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Title: Vigil
Characters: Alfred, young Bruce
Rating: PG, mostly.
Summary: just a bit of random introspection. Alfred watches over a sleeping child.
Disclaimer: I keep forgetting these things, but the boys belong to DC.
Word count: 464
Alfred sat in the darkness at the foot of Master Bruce's bed, keeping his vigil over the small figure curled into it's little ball in the center of the blankets. He was closer than the boy liked, when he was awake, and it had become Alfred's secret and guilty comfort to sit there and watch over him once Morpheus had stolen the wary sorrow from waking eyes. To be there to sooth when the nightmares came, and pretend with guilty relief to have run from his room instead of simply reaching out across the span of quilt to touch a shaking shoulder. To see when easy dreams at last loosened the clenching of small hands.
They were moments he treasured, holding them close to a weary heart and daring to allow himself a little hope, that his stern, proud child might one day remember what comfort it was to be held in waking arms. A man may wait a long, long time to see such a hope realised. And he feared it would be a long wait indeed, measured against the knowing in grief-striken eyes.
He feared that, because he couldn't forget those other moments. The chill determination of an adult in the face of a child at his parents' funeral. The time Bruce had broken his wrist falling from a tree, and had not cried as he once would have, only stared in bright-eyed, glassy determination at the injury as he staggered home to show Alfred.
And, perhaps most wounding of all, the time Alfred had knelt before him to hug him. The time Bruce reached up to gently touch his face, to trace with young fingers the lines that were growing at the corners of Alfred's eyes from earlier laughter. The time that boy's eyes had shone dullly with the knowledge of all the things Alfred wished need never be said, and that he feared Bruce would never now forget. That nothing is forever. And that even the happiest of things have their cost.
Alfred sat in the darkness, watching with weary love over his charge, and wished that he knew how to prove to him that happiness is worth whatever cost it demands. But perhaps that was not the role he was to play in this young man's life. Perhaps it was his duty merely to preserve him until someone came along who could prove to Bruce what happiness meant. It was a duty he embraced with a determination to rival that of his young charge, and one he stood for with infinitely greater joy than Bruce held for the goal he had set himself. Because the child had chosen a dream that could never be fulfilled. Alfred had chosen one that allowed for hope.
To the heart, that made all the difference.
