Alright, this one's going to be short. For my own sake I had to put a limit on how long I spent in the mindset to write this because of its content. Major trigger warnings for suicidal thoughts, attempted suicide, self harm, and child abuse. I tried to keep graphic descriptions to a minimum, but when dealing with themes like these it's potentially triggering regardless of how in depth I go. Still, I did promise prequels for the major characters, and learning this backstory is crucial to understanding just how meaningful the events of Gravesen are for Bruce.
Chapter 1: Perplexed and Frightened
"Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm." –Robert Louis Stevenson, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Bruce thought about this quote often. He thought about a lot of things often. Too many things. All the things, all the time. If he ever stopped thinking, then he thought about everything that might go wrong if he neglected to think hard enough and before he knew it he was thinking again. His mind was anything but quiet, and it could be easily perplexed or frightened.
He envied those with quiet minds. Some of his quiet-minded classmates envied him, and when they muttered about how he must have cheated to score that well, how he probably hadn't stressed over studying a day in his life because he knew it all already, or how they wished they had a mind like his so they could excel too, he wanted to tell them the truth. He would have told them the truth, that he kept his eyes so firmly fixed on his own paper during a test that his neck ached because he was terrified of being accused of cheating, stressed over studying every free minute he had because if he didn't do well in school he had nothing, and how he wished he had any mind but his own so he could experience even a second of freedom from the constant noise. But that would require talking to them. And above all else, talking to his peers both perplexed and frightened him.
It could be worse. Whenever the noise crescendoed to a cacophony that threatened to split Bruce's head in half, he reminded himself it could be worse. At least he wasn't here to remind Bruce of his every shortcoming, to reinforce everything Bruce already told himself on a daily basis with harsh words and the lashing end of a belt. If the idea of giving up again ever crossed his mind, Bruce ran his fingers over the scars on the inside of his wrists and reminded himself that it could be worse.
~0~
Bruce sat down at his desk and grabbed his homework folder from his backpack. He kept all his worksheets from the day's classes in there: incomplete in the left pocket and complete in the right pocket. Today, he had a spelling worksheet, some math problems, and another worksheet for science. In less than ten minutes he'd finished math, and spelling took only ten minutes more. Bruce always saved science homework for last because it was his favorite.
He reached for the folder again and found the left side empty. Thinking maybe it stuck to one of the other papers, he double checked his completed work, but his science worksheet did not appear. Fear began its crawling ascent up his throat. Bruce always put homework in this folder, there was nowhere else it could be. Still, he pulled everything out of his backpack and flipped through every page of every folder and journal, hoping, hoping, hoping, that it just slipped out and got lost among other things. He checked it all three times before he gave up on hope and surrendered to fear.
They'd gotten a science worksheet in class. He knew it because he remembered the teacher passing them out and he'd written it down in his planner. Somehow, it either never ended up in his folder or it got lost. Whichever it was, Bruce didn't have it, and it was due tomorrow.
"What am I gonna do?" he thought. He wasn't one of those kids who just lost their homework. What would his teacher think if he showed up to school without it? She'd be so disappointed. Bruce remained one of the only kids in his class—in the entire second grade, frankly—who could be relied upon to do his work and not cause trouble. Failing to do his homework would ruin that. Bruce couldn't let that happen.
He ran downstairs to the kitchen, expecting to find Mom. Instead, Dad sat at the table, deeply engrossed in something on his laptop. Most days he was still at work at this hour. "Where's Mom?" Bruce asked.
"Running errands," Dad said dismissively. "What do you want?"
"Um…" Bruce didn't want to tell him. Dad wouldn't take it seriously, would tell him that homework in second grade "Didn't matter one fucking bit" and that he should go play outside or watch TV instead of fussing about it. He never understood how much it mattered to Bruce, how much everything mattered.
"Spill it."
"I lost my science homework," he admitted.
"So?"
"So, I need to do it. But I don't have the worksheet."
"Why don't you have it?"
"I don't know. I must have lost track of it somehow."
"Then just tell your teacher that."
"But then she'll think I'm a slacker!"
"You lost your homework. Maybe you are one."
"I've never lost homework before, and it won't happen again," Bruce assured. "But I need to find a way to do it."
"Really? You need to?"
"Yes."
"I'll tell you what. You got friends in this class?"
The real answer was no. Bruce was friendly with the kids who sat near him, but he wouldn't call them his friends. Acquaintances, maybe. But he didn't want to see what would happen if he admitted that to his father. So he lied and said yes.
"Call one of them and ask if they can email you a picture of the work."
"I don't have an email address," Bruce pointed out.
"Then get their parents to email it to me."
"I don't know their phone numbers."
"The student directory is in the cabinet by the phone. If you know their name, you can easily find their number. Now go," Dad prompted. Swallowing the dread rising in his throat, Bruce moved to the cabinet and rifled through it. This bad situation had somehow morphed into a nightmare. Talking on the phone was not something Bruce did on a regular basis—because it terrified him. He'd answer if it was Mom calling him, but dialing someone else and waiting for them to pick up made his brain riot. The idea of calling one of his schoolmates scared him senseless.
A parent would almost certainly be the one to pick up, someone Bruce had never met, and he'd have to explain his stupid mistake and then explain it again to the kid. What if they didn't have it either and he had to do the whole thing all over again, with more new people? What if they refused, demanding Bruce suffer the consequences of his own negligence? What if he read the email address wrong and he went through all that just for the worksheet to get lost in cyberspace?
All these thoughts crossed his mind in the time it took him to locate the directory. He thought of a classmate he was pretty sure at least knew his name and flipped through to find him. His gaze rested on the ten digit number listed with the name and froze there until his vision blurred with tears.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Dad questioned when Bruce's sniffling became audible. "That's a directory, not an obituary."
"I can't do it," Bruce proclaimed.
"Can't do what? Make a phone call? Are you kidding me?"
Bruce shook his head despondently.
"Pick up the goddamn phone right this minute and get it done." For an instant, Dad scared him even more than the prospect of making a call, so Bruce picked the phone up off the hook. The second it entered his hand, it took over as the more threatening entity. Bruce was stuck between his intransigent father and the howling abyss of the unknown lurking just beyond the pressing of a few buttons.
"What are you waiting for? Call your friend. It's not that difficult."
"Yes it is," Bruce protested. Nothing he'd ever done came close to matching this task in difficulty.
"Only you would say making a phone call is difficult," Dad sighed. "Do you want your homework or not?"
"Yes," Bruce spluttered through more tears.
"Then make the goddamn call."
"I can't!" he cried, and bolted out of the room. The phone fell from his hand and clattered to the floor. Dad tore after him with a growl and had his hand fisted in the back of Bruce's shirt before he even made it past the first step. He whipped Bruce around and smacked him across the face so hard his ears rang.
"If you don't get back in there and pick up that phone, so help me," he didn't finish the statement. He didn't need to. For a microsecond, Bruce considered taking the phone and calling nine-one-one, but that would require talking to a stranger on the phone and Bruce's inability to do that was what got him into this mess in the first place. Bruce didn't move back towards the kitchen, so his father dragged him up the stairs by his shirt and shoved him into the master bedroom. He knew what was coming before Dad disappeared into the closet, and part of him knew he deserved it. That knowledge did nothing to quell the fear that arose at the sight of the glimmering belt buckle. Bruce turned around with a resigned sigh before Dad even told him to do so and bit his lip to brace himself for the inevitable pain.
By the time it was over, Bruce was shaking, still crying, and possibly bleeding. "Get out of my sight," Dad commanded, tone low and threatening. Bruce scampered back to his room and curled up under his covers, too rattled to care if he got blood on his sheets.
If he'd only been responsible and remembered his stupid science homework, none of this would've happened.
~0~
It went on much like that for the next six years. Mom knew about it. She dressed Bruce's wounds when his father really lost control, but she didn't do anything to stop it. She couldn't. Dad threatened her with the same treatment if she breathed a word to anyone. Bruce didn't blame her. Mostly he blamed himself.
Things changed when he gave up.
They investigated his old wounds and scars, the ones they could tell weren't self-inflicted, and they figured it out. Mom filled in anything they couldn't decipher just by looking at him, her concern for Bruce outweighing her fear of her husband. Fortunately, the authorities got to him before he could get to Mom. If one good thing could come out of this lowest of lows, Bruce was glad it was his mother's freedom.
Things were good, right after that. Mom got a new job and when Bruce was released, they packed up all their things and moved from Ohio to New York City, where Mom had always wanted to live. Neither of them wanted to spend another second in the house which contained nothing but memories of Dad. Bruce feared that living in a busy city might overwhelm his anxiety—he knew that was the term for it now—but the anonymity of walking through massive crowds of people actually had somewhat of the opposite effect. He wasn't expected to say hi to people he met on the street like he was in the suburbs, and he knew nobody paid him any attention so long as he kept his head down like everyone else. Remaining invisible was easy in a city where everyone had seen it all before.
Mom's happiness bled into Bruce, and between that and the medications he felt better than he'd ever felt in his entire life. The perpetual stomachache he'd had for as long as he could remember abated, leaving room for something warm and shaped like joy, and while he knew he could never achieve true silence, the volume in his mind reduced to something comparable.
Bruce started thinking about that quote the first time he read it, in his tenth grade English class. He tore through the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, racing ahead of their assigned reading schedule because he loved it so much and couldn't wait to witness the story reach its resolution. Mom bought him his own copy so he could highlight and scribble notes in the margins, and so he could read it again and again after he returned the school's copy when they moved on to the next unit. What it was about this particular story that captured his fascination, he couldn't pinpoint. Maybe it was the idea that a single person could contain two drastically different personalities.
It helped him rationalize his father's behavior, in a way. He imagined that alcohol had been the potion that transformed Dad from a normal, hard-working man into a raging beast intent only on beating Bruce into submission. It wasn't Bruce's fault, but the potion's. When he managed to think about it like that instead of blaming himself for setting Dad off with his incapability to function like a normal human, he felt better.
He should've known it wouldn't last.
Bruce started his junior year of high school full of…not hope, but at least not the same sort of dejection that had heralded the beginning of every school year before Dad left. His anxiety had always spiraled in the first few weeks of a new school year as he adjusted to new teachers, classmates, and routines. It wasn't as bad this time around, but he could still tell that the volume in his head ratcheted up a few notches.
Junior year was more difficult and much more hyper-focused on preparing students for the future, particularly regarding college. Bruce studied harder than ever because grades mattered now more than ever before. AP Chemistry and AP Physics were supposedly the hardest courses offered by the school, but nobody would know that just by looking at Bruce's grades. The subjects just clicked, and that combined with his relentless study schedule ensured he performed well on every assignment handed their way.
Over the previous two years here, Bruce had built a reputation as the quiet genius. He never talked to anyone about his grades (or anything, frankly) and he didn't participate in class—unless it was mandatory and he forced himself to speak while simultaneously quelling a panic attack—but whoever sat behind him must have caught a glimpse whenever tests were handed back and spread the word. Bruce didn't contribute to gossip, but he soaked it up like a sponge, listening quietly in hallways and classrooms. That's how he learned that many of his peers harbored jealousy for what they thought was his perfect, infallible brain. If only they knew just how imperfect it was.
In the comics, Bruce's father was actually so violent he killed Bruce's mom, but there was no way I was going to bring that to life. I've learned so much about comic books since I started listening to some MCU podcasts and as much as they're considered 'lesser reading' or 'just for kids' there's some really heavy stuff in there.