Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Jason watched helplessly as Dick executed a perfect zero-to-death three times in a row on his Kirby. “What the hell, Dickhead? I thought you wouldn’t want to beat up Kirby ‘cause he’s cute and teeny and stuff.” Dick smirked and wavedashed aggressively. Just as Jason was about to demand a rematch, Clark burst in, looking like he had just seen a ghost and the ghost had mugged him and told him his mother never loved him. “Where’s your father?” Jason felt his expression cool a little. “Hell if I care what Batman is doing. Probably scheming some crap up in the Cave. Why do you need to know so bad?” Clark looked like he was stifling a panic attack. “I can’t hear his heartbeat.” Feeling his own heart start racing, Jason made a list of possibilities. Maybe Batman was testing a new suit or in a soundproof room. Bruce wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be. Because all of them had seen that call for help, and all of them had ignored it. Because if Bruce was dead, then it was their fault.

———

Oracle was wiping the remains of a pancake feast with Cass and Steph off her face when she got the text. She hadn’t been speaking with Bruce that much recently, after one offhand comment got her glares from the whole family. She pulled up his tracker: it hadn’t moved for the last hour. She triangulated the signal to some dark and dusty alley in the corner of Gotham. Massaging her temples, she sent a silent prayer to every god she could think of that Bruce would be okay. She watched as the Batmobile sped through the streets, leaving tracks of burnt rubber and smoke behind it as Superman flew in a streak of blue and red above. Barbara sighed and nursed her mug of tea, releasing her plea into the air with puffs of steam. Please.

———

Clark frantically scanned the streets as they approached the coordinates Oracle had sent them. Eventually, he saw a black mass hunched over in the side of an alley, pointed ears crumpled over and hand clutched loosely to its side. He still couldn’t hear Bruce’s heartbeat. Dick frantically leaped from the driver’s seat of the Batmobile and rushed over to Bruce. The rest of the family arrived in the intervening minutes, but for now, Dick was free to rip off his domino, furiously rubbing his eyes clear of water. Clark drifted away, letting the air carry him away from a grieving family he had no right to intrude on. Instead, he flew through Gotham’s streets, apprehending any criminals. He had a feeling none of the Bats would have the inclination to patrol tonight.

———

Dick ripped his mask off. The white lenses fogged up if the wearer was crying, and Bruce’s heart wasn’t beating - he needed to focus. Compartmentalize. Think about his emotions later. Deep breaths, in and out. He would be okay. He tried his best to ignore how clammy and cold Bruce’s skin was (like a dead body), how his gaze looked half-lidded into empty space (like a dead body), and how his heart wasn’t beating (a dead body’s heart didn’t beat). He remembered seeing his first dead body: he and Bruce had gotten there too late to save the man from getting stabbed and bleeding out. Bruce looked just the same: a puppet with cut strings, blood blooming from beneath him in a scarlet flower, a parody of life. “We can’t do anything for him, Robin.” He started crying again. He couldn’t make himself do compressions, touch that clammy skin and look into those dead eyes. His mind was in limbo. The man in front of him was dead, yes, but Bruce was a titan on Earth. He couldn’t die.

———

Jason braked his motorcycle with a screech. Dick was there, rubbing tears out of his eyes, staring at Bruce. “Dick, why aren’t you-“ Bruce wasn’t breathing, they needed to do compressions or rescue breaths or something, Bruce needed to be okay. Jason remembered something. “Dick. He needs to wake up.” Dick shot him a teary glare that communicated “Gee thanks, I didn’t know.” Then he shook his head. “We can’t do anything. He’s gone.” For once, the green retreated from his vision, and he was flooded by summery memories of drinking milkshakes on a roof after patrol, feeling warm as Bruce’s steady voice read out Jane Austen, and flying so high and free he felt like he could pluck stars straight out of the sky. He needed more, and Bruce had to be alive to make memories. Hell, he would even take a lecture at this point, instead of dead eyes staring past him. “God. Y’know, this makes four parents dead. I think that’s a record.” He felt tears slip down his face, and suddenly he was a little kid again, waiting for Bruce to make everything better.

———

Tim rechecked the tests on the pocket computer beeping on his wrist. His blood was clear of any of the several dozen strains of fear toxin or any of Ivy’s pollens. “So Scarecrow must have invented a new strain that our software can’t detect… It’s very strange that we’re having a simultaneous hallucination.” Dick looked at him with pitying eyes and tear tracks on his face, and Tim hated it. He pulled out a syringe of  antidote, and stuck his vein with it, nodding in satisfaction. Soon this horrible vision would clear, and he could show the real, not-dead Bruce his latest take on the harbor stakeout. After a few minutes, however, the very solid-feeling corpse hadn’t gone away, and Tim had started to frantically draft more ideas in his head. He refused to accept this - there had to be something . But his mind came up blank. Tim wanted to float away, looking at the world below him with detached emptiness. Then he would see himself wracked with sobs, filled up with despair and somehow also with a yawning chasm in his heart.

———

Damian leaped out of the Batmobile, Duke on his heels. He was thinking only one thing “Baba.” Every bit of his argument and anger with his father had been pushed out of his mind because Baba needs to be okay. Dread filled his body when he saw Grayson and Todd, tears streaking their face, comforting Drake. “Why are you standing around?” he yelled. “We need to do anything! You are all so incompetent you’ll let a little blood stop you from caring for Baba. I can do what you all failed at. I can save him.” Grayson looked at him and Damian recoiled. Back when he was in the League, he had killed a man’s family in front of him and forced him to watch. The look on his face echoed that man: like something inside him had just crumbled. Damian hated it. Then, Grayson said something in the most broken voice. “I’m so sorry. He was gone when I arrived.” Damian wanted to go back in time and tell his stupid past self how good he had it, to treasure his Baba, and to answer that call. Damian knew there had been hours between that call and Clark bursting into Jason’s apartment, hours when they could have saved him. He was a horrible son. Some small part of him whispered, “ Bruce never killed anyone. He would never. He was good. Unlike, well… It should have been you. ”

———

Cass slipped through shadows and saw her family crouched around a man’s corpse. Dick, she could tell, was already blaming himself. They all were: she could see it in the ways their brows crunched together. Jason looked far-off, reminiscing about something, his eyes misting over. She could see Tim thinking about something, scribbling calculations on a piece of paper. Damian was crying ugly tears. Duke was spread flat out on his back, looking blindly at the sky. “Cass, you don’t want to see-“ Dick tried to stop her. But it was too late: Cass had already seen the body. It was Bruce and also not Bruce. It looked like Bruce, but his brow was smoothed out and the pain was gone from his shoulders. Like a plastic doll. Everything that made Bruce himself was gone: the sparkle in his eyes when he saw one of them, the gradual wear and tear of a life spent fighting for Gotham, the strength of his love. Gone, gone, gone, just like Bruce. Cass almost wanted to be gone too.

———

Duke knew illusions and hallucinations. He knew what they looked like, how they shimmered a bit at the edges in his superpowered vision. He knew how to weave them, pulling at threads of light only he could see. And that was why he felt tears bursting from his eyes when he saw Bruce’s body lying cold and lifeless on the Gotham pavement, because the light didn’t lie. It wasn’t a product of fear gas, or magic, or anything that could mean Bruce was alive. It was real. While trying his best to stop the tears, he realized something horrifying. “He died thinking we hated him.” He blurted that out, the grief breaking down his brain-mouth filter. The family looked even worse now. “I didn’t mean to say that-“ he backpedaled. Jason raised a tired hand and cut him off. “Whatever, nightlight. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. We fucked up. We don’t get to change it.” Duke looked at the sky and the clouds rushing by. How dare the world keep going without Batman? Without Bruce (when had he realized he thought of Bruce as another dad), his dad?

———

Alfred felt like a ghost. He wished he was a ghost, simply so he could speak to the man whose face taunted him from its frozen place on the manor walls. Eternally smiling, happy even while the only things stopping Alfred from breaking were the ingrained butler code in his heart and the thought of the children. He wanted to seem strong, wanted to reassure them. But in the privacy of his room, he let himself cry. He let himself curse the world for taking his son away, and when the others were on patrol, he screamed at the sky, hating the children for letting this happen and then hating himself for it. Eventually, rage ran its course, replaced by all-encompassing numb grief. Every week, he went to Bruce’s grave, and tended to the patch of Gotham lilies that had sprung up around the grave. The legend went that if the flowers grew over a tombstone for a year, watered with tears, the dead person would come back to life. Alfred usually chose to not place much stock in superstition, but he needed this be true. So every week, he would spill tears over the grave, and the lilies seemed to bloom a little brighter, or maybe it was just his imagination. The manor was so quiet and subdued without Bruce: they were ghosts in the manor, with a ghost below the grounds.

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Dick typed in the number again. “You’ve reached Bruce Wayne,” said the tinny voice. “Please leave a message!” He took a deep breath. “Dad,” he said, and after just that one word, tears started streaming down his face. Dick kept talking into the phone. “I’m so sorry. I know you love me. I said that I wouldn’t ever be enough for you, because I thought… I don’t know. Technically, I was right. I don’t-“ Dick’s voice cracked. “I didn’t deserve you. I didn’t want to be a kid anymore, and I pushed you away because of it. Y’know, I saw a mug with your logo flipped upside down and your name misspelled. I bought it and walked into the cave with it wrapped before I remembered you were dead.” He had smashed the mug on the ground when he remembered. Then, he picked up the pieces of black ceramic and put them in a Ziploc bag. Because… “I know you’re coming back. Half of our family already has, after all. You have to come back. Please.” He clicked the ‘send’ button, and watched as the latest voicemail joined a long list. He repeated his plea to the air for good measure. “Please, Bruce. What will we do without you?”

———

The body sank with an anticlimactic plop into the black waters of Gotham Harbor. Jason pulled his mask off and wiped the sweat off his hair. That was the last of the bastards who had killed Bruce. He felt a flicker of satisfaction ( see Bruce? It was that easy ), which was immediately doused by numbness. Cool, now what? Sure, the fuckers who took Bruce from him were dead, but what was that gonna do? Bruce wasn’t gonna pop out of the ground, smiling like he wasn’t dead and- Jason remembered how one of the men had apologized to his daughter as he died, not even angry at Jason, just worried for the people he loved. Fuck, now someone else was crying because their dad wasn’t coming back. Hurt people hurt people, and he hurt people. He choked back a retch. Suddenly, the blood slicking his hands felt stickier. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t breathe. He clawed at his skin. Where was his dad? He needed Bruce to calm him down and tell him to breathe and read to him in a smooth, calm timbre and just be there so Jason wouldn’t be alone.

———

Jason was sitting on the ratty couch in his safe house when he heard Dick slip quietly through the window. “Alfred told us we should keep each other company. I brought cookies?” He held out the brown paper-wrapped box as a peace offering. Jason grunted and inclined his head. Placing his domino on the table, Dick joined Jason on the couch. He procured a cartridge of Mario Kart from somewhere, and started a Grand Prix. “Do you want to talk about it?” A thin rope bridge over a chasm. “Yeah, I guess. I killed the fuckers that killed B. But I didn’t feel anything. I just felt numb. All I did was hurt someone else’s kids. I always hurt people. B wouldn’ta.” Dick hugged him fiercely. “You try , Little Wing. You try to get better every day, and you do! We all love you. B wouldn’t want you to tear yourself up over it.”

“Same goes for you, Dickhead.”

Despite the shitty central heating that blessed his apartment, Jason felt warm. He wasn’t numb anymore.

———

Tim groaned as the sun crept through the window. His room looked like a depressed tornado had swept through it: the blinds were drawn to slivers, a couple of orange pill bottles littered his desk, the lights were off, and he had thrown his comforter across the room in the grips of a nightmare. He didn’t really feel super like existing right now. For the first couple of weeks, he had obsessively looked up everything he could about ghost stories, doppelgängers, anything that could disprove what his eyes had seen. After a month, he hadn’t found anything. Every ritual he found to bring someone back from the dead required hundreds of human sacrifices, so that couldn’t work. No tech to capture souls existed yet, and meddling with the timeline never worked. For the first time, his mind had failed him, and definitely not for the first time, he had failed Bruce. He had been so stupid . “You only pay attention to me when Dick and Jason are gone!” He parroted himself. Stupid. Bruce had been monitoring him to keep him safe for months before Dick left. Yeah. He wasn’t getting up today.

———

Damian was tired of stares. He was used to simpletons staring at him because of the color of his skin and the flowing accent in his voice. Those stares were easy to shrug off. These stares were accompanied by mocking whispers: “Poor thing…” “So young!” “A bad luck charm, then.” “Bruce’s fault for falling for that exotic lady, probably killed him for the money.” Damian almost snapped and killed the balding, sweaty man who put that last remark in. Richard had handled it with a few well-placed insults disguised as compliments, then cried with him on the roof of a Batburger. Such was his new normal. School was worse; every child and every teacher had their eyes on him, turning when he deigned to spare them a look. It was hard not to feel alone. His family helped, and always would. But at school or the empty, glittering galas, he was in a deep black void. Every other member of the family was equally distant: he had heard Richard cry into his father’s voicemail, had caught Jason rubbing his fingers over the signature scratched into his father’s copy of Pride and Prejudice, and Timothy had not emerged from his room for almost two weeks. He almost understood. He resolved to go sit with his brother for a few hours, just to remind him they were there.

———

Tim heard Damian come in and cringed, bracing himself for an argument. Instead, though, Damian began quietly cleaning up his room. He threw away the empty cans of energy drinks littering the room, swept away the crumpled-up balls of paper with hastily drawn sketches of time machines, and with a dusty ruffle, threw open the blinds. He put a cup of water on the bedside table, and with a heave, placed all twenty pounds of his bulldog Titus on Tim’s chest. Then, he sat down on Tim’s bed and began to draw. Silhouetted by the golden late-afternoon light, he looked like the sweet kid everyone believed him to be. After the water moistened his throat, he asked quietly, “Why are you doing all this?” Damian put down his sketchpad, giving Tim a brief glance at the art: a charcoal sketch of the family. “You seemed like you forgot we were here.” With that, he picked his pencil and paper back up and scratched away. Tim sat there, exulting in the light and warmth. It was… nice.

———

Duke felt weird about grieving. He had gone and placed the wreaths with his siblings on Bruce’s grave, but when the others were delivering their eulogies, they all had beautiful memories to share. Freedom, safety, love, warmth. Duke didn’t have years of memories with Bruce. He felt like someone stuck on the outside. He patrolled in the day, he didn’t fall in with a League or squad or team. He knew they were trying to make him feel welcome, but it was hard to feel like he was one of them when he heard in-jokes he didn’t understand or signals (heh) he didn’t get. He had been visiting his parents much more often, just sitting there with a pair of what felt like corpses. He had looked it up: that “miracle drug” had killed every patient who had had it administered. Bruce had tried to protect him, and all Duke did was spit in his face in childish defiance. He had cried a lot after that. Still did. He idly remembered something Bruce had said once. “Your powers aren’t something bad, chum. They make you even more wonderful. When you cry, you make rainbows out of the rain.” Duke lay on his bed and watched as rainbows stretched over the sky blue of the ceiling.

———

Cass had gone silent after Bruce died. She already didn’t talk much, but after Bruce was gone, her hands felt too heavy to sign. She floated silently in an ocean of grief, melting into the shadows as she always did. She was on patrol one night when a woman stopped her. “Batman?” Cass stood frozen. The woman didn’t know Batman was dead. She nodded her head slowly, not wanting to ruin this woman’s night. “I just wanted to thank you for getting me out. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see how horrible he was, but I just felt stuck and silent. Thank you for giving me a voice. My friends are helping too. I know I’m not alone.” She walked on bravely, oblivious to the crisis she had accidentally caused Black Bat. Cass remembered simply turning away from Bruce. “I won’t take on those kinds of cases alone anymore, Cassie. I want to see you all grow up. I’ll ask for help next time. Please.” The last text Bruce had sent. She had made him alone. He had taken on the case alone. With sickening clarity, she remembered the emotions she had felt when she read the message. She wanted him to feel alone. Why had she done that?

———

Duke scooted over silently. Cass sat down with equal silence, bearing a crinkled bag of Batburger. They watched the sun start dipping and painting the harbor under the bridge blood red. Cass slowly raised her hands to sign. Something is on your mind. What? Duke sighed, setting his milkshake down on the iron of the suspension tower. “I just… it’s stupid.” Cass fixed him with a stop-the-crap stare. “It feels wrong for me to grieve for Bruce. I barely knew him compared to all of you. I don’t feel like I deserve to mourn him like you do. My parents are alive, and I didn’t know him. Why does it hurt so much.” He barely noticed he was shouting. It’s okay, little rainbow. Cass reached out a black glove, holding a prism of tears on her fingertip. We are not alone . Duke hugged her, watching as the rainbows burst through the skies around them. “Can I patrol a little with you before I head back?” Cass nodded and they shot through the darkening sky like meteors on a string.

———

Alfred noticed the manor getting louder. The kids were recovering. Tim had left his room, and he and Damian were taking photos in Gotham Park. Alfred admired the charcoal sketch laminated as the cover of the scrapbook Tim had gifted him. Dick and Jason had cooked him mulligatawny, which, thanks to Jason’s efforts, was almost edible. Duke and Cass had tried switching patrols, to great effect on Gotham’s criminal lowlife. To all outside appearances, they were healing. Still, Alfred noticed his tissues were going missing, and still heard tears when they thought he was asleep. He wanted to hold them together, to cover or fill in the Bruce-shaped hole in their hearts. But his poetry-reading voice was sharper and lighter than Bruce’s and he could not spar with them. He felt distant, constrained by his etiquette as a servant of the house. All of their eyes were still distant when they glanced away. He was stuck in limbo, butler and grandfather warring within him. He watched them piece themselves together, steering clear of the ragged holes in their souls.

Chapter Text

Bruce was floating but chained, suspended over his grave. He used to be able to float through the manor, but over the past almost-a-year, the radius had slowly shrunk until he could barely stretch his consciousness beyond the patch of dirt surrounding his grave. He could no longer haunt its halls and see his children. It was torture. He could barely breathe, almost like something weighty was pulling him down. This was probably it: the last time he would see his children’s faces. Still, they looked almost happy, with smiles on their faces as they hugged each other. One could almost believe it, if not for their glistening eyes. Alfred walked forwards and laid a wreath of blood red mourning roses on the grave. Bruce could barely project his essence past the dirt now, just enough to see his adopted father shed a single tear. Then, his ghostly ears heard a resounding chime and his soul was yanked back into his body. 

He then processed three things. First, he was dressed in a neatly pressed suit, and after performing a quick check of his senses, apparently in his body. This was especially strange; he remembered quite clearly the cold and the pain that come with bleeding out alone in an alley. Second, the ground covering his now-emptied grave (he was alive!) was covered completely in bright blue Gotham lilies. Third, his entire family was looking at him with a look Bruce recognized very, very well. I refuse to give myself hope. It hurts too much to try. They didn’t think it was him, and Bruce recognized his own paranoia staring back at him. Dick stepped forwards, subtly tilting his body to shield the rest of them. “What did you do the first time I had a nightmare?” Bruce smiled. “I made you hot cocoa and read Peter Pan to you until you fell asleep. That was when I knew, I think, that I saw you as my son.” Dick started crying. “It’s you.”

———

Because of the Bat-Paranoia, they weren’t 100 percent willing to trust it would be permanent. Bruce had preserved one of the lilies and gotten Zatanna to come over and look at it. “Yep. Y’know how there’s a Lazarus Pit somewhere in the Gotham sewer system? These aren’t flowers per se; they’re mago-organic constructs built to house a Pit’s resurrective power. I think they were supposed to just be for some wizard dude if they wanted to revive themselves, but they basically became an invasive species all over Gotham. One use per person, though, so no third chances.” With that, she left, a container of Alfred’s lemon-raspberry snaps under her arm. 

Dick looked at his siblings and they all nodded, turning to Bruce. “We’re really, really, really sorry, and we were being stupid, and dumb, and childish, and-“ Bruce just sat there and let them get it out. “Listen. You are all my children. No matter what, I love you,” he said once they had finished. Jason slammed his hand on the table. “NO! Don’t forgive us like this! We got you killed! This isn’t something you can explain away with- with love. We got you killed.” Bruce simply reached out his hand to cup Jason’s face. “So have I, and you still love me.” Jason looked dumbfounded. “Oh, Jaylad. That was really tearing you up, hm?”

Tim cleared his throat, and immediately looked like he regretted it. “But… we ignored your message, and you died, and it was our fault! What if you hadn’t come back! They were right: I screwed everything up.” Bruce silently resolved to go fistfight Jack Drake once he died for real. He wordlessly side-hugged Tim. Cass shrugged. He tells the truth, she signed. I love him, he loves us. Why are there problems? Damian wiggled his way under Bruce’s arm, and just whispered, “Baba.” Duke was standing hesitantly on the sidelines until Bruce inclined his neck. The message was clear. You’re one of us. And so they all sat together, even Alfred dropping his butlerhood for one moment and sitting there with them.

———

Bruce knew what dying felt like. Cold, lonely, far away. Now, he was warm all over. The little part inside of him that knew his children cared smiled in celebration, but for once the rest of him knew it too.

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Clark was brushing his teeth when he heard it. A strong heartbeat, seventy-three beats per minute, just like the one that had nestled into his heart and ripped it out when Bruce left. For a few seconds he stood frozen by the weight of memories of fierce kisses and cooking together and the death glare Bruce shot him when Clark caught him listening to Taylor Swift, then he changed into his cape and blazed toward Gotham. He refused to allow the growing hope in hjs chest, but he HAD to check. Just in case.

When he touched down, he saw Bruce. The same worry lines, the same stupid charming smile, the same ice blue eyes. Before Bruce could even step away from Alfred's roses, Clark kissed him, channeling every bit of love he should have been able to give him over the past twelve months into it. "Never," he said as he came up for air, "EVER do that again." Bruce's response was to kiss him again, and for a little bit the world was just them and sunlight and it was beautiful.