It aches, Dick thinks, as he smiles at Jordan Price and watches hate blossom in the other man's eyes. Aches like a joint dislocated - terrible, acute, but not necessarily fatal.
Things have changed. Dick's not sure precisely what universe he's in, but he knows he has to believe in something. Start with logic and move on from there. Search for the constant, and then change the controls. He's never wrong. He's never wrong.
'I see you've met Price,' Bruce says, gliding into place next to Dick and causing a small surge in the crowd. People start coming closer. It probably has something to do with natural magnetism, in the way of plate tectonics and charisma.
Dick hides his grimace behind a sip of his drink and nods. 'Not a friend of yours, I'm guessing.' Wayne money is a touchy subject. Everyone wants to get their hands on it. Bruce never lets it go. It's a dichotomy that people have had problems with since before Dick was born.
'He'll live through the beating that his ego is taking,' Bruce murmurs.
There's so much foreign pride in Bruce's eyes that Dick's unsure if he made the oath to the right person earlier that night. He's not sure if anything - or anyone - can be entirely unitary. But here Bruce Wayne is, being Bruce Wayne. Even his voice has changed. Dick leaves his half-finished champagne flute on a table, and goes off (flees) to continue playing the game.
There are people from Foxtecha, people who are second-generation Cadmus, people who are STAR Lab pedigree. The names have all changed. The personalities, not so much. Dick wants to tear the suit off by the second hour, and not for the benefit of the women who've been staring at him like he's a particularly fine chop of meat.
By the time it's over, Dick wants to do nothing but to go out on patrol and run himself ragged. McGinnis looks dead from boredom. Bruce looks like Bruce. They take the shortest route home.
'Rough night,' McGinnis quips as he parks the car. Dick's starting to see a pattern to his speech; it's in the way McGinnis instinctively tries to push the oppressive silence of the cave back. It's something Dick empathises with: sometimes you can feel dwarfed by the enormity of the cave, the mission, the silence. You'll do anything to stop yourself from being devoured, because if you don't talk, if you don't joke, if you don't make some noise, you turn into Batman, and that's more of a curse than Dick thinks Terry understands just right now.
'Get suited up,' is all Bruce says, even though in another life(time) he might've (should've) had Terry at the computer regurgitating information from the earlier session. 'The night's hardly begun.'
Bruce turns and gives Dick a look that is entirely different from the one he just gave Terry. Dick shrugs slightly, and goes to suit up. The Nightwing costume that Bruce has in the -- has in storage is different from the one that he came in: it's rougher on the edges, older, less streamlined. It'll have to do, for now - and it's not the equipment that matters, in any case. The only piece of tech that really matters is the new communicator. Dick flips it in the air once, then slips it into the canal of his right ear.
'Come on, kid,' he motions at Terry, putting on the domino. 'Time for you to show me what you're made of.'
'We'll see if you can keep up,' Terry replies, pulling on the cowl. It's the strangest and most pleasing thing Dick's heard yet when the kid's timbre shifts and roughens with his next sentence: 'Nightwing.' It reminds Dick of Bruce.
'Get the car, little bat.'
The cowl hides most of Terry's expressions, but Dick thinks he can see a smile when Terry says, 'Guess who's riding side-saddle today?'
Dick gets the scope of things on the way to Robinson. Terry's not totally efficient when he points out the trouble spots and the most radically changed areas of town, but then again he's a young kid coming off the shoulders of giants: no one beats Bruce at dissemination, and Dick's used to Tim and his little brother's partially frightening analyticity. Terry squeezes in a lot of opinion on the side - "that's Jokerz territory; good hunting but lots of bad taste to make up for it" - but he gets the job done.
'So the N line,' Dick says, studying a layout of the neo-Gotham transit system. 'It's right below us and heads to the park?'
'Not exactly,' Terry shakes his head. 'Changes over to the number 2 train at the Midtown junction.'
'That used to be a pretty big interchange,' Dick nods. 'I think I can handle it.' He knocks Terry on the back of the cowl, rat-a-tat-tat. 'Little bat, slow down a bit.'
'Handle what?' Terry asks, turning back to look at Dick as he eases up on the car. 'Hey, don't touch t--'
'I wonder what this little red button does?' Dick asks rhetorically, and then he hits the cockpit release and stands up to meet sweet, sweet air resistance. 'Bingo. I'll meet you at the park, kid. Don't get lost along the way.'
'Are you crazy?' the kid demands, pulling the Batmobile down to a pretty pathetic crawl, considering its capabilities. Dick can almost see individual buildings instead of a generalised blur now. 'Your suit's just kevlar! You hit anything on the drop down and I'll be scraping pieces of you off the sidewalk and giving you back to Wayne in a plastic bag.'
Terry reminds him, briefly, of audiences at the circus. They never want to believe what they know they're going to see. 'I'd better not screw up, then,' Dick grins. His domino doesn't hide anything; it was never designed to. 'Because I don't think Bruce will be too happy if I end up dead on your watch. Be on time, little bat. I won't wait forever.'
There's the beauty of improved technology: the southbound automated N line hits the tracks beneath them just on schedule, and Dick manages a small wave before he lets his de-cel rope go taut and leaps. If Terry's saying anything, he doesn't hear: the world moves into a cacophony of sound and action. Dick lands on the roof of the middle carriage with enough room to spare for a roll and a stand: he comes up, sticks the landing, and has the cord drawn back in before Terry even manages to open the secure channel between their commlinks.
'Are you out of your mind, Nightwing?'
'Live a little,' Dick shouts over the rush of air. 'You'll love it if you try it. And you really shouldn't talk while driving, kid. N out.' He shuts Terry down before opening a link back to the manor. 'N to B,' he says. 'I know you're there.'
'Yes.'
'Your kid is easily impressed,' Dick says, bounding over the gap between cars and heading for the front. It's better to have more leeway for the jump than less, and Dick's always liked riding close to the line in any case. 'Never quite showed him the ropes, did you?'
'I haven't had the time,' Bruce says, dry as anything.
'Who would've thought that age'd give you back your sense of humour?' Dick flexes his fingers, and watches the lights of the number 2 coming in from a distance. 'It's not a very good trade-in for the training, Bruce.'
'It's easier to simulate combat modules in the cave than it is to demonstrate acrobatics with arthritis.'
'Does this one listen, at least?' asks Dick, pulling himself into a crouch.
'Occasionally,' Bruce replies.
'Good,' Dick says. 'I'll get him back to you in one piece, but I don't think he's going to like me very much by the end of it all.'
Bruce says, 'Did you like me very much during your training? ' just as Dick throws himself across the tracks and onto his new ride. It takes him a good three seconds to swallow down the adrenaline. Dick flattens himself out and says, 'No,' as Robinson Park comes in closer from the East, zooming in at sixty miles an hour under the dark, filthy air. Dick thinks he could get to love this Gotham almost as much as the one he knows. 'But I sure loved you for it afterwards.'
The Park is a dead end and then some. Dick meets up with Terry at the co-ordinates of his appearance (the look on the kid's face doesn't hold up to his attempt at being casual when he tells Dick "you're alive"), and they do as fine a sweep as they can considering that the trail is two nights old. Dick goes for a lay of the land while Terry takes the intangibles.
'Radioactivity readings are normal,' Terry reports, coming back in from a loop around the radius of the original blast. He joins Dick on the roof of the park's visitors' centre. 'No significant EM spikes. No heat signatures. Air constitution is dead on average. If there's anything we're supposed to be seeing, I'm not picking it up.'
'Fancy,' Dick whistles, motioning at the suit. 'Spectrograph and mini-analysis lab all in one. Wish I had that in my day. How many times does it factor your strength?'
'Roughly ten,' Terry says offhand. Kid definitely takes the thing for granted. The cowl's eyepieces flicker. 'And I'm not getting anything on any of the light spectrums.'
'The scene's too contaminated,' Dick agrees, pointing down. There have to be at least eight couples and a few solo stragglers wandering around below them, counting only the ones that have gone by in the past hour. 'If the rip even left any at all, it could be in one of a thousand places by now. Needle in a haystack. This one's a dead end.'
'What other ends do we have? Wayne's being pretty unhelpful about this case.'
Dick shrugs. There's no point in getting frustrated, either at his situation or at Terry's abilities of detection. 'We keep monitoring the city for any other potential spikes. Consult whichever resident magic user is in Gotham at this point. I'll hit the archives in the morning, check up on any news from the date that I got plucked out, and sieve out any anomalies from there. We bother Bruce only when we have to.'
Terry crosses his arms, and here comes some of the scepticism that should have been there right from the start. It's only in this family that being a suspicious bastard is a good character trait, but some things even Dick won't question. 'I don't think the old man's just going to sit this one out.'
'Sit it out?' Dick raises his eyebrows. He resists the urge to waggle them, resists the urge to turn this into a game. 'He's not sitting this one out. If anything, he'll be pursuing whatever avenues I didn't and can't think of - and he'll tell us if anything comes up.'
'This is turning into a waiting game,' Terry gripes. 'Not exactly my forte.'
Problem with the cowl is that you can't ruffle a guy's hair while it's on him. Dick settles for patting Terry on the arm. It's not a great substitute, but Terry isn't exactly a kid -- not one of Bruce's, at least. 'Instant gratification got old with email,' he says. 'Come on, little bat. Time for you to pick up some traditions.'
It's not the easiest thing in the world, Terry discovers, to have a conversation on the top of a block of moving metal death. Shouting to be heard is difficult to do while simultaneously hanging on for dear life.
'Have you and the old man ever thought of getting yourselves psychologically profiled!'
'Nope. Get ready, little bat.'
'Because I think you'd both benefit from seeing a shrink. God I am so fragged -- '
Terry's still shaking when Dick calls the car over and gets him to change in the back seat. 'You're dripping,' Dick points out helpfully, kicking the car into a sweet, silent slide and heading straight for Terry's home.
Terry's hair is plastered right over his face. He looks flushed, worked over, a little manic. It looks good on him, looks right. The trains knock cockiness out of people almost as fast as they knock the breath out of people's lungs. What Bruce calls (called?) a sharp, severe shock. Bruce always has the quaintest expressions.
'Dripping? I'm surprised I'm not dead,' the kid grumbles, shoving the cowl aside and scrubbing his face with his fingers. 'You've got strange ideas of fun, mister.'
'Tell me you didn't like it and I'll never make you do it again,' Dick offers.
Terry snorts a laugh. It modulates his voice back into something a bit younger. 'I'll get back to you about that when I'm feeling less motion sick.'
There's the sound of the suit getting pulled off. Dick risks a look backwards, and catches a glance just in time to see how flawless the kid's skin really is. Lots of bruises, but not exactly the kind of post-war minefield that his body - or, god knows, Bruce's - is. Scratches here and there. Marks Dick would've dismissed as surface wounds, if he didn't have a sound idea of exactly how much heat the kid had to have packed against him for the suit to have allowed that much through. Dick has potholes in his own body; craters and valleys where flesh and blood emptied out to air and water. Bruce - Bruce's body is alien territory. Foreign, fabled, fantastic, fucked up.
Terry's body is a different kind of fucked up. He pulls a tank over his head, and it all disappears a little bit too easily. Dick can't exactly wear anything even resembling a wifebeater without at least a light jacket, not unless he wants to get asked questions about whether he's ever seen active duty or got into accidents.
'Drink up,' he says to Terry, tossing the kid a bottle of water. 'You're going to need to stay hydrated.'
'Yeah,' Terry says, cracking the top of the plastic and taking a good few mouthfuls. 'Wouldn't want to make it any easier for you to kill me or anything.'
'You were relying on the suit's flight capabilities just a little too much, little bat,' Dick says, with an appropriately tempered amount of glee.
'You could have told me before jamming them,' Terry complains.
'Who says I'm the one who jammed the jets?' asks Dick.
Terry snorts. 'The old man thinks I'm vulnerable enough as is. Not exactly his style to cripple the kid with the handicap.'
'Not his style?' Dick has to laugh at that one. 'Little bat, I think you just haven't seen what Bruce's style really is.'
'Heh,' Terry says. 'You're the master.'
The kid has a good laugh. A little edged by cynicism, but if what the files on him in the cave say is anything close to accurate, Dick's pleased at how gentle that edge can be. Terry saves the anger for the mission; it's the opposite of what Bruce would've wanted him to do, but it works, and it's better than watching one more bird's voice die on a caged song. 'There's only one master in this house,' Dick sings. 'I'm just an odd robin.'
'Want to tell me all about it?' Terry ventures.
And he goes where arguably no man has gone before. One small step for social graces, one giant leap for Bat-kind. 'It's a long story,' Dick warns.
'Hey,' Terry shrugs. 'You could always drive a little bit slower. C'mon. Everyone I know who knows likes to drop hints about the great and fabled Dick Grayson.'
'I may not be the same man, you know,' Dick has to point out. 'Everything's a little bit different down here, and it's not just this century's funky looking fashion.'
'Are you kidding me?' Terry says. 'The only Dick Grayson who lives down in the cave is probably right about your age. The Nightwing suit doesn't fit old men.'
'Point,' Dick concedes, because he'll be the last person to say that they don't all live at least a little bit in the past. Bruce is a master at that particular art, and Babs's other favourite past time is telling him that he's inherited way too much of the tendency to brood. 'How much do you know?'
'How much do you think they tell me? It's Wayne's game to play hide the graveyard. If he ever talks about you guys - which he doesn't - it's only to put me in my place. "None of the Robins,"' Terry does a more-than-passable imitation of Bruce's low rumble, '"ever complained". Right.'
'I don't think we complained,' Dick says. 'Yelled, shouted, snapped, screamed, yes - but complain? It's one thing to take Bruce to task for being heartless, and another thing altogether to say you don't want to finish a training sequence.'
'Who could?' Terry sighs. 'When the old man gets disappointed, the whole world gets to know.'
That makes Dick smile. 'Maybe you're just hypersensitive, little bat.'
'Could you ever look away when he was in the room?' Terry pauses. 'Sorry. Hard not to think of you in past tense.'
'Don't worry about it,' Dick waves it off. It's hard for him not to think of Bruce - this Bruce - in the present tense. 'And no, I couldn't. But I don't think I ever really wanted to in the first place.'
'Then why did you leave?'
The million dollar question. 'I think you'll have to keep at this another couple of years before you're ever going to understand the answer to that one, Terry.'
'If I had a dollar for every time someone mentioned that to me, Nightwing, I'd be pretty rich by now.'
Dick drums his fingers on the steering. 'There's Bruce,' he says finally. 'And then there's the mission. Sometimes all you'll ever see is the former. It's who Bruce is. It's what Bruce is. I don't know anyone who doesn't - openly or secretly - want to be like him in at least one way. You step into his world and nothing else in your own will ever be as immediate again.'
Terry's a good listener.
'Sometimes there are days when Bruce forgets about anything but the mission. And on those days you'll realise what it's like to matter not at all to Bruce - not at all to Batman. And let me tell you this, little bat,' Dick says, softly. 'There's nothing more humbling or degrading than how that feels. The world narrows down to a fine, high wire. I couldn't walk that line when I left. So I went.'
'You never came back.' In the monitor that feeds the rear view, McGinnis crosses his arms, an angry motion. 'None of you came back.'
'Maybe there was a reason,' Dick shrug. 'Or maybe none of us could be what Bruce Wayne is and always has been.'
The kid obviously wants to hit him for saying bad things about Bruce, and Dick would've wanted to hit himself too, in a better world. But sons are allowed to say what they want about their fathers, even if that's never been what either of them are. Dick lets Terry enjoy the entitlement of the newly converted. 'What's that?'
'Independent,' Dick answers, pulling the car up in an alley three streets from Terry's apartment block. 'Alone.'
Terry picks up his backpack and palms the cockpit controls. 'Maybe,' McGinnis says, climbing out. 'Or maybe not, Grayson. I'll catch you tomorrow.' He goes.
Dick shuts the cockpit roof. 'Yeah, little bat,' he smiles. 'I hope you prove me wrong, too.'
Bruce finds him far later than Dick expects to be found. Three a.m. and the manor is a mausoleum, expansive without Batman working against the soft light of the cray consoles and too quiet without the eternal hum of one engine or another running diagnostics in the background. Whenever Dick visits - visited - he is - was (god) used to the quiet, clockwork functionality of Bruce's playground. Nothing ever lay still: there was always a job to be done, always a case to be filed, always a toy to be designed or improved or tested. In recent - later - years it was the almost-imperceptible feedback from Tim's earphones as his little brother did his laps on the treadmill. Sometimes it was Bruce on the rings, just steady breathing and a rush of displaced air. Alfred coming down the steps. Cass in still meditation. It didn't have to be noise to be alive.
This cave is dead. Dick comes in to find more than three quarters of it shut down, and even though he started at one and hasn't stopped since, it's only still halfway active by the time he hears the sound of the lift hydraulics working.
The systems are the least rusty; Bruce still works from them, by the look of the files and the additional functionality that doesn't quite mesh with what Batman would've used if he quit two or three decades ago. The gym equipment gets rearranged - it's clear that McGinnis favours the pommel and the mats over the bars and the rings. He probably doesn't know how to work the higher elements well enough to like them; Bruce probably isn't in any state to show him how. Dick takes some of it out of storage: the extra rooms are in the same place, and the codes haven't changed. He dusts his hands and takes three sets on the horizontal bars before he's calm enough to move on.
The forensics lab is full of stale air and cobwebs. Dick knows that part of it is due to the nature of the suit - he needs to sit down with it before he'll know what it's fully capable of, but right now he wouldn't put it past Bruce to have installed enough additional functionality into the thing to make a full lab slightly redundant. But he knows it's also part of who McGinnis is. He's a real kid - the kind with a family - and an old kid. He's nothing like Tim - doesn't have the natural ability, and nowhere near the level of (Dick has to admit it) near-crazy dedication his little brother has to emulating every aspect of the Batman mythos. He did time in juvie, but he's doing time as Batman, fighting for every moment in that suit and for every part of Bruce's old morality. He's not Jason. He's also nothing like Dick himself: there's no way Bruce locks McGinnis into a lab and forces him through the motions, not with the kind of schedule McGinnis runs.
It's a strange feeling, like someone walking over his grave, that Dick gets when he runs tests on all the stock chemicals that Bruce still has here. He throws away about a tenth of what he finds - expired, or oxidised from a lack of proper sealant - and brings the rest out. Someone has to start teaching the kid, even if Bruce doesn't think that basic chemistry and criminology isn't worth the effort in this day and age. Dick wipes down the lab, and then keeps going.
There are all these aspects of Bruce that have decayed. The cave is lovely, dark and deep, and Dick has --
'You could use some sleep,' Bruce says, stepping out of the elevator and limping towards Dick. It's cold in the cave at night, always has been.
'You don't really mean that,' Dick says from his place in front of the computer. He's on a break, reading case files that look important, and keeping an eye on the EM monitors on the side. He's perched on a stool he's dragged up instead of sitting in the console's chair.
'No,' Bruce agrees, coming to stand next to Dick. 'I don't. Are you satisfied?'
'What with?' Dick asks. 'The state of the cave? No. Its authenticity? Maybe.'
'Good answer,' Bruce says.
'Are you satisfied?' Dick asks, closing the file he has open on Inque.
'No,' Bruce says, taking his seat. 'I never am.'
Dick shouldn't feel more assured by Bruce's answer than by anything else that has happened so far, but he does. It's as harsh as it should be. It doesn't have the padding that Bruce seems to eager to present McGinnis with. This is the Bruce Dick knows: the Bruce who doesn't want him to trust anything, or anyone. The Bruce who pushes instead of ever giving. The Bruce he can't come close to, can't touch. 'Terry's got potential,' he offers, a report more than anything. 'A lot of green that needs to be trained out. But a lot of spirit.'
'Mm,' Bruce says.
Dick shoots a look at the display cases behind them. He spent five minutes with a cloth and glass cleaner there, standing in front of one Robin suit and then another, wiping and wiping and wiping until he realised what he was doing. He tears his gaze away, brings it back. 'Is it because he reminds you of something, Bruce? Is that why you're compensating?'
'I'm not compensating,' Bruce says, opening up a document that requires security access that Dick doesn't have.
'Aren't you?' Dick says, antagonised. 'You're blunt with him, Bruce, and I don't mean the way you speak. You're letting him get away with easy lies and mediocre ability. He's got a brain that you're not working. He's got athleticism that you're not even encouraging him to develop. It's not because you can't, Bruce. You won't. You won't send him to whoever it is that's the equivalent of the League, or Shiva, or even any one of the good guys. You let him walk away from the Justice League when they could've put him through the paces you can't. You're compensating for something.'
'Yes,' Bruce says, which stuns Dick for a moment. 'I am blunt.' Bruce clicks and starts typing. Dick spares the screen a look and it's -- a file on him. Last edited last night, now with additional footage from Terry's cowlcam and apparently pictures from when he'd slept in his room the night before. New DNA analysis cross referenced to his old set. It's just like Bruce. 'I've become blunt,' Bruce qualifies as he fills in more details. Dick looks away before he can read just what. 'It's what old age does. Iron sharpens iron. Without that, iron rusts. There has been nothing in Gotham in the last decade but petty thieves and obvious liars. There's no challenge. Nothing to rise up against. Nothing for Terry, and nothing for me.' The silence that comes as Bruce stops typing rings in Dick's ears. 'Now you are going to be my flint, Dick.'
Now, Dick can't help but thinking, now the world is going to burn with the fire you've lit beneath all of us, isn't it, Bruce?
'You're frightening when you're like this,' Dick admits. 'I haven't seen you weak before. I haven't seen you smile like this since --'
'Those were simpler days,' Bruce growls, cutting in. 'And these are now simple times. You can walk down a street and get shoved into an alley by punks with caked makeup pretending to be a chip off of a monster they don't even remember or understand. Welcome to Gotham City, Nightwing,' Bruce pantomimes. It makes Dick shiver. 'She and her two-bit criminals that won't stand up to a boy wonder in a magic suit. But that's already starting to change.'
It's unfair of Bruce to use that term. It's unfair, and that's exactly why he's saying it. 'So does McGinnis make you laugh, Bruce?' Dick throws back. 'That's why you let him talk the way you let me talk? And will you teach him how to stop the hard way, too?'
'He doesn't make me laugh, Dick,' Bruce shakes his head, but just once. 'But he does make me remember what it was like, with you.'
Oh. Oh.
'When did you learn to start complimenting people?' Dick hazards a joke, because if he doesn't then he won't know what else to do - won't know what else to say to the man who seems to be at once Batman and Bruce Wayne, like two and two added together and finally halved the way he's always meant to have been halved. If he doesn't make the joke now, Dick won't know what to say in response to the words he's wanted to hear from Bruce for what feels like the eternity of his life since he flew the nest - the words that are coming now, fifty years in the future, from a man who's eighty years old and completely different from (and exactly the same as) the one Dick left behind. That's dangerous, too dangerous, and too easy.
Don't let your emotions get in the way. He's always right.
He's always right.
Bruce probably hears every single thing that Dick doesn't say, but Bruce knows just as well when things ought to be allowed to stay under rug swept. 'Things change,' Bruce says.
'You said it,' Dick murmurs, hopping off his seat. This is enough, for one night. Enough for him to justify more of his belief that this is real, and more than enough for him to go to sleep over. 'Need anything? Coffee, tea, me?'
'Go to sleep,' Batman says, the real Batman, emerging slow and evolved and breaking free from an old chrysalis.
You're using your command voice, Dick wants to tell Bruce, wants Bruce to know. Do you realise that?
'Yes, sir,' he says instead, and sheds the Nightwing suit as he walks past the case worth of odd-numbered Robins.