Chapter Text
Bruce stands and watches as his life changes. He sees the flash of metal in the semi-darkness of the alleyway, hears the boom of what he knows is a gunshot. He hears his mother scream. Another gunshot. The man with a ski mask pulled over his face gruffly tells Bruce he has a message. A message for the Court.
'Tell them Thomas and Martha died for what they know.'
Little Bruce Wayne stands locked in place, terror showing itself in his complete lack of response. His body does not know flight or fight. It knows only how to dissociate from the things that are happening to him. He feels himself nodding, but has no sense of making his head move. He feels tears on his cheeks, but has no attachment to why they are there.
Officer Gordon finds him like that. In the same state he's taken to the hospital, the people around him talking about shock. He goes to sleep when a needle pricks his arm and when he awakes, he's at home, tucked in his bed, Alfred sitting by his bedside.
All Bruce asks is, "Are they dead?" He knows the truth before Alfred says a word.
It's two days, seventeen hours, and thirty-six minutes before he stands uncomfortably before the Court, unmasked because there is little point when he is the only child in the room, and delivers the masked man's message, his eyes upon the floor.
It's forty-seven seconds later he knows these are not his people. There are no tears, no placations, no apologies for his parents' deaths. Not even the mumblings he hears elsewhere about that poor boy or what he must be going through. They care only about what the message means, about what they could have possibly known that got them killed. They grill him for a meaning he does not have.
He goes home, and when Alfred allows him to skip most of the Court meetings, he does. When Alfred slowly separates them from the Court in every way he can manage, Bruce does not complain. When they have to attend, for every birthday, every holiday, and have to be present at votes, Bruce grits his teeth, puts on the gleaming white owl mask, and goes.
When he's old enough, Bruce creates what he always thought as a child the Court was supposed to be: a person behind a mask that helps the city.
It begins with concepts, papers, drawings, research, and teaching himself from the extensive manor library, taking materials across the grounds and down into the cave he found as a small boy. Alfred buys him whatever books he asks for, locates whatever knowledge he wants from the library or city hall. Gordon placates the kid he knows was irrevocably changed with visits to his precinct, not knowing Bruce is watching, cataloguing, studying how things are done. To Alfred and Gordon, he's a curious teen. To himself, Bruce is learning the skills he'll need if his plan succeeds.
When he's certain Alfred will entertain his ideas, he brings him to the cave, shows him all his research, all the drawings of a man in a Bat-like costume, all the variants he's considered with the variety of types of bats in the world. He spends hours explaining himself and his decisions. Alfred listens with the same patience he always does, and when Bruce asks for the renovations, for the technology, for the last pieces of his training, Alfred holds his arms open and lets him decide whether to come in for a hug. There, tucked against Alfred's chest, Bruce hears the tremble in Alfred's voice when he asks if this is the life Bruce wants to live. He means it when he says it is.
There, between them, Batman is born, in the handful of words Alfred speaks.
"I'll help. I'll always help you, my boy."