Work Text:
Childhood trauma is a terrible thing in a myriad of ways, but Bruce has done his best to make his peace with much of the fall-out by now. Of all the unexpected consequences of having his parents die in front of him, though, it impairing his ability to process pain properly ended up being much more disruptive than the whole 'turning to a life of vigilantism' thing.
He had worked it out over the course of a week in his 30s; he’d been so busy as a child trying to deal with mental wounds that he hadn’t had any concentration left to spare for anything that happened to him physically, and that trend had carried on and on and on (likely much to Alfred’s horror).
It had certainly helped him out when he needed to power through all the thousands of little hurts that come with the cowl; training with the League of Assassins, having his back broken, the myriad of injuries and near-misses, and yet all of them barely register as calamities when compared to old trauma.
After all, a broken bone’s not as permanent as death, and therefore cannot be as painful as death.
The time after Jason died, for example; Bruce is still reasonably sure that he could have had his arm cut off without sedation back then and he would not even have cared.
It's not information that he shares, of course. His colleagues, associates, and family tend to get a bit funny when he shows the exact right amount of disregard for his well-being as he deserves, and sometimes discretion is the better part of valour.
Then Jason had come back, which was another masterclass in learning how to deal with a special sort of pain. The metaphor breaks down with Jason; a broken bone that became a lost limb that came back, somehow, twice as strong and thirteen times as vicious, as good as good gets.
Bruce still struggles to understand how to categorise what is, in effect, a miracle, but that is not the point.
The point is that recovering from emotional injuries had left him able to comfortably ignore physical injuries, and when he was younger his body was more than able to bear the cost of such behaviour.
Nowadays, he’s much better in the head and is less likely to try to throw himself at a problem until he or it cracks and buckles. It’s good;
It’s growth.
The issue, then, is that much like that introspective week in his 30s, he now has to once again reassess what he can and can’t bear.
The jam jar that is the entire cause of his latest crisis of self rests on his table, and Bruce has to once again stop himself from pulling out a hammer and ending his suffering in silence.
Bruce had broken four fingers on his right hand during an altercation with Clayface earlier this week; a badly-aimed punch, and carbon fibre plating had shattered under the stress. Bruce’s bones had broken with them, but he’d trained himself into ambidexterity years and years ago so finishing out the fight hadn’t been the issue.
Oh, no. The issue is that where in years gone past he had been really casual about treating broken bones as whole to make space for bigger issues on his mind, now that he’s older and a somewhat better-adjusted old man, it’s no longer the case.
It’s 5 AM and Bruce’s refusal to take pain medication meant he’d woken himself up from knocking his hand against the bed frame mid-nightmare, and all he wants is warm toast with butter and jam. The jam jar lid, however, was clearly screwed on by a Higher Power because Bruce can’t shift it an inch (and he’s gripped it hard enough to make him see stars in agony).
Thus, a conundrum.
He could go right back to bed, treat this as a bit of ascetic training. He could have plain buttered toast, enough to settle his belly and sate his craving. He could meditate away his bodily desires for this hundred thousandth time.
These are all reasonable options; he just doesn’t like any of them. Treating every inch of suffering as an opportunity to train himself to just endure has severe disadvantages, because it inspires him to look at all people big and small and think if only you would try as hard as me-
Which is an ungenerous way of thinking at the best of times, and is particularly spiteful and dangerous when one is meant to be any kind of a hero. Bruce has chosen that path before, and it’s not a good one.
It comes down to this: to not have jam right now would be to backslide into self-destructive behaviour that has imploded every one of his personal relationships at some point.
To have jam right now is to go through startling agony Bruce is no longer very good at compartmentalising.
Simplified to those two options, the way becomes clear:
The blowtorch is an excellent candidate for loosening the lid, and he even toast the bread while he's at it.
Mind made up, Bruce gets to his feet and picks up the jar to bring with him. He’s halfway to the kitchen to grab the bread and butter when unease prickles the back of his neck, and he’s abruptly certain that he isn’t alone.
None of the perimeter alarms have gone off, but that doesn’t mean that he should disregard his instincts. He has Alfred and Damian to protect, and fortunately he has one whole hand still good and strong, wrapped tight around a pint’s worth of cranberry jam and heavy glass.
Bruce pivots on a dime and aims without seeing, muscle memory flinging the jar at the head-height of an average man. He doesn’t wait to see if it hits the figure in the dark, doesn’t wait to hear it bludgeon the intruder, is already reaching for the closest vase that looks like it’ll break with the loudest shatter. Damian’s one floor up from here but is the lightest sleeper of all of them, surely this crash will wake him-
He’s half a second away from smashing a ceramic modern art piece the size of a mid-sized dog before he registers that he hadn’t heard any glass break or any shouts of pain. Instead he just hears laughter, and Bruce’s brain catches on to reality before he can destroy a really expensive and truly hideous chunk of china.
“Jason?” he says, hand at the ready because he absolutely can and will throw a mid-sized dog’s worth of glass at a man, just in case.
Jason steps into the light streaming in through a window, and he’s still laughing as he juggles the jam jar from hand to hand. “Whats up, old man. Killer aim for a guy with 6 good fingers total, by the way.”
Bruce lets out a breath, lets go of the artwork, and lets loose the muscles tight with tension all along his back. “Was it necessary to break into the Manor with no warning, Jason?”
“Yep,” Jason says with a marked absence of apology. “Now’s probably a good time to let you know that we got your mattress rigged with pressure plates. If you’re off the bed for more than 15 minutes, whichever poor fuck is on night-duty has to come and play nursemaid.” Jason looks at Bruce from head to toe to head again, and grins at the rumpled hair and creased pyjamas. “Guess who the poor fuck is tonight, B.”
Bruce sighs. “I can guess. Thank you for the intel; the pressure plates will be gone by tomorrow and you can rest easy. Goodnight, Jason.” He hadn’t detected any change in his bed since he had gotten injured, which leads Bruce to worry that the pressure plates have been monitoring him for a hell of a long time now.
He’s equal parts proud and annoyed at being out-sneaked, though right now he’s mostly angry at being seen when he really, truly wants to be left to work this out alone. Maybe if he walks fast enough, Jason will leave.
A man can hope.
“Bold of you to assume that’s the only thing we got rigged,” Jason says, completely ignoring Bruce’s brisk tone and terse words. “I’m legally obligated to come check in on you, B, so just give up and tell me what you’re doing up.”
By now they’ve made it to the kitchen, and at this point Bruce wants more than anything to explode all jam jars everywhere out of spite. “I wanted some toast, and was considering if I would have some jam with it.”
“Uh huh, sure. And the reason why you grabbed the jam, left the kitchen, and then came back was because?”
At least, Bruce tells himself, Jason hadn’t been there to see him stare at the damn thing for a solid 35 minutes in the dark of his office. At least there’s that. “It needed a lot of consideration.”
Jason turns the lights on, the better to see Bruce with. “And your decision was?”
To lack jam is to return to darker days; to gain jam is to experience unfamiliar, unpleasant pain is the result of his deliberation but even at this unpleasant hour and with a broken hand Bruce knows better than to share his feelings. Jason might heckle him for it, which would be bad, or Jason would go quiet and stare at him with deep, startling concern, and that would be worse. So Bruce just turns the toaster oven on, and carefully doesn’t wince when he forgets and tries to pull the bread bin towards him with his broken hand. “I have tools in the Cave that could open the jar without worsening my injury, which is what I decided to do before you interrupted me.” The butter is thankfully room-temperature soft, and he gets on with buttering his bread while making minimal eye contact.
He’s interrupted by a loud pop! , and suddenly there’s an open jar of cranberry jam by his face. It smells tart and sweet and exactly like the only thing he’s truly wanted since he’d woken up in pain, and Bruce struggles to parse if he’s upset at Jason’s intrusion into a time when he’s uncomfortably vulnerable, or if he’s glad for a helping hand that came swooping in in the dark of night when he least expected it.
It takes a while for his brain to get back online, and he’ll put the delay down to pain and fatigue when it’s really down to how much he struggles with putting words to feeling. “Thank you,” he settles on after a pause so long it would discomfit an average man.
Luckily, there’s not a single average man anywhere in sight, not a one for miles around, so it's fine. Jason just snorts, arms folded and smile crooked. “Not to exaggerate or anything, B, but if Alfred and the gang find out that you decided to treat yourself to something nice to eat and were trying to do it without hurting yourself, they’d literally throw a party to celebrate you.” He hops up on the table to sit by Bruce’s hand, gaining upper ground and looking down at Bruce with an expression that could, in the right light at night, pass for unspeakable fondness. “You know, in spite of your many, many shitty flaws, you’re probably the man with the most number of people willing to swing by at ass AM to open a jar for you.”
Jason’s unbearably gentle as he runs his fingers up and down Bruce’s heavily bandaged right hand, touch so light Bruce can barely feel it even as he sees it, even as he’s affected by it. “Next time, old man, pressure sensors shouldn’t be the thing that lets me know you need me.” Jason’s grip goes tight around Bruce’s wrist, just for a second, just to help the message sink in. “You get that?”
(This, Bruce thinks distantly, is the pay-off to becoming the sort of man that doesn’t hurt himself on his way to hurt others. No wonder people were so fond of bearing with the mortifying ordeal of being known, just for the chance of being loved.)
“I do,” Bruce manages to say, still looking at the hold Jason has on him and just, ah, luxuriating in it.
Jason leans down and in, and Bruce is willing to treat himself this little bit more, before an unholy commotion starts up down the hall, and Damian’s terrifying war cry starts reverberating through the house, Alala! loud enough to rouse the dead.
“Jesus Christ, this fucking kid,” Jason mutters even as he smiles and ducks down for a kiss he’s long since earned. “Don’t tell him I was here, he’s going to be a raging asshole when he finds out I let you stay up so long.”
The screaming is drawing ever-nearer, and Bruce is really rather proud at just how fearsome a teenager with his voice breaking can sound as they rally to an ally’s defense. “If you get caught, that’s on you Jason,” he says as he dips his butter knife into the jam jar like a full-scale heathen.
Jason doesn’t bother with replying with words when a flipped bird is much quicker to do, and then he’s barrelling towards the lovely French doors that lead out to the garden at maximum speed, like he doesn’t intend to stop, like he doesn’t care-
Damian makes an appearance with his katana out and his voice warbling as menacingly as he can make it, but for a moment it’s deafened by the unholy shattering of glass as the entirety of an adult vigilante busts through plate glass on the way to a getaway, Jason laughing at the moon with utter disregard for secrecy.
“I was prepared for an invasion when I sensed that something was wrong and found you missing from your bed, Father,” Damian says, katana still out but looking extremely put-upon. He stares at the broken glass, and with an expression of deep seething anger goes to fetch the kitchen broom. “Stay where you are, your bedroom socks are not enough protection,” he says with mild irritation as he starts sweeping up, and Bruce is abruptly reminded of what Jason had said about the number of people willing to do things for him. “Must Todd always be like this?” Damian complains to the world at large, fastidiously cleaning up every corner lest Alfred is caught unawares in the morning.
“Once he drove his bike through 3 separate fences because he was running late for a movie he wanted to watch,” Bruce says absently, biting into his untoasted bread. “If anything, he’s changed for the better.”
And so have I , Bruce is forced to concede as he gets up despite Damian’s protestations to make his son a mug of hot chocolate. A short exchange in the night, and miracle of miracles,
Bruce feels soothed inside and out.