#verylate

Dick was swing his tail lazily, letting the soft veils of it brush the sand from his chest but making no move to raise from his place prone on the ground where Jason had wrestled him a few minutes ago. He had his arms crossed behind his head and a longing look in his eyes as he stared at the surface. Bruce didn't like it; they weren't deep enough to laze around like that and humans could still spot them with their machines. Dick’s fascination for the human realm, he liked even less, but he'd learnt that talking about it only got them into fights.

As long as Dick kept to the protection of the cave and hid as soon as the vibration of a shop broke the waters, Bruce could keep his temper in check.

Jason had moved on, from bothering his older brother to picking on his younger ones. The playfulness of it all showed in the wide swings of his dolphin tail, thick and heavy and always just barely missing the smaller ones’ heads.

Tim had mastered the art of ignoring him and just kept on scrubbing his tail with a bright pink anemone. He had already a pile of dead and chipped scales, in more orange and grey shades than the bright red and white of his healthy ones, neatly collected by his side. Bruce made a mental note to scatter them around in deeper waters where they couldn't be found and their size questioned.

Damian, on the other hand… “Jay, stop bothering your brother.”

Jason laughed as he lifted his tail once again, the powerful muscles in it strong enough to nullify Damian’s attempts at anchoring himself to a rock. “What are you talking about? He's loving it!”

“I'm most definitely not!” Lifted against his will, Damian moved on to try and squeeze the life out of his brother with all eight tentacles. Jason just laughed again as, short as they were, they failed to properly immobilize him. “Let me go, you idiotic mammal!”

“Why does it feel like a scene I've already seen? Oh wait. Because I did. Just yesterday. Don't you two ever get bored?” Tim shook his head, waiting no answer, and just turned to Duke. “Braid my hair?”

Duke sighed and huffed, but swam closer and, mindful of his spikes, settled himself behind his brother to pass a sea urchin through the pitchy strands.

“Loud ones,” Cassandra commented placidly. She'd been within the cave, rather than out with her brothers, as she stopped beside Bruce to point the two, indeed, loud ones to him. “Play fight, real care.”

Bruce settled himself more comfortably in the sand, hidden in the cave’s shade but still close enough to its mouth to keep a watchful eye on all his kids. “I am aware.”

“Too stubborn to just care.” Cass smiled teasingly. “Took from you.”

He swat slightly at the bouncy dome of her waist, but she just giggled and swam back deeper to bury herself under the sand, hiding the translucent frills of her tendrils so she wouldn’t accidentally prick anyone. A jellyfish in shape but never in heart, she’d learnt the care to protect her brothers from everyone and from herself. Done, she laid her cheek on her crossed arms after, and sighed herself into a nap.

This time, Bruce tentacle went to caress her raven hair gently.

He caught his sight with only the corner of his eye, but his instincts were honed and sharp and fast enough that he managed to catch Damian's soaring form with two tentacles before he could hit the rock wall of the cave. Heart beating fast in his chest, he turned, a scolding Jason!, ready on his lip just to die when he took in the scene outside.

Where everything had been idyllic and peaceful just two seconds ago, now the stillness spoke of freezing ice and cold shivers.

Jason had his back turned to the cave. He'd clearly only acted by instinct through the motions of throwing his brother to safety and now he stood, paralysed, with his eyes anchored to the reason of his protective act.

Tim and Duke had backed slowly toward the cave as per Dick's directive gestures, but now the oldest was frozen as well, caught between his own relative safety and the brother still too far from it. “Jay,” he called, so low, just a breath of a prayer, but too loud still in their graveyard of vibration and notes.

Jason flinched.

The thing turned and saw them.

Bruce propelled himself forward with a roar. He felt the shift of water and his kids’ cries, but there was also the powerful hit of Cassandra's muscles, the sound of her descending on her brothers, pinning them to the sand and the cave, behind her poison, and it was the most reassuring sound he could have hoped for in their situation.

He didn't need to lay forward much, it had been a very long time since his tentacles had been as short as Damian's. Now, they easily reached Dick as well as Jason, and they wrapped to their midsections to pull them in roughly. For once, neither cried childishness.

Instead, they cried his name in outrage when he tucked them beside his form and behind their sister's without ever turning from the approaching threat. Their complaints were thoroughly ignored.

He was approaching slowly, as if such a trick could be a worthy deception to hide the telltale colours of his thick tail. Black like the deepest ocean, white like the sun’s reflection, soft round lines to divide them and a pointed fin in his back.

The orca smiled when he met Bruce's eyes. “Hello,” he said.

Bruce attacked.

***

It was brutal, in the way only parents with their children at stake could fight. The orca was more powerful in any way and a natural predator of squids of all kinds, but Bruce had experience and a greater goal than simple feeding. Desperation filled his lungs, his gut, choked him up and then spread to his arms and tail to snap their hits with unnamable force. His brain’s thoughts all mixed and got lost into a whirlwind of protect protect protect.

He managed to grab one of the rocks Duke had been sharpening and slice a superficial cut into his enemy's side. The orca cried out and stumbled back with five hard strokes.

Bruce let him. Just because he was getting the upper hand now, it didn't mean he would win. His foe had been half-assing his attacks at best, and he'd still landed hits that would leave big bruises on Bruce's torso and tentacles. Not to mention, orcas hunted in packs; if more were to arrive now, his kids would be their first target and Bruce had swam too far from the cave to efficiently protect them.

“Please!” the orca yelled from a distance as he lifted his hands up, palms outward in a placating manner that worked none to ease the tension in the water. “I don't want to hurt you!”

His words, the blatant lies they spelled, didn't seem to have any effect on either of them because he stumbled backward still, into nothing but water, as he tried to get further away.

I don't want to hurt you, as if his kind wasn't known for one thing above all else.

“Please,” he repeated and Bruce spread his tentacles even more, made himself look bigger and more dangerous.

“Turn around and leave,” he growled. The sack of ink in his underbelly was twitching with the need to release, every pulse of his heart yelling that he returned to the kids, grabbed them, brought them to safety, somewhere far away as the blackness hid their escape.

He didn't want to relinquish his cave to this intruder, he hated the very thought of it, but this wasn’t a foe he knew he could face in the long run.

“Please,” again, like he didn't know what else to say. “I swear I'm just passing by!”

“Go as you came, then.” A twitch of the tentacle, the sharp green rock in it glinting dangerous.

“I can't,” the other stressed. His hands went to his hair instead and he sighed. “Listen, I swear, we're a small school. We're just looking for-”

A school, an whole school of them! Bruce's brain expanded with the awful pictures of what it'd be, an attack from a school of orcas. Those white bellies circling the cave at first, unerringly, terrifying, again and again until his kids broke and made a run from the protection of the small tunnels just to escape the suffocating terror and the madness it gave birth to. And then, in an instant too fast for him to prevent it, his children torn to shreds, the blood tinting the waters, the screams, gods, the screams.

Bruce almost cut himself on the shard, holding it too tight.

“Please,” once more, again, what of it? Would his kind pay any ear to his own plead were their jaws already clenched on the kids’ bodies, or would they just chomp down harder? Killer, killer, killer! “It's just me and my kits. They need somewhere safe to rest and we've been swimming for too long already.” A flash of a look toward the cave, maybe not even intentional but enough to make Bruce hunch even more. “We won't even get close to your den! We'll find somewhere else, just… This is the first safe area we pass through since the last full moon, almost an whole cycle ago, and one of my kits got hurt three nights ago. We need to stop for a while. We'll be leaving as soon as he's better, I promise!”

Bruce didn't relax, nor he lowered his makeshift weapon. He stood still and stared at the orca with glaring eyes as he let the words play in his mind, looking for the cracks of a lie.

He found none, but he didn't trust it to be a real perception and not the fault of his memories overlapping the stranger's story.

Memories of Dick, so small and scared, hugging his middle and asking incessantly about Jason. Memories of Jason, he didn't like to dwell on. They were all just flashes of red and bite marks, anyway, not much flesh to speak of. He'd met all his kids during his trips away from the cave, but only during one he was attacked, and Jason paid the high price. Until they'd made it back to the cave, to Alfred’s careful cares, he hadn't known whether he'd still have two hatchlings by the next hour.

The despair in the orca’s eyes was familiar, and one that, he told himself, was difficult to replicate dishonestly.

“There is a rocky hill north of the cave. You will stay there, or further, and never come any closer.”

“We won't!”

Bruce's eyes closed to slits. “And if you hurt any of my-”

“We don't do that,” he interrupted. Rather than supplicating, his voice sounded harsh for once, defensive.

“Good, we won't have any problems then.” Somehow, Bruce didn't believe it. “Your stay is only temporary, remember.”

The orca look at him carefully, studying. “Of course.”

Bruce didn't offer anything else. He snapped his tentacles, let his muscles clench and release, and when he heard the other cough, when the sight turned black all over them, he finally dared to turn his back to the orca and swim rapidly back to the cave, leaving an ink numb behind himself.

He didn't feel any safer.

***

“Is this really a good idea?”

“No.”

“Reassuring.” Bruce knew Dick was staring at him, deeply unimpressed, but he refused to engage him any further.

The orca had left in the direction it had come from almost two hours ago. He was bound to return, and then Bruce would know whether he'd let his own personal demon sentence all his kids to death.

(Of course, he'd not blindly trusted the man. He'd woken up Alfred as soon as he'd been back, and they'd worked on pulling the rocks from one of the hidden tunnels that connected their main cave to an opening behind the riff two miles south. It was a long swim in a very small space, one that only his kids could travel easily and Alfred with some troubles. Bruce wouldn't be able to, but Bruce wouldn't take it anyway. If the orcas attacked, he'd fight, stay behind to cover his family's escape. And if the man brought back a school, he wouldn't be able to get to the tunnel anyway.

Of course, none of his hatchlings were happy with the plan.)

He was guarding the entrance, tentacles hooked at rocks to make himself cover the whole mouth of the cave, and the kids were mumbling and complaining behind him, but none truly.

He could catch a glimpse through the small spaces, like peeking through his fingers, Dick holding Damian tight and Cassandra with firm hands on Jason’s and Duke’s arms, holding them from running out. Tim was half hidden behind Alfred's crab legs and had been eerily silent since Bruce's return.

He didn't much peek, though. Last time he lost sight of his surroundings to indulge in watching his kids, an orca made it close enough to kill them all. Just because he didn't, Bruce shouldn't get complacent.

The orca appeared shortly after. Bruce saw it arrive from west with another orca, a bit smaller, half swung against his side and swimming painstakingly slowly. A third one, almost a fourth of the other two in size, followed swimming in fast circles around them, forward and backward, restless in either excitement or nerves. They took the side of the hill Bruce had pointed out to them, and made their way to the top where they would find a small flat clearance to rest on.

Bruce had just begun to relax a bit at the displayed truth in the orca’s words, two kids and one hurt, when the smallest one launched into a dive along the side of the hill, fast, headed toward the cave itself.

From high came a shout, but Bruce found himself losing the words of it. His senses had trained on the incoming threat and his muscles had coiled, ready to spring into action.

“Hello! I'm Jon!” yelled the boy before he'd even reached them. He stopped barely a stroke from Bruce and smiled wide, so young and bright eyed. His eyes were sharp rectangles of white menace. “Nice to meet you!”

Bruce blinked and the world shifted back into focus.

Diving after his kid, the adult orca was calling him, “Jon!”, with panic clear in his voice. The kid was ignoring him, too busy staring instead.

“You're huge!” he exclaimed, shameless, just as his father reached the bottom of the hill and stopped, lost and afraid. He was looking anxiously at the small distance between his kid and the creature who'd attacked him just earlier and Bruce could guess the terror of making a wrong move knowing he wouldn't be fast enough to reach the kid first.

Jon was too busy admiring to bother with his father. “I'd never seen someone with eight tails before!”

“How dare, those are not tails!”

Bruce shivered. Damian's voice too close and Dick's frantic surprise from inside painted a picture he was too scared of contemplating, but what he wanted clearly didn't matter as his youngest decided to appear in his peripheral vision. He absentmindedly wondered where he'd sneaked out of.

Damian was hanging with three tentacles firmly wrapped around a rock and two others snapping threateningly in the direction of the orca. “These are tentacles! Have you never met an octopus before?!”

Jon shrugged. “I met a starfish once but she didn't want to talk to me.”

Someone muttered, “oh, Kraken” and Bruce looked up to see that the brother had, much to the father’s displease, made his way down as well. This close, the wound deep into his side was impossible not to see, as was the way the flesh around it had started a putrid attempt at healing. A deemed failure. The clear imprint of an harpoon.

“Jon,” the father called again. “Come here. Please.”

Jon turned to him. Bruce felt a reproach stuck in his throat, don't give your back to a threat like this!, and struggled to swallow it back down. By the orca’s face, he'd been just as terrified of the mistake. “But dad…!”

“Now, Jonathan.”

The name must have done the trick, because the kid’s shoulders dropped. Dejected, he sent Bruce and Damian one sad look from above his shoulder, “Bye Mr Octopus, Little Octopus.”

“My name’s Damian!” his kid shrilled before Bruce could grab him and drag him under his arm, hold just tight enough to warn about the incoming lecture. Damian went quiet.

The orca stared at Bruce even once he had his kid firmly under his palms. The doubt etched in his face was blatant, and Bruce found himself sending a curt nod his way. Immediately, the man collected both children and began swimming back to the top of the hill again.

Bruce watched them.

“Well,” Jason's voice piped from inside. “That was fun. Terrifying, but also fun.”

“It most definitely wasn't!” Duke yelled back and the unequivocal sound of a fight broke out just after.

Bruce waited for the orcas to be back to their camp and down resting to turn to back to his cave and break them apart.

***

It was barely dawn when the sound of moving water drew Bruce to the entrance of the cave. It didn't wake him up because he hadn't slept, but he moved quietly trying not to rise any of the kids.

Outside, Jon was swinging his tail excitedly from side to side and torching his hands in front of his stomach. “Good morning, Mister Octopus. I hope I'm not bothering you?”

There weren't many ways to answer that question in such context. Bruce found himself playing and replaying it in his brain until it collapsed trying to give it a sense, and then saying, “You aren't.”

Jon’s face lit up with the widest smile. “I'm glad! Dad told me not to bother you, but I just wanted to ask if I could play with Damian? I haven't seen someone my age in soooo loooong!” The long drawn words came accompanied by a desperate sigh which forced Bruce to exert every ounce of his self control not to smile. “Would that be okay?”

During the fight the day before, Bruce must have hit his head heavy because he didn't downright refuse. Instead, he found himself saying, “You can't bite him.”

Jon’s face twisted in disgust. “That's not nice! Of course I wouldn't bite him!”

Of course, he said. Like it was just basic knowledge.

“I see,” Bruce said. He couldn't let a yes out of his lips so, instead, he replied, “You should ask your father too.”

This time, Jon looked away. “Dad's weird about letting us meet new people,” he admitted. “Since Kon got hurt, he's been even weirder.”

Bruce could guess Kon was the brother. “What happened to him?”

Jon shrugged again, this time stiffer. “A friend of dad got mad. I don't-” His face scrunched in confusion, his bottom lip quivered. “I thought he was dad's friend? But he made us all swim for so long and then dad told him we had to rest and he got mad and he had the harpoon and, I dunno, he'd been mean since mom left the school. He hurt Kon and dad hurt him back and the school said we had to go too.”

A frown. The discrepancy jumped out, too big to ignore. “Your school sent you away? Where are you going now?”

Like a twirl, Jon was smiling again suddenly. “To mom! When she left the school, long before us, she told dad we had to stay because it was safer. She didn't want to stay after her and dad stopped being mates, but dad says we can reach her and she'll help us find a new school! And maybe there will be more kids there! I can't wait!”

There was a dimple in the kid’s cheek, and an endless amount of life in his eyes. The words he spoke painted a fairytale in the style of old, where princesses died gruesome deaths or suffered through unspeakable pain just for someone to lay a thin veil over the ugly and retell their stories as wondrous happenings full of niceties. Bruce tried to imagine what it would have taken the orca’s father to try and keep the ugly, the cruel, away from this child so well that he could still this innocently ask for someone to play with him.

He thought of the other brother, the one with an harpoon whole in his side who wasn’t so lucky, whom no words could ever spare from the truth.

“Damian is still sleeping,” he said. “When he wakes up, you can ask him.”

One would think he had been given the blessing to ask to be his son’s mate for life. Jon was still thanking him as he scurried back to his family, and Bruce finally started to think truly of what he’d done.

Shit.

“I’ve seen only a handful injuries like that, in my long life.” Bruce didn’t startle, because Bruce knew the darkness and he never startled, but he did send Alfred a frowning look as the man emerged from the cave, legs tapping lightly on the sand. “I might actually know how to work with it, but I’d have to take a closer look.”

“Don’t push your luck, Alfred.”

“Very well.”

***

The father had a pale expression on his face as he slowly escorted his son down the hill. By the time they reached the cave, he seemed to be thinking Jon was to be sacrificed to the Kraken or something equally brutish and horrifying, no matter that the kid wouldn’t stop excitedly swinging from side to side.

Damian observed the whole spectacle with a frown on his face.

Duke elbowed him in the side. “Dude, stop glaring at him. He could eat you, if he wanted.”

“Nobody is eating anybody,” Bruce interjected, well aware of the fight waiting to start. At the same time, the orca hurried to yell, rather loudly, “We don’t eat merfolks!”

Bruce stared at him, blinked once then twice, but it was Jason who scoffed his thoughts into words. “And you didn’t think of mentioning this, like, yesterday?!”

The orca pulled his lips in a thin line and Bruce could read the answer as well as if he’d spoken it out loud, you attacked me before I could, but the fact that he didn’t speak it told more about the delicate situation they were in than anything else. An orca as big as him could have taken Bruce, sooner or later, and Alfred was old and the kids were young; by all means, the advantage should be his. But he had an hurt kid, a small one, and he looked too tired to do anything more than asking please just another time.

“Damian,” he said instead, and then didn’t elaborate because he had no idea what to say.

Luckily, his son seemed to have his own agenda for the day, for he’d already climbed the side of the cave and propelled himself to land in front of Jon, tentacles spread wide to look threatening.

Jon beamed. “That’s so cool! Can you hold things with those?! Like with hands?!”

Damian harrumphed, but started offering answers and then demonstrations. Soon enough, the instinct to bother him overcame Jason’s residual fear from the day before and he joined the kids to start embarrassing Damian as possible. Duke eventually stepped in to avoid a murder, and Dick all but dragged Tim out of the cave as well.

Alfred made his way out of the cave just to glare at Bruce. Damn old man.

“Your other son,” he forced himself to say just to escape the man’s reproach. The orca jerked, eyes going wide. It occurred to his mind that seeing Damian demonstrate how he could pick up rocks after Bruce had wounded him in that very same way so shortly ago must be playing bad tricks with his head. “Bring him here, and maybe we can help him.”

There was a fight occurring in those blue eyes, one that wedged bets so high they scraped the surface of the sea and dried out in the scorching sun. The parts fought relentlessly, winds during a storm and thunders roaring loud, but in the end it was a blotch of darkness, just beside the iris, that grew and encompassed everything else.

Three days ago, the kid had been wounded. How much longer could he last?

One last lingering look at his kid, and then the orca was floating upward again, toward the hill. Bruce watched him go.

“It would be polite,-” Alfred mentioned, in the offhanded tone he used for his lectures when the kids were in hearing shot, “-to ask our guests for their names, eventually.”

“They’re not guests,” Bruce shot back. “And they’re not staying.”

Alfred didn’t even blink. “As you say, sir.”

***

The orca's name was Clark. Bruce knew not because he asked, but because Alfred bypassed him by introducing himself as soon as father and injured son had reached the cave.

Bringing Kon down from the hill had taken much longer than it had the day before. Bruce had watched the thin tendrils of blood curling in the water, disappearing fast, and had forcibly unclenched his fists.

Alfred had set to work immediately after. Bruce stood beside, on call, but only because Cassandra had slipped out of her cave and was now floating around, tendrils carefully kept at distance from everyone, to Jon’s enjoyment.

“You look like a ballerina!” the boy had exclaimed, and Dick had had to grab him before he got too close and hurt himself.

She’d tilted her head to a side and tested the word on her lips, “ballerina”, as Jon explained to her of his mother’s human findings, her researches, her excursions to the surface. “It’s a dancer!” Jon had told her. “They have wide gowns at their waist like your dome and they spin on the tips of their feet and make music.”

As Alfred worked on sewing the cleaned wound back together, painful inch after painful inch, layers and slobs of different algae and crushed stones applied to curb the infection, Bruce watched his daughter twirl around and arrange her arms to Jon’s requests, the rest of the boys cheering loudly. Ballerina seemed to be a new word that would stick around.

Dick was sending occasional looks their way, and Bruce could guess the reason, which was why he was stubbornly pretending not to notice.

Kon was still surprisingly healthy, for someone who'd been bleeding from his side for four days. He was rather coherent and lucid, though clearly in great pain. The wound hadn't managed to hit any vital artery but it had lacerated some muscle tissue and some shards had anchored in. It was a slow process of pulling and covering with rows and rows of algae, with a good share of hoping for the best, but Alfred knew his way around injuries and executed everything with unshakable posse. After an interminable amount of time that somehow didn't reach lunch hour the boy was laid down to rest. Sweaty and exhausted, he fell asleep in half a second.

Clark brushed the hair out of his forehead with his fingertips and spent a moment just staring at him, drinking in the sight of the covered side no longer exposed. Then, he looked at Bruce.

They stared at each others as he opened and closed his mouth again, thinking and overthinking his own words until he gave up on them. Kon sighed deeply in his sleep and Clark's hand went to his shoulder, instinctively.

Bruce was looking at the boy's face when he heard, “Thank you.”

A small ripple of guilt echoed in his ribcage. He'd acted in defence of his children, and he'd do it again even if the situation were to replay in the very same way. He'd had enemies come too close once and he was never going to take the risk again. That said, he could see that Clark had acted rather similarly, under probably the same instincts, and that he could recognise and respect.

It didn't mean he believed the orca to be an innocuous new friend.

“You will leave when he's recovered,” he repeated. Then, with a frown, “Stay out of my cave.”

Clark blinked, confused, but Bruce didn't stay any longer. He heard the sigh Alfred addressed at his back, but he didn't turn.

His cave was dark and cool and welcoming, and he dragged himself to a corner to recover some rest after his sleepless night. An ear still open to the voices of his kids, ready to act.

***

Jon and Damian fell asleep side by side in the crook of Tim’s tail. Kon slept away on the soft sand in front of the cave. Clark’s head occasionally dropped, and he immediately jerked back awake every time, eyes full of fear and head turning to look for an upcoming threat. The kids got some rest for hours, the fathers not so much.

Two days later, the orcas resumed their trip. Jon sworn and promised to send messages via some fishes of his knowledge and Damian pretended not to care. Kon smiled at Tim as he carefully started swimming away.

Clark looked at Bruce. “I-” and he stopped, as he often did, because apparently Bruce’s face robbed him of all capability of speaking, reduced him to a mere aquatic mammal rather than a merfolk. It happened rather often. “Thank you. It doesn’t feel enough for the help you gave us, but I had to say it.”

Bruce had gotten glimpses and details of what had happened by Jon’s naive honesty, his words all but minced and his truths shared with the same easiness as his smiles.

That Clark was built and strong even by his kind’s standard wasn’t hard to tell. His tail was long and ponderous, his chest wide and his arms thick with muscles; he was a threatening sight until you got to meet him, indeed. That he turned out to be a meek man who just wanted to protect his family was a treat only those who dared to get close enough could discover.

The thing with being strong and meek was that it was rarely believed by those who longed to be strong because they were all but meek. So Clark’s disinterest in power had been regarded with suspect by the leader of their school and the situation had predictably rapidly worsened after Lois, his previous mate, had left to pursue knowledge of humans. Believing that the wish for another mate would turn into a thirst for the position of alpha, the current leader, Lex, had grown less and less tolerant of Clark’s presence until the first fight over how to conduct the school had broken out and brought it all to an exaggerated end.

Clark could have taken over easily, Bruce held no doubt of it, but he’d preferred leaving, the exile forced upon him accepted as if truly deserved, and maybe most of the reason was getting Jon and Kon away from the environment before they got even more hurt. It was a dumb choice to give up on everything because of one person’s envy and it was truly only Clark’s race and strength that had guaranteed him not to get killed, out on his own without a school. Still, there were many sharks that would have jumped at the chance to take down such a big predator, for bragging rights if nothing else.

“Don’t bother coming back,” he said. Dick groaned behind him.

Clark’s mouth twitched in the dare of a ghostly smile, just enough to make Bruce frown in displease, but he immediately nodded. “Of course. Take care of yourself and yours, B.”

You as well, he didn’t say. Clark was already doing so clearly, it would have been redundant to. As a matter of fact, it already was redundant to tell Bruce so.

They left as fast as they’d showed up in their lives.

Duke pouted. “They were fun to hang out with.”

Bruce ignored him. “We’re going out in deep water to fish for everyone,” he said instead. “Duke, Jason and Tim, with me. Cass and Dick, I leave you the cave. Damian, keep an eye on them.”

It was so much easier to deal with his youngest when he believed Bruce agreed that he was superior to his brothers. The small octopus nodded seriously and took position dangling from the top of the cave’s entrance, a tiny sentinel with a fierce frown. Cass rolled his eyes where he couldn’t see her.

Dick brushed his tail against one of Bruce’s tentacles. “Watch out, guys.”

Bruce didn’t answer to that either. He was starting to grow tired of redundancies.

***

Dick disappeared two weeks later. Bruce would have gotten more scared if there hadn’t been signs of it all over the place for days before.

Humans, Bruce knew as trouble, threats, danger masked as a small smiling thing that looked like them only in their upper half, smelled of plastic and smoke most of the time and walked on what looked like a tail split in two. He hated them for all the times he’d had to cover his face, for all the mad runs he’d had to do from them, for all the plastic things he’d had to disentangle his kids from. He hated them for the betrayal that had costed him his gold. The picture of the harpoon wound etched into Kon’s side was still a vivid picture in his head.

Dick, though, never shared his view. He’d been vividly curious of all human things and he’d started a small collection in one of the dead-ends of the cave, regardless of how many times Bruce told him they were dangerous and killers and all else.

The phantom presence of Lois in those few days with the orcas had been a too tempting push, of course. It had started with questions, then devolved into fights and finally, expectably, into Dick leaving.

Bruce had woken up one morning to Jason’s desperate eyes. “He did it, B,” he’d said, lowly. “I’m sorry. I tried to tell him not to.”

But you didn’t stop him, he almost said, but it would have been unbearably cruel. Jason had admired Dick every day of their shared life, even back when Dick was young and insecure and jealous to a fault and constantly shunned him away. They weren’t truly made to fight, those two of his kids; they’d built a relationship over the regret and guilt and fear and echo of Jason’s screams as that crazy moray shook him and bit him and laughed while doing so.

“He will return if he wants to,” he said instead, because of this he was sure. He didn’t say Dick would probably return just because he missed his brothers as well, though he truly believed that, because it would have been too cruel a disappointment if he didn’t come back.

The orcas had been looking for Lois. His son was following their trails. If anything, Bruce could think of Clark’s bulk between Dick and the humans and it allowed him a couple hours of sleep per night, though never much longer.

Cass dragged her fingertips on the underside of his eyes, one day many moons after the event. “Too sad,” she said. “Can’t cry.”

“I’m just tired,” he countered, and she snapped one of her tendrils just a tad too close to the skin of his tail.

Her frown was accusing, but her mouth stayed closed. Bruce was good at ignoring messages that weren’t made real by being spoken out loud in the water between them. The unsaid could bounce against the walls of the cave all it wanted for what he cared, as long as it didn’t damage the structure.

Some days, it felt like it could.

It was four whole moons and half a fifth when a terrified fish stopped by their cave. With bubbles and fleshes of scales, it left them a large algae leaf with careful words carved in the surface, not cut through.

Dick is here, it said. We’ll look after him until he decides to come back. Clark.

Bruce placed the leaf under a rock to prevent it from being swept away from the currents, still it rot and wasted away before more news of his son came by.

***

Tim and Jason had a relationship based on Tim’s patience and Jason’s desire to test it. It could make for some very amusing instances as well as some truly testing times.

It was more of the first the next time Dick’s news arrived.

Tim was braiding pearls in his hair, testing designs and intricacies, and Jason would pick from his mound until Tim found himself without any and being only half-way done. With his hands holding strands in place, he employed Damian’s help to recover the missing pearls by inventing some story about Jason stealing his toy.

Bruce had already decided to postpone his intervention to after the retrieval of Tim’s pearls when the familiar laughter bounced all over the rocks. “Nice to see some things just never change.”

Bruce’s head turned in a snap and truly enough there he was, his son, his kid, looking all but one.

Dick had cut his hair, it was the first thing that came to mind. Rather than long at the waist or lower, as all his siblings and his father, he’d chopped his the way most orcas did, close to the temples. Something shine at his earlobes, human written all over the craft too painfully small and definite not to be recognisable. He had more jewels at his arms and neck and a golden ring at the end of his tail as well.

He looked good, mature.

Bruce’s tentacles weren’t fast enough. Damian beat him and launched himself at his brother, closely followed by the rest of his siblings, and Bruce resigned himself to wait for last.

Jason hit his brother on the head, too hard for a joke but not enough for a real fight, and Cassandra bounced her dome against his hip.

Bruce’s eyes roamed past him and fell on blushing skin and averted eyes. Curiously enough, he almost managed to ignore the black and white tail lazily dangling from side to side.

Clark kept himself safely out of the cave and bit his lip when he realised Bruce was staring. “I tried to tell him to come back, but he’s really stubborn.”

That, Dick was. “Where are yours?”

“With Lois,” Clark shrugged. “She’s made up some sort of small cult of her own of various merfolks interested in discovering more about humans. They’re on a break between explorations so she wanted to spend some time with Kon and Jon.”

Humans. Bruce fought against the shiver down his spine, the clenching of his teeth, the spasms in his tentacles to wrap around his son, pull him close and never let him go again. Fucking humans.

Distance and a handful of messages seemed to have made Clark more at ease with crossing Bruce’s boundaries, because he swam closer, close enough that he was halfway into the cave and its shade was obscuring his face. His eyes shone, but so did his teeth when he opened his mouth to speak. “I’ve been watching over him, Bruce. I promise you, he’s safe with me.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“Well, technically, neither can you.”

Rage surged in his chest, fuelled by roaring I know’s and bursts of helplessness, but before he could reply a set of arms wrapped neatly around his chest. “You’re not bulling Clark, are you, B?” Dick asked. “I’d be truly disappointed if that were the case.”

Bruce grunted. “Get in line.” He could almost feel Alfred’s head shake.

It didn’t matter for long, truly. Dick’s warmth passing over to him melt the cold at the mouth of his stomach and Bruce found himself turning his back to the orca just to better embrace his son.

Dick giggled in his shoulder. “I missed you too.”

***

A human lover. Dick had a human lover. Whatever good emotion Bruce could have had for the orca disappeared the moment Dick recounted of bloody Barbara.

“B, you have to believe me,” his son plead, eyes wide and open and trusting and Bruce hated them, hated how weak he was to their sight. “She’s not like all the humans that ever hurt you.”

What did Dick knew about it? What did he knew of Vicki’s promise of health and food and medical help, of Harvey’s excited eyes and touches? What did he knew of a glass box thrice his length in all sides, opened to peering eyes, lights like thunderbolts hitting his eyes at all times, hours strapped on the dry with needles in his arms? He’d never slammed himself against a cage so hard he blacked-out, never starved himself to almost death out of hatred, never traded anything for a chance at the very same freedom he was putting now at risk just for, what, knees and fucking toes?!

Dick knew nothing of humans and their deceits. Bruce had made sure to shelter him from all that horror. And what for?

He wanted to yell, scream every hour of torture he could still feel on his skin all on his son’s face just to see it twist, pale, go green, shutter, fill up with pain and pity and fear because that was what humans should have made him feel. Fucking fear, not fucking love.

“B?”

He swam out instead. His tentacles twisted and twitched, restless, and Bruce bit his tongue over the sight of them.

He hadn’t cared, still didn’t, not really, for so long and yet now he found himself twisted with longing, melancholia etched in his every breath. He thought of the way his golden skin would lit up under the sun rays, the way the bones made a crest up his back, the twirl at his end. He would accept Zatanna’s trade a thousand times if he were offered the very same deal again, anything to get out of that place, so missing the form he used to have before she brought him away and changed him, took his colour as payment for her service, didn’t make sense.

He’d rather be a living octopus than a dead seahorse, anyway.

“You know, Lois found something.” When he turned, Clark looked much like he did the first time they met: suspiciously friendly, and with his hands raised in surrender. “We didn’t tell Dick. I wanted to talk about it to you, first.” A grimace. “I’d hoped to do it before Barbara came up, actually. Sorry about that.”

“You said—,” Bruce hated his voice, the way it sounded, the rawness of it, “—that you were looking out for him.”

Clark looked at him carefully. “Yes.”

“This is not looking out for him.”

“This is not history repeating itself,” Clark replied. “Barbara is Lois’ source. They met over a year ago and she’s kept the secret about us ever since. She’s not like the Vale&Dent Co.”

Bruce stilled, couldn’t help it. Clark’s eyes went sad and how dared he?! “You don’t know anything.”

“I know what Barbara based her researches off of. That twenty five years ago there had been clamour for the opening of a new tank in Gotham’s Aquarius, that those two researchers had bragged about catching an half-seahorse merman, had it tamed and trained even. That they spent months studying him and then just before opening night a thunder coincidentally struck the whole structure and set fire to the lab the creature was allegedly in. Everything sunk into the bay and no amount of diving excursions managed to find a single trace of it. Eventually, it was assumed to be all a big scam and Vale and Dent were arrested for fraud.”

Bruce allowed himself a few seconds to savour the last words, the justice in them. Zatanna had promised him they would pay if he did the same, but he’d never dared swim close enough to the sinking site to find anything out. Gotham had been his home when he was young, he’d been drawn to it like moth to a flame, and he’d been severely punished for his recklessness.

He wouldn’t let Dick suffer the same.

“What of this was supposed to reassure me?” he asked, dry, and Clark lowered his arms with a sigh.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe that Barbara recovered a piece of hardware miraculously stuck in a air-bubble under some debris this whole time? That she got a piece of security feed restored well enough to see a young girl sneak in and talk with the sea-horse?” Now, Clark’s eyes were piercing, searching. “I saw the video. You were— stunning, truly.” Immediately, he blushed. “I mean, no, of course you looked awful and hurt, I didn’t mean— I just—”

“My tail was stunning, yes,” Bruce scoffed. “Even poorly dying, it was a sight to behold. You think I haven’t heard it all before, Clark?”

“I’m sure you have.” Quiet, apologetic, but Bruce didn’t want Clark’s apologies.

“Then stop it. How much of the feed have you seen?”

“You bit your finger and let some blood in the water. She called it to a piece of paper in her hands and it went red. Immediately after, you started contorting in pain.”

“Gruesome to see, I’m sure.” How odd, to talk about that moment, the worst pain he’d ever felt, like some horror tale.

Clark didn’t hesitate. “Very. I didn’t watch it ‘till the end, I admit, it was too much for me.” Earnest, he swam closer yet. “I hadn’t recognised you, before that moment. You were so young in those images and with an whole different tail… But after it was over, I could tell it was you. The feed ends just after, by the way. When the thunder hits.”

Bruce nodded. “Dick will not—”

“Barbara doesn’t want that for him,” Clark granted, voice solemn. “She’s been rather adamant that he didn’t tell her where his family lived without your permission. I told her who you were, even if we decided not to tell Dick. She understands, Bruce, and if you don’t want to have anything to do with her, she won’t insist. Kraken, she’d probably get Dick to stop insisting. That’s just how close they are.”

“I don’t want them to be close.”

“I know.” And, by Poseidon, it truly felt like Clark got it, like he understood and even shared to a point, like it was taking him all his heart not to just tell Bruce he was right and help him drag Dick away to safety.

But he wasn’t going to do it, it was written all over his face. The only reason he’d followed Bruce was to try and persuade him to Dick’s side. “You don’t know what you’re asking me to—”

“I don’t.”

“If anything happens to him—”

“I get it.”

“Cut it out!”

“Okay.” Clark was so close now, his last word curled the water between them and sent it caressing Bruce’s face. “Okay.”

And Bruce, oh. Bruce had been alone for so long.

He didn’t let himself think. He twisted his hand in Clark’s hair and pulled him in a kiss.

***

Bruce couldn’t tell much about Barbara the first time Dick brought her to him because she was decked all over in black plastic and breathing from some tanks on her back. Sure, they could have met her on the surface, but that had been a point he’d refused to concede over, and which Dick still resented him for.

The human swam painstakingly slow and her eyes through the mask never left Bruce until she was firmly in front of him. Dick, a hand on her back and tail nervously twitching, kept looking between the two of them. “B?”

Barbara had a black rectangle in her hands. She touched it and it lit up and Bruce almost shoved her right then; only Clark’s hand on his wrist stopped him. When she turned it over, he could see words written on it.

Dick wouldn’t be able to read them, Clark neither. Lois could have, maybe, but she was too far away. Bruce, on the other hand, had desperately learnt the human’s language first to please his new friends, then hoping to find an escape, anything, on the many documents left open by his tank.

I cannot apologise enough for what they did to you, the square said. I know you don’t trust me, I wouldn’t either. I just hope you’ll allow me the time to prove you I would never do anything to put Dick at risk.

When she was sure he’d read, she tapped the thing and the words disappeared. Instead, rows of letters showed up and she offered them to him. An answer that nobody but her could understand.

Bruce typed. You won’t manage.

I’m stubborn.

He didn’t bother with an answer.

Dick’s eyes ran frantically from one to the other until Barbara pulled him slightly by the ear to make him stop. He pouted at her, but then went on to scrub his face against her mask. From the shaking of her frame, she was laughing at the gesture.

Bruce turned back and slipped into his cave. None of the other kids followed him, much more taken with the human than with safety, and that didn’t surprise him as much as when he realised Clark actually chased him.

“I know you don’t like me here, I’ll leave, I just wanted to give you this.” As Bruce settled into the sand, Clark stopped carefully by his side. Hesitant, or maybe just cautious, he put something down in front of him. “It’s dumb, it just reminded me of our first meeting.”

With a last awkward smile, Clark made honest to his words and left as quietly as he came, leaving him stranded to watch, eerily still, the stone the orca just gave him.

It was green and sharp, sure, like the one Bruce had used to attack him that first day. It took much care to pick it up without cutting his skin on the edges of it.

Bruce wondered, abashed, if Clark had any idea of what he’d just done.

***

Clark had absolutely zero idea of what he was doing. Bruce realised it the next time he came over with Barbara and Dick and brought a second stone.

He should have told him, but he didn’t.

Two stones turned to three, turned to four, turned to a small mound Bruce collected into a hole at the back of the cave that he constantly tried to talk himself into throwing away. It never worked and the small mound grew until, unavoidably, someone found.

That someone just had to be Damian.

“Father!” he came barrelling into Bruce’s stomach, yelling in an high pitch that made Jason laugh and Tim grimace. “I demand to know the name of the arrogant who dares presuming they can court you!”

“Woah, woah, woah! What’s this all about?!”

“Someone’s courting B? Since when?”

“Oh, fucking whale, it’s Clark, isn’t it?” Tim groaned into the palm of his hands. “It’s definitely Clark, I can’t believe it!”

Bruce clenched his teeth. “I’m not being courted.”

“Absurdities!” Damian retorted and there, in front of everyone, he opened his hand to show a few of Bruce’s prized gifts. “I found the tokens he sent you! It’s disgraceful, father; they’re all so sharp and unrefined!”

“He brought you stones?!” Jason’s gleeful voice earned him a glare. “Come on, B! How’s that not courting?! Everybody knows gifting pebbles to an octopus is a mating ritual!”

Stiffly, Bruce picked the stones from Damian’s hand, and swam back to their hiding place ignoring his youngest’s protests. “Everybody except Clark, apparently.”

For a moment, he was blessed with silence and he spent it carefully rearranging the pebbles into a mound. A dumb action, he was well aware of; the dumb delusion of a lonely creature, desperate to believe his own lie that his feelings were reciprocated, rearranging the clues so to have the mystery match his desired solution. How disgraceful, indeed.

“B.” He didn’t turn, but neither he needed to. Duke’s hand on his shoulder was tentative but warm. “Want us to have a talk with him?”

That would only make it all more pathetic, actually.

Instead of answering, he turned and pressed a kiss to his son’s forehead. “Let an old man make a fool of himself,” he said, and he didn’t mean Clark but his sons didn’t need to know. He was under no assumption that Cassandra had been fooled by his act, at all.

Duke looked doubtful, but nodded.

***

Bruce was a damn fool. Trusting his children, how could he have been so naive?

He glared daggers in Jason’s direction, but the fool had been smart and hid somewhere in the open sea after setting his older brother on task so that now Dick was hurriedly explaining something to Clark, arms flailing. Small matter, Bruce would get his revenge when the night came, and tickle the little shit until he had no breath left to spill his secrets to anybody.

Clark tilted his head to a side and replied something, placidly. Dick seemed to falter. After a few more words, Bruce frowned as his son took to swimming away, chasing after his brothers, while Clark approached the cave.

When he stopped in front of Bruce, he had a stone in his palm once again and he was smiling.

He said, “I’m not that ignorant about octopi, you know.”

Bruce burned, chest exploding and expanding, and his eyes blinked twice as he tried to rearrange the world in a way that made sense from where it had been knocked askew by those few words. “You knew.”

Clark shook his head, not in denial, just at him. “I didn’t waste all this time finding all the green stones in the area as a friend, Bruce.”

Bruce didn’t let him slander his dignity any further. He grabbed on the orca’s jaws, held them tight in his hands and pulled the man in for the second time.