Archive of Our Own

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Bruce would’ve shut himself away the moment they’d gotten back to the Manor had it not been for the fact that he couldn’t go into his room. He couldn’t bear to be around where Dick was, the shame and the horror of what he – what his body – had done too overwhelming, but he couldn’t go into the room where it had happened, either.

Bruce wondered if Dick would have the same problems, with his bedroom. Standing out in the hallway and facing the closed door, he took out his phone and dialled Clark’s number.

He could hear it going off somewhere deep in the nether of the Manor.

“Bruce?” Clark said carefully as he answered. There was a rustling noise over the speakers, and Bruce could easily imagine Clark cradling the phone between his ear and shoulder as he multi-tasked.

“Tell Dick he can move into any of the guest rooms if that makes him more…comfortable,” Bruce said. “And let me know which one he picks.” So I can be as far from it as possible.

Bruce hung up before he could hear any more of Clark’s hesitant protests about his distance preventing Dick’s recovery. Clark was trying to help, he really was, but he didn’t yet know of all the horrors that Bruce had committed. He didn’t know of the mental ramifications that would rise up from the gaslighting alone.

Bruce didn’t allow himself the luxury of sitting down on the edge of the barren mattress in the guest room, covered only with a large sheet to prevent dust, and burying his head in his hands. He didn’t deserve to cry and bemoan all that was gone forever, the broken trust, the subconscious wariness that was sure to taint their relationship for the rest of its duration, all that Dick had suffered at his hands.

Instead, he headed towards the Cave. Gotham had been patrolled by Oliver for the night that they’d been kept in the medical wing of the Watchtower. It was time for Bruce to jump back into the game. For him, it’d been almost a month since he’d patrolled.

Sitting into the large chair in front of the Batcomputer made his skin crawl, to know what the last thing that had sat there had been. He forced himself to do so anyway, because the last thing that had sat there had been himself.

Bruce tended to ignore his normal cell phone when he was downstairs. It was set to silent mode based on location, with only a few select notifications allowed to slip through.

Bruce only saw the texts from Clark when he went upstairs, knowing that he would have to make an appearance at the office the following morning and it wouldn’t do to go in looking like death warmed over. He was already moving awkwardly because of his self-inflicted wounds, not to mention the ones his body had received from the fight between him, Clark, and J'onn, and coupled with the slight changes in his behaviour over the course of the possession, it accumulated to attention he really didn’t need right now.

His phone vibrated in his pocket as messages made themselves known. Bruce stood in his office and checked through them, unsure of where to go now.

It was a text from Clark.

Bruce, it read. Dick fell asleep in the guest room right next to the game room. Let me know when you resurface and I can help you move if you want to change as well.

The games room. That was roughly in the centre of the Manor, meaning that Bruce should probably go to the north wing, possibly near the garage. But no, would that make Dick feel as though he were guarding one of the major exits? Bruce couldn’t do that, either.

In the end, Bruce went to the south wing, near where the old ballroom was. This section of the Manor was rarely used. Even in the occasions where they hosted a gala or party, one of the other halls would be used, perhaps the garden. Alfred had packed up this side of the house when Bruce had been away, and upon his return, had only opened it back up once. It remained with sheets over furniture and portraits, to prevent dust and decay from sunlight.

It was like walking into a mausoleum.

Bruce went into the farthest corner, and picked a room he doubted he’d ever really been in. There were sheets in a linen closet nearby, and he methodically made the bed and got a pillow or two. He didn’t take off the sheets covering the little table in the corner, or the ones over the abstract painting hanging above the bed.

Halfway through this, Clark appeared at the door. He didn’t say anything, just watched as Bruce fixed the room the bare minimum it needed to be in order to sleep in at night, and retreat to when Dick wanted to be in the Cave.

“You want me to get your stuff from your room?” Clark said softly.

Bruce hesitated, then shook his head. Saying yes would be taking the easy way out, and there was no part of him that deserved the luxury to ignore what he had done. “I can do it.”

But he didn’t stop Clark from following him there.

Clark’s presence, and Bruce’s insistence of being able to do this himself, stopped him from standing outside the door and just staring at it, like he’d done before. This time, he shoved down the part of himself that suddenly couldn’t breathe at the sight of this place, at everything that had happened in here.

Three weeks he’d been possessed, awake for all of them. According to J’onn, the creature’s need to sleep was because of Bruce’s body’s need to do so. Regardless of the reason, part of Bruce had been relieved at the reprieve, at the ability to gather his strength and shove it out.

It had never worked, but that hadn’t stopped him from trying. Constantine had told him that it’d been bound to his body through the symbol it’d branded onto Bruce’s chest, the one that had required another brand atop it to break the seal. Bruce was mostly glad that he hadn’t known that, hadn’t experienced the despair that that knowledge may have caused, to have believed that there was nothing he could’ve done against the vile being that’d infiltrated him so deeply.

The smell of bleach was the most prominent when Bruce entered. He wrinkled his nose immediately, eyes subconsciously trained to look in the direction of the scent. The rug that had used to be in front of the bed was no longer there, and the bed had been stripped of its sheets.

That was fine. Bruce could barely even look at the bed.

He beelined towards the closet, knowing he needed two sets of formal work clothes and also a few pairs for something at home.

The moment he entered the closet, he was overwhelmed with the scent of that rich cologne that he’d used to put on occasionally, the barest of dabs here and there because Alfred had gifted it to him a few years back and he’d liked it.

Now, it made him gag.

Bruce choked on his own breath, halting in his tracks right inside the doorway of the closet. He wanted to breathe in, but he couldn’t, because the smell was bringing back the feeling of his hands moving without his consent, his legs taking him places he didn’t want to go, his mouth forming words that he hadn’t intended to say.

He shoved his nose and mouth behind his sleeve, trying desperately to take shallow breaths. It was at that moment that he heard the sound of air being blown.

Clark was there, the window inside the walk-in closet opened, blowing air to get rid of the smell as much as he could. Bruce couldn’t help the grateful look he shot towards him, knowing how pitiful he must appear, cowering at the scent that had been his long before it’d been the creature’s.

Bruce didn’t remove the sleeve from his nose. Wordlessly, he gathered the clothing items and other essentials that he could think of. When his own arms were full, Clark was used as a secondary clothing basket. He took the items Bruce piled into his arms with a fondly exasperated look, like he had on the few occasions they’d gone shopping together, and it was the most normal Bruce had felt in weeks.

Bruce couldn’t fall asleep for the first week back home. He lay there, awake and staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, reciting the properties of elements of the periodic table to avoid his mind going places he didn’t want to revisit.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand. Bruce glanced at it, wondering who it could be now, at midnight. He’d promised Clark to only head out as Batman once his injuries had healed, which had taken much less convincing and bribery than either of them had anticipated.

Alfred.

Bruce stared at the photo he had of Alfred saved onto his phone. It was a semi-formal one, from before Dick, and Alfred had been mid-sentence.

Before he could even think of whether or not he should answer, Bruce was picking up.

“Alfred?” he said, trying to keep his voice normally. Maybe trying to give off the impression that he’d just woken up, readying for patrol.

“Ah, Master Bruce,” Alfred said pleasantly. “It certainly has been a while.”

There was a giant lump in Bruce’s throat, and it took him time to speak around it. “It has been,” he agreed. “You’re enjoying yourself?”

Alfred hummed in response. “I am,” he said. “But you obviously knew I would.”

The creature had known most things that lived inside Bruce’s head. It didn’t really bother probing too deep, lazy enough to take just get rid of Alfred instead of dealing with trying to commit the perfect crime from the very people who solved them. It had known all the right travel sites to go to, knew which cruises Bruce had marked with Alfred in mind.

“Still nice to know I was right,” Bruce said. His hand was clenched tightly, the nails digging into his palm in an effort to keep himself together.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Of course Alfred would pick up on it from so many miles away.

“Fine,” Bruce said in the most reassuring voice he could muster. “It’s just been a long week. Work. Cooking.” He hesitated, then added, “Clark’s staying over, so the risk of the Manor burning down is low.”

“You have no idea how much it relieves me to hear that,” Alfred said with feeling, and Bruce let out the shadow of a laugh. “How is Master Dick?”

Bruce’s laugh died down just as fast as it’d begun. “He’s alright,” Bruce told him. “Asleep now, though.”

“Asleep?” Bruce could practically see the frown on Alfred’s face. “Oh, dear. I’m afraid my time conversion was rather off. Did I wake you?”

“No, I was up,” Bruce said, the second honest thing he’d told Alfred all night. “You didn’t wake me. Besides, it’s been a long time since you’ve called.”

He didn’t know why he said that, why he risked Alfred confusedly telling him that they’d spoken regularly since he’d been gone. The fact was that he missed Alfred, and though he wanted him back here because he just wanted to see Alfred again, he wasn’t going to do a thing to interrupt the first extended holiday that Alfred had taken in much too long.

“Yes, the cell reception here has been abysmal,” Alfred was telling him. “It’s been longer than we anticipated – I’m sorry if I worried you. We’ve been sailing for a week now, just out of reach of the signals, even with this fancy phone of yours.”

Bruce’s heart stuttered at the confirmation that he and Alfred had spoken a week or so ago, and had talked regularly when Alfred’s ship had docked. He didn’t remember that; what else didn’t he remember? Were there going to be minefields like this for the rest of his life?

He said goodbye to Alfred soon after that, promising him that he’d let Dick know he’d called. He would have to relay that through Clark.

Despite knowing for a fact that he wouldn’t get any sleep that night, Bruce found himself waking up in the morning anyway. It was strange, always strange now, to be waking and able to move as himself.

He’d had two cases of sleep paralysis as a child, when he’d tried to see if he could lucid dream. He’d worked on it for months, consulting books and journals. In the end, he had no idea what made it click, but he’d been able to wake while dreaming.

Bruce couldn’t quite remember what the dream had been about, or what he’d done to it, because the sleep paralysis that had occurred in the moment after slipping out of REM sleep and before waking had been terrible. Unable to move his limbs, a heavy pressure on his chest preventing him from being able to draw in a full breath, and not having the control over his vocal cords to call for help – it’d been a waking nightmare.

He’d attempted lucid dreaming only one time after that, to the same effect, and then had never gone back to it again.

Being possessed had felt a hundred times worse. It was one thing to be unable to move, unable to breathe, to just lie there not knowing whether or not you would ever regain the ability to do so again. It was a completely different realm of horror to watch your body move without your consent.

The creature had been very blatant about how it had lusted for Bruce’s son, projecting its thoughts very clearly in its mind. Bruce couldn’t bring himself to be sorry that the extraction process had caused it to die, because he didn’t know whether he would’ve allowed it to survive.

But it was easy to think like that, with it being dead.

Bruce woke to the sun entering the room piercingly, hitting him right in the face. The pillows and bedsheets smelled musty, with only the slightest hint of some generic detergent that Alfred had probably used on them at some point. He was glad – Alfred had begun to use a lavender scented fabric softener in more recent years. He'd have to subtly change it, somehow.

It was strange waking up not covered in bodily fluids, no brownish red and pearly white covering his body and the bedsheets. It was stranger, too, to be clothed during sleep; the creature hadn’t liked that. Bruce’s dreams had been so plagued with the perverted fantasies of the creature possessing him that it was depressingly refreshing to wake up without having any.

Bruce didn’t linger in bed. He got up and got dressed, knowing he would either have to skip breakfast or hope that Dick had already eaten.

“That's it, Bruce, in and out,” Clark said from the other side of the bathroom door. “Focus on my voice. You're doing great.”

Bruce found himself seated on the closed toilet seat, hands between his thighs and clammy. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here, and that scared the hell out of him. The ever present fear of the creature returning, that J’onn hadn’t been able to get rid of it entirely and it was still there, in some dark corner of Bruce’s mind, sitting dormant just waiting to emerge… it was overwhelming.

Bruce’s breathing picked up speed, vision going fuzzy around the corners. He couldn’t handle that. He didn’t want to handle that. And beyond him – because he was being selfish here, thinking about himself when Dick had been through so much – he couldn’t bear to think of what his body was capable of, if it was back in control of that thing again.

He stumbled to his feet, needing to check his eyes, needing to make sure that they were his own. Bruce practically tripped over his own feet in his haste. His hands scrabbled on the marble countertop as he forced himself to stare at his reflection.

He… He couldn’t tell, if they were his eyes or if they were the creature’s. The two of them had the same eyes. How was Bruce supposed to differentiate between them? How was he meant to know if his body was his alone?

Bruce’s hand was shaking as badly as the breath in his throat as he pawed at the neck of his shirt, ripping open the buttons in his need to check the marking, make sure that it was still broken.

He ripped off the gauze that was taped there, and only when he saw the symbol etched into his flesh, broken by another line burned through it, could he stumble backwards, gasping for breath.

It was at that moment that the bathroom door was flung open. Bruce whirled around, more jittery than he’d ever been before, but when he saw it was Clark standing there, he slumped against the countertop.

“Bruce?” Clark’s hands were hovering over his torso in an instant, just shy of touching him. “What happened? I could hear your heart going off like crazy.”

Bruce shook his head. Now that the adrenaline of that moment was wearing off, he was crashing. He rarely panicked like that, but when he did, he was absolutely dead on his feet for an hour or so afterwards.

Clark eyed him, earnest and blue. Bruce couldn’t bear to look in them for too long, because they reminded him of goodness and light and right now, all he wanted to do was peel his very flesh off his bones.

And then another head poked in. “Bruce?” said a second voice, smaller than the first, and Bruce was suddenly met with another pair of blue eyes. “Are you okay?”

It was impossible to hold Dick’s gaze. It was ridiculous, how he kept asking Bruce that. Of course Bruce was fine. It wasn’t him that had been hurt. He didn’t respond, going to re-tape the gauze over the healing burn.

“Let me,” Clark said. On himself, Bruce reflected, the words would’ve come out sounding like a command, a directive, an order. On Clark, they came out as a question.

Bruce didn’t want help, especially not when his eyes still fell on Dick every second glance and saw the mottled colouring around his jaw and neck. “I can do it,” he said. His eyelids felt sticky, every time he closed them.

“But you don’t have to,” Clark told him levelly. When he saw that Bruce’s eyes were trained on the younger boy by the doorframe, he half turned and said to Dick, “Wait outside for us?”

Bruce watched in distant amazement as Dick only looked searchingly at Clark for a moment before nodding and walking back out. His feet, though better now than they’d been before, still made it difficult for him to walk normally.

Bruce struggled to find something to say when Dick left. Instead, he busied himself with rifling through the cabinets looking for the medical supplies. Before he could reach up and grab the little kit, though, Clark was there, stretching his arm up and plucking it down.

He worked in silence to put the ointment over the wound before bandaging it back up and re-taping it. Bruce stared ahead during the entire process, gaze going straight through Clark. He was glad he didn’t have much planned for the day; his brain was going to be useless now for the next hour or so.

“He worries about you,” Clark said softly, leaning back after everything was done. He started putting everything back into the box, but Bruce stopped him with a touch to his wrist, halting his movements. Silently, Bruce reorganised the box. “So do I.”

Bruce huffed, and the movement pulled ever so slightly at the newly applied tape. “Dick should worry more about himself,” he murmured. “And you’re here to worry about him.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t do both,” Clark said. “Bruce, have you considered the therapist? They’ve all worked with a fair few of our members; they know what they’re getting into. Dick’s been doing much better ever since he started going.”

“Good,” Bruce said. “I’m glad.”

It was a little difficult to avoid pointed comments if you asked a friend how your kid was doing, when you all currently lived in the same house. The pointed comments definitely increased if you asked multiple times in one day.

“And if you don’t want to talk to a doctor, there are a lot of people who’ve experienced similar—”

“Clark, please,” Bruce said wearily. “Not now.”

Bruce didn’t give Clark enough credit for possessing the ability to know when to push and when to leave it for another day. Clark nodded, immediately changing topics.

“You want anything to eat?” he asked. Then he added, “You’re a little particular about this box of yours, you know that?”

Bruce shot him a withering look. “I like being able to find medical supplies when I need them,” he said.

“B, there are like five things in here,” Clark said exasperatedly.

“Which is four items between you and the supplies you need,” Bruce countered.

Clark let out an exaggerated sigh, and was about to respond when his phone buzzed in a unique pattern. He pulled it out and glanced at it, and then looked back at Bruce.

“Dick says The Great British Bakeoff’s on,” he said. “Want to watch with us? We can surprise Alfred when he gets back with a cake.”

There was nothing Alfred hated more than culinary surprises, but perhaps that was just with Bruce. There was no way Bruce would get in the way of Dick and Clark baking together, though – there was little enough normalcy in Dick’s life, as it was.

He shook his head. “Maybe some other time,” he said.

Bruce expected Clark’s face to hide disappointment at his words, but to his surprise, he grinned without restraint. “We’ll hold you to that,” he said, standing up with a stretch. “Get some sleep, B. I’ll call you when we’re having lunch. Or,” he glanced at the clock, “late lunch slash early dinner, at this rate.”

It was only after Clark had left that Bruce had realised it was the first time he’d responded to any of their invitations with an answer that held a promise of the future.