Dick Grayson was in the Batcave beneath Wayne Manor, shooting pool with Wally and Kyle… when his pool cue turned into a garden hose and the pool table morphed into an oversized viewing screen. Batman’s face appeared on it, in an extreme close up, like Big Brother: “YOU’VE LET ME DOWN, SON,” he intoned as a whirring tone sounded…
..::Twitterbringngng::…
“Brainiac has analyzed pizza
delivery patterns from Gotham City, Hudson University…”
..::Twitterbringngng::…
“…Bludhaven, and the Titans Tower and deduced
Dick Grayson is Nightwing… ::Twitterbringngng::… Tim, Barbara and I are
all exposed because of your midnight cravings for pineapple and anchovies…”
..::Twitterbringngng::
::Twitterbringngng::…
Dick’s eyes flew open and his arm
shot out to smash the bedside alarm.
..::Twitterbringngng::
::Twitterbringngng::…
Oh hell, it was the phone.
Who the hell would be calling at… He picked up the battered but not beaten alarm
clock… 5:15. He picked up the receiver.
“HelloBruce, noyoudidn’twakeme,” he
said without pausing for the other party to speak, “I only got in an hour ago
and who needs more than forty-five minutes sleep a night.”
..:: Funny. Secure the
line. ::..
What did I expect,
thought Dick. “Oh gee, sorry kid, I never consider the possibility that
other people have lives when they’re not acting as my supporting cast.”
“Line’s secure.”
..:: I’m coming into Bludhaven.
Thought we could have lunch. ::..
“O-kay.” (Did I really have to
secure the line for this?) “Where and when?”
..:: I’m at that diner across
from your building. ::..
“NOW? That’s not lunch. That
won’t even be breakfast for an hour. That won’t be MY breakfast for
another—yawn. Crud, I can’t do math before I brush my teeth.”
..:: Dick, I came to talk.
::..
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
As he dressed, Dick calculated
that even with the fastest of the civilian cars, Bruce would have had to cut
Batman’s patrol short by almost 2 hours to be in Bludhaven now. There
was no way he’d do that for anything less than a cosmic crisis. “Dick,
I came to talk,” he had said. Bruce wanting to talk could indeed be
the portent of a cosmic crisis. Maybe different timestreams were
converging again. On the off chance that this was a chatty, sociable
Bruce from an alternate dimension, Dick greeted him with a little harmless
smalltalk:
“So how was the show last night?”
The scowl made it pretty clear that
this was not a chatty and sociable Bruce. Dick backpedaled.
“I, uh, thought Alfred said
something about you going to—never mind. What did you want to see me
about?”
“Am I a self-absorbed,
self-righteous, inflexible prig?”
Dick suddenly felt like he was playing a LucasArts Adventure Game. He imagined four possible responses to Bruce’s question appearing under his chin:
That’s how I addressed your Fathers’ Day card.
Is that prig with an “R” Yes.
Why are you having new stationery made up?
YES YES YES! IN THE NAME OF ALL
THINGS HOLY AND TRUE, YOU ARE THE KING AND LORD OF THE LAND OF
SELF-RIGHTEOUS PRIGS!
And no matter which response the
player chose, the character would say: “Why no, not at all. Why do you
ask?”
Dick signaled to LuAnn, his favorite
waitress, and ordered a bagel and coffee. Then he looked back at Bruce as
if this, the most forceful personality in the JLA, might have forgotten his
question. It didn’t work. The scowl had deepened from the
Is-this-the-best-you-can-do (Bruce reading his 9th grade history report) to
We-can-do-this-the-easy-way-or-the-hard-way (Batman staring down street
thugs).
“Yeah, I guess that description
isn’t wholly inaccurate, as applied to you, you know, by someone who felt you…
were that way. Maybe.”
“Is cop out one word or two?”
“See, that’s the kind of thing you
do that doesn’t give people warm and fuzzies. You put me totally on the
spot asking this unimaginably impossible question. Bruce, what the hell’s
going on? You show up here at the crack of dawn and drag me out of bed, I still
don’t know why, and you put me on the spot with this… I don’t know what of a—”
Bruce lifted his palm, fingertips
extended, for silence. It was a strange gesture, something an ordinary
person might do if they got the gist of what you were saying but had to think
through their response. That wasn’t Bruce. He just cut you off when
he got the gist. And he never had to search for a response.
“I really wish you’d come to the
theatre last night,” he said finally.
Dick started to laugh, then looked
incredulously at Bruce.
“You mean this is really about that play?
Alfred made it sound like a hoot, but I wasn’t going to drive all the way into
the city just to see… So, what was it anyway, was it really Catwoman?”
“It was.”
Dick grinned uncontrollably.
“Of course it was.
Who else could get under your skin so thoroughly that you cut a patrol
short to drive up here AND TALK.”
“I know you don’t like her, but
could we just put that aside for a minute and—”
“Bruce, I like her just fine, considering
she’s a thief and all. But this thing you have about her, it’s just too
good for me to leave alone. It’s like the only thing I can really rib you
about. You love the wrong person; it makes you so HUMAN. You
don’t think I’m going to give that up, do you?”
Bruce sighed. He didn’t even
bother to challenge the use of the L-word.
“The first act was bad enough.
She told… anecdotes… about us.”
Dick raised an eyebrow.
“No, not racy ones. Just
accurate. Hearing it all from her point of view, it was… disconcerting.”
“And the second act?”
“Worse. She speculated how various figures in Gotham might react to her
show. She did Two-Face, Joker, Riddler, Scarecrow, Ivy, Batgirl, Huntress,
and Robin. I never realized she was so good at mimicry.” He paused.
“It was, it was actually pretty funny.”
Dick stared, not quite believing his eyes or ears as Bruce chuckled.
“She imagined how Mad Hatter might rewrite her stories about me in the style
of Lewis Carroll: ‘First the cat kissed the bat, said we’d have such a ball, but
that isn’t all, no that’s not all at all. If the bat kissed the cat, lo
Original sin! One’d wonder just which Catnip patch he’d been in!’”
“That’s more Dr. Seuss than Lewis
Carroll.”
Bruce gave him a dirty look, and
again Dick backpedaled:
“I like it. So then what? Did
she maybe speculate how Batman might react?”
“No.”
“She didn’t predict you waking me
up at five in the morning next day, did she?”
“She said I was probably too much
of an insufferable, self-absorbed egomaniac to even see the show, but if I did
show up one night in her dressing room, she’d report back to future audiences
with my response.”
Dick laughed delightedly.
“So now, if you/Batman do
acknowledge the show in some way, she’s got a new finale. And if you
don’t, then you prove that you were too much of a self-absorbed egomaniac to go
see it.”
Bruce glowered at Dick.
“I’m just quoting you quoting her.”
An hour later, as Bruce was driving home,
Dick snapped open his cell phone. “Wally, it’s Dick. Listen, are you doing
anything this weekend? Call Kyle and Clark and the others. I just found out
there’s a new show in Gotham you’re all going to want to see.”
To be continued...