As much as he tried to suppress it there was a distinct tension and a clear bristling in the line of Stephen’s body as Bruce started to talk about his father, the kind of man he was and the kind of things he had put Bruce through. Stephen’s jaw was taut as he started to shake his head without even meaning to, glancing down at the way Bruce’s hand fidgeted against his knee and somehow managing to temper his own reaction, that intense sense of protectiveness that seemed to come out of nowhere, for Bruce’s sake. Instead, his hand moved to bridge some of the distance between them again – not that either of them had made any moves to be further apart – and paused first to give Bruce’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze before moving almost tentatively to settle in a curve at the nape of Bruce’s neck, light enough that Bruce could shift away if the touch was unwelcome. “I can’t even imagine what that must have been like,” he admitted softly and with a sympathetic tilt of his head, somewhat struggling to put into words what he wanted to get across, as clumsy as he ever was in consoling. “The kinds of thoughts that ran through my head after my brother died… those were hard enough for me to manage without someone else’s hand on the knife I was twisting in my own chest. Your father should have been someone who supported you. The things that he did to you, to your mother – they were unforgivable.”
Stephen’s voice held some of that selfsame quiet, fiery rage that Bruce had shown him a glimpse of earlier, and it took Stephen a moment to come out of it, his free hand moving to cover Bruce’s where it rested at his knee. He took a careful breath before continuing, his words candid as they ever were but edged in that softness he held only for Bruce. “Bruce, I’m not going to lie to you. You’re entirely too clever for that and I’m… entirely too bad at it,” Stephen pointed out in a moment of crystal clear self-awareness, and the faint smile to match. “The things you say are going to change how I think about you. Just like I’m sure that, even if you might deny it, the things I’ve said have changed how you think about me. For better or worse. What’s important is that…” He hesitated only briefly, and only out of a sense of wanting to make sure he chose his words carefully. “What’s important is that nothing that you say is going to change how I feel about you. It’s not going to change anything about the man you are now, the man that I care… so much about. It’s not me taking a chance on you because I know that,” Stephen murmured, his thumb brushing a faint, gentle path back and forth in the space just below and behind Bruce’s ear. “Because I already know you’re not a monster.”
“There’s nothing that you have to say out of any… sense of obligation, just because I bared some very fragile parts of my soul to you,” Stephen went on to add, seeing as his mind was already reeling at the concept of there being something Bruce was willing to tell him – of all people, the doctor with the worst bedside manner known to man and a horrendous track record of interpersonal relationships – that he hadn’t been willing to tell the woman he was married to, or his closest family. “There’s nothing you have to say, but there’s also nothing that I wouldn’t want you to tell me as long as you’re comfortable doing so.” The look in his eyes when he met Bruce’s was steady, trying to convey even some portion of the reassurance he wanted Bruce to feel. “I’m not someone who needs protecting, and I’m not going to leave you. I’m not going to leave this. No ghosts from either of our pasts can make that happen.”
Bruce felt like half the reason he didn't like to talk to anyone about his past was the fact that he didn't like people trying to comfort him. Maybe because a part of him felt like he deserved to live with the pain, or maybe it was just because he didn't like the attention, preferring to fade into the background. But that feeling, of being on display in a way, he didn't feel it now. He felt Stephen's hand on the back of his neck and let out a breath that was close to a shudder, closing his eyes for a moment and nearly leaning into the weight of it. "I still wonder," Bruce said softly, not opening his eyes, not yet. "I still wonder if it all really was me. Before I came around, they...from what everyone had said, the home movies, they were just so...happy. It was like having me around flipped some kind of switch."
He took a deep breath and shook his head, finally opening his eyes and lifting his head when Stephen started to talk, knowing it was the truth, even if it was one that he didn't necessarily want to swallow. "Sometimes I wish I wasn't so clever. I think life would be a little easier that way," he said, matching the faint smile on Stephen's face. He had a hard time believing that changing thoughts wouldn't lead to changing feelings, but there was so much sincerity in Stephen's face. "I.." he started to say but then trailed off, feeling something in him deflate a little, like something heavy had been lifted off his shoulders albiet momentarily when he felt the press of Stephen's thumb behind his ear. It was easy for a moment to just concentrate on that other than everything else. Other than the things he should be saying, the things he should be doing. "Sometimes I feel like all I have is ghosts. Maybe with Betty too, she never really...she couldn't push through them. Her life was just so...she was charmed, really. I couldn't bear to let her in to the hardest parts because she was...I don't think she could ever understand that kind of darkness. I think her father knew that too, and that's why he hated me as much as he did." He gave Stephen a small smile. "It's not a sense of obligation, not really. It's...I have to stop hiding sometime. My biggest regret when Betty died was that I never really let her know who I really was. I didn't trust her with it. I didn't give her the chance. I don't want to feel like that again."
Bruce finally took a deep breath and tried to pick it back up, eyes flicking away from Stephen's face again, trying to find the track of thought where he lost it. "My father- No one in the criminal justice system found it all that unforgivable, he was out by the time I was in my early twenties," Bruce said. "I was...better, I guess by then. I wasn't the angry kid that considered building a bomb to blow up the high school anymore at least," Bruce said, his eyes darting back to his hands. He paused there, feeling a kind of sick roll of his stomach, knowing just how close he'd been then, fifteen and furious at everyone and everything and wanting just one person, somewhere to feel the kind of anger and fear that he felt every single moment. "I was with Betty then, we'd just..." Bruce found something of a faint smile. "We'd just gotten married, as a matter of fact. I thought I had effectively put everything behind me and changed for the better, and all of a sudden, he was just...out."
He ran his fingers through his hair. "I was working then, in Boston, building a pretty good reputation for myself, but that- everything crashed down. That was when I really started drinking. I had avoided it for so long, but then I..." Bruce shook his head. "Maybe it was some kind of punishment for myself. To pour myself down the same hole he lost himself down. Either to prove I was a better man and it wouldn't make me the man it made him, or just to see if we were exactly the same, I don't know." Bruce pursed his lips. "I was never stupid enough to show up to work drunk, but when I wasn't there, I was. Enough to frighten Betty, at least. It got worse the closer I got to the anniversary of my mother's death. I ended up taking a sabbatical, and I left Betty in Boston and went back home."
The air was starting to feel thick, and Bruce knew it was just some psychosomatic manifestation of his own burgeoning emotions, but it felt so hard to breathe all of a sudden and he squeezed his fingers a little harder into Stephen's knee, solid reassurance that he hadn't taken off. Yet, at least. "My father was there. At her gravesite, the day of her death. I hadn't seen him for so long and he...he didn't even look different. A little grayer at the temple's maybe, but when he saw me, it was that same kind of smile, like he'd finally cornered some animal and was about to-" Bruce swallowed. "It was the first time I ever yelled at him. Fought back. It was probably because I was drunk, really, without better faculties to, uh, keep me in check." Bruce clenched his free hand into a kind of a fist for a moment, remembering the feeling. "He didn't come prepared to fight a grown man. I...suppose we both got our licks in well enough, but I..." Bruce looked down. "He cracked his neck on a headstone after I shoved him into it." There was something dark in his voice now, thick. "You said before that there were times when not any amount of training would help. That...that wasn't the case here. I could have done something. I knew exactly what to do, stabilize the break, oxygenate the heart until someone could-" He could hear the lapping of the lake in the distance and that was the only thing that made Bruce feel like he might still be sane, because there were no lakes where he grew up. "I didn't do any of it. I stood there and watched him die. It took awhile too. They...they didn't even call it self defense, later. An accident. They barely even questioned me about it, because who cares about an ex-con that beat his kid and murdered his wife? Good riddance, right?"
He laughed a little then, darkly. "I murdered my father, there's no...there's no long or short to that. I even tried to tell them that, but no one wanted to hear it, figuring I was just a traumatized kid. Betty came to get me, and I..god I was really on one that night, I'm surprised I didn't black out, sitting there in this shitty hotel room having drank everything out of the minibar and sitting at the sink washing my hands over and over again like some fucked up Lady Macbeth. And Betty she...so many details of that night are so far away, so dim, but that...She grabbed my arm and she shook me and I-" Bruce bit hard at the inside of his cheek. "I lifted a hand and I nearly-" Bruce shook his head.
He cast sad eyes back to Stephen, the smile on his face hardly a smile, more of a grimace mascaraing as a smile. "That was when I stopped drinking, that night. You...I am a monster, maybe not in the way I could be, I was able to stop, but I have it inside of me. It's in there. DNA, or some kind of sick fate that visits the father upon the son, it's there. It won't go away. It's just a part of who I am." He shrugged weakly. "Betty she...God, she barely even recognized how close I was, how I...she was really too good for me, the whole time. But I vowed to be better for her, to make up for it in some kind of way. And then not a year later, she got sick, died on some operating table. Liver cancer, of all things, didn't touch a drop more than champagne at our wedding and she gets liver cancer."
Bruce had said all of that, most of that in a kind of thick monotone, just small variances, trying to distance himself from all of it a little. But there was no doing that, not for real, and he finally shuddered, a sound very close to a sob on his breath before he was able to choke it back, a kind of trembling coming over him suddenly, despite how he did his best to push it back. "I didn't really come here to start over," he said, and even his voice was trembling just a little now. "I came here to hide. I've been hiding for so long." Bruce squeezed Stephen’s knee and looked up to him, feeling the tears shining in his eyes, but not doing anything about them at the moment. “I really didn’t think I’d meet someone who I didn’t want to hide from. So I find myself at a loss for how to...what to...and you deserve so much more.”
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