#personal canon

Bruce’s eyes skimmed over the mangled bodies and landed on the boy.

On the horror and the disbelief and the never ending chasm of loss just now forming on his face. 

The floor fell out from beneath Bruce and he was there again. There in that alley on his knees, screaming wordlessly as the blood spread and the rain came down and the world inexplicably moved on while his parents lay still. As the blood soaked into his black pressed slacks, black on the asphalt, black in the night. The dampness on his face, on his hands that he could not tell if they were tears or blood or the rain. He could still taste the salt and the tang of iron.

His feet were moving before he knew what was happening. Running to catch the boy as he descended from the platform high above with sharp ungainly motions. He caught him up in his arms, pulling him away. He just wanted the boy to not have to look, to not have to see. He had already seen too much. 

He didn’t want the boy to have to know the feeling of his parents’ blood on his hands. To look down at his fingernails and see blood embedded beneath them even years and years later. 

The boy screamed, kicked, tried to wrench himself from Bruce’s grip, tried to run to them. Bruce held on, speaking a rush of comforting words neither of them could hear. Nonsense words but what needed to be said. What Bruce had needed to be said.

Eventually, the rest of the world began to move again and Bruce ran out of words and the hopelessness sunk into the boy and he let himself be comforted as he sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. 

Time went to snatches. It was probably hours later when the police were there and the bodies were carted away and someone was called to take the boy. He left with Bruce’s eight hundred dollar coat, led by the hand of a social worker while Bruce sat on the dusty ground and listened to the elephant make a sound like mourning. 

“Bruce, I’m sorry,” Jim Gordon said, patting his shoulder. 

Bruce hadn’t even noticed he was there. Bruce wasn’t too sure where he was anymore. He thought he just saw his own reflection walk away. 

“Why are you saying sorry to me?”

“It must have brought back bad memories,” Gordon rumbled sympathetically.

Bruce stood up, shook off the man’s hand. “Will he be alright? Will-” Bruce stumbled to a stop. He’d forgotten the boy’s name. 

Gordon understood anyway. His sharp eyes flickered to the exit of the tent, where red and blue flashing lights still issued from.

“I hope so, Bruce. But you know this city.”

“Will he have to stay? Doesn’t he have any other family?”

Bruce loved Gotham. It was his home but the boy didn’t belong there.

Gordon pursed his lips. “According to him, his parents were the only family he had. Other than the circus. But there’s no court in the country that will give a kid over to the strong man and the bearded lady.”

A new well of grief opened in Bruce’s gut. It was as if someone had tried to take him away from Alfred and the manor. If they told him they couldn’t just leave a kid with a butler. 

He wasn’t so naive not to know even at the time that it was his money that had talked. That had kept him out of the orphanages. But this boy who’s name he couldn’t remember had none of that. 

When Bruce finally left the tent, Alfred was waiting for him. 

“Master Bruce,” he said gently, wrapping a double for the coat he had given away around his shoulders. It was drizzling lightly. “Miss St. Cloud gave me a ring. She was afraid you were shaken by the experience.”

Alfred took him by the elbow and guided him to the car. His head felt somewhat weightless. His legs didn’t feel connected to his body.

“I’m not the victim here, Alfred.”

“Of course not, dear boy,” Alfred said. “You never are.”

Alfred shut the door on him with a solid thud and Bruce had to hide his flinch. Gun shots, bodies striking ground.

He leaned his head against the window as the rain came down more heavily. There was a curling poster stuck to a sign post not far away. The colors were already beginning to bleed. He watched red run down and seep into the boy’s smiling face.