Work Text:
ROY:
Roy slides his boots into place with two despondent jerks. Across the foyer, Dick jumps into his own winter footwear with contrary delight. Something about the brat’s smile seems a little too sharp, and a little too recognizable as the practiced grin that has preceded Roy’s most horrifying events as a babysitter. Wally’s perpetual, speedster energy as he skids and swoops into the corners he’d discarded his accessories to earlier that morning only ramps up Roy’s nerves. Why did he agree to take them out again?
“Done!” Wally cries, abruptly transforming from a red-headed blur to the awkward, unbalanced middle schooler Roy rushes to steady. He regains his footing and is immediately opening the door. “I’ll wait in the car.”
His departure brings a swell of wintry cold. Roy rolls his eyes, fishes the keys from his coat pocket to unlock his car, before slamming the front door. The steady stream of biting air is cut off.
“He’s going to steal shotgun,” Dick says, frowning.
Roy senses danger. “You can have it on the way back.”
“Okay,” Dick says. Appeased, he finishes lacing up his boots and goes for the door handle. It takes a second for Roy to realize what’s wrong.
“Woah,” he says. “Wait, where’s your scarf?”
Dick, the brat, just opens the door. Like he can’t hear Roy. From two feet away.
“Hold it.” Roy snags Dick’s hood and yanks him, gently, inside.
“Roy!” Dick complains. “It doesn’t do anything anyway.”
Roy scoffs. “Don’t you feel how cold it is out there? Negative digits. That scarf’s keeping that smart-mouth attached to your face.”
“That’s an exaggeration.”
Roy—decked out in his own gloves and hat and wearing the thermal socks that have been collecting dust in their store packaging since last Christmas—disagrees. It’s freezing. He catches sight of blue and red fabric beneath a chair and recovers a Superman-printed scarf. Dick probably would have outgrown it years ago, but Roy’s seen him wear the same Superman merch over and over and still get reactions out of Bruce, so the clothing articles live on, season after season.
“Just wear it, anyway,” he says, wrapping the scarf around Dick’s head haphazardly.
“Mff,” Dick mumbles, rushing to fix the chaotic swells of fabric until they correctly cover his lower face, protecting him from the cold and any keen, searching eyes that might recognize Bruce Wayne’s ward. “Fine.”
Roy doesn’t miss a beat. Before Dick can kick up his ever-replenishing stores of obstinance, he ushers them both out of the house, glad to get this misadventure underway. Maybe, he thinks, his gut feeling about today’s outing will be wrong? And if not, at the very least, Roy will be able to tell Alfred and Bruce he had Dick properly dressed for the weather during whatever havoc he and Wally wreck.
Roy sighs. He really hopes his gut feeling is wrong.
KALDUR:
The air tastes like wet heat and the sun glares overhead, bright and burning. Kaldur’s eyes are resistant to the gleam on the ocean’s sprawling horizon but his teammates shield their eyes as they approach the water’s lapping edge. Wally smears globs of sun lotion across his pale, freckled skin. Artemis runs a hand through her damp hair. This beach outing, Kaldur decides, was a good idea. Robin, it seems agrees.
Abruptly, he nudges M’Gann with his elbow. “Race you to the water!” he says, and promptly slips free of his cotton t-shirt and kicks off his flip-flops in one smooth motion. Without missing a beat, he then chucks his t-shirt in Kaldur’s direction and, with a high, bright laugh, takes off toward the ocean. Gasping, M’Gann takes flight and follows, determinedly rising to the challenge.
“Hey wait!” Wally says and catches up with a split-second of sand-scattering bounds. Artemis breaks into a sprint as well—even with her late-start, she makes good progress.
Kaldur turns to Conner, who’s squinting at their teammates, baffled. “You’d better hurry,” Kaldur advises. “Or we’ll tie for last place.”
Conner blinks, thinks this over, and sets his stance to jump. He leaps, dropping beside Artemis, who puts on another burst of speed. Wally, meanwhile, has reached the water, and ducks under the waves, largely erasing any protections his hasty coating of lotion might have offered. Robin and M’Gann dive in after him, popping up with soaked, long tangles of hair and askew sunglasses.
Kaldur balls up Robin’s t-shirt, stoops to grab his flip-flops, and grabs the beach bag M’Gann abandoned in her haste. He sets his sights on a debris-free, flat patch of beach ahead and heads there, intent on setting up their things.
Laughter, smile-blurred threats, and general, beach-time cacophony rings out and Kaldur smiles as he watches a team of superheroes morph into giggling teenagers.
Yes, he decides. The beach was a good idea.
WALLY:
Wally reaches out to prod the mound of best-friend taking up more than half of the bed. Robin is largely unresponsive, offering a mere, disinterested grunt for Wally’s efforts. “Text Batman,” Wally tells him.
Robin hadn’t planned on staying the night at the cave, Wally knows. But hours into being holed up in Wally’s room at the cave, watching movies and gorging themselves on popcorn, he’s half-asleep and snuggled in more layers of blankets than a person who plans on moving any time soon has. Wally doesn’t want Batman showing up in the middle of the night in search of his missing partner, so he reaches over to pass Robin's phone to an unwilling hand. “C’mon, Rob.”
Robin groans, this time louder, and reluctantly sits up, sporting an impressive bedhead and sleep-squinted eyes. He powers on the phone and winces as the bright, messages app flashes into glowing life. With weak, tired fingers, he presses out a brief message and shoves the phone back in Wally’s direction. But the damage is done.
The brief interlude from rest has jerked some sense into the forefront of Robin’s mind. Frowning, he drags his mound of blankets closer around himself. “‘M cold,” he says, accusingly, as if this is Wally’s doing.
“You have like a dozen blankets,” Wally says.
Robin has clearly decided this is beside the point and looks at Wally expectantly. Sighing, Wally pushes himself off the bed. He has to grab the remote from the desk anyway. He ducks down, digging through a set of drawers, and comes up with a sweatshirt. “Here,” he says, tossing the clothing at Robin with one hand as he uses the other to lower the television’s volume.
Wally collapses back into bed as Robin pulls himself into the sweater, digging an awry arm out of the neck hole and ending up with the whole thing backward in the end. Apparently, this is not a concern, because Robin just dives as-is into the blankets and shoves his freezing, ice toes against Wally’s legs.
“G’night,” Wally says.
Robin responds with something unintelligible, but the returned sentiment gets across. Wally burrows his face against his folded arms and drops off eagerly into sleep, the dull murmur of an irrelevant comedy show playing in the distant background.
ARTEMIS:
Artemis is walked to class, reasonably on time for once, and almost doesn’t stop when she hears the suspicious clattering of metal, followed by muffled cursing, behind the door to a janitor’s closet. But the sharp slamming of metal behind closed doors has led to more trouble in her life than she knows what to do with. And part of her is curious.
She pushes the door open and immediately wishes she’d kept walking to class.
“Hi, Artemis,” Richard Grayson says, standing over the floor drain, damp hair and clothes plastered to his form. He looks surprised to see her. Artemis is not surprised to see him, nor is she surprised by his soaked appearance. She’d seen the video circling Gotham Academy’s social media spheres for the last half-hour or so—who hadn’t? She just hadn’t given much thought to where Grayson ended up after those kids decided to dump him in a fountain.
“Hey,” Artemis says. She hears a voice behind her, realizes kids are coming down the hall, and makes the quick decision to step into the closet and shut the door. She guesses Grayson doesn’t want any more people seeing him in the aftermath of a misguided prank. “Sorry,” she says. “I just—I heard something fall.”
Grayson sighs. “That was the mop,” he nods in the direction of not just the mop. Artemis sees that somehow he’s managed to send brooms, mops, and other long-handled sanitary tools to the ground. Impressive, considering a school this size has fairly roomy closets to maneuver in.
“I’ll grab them,” Artemis says as she ducks down to pick them up and straighten them back into place against the wall.
“Thanks,” Grayson says, swiping at his sleeves with a wadded-up mess of paper towels with limited success. Artemis grimaces at the sight as she stands. Grayson notices. “I guess you saw what happened?”
Artemis knows there’s no point in pretending. “Everyone did,” she tells him.
Grayson nods.
“Pretty shitty of them to do that,” Artemis offers. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Grayson says, with real dismissiveness that Artemis feels is slightly misplaced. If she was in his place she might have a lighter quiver slung over her shoulder. Grayson seems appeased to just hole up in a maintenance corner until his clothes have dried and go on with his day. It’s a little sad, and Artemis finds herself pulling her bag off her back.
“What’re you doing?” Grayson asks, paper towels coming to a stop as he peers at her bag curiously. Artemis ignores him, digging in the depths of the bag until her hands close around fabric.
“Here,” she says, passing him a bundle.
Grayson stares down at the clothing in his hands blankly. “...your clothes?”
It’s a set of sweats Artemis had planned to change into for the ever-unfortunate first-period gym class, but the class had been canceled due to a lack of a substitute teacher, and Artemis had no need for a change of clothes for study hall. “You can wear them,” she says.
“Thanks,” Grayson says, but tries to hand them back. “But they’re not exactly a Gotham Academy uniform so—”
“So wear them out of the building,” Artemis says. “What, you were planning on heading back to class?”
Grayson shrugs. “Not right away, no.”
“Then change,” Artemis says. “We’ll play hooky.”
She doesn’t know what makes her offer. She needs to be part of the lab in her upcoming class, has to write a paper on the data she’s supposed to collect during it. But with Grayson’s hair plastered into messy tangles, he looks pretty pathetic, and maybe, for some escaping reason, familiar. Whatever the reason, Artemis doesn’t like seeing him miserable. And what those kids did really wasn’t cool, when all Grayson’s ever been with her around is nice, if a little odd.
Grayson looks at her for a moment, glances down at the clothes, and shrugs. “Okay,” he says finally. “I want a milkshake.”
Artemis rolls her eyes. “We can grab milkshakes,” she says, stepping out of the closet. “I’ll wait for you,” she says.
Before the door closes all the way, she hears a quiet, “Thank Artemis.”
She leans against the locker-lined hall. She won’t be on time for class, she thinks, but can’t find it in herself to regret it.
M’GANN:
Mostly, the room is dark. M’Gann raises her hands, letting the green glow kindling there spread relief over their surroundings. She sees Kaldur standing, hand over his bruised and battered middle, eyeing the tunnel intently. Artemis is kneeling on the ground, swiping blood from her leaking nose. Wally is sprawled on and groaning into the dirt. Superboy peers upwards at the stone ceiling, perhaps wondering if he could bust through it without bringing lethal amounts of crumbling debris down on his more fragile teammates. And then M’Gann sees Robin.
He’s behind the sprawled, damaged collective of his teammates, leaning against a wall for balance. Behind him, his cape is detached from his uniform, tattered and torn on the ground. M’Gann steps forward, picks the cape up, and places her other hand on Robin’s shoulder.
“Are you alright?” she asks.
He’s grimacing, lips flecked with small, bleeding divots that, M’Gann realizes with some sad horror, he’d been pressing his teeth into. Cuts line his body and face, but M’Gann knows by the way he favors it, the real problem is his leg.
“Fine,” Robin says.
But they both know that’s not the case. She turns around, offering her back. “Hop on,” she says.
“Miss Martian—”
“I can get Kid Flash to carry you if you’d prefer—”
Robin shakes his head. “No, don’t tell KF,” he says quickly, and clambers on, lighter than a feather. As the rest of the team turns with curious expressions Robin grins at them.
“I vote we go left,” he says, and M’Gann—feeling him recoil as the rest of the team open their mouths, sure to inquire about his well-being—starts left obediently, before they can ask.
Later, when they'd returned to the cave and Robin had been sent immediately to the infirmary by a keen-eyed Batman, M’Gann found herself still holding his battered and torn cape. After a few hours had passed and Robin had time to rest and recover, she dropped by the infirmary, article in hand as an excuse, and passed it over.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
Robin shrugged. With glasses instead of his mask, she could see more of the bruises crossing his face. “Been better. Can you pass me that water?”
M’Gann did. Robin took a long drink. “Thanks,” he said. “For, you know.”
He wasn’t thanking her for the water, M’Gann realized.
“Of course,” she said. “Anything.”