Got Chaos (BtVS/Teen Titans crossover, PG) 2/2
[continued from part 1]
*
This was probably how Devon felt when he lost Oz. Without his friends, he was at loose ends, much more than merely sad. Bart ran around Gotham as twilight fell, up and down the island, cris-crossing from the Tricorner Yards up to the Kane Memorial Bridge, from the entrance to the Brown railroad tubes over to Port Adams. Heedless of any more Bat-sensors, he was looking to get lost, but the maps in his memory were far too accurate for that.
He snuck into the main branch of the Gotham Public Library through the loading dock and up into its archives. He read the entire manuscript collection, the Wayne family papers and the Kane Judaica collection after he taught himself the Hebrew alphabet, then seven floors of the circulating collection. It was well and truly night by the time he took a break and climbed through the air ducts to the roof. He didn't feel any better, but he did have lots of new facts to occupy him and drown out the sick lonely feeling creepy-crawling under his skin. He was trying to decide what to have for dinner -- Nepalese momos or Sephardi falafel were the leading contenders -- as he paced the edge of the roof and worked out the kinks in his neck and shoulders.
At the southwest corner, behind an especially fearsome gargoyle clutching the book of life in its talons, he bumped into Kon. Bart tried to move around him, pretending that Kon was just another ugly stupid architectural flourish, but Kon grabbed his elbow and yanked him to a stop.
"Jerk," Bart muttered, staring down at his toes. "What do you want?"
Kon didn't say anything for a long moment. "Looking for you."
When Kon's grip relaxed, Bart moved aside and jammed his hands into his pockets. "Why? I've got a curfew now or something? You're my babysitter?"
"Bart --" Kon shrugged and looked out over the city. "C'mon."
"You should get hazard pay, having to look after a big hyperactive baby like me," Bart said. His mouth was sticky-dry and tasted sour; he wanted to spit, but there wasn't enough saliva. "Sucks to be you."
Kon's hesitant smile turned down at the corners. "Totally sucks to be me."
"Stuck with a little kid," Bart added, in case he hadn't been clear. "Betrayed by your real friend."
Kon's expression twisted like something unraveling and he hunched his shoulders. "Bart. I --. You're my friend, too."
"Yeah, right. 'Let the big kids talk, Bart'. 'Go away, Bart'. 'Hit puberty, Bart'. 'Finish your spinach, Bart'."
"I hate spinach," Kon said. "What're you talking about?"
"Nothing, I just got caught up in it." When Kon started to grin, Bart pointed at him. "Don't laugh at me! I'm still mad and it's the principle of the thing, you patronizing me like, like --" Kon nodded and looked away; trailing off, Bart jogged in place for several moments. When he could think again, he added, "You are such a jackass, you know that?"
"You're not the first to say it," Kon said, glancing at Bart and giving him another hesitant smile. "I'm sorry."
Bart slowed his jog and shrugged as he turned away. "Thanks."
"Besides," Kon said, joining him and elbowing him gently, "what about our case?"
"Also," Bart said and raised his voice to make sure that Kon was listening, "real friends don't keep secrets from each other."
Beside him, Kon sighed deeply and didn't reply. Bart let his point sink in -- just long enough for Kon to realize he was serious, but not so long that Kon's attention would wander -- and then straightened up. He squared his shoulders and said, "What's wrong with Tim, anyway?"
Snorting with laughter -- humorless laughter, sarcastic and mean -- Kon bumped his shoulder into Bart's. "He's happy."
Bart frowned, trying, and failing, to work that out. "Really?"
Kon rose a yard up into the air and kicked Bart's butt. "He says so."
"But he lies," Bart pointed out.
Sighing again, Kon turned a slow somersault before landing on his toes. "He sure does."
"You should've told me he quit."
Kon looked at him, apparently about to sigh again, but then he put his arm around Bart's shoulders instead. As always, his embrace was warmer than any human's, and snugger, too, and Bart was the one who sighed then, breathing out the worst of his nausea.
"Yeah," Kon said, releasing Bart. "I should have."
"We should get dinner, then go back to work --" Perched on the gargoyle's flat head, Bart looked back at Kon. "Dumplings or deep-fried balls?"
Kon's laugh now was the opposite of humorless; delighted and immature all at once, it was totally Kon -- even better, it was the laugh Bart remembered from before Kon ever got his name, when he was just Kid and happy about it. Bart sped down the building feeling lighter than helium.
*
Bart finished off seventeen momos and a full order of rice noodles while Kon demolished a respectable ten momos and beef curry.
When his plate was clean, Kon tapped his chopsticks against the rim and said, without looking up, "I'm really sorry, you know."
Bart patted his stomach. "It's all right now."
When they were paying, Kon handed Bart an extra wet-wipe and gestured for him to wipe his face. "You're so gross when you eat."
Bart poked him in the chest, right where the crest was on his pseudo-costume. "You're gross when you breathe."
Kon didn't protest. He let Bart take the lead through the city. Having consulted at the library the microfiche of the three daily papers and bound volumes of both Gotham Living and its upstart competitor, The Big Stink for any reports of Batgirl, Bart thought he had a pretty good idea of her usual patrol routes.
Atop the Beaux-Arts edifice of Gotham Light and Power, which looked from the street like a giant wedding cake melting in the sun, Bart told Kon to listen for her while he ran the two most likely routes.
He returned, empty-handed, to find Kon sitting in the middle of the roof, arms around his knees and head cocked like a bird's.
"This must be weird for you," Bart said lowly as he sat down. "Being here, is it weird for you? Revisiting a lost love and all?"
Kon tilted his head the other way, frowning. Eventually, he said absently, "Why, 'cause of Tim?"
"Him, too," Bart said, impressed that Kon was cool and mature enough to admit he loved Tim. "But I meant seeing Batgirl again. Do you still have a crush on her?"
"I never..." Kon shook his head. "Yeah, okay. It's a little weird."
"Are you going to be okay?"
"Huh?" Kon finally looked at him. "I'll be fine." He put his hand on Bart's shoulder and squeezed. "Thanks for asking."
"No problem!" Bart patted Kon's knee before scrambling back to his feet. "I'm going to check some other routes."
Neither of the first three of the seven hypothetical routes were successful.
"Anything?" Bart asked Kon back on the roof.
"Nope."
Bart didn't want to admit that his calculations could use work, so he ran parallel to each of the seven routes on both sides.
"Anything?"
"Nada."
Finally, he triangulated the top three routes and ran them in a blanket stitch. He stopped two muggings and helped an old man, bent nearly perpendicular with age, with his bag of beer from a corner bodega. When he came back to the roof, Kon was right where he'd left him, but now he had his chin in his hand and his eyes closed.
"Anything?"
"Jeez, Bart, no. She's really quiet --"
Bart nodded and scooted along the tar paper to lean against Kon's back. "Bats are really stealthy! Remember that time Tim --"
"Sssh!"
Bart clapped his hand over his mouth. As quietly as he could -- to himself, he always called this channeling his inner Tim, but he suspected Kon wouldn't appreciate that right now -- he snuck around the roof before sitting next to Kon again. He tried to be patient; he recited the Hebrew alphabet backwards, translated part of his grandmother's biography of his grandpa into Russian, then Yiddish, and watched Kon. Watching was pretty interesting, as it turned out; when he was listening, Kon's eyes got this faraway look and his whole face softened until he looked younger, like he used to, and --.
"Back for more pain, dumbass?"
Kon jumped four feet in the air, but Bart couldn't move. Crouched on top of a soot-grimed stone lily on the corner of the building, a girl had materialized. Her hands were on her hips, her smirk turned on Kon, as she repeated the question. She was blonde, and masked, and she was --.
"Robin?" Bart asked, finishing his sputtering chain of thought aloud.
She grinned at him, but addressed Kon. "Your friend's a lot smarter than you, huh?"
She was Robin, and Bart had to counsel himself very sternly against sexist assumptions as he took in her costume. It was pure Robin, only her tunic was a skirt and her hair was long and she was really pretty. Tim wasn't pretty; he was good-looking -- all the Bats were, and Nightwing probably would have counted as pretty if he didn't have so much muscle -- but not like this.
She and Kon were circling each other, each staring the other down, and Bart got a huge whoosh of deja vu. Apparently Superboy and any Robin had a weird hostility-slash-magnetism going on.
Bart searched for something to say, anything to dispel the tension pumping and crackling between them, even as he swallowed another surge of resentment at the fact that Kon didn't even tell him there was a new Robin. He was about to open his mouth when the darkness to Robin's left shifted. All of a sudden, a second figure appeared. It was all black, cowled and slight, like a shadow come to life, faceless and wraith-like.
Bart moved behind Kon, just in case.
"Hey, Batgirl," Kon said and cleared his throat. "Um. 'sup?"
"That's Batgirl?" Bart whispered. He was talking to Kon, but Robin laughed and Batgirl tilted its -- her -- head. Bart made sure Kon was fully in front of him before he added, helplessly, "You don't look like the -- red-haired one."
"No," Batgirl said. Her voice was quiet and grave; Tim sounded like that, deliberately, but Bart sensed that she sounded like that all the time.
Obvious statements taken care of, silence descended. The edgy tension still arced between Kon and Robin, but Batgirl's presence sharpened everything, making it quieter, somehow more dangerous.
Robin scuffed the toe of her boot against a loose flap of tar paper and broke the eerie silence. "What're you doing here? Again?"
"We have a case!" Bart said, grateful for the chance to speak, at the same time that Kon muttered, "Nothing."
Batgirl certainly looked like a witch, but Bart knew better than to use such flimsy evidence. He wished, not for the first time, that he had Wonder Woman's lasso; it would have come in handy more times than he could count. All he'd have to do would get it around Batgirl and tug it magisterially before beginning the interrogation.
Instead, he hovered behind Kon and didn't breathe. Finally, Batgirl touched Robin's wrist with two fingers while tilting her head at a different angle. Robin glanced at Kon, then shrugged. "Fine, have it your way. You --" She pointed at Bart. "Kid, c'mere."
"I'm not --" A kid, Bart started to protest, but Kon pushed him toward Robin. He skidded right up to her. "Hi."
"Hi."
"So." Bart looked around; Batgirl and Kon had retired to the shadow cast by the largest lily on the roof. "Um."
"You're the Flash?" Robin asked.
"Kid Flash. The Flash is --"
"A lot taller?" She was mean, but it was a funny kind of mean, like Linda, sarcastic but not cruel, so Bart grinned.
"I, uh, used to know --" He rubbed the side of his fist against his forehead, unsure of how much anyone here knew about anyone else. That was the cool thing about having friends, like Oz with Devon or him with Kon; secrets were unusual. Trust meant that you didn't have to edit and revise your words on pain of, like, death. "Another Robin. He was a lot --"
Robin's smile was wide and toothy. "Quieter?"
Bart giggled. "Flatter."
Still grinning, she dropped one shoulder and punched his arm. Bart punched back and danced away; she came after him, laughing, kicking and chopping. Before he knew it, they were sparring. She was good, too, a lot looser than Tim-Robin, which maybe wasn't all that Bat-y, but it made the spar a lot more enjoyable.
When Robin trapped him in a headlock, Bart vibrated away and sped around her, kicking up enough of a breeze to flip up her skirt. Even though she wore tights beneath, the sight made Bart laugh hard enough that he slowed down and she was able to catch him off-balance and trip him.
"Oof! Good one!" Bart rolled back to his feet and bounced in place while she got her breath back. "Do you train a lot? You must train a lot, all the time. Is Batman crazy-hard on you? He was really hard on me, this one time when we teamed up to bring down the Joker, and I had to do everything he said -- Batman, not the Joker -- and I wasn't allowed to improvise or wing it or anything --"
Robin was still grinning at him, like she'd never stop. The warmth of her smile traveled right down through Bart, all the way to his bones. He got so warm that his cheeks started to hurt and he finally shut up.
"Batman?" Robin used the command voice, then added in her normal tone, "He's actually pretty cool."
"I'll bet!"
As she fixed her hair, smoothing it back and tightening the band, she asked, "You really took down Joker?"
Bart listened for doubt in her tone, but all he heard was sincere admiration. "I helped," he admitted. "It was mostly Batman's plan."
"Still," Robin said, "that's awesome."
Bart grinned back. "It really was!"
Batgirl and Kon had yet to emerge from their shadow; Bart sighed impatiently and slid down to sit cross-legged. Robin dropped beside him and said, after glancing over at what Bart'd decided was the world's oddest odd couple, "You buddies with the Super kid?"
"Yup!" Bart ripped at the tar paper. "You don't like him, huh?"
"Eh." Robin blew a raspberry. "I used to think he was the coolest. Had his poster and everything, but --"
"Which one? The beach scene, topless and just the leggings, with the crest painted on his chest with suntan lotion? Or the hands-on-hips pose with the leather jacket?"
She looked taken aback, but Bart didn't know why. He wasn't just a fan, after all; he was Kon's friend. It behooved him to know as much as he could about the guy.
"The...leather jacket one," she said slowly and shook her head.
"I miss the jacket," Bart said. "I do!" That earned him another odd look, but she softened it by rocking against him, bumping shoulders. "Anyway, what about Batgirl?"
If Kon was going to cut him off from interrogating the suspect herself, Bart figured he could do worse than question her associates. Besides, he didn't want to know what gross, obnoxious thing Kon must have said to earn Robin's enmity. She was tough as any hero their age he'd met, so it had to be really bad.
"What about her?" Robin asked. "She's cool."
"Are you close?"
She cut another suspicious glance his way, then shrugged and grinned. "I think so. Hard to tell sometimes with her."
Bart steepled his fingers under his chin and nodded slowly. "I see. And would you say that you know her well?"
Robin jabbed him with her elbow and grabbed him around the neck with her other arm, ruffling up his hair before he wriggled free. "Are you questioning me?"
Bart slapped his hair down. "Do you think I'm questioning you?"
Her mouth opened, but for a moment, no sound came out. Then she howled with laughter, rolling onto her side and kicking his leg.
"What?" Bart demanded. "What's so funny?"
She took her time sobering up, swiping the tears that ran from under the edge of her mask and swallowing hiccups. "Sorry, man. I hate it when people laugh at me --"
"It's the worst."
"-- it really is. It's just...you sounded like a cop at first, then like, I don't know, a therapist or something."
Bart considered that carefully, but couldn't decide whether he'd earned her hilarity or not. "A therapist like Freud or more like Barbra Streisand in Prince of Tides?"
Robin hiccuped again. "Freud, definitely."
"Okay, then," he said. "It's just, see -- I need to know what Batgirl was up to a couple months ago. So I'm starting with her --" Associates didn't sound very nice. "Her friends."
"She's in trouble?"
"I don't know," Bart said. "So I'm asking around. You know --" He spread his arms. "Casually."
Robin's eyebrows went up under the mask, wrinkling her forehead. "Uh-huh."
"I was just wondering. You don't have to be --"
"Nah, just gimme a sec. Two months ago?" Robin bit her bottom lip; she was taking him seriously, and Bart stayed very still, lest he hug her or shake her hand in gratitude, somehow ruin everything. "I barely remember what I was doing two months ago. Um." While she thought, her hand went to her hair, twisting a lock around her index finger and tugging at it. "The thirteenth was my birthday and BG and I went out to dinner. Then --"
Bart bit his cheek to keep from saying anything. The thirteenth was the date in question, but he needed to play his cards a lot closer to his chest than he had been.
"Then we went to a movie," Robin continued. "The arthouse was having a whole Steve McQueen retrospective, and there was a double bill. Reivers and Bullitt." She ducked her head and smiled to herself. "She really liked the chase scene."
Curiosity swayed Bart and he threw caution to the winds. "How'd she see through the hood?"
"What?"
"Did you get weird looks in the restaurant, too?"
Robin pursed her lips and looked like she was trying to hold back her laughter. "We went in civvies. Got really dressed up, made it a whole girl's night out...." When she shook her head, her hair blew over her face. "My boyfriend forgot the date, but BG showed up right before I headed out to beat him down."
"Oh, wow," Bart breathed. "It's just like Sixteen Candles, except kind of gay."
She tackled him, knocking him onto his back and wrestling him halfway across the roof until Bart could make himself heard. "It was a compliment! A good thing! Ow!" Breathless, Robin sat up, though Bart was still pinned, when Kon appeared behind her and dragged her off.
"Dead end," he said to Bart, holding out his hand, extending the TTK in an aura from his palm, helping Bart to his feet. Bart brushed himself off and shook off Kon's help.
"Yeah," Bart said. "It wasn't the Batgirl."
Batgirl nodded a single time at that, then tapped Robin's shoulder before melting into the dark.
"Have a good night!" Robin called over her shoulder as she shot out a grapple line and sailed away.
Kon shook his fist at the space where she'd been, and even though his cheek and ribs still ached a little from her punches, Bart couldn't help laughing.
"C'mon, chuckles," Kon said, wrapping his arm around Bart's waist and flying in the opposite direction. "Let's blow this stupid town."
"Gotham sucks." Bart hooked his arm around Kon's neck and squirmed until he was more comfortable. "It'd be faster if I ran."
"Sure, but you like the cuddling," Kon said and tickled Bart's armpit.
Even as he swung free, dangling hundreds of feet over the East End, Bart giggled helplessly. He had to agree.
*
The next day, Bart waited anxiously for Kon to return to the Tower from whatever it was he had to do each morning. He'd claimed repeatedly that he didn't have "chores", although Bart had never spoken the term, yet he returned smelling like mown grass and, well, manure.
After their second breakfast and several rounds of Magnetik-Boy on Gar's vintage Dreamcast, Bart announced his plans for the next stage of the investigation.
"I'm going to read all the books on magic I can find," he said as he melted butter in the frying pan for some more French toast. "And that way, I'll know what kind of witch can turn into a bat."
"How long's that going to take?" Kon added more cinnamon to the beaten eggs before Bart could stop him. "And what am I supposed to do?"
"You can talk to Devon again. Maybe he remembered something else."
Kon's brow wrinkled as he pondered that. "Or," he said slowly, "or, I could go see how Cassie's doing..."
Bart spanked him with the spatula. "This is a case. We have to take this seriously."
"Says the guy with egg in his hair and cinnamon down his shorts."
"I whisk fast, okay? Not my fault." Bart flipped the bread and wondered how wrong it would be to dose Kon with a little kryptonite. Not enough to hurt, just enough to tranq him. "And I don't have -- HEY!"
Kon let Bart's waistband snap back and flew out of reach. "Now you've got the cinnamon."
*
Bart visited Jason Blood, the Batcave (though he couldn't get in there and got shocked eight times when he tried), WayneTech's corporate headquarters (where Bruce Wayne's secretary gave him, after he waited for sixteen endless minutes, a note to access Wayne's private library), Star City's Magicks and Occult Ephemera collection, two sorcerers in Prague, a fakir in the capital of Kerala, two different shamans in the favelas of Sao Paulo, and a really nice British librarian in the Cotswolds.
He got back to the Tower in time for dinner, head stuffed with more mystical factoids than he'd ever thought possible.
"How's it going?" Vic asked, passing the pot roast.
"I can make a little golem and transfigure lead into ghee," Bart replied. "I can also perform numerological calculations that will tell you when you're going to die and how, but not where, and I translated a rune that's baffled archaeologists since 1842."
Vic wore that fond, proud-papa expression that he got when they managed to run through their training exercises without causing grievous bodily harm or any significant property damage. "Sounds good, buddy."
Bart stabbed his fork into his vegetables. "Sure, if I'm some kind of amateur dabbler in arcana. But nobody's ever heard of a bat-woman with a mystic pendant."
"Batwoman retired and bought a circus," Vic said gently.
"Not the Gotham bat-people, jeez!" Bart slumped in his chair; it was fewer than twenty-four hours since he'd made the same mistake, so he really shouldn't take it out on Vic. "Sorry. How was your day? Where's Gar?"
"The circuitry on the updated nano-satellites is being a bitch." Vic extended his roboarm and cleared the table in one swoop. Under his breath, he added, "As is Mister Logan."
Attempting to make up for his sulky snappishness, Bart joined Vic in the kitchen to wash up. But, like everything in the Tower, Vic had the dishes taken care of with computerized machinery. He retired back to his suite with three technical manuals in one hand and a can of PBR in the other.
Bart was left alone again. Kon had yet to return from his Devon-errand; Bart speculated gloomily that they were at some other cool aquatic cabaret, being awesome and making new friends and flirting while he paced the Tower's hallways with his hands in his pockets and chin digging into his chest. When he grew bored of being angsty, he wandered down to Vic's control room and tried to log on to the Tower mainframe.
Over sixty thousand log-in attempts later, he finally made it. It was a long shot, but he left a message for the mysterious Oracle with the details of the case and a request for information. Worried that the Oracle might delete his note as spam, he made sure to sign it Bartholomew Allen II, fka 'Impulse', currently 'Kid Flash', charter member of Young Justice and current Teen Titan.
No sooner had he hit enter on the note did the screen go green and a giant pointy face appear. Bart leapt backward with an embarrassing falsetto shriek and the face smiled tightly.
"I know who you are, Bart," it said.
"Is that a good thing?" He wrapped his arms around his chest and tried to breathe normally.
"I have no record of an albino witch with the power of animal transfiguration," it continued.
"Join the freaking club," he muttered.
"I do, however, see that four hours after the incident in question, a freighter bound for the big island of Hawaii out of Long Beach reported a sighting of a giant dog."
"A wolf? It turned Oz into a wolf, so that could be it and then we'd have to go to Hawaii, I don't know how Kon's going to feel about that, there's a lot of baggage for him related to that and --"
Its eyelids closed briefly before it replied, "Perhaps it was a wolf. I suggest you find the crew on that freighter and interview them. I'm sending the details to your email."
"Wow, thanks, Oracle!"
"Is your Hotmail account still active? 'ImpulsiveAllen' is not the best username, you know."
He waved his hand. "Nah, I'm on Gmail now. 'MaxLives' or 'Yo-dot-Bart', either one's good."
Without saying more, the face shrank down to a dot and vanished and the monitor screen returned to normal.
By midnight, Kon still hadn't returned, so Bart turned in.
*
"I say we forget it," Kon said the next morning. Bart met him on the roof and made sure not to mention the pieces of hay stuck in Kon's hair, nor the faint scent of turned earth emanating from him. "We're not detectives, Bart."
"We are detectives! We're detecting, so ipso facto, we qualify as detectives."
Kon grimaced at the Latin. "We suck at detecting. Ipso facto OED."
"QED, you mean."
"Whatever. What I mean is, we suck."
Bart jogged down the stairs behind Kon. "We don't suck. I just need your notes on your meeting with Devon, and then we can get started."
Kon took a hard right into the dormitory area; in his room, he stripped off his jeans and t-shirt and sniffed his armpits. "I need a shower. What say we forget about all this Magnum, PI bullshit and just kick back the rest of the week?"
Bart bounced a couple of times on Kon's unmade bed. "I don't know --"
"Come on." Naked now, Kon snapped his towel across Bart's legs and grinned widely. "It'll be like old times. We'll get some Trivial Pursuit going, set up the ping-pong table, just be --" As he paused, he rolled his shoulders, then slumped a little. "Just be us."
"I dunno," Bart said again. It sounded like a lot of fun, truth be told, and it wasn't like he was getting offers to socialize right and left.
"I'm gonna shower and you...." Kon stuck his head back out from the bathroom. "You do whatever it is you do."
Bart stuck his tongue out before he remembered that the gesture was infantile; guys their (apparent) age didn't do that. They flipped each other off instead. Same message, different body-parts.
He couldn't think with the noise of Kon's horrible, off-key rendition of "I Touch Myself" coming from the shower, so he ran up and down the hallway. On one hand, he hadn't just plain hung out with Kon in nearly forever -- at least since Young Justice disbanded. How many times had he missed their games and wrestling matches in the Poconos headquarters? For a while there, Kon was as good a friend as Preston and Carol; Bart was as close to him as anyone in Manchester.
On the other hand, there was the case to think about. They'd made a promise to Devon, and via him, to that poor guy Oz, and it would be intensely rude and cruel to go back on their word. Besides, the problems that the case posed had pretty much ensnared Bart. He didn't believe he could rest until he succeeded in making sense of the various questions -- not just who the batgirl who wasn't Batgirl was, but how to get Devon back to his human form, how to save Oz from being trapped in a wolf's body, and how to reunite them all while bringing the batgirl-who-wasn't to justice.
On the other tentacle, though -- everything had changed so much. They'd somehow reached the point where Tim and Kon could hit each other, where a blonde girl was Robin and Bart hadn't heard from Preston in six months. Maybe a couple days of bonding with Kon, case or no case, was just what he needed.
There were loads of books in every library about emotional development, but nothing Bart had ever read could help with this.
By the time the shower spray had receded to a trickle and Kon was floating bare-assed against the light fixture in his room looking for a clean pair of socks -- "bird's eye view, dude, nothing like it" -- Bart had yet to make up his mind.
Nothing said he couldn't have everything, did it? He was fast and Kon was strong; they could do it all.
"We should do both," Bart said while Kon turned a sideways, counter-clockwise somersault, struggling to pull on his jeans over wet skin.
"Fuck shit sodomize a goat -- what?"
"Both." Bart handed Kon a dry, if none too clean, towel. "Hang out like we used to and solve the case."
"I told you, we suck." Kon finally turned right-side up and pawed at his wet hair.
"No, we really don't! Listen, I got the crew list and contact details for a freighter that saw the Oz-wolf -- all we have to do now is interview them, compare the accounts to what you talked about with Devon yesterday, and we'll know exactly what to do next."
Kon turned around to rustle in his closet for a shirt. He passed over the sixteen extra black Superboy tees, muttered something under his breath, and finally dug out a crumpled baseball jersey from the bottom of the mess on the floor.
When he was fully dressed, he turned back around. "What, now I get the silent treatment?"
"I --" Bart cocked his head. "No. Why?"
"I said I was sorry." Kon folded his arms and tried to frown, but he just ended up looking sad.
Bart reviewed the past couple minutes. He'd been watching Kon, arguing for the case, and also making mental notes to run down to Manchester and check up on Preston. He'd missed something important; the longer he didn't say anything, the sadder Kon looked.
"Why should you be sorry?" he asked carefully. "Explain?"
"Jesus, Bart!" Kon threw up his hands and flew over to the window. "I already apologized."
Kon's temper had always been hair-trigger, but Bart was used to that. He didn't enjoy being yelled at, but the cause was usually fairly obvious. Not so this time. He needed to calm Kon down, make peace like he always did, and then they could get back on track.
"I accept your apology." Bart crossed his fingers behind his back, but it had to be said. For Kon's sake. "Thanks. So, about the case --"
"There's no case!" Kon banged his fist against the window. It was tempered safety glass, a mix of compounds developed by Mr. Terrific and imported from New Genesis; it was supposed to be able to withstand hurricanes, nuclear explosions, Apokoliptian parademons, and Doomsday.
All the same, the glass trembled and spider-cracked under Kon's blow.
"Sure there is," Bart said smoothly after waiting for the cracks to stop spreading. "Tell me about Devon and --"
"I didn't talk to him, okay? I suck and you don't need me!" Kon drew back his foot to kick the window and Bart realized he had a choice.
Not about the kicking -- he had to stop that, so he sped over and pulled as hard as he could on Kon's bare ankle -- but about what counted. He could make peace, soothe whatever was pissing off Kon, and go with the flow. Or he could do something a lot scarier.
Kon crashed down to the floor, cursing as he landed on a pile of unread textbooks and CD cases. Bart stepped back, all the way back to the doorway, and took a deep breath.
"You don't suck," he said and Kon snorted derisively. "But you should've kept your word." Kon snorted again and banged a loose fist against the floorboards. "I'm going to go talk to Devon. I'll see you later."
Before he could reconsider, Bart twisted around, reaching for the spangled anxiety of the Speed Force, and disappeared into its flow.
*
Devon met him in an inlet of the Salish Sea, south of Vancouver; a flock of merpeople visited the Salish in the autumn, just in time to see the Spirit Bears gorging themselves on salmon before retiring into hibernation.
"There's some hoodoo mystic shit about the bears and the mers," Devon said, "some eternal bond, that kind of crap."
Bart emerged from the fern grove where he'd left his clothes and, cupping himself with his left hand, stepped into the water.
"Dude after my own heart," Devon said, slapping his tail against Bart's legs. "Naked is the best."
"Clothes suck, totally."
The water was much warmer than he'd expected, and the current was far more gentle than the one at the cabaret. Soon he was floating next to Devon in the shadow of an overhanging tree, the sun hot on his knees. Everything was green, a trillion shades of green, from the moss on the rocks to the glints off the water to Devon's eyes to the seaweed waving deep below.
"You don't believe them?" Bart asked eventually. "About the bears?"
"Whatever. I grew up in the vampire capital of California." Devon flipped over to float on his stomach, his tail sinking into the shadowy depths. "Can't faze me."
"Oh," Bart said, for lack of anything better to say. He couldn't claim to know Devon very well at all, but in the short time they'd talked, Devon had seemed fazed by a heck of a lot.
Devon lifted his head and smirked. "Total bullshit, by the way. That's Oz. I'm a little more...what's the fucking word?"
"Temperamental?"
"Sure," Devon said. "Takes some good-ass weed or red algae flakes to chill me down."
Bart really didn't want to say oh again, but nothing else was coming to mind.
Luckily, Devon talked almost as much as Bart did. He tapped Bart's chest lightly and said, "Speaking of which, you carrying?"
"I'm naked," Bart reminded him. Just for emphasis, he spread his limbs like a starfish or a snow angel and floated a little bit away. "Carrying what? Red algae?"
Devon sighed long and deep. "That shit is good."
"About Oz..." Bart bit his lip and floated back to Devon's side.
"You totally reminded me of him," Devon said, sliding his tail around Bart's knee, keeping him in place. "Then you opened your mouth."
Bart knit his fingers together and looked away. "I'm still trying to figure out what happened. I'm really sorry."
"Aww, he'll wander back eventually," Devon said as he tied a length of seaweed around Bart's head. "He always does."
Bart blinked the water out of his eyes and brushed the seaweed back behind his ear. "He's done this before?"
"Couple times?" Devon dove into the depths, twin streams of bubbles rising behind him. When he surfaced, he was sucking on a twig of driftwood. "Maybe five. No, six." He shrugged. "Hate math. Worst was a couple years ago. He was gone for three years."
"Jeez," Bart breathed. He tried to imagine not seeing Tim or Cassie, Cissie or Preston, for that long, but it was impossible. Even Kon, because there was no way, even as angry as Bart still was, that he could go three weeks, let alone years, without talking to big blockhead. He tried, and all he could imagine was that dark void behind the Speed Force, the one that his grandfather's and Max's voices emanated from. "Wow."
Devon bit the twig in two and spat out one piece. "After that, I was ready to marry the bastard. Anything, you know?"
Bart could only nod. Nod and float and try to suppress the urge to hug Devon.
They floated about a mile away from the inlet, arms linked, through patches of cool shade and hot sun, before Devon shook Bart's shoulder gently. "You passed out."
"Did not." Bart knuckled his eyes. "I just --" Didn't know what to say. "How'd you deal? When he was gone?"
Devon reached out to the bank and snagged a handful of low-hanging berries from a bush. He picked through the bunch and offered them to Bart. "Dunno. I'm not, like --" He looked at Bart and smiled, and it was like he was on stage, flirting with an entire crowd at once, and Bart shivered even though he was simultaneously really warm. "Advice man. Ask Oz, he'd know what to tell you."
"Right," Bart said and didn't point out that he couldn't ask Oz, because Oz was missing, that was the whole point. "Want to swim back?"
As they neared the cove, Devon stopped, holding a finger to his lips. "You hear that or is my spinal fluid as fucked up as they say?"
He sounded sincerely curious and this time, Bart did hug him. "It's my phone. Be right back."
He jumped out of the water and turned on the speed to make it to his phone before it went to voice-mail. He'd explain to Devon later, if Devon even noticed -- he was kind of a stoner, Bart was pretty sure, and oblivious to the max.
"Don't hang up!" Kon said as Bart answered.
"Why shouldn't I?" The rocks on the beach were cold from the shade and Bart couldn't get comfortable. Out of the water, being naked was something of a drawback. "Jerk."
"Dork," Kon replied automatically. "I got a weird IM from something called Oracle and --"
"It's a person," Bart said. "Or an organization acting as a single entity, I'm not sure."
"Fascinating. It's got, like, length measurements or something?" Kon was speaking quickly, and, back in the water, Devon had started singing, so Bart stuck a finger in his free ear and listened as hard as he could. "Wait. Maybe it's time? This says minutes."
"Read it to me?" Bart suggested.
"Temperature, it's temperature. And time. What is this?"
"I don't know," Bart said. "Just read it to me."
"Okay, boy genius, make sense of this if you dare: 20 degrees -- that's the little circle, right? -- and 18 feet and then 138 degrees -- is that even possible? That's like boiling -- and 14 feet."
"Kon," Bart said. "It's latitude and longitude. Does it say N and W or S and E or what?"
"20 N and 138 W. So, what, it's somewhere hot?"
"Not degrees of temperature, Kon!" Bart took a deep breath. "It's somewhere near Hawaii." Bart tried to sound calm, but he wanted to run there right away and stop to box Kon's ears and, actually, now that he thought about it, maybe get something to eat.
"Hawaii's hot."
"Yeah, but --"
"Rad, we're going to the big island! Meet you there! Race --"
"No, wait!" Bart shouted, but the connection had already closed.
He dressed quickly, shouting to Devon all the while that he had a lead in the middle of the Pacific and he'd be in touch.
"Dude, I'll just swim over," Devon said from the middle of the inlet. His hair was drying in long waves. Bart paused in lacing his sneakers to admire the sight; Devon really did make a good mermaid, but hopefully he wouldn't have to stay one for long. Devon caught his eye and preened a little. "I'd offer to swim you over, but looks like you can take care of yourself, speedy."
"Speedy's someone else -- oh." Bart wiped his palms on his shirt-hem. "Right. Um, don't tell anyone, okay?"
"Already forgotten," Devon said and winked. The thing was, Bart believed him.
*
Running west, Bart escaped the dusk gathering over the coast and entered the full, late-afternoon warmth. He'd jerry-rigged up a GPS with a compass, Big Gulp straw, and some odds and ends in his pockets, and as he neared his destination, he started to worry. He was still a few hundred miles from Hawaii with no land in sight. Maybe the coordinates referred to a shipwreck, and if they did, he'd have to return to San Francisco for scuba gear. Maybe submarine like they used to photograph the Titanic.
On the horizon, a small spot glowed red against a narrow stripe of dark. Bart checked the GPS in time to slow down before he overran the tiny atoll. The coordinates were right, but no map he'd ever seen listed this place.
"Welcome to the Wild Lands," an all-too-familiar voice said to his left.
Bart paced slowly up a dune and then, when he saw Tim sitting with someone else -- around Tim's height, with weird dyed hair and lots of piercings -- he ran and slid all the way, almost into their small campfire.
"Tim!"
"Bart," Tim said. He was wearing a Gotham Knights baseball cap, cut-off shorts, and a garish Hawaiian shirt with palms and parrots and hula dancers. "Long time no see."
"I saw you the day before yesterday! Are you going to hit or can I hug you or should I just keep a respectful, respectable mature distance without any infantile expressions of oh-my-god joy and glee?"
"Hug," Tim said after a moment and it did feel like forever since Bart had gotten to do this. Gotham didn't count, he decided. It never happened. Tim was a little stiff, like always, in Bart's embrace, but he patted Bart's shoulder-blades enthusiastically and didn't pull away as soon as he tended to do. "Bart, this is Oz."
The small, pale guy was poking at the fire with a stick. He glanced up. "Hey."
Bart let Tim go and dropped down onto one knee. Not quite believing his eyes, he poked Oz in the shoulder. "You're not a wolf!"
Oz frowned briefly, as if he needed to ascertain that fact on his own. "Not at present, no."
"Devon really misses you," Bart said as he squirmed in between Tim and Oz on the log they were using as a bench. He gripped Oz's knee, which was almost as bony as his own, and let himself babble. "He's such a cool guy, you know? And it's like, to him, you hung the moon, and I didn't know what to do, and I tried and tried --"
"Well, Great Scott, Holy Hannah, Good Heavens, and By Rao's Eternal Name," Kon said as he arrived, in flight, blocking out the sun dwindling on the horizon. He planted his fists on his hips and gazed inland. "Haven't been here since, like, forever."
"Where are we?" Bart stage-whispered to Tim. Oz must have had great hearing, because he chuckled. Once, and warmly, so Bart didn't mind.
"You want to explain, SB?" Tim asked, gazing up. "This is your place, after all."
Kon floated down, a far-away look still in his eyes as he greeted Tim with a manly punch to the shoulder and "no hard feelings, Timmo?" Bart introduced him to Oz, whose entire vocabulary consisted of "hey" and "cool". That wasn't a criticism, actually; Bart figured both he and Kon could use some lessons in plain, economic speech. Then again, they'd known Tim forever and he hadn't really rubbed off yet, so it was probably a lost cause.
When Kon was halfway through his story -- something about this island being occupied by sentient, speaking animals, ruled by a tiger-king and a bat-queen -- the sound of singing, out on the water, reached them. Night was almost completely fallen, the fire had died to cherry-red embers, and Bart couldn't remember being this happy.
He took the singing for birds, or maybe whales, or some of the animals in Kon's story, but when it grew louder, lyrics became audible.
"That'd be my cue," Oz said -- it was the first thing he'd said since hey to Kon and I'm a werewolf by way of explanation for where he'd been -- and got to his feet. "Back in a..." He scratched his jaw. "Well, it's Dev, so this could take awhile."
He loped up over the dune and out of sight.
"He's really a werewolf?" Kon asked Tim.
Tim shrugged. "Don't look at me. It's your case."
"It's my case," Bart said. To his surprise, Kon ducked his head and looked embarrassed. "Okay, our case."
Kon looked at him, eyes almost purple in the low light, and grinned as wide as the horizon. "So it was Nosferata on the houseboat?"
"Who's Nosferata?" Bart asked at the same time that Tim said, "Signs point to yes."
"The bat-slash-woman queen here," Kon said impatiently. "I told you."
"Excuse me," Bart said. He could feel anxiety pulsing up his back and constricting his throat. "I would remember that. You should've remembered that."
Kon stared at the fire, his face gone Halloween-eerie with deep shadows. "Yeah," he said finally. "I should've. Man, I should see how the adventurers are doing..."
"Band of talking animals he travelled with," Tim told Bart quietly before Bart could ask.
They sat in the dark, huddled on the log, and when Bart shivered, Kon put his arm around him.
Tim cleared his throat after a long period of silence and Bart jabbed his finger at him. "Don't you dare say you have to go."
Tim blinked. "I was just going to say there are sleeping bags in the sub."
"You have a sub?" Kon shook Tim by the shoulder. "You never mentioned a sub!"
"It's Batman's," Tim said quietly. "Nightwing let me..."
He didn't finish; he stood up, brushing off the seat of his shorts, and moving down to the shore. When he returned, he carried three sleeping bags, a kerosene lantern, and a canteen of water.
"No food?" Bart and Kon asked simultaneously.
Bart lost the rock-paper-scissors match against Kon to decide who'd run to Hawaii for food. He didn't really mind; he could go so much faster than Kon that he'd be back in the time it would have taken Kon to make one leg of the trip.
Before he left, though, he stood on the other side of the fire and cleared his throat. "You'll be here when I get back, right?"
"Dude, of course," Kon said as he shook out one sleeping bag.
"Yes," Tim said as he built up the fire.
"You have to promise," Bart said loudly, making sure they were listening to him. "Don't just run off, either of you."
Kon glanced at Tim, and then Tim squared his shoulders and met Bart's gaze. "We promise. Cross our hearts and --"
Bart held up his hand. "Don't tempt fate, Tim! Just promising's enough."
The sand melted to glass under his soles, he took off so fast. Even with their solemn promises, Bart wasn't about to leave anything to chance. The Pacific steamed beneath him as he ran with a garbage bag full of snacks and provisions back to the Wild Lands, enough to feed a herd of elephants for a week, or himself and Kon for a couple days.
He thought he saw Devon's tail, the gleam of gold under water, and Oz's sharp, pale face as he passed -- they were kissing, or hugging, or something -- but Bart knew they were going to be okay. They were out of his hands now; now, he had to go back to his friends. He couldn't think about anything else.
[end]
*
This was probably how Devon felt when he lost Oz. Without his friends, he was at loose ends, much more than merely sad. Bart ran around Gotham as twilight fell, up and down the island, cris-crossing from the Tricorner Yards up to the Kane Memorial Bridge, from the entrance to the Brown railroad tubes over to Port Adams. Heedless of any more Bat-sensors, he was looking to get lost, but the maps in his memory were far too accurate for that.
He snuck into the main branch of the Gotham Public Library through the loading dock and up into its archives. He read the entire manuscript collection, the Wayne family papers and the Kane Judaica collection after he taught himself the Hebrew alphabet, then seven floors of the circulating collection. It was well and truly night by the time he took a break and climbed through the air ducts to the roof. He didn't feel any better, but he did have lots of new facts to occupy him and drown out the sick lonely feeling creepy-crawling under his skin. He was trying to decide what to have for dinner -- Nepalese momos or Sephardi falafel were the leading contenders -- as he paced the edge of the roof and worked out the kinks in his neck and shoulders.
At the southwest corner, behind an especially fearsome gargoyle clutching the book of life in its talons, he bumped into Kon. Bart tried to move around him, pretending that Kon was just another ugly stupid architectural flourish, but Kon grabbed his elbow and yanked him to a stop.
"Jerk," Bart muttered, staring down at his toes. "What do you want?"
Kon didn't say anything for a long moment. "Looking for you."
When Kon's grip relaxed, Bart moved aside and jammed his hands into his pockets. "Why? I've got a curfew now or something? You're my babysitter?"
"Bart --" Kon shrugged and looked out over the city. "C'mon."
"You should get hazard pay, having to look after a big hyperactive baby like me," Bart said. His mouth was sticky-dry and tasted sour; he wanted to spit, but there wasn't enough saliva. "Sucks to be you."
Kon's hesitant smile turned down at the corners. "Totally sucks to be me."
"Stuck with a little kid," Bart added, in case he hadn't been clear. "Betrayed by your real friend."
Kon's expression twisted like something unraveling and he hunched his shoulders. "Bart. I --. You're my friend, too."
"Yeah, right. 'Let the big kids talk, Bart'. 'Go away, Bart'. 'Hit puberty, Bart'. 'Finish your spinach, Bart'."
"I hate spinach," Kon said. "What're you talking about?"
"Nothing, I just got caught up in it." When Kon started to grin, Bart pointed at him. "Don't laugh at me! I'm still mad and it's the principle of the thing, you patronizing me like, like --" Kon nodded and looked away; trailing off, Bart jogged in place for several moments. When he could think again, he added, "You are such a jackass, you know that?"
"You're not the first to say it," Kon said, glancing at Bart and giving him another hesitant smile. "I'm sorry."
Bart slowed his jog and shrugged as he turned away. "Thanks."
"Besides," Kon said, joining him and elbowing him gently, "what about our case?"
"Also," Bart said and raised his voice to make sure that Kon was listening, "real friends don't keep secrets from each other."
Beside him, Kon sighed deeply and didn't reply. Bart let his point sink in -- just long enough for Kon to realize he was serious, but not so long that Kon's attention would wander -- and then straightened up. He squared his shoulders and said, "What's wrong with Tim, anyway?"
Snorting with laughter -- humorless laughter, sarcastic and mean -- Kon bumped his shoulder into Bart's. "He's happy."
Bart frowned, trying, and failing, to work that out. "Really?"
Kon rose a yard up into the air and kicked Bart's butt. "He says so."
"But he lies," Bart pointed out.
Sighing again, Kon turned a slow somersault before landing on his toes. "He sure does."
"You should've told me he quit."
Kon looked at him, apparently about to sigh again, but then he put his arm around Bart's shoulders instead. As always, his embrace was warmer than any human's, and snugger, too, and Bart was the one who sighed then, breathing out the worst of his nausea.
"Yeah," Kon said, releasing Bart. "I should have."
"We should get dinner, then go back to work --" Perched on the gargoyle's flat head, Bart looked back at Kon. "Dumplings or deep-fried balls?"
Kon's laugh now was the opposite of humorless; delighted and immature all at once, it was totally Kon -- even better, it was the laugh Bart remembered from before Kon ever got his name, when he was just Kid and happy about it. Bart sped down the building feeling lighter than helium.
*
Bart finished off seventeen momos and a full order of rice noodles while Kon demolished a respectable ten momos and beef curry.
When his plate was clean, Kon tapped his chopsticks against the rim and said, without looking up, "I'm really sorry, you know."
Bart patted his stomach. "It's all right now."
When they were paying, Kon handed Bart an extra wet-wipe and gestured for him to wipe his face. "You're so gross when you eat."
Bart poked him in the chest, right where the crest was on his pseudo-costume. "You're gross when you breathe."
Kon didn't protest. He let Bart take the lead through the city. Having consulted at the library the microfiche of the three daily papers and bound volumes of both Gotham Living and its upstart competitor, The Big Stink for any reports of Batgirl, Bart thought he had a pretty good idea of her usual patrol routes.
Atop the Beaux-Arts edifice of Gotham Light and Power, which looked from the street like a giant wedding cake melting in the sun, Bart told Kon to listen for her while he ran the two most likely routes.
He returned, empty-handed, to find Kon sitting in the middle of the roof, arms around his knees and head cocked like a bird's.
"This must be weird for you," Bart said lowly as he sat down. "Being here, is it weird for you? Revisiting a lost love and all?"
Kon tilted his head the other way, frowning. Eventually, he said absently, "Why, 'cause of Tim?"
"Him, too," Bart said, impressed that Kon was cool and mature enough to admit he loved Tim. "But I meant seeing Batgirl again. Do you still have a crush on her?"
"I never..." Kon shook his head. "Yeah, okay. It's a little weird."
"Are you going to be okay?"
"Huh?" Kon finally looked at him. "I'll be fine." He put his hand on Bart's shoulder and squeezed. "Thanks for asking."
"No problem!" Bart patted Kon's knee before scrambling back to his feet. "I'm going to check some other routes."
Neither of the first three of the seven hypothetical routes were successful.
"Anything?" Bart asked Kon back on the roof.
"Nope."
Bart didn't want to admit that his calculations could use work, so he ran parallel to each of the seven routes on both sides.
"Anything?"
"Nada."
Finally, he triangulated the top three routes and ran them in a blanket stitch. He stopped two muggings and helped an old man, bent nearly perpendicular with age, with his bag of beer from a corner bodega. When he came back to the roof, Kon was right where he'd left him, but now he had his chin in his hand and his eyes closed.
"Anything?"
"Jeez, Bart, no. She's really quiet --"
Bart nodded and scooted along the tar paper to lean against Kon's back. "Bats are really stealthy! Remember that time Tim --"
"Sssh!"
Bart clapped his hand over his mouth. As quietly as he could -- to himself, he always called this channeling his inner Tim, but he suspected Kon wouldn't appreciate that right now -- he snuck around the roof before sitting next to Kon again. He tried to be patient; he recited the Hebrew alphabet backwards, translated part of his grandmother's biography of his grandpa into Russian, then Yiddish, and watched Kon. Watching was pretty interesting, as it turned out; when he was listening, Kon's eyes got this faraway look and his whole face softened until he looked younger, like he used to, and --.
"Back for more pain, dumbass?"
Kon jumped four feet in the air, but Bart couldn't move. Crouched on top of a soot-grimed stone lily on the corner of the building, a girl had materialized. Her hands were on her hips, her smirk turned on Kon, as she repeated the question. She was blonde, and masked, and she was --.
"Robin?" Bart asked, finishing his sputtering chain of thought aloud.
She grinned at him, but addressed Kon. "Your friend's a lot smarter than you, huh?"
She was Robin, and Bart had to counsel himself very sternly against sexist assumptions as he took in her costume. It was pure Robin, only her tunic was a skirt and her hair was long and she was really pretty. Tim wasn't pretty; he was good-looking -- all the Bats were, and Nightwing probably would have counted as pretty if he didn't have so much muscle -- but not like this.
She and Kon were circling each other, each staring the other down, and Bart got a huge whoosh of deja vu. Apparently Superboy and any Robin had a weird hostility-slash-magnetism going on.
Bart searched for something to say, anything to dispel the tension pumping and crackling between them, even as he swallowed another surge of resentment at the fact that Kon didn't even tell him there was a new Robin. He was about to open his mouth when the darkness to Robin's left shifted. All of a sudden, a second figure appeared. It was all black, cowled and slight, like a shadow come to life, faceless and wraith-like.
Bart moved behind Kon, just in case.
"Hey, Batgirl," Kon said and cleared his throat. "Um. 'sup?"
"That's Batgirl?" Bart whispered. He was talking to Kon, but Robin laughed and Batgirl tilted its -- her -- head. Bart made sure Kon was fully in front of him before he added, helplessly, "You don't look like the -- red-haired one."
"No," Batgirl said. Her voice was quiet and grave; Tim sounded like that, deliberately, but Bart sensed that she sounded like that all the time.
Obvious statements taken care of, silence descended. The edgy tension still arced between Kon and Robin, but Batgirl's presence sharpened everything, making it quieter, somehow more dangerous.
Robin scuffed the toe of her boot against a loose flap of tar paper and broke the eerie silence. "What're you doing here? Again?"
"We have a case!" Bart said, grateful for the chance to speak, at the same time that Kon muttered, "Nothing."
Batgirl certainly looked like a witch, but Bart knew better than to use such flimsy evidence. He wished, not for the first time, that he had Wonder Woman's lasso; it would have come in handy more times than he could count. All he'd have to do would get it around Batgirl and tug it magisterially before beginning the interrogation.
Instead, he hovered behind Kon and didn't breathe. Finally, Batgirl touched Robin's wrist with two fingers while tilting her head at a different angle. Robin glanced at Kon, then shrugged. "Fine, have it your way. You --" She pointed at Bart. "Kid, c'mere."
"I'm not --" A kid, Bart started to protest, but Kon pushed him toward Robin. He skidded right up to her. "Hi."
"Hi."
"So." Bart looked around; Batgirl and Kon had retired to the shadow cast by the largest lily on the roof. "Um."
"You're the Flash?" Robin asked.
"Kid Flash. The Flash is --"
"A lot taller?" She was mean, but it was a funny kind of mean, like Linda, sarcastic but not cruel, so Bart grinned.
"I, uh, used to know --" He rubbed the side of his fist against his forehead, unsure of how much anyone here knew about anyone else. That was the cool thing about having friends, like Oz with Devon or him with Kon; secrets were unusual. Trust meant that you didn't have to edit and revise your words on pain of, like, death. "Another Robin. He was a lot --"
Robin's smile was wide and toothy. "Quieter?"
Bart giggled. "Flatter."
Still grinning, she dropped one shoulder and punched his arm. Bart punched back and danced away; she came after him, laughing, kicking and chopping. Before he knew it, they were sparring. She was good, too, a lot looser than Tim-Robin, which maybe wasn't all that Bat-y, but it made the spar a lot more enjoyable.
When Robin trapped him in a headlock, Bart vibrated away and sped around her, kicking up enough of a breeze to flip up her skirt. Even though she wore tights beneath, the sight made Bart laugh hard enough that he slowed down and she was able to catch him off-balance and trip him.
"Oof! Good one!" Bart rolled back to his feet and bounced in place while she got her breath back. "Do you train a lot? You must train a lot, all the time. Is Batman crazy-hard on you? He was really hard on me, this one time when we teamed up to bring down the Joker, and I had to do everything he said -- Batman, not the Joker -- and I wasn't allowed to improvise or wing it or anything --"
Robin was still grinning at him, like she'd never stop. The warmth of her smile traveled right down through Bart, all the way to his bones. He got so warm that his cheeks started to hurt and he finally shut up.
"Batman?" Robin used the command voice, then added in her normal tone, "He's actually pretty cool."
"I'll bet!"
As she fixed her hair, smoothing it back and tightening the band, she asked, "You really took down Joker?"
Bart listened for doubt in her tone, but all he heard was sincere admiration. "I helped," he admitted. "It was mostly Batman's plan."
"Still," Robin said, "that's awesome."
Bart grinned back. "It really was!"
Batgirl and Kon had yet to emerge from their shadow; Bart sighed impatiently and slid down to sit cross-legged. Robin dropped beside him and said, after glancing over at what Bart'd decided was the world's oddest odd couple, "You buddies with the Super kid?"
"Yup!" Bart ripped at the tar paper. "You don't like him, huh?"
"Eh." Robin blew a raspberry. "I used to think he was the coolest. Had his poster and everything, but --"
"Which one? The beach scene, topless and just the leggings, with the crest painted on his chest with suntan lotion? Or the hands-on-hips pose with the leather jacket?"
She looked taken aback, but Bart didn't know why. He wasn't just a fan, after all; he was Kon's friend. It behooved him to know as much as he could about the guy.
"The...leather jacket one," she said slowly and shook her head.
"I miss the jacket," Bart said. "I do!" That earned him another odd look, but she softened it by rocking against him, bumping shoulders. "Anyway, what about Batgirl?"
If Kon was going to cut him off from interrogating the suspect herself, Bart figured he could do worse than question her associates. Besides, he didn't want to know what gross, obnoxious thing Kon must have said to earn Robin's enmity. She was tough as any hero their age he'd met, so it had to be really bad.
"What about her?" Robin asked. "She's cool."
"Are you close?"
She cut another suspicious glance his way, then shrugged and grinned. "I think so. Hard to tell sometimes with her."
Bart steepled his fingers under his chin and nodded slowly. "I see. And would you say that you know her well?"
Robin jabbed him with her elbow and grabbed him around the neck with her other arm, ruffling up his hair before he wriggled free. "Are you questioning me?"
Bart slapped his hair down. "Do you think I'm questioning you?"
Her mouth opened, but for a moment, no sound came out. Then she howled with laughter, rolling onto her side and kicking his leg.
"What?" Bart demanded. "What's so funny?"
She took her time sobering up, swiping the tears that ran from under the edge of her mask and swallowing hiccups. "Sorry, man. I hate it when people laugh at me --"
"It's the worst."
"-- it really is. It's just...you sounded like a cop at first, then like, I don't know, a therapist or something."
Bart considered that carefully, but couldn't decide whether he'd earned her hilarity or not. "A therapist like Freud or more like Barbra Streisand in Prince of Tides?"
Robin hiccuped again. "Freud, definitely."
"Okay, then," he said. "It's just, see -- I need to know what Batgirl was up to a couple months ago. So I'm starting with her --" Associates didn't sound very nice. "Her friends."
"She's in trouble?"
"I don't know," Bart said. "So I'm asking around. You know --" He spread his arms. "Casually."
Robin's eyebrows went up under the mask, wrinkling her forehead. "Uh-huh."
"I was just wondering. You don't have to be --"
"Nah, just gimme a sec. Two months ago?" Robin bit her bottom lip; she was taking him seriously, and Bart stayed very still, lest he hug her or shake her hand in gratitude, somehow ruin everything. "I barely remember what I was doing two months ago. Um." While she thought, her hand went to her hair, twisting a lock around her index finger and tugging at it. "The thirteenth was my birthday and BG and I went out to dinner. Then --"
Bart bit his cheek to keep from saying anything. The thirteenth was the date in question, but he needed to play his cards a lot closer to his chest than he had been.
"Then we went to a movie," Robin continued. "The arthouse was having a whole Steve McQueen retrospective, and there was a double bill. Reivers and Bullitt." She ducked her head and smiled to herself. "She really liked the chase scene."
Curiosity swayed Bart and he threw caution to the winds. "How'd she see through the hood?"
"What?"
"Did you get weird looks in the restaurant, too?"
Robin pursed her lips and looked like she was trying to hold back her laughter. "We went in civvies. Got really dressed up, made it a whole girl's night out...." When she shook her head, her hair blew over her face. "My boyfriend forgot the date, but BG showed up right before I headed out to beat him down."
"Oh, wow," Bart breathed. "It's just like Sixteen Candles, except kind of gay."
She tackled him, knocking him onto his back and wrestling him halfway across the roof until Bart could make himself heard. "It was a compliment! A good thing! Ow!" Breathless, Robin sat up, though Bart was still pinned, when Kon appeared behind her and dragged her off.
"Dead end," he said to Bart, holding out his hand, extending the TTK in an aura from his palm, helping Bart to his feet. Bart brushed himself off and shook off Kon's help.
"Yeah," Bart said. "It wasn't the Batgirl."
Batgirl nodded a single time at that, then tapped Robin's shoulder before melting into the dark.
"Have a good night!" Robin called over her shoulder as she shot out a grapple line and sailed away.
Kon shook his fist at the space where she'd been, and even though his cheek and ribs still ached a little from her punches, Bart couldn't help laughing.
"C'mon, chuckles," Kon said, wrapping his arm around Bart's waist and flying in the opposite direction. "Let's blow this stupid town."
"Gotham sucks." Bart hooked his arm around Kon's neck and squirmed until he was more comfortable. "It'd be faster if I ran."
"Sure, but you like the cuddling," Kon said and tickled Bart's armpit.
Even as he swung free, dangling hundreds of feet over the East End, Bart giggled helplessly. He had to agree.
*
The next day, Bart waited anxiously for Kon to return to the Tower from whatever it was he had to do each morning. He'd claimed repeatedly that he didn't have "chores", although Bart had never spoken the term, yet he returned smelling like mown grass and, well, manure.
After their second breakfast and several rounds of Magnetik-Boy on Gar's vintage Dreamcast, Bart announced his plans for the next stage of the investigation.
"I'm going to read all the books on magic I can find," he said as he melted butter in the frying pan for some more French toast. "And that way, I'll know what kind of witch can turn into a bat."
"How long's that going to take?" Kon added more cinnamon to the beaten eggs before Bart could stop him. "And what am I supposed to do?"
"You can talk to Devon again. Maybe he remembered something else."
Kon's brow wrinkled as he pondered that. "Or," he said slowly, "or, I could go see how Cassie's doing..."
Bart spanked him with the spatula. "This is a case. We have to take this seriously."
"Says the guy with egg in his hair and cinnamon down his shorts."
"I whisk fast, okay? Not my fault." Bart flipped the bread and wondered how wrong it would be to dose Kon with a little kryptonite. Not enough to hurt, just enough to tranq him. "And I don't have -- HEY!"
Kon let Bart's waistband snap back and flew out of reach. "Now you've got the cinnamon."
*
Bart visited Jason Blood, the Batcave (though he couldn't get in there and got shocked eight times when he tried), WayneTech's corporate headquarters (where Bruce Wayne's secretary gave him, after he waited for sixteen endless minutes, a note to access Wayne's private library), Star City's Magicks and Occult Ephemera collection, two sorcerers in Prague, a fakir in the capital of Kerala, two different shamans in the favelas of Sao Paulo, and a really nice British librarian in the Cotswolds.
He got back to the Tower in time for dinner, head stuffed with more mystical factoids than he'd ever thought possible.
"How's it going?" Vic asked, passing the pot roast.
"I can make a little golem and transfigure lead into ghee," Bart replied. "I can also perform numerological calculations that will tell you when you're going to die and how, but not where, and I translated a rune that's baffled archaeologists since 1842."
Vic wore that fond, proud-papa expression that he got when they managed to run through their training exercises without causing grievous bodily harm or any significant property damage. "Sounds good, buddy."
Bart stabbed his fork into his vegetables. "Sure, if I'm some kind of amateur dabbler in arcana. But nobody's ever heard of a bat-woman with a mystic pendant."
"Batwoman retired and bought a circus," Vic said gently.
"Not the Gotham bat-people, jeez!" Bart slumped in his chair; it was fewer than twenty-four hours since he'd made the same mistake, so he really shouldn't take it out on Vic. "Sorry. How was your day? Where's Gar?"
"The circuitry on the updated nano-satellites is being a bitch." Vic extended his roboarm and cleared the table in one swoop. Under his breath, he added, "As is Mister Logan."
Attempting to make up for his sulky snappishness, Bart joined Vic in the kitchen to wash up. But, like everything in the Tower, Vic had the dishes taken care of with computerized machinery. He retired back to his suite with three technical manuals in one hand and a can of PBR in the other.
Bart was left alone again. Kon had yet to return from his Devon-errand; Bart speculated gloomily that they were at some other cool aquatic cabaret, being awesome and making new friends and flirting while he paced the Tower's hallways with his hands in his pockets and chin digging into his chest. When he grew bored of being angsty, he wandered down to Vic's control room and tried to log on to the Tower mainframe.
Over sixty thousand log-in attempts later, he finally made it. It was a long shot, but he left a message for the mysterious Oracle with the details of the case and a request for information. Worried that the Oracle might delete his note as spam, he made sure to sign it Bartholomew Allen II, fka 'Impulse', currently 'Kid Flash', charter member of Young Justice and current Teen Titan.
No sooner had he hit enter on the note did the screen go green and a giant pointy face appear. Bart leapt backward with an embarrassing falsetto shriek and the face smiled tightly.
"I know who you are, Bart," it said.
"Is that a good thing?" He wrapped his arms around his chest and tried to breathe normally.
"I have no record of an albino witch with the power of animal transfiguration," it continued.
"Join the freaking club," he muttered.
"I do, however, see that four hours after the incident in question, a freighter bound for the big island of Hawaii out of Long Beach reported a sighting of a giant dog."
"A wolf? It turned Oz into a wolf, so that could be it and then we'd have to go to Hawaii, I don't know how Kon's going to feel about that, there's a lot of baggage for him related to that and --"
Its eyelids closed briefly before it replied, "Perhaps it was a wolf. I suggest you find the crew on that freighter and interview them. I'm sending the details to your email."
"Wow, thanks, Oracle!"
"Is your Hotmail account still active? 'ImpulsiveAllen' is not the best username, you know."
He waved his hand. "Nah, I'm on Gmail now. 'MaxLives' or 'Yo-dot-Bart', either one's good."
Without saying more, the face shrank down to a dot and vanished and the monitor screen returned to normal.
By midnight, Kon still hadn't returned, so Bart turned in.
*
"I say we forget it," Kon said the next morning. Bart met him on the roof and made sure not to mention the pieces of hay stuck in Kon's hair, nor the faint scent of turned earth emanating from him. "We're not detectives, Bart."
"We are detectives! We're detecting, so ipso facto, we qualify as detectives."
Kon grimaced at the Latin. "We suck at detecting. Ipso facto OED."
"QED, you mean."
"Whatever. What I mean is, we suck."
Bart jogged down the stairs behind Kon. "We don't suck. I just need your notes on your meeting with Devon, and then we can get started."
Kon took a hard right into the dormitory area; in his room, he stripped off his jeans and t-shirt and sniffed his armpits. "I need a shower. What say we forget about all this Magnum, PI bullshit and just kick back the rest of the week?"
Bart bounced a couple of times on Kon's unmade bed. "I don't know --"
"Come on." Naked now, Kon snapped his towel across Bart's legs and grinned widely. "It'll be like old times. We'll get some Trivial Pursuit going, set up the ping-pong table, just be --" As he paused, he rolled his shoulders, then slumped a little. "Just be us."
"I dunno," Bart said again. It sounded like a lot of fun, truth be told, and it wasn't like he was getting offers to socialize right and left.
"I'm gonna shower and you...." Kon stuck his head back out from the bathroom. "You do whatever it is you do."
Bart stuck his tongue out before he remembered that the gesture was infantile; guys their (apparent) age didn't do that. They flipped each other off instead. Same message, different body-parts.
He couldn't think with the noise of Kon's horrible, off-key rendition of "I Touch Myself" coming from the shower, so he ran up and down the hallway. On one hand, he hadn't just plain hung out with Kon in nearly forever -- at least since Young Justice disbanded. How many times had he missed their games and wrestling matches in the Poconos headquarters? For a while there, Kon was as good a friend as Preston and Carol; Bart was as close to him as anyone in Manchester.
On the other hand, there was the case to think about. They'd made a promise to Devon, and via him, to that poor guy Oz, and it would be intensely rude and cruel to go back on their word. Besides, the problems that the case posed had pretty much ensnared Bart. He didn't believe he could rest until he succeeded in making sense of the various questions -- not just who the batgirl who wasn't Batgirl was, but how to get Devon back to his human form, how to save Oz from being trapped in a wolf's body, and how to reunite them all while bringing the batgirl-who-wasn't to justice.
On the other tentacle, though -- everything had changed so much. They'd somehow reached the point where Tim and Kon could hit each other, where a blonde girl was Robin and Bart hadn't heard from Preston in six months. Maybe a couple days of bonding with Kon, case or no case, was just what he needed.
There were loads of books in every library about emotional development, but nothing Bart had ever read could help with this.
By the time the shower spray had receded to a trickle and Kon was floating bare-assed against the light fixture in his room looking for a clean pair of socks -- "bird's eye view, dude, nothing like it" -- Bart had yet to make up his mind.
Nothing said he couldn't have everything, did it? He was fast and Kon was strong; they could do it all.
"We should do both," Bart said while Kon turned a sideways, counter-clockwise somersault, struggling to pull on his jeans over wet skin.
"Fuck shit sodomize a goat -- what?"
"Both." Bart handed Kon a dry, if none too clean, towel. "Hang out like we used to and solve the case."
"I told you, we suck." Kon finally turned right-side up and pawed at his wet hair.
"No, we really don't! Listen, I got the crew list and contact details for a freighter that saw the Oz-wolf -- all we have to do now is interview them, compare the accounts to what you talked about with Devon yesterday, and we'll know exactly what to do next."
Kon turned around to rustle in his closet for a shirt. He passed over the sixteen extra black Superboy tees, muttered something under his breath, and finally dug out a crumpled baseball jersey from the bottom of the mess on the floor.
When he was fully dressed, he turned back around. "What, now I get the silent treatment?"
"I --" Bart cocked his head. "No. Why?"
"I said I was sorry." Kon folded his arms and tried to frown, but he just ended up looking sad.
Bart reviewed the past couple minutes. He'd been watching Kon, arguing for the case, and also making mental notes to run down to Manchester and check up on Preston. He'd missed something important; the longer he didn't say anything, the sadder Kon looked.
"Why should you be sorry?" he asked carefully. "Explain?"
"Jesus, Bart!" Kon threw up his hands and flew over to the window. "I already apologized."
Kon's temper had always been hair-trigger, but Bart was used to that. He didn't enjoy being yelled at, but the cause was usually fairly obvious. Not so this time. He needed to calm Kon down, make peace like he always did, and then they could get back on track.
"I accept your apology." Bart crossed his fingers behind his back, but it had to be said. For Kon's sake. "Thanks. So, about the case --"
"There's no case!" Kon banged his fist against the window. It was tempered safety glass, a mix of compounds developed by Mr. Terrific and imported from New Genesis; it was supposed to be able to withstand hurricanes, nuclear explosions, Apokoliptian parademons, and Doomsday.
All the same, the glass trembled and spider-cracked under Kon's blow.
"Sure there is," Bart said smoothly after waiting for the cracks to stop spreading. "Tell me about Devon and --"
"I didn't talk to him, okay? I suck and you don't need me!" Kon drew back his foot to kick the window and Bart realized he had a choice.
Not about the kicking -- he had to stop that, so he sped over and pulled as hard as he could on Kon's bare ankle -- but about what counted. He could make peace, soothe whatever was pissing off Kon, and go with the flow. Or he could do something a lot scarier.
Kon crashed down to the floor, cursing as he landed on a pile of unread textbooks and CD cases. Bart stepped back, all the way back to the doorway, and took a deep breath.
"You don't suck," he said and Kon snorted derisively. "But you should've kept your word." Kon snorted again and banged a loose fist against the floorboards. "I'm going to go talk to Devon. I'll see you later."
Before he could reconsider, Bart twisted around, reaching for the spangled anxiety of the Speed Force, and disappeared into its flow.
*
Devon met him in an inlet of the Salish Sea, south of Vancouver; a flock of merpeople visited the Salish in the autumn, just in time to see the Spirit Bears gorging themselves on salmon before retiring into hibernation.
"There's some hoodoo mystic shit about the bears and the mers," Devon said, "some eternal bond, that kind of crap."
Bart emerged from the fern grove where he'd left his clothes and, cupping himself with his left hand, stepped into the water.
"Dude after my own heart," Devon said, slapping his tail against Bart's legs. "Naked is the best."
"Clothes suck, totally."
The water was much warmer than he'd expected, and the current was far more gentle than the one at the cabaret. Soon he was floating next to Devon in the shadow of an overhanging tree, the sun hot on his knees. Everything was green, a trillion shades of green, from the moss on the rocks to the glints off the water to Devon's eyes to the seaweed waving deep below.
"You don't believe them?" Bart asked eventually. "About the bears?"
"Whatever. I grew up in the vampire capital of California." Devon flipped over to float on his stomach, his tail sinking into the shadowy depths. "Can't faze me."
"Oh," Bart said, for lack of anything better to say. He couldn't claim to know Devon very well at all, but in the short time they'd talked, Devon had seemed fazed by a heck of a lot.
Devon lifted his head and smirked. "Total bullshit, by the way. That's Oz. I'm a little more...what's the fucking word?"
"Temperamental?"
"Sure," Devon said. "Takes some good-ass weed or red algae flakes to chill me down."
Bart really didn't want to say oh again, but nothing else was coming to mind.
Luckily, Devon talked almost as much as Bart did. He tapped Bart's chest lightly and said, "Speaking of which, you carrying?"
"I'm naked," Bart reminded him. Just for emphasis, he spread his limbs like a starfish or a snow angel and floated a little bit away. "Carrying what? Red algae?"
Devon sighed long and deep. "That shit is good."
"About Oz..." Bart bit his lip and floated back to Devon's side.
"You totally reminded me of him," Devon said, sliding his tail around Bart's knee, keeping him in place. "Then you opened your mouth."
Bart knit his fingers together and looked away. "I'm still trying to figure out what happened. I'm really sorry."
"Aww, he'll wander back eventually," Devon said as he tied a length of seaweed around Bart's head. "He always does."
Bart blinked the water out of his eyes and brushed the seaweed back behind his ear. "He's done this before?"
"Couple times?" Devon dove into the depths, twin streams of bubbles rising behind him. When he surfaced, he was sucking on a twig of driftwood. "Maybe five. No, six." He shrugged. "Hate math. Worst was a couple years ago. He was gone for three years."
"Jeez," Bart breathed. He tried to imagine not seeing Tim or Cassie, Cissie or Preston, for that long, but it was impossible. Even Kon, because there was no way, even as angry as Bart still was, that he could go three weeks, let alone years, without talking to big blockhead. He tried, and all he could imagine was that dark void behind the Speed Force, the one that his grandfather's and Max's voices emanated from. "Wow."
Devon bit the twig in two and spat out one piece. "After that, I was ready to marry the bastard. Anything, you know?"
Bart could only nod. Nod and float and try to suppress the urge to hug Devon.
They floated about a mile away from the inlet, arms linked, through patches of cool shade and hot sun, before Devon shook Bart's shoulder gently. "You passed out."
"Did not." Bart knuckled his eyes. "I just --" Didn't know what to say. "How'd you deal? When he was gone?"
Devon reached out to the bank and snagged a handful of low-hanging berries from a bush. He picked through the bunch and offered them to Bart. "Dunno. I'm not, like --" He looked at Bart and smiled, and it was like he was on stage, flirting with an entire crowd at once, and Bart shivered even though he was simultaneously really warm. "Advice man. Ask Oz, he'd know what to tell you."
"Right," Bart said and didn't point out that he couldn't ask Oz, because Oz was missing, that was the whole point. "Want to swim back?"
As they neared the cove, Devon stopped, holding a finger to his lips. "You hear that or is my spinal fluid as fucked up as they say?"
He sounded sincerely curious and this time, Bart did hug him. "It's my phone. Be right back."
He jumped out of the water and turned on the speed to make it to his phone before it went to voice-mail. He'd explain to Devon later, if Devon even noticed -- he was kind of a stoner, Bart was pretty sure, and oblivious to the max.
"Don't hang up!" Kon said as Bart answered.
"Why shouldn't I?" The rocks on the beach were cold from the shade and Bart couldn't get comfortable. Out of the water, being naked was something of a drawback. "Jerk."
"Dork," Kon replied automatically. "I got a weird IM from something called Oracle and --"
"It's a person," Bart said. "Or an organization acting as a single entity, I'm not sure."
"Fascinating. It's got, like, length measurements or something?" Kon was speaking quickly, and, back in the water, Devon had started singing, so Bart stuck a finger in his free ear and listened as hard as he could. "Wait. Maybe it's time? This says minutes."
"Read it to me?" Bart suggested.
"Temperature, it's temperature. And time. What is this?"
"I don't know," Bart said. "Just read it to me."
"Okay, boy genius, make sense of this if you dare: 20 degrees -- that's the little circle, right? -- and 18 feet and then 138 degrees -- is that even possible? That's like boiling -- and 14 feet."
"Kon," Bart said. "It's latitude and longitude. Does it say N and W or S and E or what?"
"20 N and 138 W. So, what, it's somewhere hot?"
"Not degrees of temperature, Kon!" Bart took a deep breath. "It's somewhere near Hawaii." Bart tried to sound calm, but he wanted to run there right away and stop to box Kon's ears and, actually, now that he thought about it, maybe get something to eat.
"Hawaii's hot."
"Yeah, but --"
"Rad, we're going to the big island! Meet you there! Race --"
"No, wait!" Bart shouted, but the connection had already closed.
He dressed quickly, shouting to Devon all the while that he had a lead in the middle of the Pacific and he'd be in touch.
"Dude, I'll just swim over," Devon said from the middle of the inlet. His hair was drying in long waves. Bart paused in lacing his sneakers to admire the sight; Devon really did make a good mermaid, but hopefully he wouldn't have to stay one for long. Devon caught his eye and preened a little. "I'd offer to swim you over, but looks like you can take care of yourself, speedy."
"Speedy's someone else -- oh." Bart wiped his palms on his shirt-hem. "Right. Um, don't tell anyone, okay?"
"Already forgotten," Devon said and winked. The thing was, Bart believed him.
*
Running west, Bart escaped the dusk gathering over the coast and entered the full, late-afternoon warmth. He'd jerry-rigged up a GPS with a compass, Big Gulp straw, and some odds and ends in his pockets, and as he neared his destination, he started to worry. He was still a few hundred miles from Hawaii with no land in sight. Maybe the coordinates referred to a shipwreck, and if they did, he'd have to return to San Francisco for scuba gear. Maybe submarine like they used to photograph the Titanic.
On the horizon, a small spot glowed red against a narrow stripe of dark. Bart checked the GPS in time to slow down before he overran the tiny atoll. The coordinates were right, but no map he'd ever seen listed this place.
"Welcome to the Wild Lands," an all-too-familiar voice said to his left.
Bart paced slowly up a dune and then, when he saw Tim sitting with someone else -- around Tim's height, with weird dyed hair and lots of piercings -- he ran and slid all the way, almost into their small campfire.
"Tim!"
"Bart," Tim said. He was wearing a Gotham Knights baseball cap, cut-off shorts, and a garish Hawaiian shirt with palms and parrots and hula dancers. "Long time no see."
"I saw you the day before yesterday! Are you going to hit or can I hug you or should I just keep a respectful, respectable mature distance without any infantile expressions of oh-my-god joy and glee?"
"Hug," Tim said after a moment and it did feel like forever since Bart had gotten to do this. Gotham didn't count, he decided. It never happened. Tim was a little stiff, like always, in Bart's embrace, but he patted Bart's shoulder-blades enthusiastically and didn't pull away as soon as he tended to do. "Bart, this is Oz."
The small, pale guy was poking at the fire with a stick. He glanced up. "Hey."
Bart let Tim go and dropped down onto one knee. Not quite believing his eyes, he poked Oz in the shoulder. "You're not a wolf!"
Oz frowned briefly, as if he needed to ascertain that fact on his own. "Not at present, no."
"Devon really misses you," Bart said as he squirmed in between Tim and Oz on the log they were using as a bench. He gripped Oz's knee, which was almost as bony as his own, and let himself babble. "He's such a cool guy, you know? And it's like, to him, you hung the moon, and I didn't know what to do, and I tried and tried --"
"Well, Great Scott, Holy Hannah, Good Heavens, and By Rao's Eternal Name," Kon said as he arrived, in flight, blocking out the sun dwindling on the horizon. He planted his fists on his hips and gazed inland. "Haven't been here since, like, forever."
"Where are we?" Bart stage-whispered to Tim. Oz must have had great hearing, because he chuckled. Once, and warmly, so Bart didn't mind.
"You want to explain, SB?" Tim asked, gazing up. "This is your place, after all."
Kon floated down, a far-away look still in his eyes as he greeted Tim with a manly punch to the shoulder and "no hard feelings, Timmo?" Bart introduced him to Oz, whose entire vocabulary consisted of "hey" and "cool". That wasn't a criticism, actually; Bart figured both he and Kon could use some lessons in plain, economic speech. Then again, they'd known Tim forever and he hadn't really rubbed off yet, so it was probably a lost cause.
When Kon was halfway through his story -- something about this island being occupied by sentient, speaking animals, ruled by a tiger-king and a bat-queen -- the sound of singing, out on the water, reached them. Night was almost completely fallen, the fire had died to cherry-red embers, and Bart couldn't remember being this happy.
He took the singing for birds, or maybe whales, or some of the animals in Kon's story, but when it grew louder, lyrics became audible.
"That'd be my cue," Oz said -- it was the first thing he'd said since hey to Kon and I'm a werewolf by way of explanation for where he'd been -- and got to his feet. "Back in a..." He scratched his jaw. "Well, it's Dev, so this could take awhile."
He loped up over the dune and out of sight.
"He's really a werewolf?" Kon asked Tim.
Tim shrugged. "Don't look at me. It's your case."
"It's my case," Bart said. To his surprise, Kon ducked his head and looked embarrassed. "Okay, our case."
Kon looked at him, eyes almost purple in the low light, and grinned as wide as the horizon. "So it was Nosferata on the houseboat?"
"Who's Nosferata?" Bart asked at the same time that Tim said, "Signs point to yes."
"The bat-slash-woman queen here," Kon said impatiently. "I told you."
"Excuse me," Bart said. He could feel anxiety pulsing up his back and constricting his throat. "I would remember that. You should've remembered that."
Kon stared at the fire, his face gone Halloween-eerie with deep shadows. "Yeah," he said finally. "I should've. Man, I should see how the adventurers are doing..."
"Band of talking animals he travelled with," Tim told Bart quietly before Bart could ask.
They sat in the dark, huddled on the log, and when Bart shivered, Kon put his arm around him.
Tim cleared his throat after a long period of silence and Bart jabbed his finger at him. "Don't you dare say you have to go."
Tim blinked. "I was just going to say there are sleeping bags in the sub."
"You have a sub?" Kon shook Tim by the shoulder. "You never mentioned a sub!"
"It's Batman's," Tim said quietly. "Nightwing let me..."
He didn't finish; he stood up, brushing off the seat of his shorts, and moving down to the shore. When he returned, he carried three sleeping bags, a kerosene lantern, and a canteen of water.
"No food?" Bart and Kon asked simultaneously.
Bart lost the rock-paper-scissors match against Kon to decide who'd run to Hawaii for food. He didn't really mind; he could go so much faster than Kon that he'd be back in the time it would have taken Kon to make one leg of the trip.
Before he left, though, he stood on the other side of the fire and cleared his throat. "You'll be here when I get back, right?"
"Dude, of course," Kon said as he shook out one sleeping bag.
"Yes," Tim said as he built up the fire.
"You have to promise," Bart said loudly, making sure they were listening to him. "Don't just run off, either of you."
Kon glanced at Tim, and then Tim squared his shoulders and met Bart's gaze. "We promise. Cross our hearts and --"
Bart held up his hand. "Don't tempt fate, Tim! Just promising's enough."
The sand melted to glass under his soles, he took off so fast. Even with their solemn promises, Bart wasn't about to leave anything to chance. The Pacific steamed beneath him as he ran with a garbage bag full of snacks and provisions back to the Wild Lands, enough to feed a herd of elephants for a week, or himself and Kon for a couple days.
He thought he saw Devon's tail, the gleam of gold under water, and Oz's sharp, pale face as he passed -- they were kissing, or hugging, or something -- but Bart knew they were going to be okay. They were out of his hands now; now, he had to go back to his friends. He couldn't think about anything else.
[end]