“Wow,” Bruce tensed at the unexpected voice, “that was, to be polite, an absolute train wreck.”
“That’s the polite descriptor?” Bruce turned to meet blue eyes, “I shudder to imagine the impolite version.”
The room had been empty. He’d made sure of it before allowing Dick to move their… argument. There were no signs of life on this or the next five floors down. Yet, there he was. A beautiful man, too many years his junior for his thoughts to go straight to the man’s looks, sitting on a stool at a workbench.
“Oh, for sure, you definitely don’t want to hear what else I could describe that as.” The man nodded, bringing Bruce’s attention to the jewelry tucked into the man’s shirt and hidden by his hair. “Ignoring all the stuff I clearly shouldn’t have heard,” which meant he did, in fact, notice the Bat-based vocabulary, “you are terrible at communicating with your kids.”
“Oh?” Bruce strained to sound casual, trying not to give away what all he may have not already.
“Oh yeah. Like, clearly you love your kids. Right?” The man waited for acknowledgment, which Bruce begrudgingly gave, before he continued, “right, so, what’s stopping you from saying it? Just a simple, I’m worried about you going on that inter-dimensional mission because I love you and want you to be safe, would work great. Might even get you brownie points, you know? Instead of what you said, which implied a lack of trust and a sense of derision towards your son’s skills, and was never going to be taken well.” Well. That answered well enough what all the pretty man had heard.
“It’s not that easy,” Bruce frowned at him, debating how many NDAs he’d have to threaten the man into signing.
“Sure it is. Just open your mouth and say the words, let them sit there, and don’t take them back.” Blue met and held blue from across the room before the man rolled his eyes, “right, okay, would it help you to think of it as a series of undefined tasks or a science experiment?”
“The latter,” the former sounded like what he’d already been working with.
“Okay, so pull up a stool,” the man twirled a pen as he pulled over a loose sheet of paper, “and we’ll start with the scientific method: if the big bad Bat communicates ineffectively then his children will be upset because they don’t have empathic abilities. What about this sentence can we change to make it better?”
“My ability to communicate,” Bruce admitted.
“Very good,” the man praised and Bruce wondered if he could get away with slamming the man’s head into the table without it being workplace abuse. Probably not. “So, if the Bat communicates effectively, then…?”
“My children won’t be as upset.”
“They’ll understand what I mean better.”
“Alright, we now have our hypothesis. Next step is the experiment.”
theartofmadeline
dededos
origamiaround
kaledo-art
pixelskylines
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
