Before the towering Gothic window at the end of the corridor, the setting sun cast a sharp sword of light across the floor and glazed the walls a dull yellow. Thin branches from the garden reached toward the window, and the sound of insects always brought back memories of summer in childhood.
Heavy footsteps approached from afar. Dick, who had been hunched over his desk writing furiously, suddenly straightened and pricked up his ears.
He spun around as quickly as a startled rabbit, but the expectation and delight on his face vanished the instant the door opened.
"Bruce... uh, Batman, what is it?"
Bruce outside the door was not wearing casual clothes, but Dick could still tell that this was not the young Bruce he knew. This was the master of this Gotham Wayne Manor, the real Batman.
"Have you finished your homework?" It was not a question. It meant, "Theoretically, you should have finished by now."
"Mm..." Dick twisted back around, dragged out the sound, and said, "Almost. I've got about half the sentence-pattern exercises left."
When he turned back again, Batman was already standing silently behind him. Dick looked up at him in confusion and asked, "When did you get back? Are you done with work?"
Batman did not answer. He sat on Dick's bed beside the desk and said, "If I remember correctly, you have thirty words to memorize today. Thomas will definitely check later."
"I memorized them!" Dick stood up and bent over to search for his vocabulary notebook on the bookshelf in front of him. After looking for a long while, he began rummaging through the drawers below.
Batman frowned slightly. The drawers were crammed with piles upon piles of books and textbooks, and he could barely stand to look at them. Dick dug through