Chapter Text
Everyone Sang
By Siegfried Sassoon
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away … O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
The rain was coming down so hard that the windshield wipers couldn’t clear it fast enough. Alexa Lenhart hunched down in the passenger seat and bit her lip. Water covered the road.
“Derek–” she started.
“Not now, Alex!” her boyfriend snapped, sounding more nervous than angry. He tapped the brake and the back of the car jerked one way and then the other.
“Derek!”
They lurched to a stop. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Alexa didn’t even breathe. When she pulled her hands down into her lap, Derek Brantley was staring wide-eyed at the road.
“Do you even now where we are?” she demanded, her hands shaking. She balled them together and for a second had a vision of her mom doing that exact same thing during a fight with her dad before the divorce. Something about it scared her more than the fishtailing had, dropping a cold and lonely stone in the pit of her stomach.
“How the hell would I?” Derek spat back, but his anger seemed empty now that she was so terrified. “You wanted to take a bunch of turns. I wanted to stay on the main roads, remember?”
Alexa fought the hot tears threatening to overspill. She sniffled and turned her head, watching the downpour outside the window. She forced her hands to relax.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a long silence. “This was a bad idea.”
In the bushes just beside the road, there was movement. Alexa squinted through the rain, which was finally letting up. The windshield wipers were starting to squeak against the glass.
“Today’s been shitty enough without the silent treatment,” Derek said, like it was a joke. “C’mon. Alex. I’m sorry.”
“Shh,” she said, batting at him when he reached for her. She peered at the bushes. There was definitely something moving. “Did you see that?” Alexa asked, when a large section of shrub shook violently. Her swatting him away turned into slapping his shoulder. “Derek. Derek, start the car.”
“What?” Derek unbuckled and stretched across to look out the window with her. “I don’t see anything.”
“Right there,” Alexa whispered, frozen and panicking at the same time.
The bushes swayed again and a figure stumbled out onto the road, with a shambling gait, soaked through and dripping mud and rainwater and something dark red. He lurched in front of the car, only feet from the hood, and turned to face them. His face was gray and his lips were blue and his eyes, his eyes…Alexa couldn’t see any pupils or color or anything but white.
Squeaking from the windshield wipers was frantic but Alexa’s piercing scream drowned it out. The thing on the road didn’t even flinch but Derek was screaming next to her and the volume hurt her ears but she couldn’t stop. Before she even sucked in a breath to scream again, she’d already imagined how she’d die if that thing got into the car, the way it would eat her first and then Derek and how borrowing Derek’s uncle’s car was the stupidest fucking thing they’d ever done, even worse than sneaking into the abandoned Hilton to skinny dip in the pool with all the lights off after that fire, and she was going to die and she probably deserved it after what she’d said to her mom the night before.
She was vaguely aware of Derek gripping her arm so hard it was going to leave bruises and she suddenly violently hated, hated Bristol and if she was going to die it was going to be while angry and not scared because she’d spent too many of her sixteen years being scared and flinching away from things and at least she was going to die with Derek and she loved Derek and he loved her and wasn’t there a pair of scissors or something in the damn car because his uncle was a safety freak who worried about things like locked-up seatbelts in the filthy river.
Alexa fumbled forward for the glove compartment, still screaming, while Derek let go to turn the key in the ignition but his hands must have been shaking too hard because he was just banging his knuckles against the dash every time he reached and missed.
Then the thing moved its mouth, like it was talking, and it looked so helpless and normal aside from basically everything else. The thing looked a lot less like a thing and a lot more like a boy, a boy like Derek, who was crying and muttering “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” next to her.
Then the boy in the road didn’t leap forward to attack them, to break the window like a bad movie, but he took another step and collapsed.
“Ohmigod,” Alexa gasped, her throat raw from screaming. She hit Derek’s shoulder. “Get out, get out and help him. Derek, get out!”
The blank look on Derek’s face was replaced by another kind of horror and he stopped grabbing for the keys and a second later, he was out of the car. He must have realized almost the same time she did or they would have sat there arguing, instead of Alexa jumping out of the passenger side and into the now-drizzling rain.
Derek was already kneeling by the boy when she came around the front and he had hesitated, his hands aloft by the boy’s head. The kid smelled awful and couldn’t have been much younger than either of them, his hair long and limp across his forehead and on his neck. He was wearing the tattered remnants of a suit, but it was beyond ruined.
“Call 911,” Derek ordered, his voice shaky. “Is your phone working? Call 911.”
Alexa wrestled it out of her too-small pocket and pressed the numbers, dropping to her knees next to Derek on the asphalt. The boy was mumbling something, over and over. She leaned closer while the phone rang once.
“Bruce,” the boy said, plainly now that she was close enough to hear. “Bruce.” Then his eyes closed.
The dispatcher was asking her questions and no matter how much Derek shook the boy he wouldn’t wake back up.
The great house was not empty but it felt empty. It had for months now. For one hundred and eighty three days, the inhabitants moved like they were the ghosts, like they were the ones who had died instead.
Meals held in a dim dining room, where the light spilling from the vaulted ceiling did little to dispel the shadows, were not helping matters at all. Especially when dinner was served at four in the morning.
For nearly ten minutes, Bruce Wayne had been sitting in front of a plate of cooling food. He’d barely eaten half of it. The fork was still in his hand but he was staring at the table runner like he was somewhere else entirely.
“Sir.” Alfred startled him with a gentle interruption, the refilling of a water glass and a hand offering to take the plate. Bruce set the fork down deliberately, uncurling his fingers, and let the older man take the unfinished food.
“Thank you for dinner, Alfred,” he said automatically. “It was…”
He wanted to say good. That was the script. But he found himself glancing over at Alfred, patiently waiting with the plate in hand, to see what the food had even been. He couldn’t remember, even though he had mechanically cut and chewed and swallowed it.
“How are the vehicle modifications coming along?” Alfred asked instead, turning toward a small cart and setting the plate in a bin.
“They’re coming,” Bruce said, shaking his head a little to clear it. “I’ll be able to install the new autopilot soon.”
It was like talking about somebody else’s plans, for someone else’s life. He felt no interest at the moment in one of the few projects he’d actually cared about recently. The night had been a long one, after a long day, and that always made it harder.
He’d come back drenched, every bit of the suit and cape either soaked or dripping water off hydrophobic material. And he’d gone from freezing rain into the shower in the chilled cave and now his hair was still damp and he felt for a moment like he’d maybe never be warm again. His ribs hurt from a blow he’d taken.
“Sleep, Master Bruce,” suggested Alfred, moving out of the dining room with the cart ahead of him. “And maybe a night off would be in order.”
“I’ll think about it,” Bruce replied, but they both knew as soon as he said it that it wasn’t true. He didn’t take nights off anymore, not unless an injury made it impossible to move. He was out in the cape or at the hospital with Barbara or working overnight improving gear.
Nights off were for men who could sleep.
Still, the driftless but grating tension at the Manor left him in no mood to argue with Alfred. He’d done enough of that already, plus with himself and with Dick. It was an unrooted kind of conflict, the kind that could creep into a mundane conversation or spring out of mere silence until everyone was clamping their mouths shut and even Alfred went about thin-lipped or with tears in his eyes.
Bruce had lost count of how many times either of them had escaped to other rooms to hide. The quiet in the kitchen or the study were often almost tangible things, a heavy presence that spoke of forcibly hushed noises somewhere nearby.
No, he wouldn’t argue or outright fight the suggestion and other than suggesting it, Alfred wouldn’t insist.
He pushed the chair back and stood.
“Get some rest, Al,” he said, but then he turned and remembered Alfred had already left the dining room. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting there alone.
The temptation to close his eyes for the walk upstairs was immense, but he wouldn’t allow himself even if he knew he could do it. Slow steps up the wide, carpeted stairs. Past the balcony railing. Into the hall. One foot in front of the other, going by the two empty bedrooms and then the locked door to Jason’s bedroom.
Bruce went without hesitating but making it to Dick’s door, also locked but for other reasons, and then his own brought a tiny inward relief. It was over. And into his own room he went, pausing to tug the curtains more firmly shut against the sunrise just a few hours away.
He’d likely wake before it, but just in case he actually slept for once, he wanted it to last as long as it could.
Daylight brought thinking and reality and there was never enough work to chase it away.