"Knock knock."

Bruce looked up from his desk to find Dick leaning in the doorway with a tablet in one hand and a grin on his face. "Is it that time already?" he asked.

"Yup. Afraid so." Sauntering in, the younger man dropped into a chair. "You can't be nervous. You've been to about eight hundred of these things before."

"Your math is flawed," Bruce informed him, leaning back to stretch as he spoke. "Eight hundred quarterly earnings meetings would require a tenure of two hundred years."

"Yeah, you're right. You don't look quite that old." Dick winked.

"...You're in a mood today. What's going on?"

He laughed at himself. "I'm excited," he confessed. "I'd never been to one of these before you...until last spring, when I had to go, and to be honest they're boring as hell. But now that you're back we can make fun of them together. This one won't be nearly as unbearable as the last five were."

The billionaire blinked at him. While quarterly earnings meetings were far from being his favorite part of business – they were, in fact, one of the few things he had dreaded about coming back to work after being 'dead' for some fifteen months – he recognized their importance to executive decision-making. Cracking jokes during them was something that it had never occurred to him to do. Now, though, his boy was giving him the special grin that called up all of the other shenanigans they had ever gotten into together. It had always been hard to resist that siren-song of a look, but lately it had been nigh impossible. "What makes you think I won't be paying rapt attention to the presentations? I have a lot to catch up on still, Dick."

"I know that. But I also know that a six-hundred-page report will come out of this meeting, and that there will be a copy on both of our desks tomorrow morning. More importantly," his gaze twinkled, "I have listened to you complain about these meetings for going on twenty years, and I've never been able to do anything to make it more bearable for you. You better believe that I'm not going to let you brush me off with a lecture about paying attention when I'm finally getting a chance to help."

Bruce tilted his head back and let his breath rush out of his nose in something approaching a huff. Beneath those angry twin streams of air, though, he was smiling. "All right, chum," he agreed. "What's our strategy? I don't particularly want people walking out because we're cracking jokes."

"These," Dick held up his computer. "We're already going to be taking notes on them, so I figured we'd hop into a secure chat and talk that way. And if there's something we want to say that's actually about the meeting, that's even better. Then we have an excuse."

Snagging his own tablet out of a drawer, the billionaire rose from his chair. "If we've got our plan, then let's go. It will look bad if the CEO and the deputy-same are late."

"'Deputy-same'? That makes me sound like some sort of U.S. Marshal clone from a penny dreadful steampunk western." He lifted his hands into a dramatic pose and deepened his voice to sound like a stereotypical movie trailer voice-over. "Two deputies. One genetic makeup. High noon. See 'Deputy Same Versus Himself,' the high-plains, high-action thriller that has critics saying; 'this is worse than 'Sharknado'!'"

"Are you pleased with yourself about that?" Bruce chuckled, his eyes warm. Trust Dick to manage to amuse me five minutes before a quarterly earnings meeting. Silly kid. With any luck, he thought, the younger man's knack for diverting his attention from misery would carry right into the board room.

"It made you laugh, so...yes. I'm pleased about it. Now come on." Sweeping the door open with a flourish, he held it and bowed. "Your adoring sector heads await."

"...You're going to force me to enjoy this despite the quarter century I've spent practicing how to hate it, aren't you?" He was already smiling, but the friendly weight of his son's hand landing on his shoulder as they moved towards the elevator made the expression widen.

"Isn't that what you pay me for?"

"...So glad to see you, Mr. Wayne," a ferret-faced man in a tasteless brown suit simpered at the billionaire. He had been the last person to join the executives mingling around the conference table, but he'd already proven himself to be the most annoying. Bruce was absolutely certain that he'd never met the fellow before now, but he kept up his act easily. If he'd just give him his hand back, he thought, maybe he could call the meeting to order without being rude...

A shrill whistle cut through the chatter. "So," Dick started good-naturedly once all eyes had turned to him, "we're already five minutes behind."

On that cue, a slow migration began towards the chairs. "I'm surprised you let us get away with that," Lucius joked, clapping Bruce on the back as he passed him. "What happened to Mr. Punctual?"

"That title goes to the man with the watch to match it," he replied, taking his seat at the end of the table. "That would be Dick." Aware that the comment might be taken the wrong way, he shot the person in question a wink to let him know he was teasing. Dick had tried to return the timepiece within hours of his return to the Manor, but he had refused to take it back. The two-million-dollar accessory had always been his favorite, he admitted, but that was exactly why he wanted his boy to keep it. He knew the younger man had chosen it out of all the others for its intrinsic, not its monetary, value, and that made his posession of it eminently satisfying to its previous owner.

"Ahem. I suppose we should get started, then," brown-suit announced from the front. "As Mr. Grayson pointed out, we're running late already. If that's all right with you, of course, Mr. Wayne?"

He had to fight to keep his face straight. "Dick's word is as good as mine." With that pronouncement he waved his hand, signaling the stranger to continue.

"...Ah. Yes, of course. Well, if everyone will just pull up the agenda on their screens, we'll run down it..."

Never one to waste an opportunity, Bruce pulled up a messaging window alongside the list of topics to be covered. 'Who is this guy?' he sent.

Dick arched an eyebrow a second later. One corner of his mouth rose as he tapped out a quick response, then glanced at the billionaire.

'So much for wanting to pay attention,' the text opened with a playful jab. 'That's Marvin Caltrop-Weinden. We promoted him to VP of Accounting after Heather decided she wanted to spend more time with her kids and work on her novel.' There was a pause, and then a second bubble of text. '...No one warned us that he was such a wet sock.'

The assessment seemed to be correct. Directing budgetary conferences was never going to win anyone a prize, at least not if Bruce had anything to say about it, but the sallow face at the far end of the table apparently hadn't gotten the memo. He sounded almost enthusiastic as he ran down the meeting order, which rarely changed and didn't really require going over. 'Poor bastard needs a new tailor,' he sent back, trying to feel sympathetic for this unusual specimen.

'He needs an Alfred. Or at least someone who can teach him to keep his nose from matching his clothes.'

Bruce had to sneeze to cover his snicker at that. The droning from the front ceased immediately, and a concerned question wafted back. "Is everything all right, Mr. Wayne? Can I get you something?"

"No, I'm fine. Just, ah, allergies or something. Please continue." As his gaze wandered back to the conversation window, he met Lucius' stare. Crinkles of amusement appeared in the corners of the older man's eyes as they flickered knowingly to Dick, and the billionaire was convinced that his CFO knew what was afoot. '...Lucius already caught us,' he wrote.

'He's probably wishing he could get in on it. You want to invite him?'

That would certainly ramp things up, he was certain. Years of friendship had informed Bruce that there was a dark trace of wit lurking under all of the political correctness and professionalism that the other man evinced in public. Bringing him in would end with all three of them choking on tears of hilarity. 'No,' he decided in spite of that. 'Let's just keep it you and me this time.'

'Okay. Oh, thank god, the sycophant is done.'

'Wait for it. He has a report to give too, doesn't he?'

'Don't remind me. My ears are already on the edge of bleeding...'

They calmed down during the presentations of the first three departments. Everyone in the room save brown-suit was someone the billionaire had worked with in the past, and as a result he knew what to expect from them. None of them disappointed him, and that went triple for his son, who seemed to have had a hand in financial gains on multiple levels of the company. Had he not known that the speakers weren't the sort to pass out credit where it wasn't due he might have thought that they were praising Dick in order to gain favor. Their propensity for honesty was what had launched them to the positions they held within his company, so he trusted that their words were true and allowed himself to swell with pride.

As the speeches went on their private conversation turned more and more to business. Bruce asked dozens of questions, trying to catalogue all of the minute changes that had occurred inside of the company, its rivals, and the domestic and foreign markets during his absence. He had been slogging through backdated reports for three weeks trying to prepare, and now he saw that that work had barely given him the groundwork he needed. If he hadn't been able to get fast answers from Dick, he would have been half-lost in the sea of shifting trends and legal rulings he'd missed.

There was a coffee break at the one-hour mark, after which he felt his heart sink. Brown-suit – Caltrop-Weinden, he reminded himself – was back on his feet and shuffling a fistful of papers. '...How long are his spiels, usually?' he typed with a fair amount of dread.

'Do you want the truth, or would you prefer to not facepalm in disbelief?'

'I would like both.'

'We'll take another coffee break when he's worn himself out.'

His jaw nearly dropped. 'You're shitting me.'

'Trust me. His reports thus far at these meetings represent five hours of my life that I'd like back. There are a lot of bad movies in the world that those many minutes would have been better spent on.'

'...Don't take this the wrong way, Dick, but I think keeping this guy might be one of the few poor decisions you made in my stead.' He wasn't exaggerating. Half of the room looked like they were preparing for a nap, and a glance down the table suggested that at least two people were playing games on their tablets. Even Lucius appeared to be ready to subtly snooze through this set of numbers.

'I hate to say it, Bruce, but keeping marvin was one of my better decisions,' a defense came back. 'I have wanted to transfer him somewhere else – anywhere else – after every meeting, but I haven't done it for one simple reason; the guy's a wizard with numbers.'

'I would hope so. He's an accountant.'

'It's more than that. Look, I can't explain in text, it's too involved, but...he's extremely good at what he does, at least when he's alone with his spreadsheets and not trying to interact with other human beings.'

His eyes narrowed. As much as he wanted to know what made the boring figure who was currently droning on about cell revisions worthy of the position he'd been entrusted with, it would wait. Hearing the story wasn't likely to make the meeting go any faster, after all. As things were marvin had already repeated the same point from three different angles, and he was still on the first micro-department he had to cover. '...Can you at least tell me if Caltrop is really his last name?'

The rapidity with which Dick's fingers typed out a response told Bruce that it was a good story. 'He claims it was his mother's maiden name. His secretary, on the other hand, says he added that part to go with his character.'

'...His character?' That made no sense. If their conversation was to be taken as any indication the accountant was incredibly easy to trod on, and was therefore nothing like the fearsome foot-puncturers of old. 'He's nothing like a caltrop.'

'No, I mean his 'character'. Supposedly he's really big into tabletop gaming. Not Dungeons and Dragons, but something like that. I don't know, but the rumor is that he's pretty well-known in that scene, at least in Gotham. I guess he runs a lot of games, or whatever they call them. It makes sense with his numbers wizardry, but...changing your name to Caltrop seems like going a little too far.'

Thinking back, Bruce recalled that Tim had been into something like that at one time. He'd enjoyed it, or had at least professed to be enjoying it, but he'd certainly never been so involved that he'd considered fantasizing his name. 'If it makes him happy, I suppose.'

'Yeah. What would make everybody happy is if he'd just wrap it up.'

As if he'd overheard the request, marvin began to wind down. He reclaimed his seat a mere forty minutes after he'd left it, drawing an audible sigh of relief from several of his peers. Those who came after him were mercifully brief in their details, and by a quarter to four the meeting was done.

The billionaire grabbed his son's arm and artfully dodged out of the room while everyone else was still stretching and packing up. "...Jesus, I'd forgotten how bad those things are," he grumbled once they were in the elevator. "That man..."

"The sad thing is, he's not a bad guy," Dick shrugged. "He's annoying, he can't dress, and he's clearly got a man-crush on you, but he's an okay person when you talk to him one-on-one. He's still irritating then, but...not bad."

"...What do you mean he has a 'man-crush' on me?" Bruce frowned.

"I mean he has never sucked up to me, or Lucius, or anyone else the way he did to you. I don't know what's in your cologne today, but he clearly liked it."

"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that."

"While carefully filing it away in your head in case he ever goes berserk and brings a gun to work."

"Yes. That."

Dick laughed. "Do I know you, or do I know you?"

"You know me well enough that you succeeded in keeping me entertained for almost the entirety of a quarterly earnings meeting," he answered slowly. "And that's saying a lot."

"So...it wasn't as awful as usual? Because to be honest, I couldn't tell from your expression."

"Was my misery that obvious?"

"Your poker face may have betrayed you more than once or twice, yeah."

"Damn."

"To be fair, a couple of those times you were trying not to laugh."

"...That's true." The doors opened on the executive level, and they stepped out. Suddenly Bruce reached over and gripped Dick's elbow. "Wait."

"What's up?"

"Do you have anything left in your office that has to be done today?"

"Noooo," he drew out. "Why?"

"I was just thinking...today was the first time I can ever remember wanting to burst out laughing in a quarterly earnings meeting. That seems worthy of a celebration, so I thought we might grab dinner out."

"I'm in, but I'll only tell you about Marvin's numbers wizardry if we find the most back-alley, un-Bruce Wayne Italian place in the city and eat there."

"Alfred will kill us."

"It'll be worth it."

"...Yeah. You're right. Besides, you earned it." He tightened his fingers, then released him. "Go get your jacket."

"Yup!"

Bruce traded his tablet for his overcoat, then returned to the empty executive lobby to wait for Dick. An ordinary Wednesday, he mused, staring out the window at the grey Gotham afternoon. A faint smirk appeared on his lips. 'Ordinary.' Yeah, right.

His mouth softened into a smile a moment later as the younger man came into view in the window's reflection. He was bouncing, carrying his jacket over one shoulder while the least part of his inheritance shone on his wrist. But then, the billionaire considered as he watched him approach, I suppose that I always have preferred the extraordinary above everything else...

Author's Note: I think we all know or have known a Marvin Caltrop-Weinden. Not bad people, as Dick said, but boy are they annoying.

I've posted a picture of Dick's two-million-dollar watch on my blog for anyone who's interested. And yes, that really IS the price tag!