Cross Fade
by Lucy Gillam 

The suit was different. It was completely black, for one, with only the yellow bat in the center of the chest for relief. The cape was more aerodynamic; Bruce could tell that just from watching him walk. But it was still undeniably Batman, standing in what hadn't been the Batcave for twelve years.

"You can't possibly have thought I wouldn't find out."

Dick's hand froze halfway in the act of removing the cowl, and after a pause of no more than three seconds that seemed like an hour, he finished, revealing sweat-dampened hair and a face still flushed from physical exertion. His expression was blank, but Bruce could see the signs of adrenaline rushing through his body.

Twelve years was not long enough to forget what that looked like. Or felt like.

"You can't have thought I wouldn't find out," he repeated. This was the line that had been going through his head for nearly a week: he couldn't have thought Bruce wouldn't find out. Dick had hidden his tracks very well, but in the end, it was Bruce's money, Bruce's old contacts -- Bruce's cave.

And then there were the rumors of a vigilante roaming Gotham's nights, dressed like a bat.

"No," Dick replied. "I knew you would, sooner or later."

Bruce stood from the plain office chair that was one of the few items in the cave. He recognized it from the office Dick had used in high school, and still used when home from college. He'd bought a new chair last summer, claiming back trouble from the long hours of studying. For some reason, seeing the old one down here had made Bruce even angrier. He told himself it was because Dick hadn't had the decency to smuggle in a box from Office Depot, rather than that he was using obviously inferior equipment.

"And you did it anyway," Bruce said. In the bald statement he heard echoes of the mask he hadn't worn since Dick was a child, of the voice he'd consciously worked to erase.

Dick's jaw hardened in one of the dozens of facial expressions and gestures that made people forget he wasn't Bruce's biological son. "I had to," was all he said.

"You had to," Bruce repeated, dizzy with a sense of time shifting on him. He'd had this conversation, hadn't he? Years ago, with Alfred, Bruce saying the same thing, so undeniable in its total lack of explanation. But he'd changed that; he'd made sure Dick would never feel the weight of Gotham's innocents on his shoulders.

He'd given it up himself so that Dick would never have to be here.

"We had this conversation," he said, the Bat creeping back into his voice as if it had never left. "You understood."

Dick's face twisted as if he were suppressing a grin, the look he frequently got when he was being very patient with his father. "Well, we never did have an actual conversation about it. But you're right: I did understand."

"Then why? What changed?"

Every hint of amusement left Dick's face. "You know what changed."

Bruce's shoulders slumped, almost imperceptibly. A casual observer wouldn't have noticed, but he knew that Dick would.

"Barbara."

The friendship between Dick and Jim Gordon's daughter, begun when they were the only two people under thirty at a hundred Gotham Action Committee functions, had lasted through Dick's puppy dog crush, through first Barbara's and then Dick's departures for college, and finally through Barbara's shooting last year by a random hood trying to make a name for himself by killing the Commissioner. The man's aim had been as poor as his reputation, and Barbara had ended an evening out with her father with a bullet lodged in her spine.

Dick had been one of the few people she'd allowed in her hospital room, and in the year since her shooting, he'd spent more and more weekends in Gotham to help her with her physical therapy -- and apparently to do other things, as well.

"Is this why you quit the gymnastics team?" They'd had several arguments over Dick's decision to quit last fall, but in the end, Bruce couldn't argue with Dick's statement that he wanted to focus more on his education.

And again, apparently other things.

Dick shrugged. "It wasn't important. And I couldn't afford the visibility if I made the Olympics. Too much chance of someone making a connection."

"You're visible even without that."

"Only as your son. People are already inclined to think I'm a slacker, even if I haven't been one. Quitting gymnastics, a bad semester or two at school, and I'll be just one more rich man's spoiled brat."

"Is that your way of warning me that your grades will be less than stellar this term?" Bruce resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose, where the headache that had slowly been forming over the last two weeks still lingered. "You've thought all this through," he said finally.

Dick nodded. "Yeah. I have. Bruce, you made the right decision for us then. This is the right one for me, now."

Now Bruce did pinch his nose, again remembering all his arguments with Alfred. Alfred, who'd never entirely approved, but who'd given up arguing, until that horrible week that Dick had lain battered and unconscious in Bruce's childhood bedroom.

Alfred, who knew when grieving young men could not be turned from their course.

"Alfred knows." It should have made him angrier still, but somehow, he wasn't surprised.

Dick smiled. "Yeah. Never stood a chance there. He's less than thrilled, but..." Dick gestured toward a pile of costumes draped on an old table. "He's helped a little."

Bruce looked around the cave, at the sparse piles of equipment, the computer at its makeshift workstation, at the car magazines earmarked and tagged. It all looked devastatingly familiar. Only now he knew how Alfred must have felt.

"You shouldn't be doing this alone," he said.

Dick took a startled breath, then composed himself. "Bruce," he began in the tone that sons have used when avoiding telling unpleasant truths to their fathers for millennia.

Bruce waved away the objection. "I don't mean that." He was in remarkable shape for a man in his mid forties, but several years too late to make up time. "But you need better equipment. A car. Information while you're out there."

Dick hesitated again. "Barbara has some ideas."

Bruce raised an eyebrow. "She does," he said, unsurprised that Dick was already gathering allies. He might be following Bruce's path, but he wasn't Bruce, and apparently never would be. "The three of us should talk, then."

Dick seemed surprised, then grinned and nodded.

"First things first," Bruce continued. "You need a better chair." He paused and looked around that Batcave. "Make that two chairs."