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It's a creaky old house, Terry comes to discover. Bruce likes privacy to the point where it almost edges over into paranoia. Only a small section of the manor gets power, and even then it runs off the hulking generators that labour to work the Cave; Terry wonders, sometimes, if Bruce resents the fact that he has to rely on municipal utilities to get basic necessities like water.
Bruce occupies one of the second-floor rooms. In what Terry imagines must be some sort of bizarre aristocratic fashion, there are no rooms you can actually stay in on the ground floor, and so the old man trudges his way up and down the grand staircase when he deigns to get his rest.
'Why don't you get an elevator installed?' Terry asks one day. The look Bruce gives him could freeze icebergs.
Terry doesn't push it, but he wonders after that, if Bruce has a thing about never letting anyone help.
The post is left at the guard house out by the gates, a good long trek away from the manor proper. Deliveries are made, but Terry'll be damned if he knows how or when service workers are allowed beyond the unloading bay at the back.
'Is it leprechauns?' he asks Bruce out of the blue one cold December morning as they sit together, huddled over the console in the Cave and eating some nutritious slop of a supper.
'What?' the old man growls.
'How things get done around here,' Terry says, waving his spoon around to encompass the Cave and everything above it. 'Leprechauns. Or ghosts?'
Bruce honest-to-god snorts. 'Some of us do work with our own two hands, McGinnis,' he says.
Of course Bruce turns it into a question about work ethic.
'Yeah,' Terry agrees, looking down at the tasteless porridge in his bowl. 'I'll believe you made this goop.'
Bruce doesn't deny it.
The first time the Batmobile won't start, Terry thinks he's going to have a heart attack. At first he suspects it's the keyless ignition system, but overriding that and using the physical ignition doesn't help. Then he's reduced to standing there in the suit, a fish out of water, until he finds himself quipping in Batman's scratchy voice, 'Does this thing come with a manual?' Wit being the last resort of the witless.
Bruce hits him on the back, right between the shoulder blades, with his cane. Terry's vaguely aware of the fact that, sans suit, that would have been something of a crippling blow.
'Um,' he says.
'Get one of the other cars out of the garage,' Bruce says. 'It'll do you good to learn how to troubleshoot vehicles instead of just inflicting damage upon them.'
'I don't just inflict–' Terry starts, and then thinks better of it, and goes.
He watches Bruce, eighty-going-on-a-thousand, lean on a float pad and work the 'mobile over. Bruce talks as he goes: figure out if the engine is staying silent or clicking. Is it turning over at all? Or starting and then immediately dying?
Terry listens as Bruce takes the problem and dissects it; rendering it down into a series of binary yes-or-no questions. By the end he has it pinpointed, and two hours of work later the engine purrs back to life.
'Easy,' the old man says, voice running low, a resonant timbre.
'Yeah,' Terry nods, eyebrows raised as Bruce wipes his wrinkled hands clean on a rag. 'Easy-peasy.'
The same thing happens when one of the servers crashes. At first well-trained paranoia kicks on: is it an attack? Have they been compromised? Terry's become damned good at figuring that stuff out – he can do traces, he can do diagnostics; Bruce has had him trained up on the latest tech wizardry.
Sometimes, though, shit just happens. 'Nothing,' Terry sighs, staring at the screen after a few solid hours of chasing ghosts. He thumps his hands on either side of the console. 'Just a power surge.'
'Hm,' rumbles Bruce.
'So,' Terry goes.
'Don't know how to replace a server?' Bruce asks. It's a bloody taunt.
'Sorry, boss,' Terry smiles, stretching the expression across his face. 'They don't cover that in classes at my high school.'
Bruce doesn't say anything, just calmly folds up his cuffs and sits himself down at the console and types, serene as a monk. Terry watches command-line gibberish sprout across on the screens, and then Bruce is up and shuffling over to the server room.
'Don't worry,' Bruce says, pointing at another bank lined up opposite their primaries. 'I've got spares.'
'Yeah,' Terry shakes his head, wondering if Bruce kept spare Robins around, too, back in the day. 'Of course you do.'
It's a bitter and miserable winter, one of the worst on the books. Terry spends enough time hovering over the worse parts of town in the Batmobile as opposed to outside of it that it earns him a few snide remarks from the old man about how it used to be done in the "old days."
'Bet in the old days, bad guys didn't have anti-grav units that allowed them to float merch out of snowdrifts,' Terry mutters, which earns him that special flavour of smug silence from Bruce over the radio.
That said, Terry's clearly not the only one suffering from the cold. The manor's not the easiest piece of property in the world to keep well-heated when Bruce only keeps one section of it running: the warmth just bleeds out into the rest of the building, and it never feels good anywhere but in the Cave.
The old man's paying the price for it. He leans on his cane more than ever, and starts to take the one elevator that is installed on the premises: the one from behind the clock down to the Cave's control area, bypassing the stupid spiral staircase that must be hell on his hips and back.
Terry doesn't want to admit that Bruce Wayne isn't immortal, but it scares the hell out of him: the old man all alone in the empty house.
The night of the Wayne-Powers Christmas party is particularly horrific. Driving through almost-blinding snow on the way back would have been terrifying if not for the car's state-of-the-art sensors; as it is, Terry breathes a sigh of relief when the manor pulls into range.
He pulls them into the Cave instead of the garage on the first floor. He doesn't want Bruce walking anywhere alone in this weather.
'I know what you're doing, Terence,' Bruce says, voice gravelly.
'So sue me,' Terry snipes back, killing the engine and swinging out to pull the door open for Bruce. Bruce gives him a look when he gets out, but can't hide a grimace when he steps out of the car. The Cave's still colder than the car.
Terry hounds Bruce all the way to the elevator, and strolls in with him.
'Are you going to tuck me in as well?' Bruce growls.
Terry tucks his hands behind his head and grins as the elevator starts upwards. 'In your warmest, fuzziest socks, boss.'
Then the lights judder, and the elevator shudders, jerks, and comes to a complete standstill. For a moment, everything is pitch black, then the backups kick in and the sickly orange emergency lights flicker on.
'Well,' Terry says.
'Hm,' Bruce says.
They're stuck between the Cave and the ground floor of the manor. Terry's in his civvies; there's no way he's climbing up into the shaft or doing anything equally stupid.
'Don't suppose you know how to fix elevators?' Terry asks.
'Not my area of expertise,' says Bruce. He looks up at the emergency lights. 'If we don't get going in another half an hour, it means the generators have gone down.'
'Trouble, you think?'
'It's a cold night for trouble. Might just be the storm.' Bruce leans back against one of the walls.
Terry echoes the motion. 'So, I guess we just wait?'
Bruce shrugs.
They wait.
An hour later, and the emergency lights start to flicker down.
'That's not good,' Terry says. 'Does that mean we've lost the gens?'
'Probably,' Bruce says, grim. 'It would be trivial to restart them if we were out of this shaft, but we're not.'
'Now what?' Terry asks. 'We're in the Cave.'
Bruce's face is craggy and disturbing in the on-again, off-again cast of the overhead lights. 'Leprechauns,' he says, and lifts his cane up to press at the emergency call button Terry hadn't even thought would be there.
An hour passes. The temperature drops steadily, and the lights have gone out. Bruce is a rock next to him. Terry can hear his quiet breathing; inhale and exhale, almost meditative. Terry's as jumpy as he can remember ever being, thinking of the Cave and its secrets and wondering who's coming.
'Who's coming?' he asks.
'I don't know,' Bruce answers.
'That's not comforting, boss,' Terry growls.
He feels more than hears Bruce shrug.
It's another half an hour before the sounds of the generator powering up again echo throughout the Cave and up the elevator shaft. Five minutes later and the emergency lights spring on, and then they're moving, inching downwards until they're level with the Cave floor. Someone starts to work on the doors, and then they're being levered open.
A man in his sixties, maybe the trimmest man in his sixties Terry has ever seen, smiles at them as he puts a crowbar down. He's wearing a diamond mask pasted on over his eyes. It's the most ridiculous and ineffective disguise Terry's ever seen, especially since the man is in a tuxedo, and Barbara Gordon's standing right behind him.
'Tim's off running up the generator,' says Nightwing. 'At least you had a good reason to break up our Christmas parties this time. You all right, Bats?'
'Fine,' Terry says, exactly the same time as Bruce does.
They look at each other.
'You said leprechauns,' Terry accuses. Part of him whispers, you didn't know if they'd come, and he feels hysterically like shaking Bruce by both shoulders.
'Well,' says the man who needs no one. 'Turns out they're not ghosts.'