Chapter Text
Wayne Manor has stood almost as long as Gotham itself. From the outside, it looks like a haunted house: all dark stone and shadows with lives of their own.
Every so often, someone “has to ask” about the rumors that the building is haunted. A nosy reporter. A drunken socialite. A paranormal YouTuber.
Outwardly, Bruce Wayne laughs them off, dismissing the idea out of hand. It's not his secret to tell.
The reality is that Wayne Manor is much warmer and more welcoming to those who reside there than it is to outsiders. Laughter echoes through the halls. Little faces peer out of the windows, waiting to welcome him home.
That's not to say there are no ghosts.
But they don't haunt the Manor.
They make it a home.
Bruce doesn't meet his first ghost until adulthood.
And even then, he doesn't meet him in the Manor.
After his parents’ death, Bruce swore he was going to stop crime in Gotham. His ideas on how he would do this were… ambitious to say the least.
Thankfully, Alfred talked him down from dressing like a superhero and beating up bad guys. Fun in an eight-year-old’s imagination, but wildly impractical in reality.
Instead, they had many long discussions about why people might turn to crime. As Bruce grew, he began to understand why his mother devoted herself to charity and his father worked at the hospital despite not needing to. They had the means to help. They felt it was their responsibility to do so. Now it's Bruce's turn.
So he built upon the foundations they put in place. The Martha Wayne Foundation and The Thomas Wayne Foundation might not be as cathartic as punching criminals in the face. But they’re making a dent in crime, one soup kitchen, one hospital bill, one family at a time.
The downside is that in order to keep the charities running, Bruce has to keep the Wayne name in the public eye. Which means he has to make appearances at too many galas and gallery openings. Polite conversation with Gotham’s elite is enough to make Bruce wish he'd followed his childhood dream. He wonders if it's too late to take to the streets as a masked man like Zorro.
Occasionally, he does get the chance to see something interesting. Tonight, Bruce Wayne is at Haly's circus, surrounded by a “who's who” of the city's most important people. The twinkling lights, laughing children, and smell of popcorn take Bruce back to his childhood in a way that brings a smile to his face. The mayor shakes his hand as Vicki Vale begins to edge her way through the crowds towards him, dictaphone in hand.
Despite the company, Bruce finds himself enjoying the show. It's the most fun he's had at one of these outings in years. The clowns, strongmen, and jugglers are incredible, but they have nothing on the family of trapeze artists who come on as the final act. The Flying Graysons.
The family seems to defy gravity. Nobody can tear their eyes away. A toddler a few rows in front of Bruce is frozen with popcorn halfway to his mouth, a wide grin brightening his tiny face.
Bruce watches with his heart in his throat as the smallest Grayson somersaults four times mid-air, before stretching his arms out and being caught by his mother and father.
Then the rope snaps, and mother, father, and son go tumbling to the ground.
The audience screams.
The toddler drops his popcorn on the floor.
Bruce can't breathe.
The crowd presses in from all sides. It's too loud. Bruce feels like he can smell blood and gunpowder, even though he knows there is no gun here. There's popcorn scattered across the ground. In the dim light, it seems to shimmer like the ghost of Martha Wayne's pearls.
There's a gap in the tent.
Bruce manages to slip through it, away from the panicking mob around him.
He sinks to the floor of the muddy circus grounds and tries to remember his breathing exercises. Bruce has seen a small army of therapists over the years, and he's already making plans to see when his latest one can squeeze him in… When he hears crying.
His first thought is that maybe the toddler he saw earlier got split up from his family. Bruce pushes down his own fear and goes to investigate.
He doesn't find the small child with the popcorn.
Instead, the pale form of the boy from the trapeze flickers in front of Bruce's eyes as he turns the corner. He's sobbing loudly with his arms wrapped around himself.
One second, his red, yellow, and green uniform is bright and whole. The next, it's torn and bloodied.
Everything in Bruce tells him to run.
He finds himself stepping forward.
Whether this child is a ghost or something else, he's still a child. Bruce won't leave him alone and scared.
“Hello?” Bruce keeps his voice soft and gentle as he can manage.
The boy turns slowly to face him. Bruce can see right through his (bloody) tear-stained face to the circus caravans beyond. He says nothing, just sniffs and rubs at his nose with one (bruised and bleeding) arm.
“Do you need help?” Bruce asks.
“Yes…” The boy's voice seems to echo around them. It's a whisper on the wind and a thunderous roar in Bruce's head. It makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Bruce takes another step towards the boy before crouching in front of him.
“I lost my mom and dad,” the boy says. Goosebumps prickle across Bruce's arms. “We were all together and now they're gone.”
Bruce is completely out of his depth. He decides to approach the situation the same way he would with any other child.
“Maybe we can look for them together?”
The boy smiles. It's a bright (broken) grin. Full of (missing) teeth.
“What do they look like?”
The boy rocks back on his heels. “They're acrobats like me! We match.” He gestures to his leotard.
The sound of his voice makes Bruce feel like someone is pouring ice water down his spine. He fights the urge to shiver.
“The Flying Graysons, right?” he asks.
The boy takes a sweeping bow and doesn't flicker at all.
“That's us! Did you see us?”
Bruce nods enthusiastically. “You were incredible!”
“Did you know only three people in the whole world can do a quadruple somersault?” the little Grayson asks. “And I'm one of ‘em!”
He beams proudly.
“Wow!” Bruce doesn't have to fake his awe. “I think that was my favorite part of the act.”
The boy’s smile drops. The flickering comes back faster than ever.
“We fell.”
Bruce nods sadly.
The boy looks down at his bloody leotard. His twisted, broken limbs.
“I'm dead, aren't I?” his voice wavers.
“I think so, yes,” Bruce says apologetically.
For a second, everything is still and silent.
Then the little acrobat's jaw seems to unhinge and he screams. A terrible, heartbreaking wail that drowns out even the nearby police sirens. Every light on the circus grounds glows blindingly bright before they all cut out with a bang. Bruce ducks and covers his head against the shower of glass from the broken bulbs.
When he looks up, the boy is gone.
Bruce doesn't tell anyone about the encounter with the ghostly Grayson. By the time he gets home, he's halfway convinced he hallucinated the whole thing.
Until the little glass shards fall out of his hair in the shower.
He schedules an emergency therapy appointment and prepares to take his paranormal encounter to the grave. After all, who would believe him if he told them?
And then things get weird.
Around two weeks after Haly's Circus leaves Gotham, the temperature in the Manor plummets. It's summer, but Bruce can see his breath as he makes his way through the hallways to breakfast.
“Good morning, Master Bruce,” Alfred greets him from the kitchen. “I don't suppose you've seen the good spatula anywhere?”
Bruce freezes. Blinks. He doesn't touch anything in the kitchen. Alfred banned him after the third pan fire.
“No?”
Alfred sighs and places Bruce's breakfast in front of him. He turns to rummage through the drawers.
“I could have sworn it had been washed and put away,” he grumbles. “And yet this morning, it is nowhere to be seen.”
That's when Bruce notices something red on top of the fridge. He reaches up and grasps around blindly.
It's Alfred's turn to blink mutely when Bruce presents him with the silicone spatula.
“Now how on earth…” he murmurs.
Bruce just shrugs and eats his bacon.
Over the next couple of days, the lights start going out, but only in the rooms Bruce spends the most time in.
“I'll call out an electrician,” Alfred says when Bruce remarks on it.
The television, which had started playing a news report on the investigation into the Graysons’ deaths, explodes.
“...I think that would be for the best.” Bruce agrees.
The electrician finds nothing wrong.
“The wiring’s pretty good for the age of the building,” he tells them. “Best I can figure, you got a bad batch of bulbs and a faulty TV. You'd have to contact the manufacturer for that, though.”
Alfred thanks him and shows him to the door.
Bruce frowns, remembering the little Grayson’s wail, and the darkness it brought to the circus.
The next few days are a whirlwind of exhausted frustration.
Bruce has to bring flashlights everywhere as more and more lights go out.
But he can't put the flashlights down because the second he turns his back on them, they disappear.
Alfred suggests that maybe Bruce has just forgotten where he put them down.
Bruce replies with a pointed glance between the spatula in Alfred's hand and the space at the top of the fridge.
Alfred raises an eyebrow but concedes the point.
Like the spatula, the flashlights inevitably turn up in high up spaces. The top of the fridge seems to be a favorite spot, but they also turn up on bookshelves in the library and various chandeliers. Bruce swears he hears giggling when he has to bring in ladders to get them down.
Bruce hasn't slept well since his last trip to the Monarch Theater, but recently he's been waking up from nightmares several times a night.
It's the second time he's woken up tonight, and he's counting breaths, grounding himself so he can try and get back to sleep, when he hears it.
“He'd fly through the air with the greatest of ease…”
Bruce jolts upright. A cold sweat spreads across his skin.
He tiptoes out of his room and down the hallway, following the sound.
“The daring young man on the flying trapeze…”
Bruce freezes as he approaches the grand staircase.
There in the chandelier, kicking his little legs in the air, is his circus ghost.
“Hello,” Bruce says.
The chandelier lights turn on, just a little. The dim lights like a halo around the acrobat.
“Oh,” he says, as his legs stop swinging. “Hi?”
Bruce smiles softly, even as blank eyes turn in his direction. He's just a child.
“You don't happen to have any of my flashlights up there, do you?” Bruce asks, tilting his head.
The ghost grins at him.
“I might do,” he giggles.
“I might need them to get back through to bed,” Bruce says with a shrug.
The boy stops smiling. The lights dim again.
“I'm sorry,” he whispers. “I didn't mean to break things.”
“I know,” Bruce reassures him.
“I didn't mean to do it at the circus either.”
Bruce isn't sure if it's the lights or the boy that flicker this time, but there are definitely tears in those empty eyes.
“But I couldn't stop!” the ghost gasps out as the tears start falling. “And it was scaring all my friends! Even Zitka didn't like it when I went near.”
He sniffs loudly. “Mr Haly started talking about ghosts and bad luck and something called an ex-or-cist.” He pronounces the word slowly and carefully.
“I don't know what that is, but it sounds scary,” the child admits, and for a fraction of a second when Bruce looks at him, he's all twisted limbs and bloody leotard again. “I didn't want to stay there anymore, but I didn't know where to go and then…”
He goes so quiet that if Bruce couldn't see the lights brighten and dim rhythmically, like breathing, he'd think he'd vanished again.
“And then?” Bruce asks gently.
“Then I remembered… after the… after I…” he pauses. “The first night. You spoke to me. And you were so nice.”
He glances down at Bruce. “And then I was here.” He shrugs.
He's trying to be brave, Bruce thinks, but his bottom lip is wobbling.
“Well,” Bruce says. “I don't think I properly introduced myself last time we met.”
The boy shakes his head slightly.
Bruce smiles. “My name is Bruce Wayne. This is my home, and you are welcome here as long as you like.”
Because he's not going to send a scared child out on his own, even if the child in question is dead.
“Do you mean that?” the ghost asks.
“Yes.”
The boy somersaults off the chandelier and lands next to Bruce.
“My name is Dick,” he smiles. “Thank you, Mr Wayne.”
Dick throws his arms around Bruce in a surprisingly strong hug. Bruce ignores the chill and hugs him back, stroking his hair until the sun starts rising and Dick disappears from his arms.
It takes him forty minutes in the shower to feel warm again.
Alfred doesn't believe Bruce when he first mentions Dick. Not that Bruce blames him.
It doesn't help that Dick thinks it's funny to hide when Alfred enters the room. He doubles up laughing at Bruce's exaggerated exasperation afterward.
Then the news comes on again. The police have arrested someone for the murder of the Graysons.
Dick sees his own smiling face on the TV screen and freezes.
“No!” he screeches, putting his hands over his ears. Bruce switches the TV off, but it's too late. “Nononononono–”
Alfred enters the room quietly just in time for–
“NO!”
Every light on the first floor shatters.
Dick looks up, guiltily. “Sorry, Bruce. Sorry, Alfred.”
Alfred, to his credit, doesn't so much as blink. “Don't you worry yourself, Master Dick.”
Dick rubs at his eyes, and Bruce can see the moment Alfred spots him flicker into the fallen acrobat. The brief shock and furious empathy that passes over the butler's face.
“I'll get started on clearing up the glass,” he says. “I'm sure Master Bruce is trying his best to help you with your new abilities.”
Bruce is.
The problem is that he's not sure which books are helpful and which are fiction masquerading as paranormal science. It's not an area he previously had any interest in.
He asks experts and “experts” online and over the phone.
They all give him the same advice.
“Having a ghost in your home is dangerous.”
They tell him to perform an exorcism or have a priest bless the house. A few offer to smudge the Manor for free.
Bruce turns them all down with varying levels of politeness.
Eventually, an elderly medium says, “I won't help you endanger yourself… but if you're dead set on this, you might want to look up John Constantine.”
Then she hangs up the phone.
Bruce does look up John Constantine.
He pays for the man's flight from London after a brief phone call, but makes it clear that he won't pay for anything else if Constantine so much as suggests he gets rid of the ghost.
Bruce doesn't know what he expected from a man whose website declares him an “occult detective”. Somehow, he isn't surprised that Constantine looks like he hasn't slept or showered in weeks and smells like a dive bar.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asks.
Bruce is about to reply that, yes, actually, he does mind, when Constantine lights his cigarette anyway.
Less than thirty seconds later, Alfred has lifted it straight from his mouth.
“Mr Constantine,” he says sharply. “If you must indulge in such a filthy habit, I do insist you do it outside.”
Constantine smirks and tips an invisible hat. “No problem, Jeeves.”
“Alright, Dick,” Bruce says gently, before Alfred can eviscerate their… guest. “You can come out now.”
Constantine takes one look at the small child in his flickering leotard, glances up at the lights that dim as Dick scuffs his feet, and nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “I think we can figure something out here.”
He turns to Bruce.
“Might be pricey, but you can afford it, right?”
Without waiting for an answer, he pats Bruce on the shoulder and announces, “I'm nipping out for a fag. Won't be long!”
Then he leaves.
For half an hour.
When Constantine finally returns, Bruce and Alfred watch as he talks to Dick. The questions he asks don't seem particularly helpful to Bruce. But then again, he's not an expert. Maybe Constantine is learning something useful.
Dick performs a whole routine using the chandelier and the banisters, and the wide open floor space in the foyer. He grins and bows when Constantine nods and says, “Not bad, kid.”
Then he adds, “Too bad you fell before you could finish at the circus.”
Dick freezes mid-bow. The lights in the chandelier burst one by one. Constantine stands, unfazed, in the circle of glass.
Then Dick vanishes, and Constantine turns to face Bruce and Alfred, wiping glass shards from his shoulder as he does so.
Before he can speak, Bruce punches him in the face.
“Yeah, I probably deserved that one,” Constantine admits, wiping the blood from his nose. “Don't worry. Your ghost kid's still here.”
“Forgive us if we are not reassured, Mr Constantine,” Alfred scowls.
Constantine shrugs. “You told me not to get rid of the ghost. I'm not going to get rid of the ghost. I ain't risking my paycheck.”
Bruce doesn't trust this man as far as he can throw him. He does believe he wouldn't throw his money away like that.
“So, little ghost-boy has emotional regulation problems,” Constantine says. “As long as his anger is getting the better of him, this is going to keep happening.”
He pauses for a second. “You might wanna try… I dunno. Mindfulness or some shit. Help him get his feelings under control.”
Bruce and Alfred share an incredulous look.
Constantine hands Bruce a piece of paper.
“My invoice for the consult.”
The number is absurd. There's no way Bruce is paying this.
“Thirty days to pay, or I come back,” Constantine explains. “And I ain't gonna be nice about it next time.”
Bruce fumes.
“Right. See you later, then!” Constantine gives a wave and lights a cigarette on his way out the door.
“That. Was a mistake,” Bruce sighs.
“Indeed,” Alfred agrees.
Since Bruce doesn't have any better ideas, he decides to try mindfulness.
He starts by researching child therapy and emotional regulation. Obviously, he can't take Dick to a traditional therapist. Bruce can’t risk someone misunderstanding – or worse, trying to make Dick disappear again.
But therapy was useful when Bruce was a scared and grieving child. And that's what Dick is, even if his ways of showing it are different.
They run into problems when Bruce tries to go through the child therapy workbooks with Dick.
Firstly, it's hard for Dick to move a pencil on his own. Stealing flashlights and spatulas is apparently a completely different skill from manipulating a writing implement. More often than not, the pen or pencil flies across the room.
Bruce does the writing for Dick. The boy hovers over his shoulder and tells him what to put down.
But that leads to the second problem.
“What can I do if I'm feeling angry?” Bruce reads.
“Um…” Dick says. “Uh… I don't–”
Several seconds of silence follow. Bruce turns around. Dick is gone.
It's a pattern that repeats when they try mindfulness exercises or guided meditation.
“It's just so boring,” Dick complains. “My brain keeps thinking of different things and then I go poof and end up somewhere else.”
Bruce turns back to the internet for help.
He joins a parenting forum for children with additional support needs. He figures Dick, being a ghost, definitely qualifies.
Not that he tells the other forum users that his child’s disability is the fact that he's incorporeal. After he posts, most of them seem to assume Dick has ADHD.
Bruce thinks they might not be far from the truth with that one.
The most useful advice comes from NeurospicyMomma:
you've got to meet him where he's at. it sounds like he's at his best when he's moving. let him move while you work.
SimonSaysStim adds:
It might be hard for him to name his feelings and what he can do. You can help him with that. ‘It looks like gymnastics makes you happy. Maybe moving around could help get rid of the angry feelings.’ Just an example, obvs.
Meet him where he's at. Notice Dick's feelings and name them for him.
Bruce can do that.
The handymen Bruce hires might think he's crazy, but they don't blink when the billionaire installs a trapeze in one of his mansion’s ballrooms.
Bruce pays them extra for their discretion.
Dick is overjoyed with the new equipment. He puts on a show for Bruce and Alfred the second the builders leave.
They applaud as Dick flips and twirls. It's the most solid Bruce has ever seen him.
Alfred shows up to Bruce's study one afternoon and hands him a parcel.
“I saw this online, Master Bruce,” he explains. “I thought Master Dick could use it to practice control with the lighting.”
Curious, Bruce opens the package. It's a light-up pegboard.
Dick is excited to find that moving and placing the little light pegs is much easier than writing was. It lets him practice only lighting up certain lights at a time.
The number of bulbs needing replacement in the manor decreases drastically.
Bruce frowns at Constantine’s invoice. He hates to admit it, but he was right. Emotional regulation worked.
Bruce transfers the outrageous sum to Constantine's bank account 29 days after his visit to the Manor.