Coffee

There's a knock on her door and she looks up from the ever-present paperwork. Nobody who works here bothers to knock. "Hey."

"Hey…" she says, trying to get him to say something. She has no clue who he is.

"I don't know if you remember me, but we met at the hospital."

She remembers him now. "Dick's friend." The one with the suspicious list she'd jotted the (useless) license plate number down on the back of.

"Jason." He fidgets a little. "Um, can I buy you a cup of coffee? Or something?" It's obvious he's asking to get them out of here.

"I can give you fifteen minutes." She stands up and they head out. She takes a moment to tell somebody she's going for coffee, just in case she's needed.

He waits until they're out of the precinct and on the sidewalk before he speaks again. "I just- how's Dick?"

"You haven't been speaking?" she asks. It seems odd, since they'd seemed pretty close at the hospital.

"Dick learned how to wall himself off from a master," Jason says. They stop talking until they get their coffee. "He even destroyed all the tracers."

She almost spills her coffee on herself. "You planted tracers on him?" Who plants tracers on their friends? For that matter, since when do civilians have access to tracers? Wait, no, scratch that. She knows what Dick used to do at night.

"Tracers have always been a way of showing we care in our fam-" he cuts himself off. "Uh. Circle of friends."

"You were going to say family," she accuses. He looks embarrassed.

"It's certainly dysfunctional enough to be one," he mutters into his coffee. "We aren't related."

"But you plant tracers on him and come to check up on him when he finds them?" She raises her eyebrows.

"Oh please," he says. "Some of those tracers were there for years. You think he didn't notice them in all that time? And…we're worried about him. He's cut himself off from everybody: us, Roy, Barbara…his mobility's always meant a lot to him."

"You think he might…" she doesn't complete the thought.

"No." His denial is swift. "This is hardly the first setback he's run into. If he was going to…he would have before now. We aren't worried about that."

"What are you worried about, then?" she asks, dreading the answer because she doesn't worry about it, so it will just be one more thing to add to the list.

"We're worried about him…not being Dick anymore," he says slowly, as if feeling the words. He stares into his coffee. "Dick's always been so physical and, and, friendly. And now he can't be so physical and he's cut himself off from his friends, and we don't know if it's just temporary or if this has changed him." He looks like he wants to bolt from so much discussion of feelings but is holding himself in place through sheer willpower.

She takes pity on him. "I don't think I've known him as long as you have," he nods in confirmation, "but in my opinion it's just temporary for the most part."

"For the most part?" He has a sick look on his face like he knows what she's going to say but wants the confirmation.

"So much of what makes Dick Dick is his inability to sit still. I'd be surprised if he stayed the same after this."

He nods. "That's what we figured, but we're all way too close to him to be objective about him."

"I'm his friend too," she rebukes.

"There are friends…and then there's family," he says. "Chosen or not, related or not." They walk in silence and it seems the subject is closed.

"So, why did you need night vision goggles and rope?" Amy asks, partly curious about what false answer he'll give and partly amused. If he wasn't friends with Dick…as it is, she feels secure in her guess that he isn't doing anything that hurts people, no matter how illegal it is. She wonders if he's a superhero.

"Nighttime mountain climbing," he says, deadpan. "You don't run into as many people that way."

He's definitely a superhero.