ʀᴇᴄʟᴜsᴇ! homesick

CH 19: Disney

Spring break arrives, and while the elite families of Gotham City travel abroad to satisfy their egos and wallets, the Wayne's do not.

There's no time for vacations, or long breaks as a vigilante. Villainy never stops, so why should we?

So, we train.

We prepare.

We fight.

The Bats train in the mornings, in the afternoons, and then we patrol in the night.

We've gotten into a rhythm, like a well oiled machine.

When we're not in costume, we're in the BatCave.

I practice flexibility with Dick, which eventually end up in flipping contests where we keep going up somebody gets dizzy and falls.

Tim teaches me how to use the Batcomputer, it isn't as complicated as I thought it was, it was just that I had simply never gotten around to learning how to do it.

I wasn't great with technology in the first place, and after Nadia died, I stayed away from it as much as I could.

Damian kept up his promise of teaching me knife throwing. He isn't a good teacher, there's some yelling and threats involved, and K yell right back when he goes too far. He isn't patient with me, and neither am I, but he tells me I wasn't as horrible as Tim. I can at least hit the targets. It gets better day by day.

(I learned that when Tim was trying to improve his accuracy with knife throwing, it slipped behind him, and stuck into one of the Batmobile's tires, deflating it. It was fun explaining that to Bruce.)

We spar with each other, and I'm evenly matched with Dick and Tim, so whoever wins on the day is based on who has the best luck or recovery from the day before.

Damian, however, is a little tougher for me to beat, especially since he likes to fight with weapons and I don't.

And after these long days, before patrol at night, we relax and mess around.

There's one day that we're distracted in the solemn silence that the BatCave offers. We're talking more than training, since Bruce hasn't gotten home yet.

The boys are still curious about my life in my universe, and I didn't like to tell them much. In fact, they didn't know anything at all.

So they made a bet, that if they beat me in sparring, I would tell them a little about my old home.

I stupidly agreed, even when I wasn't feeling well. If I was too sick to train, Alfred said I was too sick to go on patrol. So when I had felt one of my attacks was coming, and lied that I was going to use the restroom. I ran to my room, and cried and writhed in pain until it was over. They were getting worse, and I was getting lasting headaches after them, so ultimately I lost sparring to Dick and Tim.

And since I lost the bet, I had to tell them something about myself.

I start out with the most basics of basic. "I'm from San Francisco."

Tim makes a disgusted face, and then pulls it up on the Batcomputer. "Like this city?" He asks.

I look at it and it's all wrong. So, so very wrong. "No that city looks dull. The San Francisco I'm from is bright and full of neon lights. It's pretty modern compared to here with all the drones and hoverboards in the city. We're the new national testing site for commercial driverless cars. They tried to push for flying cars a couple years back, but there's too much pollution back home." The phrase leaves a weird taste on my tongue. Home.

Tim doesn't turn away from the Batcomputer, but begins asking, "How advanced are-" but is interrupted by the Golden Boy.

Dick is grinning, almost ready to explode. "So like San Fransokyo from Big Hero 6?" He interrupts.