Strays - Part 4
Summary: Batman is very happy with the way that Robin has picked up his training, his methods and his habits. Generally. But his protege showing up at the Batcave with two small children, Tim and Jason, clinging to him proves he's adopted one trait Batman would have rather he hadn't. It seems the batfamily has an incurable penchant for picking up strays, and Tim and Jason are only the beginning.
Fandom: DCU
Characters/Pairing: The Batfamily
Genre: Gen/Fluff/Angst
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Originally for this prompt from the yj-anon-meme, de-anoned and available on this comm with a lot of other fun art and fic by some really amazing people.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Bruce eventually made his way down to the cave. He had work to do, as Alfred had so kindly reminded him.
He sat down in front of the batcomputer and felt half-naked as he always did when he worked in the cave in his civilian attire. He brushed aside the feeling. It would be highly impractical to get dressed in his costume only to have to take it off again when Alfred came to fetch him for dinner.
He meant to get right to work, but without his permission his hands were already accessing the mansion’s security system. In moments he had found them.
The picture was clear. Bruce always kept the security cameras in mansion up to date, even if he had yet to install microphones everywhere. He might have to reconsider that decision, he thought as he watched Dick do a backflip in the middle of the third floor hallway. The aerialist had apparently relented and put Tim down at some point, either at Jason’s insistence or so that he could properly show off for his audience. The smallest of the boys was now walking hand in hand with Jason as both trailed behind their host. Tim was obviously delighted by the show. Jason on the other hand was trying very hard not to look impressed.
Dick landed gracefully and gestured at one of the gaudier paintings that decorated the rich wood paneled walls and began talking rapidly. Bruce focused on reading Dick’s lips and had to bite down on a smile when he realized what his ward was saying.
A gift from a Russian Tsar? Sure, why not. Even Bruce couldn’t remember where his family had gotten that particular pretentious piece.
The Bat shook his head, set the cameras to track their progress through the manor and minimized the camera feed to a small corner of the screen. He probably should have closed it completely, but he felt that he should keep an eye on them. Just to make sure they stayed out of trouble.
Then he left the boys to their tour of the mansion and set himself to the task at hand.
***
After quickly reacquainting himself with Gotham’s adoption and guardianship laws, Bruce began sifting through the month old data on the disappearance of Tim Drake.
It didn’t take long to reconfirm what he’d already known. But the details looked a little different when one of the bullet points was exploring his house with his ward.
Less than a month ago there had been a horrible traffic accident in downtown Gotham. A large delivery truck’s brakes had faltered at the same time a traffic light malfunctioned and some idiot in a sports car decided to go on a joyride. The result had been a five car pileup including the truck. The damage had been…extensive. It had caused as much chaos as any of Batman’s rogues did on any given night, but for once there was no one but pure chance to blame for it.
Seven people had died either on impact or before they reached the hospital. Two were lying in hospital beds somewhere, trapped in comas. Three had been seriously injured. Four had walked away mostly unharmed and one had vanished from the scene before the authorities arrived and hadn’t been seen since.
Well, at least not until last night.
Among the dead were Tim’s nanny and one of the Drake family’s drivers. The boy’s blood had been found at the site, but only traces of it. Not enough to indicate that he’d bled out. There had been no sign of a struggle, though, so the authorities hadn’t even known the boy was missing until they had started doing the paperwork on the dead nanny and driver. Only then did they realize that there was a small child lost somewhere in downtown Gotham.
According to the police records, contacting the Drakes had been difficult, if not impossible. But once they had been reached, the pair had rushed back to Gotham. Bruce watched a recording of the press conference they held on their return and read the two interviews they had given. He glanced over the three commercials that were produced and aired on every channel twice an hour as soon as they were finished being edited. He eyed the list of highly talented individuals that the Drakes had assigned to the task force specifically chosen to find the Drake heir.
He then listened to Janet Drake explain ever so pragmatically that their presence would only hinder the search and that it was too painful for them to deal with not knowing their only child’s fate. For now she and her husband felt that they best served their son and their company by keeping busy. They would of course keep abreast of the situation and return the moment their son was found.
Bruce looked at the plane tickets that took the Drakes back out of the country two days after they arrived, the tickets that had been bought before the pair had even returned in the first place, and wondered what went on behind the scenes of the interviews and commercials and the outdated pictures of Tim Drake plastered on every digital or flat surface that the family’s staff could get their hands on.
He considered the pair of them: cold eyed Janet Drake and her weak-willed husband. Janet was…upset was the only word Bruce could attach to the slight cracks showing in her perfect professional façade. That much was obvious in the video footage of her. But she was not grieving. She did not shed a single tear on camera. Jack’s distress was much more obvious. The man was clearly affected by the disappearance of his son, but listening to him talk in the interviews was painful for other reasons. He couldn’t seem to remember a single consistent fact about his son from interview to interview.
They put on a decent show, but the more he watched, the more he saw through the image the Drakes were presenting to the world. If he wasn’t paying attention, he might even believe they were a functioning family, but there was a reason that Tim was under the impression that his parents hadn’t returned at all, that they weren’t even aware of the fact that he’d gone missing. Bruce had a hunch that they probably wouldn’t have come back to Gotham at all if they hadn’t wanted to face a public outcry over the matter. After all, they could have easily delegated the campaigning and searching completely to their staff.
That wasn’t a crime, though. None of this was a crime, which was why Batman had paid no attention to either the accident or the missing child at the time.
It still wasn’t any of Batman’s business; however, it was quickly becoming Bruce’s business.
Bruce frowned and widened his search. He pulled up information on Drake Industries and about the Drake family’s residence. He looked up the dossiers of the Drake family’s personal employees and examined the family’s hospital records. He paid close attention to the family’s spending patterns as well as their traveling plans over the past five years.
What he found was telling.
Tim Drake was a child that clearly wanted for nothing. He had the best of everything that money could buy. He was well clothed and well fed, though his physician worried about his below average size. He was a genius according to repeated IQ assessments and was seen to by multiple tutors who were carefully cultivating the child’s intelligence to new and greater heights. He was the perfect heir to an up-and-coming family such as the Drakes.
To all appearances, Tim Drake had a perfect childhood. It appeared that Alfred’s worries were misplaced. The boy wasn’t abused. The child’s parents never laid a single finger on him.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it?
A quick scan of the family’s spending patterns revealed that between themselves, the parents had spent less than a cumulative year in the same city as their son in the child’s five years of life. Their travels had been extensive and far spread. They began this pattern less than a month after Tim was born.
The beloved Nanny that had died in the accident had only been with the boy for a little over a year. She had been hired as a housekeeper when the boy’s nurse, the woman who had cared for him since birth, was deemed “inappropriately attached” and was promptly fired. The files also made it clear that if she hadn’t died, the current nanny would have followed shortly for similar reasons.
No, barring unforeseen data, Batman felt that he could tentatively assume that no physical violence had ever taken place in the Drake household. How could it have? That would require the parents to actually be in the same country as their child. That would require the boy to have consistent contact with any adult.
But no judge would remove the boy from his home over that. And certainly not to give the boy to…well, anyone Bruce could find. The legal system tried very hard to keep families intact whenever possible, after all. And not even pointing out the boy’s preference for a box over the big empty house he had lived in for his entire life would get Bruce’s lawyers very far. Especially since for all their negligence the Drakes certainly weren’t going to let their son go without a vicious fight. Their lawyers would use the trauma of the accident as a plausible explanation for all of Tim’s actions and would talk sweetly about the importance of family.
And then he would hold up Brucie’s wonderful reputation and any chance of winning would...
Not that Bruce intended to attempt to win guardianship over the boy, of course. He really didn’t. He couldn’t.
Even if the boy desperately needed someone, anyone who wasn’t those…people.
Bruce knew he wasn’t cut out for parenting, but even he could do better by the boy. Not that he intended to.
He knew better than that. Didn’t he?
Bruce let his head fall into his hands and squeezed his eyes shut. He was definitely becoming over invested in the case. He needed to step back and think about this like a rational adult. He needed to stop thinking about the way Tim had leaned so tentatively into the Bruce’s hand on his shoulder or the cautious delight in the boy’s eyes when Dick had hugged him so enthusiastically.
This wasn’t supposed to be personal.
It wasn’t.
Bruce glanced back up at the screen and his eyes caught sight of the minimized security footage of the boys. Blinking, Bruce maximized the window and opened several more utilizing the secondary cameras in that particular room.
Dick and Jason were wrestling in the middle of the room. Bruce intended to rewind the video and find out how long they’d been at it and decide whether or not he should interfere, but his hand never quite made it to the button. He was distracted by the pride he felt at watching the way Dick was handling himself. His ward was stronger, faster and better trained, but he was holding back just enough to let Jason keep up with him. He was pulling his punches and…playing, for lack of a another word, with the younger boy. And Jason, well, the boy probably knew that Dick was going easy on him, but he certainly wasn’t holding anything back.
Bruce frowned as he realized that he had begun planning a training schedule based on Jason’s strengths and weaknesses in this play fight. Once he knew what he was doing he stamped down on that train of thought and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. But try as he might he couldn’t quite erase the half written plan. In his defense, though, it was a very good plan.
…Which was not a good thing, he reminded himself firmly.
Any other thoughts he had about play wrestling and non-existent training programs were derailed when Jason suddenly broke away from Dick and charged out of the room. Bruce blinked in surprise. The boy was clearly panicked and Bruce wondered what could be so distressing in the safe environment that was the mansion.
Bruce switched the camera views to follow the boy, leaving one window open still focused on Dick who looked torn between chasing after the smaller boy and staying where he was. Before Bruce could find out what Dick was going to choose, Jason had already found what he was looking for. He was gripping a blank faced Tim by the shoulders and his face was flushed an angry red.
Curious, Bruce turned up the volume on the microphones that he’d thankfully installed in that particular section of hallway.
“…how many times do I have to tell you, kid? Don’t wander off! Do you have any idea what could have happened to you?” Jason was lecturing; his young voice filled an oddly familiar mixture of terrified and angry.
“Nothing hap- ” Tim tried to protest softly, but Jason was having none of it.
“Yeah. Nothing happened. Like the time you almost got killed by Poison Ivy or when that creepy pedo was giving you the eye?” Jason demanded. “I don’t care where we are. It doesn’t matter. We stick together. You know better than this. So what the hell was going through that genius brain of yours, huh?”
Tim bit his lip and ducked his head slightly. “You. You were having fun. I, I didn’t want to get in the way,” the boy said falteringly. “I want you to be happy.”
Bruce watched Jason’s hands clench into fists and then forcefully relax. “You idiot,” Jason growled and pulled Tim into a tight hug. “You make me happy. So I can’t be happy if I don’t know for certain you’re okay all the time. Got me?” He drew back and stared the boy down until Tim nodded slowly.
Jason echoed the motion. “Good. And I’m…sorry. I shouldn’t have let Bigbird get me worked up enough to forget to watch you for even a moment. “
“You’re sorry?” Tim asked looking honestly confused.
Jason sighed as though this was a familiar conversation. “Yeah. Don’t make me say it again, Babybird. I know I’m a shitty brother, but I - ”
“You’re not a shitty brother!” Tim exclaimed.
Bruce had never heard the boy speak that loudly before, and apparently neither had Jason because the little thief rocked back like he’d been slapped. Tim was also seemed caught off-guard by his own voice. As soon as he realized what he’d done, the boy flushed and his hands flew up to cover his mouth in obvious mortification at his unprecedented boldness.
Jason snorted and pulled the smaller boy into another hug.
“You’re a very good brother,” Tim reiterated from within Jason’s hold in his usual quiet voice as his blush began to dissipate.
“Well, I try,” Jason said. He clearly didn’t believe Tim’s assessment, but wasn’t going to fight about it. “Come on,” the street urchin said, pulling away from the other boy and grabbing his hand.
Bruce watched Jason drag Tim back to the sitting room where the two older boys had been brawling. Dick had just started to move toward the door when Jason and Tim burst into the room.
Bruce turned up the audio in the sitting room in time to hear Dick say, “Everything okay, Jay, Timmy?”
“It’s fine,” Jason said gruffly. “Just had to set the kid straight on a few things. Anyway, those flippy things you did earlier were kind of cool in a stupid girly sort of way.”
“Girly?” Dick asked, attempting to raise his eyebrow at the younger boy. He couldn’t quite manage the look Alfred delivered with cutting ease, but he was improving.
“Acrobats have to be really strong.” Tim glanced worriedly between the older boys. “That’s not girly, is it?”
“Yeah,” Dick said with a small smirk. “Can you do a backflip or walk on your hands, Jaybird?”
Jason stuck out his tongue. “…No. But it can’t be that hard. And if you’re really that good you can teach me and the kid, right?”
Tim blinked in surprise. “Me? I can’t…”
“Of course you can, Babybird,” Dick assured warmly.
“Dickface knows what he’s talking about for once,” Jason agreed. “Come on, I want to be walking on my hands before the kid’s bedtime.”
Dick rolled his eyes. “It’s harder than it looks, Jay. So unless you don’t want to be able to move a single muscle tomorrow; we have to warm up first. Then we’ll start small and work our way up to the more challenging stuff.”
“Boring,” Jason said.
“Don’t care,” Dick replied firmly. “We do it my way or not at all. No one gets hurt on my watch.”
Jason made a face but nodded his assent.
Bruce watched the boys push the room’s furniture against the walls and out of their way at Tim’s conscientious insistence. Then he observed his ward lead the boys through a series of simplified warm ups. He nodded approvingly to himself as Dick corrected their stances and kept them from hurting themselves. He couldn’t quite stop his lips from quirking in amusement as Dick taught the boys how to do a simple forward roll followed by a backward roll, chattering constantly all the while.
He had long since stopped pretending to work on Tim’s case or any other for that matter. For the moment was simply sat quietly, letting the youthful voices of his ward and their guests wash over him.
“Interesting program, sir?”
Bruce most emphatically did not jump in surprise at the enquiring voice.
“Alfred,” he said. “I seem to have lost track of the time.”
Which was true, he realized when he glanced at the clock. He’d wasted most of the afternoon. No wonder Alfred had come down to fetch him.
“Yes, that does seem to be the case,” the butler said mildly.
Bruce grimaced and knew he’d been caught out. “Alfred…”
“Don’t mind me, sir,” the man said, glancing noncommittally at the screen of the batcomputer. “However, I do wonder if you’re aware of why Master Richard is behaving the way he is.”
Bruce’s lips quirked into a small smile as he thought back to the conversation over brunch and to the way Dick was handling his “lesson” with his strays. “I know exactly what he’s doing,” he admitted. “You know what they say about the problem with naming things, especially stray animals, don’t you, Alfred? And then of course he gave them bird names and has been going out of his way to showcase their potential while making a point of showing off his own ability to look out for them.”
“So you’ve seen through his schemes,” the butler observed.
“Dick has never been particularly good at deception. Or at least he’s never been very good at deceiving me,” Bruce agreed. What he didn’t say was that the worst part about Dick’s manipulations was that it didn’t seem to matter that Bruce knew he was being manipulated. It was still working.
Of course, Alfred probably already knew that.
“Dinner will be served in hour, Master Bruce, however before you come up, might I suggest that you keep today’s surveillance footage readily on file.”
Bruce glanced back at the butler in surprise. “What for?”
The man smiled faintly. “For posterity, sir.”
“Posterity?” Bruce raised an eyebrow at the butler.
“Mmm,” Alfred hummed. “I believe the colloquial term is ‘home video.’ If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll see to preparing dinner.”
With that the butler vanished into the shadows of the cave, leaving his employer at a loss for words for the second time that day.
Part 5
Fandom: DCU
Characters/Pairing: The Batfamily
Genre: Gen/Fluff/Angst
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Originally for this prompt from the yj-anon-meme, de-anoned and available on this comm with a lot of other fun art and fic by some really amazing people.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Bruce eventually made his way down to the cave. He had work to do, as Alfred had so kindly reminded him.
He sat down in front of the batcomputer and felt half-naked as he always did when he worked in the cave in his civilian attire. He brushed aside the feeling. It would be highly impractical to get dressed in his costume only to have to take it off again when Alfred came to fetch him for dinner.
He meant to get right to work, but without his permission his hands were already accessing the mansion’s security system. In moments he had found them.
The picture was clear. Bruce always kept the security cameras in mansion up to date, even if he had yet to install microphones everywhere. He might have to reconsider that decision, he thought as he watched Dick do a backflip in the middle of the third floor hallway. The aerialist had apparently relented and put Tim down at some point, either at Jason’s insistence or so that he could properly show off for his audience. The smallest of the boys was now walking hand in hand with Jason as both trailed behind their host. Tim was obviously delighted by the show. Jason on the other hand was trying very hard not to look impressed.
Dick landed gracefully and gestured at one of the gaudier paintings that decorated the rich wood paneled walls and began talking rapidly. Bruce focused on reading Dick’s lips and had to bite down on a smile when he realized what his ward was saying.
A gift from a Russian Tsar? Sure, why not. Even Bruce couldn’t remember where his family had gotten that particular pretentious piece.
The Bat shook his head, set the cameras to track their progress through the manor and minimized the camera feed to a small corner of the screen. He probably should have closed it completely, but he felt that he should keep an eye on them. Just to make sure they stayed out of trouble.
Then he left the boys to their tour of the mansion and set himself to the task at hand.
***
After quickly reacquainting himself with Gotham’s adoption and guardianship laws, Bruce began sifting through the month old data on the disappearance of Tim Drake.
It didn’t take long to reconfirm what he’d already known. But the details looked a little different when one of the bullet points was exploring his house with his ward.
Less than a month ago there had been a horrible traffic accident in downtown Gotham. A large delivery truck’s brakes had faltered at the same time a traffic light malfunctioned and some idiot in a sports car decided to go on a joyride. The result had been a five car pileup including the truck. The damage had been…extensive. It had caused as much chaos as any of Batman’s rogues did on any given night, but for once there was no one but pure chance to blame for it.
Seven people had died either on impact or before they reached the hospital. Two were lying in hospital beds somewhere, trapped in comas. Three had been seriously injured. Four had walked away mostly unharmed and one had vanished from the scene before the authorities arrived and hadn’t been seen since.
Well, at least not until last night.
Among the dead were Tim’s nanny and one of the Drake family’s drivers. The boy’s blood had been found at the site, but only traces of it. Not enough to indicate that he’d bled out. There had been no sign of a struggle, though, so the authorities hadn’t even known the boy was missing until they had started doing the paperwork on the dead nanny and driver. Only then did they realize that there was a small child lost somewhere in downtown Gotham.
According to the police records, contacting the Drakes had been difficult, if not impossible. But once they had been reached, the pair had rushed back to Gotham. Bruce watched a recording of the press conference they held on their return and read the two interviews they had given. He glanced over the three commercials that were produced and aired on every channel twice an hour as soon as they were finished being edited. He eyed the list of highly talented individuals that the Drakes had assigned to the task force specifically chosen to find the Drake heir.
He then listened to Janet Drake explain ever so pragmatically that their presence would only hinder the search and that it was too painful for them to deal with not knowing their only child’s fate. For now she and her husband felt that they best served their son and their company by keeping busy. They would of course keep abreast of the situation and return the moment their son was found.
Bruce looked at the plane tickets that took the Drakes back out of the country two days after they arrived, the tickets that had been bought before the pair had even returned in the first place, and wondered what went on behind the scenes of the interviews and commercials and the outdated pictures of Tim Drake plastered on every digital or flat surface that the family’s staff could get their hands on.
He considered the pair of them: cold eyed Janet Drake and her weak-willed husband. Janet was…upset was the only word Bruce could attach to the slight cracks showing in her perfect professional façade. That much was obvious in the video footage of her. But she was not grieving. She did not shed a single tear on camera. Jack’s distress was much more obvious. The man was clearly affected by the disappearance of his son, but listening to him talk in the interviews was painful for other reasons. He couldn’t seem to remember a single consistent fact about his son from interview to interview.
They put on a decent show, but the more he watched, the more he saw through the image the Drakes were presenting to the world. If he wasn’t paying attention, he might even believe they were a functioning family, but there was a reason that Tim was under the impression that his parents hadn’t returned at all, that they weren’t even aware of the fact that he’d gone missing. Bruce had a hunch that they probably wouldn’t have come back to Gotham at all if they hadn’t wanted to face a public outcry over the matter. After all, they could have easily delegated the campaigning and searching completely to their staff.
That wasn’t a crime, though. None of this was a crime, which was why Batman had paid no attention to either the accident or the missing child at the time.
It still wasn’t any of Batman’s business; however, it was quickly becoming Bruce’s business.
Bruce frowned and widened his search. He pulled up information on Drake Industries and about the Drake family’s residence. He looked up the dossiers of the Drake family’s personal employees and examined the family’s hospital records. He paid close attention to the family’s spending patterns as well as their traveling plans over the past five years.
What he found was telling.
Tim Drake was a child that clearly wanted for nothing. He had the best of everything that money could buy. He was well clothed and well fed, though his physician worried about his below average size. He was a genius according to repeated IQ assessments and was seen to by multiple tutors who were carefully cultivating the child’s intelligence to new and greater heights. He was the perfect heir to an up-and-coming family such as the Drakes.
To all appearances, Tim Drake had a perfect childhood. It appeared that Alfred’s worries were misplaced. The boy wasn’t abused. The child’s parents never laid a single finger on him.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it?
A quick scan of the family’s spending patterns revealed that between themselves, the parents had spent less than a cumulative year in the same city as their son in the child’s five years of life. Their travels had been extensive and far spread. They began this pattern less than a month after Tim was born.
The beloved Nanny that had died in the accident had only been with the boy for a little over a year. She had been hired as a housekeeper when the boy’s nurse, the woman who had cared for him since birth, was deemed “inappropriately attached” and was promptly fired. The files also made it clear that if she hadn’t died, the current nanny would have followed shortly for similar reasons.
No, barring unforeseen data, Batman felt that he could tentatively assume that no physical violence had ever taken place in the Drake household. How could it have? That would require the parents to actually be in the same country as their child. That would require the boy to have consistent contact with any adult.
But no judge would remove the boy from his home over that. And certainly not to give the boy to…well, anyone Bruce could find. The legal system tried very hard to keep families intact whenever possible, after all. And not even pointing out the boy’s preference for a box over the big empty house he had lived in for his entire life would get Bruce’s lawyers very far. Especially since for all their negligence the Drakes certainly weren’t going to let their son go without a vicious fight. Their lawyers would use the trauma of the accident as a plausible explanation for all of Tim’s actions and would talk sweetly about the importance of family.
And then he would hold up Brucie’s wonderful reputation and any chance of winning would...
Not that Bruce intended to attempt to win guardianship over the boy, of course. He really didn’t. He couldn’t.
Even if the boy desperately needed someone, anyone who wasn’t those…people.
Bruce knew he wasn’t cut out for parenting, but even he could do better by the boy. Not that he intended to.
He knew better than that. Didn’t he?
Bruce let his head fall into his hands and squeezed his eyes shut. He was definitely becoming over invested in the case. He needed to step back and think about this like a rational adult. He needed to stop thinking about the way Tim had leaned so tentatively into the Bruce’s hand on his shoulder or the cautious delight in the boy’s eyes when Dick had hugged him so enthusiastically.
This wasn’t supposed to be personal.
It wasn’t.
Bruce glanced back up at the screen and his eyes caught sight of the minimized security footage of the boys. Blinking, Bruce maximized the window and opened several more utilizing the secondary cameras in that particular room.
Dick and Jason were wrestling in the middle of the room. Bruce intended to rewind the video and find out how long they’d been at it and decide whether or not he should interfere, but his hand never quite made it to the button. He was distracted by the pride he felt at watching the way Dick was handling himself. His ward was stronger, faster and better trained, but he was holding back just enough to let Jason keep up with him. He was pulling his punches and…playing, for lack of a another word, with the younger boy. And Jason, well, the boy probably knew that Dick was going easy on him, but he certainly wasn’t holding anything back.
Bruce frowned as he realized that he had begun planning a training schedule based on Jason’s strengths and weaknesses in this play fight. Once he knew what he was doing he stamped down on that train of thought and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. But try as he might he couldn’t quite erase the half written plan. In his defense, though, it was a very good plan.
…Which was not a good thing, he reminded himself firmly.
Any other thoughts he had about play wrestling and non-existent training programs were derailed when Jason suddenly broke away from Dick and charged out of the room. Bruce blinked in surprise. The boy was clearly panicked and Bruce wondered what could be so distressing in the safe environment that was the mansion.
Bruce switched the camera views to follow the boy, leaving one window open still focused on Dick who looked torn between chasing after the smaller boy and staying where he was. Before Bruce could find out what Dick was going to choose, Jason had already found what he was looking for. He was gripping a blank faced Tim by the shoulders and his face was flushed an angry red.
Curious, Bruce turned up the volume on the microphones that he’d thankfully installed in that particular section of hallway.
“…how many times do I have to tell you, kid? Don’t wander off! Do you have any idea what could have happened to you?” Jason was lecturing; his young voice filled an oddly familiar mixture of terrified and angry.
“Nothing hap- ” Tim tried to protest softly, but Jason was having none of it.
“Yeah. Nothing happened. Like the time you almost got killed by Poison Ivy or when that creepy pedo was giving you the eye?” Jason demanded. “I don’t care where we are. It doesn’t matter. We stick together. You know better than this. So what the hell was going through that genius brain of yours, huh?”
Tim bit his lip and ducked his head slightly. “You. You were having fun. I, I didn’t want to get in the way,” the boy said falteringly. “I want you to be happy.”
Bruce watched Jason’s hands clench into fists and then forcefully relax. “You idiot,” Jason growled and pulled Tim into a tight hug. “You make me happy. So I can’t be happy if I don’t know for certain you’re okay all the time. Got me?” He drew back and stared the boy down until Tim nodded slowly.
Jason echoed the motion. “Good. And I’m…sorry. I shouldn’t have let Bigbird get me worked up enough to forget to watch you for even a moment. “
“You’re sorry?” Tim asked looking honestly confused.
Jason sighed as though this was a familiar conversation. “Yeah. Don’t make me say it again, Babybird. I know I’m a shitty brother, but I - ”
“You’re not a shitty brother!” Tim exclaimed.
Bruce had never heard the boy speak that loudly before, and apparently neither had Jason because the little thief rocked back like he’d been slapped. Tim was also seemed caught off-guard by his own voice. As soon as he realized what he’d done, the boy flushed and his hands flew up to cover his mouth in obvious mortification at his unprecedented boldness.
Jason snorted and pulled the smaller boy into another hug.
“You’re a very good brother,” Tim reiterated from within Jason’s hold in his usual quiet voice as his blush began to dissipate.
“Well, I try,” Jason said. He clearly didn’t believe Tim’s assessment, but wasn’t going to fight about it. “Come on,” the street urchin said, pulling away from the other boy and grabbing his hand.
Bruce watched Jason drag Tim back to the sitting room where the two older boys had been brawling. Dick had just started to move toward the door when Jason and Tim burst into the room.
Bruce turned up the audio in the sitting room in time to hear Dick say, “Everything okay, Jay, Timmy?”
“It’s fine,” Jason said gruffly. “Just had to set the kid straight on a few things. Anyway, those flippy things you did earlier were kind of cool in a stupid girly sort of way.”
“Girly?” Dick asked, attempting to raise his eyebrow at the younger boy. He couldn’t quite manage the look Alfred delivered with cutting ease, but he was improving.
“Acrobats have to be really strong.” Tim glanced worriedly between the older boys. “That’s not girly, is it?”
“Yeah,” Dick said with a small smirk. “Can you do a backflip or walk on your hands, Jaybird?”
Jason stuck out his tongue. “…No. But it can’t be that hard. And if you’re really that good you can teach me and the kid, right?”
Tim blinked in surprise. “Me? I can’t…”
“Of course you can, Babybird,” Dick assured warmly.
“Dickface knows what he’s talking about for once,” Jason agreed. “Come on, I want to be walking on my hands before the kid’s bedtime.”
Dick rolled his eyes. “It’s harder than it looks, Jay. So unless you don’t want to be able to move a single muscle tomorrow; we have to warm up first. Then we’ll start small and work our way up to the more challenging stuff.”
“Boring,” Jason said.
“Don’t care,” Dick replied firmly. “We do it my way or not at all. No one gets hurt on my watch.”
Jason made a face but nodded his assent.
Bruce watched the boys push the room’s furniture against the walls and out of their way at Tim’s conscientious insistence. Then he observed his ward lead the boys through a series of simplified warm ups. He nodded approvingly to himself as Dick corrected their stances and kept them from hurting themselves. He couldn’t quite stop his lips from quirking in amusement as Dick taught the boys how to do a simple forward roll followed by a backward roll, chattering constantly all the while.
He had long since stopped pretending to work on Tim’s case or any other for that matter. For the moment was simply sat quietly, letting the youthful voices of his ward and their guests wash over him.
“Interesting program, sir?”
Bruce most emphatically did not jump in surprise at the enquiring voice.
“Alfred,” he said. “I seem to have lost track of the time.”
Which was true, he realized when he glanced at the clock. He’d wasted most of the afternoon. No wonder Alfred had come down to fetch him.
“Yes, that does seem to be the case,” the butler said mildly.
Bruce grimaced and knew he’d been caught out. “Alfred…”
“Don’t mind me, sir,” the man said, glancing noncommittally at the screen of the batcomputer. “However, I do wonder if you’re aware of why Master Richard is behaving the way he is.”
Bruce’s lips quirked into a small smile as he thought back to the conversation over brunch and to the way Dick was handling his “lesson” with his strays. “I know exactly what he’s doing,” he admitted. “You know what they say about the problem with naming things, especially stray animals, don’t you, Alfred? And then of course he gave them bird names and has been going out of his way to showcase their potential while making a point of showing off his own ability to look out for them.”
“So you’ve seen through his schemes,” the butler observed.
“Dick has never been particularly good at deception. Or at least he’s never been very good at deceiving me,” Bruce agreed. What he didn’t say was that the worst part about Dick’s manipulations was that it didn’t seem to matter that Bruce knew he was being manipulated. It was still working.
Of course, Alfred probably already knew that.
“Dinner will be served in hour, Master Bruce, however before you come up, might I suggest that you keep today’s surveillance footage readily on file.”
Bruce glanced back at the butler in surprise. “What for?”
The man smiled faintly. “For posterity, sir.”
“Posterity?” Bruce raised an eyebrow at the butler.
“Mmm,” Alfred hummed. “I believe the colloquial term is ‘home video.’ If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll see to preparing dinner.”
With that the butler vanished into the shadows of the cave, leaving his employer at a loss for words for the second time that day.
Part 5