Abril: Shorter chapter than usual because it was getting too big and I was trying to touch on too many topics at once so I had to cut it.

Bruce Wayne was a father, this was evident to everyone who got to know him. Even to pesky, glasses-wearing, reporters who went to investigate him because they thought he was doing something to his children. And just like he was a father he was also an addict of many vices, this too, was well known, not only to those who got to know him. He was a man who was constantly tired day in and day out, but never showed signs of stopping. And sometimes things got bad, everybody knew that. It was their normal.

"House rules," Dick made sure to tell them all when he got old enough and thought his responsibility levels were up to par. "If it's too much you can always come live with me for as long as you need, okay? And I'm always, always one phone call away for whatever, be it small or big."

After taking Jason away and bringing him back, he thought it was a nice compromise. His apartment could be a safe haven for the kids when life at the manor, or more specifically life with Bruce, felt like an oppressive rock on their chest.

This he told them all. To Tim and Jason, and eventually, Cass when she came around, although she just smiled at him, as if humored by the mere suggestion. Like it was something silly.

Very rarely did Dick have to actually take one of the kids away. It was more a spur of the moment, an 'I just had a fight with Bruce,' kind of thing. But he'd said his doors were always open, so they were.

They all knew sometimes things got bad in the house with Bruce's lifestyle. He got into fights, would come home with a broken bone or some internal damage. It wasn't very often no, but it wasn't precisely unexpected.

Sometimes though… Sometimes things got really bad.

"Bruce is wrong," Cassandra said one day to Jason.

It was Sunday and the boy was studying at the big desk in the library for an exam he had the next day. He looked up at the girl, still new to the family. She'd only been with them a couple of months.

"What do you mean?" he asked, knowing she struggled to voice ideas correctly.

"Bed," she said, frowning.

"Oh, don't worry Cassandra, it's normal," Jason said kindly, even though she already knew that Bruce tended to sleep in most days. "It's still very early for him, it'll take him a couple hours to wake up properly," he said looking down at his watch. Bruce had woken up early to have breakfast with them as per usual and gone right back to bed. It was only 11:30 now.

"But…" she frowned. "He is wrong."

"Give him a bit more, don't worry," Jason tried to reassure her, feeling very much like he was turning into Dick. "Come here, I'll teach you some words." He gestured to the table.

Cassandra frowned, she only liked learning 'talk things' as she called them, with Bruce. Which shortened the man's already short time by a great deal. Still, Cassandra sat down for a while, she quite liked Jason, and the boy knew a lot of things. Bookish smart, Dick had said once to her, not to be confused with Tim smart, which was a clever sort of smart. The girl didn't really understand the difference, so she'd just looked straight at Dick until the older boy lost the smile.

She thought Dick was okay, didn't dislike him at any rate, but Cassandra did think he tried too hard to be liked.

"This is a fun one, here, I'll write it for you, multicolor." Jason said in a clear voice, doing as Bruce did when he taught her. "It means, more than one color. See my shirt? It's blue and white, it has multiple colors, so, multicolor."

The girl nodded. "Multicolor," she said quietly under her breath and thought of birds and sunsets and Bruce's deep blue eyes staring at her, stark against his pale skin, smile lines at the corner of them.

But soon enough Cassandra would learn a very important word.

It took a while for Jason to notice, but Cassandra had been right. There was something very wrong with Bruce.

It seemed strange, despite what he'd told the girl, that Bruce still hadn't made an effort to get up to spend time with them. He tried hard on the weekends to get up earlier than usual so they could have 'family time.'

Jason hadn't gone out, which meant that Bruce would usually peek in to wherever he was to try and coax him into a marathon or a board game. Seventeen and broody as all teens were at that age, it took quite a bit of coaxing. Cassandra, who always looked at Bruce like he'd hung the stars in the sky, would usually appear behind the man with a broad smile which meant trouble for Jason. It was harder to tell her no, especially when she just expected him to join and grabbed him by the arm to drag him to whatever activity it was. She could be very persistent.

But Bruce hadn't made any appearances since breakfast.

"I have the rest of the week to catch up on sleep," he always said when the kids caught his dropping eyes and tried to push him back into his room. But Bruce didn't get up. Lunch came and went and he didn't come down to eat. Which wasn't precisely abnormal, but it was the weekend. That was like two red flags combined.

Then night came. And Bruce didn't get up to go out.

That was as big a red flag as they came.

"Dad?" Jason asked, peeking into his room. It was dark inside.

A few minutes later, somewhere in Bludhaven, Dick Grayson was picking up his mobile phone. He answered with a smile when he saw the name on the screen.

"Hey Jason-"

"Dick."

The elder quieted immediately, his brother's voice was strange.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"It's Bruce," Jason's breath hitched.

Dick raced to the manor as fast his bike could go.

Sometimes things were really bad. But not because of any particular drug or hurt Bruce had acquired during the night. Not because he'd neglected to tell anyone of his injuries until it was too late. No, nothing like that.

Sometimes, it was just that Bruce couldn't get out of bed for anything in the world.

"Hey," Dick said softly, opening and closing the heavy door behind him.

No one answered as he approached. The lump in the bed raised slightly up and down with calm breathing. Dick took his shoes off and climbed onto the big bed to go lay down on top of the covers, facing his father.

Bruce Wayne was crying. Unstoppable party animal, thrill-seeker, and ruthless businessman Bruce Wayne was crying.

His eyes were hollow though.

Dick sighed carefully. Controlling his own emotions in the matter. He sneaked his hand toward his father and he brushed his hair for a long while. Eventually, Bruce moved to grasp Dick's hand in his own trembling one, bringing it down close to his chest.

"I'm…" he gasped for breath. "I'm sorry. I'm not your responsibility," he said, meaning, 'you don't have to do this.'

And Lord did Dick know he didn't but this was still his dad.

"Do you want me to call Leslie?" His father didn't have a therapist as such, but he did have Leslie.

Bruce had something against therapists. He'd had a bad experience as a kid. Alfred said when Bruce was out of earshot, that it had been one of those Gotham crazies. And it hadn't been pretty.

So there was Lesley when he needed her. She was the only doctor Bruce trusted with his health. Leslie did what she could, when she couldn't she fought with Bruce tooth and nail so he would see someone more qualified, someone she could vouch for.

Bruce nodded after a while. 'Oh, so it was that bad,' Dick thought grimly.

Bruce struggled for a moment to get his breathing under control. He still grasped Dick's hand tight between his own.

"Can-" he shuddered, breathing in harshly. "Can I ask you to stay?" His teary gaze finally shifted towards his eldest son's eyes. "Just for a while," he added meekly.

Dick did not sigh out loud.

"Of course Dad," he said.

And for a long while in the dark, they grasped hands and breathed together. Eventually, Bruce fell back asleep. Dick pulled his hand out from his grip and scooted closer. He would have to talk to the others later, but this was nothing new. Nothing he or Jason hadn't dealt with before. Or even Tim on some occasions. For now, he would wrap his arms around his father's big shoulders and rest his head on Bruce's hair.

He wished so hard his dad would just be okay. Or that he'd find the help he needed. But this was Bruce. And Dick had fought this losing battle for as long as he'd lived under this roof. He already knew there was no point.

"Spell d-y-s-a-n-i-a. Dysania. You got that?" Tim asked Cassandra as the girl wrote in her clunky lettering. "Can you repeat that?" he asked after she nodded. "Dysania."

"Dysania," she repeated. "Means, stay bed?"

"It means being unable to get out of bed, yes."

Cass frowned.

Tim and the slightly older girl had clicked together almost instantly. There wasn't much that connected them, but they found something in the other that appealed to them. So at once, Tim understood what Cassandra didn't get.

"If I put a bird inside a cage, the bird is unable to get out, yes?" he asked to clarify. "Unable, it can't. Able means that you can do something, unable means that you can't."

The girl nodded.

"Dysania, unable to get out of bed," Tim repeated once more so it would stick. The others kept telling him he was going to confuse Cass if he kept trying to teach her such complicated words without covering the basics first.

"Is Bruce in cage?" she asked slowly.

Tim wanted to say yes. Depression was like that sometimes. But there were a lot of things he'd have to teach Cass if he wanted to answer that.

"Sometimes," he said anyway.

Cass nodded. Tim thought she understood anyway.

It was not new, and the boys knew what came next after days like this snuck up on Bruce. At the first sign of getting better, Bruce would wake up bright and early, a radiant smile on his face, less tired than normal from the recovered hours of sleep. He went to the kitchen and helped Alfred with breakfast however he could. He drove the kids to school and spent extra time with them by day. He liked to pretend as if nothing had happened the previous nights and there was nothing to worry about.

Overcompensating and screaming without words 'See, I'm fine! there's nothing wrong with me! You don't have to worry!'

Jason was guilty to admit he enjoyed the days after. He did, at least a little, if he pretended nothing had happened as well.

"B, you burned my toast again," he said with a grin, the well worn joke of Bruce being a menace in the kitchen an easy and familiar mark. The toast was in fact, not burned at all.

His dad grinned right back at him.

"Sorry," Bruce said, kissing the crown of his head.

Jason didn't even have the heart to move away in pretend disgust. He didn't want to.

That first morning when Cass saw him after being bedridden for days, her eyes shimmered with emotion.

"Bruce!" she shouted in her quiet voice and jumped, as if she'd been doing gymnastics like Dick her whole life, right onto Bruce's back.

"Wow, Cassandra, careful!" Bruce said. He reacted fast, almost reading the girl's motions before she had made them, letting the plate he'd been holding on the table and quickly securing his hands under her so she wouldn't fall off his back.

"No cage?" She asked, nuzzling into his neck.

Bruce seemed confused, he didn't often not understand Cass, but he had no idea what this was about

"What do you mean Cassie?" he asked, but the girl was content enough to keep on hugging him.

Tim very pointedly did not look up from his plate.

All in all it was a very good morning, even if they had to pretend some things had never been. Maybe… maybe one day they could talk about them, one day when it did not feel as if the world would crumble around them if they acknowledged the cliff's edge Bruce Wayne lived on.

Very, very many women, had come to the press or courthouse with claims of Bruce having impregnated them. Outrages for compensation and tears down their eyes. Other powerful men would tear down such claims along with these women with strong law teams and angry denials to the claims. Which sometimes worked for them and others did not.

But Bruce didn't like doing that.

Each and every time something as such happened to him he would try to handle the situation as quietly as possible, though it seldom worked with the paparazzi following his every move. To each woman he would offer a paternity test and for each test to have been accepted a negative result would always come back.

He always looked sad when the women seemed to have acted out of desperation rather than getting their 5 seconds of fame. When it wasn't vultures after his money or with a taste for drama.

And just as quietly as he tried to handle the tests, Bruce would handle the cost of the pregnancy and the child-rearing of the desperate women.

"Why do you do that, that's exactly what they want!" Jason had told him once angrily. Still young and mighty tired of listening to his classmates talk shit about his dad.

"I know Jay, but… nobody deserves to be that desperate," Bruce had answered. Which had hit Jason in a small part of himself which he was surprised he was ever able to forget. Desperation. He hadn't felt it in a long while. Sometimes he wondered how forgetting such a visceral part of his life was even possible.

"Eventually one of them will turn out with a child of yours, you know," Alfred kept telling him. Pointedly trying to not look bitter about it and Bruce's lifestyle.

Alfred had been right.