Bart stood still on the edge of the cliff and glanced around. His grandfather, he knew, liked to pace, but for Bart, not wasting energy was a long-ingrained habit. Mal stood similarly still, peering through binoculars over the ocean below.

"You should take a break," Bart suggested, reaching for the binoculars. "Let me do that for awhile."

Mal barely spared him a glance. "I got it."

"Tired eyes aren't observant eyes."

"I can observe well enough. Believe me, doing this won't make you any less bored."

Bart watched him for a moment. This mission wasn't part of The Mission, it was one of Nightwing's little errands. The Mission left him free for another few days, assuming of course that he hadn't unpredictably changed the schedule with his previous meddling, which he probably had. But he'd look for the signs. Bart was always going over the plan, looking for the signs. When the options for failure ranged from "post-apocalyptic wasteland" to "destruction of time itself" it was important to pay attention. Mal wasn't part of The Mission either, at this point in time. No more than any interaction with any random person could affect it, anyway.

"You know, I get the feeling you don't trust me." Bart was careful to keep his voice slow. His grandpa thought he had trouble with talking speed but he'd at least learned to talk at normal speed first. Normal speed was practically a second language to Bart.

"Do you."

"Come on, there's just, the cliff, and a really boring mission ahead of us. Let's have some man time. Talk to me."

Mal spared him an annoyed glance and Bart made sure he saw only the open, earnest goofy-kid face it had taken him weeks to master. After a moment, Mal turned back to the binoculars and said, "It's not your fault."

"Well that's a relief to hear." Bart cocked his head. "What isn't my fault, exactly?"

"That I don't trust you. We have different... look, I know you can't change the past. You risk destroying time or something if you do that. So let's say you knew somebody was going to die. Somebody close to you. Let's say Jaime was meant to die tomorrow. Now, I'd do everything I could to save his life. I'd drag him from a burning building, I'd jump in front of a bullet, I'd perform CPR; anybody on the Team would, it's what we do, we depend on each other. But you, you can't change the future. If you could save him... you wouldn't. You wouldn't warn him, you wouldn't save him. You can't. I can't trust you, kid, because you can't risk being reliable."

That hadn't occurred to Bart.

Of course, he couldn't tell Mal that he would do whatever he could to protect the Team. After all, that's what he was there for. To change the future. But they couldn't know that. That was the point of the goofy persona, the attitude that let people dismiss any random-seeming things he did as, well, random. And hopefully harmless.

He decided that the best course of action was to ignore the whole thing. "Good point, Mal my man, good point, here's another; I'm hungry. I'll get us something to eat." He waited for Mal to nod silently in acknowledgement, eyes not moving from the binoculars, before speeding off to their little camp. Opening the esky was a little like old times. Finding fresh, uncanned food inside wasn't. Bart didn't think he would ever get used to the idea of there being enough food at all times. It wasn't "I'm hungry, let's go see if there's any food to fix this", it was "I'm hungry, what type of food should I eat?" Amazing. He pulled out a few sandwiches and a pack of chicken whizees, though a moment, then put them back and just brought the whole esky. "Ta-da! Food!"

"Thanks." Mal looked down long enough to grab a sandwich. "So... you can't tell me anything at all about the future, right?"

"Sorry, man, not a thing. Throw out the timestream and we are moded." Putting the mission together and keeping that risk to a minimum had been even harder than building the time machine itself. They'd decided that so long as he didn't do anything to actually stop himself being born, things should probably be alright. Maybe.

"Pity."

It was simple. All he had to do was save the world. And not tell anybody else about it, or let them guess, or let them get suspicious of his motives and get in his way. And not get any kind of help. And lie to his friends, friends like Beetle, who were somehow a different kind of friend than the few partners and small bands he'd joined up with to survive in the past... future. People who he was pretty sure were closer to the definition of "friend", but he'd never had the context to notice before travelling back in time.

That was all.

But it was okay. Because he wanted to protect those people even more now, for their own sakes as well as the sake of the world. Because they...

… because they happened to line up with his goal. What if, for example, The Mission had needed Jaime to die? What if Bart had had to stand aside, to avoid pulling a teammate from a burning building or saving them from a bad guy? It was nice that that didn't have to happen, but if it had...

Mal was right. Bart couldn't really be trusted because he couldn't afford to be reliable. The fact that he was trying to change the future instead of preserve it was irrelevant. The fact that he genuinely needed what was best for the Team to accomplish his mission was... coincidence. What if his mission had been to infiltrate and betray these people, to save the future? He'd have to do it. He could lie to himself and say that he'd die to protect his friends but really, that was always going to be subservient to The Mission. Much as he wished it were otherwise.

If only he really was a stranded tourist. Things would be so much simpler.

It didn't matter. That was all hypothetical; as thing stood, what he needed to do for The Mission and what he needed to do for his friends happened to be the same thing. That was good. That was unambiguous. That was all he needed to know.

Mal suddenly perked up and activated his communicator. "We got a ship. North, nineteen degrees East." He handed the binoculars to Bart long enough for him to sight the ship.

"On it," Bart said, and raced down the side of the cliff. He had a job to do.