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Bruce Wayne does not know what to say to the boy sitting at the other end of the dinner table.
It is Dick Grayson’s first night in the Manor, and weeks in Gotham’s juvenile detention center have turned the devastating grief Bruce had seen that night in the circus into a vicious rage that Bruce knows he is not qualified to deal with.
The boy glares at his plate, arms crossed across his narrow chest, and he refuses to look Bruce in the eye.
“Aren’t you hungry?” Bruce cannot bring himself to eat when his dinner companion is on a hunger strike, and he pushes his peas around his plate. “Would you like Alfred to make you something else? I’ve never been the biggest fan of pork chops myself.”
“I want to go back to the circus.”
Bruce closes his eyes. He cannot fault the boy for wanting to return to the circus. It was where he was raised, a familiar environment full of people who could care for him far better than a strange, lonely man, but legally, he cannot go back there.
When he’d tried to explain as much to Dick, the boy had looked at him with such outright hatred in his eyes that Bruce had decided to just shut the hell up and let the social worker do it.
A stuffed elephant sits in Dick’s lap, and the boy rubs one of its ears between his thumb and forefinger over and over. Bruce remembers carrying around one of his mother’s scarves in the first weeks after her death, and he had braided and unwound and re-braided the tassels in an almost obsessive way until the fabric had lost her scent.
“I know.” Bruce almost calls for Alfred, but Dick is not Alfred’s ward. He is Bruce’s, and if Bruce does not make an effort with this boy now, he might as well send him to the state and let another foster family have a go. “I know you do, Dick, and I’m sorry that you can’t. But maybe one day you’ll grow to like it here.”
That was very obviously the wrong thing to say, and Bruce blinks in surprise when Dick leaps to his feet.
“Why would I ever like it here?” Dick yells as he clutches the elephant to his chest. “I had a life in the circus! I had a family, people who loved me, people who understand. There is nothing for me here. I want to go back. You have to take me back!”
“I wish that I could, Dick, but I can’t. You know this.”
“It’s bullshit!” There is the slightest hint of an accent in Dick’s words, a mix of a dozen different cultures that he had grown up surrounded by, but when he swears, his voice is all Gotham. He must have picked up some new words when in juvenile detention, and Bruce’s heart clenches painfully when he thinks of all that this boy has suffered through. “They are my family, and I want to go home! I don’t understand why I can’t just go home.”
There is a moment when Bruce thinks that Dick is going to throw the cup in his hands right at Bruce’s head, but the boy whirls around and hurls it at the wall instead. Glass shatters against wallpaper older than Bruce’s parents, and Bruce flinches when Dick opens his mouth and screams.
It is a guttural sound that fills every corner of the dining room, a display of grief so visceral that it makes Bruce’s eyes sting.
He is nowhere near qualified for this. This is a kind of grief that Bruce knows intimately, but he cannot help this boy. He can barely help himself; Batman is a testament to that fact, and he just stares in shock as Dick continues to scream.
Tears roll down cheeks red with exertion, and the fabric of Dick’s elephant strains in his clenched fists. Ear-splitting screams turn into desperate, gasping cries, and shock turns to horror when Bruce realizes that Dick has descended into pure panic. His chest heaves with every cry, and soon he isn’t even crying at all, just hyperventilating as water begins to seep into his socks.
It is the sight of baby blue fabric turning deep navy that snaps Bruce out of his immobility, and he surges forward to drop to his knees in front of Dick.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers as he puts his hands on Dick’s shoulders. The boy is tiny, a little slip of a thing, and even kneeling, Bruce towers over him. “Dick, chum, I am so sorry. I wish I could take you home. I wish I could give you back to your family. I’m sorry that I’m not them.”
Dick trembles like a leaf beneath Bruce’s hands. As carefully as he can, Bruce moves him away from the shards of glass littering the floor, but the boy does not cease his horrid wheezing.
If anything, it begins to worsen, and Bruce is not this boy’s father, is barely even his guardian, but he pulls Dick close to his chest anyway. The boy falls against him, boneless as his legs give way, and his face settles in the crook of Bruce’s neck as he continues to cry.
Bruce Wayne has held countless lives in his hands. He has torn flesh and broken bones without flinching, has brought some of Gotham’s worst to their knees, and he is well-versed in the many ways that the human body can feel pain. He knows where to hit to inflict the most of it without causing permanent damage, can drop a grown man with just one careful touch, but he is at a complete and total loss as to how he is supposed to comfort the boy in his arms.
He has not been this small in years, and he can barely remember what it felt like to be wrapped in the embrace of his parents. Alfred’s arms are a more familiar comfort; he had held Bruce as he’d cried more times than Bruce can count, and Bruce tries to copy the gentle way in which Alfred would comfort him.
“I know it hurts,” he whispers into Dick’s dark curls. When he cups the back of Dick’s head with one hand, the boy presses impossibly closer. “It’s going to hurt for a very long time. But, if you’ll let me, I’d like to help you.”
“I don’t want your help,” Dick gasps against Bruce’s skin. “I want my mother.”
Bruce has been shot, stabbed, beaten, and bruised, but nothing hurts as fiercely as hearing Dick cry for his mother does. It breaks whatever is left of Bruce’s heart in two, and he rubs a trembling hand up and down Dick’s back as the boy’s cries finally begin to slow.
“I understand that you’re angry, Dick. This is unfair. You don’t know me. You don’t know this house, or this city, but I promise you that I am going to do all that I can to take care of you, alright? You have a home here now.”
Dick pulls back, and looks up at Bruce with a quiet sniff. He looks like a wreck, with wide bloodshot eyes and a sickly pallor to his skin, and Bruce wonders if Alfred had felt just as terrified knowing that he was now responsible for such a broken little boy.
“I broke your cup.”
It wasn’t what Bruce had been expecting him to say. “Well, I have more cups. If you’re angry, I’d rather you throw something and get it out of your system.”
He knows just how dangerous anger can be, sees the twisted way in which it has warped his own life, and he wants something better than that for this boy.
“You’re not mad?”
“Not at all. I can throw one too, if it’ll make you feel better.”
Dick makes a face. “You’re weird.”
Bruce just shrugs. “I suppose. Now, would you like some ice cream?”
“That’s not dinner.”
“No, it’s not. It’s better. And since you don’t like what Alfred has cooked, I’d rather you eat something instead of starving.” He cannot quite believe that Dick allows himself to be picked up, but he settles into Bruce’s arms without complaint and lets the man carry him into the kitchen.
Wayne Manor is not the circus. Its halls are dark, its rooms mostly empty, and Bruce has long since given up on trying to fill the house with anything other than his grief. It clings to the walls, settles into the carpet, hangs from the chandeliers, and Bruce has grown used to the oppressive weight of it.
Dick should not have to. He deserves a life in Wayne Manor that is not marked by grief, and Bruce makes a vow to himself as he and Dick sit on the kitchen countertops with bowls of ice cream and fudge sauce that he will not allow Dick to be consumed by grief the way that it has consumed him.