Chapter Text
Alfred set the phone down in its cradle and sighed. This again. It was disturbing how easily his thoughts fell back into the same old patterns, slipping into a deep rut of frustration and fear. Would young Master Bruce ever find his way out of the darkness and grief that his parents’ death had forced upon him? Was Alfred fighting a losing battle?
He had to believe that he wasn’t. He had to believe there was still hope for the boy – nearly a man – who he thought of as a son. He had to believe it, because to believe otherwise would mean to give up on the boy, and Alfred made a decision years ago, the day he buried Thomas and Martha Wayne, that he would sooner join them than give up on Bruce.
So he prepared himself. He let the frustration and fear wash over him, made himself a cup of tea, drank it in his favorite armchair in the study while formulating a plan, and finally set off to pick Bruce up from school.
Bruce was quiet as he opened the door and settled into the passenger seat of the Bentley. His mouth was set in a firm, unyielding line. He knew what was coming. He’d spent the past five years perfecting his poker face, but Alfred had spent the past five years learning how to read him. They were equally matched.
Alfred pulled out onto the road. Normally, when he picked Bruce up, he would have the radio on, tuned to NPR or classical music. Today they rode in silence until Alfred finally spoke. “I received a call from your school today.” He let the words settle into the air between them, let Bruce stew in the knowledge of what he had done. “Apparently you got into another fight.”
Bruce said nothing. Alfred hadn’t expected him to. Not yet. So he continued, injecting more firmness into his tone than he used to when they had conversations like this one, because Bruce was older now, and he should have known better. Certain behaviors that were excusable at age ten or twelve were far less so by age fifteen. “You do understand that you cannot continue this pattern into adulthood? Fighting with classmates is one thing. But in a few years, hitting another person will be a good way to end up in jail. And, with your name, on the nightly news.”
Bruce still didn’t speak, but he did turn to glare at Alfred. He had always resented the lofty expectations placed upon him because of his wealth and status. But it was the truth of the world, and Alfred would be doing him a disservice as a parent – as a guardian, Alfred corrected himself – not to prepare him for that.
“I thought we were past this,” Alfred said, replacing his firmness with gentleness, his admonition with understanding. It was important that Bruce knew his behavior was unacceptable, but it was also important that he knew Alfred only ever wanted what was best for him, and that was the only reason he lectured him. “You’ve been doing so well these past few years. I was under the impression that your classmates had stopped bringing up the subject of your parents entirely.”
This was the reason Bruce had gotten into so many fights in his younger years: his parents. Young boys, who had not yet developed a sense of empathy, could torture one another with words and think nothing of the consequences of their actions. For a few months after his parents’ deaths, Bruce’s classmates had treated him like he was made of glass, but they’d quickly grown tired of his grief, and had turned on him sharply, taunting him with reminders of what he had lost.
Alfred couldn’t blame Bruce for the way he’d reacted back then. Truth be told, in Bruce’s shoes, Alfred would have hit those boys too.
But sooner or later Bruce would have to stop lashing out on a hair-trigger at the mere mention of Thomas and Martha Wayne. As tragic as it was that he’d lost them at such a young age, and in such a brutal way, and as unfair as it was that anyone would expect him to move on from an experience like that, none of it was enough to excuse violence.
“They have,” Bruce said. This was a surprise, not only because these were the first words he had spoken since Alfred had picked him up, but also because they weren’t the words Alfred had expected.
What else, besides Bruce’s parents, could have caused him to start a fight with another student? As far as Alfred knew, he had no other sore spots, no other triggers, no other traumas.
Which indicated that Bruce had started a fight for no reason, or at least no good reason. Which was, obviously, unacceptable.
“Then what reason could you possibly have for hitting another student?” Alfred demanded, and if he sounded harsh then that was only because he could see his worst fears being realized, that all the pain and suffering had turned Bruce hard and cold, no longer the caring, curious child he used to be.
Bruce didn’t answer.
“I offered you some leniency in your younger years because you were in a difficult emotional state and your classmates’ behavior was cruel,” Alfred told him. “But unless you can give me a legitimate reason why you behaved the way you did today—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Bruce interrupted, and it was the pain in his voice, more than anything else, that stopped Alfred in his tracks.
The boy’s classmates had found another sore spot. Another trigger. And Alfred didn’t know what it was. And that was terrifying.
When they pulled into the garage of Wayne Manor, Bruce unfastened his seatbelt and bolted from the car, marching straight to his room without needing to be told. Alfred followed him in a daze, wondering what he could have possibly missed. If not the death of his parents, what other trauma was eating at Bruce, compounding the darkness that already existed within him? And how had he managed to hide it from the one man who – Alfred liked to think – truly knew him?
Alfred pondered this as he made dinner, but he was no closer to finding an answer. So he brought a plate up to Bruce’s room and rapped his knuckles gently on the door. When there was no answer, Alfred tried the handle, found it to be unlocked, and stepped inside.
Bruce was curled up on his window seat, looking out at the Gotham skyline. It was where he went when he needed to be alone and think about things. Alfred had seen him there many times, and it struck him how much larger he looked now than he had at ten. For a while he’d been gangly, but he was beginning to fill out. He’d started shaving. But the dark circles under his eyes and the hollows of his cheekbones were the same. He didn’t eat enough, didn’t sleep enough, didn’t have nearly enough happiness. It was hard for Alfred not to blame himself.
“I brought you something to eat,” he said, entering the room slowly and placing the plate of food down on Bruce’s desk, where his homework was arranged into neat piles for his completion. Amid all his struggles with his classmates, Bruce had never let anything distract him from his schoolwork. He’d even skipped two grades. He had enough credits, Alfred knew, to go to college in the fall. Part of Alfred hoped Bruce would stay in his current school, remain a child a little longer, but part of him thought that perhaps what Bruce needed was to get away from the same crowd he’d been surrounded by since childhood. Perhaps it would be good for him to have a little space to grow.
“I’m not hungry,” Bruce muttered. It was a depressingly familiar phrase.
“Nevertheless,” Alfred replied, as he always did. “You need sustenance.” He stood there, intent on waiting until Bruce made a move toward his dinner and made some halfhearted attempt at eating. Bruce knew he would wait there all night. He’d done it before.
Finally, Bruce sighed, shifted out of his slouched position by the window and into his desk chair, and started eating. He grimaced when the food entered his mouth, like it was made of dust and sand instead of the finest ingredients money could buy. Alfred knew by now not to take it as a personal insult.
He waited until Bruce had made some headway before asking, “Have you given any thought to what we discussed today?”
Bruce glared up at him again, but this time there was no real heat behind it. “I don’t just hit people for no reason,” he insisted.
“I know, Master Bruce.” At least, Alfred knew now. After hearing the way Bruce had spoken, seeing the way he’d looked, he knew. “But you need to develop healthier responses to other people’s actions. It is always acceptable to defend yourself if someone attacks you physically, or to defend others who are weaker than you. But mere words, no matter how cruel, are no reason to lash out. You’re old enough to know that.”
Bruce pushed what was left of his dinner around his plate. He looked almost sick. “It won’t happen again,” he said, voice barely a whisper.
“I hope that is the case.” Alfred waited for the boy to say anything more, and when he didn’t, he added, “And if you need me to talk to the school about how your classmates are treating you—”
“No,” Bruce looked up again, almost frantic. Alfred had known he would refuse the offer, but the worry in Bruce’s tone caught him by surprise. What had those other boys said to him? “I can handle it myself.”
Alfred decided not to push, at least for the time being. He knew it would be useless to do so. He took Bruce’s dishes away and resigned himself to a restless evening.
Weeks passed without incident. The school did not call Alfred again. He should have taken this as a sign of Bruce’s progress, but instead it gave him a sense of foreboding. Whatever torment his classmates were putting him through, Bruce was enduring it silently.
Finally, it became too much. Bruce came home from school on a Friday looking like he couldn’t decide whether he was going to cry or scream or hit something. He stormed up to his room and, this time, he locked the door. Alfred didn’t see him all weekend.
Monday morning came, and Bruce didn’t come downstairs. His breakfast remained untouched on the kitchen table. Alfred gathered his resolve and knocked on the boy’s door.
“Master Bruce, we should have left for school ten minutes ago. You’re going to be late, and I’m not going to write a note excusing you.”
Silence. Then, footsteps. Bruce unlocked and opened the door, just a crack, just enough for Alfred to glimpse one of his blue eyes and one-half of a determined frown. “I’m not going.”
“Why not? Are you ill?”
Bruce paused before answering, which was how Alfred knew his answer was going to be a lie. Bruce could lie to his teachers, his fellow students, and just about anyone else, but he had never been able to lie, convincingly, to Alfred. “Yes.”
Alfred forced the door open the rest of the way, and found Bruce standing inside in his pajamas, hair sticking up in every direction. He looked frightened and traumatized, but he did not look ill. “Tell me the truth,” Alfred said, unflinchingly.
This next pause did not herald a lie; rather, a truth Bruce hadn’t wanted to tell. “I can’t do it today,” he admitted.
Now they were getting somewhere. “Do I need to call your psychiatrist? You told me you were doing well on the new medication he prescribed you.”
“I’m not depressed,” Bruce insisted. “I just can’t go to school.”
Alfred could have argued with Bruce about his mental state, but he did not want to get into it. There was only one thing he wanted to know. “I am a reasonable man, Master Bruce, but I’m going to need a better reason than that. Is it about the fight you got into a few weeks ago?”
Bruce said nothing, and this meant yes.
“You haven’t been in any altercations since then,” Alfred continued. “I thought it was an isolated incident.”
“You told me I couldn’t lash out at people,” Bruce parroted.
Just as Alfred had suspected. “So whatever behavior led you to lash out at your classmates has continued, you have simply stopped responding to it.”
Again: no answer meant yes.
“What have they been saying?”
“I don’t want—”
“To talk about it,” Alfred finished tiredly. “I know. But you must. Or you have to go to school.”
They stood there for several long moments, Alfred dressed and ready in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest in expectation, and Bruce a few feet away, exhausted, disheveled, and scared. Alfred thought certainly the threat of going back to school, of facing his torturers, would be enough to wrench the truth out of Bruce.
Not for the first time, he had underestimated the boy. Bruce set his mouth into that familiar hard line and began changing out of his pajamas.
He was late to school that day, but he did attend.
More weeks passed. Bruce didn’t get into any more fights, and he didn’t try to skip school, but with every additional day, he looked more and more miserable, and Alfred grew more and more concerned. He was having flashbacks to the months after Thomas and Martha Wayne’s deaths. His fear for Bruce’s future was shifting back into an older, deeper fear, for his survival.
He needed to find out what was wrong. He needed to do it soon.
He finally saw his opportunity when Bruce went out to his mother’s garden, to sit on one of the benches there and be alone. This was where Bruce went, Alfred knew, when he needed to cry. And Bruce only cried when his endurance had completely run out. If he was going to talk to Alfred, he was going to do it today.
Alfred watched from the window and waited until the tears appeared to have stopped. He wasn’t trying to humiliate Bruce. Not that there was anything wrong with a boy crying, but Bruce seemed to think that there was, and Alfred had not been able to disabuse him of the notion. He walked out into the garden and sat down beside Bruce and pretended not to notice as Bruce wiped his eyes and his nose on the sleeve of his sweater, but he did make a mental note to launder it.
“I can tell when something is wrong, Master Bruce,” Alfred said softly, the voice one might use to approach a skittish animal. “I do wish you would talk to me about it. Whatever the problem is, I want to help.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Bruce said, trying to sound as fierce as he usually did, but his voice cracked midway through.
“It does if it’s making you feel this way.”
Alfred managed to catch Bruce’s gaze for just a moment before Bruce looked away. There were tears welling up in his eyes again. “I can’t tell you,” he muttered into his own shoulder.
“Why not?”
Alfred was expecting any number of answers to this question, or perhaps no answer at all, but the last thing he was expecting was for Bruce to choke back a sob and say, “You’ll hate me.”
And oh, Alfred had thought he’d reached the depths of sorrow for this boy, but those three words managed to dig even deeper. Alfred had never felt like more of a failure of a parent (of a guardian, not a parent, a guardian). He had helped raise Bruce from the time he was born, raised him alone from the time he was ten, and though he knew Bruce still had much to learn, he had thought he at least knew one thing, which was that Alfred’s love for him was infinite and unconditional.
But apparently not. Apparently Alfred had taken this truth for granted, if Bruce thought there was anything he could do that would make Alfred hate him.
“Master Bruce.” Alfred kept most of the pain from his voice when he spoke, though he knew he couldn’t conceal all of it. “Look at me.”
Bruce did, and his eyes were wet and shining, and he looked afraid. He looked afraid like when he’d asked Alfred at the funeral home, “Where will I go?” and Alfred had told him, already rearranging the shape of his life for this child who wasn’t his own but may as well have been, “You’ll stay in the Manor with me.”
“I could never hate you.”
Bruce seemed to search for something in Alfred’s words, in his gaze, and he must have found it, because when he looked away again, he answered, “They saw me do something.”
“Who did?” Alfred asked. “Your classmates?” Bruce nodded. “What did they see you do?”
It was the start of winter, so not even the crickets and birds provided a backdrop for the ensuing silence. Bruce looked like he wished the frosted ground would swallow him up whole. “I… kissed someone,” he finally managed.
Alfred tried not to let the surprise register on his face. Surely something as silly as that could not be the reason Bruce thought Alfred would hate him. Surely a kiss could not have been eating away at him these months. “And your classmates found that reason enough to torment you?” Alfred asked, disbelieving. “You’re fifteen; you should be old enough to engage in that sort of behavior without your peers treating you as though you’ve contracted cooties. By fifteen, I daresay many of them are doing far more than kissing girls, unless much has changed since my youth.”
Alfred must have said the wrong thing, because Bruce curled in on himself like he’d been hit. Seemingly before he could think better of it, Bruce spat out, “I didn’t kiss a girl.”
The pieces began to shift into place.
“I kissed a boy.”
Oh. That was the sore spot. That was the trigger. Bruce’s classmates had seen him kissing a boy, and they treated him the way fifteen-year-old boys – and most of the rest of society – treated those who were different, and Bruce, in his righteous anger, had gotten into a fight. And when Alfred had informed him that physical retaliation was no longer appropriate given his age, Bruce had suffered weeks of harassment in silence, until he couldn’t bear to face his peers again. And when Alfred had declined to allow him any sort of escape, he had marched back into the line of fire like a good little soldier. And now here he was crying in his mother’s garden, the same hollowed-out shell of a person he’d been when he’d lost everything, all because Alfred hadn’t realized the severity… all because he hadn’t known…
“Now I understand,” Alfred said calmly, a soothing hand on Bruce’s back. For the first time in the course of their conversation, Bruce dared to look hopeful. It broke Alfred’s heart all over again. “Yes, teenagers can be cruel to those they believe are different. People of all ages, but teenagers especially.” He paused. “No one has tried to physically harm you, have they?” Alfred knew what could happen to people who were different. The thought of it happening to Bruce…
“Not since the fight.”
At least that was some small relief. “But I can imagine the sort of things they say to you are… unpleasant, to say the least.”
Bruce’s silence did not argue with him.
The hand on Bruce’s back became an arm around his shoulders, giving a gentle squeeze. “You thought I would hate you for being gay?” The thought of it was still almost too much to bear. Not the thought of Bruce being gay; that was inconsequential. In some ways, it wasn’t a complete surprise. But the thought that Bruce had doubted Alfred’s love for him: that was intolerable.
“I’m not gay,” Bruce said. “I like girls too. And I didn’t know… whether you would.”
“I love you exactly the way you are, Master Bruce,” Alfred assured him, putting more sincerity behind these words than he ever had. “I always will. I apologize for anything I have ever said or done that made you believe otherwise.”