No Strings Attached

by Keysmasher

Summary:

Dick has a lot of sex for a lot of reasons, but at the end of the day, he knows the real reason: he just needs to pretend that he's loved.

Notes:

Hi all I'm back on my bullshit with my latest media fixation :) And projecting my own issues onto fictional characters again because fuck me that's why

This is not a happy story, and there are no happy endings here.

Dick has a problem and he knows it.

He knows it when he blinks and finds himself scrolling through a chat room on a website called hornysexchat. He knows it when he’s meeting someone’s eyes in a bar and then being dragged into an alley. He knows it when every orgasm brings him, at most, five minutes of peace.

He ups the ante.

He looks for bigger, harder men and women. He looks for ones who have no problem holding or tying him down (and he could win, he could , it would be easy but he can never quite make himself want to). He looks for the ones who call themselves ‘mistress’ or ‘sir’. He looks for the ones that advertise themselves as pushing limits, the ones that take pride in not caring what their partners think of them, the ones that enjoy leaving bruises all over him. It’s punishment and absolution both, and Dick can’t get enough, not even when he’s late to work or too sore to fight at full strength or fucked until he’s unconscious and then he wakes up to someone new inside him.

So Dick knows he has a problem, he knows his life is falling apart and the sex is part of that, but he can’t stop. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it half the time, especially when he’s too exhausted to find someone in person so he opens up the hornysexchat app and goes into the humiliation room and posts a pic and then starts talking to 3 or 4 people at once, debasing himself in the nastiest ways so maybe someone will start to give a shit because god knows if he shows his family the smallest crack they’ll lose their shit on him.

He starts to develop a routine. In the morning he talks to a woman in Oklahoma, who takes her time sending him written messages and the occasional voice recording, who works him up and brings him down and asks how his day was and generally seems to be interested in him as more than a sex toy. He can handle that for about a week before he stops responding immediately to anything but the sex talk. She gets the hint and, while she still takes her time, after they both cum she limits herself to ten minutes of telling him he’s a great slut, orgasming for her when she’s not even in the room. She stops asking about his day.

During his lunch break there’s a guy in New Zealand who works night shift. Dick talks him through the nastiest shit in his brain, the kind he could never ask to try with someone he knew in real life. The kind that has him terrified of what he wants to do, how badly he wants to hurt someone. But the New Zealander gets off on it, sends Dick videos of him getting off with a hand wrapped around his throat while he rides a dildo big enough Dick knows it’s got to hurt no matter how much lube he uses, and Dick puts his headphones in as he beats off into the bathroom toilet and sends text messages about how he’d double-team the guy with his own dick and a cucumber, put a knife to his throat and force his legs open, use just enough lube to not rip him open - and the New Zealander sends back But I want you to make my ass bleed sir :(, so Dick threatens to carve up his back and use the blood to lube the way, and the guy sends him a pic of shallow slices on his thighs covered in cum . Dick sends him That's hot but you need to disinfect those. Good pain whores don't give themselves infections.

After work there’s another guy, this one in Texas, who tells Dick what to do. Dick puts on a Halloween mask because he knows better than to show his face while he writes target practice on his chest and contortionist slut on his belly and fuckhole on his thighs with arrows pointing to his asshole. He fucks himself with his fingers while his ankles are by his ears, and the camera angle is awkward as hell but it works. The Texan drawls sweetheart and darlin’ in his ear, praising him for being such a broken slut he’ll fuck himself for anyone who wants to watch, and occasionally he brings in his wife who’s even nastier, snarling bitch and whore and faggot at him until he comes so hard he hits the pillow behind his head.

And then there’s patrol, and there’s nothing to distract him from how fucked-up his life has gotten, with his family an hour away and barely even talking to him ( and whose fault is that? whispers the back of his mind) and by the time he gets home he just needs some kind of connection and he knows better than anyone that nothing gets someone willing to talk to him quite like showing off his body, so he goes back to the hornysexchat site and posts a nude-but-masked picture and waits to see if he’ll get any takers.

He gets a reputation on the site. He’ll talk to almost anyone, about almost anything sex-related but never about his personal life. When someone asks a question about lube or condoms he’s the first to answer without making it sound like a come-on. He won’t initiate anything, waits for people to come to him, and opinions are mixed on whether it’s because he’s passive (most of the regulars) or if he doesn’t want to presume when what he wants is so fucked up (the ones he talks to over DMs when he wants to be the one calling the shots for once, when he’s sick of taking orders from every fucking person he knows and keeping a smile on his face while he does it).

He’s active in a bunch of the rooms, depending on his mood. The humiliation room, when he wants someone to fuck him up with words. The punishment room, when he wants someone to make him hurt himself and he can lie to himself that it’s for sex. The porn room, when he wants to talk fantasies with people in general and get himself off slowly. The unicorn room when he wants a couple to virtually play with. 

Sometimes, when he’s desperate for a scrap of affection that doesn’t have strings attached, he finds someone to call him sweetheart and build a fantasy of a life where the only thing he needs to do to earn somebody’s love is to exist. Usually he ends up crying on the call, and the voice on the other end either panics and disconnects or croons reassurances that he isn’t broken, that he isn’t toxic or manipulative for being the way he is, that being hurt and scared isn’t the same as being irredeemable. When he calms down, the people who stayed through his mini-freakouts gently push him to see a therapist, and he assures them he will and then he goes to the BDSM room and finds the roughest person available to make him punish himself.

And his virtual sex life is one thing, but his in-person sex life is something else entirely.

There are the bars, of course, where his ID says his name is Albert Glancom and the people inside just need to look at his painted-on clothing and sin-filled smile before they’re half in his lap (or he’s half in theirs). There’s Tinder, who bans him for being too sexual in his profile (which he didn’t know was something they did until it happened to him). He downloads a couple swingers’ apps on his phone for when he’s in the mood to find a couple, and there aren’t too many in Gotham or Bludhaven and it’s hard to get their attention but it’s so, so worth it when he does. He has a few numbers on his civilian phone for couples who extended a standing offer to join him and sometimes send him a booty call.

He never says no to anyone who calls him.

But when all the apps are too slow, when he needs something more than he can find from a random bar hookup, he goes to the only sex club in town and tells people what he needs. That usually leads to him getting suspended from the ceiling and fucked until he’s crying, then fucked some more, and someone usually lets him down after an hour or two. His record is five hours before he breaks and slurs out “red” and the guy fucking him immediately pulls out, gets him down, wraps him in a blanket, and hands him a bottle of water. One of the monitors keeps an eye on them until Dick can support his own weight again, and then the guy who got him down makes sure he gets safely in a cab.

It bleeds over into his hero life, too. He’s a good-looking guy and he’s in killer shape. Everyone wants to get into his pants, and he’s always down for a good time, so sure. Why not? They’re into it, they’re consenting adults, and it makes them happy. And sure, it’s a little weird sometimes, but who cares?

He starts to get a reputation. Nightwing, the flirt. Nightwing, the best lover on this side of the Milky Way. Nightwing, the superhero bicycle, because everyone gets a ride.

And maybe it should bother him, maybe he should feel more shame than he does when fucking Superman tries to talk to him about safe sex, but the thing is Dick always uses a condom and he’s scheduling a vasectomy the next time he goes to see a doctor anyway, and Clark’s been almost-family long enough that it’s the good kind of awkward (coming from a place of concern) instead of the bad kind of awkward (trying to control him, again , everyone always trying to tell him what to say and how to behave). It's a reminder that at least one person both respects him enough to make his own decisions and cares enough to try to make sure he's doing it safely.

Superboy comes onto him the next day and Dick is on his knees in front of him the second they’re in his bedroom, throating him so good he almost cries.

So yeah. Dick has a lot of sex. He has a lot of sex with a lot of people for a lot of reasons, and maybe it isn’t the healthiest way to make himself feel, but at least he’s feeling something other than the ache of healed bones and swollen joints, something more than the bitterness of the daily grind, something that isn’t the way the world is passing by while he goes through the motions. Sex feels good, okay, and it’s something that he needs more of. He’s late to his day job all the time because he wakes up and thinks Just one, it’ll be quick and then masturbates until after he should have left the house. He’s distracted during family dinner because his phone dings and it’s a hookup - not that any of his siblings notice his distraction, and if Bruce does he doesn’t call Dick on it. A few times he's patrolling as Nightwing and finds someone he's hooked up with, and it's awkward on his end but they don't actually recognize him so he moves past it as much as he can in the moment. 

He knows there’s no love waiting for him. There’s no one person he’s going to meet and date and fall in love with. That’s fine for some people, but he knows himself and he knows that if he ever finds someone like that he’ll fuck it up, sabotage the relationship because that’s what he always does. At least with casual hookups, he doesn't have to see the looks on their faces when he inevitably fucks it all up.

He was only ever meant to be loved in small doses. He knows that. It's why he has sex with so many people, to fill the void in his chest the only way he knows how. And if it slowly stops working, if the random sex slowly stops making him feel better, that's fine. He can always have more.