what's past is prologue

by Icestorm238

Summary:

Dick Grayson, bestowed with the memories of an alternate life, decides that things are going to go better this time.

Priority number one: preventing Jason's death.

Notes:

• Inspired by i want you to remember me by zxrysky

the basic concept of the fic that inspired this, the "what if a character remembered their entire canon life, how would they react", gripped me and would not let me go.

title is from The Tempest by Shakespeare. it's not exactly original but it fit too well to pass it up.

It’s a perfectly average Saturday in early May when Dick remembers everything.

The knowledge doesn’t cripple him, doesn’t leave him winded like he’d have expected if he’d been forewarned. It’s a sudden easing, quick and painless, settling in his mind almost before he’s registered that anything has changed. It’s comforting, familiar, pieces he hadn’t known were missing slotting into place.

He pauses for a moment to absorb the memories of a forgotten lifetime, then readjusts the basket over his arm and returns his attention to his grocery shop.

He goes back to his apartment that night and pulls out his design ideas for his new post-Robin identity. Grimaces. Shoves Discowing to the bottom of the pile and, for the sake of sparing his future self from the taunts, he draws what had been his second Nightwing costume to the top in its place.

In some ways, he’s relieved he only remembered now, after his parents’ deaths. If he’d remembered before, been faced with the chance to save them, he isn’t sure what he would have done.

There’s a not inconsiderable part of him that persistently aches for his parents. He could never have stood by and let them fall again, not when he knows how to save them, has run scenarios and schematics over and over at night thinking how he could have done things differently-

But he couldn’t have. He was only a child, and knew nothing of what was to come. Had no idea how drastically the course of his life would change with their deaths.

And he loves the life he has now, loves the thrill of vigilantism, loves Bruce and Alfred and Batman and Robin no matter how strained their relationships may have become recently. It gets better, he knows that now, knows how foolish these arguments will seem in hindsight.

He loves Jason and Tim, Steph and Cass, Duke and Damian, loves his siblings more than he thought it possible to love in that way, adores being their dependably smothering big brother.

He loves them so much.

Could he have sacrificed his second family for a chance with his first?

It doesn’t matter. It’s not a choice he’ll ever have to make. He remembered too late, and his parents are gone, and he’s locked in with the Waynes. 

So Dick takes a deep breath, and calls Bruce.

It goes more smoothly than he’d anticipated. He’d been ready to abandon his pride and grovel. He’d apologised, and Bruce had apologised in turn, and sooner than he’d expected the conversation is over and he’s making a second call to take time off work.

Dick is going home.

 

 

They’ve got about a month before Jason joins the family.

Dick doesn’t know the exact date - he was too busy being mad at Bruce the first time round, didn’t learn about Jason’s existence until the boy started going out as Robin, which didn’t happen immediately - but he knows it’s sometime soon.

He needs to make sure the adoption still happens, that he still gets to be Jason’s big brother. Needs to be better at it this time, put into practice what he learnt too late to apply to Jason: his siblings matter so much more than any petty squabbles he may have with Bruce.

He’s going to be there for his brother this time. Support him, instead of the trickle of kindness and attention he’d begrudgingly shown his replacement. Show him the love he’d stupidly withheld.

And then he’s going to save Jason from death.

The specifics of the last part are still up for debate.

Loving Jason will be easy - he’d loved him all along, really, but had bottled it beneath resentment and teenage rebellion that had been meant for Bruce but had hurt Jason just as much, if not more. This time Dick has experience with six younger siblings under his belt (and yes, he’s counting Steph, she was never officially a Wayne but she was always a Bat) and years fighting to reconcile with Jason. He should be able to handle a Jason who never had reason to hate him.

But saving him-

Dick knows what happened. Bruce had been meticulous in his notes, even more so than usual as a form of self-punishment. Dick’s self-punishment had been reading, then rereading, then rereading again, sparing himself no detail of his brother’s fate. The catalogued injuries - the brain trauma, the broken bones, the internal bleeding - the explosion, bringing a quicker end than the slow death the crowbar had otherwise doomed him to. The build-up to the beating, the litany of Bruce’s mistakes that had guided Jason step by step to his death.

Dick’s complete and total absence for the whole thing.

That might be the key. Dick will be around this time, and he’ll know what to expect, will have some idea of how to prevent it.

He won’t let Jason die again.

 

 

Now that Jason’s appearance is so close, now that he could pop up any day, Dick adjusts his patrol routes so that he cycles through Crime Alley at least once a night. It’s unnecessary, perhaps - he was uninvolved the first time, and surely Batman will abandon the Batmobile in Crime Alley sooner or later, surely Jason will stumble across it once again and seize the opportunity.

Just in case, Dick swings his way through, searching for dark hair and blue eyes and the tyre iron.

And then, one night, he sees it, all the pieces in place: Batmobile, tyre iron, Jason.

He’d forgotten how tiny Jason was at eleven. He’s dwarfed by his faded green shirt, shorter and thinner than an eleven year old should be, the malnutrition brought on by his street life having a notable impact on his health.

But he’s here. He’s here.

It’s a relief, in more ways than one. It’s confirmation that the memories lurking in the back of his mind have basis in reality, that they’re not some elaborate fantasy he concocted in the throes of loneliness.

He really does remember an alternate life, and Jason’s appearance proves it.

Dick grins, slinks into a shaded nook on a rooftop not too far away with a good view of events, and tunes into the comms.

“Hey, B, you need to keep a closer eye on the Batmobile.”

There’s a distinct pause, and Dick can imagine Batman stopping dead, running over that sentence in his head trying to parse what exactly Dick is on about, before he growls, “What did you do.”

Huh. No faith. “Well that’s hurtful. If you’re going to assume I’m the one causing problems then I guess you don’t want to hear about the eleven year old with a tyre iron going to town on your car.”

Another pause. “Are you going to do anything about it?”

“I’m calling you, aren’t I?”

“You’re close enough to see it happening, and you’re calling me instead of intervening yourself.”

“He’s already got one tyre off,” Dick informs him cheerfully, and cuts the comm link.

He settles down to watch. Jason’s clearly had practice with this kind of theft - his work is quick and efficient, and he halts at every new sound, assessing whether he’s safe to continue or if he needs to bolt. The conversation Dick just had was distant enough to blend in with the sounds of the Alley, by design, and he’s had plenty of practice himself at fading unseen into the night. Besides, no one ever looks up, not until it’s too late. Jason won’t see him.

The third tyre is being added to Jason’s growing pile when Dick sees the shadows shift in that specific way he’s trained himself to notice. They’re still for a few seconds, watching Jason return to the Batmobile and crouch beside the final tyre, then Batman drops from the sky to loom menacingly behind the child.

Jason notices almost straight away - impressive, given the silence with which Batman moves - and jolts away from the car, jerking the tyre iron up into a defensive position. The way the colour drains from his face when he registers who’s caught him is very funny to Dick, who has the benefit of knowing that Batman would never hurt this kid. Poor Jason doesn't have those same assurances, and looks appropriately terrified.

“Can I have my tyres back?” Batman asks.

“No,” says Jason.

And he swings the tyre iron at Batman.

He actually attacks Batman.

Oh wow. Dick knew about this, had thought it hilarious when he first heard the story, but it’s so much funnier when it’s playing out in front of him.

He can’t quite contain his laugh, and Batman - unaffected by the attack, which had bounced off his leg like a particularly bouncy ball against a wall - shoots him the glare that had stopped working back when Dick was still Robin, but Batman keeps resorting to it anyway.

And - uh oh, Jason’s about to run while Batman is distracted. It’s not as if he’d get far, even if Dick stayed up on his rooftop, but he takes the opportunity to hop down anyway and join the party.

Jason, who’s managed to turn and start to run in the time that took, screeches to a halt as Nightwing blocks his escape. His grip on the tyre iron tightens as Dick watches, and briefly, transcendentally, he wonders if Jason will attack him too. The idea fills him with more glee than it should - it’s prime material for teasing later down the line, as if attacking Batman wasn’t material enough.

To Dick’s great disappointment, Batman cuts that short by shuffling around the car to get closer. At the sound, Jason clearly remembers that he’s turned his back to Batman himself and spins around. Dick is slightly insulted to be considered the lesser threat.

They appraise each other, Jason and Batman, and-

And Bruce asks "are you hungry?" in his Dad Voice, and Jason's brow scrunches as he lowers the tyre iron, bewildered, and Dick knows he's just been adopted. Bruce is already planning the logistics of making it legal, he can tell.

Jason is coming home.

 

 

Dick puts in the effort this time.

He transfers to the GCPD, moving back into the manor full time. It chafes at his independence - still newly won in this timeline, established and long-running in his memories, the conflicting newness and normality conflicting harder with the loss of it - but he can spend more time with Jason this way.

Abandoning Blüdhaven hurts, but it's not permanent. Nightwing will always belong to Blüdhaven, no matter how much time he spends in his other city. He'll always find his way back.

He carves out time to spend with Jason, works at getting to know him in the moment instead of retroactively. Jason's a typical eleven year old, dialled up to an extra degree with the paranoia and mistrust he'd built up to survive on the streets, but he loosens up as he learns that his place in the home is secure, that his family's love is unconditional, that he's wanted.

Dick struggles to temper his excitement when Jason opens up to him about his love of literature. That had never happened the first time - he’d found out second hand from Alfred, hadn’t thought much about it, hadn’t realised just how important books were to Jason, hadn’t cared to learn back then. When Jason returned to them it had been treated as a known hobby, and still not one he shared with Dick.

He learns about The Tempest, about a story of revenge that ends in reconciliation, a tale of an unfair exile from home and the longing to have what was taken restored, a text with jagged edges preventing it from fitting neatly into any of Shakespeare’s otherwise firmly defined categories of comedy, tragedy, history , resulting in something inventive and unique and perfect.

It’s the only Shakespeare that Jason has read in this timeline. He can’t make comparisons between texts from his own observations, having never had the chance to read more on the streets - Dick isn’t sure where he found a copy of The Tempest in the first place - and he’s left drawing on what he’s picked up elsewhere.

Dick drags him to the nearest bookstore, buys him a massive Shakespeare anthology. The full works - every play, every poem, bound in what Dick is half convinced is a literal brick. The thing is heavy enough to do some serious damage if they were ever inclined to add it to Robin’s arsenal.

They probably have an identical copy in the manor’s library. They definitely have individual copies of all the plays. But this copy - this one is Jason's, and Dick has realised this time around just how much that matters to the street kid who’d had nothing.

It ends up thunked proudly next to Jason’s bed, except for when he’s curled himself into a ball in the corner with it cracked carefully open on his lap, like he’s terrified of damaging it. He probably is.

Dick goes back to the store a few days later, Jason-less, and gets himself a copy of The Tempest.

He completely misses whatever Jason saw in it, the archaic English blurring together and forming nothing concrete. He watches a recording of a staged version, understands a bit better, but still not like Jason understood.

It’s worth the suffering of struggling through it when he asks Jason a question about some themes that went over his head and his brother lights up like it’s his birthday when he realises that Dick has read it.

So it goes like that: Dick sneaks his brother out for late night ice cream that Alfred would never condone if he knew, buys him piles of books for birthdays and Christmas even though Jason has finally decided that he won’t get kicked out if he’s caught using the manor’s library, picks him up from school and takes him to the cinema or the park or a cafe.

They run patrols once Jason’s been trained, Nightwing hovering a little closer to Batman than he did before Robin rejoined the gang, and it’s fun. It’s so fun. Jason’s enthusiasm is infectious. Dick introduces him to the games they’d invented after his time as Robin, variants of hide and seek and tag and other childhood games they’d modified for the rooftops of Gotham. Last time Jason had been twenty and grumbling about it even as he threw himself into the games with zeal. This time he skips the complaining he’d felt obliged to provide and moves right past it to the passion he’d tried to conceal. It’s adorable.

Dick loves Jason. He loves him so much. How could he have been so stupid, to have been so caught up in his petty feud with Bruce that he missed out on his brother?

 

 

Dick has plans for after.

For when Jason hits his sixteenth birthday without a crowbar in sight.

He's going to collect their other siblings, pull them out of their abusive or lonely childhoods earlier than before.

He's already working on Tim; he’s been throwing a probably inadvisable number of quadruple somersaults into his acrobatics just for him.

He’d dived towards the kid when he saw him lurking in the back of the most recent gala that Dick and Jason had both been bribed into attending. Dick had initially tried to help Jason wriggle out of it, but he'd ended up glad he'd failed. He'd thrust little brother one at little brother two, eased over the awkwardness of their fumbling first meeting with his own natural charm and decades long head start, and hoped they'd start talking at school.

Steph and Duke will be harder. Neither currently has any desire to leave their families, and Dick has no desire to rip them away when there’s no need - it'll be a waiting game for them.

Cass and Damian will be hardest. Getting them away and safe is the most urgent goal, but David Cain and Ra's al Ghul will not give up their prized possessions without a fight. Dick is more than ready to fight for them, but not when Jason needs him first, not when he still needs to fabricate a reason to know of their existence.

And, of course, there’s Barbara. The Joker’s attack on her happened not long after he killed Jason. Oracle is invaluable, but isn’t worth the trauma Barbara endured to get there. Maybe he’ll nudge her towards her tech, her cameras and her code, but that might piss her off, make her think he doesn’t want her out in the field. It’s a tricky situation.

It doesn't matter for now. Getting Jason to sixteen is priority number one. The best he can do is set the wheels in motion for the rest, and throw himself fully into saving them only once he's saved Jason.

There's less than a year to go.

 

 

Jason is in the library, wedged into the back corner between a bookshelf and the wall, when Dick finds him. He has a book open on his lap - Dick can’t see the title from this angle - but he’s not reading it. He’s been glaring at the same page for the past two minutes, aggressively blinking back tears as Dick watched, unnoticed, from around the corner.

“Interesting book?” Dick says anyway to announce his arrival, politely glancing away to give Jason a chance to compose his face.

When he looks back, Jason is flipping to the front cover, squinting at the title like he’s seeing it for the first time. “Uh, sure.”

Dick lets it slide. He seats himself perpendicular to Jason, back to the wall and legs stretched out, fixing his gaze firmly on the row of green books shelved opposite, at just the right angle to avoid staring head on at Jason, but keeping him in Dick’s peripheral vision.

“You doing okay?”

The angling works: Jason, clearly thinking himself out of Dick’s view, lets his face fall. Not wholly, but enough. “I’m fine.”

A beat.

“He took Robin away.”

Dick’s breath catches in his throat.

That’s the trigger. That’s the start of the end. Jason is fifteen and benched and this is how it ends.

“I’m too angry, apparently,” Jason snarls, oblivious to Dick’s internal panic, the dam of his resolve broken and the words flooding out. “Too reckless. Too violent. Because I leave one guy with a broken collarbone, as if he’s never left anyone in worse condition. Anyway, he was working with child pornography, if anyone’s collarbone is getting broken then surely it should’ve been his! It’s not as if his hospital stay will negatively impact society!”

His chest is heaving, his eyes glassy, his grip on the book white-knuckled.

Dick takes a second to process - this is too important to mess up.

“You’re right,” he concedes, and his lips twitch into a small smile as Jason’s head whips to face him.

“I am?”

“Bruce is a hypocrite. He’s left plenty of criminals in a much worse state. He’s bad about it now, but he was even worse when I first started out.”

“Exactly,” Jason hisses. “Why is it only a problem when it’s me?”

God, Dick wants to hug him so bad, but he restrains himself. He’s got a point to make first. “He expects better from you because he wants better from you, for you. More than anything, he wants us both to be better than him. It took me far too long to come to that realisation.”

“So what, you were excessively violent too?” Jason scoffs. “That’s hard to believe. You’ve always been better than him.”

“Oh, Jay, you never saw me in my early days. I was so much worse than you.”

Jason doesn’t look convinced.

“We were as bad as each other, me and Bruce. Both lost in our grief, taking it out on Gotham’s criminals because who would mind if a drug dealer or a mob boss or a dealer of child pornography-” he punctuates that with a direct glance at Jason “-got a little beaten up, or a lot beaten up, because hey, they weren’t dead, just bed-ridden with permanent, life-changing injuries that they’d never fully recover from.

“We don’t have that right. Our job is to help the GCPD control the chaos, deposit the criminals on their doorstep and let due process take its course. It isn’t up to us to dispense justice, but to deliver them to justice.

“Bruce realised I was going too far, and that made him realise that he’d been going too far from the start. He started trying to pull back, to be less violent, and trying to guide me the same way. It worked better with me than him, but he’s still trying - for you, now, too.

“We don’t kill,” Dick says slowly, choosing his words with care. “So what gives us the right to inflict irreversible injuries? How is that any better?”

Jason runs his fingers down the side of his book, teasing at the edges of the pages. “But sometimes it’s obvious,” he counters. “Sometimes the criminal is obviously irredeemable, acting entirely of their own volition. I don’t see the harm in breaking a man’s collarbone when he’s very vocally and proudly been dealing in child porn.”

Dick considers that. He wants to hear Jason out, wants Jason to know he’s being heard and listened to. “We can’t know everything. What if the child porn guy was only doing it because his family was being held hostage?”

“Parents dead, no siblings or partner or children. No hostages.”

“What if those records were clever fakes? What if the loud and proud attitude was a bluff to cover up for the man holding the metaphorical gun to his head?”

“They guy did everything himself, including the selling. No middle men, and he kept all the cash.”

Why couldn’t Bruce pick someone more ambiguous to fall out with Jason over? “What if-”

“Are you seriously defending the child porn guy?”

Dick glares, fond despite himself, at his brother. “Okay, so the child porn guy is not the best example. My point still stands. There’s always the possibility, always a what if there's information we've missed that changes everything. It’s not our job to know everything, and it's not for us to sentence. We find evidence of criminal activity, we assist in the capture of the criminals, and the GCPD take it from there. The person’s guilt and sentence are decided by the people whose job it is to decide those things.”

“Oh, yeah, the notoriously corrupt GCPD, they’re sure to solve all the problems.”

Jason's tone is dismissive, but his eyes are thoughtful as he absently traces the gilded title of his book. It’s about as good as Dick is going to get from going down that path, so he switches tracks: “I’m surprised it took this long for Bruce to bench you.”

Jason’s anger comes roaring back at that, his mouth opening to argue, and Dick quickly continues, “I didn’t last nearly as long.”

That makes Jason pause, caught off guard. “He took Robin from you too?”

There’s something vulnerable in the way he asks it, like he’s unable to believe that golden child Dick Grayson could ever mess up badly enough for that, regardless of the admissions Dick has just made about his past aggression.

They’d had this problem last time - Jason, thinking himself inferior to his predecessor, and Dick either not being around to combat the assumption, or enhancing it on the rare occasions he was present, treating Jason as a lesser replacement out of misplaced anger.

He can’t let Jason think like that again. He should never have let it happen in the first place.

“Too many times to count,” he admits - did he ever tell Jason that in the first run? “I really wasn’t kidding when I said I used to be violent. But no matter what I’d done to scare him enough to take Robin away, he always gave it back. This isn’t permanent, Jay.”

Jason mulls that over, then crawls out of his corner. He slots the book back into its place - he’d taken it from low down on the nearest shelf, probably pulled it out blindly once he’d sequestered himself in the corner - and sits himself next to Dick.

He pointedly doesn’t lean into Dick, but he doesn’t protest when Dick drapes an arm over his shoulder.

“I still think Bruce is a hypocritical idiot,” Jason mumbles.

Dick laughs. “And I still agree with you.”

He tugs his brother closer and relishes the warmth of him, young and alive, and prays he’s done enough to keep him this way.

 

 

“What did you say to him?” Bruce asks a week later, catching Dick by the arm as they pass in the hall.

Dick shrugs. “The truth.”

“Well, it seems to have worked. I was… worried, for a while. I thought he was going to take everything too far but he’s pulling back. He’s listening to me again.” Bruce pauses, then: “Thank you.”

The rush goes to Dick’s head, a little. It should be enough - everything leading up to Jason’s death spiralled from this one moment, a moment which Dick has just undone.

Jason is back as Robin after only a few more days, the end averted before it could truly begin.

 

 

Dick is still riding the high of getting Jason unbenched when his brother approaches him with a look that Dick can’t quite identify.

“Hey, Dick,” he starts cautiously.

“Uh oh,” Dick says.

“I need a favour.”

“Just- lay it on me.”

“I want to go to Lebanon,” Jason says in a rush.

And Dick freezes.

That’s the next step. Lebanon, then Ethiopia. Sharmin Rosen, Lady Shiva, Sheila Haywood.

How did this happen? Jason found out about his mother when he was benched, in the last run, but he was unbenched so much faster this time. He shouldn’t have had the chance to make that discovery - Dick thought getting him back as Robin would be enough, why wasn’t it enough?

“Why do you want to go to Lebanon?” he manages to ask through a suddenly very dry mouth.

If Jason notices anything wrong, if he picks up on his brother’s mild internal crisis, then he doesn’t comment. “Turns out my mother wasn’t actually my biological mother. I’ve narrowed my birth mother down to three women, and two of them are in Lebanon. So I want to go to Lebanon and meet them, see if it’s either of them.”

Dick’s fighting to keep his breathing steady and his face blank. It feels like the nightmare of the other life is unfurling, relentless, into this reality no matter how much Dick pleads with it to remain a bad dream.

It’s okay. He’s planned for the what if of reaching this point. The situation is still salvageable.

Jason’s not dead yet.

“Okay. Sure. What do I need to know about these women?”

Act natural, act helpful, be his confidant and keep his trust.

But Jason’s biting his lip, hesitating, and Dick knows exactly why.

“Well, one of them’s an aid worker.”

“Uh huh.”

“Then there’s an Israeli intelligence agent.”

“Right.” When Jason pauses for a little too long, Dick prompts, “and the third?”

“She’s an old acquaintance of Bruce’s, actually.”

Acquaintance, very neutral, what a careful choice of words. “What kind of acquaintance, Jay?”

“The, uh, stabby kind.”

“You’re going to have to go into more detail.”

“Sandra Woosan,” Jason mumbles.

There it is. “Lady Shiva?” Dick hisses, as if he hadn’t already known.

He just needed the facts out in the open, needed to be given the information in this timeline. Now he can freely manipulate.

“Jason, no,” Dick says. “It’s too dangerous.”

“The aid worker can’t be that dangerous!”

“No, fair point. We could at least go meet her. The aid worker is in Lebanon, then?”

He knows full well that Sheila Haywood is the real danger here, despite appearances, and also that she’s conveniently the only one not in Lebanon.

Jason grimaces, as expected. “We can get the dangerous ones out of the way first by starting with Lebanon?”

“No,” Dick says firmly. “We’re not going anywhere near these women. We can figure out which one is your mother through safer methods.”

“But we can’t!” Jason explodes. “I’ve tried. The Batcomputer gave me their identities and locations, but it can’t run maternity tests without a DNA sample to compare with mine. If you’ve got another idea then please, tell me, but I’ve thought this through, and the only way I can see is to meet them and ask.”

Dick almost, stupidly, suggests getting Oracle on it. Barbara is still Batgirl in this timeline - she doesn’t get shot until after Jason’s death, and takes a good chunk of time out to recover before taking up the mantle of Oracle. And if Dick succeeds, if all goes to plan, she won’t get shot at all. Barbara’s good with tech now, as Batgirl, that skill hadn’t come from nowhere, but she’s not at Oracle levels yet. She won’t be able to do much more than the Batcomputer currently, and that’s what matters right now.

He catches himself in time. “We can get Bruce on it. He’s got resources even we don’t know about, I’m sure. We stay home and let him handle it.”

“I’m not waiting two weeks for Bruce to get back from his business trip,” Jason says. “Besides, I came to you instead of him for a reason. I don’t- I don’t want him to think I’m… ungrateful, for everything he’s done for me. He’s my father, and I’m happy here, but…”

The confession takes a lot for Jason to admit out loud, Dick can read it in his face, and he seriously has to fight the urge to wrap him in a hug. This is not the time.

“...it’s my mother, Dick. I have to know.” 

His words are fuelled by a familiar fire, one that Dick has cursed multiple times before because it’s a fire that never burns out, a fire that keeps Jason marching bravely on into even the most dangerous of situations, and-

And Dick realises, with an unwanted flash of clarity, that it’s hopeless.

The impossibility of it weighs down on him like the storm that sets The Tempest in motion, the inescapable roaring and howling, the inevitable shipwreck. No matter what he does or says, Jason is going to Ethiopia. He snuck out last time, and it doesn’t matter how vigilant Dick is because he’s only human, he has to sleep at some point - Jason will sneak out again.

He can’t talk Jason out of this.

So he changes tactics.

“Okay,” he says. “Fine. I’ll go with you to find your mother.”

Jason, in the middle of drawing breath to continue arguing his case, stalls. “You will?”

“On one condition: we start with Ethiopia.”

It’s a dangerous play. Maybe the wrong play, when Ethiopia is the endpoint that he should be desperate to avoid. Dick doesn’t want to make any gambles when it’s Jason’s life at stake, but he is going to risk this one.

This isn’t entirely being sprung on Dick, and he has an advantage there. He’d started, foolishly, to believe it would be unnecessary, but he’s been thinking about the run up to Jason’s death for years now, rolling scenarios around in his head to figure out the best way to save his brother’s life.

The ideal outcome was preventing Jason from discovering his true parentage for an extra decade, or, even better, keeping that information from him forever.

That’s fallen apart, so Plan B was to convince him to abandon his search, but Jason is stubborn and determined and nothing short of a miracle would stop him now.

So Plan C it is: accompany Jason abroad, and keep him alive at all costs.

And if he has to resort to Plan C, then he’d decided a long time ago that they had to start with Ethiopia.

Jason’s death had been caused by a series of coincidences and unfortunate encounters - Jason and Bruce in Ethiopia at the same time as the Joker, the clown’s blackmailing of Sheila Haywood hitting its peak synchronising with her first meeting with her son, Bruce and Jason’s relationship strained enough for Jason to disregard orders and choose his mother.

Dick has already improved their relationship, and inserting himself into the equation will also help in that department. That’s one problem hopefully solved.

He has no control over the Joker’s movements, no real idea of when he entered Ethiopia, or where he was before that, but if they go to Ethiopia before Lebanon, shift everything forward by a few weeks, then maybe the timelines won’t converge. Maybe they’ll be able to go in and out before the Joker even sets foot in the country.

Maybe it’ll be enough.

“Why Ethiopia first?” Jason is frowning. “Two of the candidates are in Lebanon. Surely it makes more sense to start there, knock out two at once.”

And Dick’s prepared his answer to that one. “The two in Lebanon are the dangerous two. I’d much rather start with the safer aid worker and hope she’s the one. Limit the chances of needing to interact with the bigger threats.”

Jason chews at his lip, considering. “Okay. That’s- okay.”

It’s a small victory. Dick prays, again, that it’s enough.

 

 

Three days later they’re packed and piled into the car. Bruce still isn’t home, and they waited until they knew Alfred was out of the manor to do this.

When they arrive at the airport - they’re flying commercial, because commandeering the private jet would not go unnoticed by Bruce, Alfred, or the media - Jason shifts restlessly in the passenger seat.

“I’ve never flown before,” he confesses.

Dick reaches into the pocket of his car door, unwraps the item he’d tucked at the bottom the day before, and starts to withdraw it.

Jason’s leg bounces. “I’ve only been out of Gotham a handful of times.”

Vulnerability isn’t Jason’s forte. He’s staring resolutely out the passenger window, fixated on a mother trying to corral her two kids across the parking lot.

It allows Dick to place a comforting hand on his shoulder, lowering Jason’s guard, then stick the needle in his exposed neck.

The sedative takes hold quick, and Jason is slumping against the window before he’s truly had time to react, a muffled protest dying on his lips as his left hand flops uselessly onto his leg, his instinctive grab for his neck aborted as he loses consciousness.

“Sorry, Jay,” Dick says, just in case Jason can hear him. “But I’m not putting you in that kind of danger.”

He throws the car in reverse and starts the long drive home.

He’d never intended to get on that plane. The tickets are genuine, to convince Jason, since it’s not as if they can’t afford it, but nothing beyond that was true.

The three day wait to make this trip, the drive to the airport and back - it was all stalling.

Bruce meets them at the manor, home as early as he could manage from his trip. He’d arrived while they were on the road. One call from Dick and he’d dropped everything for them.

Their father scoops Jason gently from the car and carries him up to his room, then settles into an armchair to wait for the sedative to wear off.

Dick makes himself scarce. For his own safety, he doesn’t want to be around Jason until he’s calmed down.

The inevitable yelling is audible from the kitchen.

 

 

A week later, and Jason is still pissed.

Promises from Bruce to look into his parentage hadn’t been enough to satiate him. It doesn’t help that they refuse to leave him alone for more than a couple of seconds in case he tries to run off to Ethiopia alone, grating on his already frayed nerves.

Dick gets it the worst, receives frosty glares and cold silence for his betrayal, but he bears it gladly. This is preferable to Ethiopia. He’ll shoulder all of Jason’s ire if it means Jason is home and safe and alive.

 

 

Dick is at his day job, tired from a long night of solo patrol while Bruce kept vigil over Jason, when he gets the call.

“He drugged my tea,” Bruce’s voice comes, groggy, through the phone’s speakers. “Jason’s gone.”

And suddenly Dick is wide awake.

 

 

They’re too late to catch Jason, so they’re left chasing his trail.

He chose Ethiopia over Lebanon; whether that’s down to Dick putting the idea in his head or as a concession to their concern for his safety, Dick doesn’t know, but he’s cursing Jason for it as they scramble to follow.

Jason has almost a full day’s head start, but they have the advantage of a private jet. His plane journey took fourteen and a half hours - they have Barbara and Alfred stalking his movements, feeding them information - and that’s not accounting for the time he spent in the airports.

Dick and Bruce make it in fourteen. The airports barely slow them down, buoyed as they are by the Wayne fortune and the ability to skip the queues.

It still takes another half day before they make it to the aid camp. They walk in to find Jason helping Sheila Haywood unload boxes from a truck.

Dick’s heart leaps into his throat. He feels it beating there, every thump like the damn crowbar on Jason’s body, harsh and quick and overwhelming.

Jason spots them coming from over his mother’s shoulder and grimaces. Bruce is at his son’s side in a flash  and Dick follows on auto-pilot, his mind whirring to try and find an out and coming up blank, because nothing’s working, nothing’s enough to stop it, and with every failure Jason leaps closer to his death.

Bruce slides neatly between Jason and Sheila, his masks thrown up in an instant, and then he’s shaking her hand and exchanging pleasantries. Gushing about what a good boy Jason is, how helpful, how kind.

How much she’d like to spend more time with her son.

Dick feels sick.

He retrieves his brother from Bruce’s shadow and tugs him aside, around some boxes - shit, are those the boxes she’s moving for the Joker? - away from that conversation.

“Don’t,” Jason says before Dick can speak. “I’m not sorry. She’s my mother. I deserved the chance to meet her.”

Dick feels like he’s floating, like he’s come untethered and is losing his grip on everything. It’s all crumbling in his hands, Jason is crumbling away in his hands, and he can’t lose him, he can’t lose him-

He reaches for anything to say, anything at all to convince Jason to back down, and comes up empty.

He resorts to begging.

“Promise me you’ll be careful. If we’re going to stay here-” and how Dick wishes he could scoop his brother up and carry him safely home, but Bruce doesn’t know what Dick knows, doesn’t sense the danger that Dick sees all around, and Bruce will let Jason stay to meet his harmless aid worker mother “-then you stick with me or Bruce, okay? I need you to promise me that.”

Jason scoffs. “It’s fine for me to go sprinting around rooftops every night, engaging with Gotham’s worst criminals in minimal armour - and, seriously, Bruce gets a fancy armoured cowl while we have to make do with the shitty dominos and no head protection whatsoever? You’re okay with all that, but you draw the line at letting me interact with my mother.”

“This isn’t Gotham,” Dick hisses. “This isn’t home. It’s not the same. We’re here, you’ve already won, just- promise me, please.”

His brother crosses his arms defensively, his fingers digging tight into the material at the elbows of his shirt. “Fine,” he huffs. “Fine! I’ll let you babysit me. Happy?”

Dick doesn’t allow himself to relax. He can’t trust that it’s enough.

 

 

His mistrust pays off when he catches Jason sneaking out of their lodgings to meet with his mother alone.

“Don’t,” Dick says, more a plea than an order, but Jason interprets it as the latter.

“She’s my mother,” Jason says, hunching his shoulders defensively, determinedly, and Dick can almost see the haunting green of the Lazarus Pit lighting in his eyes. “I deserve a chance to get to know her. I’m going.”

Dick reaches for him, to hold him, keep him close, but Jason ducks out of range.

“Don’t,” and it’s Jason saying it this time. “Stop it. Stop trying to control me.”

There’s venom in his voice, new and unfamiliar coming from the fifteen year old - closer to the venom of the adult Jason that creeps in Dick’s memories. He falters, caught off guard, because Jason’s been mad at him ever since the airport incident but not like this - he’d been fine last time they spoke, only a couple of hours ago - what changed?

“You know, I realised something earlier,” Jason says, voice hard. “I don’t think I ever mentioned Ethiopia. Not until you brought it up.”

Dick freezes.

He runs his mind back over that first conversation with Jason, panicked, and finds he can’t remember who first mentioned Ethiopia by name.

It was probably him. Honestly, he’s surprised it took him so long to slip up, to reveal that he knew more than he should. And he’d been so focused on getting the names of Jason’s possible mothers, of getting enough information about them that he could convince Jason not to chase them without giving away that he’d already known and preplanned his arguments, that he hadn’t stopped to think about Ethiopia.

Of all the times to get called out for knowing too much, though - this might be the worst.

“Jay-” he tries and fails to interrupt.

“And you weren’t surprised. You tried to act like you were, but you missed the mark. You accepted it all too easily.”

Dick swallows. Shit.

“You already knew. You knew who my birth mother was, and you kept it from me.”

Shit shit shit.

Dick chooses, in his state of desperate panic, to deter through hurt. Better verbal pain now than the physical pain he’ll receive if Dick can’t stop him.

“She’s working with the Joker,” spills out of him. “Or- he’s blackmailing her. Same outcome. You can’t trust her.”

Jason’s face whizzes through emotions like one of those little flipbooks. He grits his teeth, breathes carefully in once, out once. “And you’re only telling me now.”

“I thought it was kinder,” Dick says. “I wanted to protect you. I hoped you’d never have to know.”

“How do you know?” Jason asks, and he wants Dick to provide a weak justification, Dick can read it in his posture. Jason wants his mother to be good, and it breaks Dick’s heart to hurt his brother like this but not as much as it would break his heart to lose Jason again.

“I’ve been looking into the Joker’s overseas actions for a while,” Dick pulls from nowhere. He can cover up the lies later, as long as Jason believes them long enough to let Dick protect him now. “I found evidence of their collusion. I’m sorry.”

Something crumples in Jason’s face, his already shaky faith in parental figures shattering before Dick’s eyes, but he still has that set to his shoulders, that unquenchable fire in his eyes, and it’s not enough. It’s not enough.

“Stay here,” Dick says, pleads, begs, “and let me go meet with her.”

It’s the only way he can see out of this. Jason needs closure, or he’ll never stop chasing his mother, courting his death. Dick has to end it before it can end Jason.

It’s a stupid suggestion, a reckless and irresponsible and dangerous idea, but only for him. Jason will be safe. That’s all that matters.

“I can get the evidence I need,” Dick says. “You can talk to her later, in a controlled setting, where she can’t betray you.”

Jason bites at his lip. Dick readies his final blow.

“Please, Little Wing. You’re too important. I can’t risk you. Let me go instead.”

And Jason, unbelievably, mercifully, gives in.

It’s enough.

Dick suits up one-handed, texting Bruce with his free hand to tell him to stop Batmanning and get back here to watch his son. Keeps Jason in his line of sight at all times, watching as he strips off the Robin suit, ensuring he doesn’t try to escape and run towards his death. Waits, until he sees that distinctive shift in the shadows outside their window.

“I love you,” he tells Jason, then bolts before Bruce can come in and stop him.

This is the only way.

The easy option would be to take Sheila out as soon as they’re safely away from civilization, from Jason, long before they can get anywhere near the Joker.

But Dick has no evidence of their collusion, no evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever. He can’t let her walk free, can’t risk her luring Jason into any other traps in the future.

Evidence came out after they died, enough that Bruce could have put her in Blackgate for multiple lifetimes - it was the only file more thorough than the one detailing Jason’s death.

And Dick’s six years older than Jason, has ten years of vigilante experience in this lifetime alone to Jason’s four, and he has a hell of a lot more muscle mass than his baby brother (although that, he knows, won’t last). Best case scenario, he can fend off the Joker. Worst case, he should be able to take a crowbar a little better than Jason.

And Dick loves his family. He loves Jason, more than he’d ever realised before his death.

He offers himself up in his brother’s place gladly.

He failed Jason once. He refuses to fail this time, no matter the cost.

 

 

It turns out that Dick Grayson cannot fend off the Joker. He’s probably taking the beating better than Jason did, but it still hurts like hell, and he can viscerally feel the harm incurred by each whack.

Brain trauma, broken bones, internal bleeding.

This is what dying feels like. This is what Jason felt, what his baby brother endured, trapped so far from home without friends or family or any warmth - it’s cold, so cold, but it won’t last because the Joker will leave and the bomb will go off and that will wipe away the cold, wipe away all.

Better Dick than Jason.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He wakes to darkness, darker than he’s ever known, the air thin and oppressive, no room to move.

Dick hadn’t been sure he’d ever wake. They never figured out what brought Jason back. He'd had no way to know if it would bring him back too, or if it was a Jason-specific resurrection.

Maybe he hasn’t been resurrected, though. Maybe this is the afterlife-

Then the pain hits, pain everywhere, pain he’d last felt as he stared down the ticking timer, waiting for the end, shattering that brief moment of clarity. He chokes out a gasp and his back arches involuntarily, an instinctive lurch away from the pain that only has him bashing against the walls of his coffin- fuck, he's in a coffin, he's buried six feet under-

Jason clawed his way out of this. He clawed his way out when he was in this much pain, with no idea what was happening, how did Jason do it-

He's panicking. He's panicking and gasping for air but there is no air and shit, he needs to calm down, needs to think, he's better than this-

 

 

He manages it. He can't quite remember how when he looks back later, isn't sure if the memory loss is the fault of the crowbar or the panic, but somehow he gets out.

Everything after that point is unclear, a tangle of sensations and flashes of lucid thought. Nothing concrete.

He remembers rain. Pathetic fallacy, Jason would have labelled it. Rain like drumming, beating down ceaselessly on his already beaten body.

He remembers pain. His eyes are irritated, there’s something in there - mud? He can’t tell. It’s inconsequential, really, a minor addendum to the laundry list of ow , but somehow it’s what sticks out most in his messy memories.

He remembers light. Bright, cutting through the grey grey grey of the rain, stabbing at his swollen eyes.

Then nothing.

 

 

Then green.

An ocean of green, consuming him, devouring him, stripping him of everything but the green and its wrath.

Shakespeare linked green with jealousy. That wasn’t in The Tempest, that one was Othello’s green-eyed monster, one of the few things he can still recall from high school English.

Shakespeare was wrong: green is rage.

He’s choking in it, drowning in it, like it’s shoving the pooling blood in his lungs out and replacing it with its own mass. He coughs, and coughs green. He gasps and inhales green. His mind is stuck on its mantra, green green anger green hatred green rage.

He passes out, and when he closes his eyes he sees not black, but green.

 

 

When he wakes he can breathe painlessly for the first time since he woke in the coffin, but everything is still green.

It takes him a minute to adjust. He has to blink rapidly, squint through the green screen obscuring his vision, and slowly it creeps to the side, and slowly slowly slowly he can see.

He ends up with a green frame boxing the edges of his view. It does terrible things to his peripheral vision.

Dick blames that inhibited vision for obscuring Talia until she steps directly in front of him.

He jumps, he’s not proud to admit, and he’s momentarily, blindingly angry at himself for it, but then the green that had started to mist back in recedes and he sees sense - he’s been having a really rough fuck knows how long, he thinks some weakness is justified at this point.

His surprise has him almost falling off the bed he’s on - it takes Talia placing a supporting hand under his shoulder to keep him from toppling over. 

It doesn’t hurt. Dick was starting to forget what that felt like.

She eases him into a sitting position, pauses as if she doesn’t trust him not to tip sideways without her assistance (which is fair, honestly), then backs away and seats herself at the other end of the bed.

“Hello, Richard Grayson. How are you feeling?”

Dick doesn’t trust himself to respond.

“Not talkative, then,” Talia hums. “That’s okay, we can work on that.”

He fixes his gaze on a point over her shoulder, breathing carefully through the green.

Talia leans back, crossing one leg elegantly over the other. “How about I handle the talking for now, hm? We’ll get you up to date and go from there.”

She takes his silence as affirmation, and starts to narrate Jason’s story, with Dick appropriating his brother’s role as the protagonist.

And that’s when it all sinks in.

Really sinks in.

He died. Dick died, and came back not quite whole, then got thrown in the Lazarus Pit and came back even less whole. He’d never quite understood how Jason had emerged from his grave and failed to make it home, how he’d ended up with the League. Dick thought he’d be able to escape the same fate. Now he gets it, now he’s followed the exact same path.

The green, too, he had never understood - how the Pit had ensnared his brother, consumed Jason. He’d thought he understood enough. He’d thought wrong. It’s a wholly different thing, to live it.

And then there’s Bruce. Dick watched as he fell apart after Jason’s death, knows he’ll view Dick’s death as an equal loss, an equal failure, knows his father will be devastated.

And Jason. Jason will blame himself, because of course he will, and Dick might never get the chance to convince him otherwise, to tell him that Dick chose this, that Dick wanted this, because the alternative was to sacrifice Jason to this fate again, and Dick was never going to accept that when there was any other way.

He’d die a thousand times over for Jason.

But that leads into a more immediate problem - his family doesn't know he’s alive. They’ll mourn him, but they won’t be looking for him. He’s trapped for an indeterminable age with the League.

Talia’s stopped talking. Everything is green.

Dick stands, blindly, into that green expanse.

“Well, thanks for all your help with the whole bringing me back from the dead thing, but if you’ll kindly show me to the nearest exit then I think I can take it from here.”

Talia laughs, pushes him back to the bed with a single hand against his chest. He lets her - it’s not as if he’d expected that to actually work - and she shifts so she’s sitting beside him.

He shoots her his best glare through the veil of green, the colour diminished enough that he can see again. “I want to go home.”

“Why would you want that?”

Oh, here we go. Right. The Red Hood’s revenge plot hadn’t been born from nothing - Talia had manipulated Jason into turning on them, and now she’s about to try the same trick on Dick.

It won’t work. Regardless of what she might say to him, no matter how much the green calls for violence, Dick is more prepared than she could ever have accounted for.

Nothing could turn him against his family.

Talia leans in close and places a picture in his lap. "See," she murmurs, her lips grazing his ear. "Your loyalty to Batman is misplaced. Look how easily he replaced you."

Dick looks.

For the briefest instant he thinks he's looking at himself. It's his costume, the black and blue of Nightwing leaping out at him. He'd know it anywhere.

But then he looks at the face, and laughs.

It's Jason. Jason Todd in the Nightwing costume. He’d know that face anywhere, too.

His brother is destined to replace him before he's ready no matter the universe.

Good for him.

Shit, he needs Talia to think he's actually angry about this. Jason genuinely was, when it was Tim taking Robin, and that anger helped win him his freedom. If Dick can fake it then he may be released into Gotham as Red Hood, and from there he can get back home.

But he has to get Damian out too, because Damian is here, somewhere, young and vulnerable and oblivious to the happier life that waits for him outside the walls of this compound, and that complicates things.

He won’t leave Damian behind.

He tries to turn his laugh manic anyway, tries to inject some rage into it. "Of course. First he takes Robin from me, then Nightwing. Is nothing sacred?"

And Dick, to his perpetual shame, is a naturally angry person. He always was as a child, thrived on it back then, was fuelled by it in the wake of his parents’ deaths, and while he mellowed out considerably in his adulthood that rage never truly left him.

There’s green infecting the corners of his vision now, a permanent tint to his worldview, the tendrils of the Lazarus Pit coiling around his anger and amplifying it tenfold.

He’s not angry about Jason taking Nightwing, not really, but it’s not as hard as he wishes it was to reach his hands into the green and pull them out coated in wrath.

 

 

The League's idea of training is brutal.

Dick is not a bad fighter. Far from it, with his many years of vigilantism under his belt. He's been fighting every night for the past decade, with an entire other lifetime of experience on top of that. Dick can fight. 

But he's been out of the field for an unknown length of time, time spent stationary in a coffin, with no real understanding of how that's damaged his body. He's still disorientated from the Pit, limited by the green lapping at the edges of his sight - that hindrance to his peripheral vision is impacting him sooner than he'd expected. To put it mildly, he’s not at his best right now.

He gets the shit kicked out of him in his first training session.

The second goes no better.

The third time, he wakes up where he'd dropped, at the edge of the chalk-marked, blood-stained arena, and Talia barks, "again."

He drags himself to his feet just in time to take a punch in the solar plexus.

He hits the floor, again, and Talia calls “up,” and he gets up to greet a kick to the groin.

The floor, he decides, is a much nicer place to be.

The floor is where he wakes, again. Again again again. He’s blood-soaked - it’s mostly his - and he’s tired and Talia won’t let it end. He’s barely fighting back at this point. The green is roaring in his ears, his eyes, his skull, but his body won’t cooperate with its wishes, can’t cooperate, and-

And then he wakes up on a different floor.

He doesn’t register the change at first. It takes him a couple of minutes to realise that he’s been given a couple of minutes, when Talia had been giving him none.

“That,” Talia’s voice floats from somewhere overhead, “was rather pathetic.”

Dick groans, curls into himself. He doesn’t worry about his pride - he doesn’t have any left to lose.

“Honestly, you take in one of the finest vigilantes going, a man you know can hold his own in a fight, and have to watch him flounder against the easiest targets. I know you’re more capable than this. I expected more from you, Richard.”

Oh, he hates hearing that name from her lips.

“Fuck you,” the green hisses, tumbling words from his lips before he can think to stop it.

And Talia’s going to beat him black and blue for that, he’s sure, blacker and bluer than he already is, but she surprises him with a laugh. “Where was that fire an hour ago?”

“I died,” Dick grits out, ignoring that question in favour of justifying his performance. “Remember? Didn’t exactly win that fight.”

“Ah yes,” Talia hums. “The Joker. About that: I have an incentive for you. A little reminder of why we’re doing this.”

Dick wants to spit in her face. He controls himself this time, just, tugging the green back down.

She steps over his prone body, crouches to his level, and places a single photograph on the ground next to his face.

Here we go again, Dick thinks dully. More manipulation. Yay.

It’s the Joker, surprise surprise. He’s doing Joker things, Dick supposes - he’s not in the best mindset to be pulling out the detective skills on this one. It’s just a picture of the Joker.

“Okay,” he croaks out. “And?”

“This,” Talia says, tapping the photo, “was taken last week.”

Oh, right, Bruce didn’t kill the Joker. Jason was mad about that - Dick should be too.

“Oh,” he manages to vocalise, reaching back down to heave the green back up. Anger. “ Oh ”, with vehemence this time.

“Your father didn’t love you enough to avenge you. He chose the Joker over you.”

And Dick knows that’s not true. Knows Bruce had loved Jason, knows that sparing the Joker’s life had no bearing on that love for his son or his hatred for the clown, knows that it’s not a matter of choosing one or the other.

But the green still sings for vengeance.

God, no wonder Jason believed the venom Talia fed him. Talia, the League, the Pit, all working against him, without the benefit of the knowledge and hindsight that has carried Dick this far.

Dick grasps the green and, for now, lets it win.

 

 

The training gets easier.

It’s still brutal, but Dick learns to adapt, learns how to keep fighting long after his body should have given out, learns to endure the worst the League can throw at him, whether it’s torture or the sadistic battles that make up his training, and come out the other end fighting. Learns to lean into the green, to let it propel him, and learns to reign it back in when it’s over.

And then he wins his first battle against the League’s best, his arm pressed hard against the other man’s neck, his body weight pinning his battered opponent to the ground.

And Talia says, “Good.”

And Dick starts to relax for the first time in a while, which is a mistake.

And Talia continues: “Now kill him.”

And Dick realises he’s going to have to kill.

It was inescapable, really. Everything was always leading to this point. He knew that Jason had killed with the League, knew that Damian had killed, knew that the League’s morals did not match up with his own. Knew they would demand the same of him, extract it by force from the crumbled remains of his resolve if he did not offer it willingly.

Knew all along that sooner or later he would have no choice but to kill.

But he’d resolved not to think about it. To put it off as long as possible.

For a brief, stupid moment, Dick considers refusing. Considers standing firm against whatever encouragement they hurl his way, whatever coercive punishment they devise.

But Talia needs her semi-stable trigger-happy killer. And Dick needs her to believe in his madness, in his descent into immorality.

This is their territory, and he’s trapped playing their game. They’ll never let him stick to his own code.

He snaps the man’s neck before he can talk himself out of it.

 

 

Eyes, unseeing, staring up at him from a twisted neck; a mangled corpse of his making.

The green cherishes the image, craves more. It’s nauseating, calls to him like a siren song, sickens him.

It’s his first kill. It isn’t his last.

That first, though - the first haunts him forever.

 

 

Dick is being escorted (dragged, mostly) from torture to training when it happens.

He's sore. His back is on fire. Blood slips steadily from a head wound into his eyes and down his cheek like tears. He’s drenched in sweat and blood and more sweat and more blood. He feels like death, almost, except he knows death now, has lived it, knows there is worse than this.

Regardless, he’s hardly in the best condition to be noticing things, but he notices this:

Damian, on the other side of the room.

Damian, maybe eight years old, if Dick had to guess, so much smaller than he was in Dick’s memory, so much like that little boy he’d loved so sincerely all those years ago, the sight of him tugging at something deep in Dick’s soul.

Damian Damian Damian.

He watches through green tinted vision as Damian looks at him in what Dick would label, if he didn't know early Damian better, horror , as the boy whispers, "Richard?"

And Dick still isn't entirely with it, from the torture and the training and the lasting crowbar damage fucking with his mind that even the Pit couldn't undo, but nothing that life could throw at Dick Grayson could rob him of his love for his family.

He sees his little brother for the first time in an eternity and all he wants is to hold him.

They're pulled in separate directions, Dick to his torturous training, Damian to whatever he was made to spend his days doing while with the League, and Dick doesnt have much choice but to follow where he’s led, away from Damian, away away away, and it hurts more than dying.

 

 

He’d died in Jason’s place without hesitation. The consequences had seemed irrelevant at the time.

It had been what if I don’t wake up, what if I do and I can’t get out and I die again in the coffin, what if the Lazarus Pit consumes me, what if I can’t endure the League, what if what if what if, all about himself.

He’d been so consumed with Jason, with himself, that he’d forgotten the others.

Barbara - attacked in her own home, where she should have been safe, paralysed, ripped away from the fieldwork she’d taken so much pride in long before she was ready to give it up.

Tim, Cass, Steph - stuck in their abusive upbringings when Dick could have extracted them so much earlier.

Damian - with the League. The League, whose abuse Dick now knows all too well, and Dick’s reckless actions have caged his little brother in their barbarity and drowned him in their cruelty.

And he’d known that Damian was here. He’d known. But knowing is very different to seeing the results of his actions, to seeing his little brother look so small and lost and alone.

It’s very possible that Dick didn’t fully think things through.

The consequences are stark now it’s too late to change course.

 

 

It takes a few weeks before Damian sneaks his way to Dick’s side.

They’ve caught glimpses of each other since that first sighting, always at a distance, never with the chance to talk. The sight of his brother, smaller than he’s been in a long time, has tugged at Dick’s heart every time, caused flares of green to overtake his vision, because he wants to grab Damian and run, wrap him up in a hug and forget all about the League.

But he can’t. He can’t even look at Damian for too long - he made that mistake once and got one hell of a beating for daring to set eyes upon their precious heir. The threat of a repeat hadn’t always been enough to stop him looking anyway.

Dick is slumped in Talia’s quarters in quite a bit of pain, waiting for her to get back from wherever she’s just left to when Damian slides out of her wardrobe and darts to his side.

It takes him a moment to adjust, through the throbbing of his chest and the pounding of his head, through the haze of green, to his brother’s sudden and very unexpected presence, but when he does he manages to straighten through the pain. “Damian.”

The name is like a prayer falling from his lips, like salvation, like home.

He remembers too late that he’s probably not supposed to know Damian’s name, and he definitely shouldn’t be addressing him so casually. This is League Damian, assassin Damian, superiority complex Damian, and-

“Richard,” Damian breathes like a prayer of his own. “I was expecting Todd.”

-and for a few seconds too long Dick doesn’t register the full significance of what he’s just heard, too busy overthinking and overanalysing and beating back the green that wants to rampage through this base and hurt everyone who’s ever dared to hurt Damian, who’s ever dared to keep them apart, and-

Wait.

“Damian,” he says again, everything crashing to a halt, robbing him of anything more substantial. “You-”

“You don’t know me,” Damian interrupts, “but I assure you that I am an ally. I want to help you.”

“Damian-”

“I know you are angry. You want to get back at your father. My mother is manipulating you, you cannot trust the information she is giving you, but-”

“Damian.” Dick barely restrains from yelling - not a good idea, given the circumstances, but the green is lapping at the edges of his words, trying to find a grasp, and it’s a struggle to hold it back, to think clearly through its mists, through his aching head. It works, though, and Damian’s obviously rehearsed speech jerks to a premature stop, and Dick-

Dick remembers where they are, why it’s taken so long to meet, and-

"You can't be here," Dick he says, suddenly frantic as the danger becomes the clearest thing in his fuzzy mind. "Talia could be back at any moment, you can't be found anywhere near me, they'll hurt you, you have to go-"

Damian cuts across his panicked rambling. "Mother has left to talk to the guards. That gives us four minutes and thirty five seconds at a minimum while she walks there and back, plus however long she spends in conversation. We have time. Why-" and fuck, he looks so vulnerable, so young, so like the Damian that Dick has been longing for all this time and it hurts- “how do you know my name?”

“You’re my brother,” Dick says. He’s lightheaded. “You’re my brother, and I love you, and you have to go."

"I have lived this life before," Damian says carefully, slowly, like he can't quite trust Dick to believe him, like he’s not entirely convinced he believes himself. "Except last time it was Todd in your position."

"Same," Dick croaks. "I changed a few things."

His brother looks thrown, like he’s waiting for a rejection that he’s sure will hit, like it’s just a matter of time before Dick will be flinging his trust and honesty back in his face.

“I was your Batman,” he adds, desperate. “You were my Robin. You were always my Robin.”

That does it. Damian relaxes, a full body ease that had been so rare to see in the early days, his little brother a ball of paranoid tension and mistrust even after he’d been with them for years, never quite feeling safe. He looks down, processing. "You remember too. Does anyone else?”

“Not that I know of. I dropped hints to Bruce and Alfred and Jason and got nothing from them. I don’t know about the others, I haven’t met them again yet.”

Well, he’d met Tim, but only once. It wasn’t enough to tell.

“I thought I was the only one,” he admits, and because he thinks Damian might need to hear it he adds, “I thought I was crazy, for a bit.”

Damian doesn’t acknowledge that, not verbally, but Dick watches him bite at his lip, knows he’d thought the same.

“So how exactly did- oh. You swapped with Todd. You knew what would happen, so you took his place.” Familiar expressions flit across Damian’s face, the realisation fading to resignation, sorrow, guilt. “You are a self-sacrificing fool, Richard."

There's no heat to it.

Dick can’t help but bark a laugh. The stinging in his chest feels like it belongs to someone else. It’s inconsequential, any pain he’s in, because Damian, his Damian, is here. “I’ve missed you, Dami. So much.”

He watches Damian hesitate, that pause before showing affection that he’d never been able to shake, that time he always had to take to remind himself that the affection was allowed and wanted, that he wouldn’t be punished for loving. “I have missed you too, Richard. I wish we could have reunited under better circumstances.”

“It’s okay. Don’t blame yourself for this, Dami. I made my choices knowing what it meant for me, and I‘d make them again.”

It’s not Damian’s fault, not in any conceivable way, but Dick knows Damian, knows he’ll find a way to assume guilt regardless, knows he needs to cut that off early and knows Damian will still blame himself no matter what Dick says. He says it anyway.

“You have to go,” he remembers. “They can’t find us together.”

Damian grimaces, shooting a glance at the door Talia had left through. Their four and a half minutes have to be close to over by now, and he clearly knows it.

“I’ll be back,” he swears, oath-like in its severity. “I don’t know how long it will take, but I’ll be back.”

“I know,” Dick says. “I love you,” again, because he needs Damian to hear it, he probably hasn’t heard it since their last life. “Go.”

Damian goes. Talia returns. Dick misses his brother immediately.

 

 

The training gets easier still. Dick wins more and more often, takes less and less time to knock his opponent down and pin them before they can pin him.

And each opponent he defeats, he kills.

He doesn't let the green consume him, not for that final act. It's unavoidable, necessary if he wants to survive, but he takes no pride in it, aches with each new kill. It would be too easy to let the green take over, too easy to pass off responsibility, to hide behind the green and pretend it’s not his body committing the deed.

So instead he watches closely each time as life flickers out from beneath his fingers. He did that. He cradled that fragile life within the hands he’d always wielded to safeguard, and he’d killed.

That thing you always hear in movies - Dick had taken it as embellishment, as a recurring line that had lost all meaning the hundredth time it popped up in dialogue, but it had been stunningly accurate:

With each kill, it does get easier.

Dick’s grateful for it; he’s revolted by it. The green croons with each new sacrifice to its wrath.

 

 

Damian, true to his word, drops in from a vent above after a month and a half, giving Dick a heart attack in the process.

He's still hopped up on adrenaline from the bout of fights he's barely finished with, the green egging him on gleefully to kill destroy maim, and Damian almost ends up in a chokehold before Dick catches himself, remembers where he is and registers who he's with.

"Dami," he wheezes, sinking back against the wall, sliding down it until he's sitting. He can’t remember standing. 

“Are you okay?” Damian asks, genuine concern etched on his face. His hand is on his sword - he’d reached for the weapon instinctively at the first sign of danger, and he hasn’t yet noticed, letting it hover ready to strike.

Dick inhales in sharply, deeply, squeezes his eyes closed and breathes through the green. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m good.”

Damian doesn’t seem convinced but he doesn’t push, dropping himself down to sit opposite Dick.

“We don’t have long,” he says. “I am going to request that I be sent to assassinate Father.”

Dick blinks, caught off guard for a moment before his brain kicks in and he thinks it over. “Okay. Go there under the pretence of killing him, then tell him enough of the truth to get him on side. That last part wouldn’t be hard, it’s basically what you did last time. The hard part would be getting approval to go.”

“If I were to fail in this hypothetical attempted murder, then Mother has told me how he is soft, especially when children are involved. I will propose using that weakness to my advantage. That way, whether I succeeded or failed, I would benefit - either Batman would be dead, or I would be accepted by him and gain his training, which I would then use for the betterment of the League.”

“You’ve thought this through,” Dick murmurs, still thinking it through for himself.

Damian huffs. “Of course I have, Richard, I have spent years preparing for this escape.”

Damian’s speaking like he did when he first joined them, all formal and stilted and rude, obsessive with weaknesses and faults, and of exploiting them or of stamping them out. It’s not Damian’s fault, it’s the League and their bullshit. It’s how he had to develop the first time around to survive, and he’s had to fall back into old patterns to endure it again.

“But Talia doesn’t want Batman dead,” Dick says. They’d figured this out at some point in the last timeline. He can’t remember exactly when. “Right?”

“That is correct. I believe she expected me to fail last time, and will expect me to fail again.”

“So he takes you in and gets you out of here.”

“Exactly.” Damian doesn’t seem too upset about his mother’s reliance on his failure. Besides, he had failed last time, and rather spectacularly too - by betraying the League and asking his father to train him instead. “The only difference this time is that I am younger than before, and that I need to get you out with me. I was expecting Todd, of course. I planned this around his blind rage. Your presence, and comparative amenability, simplifies the situation somewhat.”

Dick’s throat is dry. His head is pounding. His bruises are numerous and each pulses with hurt. It’s so hard to keep up with a much more capable Damian in this condition. “Hold on. You’re planning on getting me out at the same time?”

The look Damian fixes him with is familiar, sends a different ache shooting through him. He’s missed this kid. “No, Richard, I thought I would wait all this time for my brother to appear - even though I have had hundreds of opportunities to leave alone - and then escape only after his arrival, leaving said brother behind. That seems perfectly logical.”

It is stupid, when he puts it like that. “How were you going to get Jason out?”

“The same basic plan, except I could not guarantee his cooperation, not knowing how he was back then. Our priorities are aligned. I could not be sure of the same from Todd.”

“Okay. What’s your plan for me?”

“Back-up,” Damian says primly. “You’ve been faking the same anger that consumed Todd, which was an intelligent choice-” and Dick doesn’t have the heart to tell him that it’s not entirely faked, that the green is curling in the corners even now- “and that allows us to send you to Gotham as Todd was sent.”

Dick is starting to catch up. “Except this time they send us together?”

Damian smiles. It’s a grim thing. “Batman versus an assassin and a vengeful vigilante with extra assassin training. If we revealed our identities to him then he would be further incapacitated by his emotional response. Your accompaniment would be a great boon.”

Okay, they can do this. It might work. “So who do you have to convince, Ra’s?”

“Mother. She is more than equipped to handle it from there.”

Talia. Their escape is dependent on Talia.

Dick is battered and bruised, his bare torso splattered with crusted blood, still bleeding from somewhere, he thinks, but he can’t risk asking Damian to do anything about it, not when Damian isn’t supposed to be anywhere near him, not when Dick shouldn’t be getting any medical attention without Talia’s approval.

He is angry, inescapably angry, because Talia threw him in the Lazarus Pit, because Talia found a catatonic and near-dead man and chose to give him life at a cost.

Dick has killed because of Talia.

He’s alive because of Talia.

And, wildly, while thinking of Talia, he thinks of The Tempest.

He thinks of Prospero, of the man who had everything stripped from him but still found space in his broken heart for forgiveness and love. Thinks of Prospero’s ending monologue, the one Jason had pulled apart line by line, spent an entire evening discussing down to the finest of details - thinks of the passing of power into the hands of the audience to bring the events to a close, of the blind reliance upon an external force, the need for impossible faith. Thinks of Talia, a sometimes ally and always threat, thinks of how they need her.

Dick knows she loves her son; Talia never would have let him go if she hadn’t. This is earlier, though, still a few years out from when she sent him away in the other timeline. And this Damian is different, with that other lifetime already under his belt, subservient to the League only as far as he must be to survive, lacking the desperation for approval that had driven him back then, replacing it with a greater understanding of his own self worth. That might have changed things, changed Talia enough that she’s not ready to set him free.

There’s no way of knowing.

So Dick nods, tells Damian “try it”, places his faith in Talia’s enduring love for her son, and hopes it’s enough for them both.

 

 

“I have a plan for you,” Talia greets him with two weeks later. “It’s a very fun plan. I think you’ll enjoy it.”

And she whispers to him a story of vengeance and retribution, a tale of murder and betrayal, and Dick quietly writes forgiveness and family into its ending.

 

 

They get him a helmet, identical to Jason’s in every way except colour. Blue, Nightwing blue, meant as a reminder of what has been stolen from him, as encouragement in his opposition of his father. Dick’s just glad it wasn’t red - they’d had enough confusion with two red-themed Bats last time around, a Blue Hood will make things much less complicated. Besides, he’s always favoured blue, chose it for a reason when he started developing Nightwing. He left red behind with Robin.

 

 

As Dick’s about to follow Damian onto their plane, Talia pulls him aside.

“His life,” Talia begins, with none of the manipulative warmth that Dick has become accustomed to, “is worth a thousand of you.”

Dick couldn’t agree more.

“Let him die, or be hurt in any considerable way, and I’ll make you wish you’d died in his place.”

Also an agreeable sentiment.

“Don’t think you can escape into death. There will be no escape from my wrath if you fail him.”

“I won’t let him die,” Dick says. He means it more than she could ever know. “I’ll look after him.”

“Yes,” she says, fixing him with a look that’s so like Damian, so inscrutable and all-knowing and superior. “You will.”

They watch each other, unspeaking, for half a minute. Then, unexpectedly:

“Give him the life I couldn’t.”

And she’s gone.

Dick watches her go, surprised despite himself. Does she know he’s been faking? Is she aware of the true extent of Dick’s love for his family, for Damian?

He wonders if letting him go with her son is an act of mercy to him as much as it is to Damian, wonders if letting Jason go was mercy too.

It doesn’t matter, not really. What does matter is that Talia is letting them go. Like Prospero, outcast for so long; like Miranda, born into exile; like both, finally released from their island prison at the end of the play: they’re going home.

Dick climbs aboard the plane, takes his seat across from Damian, and fixes his gaze firmly out of the green-infused window.

Even now, when it’s just him and Damian alone with no threat of any enemy walking in on them acting like brothers, he doesn’t dare get too close, doesn’t dare wrap Damian in the tightest hug imaginable like he so desperately wants to, doesn’t even dare to look at his brother.

There could be hidden cameras. There surely are hidden cameras. Dick’s not stupid to think they’re being released unobserved.

Damian’s not stupid either. He doesn’t speak, just sits straight-backed in his seat.

They’ll have to keep up the act until they reach Gotham, at least.

Dick fingers the rim of the helmet he has cradled on his lap, and settles in with the green for a long flight.

 

 

Dick doesn’t bother with the helmet at first. It’ll attract too much attention before they’re ready. Damian produces a backpack from somewhere and Dick shoves it to the bottom, 

They don’t want attention, not until Gotham, but they also don’t want to risk Dick being recognised early. He was older than Jason was when he died, already an adult when Jason had been a teenager; the time gap since then has not altered his appearance as heavily as it did his brother. Dick isn’t sure which would be worse - noticed by the press, or by the Bats.

Barbara keeps a looser watch outside of Gotham than she does within, only setting alerts for certain people and events. He doubts she has facial recognition set for him, not when, to the best of her knowledge, he’s long since dead and buried, but he also doubts she’d fail to notice him exposing his face to every camera from their current location to Gotham.

Better not to take the risk.

Damian finds him a hat and some glasses - it’s a basic disguise, too basic really, but sometimes simple is best, and it does its job. They don’t bother concealing Damian’s appearance in any meaningful way - they know from their memories that the Bats were unaware of Damian’s existence until he showed up on their doorstep and forced them into awareness. They won’t be looking for him, wouldn’t look twice if they passed him in the street. Right now, Damian means nothing to the family.

That won’t be the case for long. Dick will make sure of it.

For now, though, it works in their favour. Anything that’ll draw attention, they send Damian, and Dick languishes in the shadows, waiting.

When they finally cross into Gotham, finally return to the grey-soaked, crime-infested hellhole that’s beautiful and perfect and home, Dick pulls his hat a little lower one-handed as he drives their rental car, exchanges the regular glasses for sunglasses even though the sun abandoned Gotham long ago, and lets Damian lean across from the passenger seat to curl a stolen scarf around his neck, tugging it up to conceal the lower half of his face as much as possible. They’re in Oracle’s territory now, Barbara’s domain, and they have to step up their game to match her increased surveillance.

Dick has a number of safehouses scattered across the city. They’re almost certainly still there, under the ownership of the fake names he’d bought them under, the payments maintained by Bruce Wayne. Secretly, of course, using Dick’s aliases, but someone of Barbara or Tim’s hacking capabilities could easily trace it back.

It’s what they did for the two safehouses they’d set aside specifically for Robin. Dick has to assume Bruce preserved his, shrine-like, as he’d done for Jason’s.

He doesn’t suggest them to Damian. Not yet.

Jason’s safehouses had been extensively trapped and monitored both before and after he’d died. If they go to Dick’s, they’ll be accosted by Bats soon after. So, not yet. Not until they’re ready for the reunion.

They choose a seedy hotel in a seedy part of town instead, so Damian can handle the booking and payment without anyone questioning the eight year old taking the lead. Dick hangs back, as is becoming the usual, tucking his face into his scarf as much as possible even as he stands under the only camera he can see in the room, which doesn’t even look like it’s working.

He learnt early not to underestimate Barbara’s reach.

In their room - beds in disarray, dirt streaking the walls, cracked window panes, the usual, really - Damian goes straight to the window, draws the curtains shut. They’re useless, threadbare, the light from the neon billboard opposite beaming through like a spotlight, but they at least conceal the room from outside view. It’s probably enough, but Dick keeps his disguise firmly on anyway.

Damian, curtains closed, his job done, turns slowly to look at Dick.

Dick looks back.

And then Damian’s throwing himself across the room and Dick’s catching him almost before he’s registered the movement and they’re holding each other tight, like letting go will be the end of everything, and oh.

Finally, they’re hugging. Finally , after months of looking and longing and pining, after their week-long road trip so close to each other, they could reach out and touch and they did but not like this, not like they wanted, only the briefest glancing touches where they could get away with it - Dick, taking a little too long to let go of the cash he was passing over; Damian, resting his fingers against the nape of Dick’s neck as he pulled the scarf around him - but this is everything they’ve been too scared to allow themselves, afraid, always, of the League’s surveillance.

But Gotham is safer. Gotham is home. Gotham is Oracle’s and the Bats’ and theirs, and the League’s power is restricted in this hostile city. The green has less of a hold in this beautiful city, and right now it has no hold at all because they’re as safe as they’re going to get, shrouded in Gotham’s grey, and everything is clear and in full colour.

And, finally, they can hug.

God, when was the last time either of them were held like this? The last time either were touched by someone safe, someone who loved them unconditionally, someone who would never hurt them or have ulterior motives?

Before Dick died, he’s sure of that. In Damian’s case, it may well have been in the last run - Dick isn’t convinced that Talia’s a hugger, not even with her son, but he supposes he could be wrong about that.

Either way, not enough. They’re both sorely touch-starved, which is saying a lot when Damian was never tactile to begin with.

“This is safe,” Damian breathes into Dick’s chest. “We are not being watched right now.”

It’s a plea for reassurance, and Dick holds him tighter in a silent answer. “This is safe,” he repeats. “We’re safe. We’re home.”

 

 

Dick pulls the helmet out of the backpack for the first time as Damian’s working on disabling the traps on one of his safe houses. He runs his hand over it, over the blue painted alloy, the speakers embedded in its sides, the angles of its juts and curves.

It’s an exact replica of Jason’s first helmet. Dick’s never worn one for himself.

He tucks himself into the corner of the stairwell, hides under a thin blanket he’d taken from the hotel room for this exact purpose - never underestimate Barbara - and removes his makeshift disguise.

And Dick pulls on the Blue Hood.

It fits perfectly, moulded to his exact proportions. Dick does not want to know how the League managed that.

He drags the blanket off, bundles the hat and glasses and scarf into it and shoves it inside the backpack, into the space left behind by the helmet.

Damian does a double take when he turns away from the door.

“How do I look?” Dick asks, throat dry, grimacing at the effect the modulation has on his voice.

“Ridiculous.” Damian pivots back around. “The effect of it all utterly fails when you are otherwise dressed as a civilian. Plus the red worked better. Much more threatening.”

“Blue just can’t match the threatening aura of red,” Dick sighs. The modulation turns his tone more monotone than he’d intended.

He nudges Damian out of the way so he can deactivate the final trap himself.

A couple clicks and they’re in. Their presence has already been noticed, Dick is sure - they were probably on the radar of Barbara or Bruce or both from the moment they stopped outside this door; they were definitely triggering all kinds of alarms as soon as they started tampering with the traps.

Dick drops the backpack next to the door and goes for the drawers.

He hears Damian follow behind him, hears him kick the backpack along the wall, further away from the door, hears the door click closed behind them. Isn’t really paying attention to any of that, because he’s digging into the back of the bottom drawer, shuffling the fake panel out of the way, and pulling out a pair of escrima sticks.

There’s bound to be a camera in the room but Dick doesn’t care if they see this.

He’s been fighting barehanded in the League - they weren’t stupid enough to give him a weapon, unfortunately. He’s missed these sticks, their familiar weight, the separation they gift him from the fight - that last part had never meant much to him until he was forced to choke the life out of someone with his bare hands.

He’s missed not having to do that.

The sticks go into his belt, one at each hip - not their usual place, but his current outfit isn’t designed to hold weapons on his back, so he’s improvising.

Damian doesn’t comment. In lieu of conversation, he moves to unlock the window instead, dismantling the slightly less comprehensive traps that line it. It doesn’t take him long, then he’s sliding the window up, open, letting the chill of autumn in Gotham seep into the room.

Dick sinks into the ratty old sofa, the one he’d carefully positioned at an odd diagonal in the room. It leaves him mostly facing the door, but even with his limited peripheral vision he can still see out the window. Damian curls himself into the armchair to his left, his gaze falling just to the left of the window. He looks relaxed to an untrained eye, but Dick can see the coiled tension lurking in his body.

Green clutches at the frayed edges of Dick’s nerves, trying to transmute them into anger. He blinks it back, lets his stomach roil with anxiety instead, because any emotion is better than rage.

The helmet is claustrophobic, suffocating, oppressive. Like a coffin. Why had Jason kept it once his identity was revealed? How had he actually liked it?

He wants to move. He wants to work off his energy - Dick always has excess energy, but the tension is getting to him, making him antsier than usual.

He fights the urge, keeps himself still, and together he and Damian settle down to wait.

 

 

Batman enters through the window.

He’s been crouched on the opposite rooftop for the better part of an hour. Dick knows the shadows, knows even out of the corner of his eye, with his peripheral vision impaired by a green-soaked helmet, how they look when silhouetted by the Bat.

Damian noticed him too - Dick saw his shoulders stiffen, saw his brow furrow - but neither of them reacted.

They let him slide inside and straighten up before they both stand, synchronised, like they’d planned it. They hadn’t.

“Who are you?” Batman growls, when neither of them make a move to speak.

Damian stutters forwards a single step, putting himself between Batman and Dick. They had planned this part, to an extent. “We are friends.”

Batman doesn’t respond, so Damian takes a fortifying breath. “The League of Assassins sent us to kill you-”

And Dick watches as Batman’s hand, which has been hovering ready at his side, slips to his hip, watches his fingers curl around a batarang, and the green leaps at Dick’s brief flash of panic, trying to smear the fear into green wrath. He sees as Damian notices too and hurries to finish, “-but we have no intention of doing so.”

“Explain.”

“My name is Damian al Ghul,” and Batman’s reaction is slight, unnoticeable to anyone who doesn’t know him, but Dick spent over half a decade at his side every night and he sees the flicker of a reaction at the name, the shift further towards enemy and danger in his stance. “My mother is Talia al Ghul. My father- my father is Bruce Wayne.”

Damian emphasises the name in a way which makes it clear he knows exactly where Bruce Wayne is right now. What goes unspoken in the exchange does not go unheard - Batman understands the implications perfectly, Dick can tell.

"Why did you come to this apartment?" Batman asks, no less battle-ready than he was before Damian started speaking, although Dick can see him assessing the boy, trying to figure out if he's telling the truth, if Damian really is his son. Changing the subject while he mulls it over as a way to regain control. "You clearly wanted to speak to me. How did you know this would work?"

His eyes flicker down to Dick's escrima sticks.

"You are paying for and maintaining the upkeep of this safe house. The odds of you noting our intrusion were high."

It's true enough.

Batman is looking at Damian again, studying his face, trying to find Talia and himself in the features, if Dick had to guess. "And what do you want?"

“I want-” Damian starts, and falters, and Dick is sharply reminded that no matter the alternate life that haunts both of their memories, this version of Damian is only eight, has been kept from his family for all of those eight years, finally has a chance to return and yet he’s terrified of rejection, Dick knows because Damian never got over that fear of rejection, was never quite able to believe one hundred percent in the security of his place in the family, and before he’s realised it Dick is shattering their careful plan and cutting across:

“We want to come home.”

The drone of the voice modulation envelops the words, casing their genuine emotion in a false shell. It’s enough to pull Batman’s attention to Dick, giving Damian a reprieve. Unfortunately, it has the downside of throwing Dick under the spotlight.

His eyes skim over Dick again, pausing at the helmet and at the escrima sticks, seeing the individual pieces of the puzzle but failing to parse their full meaning.

Dick feels sick.

“And what’s home to you?” Batman growls - it’s always a growl with Batman, always the intimidation tactic. It usually doesn’t work on Dick.

Damian half-twists, facing Dick without turning his back to Batman. Passing the role of leader to Dick.

Green flickers at his periphery. Green is lodged in his throat.

Slowly, Dick reaches back and unclasps the helmet.

“Home is you.”

It’s almost comical, Batman’s reaction. He’d kept it together when a tiny assassin child claimed to be his son, with only the tiniest reaction that would give away nothing to anyone but family, but seeing Dick’s face causes a visible flinch, one he doesn’t even try to hide.

“No,” Batman gasps. “No, you- you’re dead.”

“I was,” Dick confirms. “It didn’t stick.”

“You should offer up proof of your identity,” Damian says to Dick, still half-turned to keep them both in view. “To show that you aren’t a shapeshifter, or a clone, or- or anything else besides yourself.”

Dick had been prepared for that, had readied his answers in advance. “I knew where this safehouse was, and how to dismantle the traps.” He pats his escrima sticks. “I knew that these were hidden behind a false panel in the bottom of those drawers, and I know that there should be one of my old Nightwing suits behind the false back of that wardrobe.”

Batman doesn’t wholly believe him - or doesn’t want to believe him, doesn’t want to be crushed all over again if Dick turns out to be false. He’d been the same when it was Jason.

“And I know you,” he offers, his voice softening in a subconscious act. “I fell ill one night while we were on patrol. I tried to hide it from you but you saw through me straight away. We went home early, and you let me sleep in your bed. I was fine by morning, but you called me in sick with school anyway, cleared your schedule for the whole day, and stayed home and watched movies with me.”

“Disney marathon,” Bruce says, distant.

“Including two rounds of Peter Pan,” Dick smiles. “I really loved Peter Pan.”

"How?” Batman rasps. “You were dead. I found your body. I held you. I buried you."

"I, uh, unburied myself."

Batman makes a wounded noise, the sound foreign and heartrending to Dick, then he’s yanking down his cowl and oh, there’s Bruce. There’s his father.

He’d been so preoccupied with his siblings, with missing and loving them in equal measure, that he hadn’t realised how much he missed his dad.

Dick has passed Damian before he’s realised he’s moving. Bruce catches him halfway.

“Dick,” his dad breathes into his hair. He’s warm, familiar, safe. He feels like home.

For the first time since he woke in the coffin - since before that, since he was first hit with the memories of a little brother lost too soon, since he resolved to prevent that tragedy from reoccurring - while sheltered in his father’s arms, Dick can relax.

 

 

They’re in the cave, just Dick and Damian and Bruce, the others ushered upstairs as soon as they’d made it back to give them space, when Jason roars in on his bike.

He’d been busy in Crime Alley, Bruce had explained earlier, occupied with a case he couldn’t be pulled from. He was the last Bat to be called home. Bruce had specifically left him until last, to give the rest of the family time to get home first, to let them gawk at the mysterious and not as dead as they thought Dick Grayson and the child he’d brought home with him. It also gave Bruce time to run multiple blood tests on both Dick and Damian, confirming their stories. Bruce thinks he’s been subtle about it, but Dick’s known him the longest, longer than even Bruce realises, and he understands what his father is trying to do.

Jason rips off his motorcycle helmet, tosses it aside. Throws the bike down without bothering to secure it properly, and almost goes down with it in his haste, his leg still entangled with the pedal. He frees himself, rips his domino off, and stares at Dick like he’s seeing a ghost.

Unconsciously, Dick stands.

“We’ll be upstairs,” Bruce says, about as soft as he gets. “I’ll get Damian settled in.”

Dick is reluctant to let Damian go just yet, and Damian hesitates too, torn. But then his littlest brother squares his shoulders, shoots a final longing look at Jason, drinking in the final sibling he’d spent eight years yearning to return to, nods once to Dick, and lets Bruce guide him upstairs.

Dick loves Damian, but they’ve had their reunion. They’ll have a whole future together. Jason needs him more right now, and, honestly? He needs Jason.

His brother is older, closer to the Jason that lurks in Dick’s memories than the Jason he left behind in Ethiopia. He’s pale and trembling, biting at an already bleeding lip, but he’s here and alive and god, Dick loves him, Dick’s missed him, but it was all worth it, every second of it, if it meant Jason got to live.

Jason drifts closer. He’s twisting the domino mask in his hands, bending it in on itself close to its breaking point, but not quite exerting enough force to snap it.

“Hi,” Dick breathes.

Jason swallows. “How?” he croaks. “I saw your body.”

“I don’t know.” It's the truth. They'd never known when it was Jason, and they'll never know with Dick. "I just woke up one day."

Shit, Jason saw his body. He'd hoped Bruce would be able to shield him from that - it couldn't have been pretty.

“And the League found you?”

“The League found me.”

Dick forces a smile, tries to move swiftly on from that topic. “I heard-” a gesture to Jason’s Nightwing-clad person “-about your upgrade. It’s a good look on you”

Jason glances down at his suit like he’s never seen it before, then back up to Dick, a guilty expression flickering across his face, and, shit, that’s not what Dick meant, he was aiming to inject something more lighthearted into the conversation, how did he miss the mark so badly?

“I didn’t mean to steal your identity,” his brother says in a rush. “We thought you were dead. I wanted-” he swallows, looks heartbroken, and it breaks Dick’s heart in turn. “I wanted to honour you.”

“I am honoured,” Dick says. “It suits you,” he adds, and means it.

He’s never associated blue with Jason - it was always red, in the end, red dominant in his Robin suit and red drawing the eye in his Hood - but he wears the opposite colour well.

The suit has been altered since that photo Talia showed him. More heavily armoured, befitting Jason’s brutal close-combat style - no need for the agility Dick’s version excelled at when you’re not working world-class acrobatics into your attacks.

"You can have it back," Jason says. "It's always been yours."

"No," Dick says, and letting go doesn't hurt as much as he thought it would. "You've made it yours. I'm so proud of you, Jay."

Jason bites down hard on his swollen lip, blinks rapidly, tellingly, and launches himself at Dick.

Dick catches him, wraps him close, and resolves to never let go.

He’s holding tangible proof that his suffering was worth it. He’s holding Jason, his brother, and he loves him and he loves him and it’s been years and he can finally hug his brother again.

They remain like that, tangled in each other, devouring the contact, revelling in the warmth. It’s both an eternity and not enough time. It’ll never be enough time

“What’s with the helmet?” Jason asks, muffled, into his shoulder.

Dick had forgotten he still had it. “Thought I’d change my style up a bit. You think it suits me?”

Jason huffs. “Not at all. It puts you at too much of a disadvantage - your fighting style is dependent on stunning the enemy into submission with your dumb face.”

“Ha ha,” Dick deadpans. He keeps one hand firmly wound around his brother’s shoulders and turns the helmet over in the other, assessing it. Then he's struck with the obvious: “You want it?”

It catches Jason visibly off guard, and he pulls back out of the hug. Dick misses the touch immediately. “Do I- what?”

“I don’t want or need it, but it’s good tech. Shame to let this lovely parting gift from the League go to waste. Think you could make use of it?”

He holds it out in offering. Cautiously, Jason takes it.

"I have always wanted better head protection," he mutters, assessing it as Dick had. Then: “Wouldn't it fuck up my peripheral vision?”

Dick laughs. Less than it fucks up Dick’s already green-tinted peripheral vision, less even than the Red Hood must have fucked up Jason’s, but he supposes it would still impact this Jason somewhat. “A bit,” he says, instead of getting into the green. “It gives you that extra head protection in return, though. I’m sure you can tweak its design a bit, or use it as a template for a better version that balances its benefits and downsides better.”

An armoured blue-hooded Nightwing. That’ll be fun to watch Gotham’s criminals run in terror from.

Jason nods. "Okay, sure. I'll play around with it."

He moves away to place it on the nearest table-like surface. The process of it means he turns his back to Dick, and he clearly uses it as an opportunity to take a moment, resting his forearms heavily against the desk. He’s trembling again.

When he pivots slowly back around, Jason’s eyes are glassy with unshed tears.

Dick jerks forward with the impulses of a big brother and the momentum of green-tinted panic. “Jay-”

“I’m sorry,” Jason gasps, cutting him off. “I’m so sorry, Dick. You tried so hard to protect me and I paid you back by getting you killed. I’m sorry.”

He’s crying openly now, and, look at that, so is Dick.

“It should have been me,” Jason whispers, and Dick’s heart shatters.

“No, Little Wing,” he gasps, jerking forward to yank his baby brother back into the tightest hug he can manage. Jason falls into him, unresisting, just as desperate for the contact as Dick. “It was never going to be you. I was never going to let it be you.”

Because he may have had moments of doubt, moments of regret for the lives he’d inadvertently bound their other siblings to, for the trauma his choices may have inflicted upon them once again, but trading places with Jason?

He would never regret saving Jason, especially now he knew exactly what his brother had been through.

“Don’t you dare blame yourself,” he commands into his brother’s hair. “I knew the risks. I weighed myself against you and I chose you. I’d choose you every time.”

Dick would always choose his siblings over himself. He wouldn’t change a thing.

Jason chokes a sob into Dick’s chest. He will blame himself - Dick knows he will because Dick would, Dick did, he knows that nothing he can say will convince Jason to stop but he’ll keep saying it anyway because it’s true.

This was another unintended consequence, he supposes, one more thing he didn’t fully consider when he made the trade.

But, hey, it worked out in the end. Jason survived. The family started to come together while Dick was indisposed, no intervention required, and they only gained minimal extra trauma in the process.

The green has subsided, he’s holding his brother tight, and they’re both alive, and they’re going to be okay.

They’re going to be okay.

Jason, Damian - they’re safe. They’re with Dick. They’re home.

Dick is finally home.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of what's past is prologue