Mourning Rituals (Dick)

He's taking down a few more Jokerz before he heads back to the Cave when the Cave intrusion alarm sounds. And he's halfway grateful that he can only say "Is that you?" and doesn't have to specify that he's talking to Max instead of to him, because he knows he's halfway talking to him, halfway hopeful that these past few days have been a dream, that he'll come online with some snark about paying more attention to what he's doing.

Whoever's in the Cave isn't Max, and knows their way around, because the alarm cuts off and when the voice comes through the com it's filtered so he can't tell anything about it. "Not exactly." And that's a Bruce kind of thing to say, and he doesn't know if that's a good or bad thing. Depends on who it is on the other end. And then he really starts to get worried, because suddenly he's making moves he knows he doesn't have as the suit is controlled from the Cave. "Relax," the mechanical voice whispers in his ear, where his voice should be. "You're going to be fine." And because the voice is filtered he can halfway pretend it's his voice, pretend it's him controlling the suit, and he can't relax exactly, but he can almost trust the voice to keep him safe.

And the Jokerz are all down and restrained, and he can only assume that the voice is making the call to the police that Bruce usually made because he's flipping off the rooftop in a move that he knows is going to make him ache in the morning, and whoever's driving isn't using the thrusters at all, in favor of the line gun that's only there for backup and that Terry only knows about because Bruce had been obsessed with making him learn everything that could be any use to him as Batman and had made him use a suit without thrusters for a month. He'd never been really comfortable with trusting his life to something that didn't look like it could even hold his weight, but the voice is obviously more than comfortable with it, and starts doing all sorts of flips and, like, embellishments of the controlled falling he's doing, until Terry barely knows which way is up and is about to toss his cookies. And then he lands and realizes he's back at the Cave.

"Who do you think you are?" he demands, and never mind that he could have asked at any time while he was going through the city, he wants to know now, and the sight of whoever's been messing with him sitting in the chair like he belongs hits him like a punch in the gut and makes him even angrier than he'd been before. And it doesn't matter when he turns and Terry can see that he's the man with the cane from the funeral, or that he's either a villain or somebody who Bruce trusted very much since he's here, or that he very obviously needs that cane, because Terry's angry, because this is his place, his and the old man's, and nobody else should be here without permission, and he grabs the man by his shirt like he's a perp (every time his internal monologue hits one of the words he'd learned from Bruce it's like a dagger in his heart) before the man can answer and he wants to throw him out of the Cave but he doesn't know whether he came through the manor or through the Cave's direct exit, and he doesn't want to show him the one he doesn't know about.

And then he's somehow split the cane into two parts and he's broken Terry's hold in what would be a very painful way if he wasn't wearing the suit. And he has this blank expression on, like he doesn't want to show anything on his face, only he doesn't do it as well as Bruce does – did – because with Bruce it's his default expression but with this guy it clearly isn't because he has laugh lines (he was probably taught by Bruce), but he's clearly used it so often that it's second nature to him. But after years of dealing with Bruce even the slightest leaks around his mask of non-emotion seem like they're shouting at him (sometimes after he's been dealing with Bruce for long periods of time and goes around other people again the amount of raw emotion he can see feels blinding. Except it won't, any more, because he won't have that emotionless mask to compare it to.). And he can see that the man is in pain, but he's in pain too, so when he attacks he doesn't pretend he's fighting somebody who's whole ("None of us are whole," he remembers Bruce telling the commissioner. "Not inside." And she'd looked so sad that Terry had somehow known that it had nothing to do with why she was in a wheelchair and everything to do with why she and Bruce weren't on great terms.) and he goes straight for the leg, and the man's expecting it (of course he is) and he makes some of the moves that Terry had seen from the inside, and they work as well on him as they had on the Jokerz, and then all he can do is lie on his back while the man reassembles his cane and hobbles up the stairs to the Manor.

When he can finally get up, he finds that all of the files on the computer (even the ones that had been locked for him before, even the ones which were hidden so well that he hadn't known they existed) are accessible to him.