wore odd socks. Not only were they odd, but they both had strange, colourful geometrical patterns.

Weird.

Says the girl with blue ball point penned stars all over her hands.

Stella looked at the back of her hand, in the crook of the web between her index finger and thumb. Stars adorned her hand from that corner scaling up, and if she were correct, there were 17 stars drawn. One for each year.

She could recall sitting at a lonely desk in English earlier that day; ignoring the lecture lesson Mrs Addams was giving to instead look out the window. It was strange, but there were always two white doves perched upon the windowsill of the opposite classroom. They nestled up to each other in the corner and sometimes during Summer, if the window was open, Stella could hear them coo quietly and lovingly once every five minutes.

She found it nice to just observe them.

Stella was pulled out of her thoughts when she felt a small weight push against her foot. She looked down and nearly jumped out of her seat in joy- her phone had slid back up the bus! She reached her hand down for it and just as her fingers managed to touch it the bus stopped at a red light.

The bus skidded to a stop, its engine exhaling down, and back down the aisle went the phone.

Stella sighed and leant back in her seat before silently groaning. She pushed her hair back and rested a hand on her forehead for a moment.

It wasn't even that big of a deal. It was just her bad luck constantly biting her ass that pissed her off.

"You look stressed." A low chuckle came from beside the girl which soon escalated to tiny, quiet high pitched giggles. The man had been observing her and how her lips curled negatively and the way her brows crossed anxiously. It seemed as though she were the only one on the bus with her own little grey cloud of rain circling above her, and he could only wonder why. Did she just have a bad day? Forgot something? Failed a test? Broken up with her boyfriend? Of course, even he was capable enough of knowing she was a good looking girl and assuming she had a partner or whatever Gotham's idiots called it, he added that idea to his lists of why she looked so glum. So serious.

Stella didn't even look at the person, but his voice was gravelly enough to confirm his gender as a guy. Stella scoffed in soft laughter and nodded. "I am."

"What's on your mind?" He asked, and she recognised a teasing smile in his words. "Tell me what cogs are, uh, turning inside that precious little head of yours."

Stella dared to glance up for a moment, only catching sight of the man's scraggly brown hair and his eyes, darker than bottomless wells. Although his hair was a little messy, he pulled it off without looking like a hobo. The little attire he wore had cleaned his image up anyways. Although strange, it didn't stand out too much.

I just hope he isn't some weird pervert, she thought.

Stella sighed shyly and her fingers tapped repetitively at the report card that just so happened to be within stress-tapping range at that moment. "Well... uh, I failed my art class for the term."

The man hissed between his teeth and then exhaled. "Yikes. What was the grade?" He didn't really care, but still, it was conversation. It broke the ice. Lord knows all he needed was a little something to relieve the weight on his shoulders as well.

Ashamed and a little embarrassed, the girl dipped her head down. "A D minus..." She then cleared her throat. "I needed a C to pass."

He chuckled in sympathy, still don't care. "Surely you can't be, uh, that bad at a subject you must've liked in order to want to take it," His T's slipped sharply off of his tongue at the end of words and his M's sounded like they could've stretched on forever. Stella had never heard anybody speak like that- so patiently, so thoughtfully and slowly. His words alone made the world seem like it wasn't turning so fast. They dragged her in at his pace, and they seemed to control to what he wanted, how slow or fast he wanted the conversation to go. It was so unique and it made her wonder how she'd never listened close enough to anybody else's speech to hear such detail before. "I mean, ya gotta be good at what you, ah, do- right?"

She nodded in agreement. He's right. "You're right."

He smacked his lips as a few moments passed, as if he was ready to speak again. It was a strange kind of smacking sound, not like a popping or a smooching noise, but a short, clean smack of his lips. It was a tic he was too careless to try and hide.

"You, uh, good at any of that stuff, then?" He asked, and she felt his gaze pierce the side of her head. She tried her best to not want to look at him from the corner of her eye and she swallowed. She really is a squirmer.

Stella shyly shrugged. "Um. I guess...?" She suggested, sucking on the bottom of her lip. Then she shook her words off, shaking her head lightly. "Well, I mean if I failed I surely can't be good enough..."

The man scoffed to himself at her irrational thought. "Aw, tut, tut. I bet that ain't, uh, true. Got any of your stuff on ya, then? Lemme take a, uh, look." He asked, a leather gloved hand gesturing towards the girl's backpack which accompanied a carry round portfolio. He was curious to see what talent the little toy had.

Stella felt her face redden, too embarrassed to want to show him but at the same time she felt guilty for wanting to lie to him. So she obliged to his request, her fingers fumbling forward.

"Uh... sure, hold on, lemme just get it..." She swallowed hard and reached for her portfolio and sat it on her lap. She unzipped the case and pulled out a few of her personally favourite pieces, and some watercolour practice paintings of nebula, space stuff and stars. Stella liked stars. Space just fascinated her and it was truly scary- so vast- yet beautiful.

Stella quickly looked at his face now he was distracted. She caught a glimpse of how his dark eyes lit up at the sight of her own work as he flipped through picture by picture things so personal to her she'd never dared to show anybody else but the teacher who marked her work. Her palms turned clammy and she only hoped her face had cooled off a little and still wasn't bright red with shyness.

He was- to bluntly put it- impressed. Very impressed. Having a past obsession with some forms of art himself, he suddenly felt... inspired. For the first time in years. He was fascinated by the twists and turns the girl's brush seemed to take and he found the mixes of colours had some familiarity to them. The violent streaks on one piece caught his eyes and all he saw was red. Just a mess on canvas, a pretty gorgeous mess.

He chuckled. "And they, uh, failed you?" He asked in disbelief, turning to face the girl yet she looked back down, away from his stare. He didn't like that she wouldn't look at him. Was it his hair? The suit? The occasional click of his tongue? Or something else...?

"I think it's because I didn't write things... like, I didn't have enough time..." Stella admitted to his verbal question, bashfully taking back her work and packing it back where it belonged.

"You in high school?" He casually asked out of curiosity, with no intention of being creepy or too much in her business. He wanted to know who he was dealing with, as did she. But neither of them commented about it.

"College," She said. "My second year, actually."

His tongue tapped the roof of his mouth in thought. "You're... eighteen?"

"In three months."

"Doing anything, uh, nice for your birthday? Eighteen's a pretty, uh, special number, ya know." Stella could see a blur of his head jokingly nodding in a matter of fact way, and she let out a little laugh.

She shook her head to his question, "No, I don't think so. The last major celebration for my birthday I had was my sixteenth," She chuckled at the memory and held a hand over her mouth to suppress her giggles. "It was a total disaster. My mom called the wrong stage act and I ended up getting a crappy rip off band of Mötley Crüe play one song before the singer tripped over a balloon and broke his leg." Stella tried not to giggle but her shoulders shook with laughter at the memory and she imagined the guy smiling with her to make herself feel better. Little did she know, he was.

He found that laughter was the best medicine, and it kept even him sane sometimes. He watched as her brows raised over shut eyes and how her rosy cheeks flared behind her hand. He also hated how she was hiding her laugh. What was the point? Wasn't it better to be seen and heard? "And to top it off I had sparkling candles on my cake and my aunt set fire to her hair-" Stella had to stop to hold back a hard laugh, "-so then the paramedics came and half of the guests already went home and it was just me, my mom, and three of my other friends left to hear my uncle badly sing karaoke to Abba!" She eventually broke and burst out laughing and she slapped a hand over her mouth but felt relieved when the man next to her began laughing too and they were both nearly hunched over trying to catch their breaths. "Oh my God, it was awful..."

He relaxed back in his seat but his laughs were still slow to cease and he still giggled between words. It wasn't the story that was funny. It was her laugh. It was contagious. "Gosh, that sounds like a blast."

The girl nodded and smiled. "Jeez, tell me about it."

Comfortable silence was exchanged between the two as they both looked ahead, smiling, whilst staring down the people who glared at them for laughing. Stella could barely remember the last time she'd laughed so much. She barely knew the guy and she thought she was setting things off pretty damn great. She was glad to know he had a great sense of humour and knew how to take a stupid joke. He could handle her sarcastic sense of humour. It was nice to not be on her own for once. Not to be the only one laughing.

The familiar heavy scraping noise of a mobile phone slid closer towards her as the man's head followed the direction of where the object slid... right by his seat. He picked the thing up and Stella was relieved to see it was her phone, finally back again.

"Uh, this yours?" He tilted the phone towards her and she nodded graciously, taking it from him and dusting off the screen with the leg of her jeans.

"Yeah, thanks." She mumbled with a smile.

She was too nice, he thought, and mentally, he grimaced.

Stella looked outside the window to see a familiar road leading to her home, and realised this was where she'd have to leave her briefly made friend.

She clutched onto her things. "This is my stop... s'pose this is goodbye," She hummed as he pressed the stop button for her and stood aside, letting her out into the aisle. He sat back in his seat and she smiled, but avoided looking at him. Although not showing it, he was annoyed. "Thanks for keeping me company." She awkwardly and bashfully said, her fingers fiddling with the strap of her bag.

He grinned at her, now able to take in her form. She was shorter than he'd expected; petite, fair skinned, fair haired... a typical girl, nothing special to her. "Anytime, toots."

Stella smiled at the little pet name she'd acquired, whether or not her nickname would last only until she stepped off the bus didn't bother her much- she was proud that she finally had the courage to have a full conversation with a total stranger without making an idiot of herself. And it boosted her confidence.

Stella gave a small, single wave to him as the bus stopped and she made her way down to the front of the bus before being stopped by who she'd consider her new friend.

"Hey, kiddo." The man's voice raised in order to get her attention. She turned and finally looked at his whole face, this time in shock as he grinned. At least she's looking.

His eyes, dark, endless pits of black. His hair, chocolate yet tinged with some coloured dye she couldn't decipher, messed to perfection. His posture, strong yet casual, like he owned the place. And his mouth. A proud little smirk stretched by two marks at the corners of his mouth. Two, long, white snake like lines. Thick scars, a Glasgow grin.

Stella was absolutely and utterly stunned how something so dreadful appeared on the face of who she'd deemed decent, and his devastating innocence came back when he said, "You get home safe, now."

She didn't have a moment to reply as her leg stepped off the bus and onto the sidewalk and before she could turn back, the doors slid shut. Stella stood with a curious look as the bus drove by and she took one last glance at the man's captivating scarred smile through the glass window, perhaps gone forever to her.

He thought the same of the girl. A fun little thing to pass time. Boring, but fun. Oh well, he thought, knowing he'd most likely never see her again. At least it'd make it seem he'd get back to his apartment faster.

Stella's head ached with confusion and her stomach spun with anxiety. It all felt like a dream to her. It was strangely unreal... his mouth...

Her thoughts were forced to be paused when her phone buzzed in her hand. She picked it up without consideration and her mom was on the other end of the line.

"You walking home or d'you need me to pick you up?"

Stella looked aimlessly down the road and blinked, looking down.

"I'll walk home," Stella said, "And I'll get myself a takeaway on the way, so don't wait for me."

"Wasn't my intention." Stella could practically hear a joking smile just by the words she spoke. The line clicked to an end and Stella ended the call, putting it back in her pocket and starting to walk to where she intentionally headed.

And she walked slow, she strode long, like his words. She needed time to think about what exactly she'd just witnessed.

I hope you enjoyed :)

I'm pretty sure just judging about the type of fanfic this is, you may already know who the man on the bus was... I mean; if the vaguely familiar purple suit and scarred mouth didn't give it away. Y'know.

Comment/review and feel free to tell me if there's any errors or mistakes (I previously wrote this in 1st person, so if there's any pronoun mistakes, please point them out to me!)!

;)