Funeral

If you looked at it the right way, the funeral was almost amusing. The turnout was good, of course; Bruce Wayne had always been a public figure, and everybody who was anybody, or thought they were, made at least a token appearance. But not many of them were crying. Bruce Wayne might have been famous, but nobody really knew him. They were just there because it was the thing to do. But there were also some faces in the crowd who weren't anybody, who came from walks of life that should have precluded knowing a billionaire. And he had been involved in a lot of charities, personally involved (though not as much in his later years, as he became frailer and practically holed up in that mansion of his until his new assistant had somewhat brought him out of his shell). And some of them looked more upset at his death than the people who he usually consorted with. And Wayne's assistant was there, of course, not even trying to hold back the tears streaming down his face. It was rumored that he would inherit everything from Wayne. A few remembered that Wayne had fostered a couple of boys, but they hadn't been seen in years, so who knew if they would inherit anything, or if they were even still alive.

The ceremony was brief. He'd left very specific instructions, so there wasn't a priest, or speeches about his life and how he'd affected everybody. Just the casket and the hole in the ground. So most people only stayed long enough to drop a flower in his grave and be seen by other people, and then they left. But some of them, mostly the people who looked like they were actually upset at an old man's death (and a few people who wanted to find out why they were so upset about a man they couldn't have known well), lingered. But after a time, they, too, drifted away. Most of them left roses that a florist would recognize as Pennyworth Reds. Eventually the massive crowd was reduced to eight: a cluster of four, standing close like they were protecting each other, and another cluster of four, consisting of Terry, Max, Commissioner Gordon, and a man with glasses. The man with glasses said something to Terry and left abruptly. Then the commissioner gently pulled Max away. Terry didn't want to pull anybody away from their grief, but he forced himself to walk over to the remaining four. Their faces didn't show any emotion, but their universally tense muscles betrayed that it wasn't because they didn't feel anything.

"Hey, I don't wanna rush you or anything, but they gotta fill it in sometime," Terry said. He'd never thought he'd be able to speak without breaking down crying at the old man's funeral, but after the first few dozen people had talked to him it had gotten easier. His voice was only slightly rough now. And really, that wouldn't be good enough for Bruce, especially since the tears still ran down his cheeks and he couldn't stop them, but if Bruce and his high standards were still here he wouldn't have a problem not crying.

His words spurred them into action, and one by one they each laid a blue rose on the casket. First the one leaning heavily on a cane, and it looked like it was made out of the same unbreakable material that Bruce's cane had been made out of, and he moved with a dangerous grace which reminded Terry of nothing so much as a leopard. Next was a guy who moved like the thugs Terry had to take down all too often, and had scars on his knuckles which were all too familiar to him, which came from bare-knuckle fighting. The third man Tim recognized from the back flaps of some of the books on criminology that Bruce had insisted he read, and wasn't that interesting, because while he looked like the professor he was, when he moved he didn't make any noise. Last, the woman, laugh and worry lines around her eyes and mouth, and she moved like she knew how to really fight just as much as the other three did, like it had been deeply ingrained in them at an early age and they hadn't forgotten as they aged.

He didn't say anything directly, he couldn't, but he had to say something. "I haven't seen any blue roses before," he blurted, and it should be a stupid thing to say but somehow it isn't.

"You've been working the night shift too often," the fighter said.

"You should take time to smell the roses when you can see them," the woman said with a smile. "Pennyworth Blues were bred on the Manor grounds. You're one of the few people who can see them growing on a daily basis."

"So you were close to Bruce?" Terry asked.

"Not for a long time," cane-guy said, and there was pain there, for all of them, and Terry knew better than to pry. He knew how difficult Bruce had been.

And they were about to leave, he could tell, so he opened his mouth to say something, anything. "I read your books," is what came out, and he was speaking to the author. Drake, he remembed now, Tim Drake. "Bruce. He had me read them."

And Drake froze for a second, not that he'd been moving much before, and then he nodded, like what Terry had told him meant something, like it carried some deep meaning and Bruce had meant it that way. And then they left, together in a way that's as meaningful and as cryptic to Terry.

And then it was just him and Bruce and the deserted graveyard.