"You hold it against Damian, who sat across from me, helpless, as it happened. You hold it against Richard, who was not himself to help you fight Bane. You hold it against Selina for make you feel it was not safe to come home for a moment longer."
This conversation still hits like a truck, because this is Bruce's vision of Alfred when he's been drugged and trying to get his act together, this is Bruce acknowledging the things he's buried in his heart and hasn't let go of yet and it strikes me so hard that these are the people who were most involved in the story around Alfred's death--and then Dick, too. Who wasn't involved at all. Yet is still brought up as one of the jagged pieces of glass still lodged in Bruce's heart.
It's so striking that Alfred-as-Bruce's-mouthpiece says that he holds it against Dick for not being there, because isn't that exactly the issue? That Bruce holds onto Dick as the one he always, always counts on for support. That, even when Dick is an amnesiac who doesn't remember anything of his life, some part of Bruce is still relying on him to be there. He's not involved in this at all, but Bruce still makes him part of this, in a way that doesn't apply to Jason or Tim or Cass or Babs or Cass or Duke.
That it doesn't matter where Dick is or where he goes or how little he's involved, when it comes to these deeply personal things, like the death of one of his family, Bruce cannot let him go. Dick is the one who knows him the deepest, who Bruce relies on to be a constant rock in the raging torrents of their life, who Bruce needs in a way that I think only Alfred ever really matched.
So much of that was from those early years, when it was just Bruce, Dick, and Alfred, they forged each other, they laid each others' foundations in this life. Yeah, Bruce was doing this for awhile before Dick came along, but it wasn't until that hurricane child barged into his life that Bruce really became who he is now, that he found any kind of balance in this life at all.
And Bruce has never let go of that, he struggles to accept that Dick is an adult in a separate city and with his own priorities now, but some part of him will always have the deepest rockbed of: Alfred and Dick were the ones who knew him the clearest and who would always pull him out of the dark. Others will find their way into the twisting paths of Bruce's heart, Damian and Selina are part of this, he has equally thorn-filled dynamics with Tim and Jason, but, oh, Dick and Alfred. Those two are the ones Bruce used to build himself upon their framework. They will always be at the core of him, even when they're no longer physically there.
