A/N: This chapter's a bit different! POV switch. ^^;
Jason Todd, nine years of age and a Gotham native, had only spent the four months since his mother's death on the streets, but reading between the lines he had been sliding that way since far earlier, as the woman's health and general fitness as caretaker declined. Slinking through Gotham's alleys, jostling its tourists, and pocketing whatever wasn't adequately nailed down.
The boy seemed like a throwback to an earlier time, before all children who were wards of no one in particular had become formally wards of the state. When urchins whose parents were dead or incompetent to care for them had thronged the streets of every major metropolis—in England, legally left to the care of the Crown from time immemorial, but practically speaking in the charge of no-one.
The boy squared his shoulders and thrust out his jaw and squinted his eyes, and one almost expected to hear a Depression-era Brooklyn drawl pour from between his lips, or even the thick see-sawing vowels of the Victorian Cockney. A sort of anachronistic Artful Dodger, dropped out of a fictional world onto Gotham's worn bitumen.
But he was perfectly real. Perfectly deadly.
Despite having gone to considerable effort to arrange for it to be so, Alfred Pennyworth did not want this boy in the house.
He was aware the child had very likely saved Master Bruce's life. He was aware the child had no home of his own. He was aware that his young charge was clinging to the other child like a shipwrecked man to a shard of flotsam.
That last was, in a way, the problem.
Because this boy had knifed a man to death, and even if it that act meant they owed Todd a life and even if it had been ruled justifiable homicide, that was not an example or an influence Alfred wanted for young Bruce. This was not the sort of friend Mrs. Wayne would have wanted for her son.
Several times, he had almost said something to that effect. But he knew his feelings would only be interpreted as prejudice regarding the boy's background, and…there was no use in expressing himself only to further alienate his ward.
"I'm telling you, bro, he's got it in for me," Todd had told Bruce in their lair under the dining table, a week into his stay.
Alfred had held his position in the hallway outside, breath silent. Listening at doors was not the act of a gentleman, but it had long been the purview of the servant. "Thinks I'm gonna poison his tea and steal the silver any second."
"You couldn't even carry all the silver, Jason," Bruce retorted. He only ever smiled now when he was alone with Todd, which should have been counted to the child's credit but some days seemed as though he was stealing every scrap of recovery Master Bruce was capable of for his own benefit. Alfred worried that at this rate, his charge would become unable to function at all without the other boy's support.
"Khhh, bragging about your bling does not actually make you cool, that is a lie spread by the music industry. Listen, Iceman is your legal guardian now, right? I'm pretty sure he can get rid of me."
"I don't think so. I mean, he's still being paid his salary…I own the house, so I get to decide whether you can stay." Bruce's voice from under the tablecloth went stretched and wet, as it always did when he thought about his own horribly early inheritance. Little more than two weeks was not nearly long enough to adjust to his new reality.
As it happened, he was wrong. Alfred did, technically, have the authority as trustee of the estate and the legal guardian with full physical custody to determine on Master Bruce's behalf whether Jason Todd could remain here. He had certainly had the freedom to refuse to file for even the temporary custody order under which Mister Todd was currently staying. He was honestly hoping the courts ultimately decided to reject their second application for long-term guardianship, much as he would hate to see his charge alone in this vast house.
But he was not so convinced of the boy's inimical qualities as to be willing to lose Master Bruce's trust forever, just to be rid of him.
He did not, in fact, expect Jason Todd to steal the silver, or anything else they were likely to notice missing. He was obviously intelligent, and advanced for his age, and intending to make the most of his good fortune for as long as it lasted.
But he did not trust the boy, and he had not taken many pains to hide it.
And if it twisted something in his chest to hear that his ward thought of him more as employee than caretaker…well. Eavesdroppers never heard any good of themselves. He had made his own bed. He would lie in it for as long as he was needed.
Jason Todd had arrived on the doorstep of Wayne Manor ten days after his knife ended the life of one Joseph Chill. He'd taken the city bus as far as it went and then walked what Alfred later calculated to have been five and a half miles, most of it uphill in the dark, to slip between the bars of the fence across the front of the Wayne property.
Then, made his way up the drive to knock on the front door.
The manor's brass door-knocker had not seen much use since the installation, some years ago, of an intercom system to the front gate; the rapping sound barely carried to the kitchen where Alfred had been putting together breakfast, and even then took him a little while to identify.
He stripped off his apron and hurried to the front door, feeling harassed and suspicious—the most likely suspects to have circumvented security were ambulance-chasing paparazzi looking to bully their way in and acquire exclusive information about young Bruce's bereavement, but his young ward's paranoia was understandable, and catching, and he could not dismiss the possibility of opportunistic murder inspired by recent events.
The unexpected guest turned out, when the door swung open, to be only barely tall enough to reach the door-knocker.
"Hey," said Jason Todd, staring up through his messily curling fringe, a plastic grocery bag slung over one shoulder presumably containing all his worldly possessions, "my caseworker called and said I live here now."
It was rude of Alfred to stand stock-still in the doorway, but it had been rude of Mr. Todd to so anticipate his invitation, and thoroughly baffling that he'd managed it, so there was some excuse. "Master Bruce and I would have fetched you in a few hours once the custody order was in hand," he pointed out as the surprise wore off.
Todd shrugged. This wasn't their first meeting, but it was the first occasion they'd had to actually speak to one another. Bruce had introduced them only absently, some days earlier, when Jason climbed into the rear of the car to be driven to a restaurant lunch, for which Alfred had not joined them.
"You want I should walk myself back to Ma Gunn's?"
"No, of course not." Alfred stepped back, the door swinging wide. "Please, come in."
Bruce had come up to him in the pantry two days after the funeral, which had been three days after the deaths.
"Did you know that in America it's ten thousand percent more likely for a child to be killed by foster parents than by a parent they're actually related to?"
Alfred could only stare, for a moment, the fifteen-pound sack of flour he'd been in the act of emptying into the glass flour bin weighing awkwardly in his hands until he lowered it to the shelf to be dealt with later.
Jason Todd had been transferred from protective police custody to a foster placement the previous morning, once the police felt reasonably secure that the Wayne murders had not been a premeditated assassination, or connected with organized crime, and thus the boy should be safe from retaliation. He should have anticipated this angle. "Where did you read that?"
"A book in Dad's study, why would you even ask that?" Bruce scowled, offended at having his accuracy questioned on data meant to prove his goals were of paramount importance, and Jason Todd's need for rescue of overwhelming urgency.
The boy was unlikely, at this point, to be charged with any crimes, but that was evidently insufficient comfort to the young gentleman.
Alfred replaced the funnel into the mouth of the flour bin and resumed pouring. "It's important to be able to cite the source of any statistic used to support an argument, since they are very easily made up." And sounded that way even if they weren't, when they contained figures like 'ten thousand.' Lies, damned lies, and statistics. He knew better than to think Bruce Wayne would have made up his numbers, but good habits should be fostered young.
Especially now that it was almost entirely up to Alfred to see that they were, good Lord.
He refocused on the child-murder statistics instead. They were slightly less alarming. "Was any figure given for stepparents?"
(For that matter, he suspected his role as a designated non-adoptive guardian not from within the foster system might not be covered by these figures at all; if it was, he was certainly included in the high-murder-risk pool.)
Master Bruce glared. "No, and it doesn't matter, because the point is that Jason is a hundred times as likely to be murdered where he is now than he would be as a kid with real parents."
Alfred rather thought the child had demonstrated a proactive inclination toward self-defense that should improve his odds immensely.
But he could hardly point this out to his young ward and expect to change his mind, nor expect it to have it accepted that murder was in fact a fairly unlikely event, even within such relatively exacerbated circumstances as foster placement. The boy's personal experience, after all, defined unexpected murder as quite common. It had happened in one hundred percent of the lives he had lived, and for all his intellect he was only eight years old.
Alfred tapped the bottom of the empty sack to get the last of the flour to roll free, and incidentally buy himself a moment to think.
Where Jason Todd was now was, more precisely, a group home, a temporary placement they had been assured, where the air had been thick with sullen violence and the caretaker all but openly scornful of the orphan millionaire turning up in a butler-driven Bentley to take one of her charges out to lunch. It had been an improvement on the police lock-up, and presumably wherever he was sent next would be an improvement on this 'home' which was clearly designated to contain incorrigible children, but it certainly did not paint a pleasant picture.
"And how do you suppose his chances stand," Alfred asked, setting the empty sack aside and lifting the funnel from the bin, "relative to his prior abode in Crime Alley?"
"That's not the point either, that's not an option anymore. He's in more danger than he would be with us." Bruce's eyes did not fill with tears and his jaw remained clenched and firm, and the deep anger that had been flashing in him since the murders rose up again, but it was the brightness in the eyes Alfred read, and the way the teeth locked together against weakness as he said, "He saved me. We can't leave him there."
In the face of this lucidity and moral conviction—and even if they thought to do this sort of research, how many eight-year-olds would effortlessly express a relative figure alternately in percentile and multiplicative terms?—Alfred could hardly demur further.
He could have pointed out that he and Dr. Thompkins had not actually entirely secured Bruce's guardianship yet, that there were hearings to get through and it was therefore not reasonable to expect to further expedite their approval for a specific non-standard foster placement, but that would have been disingenuous. Bruce was not asking him for guarantees. He was asking for his support.
Alfred pressed the rubber-sealed glass lid into place.
"I will do all I can," he promised.
And with that, he set out to exploit every loophole and opportunity afforded by Social Services' many vulnerabilities: to sentiment, and class prejudice, and old-fashioned blackmail. He had been prepared to resort to bribery, but the plain unsuitability his private investigators uncovered in a broad range of existing placements had provided him with sufficient leverage. Mister Todd's current locale alone had seen three deaths over the past fifteen years.
Doctor Wayne's books evidently had fairly good data about the American childcare system. He always had been particular about information.
The medical reports showed death by gunshot wound. No surprise there.
It had been quick, at least, for both of them—this was little consolation considering it provoked the thought that if it had been slow, there would have been opportunity for Bruce or his new friend to summon an ambulance and perhaps save their lives, but at least it had been quick.
He'd been shot in the heart, she in the throat. No one had drowned in their own blood or bled out slowly into their abdominal cavity or experienced any other slow torment. Just brief terrible pain and rapid unconsciousness, followed almost immediately by death.
(Jason Todd was to steal these reports from Alfred Pennyworth's room on the tenth day after the murders, and return them several hours later. He thought he'd gotten away with it, but in fact Alfred simply let it pass unremarked.
He was angry that Master Bruce had clearly been allowed to read them as well, and just as much relieved to be spared answering any questions on the subject, and also aware, as Jason was not, that he'd had no legal business having those reports yet and couldn't afford to draw attention to the fact that he had. He let it pass.)
Two coffins were purchased from the finest coffinmaker in Italy—not commissioned, there was no time for custom designs with the dead already decaying, but they were gorgeous masterpieces of woodworking, and the mortician had disguised the violent cause of death and left the corpses looking as serenely grim as though they had passed in their sleep after illness.
It didn't suit them. On Thomas at least the expression was believable; he was rarely angry and it rarely lasted long when he was, but the forbidding expression on his corpse was not unlike his actual anger.
Martha on the other hand had been accustomed to rave and fuss when thwarted, and able to sustain a fume long beyond its natural lifespan and be lit from within as if by fire for as long as it persisted, and the sculpted contempt made her features all but unrecognizable.
Bruce wanted to have her buried in the pearls, her favorite pretty thing, his father's first gift to her when they were young (they would never now grow old), but the police didn't give them back in time. When they were returned Alfred restrung them anyway, at his young master's (ward's) request, all the ones Master Bruce had gathered up and the ones the police had taken from under the bodies and inside the murderer's hand.
The string was one short. Alfred said nothing.
No one informed Alfred of what had happened for nearly five hours after the fact.
So far as he could determine, the decision-making process of the police had progressed something like, 'since both halves of the couple are dead, there's no point in calling their house.' It was after midnight when some bright bulb realized—or finally made their blockheaded superiors aware—that they were going to need to put the child somewhere eventually and none of his relatives had as yet put themselves forward.
(The Kanes scrambled for guardianship once the news broke, but Martha Wayne's will was so firmly set against her family having any opportunity for custody of her son in the event of her death that they were stymied, and Bruce's remaining blood relations were too far removed to have any claim by statute and by and large lost interest, once it became clear that Alfred Pennyworth's position as trustee of the fortune would persist regardless of any decisions regarding Bruce's custody.
Doctor Leslie Thompkins turned out to be surprisingly deft at navigating family court proceedings. Alfred would probably have managed, but they were lucky to have her, and not just because the judge seemed more comfortable awarding custody jointly to a woman and a man, even if they were not attached to one another in any other manner.)
Apparently it was common, though not precisely legal, to house underaged witnesses with members of the department in the short term.
This option had in Bruce's case been rejected, belatedly, on the basis of the high-profile nature of the case, and also on the basis of the fact that the young master had stood up on a chair to make him tall enough to shout into adult faces for the purpose of insisting that he wouldn't leave the police station unless Jason could come, too.
(This Alfred learned later, from one of the detectives in charge of the case expostulating in frustration. The main source of this frustration was that the importance of the victims had landed this open-and-shut case on him as a detective and he wasn't being allowed to close it until something had been investigated.
The obvious target was the surviving killer from the whole catastrophe, but the optics of prosecuting a nine-year-old for saving an eight-year-old from an adult murderer would be terrible. The DA flatly refused; it was an election year.)
At the time, Alfred was simply woken from his sleep in the small hours of the morning by the telephone—the police had called the chairman of the WE Board of Directors, who had put them in contact with Thomas Wayne's personal attorney, who had informed them after some discussion that the person they wanted to contact actually lived in Wayne Manor.
No one had apparently seen fit to ask Bruce himself who they ought to call, or if they had he had refused to answer.
In spite of it having been his free evening, Alfred felt obscurely guilty for having turned in half an hour before the Waynes would have been expected home, since they'd planned to dine out after the film. They'd already been dead by then, of course, but he still felt he'd been somehow remiss.
Master Bruce looked tiny and miserable and groggy when Alfred rushed in, jacket and tie both entirely absent and his shirt-cuffs rolled up, to conceal that he had also neglected cufflinks.
The newly orphaned child was curled up in an uncomfortable-looking orange plastic chair which seemed to share design principles with subway seats. Someone had given him the opportunity to wash his hands since the murders, but the white cuffs of his little linen shirt were stained dark with blood that had dried a familiar terrible rusty brown, and there were flecks and daubs of it across his face and neck and shirt-collar. And actually everything he was wearing, but it barely showed up against the black. Alfred simply knew what to look for.
"Alfred," Bruce said.
He wasn't small for his age. He never had been. But when Alfred went to one knee beside the hideous orange chair it was less than sixty pounds of weight that flung itself against his chest. Hot tears soaked straight through the shoulder of his waistcoat and into his shirt, but little Bruce wasn't making a sound. His breath hardly hitched.
Alfred's left arm came up to fold around Bruce's shoulders and instinctively cup the back of his head, as if he were still an infant. With less confidence, his right hand patted the young master's arm. He wasn't entirely unpracticed at offering consolation, but he felt utterly inadequate to it on this scale.
He'd held children—this child mostly—with scraped knees and broken toys, and adults breaking apart under the weight of grief, but the keening need of a child in the grips of true heartbreak was unspeakable.
Bruce cried himself out and fell asleep in Alfred's arms, and Alfred gathered him close and signed the necessary forms one-handed, until he was free to take the child home and tuck him safely into his own bed to sleep away a little of the pain.
All the while, he barely took notice of the other small boy, wearing badly worn oversized blue jeans and a stained T-shirt, watching him like a hawk. It didn't even occur to him that the scruffy child had anything to do with the Wayne murder case, and if it had he wouldn't have expected it to be in any more significant capacity than as a coincidental witness.
In retrospect, he had been uncharacteristically uninquisitive, but at the time all that had mattered was knowing that his employers were definitely dead, their son was physically unharmed, and there was no definite expectation that their murderer or any associate could pose any further threat, if no certainty that they wouldn't. And that he was the party on record as Bruce's designated guardian, in case this day should ever come.
Everything else, he'd felt, could wait.
He'd almost forgotten the other child's existence by the time he put Bruce to bed; he'd spent more attention at the time on how having run out half-dressed had robbed him of much of the armor of respectability he needed to deal with the police. The way Master Bruce was clinging to him had probably made up for it, in terms of how trustworthy he seemed, but his air of authority had suffered.
Then Bruce had woken up. Alfred had managed to be there, at least, seated at his bedside, prepared to offer comfort again when brief, blissful ignorance was succeeded rapidly by horrified realization. He was not prepared for these stages of awakening to grief to be followed immediately by demands to know where 'Jason' was and what had happened to him, and insistence on going back to the police station immediately.
He was too old for this.
Alfred Pennyworth was presently forty-one years old. He had been on the stage from age fifteen to twenty-two, when Her Majesty's Secret Service had visited upon him an invitation it would have been difficult to refuse even if, as a brash young man, he had not been thrilled at the chance.
Ten years later, he had gotten out, sick to death of the isolation and exhaustion of secrecy, of blood, and of double-dealing for a cause he believed in less every day…just in time to learn that his father was dying.
Well, he'd gone to him of course. They were one another's last family, even if they'd never been close or precisely gotten along. And of course the old man had had a completely absurd deathbed request: his employers of the last twelve years, the Waynes (who had hired him at twice his old pay, because of the excellent references given by the now-bankrupted British household that had absorbed all Jarvis Pennyworth's time and attention from Alfred's earliest memories) were apparently completely helpless on their own, incapable of managing their own staff or, to hear his father tell it, finding their own feet to put socks on. And the lady of the house was pregnant.
Please, look after them, my boy, Jarvis had sighed from his deathbed, to the son he believed had spent the last decade performing dull clerical work for the British Government. Just until things are settled after the child, until there is time to find a proper replacement.
He had met the nascent objections just beginning to rise from the congealed mud of Alfred's abject astonishment with a gentle, weary little smile and the words, I have every faith in your capability, my boy.
As a child, Alfred had been expected to go into service when he grew up, as though it was still 1880 and the servant class large and strong and inescapable. He'd received more training than any child wanted or needed in household tasks and household economy—not that they hadn't all been valuable life skills for looking after oneself, in one way or another, but that had never been the intent, and he'd known it.
Going onto the stage had been a rebellion, yes, but also a loyalty to his own passions, and a search for himself, which MI5 had seemed to further facilitate but probably only rudely interrupted.
He'd once played an ambitious young butler in a West End revival of a nineteenth-century picaresque. The critics had lauded him. This clearly qualified him to run someone else's household full of unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar country.
On the other hand, both his careers thus far had taught him mastery of improvisation, and if he did make a giant bollocks of things, it would serve the old bulldog right.
And all else aside, he could hardly refuse what amounted to a last request, so he'd swallowed his laughter and his rage both, left the old man languishing, and reported to the pretentiously entitled (if architecturally impressive) Wayne Manor.
The Waynes had turned out to be less incompetent than advertised but still impressively helpless—Alfred never saw the need to provide maps to the locations of their feet, but occasionally it seemed it might be necessary to draw up diagrams explaining such concepts as 'food takes time to cook' and 'the staff cannot immediately provide you with items we do not physically possess.'
They never got angry about failure to instantly do the impossible, however, not even Mrs. Wayne in the throes of bizarre pregnancy cravings, merely mildly surprised, as though Jarvis could certainly have managed it and, even though they had accepted Alfred's substitution with the same bemused half-hilarity with which he had offered it, they were entirely puzzled that he could not produce the same miracles.
This inadvertent flag of challenge made Alfred throw himself into his new (temporary) responsibilities with all the more determination, until by the time his father actually died two months in, he scarcely noticed. At least, that was what he'd told himself. He had been irritated when Martha Wayne insisted he take the day off after the news arrived, and when he realized this meant he was turning into his father spent the unlooked-for free hours considering the merits of getting uproariously drunk. In the end he just arranged the funeral.
He'd gone back the next day, anyway.
The rest of the staff were mostly capable of managing themselves, and considering his blatant inexperience he wouldn't dream of meddling with the dusting rotas or the dinner, which had a professional cook in every evening the Waynes didn't go out, even those nights when the master of the house was out until all hours working at the hospital.
(Alfred had looked into this, because he was naturally nosy and a trained spy; so far as he could tell, Thomas Wayne actually was working late, at his job, every time. Even very rich young doctors had unreasonable expectations piled on them, it seemed.)
He was still helpful around the place, and also a figure of authority in case an actual decision needed to be made in the absence of the good doctor and his wife, and as long as this was his job he was determined to do it properly, as he had every job ever given him. (He was beginning to feel everyday less like he was impersonating a butler and more like he actually was one.)
The Waynes attended Jarvis Pennyworth's funeral, Martha hugely pregnant and wiping away discreet tears with a black lace handkerchief that matched her gown, and he suspected their grief was rather more sincere than his own, if less…intense. Certainly far less complicated. Jarvis Pennyworth had been a master of his craft, and easily able to be whatever his employers needed, and the Waynes needed to be liked as much as looked-after.
Alfred wasn't his father. He thought he might like the couple, anyway.
Thomas was several years younger than he, and seemed younger still, being only two years out of school while Alfred had been earning his own bread for sixteen. I'd known your father since I was still in high school, he told Alfred once, as if he felt he needed to justify being upset at the man's death in the face of Alfred's stoicism.
I'd barely spoken to him since I was in upper school, Alfred had not actually replied. Which I never even finished, he certainly didn't add.
'The family' to Jarvis Pennyworth had always meant his employers, never his wife or son. Alfred had thought he was long over being bitter.
Then the child had been born, with all the excitement attendant to any birth and all the extra dramatics that came with the advent of an only heir to a large fortune. At least one cousin hanging about was clearly hoping something would go wrong and give him a better chance at getting a large piece of the fortune, should something ill befall the Waynes senior. Alfred took an uncommon satisfaction in shutting doors in their faces whenever possible.
Having safely arrived, the baby was none of his affair, really, until it learned to escape its crib at the tender age of ten months, and then he seemed to be constantly tracking it down and returning it to its mother or nurse. When the little heir cut his first sharp little teeth, the first hand he managed to sink them into was Alfred's.
Miss Satchley, being a trained childcare professional who knew how to avoid such things, laughed uproariously at him.
He began to stop outside the nursery, every evening, when he patrolled the house looking for anything amiss before going to bed, and listen for the sound of small lungs breathing. Occasionally he and Thomas Wayne met each other there, long after sunset when the master of the house slunk in well past bedtime looking rueful at having missed his evening window for familial interaction for the second time in a week.
Usually they exchanged nods in silence, before Alfred walked on and Thomas lingered, listening to his baby's breath, or even went inside to watch him sleeping. (This was a risky proposition, as Master Bruce was a remarkably light sleeper, but he was still young enough to wake in the night quite often anyway, and if Thomas preferred to hush and cuddle his son back to sleep before going to bed himself, that was his own affair.)
"Alfred," Thomas said to him once, as he was walking away. He stopped, and turned. "Thank you. For taking care of us. You're here for my family when I should be."
"It's my job, Mister Wayne," Alfred pointed out.
And somehow, seven years after that, it still was. Here he still was. No longer awkward or uncertain as a butler, even in his mind, though it was nothing he had ever wanted as a child. He had thought that he'd leave when it came to ten years, the same span as he'd given his last career. Maybe look for something to do that didn't demand he pour out a hundred and ten percent of himself into every endeavor, if he could figure out how to live that way.
But now there would be no leaving; he had been thrust into at least ten more years of responsibility and he could not even think of abandoning this duty.
Bruce scarcely knew Doctor Thompkins, and she kept odd hours and could barely fry an egg. It was good to have her as backup, but she couldn't be expected to serve as primary caretaker. Miss Satchley's employment had been only for eight hours a day and ended when Bruce enrolled in pre-kindergarten. If Alfred disclaimed him, Master Bruce would be left in the hands of distant relatives whose primary concern would be finagling access to his money, or else the state.
There had been a hundred men who could take his place for England. In this place, there was not one.
Alfred Pennyworth was here to stay.
And so, he was obligated to acknowledge, was Jason Todd.
A/N: ..also reverse chronological order. :}
Alfred's life story is weird, okay, even condensing out as many bizarre subplots as possible, and got weirder in 1987 when he was retconned into having brought Bruce up.
This also made Alfred's canon-though-mostly-subtext daddy issues link directly to Bruce's issues, which link to the Robins' issues, so technically some of Tim Drake's neuroses can be blamed on Jarvis Pennyworth. Families, man.