we'll burn like fireflies

A/N: The draft of this was called 'the one where Bruce and Jason are the same age,' which doesn't really get at the subject matter at all. Also I think I made Jason like ten months older, which is a fairly big deal when you're eight.

See foot for warnings.

In Gotham, in a year when America's strength and wealth seemed like it could grow forever even as the rot had already set in, there was a narrow alley that opened off Park Row.

Actually there were several, and their dimness and filth had begun to multiply as the neighborhood slid toward decay, but at the moment we are concerned with just one of them, a moderately shadowy corridor a block and a half from a still-popular theater. Inside there were a row of slightly dented garbage cans, and behind them a heap of paper and cardboard rubbish, and over its mouth there stood a street lamp, casting a pool of light onto the sidewalk where two people lay dead who, seconds ago, had been amongst the living.

Their blood spread under scattered pearls, and their killer stood just outside the circle of light. The hand that had torn the necklace tightened, and the hand that had fired the gun—once, twice, and twice cannot be called an accident—trembled.

The small survivor stood over the dead, and he did not tremble.

The boy had blue eyes, his mother's cheekbones and his father's stubborn chin. His name, as you very well know, was Bruce. His blue eyes had been shock-wide in the first seconds, as his parents collapsed and his world crashed down, but now they were flat. They drilled into the man with the gun. There was no fear. There was barely even anger, yet.

"Stop lookin' at me like that, kid," the murderer whispered.

Bruce didn't know what like that was but he didn't care, he would look however he wanted, and his thumbs felt like they were going to pop out of their sockets he was squeezing so hard, and he looked at the man harder.

The gun rose again. It was still shaking but shaking hadn't stopped it from killing Mom and Dad. (They were dead theyweredead they were DEAD.) Bruce still didn't look away. "I said stop looking at me like that!"

They stood frozen there in an eternal instant, where maybe the man with the gun would pull the trigger one more time, to make those accusing eyes close forever and give him a bloodier soul but a cleaner escape, or maybe he'd just turn and run, with his paltry half-dozen pearls, run away from his failure and his crime.

In either world, Bruce wouldn't look away.

And then, when it seemed like the moment had to break or it would kill them both with its own weight, something burst out of the mess of boxes and loose trash. Bruce caught a confused flash of red limned with white as the something lunged, launching itself from the steel lid of the garbage can right behind the killer with a gonnnngg! sound that was still in the air as the something hit the gunman's back, clung there, made him stagger.

They scrabbled briefly, panicked killer and mystery garbage thing—the hand holding the gun, flung up in alarm and the main target of the thing's assault—another shot rang out, and shattered the lonely, flickering street light.

In the last moments before the dark fell, as the sounds of gunshot and glass and the last reverberations from the trash can all piled atop one another until noise became so total it was almost like silence, Bruce saw the gun's muzzle drop toward him again, and the red-and-white Something jerk a limb across the mugger's throat.

In the following dark, he heard another body hit the ground.

He'd only heard that sound twice before, but he already knew he would never mistake it for anything else ever again.

His parent's murderer was dead.

He stood in the dark, with new blood joining the pool of his mother's and father's around his feet, and he still wasn't afraid at all. The worst the Something could do was kill him, right? And at least now he knew that man wouldn't get away.

"Hey, kid?" said a husky voice out of the darkness. "You okay?"

The Something…sounded like a City kid. Bruce felt a faint frown pull at his face, realized it was the first expression he had made since—since.

"Fuck, don't tell me he shot you anyway. C'mon. Talk to me."

Bruce wasn't sure how.

There was a small scraping sound, and a match burst into life. The Something was a city kid, no taller than him, in a hoodie that was way too big, and Bruce's eyes caught with the light on the red-stained blade in the boy's other hand. Then they flickered down to the crumpled shadow that had been his enemy.

"You killed him," he said.

"Yeah, well." Knife boy hunched his shoulders a little, seemed to try to tuck the knife out of sight behind him, then winced as the match burned down to lick his fingertips, and dropped it. The match-end snuffed out in the puddled blood, and for a second the gloom was full of the weirdly prosaic sound of Knife-boy blowing on the scorched ends of his fingers. Sulkily his voice came from the alley that seemed darker than ever: "He was gonna kill you. You could say thank you."

It wasn't that he hadn't realized Red-And-White Something had stopped the man from killing him, but he hadn't thought about it as saved until the boy asked for thanks, and he felt the rage sink its hooks back into him. Jerked his head up, even though it wouldn't really show with only the light of distant signs and the glow of the sky, and snarled, "Why couldn't you have killed him sooner?" Because what did he care about being saved, when Mom and Dad and his whole world was dead?

"First gunshot woke me up," the other kid answered, through his teeth, too. "Guess I should've gone ahead and done the smart thing, not got involved, huh? I'm not your killing dog, you snotty little bastard."

"No," Bruce blurted. (Later, he would realize this chagrin was the first thing he had felt since his parent's deaths that had not been about those deaths.) "Thank you. I'm sorry."

It felt sort of like thanking someone for a Christmas present you hadn't wanted, like the BB M16 one of his Kane aunts had gotten him last year, but maybe he'd change his mind someday. When he was little he thought books were an awful present. Except the ones Mom read to him, over and over. He was too big for that now, but sometimes…sometimes she still….

(Dad used to do funny voices, when he got home in time to read a bedtime story.)

"S'okay," said the boy. He sounded kind of embarrassed, too. "I mean, you're having a really shitty day." He moved forward, feet making a little sticky scraping sound on the bloodied concrete.

"Yeah," Bruce whispered. Mom and Dad would have been unhappy about the swearing, but he couldn't come up with any way to describe today that he liked better. "Really…shitty."

"Oh my God you don't need to make my understatement sound that dumb." The boy snorted a little, and stopped walking.

Bruce's eyes had gotten used to the dark, a little, and he could make out a sort of outline, dark grey on grey. The other boy could probably see him better, since even with the streetlamp out there was more light coming in the mouth of the alley than there was from inside. He was taller, maybe older than Bruce, but not a lot.

He struck another match, and used the light to maneuver himself around the bodies, around…

He didn't feel like he could cry right now, but he thought if he did he would never, ever stop.

Anyway, his mother and father. The boy from the garbage was being careful not to step on them, or even over them.

Once he was safely on Bruce's side of them, he blew out the stub of the match before that one could burn him, too, and didn't light another.

"Look, kid," he said, and Bruce couldn't even get annoyed about being called kid, "we should get away from here. Bad people come to the sound of gunshots, sometimes. Looking for scraps."

He shook his head. "I can't leave them," he said.

The other boy was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "okay. Yeah, okay, that's. We'll stay here, then."

Bruce nodded, and slowly sank down onto his knees. Reached out, tentatively, because being able to see where the bodies lay wasn't the same as being able to see them, and his fingers brushed through his mother's hair before landing on her shoulder, fashionably bare.

He jerked back from the already-growing-cold clamminess of it, and didn't reach out toward Dad. Drew in a sharp breath as a warm, solid hand landed on the back of his neck. "I know," whispered the other boy, like he was telling a secret, as he squatted down next to Bruce. (And Bruce wanted to tell him to get out of it, get back, they were his parents and it was his blood to stand in. Only some of the blood was the gunman's, and the other boy had killed him, so he had a right to get his blood on him. He guessed.) "My mom was the same. It's real. Sorry."

Bruce swallowed, slowly let his fingers sink until they touch blood. That had cooled, too. His head hung. Mom, he said, but he didn't use his voice. "Dad," he whispered. Because his father was further away, only that didn't make sense.

His pinkie finger brushed something that rolled, and he recoiled again before realizing it was a pearl. He wondered if pearls could get stained. He picked it up.

It was hard, searching for pearls in the dark without touching the bodies. He kept brushing against his mother's hair, kept realizing he was trying to move hushedly, like they were asleep and he might wake them. (If only, if only.) The warm presence of the other boy crouched just a little way away on his left side kept him awake, kept him from locking out the world and staring, but that meant he needed something, something to distract him, and shoving all his mother's bloodied pearls into his flat tuxedo-jacket pockets one by one seemed necessary, somehow. After a while, he noticed he was shivering.

The other boy noticed around the same time. Stood up, contorted for a few seconds, and then dumped his too-large sweatshirt on Bruce's head. It flopped over his still-almost-useless vision, smelling of dirty boy and garbage but not—this was important—of blood, and Bruce almost didn't want to remove it. Couldn't, he realized, without getting it bloody, because the cold-slimy-wet had seeped up through his shirt cuffs now and would smear all over anything he touched. He shook his head, instead, carefully, to make the thing slide to one side, so he could look up and say, "No, I can't. It's yours, it's—I'll just get blood on it." And if he put it on, he couldn't reach his tuxedo pockets, and.

The other boy snorted, bent over and arranged the thing so the hood was hooked over Bruce's head and the front trailing down his back, tied the long floppy arms around his shoulders so it became a sort of cape. "Thank you," Bruce said again. Not like he was talking about a BB gun this time.

The boy made a humming sort of sound and crouched down again. "I'll want it back, jus' so you know," he said, and Bruce nodded. Of course. Definitely. He took a small breath, and dipped his fingers back into the blood.

Another small scrape came near his ear, and when he looked up the boy had lit another match. He was holding it up in one hand and still had the book it had come from in the other, and Bruce realized that the first matches hadn't been wood, either. They were cardboard. "Go ahead," the boy whispered. (Where had he put the knife?) "Keep looking."

Bruce closed his eyes for a second. Nodded. Kept looking.

It was easier with the light, and harder. Easier because he could see the pearls, at least a little, but harder because he could see when there were no more in the blood around him, could see the ones just out of reach, and he tucked the ends of the boy's sleeves into the front of his tuxedo jacket so they wouldn't trail on the ground and crawled forward for them. Found one nestled against his father's ear like an Easter Egg hidden in the back garden (and Mom and Dad still thought he believed in the Easter Bunny but Alfred was keeping it secret that he'd guessed) and held his breath as he eased it out without touching. Changed his mind, suddenly, and brought his hand down to cup against the back of Dad's neck, the way the other boy had clasped him.

Dad was all the way cold, and another shiver spread up Bruce in spite of the hoodie. He snatched his hand back.

He found several that had rolled all the way to the wall, and one that had rolled up into the narrow space between two trash cans.

"Last one," the boy whispered as he lit one more match, and Bruce kept looking until it was almost burned down but found no more lost pearls. He was sure there were others, but he'd have to move the bodies, and…no. No, no, no.

He used the last of the light to go back, kneel down between the other boy and his mother.

"My name is Bruce," he whispered, when the dark had closed in again.

The red-and-white, knives-and-matches, it's-real-I'm-sorry boy pressed his shoulder against Bruce's, just for a second. His weight angled down onto Bruce because squatting on his heels made him a little higher up. "I'm Jason."

"Jason," Bruce repeated. "You don't have to stay."

"Sure I do," Jason disagreed. Then, after Bruce had listened to him breathing a little louder than before for several breaths, he whispered, "I never killed nobody before."

"You were so fast, I thought," Bruce said, and swallowed the rest of it.

"Yeah, I know. I just. You looked so small."

Bruce felt small. Smaller than he'd ever been before in his life, even though he knew he'd been growing steadily since he was born. The world was bigger and emptier than it used to be. He wasn't sure he wanted to be alive.

"It wasn't fair," Jason muttered. "You were so small. I just. I got this knife. And I was too small to wrestle him. Or. Because he had a gun."

Bruce bumped their shoulders again. Jason didn't rock from the impact, and Bruce was probably imagining he could feel that he was warm through five layers of cloth, but all the same he was definitely alive. "It's okay, Jason," he whispered. "You did okay. You saved me. Thank you."

He wasn't sure he cared about surviving. But at least the man hadn't gotten away.

A/N: Warnings: None of the archive warnings exactly apply, but a pair of fresh corpses are a physical and emotional centrepiece of the story, and a nine-year-old non-graphically cuts somebody's throat about six hundred words in.

This will probably be continued, but at the moment I have no idea for how long.