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Batman loves drunk Gothamites. It’s absolutely a guilty pleasure- there’s no reason for him to buzz around the clubs of the city like a cartoon ghost and wait to be noticed. They travel in herds, like most ruminants, so there’s little chance of muggings, and other than the occasional fight (that is usually broken up by the other herd members) there’s very scant crime for him to step in about. Most of what he does is find separated members of groups, usually stumbling along sadly like an abandoned foal, and call their friends for them to inform them that they have a man down. He enjoys those phone calls immensely. Usually they call him Mr. Batman, with the occasional Mr. Batman Sir, and promise to come pick up their cow-blinking Maggie or Rosa or Josh or Derek right away.
Drunks are also largely unafraid creatures, and the sight of the Batman doesn’t bother them much. Usually they spot him lurking and start shouting his name and greetings, waving wildly until he either runs away or acknowledges them. That is, unless he startles them by accident, in which case they stumble into each other like struck bowling pins and go WOAH! Oh my GOD! It’s BATMAN! You scared me! I didn’t see you there man! And then they laugh and laugh, and Bruce has to wage war with the muscles that control his mouth so he doesn’t smile.
Occasionally he’ll act as a shepherd (or perhaps, honestly, a sheepdog) and herd groups from club to club. There is always something better he could be doing with his time, but he justifies it to himself with the knowledge that the transition between locations is where most accidents happen. People get left behind at crosswalks and groups walk directly into traffic- sometimes they even make the decision to split up, a choice that has never had a positive outcome, with evidence spanning from movies to hiking groups to drunk college kids. People tend to make fewer stupid choices when being dogged by a huge man dressed as a bat.
There’s a group of extremely sparkly young people clumped together on the sidewalk, clearly recently spat out from the belly of a club whose music two of them are still vaguely gyrating to. They’re arguing loudly amongst each other in a way that proceeds group separation, so Batman course corrects and lands on the rooftop above them, working his way down into the alley. He’s not quite trying to sneak up on them, but they seem a little young to be clubbing. He doesn’t take too much issue with it beyond the obvious- teenagers will drink, and he’d rather them be out in a group and surrounded with bartenders and peers to cut them off and carry them home. Better than being solo, or at some hidden party, where there’s no supervision whatsoever. Still, sometimes one or two of them have enough of a desire to follow rules that the sight of An Authority Figure will guilt them into giving it up for the night.
“What about Coyote Ugly?” one of the lesser sparklers says, fists on his hips.
“Fucking no?” someone bites back immediately, performing what might be a grind if he and his dance partner were less drunk and more into each other. As it is, he’s just swiveling half heartedly into her pelvis while she gives him a limp hug from behind. This pair are the most sparkly- he’s in full chaps studded in rhinestones, and she has a cowboy hat that ensures people keep their distance via a spiked brim that seems liable to carry her away in the slightest breeze. “I hate that place, it’s like walking into a hate crime. You just want to go because there’s that stupid mechanical bull.” The lesser sparkler- adorned in a much more realistic hat, homemade jean shorts, and a glittery mesh top, growls.
“You like the mechanical bull! We have to peel you off of it, last time you did a double backflip on top of the mechanical bull and we almost got kicked out -,”
“We could go to Karma?” a curly-haired girl cuts in and offers nervously, sandwiched between another girl who’s staring at the gyrators like she wants to kill one of them, and a boy in gym clothes whose posture suggests skull numbing boredom. “I haven’t been, but, um. I’ve heard it’s fun. And they don’t check ID.”
“Ooh, yes!” Chaps claps his hands and points at her, beaming, which causes the glaring girl to swivel her head like an owl and level the stare at her instead. “I love that place, lets-,”
“You just want to go there because there’s stripper poles!” Lesser sparkler snaps. “At least Coyote Ugly is on theme-,”
“Did you seriously pick the theme because you wanted to go to Coyote Ugly?” Chaps complains, throwing his hands in the air and hitting his dance partner in the face, who hisses like a splashed cat and smacks him on the stomach. “Because seriously, we will stop doing themed nights if you’re gonna use them to -,”
“I suggested western because Donna found that fucking hat at Goodwill, dude,” Lesser sparkler growls. “You are such a fucking control freak-,”
“Can we just flip a coin?” Gym shorts cuts in. Batman has drifted down close enough to almost see his face, dropping silently behind a dumpster.
“Well, I wanna go to Coyote Ugly.” Batman’s not heard this voice yet, but the slightly nasal tones are indicating a near-to-teenage girl who is incredibly displeased. “Or the Balcony. I just don’t think Karma is our best option.”
“The Balcony has terrible music,” Chaps says dismissively. Batman ghosts up to their cluster, approaching from behind Chaps and his dance partner. Now that he’s not above them, something pings in his rolodex of faces- Wallace West in gym clothes, Roy Harper in the jean shorts. Queen, his email will start, followed shortly by In making my rounds though Gotham I happened upon your ward in an inebriated state and encouraging other underaged persons to break the law. I am inquiring as to if this is something you were aware of, have taught him was acceptable, or have given your approval for, and if not-
Batman clears his throat, and the gyrators turn as one towards him. Shaded by the improbable brim of his partner’s hat, Dick Grayson looks up at him. He’s sporting the half formed expression of someone too drunk to keep their emotions from playing across their face, lipstick smudged across his mouth. His expression turns to confusion, then horror, and then the Rube Goldberg machine of a drunk mind visibly completes the uptake just as Bruce goes to open his mouth.
Dick shouts: “Scatter!” and runs.
The following thirty seconds are perhaps the second longest of Bruce’s life. Dick hurtles off into the darkness, dragging Donna Troy with him by the arm, their unsteady footsteps echoing off the streets even over the club bass, leaving the others to stumble around for a moment. Wallace has already vanished, Roy trips and falls into a wall and then a signpost on the way out. The two girls Bruce does not recognize, and they perform double and then triple takes at him and at their surroundings, spooked, “What?” the angry girl asks, presumably of someone but functionally of nobody, as her friend spins in place looking for the rest of the group and then, from her face and immediate hard swallow, throws up in her mouth a bit. It takes them a minute, but they do both eventually run, stumbling, turning back to look at him until they make it out of sight.
After a minute, Bruce realizes that the wheezing, grunting sound he’s hearing is himself laughing. He retreats back into the alley, attempts to get a grip on himself, and fails.
“How long at the rendezvous point do we wait before we decide people are lost?” Donna asks Dick, standing on the streetcorner that Dick thought they all knew was their meetingplace. It is just the two of them, and has been for the past fifteen minutes.
“Um,” Dick says. “Now.”
Donna makes a little gesture at him that he takes to mean, so what do we do? Dick does know what to do. It is just… taking him a moment. He’s taking a moment. Or the moment is taking him.
“We… call.” Dick decides. “We call people. We have phones.”
“I don’t.”
“Most of us.”
“Georgia doesn’t. Wally doesn’t.”
“Some of us,” Dick allows, “have phones.” He pulls his from his pocket, and waits for his brain to remind him of his passcode. Thankfully it rings, because he’s not sure if it will do so. He changed it again today. Gotham area code, but not one he recognizes. All of Batman’s devices show as Restricted, so.
“So,” Wally says. “When you said scatter, did you mean just… forever? Or do I scatter to something? Because when you say scatter, scatter implies-,”
“Scatter implies go to something-,”
“Scatter just implies leave,” Wally continues. “Scatter implies leave, and keep leaving, just as a word.”
“I told you where to scatter to when we made this plan!” Dick cries. “Corner of 15th and Garden!”
“Okay, well, I’m at the payphone on… 27th… and Baldwin,” Wally says. “So I’ll be there in. I don’t know. However long it takes to actually walk places?”
“Why would you walk?” Donna asks, her face pressed to the other side of Dick’s phone.
“Batman?” Wally replies. “I don’t want to get popped by Batman-,”
“Realistically,” Donna says, with several more syllables than the word typically deserves, “Do you think he could catch you?”
Silence. “Before you go,” Dick starts, and then there’s a gust of wind blowing his hair back, Donna’s hat tumbling onto the street.
“Oh,” Wally says. “I can go back.”
“I just need you to call Roy,” Dick says.
Wally makes a face. “Why can’t you do it?”
“My phone is locked.” Donna takes it from his hand. “Or maybe it won’t be when Donna’s done with it. Can you grid search? For Georgia?” Guilt overtakes him. “And Casey, I guess. I can call her if Donna can-”
“I mean, they’re probably together,” Donna says.
“We can hope,” Dick mutters. “Find them and um… report. Back. And then we’ll go find them. All together.”
“You got it, wonderboy,” Wally throws him a quick salute, and is gone with another puff of air.
“It’s my birthday,” Donna says, handing Dick his phone back.
“Your birthday’s in- oh. Yeah, thanks.”
Roy’s phone goes straight to voicemail. Wally finds Georgia and then Casey- the former standing, shivering slightly outside of a bodega holding a bag of pretzels, the latter wandering aimlessly- but both not far from their starting point. Donna and Dick set out together, arms linked and only stopping once to puke, Wally circling by the other two at random to ensure they haven’t moved as he searches the streets for Roy.
He does not find him.
“Where do you think he is?” Georgia asks, some hours later at Dick’s apartment.
“I don’t know,” Dick grits out, arm over his eyes and his other hand fisted in a couch cushion. They need to put out the sun.
“Do we need to call the police? Or-,”
“He hasn’t even been gone twelve hours,” Dick says, trying not to sound irritated. His voice is raw.
“Yeah, calm down,” Casey says, because any woman speaking to Dick in her vicinity has become a slight to her specifically. Dick thinks about throwing up again. He thinks about aiming it at her. She’s sat herself on the floor in front of him.
“Roy will be okay,” Donna says soothingly, because things like hangovers never happen to her. She looks like she just stepped out of a limousine, even in Dick’s ratty Great Frog t-shirt and gym shorts. Dick looks like she perhaps ran him over in it, and feels like it too. His stomach gurgles unhappily. “He can more than take care of himself.” He can feel her looking at him. When he opens his eyes (regretfully) she’s holding his phone, open to Ollie’s contact and waving it at him in small, urgent motions.
“If it hits twenty-four hours with no sign of him we’ll call his dad,” Dick says, because he does not physically have room in his body to think about all the things that could have happened to Roy right now. He glances down at Casey. She’s carefully cropping Donna out of a photo she took last night, and then opens up her texts. DICKIE <3, his contact reads. He looks up at Donna. Donna is giving him an expressionless face that expresses very much, actually. His phone buzzes in her hands as a text from Comp Sci Casey arrives, and Donna gives it to him like it’s got something contagious. He needs to stop trying to befriend civilians.
“I mean, what’s the worst that could happen to him?” Wally says with more sarcasm than is acceptable for Dick’s level of hangover, sitting down on the arm of the couch that Dick’s head is resting on and only a little bit on Dick’s hair, which does not help the headache at all. The silence curdles for a minute. He needs to get these civilians out of his apartment so that he and Donna and Wally can all actually panic about this in peace. He needs to change his number. He needs to drop out of school. He needs to change his identity and get plastic surgery and move to Guatemala where no one knows who he is and he never has to see Bruce again.
As if she can read his mind, Casey says, “So… is there a… reason? That we ran away from Batman?”
“Ugh,” Dick says with great feeling, before he can think to redirect the conversation or maybe not say anything at all. “He… knows my guardian.”
“Oh,” Georgia says, her eyes very wide. “Oh, I forgot- they’re dating right? I mean, that’s the rumor-,”
“Yes,” Donna says quickly.
“For a while now,” Wally adds.
“What’s he like?” Casey asks, turning to look up at Dick. Peripheral vision tells him she is visibly trying to make it so Dick looks down her shirt. “I mean, he seems-,”
“He’s a huge jackass,” Wally cuts in before Dick can finish opening his mouth.
“He’s awful,” Donna agrees. Dick puts his foot on her face and tries to push her off the couch, and she gets about halfway through leg-locking him before he gags and she picks him up and deposits him in the bathroom.
“You could at least hold my hair,” he complains once he’s done spitting thin bile. He thinks he’s puked everything that he’s eaten since fourth grade.
“It loses its charm after round ten,” Donna says. “Privileges lost. Your phone is ringing again.”
Dick groans, but it’s not the 73rd call from RESTRICTED, who will have to leave his 73rd voicemail asking Dick to return to the manor. He doesn’t recognize the number at all. “Hello?”
“Yellow,” they reply, and that is definitely Roy’s voice on the other end. “Whats up man? You sound terrible.” He does not sound sober. “Are you in the toilet? I’m in a field. In Ohio. Can Wally come get me?”
“Are you still drunk? Why didn’t you answer your phone? Who’s phone is this?” Dick asks, and doesn’t bother to pull the phone away when he announces to everyone but mostly the toilet bowl: “Roy’s calling me. Can you get my laptop?”
“Gone. I dropped it. Down a storm drain. I thought Batman might hack me. The bus driver-,”
“Bus driver?” Donna asks, bent double to hear what Roy’s saying. “Wally still has your wallet-,”
“I gave him a cigarette and a quarter and some pocket lint and he let me on. Said I looked like a man who needed to get out of dodge. I think the clothes helped. He spent a lot of that interaction looking at my nipples. Someone left this phone on the bus and he gave it to me.” Wally delivers to him his laptop, and looking at the screen only makes Dick want to puke a little. He manages to log in and open google to try and find bus routes from Gotham to the midwest. Casey and Georgia are clustered in the doorway. Dick’s bathroom is not big enough for the amount of people inside of it. “Then there was this girl who had a whole bag of those little Fireball bottles, she kept giving them to me. I told her I was on the run.”
“Do you know where in Ohio you are,” Dick asks, exasperated.
“There’s corn,” Roy says. “And fields.”
“That’s half of Ohio,” Wally says, also exasperated, bent down as well. They are both going to regret that when Dick’s stomach regrets his upright and technological position. “Let’s try a street sign, maybe.”
“Those would be nice,” Roy agrees. “I don’t know what direction they’re in though. I got off the bus and started walking until I remembered the phone. I’ll keep you updated.”
There are two buses that go to Ohio from Gotham, and one that left at three in the morning. Dick turns the laptop with the route to Wally, who gives him a look of exasperation. “We’ll come get you,” Dick says, making please get the civilians out of here eyes and gestures at Donna. You owe me, she mouths.
“We?” Roy replies, and Dick hangs up on him before he can request a ride from the Wallace West Taxi Service in front of the civilians. Also, he has to puke again.
Queen,
Last night I found Roy Harper publicly intoxicated in Gotham City and encouraging other underaged persons- including my ward, who I will remind you is not yet nineteen- to break the law and engage in underage drinking. I am inquiring as to if you knew about or encouraged this unacceptable behaviour. If not, I request that you control Roy, whom you are supposedly parenting. I do not want him influencing Dick.
Regards.
Bruce Wayne
Bruce:
Get fucked.
Best.
Oliver