V. An abandoned or vacant place. Alfred! (just to be different) >:)
There wasn’t an inch of Wayne Manor that Alfred didn’t know better than the back of his own hand. After all, flesh was ever-changing, but the Manor was impervious to the assault of time. Generations had come and gone and left little mark.
Martha Wayne hadn’t considered herself beholden to tradition, and had refurbished several rooms of the Manor. Alfred had admired that, even though he’d known his own father would have disapproved. He supposed it was because she was a Kane, had abandoned her own legacy to help Thomas build his, and thus had taken ownership of the Manor in a way that few of the more recent ladies of the house had chosen to do.
The room that bore her touch the strongest was the master bedroom.
Alfred stood outside the door, uncertain.
The hallway was immaculate. Alfred had kept to his duties, despite the fact that he was currently the Manor’s sole resident. Slacking off was a slippery slope -- skimp on duties enough times and the entire household would fall irrevocably behind. However, the spare rooms received only the lightest of housekeeping. Just enough to stave off the dust and mildew.
The master bedroom had been for all intents and purposes a spare room for more than a decade.
Upon the murders, the rooms ought to have belonged to the new master of the house, but Alfred hadn’t been willing to move a traumatized child into his murdered parents’ bedroom. He’d thought of bringing up the matter a few times during Bruce’s teenage years, but the havoc Bruce had wreaked on his own bedroom had convinced Alfred that the boy had not been ready.
In no small part, Alfred had made that decision selfishly as much as for Bruce’s own mental well-being. He’d been entirely unwilling to see Martha’s lovingly decorated walls with punk rock posters thumbtacked into them.
Then in a blink of an eye, Bruce has disappeared on him. Old enough to consider himself grown and he’d immediately gone off in pursuit of a path towards justice that Alfred knew could never be found.
Then it had just been Alfred, managing the household and the Wayne legacy, just as he had been for years. Walking through empty halls, sticking to his rigorous chore chart that kept everything tidy and serviceable in preparation for Bruce’s return.
The messages and calls from Bruce in the years since had been sporadic and vague, filled with just enough clues that he understood that Bruce was changing. Had changed. Was shaping himself into the man that he wanted to be, and now Alfred stood outside Martha and Thomas’s mausoleum of a bedroom, knowing what his task was.
Bruce had called a few hours before, his voice rough and exhausted in a way Alfred had never heard. It was the kind of tone he recognized from his time in the service, of a man weary to the bone and ready to return home. Bruce had simply said, “I’m on my way to Gotham.”
“Your room will be ready for you,” Alfred had replied. Then, both because it was true and because Bruce needed to hear it, needed to be sure of his welcome: “I have missed you, my boy.”
“It will be good to see you, Alfred.” A crackle across the line and the communication was severed, and Alfred had stood there, white-knuckles wrapped around the phone.
He’d recognized Bruce’s tone, and unfortunately he knew another cold truth about growing up: home was never where you left it. The idea of it, perhaps, but the physical manifestation always fell short. Always felt like an outgrown winter coat, hindering every movement.
Alfred opened the master bedroom’s door, and stepped inside. He hadn’t been so ghoulish as to leave Martha and Thomas’s belongings strewn about, but some things had been impossible to pack away. The closet still held a few sentimental items carefully stored. A wedding dress, a christening gown, a white coat. They would have to be relocated to the attic, along with every other personal item he hadn’t been practical enough to remove already.
A few hours’ work, and every trace of Martha and Thomas would be gone from this room, and he could strip down the bed and have it fresh and ready for Bruce.
A few hours’ work that Alfred had been dreading and anticipating for years. He worked without allowing himself to look at the items too carefully, neatly packing away everything. Rearranging the furniture just enough to allow Bruce to see the room as his own, not a relic from his few scant memories of his parents.
Remembering them, that was Alfred’s cross to bear. Bruce’s loss was immeasurable, but so much of what he mourned was the loss of potential. The lack of a father, the absence of a mother. The ways his life would have been different had they been there to guide him.
Alfred had lost his employers and dear friends, who he had laughed with, drank with, teased and spend his evenings off with. He had a thousand memories of them as people that Bruce would never have, and it was impossible not to feel guilt over this, of being unable and unwilling to share with Bruce the way his mother had the most indelicate snort when she was in her cups, or the way his father had a fondness for the raunchiest of jokes. Mostly, Alfred suspected, because he enjoyed watching Martha snort as he told them, straight-faced, to their most tight-laced companions.
He mourned them as people, and knew that he couldn’t share their complexity with Bruce without tarnishing the few childlike memories of them that he had, and so instead he allowed their memory to slowly leech away. Allowed them to become hallowed figures in Bruce’s mind.
He worried, sometimes, that that was a mistake. That he was doing Bruce a disservice, but he knew of nothing else he could do.
A few hours’ work, and the master bedroom was a blank slate, ready for Bruce to make it his own.
Alfred left the door open as he left, and set towards the kitchen. He had meals to prepare.
The Manor would no longer be vacant.
