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Bruce Wayne was dozing at just the edge of sleep when a metallic clink stirred his attention. He cracked his eyes open to see Alfred Pennyworth collecting empty milkshake glasses on a silver tray; the older man moved around the couches and recliners in the dark with practiced ease.
The movie had ended and the credits were rolling. Tim and Dick still looked alert, focused on the screen while they chatted, which meant there was probably an after-credits scene they were waiting to see. Bruce continued his visual check: Jason, Duke, and Damian had stopped paying attention to the movie and were comparing some kind of checklist on glossy cards.
Stephanie and Cassandra were squished close together in one of the armchairs, whispering and giggling about something. One of them snorted, a loud sharp noise that drew another peal of laughter. Tim threw a piece of candy at the two of them without turning to look, and Steph caught it in her mouth. Tim twisted to look, then, annoyed and surprised they hadn’t exclaimed when it hit them, and she held her tongue out with the candy balanced on the tip.
The scowl on Tim’s face was so fierce and sudden that Bruce had to fight a chuckle. He was still smiling when Alfred approached his elbow to collect glasses and wrappers from the side table.
“Thank you,” Bruce murmured, when Alfred bent to reach a glass. Bruce sat up and collected a handful of wrappers he had Damian had generated. “For arranging this,” he clarified. “It’s been too long.”
“I was rather pleased everyone could attend,” Alfred commented. “Juggling this many schedules is growing increasingly complicated. Not a complaint; merely an observation.”
Everyone echoed in Bruce’s head as he scanned the room again. He remembered when he’d watched movies in this room with only Alfred for company, and then again with just Dick, or Jason. They’d rarely managed to get everyone together and— he added with a pained wince— alive at the same time.
The snippets of conversation drifted toward him.
“…no, the milkshake is a symbol of power. That’s why he keeps drinking after…” from Tim and Dick’s direction.
“…the foil edition card only comes with the gold suit. Bullshit, you got them separately. Nobody gets them separately…” from Duke, Jason, and Damian’s side.
“…what kind of sister am I if I don’t make you try a rollercoaster at some point?” from Steph and Cass.
Bruce yawned and stood up, thinking about the things he should do before going on a patrol. Then, he did a tiny, internal double take.
Sister?
He glanced over at Steph and Cass with a distracted frown. They looked up, perhaps by premonition, and Steph gave a thumbs up.
“Cass and I will come,” she said, hauling herself out of the chair and reaching back to slap Cass’ thigh. “Come on, binch. We’ve got some asses to kick.”
“That’s not why I…” He trailed off because he wasn’t sure, in that moment, why he had looked at the two of them like that. Rather, he had a sneaking suspicion and wasn’t ready to confront it yet.
Steph gave him an odd look in return.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said.
Alfred had said everyone. Alfred tended to be, in Bruce’s experience, rarely wrong or thoughtless.
“Boys, enjoy your nights off,” Steph announced. “You owe us.”
There were a flurry of farewells through the room and Bruce left ahead of the girls, brow knit as he walked. His expression was impassive by the time they’d reached the cave, but the internal unrest remained. They split up after entering the city, taking separate routes along the neighborhoods teeming with small crime.
By the time he collapsed into his own bed, an hour before sunrise, he was still distracted. He was sore and most of his joints ached, but that’s not what was keeping him awake.
I did, didn’t I? I didn’t think I had, but maybe I’m wrong. I remembered filing them, but dismissed it as a dream, but maybe it was just too soon after…
He wracked his shaky memories for a wisp of concrete certainty: a specific pink hair clip on the blonde hair, a whiff of turmeric from a kebab cart near the building, the refrain of a pop song through the car speakers. Anything to say for sure, one way or another.
He couldn’t ask Alfred. Not unless he wanted to come off like a colossal idiot. He supposed Alfred probably already thought of him that way most of the time, but that was no reason to dump gallons of fuel on the fire.
The problem, he decided, was the haze of memory storage his mind had become. He recalled many things with perfect clarity, but there were months here and there that were a muddle. The days he’d been drugged into oblivion after Bane, the weeks before shooting Darkseid and after returning, the months he’d been blank with amnesia: they were all periods he only reluctantly admitted to himself were a blur. He’d never confessed it directly, but sometimes he thought Dick or Alfred or Clark suspected.
So, maybe, maybe it wasn’t his fault (for once) if he was a fucking terrible father. Maybe this one time, he was off the hook.
But then, it did seem like the sort of thing one ought to have seared into memory, like one’s own wedding or graduation. Or, the other times he’d gone through with it.
When his alarm went off, which was the precursor to Alfred coming in with coffee most mornings, he got up. He rarely thought twice about treating Alfred’s entrance as his second alarm, treating the first as a sort of warning of impending arrival.
This morning, however, he was still awake, so he dragged himself toward a shower. There was little point in finally managing to sleep for only five minutes. And if he hurried, he’d have time to check a few filing cabinets before heading into work.
Just one or two folders, anyway. Just to reassure himself.
Three days had passed since the family movie night and Alfred was growing concerned. Whatever, precisely, had transpired between the middle of the film and the end of it, he could not say. It had carried a detrimental effect, nonetheless.
Bruce was distracted and agitated. He did not look it to the untrained eye, but Alfred knew. There were unfinished meals of favorite foods, the restless slumber, the extra cups of coffee, the papers he kept sorting through.
It had been a long time since a film had triggered a flashback this unsettling, but Alfred supposed it was still possible. He had personally thought the film lovely and sedate, but that did not preclude hidden or loosely connected triggers. And, aside from that, he wasn’t convinced it was a matter of flashbacks.
Alfred set a trap. Something had to change before exhaustion caused Bruce or someone else to be unnecessarily injured on patrol. Taking his cue from the secretive manner Bruce had been functioning with, he assumed it was a sensitive matter, and arranged for Damian to spend the night with young Jonathan Kent.
When Bruce returned from work, Alfred was waiting with a plate of white chocolate macadamia cookies and more coffee. It lured Bruce into the kitchen, as he hoped it might, and Alfred was quiet while Bruce ate a few cookies that he’d likely use as an excuse for not eating much dinner.
“Master Damian arrived safely in Metropolis,” Alfred said, taking a seat across from Bruce. The suspicion rose in Bruce’s eyes at once. Alfred rarely sat down in the middle of the working day for non-meal times, not without a task before him.
“Are you feeling alright?” Bruce asked bluntly, and Alfred realized he’d misidentified worry as suspicion. It didn’t make him regret his strategy very much.
“I’m perfectly fine,” he assured him. “And yourself?”
Bruce tensed, his posture straightening, and Alfred sipped the strong coffee with an innocent air. And that’s when Alfred knew he’d caught him, forcing Bruce into either lying to Alfred’s face or honesty.
“I…” Bruce began, and then stopped and slumped a little. “You make me feel like I’m five years old again,” he accused. “I have gray hair, Al. It shouldn’t still work that well.”
“You, as much as I, know there are some roles you simply never outgrow,” Alfred returned, his limbs relaxing now that he knew Bruce would confide in him.
Bruce put his head in his hands. “You even know when it started, don’t you.”
“I can pin it to the evening we had a family gathering, but not to the precise minute,” Alfred said.
“Shit,” Bruce exhaled. “This is…this is going to sound really stupid.”
“I am already aghast,” Alfred said.
“Oh, stop,” Bruce pleaded, and Alfred was taken aback. He hadn’t realized Bruce was quite that distraught.
“Go on, Bruce,” he said, more gently this time.
“I’m…god, I’m an awful person. I should just know this.”
You’re stalling, Alfred wanted to say, growing more confused by the moment. He held his tongue.
“I’ve gone through every folder I can think of, scoured a few databases but forms end up misrecorded or misplaced all the time. I’d know for certain if I could find my own copy, but…” Bruce rushed the last words and then trailed off.
“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Alfred told him, when Bruce looked up. This was the part where Alfred usually could make some inference or leap to aid in the discussion of the issue. But any guesses he’d had were just rapidly defused.
“Don’t laugh,” Bruce warned. “Don’t scold me, either. I know I should know this, but my memory’s gone to hell for some weeks. Months.”
That Alfred had suspected. He waited.
Bruce closed his eyes, bracing himself, and then opened them to look directly at Alfred. “Have I adopted Stephanie?”
“I beg your pardon?” Alfred asked incredulously, before he could think better of it. “Have you what?”
Bruce deflated, sinking down against the table.
“Have I adopted Stephanie. Yes or no,” he mumbled.
“Have you…”
“Adopted Stephanie, yes. That’s what I asked. I don’t know and I don’t remember but I think I do and then I’m sure I haven’t and then I feel like I did and dammit, I’m an awful father.”
Alfred blinked at the graying head resting miserably on the kitchen table and clapped a hand over his mouth to hold back the incredulous chuckle. It felt slightly insane, or manic; he wasn’t truly amused as much as bewildered for a moment into a more primal reaction than speech.
It was good he’d sent Damian away for the night. They never would have had this conversation if he’d been possibly within earshot.
“I’m sorry,” Alfred said, when he’d sufficiently recovered. “But might I ask what occurred during the film to make you,” Alfred paused to clear his throat, “uncertain if you had adopted a child?”
“You,” Bruce leveled, accusatory. “After the movie. You said ‘everyone’ was there.”
“I did not misspeak,” Alfred said.
“Barbara wasn’t there,” Bruce said.
“No,” Alfred said, beginning to understand.
“Clark wasn’t there. Not Diana, or Selina, or Wally. Or Conner, or Harper. Not even Kate,” Bruce said, sounding more confident as he continued. “No one from our usual network. Not even extended family.”
“Ah, and Miss Brown was the outlier,” Alfred said.
“So…” Bruce picked up sharply on the inference. “I haven’t…”
“Surely, you must have had more than a single word from me to inspire such deep self-doubt,” Alfred said, refusing to settle the matter quite yet. Bruce’s lips pressed into a thin line, an almost angry expression, and then he sighed.
“Steph…Stephanie said she was Cassandra’s sister. Not to me, of course, but to Cass. And Cass wasn’t surprised by it.”
“I believe it is customary for young women with deep bonds to refer to each other with the term,” Alfred said, a smile curving the corners of his mouth.
“You haven’t answered yet,” Bruce said. “Not really.”
“No,” Alfred said. And then again, to be clear. “No, you have not adopted Miss Stephanie.”
Bruce’s expression was pensive.
“Okay,” he said. “Well. I should?”
“Is that a question?” Alfred asked. “And no, you most certainly should not, in my opinion. Why ever had you thought you had?”
“I think I had a dream that I did. Or that I was filling out paperwork. More than one. I don’t know when; I think after I came back?” Bruce did not elaborate on what he meant by coming back, and Alfred didn’t need him to. That period was its own still-raw wound. “And why shouldn’t I?”
Alfred finished his coffee while weighing if Bruce was earnest or just contrarily stubborn.
“I don’t want her to have to depend on Cassandra and Tim,” Bruce said, when Alfred was still silent. “Not if I’m gone again.”
Bruce didn’t say dead, which is what he meant; Alfred supposed the softening term was more out of consideration for him than anything in Bruce’s own nature, and it irked him how much he felt comfort in that. He ought to not need the coddling.
“She was stranded, wasn’t she? Last time? Cass and Tim both left. I’d planned Hong Kong for Cass, but I didn’t anticipate Tim leaving, or needing to. And it isn’t fair to leave her on her own or always tied to them, not…not after everything. You know how she is.”
“I do,” Alfred said, thinking of the cheery young woman with the depths of stone and sting; she’d become one of his cooking companions over holidays, a natural older sister to ease Damian into childhood. She carried as many hurts as any of them, and still was caught between independence and a desire to be accepted. She’d told Alfred as much, while stirring batter and apologizing at the same time for intruding.
“So. I should adopt her. She should know she’s taken care of, and Arthur Brown isn’t going to do it.”
“There is her mother, to consider,” Alfred warned. “That is an attachment Miss Stephanie herself is reluctant to surrender, however bleak the situation appears. And her history with Master Timothy. It could become terribly awkward for either of them if they were made to be siblings and harbored lingering feelings, or even memories.”
Bruce frowned, displeasure clear even in his posture.
“So. I shouldn’t adopt her.”
“There are other ways to insure she’s taken care of,” Alfred reminded him. “One of which is to perhaps talk to her about her own wishes or fears in the matter.”
“Hnn,” Bruce said. “You’re right. I should talk to her. She’s clearly one of us, regardless of the legal connections. She ought to be know we’ll…that I will take care of her accordingly, whenever she needs it.”
Alfred, in his many years of service and relationship, had often appreciated when Bruce was able to be decisive, even if he didn’t always agree with the matters he was decisive about. He doubted many others knew how often the man second guessed himself, since he did not confide frequently in more than a few, and rarely spoke in public until he’d settled his mind. So, even if he suspected Stephanie was confident in her position, he didn’t contradict Bruce.
At least, not about that.
Alfred stood and straightened his chair. He patted Bruce’s cheek when Bruce looked up. “You are not a terrible father.”
He left the table and left Bruce to make of that what he would.