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Dick screams himself hoarse on the ride back to the Cave.
It’s a bad dose, even if there isn’t truly a good dose of fear toxin. Scarecrow’s last-ditch effort was the hasty deployment of all of his fear toxin vials at the same time. Dick had taken the brunt of it, inches away from slamming a fist into Scarecrow’s threadbare mask and caught in the sudden gas cloud.
The amount Dick inhales is six times the dose Bruce’s antidote is synthesized to eliminate. Without a mask or any other protective equipment, the majority of it had collected in his hair, caked the bare skin of his face, and glued itself to the inside of his nose and mouth.
Dick reaches critical toxicity fifteen minutes from the Cave. Bruce pushes the batmobile to an impossible speed as he begins to sob and scream. The screams start as short, punctuated exclamations, eventually giving way to hoarse screams of pain that go on for minutes at a time. He curls into the corner of the backseat, trembling fingers winding in the three point harness Bruce had secured him in.
There’s a bitter taste on his tongue as he pulls -- thank you, God -- into the Cave’s bay. Bruce pushes away the realization dawning in the back of his mind, ignoring the telltale trembling in his own hands and the sudden pit in his stomach.
Within seconds of hitting the brakes, Bruce lifts Dick into his arms, grimacing as clumsy fists beat at his face and chest. He takes a smarting hit across the nose but doesn’t stop. The decom showers are ten feet away from the bay for a reason -- time, of course, being a priority, but still ultimately second to practicality. Even with the 60 lbs he has on Dick, wrestling him into the showers is a fight every time. Ten feet, he can cover before Dick can do any significant damage to others -- or himself.
Bruce kicks open the shower stall, sets Dick down on the tile floor, and slams the door shut. The external lock clicks; Bruce presses the button next to the handle and waits for the water to start.
Dick howls. The sound makes Bruce shiver, even though it is muffled by the door. He knows Dick down to the bones; he knows the scream is one of agony, of loss, and not outright fear. An adult’s desperation at being shown a century’s worth of grief in a fraction of a second. A sound with no end, because grief itself could live on in his heart for as long as it was beating.
The water blasts away the rest of the fear toxin residue, taking Dick’s domino mask with it. At the same time, a throat clears by the decom entrance.
“Stay there,” Bruce warns, lifting a palm before Alfred can step inside the enclosed space. “It’s going to aerosolize in the steam. He got a massive dose.”
Wordlessly, Alfred holds out the antidote, already loaded in an auto-injector with the cap removed. Bruce steps closer, reaching out a hand; Alfred deposits the auto-injector in his glove. They both flinch at Dick’s next scream.
“Will this be enough?”
Bruce flips the auto-injector around, examining the fill line on the side. It’s a triple dose. Typically meant for three separate applications. They both know, without needing to speak, that it might not be enough for Dick.
They both know the auto-injector contains the final three doses of the antidote the Cave has on hand.
“It’ll have to be,” Bruce says. He grips the auto-injector in his right hand, preparing to open the shower stall again. “Stay back. He might try to run.”
“Sir--” Alfred says, but it’s already too late. Bruce ducks under the high-capacity showerheads, heading for the far corner where Dick is curled up into a shivering ball.
The moment Dick senses him, a heel snaps out toward his face, trembling but sure. Bruce ducks the hit, blocks the clumsy fist that flies toward his cheekbone, and maneuvers himself behind Dick to grab him in a headlock.
The injector hisses as it plunges through Dick’s suit and into his thigh. Bruce holds him through it, keeping the needle in his leg as long as possible. The water from the showerhead is blistering; Bruce closes his eyes behind the cowl’s lenses, letting it wash down his face.
Dick goes limp in his hold with a choked sob. Bruce holds him upright against his chest, removing the needle once it clicks twice.
“B,” Dick mumbles, rooting against his shoulder. “B there’s something -- wrong. I don’t --”
Bruce’s throat aches. He brushes Dick’s limp hair away from his face, trying to make some of the purge easier.
Ten minutes and twenty-seven seconds later, Dick gags, chokes, and finally vomits into the drain. He leans back against Bruce with a groan, eyes fluttering.
“Dick,” Bruce risks. At the sound of his voice, Dick’s body goes even more limp against him.
“Hnng.” Dick spits bile into the drain, groans, and does it again. “Fear…toxin?”
Consciousness. Check. Alert to surroundings. Check. Temporal awareness. Check.
“You took it face-first,” Bruce says, pitching his voice low so it doesn’t spook Dick. “Are you still hallucinating? Any pain?”
After a moment, Dick shakes his head, eyes still closed. “No.”
Relief blooms in Bruce’s chest. He hides his shaky smile in Dick’s hair, which smells faintly of gel and the bitterness of fear toxin.
“You didn’t get hit?”
Bruce closes his eyes. It’s a small blessing that Dick can’t see his face.
“No.”
“Oh,” Dick says. “Good.”
When Dick is fully stripped of his suit, decommed a second time, and bundled off to bed with Alfred, Bruce finally gives into the growing pain behind his eyes. He presses his face to the cool metal of the shower stall, realizing, belatedly, that he still has the cowl on.
Darkness creeps up in his peripheral vision. Bruce breathes through a six count, then another. He meditates on the feeling of utter detachment, warding off the oil-slick that rises up between his boots.
Fear toxin is only as powerful as the mind lets it be, Bruce reminds himself. Give it nothing. No shelter, no power, no emotion. Nothing.
Alfred knows better than to touch him like this. Still, the sound of his footsteps split through his meditation, threatening its integrity.
“Prognosis?”
Bruce lifts his head from the stall. His smile is a dizzy, indistinct thing.
“I’m not…certain. The--” Bruce shakes his head, trying to concentrate. “I was hit with about the same amount as Dick. More than the first time, so…”
“Much worse than the first time,” Alfred finishes for him when the words fail. His stern expression is balanced out by fiercely pursed lips. “How long until we can synthesize another supply of the antidote?”
Bruce racks his mind. “Seven and a half weeks. Two if I buy the supplier of the antibodies outright, but that would create unwanted scrutiny. We could try and source the antibodies from that Chinese supplier, but you and I agreed that…”
The darkness begins to creep in again. Bruce scrabbles at the latches for the cowl, tearing it off his face and pressing his forehead to the blissfully cool shower stall.
“--need to shower--” Alfred says. Next to him -- above him? “--exposure will only make it--”
“I’m fine,” Bruce says. He shivers when Alfred’s hand rests between his shoulderblades. “I’m--”
--fine. Don’t touch me. Please --
Alfred’s hand is a warm memory. The kind of warmth that attracts the fear toxin as it begins to spread through his veins. Even without visualizing a specific memory, the warmth is taken from him.
“You’re not fine.” This time, the words are clear. Bruce shakes his head.
“I will be.”
“I don’t understand,” Dick says over breakfast. “You were right next to me. You must have been exposed.”
Bruce makes a task out of buttering one side of his toast, hiding his eyes from the table. In a room full of detectives, he is a mystery to unfold. A nut to crack. One mistake, and the mirage disappears.
No quarter, Bruce repeats in his mind. The words are Ra’s’, but he clings to them anyway. The world may spin around you, but you are nothing. You are not a center. You are blank.
“Yeah, because you don’t have a cowl,” Tim says on Bruce’s right. “B has eye protection and a nose filter. And it didn’t get into his hair--”
“Helmets protect your mouth, too,” Jason chimes in, looking up from his third mug of Alfred’s coffee. “Ask me how I know.”
“I’m not wearing a helmet,” Dick protests. Next to him, Steph makes a sympathetic noise. “No one wears it except you and --- okay, Cass kinda wears a helmet. Does your mask filter air too?”
Negative, Cass signs, though she looks intrigued by the idea. Her eyes dart to Jason. Try on? Later?
Jason signs back an affirmative. Across the table, Damian lets out a long sigh, still stirring his scrambled eggs around on his plate.
“Or, we could simply avoid Scarecrow.”
“Easier said than done,” Tim says. “B’s been trying for years.”
Bruce looks up, belatedly, to see the entire table staring at him again. He nods, short and sharp
I didn’t have the antidote then, he thinks in the safety of his own mind. Alfred locked me in the medbay until I stopped screaming. I saw it all. It didn’t feel real. It was real.
Instead, Bruce clears his throat, avoiding making eye contact with Alfred across the table.
“Perhaps a different topic of conversation is in order,” Alfred says, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “Any ideas?”
The haphazard breakfast breaks into laughter, jeers, and more than a healthy dose of ribbing. For a moment, Bruce’s concentration slips. Just a moment. A flicker of fear that licks at the inside of his chest like a hungry flame.
Every person at the table is dead. Dead since he sat down at the table fifteen minutes prior and forgot to guard the joy he feels at the head of this table. The darkness had latched onto that brief surge of emotion, twisting it.
It’s Bane’s carnage, ripped limbs and broken, protruding bones. Alfred smiles with half of his face; Dick eats his breakfast with vigor, no attention spared for the bloodied stumps of his legs. Tim’s neck bends at an unnatural angle, and Damian’s bends the other way. Cass’ lips are gone, leaving behind a gaping mouth of teeth. Steph’s hair is ripped out from the root, peeling the attached skin halfway down her forehead.
The room quiets. Bruce blinks; there’s a question he didn’t hear hanging over the table, addressed to him.
“Damian asked if you were planning on going into the office today,” Alfred repeats for his benefit. Bruce forces himself to look at his youngest, reaching for nothing even as the broken vertebrae bulge at Damian’s throat.
“No,” Bruce says. He sets the knife for his toast on the edge of the plate, tines-down. The jam he’d painstakingly spread across the sourdough is blood now. Jason’s blood, somehow. It even smells like him.
Damian’s disappointed look, bestowed on his picked-at breakfast plate, is a good thing. There’s no warmth there. The darkness can pull at it, but it is a familiar pain. It isn’t as satisfying as taking the good and twisting it.
“Well,” Alfred says. “Shall we start clearing plates?”
Hot showers intensify the effects of fear toxin, but sweating it out is the best option he has. The hotter the shower, the more he sweats. The more he sweats, the faster he metabolizes the toxin and clears it from his body.
The meditation slips twenty minutes in. The heat against his face becomes a rag in the blink of an eye. His nose and mouth fill with saltwater. More water pours onto the rag, suffocating him as he tries to exhale.
Ra’s had waterboarded him three years into his training with the League. His advice then had amounted to nothing more but endure.
Bruce endures, opening his throat as far as it will go. He swallows down the saltwater, refusing to fight for a breath.
Two days later, Scarecrow points a clawed finger at Tim, thumb poised to activate the gas canisters hidden in his palm.
Bruce pushes Tim out of the way just in time. The gas clips the side of his cowl and --
-- the rest sprays directly into Bruce’s face. Scarecrow bolts across the roof, but Tim doesn’t bother to chase him.
“B.” Then: “B.”
His feet are still under him, a victory in and of itself. Bruce waves Tim off, pulling an emergency disinfectant pad from his belt on touch-memory alone.
The toxin is wiped up from his face and cowl. The pad is slipped into an airtight container on his belt and sealed away.
“He missed,” Bruce lies. Tim’s silence is deafening.
“You should be clawing your brain out of your skull right now,” Dick says. “You’re sure you didn’t get hit? Tim says you got it all over your face.”
“I closed my mouth,” Bruce insists. Dick’s face is his own, save for his lips. He recognizes the lipstick shade with a jolt he manages to conceal with a yawn.
“You still got it on your face,” Jason chimes in, tag-teaming with Dick. He has a familiar set of teeth in his mouth, sharp in the incisors like Bruce’s own teeth.
“I wear a sealant on my lower face,” Bruce lies. “The toxin wiped away.”
The truth is far less palatable. The truth is, Tim would’ve been held down screaming for a week, with no antidote in sight. Unlike Dick, Tim would’ve screamed until something in his throat burst, and the well of blood choked him into silence. He would’ve metabolized the toxin half as slowly as Bruce, because of the sheer difference in size between their circulatory systems.
“Maybe he’s right,” Dick starts, turning to Jason. He mimes wiping his face. “He’s got the thingy, plus a little immunity from the last time. Alfred said he got dosed a ton a while back, right?”
“Hmm,” Jason says, pursing his Father’s lips. His eyes shift like a tidal wave to Bruce’s face. “You’re sure you feel fine?”
In response, Bruce holds up both hands for them to see. They do not shake, even though he can barely feel them.
“Well,” Dick says, a grin splitting his Mother’s reddened mouth. “I guess that’s your proof.”
When they leave, Bruce waits two minutes -- two minutes, twenty three seconds -- before sinking down into meditation on the medbay floor.
Through nothing but will -- or, perhaps, the absence of any will at all -- his heart rate remains slightly elevated, but steady. Alfred would notice, maybe Dick would too, but the discrepancy is easily explained away.
Things that cannot be explained away: bloodshot eyes, six-count breaths for every inhale and exhale, and the fact that he cannot walk through his own Cave without flinching at the sound of the bats roosting above him.
Once upon a time, he had shared his dread with his enemies. Now, that dread is his and his alone.
Alfred’s fingers slip across his cheekbones, tilting his face up into the light. Bruce holds perfectly still; there is, after all, a body in his arms. A familiar weight. A far too familiar size.
“This cannot go on forever,” Alfred says, a hint of desperation in his voice. He examines Bruce’s eyes, grimacing at what he sees. “Have you slept?”
They both know the answer to that question. Bruce looks away, tugging at Alfred’s fingers. He doesn’t look down.
“I’ve heard you scream two times in your life,” Alfred starts awkwardly. “Scream. Not shout. Once, when you first encountered the toxin, and second--”
“When Jason died,” Bruce finishes for him.
The boy in his arms twitches, begging him to look down. He can hear Jason’s ragged breaths if he concentrates, the agonal moans he’d clung to as proof that the mangled body in front of him was still alive.
“Yes,” Alfred says, shaken. “In your sleep. When your mind couldn’t take it anymore.”
Maybe you need to scream, Bruce thinks. It’s a silly thought, easily dismissed. Jason’s gash of a mouth bubbles over in pink saliva; without looking, Bruce clears the bloody foam and the broken teeth from his airway.
That evening, he locks the Cave exits, locks the locker room door, and bolts the private shower stall inside shut. He turns on the triple showerheads until the boiling hot water is more like sandpaper on his skin than liquid. His shoes overflow, the fabric of his slacks swells with the moisture, and the thin dress shirt across his chest sticks to his skin.
Bruce kneels, then tips forward into a bastardized child’s pose. He buries his face in his arms and screams. And screams. Until all he can hear is the ringing of his own ears and --
-- a gunshot. His loafers slip against the tile just as he lifts his head up and --
The darkness surprises him. He wakes up, but it isn’t the darkened stretch of Crime Alley that greets him. It isn’t the warehouse where Jason died. It isn’t a League safehouse or a crime scene. It takes him a moment to place.
A younger Bruce walks up to the Harbor’s edge, hands in his coat pockets. A foghorn sounds in the distance. His younger self ignores the interruption. He is, after all, here for a reason.
Bruce swallows his own shame as the gun is pulled from the younger Bruce’s pocket. This Bruce Wayne had contemplated murder minutes before. The gun had been in his hand. The trigger had been under his finger. Joe Chill had been six and a half feet away, bracketed on either side by attorneys and wearing a smug smile.
Instead of launching the small pistol into the water, his younger self studies it. The barrel is spun, clicking faintly. The gun fits perfectly into his hand.
Instead of boarding the docked ship two bays over, his younger self puts the gun into his mouth and fires. Brain matter splatters across the boardwalk; the body tips back, then forward, plunging into Gotham Harbor.
“You look tired, Mr. Wayne,” Lucius Fox says as they shake hands after the board meeting. “I hope your…nighttime activities are manageable.”
Bruce shakes back, forcing a smile. The corners of his mouth feel like they’re about to tear. “Absolutely.”
“Good,” Lucius says, blinking with Talia’s eyes. “I’m glad to hear it. You could still use a nap, I imagine.”
The building under their feet begins to shake and sway. Bruce’s heart lurches with it. A surreptitious glance out the nearest window reveals nothing but destruction. Skyscrapers crumbling to their foundations. Dust flooding the sky. Screaming --
“Mr. Wayne?”
Bruce snaps out of it. He turns back to Lucius, spine perfectly straight. “Maybe you were right about that nap,” he says, with a hint of self-deprecation.
Lucius’ eyes are his own again. Bruce can’t tell if he misses Talia’s eyes, or if their absence is a relief.
“Maybe I am indeed, Mr. Wayne.”
He sleeps when he absolutely has to. A fistful of sedatives keep him dead to the world, warding off the darkness for a few hours of fitful rest at a time. Never more than two or three hours; by then, his racing mind manages to push through the drugs.
Waking up with the sensation of Selina’s warm legs tangled with his is its own kind of torture. The bed is always empty when he turns over.
“In order to create fear, we must understand it,” a nameless Wayne ancestor tells him over the great room hearth. Clad in furs and well-worn winter clothing, he is the exact opposite of Bruce’s thin sleep pants and bare chest.
“In order to understand fear--”
No fear, Bruce thinks, shaking his head. “No.”
“No?” the ghost asks. He scuffs a boot against the hearth, revealing the Wayne crest. “How do you think this Manor was built, boy?”
“Fur trading,” Bruce replies. The hearth, previously frigid under his bare feet, is beginning to warm. “They got lucky.”
“Wrong,” the ghost says. His furs rise and fall with a silent bellow of a breath. “They were hunters.”
Hunters, Bruce thinks, then decides it’s a difference of semantics. The hearth burns under his feet, sending him jumping back.
“Hunters understand fear,” the Wayne ancestor says, ignoring the cherry-red Wayne emblem under his left boot. “They must, in order to evoke it in the prey they hunt. It is held in the heart and given. Where is your fear?”
Bruce glances around the great room, his heart pounding in his chest, but no bodies appear. No blood. Not even a glimpse of another memory.
“I don’t have any.”
The ghost reaches out, tapping a massive glove against his chest. Instead of meeting flesh, his fingers tap the breastplate of his armor.
“Don’t you?”
Two weeks after initial exposure, Bruce finds himself seated on the edge of the sparring mats, overseeing a no-holds-barred match between Dick and Damian.
Alfred and the others are seated around the sparring ring, taking the opportunity to observe. Jason’s head is bent over his phone, Steph looks bored, and Cass is watching the match with wide eyes as Tim tries to entice her into putting money down on the outcome.
Dick is a natural with escrima sticks, more so than any fighter -- League or otherwise -- Bruce has ever seen. Despite Damian being more than proficient in their usage, the match ends with Dick miming a knockout blow to the back of Damian’s head, pulling the hit at the last second.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Damian hisses as he climbs to his feet. “You could have knocked me out, fair and…”
“Square,” Cass supplies from the sidelines.
“Square.”
Dick ruffles Damian’s hair, escrima sticks already tucked under his arm. “You’re gonna appreciate me so much the next time you get a concussion. You have no idea.”
They split at the center of the mats: Dick, to the far end to speak with Jason, and Damian back to his starting mark, an escrima stick in either hand.
Fear pulses through Bruce’s chest, hot and real. It isn’t the darkness, but the sickly feeling of adrenaline pulsing through his veins, as potent as the fear toxin itself.
He knows, somehow, what Damian is about to do. The boy’s teasing Dick! is barely audible through the roar of blood in his ears. He’s on his feet within a second, lurching forward and --
-- catching the escrima stick in his hand a foot away from Dick’s head. Had it landed, the stick would have struck the soft, unprotected curve of his temple.
Bruce’s hand smarts as he lowers the stick. Every eye in the room is on him. For a moment, no one speaks.
“Jesus fucking christ,” Jason says first. “How the fuck did you catch that?”
“Why did you throw that?” Steph asks Damian, standing up and pushing her chair behind her. “You could have killed him. What the fu--”
“Hey,” Dick cuts in. His eyes flick to the escrima stick in Bruce’s hand. He swallows harshly, more than aware of how close that unseen hit had come. “It was an accident, okay? It’s all good.”
Damian’s eyes are swimming with tears. He drops his remaining escrima stick to the ground, clenching his trembling hands into fists.
Desperate, Dick looks to Bruce first. Fix this, his expression pleads. They’re moments away from losing the hard-won progress of the last year.
“Damian.”
His youngest flinches. Bruce approaches slowly, one foot after the other so Damian can hear him move. He kneels down on the sparring mat, inches away from Damian.
“I’m so sorry,” Damian whispers through the tears. His eyes don’t budge from the ground. Bruce lifts his chin up anyway, nudging it with a knuckle.
“Breathe with me,” Bruce says, even as his own heart pounds with unspent adrenaline. “Six counts in, six counts out. Ready?”
They breathe together three times. Damian’s hitched breaths flatten out on the third round. Bruce smiles, and, for the first time in weeks, it feels right.
“That was scary, wasn’t it?”
Damian nods.
“Will you apologize to Dick?”
The second nod is twice as vigorous as the first. Bruce taps Damian’s chest, just over the heart.
“So let it go,” Bruce says, flattening his palm against Damian’s shirt. “Breathe in, and when you breathe out -- let it go.”
They breathe together. The guidance is for Damian, but Bruce feels his own words begin to root in his chest.
Let it go.
Bruce exhales with Damian, long and slow. The last of the darkness goes with his breath, made real in adrenaline and dismissed with just a thought.
“One dose, or two?”
Bruce looks away from the monitors, surprised by the question. Alfred holds up an empty auto-injector, raising his eyebrows.
“For what?”
“For you,” Alfred says. “I know the effects may be diminished, but an additional--”
“None.”
Alfred falls silent. Then, with a stunned expression: “I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t need it,” Bruce says, turning back to the wall of monitors. “Put that back in storage before it turns.”
“Before it -- if this is some heroic attempt at stocking the antidote for the children, you’ve convinced me.” Alfred sniffs. “Now. One dose or two?”
“None,” Bruce repeats. On the lower left monitor, a feed of Gotham Harbor from the west starts to flicker. He minimizes his other window, pulling the video feed up onto the larger screen.
“You’re of sane mind?” Alfred asks. Bruce nods. “How?”
“I got scared.”
“Goodness,” Alfred says. “Pardon me, I thought you just said scared.”
“Fear is the solution to fear toxin,” Bruce says, glib. “Who’d have thunk, Alfred?”
When his joke goes unanswered, Bruce spins around his chair. Alfred stares at him like he’s a particularly interesting bug currently misbehaving in a very expensive enclosure.
“Fear dispels the toxin,” Bruce says, taking pity on him. “I tried to ignore it, but in the end, I fed it. I fed it real fear. My own.”
Silence sits between them for a moment. “Remarkable boy,” Alfred says, slowly shaking his head. “Remarkable.”
“Please put that back in storage,” Bruce reminds him, jerking his chin at the auto-injector. “I’d still like to be able to use it the next time I get dosed.”
With some grumbling, Alfred disappears into the medbay with the injector, returning it to the deep freeze.
“The next time?”
Bruce turns his chair back around, coming face to face with Tim. “Can I help you?”
“You already have,” Tim says, one hand already typing out a message on his phone. “But seriously, B. What the fuck.”
“What what the fuck?” Dick asks from the stairs, voice carrying down into the Cave. “Did I miss something?”
“Yeah,” Tim calls back over his shoulder. “Bruce got dosed with fear toxin.”
“When?”
“That’s what I’m asking next.”
A moment later, Steph, Cass and Damian appear on the stairs, likely beckoned by Tim’s text message.
“Jason is going to be so pissed,” Steph says to Dick. “Did you text him yet?”
“Tim’s on it.”
“Father,” Damian says. Bruce turns, obligingly, to the side. “You were dosed with fear toxin and said nothing?”
“He has an immunity to it!” Dick shouts from the stairs. Damian turns back to the monitors, a serious expression settling on his face.
“Is this true?”
“True in what sense?” Bruce stalls, fast forwarding through the Harbor feed he’d missed.
“Ugh. You always do this!”
“Do what?” Cass asks. Damian makes an unhappy sound in the back of his throat.
“Answering a question with another question.”
A hand settles on his shoulder, squeezing. A week ago, Bruce would have startled, losing hold of his meditation and tumbling into another hallucination. Today, he cherishes the warmth of Dick’s hand and the absence of adrenaline.
“Bruce.”
“Hnn.”
“Did you get dosed?”
Bruce closes his eyes, delaying his response. Damian might take the deflection, but Dick evokes truth with a singular look.
“Yes,” he admits quietly. “Seven doses.”
It’s Dick’s turn to close his eyes. His hand remains on Bruce’s shoulder. “Jesus, B.”
There’s a strange kinship in being the only two. Dick had clawed and screamed himself senseless; Bruce had done the same. The only difference was he’d limited it in his own mind.
“Yeah?” Dick asks after a beat. It’s not really a question, but it begets a reply. Bruce minimizes the open video feed, turning around to face his eldest.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?” Dick repeats, dubious. Bruce smiles, and it’s the easiest thing in the world.
“Yeah.”