Author's Note: It's a short chapter today, but an important one for the Spark universe as a whole. Happy reading!

"...Robin."

"Mmmph..."

"...Robin." The boy's forehead squinched. "It's morning."

"Make it go away..."

He almost laughed. How often in the past would the power to hold the dawn back just an hour longer have been of use? The number was a high one, and there were lives wrapped up in the counting that he preferred not to think about. "I lack that ability," he said before he could dwell on past nights for too long.

The boy gave a heavy sigh. "Oookay. I'm up."

"Good." There was no movement. "...Robin?"

"I'm up, honest! And I'm thirsty." He paused. "...Do we have any bottled water left?"

"No. Even if we did, I wouldn't be able to give it to you."

"The simulation?"

"The simulation."

"...Crud." Shrugging off his blanket, Robin sat up. "Um...I still don't know how we're going to boil water without a container," he stated with a troubled frown. "That's...that's not good."

"No, it's not good. But fortunately this is training, not a real emergency."

"Does that mean you're going to tell me how to do it?"

"No. It means I'm going to show you."

"Great!" That seemed to wake him up the rest of the way, and he grinned. "So how do we start?"

"We start by waiting for Flash and Kid Flash to come back. You both need to know how to do this, and it will go faster with two of you."

"Oh. Okay. That makes sense."

They sat in silence for a moment. "...Robin."

"Huh?" He looked up from the twig he'd plucked out of the wall and had been rolling between his hands.

"Did you sleep well?"

"Oh, yeah! I was super warm. You're a good space heater."

"...No nightmares?" There had been no signs of any, but that didn't rule them out entirely.

"No. But you were right here, so that's not surprising."

"Mm."

"...Did you-"

"No," he cut him off.

"Okay. Good. Although..." The young voice grew thoughtful. "Do you ever?"

"...Do I ever what?"

"Have nightmares when you're in costume. Do you?"

It took him a breif spell to answer. Thinking back, there were few times when he had slept soundly enough under the cowl for dreams to have come at all, let alone bad ones. "I don't recall any," he replied finally. "But there haven't been many opportunities, either."

"Not even on long missions, like for the League?"

"No one gets much rest on those. If sleep was easier to come by on such trips, then I suppose I would have more nightmares." He'd seen plenty enough hellscapes while under the cowl to inspire them, that was for certain. If the frequency with which those events haunted his civilian sleep was any indicator of what they would do when he was masked, he ought to be grateful that he rarely slept in costume. "Why do you ask?"

"I thought...I thought maybe your cowl protected you from them. That's all."

There was something more to it than that, he sensed. "...You were hoping that if my cowl protected me that your mask might protect you?"

"Well...yeah. Is that weird?"

"No. It's logical. Our disguises hide our features from the world; it would make sense for them to also be capable of hiding some of the world's features from us."

"I was thinking of it like a dreamcatcher," Robin confessed. His hand rose to trace the line where his mask met his cheek. "Like...all the bad stuff gets caught in the black part – the web – and the good stuff, it goes in through our eye holes. Then when we take the masks off, the bad stuff just...goes away." He sighed again. "I know they don't really work like that, but it's kind of a nice idea, don't you think?"

"...Yes. It is. Robin..." Don't write it off, he wanted to tell him. You can use your mask as a wall. Make your night self separate from the part of you who embraces the sun. The urge to say such a thing was gone almost as quickly as it had come. What right did he have to make the child like himself in that way? Bruce didn't have to intervene for him to realize what a grave mistake giving that advice would be. His son was whole, and he needed to stay that way.

"Batman? What is it?"

"...That's not a bad way to think of it, having your mask absorb some of the bad things you see through it." Now it was he who reached out to touch the border of flesh and fabric. "You need to still carry lessons away from your experiences, but if your mask helps you filter the memories then let it."

"Is that safe, though? When we're not in masks you always say that it's important I work through bad stuff. So...which one is it?"

"It's both."

"I don't understand."

"You do need to process everything, work through it all. You can't let it build up inside of you until it explodes." That's my issue, not yours. "But you also need to understand something. Come fall, you will begin to be exposed to people whose cruelty you cannot fathom right now. I know you've read some of their files, but that is nothing compared to seeing them in action.

"When that happens – and it will, because you were promised that experience – it will be more than you or any other sane person can handle without some sort of barrier between such events and their psyche. You'll still have to work through all of it, but your mask might serve to let you control the rate at which you do so. It won't stop everything, and it can't stop anything permanently, but it will help. At the very minimum, letting your mask be a filter – your dreamcatcher – might give you a few hours of repose in your civilian life. And trust me, Robin, those little breaks may someday prove to be your salvation."

The boy was gaping at him. "...Batman?"

"Yes?"

"That was really scary, you know."

"The part about the villains, you mean?"

"No. The part about the breaks."

"How so?" That's not the part you should have been afraid of.

"Well, you just seem to be thinking about mask stuff so much, even when you're not wearing it. I mean...Sawbones, and the Joker, and the Montgomery Project, and everything else that I don't even know about...where are your little breaks? I never see them, but you must need them too, right?"

He started. "Robin..." His throat grew thick, forcing him to clear it before he could continue. "...Suffice it to say that my breaks have been much more frequent in the past year than they had ever been before. Do you understand?"

It took a moment, but his partner's lips arched into a brilliant smile. "The past year, you said?"

"Yes. More or less."

"...I'll try to use my mask like you said, Batman. Then I can have my breaks, and you can have yours."

"Good. But Robin?" There was a caveat still to be told, and he didn't dare let him leave their makeshift tent without sharing it.

"Uh-huh?"

"If your mask is ever an insufficient filter, you must tell me. Is that understood?" He spoke in a deadly serious tone, well aware of what the edge of control looked like and unwilling to imagine his son on that precipice.

"I understand."

"You're certain?"

Robin studied him, clearly picking up on the solemn tone of the question, then nodded. "I understand. I'll tell you if my mask isn't enough. But I don't think that will happen," he opined with much more confidence than the man across from him thought well-advised. "I mean, I've got it and you to help me deal with things," he smiled. "Double filtration, right?"

"...Yes. But not even double filtration can get rid of everything bad."

"No, but it's way better than nothing, or only one thing." He straightened suddenly. "Hey! Couldn't we do that with the water? Filter it? That's a good idea, right?!"

The change in topic was a relief, and the turn it had taken drew a faint smirk over Batman's lips. "It's an idea that we'll discuss shortly," he answered, not wanting to give anything away. "But you're partway there."

A disgruntled chattering echoed in the depths of the forest, punctuating his sentence and catching their attention. "What is that?" Robin queried. "It sounds like a psychotic squirrel."

"That," he informed him, "is the hallmark of returning speedsters."

"...Really? How do you know?"

"You can ask them that when they arrive in a few seconds, since they're the ones who have aggravated that damn squirrel twice now." He tapped the boy's bent knee and gestured for him to crawl out first. "Let's go. The day's already started; the dew will burn off soon."

"The dew? What's that got to do with...ooooh. I get it. Dew...water. Right?"

"Right. Now hurry up, it goes fast." Like so many other things, he mused as the child scrambled for the open air. Dewdrops and little birds; gone before you know it, but life-saving while they last. Climbing out behind him, he stood, glanced around at the trees, and shook himself free of the sentimentality that had slipped in over the past half-hour. He wasn't sure where it had come from precisely, but he had no more time to spare it; there were far more important things at hand.