#oc; niko rockefeller

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: much angst, psychological torture???

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

geez you guys. just geez. this is so intense. this chapter, as well as asten and jasons little moment made me cry while writing them :,(

part twenty-two

❝ TOO CLOSE TO HOME ❞

TUESDAY — AUGUST 11 — 3:31PM

BENTLEY HADN’T CONSIDERED JUST HOW QUICKLY HIS DAY COULD TURN DISASTROUS.

Hey, buddy. There’s been a change of plans — I want you home after school today. I’ll explain when you get here.

That was the text Bentley got from Bruce exactly seven minutes before Spanish class ended, exactly seven minutes before he was supposed to go home with Nico, so he could make the burner calls with him and Asten.

Bruce had already said yes to Bentley’s fake science project earlier that day — a lie he felt pretty terrible about — but apparently, now, it was a no.

At first, he was terrified he’d be getting in trouble. Had Bruce found out about Dr. Keene’s phone? About the cabin? About the burners? Did he know their entire plan from beginning to end? He probably did since he was the best detective in the world, and if so, Bentley was screwed.

But it wasn’t that. It was much, much worse.

Now, twenty-five minutes after the end of school, when Bentley, Damian, and Duke walked into the Manor, it was evident that something was wrong. The entire house was silent. Not the people-in-the-distance kind of silent, but the could-hear-a-pin-drop-from-the-other-end-of-the-Manor kind of silent. Nothing in the golden entryway was out of place or messed up, but the quiet gave the place quite an eerie feeling. As far as they knew, Dick, Jason, Bruce, Alfred, and Tim were all home. But there was no noise, no anything that would imply anyone had been there in a while. Not even the dogs or Alfred the cat made a peep at the sound of the front door. And Bentley… didn’t like it. He didn’t like it so much he ran a hand through his red hair and grabbed onto the hem of Duke’s blazer with the other. Their trio of matching Gotham Academy uniforms would not make for good outfits to die in.

“Titus?” Damian called through the house, shrugging off his backpack and dropping it at the door. Bentley had barely seen the giant gray dog since Damian started getting angry — and it seemed he wouldn’t be seeing him now, either. Titus didn’t come running to Damian’s call like he usually did. Like he always did.

That freaked Bentley out even more. He was pretty sure Titus would chew his way through a wall if Damian was calling him from the other side, but now, not a thing in the Manor moved. Not a sound pierced the air.

“Duke…” Bentley muttered, his voice hardly audible. He jumped a mile when Duke’s hand landed on his shoulder, and the older boy peeled his own backpack off, laying it gently on the floor. 

“Let’s go to the cave,” He whispered back, squeezing Bentley’s shoulder.

Bentley slid his bag off, too. He wasn’t exactly sure what Duke’s metahuman superpowers were — seeing the future or something — but he hoped they were online. Just in case. There was no telling what was going on, why the Manor was so quiet.

Damian and Duke started down the nearest hallway — the one with the den, library, and cave entrance through Bruce’s office. Bentley trailed along behind them, his heartbeat loud in his ears as he stepped ever-so-softly, eyes flicking here and there. The end of the hallway was dark and creepy. They weren’t ready for a fight, not in the slightest, although Damian’s fingers were twitching by his side like he was subconsciously searching for a sword. What if someone had broken in? 

It felt like an eternity before Duke pushed open the door to Bruce’s office, and they all peeked inside. Everything was in order. The desk was neat, the bookshelves were organized, the lights were off, and the grandfather clock was…

Open. 

The entrance to the Batcave was open.

Bentley breathed in, the familiar feeling of terror prickling at his skin. This was… so wrong. Everything was wrong. No one left the cave open. And why was it so cold in the house? Bentley only just realized that the prickling on his skin wasn’t terror alone, but also, the temperature in the Manor. It was cold like someone left the front door open for too long. Why was the cave open? Where was everybody? 

“Don’t worry, Babybird,”

Bentley brought a hand up to his forehead as a voice he knew all too well rang inside of his skull, sending an echo of vertigo through his head. She was here. The Secret Keeper. She was… she was…

In the Manor.

Duke and Damian filed into Bruce’s office, and Bentley followed slowly behind. There was something at the end of the hall. Someone, standing there. He could see the silhouette in the dark. It was a girl. It wasn’t Steph. It wasn’t Cass. Her eyes were glowing an amber-gold in the darkness, and she was staring at him.

“I won’t tell your secrets,”

She smiled a twisted, stitched smile, one Bentley could hardly see that terrified him all the same.

She was right there.

Bentley shouted in terror, swerving into Bruce’s office so quickly that he whammed into Duke face-first, thumping onto the hardwood from the force.

“Bentley!”

“She’s in the hallway!” He squeaked.

Everyone was suddenly moving. Bentley was trying to scurry away from the door at the same time Duke was trying to get between him and the hall, and Damian was going for Bruce’s desk, ducking under it and re-emerging with an actual katana in his hand. 

In a flash, Damian ran for the hallway, but Duke grabbed onto his arm with a shrill: “No. The light. I saw-”

“Unhand me,” Damian ordered, wrenching his forearm from Duke’s grip and jogging out of the room before he could finish.

“Damian, no!” Duke was moving to get Damian out of the hall, and Bentley was still pushing himself backwards on the floor until his back thunked against Bruce’s desk. Oh God, oh God, oh God. They were going to die.

When Bentley looked up, Damian was just standing there.

And his eyes were amber.

It was only a split second, but Bentley would probably remember it for the rest of his life — the way Damian stood there, blankly, his fiery-yet-cold greenish-blue eyes nothing more than empty, hollow as they shone the exact same amber as the Secret Keeper’s. 

And then he fell, the katana clattering off to the side. Duke was close enough to catch him, just perfectly, like he knew it was about to happen. He dragged Damian back into the office and slammed the giant wooden door, locking it behind him. 

“Don’t worry, Babybird. I won’t tell him your secrets,”

“C’mon, Bentley, stay close to me,” Duke ordered, hefting Damian up into his arms bridal-style. Bentley’s brain was hardly able to function with the Secret Keeper’s voice bouncing around in it, and he didn’t move. His heart was pounding and pounding and pounding in his ears and it was getting so hard to breathe.

The Secret Keeper was in the Manor. Talking to him, in the Manor.

They were going to die.

“Bentley! I need you to stay with me, little dude. Hey,” Duke crouched down, somewhat awkwardly since he was holding Damian, and his hand landed on Bentley’s shoulder. Their gazes locked, both pairs of brown eyes searching the other for a moment. One full of terror, the other soft with understanding layered over fear and determination. “I know it’s scary, but I need you to stay with me, okay?”

Bentley’s gaze fell to Damian, who was hanging limp in Duke’s arms, his eyes open but unseeing with waves of amber crawling across his irises like lightning. He was staring at Bentley, but he wasn’t seeing him. Damian looked…

Dead.

Bentley was suddenly back in that nightmare he’d had so long ago, tugging Damian’s lifeless body into his lap by his Robin suit. 

“Stop it. Get up! You’re Robin, get up!”

All he could see were Damian’s lifeless eyes, staring at him but not seeing. Damian couldn’t die… he was Robin, he couldn’t die.

Bentley couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t stop crying. He was on his knees, surrounded by the corpses of the Wayne’s that his father had killed in that nightmare so long ago. Damian was looking at him but his eyes weren’t seeing. Everyone’s eyes were open but they weren’t actually seeing anything. They were dead. They were dead. They all had amber pulsing in their irises and they were all dead. His father wasn’t in the doorway anymore, it was her. It was her with her amber eyes and they were all dead.

“Shh, shh, shh… I’ve got you, babybird. I’ve got you. I’ve got you,” 

They were all dead. They were all dead.

“Bentley, buddy, I've got you,”

Bentley couldn’t even think coherently enough to realize that the voice wasn't hers. He couldn’t stop seeing Damian’s amber eyes.

“I’ve got you, kiddo. Open your eyes,”

Open your eyes. That’s what he needed Damian to do — open his eyes, look at him again, not be dead. Damian couldn’t be dead, not after Bentley knew a way to fix their relationship. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t die. Robin couldn’t die.

“Bentley, can you try to open your eyes and look at me?”

Robin can’t die.

“I’ve got you, babybird. You’re safe now,”

He wasn’t safe. No one was safe anymore.

Someone was humming.

It wasn’t a song Bentley knew. He didn’t know many songs — but it was a song he might’ve heard before. He was moving. Only a little, back and forth, and something was touching him. 

His thoughts began to swirl like water going down a drain, Damian’s dead, amber eyes melding with the rest of everything in his head. What was going on? And who was humming? Was something touching his hair?

He was very… aware of his own existence. He could feel his heartbeat pulsing in his fingertips, his chest, his toes, his head. He could feel the terror twisting in his stomach, the air moving a bit-too-quickly in and out of his lungs. The wetness on his face. The something warm he was up against, the fingertips moving through his hair, the gentle rocking that the something warm was doing. The faintest of vibrations he could feel that coincided with the humming he heard. The fact that his eyelids seemed glued shut and he couldn’t see anything.

Slowly, like he was trying to pull open a tomb that had been sealed eons ago, Bentley opened his eyes. He was greeted by a blur of bright. Bright everything that swirled around for a moment before it started to come into focus.

He was in the medbay, facing the door to the rest of the cave. Sitting in a chair, but not actually in a chair, because someone else was in the chair and he was on their lap. Their fingers were moving through his hair with such a familiar rhythm that he knew exactly who it was.

“Dick,” He whispered, his voice and vision impaired by tears that were still coming without his permission.

“Hey there, kiddo,” 

Bentley blinked, looking at his own hands that were balled up in Dick’s blue t-shirt. “…What happened?”

“You’ve been having an anxiety attack, bud. For about twenty minutes now,”

Bentley looked up just far enough to meet the crystalline blue eyes that were so undeniably Dick’s. He had the vague intention of speaking again, but another hand landed on his head, this one from behind.

“Hey there, chum,”

Bentley breathed in and out shakily at the sound of Bruce’s voice, glancing at the room around them through his tears.

Everyone was down there. Barbara was at the Batcomputer, laser-focused on the screen. Cass and Steph were watching over her shoulder. Alfred was moving back and forth from machine to hospital bed, and Tim was in a chair just to the left of Dick’s, his leg bouncing almost impossibly fast. Duke was pacing behind them. Bruce was in a chair only a few feet to Bentley’s right, his hand still resting in his hair, right at the edge of a hospital bed.

The hospital bed had someone in it. 

And so did the one next to it.

The one Bruce had taken up residence next to held Damian. He was laying eerily still, attached to several machines that were beeping and whirring. His chest was rising and falling, much to Bentley’s relief, and the heart monitor next to him was beeping at a normal pace… but he wasn’t awake. He was just… laying there. Unmoving.

Bentley startled when the person in the other bed started screaming.

His eyes landed on the violently thrashing figure of Jason Todd, his wrists, ankles, and waist restrained to the hospital bed by thick leather straps Bentley didn’t even know they had. His eyes were closed, but he was throwing his weight around so forcefully that the whole bed was clacking and moving when he did. He was absolutely drenched in sweat, his entire gray t-shirt stained a darker shade, his hair wet and floppy and very unusual looking. He was breathing so hard and fast it rivaled Nico’s asthma, his expression constantly twisting between pain, rage, despair, and agony, over and over and over. 

Bentley gasped lightly, turning his head back toward Dick when the burning in his eyes threatened to double. Bruce’s hand left his head, and Bentley thought he might’ve heard him stand. “What… what happened? To Jason?”

Dick sighed lightly, gently pressing Bentley’s head against his shoulder as he carded his fingers through his hair. “Secret Keeper got him the same way she got me.”

Bentley sniffled lightly, glancing over just far enough to look back at Damian, laying so stiff it looked like a funeral. Bruce was standing between the beds now, and seemed to be talking to Jason, who was calming. “…And Damian?”

Dick breathed in. “Yeah. Dami, too.”

They fell silent when another round of screaming and bed clacking came from Jason. Dick didn’t do that when he was unconscious, so what was Jason seeing? Bentley must’ve recoiled at the noise, because Dick kissed his hair. “It’s okay, babybird. He’ll be okay.”

Dick didn’t sound entirely too convinced.

Bentley just stayed there for a while, fighting the urge to cry and keeping his face hidden every time Jason started screaming again. Bruce had moved his chair in the middle of the two beds. Bentley wasn’t sure when.

“She was… the Secret Keeper, she was upstairs,” Bentley muttered after a while. “She was here.”

Dick hadn’t ceased petting his hair. “It’s okay. Bruce and Cass cleared the Manor after you guys came down. Wherever she is, it’s not here.”

But the Manor is huge, he wanted to argue, but he didn’t exactly feel like arguing. Everything felt like a battle. Why was it so hard to just live? He’d been at school less than an hour ago, finishing off a more-or-less normal day of classes, and now? Now a raging supervillain had broken into the Manor, terror-coma-fied two of the closest things he had to brothers, and Bentley just had to have another anxiety attack about it. Why couldn’t he just have a normal life? Was that so hard?

He started crying.

“Why is this happening to us?” He managed between his quiet cries, bringing his sleeves up to scrub at his eyes. “I just… I can’t… I just want to live with you.”

That statement seemed to take hold of Dick for a moment, because at least five seconds of silence passed before he replied: “I know. I know you do, kiddo. It’ll all be over soon.”

Something like rage bubbled up in Bentley’s chest in place of his hopelessness, though the tears kept coming. “That’s what everyone keeps saying, but it’s a lie! It’s not getting better, it’s not ending, it’s just getting worse!”

Jason started screaming again, fueling Bentley’s tears until he was well and truly sobbing into Dick’s blue t-shirt. 

Screw life.

Dick tried a quiet: “It’ll be okay.”

“Stop saying that,” Bentley choked, somewhat venomous but mostly pitiful. 

“I love you,” Was what Dick resigned to, just like when he didn’t know what to say to Tim at the end of their conversation. 

Go away, Tim had said.

“I love you, too,” Bentley half-whispered. “But I hate everything else.”

Jason calmed, and the timer until he started screaming again began to tick. Dick kept on stroking Bentley’s hair while he cried for everything he hadn’t cried about yet. Part of him wished they weren’t superheroes. That his father had just wanted to destroy Bruce for being Bruce, that Bentley had gotten shoved into a normal family with a normal life. Everything else was exhausting. Draining. Maybe they wouldn’t be targeted so badly if they were just a family of civilians.

Jason started screaming, again. He started his ultra-violent thrashing, too, shimmying the hospital bed across the floor of the medbay with clacks and scrapes of metal on concrete. 

Tim abruptly stood from his spot beside Dick, looking rather sick. “I’m gonna go upstairs.”

It didn’t take a detective to realize that he looked like he might pass out. His skin was pasty, and his eyes were dull and sunken. He also looked kind of… green. 

“It… it would probably be best for all of us to stay down here together, Timmy,” Dick tried, but Tim didn’t listen, making his way out of the medbay and into the rest of the cave.

For the second time that day, Bentley watched one of his brothers hit the floor. Except no one was there to catch Tim when he went down.

Everyone seemed to move. Duke, Cass, And Steph all flinched in Tim’s direction, although none of them were close enough to actually catch him. Even Dick jostled Bentley around in his lap by nearly shooting out of the chair. Bruce stood quickly, holding a hand out toward Dick, rushing to Tim’s side.

Bentley clung ever-tighter to Dick as the tears came doubly as hard, listening to Bruce fuss over getting Tim in a third hospital bed, flinching at Jason’s screams, and watching Damian’s hands ball up and relax over and over against the sheets. The stress of everything seemed to build in his head, tighter and tighter and tighter until…

The world faded away.

—

When Bentley woke up, he was on a cot, on the floor of the medbay. There was a scratchy hospital-like blanket thrown over him, and a quick glance around revealed that Dick had nodded off in the chair they’d been sitting in. His arms were crossed over his chest and his head was down, his black hair hanging over his forehead, blue eyes hidden from sight. Alfred was on the farthest end of the medbay, running tests, it seemed.

Duke, Steph, Cass, and Barbara were out near the batcomputer, taking up residence on the floor. (And in a wheelchair.) Barbara and Duke were speaking quietly, And Steph looked to be asleep, her head pillowed on Cass’s lap. There was a map of Gotham on the Batcomputer behind them, red dots flashing near the docks of Gotham Harbor. Did that mean the burner calls had worked?

And now three beds had a Wayne in them. Closest to Bentley laid Damian, stiff with still curling and uncurling fists. Then came Jason, who wasn’t screaming, but was still writhing around on the bed like he was covered in ants. In the third bed came the small, fragile looking Tim, who was unconscious and still. He was hooked up to a lot more stuff than the other two.

And sitting right in the midst of all the beds, like he couldn’t make up his mind, was Bruce.

He was on the edge of his chair, his elbows resting on his knees, eyes trained on the floor below his feet. Bentley was sure he’d never seen him looking so… lost. He was fiddling with a ring that sat around one of his fingers, spinning it over and over to the rhythm of Damian’s heart monitor.

Bentley’s hurt for him. For everyone. For the whole world, at this point. What was Bruce supposed to do, watching three of his kids suffer like that?

Bentley pushed himself off of the little flat cot and onto his feet, earning him a little glance from Bruce. Neither of them spoke as the child padded across the room, stopping only when he made it to the man’s chair.

“I’m cold,” Was what he said, eyes flicking down to his feet. He actually meant I want to try and make you feel better with a little hint of please hold me, life sucks. He prepared himself for a rejection and walk of shame back to the cot — that’s what his father would’ve done.

Bruce leaned back and scanned Bentley with his gray-blue eyes, opening his arms up. 

“So am I,”

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

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@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

its about to get real up in here y’all (also this chapter is HUGE I apologize)

part twenty-one

❝ MURDER CENTRAL ❞

TUESDAY — AUGUST 11 — 6:57AM

BENTLEY WOKE UP AROUND SEVEN THE NEXT MORNING, CURLED UP AT THE END OF TIM’S BED LIKE A CAT. 

The night before was nothing more than a teary, emotional blur. Tim’s anxiety attack had lasted for an entire hour and twenty-seven minutes. An hour and twenty-seven minutes until he could breathe easily again, until his mind came back to him and he was left drained and empty.

Bentley sat in the floor with him for the whole hour and twenty-seven minutes, being almost impressively unhelpful. He was sure his own crying wasn’t helping to ease Tim’s anxiety — if anything, he’d probably just made it worse. But he stayed. And that counted for something, right?

Tim was now curled up on top of his comforter, drowning in a red hoodie Bentley was sure he used to fit in a little better, dead asleep with the hood tugged tight over his head. No words had been exchanged — not after the attack, not when they wordlessly took up residence in the bed and sat awake until they couldn’t. Not that Bentley knew what to say anyhow. All of the calming tactics Tim had taught him didn’t seem to work on him at all. The breathing exercises, the gentle conversation, the grounding touch — none of it worked. The only thing that seemed to work for Tim was waiting.

Bentley wondered, silently, if that changed with each attack, or depended on the person having it.

Bentley would be lying if he said he didn’t feel like a failure for not noticing. Now that he knew, he couldn’t seem to not notice. The way Tim’s clothes hung looser, how he was the slightest bit bonier than usual, that he was rejecting what was brought to him so he could focus on work instead. Bentley had known for a while now that patrol was getting bad again, that villains were popping up, that Tim was working extra extra hard to keep up. But he just hadn’t noticed.

No one seemed to. The conversation between Dick and Tim sounded like the first time they’d spoke about it this time around — which had to hurt. He’d been working too hard for weeks at that point. And still; no one noticed, no one said a word until Dick did it for them. And Bentley didn’t think Dick was the one Tim was hoping would notice.

Bentley had to admit, hearing Tim say Bruce hadn’t spoken to him in a couple of days thanks to him sucked. It was just another reminder that, no matter how badly he wished otherwise, Bruce wasn’t his father, and the Wayne’s weren’t his family. All he was doing was stealing Bruce away from his actual children. (All adopted, but still actual. More actual than Bentley.)

What did that make him? A burden? A theif? An unnecessary addition?

He turned to look at Tim. Asleep, he was much more peaceful than awake, although he still looked… Bentley didn’t know. A little troubled. His face was shadowed by his hood, his black hair hanging down near his eyes, his skin only the slightest bit paler than normal. He was curled up impossibly small for a nineteen-year-old. His knees were tucked up close to his chest, his arms coiled around his body so tightly it was like they were the only things keeping him together. He looked younger. Too young.

How old was Tim when he started living with Bruce? Thirteen? Fourteen? That would mean he’d been in the Manor for five or six years. Five or six years. And a kid who had been there for one was stealing his dad away from him. After all, Tim had been adopted. They all had — Tim and Jason and Dick, they were all Bruce’s sons. Damian was Bruce’s biological son. And Bentley was just… some kid that lived with them. He wasn’t adopted, he wasn’t Bruce’s son, he was just… Bentley Whittaker.

It boiled down to this: Tim deserved Bruce’s attention. Bentley did not. Tim was Bruce’s son. Bentley was not. So Bentley decided he just needed to get out of the way.

With a soft sigh, he carefully pushed himself out of Tim’s bed. Bentley would never forget sleeping in it after his first anxiety attack, with Tim right next to him. Maybe it at least helped Tim a little to see Bentley right there after his.

He felt pretty much like a dumpster fire for leaving Tim’s room while the poor boy was still sleeping, but it wasn’t actually that big of a deal — because as soon as Bentley stepped into the hallway, he ran straight into Bruce face-first, who’d been reaching for the door handle.

“Bentley,” He said softly, with quiet surprise. “I didn’t expect for you to still be in there.”

Bruce looked tired. Bentley wasn’t sure what had happened on patrol, or if it was tougher when Tim wasn’t on it. He had that reassuring smile that never ever seemed to leave his face, and his grayish eyes were… not dull, but not normal, either. Everyone in the Manor was suffering from something or another, all multiplied by the Secret Keeper’s appearance. 

Maybe if Bentley and Asten and Nico could really destroy her, it would help them. Tim wouldn’t have to do all the work, and patrol wouldn’t be so bad, and their minds wouldn’t be open playgrounds for her to thrive in.

Maybe he had it all wrong, when he decided he needed to be the Puppeteer again. That approach worked for Asten, but Bentley had already proved he wasn’t good at keeping up that act around the Wayne’s — one thing happened (an anxiety attack, for example) and it just fell apart again, leaving him exposed and emotional and dumb. Maybe he didn’t need to destroy the Secret Keeper just to prove his worth. He needed to destroy her… both to prove himself worthy, and to help them.

Bentley gazed up at Bruce, blinking a couple of times. Then he looked toward Tim’s door. “Tim, he… he had…”

“I know,” Came Bruce’s reply, and one of his hands landed on Bentley’s shoulder. “You did good.”

Bentley breathed in. “I didn’t do anything good. I cried.”

“But you stayed with him,” Bruce replied, smiling reassuringly, squeezing Bentley’s shoulder. “Sometimes Tim just has to wait them out. Staying counts far more than you think.”

Bentley shook his head lightly, glancing down the hall. “I tried to go get Dick, but he didn’t want me to leave…”

“You did the right thing, Bentley,”

Did he? Did he do the right thing? He was sure not. Even right now, he was doing the wrong thing, holding Bruce up in the hall when he’d very obviously been trying to go into Tim’s room. Bentley moved out of the way, out from under Bruce’s hand like it burned, toward his bedroom door. “I should get ready for school.”

Bruce said something, but Bentley didn’t really hear it. All he could hear were the repetitive chimes of not my dad, not my dad, not my dad, that seemed to play over and over in his head.

Bruce wasn’t his, and he wasn’t Bruce’s.

Bentley’s only real family was in prison for trying to kill him.

He closed his door and silently got ready — showering, putting on his uniform, the works. He needed to catch the Secret Keeper now more than ever. For himself, for Tim, for Bruce, for Dick and Damian and Jason and Cass and Steph and Duke and everyone.

It was suddenly seven-twenty-three, Bentley was trying so hard to tie his tie, and his phone dinged with a text from Asten in the group chat.

I got burners, it said.

Bentley stared at the message for a solid ten seconds before he realized he had no idea what burners were.

Nico’s reply came in an instant.

Where did you get burners??? PLURAL??????

Asten replied with: A good supervillain-hunter never tells his secrets.

Bentley had to look up what a burner was — it turned out, it was a phone that you threw away when you were done that was difficult to trace. Usually used by people committing crimes. So, Nico’s question stood: where had Asten gotten burners? And what was he going to use them for? Tricking the police?

Another text from Asten came: I know how to check if dr Keene is guilty.

Bentley scrunched his face up, grabbing his phone off the bathroom counter and typing: how?

Asten’s reply was: get to school early, we’re stealing his phone.

Bentley blinked to himself as messages came flooding in. Nico sent three separate texts, each with a single word: NO. WE’RE. NOT.

Everyone keeps secrets on their phone! Was Asten’s reply.

Bentley put his phone down on the counter and kept tying his tie. 

He could probably convince Duke to take him to school a little earlier than normal.

Another text came through from Asten.

Bring the computer.

—

It was pretty easy, actually, to get to school early — Duke was very open to taking Bentley early so he could finish some science homework (that didn’t exist) with Asten and Nico.

Lying to him did hurt just a little… especially because Duke seemed so genuinely happy to do it for him. But he needed to, he convinced himself. To help them all.

They arrived to the Academy about thirty minutes early, half past eight, and Bentley met Asten and Nico in the library.

There weren’t many kids in the halls yet, apart from a few older ones who were studying or working before their first class. The whole school seemed quiet and empty. Bentley wasn’t sure where Damian and Duke went when they split off in the lobby, but he assumed it wasn’t much of his business, anyway. Instead, he made for the high-top table with one extra chair buried between bookshelves that Asten’s and Nico were sitting at. They were the only students in the library — the librarian didn’t even seem to be there yet.

“‘Sup, Whittaker,” Asten called as soon as Bentley turned into the aisle of bookshelves. His blue-tipped black hair stuck out like a sore thumb between the shelves, though Bentley was pretty sure it would stick out anywhere you put him. “I heard it’s national steal your teacher’s phone day.”

Nico slapped him in the arm from across the table, looking rather miffed. “Say it louder, the Russians didn’t hear you!”

“Relax, there’s no one in here to hear,” Asten muttered, running a hand through his hair. “Come look. Did you bring the computer?”

The question was directed toward Bentley, who walked up to the table. He pulled out the empty chair and climbed up into it, not bothering to take his backpack off. “Yeah.”

Asten had his black backpack in his lap, and he dug around in it, pulling a ziplock bag out just far enough for Bentley to see what was inside. It was old-looking phones. Like, six of them. Burners, he realized.

“Are those the-“

“Yeah,” Asten cut him off with a nod. “Nico and I are going to go to the Harbor after school. That’s where we’re gonna make the calls so we can throw them in the water after,” He explained softly, shoving the bag back in his backpack. “You should come — I’ll need your voice. It shouldn’t take that long.”

Usually, any statements of you should come would go completely ignored by Bentley. He wasn’t much of a go here go there kind of person, but spending time with his friends  seemed… kind of brilliant. He’d be with them for the plan, out of the house so Bruce could pay attention to his actual kids, and out of the way. At least for a while.

“I’ll ask,” Was his reply. 

“Tell him it’s a… science project or something,” Asten suggested, flicking a hand toward Bentley. “And that we’re going to Nico’s house, not frolicking around Gotham.”

There it was again — the little twisty feeling he got in his gut at the thought of lying to Bruce.   Bruce didn’t deserve to be lied to. But, if he knew what they were doing, there was no way he’d allow it; so Bentley had to lie. There was no other way.

Before Bentley could even think about pulling his phone out, Asten exclaimed: “There he is!”

The trio all turned toward the sliver of library windows they could see from between the shelves, gazing out into the hall in the same direction Asten was. They were just quick enough to catch a glimpse of Dr. Keene, in his blue button up and slacks per usual, heading away from his classroom.

“Come on!” Asten was already out of his chair and shuffling between the bookshelves, zipping his bag up as he crept toward the front of the library.

“We’re gonna get arrested,” Nico muttered, sending a mildly terrified glance to Bentley before they both climbed out of their chairs. Bentley fought the buzzy anxious feeling that surfaced beneath his skin when he realized that, yes, they were seriously on their way to steal Dr. Keene’s phone. God, if Bruce found out about this, Bentley was absolutely done for.

Asten looked back at them with a snicker, his green irises shining with amusement as they stopped near the door of the library. “Stop looking so terrified, you guys. Looking terrified makes you look guilty.”

“We are guilty!” Nico shot back, crossing his arms.

“Say it louder, the Russians didn’t hear you,” Asten mocked with a sly little grin. “Seriously, just play it cool. We’re looking for Dr. Keene for… tutoring or something.”

Nico huffed. “Yeah, because they’ll believe that.”

“Have a little faith, dude. I once convinced a cook I was the Mayor’s nephew and got free food from a batburger for an entire week,” Asten explained, pointing over at Nico. “We’ll be fine. Come on, before he comes back.”

Bentley sent a glance Nico’s way as Asten trailed into the hall. They followed him wordlessly. The empty and silent halls still weirded Bentley out just a bit. He could see all the way down the dim hall, back into the foyer with the staircases. There wasn’t anyone there, right now, but it definitely seemed like something to watch.

The three of them jogged down the empty halls until they made it to Dr. Keene’s classroom door. It was closed, and according to Bentley’s phone, class started in twenty-four minutes.

Asten turned the handle and shoved the door, and much to all of their surprise (and Nico’s terror) it swung open.

“Bentley, I need that computer. Nico, stand at the door and watch for him to come back,” Asten ordered. The classroom, too, looked strange and empty when they filed in. All the desks were vacant, the skeleton in the corner without his signature bowler hat. The blackboard hadn’t been written on yet.

Nico closed the door and stood entirely too close to the little window that was cut into it, staring into the hall like his life depended on it. Asten immediately went for Dr. Keene’s desk in the corner.

Bentley followed along behind him, laying his backpack on their teacher’s desk and unzipping it carefully. Tim’s old laptop was sitting right in the center of all his books, and he gently pulled it out, laying it next to Dr. Keene’s big computer monitor so it was facing Asten.

The Brazilian was digging through drawers and cabinets so quickly Bentley wasn’t sure if he would actually see the phone or not. “Here — can you find the wires I put in here?”

Asten shrugged his backpack off and tossed it lazily in Bentley’s direction. He managed to catch it by a single strap and, with a final glance to Asten, unzipped it.

There wasn’t much in there — a couple spiral notebooks, his red pen, the ziplock of burners and a bundle of several multicolored wires that looked like… phone chargers?

“These?” Bentley questioned, pulling out the wad of purple, black, and white. Asten glanced at him briefly in the midst of all his shuffling. 

“Perfect. Just lay them on the desk,”

Nico made a high-pitched noise from across the room, and both Bentley and Asten glanced over at him. The blonde was scurrying away from the door like he’d seen a ghost.

“Jesse’s coming! Jesse!” He squeaked.

Asten opened his mouth, but only a faint sound came before the classroom door flew open, and Jesse Todryk stepped inside.

His blonde hair was a mess, and his uniform was wrinkled and maybe even faintly stained, if Bentley was seeing right. He didn’t have his dumb earrings in, and he didn’t look near as intimidating as usual.

Everyone stared. No one said a word. Jesse Todryk’s vomit-green irises flicked from one boy to the next, meeting brown, emerald green, and blue. His eyes drifted to Asten’s hands that were buried in Dr. Keene’s desk, and he got a sick look on his face.

“You three are getting so suspended for this,” He said with a twisted sort of giddiness about him, turning to duck back into the hallway.

A voice came, loud and clear, bouncing through the quiet room: “No!”

Bentley hardly realized that it was his.

Jesse turned on his heel. “What was that, Wayne?”

The redhead froze, resisting the urge to shrink with all the eyes that were laser focused on him. He glanced to Asten and Nico, who were staring back blankly, offering no help.

Control the conversation.

“We’re trying to figure out what happened to your sister,” Bentley explained, taking a step forward, toward Jesse, keeping his words laced with a little venom for good measure. “We already have leads that connect her and Dr. Keene to the Secret Keeper, and we were about to be even closer to finding out what happened before you decided you needed to be a little snitch to make yourself feel better.”

Jesse creased his brow, glancing around the classroom before he pulled the door shut with a quiet click. Bentley watched the way his stone expression faltered in the slightest, the shine at the back of his irises spinning into something different. “You’re seriously playing detective? You three?”

“Wow. I know you said he was slow, but this is just ridiculous,” Bentley muttered, crossing his arms over his chest and glancing back at Asten.

Jesse glanced between them, exasperated. Asten had a look on his face like he was trying very hard not to smile.

“Very funny, Wayne,” Jesse spat. However, he didn’t leave the room, nor did he stalk forward to punch Bentley in the face. He just sort of stood there.

“What are you waiting on? For us to invite you into our motley crew? Our merry band? Because it ain’t happening,” Asten hissed from across the room.

Jesse made a few faces, different emotions passing across his features. “The cops are being little pansies about the Secret Keeper. Too afraid to do their jobs,” He muttered, crossing his arms. His expression faltered again, to something like… sadness? “Do you guys seriously believe you can find her?”

Did Bentley actually think they could do it?

“Yes,” Asten answered for him, glaring at Jesse with a vengeance burning in his eyes. “And if you go tattling on us, we’ll get suspended, probably questioned by the cops, and we won’t tell them anything we know. Just so you’ll have to live the rest of your life knowing that you were the reason Mandy was never found.”

Bentley breathed in. Were they playing up the amount of knowledge they had? Oh, definitely. The police probably did know what they knew. And would Jesse telling on them really assure Mandy was never found? Absolutely not. But they were using his feelings for leverage, just like Bentley’s father taught him.

Asten was a natural at this Puppeteer stuff.

Jesse sighed heavily, his expression changing subtly, like he was conflicted. “Mm… fine. Fine, I won’t tell anyone. Just because it wouldn’t hurt to have someone else looking.”

Use the leverage to get what you want.

“And if you ever touch any of us again, we’ll call off the search and keep everything we know to ourselves,” Bentley added. Jesse scowled at him, long and hard, and then groaned.

“Don't push your luck,”

“I’m not the one whose sister is missing,” Bentley shrugged. “I think your luck is the one that shouldn’t be pushed. Do you want us to look for her or not?”

Jesse scowled deeply again. “Fine. You win. But I swear; if anyone hears that I spoke to you three, I’ll knock your teeth out,” He huffed. He made a face like he’d just eaten something gross, opened the door, and disappearing into the hallway without another word. The door clicked behind him.

No one said anything for a solid five seconds. And then:

“Geez, where’s that Bentley been the whole time? I like him!” Asten muttered with a snicker, shaking his head as he continued to dig through the desk drawers. “Please be brutal more often. It’s so refreshing.”

“Should I be offended by that?”  Nico questioned, drifting back toward the door. Asten shrugged.

“If you really want to,”

Bentley said nothing. That Bentley wasn’t so much Bentley as it was pre-programmed Puppeteer. But he guessed, if it worked, it worked. 

“Finally,” Asten chimed as he pulled a small blue device out of the top desk drawer, sliding it closed with a thump. Bentley watched in quiet fascination as he looked through the wires, plugging them to the phone until he found one that went in the charging hole just perfectly. He plugged the other end into Tim’s computer, opened it, and started typing around.

Bentley stepped forward. “What’re you doing?”

“Password reset software. It’s the only way we can get into the thing,” He replied, like it were obvious.

Bentley said nothing. Sometimes, it was uncanny how much Asten reminded him of Tim.

It took only two or three minutes before the phone opened up to the home-screen on command.

“This is so illegal,” Nico muttered from the door, his eyes focused so hard on the hallway Bentley thought they might’ve been starting to water. (Or maybe he was just crying, which was a possibility.) 

“Nothings illegal if you don’t get caught!” Asten replied, grabbing the phone off the desk and moving toward Bentley. “Let’s see what we can find.”

Bentley glanced over at the screen, eyes flicking between all the apps and folders on the home page. Asten’s first instinct was to click on the text messages.

There were several names Bentley didn’t recognize, probably Dr. Keene’s friends and family. Asten scrolled quickly, until he stopped on a name Bentley did recognize. 

Amanda Todryk.

Asten made a face. “You should look away. Just in case.”

Bentley wasn’t sure why he needed to look away, but he did. A few seconds of quiet passed before Asten said: “Okay. You’re good.”

Bentley turned back toward the phone, and the text messages between Dr. Keene and Mandy were displayed on the screen. Asten scrolled a bit, revealing that it was mostly just a repetitive string of tutoring today? From Mandy and yes from Dr. Keene. Those two texts repeated nearly every day, including Sunday, the day Many went missing. There were no messages after that.

Asten left that message thread and scrolled to the bottom, humming when he didn’t recognize any more names.

Bentley did. 

The very last name on the text list. Asten left the app and moved on quickly, so Bentley wasn’t totally sure, but he could’ve swore he saw the name… John Whittaker.

“Look away again. I’m going into his photos,” Asten ordered. Bentley did as he was told (but why did he have to look away every time?) until Asten said it was fine for him to look back. The photos app was closed, and Asten was scrolling through his apps. Twitter. Note Taking Pro. Amazon. Rentals for Royals.

Asten stopped on that one. Bentley wasn’t exactly sure what it was, but it looked rather harmless, really — the symbol was a swirly little crown with a bunch of colors.

“What’s that?” Bentley questioned. Asten clicked on it, and the app began to load.

“You can let people rent out properties from you on here. Like… letting someone else use your house like a hotel,” Asten explained. Bentley scrunched up his nose. There were enough people in Wayne Manor already.

The app opened, revealing a photograph of a beautifully manicured cabin in pine woods that looked like something out of a mystical storybook. There was a title below the picture that read: Pinewood Cabin.

Asten hummed and scrolled down. “Looks like Dr. Keene owns a sick Air B&B in the woods somewhere.”

Bentley watched as Asten tapped on things so quickly he couldn’t even focus on what they were, bringing up something that looked like a very colorful calendar. Each day on the calendar coincided with a color-coded name that was listed off to the side. Bentley guessed that calendar told Dr. Keene who was scheduled to stay.

Sunday was green, and the names Amanda Todryk and Lanse Handal were in green off to the side.

“Oh my God!” Asten started.

“What? What? What?!” Nico shouted across the room with such urgency a passerby might’ve thought Asten was dying. 

“Mandy rented out Dr. Keene’s Air B&B with Lanse Handal!”

Apparently that name meant something. Bentley did recognized it, only a little, but he didn’t know why.

“What? The senior from the Soccer team that went missing?! They probably rented it before he disappeared!”

Went missing. That must’ve been why Bentkey recognized the name — it would’ve been on Asten’s research list.

“I bet they were planning on having a one night-“

“No!”

“-stand.”

“Shut up!” Nico squeaked, glaring daggers across the room at Asten. Well, Nico was a bit too soft for it to be considered daggers — maybe blunt pencils.

“What’s a one night stand?”

Nico and Asten’s eyes both came to rest on Bentley, Nico’s filled with terror, Asten’s with surprise and maybe faint amusement. Bentley glanced between them as they seemed to blink, blankly, offering no explanation whatsoever.

“It… uh…” Asten started, glancing over at Nico, who shook his head with the most serious I’ll kill you look Bentley had ever seen from him. They pair seemed to have an unspoken argument, which lasted for a solid ten seconds before Asten coughed awkwardly.

“You should ask Bruce. And, uh… don’t look it up,” He finalized, stiffly patting Bentley on the shoulder a couple times. “Now, back to this. I think we need to take a trip to the cabin. An undocumented trip.”

Nico scrunched his face up. “Why?”

“Because Mandy was going to stay there on Sunday night. They said she never came home after tutoring, but she wasn’t going home, she was going there with her little boy toy.”

“Asten,” Nico warned, still glaring those blunt pencils. “Please stop. And absolutely not. We don’t even know where it is, and we’re not breaking in.”

“The address is in my hand, dude,” Asten stated, pulling his own phone out and taking a picture of Dr. Keene’s rental property’s information. “Cabins in the woods are murder central. We know that from, like, every horror book and movie ever. We have to go. Just to make sure.”

“To murder central,” Nico sighed.

“Yes, to murder central,”

Bentley breathed in deep. First, they stole a teachers phone, and now they were going to break into his rental property? He wasn’t sure he liked where this whole plan was going.

But, he guessed, if it proved or denied Dr. Keene’s innocence for sure, that’s what they needed to do.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: angst

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

jaybird :,( I’m breaking my own heart over here

part twenty-three

❝ BOILING ❞

FRIDAY — AUGUST 14 — 9:17AM

TIM WAS SICK.

Like, really sick.

He was the first of the downed three to wake, four hours after he collapsed, just to catapult directly into another hour-thirty-three minute anxiety attack that no amount of consoling could stop. Bentley simply sat with Dick while Bruce tried everything in the book to help him. Jason’s periodic screaming only seemed to make it worse and worse until Alfred decided it would be best to give Tim some sedatives.

When he woke up three hours after that, he threw up all over Bruce.

Now, on Friday morning, Tim had been bedridden and sporting a fever over one-hundred for nearly three days. Dick, Bruce, and Alfred had been going in and out of the cave, taking turns, but never leaving the trio in the medbay without a caretaker.

Jason, who was hooked up to a myriad of drips and machines, was still fighting like hell. He had been for the entire three days — screaming, thrashing, throwing himself around so violently the hospital bed had to be moved back to it's original spot a couple of times. The noise didn’t seem to bother Tim or Damian, who were both unresponsive and varying degrees of out of it. Damian was more or less catatonic, completely unresponsive to outside sound or touch, while Tim was… sort of delirious. The Secret Keeper hadn’t seemed to take hold of him, at least not for very long, but an absolutely raging fever had. Dick already had to talk him out of trying to patrol as Robin. Not Red Robin, but Robin, Batman’s sidekick, and the conversation ended with tears on Tim’s part. But at least he could wake up, even if he was just living in a fever-dream.

Bentley, for the past three days, had just sort of been… floating around. Bruce and Cass had to clear the Manor three more times before he as much as thought about going upstairs. And even then, he refused to be alone when he went. He’d slept with Dick the first night back upstairs, and Duke the second. Most of his time was spent in the cave, since there was always guaranteed to be someone down there. He hadn’t as much as checked his phone since this all started — which probably meant Asten and Nico thought he was dead. Not that he cared enough to go find the device anyways.

Instead, he abandoned Duke’s room on Friday morning and went down to the cave instead, where he knew he’d find Dick. Just last night, he and Alfred had manhandled Bruce into getting some rest, and the Butler was on babysitting duty to make sure he actually did. As far as Bentley could assume, Dick was the only (conscious) one that was down there.

As soon as he started down the stairs that led to the cave in Tim’s old Wonder Woman pajamas, he could hear Jason screaming. A sound he’d become accustomed to, as twisted as that sounded. 

It was different this time, though. As opposed to the undistinguishable wails that had been erupting out of him for three days straight, now, there were words. Screamed with such a rage, a desperation, a terror that Bentley very nearly hauled himself straight back up the stairs at the sound of it.

“Get away! Get away! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!” 

There was the clacking of the bed again, that signaled that he was thrashing. 

And then a second voice came, laced with something thick, like they were speaking through molasses: “It’s okay, Little Wing. You’re in the cave. You’re okay.”

“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

Bentley’s socked feet padded onto the hard floor of the cave, and he peered inside, just far enough to see Dick close at Jason’s bedside in the medbay.

Jason was trying his hardest to wrench himself out of the leather straps, throwing himself around, eyes still closed. The drips and tubes that were attached to him kept getting carefully moved by Dick when he would get them tangled or  almost knock them over. Based on what Bentley could see, the thrashing wasn’t as violent as it had been — he was probably wearing himself out.

“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you…”

“I’m right here, Jay. You’re okay,”

Tim and Damian were both just… laying there. Damian, stiff as a board, not doing anything but breathing. Tim shifted around to get more comfortable every so often. There was a bowl of water and a rag on his bedside table, as well as a strategically placed red bucket in the floor that looked like where he was supposed to aim if he puked again. 

Bentley wasn’t sure how long Jason had been screaming empty threats across the cave, but he assumed he was arriving at the tail end of it. Because just as quickly as Jason had thrashed and screamed, now, he was starting to cry.

Bentley had never seen Jason Todd cry.

He just stood, watching in silence as the thrashing died down and Jason futilely tried to tug his limbs free from the restraints, trying his hardest to curl into himself even though he couldn’t. “B! Batman! Batman!” He sobbed.

Bentley took a deep breath at the same time Dick did. The sound of his shouting changed again, this one more like a child in terror. 

Dick dared to reach forward and brush Jason’s white streak away from his face. “Hey, hey, hey, Jaybird, you’re okay-“

“Batman! Bat- Bat- Bruce! Bruce!”

Bentley inched farther into the room. What was Jason seeing? What was he seeing that scared him so much he was screaming for Bruce?

“B! Bruce! Bruce!” He kept on and on like a broken record, moving his head from side to side, expression heavy with something like hopelessness. He seemed to be losing his energy, his words becoming slurred and quieter, his movements slowing. “Bruce! Bruce… please… Dad…”

Dick kept on brushing Jason’s hair back, even though Bentley could nearly see how tense he was becoming. “You’re not alone, Jason.”

“I don’t want to die… Dad… I don’t want to die…”

Bentley’s heart sank into his toes. Was this how Jason died when he was just a teenager? Screaming for Bruce by name? Screaming for his dad?

Was the Secret Keeper making him relive his death?

“Dad!” The last shout before Jason fell limp was loud, desperate, nearly inhuman. Like a war cry at the end of a battle he knew he was losing.

The loud scream jostled Tim out of his not-so-peaceful slumber, which he announced his exit from with a loud groan: “M’ gonna hurl.”

Bentley decided that he should probably stop just standing there and make himself useful. So he pitter-pattered into the medbay as quickly as he could, fetching the red barf bucket off the floor (ew.) and bringing it up to the edge of the bed. Tim promptly retched into it, and Bentley busied himself by glancing back at Dick, praying Tim wouldn’t throw up on his hands.

Dick’s chair was empty.

Which was fine. He couldn’t have gone far, all Bentley had done was grab a barf bucket off the floor. Surely he’d be back soon.

Bentley looked back at Tim when he heard him flop back down on the bed with another groan. At least he seemed… here, Bentley guessed. 

“Are you okay?” He asked. Stupid question, considering that Tim, who already didn’t eat enough, had just barfed his organs out into a bucket that Bentley was just standing there holding. He scrunched his face up at the realization and put it back on the floor. Tim’s heart monitor was beeping quickly, but not too fast, he guessed. The temperature gauge screen off to the side read 104.8.

Tim’s red, icy eyes landed on Bentley, and sweat gleamed on his skin as he turned his head toward him. His black hair was hanging down in his eyes, but he didn’t seem to care. He looked at him with a strange blankness. “Of course I’m okay, kid. I’m Robin, I have to be okay.”

Oh. So this was how it was going to go. Maybe Tim wasn’t as here as Bentley thought.

Tim’s eyes widened for a split second. “I shouldn’t have said that out loud.”

Bentley blinked. Where was Dick when he needed him? A quick glance back revealed that his chair was still vacant.

Bentley startled when Tim brought his hands up, whacking himself in the face. “B’s gonna kill me for telling you that!”

“Uh… I… you’re… Red Robin, Tim. Not Robin,”

Tim uncovered his eyes, and they narrowed into slits as he glared coldly at Bentley. “I am Robin.” He said, like he hadn’t just hit himself for saying that three seconds ago.

Okay, don’t argue with someone who’s delirious, Bentley reminded himself. “I… I know you’re Robin. It’s okay. Bruce told me.”

Tim scoured Bentley’s face for a solid ten seconds with his eyes, but then seemed satisfied with that answer, turning over to shove his face in his pillow. “I feel like death.”

“Yeah… your fevers really high,” Bentley replied, glancing at the numbers on the screen. 

“I have to go to school. I have a seminar,” Said Tim Drake, who graduated, like, two years ago.

“You’re.. really sick. I think you should stay home,” Bentley suggested.

“You’re kicking me off of patrol?!” Okay, so we’re back to being Robin. “I can patrol with a fever, I’ve done it plenty!”

Bentley glanced around, desperately wishing Dick would come back from wherever he was. “You should sleep, Tim.”

“I can’t sleep,” He murmured into the pillow. “Dying instead.”

Tim was very… dramatic… when he was delirious.

Bentley sighed deeply. “You’re just sick. Not dying.”

“I am dying, I have no spleen,” He murmured. Bentley wasn’t even sure what a spleen was, nor how it contributed to him dying. 

“You’re not dying,” He replied. “Bruce and Alfred are taking good care of you.”

Tim groaned again, and after a few minutes of quiet, moved around and then went still, his eyes fluttering closed. Bentley sighed. At least he hadn’t had to physically put Tim back in the bed like Dick had.

Bruce had said the sickness was caused by the extreme stress and anxiety Tim was in, and that it had happened once before, when Tim was Robin. Bentley hadn’t known that stress and anxiety could make someone sick. But he guessed it made sense, since he used to throw up sometimes when his dad would scare him really bad.

With a soft sigh, he pulled the blankets back up over Tim’s shivering frame, sending a glance behind him to Jason. He was just laying there, limp. His heart monitor kept speeding up and slowing down ever so slightly, like he was dreaming. Damian still hadn’t moved.

And someone was crying.

Bentley whirled around and looked down at Tim, whose eyes were still closed and features were still peaceful. It wasn’t coming from the medbay, it was outside of the medbay, somewhere else in the cave.

Bentley pushed himself forward slowly, pausing when he came to the medbay door to scan the rest of the cave. 

Dick was at the Batcomputer, but the screen wasn’t on. He was just kind of standing there, one hand firmly planted on the desk to support his weight, the other hand clasped over his eyes.

He was the one crying.

The Secret Keeper really knew how to tear a family apart, didn’t she?

Bentley moved forward, out of the medbay, but Dick didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t seem to notice Bentley’s presence in the slightest until the child plastered himself against his back, hugging tightly around his waist with no reproach.

And Dick lost it.

He sobbed and choked and gasped for air until he couldn’t as much as stand anymore, and he had to crouch down to avoid falling over. Bentley moved, then, from his back to his front, synching his arms around his neck with a grip he didn’t even think Batman could break. And they stayed like that for at least ten minutes before Dick had the willpower to hug him back, shoving his face into the shoulder of Tim’s old Wonder Woman pajamas and letting out a lifetime of tears there. Bentley didn’t mind, although it was getting increasingly difficult for him to fight away the burn behind his own eyes. He just did what he knew best, what always helped him — he moved his fingers through the black waves on the back of Dick’s head.

“I hate this,” Dick admitted quietly. “I can’t handle it, Babybird.”

Bentley was so preoccupied that he didn’t even notice that the hopelessness he felt only a few days prior was slowly bubbling into rage.

—

“-herself on every point exactly as she might have foreseen. She wrote cheerfully, seemed surrounded with comforts, and mentioned nothing which she could not praise. The house, furniture, neighborhood, and roads, were all to her taste, and Lady Catherine's behavior was most friendly and ob… obli… oblig-“

“Obliging,” Alfred corrected softly.

“Obliging,” Bentley repeated, sending a glance up to Jason, like his unconscious form would mind that Bentley messed up the words to his favorite book.

Dick had been officially banned from the cave for a while after Alfred found he and Bentley in a heap on the floor. Now, the oldest Wayne son was upstairs with Bruce, who was probably doing a way better job at comforting him than Bentley ever could.

In order to not be useless, Bentley had taken it upon himself to fill the quiet in the medbay that Dick had left in his absence. The solution — read Jason’s favorite book to him (and everyone else, because they didn’t really have a choice.)

Pride and Prejudice was a weird book. Bentley really wasn’t sure why Jason liked it so much — he’d been reading for about an hour and understood a solid none. Everyone talked weird (including the narrator) and there was an abundance of big and strange words that Bentley had to struggle through until Alfred realized what he was trying to say.

Jason and Damian hadn’t moved since Dick had left. Damian hadn’t moved at all, actually, since he stopped curling his fists a few days prior. Jason seemed to have tired himself out, because he, too, had fallen unresponsive, covered with a thick layer of sweat. His heart rate spiked every now and then, but he didn’t move or make sounds like he had been.

Tim had thrown up twice more and was now sporting a fever of a hundred and five, which seemed concerning, but Alfred had it handled (or was playing it very cool). Tim had gone from kind of funny and delirious to terrifyingly bedridden and unable to hold any kind of conversation. He, too, was pouring sweat from his entire body. It seemed like he was trying hard to fight off the sickness — and Bentley wasn’t sure if he was winning or not.

“Are they going to be okay?” Were the next words that came out of Bentley’s mouth, definitely not from the pages of Jason’s old book.

Alfred looked up from what he was doing on the other end of the room. He seemed to be preparing a new drip for someone. “All in due time, my boy.”

Bentley’s eyes traveled across the trio of beds he was sitting between, bouncing from one incapacitated Wayne’s face to the next. “And Tim?”

Alfred’s gray irises followed Bentley’s gaze to Tim’s fever-flushed face. “Master Tim is as resilient as they come; they will all be on the road to recovery before you know it.”

Bentley said nothing, just looked down at the pages of the book in his hand. 

After a few moments of silence, a pair of footsteps from the other end of the cave caught Bentley’s attention. He looked up, at the door, and Bruce was standing in it.

“Hey there, chum,” He said, his dull gray eyes flicking between the trio of beds, then drifting to the book in Bentley’s hands. “Hosting a book club?”

Bentley shrugged. “Well, they can't really say no.”

They fell into a stiff silence that was only broken when Bruce beckoned Bentley with his hand. “C’mere. I want to get your opinion on something.” 

Bentley glanced back at Jason, laying Pride and Prejudice on the bedside table next to him. Then he followed Bruce out of the room.

He was escorted across the cave into a room he’d never been in before. It seemed to hold all of the vigilantes' extra suits and weapons. The most notable of which were Dick, Jason, Tim, and Damian’s old Robin suits displayed in glass cases, (maybe not the original things, since Jason had been killed in his, and there’s no good way to get bomb out of a suit.) as well as a Batman suit that looked the slightest bit different from Bruce’s. Maybe from when Dick was Batman?

Bruce, instead of heading for those, strolled over to a large table with a myriad of folded suits on top, including his and Damian’s current suits, and a few ones Bentley didn’t recognize. The child watched in silence as Bruce grabbed a neatly folded black suit from the surface. He carefully unfolded it and held it up, and Bentley might’ve been confused if it weren’t for the large, unmistakable R on the shoulder.

It was a new Robin suit. Instead of bright primary colors, the base suit was black and dark gray, with minimal, tastefully-done blood-red detailing. The cape was black on the outside, but the classic Robin yellow on the inside. 

“I’ve been working on something that better suits Damian, but I’m stumped on the cape. I have several more—“ Bentley watched as Bruce pulled out a solid yellow cape (like Dick and Jason’s old ones.) from one of the desk drawers, along with a black one with red on the inside. “— which do you think?”

Bentley glanced between the trio of capes. He wasn’t exactly sure what was going on — maybe Bruce was trying to distract him? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t really mind, either. He had been reading Pride and Prejudice for way too long anyways.

Bentley hummed lightly. Damian would probably like a black one, just because they were discreet and not as easily noticed. And the nod to the previous Robins seemed like something he would appreciate.

Bentley pointed subtly at the black and yellow one. “I think that one.”

Not that he knew Damian that well anymore.

Bruce nodded, folding everything back up and setting it down neatly. For a few moments, they just stood in silence, neither speaking, neither moving to leave. 

“Bentley,” Bruce started, eyes trailing across the table. “I have a question to ask. If you don’t have an answer for me, that’s okay… you don’t have to.”

Bentley breathed in deep, fiddling with the hem of one of his sleeves. “Okay…”

“Your father… has requested to see you,” Bruce said slowly, with a soft sigh and a wipe to his brow. He looked up at Bentley, and his blue-gray eyes stayed trained on the child, calculating.

It suddenly got very, very hot in the cave.

Bentley’s dad wanted to see him? To talk to him? To take him back? Tim and Damian already didn’t want him there, had they told Bruce that? Would Bruce really just give him back? Was it even legal for his dad to see him after he tried to kill him?!

Bentley shook his head so quickly he got kind of dizzy. “No. No, please, Bruce, please don’t make me…” 

Bruce was reaching for him. “Bentley-“

Bentley flinched away from his hands. “Please. Please, please, please, don’t make me. I don’t want him to take me away, I-I want to stay with you, Bruce, please-“

“Bentley, Bentley, hey-” The child flinched when Bruce’s hand landed on the side of his head. “-you don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything.”

Bentley sniffled. When had he started crying? He was a wreck. An absolute wreck. How was he going to destroy the Secret Keeper when he was constantly one statement, one memory, one thought away from breaking down?

“I wanna stay with you…” He trailed off, wiping at his eyes. Bruce ran a hand over Bentley’s head with a look somewhat reminiscent of Dick. “Please don’t get rid of me, Bruce, I’ll be better. I promise-“

“Hey, hey,” He said softly, bending down just far enough to pick Bentley up off the floor. The child didn’t argue, merely slinking his arms up and around Bruce’s neck in return. “I would never, ever get rid of you, Bentley. Never.”

Bentley clung ever-tighter to him, batting away the tears in his eyes and resting his head on his shoulder.

Bruce rested a hand on the back of Bentley’s head. “I love you, chum.”

Bentley’s eyes went wide, and he was sure his breathing stopped. The only person that’d ever said that to him was Dick.

Bentley cried.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod @skylathescholar

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

yall are gonna hate me in a few chapters

part twenty-four

❝ BREAKOUT ❞

SUNDAY — AUGUST 16 — 8:58PM

BY SUNDAY NIGHT, IT WAS SAFE TO SAY THAT BENTLEY WAS JUST A LITTLE, ITTY-BITTY, TEENY-WEENY BIT PISSED.

Five days. Five whole days and still, Tim, Damian, and Jason were nothing more than human-shaped lumps of misery in the cave. 

Dick, a conscious human-shaped lump of misery, was now probably the least Dick Grayson-ish Bentley had ever seen him. He seemed to float between the Manor and the cave on autopilot, his ocean blue eyes more of a murky, stagnant lake. Dick Grayson, the silence-filling extraordinaire, had been talking less and less until it tapered off to nothing. Bentley hadn’t heard him say a word since Friday morning in the cave. 

I hate this. I can't handle it anymore, Babybird.

Those were the last words Dick Grayson said before he fell into a state Steph softly described as nonverbal.

She said it was common, especially with Dick, to go silent when he was overwhelmed. It had happened  on several occasions before — occasions she seemed to be purposefully vague about. And now it was happening to him again. The very last glimmer of hope in the Manor died when Dick Grayson became nothing more than blank stares and sign language.

Jason, on Saturday morning, ramped his screaming and thrashing back up to a one hundred, and even busted one of the leather straps on his arms. He kept rotating through the same various shouts: I’ll kill you. Get away from me. B. Batman. Bruce. Dad. I don’t want to die. Repeat. 

Bentley had spent most of the time when Jason wasn’t screaming struggling through the pages of Pride and Prejudice, hoping that maybe some distant part of his mind could hear the familiar words. Bentley couldn’t imagine writhing under the weight of his own mind, being stuck in his head, unable to escape like a Robin in a cage. Like Jason was. 

Damian still hadn’t moved an inch, besides his hands that would twitch and curl every now and then. Given what little Bentley knew about his past (and the abundance of other things he could’ve been seeing), he assumed twitching was a pretty minimal response. Or maybe the only response Damian allowed himself to have.

Bentley hadn’t heard much about the League of Assassins, but Damian had mentioned before that failure brought punishment. And it hurt Bentley’s heart just a little to see that his endless training to have no reaction to physical or mental pain seemed to stem all the way into his unconsciousness.

On Saturday night, Bentley noticed the palm of Damian’s right hand bleeding from the force of his fingernails against his skin. His hands were moving in a familiar manner that Bentley only recognized then — that Damian was clutching onto a sword that didn’t exist. At that time, Bentley was the only one in the cave, and his first instinct to make Damian stop hurting himself was to put his own hand in the way.

Now, he had three Wonder Woman bandaids on the back of his hand where Damian’s nails had dug in.

Tim had become a level of bedridden Bentley didn’t even know existed — a type of bedridden where he became less Tim and more bed. He was only able to keep himself conscious for small spurts at a time, usually to take medicine or throw up or drink what little water Bruce could get into him. But, on the bright side, his fever had dropped to a hundred and two. Small mercies.

Bentley was at least glad he wasn’t being tormented by the Secret Keeper. But even then, he had only been working so hard because of the people she killed, which, in turn, made it all her fault, actually.

The Wayne family was in a state of disarray Bentley didn’t even know was possible. Patrol had been dropped in favor of caring for the ones in the medbay. School was nothing but a fleeting memory — it hadn’t been mentioned since Tuesday. Everyone was in the Manor but it felt like no one at all, like they were all trapped in some dark tunnel they would never see the end of. Like John Whittaker’s wish that the Wayne Dynasty would crumble was coming to fruition right before their eyes.

Who gave the Secret Keeper the right to do that to them? Who gave her the authority to destroy Bentley’s family from the inside out? And for what? For fun? Entertainment?

Bentley was pissed about it.

Wholeheartedly, entirely, absolutely pissed.

It was after dinner on Sunday night, and he was cooped up in the den with Dick, Duke, Steph, and Cass, watching some random Disney movie on a low volume. No one was really watching. Their eyes may have been on the screen, but he could practically see their minds wandering behind them. He didn’t blame them, his mind was wandering, too. Mostly concerning the fact that he felt like he wanted to, like, burn down a house or something.

Bentley had never been one for anger before. He was always too afraid of his father to be mad, too scared, too upset. He never had anything to fight for like he did now — like the Wayne’s. He never had anything to protect, nothing to be so utterly hell-bent on keeping in one piece. He’d been feeling it for a while, that little inkling that made him want to commit arson every time something happened to one of them. 

Instead of burning down someone’s house, he wanted to end the Secret Keeper.

Which was exactly why, for the first time in five days, he texted Asten and Nico back.

The group-chat had basically imploded on itself in Bentley’s absence. He had well over two-hundred texts in that group alone, not counting the questioning from both Asten and Nico individually. Was he sick? Was he alive? Why weren’t Damian or Duke at school? Had he been murdered? Was he missing? Should they call the cops?

I’m ready to go to the cabin was the vague and pretty random text they got from Bentley at nine on Sunday night.

Asten was quick to reply: JESUS dude. I thought you were DEAD dead. 

OMG YOURE ALIVE!!!!! was the text he got from Nico.

Secret Keeper again, he sent. And then, in a separate message: I’m ready to destroy her now.

Hell yeah! Was Asten’s next text. I’m so down. Can you both get out of your houses tonight? Preferably without anyone noticing? And stay out of them for a few days?

Stay out of the house for a few days? He hadn’t really thought about that, though he guessed it made sense — a secret plan to take out a supervillain was likely to take a while. But the Wayne’s couldn’t have a clue what was going on; they’d end it. Coming and going from the Manor would be too risky. So… that meant Bentley would probably have to do what he’d failed so miserably at the first time.

Run away. Again.

Which he pretended he didn’t feel bad about. As soon as he was out of the Manor, he’d have to commit — no turning back, no running home until the Secret Keeper was down. It was the only way to do it without anyone finding out. 

But, if he went missing now… the Wayne’s would think the Secret Keeper got him, wouldn’t they?

Bentley glanced down at his legs. Dick’s head was laying there, and though his breathing was soft and his eyes were closed, Bentley knew he wasn’t asleep. The child had been playing with his hair for a while now — it seemed to be the only thing that could take the tension out of his older brother’s shoulders anymore.

Was destroying the Secret Keeper really worth the pain it might cause them? Thinking that she got him? That he might be dead? Was it worth the people that cared about him most thinking that he was killed?

What if he actually didn’t come home? 

He ended up having to shove that train of thought deep down into his Puppeteer door and locked it away. If he thought about it too much, he’d feel guilty, and wouldn’t be able to go on with the plan like he said he would.

I can make it happen, he sent to the group, careful to keep one hand on Dick’s head so he didn’t get suspicious.

My parents are going to die, Nico said.

Asten replied: We can’t bring our phones — they can be tracked. You’ll have to delete this text thread before you leave. Nico, bring your camera.

Oh, God. They were really doing this, weren’t they? Bentley glanced up at the other Wayne’s in the den, faces illuminated by the firelight, like they could read his mind. None of them seemed to be.

Every police officer in Gotham is going to look for us, my parents will make sure of that, Nico texted. Bentley cringed at the thought. At least most of his Vigilante family wouldn’t be patrolling, right?

Bentley typed a quick: You don’t have to come.

I'm coming, was Nico’s reply.

Asten finalized: We’ll meet at Nico’s house at midnight. No phones. Bring what you think you’ll need, I’ll handle the rest. Don’t say a word. Vamos matar essa vadia.

Bentley glanced around him, at Steph on his right and Dick on his lap, staring blankly at the television. This was going to be worth it. It had to.

“Dick?” He whispered, leaning forward the slightest bit, just far enough to catch the older boy’s eyes when they flicked open. He didn’t speak, but he lifted his hands subtly, moving them in carefully trained motions.

Yes?

Bentley breathed in and out. “I’m going to go back downstairs,” He whispered. “I just didn’t want to shove you around if you were sleeping.”

Dick replied with a nod, sitting up just far enough for Bentley to maneuver out from under him. The child shuffled off the couch and stood, glancing back at Dick Grayson’s ocean-but-more-like-a-lake blue eyes.

There was… there might’ve been… an actual chance he would never come home.

He moved forward, gently wrapping his arms around Dick’s neck. “I love you.”

Dick hugged him back tight, maybe not as enthusiastically as normal, but with just as much love.

Bentley had to keep himself moving, or he’d think about the possibility of death and psyche himself out. So he reluctantly peeled himself away from Dick and fought the urge to give everybody hugs. (He knew that would be too suspicious, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to.)

With a breath in, he left the den and floated down to the cave.

Bruce and Alfred were both down there. The latter was still working at the various testing machines, while the former was between Tim and Jason’s hospital beds, still looking torn about what spot in the room he took. There was an empty chair between Jason and Damian’s beds that Bentley had seen Bruce in not too long ago. Jason wasn’t screaming, but he was wiggling around quite a bit. The other two were still.

The Bat knew he was in the cave before Bentley even knew he knew. 

“Bentley,” Bruce greeted lowly, turning from the hospital beds toward the entrance of the cave, where the child was just standing. Nowadays, his gray eyes seemed to just get more dull. “Are you guys done watching movies?”

Bentley shrugged, padding into the medbay, fiddling with the band-aids on his hand from where Damian’s grip had made him bleed. Tim’s Wonder Woman pajamas had been replaced with some old sailboat ones of Jason’s. “Just coming to check on them.”

Bruce’s eyes drifted back to the trio of beds, and he sighed softly. “No changes.”

Bentley glanced at each of them, then back at Bruce, who leaned forward and pinched the bridge of his nose. Body language that indicated stress, Bentley noted. 

He moved forward slowly, coming to a stop next to Bruce’s chair, glancing at Tim and Jason. “Are you okay?”

The question was aimed at Bruce, who glanced at Bentley at the same time he looked at him.

“Of course,” Was Bruce’s reply, and his hand drifted up, landing on Bentley’s back. 

Bentley shook his head. “You don’t have to be.”

If there was anything Bentley had learned since he moved in with the Wayne’s, it was that he didn’t need to keep everything to himself. That he could cry and stuff like his father never let him. So why, when it came back to the Wayne’s, did they seem to do exactly the opposite? Hold it in until they broke, like Tim, like Damian, like Dick?

Bruce graced him with a vague semblance of a smile that left as quickly as it came. “You’re one smart boy, you know that?”

Bentley said nothing. In all of his (limited) days, he had never ever been called smart. Stupid, dumb, worthless, and everything in between, but never smart.

“And I think…” Bruce’s eyes trailed over to Tim, Damian, and Jason. “That I might be cold.”

Bentley blinked, and then hauled himself into the man’s embrace without question.

Bruce’s arms closed around him, protecting him from probably anything in the entire world, and Bentley sighed lightly. “I think everyone’s kinda cold.”

“I think you’re right,” Bruce replied, glancing between his three unconscious sons.

The family was so cold they might just turn to ice if one more bad thing happened. Like Bentley seemingly going missing.

Was his escape plan really worth it?

—

When he woke up in Bruce’s arms, it was silent.

He didn’t remember falling asleep there, but it wasn’t a surprise, really. He had quite a bad habit of falling asleep when people held him.

Nothing was different from when he fell asleep — the trio was still unconscious, Alfred was still testing, and Bruce was still dull and cold. The only thing that looked the slightest bit different was the glow from the Batcomputer that hadn’t been on before. Barbara must’ve come to work on cases for a while, though she wasn’t there now.

“Hey, bud,” Bruce whispered, and Bentley felt his hand moving subtly on the back of his head. “You can sleep — I’ve got you.”

For a moment, Bentley almost just obeyed. It was tempting. But he knew that if he didn’t make himself get up and go, he wouldn’t, and he couldn’t leave Asten and Nico hanging.

So, instead, he fished his phone out of his pants pocket and checked the time. 11:14pm. Asten wanted them to meet at midnight.

Bentley rubbed his eyes and glanced up at Bruce, blinking a few times, then wiggling out of his arms. “I’ll be right back. I’m gonna go check on Dick.”

Bruce rubbed his back as he stood. “Okay. Text me if you decide not to come back down.”

Bentley’s words seemed to taste funny when he lied, and the sour on his tongue only got worse when Bruce replied with no suspicion. With trust — he believed him.

The child pushed himself across the Batcave, fighting away the questions of was it worth it the whole way. 

Well, until he stopped at the Batcomputer.

The screen was on with two pictures on it — pictures of metahuman villains from recent patrols. The Secret Keeper was one of them, staring into Bentley’s soul with her amber eyes and stitched grin. It simply said The Secret Keeper below her picture.

There was a picture of another girl with black hair and what looked to be purple eyes next to her. Beneath her photo it said The Void. Bentley remembered watching the patrol where they fought her a few weeks ago, before everything got really bad. She could make portals and send whatever she wanted wherever she wanted. (Then came the debacle of getting Duke home from Austrailia — Bentley would never forget that.)

He quietly wondered why they were both up on the screen. 

And then the screen went off.

Bentley whipped around, meeting the tired green eyes of Barbara rolling out from another room in the cave. “I think you’ve seen quite enough of her, squirt.”

He said nothing, but glanced back at the blank screen. “Sorry.”

Barbara rolled past him in her wheelchair. “No sweat.”

Bentley continued upstairs without another word, carrying himself, not to the den where he told Bruce he was going, but up to his room instead. Asten said for him to bring what he thought he’d need. What did he need for chasing down a supervillain?

Well, first things first — he needed to not be wearing pajamas. He closed and locked his door up tightly, changing into jeans, a hoodie, and a jacket. His phone said it was in the fifties outside, which definitely wouldn’t be super fun, but would probably be bearable.  

Asten’s rule was that he had to delete the text thread and leave his phone behind. So he did so, and left his phone on his bed, out in the open. 

He didn’t really need anything, did he? There wasn’t anything for him to bring — all he had were clothes and school supplies and toys. Maybe some of Batman’s gadgets would be useful, but stealing from the cave when he was trying to be incognito was a hard pass.

Really, all that was left would be to make it out of the Manor.

He couldn’t go out the window again. He’d have to make a new shoelace rope, and he had to make the Wayne’s think he was missing, not that he’d run away. So, there was only one obvious choice left. With everyone distracted and in varying states of consciousness, not being their typical superhero detective selves, Bentley would go out the front door.

It wasn’t the best for someone who was trying to sneak out undetected, but it would have to do. Alfred and Bruce were in the cave with Jason, Tim, and Damian, and the rest were in the den distracted by a movie. If he could be deathly quiet, he could do it.

So, with that settled, Bentley opened his bedroom door again. The hallway felt stuffier this time. Was risking his life worth it?

Breaking the Secret Keeper’s hold on his family? Stopping the downward spiral?

Yes. It was worth it.

That was the thought process that kept Bentley padding down the hall in his gross red tennis shoes from his father. He’d been sure to thoroughly hide his pajamas in hopes they would think he was really missing. He’d taken the most inconspicuous clothes from his wardrobe, in case they checked it for empty spaces. It ended up being an old black jacket of Dick’s and a blue hoodie that he was pretty sure had been Tim’s.

It was worth it for them.

He tip-toed down the staircase silently, skipping the creaky sixth and twelfth steps on purpose, before he came to rest on the floor of the entryway.

He could hear the movie playing in the den, but everything else was still. Silent.

Nico’s house was pretty much a straight shot from the Manor — they saw it every day on the way to and from school. If he went straight, he’d make it.

He inched himself toward the front door. The giant wooden mass was more than a little daunting right now, like it would break and tell everyone what he was planning.

It was worth it to save them.

His hand was suddenly on the lock, twisting it until it clicked.

He had to save his family.

He twisted the door handle until the cool August breeze flooded inside, chilling him to the bone.

Bentley closed the door, and he ran. Just like he did the first time. Through the courtyard, down the driveway, shoving himself through the bars of the main gate just like he did last year.

Bentley didn’t know it then, but the moment he stepped foot outside of Wayne Manor marked the beginning of what would become the most traumatic few days of his entire life.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

yall i am so sorry, i’ve been working on writing other things. updates will probably be more spread out now, but bentley’s back baby!

part seventeen

❝ REVELATION ❞

SUNDAY — AUGUST 9 — 3:17AM

“DON’T WORRY, BABYBIRD. I WON’T TELL YOUR SECRETS,”

Bentley woke up, standing in the foyer of Nico Rockefeller’s house. Which was strange, considering he knew for a fact that he’d fallen asleep in his own room, with Nico and Asten right next to him.

He’d never actually been in the Rockefellers’ house, but somehow, some part of him knew this was it. It looked similar to the Manor, actually. The whole foyer was wrapped in beautiful mahogany wainscoting, with dual staircases leading up to the second floor, and hallways positioned around that led to other parts of the house. A pair of giant double doors sat right in the middle of the stairs, leading to a seemingly important room. 

Bentley blinked several times. Why was he in Nico’s house? And where had his friends gone?

He stepped forward just a little, toward the huge wooden doors. Intricate and detailed pictures of Greek gods had been carved into them. Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire was in the center of the left door, his arms outstretched. The entire door was decorated with engravings of terrifying flames, of cities falling into ruins under his immense power. On the right door, Poseidon, Greek god of water, and Aether, Greek god of air, were both facing him, their arms outstretched like they were trying to reach out and bring him home. The fire trailed onto their door, too, but lessened as it neared them, replaced my waves and swirls that signified water and wind. Off to the side hovered Hermes, the messenger of the gods, alone with his hands bound in shackles. Bentley lifted his right hand and delicately brushed his fingertips over the waves made by Poseidon.

“Yeah, I’ll find it. When did you say you’d be home?”

Bentley flinched when Nico’s voice sounded from somewhere above him. He backed away from the doors like he was committing a crime, glancing around, then up at the staircases. Nico was descending the left one with his phone pressed tightly to his ear. Bentley just stood there awkwardly in the center of the foyer, fiddling with the hem of his jacket sleeve as he waited for Nico to notice him.

Only… he didn’t. Not when he came down the stairs, not when he turned toward the doors, not when he walked so closely past Bentley that he felt the air gust from his movement. It was like he was a ghost. 

“Nico?” He tried, but the boy didn’t seem to hear him.

“Okay. Love you, too. Bye,” He finalized, ending the phone call and sliding the device in his pocket as she shoved the large doors open. On the other side stood an office, more extravagant than any office Bentley had ever seen. There was a massive, solid glass desk in the middle of the room, completely clear so that Bentley could see what was in the drawers. It was sitting atop a rug that looked old, almost tribal, with geometric shapes and midwestern colors. The color of the walls was hidden by bookshelves that covered every inch of available space. There were no windows, the whole room illuminated by a large, beaded light fixture instead. All the books and trinkets that lined the shelves looked old, priceless.

Nico walked in like he’d done it a million times, striding to the other side of the clear desk and pulling out the matching clear chair that sat with it. He steadied it against the bookshelves and climbed on top of it, thumbing through the spines of books like he was searching for a very specific one.

Nico looked… the exact same as he had at Bentley’s house. He was even wearing the same gray hoodie and sweats. What was going on?

Bentley stayed quiet, drifting into the doorway of the office. The farther he went, the more old collectibles and books and antiques were revealed — things so old he couldn’t really tell what they were. He watched in silence as Nico made a small ah-ha sound, pulling a red book from the shelf. A couple others fell off with it, thumping on the carpet with muted sounds.

“Ugh,” He grumbled. Bentley, still silent, said nothing as the blonde hopped off the chair and bent down to pick up the dropped books. A brown one was laying open, facing down, its pages on the rug. The second, a dark blue hardcover, hadn’t even opened.

Nico picked up both books, turning toward the shelves to return them to their rightful spots, but then he paused, glaring at the blue one with narrowed eyes. He started shaking it like a snow globe.

Bentley furrowed his brows. What in the world was he doing?

Nico kept shaking the book strangely, and then Bentley caught onto exactly why he was shaking it — it was rattling. The book was rattling. Bentley blinked, completely sure he was losing his mind. How had he ended up in Nico’s house, anyway? And why couldn’t he see him?

Nico plopped the blue book on the desk and tossed the other to the side, moving to open it — but the blue hardcover didn’t budge. He sat it up on the spine and pulled at both covers, back and front, but still, it didn’t open.

Bentley moved forward ever-so-slightly, taking a spot on the opposite side of the desk from Nico. Why would someone make a book you couldn’t open? That rattled? To say Bentley was confused was an understatement — for some reason, he felt rather dumb.

Nico continued to pry and pull on the blue covers to no avail. He then took to examining the pages on the side, running his fingernail over them. Bentley then drifted around the desk just a bit, toward Nico’s left side.

“Huh?” He vocalized as his fingernail slid into a crack between the cover and unmoving pages. Bentley watched quietly as he pulled open the clear desk drawer, grabbing something that looked strangely like a knife. A weird, thin knife, with an ornate metal hilt. He’d seen Alfred use something similar once — to open the mail. Perhaps Alfred wasn’t using a weird knife then, either, but a thing that looked like a knife that was actually meant for opening the mail? Why else would Nico’s parents have one in their office?

Nico grabbed the probably-not-a-knife and stabbed it into the little crack between the cover and strangely stiff pages, using his entire body as leverage. Bentley flinched when the book flew open with a harsh bang against the glass desk.

It wasn’t a book at all, actually — it was a box disguised as a book. Very clever, very smart, very… spy-like, in Bentley’s opinion. Like something Bruce would have in his library. The inside of the book was hollow, the pages fake, and inside was a myriad of papers and small objects. Intrigued, Bentley stepped closer. 

Nico pinched his brows together, pulling out papers and objects one at a time. First was a pin. A pin that was supposed to attach to someone's shirt, with an old looking piece of torn and faded fabric attached to the back. The pin itself was a burnished bronze, with a lightning bolt down the center. It looked like something Bentley had seen before, but he couldn’t place it.

Nico pulled out a large envelope second, and — much to his confusion — it had his name written on the front in big, loopy writing. Bentley watched in silence, inching ever-closer as the blonde used the same little not-knife to open it.

He pulled out three papers, each folded neatly. Two were pristine and clean, the other, ratty, torn, and slightly crumbled. He unfolded the nicer two, and Bentley leaned in to read them.

The first one was a birth certificate. In big, bold letters, it read: NIKOLAI ELIJAH ROCKEFELLER. It had his birthday, his time of birth, his parents’ names, EDWARD ROCKEFELLER and JEAN AGRESTE-ROCKEFELLER.

The second of the nice papers was another birth certificate.

That was… also Nico’s?

Bentley leaned closer, genuinely confused at the same time Nico scrunched his face up. This certificate looked a little different than the first, like it was from a different place.

NIKOLAI ELIJAH ALLEN was the big name on the front. The parents' names listed were… BARTHOLOMEW ALLEN and CRYSTAL CONSTANTINE-ALLEN.

Okay, now Bentley was just really confused. As was Nico, who, with an exhale, shook his head in disbelief. He laid the certificates to the side and unfolded the ratty looking sheet of paper. It was scrawled with messy handwriting that Bentley could barely read. And even when he did decipher it, it didn’t make much sense.

Please take care of him Jean, Edward — Barry said you’d take good care of him. That you’re friends. Our timestream, our universe, dimension, reality, whatever it is… it’s falling apart at the seams — Barry says the only way to save him is to take him to a new one where his existence won’t be erased. His name is Nikolai. Nico. Just… please. Love him. Barry says he can take him back to his own timestream, to your timestream because of the Speed Force passed onto him from Bartholomew, I don’t know much about it… Bart’s worried you won’t be prepared for when it wakes up… Please don’t tell him about us until it wakes up. Nico. It’ll be better that way.

Bentley had never been more confused in his entire short life. Don’t tell him about us until it wakes up? It what? And a letter about worlds falling apart? Words that implied Nico was from a whole different universe? That his now parents weren't his parents, but his parents actually lived in a different dimension? Did that mean he was an alien? That there really was something more out there, something past the world Bentley could see?

Nico started crying, suddenly and pitifully like he had in the bathroom at school. Bentley wished he could reach out for him — but how would he feel him if he didn’t even know he was there?

A dull ache settled in the back of Bentley’s skull as the familiar feeling of vertigo started to take hold of him. The room started to teeter and spin, and he reached out to grab ahold of the desk when he started to fall, but apparently he missed, because he hit the floor anyways.

The beaded chandelier above him doubled and tripled as a stabbing pain shot from one ear to the other, black and white flecks of light dancing across his vision like it was snowing. The black flecks got bigger, and the sound of Nico crying grew more and more distant until everything fell black.

And Bentley jerked straight back into consciousness with a gasp. He blinked away the fatigue and pulsing pain behind his eyes, trying his hardest to focus, to breathe. He was in his dark bedroom, Nico snoring on the foot of the bed, and Asten… well, Asten wasn’t there. But the bathroom door was closed.

Bentley blinked a few more times to right his mind. A dream. It had been nothing more than a dream, despite it feeling so utterly real. His skull felt tight, strange, like a hot air balloon. It felt…

Exactly the same as it had in Bruce’s car, after the Secret Keeper invaded his mind to show him Asten’s memory. 

Had he just seen one of Nico’s memories? A memory where Nico was wearing the exact same clothes he was now? Could it have been a memory from, like, right before the Secret Keeper found him? The night before he called Asten?

Bentley grimaced as the throbbing in his head that had faded since the car ride came back full force, like someone was banging a gong inside of his skull. Nico hadn’t stirred even though Bentley had shaken the entire mattress with his flinch. 

What he saw in his dream was real, right? What he saw in his dream about Asten had seemed real enough, and Dick said he’d seen Bentley’s memories — so it was safe to assume it was real. That Nico was basically an alien from another universe.

He flopped back down on his pillow, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his palms. Superheroes, metahumans with powers, and now, universes and an alien that he’d managed to befriend.

He pushed it all out of his mind, for now, burying himself in his covers with a huff and willing his body to go back to sleep.

He didn’t realize that Asten never came out of the bathroom.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

*deep inhale* ah, yes, the smell of approaching chaos

part thirteen

❝ AQUAINTANCES ❞

SATURDAY — AUGUST 8 — 4:30AM

ASTEN SLEPT ON THE LEFT SIDE OF BENTLEY’S KING BED THAT NIGHT.

He envied the way Asten could fall right back asleep after everything he’d been through. He was all curled up under Bentley’s gray comforter, his black and blue hair sticking out like a sore thumb in the midst of all the dark sheets. 

Asten had been eerily quiet since the car ride. Bentley didn’t blame him, not at all. Bruce didn’t try to make him talk: he only asked him a few things, like if he needed anything to eat, or his preferred sleeping arrangement. Everything offered was quickly declined and he made it clear he just wanted to go to bed.

Neither he nor Bentley changed their clothes, they just crawled up into his bed and laid there, with one lamp on, in silence.

And that’s exactly what Bentley was still doing. Asten had fallen asleep long ago — the sun was probably going to come up in an hour or two. Maybe Bentley would’ve been able to rest if his sleep schedule wasn’t so screwed up.

He’d been sitting up against the headboard, mindlessly playing games on his phone, listening to Asten’s even breathing. There wasn’t much left for him to do but sit there and swim in his own thoughts, which had been a strange mix of what would happen if the Secret Keeper found them, wondering if he upset Dick by leaving the hospital bed, what would’ve happened if Tim hadn’t been able to get to Asten fast enough, and a slew of other mildly unpleasant things regarding their current situation.

His first ever sleepover had been brought about by a horror-movie-level supervillain chasing a kid he’d known for five days around downtown Gotham. Given what his life had held so far, he should’ve expected something like that.

Bruce had poked his head in once, and Bentley just sort of waved at him. They exchanged a few texts afterwards, but it had been a while since then, and Bentley hoped he went back down with Dick. Dick deserved having his dad down there with him.

When the clock struck 4:33am, and the after-patrol bedroom doors had been closed for a while, Asten stirred, humming incoherently.

Bentley glanced over at him, watching him shift around until he pulled the comforter up and over his head.

He mumbled almost incoherently in Portuguese, running all his words together. “Não… não. Por favor, não leve minha mãe embora. Por favor, não a leve embora.”

“Asten?” Bentley questioned, shifting slightly to face him.

“Não. Por favor. Não a tire de mim. Eu não quero ficar sozinho…”

Bentley reached over and tapped at the wiggling blankets. “Asten.”

A few seconds later, Asten’s head popped out, hair a mess, and he blinked. “Huh?”

“You were talking,” Bentley replied quietly. Asten cringed, so Bentley added: “Not in English.”

“What time is it?”

He glanced over at his glowing clock. “Four-thirty-four.”

“Ugh,” Asten grumbled, tugging the comforter back over his head. “You haven’t been able to sleep?”

“No,” Bentley replied. “I slept for a while after school.”

Asten’s voice was muffled under the blanket. “Guess I was really lucky your sleep schedules botched, huh?”

Bentley glanced over at the Asten-shaped lump in the blankets.

“You would’ve been okay,” He tried.

“You and I both know I would’ve been dead,” Asten replied, pulling the blankets off of his head. (Which made his hair even messier.) “It might be scary to think about, Whittaker, but you answering that phone probably saved my life. For real.”

Bentley said nothing. Most of him wanted to disregard that, to say that surely Asten would’ve been fine, but there was a small part of him that knew he was probably right.

“And I realize I’m staying at your house within like, a week of meeting you, and that’s kinda weird.” He continued, bringing the blanket back over his head. “So, sorry.”

“It’s not that weird,” He stated simply, fiddling with the edge of the blanket. “I mean, you’re my friend, aren’t you?”

Asten let out a huff of a laugh. “I’d like to think so. I knocked out a bully for you and you kept me from getting murdered, I’d say that surpasses the acquaintance category.”

Bentley shrugged. “I guess I’m just not the best at telling who likes me and who doesn’t.”

A moment of silence passed, and Bentley’s mind lingered on Damian.

“I guess you never really know. People can be fake right up until they’re not,”

Considering that Damian could’ve been fake-liking him the whole time didn’t make Bentley feel any better.

“So, ginger, I’m sleeping next to you and hardly know anything about you,” Asten stated, sitting up slightly against the headboard and pulling the blanket off his head again. “You’re not from Crime Alley or Bristol, you don’t sound like either of those. Where are you from?”

Bentley took in a breath, and let it out. “Drew.”

“That’s the city next to Bludhaven, isn’t it?” He questioned.

“I think so,” Bentley stated, trying to remember all the aerial maps he’d seen on the Batcomputer.

“I’m from São Paulo, a city in Brazil,” Asten explained, pulling his knees up sort of like Bentley usually did.

Bentley shifted against the headboard. “Why did you move here?”

Asten quieted.

“My, uh… parents died a couple years ago. In a car crash,” He said, speaking softer than he had been. “I don’t have any family in Brazil, grandparents or anything. My only relative was my dad’s brother, who lives here. So that’s who I went to.”

Bentley cringed, watching the way Asten’s eyes lingered on his own hands. He really did suck at talking to people, didn’t he?

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad,” He muttered, bringing his knees up, too.

“Hey, no sweat, kid.” Asten reached over and bumped him on the shoulder, quickly ridding his face of any undue emotion. “I’m fine. How’d you end up in Bruce Wayne’s house, anyway?”

Bentley quickly weeded through all the things he couldn’t tell Asten, which was basically everything. What was he supposed to say?

“My dad… got arrested… last December,” Is what he settled on. “And my mom died when I was a baby. My dad knew Bruce.”

“Oh,” Was what Asten replied. And then he snorted. “We are some little pity-fest, aren’t we?”

The word pity didn’t make Bentley feel any better, either. But he forced a little smile on nonetheless.

“Why are you in my classes when you’re older than me?” Bentley questioned, desperately trying to change the subject.

“I was homeschooled in Brazil, so credits and stuff were different when I moved here,” Asten explained, shifting so his position was mirroring Bentley’s. “You were homeschooled, weren’t you?”

Did anything his father did count as homeschooling? Bentley wasn’t dumb by any means, and he knew the basics of math and stuff. 

“Uh, yeah,” He replied. Technically he was, right?

Had he been lying to Asten this whole time? He couldn’t exactly tell him his dad was using him to destroy Batman, and he didn’t really think it was a societal norm to tell the first person you meet that you were abused and neglected for your whole life.

This whole double-life thing was hard. Of course, this wasn’t as hard as when he was trying to do his father’s work, but it was still hard.

“You seem like a homeschool kid,” Asten said with a smirk.

Bentley quirked his brow. “How?”

“Y’know, you just… have that way about you that lets me know you haven’t interacted with many people. It’s not a bad thing,” He insisted. “You’re similar to Nico, and he was homeschooled for a while, too.”

Bentley nodded slightly. (At least Asten thought he was homeschooled and not purposefully kept from outside contact by his abuser.)

“We can’t tell him about any of this Secret Keeper stuff, by the way. Nico. He’ll die on the spot,” Asten said, running a hand through his messy hair. 

“Okay,” Is all Bentley replied. With the reactions he’d seen from Nico so far (nearly crying over riding the bus, having an asthma attack over riding the bus, crying in the janitors closet when he wasn’t even the one afraid…) he really wouldn’t doubt it.

A few moments of silence passed. “Hey, Bentley?”

He looked up at Asten, brown eyes meeting green. “Yeah?”

“Have you really not seen her since your dream?” 

Bentley shook his head, pulling the blanket further onto his lap. “No, I haven’t. Not even when we went to pick you up.”

“I don’t think she’s alone,”

Bentley pinched his brows together, glancing over at Asten, who was staring off, deep in thought.

“What do you mean?”

Asten looked up at him, then down. “She was branded. Behind her left ear. I saw it in my dream — A symbol that looked like a weird A.”

Bentley sat up straighter. “Whats branded?”

“It’s, like… where you form metal in a certain symbol, then heat it up and burn the symbol onto someone’s skin. Like a mark that they belong to someone else,” He explained. “Luckily it’s not a common thing.”

Bentley squirmed a little in his spot, thinking about being branded by red-hot metal. “You… think she has a boss?”

Asten shrugged. “It’s just a thought. People don’t usually just brand themselves. Unless they’re trying to trick you and she knows I saw it, in that case, I don’t know.”

Another tense silence passed, but the way the gears were turning in each of their heads was nearly audible.

“You said in the car, you wanted your face to be the last thing she ever saw,” Bentley started, glancing up at him. “Would you actually go after her?”

Asten’s eyes lingered on his for a few moments, and something like a storm glimmered in the back of his green eyes. Similar to at school, but not so prominent. “If she’s going to make our lives miserable, then the least I can do is make her’s a hellscape in return. Why?”

Bentley glanced at his bedroom door, thinking of the family beyond.

“Because I…” Want to be good enough for them.

“… Want to help you.”

Asten searched his face for a moment, raising an eyebrow.

“We’ll have to beat the police,” He suggested.

Bentley shrugged. “And Batman.”

Asten smirked lightly. “You think we can do it?”

I’ve been trained into a deceptive weapon and living with the greatest detectives in the world, he wanted to reply.

“I think we need a plan,” Was what he said instead.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

one intense chapter after another, ey?

part fourteen

❝ BIRD OF PREY ❞

SATURDAY — AUGUST 8 — 8:10AM

ASTEN SUGGESTED THEY FIND THE SECRET KEEPER’S BOSS FIRST. Which was easier said than done, considering they were thirteen and ten and the person they were trying to find had a telepathic metahuman at their disposal. (If they even existed, considering the Secret Keeper was so twisted she might just brand herself for fun and not have a boss at all.)

But even then, that didn’t stop Asten. He rivaled Tim when it came to his case-focus ratio. He’d begun his near-endless search right after they talked about it, and he was making a running list of every single person in Drew, Gotham, and Bludhaven that had gone missing in the past four months. Gathering any and all information he could weasel out of the media. (Why, Bentley wasn’t sure.)

After about two hours of list making mixed with random chatter and questions about each others lives, Bentley’s willpower to stay awake tapered off, and he faded away on his side of the bed with nothing more than Asten’s Crime-Alley-laced Portuguese accent to lure him to sleep. And it did a pretty good job of it. Because he was utterly and completely dead to the world until repetitive, incessant vibrating drew him back out of his slumber.

The sunshine was beaming against Bentley’s blackout curtains, making the room dim instead of gold. He moved in response to the vibrations at the same time Asten did. His clock read 8:17am, and he was really glad it was Saturday. No one would expect him to get up until at least nine or ten, given their strange circumstances.

Asten, who was still sitting up and staring at the screen of Tim’s computer that Bentley now claimed, fished his phone out from under the dark sheets and pressed it to his ear with a quiet: “Hello?”

A loud, urgent, rambling voice was what came back. Bentley couldn’t tell what it was saying, but Asten blinked and shook his head.

“Wait, wait, wait, man, slow down. What?” He muttered, rubbing at his eyes and putting the phone on speaker. “Go again — slower.”

“I didn’t… I can’t… oh my God,” Bentley recognized the voice, and his suspicions were confirmed when he noticed the caller ID on Asten’s screen said Nico. He sounded halfway to hysterical, crying and very nearly hyperventilating.

“Can’t what?” Asten inquired, closing the laptop with a click.

“Breathe,”

He sighed lightly, brushing a hand through his messy blue hair. “Dude, we’ve talked about this. If you can speak, you can breathe.”

Bentley laid his head back down on his pillow to listen.

“I can’t… Asten, you won’t…”

“What is it?”

Bentley heard Nico suck in a shaky breath, and it came back out as a couple quiet, pitiful sobs. “I had a dream about her, Asten. About her.”

Bentley’s eyes flicked up to Asten’s at the same time Asten’s flicked down to his. 

Oh crap.

Asten sucked in a breath. “The Secret Keeper?”

“Yes! And-and my parents left at just five thirty for a business trip and they aren’t going to be back until Sunday night and I usually don’t go anywhere because I can just call them but I think this deal that they’re closing is really important and I don’t want to bother them and make them not close it but I’m-“

“Rambling,” Asten interjected. 

“Can I come to your house? I’ll… I’ll hail a cab or something, I-“ Nico’s voice sounded different, filtering through both tears and the phone. He almost sounded younger.

“Not a cab driver in the world is going to take you to Crime Alley alone, dude.”

“I don’t… I’ll deal with that, okay? Just… just please, please, I’m so freaking scared,”

The little rattle-rattle-hiss-hiss of his inhaler sounded from the other end of the line, and Bentley frowned.

So the Secret Keeper hit both Nico and Asten in the same night. Bentley figured it made sense if she could read minds, since Nico was probably in Asten’s a lot. Maybe that’s how she got Dick and Bentley within hours of each other?

“You can bribe them with however much money you want, but it won’t do you any good,” Asten explained, sitting up and gently placing the laptop on Bentley’s bedside table. “I’m not home.”

Nico’s funny breathing exercise they had been listening to him perform promptly stopped. “You’re not… what? Where are you, then?”

“Bentley’s,”

“Bentley’s?! When did you decide to go over there?!” Nico squeaked.

“When the Secret Keeper decided that I needed to die. I had a dream about her, too — so did Bentley. I tried to call you, but you didn’t answer, so I walked to your house instead. Halfway there, actually, before she started chasing me. I panicked and called Bentley.”

Nico’s voice nearly doubled in pitch. “You mean you saw her? With your eyes?!”

“Yes, with my eyes,” Asten shot back. “Thanks for answering the phone when I could’ve literally been dying, by the way.”

“You can’t be mad at me, I’m already crying,” Nico replied with a huff. Another rattle-rattle-hiss-hiss emanated from the phone. “We’re going to die. We’re so going to die.”

Bentley grabbed his phone off of his opposite nightstand and sent a text to Bruce:

Nico had a nightmare about the secret keeper too.

Bruce’s typing bubbles only popped up for a split second before a response came.

Oh no. Does he need anything? We’re only a few minutes away from his house. 

Bentley glanced over at Asten, who was attempting to talk Nico into a better breathing pattern over the phone.

He’s home alone all weekend and he’s really scared, is what Bentley texted back.

Bruce’s typing bubbles came, disappeared, then came again, and a text rolled in a few seconds later.

Does he want us to pick him up? You and Asten can ride.

Bentley held the phone over to Asten, who scanned the screen quickly.

“Please come over,” He heard Nico mutter from one end of the phone.

“Jokes on you, dude, you’re coming over,” Asten replied, sending Bentley a little nod. He texted Bruce back: yes.

“Huh?”

“We’re coming to get you, nosebleed. Go put your shoes on,”

Bentley furrowed his brows. “Nosebleed?”

“Means rich kid,” Asten muttered to Bentley. “You’re a nosebleed, too.”

“What do you mean we’re coming to get you? Who’s we?”

“Bruce is driving us over there, dude,” Asten stated, tossing the covers off of his legs and climbing out of the bed. Bentley followed suit.

“What?! No! I didn’t mean to… I didn’t want… I don’t want to bother him! I… I…”

“Calm down, Bruce is cool. He literally picked me up from the middle of downtown past two a.m. last night,” Asten explained as he pulled on his black tennis shoes that he’d abandoned next to Bentley’s bedroom door. Bentley did the same with the red tennis shoes he’d put back into the drawer of his wardrobe. “Plus, didn’t you literally tell me the other day that he offered you a ride whenever you needed one?”

“Well, yeah, but… but he was talking about school, and I don’t want to- oh my God, what was that?”

“Nico?” Asten inquired as he and Bentley made their way out of his bedroom and down the stairs. Bentley could already see Bruce putting his jacket on at the front door. (He really didn’t waste any time when it came to this sort of thing, did he?)

“I just heard something,” Nico muttered back.

“You have three dogs in the house, dude. We’re leaving now. I think it’s only a few minutes to your place,” Asten explained quietly as they padded up to Bruce, who muttered a quick: “Good morning, boys.” With a small smile and some kind of sentimental, nostalgic look in his gray irises.

“Good morning,” Bentley replied.

“Don’t you dare hang up on me!” Nico practically demanded, and his voice was getting thick, like he was crying hard again. “Please!”

“I’m not,” Asten reassured, switching the phone from one hand to the other.

There was another rattle-rattle-hiss-hiss and some muted mumbling about how he was going to need a new inhaler before the end of the year (which was apparently a bad thing.) as they walked out into the cold toward the garage. It was now cloudy and overcast, casting a gray hue on everything. They jogged from the house to the garage in the biting wind.

The garage was big, and the whole left wall was full of tools and car gadgets that Bentley was pretty sure no one ever touched but Jason. Bentley had only really seen him work on a few of the motorcycles they used for patrol, and the Batmobile once, all in the cave, so he wondered if anybody actually ever used the stuff out there.

They made their way to Bruce’s car, the last one on the left, and climbed in as quickly as they could. Bentley’s mind was spinning and spinning. The Secret Keeper was targeting his friends and family, for what? Fun?

He climbed in the righthand backseat and watched as Asten and Bruce popped their doors open. Bruce got in quickly, and Asten right afterward, though Bentley didn’t miss the little metallic clink or the way Asten oh-so-subtly swiped something from the workbench next to the vehicle.

At first he thought he might’ve been stealing, which was strange. But he climbed into the car with no hesitation, holding a shiny tire iron just out of Bruce’s sight, and shoved it beneath their seats with only a pointed glare sent Bentley’s way.

Oh. Right. Just in case.

They pulled out of the garage and set off, and Bruce turned the heat on. “It’s only eight minutes to your house, Nico,” He called from the front seat. All he got in response was a forced little: “Okay.” From Asten’s phone.

Bentley watched the outdoors pass in the window, occasionally listening to whatever rambling Nico kept doing. 

Why was the Secret Keeper targeting them?

He watched the minutes until arrival tick down from eight to two, only startling when there was a bang and a gasp from Nico’s end of the call.

“What was-“

“Oh my God there’s someone in the house!” Nico half-whispered into the phone. It sounded like his voice was stifled by his hand and his hysterical crying. “There’s-there’s… there’s someone in the house, the-the door…”

“We’re only a couple minutes away,” Bruce said, speeding up quite a bit. Bentley recognized the streets they were on from driving Nico home from school, and the minutes changed from two to one. They were literally almost there, yet every passing second made his heart beat faster.

What if they weren’t on time?

“I can hear them, I-I can hear them walking, I-“

“Then shut up and hide, dude,” Asten muttered, glancing over at Bentley with wide eyes, a hollowness in them similar to when he’d been chased. Something akin to hopelessness, maybe.

Nothing but the sound of Nico’s muffled crying came through the phone for a solid thirty seconds.

Then a bang. A wham. A scream. And the three telltale beeps of the call ending.

“Nico?” Asten questioned, quickly dialing his number again. It rang, it rang, it rang, and it went to voicemail.

Bentley’s heart sank to his toes.

“He isn’t answering!” Asten basically shouted. His calm and collected demeanor completely vanished, and Bentley wondered how he could keep his cool so good when trying to keep Nico calm.

Bruce pulled into the Rockefeller’s driveway not ten seconds later. It had began to mist slightly, and it was getting a little foggy. Everything looked normal. Normal except…

The front door was open.

“Stay in the car,” Bruce ordered, climbing out of the front seat. Bentley noticed that it sounded a little more like his Batman voice than his Bruce voice, and fully intended on obeying Batman’s orders. 

Asten did not. 

He popped his door open despite Bruce’s words and was already halfway out before the Batman stopped him in his tracks, taking up a position between the boy and the house. Asten’s attempts to go around him were fooled by Bruce extending an arm. 

“Mr. Wayne-”

“Get back in the car, bud. It’s too dangerous,” Bruce ordered. Asten tried again to curve around the other way, but a large hand stopped him, again.

“But-“

“I’ll make sure he’s safe, but I need to make sure you’re safe, too,” Bruce gestured quickly back to Asten’s seat. “Go on. I’ll be right back.”

With a huff, Asten slid back into the car and closed the door. All four doors clicked when Bruce engaged the locks, and both Bentley and Asten watched him head through the fog and into the house without reproach.

Once he was out of sight, Asten huffed deeply, sinking back into his seat and rubbing a hand over his face. He looked tired.

“Why is this happening to us?” He murmured, crossing his arms over his chest. 

Bentley would offer words of reassurance, but if he were completely honest, he was thinking the same thing.

Were they just another statistic, another tally on the Secret Keeper’s record, or was this something darker, something more sinister than even they could comprehend? Was she really just a serial killer and kidnapper, or was something else going on that they didn’t know about?

Bentley shrunk back into his seat, too. “I don’t know.”

Minutes passed. Two. Five. Seven. When they got to nine, the front door swung open.

And Bentley’s heart catapulted from his toes all the way into his throat.

“Oh my God,” Asten said lowly, and Bentley gasped, his left hand fumbling for something to grab — he ended up squeezing the hem of Asten’s jacket.

The Secret Keeper was grinning at them with her stitched smile from the front door, amber eyes nearly glowing into the dim fog. Her white hair was stringy and looked kind of wet, stained at the bottom with something brown Bentley didn’t want to think too hard about. She was staring at them. Hard and cold and unabashedly, deep down into their souls, into their minds, smiling.

Bentley found the back of his eyes burning, and he made a pitiful sound when Asten’s jacket was wrenched out of his grip by the Brazilian reaching for the tire iron he’d stowed away.

She was just staring at them. Just staring. Still staring when Asten sat back up with the tire iron in hand and turned toward the window, and Bentley grabbed onto the back of his jacket. Staring and smiling. The car was so quiet he could only hear his and Asten’s equally ragged, panicked breaths.

“It’s a trap.” Asten whispered, breathless despite not taking a step. “For us.”

Bentley whimpered: “Are you sure?”

“It sure as hell seems like one,” Asten replied softly. The Secret Keeper hadn’t moved an inch. Why wasn’t she doing anything?

“What if Bruce is-“

“He’s not,” Asten silenced Bentley’s dark thought pattern immediately. “Don’t panic, Whittaker.”

“Not panicking,” Bentley murmured back, even though his knuckles were starting to turn white from how hard he was clutching Asten’s jacket. 

“Call Bruce,” 

Bentley wasted no time using the hand that wasn’t holding onto the older boy’s jacket for dear life to fish his phone out. As soon as his finger hovered over the call button, however, a sharp, stabbing pain ripped from one side of his skull to the other, and he dropped the device with a shrill, stifled shout, folding in on himself in the seat. An ear-splitting ring drowned out nearly all other noise, and he didn’t hear Asten speak, only felt his friend’s hands land on either side of his head in an attempt to understand what was going on. 

Black and purple splotches danced in his vision. He could feel himself breathing, and he could feel Asten’s hands near his temples, but he couldn’t hear anything over the ring that threatened to bust his eardrums. His attempts to move were quickly halted by an onslaught of disorienting vertigo, making what he could see of the vehicle around him warp and spin.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell your secrets, Babybird,”

He grappled for something, anything, tugging at what he thought might’ve been Asten’s pant leg as he coiled up into a little ball on the seat next to him. He tried to force words out but he couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t hear anything. Please don’t let her kill me.

Everything went black.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: mentions of death/su**ide

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

this took forever but i’m getting back in the groove! I got a little ahead of myself so I had to restart my whole timeline so it made sense. also yes asten is really determined to do this, you’ll learn why later

part sixteen

❝ WITHOUT A TRACE ❞

SATURDAY — AUGUST 8 — 10:04PM

SURPRISINGLY TO NO ONE, SLEEP WAS AVOIDED LIKE THE BLACK PLAGUE THAT NIGHT. Bentley, Nico, and Asten took to conversing quietly instead, all spread out on various parts of Bentley’s king sized bed. Nico was laying on his back across the foot of the mattress, bickering with Asten a little, but staring at the ceiling, mostly. He’d been jumping at shadows and flinching at the faintest of sounds for hours now. Bentley wasn’t even sure he’d seen him smile since they got to the Manor. Asten was posted up near the left edge of the bed, scouring the internet on Tim’s old laptop with a big bag of chips Jason had insisted they take up with them. He, as opposed to Nico, was taking their terrible circumstances in his stride, acting completely normal. Bentley was against the headboard, fiddling with his phone, trying his best not to be awkward.

Before they’d come up to Bentley’s bedroom, they’d been cooped up in the den, watching random movies on a quiet volume with Dick and Jason for company. It was the first time Bentley had seen Dick out of the hospital bed. Outwardly, he was just Dick Grayson. Charming, outgoing, fun-loving and even able to put Bentley’s jittery friends at ease; but Bentley could see the glimmer in his eyes that was dimmer than usual, the brief moments that he took to breathe and gather himself before he put the never-ending smile back on.

Jason had to have been seeing it, too. He was off to the side reading a book, but Bentley saw him react to things ever so slightly, like his finger twitching the slightest bit when Dick would shift uncomfortably, or the way his eyes flicked up for a split second when Asten’s Crime Alley drawl made a unmistakable appearance. 

After they successfully spent nine solid hours in the den, and skipped lunch, Dick practically begged them to eat something. (Bentley realized just then that he and Asten hadn’t eaten at all that day.) Dinner was quiet.

Bruce had let them know Damian had gone to a friend’s house — a family called the Kents — and Bentley was ninety-nine percent sure it was because of him, Asten, and Nico. Why else would Damian spontaneously up and leave? Duke was working on a school project at a classmate’s, Steph was swamped with college, Babs was staying late at the library, Tim was working over (which really meant he was in the cave.), and Cass was… well… doing whatever Cass did. (No one could really keep tabs on her, could they?) Bentley assumed it had to do with her upcoming dance recital next week.

Bentley didn’t mind. The meal was quick and quiet, and Alfred made some really good pasta stuff, that was so good Asten got a second helping. (Which Bentley considered really good, because he was Brazilian and Brazilians were very good cooks.)

And that pretty much led to now, ten at night, sitting in Bentley’s  bedroom that was pitch silent apart from Asten’s occasional crunching.

Bentley had exhausted all the games on his phone throughout the day, so now he was just kind of playing with his phone case. Nico’s phone kept going off repeatedly. (Bruce had called his parents to let them know what was going on, and they were coming back early, but their plane didn’t leave until morning so Nico had to stay with the Waynes until they got home.) Asten had said he called his uncle, but Bentley didn’t actually think so — he’d been near the bathroom door the whole time and never heard him say anything. But maybe he texted him. Either way, Asten was staying the night again, too. (As if Bruce would even consider letting him go home alone — He’d been checking on them nonstop, once every fifteen minutes at least. No one would know he was the calm and collected Batman based on the way he acted with his kids. Which was probably a good thing.)

“Bentley?”

It was the first time he’d heard Nico’s voice in quite a while, so both he and Asten perked up, glancing over at the blonde. His ocean blue eyes were locked on the ceiling. He was tugging on the strings of his light gray hoodie in a repetitive, rhythmic pattern, staring at nothing but deep in thought.

“Yeah?” Bentley questioned, picking at the edge of his clear phone case.

“What was your dream like? About her?” 

Bentley blinked. They hadn’t talked about the Secret Keeper since they got home, and he really hadn’t expected Nico to be the one to bring it up. He tapped on his phone lightly, exhaling.

“Uh… well… it was really realistic,” Was how he started, gaze focusing on the dark comforter he had over his legs. “I thought I was awake, and I started hearing her. Talking to me.”

He tried to hide the little shiver that shook him when he imagined the warped, strange mixture of her voice and Damian’s, but he wasn’t sure he hid it very well. “I tried to run but she was everywhere, taking peoples faces, their voices, just for me to look up and realize it was her and not them. I...” He looked down a bit farther. “I threw up when I finally woke up.”

Nico glanced over at him, blue eyes bouncing across his face for a few seconds. “Mine was really realistic, too. I woke up when my baby sister was crying, and I went to get her, but when I opened her bedroom door it was…” He trailed off, focusing back on the ceiling. “She, uh… started chasing me around my house. And none of the doors went to the right rooms, everywhere was a dead end, and I couldn’t find my parents or my sister, and I…”

Bentley glanced over at him, watching him blink the tiniest hint of glassy-ness out of his eyes. “Don’t be embarrassed,” Nico finally continued. “I threw up, too. Like four times. It always happens when I get really scared.”

A moment of silence passed.

“Was yours weird like that, Asten?” He questioned, glancing over at him.

Asten shrugged, not looking up from the screen that was lighting up his face and hair. “It… uh…”

Bentley watched his green irises move from the screen, to the keyboard, down to his lap, bouncing around there for a few moments. “I don’t… really want to talk about it.”

Nico blinked, looking back at the ceiling. “…Sorry.”

“S’fine,”

The room fell quiet, and Bentley kept fiddling with his phone. Maybe Asten’s dream had something to do with his parents or Brazil — that would make sense why he didn’t want to talk about it. Or maybe he was just terrified and didn’t want to think about it. Justifiably.

Bentley breathed in and out. “How’s your research going?” He said after a few moments, glancing over at Asten.

The blue-haired-boy shrugged. “I’ve pretty much dead-ended on my missing persons list. It totals up to forty-nine in the past four months, in and around Gotham. A lot of them are already… dead.”

Asten picked up the laptop and moved next to Bentley, adjusting the screen so he could see it. He had a spreadsheet open with a list of names and links to the articles where he’d found them. The whole thing looked freakishly similar to Tim’s — Asten wasn’t kidding around with his research, apparently.

“Research for what?” Nico questioned, sitting up on his elbows to gaze at them.

“I’m making a list of all the potential Secret Keeper targets. Trying to find something to go off of. To find her boss,” Asten explained, nonchalantly.

Nico wasted no time sitting up with a high-pitched: “To find her what?!”

Asten shrugged. “I dunno! Her boss, her leader, her dad, whoever branded her head.”

“Branded her head?”

“Yes, branded her head,” Asten clarified with a sigh. Nico pushed himself upright and shimmied up to the headboard, on the other side of Asten to look at the computer.

“Why in the world are you trying to find her boss?” He murmured, scanning the spreadsheet quickly.

“Because I want to destroy her,” Asten said, with a completely blank, serious expression on his face. Nico stared at him for a solid ten seconds before he frowned.

“What’re you gonna do? She’s killed people!”

Asten scoffed. “I’m going to make her life a living hell, thank you very much. Bentley said he’s in.”

Nico’s panicky blue eyes flicked over to Bentley. “For real?”

He shrugged lightly. Chasing down murdery metahuman supervillains wasn’t exactly his idea of fun, but if it would convince Damian he deserved to live with them, he’d do that five times over. After all, it’s what his whole family did, every single night. 

“Yeah,” He muttered quietly.

“If they harass you, harass them back,” Asten chimed, like it was some sort of nursery rhyme he learned when he was little. Nico gaped at him. “Fight fire with fire, they hit you, you hit them harder, all that jazz.”

“That’s illegal and immoral,” Nico murmured. “And I’m pretty sure fire plus fire just equals more fire.”

Bentley glanced up at Asten, who snickered: “Nothings illegal if you don’t get caught!”

Nico blinked a few times, in silence. “No,” He deadpanned. “How are her supposed victims going to help you find her boss, anyway?”

Asten shrugged. “I’m not actually sure yet. Just working with what I’ve got. Which isn’t much.”

None of them said anything for a solid ten seconds, all just glancing between each other and the computer.

“You guys can help me, actually. I’m trying to find anything besides being missing or dead that might link all these people together. If you want to see what you can find on some of them, that would be very helpful,” Asten explained.

“Helpful in finding a boss that might not even exist, of a lady who can kill you from four states away, that’s been personally attacking us. Sounds safe to me,” Nico muttered, and Asten elbowed him with a pointed glare. 

“Shut up,”

“Why are you so obsessed with destroying her? Gotham has police and superheroes for that,” Nico continued.

Asten stared at the screen in silence for a moment, something grim swirling in the back of his eyes before he pushed it away with a sharp inhale. “Because she’s been stalking us like a freaking psycho. If she’s gonna mess with us, she’s gonna know who she’s messing with.”

Bentley blinked. “If she can read our minds, I guess she already does.”

Asten glanced over at him for a moment, their eyes locking for a solid five seconds before he looked away again.

“True,”

“You think she can just always read our minds? Whenever she wants?” Nico interjected, glancing between them worriedly. “Because I don’t think a supervillain that knows we’re trying to catch them is going to be very easy to catch. Not to mention she’ll probably kill us.”

Asten shrugged. “I mean, if she can, she already knows. There’s no point in stopping now.”

“Uh, yeah, there is. It’s called not dying,” Nico sassed.

“Would you just help me?” Asten finally muttered, gesturing to the computer. “Just pick anyone on the list and see what you can find. It’d take me forever to do all these.”

Bentley obeyed, turning his phone the right way and choosing a name from the very top of the list: Titus Lancaster. 

He navigated to the internet and typed the name in, and immediately, several different results popped up.

The first one was on a website called Gotham’s Coldest Cases, and when he clicked on it, a picture of a boy with shiny, grayish-brown eyes was the first thing he saw. He was holding a guitar and sitting on the floor in front of a distant Christmas tree, wearing a red hoodie and gray sweatpants, smiling brightly up at the camera with dimples the size of craters. There was a red and black beanie pulled over his head, his deep brown hair only peeking out slightly from the front and back.

The headline beneath it was: New Jersey Couple Awakes to their Twelve Year Old Son Gone Without a Trace.

Bentley continued to scroll, watching the body of the article appear as he did.

Isabelle and Jonathan Lancaster awoke the morning of May 6 like it was any other day… little did they know, it wasn’t. When Isabelle Lancaster went to wake up her pre-teen son for school, he wasn’t there.

‘There was nothing in his room or in the rest of the house that would suggest he ran away. Even his cellphone was still charging on his nightstand.’ Says Eugenia Carlomile, head detective on the case. ‘No signs of forced entry or forced exit, no sightings of him or any suspicious persons anywhere outside of their house. We’re waiting for further evidence to continue our search.’

Titus Lancaster was last seen on May 5, when he and his parents parted ways for bed around 10:45pm. He was reportedly wearing a black hoodie with his last name and the number 16 on the back, and the Gotham City Middle School basketball logo on the front, with light gray sweatpants and a black and red beanie on his head. 

As of today, July 17, there are still no sightings of Titus. His family is holding an empty, closed casket funeral that is open to the public for anyone who wishes to grieve with them on July 27.

If you have seen or believe you have seen Titus Lancaster, or have heard any additional information regarding his disappearance, please contact the Gotham City Police Department at (856)-916-GCPD.

Bentley scrolled back to the top and saved the website to his favorites folder, before tapping his way back to the initial search results.

The second website that came up was Gotham News Network (GNN). When he opened it, there was a button at the top that said About the Disappearance of Titus Lancaster, but below that stood the large headline: Isabelle and Jonathan Lancaster Found Dead.

He took a deep breath, in and out, then scrolled down.

Isabelle and Jonathan Lancaster were found dead in their garage due to asphyxiation on July 28, caused by the trapped fumes of two running vehicles. Detective Eugenia Carlomile suggests this was a direct response to their missing twelve-year-old son, Titus Lancaster’s closed casket funeral the day before.

Bentley opted out of reading the rest of the article, saving it to his file with the other instead.

He couldn’t even imagine going missing, only to come back and learn your parents were dead.

The rest of the articles were repeats of those two, the only other relevant website being one called Gotham Areopagus. Bentley clicked on it, but it just ended up being a congratulations on their website for a group graduating from a children’s physics course there early in the year. Titus was among the list of names.

“I didn’t find anything about Titus, other than what happened to him and his parents,” Bentley said quietly, glancing over at Asten. “And that he took some class at a place called the… Areopagus?”

Asten nodded lightly, typing something next to Titus’s name. “It’s some rich kid's extracurricular class thing. I think people go there to just… take more classes? Nico’s been there.”

Bentley glanced over at the blonde, who shrugged. “It’s like, hands on STEM class stuff. I only went to a birthday party there, but there are year-long courses and stuff you can take.”

Bentley nodded lightly. He wasn’t going to ask what STEM meant.

“I’m surprised you didn’t know about it, nosebleed,” Asten taunted, nudging Bentley with his elbow. “Y’know, being the kid of the richest man, like, ever, and everything.”

Bentley shrugged. “I’m not from here, remember? I’m from Drew.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Asten continued. “You can look up someone else, then. It’s fine if you can’t find much.”

Bentley moved onto another random name, in the middle of the list: Davis Henderson.

Why did he recognize that name?

He typed it into his browser, scanning the results that popped up. The first one was on a news site called Right Now New Jersey, and when he clicked on it, the headline read: New Jersey College Student Assaulted at Work.

When he opened it, a photograph of an eerily familiar, blonde-haired-green-eyed guy came up. He was wearing a blue button up and a little waist apron, with a notepad and pen in his hands, smiling down at the camera. Behind him was a bar.

The bar Bentley went into when he was running from his father last year. It was that Davis, the waiter that tried to keep Bentley away from his father’s men, to protect him, only to get the butt of a pistol to his head.

21-year-old Davis Henderson was assaulted by an unknown assailant in the back room of the bar he works at. He was found unconscious with a blow to the head by coworker, Madison Langford, who called the police. ‘All I saw was blood, a lot of it, and I immediately called the cops,’ Said Langford, Henderson’s coworker in training. ‘I was so afraid he might’ve been dead.’

Henderson woke up confused and unable to give the police any description of his assailant or the incident in question. The camera system in the bar seemed to have been tampered with, as the exact time of the assault was cut out of the footage. More on this story as it develops.

Bentley quickly clicked off of that article. He could still remember the way the gun cracked as it collided with the waiter’s head. The way he dropped like a rag doll. The fact that it was all his fault.

He silently scrolled down to the next article instead, on the same website as Titus’s: Gotham’s Coldest Cases. The headline was: Star Princeton University Student Missing?

He opened it up and scrolled past the exact picture of Davis that was on the other website.

21-year-old Princeton University student Davis Henderson was declared missing on August 2nd, after not showing up to work or classes for 24 hours. 

He was last seen on surveillance walking between his home and work on August 1st at approximately 3:27am on 9th street, near Whitehouse Library and The Gotham Areopagus. He was wearing a blue button-up, black slacks, and black tennis-shoes. He didn’t make contact with anyone on or around the time of his disappearance, and there is no surveillance footage of him returning to his apartment complex that night or the following 48 hours.

‘I assumed he was sick when he didn’t come to class,’ Said Ethan Hunt, Davis’s classmate at Princeton University. ‘But he didn’t respond all day. I drove all the way to his apartment complex in Gotham, to make sure he hadn’t fallen seriously ill, but it was still locked and he wasn’t home.’

If you have seen or believe you have seen Davis Henderson, or have heard any additional information regarding his disappearance, please contact the Gotham City Police Department at (856)-916-GCPD.

Bentley sighed lightly and closed the website. Davis was so nice to him, and now he was… gone. Disappeared off the street.

And wasn’t Whitehouse Library the same place where The Secret Keeper chased Asten?

When he went through more of the search results, they were just repeats of those two stories, plus a few social media posts where Davis was tagged. Bentley scoured four different accounts of his, even going back as far as when he was a young teenager, but there was nothing that aided his search or seemed suspicious in the slightest. 

Bentley sighed heavily, glancing at the list Asten had made. “This guy was last seen in the same area where the Secret Keeper chased you.” 

Asten glanced over at him, then at his phone. “Who?”

“Davis Henderson,” Bentley stated, and Asten nodded, finding Davis’s column and typing a few things next to his name.

“I’m not finding anything on this Olivia girl but her dream and the reports of her going missing,” Nico stated. “She saw the Secret Keeper in her yard.”

“That’s fine,” Asten muttered.

Well, three down. Forty-six to go.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[maccreadysbaby]

what was asten doing in the middle of the night when he was out of bed?

teehee I thought you’d never ask

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne Drabbles

tw: general angst

wanna read the extended fic? here’s the table of contents!

I have a thing about sad characters so here you go. also JASON AND ASTEN JASON AND ASTEN JASON AND ASTEN

⚠️ THIS IS NOT THE NEXT CHAPTER OF A HUNDRED WAYS TO BECOME A WAYNE. THIS TAKES PLACE DURING AND IMMEDIATELY AFTER CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

THIS TAKES PLACE BETWEEN CHAPTERS SEVENTEEN AND EIGHTEEN OF A HUNDRED WAYS TO BECOME A WAYNE.

SUNDAY — AUGUST 9 — 2:54AM

ASTEN COULDN’T SLEEP.

Not that he wanted to, with the Secret Keeper running rampant in people’s heads. Instead, he was buried in Tim’s old laptop on the right side of Bentley Whittaker’s king bed, spending the night in Wayne Manor for the second night in a row. His life was starting to feel more and more like some hit tv show. Sad orphan boy gets befriended by the richest man in town’s kid… because they were both getting stalked and nearly murdered by a raging supervillain. Of course their response would be revenge — it always was in shows like that.

Bentley and Nico didn’t seem to have problems falling asleep, although the endless research had probably helped coax them into it. Hours of searching and they’d found nothing… nothing that connected the missing. Nothing that made sense. Asten had been staring at that screen for so long his eyes were starting to fail, creating phantom words and swapping letters around without his permission.

He sighed heavily, rubbing at his eyes, pushing against them with the heels of his hands until colors exploded in his vision. Bentley’s clock said it was 2:55am, but it felt more like the sun had just gone down. Like the night was never going to end, and he was going to be stuck in a loop of death forever.

He blinked furiously, squinting at the bright screen, watching all the letters in the spreadsheet he’d typed up spin and switch around. 

His Dyslexia always got worse when he stared at a screen for too long.

With a frustrated noise, he closed the laptop with a clack. Stopping just felt like failure at this point. If the police or superheroes of Gotham got ahold of the Secret Keeper first, she wouldn’t get what she deserved. Asten was going to rain hellfire down on her head before any pitiful little prosecution could be proclaimed, and to do that, he needed to keep pushing on.

But he was pretty sure his eyeballs were going to fall out of his head if he stared at that screen any longer — which would definitely put a wrench in his searching. But he needed to do something. Swimming in his own mind was pretty much equivalent to navigating a minefield, and right then, he didn’t need to blow up.

So, instead, he got out of the bed. Where was he going? He wasn’t sure. Not a clue, actually. Two in the morning probably wasn’t the ideal hour to explore Wayne Manor like a creep, but his feet pushed him toward Bentley’s bedroom door anyways. Getting lost or in trouble in the Manor was better than getting lost or in trouble in his own mind.

What he wouldn’t give for a pack of cigarettes right about then. Technically, he was supposed to be done with them. Nico thought he was. But, in high-stress situations, old habits die hard.

If only he freaking had a pack.

With a quiet sigh, he pushed the bedroom door open. Even the hallway at Wayne Manor was huge and long and luxurious. He’d been too dazed to really pay attention when he’d come in and out the first couple of times — he’d been on autopilot for hours, only taking the wheel again when he decided he was going to destroy the Secret Keeper.

He was pretty sure the square footage of the hallway alone was larger than his entire apartment. The entire thing was lined with a massively long, velvety rug that looked akin to a red carpet. The dozens of blown-up photographs on the walls were hung in ornate golden frames that would probably cost more than Asten’s organs. He shut the bedroom door as softly as he could, and staying eerily silent, he crept downstairs.

The foyer was massive and intricate and all the things his bare, gross apartment wasn’t. The walls were coated in a layer of fancy wainscoting, similar to Nico’s house, and each window had curtains that looked like something from old money nobles. There were a ton of windows, actually — all evenly spaced and perfectly clean. He knew that if it were morning, the entire place would be gold. It reminded him of home. Too much of home — of São Paulo — so he moved on.

He took the first hallway he found. It was dark downstairs, because the lights had been turned off for the night, and the Manor was eerily silent for a place that held at least four of Bruce Wayne’s children at any given time.

Asten pushed himself along. Down that hallway was the den where they’d spent most of their day, complete with cozy couches and a fireplace. The next room was a library that looked like something fit for royalty. Lined with shelves and so many books — surely Bruce hadn’t read all of them? — there had to be at least a few thousand. A few lamps were left on, making the whole room glow warmly. Asten decided he should avoid it. It would be too easy to fall asleep in a place like that, and falling asleep wasn’t on his agenda. So, on he went, farther down the perfect hallway.

The next room, from what he could see through the tiny crack in the door, was an office. He didn’t spend too much time staring inside, in fear Bruce Wayne was being very quiet inside. He tip-toed away and came up to the next door.

And he stopped.

It looked to be a billiard room. There was a massive fireplace on one end, not burning, the room dimly lit by old, fancy looking sconces that lined the walls. There was a pool table and sitting area, all posh and perfect and spotless, but that wasn’t what caught his eye.

In the back of the room, there was an archway that outlined a nook — large enough to house a circular dining table.

There was a massive grand piano there instead.

Asten blinked. Glanced both ways down the hall like he was crossing the street. The Manor was huge, and… he was getting kind of tired of walking. Yeah. Bruce probably wouldn’t mind if he went inside. Probably. Just for a minute.

Asten blinked, and he was in the middle of the room. Blinked again, and he was settling on the stool in front of the piano. Blinked a third time and he was lifting up the glossy wooden fallboard that kept the keys hidden from sight, like his hands, his body was moving by itself.

He breathed in. He was so going to get kicked out for this. He should go back up to Bentley’s room and lay there, try to sleep…

His fingers crept up onto the keys instead.

Something about it felt so… strange. He hadn’t touched a piano since he lived in Brazil. It felt oddly foreign at the same time that it felt… 

Like home.

His hands started to move on their own, trying a few chords. The piano sounded perfect, even better than the white grand piano he and his mother shared in their home back in São Paulo. There was no doubt in his mind that the butler took great care of the instrument. He wondered, though, which Wayne knew how to play it?

With a breath and a final glance toward the empty doorway, his fingers began to glide, slowly, at first, and then quicker as the long-unused muscle memory started to come back to him. The gentle melody of his mother’s favorite song floated around the room, hanging in the air like smoke.

It wasn’t long — a minute, maybe — before the jittery nervousness that made him want a cigarette floated off, carried away by the melody he remembered so vividly echoing through the house in Brazil. He took a breath and closed his eyes, letting his hands go without him. They seemed to remember the notes even before his mind did.

“Can’t sleep?”

Asten nearly fell off the stool from the sheer violence with which he jumped. His fingers fumbled, plucking several off-key notes before he shut the fallboard with a loud wham that made him cringe.

One of Bentley’s brothers was standing in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest, leaning up against the frame all nonchalantly. He was wearing a gray t-shirt and black sweatpants, and Asten might not have known which one it was, if it wasn’t for the streak of platinum that stuck out at the front of his black hair.

He knew that this one was Jason, the one with the Crime Alley accent.

He glanced at the closed piano, then at Jason, then at various random places around the room. “I… uh…”

Words failed him and his voice tapered off, his gaze falling to the carpet beneath his feet. He should’ve stayed in Bentley’s room.

Jason moved, pushing himself out of the doorway and into the room a few steps. “Asten, right?” 

The teenager wordlessly nodded, still peering down at the floor.

“Why’d you stop playing?” Jason’s voice was closer to him now. Asten fought with himself — about twenty crude remarks he could’ve said came to his mind, but he decided he shouldn’t. He was a guest in Jason’s house. A guest doing something stupid.

Again, words seemed to fail him. “I don’t… uh… I’m… sorry.”

Jason didn’t respond. Asten didn’t look up. It was true that Crime Alley kids knew how to scrap, and Asten could hold his own, but he knew he stood no chance if Jason were to actually get mad at him. (Jason was, what, twenty-one?) 

He was too busy staring at his shoes to notice that Jason had drifted toward the piano, and the fallboard had been tugged back open. “You live in Crime Alley, don’t you?”

Asten’s eyes suddenly flicked up to Jason’s face, alarm bells screeching in his head. He breathed in and shook his head as his self-defense measures came back online in a flash. 

“Yeah,” He said, more venomous than he’d intended, but he couldn’t back down now. “Not all of us have a millionaire to dig us out of our holes, Wayne.”

He regretted it as soon as it came out of his mouth, but he didn’t let his expression falter. Keeping up the tough appearance was what kept you alive in the alley — surely Jason knew that. Neither of their faces changed, neither of them openly displayed anything but nonchalance, on Jason’s end, and anger, on Asten’s.

“It’s Todd, actually,” Jason replied. Asten said nothing, but instead, glanced back down at the piano keys that were now visible again. “Keep playing.”

Asten looked up at Jason, who just looked at him in return. His face stayed neutral, his icy eyes void of hidden motives, his voice even and genuine.

So he obliged — letting his hands drift up to the keys again. He started the song over, slowly at first. He’d never really played in front of anybody but his mom and his dad. His uncle didn’t know he could play the piano. Not that they could ever afford one if he did know.

The same notes bounced around the room again, and Asten could practically feel Jason’s eyes on him, boring into his soul. The first thirty seconds of the song went normally — Asten hit all the keys, chords, notes correctly. It sounded just like it did when he used to practice it at home.

And then it changed.

At first he couldn’t decipher how — his hands hadn’t moved on the board, yet there were harmonies he knew for a fact he wasn’t playing.

Jason’s hands were on the other end of the board.

Jason Todd knew how to play his mother’s favorite song?

He was better versed with the instrument than Asten was — his fingers seemed to move flawlessly, drifting up to the higher keys until they were right near his. Asten knew this version of the song, the two-person duet version. He knew because the hands on the keyboard alongside his own used to be his mother’s.

Jason played it exactly like she did. His hands even moved in the same rhythmic sort of way hers did, sliding up and down the keys the longer he held the note out. Even though Jason was standing up, he caught his foot moving, like he was pushing phantom petals while Asten pressed on the real ones.

The song, now louder, livelier, fuller, bounced around the room just like it used to in São Paulo. His mother used to squeeze herself on the bench next to him when they played, his father, sitting on the couch opposite the white grand piano, listening, watching with a little smile on his face. It sounded exactly the same as it did back then — so similar that Asten could’ve mistaken the hands next to his to be her’s, the harmonies and melodies intertwining so thoughtfully with his own coming to fruition under her fingertips. That the presence nearby was hers, and that he was in Brazil, and that everything was fine.

It was suddenly very hard to see the keys. 

He blinked through it, anyways. The show must go on, right? He simply ignored it with everything in him when the something that was blurring his vision fell down his face and landed on his hands. He felt eyes on him, but the song kept going and kept going for the full six-minute runtime. Jason’s hands left the keys near the end, and Asten played a few seconds more before he let the sound fade away.

Silence ensued.

And then a soft: “You alright, kid?”

Asten nodded falsely, wiping at his eyes with his sleeves, even though the simple question seemed to bring more tears with it. God, he missed his mom. He missed his mom so much he felt like he could curl up and die from it.

He purposely turned his head away from Jason, willing the tears to stop, trying to convince himself it didn’t hurt that bad. “Someone- uh, someone else. Used to play it with me… like that,” He fumbled over his words like he was just learning to speak, scrubbing more vigorously at his wet face like his sleeves could soak up all the pain and make it go away. 

There was another silence.

“I’m sure they’d be happy to know you remember it,” Jason replied, as though he could read Asten’s very mind and knew his entire life’s story from start to finish. That… well, that statement didn’t actually go over very well. It seemed the most perfect thing to say and the absolute worst thing to say at the same time. Asten couldn’t even decide how he felt about it, but he didn’t get to — as quickly as he’d scrubbed his tears away, they came back with even more of a vengeance than the first time.

If his parents were still alive, he’d still be in Brazil. He wouldn’t be getting stalked, he wouldn’t be running from killers, he wouldn’t be digging in dumpsters for food, and he wouldn’t feel so completely and utterly alone all the time.

Asten didn’t move much after that, transitioning from the piano bench to a chair not even fifteen feet away, and that’s where he stayed for almost five more hours, listening to Jason play his mother’s favorite song over and over and over.

Asten never asked how he knew it.

—

HERE’S THE SONG! The first one is the more tame version (one person) and the second is the epic-er version (also one person, but in this case, two)

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

first day of school is finally here for real. ALSO you meet the two additional lead characters for the whole story in this chapter :)

part five

❝ BRISTOL VS CRIME ALLEY ❞

MONDAY — AUGUST 3 — 8:21AM

GOTHAM ACADEMY WAS HUGE. So much bigger than it had been when Bentley and Dick picked up Damian when they retrieved Titus from the vet. It had to be twice the size, maybe even three times, now that Bentley was staring at the front entrance in a uniform that matched all of the kids filing inside. It almost looked like a scary stone mansion from a horror movie.

He’d done a good job keeping it together that morning. The anxiousness hadn’t been as bad as last night, and he was able to relax with Dick to turn breakfast into storytime like he always did. But now? Now, Bentley was sitting in the backseat of Bruce’s car, right next to Damian, in the exact same uniform as him, and he felt like a billion bees were taking up his body as their home. Duke was in the passenger’s seat even though he could drive. Bruce wanted to drive them all on the first day and none of them complained; Damian said it was better than when Duke drove him.

The clock on the dashboard read 8:21am, which meant, according to the schedule he had folded up in his pocket, Bentley had exactly twenty-four minutes before he needed to be in his classroom. The gray, overcast sky that might have indicated an oncoming storm did little to ease his never ending nerves.

“Alright, boys,” Bruce started, turning backwards so he could see them all at once. “Have a great day. Don’t hesitate to call or text if you need anything at all. I’ll be in the pick-up line this afternoon.”

He’d taken up a spot in the lot ahead of the school instead of driving through the drop-off-line, and Bentley was grateful for that, because in the drop-off-line, kids got out of their cars and went inside immediately. They had to get out of the car fast or the people behind them started honking. The parking lot was much nicer — Bentley didn’t have to worry about being too slow when there was no one behind them.

He flinched involuntarily when Damian popped his door open and threw his red backpack over his shoulder. “Goodbye, Father.”

He got out and closed the door behind him, striding up the massive concrete steps and disappearing into the mass of matching students like he’d done it a thousand times. Bentley wished he had his confidence.

Instead, his mouth was really dry, and his stomach was doing the crampy thing again. 

Bruce turned back to look at him. “You doing alright, chum?”

Bentley shrugged under the weight of his blue-gray gaze. He’d only heard Bruce use that nickname for Dick a couple times, usually when he was getting patched up after a rough patrol, so he wasn’t quite sure why he used it on him right then. But he didn’t mind.

“…I’m okay,” He replied, glancing down at his hands and fiddling with them in his lap. He saw Duke glance back at him from his spot in the front seat.

“Nervous?” Bruce inquired.

“Yeah,”

The man hummed in acknowledgement. “Feeling bad?”

He shrugged again. “A little.”

Bruce opened his console and pulled out a little ziplock bag, holding it back toward Bentley. It had two of the little pink things in it.

“It’s not too late to change your mind,” Bruce reassured as Bentley took the bag from his hand. “I’ll drive you right home if you want me to.”

The child sighed, peeling the little bag open and popping the chewy things in his mouth. He might’ve felt like he was going to vibrate away thanks to all the anxiety running around inside of him, but he didn’t intend on backing out now. The only way to really make his father’s words go away was to prove them wrong, make them sound ridiculous. Yes, he was nervous, but he wasn’t pathetic.

“I’ll be okay,” He muttered after a moment. Bruce smiled lightly.

“Do you have your phone?”

“Yes,” He replied, patting his pocket just to make sure. It was definitely in there.

“Do you want me to walk you in?”

Bentley looked back out the window. There weren’t very many parents venturing inside unless they had the hand of a really little kid. Way littler than Bentley. But, after all, he kinda had a built-in person to walk him in since Duke went there, too. 

“I don’t think so,” He said softly. “Duke’s coming; so I think I’ll be fine.”

Bruce’s eyes sparkled like they always did when dealing with one of his children, and he smiled. “Alright. You can go in whenever you’re ready. Take your time.”

Bentley glanced back at the entry of the utterly massive, expansive school. All of the other kids looked perfectly comfortable walking inside, if not a few that looked cold. None of them looked afraid or hesitant except for the younger ones, but that didn’t really count. Bentley wasn’t five, he was ten. He could complete the mere task of walking into a school building. Damian had done it with ease, and Bentley didn’t think the fact that he was an assassin helped him walk into a school.

He’d be fine.

He reached into the floorboard and grabbed his backpack, shifting it around until he could put it on his back. He took a deep breath and blew it out again.

“I’m ready…”

Bruce smiled. “See you guys this afternoon. Text me if you need anything. Or if you just want to. I’m not above grade-school gossip.”

Bentley smiled lightly, and nodded in agreement. 

“See you later, B,” Duke said, popping his door open, too. Bentley followed his lead and opened his. The mild cold of autumn washed over him, and he shivered, not completely from the cold but not completely from being anxious, either.

“Bye, Bruce,” He said. Which was weird, because he’d never actually said bye to Bruce before. Sure, Bruce had left for business trips, and Justice League (aka a really cool superhero group) missions, and Bentley had gone places with Dick and Tim, but he’d never actually told him bye to go be somewhere by himself, without a single Wayne. It felt weird.

“Bye, Bentley.”

He breathed deep again, in and out, climbing out of the car. Duke was standing next to the door, waiting to close it behind him.

The building looked bigger now that he wasn’t in the car. Could a building change size in front of your eyes?

Duke closed the car door with a bang, and Bentley flinched when his hand landed on his shoulder.

“You ready for this, little dude?”

He sighed. “As I’ll ever be.”

Duke sighed too, and then a second later, they started walking.

“Can I see your schedule?” He questioned. Bentley dug around in his pocket and pulled out the neatly folded piece of paper, handing it over to Duke, who took it and unfolded it. Bentley tried not to stare at the other kids (one girl had long, pink hair? He didn’t know they were allowed to do that.) as they made their way up the stairs to the massive doors that were propped open.

Duke scanned the page quickly. “How do you already have a free period? This year is my first time having one.”

Bentley shrugged. “When I took a bunch of tests on the computer, Tim told me I tested out of sixth grade English.”

Duke nodded lightly. “So you just don’t have to take it?”

“I dunno. Bruce said I could take a harder one instead, but I didn’t want to,”

Duke nodded again, handing the paper back to him. “Looks like your first class is Dr. Keene. I had him a few years back, he teaches a couple different classes. I think you’ll like him.”

Bentley nodded lightly, and Duke put his hand back on his shoulder, and it didn’t leave as they integrated into the group of kids going through the door. There was a bunch of overlapping chatter that got louder as they drew closer. There were a bunch of girls with fancy makeup and jewelry, and they looked about Duke’s age. Some of the kids had very decorated backpacks to make up for the uniforms. He watched a boy with black and blue hair — probably not much older than him but about a whole head taller — drop a lit cigarette right outside the door and smush it under the toe of his shoe before he went inside.

Other kids were strange.

They also seemed to not care about him in the slightest. He hadn’t even seen anyone look at him but Duke, and it made his anxiety still just a little bit. Maybe he wouldn’t be forced into conversations he didn’t know how to react to.

Gotham Academy was huge. The entryway looked more like a mansion than a school, with classy dark wainscoting and big pictures on the wall of uniformed students doing various things. Dueling staircases curved up each side of the room, and the massive light fixture in the middle — not really a chandelier, but not not a chandelier — bathed the whole room in a warm glow.

Bentley realized all the other kids knew where they were going. He did not.

Duke kept his hand where it was as he led Bentley to the left, toward the staircase. “Lucky for you, the classes don’t get super far apart until you’re highschool age. All of yours should be in the same general area.”

Bentley nodded lightly, but he wasn’t sure Duke caught it. They thudded up the stairs behind the stream of kids and veered off to the left. Left staircase, left hallway — he could remember that.

The number of students thinned out in that hall, mostly ones around Bentley’s age, but some older, too. The walls were lined with gray metal lockers that also stressed him out. Because the thought of not being able to get his open and not being able to get to his books freaked him out.

He probably wouldn’t use it much, wherever it was. He had a backpack for that.

“Dr. Keene is right up here,” Duke stated, gesturing to a classroom door on the left that was propped open. There were others scattered among the hall, too, but Dr. Keene’s had brighter light shining from it. Probably because it was on the exterior wall, so it had windows.

“I’ll meet you back here to walk you to the library for your free period, okay?” Duke questioned. He let go of Bentley’s shoulder, probably to walk away, and a surge of panic shot through him tenfold. He made a small, embarrassing sound and reached out, clamping onto the sleeve of Duke’s blazer.

“Wait!”

His heart was beating really fast. When had that started?

“Hey, it’s okay,” Duke reassured, putting his hand back where it had been on his shoulder. “I’m not going to be far — just in the hall on the right side of the stairs. You can text or call me. I’ll be here in a split second. Or, if you get too uncomfortable, you can text or call Bruce. He’ll come pick you up and take you home. He took off work today just in case.”

Bentley sucked in a breath, watching the stream of kids pass. None of them looked scared.

“I promise. You need someone and we’re here, okay? I’m sure even Tim or Dick would pick you up if you asked. Not to mention Damian would probably ditch class if you needed him.”

Bentley fought back a cringe. He wasn’t so sure of that, not right now, at least. Damian hadn’t been talking to him much lately. Or anyone, really. 

“Are you sure?” He muttered.

Duke nodded. “Positive.”

Bentley glanced around. The number of students in the hall was getting smaller, and Duke probably needed to go to class.

“You gonna be okay?”

He took another deep breath. “…think so.”

“Okay. I’m going to go to my classroom now,” Duke stated, releasing Bentley’s shoulder. He didn’t react this time. “Text me!”

Bentley muttered a small agreement as he watched Duke disappear down the hallway, weaving between other students until he couldn’t see him anymore.

He was alone.

Last time he was alone, he was in a warehouse with his father.

He shook the thought away and turned, realizing he probably looked dumb standing still in the hallway. The classroom door was a mere five feet in front of him. Kids kept walking inside like it was normal, like it wasn’t scary at all.

So Bentley shook his hands out by his sides and made sure his phone was in his pocket again, then pushed himself forward. Then turned, and stepped into the room.

Dr. Keene’s room was… cool. He taught environmental science, and it was obvious with the colorful posters about things like the water cycle and rocks and layers of the earth that were plastered around the room. He had a human sized skeleton sitting in the front corner with a bowler hat — probably for the Biology class he taught. The chalkboard was split in half, one side said Environmental Science, and the other, Biology. That’s probably what Duke had him for. From what Bentley understood, that was an older kid class.

The desks were organized into groups of three. Each one had a paper with a number sitting on it, but no one was in a desk yet, probably waiting for Dr. Keene to assign seats. The students around the room were chattering excitedly, and Dr. Keene was standing over the computer at his desk, typing something.

He looked older. Maybe similar in age to Alfred. He had white hair everywhere on his head but the top, and glasses perched on his nose. He was in a blue button up and slacks, and he looked, well. He looked fine, Bentley guessed. At least he didn’t look very mean.

Bentley drifted out of the doorway and stood near the wall so he wouldn’t be in the way.

All of the kids were in little cliques, talking to each other about summers and classes and comparing schedules. Bentley just sort of stood there, listening to them talk but not making any moves to talk himself. 

A loud bell noise rang over the intercom, and Dr. Keene moved from his computer.

“Alright, students, listen up,” He announced, grabbing a piece of paper off of his desk. “When I call your name, say here, and I’ll tell you your seat number.”

Bentley fiddled with the straps of his backpack as he waited for him to begin speaking.

“Ashley Adams,” 

“Here,” A small blonde girl with tight, coily hair replied.

Dr. Keene nodded. “Seat 17. Hugo Bronwyn.”

“Here,” This one was a boy with a brown bowl cut and a massive puffer jacket. Bentley hadn’t even worn a jacket — it wasn’t very cold.

“Seat 2. Neveah Bailey,”

“Here!” A rather excitable brunette girl bounced and held her hand up. She had about thirty bracelets on the her wrist. 

“Seat 9.”

Bentley listened quietly as he called the students names, glancing at them when they said here.

“Asten Evans,”

“Here,”

Bentley jumped when a voice came from behind him. He hadn’t even known someone was standing back there, on the other side of the door. When he glanced back, he recognized the boy as the one with the cigarette outside. He had black hair that fell just past his ears and faded into a rich blue at the bottom. His skin was darker than Bentley’s, but not quite as dark as Damian’s, and he had piercing green eyes that looked sort of menacing. He was propped against the wall with a nonchalant, uncaring way about him, and his solid black backpack only housed a few pins with questionable symbols that may or may not have been weird band logos? He pushed himself off the wall with a quick sigh, and now that Bentley was closer to him, he looked a little bit older. Maybe even older than Damian.

“Seat 10,”

Bentley watched closely as Asten made his way to an empty trio of desks and sat down, letting his bag drop to the floor with a little pouf noise.

Dr. Keene went on naming kids off. There were a lot of girls in the class — more so than boys. There was probably double the amount of girls.

“Nico Rockefeller,” 

“Here,” A hand popped up from behind a few other students, and they moved just the right way for Bentley to see a little dirty blonde boy. He was certainly small, though a little bigger than Bentley himself. He had ocean blue eyes that reminded him of Dick a little, and his bag was blue, too, with nothing on it but a rocketship and UFO keychain.

“Seat 11,”

Dr. Keene hummed in… annoyance, maybe? When Nico and Asten both chimed yes! as Nico slid into the seat across from the blue-haired boy. Apparently they were friends.

Bentley quietly wondered if he would meet any of Damian’s friends. Maybe he was in class with one, he wasn’t really sure. But he did snap back into reality pretty quickly when Dr. Keene called:

“Bentley Whittaker,”

He fought the urge to keep his mouth glued shut, and instead, forced out a little: “I’m here.”

Dr. Keene’s cold eyes wandered for a moment before they landed on him. “My, I almost didn’t see you over there. Seat number 12.”

He nodded slightly, glancing around at the big numbers on the desks. After a quiet moment, when Dr. Keene was already calling the next name, he spotted it: desk twelve was the third desk in the group with Asten Evans, the cigarette kid, and Nico Rockefeller.

Bentley stayed deathly quiet as he made his way over there, hanging his bag on the back of the chair and taking a seat in the desk. He didn’t dare make eye contact with either of his group members. He hadn’t exactly expected to be seated so close to other kids, in a group, he thought it would be more individual. Guess not.

“So, you’re Bruce Wayne’s new ward, huh?”

His eyes snapped up to Asten when he whispered that. The blue-haired-boy was staring straight back at him, head tilted slightly. He had a faint accent that Bentley thought he’d heard similar to before. He twisted his hands together in his lap and sucked in a breath.

“What… do you mean?” He sounded really young, talking to Asten. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe Asten sounded old?

Asten leaned back in his chair with a soft sigh. “It’s hard to miss Bruce Wayne rolling up to the school in his fancy car. Even harder to miss when a third kid gets out instead of the normal two.”

Bentley said nothing, but averted his gaze down to the top of the desk.

“What he means is-“ Nico sent a warning glance across the table to Asten. “-Hi, I’m Nico, and he’s Asten, the idiot. Bentley, right?”

He had a faint little smile that kind of reminded Bentley of Dick again, and he seemed a bit nicer than Asten. “…Yeah.”

Nico nodded. “Nice to meet you. How old are you?”

Bentley looked down at his lap. “Ten.”

“Wow, you’re probably the youngest in here,” The blonde replied, folding his arms on the desk. “I’m eleven. Jerkface over here is thirteen.”

Asten scowled at him over the desks. So, Bentley had been right about him being older than Damian. But what was a thirteen-year-old doing in a sixth grade class? Wasn’t he supposed to be in eighth grade?

“And that’s how you introduce yourself, idiot,” Nico grumbled. Asten rolled his eyes. For friends, they didn’t seem to be very nice to each other. But then again, it wasn’t very different from Dick and Jason’s relationship, and they were brothers.

“Sorry I don’t want to write a biography every time I meet someone,” 

“Saying your name isn’t a biography,”

“If they want to know my name, they’ll ask,”

“That’s not polite,”

“Since when have I ever been polite?”

“You’re polite to my parents,”

“Yeah, because they already hate me, you dingus,”

Bentley just stared down at his desk and listened quietly. Being in a group with kids that he’d never met was already going to be a challenge, but being in a group with two boys that already knew each other was probably going to be even harder.

“They don’t hate you,”

“It’s straight pity that keeps me in their good graces,”

“It is not,”

“You wouldn’t believe the amount of adults I can make all sappy and weird,”

“I could because I’m with you when you do it, idiot. My parents don’t like you out of pity,”

“Whatever you say,”

“Alright,” Dr. Keene’s voice rang out through the room. Bentley hadn’t even realized everyone was seated until then. “I’m going to hand out a get-to-know-me worksheet, and that’s all we’re doing today. Talk quietly within your groups, make friends. Real classwork starts tomorrow.”

Bentley watched as he grabbed a file folder off his desk and came around to all the groups, dropping a page in front of each student. It was black and white with a big cartoon star with a smiley face in the top corner. Across the top it read, in a big, bubbly font: get to know me!

It was full of questions like what’s your favorite color? What’s your dream job? Do you play sports? Where do you live?

Bentley dragged a pencil out of the side pocket of his backpack and wrote his name on the name blank. The class went mostly quiet aside from a little bit of chatter. The first questions were easy. His favorite color was blue. His dream job, he guessed, would be a superhero, but he didn’t think he needed to put that. He wrote detective instead. He didn’t play sports. He lived in Wayne Manor. He paused on question five.

How many siblings do you have?

He blinked a few times. Technically, he didn’t have any, right? Or did he count his sister even though she was never born? Was he supposed to count the Waynes since he lived with them and Bruce was his guardian? He could’ve put zero. Or one, for his sister. Or eight, for Barbara, Dick, Jason, Cass, Tim, Steph, Duke, and Damian.

He glanced up toward the other boy’s papers, as if their number of siblings would somehow help him decide his own. Asten was writing with a red ink pen, and his number of siblings was zero. Bentley also managed to see that the where do you live question had been answered with a messily scrawled Crime Alley with a skull and crossbones drawn beside it.

Nico’s number of siblings was one, and said baby sister next to it. His where do you live question was answered with a neatly written Bristol.

It didn’t surprise him. Nico seemed to be more like Tim, and he was from Bristol, while Asten was similar to Jason, who was from Crime Alley.

Bentley was pretty sure Wayne Manor was in the Bristol area.

He kept quietly answering the questions, eventually just scrawling a zero next to the sibling question. Near the end of the class, Dr. Keene got up and did a little presentation about himself, his family, where he went to college, what he does outside of school, and so on. He was a photographer. A good one, Bentley thought, but not as good as Tim used to be. (Dick and Jason always thought it was funny to show off the pictures Tim took of Robin and Batman when he was little and call him a stalker. That’s how he found out their identities, following them around and taking pictures. Bentley had managed to see a few, much to Tim’s disdain, and they were actually very well done. Tim was in the age range of nine to thirteen when he followed the vigilantes around and took nice looking snapshots, and here Bentley was, ten and scared to even be at school.)

“Sorry, I don’t mean to be weird or anything, but why did you put zero on your siblings?” 

Bentley glanced up at Nico, who was peering back at him in curiosity. Man, his eyes looked a lot like Dick’s.

“Dude, you don’t just ask someone that,” Asten grumbled, with an are you serious? look on his face.

“I just thought it was weird. Bruce Wayne has a bunch of kids,”

“A bunch of adopted kids, buckethead,”

“No, the one in the grade above us isn’t adopted. His last name is Wayne. Dimitri or whatever,”

“Damian,” Bentley corrected. Nico nodded toward him.

“Damian,”

“People can get their last names changed when they get adopted,” Asten argued. “There’s no telling if he is or isn’t, and it’s really none of your business.”

Nico sank back into his chair. “Sorry,” He said, but it was more aimed toward Bentley.

“…It’s okay,” He replied, tapping his pencil against the top of the desk. A few quiet moment passed before:

“Have you heard about all the missing people? It’s like half of Gotham is disappearing,”

Bentley glanced up at Asten when he spoke. 

“Yeah. Freaks me out,” Nico replied. 

Asten hummed. “The last person that went missing was a kid that disappeared from his house in Bristol, I think. He didn’t go here, though.”

Bentley knew that was true. It had been on Tim’s papers in the batcave.

Nico’s eyebrows nearly shot off of his face. “Dead serious?”

“Dead serious. Right, Bentley?”

Bentley didn’t know how Asten had learned that, or why he wanted his input. Tim said it was pretty quiet information, but he couldn’t really deny that he knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Yeah,” He replied softly. He remembered Tim saying the last person to go missing was a fifteen year old boy who lived in Bristol, not too far from the manor. Nico looked over and searched Bentley’s face for any sign that he was joking, and when there wasn’t any, he shuddered.

“I think I’m going to stay at your house tonight,” He murmured. Asten snickered. 

“Dude, people go missing, like, every day in Crime Alley. I think you’re better off at home. Plus, your parents would literally die,”

Nico frowned. “I wish I didn’t ride the bus. It’s so easy to get kidnapped getting off a bus.”

A beat passed.

“You wanna ride the bus with me?”

Asten snorted. “Your house is literally the opposite direction to mine. You’ll be fine.”

Nico looked down at his hands and fiddled with the pencil in them. He seemed to be nervous now, kind of like Bentley. He wouldn’t want to take the bus, either, after hearing that.

“You wanna come home with me?”

“Nico,” Asten scolded lightly with a faint smirk. “You’re not going to get kidnapped, dude.”

“But my parents aren’t going to be home till six…” He trailed off.

“And you’re going to be fine until they get there,”

Nico went quiet. 

“You’ve been living in Bristol this whole time and you haven’t gone missing. Bentley, too,” Asten stated, gesturing toward him. “Wayne Manor is in Bristol, isn’t it?”

Bentley shrugged. “I think so…”

“See?” Asten continued. Nico didn’t say anything, but kept messing with his pencil. “I’ve been in Crime Alley for about a year and I haven’t gone missing. You’re gonna be fine.”

Nico still stayed quiet, although he had that telltale expression that said he wanted to cry. Asten caught on.

“Dude, don’t-“

“I’m not,” Nico cut him off. 

Bentley stayed quiet. Actually, they all went quiet, focusing instead on the papers in front of them.

Not a minute later, a bell came through the intercom again, and everyone started getting up. 

Bentley picked up his backpack and put it on his shoulders. One uneventful class done, three more to go. And it wasn’t even that bad.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: bullying, anxiety attacks, slight violence?

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

welcome to jesse todryk’s funeral, hosted by asten evans and an old history textbook. by the way, both of asten’s portuguese lines are telling of his character and foreshadowing, so if you want to pop those suckers into google translate to read them, i would love it, thanks

part ten

❝ BLUDGEONED BY A BOOK ❞

FRIDAY — AUGUST 7 — 8:00AM

BENTLEY WENT TO SCHOOL ON FRIDAY SIMPLY TO DISTRACT HIMSELF. From everything. From Dick (who was still not awake.), from Damian wanting him gone, from the Secret Keeper that kept popping in and out of his head. He figured school would help him at least stop thinking about all of that for a while.

He hadn’t gone to dinner the previous night or breakfast that morning, for the sake of staying away from Damian. It was fine — he never got very hungry when he was upset anyways. It was easy to fake that he was just tired when Bruce came to check on him after dinner since he hadn’t slept properly in a couple days. (He had gotten four hours of uninterrupted of sleep the night before, though, which was really good compared to the cat naps he’d been taking.) 

It was also easy to fake that everything Damian said didn’t hurt half as bad as it actually did, and that it didn’t make him want to cry his eyes out or give him extra anxiety about being taken away by social workers. 

The car ride to school was completely silent, and Bentley sat in the passenger’s seat next to Duke instead of in the back with Damian like he usually did. Thankfully, it went mostly unnoticed. Bentley assumed Damian wasn’t about to tell anyone about what he’d said, so Bentley wasn’t going to, either. 

But he was going to try and fix it.

He’d been wracking his tired brain for hours (given his four hours of sleep had been eight pm to midnight and he’d been awake since then.) on how in the world he could live up to the Wayne name without being a superhero. He came up with nothing. He wasn’t smart enough or strong enough to be Robin like all of Bruce’s sons had, and even suggesting he be Robin instead of Damian was ludicrous. Bentley still cried when it stormed. Robin couldn’t be a kid that cried when it stormed.

So, Robin was off the table. (It had never been on the table, actually.) Bentley couldn’t even beat a twelve-year-old at a spar, so superheroing was off the table, too, and now the table was empty. 

But that was fine. He’d figure it out eventually. Right now, he needed to focus on the task at hand — school.

More specifically, not getting lost after he told Duke he could walk himself around the building. They were a bit earlier than usual, it was about eight, so he had time to get lost if he really couldn’t remember the way. The sun was shining and making the building gold. He took the left at the top of the staircase. At least he knew the left was right.

Thankfully, when he turned left, students spreading everywhere and filling the halls with lively chatter, one blue-haired-Brazilian made not getting lost a pretty easy feat.

“Hey, Whittaker. Feeling better?” Asten drifted out of basically nowhere, in his uniform and smelling like cigarettes per usual. Bentley fell into step with him in the crowded hallway. He pretty much remembered where Dr. Keene’s room was, but he definitely wouldn’t have an issue finding it now.

“Yeah,” Bentley replied simply, tugging his backpack tighter on his shoulders. 

“Good. It sucks to be sick in the first week,” Asten stated. “Though I guess it’s never a bad time to have a vacation from the Academy. Well, as much of a vacation as you can get with Nico playing the role of temporary teacher.”

Bentley snickered lightly as they continued down the hallway. He could see doors on the left coming up, and he was pretty sure the second one was Dr. Keene’s. He was fairly confident he would’ve found it even without Asten to assure that he was going the right way.

Speaking of, Asten cursed under his breath, and Bentley glanced over at him just in time for him to throw his jacket, irremovable, suffocating cigarette-smell and all, over Bentley’s face. He made a surprised noise and slowed to a stop, grabbing the bottom of the fabric.

“Asten?” 

“Shh. Keep walking, ginger,”

He felt Asten’s hand land in the center of his back to keep him from veering off course, and after a second of (literally) blind trust, the blue-haired-boy pulled the jacket off of Bentley’s head and messed his hair all up.

“Todryk and his squad of gremlins went by. Ever since he heard the ‘new Wayne’ got sick on the third day of school, he’s been talking about having a conversation with you. And Todryk never just talks,” Asten explained. Bentley blinked and smoothed his hair down the best he could without seeing it.

“Oh… thanks,” He replied after a moment. Asten shrugged as they made for Dr. Keene’s room.

“The old throw-something-over-your-head move only works a few times, but it really does wonders. You won’t believe how many beatings I’ve warded off by hiding my face,” He continued. “Especially from Todryk. He’s dumber than a box of rocks.”

Bentley snickered again, and Asten cracked a smile as they took a left into the Enviornmental Science classroom. They’d been learning about different types of precipitation when Bentley stayed home, and he was pretty sure Dr. Keene’s post said they were going over the types of weather and water cycle one more time today before they moved onto a different subject in the unit.

He and Asten made their way to their trio of desks and sat down in it. Nico wasn’t there, but it was early, and Asten didn’t seem bothered about it, so Bentley wasn’t, either. Instead he pulled out his phone and replied to a text from Bruce that said all good? that he’d received not one minute ago. He hoped his simple yes was a good enough response.

“Did you hear? Another kid from Bristol vanished this morning — a girl,” Asten said, leaning forward over the desk. “And her friends said she told them about a nightmare with the Secret Keeper the night before. You know, a lot of these missing people claimed to have seen her.”

Bentley nodded, trying his best to push her terrible face out of his head and keep his expression neutral. “That’s so weird,” He forced out.

“The weirdest,” Asten responded, grabbing his red pen from his backpack and spinning it between his fingers.

Bentley tapped his fingers on the table. “Where do you hear about all this stuff?”

Asten shrugged. “I have nothing better to do in Crime Alley than bum off the nearest place’s wifi and look into current events. It’s either that or go get mugged for fun.”

Bentley didn’t say anything. Instead, Dr. Keene walked into the classroom and, after a second, started making his way to their desks. His light brown eyes were bouncing between Bentley and Asten as he made his way to them, and he slowed to a stop next to their group of tables.

“Nice job on your work while you were out. Most students choose to ignore it,” Dr. Keene said to Bentley with a warm little smile. “If you need anything, don’t hesitate to let me know.”

Bentley nodded up at him, sheepishly. “Okay… thank you.”

“Of course,” He stated. He patted Bentley’s shoulder lightly and proceeded across the room to his desk. Asten snorted.

“What?” Bentley asked.

Asten shook his head, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms with a little smile playing on his lips. “Already becoming the teacher's pet and you didn’t even know it. Typical Wayne kid if I've ever seen one.”

“What do you mean?” Bentley questioned.

“Bruce Wayne’s kids have always been teacher’s favorites. One of the algebra teacher’s still has Dick Grayson’s graduation invitation on her wall. And the theater coach can’t go a single class without talking about Jason Todd.”

Bentley snickered a little. He’d have never pinged Jason as a theater kid, but he guessed it made sense given his love of literature and extensive knowledge regarding classic plays and books. 

“Are you in theater?” Bentley questioned.

“Dear God, no,” Asten replied with a snicker. “Sometimes I hang around in their rehearsals after school if I don’t feel like fighting my way back into the Alley yet.”

Bentley nodded lightly, but didn’t respond.

The bell rang, and Dr. Keene made his way to the front of the room. He kept all the textbooks on a shelf near his skeleton, and he began to grab them and hand them out.

“The water cycle review worksheet is on page sixteen. Lucky for you guys, since it’s Friday, I’m not going to make you do any more than that,” He stated, handing out the textbooks to a few students and going back to retrieve more. “On Monday we’ll get into the real meat of unit one, about the sky. It’s one of my favorite units.”

Bentley listened quietly as he brought two books to their table and put them on their desks. “I think you guys will find it interesting, even though we won’t be talking about UFOs or other worldly entities.”

Bentley saw Asten make an ew face, and he snickered.

Dr. Keene finished handing out textbooks. “You can talk with your tablemates, just not too loudly; and you may use your cellphones after you finish the page and bring it to me.”

Bentley watched him go over to his desk and click around on his computer. Not a moment later, soft music came on, and he sat down in his chair.

Quiet chatter began to filter across the classroom. Bentley turned to the right page in his textbook, like everyone else was, and glanced over at the empty desk across from Asten.

“Where’s Nico?” He questioned softly, and Asten shrugged, glancing up only after scribbling something on the worksheet.

“I’m not sure. He said he was here a little bit ago, and he’s so committed I think he’d rather die than be late for class. I’ll text him again,”

Bentley watched in silence as Asten pulled out his phone and typed under the table. He couldn’t help the slight buzz that surfaced under his skin. Nico said he was at school, but didn’t come to class. That wouldn’t be so freaky if half of Gotham wasn’t vanishing without a trace.

Asten put his phone away, and they worked on their worksheets.

For five minutes. For ten minutes. For fifteen minutes. Asten sent a few more texts during that time, but got no responses. Twenty minutes. They finished their worksheets and there was still an empty desk at their table.

“Still no response,” Asten stated, and while he was still cool as a cucumber, it was obvious he was getting suspicious. “I’m about to call his scrawny butt.”

Bentley said nothing, but after a few moments of silence, the classroom door opened and the scrawny butt in question came through it.

Dr. Keene simply asked: “Do you have a late note, Mister Rockefeller?” And when Nico shook his head no, he nodded and didn’t say anything else.

Bentley and Asten both watched as Nico made for his chair and sat down quickly. It was painfully obvious he’d been crying — Bentley could recognize the red-rimmed blue eyes and pink nose combination anywhere. He’d spent a lot of time locked in bathrooms waiting for it to fade off of his own features back at Whittaker Estate.

Dr. Keene brought Nico a book and told him what they were doing, and gave him a supportive pat on the back before he walked away.

Once Dr. Keene was gone, Asten leaned forward. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Nico said back a bit too quickly, flipping his book open with one hand while the other stayed rooted in his lap. His voice wavered way too much for it to pass as anything but emotion.

“You’re a bad liar,”

“Stop it, Asten,” Nico practically pleaded, his dull blue eyes flicking between both of them before he looked down at the book. Asten did, indeed, stop it. He sat back again and took to silently scrutinizing his best friend from across the table, and Bentley was left as the monkey in the middle, glancing between them every now and then.

Bentley’s phone vibrated.

He’s not using his right hand.

He glanced up from Asten’s text and looked back at Nico. He was writing with his left hand (his non-dominant hand, which made his usually neat handwriting way worse than normal.) and his right hand was still sitting, unmoved in his lap.

I see, was what Bentley texted back.

“Nico, what happened?” Asten tried again, quietly. Nico didn’t do anything but shake his head and stare at the book really intensely.

Dr. Keene stood up. “Class wide bathroom break. You can go if you need to, you can stay if you don’t.”

Bentley didn’t miss the way Dr. Keene eyed their little group of desks with something like sympathy. Asten didn’t miss a beat, either. He was up out of his seat and gesturing for Nico and Bentley to follow him before anyone could do anything else. Thankfully, more kids around the room stood, so it didn’t look suspicious.

Bentley rose from his desk and put his phone in his pocket, and Nico begrudgingly stood, too, making sure his hands were in his jacket pockets before he followed Asten out of the room.

The hallways were weird when they were empty. They looked a lot bigger than normal, and they were really quiet. A few more kids filed out of the room behind them, but Asten broke away and went to a farther bathroom. The three of them had hardly stepped inside the tiled room when he turned on his heel and asked:

“What’s wrong with your hand?”

Nico took to staring at the terra-cotta floor. Now that Bentley focused really hard, he could see blood on the cuff of his right blazer sleeve.

“It’s not that bad,” Was his half-whispered defense, and it might’ve held some merit if his eyes weren’t already brimming with just about as much liquid as they could hold without spilling over. 

(Geez. Bentley was brand new at this whole friends thing, and something like this had to happen on only his third day in person with them? He had no idea what he was doing. But he guessed he should at least try, right? He did sincerely care about Nico’s wellbeing, so maybe he should just try to treat him the way he treated Damian. Well, the way he treated him before he started avoiding him like the plague.)

“Nico,” Asten said, but the blonde only turned the slightest bit away.

“…You’re bleeding,” Bentley tried quietly, gesturing vaguely to Nico’s sleeve. “Did you get hurt?”

Nico did that thing where he looked long and hard at Bentley’s face. He still wasn’t sure why he did that. But after a solid five seconds of silence, Nico looked away and wiped at his eyes again. Then he extended his bloody hand toward Bentley.

Toward Bentley. The redhead did a double take and glanced around, eyes bouncing to Asten, before he glanced back at Nico and gently pulled his long sleeve out of the way.

“What the hell?” Asten suddenly snapped, moving forward toward them, and Bentley drew in a sharp breath.

The words BRISTOL BRAT were scraped into the back of Nico’s hand, probably with something small and dull (it didn’t look deep or precise enough to be a knife), and they were bloody and still bleeding. It looked like he’d tried to clean it off, because his skin was tinted pink on that hand and on the fingers of the other, and probably gave up when it wouldn’t stop bleeding. Asten jerked on his wrist and pulled his hand closer so he could examine it.

“Was this Todryk?” He practically hissed like some kind of snake. His tone had gone venomous, his eyes stormy and grim. Nothing like the usual carefree aura he carried around, and it threw Bentley for a loop and a half.

Nico was crying again, trying his best to wipe his eyes with his opposite hand. “He cornered me. In an alley, while I was walking here from the bus stop. I-I tried to make it stop bleeding-”

“We’re taking you to the nurse,”

“What? No!” Nico practically squeaked, jerking his hand away from Asten with a pitiful little sob. “If we get him in trouble it’ll just make it worse. Please don’t tell anyone.”

“He scraped words into your hand, Nico. That could be considered torture,”

Nico didn’t reply, but kept wiping furiously at his eyes as he cried quietly, the sound bouncing around the empty bathroom. Bentley wished he could help more than offering support, but he couldn’t really, so he let a hand drift up to rest on one of Nico’s shoulders.

What did Bruce and Dick and everyone do when Bentley was upset, or hurting? Crying?

Bentley stood there for a second, and considered lots of things before he finally settled on asking a risky question. Well, what was the worst that could happen? He’d be shut down?

“… Do you want a hug?”

It was certainly something he’d want if he was in this situation, but not everyone was the same as him. Some people probably hated hugs.

Fortunately, Nico didn’t seem to be one of those people. Because as fast as the half-whispered question could leave Bentley’s mouth, the blonde turned and walked straight into him, prompting Bentley to bring his arms up around his shuddering shoulders.

He noted that Nico was a crier and a hugger. (Both of which Bentley was, too.)

“Ele merece ser queimado vivo,” Asten muttered from off to the side. “We have to tell someone, dude. That’s basically assault.”

“No!” Nico sniffed, bringing his arms up and around Bentley’s back loosely. “Please don’t, Asten, please.”

“Your parents are going to see it anyways,”

“No they won’t,” He protested, and Bentley felt him reposition his head against his shoulder. (It was really strange to be on the giving end of a hug instead of receiving. But he couldn’t say he didn’t like it.)

“Bentley?” 

Of course Asten would turn to him for his opinion.

Bentley glanced over at him and blinked. Well, he’d cried himself to sleep last night and didn’t tell anyone, so he guessed if Nico didn’t want anyone to know about the cuts, then they should just… not tell anyone. Right?

Varying Wayne voices that said tell someone if it gets worse bounced around in his skull. Jason hadn’t told anyone about Bentley’s hurt hand all those months ago, but he’d made it clear he would if it got any worse.

Bentley shrugged as much as he could without disturbing Nico’s position too much. “Uh… I think we should… do what makes him comfortable. For now. Unless it gets worse.”

“Yeah,” Nico agreed quietly, with a string of little coughs. His crying was starting to sound a little more wheezy than Bentley would’ve liked.

Asten let out a puff of air. “Fine, fine. But if he goes stabbing you with knives or trying to brand your other hand, I’ll shove his own foot so far up his rear end it comes out of his mouth.”

Nico pulled away from Bentley and fished something out of his jacket pocket. It was the little gray thing he’d puffed on once after school — the thing Bentley thought might’ve been, like, drugs or something? He watched curiously as Nico shook it for a few seconds and then put it in his mouth, pushed in the top of it with a little hiss, and breathed in deep. He did it twice.

Bentley didn’t ask what it was.

“Let’s just go back to class,” Nico muttered after a few quiet seconds. “Please.”

The three of them shared glances, gave Nico time to calm down, and then did exactly that.

Most of the day went normally. After they went back to class, they reverted back to their most common source of conversation: missing people and conspiracies. Bentley went to the library for free period, answered some texts from Bruce, and went to Geography and talked about time zones. 

It was when he was walking between Geography and Spanish that things went wrong again.

The Geography classroom wasn’t that far from the Spanish room — only a few moments walk. Asten was probably already in there (his classroom was even closer to Spanish than Bentley’s.) and ready to talk about aliens or something. Bruce had texted Bentley several more times during the day to check in on him, and he was answering one of those many messages on his way through the halls, not paying much attention to the people around him in favor of responding timely.

So, naturally, that was the moment someone chose to grab the handle of his backpack and jerk him backwards, and his fall was only broken by his back slamming into the row of lockers. His phone fell out of his hand and clattered on the tile.

“Hey there, Wayne,” 

Bentley looked up at who was talking. It was a really tall boy (taller than Asten, who was already a lot taller than Bentley.) with fuzzy blonde hair and little black gemstone earrings. There were two other boys behind him, one was short and pudgy with a big jacket and beanie, and the other looked like a stocky athlete in a varsity Gotham Academy jacket.

Blonde hair. Dumb earrings.

Crap.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t find you sooner or later? You’ve been hanging around with my favorite little nerds to scare!” Jesse Todryk’s vomit-green eyes scanned Bentley judgmentally, and he sneered. 

Bentley said nothing. What was he supposed to say? Jesse was towering over him like his dad always used to and it was making his heart hammer behind his ribs. He wasn’t touching him, he wasn’t coming at him, he had to remind himself. But the not-so-distant memory of Nico crying in the bathroom because Todryk scraped words into his hand like some kind of sick torture-fest made him want to cry just a little.

Instead, he leaned down and picked up his phone. The hallways still had a few kids in it, so he assumed making a scene wouldn’t be good. Jesse made a face, a scowl, Bentley saw it in his peripheral. He slid his phone in his pocket and made a move to walk away — the Spanish classroom was so close — but Jesse grabbed his shoulder and jerked him back, shoving him into the lockers and keeping the hand on his shoulder so he couldn’t move.

“I wasn’t done talking to you, Wayne,” He spat, his face drawing closer to Bentley’s with an annoyed scowl.

“Get off,” Bentley tried quietly, squirming under his grip, but that only got his shoulder pressed harder into the metal behind him. 

“Nah, I don’t think I will,”

The two boys behind Todryk disappeared off to the right.

“I’m so tired of the Wayne’s running this school. There’s always been a Wayne here, everybody loves them. They’re the center of attention everywhere they go. The golden students,”

Bentley sucked in a shaky breath, glancing around the emptying hallways for someone, anyone, but the few kids still going past were ignoring them really well and no adults were around. 

He thought he was done getting hurt when he left his father.

He squirmed again, ducking down in an attempt to run under Jesse’s arm to the Spanish room, but the older boy caught him by the scruff of his blazer and yanked him back like he was some kind of cat. 

“You might be quick, but quick doesn’t beat me,”

Bentley could hear his blood pumping in his ears as Todryk shoved him back against the lockers with a sick looking smile, pushing a hand against both of his shoulders, this time. 

“I’m so sick and tired of the Waynes running this city. Being everyone’s favorites,” He spat, in Bentley’s face, only a few inches from it. Bentley’s eyes were burning spectacularly, but he didn’t dare let himself cry, not in front of him. “Let’s see how much your teacher likes you after you skip her class.”

He was suddenly being moved. Jesse grabbed him by his hair and pulled him across the hallway and Bentley made a small sound. It reminded him of the nightmare where his father threw him down the stairs.

He wanted so badly to wiggle out of his grip, but fighting always only got more pain. So what did he do?

He took it, just like he used to take it from his father. He stayed quiet while the bully dragged him along, and quiet when he shoved him forward with a thwack onto the tile in a little janitor's closet, and quiet when the door slammed with a twisted, bubbly laugh.

And he was alone. In the dark. There was a sliver of light coming from under the door.

“Have fun in there until pick-up, Wayne,”

He heard laughter and footsteps recede.

Bentley pulled himself out of the floor in the pitch black room and made for the door, twisting the handle.

It didn’t twist. Not an inch, not a centimeter. It didn’t move. 

He tried it again. He tried it again and again and pulled on it and jerked it and the door was slamming around on it's hinges and it sounded exactly like the door from… home.

Bentley’s heart felt like it was about to rip right out of him. It was pitch black. It was so dark, just like it always was when his father… just like it was back… 

“Let me out!” He tried, jerking on the knob. “Please!”

“Please, father, I’m sorry!”

The buzzing in his body turned into trembling and the tightness in his chest felt like it was choking him. He opened his mouth to call for help again, but all that came out was a strange little noise and a pitiful sob.

He was in the closet.

After who knows how many minutes he spent fighting with the knob that wouldn’t budge, he sat down on the floor, tears streaking down his face at an unmatchable rate. He kept tugging at his own shirt in an attempt to make his lungs work but they wouldn’t. Everything hurt. Everything hurt.

This hasn’t happened since the grocery store.

It hadn’t happened without Tim.

He tried to remember how Tim helped him at the store but he couldn’t. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t see because it was too dark. All he could think about was his father ripping open the closet door and having his way. He was going to die.

He flinched when his phone clattered out of his jacket pocket onto the floor.

His phone.

He picked the little device up in his trembly hands, sending nothing more than the word help to the very first name at the top of his list.

He didn’t even comprehend that there were actually two names there, and that it was a group chat, not a single message thread.

A flood of messages came in only seconds later, including an are you okay, a where are you, and a what’s wrong?

He couldn’t think. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see the screen through his own tears and he couldn’t make his fingers move no matter how hard he tried.

His phone started ringing. The caller ID was Asten. He tapped the green button.

“Bentley? What’s going on? Where are you?”

He couldn’t breathe.

“Are you crying?”

He tried to make words come out but he couldn’t, he couldn’t. Even with Asten’s questions lingering in the air, laced with concern and alertness, he couldn’t talk.

“Where are you, dude? I’m leaving class,”

Bentley sucked in as much air as he could. It wasn’t much, and it hurt, and he sobbed. He knew he needed to talk for them to find him but he couldn’t breathe. “Locked… the closet.” It hurt his chest to force the words out and he started coughing so hard he wanted to throw up. Everything hurt. 

“Jesus, dude — what closet? Where are you?”

He coughed harshly. The only thing his brain supplied was Whittaker Estate, Whittaker Estate, Whittaker Estate. Instead of saying that, he sobbed again. “… I don’t know.”

“Shove something under the door so I can find you,”

It took way too much willpower to force his body to move. It felt like he was underwater, like he weighed a million pounds. He felt around on the nearby shelves until he grabbed something thin and fabric-ey, and shoved it under the door into the hallway.

There was a moment of silence, before Asten’s voice came again, quieter: “He said he’s locked in a closet.”

It was clear he was talking to someone else, but Bentley couldn’t think straight enough to work out who else’s voice he heard. He was too focused on trying to breathe and not throwing up. 

Bentley coughed more and silence passed, and he couldn’t think of anything but his father, his father, his father.

“I see it,” Asten said, but Bentley hardly heard him through the static in his brain and his own unquenchable wheezes and sobs. Everything hurt so bad.

There was rattling on the other side of the door, a weird sound that told him there was someone else on the other side, and he curled in on himself, scooting back into the farthest corner of the closet so maybe his father wouldn’t be able to reach him right away.

The door swung open, light flooded in, and Bentley’s father had blue hair.

“Oh my God,” 

Someone else came into his view, someone blonde, and then they were in the closet next to him. He flinched away but they grabbed one of his arms, gently.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay,” They repeated quietly, like a broken record. “It’s okay, Bentley.”

He got guided into a one-sided embrace on the floor, and he could hear them breathing, and their heart pounding.

“It’s okay, Bentley. It’s okay,”

“It’s okay,” Is what they kept saying. Over and over, for a long time. Bentley was thankful for whatever strange hug-thing he was in, because he was able to hear their breaths and try to match it. It didn’t stop the crying or the cramping in his organs or the headache that was starting to gnaw at his skull, but it gave him some clarity, at least.

When he was finally able to think and look around and comprehend things again, he realized that Nico was the one holding onto him, and Asten was crouched in the doorway, watching them quietly. His green eyes looked stormy again, but also sympathetic, and Bentley couldn’t see Nico’s face, but he was pretty sure he was crying from the way he was breathing.

A long moment of silence ensued as Bentley re-gathered his bearings.

“We should call your dad,” Asten suggested softly, shifting his positioning in the doorway. “Or… take you to the office.”

Bentley just shook his head. If acting like that in front of his newfound friends wasn’t embarrassing enough, going to the office like that would humiliate him. His phone was laying next to him again, probably because he’d dropped it, and the call Bruce idea didn’t sound so bad. So he used one of his legs to nudge it toward Asten. 

“You’re okay with me using it?” He questioned.

Bentley nodded, and the blue-haired-boy picked up the device and began tapping on it.

“That was scary.” Nico said quietly, pulling away from Bentley so he was just sitting next to him in the floor. His eyes were red-rimmed just like they had been earlier that morning. Bentley repositioned himself against the shelf behind him and pulled his knees up, taking a shuddering breath. He wanted Tim. “Was it Jesse? Did he lock you in here?”

Bentley silently nodded.

Nico huffed. “What a jerk.”

“…Hey, Mister Wayne. My name is Asten Evans, I’m a friend of Bentley’s… yeah, no, that’s what I’m calling about,”

Bentley glanced up at Asten, who was now in the hallway, drawing imaginary shapes on the tile with the toe of his shoe. 

“One of the school bullies locked him in a janitor's closet, and I think he… had a panic attack or something. But it's over now, he’s okay, if not a little shaken,”

Bentley just stared at the floor. He couldn’t hear the other voice, but he could imagine Bruce’s immediate worry when he realized it was another kid’s voice on the opposite end.

“Yeah, we’re, uh, still at the closet, actually. He doesn’t really want to go to the office,”

A quiet moment passed. 

“No, I don’t think so. Our teacher knows I left class in a hurry but she doesn’t know why. I think-“

A pause. 

“But he’s doing good with us, Mister Wayne, I promise. I think that’ll just stress him out,” Asten reasoned. And then he muttered: “Yeah, of course.”

Bentley looked up when Asten came into the closet and held the phone toward him. “He wants to talk to you.”

Bentley sat up a little. “He’s here,” Asten said.

“Hey, there, bud. I heard what happened, I’m on my way to get you right now. Would you like to wait for me in the office, or the nurses?”

“No,” Bentley muttered in response, wiping at his still-crying eyes. “I wanna stay here.”

“Do you want me to message Duke or Damian for you?”

“No,” Bentley repeated.

“Okay… well, your friends probably need to head back to class, so-“

“That won’t be a problem, Mister Wayne,” Asten spoke up, leaning closer to the phone. “Even if he did go to the office, we wouldn’t make him go alone.”

Bentley heard Bruce exhale. “Okay… okay. If you’d like to stay on the phone with me, Bentley, that’s fine. If not, I'll be there in just a few minutes.”

Bentley nodded lightly. His tenseness was starting to ease. “You can hang up, I’m… okay.” He muttered.

“Alright, bud. I’ll be there in just a few minutes, okay?”

Bentley sniffled. “Okay.”

“Bye,”

After a quiet moment, Asten ended the call, and sat down against the wall across from Bentley, right next to the door. He put the phone on the ground and carefully nudged it back across with his foot.

“I’m sorry,” Bentley whispered, wiping at his eyes. “You… don’t have to stay with me.”

Apparently he wasn’t supposed to say that.

“Whoa, Whittaker, are you apologizing for having a panic attack?” Asten questioned, scrunching his face up. “It’s not like it’s something you willingly choose to do. You don’t have to apologize.”

“And you’re not bothering us at all,” Nico added, smiling lightly when Bentley glanced over at him. “Asten’s used to stuff like this. I have asthma attacks a lot. Pretty sure I’ve had one in this exact closet, actually.”

Bentley sucked in a breath. “What’s… asthma?”

Nico blinked. “Well, it’s… it’s like a sickness that makes it really hard for me to breathe sometimes. That’s what I use my inhaler for,” He took the little gray thing out of his pocket and shook it with a quiet rattle, then put it back. “Asten’s actually one of my emergency aids. Which means if I go to the nurse’s office with an asthma attack, she calls him down there to help me.”

Bentley said nothing, but the conversation was helping to distract him and help him feel a little better.

But then, a different voice came. Not Nico’s, not Asten’s. One that was way more intimidating, from in the hallway.

“Looks like someone found the Wayne. Doors open,”

Jesse’s voice was the one floating through the air. It didn’t sound like he was talking to them, he probably couldn’t see inside the closet.

Bentley tensed again when Nico grabbed his wrist. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was scared or because he knew Bentley was probably scared, but he didn’t have time to think about it.

“Probably Damian,” A second voice replied. Bentley glanced over at Asten, and he was scouring the shelves, dragging his eyes across every available tool before they finally rested on a couple stacks of old, worn textbooks.

Nico said nothing, and Bentley stayed equally quiet as Asten stood up slowly. The footsteps were getting closer, and the blue-haired-boy gently brought his hand up and grabbed a textbook off the top of the stack. His hand dipped when he was supporting its full weight — it was thick and heavy looking.

Jesse Todryk stopped in the doorway, spotted Bentley and Nico, and laughed sinisterly.

“Well! Isn’t it little mister-“

Bentley flinched almost violently when Asten — with the same unmatchable storm in his eyes and scowl on his face — swung the textbook like a baseball bat aimed at the sun.

“Vá queimar no inferno, seu filho da puta!”

Bentley flinched, and Nico gasped when the blunt corner of the book’s spine came in contact with Jesse’s head so hard it whammed him into the door, and he ragdolled flat on the tile.

“Jesse!” The short boy screeched, kneeling down next to the bully, who looked completely and totally zoned.

“Oh my God, you’re going to get so suspended!” Nico suddenly exclaimed, gaping up at Asten with wide eyes.

The Brazilian shrugged, letting the textbook thud on the floor. “It was self defense.”

“He wasn’t hurting us!”

“He was gonna!”

Bentley said nothing, but instead, stared at the book that laid between Asten’s feet and where he was sitting.

He didn’t condone violence or anything, but… it was kind of nice to have a friend that would cause a little bit of mayhem on his behalf. Just a little bit.

“We should probably get out of here, though. Time to walk Bentley to the office?”

Nico glanced over at Bentley, and when he nodded, they stood up and left the closet. And they didn’t spare a second to look back at Jesse and his friend, even while the beanie kid cursed them all the way down the hallway.

(Bentley didn’t know what suspended was, but from the way Nico yelled it, he was pretty sure Asten was going to get it.)

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[maccreadysbaby]

oh shoot y’all here goes

a sneak peek of my next work, you won’t be surprised what it is

—

“Bentley. Bentley, c’mon dude. Breathe. We gotta go,”

Bentley was trying to breathe, but Asten was dragging him with one hand into the endless forest beyond, and dragging Nico with the other, who was crying hysterically, and Bentley was sure they were going to die. His breaths were coming out as nothing more than painful wheezes and his heart felt like it was going to rip his chest open. And to top it all off, he was in the middle of a forest on the outskirts of Gotham, and not a single Wayne knew about it. The only sounds were the crunching of leaves and the clinking of the crowbar against other tools in Asten’s toolbelt. Their bodies would never be found out here.

Asten kept trying to drag them, but it was pointless when they were both crying messes that couldn’t keep up to save their lives. 

“He’s freaking coming, you guys. Where are the bikes?” He whispered anxiously, whirling around and trying his best to keep the panic off of his face, for the sake of his younger friends. The crowbar hanging on his belt nearly hit Bentley in the stomach with the speed he pivoted. But Bentley was too focused on trying to get air into his lungs through his wheezy sobs and splutters to see Asten’s hazel eyes flick anxiously between the two of them.

“Jesus…” He muttered, and Bentley felt Asten’s hand land on the side of his head. “Do you have asthma?”

Bentley was pretty sure he didn’t. He’d only heard about asthma when Nico talked about his, but then again, asthma sounded a lot like anxiety attacks. At least the whole not being able to breathe part.

He wasn’t able to respond between the ragged breaths and cries that were forcing their way out of him, so he didn’t.

“Nico, can you-“

“I’m getting it!” The blonde exclaimed through sniffles and sobs of his own. He dug around in the pocket of his brown jacket, and Bentley heard the telltale shake of his inhaler right before the hiss of the medicine being released a couple times.

“Here,”

Bentley saw the quick exchange of the inhaler from hand to hand, and Asten started shaking it, leaning down farther so he could see Bentley’s face. His hand had moved from his head to his shoulder and stayed firmly there.

“You gotta breathe deep when I shove this thing in your mouth, Whittaker. It’ll help you breathe,”

Bentley nodded quickly, and Asten promptly put the inhaler in his mouth and pressed on it. He sucked in about as much air as he could force into his rebelling lungs.

“Perfect, just do it one more time,” Asten stated, moving his hand from Bentley’s shoulder to the back of his neck to keep his head in place. “Nico, you see anyone?”

“No,” He whimpered, his voice obstructed by his near endless crying. Asten pressed on the inhaler again, and Bentley made himself suck in what felt like a gallon of air. (It wasn’t actually that much air at all.) The medicine made him feel kind of woozy for a moment.

Asten kept his hand on Bentley, but stood up and looked around the woods, behind them at the cabin they’d come out of. “We have to go. You think you can run? I will not hesitate to give you the most terrifying piggyback of your life.”

Bentley forced a few more breaths in and out, and while the inhaler wasn’t making his stomach stop cramping or his panic fade, he wasn’t gasping for air so much anymore. 

Nico squeaked, a high noise in the back of his throat, and jerked on the sleeve of Asten’s jacket and choked on a few more sobs. “I see him coming.” 

Bentley turned back, and the unmistakable ray of light coming from a flashlight not that far behind them made him want to curl up and die.

“Run, go,” Asten ordered, ushering Nico out in front of him. “You got it, Bentley?”

“I got it,” He murmured. Running nearly a mile probably wasn’t ideal for someone still in the midst of an anxiety attack, but he didn’t really have a choice at this point. Asten shoved Nico’s inhaler in Bentley’s pocket, and they started running.

The cracking and crunching of leaves under their feet was nearly deafening in the pitch black, vacant forest, and the dim light from the moon and stars were their only source of vision. Asten stayed in the back, behind Bentley and Nico. Bentley was so focused on not falling and not throwing up and not hyperventilating that he shouted in fear when there was a loud metal CHINK! and Asten screamed.

Like actually screamed. Bentley hadn’t heard a sound like that since he’d been poisoned, and it sent both him and Nico pivoting backwards instantly.

Asten was on his hands and knees in the leaves and dirt, heaving for shaky breaths, and there was a bear trap on his right leg.

There was a bear trap on his right leg.

“Oh my God!” Nico shouted, dropping to his knees next to him. Bentley stood in a mixture of shock and terror before Asten forced out the words:

“Get it off,”

He wasn’t crying, but he was batting tears out of his eyes, which instantly made Bentley’s anxiety triple. He dropped down into the dirt on the other side of him.

Even in the dim light, Bentley could see the blood soaking through the leg of his pants. A lot of blood. And Asten was trembling, so Bentley put a hand on his side to give some kind of support. He had no idea how to remove a bear trap.

“These are freaking illegal-“ Nico was muttering (and still crying, now harder than he had been.) as he examined and tried to figure out any way to get the trap off. 

And there were footsteps coming. Bentley glanced up, and he could see the flashlight beam panning through the forest.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Nico murmured, bringing one hand up to his mouth and sobbing into it.

“Just…” Asten cursed under his breath, leaning into Bentley slightly to turn over and sit on his butt. “Just take it out of the ground, and… and we’ll get it off later.”

“You’re going to drag a bear trap on your foot where? Onto a bus? A taxi maybe?!” Nico squeaked. Asten reached for his toolbelt and pulled out the crowbar, holding it out to Bentley. The footsteps and flashlight beam were getting closer, and they wouldn’t be able to get away in time.

“Bentley,” Asten said seriously, grabbing his shoulder with one hand and attempting to hide a grimace of pain. Bentley looked down at the long, cool piece of metal he put in his hands. Wasn’t getting beaten by a crowbar how Jason died all those years ago?

He didn’t have much time to think about it, because the footsteps were getting closer, and they weren’t going anywhere.

Asten was hit by a wave of trembling, and he squeezed Bentley’s shoulder. “When he gets here, beat the hell out of him.”

—

AAANNDDD Bentley isn’t out of the woods yet (literally.) there was no way I could abandon this boy. The second installment of his series, A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne will be coming out soon! Keep ur eyes open 👀

@sassenashsworld @fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @manwrangler @and-andromeda

[maccreadysbaby]

The platform I write in deleted my whole next chapter of A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne. It was set to come out tonight, but now that I have to rewrite it the next update will take a few more days :(

[sassenashsworld]

Just for you all to know, the story of this author are all amazing

You want to read it

Before A hundred way to become a Wayne there was A hundred day to become a Wayne, and it's pure genius

Go read it, you'll be pleased

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne Masterlist

in which, after falling into bruce wayne’s custody, bentley whittaker endures the struggles of your average eleven-year-old-boy: starting school, making friends, solving two dozen missing persons cases, having an anxiety attack in a morgue, playing robin for a single night, and catching the eye of gotham’s newest and most dangerous rising supervillain. (he’ll tell bruce about it soon, he swears.)

first fic of the hundred days series linked here! this is fic number two!

one — miracle worker

[sassenashsworld]

Wow... so much pain in so short words

You put us at the worse a human can live, and feel

Poor Asten... and poor Bentley

And even, I have the feeling you just barely scratch what you can, and what you will give us

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: character death, blood & gore

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

did anyone order a sad blue haired brazilian?

part fifteen

❝ UNWELCOME MEMORIES ❞

SATURDAY — AUGUST 8 — 8:29AM

WHEN BENTLEY OPENED HIS EYES, HE WAS STANDING ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, STARING AT A SEMI-TRUCK WHOSE FRONT HAD BEEN TERRIBLY DENTED AND CRUSHED ON THE PASSENGER’S SIDE. It was raining torrentially, and dark now, obscuring his vision and making it tough to see what was going on behind the one still-working headlight aimed right at his face. He couldn’t really hear anything over the downpour.

He could vaguely make out the silhouette of a man beside the truck, maybe on the phone? He couldn’t tell. Was that Bruce? And when had it gotten dark? Wasn’t it just morning?

He glanced down at himself. He was still wearing his red shoes, t-shirt, and red jacket, the same ones he’d been wearing when they went to pick up Nico. But he wasn’t in a fancy Gotham Heights neighborhood anymore — he was on a street that cut through big trees, and despite the rain, it was warm. It hadn’t been warm earlier. Where was he?

He took a few tentative steps forward, toward the man. As he grew closer, he could hear him speaking — not English, definitely not, but it was a language Bentley had heard before. Spanish? It sounded like Spanish. He had tan skin and dark hair and was wearing a shirt that matched the logo Bentley could see on the hood of his truck. So definitely not Bruce.

Where was he? What was going on?

Once Bentley realized he was very much in the man’s line of sight, he cleared his throat in an attempt to not be awkward. “Uh… excuse me?”

The man didn’t look at him. It seemed like he looked… through him? Past him? Like he wasn’t really there. He just kept talking on his phone, frantically, and Bentley could see a little blood on various places around his body. There didn’t seem to be anyone in the passenger’s side of the big truck, and that was good — it was totally crushed.

With another glance around, Bentley verified that Bruce’s car was nowhere to be found. Had the Secret Keeper taken him somewhere?

He stepped forward again, exhaling lightly and running a hand through his wet, red hair. “Excuse me?”

The man didn’t notice him. Didn’t look down, didn’t brush him off, didn’t startle at his presence, just… nothing. He legitimately didn’t know Bentley was there, standing right next to him, in bright red clothes with bright red hair.

Bentley guessed the adrenaline of being in a crash, like it seemed this guy had, could take a toll on you.

A deafening crack of thunder shook the ground beneath them, and Bentley made a noise akin to a squeak, drawing nearer to the man who didn’t know he was there. The lightning illuminated the dark forest for only a split second, but Bentley saw something. On the left side of the road, there was a hill, a steep drop off, and sitting upside down at the bottom of the hill was…

A car. Wheels in the air, still spinning, making faint noises over the downpour.

The fact that it was dark enough to look black was all Bentley saw, and Bruce’s car was black.

So, despite the terrible storm, Bentley pushed himself forward, toward the edge of the road. Another crack of thunder sounded, and he flinched. It hadn’t been storming this badly earlier. The lightning came again, and allowed him to see something he hadn’t seen before. On the ground beside the car. Something that shot fear through him like a poison arrow, seeping into his bones and threatening to destroy him completely.

A mop of blue hair.

Asten had blue hair, and Asten had been in Bruce’s car.

At once, he started down the hill. How had he ended up on the road when Bruce crashed? And he wasn’t hurt at all? He felt fine, actually, despite the slight headache that was forming at the base of his skull. He did another once-over in his mind, and he didn’t feel any pain anywhere but his head. Leaves and sticks crunched under his shoes as he padded ever-closer to-

“Asten!” He shouted over the rain, drawing nearer to the vague shape of his friend he could see. The Brazilian was facing away from him, on his knees on the ground. “What happened? Are you okay? Where’s Bruce?”

When he got within a few feet of him, he could hear him talking.

“Mãe... Mãe, por favor, acorde. Você-você pode me ouvir?” 

“Asten?” Bentley tried again. He stepped up to his left, and another faint gasp left his lips.

Asten was cradling a woman on his lap. Not Bruce, not Nico, a woman. A woman that, when illuminated by the occasional lightning, looked just like him. Same tan skin, same eyes, same rich dark hair. Asten was crying, sobbing, actually, and his forehead was bleeding all over his face and clothes. Bentley noticed that one of his hands was drenched in blood that seemed to be pouring from the inside of his sleeve. And he looked… younger, maybe?

Bentley glanced inside the car, quickly looking away when he saw the crimson and mangled body of a man. A man he assumed was… Asten’s father, maybe? It definitely wasn’t Bruce. He double checked the crushed car for signs of Bruce or Nico, and there were none. Where was Bruce? Where was Bentley? What was happening?

“Asten?” He asked softly, kneeling down beside him. Bentley could see a huge crimson stain on the woman’s light-colored shirt, and he wasn’t exactly sure her legs were facing the right way. Her stark, emerald green eyes — the same ones that sat on Asten’s face — were open but staring at nothing, reflecting no more than the headlights in the distance and the occasional moon when the clouds shifted. That meant she was…

“Mãe, por favor, não me deixe. Não adormeça. Eu não quero ficar sozinho,” Asten sobbed, tugging his mother closer, pressing her lifeless head into his shirt to close the distance between them as tightly as he could. His bloody and trembling hands were around her shoulders, one laced in her crimson-stained hair, and he was rocking slightly, like he was trying to get a baby to sleep.

“Asten?” Bentley whispered, scanning his friend’s features. Asten didn’t seem to notice him, either. He was just crying, the same hopeless, lost, empty look in his eyes that had been in them when he thought he lost Nico, but magnified and multiplied.

He sucked in a breath, hardly getting any air before he dissolved into more loud, desperate sobs. “Por favor, por favor, não me deixe. Por favor não me deixe sozinho.”

Asten was soaking wet and shivering from the rain, clinging to his mother’s body like he’d die if he let go. He was crying so hard Bentley thought he might throw up. Where was Bruce?

“Mãe! Por favor, não me deixe com eles! Você disse que nunca me deixaria!” 

Bentley watched as he grew more and more frantic, his voice growing louder, more desperate, like the weight of the situation was crashing down harder than it had been.

“Mom!” Bentley startled when Asten changed to English. “Mom, please, don’t… don’t, they… please, wake up. Mom, please. Please! Get up!”

He pulled her close and hid his face away in the jacket she was wearing.

“Please wake up,”

Bentley blinked away the burn in his eyes, dismissing it as raindrops.

“Mom,” Asten hiccuped lightly, hand moving in her hair, trying to stimulate any kind of response. Anything that might suggest she was still alive. “Please don’t leave me here by myself. You promised... You promised! You… you… Please… please, please, please, no.”

Everything started to spin a little, and Bentley sat down on the wet ground. Black dots started floating in from one side of his vision to the other.

“Please, Wake up! I don’t want to be alone!”

The throbbing at the back of his head got more prominent, and he brought a hand up to rest on his skull. The forest started teetering and swirling. Where was Bruce?

“Wake up!”

Pain. Stabbing pain, like his skull was cracking, like someone was stabbing needles into his ears. He doubled over with a soft whine, hands scouring his own head for injuries. They came back with nothing. Where was Bruce? He wanted Bruce.

“Wake up!”

He couldn’t see, but he felt like he was vibrating. Like his head was a balloon being pumped with so much helium it was about to explode. Someone touched his forehead.

“Bruce?” He forced out, quiet and desperate.

“Bentley, wake up!”

He startled back into consciousness with a jerk and a gasp. He could feel his heart beating a million miles per hour, and he blinked rapidly, sucking in air like he’d never breathed in his life. His head was spinning like he’d gotten off of a carousel.

“Oh my God,” 

He finally comprehended what he was seeing. It was the ceiling of Bruce’s car. And Asten’s face was staring down at him, grim and worried.

“What happened? Are you okay?” Asten mumbled, and removed his hand from where it was resting on Bentley’s forehead.

Bentley said nothing, but pushed himself upright with a grunt. He felt Asten’s hands gently supporting his shoulders and back.

“What happened?” Bentley whispered, rubbing at his eyes with a small groan as pain blossomed across his skull again, though not as intense. He felt wrong. Invaded. Like someone had shoved their hands in his brain without asking first, and left it in a mess.

Asten’s green eyes bounced from the Rockefeller’s front door, to Bentley, to the car seat. Bentley suddenly remembered what they were doing, but now, the doorway was empty. “You acted like your head was hurting really bad all of a sudden. You were out cold, for, like, thirty seconds.”

Thirty seconds? That felt like thirty minutes, thirty hours, thirty years.

But yeah, his head did hurt pretty bad.

“What did she do to you?” Asten muttered, his hand still resting lightly against Bentley’s shoulder. Maybe incase he fell over again.

“I saw…” Your mother die? You covered in blood after a car crash? How was he supposed to talk about it? He winced when his head throbbed.

Was this what Dick meant when he said he was seeing other people’s memories?

“… something scary,” He concluded. Reminding Asten of what he’d lost, and telling him that his new friend had literally seen it without his consent wasn’t really something Bentley wanted to tackle right then. The throb in his skull was blossoming into the got-hit-by-a-shovel kind of pain that made even his eyeballs hurt. He kind of just wanted to go back to bed. “My head hurts, bad. I… don’t feel right.”

It took all of his willpower not to cry right then, for some reason. “I want Bruce.”

Asten winced in sympathy, squeezing his shoulder lightly. “You can lay back down. If she comes back, I’ll kill her.”

Asten sounded so absolutely sure about it that Bentley nearly believed him. 

Just as he was contemplating laying back down like Asten said, or maybe crying, a quiet thump from outside of the vehicle caught his attention.

Both he and Asten looked up, and Bruce was coming out the front door of the Rockefeller’s house, carrying Nico like he carried Bentley when he was really upset. There wasn’t any blood, and he was definitely breathing. (hyperventilating so badly Bentley could see it from the car, actually.) Bruce looked fine, too.

“She just… left them alone?” Asten muttered, scooting over into the middle seat as Bruce approached the left door. “What the hell is she trying to do, play us like a game?”

Bentley said nothing. If this was a game, it was one sick, terrible game. Mind games, but for real, playing with their minds and fiddling around just enough to leave them feeling violated, invaded, wrong.

Bruce opened the back door and ever-so-gently put Nico in the leftmost backseat, sending a few glances to Bentley and Asten.

Nico was an absolute wreck. He was shaking like a leaf, trembling, and crying so hard he couldn’t seem to breathe. He was still in a hoodie and sweats, most likely what he’d slept in. Bentley and Asten both shared pitiful glances.

“He was asking for you, Asten,” Bruce stated, closing the door and getting back in the driver’s seat, probably to get out of the open. There was a click as he engaged the locks, turning in his seat to face the three of them.

“Jesus, dude,” Asten muttered, turning in his seat toward Nico, who was wheezing like an old smoker. Bentley saw him dig the little inhaler out of Nico’s hoodie pocket and shake it for him. He simply frowned. He might’ve felt useless if he wasn’t too busy feeling wrong.

“Bentley,”

He glanced forward at Bruce, whose gray irises lingered on his face for a few moments, a slightly concerned expression on his face. “What’s wrong?”

Bentley glanced over at Nico and Asten, who were very preoccupied by getting his lungs to work again. So Bentley stood up, climbing up and over the center console to plop in the passenger’s seat next to Bruce, who was watching him dutifully.

How was he supposed to explain that feeling to him? The feeling of your mind, your head being boggled by someone else, every thought read, rearranged, scoured.

He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around himself, a bad attempt at supplying comfort. “The Secret Keeper… came outside when you were inside,” He explained in hushed tones, quiet enough Asten and Nico probably wouldn’t hear. His head throbbed spectacularly, and he winced. “She didn’t come to the car or anything, only to the house door, but…”

“But?” Bruce inquired gently.

“But when I tried to call and tell you, she…” Bentley paused, then pointed at his head. “It felt like someone stabbed me in the head. Then I saw something.”

Bruce hummed lightly. “What was it?”

Bentley glanced back at Asten and Nico, satisfied that the Brazilian was getting Nico to use the inhaler as opposed to listening.

“It was like… something that happened to Asten. Like I was really there,” He muttered quietly, glancing back up at Bruce, then down at his hands. “He said I got knocked out for a minute. And now my head hurts.”

He heard Bruce sigh lightly, but didn’t look up.

“And now I feel all wrong. My head, it… it feels wrong. I don’t know how to tell you…” He muttered, resting his chin on his knees, batting away tears that were stinging in his eyes. “Like it’s been all messed up and unraveled. I don’t… I... I don’t know…”

He didn’t look up until he felt Bruce’s hand delicately land on the side of his head, the warm sensation warding off the strange emptiness that had been hovering over his skull, his brain. He couldn’t help but lean into it like some sort of sad little kitten, a nearly silent cry forcing its way from between his lips.

“Let’s get you three back to the Manor, okay?” Bruce said softly. Bentley nodded in response, wiping at his leaky eyes, though the thought of Bruce moving his hand to drive the car was nearly unfathomable.

The hand in question only moved enough to stroke Bentley’s hair as the car started up in the background. “You’re going to be okay, chum.”

He wanted to believe that, but he couldn’t stop thinking about how fast the Secret Keeper took him down… how fast she took Dick down. She didn’t even have to touch them. Didn’t even have to see them to influence their dreams.

How were they supposed to fight against something like that?

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[sassenashsworld]

Aaaaah the little juvénile delinquent

Yup, the kind of Asten have a radar for the kind of Nico and Bentley because they know they can convince them to follow them

But hey, a friend is a friend and surely Bentley will did the good choice

He will, uh? He will? *not so sure*

Loool

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

this is so random but i just realized dick is only four years younger than bentley’s actual father

also LOOK AT THIS ART OF BENTLEY I WEEP

part six

❝ JUVENILE DELINQUENT ❞

MONDAY — AUGUST 3 — 1:30PM

BENTLEY LEARNED THAT FOR FREE PERIOD, ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS SIT QUIETLY IN THE LIBRARY. The librarian, who’s name Duke said was Ms. Whitmore, didn’t really care what you did for free period as long as you were being quiet.

Bentley decided playing games on his phone was a good pastime for the hour and a half class block, a lot of the other kids were doing the same. He was sitting at a high-top table, shoved between a couple bookshelves, so he didn’t have to worry about other students staring at him unless they came to look for a book. Some were older, some younger. He guessed the free period didn’t have an age limit since all they did was sit there.

Other than trying to find a seat (which took a few minutes, sifting through the other students.) nothing really stressed him out that block. 

It ended, and Duke met him in the hallway to take him to lunch. Which he hated, because he had to get a food tray and go through a line and make decisions about food on the spot with kids waiting behind him. He already didn’t like making decisions, but making decisions with someone waiting on him made it so much worse.

Duke suggested that Alfred wouldn’t mind to pack him lunch from now on. Bentley was going to take him up on it.

After lunch, Duke walked him to US Geography. Which was fine, he guessed. The teacher was a eclectic old woman named Mrs. Penny, with big, bug-eye glasses, and she talked about as much as Dick. Her room was an explosion of colors and strange objects she’d gotten from all around the world. Every single one had a story, and she tried to tell them all in a single block. It didn’t work; and she ended up forgetting to hand out the worksheet about traveling and said they’d just do it another time.

That was fine with Bentley. He hadn’t been anywhere besides Gotham and Drew anyways. 

So, he’d successfully survived three blocks without a) embarrassing himself, b) having an anxiety attack, or c) being forced to talk to people. 

Maybe school wasn’t as bad as he thought after all.

Once third block was over, Duke took Bentley to his final class: Spanish. Which, by itself, made him a little more buzzy than he had been all day. Learning Spanish didn’t seem easy — not at all — and he was already out of his element simply being at school. Being at school and being expected to understand a foreign language might just push him into malfunctioning brain territory, a place he was glad he hadn’t been yet.

The Spanish classroom was similar to the Geography classroom, but all of the decor was cultural to Spanish speaking countries. From sombreros to giant skirts draped on the wall, the room was a messy mixture of… well… Spanish things. The teacher, Ms. Venetstantos, was younger than all the other teachers, and wearing a traditional looking Spanish dress with lots of colors and designs.

Bentley was not pleased to see that the desks were situated in pairs. (His Geography class had been individuals, which he highly preferred.) Students were already sitting down in some of them, and Ms. Venetstantos didn’t seem to mind, (she was braiding her hair in the corner) so he made his way to an empty pair of desks and sat down in it, trying not to look so out of place and awkward. Although he really hoped no one sat in the chair that was a mere three feet in front of his face, aimed directly at him.

He watched kids file through the door, some already knowing exactly who they’d sit with, and some sitting alone to take a gamble. A few students ended up sitting with kids they didn’t seem to know. None of them had tried to sit across from Bentley, and he didn’t mind. Maybe there’d be an odd number and he’d be left alone.

He was scanning the purple conjugate me! poster on the wall (conjugating seemed so hard) when someone thudded down in the seat across from him, the knock of both desks clacking together emanating through the classroom.

He looked up just in time to meet a pair of rich green eyes.

“I’m so glad you’re in here. I was going to throw a tantrum if I got paired with one more kid I’ve never seen in my life.”

The blue tinged hair, telltale accent and smell of cigarette smoke made it obvious who it was, even if Bentley looked away just as fast as he looked up. God, he wasn’t prepared to talk to someone. Let alone someone he’d already talked to (a tiny bit) that now expected him to keep talking to them.

He heard Asten snicker, dipping his head down in an attempt to catch Bentley’s eyes. “You okay, dude? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Don’t worry, I’m not dead. I hope.”

Bentley shrugged, picking at the sleeve of his blazer. He’d never been called a dude before. Well, Duke had called him little dude, but he didn’t think that counted. Dude was a nickname Bentley had only heard between friends (Asten and Nico, precisely three periods ago.) and brothers. (Dick and Jason. Mostly Dick.) He was neither of those things to Asten and it just made him confused.

Don’t make it weirder by staying silent. “I’m… just not great at talking to people, I guess… sorry.”

Asten leaned back in his chair with a long sigh, crossing his arms across his chest nonchalantly. “No sweat, kid. I’m not easy to offend.”

Bentley wondered why a thirteen-year-old found it fit to call him kid. He didn’t really mind, though.

“Alright, familia!” Ms. Venetstantos started, closing the classroom door with a click. “How are we today?”

There was a variety of responses from around the room, from goods to extended groans. Bentley opted for staying silent, as did Asten.

“Okay. First, we’re starting with a little quiz. It isn’t going into the gradebook, so don’t worry. It’s just so I can see where your knowledge of Spanish starts,”

She sauntered over to her desk and grabbed a stack of papers from it, handing them to each child. “When you’re finished, put your pencil down.”

Bentley glanced at the paper when she handed it out. It was just a massive list of Spanish words, with big, empty blanks beside them. He assumed she wanted them to write the English translation next to it.

He only knew one. Uno. Because of the card game.

He stared at the other words for a while, and then glanced around the room. Thankfully, other students already had their pencils down, so he laid his on the desk, too. Asten was still writing with the same red pen he had in science class, and he was filling in almost all of the blanks. Did he speak Spanish?

It only took a few minutes for everyone’s pencils (and pen) to go down. Ms. Venetstantos came back around and collected all the papers. When she picked up Bentley and Asten’s, she made a sound of approval. “Wow! ¿hablas español?” 

Asten shook his head, as though he actually understood what she was saying. “Portuguese.”

“Ah! Portuguese! Isso é incrível! Você é de Portugal?”

Bentley blinked.

“Nasci em São Paulo, Brasil,” Asten replied simply.

“Quanto tempo você esteve lá?”

“Me mudei para cá há alguns anos,”

“Nunca tive um falante nativo de língua românica em minhas aulas! Estou tão animado!” She explained excitedly, turning and continuing to pick up other student’s papers.

Well, he guessed Asten being able to speak Portuguese explained his accent. That and Brazil were the only two words he caught in the whole conversation.

He tapped his fingertips on the desk. If he was going to be seeing this kid twice a day, he probably needed to get used to talking to him. So Bentley took a deep breath. “… You’re from Brazil?”

Asten glanced back over at him. “Yep. Born and raised,” He explained, crossing his arms again. “My dad moved there from Gotham so he could be with my mom. Then bam! I arrived. And everything went downhill from there.”

Bentley wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, so he didn’t say anything.

“Moved here with my dad’s brother a couple years ago,” He shrugged. “All's well that ends well, I guess.”

Bentley quietly wondered why he went from living with his parents to his uncle, but it definitely wasn’t his place to ask, and he wasn’t about to ruin one of his first good conversations. So he just said:

“That’s cool,”

Asten shrugged. “It would be, if it didn’t load Todryk’s gun.”

Bentley scrunched up his face. He wasn’t sure who Todryk was, nor why he had a gun. Asten raised an eyebrow when he didn’t seem to catch the name.

“Todryk? Jesse Todryk? I guess you’re lucky you don’t know who he is yet,” He humphed, spinning his pencil between his fingers. “Your typical eighth-grade douchebag. He’s the one who chooses if you’re cool enough to hang out with him, or if you’re gonna get shoved in a locker.”

Bentley said nothing.

“Bet you can guess which one I am,” Asten snorted.

His tone implied that he was one of the ones that got shoved in lockers. Bentley wasn’t sure why, because Asten was from Brazil and had blue hair and spoke another language, which he thought was cool, but apparently it wasn’t? Not to this Todryk character, anyway. He wasn’t aware kids at school shoved you in lockers if they didn’t like you. The Wayne’s had neglected to tell him that.

“He… doesn’t like that you’re from Brazil?” Bentley tried.

Asten shrugged. “He’ll make up a reason not to like you if he finds it fit. No one argues with him anyways.”

Bentley stayed quiet again.

“Word to the wise: if you see a dude a little taller than me, stupidest blonde hair you’ve ever seen, wearing some girly-looking little earrings, turn the other way,” He explained. Bentley nodded in response. 

“Okay,”

A tall blonde with girly-looking earrings. He could probably spot that.

Spanish class was similar to all the others — worksheets about themselves and a slideshow about the teacher’s life. Ms. Venetstantos was born in Puerto Rico, and ended up being an avid traveler. She was fluent in Spanish, as well as Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian, which she demonstrated to the class. (She made Asten come to the front of the room and talk to her when she demonstrated Portuguese. He didn’t seem particularly thrilled about it.)

At the end of the class period, Duke met him at the door with a wide smile.

“Hey! How was class?”

Bentley shrugged. “Fine, I guess. The teacher seems cool.”

“That’s awesome,” He replied. He put his hand on Bentley’s shoulder again as they joined in the mass of students heading toward the front door. “So, all in all, how was your first day of school?”

Well, his anxiety had been buzzing all day, but it was minimal compared to last night or that morning. First block was fine, his tablemates were nice. Second block was his favorite because he didn’t have to do anything. Third block was fine, his teacher talked more than anyone he’d ever met, and fourth block was good, Asten was cool. Lunch freaked him out a little but they already had a solution for that.

“I think it was good,” He replied, pulling on his backpack straps. He and Duke thudded down the stairs at the front of the building and stopped at the bottom.

“Bruce is going to be so excited to hear you say that,” He stated, tugging Bentley over until they were out of the way. “Let’s wait here for Damian.”

Bentley watched the crowds of students pass. He saw Asten go by (because how can you miss half-dyed bright blue hair?) and the girl with pink hair from that morning. There were actually more kids with colored hair than Bentley would’ve thought. He’d never even considered that one could change the color of their hair until he met Steph, who got something called highlights. That… made her blonde blonder? Or something?

After a few minutes of scanning students, Damian appeared, coming down the stairs on the opposite side of the room.

Duke tugged on Bentley’s shoulder and they integrated into the group again, working their way up until they were next to Damian.

“Hey, Damian. How was your day?” Duke questioned as they neared the front door. 

“Fine,” Damian replied shortly, then he pushed ahead of them, squeezing through a few students so he wasn’t beside them anymore.

Bentley was starting to wonder if Damian knew what the word fine meant.

When they made it outside, the stormclouds were darker than they had been earlier. It wasn’t raining yet, though, and Bentley was glad.

As soon as the kids spilled out the front door, they went in all different directions. Toward the parking lot, to the pick-up line, disappearing into the city without warning. Bentley was relieved when he found Bruce’s car parked in the parking lot. Even in the same spot he’d parked in that morning. Damian was already halfway there.

Bentley and Duke padded down the concrete stairs, and they passed a pair of boys, a certain blue haired boy and a certain blonde boy, near the bottom of the staircase. There was a strange rattling sound, and Bentley glanced over just in time to see Nico shove a weird little thing into his mouth and take a deep breath. Then he did it again.

“C’mon, dude, you’re gonna be fine,” He heard Asten mutter.

Bentley looked away and kept walking, wondering what in the world that thing was that Nico breathed in. Surely it wasn’t, like, drugs or something. 

He and Duke paused on one side of the pickup line, and waited until the cars were still to go across to the parking lot. (It ended up being, like, five whole minutes.) 

Damian was already getting in the car when they entered the parking lot. They were just working their way to the vehicle when Bentley felt someone grab his sleeve from behind.

He flinched and whipped around, only relaxing when he met a pair of big, ocean blue eyes that reminded him so much of Dick’s. 

Nico was staring at him. Bentley stared back.

“Uh, hey… Bentley,” He started, eyes darting between him and Duke, who’d turned around when Bentley did. Nico released Bentley’s sleeve and put his hands in his pants pockets instead. They weren’t far from the car, maybe ten feet, so after a quiet moment, Duke made his way  over to it so Bentley and Nico could talk.

Nico sucked in a breath, blue eyes flicking to the car, to Bentley, to the ground. “Do you, uh… your… house is in Bristol, isn’t it?”

Bentley glanced around warily. “I think so.” He stated, but it sounded more like a question than an answer. He couldn’t see Asten anywhere, and he had no one to help him with the spontaneous conversation, so he’d just have to try his hardest not to be awkward. 

Nico tugged at his backpack straps anxiously, unable to look Bentley in the eye. “Do you think your dad would… I don’t know, I mean… I don’t really…” He sighed heavily, hanging his head so Bentley couldn’t see his face. “I’m sorry.”

Bentley said nothing, but realized Nico might not be so different from him at all. And that he’d probably have to take over the conversation if he actually wanted Nico to finish. Was this how the Waynes felt every time they talked to him?

So he breathed, in and out. What did Dick say when he acted like that? 

“What’s wrong?” He tried. He could feel Bruce, Duke, and Damian’s eyes all on them from behind. There was no doubt Nico could, too. He kept glancing back there.

“I’m… too scared. To ride the bus. Which… sounds really stupid now that I’m saying it out loud,” Nico cringed. “Last year, sometimes Asten would take it with me, but he can’t today, and my parents aren’t off work yet, and I… was just, uh…” He shoved his hands in his armpits, probably to fight the cool breeze, and Bentley felt sprinkles pricking his exposed skin with momentary coldness. “I’m sorry, this is so stupid.”

Bentley blinked. Once. Twice. Trying so hard to come up with a good response. 

“…Nevermind,” Nico muttered, starting to turn on his heel, although he had that look on his face. The same one he had in first block that said I’m probably going to cry about this when you’re not looking at me. Bentley was familiar with that look, because he got it too, sometimes.

Bentley wondered if Nico cried a lot.

“What were you gonna ask?”

Nico paused, looking back at him warily, then at the ground. “Well, uh… Do you think your dad could maybe… drive me home? Just today. I won’t bother you any more about it, I swear. But if you don’t think he wants to, that's fine, I can still catch the bus. Or if you’re like, wow this kid is weird I just met him today and he’s asking for a ride and I don’t want to, that’s fine, too. I didn’t mean to, like… y’know. Be all weird. About it. I’m… sorry.”

Bentley blinked. That was a lot of words just to ask for a ride. And he tried not to have a reaction when he called Bruce his dad, twice. (Although he didn’t really know how he should react to that, but he didn’t move, nonetheless.) But he was pretty sure… well, like, sixty percent sure Bruce probably wouldn’t mind driving him home, especially since they lived pretty close together, and it was raining. He was nice like that. But he wasn’t exactly sure what the rules were regarding strangers and cars. He knew he wasn’t supposed to get in a stranger's car, but what about a stranger getting in their car?

The sky above them rumbled lowly, pulling Bentley out of his mind and back into the present.

He sucked in a breath. “You can ask him,” He replied. “I… don’t think he’ll mind, but I’m not sure.”

Nico glanced up at him skeptically. “Really?”

“Yeah. He’s really nice,” Bentley tried, glancing down. 

Nico furrowed his brows. “…For real? I expected you to tell me to shut up and go away.”

Bentley scrunched up his nose. “I wouldn’t tell you that.”

A silence passed where Nico just sort of looked at him. Maybe searching his face to see if he was genuine?

“I can take you to him…” He trailed off again. Nico nodded slightly.

“Okay,”

Bentley turned back towards the car. Damian and Duke had already gotten in, and the former was glaring at Nico so angrily Bentley could practically feel it through the glass.

Bruce popped open his door and stepped out when they got close, with a reassuring smile on his face. He was really good at those.

“Hey there, bud. Have a good day?”

“Yeah,” Bentley replied, and Bruce ruffled his hair a bit when he got close. Bruce glanced between Bentley and Nico, who was staring at the ground awkwardly. “This is Nico, and… he wants to ask you something.”

Bruce shifted his attention to the little blonde, with the same smile on his face.

“Yeah, I, uh…” Nico started, taking a deep breath and messing with his backpack straps again, careful not to actually look at Bruce. “Hi. I’m… Nico Rockefeller. I… just wanted to ask if maybe you… can… give me a ride home, maybe? I think I live pretty close to you. But you don’t have to, that’s fine. I’m just kinda afraid to take the bus, and… I thought the Wayne Manor was near Bristol, and, uh, Bentley was in my homeroom and he was pretty nice, so…”

Bruce chuckled lightly in amusement. “Sure I can, if you think your parents would be okay with it. Edward and Jane Rockefeller, right?”

Bentley blinked. Bruce knew Nico’s parents?

Nico snickered a little, kind of awkwardly. “Yeah, they come to some of the charity galas and stuff you host. But, I mean, ride three public buses and walk through downtown in the mornings and afternoons to get here and back, and that’s full of strangers and creeps, so I don’t think they’d care.”

Bruce nodded, a thoughtful expression flashing across his face. ��Then hop on in.”

Nico cracked the slightest of smiles. “Thank you so much. I won’t bother you about it again, promise.”

Bruce popped open the back door, on the opposite side from Damian. “It’s no problem, Nico.”

Bentley climbed in and settled into the seat next to Damian, the middle seat, and Nico climbed in after him. Bruce closed their door and got back in the driver's seat. 

“I want to hear all about your day, Bentley,” Bruce insisted when he climbed in and buckled up.

Bentley shrugged. “It wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be,” He stated. “Duke walked me everywhere and had lunch with me, and we didn’t do any real work today. My teachers were all nice.”

“I’m so glad to hear it,” He stated, backing out of the parking spot. “And you, Damian?”

Bentley glanced over at Damian, but he just looked out the window. “It was acceptable, like any other school day.”

Bruce hummed in acknowledgement. “What about you, Nico?”

Apparently, Nico was not expecting Bruce to talk to him again. Bentley watched him open his mouth and close it a few times, and he cleared his throat before he settled on a simple: “… It was good.”

“Great. Duke?”

They pulled out of the school parking lot and drove. Duke talked about his classes and old friends and complained about already having homework. Nico told Bruce his address, and in the GPS, it was only eight minutes away from Wayne Manor. It started to rain pretty hard when they got to the outer edge of Gotham. 

They pulled up at Nico’s house about fifteen minutes after they left the school. It was big, and it had similar architecture to Wayne Manor. It actually looked more like the massive house Tim grew up in. (Bentley only knew what it looked like because it was neighbors with the Manor. Well… far. But still neighbors.) It didn’t have a huge fence or gate like Drake Manor or Wayne Manor, but it did have a long, brick driveway lined with trees and a fountain in the front courtyard.

Nico sighed, putting his bag back on in the seat. “Thank you, Mister Wayne. I’m sorry for imposing on your evening.”

Bruce made a pfft sound. “You’re not imposing, Nico. Not at all. Your house is on the way to the Manor. In fact, if you ever need a ride to or from school again, please reach out.”

Nico smiled lightly, pulling his phone from his pocket. “Thank you. Again. Can I get your number?”

The question was aimed at Bentley, who pulled his phone out when he realized Nico was talking to him. He navigated to his contacts, like Tim showed him, and let Nico copy the number into his phone.

“Thank you all. See you tomorrow, Bentley,”

“Yeah… bye,”

Nico popped open the door and hopped out into the pouring rain, jogging up to the front of the house. Bentley scooted into his seat and shut the door, and watched him fumble in his pocket for a key, before he opened the massive double doors and went inside.

Bruce drove off only after the front doors closed behind Nico.

Suddenly, Bentley’s phone dinged, and he glanced down at it.

Hey. It’s Nico. This the right number?

He unlocked his phone and sent back a yes.

He wasn’t sure if giving a scared eleven-year-old a ride home in the pouring rain was considered making a friend, but he counted it as something.

Damian scoffed as soon as they pulled out of Nico’s driveway.

“He and that narcissistic blue-haired juvenile delinquent are more trouble than they're worth. I would not befriend them if I was dying and it was the only thing that could save me.”

“Damian,” Bruce warned, sending him a patented dad look in the rear-view mirror. He huffed and looked back out the window.

Great. So he shouldn’t actually be friends with them? Of course Damian would hate the ones he was kinda sorta starting to maybe like.

“I think Nico was very kind and polite,” Bruce weighed in.

It helped. A little. But he kept glancing over at Damian, who looked less than amused.

He wished he knew how to make Damian happier.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

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