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The Tower is too quiet. Gar's been wandering and he knows that the kids are all off in their own places, well away from each other. Cassie is sitting in Kory's garden, Tim is in the living room, Kon is on the roof, and Bart is in his room. It makes Gar itch a little, because with this many people around, there should be movement and laughter and talking and fighting. But Kory is doing her Kory things, and Vic is working, and the kids aren't talking.
He isn't sure whether or not the silence is better than the loud fighting of the older Titans. If this was Dick and Wally and...well, not Donna, for a lot of reasons, but maybe Kory and Roy... If this was them, the tension probably would've already resulted in a lot of yelling and several thousand dollars' worth of property damage.
Gar feels done roaming for the night, though, so he heads back to his room. He's in cat form and switches to sparrow to fly into the Tower, and there's that split second in between forms where instincts overlap and he feels the urge to chase himself. On the boys' floor he hops down the corridor, switching from rabbit to kangaroo to frog. He's almost to his own door before he notices that Impulse is standing outside Superboy's door. He shifts back into his own body.
"He's not in there, Impulse."
"Oh. Um." Bart bites his lip and strobes for a few seconds like he can't decide if he should run away or not. He ends up next to Gar.
"You okay?" Gar asks, thinking of the cold reception the other kids had given Impulse earlier. "If you need somebody to talk to..."
Bart shakes his head. "No, I just...I mean, can I--canIhaveahug?"
(Get off, Impulse! Get off!)
"Yeah." And Gar holds out his arms. They're automatically full of warm, clinging speedster.
The two of them stand there in the hall for a long time, and Gar really hopes that Bart is getting what he needs out of it since he isn't quite sure what that is. All he can do is wrap Bart up and hold him as long as he has to.
After a while, Bart pulls back and rubs at his nose, then looks up at Gar with a tiny smile. "Thanks," he says, and he gnaws on his lip again. "I should probably go back to my room and do my homework or something. So, um. Thanks."
No normal kid voluntarily does homework on a Friday night.
"Hey," Gar says before Bart disappears. He gestures toward his own room. "You wanna watch a movie?"
For the first time since he got to the Tower, Bart really smiles.