Chapter Text
A tense silence fills the Jeep as it tears down I-70. They have four hundred miles to go on this road alone, much less the approximately nine hundred miles after that. They have hours and hours of driving ahead of them and Bruce doesn’t want to spend it not talking.
The problem is that he’s pretty good at not talking.
They can talk-- they have been talking, on the phone at least once a week. But it’s been twenty-four days since the Joker and Zsasz died and they’re on the way cross-country to a surgeon in Montana and the stress is radiating off Jason in waves so thick and hard that Bruce is slightly worried the boy will throw open the car door and literally run if they have to slow down for anything.
If Dick were here, he’d know what to say. Or he’d be so good-natured about trying that it would smooth things over.
But Bruce is acutely aware of his own failings in communication, maybe more these past few years than ever. And as his own stress levels rise in reaction to Jason’s, he feels his words slipping further and further away from him until his fingers are a vice around the steering wheel.
Get Jason to Montana with both of them in one piece. That’s the goal.
Bruce wants more than just the bare minimum but sometimes the minimum is the best target.
In one of those grand internal paradoxes, he both entirely understands his kids’ need for words and is blindsided by it every single time. He knows he hyper focuses, he knows he often says things in a way that isolates or distances-- but knowing this doesn’t fix it. And in the moment, he knows he still misses so much when he’s communicating information. It used to make him angry, this disconnect between relevance and feeling. But now it’s just another reminder of the ways in which he is internally crippled.
I don’t know how to talk to them about it, he’d told Martha Kent once.
But they need you to, she had answered.
And he’s glad to be on good terms with Babs again because he needs it, he needs her interpretations and reminders that how he communicates matters just as much as what he communicates, and she’s developed a straightforward and sterile way of telling him and keeping him in line that he can take. And he does need it.
It wasn’t always that way.
The normal trajectory of memory is that the older one gets, the things furthest from the current point in time are the first to fade. But he isn’t normal and it’s not true for him-- preparatory school and college are a blur now, some of those first months with Dick have merged into a composite, but those memories of his early childhood have become sharper and more pronounced with age.
Did you know memories gain permanence the more often you recall them? Dev had asked him just a week ago, while Bruce had been mercilessly butchering him over a game of chess.
Yes, Bruce had answered, because he did know. It was readily available research.
The problem is that they’re rewritten as new memories every time and any bloody error in memory is recorded as the strongest iteration, so your most vivid memories might be the most faulty. It’s sodding mental, Dev had continued. The most accurate ones are the ones you don’t think of often.
Bruce hadn’t wanted to think about this. He still doesn’t want to, really.
Sorry, I’ve just been thinking about my mum, Dev had said, while Bruce captured his remaining rook.
Bruce doesn’t want to think about it because his only connection to his parents for over thirty years now has been through memory and they are some of his most vivid ones, memories he’s accessed thousands of times. And the possibility that he has misremembered, rewritten an ideal over their reality, is so horrific to him that even with his usually realist leanings he cannot dwell on it.
And what he remembers is talking. He remembers following his mother when he was only tall enough to see the hem of her mid-length skirt at eye-level, holding the pieces of a dissected wristwatch in his hands and asking, Why is this here, what does this do, why is it this color, what is it made of, who made this, what did they use? He remembers her laughter and the way she never was exasperated the way his father would be after the first two or three questions.
Let’s look it up, she would say if she didn’t know. Let’s ask Alfred, who then seemed like an endless fount of knowledge, like a household encyclopedia, a reference for when they couldn’t find answers in the pages of the brown bound and numbered volumes or didn’t feel like the trek to the library.
He remembers her talking about the smell of roses, making up stories about the life of the mink whose fur she wore around her neck in the winter. He remembers asking about swimming pool safety, about whether you could stand on Jupiter, about a joke that went over his head at a party, about a picture he had seen of a Holocaust victim. Nothing was off-limits to him and she never dismissed his questions.
When he gave his opinion on her necklace, a lunch, a politician’s speech, a news report, the importance of space exploration, she listened and considered it with the same gravity she gave to his father’s words.
He thinks some days he remembers every single thing he ever said to her and she to him, though he realizes this must be an impossibility.
And he remembers the last night they spoke anything to each other, but one of his deepest griefs is that he never has been able to remember what she said. He thinks it should be etched firmly into his memory, more than the mundane questions about the composition of clouds or whether Mozart had a dog or how blood types were distinguished.
But when his parents died in that dark alleyway, he thinks his language died with it. He doesn’t remember what, if anything, any police officer said to him that night. He remembers the visuals but not the words.
Bruce knows he’s not as bereft as Cass was; he still thought in language, he could still manage sentences of structure with proper form and vocabulary. But what had once poured out of him without effort became a mountain at the edge of a desert valley he was lost in.
He can count on his fingers the number of things he said to Alfred in that first month after. And the older man, already tending toward reserved silence, had not pressed. It wasn’t until much later that Bruce had realized the older man’s reticence wasn’t neglect or carelessness, but the mutual muteness of his own grief at the loss of what were certainly at that point his best friends.
In his silence, he felt like all his speech and questions and desire to understand the world had died with the one who had always answered him. It was months before he even wanted to ask anything again, and when it crept back into his life and out of his grief, this thirst to know, it did not bring his old ease of speech along. For the first time in his remembered life, his hunger for information was hampered by his struggle with the words he needed.
He had only been a child, but he had never told anyone how difficult it was to just ask something. To comment on anything. To respond to questions. So his silence became a part of him as much as their deaths had and his interactions with the verbal world were the result of intentional rehearsal and planning. He often heard himself spoken of as that aloof Wayne boy, that poor quiet thing.
By the time he reached college, language had become a function of necessity rather than nature. Like any foreign tongue, he became more fluent with usage and immersion, and knew how to navigate different expectations. He even enjoyed it again, sometimes, but it was a guarded enjoyment of something he knew he could lose again and didn’t want to grow too dependent upon.
And somewhere along the way, he realized he wasn’t catching nuance in the way others spoke, outside of his familiarity with Alfred’s mannerisms and sarcasms and sincerity, so precision became crucial to him. He moved most easily in concrete terms, in the accurate transmission of data. It made sense to him when he struggled to make sense of himself.
Because he still wasn’t certain he was understood, could make himself understood the way he wanted to be. He could chat and flirt and small talk and lead board meetings, but that was more the result of the study of human nature and body language, of learning what to say to achieve a result and it was always too false to apply to his family, to his own desire to genuinely connect.
He thinks sometimes it’s why he started learning foreign languages, to test each possible variation and see if there was one in which he could find natural expression again. Maybe the remembered ease was a product of childhood, but he suspects it’s a mix. Still, he never has found anything that’s come close.
But knowing his flaws are rooted in trauma and actually changing how his brain functions are two vastly different things. It is a disassociation that gives him the means to look back and explain himself in retrospect, but once situations have escalated because of his own failures to handle them well, he feels those explanations are often unwelcome and pointless. The damage has already been done.
Still, he has improved, like any skill. It’s not always a struggle. And he’s had good teachers along the way, even if they didn’t realize it-- Dick and all the emotion he managed with words, Jason and his profane and then tempered eloquence.
Cassandra he understands so easily and readily that it had startled him at first, how alike they are. He can see himself in each of the boys and some of each of the boys in him, but Cassandra is…Cass is the closest he’s ever come to seeing and knowing himself reflected in another. But she’s a child and a daughter and he has certain responsibilities and burdens that are not yet hers to bear.
It is no small wonder then that his closest friends over the years have been those who are comfortable with silence, unthreatened by the absence of speech. He likes talking to them but it does not frighten or worry Clark or Alfred or Selina when he lapses into silence, into the language of motion or stillness. When he is stressed or struggling, they have the ability to let him mull or brood or sort his thoughts without demands.
But the kids need more than that, more than his sparsely delivered instructions and stony quiets, and when he is most troubled or distracted he often doesn’t see it or remember it until long after. Sometimes, he sees it in the moment but it is the times of greatest stress in which his words, beyond the most basic or functional, slip away from him again.
When Jason died, he lost years of progress-- poor, long-suffering Alfred waited almost two weeks for him to manage more than a brief recitation of the barest facts surrounding the boy’s murder. It wasn’t that the words weren’t there; he has a head full of hundreds of thousands of words in over a dozen languages by now. It was just that he couldn’t force them into the leap from his brain to his lips and on some level, he didn’t want to.
He built himself back up again but he still always struggles with tension, with stress. It is not fear that stays his tongue, it is something mechanical, some process that shuts down and restarts only with effort. The problem is often that he doesn’t even realized it’s happened until well after it has. And that’s usually after he’s already hurt someone or pushed them away with his brevity, his brief and cold words. It’s not an excuse, just a reason, a dissection of why he should apologize and then even that is hard because he’s also, if he’s honest, pretty prideful. And he worked like hell to make himself who he is, a sharp and unrelenting human weapon, so he feels he has a right to be a little proud.
But it kills him in the times when he wants–needs– to connect or engage. With Dick, with Jason, with Babs, with Lesley. His mission has been to save or protect Gotham for so long that it seems stupid how bad he can be at rebuilding or repairing things. And then he gets frustrated and angry with himself and the kids read it right off his face and his body, like he taught them to read people, and jump to conclusions and it all goes to shit and he’s left with the aftershocks of his firm opinions and inflexible rules and desire to reach them and attempts to retain some semblance of understanding.
It is times like those that he most misses her.
It is times like these that he most misses her, when an old foe is vanquished and his boy is terrified of surgery and he doesn’t know if he should be happy or heartbroken or somewhere in between, when he is always, always bittersweet or broken and he just wants to ask her, she who never made him feel despised or misunderstood or small even when he was six years old,
How the hell do I do this? How do I talk to my son?
And it is a further bittersweet to know he ought to know better than she. She, who had all that patience wrapped up in thirty-two years of life, he who has eight years and three months beyond what she ever had. He should be better at this by now, but he’s spent over thirty years trying to resurrect his words and they’re still stiff and dead things when he most needs them.
So it makes perfect sense and is fitting and stinging all the same when it is Jason who breaks the silence.
The kids-- all of them, even Cass-- are good at being the first to speak, when they tire of waiting for him.
“So, are we just gonna glare at the fucking road for seventeen hours? ‘Cause I’ve got some music I could play or you can just ignore me, that’s goddamn fine, too.”
“Sorry,” Bruce says quietly, “I was just thinking.”
“About how to tear off the steering wheel in a fit of rage? Because I want out of the fricking car first,” Jason quips.
Bruce glances over at him. The interstate is clear and he can spare a good look. And it strikes him, a blow that shatters his own inner turmoil, how hard Jason is trying and how proud he is of him.
Because there was such a gap, it is hard sometimes not to still think of him as a kid, as a smart and brash young teenager. But the boy sitting next to him in the Jeep with his arm in a sling is a man, a man almost twenty-one, a man he’s been talking to on the phone and emailing and building relationship with for years now. And it reminds him of Clark, a little, the way Jason navigates around Bruce’s silence, the way he doesn’t treat it like a bomb about to go off but just as a fact to work with.
“My mother,” Bruce says, returning his eyes to the road and swerving a little to miss a shredded piece of tire. “I was thinking about my mother.”
“You don’t really talk about her much,” Jason answers, adjusting the flow of one of the A/C vents. Outside around them, June is picking up speed and barreling into the heat of approaching July.
“No,” Bruce says simply. “I don’t. I don’t think I could do her justice.”
“B,” Jason says, with an audible eye-roll, “if there’s anything you can do, it’s justice.”
Bruce doesn’t try to temper the smile that pulls at the corners of his mouth.
“She was good at talking. And listening. I’ve always envied it.”
“Hm,” Jason says.
There’s silence in the Jeep again but it’s no longer tense, just companionable. Or, Bruce thinks it is until the fifth minute when he looks sidelong at Jason and sees the pensive expression. And it’s his turn to manage words, but he finds it easier now. He thinks he’s been getting better, maybe.
“What’s bothering you?”
Jason looks startled at first and then pensive again.
“I dunno,” he says, rubbing his face. “A lot. Shit. A lot I was waiting to talk to you about, but now I don’t know where to fricking start. Surgery. That I hate school. I miss everyone. That the Joker is dead and that you were right and I’ve never apologized.”
“Apologize?” Bruce asks, raising an eyebrow. “What the hell for?”
“I gave you a lot of grief for not killing him,” Jason says quietly. “But it was leaving him alone that kept everyone’s hands clean. It’s kind of a fucking poetic justice, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Bruce says, equally quiet. “But you don’t need to apologize for that, Jay.”
When the silence is tipping into tense again, Bruce takes a deep, long, and measured breath-- the kind he’s gotten practice taking without anyone noticing. It’s a useful skill.
“So, what’s this about school?”
“You know,” Jason says, swallowing hard, “we’ve got like sixteen more hours at least. Can we talk about it later? I’ve feel like this whole summer has just been up and down. I’m tired. I’m so tired. And I just want to sit and be here with you and not feel like we have to talk.”
“Okay,” Bruce says, reaching over and squeezing Jason’s shoulder. “That’s fine. I’ve missed you, too.”
So the Jeep eats up the miles of I-70 and the tension fades and after a while, Jason tips the seat back and dozes while Bruce drives and in the quiet, it feels a lot like being understood.