Chapter Text
It had been four months since Bruce was murdered in front of his parents. Four months of absolute hell. From that rainy, bloody alley, to the wake and everything after that. Martha had thrown herself into her business, trying to fill Bruce’s absence with the charity work and entrepreneurship Wayne Enterprises was known for. She’d even started her own DIY projects on the manor. Something about the old foundations. Thomas didn’t know and he didn’t care and he certainly didn’t ask Alfred about it. In fact, he didn’t care about anything much anymore. His empathy was at an all time low and spiralling deeper with every socialite that came to offer their sympathies with a fake sad smile. He hadn’t been back to work and couldn’t bring himself to go. It hurt too much. It was like there was something rotten inside of him. Most days he sat at home, getting more angrier by the minute. The walls of his family home were driving him mad. It must’ve been the ghost of old Mad Mister Wayne who ran through the Gotham streets nude coming back to haunt him. Or the ghost of Bruce. He was a rational man, however, and knew that his thoughts were simply a part of his grief and not ghosts or some kind of monster inside him. But that didn’t make them any easier to ignore.
It had started with simply hurting one of the birds that sat outside his window and squawked early each morning when he was trying to sleep. Then, it turned to the man who killed Bruce. God, the things he wanted to do to him. He was a surgeon, after all, and he knew his way around the most painful areas of the body to hack away at. The thought of hurting him was sometimes all that got him through the day. Eventually, those same thoughts had spread to hurting his wife. Every single time it made him panic, withdraw into himself like an animal scared of its own claws. He tried to remind himself that he’d never do it, it was simply intrusive thoughts come to make his life worse than it already was. The fear was still there. She needed him more than ever and he was forcing himself away from her. What a failure of a husband. It was his hands that pressed tight to the bullet wound as little Bruce bled out, his short life slipping away between his fingers. All that training, all his medical knowledge, and he couldn’t even save the one thing most precious to him in the entire world. What a failure of a doctor, no, what a failure of a goddamn human being.
Thomas stood frozen in the doorway to Bruce’s room. He hadn’t even realised he’d been walking there. He stared into the room, but looked at nothing. His eyes went in and out of focus as he tried to bring himself back to reality.
“Thomas?” Martha said softly.
She hadn’t expected him to emerge from the library, but she was grateful he had. She’d been altering the security system for the manor with the help of Lucius, making it more efficient and accurate. She wasn’t taking any chances. She didn’t feel safe in her own damn house. She had been going to self-defence classes and Alfred had volunteered to teach her what he knew from his military service. She hadn’t told Thomas about it, she didn’t want him to worry about her. It was a nightmare. They were living a nightmare.
She waited until he seemed to recognise her before she slipped her arms gently around his waist.
“Martha, I…” he averted his gaze. He imagined what it would be like to smash her head in against the doorframe. It made him sick.
She could feel him tense under her touch, but she held on until it melted away and he wrapped his arms around her tightly. He buried his face in her hair and began to cry. It became hysterical and he started to gasp for air in between sobs as the absence of Bruce became like a black hole.
“Shh, shh,” Martha hushed him. She led them both to sit down on Bruce’s bed, though he seldom slept in it, opting to sleep in between his parents.
She had tears in her own eyes and they began to fall down her cheeks, “Baby, just talk to me… please. What’s going on?”
She cupped his cheeks with her hands. He’d shaved the moustache off. He looked different without it. She ran her thumb delicately over his top lip.
“I got sick of the upkeep,” he said.
“You’ll be the talk of the town tonight,” she whispered.
“Fuck, that’s tonight?”
Thomas groaned. It would be their first fundraising gala since Bruce died. Neither of them particularly wanted to attend the party, but there was the promise of a new bill to regulate firearm ownership for Gotham citizens. It was important, especially now. It seemed the only way to get rich people to invest in a gun safety campaign was to throw a dinner party. Luckily, the caterers they hired had done enough of the Wayne galas to know exactly what to do without the need for them to provide instructions.
Martha sighed, “It will only be a few hours. It’s for Bruce. I want to do it. I have to. I have to change Gotham.”
Thomas frowned, “Well, you’ve certainly got this all figured out, haven’t you? Meanwhile I’m stuck not knowing what the hell I’m supposed to do with my life.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
He pulled away from her so he could pick up the stuffed tiger that Bruce never seemed to outgrow. He placed the tiger in his lap and stroked its soft fur.
“As a doctor, I took an oath to do no harm, but—God, Martha—I’m not sure I can do that anymore. I don’t know if I want to save lives. I couldn’t even save my own son’s. And the patients. They whine and cry about a bloody nose, a scraped knee, a mouth ulcer. Meanwhile my entire world has fallen apart. And I’m supposed to help them?”
Martha had never been scared of her husband before today, but she neglected to verbalise the concern. It was scary to hear him talk like that. She could have never imagined him hurting anything, let alone a person.
“We have to try and fix things, darling. We can’t let this kind of grief happen to anyone else,” she said.
“And why not? I think the person who murdered our son should feel like this.”
“We owe it to Bruce, to Gotham—“
“We don’t owe this city anything! All the money we’ve invested in Gotham. For generations, our families poured their hearts into this fucking city. And what did we get from it? It took our son from us. Aren’t you angry?”
Thomas flinched when he realised he’d raised his voice at her. He withdraw back into himself again, though he was fighting thoughts of the feeling of skin slicing apart so easily under the weight of a new scalpel.
Martha let out a breath and took the hand that Thomas had balled into a fist into hers.
“I am angry, Thomas, but not at Gotham and not at the man who shot Bruce. I was and… maybe I still am, but I’m more angry at the poverty, the lack of employment opportunities, the readily available guns in every store that led to this. Bruce’s death is a product of the injustices that maybe we allowed because it benefitted us. I won’t allow that any longer. I refuse to.”
Thomas choked out a tiny laugh. It was fleeting and hopeless.
“You won’t change things. There’s no point in trying. Promoting good will in Gotham is a joke. You really think throwing money at politicians is going to change it? They’re all lying swine anyway. There’s nothing left for us to do that matters.”
Martha went silent. She didn’t feel like fighting him when he clearly wasn’t thinking straight. Grief could do that. It had changed her way of thinking, too, but she didn’t let it show. Or, it had changed it in a way that made her more prone to keeping things bottled up.
“It’s just a few hours,” she repeated, to which Thomas seemed to finally acknowledge and accept.
“Okay. Okay,” he said and he pressed a small kiss to her forehead and then to her lips.
Martha was grateful for the affection and she let herself sink into his arms. God, she was exhausted.
They sat in silence for a while.
“Thomas…” she whispered, voice breaking, “Can I ask you something that might make you hate me…?”
Thomas didn’t know what to say, so he sat quietly and held her. His fingers combed through her hair and he tried to avoid looking at all of Bruce’s toys, which only provided pain.
“Do you think it was worth it? H-having Bruce, I mean? Are those eight years of absolute joy going to be worth all this pain? All those miscarriages before him… maybe it was some kind of message.”
“I…” Thomas fumbled over his words. Usually, he would’ve told her that any amount of time with Bruce would be worth whatever came after, but, god, did it hurt. And eight years was so very short; the rest of their lives so very long.
“I don’t know.”
Martha cried softly into his chest and he joined her in grief. It felt better to cry together than it did to cry alone. It was the first time since the funeral that Thomas had seen his wife as broken as he felt. It was a strange sort of reassurance. She hadn’t cried, she’d gone straight back to running the company. She was functioning, at least she appeared to be, whereas his life had come to a crashing halt. For a brief moment, his thoughts of harming her stopped, which brought him the relief he needed to hold her closer. Maybe they could get through this together. If they could just get through this gala, then everything would be okay.