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“I didn’t,” Dick said, “want to kill anybody.”
“You didn’t have a choice,” Bruce said.
Dick looked up, sharply; Bruce bit the fat tongue in his useless mouth. Dick’s pale eyes were wide and very fervid and too big for his face, almost like a frog. He was tucked up in bed, under a thick blue comforter pulled up to his chin, and Bruce was leaning against the nightstand by the bed with his hands in his khaki slacks. It was nine-thirty. Bedtime. For the dead little boy.
“Yes, I did. They said you do it or we chop out your guts. And eat them. They said or.”
“Or,” Bruce echoed. It came out strange.
“They could have chopped my guts out instead and then I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have—well. I don’t know if I did.”
“…You don’t know if you murdered anyone,” said Bruce, the way another man over another child might have said, Would you like a glass of water before you hit the hay, haim shelli? Then, said Bruce, hushedly, “I don’t think you did.”
When he thought about it, it made sense. Since he had gotten Dick, he had assumed otherwise out of precaution. But Dick was tiny. The Court was awful. But Dick was so tiny. They could not have possibly. Dick could not have possibly.
And he was so new to the Court too. None of the many, many deaths in Gotham in that period were committed by someone so small, someone so near the four-foot mark.
“I don’t remember.”
Dick bit down on his lower lip. Bruce took a hand out of his pocket to touch his index finger gently to Dick’s temple to say, Stop. Dick didn’t feel things, like pain, the way he should have. It was the same as when babies stuck their hands in their mouths and bit off their fingertips and chewed off their tongues during sleep. Dick stopped.
“But I know they said or. So if I did, it was my fault." Pause. His voice went small. "There's always a choice.”
Bruce thought, You are—I do not know if you know this. Do you know this?—ten years old. You are ten years old.
And then Bruce thought, haltingly, But you get it. No one else has gotten it before.
You can’t kill. You can’t. You just can’t you can’t you can’t Bruce can never kill never ever. You will always be responsible. You just—
Can’t.
Bruce looked at the little boy, his big eyes. Said, “Do you want to get ice cream.”
-
Alfred was loudly, clatteringly polishing silverware in the kitchen when he saw Bruce come down the stairs hand-in-hand with Dick. “What’s all this?”
“We’re getting ice cream,” said Bruce. Dick’s small hand was very cold. Dick was still in pajamas.
“At ten o’clock?”
“It is.” Bruce checked his Oyster Perpetual. “Only nine-thirty-six.” The minute hand tick-ticked. “Seven.”
Alfred’s incredulous gaze slid slowly from Bruce’s height to Dick’s, then back. With him? In public? Alfred’s eyes said, which meant, more specifically, Why are you taking the emaciated, traumatized, yellow-eyed ten year old from a cult out at night for ice cream have you lost your bloody mind again? (…Respectfully. Sir.)
“I’ll have them clear out the store for us. I’ve done that plenty of times. They know what to expect.”
Alfred shut his eyes tight. “Yes, with many a woman, Master Bruce, never a child the whole world is going to claim is your byblow!”
“What’s that?” said Dick, at the same time that Bruce said, “What’s a byblow.” They exchanged a look.
Alfred stood there a moment longer, let out a long, hot breath. “Nevermind, sirs. Enjoy your evening since you apparently must go out and—nevermind. Nevermind!” Alfred went back to scrubbing the silverware, more vigorously than strictly necessary.
“I’ve never heard anyone say that before,” Bruce confided as they walked to the car. “Not once. I’m 24. I have heard. So many words.” He closed the door for Dick and got in, started driving.
When they pulled up, it was sprinkling. Bruce stepped into a puddle in the asphalt where there was a pothole. The green and white lights on the sign twinkled in the wet dark.
Bruce heard Dick’s cardoor open so he started toward the shop without looking back, reached the door before he paused as a little form sidled up to his leg and a cold hand reached for his. Bruce twined their fingers together, hesitated. Squeezed. Tight.
The shop was empty. The cashier looked high. Bruce cleared his throat. “A bowl. Two scoops of cherry. Please.”
He glanced down at Dick, who was squinting in the bright light of the shop, holding his free hand like a shield over his eyes. Bruce waited expectantly, but Dick didn’t say anything, didn’t order or whisper Bruce his order for him to relay. He peeked up at Bruce as if waiting, as if confused, as if he was expecting Bruce to do something that he wasn’t. Bruce glanced once more at the cashier, who was sluggishly fiddling with the ice cream scoop over the red cherry tub.
He crouched down to be at Dick’s level, and then Dick looked away, pale yellow eyes falling to the linoleum. Bruce reached up hesitantly. Used his index finger again, this time to tap Dick’s jaw until Dick met his eyes.
“Hey,” said Bruce.
“Hi,” whispered Dick.
“What do you want.”
Dick looked away again. Bruce tapped a second time. A third.
“Can you see the kinds they have,” Bruce asked after a moment, because Dick was short and maybe the window with the flavor labels was high. Maybe that was it. Bruce didn’t have an excellent frame of reference for height, because he was very tall. So people said, at least. Clark was taller than him by almost a centimeter. Hn.
Dick paused, didn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t…”
Still crouching, Bruce splayed out his hands to ask for permission. Dick looked confused. “Can I pick you up.”
Dick’s eyes widened. “What?”
“So you can see better.”
Dick shook his head quickly, wrapped his arms around himself, took a step back. All of a sudden, Bruce felt embarrassed, too forward. He hunched. Drew both his hands back to himself, then stuck them hastily in the pockets of his slacks. What had he been thinking?
Dick started chewing on his lower lip again. Bruce dared not tell him not to again after crossing this latest unspoken line, except he had to, he didn’t want Dick to hurt himself, but he couldn’t because he’d already overstepped tonight, and that would be bad enough if Dick was an ordinary child who Bruce was sheltering, but Dick was highly traumatized, averse to some touches and relentlessly pursuing others, the victim of unthinkable violence, and—
“You pick.”
Bruce started. “Pardon?”
“You pick,” Dick mumbled hastily, eyes darting down once more, sounding almost forlorn.
Bruce paused for a long moment. “No.”
Then he took a chance. He hoisted Dick up under his arms and propped him on his hip and Dick yelped quietly before Bruce felt a small, cold hand claw into the shoulder of his turtleneck and not let go. “Look,” he pointed, feeling keenly how out of place his naturally low, gravelly voice and general being was in this place as he began to speak, “they have chocolate, strawberry, cherry, mint, pistachio…Superman, cookie dough, caramel, or vanilla—” he felt Dick shift, and he cut off, patiently.
For a second, Dick buried his head into the crook of Bruce’s neck, the overwhelmed act of a child much younger than ten, but lifting him up like this wasn’t treating him as much older. Bruce propped his head atop the child’s soft hair, breathed in. It was very quiet. It was a moment that Bruce memorized—the cold weight in his arms, the thrum of the white overheads, the lolling head of the cashier, the gossamer soft hair pinned under his chin.
It struck him then that Dick had been even younger than he was now when the Court got to him. He wondered how old he had been. Eight? Nine? Bruce had only had Dick since he found him on a rooftop two months ago, shrouded in black and metal and wild-eyed. A dark, startlingly protective wave crashed over him at the memory of the small shadow that followed him; the slow, coaxing trust; the hurt they had to work through every night since; the guilt they excavated just tonight. He tightened his grip on Dick without thinking.
“You can pick,” Dick mumbled again eventually into Bruce’s neck.
Bruce let out a long breath. “Okay. Okay.” To the cashier, he said, “Caramel.” He paused, thinking of what kids liked. What Clark would get. “In a waffle cone.”
Bruce was reaching for his wallet with his one free, deft hand when Dick finally lifted his head up. “Actually,” he started, then faltered.
Bruce looked at him.
“…Did you say Superman?” Dick whispered, eyes unusually bright.
-
They sat inside the dark car, watching the rain come down. It was loud, ambient, and the pounding water on the windows made the lights from the ice cream parlor glitter. Bruce stuck the spoon in his cherry ice cream and glanced over at Dick, who was staring down into his untouched waffle cone with one caramel colored scoop and one red, yellow, and blue one. He held the cone with the tips of his fingers.
“Dick,” asked Bruce when a few minutes had passed and Dick still hadn’t moved.
Dick looked up, washed with the wavy light from outside.
Bruce tilted his chin toward the ice cream.
“Oh,” Dick said. “. . . It’s cold.”
“Oh,” Bruce echoed, as it hit him. Ice cream was cold. Dick didn’t like the cold. That was how Bruce had taken down the Court the last time; it was the Talons’ weakness. Bruce felt astoundingly stupid. He had just thought that—that children—he hadn’t even considered—
“I liked it, though,” Dick said quietly. There was a clap of thunder, then a sheet of lightning. “I didn't think I would. Not after last time."
Dick paused for a second, like he was sounding the word out, like it took something out of him to say it.
"Choosing.”
Dick took in a quiet breath, and suddenly as clearly as Bruce could tell what Alfred meant without saying, he understood what Dick was trying to say. Choosing without my guts being on the line. Without anyone’s life being there too.
Bruce suddenly felt sick. Sick at the idea of what the Court had made this child do, or at least believe he had done. Made this child believe he was even capable of doing. Made this child afraid to choose the simplest things—made him unable to even have those things. This child who Bruce had held in his arms. Wanted to keep there, even now in the dark, in the rain, in the car.
The cherry on his tongue began to taste like iron instead.