thegoshdarn | (no subject)

(no subject)

It's not an interesting event. Boring as hell, actually, and Tim might have spent the last hour or so trying not to let her attention glaze over entirely, but being here is one of the occupational hazards of being Bruce's adopted child. At least she has years' worth of practice from being the Drake daughter to call upon in her hour of need. (Several hours, technically, and she might be counting down the minutes until she can reasonably leave.)

And then it's... It feels almost like someone smashed her arm with a sledgehammer. There's noise and sensation and pressure but nothing quite connects, even when she looks down at her arm and sees she's bleeding through her stupidly expensive dress. For a second, she thinks - should've worn the Robin suit, and she turns to Bruce, ready to say something stupid about the cost-benefit analysis of high fashion versus body armor if she could only get her voice to work.

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"Fine."

It's not like she has much choice, does she?

No, she doesn't. "You'd rather be shot again?"

"Those aren't the only two choices."

"Add the word risk to my previous statement and they damned well are."

"You could add the word risk to pretty much anything and make a true statement. That doesn't mean it's likely."

"And in some situations unlikely is good enough. It isn't in this one."

"Fine."

As a teenage girl, it is her right and duty to exercise the occasional huff and end of conversation that is not going anywhere she likes.

"Good." And as an adult he has the right and duty to pretend not to notice the huff. "Now that that's settled have you spoken to your friend about your homework yet?"

"No."

She's had other things on her mind, Bruce. "Since I'm apparently going to Switzerland, I don't think it matters anymore."

"You're going to Switzerland if I haven't ended this before you're ready for therapy, and you're not staying there forever. It matters, even if you intend to enroll there. Get the work."

"Fine. I'll talk to him."

Is this conversation over yet?

"Good. Thank you."

It is now.

So the thing about training your daughter in fighting crime is that (a) she develops a fairly high pain tolerance that means she can start going off the painkillers earlier than usual and (b) it is remarkably difficult to keep her on the sidelines when she doesn't want to be. She's already started sneaking into the Batcomputer's mainframe and is currently multitasking digging through information on various cases (including hers) and sorting through a couple albums of photographs she's taken over the years. It's amazing what you can do even with the use of only one arm.

Bruce is eerily quiet as he makes his way down to the cave and then directly to the computer and directly behind her. "What do you think you are doing?"

~~Passive-aggressively objecting to being locked out of the loop on her own case?~~

To her credit, she doesn't so much as flinch. "Spring cleaning?"

"I could be wrong, but I don't think that usually takes place on a computer."

Without missing a beat: "Your generation traditionally isn't quite as adapted to changing technological trends as mine."

"Except you appear to be spring cleaning my computer." At least in part, and no he wasn't missing the pissiness.

"I have things on it, too." She helpfully brings up one of the photographs, a view of the Manor in spring.

(It's good. Most of her shots are, despite being largely self-taught. Jack and Janet Drake were amenable enough to her hobby as long as it didn't require active participation, like supervising her so she didn't get that chemical burn on her wrist while learning to develop film.)

Edited 2015-07-03 15:10 (UTC)

It was a beautiful picture, really, and made Wayne Manor look more alive than it sometimes felt to Bruce. More home, slightly less museum.

"And you needed to get out of bed to do this why?"

Because it's so much easier to just get the case files from here than sneak into the system with her laptop.

"The bats missed me," she says promptly. That'll definitely work.

That was his assumption, yes.

"Well, in that case I'm sure I can arrange for some of them to hit you, but I really don't think they've actually noticed your absence and you really shouldn't be out of bed, yet.."

It's a good thing she's already copied a few pertinent files for herself, then.

She turns a wibble-face on him that is so theatrical that it's clear she's not even trying to look genuine. "Are you saying our colony of bats doesn't care about me?"

"What I am saying," he said, firmly, "is that if you don't get upstairs and back in bed, I may decide to hang you from the ceiling here for some real bonding time."

Blandly: "That doesn't seem very conducive to healing."