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Chapter Text

Alfred was already at Bruce’s side as the younger man staggered out of the Batmobile, one leg practically unusable.

“Calyface,” Bruce tried to explain through gritted teeth. “Cement pillar.”

“Shh. We’ll discuss all that later, sir” Alfred answered calmly, barely stumbling under Bruce’s considerable weight as he half-carried Bruce to the med bay. “Up you go.”

Bruce hauled himself onto the gurney and threw an arm over his face, one hand gripping the mattress as the older man got to work cutting away his pant leg and examining the extent of the damage.

“Well?” Bruce asked after a few minutes of silence.

Alfred set aside the handheld X-ray device. “It’s an oblique nondisplaced fracture. You’ll likely need a cast for no less than six weeks.”

Bruce let his head fall back onto the pillow.

_______________

Bruce was distantly aware of a swirl of activity around him, what felt like a dozen voices speaking over each other at once, fading in and out of coherence.

“—hit his head,” one of them was saying. A stranger. No, not a stranger. The voice was too familiar. Wonder Woman. Diana. “He’s been in and out of consciousness, but he told me to bring him here.”

“Thank you.” This voice was familiar, too. It sounded like home. Bruce’s first thought was Dad, but that couldn’t be right. Alfred, he realized. This was Alfred. “How long has he been out?”

“About two minutes.”

“Bruce?” Alfred’s voice was closer now, and suddenly Bruce’s face felt naked and cool. His cowl must have been removed. A hand cupped his cheek. “Master Bruce, could you open your eyes for me, sir?”

Bruce struggled to obey, peeling his lids apart and squinting up at Alfred’s reassuring, if anxious, smile. He didn’t like the lines between the older man’s brows, the tension around his lips.

“There you are, my boy. You had us worried. Don’t try to move,” he added when Bruce went to sit up. “Not yet. Stay awake while we run some tests, all right?”

The tests were many, but Bruce was kept alert by a steady stream of conversation with Alfred an Diana. By the end, he’d been diagnosed with a severe concussion and ordered to rest for at least a month.

When Alfred found him suiting up in the cave less than a week later, the older man was beside himself.

“What on earth do you think you are doing?” Alfred demanded.

“Disturbance at Arkham,” Bruce replied, catching himself as he swayed while trying to pull on one of his boots. “I need to get down there before it turns into a full riot.”

“No, you most certainly do not. A crisis at Arkham is taxing even at your best, which you are not at the moment. A blow to your head could be catastrophic.”

“I can’t just sit at home while this is happening, Alfred. If it escalates the whole city could be threatened.”

“Why not call one of the Justice League to sort it out? Any one of them would be happy to—”

Bruce leveled a hard look at the older man, which took some effort since Bruce was still having trouble focusing. “This city is my responsibility. I’m going.”

Alfred cocked his chin indignantly, clasping his hands behind his back. “Well, I hope you don’t expect me to wait up while you throw yourself to the wolves.”

“I don’t.” Bruce climbed into the Batmobile and left without looking back. He defused the incident at Arkham without taking much of a beating, but the ordeal still left him dizzy and nauseas, his head pounding so violently he could hardly see straight on the drive home.

When he did return to the cave, he sat in the Batmobile with his eyes closed for several mintues breathing deeply and waiting for his balance to return. He was so out of it, he didn’t even question when the roof of the car slid back and a pair of gentle hands guided him out of the vehicle, helped him out of his gear, and led him to a spare bed in the cave.

_______________

“Master Dick seems to be doing well, all things considered,” Alfred said as he came down the stairs to the cave where Bruce was plucking shrapnel from his own neck and shoulder. The metal fragments clanked into the dish like tiny bells.

Bruce winced as he fished a particularly deep shard from his upper arm. “Did you expect anything less?”

Pulling up a stool, Alfred gently took the tweezers from Bruce’s hand to continue the process. “I expected him to be rattled given everything that happened tonight. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were simply putting on a brave face now.”

Bruce frowned. “I don’t see why he’d have any reason to be scared.”

Alfred paused, sighed, resumed pulling shrapnel. “You were very nearly get blown to pieces, sir. And the boy has far too much experience watching his family die.”

The words were said calmly, but they pierced Bruce like a spear. “I had it under control.”

“And yet,” Alfred maintained with a cocked brow, “it seems no matter how capable an individual may be, those who care for them cannot help but worry when the person in question insists upon putting themselves in harm’s way.”

Alfred grabbed an irrigation bottle and gently rinsed the wounds, continuing, “My guess is that young Master Dick will spend the rest of the night wondering if you are in pain, thinking of all the ways this evening could have gone worse, and punishing himself for not doing more to help you.”

“That’s—”

“A perfectly natural reaction,” Alfred finished with a tone that discouraged any further debate. “Yes, I agree. You would do well to reassure him before going to bed yourself.”

As Alfred put the medical supplies away and finished bandaging Bruce’s injuries, Bruce couldn’t help but notice the subtle drag in Alfred’s usually fluid movements, the heaviness under his eyes.

“You look tired,” Bruce noted, rolling his shoulder experimentally and grimacing at the tug.

“Just old, I’m afraid.”

Bruce knew this was a dodge, but before he could press, the comms in the cave crackled to life with Superman’s voice. “Batman, are you there? I know you’re probably just finishing up patrol, but—”

“What is it?” Bruce cut in, turning back to the computer and pulling the upper part of his uniform back on. Beside him, Alfred went still.

“Need some help at STAR Labs. Looks like a potential security breach. Think you can get here in thirty minutes?”

Standing, Bruce said, “I’m on my way,” but he paused when his gaze fell on Alfred.

The older man wordlessly handed over Bruce’s cowl, sounding more than a little weary when he asked, “Shall I retrieve Master Dick?”

“No,” Bruce decided. “Let him sleep. You should get some sleep, too.”

There was a brief but loaded silence before Alfred said, “Of course, sir. Do be careful.”

_______________

In the days following Bane breaking Bruce’s back, Bruce was unable to move at all, essentially trapped in his bedroom. He drifted in and out of a sort of dissociative state—a combination of shock, depression, and powerful pain medications made it difficult to tell dreams from reality, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to try very hard to do so on most days. Since losing Jason, his daily life had become a waking nightmare, so it hardly felt worth the effort.

But there was something that did occasionally cut through the fog—a quiet, wobbly noise that he grasped at lazily from time to time. It sounded like someone crying right outside his bedroom door. And it was a cry he recognized.

He’d heard it at his parents’ funeral. And at his son’s.

Was Bruce dying? Statistically—karmically—he should be. But he was fairly certain he wasn’t.

So why was Alfred crying?

_______________

“We’ll try it again tomorrow,” Bruce sighed, shutting off the cave’s computer monitor and stretching his neck with a groan. He stood and dropped a hand onto Tim’s hair. “I’ll be upstairs to give you a ride home when you’re ready.”

Tim said nothing. He looked exhausted, almost ghostly in the dim light. It had been a difficult patrol—the kind that felt as if the city itself were trying to crush them—and Tim had been off his game. Sluggish, sloppy, distracted. In fact, he’d been out of it for a few days now.

Bruce planned to ask why, but not tonight. “Tim?”

The boy blinked and looked up at him. “Oh, yeah. Okay.”

Up in the study, Bruce flopped into one of the couches, achy and depleted. Tim’s house was just a couple miles down the road, but the longer Bruce lay there with his eyes closed, teetering on the edge of sleep, the further the drive became in his mind.

At some point he must have finally drifted off, because when the whispered, “Bruce?” found his ear, he had to drag himself out of a dreamless sleep to open his eyes.

Bruce blinked at the figure hovering over him. Not Alfred’s tall, lean silhouette, but a smaller form, topped with a head of shaggy hair.

“Sorry,” Tim muttered. “I didn’t wanna wake you up, but…”

“It’s all right.” Bruce sat up with a grunt, squinting for his shoes. He spotted them across the room. “I’ll grab my keys and we can go.”

“I…um…”

Bruce paused with his foot halfway in his loafer and turned to look at Tim, the last traces of sleep and exhaustion giving way to the sudden clang  of alarm bells in his head. Something in Tim’s posture, his voice, was off. Bruce reached out and tugged on the chain of a nearby lamp, flooding the room with light. Tim flinched.

“What’s wrong?” Bruce asked, suspicion pitching his voice into a register more appropriate for an interrogation room.

“Um…Well, nothing’s ‘wrong,’” the boy hedged.

“Tim.”

The kid’s eyes drifted down to where he had one arm carefully wrapped around his torso. Moving gingerly, the fourteen-year-old lifted his white tee. Before he’d even gotten it up halfway, Bruce was across the room, crouching in front of him. He raised a drooping part of Tim’s shirt and tensed when the light fell across the dark, mottled bruise covering the boy’s left side.

After a moment, Bruce said, “I’m going to have to touch it.”

Tim whimpered but nodded, sucking in a breath that only elicited a moan as the boy’s ribs expanded with the inhale. Bruce’s mouth twisted sympathetically as his fingers worked their way along the discolored skin, feeling for compound fractures. By the time he was done, Tim was trembling, but his eyes, Bruce noted, were dry.

“I don’t think you punctured anything,” Bruce said, his relief tempered by a steadily growing suspicion now that he knew Tim was okay. The bruises were too advanced to have happened that night. “But we should go back down to the med bay to—”

Tim handed him his phone, already loaded with a series of X-ray scans of his ribs. The timestamp was from before they’d gone on patrol that night.

“Only one of them is broken,” Tim offered nervously as Bruce looked the pictures over.

“Only one?’” Bruce echoed sharply.

Tim blanched.

“When did it happen?”

“Tuesday.”

“That was three days ago,” Bruce said as if Tim didn’t already know. “Tim, are you telling me this happened three days ago?”

Tim cringed and nodded.

Bruce let out an exasperated breath, handing the phone back. “Have you taken anything for the pain?”

“Some ibuprofen before we left.”

Bruce, who had already rounded his desk to search for painkillers in one of the many drawers, paused to glance up at Tim. He knew what was to break ribs, the vice-like tension of each breath, the explosive agony of any wrong move. Ibuprofen would hardly be enough to take the edge off. “That’s it?”

“I didn’t wanna take anything stronger before patrol.”

Of course. Taking anything stronger would risk making him groggy and compromise his performance. The boy was conscientious even while making an impossibly ill-advised decision. It was so very Tim. If it hadn’t been so reckless, Bruce might have found it endearing.

Closing the last drawer, Bruce said, “Come on. You can stay here for the night. I’ll find something to help you sleep.”

There was a moment where Tim looked uncertain, but after a brief hesitation he followed Bruce out of the study and down the long dim corridors. They walked without speaking, though Tim’s pained gasps punctuated the silence at times, causing Bruce’s steps to stutter and his eyes to flick back over his shoulder.

When they arrived at a guest room that had gradually turned into Tim’s unofficial bedroom, the boy perched awkwardly on the edge of the bed and watched Bruce rearrange the pillows so that he could lay without putting too much pressure on his side. “I’ll check back downstairs for some meds.”

“It’s okay,” Tim insisted. “It’s really not that—”

“Enough, Tim.”

The boy fell silent, gingerly swinging his legs up onto the mattress as Bruce held the blankets up for him.

“You’re pissed,” Tim observed so quietly Bruce almost didn’t catch it.

“I’m frustrated.”

“Because I lied.”

Bruce sighed. “Do you realize how dangerous that was? What if you’d been alone and your rib had shifted and punctured a lung? Your chest cavity could have filled with blood and you would have drowned before I’d ever known something was wrong.”

Tim’s eyes went wide. “You go out hurt all the time…I just thought—”

“It’s not the same,” Bruce cut in. “I don’t have parents waiting for me to come home. No one other than me is responsible for—or invested in—my well-being.”

Tim gnawed on his bottom lip, looking like he wanted nothing more than to simply disappear. “I’m invested in your wellbeing.”

“Tim…”

“So is Alfred.”

At that, Bruce froze.

“He waits for you,” Tim continued. And it wasn’t an accusation or even a retort, but a tentative statement of fact. “He told me once that he waits for you every night even when you think he’s already in bed. He said he can’t sleep until he knows you’re home safe.”

A dozen different nights from over the years flashed through Bruce’s mind. How had he never seen it before?

“My parents don’t do that,” Tim added now, staring down at the sheets as he pinched and plucked at the pale linen. “I mean, they care and everything but they aren’t home enough to…well, you know.” He paused. “Sorry for keeping stuff from you. And making you worry.”

Bruce bent forward and pressed his forehead into Tim’s, closing his eyes. He felt Tim relax into the touch. “I’ll always worry about you, Tim. But apology accepted.”

After Bruce managed to scrounge up some suitable painkillers to help Tim rest comfortably, he wandered into the kitchen, sleep now the furthest thing from his mind. Alfred was already there in a robe and pajamas, sitting at the island with a cup of tea and a book.

How many times had Bruce found Alfred awake at all hours without ever considering to ask why? “It’s late, Alfred. What are you doing up?”

The older man removed his reading glasses and waved a dismissive hand. “Just a bit restless, is all. How is young Timothy?”

“He’s okay,” Bruce sighed, sitting beside him. “He’ll be asleep soon.”

“Good. I’ll prepare some clean clothes for him to wear and make a call to the school explaining his absence.”

“Thank you.” Bruce thought for a moment before adding, “I’m sorry, Alfred.”

Alfred frowned at him. “What for?”

The younger man hunted for the right words to say, something profound enough to account for years of overwhelming selfishness. When he found none, he said simply, “For all the restless nights.”