thirty one

                                    

                                          
Forty.
When you were young, Bruce realized, that number seemed like a fantasy. A distant dream— an unimaginable period in your life that all adults would warn you about reaching as you grew up. You'd then wave them off, passively roll your eyes, and dignify your naivety with some excuse along the lines of "please, like I'll ever turn forty."
And now, as Bruce sat at the foot of his bed, eyes trained on the portrait of him and his parents, he realized that he'd finally reached that unimaginable number— that distant dream which had somehow become a startling reality all too fast.
The air in the Manor felt heavy and cold, just as it did every year on his birthday.
Forty.
Bruce Wayne wasn't supposed to be forty years old. Bruce Wayne was playboy extraordinaire— forever young and reckless; forever mischievous, drunken, and good-looking. And forever was supposed to be... forever. Not forty with four kids.
Every birthday for him was rough— a reminder of another event his parents wouldn't get to share with him. Another year of never getting a celebratory clap on the back from his father, or a warm smile from his mother.
This birthday, however, was particularly horrible, because it was the first year that Bruce made it to an age his parents never did.
They had been thirty-nine when they died.
Bruce was finally forty.
Why?
It was the one question he'd never be able to find an answer to.
Why them? Why not him?
He didn't even want to finish getting ready for the stupid party that stupid Devin was forcing him to go to. Stupid fucking Devin, with his stupid eyes that looked exactly like his Eleanor's. Stupid Devin who had parents that were alive. Stupid Devin with his stupid wife and stupid kid and stupid happy life in which he didn't run around one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world dressed as a bat because he felt he had something to prove. So fucking stupid.
And, to top it all off, there was some... wrinkle forming in between Bruce's eyebrows. An actual wrinkle. What the fuck. Wrinkles were for old people and Bruce was certainly not old.
He replayed the image of him earlier that day when he inspected the divot in his skin with confusion. He had pressed at it in the bathroom mirror. It hadn't gone away when he'd relaxed his face.
He then frowned, which had deepened the effect of the wrinkle and he finally realized that it was most likely the product of him being stressed all the time. So there were only two logical solutions to his problem: never move his face again, or invest in botox.
And he definitely wasn't going to think about botox because that was for people who accepted that they were aging, which Bruce was not. So he concluded that he was just going to have to never move his face ever again. Shouldn't be too hard. Batman wasn't even supposed to have emotions, after all.
There was a knock on his bedroom door.
A second later, it widened and the grinning face of stupid Devin Elias with his stupid eyes greeted him.
"There's the birthday boy!" Devin smiled widely, dressed in a sharp navy blue tux. "How are you feeling on this fine fortieth day of birth, Short Stuff?"
Bruce had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. He couldn't move his face in fear of wrinkles.
Christ. That was so... lame. "Fear of wrinkles." Fuck. So now he was scared and old.