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Bruce set his coffee down with the careful precision of someone who'd learned to telegraph his movements around a man with super-hearing. "Your mother called mine last week."
Clark's hand paused halfway to his own cup. "About the gala?"
"About hiring practices." Bruce's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "Apparently Martha Kent suggested that perhaps—just perhaps—Wayne Enterprises' new healthcare initiative might be, quote, 'actually necessary.'"
"I'm sorry." Clark had the grace to look mortified. "She gets—"
"Don't." Bruce cut him off, but without heat. "Your mother is right. Mine is..." He trailed off, watching rain sheet down the penthouse windows. Below them, Gotham churned through another Tuesday morning—people cramming onto buses, juggling three phones, eating breakfast from foil packets. "My mother lives in a world where 'help wanted' signs mean opportunity. Where employment is a solution rather than a trap with better lighting."
Clark leaned back, recognizing the particular quality of Bruce's stillness. This wasn't Batman-stillness, predator-waiting. This was something rawer.
"She cornered me at the foundation office yesterday," Bruce continued. "Wanted to know why we were 'subsidizing' healthcare for Wayne Enterprises employees. Said she'd seen dozens of help wanted signs driving through the Diamond District. Couldn't understand why people just don't... get jobs."
"Did you explain—"
"I pulled up the numbers." Bruce's voice carried that specific flatness that meant he was furious and working very hard not to show it. "Seven dollars an hour. Twenty-seven hours a week scheduled in four-hour shifts across seven days so you can never hold a second job. A hundred and eighty-nine dollars weekly, gross. Minus taxes, you're taking home maybe a hundred fifty."
Clark did the math automatically, the way he still calculated grain yields per acre despite living in Metropolis for a decade. "Six hundred a month."
"Six hundred a month," Bruce echoed. "I showed her apartment listings. Showed her that the literal cheapest studio in Gotham—the one with black mold and a broken fire escape in Crime Alley—runs eight hundred. Before utilities."
"What did she say?"
Bruce picked up his coffee again, didn't drink it. "She suggested roommates. Multiple jobs. 'Making it work.'" The quotes were audible. "She said that's what her grandfather did during the Depression."
"Did you mention that her grandfather had a trust fund?"
"I mentioned that Walmart employees are the single largest group of food stamp and Medicaid recipients in America. That we're subsidizing poverty wages with federal programs while shareholders profit." Bruce set the cup down again, harder this time. "I explained that even two of those jobs won't cover rent plus daycare when your schedule changes with forty-eight hours notice. That you can't plan childcare when you don't know your hours.
"That you can't get bank accounts with bad credit, can't rent a car without a credit card, can't fix your fifteen-year-old car's brakes without credit you don't have because medical bills from that time you couldn't afford insurance tanked your score."
"The payday loan spiral."
"Two hundred a month in late fees while you juggle which bill to pay." Bruce's jaw worked. "Another hundred fifty in payday loan interest. You're underwater before you've paid for food."
Clark watched his boyfriend's reflection in the rain-dark windows—not the playboy, not the Batman, just a man who'd spent his entire adult life trying to understand the mathematics of desperation that his mother would never see.
"She asked why they don't just save," Bruce said finally. "Build an emergency fund."
"Jesus, Bruce."
"I told her that you can't save when you're already two hundred short every month. That there is no emergency fund when being alive is the emergency." He did drink the coffee this time, like he needed something to do with his hands. "Then she suggested better budgeting. More financial literacy education."
"You can't budget your way out of insufficient income."
"No. You can't." Bruce turned from the window. His eyes were the particular shade of tired that came from beating your head against generational privilege masquerading as common sense. "But she'll never understand that. She sees the help wanted signs. She sees the opportunities. She can't see that we've built a system where full-time employment isn't enough to survive, where the safety net has holes large enough to lose entire families in."
Clark tilted his head slightly. "You didn't always see it either."
Bruce went very still.
"I'm not—" Clark raised a hand. "I'm not criticizing. I'm just saying you came from the same world she did. Same prep schools, same social circle. What changed?"
Bruce was quiet for a long moment, turning the coffee cup in his hands. "Alfred sat me down when I was nineteen. I'd just come back from Princeton for winter break, full of economic theory and Ayn Rand and the conviction that market forces solved everything." His mouth twisted. "I said something—I don't even remember what exactly. Something about people needing to take personal responsibility. Something ignorant and smug and utterly divorced from reality."
"What did he do?"
"He didn't yell. That would have been easier." Bruce's voice dropped. "He pulled out a ledger. Showed me his mother's budget from 1947. Factory work, paid by the piece. She could sew forty-seven units in an eight-hour shift. Got paid per unit, not per hour, so if the fabric was bad or the machine broke, she just... didn't get paid for that time."
Clark said nothing, watching his friend's face.
"She worked sixty hours a week and still couldn't make rent some months. Had to choose between keeping the heat on or keeping food in the flat. Alfred was seven." Bruce set the cup down. "He told me about the time she got pneumonia and couldn't work for two weeks. Lost the apartment.
"They stayed with three different families over four months until she could save enough for a deposit on a new place—except she couldn't save because every penny went to immediate survival, so it took four months of her sister paying for it in installments because no landlord would take payment plans from someone who'd been evicted."
"He told you this to—"
"He told me this because I'd just suggested that poor people should simply make better choices." Bruce's voice turned savage with self-directed anger. "I was nineteen years old, living in a mansion, with a trust fund that generated more interest in a day than his mother made in a month of sixty-hour weeks, and I thought poverty was a failure of imagination."
"You were nineteen," Clark said quietly. "You didn't know."
"I didn't know because I'd never had to know. Because everyone around me had the same blind spots, the same assumptions." Bruce turned back to the window. "Alfred spent three hours walking me through it. The math of late fees. The cost of being poor—how you pay more for everything because you can't buy in bulk, can't afford the upfront cost of quality goods that last, can't access credit with decent interest rates. How a broken taillight can spiral into a suspended license, lost job, eviction, and homelessness in a matter of weeks when you're living that close to the edge."
"He made you understand."
"He made me see that I'd been living my entire life in a reality that bore no resemblance to the one most people inhabited." Bruce's reflection in the glass looked haunted. "That the distance between me and destitution wasn't hard work or smart choices or moral character. It was pure accident of birth. That someone could do everything right—work full time, budget carefully, make responsible decisions—and still drown because the system isn't designed for survival at that income level. It's designed for exploitation."
Clark thought about Martha Kent, who'd explained similar truths from the other direction—not from intellectual exercise but from lived experience. "Your mother never had that conversation."
"My mother had parents who told her that their success was earned. That the world was meritocratic. That people who struggled simply weren't trying hard enough." Bruce's voice went flat again. "And no one close to her ever challenged that belief. Not enough to make her really hear it."
"Alfred challenged you."
"Alfred—" Bruce stopped, something complicated crossing his face. "Alfred loved me enough to show me I was wrong. To risk me being angry or defensive. To spend hours of his life teaching me something I should have already known, that everyone in my tax bracket should know and almost none of them do." He picked up his coffee again, found it cold.
"He said that the greatest privilege wealth provides isn't comfort. It's distance. Distance from consequences, from understanding, from the reality that most people live in. And that if I was going to inherit the Wayne fortune, I had a moral obligation to close that distance. To understand what that money meant in real terms—not just how many yachts I could buy, but how many lives could be changed if I actually paid attention to how the math worked for everyone else."
"So you paid attention."
"So I paid attention." Bruce's jaw set. "Spent that spring semester volunteering at legal aid clinics. Listening to people explain their situations—the payday loans, the predatory lending, the jobs that scheduled you just under full-time to avoid benefits, the medical bankruptcies, all of it.
"Met a woman working three jobs who lost custody of her kids because she was never home—because she was working three jobs to keep a roof over their heads. Met a man who lived in his car for six months after an injury because disability took eight months to process and his savings lasted six weeks."
Clark's chest hurt listening to this, imagining a younger Bruce having his worldview systematically demolished.
"I went back to Gotham that summer and started really looking at Wayne Enterprises' practices. Our wages. Our benefits. Our scheduling policies." Bruce's voice turned grim. "Found out we were doing everything I'd just learned was destructive. Part-time schedules to avoid healthcare costs. Wages that qualified our employees for public assistance. Everything legal. Everything normal for American business. Everything designed to extract maximum profit by keeping workers just desperate enough."
"And you changed it."
"I changed it. Over my mother's objections and half the board's objections and the shareholders' objections." Bruce finally looked at Clark. "Because Alfred taught me something my mother will never learn: that understanding how the world actually works isn't about intelligence. It's about being willing to listen to people whose reality makes you uncomfortable. It's about having someone you respect tell you that you're wrong and then proving it with math you can't argue with."
"She doesn't have her Alfred."
"No," Bruce agreed. "She has people who tell her what she wants to hear. Who reinforce her worldview. Who benefit from her never examining it too closely." His expression hardened. "But she has me now. And I'm too old and too tired to let her keep living in that bubble when I have the power to pop it."
"Even if she never forgives you for it?"
"Even then." Bruce's voice carried absolute certainty. "Alfred taught me that comfort isn't the highest good. Understanding is. And sometimes the most loving thing you can do for someone is make them uncomfortable enough to grow."
They sat in silence again, but it felt different now—less heavy, more purposeful.
"The healthcare initiative," Clark said eventually. "You're doing it anyway."
"I'm doing it anyway." Bruce's expression hardened into something purposeful. "And expanding the childcare subsidies. And the emergency assistance fund. And the transportation program." A pause. "My mother will adjust."
"Or she won't."
"Or she won't." Bruce met his eyes. "But I stopped needing her approval a long time ago. Alfred taught me that too."
Outside, Gotham turned. People worked three jobs and still chose between food and rent. Lined up at food banks. Paid seventeen dollars to cash checks because banks wouldn't take them. Rode buses two hours each way to jobs that wouldn't give them enough hours to qualify for benefits.
And in a penthouse above it all, two men who'd learned about poverty from different angles—one from a butler who'd lived it, one from a mother who'd survived it—sat with their expensive coffee and did the only thing they could: tried to build something better, one policy at a time, against the tide of people who genuinely couldn't see what was right in front of them.
"She means well," Bruce said eventually.
"I know."
"That almost makes it worse."
"I know," Clark said again. Then, quieter: "Alfred would be proud of you."
Bruce's throat worked. "He told me once that the measure of a man isn't what he inherits. It's what he does with the understanding he gains." He stood, suddenly restless. "I'm still trying to live up to that."
"You're doing better than you think."
"I'm doing what should be normal. What everyone with resources should do." Bruce's voice turned savage again. "The bar is just so low that basic human decency looks revolutionary."
The rain kept falling. The help wanted signs stayed up. And somewhere below, someone was doing the math, realizing it still didn't add up, and going to work anyway because what other choice was there?
But at least some of them worked for Wayne Enterprises now, where the math added up a little better. Where someone had bothered to learn it in the first place.
It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough.
But it was something.