Gifts From the Sea[Batfam Bingo 2019: AU: Zoo] - Part 4 (rough draft)

A Batman fanfic by Raberba girl

The next morning, Bruce was granted his request to try calling Dick for his daily treatment. The team stood back, all the supplies ready, as Bruce stood on the ledge with a fish and slapped the water.

Dick poked his head up and glared suspiciously.

"Dick! Time for medicine."

Dick very, very cautiously swam toward him, frowning at all the people ringed behind Bruce. He darted in just long enough to snatch the fish and then back away again to eat it.

"You want another one? You can have it if you come sit up here for a little while."

Dick bared his teeth.

"Dick, you need your medicine, and you're getting it whether you cooperate or not. Come here."

Dick eyed him as he moved back. Then he dove.

Bruce sighed. "You can use the net, but give me a minute to catch him once he's up here."

The merboy was forced to the surface, this time screaming in absolute FURY as he was dragged to the ledge. Bruce knelt and held out a hand behind him to indicate that the others should pause.

"SCREEEEEEEEEEEE!" Dick shrieked at him, enraged and betrayed.

"Dick."

"SCREEEEEEEEEEEE!"

"I'll wait."

Dick screamed and pushed at the net until he finally went quiet and started crying.

"Dickie."

The merboy look at him and made a savage-sounding, piercing whistle.

"Listen. I know you don't like this. But we have to put this medicine on your tail." He showed the mer the medicine bottle and then pointed at the infection. "I know it's not fun, but once it's finished, then you can swim away and go play. I know you don't like it, and I'm very sorry." Carefully, he held Dick in the restraining hold, the mer struggling until they'd gotten his tail strapped down. Then, still confined in Bruce's arms, he sort of hung over the man's leg, limp and resigned as he watched the vets treating his tail. Bruce stroked him and talked to him quietly, even though there was no response.

When the timer went off, Bruce said "Finished" as the straps were being undone, then let go and stepped back.

Dick, lying in a heap on the ledge, made sluggish attempts to drop off the edge into deeper water. But then he paused, looked up at Bruce, and whimpered as he flopped a hand toward the man. Bruce crouched down and took his hand. After a pause, Dick lunged to bite, and Bruce dodged just in time (he had armor on, but it didn't cover his hands). Dick hiss-shrieked and swiped at Bruce's legs; Bruce skipped back (everyone else had already moved a prudent distance away).

They stared at each other, Dick glaring.

"Finished, Dick. Go play," Bruce said, sweeping his arm out toward the pool.

Dick raised his head and braced his hands, propping himself up so that he was as tall as he could get while lying on his stomach. He stared at Bruce intently for a long moment, then bared his teeth and slipped over the edge into the water.

Soon afterward, Bruce was called from his duties to help clean up the shreds of the polo shirt Dick had ripped up, as the merboy glared balefully at him from behind Gate B.

When Bruce was done, he called, "I know you're angry at me, and that's okay. I'm not angry at you."

"hisss"

"I'll see you at lunch, all right?"

Around noon, Bruce brought his lunch to the mer pool. After several long minutes, Dick surfaced a little and watched him balefully from a distance. Bruce was nearly finished eating when the calf swam close to the submerged ledge and called, "B'sss!"

"What is it, Dick?" Bruce asked, signing as he spoke.

Dick swiped his tail briefly through the air, then made a chirping sound and glared.

"Are you asking what we're doing to your tail every day?"

"chirp!"

"Look." Bruce got up and stepped onto the ledge, unbothered when Dick immediately backed out of reach. He mimed as he spoke, trying to sign when he could. "Sometimes, parts of our bodies get hurt, and then we have to put medicine on the hurt part to make it better. The water washes the medicine off, so we have to wait...and wait...and wait...until the timer goes off-" He imitated the beeping sound. "-and then we can go play. Then the next day, we have to put medicine on again, and the next day again, and the next day again, until it's all healed and not hurt anymore." He wondered how much of that the merboy had understood.

After a long pause, Dick cautiously approached and touched Bruce's knee, fingers moving slowly over the joint.

"That's my knee. Knee." Bruce started naming body parts in both English and ASL as Dick touched them. "Calf. Foot. And, look, the whole thing all together, my thigh and knee and calf, is my leg. Leg. ...Those are toes. I have five toes on my foot." He counted them as Dick watched in fascination. "One, two, three, four, five. Five toes." He slipped his remaining water shoe off and brought that foot close to join the other. "Look, I have five more." He counted all of them. "...eight, nine, ten. Ten toes all together, five on this foot and five on this foot."

Dick clicked softly, and spent the rest of Bruce's lunch (and beyond) playing with the toes, discovering Bruce's pain tolerance ("Ow, they don't bend that way, Dick!"), and making occasional attempts to drag him into the water.

"You are a dangerous little cutie," Bruce remarked after the third, almost playful attempt, ruffling the boy's hair. Dick grabbed his hand and then started comparing it, frowning, to his own webbed ones. He squeaked at Bruce inquisitively, rubbing one of the spaces between Bruce's fingers.

"I don't have any webbing, Dickie, that's normal for humans. Mer like you have webbed fingers; humans like me do not."

"Uhhn't," Dick mimicked. So then Bruce started teaching Dick how to enunciate until he realized he'd accidentally taken an extra half hour for 'lunch' and that Mark was filming him.

Bruce tried to skip his break to make up for it, but then Mark found him an hour before the end of his shift and told him he had a new job, which was to interact with Dick. When Bruce stared at him, he smiled back, looking resigned and rueful. "He likes you. We need him to like people. Or, well, to be non-hostile, at any rate."

"Human."

"What?"

"Dick is already a person. What you need, specifically, is for him to be non-hostile toward humans."

"...Right," Mark said, helplessly thoughtful.

Dick was apparently sleeping, and Bruce was loath to wake him up, but Mark slapped the water and then tossed a fish in. After a long moment, Dick popped up to the surface, then squealed in pleasure and swam quickly over to his friend. "B'sss."

"Hello, Dickie."

Dick once again started grabbing Bruce and trying to drag him into the water.

"All right, you know what, stop. I'll swim with you, but I am going to take precautions first, you little siren."

With Mark's help, Bruce was outfitted with a rebreather and goggles, flippers, emergency flotation devices, and a harness with a safety line which was securely fastened and which Mark would keep hold of the entire time Bruce was in the pool. Dick lay on the ledge and watched, utterly fascinated to see complicated, scary things being done to someone other than himself. "Remember," Mark grumbled as he worked, "you signed papers. If you get injured or killed doing this, you and your family can't sue us."

"Yes, I know."

Bruce finally tromped awkwardly over to the mer, who hastily backed into the pool but continued to stare at him. "All right. Now I'll swim with you." He waded across the shallow segment and sat down on the edge.

Dick watched him for a minute, then warily approached. Bruce held out a hand, which Dick shied away from, but Bruce kept it patiently extended, and the merboy finally grasped it. He tugged.

"Do you want me to swim with you? Yes or no?" Bruce asked, signing with his free hand and using his expression and vocal tone to indicate which response was positive and which was negative. "Swim, yes? Or swim, no?"

"Swim yes," Dick signed diffidently.

Bruce, delighted to see the creature successfully signing, confirmed, "All right, Dick, I will come swim with you." He pushed himself off the ledge and allowed Dick to drag him under the water. The merboy pulled him deeper and deeper, until they were finally at the very bottom of the pool. Dick stared at him for a long moment. Then he let go, and Bruce started to drift upward. Dick swam around him in fascination, then took his hand and dragged him down again. He watched as Bruce slowly rose.

"You are a mer," Bruce signed as he drifted up. "You stay under water. I am a human. I rise up."

Dick started making a lot of purposeful-looking gestures that definitely wasn't any sort of sign language Bruce recognized. The calf's vocalizations sounded different underwater, richer and closer.

"When we are under water, you must be gentle with me. When we are on land, I will be gentle with you."

Dick went quiet and swam a little closer, watching Bruce rise and rise and rise until they reached the surface. After a moment, Bruce took out the rebreather and inhaled deeply.

"You okay, Bruce?" Mark called, and Bruce, not wanting to look away from the mer, raised his hand in a thumbs-up.

Dick watched assessingly, then dragged Bruce down again, released him, and watched him rise. This time, about halfway up, he reached for the rebreather and tried to pull it out of the human's mouth.

There was a tussle, and Dick ended up successfully stealing the rebreather. When he tried to pull the man deeper, Bruce kicked him away and swam hard for the surface. "Pull in the slack," he called to Mark immediately upon surfacing.

The man started to obey. Dick emerged, grabbed Bruce, and started to pull him under again.

"No," Bruce said sharply, yanking free. "Not without my rebreather. Give it back." He backed away from Dick, who pursued. "Give me my rebreather."

When he reached for it again, the mer threw it.

"All right," Bruce said, "I am finished swimming." He started to head for the shallow ledge in earnest, but Dick grabbed his leg and dragged him down, though the line soon went taut and their descent halted. Dick looked defiantly up at his captive. "LET GO," Bruce signed.

Dick made a sharp 'biting' motion with his hand and emitted an ominously low-pitched vocalization.

Bruce kicked again, and managed to dislodge the mer. Dick made an angry screech and zoomed away.

Bruce surfaced and made his way to dry land, helped up by Mark. "Are you all right?" his supervisor asked urgently.

"Fine. He's testing boundaries, I think."

"Bruce, this behavior is very aggressive and threatening. He could kill you - don't think you're safe just because he's so small."

"I'm the first chance he's had to lash out at the species who imprisoned, exploited, orphaned, and restrained him."

Mark's eyes narrowed.

"You're doing good work here at CCAZ," Bruce said, knowing he needed to keep the man on his side. "But if you were in his position, wouldn't you have grievances? Wouldn't you have little way of knowing that your guardianship had changed hands? For all he knows, we're in league with Sandy's Ocean World."

"How smart do you think he is, Bruce?"

"He doesn't need to be smart to know that creatures shaped like me have done unpleasant things to him!"

Mark turned away, squeezing his eyes shut and rubbing at his temples like he was trying hard to hold his anger in check.

Bruce turned back to the pool. He was surprised to find that the mer had approached again. Dick was low in the water, eyes just peeking over the submerged platform, one hand gripping the edge. When Bruce looked at him, he raised his other hand and gently set the rebreather in the shallow water like an offering.

"It needs to be cleaned out before I can use it again, chum." Bruce walked back out to the ledge and knelt down almost as soon as he stepped onto it. After a moment, Dick hauled himself onto the ledge and slowly crawled close. He held the rebreather to Bruce's face.

"I can't use this one anymore right now," Bruce explained, gently taking it and trying his best to communicate with words, tone, and miming. "When you take it off underwater, air and water get into the wrong parts, and you have to clean it with a machine before you can use it again. I will put a rebreather on later, maybe tomorrow, and swim with you again. But today, I am finished swimming."

Dick looked down at the rebreather for a moment, then pressed it to his own face. He grimaced and lightly tossed it away. Then he looked at Bruce at put his hands on the man's face.

Bruce grunted warily, hands hovering over Dick's wrists just short of touching, in case the mer suddenly got violent. Webbed hands experimentally squeezed and patted. Bruce grunted uncomfortably, then winced and tugged the slimy fingers back out of his mouth when they carelessly started to slip in. "No. Leave my mouth alone." The hands moved down his throat, then rested flat against his chest. Bruce began to breathe deliberately, keeping up a deep and slow rhythm, and Dick leaned closer, intent.

"The air comes in through my nose, goes down into my lungs, and the carbon dioxide I don't need comes back out. If I'm underwater and use up all the oxygen in my lungs, I don't have gills to fall back on like you do, Dick. I can hold my breath a lot longer than most humans can, but not indefinitely. That's why I need a rebreather to stay submerged when I swim."

As he spoke, Dick lifted his eyes to frown at his face, then began vocalizing for several minutes straight, clicks and chitters and whoops. Bruce wished he had his phone so he could record it, and immediately resolved to get one that was designed to be worked with underwater.

They spent much of the remainder of Bruce's shift playing with various-sized balls. Dick seemed to enjoy both tossing the beach ball back and forth and racing to fetch the smaller, heavier balls. After a while, he mischievously started throwing balls for Bruce to fetch. "You rascal," Bruce chuckled.

The sun had nearly set by the time Mark came up and set his hand on Bruce's shoulder. "Bruce, it's long past closing time."

"...All right."

Dick, reading his friend's body language, grunted anxiously.

"Dickie, I have to go home now. Goodbye."

Dick made an alarmed noise.

"Goodbye, Dick. I will see you tomorrow."

"No!"

"That is very good signing, Dick, but I still have to leave."

o.o.o

That night, Bruce called his parents, as he did every week.

"How has your new job been going?" his father asked.

"It's been...really interesting." Bruce debated whether to tell them about the merboy. "Did you know that CCAZ has a mer calf?"

"A what?"

"A baby mermaid."

"Really?!" his mother exclaimed in delight.

"His name is Dick. His parents were killed, so he was sent to CCAZ and...I get to work with him."

"That's wonderful, son," Thomas said warmly.

"What's it like?" Martha asked. "Is he dangerous? Does he sing?"

"It's amazing; he's a wild animal, but I've been careful; and I haven't heard him sing yet, but he might someday. He's in captivity, so his behavior isn't going to be completely natural."

They spent the rest of the phone call talking about Dick, though Bruce was careful to downplay the more dangerous aspects of his work or the extent to which he'd been interacting with the merboy. His parents probably wouldn't order him back home, but they would be very unhappy and start keeping a much closer eye on him. Although Bruce had been the one most deeply affected by that long-ago mugging, his parents hadn't come out completely unscathed, either. It had been a struggle, both against his parents and himself, for Bruce to leave Gotham, and Thomas and Martha Wayne were still very protective of their only child.

Bruce finally asked to say hello to Alfred, then hung up and lay back on his couch, gazing at the ceiling. 'I'm going to see Dick tomorrow,' he thought. He smiled a little. 'That kiddo really is something.'

TBC

A/N: When I say "rebreather," I mean the small, improbable comic book device the Bats always use underwater, not an actual rebreather in real life, which I think works and looks different. X'''D