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Bruce hadn't thought much about whether he should sneak out of the house alone, or whether he should even know how to, or what the inevitable consequences would be. As far as he was concerned, the answers were-- respectively-- yes, definitely, and freedom . Liberty, like Alfred’s homemade ice cream, came to him in sweet and infrequent little tastes, and needed to be savored-- but he was learning, slowly, to make his own.
Liberty, that was. The ice cream would forever be beyond him.
He was small, and he knew how to be quiet, and it would be the work of only a few minutes to slip past the guests and out one of the side doors. It would be easy, and he wanted out . He loved to be outdoors in the twilight. Daylight seared his eyes, and he did not care for all the people. And nighttime, his parents reliably informed him, was when monsters came out and little boys should be in bed. The twilight hours, neither light nor dark, made for a perfect compromise.
The dinner party his parents were throwing continued apace, in spite of the little outburst he'd carefully calculated to get himself banished from the dinner table. He had been excited, at first, to be invited to sit with the grown-ups-- but he hadn't realized just how much sitting still and being quiet that would entail. Mother had warned him, and she had offered a new book about the Knights of the Round Table for him to occupy the evening with. It had been a tempting prospect. But Father had asked whether he could handle it, and he'd said that Great Men had to challenge themselves, and didn't Bruce want to be a Great Man someday?
"Great Men," Bruce had learned, were people who had earned Father's attention. And he wanted very much to be one of those one day. But that day was not today, because dinner had been horrid. Everyone seemed to have an instruction manual Bruce had forgotten to read-- either he'd been too loud, and he needed to quiet down, or someone had asked him a question and he needed to speak up. As far as he was concerned, life would be a great deal easier if people would just decide once and for all whether or not he was allowed to talk. And the people next to him had been too close-- they had brushed his elbows while he tried to eat-- and his suit pinching at his neck and constraining his shoulders might not have been painful, but it had been the most unbearable thing he had experienced in his short life so far.
He’d tried to keep quiet. Great Men endured hardships, after all, and they were always brave and courageous. A strapping lad of the advanced age of almost-four, Bruce knew he should be able to manage one dinner party without making a nuisance of himself.
He'd be a Great Man someday. He was determined. There were years between now and adulthood-- he had time, and infinite potential. But today, he couldn't do it.
So he had pitched a very loud and visible fit, which had gotten him hastily bundled away from the table by a harried but sympathetic Alfred. "I don't blame you, Master B," he'd whispered as he carried Bruce up to his room. "I wouldn't like having to sit on display like that either." He’d looked like he had wanted to stay a while, maybe read aloud a chapter of that new book-- Bruce wouldn’t have complained-- but he had a dinner party to look after, and Bruce had a scheme to enact, so perhaps it was for the best.
Briefly, before Alfred shut his bedroom door, he could hear his mother apologizing faintly from downstairs. "...really such a sweet boy normally, I don't know why…" He did feel a pang of shame, for embarrassing her, but necessity was cruel. The ends would simply have to justify the means.
Once Alfred's footsteps had faded into the distance, Bruce sprang into action. He discarded his little suit in favor of much more practical play clothes (though, in rebellion against his mother and her fussing, he forewent his jacket) and gathered his shoes in his hands so they wouldn't make noise on the stairs. Walking as quietly as he could on the balls of his feet, he poked his head into the hallway to make sure the coast was clear before slipping out of his room. He eased the door shut behind him, tiptoed down the stairs (careful to skip over the one that creaks!) and beat a silent sock-footed path towards the nearest side door.
Freedom, just like that. He stood, wavering, on the threshold for just a moment, wondering whether he should really do this. He put on his shoes and, stalling, double- and triple-checked that he hadn’t put the wrong shoe on the wrong foot as he was sometimes wont to do. Envisioning the possibility from his prison at the dinner table had been one thing-- looking out of an open door, with nothing stopping him from stepping out all by himself, was quite another.
He mustered up all his courage, spared one look back to make sure nobody was watching, and left.
Once he had escaped into the open air, his breath came easier, and he relaxed against the side of the house for just a moment. The evening stretched out wide and mysterious before him, freed now of the spectre of the dinner party and its terrible, terrible guests. It contained, like a treasure chest at the end of an adventure story, all the riches and promise in the world-- it could be anything, become anything. He could do literally whatever he liked. Nobody would ask what a Great Man would do, nobody would fuss over his clothes and his hands, nobody at all would possibly impede his enjoyment of the night. For a moment he stood still, hefting the weight of this responsibility-- and then, whooping, he took off at a sprint into the vast purpling twilight.
No longer did he have to bother with sneaking. Nobody from the dinner party could hear him-- and even if they could, they couldn’t catch him. His feet crunched in the leaves and skidded in the mud, his hair and his clothes snagged on twigs and thorns, his breathing came loud and harsh and stung in his chest. The air was crisp and cold; the shadows were long; the early-evening moon hung pale against the lavender of the sky; everything was perfect.
There was so much to do . It was intoxicating. Should he go to the pond first? Pay a visit to the frogs and fishes? Or perhaps he should climb all the way to the top of his favorite many-limbed oak tree, or find a clearing to lie on his back and watch the stars wink into the sky one by one. Anything, anything was within his grasp.
He couldn’t have told you where he was going-- he let the wind push him one moment, chased fireflies the next. He only stopped running once he couldn’t anymore. By then the house was a distant glowing smudge on a faraway horizon, obscured by trees. It was getting dark around him, pale purple sky darkening to sapphire blue, but he hardly minded-- the lengthening shadows were easy to imagine as monsters, or pirates, or bandits, or dark knights lurking in wait to prey on passersby. Who, he asked himself, should he be tonight? What sort of adventure should he have?
He pondered the question so busily that he didn’t register when the satisfying crunch of fallen leaves under his feet turned into jarring cracks and the scrape of stone on stone. The ground falling in underneath his feet was hard to miss, though-- his heart was in his stomach and his stomach was in his throat and he fell, head over ears, into an abyss.
Bruce knew, intellectually, about Isaac Newton and his apples and the discovery of gravity. Newton was one of Father’s Great Men, after all. But until he’d found himself falling, flailing desperately, grabbing at outcroppings and exposed roots and swallowing bitter terror when they slipped through his small fingers, he’d never given it much thought.
He fell, faster and faster, shrieks echoing off the sides of the cavern, until quite abruptly he stopped and everything hurt a great deal.
Distantly he noted that his shirt was warm and sodden, which meant that he was bleeding, had been from some time. From where he couldn't say-- it was too dark to see anything clearly, and his vision swam sickeningly. It was the sort of thing Mother and Father would fuss about, but Bruce was pretty sure he would be all right. He’d be fine, at least until he started feeling woozy.
Blind, he reached out to press his hands flat against cool stone. The solidity was reassuring, and he leaned against it as he stood up. It took a few tries-- the ground kept coming back up to meet him, and felt unsteady under his feet. “Mother?” he called cautiously, peering up the way he’d come. The cave echoed it back to him, mocking, as though to rub it in-- that she wouldn’t come, that he sounded like a foolish and ridiculous child, that he was alone. He tried it louder, but only succeeded in deafening himself with the echo, shrinking back in pain against the wall of the cave as the noise scraped against the inside of his skull.
So there would be no calling for help. That was fine-- Great Men didn’t do that, anyway.
Instead of calling for help, he walked. A few paces up, a few paces down-- he couldn’t see where he was going, in the dim and dusty haze, so his route was an uncertain and meandering one.
He tripped and landed hard on the palms of his hands, and that was too much and he finally started to cry. Not very Great of him, but he couldn't do anything else. Everything was too heavy and too disorienting and he wasn't strong enough.
"Pathetic," something agreed, matter-of factly. The sound rippled and echoed like nothing Bruce had ever heard before-- it didn't seem real, but it reverberated inside his skull too sickeningly to ignore. “And you wonder why they don’t have time for you. It’s not because you’re not Great, you know.”
Bruce had been trying to shame himself quietly but at that he let out a wail. It ricocheted off the sides of the cave, mocking him again, amplifying the sounds of his own helplessness.
If someone was there, that meant they could help him. And yet the voice only sent cold fear slicing through him. Whatever was talking wasn't here to save him.
He was silent for a while, shaking, wishing he'd brought a sweater. He should run, he thought, but he didn't know where his feet were, and he couldn't see. And if he wasn't going to run, he should fight, but he couldn't do that either. When he spoke his voice was shamefully thin and watery. "Who are you?"
"Nothing to you, yet," the voice continued. "Asking the wrong questions. Stupid pup."
Bruce squinted in the darkness, but the effort only made his head hurt worse. "Where--"
"Don't look. Listen."
"It hurts."
"Good."
Bruce didn't think he could argue with that, so he listened instead. The effort of not letting it hurt proved too much and he let go, pain blooming sharp and colorful behind his eyelids. The rustle of leathery wings, a nervous chitter, the scrape of little claws against stone and stalactite-- bats, living in the cave. Every sibilant sussurating sound carried with it a subtle, sharp-toothed threat. Bruce curled up smaller, squirming towards the security of the wall and hating himself for crying like a scared child. "A-- animals can't talk," he hiccuped, or tried to. He didn't quite have the hang of polysyllables yet. "You're not really talking."
"Does that make me any less right?" the voice snarled, so much closer suddenly. Bruce screamed, skittered away, but the voice only followed him, laughing. A weight descended on Bruce's chest, stuttered his breathing-- he gasped, but couldn't get any air. "I could say the same to you."
Bruce protested, but the words were garbled with sobs.
“You see? You can’t talk either.” The voice sounded horribly satisfied. “You’re not a Great Man. You never will be.”
It paused. “It’s not because you won’t be Great.”
Maybe he had only come out here to escape his parents and their dinner party, but he would have given anything then to be back in his uncomfortable suit, sitting in his uncomfortable chair, enduring conversation with people who saw him as nothing more than a child. “I can-- I can talk.” Sort of. He could sort of talk. It was difficult, still. But if he worked hard enough at it, worked hard enough to endure the dinner and the clothes and the constant reprimands, maybe--
"Talk all you want." It scoffed, uncaring of his efforts. "You won’t make those people back there understand you. You won’t make your parents understand you. You really think anyone ever will?"
Bruce had hoped so, had hoped not to have to bear the weight of the future alone, but he didn't want to admit that. The voice would just laugh at him again.
"I understand you." The words brushed Bruce's face in a mockery of tenderness. "I'm the only one who can."
Bruce wanted to tell it that it was wrong. Alfred understood him. Mother and Father would, someday. But he couldn't muster up the words-- they melted in his throat into a wordless, hoarse wail. He tried to curl up tighter, but his chest was too heavy. Everything hurt-- something warm was trickling down the side of his face like a horrible caress.
"I'll come for you someday," the voice hissed. "When you're ready. When you need me."
Bruce tried to spit that he would never need something so vile. His throat closed around the words and he choked on them, but the voice responded as though it could read his thoughts.
"You will," it assured him, and the weight on his chest shifted impossibly closer. Wide, abyssal, hate-filled eyes-- sharp teeth-- pointed ears and shadow-black wings and a wind that smelled of death-- Bruce only caught a glimpse of his interlocutor before it flew past him, knocking him backwards and shrieking up the cavern. Bruce had almost caught his breath back, dragging in harsh gasps that grated in his chest, but the deafening slither of a million leathery wings stole it from him again. He hardly had time to turn and look before his vision was engulfed in a sea of deafening black wraiths, claws scratching his skin, wings bruising him. A scream clawed its way out of him, too big for his child's body, rupturing out of his throat like a colony of bats. His eyes were dark and his form limp against the rock long before the cloud had a chance to dissipate.
It was many hours before he awoke later in his own bed, to the sting of daylight and antiseptic. “Ah,” said another voice, this one crisp and cordial and a balm to Bruce’s raw, still-bleeding heart. “Good of you to join us, Master B.”
“He’s awake?” His mother, her voice brittle. Bruce didn’t bother wondering where Father was, why Father wasn’t tending his wounds-- it would have been more remarkable if he had been there.
Mother breathed a long, hissing sigh of relief and collapsed against the dresser. “Baruch Hashem. My heart was in my mouth, Alfred. Is he--”
“He’s fine.” A warm hand in his hair, brushing at his forehead. “He is fine, isn’t he? He’s been very brave.”
Bruce squinted up at Alfred. He didn’t feel brave. “Hurts.”
Alfred looked down at him, face inscrutable. “I know,” he said. “But it won’t hurt forever.”
He heard his mother gasp, watched through hazy, unfocused eyes as she wrung her hands. Bruce whimpered, in spite of himself. “It hurts ,” he said again-- not only his wounds, but seeing his mother so horribly distraught, knowing it was his fault.
Alfred was silent for a moment or two, thinking. Then he stood, murmured quietly in her ear-- and then, mercifully, she left. Bruce breathed a sigh of relief as Alfred sat back down at his bedside, drew him a little closer, tucked up his blankets tighter around him. “Let’s try to keep our nighttime escapades to a minimum in the future, hm?” he said, and ran a gentle hand over Bruce’s face again. “I won’t always be here to stitch you up.”
The disinfectant stung. The idea that Alfred would leave someday stung worse.