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There’s a dragon egg in the cave.
Bruce stares at it. It’s dark, pure obsidian in color and about the size of a large dog. It’s tucked away in a small corner, and Bruce’s first coherent thought is one of regret. Who would be so careless to misplace such an egg? Surely it must be old; no one has been in these caves for centuries. The only bright side is that perhaps the embryo has mineralized in the shell - he should call up the museum, see if they can do anything with it.
Still, it’s a shame.
Bruce places his pickax against a pile of rubble and picks his way across the uneven ground. It’s a trick not to roll his ankle against the stalagmites, but he manages it, and then he’s standing before the thing, pulling his phone from his pocket so that he can inspect it more closely. Bruce is far from an expert in dragonology, but running his hands over the smooth black shell he thinks it must be quite rare. The handful of shells that he has been privileged enough to see have all been mottled to varying degrees, or veined, and this one is neither.
It’s rock hard, which supports his theory that it has been mineralized for some time.
“I’m sorry,” he tells the egg quietly, “that you could not have hatched.”
Perhaps he shouldn’t donate it to the museum. Would it be better to bury it in the barrow mound beside the corpse of old Tempest? Bruce decides that he will consult Lucius. Lucius will know what is the most respectful.
And then the egg cracks.
For a moment, Bruce thinks that he must have hit it somehow with the ax he left leaning against the pile of rubble. Then the egg fractures again, and again, and Bruce realizes with dawning horror and disbelief that it is not inviable, and that it is hatching.
“Alfred!” he yells, frozen in place. Should he run and get the old butler, who will surely know more about dragons than Bruce does, or should he stay in case it needs help? Do dragons need help hatching? He has only watched a handful, and those were all presided over by the local dragon.
“Alfred!” he shouts again, as loud as he can, before he remembers that Alfred went up to the manor half an hour ago. He won’t hear Bruce (or the egg) all the way down here, no matter how Bruce yells.
And then the egg shatters, and out tumbles the ugliest little thing that Bruce has ever seen.
The hatchling is all over gray, only a shade lighter than the black basalt from which the cave is constructed. Its body is covered in coarse needle-like hairs, its face wide and triangular, and its wings so crumpled and twisted that it takes the thing a few tries to shake them out. When it does, Bruce sees that they are translucent.
Never in his life has he heard of a dragon with translucent wings.
Seeming to notice him for the first time, the hatchling opens its mouth and says something in a language wholly unlike anything Bruce has ever heard before. But he needs to say something, since despite the words the intonation is without a doubt that of a question, so he picks his jaw off the ground and manages to say “What?”
The hatchling repeats its question. Bruce shakes his head, trying desperately to force himself to think. He’s been to hatchings before; “Are you asking for a name?” he tries, because he seems to remember names being of utmost importance to newly hatched dragons.
“È-è,” the hatchling says, a noise of assent, and then it says in perfectly pronounced English: “A name!”
At which point Bruce finds his mind entirely blank. If only he had known the egg was viable, he would have thought of something. If only he had some time to prepare, he would have known exactly what to name the small creature before him.
The silence drags on and the hatchling’s wings droop a little. “Alfred?” it suggests, when Bruce comes up empty.
And with that horrifying option on the table, Bruce just blurts out the first name his mind latches onto. “No, no! Ace! What about Ace, do you like that name?”
“Në pèhta, Ace!” the small dragon says. And then it adds morosely: “Nkatupwi.”
“I’m sorry,” Bruce says, truly at a loss. The hatchling is beginning to droop even more now, its delicate wing tips trailing the rough floor, and in a moment of panic Bruce realizes that they are not out of the proverbial woods yet. The little dragon is still very small and fragile, and may still die if Bruce doesn’t figure out how to take care of it.
And that simply cannot be allowed to happen.
“My name is Bruce,” Bruce says belatedly. “If you like, I think I can lift you. We can go and find Alfred, he will know what to do.”
It takes them several minutes to navigate the stalagmites and piles of rubble everywhere. The hatchling drapes itself across Bruce’s shoulders and whenever he stumbles its soft claws dig into his shoulder. “Sorry!” the dragon says, every time it does. “I’m sorry!”
“It’s okay,” Bruce reassures it. Closer to the make-shift stairs the ground evens out and Bruce is able to walk faster, his free arm sneaking up to steady the dragon against his neck. “Alfred will know what to do,” he repeats as he ascends the stairs; he doesn’t know what he will do if he doesn’t.
“Alfred!” Bruce calls, stepping out from behind the false bookshelf in the music room. “Alfred, come quickly!”
The two of them must look quite a sight. They run into Alfred when Bruce is half-way to the kitchen and Alfred goes stock still, his hand going to his chest as he stares at them, mouth agape.
“This is Ace,” Bruce says, his embarrassment at the name overridden by his desperation to keep the creature alive. “He just hatched, Alfred, but he doesn’t speak English, so I don’t know what he needs!”
“Nkatupwi!” Ace says urgently.
“Oh my,” Alfred says faintly. “Ace. I - I imagine you must be quite hungry, dear?”
“Na nëni, na nëni!” Ace exclaims. “I am hungry!”
“Alfred,” Bruce says. “What in the world am I supposed to do with a dragon?”
“Lord,” Alfred says, eyeing the creature with a slightly impressed look on his face. “Well. You must keep it, lad. I am afraid it has quite imprinted on you.”
Ace was indeed half sprawled across Bruce’s lap, his chest rising and falling steadily in sleep. Bruce hesitantly ran a hand down the long neck, smoothing the strange spikes. They were soft to the touch, bending slightly when Bruce applied too much pressure, but he had no doubt they would harden and become quite deadly as Ace matured. He reached over and straightened the hatchling’s wings, his hand becoming slightly blurred when he viewed it beneath the translucent membrane.
“I never thought Wayne Manor would house another dragon,” he admitted. “My father was only five when Tempest passed away.”
Tempest had been one of the most successful business-dragons of the nineteenth century, and was largely responsible for the Wayne family’s considerable wealth. A large Regal Copper bred in Halifax, he had been hatched by Elijah Wayne quite on accident, when the man was visiting the breeding grounds on a scientific expedition. The two had returned to Gotham and, when Tempest showed himself skilled in business and trade, had together formed what would one day be known as Wayne Enterprises. The dragon had lived one-hundred-and-seventy years before passing quietly in his sleep. A public funeral had been held, and a large barrow mound was erected over his body.
“I thought the egg was dead,” Bruce says. “It must have been down there at least a century, Alfred - do you know of any breeds with that long of an incubation period?”
“No,” Alfred says. “No, I do not.”
“And he doesn’t speak English - I thought all dragons came out of the shell fluent!”
“I believe they are fluent in the languages they are exposed to while they are in the shell,” Alfred says slowly. “It may be this is the first time Ace has been exposed to English.”
“Alfred,” Bruce says. “How am I supposed to be Batman if I am to be the companion of a dragon?” Surely Ace would never stand for it; dragons became incredibly possessive of their companions, and would never let them go anywhere near something as dangerous as Batman.
Alfred is silent for so long that Bruce thinks he must not have an answer. And then he says “Well. Perhaps it is a good thing you have hatched yourself a dragon after all, lad.” Then he stands, pats Bruce lightly on the shoulder, and walks out of the room.
Bruce should go downstairs and keep working on the cave. But he has a sleeping dragon in his lap, and he finds himself unwilling to move.
By the end of the week Ace is mostly fluent in English and has more than tripled in size. The first flock of reporters arrived yesterday after Bruce filed with the state for a share of the dragon provisions, but he hasn’t allowed anyone to catch sight of Ace yet. The more he learns about the young dragon, the less willing he is to present him to the public; Ace is a unique dragon, and Bruce worries that he will be taken away.
“Why do they want so badly to speak with us?” Ace asks, standing beside Bruce on the second floor balcony. Bruce had warned him not to be seen, so now Ace is flattened to the stone deck, peering between the railing slats. “Do they want your wealth?”
“No - well, yes, but they are not here for that,” Bruce says. “They wish to meet you. It has been a long time since there was a dragon here.”
“Oh,” Ace says. He considers this. “I would not mind meeting them,” he says at last, “if they would like to speak with me.”
“The thing is that you are an unusual dragon. I’m afraid they will ask you questions you don’t know the answer to, and they will not leave you alone until they know those answers, or else that they will make up answers of their own.”
“What kind of questions?” Ace asks.
“Where did I get your egg?” Bruce says quietly. The door beneath the swings open and Alfred steps out; Bruce watches with cold eyes as he speaks to the reporters. “What breed of dragon are you? Why do you look the way you do? Why did you not know English when you first hatched?”
“Well,” Ace says. “My egg was down in your cave. I don’t know what breed I am, nor why I look the way I do, and I simply did not know English before I hatched. These are not very difficult questions, although ....” Ace trailed off, watching one of the reporters lift her camera to snap a picture of Alfred. “I suppose I can understand how it might not be so nice to answer them.”
“We’ll have to meet the world eventually,” Bruce says. He absently pets Ace’s head, which is nearly up to his waist even pressed down like it is. “But we will do it our own way, in our own time.”
The reporters leave. Ace sits up when the last of them have gone, shaking himself slightly; his spikes rattle as he does so. “I am hungry. Would you like to join me, after?”
“Go eat,” Bruce tells him, amused. “I will join you shortly.”
He makes it to the back yard just in time to see Ace take down a young heifer, dark blood spurting from his razor-sharp claws. He watches for a time, mesmerized, as Ace devours the thing; then he turns on the hose by the old stable and lifts it, beckoning Ace to come over.
“Yes, there!” Ace says happily, as Bruce aims the nozzle at his gore-covered jaws. “That is very nice, Bruce, thank you. I don’t know how I would get it out from between my quills all by myself.”
“Is that what these are?” Bruce asks, lifting some of the spikes coating Ace’s face and neck in order to clean them better. “Quills?”
“Are they not?” Ace asks, his voice suddenly uncertain.
“Well, I don’t know. But no, you’re right. They do look more like quills than horns, don’t they?”
“Yes, I think so,” Ace says, apparently satisfied. He lets out a contented sigh when Bruce has finished, and curls up on the sun-warmed stones beside the old stable. Bruce, after a moment of hesitation, says “I’m going to get my tablet, Ace, and then I’ll join you. I’ll be right back.”
So he grabs his tablet as well as two extra books, and then he strides back outside and settles against Ace’s side, feeling the young dragon’s chest rise and fall against his back as he unlocks his screen.
He spends half an hour scrolling through pages and pages of different dragon breeds. He starts with the ones native to North America, then broadens his scope to include those from South America, central Africa, Asia, and Europe. He tries searching key words (such as quills, translucent wings, old (old) egg), and while there are some results there is nothing that resembles Ace. Eventually he gives up, and goes back to tunneling into the GCPD database. Just because he’s currently grounded doesn’t mean that he can’t do research on cold and ongoing cases.
“Bruce,” Ace says. Bruce starts - he had thought the dragon was asleep. “Am I a very strange dragon?”
“I have never seen another dragon like you,” Bruce admits, “although I am by no means an expert. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, as long as you are not uncomfortable. Strange is not the worst thing in the world to be; in fact, strangeness is what makes one unique.”
“You are not strange, though.”
“Oh, Ace,” Bruce says dryly. “You have no idea who I am.”
“Well, I would like to,” Ace decides, settling back down. “I already know that you are a very kind person; you helped me when I hatched, and you didn’t have to do that.”
Bruce speaks through an unexpected tightness in his throat. “I - of course I had to, Ace. I would never just leave you down there, no matter how strange you looked. Other people may judge you for it, because that is unfortunately how the world is, but for myself I am very glad that you decided to hatch when you did.”
It was, Bruce was surprised to realize, true.
“Oh, good,” Ace sighs, the breath escaping his mouth in a contented exhale. “Well in that case, I am very glad that I hatched as well. And if you are strange too, then maybe it won’t be so bad. We can be strange together.”
“A mid-weight for sure, if not a heavy-weight,” is Alfred’s prognosis. It has been a full month since Ace hatched, and he is now nearly ten tons, and becoming harder and harder to keep out of the public eye.
“Oh, I am glad,” Ace says, puffing his chest out a bit as Bruce helps Alfred coil the measuring rope. “I am trying to get bigger.”
“At the rate you’re eating, I’m not surprised,” Bruce says dryly. “I’ll have to write to the governor to get you a bigger share.”
“I can hunt as well,” Ace agrees. “Bruce, have you ever been to the kitahikàn?”
Bruce stares at him blankly. “The what?”
“The kitahikàn,” Ace repeats, the quills around his jaw quivering in a way Bruce has come to interpret as frustration. “Oh, you know what I mean - the large expanse of water, the one that’s all full of salt.”
“The ocean,” Bruce realizes. “Yes, I’ve been to the ocean, many times. We’re quite near to it. Gotham is a port city, you know.”
“Can we go?” Ace asks excitedly. “I’ve been curious about it, ever since I hatched.”
“You’ve been curious about the ocean?” Alfred asks.
“Well,” Ace says. “I’ve seen the pond, and there’s a small creek in the woods, and I quite like it when it rains, but I haven’t seen the ocean yet. Bruce, do you suppose we could go?”
“Right now?” Bruce asks, checking his watch. It’s just past four in the afternoon. “I guess, if we’re quick about it. You can follow me in the car -”
“I could take you, that would be faster,” Ace offers.
Bruce pauses. “You mean, you would like me to ... ride you?”
“Do you not want to?” Ace asks, suddenly very anxious.
“Oh, no Ace, of course I would like to!” Bruce says quickly. “Only I never have, and... I suppose, Alfred, we must have some harnesses somewhere?”
It takes them another two hours to get everything sorted to Alfred and Ace’s satisfaction. They find one of Tempest’s old harnesses in the barn, as well as a personal one for Bruce in the attic, and then it’s only a matter of sizing it down to fit Ace’s smaller body, and trying to get it on him around his quills. Ace spreads his wings, trying to help Alfred arrange the thing on his back. Bruce takes a moment to pause, admiring the way Ace’s wing-bones showed black like fingers through the translucent membrane. The darkness of the bones and joints is a new development, and makes Ace’s wings look terrifying indeed.
“There, that feels good,” Ace confirms as Bruce climbs up his shoulder. “No, Bruce, that does not hurt at all; in fact, you should probably hang onto my quills, to make extra sure you don’t fall off. Are you well strapped in?”
Bruce confirms that he is, and Ace leaps into the sky.
It’s a very good thing that Bruce is tightly strapped in, because otherwise he thinks he would have fallen off immediately. Ace is not the most graceful of fliers, and every time he beats his wings his body moves side to side as well as up and down. Bruce tries to steady himself by holding onto the quills, pokes himself, and tries again.
“Ace!” he calls. The wind snatches his voice away, so he tries again: “Ace!”
Ace twists his neck, the movement making Bruce tilt sideways before he steadies himself again. “Yes?”
“A bit more to your right; you want to go east, away from the sun.”
Ace adjusts his course, and only a few minutes later the ocean comes into view, the wide expanse twinkling in the low sun’s light. Ace snaps his wings out into a glide, and suddenly the entire world smoothes out.
“Oh, wow,” Ace says. “Wow, that really is very big.”
Bruce directs him to land on one of the empty trading docks. It’s not very busy today, and they only get a few strange looks as they come down. Bruce’s hands are numb from the cold (he only wore his winter coat, which is apparently inadequate for even short flights in late summer), and it takes him a few tries to get himself unstrapped from the harness. He finally does manage, and slides down Ace’s shoulder to the slippery boards of the dock.
“You can explore, if you like,” Bruce tells Ace. The dragon is already nosing the water, tongue flipping out to taste it. “Don’t go swimming here, though, and careful of that water; it’s highly polluted.”
“Oh,” Aces says, disappointed. He draws his head back, and then turns to peer at Bruce. “Will you stay here then, if I go to explore?”
“I have a few places to explore myself,” Bruce says. He hasn’t been out as Batman nearly as often as he would have liked in the past month - in fact, hardly at all - and there are a few storage lockers on this section of the docks that he would like to case for a shipment arriving next month. “What do you say we meet here in half an hour?”
Ace considers this for a beat longer than Bruce was expecting him to. “We could explore together,” he suggests. “I don’t mind coming with you.”
Briefly, Bruce considers refusing. It will be difficult to sneak around with a ten ton dragon, and he still hasn’t told Ace about Batman, but Ace sounded so hopeful at the prospect of keeping Bruce company that Bruce finds himself unwilling to deny the beast outright. Perhaps Ace will have valuable input too, he decides. After all, the shipments Bruce is hoping to case will be delivered by a host of dragons when the ship comes into port.
“Hamilton & Co. are expecting a shipment of arms next month,” he explains quietly, striding around the shipping containers and mentally mapping their positions. “I would like to be here to stop them; one well-placed grenade can kill ten people, and if I can prevent that those will be ten people who I have saved.”
“Why are they trying to kill people?” Ace asks. He is doing an admirable job of keeping a low profile, his body tucked to the ground and his quills moving in such a way that his hide almost appears to shimmer, creating an optical illusion.
“The business men would argue that they are blameless, since they are simply delivering the weapons and have no intent to use them themselves. The gang members kill for a variety of reasons, all of which boils down to a desire for control. I will explain it to you in more detail later, if you are interested.”
“Yes. I would like to know.”
It goes well. Ace is actually quite helpful at pointing out small details that Bruce missed - at one point he lefts Bruce up to the roof of the old fare-master’s house, and together they are able to map out a route Bruce can take when he returns here in a month’s time. Never once does Ace question Bruce’s desire to stop the shipment, or suggest that it is too dangerous; guiltily, Bruce thinks that perhaps he does not yet understand the full danger of this operation.
Every now and then, when they make their way past the edge of the dock, Ace stops. He’s fascinated by the water, and keeps flicking out his tongue to taste it despite Bruce’s warnings. “You’re right,” he decides, after perhaps the tenth time he has done so. “It is polluted. Can we do something about that?”
“I’ve proposed a new branch for Wayne Environmental dedicated to cleaning up both the harbor and the river,” Bruce replies. “But it will take some time.”
“Maybe I could help. I would like to.”
“I’ll show you my plans later,” Bruce promises. And then he steps around the next storage crate and runs right into a group of three men, who look just as surprised to see him as he is to see them.
As his very first instinct is to fall into a defensive crouch, it takes all of Bruce’s concentration to maintain his surprised Brucie Wayne persona. “Mate,” one of the men says, looking like he can’t decide whether to laugh or not. The one on his left draws a small pistol. “Wallet,” he says. “We’ll just take yer money.”
Two problems immediately present themselves to Bruce. One: he doesn’t have his wallet. This was merely an outing to show Ace the ocean; he hadn’t planned to actually interact with anyone. Unfortunately, it was unlikely these men would believe him when he told them as much. The second problem was Ace. The dragon hadn’t noticed anything yet, and was in fact getting perilously close to a small dinghy in his curiosity, but as soon as he understood the threat to Bruce then their odds of a bloodless night decreased drastically.
Plus, it looks like the third man has a can of dragon spray. No way is Bruce letting him anywhere near Ace with that.
“Listen,” he starts, forcing his voice not to drop like it so desperately wants to. “I forgot my wallet at home, okay? Silly me, I know, but I’d forget my own head if it weren’t attached to my body.”
The guy with the gun snorts. “Likely story,” he says. “You won’t mind if we search you.”
Bruce does, actually. He quite minds.
“Bruce?”
All three men pale as they realize there is a dragon among them, and that Bruce is likely his companion. The smart thing for them to do would be to de-escalate; had they pretended to be old acquaintances, Bruce would have played along. But instead they panic, and don’t think, and all of a sudden there is a gun in Bruce’s face.
“Stay where you are!” the man says sharply. Bruce can feel how he’s trembling. “We won’t hurt him, just stay where you are!”
“I’m fine, Ace,” Bruce starts, but Ace isn’t listening to him. Instead he’s gone terribly still. His gaze is fixed on Bruce as he slowly lowers his body to the ground, every quill rising to stand on end.
A low hum fills the air, steady and not like a growl at all. Ace’s quills begin to quiver, ever so slight, and despite himself Bruce feels a strange thrill of terror run down his spine. Ace isn’t even doing anything particularly threatening, but still Bruce feels frozen to the spot, his feet rooted in stone even as some animalistic part of his brain screams at him to run.
Slowly, Ace walks forward. He wraps one clawed forelimb around Bruce and herds him away, leaving the three men petrified where they stand.
“Bruce! Bruce, are you all right? Are you hurt?”
Bruce shakes his head, forcing the numbness away. It has been years since he’s been terrified like that, and he’s angry at himself for freezing. He thought he’d trained that response out of himself long ago.
“Bruce!”
“I’m all right, Ace,” he says, and then he realizes that they’re back out on the dock, the sea breeze ruffling Ace’s quills. He blinks at the dragon as his mind clears. “What did you do?”
“They were going to hurt you!” Ace says instantly, his voice spiking in distress. “I had to get you away safely!”
“Yes, yes, you did a very good job,” Bruce reassures him quickly. He’s still trying to wrap his brain around what happened, namely: the muggers are still alive. “Was that - some sort of hypnosis?”
“Oh, you mean what I did to those men,” Ace says. He looks up, eyes narrowed in the direction they came from. Then he turns back to Bruce. “I don’t know what I did, I only wanted to get you away. They were going to hurt you!”
“They wanted my money,” Bruce says. “If I had given it to them, they would not have harmed me. Ace, this is very important. You must never kill another human or dragon, am I clear?”
“Why would I ever want to kill someone?” Ace asks. “Bruce, are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes, I am fine,” Bruce repeats. “If someone threatened to hurt me again. If someone threatened to kill me, or actually succeed. You might wish to kill them, out of revenge.”
“I suppose,” Ace says doubtfully. “Although they will die soon enough, especially if they are human. I don’t think I would enjoy killing very much, so I can easily promise you that I won’t.”
Bruce is skeptical, but he lets it slide. “Come, let’s leave before we get in anymore trouble. I have a good feel for the shipment coming next month, and Alfred will be expecting us for dinner.”
Ace doubles in size again. The dull gray color of his hide sharpens to a glossy black which in turn seems to reflect and repel the sunlight. He begins shedding some of the quills along his flanks, which slims down his appearance quite a bit even if it makes his head appear more bushy by comparison.
“We can store them down in the cave,” Bruce decides, surveying the five full baskets of shed quills. “Once I get some equipment down there, perhaps we can run some tests to determine what they are made of.”
They also, quite by accident, discover a new entrance to the massive cave system. Ace, having discovered the lake, also discovers that there is a natural tunnel beneath the water which he can swim through to another underground lake. They spend an entire week working together to knock down the adjoining wall of basalt, and once they have managed it the cave has nearly doubled in size.
Once, Bruce accidentally falls asleep nestled beneath the curve of Ace’s wing. He is awakened by Alfred, shaking his shoulder and swatting at Ace’s head.
“Up,” Alfred commands, ignoring Ace’s grumbling. “No, not another word. Master Bruce will sleep in his bed and you, Master Ace, may sleep in the courtyard. We will open the doors, if that will make you feel better, but I will not have the two of you sleeping in this cave.”
So Bruce stumbles upstairs and opens the great doors adjoining the master bedroom, specifically constructed for the purpose of allowing a dragon to rest their head inside.
The first time Bruce sneaks out on patrol, Ace is distraught. Bruce receives a call half-way through his patrol, answering to find that Alfred has put the phone on speaker: Ace is on the other end, demanding to know where Bruce is and what he was thinking.
The first time Ace follows Bruce on patrol, it is not nearly the disaster Bruce had envisioned.
“You must stay here, Ace,” Bruce says sternly, perched on the roof of an old bicycle factory. “I’m going in to take out those men. There is not enough room for you, and they may be equipped with dragon spray or worse.”
“But what if they try to shoot you?”
“I am trained to protect myself,” Bruce says firmly. “You must stay here and watch.”
Bruce descends from the ceiling in a shower of glass. He releases a smoke bomb, and the warehouse descends into pandemonium.
Ten minutes later five of the six men are down for the count. Bruce dashes for the door, trying to catch the sixth before he can escape, and he comes up short at the sight of Ace crouched low, quills shivering and that low, eerie hum resonating from his throat. The sixth man is frozen in terror before him, and Bruce quickly averts his gaze as he takes the man down.
“These men were not very skilled,” Ace comments, as Bruce makes sure they are all secure. He’s followed Bruce into the factory, and again it amazes Bruce how a dragon of nearly twenty tons can fit himself so seamlessly into such a small space.
“No,” Bruce says. “They were not. But had I left them alone, they would have released this drug onto the streets, and killed hundreds.” He gestures at one of the stacks, and Ace gazes at it curiously.
“I would like to help,” Ace says, as they exit the building. Bruce makes a non-committal noise, pulling his phone from his pocket to call the police. “You told me that you want to make Gotham safe again. I would like that too.”
“It’s dangerous work. Some of these men will have weapons specifically designed to take down dragons, and sometimes we may even need to go against other dragons.”
“You’ve told me that you spent several years training,” Ace says, considering this. “Perhaps if I train too, it won’t be so dangerous. You could help me.”
“Are you offering because you truly want to help,” Bruce asks, “or because you don’t want me to go out without you?”
Ace stops in the middle of the street. When Bruce turns, he finds the dragon regarding him, his quills laid back so that they are almost smooth along his neck. His wings, where they are pressed against his back, seem to capture the shadows around them.
“Of course I would like to come with you,” Ace says. “You are very small, Bruce, and fragile, and after all you looked after me when I was too small to look after myself. I know that you are quite good at fighting, and that you can keep yourself safe, but Bruce - you can’t fly.”
Bruce says nothing.
“So yes, one reason is that I want to protect you and watch your back and make sure that no one escapes when you take people down. But I also want to help people. Not everyone is as big as me, and some people like to kill others, which is terrible. Death makes people afraid, and people shouldn’t have to be afraid. That’s why you do this, isn’t it? It is mèthik, and it must stop.”
“You might get hurt,” Bruce says, and he doesn’t like the way that thought makes his own chest tighten.
“But Bruce, so might you,” Ace says. “And that doesn’t stop you from doing it, so why ever should it stop me?”
“It is very uncomfortable to be hurt.”
“Yes,” Ace says. “I suppose it is.”
The official story is that Bruce Wayne has lent his dragon to Batman, along with most of his money. Bruce is a bit worried that Ace will have trouble remembering that Bruce and Batman are not the same people in the public eye, but as soon as they host their first interview he realizes that he has absolutely nothing to worry about.
“Some find it curious that you should agree to fight alongside Batman,” the host tells Ace, shuffling her note cards. “Some have even proposed that Bruce Wayne is Batman, and that is why you accompany him.”
“Well that is not true,” Ace says, before Bruce can interject with a lazy lie of his own. “Of course Bruce is not Batman; I would never allow him to go into danger like that.”
And of course no one questions him, because had he been any other dragon that would have been perfectly true.
“I think I understand why you act so differently when you are around other people,” Ace tells him that night, quite out of the blue. Bruce is perched on a gargoyle, his cape blowing about his shoulders while Ace twines around the building behind him. In the shift lights reflecting off the low clouds, he is nearly invisible. “It is not very nice to be yourself, and then to be judged for it.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Bruce says honestly. He hadn’t realized that Ace would notice, although thinking back it was foolish of him not to. “You shouldn’t worry how others perceive you, Ace.”
“You worry,” Ace points out.
“I am a Wayne,” Bruce says, the words torn from his mouth by the wind. “There are certain expectations upon me. There always have been.”
“And I am the Wayne dragon,” Ace says. “Surely there are expectations upon me, too, as your companion.”
That was true. Bruce wished it weren’t, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.
“Then we’ll be ourselves when we’re alone together,” he decides, and it’s such a small thing that it fits right in his chest, a little flame that flickers beside his heart. A strange hope that first appeared months ago down in an old cave, the prospect of a friend who truly understands him. “When it’s just us and Alfred.”
“And when we’re talking to other people, and when we are here fighting for a better city, we can be different together,” Ace says in satisfaction.
“Partners,” Bruce murmurs, and he doesn’t think that Ace has heard until the dragon’s quills shift, rippling as though with laughter.
“Yes, partners,” Ace says. “Oh Bruce, I would like that very much!”