Author's Note: I haven't done a flash fic in a while, and this idea just hit me and begged to be developed. This was the toughest one yet to trim down, since it started at over 1300 words and ended just under 1000, but I think it turned out well. Happy reading!

Bruce slipped through the front door, trying to keep his arrival unknown. He hadn't called about coming home early in the hopes of not disrupting Alfred's schedule, which was packed with preparations for the next day's spring luncheon. Society events were common at the Manor, but the lawn party was big enough that both Dick and Tim had come home for the weekend to attend it. With three boys in the house and a party to coordinate, he figured the butler had enough going on without waiting on him hand and foot.

The full nature of the older man's calendar was highlighted by the six shoes the billionaire found jumbled beneath the entry bench. On any other day of the year Alfred would have picked them up and put them away within five minutes of their abandonment. This afternoon, however, it appeared that he was too busy to have noticed them. Gathering the castoffs, Bruce moved to the closet, put his loafers up, and then sorted the other matches out. From left to right an intriguing array emerged as Damian's, then Tim's, then Dick's footwear were laid out. It struck him, and he paused before giving a little hmm and lifting the first set.

His youngest's school shoes were abused, but Alfred's diligent polishing had rendered the scars wrought by sullenness almost unnoticeable. Only someone familiar with Damian's habits of dragging his feet and kicking things could have identified the well-masked scuff marks along the toes and sides. The damage to the insides was less easily disguised. There was a strict prohibition against individualism in student clothing, so naturally the boy had attacked the liners with a pen, leaving them heavily graffittied. Little rebel, he snorted.

Recalling the similar treatment he'd once given his own uniform slip-ons, he sneaked his fingers beneath an insole. Sure enough, a square depression that felt about the right size for one of the boy's small iPods had been carved into the low heel. How difficult would it be, he wondered bemusedly, to run a line under one's clothes from foot to ear and still walk normally? He would have to ask, since the boy had likely figured the trick out already.

Next came Tim's cross-trainers. Knowing that he'd been subjected to rigid shoes not unlike Damian's during his K-12 career, Bruce wasn't surprised that the teen had chosen more comfortable college footwear. The article's dark color and high ankle didn't shock him either, since ease of cleaning and overall support were the sort of things the middle member of the trio would think about. More reasonable still, the sneakers were an off-the-rack brand, not the flashy thousand-dollar sort that their owner could have afforded and might well have been mugged for.

Logic and clear explanations ceased when he spotted the still-tied laces. Peeking at the back, he found telltale folds where Tim had been shoving his feet in rather than strapping them up properly. He couldn't fathom why the eighteen year old was putting on his shoes like he was eight, but his concern shifted once he discovered the wear pattern on the soles. The flat-footed teen was still pronating when he walked, it appeared, leaving smooth patches where none belonged. Making a mental note to mention podiatrists again, he shook his head and put the second pair away.

His mouth tightened as he reflected that there should have been another set before Dick's. They existed, to be fair, but the wall between he and Jason still stood, and therefore his second son's shoes weren't here to be handled. What would he be wearing these days, the billionaire pondered. If his fashion sense had stayed intact through his resurrection – and judging by Red Hood's costume, it had – then combat boots were the answer. He cringed; he had hated those damned clunkers. They'd held smells, their laces broke too often, putting them on had added an extra five minutes to every departure...

Nevertheless, he would have given his net worth to have found them under the bench with their brothers this afternoon.

Swallowing hard, he distracted himself with one of the ultra-light constructions his eldest had been sporting lately. At first glance it looked like a tabi, and he grinned at the idea of the boy whose childhood peers had deemed him a ninja growing up to adopt feudal footwear. Knowing Dick, though, he'd made his choice not as a homage to his younger self but because he'd wanted as much flexibility as possible.

Bruce bent one in half easily, proving his theory. Fingering the fabric, he frowned; one misstep in the wrong street and a dirty needle, a shard of glass, or a thousand other things would be lodged in his firstborn's flesh. He understood the desire to feel the terrain with one's toes, but these things were more reinforced sock than . He would buy a set online tonight, he decided as he put them away, and find some way to keep them acrobat-friendly while beefing up the protection they offered.

Finished, he reflected that there was nothing like a good investigation that yielded interesting results. In this case, perhaps the lesson had been that the old adage of the shoes making the man was more legitimate than he'd previously allowed. He had learned so much from theirs, after all: Damian was a rebellious sneak, just like he himself had tried to be at that age; Tim possessed a child-like stubbornness about footwear and doctors despite his usual reasonableness; Jason was quite possibly the same in certain essentials as he'd always been; and Dick still danced through the world with a cop's mentality, trying to gain as much information as he could even when the methods put him at risk.

His boys were as eclectic as their shoes, and he loved it.

Wearing a faint smile at that thought, he turned and headed to find his family, feeling somehow closer to them than he had fifteen minutes before.