Chapter Text
The after was weird.
The cliffside was cold. The wind was worse. The clouds had opened and had started spitting down on him, like the damn sky was trying to contribute to the whole dramatic protagonist thing Hal had going on right now. He stood there at the edge for longer than he’d care to amidst, fists balled at his sides while he waited for something cinematic to happen.
Alas. The water didn’t sparkle, the moon didn’t make him look heroic, and Bruce did not reappear in an arcing spray of seafoam. All that effort squaring his shoulders to the horizon for nothing.
He gave it fifteen minutes of trying to imbue the sea with homoerotic yearning before he started feeling stupid.
Reluctantly, he ended up back at Bruce’s place. It wasn’t exactly by choice, but when his ribs were doing something unpleasant beneath his skin, and when there was an ache blooming behind his left eye, he figured he’d make do with what he had nearby. Hal barely remembered to kick off his boots before he was falling face down in the bed he’d shared with Bruce.
In the morning, nothing had changed. The place was still dusty, and a pair of seals hadn’t magically returned in the night.
Fine. Okay. Cool. What now?
There was no point wallowing in it. Hal had done the whole wallowing thing when he and Carol called it quits, and he didn’t like what that turned him into. He was more a man of action. Besides, it wasn’t like Bruce dumped him or anything. There had been nothing there to dump, if you ignored the way Hal’s stomach jumped even just thinking about him, or the way they totally made out before Bruce turned all pinniped on him.
The ‘what now’ was to go back to how things were. No, actually, that was dumb. Hal knew he couldn’t go back to the beforetimes, where he was but an innocent bystander with no knowledge of magic seals or ninja death cults. More realistically, the ‘what now’ was to go back home and compartmentalise everything that had happened. After that, maybe he’d allow himself five minutes to mope about what could have been if Bruce and Jason came back with him.
God, he was being lame. Mind made up, feelings checked at the door, Hal refitted the dust sheets to the disturbed bedoom. Leaving it messy and exposed felt weirdly disrespectful to the ghosts that still lived here. He even went as far as to track down the utility room to shut off all the power before he left.
Bruce had left the keys to the sedan on the bedside table, so Hal felt perfectly within his rights to take the car to the airfield where they’d stashed the Praetor. Honestly, he didn’t exactly have a plan on how to get home. He fully expected to be stopped, questioned, and rerouted to the public airport where he’d be forced to fly commercial between some screaming baby and a sweaty tourist who liked to fly barefoot.
It didn’t happen like that, though. Apparently, Bruce had pulled some kind of wizardry bullshit behind his back. A signature here, a memo there. Paperwork had been pre-filed and clearance codes updated to add Hal’s name on the damn manifest. It was like Bruce had known, even back then, that he wasn’t coming back with Hal.
Asshole. It was just like him not to share the whole plan. Hal sat in the cockpit a few minutes too long, staring through the windshield and trying not to feel like he’d been outmanoeuvred in a game he hadn’t realised they were playing. Then he turned the engine over and taxied to the runway
So. Life went on.
It went on in a trudge, too. Hal called in his apologies to his dispatcher, made his voice sound properly contrite about the last-minute no-shows, and spent a solid thirty minutes leaving voicemails for his most pissed-off clients. The Rothchilds were at the top of the list, and because they were genetically predisposed to be bastards, they let him have it. There were threats of formal complaints and hiring someone with more professionalism, but by the end of the week they were back on his roster. Maybe they could smell the gay sadness wafting off him through the phone. Maybe they’d been ditched by an ocean hot guy once too. Either way, they went easy on him.
He figured he could take the financial hit that came with skipping work. One missed week wasn’t the end of the world, after all. Rent had already been taken care of beforehand, but there were still his seaplane hangar fees and an endless parade of maintenance bills. He braced himself as he logged into his bank account, mentally tallying what he could pawn for grocery money.
What he didn’t expect to see was a fresh deposit, flagged under the bland little title of ‘WAYNE ENTERPRISES’ for ten thousand american dollars.
The scene he made at the bank was, in hindsight, a little dramatic. There was some yelling and some gesturing, and a mortifying bit where he tried climbing over the teller counter to shove the money back into the system with his own hands, as if that would make it less real. That was when security was called in to escort him out. They wouldn’t take it back because all the necessary documentation had been ‘acquired’. Apparently, Mr. Pennyworth’s name carried a certain weight.
Hal had no idea who Mr. Pennyworth was, but he wasn’t going to let this stand. He had his pride, goddamnit, and he didn’t need a payday just for doing the right thing. It was actually insulting as hell. Did Bruce really think he needed this? That he needed money for tagging along and playing the hero?
He headed to another branch and withdrew it in cash, fifties and hundreds all stuffed into one of those canvas envelopes that made him feel real official. Then, because he had no idea where Bruce was for him to shove the lot of it up his sanctimonious ass, Hal decided on the next best thing. On his day off, he headed to the Villa where Bruce’s weird English dad lived.
He stormed up to the gate and delivered an entire tirade to the security camera when it turned out Alfred wasn’t home. It was pointed and impassioned, and perhaps it was a little too personal in parts, but by the end of it he had made a show of cramming the envelope under a potted plant and saluting the camera with his middle finger.
The next morning, the envelope was back on his haphazardly repaired coffee table.
“Goddamn fucking bastard assholes,” Hal said eloquently.
He snatched it up and stomped back in his bedroom, where he stuffed it under the bed beside a half-dead flashlight and a box of vintage porn mags. Out of sight, out of rage-induced temptation to rip it up and mail it back piece by piece.
Later. He’d deal with it later. Maybe Bruce would show up and Hal could throw all the bills in his smug, brooding face and explain, quite calmly and not at all dramatically, that he didn’t want the money. All he wanted was—
Nope, he wasn’t going to think about what he wanted. That was unrealistic and, honestly, it was a little too fairy tale for his tastes. Real life didn’t end with the guy getting the selkie. Real life left you sore, tired, and wondering if you were the idiot for ever believing otherwise.
Even so.
His next delivery to Arthur’s island came with some real mixed feelings. On the one hand, there was a possibility of seeing Bruce again. Well, seeing Spooky the seal, at least. It would also give him the opportunity to yell about money and kick sand at the bastard for assuming he needed a payout. On the other hand… what the hell were you supposed to do when you were really into a guy, but the guy was a seal and had also definitely ditched you?
Like, it was understandable. Hal was under no delusions that Bruce would actually do away with his oceanic lifestyle to cram himself into Hal’s shitty Coast City apartment for the rest of his life. He had his children to take care of, he had restrictions imposed. It wasn’t like he could actually hold down a proper relationship with a seven day limit.
(“There are ways around the limitations,” Bruce had said, lying on top of that bed in Gotham. Downstairs, there had been a portrait of a serene selkie woman living a human life, covered in a dust sheet and reminding Hal that maybe… maybe…)
Spooky wasn’t at the island.
Hal didn’t know what he expected, honestly. If Bruce and Jason had decided to swim all the way back to California (which was nuts, by the way), then it would take them months to do so. Still, there was this pathetic little hope in him that wondered what would happen if they were back early.
The other seals weren’t there either, which was more concerning. If Hal had his math right, which he definitely did because he was excellent with numbers, then the whole family should’ve all been in blubber-mode right about now. Three months per change, wasn’t that what Bruce told him?
Unless…
Ah, okay. That made sense.
He unloaded Arthur’s supplies onto the dolly and emptied his brain. The jetty was clear and the surf was beautiful.
The seals, Hal knew, had migrated.
The seals had not fucking migrated.
Six months of peace. Six months of quiet. Six months of Hal moving on and convincing himself that he was never going to see Bruce again. Which was fine, really, it was fine, he was fine. Only, it was pretty hard to convince himself of that when his guts did some Cirque du Soleil shit in his stomach as he touched down to find a whole goddamn pile of slappy bastards clogging up his personal dock.
He didn’t even clock them as seals at first. From the air, the mass looked like algae. Or maybe a bundle of driftwood and tarps tangled up during a storm. He was halfway through his landing checklist before it occurred to him that algae didn’t usually roll over, bark at each other, or actively fight for real estate.
Dick was lying flat on his back in the middle of it all, pounding his tail against the wood in rhythmic slaps. The angry little pup, Damian, was being held hostage on his stomach, and was scolding his big brother with vicious little barks that sounded like a kitten hacking up a hairball.
Off to the side, Steph and Cass were taking it in turns to roll off the dock, vanishing beneath the surface, then flopping back up to immediately do it again. A little further along, Dapples — probably Duke, by process of elimination — was slowly inching toward the group, like he thought he was being stealthy. When nobody stopped him, he took the opportunity to hipcheck Sleepy (definitely Tim) into the water with a proud little bark before flopping into the warm, freshly vacated space. Tim surfaced a moment later with the most betrayed bark Hal had ever heard.
And there, at the edge of the dock, half-curled beside Dick and being repeatedly thwacked in the ribs by his flailing tail, was a great, unmistakable lump of brooding blubber with a white patch on his head.
Jason was the only one who didn’t perk up when Hal threw the door to his plane open, but he was the only one Hal was looking at. Because he was here, he was back, he had swum his big seal ass all the way from the hellscape that was New Jersey to better pastures in California. And if Jason was back, then that meant—
“Hnk!”
Hal startled violently as Little Miss Honky launched herself across the dock and began attempting to board his floatplane with a series of delighted, jabbering barks..
“Oh no you don’t, blondie,” Hal snapped. He shooed her away with his clipboard, a little mystified, a little shellshocked. “Get your little flipper mitts out of my plane.”
Steph barked again, cheerfully unrepentant, and let herself roll away until she had settled into a plump little loaf next to Cass. “Hwak,” she said. “Hnnnk”
“Hm,” said Cass.
“Hwah,” said Dick.
Hal stared at them and briefly wondered if he was going insane. “I don’t speak fish,” he said weakly. “What’s the deal? I thought you all… I mean, after everything, I figured you all left the island.”
He didn’t actually expect an answer, but he did get a full-blown seal symposium. Steph took the lead, because Hal had come to realise that talking was just her thing. She slapped her tail, barked emphasis, then rolled halfway onto her side and launched into a cacophonous monologue. Cass chirped quietly in agreement. Dick piped in with his own commentary, and Tim, who had apparently decided he’d forgiven Duke for the earlier betrayal, grunted from the surf to add his two cents.
“Right. Okay. Sure. That tracks. I don’t understand.”
Dick heaved out a sigh, like it was Hal’s fault he couldn’t understand the ancient language of goddamn seals, and he rolled back onto his stomach.
“Hnnnnnk!” Damian squawked as his brother squished him.
All the siblings fell silent as Dick patiently made expressive sounds towards Hal. His voice was rich with meaning and bewhiskered face looked so deeply sincere that Hal almost felt like he could understand the sentiment. He couldn’t, because he was a human and that would be weird, but there was an almost there he could really appreciate, especially as all the younger seals seemed to nod at whatever he said.
When they all looked at Hal expectantly, he rubbed the back of his head. “I… Uh… Yes?”
Laughter, if it could be called that, rippled through the group. Urgh. Of course they were mocking him. Of course these bastards went missing for months, just to continue being cryptic dicks on their return. He shouldn’t have expected anything else from Bruce’s brood.
Hal glanced over the dock to Bruce’s usual spot on the big rock, and was disappointed to find it empty.
“So,” he said, gesturing vaguely with a thumb toward the largest lump of seal pretending not to eavesdrop. “You got this Asshole back.” Jason opened one eye and bared his teeth. “But where’s the other asshole?”
Dick seemed to grin, which was a weird expression on a seal, and he lifted his torso up just a little to set the little pup free. Immediately, Damian wriggled out in the most dignified shuffle Hal had ever seen, before letting out an imperious squawk. His little flippers smacked against the dock as he flopped away, escaping with the same self-importance as a tiny emperor fleeing an unacceptable social engagement.
He didn’t go far at first. Just far enough to turn back and glare at Hal with an absurd amount of disdain, before he turned back to make a beeline to the darker parts of the shoreline. Where… where a shadow was half-hidden beneath the edge of the rockface.
“Oh,” Hal said as he caught Bruce’s eye.
Bruce, damn him, didn’t move.
This was where the music was supposed to swell and where Hal was supposed to reach up to clutch his chest like a windswept heroine. Reality wasn’t quite so dramatic. His heart sped up a little, but he did not, much to his relief, fall into a puddle of smitten goo like he half-expected himself to do if he ever saw Bruce again. Maybe it was the seal form. Fortunately, sea mammals didn’t do it for him.
“Creepy sea bastard,” Hal muttered under his breath, but the words came out softer than he meant them to. It was too full of something he didn’t want to name. He let out a breath that rattled in his chest, the pressure of the last six months rushing out of him all at once, wedging itself between his ribs and setting up camp in the hollow space where his composure used to be.
He stared long enough to toe the line of weird. Not weird-weird, but the very edge of weird. Enough that if someone called him on it, he could still pretend he was zoning out instead of pining. Automatically, as if to scrub away whatever feelings were beginning to rise up, Hal lifted his hand into a casual, lame little wave.
When Bruce continued not to move, Hal let his hand drop, suddenly aware of how completely stupid it felt to be trying to communicate across a species barrier. What was he even supposed to do here? Cup his hands around his mouth and shout something heartfelt? Wade into the water and kiss his stupid seal head?
It wasn’t like Bruce was going to bark out a soliloquy in response. He never said anything in this form, unless it was a growl or a warning or a grumpy mmmm that sounded like he was five seconds from flipper-slapping Hal into space.
This was stupid. This was— Hal didn’t even want to start unpacking the nesting doll of emotional implications that came with Bruce staring at him from beneath a rock. He didn’t want to think about what it might mean that the whole gang was back. He especially didn’t want to acknowledge the fluttery, traitorous feelings pinging around in his chest. For now, he tore his gaze away from Spooky and looked back at the dock full of still-grinning kids.
“Well, good to see you’re all home. Real heartwarming stuff,” he said, realigning himself. “But I’ve got a job to do, so if you could all move your asses out of my way, that’d be great.”
Jason let out an aggressive bark, but ended up rolling off the dock with a plop that had Hal grinning secretly to himself. One by one, all the seals followed suit until it was just Dick left on the jetty, looking up at Hal with warm eyes. He let out two heartfelt barks, nodded once, then slipped gracefully into the water to swim at Jason’s side.
Hal watched and promised himself that he’d have a long mental breakdown about all this later. For now, he had work to do. Boxes to haul, friends to meet, normal human things to accomplish. Hal bent, grabbed a crate, and wheeled it off the plane, refusing to acknowledge the way Bruce’s gaze followed every step he took. Until later, at least.