#bruce&jay

so this is inspired by the latest chap of @frownyalfred's lovely fic 'hold me loosely' (chapter 4, jason POV) — but i feel like i've also seen other people use this scenario? like, i feel like it's an oddly common recurring bit of bruce characterization in fanfics. anyways, what i'm actually referring to is bruce, when someone around him gets injured on the job, defaulting to listing random facts at them as a way of keeping their mind occupied/off their injury. [fairly often, but not always, it's specifically facts about said injury (ex. "on average XX takes X number of days to heal in a healthy person" "Y% of people will experience XX in their lifetime" etc. etc.)]

...so i was thinking about the thought process bruce would go through in order to arrive on that being his go-to strategy for this kind of scenario, and if you think about it, it actually makes perfect sense? bc i can totally imagine him being like "hmmm so a Normal Person incapacitated in the manner of scenario 259(c)(iii) would likely appreciate/require a distraction from their condition" —> "the most appropriate/comforting distraction that does not hinder my ability to actively continue assisting them is to fill the silence —> "slight problem: i am bad at making conversation" {the genuine kind, not the brucie frivolous-lifestyle-bullshit kind} —> "i can speak about a subject that the injured listener has an interest in" —> "i can speak about a subject that will already be on my mind and will be directly relevant to the listener, as well as assure them that i have the requisite knowledge and am therefore capable of taking care of their injury properly"

...of course, the part that bruce forgets to anticipate is what Injured Party makes of him suddenly turning into an audiobook encyclopedia, and how they might actually respond to that beyond just shutting up and listening to him monologue lmao. thankfully, he gets plenty of practice individualizing his Distraction ManeuverTM accordingly on all of his batkids!

dick: EFFECTIVE. the one this strategy was invented for in the first place — does not deal well with tense silence, also just really loves listening to the sound of his loved one's voices, finds it super relaxing/comforting. used to fall asleep easiest in his family's tent at the circus when he could listen to his mom and dad chat about anything late into the night. he had the perspective to recognize that batman monologuing at you all about the mechanics of the injury you've just received yourself is more than a bit morbid, but hey, he was a bit of a dark-humored morbid kid himself, he doesn't mind 🤷🏽‍♀️

jason: EFFECTIVE. isn't averse to silence in the way dick is, maybe even prefers it mostly — but, when he started out as robin bruce monologued at him when he got injured the first couple times out of habit, and jason definitely noticed and picked up on the pattern. then bruce stopping would have made it weird, so after that he comes to find it comforting in the sense that it's like an endearing habit of bruce's/a familiar routine. so like, he ignores it mostly, but if bruce ever didn't start monologuing at him while he's trying to hold it together he'd definitely notice and be all "hey what the fuck happened" lmao

tim: NOT EFFECTIVE. does not like just listening to bruce growling out mildly-alarming injury statistics, thank you very much. if he can talk, he'll do the talking himself; if he can't, he'll take silence. (also a hand to hold— which bruce eventually learns to provide.)

steph: NOT EFFECTIVE. bruce learns the hard way that steph will interpret him going on about her injury as condescension (which tbf, by definition it kind of is?). his second try is to talk about her performance in the field re: whatever she was doing right before she got injured, which is unsurprisingly received equally poorly. if she can talk, she's definitely talking, and bruce reluctantly learns to tolerate the fact that said chatter is 99% of the time completely unrelated to their current situation. the first time post-war games that he ends up stuck with a steph injured badly enough that she can't fill the silence on her own, in a fit of panicked inspiration he starts telling her about the historical value/sourcing of purple dye, which she teases him endlessly about once she's able to later, but he's just glad that it seems to be implicitly approved of.

cass: SITUATIONALLY EFFECTIVE. cass comes in after tim (and i guess kind of during steph's initial integration into the fam?) so bruce has already been made aware of the possibility that she won't appreciate it. but it turns out that whether cass prefers or dislikes silence varies by the day, honestly, so bruce tends to go for it, and then about 60% of the time he'll get a soft "batman, stop talking, please." (or the equivalent in sign) after a couple minutes lol. (also, even though cass is generally not particularly impolite about it, bruce somehow always feels very effectively chastised by the specific way she tells him to stop: it's like her version of the 'alfred voice'.)

damian: EFFECTIVE. with the unfortunate caveat that if he's capable, he'll certainly be snarking back at bruce the whole time about how he "knows, Father, i memorized the relevant information on these topics when i was five" — but he likes it. he'd never say anything about it, of course, but bruce realizes after some time that being left in silence when bruce is there kind of makes him feel like he's waiting for punishment for being sloppy enough to get injured in the first place.