Gifts From the Sea, a Batman fanfic by Raberba girl
Batfam Bingo 2019: AU: Zoo
Chapter 10 - Safe Haven (rough draft 2)
It was late at night when Bruce pulled into the garage of Wayne Manor, and Dick was fast asleep in the passenger seat. By the time Bruce had pulled the little mer out of the car and carried him to the door to the house, it was open and his parents were waiting for him, with Alfred just behind them.
"Hi!" Martha mouthed, her face alight.
Bruce smiled in response. His parents carefully hugged him, trying not to wake Dick, but the boy stirred anyway. He peered blearily at the new adults and then smiled, sleepily stretching out his arm. Martha grasped his hand and Thomas ruffled his hair, then Dick, without having moved his head away from Bruce's shoulder, closed his eyes and went back to sleep.
"How was the trip?" Thomas asked quietly as they moved to the indoor pool on the other side of the house.
"A little stressful, but we made it," Bruce murmured back. "I kept him bundled up and in a wheelchair. I don't think anyone realized he's not human."
"We sent all the servants on holiday, so it's just us here for a while," Martha explained. She chuckled a little. "They're going to be so angry about the pool when they come back and have to clean it!"
"Tell them you wanted to try making your own float experience," Bruce suggested, hoping that would be enough to mislead anyone about why their masters had decided to fill their swimming pool with salt.
"Master Bruce, what did you have in mind for your sleeping arrangements?" Alfred asked.
"I'm used to sleeping on concrete floors with him, so having a cot seems like a luxury to me now."
The butler nodded and went off, presumably to procure one.
Bruce paused only to step out of his shoes before descending the steps into the pool. At the touch of the water, Dick stirred again, then abruptly sat up. He flopped out of Bruce's arms and zoomed around the pool a few times, then breached repeatedly, screeching in pleasure and relief.
"He's tired of bathtubs," Bruce explained, he and his parents all cringing away from the splashing.
"Waterrrrr!" the mer signed enthusiastically. "Water! Good! GOOD!"
Bruce got back out of the pool and changed from his wet clothes into a bathrobe. Exhausted, he fell onto the cot the moment Alfred set it up and was asleep before the butler even started laying blankets over him.
Thomas and Martha and even Alfred played with Dick for a while until the boy's excitement finally abated. They tried introducing him to the dog - Ace was a little too frantically excited at first and the mer was clearly alarmed, but after several minutes of curious watching and intense sniffing on both sides, Ace finally gave the mer's hand a cautious little lick.
Dick giggled and gingerly fingered the dog's ear. Ace accepted some petting, but then got wriggly and nippy again, so Thomas went to shut him away in the master suite. Dick, meanwhile, crawled to Bruce's cot, hauling himself onto it with little trouble. He nestled close, and Bruce, still asleep, slid an arm over him.
"My favorite thing, I love him," Dick signed, then closed his eyes in contentment.
Martha took a photo, Alfred and Thomas wrapped the mer's tail and changed the bedding, then the three of them simply stood there for a while, affectionately watching their boys sleep. They finally slipped away to their own beds, and the manor was comfortably silent until morning.
o.o.o
Much of the next day was spent packing. Alfred patiently guided his masters, who had very little experience doing without servants, and Dick refused to stay in the pool when he realized Bruce couldn't stay with him. He kept getting out and crawling after his human, no matter how much Bruce tried to reassure him, so they brought the wheelchair back. Dick followed Bruce around and wheedled unsuccessfully for Bruce to play with him.
"Dickie, we'll have all the time in the world to play at the beach house, but right now we need to pack. The sooner we're finished packing, the sooner we can leave to our new home."
It was late afternoon when they were finally ready to go. Thomas, Martha, and Alfred's luggage took up the bulk of the room in both of the vehicles; even though they weren't planning to stay at the beach house for more than a few months, their ideas of what they would need were much more expansive than Bruce's, who'd gotten used to spartan living at ABAZ. Bruce, in fact, barely brought anything other than equipment for Dick's care.
The journey was largely unremarkable, and Bruce left it to his parents and Alfred to get settled in. As soon as he could, he picked up his child and carried Dick out behind the house. There was a swimming pool and a pretty lounge area, and no barriers between it and the ocean's edge just a short walk away.
Dick clutched Bruce hard and started to tremble. "No no no no no no no...!"
"I'm not going to leave you, Dickie," Bruce assured him, sitting down on a deck chair. "You are safe here. We can go slow. You can take all the time you need, years if you want. I will never abandon you in the ocean like the zoo made us do."
They stayed there for a while. Dick huddled in Bruce's arms, staring out at the waves, until he started to get too dry, then Bruce put him in the swimming pool (it needed to be salted, but a few hours of freshwater wouldn't do any significant damage). Dick occasionally relaxed enough to swim and play with Bruce in the pool, but frequently was drawn back to the side, where he stared at the ocean again.
At last, he turned away and signed that he wanted to go inside, so Bruce carried him back into the house.
o.o.o
Thomas and Martha stayed for as long as they could afford to be away from their work in Gotham, vacationing and spending time with their son and with the little creature whom they looked upon as a grandson. Bruce soon acquired a smaller boat than his yacht which made their supply trips to the mainland easier.
Though much of Bruce's time was spent researching animal rehabilitation techniques and in turn training Dick to be more comfortable in the sea, it occurred to him that he probably also ought to be giving Dick the basics of a human education as well. Although he had long been convinced of mer intelligence, he still marveled at seeing his beloved fish son haltingly making his way through a Winnie-the-Pooh book on his own. With no other mer to compare to, Bruce wasn't sure if Dick disliked reading as a personal preference or if it was a more general mer trait, but whatever the reason, the boy did enjoy math better. He liked science experiments, too, and was delighted when he learned how to make paper airplanes and lava lamps and vinegar-and-baking-soda volcanoes.
Dick also discovered just how much of an asset upper body strength could be for a mer having to make his way on land. After adopting a strength training regimen appropriate to his age, it soon became standard practice for him to walk around on his gloved hands, which he preferred to the wheelchair. Bruce also obtained some biodegradable plastic sleeves for his tail, which, when filled with an oily solution, could keep Dick hydrated without him having to constantly dip into the pool all day. Dick decorated them with stickers and glitter.
Although Bruce was careful to keep his child's mer nature hidden, Dick loved to go into town. Swaddled in his disguise and wheeling around in his chair, he nevertheless had a bright and sunny attitude that won him many friends in a very short period of time. He accompanied Bruce on almost every shopping trip (and even, as he got older, started making his own. He would tow the boat to shore, disguise himself in private, then head into town with the list and a shopping bag slung behind the wheelchair). He chatted at length with the shop owners and their families, called out greetings to passersby, even flirted with girls his age and played modified basketball with groups of boys (in defiance of Bruce's concerns that the sport might damage his disguise at some point).
Dick's English grew more natural-sounding as he spent more time around people who spoke more colloquially than Bruce did, and he started teaching ASL to a few interested people. He wandered around town and found people to talk to or play with just for the fun of it, and chatted readily with tourists in the summer. Bruce cautioned him to try to avoid being photographed.
Bruce eventually gave in to Dick's pleas to enroll him in school. He had hoped that the school wouldn't allow a child in who didn't legally exist, but it was a small town and half the staff already knew Dick from seeing him out and about, so they accepted him readily. Bruce, stern in his anxiety, lectured the principal and the nurse and the teachers and everyone else who came into regular contact with Dick about the boy's alleged special needs, and Bruce spent every week day in the school library, volunteering when there was work to do and trying to concentrate on his computer work when there wasn't, constantly worrying about Dick being outed or accidentally causing trouble.
The closest call came during one recess when a bully knocked Dick out of his chair and yanked the blanket away, but fortunately, the plastic sleeve concealed the details of the mer's lower body, and Dick's classmates and teachers were hotly defending and tending to him even before Bruce reached the playground.
Dick soon made many friends and rarely came to visit his worried guardian in the library (though Bruce sometimes did have to assist Dick if the boy got too dried out and needed to refresh in the single-stall handicap bathroom. Dick didn't actually need much help, but it was better to let the staff think that they weren't shutting a special needs child in a room all by himself. Most of what Bruce did was mopping up with paper towels, since Dick could get careless with the water and had never seen much point in tidiness).
At the end of every day, though, Dick came wheeling in, usually all smiles, and Bruce would drop whatever he was doing to kneel in front of the wheelchair and ask the boy how his day had gone and hug him, feeling himself relax just at the feel of his child safely in his arms. "You all right, Dick?"
"Yup, all good, B."
For all Bruce's anxiety and fretting, he was immensely proud whenever Dick won any kind of academic recognition, and religiously filmed all the awards ceremonies. He did the same with Dick's various extracurricular performances, though he nearly had a heart attack the time he attended a school play and discovered that Dick had been cast as a mermaid.
Dick shrieked with laughter afterward, gleefully recounting the look on Bruce's face and eagerly explaining how he'd managed it without either blowing his cover or spoiling the surprise. Everyone already thought that he'd been born with a deformity that had fused his legs into a single limb; it had been a simple matter to get a few girls' help in sewing a crappy fake bedazzled mer tail to slip over his real one. Copious amounts of glitter and makeup had misdirected any attention from his inhuman skin, especially since everyone already knew it was a strange color due to his 'medical condition.' The only true difficulty had been remembering to bend his tail at a single spot in the middle as if he only had one joint, but he had managed it, and no one was any the wiser.
Bruce had a myriad of skills and hobbies, and rather enjoyed trying out most of them with Dick and seeing which ones the boy took to and which he didn't. Surprisingly, the mer seemed to be interested in martial arts, and it was a nice challenge to figure out how to adapt hand-to-hand combat techniques to suit Dick's non-human body.
"You know what, no, I'm done getting hit with a giant fish tail today," Bruce laughed, backing away with his hands up defensively.
"Aww, c'mon old man, another round!"
Bruce kept meticulous records and journals despite having no one but his parents and Alfred to share them with. "It's too bad I'm not a scientist," he remarked one evening, writing up his daily report. Dick, cheerful but exhausted, was lounging beside him on the couch, sipping at a cup of juice. "I know there are people who would kill for this data." The reports were just for his own whims; he didn't feel comfortable sharing them and risking Dick's safety.
"B, I wanna watch the dragon movie," Dick said.
"You know how to work the TV."
"No, I want you to watch the dragon movie with me. Please, Dad."
Bruce's fingers froze on the keys of his laptop. He slowly made eye contact with Dick, who smiled sunnily. "Second dad," the mer amended. His smile started to fade. "You don't want a fish son."
"No! No, Dick, I...I'm- I like- it. Being...called that."
Dick smiled again. "Watch How to Train Your Dragon with me."
"Yes, all right, let me get it set up..."
Dick fell asleep a little over halfway through, his head pillowed on his father's leg and Bruce's fingers slowly carding through his hair. After ten more minutes had passed, Bruce leaned down and whispered, "As far as I'm concerned, you have been my son almost from the day I met you." Bruce leaned back and exhaled.
Dick, whose eyes were still closed, smiled in satisfaction.
TBC
