The young master was still prone to fits of mourning and probably would be for some time, and last time Alfred had found him tucked away somewhere weeping he'd said something about not wanting to bother Jason.
Alfred had kept his silence about his opinion of anyone who complained about their recently bereaved friend and benefactor crying in front of them, and his efforts at soothing had seemed to help.
Once his ward had finished his cry that day and gone off to read a book, Alfred had gone and fetched a tray of snacks and a mug of cocoa. He found himself cooking more and more often lately—hearty, filling lunches and intricate pastries to entice Bruce into doing more than picking at his food.
The other child was helpful in that, at least; Alfred often found it obscurely irritating watching half a dozen carefully frosted cakes vanish in under a minute, but it did tend to encourage Master Bruce to keep up, at least to some extent.
When the Waynes had been alive, family meals had usually been in the smaller of their two dining rooms. Bruce refused to set foot there anymore, so the two boys ate most meals facing one another across one end of the formal dining table, which seated eighteen. The cook, who still came in to make dinners four times a week, disapproved, and as a result Bruce was avoiding her too, and only came into the kitchen when Alfred was alone there.
He put more and more effort into the food, as if the right combination of ingredients prepared in just the right way could possibly help.
He knew he could never replace Bruce's parents. But he had been serving as their occasional substitute for years already, and it was no trespass against the dead to so continue. They'd written him into their will as guardian, they must have wanted him to substitute as best he could.
He wished they'd told him.
He wished he knew why him. Thomas had had only disagreeable distant cousins, but the Kane family weren't so terrible, were they? Perhaps there were family skeletons of which he'd never been made aware.
Perhaps it had only ever been intended as a joke. But that seemed unlikely, didn't it? They must have known they might go down in the same plane or car crash together, even if they'd never expected to be murdered.
The sound was coming from under the piano, a gasping, broken sniffling that only occasionally included a voiced sound such as a whimper, always quickly stifled. He made his way across the carpet and sank into a crouch, setting one hand on the side of the piano for balance and bending sideways until he could lay eyes on the weeper.
It was not Master Bruce.
"Oh, hell." Jason Todd's swollen face blinked at him, morphing in moments from abject misery into a weary, aggravated sort of horror. "What are you, part cat?"
The child hitched himself backward, a little further out of reach, and then began to sidle left along the wainscoting, toward the nearest window, which stood open. The placement of a bulky loveseat to that side of the piano meant that Alfred would have some difficulty reaching the wall in a hurry if he stood, at least without performing an impressive vaulting maneuver.
Without resort to which maneuver, if the boy made a break for it and Alfred did not successfully lunge under the piano to grab him, he could be over the windowsill and on the trellis to the ground before he could possibly be caught.
Alfred realized with a strange twist in his stomach that, though there were only the three of them in the house and Bruce seemed to be trusted implicitly, the urchin had still chosen a defensible location with an emergency escape route to have his cry.
He repressed the unworthy impulse to simply let the boy go and thereby himself escape this uncomfortable interaction, sank down a little further onto his heels, kept both hands visible, and said, "Not to my knowledge, no. The Pennyworth family has been more generally suspected of bulldog tendencies over the years."
Jason frowned, still plainly itching to escape into the weak autumn sunshine but evidently not willing to leave his cover without an immediate threat to drive him. "What the fuck? Was that a joke?"
Alfred's lips thinned involuntarily at the vulgarity, and now that he was looking for it, he could see a paradoxical shift in the boy's tension at the sight—more wariness, but a relaxation at the same time, as the departure from the script that had been Alfred's moment of levity ended, and he again knew what to expect. Even if it was nothing good.
It shamed him, the feeling sharp and bitter on his tongue. Whatever his suspicions, this fear was real, and he was a cause of it.
"I never joke," he lied gravely. "May I ask what has brought you to such a pass under the piano?"
Rolled eyes. "It is my life's new ambition to be a professional piano tuner; I decided to give myself lessons."
"I'm sure we can afford an expert instructor for you," Alfred replied, amused.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm the Great Mooch, I get it." More eye rolling. "Whatever. I'll figure stuff out for myself, I'm not giving you anything else to hold over my head."
Alfred frowned.
A ridiculous idea struck him. "Do you expect to be asked to pay back the cost of your room and board here? This is not a hotel."
Bribes having proven largely unnecessary in the face of so much ready implied blackmail, the biggest expense of housing the boy had been, in fact, the purchase of a modest wardrobe; Todd had come with only one change of clothes and worn Bruce's things for the next few days, which had looked fairly ridiculous as he was three full inches taller.
The child rolled his eyes. "I'm not stupid. That's not legal. But we both know just because you can't bill me doesn't mean I'm not putting myself in the hole here. Bruce doesn't get it." And this wasn't a complaint, oddly. It was sort of fond, with a ghost of a smile that made the boy look almost an adult, not wanting to ruin a child's pleasant illusions.
Mister Todd's certainty that he understood exactly what Alfred thought of, and wanted from, everything in his vicinity was neither amusing nor truly offensive, somehow. Alfred arched an eyebrow. "And you are unhappily under the piano because you're concerned about this supposed debt?"
"I'm not scared of you." This was a lie. Oh dear. "And if I was, I wouldn't cry about it, Jesus Christ." This was not. How curious.
"Then what seems to be the problem?"
"Conceited much," Todd snorted. "Not everything's about you." Alfred waited. "Bruce isn't doing so good," the boy said after several seconds, fidgeting one knee back and forth and look anywhere but at Alfred's face. "He's—I mean, it's too soon to be over it, but…" He shrugged. "I can't exactly 'enjoy this while it lasts' when he's so messed up, ya know."
"I'm sure he would be very regretful to have ruined your enjoyment," Alfred said stiffly.
"Oh, fuck you." The insult was desultory, lacking in energy, and the boy's head hung over his knees, shoulders up defensively. "Point is, I can't stop thinking about it. Because he can't stop thinking about it. We distract each other for a while, then remind each other again, and I just—"
"You—" said Alfred, and he sounded even more baffled than he was.
Jason Todd's head snapped up. His teeth were bared and his eyes glinted. "I killed someone! Maybe you don't think that's a big deal, or think someone like me shouldn't care, but I—I—I…" the shouting trailed off.
"I killed a person," the boy reiterated, desolate. "I knew I could and I knew I had to and I did. I didn't freeze up, or come up with a better idea. I just…. Maybe that does make me the kind of person who shouldn't care, but I fucking do." He jerked his chin, and his glare re-sharpened on Alfred. "And if you tell Bruce I'm all broken up about this I'll…I'll kick you in the shins and break all that fancy china. He doesn't need to know."
Alfred's eyebrows had arched their way all the way up his forehead of their own volition. Jason Todd saw something in his polite astonishment that made him bridle, almost spitting out his next words. "He's got his parents to be broken up about already, and I did it for him. He doesn't need to feel like this. He doesn't need to think I wish I didn't!"
The boy buried his face in the crook of his elbow for a second, then jerked it free again, glowering through tears. He didn't dare blind himself to Alfred for more than a few moments. Alfred wondered what the child thought he would do.
"I'm not sorry," he rushed on, "I won't be sorry, I can't be sorry, because I saved him, and that has to be a good enough reason, okay? I don't care if that makes me evil, it's not his fault!"
Good Lord.
Alfred was man enough to acknowledge when he had been wrong.
And…he felt almost that he saw himself, shards of who he had been, in those furious tear-stained eyes, as much as that was also presumption. He had never known the desperation this child must have lived in. Never had he been alone in the universe, without any recourse—if he had failed as an actor as a youth, and swallowed his pride enough to admit it, his father would always have taken him back, though at the cost of endless superiority and lecturing and probably a menial job, followed by a return to ignoring him in favor of the Family.
Even in his most desperately derailed field assignments, later on, he had had the assurance that if he could survive and escape, there would be somewhere to return to, to be patched up and debriefed and allowed to go to bed in a secure building, and paid what was really not enough for all his trouble.
When he had first killed a man, it had been with three years' training and mental preparation, and the certain knowledge of his duty.
He had hated his country, a little, by the end, for the blood she had asked of him. Perhaps that was one reason he had been so willing never to go home. But England had no heart to feel guilt for the crimes done in her name.
And unlike Master Bruce, she had asked it of him.
"I understand," he said quietly. Fully aware that he would not be believed.
"Sure you do. I told him he should thank me," Jason spat. "He was upset I didn't save his mom and dad too and I said—and he did. He said thank you. For what I did. So I'm not letting him think I'm sorry. He's alive."
"That is terribly important."
From the snorting sound Jason made, it seemed he took that acknowledgement for sarcasm, and his hands curled tighter into fists. He turned his face away harder than ever, but didn't resume trying to leave.
Stiffly, Alfred sank further down onto his heels, so as to be able to see under the piano without continuing to hold his head at such an awkward angle. "…you do know," he ventured, "that you don't have to stay here, if you hate it so much."
It would be easy, even now, to get the guardianship revoked—Bruce would forgive it, if it was at Jason's request, and the particular agent of Child Services assigned to Jason was not one of those implicated by his blackmail and would probably take it into consideration, if Jason told her to her face he would rather be placed elsewhere.
The lad showed his teeth. It wasn't exactly a grin. His eyes caught the light slanting from the bay window into the space under the piano, a little too wide and too bright. "Sure, like I'm going to leave Bruce alone with you. For all I know, you'll bump him off for the money first chance you get."
For the second time in as many minutes, Alfred found himself speechless. He had been aware of a reciprocity of distrust and dislike, but it had somehow not occurred to him that his tentative ward might regard him with even more suspicion than he had doled out himself.
But of course, no child living on the streets could have been given much reason to trust adults in general. And Alfred had given him only slight reason to trust him, in particular.
"From a purely mercenary angle," he said mildly, when he had found his voice again, "I can assure you that all I would get in the event of Master Bruce's untimely demise would be a bequest sufficient to support me in a modest retirement, and responsibility for overseeing the disposal of the estate in conjunction with numerous solicitors. I would be much better served to embezzle stealthily over a long period, in my position as his legal guardian."
The boy swelled up in a combination of indignation and a breath deep enough to blow out in a profundity of scorn. "Right," he followed this disgusted noise with, "and there's nothing short of murder that you could possibly do to hurt him."
"And speaking from angles other than the purely mercenary," Alfred said, keeping his tone from becoming short with some care, "I have known Master Bruce since his infancy, and care for him very much."
"Yeah right. Well, you sure don't act like it." Alfred frowned, and the boy's spine curled and limbs tensed in subtle defensiveness, but he kept his chin up. "Besides glaring at me like a girl that got dumped the week before prom, you just go in and out with food and clothes and scheduling updates, like some kind of pissy robot, and sure it's swell that he's spoiled practically rotten but like hell am I leaving my friend alone with that."
Anger flared in Alfred's chest. No, he was certainly not the most suitable of parental figures, even if Master Bruce had been willing to have another father in Doctor Wayne's place, which of course he was not.
But he was certainly not neglectful. Master Bruce had always come to him with small injuries and discoveries and questions and needs as often as to either of his parents, and knew very well that Alfred was always available to him.
Young Mr. Todd was drawing false conclusions about the situation as it would be in his absence, based on data tainted by the effects of his presence, which was understandable, but wrong. They would have been fine.
…but on the other hand, the boys spent most of their time together, lately. Which meant that outside the times he'd found him crying, or Bruce had come into the kitchen to get snacks, which he always did alone, the Alfred that Jason Todd had seen had been, for the most part, the same one Bruce Wayne had experienced. He had not considered this might have an effect—had made sure to coax the boy into eating with his favorite foods, provided handkerchiefs and sundry necessaries, offered entertainments and tidied up abandoned toys, and had given his full complement of emotional support on the few occasions he had been alone with the young master of the house, and thus been the one looked to for it.
He had assumed (perhaps mistakenly) the fact that Bruce had not sought him out for such comfort since Todd's arrival was due to some combination of the angry shell of grief the boy seemed largely to live inside at present, and the fact that his young rescuer was always at hand to provide that kind of support, rendering Alfred unnecessary in that sphere.
Was it possible, Alfred was forced to ask himself in all seriousness, that his judgment had in fact been influenced by jealousy at having his role as his ward's foremost confidante usurped by an outsider?
Possible, he concluded. He probably would have not felt it enough to notice much effect, had he not had so much reason to distrust the boy already, but he had seen it as his place to give comfort, prepared himself for the role as soon as he heard the tragic news, and pushed himself to his limits of demonstrative affection in the hours and days after the tragedy.
And becoming quite abruptly unable to fulfill that duty because it was already being done, and that by someone whose skills and motives he already considered suspect…
Alfred knew himself to be a perfectionist about even the most minor of tasks. Having something this vital taken from his control in a way that might threaten his charge…it was no wonder he had resented it.
But one of them was going to have to be the adult here, and if it were not him generations of Pennyworths would roll clean out of their graves.
"I apologize," he said. It was met with a look of pure suspicion; he accepted this. His own paranoia had not been unfounded but it had been inaccurate; it was his responsibility now to prove the reverse case. "I judged you only by your actions, and not by their motives."
The child stared.
"Is that…another joke?"
Alfred sighed, sank down, and stretched his legs out so he was sitting on the carpet, one shoulder against a piano leg. Now it would require far more impressive acrobatics to capture the boy before he could make it over the windowsill. He would simply have to avoid giving him cause.
"No," he stated. "It's no joke. I owe you that apology. I've been uncomfortable with the presence of a child capable of killing. But you killed that man for him, at great cost to yourself, and that…was not a thing I should criticize you for. I would do the same myself."
"You'd—" the sentence strangled itself in its bassinet and left the boy goggling.
"To protect Master Bruce. I've known him all his life," Alfred repeated again—hoping that this could convey to a nine year old child some fraction of what it meant to an adult; the way Alfred was not Bruce's parent, was nothing to him except, now, suddenly, legal guardian, and yet to him Bruce was nearly as precious as if he had been his own son.
Whether Jason Todd grasped any amount of that meaning was unclear, as he ducked his head sharply, breaking that shocked stare. "But what if I wasn't," he said, strangled. "I can't stop thinking that. What if I didn't save him. What if the man was about to leave. What if I didn't have to, and I did anyway, that makes me a murderer, right? What if…"
"You can't let yourself get caught in those questions," Alfred tells him. He knows them, remembers what it was like—wonders whether a child's incomplete grasp of mortality provides anything like the shelter that a young fool's belief in the greater good once offered. "You have to live in the world as it is. Listen to me. Did you think, when you acted, that Master Bruce's life was in danger?"
"Well, yeah!"
"And did you have good reason to believe it?"
"He'd just killed two people and he was pointing the gun at the kid and yelling and Bruce wasn't doing what he said!"
"Yes, then." Alfred nodded. "You made the best judgment you could in the moment."
It was still a little horrifying that a nine-year-old freshly wakened by gunshots had been able to take in the scene and decide that the only sure way to end it without unacceptable risk to himself or the other child was with a single death-stroke to the neck from behind, but he hadn't been wrong. It was impossible to say for certain that he'd been right, but he certainly had not been wrong. "Had you perhaps thought through that scenario before?"
Jason Todd shrugged. "I thought a lot of times, when a big guy was going after a lady or a kid or something, if I really have to, I've got my knife, he hasn't seen me, I can stop him. I ran it through in my head. How I could do it. If he had a knife too. If he had a gun. Mostly it never got that bad, or someone else did something first, or something. Or…I just chickened out, maybe."
He seemed almost as disgusted with himself for this idea as he had shattered by the possibility that he had taken a life unneeded. It seemed he truly had been desperate for a confidant, because although he had made his distrust of Alfred clear the words kept flowing out of him in a flood. "I used to wonder if I was just lying to myself as an excuse not to get involved. This was the first time I knew he was ready to kill, you know? Because they were right there. I mean."
Alfred nodded again. He did know. "I think you made the right decision," he said. "But I also think it's a very good sign that it worries you, that you might not have done."
He could try to soothe the child's self-hatred with more assurances, estimations that the man whose corpse had been identified as Joseph Chill had certainly deserved it, and been no loss to the world besides. But that was probably not what a responsible adult did for a little boy, even if it had been the sort of thing his mentor in the Service had said, and he'd been grateful for it at the time.
"The best thing you can do about it now," he said instead, "is resolve to think very carefully if it ever comes up again."
"Comes up again?" Jason Todd stared at him, offended. "You think I'm gonna just run through life finding people to kill?"
"You told me you had been in situations that made you consider the measure before," Alfred said calmly. "Even as safe as I will of course strive to make the rest of your time growing up, it may happen again. And one thing I learned in my term of service is that lethal force can be a very…habit-forming method of problem-solving, if one does not watch oneself with great care."
The half-feral child squinted at him from his inadequate den. "Is that why you've been so weird about me? You thought I might turn into a murder junkie?"
"Intentional homicide is rare at your age," Alfred said, having no way to soften this fact and thus not trying. "I had no way to be certain you weren't already." Hadn't really thought so, or he'd never have tolerated him. But as unjust as he had been, he still thought he could be excused his suspicion.
The boy pulled a face. "But you think you know now," he said, just to be certain.
"I think so, yes. It was my mistake," Alfred repeated.
"Okay, Battle-Butler-Bot," Jason shrugged, still deeply uncomfortable and clearly regretting his honesty. "I guess you're the murder expert here."
"I'm afraid so," Alfred agreed.
Technically, neither of them was a murderer. Each of their kills was known to some face of the law and judged justified, in the defense of something worth more than the dead.
But that could be cold comfort, when it was your hands that bore the blood.
"I think you will be quite able," Alfred said, "to leave it behind."
He had, after all. Wayne Manor was the kind of place that made it easy—to leave your past at the door, to wrap the security of the present around yourself for as long as it took to be ready to face the future.
This wasn't the future he'd intended. But…he thought he was beginning to be certain it wasn't one he'd regret.
"Yeah?" The small, tear-smudged face was intent, probing Alfred for something though he did not know what. Ingrained distrust and habits of survival clearly tugging at a child whose natural impulses were to honesty and generosity, if only he could afford them.
It helped to think of Jason's life up to this point as being another face of the same world he had lived in once, all double dealing and sudden violence, as often hidden as overt, and an impossibility of trust because everyone who could possibly understand you was a fellow professional liar. He had found a certain peace here, over the past eight years, caring for strangers as they became something like family to him, even as he'd worried that he was becoming his father in the process.
Even now, shrouded in grief and echoing with emptiness, the Wayne home was a—safe place, a good one. A haven from the darkness of the world they'd both known.
Or at least, he liked to believe he could keep it so. Carefully, Alfred extended his right hand under the edge of the piano.
"Jason Peter Todd," he said, with all due formality, "I would like to make you an offer of alliance."