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“You think he’s actually gonna show up?”
Clark glanced at the stairs near the northwest edge of Batman’s -- Bruce Wayne’s -- Cave, hesitant. The butler who’d escorted them off the zeta platform was almost certainly listening in, even though Clark couldn’t pick out his steady heartbeat for the life of him.
“Sounds like it,” Clark told Ollie, who’d managed to kick up both boots on two different couches when he hadn’t been looking. “Why? You have somewhere else to be?”
“Anywhere but here,” Ollie said with a dramatic shudder. Clark wasn’t fooled by the performance; Ollie’s eyes were even sharper than normal, if such a thing were possible.
“It’s interesting to look at,” Clark prompted, instead of following that line of conversation. “I didn’t realize it would be so--”
Ollie wiggled his eyebrows. “Large?”
“Expansive,” Clark said, grimacing. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but not this. The dinosaur is also kinda throwing me off.”
“No shit,” Ollie said, glancing over the couch edge at the mounted dinosaur in the distance. “I’m pretty sure that isn’t even the weirdest thing in here. Can you see anything else? Torture rooms? Kinky rooms? Kinky torture rooms?”
“I can’t.”
Ollie’s head snapped back around. “What, really?”
“I’m not looking,” Clark explained. At Ollie’s dubious expression, he continued. “This is a huge show of good faith from him. I’m not going to snoop around here with my powers. It’s not fair.”
“Sweet, sweet summer child,” Ollie said, waving a hand. “B isn’t the kind of person to leave his secrets just lying around. Especially in here. Everything you’re seeing right now is misdirection. Even this super fluffy loveseat is a red herring.”
“A red herring for what?”
“Dunno,” Ollie said, unfazed. “We’ll find out. Hey, since you’re not looking, wanna hear what I just realized?"
“Shoot,” Clark said. Ollie gestured at the ceiling with two fingers, leaning back against the loveseat.
“This Cave has two natural exits. And there’s real bats hiding on the ceiling,” Ollie said, thoughtful. “Maybe that’s the red herring, actually.”
“How do you know that?” Clark asked, curious. Ollie glanced back at him, one eyebrow raised.
“Sound. And airflow. If you were using your powers, you could see it too.” Ollie clicked his tongue, returning his attention to the ceiling. “Listen.”
Clark pressed his lips together. Ollie lifted a hand up and, after a suspenseful pause, snapped his fingers.
The snap bounced off the nearby Cave wall, then the ceiling. Clark tried to follow the sound as it traveled, but without his super-hearing, it was harder. A lot harder.
“Huh,” Clark said when the sound split. Two distinct echoes disappeared into the Cave’s depths, presumably traveling in different directions. “How’d you notice that?”
“Airflow, mostly,” Ollie said, still squinting at the ceiling. “And I clicked my heel against the ground when we were walking over here. The floor is solid fucking rock, by the way.”
“So there’s nothing under it?” Clark asked, surprised. Ollie shrugged.
“If I had to guess, good old Brucie--” Ollie’s nose wrinkled, even though he was the one using the endearment, “--built every level with a certain amount of the original rock on either side. He must have tunneled through instead of excavating the rock for sublevels. Jesus, that was probably expensive.”
Clark glanced down at the floor. The small seating area had a plush carpet, something he hadn’t expected, but he could still feel the rock underneath through his boots. It felt solid, even to him.
“He’s really keeping us waiting,” Ollie complained, letting his head drop back onto the armrest. “You told Alfred it was urgent, right? Not like, a world-ending emergency, but still urgent-urgent.”
“Alfred?” Clark asked.
“The butler.”
“Oh. Yeah. He said Batm -- Bruce was finishing something up, and he’d be out here soon.”
“Hm.” Ollie’s boot kicked out, swiping through the air. “Bets on what he’s doing that’s more important than the literal Justice League?”
“I’m not betting on that.”
“Shame,” Ollie said. After a beat, he clicked his tongue. “You know what I haven’t seen so far?”
Clark raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“Training equipment,” Ollie replied. He gestured with his raised heel at the Cave around them. “I see trophies, a freakishly large computer, and a vehicle bay. But no sparring mats. No weights. Not even a medicine ball.”
For all of his childish bluster, OIlie’s eyes were sharp. He wasn’t a detective like Bruce was, but there were very few things he missed. Details like the subtle shifts in a cave’s airflow, or the bounce-back of his own heel. Like Bruce, his mind was always running on multiple tracks at the same time.
“So he trains in another room,” Clark surmised. It made sense -- no one wanted sweat and rolling weights near the kind of priceless equipment he’d observed around them. The individual screens above the computer looked expensive. Expensive and fragile. “He probably likes to keep things separate.”
“Or he wants to keep people separate,” Ollie muttered under his breath. It took a moment for Clark’s brain to catch up.
Robin.
The most contentious, controversial discussion item on the Justice League’s standing agenda for the last six months. Robin -- and his training -- was why Diana wasn’t down here with them. During their last open discussion, her disapproval had come as close to a formal ultimatum as it could without an outright motion.
The reporter part of Clark’s brain wondered, distantly, where Ollie fell on the spectrum of that discussion. He and Bruce were humans who’d trained extensively -- exhaustively -- to reach where they were. But Ollie’s tone hadn’t exactly been approving, either.
“You’re on Diana’s side, then?”
“Children don’t belong in combat.” Ollie’s face had flattened into a bitter mask. His hands were clenched, completely white at the knuckles. “I’ll leave it at that.”
Clark grimaced. Luckily, Ollie’s eyes -- and his sharp-eyed attention -- had shifted away. “I’m not sure it’s that straightforward in Gotham. There’s -- things are different here."
“Hnn.” That was a dangerous sound, especially when it was coming out of Ollie’s mouth. “So when Batman forced Robin through Joker Gas as training, that was just dandy? And when the kid showed up on the Watchtower a month later with six broken bones because Batman abandoned him in Gotham for a night -- that wasn’t straightforward to you?”
Just like their previous, disastrous meetings, Clark was finding himself up against the wall of a position he wasn’t entirely sure he really held. He bit back the instinctive urge to rebut Ollie’s accusations, knowing it would only make things worse. Especially when Ollie saw Roy in Dick.
“We both care about Robin’s welfare,” Clark hedged. Across from him, Ollie’s shoulders relaxed a fraction.
“Sure. We do.”
The most unsettling thing about the neverending Robin argument wasn’t the content. It was the fact that Batman had never once tried to explain, contextualize, or minimize the accusations against him. Under Diana’s fierce gaze, he had remained studiously blank-faced and uninvested in the discussion. Even her almost-ultimatum had failed to do anything more than tilt his head a quarter-inch to the left.
Despite his own intentions, Clark’s mind began to wander. He loosened the hold on his super-hearing for just a moment, intent on somehow proving Ollie wrong.
Two familiar heartbeats filled his ears, one glacially slow, the other fast and fluttering. Batman and Robin. Bruce and…
Dick, Clark reminded himself. It was still a novel feeling to link names to the masked faces he knew. Those names were a privilege; Knowing Bruce, they were also a test. Somehow.
“I think they’re training,” Clark said. Ollie sat up, abandoning his sprawl.
“Where?”
“Below us. There’s some sort of…large space. Maybe a gym?” Clark concentrated for a beat. “It’s a weird sound.”
“Weird sound?”
“Yeah. Kind of…I don’t know.”
“So try the x-ray vision instead,” Ollie suggested. When Clark balked, he continued. “Something could be wrong. You won’t know until you look.”
Normally, Clark would have pushed back, but the difference in heart rate between Bruce and Dick was concerning. Dick’s heart rate was elevated and Bruce’s -- wasn’t. They weren’t sparring; even Bruce’s heart rate increased a little during vigorous exercise. And Clark still couldn’t place the faint sound underneath their heartbeats. It almost sounded like --
“FUCK.”
Clark’s eyes snapped into x-ray vision instantly. He dug through the hazy layers of rock, his heart suddenly in his throat.
The sound of flesh hitting flesh -- and hard -- had upended his previous confidence. Robin’s pained cry had followed it. Almost like --
“What is it?” Ollie asked. Clark held up a hand, still concentrating.
After two attempts, he managed to focus on the sub-level beneath them with the gym. It was a large room, like he’d guessed. The missing equipment Ollie had noted was scattered throughout the room in isolated stations. At the center of the room was a --
Dick jumped back onto the balance beam, settling on one bare foot. Bruce -- in sweatpants, of all things -- moved with him, spotting him with raised arms.
“Try again,” Bruce instructed quietly, barely more than a murmur in Clark’s ears. “Don’t think about what’s coming or where. Think about sticking your landing no matter what happens.”
“I always stick my landings,” Dick said petulantly. “You’re the one making it hard.”
“Good.”
“UGH.”
Clark watched, transfixed, as Dick leapt impossibly high, twisting through the air on a parallel path to the beam. Just as he was set to reach the zenith of his flip, Bruce’s arm shot out, tugging one of his ankles to the left.
Dick’s body wobbled mid-air, the leg Bruce had tugged throwing him off balance. He landed on the opposite foot, a vicious smack against the beam that Clark could feel in his teeth.
The beam shifted back and forth, then left to right. Dick gritted his teeth, trying to set his other foot behind his heel. The beam jerked abruptly to the right as he did so, sending him tumbling off the left side.
A second smack sounded as Bruce caught Dick around the midsection, stumbling back a step to accommodate the sudden weight.
Not a hit, Clark realized. There’s no armor. That’s why it sounds weird.
In the span of two seconds, Bruce righted Dick in his arms, rolled him onto one of his shoulders, and gave him a boost back onto the balance beam. Dick launched off of Bruce’s cupped palms, landing gracefully where he’d started.
“You almost had it,” Bruce said. “Don’t overcorrect on the landing. If you need to land on one foot, land on one foot.”
“Uh huh,” Dick scoffed. “And when exactly am I going to need to land on one foot?”
Bruce was quiet for a moment. Then: “When you only have one functional foot.”
Dick groaned again, like the response was familiar. “That’s so stupid.”
“What’s stupid?”
“Well, for one, I’m not going to be jumping around if one of my feet is toast.”
Bruce hummed low in his throat. It wasn’t quite Batman’s grunt. This sound was…softer, somehow. “And if someone breaks your ankle in the middle of a flip?”
“That’s not a thing,” Dick complained. “You’re just saying that. Just because you can grab my ankle doesn’t mean everyone else can.”
Bruce grunted, ignoring the protest. “Again.”
“What’s he doing?” Ollie asked to his right. “C’mon man, you’re kinda freaking me out. Is Robin okay?”
“They’re fine,” Clark said, still focused on the sub-floor. “They’re…training.”
“Tell me Batman isn’t beating the shit out of him. Please.”
In the middle of Dick’s third flip, Bruce grabbed for his knee instead of the ankle. Dick’s other leg snapped out, kicking Bruce’s hand away. Within a half-second, Dick had pulled the leg back, recentered, and tucked forward into the final rotation.
“Good,” Bruce said emphatically when Dick landed hard on both feet. “Again.”
“Again?”
“Kinda the opposite,” Clark reported to Ollie, feeling the bizarre urge to laugh bubbling up in his throat. “Robin’s…uh…kicking him.”
“Fucker had it coming,” Ollie said under his breath. “Is he pissed? Do we need to find a way down there?”
Smack. This time, Dick nailed the landing, despite the fact that Bruce had grabbed for both of his ankles this time. The beam barely wobbled. The cry of frustration became a cry of victory.
“No. And no.” Clark felt his lips curve into a smile as Dick launched off the beam, tackling Bruce around the neck. “They’re…playing, now. I think.”
“Bullshit,” Ollie said. At the same time, Bruce threw a giggling Dick back toward the beam, grunting as his throwing arm became an impromptu jungle gym.
“Master Wayne.”
Clark’s eyebrows rose as the butler -- Alfred -- cleared his throat at the gym’s doorway. Instantly, Bruce straightened up, gently lowering Dick to his feet.
“Your guests…” Alfred trailed off. Bruce turned to Dick.
“Take the eastern elevator up. I don’t want them to see you.”
Clark blinked, surprised by the note of protectiveness in Bruce’s voice. Dick didn’t seem surprised in the slightest; if anything, the hovering seemed to annoy him.
“I want to see Superman.”
“Another time,” Bruce insisted. Dick bonked his head into Bruce’s side, continuing to do so until Bruce seized him, lifted him up, and threw him halfway across the gym like a javelin.
By the time Clark opened his mouth to say something, Dick had already flipped, twisted, and landed gracefully near the far door. He stuck the landing and then -- charmingly -- stuck his tongue out at Bruce for good measure.
“He gets that from you, sir,” Alfred chimed in. Bruce’s eyes narrowed.
“Dick.”
“Going!” Dick called out. He retreated into what looked like a locker room, leaving Alfred and Bruce alone in the gym. Every step he took was a bounce.
“Shall I make your excuses while you clean up?”
Bruce shook his head at Alfred. “I’ll go now. I’d rather get this over with.”
“What a surprise, sir.”
Clark blinked quickly, beginning the process of shifting his eyesight back to the visible spectrum. As he did so, Bruce turned on a bare heel, peering up -- and through -- the gym ceiling in their exact direction.
Oh no.
Their eyes connected through the rock, just for an impossible second. Clark jerked back against the couch, the afterimages of Bruce’s expression burned into his mind.
“You good?” Ollie asked, far more worried than his tone let on. Clark nodded.
“Yeah. Just a little…surprised. That’s all.”