Gardens of Wayne Manor: Fever (25/40)
Title: Chapter Twenty-Five: Fever
Pairing/Characters: Clark/Bruce, Alfred Pennyworth
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: References to drug abuse, descriptions of drug withdrawal
Continuity: The Gardens of Wayne Manor is an AU series in which Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne's lives intertwine at an early age. Click here for the complete series and series notes.
Word Count: 2400Summary: Bruce, Clark, and Alfred all deal (or don't) in their own ways with Bruce's homecoming.
Clark rocked back from Bruce’s vehemence. “What have you done?” Bruce repeated, his voice thick with anger.
The unfairness of the accusation sharpened Clark’s response. “What have I done? I found a friend lying in a gutter and I brought him home--”
Bruce’s bony hands tightened on the sheets. “If I’d wanted to come home, I would have walked here! You had no right to interfere. I was trying to--” His own fury seemed to choke him and he doubled over with retching. Clark grabbed the bowl Alfred had left and got to Bruce’s side before it turned to vomiting, although there was nothing but bile to bring up. He smoothed Bruce’s hair away from his damp, harrowed face and held him; Bruce clung to him through the spasms, his hands clenched in Clark’s flannel shirt like a lifeline. But after an agonized eternity of retching, he pushed Clark away again with a sound of disgust. “That’s exactly--” he muttered. “Damn it, why?”
Pity and anger were curdling together in Clark’s stomach. “Why didn’t I let you starve on the street? I’m starting to wonder,” he snapped. “Or do you mean why didn’t I fetch you another fix?”
A flicker of pain in dark-circled eyes; Bruce put his hands to the crooks of his elbows as if to hide the marks. “It’s not what it looks like,” he said.
“Really? Because it looks like you've been shooting up. Or do you really think I’m so stupid I wouldn’t realize?”
Bruce’s mouth was a flat, sharp line. “You don’t understand.”
“I guess I don’t,” Clark lashed back. “Of all the things I imagined you were doing for the last year, I never imagined that.” He laughed, tasting bitterness. “I’ve been studying, applying to colleges, I’ve been--” He started to say --fighting sun-eaters and intergalactic dictators, but the words slammed into the mental barrier Imra had given him and he merely choked. “And you’ve been right here in Gotham the whole time, right here doing drugs on the streets!”
Bruce looked away from him, thin fingers tracing the roses on the counterpane. “I needed to,” he said, very low.
“You needed to.” Clark heard the flat disbelief in his voice. “Nobody 'needs to,' Bruce. Just what were you running away from, anyway? Alfred? Your money?" Bruce stared at Clark, his eyes opaque. "Me?"
Bruce looked away. “Believe it or not, not everything is about you.”
“You’ve made that pretty obvious. Like it’s obvious you don’t need my help, or want me anywhere around. I’ll just spare you then,” snarled Clark, throwing the door open before Bruce could say anything else.
He banged down the stairs at a satisfying volume--until he met Alfred coming up. Alfred gave him a reproving look, and Clark modulated his descent from “catastrophic” to “emphatic.”
“He doesn’t want me there,” Clark announced, brushing by him.
“I fail to see what difference that makes,” he heard Alfred say, but Clark was already past him, hurrying down the stairs and into the fresh spring air outside.
He broke into a lope, heading down the grassy hill toward the sea, but he could still hear Bruce’s hectic heartbeat behind him, hear his panting breaths and the nausea beneath. If he listened closer Clark was sure he would be able to hear the very muscles in Bruce’s body spasming in pain, the nerve endings sparking agony into his mind.
He didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to know it. He couldn’t help Bruce, and Bruce didn’t need him, had never come to him through two long Gotham winters. Bruce was in pain and Clark could stop a bullet, but couldn’t help his friend.
The ocean was a rustling murmur all around him, rising and falling, but it couldn’t drown out the sound of Bruce’s stifled groans hissing between his teeth. Clark picked up a rock and hurled it at the sea, taking a childish pleasure in the sharp-ridged rings in the water before they smoothed out and were gone, erased by the waves. The sound of Bruce’s pain was a fire in his mind, unquenchable. Cursing under his breath, Clark glared back at the Manor--and his eyes fell on a small dark spot in the cliff.
He hadn’t been there for years, but now he scrambled up the slope and squeezed into the tiny little cave, his body just making it through the little opening.
The sound of the waves was amplified inside, a steady rushing roar. Clark sat down on the rock where he and Bruce had promised to be friends forever and put his hands over his ears, focusing on the sound of the sea, pushing the sound of Bruce’s agony away from him. Beneath the waves there was a soft rustling noise, sliced through with silvery calls no human could hear. Deep below the Manor, the bat colonies were stirring for the evening hunt.
He fell asleep there on the cool rock, with the sound of the waves and the ever-present motion of the bats a buffer between him and pain.
: : :
There was napalm in his bones, burning from the inside out. He hadn’t thought it could get worse. Bruce bit back another groan, grinding his teeth. This only caused the nausea to gallop up his throat again, pushing at his tongue. He swallowed hard, reminding himself there was nothing left to bring up anyway. He felt cold sweat trickle down the small of his back, felt the sheets sodden against his body. Everything seemed distant, hyper-lucid and edged with strange shadows. Fever. The word was a crimson blot in his mind, a small bloodstain on a blank white cloth.
The handbell on the nightstand seemed to glow in the darkness: gold and dark wood, mellowed by centuries of human touch. Alfred had insisted on leaving it there despite Bruce’s protests that he wasn’t going to ring for Alfred like some antebellum plantation owner. “I prefer it to these newfangled intercom systems, sir. Your parents used it, and it now is yours.” He had put the bell down beside the bed and it made a faint resonant noise, like a song trapped within. “Use it when you need help,” he had said.
Bruce closed his pain-etched eyes against its soft gold and turned away.
There was a faint rustling in the corner and Bruce felt his breath catch in his throat, scraping. Was it his imagination? He lay there, listening, and it was repeated, a sinister slither of sound.
He wasn’t alone in the room.
Bruce’s heart started to race as he dragged himself up onto one elbow, staring around the darkened room. It seemed empty. Clark was gone, Alfred downstairs. He was alone.
The curtains stirred.
His breath seemed frozen and his heart was hammering painfully now, his body betraying him to panic. There’s nothing there, nothing. Bruce fumbled for the lamp by the side of the bed with hands gone numb and clumsy.
And then the curtains billowed and something came out of them, flying straight at Bruce’s face like a nightmare. A glimpse of eyes, an orange gleam in the darkness, and Bruce was a child again, helpless in the dark, alone and afraid while the unknown swarmed around him.
He groped madly for the lamp as the presence in the room veered away, then back at him, over and over as if drawn to the darkness in his heart, thumping against walls, a whisper of claws in his hair. The air seemed full of shrieking at the edge of hearing. The lamp crashed to the ground, taking the little handbell with it with a muffled clank, an impotent sound lost in a vast darkness that grew ever more complete; Bruce put his hands up to ward it away, nothingness threatening to swallow him whole.
And then the light was on and Alfred was there, staring wildly. “Master Bruce, what--” He broke off and grabbed a wastebasket, bringing it down on something on the floor. “It’s a bat, sir. I’ve got it.” He looked up and met Bruce’s eyes, and Bruce was abruptly aware that his cheeks were wet. He lay down and rolled away, trying to make his heart stop pounding, trying to ease his breathing from sobs down to breaths once more. With the lights on, with Alfred there, it was obvious what had terrified him was just a lost little animal. He felt ridiculous. He felt ridiculous, and his heart wouldn’t slow down.
He couldn’t seem to catch his breath, couldn’t seem to stop--that was a symptom of withdrawal, he told himself, excessive tear production. A physical symptom. He wasn’t crying.
Alfred must despise him, just like Clark did. Clark had seen him like this, sick and shaking on the street, track marks on his arms. Clark hated him.
He wasn’t crying.
The spasms that seemed so horribly like heartbroken weeping turned to retching again, and Bruce curled around the pain, losing himself in it until it ebbed for a moment, leaving him wrung and exhausted, panting.
“Open your mouth.” Alfred’s voice was crisp as fresh linen, his hand on Bruce’s brow a blissful cool. Chips of cold on his tongue. “Don’t chew. Let them melt.”
Bruce let cold water trickle down his raw throat and into his roiling stomach. His teeth chattered wildly and he clamped his mouth shut.
“You’re developing a fever,” said Alfred. His voice sounded very far away, swimming in a syrup of pain. “I’m afraid things will only get worse for a while.”
Bruce opened his mouth. “Cu--Cu--” The syllable jittered wildly, jagged-edged. He hadn’t meant to say that.
“Master Clark has gone, sir.” There was reproach in Alfred’s voice, a small, hot thread that made Bruce’s stomach clench again. He tried to focus, tried to keep the weltering confusion at bay for a moment.
“I didn’t--” he started, then had to stop and re-organize his thoughts. “I needed to understand,” he said.
“Understand?”
Bruce wanted to nod, but didn’t dare. “I saw so many people throw everything away for it. Friendship. Hope. Safety. Just to...make this stop. I despised them. I couldn’t...understand. I had to. To fight it.” A fresh bout of trembling threatened to liquify his bones; he hunched into it, panting. “Had to feel it from the inside. Had to know it could be beaten. That I could beat it. Alone.”
He looked up. Alfred was a smudge in the fading light, blurred in Bruce’s vision. “Now I won’t ever know,” Bruce said. “Won’t know if I was strong enough.” His hands clenched. “Can’t be sure.”
The bed shifted as Alfred sat down next to him. Bruce could feel him take a deep breath, let it out. "How long has it been since the withdrawal symptoms started?"
It was not what Bruce had expected him to say. "I don't remember," he said weakly, rummaging through memories jumbled with pain, trying to piece them back together like a shattered china plate. "I'd gotten through one night, so...about twenty-four hours."
"The worst of it should take about two days." A small part of Bruce's mind, the tiny part that could still think, wondered why Alfred had this information. "So you were about halfway through when Master Clark found you." A silence in which Bruce navigated pain like a vast river. "And I'm afraid you're just going to have to accept that people will sometimes meet you halfway."
"No halfway." Bruce mumbled. "No halfway for me."
He heard Alfred sigh, as far away and small as the wrong end of a telescope. “You have learned so much about fear and pain and solitude,” he said after a moment. “But my boy--” He stopped and took another careful breath. “--Perhaps there are other things that are valuable to learn. About trust, and compassion. Not feeling it for others,” he added when Bruce opened his mouth. “No. I know you need no lessons there, child.” A cool hand smoothed sweat-soaked hair back from Bruce’s brow, and Bruce clamped his teeth tight over another random jag of sobbing that clawed up his throat. “But perhaps about accepting it for yourself.”
“I don’t want pity.” Bruce managed to turn the incipient sobs into a convincing snarl.
"If you continue like this, sir, you certainly won't have to worry about that." Alfred’s voice was sharp, and Bruce could hear pain beneath it to match his own. Then he sighed, and his voice gentled. “However, the difference between pity and compassion is also a valuable lesson to learn.”
He said nothing more, just sat by Bruce through the night, a silent presence. It didn’t ward off the nightmares that stalked Bruce’s fevered, exhausted soul, but nothing could do that.
( Chapter Twenty-Six)
Pairing/Characters: Clark/Bruce, Alfred Pennyworth
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: References to drug abuse, descriptions of drug withdrawal
Continuity: The Gardens of Wayne Manor is an AU series in which Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne's lives intertwine at an early age. Click here for the complete series and series notes.
Word Count: 2400Summary: Bruce, Clark, and Alfred all deal (or don't) in their own ways with Bruce's homecoming.
Clark rocked back from Bruce’s vehemence. “What have you done?” Bruce repeated, his voice thick with anger.
The unfairness of the accusation sharpened Clark’s response. “What have I done? I found a friend lying in a gutter and I brought him home--”
Bruce’s bony hands tightened on the sheets. “If I’d wanted to come home, I would have walked here! You had no right to interfere. I was trying to--” His own fury seemed to choke him and he doubled over with retching. Clark grabbed the bowl Alfred had left and got to Bruce’s side before it turned to vomiting, although there was nothing but bile to bring up. He smoothed Bruce’s hair away from his damp, harrowed face and held him; Bruce clung to him through the spasms, his hands clenched in Clark’s flannel shirt like a lifeline. But after an agonized eternity of retching, he pushed Clark away again with a sound of disgust. “That’s exactly--” he muttered. “Damn it, why?”
Pity and anger were curdling together in Clark’s stomach. “Why didn’t I let you starve on the street? I’m starting to wonder,” he snapped. “Or do you mean why didn’t I fetch you another fix?”
A flicker of pain in dark-circled eyes; Bruce put his hands to the crooks of his elbows as if to hide the marks. “It’s not what it looks like,” he said.
“Really? Because it looks like you've been shooting up. Or do you really think I’m so stupid I wouldn’t realize?”
Bruce’s mouth was a flat, sharp line. “You don’t understand.”
“I guess I don’t,” Clark lashed back. “Of all the things I imagined you were doing for the last year, I never imagined that.” He laughed, tasting bitterness. “I’ve been studying, applying to colleges, I’ve been--” He started to say --fighting sun-eaters and intergalactic dictators, but the words slammed into the mental barrier Imra had given him and he merely choked. “And you’ve been right here in Gotham the whole time, right here doing drugs on the streets!”
Bruce looked away from him, thin fingers tracing the roses on the counterpane. “I needed to,” he said, very low.
“You needed to.” Clark heard the flat disbelief in his voice. “Nobody 'needs to,' Bruce. Just what were you running away from, anyway? Alfred? Your money?" Bruce stared at Clark, his eyes opaque. "Me?"
Bruce looked away. “Believe it or not, not everything is about you.”
“You’ve made that pretty obvious. Like it’s obvious you don’t need my help, or want me anywhere around. I’ll just spare you then,” snarled Clark, throwing the door open before Bruce could say anything else.
He banged down the stairs at a satisfying volume--until he met Alfred coming up. Alfred gave him a reproving look, and Clark modulated his descent from “catastrophic” to “emphatic.”
“He doesn’t want me there,” Clark announced, brushing by him.
“I fail to see what difference that makes,” he heard Alfred say, but Clark was already past him, hurrying down the stairs and into the fresh spring air outside.
He broke into a lope, heading down the grassy hill toward the sea, but he could still hear Bruce’s hectic heartbeat behind him, hear his panting breaths and the nausea beneath. If he listened closer Clark was sure he would be able to hear the very muscles in Bruce’s body spasming in pain, the nerve endings sparking agony into his mind.
He didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to know it. He couldn’t help Bruce, and Bruce didn’t need him, had never come to him through two long Gotham winters. Bruce was in pain and Clark could stop a bullet, but couldn’t help his friend.
The ocean was a rustling murmur all around him, rising and falling, but it couldn’t drown out the sound of Bruce’s stifled groans hissing between his teeth. Clark picked up a rock and hurled it at the sea, taking a childish pleasure in the sharp-ridged rings in the water before they smoothed out and were gone, erased by the waves. The sound of Bruce’s pain was a fire in his mind, unquenchable. Cursing under his breath, Clark glared back at the Manor--and his eyes fell on a small dark spot in the cliff.
He hadn’t been there for years, but now he scrambled up the slope and squeezed into the tiny little cave, his body just making it through the little opening.
The sound of the waves was amplified inside, a steady rushing roar. Clark sat down on the rock where he and Bruce had promised to be friends forever and put his hands over his ears, focusing on the sound of the sea, pushing the sound of Bruce’s agony away from him. Beneath the waves there was a soft rustling noise, sliced through with silvery calls no human could hear. Deep below the Manor, the bat colonies were stirring for the evening hunt.
He fell asleep there on the cool rock, with the sound of the waves and the ever-present motion of the bats a buffer between him and pain.
: : :
There was napalm in his bones, burning from the inside out. He hadn’t thought it could get worse. Bruce bit back another groan, grinding his teeth. This only caused the nausea to gallop up his throat again, pushing at his tongue. He swallowed hard, reminding himself there was nothing left to bring up anyway. He felt cold sweat trickle down the small of his back, felt the sheets sodden against his body. Everything seemed distant, hyper-lucid and edged with strange shadows. Fever. The word was a crimson blot in his mind, a small bloodstain on a blank white cloth.
The handbell on the nightstand seemed to glow in the darkness: gold and dark wood, mellowed by centuries of human touch. Alfred had insisted on leaving it there despite Bruce’s protests that he wasn’t going to ring for Alfred like some antebellum plantation owner. “I prefer it to these newfangled intercom systems, sir. Your parents used it, and it now is yours.” He had put the bell down beside the bed and it made a faint resonant noise, like a song trapped within. “Use it when you need help,” he had said.
Bruce closed his pain-etched eyes against its soft gold and turned away.
There was a faint rustling in the corner and Bruce felt his breath catch in his throat, scraping. Was it his imagination? He lay there, listening, and it was repeated, a sinister slither of sound.
He wasn’t alone in the room.
Bruce’s heart started to race as he dragged himself up onto one elbow, staring around the darkened room. It seemed empty. Clark was gone, Alfred downstairs. He was alone.
The curtains stirred.
His breath seemed frozen and his heart was hammering painfully now, his body betraying him to panic. There’s nothing there, nothing. Bruce fumbled for the lamp by the side of the bed with hands gone numb and clumsy.
And then the curtains billowed and something came out of them, flying straight at Bruce’s face like a nightmare. A glimpse of eyes, an orange gleam in the darkness, and Bruce was a child again, helpless in the dark, alone and afraid while the unknown swarmed around him.
He groped madly for the lamp as the presence in the room veered away, then back at him, over and over as if drawn to the darkness in his heart, thumping against walls, a whisper of claws in his hair. The air seemed full of shrieking at the edge of hearing. The lamp crashed to the ground, taking the little handbell with it with a muffled clank, an impotent sound lost in a vast darkness that grew ever more complete; Bruce put his hands up to ward it away, nothingness threatening to swallow him whole.
And then the light was on and Alfred was there, staring wildly. “Master Bruce, what--” He broke off and grabbed a wastebasket, bringing it down on something on the floor. “It’s a bat, sir. I’ve got it.” He looked up and met Bruce’s eyes, and Bruce was abruptly aware that his cheeks were wet. He lay down and rolled away, trying to make his heart stop pounding, trying to ease his breathing from sobs down to breaths once more. With the lights on, with Alfred there, it was obvious what had terrified him was just a lost little animal. He felt ridiculous. He felt ridiculous, and his heart wouldn’t slow down.
He couldn’t seem to catch his breath, couldn’t seem to stop--that was a symptom of withdrawal, he told himself, excessive tear production. A physical symptom. He wasn’t crying.
Alfred must despise him, just like Clark did. Clark had seen him like this, sick and shaking on the street, track marks on his arms. Clark hated him.
He wasn’t crying.
The spasms that seemed so horribly like heartbroken weeping turned to retching again, and Bruce curled around the pain, losing himself in it until it ebbed for a moment, leaving him wrung and exhausted, panting.
“Open your mouth.” Alfred’s voice was crisp as fresh linen, his hand on Bruce’s brow a blissful cool. Chips of cold on his tongue. “Don’t chew. Let them melt.”
Bruce let cold water trickle down his raw throat and into his roiling stomach. His teeth chattered wildly and he clamped his mouth shut.
“You’re developing a fever,” said Alfred. His voice sounded very far away, swimming in a syrup of pain. “I’m afraid things will only get worse for a while.”
Bruce opened his mouth. “Cu--Cu--” The syllable jittered wildly, jagged-edged. He hadn’t meant to say that.
“Master Clark has gone, sir.” There was reproach in Alfred’s voice, a small, hot thread that made Bruce’s stomach clench again. He tried to focus, tried to keep the weltering confusion at bay for a moment.
“I didn’t--” he started, then had to stop and re-organize his thoughts. “I needed to understand,” he said.
“Understand?”
Bruce wanted to nod, but didn’t dare. “I saw so many people throw everything away for it. Friendship. Hope. Safety. Just to...make this stop. I despised them. I couldn’t...understand. I had to. To fight it.” A fresh bout of trembling threatened to liquify his bones; he hunched into it, panting. “Had to feel it from the inside. Had to know it could be beaten. That I could beat it. Alone.”
He looked up. Alfred was a smudge in the fading light, blurred in Bruce’s vision. “Now I won’t ever know,” Bruce said. “Won’t know if I was strong enough.” His hands clenched. “Can’t be sure.”
The bed shifted as Alfred sat down next to him. Bruce could feel him take a deep breath, let it out. "How long has it been since the withdrawal symptoms started?"
It was not what Bruce had expected him to say. "I don't remember," he said weakly, rummaging through memories jumbled with pain, trying to piece them back together like a shattered china plate. "I'd gotten through one night, so...about twenty-four hours."
"The worst of it should take about two days." A small part of Bruce's mind, the tiny part that could still think, wondered why Alfred had this information. "So you were about halfway through when Master Clark found you." A silence in which Bruce navigated pain like a vast river. "And I'm afraid you're just going to have to accept that people will sometimes meet you halfway."
"No halfway." Bruce mumbled. "No halfway for me."
He heard Alfred sigh, as far away and small as the wrong end of a telescope. “You have learned so much about fear and pain and solitude,” he said after a moment. “But my boy--” He stopped and took another careful breath. “--Perhaps there are other things that are valuable to learn. About trust, and compassion. Not feeling it for others,” he added when Bruce opened his mouth. “No. I know you need no lessons there, child.” A cool hand smoothed sweat-soaked hair back from Bruce’s brow, and Bruce clamped his teeth tight over another random jag of sobbing that clawed up his throat. “But perhaps about accepting it for yourself.”
“I don’t want pity.” Bruce managed to turn the incipient sobs into a convincing snarl.
"If you continue like this, sir, you certainly won't have to worry about that." Alfred’s voice was sharp, and Bruce could hear pain beneath it to match his own. Then he sighed, and his voice gentled. “However, the difference between pity and compassion is also a valuable lesson to learn.”
He said nothing more, just sat by Bruce through the night, a silent presence. It didn’t ward off the nightmares that stalked Bruce’s fevered, exhausted soul, but nothing could do that.
( Chapter Twenty-Six)