Work Text:
The book was hidden in a corner of the library which rarely saw a duster.
It sat between the cushion and the windowsill, a little nook that hadn’t changed much since Bruce was only up to Alfred’s waist. Martha Wayne's pillows were pushed neatly against the wall, velvet covers pluming out with their disuse. All of this overlooked Alfred's garden. His mustache twitched with pride seeing it from this angle, nothing more than a passive onlooker to his work. One pillow sat slightly askew from the rest. His brow ticked upwards when he saw it. Tim had come in here every once in a while to work on school projects, and it was often he found himself picking up forgotten knickknacks and homework assignments when all had long gone quiet in the manor. He huffed. How hard could it be to pick up after oneself?
He picked up the book and adjusted the pillow neater than it had been before. It was a classic, Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, the cover was protected in a thick coat of dust, otherwise well taken care of. In fact, it looked practically brand new. He blew the dust off, and for good measure, ran it over a few times with the duster. As far as he was aware, this wasn’t a book from the Waynes personal collection, it was a paperback, a clearly modernized edition at that. He opened it with the intention of making sure it wasn’t damaged.
The words scrawled in the front cover squeezed the air from his lungs.
In Bruce’s cursive, For Jay.
A gift from Bruce for a birthday, perhaps.
Alfred’s throat spasmed violently.
When Jason had died, he combed through every corner of the house to ensure he put everything back where it belonged in Jason’s room, which had since been sealed off from the rest of the manor, untouched. Sometimes, Alfred wanted to tell Bruce that the concealment made it feel like a crime scene, and wasn't that not too far from the truth? And yet, here sat another missing piece of Jason, so familiar it ached, so familiar it was as if he had been sitting in the nook just seconds ago, who, as Jason so often did, only put his book down when he’d been called to dinner. It was always difficult to pry him away from the things he found most precious.
The cynical part of Alfred wondered if Tim had taken the book, but he quickly tucked that thought away. Tim was a good child, if not a bit eccentric, but no more so than the rest of them. He had rightfully earned Alfred’s trust over the few months he had claimed the mantle of Robin. There was no need to doubt that trust on behalf of his own incompetence.
Curiosity, despite all else, got the better of him. He flipped open to the other pages and held it like an injured animal, so careful and so terrified that he would harm it just by breathing the same air. Jason had always taken care of his things. Like any teenager he was often untidy, but when it came to personal items, gifts, heirlooms, he handled them like they were glass. Finally, he found a section that was different, a man made bookmark folded neatly in the crevice. It was a simple piece of paper that had been ripped out of what was probably once a school workbook. It divided the pages about one third of the way through. The spine hadn’t even been broken.
Alfred flipped the bookmark over in his hand. Jason’s handwriting looked up at him, compact and tangled and familiar. His name was written on the back page. Along the books side, sticky note annotations stuck out like neon flowers. They varied from textual analysis to what seemed to be conversations with the book itself, and, from what Alfred could tell, inside jokes Jason had written just for himself. He flipped through the pages after the most recent annotation, hoping to find more, but there was nothing else, no trace of any hidden notes or signs Jason had even skimmed through the rest—nothing. The pages might as well have been blank as he stared at them.
Two thirds left unfinished.
Slowly, a blurred image came to mind, a half remembered scene that came to him in dreams. Jason sitting by the window, dressed in mismatched pajamas, early morning dew lining the windowsill, turning a page in his book and smiling to himself, as if the book had just told him a joke for just the two of them. The image receded, now reduced to a smudge in his mind.
Alfred remembered so vividly that he hoped, if there were a God, he could be forgiven for thinking locked bedroom doors were some sort of gospel. His carefully concealed foundations of grief were crumbling, the wire was pulling taut. It sat heavy on his tongue. He’d learned this long before he’d lived in Gotham, the shape of it, before he’d carved out his place in the manor; because Gotham was a parasite for the griefless, and a refuge for the sorrowful. Grief had driven Bruce to vigilantism, had created Batman, and Alfred’s failure had molded it.
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He placed the bookmark back in its spot, closed the book, and tucked it between the cushions. Eventually it would reaccumulate dust, and it would be as if no one had ever found it at all. In his dreams tonight Jason would ask him, what happens to Elinor at the end, does she ever get married? Is she happy?
The grief now sat in the form of a book, between a pair of cushions, in the corner of a library, at the end of a dormant hall in Wayne manor.