Chapter Text
Bruce was at the Batcomputer, working on the problem Peter had presented them with and halfway into being Batman. Dick’s siblings were scattered around, either helping, taking a break from helping, or trying to entertain Peter whose mind seemed to be always working faster than one of them alone could keep up with - and whose energy seemed limitless so far.
As exhausting as it was, Dick was so proud of his alternate-self’s kid that he could cry and he wouldn’t change a thing about him.
It also made him glad in a bittersweet way that he didn’t have to keep up with Peter when he had the energy and impulse control of a toddler.
Peter was currently working on some chemical project off to the side that he’d apparently taken on after snooping his way through some of their files again. He’d printed off some pages, grabbed a spare notebook, and commandeered a small whiteboard then tucked himself into a nearby nook and not emerged since. The sound of a pencil scratching at paper and a marker squeaking on the whiteboard were the only noises emerging.
Jason had been switching between working on cases and texting on his phone with a scowl dark enough that Dick elected not to get involved - if it was Red Hood business like he suspected, he didn’t want to step on his little brother’s toes too much. It was nice having him home, and he didn’t want to be the one to bring that to his attention enough to drive Jason off. … He may have also wanted plausible deniability if he was later asked about whatever Jason was getting up to.
Damian had scoffed at the offer to join them, claiming that he needed to attend to his animals. He’d also said something about them proving their competency, but Dick had tuned out that bit by then. His littlest brother had since stopped in several times to check their progress, then scoff at them some more, like the prickly little cactus child he was. But Dick noticed how every time his eyes landed on Peter, his shoulders relaxed a little upon seeing that his nephew was still here.
If he didn’t think his little brother would stab him for it, Dick might have been tempted to coo over how cute he was being, and at how much progress he’d made since arriving so long ago. He might have still done it anyway - older brother privileges and all - but he didn’t have the energy to deal with the inevitable fallout of pushing his littlest brother’s buttons at the moment.
Cass was watching Peter in a way that would have been creepy had it not been her. And had Peter not seemingly been chill with being stared at intently - from the beginning he seemed relaxed around Cass in a way it took most people a bit of time to get to, and had warmed up to her surprisingly fast much to her smug amusement.
Peter calling her his aunt the other day had been a source of smug pride for her, and had netted her a decent chunk of money from the wager his siblings had set up about who he’d call his aunt or uncle first.
Dick had been given his own share of the pool shortly after. You never bet against Cass; he was surprised his siblings hadn’t learned that yet.
Tim had been acting as B’s main helper, though he was currently taking a semi-break at the moment. He’d been performing juggling and trick throws with a nearby stress ball for the last half hour, staring up at it with a frown as he muttered under his breath. Dick could only make out a bit of it, but it sounded like the math wasn’t really mathing the way Tim wanted it to.
Dick himself was great at math, but he wasn’t the same kind of mad genius as his middle brother, and had ‘stayed in his lane’ for once and just been going through his stretching routine on the mats nearby.
Jason standing drew his attention as his brother stood up from his chair and stretched with a groan. A series of crackles emerged from his joints, loud enough that even Dick winced at the sounds. He watched as Jason’s eyes lit upon Tim, and a mischievous smirk flashed across his face as he made his way over to him.
Tim yelped as Jason flopped obnoxiously across his shoulders, tipping his desk chair back with his weight. Tim’s aim with the small ball he’d been playing with by tossing high in the air went wide. The ball ricocheted off a hanging stalactite, before lodging itself high up in a crevice between two stalactites, far out of reach.
“Aw, ball, no,” Tim complained staring after it forlornly.
Dick frowned and peered a little closer at his younger brother. Yikes, those were some large eyebags. That explained why Tim was being slightly whiny and so grumpy about his hangup on the project. He almost never got that way until he was really tired, and between his frequent naps and caffeine intake, he usually managed to get enough sleep and fight off his tiredness enough to stay fully functional despite his packed schedule.
He must have been up all night trying to find a solution for Peter.
“Ah, I got it!” Peter said as his head snapped up from his work a little unexpectedly, eagerly springing to his feet and apparently abandoning his chemistry project easily. Dick hadn’t been aware he’d been paying that much attention to his surroundings - he’d looked pretty absorbed. Peter peered up at the ball and scanned the wall briefly, before jumping towards the side of the cave in a short hop.
Peter somehow stuck to the smooth wall and began… scuttling up the surface towards the ceiling. Dick’s jaw dropped open slightly as he slowly released the stretch he was in the middle of. Walking over towards the others, he stared at Peter moving up the wall. He knew rock climbing, and this was definitely not that.
“What the fuck?” Jason muttered under his breath, sounding a little unnerved. Peter peeked back over his shoulder as he climbed a short part of the wall that almost parallel to the ground. He’d somehow heard his uncle’s quiet comment, despite being too far away to have heard it, even with the echoes of the Batcave.
“Oh, did I not mention my abilities yet?” Peter asked, his joints moving slightly unnaturally as he quickly made his way up. Dick made a quiet sound of disagreement, eyes glued to how high he was getting. “Huh. Well, I’m super sticky! I have all these microscopic hairs on my skin that can grip pretty much anything. I can also do this!”
Reaching the ball, Peter grabbed it, before leaning back on his heels and giving Dick an aneurysm by letting go. He swung back, standing almost perpendicular to the ground on what was basically the ceiling. Grinning down at them, Peter tossed the ball back to Tim who caught it, blinking slowly up at him.
Peter then gave them all a grin and basically jumped while upside down. He brought his knees to his chest and made several somersalts, landing lightly on the ground far below. He straightened and held his arms out like a gymnast.
“Ta-da!” he said, smiling happily.
Dick felt like he was about to have a heart attack from either fear or pride. Maybe both. Was this how Bruce felt when he was a kid? He might owe the man a bit of an apology after all.
“That was a modified quadruple somersault,” Tim said faintly, staring at Peter, before his eyes dragged over to his big brother. He huffed a quiet laugh, rolling the ball around in his hands. “He really is your kid, Dick.”
Dick blinked, his mind rapidly going back over what he just saw only to realize Tim was right. He couldn’t kill the resulting proud smile if he tried.
“Yeah, he is,” he said happily, only to notice Peter flush red as he abruptly flustered. Oh, right, his kid had super hearing. “Ah, anything else you can do that you feel like sharing?”
Peter took the out, looking a little relieved, and Dick didn’t take it personally. He knew how it felt to lose at least one set of parents/parental figures and how it felt to ‘replace’ them with someone else. Even though Dick Grayson and Richard Parker were technically the same person, they weren’t the same person. So, he got it.
“Well, I’m also super strong?” Peter said, glancing up as he thought aloud. “Mister Stark and I haven’t had a chance to put a real number on my limit - especially since I’m still growing. But I definitely know I can stop a train, hold together a ferry, and lift a warehouse, so that should give you a ballpark range.”
Dick really needed to stop asking his kid questions.
“I also heal really fast and am pretty durable to begin with - but you guys already knew that from my broken arm healing in a few days. I once got run over by a train and was up and fighting again a few hours later,” Peter continued absently, seeming not to notice the alarmed looks that got him from everyone in the room.
Jason dropped a hand to Dick’s shoulder, squeezing tightly, rightly reading that Dick was about three seconds from losing it again.
“Um, I also have this sixth sense for danger. We don’t really have a good name for it, but Aunt May and Mister Stark called it the Peter Tingle,” Peter continued. “Peter 2 and Peter 3 called it their Spidey Sense. I’m not really fond of either of those names, so it’s still a work in progress. I also process sensory stimulus a lot faster, which is a combination of my sixth sense and strength making me really fast and have great reflexes. I’ve also been suspecting my eyesight is a little better than a human’s, but I haven’t really had a good chance to test it. I think that’s it?”
There was a long moment of silence as they all tried to process that influx of information with varying degrees of incredulity and alarm.
“Peter 2 and Peter 3?” Tim finally asked, sounding a little wary of where this story might go. Which, given how their questions seemed to be going so far, Dick felt was pretty fair.
“Oh!” Peter lit up a little. “They’re my alternate selves from the multiversal issue I mentioned I was dealing with right before I ended up here! They’re both older than me, and one of them can produce his own webs, how cool is that?!”
“Very cool,” Cass said, making no effort to hide her amusement. Peter noticed, and seemed to pout for a moment.
“You’re laughing at me,” he complained to her.
Not laughing , she signed, smiling. Cute. Adorable. Love you.
Peter squinted for a moment as he deciphered her signs, before his eyes widened as he understood and he turned bright red. He curled into himself and covered his face with his hands.
“Why are you all like this?” he complained. “I thought all of you were supposed to be, I don’t know, repressed or something. That’s what everyone on the streets was saying.”
Dick couldn’t help but laugh.
“Oh, you haven’t seen us at our worst yet, kiddo,” he said, unable to really deny the accusations. “Right now we’re all a little… enamoured shall we say, with the new baby of the family - or grandbaby, in some cases.”
A glance at Bruce and Alfred showed the former looking a little sheepish but it was hidden under his usual stoic mask. The latter however, had his own stoic expression, but a twinkle in his eye gave him away.
“You haven’t seen me at mine, either though,” Peter said quietly behind his hands, before seemingly moving on to a new topic before anyone could address that comment. “So, what’s the plan for the rest of the day? We’ve been down here for hours, and I’ve almost finished doing the math and chemistry for my fourth web re-design.”
Ah, so that’s what he’d been doing. Dick walked back over to the mats and sank down into another stretch as he thought, glancing over at B and Tim who had been looking into everything. They both had their ‘analyzing’ expressions on and went to look over their shared progress for a moment on figuring out dimensional travel. Feeling new eyes on himself, Dick looked over to where Peter was now watching him stretch curiously.
“Wanna stretch with me?” Dick asked quietly, not wanting to interrupt Bruce or his brother when they were in the zone. Peter shrugged, jogging over and dropping down to the mats nearby.
“Sure, as long as it’s fine that I’m inhumanly flexible,” Peter said, immediately sinking into the same stretch Dick was doing. Dick laughed, giving his kid a slightly sharp grin in response.
“I’m sure many people have said the same about me,” he laughed. “You come by it honestly, either way.”
Dick led them through a stretching routine that got more and more complicated as time went on, and Jason came over to watch after Tim kicked him off the back of his chair finally. The stretching didnt really seem too difficult for Peter either, and it wasn’t long before he seemed to be paying less and less attention. Damian came down as the time to go out on patrol neared, to join them in stretching to warm up for heading out.
“If I promise to stick with one of you guys, can I come on patrol with you? I’m getting antsy,” Peter complained, giving up on following Dick’s routine and opting instead to skip ahead to folding himself into a complicated pretzel to stretch.
Jason looked a little green at the sight, and seemed to avoid looking at Peter after that, keeping his eyes just on his brothers instead. Dick hid his smile and started doing some of the stretches he knew squicked his brother out in response, and Jason shot him a glare before flopping down onto the mats and turning his back to them all to start his own warmups. Dick snickered under his breath.
“Seriously though,” Peter continued. “I’ve done nothing but sit here and tell stories and eat food since I got here. I want to move. I want to do actual science. Something . At least let me upgrade something; all your tech is so retro .”
“ Retro ?!” Tim exclaimed, popping up from over the back of his chair to stare at Peter in offense. “This is one of the most technologically advanced places on Earth! How is it retro ?”
“Really?” Peter asked, nose crinkling in judgement, before his eyes widened and he flushed a little as he seemed to realize he might be being rude. “Not that it’s a bad thing! I love the vibe you’re going for, very neat. It’s just. Mr. Stark and Wakanda brought us past this level of tech years ago. We have green energy, scientific time travel, nanite technology, living AIs, and everything. Add in the Asgardians coming to Earth, the Chitauri remnants, and the bits and pieces the Guardians bring with them during visits, and well. It’s outdated? Not everything! I’m sure some of the stuff is probably ahead of us since you have aliens too. I haven’t really had a chance to look at it all super closely, either, so there’s likely things I haven’t seen, but yeah.”
Dick didn’t really know what to say to that, and he could tell his siblings didn’t know either. After a few moments though, Damian narrowed his eyes at Peter.
“You will show us these things immediately,” he demanded. “If Wayne Enterprises is to remain a paragon of its field and a worthy inheritance, it must stay ahead.”
“Sure,” Peter shrugged easily. Damian paused, blinking at the easy acceptance. Catching the look, Peter frowned. “What, did you think I would gatekeep things like green energy and what are basically medical miracles? I’m not a monster. Besides, it’s not giving away trade secrets if this is another dimension; my NDAs don’t apply here.”
“...An astute observation,” Damian finally said, sniffing a little haughtily, but looking pleased anyway. “Your contributions should be adequate then. Besides, there should be no secrets between family anyway, nephew.”
Peter’s cheeks still flushed, but he smiled and inclined his head in agreement anyway. They’d have him accepting that he was family sooner rather than later, from the looks of things so far.
“Tim, start your warm ups,” Bruce finally said, putting a halt to his research. “We can finish this later.”
“But I’m so close!” Tim said, running a frustrated hand through his hair. “The math works out, we just don’t have the tech to meet it, so I keep having to adjust it to match the parameters we have! Either the materials are available and we need more energy to get them to work, or they’re unavailable because they don’t exist and we have the energy we need. They just aren’t matching up!”
“We’ll figure it out later, we aren’t going to solve this right away. Go.”
Tim grumbled, but made his way over to to the mats and joined everyone else. Dick wasn’t sure Bruce would join them today, but he made his way over soon after, going into a modified stretching routine.
All the Robins, even Jason despite his current build, tended to favor a more limber style of fighting than Batman did. Bruce focused more on technique and power, and Jason fell somewhere between the two styles these days. But it did mean that they could all do more complicated stretches than Bruce could.
“So… do I get an answer about patrol?” Peter asked, and Dick blinked, having gotten sidetracked before he could give an answer. He had to admit, he wasn’t really all that fond of the idea of his kid fighting in Gotham, but he also knew Peter was an accomplished hero on his own merit and that he would be a hypocrite if he outright said no.
“Compromise,” Dick suggested, raising his head. “We set up a time for you to spar with all of us later in the week, and then when we’re on patrol tonight you can do your science thing. We still haven’t had a chance to go over Gotham’s rogues, gotten a read on your skill level, or trained you on our general protocols, so I for one don’t feel comfortable sending you out right now.”
Peter got a set to his jaw that had Dick immediately praying that his son hadn’t inherited his stubbornness - or, at least, that his counterpart’s personality was a little more complacent even if he doubted any version of him wasn’t a little stubborn. Then Peter closed his eyes, took several deep breaths, and the tension in his shoulders eased.
“Fine,” he muttered, looking annoyed but resigned. “You have a point, even if I don’t like it. If we’re not prepared and able to work together smoothly, I’ll be a liability to have out there and someone could get killed.”
“We’ll be happy to have you with us,” Bruce said, the expression on his face soft enough that it had Dick exchanging covert weirded out looks with his brothers. Was this the effect of having a grandchild, on the man? It was weird. “We just need to make sure we’re smart about it.”
“I know,” Peter sighed, before smiling slightly. “Thanks, Grandpa.”
“Of course,” Bruce said as he abruptly stiffened, his voice coming out a little halted. “I’m going to - check the supplies.”
He stood quickly and wandered off deeper into the cave as Peter flushed red and groaned, hiding his face by twisting into a new position.
“I can’t believe I said that out loud,” Peter moaned, his voice muffled. “It just came out before I could stop it. Do you think he’s mad?”
“Mad?” Jason asked, laughing. Even Tim was snickering at the situation, as Dick bumped his shoulder into Peter’s. “I think you just made his damn year, even if he’s too emotionally constipated to express it like a normal fucking person. Right, Cass?”
All of them on the mats jumped a little at suddenly noticing Cass right near them, and her eyes crinkled in the way they always did when she was laughing at them on the inside.
Happy . Love. Confused, awkward, she confirmed. A sly glint entered her expression and she continued, Mostly for Peter, but also everyone.
The laughter eased as they all shifted awkwardly at that. Dick himself ducked his head and began wrapping up his stretching, now fully warmed up for heading out. Peter broke into laugher, and they all glanced at him.
“You all really are repressed, aren’t you,” he commented with a grin, and his voice was fond as he looked at them. “I thought you and the rest of Gotham were lying, but it looks like we’ve just gotten lucky until now.”
“I’d be more offended, but I can’t exactly refute it,” Tim muttered, deciding he was done with his warm ups a moment later and rising to go change into his suit. Dick debated about demanding he do more, but let it go. His brother knew his limits - if he wanted to risk getting a cramp while on patrol, that was his prerogative.
“All right, time to suit up,” Jason said a moment later, following suit and heading off towards the locker rooms.
“I’m going to get changed real quick, then I can show you the lab,” Dick said, looking back towards his son. “It should be fully equipped, but if you need anything just ask Alfred - he’ll be here helping Oracle run comms while we’re on patrol. I’m going to assume based on what you’ve told us that you’ve had basic lab safety training?”
Peter nodded, looking excited as he unfolded himself and bounced to his feet. He kept rocking back and forth in his energy, and it felt a little like Dick was seeing double to his younger self. He couldn’t help it, and ruffled his son’s hair as he stood to go get changed. Peter leaned into the contact but didn’t really seem to register it.
“It’ll be so cool to finally be able to fix my suit! It hasn’t been working quite right since the - rift? Wormhole? I’m not sure what to call it. Hopefully I can get that fixed and refill my webs - I used up quite a bit back in New York and while exploring here.”
“I look forward to seeing it then,” Dick laughed, heading off to go become Nightwing again. He was looking forward to seeing Peter’s reaction to the lab - it was impressive, even if Peter’s world apparently was more advanced in certain areas. Regardless, he knew Peter would have a good time while they were out stopping crime, which was the important part.
He changed quickly and led Peter over towards their chem lab, and showed him the mechanic room right nearby where they did work on their vehicles and gadgets. Peter was bouncing on his toes the whole time, and Dick had to hide a smile the whole time to avoid making his kid self-conscious over his enthusiasm.
It was harder than he expected to leave for patrol once he’d ensured Peter was all set in the lab. But, he was equally glad that, at least for a little longer, his kid was safe in the Cave. He’d been worried for his family and friends before too, but this felt like a different kind of worry. If this was what B had been feeling all these years, then his self control was better than Dick had realized all these years.
His head wasn’t fully in it today, so he was glad it was a fairly uneventful patrol. A few muggers, a few robbers, breaking up a gang fight… All pretty run of the mill stuff. He’d run into his siblings several times, and they’d all teased him for his lack of focus, but they’d seemed a little distracted too. His shift seemed both faster and slower than normal, and he was for once relieved when he could ‘hang up the cape’ and get home.
Getting back from patrol didn’t leave Nightwing as drained as he was used to, and part of him suspected it was because he had his kid to come home to instead of just memories and commiseration with his siblings of the awful things humans could do to each other.
He changed out of his suit quickly, happy to let Nightwing fall away for the evening. A quick shower later, and Dick was running a towel through his hair as he walked towards the Batcave lab, where he could see a faint light shining.
Coming around the corner, he leaned up against the door frame as he gazed at Peter, watching the kid work. Peter had a focused expression on his face, and the whiteboard in the corner was covered with scribbles Dick couldn’t make out from the distance - though he guessed it likely was some combination of math and chemical formulas.
As Dick watched, Peter began mixing chemicals in several flasks and vials as the particle accelerator nearby glowed ominously. He seemed to be ignoring it for the moment, darting across the lab to where the advanced 3D printer had spit out… capsules?
He snagged them and went back to the lab counter, where he had been left with two vials of liquid. He poured one into one half of the capsules, and the other into the other half. Moving carefully, he stuck them together, until the capsules were one singular item again.
“Heyyyyy kiddo,” Dick said, laughing a little tightly at the vague mad scientist vibe going on in the Batcave’s labratory. “Whatcha up to in here?”
“Oh, hey Dad,” Peter said distractedly, attention focused on lining up more halves of the capsules. Dick’s heart swelled the way it had every time the teen had accidentally called him that - the moments coming more and more often the longer Peter was here. “Making Starkium since you don’t have it here, and making some more webs for my shooters.”
“I understood all but one of those words individually,” Dick joked, relaxing a little as the mad scientist vibes dissipated a bit at the explanation. “What’s Starkium again?”
“It’s an element Mr. Stark made to save himself from heavy metal poisoning,” Peter said, looking satisfied as the last of the capsules were put together. He looked up at Dick as he came up behind the teenager. “It’s an amazing energy source, and I need a little bit of it to power my suit. You know how it was damaged by the portal? I thought it was a fried circuit somewhere, but now I think the magical interference messed with the composition of the Starkium a bit since the spell wasn’t exactly stable. The carbon fibers around it are all fried and it keeps… flickering in a way that makes me want to put it in a containment unit.”
“...Right,” Dick said, glancing at the glowing element-in-progress nearby. “Since when did we have a particle accelerator?”
“Oh, I built it earlier,” Peter said absently, twisting together the last of the capsules. “I made it first thing, since Starkium takes a bit to synthesize the safe way, and I figured I could make more web fluid while that was being made. The chemicals for the web fluid were cooking while I was making the accelerator. Efficiency.”
“You did all this just since we started patrol?” Dick asked, looking around in amazement.
“I guess?” Peter said, glancing around the room before turning his big eyes on Dick. “It wasn’t that hard. I learned multitasking from Mr. Stark - he was always working on so many projects at once that he had it down to pretty much an artform. When he wasn’t hyperfocusing on one specific one, at least.”
“That’s amazing, kiddo,” Dick said honestly, genuinely impressed with the progress his kid had made in the span of a single night.
“Thanks,” Peter said, looking a little flustered, but also a little pleased. “I’m making some extra Starkium too - I told you I’d share the secret of green energy with you guys, and Starkium is a key component of that.”
“You have an alternative energy source?”
At Tim’s voice, both Peter and Dick turned to look at him. Tim was leaning in the door, no doubt having come over to see what Peter had been up to while they were gone, only to have been listening in since then.
“Uh, yeah,” Peter said, recovering from his surprise pretty quickly. “It’s a nonradioactive, long-lasting source of energy. Mr. Stark used it to power an electromagnet in his chest, keeping shrapnel from entering his heart, and it doubled as the power source for his suit too. A little later, he attached a version of it to the ocean floor energy cables of Stark Tower - kind of like Wayne Enterprises here - and they were entirely off the grid at that point. Mr. Stark said they weren’t going to need to replace it for at least a decade.”
“It can power an entire corporate building for over a decade?” Tim asked to confirm, and Dick noticed the signature mad scientist gleam in his little brother’s eyes and got a little warier.
“It should, yeah. Why?”
“Well,” Tim said, a slow smile spreading across his features, “I think that just solved our dimensional problems. After all, a power source like that solves our issues with parameters. We should have a way for you to visit home.”