“Burning Questions”

“I’m hungry.”

Dick leaned back against the hood of his Ferrari and let out a long breath. “Suck it up.”

“You can’t suck up hunger,” Tim grumbled, sitting upon the hood next to his brother’s butt. “If you don’t eat, it eats you.”

“You can deal without food for days. It’s dehydration that will kill you.”

The hot, North Carolinian air scraped their cheeks and saturating their T-shirts. The only noise came from the rustling corn surrounding them on the side of the desolate two-lane highway.

“I’m thirsty.”

Dick slammed his palm into his forehead. “If you didn’t talk, you wouldn’t be.”

“We’re going to die out here, aren’t we?”

“We wouldn’t if you could actually do something useful.”

Tim’s eyebrows knitted. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you can light your entire body on fire without singeing your clothes, but you can’t fly to get us gas.”

“Even if I could, wouldn’t I start the gas on fire? The only things that don’t catch on fire are those on me.”

Dick blinked and growled. “Shut up.”

“You shut up.”

“I will if you will.”

“Oh, that’s mature.”

“Uh, yeah. I don’t want you to die, so seriously, shut it.”

Two minutes.

“Oh, and Tim?” Dick solemnly looked into his little brother’s eyes. “If I go first, you can have corn-on-the-cob on the side of my dead carcass—”

“A-hole!” Tim elbowed him, and Dick cracked up laughing.

Two minutes.

“You think I could do that anyway? I mean, actually control the fire?”

Dick shrugged. “I wouldn’t suggest trying it in the middle of kindling, but yeah, I think you could. We just have to try it in a controlled environment.”

Two minutes.

“Dick?”

“Tim, you are so going to get us killed.”

“I’m no longer…y’know…normal. That won’t matter to—to Bruce, will it?”

Dick snorted. “We were never normal, Tim.”

“Yeah, but still—”

“You know what will matter to him the most?”

“What?”
“Us being alive to greet him—part Syren and part Paladin.”

Tim stayed quiet for the next three hours until the old, beat-up truck pulled up before their car. When the man jumped out in his oiled jumpsuit, Dick handed him the AAA card while Tim made a mad dash toward the truck’s cab.

“Uh, son? This card’s expired, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say Dick Grayson was killed in an explosion more than a year ago.”

Dick dipped into his pocket and flipped out three large bills from a wad. “This says you give us gas and don’t say another word.”

Tim hung off the truck’s door, holding up a half-drunken bottle of Coke and what looked like a bag of garlic knots.

Dick flipped off another bill. “And this says we get your dinner.”

The End