Work Text:
Bruce remembered being young. He remembered the amber light through the library window creeping across the dark patterned rug. He remembered, in the soft way of youth, his head in his mother’s lap and her soft honey and milk voice in his ear telling him stories. He remembered the smell of paper and ink and her sweet perfume. He remembered the feel of her hand in his hair as she told him about the Golem. He remembered her finger underlining the characters as she spoke them אמת, truth מת, death.
“The Golem was created to protect the Jews in their time of need,” his mother explained.
“Like a hero,” Bruce said “Like Gray Ghost!”
“Yes,” his mother laughed “Like Gray Ghost,”
After the alley Bruce had been inconsolable, desolate, empty. He swung wildly between rage and sorrow and apathy.
The first time he entered the library after the alley he had gone to his mother’s alcove where she had once read to him and laid his head on the leftmost couch cushion where she had always sat. The cushion was cold. The sun was the same amber through the window. He marked its place on the carpet. It didn’t smell like her. It didn’t smell like her anymore.
By the time Alfred found him and hushed him to quiet it had been hours. Hours that he didn’t remember. He didn’t realize until he finally surfaced to feel Alfred’s hand rushing up and down his back, his strong arms pinning Bruce’s own to his chest. He didn’t realize until he looked down at the rug and saw how far the sun had moved. His face was hot, his mouth was dry and salty, his throat tight. His knuckles were scraped.
The rug was wrinkled, the couch kicked astray, books were upended onto the floor. Looking at their bent pages and dented spines Bruce was struck immediately with nausea. How could he have done that? How could he have done that to his mother’s precious things? He was horrific, irredeemable. He was filled with blackness inside and it was eating him up.
“Alfred,” he sobbed wretchedly “Alfred,”
By the time he could suck in a real breath the sun had moved another inch across the carpet. He heaved himself from Alfred’s grasp and crawled across the carpet to the first book. He tenderly smoothed out it’s pages with trembling hands. He brought the spine to his lips and kissed it like he had seen his mother do a hundred times.
“Sorry,” he said “I’m sorry,”
The last book he gathered to put back was the story of the Golem. He kissed it’s spine like all the rest and then held it for long minutes. Like a hero he remembered saying and something in his chest shifted into place.
That was where it truly began.
The years went by. Bruce returned to his parents' graves and said the Kaddish and left visitation stones. In sun and snow and most often rain. The Golem never left his head. Created to protect the Jewish people, sent to solve the crimes of blood libel, put back to clay to rise again in an hour of need.
Every time Bruce ventured to Gotham he saw that need. He saw the hungry and the cruel, he saw them in board rooms, he saw them on the streets, he saw them in school. Need. Gotham needed something. That night in the alley could not be repeated. It was repeated everyday.
He thought of the Golem while training with the league, as his bones broke and his mind sharpened, as he grew more dangerous. From clay, he shaped himself. Again and again and again, until he no longer bled from it.
He thought of the Golem often that first year of Batman. He thought of it as he attempted to untangle the Gordian knot of rot in Gotham, finding at every turn that it only went deeper. He thought of it as he sought out clues, pounded pavement and read in the cave until his eyes burned, examined evidence again and again. He thought of the Golem seeking out the source of the accusations of blood libel. He thought of the Golem searching out evil to its root and tearing it free once and for all.
At the end of that first year Dick Grayson came to stay with him. Dick was so like him. Except he did not have the manor library to grieve in. Everything that had been his parents had been packed up and moved with the circus. He hated the manor. He hated it’s largeness, used to the claustrophobic comfort of a trailer with his parents. He hated it’s smallness, used to the open air and the permeable barrier of the cloth walls of a circus tent. He was so dear. So small and fragile and precious.
“Would you like me to tell you a story?” Bruce asked during a gray day when Dick refused to get out of bed.
“Okay,” Dick said and didn’t move at all.
Bruce opened the curtains so the light would shine into the room and climbed up on the bed next to Dick. He ran his fingers through Dick’s greasy hair and worked the knots out with careful fingers. He told the story as best he could, trying to give Dick something. A place to grieve. A place where the light shined in and he didn’t have to be alone.
“The Golem was created to protect the Jews in their time of need,” Bruce said at the end, like his mother had said to him. Dick’s forehead was tucked against the side of his thigh, his tiny body curled beneath the blankets.
“Like you,” Dick said into the bed, barely audible, and Bruce had to close his eyes against it. He was saved. He was saved. He swallowed.
“Do you think you could eat something now, Chum?” Bruce asked gently.
“Okay,” Dick whispered.
He told the story of the Golem again to Jason. He told it to him many times, as he had told it many times to Dick. Dick had taken it as a comfort, like his stuffed elephant Zitka, or a cup of tea from Alfred. Bruce told it to him as he was laid up in bed from a bad patrol, when he was grieving his parents, and Dick took the words and wrapped them around himself to keep safe for a moment.
Jason took the first telling as a gift. He took the words and hoarded them, tucked them away in his chest as something precious. Not, so for the next telling or the next. His contrary, inquisitive Jaylad. He interrogated the story from all angles. He asked after the violence of the Golem and the hubris. Where was the line where justice lay? He asked how alive it was, could it think or feel, did it feel sad to return to clay? Where was the Golem now? Where had the Golem been in all times of need after it had been put to rest? It reminded Bruce so vividly of his mother’s family visiting for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and arguing. His mother and family debating and breaking bread at the same table.
After Jason’s death he thought of the Golem frequently. He thought a lot about what he had made himself into. He thought of it after he woke from a bloody haze to find men and women, criminals, people, beaten at his feet. He thought of the Golem in every fight, with every blow, with every scream, and broken bone, and burst of blood. He thought of the Golem wreaking havoc on the enemy, doing only what it was made to do. He thought of the rabbi watching on in horror at what he had created.
He wished he really was a Golem. That he really was made from clay. That someone could wipe truth from his forehead and he could return to nothing, could rest.
He thought of the Golem with every passing year. Every time he woke up to a Gotham still bleeding out he thought of it. He considered the arrogance of it. The hubris of thinking man could create life again in his own image. In thinking one man could bail the sinking ship that was Gotham city.
Bruce was not the Golem, but the Golem was still sleeping, a pile of clay in some far away place. He was not the Golem, he did not have any part of the name of G-d in his mouth, but on his better nights, he could understand that his work was not nothing.