Chapter Text
Someone was probably looking for him by now.
He’d asked to go to the bathroom midway through Trigonometry. He already knew trigonometry, so it wasn’t like he was missing anything important. But the girls in his class had been whispering about him, and it got to the point where he couldn’t stand it anymore.
So he’d asked to go to the bathroom, and then he’d walked out of the building, crept behind the greenhouse, cut through the hedge maze, and climbed the only tree on the grounds that couldn’t be seen from any windows. It was hidden by the groundskeeper’s cottage, which wasn’t in use as an actual dwelling anymore but was instead where the current groundskeeper kept his tools and equipment.
Bruce and the groundskeeper had an accord; he wouldn’t snitch on Bruce to his teachers as long as Bruce left a tin of Alfred’s baked goods on his doorstep once a week. This had required Bruce to ask Alfred to triple the amount of baked goods he sent Bruce to school with, which had in turn required Bruce to lie and say he was sharing these baked goods with his friends. Bruce hadn’t had friends since his parents died, and so Alfred had been only too happy to comply.
Bruce never felt good about lying to Alfred, and he felt even worse getting Alfred’s hopes up, but there was nothing else he could do. He needed a place to go where no one could find him, for days like today when he couldn’t tolerate the things people said.
Bruce’s entire academic career had been marked by his classmates talking about him behind his back, or sometimes to his face. When he’d been very young, it had just been because he was a bit odd. He either talked too much or not enough, and never about the right things. He had nontraditional hobbies and interests. He had strange, inexplicable habits.
He’d only just started learning how to fit in, how to pretend to be normal, when his parents had died, which had set him apart from his peers even more. He hardly spoke at all anymore, he flinched at loud noises, and sometimes Alfred had to pick him up in the middle of the day because he couldn’t breathe.
It had been a few years since then, but instead of getting better, Bruce felt like he was only getting worse. He couldn’t pretend to be normal anymore; there were too many ways in which he wasn’t, lined up like dominos. He couldn’t keep up.
He’d figured out social interactions, at least to enough of an extent that he flew under the radar; he could fake his way through conversations or avoid them entirely. And he’d found ways to hide his grief. But then he’d reached adolescence, and suddenly certain things started bothering him that had never bothered him before, things he couldn’t explain, and it gave his classmates even more ammunition to use against him, mostly related to his appearance.
That was what the girls in his Trigonometry class had been whispering about: his appearance. Over the summer Bruce had asked Alfred if he could get bangs, and of course Alfred had said yes, but then Bruce hadn’t let Alfred take him to the salon to get them trimmed in over eight months, and now they were half-covering his eyes. His shirts were all too big and he was constantly getting in trouble with his teachers for refusing to tuck them in. He kept his blazer on no matter how warm it was outside. He wore his skirts low and pulled his socks up to his knees so no one could see that he didn’t shave his legs, which he knew he was supposed to do but had tried once and hated, not liking the way it made him look or feel.
Alfred used to express his disapproval of the way Bruce dressed and styled himself. He’d brushed Bruce’s hair and clipped it out of his eyes every morning, only for Bruce to take the clips out and throw them away as soon as Alfred dropped him off at school and his car pulled away. He’d insisted on dressing Bruce in clothes that actually fit, only for Bruce to deliberately ruin everything he owned that he didn’t like wearing. This behavior had eventually culminated in an argument, and Bruce breaking down into tears in a fitting room, after which Alfred had started taking Bruce’s concerns much more seriously.
Alfred hadn’t made Bruce talk about it yet, which Bruce was grateful for, because he didn’t know how to put any of his feelings into words. He didn’t know if his feelings even had words that described them. He was certain he must be the only person in the world who felt the way he did.
Certainly none of the girls in his class felt the same as Bruce, which was why they spent so much time whispering about him. He wished they would just leave him alone. He didn’t need any of them to be friends with him. He wasn’t asking that much. If he could be invisible, he’d take that over what he was currently experiencing.
Unfortunately, the closest he could get was hiding in the tree behind the groundskeeper’s cottage. So that would have to do.
He’d been up there for over an hour before he heard someone approach. It didn’t sound like a teacher or the groundskeeper; the footsteps were lighter. Very light, actually, which meant it was someone experienced in sneaking around.
Bruce peeked down through the leaves and the branches and saw another student standing on the ground, in the grass. Bruce recognized him. He was a new kid who’d started at the beginning of the spring semester. Oliver Queen. He was in Bruce’s grade, fifteen years old and of average height and build, with wavy blond hair and the patchy beginnings of an adolescent mustache and beard. Even though he was new, he was already more popular than Bruce had ever been; he was constantly surrounded by a group of friends, and the girls in Bruce’s classes whispered about him in a very different way from how they whispered about Bruce.
What Bruce was most impressed by, though, was Oliver’s skill on the archery range. Bruce used to be the best archer in the school, but Oliver made Bruce look like a novice.
This was the first time Bruce had ever seen Oliver alone. He leaned down farther to get a better look at him, and in the process he must have made some small noise alerting Oliver to his presence, because Oliver looked up, tension in his arms, spine, and shoulders like he was ready for a fight. When his gaze landed on Bruce, he visibly relaxed.
“Hey,” Oliver said. He already had a deeper voice than most of their male classmates. Bruce could spend hours in front of his bathroom mirror every night trying to practice speaking in a deeper voice (something he may or may not have made a habit of doing recently) and he would never sound like that.
Bruce hesitated. He didn’t like that another student had found his hiding place. He came here to avoid everyone else. But it was too late now. And if he refused to speak to Oliver, Oliver would probably go back to their classmates and tell them all about how he’d found the Wayne kid in a tree acting weird and Bruce would never hear the end of it. So he reluctantly answered, “Hey.”
Oliver squinted at him like he was trying to place Bruce’s face. “You’re in my English class, aren’t you?”
“And History.” Like Bruce, Oliver typically sat near the back of the classroom, but unlike Bruce, he wasn’t doing so to try to blend into the shadows. He just wanted to be able to pass notes with his friends without getting caught.
“What’s your name again?” Oliver asked.
Bruce hated that question. His name was stupid. He hated it. It was so common – two other girls in his grade alone had the same one – and so girly. “Wayne,” he said.
Oliver didn’t question this. The good thing about rich people was that many of them understood the inclination to go by one’s last name instead of one’s first name, as a status symbol or simply because it came across as more formal or professional. “I’m Oliver Queen,” Oliver told him.
“I know,” Bruce replied. “You’re the new kid. From Star City.” He paused, recalling the other piece of information he knew about Oliver. “I heard you got expelled from your old school.”
Bruce watched Oliver’s reaction carefully. He’d gotten a lot better at reading body language and facial expressions. He’d made a study of it. It was useful to know what people were thinking, or to at least be able to guess.
On the surface, Oliver responded casually to the mention of his recent history, but some of the tension was back in his shoulders, which led Bruce to believe Oliver was putting on an act. That was something else that didn’t come naturally to Bruce. He didn’t know how to make his face display an emotion he wasn’t feeling, so instead he’d learned how to show no emotion at all. He was much better at that. Showing no emotion was his default.
“You heard right,” Oliver said, his tone as guarded as his body language was.
Bruce drew the conclusion that Oliver didn’t like talking about his expulsion. But Bruce was curious, as he often was. He wanted to know more. Perhaps Oliver would be more willing to provide additional details if he felt that he and Bruce had something in common. Bruce knew that most people were biased toward people they had something in common with.
“So did I,” Bruce provided. It was the truth. A year and a half prior, he’d been the new kid in school, like Oliver. But Oliver had managed to spin being the new kid into something cool and exciting, whereas Bruce hadn’t.
“What’d you do?” Oliver asked. He was less guarded already, more open, curious. Bruce congratulated himself on a successful gambit.
“Got in a fight.” In the girls’ bathroom. Himself against six other girls, and none of them had stood a chance. It hadn’t been for no reason; he’d been provoked. But the administration hadn’t been interested in hearing his side of the story. Apparently he was lucky the girls’ parents hadn’t sued.
Alfred had wanted to hear Bruce’s side of the story, but Bruce hadn’t told him. He still didn’t like thinking about it. These days he tried not to use the bathroom at school at all.
“What’d you do?” Bruce echoed, eager to move on in case Oliver pressed for details.
“Got caught with a girl in my room,” Oliver explained. Then he, too, changed the subject. He looked around himself, at the groundskeeper’s cottage, at the school’s perimeter wall that closely bordered two sides of it, and up and down the trunk of the tree Bruce was perched in. “Is this your spot?” he asked.
“Yes,” Bruce told him.
Oliver nodded. Then he shrugged. “Okay. That’s cool.”
He started to walk away, and Bruce belatedly realized that there had been subtext in their exchange that he had missed. Oliver hadn’t just been asking if this tree was Bruce’s spot; he’d been asking if Bruce was willing to share it. But he hadn’t said the second part out loud.
Bruce panicked. Was Oliver going to be offended that Bruce wasn’t willing to share the only good hiding spot on school grounds? Was he going to tell their other classmates about it, or worse, their teachers? Bruce didn’t know what he would do if anyone else found out about where he went when he disappeared.
“Wait!” he called out, and Oliver turned and looked back at him, surprised. “You can stay. As long as you don’t tell anyone else about this place.”
“I won’t,” Oliver promised.
“And you can’t talk too much.” Bruce could tolerate Oliver’s presence if it meant Oliver would keep his secret, but he didn’t want Oliver to expect him to make conversation the entire time.
“Deal.”
Oliver climbed up the tree, situating himself on another sturdy branch on the other side of the trunk. He leaned forward so he could still see Bruce, and he frowned at Bruce’s bare knees poking out from between his skirt and socks.
Bruce tugged his socks up self-consciously, but Oliver didn’t say anything about Bruce’s appearance, about his legs being hairy and therefore gross. All he said was, “How’d you get up here in a skirt?”
“It’s not that hard,” Bruce told him. All he had to do was hike the skirt up while he climbed. It wasn’t what Alfred would call “dignified,” but it was effective.
“Really?” Oliver sounded skeptical. He’d probably never worn a skirt, so he wouldn’t know. (Lucky, Bruce thought bitterly.)
“It’s an easy tree to climb.” Plenty of sturdy branches not too far from the ground, a thick trunk for support. It took a little bit of arm strength to get higher up, to the branches completely concealed by leaves, but Bruce could do more pull-ups than any of the girls in his grade and most of the boys, and Oliver no doubt had arm strength to spare.
“You climb a lot of trees?” Oliver asked him.
“I don’t know. How many is ‘a lot’?” Bruce mostly just climbed this tree, but he did it often, so maybe that counted.
Oliver considered the question. “I guess I don’t know. My old school was in the city. Not a lot of trees around.”
“Do you like it better here?” It seemed like a polite question to ask, and Bruce hadn’t asked any of those yet. He tried to ask at least one in every conversation, even if he didn’t want to, because he’d found it was often a surprisingly good way to get information out of people.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Oliver said.
Bruce nodded, signaling that he’d heard Oliver, and then he looked away, ending the conversation. Oliver didn’t try to revive it. When Bruce glanced back over at him to check that he wasn’t staring – people stared at Bruce a lot – he saw that Oliver had taken out a CD player and was listening to headphones.
Bruce looked away again, satisfied.
Weeks passed. Oliver didn’t climb the tree behind the groundskeeper’s cottage every day, but often enough that it became a routine.
From Bruce’s point of view, it was an acceptable arrangement. Oliver was true to his word and didn’t talk much. When he did make conversation, he limited it to school-related topics: teachers, classmates, subject matter they were currently covering. Bruce began to get a better picture of the kind of student Oliver was: intelligent but not particularly motivated, not content to be stuck in a classroom for hours at a time, preferring to be outdoors or socializing.
Bruce couldn’t have been more different. For one, he wasn’t very outdoorsy, and he rarely socialized with anyone. School was one of the few places he could channel his energy and focus, and so he was consistently the top of his class and taking advanced courses, on track to graduate early and leave this place.
He hadn’t decided what he was going to do about college. Alfred said it would be “good for him.” It would supposedly teach him “independence” and give him opportunities to engage with “likeminded individuals.”
Bruce wasn’t convinced there was anyone out there who had a mind like his.
Another thing Bruce grew to appreciate about Oliver was that he never mentioned any of the things about Bruce that were odd or different. He seemed content to do most of the talking in their conversations. He never brought up Bruce’s parents; he never brought up the subject of family at all. He called Bruce only by his last name, and he didn’t comment on Bruce’s appearance, even on days when Bruce looked his worst, when he couldn’t be bothered to brush his hair because he was going to hate the way it looked no matter what he did with it, and when he buttoned his shirt all the way up to his neck even though it looked stupid because the extra coverage made at least a small difference in how he felt.
The weather was starting to turn, which meant it was only going to get worse for Bruce. Spring was his least favorite season. Summer meant he could go home and do whatever he wanted and not have to worry about what everyone else thought of him, but the arrival of spring meant he still had three more months of hiding and other people whispering. Three warm months during which the way Bruce dressed became increasingly impractical and even more uncomfortable than it already was.
Bruce was skipping out on History today. His Trigonometry teacher had threatened to fail him if he missed another class, but History was right after, so he missed that instead.
Bruce liked History because the teacher never called on him. But he needed a break in the middle of the day most days. Being around people – especially other teenagers – for that long made him feel somehow exhausted and restless at the same time. He would rather sweat outside in his too many layers than endure another minute trapped in a room with fifteen other students who wouldn’t stop passing notes and snickering behind their hands. Even if they weren’t talking about him, Bruce’s paranoia told him that they were. So, like always, he asked to go to the bathroom, and then he left.
Oliver had seen him leave. In school, they both pretended not to know each other. They hadn’t explicitly agreed to; it had just happened. Bruce assumed Oliver didn’t want anyone else he associated with to know he was friendly with the weird Wayne kid, and Bruce didn’t want attention from anyone who wasn’t Oliver.
Ten minutes after Bruce made it to the tree behind the groundskeeper’s cottage – leaving a tin of shortbread biscuits on the doorstep as a tribute – he heard Oliver arrive. He knew how to recognize Oliver by his gait. It was unique; most teenage boys thundered around, shoving each other, shouting. Oliver did some of that when he was with his friends, but on his own, he was quiet. He moved purposefully, and he was light on his feet.
He ducked under the tree’s lower branches and looked up. “Hey,” he said, in that low voice.
“Hey,” Bruce replied.
Oliver climbed up to his branch. (He sat on the same one every time, so Bruce had started to think of it as “his.”) “I heard something about you,” he said.
That was never a good thing. Bruce immediately leapt to being defensive. “If it’s about my parents, you can keep it to yourself,” he snapped. Most of the other gossip Oliver might have heard about Bruce was almost as bad, but Bruce’s parents were still his biggest sore spot. He hadn’t been teased about them in a while and he wasn’t interested in breaking that streak.
Oliver looked confused. “Your parents?” He shook his head. “What do you mean?”
Bruce was surprised he didn’t know. He knew Bruce’s last name. That was usually all it took. “You haven’t figured it out?” Bruce said. “My parents are Thomas and Martha Wayne.”
Oliver didn’t react to this in any way. “Never heard of them,” he remarked.
Bruce blinked. That was a first. He’d never met anyone who’d never heard of his parents. Not in Gotham.
He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, and Oliver continued, “Why’d you think I’d know who they are?”
“Most people do.”
“So they’re famous?”
“They are in Gotham.”
Oliver shrugged. “I’m not from Gotham,” he pointed out.
“You live here now,” Bruce countered.
“I haven’t been here that long.” Oliver leaned back and squinted at the sky through the leaves, already visibly losing interest in this conversation. “Why are they famous?”
“The Waynes are the oldest and wealthiest family in Gotham,” Bruce informed him matter-of-factly. Oliver snorted.
“Why would I care if your parents are rich?” he asked. “Everyone here has rich parents.”
Bruce wasn’t used to talking to someone who just didn’t care who his parents were. He had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it meant Oliver’s first impression of Bruce hadn’t been that he was a tragic young orphan, a role Bruce had always resented. He didn’t want people to pity him. No amount of pity would bring his parents back, nor would it solve any of the problems that existed in Gotham that had led to his parents’ deaths: gun violence, crime, corruption in the police force.
On the other hand, the legacy of Bruce’s parents was important to him. It was part of him, and it always would be. He didn’t know who he was without it. What else was he, other than a Wayne?
“It’s not the fact that they’re rich,” he argued.
“Did they get rich doing something bad?” Oliver narrowed his eyes. “Are they in the oil industry?”
“No. Shipping and manufacturing.”
“Were they in some sort of scandal? Your dad cheat on your mom?”
Bruce leapt to his father’s defense. “No!” he exclaimed.
“Then why—”
Bruce cut Oliver off. “They’re dead,” he said, abruptly done with this conversation. “They were murdered. It was all over the news. People still talk about it. It’s the first thing everyone knows about me. ‘That’s the Wayne kid; his parents are dead.’”
Bruce clamped his mouth shut. Shit.
Oliver looked at him strangely, mouth drawn in a thoughtful frown. Bruce waited, feeling dread creep up his spine. Bruce didn’t know why he referred to himself in the third person like that. He’d just accidentally done it one day, in his own head, and it felt good. Not a lot of things in Bruce’s life felt good, so he noticed when they did. But he knew better than to say it out loud.
He didn’t know what would happen. What was Oliver going to do? Bruce leapt to the worst-case scenario: Oliver telling the whole school, and word getting around to the teachers, and then to the principal, and then to Alfred.
Bruce hadn’t said anything about it to Alfred. He still didn’t know what, exactly, “it” was. All he’d done so far was tell Alfred to stop calling him “Miss” all the time, and now Alfred just called him by his first name, which was better, but not great.
Alfred could tell something was wrong. He could always tell when something was wrong. But so far he hadn’t figured out what, and Bruce didn’t want to tell him. He didn’t want Alfred to know. The thought of disappointing him – or worse, losing him – made Bruce want to curl up and die.
But Oliver didn’t react at all. He didn’t run off to tell everyone. He just shrugged again, like it wasn’t his business, or maybe he’d heard wrong. “My parents are dead too,” he told Bruce.
Bruce was reeling from the fact that he’d slipped up and gotten away with it. It took several seconds for him to register what Oliver had said. My parents are dead too. It was a huge admission, and it had flown right over Bruce’s head. He’d been too caught up in his own emotions. “Oh,” he said, not knowing what else there was to say. And then they just looked at each other for a moment.
And then Oliver moved on. “The thing I heard about you was that you’re some sort of genius?”
That was what Oliver had heard? Not that Bruce’s parents were dead, not that Bruce was the school freak. Just that Bruce was smarter than average. “Some people say I am,” Bruce replied honestly.
“Why don’t you ever speak up in class?” Oliver asked.
“Why don’t you?” Bruce countered.
“Usually because I’m not paying attention,” Oliver said with a smirk. “But if you’re such a genius, why do you act like you don’t know the answers? You never raise your hand. You always sit in the back.”
“I’m not trying to show off.” The real answer was more complicated than that. A combination of the fact that Bruce had been picked on when he was younger for being a know-it-all, the fact that raising his hand meant the teacher would call on him which meant hearing his own name, and the fact that Bruce hated the sound of his own voice. But he wasn’t about to explain that. Not to Oliver, not to anyone.
“Why not?” Oliver pressed.
Bruce made a show of rolling his eyes. “I’m not like you.”
Oliver laughed. “You think I’m a show-off?”
“You are a show-off.”
“How am I a show-off?”
There was an endless list of examples Bruce could give of Oliver being a show-off, especially around girls, but he mostly wanted the conversation to be over, so he just said, “You talk too much. I told you you could only be here if you didn’t talk too much.”
Oliver held up his hands. “Alright, alright, I’ll shut up.”
Oliver took out his CD player and put on his headphones, like he usually did when Bruce didn’t want to talk. Bruce sometimes wanted to ask him what music he listened to, but he never did, and he didn’t today. He kept to himself.
The next time Oliver and Bruce were in the tree together, Oliver asked Bruce out of nowhere, “So who do you live with?”
Bruce leaned forward to see Oliver on the other side of the tree trunk. “What?”
“Like, my parents are dead, so I live with my uncle,” Oliver told him. “Who do you live with?”
My parents are dead. Oliver said it so casually, but it was a forced casualness. That seemed to be Oliver’s default: casual on the surface, not-so-casual underneath. Bruce wanted to know how he did it so he could emulate it. It seemed like a useful skill. It might help Bruce get other people to leave him alone and pay less attention to him, something he was always trying and failing to do.
“My parents’ butler,” Bruce answered. “Alfred. He’s from England.”
“Do you like him?”
“Of course,” Bruce answered without hesitation. “Like him” was an understatement. Alfred was more important to Bruce than anyone else. He was Bruce’s whole world.
“What’s he like?” Oliver sounded genuinely curious. “Does he drink tea?”
It was a stereotype, but in this case, an accurate one. “He does. And he’s an excellent cook. And he enjoys gardening. He tends to my mother’s rose garden.”
Bruce wasn’t sure why he voluntarily brought up his mother. But he hadn’t stopped thinking about Oliver’s admission during their last conversation. Oliver’s parents were dead too. They had that in common. So maybe Oliver understood, in some small way, at least a part of what Bruce was going through.
“Your mom liked gardening?” Oliver asked.
Bruce nodded. “She was also an art collector and a philanthropist. And my father was a surgeon.” Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt, talking about his parents like this. Talking about who they’d been when they were alive, instead of what it had been like when they’d died.
He’d never had an opportunity to do that with anyone other than Alfred. No one else wanted to hear about those parts. They were only ever interested in picking at the scab of Bruce’s trauma and watching him bleed. When Bruce had returned to school after his parents’ deaths, the other kids had been morbidly curious. They had only an action movie understanding of violence; to them, it was exciting.
Bruce couldn’t watch action movies anymore. He couldn’t tolerate violence as entertainment, couldn’t sympathize with good guys who used guns.
He forced himself to stop thinking about it. He focused on the good things, the things Oliver had asked him about. His mother liked gardening. His father was a surgeon. They had their friends over for parties on Friday nights. They only ever argued in private. They liked to go dancing.
“My dad founded a company,” Oliver said. “Queen Industries. And he liked hunting.”
Bruce frowned. “Hunting animals?” He knew big game hunting was a somewhat common pastime among a particular sort of wealthy person, the hyper-masculine type. Bruce’s father had had acquaintances who’d stuffed lions, made rugs out of bears, and mounted moose heads on their walls. The hobby didn’t appeal to Bruce whatsoever. Even if guns weren’t involved – which they usually were – it still struck him as gruesome and unnecessary.
“Yeah,” Oliver confirmed. “That was how he and my mom died. On a safari. I was there.”
Bruce’s disgust faded away. Oliver’s father may have had questionable hobbies, but he didn’t deserve to die for it. And Oliver had been there? “I was there when my parents were killed,” Bruce told him. Something else they had in common.
Maybe that was what was under Oliver’s casual attitude. Was it possible he felt some of the same things Bruce did and was hiding it like Bruce had learned to?
Apparently Oliver was thinking along the same lines. “Do you…” he began, then trailed off, second-guessing himself.
“What?” Bruce prompted, desperate to know what Oliver wanted to ask him.
“When did it happen?” Oliver said. “How old were you?”
“Ten.”
Oliver nodded. He chewed on his lower lip. Then he asked, “Do you still… Do you ever dream about it?”
Bruce’s eyes went wide. “All the time.”
“Me too.” Something that wasn’t quite a smile – too sad to be a smile – played at Oliver’s lips. “All the time.”
“I think about it during the day too,” Bruce admitted. Although “think about it” was putting it lightly. He pictured it vividly, heard the gunshots, saw the blood, couldn’t breathe. It happened at all the most inconvenient and embarrassing times. Yet another reason for all his classmates to think he was weird.
“So do I,” Oliver replied.
Bruce looked down at his hands. They were shaking. He needed to stop talking about it, at least for now. Maybe not forever.
Talking to Oliver about it was different, Bruce realized. He didn’t bother talking to other kids his age whose parents were alive. Even with Alfred, he couldn’t say everything he felt like saying. Not without Alfred worrying. Alfred worried too much already. Bruce didn’t want to make it worse.
But Oliver didn’t look worried. He looked how Bruce felt. It was the relief of finally finding someone who understood.
Bruce had never, ever felt like that before.
Neither of them said anything else. Oliver got out his CD player. Bruce watched him for another minute or two, then asked, “What are you listening to?”
Oliver looked up and took his headphones off one of his ears. “What?”
“What are you listening to?” Bruce repeated.
Instead of answering, Oliver took his headphones all the way off and handed them to Bruce. Bruce put them on and listened. It wasn’t a song he’d ever heard before, but that wasn’t saying much. Bruce didn’t know what kinds of music were popular among other teenagers. That would require talking to other teenagers.
Bruce gave Oliver his headphones back. “You can come sit by me,” Oliver offered.
Bruce maneuvered around the tree trunk to join Oliver on his branch. They shared Oliver’s headphones, twisting them awkwardly and holding their heads together. They made it all the way through the CD, and then Oliver took another one out of his backpack, a different album by the same artist.
They stayed like that until Bruce distantly heard the school bell ring, and he had to leave. Oliver lived in the dorms, with all the other out-of-town students, but Bruce went home to Wayne Manor every day. And today was Friday, so Bruce and Oliver wouldn’t see each other again until Monday at the earliest.
Alfred was waiting for Bruce in front of the school. Bruce got in the car and threw his backpack in the backseat.
“How was your day?” Alfred asked.
“Fine,” Bruce said. It was a familiar exchange. Neither Alfred’s question nor Bruce’s answer ever changed.
“Did your friends enjoy the shortbread biscuits?”
The groundskeeper had left Alfred’s empty tin on the front step of the cottage for Bruce to take home. It was in Bruce’s backpack. “I think so.”
Bruce wondered if Oliver would have liked the biscuits. Maybe next time Alfred baked something, Bruce would save some for Oliver to try.
“Will I ever get to meet these friends of yours?” Alfred asked, teasing.
Usually when Alfred asked about his nonexistent friends, Bruce made up another lie to explain why he could never bring them over, but today he answered differently.
Oliver wasn’t his friend. At least, Bruce didn’t think he was. But he was more of a friend than Bruce had had in a long time. They’d shared Oliver’s CD player. And they’d talked about their parents.
“Maybe,” Bruce said. Alfred looked at him, surprised. “Maybe just one.”
Alfred smiled. “One good friend is better than none. Does this friend have a name?”
“Oliver Queen. He’s from Star City. He moved here in January.”
“Does he enjoy some of the same things you enjoy?”
Bruce didn’t know why Alfred had so many questions. “He likes archery. He’s better at it than I am. He’s better at it than anyone I’ve ever seen.” Bruce had picked up other things about Oliver through their conversations and witnessing Oliver’s interactions with other students. He knew Oliver wasn’t just a talented archer; he was also generally athletic. He had strong political opinions. He didn’t mind Gotham’s rainy climate, but he thought the food was better in Star City. He didn’t respect authority. He liked music. He liked girls.
“And this Oliver Queen… is he just a friend?” Alfred cautiously ventured.
Bruce turned to look at Alfred, and the horror he felt must have shown on his face, because Alfred quickly backtracked. “My apologies. I shouldn’t have assumed.”
Bruce had never thought about Oliver like that. He’d never thought about any boy like that, which he knew was strange, but it was hardly the strangest thing about him, so he’d never let it bother him.
Now Alfred had put the image in his head, and Bruce couldn’t shake it.
Bruce had tried, before, to imagine himself doing the sorts of things other teenagers did: holding hands, kissing, making out under the stairwell. He’d tried to imagine it with boys and, desperate, he’d even tried to imagine it with girls. But something stopped him every time. Something got in the way.
Bruce could conjure an image of an attractive boy or girl, and he could point to examples of specific boys and girls in his class who he found attractive. That part was fine. It was nice, even. But as soon as Bruce tried to picture himself with any of those people, it all fell apart. It was like he couldn’t remember what his own face looked like, let alone his body. There was just a blank space where he was supposed to be. A nameless, featureless fog.
Trying to imagine himself doing anything sexual was even more impossible. As soon as Bruce got to the part where he was naked, he instinctively shoved the image away, like a child would reject a plate of food they thought was gross.
Bruce tried to imagine any level of romantic physical contact with Oliver and got the same result he always did. He could picture Oliver, and he could acknowledge that Oliver was a good-looking guy, but he couldn’t picture himself with Oliver, in the same way he couldn’t picture himself with anyone.
In the same way he couldn’t picture himself.
He didn’t know what that meant. Other than that something was clearly wrong with him. But that much he’d already known.
On Monday, Bruce avoided going to the tree. Ever since Alfred had alluded to the possibility of there being anything romantic between him and Oliver, Bruce hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it, and it made him uncomfortable.
It was the fact that that had been Alfred’s first assumption when he’d learned about Oliver. When he’d learned that Bruce had a friend who was a boy. It had made Bruce realize that that was what everyone’s first assumption would be when they saw Bruce hanging out with a boy. Especially a boy like Oliver.
It might have even been Oliver’s first assumption. Bruce couldn’t rule out the possibility that Oliver believed Bruce had a crush on him, or that he had a crush on Bruce. And the thought of Oliver thinking of him like that, like one of the girls he was always flirting with, made Bruce want to crawl out of his skin.
He didn’t want Oliver to think of him that way. He didn’t want to be anything like those girls, and he didn’t want Oliver to think he was anything like them. But it might have already been too late for that.
On Tuesday, Bruce saw Oliver hanging out with a girl in front of school after classes, when Bruce was waiting for Alfred to pick him up. They were leaning in close, talking to each other in low voices. Oliver was smiling. The girl was too.
Oliver leaned down and unzipped his backpack, withdrawing his CD player. He held it up between them, and the girl nodded.
They sat with their heads together, headphones twisted awkwardly so they could both listen.
Bruce felt sick. Oliver had done the same thing with him. Oliver did see him like that.
He avoided the tree for the rest of the week.
The week after, Bruce had a particularly rough Monday morning and couldn’t stand the thought of eating with everyone else, at a lonely table in a crowded lunchroom, so he finally went out to the tree. He brought the lunch Alfred had packed for him, and he left a tin of lemon bars on the groundskeeper’s front step.
“I beat you this time.”
Bruce looked up. Oliver was sitting in the tree, eating his own lunch. Bruce retraced his steps; he’d come straight from English class, which they had together. How was it possible that Oliver had gotten here first and Bruce hadn’t seen him?
“How did you get here before I did?” Bruce demanded. He was already on edge. He’d been planning on eating alone. Why would Oliver even come here during lunch break anyway? He had real friends to eat with.
“I found a shortcut,” Oliver said.
“Where?”
He smirked. “I’m not telling you.”
“Fine.” Bruce made a spur-of-the-moment decision. “I’ll figure it out on my own.” He turned to leave. Oliver called out to him.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to find your shortcut.”
“But you’re already here.”
Bruce stopped and looked over his shoulder, scowling. “So?”
“So, stay and talk.” Oliver indicated the branch Bruce usually sat on. Bruce looked at it, then he looked at Oliver. He thought about Oliver and the other girl sharing Oliver’s headphones, the way Bruce had shared Oliver’s headphones.
He shook his head. “It’s not my job to entertain you, Oliver Queen,” he said bitterly.
“You’re not the entertaining one,” Oliver teased. “I am. I entertain you.”
Bruce scoffed and crossed his arms over his chest, unimpressed. Then he thought about the angle Oliver had of his chest from where he was sitting, halfway up the tree, and dropped his arms to his sides, suddenly immensely uncomfortable.
He was even more uncomfortable when he thought about the view Oliver would get when Bruce climbed the tree. Bruce maintained that he could easily climb a tree in a skirt, but it was the sort of activity that was best done when no one was watching.
“Come on up,” Oliver coaxed, oblivious to Bruce’s dilemma. “You can search for my shortcut later.”
“I don’t want to come up,” Bruce maintained. “I’ll sit on the ground.”
“Then someone might see you,” Oliver pointed out.
“That’s fine.”
Oliver sighed, sounding put-upon. “We’re not supposed to be out here. You’ll get us in trouble.”
“Maybe,” Bruce agreed.
“Just climb up the tree.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to.”
Oliver threw up his hands. “You’re being stubborn for no reason. Just because I beat you here one time. Are you really that much of a sore loser?”
Bruce bristled at the implication that he’d lost anything just because Oliver knew a shortcut that he didn’t (yet). So he told the truth. Part of it, anyway. “I’m not going to climb the tree and let you look up my skirt the whole time.”
“You think I’m gonna look up your skirt?” Oliver barked out a laugh. “Please.”
“That’s what you do, isn’t it?” Bruce countered defensively. “You’re Oliver Queen. You got kicked out of your old school for having a girl in your room.”
“Yeah, I like girls,” Oliver freely admitted. “But not you. You’re not my type. I don’t even really think of you as a girl.”
Bruce’s thoughts screeched to a halt. Just when Bruce finally thought he had a handle on things, Oliver somehow had a way of turning the whole conversation upside-down.
“You don’t?” Bruce said, voice quiet.
“Nope. Sorry.”
Bruce couldn’t feel anything but relief. “Don’t be sorry. That’s a good thing.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think I was your type either,” Oliver said with a smirk. He politely looked away while Bruce climbed the tree.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Bruce asked once he was firmly situated on his branch.
“Just that you’ve never seemed interested in me,” Oliver explained. “Which is good. Because I’m not interested in you.”
“Good.”
“Yeah, good.”
When Alfred picked Bruce up from school that afternoon, he asked his usual question: “How was your day?”
And Bruce gave his usual answer: “Fine.”
“How is your friend? Queen, was it?”
“Oliver. He’s fine too.”
“Does he have any plans for spring break? If not, you could invite him to visit us.”
Bruce had overheard Oliver discussing his spring break plans with his friends. “He’s going home to Star City,” he told Alfred.
Alfred nodded. “Another time, then, perhaps.”
“Maybe.”
Bruce looked out the window, at the trees and manor houses they passed by. His school was well outside of Gotham, in a lush, green part of New Jersey so unlike the city it was like a different planet. Wayne Manor was out here too. Bruce liked it, but part of him missed going into the city, where his old school was. The city streets, the buildings, the gray skies, they were familiar. Even the shadows, dangerous as they were.
Bruce wondered if Oliver felt the same way about Star City. Bruce had never been there; he only knew it from pictures. He thought he should probably ask Oliver about it. There was a lot he should probably ask Oliver about. It had been months and they still only had a surface-level understanding of one another.
That was probably Bruce’s fault. He didn’t have a lot of practice getting to know people. He wasn’t very good at it.
“We’re just friends. Oliver and I,” Bruce felt compelled to say, just in case Alfred still had any ideas in his head and that was what was compelling him to try to convince Bruce to invite Oliver over.
“I understand,” Alfred said. “I never should have implied otherwise.”
Bruce thought about his and Oliver’s exchange during lunch. He’d been thinking about it all day. “He said he doesn’t even think of me as a girl.”
Bruce didn’t think of himself as a girl either. Hadn’t ever. He hated girly things. He hated his girly name. He hated being called “Miss.” He hated wearing the girls’ uniform. He hated that his voice made him sound like a girl. Before his parents had died, his friends had always been boys. Now Oliver was the only thing he had that he could call a friend, and Oliver was a boy.
On some level, Bruce was jealous of Oliver. Oliver had a boy’s name and a deep voice. Oliver got to wear the boy’s uniform. Even if Bruce wore the same clothes Oliver did, he wouldn’t look the same in them. Everyone looked at Oliver and saw a boy. And someone like Oliver saying he didn’t see Bruce as a girl… It felt good. The same way that changing the way he referred to himself in his own head made Bruce feel good.
He wanted to feel like that more. He wanted to feel the way he usually felt less. He didn’t know what he needed to change to accomplish that, but he knew a change needed to happen. A whole series of changes, probably, and he didn’t know where to start, or whether he would even be allowed to.
“Is that a good thing?” Alfred prompted. They were at a stoplight. Alfred was looking at Bruce. Bruce wouldn’t meet his gaze. He didn’t know how to answer. It felt like a trick question.
“Yes,” he muttered.
There was a long pause, during which Bruce waited for something terrible to happen. Alfred had never yelled at him, not even when Bruce had gotten expelled, but Bruce half-expected him to do it now. It felt like the sort of thing an adult would do – maybe even should do – in response to what Bruce had just said.
He’d admitted to something serious, something he still didn’t have a name for, something he’d been aware of for a long time and skirted around but never approached directly. It was right there in front of him, but if he reached out and grabbed it, brought it close to his face and got a good look, then he’d know what it was, and he wouldn’t be able to ignore it anymore. He’d have to live with it forever.
Although he’d probably have to live with it forever either way. So maybe it was better to know.
The light turned green. Alfred drove. They were almost home. When they pulled into the driveway, Alfred stopped, put the car in park, and turned to look at Bruce again. The weight of his stare made Bruce shrink into himself, hunching his shoulders – his posture was already terrible – and looking away.
“How would you like me to think of you?” Alfred asked.
Bruce didn’t say anything.
“There is no wrong answer,” Alfred promised.
Bruce wanted to believe him, so he settled on a compromise. There was one thing Alfred could change that would make him feel better. And that was what Alfred wanted. That was what Alfred always wanted. For Bruce to feel better.
“I want you to call me Bruce.”
Alfred nodded. Easy. Painless. “Just Bruce?” he clarified. “Or perhaps… ‘Master Bruce’?”
Bruce finally met Alfred’s gaze, feeling hopeful for the first time in years. “Would you do that?”
Alfred didn’t look like he was going to yell at him. “I would do whatever makes you happy. That’s all I care about.”
Alfred shifted the car back into drive and parked in the garage. He got out and opened Bruce’s door for him. Instead of walking past him into the house, Bruce stopped and threw his arms around him, burying his face in the lapels of Alfred’s jacket. Alfred held him close.
Bruce came back from spring break feeling lighter. Nothing had changed at school, but everything had changed at home. Alfred didn’t always address him correctly on the first try – he made a few mistakes – but he corrected himself quickly and apologized every time. By the end of the week, he was getting it right at least ninety percent of the time.
No one had ever called Bruce the name he wanted, in part because he’d never shared it with anyone. Sharing it felt like opening himself up to the possibility of rejection. If no one knew that he preferred “Bruce,” then when they called him his other name, Bruce could tell himself it was because they didn’t know any better. If he told them and they still called him his other name, he would know it was because they didn’t care how he felt or what he wanted. But Alfred did care. He’d always cared.
In addition to feeling good about his breakthrough with Alfred, Bruce was still thinking about Oliver. Oliver had never seemed to mind that Bruce was different. He still had never commented on the way Bruce looked. He hadn’t told anyone about their hiding place. Bruce had slipped up in front of him by addressing himself in the third person and Oliver either hadn’t noticed or had kept it a secret. He didn’t see Bruce as a girl.
Maybe Bruce could trust him, the way he’d trusted Alfred. Bruce wasn’t very good at trusting people. But he wasn’t very good at making friends either, and yet here he was.
The next time he and Oliver were in the tree together, Bruce had made up his mind. He was going to do it. He was going to take a leap of faith. And if Oliver let him down, well, Bruce could always tell Alfred he needed to change schools again. Maybe Alfred would even send him somewhere in Europe. He could flee the country entirely. That seemed like an appropriate response.
“Hey, Wayne,” Oliver said, climbing the tree to sit with Bruce.
Bruce cleared his throat. Here went nothing. “Bruce.”
Oliver glanced at him, unconcerned. “What?”
“Call me Bruce.”
Oliver’s eyebrows drew together in confusion. “Isn’t that a guys’ name?”
“If you don’t want to do it—” Bruce began, but Oliver cut him off.
“I’ll call you whatever you want,” he said. “I was just making sure.” He situated himself on his branch, leaning with his back against the trunk, and added, “You can call me Ollie. That’s what my friends call me.”
Ollie. Bruce took note of it. And he took note of something else. Oliver – Ollie – had called Bruce his friend. Well, not exactly, but he’d heavily implied it, which was more than anyone else was willing to do.
Bruce hadn’t had a friend in so long. He’d convinced himself he didn’t need them anymore. But maybe he still did. Because having one now felt like shelter in a storm.
On the other side of the tree, Bruce heard Ollie muttering under his breath: “Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne.” Like he was committing it to memory. It made Bruce feel like smiling.
The next time they were together, Ollie slipped up like Alfred had, but also like Alfred, he corrected himself and apologized. Bruce asked him about his spring break, and Ollie gave him a short answer, emphasizing that he hadn’t done much: got in some archery practice, ate at his favorite Star City restaurants, lazed around his mansion. Bruce took the opportunity to ask Ollie what it was like living in Star City, and Ollie answered in much more detail, lighting up as he described his hometown. It seemed like he loved the place in the same way that Bruce loved Gotham.
“Do you miss living there?” Bruce asked him, out of both politeness and genuine curiosity.
“Yeah,” Ollie said truthfully. “I’ll definitely go back after I graduate. What about you? Are you planning on staying here?”
“I don’t think I could ever permanently leave,” Bruce told him. “But sometimes I think… It might be worth it to leave for a while.”
“I get that,” Ollie said, nodding. “I miss Star City, but it’s good to get away. A change of scenery, right?”
Bruce wasn’t sure it was the scenery that was the problem. Not in his case. “A change of something,” he agreed. “Maybe if I went somewhere else, I could come back different.”
“Different how?”
“I don’t know.” He did know, but as usual, he didn’t want to say. “Isn’t that why people travel? To ‘find themselves’?” That was what Bruce had heard other rich people say. He had to admit, it was a compelling notion. Bruce felt like he hadn’t yet found himself, and the idea that there was somewhere he could go, or a series of places he could visit, and collect pieces of himself along the way, sounded almost too good to be true. But it might be worth a shot.
It appealed to him more than college did. Bruce excelled in school, but he didn’t enjoy it. There wasn’t anything he could learn in a classroom that he couldn’t learn elsewhere. He couldn’t stand the thought of two-to-four more years of forced interaction with other young people. So far Ollie was the only one he’d met who was worth his while.
“I never knew what people mean by that,” Ollie admitted. “Maybe you’ll have to try it and tell me how it goes.” He paused, looked at Bruce curiously, and asked, “Do you want to be different? Is that why you go by a different name?”
It was a complete non-sequitur, and Bruce didn’t have an answer prepared. “It’s part of the reason,” he said.
“What else is part of it?”
How could Bruce possibly explain? How could he explain how he’d one day felt compelled, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, to come up with a “nickname” for himself that wasn’t too far removed from his original name but that he actually liked? He’d gone through thousands of names starting with the letter “B” and settled on “Bruce” after learning his mother had been fond of it. It had been written in the diary she’d kept when she was pregnant, among a list of other names she and Thomas were considering, one column of boys’ names and one column of girls’. Bruce had latched onto it immediately and hadn’t let go ever since.
He couldn’t explain that. So instead he said, “It’s just what I like being called.”
Ollie accepted this and moved on. “Why haven’t you told anyone else to call you that?”
“They’d think it’s weird. Everyone already thinks I’m weird.”
“That’s not true,” Ollie argued.
Bruce raised an eyebrow at him pointedly. “You don’t have to lie.”
“Alright,” Ollie caved. “Yeah, people think you’re weird. So what? I thought you didn’t care what people think. You act like you don’t care.” He paused, and when Bruce didn’t say anything, his tone grew more serious, and he asked, “Do you care?”
It was a complicated question. More complicated than Ollie understood. It wasn’t that Bruce didn’t care. But he didn’t know how to be any other way. He didn’t know how to be how Ollie was.
“I’d care less if people minded their own business,” Bruce said. It was as much as he was willing to admit to.
“Are you talking about me? Do you want me to stop asking questions?”
“No.” Bruce waved a hand dismissively. “You’re fine. Everyone else is the problem.”
Ollie smirked. “Yeah. People suck.” He looked off into the distance, then looked back. “Would it help if I said something when I hear people talking about you behind your back?”
“You don’t have to do that,” Bruce said.
“I know I don’t ‘have’ to,” Ollie countered. “But I would, if you wanted me to.” He made eye contact, and he looked serious enough that Bruce was forced to believe him.
“Aren’t you worried people will think we’re friends?” Bruce asked. He and Ollie had spent months pretending not to know each other in public. Bruce had been under the impression that was what Ollie wanted. Why would he risk his social standing for someone like Bruce?
“We are friends,” Ollie said.
Oh. Maybe that was why.
It wasn’t a revelation that Ollie considered Bruce a friend. Bruce considered Ollie one too. Ollie was the only friend he had. But it was a revelation that Ollie’s friendship extended to a willingness to make personal sacrifices for Bruce’s comfort and happiness. The only person Bruce had ever known to make sacrifices for him was Alfred, and Alfred was so much more than a friend. Alfred was family.
Bruce didn’t want Ollie to feel like he had to advocate for Bruce. But if that was what friendship meant, and Ollie wanted to be friends, Bruce wouldn’t stop him. “If you feel like saying something, you can say something. It’s up to you.”
Ollie nodded. A moment passed in silence, and they just stared at each other until Bruce finally broke eye contact, looking down at the ground.
“Can I ask you one more thing?” Ollie said.
“Sure.”
“I know it’s none of my business. So you can tell me to fuck off if you want. But I’m trying to figure out what’s up with you, and I think it might be easier if you just tell me.”
Bruce didn’t answer right away. He hadn’t even fully acknowledged “what was up with him” to himself, let alone to anyone else. I want to be a guy, he thought about saying. But that didn’t feel quite right. I am a guy, maybe, but how could that be true?
Why couldn’t anything about Bruce make sense? Why couldn’t anything be easy?
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t.”
Bruce glanced up. Ollie didn’t look completely satisfied with Bruce’s answer, but he didn’t look like he was going to argue with it either.
There was something Bruce wanted to ask Ollie too, now that they were getting personal. He’d wanted to ask since the very first time they’d properly met, when Ollie had found Bruce hiding up here and asked if it was “his spot,” and Bruce had told him he could stay as long as he kept it a secret. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Ollie said.
“Why do you come here?” Bruce gestured around them at the tree. Their tree. Bruce came here to escape, and he knew Ollie knew that, but Ollie didn’t have the same problems Bruce did. He had other friends. He had a whole social life. He was well-liked and, at least from the outside, seemed normal. As far as Bruce could tell, he didn’t have a reason to sneak out of class multiple times a week and hide in a tree with some weird loner kid who thought he was a boy. “What are you hiding from?”
This time Ollie broke eye contact and looked down at the ground. “Nothing.” His tone told Bruce that that was a lie, but Bruce didn’t call him on it. “It’s just nice to have a break sometimes.”
“From what?”
“From… I don’t know.” He huffed out a breath. “People’s expectations?”
“What about my expectations?”
“All you care about is that I don’t talk too much, don’t tell anyone else about this place, and call you Bruce,” Ollie said. “That’s easy.”
It may have been easy, but it was more than most of their other classmates would have done for Bruce. And it meant a lot.