Challenge Fic: He Who Laughs Last...
Title: He Who Laughs Last…
Author:
comicshopgrl
Claim: General DCU
Characters\Pairing: Nightwing, Robin, Batman
Rating: G
Word Count: 669
Prompt: Ritual (T07; P22)
Continuity: The happy place in my mind where Batman Wayne: Murderer never happened and lighthearted hijinks can ensue.
Summary: It’s Dick’s favorite day of the year. This is the last time Batman sits on that stupid Whoopee cushion.
Disclaimer: DC owns’em.
Author’s notes\Warnings: Super quick fic but I couldn’t let April Fool’s Day go by without some kind of shenanigans. Sorry for being too busy for anything more than a quick go over.
It started with peanut butter smeared under the door handles to the Batmobile. Dick was just nine at the time and had only been living in Wayne Manor only for a few months. The boy had laughed so hard over his childish prank that Batman thought he might hyperventilate. He hadn’t had the heart to put a stop to all this April Fool’s nonsense then and had been persecuted with it ever since.
Jason didn’t have the sense of humor for such mischief and then he was gone. Batman had thought Tim would be too practical for pulling pranks and for that first year he was correct. But once his relationship with Dick began to mend and the young man started coming around more often, Batman found himself the victim of April Fool’s Day jokes yet again.
Tim’s second year as Robin, Batman had gone out on patrol only to find that the boys had sent Catwoman a large bouquet of flowers with a note that declared his undying love. The third year, they filled the Batmobile entirely with green Jell-O. The fourth had been a Whoopee cushion on his chair when he went on Monitor Duty. He had initially suspected Plastic Man of that one until the transporter logs showed the unauthorized access of two human males. That one he found rather impressive; he designed the security system himself and knew it wasn’t easy to break into JLA headquarters.
This year would be different though. The pranks would stop here and now even if he had to give his sons a taste of their own medicine.
So Batman had gone out on patrol, leaving Robin and Nightwing to work on some computer analysis in the cave. He had bugged the area with hidden cameras but Robin jammed the frequency as he had expected.
He gave them about three hours before heading back. Parking the car at the far end of the cave, he proceeded on foot. As he got closer, he heard the whine of a blowdryer punctuated by intermittent giggles.
“This is so good, bro. He’s going to spaz,” Robin remarked happily.
Batman ducked behind the dinosaur and watched as the younger boy tightly wrapped a chair with plastic wrap. Nightwing followed behind him with the hairdryer, effectively shrink wrapping the piece of furniture. They had gotten about half the cave done from the lab tables to all of the pens on his desk.
“Good? It’s great! I can’t wait to see his face,” Nightwing replied. He knelt to apply careful heat to the leg of the weight rack. “Do you remember the look he gave us the year we did the Batmobile? I thought he was going to have a stroke.”
“Stroke? I thought he was going to kill us slowly and with great prejudice.”
“You’ve got him all wrong, Boy Wonder. Bruce loves this stuff. If he didn’t, why would he go along with it every year?” Nightwing stood up and surveyed the damage already done.
“Come on. Let’s get his chair.”
The duo trotted to the big leather chair facing the enormous monitor of the Crays. Batman trailed after them. This was going to get interesting.
“How should we do the computer?” Robin was asking his mentor as the pair began to flip the seat over.
“Maybe if we…”
Nightwing never finished his sentence. The minute the wheels left the ground, a fine blue powder exploded from the cushions coating the pair. Robin sneezed, Nightwing dropped the chair and both looked completely dumbfounded.
Batman sauntered from the shadows, using every ounce of his willpower not to laugh or smile. Pulling another chair from nearby, he cut the plastic wrap off it with a Batarang and sat down at the computer.
“Robin, I’ll need the results from that security tape you were analyzing. Nightwing, you’re standing in my light. Why don’t you go get cleaned up?” As the shell-shocked pair began to walk away, Batman called after them.
“Oh, and boys? Happy April Fool’s Day.”