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Dick wriggled in his seat as the Batmobile pulled into the Batcave. The wet, sticky tarp between him and the seat crinkled with every movement. The thick liquid clinging to his dyed wings made him shiver with cold, even with the car’s heater on.
He clicked his seatbelt open as soon as the Batmobile slowed down and jumped out before it had stopped moving, and immediately regretted it. The cave was cold. Sure, it was always chilly, but it was freezing now that he was covered in sludge that neither rinsed nor dried off. With a shiver he brought his gunked-up wings around himself, but that, if anything, made him shiver harder. “Brrrrrr.”
Dick looked at the elevator at the sound of light shoes tapping on metal grate. Alfred had come downstairs to greet them, and etched on his lined face was a look of concern. “My word, master Richard, whatever happened to you?”
“I fell into the harbor,” Dick said and grinned at the butler with chattering teeth.
“The harbor, master Richard?” Alfred said and bustled right up to him, pied wings folded as neatly as ever even as his hands gently pulled Dick’s drenched wings open from around him. “You look like you’ve been through the sewers!”
“The Maronis blew up an oil tanker to hide their involvement in the large-scale trafficking of migrant workers,” Bruce said. He’d parked the Batmobile and was now pulling off his cowl. His hands and uniform were still partially covered in the oily gunk he’d pulled Dick out of and he had a long streak of dark brown sludge on his face, but his gloomy wings were safe and clean under the cape-cover. “Pino Maroni kicked Robin in the water while we were busy making sure nobody remained at the wreckage.”
“I took him down with me and there’s a big fistful of his primaries he won’t see again,” Dick said and tried to swat Alfred’s dirtied hands away. “Gave him a good trim.”
“I’m sure you did,” Alfred said. “And now you need a proper bath so you won’t need a trim as well.”
Dick groaned. He knew he needed to wash the oil off like, yesterday, but all he wanted to do was curl up in his bed and sleep the rest of the night away. Cleaning up would take forever. “Ugh.”
“It has to be done, I’m afraid,” Alfred said. “Prepare the big tub, won’t you Master Bruce, while I get the soap.” Then he turned on his heel and walked back up to the elevator.
Dick pulled the cold, clammy wings around himself again. He’d done enough swimming today to last the whole week, but Alfred was right. Alfred usually was. The weight of the oil was starting to get to him, and the way it clung to the feathers, to his skin, through the down around the feather shafts where not even the brightly colored dye powder he used as Robin penetrated… to call it unpleasant was to call an elephant’s trunk her nose; technically not wrong but definitely the understatement of a century.
At least the bath would be warm. Warming up sounded really nice right now.
“We can get hot chocolate afterwards, chum,” Bruce offered, and laid a reassuring gloved hand on Dick’s sticky shoulder. Dick looked up at his guardian. Bruce was giving him a genuine smile, one of the little ones the public never saw. “It’s really not that bad.”
“Oil be the judge of that,” Dick muttered.
Dick shimmied out of his oil-soaked uniform in one side of the showers while Bruce set up and started filling up a big plastic tub in the other. He tried to rinse out as much gunk as he could with water as hot as he could stand, but just the heat didn’t seem to be doing much. If anything, having to inhale the harbor-smelling steam made him feel heavier than before.
Alfred came back when the tub was maybe a quarter full, and took over watching the water while Bruce got out of his oily uniform. He had left his tailcoat off and had instead pulled on arm-length plastic gloves that he didn’t use unless there was an extreme cleaning emergency. With him, he had three bottles of Dawn dish soap. “Time to get in the tub, master Richard,” he said.
“You’re not gonna wash me with dish soap, are you?” Dick asked and gave the bottles of blue liquid a suspicious glance. The little duckling on the label stared back, innocent as ever.
“It’s a surprisingly gentle agent and it’s the best way to get all that oil off quickly and efficiently,” Alfred said, uncapped the first bottle, and began to squeeze it into the tub. “You’ll need a good preen afterwards and might have to lay off the powder dye for a while, but this really is the easiest way.”
Dick hummed a distinctly displeased note of token protest, but climbed into the tub. He’d expected the water to be hotter, but it had to be around 110 degrees at most. He lowered his wings, heavy like they’d been wrapped in thick velvet, into the water that was getting bluer by the minute as Alfred laid on the soap.
The tub was big enough that Dick could relax his wings and let the water support them without his primaries having to fear the edges. Alfred instructed him to drag his wings back and forth to get the warm soapy water in contact with the oil between the feathers.
Dick swirled his wings around and droplet by droplet, glob by glob the dark oily gunk began to come loose. It pearled off where it was thickest and dissolved into the soapy water in murky brown clouds. In no time at all the tub looked like he was bathing in world’s grossest chocolate milk.
“Do we need to change the water?” Dick asked once he could no longer see his hands if he held them underwater. Flaked-off feather dye floated on the surface like wet sprinkles.
“Not yet,” Alfred’s said and brandished a feather comb at him. “Better to get as much oil out as possible before the first rinse.”
“This is gross,” Dick whined. He didn’t usually whine, but this situation called for it.
“It’s going to get grosser yet, chum,” Bruce threatened from the other side of the tub, shirtless and holding another wide-toothed feather comb. “Give me your wing.”
Dick grumbled but held out his wings so that Bruce and Alfred could comb the miraculously still-foaming nasty soap water through his feathers.
The combination of heat, soap, and combing slowly made Dick feel less and less like a tiny wad of cotton had been pushed under each and every feather. By the time Alfred decreed that Dick could go rinse off, the water had gone cold. Dick climbed out of the tub and into the shower and watched clean water wash away yucky dirt water while Bruce drained the tub behind him. The full bottle of Dawn had washed away most of the oil, though especially the feathers on the underside of his wings still were dirt-brown with it. Almost all of the Robin-bright feather dye was gone as well, and save for a few lingering spots of red and green his wings had returned to their natural gray with black tips and dark blue specula.
Or, almost; the usually iridescing spots of color had dulled into a lifeless black, and now he was completely grayscale save for a faint rainbow sheen of oil swimming on top of his drenched feathers. Dick really hoped the beautiful blue sheen would come back once he was done. If he had to wait until his next molt, he’d get depressed and wither away, he just knew it. He had some decent spare feathers saved from his last molt he could use to replace his dulled secondaries, but not enough for imping them all.
“Do you think my speculums will turn blue again or am I gonna be dull forever?” Dick asked when Bruce and Alfred told him to get back into the tub for a second round of Dawn.
“It’s not that bad being drab once in a while,” Bruce said.
“You’ve never been drab a day in your life,” Dick shot back and pointed with a sodden, soapy wingtip at Bruce’s wonderfully iridescent black feathers. “They’re gonna call me names at school, I just know it,” he boded. “Jackson Andrews burnt his primaries playing with fireworks last year and everyone called him ‘Stumpy’ for a month. They’re gonna call me ‘black eyes’ or something stupid like that.”
“I’m sure they will be fine, master Richard,” Alfred reassured him. “Once you’re completely dry they’ll bounce right back, and if not, we’ll find an iridescent powder dye in your shade.”
“They don’t let us use any except for prom,” Dick muttered and focused on combing the soapy water through his axillaries where plenty of oil still remained.
“Let me help you with that,” Bruce said and waved a comb at Dick’s inner wing.
“No,” Dick said. “It tickles when you try it. Alfred can do it.”
Dick had to fend off Bruce’s various attempts and offers to help with the most ticklish spots, but finally he let the butler scooch over with a pout that wasn’t nowhere near good enough to work on Dick, who had once managed to resist a lion cub’s kitten eyes. Dick either combed those spots himself or let Alfed do it for the hardest-to-reach places, because Alfred had magic touch. Dick did let Bruce wash his hair to get him to stop his pouting, and then there was nothing more to do but sway his wings back and forth so that the soap really got everything out.
The water was a much lighter brown this time, only about as dark as milk tea. Dick took the time to give Alfed a play-by-play of their night and recounted him just how many feathers he’d taken from Pino Maroni, one for each poor soul they’d gotten out of the now blown-up ship. Bruce very politely didn’t say anything about his math, which was impeccable.
The water was still warm when Dick was let to go rinse off again. Alfred helped him get the hard-to-reach bits with a second shower head. Then they deep-conditioned his wings with a moisturizing feather conditioner that took forever to get in and out, and although Dick was so tired that falling asleep standing up right there in the shower spray was starting to sound pretty cozy, his wings finally felt alright even with the water weight. He almost cried when Bruce got out the blow dryer.
“Just a little longer, chum,” Bruce promised and attached the narrow nozzle for fluffing up down. “Then you’re done and we can all go to bed.”
“You promised me hot chocolate first,” Dick reminded his guardian. He would stay awake for hot chocolate, even if he had to pinch himself to keep his eyes open.
Bruce just chuckled fondly and turned the blow drier on. A lance of cool air shot into the tender skin under the lesser coverts of his right wing and made him startle, but in no time at all the narrow stream of air turned pleasantly warm.
It was most important to get the down dry; if the smooth, streamlined surface of the feathers on top of it locked in the moisture, he could get a fungal infection. Bruce deftly swished the dryer nozzle back and forth in a rapid zigzag, fluffing up one spot and moving on to the next so that the thin skin the shafts of the feathers being blown about didn’t get any more irritated on top everything that Dick’s poor wings had already gone through. He dried from the back first, then from the front, and back again. Then Bruce said, “I think that’s dry enough. Let’s get you to bed.”
Dick agreed with ‘dry enough’. He was still damp in a lot of places, but not so much so that he couldn’t sleep now and air them out properly in the sunshine tomorrow. “Not without hot chocolate.”
Alfred gave him a doubtful look, and Bruce sighed. “Dick, it’s almost five in the morning.”
“But you promised.”
Bruce sighed again, deeper, like he was a deflating balloon. “...alright. One cup of hot chocolate. I’ll... I’ll make it, Alfred, you can go to bed.”
Alfred gave them both quick assessing looks, and then nodded. “Goodnight master Bruce, master Richard.” He turned and walked out of the shower area, light shoes barely making a sound on the damp tiles. The black tips of his pied wings gave him an impression of the ever-present tailcoat trailing after him, even as he was in his shirt sleeves.
Bruce and Dick put on the fluffiest bathrobes they could find in the cave and followed Alfred upstairs. In the kitchen Dick sat down at the island and kicked his feet under the table so that with every swing his heels hit the sharp angles of the chair legs to keep from falling asleep, and Bruce steamed them both a cup of milk with the espresso machine. Dick listened to the steam bubble and hiss through the heating milk like a backing-up sewer and wondered if something like that could be used to dry feathers faster or if he’d just end up with third-degree burns.
Bruce mixed a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and cocoa powder into each mug, sat down at the counter and slid Dick’s mug across the table.
“Thanks,” Dick said, and the word turned into a jaw-splitting yawn. He wrapped his heavy hands around the cup and stared down. The pure cocoa powder Bruce had used had made the beverage dark, the exact shade of dark brown his first bathwater had been. Even the milk foam was the same color as the dish soap lather.
The thought of hot chocolate had gotten him through the tedious wash, but now that it was in front of him, he didn’t want to drink it.
Dick glanced at Bruce, who had closed his eyes and was breathing in the fragrant steam rising from his cup. Dick couldn’t help noticing how dark the crescents below his eyes here, or how he still had traces of the oily streak on his face. But he was also smiling, a small and tired little thing, barely curling the corners of his lips upwards.
Dick looked down at his cup again. His heel bounced off the chair leg. Bruce had made him this cup of cocoa with love. The least he could do was drink it, even if it looked like nasty oily bathwater. He closed his eyes, lifted the hot cup to his mouth, and took a careful sip as not to burn his tongue.
It was good.
He wasn’t in a hurry to get oiled again, but maybe it wasn’t all bad.