"Master Bruce, you have a visitor."Bruce looked up from his position, curled in a fetal ball, on the window ledge. He'd had plenty of visitors since the death of his parents. And endless stream of grown-ups who suffocated him in kindness, patting him on the head and talking in soft, patronising voices as if a sentence spoken at normal volume might cause the poor little orphan to detonate, like a bomb they'd rather leave undisturbed then risk having defused.
This wasn't one of those people.
This was Thomas Elliot. Tommy.
The blond boy pushed past Alfred before Bruce could respond. He looked at Bruce and grinned.
"Thank you, Alfred," Bruce said, trying to sound formal in front of his friend.
Alfred coughed awkwardly before leaving the room. It was these moments, when others were around, that he and Bruce were still learning to navigate together. Alfred had reached for Bruce's hand the funeral only for the boy to snatch it away, embarrassed. Yet he refused to let go during the car ride home.
"We have to be kind to you," Tommy slumped casually down next to Bruce and fixed him with an intense stare that mirrored Bruce's own. "That's what Ms Hyslop said at school."
"Everyone's being kind to me, Tommy. It's boring."
Tommy thought about this.
"I wish my parents were dead," he said, eventually. "Then I'd be a billionaire. Like you."
Bruce's stunned laughter echoed around the manor's empty rooms.
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