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“How good is your aim, Alfred?”
Bruce comes to him with the question early one morning, squinting as the sun makes a rare appearance through the Gotham smog and dapples the dining room with light. He had planned out this confrontation meticulously in order to facilitate the ideal response. For one, this was a strategically favorable weekend to finally ask — Bruce had minimal obligations both today and tomorrow and no major upcoming engagements for the butler to concern himself with. Alfred was also always notably more agreeable in the mornings, when Bruce had yet to distress him with his antics, and those of the prior day were mostly forgotten (Alfred, Bruce had learned quickly, never truly forgot anything). By making sure to eat over three quarters of his breakfast, Bruce was sure that he had successfully put the butler in the best possible mood for this conversation.
“You will have to be more specific, Master Bruce. My aim with what?”
Bruce nervously chewed on his lip, a habit he knew he would have to break before he left to continue his training abroad. It would do him no good in the future to have such an obvious tell. “A gun,” he said, with as much confidence as he could muster.
The butler froze briefly from where he sat across from Bruce, diligently polishing silverware, before continuing the ritual with more vigor. In the months following the deaths of Martha and Thomas Wayne, Alfred had sought to maintain his typical propriety with his new ward, and thus had refrained from joining Bruce at mealtimes. But, as the young and grieving boy had steadily lost weight when left alone to eat, the silverware had become their compromise.
“And why,” Alfred asked, his voice steady, “are you asking me such a thing, Master Bruce?”
“You are aware of the various activities I have undertaken as part of my training. You must also remember that one of my goals is to…” Bruce trailed off, letting the train of thought hang unspoken in the air as he sought to shove down the shame crawling up his throat. “Well, it's to conquer my fears,” he finished quietly.
Alfred’s eyes sharpened. He had clearly already parsed Bruce’s true intentions from this lone admission, but he nevertheless set the fork he held down with a disapprovingly loud clatter before picking up a spoon and nodding for Bruce to continue.
“You have witnessed my efforts over the years to overcome my fears of heights and bats, among others. But there is one major aversion that we have yet to address.” Bruce swallowed audibly, but fought to look Alfred in the eye in an effort to convey the severity of the matter, “Guns.”
What went unsaid, of course, was that there had in fact been an attempt to acclimatize a younger Bruce Wayne to firearms. As the lone protector of the household, Alfred kept several weapons in secure locations across the manor. He hadn’t wanted his freshly traumatized ward to be surprised by this fact if any threats were to breach the grounds, or if Bruce somehow came across them in his explorations, so, a few months after his parents’ deaths, Alfred sat the boy down and showed him his old revolver. Alfred had first deconstructed the weapon and explained the mechanisms of the device to Bruce, in an effort to appeal to his ward’s endless curiosity, before outlining how keeping the weapons helped to ensure their continued safety. It had taken far too long into the spiel for Alfred to realize that Bruce had stopped breathing. The nightmares had only gotten worse in the coming weeks.
No further attempts had been made since that day — Alfred evidently hadn’t seen the threat to his ward’s already precarious mental state as a necessary risk to take. Even after the pain of his parents’ deaths had begun to numb, thanks in part to the vital anchor his so-called “training” appeared to provide (heaven knows Alfred wouldn’t have entertained it otherwise), the butler had never again broached the subject.
Until Bruce forced him to today.
Alfred heaved an uncharacteristically weary sigh before asking, “And what are you proposing we undertake to do so, Master Bruce?”
Bruce bit down hard once more on his lip, until the iron taste of blood began to fill his mouth. He was not scared. He could not afford to be scared.
“I want you to fire one at me.”
*******
Alfred’s answer to this proposal, of course, was a resounding and passionate no.
Bruce, despite his carefully structured plan of attack, had known that Alfred would likely respond in such a way, at least initially. It would have perhaps made more sense, in light of this, to first broach the subject with something easier for the butler to digest — Alfred would have been much more willing, Bruce knew, if he were instead propositioned to finally finish his long-abandoned lecture. But, Bruce was all too aware that the images that haunted him at night did not originate from a lack of understanding of the weapons. No, the memory that had stalked him for nearly a decade now was that of staring down a barrel as his ears rang with the thuds of dropping bodies and the plinks of scattered pearls.
It was moments like these that made Bruce suddenly and starkly aware no one would ever understand the urgency he felt so acutely, still in his teens, to become Gotham’s protector. Alfred certainly didn’t, and still pushed against the idea however halfheartedly (and if Alfred didn’t understand Bruce, then who else was there who could?).
People just couldn’t comprehend, and Bruce couldn’t properly convey, that burrowing a gaping hole in his chest was a desperate yearning to do something, anything. That Bruce, with a lifetime left to live but nonetheless weathered beyond his years, felt a growing itch under his skin that begged him to take action, and do it now — because when someone in Gotham lost their parents to a mugging or their future to guns or their livelihoods to a gang, he felt, however illogically, that that was on him.
Since the moment Thomas and Martha Wayne had died, Bruce constantly felt like he was choking on his parents’ ghosts. Training, learning, dedicating himself to this; it was the only thing that eased the suffocation. Bruce knew in his core that he was born to protect Gotham, whether that duty was ordained, inherited, or merely assumed. It was all he had, all he knew, all his parents had left him when their blood was seeping through his shoes. And right now, he was failing.
Therefore, Bruce couldn’t afford to waste time teetering through the baby steps Alfred would prefer. He had a duty (to his parents, to Gotham, to himself) to race straight towards the root of the problem, and to do it now.
Contrary to Alfred’s belief, though, Bruce didn’t actually have a death wish. He knew all too well that guns were rife in a city like Gotham, and he would undoubtedly encounter them when training abroad as well. Freezing or panicking before them would be a quick way to find himself six feet underground. And while Bruce once hadn’t seen the point of living in a world without his parents, he now knew that he couldn’t leave Gotham behind.
The only way he saw to get over that instinctual fear, if he even still had it after years of trying to wish it away, was to force himself to face it again, and again, and again. No matter how long, or how many tries, it took. No matter how much it may hurt him to do so.
Alfred naturally disagreed with that sentiment.
Alfred also soon realized he unfortunately didn’t have a choice. Seemingly, not even he could forever withstand the weight of Bruce’s stubborn refusal to drop the subject. The teenager had tried a range of threats against the resolute butler before he finally cracked — Bruce had described in detail how he could easily procure a weapon of his own, for example, and almost started an argument by claiming that Ollie (who Alfred maintained was a terrible influence) would be eager to help in the butler’s stead.
Both parties knew on some level that these threats were as empty as Wayne Manor had been for the past decade. Bruce would never trust anyone but Alfred with something this sensitive, this raw, and it would be unwise to conduct his experiments without proper supervision for a multitude of reasons.
Maybe Alfred had just come to realize that he could either let the topic die, or his ward.
*******
“So, Master Bruce,” Alfred began as he passed his old service revolver back and forth between his hands in a rare show of nerves. “How would you prefer we proceed?”
Bruce drew a slow breath, seeking to ground himself solidly in the present by taking in his surroundings as he pondered his answer. He could feel the light breeze tousle his hair, which was beginning to scratch the nape of his neck. He had been ignoring Alfred’s pleas to get it trimmed for weeks now. Bruce had neglected to bring his jacket, so his arms were exposed to the air and covered with goosebumps from the chill. He had to squint to make out Alfred’s face in the morning light. There was nothing to see in this wide open and secluded section of the Manor grounds but the grey Gotham sky. He was not in a cramped alleyway, he was not wearing a suit. He was not being smothered by the weight of the summer heat and the world was not dark. His hands were damp with sweat, not blood.
“I was being serious when I asked about the quality of your aim, Alfred,” Bruce said, clenching his fists around the heavy-duty earmuffs he held to still their shaking by force. He averted his gaze pointedly from Alfred's weapon and instead stared his guardian dead in the eyes, “How close could you get a bullet to me without making contact?”
Bruce knew that the answer would likely be too close for either’s comfort — he wouldn’t have entrusted Alfred with this exercise if he didn’t suspect the man’s aim was very good, after all. Bruce had never actually been made privy to what Alfred did for work before he joined the Wayne’s employ, but as a child he had always liked to theorize that Alfred, with all his British stiffness, could only have been a spy. The butler would never confirm nor deny these theories, but whenever a young Bruce would bound up to him with cries of “Agent A! Agent A!”, the slight upward tick of the butler’s mouth had meant that Bruce couldn’t have been too far off.
Alfred, whose hair had grown greyer and whose face held significantly more frown lines now than it did in those memories, grimaced, before responding with a clipped and displeased, “Quite.”
Bruce nodded curtly as his focus shifted momentarily to the large expanse of the manor in the distance, his breath catching for a moment as shadows appeared to dance behind the master bedroom’s curtains.
“Well, then,” Bruce instructed after taking a second to steel his voice, “I would like you to do so.”
At this request, Alfred turned his eyes downward towards his weapon, fussing with the mechanisms despite the fact the gun had already been perfectly prepared. To Bruce, this was a sure sign that Alfred, who was usually too well-mannered to avoid someone’s gaze, was going to bypass the degree of separation he usually maintained and attempt to speak from the heart.
“You should know, Master Bruce, that it is perfectly reasonable for someone with your background to still experience difficulties surrounding this subject, and that I, and your parents for that matter, would never want nor ask for you to take some responsibility upon yourself that would put you in harm’s way.” Alfred lifted his head, his gaze softening as he stared imploringly at his ward. “There are some things, you must understand, that do not have to be overcome.”
“Alfred,” Bruce clipped through clenched teeth as shame swelled past the fear in his chest at the reminder there was something to “overcome” in the first place. “Get on with it, please.”
The butler’s shoulders slumped at his ward’s insistence, looking far older than his age. It was no secret that Bruce was at fault for the frown lines that now stretched his face.
“Very well, then.”
Alfred lifted the revolver, and his hands did not tremble when he curled his finger around the trigger. Bruce tried to look past the gun as his heart sped up, attempting to fixate instead on the man who he trusted without question. The man who raised him, who would never do anything to hurt him.
Bruce steadied himself once more and bit back his desire to just go inside, to curl up and hide in his lonely room and pretend this experiment had never been suggested. He forced the earmuffs on with a harsh snap.
“Do it.”
BANG!
The world seemed to stutter and stop until everything was moving in slow motion, Bruce’s vision narrowing to a pinprick around the weapon as he was abruptly forced to focus on it for the first time. It was like a black hole was spreading from the gun’s barrel, turning the manor grounds dark. He felt as if a cavern was opening within his chest, beneath his feet, above his head, threatening to swallow him whole. Despite the hearing protection Alfred had insisted upon, Bruce’s ears began to stubbornly ring with the sickeningly familiar cracking of a bullet whizzing by.
Suddenly, like he was eight years old once again, sitting in his father’s study watching Alfred dismantle a gun, or kneeling newly alone under a dim streetlight, Bruce found that he could no longer breathe.
The teenager, the boy, gasped for air desperately, but it was as if none could enter his lungs past the soil and grease that filled his throat. It felt like he was choking on ghostly fingers, like he was drowning in his parents’ blood, struggling to stay afloat as he was swept away by an unforgiving tide and polluted river water filled his mouth.
Bruce tried to turn toward shore, searching for something solid to grab onto as the world tilted and swirled, but was forced to stumble back in shock as he was met with his mother’s lifeless visage.
“This is your fault,” she said like it was fact, as Bruce’s eyes traced the patches of her bones revealed through the rotting flesh. He quickly spun away from her, unable to bear the sight.
“You need to do more,” his father insisted from the other side, his teeth stained with blood. Bruce stared through the wound in his forehead to the alleyway on the other side.
A skeletal hand laid itself on Bruce’s shoulder, pinning him in place. “We raised you to be better than this, Bruce,” Martha Wayne whispered.
“Bruce!”
His father’s body nodded in agreement.
“Bruce!”
Bruce’s feet were sinking into the floor. His father reached out to grasp his hand as his mother pushed him deeper.
“Maybe,” Thomas Wayne soothed with a crooked smile, “if you can’t be what Gotham needs, you should just join us here.”
“Master Bruce!”
Bruce blinked once, then twice, and his eyes filled with bright light as he was finally able to take in a shaken and ragged breath. He was on the ground. He didn’t know how he had gotten there, but Alfred was sullying his suit to kneel by his side.
Bruce inhaled sharply, once, then twice, and spat through gritted teeth.
"Again.”