Chapter Text
Dick knew that Bruce would prefer to be at the manor right now.
As personable as Bruce pretends to be sometimes (as personable as he pretends to be for him ), Dick knows that he’s a bit weird and would prefer to be in his study, ordering everything they may need for his ballet classes (that he got into!) with same-day shipping. He knows that that’s probably what they would be doing if not for Alfred insisting that “Bruce take him out for once”.
He thinks it’s better that Bruce is a bit weird. So is he, he knows. It’s fine though because Daj and Dat knew all about how weird he was and loved him anyway. He thinks of Bruce, and Alfred, and even Elliot who are getting to know him and seem to like him just fine.
He finds his brain wandering and pondering and probably doing other things that rhyme while he shifts through racks of leotards in the otherwise quiet store.
The store’s empty except for them and a bored-looking teenager behind the register doing a poor job trying to look like she isn’t on her phone.
He sorts through a rack of leggings while Bruce reads a poster on the wall about standard testing uniforms. He knows that he’ll have to wear a pair of plain dark-coloured shorts for exams, but hopes that he’ll get away with dressing how he’d like during the rest of the year.
Ooh. He pulls out a light purple wrap skirt and checks the size. Would he be a medium or a large in girls’ sizing? He adds one of either size to his basket. It’s looking a little full, though that’s probably because he keeps adding multiple of each item he wants. It’s not as though he knows what a “size 16” is because as long as he’s been at the manor, Alfred and Bruce had been buying his clothes for him and everything at Haly’s was either hand-me-down or shared or tailored to fit.
He wonders whether Bruce would let him get the girls’ and boys’ character shoes— he likes the girls’ ones more, but he would likely be required to wear the boys’ ones for exams but he’s wondering if he absolutely has to pick up a pair of the— ew — white boys’ shoes instead?
Dick isn’t even sure as to what annoys him about them other than that they’re white and going to be walked in. They will touch the ground , he thinks, a bit dumbly. Are they supposed to stay clean? Are the shoes meant to show off how clean the floors are?
Dick thinks of when he was much younger, when his Daj would ask him if he was trying to polish the floor when he would practise his tumbling wearing a white t-shirt.
He wonders if he can get away with wearing the black boys’ shoes instead.
He’s about to call out to Bruce— who’s now inspecting a poster about sizing for the shoes— when a short woman bursts from the employee area, talking rapidly.
“Eva, you can’t possibly expect me to leave you in the front if you’re never going to do anything out here,” she spots them, and stops in both her tracks and her lecture, plastering on a polite smile.
“Good—” she checks her watch, “—afternoon gentlemen. Can I help you with anything today?”
And suddenly things are moving very quickly . The woman— who introduces herself as Charlie— takes one look at him and declares him a medium and sends him in with one leotard to try on (after confirming that he was wearing tight underwear). When he comes out she grasps him by his shoulders and spins him in a circle which has Bruce doing a little pinched face but ultimately saying nothing when Dick sends him a thumbs up. (Which is normal in Gotham, even though the lion tamer at Haly’s claimed it was rude and that he should be careful not to do it in case it gets him in trouble.)
Charlie says that the leotard fits and then sorts through his basket, leaving the correctly sized ones and putting the others in a pile that her (now embarrassed) employee sorts through and puts back on their shelves.
He’s ordered to take off his shoes and, similarly to his leotard size, Charlie declares his shoe size without any measurements and pulls a box from the shelf and directs him to a bench.
“Now, you’ll be expected to wear socks with these, so keep those on when you try them on.” She kneels in front of him and puts it on his foot.
Addressing Bruce now, “He has narrow feet, so he’s really lucky that these will fit him well enough, but the elastic here is too loose. I can take it to the back and alter it, but this means that if he grows at all he’ll need to replace them every half size, and he’ll probably need to have the bands altered each time.”
Bruce just gives his ditzy-est ‘Brucie’ smile and says that it won’t be a problem.
Dick asks if he’d get in trouble with his dance school if he got black shoes instead of white ones.
She grins at him and rises to her feet with creaking knees. “That depends on your teacher though you’ll probably outgrow them in time for exams regardless.” She puts the box back on the shelf and pulls out another one, as well as a pair of the girls’ character shoes in the same size, “Though if you ask me,” she adds with a wink, “for the kind of money they charge there, there shouldn’t be a uniform at all!”
With that, Charlie hollers over her shoulder that the alterations shouldn’t take more than five minutes each and that Dick is a size 14 if he’s looking for girls’ bottoms and a small in the boy’s shorts, already in the back rooms before either of them could respond.
“Do you have everything that you want?” Bruce addresses him for the first time since they came in and he told Dick to pick out whatever he wanted.
Dick, instead of responding, goes to pick up a pair of shorts size small and a tie-dye patterned wrap skirt that he passes by on the way before returning to the till.
“Just need to make sure all the sizes are right, now.” And Bruce looks a bit relieved at the prospect of leaving.
They manage to sort through his things and have Eva ring them up just in time for Charlie to come back with the shoes to add to the bag.
Dick tries to peek at the total but the screen is too dark to see from his angle and Bruce pays by card and puts the receipt in his wallet right away, pretending not to notice him trying to get the total. It’s not like he could have gotten it on his own anyways; he has no clue what the alteration cost and Americans always add tax after finding the total and Bruce always tips customer service extremely generously and Dick is still figuring out the value of a US dollar.
He knows that Bruce’s pockets could take it (knows that he could probably buy the whole store without someone so much as calling in to confirm it) but he wants to know . Clothes-bought-for-him is still a foreign concept and he’s already confirmed with Bruce that all of it will be given away when he can’t wear them anymore but he wants to know.
He’s sure that he can get Alfred to tell him, if only for his own piece of mind.
For now, he climbs in the front of the car and puts his bag between his feet while Bruce does that exhausted sort of sigh that he does whenever his “social battery is too low”. He’s content to watch the buildings of Gotham peter out as they make their way to the manor.
They make the drive back to the manor in a comfortable sort of silence and go their separate ways; Bruce to his study, and Dick to the laundry room to drop off his new clothes then back up to his room. They don’t see each other again until dinner that night.