The other ending where Bruce lives, but it's equally emotional, so I struggled just as immensely with this. Better ending, ends on a hopeful note, but shorter than the past two chapters. Review when you're done, but please no flaming.
Chapter Three
Survival
"Trying to take the easy way out?"
"Shut...up," he ground out. Goddamn it, he just woke up, and now he heard this. From none other than -
"Nah ah, you don't get to pull that shit, old man," Jason snapped, sitting in the empty chair to his right, where the machines and IV were. "You have any idea what we had to tell Sierra while she cried and wanted to know how you were? We had to tell her you were just 'SICK'! Seriously, you tried to kill yourself with her and all of us in the house!"
Goddamn it, Jason! "Either you shut down your voice or I'll call the nurse and get you out of here," Bruce finally growled, reaching for the call button above his head to prove the point, because he wanted to see no one. If he was going to be lectured, restrictions being tightened, then he would drop a "screw you" to all his blasted kids - and this so-acquaintance right here. As far as he'd been concerned, Jason wasn't his kid anymore, not even if his heart wanted it.
Sierra was the new light in his life now, and all of them were keeping them at arm's length.
Jason continued to mock him. "You know you'll be put into evaluation after this, right? That also means you won't get to see Sierra, except the rest of us -"
Bruce had pressed the button anyway, tired to his bones and fearful in his heart for his granddaughter. Moments later and while Jason was still ranting furiously - he tuned it all out, exhausted to his bones - the nurse came in and snapped at him to shut it and get out. That was crudely putting it, but it happened. With a livid huff, Jason stood up to stalk out, not before with some parting words. "He's a coward, you know? He knew the rules, he was never a good father and was just doing this for attention so everyone could feel bad about him all over again. Bad enough, too, that I had to find my mom dead in our home. I know the truth, and we won't let this venom touch my daughter."
This left him with the nurse, a no-nonsense late fifties-aged woman with graying brown hair and married based on the ring on her finger. It made him wonder if she had children of her own, but he was too afraid to ask. He swallowed and stayed silent until she spoke first.
"You know, Mr. Wayne, while it's not my place, I'm not afraid to tell you like it is: you got what came to you when your kids took control of their lives. I'm a mother. I know damned well what I'm talking about when I say they eventually grow up and start thinking for themselves whether we like it or not -"
"Not the same thing," Bruce snapped, but she wasn't done.
"Is it? I remember learning everything that came out ten years ago," Grace said coolly as she began to work on the machinery and the IV, as well as the clipboard with everything to help. He was NOT to eat or drink anything because they were still working to flush the rest out of his body. "I'm not gonna lie: I'm still very disgusted because I myself am a mother and a grandmother."
Bruce closed his eyes, so tired he just wanted to sleep and never wake up. He failed to get out of this world, or at least be in a coma until the machines were turned off. "I've done nothing but try, and try, and TRY," he gritted out. "They keep me a prisoner in my own home! After ten years, I was at the end of my rope. The only good thing I really had was Sierra, Jason's daughter. And I felt reborn as soon as she came into this world." His eyes burned with tears he finally broke to let fall. "I love her...more than the boys now. But Dick threatening to have me put away forced my hand on my decision. I've lost my will to live."
If that put him in psychiatric lockdown, to hell with all of them.
"Oh, dear God, Mr. Wayne..."
~o~
"Of all the stupidest, Godforsaken shit - of all things you said, Jason Peter Todd!" Kristine hurled at him when they were all back at the manor, Jonathan and Pamela taking Sierra with them and leaving the rest of them to deal with the dramatics.
And that wasn't the worst: she slapped her husband, she threw spoons at him - because she would NOT kill him accidentally with forks, and knives were a hundred percent out of the question - and didn't care about the others around, but there was Damian to rush and physically restrain her himself, shouting at her to calm herself, followed by Dick shouting at her that taking it out on everyone wasn't the answer, as well as Barbara wheeling to be next to Jason, facing the scene.
"You're all blaming ME for something HE did?! What about you, Dickhead? You were the one who told him he deserved to go into an old folk's home because he's all but useless and broke the rule -"
"No one's blaming you or her, but Sierra went to him!" Dick shouted back. "She didn't tell any of us; she lied! I think he told her -" He paused, rubbing his eyes and choking for a second. "- to leave before we found the footage. I just lost it for both of us and...now the words can't be taken back!"
"Half of me wished he'd live so that I could pierce him below the heart again," Damian growled. "Taking your life is the coward's way out. I agree with Todd on that."
Now was Barbara's turn to get in. "We're getting nowhere with blaming..."
All voices mingled in the air to the point you couldn't make out everyone's sentences fully -
- until the commotion was interrupted by a certain angry butler who slammed both fists on the surface of the great dining room table. No one had an appetite for dinner even though the heavenly meat aroma was created to console the distress.
"ENOUGH!"
Alfred's wrath had been provoked, and all were alert and suddenly grouped together as if they were all kids again. Damn it, Jason swore in his mind. We've done it now.
"All of you, sit!" Alfred barked, taking charge immediately, and everyone hurried to their places. Kristine plopped down in the center of the sofa, Dick to her right and Damian to her left, the former taking a hand into hers, holding it for comfort and knowing she and her husband would try to kill each other - no, Jason would never do that to the mother of his child - while Damian crossed a leg over the other and leaned back like the prince he was, scowling intensely. Jason forced himself down on the loveseat, Barbara keeping her distance in her wheelchair in the opened space between the left end of the sofa and the livid old butler who folded his arms across his chest.
"Now, listen, all of you: all of us are taking responsibility, and no one is going to blame Master Bruce. Yes, I am still disappointed in him and myself, but I'm equally disappointed at the words that drove him to do this." He narrowed his eyes at an ashamed Dick who looked down at the marble floor. "And you, Master Jason, should have controlled yourself and waited until he was home and we discussed the future as we always have. Now, it seems, we all have no choice but to put him under psychiatric evaluation rather than here at the manor even though we can bear it. But we all have limits, and the time's come.
"He hasn't ever been well despite everything we've done for him, as well as to him. He has all of you, but it's clear it's a burden on everyone - him, most of all. He tried to take his own life as one means of control, to go out on his terms when the only reason for living was threatened to be taken from him." Sierra. "He would rather be dead than spend the rest of his life in an elder home. Everything has changed for the worst instead of the better. All hung by a fragile thread that has finally snapped. I can see it in his eyes he immensely regrets causing so much pain, but we've never given him an inch, only keeping him entrapped at arm's length." Alfred then paused shakily, taking a deep breath before admitting the damning fact.
"We need to swallow our pride and allow him more proximity with Miss Sierra after we've dealt with the mess we are in at the moment."
~o~
Jason was having more panic attacks than she was, and even their daughter could see it despite her anger at all of them.
"Babe, we - we are the monsters this time! I still don't trust him, because what if he poisons her ear when we're not around?" he gasped, tugging a little at his hair and threatening to pull it out at the roots, leaving bloody drops all over their bases. That was an image Kristine didn't need to see, but the sight was something they both didn't need.
She agreed with him, but what was done was done. They were going to listen to Alfred's suggestion, the wisest of all of them. "Yeah, you're right," she said, acting and reaching to take both of his hands off his head so he didn't rip his scalp apart. "Jason Peter Todd, look at me." When she used his full name, she. Meant. Business.
"Jason," Kristine repeated once she had his full attention, "Bruce has no choice but to go into psychiatric observation. He knows it whether he admits it or not..." She stopped, remembering when that nurse came out along with the doctor and they both told everyone Bruce had lost the will to live because he feared he would no longer see Sierra.
He went far to admit he loved her more than the rest of them now. The doc added he'd seen this before and said he knew cases where grandparents, depending on the scenario, loved the grandkids more. Reasons varied in that the grandchild was their second chance to get it right after failing with their own child, or perhaps using that innocent little one to get back at the parent. Either those two or the third: reconciliation after the grandchild came into the picture.
Little good we ever did for each other. And we imprisoned him in the worst way possible. We stopped him when he became a monster, but now WE are in his place.
~o~
The agreement came to this, albeit from a reluctant Diana Prince.
"Okay, then as much as I hate this, we do this for Sierra. We have no choice, just as we have no choice but to have him under observation for the time being." Her eyes then hardened on every single one of them, especially those who were just witnesses and stood by.
"It was equally disgraceful to outright call him a coward for trying to escape his prison. We did it for his own good, for all of us, and for the little one, but look where we are now." And she said it no differently than Alfred had.
Bruce was getting help whether he liked it or not, and when he did tell them his agreement, he said he did it for Sierra. Sierra, not any of them, though the last part was unspoken. There were strained hearts everywhere, but what Bruce said did little to soften it:
"Think whatever you all wish of me, but she's everything to me and the only reason I'm tolerating what you throw at me. I've been able to survive until you threatened to keep her away permanently."
Didn't that hurt all of them? And it would take a long time for what would be the semblance of a normal family.
Also, in time, everyone would just go on with their lives and rely on each other and not Bruce, while also allowing him to have a relationship with Sierra; at the same time, her parents, aunts, uncles, and her grandfather Jonathan would learn to clean the poison they'd sewn themselves after taking down the man who had gone too far.
