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The car is silent as Alfred drives the boy and the man through Gotham’s gray streets. Richard clutches the small bouquet the butler helped him pick out. The flowers are yellow and pink, his mother’s favorite colors. He doesn’t want to go, but he doesn’t want to not go even more. He tries to breathe slowly the way the man and the butler have been teaching him, but he keeps losing focus and going back to the quick, sharp breaths that make him feel like his chest is exploding.
He can feel Bruce’s eyes on him once or twice. He doesn’t look over. He feels profoundly alone, and something seems right about that. How could anyone else really understand?
He conjures up his mother’s laugh and his father’s terrible singing. Even the fights, the times he was grounded or scolded, have a sacred meaning now. He’d give anything for one more conversation.
It’s not like when his grandparents died, the long, slow passing of time, the years of seeing them grow old that, unbeknownst to him, acclimated his brain to losing them. It was as if pieces of them had disappeared each time he saw them, until one day they were all gone.
With his parents, it was all and then nothing. All blonde hair and joy and life. Until it wasn’t, in one moment. Sometimes time seems to cave in on itself, and he still can’t believe they’re gone. It’s as if he could take a step and go back in time, and everything would be different.
The black car halts at a parking lot on the edge of the windswept cemetery. Flowers are scattered across the ground, displaced from grave markers by the intense gusts. Richard gets out, and Bruce comes around.
The boy carries the bouquet in his left hand. Bruce takes hold of his right, holds it in his own hand. Richard is too old for handholding. But he doesn’t let go or pull away.
—
Alfred stands silently near the boy, letting him approach the Wayne monument in his own way, on his own time. Bruce has not asked to come here. Truth be told, Alfred is not even sure it’s a good idea. But it’s been months, and he’s hardly seen the boy cry. The thoughts in that enigmatic head are impossible to decipher. So he’d bundled his charge into the car and driven here without asking.
After a few minutes, Bruce takes the flowers Alfred insisted on buying and walks forward, placing them atop the marker. The butler watches as the boy takes his hand and slides it across the cold marble, as if he’s trying to ground himself, trying to believe it’s real. Maybe he’s trying to touch what remains of his parents.
The handkerchief Alfred uses to wipe his eyes is satin. Martha Wayne had given it to him for his twentieth anniversary with the family.
The man suddenly looks up when he hears a cry, like a shriek of a wounded animal. Bruce is running toward him, full speed. Alfred opens his arms, but the boy has his fists out.
—
Richard walks with Bruce, noticing with his usual quick observation that Alfred stays slightly back. His parents have a small, cheap grave marker. Bruce has offered to buy a new one, but Richard thinks that would be wrong. The one they have is the one they could afford, the one their years of performing had bought. They weren’t rich, and they wouldn’t have wanted to rest under something that said they were.
Bruce lets him go when they get up to the marker, and he places the flowers in the small vase atop it. Alfred knew to get a weight on the bottom, so they don’t fly away like the others crunching underfoot.
He reads his parents’ names over and over. The letters don’t seem to make any sense. How could they? How is it possible that two people who were so alive can be underneath the ground?
Richard feels faint. He sits down on the grass. “Breathe, Son.” He hears Bruce’s voice from somewhere, and he catches his breath, pacing with the older man’s.
He feels Bruce sit down next to him, heedless of his dress slacks and leather shoes.
—-
Bruce is screaming, punching, kicking. Alfred holds on, taking it all, wishing he could take the inside pain that’s finally manifesting on the outside.
“Why? Why? Why?” The unanswerable question is the only word distinguishable between the pummel of fists and the little boy’s sneakers flying at him.
The butler has no idea what to do, so he just keeps holding on until the boy tires himself out. Then, he picks up the limp body and carries him back to the car.
Alfred sits in the back seat, holding Bruce Wayne on his lap, bruised and exhausted. Strangely, it’s the closest they’ve been in years, probably since the boy was the baby Alfred used to rock in the middle of the night. Bruce quietly cries into his shoulder, and Alfred instinctively pats his back rhythmically and hums something his mother used to sing to him in England nearly half a century before.
—-
Richard blinks back tears, trying to calm down. He feels a shift next to him, and suddenly he’s pulled close with Bruce’s arm around him. He’s not a baby. He’s not a kid who needs to be treated like one. But he leans into his guardian and sobs.
“My parents are gone, too,” says the deep voice. “I know it doesn’t help, but—I understand.”
Richard closes his eyes, and the stabbing pain isn’t all there is. He also feels something else, something warm and safe and solid. His breathing evens out, and his tears grow less violent.
Neither the man nor the boy says anything else, but when they finally get up to leave, Bruce helps him stand, and Richard actually looks at him. For a split second, the man brushes away the boy’s last tears with his thumb, and Richard—he doesn’t even mind it.
—
“Alfred?”
“Hmm?”
“Are you okay? I—hit you pretty hard.”
The butler looks down into the tear-stained face of the thing he loves most in the entire world. “I’m okay, Master Bruce. Are you?”
“Getting there.”
Alfred hugs him again. He won’t let go until the sun goes down.