Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She tries not to get stuck in the loops. She does, even if her dad doesn’t think she does, she tries. On Monday, Barbara spends six hours of her night staring at the gray, popcorn ceiling of her townhouse, ignoring the boxes that sit in masses around her. She likes the new townhouse better than the last apartment—she was always up all night, there, listening to every sound through the paper-thin walls—but she’s definitely still being overcharged. It’s nothing much to look at, this little yellow-y townhouse on the edge of what her dad would call Respectable Gotham. Barbara has tried to convince him many times that these words are a myth he’s made up. Her dad remains pretty resistant to the idea. The overcharging doesn’t bother her, because, frankly, she’s been putting in Bruce’s credit card information at every rental she’s had since she caught on to his identity, and Bruce either doesn’t notice, doesn’t care, or some combination of the two. Barbara's guess is that it's somewhere between the two, because someone has to be sending the ostentatious sets of chocolates and flowers every time she moves—and everyone else in her life already knows she gives the chocolates to Dinah. 

Barbara tries not to get stuck in the loops. At her last apartment she’d heard every life buzzing through the walls, melting through the ducts like sludge; maybe she called her dad hyperventilating about black mold on the ceiling, maybe when her dad got there the ceiling was a perfect eggshell color and she’d sobbed into his side, drinking in the familiar scent of gunpowder and Old Spice and the diner out on Neal & 5th. She checked that the stove was off five times before she ever left and six before she ever went to sleep, once a week she took a duster and inspected the ceiling, excruciatingly aware of all the places she doesn’t notice, anymore, from her chair. When she was crying into her dad’s side all she’d wanted was to be tucked under his chin, and it’s a wonder, how little things happen when you move differently from almost everyone else you know. On Tuesday, in her dusty new townhouse, Barbara only checks the stove twice before she goes to sleep, but she’s up the whole night, yet she doesn’t hoist herself into her chair to make sure the stove is off. She decides if the stove is on, at least there’s a fire between her and the front door, and the door is the vessel, isn’t it?

On Wednesday, she installs a security system of her own design. It reports suspicious activity to the flip phone she keeps in a bag underneath her chair, reads out warnings through mechanized code words, dumps it into her voicemails. She doesn’t sleep that night because, one by one, nearly every bat in Gotham swings by her house, all individually checking in, each seemingly convinced they’re the first to have the idea. Barbara realizes she forgot to mention the system to anyone. Dick trips the alarm twice, so she gets two voicemails from the system and two blurry, indistinct, hilarious photos, which will be useful blackmail if she ever needs Damian’s help with something. It should feel reassuring that even her dad trips it. It's somehow not reassuring. What really ventilates the pressure are her ceremonies; checking the stove, and checking the ceilings, and listening for jackals laughing in the night.

On Thursday, she’s back in action. Moving is nothing. The door is nothing. There’s a job to be done.

“There’s an active sweep three blocks down from the abandoned cannery, Hood,” she says. She’s started to clip her comm microphone to her shirt, so she can sound clear and type at the same time; not every night is catastrophe. Sometimes, they’re only doing chores, as they call it: repairing potholes and traffic signs the city refuses to; hauling off trash the city refuses to; distributing Narcan the city refuses to; there's a host of livid issues the city refuses to lift a finger over. It's not always Scarecrow breaking into a water treatment plant to test his newest terror chemical through the tap.

“Fuck me, why do I have to go? It smells like shit that close to the bay,” Jason whines, voice rendered tinny by the incredibly shitty microphone in his deeply silly helmet.

Barbara snorts. “Because you have built-in nose plugs, Boy Genius. You’ll be yelling at cops, you won’t even notice.”

“I think it’s noticeable even during high exertion periods, personally,” Tim says.

Jason guffaws, a snorting-wheezing noise manipulated through the helmet's voicebox. “High exertion periods? Can you talk like you’ve been alive on planet Earth before?”

“To the cannery,” Barbara intones.

“Alright, alright, alright, I’m unwanted, I got it, nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms—”

“If I tell you I love you will you stop occupying the communication lines with your insecure ennui,” Bruce snaps.

A third of the time when Bruce snaps, he’s pulled the pin and thrown a grenade into everyone’s faces, and the fallout is nuclear. The other two thirds of the time, Bruce has said the most absurd sentence with such seething irritation that laughing at him is the only possible response. The communication lines go frizzy with so much mockery at once that Barbara mutes all her idiots briefly and turns to glance behind her at Cass, who’s been in a sour, foul mood on account of being benched for a sprained wrist.

“They are in dire straits without you, my God,” Barbara says. “Cassie, they’re useless.”

Cass is in her own wheeled chair, lazily spinning it in circles with her foot. Benching goes about as well for Cass as trying to bathe a cat. She’s been in the same gray hoodie and sweatpants—which Barbara’s pretty sure were stolen from Dick, because she also used to like that hoodie, frankly—for two days. If Barbara’s in play as Oracle, Cass has been glued to her side.

“Always true,” she says, glaring at the screen above Barbara’s head. “Need me always.”

“Maybe not always. You should sometimes sleep.”

Cass flashes her teeth. “I am resentful,” she says, carefully enunciating each word.

Barbara chuckles. With her choppy hair hanging around her face, slightly greasy, framing an intense pout, Cass paints a pitiful picture. “Of what?”

“You don’t.”

Barbara frowns. “I don’t... what?”

“Sleep,” Cass growls. “You tell me to do things. Then you don’t. Then is funny when I don’t. Because I am funny.”

Barbara lets out a breath of air. “Cassie. Can I have a second to tell them I’ll be offline?”

Cass jerks her head, and twirls the chair around so her back is facing Barbara. Sometimes she’s so childish it almost makes Barbara smile, because it’s almost like her lost childhood winks back through her; of course Cass would be the fighter to claw her childhood back where she can. There’s something heavy settling in her chest, though, a dread of the conversation she’s about to have.

Barbara pivots and switches the line of communication on.

“—not, strictly speaking, definitionally, what ennui even is,” Tim is saying.

“You just used the word ‘definitionally’, son, why should I trust you?” Bruce counters.

Jason groans. “What was just done to me was a literal war crime, and the only thing you guys have to discuss is verbiage? Fuck you people.”

“I was stating the obvious,” Bruce says.

“You really just don’t stop,” Steph gasps.

“Holy shit, Bee, stop digging,” Dick hisses. “What’s the first thing you do when you’re at the bottom of a ditch? You stop fucking digging, that’s what you do, oh my God, put the shovel down. I don’t think Hood wants to talk about his feelings—”

Bruce hums. “The obvious fact was that I love him. That’s the obvious fact I was stating. I don’t know what obvious fact everyone else thought I was stating.”

“Oh my God, pops, I was trying to be funny, not go to therapy, and those things are inversely fucking related!” Jason shouts.

“Okay, you guys are officially on your own, I don’t think you need me,” Barbara says. “I’ll be offline, use emergency protocol if any of you fuck anything up.”

She cuts the line before any of them respond, because everyone in that fucking family is specifically good at drawing people into antics. There's a gravitational pull to their drama by now. Barbara takes a moment to compose herself, breathe in deeply, before she twists her chair and turns back to Cass. To her surprise, there are tears streaking down Cass’ face, glinting in the light. Barbara pumps her arms and wheels across the room, over the metal grating and the wood ramp that caps what used to be stairs, lined with sandpaper grips.

“Cassandra, don’t cry,” Barbara says, quietly, as she’s approaching. “What’s wrong?”

Cass glares at her with damp, dark eyes, and swipes a sleeve roughly over her face. Pink pinpricks of color fan across her wide, heart-shaped face, her monolids puffy and swollen. She’s crying in this arrested way, where she’s cutting off the sound; no wet gasping, no great heave of air, only this jagged, painful rhythm.

“Don’t be—don’t be sick,” Cass gasps, and then she slips out of her chair and spills onto the floor, pressing her face to Barbara’s unfeeling knees.

Most of the time, Barbara's breath catches in her throat, if anyone touches her chair or brushes her legs; it's happened a few times, that total strangers have seen her manipulating her chair in public and simply grabbed the shortened handles, moving her against her will. To the able-bodied her chair, its rich, purple paint, and the tri-colored bats Damian painted over the lightweight metal, it's an object. People feel entitled to objects. It's become an extension of Barbara's body, a nerve-less structure attached to her nerve-less legs. She doesn't mind when it's family, though. Her idiots are the people who respect her boundaries the most, meaning that, sometimes, they almost carve a space around her, anticipating an amount of space Barbara really doesn't need. Cass is, perhaps, the opposite. For a moment the only thing Barbara can feel is rage, that she can’t feel this weight, that no matter how much she screws her eyes and tries, she never will—it was stolen. It was ripped out of her spine through time.

Barbara reaches down and tilts Cass’ head up by her chin. “What do you mean, sunshine?”

“You’re so tired,” Cass whispers.

Barbara recoils as though she’s been struck. “I—I’m... in the middle of moving, Cass. Of course I am.”

“Not what I mean,” she says, curling up her fists. She knocks one against her temple. “Here. Don’t want to lose you. Please sleep. Stop.”

Barbara’s mind is whirling. “I—I... okay. If you’re scared. For you.”

Cass cries herself out, hugging Barbara’s legs to her chest, and it’s the first time Barbara realizes that, to Cass, she’s never been different—that's why Cass is different. The knowledge sears through her. The chair, the fact that her legs no longer move, they’re not to be avoided, they’re not open wounds in the conversation, she isn’t the most obvious thing in the room. There’s something disconcerting about the realization, buried in the idea that she’s lost Upright Barbara forever; but perhaps Upright Barbara is equally as false as Respectable Gotham. She wonders if Dad thinks of her Upright Barbara the same way she thinks of his Respectable Gotham.

After a long while, Barbara says, “Do you want to see the new place?”

Cass blinks at her, and nods.

Barbara drives them both to her new townhouse in her side-entry wheelchair van, chattering nervously on the way about different decoration ideas she can imagine other new-movers having. In reality, she hasn’t had any decoration ideas, she’s had ideas for places to hide weapons. She’s really only decided against glass-topped tables and the first thing she did was stick a camera over her doorstep. What Barbara’s imagined instead of a life here are new ceremonies: she’s going to check the fire alarms twice a week; on her bathroom mirror she’s weighed her weekly set of checks and balances, this list she staples her sanity to. When they pull in, Cass slips out of the passenger seat, opening the space so Barbara can unfold her wheelchair—tucked in the middle, between them—and Barbara lifts herself into it, before rolling backwards onto the side-entry lift. Barbara prattles uselessly as they take the brick path to the front door, as she fumbles with her keys, as they pass under her camera.

“It’s bigger than my last place,” Barbara says, flicking on the garish overhead lights.

“Tall,” Cass says, smiling at the peaked ceiling.

“Yeah,” Barbara says back, with a smile.

Without a couch, or a second bed, or an air mattress, Barbara simply elects to let Cass share her bed for the night. Cass politely mans stovetop ramen while Barbara turns the bed into a clutter-castle of blankets and pillows. Cass doesn’t watch her while she pulls herself into the bed, and then, Cass readily snuggles against her, burrowing close into her side, shoving ramen into her mouth with her trapped elbow. The paralysis, the pocked scars from old sores, these things don’t phase her. Sometimes Cass just needs to be a girl, in need of reminding that the people who love her aren’t going to crumble—it’s nice, to not have to be alone. Barbara even sleeps in.

Chapter Text

Sometimes it blurs together, after a certain point; a stack of bodies buzzing with corpses trips into the overstimulating, and the gore buries itself. It’s easier to ignore the way it gnaws inside of him when he’s awake, moving, consistently burying the intrusions of cracked skulls and the festering, sweet smell of death, acrid and flowering. Bruce’s nightmares have turned scarlet. He sees the mossy, maggot-bound corpses of his parents reaching out for him—this is hell—and then the rats squeal and tumble beneath his feet. They’re clawing through him with their bony white hands, skeletal fingers grasping his guts and wrenching, and Bruce writhes against the pain. Yellow sunlight splits the ceiling and it crumbles in, and Bruce thinks, in panic, that Gotham City is splitting into pieces, and he thrashes against the rope binding his wrists.

“—right, alright, then, let’s not have all this, now,” a voice says, and there are hands on him, hands, and in a second Bruce snaps his head forward.

There’s a loud scoff, which sounds, distinctly, like Alfred. Bruce blinks at the endless yellow and whips his head back and forth, scrabbling for a sense of the exits: in the process, he realizes he’s in the Manor, the first floor den; the scoff is most definitely Alfred; and the pain is real, but the cause is not. Bruce’s chest heaves. It’s like the air is too wet to breathe.

“I hope you’ve not pulled those stitches,” Alfred says, after sucking his teeth. “Good afternoon, Master Bruce. You were last with us, oh, say three or four days ago. You’ve been through a bit of a nasty withdrawal, I don’t expect you’ll recall much. I’ve not the foggiest idea what precisely you were dosed with, by the by. There’s a right few synthetic hallucinogenics in this world.”

“Three or four days,” Bruce repeats.

Alfred, dressed down in tan khakis and a maroon sweater, leans against the edge of the couch. He lays a hand on Bruce’s shoulder, and, beneath its warm, light weight, Bruce slowly lays back down. He wonders, idly, why his stomach is cramping with hunger, and why there’s this pulling sensation in his arm, and he taps around only to find himself hooked up to an IV pole set up by the couch. His intestines have been replaced with molten lead. Bruce feels out the edges of a thick wad of bandages covering his stomach.

“You were unconscious the entire time. You’ve also beat an infection, perhaps from having open wounds in a sewer for a week, who’s to say,” Alfred says, and the way his thumb strokes Bruce’s shoulder belies his nonchalant tone.

Bruce scrubs a hand over his face. His mouth feels like cotton, and his skin feels gritty with dried sweat. “Sounds... eventful.”

Alfred snorts, and cocks an eyebrow. “I’ll warn you—presently—that your boys are going to be irrepressible. You were rather ill, and they were sick with worry, they were. They’ve bed down in here with you every night, like fawns. Mister Kent’s been by, as well, the lad’s dropped off a few pies, now. I hadn’t informed him of the precise nature of your injury—busy as I was with all this keeping you alive business—so you won’t be able to eat them before they spoil. You lost a bit of intestine to that infection, alas.”

Bruce blinks at the ceiling. He struggles to come up with a coherent reply. “Surely I can’t need all of it. Some parts of it have to be spare, I think.”

Alfred’s hand starts to move in circles over Bruce’s shoulder. “You’ve done us all a real horror and here you are, a pursuant of a career in comedy. I’m chuffed. Ridiculous man. I see now you’ve not caught a word I’ve said. What’s your question, sir?”

“Boys?” Bruce croaks, wincing at the hopeful mewl of it.

Alfred smiles. “Richard’s here, yes. I’m rather glad of it. He’s kept Master Jason occupied—I didn’t let slip more details than necessary, but that child knows a drug withdrawal when he sees one, he certainly does. They’re not about to be leaving you unless America calls the nuclear war back on. Make your peace with it now, Master Bruce.”

Bruce moves to sit himself up and grimaces against the snarl of pain his abdomen’s become. He’s exhausted, like all the tendons inside of him have been unstrung, unwound, reduced to stock inside of him. Alfred stands and claps his hands on his thighs and searches about for a pillow, stuffing it behind Bruce’s back when he does. The first floor den has incidentally become a sort of crashpad, for harder weeks, or major injuries. Bruce glances around, and finds blankets and pillows strewn about, clutches of cups, all the signs of a lived-in room.

“I didn’t realize Dick would,” Bruce mumbles, rubbing his chest against the disconcerting feeling of acid crawling up his nerves.

Alfred scoffs again, louder, pointed. “Because you’re ridiculous,” he says. “If he cared at all for my opinion of it, so’s he.”

Bruce’s eyes drift closed. He jerks when the backs of his eyelids offer a fine screen to project the rotten, twisted faces of his parents’ corpses, lurid with heat, skin and flesh melting down their bones, the spittle-moaning of their eternal disappointment. He blinks at the long cast of yellow cutting across the ceiling.

“Is it... morning,” he rasps.

“What to do with a lad who doesn’t recognize the morning sun,” Alfred mutters, under his breath. “Yes, yes, I suppose you’re not overly familiar. I’ll walk you through it. That yellow thing you’re seeing is something called ‘daylight.’ I realize this all horrible and foreign to you, but it’ll—”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Bruce wheezes, a hand pressed over the wad of bandages. It’s like there’s hot needles being dragged through his nerves, every time his abdomen twitches and pulls at the knot of complex sutures, tugging him into different pieces.

Alfred’s hand moves from Bruce’s shoulder, to his hair, his hands carding through it gently. These are the gestures that tell Bruce that the gaps in his memory were the worst of it, and that the boys aren’t the only people around he’s scared, recently. The gesture is comforting, even when every touch is almost overwhelming, through the cringing skin-hurt of a wound spilling into all the body’s nerves. They stay like this for a while. Bruce’s eyes drift shut and he doesn’t smell festering bodies, the ammonia, the shit, the squealing rats, the squeaking bugs, the way massacred flesh is so strong it cleaves to the roof of the mouth, never leaves. He remembers strikes from lengths of rebar, becomes aware of the odd, motley patterning of bruises peppered over him. Bruce exhales shakily.

“I’d think about it now,” Alfred murmurs. “The moment I open that door, the boys will be barreling through it. I’ve attempted to instill a bit of rationality, but I can’t say I’ve been successful.”

“Right,” Bruce breathes, blinking at the light.

There’s nothing to think about, after a certain point; it’s just designed to hurt. There’s only so many words to express the disgust of kneeling on top of rotting bodies, and only so many words to express the helplessness of being strung up and tortured on hallucinogenics. Harder still is the idea of expressing how the two had mixed, the droning quality of the mound of his parents’ graves telling him, we’re so disappointed in you, Bruce. Judging by the shadows underneath Alfred’s eyes, and the slight tremor in his hands, though, Bruce guesses that Alfred’s already overheard everything rattling around Bruce’s skull. Maybe there are times where the words don’t even matter. If Bruce pushes himself upright, wincing against the pain, and finds himself wordlessly crying against Alfred’s shoulder, perhaps that’s the part that matters.

Chapter Text

The same-style houses with the cleaned-out gutter-places and the rolled-out lawns in front of them are filled with venom, Cass decides.

The darkness on this coastline is eager, and she’s seen a lot of kinds of darkness before, has self-trained the art of disappearing inside of the velvet black into the world where strength is measured in the callouses on her hands. The loping gray pathways of the same-style house kingdom are flecked with too-tall violet light towers. They’re every half mile. Cass keeps a count of how far she’s gone, to tell Cain, to make sure Cain knows that she’s been training hard while he was gone and he doesn’t have to worry, she will turn herself into steel. Cass can do this on her own. Her bare feet conquer the asphalt. Her bloody footsteps invite challengers. She will lead them back and bite off their faces, like the mantis females her little brother—dark brown eyes, dark, warm-toned skin, little clammy hands that cradle dog noses, cow cheeks—tells her about. The warmth creatures Damian treasures make sense to her, sure, but nothing seems as sensible as an exoskeleton, and in the summer Alfred points the dancing green bodies out in the shrubs, through thickets of coral honeysuckle and silky dogwood, in the creeper vines tangling the back end of their big house.

The big houses here are different. They smell different. They smell like epoxy and wood pulp, like department store flavors; prowling by these houses, every door that’s opened, the air whisks by a scent that feels like opening the door to the Macy’s in St. Cloud Square midwinter, the wind stripping the chemical perfume scent with iron, oil, and dead fish. The people scuttling around these structures are pre-prepared people, with this strange attitude to hair that requires all lay flat and straight, with these clothes that they dance around friction. Cass has struggled to understand a lot of things about these strange American nesting dollhouses, but perhaps the most confusing is the class of people who behave allergic to dirt. Clothes are meant to be between the dirt and the body. These people only walk on concrete only in their snappy shoes.

It’s cold, and it's the holidays, and when it’s cold and the holidays there are lights on in just a few of the windows; her dad—the one she found—does this, puts a candle in the windows, even though the only people who will ever see are them and theirs already. New faces rarely wander out to their big house. These don’t feel like the times for wandering. Cass likes it when her dad tumbles around laying out the fire-bright candles, muttering about failing all traditions, all except this one. It makes sense that the tradition her dad adheres to is about lighting the dark. Here the towering guard lampposts and their odious violet light-noise drown the scant candles, because the night is no longer left to the dark, but to tubes of neon and glass bulbs that swallow the night sky. Where there are no candles, there are ostentatious glowing deer, and massive LED blazed red jackets. She hasn’t seen stars since Cain. Cass wonders why the people of these American nesting dollhouses want to feast on the stars. Are they not there to become—do they not light the way?

The scars that snake over every inch of her ache and inch. The more manicured bodies she passes—women with streaked, blonde highlights, and acrobatic shoes that propel them into the air, men with glittering gel-hair, children stuffed into stiff starch outfits—the more aware Cass is of every imperfection. Her unbrushed, greasy, choppy hair tickles her neck like biting ants, and the blood welling between her toes brings a hot flush of shame to her cheeks. Cass doesn’t want to look at her hands; shiny, pocked scars, raised burns, long, white lines that snake under her wrist. The people here, toddling out to their cars for jangling keys, for abandoned hoodies, for leftover bags, cut their eyes at her, draw together and whisper and point at her. This is what Cain would have wanted her to see, she thinks, her distance from all these normal bodies, her throat that has scarfed down rotting food to survive, her bones with their savage fissures. She was torn apart young and rebuilt into something utterly victorious. These people, she could crush them in the palm of her sneered-at hand—so why does it feel so wrong to breathe here? Why are they all watching her and her gilded scarlet march, as though she’s a passing over-large rat? They point, and they dial others on their bright phones, too big, too individually nuclear to every become stars.

The night gets colder, and several streets down she sees a canopy of red and blue flashing lights. For a long moment she stares at the canopy, fingers trembling, thinking of boots over crushed glass and the floodlights of a great bull-dozer crackling and hissing and spitting its way through tents and nailed-up boards and houses made of strung-up towels. Her mind spills out of her. The boots thunder around her, a hand hooks around her wrists, squeezing until it bruises, and then these men in blue drag her backwards in her nightmares. She feels her skull connect with concrete through time, hears the wry whispers as the men root through her only things, feels one of them pin her to the back-alley ground by her neck, abusing her shock. One hits their knees, and Cass’s real-time breathing speeds up as though these memories are the creeper that grows on her big house, and can still strangle her today. She could have killed these men with the glass underneath her. She could have cut out their eyes. Cass wasn’t the only one hiding there, in that tent colony, though, and she devours pain like a praying mantis, so she waited to smash their noses in until everyone had fled. The canopy of pain-lights ticks her breathing ever faster. She begins to run.

When she’s aware, next, sides heaving, when her soul lights back down on planet Earth, the same-style houses are gone, replaced with construction lots of emptiness, the terrifying shadow of great bulldozers. Cass doesn’t know where this place is, or where it leads; her feet are sore and her mouth is dry, and she shudders all over, quaking with the cold. She has the strange, distinct sense that Cain is here, lurking in every shadow. Cass turns out her pockets. She has nothing. She must steal water. There is a bodega on Neal & 5th that will turn a blind eye if she slips a bottle of water into her sleeve. The canopy is still searching for her. She wonders, in absent, silent, screaming horror, if she’s actually taken on the bat’s wings as her own, if she only imagined herself into someone Cain wouldn’t have wanted her to be, imagined a warm set of walls. What if she’s only been dreaming this nuisance-nonsense of victory and saving lives instead of grasping at broken glass all the time? She curls up in the emptiness of new development, in its wasteland of life, and wraps her arms around her knees and sobs into them.

After a long time alone, a black sedan chugs into the cul-de-sac. Nondescript. The plate has a bucking horse and a cowboy—Wyoming. Her people prefer the anonymity of fake plates. Cass scrubs her face and glares at it, but it just parks across the circle, and the person who ducks out is her dad. He moves naturally in the dark, like she does, because moving naturally in the dark comes from not wanting to look at yourself, or this is at least her theory. He avoids mirrors with his own face, loathes pictures, dislikes visibility, too. He walks differently than other people, quiet, simple, trying not to be seen. These things are reassuring; he is like no one else, so she sees him and knows it happened, her flight from death, her theft of a bat’s wings. She didn’t imagine her becoming. She has done it. The canopy men can’t come and get her anymore, she has family who now close rank around her like steel walls clattering down. Even her little mantis-loving brother, sweetly protective in his hidden way, gentle behind his teeth.

“May I?” her dad asks, standing six feet away.

Cass doesn’t know what he’s asking but doesn’t want to look at him to find out. She nods miserably. Her dad eases himself down, and she grins behind her hands because he does this because he is old, and she’s learned that this is a little funny. This is the thing to laugh at when there’s nothing else to laugh at.

“You should take my coat,” he says, shucking it off his own shoulders in such a way Cass doesn’t think he’s asking.

She lets him arrange his black wool coat over her shoulders. It smells like him, sweat and metal and the cleaning type smells that Alfred preens over. Cass huddles in it, ignoring the damp tears running down her face, hoping her dad doesn’t see a problem with them being there. The canopy of red and blue is still hovering, in the distance.

Her dad follows her gaze. “Al has a few friends who live through here,” he says. “They told him every jackass in Bristol was phoning the police about a ‘suspicious girl.’ I’m glad it’s you. I’ve been looking for you.”

“Oh,” Cass says, quietly.

“I’m angry for you,” he says. “Not at you.”

Cass nods. She had gotten this sense. Her dad has this strange anger, reserved mostly for the abstract, not the distinct; he doesn’t like being angry at people, but he loves being angry at almost anything else, like potholes or added lanes to highways. This, too, is reassuring, the idea that there is no failure she could commit that would scare him away, he would simply keep coming back with his coat, all too happy to bitch about the dollhouses.

Cass rubs her gritty eyes. “How long?”

“Six hours.”

“Sorry,” she says, because this feels like a long time.

Her dad shakes his head, a quick, sharp jerk. “Don’t be. It happens. You were only walking. What do you remember?”

Cass swallows. This could be information seeking. What she should respond with are details, locations, faces, reasons, motivations, the concrete viscera of decision-making, a path backwards to the viper that sent her fleeing for six hours. She doesn’t want to say any of these things, is the problem.

“Lost,” she says, “but they don’t want me here. Kept going.”

Her dad hums. “They don’t. That doesn’t make them right about you, that makes me right about them. Can I touch you?”

People do not touch her unless they want to hurt her, except for her family, these people she wants to live for. Except for her dad, who rarely even spars with her these days, because they both know the little secret that is—she wins more than he does, when they do. They are different. The rest of them, he is still teaching in the field, in some ways, all the time. He teaches her things like what it is like to have someone come and find you when your brain is too heavy to get out of bed. Cass nods.

Her dad carefully takes her face in his hands, using the edge of his longsleeve shirt the tear tracks on her face, brushing his rough knuckles against the ridge of her cheekbone. “You’re freezing,” he says. “Can I carry you?”

Cass’ throat closes. She tries to remember if Cain ever carried her when she was conscious, when she technically could walk under her own power. If it ever happened, she doesn’t remember it. She remembers Cain carrying her after teaching her what it was like to be shot with the American guns he loved more than her.

“Yes,” she whispers.

Her dad does this gingerly. He stands and stoops, one strong arm against her back and the other under her knees, and he carries her through the vast expanse of nothing and absence to the slowly-chugging car. He tucks her into the passenger’s seat, stuffing a ball of what looks like every hoodie Damian has ever forgotten in this car underneath her heels, propping up her sore feet. Then he closes her in and ducks around, sliding into the driver’s seat, dialing the vents and heat up as high as possible.

“There are police?” Cass asks, pointing at the distant, whirling lights with a finger. There’s a long, purple scar cutting up that hand.

“People here can be suspicious. They don’t like anything that challenges their sense of control. You haven’t put anyone in any danger.”

Cass’ throat closes. She struggles to swallow for a full minute, glaring at the window’s personal offense to her. “I don’t like them.”

Her dad’s hand closes over hers, thumbing the ragged scars over her knuckles. “I know.”

“They use girls as theirs,” she says, hoping her dad will understand what she means, the concept she’s trying to slice close to.

His sandpaper hands thumb over her knuckles for a long time, while she breathes until her breathing is calm. He doesn’t say anything, but Cass wouldn’t like him to, not when she’s scrambling for the thing it is that she wants to say.

“Not here in my head,” she mumbles, after a while. It’s not the thing. It’s close enough.

“Like everything’s happening far away?” he asks.

Cass dips her head.

“The word for it is dissociation,” he says, “but you can call it what you like. That’s just the word.”

“The world is made of pudding.”

Her dad huffs a laugh. “I understand. That’s alright. You’re thinking through something that takes all of you to think about.”

“You feel this?” she asks, cutting her eyes at him.

He snorts. “Most of the time. Don’t tell anyone, though. Trade secret.”

Cass presses a finger to her lips, smiling wryly. “Silence. Will say silence.”

“That’s my girl.”

Chapter Text

The entire affair is ridiculous, in Damian’s estimation, but he finds himself burning with shame anyways.

“Magic ends,” his father repeats, for the thirtieth time, perhaps, with the same aggrieved, incredulous tone he’s been speaking with since Jon helped Damian limp through the front door. “Curses end. Gifts of incredible power end. I thought we had covered that. Exhaustively.”

“I know,” Damian growls. “The omega shard doesn’t exactly arrive with a handbook, or a timeline, Father. It was just an experiment.”

His father stares at him, pale eyes wide with genuine, literal shock. Damian’s father has shown less animation when faced with dinosaurs or parademons; he truly did think the most animated he would have ever seen his father is the day Damian was brought back to life with the omega shard. Then Damian threw himself off the roof trying to fly. His broken ankle still stings, and they’d had to go to the Watchtower to have it set, which means Richard will inevitably know, because Kent will inevitably know, and Kent is a foul blabbermouth. This will make interacting with his siblings a living nightmare for at least a fortnight. Damian will have to spend the intervening time sticking close to his father’s side, but with a bit of an attitude, so his father’s resulting gloom can act as a bulwark against irritants such as Drake, and Brown. It is a rather effective piece of social engineering.

“An experiment,” his father says, dubiously.

Damian groans, and thwacks his father’s shin with one of his crutches. “I thought I could still fly. I’m still bulletproof. I thought these things were connected.”

His father’s eyebrows, somehow, crawl ever higher. “The magic didn’t make you Kryptonian, Damian.”

“I know,” Damian growls, louder.

His father sighs, and straightens. The blue-lit medbay and the Batcave attached to it are empty, but Damian’s cheeks are still flushed hot with shame, anyway. His father had insisted that, even after being cleared by the Watchtower’s doctors, Damian would need to come down and have yet another check-in, this time with his obstinate father. Mostly Damian has sat on one of the cots, wishing he could set the giant dinosaur on fire—it’s a completely inaccurate representation of a tyrannosaurus, which his father should be ashamed of—and wishing the pain radiating up from his broken ankle was easier to ignore. There’s something about injuries like this that make him feel useless, until he’s working around it.

“And you didn’t jump off the roof for any other reason than... running an experiment about whether you could fly or not?” his father asks. His dark brows are drawn low, and serious.

Damian rolls his eyes. The implication of feeling is absurd. “I am not that weak, Father.”

“It wouldn’t have made you weak,” he says, quietly. “You died and came back, Damian. That can... tangle wiring. That sort of thing.”

Damian kicks his uninjured foot, scowling. “This is ridiculous. You are ridiculous.”

His father leans against the cot next to him, the weight of him shifting the table’s joints, so that it creaks, that the paper crinkles. One corner of his mouth has ticked upwards. “Why?”

Damian glowers at the underside of his palms, paler than his dark brown knuckles, and the purplish scars that lash them. The scars on his palms are paler still. “What do you mean, why, Father?”

His father shrugs. Only one shoulder moves. The left slips out of socket often. “I’m curious. Is the question ridiculous, or is the fact that I’m asking you the question ridiculous?”

Damian stares at him. “Both, tch. Obviously.”

“You’re thirteen. You’ve been through something traumatic. Suicidal ideation is a common response to these things. I think it would be ridiculous if I didn’t ask.”

“Why?” Damian asks, baffled. 

His father squeezes Damian’s knee, gently, and his thumb rubs rough circles into Damian’s muddy, twig-pocked slacks. “Because your father should watch out for you. You should have a good life. More than that, I love you. I don’t ever want to lose you again.”

It registers, for the first time, that his father looks relatively exhausted; he didn’t even change out of civilian clothes to accompany Damian to the Watchtower, for once leaving anonymity to the robust secrecy protocols of the Watchtower’s medical wing. The bruises under his eyes are deep, and his one working shoulder is slumped. Thinking about his own death has been like trying to touch the eye of a stove; Damian sees his grandfather’s face, feels the first blood of the sword through his middle, and everything goes white. It’s made it easier to continue as though it never happened. Father really would miss me, he thinks. 

“Unfortunately for your emotional speeches, Father, I really did just want to see if I could be faster than Jon in a dive,” Damian sniffs.

His father lays a hand on Damian’s knee, gently, but the weight of it pulls Damian to the side. “I’m glad.”

“But you aren’t—wrong,” Damian adds, in a whisper. "Generally. Occasionally."

“We should talk about that, sometime,” his father says, softly.

Damian hastily wipes at his eyes, with the sleeve of his green sweater. “If you must be disgusting, insipid, and attached, I’ll allow it. Briefly."

Unexpectedly, this makes his father laugh so loud it rings off the stone cavern. He slumps forward with it, shoulders shaking, pinching at the corners of his eyes. “This is why we should talk about it. What would I do without you?”

This steals the breath from Damian’s lungs, but his father doesn’t seem to realize it. For a moment he pulls Damian closer and squeezes him, a side-hug that’s warm and solid and safe, mostly because that arm is bearing none of its own weight. The throb of Damian's ankle lessens, just briefly.

Chapter Text

If anyone asks, he’s fine, he’s good, all statuses are normal, Tim would file himself away with a radiant bill of health; but Alfred does have the flu, which means Bruce is following him around like a search and rescue Saint Bernard, burdened with blankets, NyQuil, and the intractable conflict of trying to convince Alfred Pennyworth he’s mortal. Tim’s been around, sure, but maybe not really, hovering somewhere between sorry-old-man-I’m-spleenless and oh-no-please-don’t-die. The two mix like oil and water. Physically, Tim’s completely, entirely fine, it has to be said, clean bill of health, but he has to keep himself busy. It’s enough to find whatever slack Bruce left behind in his rush to keep Alfred from fainting in the shower and cracking open his skull: Tim casts batarangs, sharpens them in turn; he re-fills the discharge chambers on the automatic sanitizers posted to the Batcave’s entrances; he even manages the awful feat that is trying to change the Batmobile’s oil, which means wrestling through engineering that’s decades old because Bruce is all but married to the piece of shit he built when he was twenty-five, like most middle-aged-men-obsessive-about-cars Tim’s ever met.

Sometimes, Tim slips and dozes off, in one of the dens, or at his desk, or at one of the worktables in the basement to end all basements. He wakes up with tears on his face, blinking away his dad’s corpse, his mother’s corpse, Bruce’s corpse, Alfred’s corpse, Jason’s corpse, name-a-corpse. Tim’s dreams are some psychedelic flooded walkway of the undead, and the weirdest thing is, they all speak, groan, wheeze; why didn’t you make it in time, why didn’t you love us, why didn’t you find me, why did you take my place, graves are these water cooler liminal places, all the best gossip’s to be found there. The dead are always disappointed in him. The cold sweat wracks him to the bones and Tim skitters out of wherever he’s disgracing with his presence, and he’s been writing all of these dreams down. That’s the sort of thing the rest of the world does when their dreams start turning acrid. The little leather-bound notebook he picked up somewhere has become a bit of a twisted diary, letters to himself about the bodies he’s sure he's going to bury by the end of this week. The rigors of mortis is written on the inside of the cover.    

Alfred falls ill on a Saturday, and by Monday, Tim’s pretty certain Al's going to die, so he avoids Bruce like there’s a toxic sheen on the other man’s skin, like a human poison dart frog. Between Saturday and Tuesday Tim logs eight combined hellish hours of sleep, around the symptoms of Alfred's definitely imminent death, he’s halfway through the journal, and his fingers have developed a permanent tremble. He’s neck deep in medical articles about pancreatic cancer, and then he’s deeper still in Wikipedia tabs, reading about the bubonic plague, and he’s resolved never to go anywhere near even where a prairie dog might be. The Batcave is officially as close to a live bat as Tim ever personally wants to be, and there are massive mesh nets that cordon off the work space, and Damian always checks the nets for stragglers because that's as close to joy as Damian probably gets. By Tuesday, Bruce has been looking for him, and avoiding the Batman is its own convoluted task, but anyone who knows anything about Bruce Wayne knows that he’ll never go into his parents’ old room, not for any reason remaining on Earth. It’s the perfect hiding place. It feels like crossing sacred ground, but Tim’s made a solid habit of stepping over graves since his first day in the Batcave.

By Wednesday, Tim’s stomach is cramping, for reasons he can’t particularly figure out. Thursday, six sharp in the morning, Dick finds him, in his awful little hiding place.

“I won't rat you out,” Dick says, closing the door behind him, “but I don’t ever see Bee come this way, y’know. He might get pissed, if he notices. Honestly, I can’t believe I never thought of this.”

Tim, sprawled in the inches of dust on the floor, hands behind his head, thoughtfully studying the paneled ceiling for what must be the seventh hour, croaks, “I’m a genius. I know.”

Dick winces, visible even in the low, gray light of the windows. “Timmy, you sound like shit. Did you catch what Al’s got? Is that why you suddenly became allergic to, I don’t know, sunlight, human contact, anything remotely containing a calorie?”

“I didn’t,” Tim says, a hysterical laugh bubbling up through his throat, “and I’m glad. 'Cause he’s gonna die.”

Tim screws his eyes shut. The floor stops creaking somewhere by Tim’s ankle. There’s the shuffling of Dick’s sweats, and then a burning hot hand wraps around Tim’s ankle, and Tim forces himself not to flinch; inch by inch, his muscles relax, focusing on the warm weight of Dick's sandpaper-y hand.

“He’s okay,” Dick murmurs. “He really is okay. I know it’s scary when Al’s sick. Bee completely freaks, I know, but Al’s gonna be fine, he’s already on the mend. You’d see him up and about, but you’ve been hiding out here.”

“Everyone dies,” Tim says, swallowing against the lump of ice in his throat. “Everyone dies, he’s gonna die, Dick. I failed him. I—”

“Woah, okay, reel it in, you’re not at fault for a strain of influenza,” Dick says, running his thumb over the knob of Tim’s ankle. “You haven’t failed anyone. No one’s going to die spontaneously because they came in contact with your Timothy-specific air, or anything.”

Tim sucks down air. “But isn’t—I’m why they all—it’s math, right? What’s the common denominator of people who die in my life? It’s me. It’s always me.”

Dick’s hand leaves Tim’s ankle, and Tim finds himself missing the contact, and then Dick’s dropping into a sit and pulling Tim’s head into his lap, as easy as anything. Tim can tell Dick’s parents were deeply physically affectionate, because Dick acts through these displays with an ease that isn’t found, not when you’re the child of people like the Drakes. People like the Drakes have rigid ceremonies even for their embraces. Lean, strong, heavily calloused fingers curl through Tim’s hair, the grooves of scars and dry skin catching against the knots Tim's left in his hair. Dick runs warm. Laying in his lap is like sticking your face in the air of an open oven door. 

“Timbo, don’t look now, but I think the common denominator being you is normal. You are in fact talking about grief that you feel, which kind of necessitates you being the common denominator,” Dick says. “They wouldn’t be yours, otherwise. I’m sorry. It’s horrible. But it’s not something you did to anyone, or even yourself.”

Tim scrubs at his face with his sleeve, sneezing on some of the dust he stirs up. “God, it’s gross in here. They’re all going to be disappointed. I don’t know how to stop—I don’t know.”

Dick hums, fingers dancing along Tim’s temple. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. Uh, sure, I guess.”

“What if I was in charge for the day? You wouldn't have to have the answers. It’d be my job to have the answers,” Dick offers.

Tim opens his eyes. Dick’s looking down at him, dark eyes pinched, curls hanging down around his face, damp from the shower he took after patrol. He looks tired. Tim wonders at the strange idea that is Dick Grayson, the Boy Wonder, approaching thirty.

“Okay,” Tim mumbles.

“I’ll take you downstairs and put you up in the den. The first floor one, the one we use when shit gets rough. You, at bare minimum, are going to have thirty ounces of water, a meal replacement shake, and a sedative. No, don’t make faces at me, Timbo, you look like shit, and it was your week off, man.”

Tim un-wrinkles his nose. “I don’t remember sleeping last. Uh. Nightmares.”

“Then I’ll stay with you, I’ll wake you if I catch you having one. I need to stay up for a while, anyway, I have some work to do,” Dick says.

Dick pushes himself upright, and holds out his hand; he pulls Tim up in an easy motion. For all that Tim usually feels almost like Dick’s peer, almost, there are moments where his steadfastness uncovers the gulf of experience between them, reminds Tim there's a reason they default to his guidance when Bruce isn't around. Tim sways, black dots gnawing through his vision, and blinks when his cheek meets Dick’s shoulder. He’s too nauseous to speak.

“On second thought,” Dick murmurs, cupping Tim’s head and pulling it to his chest, “I think I’ll just carry you. Don't worry. No one will see."

Chapter Text

It’s not all that often any of his kids experiences a dose of fear toxin intense enough that they have to be restrained, but it’s a miserable experience when it does occur. Tonight, Dick had seemed entirely put together, if a little exhausted, until about twenty-three and a half minutes after they’d all debriefed and broken to clean up, when he dropped to the floor all at once, ripping bloody chunks of his hair out. Dick’s screams pierced the air, scraped the Batcave’s granite ceiling; Bruce gets there first, just in time to catch the boy before he slams his own head into flat concrete, at a speed that could crack his skull, even kill him. Alfred quickly herds the rest of the kids upstairs, after shouting Damian down. Bruce hears nothing of the altercation over the nonsense platitudes he's mumbling into Dick's era. In these situations, they try to default to what they know the individual incapacitated would prefer, and Dick trends more private than most expect. Dick is also rather prone to injuring himself under the influence of fear toxin. It's not something he'd want Damian around to see. While his eldest tries his best to stomp on the bridge of his foot, Bruce adjusts his hold around Dick's shoulders—which is hopefully stabilizing those joints. Further shoulder damage is the last thing Dick would want. 

“I don’t want to hurt you, but you’re hurting yourself,” Bruce wheezes, through a mouthful of Dick's thrashing curls.  

Dick pulls his head forward and rockets it back, smashing Bruce’s nose with a dull, dispassionate crunch. 

“Thanks,” Bruce growls, wetly, through the blood flooding his mouth, dribbling down the sides.

He pulls Dick, who is screaming in the back of his mouth, a caterwaul of high-octane terror, inch by inch towards the medical bay. By the time they cross the threshold, they’re both exhausted, and Dick’s screaming has turned into mewling keening, his struggles reduced to donkey kicks driven into Bruce’s knees every three seconds. The left one cracks and gives, which is mildly irritating. 

“You’re alright,” Bruce gurgles, “you’re alright. It’s me, Dick. I’m not going to hurt you, I don’t want to hurt you. If you stop trying to hurt yourself, I can relax, okay?”

It’s as useless an effort as there ever is, with fear toxin; Dick babbles no, no, he’s dead, don’t touch me, what are you doing, and when these last words put a knife through Bruce’s heart and he tries relaxing his grip, Dick tries to knock his head into the floor again. Bruce hauls Dick onto one of the cots, and takes a few powerful right crosses to the face, a body shot or two to his lower ribs before Dick is fully restrained by the padded strips of leather. The boy writhes against them in a way that makes Bruce want to throw up. Guilt gnaws through the bottom of his stomach. Assuming Alfred is occupied with all Damian’s might, Bruce swabs Dick’s wrist—wrestling the way he is, if Bruce pins down his elbow Dick will blow the joint—and draws enough blood for diagnostics, but by the end of this Bruce’s face is so swollen he’s struggling to see the paper labels, or even the vials themselves. He’s relieved when Alfred’s shoes click around the corner. 

“Good heavens, you lost,” Alfred exclaims. “The lad’s drugged, and you’ve still gone and lost! How on Earth have you managed it?”

Bruce snorts, briefly forgetting that his nose is in pieces. The sensation of congealed-to-fresh blood pressing against the break from the inside isn't necessarily painful, but it is very, very odd, as a sensation. “Maybe he had a good teacher. Who's to say. These are for you. Close your ears.”

Alfred presses his ears shut and closes his eyes, and Bruce leans his head forward, blood sluicing down his mouth, and snaps his nose back into place. Or what he believes is where his nose is supposed to go. He’s quite a few breaks beyond knowing exactly what goes where, just that some motions make it easier to breathe, and some make it significantly more difficult. 

“I’ll get to it, then, but you’ve got to ice that, Master Bruce,” Alfred says, taking the tray. Before he ducks into the lab, he drags a chair out beside Dick's cot, and jerks his head towards it.

Bruce takes the hint and settles in beside Dick’s cot. Dick’s eyes flick to him, wide and horrified, and Bruce feels as though his organs ought to be on the ground, for how that look carves him up.

“I hate doing that, too,” he says, softly. “I won’t leave you.”

Alfred comes back some time later and announces that it’s luckily a strain they’ve seen before, a dangerous cocktail that spikes with violent responses; he hooks Dick to a steady drip of the antidote, with Bruce there to pin the boy. Luckily, by this point, the kid's mostly tired himself out. Then Alfred’s headed back upstairs, facing down Damian alone. Bruce privately steels himself for the meltdowns from the rest of his kids when he makes his unexpectedly bloody appearance. Every ten minutes he tries laying a hand on Dick’s hair, waits until Dick relaxes under the weight, instead of tensing, or showing no sign he knows it's there. The IV bag is halfway to empty before Dick’s anywhere close to lucid, and then what he does is roll big, bloodshot eyes over to Bruce, wide with latent terror.

“M’sorry I disappointed you,” he mumbles.

Bruce clucks his tongue to the taste of iron. “No, no. You didn’t. You impress me all the time.”

“I shouldn’t have let it happen,” Dick continues, gagging over his words. “I don’t know why I let her. Why I—why would I let her?”

Bruce stays silent, as his fingers start to work through Dick’s stiff, sweat-dried curls. Dick curls into his hand. Fear toxin can be an incidentally revelatory state; this can swing between involuntary and voluntary revelatory, and Bruce, in Dick's position, finds its revealing nature intolerable. Dick may or may not be similar, and Bruce has a spectacularly bad track record when it comes to understanding what level of independence Dick actually needs, as opposed to what he puts himself through as a form of self-punishment. Bruce has no idea of what path respects Dick the most: if this is dire, and he ought to press the boy further; or if he needs to remind Dick of his own inclination towards privacy. Unable to decide, Bruce opts to listen without pressing or interrupting.  

“Bruce would be so disappointed,” Dick whispers.

Bruce hums. “I’m not so sure about that.”

“He would. Because I just let it happen,” Dick says, a whine peeling through his voice. “It’s my fault, that I’m like this, I’m—wrong. I can't get it out of me.”

“Sweetheart, you’re not a machine,” Bruce says. 

“I feel like that,” Dick says, shuddering against the restraints. His pupils finally focus on Bruce, casing him up and down, then locating the ceiling, the cot he's on, the drafty air of the Batcave.

Bruce taps Dick’s wrist, above the cuffs. “If I take these off, do you think you'll start trying to hurt yourself?”

“I think they’re freaking me out, now,” Dick says, through the tears streaming down his face. “Please. Please, Bruce."

Bruce nods, satisfied that Dick is starting to recognize where he is and who he's with, and makes quick work of all four padded straps, and the last one over Dick’s chest. “You were trying to cave your skull in. I wouldn’t have, unless it was your life. It... unfortunately, it was your life.”

Dick’s sob catches in his throat. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I’m—did I do that, to you? I’m so sorry.”

Bruce lowers his hand, slowly, and cups Dick’s cheek. He thumbs across Dick’s cheekbone. “I couldn’t care less. Consider yourself having preemptively passed your next skills test.”

Dick snorts, and then his gaze drifts off, the skin around his eyes tightening. He flinches at something above him, and hisses, “Get her off me.”

The words dump ice into Bruce’s veins, but he does, mimes hauling someone off of Dick’s lap because at this stage in the treatment process, it puts someone more at ease, to go with the delusions instead of countering them. Dick curls onto his side, facing Bruce, sobbing hard into his fist; Bruce sits back down, and gets back to running his fingers through Dick’s greasy hair. It doesn't require the World’s Greatest Detective to figure out the emotional story Dick’s words tell; he can’t tell if the emotion he feels is rage, a desire to pull Dick in his arms and never let go, or a hybrid of the two, a snarl of grief for his boy.

“I didn’t want it, you have to know I didn’t want it,” Dick keens. "I failed. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Bruce’s gut cinches. “You didn't fail anything. It wasn't your fault. I believe you. This was done to you, someone hurt you.”

Dick’s breathing hitches, again and again, and his chest becomes arrested with sobs. “I wish that was true.”

Bruce bows his head. It's a long moment before he can speak around the thorns in his throat. “It is. I’ll prove it to you, later. I promise.”

Chapter Text

Timothy Jackson Drake will be on Barbara's shit-list probably until the day he dies. He still owes her favors for the last four vexing things he's pulled, and now he's added a fifth, and Barbara's patience has withered entirely. A minor declaration of interpersonal war may be in order.  

“What the fuck, Tim!” Dick shouts, against the elevator shaft's stainless steel barrier.

On the other side, there’s a self-satisfied snickering, and then Tim says, “It’s not my fault you’re both acting weird! Don’t blame at me, anyway, Damian’s the one who snipped the wires in the crawlspace. I'm just the bearer of the bad news, which is that you're both really, really weird right now."

Damian will be a little less on her shit-list, mostly because if Barbara worked herself up over Damian's various transgressions, she'd spend her entire life in a state of constant fury and end up with chronic high blood pressure. It’s simply just true that Damian is thirteen whole years old, has developed a taste for mischief, and would've locked Barbara in the lift for the price of a singular tortilla chip; and it’s also true that Tim would’ve had to bribe the kid pretty thoroughly, in order to turn him against Dick even just briefly. Frankly, Barbara doesn't even have enough time to stress over all of Damian's tiny tyrannical escapades. Just last week, the kid went missing for seven straight hours—without a word of warning—to seed-bomb golf courses with wild, native mint and milkweed. This is just Barbara trying to protect what little peace this extended family of urban ninjas will give her.

“I’m gonna kill that kid,” Dick hisses, shaking his head. He thumps his curled fist against the door of the elevator for emphasis, and Barbara prides herself on the way she doesn’t flinch, in spite of the long, echoing bang.

Barbara’s half the reason there’s an elevator that leads to the Batcave, and there’s something odd about someone confined with her, someone that isn’t Bruce, who hitches rides with her when no one's looking because his knees crack like oyster beds. There’s almost a subconscious instinct to throw out an over-the-hill joke. Dick stalks the perimeters of their new enclosure, casing every angle of the cab with wolf-like eyes, throwing his shoulder wherever he thinks the structure might give. God knows why that man thinks he can beat his way through steel with mere blood and bone.

Barbara folds her hands in her lap, over her dad’s old quilt, with the Mallard ducks and gundogs, a pair of woven yellow labs. She'd nicked it from his couch a few weeks ago. It still smells faintly of Old Spice. “I don’t think breaking the elevator more will help.”

Dick twists to look at her in the low, red emergency light. His eyes are bloodshot, wild. He clearly hasn't been sleeping. A nasty part of Barbara hopes her face is the thing keeping him up at night. “I’m not—huh. I wasn’t trying to break it, really. It’s just not sitting level, I was thinking the doors would trigger if it did, if you—sorry.”

Barbara raises an eyebrow. “You can turn your shoulder to paste if you want, but I'd just give it half an hour. It’s eight o’clock already, right? So Bruce will be down in half an hour, which means he's going to try to use the elevator. Tim's a dork and didn't think this shit through. Just be patient."

Dick looks at her, quizzically, pausing his caged pacing. “Bruce? But—why would Bruce use the elevator?”

Barbara glares at him. “What world do you live in where breaking your spine doesn't, I don't know, fundamentally alter someone's mobility?"

Dick scowls and crosses his arms. "I obviously didn't mean it like that. I've just never seen him do it."

"Perhaps,” Barbara snarls, “that’s mostly because you never use the goddamn elevator, because you don’t need to, do you?”

Dick shakes his head, too-long curls flicking his chin this way and that. He raises his hands in a feigned surrender. “Okay! Okay. I am sorry for assuming Bruce would do things the hard way. I obviously have no basis for that, I guess, and I should've deferred to your wisdom, clearly. You must know better, even if you don't fucking live here."

Both of Barbara's brows crawl to her hairline. "You've got five minutes to walk that back."

She's so hacking into the traffic lights to make sure Dick hits nothing but red lights every time he goes out for a week. Dick falls quiet, as he studies her, and the way his eyes flick back and forth unsettles her; he’s searching through her, her face, her voice, her posture, looking for something. Goosebumps break out over her skin, and suddenly it feels as though things crawl across her scalp, weaving between her prim edges, around the afro puff pulled high on her head.

Dick growls, cut off, in the back of his throat, and on the other side of the cab he drops to the ground, mutinously glaring at the laminate. "I'm sorry," he says, finally, in a genuine tone. "If I'm honest, I never thought about it that way. Sorry. I—sorry. I guess I didn’t expect that.”

Barbara sighs. “Must be nice. To think that little about moving.”

“Is that why I'm always messing up with you?” Dick asks, softly. "I... I want to know. I love you as a friend, too—I really don't want to lose that. But it feels like I am."

Across his last words, Dick's voice breaks, shutters into a whisper; he hides his face in his hands. Barbara closes her eyes, her mouth twisting, the vanilla-ish taste of her chapstick cutting into the corner of her lip. The sound of those words rattles through her, drums up an ache in the center of her chest. It’s been two weeks since they ended things, through a three hour shouting match that swirled a tumultuous six months down the drain; they talk for the cause, and little else, until one Timothy Jackson Drake decided to force the issue. The ways she misses him are unexpected, like a touch between her shoulder blades, or in the bath, when she’s scrubbing her numb, deadened legs with tears carving down her face. It’s exhausting to bathe with an overtaxed, wiry upper body at the end of the day, more exhausting still to feel the bumps of scars from old bed sores, embarrassing even just to writhe in the water alone. Dick would help, when they were dating; he loved it, for reasons Barbara can’t imagine, but he’d run a soapy washcloth down her hamstrings and over her long-atrophied quads with this wistful look. She’d stare at his tan fingers against her darker thigh, wishing she could feel it.

“I think it was maybe the me part, a lot of the time,” she answers, quietly.

Dick hums. “I don’t. I think... you're right. I don't think about ability, most of the time.”

Barbara swallows against the knot coalescing in her chest. “You don't. Remember that one spring you fucked up your shoulder?"

"Yeah. It was shit."

"You had, like, three panic attacks a day. I remember. The idea of not being able to use the skills your parents taught you, it scares the hell out of you," Barbara says, slowly. She gestures to herself, to the wheelchair that's become a part of her. "I have you made, you know. I know I live your worst nightmare. But what you don't understand is that it isn't mine. I don't want your pity. I don't need you to be overprotective. I hated it when you grabbed the handles of my chair without asking." 

Dick blinks. "I didn't know that bothered you. Is that why you took the handles off your chair?"

Barbara shakes her head. “Yeah. I maybe should’ve told you. That's... the me part. Sometimes total strangers will do it, too."

"I had no idea," Dick murmurs. “I’m sorry I made you feel like you couldn’t ask me to stop. I won't do it again.”

Barbara grits her teeth; the sentiment is understandable, because they never spent a lot of time in public, together. The daughter of the former police commissioner and the son of a spendthrift billionaire would raise too many questions. The apology smooths over the burning in her chest, though.  

"It's not that I hate help," Barbara breathes. "I don't. A lot of the time, it's nice. But I want to ask for it, like anyone else, and I don't want it—to control me. Your protective shit... it makes me—paranoid. Every time I open a door, I know what could happen. I’ve had to rebuild myself around the idea that whenever I open that door, I can’t just run. I can’t just escape. Most of the self-defense I busted my ass to learn has to be different now. I'm a little obsessed with being ready for that. When you would get controlling, it’s not just belittling, it’s—I felt like you were trying to tell me who was at the door. I would panic all the time. That’s why it’s me.”

Dick scoots over, across the laminate flooring, until he’s sitting beside her chair. “Hey,” he says, softly, “that’s why it’s not you. I didn’t know that. I should have. I’m sorry.”

Barbara breathes in, carefully, through her nose. “I can’t turn it off,” she says, thickly. “It’s going, all the time. I think of every bad thing that could happen. Like we get out of here, and I get a phone call, and Dad’s dead. We get out of here and Bane’s in the cave. The Joker’s upstairs. Who knows.”

Dick sighs. His eyes are suspiciously damp. "I don't... know if this helps, exactly, but—I never did any of that because I thought you were incapable. I... don't know how to explain this. There was this—thing, that... that's something I've been doing to a lot of people, recently. I don't know how to stop. It's something I've gotta fix. I wasn't ready for us, is what I mean. I'm sorry."

“I don’t mind waiting,” Barbara says, quietly.

Chapter Text

Richard finally consents to bedtime—only, of course, after an hour spent pressing his rosy cheek to the crook of Bruce’s arm, chattering while Bruce bobbed along, halfway to aware. For a young man recently shot seven times, Bruce was still rather good at nodding precisely when Richard’s little voice started to tremble, Alfred thought, personally. Miss Thompkins had unwound her kit nearly entirely of suture by the time the operation was over. She'd sworn foully even as she was walking out the door. A typical parent may keep their child's baby teeth or kindergarten drawings, but Alfred finds himself a far stranger sort of somewhat-father, who carts a tin of cut-out bullets, freshly four higher in number than it'd been just two days before. Only now, of course—nearly twelve hours after Miss Thompkins lit through their door—has Bruce even begun to stir. Leslie had suggested tearing the boy a fresh verbal wound immediately upon consciousness, before Bruce could seize the license to take any further idiotic action. Alfred has, alas, digressed; Richard is merely eleven, but a mite, and has been a self-sufficient steam of terror throughout this entire ordeal. There would be plenty of opportunity to knock Bruce down a peg or two when he's graced with more lucidity, and perhaps a little less hole-punched, and perhaps once Richard is thoroughly reassured that Bruce Wayne is, frankly, capable of simply ignoring death if he so chooses, apparently. After an hour of clinging to Bruce's elbow, Richard was nearly too excited to fall asleep; he'd had to jump up and down on the bed for ten minutes before he could even sit still, which Alfred allowed and supplied ratings out of ten for the little boy's assorted somersaults and nifty tricks. For all his tiny bravado, Richard trends more anxious than many suspect of him. 

When Alfred finally returns to the first floor den, having finally lulled Richard into soft whistling snores with a chapter of James and the Giant Peach, Bruce is blinking at the ceiling as if it’s this unknown, foreign construction, whipped out of extraterrestrial material. This den, thanks to its central location, plentiful light and soft furniture has become a sickroom in all but name. Half Bruce's face is black and blue from the working over Two-Face had given him, but that’s what that man gets for going in both blind and alone; it does wound Alfred, though, in the private way this boy's suffering always has, as there's something about a child that's more or less forgotten, despite the wealth sunk into this house, into that family name. Alas, Alfred may extend his deepest sympathies, but he dare not claim any extension of approval, lest Bruce start to accrue further stupidity seemingly out of the ether.  

“Would you care to try for some water?” Alfred asks, snatching a fleece blanket—patterned with those animated, violent tortoises Richard enjoys—cast onto the floor and snaps it into a sharp fold, corners-to-corners.

Bruce grunts. Alfred knows this occasionally precedes an attempt at verbal communication, but only if he’s lucky, because most of the time Bruce largely forgets to follow it with anything. Alfred crosses the room to raise a mug to the boy’s face, angle the straw into his mouth, and Bruce drinks gratefully, though his expression creases with strain as he does.

“Oh, yes, well, you’ve just had some of your intestine essentially lit on fire, if you’re wondering what all that dire agony you're feeling is for,” Alfred says. He fails to keep his tone from dipping into the acidic. “Two-Face shot you, hm, seven times. Oh, dear me, after you were beaten, I should add, can't forget the beating. A rather good showing from the Batman, innit?”

Bruce snorts. “No... laughing,” he rasps, his voice barely louder than a breath.

Alfred huffs. “This is my revenge, now, after all this worrying you’ve had me doing, Master Bruce. You'd best embrace it. This is the rest of your life I’m speaking of, and I seek to thoroughly ruin it—so, mourn it quickly, I’ve jokes to get on with.”

“Stop,” Bruce says, chest shuddering. “Hn. You’re... mad. Pretending not to be. Why?”

Alfred’s brows err skyward. “You’re joshing, you are. You must be, you absolute nutter. Why am I angry? What do I have to be angry for—perhaps because the amount of suture inside of you could circumnavigate the globe if I taped it to a jet plane?"

“Not... possible, Al,” Bruce groans.

Alfred scoffs. “And how would the likes of you know, Master Bruce? You were out like a light. Good morning, by the way, it’s ten in the evening, I’ve just seen Richard to bed, which is to say he’ll be down here the second he thinks I’m not. Do keep him away from those stitches. I understand to that boy you're mostly a mobile jungle gym, but if you pop even a one of those, you and I will be having words until the day you die. Perhaps even after. You've no idea what witchery I'm capable of."

“I thought... I’d been with Dick,” Bruce wheezes, attempting to shift more upright, but his face crumples as he realizes exactly how many stitches are zippering him up, all in one motion.

Alfred steadies Bruce’s shoulder with his hand. He applies enough pressure to deter Bruce from moving again, and his voice pitches lower, softer. “You were, dear boy. How are you feeling?”

“Like I was—shot... that—that many times,” Bruce says. “Whatever you said. I didn’t go... it wasn't Batman's showing. I went as—me.”

“I rather didn’t suspect the Batman of wearing a Tom Ford button-up, no, and I'm unsure as to what you believe that changes,” Alfred replies.

Bruce grits his teeth, eyes screwing shut against an internal wave of pain, and then he mumbles, "No fighting back. Harvey... he'd guess."

Alfred hardly suppresses a roll of the eyes. “So you appeared to Two-Face alone, unarmed, not a kevlar vest in sight, specifically having deprived yourself of the ability to fight back? You vex me, you truly do. World's Greatest Detective my absolute arse. What were you thinking?"

Bruce’s eyes open, just narrowly. “I don’t... know. I thought it best if I... didn’t startle him. No weapons to seize. No vest to stare at. Maybe the trust would... I don’t know.”

Alfred huffs, even as his thumb draws across the pocked scars dotting Bruce’s shoulder, detectable even through his black shirt. “I take it from the more or less pitiful state of yourself, that trust did a grand bit of nothing?”

“He judged me guilty,” Bruce says, quietly, “for letting him become... Two-Face. I think he’s... I think he’s right.”

Alfred outright laughs at this, loud, bawdy, even. “An utterly hilarious notion, but don’t quit the day job you don't have, Master Bruce, you’d not make it long as a comic, I fear. I think perhaps what happened to Harvey Dent is simply what happens to prosecutors all across this godforsaken nation—sentence others to damnation long enough, and you won’t remember how to live with yourself. What’s that got to do with you?”

Bruce glowers at him, and it’s fortunate that others find this expression intimidating, truly, it is, but Alfred simply cannot find what they're so scared of. It’s got all the effect of a bear cub baring its twiggy fangs. Alfred raises a brow and offers Bruce the mug of water again, and Bruce sucks down another gulp.

“He was my friend,” the boy says, after a painful, jerking, wet cough, “and I... benefit from that system, Al.”

“Oh, yes, one thing is precisely the same as another, I’d forgotten,” Alfred snips. “Excuse me, I have to re-enter this queer world you’ve envisioned, where participating in the evils of our system is an equivalent sin to trying not to, purely because both individuals benefit from a world-ordering that occurred long before their birth. My sincerest apologies, I'll have to shut parts of my mind off, if you'll give me a moment. Right, then, now that I've killed all nuance, I should think I’m prepared to hear out your idiocy. Certainly, explain to me why you're inherently evil for your existence, and therefore your choices no longer matter."

Bruce presses a hand over his bruised eyes. “Al. What are you... trying to do. Here.”

“I’m trying to convey exactly how ludicrous I find the real idea of yours, behind this, that you’ve always had,” Alfred says, gingerly, “that I or anyone else would benefit from losing you. One does not waltz in on Two-Face alone if they’re not willing to die. I’ve always known this to be a tendency of yours. I would like you to know that I’d miss you, and so would Richard, and while I am sorry you feel this way, you are strictly not allowed to die. Keep committing to the more difficult choice, Bruce."

Bruce’s hand falls, and he looks at Alfred, initially skeptic but whatever he finds in Alfred’s expression reflects in the seriousness of his own. “Oh.”

Alfred lays a hand over the boy’s hair, thumbing across his forehead. “You should get some rest. I’ll keep an eye out for your little one. I daresay I hear him puttering down the hall now."

Chapter Text

Everything smells like the burning wings of little lantern flies, or the smell of the place and dirt and concrete after a bellowing bulldozer has flattened the world, crushing the tiny rats under tread-heel and a few days after, the smell sticks to your tongue. In some parts of her mind, Cass is smaller and skinnier with knobbly, scaly fingers from the acid-air searching through the garbage for the four things that had once been hers: plastic bottle, tinted blue, for catching water in the rain, for sneaking into pleasantly peopled stores with galleys of onlookers to fill with water at their clean sinks and sneak out under her jacket; towel, shredded by the street cats, smelling of the ammonia that seeps up from the ground; hole-punched coat, lifted from a girl who’d left hers on the curb; a second plastic bottle of sand and sea shells, that type of thing that gets to be done when there’s nothing her hands can cling to. Logically, Cass figures the air around her is warm and smells filtered, harangued by the ghosts of cigarettes and floor traffic and trees older and deader than she. Despite this she’s still, in her mind, sorting through the garbage for the four things that had once been hers, and finding them flattened by the dozer’s weight, and finding that she still has enough grief in her to weep for these things.

The tea kettle hisses and Cass’ hand meets the burning swirl-eye, and it’s only after she does this that she realizes the burning smell is seeping from beneath the swirl-eye, and she can’t reach it from here. The response is automatic. Her father has reached into her mind through their infernal connection, this thing that allows him to appear as large as he likes, whenever he likes, and when she chokes up and can’t speak he has these responses: draws a long knife over her arm, again and again, making neat scars like the rows of a pine monocrop; or holds a lighter under her palm, stimulate the nerves, jolt her into action. Her palms are thick and shiny, not a texture too good for feeling living things, people things, but exceptional for bracing the hilt of a weapon, wonderful and singular for all the purposes of shoving someone’s nasal cavity into their brain, killing them with their own homemade ivory knife. The oven-eye whistles and she doesn’t feel a thing. This is what happens when you lose focus, her father’s saying. Then the heat is pulled from her, or she is pulled from the heat.

“Cassandra!”

Cass blinks. Sometimes she likes her full name, most of the time she does not. Her father was American, and she doesn’t like the way the vowels drawl long and bland, in that way. This man has drawn the vowels high and architectural, like there’s meaning to them, maybe even worthiness. Her full name is said again. This is the man who feels familiar twice over, so Cass lets herself be pushed, and is rewarded when the hands that guide her by the elbow are textured with age, having lost callouses to thinning skin. She’s sat in a chair before she realizes motion is something happening to her body. Alfred rubs his hands up and down her knotted, coiled arms, gently, slowly, from her wrists to her elbows. It feels nice, like something her dad would do, the one she pounced on and chose and who happened to be happy to be chosen. Familiar twice over.

Cass registers Alfred’s face. She’s not sure she understands his expressions, but she’s learned that Alfred’s mystery is a form of clothing, a ritual this odd family partakes in simply to laugh, because they need to.

“Ah, there she is,” he hums, still stroking her arms. “Is this alright, Miss Cassandra?”

Cass works her jaw, and then abandons speech; it’s too sensitive, and if he misunderstands her she will just arrive at the same place, this unwillingness to speak. She nods, and he hums again, continuing but perhaps softer.

“I’d like to clean that hand,” Alfred says, nodding to her right palm, blistered cherry-red and bulbous and shining with released fluid. “You’ve a nasty burn, my dear. You were holding your hand right to the heat. If you’d like to tell my why, I’d listen, of course, but it’s far from necessary. You are in a household of good company, in this respect.”

Cass elects not to explain. She’s interested in exploring mystery as a form of clothing, and pressed in on all sides by a great house of things, she finds it difficult to explain what it is like to have only four things, all of which exist only to be crushed under the tread-heel. Hawks of onlookers can’t laugh or spit on her, here, and it now feels impossible to explain why they ever would. The motion feels nice. She doesn’t want to interrupt it. Perhaps she can explain in part.

“Distraction,” she says, sourly. “David focused me. Knife, or lighter.”

Alfred’s hand crosses over one of her pain monocrops, a patch on the inside of her arm. The scars are bloated and stretched with age. She’d been four, she thinks, or maybe five; no one ever told her she was supposed to remember how old she was when certain things happened to her. This was something she discovered from the people she’s chosen to live for, slowly. I was six when or I was nine when are forward-speech phrases, explanatory turns of speaking designed to place her in someone else’s life. Cass doesn’t know how to do this. She just is.

“What a foul man,” Alfred says, with a sympathetic smile. She relaxes—maybe he doesn’t need the forward-speech phrases. Being understood feels dangerous and new, but exciting.

Cass scrunches her nose. “He smelled.”

“Oh, I’m sure, like days’ old sauerkraut, I'd wager,” Alfred says, mock-gagging. This pulls a laugh out of her. “May I take that hand?”

Wordlessly, Cass presents it, registering the pain of it as her tendons and muscle fibers piston, manipulate her for her, in her name, distantly. Alfred clucks his tongue, turning her palm over.

“Poor mite, this looks quite painful. I’d like to run it under some cool water, if I can. How does that sound?”

The word painful notches into her gut, and it clicks inside of her head, her father’s hands holding a knife to her and with all intent writing the word painful into her skin forever. David had never described it that way. Maybe he’d hoped she’d never discover the word for pain, so she’d never realize that’s what it was; it’d been just another sensation, another weight to bear, a nameless tangled-gorse feeling in her throat of undefinable hate. In a moment the pain in her chest eclipses the pain in her hand, and she’s pulling Alfred forward by his button-up, pressing her face to his collarbone, sobbing like she’s never sobbed before.

Chapter Text

Blüdhaven is lit like the surface of the sun even by night, so sometimes when Dick wakes up to the afternoon sun, he thinks he’s somehow missed patrol. The city lights never give an inch. Dick spends hours alone, thinking about this, staring at his ceiling from dawn to dusk, pretending he’s sleeping; he clicks off his phone so he doesn’t slip, contact someone, let something slip, so he doesn’t do much other than stare, blithely, at the faux-luxury popcorn ceiling. His desk is a tangled mess of copied evidence, bound by red-string-vines and thumbtacks that turn into magnets over the crooked whiteboard scrawled with a schedule he knows he's not paying attention to. It's in Dick's best interests to wall off these functional, active spaces from the dysfunctional, rotting spaces, like his bed, the bare kitchen, the tangled gorse-stack of laundry to the side of it. Isolating the sickness has to be the best way of ripping it out. Dick hasn't been able to unwind the days where he's a breathing member of society from the days where he's sweaty from nightmares and the most he can do is stumble into the kitchen, drink from the tap, and stumble back, a careful blank, a brain fleshed with pale green shoots too fragile to disturb. Sometimes he thinks if he moves, gestures, breathes, he’ll break the spell; the sickness will spill out of its containment, slop to the floor, contaminate the working places. His neighbors keep knocking on his door to ask him why they hear screaming during the day, does he have a girlfriend, a child, a dog, if he knows what’s making that animal noise of pain—there's this shadow in their eyes, and Dick traces what they're thinking. The cops have been called on him—a few times, now—and Dick is lucky Commissioner Gordon hasn't been feeling chatty with the Blüdhaven Police Department.

To keep the screaming down—and maybe convince his neighbors he's not torturing animals or children—Dick isolates time into three-day spans, two days off, one day on, at least until he's sleeping through most of the night. He can sleep with a clean roll of socks in his mouth for the one night, maybe invest in some noise-dampening foam, or something; there's probably a way to design his own container for his personal, psychological Chernobyl. 

Self-control is a hard-won fucking thing. Managing shit, few realize, is not about forcing yourself through the proverbial meat-grinder, but more a game of designing a mindset that loves the meat-grinder just as much. Pushing yourself, eventually, the will dries up, it's an inevitable consequence of the mortal coil; the infinitely more powerful trick is building a brain that craves pressure. It's all subtraction and abstraction. Dick reverts to boiled chicken and rice, baked fish, thirty-minute-dinners that taste like cardboard; he eats once a day, and it’s this rigid subtraction he builds upon to accomplish the abstraction. Six days out of every nine, he’s a fleshy machine, sifting through his chaotic apartment and the streets of Blüdhaven with the same hand. He helps Tim with a lead, calls Cass to make sure she takes a break, checks Steph’s biology homework, razzes Jason for giving himself a concussion because he popped a wheelie on a bike without wearing a helmet, listens to Damian rage about how Lois gave him salted tea just to wind him up. When they ask what he's so busy with, Dick equivocates, alternately implies he's focusing on deep cover work or supportive work, depending on which sibling he's talking to. He texts Alfred questions that imply he's thinking about getting a few plants, because keeping Al talking about plants is the only way to hide anything from him. Dick doesn't feel all that foul for these omissions—they're necessary. What Dick does feel ugly for: the only way to keep Bruce off his back is to chase him off. Dick contrives an argument and goes silent, lets Bruce think that he's genuinely pissed and genuinely hurt, because Bruce will always wait around for Dick to initiate. It's the only way. Bruce would otherwise have him made inside of five minutes. If he’s made, he’ll have to explain that these dreams, they’re not his parents’ fragmented skulls, a splash of brain matter on the floor, but something else. Those other three days, he finds himself to be Dick Grayson, who has to barricade his doors to keep from opening doors when he sleep-walks, who wakes up with a throat so raw he can barely speak. Dick knows enough to know his reaction is broken, in its own way; sex is sex, men are supposed to enjoy sex, and it’s not rape if he enjoyed it. These are the facts. If he pushes his way through, eventually his body will realize the facts. That something in him will finally catch up. He’ll make it, if he goes through the motions, if he commits to subtraction and abstraction.

Dick pulls through one week and then another and then it’s four and then it’s six: there’s a clutch of his hair huddling at the shower drain; he can’t shake a headache that's bolted down; at some point, he's trembling his way through these motions. He scales back his work in Blüdhaven and scrambles for excuses on the days he allows himself to answer the phone. The world narrows and grays all at once. He's light with giddiness, in some ways, proud of his own private pool of suffering, successfully hidden from anyone else's judgment. Dick's neighbors stop calling the cops and slowly they stop beating down his door. The trade-off has been waking up with a mouth full of blood, like he'd bitten his cheek in his sleep, but at least that means the directive that is shut the fuck up might finally be seeping into his subconscious. Maybe it's almost over, he finds himself thinking. The glee of that hope animates him keeps him going for another two days before he's forced to head out to the grocery store on the corner.

The hope doesn't last long. 

At the end of the month, there's a long-standing get-together to run group drills in Gotham; he pulls on his costume only to find it obviously loose, and he slides into a chain of panic attacks on the floor. He texts Babs a half-assed fuck I’m throwing up, food poisoning, won’t be there, staring at the ceiling for nearly twelve hours afterward, before his abstraction kicks in and he needs to be fleshy and mechanical. It's nine in the evening, now—the morning rush, in his family—and his phone blinks every half-hour with a different message, from a different person. Every time Dick tries to conceive of an answer, he feels like a breathing attention trap, like a python wiggling its tail to lure its prey in, or a tiger mimicking the calls of the animal it's hunting. Surely everyone has something better to be doing. The problem with not answering is that not answering is, in and of itself, a lure, an asymmetrical piece of information that attracts eyes. When the painful throng of panic in his stomach writhes too much for him to stay still, Dick paces down and back through his small kitchen, trying to brute force himself into pressing the call button: maybe Steph would miss the tremor in his voice; maybe Jason would believe he's just been taking some time for himself; maybe Cass would be sympathetic to his false food poisoning; maybe Tim could be tricked into rambling about whatever's happening with Young Justice; maybe Damian could be baited into talking about his pets. At some point Dick must faint, despite having no memory of it, because he wakes up to the bleary midnight-dark in a cold sweat on the floor, throat made mincemeat. His empty stomach has rent itself into woody knots. His hips and shoulders press sharply into the floor, bruising where there is no give. Hands-not-there still flutter around his waistband. Dick chokes back a dry, aching sob, and drags himself up by the counter, hooks a knot of steel wool off the sink and stumbles into a shower. He scours his skin raw until his skin is too numb to feel anything, even the imaginary hands lacing up his legs; by the time he's done, he has to collapse in the tub, gasping for air. The spray runs icy while Dick sucks down air and tries to figure out why it's so fucking hard to stand, why his joints hurt this badly, why he's shivering so hard he knocks his spine into the tub basin over and over again. 

He loses grasp of the time, slowly. Dick hears his phone rattle with a call, buzzing at the edge of the sink. The water continues to hum. The cold now feels kind of nice, over the deep, puffy, bloody welts he's ripped all over himself, and the water eventually stops spooling away pink. There's another call. This coincides with precisely five knocks at Dick's door, which means it's Bruce; it’s only then that Dick remembers missing two calls in a row, and it’s game, to miss any amount of calls from Bruce and not explain why within the hour. It used to be somewhat doable, and then Jason died. Dick's fucked, at any rate. He lingers in the shower, his shivering becoming an almost convulsing—outside of the bathroom, there are the quiet noises of things being put away, the rasp of a broom, the hiss of a spray bottle, the shriek of a tea kettle. It sounds like Alfred puttering around in the early morning, though with a lot less singing in French. When these noises slough away, and Dick's so frigid every inch of him is stiff, he twists the shower off and stumbles out of the tub; he has to sit on the edge of the counter to ruffle a towel through his hair, and to pull on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt from the floor that are clean enough. It's as though there's a sheet of ice between him and himself. Everything feels distant and shallow. He shakily thumbs to his missed calls and finds Bruce is the last three, which is to say, the last three are completely random numbers from a Nebraska area code. Dick claws to the back of his mind, trying to remember what fight he'd even manufactured with Bruce, six weeks ago—hadn't it been something about personal space?

Facing the music, Dick thinks, grinding his teeth so that his jaw aches. He pushes through the door—on the bright side, at least his apartment is notably more livable, less divided into thirds. He can hear the tumble of the laundry machines, of the cramped dishwasher in the kitchen. 

Dick finds Bruce around the corner, in the living room, on the couch, scowling at the wall. He clearly had his own lecture he’d had in mind, but it’s utterly damning that when he turns his head and catches sight of Dick, his eyes widen and he murmurs, “Oh, hell, Dick.”

Bruce stands, gesturing impatiently for Dick's forearm, which is precisely when Dick remembers the bruised welts lancing his skin; he's in deep enough shit, now, so he turns over his arm and Bruce's rough fingers ghost over the wells of blood, both above and beneath the skin. Dick finds himself enveloped in an embrace, his head tucked under Bruce’s chin and his cheek pressed into a familiar, scratchy wool sweater. Now he recalls the chill sunk into his bones, and he shivers in fidgeting spurts; like a finger trap, the hug only tightens for all the wriggling. Dick's eyes slip closed of their own accord. Eventually he's leaning so much weight on Bruce, the hug is the only reason he's upright—even with his eyes shut, the world feels like it's spinning. Bruce's thumb rubs circles into the nape of his neck.  

“That bad, huh,” Dick mumbles.

“That's putting it mildly,” Bruce says, into his hair. “This is... not food poisoning. You are—freezing.”

There's no point in pretending. If Bruce's first instinct is a hug, Dick probably looks closer to dead than not. “Cold shower. Steel wool doesn’t make a good spare loofah, I guess. Sorry.”

Bruce’s arms tighten ever further. “Do you actually think I'm angry, or—Richard John Grayson, you are... skin and bone. Sit. Now.”

Shame burns hot across Dick’s cheekbones. For a second, he entertains the idea of arguing against the order, but he can't sift through whether Bruce's tone is more authority, or more panic. Bruce lowers him to the couch, and Dick is startled to find that he actually needs the help—his vision crawls with black spots, bearing his own weight. The next he knows, he's lying on his back, his neck pressed to Bruce's thigh and there's a hand running through his hair, holding him to Earth. It's longer still before Dick can drag his eyes open. When he does, Bruce's expression is openly alarmed—there’s tufts of dark, curly hair caught between his fingers. 

“Dick,” he says, quietly, “what... are you sick?”

“Just been having nightmares,” Dick murmurs.

Bruce's eyebrows nearly meet his hairline. He looks actively gobsmacked.  “When did you last... eat something?”

Dick casts his gaze to the ceiling. “I don’t, um, remember. Probably rice. Probably... two days ago. I was trying to, uh, control it.”

“The nightmares?” Bruce asks. Dick nods his assent. “I realize this will sound ludicrous coming from me, but I'm saying it anyway. Why not ask for... help?”

“I think... because—you’d, uh, know?” Dick says, thickly, “you’d... know. What I am. I feel like everyone knows, from the second I talk to them. I kept screaming, so the neighbors kept... checking. I couldn’t explain. Just had to... control it. I was doing fine. I really was."

“You were doing fine,” Bruce repeats, hollowly.

"I definitely was."

"Do you have any idea how enormously I disagree with your definition of fine," Bruce grits out. 

Dick shakes his head, wincing when the motion drives an ice pick through his eyes. “No, no, I was—for a little bit. I was doing fine for a little bit. It's just, uh, been a bad day."

"These nightmares aren't about your parents," Bruce says. He must've noticed Dick's wincing, because he rubs his knuckles into Dick's temples, relieving some of the pressure. "You wouldn't work this hard to hide it, otherwise. You never have before. Is that an accurate statement?"

Dick covers his face with his hands. "Why do you always have to sound like you're addressing a witness on the stand or something? You never went to law school. 'Accurate statement' my ass." 

"Your lack of response indicates it is, in fact, an accurate statement."

"So what if it is?" Dick answers, the response muffled by his palms. 

There's a beat of silence. Gently, Bruce tugs Dick’s wrists away, and thumbs away the tears Dick didn't realize were even there. “There’s nothing that could happen to you to make me think less of you. You don't have to tell me anything, if you don't want to. But you should know what's true."

Dick chokes on his own breathing. “I think I maybe fucked up,” he says, breathlessly.

“No. You hurt yourself. That’s it. There is no moral judgment for that. It is not a moral issue. Do you understand?"

Dick heaves a shuddering breath, and Bruce's hands move from his temples, to smoothing down Dick's wrecked arms. The welts are raised and radiating with heat; Bruce's hands, slightly cooler, feel nice, like cool water on a burn. "Yeah."

Bruce's mouth thins. "I think you realize that I'm going to insist you come home."

This, Dick had more or less figured, sometime between the hug and the couch; he pokes at the idea of railing against it, but even entertaining it is so draining, he wants to curl up and go to sleep.

“I just don’t... want to disappoint them,” Dick whispers. "Being like this."

“You won’t,” Bruce says, almost fiercely, “because they love you. If your siblings express a mild dissatisfaction with you, even that would be something I correct. Harshly. Because it would be wrong. It would be an unfair way to treat you. Again, they won't, because they adore you. But you get my point. If it makes you more comfortable, we can give you a cover story, fake an injury. Whatever it takes to make you comfortable with going home, that's what we'll do."

“I... I don’t remember the last time I slept more than three hours in a row,” Dick mumbles.

Bruce lays a cool hand on Dick’s forehead, his thumb drawing circles into the skin. “We’ll see what we can do.”

Chapter Text

The first floor den has been turned, more or less, into a crashpad for the human body's variable crashes: over the years, a mattress made its way to the middle of the old carpet; the couches were swapped out for a more comfortable set from the second floor den; bean bag chairs have migrated from dollar signs off Tim's trust fund to the corners of the room; and, no, Steph has never gotten a straight answer every time she's posed the question, why do rich motherfuckers need a different den, study, and drawing room on every damn level? There was no way that a surgeon slash-tech CEO and a society girl needed three separate drawing rooms' worth of space dedicated to their artsy side hustle. Except every time she's asked this out loud, Bruce pales to porcelain and Alfred laughs, uninterrupted, for ten minutes. Neither of these responses are answers, and Steph is always counting. The closet adjacent the first floor den is stacked high with the oldest and therefore softest linens in the house, and now cheesy, patterned fleece blankets are parked on every cushion, old quilts tucked by misshapen, lumpy pillows. The first floor den happens to be at the intersection of one of two halls that spill into the foyer at ground-level, meaning the lift from the Cave isn't far, and the kitchens aren't a half-mile hike through Alfred's one thousand, nine hundred and thirty-nine morose landscape paintings. They're only a fifth of a mile hike through Alfred's watercolor technique. The convenience has turned the room into a physical-psychological figurative-yet-literal triage; on their shittiest weeks, her extended network of fellow lawbreakers all matriculate through this one pulse-point, sore, exhausted, usually at least mildly angry with each other.

After things get hellish in Gotham, this is where they all end up. The last two weeks have seen massive, rolling thunderstorms batter the New Jersey coast, and a lot of the lowest-lying areas of Gotham have flooded, drained, and flooded again. The city's flood maps are years out of date and don't take sea level rise into account, or the fact that most of Gotham's glitzy high-rises are sinking, along with the rest of the city. The result is two weeks spent diving in to pull people out of their now-deadly basement apartments, SUVs, townhouses, and encampments: it's two weeks spent pulling bodies out of the swirling, black water, then hauling them back for identification, to bring someone closure; it's two weeks of everyone sleeping three hours a night to run themselves into the ground all day.

“Like, is that evil enough, though?” Steph asks.

There’s another ritual this room has been used for, ever since Steph decided to bother everyone in this stupid house with her presence more and more frequently: Bruce-shaming. Steph would never imply that she's the first to think of the concept, but it's true that she perfected the art.

Tim shrugs, one hand wrapped around a Playstation controller, which he gestures with as if he's an orchestra conductor. “I don’t know. I didn't write the rules, you wrote the rules, you tell me. It’s just Dungeons & Dragons, but, y’know, with a screen?" Tragically, Tim has the most brain cells left of any of them, and as such has been elected to control the television, and also insist on hydration and sustenance of some form while Alfred sleeps the chaos off.

Steph's taken one of the loveseats for her own, and has been directing her best bitchy-as-hell expression towards anyone who wanders too close; this has nearly broken Cass' heart, and while Steph loves Cass to death and pieces and forever and ever and then some, but Cass cuddles like she’s trying to pin your soul to the mat, spiritually speaking. Steph landed hard on her left side six or so hours ago, which means she's metamorphosing into a wall of bruises, so if anything so much as pokes her there, she’ll vomit. Leslie had taped her ribs and tsked every thirty seconds, it felt like. Steph did not suffer the indignity of all that tsking for nothing.

“That’s not evil enough, it needs to have murder in it,” Jason says, drowsily.

The pissy twenty-year-old otherwise known as Jason Todd has been reduced to a tuft of orange hair beneath a fleece blanket, mostly buried beneath Cass, and the spiritual battle he's absolutely losing. At the other end of the couch, Dick is drooling on the arm with his hand still snarled in Damian's spiky hair, and Damian is perched in front of him and glaring at every individual in the room in intervals, daring them personally to speak above a whisper-yell. When Dick runs himself into half death, he does it proper; what he leaves behind is a tiny, sharp ball of protective stress, and no one has had any success convincing Dick these two eventualities are related. In the present calamity, most everyone is just exhausted, or wrestling a cold; Steph got thrown by a buckling awning, and, without Bruce, she’d be at the top of the tsk-pyramid. Her mission is thusly—remind everyone that Bruce is at the top of the fucking pyramid, so pay attention to what an idiot that guy is instead. 

“There’s definitely murder in Dungeons & Dragons,” Tim says, affronted.

“Why murder,” Bruce rasps. Bruce is laid out on the mattress in the middle of the floor, hooked to an IV pole that's situated close enough to Damian to benefit from Damian's boy-converted-into-gargoyle act. 

“Because you actually fuckin’ feel bad for killing things in video games—I know this, no, don’t make that face, shut the fuck up, you know I’m right,” Jason grouses, all with his singular visible eye fixed on Bruce. “It’s penance, pops. You’re not supposed to goddamn like it. Therefore it's got to have murder in it." 

“Yeah, this is for cleansing your soul of sins, and also revenge, and all that shit,” Tim says. “But I’m vetoing Jason. I’m the one who has to play. If you want me to play something else, you have to fight me for it.”

“What if it wasn’t a video game,” Steph offers. “There’s so much out there, you know? Let’s broaden our horizons. Bee, have you seen Wayne’s World?”

“That’s not agonizing to experience, that’s a good fuckin’ movie—you guys are busted, that's what. I get myself resurrected and there’s eighty-four Jurassic Parks, and now none of you know what a good fuckin' movie is,” Jason groans, and he draws it out long enough that Damian flops an awkward kick in his direction.

“You are a disturbance, Todd,” Damian sniffs.

Bruce fixes the ceiling with a look of confusion. This is only slightly different from his usual resting expression, or bafflement with a hint of disgust for flavor. “Must it be... agonizing?”

“Duct tape,” Cass growls, from beneath her blanket. She shuffles so the fabric is covering more of her face, as if it's possible to shun Bruce more intensely than she already is.

Tim gestures towards Cass with the Playstation remote. “Duct tape, man. Like, I can’t even save you from those consequences. You dug this grave.”

Bruce hums, as if this is a great and thoughtful point. As per usual he’d been fairly obsessive about being in the field every second he wasn’t being forced to sleep by both the laws of nature and Alfred, and as per usual at some point he’d gotten stabbed, and as per usual he’d hidden it. This is all in his standard idiot operating system, but this week Bruce took it to a new level; he duct taped the wound shut over layers of his costume, and then promptly forgot the wound was there at all for multiple days. It’s a testament to how exhausted Dick is that he’s asleep, instead of bitching in the corner about it. Needless to say, the only reason Steph isn’t married to putting Bruce through much suffering in the near term because, unfortunately, he’s on enough antibiotics, painkillers, and sedatives that he won’t remember a goddamn thing. Sadly, the point will be moot for at least a week; Bruce’s dumb blood went septic, which is why the forty-eight hours of lectures the family’s run through have fallen on glassy eyes and deaf ears. The problem with Bruce-shaming is that he just ignores all stimuli that isn't relevant to the task of justice. 

“We might have to settle for Wayne’s World,” Tim sighs. 

“I don’t know what that is,” Bruce says.

“I fuckin' knew it,” Steph mumbles to herself. She shifts further to her right, stretching her left leg out over the arm of the loveseat, breath hitching as she does. Snaps of fire-hot pain bloom in her chest.

Outside the closed door—no animals allowed, naturally—four sets of nails click against the wood, and Titus lets out a low whine.

“No, Titus,” Damian snaps.

Dick stirs at this, blinks lazily, realizes his hand is still in Damian's hair, and then ruffles Damian’s hair. “What’d I miss?”

“We’re trying to make Bruce suffer,” Jason says, voice scratchy with exhaustion. 

“I suggested Wayne’s World,” Steph says. 

Dick’s lip curls. “You suggested Wayne’s World before Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? No offense, but have you lost your actual mind?”

“What the actual fuck, that’s not a bad movie,” Tim says. “The point of this is supposed to be payback, it has to be shit he won’t like. Duct tape, Dick.”

“Duct tape,” Dick sighs. “Counterpoint, little man—Bruce wouldn’t get any of the jokes in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. That could be funny, for us, specifically. And isn’t that the better revenge? Blackmail?”

“Good point,” Cass mumbles, the lump of blanket that represents her moving just slightly.

“I have no idea what any of you are speaking of,” Damian sniffs. “But I would like to argue in favor of psychological torture.”

Bruce's mouth thins. “Oh."

“Duct tape, Father.”

Steph snaps her fingers, as an idea lights up in the back of her head. “Bee—have you seen Napoleon Dynamite?”

“Who do you fucking think I am, Stephanie Brown?” Jason hisses. “I took care of that, because I, unlike you fuckers, did actual work when I was Robin. Pops got a concussion when I was twelve, I made him watch it six times in a row.”

“I... have... unfortunate news about concussions,” Bruce says, slowly. 

Jason sits upright, causing Cass to yelp as she’s shoved forward. “You’re joking. It was six times.”

“It was a good nap,” Bruce offers.

Tim groans. “How much basic, necessary education do we have to redo with you? Damn. Okay, fine, Napoleon Dynamite it is. Steph's always right, I fuckin' guess.”

Chapter Text

The specific smell of hospital air crawls under her skin; it clings the inside of her sinuses, hooking Barbara back to the memory of waking up, no feeling in her legs, the panic of feeling utterly trapped, pinned under pitiful eyes and iron sympathy. She’d spent months in Gotham General, between two spinal surgeries, and the sutures where her dad’s old glass table cut into her skin. The whiff of air out of the automatic doors shoulders her brain to the floor. It cracks into shards of stained glass. She rolls through the open double-doors and then the joints hiss, give, and they seal behind her, barring out Gotham’s stale, poisoned air and enveloping her newly into the cacophony of one of the busiest hospitals in the world. Gotham General has grown to occupy multiple campuses in and of itself, attached to university buildings by glassy bridges, congested asphalt arteries, pulsing bus lines. The nurse at the desk gives her a room number before Barbara even encodes the memory of asking for her dad's room number. She'd wanted to be alone for this part, but preference doesn't make anything hurt less. 

By the time she wheels her way to the clot of people by the nearest elevators, her arms are exhausted and twitching; most of the crowd presses into the elevator’s opening space ahead of her, and for once, Barbara doesn’t seethe over her theoretical invisibility. Perhaps no one even looked at her long enough to realize she’s crying. Her dad has this way of knowing how to stand next to her, eyes cast to the side, but still rest his warm, calloused hand on the nape of her neck, thumbing at the corkscrew curls of her hairline; all the privacy of solitude, none of the longing. The rest of the world rushes toward her extremes. The muscles in her arm tremble when she raises it to press the button, and after a lag, the doors slide open and deliver her to a different floor of the hospital, far from the room she’d basically lived in, after. Her dad is still asleep when she slides in; less than three hours ago, Jim Gordon had suffered a massive heart attack, right in the center of his own police department. Now, with the city lights painting the night sky with oil, he’s still, face haggard, stubble peppered with white curls, dark skin hosting a gray pallor. Barbara’s breath hitches when she sees him. She pivots her chair and awkwardly fixes it between her dad and the window, watching the distant lanterflies of cars pumping through the streets, the floodlights, the flashing casinos of Gotham’s infinite, snarling spectacle. Her father’s pulse beats steadily in the background, animated musically by humming machinery.

Barbara, arrested breath by arrested breath, forces her shoulders to relax, sneaks out a hand to wreathe around her dad’s. The thin scars networking his palm are a comforting, familiar roughness, a texture that dashes through her memories: she’s six and she’s scraped her knee, but she doesn’t cry so Dad croons attagirl; she’s ten and the beads Dad braided into her hair click and pop behind her; coming home from the hospital and Dad’s hand rests at the nape of her neck, an extension of something he's always been. He does that more, now that she’s permanently closer to the ground. There’s an hour of this even breathing before there’s a knock at the window, and it creaks inward, Batgirl spilling into the hospital room. 

“I brought snacks,” Steph whispers. She’s holding two massive cloth sacks of tangled cords, folded blankets, the shiny tops of potato chip bags, hell knows what. Steph is the type who over-packs nearly as a religion; she keeps throwing her grappling swings because she over-packs her utility belt, and it throws off her calculations. "Should I be quiet?"

“I think you brought the supermarket,” Barbara murmurs. “He’s out. Dad could sleep through an earthquake, if he wanted.”

As if to emphasize her point, a whistling snore works its way out of her dad's throat. Barbara suppresses a snort.

“I maybe brought the whole supermarket,” Steph says, crossing the room and dumping the sacks at the edge of the bed, instead of directly in Barbara’s path, like Tim does, because he has the spatial reasoning of a turtle. 

“How’s Commish?” Steph asks, flicking a hand towards the still softly-whistle-snoring Jim Gordon.

Barbara doesn’t bother wiping the tears from beneath her eyes. Her dad has been one of her closest friends her whole life long; who would she call on weeknights, before she’s active as Oracle, but after she’s finished at the library? What do Sunday mornings look like without Dad scowling over shit coffee at their weekly diner date, a tradition that began before she was even old enough to realize how special it really was? She sits on the precipice of never feeling safe again. Her father lays on the edge of losing everything.

“He didn’t quite go into cardiac arrest, at least,” Barbara says, faintly.

“Poor Commish,” Steph says, softly.

She bends and, from beneath the tangle of assorted throw blankets, produces a massive bouquet of rather conspicuous canary yellow and baby blue roses. Alfred must have clipped them, and sent them along with Steph. That sentimental English bastard. Steph drapes an extra throw blanket over Jim Gordon: she disappears and reappears with a tall paper cup, which the roses are precariously set into; then she arranges the snacks on the available table, potato chips and beef jerky and protein bars and wrapped sandwiches. It's ludicrous. Stephanie Brown packs like she expects to be left stranded on a desert island somewhere between her location and her destination, whether it's a fifteen minute train ride or a transcontinental flight.

“How are you?” Steph asks, when she’s done.

“The smell in here is just the same,” Barbara says.

Steph rounds the bed, dropping into a sit on the floor, leaning her head against Barbara’s left wheel. The long, dark cape spills in front of them like an ink-blot shadow. Steph reaches a gauntlet-bound hand up, laid casually on Barbara’s knee. There’s no pressure. There’s no sensation. There never will be. Briefly, Barbara wonders if some malignant force is hacking her life into pieces, drinking down everything she is, death-by-a-thousand-cuts until she has nothing and no one left. She snarls her fingers between Steph’s, and lets out a shaky breath. 

“Thank you for coming alone,” Barbara says, finally.

Steph snorts. “I figured it's what you'd want. I managed to secure your peace until the morning. I'll leave, too, if you want.”

“You brought me Fun-Yuns. You’re... an acceptable companion.”

Steph giggles. “’Acceptable companion.’ Fuck you, too, Babs.”

This draws a half-hearted chuckle out of Barbara, but the motion, the feeling tickling up her throat, shifts on a dime into grief. She tries to breathe through it, which turns to quiet crying, and shame burns her cheeks; she expects Steph to say something, but she doesn’t, just rubs a thumb over the old scars on Barbara’s knuckles from the days when that cape was hers. They’ve faded in the time since. In the darkness of the corner, the Joker has but one gleaming eye, and he’s laughing.

“Sorry,” Barbara chokes out.

“Don’t be. You’re good. I'll watch the door.”

Chapter Text

Bruce catches himself awake in the low dark, half-strangled by the flotsam of a nightmare he can't quite remember, outside of some hatched shapes of bodies floating in still water. A vertebra in his neck cracks as he straightens in the stiff, wooden chair; Bruce finds himself watching the snowflakes whirl outside the paneled window wondering when it got so cold, until his eyes hitch on the cracked window, the source of the ache in his joints and the goosebumps flaring out over his skin. Al always likes to leave at least one window cracked, even in freezing temperatures, hence the tangled knot of blankets Bruce keeps leaving on the end of Alfred's bed, a suggestion Al only heeds a third of the time. It takes Bruce a minute and a half to realize he’s fallen asleep by Alfred’s now-empty bed. A hand pressed to the bare sheets implies Alfred hasn’t been absent long—they're still warm—but it’s still disconcerting to discover that every day, Bruce sleeps a little bit deeper than he used to, whether he likes it or not. A year ago, and Alfred couldn’t have gotten past him, not without Bruce hearing him, and certainly not without Bruce waking up at all. The leveling-off of pain in his body has siphoned the exactness off his senses, over the years.

He creaks down the hallway with a rising ugliness lining his stomach, an acidic panic. It’s midday, his family's personal witching hour, so the Manor is as quiet as it ever is; the work in Gotham the night before had been taxing, but not devastating. The pain blooming underneath Bruce’s skin is just the kind he will live with for the rest of his life, but the anxiousness twisting his gut is something he will lose with Alfred. The thought makes his throat close—years trying to prepare himself is still not enough.

Bruce tries the kitchens, first, and the pantry, and then the cellar, wrestling against the worry that Alfred managed to get as far as the cliff or the road; then he ducks in that bleak little drawing room nearby, before he casts a glance over the feathery snow on the patio. The white expanse is still unbroken, it’s just peppered with dead grass picking through where the snow isn’t deep enough. A few flurries switchback their way down, but the snow looks dry, lazy, although pristine. Bruce takes the hall to the foyer—similarly empty, stoking those horrible what-ifs—and trots down the left side staircase, stopping in front of the windows that frame the Manor’s massive front entrance. There’s a flash of movement, and Bruce makes short work of crossing the massive granite floor inlays, heaving open the left door before he even registers having crossed the room.

Tim and Alfred are standing in the snow a few paces dead ahead, red-cheeked with the cold, but Bruce can already hear the sharpness of Alfred’s tone, and the desperate one of Tim’s. Tim’s in just some soaked trainers and a hoodie, Alfred in a matched set of pajamas with his robe thrown on, in his house shoes; neither of them are dressed for the low hung sky of the day, the fine dusting of ice. Bruce picks his way to the frosted, uneven brick roundabout, ignoring the burning cold through his wool socks. 

“—just trying to help,” Tim is saying. Bruce’s stomach plummets.

“What’s going on?” Bruce barks, louder than he intends.

Tim flinches, eyes darting between Bruce and Alfred as though he's been caught trying to snoop through the Batcomputer's restricted files, but Alfred himself brightens. “Oh, there you are, Master Bruce. We’ve a trespasser. We often do—now, I don’t necessarily mind trespassers, but I’d like at least a warning, beforehand.”

Tim’s mouth falls open. He blinks between Bruce and Alfred, eyes glinting. “But—it’s me. Alf, it’s me. Don't you know—it's me!”

“I understand that, we are all ourselves, I suppose—but my question is, lad, who are you, then?” Alfred asks.

Bruce grits his teeth against the way his heart seizes. “He’s just with me, Al. It’s alright. I forgot to tell you he'd be here. This is Tim. He's the neighbors' son. Do you remember the Drakes?”

Tim yelps. “But he can’t—Alf, you’re... you're like a grandfather to me. I’m—”

“Not now, Tim,” Bruce snaps. He winces when Tim's expression collapses in return.

Alfred’s owlish eyes nip between the two of them, squinting with his suspicion. “I don’t recall... young man, are you certain you’ve not mixed up an address?”

Tim’s eyes widen. “I have a room—you... I live with you—”

“Tim, I’ll see you inside,” Bruce says. He reaches out to squeeze Tim’s elbow as the boy shuffles past, and he hears just the whisper of a choked-off sob, and Bruce’s heart fills with ice.

Alfred waits until the door clatters shut, before he speaks again. “I wouldn’t know that child from Adam, myself. I’m glad you’ve new endeavors, now, Master Bruce, but I’d like a spot of warning before children manifest out of the ether.”

“Tim’s an adult, he’s just short,” Bruce says.

Carefully telegraphing the movement, he reaches out for one of Alfred’s lined, spotted hands. He rubs his thumb over the thin skin that covers Alfred’s knuckles. Al’s hands are like ice, and they’re still trembling from the cold—not that much, though. Demanding Alfred do anything is not dissimilar to pouring kerosene on dry kindling. It’s asking for trouble. These days, Bruce has had to get a bit creative; like sitting with Alfred every morning to make sure he eats breakfast without choking, and that he keeps it down afterward. The days where Bruce has to hold the spoon for him are rising in frequency, like the stinging nettles of fear Bruce feels all over, watching Al tremble in the cold. 

“It’s too cold out here, for me, personally,” Bruce says, gingerly, “would you mind going inside, for me?”

“I do have something of a headache,” Alfred murmurs, casting his gaze about. “It’s proper foul weather, this. I've not seen a sky this ugly since I was a boy.”

Bruce nods. “It is. Does it remind you of Manchester?”

“Took the words out of my mouth,” Alfred says. “I hated living there, I hope you know. We’d had this Shire gelding when we were out in the country, Dutchman. Sweet as anything, that old horse.”

“I’m sorry you lost him,” Bruce says, because Alfred repeats this story most days of the week, in fragments. Bruce has heard it enough to know the parts Alfred forgets to say, like the bit about scaring crows off the fields when he was small, the fact that his family had moved to Manchester in search of better wages.

He steers Alfred back towards the Manor’s entrance with an arm thrown over those rail-thin shoulders—it’s difficult to get Al to eat much, these days—and once inside, he makes for Alfred’s room. Bruce knocks the chair he’d fallen asleep in aside, and then there’s a five minute batch of bickering because Bruce offered to help Alfred change clothes. Al insists he's alright on his own, but Bruce waits by the door, listening for a thump or a thud, telling himself he’s not going to find Alfred dead on the ground, blood running from a cracked temple, because he's there, listening. When Alfred emerges, thankfully fine, Bruce ducks out and snags a spare space heater, an extra blanket to add to the half-dozen he's already sacrificed to Alfred's room, which Al fusses at him for; next, he stops by the kitchen and returns with tea, water, and a bit of buttered toast. By the time he returns, Alfred is fast asleep—he sleeps quite a bit, these days. Bruce leaves the tray on Alfred's bedside table, and box-breathes until he can convince himself that Alfred is snoring, probably going to stay put, and is only somewhat likely to die if Bruce leaves him alone for a moment. 

Tim isn’t hard to find. Bruce finds him huddled by himself on the left side foyer stairs, and Bruce knocks on the wall as he comes up, so he doesn’t startle Tim’s lurching shoulders.

Tim twists around, scrubbing at his eyes. “I didn’t mean to make it worse,” he whispers. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Bruce doesn’t answer until he lowers himself onto the staircase beside Tim, slowly, all of his joints slicing like they’re welded of kitchen knives. “You didn’t. I promise, Tim, you didn’t. This is... normal. It’ll likely get worse. Al loves you, Tim. I’ve heard him talking about you in his sleep. But he doesn’t always know what’s what, or who’s who, anymore."

Tim sucks in a rattling breath. “I hate this. I hate this so much.”

Bruce squeezes Tim’s shoulder. “I know. That’s okay. You can hate it, so do I. But we have to work with Al, not against him. There are things he won’t remember no matter how much you tell him. That’s not his fault, and he’s not trying to hurt you. His brain is just... physically different, now. If he says he doesn’t know you, he really does mean it. Reintroduce yourself, and sometimes he’ll remember something again, sometimes he won’t. We have no control over that.”

Tim slides to the side, knocking his head against Bruce’s shoulder. “He’s getting worse. I... miss him. How he used to be.”

“That’s okay,” Bruce says. “I... don’t tell your siblings. Not yet. But he’s started doing that more often. I think I’m going to put down the cowl until it’s—I don’t think he should be alone. I’ve been trying to do both. But he’ll need more care in the future, not less.”

Tim stifles a sob. “I don't want to lose him.”

Bruce tugs his son closer. “I know. All we can do is send him off well.”