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When Bruce’s mother died, he had been covered in her blood and brain parts. It had been all over his shirt, because he had been right behind her when the bullet shot, ringing all through the alley and up along the brick walls. It had torn into her head, through one side and out the other within a blink. A perfect headshot. She had been shielding him, one arm stretched over him before she fell limp to the ground, life dying out of her eyes. Some nights, those eyes would haunt him.
His father had been shot through the chest, and they had both laid unmoving as Bruce kneeled in their pooling blood. It soaked through his trousers, his shirt, the strong, metallic smell sticking itself to him. He had been frozen, at first, in disbelief. He hadn’t known what to do. He hadn’t screamed or cried or did any of the things any other person would’ve done. After a while, however, came the shaking. He had trembled and trembled for what felt like hours.
When the police came, the shaking hadn’t stopped. It persisted all through his ride back to the Manor—his father’s house—and persisted still throughout the entire night. He hadn’t slept a wink. In fact, he hadn’t slept at all, the first three or so days after their deaths, until Alfred must have slipped an ambien into his drink.
They told him, some time later, that his parents had died an instant, mostly painless death, like some sort of reassurance. The bullets were perfectly aimed, they said; there couldn’t have been a way to save them if they tried. He hadn’t ever told anyone about the third bullet, the one that had been shot right before the gunner had fled the alley. It had missed, digging into the pavement two inches from his feet.
He also hadn’t known what to do with his clothes. They had been soaked through with blood—Alfred would wash it all away. In the end he had shoved them into the back of a drawer in his closet and never opened it again. It was some years later that Alfred finally found it, digging it out of where it had hid for years.
“Master Bruce,” was all he could say as he held it, and Bruce just stood frozen, watching him.
“Please don’t throw it away,” he told him. It was the only thing he could bring himself to say. Those were his parents’ blood; in some twisted way, it was the only real thing left of them, aside from their bedroom in the Manor, left mostly untouched after that night, and the scattered pearls in the alley, lost in the winding sewers underneath the city. He couldn’t throw it away.
“Master Bruce,” Alfred said again, but this time in a different voice. There was an inscrutable look in his eyes as he watched Bruce, hands clutching the blood stained clothes. Those hands, they did not shake; they never did, even in the worst of situations. Always steady, like Alfred’s presence had always been.
“I—” he tried, but could get nothing more through the sudden spasm in his throat. He realised too late that there was a trembling in his fingers, crawling up his arms, and soon it took over him completely. For a moment he was back in that alley, kneeling in front of his parents’ motionless bodies, reliving that moment all over again.
He choked when Alfred moved forward, hesitating, before suddenly he was being held. Alfred held him, as he shook and shook and shook. They lowered to the floor, and all he could do was hold on, clutching at the man’s sleeves. A hand stroked up and down his back, and Alfred was instructing him to breathe, was trying to ground him, was speaking with his steady voice and holding him in his steady arms. Bruce listened with half an ear, folded over.
After a while the trembling subsided, but the hand didn’t stop its stroking.