The human portion of Victor's face began to sweat profusely, the glow of his holographic screen highlighting the fear in his eye. "Recognize: Batman – 01. Come in, Batman!" He yelled into his communicator – designed by his own technologically-advanced mind – for the umpteenth time. He had only intended to test the connectivity of the League's ear pieces to guarantee that his latest update didn't upset the response times and that everything would be working smoothly should they be called into action. It made complete sense to run through their superhero team in order of their clearance numbers on the official registry and of course Batman was stationed at the very top.

Knowing how much heroism and perfection meant to the dark knight, it was quite jarring that he was not answering Cyborg's call.

Concern was driving Victor mad. He felt oddly hopeless while sitting on the floor in his room. He hadn't been a hero for very long, and though the responsibilities seemed similar to his days as a quarterback on the Gotham U's football team, a missing Justice League member was much more terrifying than someone simply not showing up to practice. It seemed as though the only appropriate decision then was to skip down to the next name on the list and warn another League member of his uncertainty. Victor dialed in and unintentionally shouted, "Recognize: Wonder Woman – 02! Wonder Woman, are you there?" There was no static, no echoing of his own voice to indicate any sort of fracture in the line. So clear was the call, that he would have noticed if Diana had even tapped her ear piece for only a second.

But there was no answer.

While Batman fought crime in Gotham at night, Wonder Woman was much more free to transform into her hero persona whenever she so needed; whether or not Diana was required somewhere as Wonder Woman, Victor couldn't possibly know. Her inactive status on the League's communications line was potentially just as concerning, despite her immortality. After all, what excuse could she have to avoid his check-in? He tried one more time to contact her, "Recognize: Wonder Woman – 02. If you're there, please pick up!" When he failed to reach her, his patience blew like an overheated fuse.

"Okay," he mumbled to himself as stretched his hands farther apart and expanded the immaterial screen before him. "It's time for a more intrusive approach." It wasn't Victor's style to tap into security cameras or scan the world to locate a person without a vital need to so. Admittedly, the rational part of his mind urged him to refrain from doing something so rash.

He was only human though, and his cybernetic powers were just too tempting to utilize in moments such as these.

His brain pulsed and warmed within his skull as he began to reach out to the wifi router attached the apartment building. All he needed was a connection of greater reach and Cyborg could have access to any security camera in the city, let alone the world. The tricky part was learning how to fuse his human memories with the footage he was seeing in order to create a self-aware facial recognition program that would locate either of his teammates. Images of restaurants and street corners and move theatre staff rooms passed by his mind's eye in an overwhelming whirl, scenes of chaotic clubs and twenty-four hour convenience stores and—

"—could use a night out like this more often." A familiar voice caught Victor's attention in the same moment that his human eye flew open, the recognition feeling like a cold splash of water awakening him from some deep, dark dream. Diana was located faster than he had anticipated, but her location was none too shocking: Naples, Italy. If he recalled correctly, she lived in Europe. He could have sworn she said Paris, but whether or not he was having trouble remembering, Italy wasn't too far away from France for the believability to be too much of a stretch.

On a moonlit street in the cliff-side city, Diana was found to be waltzing out of a rustic-looking restaurant, with red crackled bricks and decorative vines along the walls. The awning provided unnecessary shade as she exited onto the sidewalk and it was easy to presume that she was awaiting her car as she stood close to the valet parking booth on the sidewalk out front. The lense Victor was looking through was fastened up high and off to the right of the doorway, with the only light reaching her body was the warm glow from inside the building. It couldn't highlight her face enough to provide him with a perfect resolution but it definitely managed to catch the dazzling sparkles that adorned her elegant dress.

The thin straps that adorned her shoulders waved their way into a delicate but transparent floral design over her chest. She was a naturally tall woman, and the thin yet lengthy cut of the skirt highlighted how much of her height was in her legs. She wore no jewelry, did nothing else to dress up for the evening, as her gown was all she needed—

Oh, she was on a date.

Victor childishly grinned to himself in the quiet, empty space of his room at the sight of Wonder Woman living a normal (yet ritzy) life; she was out on the town with a man, enjoying every second she had to herself, having found a way to balance both her heroism and her personal life—

"If we did do this more often, we might be tempted to retire and live like this every night." Cyborg froze as if the emotion of surprise compelled his circuits to freeze. That voice, growing louder as a mysterious man moved out from underneath the restaurant's awning, was too familiar to miss for a resident Gothamite!

It was none other than the Batman himself, in cognito as his everyday self.

He was seeing it with his own eyes – one human and one with a built in facial scanner! – and still, he was in disbelief.

"You and I have very different ideas on what it means to date somebody."

But if they were together, then didn't that mean—

"Really?"

–it was possible—

"For one, you can see someone outside of work more than once a week without promising to grow old together."

–it was possible—

"Oh so we won't be taking the Victorian approach to dating?"

–that it was indeed his technology that was the problem in this situation?

As Diana laughed in a way that he never thought possible with Bruce, Victor was shocked, to think that he had been the reason that the calls had failed. Perhaps he hadn't properly considered the transmission boost needed to reach each member overseas. After all, if they were in a casual situation such as a night out together, it was impossible to believe that either one of them would ignore a summons on the Justice League's communicators.

He left the channel open so he could observe them the moment the connection would strengthen. The map and the footage sat clearly over his lap while he attempted to create a holographic model of the ear pieces to examine each component in real time. First, the most obvious place to begin was with the audio filter inside the ear pieces to recognize if there was any blockage or if the mismatched parts he had assembled were incompatible with one another.

As he panicked to get the technology he designed up and running, Diana lowered her voice as she stepped close to her date. Naturally, Cyborg's mind forced the security camera outside the restaurant to fixate and zero in on the couple in order to catch every single action. Without any hesitation, she leaned and whispered into his ear, "Given the things you said to me at dinner, I think it's much too late for that."

If Victor still had the entire expanse of his human head, he'd most likely have reddened ears to have overheard something as private as that.

But his focus was the audio filter and while the night turned saucy in Italy, Victor ran the analytics once more and found that the audio filters should have been fully operational, the schematics before him flashing a one hundred percent compatibility between the parts like a neon sign.

It was time to move onto the Bluetooth enabler. There was no doubt that the Cyborg's internal mechanisms could interface with the tech he created, so he chose to take a different approach in reaching the communicators during his test. He shamelessly hacked into the BatCave's computer and booted up the installation program that was meant to act as a backup base for the connections in case of an emergency.

While imagining Bruce's sour reaction, the man himself was much too sweet with his date, the footage revealing how he wrapped his arms around her and brought her close to him. "They weren't just things I said, Diana."

"Oh?" She hummed.

"Oh God, no." Victor cursed. He needed to pinpoint the problem before he heard anything else! He forced the transmitter to play the test audio used in the beta stage of development in the hopes of using the original, functional sound to provide him with the insight he needed!

Lo and behold, the test was not permitted by either ear piece to begin.

It felt like a break through to have found the root cause of his problem, the one that had been plaguing him the entire evening! If it was indeed the Bluetooth that was problematic—

"You should know by now that when I speak to you, I mean every word."

—then did he only need to replace the pieces?

"I know you do. If you can confess your love to me, you can keep all of those promises you made during dinner tonight."

If that was the case, then the blame was on Bruce! He had provided the technology, and presumably had been using it for years. If the Bluetooth reception was down, it was on none other than the Batman who was to blame for the faulty connection. As frustrating as it was that there would be no solution tonight, it was absolutely gratifying to know that he himself had not been the cause of the mistake.

With a proud smile did he watch the security footage just as their car rolled up next to the restaurant, the high beams blaringly bright as the streets of Naples were nearly cloaked by the night. Diana swung her head to look at the car, but had recoiled and returned her gaze to Bruce when she realized how blinding the Mercedes was.

And that was when Victor felt the phantom feeling of his heart falling into the pit of his stomach: when she tossed her head around like that, he immediately noticed how Diana was not wearing her Justice League communicator. At all. Most likely, neither was Bruce.

As he blankly stared at the live recording of the Batman helping Wonder Woman into the passenger seat, the anticlimactic realization felt sickening to know he had spent the whole night panicking over his broken creation only to discover that the ear pieces were most likely at each of their respective homes the entire time.

Diana stopped herself from slipping into the car suddenly and the break in motion caught Victor's attention. She once again leaned into Bruce in order to whisper something private to him. "But I'll save the promise I made for another night , in another car—"

And with that, he terminated the connection to the security camera in Naples. His bedroom, which had been filled with the orange light of his holograms since the sun had set on Gotham that evening, was now pitch black, cold and lifeless like his defeated being felt it should be.

It was only after a few moments of rebooting his perspective did Victor mutter to himself, "I'm adding tracking devices to those things." An unfortunate overlook that would have saved his entire evening.
And perhaps, kept him from hearing Bruce Wayne seducing Diana.

((Ta da~ This 'first' this time is a tie between their first date and the first time Victor noticed they were in love! This takes place after Arthur and Mera's discussion of course, but the timeline is up to the imagination of the reader. Also, the security clearance list that Victor was referring to was written to sound like the list from Young Justice, but I modified it so that Bruce and Diana are higher than Clark, since that makes more sense given the DCEU's format. Hope you all enjoyed and please look forward to the next in this lovely series I am writing with trentran ! ~ Maiden))