#(normal canon)

Only the second in the time Bruce had been away globetrotting, and the first had taken in the shotgun and the man behind it and taken off at a dead sprint.

“The silver is locked up and you will not get far with other valuables. Leave now, ahead of me where I can properly see you out, and you may be ahead enough of the police to escape.”

The figure down the hall didn’t move. There was a dark shape hanging at its side, a duffel bag, perhaps. It looked heavy and full-- Alfred was getting too old and soft if he’d missed the intruder already collecting things around the manor.

“I knew I wasn’t going to get a warm welcome after how I left, but it is still my house, I think,” the figure rumbled, a touch of amusement in the deep baritone.

Alfred, arms suddenly weak, lowered the gun.

“Master Bruce?”

“Hey, Al,” Bruce said, and he didn’t sound like Thomas anymore. That, more than a resemblance, startled Alfred. He had once, for a few years, sounded an eerie match for the youthful timbre and cadence Thomas had never really outgrown. Thomas Wayne had always sounded young, and Bruce seemed destined to follow during his later teen years.

Alfred fumbled at his side for the lightswitch and the hall flooded with bright, clear light. Bruce stood at the end with the bag strap digging into his broad shoulders. His hair was a shaggy mess beneath the cap he pulled off and held in one hand, and there was a shadow of beard partially covering the sculpted cheekbones of an adult.

He was a man.

He was a man, and Alfred had missed it, but he still knew him beyond the shadow of a doubt.

“Master Bruce,” Alfred said, swallowing. The rebuke he wanted to give at the creeping and sneaking in the dead of night did not come, it refused to spill out of him in that same scolding habit he’d developed in the last few years of Bruce’s adolescence. For one thing, it struck him as a bit off to scold this adult, and for another, the gun was still in his hands.

He’d leveled a gun at Bruce Wayne.

Reproach funneled inward, while concern overrode other outward emotions.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Alfred said. “I shouldn’t have…I heard the alarm. I’ll go put this dratted thing away, if you’ll give me a moment, and then perhaps a cup of tea would be in order…”

He felt horribly out of place in the manor he’d called home for so many years. He’d raised someone’s child, here, and now he felt like the stranger staring down the hallway at the master of the house, waiting with bated breath for the inevitable panic.

“It’s alright,” Bruce said calmly, as if the gun simply hadn’t registered, or didn’t bother him in the slightest. “You don’t need to rush. I was going to wait until tomorrow, but I wanted to see you.”

The size, the voice, the confidence. They were all things Bruce had grown into or manufactured for himself somehow in his time away, and Alfred felt each detail like a carving knife in his gut. He’d missed it, because it had been kept from him, and that stung in a way he hadn’t known to brace himself to bear. He had expected, foolishly he now saw, that Bruce would return very much the same-- a few more books or skills crammed into his thick skull, but otherwise unchanged. He had been waiting all this time for a sullen teenager to return, and hoping he’d grown out of the sullenness at the least.

Now, he wished Bruce had grown a little less.

The shotgun in his hand felt heavy. He left without a word, startled beyond speech, and tucked it into the case that slid beneath his bed. It was the gun he kept close, and for the first time in years, he didn’t bother to lock the hardshell. Distraction drove him back out of the room and down the hall toward the kitchen, where he hoped Bruce was still lingering and not merely a nighttime phantom wrought by strange dream.

Dread enveloped him. For the first time in months, he let himself wonder quite at what Bruce was doing when he dropped occasional postcards about training, or education. His suspicions were varied and wild and vast, so he had never allowed himself to entertain them much before. Whatever it had been, to strip the instinctive fear of a gun barrel away, it must have been unpleasant and difficult.

The hall was empty, but someone was rummaging in a cupboard in the kitchen.

He went into the lit room to find the duffel bag on the floor by the kitchen table, and Bruce sitting on the marble countertop eating peanut butter with a spoon directly from the jar.

There you are, Alfred thought, the dread draining some, like a canal lock had been raised and diverted the depth of it into smaller channels. This was his Bruce, for all his size and gravelly voice.

“M’hungry,” Bruce said, sticking the spoon back in. “I didn’t eat on the plane.”

A spark of suspicion ignited in Alfred; he knew that wariness, the distrust of food he didn’t see prepared. He chased that away and in this new, fragile balance between worry and relief-- a thing in its infancy compared to what he remembered of the same scales in Bruce’s adolescence-- he found it was not beyond him to scold, after all. He swatted at Bruce’s leg with the kitchen towel, before throwing it over his shoulder to prepare tea.

“Off the counter, sir,” Alfred said. “We have chairs enough.”

It wasn’t until Bruce grinned that Alfred realized his expression had barely changed since he recognized him. The grin was familiar, the ghost of a child’s smirk, and a balm. He hadn’t seen that expression in years, not even in all the months before Bruce had left. Whatever fear or misery he carried in addition to his grief, it seemed Bruce had outgrown that some, too. He moved like a man with purpose, even dropping into a chair, and not a sulking and haunted boy.

Perhaps he had not been the only one suddenly anxious at the reunion and its tone.

Alfred chided himself, while setting the kettle, for being so conflicted at Bruce’s lack of response to the gun. That, too, was a good thing, in theory, however unsettling he found it. He warmed a small pot of soup from the freezer and sat it down at the table before his former charge.

“Well, then,” Alfred said. “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been up to, hm?”

Bruce stared at the soup for a long moment, and then inclined his head. For the first time since he’d made his presence known in the house, he seemed uncertain. Alfred wondered if it was the food, until Bruce spoke, his voice thick.

“It’s a lot. You’re not going to like it all,” Bruce warned. “Honestly, I thought you were going to be pretty pissed at me for showing up at all.”

Broad shoulders, shadow of a beard, deeper voice, new habits, changed manner-- none of that changed that this was Alfred’s boy, still. He did harbor dread at whatever Bruce would tell him, he was more than a little angry at the long absence, but these were things for later. For now, Bruce was home, and alive.

Alfred bent and folded Bruce into a hug against his chest, pressing a kiss into the hair that so needed a trim.

“When has being mad ever stopped me from caring for you,” Alfred said. Bruce slumped a little into the embrace and sighed, and there it was-- that young sound. Alfred withdrew and took a seat, and Bruce shook his hair out of his eyes and tucked into the soup.

“Do people do that often,” Bruce asked, between mouthfuls. “Break in?”

“More than I’d like but not as often as you probably will let yourself think,” Alfred said. “That’s the kettle. Tea?”

“The usual,” Bruce said.