maskormenacelogs | I watched him smile. I watched him cry. I watched him grow. I watched him bleed.

WHO: Alfred Pennyworth and Bruce Wayne [Closed]
WHERE: Residence 27
WHEN: August 2nd
WHAT: Alfred excuses himself from a phone conversation and Bruce hunts him down.
WARNINGS: Batfeels and angst. Those are kind of the same?

While he's aware that Bruce won't allow his rather abrupt departure to remain unquestioned, Alfred had been unable to stay on the phone and pretend that the younger man's words hadn't affected him as much as they had. His Bruce, ~~his son~~ the one that should have been either here with him or back in their world awaiting Alfred's return was gone. Dead.

'It never ends,' Bruce had said. And yet, for the Batman in his world, it had ended. His work was unfinished, certainly, but he was no longer around to oversee its completion. That task now fell to his children - the next generation - whether or not that was a burden they were entirely ready to shoulder. Alfred had to remain strong for them, regardless of if they showed up here or not. He had to be strong for them and for this different, younger Bruce that he now found himself standing beside. Because while not from the same world as him, that didn't make this man less his than the other. Although it was sometimes painful to stand by as if nothing was wrong back home and nothing had changed in ways that none of them could have predicted, he had an obligation to his family. Beyond that, he had an obligation to this Bruce to not fail him as he had his world's Batman.

Alfred excuses himself from work early and goes home, fortunate not to come across any of his housemates as he makes his way to his room. Once there, he closes the door and sinks onto the bed, head in his hands. And for just a little while, Alfred allows himself to retreat, to mourn the death of the son that he had lost, even though Bruce is equally present here.

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It went both ways. This relationship of theirs--it went both ways. Bruce might have been an adopted son in all but name, but he knew Alfred better than any flesh and blood son of his might have been able to, and in turn he was himself known better than his parents could have known him.

Bruce sometimes wondered how Thomas and Martha Wayne would look at him if they could see him now. He hoped they'd be proud - Alfred had told him they'd be proud - but often he'd dreamed of coming down onto the stage, black cloaked, the writhing dancers of the oprah landing on featherlight feet on the floorboards around him. He dreamed of raising his eyes to see himself in the seats near the stage, sat between his mother and father, staring fathomless reflections of dark shapes back at him, and where his own face would be impassive, his parents' faces would twist first into horror at what their son had become, then back into the staring death masks that flashed behind his eyes every time he closed them.

Even with daylight, his nightmares never faded; but they were noone else's to witness but himself, and Bruce never screamed, not even when he found himself at the bottom of the well.

But he knew Alfred. He knew when he was avoiding a topic--he'd called, after all, to discuss Carrie, but they'd have shared more information about the weather. That meant it was personal, that Alfred was finding it physically difficult to discuss it. Going back and forth over their conversation in his mind, he thought he had some potential ideas as to what the other man's hangups might be. But if it was as he suspected then Alfred would be difficult to read, stubborn, defensive. He'd have to work his best game to get him to say the words. And that was if he really even wanted to hear them. Some truths were better left unsaid.

Bruce knocked on the door, a gentle knock at chest level, three taps. He'd know Alfred was in because of his surveillance systems, but he'd also investigated in so rudimentary a technique as to wedge a tiny strand of electrical wire between the frame and the top of Alfred's door. It had fallen onto the carpet.

"I know you're in there, Alfred. May I come in?"

The knock is expected, but Alfred still starts slightly when it comes, lifting his head from his hands and turning to look at the door. He'd known that it would only be a matter of time before this conversation would be necessary, but that doesn't make him any more eager to have it.

At the same time though, he could hardly turn Bruce away when the younger man is standing outside his door, asking to come in. He sighs softly and makes sure there are no stray tears on his cheeks, even if there will be no hiding his upset from Bruce it doesn't mean he can't at least attempt to compose himself first; steel himself for the conversation that Bruce would undoubtedly wish to have now. There's no other excuse he can offer for his earlier behavior and this isn't something that he can lie about, as much as he might wish it to be untrue. More than that, the younger man deserves to hear the truth. Alfred has never been one to conceal the hard truths from him and now would be something of a poor time to consider starting.

"Of course, sir." His voice, at least, doesn't waver at all when he calls out. He should probably stand up for appearances sake, but it feels like he can't quite find the energy to do so at the moment so he remains seated on the edge of the bed, face turned towards the door as he waits for Bruce to let himself in.

Bruce hesitates, even with the invitation to come in, because he knows for sure that he's interfering in Alfred's quiet time, the value of which he's very aware of; the integrity of which he's rarely intervened in before. It didn't do. When Alfred needed time, he had to be left to brood, just as Bruce expected it in turn.

But... But Bruce couldn't help but feel like it was somehow his fault. He'd mentioned children, family, the future. Those weren't topics you carelessly brought up in the way that he had raised them. Carelessly. On the goddamned telephone. There was something wrong with him to treat his oldest friend that insensitively.

So Bruce felt like he owed him an apology at least, a conversation if Alfred would allow it. He let himself into the room, not looking at the door as he pulled it closed behind him. Alfred was sitting down, and some of the capillaries in his eyes were hot red, leaving a pinkish tinge around the iris - he'd been crying - it made the situation impossibly clear.

"Don't say anything," he said, firmly, approaching to sit on the bed beside Alfred brusquely. He took the other man's hands in his own. "We've talked about everything in our professional capacity that we deemed to be necessary. Our professional capacity. My parents were never so reserved that I could have learned such a trait from anyone but you, Alfred." And yet reserved or not he'd been raised with an overflowing surfeit of love. "So let's not talk in a professional capacity. No sirs, no Master Bruce." His eyes flew up from their hands at last, searching Alfred's gaze. "Let's talk as though I've known you all my life."

Alfred is just thinking about making some sort of comment on the situation when Bruce tells him not to say anything. he allows an eyebrow to arch slightly, but remains silent as the younger man approaches, sitting down and taking his hands. It's odd, in a way, to be the one who's on the receiving end of a gesture of comfort. So much of Alfred's life with the Wayne family has found him on the other side of that equation. First with Bruce, and then Richard and the children who'd come after. They'd all known that they could come to him if they needed to.

He silently watches Bruce as he talks, meeting the other man's eyes when he raises them. 'Let's talk as though I've known you all my life,' Bruce says. And the comment only serves as a reminder that he hadn't known this man all his life. Yet... "Have I not known you all your life, Bruce?" The corner of Alfred's mouth twitches up just slightly, almost imperceptible.

"I presume I'm allowed to speak again?" The words are spoken lightly, with a touch of sarcasm, but Alfred's expression sobers a few seconds later.

What Bruce says is true. Their relationship here has been professional, first and foremost. Whether that was intentional on either of their parts or not, he couldn't say. Either way, that needs to change. They need to find more of the balance that had existed before they'd found themselves here. Before. Before things had fallen so horribly apart.

It had never been Alfred's intention to close off part of himself from this younger Bruce. Or if it had been, it had been with the best of intentions. There were certain things that were better left unsaid, were there not. But then again, perhaps those were the things that needed to be shared.

It is jarring: of course it is. They've both known each other for as long as Bruce has been alive, and it's very difficult for him to look at this man and not see the man whom had gathered him up in his arms when he'd fallen on the path up to the house, the man who had put all the cookies in a jar on the top shelf because Bruce would find ever more ingenious ways to steal them, the man who had at the drop of a hat flown out to Tibet on the word of a call collect international phonecall when Bruce had been missing for more than seven years.

And yet it wasn't his Alfred at all. This man had raised him through most of his adulthood, was impossibly old - possibly dipped into a fountain of immortality for all Bruce knew - and yet still approaching life with a defiance that was enviable; had raised batchildren of all kinds with a (mostly) fair hand. He'd come here, lifted away from his world, and thrown himself at his work, and at those same children, and he'd done it without a single sound of complaint. Bruce envied that. This was an Alfred who had seen and done everything, and Bruce didn't even know how to approach his expertise; but somehow he felt like he belonged to that family through Alfred. This man was his connection to them.

He closed his eyes, then nodded once, but it was an affirmative to both the questions that Alfred had asked, and all along he was still carrying with him the instinct, the knowledge of what was wrong without even speaking it aloud.

Alfred had seen death - he knew death, even in the family, and it shook him, but not so much that he literally couldn't speak about it. The only thing that could do this to him...

So he knew. But they'd come to it at Alfred's pace. In Alfred's time.

Edited 2014-08-27 16:15 (UTC)

I watched him smile. I watched him cry. I watched him grow. I watched him bleed.

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