![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficTitle: Five Things No Robin Ever Asked Batman
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Bruce, Dick, Jason, Tim, Steph, Carrie Kelly.
Warning: None
Word Count: 2,046
Summary: All the Robins have had questions. But Bruce hasn’t had the answers.
1. Dick Grayson
Batman didn’t look back. He straightened his senses behind him. Taste and touch were impossible, obviously, and scent was ripped right away by the wind that they were cleaving through. Sound was easy, though. It was the flapping of his cape, Robin’s voice over the wind, and his own cape under it. Perhaps if he were Clark, Batman could hear more – the rush of blood and the beat of heart, so pointlessly frantic to the task at hand – but no, those he could only guess at. Dick was far too excited to be flying again. Batman didn’t expect taking to the air once more to be quite like visiting Crime Alley was to himself, but the jolly “Yahoo!” was psychologically unhealthy.
But it beat any number of alternatives.
“So, why me?” Robin asked, as their arc shortened and they were more or less at the slowest of their swing.
“Your training in acrobatics made you an obvious candidate as my successor. Events conspired to force me to exert an influence sooner.”
“But I was always going to be your… heir?” Robin asked, somersaulting wildly in a flare of yellow cape before scoring a two-point landing.
“It was idle speculation, but yes, you were the leading candidate.”
They were both on the rooftop now. Batman put his grapple-gun away, Robin gestured wildly with his like a child pretending to sword-fight. Like Zorro fighting Captain Pasquale.
“Kinda like destiny or something?”
“Men make their own destiny. Nothing chooses us for anything.”
“That’s… a little scary.”
“I prefer to think of it as liberating.”
Robin nodded. “Cool. So it’s my choice to be Robin?”
An obvious question, and Batman felt absurdly Socratic answering it. “Yes.”
“And you’re not going to take that choice away from me?”
Bruce looked at Robin. Younger than young despite his years, innocent despite his background, and desperately afraid despite his courage. He didn’t look anything like the Batman’s ideal partner. He was perfect.
“Why would I?”
Robin rocked backward on his heels. When he rocked forward again, his words came out in a wild torrent. “I just thought you might find someone better or want to leave or get bored of me or die or something, something, I don’t know what!”
“I’m not going to die,” Batman said simply.
“Oh.”
“I couldn’t find anyone better if I looked, which I’m not.”
A cocky grin. “Of course.”
“I could never leave this city. It’s my home.”
“Yeah, but—“
“And no one could ever get bored of you.”
“Gee, ya mean it?”
“Why would I lie?”
2. Jason Todd
The body was sprawled out. It was dressed in shades of red and green and yellow, made tawdry by the blood that surrounded it in a reflecting nimbus. The legs, specked with blood, shot out from under the cape almost obscenely. Dishabille would be the word for it, if he hadn’t been murdered.
“Jesus.” Jason was trying hard not to throw up. Not in front of Batman. “I mean, Jesus. Sure did a number on a guy. I’m starting to get the impression people don’t like me.”
Batman shot him a glance. Mental note: Not the best time for wisecracks, those murder scenes.
“It’s not meant to be you. It’s meant to be… your predecessor. He’s a Rom, abducted from the Maven Circus three days ago. Those clothes are tailored to the original Robin’s specifications, not yours. The eyes are blue, not green. The killer had his victim put in contact lenses before he died.”
“How would he know about the eye colors?”
“Lenses don’t always stay in. This is an old enemy.”
“The Joker?” Jason said it with excitement. He’d been looking forward to a dust-up with Batman’s greatest nemesis.
“No. There’d be a punchline. Not Two-Face either… and the Riddler isn’t homicidal.”
Robin did what he’d been trained to do. Stepped back and took in the crime scene.
“Did he really look like that? The guy before me?”
Batman made a disapproving noise deep in his gut. “More or less. Another clue… the facial structures match up. The victim doesn’t have your chin or nose.”
“And after me?”
Batman was crouching over the body, his cape shrouding him like a blanket. He broke his crude, black silhouette to look at Jason with shiny white eyes.
“I mean…” Jason toughened, raising his voice a little. “I mean, you gonna have someone after me?”
“Do you think I need a Robin?”
Batman turned back to his work.
“Multiple lacerations. No murder weapon, though. The killer might’ve taken it with him. Robin, use the blacklight. Check for blood nearby, it might lead to a hiding place.”
“Yessir.” Robin pulled the flashlight gizmo from his pocket and started shining it around. “So after me, that’s it? You’ll just do without a partner?”
“Anything’s possible. This line of work has taught me that.”
“So maybe you’re going to find someone else?”
“If I need help, Gotham will provide it. She always has before.”
“But you won’t. Because you have me. Am I right?”
“I suppose.”
3. Tim Drake
Batman pushed him harder, harder than he’d ever pushed a Robin before. Tim picked up on it. After a long work-out he’d drop down on the couch and Alfred would set an ice-cold can of Zesti down for him, not diet either. Tim was smart enough to know Alfred despised the stuff, so it must be a reward. For surviving, Tim thought.
And once when Bruce called Dick in to help train him, Tim had been pretty sure he’d gotten bruises over half his body. If Bruce went hard on him, Dick went harder. Afterward he hadn’t even been able to climb the stairs. He just sat down on the first step, feeling like vomiting, while Bruce and Dick went at it like wildcats. So fast and furious, Tim was sure he could train for a thousand years and never move so fast or dodge so gracefully. And after that, he’d been half-asleep, so he just remembered being cradled in Dick’s arms while the older man carried him upstairs and set him down on what had to be the most comfortable couch ever invented.
When he woke up, Dick was nearby, flipping channels with the sound off and the closed captioning on. “Practicing my lip-reading,” he explained.
“Kink’s outta my back,” Tim reported.
“Yeah, that couch is magic. I used to lie there whenever some fuc… some jerk kicked my butt. Felt like sleeping on air.”
Bruce was standing in the doorway, drinking a tall glass of water. “Is he awake?”
“I’m up.”
“We wore him out, but he pushed himself pretty hard before. Spirit’s willing, Bruce. Can’t argue with that.”
“I can argue with anything I want.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t mean you’ll win the debate.”
It seemed like an old argument and Bruce glanced significantly at Tim just then, like he was doing it to remind Dick that Tim was there, and Dick made a sort of cough sound. Then he was up and on his feet.
“I should get back to the Titans before Kory sends out a search party. You know how she is.”
“Actually, I don’t.”
But their handshake was friendly enough, even if their arm muscles bunched with the squeeze they gave each other. Dick touched Tim on the back of the neck, three fingers sinking into the flesh, then was gone. He was barely out the door when Tim asked “Am I cut out for this?”
Bruce looked at him, about as surprised as Tim had ever seen him. On someone else, his mouth would be wide open, his eyes shot. On Bruce, his lips were just parted slightly, his ears seeming to twitch like a cat with its ears flat.
“That’s what you were fighting about, right? Whether I can handle this?”
“We were not fighting. And especially not because of you.”
There was an oxymoron in there, but Tim didn’t point it out. Instead, he pushed himself up until the old pain in his limbs was in full bloom. There was, as if by magic, a glass of water filled nearly to the brim with ice cubes, waiting for him on the endtable. He gulped it down gratefully. It tasted like ambrosia. He hadn’t even been thirsty, but it was just so cold…
“You are training me really hard.”
“I could never train you hard enough to prepare you for what’s out there. I wasn’t,” Bruce admitted.
“You’re still alive though. That’s something.”
Bruce said nothing. Just gestured for Tim to take another drink. Tim did, polishing off the second half of the cup, drinking so fast that some of it sloshed down his cheeks. Better than ice cream, better than the fine chocolates they didn’t sell at candy stores.
“I don’t know if I can keep up,” Tim confessed.
“You will,” Bruce said, and they didn’t discuss it anymore.
4. Stephanie Brown
It was after a fight, in the Batmobile. Steph had swung too hard and too skilled, breaking a bone. Just a fracture, just a skull… Batman had to assure her that he was still breathing, that there’d be no permanent damage, but he made sure not to tell her that the skel had deserved it. Not after Jason.
So Steph just kept staring at her hand and Bruce occasionally stared at her. After Dick, all of them had known what they were getting into, to some degree or another… they’d seen Robin on the news, they’d had at least an inkling what it was that was out there. But Steph knew nothing. She thought she knew, because she had dabbled in it. But all she’d done was get into mischief. She’d never gone for a walk on East End.
“He wouldn’t have messed up,” she said.
“No. He wouldn’t have.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt him that bad.”
“Would it have been any better if you had?”
“I suppose not.”
“You’d be wrong.”
She was taken aback. He pressed on.
“We walk a line between justice and vengeance. Always we must ensure that only the guilty need to fear us. You’re young--”
Stephanie saw where he was going with this. “You’re not firing me, are you?”
“Not yet. You’ve shown a willingness to learn. You know that I’m more experienced than you. Those are important qualities.”
A moment of silence.
“So why Robin?”
“Excuse me?”
“If I had to be your sidekick, why couldn’t I stay Robin? I don’t think anyone’s going to be fooled that it’s the same Robin.”
“The opposite. Many think I’ve been through hundreds of Robins.”
”Have you?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“Too many…” She was still looking at him. “No. But still too many.”
“Then why? If you needed help, you have Batgirl and Nightwing… maybe a robot or something…”
“Do you want the job or not?”
“I want it, I want it.”
“Then don’t ask so many questions. I don’t need lip from a rookie.”
5. Carrie Kelly
Batman spent half the day reprogramming the Batcopter to respond to his nice, neat hierarchy of commands. The system prompted him on whether to delete the old settings. After a moment, he selected ‘no’ and saved them as a separate control scheme. If he hadn’t, she just would have reprogrammed it again.
The very corner of his lip twitched upward.
“So, what’s breaking?” she asked, from the entrance he’d assigned her. She was on one of those little hover-scooters that sounded like the world’s most annoying electric razor.
“Nothing’s broken.”
“It’s slang, dicer! How long you been hibernating in here?”
Alfred was polishing the penny back to its old, ancient, sheen.
“Too long.”
Alfred made a noise that Bruce didn’t dignify with a response.
“From now on, if you want to use the controls, say ‘System Access – Robin’.”
Her pale lips, unmarked by lipstick, broke out in a wide grin. “So I’m in?”
“You’ve been ‘in’ for a long time.” Before she was born, probably.
“Why?”
He looked at her. Alfred looked at her.
“I’m not ungrateful, but I’d like to know how come. I mean, it’s not like a thirteen-year-old with a slingshot is going to tip the balance.”
“Actually, it’s a lot like that,” Bruce said, and said no more.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Bruce, Dick, Jason, Tim, Steph, Carrie Kelly.
Warning: None
Word Count: 2,046
Summary: All the Robins have had questions. But Bruce hasn’t had the answers.
Batman didn’t look back. He straightened his senses behind him. Taste and touch were impossible, obviously, and scent was ripped right away by the wind that they were cleaving through. Sound was easy, though. It was the flapping of his cape, Robin’s voice over the wind, and his own cape under it. Perhaps if he were Clark, Batman could hear more – the rush of blood and the beat of heart, so pointlessly frantic to the task at hand – but no, those he could only guess at. Dick was far too excited to be flying again. Batman didn’t expect taking to the air once more to be quite like visiting Crime Alley was to himself, but the jolly “Yahoo!” was psychologically unhealthy.
But it beat any number of alternatives.
“So, why me?” Robin asked, as their arc shortened and they were more or less at the slowest of their swing.
“Your training in acrobatics made you an obvious candidate as my successor. Events conspired to force me to exert an influence sooner.”
“But I was always going to be your… heir?” Robin asked, somersaulting wildly in a flare of yellow cape before scoring a two-point landing.
“It was idle speculation, but yes, you were the leading candidate.”
They were both on the rooftop now. Batman put his grapple-gun away, Robin gestured wildly with his like a child pretending to sword-fight. Like Zorro fighting Captain Pasquale.
“Kinda like destiny or something?”
“Men make their own destiny. Nothing chooses us for anything.”
“That’s… a little scary.”
“I prefer to think of it as liberating.”
Robin nodded. “Cool. So it’s my choice to be Robin?”
An obvious question, and Batman felt absurdly Socratic answering it. “Yes.”
“And you’re not going to take that choice away from me?”
Bruce looked at Robin. Younger than young despite his years, innocent despite his background, and desperately afraid despite his courage. He didn’t look anything like the Batman’s ideal partner. He was perfect.
“Why would I?”
Robin rocked backward on his heels. When he rocked forward again, his words came out in a wild torrent. “I just thought you might find someone better or want to leave or get bored of me or die or something, something, I don’t know what!”
“I’m not going to die,” Batman said simply.
“Oh.”
“I couldn’t find anyone better if I looked, which I’m not.”
A cocky grin. “Of course.”
“I could never leave this city. It’s my home.”
“Yeah, but—“
“And no one could ever get bored of you.”
“Gee, ya mean it?”
“Why would I lie?”
The body was sprawled out. It was dressed in shades of red and green and yellow, made tawdry by the blood that surrounded it in a reflecting nimbus. The legs, specked with blood, shot out from under the cape almost obscenely. Dishabille would be the word for it, if he hadn’t been murdered.
“Jesus.” Jason was trying hard not to throw up. Not in front of Batman. “I mean, Jesus. Sure did a number on a guy. I’m starting to get the impression people don’t like me.”
Batman shot him a glance. Mental note: Not the best time for wisecracks, those murder scenes.
“It’s not meant to be you. It’s meant to be… your predecessor. He’s a Rom, abducted from the Maven Circus three days ago. Those clothes are tailored to the original Robin’s specifications, not yours. The eyes are blue, not green. The killer had his victim put in contact lenses before he died.”
“How would he know about the eye colors?”
“Lenses don’t always stay in. This is an old enemy.”
“The Joker?” Jason said it with excitement. He’d been looking forward to a dust-up with Batman’s greatest nemesis.
“No. There’d be a punchline. Not Two-Face either… and the Riddler isn’t homicidal.”
Robin did what he’d been trained to do. Stepped back and took in the crime scene.
“Did he really look like that? The guy before me?”
Batman made a disapproving noise deep in his gut. “More or less. Another clue… the facial structures match up. The victim doesn’t have your chin or nose.”
“And after me?”
Batman was crouching over the body, his cape shrouding him like a blanket. He broke his crude, black silhouette to look at Jason with shiny white eyes.
“I mean…” Jason toughened, raising his voice a little. “I mean, you gonna have someone after me?”
“Do you think I need a Robin?”
Batman turned back to his work.
“Multiple lacerations. No murder weapon, though. The killer might’ve taken it with him. Robin, use the blacklight. Check for blood nearby, it might lead to a hiding place.”
“Yessir.” Robin pulled the flashlight gizmo from his pocket and started shining it around. “So after me, that’s it? You’ll just do without a partner?”
“Anything’s possible. This line of work has taught me that.”
“So maybe you’re going to find someone else?”
“If I need help, Gotham will provide it. She always has before.”
“But you won’t. Because you have me. Am I right?”
“I suppose.”
Batman pushed him harder, harder than he’d ever pushed a Robin before. Tim picked up on it. After a long work-out he’d drop down on the couch and Alfred would set an ice-cold can of Zesti down for him, not diet either. Tim was smart enough to know Alfred despised the stuff, so it must be a reward. For surviving, Tim thought.
And once when Bruce called Dick in to help train him, Tim had been pretty sure he’d gotten bruises over half his body. If Bruce went hard on him, Dick went harder. Afterward he hadn’t even been able to climb the stairs. He just sat down on the first step, feeling like vomiting, while Bruce and Dick went at it like wildcats. So fast and furious, Tim was sure he could train for a thousand years and never move so fast or dodge so gracefully. And after that, he’d been half-asleep, so he just remembered being cradled in Dick’s arms while the older man carried him upstairs and set him down on what had to be the most comfortable couch ever invented.
When he woke up, Dick was nearby, flipping channels with the sound off and the closed captioning on. “Practicing my lip-reading,” he explained.
“Kink’s outta my back,” Tim reported.
“Yeah, that couch is magic. I used to lie there whenever some fuc… some jerk kicked my butt. Felt like sleeping on air.”
Bruce was standing in the doorway, drinking a tall glass of water. “Is he awake?”
“I’m up.”
“We wore him out, but he pushed himself pretty hard before. Spirit’s willing, Bruce. Can’t argue with that.”
“I can argue with anything I want.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t mean you’ll win the debate.”
It seemed like an old argument and Bruce glanced significantly at Tim just then, like he was doing it to remind Dick that Tim was there, and Dick made a sort of cough sound. Then he was up and on his feet.
“I should get back to the Titans before Kory sends out a search party. You know how she is.”
“Actually, I don’t.”
But their handshake was friendly enough, even if their arm muscles bunched with the squeeze they gave each other. Dick touched Tim on the back of the neck, three fingers sinking into the flesh, then was gone. He was barely out the door when Tim asked “Am I cut out for this?”
Bruce looked at him, about as surprised as Tim had ever seen him. On someone else, his mouth would be wide open, his eyes shot. On Bruce, his lips were just parted slightly, his ears seeming to twitch like a cat with its ears flat.
“That’s what you were fighting about, right? Whether I can handle this?”
“We were not fighting. And especially not because of you.”
There was an oxymoron in there, but Tim didn’t point it out. Instead, he pushed himself up until the old pain in his limbs was in full bloom. There was, as if by magic, a glass of water filled nearly to the brim with ice cubes, waiting for him on the endtable. He gulped it down gratefully. It tasted like ambrosia. He hadn’t even been thirsty, but it was just so cold…
“You are training me really hard.”
“I could never train you hard enough to prepare you for what’s out there. I wasn’t,” Bruce admitted.
“You’re still alive though. That’s something.”
Bruce said nothing. Just gestured for Tim to take another drink. Tim did, polishing off the second half of the cup, drinking so fast that some of it sloshed down his cheeks. Better than ice cream, better than the fine chocolates they didn’t sell at candy stores.
“I don’t know if I can keep up,” Tim confessed.
“You will,” Bruce said, and they didn’t discuss it anymore.
It was after a fight, in the Batmobile. Steph had swung too hard and too skilled, breaking a bone. Just a fracture, just a skull… Batman had to assure her that he was still breathing, that there’d be no permanent damage, but he made sure not to tell her that the skel had deserved it. Not after Jason.
So Steph just kept staring at her hand and Bruce occasionally stared at her. After Dick, all of them had known what they were getting into, to some degree or another… they’d seen Robin on the news, they’d had at least an inkling what it was that was out there. But Steph knew nothing. She thought she knew, because she had dabbled in it. But all she’d done was get into mischief. She’d never gone for a walk on East End.
“He wouldn’t have messed up,” she said.
“No. He wouldn’t have.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt him that bad.”
“Would it have been any better if you had?”
“I suppose not.”
“You’d be wrong.”
She was taken aback. He pressed on.
“We walk a line between justice and vengeance. Always we must ensure that only the guilty need to fear us. You’re young--”
Stephanie saw where he was going with this. “You’re not firing me, are you?”
“Not yet. You’ve shown a willingness to learn. You know that I’m more experienced than you. Those are important qualities.”
A moment of silence.
“So why Robin?”
“Excuse me?”
“If I had to be your sidekick, why couldn’t I stay Robin? I don’t think anyone’s going to be fooled that it’s the same Robin.”
“The opposite. Many think I’ve been through hundreds of Robins.”
”Have you?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“Too many…” She was still looking at him. “No. But still too many.”
“Then why? If you needed help, you have Batgirl and Nightwing… maybe a robot or something…”
“Do you want the job or not?”
“I want it, I want it.”
“Then don’t ask so many questions. I don’t need lip from a rookie.”
Batman spent half the day reprogramming the Batcopter to respond to his nice, neat hierarchy of commands. The system prompted him on whether to delete the old settings. After a moment, he selected ‘no’ and saved them as a separate control scheme. If he hadn’t, she just would have reprogrammed it again.
The very corner of his lip twitched upward.
“So, what’s breaking?” she asked, from the entrance he’d assigned her. She was on one of those little hover-scooters that sounded like the world’s most annoying electric razor.
“Nothing’s broken.”
“It’s slang, dicer! How long you been hibernating in here?”
Alfred was polishing the penny back to its old, ancient, sheen.
“Too long.”
Alfred made a noise that Bruce didn’t dignify with a response.
“From now on, if you want to use the controls, say ‘System Access – Robin’.”
Her pale lips, unmarked by lipstick, broke out in a wide grin. “So I’m in?”
“You’ve been ‘in’ for a long time.” Before she was born, probably.
“Why?”
He looked at her. Alfred looked at her.
“I’m not ungrateful, but I’d like to know how come. I mean, it’s not like a thirteen-year-old with a slingshot is going to tip the balance.”
“Actually, it’s a lot like that,” Bruce said, and said no more.
