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Bruce hadn’t gone to Lake Tahoe with the intention to make happy memories in the first place. His parents had dragged him here for the Concours d’Elegance, a wooden boat show seven year old Bruce couldn’t bring himself to care about. The show only lasted for three days but the Waynes had decided to stay for two whole weeks. Bruce was convinced he would feel very miserable for the whole time.
He would much rather have gone to Haly’s Circus. It was in town at the moment and he had expressed his displeasure in no uncertain terms to his mother. There were a new couple of acrobats he was dying to see. The posters were everywhere in town.
“Come now, Bruce ! The circus will come again next year. Your father was absolutely certain you would love the lake. Are you not excited to see all the boats ?” his mother had told him.
So Bruce had sulked for a while, determined to bore himself to death. However his brand new sailor suit had cheered him up quite a bit. It looked amazing.
“Aye aye, Captain !” his father had said when Bruce had put it on. “Are the fish biting today ?”
Bruce’s cheeks had turned pink with pleasure but he had proclaimed that he didn’t have anything to catch fish. His father had let him play with a shrimping net.
“We’ll get you a fishing rod next year, when you’ll be bigger and stronger,” Thomas had told his son.
Bruce had tried to look as big and strong as he could but only managed to make his parents laugh. His father had told him to look for shrimps but Bruce, despite his best efforts, hadn't been able to find any, and the water around his knees was turning a bit cold.
He looked back at the beach. His parents were talking to another couple. There were three boys with them. A little one that was hiding behind his mothers’ legs, one that was bigger than Bruce and didn’t look very nice, and another that was about Bruce’s age.
The last one was the most interesting in Bruce’s eyes. When he spotted the boy in the water, he waved. Bruce looked behind him, but there were no other kids around. He pointed at his chest. The other kid nodded vigorously, said something to his mother and joined Bruce in the water.
“Hello,” he had said, when he had been at Bruce's side..
“Hello," Bruce had said back. ”I’m fishing sharks, do you want to help ?”
It was only a small exaggeration after all and the other boy seemed elated at the idea.
The two boys played together all afternoon, regularly and very reluctantly pausing for their mothers to spread some more sunscreen on them.
Towards 5 o’clock, the families had separated and Bruce had said goodbye to his new playmate.
"Wait !" the boy had shouted from afar before Bruce’s family could leave the beach. "What's your name ?"
"I'm Bruce ! And you ?" he shouted back, looking at the smiling boy.
"Hal !" the other kid screamed at the top of his lungs.
A friendship was born.
Many, many years later
Dinah had asked them to meet her and Ollie at their country house in the middle of nowhere to help her with her case, but of course, the Queens had been running late. Hal couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t been. He and Bruce had looked around because Bruce was a security freak, and Hal had stopped in front of the large pond to pick up a few rocks as they waited for their friends.
Bruce hadn’t paid much attention to Hal, checking his messages now that they had been certain that their surroundings were secure, but had blinked when he had caught sight of what Hal was doing, a memory coming back to the forefront of his mind as Hal skipped a flat stone over the surface of the pond.
"That was you. The boy of the lake,” he said softly, flashes of a fair-haired boy with eyes filled with wonder coming back to mind.
"The…" Hal said, looking at him in puzzlement. "Bruce, that lake ? You're that Bruce ? I almost thought I’d made you up,” Hal admitted.
They had been so young. He couldn’t have remembered the boy’s face if he had tried, now.
The summer they had skipped stones together was the last they had been to the lake together.
"You didn't come the next summer. Have you ever come back to the lake ?" Hal asked hesitantly.
He hadn’t known why his friend had stopped coming here. His mother had said something about rich people looking to diversify their holidays or something. His Dad had told Hal that maybe they’d be back the next summer. Hal wondered if they had known who the Waynes were and if they had decided to hide the truth from him.
He would never know. Both his parents were dead now. Maybe Jack would know but the two brothers weren’t exactly on speaking terms at the moment.
"Not until I was well into my twenties. Have you come back often ?" Bruce asked, curious.
He had wondered, a few years after his last summer at Lake Tahoe, if his friend was still coming back there every summer, maybe expecting him to turn up.
"The next summer, since my Dad was still alive. And the one after that when my Mom was still trying to make us kids feel as if nothing bad had happened. I looked for you. Left you messages in our wooden box,” Hal said.
The wooden box was a gift from Bruce’s grandma. Their treasure box, that held a notebook, a pencil, and a few pressed flowers between the pages of the notebook.. He and Hal had hid it in the hollow trunk of a dead pine tree. They had used it to communicate, the days they wouldn’t see each other because their families were doing different activities. They would leave messages in the pages of a small notebook that Hal had “borrowed” from Jessica Jordan.
They even used a code for their messages. To read them, you'd have to replace every letter by a letter two positions up the alphabet. Hal had thought the older boy was brilliant to think about securing their communications that way. Much later, he had learned about the Caesar cipher and shook his head at the memory, a light smile grazing his lips.
Bruce proudly signed his messages "AYNRYGL" while Hal, who had a better understanding of how military ranks worked thanks to his Dad, signed his "YBKGPYJ".
"What did the messages say ?" Bruce asked.
He didn’t expect Hal to remember. The last time he had come there as a child, he had only been ten, and he was older than Hal by a year.
"The first one was just to tell you I've been there, hiking with my family and skipping rocks with my Dad, that Jim, unlike you, sucked at swimming and that I saw a bear. Maybe other stuff but I don't remember it,” Hal said apologetically.
Bruce shrugged. Hal’s memory seemed good enough. He wasn’t sure he would have remembered so much of what he would have written himself.
He remembered Hal complaining about the coldness of water but joining him in it anyway. Bruce was taller and stronger and always had a head start on him when they raced each other.
"I was upset when I didn't find a message from you the next year, and even more upset when I didn't find any trace of you. In my next message, I told you my Dad was dead and I didn't know if we'd ever come back and I gave you our phone number, begging you to call. I picked up a bunch of buttercups and put them in my notebook in our box for your Mom. They must be quite dry now. You always picked up a few for your Mom on our walks, I thought you could give them to her. I didn't know…"
That she had already been dead by then. Of course. Bruce let his gaze graze the surface of the pond and let Hal intertwine their fingers.
"... that you wouldn't come back,” Hal finished gently.
"I've written to you,” he told Hal without looking at him.
It felt like something childish to say, but Hal’s tone warmed and Bruce was quite sure that if he had looked up at him, he would have noticed that his eyes had brightened.
"You have ? But you didn't know where I lived. I don’t think you’ve ever known my surname either.”
"I've never sent the letters. They still must be at the Manor, somewhere.”
Bruce knew exactly where they were, with his rock collection from Lake Tahoe and a few drawings of wooden boats from his Mom, in some boxes in the attic. Maybe he would show them to Hal, some day.
"We could go back there,” Hal mused. “Get that box back. I think I could find the tree, if it hadn’t been felled.”
Bruce shrugged. He was already too attached to the past as it was. Maybe it would be best not to dig up more of it.
"Or we could let it be,” Hal said prudently, noticing his reluctance. “Maybe others’ kids are using it now.”
“I didn’t want to go there the first time my parents took me,” Bruce said.
“Really ? I’ve always loved it. I think my parents already came there when my brothers and I weren’t born. Were you a picky child ? A spoiled brat ?”
“Maybe a bit. Ask Alfred, he’d be delighted to tell you. But I have fond memories of the lake. My parents actually looked after me when we got there. My Dad spent time teaching me how to fish and how to speak like a sailor and what else. My mother took pictures and taught me plants’ names and we would go on walks together. It was nice,” Bruce said.
Hal squeezed his fingers. Bruce looked at his phone and put it back in his back pocket. The Queens would need at least thirty minutes more to get there.
“You know, I took Dick there the first summer I had him."
He had thought that this place where he had been happy as a child would make Dick happy too. How wrong had he been ?
"At the lake ? How did it go ?" Hal asked.
He sounded genuinely interested. Bruce liked that about Hal. Of all of the people he had dated, Hal was the only one who didn’t sound even slightly bored when he brought the kids up.
"It was hell. Dick kept sulking. He climbed up one tree and just stared down at me from his branch, throwing small rocks at me,” Bruce sighed as Hal let go of his hand, doubled up with laughter.
“For three hours,” Bruce added, and Hal had to wipe his eyes.
“How did you convince him to climb down ?” Hal asked once he had been able to breathe again.
“I didn’t. Dick fell asleep on his branch and I climbed the tree to get him and put him in the car. He didn’t wake until we reached Gotham. I wondered what I was doing wrong all the way back.”
Hal took his hand back into his but didn’t say anything, waiting for Bruce to share more.
“I talked to Alfred about it and he told me the story of a young grieving boy throwing a tantrum and biting his guardian when he tried taking him on holidays for the first time after his parents' death. I didn't even remember that,” Bruce said, shaking his head.
They stayed silent for a bit, and Hal slid a flat stone in Bruce’s hand.
"I've become better at it. The stones you kept giving me were not flat enough. You kept the best ones for yourself,” Bruce observed.
Hal was nine when his Dad had shown him how to skip stones and which stones were the best for that, and Hal had taught Bruce, keeping the last part for himself.
"Guilty as charged,” Hal said, laughing warmly. "You were older than me and cooler than Jack. I wanted to impress you so hard,” he remembered.
His eyes were shining with the memories, his smile more boyish than it should be on a grown man’s face. Bruce couldn’t help but smile back.
“Maybe you could take Damian there next summer,” Hal mused.
“Would you like to tag along ?” Bruce asked.
He hadn’t wanted to make plans with Hal before, in case it didn’t work, but he had to admit that it did. It’d been nearly a year and against all expectations, they had made it work. The kids knew and it was an open secret among Leaguers. Nobody had raised an eyebrow. He liked Hal, quite a bit, and he didn’t think Hal would have stayed with him for so long if he didn’t like him back. He had no reason to think it couldn’t last.
Hal looked at him, surprised. They had never made plans concerning their relationship, always treating it as if it could end the next day. That Bruce would ask him if he would like to go on holiday with him nine months from then meant a lot.
Hal knew his answer would mean a lot too.
“Actually, I’d love that,” he said, resting his head against Bruce’s shoulder.
They were still holding hands when Ollie and Dinah arrived and they had to start working on Dinah’s last gruesome case.