Indispensable

by ShariDeschain

Summary:

A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable. (The Stand - S. King)

 

Dick Grayson is now a father of two.

Chapter 1

It’s not like he wasn’t prepared to be a dad, okay?

As a matter of fact he’s started reading books about parenting as soon as they found out Kory was pregnant, and by the time of Mar’i's birth they had at least two library shelves overflowing with preparatory material.

It’s just that all those books didn’t help one bit, okay?

Or so it feels right now, while Dick paces through the room on his tiptoes, rocking his beautiful, precious, screaming baby daughter in the vain attempt to make her sleep.

He tried singing, and talking, and reading, and he tried giving her a bath, and warm milk before that, and every other trick he’s read about, plus some more he googled on the spot out of exhaustion, but it’s just useless. It’s all useless, and he’s running on two hours of sleep and three cookies, and that’s not even the real problem. The real problem is that Mar’i won’t stop crying and he doesn’t know what the hell to do about it except keep rocking her back and forth from the bedroom to the living room, humming lullabies and random pieces of old songs.

If Kory were here it would be easier, but she’s on League business tonight and Dick feels like he should be able to handle their three months old baby on his own anyway. It’s just that some help would be nice, that’s all, but the only other person in the apartment really doesn’t want to be helpful right now (or in general, to be honest).

“Damian, can you turn down the volume of that thing?”, he asks through his teeth, trying to whisper and at the same time to be heard above Mar’i’s screaming . “I’m trying to put Mar’i to sleep.”

Sitting cross-legged on the couch, Damian doesn’t even spare him a pity glance, too focussed on destroying his virtual opponent on the screen.

“You’re failing.”

“Yes, I know”, Dick hisses, shifting Mar’i into his arms. “Maybe if there was a little silence it would be easier for her to sleep, don’t you think?”

“I thought you invited me here to play video games, not to contemplate your failure at taming your bothersome offspring”, Damian answers, still without looking at him, and he doesn't even pretend to turn down the volume like he usually does with Bruce. “I see I was wrong.”

And yeah, there’s that too. Dick has another pile of books on his nightstand about that. For a brief moment he’d even considered to ask Bruce about siblings rivalry and how to try and reassure a child that he was not being replaced by the newest addiction to the family, then he’d regained full possession of his mental faculties.

Bruce. Handling siblings rivalry. Ha.

He would be as clueless as Dick is. Which is a lot. He just doesn’t know what to do to convince Damian that Mar’i is not a threat to him, that there’s no blood child here and that Dick loves him just the same, that nothing’s changed between them. It frustrates him, because Damian should already know all of that, and yet he’s always cold to Mar’i, and sometimes even to Dick and Kory, and that’s downright infuriating. Especially in situation like this one.

The sound from the console intensifies as Damian hits a combo, and Mar’i cries even harder right into Dick’s left ear.

“Damian! Shut that damn thing down right NOW”, he yells, spinning on his feet to face his little brother.

There’s a moment of stunned, blessed silence, just enough for Dick to realize that he yelled so loudly to startle both Mar’i and Damian and feel bad about it. Then Mar’i starts crying again, even more desperately than before, and he’s at loss again.

“No no no, I’m sorry baby, I’m sorry, sshh, don’t cry”, he pleads, rubbing the baby’s back and bouncing her into his arms. It takes five minutes and four trips to various room of the apartment before Mar’i’s crying tunes down into a soft whimper, and by then Dick realizes that there’s only silence coming from the living room.

He swears under his breath and races there as smoothly as he can, already convinced that he’ll find nothing else than an open window and Damian gone and fuck, fuck, fuck, that’s not how he wanted tonight to go at all.

The TV’s off and the PS4 controller lies abandoned on the carpet, but to his surprise Damian’s still there, perched on the couch armrest, phone in his hands. Dick sighs in relief, scoops Mar’i up onto his shoulder and carefully approaches the kid.

“Hey, kiddo…”, he starts, an apology ready on his lips as he reaches out to ruffle Damian’s hair, but his brother dodges him and swats his hand away.

“Come on, don’t be like that, I’m sorry I yelled at you okay?”, Dick continues anyway. “I’m just… Mar’i is very tired and the sooner I can put her to bed the sooner we can spend some time together, yeah?”

Damian doesn’t answer, which is… expected, to say the least. Dick sighs, reaches out again only to earn himself another swat for his trouble, and then just gives up because Mar’i is finally sleeping and he doesn’t want to wake her up. Win some, lose some. Besides, he can always make it up to Damian in a few minutes. Bribe him with pizza or something.

“Alright, I’m taking her to bed. Back in five minutes, okay?”

Still no answer. Dick sighs again, then marches towards the bedroom. Silence is weird to his ears right now, almost like a spell waiting to be broken. Which is exactly what it’s going to happen in a few hours, but hey, that’s a problem for the Dick of the future.

He lies down on the mattress, careful to support Mar’i’s head with his hand while lowering her down next to him. He needs to go back to Damian, but before that he takes a moment to admire his daughter, the perfection of her beautiful little face, from the long, dark lashes brushing her cheeks down to the tiny nose, so similar to Dick’s, and the sweet line of the little chin, which Kory claims to be exactly as her own.

Everything’s been so frenetic these last months, and yet the amazement of these little moments is still there, perfectly intact. It’s like magic, and all the crying and the sleepless night are nothing compared to it.

Dick wants Damian to know this, to feel this. Because this baby belongs to him too, she’s his family too. Dick only needs to find the right words to make him understand that, to make the jealousy and all the bad feelings go away. He knows he can do it.

He falls asleep without even realizing it.

*

He wakes up an hour later, in a panic. He doesn’t know at first what he’s panicking about, but it becomes clear the moment he opens his eyes and finds an empty, cold spot where Mar’i should be.

I dropped her, he thinks, and the horror freezes him for a long, terrifying moment. Then he bolts out of the bed on shaky legs and tries to call his daughter’s name, but his throat’s so tight that the only sound capable of escaping his lips is a feeble whisper.

He walks around the bed with his heart pumping hard into his chest and he feels the sweat freezing on his neck. Years of life as a Gotham vigilante and he can’t remember ever being so scared. The fear only intensifies when he reaches the other side of the bed and he still can’t find Mar’i. His three months old daughter, who was sleeping just next to him, gone. Gone.

A soft sound from the living room catches his attention, and his heart stills before his brain starts to work again. Damian. Damian was still there.

He walks out of the bedroom like a zombie, and sure enough there he is. Slouched down on the couch, playing his video game with the volume to a minimum and a very awake and very quiet Mar’i cuddled up against his chest.

“She woke up half an hour ago”, Damian informs him, still pressing button after button with his usual efficiency. “You looked like you needed the rest more than she did, so I picked her up.”

Dick’s first, instinctive reaction would’ve made him ashamed of himself, hadn't he caught it in time.

But he’s never hit Damian, and he’s not going to do it now. Fear and exhaustion are not an excuse, and even if his hands itch to grab the kid by the shoulders and shake him hard, Dick is rational enough now to realize that his intentions were good, that he was only trying to help him out.

So he closes his eyes and rubs the bridge of his nose with cold fingertips.

“I- well, thank you, kiddo”, he exhales, and there must be something weird left in his voice because Damian actually pauses the game to look at him.

“Something wrong?”, he asks with a frown.

“No. No, I just- had a moment of... confusion, when I woke up and didn’t find Mar’i there”, Dick admits, careful to keep his voice as casual as possible. “Thought someone took her.”

Damian’s frown only deepens at that.

“I was here”, he remembers him. “I would’ve never let anyone take your daughter.”

Your daughter, Dick repeats in his mind.

“Thank you”, he says again.

Damian shrugs, and Dick walks around the couch to sit next to him. Mar’i looks up at him with big, green eyes, and she seems pretty content to be where she is, lying on Damian’s chest, her little head on his shoulder, little fists tighten around his shirt.

It’s the first time Damian holds her of his own volition, Dick realizes. Sure, he's held her before, mostly because Dick and Kory had insisted on it, but he’d never gone and picked her up on his own before tonight. Dick supposes it’s a big step forward.

“Do you mind if I take a photo?”, he asks then, unable to help himself.

“Yes”, Damian scoffs.

“Too bad”, Dick grins, reaching out to take his phone from the table in front of the couch. “Because I’m gonna do it anyway.”

Damian ignores him and resumes his game, only to stop it again when Mar’i starts to fuss on him. From behind the camera’s lens Dick watches him shushing and bouncing the baby into his arms, and he smiles as the same feeling of amazement hits him right into the chest, fear and anger now completely forgotten.

He takes a video of it, and then a dozen photos from various angles, and Damian huffs when a minute later he shows him his favorite.

“Happy now?”

“Ecstatic”, Dick confirms, his head resting on top of Damian’s. “It’s the first picture of the two of you together that I can put on my desk.”

“You don’t have a desk.”

“Not the point.”

That earns him another scoff, but Dick doesn’t mind. He pulls back to rest his elbow against the couch, then he leans his head into his hand, and watches the two kids in front of him.

It’s weird, he knows that. Damian is Bruce’s son, not his, and yet he can’t help himself now more than he could back then, when for the first time he seriously started thinking about keeping Damian as his own. He still wonders about it, sometimes. Would’ve Damian accepted to go with him? Would’ve Bruce allowed it? Would’ve it worked?

This time Damian doesn’t swat him away when he reaches out to pet his hair, nor he tries to squirm away from him when Dick leans over to kiss the side of his head.

“I missed you”, Dick admits. It should be the easiest thing for him to say, but more often than not those words remain stuck in his throat, weighed down by the guilt and the fear of breaking the delicate balance between them.

“You’re the one who’s always otherwise occupied”, Damian reminds him bitterly, and Dick sighs.

“Babies need a lot of attention”, he answers. “You know that. We talked about it.”

“I know.”

“I don’t love you any less because of it”, Dick continues. “You know that too. But I’m sorry that we spent so little time together lately. I thought tonight could be our boys night, you know? Just us, pizza and video games. Like it used to be.”

Damian nods, then bites his bottom lip.

“I’m sorry too.”

“Don’t be. There are going to be other boys night, I promise”, Dick quickly reassures him, swinging an arm around the boy’s shoulder and leaning down again to kiss Mar’i’s forehead. “We only need a little time to adjust, that’s all.”

“No, not that”, Damian snaps, and Dick blinks down at him. “What I mean is that I know I have contributed to our… falling out. And I apologize for being a menace, and not helpful at all with this new situation of yours.”

“This new situation of mine is your niece”, Dick retorts. “Your sister, if you prefer.”

Damian hums noncommittally at the idea of adding a sibling to the list, then furtively glances at him.

“So you’re not angry at me?”

“Kid, I promise you I never was”, Dick sighs. “I’m just very tired. But believe me when I say this: despite what it may look like, this is the happiest I’ve ever been. Especially with you here. You and Mar’i are the two things I love the most, okay? You two and Kory are my family.”

His words are received only by a heavy silence for a few moments.

“Cheesy”, Damian eventually comments, but by the light blush on his cheeks Dick knows his message came through. So he laughs, and Mar’i gurgles happily along with him, drooling a little on Damian’s shirt.

“The important things in life always are”, Dick states, then he leans down again, this time to steal the controller from Damian’s hands. “But now it’s my turn to kick some bad guy’s ass while you get to play the babysitter. And pray that she doesn’t need a diaper change before I finish this level, because believe me, that’s not going to be cheesy in the slightest.”

Notes:

Written for the "I wish you wold write a fic where" meme, this was the lovely prompt I got.

Chapter 2

Dick had thought that the long stakeouts on the rooftops of Gotham first, and of Bludhaven later, had taught him patience like nothing else could have ever possibly done, but that had all been before Damian. Damian becoming part of his life had been a major turning point for him, something that - the rare times he allows himself to think about it - he links back to the very concept of becoming an adult.

Not that Dick hasn’t felt like an adult before, because he has. He’s started to feel it the night his parents died, and nothing has ever been able to shake off that sudden grip of reality and solitude that had crashed over him underneath that circus tent. But there was something different about being an adult for yourself and being an adult for someone else’s sake, and even in that last circumstance the difference between being an adult among peers and being an adult around a child - and a difficult one, while at it - was terrifyingly distinctive.

Damian had taught him all of that and a lot more (most of it without even suspecting it), but even Damian hadn't fully prepared him for the life as a parent of a newborn baby.

And it wasn’t just that he was constantly out of patience for every little thing, it was also the constant fear and worry and the endless catastrophic scenarios that piled up in his mind even while he slept. All the normal everyday concerns and then the monsters, the criminals, the galactic and intergalactic threats. It's exhausting.

But then there’s this.

Coming home to find Kory reading on the couch and, on the carpet at her feet, Mar’i in her playpen, gnawing at her foot and her Batman doll indiscriminately, and a little bit farther, Damian lying on his stomach with his sketchbook open in front of him. And they are all quiet and comfortable, and it’s probably not going to last, but for now it’s here, and it’s beautiful. So beautiful Dick’s tempted to stay just there on the doorstep, without disturbing any of them, but of course it’s impossible because they’ve already detected his presence.

Damian is the first to attack.

“I was forced to change your daughter’s dirty diapers today”, the boy informs him.

Dick mentally observes that it’s been a while since the last time Damian’s called Mar'i your daughter with that tone that implied she was a wrong done against him.

Kory doesn’t look up from her book, but when he looks at her to seek a clarification, Dick sees that the corner of her lips is pulling into a smile she’s clearly trying to prevent.

“I asked Damian to help me with the baby”, she manages to explain composedly enough. “He was wonderful.”

Neither of them look at the other during this exchange, and Dick finds out he wants to know the details of that particular conversation more than anything else in the world, but this probably isn't the right time to ask about it.

“I’m not doing it again”, Damian points out, refusing to acknowledge the praise. “It was disgusting.”

Dick would pay good money to go back in time and witness the scene himself. He wonders if maybe he can find a way to corrupt Zatanna into it.

“You chase people in the sewer at least two nights per week”, he answers for the time being. “I know from experience that diapers are not worse than that. At least the stuff is contained and doesn’t get in your hair.”

“Says you”, Damian scoffs, and at that Dick has to laugh. It couldn't have been such a tragic experience if the boy decided to stay here instead of fleeing back to his father's house to complain about the ignominy just suffered.

He drops his gym bag on the floor and, after kicking off his shoes, he picks up Mar’i and sits on the carpet, his back resting against the couch, legs stretched out next to Damian’s body.

“Hey princess, was Dami so bad at changing your diaper?”, he asks the baby, and she happily gurgles back at him. Dick nods in understanding.

“Oh, I see.”

“I was as competent as always”, Damian butts in, obviously offended by the very implication that he could fail at something so elementary, and he looks up at him for the first time since Dick’s stepped into the house. It’s not a welcoming look at all. “And stop pretending you can understand what she’s saying, she’s not speaking.”

“Says you”, Dick retorts, and Damian stabs him in the shin with his pencil. Not so hard, all things considered. Just hard enough for Dick to want to pinch him back in retaliation.

“Children, stop fighting please”, Kory chides from the couch, and to Dick’s amazement Damian actually stops giving him those dirty looks that usually promise long hours of bitching and snarky talk-backs, and goes back to his drawing. Kory must have some sort of children-taming secret he’s unaware of (and that he envies her a lot), and Dick’s about to comment on that but he catches his wife’s glare and thinks better of it.

Kory rewards his sensibility by stretching out to kiss him on the lips, then she goes back to her reading, and for a while the only sounds in the living room are the scratching of Damian's pencil on the paper, the slow rustling of Kory's book and Mar’i’s self-absorbed babbling when Dick tickles her stomach or pulls a funny face at her.

And this too is new, different from everything else he’s ever experienced. It’s surprising in a way only conventional things that you never think could ever happen to you can be. It’s scaring, and unnerving, and makes him want to scream his head out. And he loves it to pieces.

“So… what are we going to cook for dinner?”, Dick asks eventually, and he feels stupid, and too normal, and so, so very happy.

Notes:

Unplanned chapter 2 because only god knows how long ago someone on tumblr asked for it.

Written for the COWT @ landedifandom, prompt 'newborn'.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 5 of I wish you would write a fic where meme