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There were many clocks in Wayne Manor, digital alarm clocks with glowing red numbers, elaborate antique Swiss clocks, a case containing dozens of vintage wristwatches, which were technically small clocks, and of course, a classic, stately grandfather clock that served a much different function that clocks usually did.
This isn’t about any of those clocks, though. This is a story about a much simpler clock that hung on the wall in the Wayne Manor kitchen. The clock itself wasn’t anything fancy, just an inexpensive round gray wall clock, matte plastic, battery-operated, and likely purchased not for its own merit but because its predecessor gave up the ghost and stopped working. The clock resided over the kitchen, ticking faithfully away even during the lonely nighttime hours when the kitchen was dark and empty.
Tonight, however, was not one of those nights. Shortly before the clock’s hour hand had reached the number three, a boy had walked blearily into the kitchen. He’d forgone the main light, and instead turned on the light over the sink, as he often did. He was a familiar visitor to the clock, and over the years it had seen him in various mental and physical states.
Tonight, it seemed to the clock that the boy was mostly well, as well as the clock had seen him. He was not much of a boy, these days. Time had passed, as the clock knew so well, and he’d grown into that stage between boy and man. He had all the potential of a man, but with the experience of a boy, and he was leaving that behind more every day.
The clock did not mind the passage of time. It was what it was meant for, after all, to mark out the seconds and minutes and hours, but the clock thought that perhaps the young man regretted growing up and wished to still be young, to still be a boy with a boy’s problems. Still, one could not go back in time, anyway, no matter if one wished it. A clock could turn back its hands, but even that was meant only to correct for deviations and had no real bearing on the actual, unstoppable passage of time.
The young man sat alone for a while, but it was not long before there was another visitor to the clock’s domain.
When this boy had first arrived at the house, the clock had seen very little of him, and then for a long time after, the clock hadn’t seen anyone at all. The house had sat empty and quiet, save for the tick tick tick of the clock, until even that sound went away when the batteries died. Eventually, though, the house was occupied once again, and the old man with the steady hands had changed the clock’s batteries and it once again ticked resolutely. This boy was a less frequent nighttime visitor, but even so, he was a memorable one. On one particular night, the boy had come into the kitchen shaking so badly that when he attempted to fill a glass with water from the tap, he’d dropped it and it shattered in the sink. He’d stood there for a while, and the clock had heard how the boy matched his inhales and his exhales to the steady, even tick’s that filled the room. Eventually, he’d stood and cleaned up the shards in the sink and left the kitchen, without drinking anything. After that, the clock did its best to tick as loudly as it could when the boy was alone in the room, so it would be easier for him to hear the steady beat if he should need it.
“What are you eating?” the youngest boy asked, voice raspy with sleep.
“Peanut butter bread.”
“Peanut butter bread?” he repeated dubiously.
“Well, it was meant to be peanut butter and jelly, but by the time I got the bread and dug the peanut butter out of the cabinet, I was too hungry to bother with finding the jelly in the fridge.”
The boy stood still for a moment, then slid into a seat beside the young man.
“Pass the knife,” he said quietly. The young man slid the bag of bread so it sat between them and passed over the knife.
They sat there at the table for a while, trading the knife back and forth as they ate, until the young man said, “Couldn’t sleep?”
“Obviously,” the boy muttered. The young man didn’t seem bothered by the boy’s moody answer, and after a moment, the boy asked, “You?”
“I was sleeping, but. Nightmares,” he responded.
“Oh. That sucks.”
The young man shrugged. “I’m used to it. Besides, they weren’t bad tonight. I can’t even remember what they were about, you know? I just woke up with a weird sense of dread. That’s what I get, for going to sleep on an empty stomach.” He gave a slightly self-deprecating laugh, and the boy frowned, but said nothing.
The conversation was surprisingly civil. The clock did not gossip, of course. It was much too principled for that, but it was hard not to overhear things when the house creaked and sent messages from the basement to the attic. In any case, the clock had heard of the pair’s disagreeable relationship, marred by tension and anxieties, the fruit of a sorrowful time when the master of the house had departed and his sons had scattered and the house had stood empty.
But that was in the past, and this was now, and the clock knew very well that things were sometimes different in the liminal hours of the night. Perhaps the boys knew it, too, because they sat together, perhaps not sociably, but at least amicably, building a bond over a shared meal of peanut butter on bread.
It was a quarter past three when the third visitor for the night slipped silently into the kitchen. He went straight for the fridge, ignoring the existing occupants of the room, and flung open the door, then stood there squinting against the light and examining the contents. He pulled out a gallon of milk and a carton of eggs and set them both on the counter, nudging the refrigerator door shut with his bare foot. He opened a cabinet and pulled out a large bowl, then grabbed a whisk from a drawer. Finally, he looked at the other occupants of the room.
“What are you freaks doing?” he asked, grimacing at them as if he’d just tasted something unpleasant.
“Eating peanut butter bread,” the young man said. Neither boy reacted to the insult, so the clock was left to assume that this was one of the bonding rituals people had that were incomprehensible to outsiders.
The newcomer stared at them both. “Freaks,” he said, reaffirming his earlier point. “You want some eggs?”
They both made agreeable noises, and he turned away to begin cracking eggs into the bowl. Behind his back, the young man whispered something to the boy, and the boy snickered. “I heard that,” he said, and began whisking his bowlful of eggs.
The clock had heard (not by choice, mind you!) that this young man had died, and come back to life. The clock was uncertain how that could be possible. The clock had assumed that people did not get more time once their allotted amount ran out. However, the clock was not in the business of dictating how much time people had, only marking the passage of it, and it supposed that maybe someone had simply replaced the man’s batteries with new ones, and he’d started ticking again, the same way the clock had. Of course, the clock would keep that supposition to itself, because it, unlike some, wasn’t a gossip. The house also liked to whisper about how the man was different since his return, more cynical than the boy that had left. The clock had not known him as a boy, and so could not judge for himself. He only knew the returned man, and he knew him very little, since he was only rarely in the house.
“Damian, get plates,” the man said. The boy got up and took three plates from a cabinet.
“This is why I like peanut butter bread,” the young man said sagely. “You don’t have to dirty a plate.”
“Yeah, but then you get fucking crumbs everywhere,” the man griped, stirring his eggs. “You’re a slob, Tim.”
“Me? You should see Dick.”
“I have. He uses paper plates so he doesn’t have to wash dishes, which, weird, but whatever, I get it, and he manages to not get crumbs everywhere.”
“Jeez, I wipe them up when I’m done.”
“Yeah, onto the floor,” the boy said. “Then Alfred has to sweep them up.”
“Okay, what is this, pick on Tim night?!” the young man said.
“Every night is pick on Tim night,” the boy and the returned man said simultaneously. The returned man looked at the boy over his shoulder and they shared an indecipherable look.
It was half past three when they plated the eggs, and as the returned man scraped the last of them out of the pan, another man came in.
The clock did not need the house to tell him that this one was an acrobat, though it was most often the chandeliers who spoke of him, chiming about how he’d do flips off them. It was apparent in the way he moved, bending himself over the back of a chair and somehow managing to turn himself upright into a normal sitting position. Tonight, though, he slouched gracelessly into a chair and laid his head down on his arms.
“Can’t sleep?” the young man asked sympathetically.
“Mm,” the acrobat grunted.
Without saying a word, the young man got up and got another plate. He came back and divided the eggs on his plate into two portions, then scraped the larger portion onto the empty plate and slid it in front of the acrobat.
“Dick,” the man said, tapping his fingers on the table to get his attention. “Wake up.”
“I’m not sleeping,” he mumbled, blearily lifting his head. “That’s kind of the problem.”
“Eat,” the boy said, handing him a fork. The acrobat stared at the plate for a few moments like he didn’t know what he was looking at, and then slowly began poking at the eggs.
The only sounds for a few minutes were the scraping of forks against the plates and the ticking of the clock. The acrobat only made it halfway through his eggs before he started staring off into space.
The man snapped his fingers, and the acrobat jumped, eyes fixing onto the returned man’s face.
“You’ve got to get some sleep, man. This isn’t healthy.”
“I know,” the acrobat said with a tired smile. “I’m trying. I just can’t. I start to fall asleep and then I jerk awake again. You know how it is.”
Apparently he did know how it was, because the clock observed as he reached out and gripped a few of the acrobat’s fingers tightly for a few seconds, a comforting gesture. “Feels like falling,” he said, his voice low. The acrobat nodded.
They were all quiet at that.
The clock was very pleased that it managed to keep its ticking steady and even when the master of the house walked into the room. The first time the clock had seen the master, it had missed an entire second, and of course the house had noticed and whispered about it to absolutely everybody who would listen. It was terribly embarrassing, but luckily the house had quickly moved on to better gossip.
“I thought you lost that,” the man said, eyeing the pink satin robe the master was wearing.
“No, Damian thinks I don’t know that he burned it. I bought another one.”
“Tim, you should figure out where he bought it from so I can burn down the factory,” the boy said in a mock whisper.
The master just grunted in amusement and headed for the coffee maker.
“Bruce, decaf,” the young man said. He got up and carried the plates to the sink, setting them in with a clink!
“Who are you, my mother?” the master teased.
Everybody froze a little, then pretended they hadn’t. It was a normal reaction to the master mentioning his mother. The clock did not freeze, nor did it miss a tick. The clock could offer no comfort other than an audible reminder of the passage of time.
“Somebody has to remind you to actually sleep once in a while, and I don’t mean that power-nap meditation crap that you do,” said the returned man.
“Speaking of sleeping,” the master said, nodding towards the acrobat.
“I’m awake,” he mumbled.
“I can see that,” the master said. “When was the last time you slept?”
He made a noise that was like the vocal version of a shrug.
The master sighed and turned back to stare at the coffee maker. The clock, if asked, would say that it thought the coffee maker was some sort of spy sent to sow discontent in the house. Of course, no one had asked, so the clock kept that opinion to itself.
“I suppose telling you to get some sleep wouldn’t help?” the master said, carrying his steaming mug of coffee over and sitting down next to the acrobat.
“I wish,” the acrobat mumbled into his arm.
“I’m sorry,” the master said. He rubbed soothing circles on the acrobat’s back with one hand and sipped at his coffee with the other.
“S’okay. Not your fault.”
The returned man snorted. “Please. If the sun fell out of the sky and flattened Gotham and everyone in it, Bruce would find a way to blame himself for it.”
“If the sun fell out of the sky and flattened Gotham, Father would be dead, and therefore couldn’t find a way to blame himself for it,” the boy scoffed. “Your metaphor is inapt.”
“It’s a metaphor, it doesn’t have to make sense,” the returned man shot back. “It’s meant to highlight a point, the point being that Bruce has a guilt complex the size of a small country.”
“Boys,” the master interjected. “Can we maybe argue about my guilt complex another time?”
“We’re not arguing, we’re discussing,” the boy said.
At the same time, the returned man said, “So you admit to having a guilt complex?”
They both turned to look at each other, glaring.
“I don’t know, Bruce, I think you should let them go. I kind of want to see how this one plays out,” the young man said cheerfully. “We can take bets on who goes for a weapon first.”
“It had better be neither of them. Nobody’s getting stitches tonight.”
“Dead men don’t need stitches,” the boy muttered, eyeing the returned man.
“Is that a metaphor or a threat?” the young man asked.
“Why can’t it be both?” the boy said.
The three kept up their banter, and the master kept up his circles on the acrobat’s back, and the clock kept up the rotation of its hands.
“Father,” the boy said suddenly, interrupting an argument between the young man and the man about electrical wiring. He pointed to the acrobat. Gently, the master smoothed his hand over the acrobat’s forehead, brushing back his hair. The acrobat made no sound, and did not stir.
“He’s out cold,” the master declared.
“Great. What are we supposed to do, just leave him here? His back will be all fucked up in the morning,” the returned man said.
The master downed the last of his coffee and set down his mug. “Don’t worry, I’ll carry him,” he said.
“What, so you can fuck your back up, too? Hell no.” The returned man moved closer, pushing up his sleeves. “I’ll do it.”
“We can both do it. You get his arms, I’ll get his legs?”
The returned man shrugged. “Fine,” he said.
The clock watched as they carefully began gathering up the acrobat, the man getting him around the torso and the master getting ahold of his legs. They lifted him with a grunt and filed out of the kitchen. The boy followed behind them, and the young man hung back just long enough to put the master’s coffee cup in the sink and turn out the light.
The kitchen was once again dark, empty, and silent, save for the ticking of the clock. The clock was not lonely, though. The clock heard the house whispering about the group’s progress up the stairs, and in a few hours, the sun would rise and the old man would come into the kitchen. There would be other nights, as well, nights when one or some or all of them would come to the kitchen during the liminal hours, and the clock would keep watch, faithfully, as it always did.
The hour hand reached four, and the clock ticked on.