Time Cut

Chapter Two: Definitely Not Eleven

It wasn't home yet until he'd bothered Robin, and he'd made sure everybody knew it. Besides, the video games got boring pretty fast. Wally had never really been that much into them: watching characters on a screen was only so exciting when you didn't actually get to fight the dragon or find the coins or drive the car. And Starfire kept wanting to play the one with the monkeys, because she liked feeding them bananas. They'd tried to explain the story to her, but she was mostly interested in the bananas.

"Guys, can we go now, please?" he whined, lying on his stomach with his chin propped up on one of Vic's bean bags.

"One moment," said Starfire, face glued to the screen. "I only have to find six more bananas for Dixie."

He dropped his face into the bean bag, sighing loudly. "The bananas aren't the point, Star; you're supposed to be climbing the pirate ship."

Starfire shrugged. "I'll do that later."

"You said 'later' like two hours ago!"

Vic tapped him on the shoulder until he looked up, pointed to the clock above the television. "Actually, it was about fifteen minutes ago."

"Details, details," said Wally. "But you did say that we could go see Robin later, and it's later now, so can we? Please?" He fixed him with the smile that he knew would work.

It did. Like always. "You okay with finishing later, Starfire?"

Starfire shook her head. "I'm already finished—they all have enough bananas now." She grinned and shut the game off without bothering to save it, turning to Vic with her head slightly to the side. "Why do they call it Donkey Kong? There are no donkeys in the game."

Vic paused for a long moment, then finally shrugged. "No idea." Which was a very rare statement from him, since he knew everything about games. And computers. And cars. Though Wally knew a lot about cars, too, and whenever they'd talked on the phone it was usually about that.

"We'll ponder that in the car—let's go, guys, c'mon!"

Starfire grinned and raised her arms, so Wally did what she wanted and took hold of her hands, pulling her to her feet. Vic grabbed a set of keys from where he'd left them on the coffee table as Wally pulled them both out of the room.

"Fine, I'll go; but I'm notdunking him, I'm not annoying Bruce because I'd like to keep breathing, and I have to be back by five to make dinner."

"No worries," Wally said cheerfully. "You can leave the dunking to me, Coach Bruce is probably off being rich and important, and why do you have to make dinner?"

Vic shrugged, eyes dropping to a spot on the floor—the spot that still hadn't come out from where Wally had spilled orange paint when he was ten. "Let's just go—bothering, right?" He offered a smile, but it was one of those fake ones.

Wally raised his eyebrows as he opened the front door, but he decided not to say anything now. He'd just say something later, if the compliant sadness in Vic's eyes didn't go away.

"…I'd forgotten that he sorta lived in a mansion, y'know."

Vic laughed, like there was something funny about the fact that Wally had forgotten, but it was true. He'd been over here a million times, of course, before he was old enough to realize that it was unusual, but Robin brought to mind those crazy monks who would beat themselves for their sins, not Wayne Manor. Truth be told, the place kind of freaked him out: it was like something out of a movie set, one of those retarded ones where the little girl got taken away to stay with her evil uncle, and he didn't want to think about what actually living there would be like.

Except, Coach Bruce wasn't the evil uncle, though how he'd come into Robin's life was fairly similar to the clichéd story. Robin had eventually explained it, after two years and enough time for Wally to have basically figured it out on his own. He'd said that Robin was the bravest person he knew, and he'd meant it.

Alfred had offered to show them to the pool, but Wally had waved a hand dismissively and said that he remembered where everything was. Which he did, even though he'd sort of forgotten that Robin lived here. And anyway, if Alfred was there, it would put a stop to most of the Robin-bothering. Which was unacceptable.

"Do you think he has really been down here since he got home from school?" Starfire asked as she slid open the glass door, bringing the scent of chlorine and sticky humidity.

"Do you think a week has seven days?" Vic sighed, following her into the huge room.

It was a really nice pool. Six lanes, twenty-five meters (Robin hated yards for some reason), and their pace clock worked, unlike the one that Wally's coach back in Georgia kept having to hit to make the needle move. Wally peeled off his coat and tossed it to the ground without bothering to see where it landed. He'd forgotten how warm Coach Bruce kept the place; the water was freezing, and Robin turned blue really easily—and had a bad habit of staying there too long, especially when his guardian was at work and couldn't do anything about it.

And he was probably about to turn into an icicle right now, considering how long he'd been swimming. Swimming butterfly in the center lane with his head down, completely unaware that he wasn't alone.

Robin had a nice back.

Starfire waved at him, but of course he didn't respond—then she yelled his name, but that didn't work either. Then she shrugged and walked over to the end of the lane, flip-flops squishing on the white tiles as Wally and Vic followed, and she bent to pick up the kickboard that had been lying on the edge of the deck. And leaned over to tap Robin on the head when he got close enough to the wall.

"Surprise!" she chirped. "We came to bother you!"

Robin kind of choked on the water, jerking his head up and really, obviously trying not to cough as he stared up at her. At them. At Wally. Then he took off his goggles, setting them against his forehead, and though the red, circular indentations under his eyes made Wally frown…they didn't even matter because Robin had really nice eyes. It wasn't that Wally didn't know what he looked like, because he did, he had pictures of him with the rest of the team, even, but Robin had been eleven years old then, and…and he wasn't eleven now.

Wally caught his gaze drifting a little further down. No, definitely not eleven. At all.

Robin blinked, which was more than cute enough to distract Wally from whatever witty remark he'd been planning to make, crossing his arms and leaning them against the deck. "You're not bothering me," he assured Starfire, and it took Wally a few seconds to remember that yes, she had said something about that. His forehead wrinkled as he looked up at Wally, then finally at Vic for help.

"Think you remember Wally," Vic said. "Who will someday tell us why he's back in town. Seriously, man—are you here for vacation, or did you move back, or what?"

"Moved," he answered, focusing on the thoughts in his head that were appropriate for conversation. "I'll show you guys where later. So Robin, how many years have you been in that water?"

He shrugged. "Since four."

"Geez!"

"What time is it now?"

"Almost seven-thirty, you crazy person," said Wally, actually taking the time to look at Robin rather than, well, looking at him. His lips were, predictably, blue, and one of his shoulders was at a weird angle, one that Wally recognized as profoundly not good. "Just so you know, if you're trying to die a noble death at sea, you might want to find a bigger body of water. It'll be easier to keep people from looking for you."

For a moment, Robin didn't answer, just stared in disbelief, and then he sort of halfway-smiled, an expression that reminded Wally way too much of Coach Bruce. "Now I know you're Wally."

Starfire kicked her shoes off and sat down on the edge of the deck, rolling up the legs of her pants so she could drop her feet into the water. "But swim team is over for at least a month, if I'm not mistaken."

"You guys still swim?" Wally felt a grin warm his face.

"Oh, yes," said Starfire. "But do you remember how the pool during the summer was outside? We swim inside now, like this one," she indicated the big room, "except sometimes our big clock stops working, and Coach Clark has to hit it." She tapped the side of her chin, then added, "It is very strange to see him hit something. Even an inanimate object."

Wally blinked. "Wait, so you guys swim for—and—did Coach Bruce stop doing it, or what?"

"No, he didn't quit, but this is during high school," Vic said, and for some reason, that was comforting. Bruce didn't need to quit. That would be bad for a lot of parties, but especially Robin—and Wally found himself really, really not wanting things to be bad for Robin. "Coach Clark teaches English. And yes, it's impossibly hard to stop calling him 'Coach' during class. Good thing he doesn't mind."

The man was, at best, a fuzzy memory to Wally, the much-older cousin of one of Vic's friends, the coach they saw a few times each summer and didn't really pay that much attention to because they were busy trying not to get in trouble for climbing the fence. But he did remember that, unlike Coach Bruce, he didn't look like he belonged about six thousand miles away from children. And it made sense. Though Wally would have thought that he'd be more of the kindergarten teacher type.

"Well, this will be interesting," Wally announced. "I wonder how annoying I can be before I make him mad."

Robin raised an eyebrow. "And I'm the one who gets labeled insane." He looked like he was going to smile, but it turned into an attempt to take the kickboard back from Starfire. "Okay, you guys, I really need to finish this set now."

"Naw, you're gonna get out of the water and explain to Starfire why they call it Donkey Kong, since you know everything," said Wally. He'd taken another look at Robin's shoulder and decided that nobody was going to be finishing any sets today. And if that meant that Wally had to get in the pool and drag him out…well, he wouldn't complain. At all.

Robin sent him a completely confused look, but shook his head. "I have a thousand more meters, and then we can talk about…were you guys really playing Donkey Kong?"

Wally took a step closer to the pool. Fought the urge to take a few more steps. "You should try being juvenile sometime before you get too old; it's fun."

"Uh huh." Robin didn't move.

"Seriously, Robin, you've been here long enough." Vic frowned, taking a deep breath, and Wally wondered if he'd agreed to come along for a reason other than bothering. "We can find something else to do, huh?"

They stared at each other, as if waiting to see who'd blink first, and whatever battle of wills they were in, it seemed a well-worn script—until finally, when Robin sighed and climbed out of the pool, rolling his eyes when Vic pointed insistently to the towel hanging over a chair. And though Wally had read enough of Vic's emails about Danielle—and, later, about Danielle breaking his heart because she was selfish, shallow, and stupid (Wally's words: Vic insisted on being infuriatingly accepting and understanding)—to know that he didn't have anything to worry about, he still had to force himself to take a deep breath.

That was when a polite-but-not coughing noise from the doorway made Wally turned around to see Komand'r leaning against the glass, arms across her chest, face contorted in a predatory snarl, and he wasn't sure who it was directed at—but he could take a guess.

"Hi, jailbait," she sang. "You finally decided to ditch the losers and hang out with somebody who's worth it?"

Wally had to force himself to take several more breaths.

"But there are no donkeys in the game."

Vic sighed. "Starfire, that's just what they ended up calling it. Maybe there wasn't a reason. Maybe it was some weird translation error."

She stopped walking to tilt her head to the side, sighing loudly. "Or maybe you just didn't get to the part with the donkeys yet."

Robin pushed open the door to his room and turned on the light. "I'll look it up," he announced, crossing the room to his computer and sliding into the chair, still wearing nothing but his suit, towel falling limply on the floor when he leaned forward to type something into a search engine. Wally couldn't decide if that was a good thing or not.

Vic went to join him at the computer, and Wally followed with the others, suppressing the urge to glare when Komand'r sat on top of the desk, pretending to be interested in the screen when it was painfully obvious what she was really interested in.

"Seriously, Robin, it's fine, you don't have to—"

"She wants to know, and I'm going to find out," he stated forcefully, blue eyes narrowed and intense.

Sighing, Vic shrugged and started looking through a drawer below Robin's television. "Gonna see if you have any cool games. You know, the ones you only have 'cos people give them to you as presents, and then you stick them in here in alphabetical order and never play them."

"Does he have the one with the green dinosaur that has very large eyes?"

After a few tense seconds of Wally telling himself that he really shouldn't glare at Komand'r because that would be mean and he was only a mean person before nine in the morning, Robin closed a window on the computer, turned to Starfire from where she was sitting on the floor, and said with a hint of triumph, "They wanted it to convey stubbornness. 'Kong,' means 'monkey' colloquially in Japan due to the movie. And it wasn't originally called 'Monkey Kong'; that's a myth."

Wally grinned down at him. "Stubborn? Like you?"

"I'm not stubborn."

"So are."

"I need to do pushups now," he muttered, shifting surreptitiously away from Komand'r as he pushed the expensive-looking laptop further to the back of the desk.

"See. Stubborn."

Robin's jaw tightened visibly. "That's not stubbornness. That's doing what I'm supposed to do."

"Coach didn't say anything about training over the break," Vic interjected from the floor, sitting in the middle of a pool of black wires. "Now where's—Starfire, I need that!"

She didn't listen, leaned over the television in a way that made her volumes of hair obscure what she was doing, and a few seconds later she spun around, eyes bright with victory. "I plugged it in correctly, even though Robin likes to hide the cables."

He gritted his teeth. "I do not—"

"You put them in that drawer with rubber bands around them if you don't use them often," she pointed out solemnly, patting the drawer. "But that's okay; I am very good at finding things."

Komand'r cleared her throat, crossing one leg over the other, still sitting on the desk. "So. Thought you were gonna do pushups, jailbait."

Robin blinked. "I…was."

Her smile reminded Wally a little bit of a snake. Maybe a snake that had just found a nice, sunny rock to sit on and was way too happy about it.

"If you screw up your shoulder again, Coach will not be happy," said Vic. "And it's freaky when he's not happy, so I'd rather you not."

Again. The word was heavy and threatening, somehow, and Wally was glad for at least six different reasons when Robin took another uncertain glance at Komand'r and amended, "Actually, my shoulder does kind of hurt."

He stopped being anything that looked like it might be related to 'glad' when Komand'r's eyes lit up in that same, happy-snake way. "Ohh, you poor baby. A massage will make it all better."

Robin kind of choked. "Umm. That's really not—"

But she'd hopped off the desk and had him pinned to his chair before he could finish, Robin cringing visibly as she touched him, clearly using all the willpower he had to avoid jerking out of her grip and putting as much space between them as possible.

"No need to thank me; I don't mind at all." She stared hungrily down at him on the last word, and it was perfectly clear how much she didn't mind—and just as clear that she had no idea what she was doing, and it was just an excuse to touch him. Of course.

Robin stared at the calendar on his wall (the one that had about a million things written on it in tiny, perfect script), an expression that could only be called absolute misery on his face as Komand'r caressed his back, his breathing controlled and deliberate. Until finally, Wally couldn't take it anymore and stalked over to them, meeting Komand'r's eyes and hoping he looked something like intimidating. Even though that had never been his strong point.

"That," he said curtly, "is not a massage." He got between the two of them, sending Komand'r a smile that was way too polite, ignoring her vicious glare. Mostly ignoring the way Robin immediately tensed when he touched him—and it was bad, he realized as he began to knead Robin's shoulders, and he completely believed what Vic had said about this not being the first time he'd hurt himself.

Robin pulled away slightly, head swinging around to glare at Wally, one hand gripping the edge of his desk till his knuckles turned white. "Can you please not touch me?"

"Can you please not run your back through a meat grinder?"

He took a controlled breath. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm the only one not wearing a shirt."

Oh, Wally had noticed. Wally had definitely noticed. But this was absolutely a bad time to point that out, and an even worse time to solve the letter of Robin's complaint by removing his own, so he just opened a drawer near Robin's desk and tossed a t-shirt into his lap. Robin glared, but pulled it on.

"There. Now you're not. Any more requests?" he asked cheerfully as he continued.

"Yeah: stop touching me."

"'Kay, Robin," he said, working on a particularly bad spot below the boy's neck. "I'm gonna ask you if you actually want me to stop. And if you do, then I will. But I want you to think about it first. I know you're really good at thinking; you told me when you were seven."

"Stop. Patronizing. Me."

He grinned. "But don't stop touching you?"

Robin didn't answer for a while, but finally crossed his arms on his desk and leaned his head into them slowly, as if he wasn't really sure how. "Stop patronizing me," he repeated, the words a million shades less biting.

"That's fair," Wally agreed. "I won't even say another word, I promise. It's just that, as interesting as it sounds to have Coach Clark not-happy, I'd prefer to be the one to cause it."

"Thought you weren't g'nna t'lk."

"Sorry. Shutting up."

So he shut up and didn't pay attention to the infuriated glares from Komand'r as she stretched out on Robin's bed with her feet on top of Starfire, or the single, questioning look from Vic—he'd probably be asking later, but Wally didn't care about that; he almost even found it hard to care about the perfect, solid muscles beneath his fingers when said muscles were knotted into something unrecognizable as human. And he'd been able to fix some of it by the time Robin's eyes started to close and his breathing evened out, though it was still bad, and how long had the boy been trying to kill himself in the most painful way possible, and—

"What are you doing?"

Wally probably should have been paying more attention, because he definitely wasn't prepared for Bruce looming over him, voice carefully modulated but fully alert. Robin jerked to attention in less than a second, a tiny gasp escaping him as his right arm knocked over a jar of pens on his desk. He stared at Bruce in disbelief, trying to clean up the mess without looking at it, eyes locked on the man as if he were trying to assess how much trouble he was in. Or analyze it. Or something. Whatever it was, it kind of made Wally mad, and he kept his hands on Robin's back, trying to calm him.

"He wasn't—we weren't—nothing," Robin finally managed, shaking his head and pulling away from Wally entirely. He stood up, pushing the chair back under the desk and taking a deep breath.

"I see. I'm sorry I was late tonight; a meeting ran late and there was some work I had to finish." Bruce paused deliberately and turned his attention to Wally with a look that made him wonder if being mad was worth it. "Nice to see you again, Wally."

"You, too—umm, sir." He glanced over at Robin again, who was red-faced and looked like he wanted to take the place of the chair under his desk. "And when you get a chance, you should take a look at Robin's shoulder. I think he hurt it—again."

Robin's eyes widened in horror. "Wally—" But he must have not been able to think of anything to put on the end of that, so he closed his mouth.

Wally shrugged. "It's his left shoulder."