It's only a day after the funeral when Terry goes on patrol. And it's not that he doesn't miss the old man, not that he doesn't want to curl into the fetal position and spend a few days crying, but he's afraid that if he starts he won't be able to stop. And he's always heard that work helps when you lose somebody close to you, so he goes out on patrol. Only, perhaps this wasn't the best idea in the world, because he keeps listening for the voice on the other end of the radio, making some sarcastic comment about his form. And it never comes. And that maybe makes him a bit harder on the criminals he runs into than usual, until word gets around and suddenly it's a quiet night and he has nothing to do but fly around and think.
Thinking's the last thing he wants to do, so he's almost grateful when he sees the unmistakable shape of somebody scaling a building, one of the older buildings, and he isn't using the fire escape, he's actually scaling the building, so whoever it is has to be experienced. Terry flies in closer, and he can see that whoever it is has all of the most state of the art burglary equipment, stuff that costs so much that any burglar who can afford it shouldn't have any reason to break into this particular building (and why isn't he using the flight gear, since Terry can see he has it). And since Terry really needs a fight tonight, and it's difficult, if not impossible, to have a really good fight while one fighter is clinging to a building and the other is flying, Terry lets the burglar climb onto the roof before he makes his presence known.
"Boo," he says, camouflage on, thinking he'll startle the guy, but he just cocks his head like he's listening to the little sounds that Terry can't keep from making and turns to look in Terry's direction in that same creepy way that Bruce has – had – and he can see that the guy's wearing one of those little masks, a domino, and that he has grey hair.
"Why, Batman!" the man exclaims, mock-surprised. "Fancy meeting you here!"
"What are you doing here?" Terry demands.
"Just a bit of nostalgia," he says, and takes a swig from a half-empty bottle of vodka Terry hadn't noticed before. He'd climbed a building drunk?
"This isn't the best time," Terry says. "Or the best way."
"Believe me, I know," the man says. "But, you know, it just didn't seem right to do it any other way without the light on."
"The light?" Terry asks, trying to move to get around him, but he moves to keep Terry in front of him.
"The Bat-signal," the man explains earnestly. "I know you're not him, but surely you've heard of it…?"
"I know what the Bat-signal was," Terry says, trying not to think about how this man knows (guessed. It has to be a guess because the alternative is too disturbing to contemplate, especially with the timing) he's not Bruce.
"Ah, good. So anyway, I'm not robbing this place. For one thing I don't pull jobs in Gotham." He pauses and contemplates. "Well, I might now. I'm not sure. I'll have to think about it. But I'm not pulling one now. But I really need someone to fight and you're one of the few people in Gotham who I won't have to hold back on." He takes another drink. "The others have their own ways of grieving but I think you need to hit somebody too." And that's confirmation that he knows who Bruce is – was – and that he's a thief and Terry thinks this is just going to get worse if he thinks about it more. But Terry really does need a fight tonight and the man is standing there in that casually ready position that Terry had learned from Bruce. So he turns off the camouflage and the man tosses aside the bottle to break on the roof, leaving sparkling shards of glass as yet another hazard to think about, and the man takes out some sort of a wavy knife (a kris, the Bruce-trained part of his brain whispers).
And then they're fighting, and Terry tries not to think too much about the fact that the man has some of the same moves that Bruce had had, had kicked his butt with when he'd been deaged in the Lazarus Pit. They're different though, harsher, more violent somehow, like this man had learned from Bruce but didn't draw the line in the same place Bruce did, like he drew it further than Bruce could or would. And Terry's glad that the suit makes him faster and stronger, because the man isn't pulling any punches, or kicks, or jabs with the knife, and he's better than Terry is, and only the fact that the man is middle aged and drunk and the suit helps him keep from getting injured worse than he's ever been in all the years of Bruce whispering in his ear. And he's glad that the man is so good, because it means that there's no time to think about how nobody's going to whisper in his ear again, except maybe Max.
And when the sky starts to change color (they can't see the sunrise here, not in the city, not surrounded by skyscrapers, but they know it's dawn) they stop at the same time, as if it was a signal, and maybe it was. And as Terry flies away home he hears the sound that he recognizes as a line gun being fired and he knows that the man won't be going down the same way he went up.
His pain isn't gone (he doesn't think it ever will be), but he thinks he can bear it, now.
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