Batman Beyond!drabble: would you tell me I'm not old?

[karanguni]

Bat!drabble is breeding into an Arc, much like the Bat!family itself. Takes off right after if I told you I felt ageless:

would you tell me I'm not old?

Rating: PG
Characters: Bruce, Terry
Warnings: Me n00b. Terry silly. Bruce caveman. Caveman steal prey and bring back into cave. P.s. Ted Leo I'm really (not) sorry for stealing your lyrics.
Summary: One light warm-up later, and Bruce has to find a place to stash Terry. Terry needs to find a place to stash Bruce's encyclopaedic history.

926 words and Dick Grayson looming! Again! Like a gargoyle!

'Don't you ever change these drapes?' Terry asks, late afternoon of day one and just after Bruce lets them out of the Cave. He tugs at the protective sheets over the relics in the mausoleum that Bruce calls the manor, and wonders what's under them. More dinosaurs? He still doesn't get it.

'Every once in a while,' Bruce replies, slipping on a track jacket, because he's either insane, or just really particular about keeping his muscles and joints warm outside of the climate-controlled basement. He starts off away from the main living area. His walk is a lot smoother now. Gait, but Terry believes that word really only applies to dogs.

(It's a cold wind that blows through this house.)

'Why'd you put them up, anyway?' Terry wonders, following the old man. He's never actually seen much of the residential wings - he's never stayed over before, and the thought of it is kinda creepy.

Figures, then, that Bruce is padding through the hallways looking for a place to put him, like Terry will fit into the series of unfortunate others just as easily as he fits the suit.

'You're not,' Terry ventures, 'you're not going to put me in one of their rooms, are you?'

The idea freaks him out. He's not sure why, but it does. It's probably got something to do with tradition, and echoes of a past he has no clue about - instinct just tells him to run like hell in the other direction, and Terry's beginning to learn to listen to that voice in his head.

Bruce stops, turns, raises an eyebrow, and says, 'Would you rather sleep in mine?'

Terry hates him so much, but he's pretty sure the world's-greatest-detective knows that. 'What, you lonely in there?'

There's a beat, in which Terry looks at Bruce and Bruce glares, and that's one point for McGinnis, up against the three million or so for Wayne. 'I'd get lonely,' Terry confesses, picking the conversation back up as he looks down the rows of closed doors. 'You must have, what, twenty rooms in this place?'

'Twenty-five,' Bruce replies. 'If you're counting.'

'Nice,' Terry mutters. 'I'm used to two- or three-room apartments, Wayne. There's just about enough space at my mum's place for me and my brother to almost want to kill each other, but not quite.' This place echoes.

Bruce makes a noise like he's considering it. Running permutations through his head, faster than anything the Cave's ever going to have in it. 'You can take this room,' the old man says, pointing at one directly opposite what has to be the master -- there's less dust around there, and those hinges look oiled. Oh, and the doors are ridiculously huge.

The inside of Terry's new room is musty, but clean, in an old and dark kind of way. Bruce comes back after a moment with a stack of sheets and linens. 'Change them yourself,' he tells Terry. 'I'll be in the dining room.'

Terry sticks his leg out in front of Bruce before the old man can move off too quickly. 'Who's was this?' he asks.

'No one's,' is Bruce's reply. There's a warning tone, somewhere in there. Too bad Terry's never been good at listening to those.

'D.G? That's Dick Grayson, right? The commish says he and you used to fight all the time. Or was it hers? Gordon's?'

Bruce takes the words like how Terry imagines he would've taken bullet wounds in the past: staid, steady, without blinking, and breathing so steadily that it has to be fake. 'It was a spare,' Bruce says. His voice is somewhere else. 'Alfred put everyone else in the southeast wing.'

Terry quirks an eyebrow. 'Easier access to the cave?'

'Farthest away from me,' Bruce replies, savagely factual.

So, about those three million points for Wayne, again.




By the time Terry gets a hang of spreading the sheets (a king? He's used to sleeping on singles, and he has enough problems with tucking the corners in on those) and getting back downstairs, Wayne's thrown together a late lunch that is completely nutritious and altogether tasteless.

'Not your speciality, huh,' Terry asks after the second bite. Bruce raises his spoon, and it's amazing how he manages to make that look like an extremely dangerous offensive measure. 'I could teach you,' Terry says, taking a third bite (and a fourth, and a fifth, and this has to be a sort of test, right?). 'Mum and, well, Dad used to be real busy all the time, working for the company.'

'Wayne-Powers Engineering doesn't keep easy timetables,' Bruce admits.

'Yeah,' Terry nods. 'So there was a lot of practical cooking to make sure I didn't starve myself to death.'

'Alfred did most of the work in that department,' Bruce says. Ghosts, again, even though Terry knows more about the old butler than anything else from the Big Book of What.

Terry finishes up his food, and looks for an appropriate rejoinder. 'Must have made living alone a real hell.'

'Loneliness I was used to,' Bruce shrugs. 'Household chores, not so much.'

Terry clears up his utensils and looks across the table. Okay, time to put the foot down (or in his mouth, or something). 'Is there any conversation I can have with you that doesn't involve, like, three layers of history that I'm not aware of?'

That actually makes Bruce smile, which tells Terry way more about the guy's psychology than he really wants to know.

'You can try,' Bruce says, and everything's a challenge, isn't it?