Work Text:
Inner Child
by Buffy
Lucius had come believe that Bruce deserved the nickname of "The Da Vinci of our time" much more than Tony Starke did, Bruce just kept his genius under wraps. Though Bruce had ended his formal schooling before he'd received a degree, Lucius had a feeling that if tested, Bruce's independent studies for his hidden life would qualify him for several doctorates in science and engineering. If nothing else, Bruce probably qualified as a black belt in several martial arts, and would probably walk through the training programs for most government-run military, espionage, and security agencies without breaking a sweat.
But for all that, it did Lucius' heart good to see that there was still some corner of the young man that was still the little boy that had played an unannounced game of hide-and-seek the one time Thomas Wayne had brought the boy to Wayne Towers for a board meeting. The last thing that Lucius had expected when he'd come down to check on the computer system they'd just installed in the refinished Batcave, was to find Bruce watching cartoons.
True, several screens were showing real-time surveillance of Gotham hotspots; two other screens were in-progress searches of databases Lucius didn't look too closely at; two others showed lab reports of some kind, but those didn't interest Lucius. It was a the last screen that interested Lucius. Bruce was sitting back, holding an icepack on one shoulder, laughing as he watched four penguins carry off some kind of military operation to . . . beat a lemur at "capture the flag"?
"The computer's working great, but since you're here, could you take a look at the cycle? The handling feels a little off since I had to do that jump on the bridge." Lucius chuckled as he moved towards the vehicle. Bruce may still have an inner child, but the outer adult was still a borderline-paranoid and highly-trained badass.
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