Chapter Text
1
That night does not become a fateful night. Bruce’s parents don’t die when they take the alleyway, looking for a shortcut.
As the robber-would-be-killer aims his gun at the center of Thomas’ forehead, a figure emerges from the shadows. “He appeared out of thin air”, Bruce’s mother, Martha, will later tell the Commissioner himself when reporting the bitter but not tragic incident. “Jumped out from the shadows and pushed the robber down to the ground,” Thomas will also say while Bruce keeps a white knuckled grip on the side of his mother’s coat.
His parents almost died, but they didn’t.
Instead, a man no one seems to know (no one has seen him before) jumped in between the gun and his father, and in one swift motion stopped the bloodshed from happening.
“Did you manage to see what he looked like?”
Thomas scoffs, keeping a firm arm around Martha’s shoulders.
“No, of course not. He had a helmet on. Face completely covered.”
Bruce shakes, remembering. His voice shakes, too, when he speaks. “It was red,” he says, half hidden behind Martha’s legs. “It was a red helmet.”
—
Bruce’s parents don’t die. He has a happy, safe, spoiled rotten childhood. He scrapes his hands and knees climbing up a tree going after the cat he rescued from the streets that his parents pretend not to know about. He only cries a little when Alfred disinfects the cuts and scratches.
Bruce’s parents don’t die. They do seem to get into their fair share of accidents, though.
A car crash. An attempted kidnapping. Bombs sent via mail that detonate (seemingly on their own) while waiting on his desk, when no one’s around. No one gets actually hurt. Someone tries to rob Martha when she’s out shopping without her security detail, having ditched them three shops behind. All accidents that never claim them. One after the other, like there’s some sort of energy that’s trying to collect their souls after botching the first attempt.
Sometimes, Thomas will later say when he thinks Bruce isn’t listening, sometimes it is the man in the red helmet who saves them. Martha will agree with a whispered confirmation even when she thinks Bruce isn’t in the room (though he is, hiding).
The man in the red helmet seems to save them quite a lot of times.
So Bruce dreams of him.
Like this, Bruce grows thinking of him.
He owes him quite a lot. He owes him the life of his parents. He owes him for that one night someone snuck into his room and tried to take him away, but the man in the red helmet emerged from the shadows (had he always been there?) and took the bad stranger away.
The boarding school he's sent to right after the incident feels like he’s being forced to say goodbye to the hero of his family. Like he’s being kept away from the only true safety he's ever had.
But then…
There are The Nightmares that he writes about. Of bats and caves and guns and blood. A pearl necklace that snaps and splashes across the puddles of blood on the cobblestones.
A boy, and a circus. A fall, parents that leave, parents that always leave all too soon.
An alley, a car, tires that are missing, a kid that runs and runs and runs and—
A kid that follows him and follows danger. A kid with long hair that he fails. One with his face, with different colored eyes. Alfred dying so many gruesome deaths.
There are The Nightmares.
The one he always stops writing right after the ‘and—’ is the one that makes his head hurt the most.
—
Bruce takes self defense classes while in college. Harvey goes with him and their eyes follow each other through the many exercises. Bruce looks at himself in the mirror and for a moment he thinks he sees something else in there. Someone else. They have the same face, they have the same eyes, they look like himself, sure, but so many things are different.
The man he sees in the mirror has a burdened gaze, an emblem of a bat spread across his chest. Bruce doesn't get it, though. Doesn't get how that someone else that looks like himself could affiliate himself with something like that. Matter of fact, he hates bats.
In the shower, he runs his hands over his chest, his thighs, and thinks I should have scars, where are my scars, followed by why should I have scars?
None of that makes sense. These intrusive thoughts he keeps having, near hallucinations of another self in the mirror, seeing scars, blood, all over his skin when he's in the shower, or changing clothes, or getting closer to Harvey, more than anyone else knows—these things that haunt him, they don't make sense.
Just like the man in the red helmet never did.
He hasn’t really thought about the mysterious man from his childhood in a long time. Distance brought by the boarding school, by time, by life never stopping, turned the mystery into a thing of the past. And this fact remains the same until, two days before the graduation ceremony, he gets a call from his mother, telling him to come home, telling him dad has died in his sleep.
On the private jet back home, Bruce grinds his teeth, clenching his fists while thinking with a bitterness he can't shake away: couldn’t you have protected him from natural causes, too?
—
The night after the burial, it rains over all of Gotham. The rain itself isn’t enough to wash away all of the dirt and grime, and it’ll never be enough to wash Bruce from the pain of losing his father. He sits alone in the study, sits in his father’s chair while his fingertips trace the edge of the desk, feeling the sturdy mahogany wood under his touch. The desk was his father’s, just like once it had been his grandfather’s, and once it had been his great grandfather’s. An heirloom of sorts—timeless. Dependable. Durable.
His dad had died of old age in his sleep. There is, perhaps, no other death better than the one his dad went through, and yet Bruce can’t help but feel restless. It’s keeping him awake. The faint sound of his mother crying, locked up in her bedroom, is not the only thing haunting him. Because he can’t chase away the stray thought he had when watching the casket being lowered into the busy soil of Gotham. The thought that something is wrong. That this isn’t how it was supposed to be.
That a particular man with a red helmet was not seen at the funeral, but Bruce swears he saw him nevertheless. Behind trees. Behind tombstones. Far, but close enough. Just barely enough.
It makes his head hurt.
It makes him feel in need of a drink.
Standing up on stiff legs, he makes his way to the ornate liquor cabinet his dad kept in the study. In the dark, guided only by the shine of the garden lights coming in through the window, he stumbles. He walks into a decorative table placed next to an armchair, making the table tip over and fall onto the dark red carpet.
Red.
A flash of metal, of a gun, an alleyway and his parents, hiding behind his mother's legs. Pearls. Pearls? His mother's pearl necklace yanked off her neck. The pearls don't clatter, the knots between each one keeping them in place. The necklace falls next to his father’s bleeding head.
Red.
He groans loudly, falling to his knees onto the carpeted floor right next to the table he knocked over. It hurts. His head hurts, it feels like his brain is much too big for his skull or his skull is way too small for his brain—either or, it does not matter, it just hurts so much, the flashes of things that never happened hurt. They’re lies. They’re not true. His father didn’t die in the alleyway, ages ago. His mom didn’t die. She’s still alive, crying herself to sleep in the bedroom she used to share with his dad.
Red.
The helmeted man, he came crashing down onto the robber as if he had fallen from the sky.
An unexplainable presence, someone no one saw before then and that few have seen after. A man, nonetheless, a man that had fallen from the sky to save him. Them. His family.
Even with the carpet covering the length of the whole room, the floor is still cold. Bruce moves to stand, placing one hand on the side of the armchair, the other dropping to the ground to help his balance. The instant his fingers touch something that’s neither carpet nor wooden table, he freezes. That’s—that’s paper. Blindly, as if captured by a spell he cannot break out of, he doesn't look down as his fingers dance over the thing he’s touching. Paper, yes, but… thick, glossy. It’s not just paper. It’s a photograph. His hand slides further to the left, and there are more. So many of them.
Bruce shoots up to his feet then. He doesn’t pick up his discovery from where it’s strewn all over the carpet. Instead he takes three long strides to the lightswitch of the antique table lamp on the desk. His hands are shaking. No, it’s not just his hands—his entire body is shaking, along with the air leaving his lungs. The rain is something he no longer registers, instead all he can hear is the sound of his own heart beating erratically in his chest, thundering so loudly it deafens his ears. Photos. Photos? Hidden, that much is clear, and as far as Bruce is aware, his dad hadn’t had much to hide while alive.
So what, pray tell, could those pictures be about?
Or…
Who?
The light coming from the lamp blinds him for a handful of precious seconds. It feels like an eternity almost until he can see clearly again, and when his eyes focus again he zeroes in on the photographs spread all over the floor like a halo around the table he walked into. White margins make a crisp contrast against the dark colored carpet. White margins also emphasize the red of a helmet, the shade of fresh blood.
A shiver runs through him just as real thunder breaches the night sky of Gotham outside the manor. For some reason, Bruce feels… too exposed. Vulnerable. And then, then he realizes—
The window.
The curtains aren’t closed.
The curtains aren’t closed and the window, anyone could look into the study through the window, and it’s dark, it’s dark outside, the light from the lamp is a beacon, a lighthouse for those who trade in secrets and charge you a life for them.
And the photos.
The fucking photos.
Bruce doesn’t breathe as he lunges towards the curtains, crashing against the wall as he grabs fistfulls of the thick embroidered fabric, almost ripping it off the rod in his haste to close the curtains shut. It’s ridiculous—that’s his immediate thought right after. He’s being ridiculous, he’s being paranoid, no one can look into the study that’s on the third floor of the manor with no balcony or railing or ledge to, to. He’s being ridiculous. Even though his father kept those pictures secret for some reason, this level of fear, paranoia, Bruce is sure it’s unwarranted.
And yet when he turns, the window to his back, he still looks at the scattered evidence as if it is a ticking time bomb. For all intents and purposes, it might as well be.
He approaches the accidental display with slow, unsure steps, feeling as though his ankles are one second away from snapping out of place, tearing the tendons as they do. That never happens, of course. His feet never fail him. In two seconds he’s towering over the photos, staring down at blobs of red printed on glossy paper. Red that cut against the inky black night of Gotham. Red that saved Bruce’s parents’ lives one fateful night. Red, the color of blood that was never shed.
This time he is in control of his legs when he kneels, no longer under the pain of random throbbing within his head. He is in control of each breath he lets out, of the muscles of his arms and hands when he reaches out to collect the pictures. From this new angle he can see the taped up envelope under the table. When he walked into it, making it crash onto the floor, the tape, worn out only by passage of time, gave way to gravity, spilling out its metaphorical guts over the all too clean carpet. It’s one hell of a coincidence, Bruce thinks. It’s almost too much of a coincidence, too many events chained to one another for this to happen, and yet there is no other possible explanation. There is nothing else that can make this make sense.
Having collected each printed photo, stacking them in a neat pile, the yawning jaws of curiosity untangle previous knots in Bruce’s stomach only to tie new ones. The very first picture on the top of the pile shows the unknown man standing tall on a rooftop, a billboard with a sign about whitening toothpaste to his back. His helmet looks like a cherry against the model’s blown up toothy smile. Like he’s about to be eaten. Like he’s something to be consumed.
Bruce swallows. He has always seen this man in movement, each motion precise, elegant, economical in the usage of energy, and thus he’s never had a chance to truly study the form of the body, the cut and shape of the figure. He looks tall, is the first thing Bruce notices. He’s muscular, which he already knew, but seeing him like this (standing still in a moment in time that belongs to a past he didn’t experience) lets him appreciate just how muscular. The tight pants, the kevlar vest, the jacket… the figure is well emphasized. The broadness of the shoulders cuts a firm line across the billboard, sharper than the cut of a surgical scalpel. The torso narrows into a waist that’s not exactly slim, but it’s still enticing.
He blinks. Enticing?
He makes himself turn to the next photograph on the pile, shoving the first one to the bottom. This one is a close-up of the man, clearly using the zoom feature of the camera to capture it. The quality is still excellent, and Bruce feels as if in a trance when he balances the entire stack of photographs in the palm of one hand while he lifts the other to trace the lines of the helmet with two trembling fingertips. The last time he had seen it so up close was when he first saw the man, when he was a child, shocked by the thrill of fear and danger.
He’s holding his breath, about to flip onto the picture right under the second one, when the heavy door to the study opens so quickly that he cannot react. There he stays, on his knees by an overturned table, damning photographs cradled in his unsteady hands. And there, standing by the threshold, caught between the corridor and the study, is the young servant his parents hired some years ago to work as Alfred’s aide.
What was his name?
Jason?
Bruce swallows again. He never got around to pouring himself a drink from his father’s liquor cabinet.
“Master Wayne,” the man speaks, not moving from his position by the door, the light coming in through the corridor enveloping his entire body like a shield, “it’s quite late. Perhaps it’d be best to retire to your bedroom now.”
The man’s eyes never stray from Bruce’s face. And yet, Bruce is sure he has seen the stack of photographs still in his hands.
“Yes,” he replies, though his lips feel numb and his legs even more so as he stands. Jankily he stuffs all of the pictures in his right pant pocket. “I’ll be going to bed now. Thank you—”
“Jason, sir,” the man gives a shallow nod, barely an inclination of his head, as he steps both into the study and to the side, leaving the exit open for Bruce to walk through. “Do try to rest, sir. If not for yourself, at least for your mother.”
Heat rises to his cheeks, a mixture of shame, guilt and embarrassment over the butler aide’s words. The man means no harm, he tells himself. He’s doing his job looking over the new master of the house. He’s taking care of Bruce and his mother under Alfred’s careful, watchful eye.
On his way out, he stops when he’s right by Jason’s side. He’s only a handful of inches shorter than the aide. With practiced ease he ignores the way his stomach flips upon the realization. Outside, rain doesn’t let up and they can both hear the explosion of thunders as they roll and cut the sky in two. Yet it is as though time stops for the moment they are standing next to each other—Bruce looking up at Jason, Jason looking down at Bruce. He looks just so familiar. He looks like someone he used to know so well.
His head throbs again.
Bruce is the first to look away, muttering good night under his breath as he hurries to his bedroom, leaving the study and the strange man behind.