A/N: I love Christmas. I LOVE Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanza, hell, whatever you celebrate during winter break, I love it. So, I have decided to merge my favorite movie (Batman Begins) with my favorite holiday, with my favorite OC, who has never been introduced to paper (as you might guess, this is Audrey McKenzie).

So . . . please, just read the first chapter. If you don't like it, it will get better, I promise. Review anyway. I have no problem with flames.

And if you like it – well, it'll get better, and you can like it even more!

Without further crazy ramblings:

Home for the Holidays

Chapter One: So the Holiday Begins . . .

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"Good morning, Mr. Wayne. I hope I'm not disturbing you."

The female voice trickling through the antique gold and white phone sounded nervous and a little on edge.

"Of course not, Jessica. What's the matter?" He rubbed his eyes with a weary hand, and shot a look at the matching clock on the bedside table.

"Well, Mr. Wayne, your phone messages have been accumulating, and I know that you usually don't come into the office on Saturdays, so I thought it best to call you. The most recent of these calls have insisted that it is vital that y—" The nervous voice of Lucius Fox's secretary was cut off.

"How many messages do I have, Jessica?"

"Sixty-five, Mr. Wayne. Fifty-five yesterday and ten as of this morning." A phone warbled in the background, and there was a short pause. "Make that sixty-six, sir."

He sighed. "Who's left sixty-six messages for me?"

"Well, sir, all of them are from Audrey McKenzie's office."

"Who?"

"I believe that you and Mr. Fox met with her in association with the Hatford Fund concerning the train station . . . and the turtles."

"Ah . . . yes. The turtles which are apparently going to be destroyed by the train station we're building."

"Yes, Miss McKenzie, the Hatford Fund's lawyer."

"Dammit. Did she mention what she wanted?" Eleven in the morning. He and Fox had met her two days earlier and she had already left sixty-six messages? Again he heard the trilling phone; sixty-seven messages.

"Well, sir, she did mention that your decision concerning the . . . turtles . . . was unfair, and that she would like to make another appointment." Jessica paused uneasily.

"Spit it out," he said.

"Miss McKenzie became ruder in her latter messages, sir. I believe that she is becoming annoyed that you have yet to call her back. She has pointed out that her employer has numerous backed the decisions that Wayne Enterprises has made—"

"The Hatford Fund is made up of a few rich bleeding-hearts, Jessica. Does Wayne Enterprises need their support?"

"Well, no, sir."

"Thank you Jessica." Without waiting for her reply, he hung up the receiver. Then he rolled back onto the bed, rubbing his eyes sleepily. The name Audrey McKenzie brought up the remembered, blurred image of a harassed-looking woman with a mass of uncontrollable hair stuck into a knot at the back of her head that came undone three times during the meeting.

The lump of brocade comforter and silk sheets curled next to him gave off a sigh and shifted closer. Peeking from the embroidered edge of the comforter was a lock of curling, blonde hair.

"Mmm . . ." came a detached, feminine voice from under the covers. "Bruce, was that the phone?" He turned on his side, wincing as his elbow rolled into the bruises on his ribs.

"Yes. I have a vigilante environmentalist lawyer stalking me." The comforter vibrated with giggles.

"I think she has the right idea," mused the comforter sultrily. It tossed aside to reveal Veronica McKenzie, leggy, blonde, with curls floating on the pillow like a halo around her angelic face.

Gotham's new It girl edged closer, the green eyes that had made her famous now dark with desire as she wrapped her arms around him, and pulled him into a deep, drowning kiss that made his senses go haywire.

Veronica McKenzie was also going crazy. She'd never felt this before, and was falling quickly down a spiral tunnel that dropped into Bruce Wayne's arms.

That moment when she saw him, exactly two months ago, when she was shopping with two close friends on Madison Avenue, she froze, staring. She dropped all of her shopping bags, and when he came over to help her pick them up, abandoning the actress he was strolling with, all she could do was stare at the top of his dark hair.

He shuffled up her merchandise in a rascally way, putting her Prada sunglasses in the Gucci shopping bag, and did so with a smirk that said he knew exactly what he was doing.

Then he stood, handing her back the numerous bags, laughing eyes, and she couldn't help herself.

She dated him. Even after her sister told her, with a sour look in her eyes as she dug into her Dean and Deluca turkey sandwich, that he went through supermodels like normal people go through socks.

Her older sister had given the relationship two weeks, tops.

Surprise, surprise – two months later, she was still there. And she had every intention of staying.

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Two weeks later.

"Wayne Enterprises. How may I help you?" The voice oozed more cheerfulness than a Santa Claus convention.

"I'd like to speak to Mr. Wayne."

"May I ask your name?"

"Audrey McKenzie." The receptionist stopped clicking her fingernails and her eyes flitted to the list of names that she was not to, under any circumstances, allow to talk to anyone. Scribbled in pencil at the bottom was Audrey McKenzie.

"Actually, Miss McKenzie, Mr. Wayne isn't in the office right now. However, I could direct you to Mr. Fox's secretary, who coul—" She was cut off.

"If I told you that Wayne Enterprises intends to build a train station next to an endangered turtle habitat, would you connect me?"

The receptionist bit her lip in indecision.

"Unless I talk to Mr. Wayne and convince him that he'd be very stupid to put the environmental community at arm's length, he'll kill defenseless turtles." Relying on her high school acting career, she pressed her point with a small note of despair. "No one is going to speak for the turtles."

"Well . . ." The receptionist's eyes drifted to the picture of her and her golden retriever. "I didn't do this."

"I completely understand," said Audrey, biting her lip to keep her from laughing.

As she was put on hold, Puccini soaring robotically in her ears, she changed to speakerphone and put the receiver back in the cradle. The 600-page report that she was summarizing lay sprawled across her coffee table, occasional lines highlighted. The blue ballpoint pen clutched in her hand waved as she moved her elbow to shoo away the ball of fluff trying to sit on her laptop.

"Dortmunder!" she snapped. "Go away!" Dortmunder daintily stepped across the keys, pressing 'lokasdf' into the report summary. "Go eat something!" Most likely following her orders, Dortmunder wandered off into the kitchen.

With a mechanical whirl, the stereo in the corner replaced the Vivaldi CD with one of Mozart.

Humming along to the opening stanza of 'The Magic Flute', Audrey circled a paragraph on the report, and typed it into her laptop. Noticing something important, she stuck the pen behind her ear and picked up the purple highlighter.

"Miss McKenzie."

"Yes?" she asked, her voice strained as she grabbed for a stack of papers.

"I'm really sorry. I tried, but Mr. Wayne really isn't in the building. I believe he is having a lunch appointment with his girlfriend." Audrey choked on air, but the receptionist didn't hear. "All I can do is connect you with his secretary."

"That's alright. I've been leaving messages for the past two weeks." Audrey pressed the Disconnect button and let out a savage shriek.

Dortmunder appeared in the doorway, then sniffed and returned to his food dish. Audrey gave a sigh, and leaned back into the couch, throwing her highlighter onto the coffee table. She massaged her temples with fingers stained luminescent purple.

Who would have thought that Audrey Jones would be leaving sixty messages a day for Bruce Wayne like some sort of stalker? When she'd gone into law school, everyone had been certain that she would be a great criminal defense lawyer, just like her mother.

The moment she'd realized that she didn't want to spend the rest of her life protecting Mafia members, she had been walking through campus. There was an environmental protest going on at the time, and she found a few pamphlets about the environmental lobby.

In a way, she'd never left the protest.

She'd seen The American President one too many times, and naively assumed that Annette Benning was properly portraying the way her life would be. Ha. Her life right now was as if she'd never left college – without the inheritance from her grandparents she never would have been able to afford an apartment in Gotham, and she limped by on Ramen noodles and Snapple, not exactly the proper nourishment for a twenty-nine year-old.

Fighting Bruce Wayne for the rights of some turtles was not the way she'd envisioned her career. If, if she could convince Wayne Enterprises to move the train station, it would be a huge boost for her career. She could move down to Washington, still do the whole environmental lobby thing, but find a better paying job.

When it became obvious that massaging her brain was not going to make it work any better, she ran her fingers through the tangled mass calling itself her hair and made a resolution to avoid her sister for the rest of the month.

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BRUCE WAYNE AND VERONICA JONES: THE NEW IT COUPLE

GOTHAM – Billionaire Bruce Wayne and model Veronica McKenzie are now engaged. You heard it here first: confidential sources inside the restaurant Il Diamante say that in the middle of a romantic, candlelit dinner, Bruce dropped to one knee and asked Veronica to marry him. According to their publicist, the couple wishes to get married sometime this summer. The ring is a Wayne family heirloom reputed to be worth $8 million when it was last appraised. The bride-to-be, Veronica McKenzie is currently working for Gucci and has been recently named –

Audrey gazed in disgust at The Gotham Globe, which was sporting on the first page a sappy-looking picture of Bruce Wayne holding hands with Veronica McKenzie, who was flashing a bright smile that had nothing on the glittering boulder that was sitting on her ring finger. Even the grainy quality black-and-white photo couldn't disguise the gaudiness.

Eyebrows raised, Audrey calculated it to be the size of a marble. Wayne family heirloom, my ass.

As she flipped the page, a bit harsher than she should have, and took a savage bite of her lox and cream cheese sesame bagel, the phone rang.

"Yes," she mumbled through a mouthful of bread and cheese. The voice that came out was the last one she wanted to hear.

"Audrey! I'm getting married!" Her sister.

"So I've read. Front page of the paper." She swallowed hard, and swilled down some orange juice, wishing that it was a shot. Or five.

"Can you believe it?" continued Ronnie. She'd never been very good at noticing sarcasm. Then again, Ronnie McKenzie had never been the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree; being drop-dead gorgeous meant she didn't have to be.

"Yes," replied Audrey in a monotone, and she heard strangled laughter that couldn't have come from her sister, seeing as Ronnie only giggled. "Ronnie, do you have me on speakerphone?"

"Of course, silly," giggled her sister.

Audrey's eyes lit up like Christmas lights. She dropped her bagel and leaned into the phone.

"Is that billionaire fiancée of yours there?"

"Say hi to my sister, Bruce." Giggle. That had always annoyed Audrey, how much her sister giggled.

"Hi."

Audrey jumped out of her seat, dancing a silent, mad dance of happiness. Her sister chattered on ("Oh my gosh! You have to be my maid of honor, Audrey! You'll look stunning blood red, don't you think? Everyone says that it's going to be this summer's color. Bruce and I have already agreed that it'll be nothing major, just a little affair. Mom and Daddy will just love him, don't you think?") and after a while, Audrey was collected enough to interrupt coolly.

"Well, Bruce, it seems you have to latch a boulder to my sister's ring finger for me to get you on the phone."

In Wayne Manor, just about to bite into a celebratory grapefruit, Bruce's heart stopped. He'd heard Ronnie mention her sister numerous times, but the name had never really connected.

"Audrey McKenzie."

Please, please let me be wrong, he begged.

"Just out of curiosity, this 'small affair' you're having – will it be before or after you murder a community of helpless turtles with the toxins used to build your train station?" The voice coming out of the phone didn't sound human.

"Listen, Audrey," he snapped, unconsciously smashing the grapefruit into his plate. "I don't give a fuck about your goddamn turtles. So you can stop following me around like a groupie and fucking FedEx the turtles off my land!"

Ronnie gazed at him with surprise.

"Bruce," she began, but her furious sister cut her off. The inhuman voice was vibrating at a low pitch.

"You listen, you stuck-up, billionaire bastard. You don't have to give a fuck about the turtles – hell; I don't give a fuck about the turtles! They're annoying and they smell. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that Wayne Enterprises is run by a prick who thinks that he can boss around the little people because he's the goddamn prince of Gotham!"

"What does that have to do with turtles?" pointed out Bruce nastily, momentarily transported back to eighth grade.

"Everything," replied Audrey. "You, you" – here she couldn't find an adjective awful enough to describe him in English, so she moved on to other languages – "Pièce de merde. Despiadado, fou, rico porc."

"So now I'm a piece of shit and a heartless, crazy, rich pig?" asked Bruce, slightly impressed with her grasp of the French and Spanish languages.

"Damn straight," she snapped.

"Well, sorry to disappoint, but as far as I can tell you don't know me well enough to make those assumptions," he said, a bit haughtily. That not only took Audrey to the edge, but threw her over it.

"So the incident about you burning down your house in a drunken stupor a few months back was fabricated?" she asked. An uncomfortable pause ensued.

"No. But you don't know the—"

"Whole story? What, you were high and drunk? Oh, I forgot. Because you have enough money to buy and upkeep ten Wayne Manors, it doesn't matter that you burned down your ancestral home, does it?"

Bruce toppled off the edge right behind her.

"Why does me having money seem so despicable to you?" he asked, squeezing his grapefruit even harder. "Is it because you don't?"

Oops.

He knew, the moment that he said it, that it was a mistake. Still, he didn't expect what came next.

"It's not that you have money and that you throw it around like the pope throws holy water. It's because you don't give a shit about where you throw it." Audrey paused to control herself. To her surprise, she wasn't angry anymore. Hot tears were beginning to blur her vision, and she snapped into the phone, "I'll see you next week, Ronnie," and pressed the Disconnect.

"Bye, Audrey," said Ronnie quietly to the dial tone. Then she turned to Bruce. For the first time ever, he saw that she was angry.

"Don't provoke her like that," she said. "Audrey's always been defensive, and if you two are going to survive Christmas, you'll have to get along."

Christmas?

Shit.

Bruce had completely forgotten his promise to spend the upcoming two weeks of Christmas vacation with Ronnie and her family. Now that 'family' consisted of Audrey McKenzie, he seriously thought about canceling.

But looking at Ronnie, bubbly, vivacious Ronnie, glare at him in anger, he knew that he couldn't. "I'll try my best."

The anger vanished.

"Great! Okay, we're leaving next Saturday . . ." He tuned his fiancée out, and wiped his sticky fingers on the napkin, dipping them in some water. A mangled blob that looked much too much like an organ was sitting in the middle of his plate.

So much for a celebratory breakfast.

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Please, please please review! It's this nasty little plot bunny, you see . . . it just wouldn't go away!

I had to give in! It just wouldn't LEAVE ME ALONE.

MAKE IT GO AWAY! Because you know your reviews would do that . . .