A/N: Thank you for the reviews! And Angel Queen in a genius, so a round of applause for her!

Chapter Four - Losing Sleep

Whoosh!

"Got it! I-"

Snap!

Thump!

"Ow."

Sarah stared down at her brother's crumpled form. "That must have hurt," she commented.

Nick looked up at her, rolling her eyes. "You think?" He rubbed his leg, which he had hit on a branch. "Superheroes make flying look so easy," he muttered.

Sarah shrugged. "I'll try to get more footage of Wonder Woman and Superman and the other heroes that can fly," she promised him. "It might help." She bent over and took his hand, helping him to his feet.

"How?" he asked her, still rubbing his leg. "I know Daddy gave you that laptop for your birthday, but can you really do that on it?"

She grinned. "Nicky, what do you think YouTube's for? People think the Justice League are awesome. They'll post whatever footage they can get of them on there. There's lots of stuff." Sarah paused, wrinkling her nose. "Only problem is finding good videos," she told him. "A lot of them are jumpy or have really grainy pictures."

Nick nodded. "Okay..." He looked up toward the manor, glad that they knew of this spot that was near the house, but still out of sight. It was the best place to practice while not being seen. They just had to keep it at short bursts, or Alfred or Mommy or Daddy would come looking for them if they stayed where they couldn't see them for too long.

"Think we should head back?" he asked.

"One more try," she said, "then it'll be nearly dark anyway."

"Sarah, I'm getting tired."

"One more go, Nicky, come on," she insisted.

He stopped and folded his arms. "You can't make me, Sarah!"

She sighed. "Okay. Sorry," she admitted. "I'm being too bossy, aren't I?"

"What else is new?" he muttered.

"Hey!"

He stuck his tongue out at her. "You know it's true."

She huffed. "Are you gonna do it, or not?"

As with most things like this, Nick knew it was easier to just let his sister have her way. Otherwise she'd be in a mood all day, and with Mommy not talking to Daddy, and Daddy not talking to Alfred since Alfred would want to talk about Mommy, Nick really didn't want to deal with Sarah not talking to him.

Accordingly, he squared his shoulders and took a deep breath, then squeezed his eyes shut, screwing his face up and concentrating as hard as he could. After a few seconds he cracked open one eye. "Did I do it?"

"No," she answered. "Maybe you're too tired. Maybe you need nappy-time."

He growled under his breath. Even if he was tired, there was no way he was just giving up – how was he ever going to prove to Mommy he could do this if being tired got the better of him? Still, it was hard. He'd spent all day at school imagining this, but now that he was trying...

"No," he said finally, "I've just gotta... relax."

Sarah nodded, though it didn't look like she knew how he was going to do that. Nick lost patience after a few minutes. "Well, I can't do it with you looking at me!"

She rolled her eyes with a smirk, and laid back on the grass, directing her gaze up to the sky instead. "Hey, that cloud looks like a dog," she giggled.

Nick groaned inwardly. How could she go from school teacher to school girl so quickly? Still, he glanced up to the cloud she pointed out. Huh. It did look like a dog. And that one next to it almost looked like a ball. Or maybe that was his imagination. He formed a circle between his finger and thumb and gauged it. Yup. A ball.

He glanced down at Sarah – only to find she was a lot further down than he remembered. They stared at each other for a second, Sarah with eyes wide and biting her bottom lip. Then it hit Nick that he was ten feet in the air.

The second thing that hit him was the ground.

Sarah didn't give him a hand up this time; she jumped on him and hugging him tightly. "Well done!"

"Ow, Sarah, I just –"

"You flew!" she said, grinning excitedly. "You flew, Nicky, you just floated up into the air!"

He nodded, stood up. "I think I know how to do it now – I just focused on the sky and... whoosh."

She giggled. "Well, it worked." She stood too, and then sighed. "We should probably get back. Alfred will have dinner ready soon."

They made their way back to the manor, smelling the delicious scent of dinner already well on the way.

"Damn it," Bruce muttered. Another dead end.

He'd been tracking a shipment of nuclear warheads that the weapons division of LuthorCorp had mysteriously 'misplaced'. The warheads had had their GPS locator cards removed, so there was no conventional way to track them. Batman, however, had unconventional ways. His methods showed the warheads to be in the middle of Uzbekistan. That was fine, he'd already alerted the League to their locations and was confident that they'd be picked up within hours.

The thing that wasn't going to so well, though, was breaking into Lex Luthor's personal accounts. He need to track the money back to the arms dealer, so then the police could arrest Luthor for arms trafficking. Those warheads could have easily ended up in the hands of Al Quada, or any other terrorists with the money – to let Luthor get away with it would be unthinkable. Obviously he couldn't funnel the money into company finances, but Luthor had better firewalls on his accounts than Bruce did – that was evidence enough he had something to hide, but it was also circumstantial. So far he'd not been able to write a virus programme that could crack them. At this rate he'd be asking Sarah for help.

Using his secure League email account, he composed a message explaining the problem to the Question, and sent it to Vic. Once that was done, he checked the time. Seven-thirty. He needed to make an appearance upstairs, if only so that Sarah and Nick would believe he was just arriving back from the city. After the twins were born, Bruce had installed a secondary entrance to the Batcave in the garage floor, so that if he were in the Cave while the kids were in the house, he could pretend to have just been coming home from the office.

As expected, they were both in the kitchen with Alfred. Doing the dishes, from the sounds of banging china and the clinking metal. He pushed open the door to see Alfred sitting on one of the kitchen stools, twitching every time Nick dropped a plate into the sink with a loud splash, or Sarah shoved the glasses into the wrong cupboard.

Bruce smiled at him, and the Englishman stood. "Good evening, Master Bruce."

The twins turned around, identical smiles on their faces. "Hey, Daddy!"

He hugged his son and daughter. "Hey. How was school today?"

"Good," Nick shrugged. "History was boring. We were doing the... something War."

Bruce raised an eyebrow. "The Something War? You weren't listening were you?"

"It was a really long time ago," Nick explained, and nothing to do with me –"

"Things a really long time ago still mean things," Bruce said. "Look at how the Romans influenced every culture they conquered."

Nick didn't seem convinced. "Okay, but learning about a wooden bunny? How's that gonna affect me?"

A wooden ...?

Suddenly, Sarah tutted and whacked her brother lightly on the arm. "Sarah," Bruce warned. "Not acceptable."

"Sorry, Daddy. But, Nicky, it's a wooden horse."

"What?"

"You're learning about the Trojan War – the Greeks used a wooden horse to get inside Troy."

"Oooooh."

Struggling to contain a laugh about what Diana would say if she knew her son considered the Trojan War boring, Bruce restrained himself to saying, "Even boring things have to learned sometimes, Nick."

"But why?" he asked, slightly whining now.

"Think about it, Nicky, your two times tables are really boring, but once you learn them you get to move on to interesting stuff, like quadratic equations –"

Nick shot his sister an alarmed look. "Math? You call math interesting?"

"Just because you're too stupid to –"

"Enough, you two," Bruce quelled. He looked at the clock. "I think it's bedtime."

"Aw!"

"Come on."

Forty five minutes later, the children were in bed and Bruce was once more down in the Cave. There was something wholly unsettling about the juxtaposition of brush-teeth-warm-milk-bedtime-story against nuclear-warheads-followed-by-beating-the-shit-out-of-criminals.

Always verging on being two people, Bruce had decided he now definitely was. Kissing his children's painfully innocent sleeping faces was so easily affectionate – every moment he spent with them was. There were his kids; so free with their own love that it was impossible not to return it. Unfortunately, though, it had also gotten him used to the idea of showing his love for the people he cared about. It had only improved his relationship with Dick and Tim, but he couldn't help wondering if it was making his relationship with Diana worse.

Even before the twins were born he'd known how he felt about her, but like everything else he'd gotten so used to hiding it. Now it was out, and neither of them really knew how to deal with that. Well, he knew how to deal with it – be with her. However, whenever he tried to broach the subject with Diana, she ran, and when that happened... it hurt. The result was nights like the one he'd spent with Selina.

Which led him to another problem. He had been blisteringly drunk, he knew that, but he had doubts about how drunk Selina had been. He only remembered her having two martinis, which didn't make sense. If she'd come to Gotham with the intention of seducing him – she normally did – then why not wait till he was sober? He knew she had more pride than to sleep with a drunk – she relished a challenge. Sleeping with a trashed ex was hardly that. So she'd wanted something, something other than sex. What? To steal something? Nothing was missing; all the paintings were still on the walls, all the jewels in the vault. The Batcave hadn't been disturbed. If she'd take anything at all, it was something he hadn't missed – but he was inclined to think she hadn't taken anything. She'd changed her mind.

Next question: why? The only person who could answer that was Selina, and she was gone. Had caught the earliest available flight out of Gotham and was now in Toronto. Had something... scared her away? Selina? If that were a possibility then he'd consider Diana a potential suspect, but Diana had made it perfectly clear that she wasn't –

Don't go down that road. He had no desire to spend tomorrow nursing another hangover.

Drawing a line under the Selina mystery, Batman accessed the email from the Question that had just landed in his inbox. The message was short. Mutating algorithm attached. Been wanting to test it for a while now. Q.

Batman lifted an eyebrow. He'd tried all of his own – not insignificant – hacking skills, and come up empty. Did Vic really think a simple-?

Yes, he did. Because it was. A few seconds after using what the Question had given him, Batman had complete access to all of Luthor's accounts. He ran a scan of all the companies that had paid money in; three flashed up as dummy corporations. They'd all made substantial payments within the last twenty-four hours. Now all he had to do was follow the money.

An hour later – after it had gone through a dozen more companies and fifty seven countries – the money landed squarely at the feet of Arkady Maltayev - Uzbek arms dealer.

Smirking, Batman tapped his com-link. "Superman, come in."

"Go ahead, Batman."

"Arrest Luthor. I've found the connection."

He could almost hear the grin spreading across Clark's face. "Good work. On my way."

"Batman out."

Right, now that was the international terrorism taken care of, it was time to turn his attention to more important matters. Gotham.

On cue, the door opened at the top of stairs, and Alfred descended, a tray in one hand with a steaming cup sitting on it. "Your espresso, sir."

Bruce took it, tossed it back. "Thank you, Alfred."

"Very good. Take care, Master Bruce."

Bruce had acknowledged him with a nod, then jumped into the Batmobile and sped away as Alfred climbed back up the stairs to the Manor.

Sarah sighed, sitting up in bed. She couldn't sleep. Too much had been happening lately – discovering Nicky's abilities, Mommy and Daddy fighting and now not speaking to each other – and she couldn't stop thinking about it. She looked across the room toward her brother's bed, and rolled her eyes. Finding out that he was meta-human wasn't causing Nicky to lose any sleep.

Pursing her lips, she crawled out of bed and slipped out of the bedroom. If she couldn't sleep, she might as well get something to help. Walking downstairs, she looked through the various rooms for Alfred. It was past her bedtime, but she doubted it was past Alfred's or Daddy's. They were probably still awake somewhere.

Still, as Sarah searched, there was no sign of either of them. She finally made it to the kitchen, which was also deserted. Sarah pouted for a brief minute. She wanted hot chocolate; Alfred's hot chocolate, to be precise. It always helped her sleep. If he knew, she didn't doubt that he'd make it for her. For a few moments, Sarah toyed with the idea of making it herself, but then decided not to. Even if she could do it, there was no way she could hide the mess it would make and she knew she'd be in serious trouble. She already had enough of that at the moment with Mommy and Daddy. She didn't want more.

Sighing, she grabbed one of the glasses left on the counter for her and Nicky since they couldn't reach the cupboards – though, now that Nicky could fly, Sarah didn't think they'd have too much trouble with that anymore – she set it on the kitchen table and went to the fridge. Pulling the milk out, she poured some into her glass. After putting the milk away again, Sarah took her glass and walked out of the kitchen. Sipping on her drink, Sarah eventually wandered into the study.

She wasn't in there more than a few seconds when the big clock began to shake and shudder, of all things. Sarah gasped and instinctively dove behind her father's desk – her milk coming with her and miraculously not spilling – and then peered back around it with wide eyes.

A/N: Review please!