(nothing new) under the earth or sky

This one-shot was written for my best AO3 reviewer, Cerusee, who really wanted Alfred to get his own chapter of 'All the Roofs of Uncertainty,' and I figured I'd crosspost it here. It's basically the bastard child of my attempts to wrangle chapter nine to fruition and wikiiing Silver Age trivia. This is not in the same universe as 'Roofs,' but it's about the same approach to Jason. (Except he seized the present tense this time.)

Okay, so background: In the mid-sixties there was a Batman storyline that looks, in retrospect, *remarkably familiar.* ;D Assume this is set sometime during the lost year of 52, that Nightwing: Brothers in Blood is not a thing so Jason isn't running around in the blues, and that his Titan Tower blood-graffiti attack happened after UtRH instead of in the same time block.

"Good evening."

Jason jerks, smacks his knuckles on the wall, sits up in bed and stares at the patient apparition in the middle of his floor. "Al—Alfred!"

And how much does it say, he thinks distantly as he scrambles to his feet, heart doing double time, that the only thing that's gotten him to stammer in the six years since he came back from the dead with new purpose turns out to be the sudden appearance of the Wayne family butler. "What the…how…"

Asking how Alfred snuck up on him is pointless; Jason doesn't know if it's just a butler school thing or something from the mysterious past Bruce always intentionally didn't research, but before he was even in the field as Robin he'd learned that the old man had possibly the best stealth in the family and that no, he was never going to answer that question. How he'd found him? Less ridiculous a question, but still unlikely to be answered and more or less beside the point. At least he didn't quite swear. "What are you doing here?"

Alfred glances around the shabby little apartment, furnished with little more than stacks of weapons and the case-related clippings tacked to the walls, and the battered table that stands between them. And the bed, obviously, which by Alfred standards is probably even less of a bed than the table is a table. "I take my duties very seriously, Master Jason."

Jason smacks his hand against his forehead, as much because it's a good distraction from being embarrassed by his lack of housekeeping or eating vegetables as because he really can't believe this. "No. Seriously, no. Do not call me that."

"Is there some other form of address you would prefer?" the old man inquires, doing the eyebrow, as if he's ever taken much notice of what people want him to call them when he already knows what he deems appropriate. Jason considers the question anyway.

Mr. Todd? No. It would fit, but Jason can't demand it. Just can't. And Alfred would never call him just Jason. He tried for it, when he was new to the Manor and the servant thing was more pushing him toward flipping out about how out of place he was than it was exciting or flattering or whatever. Rags to riches is fucking stressful. "I'm the Red Hood," he says, and gets the eyebrow again. If Batman's mask didn't cover his forehead, his copied version of this expression would be a certifiable interrogation tool, Jason was always sure.

"Not out of costume, I think," Alfred says primly, and that's it. Jason scoffs, throws his hands up in the air, and flops back onto his unmade bed, skull thunking against the wall.

"Is this for real?" he demands of the ceiling. Looks back at Alfred. Still standing in the middle of the floor, calm as you please. "I don't even know how many people I've killed," he says flatly. "You sure as hell don't. I almost killed Bruce three times. I fucked with his head for months. I beat the Replacement half to death."

"Master Timothy has recovered nicely," says the butler, not a hair out of place. He even let the swearing go. Jason tries to ignore the twist in his gut at the title. He bets Alfred's the only person the Pretender knows who calls him Timothy.

"I must confess to some relief," Alfred continues, and Jason narrows his eyes. If this is about lecturing him, he can handle that. He won't put up with it for too long, but he knows where he stands if the old man's here to guilt-trip him about hurting the precious baby.

"His injuries are extraordinarily regrettable," Alfred says, in a tone as though he's agreeing with Jason even though Jason said not word one about regret, "but until you resurfaced to assault him, we had no evidence you had not been killed in the explosion."

"Killed again, you mean? Nah, me and the Joker, couple of cockroaches." Jason spits the words out with an easy smirk while he feels his world rock slightly and then settle back where it belongs. So Alfie was glad he wasn't dead again. That's what he's here to say. That's…nice. Actually nice.

Alfred was never the making-the-first-move type, not unless someone was bleeding to death which probably itself constituted an opening move in some kind of medical-aid checklist, so that he went to the trouble of coming here just to see Jason. Hard to believe. Pointless. But…yeah. Nice.

And now the Eyebrow has been moved up to an Alfred Stare, the one the Batglare totally used as prototype. "If you would please not refer to yourself in that manner, Master Jason."

"Shut up!" Jason retorts, bouncing up onto his feet once more as the hair on his neck prickles. "Stop! That was a failed experiment, okay? I'm not one of your young gentlemen, and if you really feel so obligated, sweep the place up and leave me a casserole or something and then…go." He squeezes his eyes shut so he doesn't have to deal with the look he knows he's getting for being so fucking rude. "Just go. You don't owe me shit."

There's a long silence, long enough Jason thinks Alfred might have used his Butler Stealth Powers to disappear while he wasn't looking, and then there's a soft scrape, and when he looks Alfred's pulled out the one wobbly chair from the table, the one Jason uses when he's cleaning his guns there and that's pretty much it, and sat down.

Jason knows they're all getting older, but Alfred still always made a point of only sitting down in sight of 'the family' under very specific limited circumstances. But then, Jason's not family. He just made that point. He's only not street trash right now because he has a budget won by mass murder and drug dealing. "My duty," the old man says, very crisply but still, somehow, a little bit pained, "has never been something as minor as an obligation."

Jason sags. He can't fight Alfred. It's like fighting a cloud right up until you actually manage to connect, and then hurting him just hurts you even worse. He drops himself back onto the mattress and his head into his hands. "I'm sorry about the books," he mutters.

He felt so smug, taking advantage of his intimate knowledge of Bruce and Alfred's private traditions and personal feelings, but he knew Alfred was the one who'd open the package with Joker's hair and get the message, and—well, he felt smug about that, too, because he's told himself for years that the proper, class-conscious old geezer was probably glad to be rid of him, but he can't hold onto that with Alfred right here. He doesn't have to lie to himself about Bruce to hate him, so seeing him face to face didn't change a thing, but Alfred…ugh.

"On the contrary," is the reply, with amusement tucked into it, "I would like to thank you for not sending the traditional severed ear."

Jason snorts, almost a snicker, really. "Oh, god, I should have. If Bruce had been the one opening the box I might've," but that's too much of a confession, and he raises his head, tense, and—Alfred's smiling. The tiny, thin smile that was all you ever really got out of him on a normal day, but still. Smiling.

"What do you think this is going to change?" he demands, partly to chase that smile away because that's not a way anybody should look at him. Talia's the only one who has in years and she was always only trying to use him. "Do you think you can guilt me back to the Manor and set me up in my old room and pressure Bruce into not throwing me into Arkham or cutting my throat again, or whatever he wants to do now?"

Alfred doesn't wince or look startled at the throat part, so he must already have heard—at least Bruce owned up, jesus—but folds his hands on the oil-stained tabletop. "I came to ascertain your health," he says, "and to express my joy at seeing you alive in person."

The hot twisting feeling inside Jason isn't anger, this time, but anger is always easiest to express, and he punches the mattress and forces down a pricking behind his eyes because this is meaningless. "Pretty sure you're the only one glad," he growls, and Alfred does the eyebrow thing again. "Yes, I know that's my own doing," Jason retorts, "but face it, it's not like Bruce was going to be throwing me any parties anyway, I come back after he's already replaced me, hopped up on Lazarus Pit, demanding he do things I'm clearly not worth. This was the only thing I could do," he insists, pushing Alfred to grasp that fact. Or to argue. To stop sidestepping the issue, already.

Alfred sighs. "I wish you could have seen," he says quietly. "The pain your loss wrought. Young Master Timothy loves his role, and has done well in it, but he stepped into it only because the void where you had been threatened to destroy us, and that he could not allow."

And no. No, he will not feel guilty for dying. He refuses.

"Can't you just…go. Please." Jason can't cope with this ambiguity. He's never been good at greys, he knows that, likes things simple and clear and clean, and now that he's realized nothing on this fucking polluted scrap-heap of an Earth is clean, well…clear, at least. He can manage clear-cut, if only by cutting everything messy out of his life. "I'm still out for revenge. I'm going to keep trying to break your charges, and making them bleed until they admit what they are. You're still thinking of me like I'm that kid who got grounded and ran off to Ethiopia and got blown up, and you need to stop, cuz he's still dead. This is what I am now. You can't change that."

He's locked eyes with Alfred by the end, and the old man sighs again. Looks away first, but still so effing composed.

"During your time as Robin," he says, and it's the first time either of them have specifically named any costume, any of the family hero identities, "did you ever come across mention of the crime figure known as the Outsider?"

Jason blinks. "Don't think so." There was that team Bruce led for a while, of course, but that wasn't a villain.

Alfred nods, as if that's unsurprising. "I brought the relevant file with me," he announces, pulling a flash drive from his breast pocket and looking pointedly toward the closed laptop balanced on the bedside crate. Eyebrows up to his hairline, Jason grabs the thing and stands up. He's willing to play along if it means finding out what this is about; Alfred Pennyworth has apparently smuggled him data stolen from the Batcomputer. He sets his own on the table and opens it.

It's a good piece of equipment—buying a decent computer isn't nearly as easy to track as renting a decent apartment, and is way more useful—and boots up quickly. Jason inputs his passwords before pushing the laptop across the table to Alfred, who turns it, slots the drive into place, and waits the necessary seconds for the drivers to download. Jason circles around the table so he can look over Alfred's shoulder.

Click, click, and the file's open. It's formatted for the giant Batcomputer screen, so all that shows is the photo at the top, kind of blurry like a lot of the file photos for villains that have never been taken into custody, cropped either from security footage or a camera Bruce or Dick had in their gear during an encounter. Jason squints at it for a second. Dead-white, slightly manic-looking…covered in overlapping black rings. Or possibly very circular lumps. Is that face paint or a skin condition? It's like the Joker's angry Dalmatian cousin, or something.

Alfred scrolls down. Right under the picture is the red [INACTIVE] bar that mostly only gets added once an enemy is believed dead.

Under that the text reads: Outsider, The (Alfred Pennyworth)

and Jason stops reading. He hears himself make a sort of muffled squeaking sound, and without thinking about it reaches forward and pushes Alfred's hand out of the way to scroll up again, to get that deathly white face back on screen.

Looks again. Through the coloring, the expression, the total baldness, the bubbles all over the man's face, the weirdly beefy shoulders that are just visible below the head…yes. Okay. There's a resemblance. Maybe. He wouldn't even have thought that much if Alfred hadn't made a point of showing this to him. Would've thought it was just one of those coincidences, two people just by chance the same name. It probably is. He backs off with a sharp disgusted sound and glares at the old man's stoic profile. "What is this bullshit?" he demands.

"When Master Richard was thirteen years old," Alfred says, too calmly even for him, staring back at the ridiculous blurry photograph and its furious sneer, "I was struck by an exceedingly large rock due to my own…ill-considered approach to averting its crushing of Batman and Robin."

Jason can follow that much. He bets Alfred shoved them out of the way or threw himself into it or something like that.

"Events afterward are somewhat confused," Alfred proceeds emotionlessly. "I have no memory of the immediate aftermath. A body was recovered, which was understood to be mine and interred appropriately. A body was also recovered, probably but not definitely from the grave, by an extraordinarily mad scientist and mystic by the name of Brandon Crawford. His account of whether I was dead or merely nearly so at the time varied, as did his description of the techniques he used for my revivification, perhaps partly because he managed to give himself radiation poisoning in the process, but the result was as you see."

Fuck the 'as he sees' and the ominous Outsider villain file and all that, Alfred seriously spent long enough legally dead, or possibly actually dead, that there was a funeral, and Jason never knew it had happened? Before his time, sure, but what the fuck?

The old man turns to look at him and he can't believe he's being messed with. Not with those eyes. "My memory resumes from this point, although—jumbled. For all the change in my appearance, my faculties seemed to me to be intact. I felt stronger than I had in decades. I knew myself, and my recall was unimpaired. I believed I had sacrificed myself for my young charges and been abandoned where I fell, like unwanted rubbish, or else buried alive." His eyes go distant, over Jason's shoulder, and he's never seen the man like this. "While I remember it clearly, I find it difficult now to fully understand the rage I felt at this betrayal."

Jason's nails are biting into his palms and his hands are shaking. He tries to interrupt and can't.

"A woman named Harriet Cooper had taken over my responsibilities. Life otherwise continued as it had before. I have since been assured that my absence hung like a pall over the household, that the appearance of normality was an attempt to do as I would indeed have wished and carry on, seeking closure. But from where I stood, outside the circle of this resolution, I could only see a life dedicated to service thrown away, and I…was not myself." He pauses. "I swore vengeance."

"On Harriet Cooper?" Jason asks, and is utterly startled to hear his voice come out only a little rusty, with the joke more snide than…hopeful. Damn, he's good.

Alfred looks flatly up from his seat, possibly seeing right through him. "I am afraid I considered her beneath my attention. No. On…Batman and Robin. I set myself up as a criminal mastermind. This is surprisingly easy to do." There's a wry twist under the narrow moustache and Jason makes a voiceless laughing sort of sound that has less to do with amusement than surreality.

"Yeah," he agrees. He put a lot of work into Red Hood, but when it comes down to it, he could've established himself completely in well under a month. Gotten enough of a rep to come to Batman's attention within days, if that had been all he'd wanted.

Alfred nods; turns in the wobbly chair so he's facing Jason and his folded hands are in his lap. "I worked through agents, for the most part," he says lightly. "Hired a man called Grasshopper to take advantage of certain security bypasses of which I was aware, to steal and misuse various Bat-vehicles. Strategically sicced a witch and a gang on the pair. Eventually, utilized extranormal abilities which the revivification process had left me to turn every piece of equipment they used against them. If footage existed of Batman's fight against the Batmobile I assure you it would be most amusing."

Weirdly, Jason's breath is coming easier at this recounting of Alfred's (relatively tame) villainous exploits than it was earlier, when he was talking about how he felt about the circumstances of his 'death.' Alfred does not talk about his feelings. Even more than Bruce. Alfred does not talk about himself.

It's more than that, he knows, but that's enough to be freaking out about.

"And after each operation," Alfred continues, "I made sure to leave them a message, informing them of The Outsider's involvement. To rob them of any satisfaction in their victory, you see, as I knew such things always did, and to enlarge the shadow of my threat in their minds. That was the message, you see. One of two messages: 'These things you depend on, how will you manage if they are taken from you, turned on you?' And 'You will be defeated by me.'"

"Well, obviously that didn't work out for you," Jason points out roughly. The first message—he gets that. It makes so much sense, if he can get past the weirdness of Alfred feeling used and discarded and doing something about it.

"No," Alfred agrees. "Fortunately."

"So?" Jason asks. "What happened? They figured you out, dragged you home?"

"Mm," Alfred hums, that noncommittal sound he always used when you were so interested in what you were saying you didn't really care if he said anything at all, and he had nothing he wanted you to hear. Jason's shoulders bunch up worse and he gives Alfred a look.

It's his own version of Alfred's own Look, more or less, layered over the one Jason developed himself as a mouthy kid without a gang to back him up, with bits and pieces stolen off a lot of the pretty huge number of people who've glared at him over the course of his life. For some reason, it makes the old man smile.

"I sent a pair of Batman and Robin automata I'd had commissioned to deliver a coffin each to Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, and put my fingerprints on the outside of each casket. A promise of death, and a whisper of my name. It was enough. They understood, even if they didn't entirely believe…"

"And?"

"I nearly killed Master Richard." Alfred says it so flatly, so dryly, it almost doesn't sound like it bothers him. He shrugs a little. "I underestimated the extra burst of strength his peril would lend Batman, and was defeated."

Jason blinks. He doesn't know why he expected more information. Crazy Alfred was just a standard villain takedown, it sounds like. If there was anything special about the fight, Alfred's not sharing. "So I'm guessing he kept you instead of handing you over to Gordon."

"Just so. Master Bruce gleaned what he could from Crawford's jumbled notes, and prevailed upon his Justice League compatriots for assistance." Even back then, that was a pretty huge concession for Bruce to make, but—it was Alfred. Jason isn't surprised. "Kryptonian knowledge of exotic radiation frequencies and Miss Zatara's direct aid were both invaluable."

"So they fixed you." Alien technology and magic and who knew what, to turn a crazy ridiculous monster back into the Alfred they knew. The one from before he died.

Alfred inclines his head. "As you see."

"And everything just…" he gestures roundly. "Went back to normal? How long were you 'dead?'"

"Some five and a half months, Master Jason. I was restored in time to help Master Richard prepare for his first term of upper school."

"But—you—what about that Harriet woman?"

"She did not leave immediately, but she did leave." Alfred shrugs again. "I confess when she had departed I found myself missing my short-lived telekinetic abilities far more than the aid of Mistress Cooper, faced with managing the household myself again."

Jason snaps. Strides forward, slams the laptop closed, and looms over the thin old man—who he always imagined could defeat them all easily if he ever lost it, but then the disadvantage of losing your mind is you're crazy afterward, and your plans are therefore stupid. "God-fucking-dammit!" he snarls. "What kind of pointless story is that? They failed you, and you were mad, and you tried to get revenge and lost so they—turned you back to what you were before and you let everything be the way it was? Like they'd never done anything?"

"As if I had not, either," Alfred replies, gazing calmly up at him as though there is not a hundred and ninety pounds of repeatedly-homicidal muscle in his precious personal space.

"That's not the same!" he spits. "You were used and abandoned and tried to do something about it, and then you just let it happen again?" Alfred's always been taken for granted, pulls off miracles and dedicates everything to taking care of Bruce and whatever brat he's dragged home, and the one time he stands up for himself—

Alfred stands. Right up into Jason's personal space, and slips one arm over his shoulder to pat his back, gently, twice.

From someone who never seems to touch anyone unless he's giving medical treatment, it's practically a hug, and so is the way he settles his hand momentarily on Jason's shoulder as he withdraws to the other side of the chair, giving them both back their space. "Master Jason. I was granted back my life. And whatever I believed, I was sorely needed and missed. And no matter my anger, I did not truly wish to see them dead."

"It's not the same."

Alfred shakes his head in agreement.

"They put you in a coffin and walked away and replaced you!"

It's exactly the same.

Jason's knuckles ache with the tightness of his fists. "I don't have to forgive him!"

"Of course you don't. My dear boy."

And Alfred always had this way, when he acted up as a kid, of looking at him so he shriveled up in shame, but that's not quite the look he's using now. He's using the one that was so patient, so understanding, that Jason would sneak around trying to undo whatever mess he'd made before Alfred had to deal with it at all.

He means it.

"So what's the point of telling me about how you did?" His voice cracks a little, and Alfred's mouth tightens.

"Because I wanted you to know, Master Jason. That I understand. And that you can come home, if you wish. It is not too late."

Jason swallows. "It's too late. It's been too late."

"Your room has been kept just as it was."

Cleaner, he's betting. Alfred probably dusts once a week, and the dirty laundry he left at the foot of his bed was probably clean and in the closet long before Jason was cold, let alone in the ground. He left the copy of All Quiet on the Western Front he'd been reading for school bookmarked with the notes he'd made for the paper that was due at the end of the week. Is that still there?

Wayne Manor has enough empty rooms Bruce could afford to close up a dozen and never look at them again, so it doesn't mean that much, except the reminder that the dead are static. The room of the dead Robin has stayed as it was.

Jason's voice isn't as loud as he wants it to be. "But I haven't."

"That's quite alright."

Anger makes him strong again. "No it damn well isn't! I can't be that kid who died, old man," he says again, as if Alfred might be listening better than he was before. "I don't even want to."

And he doesn't. That stupid, stupid fifteen-year-old boy, body and soul all marked with scars from years on the street and comparatively cushy years in the vigilante business and still so soft, yearning in every direction for people to love, people to trust, for someone to care about him as much as he did about them. For someone to be willing to fight for him. Bruce came closer than anybody ever, and it was never enough, even then, any more than Jason was ever good enough for him.

He shakes his head, hard, and narrows his eyes at Alfred. "All trying to be what other people want gets you is thrown away. And maybe that works for you, or maybe you just got magically brainwashed into thinking it was okay, but I am done letting people use me."

If Alfred argues with him now, Jason can kick him out and pretend this never happened. So of course he doesn't. He just waits. One eyebrow a little higher than the other.

Jason slams a hand down on the table. He doesn't have a gun on him—there was one under the pillow, but he left it behind without a second thought when he went to lend Alfred his computer. "Are you listening? I don't want to go back."

"And that is your choice to make. Master Jason. But understand," and now his eyes sharpen, though otherwise he doesn't move, "that it is a choice. I chose my place in the household. I chose it and shaped it around myself, and would not surrender it for anything short of death. This exile you have lived in—that is your choice."

Jason's gut lurches, and if he'd eaten today he might have been in danger of throwing up. He punches the table again, and turns his back on the old man. Takes several impatient steps, and hears a soft brush of cloth against cloth, Alfred making some motion behind him. Before he knows he's moving he's snatched up a box of ammunition, the heavy .50 caliber stuff, and hurled it against the wall, hard enough that the cardboard splits and spills out the whole contents in a terrific clatter of brass, and while it's still rolling and clinking across the floor he's turned back, to find Alfred hasn't taken one step to follow him. "Do you think I don't know that?"

He feels unsteady on his feet suddenly, and moves in a little bit of a hurry to close the remaining gap to his bed, where he sits like a dropped puppet. "Do you think I don't know that," he repeats hoarsely, staring at his hands until they come up to cover his face.

He doesn't really think he can come back now. Alfred is being ridiculous. But back at the beginning—when he first had his mind again, when Talia pushed him into the Lazarus Pit to undo the brain damage and then pushed him off a cliff to get him away from Ra's, and he was finally, really alive again—if he hadn't seen that story, Batman Jails Joker Yet Again, he would have gone home. He would have run right back to Bruce.

Going back to Gotham to wire the Batmobile with a bomb he never set off doesn't count. He remembers…the evening after Talia told him about his replacement, handed him the file with all the data her agent had gathered, and he just smiled straight through it. Until he was alone. In his own room, with the photographs posted on the wall, the new Robin smiling so free…and then he'd let himself feel it. Let himself cry for the last time. For the death of one of the last shreds of his childhood, he guessed. For the belief that Bruce was hurting just as bad as he was, even if he wouldn't do anything about it. For the idea that it mattered at all that he was dead.

And he knew, then, that he'd thrown away something he hadn't realized he had. Perfect Grayson had been so pissy about being replaced, even though Bruce always liked him better anyway, but the thing about being replaced was that it meant home wasn't there to go back to anymore. Not wanting to go didn't mean you didn't want it to be there. But he'd left it too long, and there was another boy in his place.

Nowhere for him in Batman and Robin. He'd given it up—would have spat on it, if it had been a physical thing you could hit with spit. But having it taken—well. He'd thought he had nothing left to take.

"You will always have a place with us," comes Alfred's quiet voice, from much closer than he expected, but he can't bring himself to be surprised.

"I could take that as a dare, you know," Jason says, without picking up his head. "To find some crime bad enough that you'll give up on me."

"I am rather stubborn, young sir," is the reply.

Jason curls his fingers into claws around the tuft of white hair at the front of his head. The Pit took all his scars and left him this. "I don't have some nonsense radiation crazy that you can just reverse and pretend it never happened," he points out. Not that he'd let them if he did. "I chose this." It tastes bitter on his tongue, because going back to Bruce once he knew how little he'd ever mattered was no choice at all. But maybe there was something he could have done besides this. Something better. Something that had nothing to do with Batman or Robin or the League of Shadows, maybe.

He doesn't know. To walk away for good would have meant giving up fighting, and that was never in him, before or after the burn of death or the cold fire of leaving it.

The bed groans as it sinks with the weight of a second man, and Jason can actually feel the prickling presence of Alfred just past his elbow. Might not be imagining a hint of body heat, and even though he's never really doubted the old man's humanity it's strange to imagine him having things like sweat and blood and body heat. Fuck, the guy has to shit and piss just like anyone, too, though he'd never let on. Took Jason months at the manor to get proof he ate.

"It does take a certain determination to hold to a path once chosen, in spite of all obstacles," the crisp British voice remarks, a million miles away from bodily functions and the gutters built to cope with them. "But in many ways it takes a greater strength to choose again."

Jason snorts. As if Bruce would ever believe that. Whole house of hypocrites.

"You always thought I was going to go bad," he says. Because he might not believe Alfred actually wanted him dead, but he knows this. "You worried about how I thought from the beginning. You never trusted me. I was just—just this psycho street kid." His arms want to fold across his chest and he lets them, closing his right hand around the hilt of a hidden knife as his shoulders hunch and he keeps his eyes closed like that will mean his face is still covered. "You were probably—so glad to have a nice, well-bred boy like Master Timothy in the house."

"I am quite fond of him," Alfred agrees blandly. "He is well-mannered in addition to clever and determined. But I am afraid I cannot say that I like him any better than you. After all," he adds, that amused pinch he calls droll coming into his voice, "Young Master Drake lacks a certain enthusiasm for the culinary arts."

The hand on the knife has loosened. "Just shovels down the fuel like Bruce on a case, huh?" he asks. Props his forehead in one palm and lets the other arm lie slack across his knees. The wrist bones stand out.

"Worse," Alfred answers. "He displays a tendency to forget that food exists if not reminded at regular intervals."

Jason snorts. Lucky brat, to never have learned not to take eating for granted. Bruce used to do the same thing, when he got really focused. "At least you get to feel useful," he says.

"That is important," Alfred agrees serenely. Jason wonders if Alfie knows he's cut him off from the nearest gun by sitting between him and the pillow. Not that he thinks Alfred could take him barehanded. Could he? Probably not. At his age, the bones start to get brittle, and there's no way even if he was really good at aikido or something once that he's kept in real practice without any of the highly trained vigilantes he lives with noticing. Well, almost no way. The point is, Alfred's apparent total lack of concern for his own physical safety in this situation is almost certainly down to not expecting Jason to try anything. Which is really not justified by the available data.

Well, there's the part where Jason knows hurting the old guy will just hurt himself worse. But he's not exactly renowned for his sense of self-preservation.

Kind of the opposite, actually.

He closes his fist, the one in his lap, and thinks about driving it into Alfred's face. Cracked cheekbone. If he punched him in the stomach maybe he could prove the eating thing retroactively. And—

The abrupt snapping feel of bone yielding under his heel flashes through him and leaves him sick. No. He can't. Not Alfred.

It's not that he thinks the old man's a saint, even if he has the patience for it. It's just…fuck. Bruce tried so hard, when he got to the Manor, to make it home, to make it a place worth being in for something besides the sheer fucking crazy wealth oozing out of the walls, and he didn't do so bad, but Alfred's the one who made it real. Or safe, or both. He didn't expect the worst from Bruce, exactly, but it would've taken a lot longer to believe it wasn't all some kind of con if they'd been alone in that big house. Plus, food. Always a sure way to a guy's heart.

"You were not 'just' anything," Alfred says gravely, and there's no hesitation, no discomfort, or attempt at offering comfort. Just fact. "You were not distrusted. And I did not expect anything but the best of you."

That hits like the boot up under the ribs that Jason isn't going to give. Guilt for dying, fuck no. For fucking with Bruce and Replacement and that whole thing? Infinitely postpone. For the vigilante killings? He was doing the world a fucking favor. But for disappointing Alfred? Apparently, hell yes.

"I worried, certainly. I have always worried. That each night will be the one on which someone does not return. That the darkness in which Master Bruce steeps himself will one day swallow him. And I had that fear as well for you. You had so many reasons to be angry. I have taken lives," he continues, almost without a change in tone, and does not falter when Jason starts, sits upright, and stares at him, heart pounding. "In the service of my country. I know what it costs, even from behind the shield of duty."

Again the laugh barks from Jason's throat. "Costs?" he repeats. "It doesn't cost a damn thing!" It doesn't. He thought, the first time—he expected to feel something. But it was exactly like any other takedown, except he didn't have to worry about fighting the bastard ever again. It was winning, only better. "And even if it did," he continues, so harshly his throat stings, "why shouldn't I be worth it? He was supposed to be—like a father. He was supposed to—"

"He cares." Alfred's interruption was barely more than a murmur, but it cut Jason off anyway. He chokes. Turns his head away, hard. Alfred's shoulder brushes a little closer to his—well, to his bicep, really; he's taller than Alfred now. When did that happen? "I promise, Master Jason. He cares very much." Jason scoffs. "I know exactly how you feel," Alfred repeats. Still present. Still almost touching him.

"Why does he do it?" Jason asks. Anyone even inches further away than Alfred is couldn't have heard him. "Why does he—throw us away and move on?"

"He does not."

Anger starts to hiss through Jason's teeth, and again there comes that whisper of sleeve against arm, prickling against the stiffened hair on his skin.

"He never moves on, Master Jason. Only—forward. Your loss has become as much a part of him as that of his mother and father. You have my word." Alfred lets that sit for a few second. Jason isn't even entirely certain what Alfred's word means—oh, he trusts it, as much as he trusts anything, but he doesn't know if this is just believe that I do not lie or I stake my reputation or something bigger and fiercer, like whatever Alfred did or said to promise himself to Bruce, apparently forever.

Forever doesn't actually have to last. Jason said forever once, himself.

And Alfred once said never, and even if they held him down and forced him to become theirs again—well, this is Alfred. Jason can't believe he's the result of brainwashing. He chose. And chose again. And chose again.

"If I make you choose," Jason says, "you'll choose them. Him. You have to."

"It's true," Alfred agrees, quiet and toneless like he's trying to make it not a threat.

Jason snorts. "Fuck."

"Master Jason…" Alfred says, and Jason doesn't argue about the title even though it gives him a flare of frustration and bitter-fucking-loneliness, and he grunts acknowledgement. His name, said and noted. "Simply because the past can never return as it was…it does not follow that nothing can ever be the same."

Jason lets himself breathe through it as he feels out the corners of that. He has the feeling of being a feral animal being coaxed with scraps, which makes him want to burn the world, but he also—it's Alfred. Just because everything's changed doesn't mean some things can't go back to how they were?

Alfred will never choose him over them. Fact. He's admitted it. That should be more than reason enough to kick him out and scrub the location and be more careful about where he hides out next time.

"Tell me about that Batmobile fight," he says. Because he knew the same secrets Alfred did, to get the car stolen, and he used them against Bruce the same, except it was a bomb, meant to devour everything, and…he never actually hit the trigger.

For a second he thinks Alfred won't, which wouldn't be surprising, or even really offend him. Some people might say Jason's an overentitled prick, but it's really about a fifty-fifty split between times he expects stuff he doesn't get and times he gets more than he thinks he deserves. "Well," comes the papery voice after a few seconds, "it exploded at the end."

He snickers, and shoves very lightly with his shoulder into Alfred's arm. So long as he keeps his eyes covered it's almost like he's fourteen again, lounging around the kitchen pinching food and giving Alfred a hard time while the old man pretends to mind. "Come on, that's not how you tell a story! Who starts at the end, jesus."

"Well," says Alfred again, with that droll pucker sounding in the corner of his mouth. "Most disconcertingly for Batman, it did not fight like a vehicle, but more like a Burmese tiger, all lunging and prowling."

"He was still using souped-up sports cars then, wasn't he?" Jason reflects, thinking over the history of the Batmobile as he knew it. He always took an interest in the car—it was what got him into the family in the first place, after all. Twenty-some years ago, Bruce started by basically just armouring a Lamborghini and sticking the Bat logo on it. Sometimes Jason doesn't understand how Gotham doesn't recognize Bruce Wayne just as easily as Star City did Oliver Queen, even without the distinctive facial hair.

"As a base," Alfred agrees. "Yes."

Neither of them states that obviously a powerful sports car is the vehicular equivalent of a great cat. They are clearly on the same page.

"The duo had more practice with cars than tigers, but after a few false starts Batman began luring it into leaping attacks that exposed the undercarriage. Robin darted in—at first he targeted exposed fragile systems, as though he really were disabling an animal, but soon enough he focused on fouling the axles, so that the car could not accelerate, and after that, defeat came swiftly.

"And when they had subdued the creature, and it seemed they would either destroy it or drive out my influence and repair it to use as a car again, I lashed out and, ah…separated the component atoms of the steel from one another, so that they burst into a cloud of metallic dust."

Jason raises his eyebrows against the palm of his hand. That was some telekinesis, and he hoped Bruce had been appropriately impressed by the sheer force that had gone into denying him his Batmobile. "That doesn't sound too dangerous."

Alfred shrugs. "Robin came close to damaging his lungs by breathing it in, but other than that, it was not. Mostly, it made a statement." A statement. Yeah. Jason wonders for a second whether The Outsider was prepared to kill himself rather than belong to Batman again, if they had to strap him down or sedate him for the procedure. Stops wondering. "It was foolish, as well, because it gave Batman the necessary data to shield his equipment against further remote animation, and I had to move on to other, somewhat less poetic modes of attack."

Like robots with coffins and hired gangs.

"Why did you call yourself The Outsider?" he asks.

"Why do you think?" Alfred's voice is gentle, but it's also got a cutting edge, turned entirely inward. Jason wants to take the blade away so Alfred can't hurt himself with it, even though he knows there's no way you can take away a person's ability to turn on himself.

He closes his eyes instead. "Yeah," he says, because he knows. He remembers. Older than the memory of waking in his grave, of the Pit or the newspaper; long before he found out he'd been replaced. That lance of pain, down through your chest, shaking through your arms into the palms of your hands, trying to make them grasp because the lizard brain doesn't understand that you can want so badly something that can't be touched, it only understands taking the things you need. Standing on the outside, looking in.

When Jason was nine, he climbed a fire escape and watched somebody else's family eat Thanksgiving dinner. Twenty of them crammed into the main room of a crappy Crime Alley apartment, gathered around a patchwork mass of half a dozen folding card tables and somebody's desk, and they were so happy. It took everything he had not to break the window.

It's so much worse when you used to be inside, and you finally know what it's like, but you can never have that again.

He wonders what Alfred's parents were like.

"I feel kinda cheated," Jason says at last. "I didn't get any superpowers from the Lazarus Pit. Just—" He cuts himself off reflexively, but it's Alfred, Alfred who came here to tell him about his own brief career as a supervillain and how it felt. "Just voices in my head," he mutters, ruffling his hand up the back of his skull, and glances up to see what Alfred thinks about that. "They're gone now," he adds. "Mostly."

There are still moments when he laughs too loud and talks too much to drown out the voices, and he doesn't think they're really the Pit exactly because they're him, it's his own voice in his head screaming and whispering and sneering, but his thoughts never did that before he died, not even when they built up so much he was shaking with them.

So he's crazy. It's not like everybody didn't already know. It's not like he's going to blame anything on that. They're gone now and they were never constant, and he made a lot of his most vicious decisions in the still, pure silence of certainty. There was green fire eating through his skin occasionally but mostly, mostly ever since he came back he's been cold. When he's angry, especially when he's got the Pit screaming in his head, that's when he's felt the most alive.

He hates the way Alfred's carved his way through that cold distance, but he can't quite bring himself to reach for fire, when the slight pressure against his arm is so warm.

"Well, Master Jason," says the old man, with something that's almost a twinkle in his eye like Jason used to catch when he let him have extra cookies before patrol, "at least you kept your good looks."

And he pictures the angry lumpy-faced troll that was apparently Alfred for a few months, and finds himself laughing.

Alfred hums his own amusement, understated but not exactly hidden, and says something about the groceries he left in the kitchen, which is literally eight feet square not counting the fridge but of course he brought food, and it's. Just like it used to be. Even though everything's different.

…how about that.

A/N: It was the Silver Age so Alfred really *didn't* get mourned that much; various other liberties have been taken with the original Outsider storyline to make it a) less stupid and b) fit into the post-Crisis universe. (Including aging Dick down; he actually attended prom in the same issue that Batman and Robin fought the Batmobile, but he pretty much stopped aging for the entirety of Tim's Robin run, so retroactively he split with Bruce before he hit twenty, and that was definitely not in the immediate aftermath of Alfred's death and resurrection, because that would have changed the emotional dynamic profoundly.)

Alfred's scenes in 'Under the Red Hood' have a very different feel if you reinsert this incident into his backstory. Especially the already-intense coffin scenes. O.o