#the car keys thing was totally ren's idea so shoutout to her

[fictionalguystalker]

I'm ok, no really.... why is this place so dusty!! 😭

Prompt: Bruce, Jason's grave, first christmas after he died. Make me cry pls and thank

Anything for you, Ren, my sweet sweet angst goblin.

Dick came home a week and a half before Christmas, carrying enough gifts with him to feed and clothe all of Gotham penitentiary, and a few orphanages to boot. He insisted that Bruce open one every day, and afterwards they would go looking for trees, or Christmas parties, or to a wreath making class, or learn how to make gingerbread houses.

Once they even went ice fishing. Dick caught a walleye. Ten pounder. Bruce caught nothing.

After their assorted Christmas themed activities, they would come home and Dick would make him open another present. Then it was a joyful long dinner, with pot roast and cranberry sauce and jellied consomme and roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and eggnog.

And then Dick would make him watch Christmas movies with him until long past midnight, and then Bruce would have to insist he had to go to bed, because they had a long day of opening presents and competitive skiing and glazed shrimp scampi ahead of them the next day.  

He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. It was not easy to sleep, most nights. Dick had firmly told him that he was not to be patrolling around Christmas time this year. Kate would handle it. He sighed, turning over.

The house was quiet, save for the muted sounds of the TV from the downstairs lounge, where, no doubt Dick had fallen asleep without switching off the system.

 He got up a few minutes later, scrubbing at his face. Sleep would not be coming to him tonight. Tomorrow was Christmas Day. Perhaps it was why Dick had been extra enthusiastic in his gift giving attempts. He’d given Bruce a set of jade cufflinks, and a five hundred dollar espresso machine.

When he saw Bruce staring at him, Dick grinned. “I made the down payment a week ago, and I’ll have paid the rest off by February.”

When Bruce shook his head, he saw Dick’s face fall a little. “You don’t like it?” Dick said.  

Bruce studied the espresso machine, trying to think of the best way to put it.

“I do like it,” he said finally. “But you need to stop trying so hard.”

There was a silence for a while. An unspoken weight.  

“You’re not trying at all,” Dick said, his eyes on his shoes. His voice was quiet.

“I don't–”

“Can we– can we talk for a sec, Bruce?”

Bruce shoved his hands in his pockets. He didn’t want to do that. “We’re talking now,” he said.

“It’s like, it’s like you don’t even want to move on!” Dick said, his hands up in the air, “after what happened to– what happened, you don’t think I gotta live with that too? That I don’t stay up nights thinking about how I could have done things differently and maybe, and maybe he wouldn’t have–” Dick stopped talking, and went quiet. He was still look at his shoes, only now his jaw was clenched hard.  

Bruce realized with a start that Dick was trying not to cry.  

“Dick,” he started, “I'm–”

Dick was shaking his head. “You just want to die,” he was saying. He swiped at his cheek with the back of his hand, an abrupt, embarrassed gesture, “you don’t even care.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is,” Dick said, his voice low, “it is.”

Bruce looked away. “Dick, we don’t have to talk about this now.”

Dick said nothing. “You mean, you don’t want to talk about it,” he said.  

“No, I mean this is Christmas Eve and I don’t want to ruin it for everyone,” Bruce said, quietly.  

Dick laughed a little. “Who’s everyone, Bruce? Kate? Selina? Clark? No one’s here. No one’s coming to see you because you don’t return their calls. You don’t talk to them.”

“Let’s talk about this later.”

“And I know you still haven’t been going to work regularly, because Alfred called me up last month and told me. So all you do is sit at home or go to patrol, pretty much, huh?”

“Dick,” Bruce said.

“You act like this is all your fault and guess what, B. You’re not that special. It was just a random, horrific thing that happened, and it’s not all on you, you goddamn–”

“Dick!” Bruce snapped.

Dick fell silent. Through the windows across from them, Bruce could see the snow fall. It was going to be a white Christmas.

He sighed. His skin felt too tight on his face. “I’m sorry,” he said.  

Dick nodded stiffly. “Me too,” he said, after a while.

And that had been that. An hour later, Dick was back to normal, forcing Bruce to go to the the Neimann-Bauer annual Christmas Eve benefit, and making sure that he wore his new jade cufflinks and drank coffee out of the new espresso machine. After the benefit, they drove home in the Bentley while Dick talked his ear off about the new Radiohead album or something like that.

Then they came home, and went to bed. Or tried, in Bruce’s case.  

He walked over to a window and looked outside. It had stopped snowing, at last. Tomorrow morning would be beautiful. A dreamscape, something out of a surreal painting. The whole lawn of Wayne Manor swathed in white.  

He pressed his forehead against the glass. Closed his eyes.

*

Bruce drove to the cemetery.

He couldn’t explain why he did it, especially in the dead of the night, and just after it had snowed, too. He just felt as if he had to. His mother had always told him it was impolite not to wish family members Merry Christmas. Even ones that lived far away. You were supposed to call. It was the right thing to do. In the morning, he was going to apologize to Dick. Make things good with him. He just wanted to wish Jason first.  

He got out of the car, turning up the collar of his overcoat. It was deathly cold. The cemetery was far from the manor, situated in Gotham proper. It had been near Jason and his mother’s house, back when they had still lived there.  

At the time, he had felt that Jason would want to be buried next to his mother.

He walked along the neat row of graves, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. His breath came out in puffs of mist. Jason’s grave was in the third row. He stood in front of it, coming to a stop.

“Hi,” he said. Then he cleared his throat, because his voice had come out all rough and strange.  

“Hi,” he said again. “Merry Christmas.” He paused again, unsure of what to say.  There was a long silence. “Alfred made plum cake again, Jay. It was perfect. You would have loved it.” He looked away.  This had truly been one of his more idiotic ideas, driving down here through the snow and the iced up roads in the middle of the night, to talk to a rock about a cake.  

He clenched his jaw. “Maybe it’s stupid, talking like this. I don’t know where you really are. Maybe you’re nowhere at all. I don’t know what– what I believe.”

Jason wasn’t in heaven, he thought. He wasn’t in hell either, or anywhere in between. He wasn’t six feet underground, listening to Bruce as he talked. Jason just… wasn’t.  

And yet something strange in Bruce’s chest kept him talking. Kept him from acknowledging the horrible decision that this had been, and driving back to his house and getting back into his warm bed.  

He brushed away some of the snow from the gravestone, idly. “I’m sorry,” he said, “you know I’m not good with words.” He realized that he’d forgotten to wear gloves. His hands would be numb soon. Right now they were just cold.

“That was always Dick’s strong suit,” he continued, in a low voice. “Words, I mean. He always knows the right thing to say.”

“He’s been trying really hard this Christmas. To forget, I suppose. He needs that,” Bruce said, “I owe him that.”

A wind had started to pick up, and he could hear a faint rustling coming from somewhere. Possibly just a rat. “He said something to me today. He said that I just wanted to die, now that you’re gone.”

Bruce furrowed his brow, “It’s true,” he said, “isn’t it? I don’t think I knew it myself.” He shrugged.

“Wouldn’t be so bad,” he said, thinking. “Dick could handle things in place of me, in Gotham. I trust him. And everyone else would just carry on, I suppose. And I’d be with you. No one would mind too much, I think. Clark or Selina or any of the others.”

He looked at the gravestone, frowning. “People move on,” he said.  Other people, he thought. It was a thing they did. Moved on.

If Jason was here he’s have done an elaborate snort. Apparently not you, you emotionally repressed asshole, he’d have said, or something as equally sardonic.

“No,” Bruce said lightly, “not me.” He touched the freezing edge of the gravestone again, with light fingers. “In my defense, it’s only been three months. And I did love you so much,” he said quietly. “I didn’t say that enough, how much I loved you. I’m so scared that you died not knowing. I lie awake at night thinking about it. Did you know?”

The gravestone answered him with an expected silence, and Bruce almost half-smiled. He truly had gone insane. Asking questions to a grave.

He reached into his the pocket of his coat, and took out a pair of car keys. He knelt down, and placed it in front of the grave.

“Merry Christmas,” he said, smiling. “It’s only a  Honda Odyssey, so don’t get too ahead of yourself. I bought it almost six months ago. Wanted to surprise you for Christmas. I just thought, with you turning sixteen next year and all. You might’ve wanted me to start teaching you. That’s all.”

He knelt there for a while, the snow soaking through his pants and the cold going straight to his knees. “That’s all,” he said again, his voice low. “Just thought you might appreciate it. You could drive to school and back, and go out with that girl you wanted to ask to homecoming. Take her to the movies or something,” he smiled, “I know you think that I didn’t know about her, but I overheard you talking to Dick about it. And she came to the funeral with her mom. She seemed like a very nice young lady.”

She’d cried a lot. An uncomfortable amount, and Bruce had had to look away.

He hadn’t felt much at the funeral at all. Only a faint sense of embarrassment at all the crying around him. Jason would have been amused.

He hadn’t felt anything after that initial night in Ethiopia. And even that couldn’t have been strictly classified as feeling, so much so as his mind just shutting down and focusing on getting the body home. He could barely even remember it now. A feeling like there was a stone in his stomach, something that got heavier and heavier as the days went by. At the funeral, while he watched everyone cry, in the kitchen, when he saw a half empty box of Reese’s puffs. At conferences at work, when he could feel all the interns staring at him while Lucius talked about EPA regulations in their factories in Detroit. When he saw a pair of socks that one of the maids had mistakenly put into his drawer instead of Jason’s.  

All along, the stone in his stomach was turning, solidifying, building on itself, layer by layer. Getting heavier and heavier. And he had foolishly believed that he was going to feel nothing forever.

It had only been the morning after the funeral, when he’d gotten into the shower before going to work that he’d just… stopped. He’d looked at the water swirling down the drain, and some strange, anomalous part of his brain had decided that it was time to snap. The stone had split open. Cracked in half.

After that he had gone straight back to bed. And he hadn’t gone to work for a week, until Alfred called Dick and made him come down to Gotham and talk to Bruce. That had been September.

This was now. His brain still felt snapped. Broken into several pieces, chunks of them floating aimlessly in cerebrospinal fluid, gray and useless. Shattered, was the right word. Shattered.  

The car keys lay in the snow. Bruce stared at them. A car. What a naive idiot he had been.

“I think he’s having a breakdown or something,” he had heard Dick whisper into his phone, that morning that he’d driven down, a week after the funeral. He didn’t care what Dick said. He didn’t care about anything at all. He lay in bed, staring at a patch of wall. His son was dead. His son was dead.

“Bruce,” Dick had whispered when he’d hung up. He’d put a hand on his shoulder. “You have to get out of bed,” he said.  

Bruce had closed his eyes and pretended he was asleep.  

“Okay,” he said now, “okay. Bye, Jaybird.” He stood up, brushing the snow off his legs.  

Tomorrow morning he was going to smile when he opened his presents, and he was going to give Dick that picture of the two of them that he had had framed, of when Dick was very small and they had gone to the zoo the first time. And then he was going to give him the paperwork that said that Zitka officially belonged to Gotham Zoo now, and no longer the circus, which had stopped showcasing animals. Bruce had donated enough money to the zoo that they had had an enclosure made, with plenty of room for her. Another elephant was being shipped in from a zoo in Arkansas, so she wouldn’t be alone.

Because that was the last thing anyone wanted. To be alone.

To new beginnings, he would say into Dick’s collar, as they hugged, and then they would take a family photo with Alfred, without only three chairs instead of four, and that night they would eat a pot roast they wouldn’t be able to finish because Alfred had used his old recipe that accounted for four people. And they would pretend not to notice and Alfred would pack the leftovers and the next morning Dick would go back to Bludhaven.  

And Bruce would just have to carry on, with his snapped brain and the shattered stone in his stomach, and he would wave goodbye as Dick pulled out from the driveway.  And then the rest of his unbearable life would go on and on forever until he was dead.

To new beginnings, indeed.

He gave the gravestone one last look. Then he walked off, towards the car. The car keys lay where he’d left them, in the snow.