Archive of Our Own ^beta

Alfred’s hands are tense round the steering wheel leather. It’s all leather in here, the car, and it smells like it, imported calfskin, overtoning the dry fine air-conditioner air, different from air outside, and Dick’s sure Alfred’s driving cap smells like it costs ten-thousand dollars, not that Dick has ever gotten close enough to Alfred to smell it on the cashmere felt. Dick has gotten close enough to B to smell him lots; as Bruce Wayne, like fresh envelopes, and as Batman, chemicals and fresh, wet sweat, creating negative space in Dick’s chest when his arms yank round Dick‘s intercostals, rubbergrooved fingertips digging into his navel, catching him as the grappling rope goes taut. The soap in the cave showers is plain. 

Small wonder Alfred doesn’t let him get close. 

Dick doesn’t say sorry. He isn’t sorry, or ashamed of what he’s done. He’s ashamed to have been caught by the scruff of his neck and frogmarched to the office of a total sham of a schoolmaster, in stupid argyle-sweater vetement shackles Alfred starches every morning before school, and he’s ashamed to have been scolded and humiliated in front of Alfred by the schoolmaster and in front of the schoolmaster by Alfred and he couldn’t say anything in his own defense lest he look defensive—and therefore immature, hot-tempered, rageful, fickle, trapped. 

Dick rolls down the window and wants to throw himself out, leaping into the wind and passing over the carhoods like a spectrum of light instead of him, and dissolve like salt and remanifest back in Jack’s hellhole of a boiling trailer with papers and melted butterscotches and cigarette ash and unsold tickets everywhere, or hell, even the Center. Dick would take the Center and its scratchy blankets and knocked-out teeth over this. But that’s a playing card Dick has yet to play cause he doesn’t know exactly how it would work out for him. He’s saving Then why don’t you just take me back to juvie? till he knows what will happen, or when he wants it bad enough not to care. But it’s just a little scolding, after a little misunderstanding, Dick tells himself. So his eyes shouldn’t be burning, so Dick’s heart shouldn’t be petrifying pharoanically hard, crawled up in Dick’s esophagus to die there, a stick of ash. So instead of all that, he lays his cheek delicately half in the fresh air and shuts his eyes and listens to the traffic and polleny wind and the window throb and the terrible, uncompanionable silence. 

“Master Dick?” says Alfred when the car comes to a stop and they’re back in Bristol, tires bubbling softly on the long stone drive-up to the manor. “What I said to you before.” With his eyes squeezed shut, Dick doesn’t see it but can picture in his mind all the dappled noon sunlight from the trees, Alfred’s backward glace, can smell the fir out the open window. “...It was very out of turn. I sincerely apologize.”

Alfred’s eyes home in on Dick’s the second he opens them. Swallowing, Dick buttonswitches the window up when he straightens, rolling his shoulder slowly.

“‘S all right, Alfie.” Dick’s eyes burn even worse now with resentment and humiliation and how bad he wants to not be here. The windowglass is up now. “All part of the dance.”

The night Dick found out Bruce was Batman Dick had about ten million questions of which Alfred answered one or two. Alfred said Bruce operated on boolean logic, either Bruce, or not, the not being Dick presumed Batman. Dick thought at the time that was dubious and now it strikes him that way even moreso. Alfred and Dick enter now the manor through the huge garage, Alfred cleanly sniping off his leather driving gloves and backwards glancing at Dick. The entrance to the place where Bruce keeps all his cars is only several feet from the entrance of what had once been the servants’ kitchen, from which laughter now emanates, a woman’s, not Bruce’s, although Bruce’s hushed, charming (charmed?—a pit in Dick’s stomach, frightening) voice follows shortly. The breathless sounds now stop abruptly. “Alfred?”

“Oh, damn. He was asleep when I left,” a flustered Alfred promises Dick in a furious, terse whisper, yet Alfred seems almost desperate, entreating, to have Dick believe him, as if they were conspirators and allies and not headman and soon to be hangman. “Here, sir!” calls Alfred loudly. “Get yourself to—” to Dick Alfred is whispering, steering Dick toward the stairs with his hands when Bruce appears in the doorway and Alfred cuts off and Dick stills. 

Bruce’s eyes zero in on Dick instantly. 

“It’s the middle of a schoolday.”

Dick holds his gaze and tips his chin up defiantly. A blonde woman in only a too-big shirt peeks curiously over Bruce’s shoulder, tangled hair lit up from the bright light in the yellow-tile kitchen. 

“There was an incident,” says Alfred with confected lightness. “As you can see.”

“Does he need,” says Bruce, “ice?” 

The question is addressed to Alfred although Bruce’s eyes have not moved for one moment from Dick. 

Dick turns tail and runs up the stairs, his backpack jumping, thudding, against his spine every step. 

Dick has it planned. When Alfred comes and knocks on his door and brings lunch in on a tray and asks, “Young sir? Would you tell me? What started it? Whatsoever did they say to you, for I know you, a gentle spirit and good if flashtempered boy, would hardly be the one to hurl the first spear?” Dick will say sullen and withdrawn but admirably proud and fair of mind and impartial: “They called me circus trash,” and Alfred will stiffen, enraged on his behalf; because how could they say such a thing? “Oh! My boy, you will know that you are no such thing,” Alfred will breathe, stunned and furious, and Dick will lurch away from where Alfred’s carefully palpating the bruised fruitmeat of his eye with ice wrapped in soft terrycloth and say, “Yes, I am! That’s exactly what I am! And that’s better by far than being what they are! What you are! What Bruce is!”

But the knock on the door doesn’t come till dinnertime so all these seven hours Dick spends with his head buried in his pillows, the insides of his throat quivering in his neck. When he opens the door Alfred isn’t there waiting in the doorway at all; but Alfred has left behind a silver tray with four little legs on which dinner is balanced with a glass of white milk, two chalky pills in a small ceramic bowl, and a cold compress alongside. 

Dick pokes his head down the hallway but Alfred or any trace of him is long gone. 

He drops the pills in the milk and watches them dissolve. Maybe Alfred was trying to drug him. Maybe Alfred was trying to kill him with these pills. Or with the milk, so cold the glass had condensation but full of skin-rupturing, eye-jellying, split-open-and-spill-out-all-the-gold-coins-in-your-tummy hydrochloric acid. Well, Dick’s sure as hell shown him! Dick will not die on any account. Dick, crouching in the hallway before the tray, stands and brings it up with him and marches to the window, where he dumps it all out and the little ceramic bowl disappears into the finely shaped sphere hedges below. 

Dick’s eye hurts.

Alfred mercifully, kindly, and tastefully spares Dick the humiliation of a talking-to in front of Bruce which would be more impressive if it weren’t some kind of feat for there to be a Bruce around to do something in front of. But nevertheless the next day Dick does not escape a talking-to. Although admittedly Alfred also spares Dick the humiliation of Alfred’s full attention being focused on Dick when he executes his talking-to but this makes Dick feel almost even worse; Alfred’s distracted voice and averted busy eyes do not make Dick feel particularly mercied, only like he is reduced to an embarassing afterthought unworthy of full attention for his dressing down. Worse still Alfred’s voice carries; they’re at the grocery store, a rich-person one, Dick can tell by the polite, put-together look of the people checking out at the registers and the mountain-water mist over the whole wall of carrots hued rainbow colors Dick’s never seen once before in his life. “I am sure that being as you are you must have developed a good sense of social hierarchy and physical ability and fairness and, well, noblesse oblige, so frankly I’m not sure why—oh, that one. Yes. Thank you.” He accepts the glass bottle of turmeric water from Dick delicately and sets it in the front part of the cart. “Well, needless to say it’s wholly inappropriate that you should fight, especially that you should win. It wouldn’t be right against grown men outside of…your…nights, and it certainly isn’t right against boys. You mustn’t. For the sake of…well, you just mustn’t. It isn’t fair, and it isn’t right of you. Why can’t you just let things wash over you? Seaspray and water over rocks, I always told Master Bruce.”

“So what, I should just lose?” Dick swings his arms out and does not hit the wall of wines. “Alfred, I’m not even using what B taught—”

“Don’t,” says Alfred, and Dick doesn’t. “You should not be starting fights in the first place.”

“I don’t start them. They do. They call me things,” Dick confesses. 

“Well—” a pause, like that surprises Alfred, like he hadn’t considered that. “...What kind of things?” asks Alfred slowly, darkly, nose twitching in a way that Dick hasn’t seen before as he turns toward Dick. His fingers still around the paper list. “Lies?”

Dick’s resolve flickers. He realizes suddenly if he says it maybe Alfred will understand and perhaps even coo out comforts but any chance of Dick having his respect like a man, as a man, will fizzle out and cratercrash like a meteoroid. Dick can’t let Alfred pity him. If you eat cherries with lords, they will spit the stones at you, so Dick snatches the paper out of Alfred’s hands. “No. True things.”

Bruce promises they can go on patrol tonight if Dick behaves at the party. Throughout Dick’s two-week out-of-school suspension and his subsequent two-week probationary period back in school, at home he has more or less been treated like a plaguespirit as Alfred has avoided him and Bruce has cropped up even less than usual, just fifteen times total, five of which were for patrol itself, five of which were invitations to patrol, four for dinner, and one tonight’s bargaining-chip-stakes-negotiation (“Alfred says if you behave…”) which Dick considered less of an invitation to patrol per se like the others than a clumsy attempt at the nice end of reward-or-punitionism. At the circus Mom would slap the back of Dick’s head when he said something naughty or Dad would grab Dick by the ankles and shake him upside down until Dick was gigglesick and panting apologies but it was all dealt with in good time and there certainly wasn’t this putrefying wound bubbling with flies and infection where Dick’s still standing there looking around uncertainly. At the Center there were house rules ( Silence during headcount is non-negotiable; beds made for inspection by 7:00 sharp; sorry, kid, I know you didn’t do anything but all the same) and there were the How Things Run rules of conduct among the boys ( Never accept anything anyone here gives you; never tell anybody when your release is coming up), intelligible social equilibriums and causative lineages. Dick isn’t sure if Alfred and Bruce truly hate and contemn him or if Alfred and Bruce just get busy. 

Certainly the premise that Bruce is busy can be granted true or at least Bruce has been to lots of parties since Dick was adopted. Dick has been to none of these parties because these parties were all “adult parties” although Dick previously found no such distinction there; at the circus as far as children went there was Dick, Raya, and Raymond only and thus the adults had an easy enough time integrating this meager number of intruders equal as anything although Dick would probably comfortably venture that the three of them were offered powdery drugs and drink less than other attendees. Anyway: something to do with the mayor tonight, whose party apparently promises to be much tamer than whatever happened at the District Attorney’s birthday party from which Bruce came back looking thoroughly rattled, on account of to this one for once Dick is invited. Not that anyone tells Dick that until that very afternoon. Alfred finds Dick getting bugbitten lying in the grass with a yellow paperback copy of Таня Гроттер, for which he paid 50 cents to a street vendor when he slipped out of homeroom one morning before he got suspended, shielding his face from the sun with it. Alfred drags him inside where Alfred buttons and re-buttons and tsk !s and combs and gels and adjusts Dick into a suit. 

When Alfred pulls back to look at him, Alfred goes still, and the expression on his face goes soft and wondering. “...Ah.”

“Ah, what?” demands Dick, pulling back suspiciously. 

Alfred squeezes his thumb and forefinger round Dick’s jaw delicately, marveling at it in silence a second longer. “...For all your trouble, my child,” says Alfred softly, “you’re the perfect vision of a little angel.” Dick sucks his cheeks in and gazes darkly at Alfred for a long time. 

“I’m failing all my classes,” Dick lies. 

“What?” Alfred reels back. 

“Ee-specially mathematics.” Dick scowls, scrabbles up his hair with his fingernails, and makes a note to fail his next test. “I think it’s too advanced by far for me not to mention,” “Master Dick,” Alfred sears, but, “unsuitable and unrelevant for my future shrinkwrapping muffins and tinning sardines and picking up stray twigs and sticks and used condoms from city blocks and gutters.” 

Alfred’s eyes glint fiercely as Bruce enters the room and brings the clean sharp smell of cologne and fresh paper with him. Bruce appraises the scene and though Alfred does not turn back to look at the new arrival he clearly knows Bruce is there: by the stiff straightening of his spine. “Young man, you will not carry this attitude into tonight. You will not be naughty. You will not be contrary. You will not start any fights. And you will not. Be. Any. Trouble," Alfred whispers low so only Dick can hear. “And for the record! It is irrelevant.”

Dick’s still smiling smugly when they pull up in the towncar, his cheek smushing against Bruce’s shoulder when Alfred, clearly still steaming, makes a sharp turn round the circular drive-up that sends Dick sliding into Bruce like a tidal wave. As he pushes a hand against Bruce’s seatbelt-covered collarbone to push himself back into his seat, he giggles, and Bruce glances at him bemusedly, mouth a line, only a line, but his dark intelligent eyes are sparkling, and Dick feels for not the first time an immediate urgent, foamy, magnetical kinship with Bruce. But Bruce’s eyes dip from Dick to look out the window at the smartly dressed and bejeweled men and women ducking out of their rented cars. A  b-e-a-d-e-d  b-a-b-e  b-a-d-e  a  c-a-b  will work most nicely. Probabilistically that shouldn’t get him more than a 4 out of 19 on his next exam. The 20th point the teacher gives you just for writing the right date.

Over Bruce’s sharp intake of breath and Alfred’s startled protests Dick presses the cardoor open and steps out onto the soft grass before the venue, a huge stone manor with trees of nectarines. 

First there is schmoozing, two hours of it, then there is dinner, which lasts so long it actually protrudes and punctures the thin wall of the temporal to needle into the spatial; Dick is there for not only hours but what seems like kilometers, lightyears. Schmoozing is fine because there are different people circling and unpeeling and grapeclustering together around Bruce. Raymond and Raya and Dick used to crawl on the trailertops and lie there on their tummies to pick the characters out of the night’s milling crowd fore the show. She’s really pretty. Bet that guy wants to give all their kids up for adoption, see how bad they’re all being, bet he hates his wife, his wife hates him. That lady’s here to sell Pop more of his klonopins in a plastic bag, see how she’s walking. Bet he spits on pigeons he sees on the street. Dick didn’t know it was Bruce at the time but he remembers Raya curling over the lip of the hot steel trailertop to spit down on the grass and sawdust to point and say, “Bet he’s rich.” He had followed her gaze to a tall broad man whose gaze slanted over Dick. His eyes were the color of apples.

The adults here are nice to Dick, nicer than kids at school are anyway and better-read admittedly not by very much, and of course Dick hears the comments, the What the hell was Bruce Wayne thinking? and Jesus, going to be a shitshow when he bums out and gives the kid back. Too fucking cruel, but in front of him they act charmed by him and shake his hands with joking, only a little patronizing faux seriousness and say things like What a little angel! and What a face! and Bruce keeps his hand on Dick’s shoulder or the nape of his neck and there’s an old guy who speaks Russian and delights when Dick surges up to him rambling in soft-r-ed southern dialect, straining giddily against the leash of Bruce’s arm, and Bruce pretends not to understand what they’re saying, and at dinner Bruce lets Dick drink from Bruce’s drink, not champagne but just sparkling grape juice the same color, over the warmly winking pretending-to-be-scandalized stares of their tablemates, and Bruce as this character, this charming, laughter-prone, talkative, vibrant, electrical character, is nice to be around but then Dick finds every Bruce he’s met nice to be around, more than nice, although he likes best the Bruce he sees sometimes when they’re training and Bruce’s eyes fall on Dick clear and pure and perceptive of every single thing there is or has ever been in the cave, all the bats all the pipe exhaust all the catalogues of steel gadgets and every move, every millimeter, Dick’s ankles turn on the training mats; when Bruce who’s otherwise always noticing everything has put his attention just on Dick, a humming, air-vibrating chilled grunt when Dick yelps out jokes or wiry insults that makes Dick feel like they climbed up to the top of a very tall stairway and found a isolatingly high pure floor to be inhabited secretively and joyously by them and them alone. 

But in real life they aren’t often so alone with one another. In real life mostly Dick is alone with himself. 

It’s during the second round of schmoozing, after dinner, that the dull talk becomes so dull as to become bleak and Dick slyly slinks out of Bruce’s shoulderhold while Bruce is talking to some old guy. Bruce’s eyes flicker back to Dick intently even as he hasn’t stopped speaking— Where are you going?— and Dick slants his head toward where the waiters are disappearing back down the hall toward the kitchen with trays full of the desserts that weren’t eaten. 

Upon having smuggled out a new plate of dessert Dick locates Bruce visually in the crowd (he stands out) but doesn’t go to him; Bruce is surrounded by young women and having what anyone can tell is a good time and Dick knows that having a ward has certainly damaged Bruce’s personal life and sexual prospects and inhabited Bruce’s familial home and sanctuary with a troublesome, loud, out-of-key person so Dick will give Bruce a break for the night from Dick and also himself a break from listening to people recite something they read in an article somewhere as their own revelation. 

Dick dips into a shadowed hallway to crouch on the ground but is not for long alone; upon seeing the shift in the shadows Dick’s traitorous, stupid chest rips open and sparkles, is glad to not be alone; for a second, stupidly, contradictorily, he hopes it’s Bruce come to find him but it’s not, it’s some other guy, inebriated and maybe 30, maybe less, with dark hair and bright eyes, who smells like fougere; whose shirt is untucked. Dick half-smiles up at him and the guy presses his back to the wall and slides down till he’s sitting on the floor next to Dick. “Hey.”

“Hi.” Dick extends a hand, which the man takes with a goofy incline of the chin, which makes Dick smile bigger. 

“Saw you all alone over here and thought you had the right idea.”

Dick shrugs shyly but that keeps the smile on his warming face. “It’s a lot of talking out there.” The frozen king-melon sorbet pearls the kitchen staff slid him are melting on the gleaming white plate into silky-looking jade-green emulsion. 

“I bet,” says the man, hands on his bunched-up knees. “God, it makes me want to off myself.” Dick giggles, sitting up straighter, electrified, delighted at the honesty. “Can’t imagine what it makes a kid your age. Which is.”

Nine come March. “Almost ten.” 

“Double digits. Very nice.”

“Thanks.” 

“You’re very pretty for almost ten.” The man’s right hand drops down from his own knee to the high point of Dick’s thigh, exactly where Alfred’s ironpressed the beginning of his pantsleg’s sharp crease. The frozen sorbet on Dick’s tongue suddenly tastes sour and hot. Dick stills. “Shh.” The hand smooths higher, till there’s a pinkie dragging against the ridge of Dick’s hipbone. “Who’re you here with? Mommy and daddy?” A thumb under his belt. 

Dick could snap the man’s wrist in half like a CD. It would be easy, easy as anything. Easier by far than—than letting it wash over him, seaspray and water over rocks. But abruptly, robotically, Dick suddenly doesn’t know if he—if he’s allowed to—would that look like something Robin could do?—if he’s—because he isn't supposed to fight. Isn’t supposed to get in trouble. Alfred will kill him if he gets in trouble and embarrasses them again, and it won’t just be not patrolling like Bruce thinks, cause the stakes here are actually much higher, Dick knows, Bruce’s identity, Batman. He’d ruin everything, they’d be apoplectic, maybe, no, certainly, they’d even send him back to the Center. Dick’s eyes suddenly feel like they have chemical burns, panic building in his chest. He doesn’t want to go back to the Center, he finally lets himself admit, eyes burning. He doesn’t. 

Dick’s tongue feels cold, slimy, and small in his mouth. “No.” 

“Hm? Oh, hell. You’re Bruce Wayne’s kid, aren’t you?” The man laughs. “Yeah, no mommy or daddy’s about right. Bet you’re used to this then.” Dick’s still holding the white plate over his knees; it covers his lap so he can’t see and Dick doesn’t want to move it as if it’s a piece of armor even though the only thing it’s hiding the man’s hand from is Dick’s eyes, it’s certainly not keeping him from snapping the band of Dick’s underwear under his belt. Dick spasms, and the man drags his left hand down into his own briefs in tandem. Let things wash over you, Dick tries miserably to remind, resign, himself. Out in the field, Bruce in Dick’s memory says, ardent-eyed and very still, a batarang between his coarse thumb and index fingerpad, you must listen to my orders. 

And you will not. Be. Any. Trouble.

Dick throws the plate into the man’s teeth and hears many cracks, a yell. Under the arch of the hallway, all lit up, is the party; Dick’s leg muscles vibrate when he wilts upward and runs down the other side of the dark hallway, down until he hits what must be an egress, and bursts out onto the grass, warm and green in the nighttime. Dick’s heart feels like it’s beating so hard it’s been reduced to foam, sludgey shapeless foam. Sliding his back against the door and dropping to the ground, he rips off his tie and grinds it between his teeth so he doesn’t bite off his tongue. It’s at least an hour that he sits there, the tie wet and tasteless clenched in his mouth, hands on his knees. Maybe it’s two or three hours. Dick knows when the party is winding down because he can hear laughter echoing around the front of the building and falling into his ears as people head back to their cars, the sounds of slowly peeling-away tires on bumpy cobblestone. 

Dick doesn’t know what the man is doing inside, if he’s grabbing Bruce by the elbow, telling lies that Dick did something to him or something or telling truths that Dick let him do that, and Dick’s tummy feels like it’s sloshing with hydrochloric acid, his eyes feel like they’re burning with hydrochloric acid. By the time Bruce comes to find him, the tie has dropped out of his mouth, and Dick’s eyes have gone numb and he isn’t cried-out because he hasn’t cried at all but it’s like all his muscles have gone stiff and sore enough that he doesn’t even feel the urge to anymore. Bruce drops down next to Dick soundlessly in the grass, six inches from Dick’s knee. It’s dark out now, maybe midnight.

“How was it?” Dick asks very softly, staring wide-eyed at the swaying tree in front of him and not Bruce. 

Bruce shrugs, and his neutral, flat, sebasmos awe-reverence presence is like cold ice cream, and Dick knows instantly that the man did not find Bruce and tell him. Bruce does not know. The relief knocks the air out of Dick but the sickly, foamy feeling remains, his tie wet, and cold, from his spit, against his neck. “The usual, mostly.”

“Mostly?”

Bruce pulls up a handful of grass, and drops it into Dick’s knee; Dick glances over at him; their eyes catch only briefly. “You were a hit.” Dick’s stomach slips and goes cold again, but Dick should be happy because in the exchange of their eyes Bruce indicates that patrol will indeed happen tonight; that either Dick had apparently behaved enough tonight, or else this requirement had been waived, so merciful. Thusly that night on patrol they stop two muggers. That night on the drive back home in the Batmobile Dick looking straight ahead somehow senses Bruce’s face flickeringly turned slightly toward him and turns not in time to see a smile, only the edges as Bruce turns back. 

Alfred comes into Dick’s bedroom the next morning, a Saturday, and is visibly shocked (and makes a big show of looking visibly shocked) (—as if it’s unusual, as if Dick hasn’t been doing it every day he’s been here; accustomed to neatness in a very small, much smaller than this, space, just his trunk under his bunk in the trailer, not a whale-sized closet and an armoire and a big dresser, too) to find Dick’s tux from the last night folded neatly on his desk, and, admittedly much more unusually, Dick himself, still in pajamas, in bed. Alfred comes over, rips down the covers, and presses his bony palm onto Dick’s forehead. It’s a conscious contrarian thought in Dick’s head that he would like to be alone; but the fairer more considered thought is that he isn’t sure if it’s all the way true. However he is sure it’s very dangerous to be around Alfred right now because some important membrane in Dick is very thin. “Are you coming down with something, Master Dick?”

That alone is almost enough to do it. Dick squeezes his eyes shut tightly so he doesn’t cry. “No.”

The palm changes to the backs of Alfred’s fingers, which try about four different places on Dick’s temples, as if searching. “…You don’t feel feverish,” frets Alfred. A strange note in his voice. “Master Bruce didn’t mention you getting on patrol struck by any blows nor afflicted by any—”

“I didn’t,” Dick says very quietly, a mumble. “I wasn’t.”

Alfred’s fingers pull at Dick’s eyelids. Dick’s mouth floods with something so sad and sour that his mouth can’t help but turn down till it’s shaped like an umbrella and frozen like that. Looking up at Alfred, Dick’s eyes sting with tears and he bites the inside of his cheek and the muscle snaps apart and the mineral tang of blood floods his mouth, and Alfred’s expression falls to pieces; he croons, sitting quickly on the edge of the bed; it creaks; and his hand is stroking through Dick’s still stiffgelled hair, and the tears start beaming down Dick’s cheek in earnest. Dick covers his face with his arms. “Oh, Master Dick,” breathes Alfred, surprised.

“I’m—really—sorry,” Dick sobs out. “I’m really. I’m really sorry. I’m really—sorry—Alfred, I’m real—ly—”

“Oh, Master Dick!” Alfred repeats, heartbroken; bewildered. His hand, blocked by Dick’s arms, resorts to massaging Dick’s shuddering shoulders. “You have nothing to be…” he trails off helplessly, scoffing up to the ceiling as if trying to avail Godhelp. Dick hears him click his teeth worriedly. The hand kneads harder, deeper, and Dick sobs harder, wracking. “I…oh, darling child...” Dick’s throat is filled with huge, slimy wet rocks; he’s hyperventilating. “I confess I…what has caused this?”

Dick tries to answer and can’t. Nothing can come out. Alfred very gingerly tries to uncross Dick’s arms from his face and the touch makes Dick’s veins quiver under his skin; he resists; Alfred in some move Bruce certainly hasn’t taught Dick yet snaps Dick’s wrists down to the mattress on either side of his head and holds them there and Dick is left sobbing, arching, humiliating sobs into the bare exposed air a foot under Alfred’s stunned-wide, watchful gaze. Dick’s teeth are catching numbly on his lips as he bites to hold it all in. He thrashes and Alfred holds fast. “Oh, stop this,” scolds Alfred. “Stop this, young sir.”

Alfred holds Dick down by the wrists until the sobbing dehisces into raking, gasping, tremoring retches. It happens all at once and Dick is left glaring, sullen, humiliated, resentful, and swollen-eyed, up at Alfred’s long, oval face, parallel to his. 

Alfred has lovely eyes the color of rum but mostly they are inscrutable; inscrutable equally to Bruce as to Dick such that Dick knows it’s not just because he’s been here seven months that Dick can’t read Alfred too well; Bruce can’t either; but now they are quite, in fact very perfectly scrutable and painfully perceptive and piercing-feeling: Dick has lost Alfred’s respect totally, forever. 

“What on earth,” says Alfred at long last, “have you to be sorry for?” 

Cherry stones, Dick’s tongue hits the cold behind of his front teeth. Alfred’s eyes dart to the soon-to-follow bulge of Dick’s tongue against the inside of his cheek, and then back up to Dick’s eyes, obviously trying and failing to piece something together.

“You should take me back to the Center,” Dick whispers. 

“…What?”

Dick tries to shift. Alfred’s hands tighten. Dick swallows thickly, and his eyes sting again. His voice is thick. “Just let me go back there.” 

“…What did Master Bruce do on patrol last night?” Alfred demands, a look of indignant rage catching in his eyes. “What did he say to you?”

“He didn’t say anything!” Dick cries, tugging at his wrists furiously. Alfred holds fast. 

“Clearly, he said something of—”

“He didn’t! He didn’t say anything!” Dick yells, so furious at the accusation that it makes tears sear down his cheeks again. “He didn’t do anything wrong! I love him!” One wrist at last bends free and he smacks his palm hard against Alfred’s suited collarbone, only for Alfred to grab his hand and lace their fingers together tightly, so tightly Dick’s fingertips turn snowwhite. “Don’t accuse him of—” Dick’s voice breaks off and they’re just staring at each other in silence once more, Dick’s chest heaving, rising, falling rapidly. “He didn’t do anything wrong.” Dick buries his face in his shoulder, scraping away the teartracks into his pajamas. “Just put me back.”

“Back in the Patrick Worthington Center for Juvenile Detention?” demands Alfred in a high voice. 

Dick gazes up at him emptily.

“...Lord God.” Alfred finally withdraws his hands from Dick altogether to hold his own temples but instead of  feeling relief that Alfred’s giving up on him he feels his stomach twist.  Dick slowly sits up on his palms and watches. Alfred’s neck is craned, face is in his hands before he finally looks back up, eyes finding Dick. “Why?” asks Alfred in a terse, brittle voice. “Why would we do such a thing?”

Dick’s shoulders raise, and drop again, in a wary, guarded shrug. His throat is tight. Alfred’s gaze is fiery and expectant. 

“Well?”

“Cause I’m trouble,” Dick shoots back in a whisper, warily, unsure of why Alfred’s acting like this and unable to puzzle it out; Dick’s voice buckles on the bilabial stop of the b in trouble, and Alfred’s face crumples like cardboard under a foot. Dick’s eyes sting again but he blinks it back, but he can’t bite back the thickness in his voice, which despite his best efforts refuses to raise louder, “And I don’t want to be trouble fo-for you. Either of you. So you should just put me back.”

“If God forbid we ever were to ‘put you back,’ it would not be a fortnight before Master Bruce would begin emulating his parents’ sleeping habits: their current ones, I'm afraid. And me! Well, I would manage obviously but I would be very much out of a livelihood and employer  so as you can imagine this is very much against both of our selfish interests to do and OBVIOUSLY VERY SILLY!” 

Dick’s expression goes dire. “Don’t joke about that.”

“My prospective indigence in my twilight years is no joking matter, Master Dick.”

There is a beat. “I meant about Bruce.”

“Ah!” says Alfred. “And there we have it, your priorities reveal themselves!” But Alfred is smiling, calculating and tentative, this was a sleight of hand and distraction to make him off-guard, laugh, and he’s clearly waiting for Dick to disarm…and slowly, Dick does, tinily ghostily smiling very shyly, cheeks warm. Alfred sighs deeply in relief and reaches for Dick, gently rubbing at Dick’s cheek. “There you are, child. Come here.” Dick bonelessly  lets Alfred pull him into a stiff, awkward embrace. Dick’s forearms tremble, the muscles in his arms jumping and vibrating, as he tentatively clutches Alfred’s middle.  “Shh.” Dick’s nose bumps into Alfred’s starchy white collar, which smells like peppercorn and tobaccoleaf, Dick’s fingers clawing down Alfred’s spine as Alfred slowly rocks him, and suddenly the sadness and stomach-swooping, vacuous fear is back. Dick buries his cold face fully in Alfred’s shoulder, and Alfred’s arms tighten. “Oh, Master Dick. It’s all right. It’s all right.” Dick feels Alfred hesitate more than he feels the very, very brief kiss to the top of his head. “We will not be putting you back anywhere.” 

“But I’m so much trouble,” Dick whispers into Alfred’s acromion. “And you guys are both so busy, and I’m so bad and I—”

“‘Bad’?” Alfred stills and pulls back. “Master Dick, you are…many things but you are not bad. Good lord, child. No. In truth you have spoiled me. When I went inside your school to speak with the schoolmaster that day I saw other children up-close for the first time in, well, I suppose, 20 years and I was astonished and dismayed by their ugliness, their dismalness, coarseness, uncleverness, naughtiness, their consummate ungoodness.” Alfred grips the back of Dick’s neck, fingers smoothing over Dick’s hair. “Admittedly: mostly their ugliness; similarly just the other day I saw a photo of Master Bruce as a child and I became frightened! Imagine.” Dick inhales on a surprised beat of laughter even though Alfred’s words mostly make him defensive of Bruce; he lifts his head, or tries to, Alfred’s hand on Dick’s skull presses him down. “As far as trouble, well, you know already very well I have spoken to you too harshly. Those things I said…I apologized before and I should apologize to you for what I said outside of scolding, too.  I just respect you very much and find you a fierce and impressive peer and enjoyed playbiting with you. I feel we’re kindred spirits, and being so much impressed with your brightness and enjoying so much your mischief, wit, and daring, I forgot all these lived in a very sweet, soft, and gentle soul.”

Dick squeezes his eyes shut tightly so he doesn’t cry again. His voice comes out in whispery jumps.

“I like playbiting with you too.”

Alfred traces polygons over Dick’s neck. Dick shudders into it, breathing shallowly into Alfred’s collarbone, but deep down he can count the degrees Alfred’s esteem is dropping, no longer are they ровни or even even pretending at it; all the esteem traded for comfort; and for it Dick feels cold; another thing given up, when Dick does not have much left; but even for all that he could still stand to be held here in a little closer, tighter, longer.

Now I must to the young man send humble treaties, dodge and palter in the shifts of lowness; who with half the bulk o' the world play'd as I pleased, making and marring fortunes. You did know how much you were my conqueror; and that my sword, made weak by my affection, would obey it on all cause.

Pardon, pardon!

Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates all that is won and lost: give me a kiss; even this repays me. We sent our schoolmaster; is he come back? Love, I am full of lead. Some wine, within there, and our viands! Fortune knows we scorn her most when most she offers blows.