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“I can’t believe you.”
“Mhm.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“Mhm.”
“We’ve known each other for decades, Bruce.”
Bruce continued to ignore Oliver.
It was the first time he’d been back to the Watchtower since he finally conceded his identity two weeks ago. It wasn’t that he was deliberately avoiding the team — though, given the nature of his identity, Bruce thought he could be forgiven for a few weeks of strategic invisibility. His absence had been more to do with an enforced convalescence back at the manor. A broken leg wouldn’t heal itself, and Bruce had been going insane without anything constructive to do.
He hadn’t been alone on house arrest. As he suspected, Alfred had forced Tim and even Jason to stay as well. Which was nice for Bruce, but if he had to play one more game of Monopoly with the Bat-House Rules (involving far more body slams than Bruce thought was strictly necessary), then he was at serious risk of committing some kind of arson.
Bruce loved all his children. Truly, deeply, unfathomably. But they were also dirty goddamn little cheaters. Tim had somehow cornered the utility market so efficiently that Bruce was half-convinced his investments were actual shell companies. Duke was almost certainly using his powers to rig the dice in his favour, because absolutely nobody could avoid landing on all those hotels without some devilry afoot. Jason invented the term ‘full-contact capitalism’ as he tried to choke Bruce out, and Damian was never allowed to be the banker again.
Next time they were going to play Scrabble. Bruce was not expecting it to go any better.
The only reason Alfred released him from this domestic hostage situation was because of the kids. In a very rare moment of soft-heartedness — or insanity, depending on your perspective — he finally agreed to let them show their respective teams around the Batcave.
He originally had no intentions on making good on that promise. At the time, it was just one of those throwaway commitments he’d make with a leg a cast and his judgement clouded by painkillers. Really, he should have known that they’d all take it to heart and immediately draw up plans to bring their teams into the Batcave for vigilante show-and-tell.
It was a logistical nightmare and Bruce wanted no part of it. Fortunately, his kids didn’t want him there either. They relegated him to the Watchtower just before their first guests showed up under the promise that they’d be good. Mostly.
(Artemis, one of Jason’s friends, had been the first to arrive and she brought an entire keg of mead as a gift for Alfred. Alfred adored her.)
Bruce wasn’t worried about anything major going wrong. Not really. He trusted his children to behave, especially since the Batcave was just as important to them as it was to Bruce. Besides, Alfred was left in charge and he was a force of nature when it came to managing the chaos that followed when all the kids were in one place. Then again, Alfred was also, in Bruce’s private opinion, an incorrigible enabler. To the point of concern, actually. The man had raised Bruce, after all, and Bruce was unhinged as hell.
Now that he was back for the first time since unmasking, Bruce figured it wouldn’t hurt to leave the cowl off while he worked. The team needed to get used to seeing him, and he needed to get used to letting them.
There were a lot of members who hadn’t seen the grand reveal, so there’d initially been a lot of confusion when he pulled off his cowl in the common room to work on its internal communicator. A lot of them, unsurprisingly, struggled to reconcile the disparity between his famous face and the batsuit, and that had resulted in a few unwanted interactions that Bruce was trying to keep to a minimum.
They’d see his unmasked face and instinctively move towards him, clearly comfortable with the idea of Brucie. Which actually made some sense. Brucie was a deliberately charming man who laughed too loud and shook hands like he meant it. A lack of vapid behavioural cues wasn’t enough to erase the fact that his face had been on the cover of magazines.
But then they’d take notice of his flat expression, the batsuit, and the general vibe of ’leave me alone if you have nothing constructive to say’, and their self-preservation instincts would kick in. The whiplash was almost audible. And actually rather amusing.
They’d all just have to get used to it. He wasn’t Brucie, not really, and he wasn’t exactly Batman either. He had always been something in between, and it was finally time for him to acknowledge that openly. And if the team was going to work with the whole man instead of just the myth, they’d have to accept the parts that didn’t fit neatly into either persona.
Bruce was still figuring out what that meant himself. He supposed he always would be.
Annoyingly, one of the very few people who hadn’t been initially weird about the whole Brucie thing had been Lantern — but that was mostly because he somehow had no idea who Bruce Wayne was in the first place. Barry, who Bruce used to have a high opinion of, had gleefully sat Hal down to deliver a crash course on the cultural phenomenon that was Bruce Wayne. The two had been watching compilations on the Watchtower monitors for days now. Hal had taken to sending the stupidest videos to the Batcomputer and captioning them with ‘this u?’.
Yes, it was him. Every time. He never responded.
Fortunately, Superman and Wonder Woman had accepted the whole thing quite gracefully. Clark was almost certainly brimming with questions, but he was wise enough to Bruce’s demeanour to know better than to ask just yet. He had just clapped him around the shoulder, introduced himself formally, and left it at that. For now, anyway.
Diana was the same, even though Bruce knew without doubt that all she wanted to do was meet his children properly. She knew it hadn’t been the time, not right after he had finally looked them in the eye for the first time. She had just responded with a knowing smile — one of those expressions that managed to be perfectly disarming and deeply insightful. She had looked at his face without shock and simply said, “It suits you.”
This was why Bruce liked Clark and Diana the best.
Everyone else though… Well, he probably should have prepared himself a little better. Ironic, considering preparation was basically his superpower. As soon as Clark and Diana made use of their special privileges by greeting him first, Bruce had decided that he really didn’t want to deal with anything more than that. He had already shown them his face, what more did they want? When he noticed the others begin to close in, their faces ranging from wide-eyed curiosity (Captain Marvel) to apoplectic shock (Oliver), Bruce decided to leave.
He did what any rational, level-headed, completely sane individual in his position would do. He detonated one of the smoke bombs he had left at the far end of the battlefield.
It distracted the League enough for him to herd his exasperated kids back into the shadows where they could disappear. It wasn’t so much as him fleeing the scene as it was a tactical withdrawal. Though, it may certainly have had an uncanny resemblance to someone bolting for the nearest exit. Maybe that was dramatic of him. But then again, Bruce had always been a pretty dramatic guy.
“I can't believe you,” Ollie said for the third time
Bruce was fairly determined to go about business as usual and Ollie was making that very difficult. Finally, he looked up at him, barely restraining a deep sigh.
“What,” he said flatly.
“What? What? Is that all you’ve got to say to me? ’What?’. Bruce, you’re you!” Ollie threw his hands up as though all this was some great cosmic revelation. It was a fairly delayed reaction, Bruce decided. Oliver had his personal number, Oliver knew where he lived, Oliver could have had this conversation literally the day after Bruce took off the mask.
“I noticed.”
“So when you fell off Veronica Cale’s balcony and broke through the canapé table, that was you.”
“Yes.”
“And when you let that ballerina try to teach you how to go en pointe and you ended up straddling the Mayor’s lap, that was you.”
“It was.”
“And when you made that wannabe oligarch slow dance with you to keep him from creeping on Dinah, that was you.”
“Mhm.”
“And when you—”
“I think we understand, Ollie,” Dinah said. She was leaning back in her chair, arms crossed, but her eyes were wide, fixed on Bruce as though seeing him in an entirely new light.
“I’ve walked in on Batman having a threesome, Dinah! This goes beyond understanding!”
Bruce shrugged, unbothered. “You should have knocked.”
Behind him, he could hear Hal and Barry positively losing their minds, mostly at Ollie’s expense. At some point, they had discovered that Oliver, who was rapidly approaching some sort of existential crisis, was somehow far more embarrassed by the situation than Bruce would ever be. Bruce, for his part, had evolved beyond shame when it came to his public persona. Years of cultivating the Brucie Wayne act had rendered him immune to most forms of public humiliation, and anything else simply fell under the category of not my problem.
This, decidedly, was not his problem.
Still, Ollie’s flailing indignation was getting tiresome. Bruce let out a long, deliberate sigh and finally looked up. “Would you rather I put the cowl back on?”
“Kind of, yeah!” Ollie blurted. “How am I supposed to be okay with this? I once watched you spend five minutes trying to pull open a push door! I had to open the door for you, Bruce! You still walked into the glass!”
“So?”
Ollie’s face did something interesting at the response. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, as though trying to find the exact words to process what he’d just heard. His eyes widened, his brows raised, and for a moment, he looked like a man teetering on the edge of full-on villainy.
“Oh god,” he finally said. “You’re actually a maniac, aren’t you?” There was no inflection, no accusation. Just raw, unfiltered realisation. He slumped in on himself, his earlier indignation giving way to a sort of defeated acceptance. “I always thought you were just a harmless eccentric weirdo. But no. You’re an insane eccentric weirdo. What the hell, Bruce?”
“I fail to see the issue here.”
“I get why you wouldn’t tell anyone else. Really, I do. I mean, it was because of the boys, right? And Cass? But we’ve known each other since we were kids. We took baths together!”
Bruce turned back to work on his cowl. “It didn’t seem relevant.”
“Not relevant?!” Oliver sputtered. “How is this—” He flailed a hand in gesture towards Bruce. “—not relevant?”
Bruce didn’t answer, which, unsurprisingly, did little to calm Ollie down. It probably escalated his outrage, but Bruce tuned it out in favour of focusing on his circuitry. Meanwhile, Hal and Barry had moved past watching Bruce Wayne Funny Moments compilations on the monitor and were now analysing every clumsy social interaction Bruce had ever staged in public.
“Click on that one,” Hal was muttering to Barry, pointing at the screen. Bruce definitely didn’t want to know which TMZ trash they were about to watch, but he also made no great moves to stop it. That would just encourage them.
“In hindsight, it makes so much sense,” Dinah mused, idly patting Ollie on the back. “But at the same time, I still can’t believe it. It really is an excellent secret identity, Bruce.”
“Thank you.”
“There’s a whole clipshow of you messing with Luthor,” Hal interrupted, sounding reluctantly impressed as Barry played a clip at last year's LexCorp Tech Convention. It featured a wildly inebriated Brucie Wayne (or rather an incredibly bored Bruce pretending to be drunk for the fun of it) bodily throwing himself at Lex Luthor in an aggressive hug that sent them both into a nearby fountain.
“Ah, I remember that,” Dinah said, nodding thoughtfully and taking all of this very much in stride.
Clark, who had been on the periphery with Diana to watch the scene unfold, finally decided to offer some input. “Oh, me too,” he said. He looked at Bruce, grinning. “Luthor was furious with you.”
“Yeah, and Luthor can’t do anything because that’d be social suicide,” Oliver grumbled. “People love Brucie. If Luthor so much as looks at him wrong, all the tabloids are calling him a bully and LexCorp loses stocks.”
“I can’t imagine a world where people like you for your personality,” Hal said.
Bruce shrugged. He couldn’t either.
“Shall we put all that aside for now,” Diana said, reaching forward to shut off the screen. Hal and Barry booed her good-naturedly. “Yes, yes, he is Bruce Wayne. I suppose I understand your surprise. But I would instead hear about the children!” She turned to Bruce, eyes positively sparkling. “I thought you only had two!”
“I used to only have two,” Bruce said unhelpfully.
Diana rolled her eyes. “My friend, I can forgive you for keeping your identity to yourself, but now that I know about your children, nothing is going to stop me from being a part of their lives. They all look like fine young men and women.”
“I knew I recognised Red Robin. I knew it,” Oliver, clearly not over it, muttered. “And you lied to my face about it.”
“I always lie to your face.”
“That really doesn’t make it any better!”
“You really do have a lot of kids, it’s weird as hell,” Hal said. He made space for Captain Marvel as he awkwardly slipped in to listen to the conversation. “Like, where did you even get them all from? Did you steal them off the streets or something?”
“No,” Bruce said. He thought of Jason and amended, “Mostly no.”
“What does that even mean?”
Bruce didn’t respond. Hal just stared at him incredulously.
“You know,” Barry cut in, blinking like he had just made a major realisation, “Wally’s known some of your kids for years. He talks about his friend Nightwing all the time.”
“Roy, too,” Dinah pointed out, which just made Ollie drop his head into the table and groan.
“So have Superboy and Wonder Girl,” Bruce said, but he didn’t think that helped very much. He didn’t plan on helping, really. He was fully committed to making this as difficult for everyone as possible.
Diana looked delighted to have a connection to the family, but Clark frowned in thought. “You mean Kon’s strange friend Robin is one of yours?”
“Red Robin,” Bruce said automatically. The distinction was important to Damian. He still measured his worth on his ownership of the name — they were working on that, but it was slow going. They finally managed to convince him that being Bruce’s only biological son didn't put him above his siblings, but Robin was different. Robin was magic. They had Dick to thank for that. Bruce certainly couldn't contribute any more than a safety net.
Hal looked around the group suspiciously. “Wait, do all you have secret blood ties to Batman,” he asked. “Am I missing out on the whole sidekick thing?”
“I don’t either,” Billy said, looking too big in his Captain Marvel suit. He peered at Bruce awkwardly. “I don’t, right?”
“For now.”
Billy rubbed the back of his head, deep in thought as he considered that.
“Robin,” Diana remembered thoughtfully. “That is the little one I met when I came to Gotham, is he not?”
Bruce nodded, because really there was no point in refusing now. “My youngest.”
Diana’s entire face lit up. “My little warrior,” she said, grinning brightly. “I would be honoured to meet with him again, Bruce. He looked very capable for someone so young. And I can’t help but wonder about that sword of his.”
Bruce didn’t respond, but he did feel a smile tug at the corner of his mouth. Smiles always came easier when he wasn’t wearing the cowl — and there was certainly some deeply layered psychology there that he wasn’t planning on unpacking anytime soon — and compliments towards his children always had a way of getting past his defenses. The smile wasn’t more of a flicker, but it was also an expression he wasn’t well known for in the League. Diana beamed that she managed to elicit it.
“In fact,” she continued, undeterred, “I insist you introduce me to all of your children. There was no time to say hello before you slipped away last time, and you’re very lucky I won’t take offense to that. You should invite me and Clark over for dinner. I’m sure you can make time for your friends.” She paused thoughtfully, then added, “I am free this Thursday and I have no dietary requirements.”
Clark brightened next to her. “I’m also free this Thursday,” he said. “I can bring dessert!”
“Wait, are we having a dinner party at Batman’s place?” Barry said. “Because I could eat. Like, a lot.”
“Excellent,” Diana said. “Then it’s decided. You will host the League for dinner this Thursday. From what I know about you, my friend, I’m confident your home is large enough to accommodate all of us. Shall we say six o’clock?”
Bruce turned his head slowly, levelling Diana with a withering stare that would’ve sent most people scurrying for cover. Most people, however, were not Diana of Themyscira. She met his glare with an unbothered smile, serene and completely immovable.
“I’m busy on Thursday,” Bruce said like a liar. He certainly wasn’t busy on Thursday. His plans essentially amounted to propping up his broken leg and watching terrible rom-coms with Steph, Cass and maybe Barbara if she was free.
“Busy hosting dinner, apparently,” Dinah said, jumping in easily. “Everyone knows where Wayne Manor is, so it’s not like you can hide from this. Besides, it’s been a while since I’ve had Alfred’s cooking.”
“Oh god, Alfred is Penny-One,” Ollie groaned in realisation. “How did I not realise that?”
Everyone ignored him save for Billy sending him a half-amused, half-pitying look.
“We want to get to know you, Bruce,” Clark said earnestly. “Not Batman, and not Brucie. I’ve met Brucie and I don’t think I can ever forgive you for that. The insinuations you made haunted me. Lois had to reassure me that it wasn’t normal and you were just like that.”
“Wait, what insinuations?”
Clark let out a long, defeated sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose. When he didn’t elaborate, Bruce answered for him. “He decided to invade my privacy during an interview and saw that I had three cracked ribs and a broken femur. I may have implied that the injuries were of a sexual nature.”
“Your heartbeat didn’t change!” Clark exclaimed, pointing accusingly at Bruce. “I thought you were telling the truth! I didn’t even think to make any other connections. You told me—” He cut himself off and shook his head to dislodge the memory. “I’m not even going to repeat what you told me.”
“Who’s to say I was even lying?”
“Don’t start with me, Bruce. I will never speak to you again.”
“Hm. Prude.”
He could feel people gaping at him and Oliver sighed. “This is it,” he said. “He’s unmasked now. He’s going to be a horrible flirt, and it’s all your fault.”
Bruce glanced at him. “Whose fault?”
“I don’t know!” Ollie snapped, throwing his hands in the air. “All of you! You for being Batman! Diana for being so damn pleased about it! Everyone else just for being here! And Hal, because it’s always Hal’s fault somehow!”
“Hey!”
Diana put a reassuring hand on Clark’s shoulder, laughing pleasantly. “Well,” she said, turning to look at Bruce again, “I, for one, very much look forward to getting to know you properly. After I’ve met all your children over dinner, of course.”
The worst part of all this was that Bruce suspected Alfred would be thrilled by the opportunity to host the League for dinner. Not because he particularly cared about entertaining a group of vigilantes and heroes, but because it would mean that Bruce was, in Alfred’s words, ‘finally sourcing himself a social life.’
Even the idea of that was starting to give him a headache. The League were (mostly) responsible adults, fully capable of behaving in a social setting. Especially when the setting was Bruce’s home, he’d damn well make sure they would behave. His children though… They knew how to be professional, certainly. They just didn’t always act that way.
Cass, beautiful, perfect Cass, could at least be counted on to behave. The worst Bruce could expect from her was maybe she’d try to scare the League just by existing a little too quietly, but that wasn’t something he could hold against her. He liked to do the same thing.
The others, however, seemed to take great pleasure in trying to give Bruce more grey hairs. The odds of Tim oversharing classified information were uncomfortably high. Not about the family though. Tim would make a point to reveal intimate secrets about every outsider sitting at the table, just to show them that he could. It was exactly the same power move Bruce himself had made when he first met the League, so once again he couldn’t hold it against him. But it would be nice, he thought, if his children could develop the ability to hold a normal conversation.
Damian would undoubtedly declare at least one guest unworthy as breathing the same air as the family. He would do it with impeccable manners — the Al Ghuls had managed to drill in some element of dining etiquette during his upbringing — but Damian had the wonderful talent of insulting someone so severely that it came across as almost polite. Upon being assured that the Justice League had proven themselves time and time again to be good at what they did, he’d likely submit a notice of challenge to someone. Probably Diana. And Diana would probably accept.
He’d have to put Dick on standby to wrangle Damian. Dick was good during dinner usually. He would be charming and polite, the picture perfect oldest son. Right up until he decided it was time to tell embarrassing stories. Which could go either way. He could gleefully tell everyone all about Bruce’s earlier years as Batman and some of the more stupider situations they’d gotten into as the original Dynamic Duo. Or, if he was feeling magnanimous, he’d take a page out of Tim’s book and just blurt out every humiliating bit of info he knew about the League. Bruce hoped for the latter.
If Jason was going to join in on the hazing, then he was the wild card and it all depended on his mood, his current opinion of Bruce, and probably the alignment of the stars. Bruce imagined he’d pick a target (Oliver, most likely, given the fact that Roy was his best friend) and just go to town. Bruce would make a token attempt to stop him, he supposed. Maybe.
Duke was also a little unpredictable. He had a lot of people fooled into thinking he was the normal one in the family, but Bruce wasn’t an idiot. He knew damn well that there was a reason he fit in so well with the others. This was the kid that led the Robin Rebellion throughout the streets of Gotham. He was just as unhinged as the rest of them. He just hid it better.
As for Stephanie… Well, Bruce didn’t want to even think about what she would get up to. Hopefully she’d be too distracted by how cool she thought Dinah and Diana were to cause any real trouble.
Bruce grimaced. He was actually thinking about this like he was ever going to let it happen. He said nothing about it, but he did narrow his eyes as if the intensity of his stare could somehow dissuade Diana from doing something she’d already decided to do.
His communicator took that exact moment to buzz as if just thinking about his children could summon them. Which Bruce hadn’t actually ruled out yet. He blinked down at his deconstructed cowl and held back a bone-deep, full-body sigh. The circuitry was still exposed and scattered across the table as he worked on it, but its functioning wasn’t entirely compromised. If he wanted to answer it, he would have to do so on speaker. Not ideal.
The alternative was to hobble to a more private part of the Watchtower. Tempting, but also unappealing. His leg was still in a cast from the invasion two weeks ago (signed only by Cass because she was the only one who managed to catch him with the marker) and he left his crutch a little too close to Hal and Barry. That would certainly impede any attempt at a quick escape. Not that Batman would consider it an escape. More like a calculated retreat.
The only people who had access to the bat-channel were his family and, if Bruce was being perfectly honest, he had been a little on edge since leaving them to their own devices in the Batcave. Especially since they were bringing in outsiders to gawk at all of his tech. Urgh. Bruce hated making concessions.
Resigned, he answered the comm.
“Father, if you leave me alone with the animals Drake calls friends again, I can’t guarantee you’ll find a home to return to,” Damian said before Bruce could get a word in. One of those calls, then.
Immediately, Diana leaned forward as if she could bully herself into the conversation just by being obnoxiously present. She wasn’t the only one either. Everyone in the room had stopped what they were doing to listen in, all them in various degrees of amusement. Oliver, likely recognising Damian’s voice, muttered something incoherent into the tabletop.
“You’re not alone, Robin.”
“I may as well be in this family of traitors. They keep referring to me as ‘compact’, because apparently it seems that these— these— buffoons have no real concept of a growing boy. I demand that you— Hey!”
There was a burst of static over the line followed by a brief scuffle. A moment later, Dick’s cheery voice broke through. “Hey, B. Sorry about that, the little guy’s all tuckered out. Conner brought his little brother to keep Damian company. I think he made a friend!”
“I did no such thing.”
Clark blinked at the implication that his son had somehow ended up in Batman’s cave, but Dick continued speaking before he could question it. “Just wanted to give you a quick update.
“What broke?” Bruce asked bluntly. At this point, it was fairly expected that at least something would break whenever all the kids got together.
“Wow, way to think the worst of us. Why do you always assume we broke something when you leave us alone?”
“Nightwing.”
“Now, define ‘broke’, because there’s a really funny story—”
“—Dick broke Fido,” Jason cut in with a snicker.
“Fido?” Barry asked in an aside to the group.
Clark took it upon himself to explain as if he hadn’t been equally confused by the animatronic T.rex when he first saw it. “The dinosaur.”
“The what?”
“You broke Fido?” Bruce said in disbelief. He loved Fido.
“Jay, you’re such a tattletale, what the hell?”
“What are you, twelve? What sort of grown man calls someone a ‘tattletale’?”
Bruce treated himself to a deep sigh. It was a special sigh, one pulled straight from the heart and specifically reserved for all of his children. He valiantly resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose, but he couldn’t stop himself from turning his back to the League in the hopes of maintaining a slither of privacy. It didn’t work, of course.
“Bruce, I swear, it wasn’t even my fault,” Dick insisted, his voice barely audible over Jason’s cackling. “Okay, well, maybe it was a little my fault, but in my defence, I’ve climbed on Fido like a million times since we installed him and nothing bad ever happened.”
“Stop.”
“No, wait, let me explain—”
“Stop.” There was moment of quiet over the line, but Bruce could hear muffled snickering in the background. It sounded like Duke and Stephanie. “I’ll deal with it when I get home,” Bruce said, half-defeated.
“B, it’s all good, I promise,” Dick continued, but he was using the voice of someone who had done something wrong and was resorting to innocent charm to smooth it over. It used to work all the time when he was a kid. Not so much these days. “Fido just needs a little dental work and he’ll be good as new. Also, Tim might’ve had to wrestle Bart out of the Batmobile, but that was mostly just a misunderstanding.”
“Now who’s the tattletale,” Tim’s voice chimed in faintly from somewhere in the background. There was a noise in the background that sounded like someone was slapping someone else repeatedly. Bruce wasn’t going to ask.
“Anyway — will you stop hitting me?” There was another short scuffle before Dick came back. “Anyway,” he continued, still as chipper as ever, “we’ve all wrapped up here. Everyone’s heading out now, so you’re hereby released from your exile.”
“Get your old man ass back here, Jay’s making quesadillas!” Steph shouted from somewhere nearby.
“I’ll be down soon,” Bruce said, pleased he finally had an excuse to leave. He was already calculating how to retrieve his crutch with minimal contact and bracing his leg for the short walk to the Zeta. “If I find any other damage—”
“Yeah, yeah, we get it.”
“And Nightwing, I want you to—”
Before he could finish, Diana leaned into his space with a bright grin. “Nightwing,” she announced suddenly, speaking directly at Bruce’s cowl as though addressing Dick in person. “I’d like you to inform your family that we will all be attending dinner on Thursday, if you would be so kind as to host us.”
There was a stunned silence on the line, followed by Duke’s incredulous voice. “Is that Wonder Woman?”
“Hi Wonder Woman,” at least four voices said.
“You’re coming to the manor?” Dick asked, sounding almost giddy. “Holy moly, that’s great! We’d love for you to come visit!”
“‘Holy moly?’” Jason deadpanned. “You’re such a rube.”
“What’s next? ’Holy Social Life, Batman!’ You’re so embarrassing, Dick,” Tim added
“Timmy, you’re supposed to like me,” Dick mourned.
“I like you.”
“Thanks, Cass. I like you too.”
“Oh god, you guys suck so much,” Steph grumbled. Her voice was suddenly closer like she had commandeered the comm. “Wonder Woman? Hi, I’m Steph, you’re so cool. Please forgive my idiot friends, they were raised by a man who would rather fall off a building and break all his bones before figuring out how to emote properly — true story, by the way.”
Diana laughed warmly. “No, no, it’s quite alright. I’m pleased to finally get a chance to speak with you.”
“So, you were saying something about dinner?”
“That’s enough, I’m hanging up,” Bruce said firmly. He cut the line off immediately, because goddamnit, when Batman makes a threat, he follows through with it. Not like it mattered in the slightest, however. The damage had already been done, the news was probably already being spread around the family, and there wasn’t a chance in hell that Bruce was ever going to get out of this now.
Behind him, Hal was whispering something to Barry, who looked like he was desperately trying to hold in his laughter. Beside him, Ollie sat looking particularly vacant. Almost like his whole understanding of life had been flipped on his head in the last hour or so. Dinah had placed a ground hand on his shoulder, but she certainly wasn’t immune to the general amusement that was permeating the room.
Clark was the only one who looked any kind of sympathetic towards him, but Bruce wasn’t fooled. That was exactly Clark’s game. Playing the understanding, supportive friend, when in reality he was just as gungho about all this as Diana was. Traitor. Bruce rescinded any preferential feelings he had towards his two closest friends.
“I’m going home,” he said flatly, nursing a phantom itch where his dignity used to be. A chorus of boos sounded from the more immature members of the team as he pulled himself up as gracefully as his bum leg would allow.
“See you on Thursday, Bruce,” Diana called.
Bruce paused mid-hobble. He turned his head just enough to shoot her a look of resignation as he said in his most deadpan voice, “Can’t wait.”
And without another word, he fled the room as best he could while hindered by a broken leg, an ungainly crutch, and the sinking sensation of complete and utter defeat.
It was all going to be fine, he told himself grudgingly. He’d go home, sit down with the family to eat one of Jason’s quesadillas, and he’d just go ahead and pretend that everyone in his life had gone according to plan. Nothing had ever gone wrong, no one in the League were privy to the personal circus he called his existence, and this was just another normal, boring day. He’d take great pleasure in ignoring his children’s badgering about dinner plans, and maybe, just maybe, they’d let him sit in quiet denial for an hour or two.
It was a solid plan. A perfect plan.
And then someone stepped into his path, having following him out of the room.
“Hey, uh, Mr. Wayne—?” Billy started, looking far too big in a body not built for his age.
He hesitated for a moment, his eyes darting around furtively as if someone could sneak in to listen to whatever he wanted to say. It was a gesture that seemed too small and genuine for someone who could bench press a train on his off days, but Bruce figured it was something that would have fitted better on his real face. He wondered, not for the first time, how nobody else could see what Billy really was. To Bruce, it really was all so obvious.
He cocked his head. “You can call me Bruce, Captain.”
“Um, Mr. Bruce…” Billy corrected himself. “I was wondering if we could…uh…talk?” His eyes darted towards the direction of the League. “In private?”
Oh. Well. Okay.
Bruce wasn’t expecting to have this conversation today. If, indeed, this was actually the conversation he thought it was — and judging by the incredibly nervous expression on Billy’s face, he suspected it was. He wasn’t one hundred percent certain on how old Billy actually was, but he knew without a doubt that it was closer to Damian’s age than it was to Dick’s. Maybe today was the day he finally found out.
He let his expression soften, just a fraction. “Of course,” he said. “Come with me back to the Batcave. We can talk there.”
Billy’s eyes widened but his face brightened at the unexpected invitation. Bruce turned back towards the Zeta-Tube and gestured for him to follow. “The family’s at the manor,” he added, wondering how Billy liked his quesadillas, “and they’ve been very interested in meeting you.”
END