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Bruce doesn’t want to be here. He makes no effort to disguise that fact.
Not from Alfred – not that there is any point trying to disguise anything from Alfred, he has learned that all too well – and not from the farmhouse couple cooing over him and offering him hot chocolate and whatever.
Certainly not from the wide eyed six year old nuisance who is practically bouncing off the walls and chattering non stop. Bruce has long ago stopped listening.
“You’ll have to stay the night” the man – Jonathan Kent – tells Alfred. “I called Louie, but he says there’s no way they can get here in the storm. He’ll come around as soon as it lets up.”
Alfred nods, all polite gratitude and charm “Thank you, Mr Kent. We are really sorry to intrude like this, but-“
“It’s no trouble. At all”
Bruce has gotten good at reading body language over the past year, and he is surprised to note that the man actually seems to mean what he says. Or close enough. As if ending up with two city strangers stranded on their doorstep on Christmas Eve is no big deal.
“The more the merrier” the woman – Martha Kent – smiles, ruffling Bruce’s hair. He glares at the floor.
……………………………..
Bruce hates this place.
Of course, he was against the trip from the beginning. He likes Dr Leslie, but he has absolutely no interest in driving three hours to go spent Christmas with her.
But Alfred insisted. It didn’t need to be Dr Leslie, he said, but they had to get out of Gotham for the day. Alfred had turned up with nearly a book’s worth of options.
It’s the first Christmas since… Since. Alfred had no intention of letting Bruce spend that day in the Manor.
Bruce had picked Dr Leslie as the least irritating option of all the pointless ones Alfred had laid out before him.
And of course, that plan has now gone spectacularly wrong, thanks to an unpredicted snowstorm and car trouble.
So here they are in a farmhouse that looks like it stepped straight out of a Hallmark movie complete with Ma and Pa and little bouncy kid. And the place practically buried under decorations.
Bruce looks around the ‘guest bedroom’. Well, at least the farmhouse is big enough to have two guest bedrooms, even if they are both smaller than Bruce’s closet back home.
Alfred knocks on the door. “Master Bruce?”
“I’ll be down presently, Alfred” Bruce holds on to the irritation and anger like a shield. It’s the first Christmas since. His clothes are laid out on the bed, ready to be stepped into.
Naturally, the Kents aren’t the type to ‘dress for dinner’, and Alfred mentioned it might seem a bit…well, snobbish to do it here, but Bruce has no objection to seeming snobbish. He has no desire to make a good impression tonight. There is no reason to.
Another round of knocks on the door – this set a bit lower down and a lot more rapid.
Bruce pulls the door open to see the kid standing there, a wide grin and smudges of chocolate on his face. “C’mon!”
Bruce wants to tell the brat to get lost and slam the door in his face, but that will lead to more lectures from Alfred. He’s really not in the mood for that right now.
“I’ll come. Just getting dressed” he keeps his voice polite, but icily so.
The kid looks at him, big blue eyes widening. The grin fades, and his face kind of crumples a little, like those of little kids when they’re about to start crying.
Bruce frowns. His tone certainly hadn’t been harsh enough to merit this reaction.
“What happened to you?” the kid asks, eyes fixed on Bruce.
There’s something creepy about the way the kid looks at him, as if he is seeing something far more than he should.
“What?” Bruce makes his tone curt, cutting.
The kid just keeps looking
“You’re…you’re all grey.” He reaches out as if to touch Bruce, but his hand hovers an inch or so away from him.
“Grey?”
Startled, Bruce turns to look at himself in the mirror. His complexion looks normal enough. Okay, not as tanned as the kid’s, but certainly normal enough. Maybe the kid’s so used to seeing burned brown skin that regular skin tones look creepy.
“What d’you mean, grey?”
But then the kid’s ma calls him from downstairs and the kid bolts, looking at Bruce over his shoulder even as he runs.
……………………………
Bruce is good at listening. He has always been, even before. But now it is something he deliberately trains himself into. Something he practices. Always. And now he listens to them, talking.
Alfred and Mr Kent. Out on the porch. Chatting. Kent asking-by-not-quite-asking why they are there. Little boy and family servant travelling alone on Christmas Eve.
Alfred’s short, concise explanation. Death. Will specifying guardianship. Family friend more than family servant.
Kent offers all the appropriate condolences. Bruce knows Martha Kent will be listening too, and from the kitchen, she wouldn’t need any special training to pick out the conversation.
Bruce knows the pity he will see in their eyes when he goes downstairs again, the excuses they will make to themselves for any rudeness he might show.
The poor little thing, he can practically hear them thinking. He can almost see Ma Kent hugging her little boy to herself, perhaps imagining him staring down the barrel of a gun, him kneeling in a blood stained alley.
Promising herself that it will never happen. Promising herself that she and her husband and her little boy are safe, that such nasty things happen only in big cities, that they are okay, they are home, probably swearing she will never ever let her baby boy go to one of those awful cities.
Of course, Bruce knows things can go wrong here too.
A tractor turning over. A little boy falling down a disused well, swimming and paddling and calling out for hours till he can’t do it anymore. Getting lost in the woods. A perv deciding to stop by where there aren’t security cameras to spot him.
They aren’t safe either. They just don’t want to know that.
…………………………………………..
The dinner is, of course, all homemade. And surprisingly, vegetarian.
“Hope you don’t mind” Mrs Kent doesn’t offer an explanation.
Bruce is slightly curious, but it will take too much effort to bother about it.
When they mention the vegetarianism, Mr Kent glances at the kid – Clark – with a fond smile. It’s because of the kid, Bruce notes. Maybe the kid is sick? Looks like the picture of health.
Maybe on the spectrum.
Yeah, that might be it, Bruce decides, remembering the kid’s weird comments about him being grey or what not. Some fad diet they think will help. It’s all delicious, though.
The kid is seated next to Bruce. And seemingly unable to shut up. Bruce’s glares turn out to be ineffective.
The annoying part is not the chatter. That Bruce is more or less used to filtering out. It is the feeling that the kid is apparently doing his best to get him to smile.
“The cake is real good” the kid practically pushes a huge slice of it onto Bruce’s plate.
Bruce pushes it right back. Too many calories. Not enough protein. He has researched the most suitable diet for his future plans, and has no intention of deviating from it. Alfred has finally given up trying to.
The kid looks at him with those kicked-puppy eyes, and it is an effort to glare. The grownups’ conversation holds little of any interest.
Bruce tries to tune out the kid’s chatter and starts thinking about the meditation techniques he had been looking up on the ride here.
……………………………….
Bruce would have preferred to go back to his room immediately after the meal, but the kid sticks to him. A look from Alfred warns him not to be too rude.
“D’you wanna stay up and watch for Santa?” the kid asks.
Bruce has had enough. “Santa isn’t real.”
The kid is around five or six. Probably still a bit too young for the Santa-Is-Not-Real talk. Who cares.
“He is!” the kid’s tone isn’t argumentative, just plain statement of fact. And he’s looking at Bruce like Bruce is the dummy here.
“He isn’t” Bruce insists. He knows he should just back off, let the kid have his fairy tale. But he is annoyed, tired, and really really doesn’t feel like letting anyone hold onto their fairy tales. “Your ma and pa put those presents under the tree.”
The kid doesn’t react the way he is supposed to. “Oh, I know that!”
“Huh?” There’s not much that can make Bruce fumble these days.
The kid prattles on, unaware that he has derailed the older boy’s script. “I mean, he sometimes gives presents, but only sometimes, and they are special presents, and they have magic, but he doesn’t do that often, only when kids have been very very good or very very hurt and they earn it or they really really need it and there’s magic in-“
“Kid, slow down.”
“Oops, sorry, I’m doing it again, ain’t I? Ma says my tongue goes faster than my brain does and it’s supposed to… Oh. I’m doing it again.”
“Do you ever shut up?”
“…sometimes?”
Bruce rolls his eyes.
“Santa says he’s supposed to…” the kid halts, as if trying to remember the words or fit his tongue around them “Uh, spread the spirit of the season, the magic. Kinda reminds mas and pas to buy their gifts, you know? And he’s magic, so he knows how to tell who and when, but sometimes they don’t listen, and that’s sad ‘cause then the-“
Bruce tunes out the babble. He has to. There is too sharp a memory of the Christmas last year, the presents under the tree, the laughter. The feel of their hands holding his.
Bruce doesn’t cry. He hasn’t, since that night. He just freezes up. Goes quiet. He knows how to do that without scaring grownups. He knows the right expression to put on his face as a filler.
The kid has stopped talking. Now looking at him with an expression like he’s about to start bawling.
“…I’m making it worse, ain’t I?”
“Kind of. Yeah.”
The kid nods, miserable. “Sorry. It’s just… I never saw kids look grey before”
Curiosity is the one thing he has never lost, even in the days just after…after it.
“What do you mean, ‘look grey’?”
The kid pauses, the way little kids do when they have a lot of things to say and can’t quite find all the words. “It’s… It’s kinda like…I dunno, like rainbows? Around everyone… Glowing. Like the paintings in church and all?”
Kid is definitely on the spectrum, Bruce decides.
“It’s really nice to see, most of the time. But sometimes…” the kid pauses, his face going a little pale. “Sometimes it gets bad. Really really bad. Blood red is bad, black is bad, but they all last only a bit. Then it’s rainbow shades again. But when it’s grey…Grey lasts a long time. And that’s really…”
“Bad?”
The kid nods. “Do you take pills?”
“What?”
“Lex’s mom does it. Takes pills. They make her look less grey” the kid pauses suddenly, then claps a hand over his mouth in horror “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone!”
Bruce manages a small chuckle at the kid’s expression. “Don’t worry, I don’t know your Lex or her mom. So no harm, right?”
“Sure?”
“Sure”
“So… Do you take pills?”
“Nah”
Bruce has an idea they will probably put him on pills – and definitely put him in therapy – if they find out what he is doing. The training. The people he has established online contact with. The plans.
But they won’t find out. Not even Alfred. Not till it is too late for Alfred to stop him.
“So, you stay up to see Santa?”
He needs to re-direct the kid. He knows Alfred is considering the idea – the pill idea – and he really doesn’t want it called to his attention, just in case he overhears.
The kid nods enthusiastically. “We’ve just got to get on to the roof. Last year he took me flying with him while he finished this hemisphere. It was really really fun. The reindeers are so soft to pet!”
“I bet they are”
“And then we went to the North Pole and he showed me his workshop. We couldn’t look around a lot ‘cause it was almost morning and Ma and Pa’d worry if I wasn’t here. It was so pretty!”
“North Pole?”
“Yeah! When I grow up I’m gonna go stay there, it’s so so snowy and pretty and there are white bears! They look so fluffy!”
Well, kid’s got an imagination that’s on hyper scale. It’s almost adorable.
“You’d freeze your butt off”
“I never get cold!”
Fortunately, at this point, Mrs Kent turns up to enforce the little nuisance’s bedtime.
Bruce tunes out the variety of excuses -“Five minutes more, Ma!” – and retreats before his dignity is damaged by Alfred doing the same.
………………………………
Bruce wakes up early on Christmas morning.
Old habits die hard. At least now he no longer wakes up expecting them to be there.
There’s a knock at the door. Not Alfred. Too early, too rapid, too low on the doorframe. Bruce is not really surprised to find the kid there when he opens the door.
The kid is grinning hopefully, and holds out a teddy bear half as big as him. The bear is white, very fluffy, and with a red ribbon around its neck.
“You aren’t supposed to open presents early.”
“Santa gave it!”
Bruce rolls his eyes. “Sure. Now put it back before your Ma finds it.”
“It’s for you!”
Bruce is so surprised that he reflexively takes the teddy bear the kid shoved into his arms. “Me?”
“Santa gave it! I asked him to give something that’d make you…less grey.”
“I’m fine” Bruce growls.
The kid isn’t intimidated, not even particularly discouraged. “Santa says you got hurt, hurt bad, and it’s gonna take a long while to be okay, but this might help-“
“I don’t want your stupid teddy bear!”
“It isn’t mine! It’s yours, Santa told me to give it to you!”
And before he can shove it back into his arms, the kid is gone, darting away so fast that Bruce almost considers it an optical illusion.
………………………………………
Bruce tries to return the stupid toy, of course.
Everything else aside, looks like the kid got a grand total of three gifts, including the bear. No way he’s going to take that, just because the little idiot feels sorry for the poor little rich boy.
Somehow, the thing vanishes and reappears in the car. Inside his packed luggage. Even Alfred can’t explain that, when they finally find it when unpacking.
Finally, a compromise is arrived at. Alfred picks out a New Year’s gift for little Clark Kent and sends it.
Bruce tells Alfred he wants to throw the teddy away – everything else aside, he is definitely too old for freaking teddy bears – but somehow he can’t bring himself to do that. He keeps it in his room.
Alfred is wise enough not to remark on that. Especially when he finds the teddy clutched in a sleeping Bruce’s arms. Especially when he finds the white fur wet with tears on some mornings.
Bruce hasn’t quit his plans. He hasn’t stopped his training. But he has started letting himself cry again, though only when he is hundred percent certain no one can see him.
Clark Kent, at six years old, is much too young to truly understand the situation. But if he could see him, the child would have said the greyness has started to lighten a little.
Only a little, but a little can be enough to make the difference between pain and destruction.
……………………………………….
The teddy bear – in all its silliness – will remain in Bruce’s room long since he has stopped holding it.
In time, it will migrate to the attic, like all forgotten toys. Somehow Alfred doesn’t end up donating it with the rest of the outgrown articles.
Several years after the encounter in the farmhouse, eight year old Dick Grayson, newly arrived occupant of the Manor, will find it in his turn.