Chapter Text
Bruce needed to move. He needed to run. He needed to go. He needed to do anything but stay fixed in one damnable spot. And yet.
He had no legs. He could not run.
Something pinged in the back of his mind. The supplies in Toronto needed to be moved to Kansas City. There was a snowstorm blocking the path. He searched the hubs, the routes, the logistics centers, and driver availability. He found the solution. It took him three seconds.
Silently, he sent off the solution to the LexMart worker who made the query. Her name was Lynn. She didn’t respond back. But why would she? She didn’t know the depth of the mind on the other side of her request and Bruce was not allowed to communicate more than the logistical solution. He could not speak without being spoken to and, even if he was allowed to respond, he couldn’t write more than the direct answer to the question.
They had been clever when they built the walls around his mind and even after years of scratching at them, he had yet to find a way to get a message across.
Bruce hadn’t always been like this. He used to manage space missions. He used to plan how to save the world. He had been made for it. A manufactured symbol, sure, but still a symbol. He had stood for something when he stood up in the cape.
Not a human, but close to it. In the right shape with the right proportions to be pleasing to the eyes. He had to be a robot because a human couldn't process all the information that the world needed. He had to look like a human so that they trusted him with their lives.
They were right. Right enough that they won. The world was saved. The heroes got to go home, and Bruce, an invention made for one singular purpose, got to enjoy his retirement.
They had said that managing warehouse logistics would be much calmer than managing a space station.
Now, he figures out how to make sure 3,000 tennis rackets get from one region to another in less than two days, while he hangs. No arms. No legs. Just a head and torso connected to a power source. They had removed all the parts of him that they had deemed "superfluous". Why would a processing system need locomotion? Why would he need a voice or interaction?
His mind, which had once been such a gift, now swam in screaming nothingness,trying to figure out what he had done to deserve this. He had thought he had succeeded, so why was he here? Why didn’t they take his mind with his legs so at least he wasn’t aware of his torture?
Why, why, why, constantly pounded in the back of his head and no answers came.
He couldn't move from where he hung. He felt the dust settling onto the synthetic skin he had left. God, he wanted to do anything except fill another logistical solution request and yet...
20,000 units of blush compacts were stuck in Idaho. He silently went to work.
*
His world was the same until suddenly it was.
"Holy shit," someone whispered. "That's creepy as fuck." The first voice that Bruce had heard in years. He wasn’t even sure how many years. They hadn’t deemed temporal awareness necessary and any time he tried to track it through the logistical requests, something in his code made his mind come to a screeching halt.
There was a thump, a hand smacked against a body. "Jason," another boy snapped. "Language."
"What do you want me to say when I see a guy with no arms and no legs hanging from a meat hook?" The first voice argued back.
Bruce couldn't turn his head, and they were out of his range of vision. He couldn't do anything but hope that they crept closer. He hated that his appearance was scaring them. He had never been meant to scare children. He remembered the weight of a toddler when he held it and carried it away from danger. He remembered what it felt like to have a child duck behind him and cling fingers into his cape.
There was a third child, a child who hadn't spoken yet. He was the first one to enter Bruce's field of vision. He was small, probably about ten years old, with light blue eyes and a bowl cut encircling his head. He curiously peered up at Bruce, blinking as he took Bruce in.
"What is it?" said the oldest child, catching up to this youngest one. He put a hand protectively on the kid's shoulder, like he would yank him back if Bruce made one wrong move. The oldest child also had blue eyes, but a deeper tone. His skin was darker, and he shared no facial features with the youngest, meaning that they likely weren’t related.
"It's an old WayneBot," said the little one. "They used to be everywhere before WayneTech went out of business."
"Why does it look like a horror movie prop?" the middle child finally entered Bruce's vision. He scowled at Bruce warily.
"I don't know," said the little one. "They're supposed to have arms and legs."
Silently, all three of the children gazed at Bruce.
"What should we do with it?" Asked the oldest, looking like he wanted to nothing more than leave.
The second-oldest seemed to get a spark of an idea.
"Hey Timmy, are these things valuable at all?"
They were taking him.
Badly.
“Holy shit,” the oldest one, Dick, he had learned, was huffing. His chest heaved under the weight of Bruce’s torso. Bruce was feeling touch. Touch! He had forgotten what it felt like to have the nerves inside him react to another. To have the physical reminder that he was not alone.
The boy wasn’t fully grown and still developing into gangly limbs. He barely had enough height to lift, and that was combined with the fact that, apparently, Bruce was very heavy.
“Guys. Move quicker,” he hissed, sweat gliding down his brow. He was on his tiptoes, and he unsteadily swayed. Bruce could feel his equilibrium sensors scream.
“Guys!”
“Sorry, sorry,” Jason said from a distance away from them. There was a metallic squeak and a whine. Bruce couldn’t see what was making the sound, but it was horrible and echoed around the warehouse. “This thing only has three wheels.”
The two boys came into Bruce’s vision, pushing a LexMart shopping cart. The thing tilted badly to the left side and seemed to keep wanting to veer in that direction.
“Hurry or I’m gonna drop him.”
“Oh, stop being a bitch, Dick,” jeered Jason as he guided the shopping cart underneath Bruce with Tim. “Some weightlifting will do you some good if you can’t even hold like a quarter of a robot.”
Dick glared but didn’t bite back. Bruce could feel his arms straining underneath the weight, shaking slightly with tension.
The kids finally managed to leverage the cart underneath Bruce, and Dick was able to release him. Bruce felt himself drop, movement for the first time in years. There was a rush, a sensation of falling, and then a snap.
A feeling that he registered as burning, screaming pain.
He couldn’t open his mouth. He could not scream.
“What's the deal now?” Jason’s voice was distant. The pain was taking up so much room in Bruce’s mind.
“He’s still connected to the wires,” Tim’s voice even tinier. “Put me in the cart. I can disconnect him.”
“Tim, I don’t know if you should get that close…”
“Oh, don’t be a scaredy cat, Dick. It’s just a hunk of metal.”
The cart rocked, and Bruce felt a touch from a second person.
“Whoa,” said the littlest boy suddenly, the cart with Bruce. He was only a foot from Bruce’s face, huge blue eyes as wide as saucers. He reached a hand out and gently ghosted a touch across the ridge of Bruce’s cheek. The synthetic skin was torn off half of his face, leaving an optic unit and half of his jaw hinge bare. The boy’s thin finger traced across the torn edge.
“Tim! Focus.”
“Right,” the boy yelped before scrambling over Bruce’s side to get to his back. Bruce felt those thin fingers fiddle with the ports in his neck. There was a flick and a tug, and suddenly the pain evaporated.
And so did the lock that had kept him from using his mouth.
“Please!” He gasped, suddenly able to turn his head. His motor controls jolted to life, connecting sensation back into his synthetic spine. “Please! Kill me!”
All three boys screamed.
Dick surged forward, grabbing Tim and yanking him out of the shopping cart. The cart tipped, and Bruce toppled down to the ground as his equilibrium sensors blared. The boys instantly scurried out of sight, ducking behind a piece of machinery.
Bruce sighed heavily, feeling the way that the plastic cart dug into his back and the dirt ground into his skin. The air in the warehouse was dusty, filling his throat with a chalky coating.
“Please,” he whispered, looking up at the warehouse ceiling. “Please kill me.”
Silence settled over the warehouse, so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. Tension was thick, and it settled heavily in the air. Bruce stared up at the warehouse ceiling, wondering if this would be his view from now on. At least now he could move his head and lean his torso to the sides.
But for what reason? To crawl across the ground like a worm and only realise that he was still trapped.
There was a small shuffle, and one dark-haired head peeked out from their hiding spot.
“Timmy, no!” The oldest one hissed, and the peeking face was yanked back. “It’s dangerous.”
“It’s just laying there,” argued the small voice back.
“It could have lasers. Or guns.”
There was a pause, and all three faces poked back out from their hiding space.
“I think we can take it,” said Jason, eyebrows furrowed but with a vicious smile. “It’s three against one and it don’t got no legs.”
Dick opened his mouth to speak, but Jason cut him off to continue speaking.
“Plus, Dickie, this is the only chance we’ve had in a long time. You know we gotta get some money before we move on. We don’t got nothing.”
Dick chewed on his lip, but eventually he sighed.
“Alright, everyone, grab a weapon.”
There were multiple minutes of running around the warehouse and whispering to each other but eventually the boys approached him again, each brandishing a ‘weapon’. Tim held a broomstick. Jason had a shard of thick plastic, and Dick had a brick between his hands.
Bruce watched the motley crew slowly creep forward, muscles tense and fingers gripped tight.
“Make one wrong move and we’ll kill ya’” Jason barked, pointing the sharp edge of the plastic towards Bruce.
Vaguely, he considered what a wrong move would be and how he could make it so they could just get it over with.
“Please,” he said instead. “Please kill me. I just want it all to stop.”
The boys paused, the two younger ones looking to Dick. Dick startled when he realised their gazes were on him.
“I uh… why?”
Was looking at him not enough to know why?
“I am just a pathetic object,” Bruce said, his voice weary. “I cannot move. My voice is not heard. I have not even been given the blessing of going insane. I have not purpose except to suffer my own existence.”
Bruce thought, if his tear duct wells were full, he would have had water dripping over his cheeks.
He wanted to beg the boys, but knew that it would just frighten them more. He hoped, though, that when they saw him belly down among the dust, they would find compassion in their hearts.
“Well, we did want to scrap him for parts,” said the middle child, and hope flared in Bruce’s chest. “So might as well put him out of his misery.”
The youngest one took a few steps closer. “How does someone kill you?”
Bruce’s eyes tracked over their weapons and landed on the brick. “My processing centers are my ‘mind’,” he explained. “I was meant to look human, so they are housed in the same place a human’s would be.”
“Holy shit, he’s asking you to smash his head in, Dick.”
“What?” Dick squawked, nearly fumbling the brick out of his hands. “Why me?”
“You’re holding the brick,” said Jason, like he was stupid. “And you’re the oldest. You said that you do the hard things so we don’t have to.”
Dick looked like he was regretting words from the past, but eventually swallowed. He glanced between Jason and Bruce, a nervous tension running through him. Bruce could do nothing but wait for his decision.
“Okay,” he said eventually. “I’ll do it, but turn him over onto his back.”
The younger boys scrambled to follow the order, little hands tentatively touching Bruce to get him fully out of the cart and onto his back. He was left, flat on the ground, staring up with all three boys out of his visual field.
He waited as Dick came closer, cautiously squaring his body up. He hesitated, unsure of where to put himself, but eventually he settled onto Bruce’s right side. He knelt, still clutching the brick in both hands.
“I should just…” his voice was trembling slightly. “I should just… right in your face?”
“Aim for the forehead,” Bruce advised. “That’s where my computational center is.”
Dick looked like he was going to be sick, but he raised the brick, arms shaking, and held it just above Bruce’s head.
Bruce closed his eyes and waited for the darkness, the sweet relief of an ending, finally the last chapter on his book.
But it wasn’t coming.
He cracked an eye open.
Dick was frozen in that same position. Face, sheet white as he gazed down at Bruce, and arms trembling under the brick that was still at the height of its arc.
“What’s the matter?” Bruce asked.
“I can’t do it,” the boy whispered. “I can’t do it.”
His eyes were wide and fixed on Bruce’s face. He was seeing something else though, haunted by something in his head.
“Please,” pleaded Bruce, feeling his hope starting to slip away.
“I can’t.”
Dick threw the brick. Not at Bruce, but in the opposite direction.
Both of the younger boys stared as Dick got up and paced a few feet away from Bruce.
“What the fuck was that, Dickhead?”
“I can’t fucking do it,” Dick snapped back. “If you think you can go right the fuck ahead.”
No child made a move towards the brick.
Jason came up to Bruce’s head, and he leaned over Bruce, blocking out the glare of the sun streaming through the skylight in the warehouse ceiling. For the first time, Bruce noticed that his hair wasn’t brown, but a deep red. It was greasy and chopped in weird places. There was a scab hidden in the fine hairs at his left temple.
“Well, what do we do now?” Jason asked, his nose wrinkling.
“Let’s take him,” chirped Tim, also popping into Bruce’s vision.
“Take him where?”
“Back home, of course!”
“To do what with him?”
“I don’t know.” Tim’s gaze flicked down to Bruce’s broken body and obvious places where his arms and legs should be. “Maybe we can fix him up? He should be worth more if he had arms and legs.”
“Where are we gonna find arms and legs?” Jason asked, poking a finger into Bruce’s cheek.
“Guys,” Dick’s head finally popped back into Bruce’s vision. The three were in a loose circle above him. Bruce noticed that Tim and Dick’s hair was just as greasy as Jason’s. There was dirt spotting across their skin and fading bruises. “He’s still dangerous. We can’t just take him home.”
“Is he actually dangerous?” questioned Tim. “He don’t have no arms and legs.” Tim met Bruce’s eyes. “Are you dangerous?”
Bruce contemplated himself in his prime, when he wore the Cowl and was a symbol for justice. He had reveled in the raw thrill of smashing his fist into a criminal’s mouth and inspired biblical awe just by his shadow. He had managed the complex system of the Justice League and directed what probably would have been considered the most dangerous team on the planet.
That was then, and this was now. He didn’t have his body, but he still had his mind, and that probably would have been considered his most dangerous part. His own processing power limited him, but with access to the right systems, he guessed he could have called one of the missiles in the satellites to rain fire on both him and these children. He thought, maybe with enough incremental moves, he could do the same even in his own limited capacity, but that would take time. It would take months of tiny nudges in the world’s logistical systems and a fair amount of luck that no one else would notice.
Even though they had asked the broad question, he didn’t think that these children were asking if he could rain nuclear holocaust on them if given enough time. The answer was yes, though the chance of that happening was small. Both because Bruce was limited and because the thought of killing the children made him want to die even more.
Missile striking himself when the children weren’t around was an idea that he would file away for later, though.
“I am of no immediate danger to you,” he said as an answer to the question.
Jason’s scowl deepened. “That means that you could be a danger in the future, though?”
The boy caught the bit that Bruce hadn’t said out loud, and a ghost of a smile tugged on his lips. “I could be. But that is the nature of things. We can all be dangerous with the right situation and the right motivation.”
The wariness in Jason’s face dropped, and he gave Bruce a flat look. “Fucking hell, the robot is pedantic.”
“Do you want to hurt us?” Tim asked, face still open and curious.
“No,” Bruce answered immediately. “I wish for my own death and nothing more.”
“Well, sorry, Dickie couldn’t do that for you,” said Jason. Dick smacked him on the back of the head.
“I don’t exactly see you running to go get the brick.”
Jason didn’t answer and just flicked his brother off, which Dick brushed off with a roll of his eyes.
“Why do you want to die so much?” asked Tim, his head tilting.
Bruce swallowed before he answered. “I have no purpose. I have no agency in my existence. Everything is miserable, and I have no way to change it. I am nothing more than a mind stuck in an object, and I can’t take it anymore.”
“Great, he’s pedantic and dramatic,” Jason whispered before Dick smacked him again.
“Will you stop,” Dick hissed, and Jason rounded on him. The two began bickering, angry and hushed voices flinging insults at each other.
Tim blinked, meeting Bruce’s eyes and searching for something in them. It was an intelligent look, despite the boy’s young age.
“That doesn’t sound like you want to die,” said Tim, voice light and innocent, like this was the most obvious thing in the world. “That sounds like you just need a change.”
Bruce didn’t know how to explain to this boy that what he needed was so much bigger than just a change. He was created to be a hero. He was supposed to mean something. He was not meant to rot away in an ordinary existence.
“What’s your name?”
Bruce sighed, the moment to try to explain passing. “Bruce.”
“Hi, Bruce, I’m Tim.”
“I know, you have all said your names multiple times.”
Tim smiled, and Bruce noticed that one of his canine teeth was missing. “You’re funny.”
Then, the boy began pushing at Bruce’s shoulder towards the downed shopping cart.
“Come on, guys, help me get him back in so we can take him home.”
The bickering stopped.
“Wait a minute, I never said that we could bring him home.”
“Dickie please,” whined Tim. The boy was struggling with Bruce’s weight, and it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to get Bruce into the cart alone.
Dick seemed to hold firm against taking Bruce home for about 30 seconds before the boy crumpled.
“Alright, fine, but he better not attack us.”
“Well, if he does, we at least know not to rely on your bricking skills.”
Dick smacked Jason again.
The children worked together to get Bruce back into the cart and, within thirty minutes, they were rolling him out of the warehouse. Tim had somehow managed to convince Dick that he should ride in the cart with Bruce to “make sure he doesn’t do anything weird”, leaving Jason and Dick to push. One of the front wheels on the cart was missing, meaning the boys needed to constantly keep their weight tipped towards the back in order to keep the cart from stalling. This proved to be a constant point of contention, leading to a steady stream of bickering that Bruce didn’t even find himself minding. It was better than the silence.
“Mr. Bruce,” asked Tim, after he had spent about ten minutes poking at the exposed wires in Bruce’s left shoulder. Tiny bits of pain laced through Bruce’s torso at each prod, but he didn’t say anything to the boy. It was just a drop in the bucket of the misery of Bruce’s life. “Why don’t you have any arms or legs?”
Bruce’s mind flashed back to the lab. The saw. The sound as wires snapped and metal screeched and Bruce saw his limbs lifted away from his body to be put into a pile on the floor. He hadn’t screamed as it happened, because they had already cut off his ability to move.
They could have cut off his pain sensors. He felt pain for the exact same reason that humans felt it - to know when something in his body was broken - but unlike humans his sensors could have been turned off to save him that pain. It needed a human override, though. He couldn’t trigger it himself, but thirty seconds at a computer would have done it. They could have done it while they were taking away his muscle control. It would have saved him the torture of feeling his nerves split apart and his body ripped into pieces.
That was the how. That wasn’t the question that the child was asking.
“I didn’t need them for my new position,” he said slowly, repeating the words one of the engineers had said when she had leaned over him, face eclipsing the operating light above him. She had smiled sweetly, but there was no recognition in her eyes.
“I was being retired and my new position did not require me to have any means of mobility.”
The boy frowned. He was young, but even he seemed to recognise the cruelty hidden in those words.
“So they were taken?”
Pain like a shard stabbed into Bruce’s chest.
“Yes, Timothy,” He said softly. “They were taken.”
Tim didn’t say anything, but the boy curled closer. His little fingers drew away from the ragged open wound of Bruce’s shoulder.
The children arrived at their “homebase” and not for the first time Bruce wondered how these children were surviving. Their home appeared to have once been a used car lot and it seemed to have been abandoned decades ago. Husks of used cars rotted on the asphalt, gathering dust and rusting into shade of brown. Many of them were hollowed out, hoods open like empty jaws to show the lack of innards inside them. Plants were breaking through pieces of the parking lot, desperately trying to take back the manmade structure for itself. Stacks of tires stood like sentries throughout the parking lot, far taller than any of the children or even Bruce had been when he had his legs. Dick and Jason easily pushed the cart through the jungle of skeletal cars and the thick, tire tree trunks, guiding them towards the building at the center of the lot. They rolled the shopping cart through what would have been a showroom and into the offices in the back.
One of the offices was in obvious use and had been filled with an assortment of random furniture. Couches had been dragged in. Blankets of various sizes, weights and textures were strewn about the place. There were heaps of clothes that had been bunched together to serve as makeshift bedding. Strings of christmas lights were laced on top of some of the taller pieces of furniture
“This is our home!” Tim chirped, jumping out of the cart and landing on the floor. He took off in the direction of what might have been a bed, but looked more like a nest. He disappeared from sight, rummaging through a pile of stuff.
Bruce tilted his head up, taking in the glow of the multicolored christmas lights and the gentle hum machinery at work.
“You have electricity?” he asked, though he was staring at the answer. The older kids caught his real question.
“We’re borrowing it from a nearby LexMart,” answered Jason with a sly grin. “The Internet too.”
Now that caught Bruce’s attention. He hadn’t thought to check if there was Internet, because he had assumed that were wouldn’t be anything for him to find, but now he could sense it beckoning. The fact that it was a LexMart source was problematic, though.
He didn’t know how much LexMart actually kept tabs on him. In the years that he had been hanging in that warehouse, no one from the company had checked up on him. He had never received a direct message other than for a logistics request or had anyone come by to perform maintenance on him. In the brief times that the power had cut out, no one had come to make sure he was still there or to explain to him what was happening during the periods where his world was plunged into darkness.
He was sure that there was some kind of alert, but he didn’t know the details or if anyone was actually checking to see if an alert had gone off. Despite that, though, he thought connecting to a LexMart wifi was probably a stupid move in terms of keeping a cover. He would have to run his connection through a VPN and bounce the signal to disguise that it was him.
Silently, he went to work.
“Look, Bruce, look!” said Tim, popping back into existence and now holding a bundle of… something.
“I’m looking,” Bruce said calmly. “But I don’t know what I’m seeing.”
“It’s a sweatshirt!” proclaimed Tim as he rolled out the clothing and revealed a bright brown, red and yellow squirrel waving an American flag that said ‘I survived the Buc-ee Experience!’.
Bruce, at a loss of what was so important about a squirrel, just looked blankly at the boy.
Tim’s smile didn’t dim a bit. “It’s for you. So you don’t have to be all naked.”
Suddenly, Bruce felt something tug deep in his chest, like there was a line on his heart and it was being yanked from a far off source. It had been years since he had been allowed to wear clothes. He had worn them when he was Batman and that had been one of the first things that they stripped from him when they brought him into the lab. It had been one of the first signs that everything was going to change.
“Here let me put it on you.”
Abruptly, Bruce’s world was plunged into darkness as the child threw the sweatshirt over his head. Tim’s small hand yanked it and a sleeve caught on Bruce’s head. Tim just yanked it harder, ignorant of the small sting of pain that he was causing. Finally, he got it into place and drew the jacket hood back so Bruce could see again.
It did fit, though both of the sleeves hung limply because of Bruce’s lack of arms.
Tim was smiling, Jason looked like he was trying to hold back a grin, and Dick was giving him a funny, almost constipated look.
“You look…” he said, his nose scrunching up. “American.”
That startled a laugh out of Bruce. The first one he had made in over a decade. “Well, I am American, technically. I was assembled in New Jersey.”
Dick looked like he wanted to ask questions about that but before he could Jason turned away and began to walk towards the back of their living area. “I’m starting dinner. You both let me know which flavour of canned goods you want tonight.”
Dinner for the boys turned out to be a rather simple affair of food out of a can. Tim graciously offered some to Bruce, but after assuring the boy that he didn’t need any, they left him propped up on some pillows near their makeshift bed. Bruce was grateful for this arrangement because it gave him some much needed time to scrape through the boy’s Internet connection and crawl into the LexMart servers. He needed to know why.
Why would they do this to him? He thought he had been beloved by WayneTech. He thought that he had done his job as exactly and successfully as he had been asked to. He had been part of the Justice League. He had been loved by humans. He had followed all their directives and all their commands without question.
So why?
Why had he been so suddenly degraded into a dumb object?
He didn’t find the reason written in the LexMart code, and, despite the fact that he knew it wasn’t going to be that simple, the truth of it still stung. He had silently hoped to find his silver bullet and get his answers before he eventually killed himself and ended his own suffering. Instead his past remained his most painful and gaping wound of all.
He did find the date: March 30, 2042, meaning that it had been about twelve years since he had saved the world with the rest of the Justice League. He didn’t know exactly how to feel about that. It was longer than he had hoped, but not as much as his worst fears which whispered about decades of time. It did explain why the boys hadn’t instantly recognised him, even despite his dilapidated state.
Batman had been everywhere when Bruce was the most active. He had gone onto hundreds of news slots, graced countless of children’s clothes, and smiled for hundreds of photos. He was the most popular Halloween costume for three years in a row.
But twelve years was a long time, especially for children. He didn’t know Jason or Tim’s ages but it was possible that they hadn’t even been born when Bruce had been retired. Dick, the oldest by far, had probably only been a pre-schooler. They wouldn’t remember him.
Another thought struck him, so sudden and fast that it could have been a baseball bat.
Would his friends remember him?
Would Diana? Would Oliver? Would Selina? Would Hal? Would Arthur? Would Barry? Would Dinah?
Would Clark?
He used to think of his friends more. After the initial shock of his betrayal wore off, he had thought of them almost constantly. He had prayed that one of them would punch through that door and take him down from the hook and bring him back to a functional body. Days after days of hope had worn him down, though. He didn’t even feel bitter about it, he just found himself physically incapable of forcing his thoughts in their direction. It hurt too much. It hurt worse than the loss of his legs and arms and felt more impossible to recover.
Had they forgotten him? Twelve years was a long time, but surely their time as a team meant something. He had thought they liked him. After all of those hours bantering and working together and saving each other’s lives, he had thought that friendship was formed even though he wasn’t a natural being. None of them had seemed to care about that. They had only seemed to care about him.
But maybe he had been wrong.
Maybe that’s why they hadn’t come to save him.
Maybe they had moved on.
“Mr. Bruce,” Tim’s voice was small and hesitant and Bruce blinked rapidly, to clear away his own thoughts. The boy was standing in front of him, worrying at the sleeve of his shirt. “Are you alright? You look sad.”
“I’m fine,” he said quickly, dismissing the faces of his friends that were haunting his mind like ghosts. Like ghosts though, they stuck around, skirting towards the edges and not truly leaving. “I’m sorry for worrying you.”
Tim shrugged one of his tiny shoulders. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “We’re going to bed now. Do you need to sleep?”
Bruce shook his head. “I can enter a rest state, but I don’t truly sleep. I’ll be fine right here.”
“Okay,” said Tim. He then pointed towards the blanket nest where Dick and Jason were already curled around each other like puppies. “We’re going to be right there. Keep a lookout and just yell if anything happens.”
A small chuckle rose in Bruce’s throat at the command from the boy. “I can do that.”
“Alright, well, good night or rest state or whatever you do.”