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Over the course of his long career, Alfred Pennyworth had witnessed sights that would send the average person screaming into early retirement. He had scraped the viscera of alien creatures off a Kevlar cape at three in the morning; he had stitched a man’s torso back together using dental floss and a sewing needle (the kind meant for buttons); and throughout it all, the hand holding the silver tray had remained rock-steady, never once trembling.
He had buried a child with his own hands.
And, defying every rational law of God and nature, he had witnessed that child’s return.
Yet Alfred had to admit that, despite a lifetime of service as a butler, he had never anticipated that his reunion with Jason Todd would take place while the young man was sitting on the toilet in the dead of night.
The motion sensor in the kitchen had triggered, sending a soft chime to the control panel by Alfred’s bedside. This was nothing unusual; the manor’s residents were mostly "creatures of the night" who treated the refrigerator like a watering hole on the savanna. Alfred had long since learned to identify individuals by the sound of their footsteps alone, but the movement pattern registered that night felt off. It began in the kitchen, moved to the east corridor, and then shifted to the second-floor guest wing a trajectory that didn't match the habitual late-night snacking routes of any household member. Alfred rose, donned his robe, and retrieved the Remington 870 shotgun from a hidden compartment behind the headboard. One didn't serve Batman for forty years by harboring the naive hope that uninvited guests meant no harm.
He moved through the manor with practiced efficiency, as if intimately acquainted with every creaky floorboard—having long ago reached a sort of non-aggression pact with them. The east corridor was empty, and the guest wing lay in darkness. Yet, a faint, pale light was seeping out from beneath the door of the second guest bathroom. Alfred racked the slide of the shotgun.
In the cathedral-like silence of Wayne Manor late at night, the sound rang out with startling volume. It was the sort of sound engineered by God and John Moses Browning—designed to convey a very specific message across all languages and cultures: whatever you are doing, you had better give it some serious thought.
A voice drifted out from behind the bathroom door.
"Old man, if you dare shoot while I’m taking a dump, I swear I’ll come back to haunt this place for real."
Alfred’s hand did not tremble. It hadn’t shaken when he buried that boy all those years ago, and it remained steady now. Yet, deep within his chest, he felt a complex flutter—a sensation somewhere between an irregular heartbeat and the lump in the throat that comes with overwhelming emotion.
He lowered the shotgun.
"Master Jason," he said, annoyed by the faint, unmistakable tremor in his voice.
"Hey, Alfred." A pause, then: "Don't come in."
"I had no intention of doing so."
"Good. Because I need... about twelve minutes. Minimum."
Alfred leaned the shotgun against the wall, adjusted his dressing gown, and then did the only thing a man of his training and temperament would do in such a moment: he went downstairs to make tea. The toilets at Wayne Manor had histories of their own—histories Alfred could recount with stern authority, having personally witnessed every embarrassing chapter.
Initially, Thomas Wayne had insisted on keeping a few of the oldest models. After all, the manor was a historic building, and Thomas possessed that particular brand of old-money sentimentality that conflated "antique" with "functional." Those original toilets, installed in 1887, embodied the confident philosophy of Victorian engineers: anything worth doing was worth building with cast iron, exposed piping, and a chain-pull flush mechanism requiring the upper-body strength of a dockworker. Thomas found them full of character.
Martha did not.
As for why they eventually donated these antiques to the Gotham Museum of Domestic History that involved a rather unfortunate incident concerning a backside. Specifically, Martha Wayne’s backside. One January night, the temperature in the manor plummeted, and the cast-iron toilet seat in the master bathroom grew nearly as cold as surgical instruments kept in cryo-storage. Martha’s scream roused the entire East Wing. Thomas displaying a total lack of spousal sympathy that would become a legendary family anecdote actually laughed as he watched Martha hopping madly on the spot, her rear end frozen. He laughed so hard he sat down on the adjacent toilet; he soon discovered, however, that the cold had jammed the chain-pull mechanism. When he gave it a sharp tug, the entire flush assembly tore free from the wall and with the force and precision of a medieval flail slammed into the back of his head.
Alfred, then in his first year of service, arrived to find his master bleeding from the scalp and his mistress standing in the doorway, clutching the doorframe for support, torn between laughter and shock. Looking back, Alfred realized that was likely the moment he fell in love with both of them though he would never admit it, not even on his deathbed.
Following the event privately referred to within the household simply as "The Incident" Thomas purchased a batch of state-of-the-art, clog-proof toilets from a German manufacturer. The company’s brochure, with typical German confidence, promised that the units could handle "any reasonable domestic requirement." Perched atop a hill far from the city center—standing out like a stark Gothic anomaly against the Gotham skyline the manor was hardly a place where a repairman could simply dash over late at night to fix a plumbing issue. Consequently, the German-engineered toilets were designed for rugged durability, incorporating the kind of engineering redundancy usually reserved for nuclear submarines.
Even so, they occasionally clogged.
The first clog was Thomas’s fault, a regrettable accident involving a large quantity of medical gauze that should never have been flushed down the drain. Thomas had sustained an injury during certain nocturnal activities; to avoid the gossip that a hospital visit would inevitably spark, he had attempted to treat the wound himself at home.
The second clog was Alfred’s doing, though he maintained to his dying day that the real culprit was the 1979 edition of the Gotham Yellow Pages. Thanks to an ill-advised decision to include a restaurant review section, that particular volume was significantly bulkier than its predecessors. An ordinary person would have simply called a plumber. Alfred didn't ask for help; he handled it himself. He always handled these things.
Those German-made toilets soldiered on aging and battle-scarred, perhaps, but functional until Bruce grew up and brought home new models equipped with automatic heating and massage functions. Alfred privately categorized this period as "the phase where Master Bruce spent money on things he didn't need, because for him, purchasing useless objects was far easier than dealing with even a single human emotion." These new toilets were Japanese-made, the product of a company whose name Alfred couldn't pronounce but whose engineering philosophy commanded his deep respect: they had anticipated every conceivable human need during the act of using the toilet and met those needs with a thoroughness that bordered on religious devotion.
The seat would automatically warm to a preset temperature. The lid would lift as soon as someone approached, much like temple gates welcoming a devout pilgrim. Water pressure and temperature for the spray function were fully adjustable, and a warm-air drying feature was built right in. There was even a deodorizing function. The ambient sound feature could play everything from white noise to birdsong. There was a nightlight, too. Alfred even suspected there was a setting hidden somewhere that would recite poetry though he had never found it, nor was he certain he actually wanted to.
Jason loved these toilets.
Alfred knew this because Jason, unlike the rest of the household, was never one to mince words. Jason Todd was blunt about everything. He had arrived at Wayne Manor at twelve years old, carrying the survival instincts of an alley cat, the vocabulary of a longshoreman, and an emotional candor that Bruce found both endearing and terrifying. While Bruce buried his feelings in silence and Dick masked his with charm, Jason simply blurted out whatever was on his mind. He spoke loudly, swore frequently, and often shouted his thoughts right at the dinner table.
"Alfred," he said on his third night at the manor, looking as solemn as a boy delivering a papal address, "that toilet is the best thing that’s ever happened to me."
"I am delighted to hear that, Master Jason."
"No, I’m serious. It’s warm there. The seat is warm, Alfred it feels like sitting on God’s own lap."
"That is a vivid image, sir, albeit a slightly blasphemous one."
"Back home, the water was always getting shut off. I mean, always. My dad would either forget to pay the bill, or the check would bounce, or he’d pay the wrong bill because he was high. And whenever we *did* have water, he’d clog the drain. Every damn time. The guy ate like a garbage disposal; the pipes just couldn't handle it. Have you ever tried flushing a toilet with no water pressure? You have to pour a bucket of water in from the top and pray it all goes down."
Alfred, in truth, had never tried such a thing. But he nodded, because Jason was speaking; and to Alfred, Jason speaking was something precious like the rare birdsong or sunlight in Gotham: scarce, fleeting, and worthy of breathless attention.
"Back when I was living on the streets..." Jason continued, reaching for another dinner roll with a movement so swift it was practically a reflex, a habit born of experience, knowing that unattended food vanished in the blink of an eye. Those abandoned buildings didn't have running water. You had to use the park restrooms. Those kinds of public toilets."
He paused and looked at Alfred; the world-weariness in his eyes stood in stark contrast to his youthful face.
"Alfred, you really don't want to know what was in those stalls at night."
"I suppose I truly do not, Master Jason."
"Drug deals. Rats. Things that looked like rats but were absurdly huge. And guys... guys who actually lived there. Once, I pushed open a stall door and saw a man sleeping on his feet like a horse. Just dozing off against the wall with his pants down around his ankles. I closed the door and went to the next park."
He spoke casually the way children who have endured harrowing experiences often do—stating facts without self-pity, as if merely discussing the weather.
In the end, Alfred simply asked, "Master Jason, would you like some more potatoes?"
"Sure."
Alfred served the potatoes. Jason began to eat. The toilet seat, one imagines, would still have been warm.
As for the bathroom situation during his time living with Talia al Ghul that was something Jason told Alfred much later; a different scene entirely, shared over whiskey in the kitchen.
"One shouldn't let stereotypes mislead them," Jason said, pouring himself a third glass with precise, careful movements, striving to conceal just how drunk he actually was. “I mean, what would you think? The League of Assassins, right? Ancient organization. Mountain fortress. Old-world vibes. You’d assume, well, it’s probably just a pit latrine or something.”
“It is easy to assume that,” Alfred agreed.
“Sometimes? Sure. Sometimes it really is just a pit. Talia has bases everywhere, and some are modern I mean, really modern. Dubai-penthouse-level modern. Her place in Marrakesh has a steam shower with sixteen nozzles and a deep soaking tub made of some stone I can’t even name. I’m pretty sure the toilet was Wi-Fi enabled.”
He took a sip of his drink.
“But then there are the other places. The old bases. The ones in the mountains. The toilet there... look, I don’t want to seem disrespectful of the culture...”
“Master Jason, you’ve never shown such concern before.”
“Fair point. Anyway, there was this one time at a base—Western Asia? Maybe Mongolia? Somewhere cold and rugged, at any rate. I’d been sword-training all day—the kind where one slip-up costs you a finger—and I hadn’t eaten since morning. Then they served this huge meal; I was starving, so I ate like I was trying to break a world record, just shoveling it in. An hour later, my gut started making noises like something out of a haunted house, and I had to go to the bathroom—now.”
He paused for dramatic effect. Alfred waited patiently, as waiting was one of the skills he had truly mastered. “So I rushed to the nearest restroom. It was one of those old-fashioned ones—very primitive. Basically just a concrete trench with squatting platforms over it. No flush mechanism, no water, no door. Just... a trench.”
“Ah.”
“I looked down, Alfred. I saw things. Things that had accumulated over a long time. Layers upon layers, like geological strata. I believe they were the ‘contributions’ of many people over a very long period.”
“I see.”
“I experienced a very specific kind of trauma. The sort usually reserved for Asians born in the seventies. I know this because a guy training with me saw the look on my face when I came out and just nodded. That look said, ‘I get it, brother.’ It was a shared understanding... a bond of mutual suffering. No words needed. We’d both witnessed the same darkness.”
“That bond of shared suffering transcends cultural boundaries,” Alfred remarked.
“It transcends a lot of things. Most notably, it makes it impossible to eat comfortably for the next three days.”
Jason took another sip of his drink. Alfred refilled the glass without being asked; some stories require the proper ‘supplies,’ and this was definitely a story best told over whiskey.
But that was all in the past a private, undignified history involving excrement and as Alfred stood there, the word ‘past’ was exactly what crossed his mind. Three in the morning, in the manor’s kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil.
Intellectually, Alfred had always known Jason was alive. The family had known for a long time, too. There had been several confrontations, some violent, some baffling involving body armor, firearms, and the kind of family dysfunction that would make a therapist weep in professional despair. As for Jason’s state upon his return had he gone ‘bad,’ ‘good,’ or simply changed? Or was he the same old Jason, just with a shorter temper? It depends on which family member you ask; and asking any of them is practically an act of self-torture, given that they have never agreed on anything not even trivial matters like the color of the sky or the ideal temperature for soup.
Yet Jason had never truly "come home."
Until tonight when, evidently, his digestive system made the decision to return for him.
The water boiled. Alfred poured it to steep the tea, then arranged the teapot, two cups, a small pitcher of milk, and a plate of shortbread baked that very morning on a tray. He carried the tray upstairs with a steady gait and an upright posture the bearing of a man who had been carrying trays for forty years, and .It was the posture of a man who relied on God’s grace and a healthy lumbar spine to keep doing his job for another forty years.
He placed the tray on a small table in the hallway outside the guest bathroom, pulled over the mahogany chair that had sat there since the Eisenhower administration, and settled in to wait.
There were sounds from behind the door; out of professional discretion and basic human decency, Alfred chose not to speculate on exactly what those sounds might be.
Then came a voice: "Alfred?"
"I'm here, Master Jason."
"Are you sitting outside the door?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I’ve brought tea."
A silence followed. Then, a very faint voice asked, "What kind?"
"Chamomile, with a hint of mint. It’s soothing for the stomach."
Another silence. A longer one this time. Alfred heard a sound—something that might have been a laugh, or perhaps something else entirely. For Jason, the distinction was often academic, devoid of real meaning.
"I’m going to be in here for a while," Jason said.
"I’m in no rush to be anywhere else, sir."
"It’s three in the morning."
"Precisely as I said."
When the story finally came out, it went something like this:
That afternoon, he had eaten a massive amount of lemon ice cream. Not a scoop, not a cone. The portion was staggering, defying the standard units used to measure frozen desserts. He’d bought it at a shop that charged by weight; the cashier had looked at the ice cream, then at Jason, then back at the ice cream, before silently taking the money. He had worked in the Bowery long enough to know better than to question a six-foot-two man—with a streak of white in his hair and a physique strong enough to bench-press a refrigerator—about his choice of ice cream portion.
"Exactly how much ice cream are we talking about?" Alfred asked, sitting in the hallway chair. "I don't want to say."
"A pint?"
Silence.
"A quart?"
Still silence.
"Master Jason."
"It was a half-gallon, okay? I was having a lousy day. Don't judge me."
Alfred didn't judge. Alfred never judged. He simply made a mental note with the cool, clinical detachment of a battlefield surgeon and filed the information away for future reference, or perhaps as ammunition for a future argument.
Jason went on, his tone taking on a feverish quality—like someone determined to tell a story they were already too deep into to abandon; eating that lemon ice cream had been a mistake, yet he’d eaten it knowing full well it was a mistake. Jason had a complicated relationship with dairy. His stomach processed dairy the way Gotham City handled urban renewal projects: slowly, resentfully, and with massive collateral damage. But that lemon ice cream was incredible. It was the kind of lemon ice cream that made you believe, for one fleeting moment, that the universe was fundamentally benevolent—that good things could happen for no reason at all. "I understand the impulse, sir. After all, the fall of man began with an apple."
"Yeah, well, my digestive system’s 'collapse' began with about two liters of frozen lemon cream ice cream; by that measure, I’ve got Adam beat."
But the ice cream alone wouldn't have triggered this crisis. At best, the ice cream was just the prelude; the real catalyst was a call from Roy Harper at six in the evening delivered with his signature brand of chaotic, high-octane enthusiasm, the sort that disregarded context, consequences, and basic gastrointestinal physiology. Roy had discovered a hot pot place in Chinatown. According to him, the flavor was out of this world; according to him, it was the best hot pot he’d ever had; according to him, it was all-you-can-eat for eighteen dollars and they had that spicy broth. It was the kind of truly spicy broth where the oil floating on the surface took on the hue of a sunset, and the chilies bobbing within looked as though they’d been hand-picked by someone with a personal vendetta against you.
“So you went,” Alfred said. It wasn’t a question.
“I went.”
“And you’d already eaten half a gallon of lemon ice cream by then.”
“That’s right—I had indeed eaten half a gallon of lemon ice cream.”
“I see.”
“Don’t give me that ‘I see’, Alfred; I know exactly what you mean when you say that.”
“It simply means I understand, sir.”
“It means you’re filing it away. That ‘mental file.’ That ‘Alfred File’ where you store every mistake we’ve ever made, just so you can trot them out and lecture us at Christmas.”
“I have no such file.”
“You absolutely do.”
Alfred did, in fact, have such a file. It was exhaustive, organized alphabetically by family member, with each person’s section arranged chronologically. The section on Master Dick alone was long enough to fill a novella. But now was neither the time nor the place.
Jason went to that hot pot place. He ate with reckless abandon and high spirits—like someone who knows dairy wreaks havoc on his gut but decides to throw caution to the wind; a gastrointestinal nihilist plunging headlong into the abyss of nothingness. By his own estimate, he consumed an “irresponsibly large amount” of lamb, beef, mushrooms, tofu, noodles, and about four hundred grams of lotus root slices—all cooked in a broth that was, in his words, “seventy percent chili oil and thirty percent pure malice.”
Roy kept pace, bite for bite—because Roy Harper had never understood the concept of “moderation” in his life. Kori, meanwhile, ate with elegant restraint, watching them with a look of indulgent amusement—much like a woman watching two Golden Retrievers rummaging through the trash. The consequences began to manifest on the subway ride back.
"It started as a low rumble," Jason said, his voice sounding detached, as if he were recounting a natural disaster. "Like... geological activity. Sub-bass vibrations. I could feel the tremors right in my fillings."
"The interaction between dairy products and capsaicin within the human digestive system has been extensively documented," Alfred remarked. "I believe it has been the subject of numerous academic papers and at least one cautionary TED Talk."
"Yeah, well, I didn't need a TED Talk. My large intestine sent me a 'DM' directly—and it was all in caps."
Jason explained that the problem lay with the apartment. The place he shared with the Outlaws had only one bathroom. Just one. Three people sharing a single bathroom—one of whom was an alien princess whose showers took roughly two geological epochs and consumed enough water to supply a small nation—was a recipe for disaster. As for the plumbing, to Jason’s expert eye, it was held together by nothing but rust and a faint, lingering memory of solder. The toilet itself appeared to be a mid-90s model—a peculiar era for American toilet design, constrained by post-1992 federal regulations mandating low-flow mechanisms that delivered a flush so feeble it felt less like a forceful clearing and more like a 'polite suggestion.'" “That toilet,” Jason said, “was never going to handle the situation I was about to ‘produce’.”
“So you came here.”
“So I came here.”
“You crossed Gotham in the middle of the night, with severe gastric distress, just to use the toilet at Wayne Manor.”
“Actually, I crossed Gotham at ninety miles an hour. Ran two red lights. Almost hit a raccoon. But, yeah.”
“Instead of using a gas station restroom. Or one at a restaurant. Or any of the thousands of toilets between your apartment and here.”
“Alfred,” Jason said seriously, “have you ever used a gas station restroom during an emergency caused by, say, hot pot and ice cream?”
“I have not.”
“It’s not about the toilet itself; it’s about the infrastructure. The plumbing. Gas station pipes are only two inches wide and made of the cheapest PVC a government contractor could find in 1987. I needed capacity. I needed flow rate. I needed a toilet designed by people who really knew their stuff—people who understood that sometimes, what the human body expels practically violates the Geneva Convention.”
“And the Manor’s toilets meet that standard.” “The Manor’s toilets can flush down a whole Thanksgiving turkey; I’ve seen Bruce’s shopping lists and know what comes into this house. The plumbing was designed to handle that sort of thing.”
Alfred couldn't argue with that logic. Ghastly as it sounded, it was irrefutable.
There was a brief pause in the conversation, accompanied by a few quiet sounds. Alfred sipped his tea, letting his thoughts drift to more pleasant topics: the pruning schedule for the East Garden roses, the quarterly silverware inventory, or whether to switch brands of floor wax for the ballroom.
“Alfred?”
“Yes, Master Jason?”
“Sorry I didn’t... I mean, I should have...”
Another pause. This time, there was no accompanying sound; instead, there was something far more unsettling: silence. It was the kind of silence peculiar to young people trying to articulate something deeply important—a moment when they discover, as so many do, that the words which truly matter are precisely the ones hardest to find.
"You needn't apologize, Master Jason."
"No, I do need to. I should have come back sooner. Not just..." A vague gesture followed—one Alfred could almost hear through the door—"...not just for the bathroom. I should have come back."
"You are here now."
"I'm here because my colon staged a coup."
"The motive is of no consequence; the result is what matters."
Another silence. Alfred poured a second cup of tea. This time he chose Darjeeling; he didn't brew chamomile, for the conversation had moved past the stage of soothing nerves and into a territory requiring something with a bit more backbone.
"Is Bruce home?" Jason asked.
"Master Bruce is out on patrol. He is expected back at four-thirty—barring any unforeseen complications, though in my experience, such assumptions are rarely reliable."
"Good. I mean, I didn't want to see him in this state."
"Of course, Master Jason."
"It’s not that I... it’s just... it’s complicated."
"Anything involving Master Bruce is complicated. I believe him to be the most complex man alive—and I say that with some authority, having served in British Military Intelligence alongside men who would guard their backs even against their own shadows."
Jason laughed. It was a quiet laugh, but a genuine one. “Dick would probably want to hug me.”
“Master Dick would certainly want to hug you. He would be incredibly enthusiastic, completely disregarding personal boundaries or whether your current physical condition is up to it.”
“And what about Timmy?”
“Master Tim is in San Francisco this week.”
“And the little demon?”
“Master Damian is asleep.”
“Good. Good, good, good.” Jason fell silent for a moment. “You know, I don’t hate them.”
“I know, Master Jason.”
“It’s just... I can’t handle it all. That feeling of ‘home.’ Not right now, anyway. It’s too... I don’t know how to put it. It’s like—well, you know that feeling of being at a buffet—”
“Master Jason, I am not certain I wish to hear any more food metaphors at this particular moment.”
“Fair enough. Okay. No food metaphors. It’s like—” He paused, then started again. “When I came back... everything was deafeningly loud. Everything. Even the sound of my own heartbeat was thunderous. And coming back here—to this house—where everything is so grand and significant, where every room holds memories... it’s overwhelming. It’s like trying to drink straight from a fire hose.”
“I understand.”
“And I know it’s not... I know it’s not fair to you. To any of you. I know you...” His voice took on a complex note. “I know you mourned for me. I know what that cost.”
Alfred set down his teacup. He placed it with precision, landing exactly in the center of the saucer. “The cost,” Alfred said, “is not a debt you need to repay, Master Jason. It is simply the cost itself. Grief is not a bill.”
Silence fell behind the door. Then came a sound that clearly did not originate from a rumbling stomach. “Damn it, Alfred.”
“Mind your language, Master.”
“You can’t just... you can’t, while I’m in the middle of... in the middle of...” He took a breath, his voice trembling slightly. “You know, the timing for this kind of emotional outpouring is absolutely terrible, right? This is just about the worst place for something like this to happen.”
“Quite the contrary. I have found that some of the most important conversations in this household take place in the most unexpected settings. Master Bruce once confided his fears about fatherhood while I was extracting a bullet from his trapezius muscle; Master Dick poured out his heart about his first heartbreak while we were both hanging upside down in a cave that was rapidly filling with water.”
“This—” he gestured toward the closed door, “—is practically routine by Wayne standards.”
Jason fell silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was lower. “I missed you, Alfred.”
Alfred closed his eyes.
“I missed you terribly as well, Master Jason.”
“Even though, right now, I’m actually...”
“Especially now. Because you are here. As you said, the circumstances are far from ideal. But you are here.”
At around 3:40 a.m., the sound of a toilet flushing echoed through the air.
The flush carried an air of confidence and authority, as if a Japanese engineering masterpiece were flawlessly fulfilling its design purpose. No clogs, no malfunctions. The plumbing system of Wayne Manor—its pipes tracing back to infrastructure laid by craftsmen who valued nothing less than enduring durability—bore the load without a murmur of complaint.
Alfred heard the tap turn on, the pump of the soap dispenser, and then the sound of running water—this time for a longer duration, as Jason had always been meticulous about washing his hands. It was a habit Alfred had instilled in Jason during those early months when the boy first arrived at the manor—a habit that endured even after death, resurrection, and the grueling trials of the League of Assassins; frankly, it was a better testament to Alfred’s tutelage than any academic credential.
The door opened.
Jason stood in the doorway. He was dressed in casual clothes—jeans, a black T-shirt, and a leather jacket that looked weathered and worn. The streak of white in his hair was more striking than Alfred remembered. He gazed at Alfred.
Alfred gazed back.
"Tea?" Alfred asked.
"Yeah," Jason said. "Sure."
He sat down right on the floor. "This tea is great," Jason said.
"It’s a Darjeeling, second flush. My supplier is in Kolkata; I’ve been corresponding with him for twenty-three years."
"Of course you have."
They drank their tea in silence. The manor creaked around them—the sounds of the old house breathing, settling, and bearing the weight of its own history. Somewhere in the east wing, a clock chimed four times.
"I should get going," Jason said, "before Bruce gets back."...come.”
“You can stay.”
“Alfred—”
“The guest room is ready. It has always been ready. All of them are.”
Jason looked at him. Alfred read something in his expression—like a stray animal facing a hand that offered food; it yearned to trust that hand but couldn't—not yet—because the hand before it had hurt it, and the hand before *that* had hurt it even worse.
“All the guest rooms?” Jason asked.
“All the rooms. Including yours—though strictly speaking, that wasn't a guest room. It was *your* room. It has been your room since you were twelve. Whether occupied or not, I changed the sheets every two weeks because rules are rules; I would never allow it to be said that any room in this house was not properly cared for.”
“Does Bruce know? That you kept it...”
“Master Bruce knows. He never commented on it, nor did he ever ask me to stop. What conclusions you draw from that are entirely up to you.”
Jason set his teacup on the floor beside him and rested his hands on his knees. For a moment, he looked as though he were about to say something—something momentous, something capable of shifting the dynamic of the conversation or even the entire family—but then a sound rumbled from his stomach, like a vengeful ghost playing an organ, and the moment passed.
“Damn,” Jason said.
“Round two?” Alfred asked.
“Round three.”