Arctic Light

The clock marks the start of April 27^th, military time; Bruce enters the new day with the stench of alcohol firmly sunken on his breath.

The second anniversary, despite all the begging and pleading he was subjected to after his behavior on the first one, Bruce had decided to go out into the night. The result had been so disastrous, Bruce walking the line between dangerous to others and dangerous to himself and tilting swiftly into the worst direction of the two, that on the third year, he timed it perfectly to grant himself one night off. He’s already determined this is an indulgence he’ll only allow himself once.

Bruce thought he’d be itching to leave the house. Yet he sits on the stairs, bottle abandoned, and thinks of Dick, who’d come along to take Tim away –he pictures the two of them jumping from rooftop to rooftop, Tim in a Robin uniform, and his stomach twists; a phenomenon somehow unrelated to the toxic liquid he’s filled himself up with.

Maybe Tim will timidly ask Dick to tell him some nostalgic anecdote of times past; maybe, though unlikely, Dick will be the one to openly share it. Bruce wouldn’t know; this is not a topic he and Dick ever touch. Not since that first time.

Alfred is lost in the house, and Bruce won’t bother chasing after him. They each find the other’s presence unbearable, in this day. Instead, his legs move on their own, and they lead him to an empty room.

‘Empty’, as a term, comes short. Emptied strikes as far more accurate, because that’s exactly what Bruce ordered Alfred to do, come that first month of May: to empty out Jason’s room.

The furniture remains, each piece covered in white sheets buried in dust. Bruce removes the one over the bed with a violent yank, and lies his body upon it, looking straight up; like a corpse.

The time after his parents’ death is starkly vivid in Bruce’s memories. He had longed to return to Wayne Manor as soon as possible; there, every inch was wrapped in their presence. To this day, not a single room was devoid from at least one object that was cause for remembrance. Maybe Thomas’s old check book, which he’d been in the habit of using to write himself little notes when he didn’t want to forget a task; or Martha’s baseball card collection, shared with Bruce with the enthusiasm of a true fanatic. Bruce still found, still sought comfort in the echoes of their presence like a kid did on an old, soft, ratty blanket.

There wasn’t –couldn’t possibly be, not then and not years away– any comfort to be brought from Jason’s mementos, and thus Bruce had done away with them. He hadn’t been able to stomach the signs of his passage through Bruce’s life. The souvenirs from their cases were removed from the cave, and Jason’s own room had been emptied out.

All that remains is the old uniform, erected while a reluctant Bruce trained yet another child. A brutal reminder for both Tim and Bruce himself of the stakes. But that’s a monument to Robin; the only piece of Jason is encased in Bruce’s ribcage, sprouting –rebellious, accusing– whenever Bruce lowers his guard.

Abruptly, as if disconnected from his own body, Bruce realizes he’s now choking on drunken sobs. He bites them down, swallows them deep. He curls in on himself, arms in a protective loop over his knees, forcing open the eyelids he hadn’t noticed close.

Bruce remembers how, at first, Jason didn’t let him enter his room. He hadn’t let Alfred either, insisting on cleaning after himself –and all in all doing, if not a good job, a better one than any kid his age should’ve ever been expected to do. It took time to build trust, but by the end of things, Jason had no qualms about Bruce’s presence in his room, and Bruce would’ve been able to describe every corner of it to the minute details.

It's as if the image of that last time he walked in, the smell of fuel and charred skin still glued to his nostrils, remains engraved to his retinas. The built-in closet is in front of the bed, by the door; Jason never kicked the bad habit of not closing the doors properly, much to Alfred’s chagrin. The wall adjacent to it and the one perpendicular to the closet held various posters, mainly of whichever band Jason had most recently incorporated into his personality. The last one to go up was from Siouxie and the Banshees, and the very first Jason plastered against the ocher walls, now faded by neglect, was from Sisters of Mercy. He’d wanted Bruce to listen to those bands with him, and gently, playfully ribbed him for not getting it; asking “what would Bruce know”, when the only music he listened to were those recorded nature noises for meditation, surely.

Jason hadn’t been completely wrong. Bruce didn’t exactly keep up with the trendy bands of his favorite music genres; he has no idea of what poster Jason might’ve put up next.

On the door itself there had been a map of the night sky, each constellation identified by name emitting a soft glow in its stars. Bruce wonders if Jason would’ve ever tired of it, found it childish after a few more years on the house, when he’d once used to enjoy tracing the constellation patterns with his finger.

The one window in the room, looming large, was to Bruce’s right. Under it, pressed to the wardrobe’s wall, there had been a truck, now removed, that Bruce had never betrayed Jason’s trust by opening. On the other side of the window, beside the bed, Jason had requested they’d move a large music equipment in from one of the studios. It allowed tapes and CDs, and connected to the radio, but Jason only ever used it for the eclectic vinyl collection. One once shared by Thomas and Martha, the solace of their ghosts dripping into this room, too. Just like once the joy of meeting Jason, that daring boy he was, had soothed the ache of the anniversary of their loss.

On top of the bed there was a framed painting. It was one of the first things Jason had ever asked him to buy, and certainly the first one that wasn’t a necessity. Jason had stopped in his tracks during a walk with Bruce, and the two of them had taken a moment to watch it being made –a vivid picture of nocturnal wilderness, spray on canvas by a talented street artist. Instead of simply plastering it to the wall as he later did with his posters, Jason had insisted it needed a fancy frame, aged grey wood in strange harmony with the vibrant colors.

On Bruce left there once was a nightstand whose sole purpose seemed to have been serving as the resting place for whatever book Jason was devouring at any given time. Bruce only knew that Jason’s clothes all went to the closet, and that it was never quite full, for that’s not where Jason’s expensive tastes had gone.

Those were reserved, of course, for the bookshelves that stood past the bedside table. They were mounted on a writing desk that occupied the entire wall and part of another, and they were filled to the brim. If pressed, Bruce thinks he could’ve recited every copy, from a handful tattered books Jason brought with him on his arrival to the Manor, to the gold-leaf, leather-bound editions he had fallen head over hills for.

There had been an assortment of knickknacks amidst the bookshelves, a form of sui generis decoration of every useless thingamajig Jason had thought worth keeping. A small, customized music box that played a song from Prokofiev’s Cinderella, the first ballet he’d taken Jason to see. Clark’s autograph, proudly displayed in front of the non-fiction books. A seashell, from the first time Jason ever visited what he called “a real beach”, to Bruce’s utter confusion. A picture of Catherine that he’d later accompanied with a cut-off of Willis’s printed mugshot, trapping it on a corner of the frame.

A small board with the meaning of his name Alfred said he’d bought on a whim, at a flea market he liked to visit to get artisanal products. It’d said “healer”, and Bruce suddenly remembers how Jason had returned from an unauthorized mission with the Titans half-joking about wanting to be a doctor. Bruce had felt Thomas’s presence in his son’s room then, too.

Jason’s computer had sat at the corner of the table, and when he left, some of his class books had still been neatly piled up right next to the lamp at the end of it.

And on the nightstand… Bruce can’t remember, if Jason had left any half-read books on the nightstand.

He holds his head in his hands, fingertips pressing into his skull with a strength bordering on violence. Jason’s room had been a reflection of its dweller, filled to the brim with color and individuality, and Bruce thinks of how he’d wanted nothing more than to excise all of it from his life, to then reflect his own inner state. In at least a small part he succeeded, because he can’t remember if Jason left yet one more thing unfinished. Bruce feels the press of shame atop his lungs for it.

Alfred, nostalgic by nature, wouldn’t have thrown it out. He could put it all back, all of it; Bruce thoughts swirl with a tinge of desperation, imagining the posters and the painting and the books, all placed in perfect order to match. He could put it all back; all, except his boy.

There’s a violent ache in this pain, devoid of the hope of ever reaching a place where Bruce could look back on Jason’s unfairly short life, and on the even shorter –all the more unfair for it– amount of time he got to spend with him, with the tender nostalgia that sometimes visits loss. Would it have been better, to never meet Jason at all? To never feel this?

“I don’t know,” Bruce mutters, as if anyone could hear and judge his plea but himself. “I don’t know.”