Chapter 1: Provenance
Summary:
Provenance
/ˈprävən(ə)ns/Noun
1. the place of origin or earliest known history of something
2. the beginning of something's existence(Dictionary.com)
Chapter Text
Damian doesn’t get along with Tim.
Damian doesn’t get along with anyone, really. Not even Bruce. He had some begrudging respect for his father, despite the way he acts, because he’s hung up on this blood-son thing. But they aren’t exactly close, like the way Bruce and Dick were when Dick was Damian’s age.
Dick doesn’t care much. He’s happy to have another little brother, even though Damian refuses to see him as one. He’s a feisty thing, small as he is, and a lot more dangerous than he looks. Dick takes a liking to him immediately.
He’s the only one out of his siblings that are happy about the situation. It’s fine, though. Dick will take the kid under his wing the way he did for Tim, and the way he should have done for Jason. It’ll be Big D and Little D one day, Dick is sure of it.
He’s sure that’s the thought that jinxed him, in the end.
After Bruce’s funeral, Dick moves back to Gotham, intending to help Alfred raise Damian during the day and protect the city at night.
And then someone starts posing as Batman. Whoever it is smears Batman’s name, using lethal and violent tactics that Bruce would never have dreamed of using.
And then he and Tim resign from the Titans. And then Tim dresses up as Batman to catch the imposter. And then Dick and Damian are attacked and saved by the Batman imposter. And then it turns out the Batman imposter is Jason. And then he almost kills Damian and Tim. And then Dick goes after him and kicks him off a train. And then Damian tries to kill Tim.
And then Dick becomes Batman.
He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want the pressure, or the restriction. He can fly as Nightwing. He’d sail as Batman. It’s a distinct difference to Dick and only Dick, because Tim doesn’t understand. But it’s enough for Dick to want to cry as he folds up his Nightwing costume and locks it away.
Gotham needs Batman. They need someone they can trust to look out for them. Even more than that, they need a symbol of hope. As long as Batman exists, Gotham will have hope, and if Gotham has hope, that means they will fight. They’ll go down fighting.
Bruce didn’t want Dick to be Batman. He said so in a letter, tucked away in the depths of his sock drawer that Alfred gave to him at the funeral. But he has to be. Gotham needs him.
And, if he’s being honest, Dick needs Batman, too. He doesn’t need to be Batman, but he needs him. It’s the only thing he’s known for so long, and with everything uprooted so suddenly, he’s clinging to any familiarity he can grasp.
Dick hasn’t even been Batman for twenty minutes before he makes his first detrimental mistake.
Figures.
May is a flurry of changes.
He takes Bruce’s role as CEO of Wayne Enterprises, solely for looks. Lucius Fox is really the one running the show, and he’s more than happy to let that happen. Lucius also helps him make a new Batman suit configured to Dick himself. It feels disrespectful to Bruce, but there’s nothing he can do about it. It needs to be done.
The media needs the image of the Wayne family just as much as they need Batman. It may just be Dick and Damian now, but Dick has been dealing with the media since he was a child. He hides his lies behind a pretty smile and twinkling eyes, and Gotham eats it right up.
To the outsiders, the Wayne family is mourning but moving forward. Dickie Grayson has moved home to take over the company. New son Damian Wayne is a doll, ready to charm the people like his father did, and eventually take up Bruce’s role in society. Tim Drake is learning how to take over his own city in Rhode Island, but visits his family often. Alfred and family friends remain studiously at their sides.
Tim never comes back to the manor, and he won’t return Dick’s phone calls.
Jason is alive and hiding out somewhere in Crime Alley. He’s furious with Dick, and won’t even answer his burner phone when Alfred tries to contact him.
Damian doesn’t think Dick deserves to be called Bruce’s son, let alone Batman. He refuses to speak to Dick unless necessary, and when he does, he is violent and cruel with his words.
Dick lost all three of his brothers in the span of two days, and his father’s charred body rots in a casket buried six feet beneath the dirt.
“Why did you do this to me?” he asks Bruce’s headstone as the rain drenches him and drowns his shoes in the mud.
The headstone, expectedly, does not give him a reply.
Dick won’t let Damian out in the field until he’s had at least some Bat training. The kid can handle himself, obviously, but as hardcore as the League of Assassins may have been, this is Gotham. Here, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Damian needs to know how to accept that he may need to abort a mission, and needs to know how to do it.
Damian is furious at the idea that he is less than adequate to be in the field — which is not at all what Dick said — and tries to stab him. Dick, stupidly, puts him in a time-out. When Damian storms away from the corner, Dick tries to push him back, and Damian attacks.
Dick ends up strapping Damian to a chair in the Batcave and leaving him there. He breaks down in the bathroom, because of fucking course Damian wasn’t going to respond to a time-out. What the hell was he thinking?
Wisely, Alfred does not say anything to him, knowing that Dick needs to learn how to do this on his own. Plus, Dick has told Alfred not to engage in anything that could cause Damian to react violently — because, as much as Alfred can take care of himself, he’s no match for a katana or a surprise attack.
Determined to fix this, but also wanting Damian to stew in the Cave, trapped, he first makes his way to the kitchen and eats a bowl of cereal. Only when he’s finished does he walk back down to the Cave and set Damian free.
Damian punches him in the face, and Dick lets him. When he storms off, Dick heads to the medbay for an ice pack, then begins his evening preparations.
Through it all, Alfred stands off to the side, away from Damian’s line of fire, unsure of who to go after. Dick motions towards the stairs, and Alfred leaves without a word. Dick gets ready for patrol alone.
It’s been three agonizing weeks of manor being eerily silent when Dick gets tired of Damian’s shit.
Tim left on his (futile, unreasonable, fruitless) search for Bruce exactly twenty days ago, and Dick hasn’t seen Jason since he popped up on the east side two weeks ago. Alfred is all Dick has right now, the only thing that is familiar, and he’s struggling to find a way to cling to that without being, well. Clingy.
This thing with Damian is new. If you could even call it a thing, anyway.
Dick hardly sees Damian at all most days. Alfred is the one who alerts him that Damian is, in fact, still alive and residing in the manor. Damian stays away from Dick most of the time, except for mandatory training.
Damian hasn’t warmed up to Dick very much, but he knows what Dick ruined gave up with Tim to give Robin to Damian, and Robin is the only thing Damian has to connect him to his father now. And, Damian’s entire life has been nothing but missions and fighting. It’s all the kid knows.
And as much as Dick would love to keep him far away from this kind of life, and give him a normal one — as normal as you can have when your mother trained you to be an assassin, abandoned you, and you’re being raised by your dead father’s eldest adopted son until further notice — Dick could never take away vigilantism from him, the one constant he has in his life.
Damian doesn’t go out with him often. In fact, since Bruce died almost two months ago, Damian has only hit the streets twice.
Damian is skilled. His small frame makes him quick and agile, the same way Dick was when he wore the colors. He knows how to protect himself and isn’t afraid to do whatever it takes to stay alive.
But he’s cocky, and a know-it-all (or so he thinks he is), and that makes him reckless. He’s got this thing about bloodlines, and the times he is around Dick, he continuously reminds him that he is not, in fact, Bruce’s son.
Normally, Dick wouldn’t care about comments like that. He’s had his fair share of them since he was first adopted. But hearing them so close to Bruce’s death… it cuts a little too deep.
But Damian has been here for a while now, and he and Dick have come to a sort of silent arrangement. They’re on their own during the day, keeping to themselves unless needed, and in the evening they meet up in the Cave for training. This lasts for about two hours, before Dick suits up and, nine times out of ten, leaves Damian in Alfred’s care for the night.
But it’s been three weeks since Tim left, and Jason is MIA, and Dick is alone in a massively empty manor with Alfred and a little brother that doesn’t want him, forced to wear the cowl of a hero he can never live up to.
When Dick first left the manor when he was nineteen, when Bruce fired him from being Robin and Dick fled to Blüdhaven, he knew in the back of his head that Bruce was always there. If something went horribly wrong, as much as he hated it, he knew he could always run back to Bruce, and Bruce would be there.
Bruce is not here anymore. Dick is alone without his father, and he doesn’t know what to do.
It’s one of the bad days, today. It’s a Saturday, which means he didn’t have anything to do at Wayne Enterprises. He hasn’t had the energy to do much except trudge downstairs, eat a few bowls of cereal, and go right back to bed.
But duty calls, so Dick leaves his room for only the second time that day. He uses the bathroom, then makes his way through the grandfather clock and into the Cave.
Damian is already there, sparring with one of the dummies. Dick tries to muster up some sort of positive energy — after all, Dick’s not the only one who lost his father — and greets the kid with a smile.
“Evening, Damian.”
Damian jabs the bo staff directly into the dummy’s throat, sending it toppling over. “You are late.”
Dick crosses over to the training mats, a few feet away from Damian, and starts on some stretches. Damian stands the dummy back up and continues where he left off, but Dick knows the kid is watching him in the corner of his eye.
Dick has a hard time reading Damian. The kid is like a robot. He hasn’t shown any sadness for the loss of his father. Dick knows that they didn’t really know each other too well, but Bruce, for as emotionally constipated as he was, would have mourned Damian if something had happened to him.
For Damian to not care worries Dick, just a bit. What the hell did Talia teach him? But everyone grieves differently, so Dick lets it go. He keeps on with his stretches.
They start with some sparring. A large majority of their training is sparring, because it’s something Damian knows, and he refuses to let Dick teach him anything.
I already know everything I need to, Grayson, he says, every damn time Dick tries to give him pointers or teach him a new skill. I do not need to be taught anything more, especially by the likes of you.
That mindset is another prominent reason Dick won’t let Damian out as Robin much. One of the first things Bruce teaches every Robin is to never let your ego get in the way of the job (ironic and hypocritical, sure, but after all, Bruce would know that better than anyone).
Jason had a hard time with that, way back when he was first starting out (he still has a problem with it, despite what he likes to say), and things didn’t turn out so great. Dick refuses to let that happen with Damian.
They spar for a while. Dick wins most of them, but they’re not training to win; they’re training to refresh their reflexes, and Damian’s are halfway flawless. For as much as Damian is a pain in the ass, Dick is continuously in awe of him.
When they break, Dick heads to the gymnastics area to work on his flips. The Batsuit is a lot heavier than the Nightwing suit, and he’s not used to the added weight when he moves. He’s been messing up a lot of landings lately, so he needs the extra practice.
He knows, knows, Damian is going to snap at him, but Dick is his vigilante mentor and is in charge of his well-being both in the manor and out in the mask, so he points to the gym with his thumb and asks, “Want me to show you some things?”
As expected, Damian’s face twists into a scowl. “I do not need you to show me anything, Grayson,” he huffs. “Go play on your gymnastics set while I actually train.”
Damian “actually training” consists of chucking knives, Batarangs, and throwing stars at a target on the wall. He also does some work with the grappling hook, because he’s not used to using one. Dick plays on his gymnastics set.
In just a shirt and sweatpants, Dick lands everything easily. Even in the damp air of the cave, Dick revels in the breaths he takes when he’s in the air, not touching a thing — when he’s flying. It’s strange. Dick enjoys the ability to use the Batcape as wings so he can actually glide, but at the same time, it doesn’t feel right.
He can’t flip around in the Batsuit like he could as Nightwing. For one, the suit is less flexible and a lot heavier. For two, Batman can’t do acrobatic flips like that. Flipping around is how Tim found out he was Robin, so a bystander seeing Batman land a triple flip midair would absolutely alert them that Batman may not be who he appears to be.
When Dick put the Batsuit on for the first time, he had no idea how restricting it would actually be. Metaphorically, but also physically. It pinches.
After some time warming up and finding his balance, Dick retreats into the furthest wall to take the Batsuit out of the display. He’s gotten better at putting it on quickly. It still takes him longer than it took Bruce despite this suit having less pieces, but it used to take Dick upwards of forty minutes to get every single piece attached, secure, and loaded. Now it only takes him fifteen.
He leaves the cowl off as he climbs up the ladder to the top of the set. There’s a platform that Dick installed a while ago to resemble the edge of a rooftop. He does most of his leaps off of it, unless he’s using the bars or the trapezes, so he’s familiar on how to land dismounting off of it.
Except for in the Batsuit. Despite the previous, perfect landings he just did, his first flip off of the platform is a complete failure. He’s gotten the complete rotations down pat, but never quick enough that he has enough time to steady his legs for the landing before his feet hit the mat.
His knees buckle, and he stumbles forward as if he’s a newborn deer. When he recenters himself, he sighs, then heads back to the ladder.
He changes the pressure as he dismounts the next time, but that only makes it harder to flip. He doesn’t manage to get his legs under him and nearly lands on his head. He rolls his body into a somersault to avoid putting weight on his neck.
Damian is watching him unimpressed. Dick ignores him and goes again. Alfred stands by with an ice pack ready to be activated if need be. (It will probably be needed.)
The next four dismounts are better, and the landings progressively better as a result. He just has to figure out exactly how he needs to distribute his weight and when to get a satisfactory landing. It’s harder with the Batsuit, but nothing has ever stopped Dick.
On his last flip before needing to prepare for patrol, he lands almost perfectly, except for a single misstep to steady himself. Good enough for this patrol, and better than what he’s been patrolling with.
Still, what should be a victory feels just as much of a failure as when he was falling on his face the first try. Dick used to be able to stick that landing without a thought when he was Robin. He looks down at his hands, concealed by dark black gloves and gauntlets, ones that match the rest of his black and gray suit. Not a stripe of red or green or blue in sight.
Alfred must notice his pause, because he walks forward and rests a loving hand on his shoulder. “Master Bruce would be proud of you,” he tells Dick earnestly.
Dick looks up at him. He knows Alfred is hurting, even though the man doesn’t show it. Alfred doesn’t need to carry any of Dick’s weight when he’s already carrying so much, because Dick lost a father, but Alfred lost a son.
They cried together, the night Dick came home. He was the one who told Alfred that Bruce was gone, and they collapsed onto the kitchen floor together. That was only the second time ever Dick has seen Alfred cry (the first, of course, being Jason’s funeral), and he hasn’t seen it since.
Of course, Damian takes notice of this.
Of course, Damian has something to say.
“You must get over this ridiculous mourning period,” he huffs. “You are supposed to be Batman. You cannot disgrace the name by blubbering about all the time.”
Alfred’s hand slides off of Dick’s shoulder. Dick clenches his teeth, trying to keep his anger at bay. “I didn’t want to be Batman in the first place,” he reminds Damian. “And I’m allowed to mourn my father’s death.”
“You are not his son. I am,” Damian hisses. Dick feels the annoyance swell up in his chest like a rising wave. Here we go again.
“The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb,” Dick echoes for the hundredth, thousandth, millionth time since Damian arrived at the manor. Damian, obviously, hates hearing it.
“You may as well let me be Batman, at this point,” the kid snaps, despite being ten years old. “You were a circus toy, one that Father pitied when your parents died and left you to clean up the peanut shells they spent their lives picking up.”
“Master Damian!” Alfred gasps, horrified.
The rising wave smashes into the sand, shattering in all directions. Dick slams the cowl down onto the table so hard that the resounding impact echoes deep throughout the Cave. He crosses the short distance between himself and Damian, then grabs the kid by his shirt and hoists him up into the air.
“Master Dick!” Alfred yelps, reaching out towards them.
Dick glares down at Damian, who is struggling to free his shirt from Dick’s fists. His tiptoes frantically graze across the ground as he tries to find purchase.
“Your manners are atrocious,” Dick barks. “You have no empathy. You have no respect for anyone, but expect everyone to respect you. You are a spoiled brat that your mother discarded like trash.”
It’s a nasty, awful thing to say, especially to a child, but this is Gotham, and the Waynes believe in an eye for an eye. The kid needs a taste of his own medicine, and Dick is done being strung along with Damian’s games. He kind of hates himself for it, though.
Damian bares his teeth. He opens his mouth to speak, but Dick interrupts him.
“You are not on Nanda Parbat anymore, Damian. You may have gotten away with this shit there, but it’s not going to slide here,” he growls. “You are living under this roof, under our supervision, and you will show some respect to the people who are trying to give you a home.”
Damian continues to struggle in Dick’s hold. “I do not need you to give me a home!” he snaps. “I can manage perfectly fine on my own!”
Maybe that’s the heart of it. Damian’s been uprooted from his entire life, and is expected to make one here, where everything is different. Dick’s ire eases a little at the thought, but not enough to stop his seething.
“I don’t care what you say about me, but you keep my parents out of your mouth,” he demands. “I loved them; but Bruce was my father longer than my real one was, and longer than he was yours. I am allowed to mourn him.”
He glances over at Alfred, then back to Damian. “We are all grieving over Bruce.”
Damian’s face is red with fury, but Dick’s own anger is waning fast. He never could stay mad at anyone for long. Now, all he feels is pity. “This attitude needs to stop,” he demands. “If it doesn’t, I won’t hesitate to take Robin away and give it back to Tim.”
It’s kind of a bluff. Dick will absolutely revoke Damian’s privileges to be Robin, but Tim would never take it back now. He’s rightfully pissed off at Dick, and whenever he returns from his hunt for their dead father, he doubts Tim will ever talk to him again.
With a sigh, he sets Damian back onto his feet. The kid straightens out his clothes and holds his head high with a furious, but rightfully chastised look on his face.
“You could be happy here,” Dick tells him, calmer than before, “if you let yourself.”
He leaves, then, heading to the other side of the cave to start loading weapons into the suit. Damian goes to follow, but Dick holds up a hand to stop him.
To his surprise, Damian obeys.
He’s mad about it, obviously, but he does. Dick is relieved, and he’s disgusted to be relieved. He’s disgusted that it took putting his hands on Damian, heaving him off the floor and getting in his face, for the kid to listen. Was that the easy way out? Could Dick have done something different to get that reaction?
God. He’s awful at this.
Once he’s fully stocked with enough weapons to aid a small army, he walks back towards the center of the Batcave, heading towards the Batmobile. Alfred is still standing where he was, looking between Dick and Damian, who is also standing where he was, arms crossed and a furious look on his face.
He can’t leave for the night with things like this. What if Bruce had left on his mission with bad blood between him and Dick? He would have died with Dick angry at him. He died with Jason still upset and distant, their bond broken too much to heal before he left.
And, well, he and Damian aren’t as close as he and Bruce were, but he’s the only family the kid has right now, besides Alfred. So, feeling like he has to say something, he says, “This suit is really uncomfortable.”
He wants to smack himself in the face as soon as he’s said it. What kind of talking point is that? Damian doesn’t look amused — he never does, but still. Dick does his best to keep the embarrassed heat from rising to his cheeks.
“I don’t know how Bruce did anything in this thing,” he continues, digging himself a deeper grave. “He always did have a thing about self-punishments.”
And what the hell is that thought?
Damian doesn’t look that angry anymore, though. Still mad, but more bewildered now, than anything else. Dick is going to take it as a win and shut the hell up. There’s something nagging at him, though, and he needs to address it before he leaves for the night.
Dick never did know how to shut the hell up.
“For the record,” he adds, gentle, but still stern enough that Damian knows he is serious, “I will never hit you.” He nods to Alfred. “And neither will he.”
Damian’s eyes go wide. It’s a testament to what it means to him, that his perfect mask fractures, just a bit.
Ignoring it, because Damian is never going to want to talk about that, and Dick isn’t going to push him, he plasters back on the Guardian Facade. (Because it is a facade, really. He has no idea what he’s doing.)
“You’re not going out tonight,” Dick tells him, then looks over at Alfred. “Pull out those old family photos, will you?” he asks. “I think he should see them.”
Alfred nods, a pleased expression blooming across his face. “A fine idea, Master Dick,” he responds. “Do be careful tonight.”
Dick gives him a beaming grin. It doesn’t reach as far as it used to. “Will do, Alf.”
With that, he slides into the Batmobile, revs the engine, and speeds out of the Cave and into the dark Gotham night.
Two days later, Dick returns from patrol and peeks into Damian’s room to check on him.
It’s ass-o’clock in the morning, so Damian is fast asleep in his bed. Surrounding him, spread out across the comforter and spilling onto the floor, are glossy photographs and a large, empty box.
Dick hasn’t looked at those photos in a long time. A part of him longs to, but he doesn’t think he could handle it right now. And besides, Damian is a light sleeper. If Dick were to take one step into the room, he would wake up.
So Dick closes the door and heads for his own room. At the end of the hall, the master bedroom remains firmly shut and locked, untouched since Dick closed it up three months ago.
Dick has been doing this vigilante thing since he was nine years old. It’s safe to say that he’s got the whole sixth-sense thing down pat. He’s not, however, entirely sure that Damian is aware of that yet.
Ever since Damian moved into the manor, he’s been watching Dick. He watches everything, always examining every small detail, each minute movement. His eyes are always sharp and alert, calculating everything around him.
It’s Talia’s training, he knows, and he also knows that Damian hasn’t been around him long enough to trust him much. It still makes him sad that the kid is stuck living somewhere where he doesn’t feel safe, with people he doesn’t know, and without the father he deserves to have.
When they’re in the same room, Damian hardly ever takes his eyes off of Dick for more than a few seconds — that includes when Dick is alone and Damian is hiding somewhere in the same room.
Dick was willing to let it go for the first few weeks. After all, Damian is still a kid despite his upbringing, and Dick knows a thing or two about being suddenly uprooted from your entire life at a young age and dropped in a place with people you don’t know, expected to start a whole new life.
However, it’s pushing five weeks of Damian sneaking into the study and spying on Dick in the shadows, thinking Dick can’t see him. Dick is starting to get concerned. Plus, Alfred gave him a stern talking to about it, so. He kind of has to say something.
(In hindsight, this was the first clue that something between them was going to change, since Bruce was once in this exact same position when Dick first arrived.)
He’s been going over data for Wayne Enterprises all morning, which included a two-hour meeting over video call that felt like it dragged on for double the time. He supposes now he can take a break, brief as it may be.
So, he minimizes all of his tabs (so, so many tabs) and sets down the stacks of paper from Wayne Enterprises that he was looking over, then leans back in his chair. “I know you’re there,” he calls out to the dark corner behind him. He spins the chair around just in time to see Damian step out of the shadows, jaw set.
“Grayson,” he greets tersely.
Dick can think of two ways this could go: one, he could go for bluntness and say “What are you doing?” or “Why are you spying on me?” He thinks Damain would appreciate not beating around the bush.
Or, option two, he could beat around the bush. Obviously, he goes for the latter.
He stares at Damian for a moment longer. Then he turns back around to face the computer, pulls his tabs back up, and motions to the couch across the room, against the wall and directly across from Dick’s desk.
“If you’re going to come in here every day, you might as well sit down and be comfortable,” he tells Damian. “Or you can sit in that chair over there, if you’d rather.” He points at the leather armchair that’s not quite beside the desk, but not quite in front of it, either.
“I’m sure you’re aware by now that Alfred comes up around noon to ask what I want for lunch,” he continues. “You should tell him what you want, if you’re hungry.” With that, he clicks back onto the document he was working on and goes back to typing up the weekly stock report.
For an entire two minutes, Damian stays perfectly still, steadfastly remaining at the corner of the room. And then, only after Dick looks back at him to see what’s going on, Damian stalks towards the couch and plants himself on it.
Dick tosses him a remote, careful to make sure Damian is watching for it and it doesn’t hit him in the head. “Put on some TV if you want.”
Damian sniffs. “Mother said television rots your brain.”
“Says the woman who taught you how to kill a man,” Dick points out.
Damian has nothing to say to that.
Dick continues to type away at the computer. A few minutes later, he hears the TV click on.
Alfred drops by half an hour later. Dick tears his eyes away from the monitor, feeling like they’re about to burn out of his head. He looks over at Damian for the first time since the kid sat down.
He’s watching Scooby-Doo. He seems enthralled by it. He’s upright and at attention rather than leaned back, relaxed, which makes Dick a little sad to see; but it’s progress, no matter how small it is, so he takes it as his first real victory. Damian only looks away when Alfred walks in.
Alfred appears completely unsurprised to see Damian sitting on the couch instead of hiding in the corner like usual. “Lunch, Master Dick?” he asks.
Dick smiles at Alfred, pondering what they have in the kitchen made already so that Alfred isn’t forced to make a bunch of meals. “Do you have any of that chicken parmesan left over from last night?”
Alfred’s lips quirk upwards into an amused smile. “I do,” he confirms. He glances over at Damian. “Would the young master like anything?”
Damian looks at Alfred, curious. “I have heard of chicken parmesan, but I have never had it.”
“It’s chicken in marinara sauce with cheese melted over it,” Dick replies. His stomach rumbles at the thought of it. He hardly got any last night before he had to leave for patrol, and now he has an entire afternoon to enjoy it.
“A gross under-simplification,” Alfred tuts, “but yes, essentially.”
Dick flashes both Alfred and Damian a grin. “Alfred takes his cooking very seriously,” he tells Damian. “I’d be more than happy to have cereal for dinner if it wouldn’t give poor Al an aneurysm.”
Damian tilts his head a couple degrees, intrigued. “Could Father cook?”
Dick’s throat tightens up. Alfred must somehow be able to tell, or maybe he just knows, because he looks back at Dick with a cool, calculating gaze. Dick manages to give them both a small, careful smile. “Not a chance,” he answers. “He couldn’t even boil water without the smoke alarm going off.”
Alfred snorts, obviously remembering the exact same memory Dick is thinking about. “I did my best to teach him what I could,” he says. “That boy could take out the entirety of Falcone’s mob in a single night, but ask him to make a pot of noodles and we risked burning the kitchen down.”’
Dick’s smile becomes a little more genuine. “Tim wasn’t much better,” he adds, trying not to think too much about the last time they spoke.
“That is only because he hardly ever went into the kitchen,” Alfred points out.
Dick snorts. “Yeah, he’d go days without consuming anything except coffee,” he says, “and would only remember to eat if you put a plate of food in front of him, or if he fainted.”
Alfred shakes his head, a worried crease appearing between his brows. “I do hope he’s taking better care of himself.”
Dick swallows, a pit of guilt forming in his stomach. “He’s a smart kid,” he reminds Alfred. “I’m sure he’s doing well on his own.”
Damian obviously senses the shift in the mood, because his head straightens back up, and he leans in just a bit, as if to make sure he’s hearing everything.
“Master Jason was a surprisingly good cook,” Alfred says lightly. “He took to everything I said as if it were second nature.”
That’s good, Dick thinks. At least we don’t have to worry about him starving. But it’s not like Jason cares if Dick worries about him, anyway. Dick hasn’t heard from him in a while. Not that it’s surprising.
“Jason,” says Damian, “he was the second Robin, correct? The one who futilely pretended to be Batman a few months ago.”
Dick nods. He’s sure Talia has told him all about the Lazarus Pit. One day, Dick will tell him what happened from their end, because he knows Talia wouldn’t have told Damian everything. He doesn’t think he could handle that today, though.
“Would you like some of the chicken parmesan as well, Master Damian?” Alfred asks, apparently sensing that Dick is starting to spiral.
Damian hums, thinking, before nodding. “I will try it.”
Alfred pats Dick’s shoulder, then says, “I will return shortly,” and slips out of the study.
Dick watches him go with an odd feeling in his chest. Talking about Jason always makes Dick feel queasy. That’s his little brother, after all. His first little brother, who’s not so little anymore, who he failed. Just like he failed Tim. He failed them both, and neither are speaking to him because they hate him, and he’s the only one to blame.
He looks over at Damian, who is watching Scooby-Doo with intrigued, yet confused fascination. Acidic, bitter pain slithers through his veins and churns in his stomach. He’s already lost his father and two of his brothers. He can’t lose Damian too.
And now, Damian’s life is entirely in Dick’s hands.
Nausea sways through his stomach like waves. He closes out the tabs on his computer, then stands, garnering Damian’s attention. Dick puts on his best fake smile, and says, “I should go help Alfred.”
Damian wrinkles his nose distastefully. “But he is a servant.”
“He’s family,” Dick corrects, stepping out from behind the desk. “And even if he was just a servant, there’s nothing wrong with helping people.” He gives Damian a pointed look. “Bruce knew that better than anyone.”
It makes him feel sick to say. Mentioning Bruce after spending the past four hours doing work as the CEO of Bruce’s company, causes bile rise in his throat. He leaves the study, mumbling, “I’ll be back,” as he goes.
He finds Alfred in the kitchen, bending over to check the progress of the chicken parmesan heating up in the oven. He looks up when he hears footsteps, eyebrows furrowing when he sees Dick standing by the fridge.
“Master Dick?” he asks, surprised. “Is there something else you need?”
Need. Dick needs a lot of things, most of which he can’t have, and he’ll never have again. What he really needs is a hug from his father. Or from his brother, either one of them, or both of them. Or all of them. He wants his mom and dad, because they’d know what to do and how to raise a child.
He doesn’t want to raise a child. He wants to go back to when he was young, when he was Robin, when it was just him and Bruce and Alfred, when he didn’t have a care in the world.
“Master Dick?” Alfred asks again.
A choked breath forces itself through as tears gather in Dick’s eyes. “I need you to cry with me,” he answers. The butler’s face falls at his words. “Jason has been so angry with everyone for so long, and Tim… I only cried with him once, when we found out, and then I— and then he—”
His breaths come in staccato hiccups the longer he goes on. “I thought I was fine, but then I had a two-hour meeting for a company I didn’t want to go to, and Damian started watching cartoons, and— and I haven’t seen you cry once, Alfred. I don’t know how to be that strong.”
“Richard,” Alfred coos sadly. He draws him in and holds him, but rather than the squeezing hugs Dick is used to, this one is gentle and malleable. It’s a hug like he would get from his mother.
He sobs heavily into Alfred’s shoulder. Carefully, Alfred lowers them to the floor where they can sit. Dick gets his tears and snot all over Alfred’s perfectly pressed shirt as he combs a hand through Dick’s hair. It dislodges the gel he’d placed in it earlier, to seem more professional for the Board of Trustees. The longer Alfred works it, the more messy it gets.
“Oh, my dear boy,” says Alfred, throat thick with emotion. “I’m not nearly as strong as you think I am.” Dick tries to respond, but anything he attempts to say comes out in chokes and sobs that muddle his words.
“I’ve cried,” Alfred admits. “I’ve cried nearly every night, after you return from your patrols.” He caresses Dick’s head and soothingly across his shoulders. “I’ve cried for the son I lost. I’ve cried for the grandson who hurts his family. And I’ve cried for the person you’ve been forced to give up.”
Dick curls into Alfred’s body, and Alfred cradles him in his arms. He feels tears drip into his hair. “You can always cry with me, Master Dick.”
The timer on the oven beeps, but neither of them make a move to turn it off. They remain there on the floor, leaned up against the kitchen cabinets, and cry together.
The Fourth of July is one of the days out of the year that is the most chaotic. Crime isn’t necessarily higher, unlike during Halloween, but people are drunk and often surrounded by bodies of water, or drunk and shooting fireworks around dry grassy areas.
Bruce and Dick always used to bring the fire department an extra large bag of Alfred’s cookies while on patrol, because it’s one of their roughest nights during the year.
This year is no different. Dick keeps Damian in the manor, because the chaos of the night would be too much for Damian to handle with such little Bat training. He bags up Alfred’s cookies, made specially for the fire department, and leaves them on the department steps when he sees every truck is gone from the bay.
He ends up running into all of them throughout the night, going all over Gotham to help put out fires, rush people to the emergency rooms, and sometimes drive EMTs to locations. He also manages to interrupt two armed robberies and disable a bomb hidden in a box in an alley downtown before the sun comes up.
Dick barely has the strength to get out of his suit once he’s safe in the Batcave. He puts off all of the reports until tomorrow and leaves his suit on the floor of the Cave. All the while, Alfred is at his side, helping him stay upright and carefully leading him to the stairs.
Damian watches the whole thing without a word.
Alfred gets Dick to his bed, where he collapses face-down into his pillows and falls asleep immediately.
His work alarm goes off two hours later, and Dick wants to cry.
Dick tries to call Tim on his birthday, but the voice on the other end says the number has been disconnected.
He asks Barbara if she has Tim’s new number, and Babs tells him that she had no idea he’d changed it. When she tries to call him, it also tells her it has been disconnected.
“Just let me know that he’s alive,” he tells her. By the time she tracks him down — and she will, he has no doubt about that — it will be long past his birthday.
“I will,” she promises. “Give me a few days.”
(It takes a week and a half. Tim is somewhere in Nunavut, doing research on thinner parts of the universe. All Babs says when she calls him is, “He’s alive.” If he left Dick a message, she decided it wasn’t worth repeating. Or he didn’t have anything to say to Dick at all. He’s not sure which is worse.
But at least he’s alive.)
It takes Dick a while to get used to his duties at Wayne Enterprises.
Lucky for him, the Board and investors are used to Bruce being MIA half of the time, and away from the office even more, so Dick is able to get away with a lot more than he was expecting. Lucius Fox has also been an incredible help, easily and graciously picking up the slack where Dick has been stumbling.
“Bruce wouldn’t have wanted you to struggle,” Lucius told him after the zillionth time that Dick asked if he was one hundred thousand percent sure that he was okay with taking his place during a Board meeting. “He wouldn’t have wanted any of this for you.”
But despite all this, Dick still manages to find himself away from the manor — and in turn, Damian — far too often for his liking. So when the opportunity comes for a full three-day weekend, work phone turned off, he leaps at it and leaves the office building in the dust at the end of his hours on Friday.
He arrives at the manor to a wonderful smell that makes his mouth water the moment it wafts through his nose. Definitely cookies of some sort. Dick’s stomach is already rumbling at the thought.
Dick retreats to his room to strip out of his suit and kick off his shoes. He leaves them off but slips into something more comfortable, before heading back out in search of those cookies.
The kitchen, to his dismay, lacks any sweet treats; but upon further inspection, the dishwasher is full of floured bowls and dough-covered spatulas, so he knows they’re around here somewhere. He puts his nose to work and follows the trail of warm sugar down the winding halls and up the staircases.
Finally, he comes across one of the sitting rooms with a wide-open door and a kicked-over rug in front of it. Someone is in there, which means it’s either Alfred or Damian, because the only other people in the manor are the maids, and they would immediately fix a kicked-over rug.
Come to think of it, so would Alfred. Unless, of course, he had a tray of cookies in his hands and would have to fix it afterwards. Sure that he’s onto something, Dick marches inside.
He’s right; Alfred is there, setting a perfectly piled plate of cookies onto the table in front of Damian. There’s a large white box on the other side of the table, and photographs are sprawled all across the surface.
“Hello, Grayson,” Damian says, looking up from the photo in his hands for a moment before looking back down again.
“Good evening, Master Dick,” Alfred greets, rounding the edge of the table and making his way towards the doorway where Dick is. “How was work?”
“Boring as always,” replies Dick. He pats Alfred’s shoulder to say hello, then heads to where Damian has begun to dig around in the box for another picture. “What are you looking at?”
Damian thrusts a hand out and points at the photos on the table. “I believe the answer is fairly obvious.”
Dick rolls his eyes at the response, but smiles fondly at the expected snark. Alfred motions to the open closet, where another white box and a larger, brown box are peeking out from behind a row of old, forgotten clothes and dusty board games.
“Your previous suggestion to show him family photos was a raging success,” Alfred informs him. “Master Damian asked to see more.”
A surge of pride fills Dick to the brim at the understanding that his idea was so appealing to Damian. He must be putting cracks in the kid’s walls. Maybe he is doing something right.
There’s a strange look on Alfred’s face as he looks between the two of them. “Perhaps the young master would like to hear the stories behind some of the photos,” he suggests.
Damian doesn’t appear pleased at the idea, but Dick beams. “Hey, that’s great!” he exclaims. He collapses onto the couch beside Damian, then snags one of the cookies off of the tray on the table.
“Excuse you!” Damian sputters. “Mister Pennyworth made those for me.”
Dick is quite happy to hear Damian refer to Alfred as Mister Pennyworth. It may not be Alfred just yet, but it shows that they’ve succeeded at drilling manners into Damian, and that he’s garnered some begrudging respect for the older man.
“Too bad. In this family, we share,” says Dick, which is completely untrue. The only thing the Waynes have ever shared is important vigilante information. But hey, important life lessons and all that.
He’s not expecting the body that comes flying at him, trying to snatch the cookie out of his hand. He reaches his arm up as far out as it can go, keeping the cookie out of Damian’s reach, and shoves him back, but Damian fights against him.
“Okay! Sharing!” Dick announces, amused, as he wrestles with the ten year old. “That’s our next unit, class. Get excited!”
This only infuriates Damian more, who starts to punch and jab at whatever part of Dick he can. He knocks Dick in the kidney, which hurts like a bitch, so Dick shoves the cookie in his mouth and effectively wins the fight.
Damian roars in fury and jumps on him, elbow first. Dick’s breath leaves him with a pained “Oomph,” and he curls in on himself to protect his organs from any more abuse. He wrestles Damian down, grabbing the sides of his arms to prevent any more flying fists of fury.
Damian puts up a good fight, but Dick wins in the end, plopping Damian down in the middle of the couch. Damian harrumphs, but cedes the fight. Dick eats another cookie, just to piss him off.
“Why don’t I leave you to it?” Alfred says, interrupting them before Damian can charge at Dick again.
Dick almost suggests that Alfred get him his own plate of cookies, but he stops himself at the last second. All jokes aside, Damian does need to learn how to share, even if it’s something as minuscule as cookies.
“Thanks, Alf,” he says instead. “I’ll give a shout if we need something.”
Alfred nods, gives him one more, slightly unsure look, then disappears, leaving the door wide open. So he can hear them, or if Dick calls out for help. Hopefully he won’t need to.
“I do not see why I need your assistance to look at photographs,” sniffs Damian. “I can easily see that Father is standing in front of his many cars without you telling me so.”
Dick peers over Damian’s arm to look at the picture and smiles. “That’s true,” he responds, looking down at Bruce standing in the garage in front of his row of multicolored luxury cars, “though I doubt you’d know that that was the day Bruce bought the car he would turn into the first Batmobile.”
Victory flourishes through his body when he sees Damian’s eyes widen. “Truthfully?” he questions.
Dick nods. “It was back when Bruce was just starting out and didn’t have access to heavy-duty machinery,” he explains. “Our Batmobile is basically a mini tank. But the original one was a tricked out Italian sports car.”
Slowly, so that Damian doesn’t think he’s about to attack, Dick points the car out and presses the tip of his finger to the car in the photo. “It’s that one.”
When Dick pulls his hand away, Damian brushes his fingers over the silver car beside Bruce. “Woah.” Intrigued at the story, he sets the photo down and looks around the table for another picture. He makes a triumphant noise when he finds the one he’s looking for, then holds it up to Dick.
“What about this one?” he asks. “Was this part of a mission? Was he exposed to a toxin? Or a chemical? A drug bust?”
Dick has to bite down hard on his lip so that he doesn’t burst into laughter. In the photo, Bruce is standing in the kitchen, staring at the camera in dismay. There is flour all over the countertops, floor, and on Bruce himself. He’s got a spatula in hand that is half melted, half covered in batter, and there is smoke drifting above him.
He had been trying to make pancakes during one of the first days Bruce returned to Gotham after his time away. Alfred woke up to the smoke detector going off and Bruce cursing like a sailor downstairs.
According to Alfred, Bruce had stupidly forgone wearing an apron, and cited him saying, “I didn’t think it would be hard.”
“He always did have a hard time following other people’s directions,” Alfred had told Dick when he had found the photo all those years ago. “Even for cooking.”
“That’s baking flour,” Dick tells Damian. “Bruce was trying to cook. It didn’t turn out very well.”
Damian tuts, shaking his head in disappointment. “Tt, so this is what you meant when you said Father was awful at cooking.”
Alfred taught Dick how to cook. He tried teaching Bruce, too, even occasionally at the same time, but cooking and baking were just never things that stuck with him.
Damian sets that one down and scans the pictures on the table, pondering which one to pick up next. Dick sees the lightbulb flash on above his head right before he whispers, “Aha!” Something fond tugs at Dick’s heart, watching Damian investigate so at-ease.
“What about this one?” Damian prompts, holding out another photo. “Is this you?”
That’s interesting. Dick doesn’t remember many pictures being taken of him. Bruce was never big on leaving anything that could be considered proof of them being vigilantes, and pictures were some of the most incriminating types.
Intrigued, he takes the picture from Damian, but his stomach lurches when he notices what’s photographed. He remembers that day so vividly, as if it happened yesterday.
The fair had come to town, a rare occasion since most companies tended to avoid Gotham when making their round. Dick, who had only been living with Bruce for about six months at the time, begged to go. It reminded him of the circus, and Dick had been terribly homesick.
Back then, Dick used to be able to flash his big eyes at Bruce, and Bruce would cave like a rocky landslide. And so, despite Bruce not thinking it was a good idea, agreed.
He was right, in the end. Dick had fun for the first hour or so, but the longer he was there, surrounded by something so similar to the circus and yet so, so far off, Dick found himself feeling worse than he already was.
Bruce tried to make him feel better by buying him a shit ton of cotton candy. It didn’t work. Dick distinctly remembers his tears melting most of it.
So Bruce, who wasn’t the best with kids and had no idea how to comfort one that was crying, whisked him back home. Alfred, of course, refused to let Bruce leave Dick’s side, so Bruce curled up with Dick by the fire in the sitting room, Dick in his lap and a blanket over their shoulders, and told Dick stories about his parents. They had fallen asleep like that, cuddled together.
Dick has never seen this photo before. He had no idea Alfred took a picture of them.
“Yes, that’s me,” he confirms, feeling his eyes sting. He carefully puts the photo down, looking away from it. “Me and Bruce.”
Damian is watching him, curious. “You appear upset,” he points out. “Is the photograph of an unpleasant memory?”
It’s one of the most pleasant memories Dick has. It’s a rare one with Bruce where vigilantism wasn’t involved — where it was just the two of them, father and son, for that day.
“No,” says Dick. “Just bittersweet, now that he’s gone.”
Damian doesn’t look like he completely understands, but he can obviously tell how uncomfortable Dick is, so he drops the subject and searches for a new photo to ask about. It gives Dick a few moments to breathe and work through all the conflicting emotions.
Surreptitiously, he slides the photo off of the table and tucks it into his pocket. Dick can still hear the crackling of the fire from that night, the smell of the wood burning and Bruce’s aftershave, the low rumble of Bruce’s voice as he spoke.
Things were so much easier, back then. It was before the Joker got out of hand, before Falcone got his claws in over half of Gotham’s crime syndicate, before Jason and the Justice League and the Lazarus Pit.
The peace back then didn’t last long. As he looks over at Damian, who’s sifting through a stack of pictures from what appears to be one of Bruce’s many trips to Aruba, he wonders how long this peace is going to last.
(Bruce was never the same, after Jason’s death. But Dick would see the real him, deep down. Hiding. Protecting himself. He’d lost his parents, and then his son. He couldn’t take much more.
Dick understood, but it didn’t stop the hurt. He wanted his father, and his father didn’t exist anymore.
He did get his father back, in the end. Six months later, he was dead.)
The next time Dick checks on Damian at night, the boy is burrowed under his blankets, surrounded by more photos. He has one clutched in his hand, despite being fast asleep. When Dick looks closer, he sees that it’s a picture of Bruce and himself, when he was sixteen and at one of Bruce’s charity galas.
Dick smiles something sad, then turns and heads towards his own room to retire for the morning.
Dick starts bringing Damian on patrols more often.
He really, really does not want to bring a kid so young on patrol. But he went out as Robin when he was nine; Jason, when he was twelve, and Tim when he was thirteen. The kid is an assassin, after all, and has a much higher kill count than Dick even though he’s only ten.
He’s gone out a couple of times since Dick became Batman, but those were sporadic, so that Damian could ease into life as a vigilante and get acclimated with the environment at night. They’ve been walking and driving Gotham for a few weeks, so Damian can get used to the city and learn the terrain, but Gotham is a whole different playing field after dark.
It helps that Alfred is homeschooling Damian, because no one will be able to question any bruises he garners or how tired he is in the mornings.
Dick is anxious as hell the first time they go out together, knowing that, if all goes well, Damian will be out in the field every other night. If all doesn’t go well, that means one of them got seriously hurt.
But it goes well. Bruce must be watching after them, in whatever afterlife he ended up in, because their first real night together is relatively quiet, for Gotham’s standards. They stop a few muggings, track down an escaped prisoner, and interrupt a corner-store robbery.
Dick gets nicked in the arm by a knife during one of the muggings. Damian is sure to rag on him for it, but considering all the things that could have gone wrong, Dick will happily take a nicked arm.
The second night starts off slow. A few hours in, the police scanner alerts them of a high-speed chase with a group of criminals who just robbed a jewelry store. Damian’s face lights up with excitement, then melts with mischief.
“Are we taking that?”
Dick sighs and resigns himself to a night of holding back the kid from skewering people with his sword. “We’re taking that,” he confirms.
Damian hollers out a “Woo-hoo!” before leaping off the rooftop.
“Robin!” Dick yells, scrambling after him. He grabs Damian around the waist and fires his grappling gun, swinging to another rooftop. Damian squirms in his hold, annoyed.
“Unhand me!” he demands. When Dick lets him go, he takes three steps back and crosses his arms in frustration. “And what is the meaning of this?”
Dick takes a long, deep inhalation to keep himself at bay. “You didn’t know where we were going or what the plan was,” he explains. “You can’t just run into a dangerous situation like that.”
Dick can’t see Damian’s eyes through the domino mask’s lenses, but he’s pretty sure the kid just rolled them. “Obviously,” he huffs. “I was going to the Batmobile so we could enter the chase.”
Dick pinches the bridge of his nose. “You can’t just swing out into the air and expect there to be a vehicle underneath you,” he tells Damian. “If you had waited even another two seconds, I would have told you that we’re taking the BatBike. I also have to call it to come get us, because we left the Batmobile twelve blocks away from here.”
Damian bares his teeth at the scolding, but he says nothing, because he knows that Dick is right.
Deciding he’s not going to stand here and argue when his point has already been made, Dick pulls out a small remote that controls the Batmobile from a distance. He presses the button with two wheels stamped on it to make the Batmobile launch the motorcycle, then presses the green button near the middle to call it to their location.
When he hears the BatBike approaching, Dick reloads his grapple and looks to Damian. “Ready?”
Faced with the promise of a high-speed chase, Damian flashes him a wicked grin. “More than.”
Dick grabs Damian in one arm and swings them over the side of the building. The BatBike speeds into view, and Dick extends the rope on the grappling gun so that they have a quick, smooth descent down into the motorcycle.
He retracts the gun and sticks it in his holster, revs the engine, and tells Damian, “Hang on tight,” before letting the bike fly. It shoots through the streets of Gotham, whipping around corners and skidding onto sidewalks. Damian hollers in pure joy, and for once, he actually sounds like a kid.
Dick uses the GPS to lead him to the chase. He can hear the sirens in the distance as they get closer, and the static on the police scanner clears up. He tilts his head back just slightly, so Damian knows he’s about to say something.
“Wanna make an entrance?” Dick asks.
“I would say yes if it were to be an impressive entrance,” Damian shouts over the noise, “but I doubt someone as old as you could achieve such a feat.”
Dick’s jaw drops open, and then he laughs. “You little shit.”
“Language, Master Dick,” Alfred’s voice comes from the comm set.
“Sorry, A,” Dick responds, chuckling, then bows his body forward. “Alright, Robin, you asked for it.”
The speedometer hits triple digits as it flies through the Gotham night. Spurred on by Damian’s cheers and the sound of the chase getting closer, Dick makes a hard right turn off the main highway strip and onto a side street.
He takes it for another few yards, before cutting through an alleyway. He has to jump the bike over stray boxes, which makes Damian scream out in delight. When he lands back on the ground, he’s cut off the cop cars and is now speeding right behind the robbers’ old, light blue Austin-Healey 3000.
Dick whistles. “That’s a pretty car.”
“They most likely stole it,” Damian remarks. “Fiends.”
They give chase, bobbing and weaving through midnight traffic and taking shortcuts across sidewalks and short alleys. Dick clocks the passenger’s window rolling down right before a gun sticks out of it.
“Gun!” Dick yells, just as the bullets start raining. Dick ducks his head down and leans to the left, pulling away from the direct line of fire. Damian presses in closer and dips his head behind Dick’s back.
The guy’s got shit aim, because most of the bullets ping off the motorcycle or embed into the road, kicking up dirt and bits of concrete. One, however, manages to get his shoulder. The kevlar stops it, but fire erupts in the spot it hit, and Dick yelps when it lands.
“Are you alright?” asks Damian.
“Fine,” Dick replies. “Just keep your head down.”
Dick starts to sway the bike side to side across the width of the road, making it harder for the man to aim. Eventually, the bullets in the gun run out, and the man tosses the gun out of the window in anger.
“Batman, we lost the police,” Damian alerts him. “Now what?”
Dick thinks for a moment, before making a sad noise. “It’s gonna hurt like hell to crash that car,” he laments.
Dick can feel Damian tilting his head against his back in confusion. “Crash it?”
Dick’s left thumb presses a small button further down the handlebars of the BatBike, which opens up a small hatch at the front of the bike, and prompts a sonar scanner to pop up on the console screen.
“Aim and lock the projectile,” Dick orders.
Reaching under Dick’s arm, Damian aims the scope-target at the robbers’ car. When he locks it, he asks, “I get to blow them up now?”
Dick feels a smile pull at the corner of his lips. “The tires, baby bat,” he corrects. “You can blow up the tires.”
“Tt, you are no fun,” Damian sniffs petulantly. “And do not call me that.”
But he launches the projectile anyway. Two small projectiles shoot out of the tiny compartment and embed perfectly into the two back tires of the car. The car speeds out of control, and from the open window Dick can hear the two men inside cursing as they try to steady the wheel.
It’s no use, though. They hit a curb and spiral to the side, and Damian takes the opportunity to fling a Batarang at the passenger’s side front tire. It lands and pops the tire, and then it’s all over. The car zig-zags, and through the back windshield Dick sees the driver make too hard of a right. The car jerks into an alleyway and crashes into a brick wall.
Dick skids the BatBike to a stop a few feet away from the crash site. He waits for Damian to hop off before swinging his leg over the side and kicking the bike stand out.
“Alright,” Damian relents, “that was an impressive entrance.”
Dick beams, pleased.
The robbers are scrambling out of the car, desperately trying to gather the bags of stolen jewels that fall out of their arms as they run. Dick and Damian share a look, before running after them.
“It’s the Bat!” one of them shouts before Dick tackles him to the ground.
The adrenaline helps speed things along. One of them comes at Dick with a knife, which makes him roll his eyes. “A knife is all you could come up with?” he asks, grabbing the man’s arm and twisting it at the elbow. “Phooey, I was hoping this would be a harder fight.”
He knocks the knife out of his hand and elbow the man in the face, then kicks him hard in the sternum, sending him flying backwards and smacking his head against the brick wall behind him.
Damian’s robber is bleeding, of course, slashed at the legs by his sword. Dick sighs, but at least the guy is on the ground no longer a threat to the kid. He’s staring up at Damian, one hand clutching a bag of jewels, the other desperately trying to stop the bleeding in his calf.
Dick has the computer in his lenses scan the wound. It’s a long, but shallow cut. It will clot before he gets even close to bleeding out, so Dick isn’t concerned. The guy’s just probably too tired and terrified to comprehend that.
“No, please,” he begs as Damian approaches closer. In a flash, Damian raises his sword to strike, and Dick lunges for him, grabbing his hand and the handle of the sword before he can swing it down.
“Robin!” Dick scolds. “What have we talked about?”
Damian tries to jerk his sword free, but Dick wrestles with him and manages to confiscate the sword. Damian crosses his arms petulantly.
He doesn’t speak until Dick gives him the look, and then he stamps his food in annoyance. “No murdering.”
Dick nods. “That’s right,” he agrees. He gently nudges Damian out of the way as he walks towards the robber on the ground, who’s grown very pale at his near-death experience. “We never stoop to their level, Robin, because we’re better than them.”
It’s not technically true, other than from a moral standpoint (and even then, that’s pushing it), but if Damian thinks that Batman and Robin are better than criminals, and are therefore held to a higher standard, the Heir to the Demon’s Head training in him will eat that right up.
With that, Dick slams his boot into the robber’s face, and the robber passes out instantly. Dick dusts the first off his gloves, then pulls two sets of handcuffs from his belt. “Alright, let’s round ‘em up.”
He and Damian cuff the two robbers and attach them to a metal drainage pipe alongside one of the buildings. Once the robbers are restrained, Dick turns his sights on the jewels spread out all over the ground.
“Pick up anything you find and put them in the bags, here,” Dick orders, grabbing the two bags the robbers dropped, still half full with expensive jewelry. “We’ll hand them in to the police.”
Damian has already started picking up the jewels, using his flashlight to help catch any in the corners. “But Gotham Police is corrupt,” he points out as Dick makes his way to the totaled car. Dick sheds a tear for the loss of such a beauty. “Will they not take the jewels for themselves?”
That’s a good point, one that Dick is proud of Damian for thinking of. “Most of them would,” he agrees, collecting the fallen jewelry from the backseat floor. “That’s why we’ll be giving the bags to Commissioner Gordon.”
Damian seems to like the idea, because he says nothing and continues to pick up the shiny chains and pendants. Once Dick is sure he’s gotten everything from the backseats, he opens the door to the front seats and starts collecting there.
He’s got almost all of the jewelry back in the bag when something catches his eye. There’s a ring in the foot-space by the passenger’s side. When he picks it up, it glitters in the beam from Dick’s flashlight.
It looks just like the one he bought for Barbara a few years ago.
Their engagement had been short, and Babs had given the ring back when Dick went off with Bruce and Tim to help Batman become the Dark Knight. She said it was so that he could re-discover himself, so that he knew who he was and who he wanted to be before they got married. Dick gave it back to her, promising to come back for her when he was ready.
They get lunch, every now and then. They talk about a lot of things, but Dick doesn’t ask about the ring, and Babs doesn’t ask about getting back together. They know, without having to say anything, that they’ve both moved on.
“Batman,” Robin calls out from behind him. “Are you finished?”
That’s when Dick hears the sound of the police sirens getting louder. Quickly, Dick drops the ring and the rest of the jewelry into the bag, then ties it up tight so that nothing falls out. He slams the door shut, checks to make sure the robbers are still tied up, then goes back to the BatBike and kicks up the stand.
“Let’s move out,” he says, pressing the Return button on the motorcycle. The bike revs to life and drives away, heading back to the Batmobile. With a curt not to Damian, the two of them shoot their grappling guns and swing up to the rooftop.
They wait the few minutes it takes for the police to arrive on scene, hidden in the shadows of the dark night. Dick watches, faintly amused, as the cops scratch their heads at the scene they come across.
When he spots Commissioner Gordon walking towards the crashed car, Dick whistles sharply. The entire crowd of cops frantically aim their guns at the sky, then lower them when they see Dick and Damian on the roof.
Dick waves his bag around in the air, before tossing it down to the commissioner. Damian does the same. Commissioner Gordon catches both bags, then gives the two of them a salute.
Dick doesn’t respond — he has to keep up the mysterious and aloof Batman persona, after all. Plus, it kind of makes him feel like a badass, turning around and swinging away with Robin immediately.
When they’re far enough away from the scene, Dick tosses Damian’s sword back to him. “You did good tonight,” he says when they land on the roof of the building where the Batmobile is parked beside.
Damian puffs out his chest with pride. “And you, yourself,” he replies.
Well, that’s as good of a thank you as Dick is going to get, so he’ll take it. They swing down into the Batmobile and slide inside. There’s only two hours of patrol left, so they better make the most of it.
“Wanna speed down the highway and scare alleyway criminals?” Dick asks, reclining his seat.
Damian’s smile is dangerous and eager. “Absolutely.”
“Careful with your speed,” Alfred pipes in from the comms. “Even Batman can get pulled over.”
Dick shoots Damian a mischievous look. “They’ll have to catch us first.”
Damian bangs on the door in excitement as Dick burns rubber speeding into the night.
He’s careful not to go so fast that the Batmobile’s emergency crash features would be obsolete, because he does have a kid in the car. But he goes fast enough to strike the fear of God into the scattered criminals on the streets, and to make Damian cheer him on.
So he might be trying to show off a little for the kid. Whatever. This is the best they’ve gotten along since Damian arrived in Gotham. Dick should reward good behavior, even if it means getting a stern talking to from Alfred later on about safety.
They stop another mugging and investigate an abandoned warehouse before calling it a night. Of course, when they arrive back to the Batcave, Alfred gives him that Talking To while Damian is changing out of his suit, but then he pats Dick on the shoulder like he’s done something right.
Alfred wraps his shoulder with gauze and ice. There’s a gnarly bruise where the bullet hit the kevlar, and it hurts like hell to move. Damian stands in the doorway to the medbay, urging them on.
“I require food,” he demands.
Dick rolls his eyes, but smiles. “Yes, your majesty,” he replies, hopping off the table. “We’re coming.”
Dick decides to forgo the reports for the night and postpones them until the morning, because he’s hungry as hell too. They head up to the manor in their pajamas and celebrate with Alfred’s famous lasagna. Dick gets sauce all over his face, but Damian is the epitome of perfection and properness by the end of his meal.
Dick’s so tired that he nearly doesn’t make it to his room, because the living room couch is looking pretty scrumptious. But Damian is also exhausted that he’s shuffling on his feet, stuffed and content and falling asleep as he walks.
Something happy blooms in Dick’s chest at the notion that Damian is letting his guard down around him. He wonders if Damian is just that tired, or if Dick is starting to gain his trust.
He has the urge to pick Damian up and carry him to his room, but that might break any trust Dick has earned tonight. So instead, he trips up the stairs and down the hall, right beside him, until they make it to Damian’s room.
“G’night, Damian,” Dick calls out quietly.
“Goodnight, Grayson,” Damian mumbles back, falling through his doorway and shutting the door behind him.
Dick trudges to his own room and collapses onto the bed, not even bothering to get under the covers. His limbs don’t have the energy. He thinks, that’s the first time Damian has said goodnight, before sleep pulls him under.
Damian’s eleventh birthday comes and goes without a fuss.
Alfred cooks him his favorite dinner, and Dick lets him eat in his room. Alfred and Dick each got him a little something — Alfred, a cookbook of middle eastern foods for Damian to learn to make on his own, and Dick, a specially-made knife sheath for his uniform belt with the Robin logo on one side.
Dick sits at the kitchen table that night, staring at one of the first pictures of Damian when he first arrived at the manor half a year ago. He’s not happy to have his picture taken, glaring at the camera with his arms crossed and a deadly glare on his face.
Dick took the photo to send to Babs, because she was the first person he called when he found out about Damian, and she demanded a photo as evidence and so she could run a background check, per Bruce’s request.
It’s weird. It’s been seven months since Damian first arrived, and it seems like both a long time and no time has passed at all.
Alfred gently touches Dick on the back after a while, which is the only reason Dick notices the time. Alfred gives him a knowing look, to which Dick sheepishly sticks the photo in his back pocket, then hurries off to the grandfather clock to get ready for the night.
Patrolling with Damian becomes more frequent now that he’s gotten in the groove.
Two weeks later and there has yet to be any detrimental problems while patrolling with Damian. The kid gets some minor injuries every now and then, as per the conditions of the job, and Dick gets nervous every time.
Six days ago, Damian needed stitches in his upper arm to close up a knife wound he got fighting a bank robber, and Dick didn’t stop pacing the length of the Cave until Alfred told him that Damian was fine and Dick set his eyes on Damian’s alive, glowering figure when he emerged from the medbay.
“I should have ducked instead of dodged,” he had grumbled as they ate dinner together.
Dick wanted to hug him, but Damian only allows hugs from Alfred right now, so instead, he said, “Everything is obvious in hindsight. Now you’ve learned from it.”
Damian was not mollified, but two nights later, he was ducking out of the way of an incoming blade, and he left that fight with only a bruise. Dick took him out for ice cream on their way home.
They’re getting better, learning how to work as a team. They clash a lot at home, but somehow, they get along easily in the field.
Maybe it’s the overwhelming need to trust each other in dangerous situations. Or maybe they’re bonding over being adrenaline seekers. Either way, Dick begins to look forward to each patrol, and he has a feeling Damian is, too.
One a.m. rolls around, and the streets are filled with people driving or walking into their night shifts, and criminals roaming the corners and slinking along the sidewalks. Dick and Damian are perched on a low roof, rather than on top of their usual skyscrapers, so that they can scan the ground easier.
That’s how they’re able to spot the little girl.
And she is little. Not just short, but thin. She can’t be any older than five. Her blonde pigtails are hanging limp and dirty, and her pink leggings are torn at the knee, like she’d fallen. Dick bets that her hands are all scraped up.
“Never forget, Robin,” Dick tells Damian, “we help the innocent. Sometimes, we do that by taking down criminals.” He points to the girl wandering the streets, shaking and scared. “Sometimes, we do that by helping people get home.”
Damian wrinkles his nose, but nods nonetheless, willing to follow Dick’s lead. They swing down to the streets, far enough in front of her that she doesn’t get scared, but close enough that they see her.
“Could this be a trap?” Damian questions.
Dick puts his grappling gun away. “Everything can be a trap,” he answers. “But this isn't something I’m willing to risk.”
Slowly, they approach the little girl, who has stopped frozen in her tracks upon seeing them. Dick pushes his cape back so that she can see his body, see that he’s human. “Hey honey,” he greets gently. “It’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you.”
She takes a cautious step backwards, so Dick roots himself in place. He grabs Damian as the boy advances, stopping him. The girl sniffles, rubbing her eye with the back of her hand, and Dick can tell now that she’s been crying.
“Are you lost?” he asks. The girl stares at them apprehensively. Hesitantly, she nods. Dick extends an arm out towards her. “I can take you home.”
None of them speak. Dick keeps his arm out to her. After a few passing beats, the girl sniffles again and toddles over to them. Dick meets her halfway and scoops her up into his arms. She holds onto his cape with one, tight fist, the other grappling at Dick’s chest-plate.
“You’re alright,” he assures, smoothing out her flyaways. “What’s your name, honey?”
The girl stares at him, big, hazel eyes boring deep into his soul. When she doesn’t reply, he says, “Alright, suit yourself.” He digs the remote out of his utility belt and calls the Batmobile. “We’ll do a facial scan in the car and figure out what address she’s registered to.”
The Batmobile comes screeching around the corner, then slows to a smooth descent as it stops in front of them. “How will you know it is the correct address?” asks Damian as they slide into their respective seats. “What if she is registered at one address but has been living at another, safer one?”
Dick beams at Damian as he shuts the door and situates the girl in his lap so that she’s sitting comfortably. She seems to relax now that she’s no longer out in the open, which gives Dick an inkling about where she lives.
“Good question,” he praises. “That could be, but kids this young will let you know if they’re scared. If we get to the address or see the person she’s registered to live with, and she feels unsafe being there, we’ll be able to tell.”
“Legally, will we have to leave her at that location?” Damian questions.
“Legally, I’m Batman,” says Dick as he types the order for the facial scan into the car’s computer. “I’ll decide as I see fit.”
When the order is sent, Dick turns his attention to the girl. “Hi sweetheart,” he says to her, rubbing her back to keep her calm. “There’s gonna be a blue light on your face, but it’s not going to hurt you, okay? You won’t even feel it.”
Carefully, he spins her around so that she’s facing the console screen. “You just say real still for me, and it’ll be over in a jiffy.”
“Jiffy?” he hears Damian murmur. Dick ignores him.
He presses the button to start the scan. The blue, holographic light spits out from the screen, flattening out, and drifts down the girl’s face. When it reaches her neck, it goes back up. It does this three full times before disappearing as the computer calculates an identity.
“Good job!” Dick grins, turning the girl back around. “That was very brave.”
The girl hides her face in his chest-plate, seemingly not at all bothered by the armor and kevlar. He puts a comforting hand on her back and waits for the computer to finish the search.
“That was not brave,” Damian says, confused. “She sat still while a light hit her face.”
Dick tuts at him. “She’s little, Robin, and is already scared,” he explains. “If you were in a strange place with strange people who were doing strange things to you, you’d be scared, too.”
Damian crosses his arms. “Tt,” he disagrees. “I would not.”
Dick presses his lips together with a look of disbelief, but lets it be. Finally, the computer beeps to signal the end of the search, and pulls up a picture of her off of someone’s Facebook — not a school photo, which means she’s younger than five — along with a list of relevant information, including her name and address.
She lives in Crime Alley. He figured as much, considering the way she was comfortable being inside with strangers, but scared of being outside on the streets alone. The people of Crime Alley look out for the kids there, especially with the Red Hood watching over it. The adults in Crime Alley will help any kid, no matter their rap sheet. The girl probably knows that.
The girl — who’s name is Honey.
“Well, no wonder you kept giving me that look,” Dick says to her with a smile. “Alright, Honey, let’s get you home.”
The drive to Crime Alley is short. Dick wanted to put her in one of the emergency car seats built into the backseats, but Honey wasn’t too fond of the idea of letting go of Dick, so he buckled his seatbelt around her and took the drive slow.
Don’t do that, people, it’s not safe. Batman is not responsible for your childcare decisions.
He parks a little ways down from the street entrance, hoping to not alert anyone of their presence. Dick and Damian walk into Crime Alley together, with Honey on Dick’s hip, taking the main strip and avoiding the backroads and alleyways, but also keeping in the shadows.
They’re ten feet from her house when someone drops down behind them. Damian whirls around, ready to fight, but Dick knows who it is before Damian has even registered the boots hitting the ground.
“Hood,” Dick greets as he turns around.
He can’t tell how Jason is, if he’s healthy or sick or tired, because his hood is on and he’s suited up. He’s double-fisting a pair of guns, though, and his legs are parted in a steady, attentive stance.
“Bats,” Jason snuffs. “Demon brat.”
“How dare you dishonor—”
“Settle down, Robin,” Dick commands. Damian bares his teeth at Jason, but obediently lowers his sword and steps back.
“Got ‘im trained like a dog, huh?” Jason taunts, looking at Damian. “Roll over, Fido. I’ll give ya a treat.”
Damian goes for his sword again, so Dick puts a hand on Damian’s shoulder and squeezes it tightly. “Enough, both of you,” Dick orders. “We’re not here for trouble, Hood.”
Jason makes an annoyed noise. “S’that why you’re here on my turf?” he questions dangerously. “Takin’ a kid?” One of his guns clicks with an alert of the safety being turned off.
“Relax,” Dick says sharply, narrowing his eyes, “we’re taking her home. We found her downtown while on patrol.”
Jason’s head tilts just enough for Dick to know he’s looking between Honey and her house behind him. “Facial scanner?”
Dick nods. Jason sighs, but turns the safety back on and tucks his guns into his holsters. “I’ll get ‘er home.”
“You will not,” snaps Damian. “Why would we trust you to get her home safely? You tried to kill Gray—” He stutters. “You tried to kill Batman.”
Jason’s body language betrays his irritation, so Dick does his best to defuse the situation. “Family bonding,” he dismisses, looking at the eyes of Jason’s helmet. “I’ve already forgotten it.”
It’s true. Dick will always remember what happened that night, when he and Tim fought against Jason, and Jason almost killed them both, again. But Dick is sick of the fighting. Jason wanted to be Batman for the wrong reason, Tim wanted Dick to be Batman for the wrong reason, and Dick is Batman for the wrong reason.
Shit sucks. Dick is willing to overlook it. He just wants his family.
“Besides,” he continues, moreso to Damian this time, “Hood has one rule, and that’s to always protect children.” He’ll tell Damian why later, but it breaks his heart to remember. “And we’re not exactly liked in the Alley.”
Ain’t that the fucking truth. Dick has been itching to get onto the rooftops, out of sight, but he hasn’t been able to with Honey in their possession. It’s too dangerous.
“He won’t let anything happen to her,” Dick assures, before offering Honey to Jason. Jason takes the girl in his arms, and immediately, Honey smiles at him, patting his helmet in greeting.
No wonder she was so quick to warm up to him. If she’s not afraid of the Red Hood, she’s not going to be that afraid of Batman or Robin. Jason puts his other hand on her side protectively, then walks past them without another word.
Dick watches him go for a second or two. No matter what Jason might say or the Red Hood might do, Dick knows that he cares. Even if his methods aren’t quite aligned with the Bat symbol, his methods exist to help people. He’ll keep Honey safe.
He hits the roofs, and Damian follows. But instead of heading to the car, they stay on the roofs, watching from a distance as Hood knocks on Honey’s door and offers the child back to her mother. Dick doesn’t question why Jason knows where she lives. He keeps an eye out for all the kids in the Alley. He’s sure Jason knows plenty about Honey and her family.
Dick watches with a small smile as the mother drags Honey close and cries, collapsing onto her front porch steps in relief. Jason stands there, menacingly, surely telling the mother to keep a better eye on her girl.
When the mother takes Honey inside, Jason leaves the house, slipping off the main strip and into an alleyway. It’s bait, and Dick takes it like he’s gullible. He makes Damian stay on the roof to watch his six (really, to keep him in a safe location), then drops down into the alley in front of Jason.
“Surprised you came,” his brother remarks.
“No you’re not,” says Dick.
“No, I’m not,” says Jason. He crosses his arms and leans against the bricks to the left of him. “You took to the suit like a pro.”
Dick grimaces. “I really didn’t,” he admits. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen on my face.”
Jason snorts. “Wow, all it took to clip the birdy’s wings was to put ‘im in a heavier suit,” he glowers. “I would’a done that years ago if I’d known it was that easy.”
Dick frowns at him. “No you wouldn’t have.”
Jason pauses, then says, “No, I wouldn’t have.”
Dick wants to shove his hands in his pockets, but the Batsuit doesn’t have any, so his hands drift around his thighs awkwardly with no place to put them. “Did you want something,” he asks, “or did you just draw me here to taunt me?”
“Why?” asks Jason. “Gotta get Junior home before his bedtime?”
“So the latter,” Dick deduces.
“How’s Red Robin?” Jason asks cruelly. “Talked recently?”
Guilt swamps Dick’s gut like a flood, but anger quickly drowns it out. “What do you want, Hood?’
Jason uncrosses his arms and jabs at Dick’s chest with his pointer finger. “I want you to take off that fucking suit,” he snaps. “It’s not yours.”
“Says the guy who donned it immediately and wore it while destroying every moral Batman believed in,” Dick fires back.
“Batman’s morals are why the Joker is still breathing,” hisses Jason. “Couldn’t even kill the guy who killed his son, and now you’re sailing through the sky under the same code.”
Dick rolls his eyes and scrubs a hand over his face, cowl and all, because he’s sick of having this discussion. “Don’t forget why he had those morals in the first place,” he argues. “He watched his parents get murdered right in front of him through unnecessary violence, and he swore he’d never do the same.”
“Killing the guy who murdered your son is unnecessary violence?” Jason asks in disbelief.
(Dick has a quick, blinking thought that he’d kill anyone who dared to put their hands on Damian, but then it’s gone as quickly as it came.)
“Killing someone for revenge is,” Dick explains. He’s going in circles, the same way every conversation with Jason goes. He sighs, watching Jason open his mouth to get ready for another spitfire comment.
“Is there something you wanted to talk about, Jason?” he questions, tired.
Jason stops at the sound of his name. Dick wonders how long it’s been since he heard it, or anything other than Hood.
“You want me to take off the suit, but I can’t,” he tells him. “Gotham needs a symbol for hope, and whether or not you believe it’s Batman, others do, and that’s enough to keep it on.” He clenches his jaw. “So if that’s all you wanted to say, I’ll be leaving now.”
Dick turns and pulls out his grapple, but before he can aim it, Jason calls out, “Wait.”
Biting back another sigh, Dick turns back around. Jason is still wearing the helmet, so Dick can’t see his face, but his body language isn’t as tight-strung as it was at the start of the conversation.
“I didn’t want to be Batman,” is what he says, which is not what Dick was expecting. “I put it on because I thought I could keep on B’s legacy. Because I didn’t want it to die like the rest of him.”
Wow. That’s— this is a much different direction than Dick thought this talk was going to go. Guess Dick doesn’t know his brother as much as he thought he did.
No surprise there.
“I thought I’d be happy that B was gone,” Jason confesses, though it’s riddled with guilt, “that the tables had turned.” His head droops down, just a sliver, like it’s involuntary. “But we’d gotten… I dunno, better, maybe. I was still pissed at ‘im, but it wasn’t…”
He stops. Swallows. “It wasn’t like before.”
There’s a nagging feeling in the back of Dick’s head, a connection between the two conversations that has something lighting up in his brain. Or rather, a disconnect between them.
“I didn’t want to be Batman,” Jason repeats.
Dick isn’t entirely sure what it is that Jason is confessing, but whatever it is, it’s hard for him to say, so Dick isn’t going to just brush it off. “I’m not upset with you, Little Wing,” he tells him. Jason’s body language seems enraged at the nickname, but he never actually says anything about it. “I just wish you’d come home.”
Jason scoffs. “I ain’t got a home,” he huffs. “Not since I died in that warehouse.”
Dick doesn’t rise to the bait. All he replies with is, “B would want you to.”
Jason huffs. “When have I ever cared about what B wanted?”
Dick gives him a small, rueful smile. “Since he took you in after you jacked his rims.”
He turns, then, and fires his grapple at the roof where Damian is still sitting, watching them unwaveringly. Before he leaves, Dick cranes his head around, eyes the earpiece he knows is underneath the helmet, and says, “Tell Red Robin I said hi.”
With that, he sweeps into the air and onto the rooftop, then swings away with Damian, leaving Jason standing in the alley, alone.
(Uncharacteristically, Damian doesn’t make a single comment about the conversation for the rest of the night.)
A few nights pass, and the Riddler escapes from Arkham one afternoon. They’re able to track him down to a small houseboat in the dockyard that he’d won the keys from in a poker bet.
It was just him, luckily — they’d gotten to him before he could gather any lackeys or goons. He put up a good fight and even busted out a shockingly large knife that looked like a deformed question mark. But Dick and Damian were able to overpower him, cuff him, and deliver him right back to Arkham by morning light.
It’s as they’re climbing back into the Batmobile after dropping him at Arkham when Dick first notices Damian wince.
“You okay?” he asks, doing a twice-over of Damian’s body to see if there are any visible injuries.
Damian, for his part, looks completely normal, so Dick believes him when he says, “I am fine.”
The second time Dick notices the wince is when they’re walking through the Batcave to get undressed. Dick falls back to test his theory and sees Damian walking very, very cautiously. He tries to ask, but he gets caught up with helping Alfred lift something, and by the time he turns back around, Damian is gone.
Twice is too much of a coincidence in Gotham, so Dick does the logical thing and corners Damian in his room. The kid makes a beeline right for it as soon as he finishes showering, so Dick follows hot on his tail. He tries to swing the door shut as quickly as possible, but Dick intercepts it and shoves it back open.
“Take off your shirt,” he demands.
“Grayson,” Damian snaps, backing away, “this is highly inapprop—”
“Take it off,” Dick orders. He says it with an inflection that he has never used before. It’s like his Batman voice, just not as low, and definitely more severe. “Now.”
Damian clenches his jaw, arms defiantly at his sides. But Dick meets him head-on and gives him a warning look. He’s ready to start that counting threat he’s seen parents do, daring their child to get to three, but then Damian grabs the hem of his shirt and, with a quiet hiss of pain, pulls off his shirt.
Dick feels the blood drain out of his face. “Damian!” he exclaims, hurrying over to the kid. “Sit down, oh my god, get the hell off your feet.”
Damian rolls his eyes, but he sits on his bed regardless, wincing as it bends and pulls at the gash on the lower right side of his abdomen. “It is not as bad as it seems,” he argues. “It was not deep enough to cut any important arteries, veins, or organs.”
Christ, like that’s the only thing that matters. Dick wants to vomit just looking at the thing, knowing the kid must be in immense pain by just breathing.
The wound is terrifyingly long. It’s red and irritated, scabbing over in some areas and still raw and fresh in others. It definitely needs stitches, and it’s not bandaged at all — though he knows Damian keeps a medical kit stashed somewhere in his room, just like Dick.
For fucks sake, he was going to deal with this alone.
“Why didn’t you say something?” he asks, nearly breathless from concern, as he hurriedly drags the medical kit out from under the bed and starts unloading the necessary items. “This could have gotten infected!”
Damian looks away from him, shame written across his face. “I should not have been injured in the first place,” he replies. His voice is terrifyingly steady. “I made a miscalculation and was hit as a result.”
Dick furrows his eyebrows as he frantically uncaps the peroxide bottle and grabs a clean cloth from the kit. “You’ve had injuries before,” he bounces back. “You’ve let Alfred patch you up before.”
Damian’s nose twitches, the way it does when he’s getting angry. “Never for something this severe,” he replies, clenching his jaw. “I did not want to disappoint you when you saw how poorly my mistake cost me.”
Dick takes a moment to take a long, deep breath in through his nose. He reminds himself that it’s Talia’s training, and he’s still trying to shake Damian from it. Then, very carefully, he puts his hands on Damian’s shoulders and turns him, lightly, to face Dick completely.
“It doesn’t matter what you did, or what you didn’t do,” he explains, staring into Damian’s eyes. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of an injury. Always tell me about these things, okay? No matter how major or minor they are. I want you safe.”
His heart hurts at the idea that Damian might have been thinking otherwise. “You don’t need to punish yourself by suffering.”
Damian says nothing as Dick cleans up the wound and stitches him back up. But he doesn’t pull away from the extra, comforting touches Dick gives him, nor does he give him any annoyed looks as Dick frets over him, getting him to lay down and tucking him in nice and snug.
“Alfred and I will be unwrapping those bandages tomorrow morning and cleaning them again,” Dick tells him.
“Yes, Grayson,” Damian sighs.
Dick presses his lips together. “You know what I’m going to say next, right?”
Damian huffs, despondent. “Did Father bench you this often when you were Robin?” he asks.
Something bittersweet — or maybe just bitter — crawls up Dick’s throat. “No,” he responds. “Not as much as he should have.”
Damian makes an aggravated noise. “I am more than capable of fighting with an injury,” he says.
“But you shouldn’t,” Dick remarks. “And you shouldn’t need to.” He fluffs Damian’s pillow, just for the sake of it, and makes sure there’s enough room under the blanket that it doesn’t rub against the bandaged wound.
Against his better judgment, he runs a hand over Damian’s hair, smoothing it out. Thankfully, Damian doesn’t snap at him for it, just growls in annoyance. It makes him smile fondly, then sadly. “Promise me you’ll tell me if you get hurt again,” he begs.
Damian does not look like he believes anything Dick has said, but he nods, and says, “I promise.”
Now he understands why some parents still have baby monitors for their older children, because when Dick goes to bed shortly after, he falls asleep staring at the door, listening hard for any signs of emergency. Nothing ever comes.
One day, Dick wanders into the kitchen looking for a snack, and finds Alfred mixing something together in a bowl while Damian stands on a stool beside him and watches.
“Mother never allowed me sweets,” Damian is telling him. “But I have had some of these cookies before, on a trip to Star City for intel on the Chinese Triad.” He looks up at Alfred. “They were awful.”
Alfred is not deterred. “That’s because you have yet to try mine, young master.”
Dick leans against the doorframe and watches them interact, crossing his arms over his chest with a smile. Before now, Damian has stayed out of the kitchen while Alfred cooks for the most part. It’s only now occurring to Dick that maybe the kid doesn’t even know how to use their stove.
“These have the same ingredients as the others, do they not?” questions Damian. “What could be different?”
Alfred shakes his head. “Actually, young master, they do not have the same ingredients. This recipe has—”
“It’s not love, is it?” Damian interrupts, an unimpressed look on his face. “Richard says that constantly.”
Dick holds back his sputters of protest. It is not constantly. Maybe once or twice. Or five.
“— baking powder,” Alfred finishes, ignoring the way Damian cut him off. “This recipe has baking powder instead of baking soda. It also has different amounts of each ingredient. My recipe has more butter than most recipes, and much more vanilla extract.”
Damian makes an inquisitive humming sound and continues to examine the way Alfred is stirring in the flour to the wet mixture with the hand mixer. Dick goes to leave, so they can bond together, but the floorboards creak under his feet, and it gives away his position.
Both turn in his direction. Alfred smiles in greeting when he sees him, and Damian nods to acknowledge his presence.
“Hello, Master Dick.”
“Richard.”
And that’s a new thing. Damian has subtly shifted from Grayson to Richard over the last few weeks. Dick has refused to speak about it, or even acknowledge it in his head, in fear of jinxing it and having Damian revert back to using his last name.
“Don’t let me stop you,” he says, holding his hands up in surrender.
“Actually, Master Dick,” Alfred calls out before Dick can turn around, “why don’t you give me a hand?”
Dick curses himself internally for interrupting the moment they were having. But he can never say no to Alfred, especially when he’s asking for assistance.
“Sure, Alf,” he agrees. “What do you need?”
Alfred removes his apron and hangs it up on a hook against the side of the refrigerator. “Mixing the chips in is getting too hard on my old hands,” he informs. “Fold them in for me, while I run to fetch something?”
Dick narrows his eyes in suspicion. Alfred may be getting old, but that man is as healthy and nimble as a horse. The man doesn’t even have arthritis or carpal tunnel syndrome. And he sure didn’t have any issue making mashed potatoes by hand two days ago.
But again, he can’t say no to Alfred, so he nods and takes Alfred’s place at the counter, with Damian to his left. Alfred thanks him, then gives him a knowing look and leaves the room.
Dick has no idea what he’s up to.
But Alfred asked him to finish up, so Dick will finish up. When he looks into the bowl, he notices that Alfred has yet to add the flour to the dough, so he dumps the perfectly-measured amounts into the bowl.
“So Little D,” Dick says, trying to make conversation, “Alfred’s teaching you how to make chocolate chip cookies?”
Damian shrugs. “He was starting to make them when I came in to ask for a sandwich for lunch,” he reveals. “I was curious as to what he was doing.”
Dick makes a little “ah” sound and nods. “Well, did you get your sandwich?”
Damian scoffs. “Of course I did,” he responds. “This is Pennyworth we are talking about.”
Dick nods seriously. “You’re absolutely right,” he says. He notices that the baking trays are all set out, but none of them have parchment paper on them, so Dick pauses what he’s doing to cut out the necessary length of paper and places them on each tray.
Odd. Alfred usually sets these out first, so that they’re ready to go as soon as the dough is done.
“Pennyworth was practically a father to Father,” Damian inquires, words coming carefully. “Does that mean he is a grandfather to you?”
Dick scrapes down the sides of the bowl and continues stirring and folding to get everything incorporated. “Yeah, I guess,” he answers. “I’ve never called him ‘grandpa’ — I think he might actually kill me if I did that — but he’s kind of played the grandfather role for all the kids that have come into the house.”
Damian tilts his head to the side, considering. “He dotes on me more than you.”
Dick snorts before he can stop himself. “It’s ‘cause you’re the youngest.”
(He ignores the brief, fluttering thought in the back of his head, that maybe there’s another reason he dotes on Damian more. A title that was unlocked at some point between Bruce’s death and now. The same reason grandfathers spoil their grandkids more than their own children).
“But he likes me,” Damian says, but there’s an infliction in it that makes it sound like more of a question than a statement.
“Of course he does,” Dick assures, confused. “He loves you to death, kiddo.”
Damian wrinkles his nose at the nickname, but seems content with the answer nonetheless. Dick hands him the opened bag of chocolate chips, and, to his surprise, Damian unceremoniously dumps the entire bag into the bowl.
Dick grins. He’s teaching this kid so well.
Dick folds in the chocolate chips, a tedious process as the dough has to have an even amount of chips everywhere. As he does, Damian says, “My grandfather hated me.”
That makes Dick stop short. He refrains from looking over at Damian, because Damian is sharing something personal, and he refuses to scare him off with eye contact.
“I like to think that Mother liked me, but Grandfather did not,” Damian explains. “I was but an heir to him.”
Dick risks a glance. Damian seems indifferent despite the sad story. He catches Dick peeking, and Dick hurriedly looks away, but Damian does not appear upset about it.
“I do not miss him,” he tells Dick. “I think I would miss Pennyworth, though, if something were to happen to him.”
Dick glances to the other side, at where Alfred has been standing half in the doorway, listening. Dick can see the shiny, glossy tears welling up in Alfred’s eyes.
“Yeah, kid,” Dick agrees, making sure Alfred sees that Dick is looking at him. “Me too.”
He turns away then to give Alfred a moment to himself, then offers the spatula out to Damian. Damian stares at it, befuddled. It makes a grin quiver across Dick’s mouth. “We have a tradition when baking cookies,” he tells Damian. “When the batter is done, you lick the spatula clean.”
Damian furrows his eyebrows. “There is raw flour and raw eggs in this, Richard,” he states. “Do you know what diseases I could catch?”
This only makes Dick grin wider. “That’s half the excitement,” he urges. “Besides, it tastes good.”
Damian still seems skeptical, but then Alfred steps into the kitchen, looking perfectly put together, as if he wasn’t shedding tears just seconds ago. “Right so, Master Damian,” he agrees. “It’s quite good. And a few bites won’t harm you.”
Damian is hesitant, but with Alfred backing it up, he takes the spatula from Dick and takes a very, very tentative lick.
He takes another one.
“I suppose this is sufficient,” he announces.
Dick raises an eyebrow at him. “Just sufficient?” he asks. “If you don’t like it, I can clean it myself—”
He reaches for the spatula, and Damian takes a hurried step backwards, nearly falling off the stool. Dick grins at the reaction.
Damian huffs, knowing his act is see-through. “Perhaps you were right,” he relents.
Dick ruffles his hair, still smiling widely. “Hurry and finish so you can help me roll out the cookies,” he says, then scoops up some with a spoon and starts rolling it into a ball in his palms. When he puts it down on the tray, his hands come back sticky with dough, and Damian makes a face.
“Absolutely not,” he demands. “I will not partake in such messes.”
Dick is not swayed. He figured he’d get that kind of reaction. “Whatever you say, baby bat,” he remarks. “Alfred will help me, then, won’t you, Al?”
He turns to Alfred, who is watching the two of them with a soft, fond smile. “Always, Master Dick.”
Dick smiles right back at him, and then Alfred ties on an apron and gets to work. The two of them roll out the dough balls together, while Damian sits on the counter beside them, swinging his legs and nibbling at the spatula until it’s clean.
“Where’s the thing you needed to get?” Dick probes, glancing over at Alfred.
“Oh, it wasn’t there,” Alfred replies easily. “I’ll just have to look for it later.”
He planned this, Dick realizes, looking between him and Damian, who is now bitching at Dick for how very un-circular his cookie balls look compared to Alfred’s. He must have noticed Dick watching them a while before he turned around, and made a plan on his feet to get Dick and Damian to bond more.
That sneaky old man.
Dick smiles to himself and continues rolling his perfectly shaped, thank you very much cookie balls onto the parchment paper. He says nothing when Damian sneaks bites of dough from the bowl when he thinks no one is looking.
Dick takes some for himself, and then smears it on Damian’s cheek, just to hear him sputter in outrage.
Of course, as soon as life begins to be smooth sailing again, a storm comes in from the horizon.
It’s been a few months since Dick had to race into patrol, but when the emergency alerts pop up on his phone about a sudden biochemical attack in downtown Gotham and spreading fast, Dick grabs Damian and sprints to the Batcave an hour before patrol is set to begin.
He’s so glad he remembered to teach Damian how to use the rebreather and the gas masks when they first began training. It means less time wasted as they suit up and jump into the Batmobile.
Alfred sends them the coordinates through the computer in the car, and then they’re speeding off into the cold Gotham night while Damian is still tugging on his boots.
“Remember what I told you,” Dick says, pressing a button on the roof of the Batmobile to temporarily seal off the outside. “Priority number one is to find the source of the attack and dismantle it. Then we can go after the Scarecrow.”
Not for the first time, Damian glowers at the idea. “But then he could escape,” he argues. “It is better in the long run to capture him now and then destroy the source.”
Dick shakes his head, not looking to fight about it. He passes dozens of wailing cop cars and ambulances as they race through the streets like headless chickens. He’s sure plenty of them are stalling because they’re somehow working for the Scarecrow, one way or the other.
“Firefighters don’t spray the fire and then check for people stuck inside,” Dick rationalizes, skidding around a corner. “They spray and look for people. Gordon and Agent A will track the Scarecrow and give us a location. In the meantime, we destroy the source.”
“But if he gets away—”
“That’s the plan, Robin,” Dick barks. “Stick to it.”
Damian clenches his jaw in annoyance, but doesn’t say anything back.
They get to the source of the attack, according to the ToxScanner on the Batmobile’s radar computer. Eerie, dangerous green is slowly seeping across the map of Gotham, and the epicenter of the cloud of gas is here.
Damian digs around in one of the compartments to find the gas masks, then tosses the bigger one to Dick when he does. Only when both masks are secure, and Dick has checked to make extra positive Damian’s is on properly, does he unseal the car.
“We should go in through the vents,” Damian suggests, pointing at the large vent opening on the side of the building.
“That’s good thinking,” says Dick, “but they’re most likely pushing the toxin out through the vents, too, not just the doors. The toxin will be more saturated there, which means a greater risk of our masks failing.”
Once outside of the Batmobile, the two of them climb onto the platform of a neighboring building so that they can scan the warehouse for another way in.
“A lot of warehouses don’t have windows,” Dick tells Damian, deciding to make this another teaching moment. “But the Scarecrow likes ventilation, which means it’s likely this one does.”
They circle around to the other side of the warehouse, sticking close to the shadows and high above eye-level to avoid being seen. As suspected, there is one large window on the back of the building, cracked open enough to let the white, gaseous toxin drift through.
The view inside is partially obstructed, but from what Dick can see, the toxin is held in barrels (which means they’re pressurized, which means they could explode), and each barrel has an odd-looking device sticking out of the top. Dick zooms in on the barrel clearest to see using the camera in his lenses.
He’s about to observe something out loud, but stops, then nudges at Damian. “Use your lenses to zoom in on the devices releasing the toxin,” he probes. “Tell me what you see.”
Damian is silent as he does as ordered. He tilts his head the longer he stares. “They appear to be some form of a funnel.”
“Good,” praises Dick, much to Damian’s obvious pride.
The funnels are thin where they’re shoved into the holes in the top of each barrel, and wide at the top. Normal-looking, except for the fact that they’re made with metal, which makes the wide-tops sturdier for the electric fans that are sitting on top of them. He’s sure there is an industrial fan attached to the ceiling, too.
“Do you see anything that vacuum-seals the funnels to the barrels?” he prompts.
Damian looks again, then shakes his head. “I do not.”
“So what does that mean?” Dick asks, then elaborates, “In regards to how we can remove the funnels.”
He lets Damian take his time as he keeps a sharp eye on the lackeys inside. He checks the microcomputer on his gauntlet — no messages from Gordon or Alfred.
“If they are not vacuum sealed, it means they are easy to remove,” answers Damian.
“Correct,” Dick smiles. “And if the funnels, which are helping speed up the toxin-release process, are easy to remove, then what does that tell us about the lackeys guarding them?”
Damian stares through the window, examining the barrels, and then the men inside as the pace along the length of the floor. “Scarecrow could have overestimated their ability to do their jobs,” he starts, “but Scarecrow is—” He pauses. “Would you consider him smart?”
Good question. Dick shrugs. “Well, think about Harley, who has a PhD,” he says, “and compare how she fights to how the Joker does.” Risky but calculated versus calculated but impulsive. “Crane isn’t Harley, but he does have a PhD in psychiatry, just like she does.”
Damian takes this into consideration. “So he would be able to tell that his lackeys are incompetent,” he decides. “This means that he is expecting them to fail.”
“Which means this is a trial run,” Dick expands. “But at least the fight will be quick.”
Dick turns his lens-camera off so that he can see normally. “We’ll go in through the window,” he orders, shooting his grappling gun for the roof of the warehouse. “Ready, Robin?”
Damian goes the same, then turns to Dick when his line is secure. “Ready, Batman.”
Dick grins, but Damian won’t be able to see it behind the gas mask. They swing to the warehouse together, Dick crashing through the window with a flashbang thrown to the center of the room, and Damian flings in after him as the flashbang explodes.
Guns go off immediately, frantic, with their aims all over the place. Scarecrow’s men yell out in shock as the flashbangs blind them. Batman and Robin swoop in together, taking out two men nearest to them and disarming them, before moving on to the next ones.
Someone aims a gun in Dick’s face, and he just manages to react quick enough to dodge the bullet that comes flying towards him, jerking his body sideways. He grabs the goon at the wrist and bends it until the goon drops the gun. Dick punches him with the full force of the metal on his gauntlet, and the man stumbles back, clutching his bloody nose.
Dick grabs the gun and ducks away, hurriedly unloading it and shoving the bullets in the random boxes on the nearest shelf to keep them out of the lackeys’ hands. Then, he grabs ahold of the side of the shelves beside him and uses them to swing back into the fray, jabbing his feet into the chest of one of the goons and sending him sprawling backwards.
He fights the goons surrounding the barrels to toxin, where the majority of the goons are circling.
“The Scarecrow isn’t here!” Damian exclaims.
Dick furrows his eyebrows, distracted by his shout, and narrowly avoids a knife slashed towards his face. He grabs it by the blade, hand protected by his glove, and twists the knife so that the man’s wrist twists with it. When the man drops the gun, Dick punches him, ducks under a right-hook, then punches him again.
“Of course he’s not,” Dick calls back, knocking over another barrel and kicking the funnel away from it. He finds the cork on the floor beside it and clogs the hole. “I said this was a trial run. He wouldn’t risk getting caught tonight.”
He dodges a sickle that swipes towards his head. The neck of the cowl prevents the sharp tip of the weapon from slicing Dick’s throat open. His reflexes kick in and he grabs the arm holding the sickle, yanking him close and elbowing him right in the face. He hears a crack, probably the guy’s nose breaking, and a scream as the goon drops to the ground in pain.
“This is ridiculous,” Damian shouts. “We need to find the Scarecrow, or this recon is for nothing!”
Irritation swells in Dick’s body like a rising tide. He thinks that his time with the League of Assassins is enough to give him as much authority as Dick has, as if his way is the right way and Dick is causing the problem.
“Robin, I gave you an order,” he snaps. There are only six goons left. If they can just take them out, they can collect the toxin sample without interference and then get the hell out of here. “Gordon is tracking him.”
But Damian doesn’t listen to the order. He manages to alienate one goon from the rest of the group, but instead of trying to knock him out, Damian wrestles him to the ground, pins him down with a knee to the groin, and presses his thumb into the goon’s throat.
“Where is Scarecrow?” Damian questions furiously. The goon spits at him, so Damian knees the man in the crotch again and headbutts him when he bends forward in pain. “Where is he?”
Dick’s by them in a flash, pulling Damian off of the man who curls in on himself and coughs up blood from where he bit his tongue nearly in half. “Robin, enough,” he snaps.
Yelling at Damian means he didn’t hear anyone sneak up on him, and when he turns back around, one of the lackeys grabs his rebreather and slices it off of his face with his dagger. The sharp, unforgiving blade also cuts his cheek with a nasty slash.
“Batman!” Damian exclaims, dashing at the lackey and dragging him to the ground so he can pummel the man’s face.
Another lackey sprints towards them, whom Dick intercepts. He wrestles him away from Damian, slamming him into the wall with one hand on his shirt, the other at his wrist, holding the knife away. He slams the lackey into the wall again, and again.
A hail of bullets fly out of the barrel of a gun, right for him. They land in his armor, stinging and burning where they land. He slams the man into the wall one more time, until his eyes roll back into his head and he slumps forward, out like a light.
Dick drops him like he’s made of fire and leaps away, ducking at the bullets. He grabs Robin, whose rebreather has been torn off in his fight, and shields him behind his cape. He hides behind a metal shelf, but it only provides so much protection.
“Batman, you’re bleeding,” Damian alerts him, sounding distressed. Dick hardly hears him, mind racing as he tries to think of a way to get Damian out of here before he can inhale too much of the toxin.
When he spots the window they came in through, it comes to him. He takes Damian by the hand and says, “Come with me,” before dragging him towards the barrels and the window.
“Get as far away as you can,” he orders, and doesn’t wait for Damian to finish saying, “What do you mean—” before lifting Damian up by the armpits and tossing him out the window like a sack of potatoes.
He prays to any god listening that Damian actually does as he’s told this time. The goons are awful at fighting, so it doesn’t take long for Dick to take them down, even as his vision starts to get a sickly yellow-green haze to it.
One by one, he throws the goons out of the window, most of them unconscious. A few of them fight him, but it does them no good. Dick’s adrenaline is pumping fast, both from the toxin and the desperate need to find Damian and make sure he’s far away from here.
He leaps out the window, using the goons to break his fall without a single qualm. That, of course, is when he spots Damian running towards him. Fucking figures.
“Drag them away from here,” Dick orders. “Take one and grapple to the roof right there.” He points at the building in question. “Do exactly what I say. You disobey again and you’re benched.”
Damian clenches his jaw, but obediently gets the lightest goon in one arm and grapples to the opposite roof.
It takes some time getting all the goons out of harm’s way, especially as his heartbeat starts accelerating and the audio hallucinations start up in the distance. But he gets everyone a safe distance away, then pulls the pin on a grenade and throws it through the window of the building.
He grapples away just as the warehouse explodes.
The goons are still unconscious as Dick and Damian stare at the burning building. Damian’s breaths are coming faster, slightly more panicked than before. In the back of his mind, Dick knows now is definitely not the time to yell at him, but he sees Damian’s burning, bloody corpse screaming in the corner of his eye, and the fear in his body rackets up tenfold.
He whirls around and grabs Damian by the arms — Damian, alive with clean skin and perfectly fine — and yells at him.
“What were you thinking?” he shouts, shaking the kid. His brain feels like it’s a record spinning a thousand miles a second. “I could have killed you! You could have been— you have to listen to me!”
Dick can’t see Damian’s eyes behind the white lenses, but his face scrunches up like he’s clenching his eyes shut. “Stop,” he chokes. “Stop it.”
They didn’t even get the toxin sample because the plan went to shit when Damian went off on his own. Now Alfred’s going to have to get it from his body using needles, or they’ll have to track Scarecrow down tomorrow and get a sample. But that’s even more dangerous because it’s head to head with Scarecrow, not his goons, and Damian obviously isn’t ready for that— and Damian is— Damian…
Dick needs to get him out of here. Damian is out in the open where anyone could get him, where the goons at their feet could wake up at any second and stab him or slit his throat or shoot him in the head—
Dick thinks he’s starting to feel the effects of the toxin.
He doesn’t even think. He sweeps the cape around Damian, plucks him up, and leaps into the night.
He must have blacked out at one point, because blinks, and suddenly he’s in the Cave. He’s not entirely sure how he got back here, but he knows the Cave is safe, so of course he ended up here eventually.
Alfred must have hooked them up to EEGs and IV drips, because there are wires and tubes attached to his body. His brain feels a little clearer, but when he looks up, the Cave is dark and lightless, and he hears the echo of his mother scream as she falls to her death.
He notices that he’s not lying down, like he usually is when in the medbay. He’s sitting up a bit, propped up against the wall, and Damian is curled up beside him, hiding his face. His little body shakes in fear as the toxin works through his system.
“Ummi, please,” he hears Damian beg quietly, slurring his words. “M’sorry. M’sorry, d’nt do it.”
Dick doesn’t know what he’s hallucinating, but Ummi means “mother” in Arabic, which means it has something to do with his mother.
“Shh, you’re alright,” he whispers into the boy’s hair. “You’re safe, baby bat, you’re safe.”
There’s a figure belly-down on the ground, sinking his nails into the cave floor and dragging himself towards them. Dick makes a scared, wounded noise and folds his entire body over Damian as much as he can, shielding Damian and closing his eyes tightly to keep Jason’s burned, fifteen-year old body out of his sight.
He hears bones breaking somewhere, and then John Grayson whispers from somewhere far away, “How could you replace me?” He can feel his father’s breath in his face. He refuses to open his eyes.
“R-Richard?” he hears Damian whimper.
Dick keeps his eyes closed, but he sweeps a hand down Damian’s head to push it back down and cover his eyes. “It’s the toxin, Little D,” he assures. “It’s not—”
“Help!” Bruce screams, fear and desperation clawing through his voice. “Dick! Help me!”
Hot tears squeeze out of the corners of Dick’s eyes. “It’s not real.”
Something pinches the inside of his arm. He winces, trying to pull back, but something keeps him from doing so. He tries not to fight in fear that he might hurt someone real. His head feels kind of woozy.
His arms feel like noodles out of nowhere. They slump down Damian’s body, no longer able to keep a tight, protective hold on him. He senses someone loom over him, and he tells himself it’s the toxin, it’s not real.
But then Damian screams, and Dick is too dizzy to move, and he hears someone sob out “Richard,” and then Dick realizes that he’s been given a sedative.
Of course, that’s when he knocks out, and can’t assure Damian that they’re going to be okay.
Dick is slow to wake up, in the aftermath.
He’s conscious long before he has the strength to open his eyes, but luckily, the Cave is nice and dark, even in the medbay, so they don’t strain too much when he finally peels them open. Alfred is by his bedside, reading, but looks up when he hears Dick start to shift around. He closes his book quietly and sets it to the side, then scoots in closer.
“Welcome back, Master Dick,” he greets.
Dick groans, stomach rolling with nausea. “What… uhh.” He stops and holds his head, pressing his palm down hard against his left eye in hopes of easing some of the pain. “What…”
“What do you remember?” Alfred asks, offering him a glass of water with a straw.
Dick sucks it down greedily, and pouts when Alfred takes it back, warning him of going too fast too soon. “The warehouse,” he starts, slow. Even talking hurts his head. “It exploded. I— yelled at Damian.”
Damian. Dick looks around for the boy and, thankfully, finds him tucked under a sheet on another bed, fast asleep. He sighs in relief, sagging against his own bed.
“Do you remember who the warehouse belonged to?” questions Alfred.
Dick nods, then regrets it instantly when white pain shoots through the entirety of his brain. “Fuck,” he curses. He must be in bad shape, because Alfred doesn’t scold him for the language. “Scarecrow,” he answers, and then it all comes back. He drops his head against the pillow. “The toxin.”
Alfred hums in agreement. “I took a blood sample,” he tells Dick. “Not the best way to analyze the toxin itself, but it appears I didn’t need to.” When Dick raises his eyebrows in curiosity, he continues. “This strain is almost exactly the same as his original formula.”
Now that’s interesting, and not at all what Dick expected. “The same?” he echoes.
Alfred nods. “There were a few differences, enough that we will still need to make a new antitoxin, but this one isn’t nearly as dangerous as the last few strains he’s released.” He glances between Dick and Damian. “I assume that’s why you woke before Master Damian. You have more immunity to the original strain, and were able to fight it off faster.”
Dick stares at the ceiling, low-hanging in this part of the Cave, where no bats can get close and contaminate the clean area. The original toxin is easier to make because it’s simpler, and therefore less potent, and therefore less lethal. Scarecrow wouldn’t revert back to that formula unless he was running out of resources. That means he’s getting desperate.
Desperateness means mistakes. Mistakes for criminals means victory for Batman, if he can plan it accordingly. It gives Dick an idea. A crazy, dangerous, agonizing idea that Alfred will absolutely scold him for. Even Bruce would scold him for it. But damn, if Scarecrow won’t see it coming.
He looks over at Damian, unconscious from the sedative, finally at peace after a horrible night of nightmares. He won’t let that happen to Damian again. If he has to torture himself to make sure of it, then so be it.
Damian is avoiding him.
Dick had a feeling that Damian wouldn’t want to talk about the disaster of a mission it was, but it’s been three days and one patrol where Damian has only spoken to him to acknowledge orders or deliver intel. At home, Damian stays far, far away from him.
Dick, frankly, is sick of it. So he does what he does best and utilizes his number one role in this godforsaken emotionally constipated family: he corners Damian and forces him to talk about his feelings.
He gets Damian in the living room, neutral ground with plenty of space between them, but only one door to escape from, which Alfred promptly closes and locks from the outside as soon as Dick enters. Damian, who saw Dick walk inside, shoots to his feet when he hears Alfred lock the door.
“What is this?” he asks, but it comes out more like a demand. “What are you doing?”
Dick crosses his arms over his chest. “We need to talk, baby bat.”
The nickname does nothing to ease Damian’s paranoia. Dick knows that this probably wasn’t the best way to go about this, considering how awful he had it while living with the League, but Dick knows any other way would have Damian running off and refusing to talk. Whatever this is, it ends today.
“This is preposterous,” Damian huffs, but his voice has a light, barely-there tremble that Dick clocks despite Damian’s best efforts to conceal it. “Pennyworth? Alfred! Open this door.”
“You’re not in the position to be giving any orders right now, kiddo,” Dick tells him, making sure to put an air of scolding into his voice. “Especially not out in the field.”
Damian wilts at his words. He looks down at the floor, chastised, before whatever training Talia worked into him kicks in again, and he straightens himself up and meets Dick’s eyes.
“What I did was uncalled for and irresponsible,” he says, almost robotic, as if he’s been practicing. “I apologize for my actions and the injuries you sustained as a result.” His eyes shift, ever so slightly, to the side of Dick’s face where the cut is scabbing over. It’s going to scar, Dick knows, but he doesn’t really care.
Dick frowns at him, arms falling to his sides. “You don’t really think that’s why I’m upset, do you?” he questions. “That I got hurt?”
Damian’s jaw clenches. “I should have listened to you,” he responds. “You would not have been injured if I had.”
Dick’s eyebrows draw together. Slowly, he makes his way over to Damian and the couch, then sits down and pats the spot beside him. Damian looks hesitant, but he obliges.
“Dames,” Dick starts, “Do you remember a long while ago, when we had that fight when you were still training to be Robin? And I told you that you’re not on Nanda Parbat anymore? You’re not with the League?”
Silently, Damian nods.
“I’m not mad because you did something that led me to get hurt,” Dick explains. “In our line of work, these things happen. I’m mad because you disobeyed a direct order, and it almost got you killed.”
Damian, of course, does not seem to understand.
“You have more experience coming into Robin than any of us did, but that doesn’t mean you know better,” Dick tells him. “There are skills I have that you haven’t learned yet, because going on missions with your mother for the League does not require the same skill set as fighting crime in Gotham.”
Damian shimmies backwards a bit, putting some space between himself and Dick. Dick hopes it’s not because Damian is afraid of him, or afraid that he’ll do something. He lifted Damian up off the ground by his shirt at the start of all this, and that’s as far as he’s gone since, and as far as he’s ever willing to go.
“But finding the Scarecrow is imperative,” Damian reasons. “Who better to tell us than his men?”
Dick nods, following his train of thought. This is good. It’s just another teaching moment. He can do this.
“That’s great thinking, if his men are willing to talk,” he explains. “Most aren’t. In the League, you could torture people to get information out of them. We don’t do that. If they won’t talk, we have other means of accessing the info we need.”
Damian seems to get what he’s saying, but he still seems confused. “But I have seen you and Father intimidate criminals for information,” he counters.
Point. “You’re skilled, kid, don’t get me wrong,” Dick says, cracking a small smirk, “but you’re four and a half feet tall. Seasoned criminals aren’t going to be as intimidated by you.”
Damian glowers. “They should be.”
Dick smiles a little. “Yes, they should be,” he soothes, “but you can’t let pride or ego get in the way when you’re out there, because you’re not just fighting for your life; you’re fighting for mine, and for the people of Gotham. They’re counting on you.”
This seems to mollify Damian, and as the words settle in his mind, his face turns abashed. Dick reaches out and pats Damian’s hand comfortingly.
“Now if you have an idea, I always want to hear it,” Dick explains. “But I have to juggle keeping you safe while also trying to fulfill a mission. So when I tell you to do something, I expect you to do it, because I expect you to trust me, and trust that I’m doing the right thing.”
He’s not exactly working off a prepared speech, so when the words fall from his mouth, Dick’s heart suddenly leaps up and lodges in his throat. “You do trust me, don’t you?” he asks very, very carefully.
Without missing a beat, Damian furrows his eyebrows and says, “Of course I do, Richard,” as if Dick were stupid enough to think any different. Then, he looks away, scratching his nails across his knees. “I trust you with my life, Richard, you must know this.”
Warmth and pride curl through Dick’s blood. It’s not something he takes lightly. The League of Assassins trained Damian to trust no one in the field, not even his own mother.
“Thank you, Damian,” he says earnestly. When Damian looks up at him, his eyes are full of something Dick has only seen in them once before — vulnerability. “And you’ve gotta know that I trust you with mine.”
Damian’s lips quirk upwards, a hint of a barely-there smile that he’s obviously trying to keep at bay. “I do know, Richard,” he assures, “and I will cherish that trust for the rest of my life.”
Tear prickle in the corners of Dick’s eyes. Reverent little shit, always knowing how to hit Dick right in the feelings.
Of course, it makes Damian scrunch his nose in annoyance. “Again, Richard?” he asks when he sees Dick’s watery eyes. “This is the second time this week.”
Dick rolls his eyes, swiping at the corners to wipe the tears away. “I’ve had a stressful week, okay?” he huffs, but can’t hold back his grin as Damian stands and heads for the door, surely knowing that Dick has the key to unlock it.
“Whatever you say,” Damian snarks, and the moment between them is over. “Has Alfred made lunch yet? Because I am famished.”
“I am famished,” Dick parrots, teasing.
As expected, Damian immediately starts spouting off in defense about how proper grammar is good for the future of society. Dick just beams from ear to ear as he unlocks the door and lets Damian march through, following right behind, knowing Alfred is waiting for them in the kitchen with their meals already on the table.
Dick isn’t grinning the next day, when he and Alfred start the trials. And they start… rough.
He expected this, of course. He’d be naive to think that he has enough immunity to the original strain that he’d be mostly fine, because he was, in fact, mostly not fine.
They do it after patrol, when Damian is upstairs, none the wiser, and the toxin sample is still fresh from when they collected it from another warehouse just hours prior. Alfred hooks him up to all sorts of monitors and machines, keeps an emergency sedative and a beta blocker drip nearby, then gives Dick the toxin through an oxygen mask.
It’s a lot more concentrated like that, and it’s absolute hell. But if it’s going to help him gain immunity, and therefore make it easier to get to Scarecrow in person, he’ll deal. It is temporary, after all. (Still, it can’t be good for his brain.)
Usually, when he’s under the effects of the toxins, he sees an array of people: Bruce, his parents, his brothers, his parents, the people from the circus, his friends from New York, the Titans, and more.
Today, though. Today, all he sees is Bruce.
He sees all different kinds of Bruces — the Bruce who took him in right after his parents died, the Bruce who kicked him out, the Bruce who destroyed himself after Jason’s death, the Bruce who was jaded but learning to live again, the Bruce who existed right before his death, and a burned, crispy Bruce, whose blackened skin makes the red tissue around his bulging eyes even more prominent.
Some of them look like zombies. Some of them look normal. All of them hate him.
Alfred tries to keep him as calm as possible, but there’s nothing either of them can do as the toxin completely clouds his mind and everything falls away except for the hallucinations.
They tell him awful things. I should never have adopted you. You were a terrible Robin. Jason deserved it so much more. You’re a disgrace to the Wayne name.
“No,” he cries, reaching out for the youngest Bruce of the group. “I tried — please, I tried so hard.”
“You let me die, Dick,” the Bruces say, talking over each other. The evil in their voices has melted into despair. “Why did you give up on me? Where were you? Why weren’t you here?”
“I’m sorry,” he sobs. “I didn’t mean to. Come back. Please come back.”
The oldest Bruce towers over Dick, fury and betrayal across his face, plain as day. “You took my son from me,” he says. “How could you?”
“No, no,” Dick denies, moaning in hurt. “You don’t understand—”
“I’ll never get to see him grow up,” Bruce frowns. “Why did I get to see you grow, but not my son?”
“I’m your son,” whimpers Dick. “I’m—”
He blinks, and every Bruce is gone except for the charred one, who stands in the center of Dick’s line of sight, blood and leather and skin peeling off of his body and sopping to the ground.
Dick screams, covering his face with his hands. He never got to see what Bruce looked like in the end. Clark and Diana suggested having a closed casket and no viewing, and Dick was too sick at the time to want to know why.
The burned, unrecognizable face. The reason why Tim refuses to believe that he’s gone.
“Dad!” he wails. “Dad! Dad!” He yells and he cries, and when Alfred tries to still him, he thrashes and flails, and Alfred steps back a safe distance away.
“Come back!” he shouts. He can hear the others beginning to crawl up the walls, Jason’s dead body and Tim with a gun in his hand and Barbara bleeding out in a pool of her own blood. All the while, Bruce’s voice echoes through the Cave, taunting and crying for a better son.
This lasts throughout the night and into the morning. Dick lays on the bed in the medbay, writhing and burying his face in his hands or his pillow, trying to keep the monsters away. Dick knows when it’s out of his system when he stops hearing things, and immediately after, he passes out.
(He never noticed Damian standing by the stairs, watching him in the shadows all night.)
Dick makes sure to wait a few days before exposing himself to more toxin, to make sure he doesn’t fry his brain. So until the next trial, he makes sure to enjoy whatever he can.
One of which is Damian.
Things are getting easier with him. Dick thinks that being out on patrol with him has made them closer. Dangerous, life-or-death experiences tend to do that to people.
Dick doesn’t think the guilty feeling is ever going to go away, but as long as Dick can keep seeing the boy’s smile light up his face as they sail through the air, he’ll keep doing it.
Nights like this one, though, Dick seriously reconsiders.
Halloween is the one night a year where crime skyrockets like nobody’s business. It’s hard to tell alleyway robberies from teens playing pranks; drunk college kids are getting into trouble, and criminals are taking advantage of everyone wearing masks to rob and murder and get away with it.
After a hard night of fighting Professor Pyg, helping three drunk frat boys back to their campus, interrupting a museum heist, intercepting a group of the Joker’s lackeys trying to smuggle weapons, and an unfortunate incident of having to leap into Gotham Bay to avoid a grenade explosion, Dick nearly crashes the Batmobile when he drives into the Cave, so exhausted that he can hardly keep his eyes open.
Damian is dead on his feet as he climbs out of the car, still dripping with lake water. He has a cut over his eyebrow that has stopped bleeding, but the thin sheen of water across that side of his face is tinted red from where it blended into the water and smeared.
They undress quickly. Damian doesn’t look like he has much energy to do anything except peel off his suit and step into the pajama pants that Alfred graciously brought down. Dick can’t even manage to pull a hoodie over his head, so he stumbles into a pair of sweatpants and calls it a night.
He does, however, help Damian into his pajama shirt, because Damian hates walking around with only half his clothes on. Dick’s shoulders ache when he’s done, but Damian seems comfortable, and that’s what matters.
They head up towards the manor immediately, not bothering to stop by the medbay for Alfred to tend to their injuries. Dick doesn’t even think about it when he sees Damian stumble on his feet on his way to the stairs. He scoops Damian up without a word and carries him out of the Cave.
It’s a testament to how tired Damian is that he doesn’t make a peep about it.
Alfred follows behind, most likely so he can patch them up before they fall asleep or before he loses them in the winding corridors of the manor. Damian just rests his head against Dick’s chest and sighs.
It’s nights like these where Dick misses when he was a child, and he would follow Bruce to his room and curl up with him under the massive downy covers, knowing he was safe and protected from the horrors of the night they’d faced.
But Dick hasn’t brought himself to go into Bruce’s room since he died, and he’s not going to start now, when he’s too exhausted to deal with all of his complicated emotions. Instead, he makes his way to his own room and sags onto the bed, Damian still curled in his arms.
Alfred switches on the lamp at Dick’s bedside, then sits on the edge of the bed. He’s got a medical kit that he opens up and starts sifting through, but Dick doesn’t really care to pay attention like he normally does. He leans his head back against the headboard and closes his eyes, feeling the exhaustion seep through his muscles and nerves.
“Does the young master have any injuries I should know about?” Alfred asks, keeping his voice low. Dick thinks Damian might be asleep.
It’s the first time Damian has fallen asleep in front of him. Tired joy flutters through Dick’s worn-out body at the notion that Damian feels safe enough around him to fall asleep like this.
“Bad bruise on ‘is side,” Dick slurs, not bothering to open his eyes. It’s a miracle that after all that happened tonight, Damian came out practically unscathed. “Bullet burn on ‘is arm.”
Alfred rustles around for a few minutes, most likely lifting up Damian’s shirt in the necessary places and applying creams and antiseptic to the wounds. He tuts at some point, probably when he sees Dick’s shoddy bandaging work on Damian’s arm where a bullet grazed him, but whatever judgment he has, he keeps it to himself and fixes up Dick’s boy.
Damian shifts slightly as Alfred works, but otherwise doesn’t make a peep. Whether or not he’s woken up or is still fast asleep, he never once moves away from Dick or out of his arms. If anything, he ends up curling in closer.
At some point, Alfred finishes tending to Damian and starts working on Dick, who has more extensive injuries and a lot more awful, quick-time bandaging on his body. Alfred cleans and begins stitching a stab wound on his side, but even the pinches of pain from the needle aren’t enough to keep the sleep away.
Dick spends another afternoon in the Cave, exposing himself to the toxin.
For hours, he curls into the corner of the medical bed, pressed against the walls of the Cave, trying his best to hide from Bruce and Tim and Jason and Starfire and Donna, screaming and snarling like zombies. They tell him things that hurt his heart and make him cry. Putting his hands over his ears does nothing to drown it out.
He loses a lot of time down there as the toxin works through his body. By the time it’s flushed out of his system, the bats begin to wake from their slumber, and he’s not sure if the small hand that sat on his arm throughout the day was real or just a figment of his imagination.
(Alfred tells him he came out of it half an hour earlier than last time.)
The trials take a lot out of him, even with the careful spacing between each one. When the toxin is out of his system, he doesn’t experience any terrors, but the adrenaline he experiences during the trials make him bone-tired and muscle-exhausted in the days following.
So naturally, when Dick comes home from a long, boring day at Wayne Enterprises and finds Alfred waiting on the porch outside, he panics. “What’s wrong?” are the first words out of his mouth, followed by, “Is Damian alright?”
Alfred’s usual stoic face softens at Dick’s concern. “Fret not, son; the young master is perfectly fine,” he assures, and Dick’s shoulders slump in relief.
“Then what’s going on?” he asks. He shifts his briefcase from one hand to the other.
“Master Damian is currently hiding somewhere in the manor,” Alfred explains. “He has requested that you find him.”
Dick’s eyebrows pull together. “Find him?” he echoes. “Like… hide and seek?”
Amusement flickers across Alfred’s eyes. “He has decidedly banned the term hide and seek from manor vernacular,” he informs. “But yes, essentially.”
Joy and excitement bursts through Dick’s body. Any lingering exhaustion from the work day and the toxin trials vanishes at the prospect of playing a game with his boy.
“He claims it is part of his training,” Alfred adds. The tone of his voice tells Dick that he doesn’t believe that for a second. “Stealth training, specifically.”
He and Dick share a look that has Dick grinning biting back a smile. “Understood,” he says. “Any rules?”
Alfred nods his head. “He is inside the manor and not on the outside grounds,” he replies. “Weapons have been disallowed.”
Dick’s eyebrows shoot into his hairline. “Damian said no to weapons?”
“He did not,” says Alfred.
Of course. Dick pats the man on the arm in thanks because, while he knows Damian wouldn’t take this so far as to go for a kill shot, it’s good to know that Dick won’t have to dodge katanas and throwing stars coming from the depths of the darkness of the manor corners.
“Allow me to take this,” Alfred says, taking Dick’s briefcase.
“You’re the best,” Dick says honestly, before following the butler into the manor. The lights are dimmer than normal. Dick rubs his hands together, eager for a challenge, and starts for the first hallway.
He’s meticulous about it. Is Damian the type of fighter to hide in plain sight, or hide in the most secretive places? It depends on his comfort level of his environment. He’s probably in plain sight, but still tucked away somewhere, not obvious to the immediate eye.
He’s likely not in a hallway corner, but he could be hanging off the ceiling somehow. He could be in one of the many rooms, hiding under a bed. He could be in a closet or cupboard. He could be in the attic, or the Cave. He could be in the sunroom, hiding underneath one of the couches or behind the curtains.
The manor is massive. There are four floors, an attic, and the Cave in total, which means he could be anywhere, and searching could take a while. So Dick’s best bet is to keep an eye out for discrepancies — anything even a hair out of place.
He checks the rooms on the first floor head to toe. Sheets, in perfect condition. Closets clear, not a hanger out of place. Cables still tucked away, out of sight. Not a skid mark on the hardwood or divot in the carpet.
He clears the first floor in about fifteen minutes, then starts up the stairs to the second floor. He’s careful to keep his footfalls quiet so that Damian doesn’t hear him. Since this is “stealth training” (*cough* assassin hide and seek *cough*), it’s possible that Damian may move locations if he hears Dick coming.
He clears both his room and Damian’s. He knows the kid isn’t hiding in Alfred’s room, because he respects Alfred’s privacy enough to stay out of there, so he moves on to the other two rooms.
He checks off the second floor faster, in about ten minutes total. He’s starting for the third floor when he realizes that he never cleared the kitchen. Damian’s gotten more comfortable there, often watching Alfred from the kitchen table as he prepares dinner. He likes the methodical-ness and careful precision that comes with baking and cooking.
Alfred just cleared out a bunch of old, blackened pots a few days ago, which led to a huge rearrangement of utensils and cookware.
Interesting.
Dick spins around and heads back to the first floor, then beelines it for the kitchen. He slows as he gets to the doorway, in case Damian is hiding somewhere with a vantage point. He peeks carefully around the corner, keeping as much of his head hidden as he can, and scans the vicinity.
The manor’s kitchen is a million-dollar kitchen. It utilizes as much space as possible, which includes most things being sunken into the walls and counters, such as the fridge, ovens, and cupboards. So there’s not a lot of space on the outside to hide. Damian is small, so it’s possible he squeezed himself into the cupboards.
But Damian was raised by the League of Assassins, by Talia and Ra’s themselves. Dick knows that Damian is going to assume Dick will look for him inside of something, because those are the best places to hide.
But Damian is an assassin, and he is Robin. He wouldn’t go the easy route.
He’s on top of something for sure, but where? The open surfaces are all empty. The doors and drawers are all shut. The overhead lights are off, so the room is lit up by the light from outside as it filters through the numerous, massive windows.
Alfred almost always keeps the overhead light on. It’s easier for him to see when he does quick checks that the stove hasn’t been left on, and that there are no knives or other dangerous objects that have been left out.
If Damian is here, that means he’s up high. The light has been turned off so that it doesn’t hurt his eyes or cause a glare that obstructs his view. There’s only one place in the kitchen that has a flat, open surface high enough that the overhead lights would be too bright, and where Dick can’t see.
There’s one cupboard on the wall that doubles for both the kitchen and the hallway. It’s attached to the doorframe, the very left wall when someone first walks into the kitchen. The cupboard is right beside the fridge, on the other side. The fridge and the top of the cupboard are the same height, so Damian would have a perfect view of the doorway.
A perfect view, except for the fact that because he’s so high up and on the other side of the fridge, the lower half of the fridge blocks the floor on the other side. Which means Dick is hidden perfectly when he flattens himself onto the ground.
His spot on the floor is how he sees an ice cube on the hardwood right in front of the fridge, and that’s how he’s sure that Damian is up there. Dick bets it got there when Damian climbed up using both the counter beneath the cupboard and the space where the water and ice dispenser is on the fridge as foot boosts.
Now, how to get him. Dick could jump out, but that seems boring. “Found you!” doesn’t have the Wayne family ring to it.
Instead, he carefully shuffles backwards out of the doorway. He hurries to the family room, where he knows Alfred has a bowl of fake fruit as a centerpiece on the coffee table.
Alfred is there, actually, sitting on the couch and reading a newspaper. He folds the paper inwards when he sees Dick scampering into the room. “Find him, did you?”
Dick flashes him a devious smirk. “Oh yeah,” he says, grabbing a fake banana from the bowl, then runs back out of the room.
He remembers to get down flat when he gets to the doorway of the kitchen. Once he’s on his back, he toes off his shoes so that they don’t squeak against the wood, then slowly wiggles into the kitchen. He’s attentive not to pass the edge of the fridge and into Damian’s line of sight.
When he’s in perfect position, he can just barely see Damian’s arm on top of the cupboard space. Dick grins, carefully aiming the banana, and flings it towards the top of the fridge.
It disappears over the edge for a split second, but then he hears a squawk as it bounces off the side of Damian’s head. Damian’s head shoots upwards, but he must have forgotten how close the ceiling was, because he slams his head into it.
Dick slaps a hand over his mouth to keep in his laughter. Damian rubs the top of his head, staring at Dick with a mix of annoyance and surprise.
“How did you find me?” he asks in disbelief.
Dick gets to his feet, taking a couple of deep breaths to stop the laughter spasming in his chest. “Al just cleaned the kitchen out — perfect chance to find an unknown hiding spot,” he explains. “When I couldn’t find you, I realized you were out of my line of sight, which meant you had to be on the other side of the fridge. Also,” he points to the ice cube on the floor, “you left evidence.”
Damian scowls. “What a rookie mistake.”
Dick snorts, coming around the side of the fridge to stand in front of the cupboards. The boy is on his stomach, crunched into the small space. He eyes the hiding spot, suddenly taking in how high up he actually is. “Uh, can you even get down?”
Damian peers down at the counter below, then the floor, and the hums. “I do not think I thought this through all the way.”
The corners of Dick’s mouth tug upwards a little. He claps his hands, then opens his arms wide. “Alright, part two of stealth training,” he says. “Dismount from the hiding place.”
It’s not much different than leaping from roof to roof the way they do every night, but Damian still appears a bit wary. Maybe because he doesn’t have his grapple. Still, a fall from that height won’t kill him, and Dick wouldn’t let him hit the ground anyway.
“C’mon,” he urges, waving his hands inwards. “I’ve got you.”
Damian is still slightly dubious, but he takes a breath, shuffles to the edge, and pushes himself off. Dick takes a step forward when he recalculates the landing position, and easily catches Damian when he lands in his arms.
“Fantastic landing,” Dick teases, “but the dismount was sloppy.”
Damian just rolls his eyes and says, “Put me down, heathen.”
Dick gives him an extra tight hug as a punishment, which results in Damian shrieking bloody murder, but he eventually drops Damian onto his feet.
“This was very beneficial,” the boy tells Dick as he straightens out his clothes. “We should adopt this into our regular training regimen.”
Dick presses his lips together to keep from beaming at the kid and risking him changing his mind. “I think that is an excellent idea,” he agrees.
Damian nods curtly, pleased, then says, “I am hungry.”
Dick lets himself smile at that. “Me too,” he says, then turns to face the refrigerator. “Let’s see what we can scrounge up.”
Dick doesn’t come home to Damian hiding every day, but it’s become a regular part of their week. Most times, Dick is able to sneak up on him, much to Damian’s chagrin. But Dick can see him improve over the weeks their little game goes on, and he’s able to catch Dick more and more and starts racking up wins.
It’s become the highlight of Dick’s week.
All in all, it takes four months of sessions (with a three-day period in between) for Dick to be mostly immune to the strain. It’s pretty impressive, and Dick is proud of himself, but man, as soon as Scarecrow is back in Arkham, Dick is downing an entire bottle of melatonin pills and sleeping for two weeks.
The night before their expected final showdown with the Scarecrow, Dick catches Damian in one of the many sitting rooms, huddled by the roaring fireplace. Bruce’s comforter is around his shoulders, so fluffy that it drowns him and Dick nearly misses him, thinking it’s just a pile of bedding.
When he realizes what he’s looking at, though, his heart clenches painfully.
He comes around Damian’s left, away from the fire, because he’s overheated after training down in the Cave. They cut their patrol short tonight so that they could come home and get a good rest and meal in before the showdown tomorrow.
Dick doesn’t prompt or probe at Damian. He knows that Damian knows he’s here, and will say something if he wants to say something. Instead, he just fixes the comforter where it’s twisted up so that it’s less constricting.
“Was Father ever afraid, before an important battle like this?” Damian asks.
Dick cocks his head as he thinks. “A few times,” he remembers. “When the Justice League faced down Darkseid for the final time. When Bruce went to fight Scarecrow the day after getting hit with his toxin for the very first time. Every first time a Robin went out with him.”
“Not while trying to find Todd?”
Surprised at the question, Dick has to take a moment to recalibrate before replying, “He was more angry and frantic than he was afraid.”
Damian is silent as he ponders the information. “Do you think he was afraid when he died?”
Something painful clogs itself in Dick’s throat at the idea. “I don’t know,” he answers honestly. “But I’d like to think that he wasn’t. That he didn’t know what was about to happen.” He swallows thickly. “That he didn’t feel anything.”
It’s naive to think. Logically, Bruce would have felt some pain, the fire from the explosion burning his skin until it ate at his nerves, and then he wouldn’t have felt a thing. It only would have lasted a few seconds, if that, but he knows that Bruce probably felt something. He just really, really wishes that weren’t the case.
“What’s going on, Dami?” he asks.
Damian pulls the comforter around him even more, which just makes his head almost disappear underneath. “I do not know what it is like, to die,” he says. “I do not like not knowing things.”
Dick would suggest talking to Jason about it, but he thinks that would only scare the kid more. Plus, he’s not even sure Jason would talk to him.
“You’ve never been concerned like this before,” Dick points out gently. “Why now?”
Damian makes his little, “Tt” noise, tilting his head away almost in shame. “I have something to lose,” he replies.
Dick frowns. “You’ve always been able to die, Damian.”
“I would rather die,” Damian confesses, “than live without you.”
The air whooshes out of Dick’s lungs without his permission, but he doesn’t manage to get any more back in. Of all the things he expected Damian to say — how he missed his father, how he wished Bruce was there to guide him, how he was scared of the pain that sometimes comes with dying. This…
“Oh, baby bat,” Dick coos sadly. “I’ve fought the Scarecrow a thousand times. Everything will be alright.”
“How do you know that?” Damian shoots, whipping his head around to glare at Dick. “You cannot say that. You don’t know for sure.”
Dick reaches forward and knocks on the wooden floor three times, an old superstition that Bruce taught him all those years ago. “Now I’ve un-jinxed myself,” he says. “All is well.”
Damian lets out a frustrated noise. “You are a buffoon if you think that tapping some wood is enough to—”
Dick reaches out as Damian squabbles out his rant, scooping the kid up and dragging him into Dick’s lap. Damian makes a squawking, shrieking noise in surprise as he is transferred from one location to the other. Dick keeps the comforter curled around him, and drags the ends so that it covers Dick’s body, too.
“Richard, what on earth do you think you—”
“Knocking on wood comes from an old Celtic myth,” Dick interrupts, soothing Damian’s prickling edges with long, broad strokes of his hand down his back. “They thought that wood spirits lived in the trees. The spirits were mischievous, so if they heard you making a promise or hoping for something, they would use their powers to mess it up, or stop it from happening.”
Damian has quieted, staring at Dick with wide eyes and holding his shoulders with trembling hands. “But they thought that knocking on the wood would shake and startle the spirits, and would ward them off,” he continues. “So if you knock on wood, it’s meant to prevent you from getting jinxed, in case those little wood spirits are listening.”
Damian’s breathing has settled, and he stares at Dick with wary disbelief. “You do not actually believe that is true, do you?”
Dick shrugs. “I didn’t think aliens and goddesses were real,” he reasons, “but look at the Justice League.”
Damian averts his eyes, obviously still concerned about tomorrow. When Dick pulls Damian in, he knows Damian won’t fight it. And he doesn’t — Damian all but falls into Dick’s body, coiling his arms around his midsection and locking his knees on either side of his hips, pressing his cheek where his heart beats.
They say nothing for a long time. Dick gets lost in the crackling fire and the heat from Damian’s little body. He’s worried about tomorrow, too. He has no clue what tricks he’s going to pull and how many goons he’s going to have. He’s worried that the long-term exposure won’t work and he’ll be affected by the toxin anyway. He’s worried something will happen to Damian.
But Dick can’t get bogged down with worries. He needs to go into this with a clear head, ready to think on his feet and adapt at a moment’s notice. He needs Damian at his side and Alfred in his ear. He needs Bruce keeping watch up above.
When Dick manages to pull himself out of his thoughts, he looks down and finds Damian fast asleep. He’s drooling a little, a small, dark wet stain on Dick’s right pectoral. His fists are clenching Dick’s shirt. They look so much bigger when they’re circled around the handle of a sword or the length of a bo staff, but here, Dick sees how small they really are. How young Damian actually is.
Damian. His boy. His son.
He gently runs his hand down Damian’s head, smoothing back his hair. Then he does it again, and again, and again. “Whatever happens tomorrow,” he says quietly, “just know that I love you.”
Damian burrows further into Dick’s chest, warm from every angle. He sniffs, breaths slow and even. His fingers tighten around Dick’s shirt.
“I love you too,” he whispers.
Dick’s heart lurches. So. Not asleep then.
He doesn’t let himself feel embarrassed, not when his boy just said that he loved him. Dick cradles him like that long through the morning and falls asleep there, with his head thrown back against the couch.
He’ll wake with a crick in his neck that he will fix with some Advil. And then, he and Damian will ride into Gotham to implement their final plan for the Scarecrow and hope they both make it back in one piece.
For now, though, all Dick cares about is holding his son as he sleeps. Because, while Batman has duties and dangers for miles, Dick Grayson doesn’t see past his own nose — not when his son is underneath it.
Phase One goes into effect.
It pains him to leave Damian behind, but he knows that he has to. He draws the cape over his shoulders to appear more menacing, then sweeps through the night, locating the warehouse that Scarecrow is working out of.
He perches on a nearby rooftop, hanging off the big antenna at the very top to use his vantage point to figure out the best way to get inside. He’s got to take out as many goons as he can at the very beginning, but there isn’t a way for him to sneak in without being noticed.
He already knows the layout of the warehouse, having staked it out and looked up the blueprints from the Gotham City online archives. There are no windows, only a bunch of small vents that are too narrow to crawl through, and a single skylight on the roof. Game plan is: walking in through the front doors.
Dick’s really not looking forward to it.
It’s odd, not having Damian at his side. He’s gotten so used to the kid being his shadow these past few months that he almost feels exposed without him here. But it’s for the best.
“I’m going in,” he tells Alfred over the comms.
“Copy,” Alfred replies. “Do be careful. Your body may not be able to handle repetitive exposure in short periods of time, despite your immunity.”
It’s something he and Alfred have been discussing for weeks. This strain may not make Dick hallucinate, but that doesn’t mean so much chemical exposure to his bloodstream won’t have disastrous consequences.
“I’ll watch out,” he promises, then sails off the roof and lands swiftly onto the ground in front of the warehouse doors. “Be ready for my signal.”
“Understood,” says Alfred, then goes silent.
Right. It’s now or never.
There are a few different ways Dick could go about this. He could try to sneak inside — pick the lock as quietly as possible and open the doors without being noticed — but that would waste time, and Dick is sure he’ll be too loud for it to work anyway. He could also barge right in and catch them off guard, attacking for the few seconds that he has the upper hand. But he wouldn’t have it for very long.
He goes with the only other option he could think of: smoke bombs.
The doors are locked — he’s not sure if there’s a door lock, a doorknob lock, or a giant metal lock securing a string of chains. But it’s locked, which means he gets to blow shit up.
He pulls a small detonator out of his utility belt and sticks it to the surface of one of the doors. Once it’s activated, he takes a few steps back and pulls his cape up over his body to shield himself as it explodes.
The doors splinter and break open, flinging wide and giving Dick a clear way inside. As he hears the goons inside start yelling, Dick pulls two smoke bombs, lights them, and flings them into the warehouse.
The two, smaller explosions that follow result in even more yelling from the goons. Dick, vision clear thanks to the lenses in his cowl, rushes into the warehouse. The air is thick and gray from the bombs, but Dick can see right through it, and gets his hands on the nearest lackey. He’s able to knock him out with two precise punches.
There are more than there were during the trial run, but there still aren’t that many. Scarecrow likes flying under the radar, so it’s unsurprising he cut back on his number of goons to avoid garnering attention.
One goon leaps on him from behind, but Dick runs backwards and slams their bodies into the wall. The man on his back takes most of the hit, and he crumples to the floor in pain. Somewhere, he can hear the Scarecrow screaming his name.
Bullets start flying from all directions. Dick ducks behind one of the massive metal shelves along the inside perimeter of the warehouse. There’s all sorts of stuff on them — bottles of chemicals, broken pieces of technology, books, giant stirring spoons and sticks, gas masks, and a whole lot more shit that helps block Dick from the others.
Through the thinning smoke, he locates Scarecrow on the catwalks hanging along the top of the warehouse. Dick hides under the mask of the shelves as he hurries towards the stairs that lead to the catwalks. As he goes, he tosses a handful of stun Batarangs into the fray of frantic lackeys. Hopefully it can buy him some time.
He rushes up the stairs, but they’re old and loud, and the Scarecrow hears him coming. Scarecrow swings his scythe at Dick when he gets close. Dick jumps backwards to avoid the swipe, then grabs it by the handle and tries to twist it out of Scarecrow’s grasp.
Scarecrow keeps a surprisingly tight hold on it, so Dick lets go in favor of taking his own swing at the Scarecrow’s head. The Scarecrow manages to dodge it, swiping his scythe again, but Dick knocks it out of the way with the sides of his arms like a shield.
They fight up on the catwalks for a few minutes, until the smoke has cleared almost completely, and the goons realize that Batman is on the catwalks with their boss. Dick sees them flood up the stairs towards them, so the next time the Scarecrow takes a swipe at him, Dick drags the scythe and the Scarecrow forward at one time so he can punch the Scarecrow directly in the face.
When Crane hollers and lets his guard down long enough to clutch his nose, Dick grabs the edges of the catwalks and uses them to propel him over and onto the ground below. He takes out a couple more of the lackeys that are waiting, but by the time he’s done with them, the Scarecrow and the others are coming after him.
Dick books it to the barrels of toxin, of which only five of… sixteen maybe? — are open and releasing gas into the air. He’s able to drop a vial of antitoxin into one of the open barrels to neutralize it before a pitchfork is hurled his way. He just barely manages to avoid it, but he has to jump sideways, and ends up crashing right into the Scarecrow himself.
Without a word, the Scarecrow rips Dick’s gas mask off with his scythe and sprays a burst of toxin from his blaster into Dick’s face.
It’s putrid and smells like rotten eggs. Dick coughs and gags, tripping backwards and onto his ass in an attempt to get away from the smell. But he can’t, because the smell is all over his suit and his face.
“What’s the matter, Bats?” Crane asks, stalking over to where Dick is choking through the gas. He looms over Dick’s form, the stitched frown on his burlap mask eerie and sinister in the dim warehouse lights. The industrial fan attached to the ceiling whirrs in slow, low swings, moaning into the night. “You’re looking a bit… frightened.”
Dick tries to scramble to his feet, but the Scarecrow shoves him back down. Dick goes without a fight, legs weak as the toxin works through his system. Alfred was right — the hallucinations aren’t here, but his body is still feeling some of the physical effects. The good thing? His heart feels fine, save for it being slightly elevated from exertion.
Good. That means their plan is working.
Dick continues to play it up for the Scarecrow. His lackeys have ceased their attacks in favor of watching Batman struggle on the cold floor, grinning from ear to ear. Their guns and sickles have been lowered to their sides.
“Things are always scarier in the dark,” taunts the Scarecrow. Dick gags again and spits out a mouthful of bile. “But I thought you liked the dark?” He cackles to himself. “Did I make the big bad bat afraid of the dark?”
He presses the edge of his scythe to the thin skin right where Dick’s jaw meets his neck, tilting his head up. “I can make you very afraid,” Scarecrow says lowly. He kicks Dick hard in the chest for good measure. “I can make you shake like a worm in a bird’s mouth.”
Behind the Scarecrow, visible from around the side of his body, is Damian — decked out in his Robin uniform with a rebreather shoved into his mouth. He’s neutralized all of the open toxin barrels and marked the unopened, unneutralized ones with an X in black marker. He’s placed a shock pad on each one, so that anyone who touches the barrel without inputting the passcode is electrocuted.
He gives Dick a thumbs up and extends his bo staff, ready for a fight, and Phase Two begins.
“You’re looking a little dizzy,” the Scarecrow tuts, raising his scythe like an executioner’s sword. “I have a way to—”
“You talk too much,” Dick wheezes, then swings his legs around to knock the Scarecrow off of his feet. He rolls away as the Scarecrow comes toppling down, avoiding being kicked in the face.
Behind them, Damian sprints towards them. One of the lackeys spots him and shouts, “Hey, look out!” but he sees Damian a moment too late. Damian leaps and strikes one of the lackeys with his electric bo staff in the back of the neck, then jabs the end of the staff into the gut of another one nearby.
“Robin?” Scarecrow shrieks, outraged. “Where did he come from?”
“The front doors,” Dick replies in the middle of beating the shit out of three goons that are trying to rip him apart with the points of their sickles. When they’re down, he turns to the Scarecrow — who is scrambling back onto his feet — and adds, “You should probably lock those next time.”
“Tt,” Damian huffs, stepping over the goons twitching with electricity, “I still wanted to crash through the skylight.” His voice sounds just the slightest bit mechanical due to the rebreather.
Dick rolls his eyes at him. “I’ll make sure you make a grand entrance through a skylight one of these days.”
The Scarecrow lifts his toxin gun again, so Dick shouts, “Look out!” and shoves Damian out of the line of fire. He tries to throw himself out of the way as well, but the Scarecrow is aiming at him, and he takes the hit. Dick frantically waves his hand around to diffuse the gas and coughs, tears welling in his eyes at the awful smell.
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand,” the Scarecrow rambles as Dick shakes the fog from his brain. The direct hit is a lot to take, but it still can’t beat Dick’s immunity. “You— you’re immune. It’s not possible.”
Dick is still able to fight off the goons that attack him when they think he’s down, and then he goes after the Scarecrow again, undisturbed by the toxin or the hallucinations that never come.
The Scarecrow lunges at him in rage. They wrestle on foot, stumbling around the warehouse as the Scarecrow tries to rip Dick’s head off. Dick manages to shove him off, but it turns out to be a mistake, because his arms being free gives him the opportunity to slam the butt of his toxin gun square in Dick’s face.
Blood gushes from his nose, but he didn’t feel a crack, so he doesn’t think it’s broken. The Scarecrow swings again, but Dick catches his wrist and twists it, then kicks Scarecrow in the chest. The Scarecrow stumbles backwards, but grabs ahold of one of the barrels for balance. It electrocutes him as soon as his fingers touch it. He screams in pain, yanking his hand away, then kicks the barrel towards Dick.
Dick jumps out of the way, and the barrel rolls off towards the middle of the warehouse. It ends up slamming into two other lackeys behind him. And, well, that takes care of those guys.
“Something is different,” the Scarecrow snarls in a gravelly voice as he heaves for breath. He points at Dick accusingly. “You’re different. What did you do? What did you do?”
Scarecrow lunges at him, taking them both to the ground, but the Scarecrow is awful at hand-to-hand combat, so Dick gains the upper hand easily. He pins Scarecrow down with his knees and the weight of his body, then sucker punches the Scarecrow in the face. Then he does it again, and again, and again.
Scarecrow desperately tries to fight back, but he’s too weak to give Dick any more than a few scythe slashes at his suit. He’s desperately trying to spray his toxin in Dick’s face, but it’s useless. Dick’s immune now, which means Scarecrow has been reduced to nothing more than a level one criminal.
Dick decides to be merciful, so he grabs Scarecrow by his burlap mask and pulls him up, then slams his head into the floor. Scarecrow falls limp with a pained yelp, toxin blaster clattering to the ground.
Dick sighs out in relief. Crane may be a brilliant (read also: psychotic) mastermind, but unlike most of the other Gotham criminals, he’s puny and can’t fight for shit. Small blessings, he supposes.
Another goon comes sprinting at him from the side. Dick to rolls off of the Scarecrow to dodge a knife flying at his face and gets to his feet. He takes a punch so that he can let the lackey get closer, then drags him forward and around to put him in a chokehold.
That’s how Dick locates Damian across the warehouse, still fighting a couple of goons. It’s also how Dick is able to see one of them pull something out of their belt.
“Grenade!” he yells.
Damian reacts immediately by throwing a Batarang towards the lackey. In turn, the lackey is unable to throw the toxin grenade and takes the brunt of the explosion. But Damian is too close to him to come out unscathed, and he goes sprawling backwards.
“Robin!” Dick screams. He squeezes his chokehold around the lackey in his arms until he passes out. He leaves him behind, rushing to the pile of collapsed shelves where Damian was standing.
He finds Damian on the ground a few feet away from the shelves, carefully sitting up. Dick exhales sharply when he sees that the kid managed to not get crushed. He helps Damian to his feet, doing a frantic thrice-over of his body.
“Status report,” he orders, heart clenching with nerves.
Damian pauses to do — what Dick assumes is — a silent check over himself, and comes to the conclusion of, “Fine.”
“Eloquent,” Dick responds, sighing in relief. He pats Damian’s shoulder, and when he doesn’t get so much as a wince, finally feels the knot of tension in his body ease. “You did good.”
Then, he stalks over to the goon that threw the grenade (who is still on the ground, dazed from the explosion) picks him up by the shirt, and slams him hard into the floor, just like he did with his boss. His head smacks against the concrete, and he’s out like a light. Dick drops him without another glance.
Damian nods with approval, which only makes Dick grin. And with that, it’s time to begin Phase Three: taking them all to Arkham.
The two of them begin tying up Scarecrow and his goons. It’s a relatively easy task, despite the fact that their unconscious bodies are heavier to work with, so it doesn’t take them long. Just as well, though. He and Damian have had enough excitement for one night. Dick is itching to get out of here and get home. Robin also seems to be stumbling on his feet — most likely an after-effect from the force of the grenade.
Dick starts heading for the doors, and that, of course, is when things go wrong.
He didn’t even know Damian wasn’t following him until he heard a hoarse, high wheeze come from behind him. When he turns around, he expects to find a goon waking up, not Damian swaying on his feet.
Dick’s heart drops straight down into his feet. “Robin?” he asks cautiously, already briskly approaching his partner.
Damian can’t talk. He barely gets out, “Bat—” before he collapses.
Dick leaves the goons tied up and mostly unconscious in his dust as he sprints across the warehouse. The only important thing is that Dick has to get to Damian, because there’s something wrong with his son.
“Robin!” he yells, falling to his knees beside him. Damian is staring up at him, and even through the white lenses and the rebreather, Dick can see the pain and panic written across his face.
“What happened?” he asks, rushed, and frantically pats around Damian’s body to see if there’s any obvious damage. “What happened?”
That’s when he clocks it — a crack in the mouthpiece of the rebreather.
Dick swears sharply. That fucking grenade. It must have cracked the rebreather in the explosion. That means Damian got the full dose of the toxin, lethally concentrated.
Damian sounds like he’s struggling for air, letting out choked-off gasps and rattling coughs. He’s clutching at his chest, right above his lungs, grappling at them and flailing his head around, like he’s freaking out.
“B-Baba,” he wheezes, strained. There’s panic in his voice.
Dick doesn’t have time to feel elated at the word. His joy burns away as quickly as it came as ice-cold fear shoots through Dick’s body. Damian’s too small to take the concentrated dosage. His heart won’t be able to handle it.
“You’re alright,” he assures, hurriedly digging around in his belt for the antitoxin. There are multiple vials, but the human body can only handle one dose of the toxin and one dose of the antitoxin in a short span of time before their organs get overwhelmed and start to shut down.
“You’re alright,” he repeats, sticking the syringe into the vein in Damian’s arm.
The antitoxin pumps fast through his body, but not fast enough. Within the next seven seconds, Damian’s entire body seizes up, then slumps, and then he goes still. Dick puts two trembling fingers to his carotid; no pulse beneath them.
“No, no!” he shouts. He flings a leg around Damian's hips, straddling him, and then locks his hands together and starts chest compressions.
The antitoxin can’t work if the blood isn’t pumping through the body. Blood can’t pump through the body if the heart isn’t beating, and organs can’t function without blood.
“C’mon,” he breathes. His chest feels tight, lungs squeezing together as he starts to hyperventilate. “C’mon kid, please.”
He thinks he hears the sounds of sirens in the distance, but Dick can’t be sure. He can hardly hear anything over the roar of blood in his ears, the terrified pounding of his heartbeat.
This was not supposed to be Phase Three.
Damian’s body jerks around under him from the force of Dick’s compressions. He’s so small, so much smaller than him or Bruce, or even Tim. It doesn’t matter how much he’s grown in the year that Dick has known him. He’s still so fucking small. Still so fucking young.
He should never have been out here. He should never have been out here. What has Dick done?
“Dami, please,” he begs. “Don’t do this.”
He bends down, pinches Damian’s nose, and blows into his mouth, then goes back to pumping his chest. He waits a handful of seconds before doing it again. He can feel Damian’s ribs crack under his hands. He keeps going. He tries to count in his head to stay on rhythm, but it’s hard when he can feel himself panicking, when he can’t feel Damian’s chest rising with air.
Dick thinks he’s screaming, but he’s not sure. He can’t hear himself. The only thing he can think of is that he knocked on the wooden floor three times yesterday during their conversation, and Damian did not.
His eyes burn as they fill with tears, the longer Damian goes without moving. His face is slack, and his usually dark skin is a sickening shade lighter. Dick is going to have nightmares about it for the rest of his life.
“Robin,” he says on a sob. “Damian!”
He yanks off his glove and puts two bare fingers to Damian’s neck to feel for a pulse. He cries out when he doesn’t and goes back to CPR. He thinks he’s broken a bone in his palm, but he doesn’t register the pain. It’s overridden by the agony erupting in his chest.
Please no, he begs, over and over in his mind. His chest heaves, but hardly any air seems to make it in. Please don’t take him. Please don’t take my son.
Dick keeps up the compressions. He can feel one of Damian’s ribs cracking beneath his hands. It only makes Dick cry harder. Damian’s torso jolts from the force, and then a hoarse cough wheezes its way out of his mouth.
Dick sucks in a trembling gasp, watching as Damian’s face starts to move. Dick hurriedly gets off of him so he can breathe easier and then rips off Damian’s mask, almost unable to from how badly his hands are shaking. With his face free, Damian’s eyes flutter open.
Immediately, they shut again, but Dick puts his hand over Damian’s chest and feels his heart beating — weak, and practically imperceptible, but beating. Damian takes a few shallow, shuddery inhales, and Dick’s entire body wracks with sobs as relief floods through his system. “Dami,” he cries. “Baby.”
Damian makes a wounded noise. He tries to open his eyes again, attempting to turn and find the source of Dick’s voice, but he doesn’t manage to succeed very well. “B—” he mumbles, airy. “Buh…”
“Shh, Baba’s here,” Dick sniffles, pressing his palm to Damian’s cheek to let him know he’s there. “Don’t try to move, baby bat. Just stay with me.”
Dick breaks every traffic law known to man getting back to the Batcave. Alfred is there, and he takes Damian away. He hooks him up to an EEG machine and keeps a defibrillator nearby. He gives him medication in an IV drip, and then forces Dick to sit down on one of the beds beside Damian before he faints.
Alfred does much more than this, but these are the only things Dick has been able to process. The only thing going through his head is Damian Damian Damian. He still has on his Batman suit.
Dick wants to take him. He wants to pull the curtains around them and nail them into the wall so no one can get in. He wants to bundle him up and hide him away.
He loses time down in the Cave, because Dick does not move. He remains seated crisscross on the bed, watching Damian’s body and EEG like a hawk. Because Damian is okay right now. He’s alive and breathing and his heart is beating again. What if Dick looks away and it stops again? What if he dies again?
Because Damian died. He died.
He watches the steady rise and fall of Damian’s chest as he breathes, the physical proof that his boy is still here with them. Alfred sat with them once, for a bit, probably thinking that Dick may get up and take a break with someone keeping an eye on Damian. If so, he was wrong, because Dick stays put.
Alfred didn’t say a word the whole time. He just got up after a while and left them be.
As it turns out, Dick did not, in fact, break a bone in his palm; but there is a small hairline fracture (a break, according to Alfred, but Dick refuses to think so). He keeps his hand wrapped and braced tightly, but his non-injured hand remains studiously on top of Damian’s as he sleeps.
Eventually, Damian rouses for a bit, long enough to chirp at Dick for being a worry-wart and drink some soup, and then falls right back to sleep. Dick stays in the chair by his side.
Come late morning, Alfred descends into the Batcave with a tray piled high with breakfast foods, then forces Dick away from Damian’s bedside and over to a metal examination table so he can eat.
“Master Damian’s health has nothing to do with your presence, Master Dick,” Alfred chides, forcing him down into a seat. “It does, apparently, have everything to do with yours. Eat.”
And, well, Dick can’t say no when Alfred is scolding him like this.
So he eats. Slow, at first, since it’s been a while since he’s eaten anything, and then hunger comes ravaging through his stomach after a few minutes, and Dick tears into the food like a starved man.
“I believe I should update you on the events that occurred after you and Master Damian fled the scene,” Alfred tells him.
Dick’s heart kicks up a notch. Fuck, he’d completely forgotten about the entire mission that led to Damian’s injured state. He just left the Scarecrow and his men in that warehouse alone. Any of them could have woken up and gotten themselves free.
“Crane and his men were still there when the police arrived, and were all promptly arrested,” Alfred informs him. Oh, good. That means everything that’s happened in the last twelve hours wasn’t for nothing.
“What about the antidote?” he asks. How could he forget that? While Damian was laying in the medbay, alive and well, innocent people were still suffering in hospitals from exposure to Scarecrow’s toxin.
“Fret not, Master Dick,” Alfred assures him. “Once you and Master Damian were stable, I emailed Commissioner Gordon a file on the toxin, along with direction on how to make the antitoxin. He responded two days ago, citing he sent the directions to the hospitals and first responders. As far as I have heard, those affected are responding well to the treatments.”
Dick sighs out in relief. “And the barrels of toxin?” he questions, suddenly remembering those. “Damian put shock pads on them. Not even the police would be able to touch them.”
“I phoned Commissioner Gordon after Damian was stabilized and informed him of the code,” Alfred replies. “He was very grateful. Two of his officers received first-degree burns from the shocks.”
Dick winces, but can’t find it in himself to be too guilty. The shock pads prevented the toxin from getting into the wrong hands when Dick and Damian had to flee. Besides, first-degree burns usually heal pretty well.
“Have they disposed of it, yet?”
“No,” answers Alfred. “Commissioner Gordon put the barrels in an armored car and drove them to a meeting place I arranged with Master Jason.”
Dick sits up at attention. “Jason?” he echoes. “Jason went to pick up the toxin? Wait, even more— Gordon willingly gave sixteen barrels of gaseous toxin to the Red Hood?”
Alfred nods like it’s nothing. “I told Commissioner Gordon that the Red Hood was enough of our ally to be trusted,” he explains. “I told Master Jason what had transpired, and that you were unable to meet to pick up the shipment. He agreed and sent them over.”
Dick blinks, then leans back enough so he can see the four rows of barrels up against one of the far walls on the other side of the Cave. Jason brought them. How on earth did Dick miss Jason coming into the Cave and dropping off sixteen barrels?
Christ, what an awful Batman he is.
“Did Jason…?” Dick trails off, glancing over at Damian, then back to Alfred.
Alfred shakes his head. “I told him you would both be alright, and he left,” he remarks. His voice is tinted with disappointment. “He wasn’t here for maybe ten minutes.”
“Oh,” says Dick, slouching a little. “I’ll find him later and thank him.”
Alfred nods again, happy with that answer, then motions to Damian’s bed. When Dick turns around, he sits ramrod straight when he sees that Damian is awake again. He hurries over to the bedside to fret all over him.
“I am alright, Richard,” Damian says, voice tired. “I feel a bit weak, but I am the pinnacle of health otherwise.”
Dick snorts as an attempt to hide his sniffle. “After the night we just had, I’m more than happy to hear that, kid.”
Something in Damian’s face turns sour, and he looks away. “I apologize for what occurred,” he says, ashamed. “I should have run, or better protected my face.”
Dick blinks, taken aback. Confusion, and then sadness, and then rage, and then despair flood through him like a tidal wave. Carefully, he lowers himself into the chair beside the bed. “That wasn’t your fault.”
Damian’s face hardens over. “But if I had just—”
“No, Damian. It wasn’t your fault,” Dick says, firmer this time. “I could have done a thousand things to stop that from happening: if I hadn’t brought you on the mission. If I had made you immune too. If I had stayed with you. If I had noticed the crack sooner.”
He rests his hand on the top of Damian’s head, caressing it softly. Damian’s eyes flutter at the feeling. “It’s no one’s fault but Crane’s,” Dick tells him. “You understand? Don’t you dare blame yourself for this.”
Slowly, hesitantly, Damian nods, glossy eyes shifting and finally looking at Dick. “It was frightening.”
Dick’s heart twists painfully. He scoots in a little closer. “I know,” he responds. “But it’s over now. You’re safe. And I’m going to do whatever I can to make sure it never happens again.”
Damian closes his eyes, leaning back against the pillows, and lets Dick continue to pet his hair. All the while, Dick’s bandaged hand remains in Damian’s grasp, tiny fingers locking him in place.
“I’m going to be benched again, aren’t I?”
“Oh yeah. So fucking benched.”
Dick benches Damian for three months, minimum, and Alfred feeds him nothing but heart-healthy foods for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Damian is obviously exasperated by it all, and often gets frustrated with them, but he obeys what they say and eats what they tell him to.
He is very angry when, once Damian is up and walking again, Dick announces that he’s cutting his patrol hours in half.
“Gotham needs Batman,” he argues furiously. “You cannot just abandon the city because I’ve been hurt.”
Nothing he says ends up swaying Dick in the slightest. When he arrives back at the manor after his first shortened patrol, he finds Damian still awake and fuming on the couch, so drags Bruce’s comforter off the bed and into the sitting room, then drapes it over the both of them until they’re covered head to toe.
“Bruce always had a hard time balancing his job as a father and his job as Batman,” he tells Damian. “Mainly, he didn’t know where Batman ended and Bruce began. It affected his ability to parent.”
Damian doesn’t have anything to say to that. Dick wonders if he’s remembering his mother, who put her own mission first before Damian. He wonders if, at any point, Talia snapped out of it like Bruce did. Something tells him that the answer is no, considering Talia sent him away — unless that was her snapping out of it.
“Maybe I should resent him for it, but I don’t. I wouldn’t give up those years with him for anything,” Dick continues. His throat burns a little. God, he misses his dad so much. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from his mistakes.”
He tentatively curls an arm around Damian’s shoulders, and Damian leans into him without a second thought. Dick rests his chin on Damian’s head and closes his eyes.
(If he tries really hard, he can almost hear Bruce on the phone upstairs.)
“The mission means nothing if it’s at the cost of you,” Dick tells him. “There is nothing in this world that will ever be more important than you.”
Damian lets out a shuddery breath into Dick’s chest. He doesn’t say anything, but the silence speaks for itself.
He knows he made the right choice when he wakes up at a normal time three days later and gets to see Damian all sleep-ruffled with his hair in disarray and sheet indentations on his arms.
He transfers all ownership and executive power of Wayne Enterprises to Lucius Fox. Dick is relieved to have the weight off his shoulders — because really, he hates being a CEO, and everyone knows it. The Board is also relieved to hear of the change. They pat Dick on the back when he announces it during his final board meeting and tell him that he’s done well in his father’s absence.
“Wherever he is, Bruce is smiling,” Lucius tells him in his new office that afternoon. “I told you he never wanted you to have this job.”
Dick hugs Lucius with tears in his eyes and tells him not to be a stranger. “Alfred is always happy to cook for you, any time.”
“I just might take you up on that,” replies Lucius, grinning. “I haven’t had Alfred’s cooking in far too long.”
Dick walks out of Wayne Enterprises that sunny Thursday afternoon, and he’s never felt lighter.
He spends the next three months staying in with Damian when he can and going out when he has to. Both the city and her criminals know something’s up with the decrease in Batman sightings. Dick has taken to changing up the times he’s out at night so that criminals don’t become expectant on when he’ll be patrolling and when he won’t be.
The news has run rampant with speculation as to what’s going on — an injury seems to be the most accepted idea, but there are also theories such as body snatchers and Batman cutting deals with criminals. Dick lets them think whatever they want. It’s not like he cares.
Crime goes up, but even with the patrol reduction, Dick still manages to keep things at bay. Bane is somewhere in the Caribbean islands; the Penguin’s latest crime was overturning a Starkist semi-truck and stealing all of the canned tuna inside; Harley and Ivy are vacationing in Australia, and the Riddler, Scarecrow, and Joker are still locked up tight in Arkham.
The others, Dick is monitoring, but all have been fairly quiet since he and Damian took down Scarecrow’s operation. He knows they’re probably up to something, but he’ll leave them be for now.
And anyway, Damian is alive. He’s teaching Alfred how to make his favorite middle eastern foods, and convincing Dick to watch rated R movies with him, and helping from the Batcomputer while Dick is on patrol.
Damian is alive and spending time with Dick, and that’s all he really cares about, in the end.
Damian’s first Christmas with them is… surprisingly uneventful.
Dick bullies Damian into coming with him to pick out a tree. Damian, though he had loudly and irately announced that he was not looking forward to it, was very particular about each of the trees they looked at. Dick liked the third one they saw, but Damian spent an extra hour looking at as many as possible before finally deciding on the one he dubbed, “Sufficient.”
Dick could tell that Damian was very pleased at the way the tree farm owners gawked at the two Waynes and stumbled over themselves to make sure their tree was cut and trimmed properly and securely tied to the top of the car.
He doesn’t help much with the decorating, but Dick doesn’t mind. He’s more than happy to decorate the tree with Alfred while Damian tries hot chocolate for the first time and dives curiously into the DVD pile of Dick’s favorite Christmas movies.
Christmas Eve sees a shorter patrol. It snowed a couple of nights before, and Dick was eager the entire night to get Damian back home where he was warm and unable to get hypothermia.
In the morning, Dick hardly pays attention to his gifts, focusing entirely on Damian as he opens his very first Christmas gifts and dumps out his stocking.
Damian has no religion, like most of the Wayne family, and the League never celebrated Christmas. Dick had told him, on the first of December, that he didn’t have to celebrate Christmas with them if he didn’t want to.
But Damian said he didn’t mind participating, especially if it meant he got presents. So Dick made sure to get him enough gifts to drown him.
Dick calls off patrol that night, and instead, the three of them sit around the fireplace and watch Dick’s favorite Christmas movie: Elf. Damian, surprisingly, seems to enjoy the movie.
It’s one of the nicest day’s that Dick has had in a while.
Dick postpones patrol on New Year’s Eve to watch the ball drop on TV. It’s the first time Damian experiences the celebration, and Dick spends the evening dancing to the musicians, much to Damian’s dismay.
Alfred bakes cupcakes for them to eat and Damian’s favorite middle eastern food, chicken tikka masala, so that he still has a little bit of his home that gets to mix with his life here.
Alfred and Dick proudly wear the glittery cardboard top hats that the latter bought at the dollar store the day before. Damian refuses, and he and Dick get into a sparring match as Dick tries to wrestle one onto Damian’s head.
Damian wins.
Dick counts down with the crowd on the TV and blows his party blower as hard as he possibly can right in Damian’s face. Damian attacks him.
He’s suited up and cruising the streets of Gotham by 12:45. He pays for his delay by frantically trying to clean up all the messes left by drunken people wandering the streets and criminals taking advantage of the celebrations.
Damian is asleep on the couch beside the clock in the study when he gets home. He scoops Damian into his arms without another thought and carries him off to bed.
Bruce’s birthday arrives on a quiet day in February. A fresh layer of snow has covered the ground overnight, and there are birds tweeting good morning outside in the trees.
Dick stays in his room for most of the day. Damian allows his privacy for all of thirty minutes before forcing his way inside and laying in the bed with him. Alfred follows forty-five minutes later and makes sure the curtains are open to get fresh sunlight into the room. Then he sits down in the armchair near the bookcase and opens up a book without a word.
Damian turns on the television and plays the pre-recorded episodes of The Brady Bunch, then sits beside Dick up at the pillows.
Sometimes, Alfred leaves the room to bring food, and at some point they all leave to use the bathroom; but for the most part, the three of them remain in Dick’s room with the door closed and the winter sunlight streaming in. None of them say a word the entire day.
At one point, a cardinal lands on Dick’s windowsill, bright red feathers stark against the pure white snow behind it. Hi Bruce, Dick says to himself.
The bird chirps at him, as if it could read Dick’s mind, then flutters away.
The three months’ bench time goes by in the blink of an eye, and soon Damian is back out on the streets with him again on a beautiful night in March.
Dick hates it.
“I think I should stop being Batman,” Dick tells Alfred one day.
Damian is asleep on the couch, having passed out towards the end of Nightmare on Elm Street — another one of Damian’s suggestions. Dick has been staring at him for the rest of the movie, and he only looks away when he notices the main menu playing for the second time in a row.
It’s early morning, but Dick has the blackout curtains in the living room drawn, and all the lights off except for the television and the lamp on the table beside the couch.
When he looks up, his eyes find Alfred watching him on the other side of the room. There’s a pause as the man takes in the information, but he recovers quickly enough. “Right so, Master Dick,” he agrees. “It will be good to see Nightwing in the skies again.”
Something curls in Dick’s gut at the idea. “Actually,” he admits, cautious, “I was considering stopping all together. At least for a while.”
Alfred’s old eyes widen in surprise. “Is that so?” he asks. “Of all of you children, you were the last one I expected to say such a thing.”
Dick shrugs, glancing back down at Damian, then looking away. “Gotham has Jason and Tim. And, technically, Selena,” he rationalizes. “But it also has the Justice League. Any of them would help in a heartbeat if Gotham were in trouble.”
Alfred remains quiet, letting Dick get it all out.
“I’m not meant to be Batman. But after all this time, I can’t imagine going back to Nightwing just like that,” he says. “I don’t want to keep leaving Damian all the time, not when he finally has some stability in his life. I got shot up last night, Alf. I could have died.”
“You’ve always had that risk,” Alfred points out.
“I know, but— I don’t know if I’m willing to take the risk anymore,” he confesses. “You and I are all Damian has left. If something happened…”
He looks back at Damian again, at the way his nose wrinkles when he breathes in. “I don’t even want to leave him for the night, Alfred,” he says. “I don’t want to die and leave him forever.”
Alfred waits for him to say something else. When he doesn’t, he prompts, “But?”
Dick worries at his bottom lip. “But Gotham is my responsibility. How could I just leave her?” he questions guiltily. “I’d be ruining everything Bruce worked so hard for.”
Alfred makes a sharp tutting sound, and when Dick whips his head around, he wilts under the stern look the butler is sending him. “Gotham City is the responsibility of everyone who lives in her,” he tells Dick.
“Yes, and—”
“And your father made his choice,” Alfred interrupts. “Don’t make yours for someone else. Make your choice for you.” His eyes flick down to Damian, then back up at Dick. “You and your family.”
He leaves, after that, heading upstairs to get ready for bed. Dick stays where he is for a while, thinking over everything. Maybe he should talk to Wally about it. Or Clark and Diana. They always know how to think level-headedly about important things.
(Deep down, Dick thinks he’s already made up his mind. What he’s really looking for is for someone to tell him that it’s okay.)
He shuts off the TV and calls it a night. He stands, twisting and stretching to crack his back, then eyes Damian’s sleeping form. He considers for a moment waking him up. But then he thinks, hell with it, if Dick is considering abandoning vigilantism for this kid, there’s no reason why he can’t carry him.
Carefully, so that he doesn’t wake him up, Dick gets his arms under Damian’s curled-up figure and scoops him up. Damian shuffles around, but ultimately stays asleep. Mind made up, Dick heads for the staircase. He carries Damian up and down the hall, then gently deposits the kid into his bed.
“Goodnight, Damian,” he whispers, pulling the comforter over his small body.
Damian sighs in his sleep, pressing his face towards the cool surface of his pillow and snuggling deeper into the blankets. “Goodnight, Baba,” he whispers, then falls still.
Dick swallows back his noise of surprise. A fond, warm rush floods through his body, and he’s unable to stop the grin that spreads across his face. He hasn’t been called that since he nearly died — which Dick has been referring to as the Major Incident.
He brushes a stray strand of hair out of Damian’s face. He crouches there, cupping the back of Damian’s head for a short stretch, and stares down at his boy.
He kisses Damian on the forehead even though he’s asleep, then quietly slips out of the room. His chest feels lighter than it ever has been. When he drifts off, he’s more content than he has been in years.
Tim returns the next day. Bruce returns with him.
Chapter 2: Winnow
Summary:
Winnow
/ˈwinō/Verb
1. the act of separating grain from a chaff(Vocabulary.com)
Notes:
Content Warning: this chapter touches a little more on Dick’s mildly depressive habits and identity crisis. It’s not the entire chapter, but there are scenes that dive into it, so if that could be a potential trigger for anyone, please read through this chapter with caution
This chapter also goes heavy into Dick and Tim fighting out their problems and feelings. This is NOT Tim or Dick bashing, but they have a lot of shit to work out on both their ends. It gets worse before it gets better.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
His father is back.
Dick hasn’t seen him much. He stayed at the manor for a week following Bruce’s return, helping him whenever he can. Batman did not make an appearance the first night Bruce was back home, but by the second day, Bruce was out in the streets by sundown.
Of course, Tim avoided him the whole time. It still stings.
It’s been a month, and Dick is back at his apartment in Blüdhaven. He ran here with his tail between his legs, putting as much distance between himself and his family as possible.
After all, Damian and his father have a lot to catch up on.
His father is back, and so is Damian’s. Dick thought, maybe, they could work something out. A sort of co-parenting kind of thing. He’ll take any part of Damian he can get. Damian did call him Baba. A couple of times, actually. That has to mean something.
And maybe it did, when Dick was the only father figure Damian knew. But now his real father is back, and… he’s been training Damian. Lots of alone time, without Dick. Lots of time for father and son to bond.
His father is back, and Dick is so fucking happy about it, but every time he remembers it crushes him inside.
It’s a really suckish feeling.
Dick spends his twenty-eighth birthday alone in his apartment.
They were going to come over and celebrate, but Bruce got swept up in Justice League business dealing with his return, and by default, Damian went with him.
Alfred and Bruce mailed their presents, and Damian has sent a card. He opens them up after eating half of a grocery-store vanilla cake all by himself.
Bruce has sent him a high-definition dual infrared and night-vision camera, since he had to leave that kind of equipment behind when he moved back to Blüdhaven. It’s nice. He could really use this out in the field. Out on his own.
Alfred has sent him a handmade recipe book, consisting of his favorite foods, Bruce’s favorites, Alfred’s favorites, and Damian’s favorites. There are a lot more entries for Dick’s and Damian’s, and there’s a small, hand-written note in the back that reads, For when you need a taste of home.
Dick balls his hand into fist and presses it against his mouth, hiccuping back tears.
Damian’s card is store-bought. There’s a photo of a slice of cake on the front, and the inside reads, Have your cake and eat it too! in print. But there’s a written note underneath that spells out, Happy birthday, Richard in Damian’s sharp handwriting.
There’s also a folded-up piece of paper.
Carefully, Dick opens up the page. It’s a beautiful graphite sketch of Dick, fast asleep on the couch in the sunroom. He’s stomach-down, cheek to the throw pillow and his mouth open as he breathes. One foot is hanging off the edge, and one arm is dangling down, knuckles brushing the floor.
He’s shirtless and in a pair of sweatpants, most likely from a weekend where he had the day off from WE and had knocked out after finishing a training regimine. Dick can’t remember which day this was — it could have been any. But he never realized Damian was watching him so closely.
He considers putting it in his room, but he decides to hang it on the fridge with a magnet. Before Dick took over as Batman, he spent many a night crashing on his living room floor after patrolling Blüdhaven. He has a feeling that pattern of behavior will make a reappearance once he gets back in the swing of things, which means he’ll be seeing his fridge more than he’ll be seeing his bedside table.
Dick texts him right after. Thank you for the drawing, he says, then adds, You’re so talented
Damian doesn’t respond for a number of hours, most likely either down in the Cave or out on patrol with Bruce. Dick can’t sleep but has forgone patrol until he’s gotten used to the streets of the ‘Haven again, so he’s awake when Damian replies.
I am glad you deem it an acceptable birthday present, he has said. Another text comes right after it: I would have liked to have given it to you in person.
Dick’s heart tugs painfully at his words. Me too, Little D, he types back.
I will see you soon, comes the response. It’s not a question; it’s a statement. A demand.
Yes you will, answers Dick, and means every word.
It starts off fine.
Dick’s been trying to get used to being away from Damian, not constantly having to care for him and keep an eye on him all day. It’s hard. But he manages.
It’s weird being away from Bruce after everything. He planned the man’s funeral for goodness sake. He watched them lower, who he thought was, his father’s body into the ground. And then he took over his company, and raised his son, and became Batman.
And now it’s gone.
He doesn’t mind some of those things. He didn’t want to be Batman in the first place. He didn’t want to become CEO. So he’s more than happy to go back to shifts at Blüdhaven Police Department and zip around the city as Nightwing.
Damian, though…
He should talk to Bruce about it. After all, when Dick first came to him, Dick didn’t want him to be his father, and Bruce didn’t want to replace his real one. And then they both failed. So Bruce would know what it’s like to become the guardian of a child and then start thinking of him as your son. Bruce would understand. He wouldn’t be mad.
But it can’t be that simple.
When Bruce first walked into the manor after being presumed dead — assured dead — for a year, it was like a firework exploded inside of Dick’s body. There was his father, alive and unharmed and sweeping Dick and Damian and Alfred into tight, relieved hugs.
Dick cried. He cried a lot. He held onto his father and didn’t let go, and they all had to maneuver to the couch as one giant mass of bodies because no one was willing to release.
Then the mass disassembled fifteen minutes later, and Tim sneered at him, “I told you,” and the shock factor began to wear off.
For the rest of the night, Dick was acutely aware of Damian’s proximity to Bruce, and Tim’s proximity to Bruce, and how all three of them managed to squeeze into the loveseat. And Bruce had watched Damian as he rambled about his and Dick’s adventures, with love and awe in his eyes in a way that Dick hasn’t seen in over a decade.
That was Damian’s doing, not Dick’s. And of course he felt particularly close to Tim, because Tim was the one who came after him. And he spoke with Dick, sure, asked how the company was and apologized when he heard that Dick had become Batman. He was happy to see Dick.
And then he thanked Dick for taking care of Damian. Taking care, as if it was nothing more than an extended babysitting job.
Would things change if Dick told Bruce the truth? Would Bruce make him stop seeing Damian to prevent any more confusion? Damian isn’t some random kid he picked up and adopted. Damian is his biological child — his only biological child. How could Dick justify swooping in and taking him?
If Bruce were still gone, he could. Damian needs a parent and Dick is the one who’s there. Dick is the one that wants to.
But Bruce is here. He’s here and willing and able to be Damian’s parent. So he gets Damian by default. There’s no justifying anything, because it’s plain and simple. He’s not Dick’s; he’s Bruce’s. And there’s nothing more to it.
But really, it starts out fine. Dick keeps his distance and learns to live without Damian at his side. Sometimes he calls to check in on everyone. Damian is always eager to speak to him, and every time he wrestles with Bruce or Alfred to get the phone and says, “Hello, Richard,” in his little voice, Dick has to hold back tears.
Things aren’t exactly great, but they could be a whole lot worse. His father is alive, Tim is back from his dangerous mission, and Alfred and Bruce have their sons back. It’s fine.
It’s fine.
It starts to not be fine when everyone gets over the earthquake that resulted from Bruce’s arrival, and everyone starts to go back to their lives from before.
Dick doesn’t understand how Tim can continue to drop in and out of the Cave for missions and not want to sit with Bruce for a bit.
He doesn’t understand how Jason, who spiraled in the direct aftermath of Bruce’s assumed death, can still hold his furious grudge against Bruce.
He doesn’t understand how Alfred can let Bruce out of his sight for even a few minutes and go about his chores as if they’re a priority, let alone let Bruce go off as Batman directly after his return.
He doesn’t understand how Damian can call Bruce “Father.”
Because Dick doesn’t know how to go back. His entire world was upended and flipped. How is he supposed to put it back? How is it supposed to fit back into place?
The one speck of normality that Dick has left is his time with Damian. It’s been about two months since Bruce came home, and Dick has managed to come to the manor at least twice every week and a half to spend time with Damian (and Bruce, but mainly Damian). That’s been the routine for the last couple of months, and that’s how Dick is expecting it to remain.
(He’s part of the BatTeam. He should know better.)
When he arrives at the manor, he’s pleased when it’s Damian who opens the door. When he sees Damian in workout clothes, his first thought is he wants to learn more acrobatics, and excitement bursts through his body.
That is, until Damian’s eyebrows furrow together. “Richard, what are you doing here?” he asks, confused.
Dick’s heart skips a beat. Is he here on the wrong day? It is Tuesday, isn’t it? He’s had this date circled on his kitchen calendar for the last two weeks. He was sure their meeting was today.
“We’re supposed to hang out, remember?” Dick prompts. “You told me you were finally ready to watch The Purge.”
He says it teasingly, poking Damian in the arm to rile him up a little, but Damian just frowns. “I thought Father informed you,” he says.
A horrible, nasty feeling sinks its way into Dick’s heart. He swallows, clutching his keys in his hand. “No. He hasn’t said anything.”
Damian’s frown only deepens. “Oh,” he says. “Father is taking me to the Watchtower for the day to train me.”
What? An entire day to train? “But you already have training,” he points out. Something bubbles in his chest, but it’s not jealousy like Dick expected. It’s… anger. Annoyance, at Bruce undermining his authority.
Damian shrugs. “Yes, but he wants more training. From him, specifically.”
Dick tries not to let that hurt him. Bruce has far more experience than Dick does, and has been through very specific experiences that Dick has never gone through. The more Damian learns from him, the safer he will be out in the streets.
Out without Dick.
Dick plasters on a smile, reaching out with his free hand to ruffle Damian’s hair. His smile turns into something a little more real when Damian bats his hand away with a scowl and immediately goes to fix his hair.
“Sounds like a good time, Little D,” he tells him, honest.
Damian looks up at Dick like he can see right through him. Maybe he can. “We will do something tomorrow instead.”
Dick’s smile becomes less real, at that. “Got a double tomorrow,” he informs. “I’m working shifts all week. My first day off is Sunday.” Today is Tuesday.
Damian’s frown gets deeper. “Then we will do something Sunday.”
Dick’s throat tightens up. He takes a slow, shallow breath through his nose to keep himself calm, undetected by Damian. “You and Bruce have a meeting with the Justice League Sunday afternoon,” he reminds him. “You know how long those can take.”
Damian seems troubled by this news, which is not what Dick wants. He straightens his shoulders, scolding himself for not being more convincing for Damian’s sake. He takes the boy’s shoulder and gives it an affectionate shake. “We’ll figure it out, baby bat, don’t you worry.”
Damian does not appear placated, but he nods nonetheless.
Alfred, who has been patiently standing off to the side and witnessing the encounter, finally steps forward. “Why don’t you stay for a bit, Master Dick?” he suggests. “Perhaps you can join the training session? Or help me with dinner?”
Dick grins at Alfred, even though they’re both aware that it’s fake. Dick loves Damian, but this new situation is still raw. He refuses to torture himself by watching Bruce train and parent Damian like Dick did nothing for the past year.
“Nah, don’t worry Al,” he declines. “I’ll talk with Bruce and figure out a time to come by.” He looks back down at Damian, then pinches his cheek just to hear Damian squawk.
“See ya later, Dames,” he says, stepping towards the door.
“Goodbye, Richard,” Damian responds. There’s something in his voice that makes Dick think that there’s something else he wants to add, but nothing else comes.
When he walks out of the manor, taking the front steps two at a time, it feels just like it did when he left the manor when he was nineteen.
He does work out a day with Bruce to come by, but it takes some finagling. Not because Bruce doesn’t want him there, but because their respective schedules are ridiculously packed.
Bruce has let Lucius Fox keep his position as CEO of Wayne Enterprises, but Bruce remains the owner, which means he still has to go into work, just not as often. Bruce has work in the mornings every day during the regular business days, but he’s off each day by noon.
Damian’s finished with school — and even if he wasn’t, he’s in online school anyway — so he’s free unless there is important Batman or Justice League business. But Bruce has a strict training schedule that takes hours a day that, according to Bruce, cannot afford to be missed. Even for one day.
Dick works a lot, and for very long shifts. So when he calls Bruce, he suggests taking a day off to come over. Bruce shoots that down immediately.
“You shouldn’t skip work just to see us,” he scolds Dick. “Come by on a day that you’re off.”
But the days that Dick is off don’t align with the times that Bruce and Damian aren’t busy, not for another two weeks. So he tells Bruce that he’s off on Friday and, immediately after ending the phone call, puts in an emergency request to take the day off.
It’s Blüdhaven. Emergencies are as common as flies at a trash can. He gets the day off, but a strict warning that he only has so many emergency days in his pocket.
(Dick knows he’s going to use them all to see Damian.)
But the most important thing is that he gets Friday off, which means he gets to see his family.
He’s practically vibrating as he pulls around to the front of the manor Friday morning. It’s been weeks since he’s seen Damian. He knows Bruce would have told him if the kid had been hurt, but he still needs to get his eyes on the kid, just once, to make sure.
He also really, really needs to see Bruce. Logically, he knows that the man is alive and back home safe, and has been for months. But thinking his father was dead, only for him to spontaneously come back from time has Dick a little on-edge.
If Dick can see them, they can’t disappear on him.
He doesn’t even bother ringing the doorbell to wait for Alfred like usual. He walks straight into the manor using his keycode and begins his search.
It feels natural as he makes his way through the winding hallways, turning corners and peering into dark rooms. It reminds him of when he’d get back from work at WE and Damian would be hiding somewhere in the manor, waiting for Dick to find him.
They haven’t done Assassin Hide and Seek— ahem, stealth training, in a while. Dick should bring it up later.
He finally finds them both in the sunroom. Bruce is reclining on one of the couches, circling things on a newspaper and — supposedly — checking them with whatever is on his laptop, which is open on the coffee table. Damian is on the other side of the table, surrounded by neon Sharpie markers and papers covered in dark ink.
A floorboard creaks when he steps into the room, which makes both of them look over at him.
“Hello, Dick,” Bruce greets with a smile.
“Richard!” Damian exclaims.
“Hey, Bruce. Dames,” Dick smiles back, walking over to Damian. He looks down at the table and finds an array of aerial views of different streets and neighborhoods in Gotham, all with brightly colored lines drawn all over them. “Whatcha working on?”
Damian tilts his papers so that Dick can see it better. “Father has me drawing patrols routes and emergency escape plans over the maps.”
Dick clenches his jaw, but otherwise keeps his cool. They’re the same exact routes he trained Damian to know, because they’re the same ones Bruce taught him over a decade ago.
It’s manual to tell himself that Bruce is doing this to make sure Damian is safe as Robin and not because he thinks Dick wasn’t capable of teaching him himself. Soon, it will be automatic. Soon Dick won’t even have those thoughts. He’ll just know.
Soon. He’s sure.
Instead, he looks to Bruce and says, “Good strategy.”
Bruce nods, folding up the newspaper and setting it beside his laptop. “I know you’ve already got him accustomed to directions,” he explains, “but it makes me feel better knowing I’ve gone over it with him, too.”
The acknowledgement makes Dick’s heart flutter with pride. He suddenly feels foolish for believing Bruce thought he was incapable. He really needs to tone down the jealousy.
“I understand,” he says honestly, then takes the spot on the couch beside Bruce. “So, what’s on the agenda for today?”
And then, to Dick’s astonishment, Bruce actually… shrugs.
Shrugs.
“I thought you may have some ideas,” he replies. “I’ve given Damian the day off from training until patrol tonight.” Dick stares at his father in utter astonishment, long enough that Bruce makes a face. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You don’t have a plan,” Dick sputters. “And you’re letting Damian skip training?”
To that, Bruce actually turns a bit sheepish. Sheepish, for god’s sake. What the hell sort of alternate universe did Dick step into? “You can thank Alfred for that,” he admits. His face shifts again, and he’s right back to being the regular old Bruce that Dick is used to. “I can always change that if—”
“Nope!” Dick blurts. “No take-backs!” He’s already forming a thousand different ideas in his head. He gets to plan the whole afternoon with Damian and Bruce. The possibilities are endless.
Well, to an extent. Damian is picky.
Dick is reminded of the thought he had while entering the manor earlier. He looks over to Damian, who has finished his maps and is watching Dick with blatant concern. “Please tell me we are not going to the fair,” he intones.
Dick perks up. “There’s a fair?”
“Tt. No.”
Dick gives Damian a knowing, amused smirk, but relents. No, he had something else in mind. Something better.
“I don’t know, Bruce,” he starts, carefully keeping his eyes on Damian as he spins his body towards his father. “Skipping day training can be a critical error. Think of all the skills he’d miss out on that he may need for patrol tonight.”
Damian’s eyebrows furrow in confusion. “What are you on about?” he asks, affronted. “I am more than skilled enough to miss one day of training.”
Bruce also seems bewildered. “You want him to train today?”
Dick nods, casting his eyes towards Bruce, but still keeping Damian in his peripherals. “I think it would be a good idea,” he says. “Stealth training is particularly important for Robin. All those bright colors can make him an easy target.”
Bruce is still completely thrown for a loop, but Dick can see a devious grin stretching across Damian’s face. “Alright,” Bruce agrees carefully. “What did you have in mind?”
Dick’s smile turns wicked, and Damian is gone.
Bruce blinks at the spot his son vacated, there and gone in a flash. Slowly, he looks back over at Dick. “You know something I don’t.”
Dick shrugs, standing up and patting Bruce on the shoulder. “Training can be fun,” he says nonchalantly. “You have ten minutes to find us, or else.”
Dick heads for the stairwell, already knowing exactly where he wants to hide. It’s only when Dick is halfway up the stairs that Bruce calls out, “Wait, are you playing hide and seek?”
“Stealth training!” comes a very quiet, very distant shout from somewhere in the manor. Bruce suddenly looks very, very grim. He has accepted his fate. Good. That will make things more fun.
Dick wants to go look for Damian like normal, but this is Bruce’s first time participating in their stealth training, and Dick wants to give him the full experience. Besides, it’s been a while since he’s hung from a chandelier. It’s going to take him a while to get up there.
He hides in the broom closet on the second floor while he waits for Bruce to vacate the living room. He’s sure that Damian is changing hiding places the closer Bruce gets, so that gives Dick a little more time.
When he’s sure Bruce is gone, he slips out of the closet and heads back for the stairs. He goes quickly but quietly, purposefully metering his footsteps to be as soft as possible. He walks up another floor so he can get to the ceiling.
The chandelier chain is long, so even though he’s on the third floor, the chandelier actually hangs down to the very top of the second floor. It’s a safe enough distance for Dick to drop without injuring himself.
He walks swiftly down the hallway, aiming for the middle. He passes Alfred on the way as he walks out of one of the spare rooms with a feather duster. Immediately, his eyes move from Dick to the chandelier directly behind him, and gives the chandelier an exasperated look.
“Do refrain from accidentally killing yourself, Master Dick,” he says with all the experience of a man who has never known peace a day in his life.
Dick gives him a bashful grin. “Will do, Al.”
Alfred leaves with a shake of his head.
Dick will apologize for giving the man heart problems later. For now, he’s on a mission. Carefully, he puts his hands on the top of the banister and hoists himself up, the way he would if he were getting onto a gymnastics beam. He adjusts his center of gravity as he stands and balances with both feet parallel with the banister.
The chandelier is made of a thick metal chain, anchored into the ceiling with Batman-grade steel and titanium. After an incident involving Dick and a different chandelier when he was sixteen, Bruce replaced the anchors and brackets enough that Bruce himself could swing on it without issue, so Dick is unconcerned about his own weight.
The only problem is that the chandelier is in the middle of the ceiling, which means there’s at least ten feet of space between it and the banister, if not more.
Oh well. Dick has jumped from worse.
He takes an extra few moments to calculate his trajectory and ready his legs for the jump, before finally pushing off and leaping into the air. He angles his body enough that he doesn’t crash right into the chandelier, but instead is able to grab the long chain and hoist his body upwards.
The anchors are strong enough to hold him, but the chandelier itself is still made of glass, so Dick is careful to keep most of his weight in his arms and upper body, hanging off the chain with his feet planted firmly on the right and left edges of the chandelier.
Dick hasn’t dangled from a chandelier in years. He forgot how thrilling it is.
He patiently lies in wait as Bruce scours the manor in search of his sons. He’s not sure where Damian is hiding, but the last few times they played before Bruce returned, he had gotten very good at squeezing himself into cramped spaces below eye-level and leaping out at your shins.
Alfred walks into the room after a couple of minutes, cleaning up the clutter in the room. He doesn’t spare a look up towards Dick even though he knows Dick is there.
Dick times it — because what else is there to do when he’s standing on top of a chandelier? — and it ends up taking Bruce exactly eighteen minutes and three seconds to locate Damian. Or, rather, for Damian to locate him.
There’s a holler of surprise from the left side of the manor, a floor below Dick. He grins to himself, because it was definitely Bruce who made that noise. It’s hard to get the man to make anything more than a grunt if someone can manage to startle him, so Dick is dying to know where Damian was hiding that caught Bruce off guard.
A minute or two later, Bruce emerges from the first-floor hallway with Damian beside him, grinning from ear to ear with a pleased expression on his face. Dick’s heart soars with pride.
“Where is Dick hiding?” Bruce asks Alfred when he spots the man.
Alfred merely continues to collect the drawn-on maps and discarded magazines on the floor. “I am not at liberty to say.”
Bruce gives him a flat look. “So you do know.”
“I know everything that goes on in this house,” Alfred replies, sliding the magazines under the table and folding the maps and newspaper in preparation to throw them away.
“Richard is excellent at stealth training,” Damian tells Bruce. “You will never find him unless he wishes you to.”
Dick thinks this is a great time to make his grand entrance.
He lifts his lower half off of the chandelier and gives the chain a good couple of swings to gain momentum. He tries to be as quiet as possible, but the hanging glass beads rattle when the chandelier moves.
Bruce looks up a second too late, and is unable to so much as take a step back before Dick flings himself downwards and straight onto Bruce. The two of them hit the floor with a resounding thud, and Dick hears the wind get knocked out of Bruce with a harsh “Umph.”
They both lay on the floor for a few passing seconds, dazed and absorbing the blow. And then, Dick presses his face into Bruce’s chest and laughs.
Bruce does not laugh, but he does pat Dick on the back a couple of times and say, “Well played,” in a hoarse wheeze. Across the room, he can hear Alfred sigh heavily.
Dick just laughs even harder.
Eventually, Bruce gets tired of lying on the floor, so Dick rolls off of him and they help each other to their feet. Damian is watching them with an amused smirk, but he tells Dick, “Impressive. I believe you have won today’s stealth training.”
Dick grins and ruffles Damian’s hair, much to his dismay. “I’m not so sure,” he replies. “Where did you hide? I haven’t heard Bruce make a noise like that in a long time.”
Damian smirks. “Inside of the dumbwaiter,” he answers. “I opened the door and threw a rope around his neck to emulate what would have happened if we were in the field and I was an enemy.”
Bruce snorts. Dick grins wider. Alfred looks towards the heavens, probably wondering what his life has become.
Alfred does a quick check over the both of them to make sure there are no actual injuries, before sending them off to the dining room so he can serve them lunch. He lays out two plates full of chicken salad croissants and a large bowl of cut-up fruit, and Dick digs in like a starved man.
Alfred puts some sort of crack in his chicken salad, Dick is sure of it.
After, Bruce retreats into his study for a few hours to do some work, so Dick forces Damian onto the couch in the sitting room and lets him pick a movie to watch. He chooses Dracula, unsurprisingly.
Damian ends up falling asleep three-quarters of the way through, also unsurprising. The kid can’t ever seem to get through an entire movie in one sitting. Dick lets the rest of the movie play out, just in case Damian wakes back up. He does not. He remains steadfastly asleep with his head on Dick’s shoulder.
Dick cards his fingers through Damian’s hair, eyes only on his boy. When Damian shuffles slightly in his sleep, turning into Dick’s touch, Dick presses a kiss to the crown of Damian’s head.
His eyes sting. God, he’s missed this so much.
He’s not sure how long he sits there with the DVD menu replaying over and over in the background, before Bruce steps in through the doorway. Whatever he was about to say gets silenced by Dick’s sharp, “Shh!”
Bruce’s mouth clacks shut. He glances between Damian and Dick for a couple of seconds, with a strange furrow to his eyebrows. A chill runs down Dick’s spine.
Finally, Bruce whispers, “Go on and take him up to bed before he gets a crick in his neck.”
Dick has spent plenty of nights sleeping on his couch, and he is terribly aware of the neck pain that comes with it, so he gathers Damian into his arms without another thought.
“Wait, don’t—!” Bruce hisses, snapping Dick straight and still, but Bruce stops talking before he can finish whatever he was protesting against.
“What?” Dick whisper-shouts back to him. “What’s wrong?”
Bruce stares down at Damian in bewilderment. “He’s still asleep.”
Dick feels his forehead crease as confusion sweeps over his body. “Yeah?” he remarks.
Bruce shakes his head, astonished. “How did you do that?” he asks. “He always wakes up when I try to carry him. He throws a fit.”
Damian doesn’t like anyone carrying him, even sometimes Dick. There are exceptions when it comes to Dick, though, and it’s something he cherishes.
He's carried Damian enough that it’s second nature. He knows how to roll Damian’s body into his, an easy glide that keeps him asleep or lulls him back if he stirs. He knows not to heft him up, because being lifted is enough to wake him. He knows how light to let his feet fall as he walks so that he’s not jostling the kid awake even the slightest.
Dick just knows. It never occurred to him that Bruce doesn’t.
He should probably tell Bruce how to do it. A father should know how to carry his son to bed. But Dick is selfish. He wants this all to himself, like being the sole person a cat likes that hates everyone else.
So instead, he winks at Bruce and says, “Robin is made of magic, remember?”
Bruce makes a contemplative “Hn” sound, but steps to the side as Dick walks by and starts up the stairs to Damian’s room. He doesn’t follow Dick inside of Damian’s room, so Dick makes sure to close it with his foot until there’s only a crack, then brings Damian to his bed.
He lays him down gently, arms flat to the bed so he can roll the boy onto the mattress and pull his arms out at the same time, slow and careful. Damian remains sound asleep, breaths deep and even.
Dick considers pulling the covers over him, but that would definitely wake him up, and the kid needs his pre-patrol nap. So he leaves the boy be and makes a note to turn the thermostat up, then quietly walks out of the room.
He closes the door behind him, and when he turns around, he sees Bruce down the hall, standing on the top step of the staircase. Dick rolls his shoulders back, unsure of what’s waiting for him, and heads towards him.
“He should be out for a while,” he tells Bruce when he’s close enough. Then, he adds as a joke, “Horror movies always seem to put him right to sleep.”
Bruce snorts. “I’ve been noticing that lately,” he admits. Then, he motions downstairs with his head. “Why don’t you come down to the Cave for a bit?” he suggests. “There’s a case I could use your help with.”
A pleased feeling flutters in Dick’s chest at the idea that his dad wants his help. Like a kid when his dad asks him to hold the flashlight while he works on a project. “Sure,” Dick says, trying to play it off as they walk towards the study together. “Wanna give me the run-down?”
It’s a weapons-smuggling case, according to Bruce. He thinks the Penguin has something to do with it, because the boxes of weapons they found while intercepting a suspicious pickup truck a few nights ago smelled like tuna and had minerals found in the cave systems under the city that the Penguin likes to hide in.
“So what’s the problem?” Dick asks as they sit down at the Batcomputer. “You’ve handled Penguin’s smuggling pyramid before.”
Bruce nods, pulling up the file he has on the mission, as well as, to Dick’s surprise, a file on Poison Ivy.
“I think she has something to do with it,” Bruce explains. “The Penguin and Harley Quinn were having issues for the last couple of years, since her split from the Joker. Since Ivy is her closest friend, I have a feeling she struck a deal with the Penguin.”
Dick nods as he scans over the files on the screen. There’s not much that links Ivy as a partner in the Penguin’s current scheme. However, there are some suspicious instances noted in the most recent two incident reports of spores found in the blood samples taken from the Penguin’s lackeys that Batman and Robin intercepted.
According to the reports and the labwork results, the spores match Poison Ivy’s DNA. That tracks with one of her signature MO’s — her mind-control pollen.
“So she agrees to help Cobblepot with his smuggling operation, and in turn he leaves Harley alone,” Dick deduces. “I could see that. But it feels out of character for her to join selflessly just for Harley. There’s got to be something else in it for her.”
Bruce nods. “That’s what I was thinking,” he agrees. “I wanted to see if you had any information that might tell me what she was planning.”
They go back and forth between ideas, trying to figure out what plan Cobblepot has for smuggling weapons this time. It’s refreshing. Dick was able to bounce ideas off of Damian when they were partners, but Damian didn’t know the criminals like Dick did, so he was only so much help. But Bruce knows them just as much as Dick, if not more.
The exchange of ideas has a lot more flow with Bruce at the helm, and it takes Dick back to all those years when it was just the two of them, figuring this whole vigilante thing out together.
His dad is home.
After a while, the flow ebbs, and their conversation trickles off. Reclined back in the chair, Dick toes off his shoes and kicks his feet up on the counters where the Batcomputers are. Bruce gives him an exasperated look.
“How are things in Blüdhaven?” he asks instead of commenting on Dick’s manners.
Dick grins, knowing his feet being right where Bruce works is bothering the man just so. “They’re good,” he answers. “As good as they can be in a city like that.”
Bruce nods like he expected that answer. “Any cases you’re working?”
Dick shrugs. “Not big ones,” he replies. “Mostly it’s been bank robberies and armed assaults. Pretty quick stuff that the police wrap up when I’m done.”
Bruce hums, leaning back in his chair. He’s got his toes pressed to the ground so he can swivel slightly side to side. “How’s it going with the clean-out anyway?”
Dick grimaces. “Work in progress,” he says bitterly. “I think Blüdhaven PD is more corrupt than Gotham’s. I get one out and three more show up.”
Bruce clicks his tongue, unsurprised to hear that. “That’s usually how it works,” he says with a what can you do tone of voice. “I don’t think I’ll ever get Gotham PD cleaned out.”
Dick makes a mournful sound. “What hope do I have, then?”
He’s mostly joking, but Bruce frowns at him, and he plants his foot on the ground to stop his swiveling. “Because Nightwing isn’t Batman,” he responds. “If anyone can get it done, it will be you.”
Dick stares at his father, feeling a ball rolling around in his chest. He’s not sure what that emotion is, but he’s feeling it. He’s a bit hollowed out, actually. “I’ll try,” is what he says, unsure of what else he could offer.
The right side of Bruce’s mouth quirks upwards, just for a moment. “I know.”
With that, he pats the arms of the chair and uses their leverage to hoist himself to his feet. “I’m going to take a nap,” he tells Dick. “You should stay. Damian would enjoy seeing you before patrol.”
Dick can’t remember the last time Bruce asked him to stay. He did it all the time the few instances Dick would visit the manor when he was nineteen, and Dick declined each one. When Jason died, Bruce stopped asking. Then Tim came along and started guilt-tripping him into spending the night occasionally, but Bruce would never be the one to ask. And then he was gone.
And now he’s asking again.
“Yeah,” Dick decides. “I’ll stay.”
Bruce smiles at him, light and pleased. The way he’d been smiling in the six months before he disappeared, when he was finally back to his old self. It makes Dick go all warm.
Bruce nods as a goodbye and makes his way towards the stairs, but Dick doesn’t follow. He likes spending time in the Cave, and it’s been so long since he had it to himself. He fiddles around on the computers for a bit, sending himself files that he thinks may be beneficial to have. But, of course, he spends most of his time with the acrobatics.
He’s relieved Bruce never got rid of it after he moved to Blüdhaven. He needed it when he was Batman, and he needs it now. Besides, Dick hasn’t swung on these beams since he was Batman. He’s dying to get his hands on them.
He finds the block of chalk where it always is, untouched, because if there’s one thing that Bruce has always respected, it’s that this section of the Cave is his. No one gets to mess with it. So he breaks off a piece of the block and crushes it, then puts it in the chalk bowl on the counter.
Once he’s chalked up his hands, he heads right for the trapeze. The first year or so after his parents died, Dick couldn’t stand to look at a trapeze, let alone use one. But since then, it’s become his favorite way to connect with his past, and his parents.
He spends a lot of time on the trapeze, swinging from each one. He falls a few times because he’s out of practice, but the net is there to catch him, always — a stipulation that Bruce, when building the acrobatics center for him, deemed the most important requirement.
After that, he does some time on the balance beams to work on his stability and the even bars to work on his stamina. He eyes the gymnastic rings hanging from the ceiling, but he decides to leave them for another time. He kind of wants to twist around on them, but they’re not made for that kind of stunt the way aerial silk is.
He should invest in one of those. He hasn’t done aerial silks since the circus.
He’s also been eyeing the practice dummies for a while. He looks around to see how he can incorporate them, and then his eyes land on the high beam at the far right edge of the area.
God, sometimes he’s brilliant.
He sets up three dummies in front of the landing mat, about two feet away from the edge. Then he takes a mechanical bo staff from the wall, making sure it’s light enough for him to swing with, then heads for the vault.
Putting enough distance between his starting point and the vault, he peers around to calculate how far his landing point would be from the dummies. He shortens the bo staff so that it’s the length of one of his escrima sticks and holds it securely in his palm.
He charges. He picks up speed, calculating where he needs to focus his weight as he runs. When he’s close enough to the vault, he leaps, using both hands to push himself up and into the air. He spins around so that he’s facing the high bar, and grabs it with the hand not holding the staff.
His core burns in the best way as he propels himself forward, up, and around the bar. When lets go after one full rotation, he extends his bo staff midair. He lands perfectly on his feet and immediately swings at the nearest dummy, transitioning from acrobatics to hand-to-hand combat.
The dummies are easier to fight than real people, but they’re filled with packed, heavy sand that makes them hard to knock down. But Dick has practiced with them before and knows all the tricks, and he takes them down easily.
That’s when he hears it — a soft, nearly inaudible sound from the other side of the Cave. Dick pauses, bo staff midair, as he tries to steady his breathing enough to listen closer.
The sound doesn’t come again, but Dick knows he heard something. When he turns around, he’s unsurprised to find Damian standing in the shadows, watching him. Damian has always moved silently, but he does make certain noises that Dick has come to recognize. The kid can’t sneak up on him anymore.
“Dames?” he calls out.
Damian hiccups, then goes quiet. Oh.
“Oh, baby bat,” Dick coos. The nickname is enough to get Damian moving, sprinting out of the corner and across the Cave floor. Dick drops the bo staff and catches him when Damian barrels straight into him.
Damian doesn’t get nightmares often, and it’s even less often that he seeks out comfort for them. Dick wonders how many he’s had since he left.
Damian doesn’t cry, but he shoves his face into Dick’s torso as far as he can, little hands clinging desperately to the back of Dick’s shirt, heedless of the sweat. Dick lays one hand on his shoulder, and the other comes down to caress his hair.
“Another nightmare?” he murmurs, sliding the hand on his shoulder down to his back.
Damian hiccups, but he does not cry. He doesn’t need to. Dick knows expressing this level of vulnerability is Damian’s equivalent.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Dick questions gently.
Damian shakes his head, burrowing in impossibly closer. Dick doesn’t ask again; he just brings both of his arms down to coil around the younger boy, curling him into his chest, and letting him take what he needs.
He drops his head, pressing his nose into Damian’s hair. They stand there for a long, long time.
Dick wishes he could say things get better after that, but they don’t.
A tropical storm batters the east coast for two days before dying out. Lucky for New Jersey, there was hardly any flooding. But that’s about all the luck they got.
Blüdhaven has significantly less skyscrapers than her sister city, so they received more wind damage. Old, decaying buildings were collapsing all over the city. Inmates took the opportunity of the chaos and escaped. Power lines were knocked over, setting grass and trees and homes on fire. Despite the heavy rain, the city has been burning for three days straight.
Dick sleeps all of four hours across the course of those three days. During the day, he’s a police officer, following his commanders and operating search and rescue teams for both civilians and escaped criminals. He’d return home and get an hour of sleep before suiting up as Nightwing and hitting the streets, continuing the searches on his own at night and assisting the fire department whenever they called for help.
The power has been out in his apartment since the first night. He’s been washing his hair in the rain and pulling out the winter blankets packed away in the back of his closet.
He towels himself off until his skin is raw, covers himself in cologne and spray-deodorant. But even when the water comes back on on the last day of the storms, he cannot get the smell of rainwater and char off his body, no matter how hard he tries.
After three full days of near-nonstop work, the dark clouds are moving out of Blüdhaven, taking the rain and the wind with it. Sunrise brings Dick a sense of relief so powerful that he yells, loud and hoarse, from the tallest skyscraper.
He hasn’t seen the sun in four days.
Dick is about twelve seconds from passing out. He barely manages to stay on his bike as he makes his way back to his apartment. He parks it hidden in the alley like always, then haphazardly climbs the fire escape until he reaches his window.
He nearly loses his grip a number of times on the ascent, fingers and arms too weak to hold his weight. But he gets there, and he crawls through the window like a dying man. He doesn’t even bother to get off the floor. He just lays there, catching his breath while his body melts into the safety of his carpet.
He remains on the floor for a while, gathering up the strength to get up and move to his bedroom, or maybe the shower, but once he gets to his feet, he only ends up making it to the couch before he collapses.
Ah well. He and his couch are plenty acquainted.
He decides to flick the television on to get the latest updates on how Blüdhaven and New Jersey are doing. It immediately opens to the news, because that was the last channel he was watching the night before. It’s been the only channel he’s been watching since the storms came.
The weather report is on, likely between news reports. Dick’s eyes droop heavily as he watches the screen. It looks like the storm is moving out. Hallelujah. He can’t take another pitch-black night in the storms.
The broadcast shifts to the news anchors. Dick closes his eyes, not at all caring as the water from his soaking-wet suit seeps into his yellowing couch. He weakly reaches for the folded blanket across the back of the couch and drapes it over himself. He dozes to the voice of Vicki Vale as she gives an update about a school bus full of children in Gotham that Batman saved earlier today.
“...reported that most of the children are injured, but none seem to be life-threatening, and there are no reports of any fatalities,” reports Vicki. “Only a few hours later, Red Robin was spotted alongside Batman and Robin as they made their way downtown.”
Dick’s eyes fly open. On the screen is a video recorded by the news reporters. Batman and Robin are swinging from building to building tens of stories up, and right behind them is Red Robin hot on their heels. He swallows the bitter feeling crawling up his throat. Tim is mad at him; of course he would help Bruce instead. Besides, it means there’s another set of eyes watching out for Damian.
It’s fine. Dick is fine.
He continues to watch the broadcast with interest. Winds had gotten strong enough to overturn cars and trap people inside. People got stuck inside of buildings and vehicles where heavy debris closed them in. There were ten-car pile-ups all across Gotham Bridge.
They sure had their work cut out for them. Blüdhaven faced all of that, but instead of a bridge, cars had lost control and spun out into the marina. Dick could hardly handle it all, even with the help of the police and first responders. It’s good that Bruce and Damian had Tim’s help.
The video cuts to another one, this time shot by a passerbyer on their phone. It’s dark and grainy, but as it zooms in, the unmistakable forms of Robin, Red Robin, and Red Hood stand out on the stormy streets.
Jason shoots through windows and blasts apart debris blocking people in. Bruce, Damian, and Tim then go in and get the people out and to the paramedics waiting nearby. It cuts to another video where the four of them are working to pull broken boards and beams off a group of electricians who got caught when the ceiling of a building they were working on collapsed.
Dick had to do that, too. But he did it alone. So he’s glad they had each other to help ease the load.
It’s fine. Dick is fine.
He closes his eyes again, trying to ignore the feeling of his chest being carved open. He feels guilty for wanting them to have come to help him. Gotham needed them. After all, Jason lives in Crime Alley, and Crime Alley is in Gotham, so of course he stayed in the city. Tim probably knew that his bias for Dick would have caused more issues, so he stayed away.
They didn’t forget about him. They just knew he could handle Blüdhaven alone.
And he did. He did just fine. Blüdhaven will recover, and so will he.
When Dick opens his eyes again, it’s morning. His alarm is shrieking at him that he needs to get up and ready for work, but the aches from the rescue ops and the crick in his neck from another night on the couch are making him reconsider.
He silences the alarm and stays in bed another few minutes. He grabs his phone to check his notifications and finds a small slew of messages. Most are from Babs and the original Titans, asking how he and Blüdhaven are doing. There is one from Damian, inquiring if he is alive. There are none from Tim or Jason.
There is one from Bruce, a very curt: Check in.
Dick types out, equally as curt: Checking in.
He responds to the other texts, letting everyone know he’s alright. He gets no response from Damian, which is fine. He’s probably still asleep.
By the time he’s done, Bruce has responded: Good to hear from you, and another right below it that says, Everyone is fine here.
Dick sends back: Good. He hears nothing more.
He scrolls up a bit to the string of messages Bruce left when the storms first hit, and Dick was scrambling straight out of the precinct and into an alleyway to change into his Nightwing suit.
Bad storms moving in, hit Gotham hard.
Heading for Blüdhaven.
Are you alright?
One right after the other, seconds apart. He was worried, and it had warmed Dick’s freezing interior as rain pelted his body.
They just got here, he had replied. I’m okay.
Bruce hadn’t responded the rest of the night. It didn’t really matter, because Dick was busy the whole time rescuing people from crashed cars that hydroplaned from rain puddles, helping the fire department put out fires, and interrupting robberies.
By the time he’d crawled into his apartment that first night, he was so exhausted he fell asleep on the floor right there as soon as he was inside. He checked his phone when he woke up, but there were no messages from Bruce. The only way he knew they were alright was by checking the news.
He hadn’t heard from Bruce until now.
After a second thought, Dick opens up his news app and scrolls through the latest under the Batman section. There are a slew of articles about their activities during and after the storms, but Dick is surprised to see an article about how the Red Hood was sighted with some of his allies while helping clean up the debris.
The fact that Bruce is letting Jason’s outlaw friends help them means Gotham got hit hard, and Bruce isn’t relying on the police department to be much assistance for certain things.
Dick feels proud, sort of, overtop his overlying exhaustion. Maybe Bruce and Jason are finally starting to come around. Maybe a giant storm was exactly what they needed to kick their asses into gear and just forgive each other.
Deciding he’s spent too much time in bed already, Dick tosses the covers off of himself and shuffles to the bathroom to do his business. While he’s there, he takes some time to unwrap and rewrap the bandages around his ribs, legs, and arms. He’s pretty sure he’s bruised his ribs, if not broken one of them, and he’s cut up all over from lifting trees and cars and pieces of houses off of people.
He can tell he’s still dehydrated, so he gets dressed and heads to the kitchen. He downs three glasses of water before deeming it enough, then fills up a reusable water bottle to take with him on shift.
He’s dreading today, because he’s going to be a part of the search and rescue teams to look for people who are missing in the wake of the storms. He spent the past three nights carrying half-dead and dying people to the hospitals. He’s not looking forward to doing it again, all day.
But if he can save even one life, it will be worth it.
He walks out of his apartment on weak legs, not at all ready to face the day.
He finds a teenage girl bleeding out underneath a pile of rubble. He calls it in for an ambulance, but all of them are on calls already and none are available. So he and his partner drive her to the hospital in their cop car. His partner takes the wheel, and Dick stays in the back with her draped across his lap and curled in his arms.
She’s shivering, and her blood is seeping into Dick’s uniform. She can’t be any older than sixteen.
She doesn’t make it to the hospital.
Red Robin stays in Gotham until the missing have either been found or pronounced dead. The news says he’s left, and Dick assumes he’s back to whatever the hell he’s doing in Rhode Island.
Red Hood was also part of Gotham’s search and rescue teams, specifically sticking to Crime Alley and the surrounding areas, along with some of his allies. He, too, disappears when the search parties disband.
Dick has been sneezing all day, and he’s got an awful sore throat. He’s pretty sure his three nights out in the rain are finally catching up to him.
Damian calls to tell him all about the week they’ve had. Apparently, Robin was able to go solo with his own search party. Dick is furious about it, but he keeps it contained.
“How are you?” Damian asks after a grand retelling of intercepting a robbery on the second night of the storms. “The news claims you had to fish cars out of the marina.”
People, not cars. It took Dick seventeen separate dives to get everyone out of the water — busting open the windows, cutting their seatbelts, and either swimming people to the surface or shoving them towards it.
Dick saved twenty-two people that night, but he lost one. A man who’d drowned before Dick could get to him. He remembers the horrid, heart-wrenching cry of his wife when she saw her husband unmoving on the dock.
“I did,” he tells Damian.
“That sounds exciting,” Damian replies, boyish glee in his voice.
Dick wants to scold him. People died this week, he wants to say. It’s not exciting; it’s dangerous. He wants to send him the news articles with the interviews of those with loved ones that died or were laid up with injuries. We have to take this job seriously.
But is it his place? Bruce is his father, but Dick is his brother. Does Dick have the right to scold Damian? To teach him lessons? And has Bruce already taught him this? He can’t undermine Bruce’s authority. It wouldn’t be right.
So instead, he changes the subject. He asks, “How’s Alfred?” and Damian spirals into catching Dick up on everything he’s missed at the manor.
Dick covers the receiver and sneezes again.
He goes to the funeral of the girl who died in his arms.
Her name was Maggie, apparently. She was fifteen, and a freshman on her high school cheer team. She left behind two parents, a younger sister, and three cousins that are all about her age.
A lot of people show up despite the damage done to the city. Most of them, it seems, are people from her school. The chairs in the grass at the cemetery are all taken, and there are people packed shoulder to shoulder standing in rows behind them.
Dick stands off to the side, dressed in his police uniform. His partner didn’t want to go. She said she couldn’t handle another funeral for a kid. But Dick has been around death all his life, and he needed to pay his respects. An apology, for not getting her to the hospital in time.
Her parents cry into his shoulders when they see him, thanking him for coming, for trying his best to help her.
“I’m sorry,” is all he can say as he hugs them both. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Tim’s birthday arrives. According to Babs, he’s off somewhere in his nest, wherever the fuck that is. Apparently, Bruce, Jason, and Barbara know, but Tim has refused to share that location with Dick. Dick won’t ask the others, even though he knows Bruce and Babs will give it to him. He won’t cross Tim’s boundary like that.
He tries to get ahold of Tim, tries to use the others to send him a happy birthday message. It’s not until the next day that he gets a text from an unknown burner number that just says Thanks.
Dick sends back, you’re welcome, and saves the number in his phone. It’s better than nothing, and it’s more than Dick deserves.
Dick doesn’t dream very often. But when he does, they’re never good dreams. They’re always nightmares.
Usually he startles awake from them. Sometimes, he wakes up screaming. Sometimes, he wakes up crying. It’s gotten so bad that he’s had to tell his coworkers his seasonal allergies are just acting up.
Some of his nightmares are of Jason — both his dead fifteen year old self and his normal self, both of them trying to kill him. Sometimes, he dreams that he’s still nineteen, and Bruce is throwing him out of the manor again. Only this time, Dick winds up homeless, and Bruce won’t let him back home.
There are a few of Tim, where he sides with Ra’s and turns on them all. Some are of Barbara, where the shot killed her instead of paralyzing her. Some are of coming home and finding various loved ones dead on the floor.
Most of them, though, are of Damian.
Damian dies in most of them. Sometimes Dick relives the Major Incident in 1080p technicolor. Other times, he dreams of Damian dying in literally any other way possible.
There is one exception to the Damian-centric nightmares. Damian doesn’t die in that one; instead, Bruce takes him away from Dick, and Damian lets him with relief and never speaks to Dick again.
Those ones are the ones where Dick wakes up crying.
He’s been getting them a lot lately.
A week later, Dick receives a letter in the mail, addressed to him in familiar handwriting. It makes his heart skip when he sees it.
Very, very carefully, as to not tear whatever is inside, he opens the envelope and pulls out the pristine white sheet of printer paper. He folds open the page, and something flutters out and to the ground. When he bends down to pick it up, he notices that it’s a photograph.
He hesitates.
He’s careful to not get his fingers on the glossy part when he lifts it from the floor. He stands and straightens back up to buy himself even an extra second to prepare for whatever is on the other side.
With trembling fingers, he flips it around, then immediately slams it face down onto his kitchen table. He makes an involuntary hurt noise in the back of his throat.
Shit.
He has to wait until his vision is no longer blurry to look at the note. He takes a few, trembling breaths in an attempt to calm himself down as he reads over the delicate script in the greeting.
Master Dick,
The young master was sifting through another box of photos he found in your father’s closet. I had forgotten the box was there to begin with, and I only assume your father has forgotten as well. They are old photographs, most from before you came to us. There were a few, however, in a baggie nestled securely in the middle of the rest of the pictures. The one I have sent you was inside.
I do not recall placing any of those photographs in that baggie, nor do I remember putting them in that box for safe keeping. I thought you might want to know. And I thought you might like this one.
Come for dinner soon.
Love always,
Alfred
Dick has a love-hate relationship with photos, and with himself for suggesting to Damian to go through them. He doesn’t have many photos of his family around his apartment. He’d love to put up more, but he’s not sure he can handle looking at them every day, remembering what used to be and what doesn’t exist anymore.
He only managed a glimpse of the one Alfred sent him, but he knew what it was immediately. It’s one of Dick’s favorites, though he’d completely forgotten it existed. Alfred would know that, so of course he sent it. Dick isn’t sure if he was trying to be nice or cruel about it.
Slowly, he picks up the photo and looks at it again.
It’s an old polaroid of everyone. Bruce, who’s holding the camera front-facing to take a group selfie; Alfred, standing in the back and keeping the peace; Jason, crossing his arms like he doesn’t want to be there but pressed suspiciously close to Bruce’s back; Dick, grinning from ear to ear as he looks down at Tim while trying to tickle him; and Tim, who’s got his head thrown back as he laughs, trying to fight against Dick’s attack.
It was taken a month before Bruce went on his mission and was assumed dead.
Bruce was the one who took the photo. Once everyone had gotten their turn looking at it, he took it up to his room and stashed it somewhere safe. Dick hasn’t seen it since.
To think, Bruce had it kept safely in a baggie, tucked between a bunch of other photos to make sure it stayed in place. So that nothing ever happened to it.
He wonders what other photos are in the baggie.
The photo feels like a relic, a snapshot of a moment in time. People who would never be the same again. A family missing one of their own. An ominous sign of what was to come.
Lightly, as to not ruin the gloss, Dick grazes the pads of his fingers over Tim’s face and tries to memorize it. The wide, beaming smile. The joy in his eyes. The pink tint on his cheeks from laughing so hard.
Dick may never see any of that again.
Dick presses the photo to his chest protectively, and, with a rough sob, he sinks to the floor and starts to cry.
He tries to tell himself that he’s not spiraling. To prove it, he drops by Gotham one night before patrol, because if he were spiraling, he wouldn’t be able to handle it. And he’s in Gotham, so he’s handling it.
The other reason for visiting Gotham is because he’s got a tiny vial with a plant specimen inside that he wants to deliver to Bruce. He found it while running a call during his shift at the department this morning, and he has an inkling as to where it came from.
The Penguin has been apprehended, but Ivy is still on the loose, and while she likely wasn’t in for nefarious purposes, Bruce still wants to bring her in. So finding a weird-looking plant in the middle of an abandoned building after taking a call to break up a domestic dispute that vanished by the time he arrived— yeah. Dick has a sinking suspicion about who was there.
He also really, really wants to see Damian. And his dad.
So he drops by before patrol to give Bruce the specimen. But when he pulls his bike into the Cave, he finds it completely empty, save for Alfred, who is sitting by the computers.
Oh. They went out early.
“Master Dick,” Alfred greets with a surprised smile. “To what do we owe this visit?”
Dick swallows thickly, chest carving out like the hollowness of the Cave. Carefully, he steps off the bike and kicks up the stand, then fishes the vial from the hidden compartment underneath the seat.
“I think Ivy’s been in Blüdhaven,” he tells Alfred. “I found this in an empty building. I think she was having a meeting with someone.” He sets the vial down on the desk. “I figured Bruce would want to take a look at it, since he’s still working Ivy’s case.”
Alfred nods, peering at the vial curiously. “I see,” he responds. “The master and young master are already out, but they are on their way downtown if you would like to meet them.”
Dick’s immediate answer is to say yes. He wants to so badly, and this would be the perfect chance for him to finally spend some quality time with them both.
But he doesn’t like knowing that Ivy has been in his city, because with Ivy comes Harley, and with Harley comes the Joker, even after their split. He wants to investigate around Blüdhaven as soon as possible, and losing a day’s patrol could give Ivy the chance to clean up her messes and run.
To make things worse, the fire department was called out to a gas leak in a neighborhood, but they couldn’t find the source. It sounds like Chemo, or maybe Scarecrow. Dick needs to get on that fast, because both options could be disastrous.
Dick hates them all.
“I’ve got too much to do,” he confesses sadly. “I’ll go out with them another day.”
Alfred frowns, but nods understandingly. “Come by for breakfast soon,” he offers, though Dick knows the answer he’s expecting. “Cereal every morning is hardly enough for a man of your stature.”
Dick hasn’t been eating breakfast as of late, but he’s not about to tell Alfred that. “Sure thing, Al,” he promises. Then he turns and heads for his bike, waving to Alfred as he goes.
When he speeds out and into the streets, a heavy feeling settles deep into his stomach. He makes it about five minutes, zooming down the empty highway. That’s as far as he gets, however, when he catches something out of the corner of his eye. He skids to a stop, planting his feet on the ground as he turns his body around.
Up in the sky, Batman and Robin, swinging across the Gotham skyline.
It almost feels like a betrayal, seeing them up there. Because that’s supposed to be him up there with Damian, teaching him how to fly. But also… Dick used to fly with Bruce all the time. That used to be Dick in the red and yellow, following his father as they sailed the skies together.
He’s not Robin anymore. He’s not Batman, either. He’s just Nightwing. And that’s— fine. He doesn’t want to be Batman or Robin. He wants to be Nightwing. But that’s all there is. Just Nightwing.
No wonder Damian wants Bruce to be his father.
He pulls his legs back in and drives off towards Blüdhaven without another thought.
Damian’s birthday rolls around the second week of August, and god, Dick can’t believe his boy is twelve.
There’s a celebratory dinner thrown in his honor with the whole family. Jason and Tim never show, but to Dick’s surprise, Jason has sent a present. (He’s even more surprised when he learns it’s not a bomb, but a sleek new dagger instead.)
Dick bought two cards for Damian. One says For my son on his birthday. The other says To a cool guy.
Dick signs both of them. He gives Damian the latter card, and keeps the former locked away. Alfred and Dick are the only ones who got him cards — not that Damian cares, since he glances through them with polite thank yous and then rips into his presents. Dick figures he made the right choice.
Dick convinces Bruce to give Damian the night off, right after he convinces Damian to take the night off. Once the cake is put away and the sun is casting a pretty orange glow across the sky, Bruce takes to the Cave for pre-patrol work, and Alfred busies himself with cleaning up the kitchen so he can get to his room and relax with his book.
Dick is left with Damian, who silently heads towards his room. Dick follows, knowing that Damian will be expecting it.
“I have a new book I thought you might be interested in hearing about,” Damian tells him halfway up the stairs. He doesn’t bother turning behind him.
Dick smiles to himself. “Sure, Little D,” he says. “What’s it about?”
They enter Damian’s room, and Damian swings it shut with a loud slam and not a care in the world. He climbs up onto his bed, leaving one side open for Dick as he digs under his pillow and pulls out a rather thick book. Obediently, Dick sits down beside him and peers over his shoulder as Damian opens the book.
“It is a book about Greek mythology,” answers Damian, finally. “It is a bit difficult to read, but I’ve found that means I read it slower and am able to appreciate it more.”
Dick looks in the upper margins to see if he can find the title or author’s name. When he finds it, his eyebrows shoot up into his hairline. “The Odyssey?” he asks in disbelief. “You’re reading The Odyssey? On your own?”
Damian nods, looking slightly perplexed. “Yes,” he confirms. “Why? Should I not be?”
Dick shakes his head. “No no, you can,” he clarifies. “It’s just, it’s harder to read because it’s— well. Really hard to read, even at your advanced reading level.” He shakes off the shock, hoping it wasn’t enough to scare Damian away from reading it. “It’s pretty good, once you figure out what they’re saying. How far have you gotten?”
Damian shrugs, flipping through a few pages before landing somewhere with his bookmark. “Only through the first chapter. It seems like it will be riveting, however.”
Dick does his best to bite back the grin threatening to spread across his face. Only Damian would call The Odyssey riveting at twelve years old. “Most Greek myths are, especially this plotline,” he explains. “It’s sort of a sequel to another epic called The Iliad.”
Damian nods. “I have heard of The Iliad,” he replies. “Did you ever read these stories?”
Dick makes a noise in between a scoff and a snort. He reaches out and takes the book out of Damian’s hand, flipping through a few of the pages. “Oh yeah. I read them both in high school.”
An idea pops into his head. He shuts the book with a smirk, looking down at Damian who is staring at him with growing apprehension. “I should read it to you.”
Damian looks appalled. “Read it to me?” he questions. “Why would you do that? I can read perfectly fine.” He almost sounds offended.
Dick just smiles and taps at the name Homer etched in cursive across the cover. “Of course you can,” he responds easily. “But stories like this were meant to be orature, not literature. Speaking them is a whole different experience than just reading it.”
Or at least, that’s what his ninth grade English teacher told him when they read it. He doesn’t completely understand, other than the fact that he can do funny voices, but it’s giving him a chance to read Damian a story, so he’s going to milk this as far as he possibly can.
Damian contemplates the information for a few moments, but finally, he concedes and falls onto his back, staring up at the ceiling fan as it whirls around. “Alright,” he agrees. “You may read it aloud.”
Dick tamps down his excitement so that he doesn’t blow his cover. He fingers through each page until he gets to the start of the second book, where Damian left off.
“When primal dawn spread on the eastern sky her fingers of pink light,” he starts, as Damian sprawls out on his back beside him, “Odysseus' true son stood up, drew on his tunic and his mantle…”
Dick bends his right leg so he can press his big toe against Damian’s arm. Damian scowls at him in disgust. “...slung on a sword-belt and a new-edged sword, tied his smooth feet into good rawhide sandals, and left his room, a god's brilliance upon.”
He reads on for a while. He forgot how much he enjoyed the story until he started getting into the action parts. He remembers sitting in his English class, thinking of himself as Odysseus or Achilles. He remembers being invigorated, and going out on patrol telling himself that he could be a hero like them.
Of course, then Achilles died. And he and Odysseus did some pretty bad stuff. Dick stopped looking at them as role models after that. But it wasn’t hard — he had a pretty great dad to look up to instead.
He stops at the end of book three, to point out, “You haven’t made a comment in a while—”
But when he lowers the book, he sees Damian, still sprawled starfish on his back, sound asleep.
Warmth spreads across Dick’s chest and down to his fingers. Damian's mouth is parted just enough to let out little puffs of air, and his chest is a steady rise and fall. Dick used to watch Damian sleep all the time in the aftermath of the Major Incident with the Scarecrow. Everything is different now.
Carefully, so that he doesn’t wake him, Dick slides away from the pillows and turns so that he’s the same direction as Damian. He lowers himself down, resting on his side with the book open by his face, but with Damian right beside him.
“By vales and sharp ravines in Lakedaimon the travellers drove to Menelaos' mansion,” Dick reads, whispering. Very, very cautiously, he reaches out and lays a gentle hand on Damian’s stomach. Damian, blessedly, stays asleep. “...and found him at a double wedding feast for son and daughter.…”
He’s not sure how far he gets, but it’s not about reading the book anymore. He trails off as he falls asleep with Damian at his side, tucked away in the dark of Damian’s room where no one can get them. Their own little bubble, just like before.
In the morning, Dick opens his eyes to find Damian already awake. Damian had rolled onto his side sometime in the middle of the night, and now they’re staring at each other.
“Morning, Damian,” Dick murmurs.
Damian’s eyes flutter, then reopen. He stares at Dick like he’s trying to see his soul. “Good morning, Richard.”
Dick pretends not to know where Jason’s safehouse(s) is, usually. But he sends Jason a small gift for his birthday — a leather necklace cord with a funky pendant hanging from it. It doesn’t really have any meaning, but Dick thought it looked cool, and he thought Jason might like it.
Dick waits for it to inevitably come back in the mail, or get thrown at him out of nowhere while he’s out, but it never does.
Jason could have thrown it away, but there’s a small ember of hope that burns in the back of his chest, that maybe Jason kept it after all.
He gets a call from Barbara two days later while on his lunch break. He’s surprised by it, so he steps outside to answer, taking a seat on the bench to shield himself from the sun peeking out through the stratonimbus clouds.
“Hello, Golden Boy,” she opens with as soon as Dick connects the call.
“Babs,” Dick greets, already feeling a smile pull at the corners of his mouth. “How kind of you to call a lowly peasant such as myself while busy working for royalty.”
He can practically hear her rolling her eyes. “It’s not royalty, you brat. It’s a viscount. And I haven’t even met him.” She sounds a bit bitter. “I’ve been at the base the whole time.”
Dick frowns with sympathy. The Titans needed Oracle’s help on a mission in Europe, something about international bank codes. But since her paralysis, not being out in the field on such a high-stakes mission must suck, especially considering she’s been at it for a month.
“The food is good, though,” Babs adds, sounding more cheerful. “Dick, I’m telling you, you have to taste authentic Italian. Your tongue will never be the same.”
Dick grins. “I’ll make sure to try it one day,” he promises, leaning back against the bench and sprawling his legs out. It’s been a while since he’s had a real, sit-down conversation with her. It reminds him of a time when things were easier. “So what’s up?”
“I’ve been away from Gotham for far too long,” she answers. “I want to know about everything that’s happened while I’ve been gone.”
Dick snorts. “That could take forever,” he tells her. “There’s been a recent issue with Cobblepot weapon smuggling, but B took care of that. We think—”
“No, not that,” she interrupts. “I mean with the Waynes. I know things have been kind of crazy since Bruce came back. What’s been going on?
Oh. Well, that makes things a little more complicated. How is he supposed to explain to Babs that he’s been feeling like an imposter in both of his cities since Bruce stepped back into the manor five months ago?
“Uh,” he stutters, scratching at the hairline across his forehead. “Well, not much I guess. Alfred taught Damian how to make cookies.”
“That’s good,” she says. ‘What else? How’s Bruce?”
Dick presses his lips into a thin line. “Bruce is… fine.” Because he is. He’s moved in and acclimated himself to the manor, the Cave, and the city. That’s really all there is to it.
“How are things going with Damian? With Bruce’s return and all.”
Fuck. Why can’t she just call them if she wants to know about them? “Damian is fine,” he responds. Because it’s true. He cracks the knuckles in the hand not holding his phone.
“You haven’t been home, have you?” Barbara questions flatly.
Dick winces. “I’m home all the time,” he argues. “Just not at the manor.”
Barbara tuts at him, disappointed. “Don’t try to play with my words. You know what I meant.”
Dick huffs, a tendril of annoyance curling in his chest. “I’m an adult who moved out, just like every other adult on the planet,” he reminds her. “I come over for dinner plenty. Alfred makes sure. Things are fine, like I told you.”
He can feel her frown radiating through the phone. “Stopping by for dinner isn’t the same as visiting,” she says. “What’s the matter? It’s not like you to distance yourself from the family.”
Dick clenches his jaw tight, teeth grinding together in a way that makes his skin prickle uncomfortably. “I’m not distancing myself,” he snaps. “You should know what that’s like better than anyone.”
The line goes silent, and immediately, Dick wants to take it all back. He sinks into his uniform as far as he can, propping his elbow up on the arm of the bench and putting his face in his hand. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “That wasn’t fair.”
A beat passes, and then Barbara replies, “No, it wasn’t.” And then, “You’re not wrong, though. We grew apart. It happens sometimes.” She sighs, and Dick sighs with her. “But Dickie, you can’t let your family grow apart. Relationships can be finicky, but family is forever.”
Dick’s heart twists painfully. He’s already lost one family already. Family is forever, she says, but when was the last time Dick visited his parents’ graves?
“I’m not doing it on purpose,” he defends weakly, “and neither are they. Things just… aren’t working out.” He picks at the paint chipping off of the bench. “I’m trying. But things are different now. Nothing is the same.”
Barbara clicks her tongue at that. “Alfred is worried about you,” she admits. “I am, too. And Jason and Tim—”
“What?” Dick asks, coming out harsher than he meant. He sits up straighter. “Jason and Tim what?”
There’s silence as Barbara hesitates, before quietly admitting, “Jason and Tim have kept close contact since Bruce’s return. Jason told Tim that he thinks something is up with you, so Tim thought it might be best to check in.”
Boiling, red-hot rage crashes through Dick so fast that his legs start to tingle with adrenaline. “Is that what this is about? Tim told you to call me?” And that hurts like scalding water, for about a thousand different reasons.
“That’s not why,” Barbara answers, voice stern at the accusation. “That’s not the only reason.”
“It’s the main reason though, isn’t it?” Dick huffs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I don’t hear from you in months, and when I do, it’s because Tim thought that maybe I was worth checking up on?”
“Dick—”
“If Tim is concerned, he can call me himself instead of acting like I’m shit on his shoe,” Dick snaps. “And Jason needs to keep out of my business, especially when it involves the family he wants nothing to do with.”
Dick goes to hang up in a fit of anger, but he pauses when he hears Babs calling to him even after he’s pulled the phone away. He’s fuming right now, but he can’t bring himself to hang up on her so disrespectfully. So, wearily, he lifts the phone back to his ear.
“I’m sorry for yelling at you,” he says into the receiver, cutting her off. “I’m just— I’m gonna go. My break is almost over.”
Babs makes a sad sound on the other line. “I’m sorry for pushing it,” she replies. “I’m just worried about you, Dick. First you lose your dad, and then you have to raise your brother on your own when Jason and Tim leave. And then Bruce comes back, and so do Jason and Tim, but then… you just leave. I don’t get it.”
Dick gets it. But that’s usually how these things go. Dick sees everything, and the others see nothing.
“That’s the thing,” he tells her. “Jason and Tim haven’t come back. Not really. And Bruce isn’t the same, and Damian is stuck in the middle, and everything is different now.”
Confused, Barbara asks, “Damian is stuck in the middle of what?”
Shit. “Nevermind,” he says hurriedly. “Look, I have to go. Be careful, okay? Even the base can be dangerous.”
“I will,” Barbara says uneasily. “Tim is coming back to Gotham soon. Maybe all this time away will give you guys the kick in the ass you need to talk.”
Dick shrugs, even though he knows she can’t see it. “I’ve tried. If he wants to talk, that’ll be up to him,” he remarks. “I’m tired, Babs.”
“I know, Dick,” she murmurs. “It’s all going to work itself out, alright? Just take it one step at a time.”
“Yeah,” he croaks, then clears his throat. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” she says. “Bye, Dick.”
“Bye,” he replies, and waits for her to hang up. When she doesn’t, he ends the call himself. There’s nothing else to say.
He wants to go back to his apartment and lock himself in his room until patrol. He wants to get in a burning hot shower and curl up on the tub floor. More than anything, though, he wants to drive to the manor, wrestle Damian under Bruce’s massive comforter, and tuck him into Dick’s side while they watch a funny movie.
He doesn’t do any of that. Instead, he stands and walks back into the precinct. His lunch break is up, after all.
(It doesn’t even occur to him that he didn’t eat.)
A few days later, Dick meets up with Bruce in the Cave after their respective patrols through Gotham and Blüdhaven to discuss a strange disappearance of chemicals, when Tim’s motorcycle enters the Batcave.
Right. He’s back from the Titan’s mission.
Tim is obviously not expecting Dick to be there, because he dismounts from his bike already saying, “Bruce, I need your help analyzing a sample—” and stops dead in his tracks when he sees Dick standing beside Bruce at the Batcomputer.
“I can come back later if you’re busy,” he says after a full thirty seconds of processing.
Bruce, of course, shakes his head, always happy to have as many of his kids under one roof as possible since his return. “We were just wrapping up,” he remarks.
Tim looks between Dick and Bruce, unsure.
Dick hates it. But Tim drove all this way to talk to Bruce, and it could be something important. Dick can wait until they’re done to continue his conversation with Bruce. Like Bruce said, they were pretty much finished, anyway.
“You two go ahead,” Dick tells them, smiling reassuringly. Tim does not smile back. “I’ll check on Damian. We can talk later.” He directs that last part to Bruce.
Bruce’s eyebrows furrow, obviously not liking the tension between his eldest and second-youngest sons. “Are you sure?”
Dick nods and pats his back. “Positive,” he assures. “Just give me a holler when you’re done.”
He can feel both pairs of eyes on him as he walks off, heading to the changing area on the other side of the Cave. He steels himself as he goes, shoulders straight, trying to keep his composure.
He finds Damian sitting on one of the medical tables in the medbay, miserably failing to wrap his wrist with one hand. Instantly, some of the tension leaves Dick’s body when he sees the kid sitting there. He smiles fondly at Damian’s struggling and obvious refusal to call someone for assistance.
“Pro tip,” he teases as he eyes the tangled mess of ruined athletic tape on the floor that equates to about half the roll, “you don’t need that much.”
Damian rips off his domino mask just so he can shoot Dick a vicious glare. Dick only grins at it and walks over to the spinny stool against the wall.
“Here,” he says, sitting down and rolling over to the kid with his arm outstretched, “let me help.”
It took months for Damian to allow Dick to assist him with any sort of medical patch-up when they were first moonlighting as Batman and Robin. Now, Damian offers Dick his hand without so much as a blink.
The kid immediately dives into a rant about how he wrenched his wrist trying to tackle one of the criminals they put away tonight. Dick nods along, listening to his dramatic retelling as he swiftly and expertly wraps Damian’s wrist. It’s only a mild sprain and should heal in a day or two, but it’s better to wrap it and let it heal in place than risk making it worse in the coming days.
When he’s done, he pats Damian’s hand and rolls backwards a bit to give him some space. “You were very brave,” Dick smiles. “Would you like a lollipop?”
Damian is not amused by the teasing. “If you give me a lollipop, I shall choke you with it,” he warns.
Dick salutes him with two fingers, to which Damian rolls his eyes and hops off the table. “Thank you for your assistance,” he says.
This time, Dick smiles for real. “Always, kiddo,” he replies. “So besides the sprain, good patrol tonight?”
Damian nods. “It could have been more exciting, but it was nonetheless busy,” he answers, “and Father says that a quiet patrol means something is amiss.”
Bruce has never in his life used the word amiss, and it makes Dick chuckle at Damian’s paraphrasing. “He’s not wrong,” he agrees. “A quiet Gotham is like the calm before the storm. A really, really, really bad storm.”
Damian nods along as they make their way out of the medbay. “When will you be joining us on patrol again?” he questions.
Dick’s heart lurches. “Soon, I hope,” he answers honestly.
“May I patrol with you in Blüdhaven one day?” Damian asks.
And oh, would that be incredible. Damian at his side as they swing through the streets, just like it was when Damian first came to them a year and a half ago. A new city for Damian to learn, which means Dick gets to teach him again. What Dick would give to have that.
But he tells Damian, “You’ll have to ask Bruce,” because Bruce is both Batman and Damian’s father, which means what he says overrules anything Dick says.
(Deep, deep inside, he’s bitter about it, and very angry. But there’s nothing he can do about it.)
“Ask Bruce what?” calls the man himself as the two of them near the middle of the Cave. Tim is still there, sitting in a chair beside Bruce at the computers. When he looks at Dick, he wears nothing but a blank face.
“If I may patrol Blüdhaven with Richard one night,” Damian responds bluntly. “I feel it would be essential to my training to learn about neighboring cities.”
Dick feels himself wilt, just slightly. Was that the only reason Damian wanted to patrol with him? No, surely not. Damian is a master manipulator, always telling people what they want to hear to get what he wants.
Dick likes to think Damian doesn’t use it on him that much. But maybe he’s been wrong.
“We’ll see,” Bruce decides. For most parents, that means a straightforward no. For Bruce, it really does mean we’ll see. He makes choices pretty quick, but he always turns them into elaborate plans, which he usually doesn’t disclose until the last minute.
Damian nods, letting the subject drop. “I will be retiring to bed,” he announces. “Richard, will you be continuing our read of The Odyssey?”
Dick swallows thickly. “Sure, baby bat,” he replies. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
Damian gives another curt nod, pleased. “Alright,” he says. “Goodnight Richard, Father.”
He ignores Tim entirely as he turns around. Tim doesn’t seem to care, but Dick instinctively takes Damian by the shoulder and says, “And?”
Damian sighs heavily through his nose, like what Dick is asking is a chore, then says, “Goodnight Drake.” Dick lets go of his shoulder, and Damian continues his journey to the stairs.
“Night, Dames!” Dick calls out. “I’ll be right there!” Damian does not respond and does not falter in his steps.
When the elevator begins its ascent, a small stretch of silence hangs over the Cave. Before Dick or Tim can say anything, Bruce clears his throat. “I’m going upstairs to help Alfred,” he tells them. He looks between the two of them, cautious. “You two should talk.”
Dick straightens up at attention, but Tim stiffens, obviously hating the idea. “I should probably go,” Tim starts to say, but Bruce gives him a stern look that makes him snap his mouth shut.
“Talk,” Bruce says, then turns for the stairs. Tim and Dick both watch him go, following every exact movement he makes so that they don’t have to look at each other. When Bruce is gone, they continue to stare at the spot on the platform above the stairs where Bruce disappeared into. Dick wants to slap his palm against his forehead, but he resists.
“I’m leaving,” announces Tim, who promptly spins on his heel and stalks away.
Dick blinks, taken aback. “What? Tim,” he calls, hurrying after him. “Bruce told us to talk.”
“So we’ll tell him we talked,” Tim says simply, not looking back as he continues his journey to his bike. “He went upstairs. It’s not like he’ll know.”
“I’ll know,” Dick argues. “He’s right; we should talk.” But Tim keeps walking, and he’s closing in on his bike, so Dick reaches out in a last-ditch resort and grabs his elbow. “Wait—”
Tim whirls around and yanks his arm free, glaring at Dick like he’s some sort of criminal. “I don’t want to talk, Dick,” he snaps.
“Yeah? Well,” Dick replies, scrambling, "I do. So now what?"
“So now I leave,” Tim answers flatly, then turns around again. So Dick rounds him and stands in front of him, blocking his path. Tim’s glare turns lethal.
“We need to talk,” Dick repeats.
Tim huffs furiously through his nose. “You didn’t want to talk when Bruce was stuck in time.”
That’s lemon juice in a festering wound. “I wouldn’t have left him there if I knew that,” Dick defends. Hurt manages to sink into his words despite his best efforts.
Tim throws his hands up in the air. “I knew it,” he snaps. “I knew he was alive and you refused to believe me.”
“The Justice League told us he was dead, Tim,” Dick responds coldly. “I had so many responsibilities put onto me the moment they told us. I had no reason to think he was alive—”
“Except that I told you,” repeats Tim. “You should have believed me.”
“Yes, I should have!” yells Dick. “I should have believed you because you were right. But while you were dealing with the Titans and mourning Bruce, I had to deal with lawyers, contracts, custody meetings, becoming CEO, planning a funeral, dealing with the press and the public, raising Damian—”
“I was dealing with so much more than just the Titans and mourning, you asshole,” Tim fires back. “You were dealing with shit, I get it. But you should have taken me seriously.”
“I already said that I should have,” hisses Dick. “What else do you want me to say? I’ve apologized; I’ve said you were right. You got Bruce back without any help from me and you went through hell to do it. I get it. I get it. ”
He runs a hand through his hair, exasperated. “What can I do to fix this?” he asks, feeling like his lungs are running out of air. “Just tell me. I’ll do anything.”
His words leave a gobsmacked expression on Tim’s face. “Fix this?” he echoes.
“Yes, fix this,” Dick fires.
Tim laughs in disbelief. “Bruce doesn’t know what to do except be Batman anymore,” he says. “Jason is still homicidal. You took Robin away from me to give it to the brother you like more, and you left me to deal with the League of Assassins alone. You can’t fix this , Dick.”
Ire swirls through Dick’s blood at Tim’s dismissal of everything. Dick has made some stupid decisions, ones that he regrets with every fiber of his being, but that doesn’t justify giving up on him.
“I have made so many mistakes since Bruce died,” he tells his brother, “but we are all here and we are all alive. If I can’t fix things, that’s only because no one else except me is willing to work things out.”
Tim looks at him as if he’s stupid. “Of course we don’t want to work things out,” he replies. “Why would we?”
Dick’s mouth falls open in shock. He can practically hear the record-scratch echo in his ears. “Because we’re family?” he responds, incredulous.
“Family? We’re not a family,” Tim scoffs. “Jason still hates us. Bruce is even more lost than he was before. Damian despises everyone, and you and I—”
He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. Dick knows what he meant.
“No,” Dick says, interrupting him. “You don’t get to erase an entire decade because of a rough patch in the wake of the loss of our father, Tim. That’s not fair. I’m trying, and you’re not letting me.”
Tim rolls his eyes. “You’re the one who erased an entire decade when you picked Damian over me,” he snaps. “And you need to get over this desperate need to always try to fix everything. You can’t fix shit.”
That hits Dick like a stab in the heart. He’s the only one in this family who has ever been emotionally un-constipated enough to force everyone to work things out when there have been issues. Granted, he’s not always successful (see: Jason and Bruce), but he tries, because his family is worth it.
He has always been proud that he never lost his ability to communicate with empathy. It’s one of his biggest roles on the team. But how useful is he really, if he can’t keep his family together?
“It’s stupid to think we’re a family,” Tim repeats, turning away from him. “And after all of this, I think it’s clear that we never were.”
He stalks over to his motorcycle without another word, jamming the helmet onto his head. He gets the keys in the ignition, swings his leg over the body, and skids out of the Cave. Not once does he look back at Dick.
Dick remains where he is, standing in the middle of the Cave, alone. It feels like his chest is being carved out.
All Dick has is his family. His Titans are god-knows where, scattered out across the universe. Neither Gotham or Blüdhaven feel like home anymore. Two out of three of his brothers hate him, Bruce struggles to speak to him sometimes, and every time he looks at Damian, he’s torn between forcing himself to be the boy’s brother and aching for him to call him Baba again.
All Dick has is his family, and his family has fallen apart.
He almost wishes everything was back to how it was. That Bruce was still gone, that Jason and Tim refused to come to the manor, that Damian was still his. The boundaries were there and clear, and that Dick was still living in the life he built for himself over that year. How horrible is that?
He’s horrible. He’s a horrible son, and an even worse brother.
Dick yells. He yells as loud as he possibly can, until he’s out of air and his face is hot. And then he yells again. He yells so loud it disturbs the bats above him. He chucks his escrima sticks across the Cave, takes the bo staff on the floor and snaps it against the wall. He knocks over the stand with his gymnastics chalk and watches white powder go flying into the air. He yells and he yells.
You left Bruce stuck in time. Jason hates us.
You took Robin away from me to give it to the brother you like more.
It’s stupid to think we’re a family.
A small hand tugs on his suit. Startled and heaving for breath, Dick turns and finds Damian beside him, now changed into his pajamas. Damian tugs on his suit again. Taking a deep breath, Dick does as he’s being asked and crouches down on his haunches to Damian’s height.
Without a word, Damian reaches out and puts his little fingers underneath Dick’s mask. He presses the safety mechanisms until the mask unlatches, and then pulls it off. He sets it off to the side, on the floor. He stares at Dick with wide, sad eyes, with no lenses interfering. Then he wraps his arms around Dick's waist and presses his face into his abdomen.
A sob gets lodged in Dick’s throat. He squeezes Damian tight and cries into his hair, and Damian lets him. Damian doesn’t say anything else, but he doesn’t need to. The way he’s holding on tight to Dick tells him everything he needs to know.
A week goes by, and Dick still hasn’t recovered from his conversation with Tim.
He walks around his apartment like a ghost, eating his cereal and aimlessly watching whatever show is on his TV. He can’t really make it to his room. He could if he tried, but the living room is closer to the kitchen and therefore requires less energy to get there, so he’s been camped out on his couch.
He hasn’t returned to Gotham since he dropped by the Cave that night. After he sent Damian to bed, he got on his bike and went back to Blüdhaven. Bruce called him the next day, but he hasn’t heard from anyone else (including Damian) since then.
We’re not a family, Tim had said.
When Tim came back with Bruce, he told Dick all about the horrors he faced trying to get Bruce back, and when he left, Dick sat in his room and cried for hours at everything that happened to his little brother. And he did that. He left Tim to go after Bruce on his own, without his older brother to watch his back. And then he had to go up against the League of Assassins, by himself.
No wonder Tim wants nothing to do with Dick anymore. Dick doesn’t blame him. He just isn’t sure if he should give up. This is his little brother, after all. He left Tim alone, and he doesn’t want to abandon him again. But Tim wants practically no contact with him. Should he respect that?
Dick holds his head in his hands, groaning pitifully. He’s had a three-day migraine despite the pain meds he’s been taking, and it’s hard for him to keep anything down.
It’s getting bad again.
It was a little easier when he was at the manor with Alfred and Damian. Alfred helped take care of him, and he knew he had to take care of himself for Damian. But now he’s alone in his apartment, in a city that doesn’t feel like home anymore, longing for a family that doesn’t want him.
Well, okay. Bruce wants him. But Bruce also has three other kids (two of which actually like him) that can easily replace Dick. And Damian may want him, but he doesn’t need him. He needs his father, and that’s Bruce.
Dick covers his face with his hands and tries to cry, but there are no more tears in his head. His mouth is suspiciously parched. He cries dry instead. He tries to close the curtains, but his arms feel weak and heavy. He gets one of them halfway down the rod, but the other one doesn’t budge when he tries.
Dick lets his arm fall and gives up.
For the first few seconds when he wakes next, he thinks he’s in heaven. He’s not sure what else would be the reason for such sweet-smelling herbs and spices to be filling his nostrils, but they are, so it seems like he’s died and gone to heaven despite the sins he’s committed to his family and the fact that he hasn’t fully believed in God since he was in the circus.
That, of course, is when he hears, “Sit up, Dickface, before you fall asleep again.”
… oh god, Jason’s died too.
He feels two hands grab his arms and shake him around. Dick groans as his head pounds with shooting, agonizing pain. He wants to open his eyes, but even the light from behind his eyelids is bothering him.
“Seriously, Dick, open your eyes before I call for an ambulance.”
There’s urgency in Jason’s voice, and, despite the fact that Jason can’t call an ambulance when they’re in heaven, Dick does what he’s told, because the last thing he wants is to cause any more pain to his family.
His family. Does he even have a family anymore, besides Damian?
His eyes sting when his pupils eat the light. There’s… hardly any, actually. Jason has drawn the curtains and turned off all the lights in the room except for the lamp on the table at the other arm of the couch.
The couch. He’s still in Blüdhaven.
“Give your eyes a minute to adjust,” says Jason, as if Dick doesn’t know that. “Jeez, I didn’t think it was this bad.”
“B’huh?” Dick asks eloquently, squinting up at Jason, who is sitting on the couch beside his legs.
Jason sounds annoyed, but his face betrays a hint of concern, even in the dim. “Damian said he hadn’t heard from you.”
Damian?
Dick sits up a little, but his arms give out and he falls the few centimeters back down. “Damian?” he asks. “How’d…?”
“We’re Bats,” Jason says. “Word gets around fast.” When Dick remains silent, Jason concedes, “Alfred called me. Said the little demon brat was worried about you.”
Dick blinks up at Jason, surprised. “And you came?”
Jason shrugs. “Damian was ready to walk all the way here by himself, but Bruce and Alfred wouldn’t let him,” he answers. “Bruce didn’t want to impose on your personal space, and Tim doesn’t want to talk to you, so I was the only one left to check.”
Well, that fucking stings.
Dick manages to sit up with a little help from Jason, then nudges him away. His head pounds achingly every time he moves.
“Why are you here?” he asks. There are pain relievers on the coffee table, right beside a large glass of water. He greedily takes the pills and swallows down the water too fast. He feels sick when he finally sets the glass back down.
“I told you,” replies Jason, “Bruce didn’t want—“
“I know what you said,” Dick interrupts. He says it harshly, harsher than he meant to. He feels bad, but doesn’t apologize. “Sorry for hoping you were here for another reason besides obligation.”
Jason’s eyebrows furrow. He pauses, like he’s analyzing something, then nudges the plate on the table. It’s a steak, still sizzling from the heat of the pan it was cooked in and overflowing with juice. One of Jason’s steaks. Fuck, those are incredible.
Too bad his stomach is twisting up again.
“Don’t get all righteous on me, Dick,” Jason says. “Just because I was the only other option doesn’t mean I didn’t want to come.”
Dick looks at the steak, slow to understand. There’s fog in his brain and a weight in his heart. “Why did you?” he asks. “After everything I did, why would you want to come?”
Jason stares at him. He stares, and stares, and stares some more. It makes Dick’s skin crawl a little, but he looks at Jason anyway, because he asked him a question, and it’s only polite to look at the person you're talking to. His mother would be proud.
Or would she?
“Dick,” Jason says slowly, “letting Tim go alone was a shitty move, but you had other responsibilities — a child being one of them. And Tim was the one who decided to go without you. What you did wasn’t evil.”
“Tell that to Tim,” Dick says bitterly.
Jason sighs. “Yeah, Timmers is pissed as hell, but I think it’s mainly because of the Robin thing. Some of his anger is rightly placed. Some of it isn’t.”
Dick snorts at those words. “Pot meets kettle,” he mutters. “Some of Tim’s anger towards me is misplaced, but some of yours to Bruce isn’t?”
Jason goes rigid immediately. “That’s different,” he snaps.
“No, it really fucking isn’t,” Dick snaps right back. “Our family is disintegrating in front of our eyes and none of you are willing to do anything about it—”
“Disintegrating?”
“—so don’t come into my home and try to console me about shit you don’t even fully understand because you’re never home.”
Jason does not reply for a good minute or so. Dick’s stomach continues to twist. He wants to take a bite of the steak, but he’s worried he’ll throw it up, as well as everything else he’s eaten in the past twenty-four hours — which, granted, isn’t that much.
“You contradicted yourself,” says Jason.
That’s not what Dick expected, so he says, “What?” in hopes that whatever he said will be different the second time around.
“You contradicted yourself,” Jason repeats. ““You said that I’m here in your home, but then said I’m never home,” he explains. “You meant the manor.”
A bubble of annoyance pops in Dick’s chest. “So?” he asks. Why is Jason talking to him about wordage, when they were just talking about how their family is falling apart?
“You need a therapist,” says Jason.
Dick scoffs so hard that it scratches at his dry throat and he gets hurled into a coughing fit. He chokes and gags and Jason beats on his back as if that will help. There’s a little bit of water left in the glass Jason brought him, so he sips on the rest of that to ease his throat.
When he can finally breathe without coughing, he catches his breath and glares incredulously at Jason. “That’s rich coming from you.”
Jason only raises his eyebrows at him. “Yeah, it is. But you’re obviously losing something here,” he argues. “You don’t have a set place to think of as home, and you think the family is falling apart—”
“It is,” hisses Dick. “Tim despises me. Damian despises everyone but me. And maybe Bruce. And you despise all of us.” His chest constricts from the force of his words. “We all fucked up a lot of stuff when Bruce died and I’m trying to fix it and no one wants to. I just—”
Dick puts his head in his hands and pulls at his hair, trying to stay calm. “I just want things to be normal.”
Dick can sense how uncomfortable Jason is at the turn of the conversation. He pats Dick on the shoulder anyway, as an attempt at comfort.
“Alfred will guilt Tim into coming over more, and you’ll get more chances to make up with him,” he tries. “And Bruce will get used to being back. And I’ll— I’ll… come over more, I guess.” It’s hard for him to say, Dick can hear it. “Damian, though, will always despise everyone. It’s just the kid’s nature, spiteful fuck.”
Normally, Dick would jump to defend Damian. Instead, the words just make him laugh a little. “Yeah, he is,” he says, feeling himself smile for the first time in a week. Then, he frowns again. “You said he was worried?”
Jason nods. “He said you usually call him on Tuesday evenings, since everyone’s patrols are shorter,” he relays. “You missed your call.”
Damn. Dick forgot to call him. How could it just slip his mind? He hopes Damian didn’t think it was on purpose, or that he would ignore him, or abandon him like Talia. Dick could never do that to his boy.
“Easy, cowboy, I can see your turmoil from here,” Jason says, whacking Dick’s shoulder. “He’s fine, just concerned. You must’ve really done something to scare the kid into caring about you. He doesn’t even get this worried about Alfred.”
He says it as a joke, but when Dick doesn’t reply, his voice turns serious. “Shit, Dickhead, what the hell did you do?”
“Being Batman was hard, alright?” defends Dick immediately. “It doesn't matter. I’m fine.”
Jason refuses to let it slide, much to Dick’s dismay. “Is that when you got that scar?” he questions. Once again, Dick does not respond. “Dick.”
“It’s done,” Dick says, stern. “I never have to be Batman again, and Damian can work under the expert. Everyone wins.”
Jason’s face pinches, confused. “What does Damian and Bruce have to do with anything?”
“You said I must have done something to him to scare him,” relays Dick.
“You getting seriously hurt has nothing to do with Damian.”
“It is if I got hurt protecting him.”
Jason, obviously, doesn’t like that answer. “Dick,” he asks, slow, “what happened?”
Dick rolls his shoulders uncomfortably. “Damian wasn’t listening to me in the field. He thought he knew better than me, and he didn’t,” he explains simply. “I had to take the hit for him.”
“You had to…” Jason trails off. “You couldn’t have pushed him out of the way?”
Dick shrugs one shoulder. “Didn’t really register at the time.”
Jason continues to be unamused by the whole thing. He snorts and rubs at his forehead. “So you really went and almost died to make Damian care about you?” he questions in disbelief. “I get that you were his guardian and all, but you didn’t have to go that far to teach him a lesson. It’s not like he’s your kid.”
Dick doesn’t have anything to say to that. It doesn’t make it hurt any less. Because he’s not Dick’s kid. He’s Bruce’s. He always has been, even when Bruce was gone. Dick was naive to think anything else.
Jason must finally comprehend it all, because understanding dawns on his face, and the tension in the room droops. “Aw shit, Dick.”
Dick covers his eyes with his hands and digs his palms in. “Everything is falling apart,” he whispers. “It’s like a landslide, and I can’t stop it.”
Jason gives him a few pats on the back, obviously not knowing how to show support but wanting to do something. It does make Dick feel somewhat better. Despite the shit going on between them all, Jason still cares about him. The relief of it just makes him want to cry anymore.
“Y’know the thing about landslides,” Jason tells him, “is that you can’t stop them, no matter how hard you try. You’ll just get buried in its wake. You just have to let them go.”
“I can’t,” says Dick. “I can’t let him go.”
Jason sighs, but says nothing in response. They sit there in silence, until Dick regains his composure and peels his palms away from his eyes. He runs his tongue across his teeth, then grimaces. He needs to brush them. And take a shower.
“Could you get me some water?” he asks Jason.
It must be a testament to how bad he looks, because Jason doesn’t even open his mouth with a remark. He just gets up without a word, carries the empty glass to the sink, and fills it and two other glasses up from the tap.
When he gets back, he sets one down near him and the other two a bit further away. “Pace yourself before you get sick.”
Dick doesn’t snark at him. He just sips at the first glass and revels in the cool water as it floods his dry, cottony mouth. Once he’s finished the first glass, Jason says, “Eat the steak, Dick.”
Dick doesn’t want to eat the steak. He wants to curl under his blankets and hide from the world. But Damian is expecting a call soon, and Alfred will want him over eventually for dinner, so Dick had to have enough strength to do those things.
So he picks up his fork and knife and cuts into the steak, and doesn’t say a thing about the leather necklace hanging from Jason’s neck.
The following week is hard.
Dick feels like he’s losing time, floating through the days. But crime never sleeps in Gotham, and four days after Jason’s drop-in, Bruce contacts him with an urgent message that there’s a situation in Gotham that he could use another set of hands with.
And, well. He’s maybe neglecting his own city just a bit; but Dick is in desperate need of any sort of contact with his family — his family? — so he agrees almost instantly and lets Bruce know he’s on his way. Hopefully crime in the ‘Haven stays on the lower side tonight, like it was the night before.
Bruce’s tracker leads Dick to the top of a finance building, where he locates Batman, Robin, Riddler, and his men all fighting each other.
He gets off his bike and grapples towards the building a few yards away, to give himself momentum. He veers towards the Riddle and knocks him hard to the ground with his feet. Hands still on the grappling gun, Dick swings away, waiting until he’s a safe distance away before letting go and gracefully somersaulting across the roof to absorb his landing.
He tucks the grapple gun away, nodding at Bruce and Damian in acknowledgement, who nod back at him. Something small unravels in his chest at the correspondence.
The Riddler isn’t alone. He’s gotten his claws in a handful of goons, some of which Bruce and Damian are fighting, and others who break away from the group and charge at Dick. Dick alights his escrima sticks and revels in the crackling sound of their electricity. He needs to get the fervor that’s been building since his talk with Tim out of his body.
It feels good when the first punch lands. His body is used to impacts like that, and his adrenaline is starting to run, so all he feels is a barely-there ache when his knuckles slam into the jaw of the first goon that gets to him. He grabs the guy’s fist and his elbow and twists his arm backwards in a back-arm lock, then shoves him hard at another goon running towards them.
He ducks under a left hook, then pops back up with an uppercut that sends the man sprawling onto his ass. Two more try to block him from either side, so he jabs them both in the gut with his escrima sticks. They spasm hard enough that Dick can knock them both off their feet with a quick couple of swipes.
Another handful of goons gang up on him after that, and Dick has to struggle to get them off of him. But he manages, and his blood pumps with cortisol when he hears each of his hits land. He beats the frustration out of him and into each goon trying to hurt him.
He puts down all of the goons, just in time for Bruce to yell, “Grenade!” and Dick has three split-second thoughts at the exact same time.
Find Damian. Cover Damian.
This can’t end up like last time.
Damian has ventured beside him, like always. He grabs Damian by the arm, drawing him up to his chest, and Damian, reflexively, folds into Dick’s body. Dick goes to grab the cape to shield them, but when he reaches back, his hand touches nothing but air.
Right. He’s Nightwing.
Thinking fast, Dick wraps both arms tightly around Damian and leaps behind the stairwell building. He puts his back to the Riddler, which is a good thing, because they only barely manage to get safely behind the concrete before the grenade detonates.
Shards of metal and broken bits of concrete slam into the back of Dick’s body, tearing at his suit and striking his skin. All the while, Dick covers Damian with his entire body, shielding him from debris from the explosion.
His ears ring painfully sharp as the dust settles around them. Damian wiggles beneath him, alive and safe.
Dick’s not sure how long he lays there. It’s in part because he’s too weak to move immediately; but he also knows that, as long as he remains where he is, Damian is safe. He’ll move when Bruce tells him to. When Bruce says it’s okay.
“Nightwing,” Damian says, muffled against Dick’s leather uniform and the ocean in his ears, “what is wrong?”
Dick makes a pained wheezing sound, not on his own accord. “Fine, Little D,” he breathes.
Damian, obviously, does not seem to completely believe him, because he begins to pat around Dick’s body in the sparse space they have, checking for wounds or broken bones. A fierce protectiveness washes over Dick, and he presses his face harder into the concrete below him, desperate to keep Damian safe.
Finally, a hand rests on Dick’s shoulder, and he knows without even having to look that it’s Bruce.
Very carefully, Dick gathers the strength he has and pushes down on his arms, lifting his body up and off of Damian. The kid gracefully rolls out from under him. Dick shifts his weight to his knees to draw himself upwards, wincing at the striking pains in his back.
“You are injured!” Damian exclaims as Dick shakily gets to his feet. Bruce slides over and helps steady his weight without a word. “You liar.”
“I didn’t lie,” Dick counters, affronted. His head feels kind of dizzy. “I’ve had much worse than this and you know it.”
Damian scowls but does not respond. Dick thinks back to the first time he caught Damian hiding a wound from him, how horrified he felt when he saw the large gash across his side. Shit.
“Let’s take you to Agent A,” Bruce suggests, though Dick can tell it’s an order. “He’ll get you patched up.”
“What about the Riddler?” Dick asks, vision still sort of unsteady.
Bruce stares at him with unblinking, unwavering white lenses. “Unconscious and tied up on the steps of Gotham PD,” he replies. Oh. Dick must have lost more time than he realized.
He lets Bruce grapple them down to the Batmobile and guide him where he needs to go. He knows better than to argue about medical services after an explosion. He’s got to set a good example for Damian, after all.
Alfred is entirely exasperated by the whole thing. He doesn’t show it on his face, but Dick put himself into a number of compromising situations as Batman, all of which Alfred was there to fix him up in the aftermath. Dick can read it in his eyes.
“Is there not a concrete stairwell cover on the top of that building?” he asks, feigning ignorance as he and Bruce help Dick to the medbay.
“There is,” Dick replies, trying to keep from curling in on himself like a chastised child. “Couldn’t get completely covered in time.”
They keep Dick steady as he puts one knee on the surgical table, and then the other. He lays obediently on his front, leg muscles slacking in relief when he takes his weight off them. Bruce carefully unzips Dick’s suit and pushes it down his arms a bit to expose his torn-up back, then steps back to let Alfred work.
“I see,” says Alfred, who then looks at the other two — at Bruce’s cape, with a handful of holes and a singed left side; and at Damian, with a skinned knee and slightly-ripped edge of his cape.
Alfred doesn’t say anything more, but he lingers on Damian for a few seconds longer than he did for Bruce. He turns away from the others and begins prepping the areas on Dick’s back. Bruce leaves with Damian, trusting Alfred to patch Dick up without a worry.
Bruce didn’t say anything about Dick’s delay in the field, which means he probably didn’t even notice Dick’s slip-up. And yet, as he looks over from the doorway and meets Alfred’s eyes, the look Alfred gives him means he knows what happened all the same.
“I see Master Damian managed to evade the explosion,” he mentions offhandedly as he threads the needle. “I am surprised that you were unable to.”
Dick keeps his mouth shut the entire time Alfred works.
There’s a text message waiting for him when he wakes up in the morning. It’s from Alfred, and he already knows what it says before even having to look at it.
Dick sighs. He wishes his life could be less predictable.
Dick doesn’t bother to dress nice. He throws on a pair of joggers and a navy blue t-shirt that’s loose enough to not irritate his stitches, steps into his sneakers, and leaves.
The mid-September sunset is just peeking out over the horizon as he crosses into Gotham. When he passes Gianni’s Pizza Parlor, he can almost see himself and Damian sitting on the rooftop, watching the sunrise like they used to at the end of their patrols.
By the time he walks into the foyer of the manor, the bruises all along his ribs and stitches in his back still ache like hell. Judging by the look on Alfred’s face when he passes, he’s not fooling anyone about the pain.
Bruce and Damian greet him with hellos when he enters the kitchen. Dick murmurs back a greeting of his own, then plops down into the seat on the other end of the table, opposite of Bruce.
Damian, who had been sitting on the middle side of the table, stands up and moves seats so he can sit beside Dick. It makes Dick smile. He ruffles Damian’s hair, still damp from (presumably) a shower, and sits in the comfortable silence of the kitchen as Alfred rustles around the kitchen.
He’s glad he enjoyed it while he could, because dinner is, of course, a shit-show.
Jason actually shows, which Dick is surprised about, but grateful for nonetheless. Despite everything going on with him, he’s in Dick’s corner one way or the other, even if he still can’t look Bruce in the eye.
He sticks near Alfred most of the evening, helping him with dinner. Dick can tell he’s trying to keep away from Bruce, and he doesn’t think Jason is looking to converse much with him after the heaviness of their last talk. But he’s here, and for now, that’s enough.
Tim comes, as well, which is also surprising. But when Tim sees him, his face hardens over. It’s only Alfred’s presence that keeps him from saying anything untoward.
Alfred must not have informed him that Dick would be there. That’s not surprising in the slightest.
They sit at the table all together. It’s awkward as hell, because it’s a really long table, and everyone is spread out, not wanting to be near each other. Except Damian, who is the only one sitting anywhere near someone. That someone, of course, being Dick.
He begins to ramble on about how Bruce wants to put him into a private school, not paying a lick of attention to the quiet tension coming from the others. Damian does this sometimes. When he’s overtired, he tends to ramble, using up the last of his energy before he completely passes out.
Dick wonders if Bruce knows. If he’s paid attention. Because Dick wants to send Damian straight to bed, but Bruce doesn’t look like he’s planning anything of the sort.
Dick keeps up the conversation with him, because he’s not just going to ignore someone when they’re talking to him, especially his kid. He’s hoping it will help get some of the others talking, but of course, it does anything but.
It actually backfires spectacularly.
“No please, keep talking,” Tim mutters into his food when Damian pauses to eat. “S’not like there’s four other people in the room.”
Dick’s jaw clenches violently tight, but before he can say anything, Jason snaps, “Shut the fuck up, Tim. I don’t see you starting a conversation.”
Tim glares at Jason from across the table. “Why are you defending him?”
“I’m not,” Jason argues. “But you’re being a prick, and I’m trying to eat.”
“Language, Master Jason,” Alfred chides, but he goes unnoticed.
“Why are you even here in the first place?” Tim hisses. “You hate it here.”
Dick is a little taken aback at their squabbling. It’s not near as rough as the arguments between him and Tim, but as far as Dick knew, he thought the two of them were on decent terms. He distinctly remembers Barbara saying something about the two of them being on talking terms, enough that Jason convinced Tim to get Babs to check in on Dick.
“You know just as well as I do that I’m not going to say no to a direct order from Alfred,” says Jason.
“Bullshit,” fires Tim. “You don’t take direct orders from anyone.”
“Boys, enough—” Bruce starts, but of course, Jason cuts him off the moment he registers Bruce’s voice.
“Leave us alone, Bruce,” he snaps. “You seem to have a great grasp of that concept.”
“Jason, that’s out of line,” Dick scolds.
“He’s out of line?” Tim screeches. “But you weren’t when you fired me from being Robin?”
“I didn’t fire you—”
“You fired me like Bruce fired you, you fucking hypocrite,” Tim seethes, and a hole punches itself right through Dick’s chest.
“Tim,” Bruce warns, low. “That’s too far. I’m sure Dick didn’t mean—”
Tim rolls his eyes and throws up his hands. “Yeah, sure, go ahead and defend Dick like you always do.”
Bruce narrows his eyes at him. “That is not true.”
“It is true,” Tim argues. “He replaced me with a kid he hardly knew and you’re defending him.”
“Get used to it,” Jason spits. “Robins get replaced, Replacement. Deal with it.”
“Jason,” scolds Alfred.
“I did not replace you,” Dick huffs. “I gave Robin to Damian and was going to work with you to figure out a new alias—”
“I didn’t want a new alias; I wanted Robin,” Tim fires. “You don’t just get to replace me because—”
“Robin was mine,” Dick shouts. “Jason replaced me, wearing my circus colors that my mother designed. And then you replaced him. And then I gave Robin to Damian.” It’s an endless, vicious cycle, it seems.
“I don’t think the demon brat fits Robin at all,” Jason counters, glaring dangerously at Bruce. “The Robins are the ones who get hurt, not Batman.”
(“Dami, please,” Dick begs as the CPR breaks Damian’s ribs. “Don’t do this.”)
Bruce opens his mouth to argue, like always, that he tried his best to find Jason in time. But then he stops, straightens up, and looks at Dick. “What is he talking about?”
Dick can practically feel the sharp, stinging blade slash across his face when Bruce meets his eyes.
Tim stands swiftly, shoving his chair backwards so that it makes an awful scraping noise against the floors. “I’m leaving,” he announces, then glances at the butler, who is watching it all with detached exasperation. “Sorry, Alfred.”
And with that, he storms out of the dining room. A few seconds later, and the front doors boom shut.
Jason grabs his jacket hanging over the back of his chair and stands too. “I’m out of here, too,” he says, and leaves the manor without another word.
Predictably, Bruce does not go after them. He merely pinches the bridge of his nose for an entire minute, taking slow, even breaths, the sighs. “I’m going to get ready for tonight.”
Dick’s shoulders slump a little. Great. Another Wayne running off to lick his wounds alone and leave the rest to pick up the pieces.
Bruce must see his dejectedness, because his frown lightens up into something more apologetic. “You two finish up,” he says. “I’ll see you downstairs.” In Bruce’s defense, he waits until Dick gives him the okay to leave before actually booking it out of the kitchen, but Dick still feels a bit bitter that Bruce didn’t stay with them after what just happened.
With the kitchen finally quiet, Dick collapses into his chair, slouching over as he cups his hand over his eyes. His stitches sting when he leans back. “Fuck.”
For once, Alfred does not chastise him. He simply collects the abandoned plates and begins taking everything back to the kitchen. A small hand touches Dick’s arm, and he startles. He almost forgot Damian was there, remaining silent throughout the whole ordeal. Now, he’s looking at Dick with a stormy expression on his face.
“I hate them,” he says. “They are unfair to you.”
Fresh tears spring into Dick’s eyes, but he holds them back. “No, they’re fair,” he admits quietly. “I did awful things to Tim, and Jason and I have never been on the best of terms. Their anger is justified.”
Damian only frowns harder. “It is not,” he argues. “They have no right to continue to make you feel bad when you have expressed guilt and have tried to make amends. You did nothing out of ill will.”
Dick quirks a small, sad smile at him and runs a hand over his hair. “I wish it were that simple.”
Damian’s eyes grow darker. “It is that simple,” he bounces back. “They just refuse to make it so.”
Dick’s not sure if he believes it, but he really doesn’t want to talk about this anymore, so he sits up again and motions towards their plates. “Finish eating,” he says. “You’ve got a long patrol tonight and you need the energy.”
Damian does not look happy at the drop of subject, but he obliges and goes back to eating his dinner.
The two of them eat in silence until their plates are clean. When they’re done, Alfred takes them, and gives Dick a gentle pat on the shoulder as he goes. It makes Dick want to cry, but his body is too drained to do so.
“C’mon,” he says to Damian as they stand. “Let’s get you down to the Cave.”
Damian walks beside him, easily keeping up with Dick’s slow, tired pace. “Will you come with us tonight?”
Dick wants to. He’s missed patrolling with Bruce, and he wants to keep an eye on Damian to keep him safe. But his legs feel like deadweight, and his head feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. Going out tonight could actually kill him.
Besides, his stitches are still fresh and sore. He’d pop them all if he went out before they were even semi-healed, and then Alfred would kill him very methodically and very slowly.
“Not this time, kid,” he declines. “Next time, though.”
Damian obviously does not like the answer, but he doesn’t argue, since Dick follows him into the clock and doesn’t leave immediately.
Bruce is down there, typing at the Batcomputer. He’s not dressed in his suit, which is odd. Usually Bruce likes to spend some time in it so he can adjust to having it on. He’ll have to do it soon if he wants it to feel like a second skin.
He turns when he hears them coming down the stairs. Dick averts his gaze, feeling too embarrassed about what happened at dinner to even look at him.
“Are you coming with us?” Bruce questions when they get to the bottom.
Dick winces. “Not tonight,” he answers. Bruce nods, nothing on his face giving him away at all. Dick has no idea what he’s thinking.
“Stay so you can see us off?” Damian asks.
And how can Dick say no to his boy? “Sure, Dames,” he promises. “I’ll stay.”
This pleases Damian, which makes Dick’s heart clench with happiness. If he can’t do anything right, at least he can make his son brother happy.
“Go on and start getting ready,” Bruce orders Damian. “I’ll follow you in a moment.”
Damian looks between the two of them, obviously able to see that Bruce wants some privacy with Dick. Dick tries to convey with his eyes for Damian to stay here, but of course Damian won’t ignore a command from Batman, or his father, so he nods and turns a corner, heading for the Suit Room.
Dick watches him as he goes, hating when Damian leaves his sight, but knowing it’s necessary and he is being way too protective. Damian is safe here, with Bruce. He doesn’t need Dick fretting over him.
It takes a few seconds to realize Bruce is still staring at him.
He’s almost afraid to turn back around, because he knows whatever it is that has Bruce staring at him has altered the tension in the room into something thicker. It makes anxiety swell in his chest. He knows, doesn’t he? He knows about Damian, and how Dick looks at him. He knows he he tried to take Bruce’s place and now is paying the price—
A hand reaching towards him in his peripherals startles him, and his resulting full-body jerk turns him inadvertently towards Bruce. Bruce pauses, looking almost as if he expected the reaction. After a moment, when Dick’s shoulders ease a bit, Bruce’s hand continues its journey towards Dick’s face.
Bruce cups the side of Dick’s chin, turning his head ever so slightly. His thumb brushes across Dick’s cheek. At first, Dick is bewildered, but when Bruce does it again, and a sad look crosses his face, that’s when Dick registers the barely-there difference in texture on his skin as Bruce’s thumb grazes over it.
The scar.
Dick wants to avert his eyes, but he’s been at this for a long, long time. He knows better. He’s trained to keep eye contact. So he does, despite the way his skin crawls the longer they look at each other.
Bruce doesn’t say anything for a long time. He never says anything, actually, and it eats Dick up inside, because Dick can usually read Bruce pretty well, but he has no idea if the look on his face is directed at Dick or himself.
So, summoning all the strength he has, he says, “Fighting in the Batsuit is different than fighting in the Nightwing suit.” Feeling stupid, he adds, defeated, “Trial and error, y’know?”
It’s a lie. But it’s better than the truth. It feels like his scar is the barrier between everything — the chance of getting everything Dick wants, and losing everything he has.
Bruce continues to not say anything for another few beats, but his thumb sweeps over the scar one more time. The sadness in his eyes melts away into something more guilty, and despite that, Dick feels the anxiety ease from his body. Whatever this is, Bruce isn’t upset with Dick.
“Oh chum,” his father finally says. His voice mirrors his visage, and when his eyes droop, he looks about ten years older than he actually is. “I’m so sorry.”
Dick blinks. He stares at Bruce with his lips parted, dumbfounded, because when was the last time Bruce apologized? Where the words I’m sorry actually left his mouth? With Jason, sure. Bruce never lets an opportunity go to apologize to Jason, desperate to have his son back.
But Dick? It’s been… well, it’s been years.
“I put so much on your shoulders when I was gone,” continues Bruce. “I didn’t mean to, but I did. And that wasn’t fair to you.”
No, no it wasn’t, and even worse— Dick didn’t have anyone to blame. Bruce didn’t vanish on purpose. He never intended Dick to take up the mantle right then. Dick didn’t even have to become Batman. But he did, for a lot of reasons, one of them being some misplaced sense of duty to Bruce. To Batman.
But of course Dick was going to don the cowl no matter what. It was never an option. And Bruce would go on missions with the Justice League knowing that, knowing that the mask would be safe with Dick.
Dick manages to give him a weak, sad smile. “It was a shitty situation.”
Bruce nods, drawing his hand away. “Yes it was,” he agrees. “I should never have put the pressure on you all these years to become Batman.”
Dick shrugs. “You were right, though,” he counters. “Gotham needs Batman. It doesn’t matter who is under the mask. As long as the city can see Batman, they have hope. Gotham would have been lost if I hadn’t taken the cowl.”
Bruce sighs, rubbing a hand over his mouth. “Helping Gotham is important,” he replies, “but the mission is not, and should never have been, more important than you.” He takes Dick by the arm, holding tight. “Than any of you.”
“I know that,” Dick assures, “but Batman—”
“You could have protected Gotham as Nightwing,” interrupts Bruce, “and everything would have been okay.”
“If Gotham found out that Batman was gone, they would have lost any hope that you gave them,” Dick argues. “They needed Batman.”
“I’m not the only one on this team, Dick,” Bruce reminds him. “I haven’t been for a long, long time. Yes, some of them would have been disheartened. But you were still there, and seeing Nightwing would have kept the hope, because Nightwing represents Batman as much as I do.”
“I’m not enough,” snaps Dick. “Nightwing couldn’t have done it alone.”
“But Nightwing did,” says Bruce. “You just did it with a Batman mask, instead.”
Fuck.
Dick looks away, clenching his jaw to keep himself under control. Bruce doesn’t let him look away for long, gently nudging him to turn back around. Obediently, Dick does.
Bruce lets out a soft sigh through his nose. “I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for you,” he says, softer this time. “You’d lost two fathers, and you had to deal with not just training Damian, but taking care of him.”
Dick’s eyes fill with tears. He tries to blink them away before they fall, but he is unsuccessful. He didn’t just take care of Damian. He made Damian his . His Robin, his son. He almost took Damian away from Bruce, and Bruce has no idea.
When Bruce pulls him into a hug, he’s crying for a number of reasons. He lets them all go, just for this moment, so he can hug his father who he mourned and grieved, who he never thought he would ever see again.
God, he missed Bruce so much.
“I’m here, chum,” Bruce whispers, cradling the back of Dick’s head with one of his hands, the other clutching tight at Dick’s back. “I won’t leave you again.”
The words should feel Dick with joy. It does a little. After all, that’s all he wanted for the past year. He wanted Bruce back, and now he is. And it’s uprooted everything Dick built while he was gone. He has his father back, but at the cost of his son. How is he supposed to rationalize that?
When Dick cries into Bruce’s shoulder, he sobs. He holds onto his father as tight as he can, desperate to never lose him again, and agonizing over the loss of his son.
Dick remains in the manor until they’re back from patrol, helping Alfred out over the comms. He doesn’t care that he’s skipping patrol in Blüdhaven. He’s actually kind of relieved.
(He remembers, distantly, the conversation with Alfred where Dick was ready to hang up the cape for good. He also thinks, maybe he can still do that.)
When Bruce and Damian are patched up, showered, and dressed, Damian orders Dick to spend the night. He even suggests that they watch a movie before they all retire to bed, and when Dick goes to say no, Damian pulls the You-Missed-Our-Call Card from a couple weeks ago, and Dick says yes.
He was nervous about it, after the moment he and Bruce had down in the Cave, but Bruce seems pleased as the four of them settle in the family room to watch a movie. Dick has Damian on one side of him, pressed arm-to-arm. Bruce is in the recliner beside the couch, feet propped up and arms behind his head. Alfred is in the loveseat, stretched out comfortably.
It’s nice, Dick realizes. For so long, family movie night has consisted of him, Damian, and Alfred — if Damian even agreed to the movie night at all, which wasn’t for a while. Now they have Bruce back and able to join them.
It makes Dick feel slightly invigorated, despite what happened at dinner earlier. They got Bruce back. He can get Jason and Tim. Maybe they’re not a completed family yet, but they will be. Dick will see to that.
Notes:
You can find the link to Robert Fitzgerald’s version of The Odyssey here !
Chapter 3: Maladjusted
Summary:
Maladjusted
/ˌmaləˈjəstəd/Adjective
1. poorly or inadequately adjusted
2. lacking harmony with one's environment from failure to adjust one's desires to the conditions of one's life(Merriam-Webster.com)
Notes:
Chapter warnings: canon-typical violence, near-death experiences. This chapter also continues to dive into topics such as depression, grief, and self-destructive tendencies. If these themes can be triggering for you, please read with caution
Chapter Text
His plan doesn’t start off great.
He still can’t get ahold of Tim, and what happened at dinner the other night must have either angered or rattled Jason so bad that he disappeared. Right off the fucking face of the earth. Figures.
Annoyance bubbles under Dick’s ribs when he thinks about it, but he tells himself to cool it. Jason is his own person, and his trauma responses (while not healthy) are valid.
So whatever. Jason is gone and Tim is off the grid. That’s not going to stop Dick, though.
After all, they might have all been Robin, but he was the first.
He starts with the Bat computers. He’s ninety-nine percent sure Bruce knows where both of them are, because as emotionally-constipated as that man is, he does love his kids, and he shows it through obsessive researching and relentless amounts of stalking. The only reason Tim’s or Jason’s locations wouldn’t be in here is if they were able to get around Bruce’s incessant technology.
Of course Tim is that one percent. Dick spends hours combing through every file, every data encryption, decoding a hundred different lines of code in hopes that Tim’s location is buried somewhere, but alas, there is absolute zip. Tim is so far off the grid that even Bruce can’t find him.
(A part of him panics, and a part of him sings with pride.)
But this isn’t Dick’s only means of finding Tim, so he lets it be for now. He simply crosses off the bullet point labeled Batcave Comps on his notepad and moves on.
Jason is easier to look for. Still hard, because he’s not tech-stupid, but his skills are mediocre compared to Tim. It takes Dick about an hour and a half of searching before he finds a single zipped folder buried beneath mounds of old maps and CCTV footage from ten years prior. He spends another ten minutes decrypting the file so he can get into it, and he sighs in relief when the folder opens across the screen.
There’s one file inside the folder. It’s labeled [email protected]!, and the thumbnail is a single, white piece of paper with a folded edge. It’s the computer’s way to tell the user that the file can’t be accessed. Dick knows better, obviously, so he clicks it anyway.
A map shows up with a GPS dot, somewhere northeast of downtown Gotham. Son of a bitch, Bruce found one of Jason’s safehouses — the safehouse, actually. The one Dick knew about already, where he sent the necklace for Jason’s birthday.
Instinctively, his core lurches in an attempt to get up, with a plan in mind to waltz right into Jason’s place, but he stops himself. Dick’s never actually been there before, and he’s lucky Jason didn’t up and ditch the safehouse the moment he knew that Dick knew of its existence. There’s a reason why he’s never been invited over.
He remembers being eighteen and alone in Blüdhaven, filled with anger and weariness, determined to never let Bruce know where he was or how he was doing. Jason is doing the same, even if there’s a silent acknowledgment that Dick knows the location.
He can’t bring himself to cross the boundary Jason has so visibly set.
Dick puts the pen down and closes the file on the computer. Jason will come back around, and then Dick will make his move. It’s only fair.
Tim, however, is another story.
Maybe he’s a hypocrite for trying to hunt down Tim and leaving Jason alone, but whatever. He wants his brother back, and Tim has spent too long running from him for Dick to let it slide anymore. Jason always comes back, despite never admitting it, and it’s time Tim does the same.
(Maybe that’s why Tim hates him so much. Maybe Dick has a problem with autonomy.)
He makes his way to the Titan’s Tower. Wonder Girl is sitting at the control panel, checking the satellite monitors. There’s no one else around, but Dick can hear someone clashing pans together in the kitchen.
It’s been a long time since Dick has been to the Tower. He never actually stopped to think about it, because he hasn’t actually thought about the Tower in just as long. Not since Bruce “died” and he took up as Batman.
Not since he got Damian.
Cassie turns around when she hears him enter, and smiles in greeting when she sees him. “Hi, Nightwing!” she says with her cheerful disposition. “What brings you here?”
Well, at least one member of Tim’s team doesn’t despise him. Yet.
“Wonder Girl,” he greets amicably. He’s forgotten how young the current Titans are. “I was hoping to know if you’ve heard from Red Robin.”
Cassie’s smile falters, ever so slightly. If Dick hadn’t been raised by Bruce, he never would have noticed. He’s proud of her. He remembers the first time they met, and Cassie couldn’t hide an emotion to save her life.
“Not in a few weeks,” she tells him.
Relief ignites in his chest. “But you have heard from him,” he emphasizes. “He’s alright?”
Cassie’s eyebrows scrunch together for a moment. “As far as I know.” The confusion on her face melts into concern. “Is there a reason he wouldn’t be?”
Dick shakes his head. “Nothing like what you’re thinking,” he assures, and her shoulders slump in solace. “There was a family meeting a few days ago, and it didn’t end very well.” He winces at the reminder of Tim’s anger. “I just wanted to make sure he was…”
Not okay, because of course Tim wasn’t okay after everything that went down. But Dick doesn’t have another word for it.
Cassie offers him a sympathetic smile. “Ah, I get it,” she says. “We haven’t been able to trace his calls for months, and his tracker won’t pick up a signal anymore. None of our scouts have seen him, either.”
Dick bites the inside of his cheek, feeling slightly disheartened, but also unsurprised. “Would you be able to check on him?” he asks. “Call him or track him down somehow?”
Cassie shakes her head with a sorrowful frown. “Sorry, Wing, but we can’t contact Red Robin,” she informs. “He contacts us.” Well, that’s an inefficient way to lead a team. But that’s not the point.
“We’re also not going to break his trust like that,” someone says from behind him.
Dick whirls around to find Conner Kent standing a few feet away from him, a grilled panini in hand with a large chunk bitten out of the middle. Huh. Kid’s gotten better at sneaking up on people. Good for him. He used to shake the floor when he walked because of his sheer bulk and inability to control his strength.
Conner looks at him pointedly. “Even if we knew how to get in touch with him.”
Dick has to tread lightly here. Tim is most protective of his team, and Conner is basically Tim’s best friend. Pissing Conner off is a surefire way to lose any chance for Tim to forgive him.
“I understand,” he replies, careful with his words. “I wouldn’t want you to damage his trust. I’ve done enough of that.” A calm tone and acknowledgement of the other side, step one. Admittance of wrongdoing, step two. “I’m just worried about him, and I want to check on his well-being.” Honesty and diffusing the severity of the situation, step three.
Conner stares him down for a good minute, probably deciding how deceitful Dick is being. If he’s learned anything from working with Tim, it’s that not one member of the Bat Team is always entirely honest — even Dick. Everything is calculated.
Eventually, Conner says, “You should have thought about that before you took Robin from him.”
Apologetic admittance of wrongdoing again, step four. “You’re right,” Dick says. “That was wrong of me, and I regret how I handled it.” Step five, circle back around. “I don’t need to know where he is—” a lie “— I just want to know that he’s…okay.”
Not okay. That he hasn’t given up on the family entirely. That he’s willing to come back one day. That he won’t leave Bruce. That he doesn’t hate Dick as much as he thinks he does, maybe. That he’ll come home.
Conner takes a slow breath out through his nose. He’s relenting, but Dick knows that Conner is aware of what Dick is doing. “He’s fine, for all intents and purposes,” he answers. “Mad as hell, but fine.”
Dick nods. That’s what he expected. But at least Tim didn’t let the dinner cloud his judgment and got himself into trouble. “Okay,” he says. He’s not sure how he feels. It’s not the information he wanted, but. Now he knows Tim is still alive, still in one piece, and still probably hates everyone, including Dick. “Okay, thank you.”
Conner raises an eyebrow at him, then takes another bite of his panini. “Cassie, I think your laundry is done.”
Cassie frowns at him. “I only put it in ten minutes ago?”
Conner gives her a flat look. Cassie makes a squeaky, “Oh!” sound, then without another word gets up and hurries out of the room to a door on the right — a door which, unless they changed the structure of the Tower, Dick knows does not lead to the laundry room.
Once he and Conner are alone, the younger boy’s face clouds over with a blank, uninterested look. “You can assure Batman and Superman that we take safety and security very seriously here,” he tells Dick. “Only Titans can access the console and the mainframe.”
For a moment, Dick doesn’t understand, until Conner takes another bite of his sandwich as a way to muffle, “Don’t fuck this up again.”
He walks away after that, calling back, “You know the way out!”
He’s gone through the same door Cassie went through. The slam echoes through the large, empty room. As soon as he’s gone, Dick sprints to the console. He’s not sure how much time he has, but he’s not going to waste a second of it.
He may not be an active member of the Titan’s anymore, but he was the leader of the original team. Of course he still has access. He taps in his six-digit code when prompted, and boom. He’s in.
The Titan’s mainframe is much easier to navigate than the Bat computer. He should probably talk to them later about that, but right now, it’s a blessing. He’s got clearance almost as high as Bruce, higher than Tim , which means he’s got access to almost everything.
He finds what he’s looking for in a matter of a minute: GPS coordinates sent from a burner cell to the Titan’s comms, circa last night at midnight. There are updates every hour or so beforehand, probably as he moved, so the last coordinates mean he hasn’t moved from that spot since then.
Dick recognizes the first half of the coordinates immediately. His heart leaps into his throat with hope as he types the coordinates into the map on the computer so he can get the precise location. A small red dot pops up on the screen, and the hope in Dick’s throat soars throughout the rest of his body.
Tim is in Gotham. He’s far away from the manor and from Crime Alley, all the way at the southern border of the city. But it’s still Gotham. The dinner was four days ago, which means Tim stayed.
He’s home.
Dick keeps his distance. He knows Tim is in Gotham, and that’s enough for him right now. He’s not going to go so far as to show up on Tim’s doorstep. Tim and Jason want space, fine. Dick can wait. It’s what he does best.
It’s another few weeks after that when Dick, who has just sat down at his kitchen table for lunch, hears a very firm series of knocks on his apartment door. Dick looks down at his food forlornly. There goes his hope for a peaceful meal.
The knocks are indefatigable, and he knows exactly who it is before he even gets out of his chair. He sighs, then puts his fork back down onto the table and heads to the door.
“My grandpa moves faster than you, boy wonder,” Babs says as soon as the door is open. She wheels through before he’s even opened it completely, beelining straight into his kitchen.
“Hi Babs,” Dick greets, closing the door behind her. “Come on in, Babs.”
“Hi Dick,” she replies. So that’s something, at least. “How are you?”
Dick glances over at his bowl of food, which is getting colder by the second. “Hungry,” he says honestly. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, but what are you doing here?”
She’s been back from her previous assignment for about three months, and this is the first time he’s seen her since she was first sent off. She also usually calls beforehand.
She looks down at his food, then shrugs. “Eat while I talk,” she tells him. “What even is that?”
Dick contemplates, but his stomach is gurgling, so he pulls one of the chairs away from the side of the table for Babs to sit and plops right back in his own seat. “Butter chicken,” he answers. Babs doesn’t bat an eye at the answer, which means she probably doesn’t realize that it’s not something he eats often.
“I’m sure you know Tim is back in town,” she starts off. Dick doesn’t even try to deny it. He just mixes the rice and chicken around in his bowl and nods. “He’s working with Jason to break up a human-trafficking ring working out of Gotham Harbor.”
Dick hums noncommittal, shoveling forkfuls of food into his mouth. Babs ignores his behavior. “Tim thinks it’s being run by the League of Assassins,” she continues, “trying to gather people for recruitment.”
Well, that explains why Tim is involved.
When Dick doesn’t respond, mouth shoveled full of rice and curry, Babs raises her eyebrows at him. “You don’t seem concerned,” she says. “Gotham’s Harbor bleeds into Blüdhaven’s.”
Dick wants to snort, but he refrains. “You do realize that you’re talking about a joint mission with Jason and Tim, right?” he clarifies. “If I swooped in there without being invited, they’d both actually kill me. Together, probably.”
Babs rolls her eyes. “Blüdhaven is higher than any surrounding city when it comes to trafficking, and they know that. They wouldn’t jeopardize their mission because they’re holding grudges.”
Something twinges in Dick’s eye. “It’s a lot more than just a grudge, Babs,” he tells her. “Besides, you know how everyone is about impeding on missions.”
Babs frowns at him. He takes another few bites before she says anything else. “They asked for my help getting information on a few people involved,” she tells him. “It’s pretty serious. They’ve been talking about getting Bruce and Damian involved.”
Ice-cold terror rips through Dick’s body, and it’s almost immediately replaced with rage. What are they thinking, trying to get Damian involved in a human trafficking mission? Dick kept him away from those when they were Batman and Robin for a reason. How could they think— how could Jason of all people even consider—?
And then he looks at Barbara’s face, and he realizes he’s just been baited.
“What the hell was that?” he fires, anger and relief crashing over him like a violent tidal wave. “Why did you just lie to me like that?”
Babs leans back in her wheelchair and crosses her arms. “Something is going on with you,” she replies. “I’ve barely heard from you since I got back. Got talking with Alfred a few weeks ago, come to find out you’re hardly ever at the manor and you’re out on patrol longer than Bruce is.”
Dick clenches his fist in the fabric of his pants, balling them up. “What does that have to do with lying about Damian’s involvement in a human trafficking ring?”
“A fake human trafficking ring,” she reminds him. She quirks an eyebrow. “So Damian is the one that’s got you so out of whack.”
Dick has felt a lot of things for Babs over the years, but not once in his life has he ever felt so furious with her. “Lying about that shit to try to psychoanalyze me is a shitty-ass thing to do,” he snaps. “What the hell?”
“Alfred is worried about you, and both Bruce and Jason have expressed concern over how long you’re out at night,” she answers flippantly. She watches him for a moment, before dropping her hands. “But you’re right. Using Damian like that was out of line. I’m sorry.”
Dick shoves his bowl away from him in a fit of anger, but already feels it draining out of him as her apology sinks in. “It’s fine.”
It’s not fine. She read him so fucking fast. He played right into her trap so fucking fast. Brought up everyone in his family and managed to get him to target Damian. How often has that happened with other people without him realizing it? How easy is it for him to compromise Damian like that?
Barbara, to her credit, looks pretty guilty. “No, I know how much Damian means to you. I shouldn’t have done that,” she frowns. “I wasn’t trying to psychoanalyze you; I was just—” She takes a breath. “It doesn’t matter. I went too far.”
Dick just nods, trying to lower his heart rate. He smells the butter chicken in his bowl a few feet away, but he’s lost his appetite entirely.
“So,” Babs says, trying to start again. “How have you been?”
I miss Damian, he thinks to himself, but what he says is, “I’m alright.”
They chat for a while about her last assignment, and she tells him all about how she spent the last week of it sightseeing in Rome because her part of the job was done, but the rest of her team had clean-up duty.
By the time she leaves an hour later, the butter chicken has gone cold. Dick throws it away and leaves the bowl in the sink, and decides to head straight to bed. He’ll do the dishes tomorrow.
(He doesn’t do the dishes the next day, and they sit untouched in the sink for a week.)
Dick is halfway through his nightly patrol when his comm set crackles, and a voice sounding suspiciously like Bruce says, “Nightwing, come in Nightwing.”
Dick swings around a corner and lands on a rooftop. “Batman?” he asks, bewildered. “Did you hack my comms?”
Bruce hasn’t had access to his feed since he moved to Blüdhaven, as a part of showing the older man that he didn’t need his help. The only people that have access are his Titans. And the Justice League. Which Batman is a part of. Right.
Thankfully, Bruce ignores that comment. The relief is short-lived, however, when he says, “I need assistance. Robin has been taken.”
The blood drains right out of Dick’s face. “What?” he yells. “What are you talking about?”
“There was an explosion,” Bruce replies, voice tight. “It separated us just long enough for someone to grab him. I heard him call out.”
Dick’s legs are beginning to shake. “Who?” he demands. Babs’s lie last week forces itself to the front of his brain, and his heart rackets up into his throat with fear.
“Unsure,” Bruce answers shortly. “But I’ve lost track of Robin and I need your help finding him.”
Dick will not sleep until he’s found.
“On my way,” he says, swinging down to his bike and speeding off without hesitation. “Where are you?”
“Center of downtown, near the fountain,” answers Bruce. “Hurry.”
Dick hurries. He passes a lot of cop cars on his pursuit, many that turn on their sirens and follow him until they realize who he is. Then they back off. He crosses into Gotham in record time, keeping a sharp eye out for bright colors or any sign that Damian might have left them. By the time he gets to Bruce’s location at the center of downtown, he’s found nothing.
“Tell me what you know,” he orders, tossing his leg off his bike.
“Not much,” Bruce tells him, lips pressed thinly together. “I think they went west. Definitely not south — that’s where I ended up when we were separated.”
Dick tries not to panic. It won’t do Damian any good if Dick’s brain starts spiraling. “Okay,” he says with careful, metered words. “What’s the status on his tracker?”
“Unresponsive,” Bruce replies, offering him the small, rectangular GPS tracker. “I believe it was damaged in our fight with chemical smugglers earlier.”
Sure enough, there’s a black dot exactly where Bruce is standing on the map, but Robin’s red dot is nowhere to be found. Shit. Dick knew he should have put another tracking device on the kid for emergencies just like—
“Oh my god,” he says, stunned, because he did. He pulled a Batman and put a second, secret tracker on the inside of Damian’s boot months ago.
He shoves the GPS tracker at Bruce, not bothering to wait to make sure he grabs it before scrambling back to his bike. He flips open the seat and pulls out his own, smaller GPS tracker, about the size of an old iPod.
He flips the tiny switch on the side to turn the tracker on. It takes a few seconds to load and warm up, but once it does, the bluish-green sonar map pops up on the small screen, and there’s a bright red dot staring right in Dick’s face.
“My tracker’s still working,” he alerts Bruce, frantically pressing buttons to zoom in on the map to find Damian’s exact location.
That’s when, of course, Bruce asks, “You have your own tracker on him?” and Dick freezes.
He recovers quickly. Thinking fast, he says, “It’s from my time as his Batman.” He pretends to be a little sheepish, just for the extra effect. “I completely forgot to take it off of him.”
It’s a lie. Dick specifically put that tracker in Damian’s boot after Bruce came back, for situations just like this. (And also so that Dick could check up on him whenever and make sure he was still alive. But mainly for emergencies.)
Bruce shakes his head. “Well thank god for that,” he huffs in relief. “Can you tell where he is?”
Dick waves him off, all of his attention back on the tracking device. The screen is small, but Dick made it that way on purpose, so he could stick it in his utility belt as Batman and in his pocket when he was out in public as Dick Grayson.
He zooms in, and then zooms again. The dot gets smaller and smaller until it turns into a pinpoint directly where Damian is.
Son of a bitch.
He whirls around to face Bruce. The only reason why he doesn’t look like a crazed maniac is because his lenses are white and can’t show his eyes. “He’s at the Gotham Bridge.”
Bruce curses sharply, then does a swift spin and climbs into the driver’s seat of the Batmobile. Another second passes, and the passenger door swings open. And, well, Dick probably isn’t in the best state to drive, anyway.
He slides into the passenger’s side without a words. The door slams shut and then they’re flying down the streets.
Unlike most times Dick is in the Batmobile, neither of them speak. They’re both rooted in tense, nervous silence. Dick is trying everything he can to hold back the accusations, the ‘You were supposed to protect him’ and ‘You should never have taken him back into the field.’ He doesn’t have the right to say any of that because he’d be a hypocrite.
It doesn’t make him stop thinking it.
“Maybe it’s not what we think,” he says instead of ‘How could you let this happen?’ “Maybe they’re in a car. We can block a car no problem.”
Bruce doesn’t reply. He doesn’t even grunt like he usually does. He is completely, terrifyingly quiet.
They’re not in a car. When Dick and Bruce perch on a rooftop overlooking the bridge, Robin’s tracker has stopped moving, and is stopped firmly in the middle of the entire bridge. They both scan their surroundings, trying to locate Damian and look for any explosives or hidden weapons. This may not just be a kidnapping. It could be a doomsday plan.
“There,” says Bruce suddenly, pointing at a certain spot on the bridge.
The computers in Dick’s lenses zoom in to where Bruce is pointing to. He sees Damian in a chokehold, wrists bound behind his back while his kidnapper presses them up against the barriers at the edge of the bridge, gun outstretched in his free hand.
There aren’t many cars on the bridge, but there are some, and Dick sees them all accelerate when they pass by. Dick knows that it’s not their job to stop and help — that’s why he and Bruce do what they do — but something boils in his blood when every single car leaves Robin in the dust.
“Marcus Grant,” Bruce says in the silence. Dick startles at the sudden sound. He turns and sees Bruce staring off at the bridge, probably so his lenses can do a facial recognition scan of the criminal. “Previously arrested for robbing a pharmacy and attempted domestic terrorism because of his association with the Scarecrow.”
Fucking hell. Why does it always come back to Crane? There’s something about that name that sounds familiar. Probably one Scarecrow’s old lackeys.
“He managed to escape five months ago and was never found,” Bruce tells him, tapping the side of his mask to turn off the computer features and revert back to regular lenses. Dick knows, because he knows everything about that suit.
“I’m sure Gordon will be pleased to have him back in custody,” Dick remarks. He’s trying to stay cool. Every muscle in his body is screaming at him to leap off the roof, plan be damned, and beat Grant senseless so he can grab Damian and swoop away. But he can’t, because this is Gotham and Bruce calls the shots.
“What do you want me to do?” he asks instead of taking a swan dive off the roof.
Bruce stares at the bridge, most likely calculating angles and how far down the water is on the chance someone goes falling off the side. “You’ve got more stealth than I do,” he says, “and he’ll be expecting me. You’re our upper hand.”
Dick nods. That’s good. An element of surprise can throw Grant off his game just enough for one of them to grab Damian and run. “I can come in from the top,” he suggests. “You fly down to meet Grant head on, and I can jump down from the top and get Robin.”
“You’ll jump down from the top and take out Grant,” Bruce corrects. “We need to incapacitate him first.”
To hell with that. Damian is first priority, not Grant. “We need to get Robin to safety at first chance,” he argues. “I can do that if I grapple down and pick him up.”
Bruce shakes his head. “Grant is armed, and Robin is currently defenseless. One sound and Grant will shoot someone,” he tells Dick. “How are you going to get Robin from Grant’s arms without him noticing?”
“You’ll be fighting him?” Dick questions.
“Grant is armed,” repeats Bruce, slightly annoyed. “He will fight with his gun.”
“That’s never stopped you from running into a hail of bullets before,” Dick fires back.
“If Grant sees me advancing, he’s more likely to toss Robin over the bridge.”
“So I’ll go get him,” replies Dick. Obviously.
“And if Grant shoots him instead?”
“He won’t shoot his only means of leverage.”
“We can’t take that risk,” snaps Bruce. “You’re taking Grant out first and that’s final.”
Dick grits his teeth together and balls up his fists. There he goes again, digging into Dick’s deepest insecurity, undermining his authority. Bruce, of course, notices immediately, and he sighs.
“Don’t forget that Robin is far from helpless,” he reminds Dick. “And don’t forget that you’re not the only one who’s worried about him.”
Dick feels rightfully chastised at that, because no, of course he’s not. Damian is Bruce’s son. He loves him, which means he’s going to figure out the best means of attack to rescue Damian safely. Dick isn’t alone in this anymore.
He takes a deep breath to calm his nerves, then nods. “Alright,” he relents. “We’ll do it your way.”
Bruce clasps Dick on the shoulder, shakes him gently just a little, and Dick’s throat goes tight.
(Dick nearly runs into Alfred as he’s exiting his room, looking like a deer caught in headlights. Behind him, Damian is fast asleep in Dick’s bed, burrowed under the blankets. Who knew the kid was so clingy when he was sick?
Alfred clasps Dick on the shoulder as he passes, enough to jostle him just slightly. They share a silent, knowing look, before Alfred’s hand slides away and he continues his path down the hall.)
“We’re going to get him,” Bruce assures.
Dick knows. He’s just not sure how far he’s going to go to make sure of it.
It’s Dick who heads to the scene first. He swings a few yards away from where Grant is, carefully balancing on top of the right side of one of the towers. The cars driving by and the regular nightly Gotham noise mask any sounds Dick might have made upon entry.
Dick fixes his eyes on Grant and Robin. He’s close enough now that he can see Grant’s face, and when he does, fury alights up and down Dick’s bones like a Pavlovian response.
He recognizes Grant from the warehouse eleven months ago, when he and Damian captured the Scarecrow, and when Damian was exposed to too much toxin and his heart stopped. Grant is the bastard who pulled the grenade that broke Damian’s rebreather.
Before Dick can do anything rash, a dark figure swoops in from the other side of the bridge. Bruce lands hard and furious on the bridge, and a second later, the Batmobile screeches down the lane and turns sideways, blocking off oncoming traffic.
Dick has to admit that there’s not much he misses about being Batman, but he does envy the multi-use of the Boatmobile. It and Dick’s bike both have the self-driving feature, but his bike is definitely too small to stop traffic, unlike the menacing height and length of the Batmobile.
“Marcus Grant,” Bruce growls. “Let Robin go.”
“I’ll throw him off the side of the bridge if you come any closer!” Grant threatens, pointing his gun at Damian’s head. Damian looks pretty bruised up from Dick’s vantage point, but it’s also nothing the kid hasn’t gotten before, so he’s probably fine.
Except for, you know, the gun to his head.
“What do you want?” Bruce asks. “Because you’ve only got one chance to end this peacefully.”
Dick knows that Grant won’t go peacefully, but he also can’t make his move yet, because Grant will easily see him if he were to drop in now. Grant is facing his direction, which means Dick has to move locations.
That’s going to be hard. He can’t use his grapple because it’s too loud, and even the Gotham noise and sirens in the distance aren’t enough to mask it. He’s going to have to slide down the main suspension cables.
The problem is, the suspension cables are in a wide U shape, which means he’d be going down the cables, and he’d have to pass by Grant to get to the other tower. He’ll have to cross the width of the tower and go down the left suspension cable, where he’d be in Grant’s blind spot.
He makes that his first goal: get to the left cable.
Very carefully, he stands, using his midsection to center his balance as he begins his journey. There’s a thick, wide bar between the left and right posts of the tower, so it’s easy for Dick to walk across it. He decides not to climb up the left post, and instead sets his eyes on the cable, where it’s attached to the top of the post. He backs up until he’s at the edge of the crossbeam, then sprints the short width and leaps off.
He shoots for the cable and curls both arms around it, using his upper body strength to pull himself upwards so he can wrap his arms and legs around it. He slides downwards, but hits the first suspension cable before he can go too far.
Alright, goal number two: get to Grant.
This is where he has to be careful. If he moves around too much, the cables could wobble, which would alert Grant of his location. Bruce gave him his orders because of his stealth, and Dick is going to use it to his advantage.
He pulls himself upwards so he can turn, so that his body is straddling the main cable from the top. With the suspenders no longer an obstacle, gravity is able to pull him along, sliding down the cable with ease. The leather and kevlar of his suit prevents any burns.
When he’s close enough to dive at Grant without killing himself, he flips back over so that he’s hanging off the cable. He uses his acrobatic abilities to clamp his legs around the cable and bend back so that he’s upside down and vertical. That gives him the opportunity to see where the suspender is so he can grab it with both hands without the risk of missing and freefalling down towards the deck of the bridge.
He releases his legs from around the cable and swings forwards, then wraps his body around the suspender. He can hear Bruce’s low, warning baritone, and Grant’s responding shouts. Bruce is bluffing — he won’t be attacking Grant; he’s going to go for Damian.
Because it’s Dick’s job to take care of Grant. Which brings him to goal number three: get Damian free.
Adrenaline beats through his blood as Dick sails down the suspender, right above Grant and coming straight for him. He’s sure Bruce sees him, because whatever he says next makes Grant point his gun away from Damian. It gives Dick the perfect chance to whip himself off the suspender and land right onto Grant’s back from behind.
The two of them hit the ground hard, enough that Damian’s body is wrenched out of Grant’s hold. The gun clatters out of Grant’s hand and skids away, and Dick has to stop himself from reaching out to grab it.
Instead, he shakes off the ache from the impact and rolls to his side to face Grant. The man is groaning in pain, shifting and curling in on himself. A bit of a ways behind them, Dick can see Batman sweep Damian into his cape.
A sudden flash of violence overcomes him, and Dick gets to his knees, grabs Grant by the hair, and slams him face-first into the asphalt. When he lifts his head, Grant’s nose and lower jaw are bloody. Dick slams his head down again.
That knocks Grant out cold. Dick falls backwards off his knees and onto his ass, heaving for air. His lungs won’t seem to inflate all the way. He scrubs his face with his hands, but he rips them away when he feels the hot, gritty texture from where the suspenders and cable abraded the fabric.
He jolts when a hand comes down on his shoulder. He sees the green boots with red laces, and instantly grabs Damian’s cloak and drags his entire body down into Dick’s lap. Uncharacteristically, Damian does not protest. He wraps his arms around Dick and holds on.
“You came for me,” he whispers.
Dick presses his nose into Damian’s neck, covered up by his hood, and breathes in. After a few inhales, air finally starts reaching the lower parts of his lungs.
“Always, kiddo,” he murmurs, clutching him tighter.
He hears metal cuffs clink together, which means Bruce has handcuffed Grant. Not that it matters. The guy won’t be waking up for a while.
The sound of Bruce’s boots get closer, before they stop right beside him and Damian. Dick tries to let him go. He tells himself it’s been long enough, and that it’s weird that he’s hugging the kid for so long. But his arms don’t get the memo and stay locked firmly around Damian’s body.
Bruce doesn’t tell him to let go, though. Instead, he just sits down beside them and wraps an arm around Dick’s shoulders. Vaguely, Dick is aware that it means Bruce also has a hand on top of Damian’s head. He’s also vaguely aware that he’s not overcome with possessiveness at Bruce intruding.
It’s actually really, really nice.
He’s not concerned about being out in the open. They’re close enough to the Batmobile that anyone behind it won’t be able to see them, and the road is still blocked, which means most people have turned around and gone another way.
And anyway, who cares if someone sees? The Gotham Gazette needs more positive headlines, anyway.
Dick stays at the manor that night, and an hour into the three of them branching off to their respective rooms, Dick wakes to a small body crawling into his bed. Dick just drapes an arm around him and goes back to sleep.
Damian is gone in the morning, but that’s not surprising. Dick stays for breakfast upon Alfred’s request, checks up on Damian, then goes back to Blüdhaven and crashes for another six hours.
When he wakes, Jason is in his kitchen making the ground turkey in his fridge that was a day away from expiring. He’s kind of getting sick of people barging into his apartment, but he’s not going to scare Jason away or turn down a chance to spend time with his brother, so he bites his tongue.
They eat in silence, but Jason makes a show of piling an extra pile of food onto Dick’s plate, and Dick makes a show of eating it all. After, Jason cracks open two beers and hands one to Dick. He must have brought them, because Dick doesn’t keep alcohol in his apartment anymore — not since he spent three weeks straight drinking in the wake of Jason’s death.
Dick takes the beer and downs half of it in one go, scratching his fingers across the surface of the table. He should go down to the gym tonight. He needs to hit something. He needs to bust a punching bag open.
“I wanted to kill him,” he admits.
“I know,” says Jason.
“I would have hated myself,” says Dick.
“I know,” says Jason.
There’s nothing more to say, after that.
Dick gets a little antsy in the aftermath.
He knows Damian is alright, because he’s called the kid three times in the last week, and because Dick still has the tracker on Damian’s uniform boot. Which means Bruce hasn’t removed it yet. Maybe he never will.
Dick can only hope.
He still gets nervous, though, hearing news reports of Robin sightings across Gotham every night. Every time, he’s reminded of the night he was ready to give up Batman and Robin, ready to just let them be Dick and Damian, father and son, sort of. Make it to where Damian was safe and Dick would get to see him grow up.
He wishes he had come to the decision so much earlier. It’s not his decision to make, anymore.
He wonders, even if he had made the decision earlier, if Bruce would have overridden Dick’s parenting choice and taken Damian as his Robin anyway, or if he would have accepted it. He wonders, if he had made the decision, if it meant Damian would have only ever been Dick’s Robin.
The thought makes his teeth ache.
The cold November air nips at Dick’s skin as he swings away from the scene of an alleyway attack he interrupted. The criminal is stuck in the back of a cop car, and the poor young girl has her purse back. Dick’s job is done; he’s no longer needed.
He’s getting that feeling a lot, lately.
He climbs higher and higher, feeling just a little bit lighter the further from the ground he gets. The sky is his home. The air calls to him, his blood singing for the rush of the wind in his face. It’s nights like these where he misses the circus.
He doesn’t get that feeling very often. He hasn’t longed for the circus in almost a decade. But he misses the freedom he used to have when he could fly without anything holding him down. His circus outfit felt like a second skin. His Robin uniform revitalized him, represented his hope and determination for a new life. His Nightwing suit felt like body armor.
His suit has never felt so constricting.
The Batman suit has not been, and never will be, a symbol of fatherhood. It is a symbol of hope and protection and danger. But Dick’s father wears it, the father of his brothers. Dick wore it. It means something. Or at least, it feels that way.
And for that, Dick hated the Batman suit. He wanted his father to be the one wearing it. He wanted to wear the Nightwing suit and fight alongside him, not as him.
And yet…
He blames his jumbled thoughts for not noticing the figure following him until he lands on the roof of the skyscraper he was climbing. He extends his escrima sticks and swings one in the direction behind him. The shadowy form smoothly ducks out of the way and swings a bo staff at him in return.
They exchange blows quickly and efficiently, but Dick notices that the person is fighting defensively, not offensively. They are also sticking close to the shadows, as if to keep out of sight. A stealth tactic that is very hard to pull off successfully without at least a portion of their body coming into the light.
When a flash of red crosses the inky darkness, Dick knows who it is immediately. The bo staff swings again, and Dick grabs it with one hand and yanks it, and the person, into the light.
“Hello, Talia,” he says.
Talia shakes her staff from Dick’s grip. “Hello, Richard,” she replies. She pulls her cloth facepiece from around her head and reveals herself.
Dick’s hackles stay up despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to be there to hurt him. He doesn’t dislike Talia, necessarily, but the need to find Damian and hide him away beats through his body like a warning drum. This is the boy’s mother, after all.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. He tries to keep the level of warning in his tone low enough that she doesn’t think he’s threatening her, but high enough that she knows he’s not to be trifled with.
“Relax,” she says coolly. “I’m not here on League business.”
Shame and embarrassment rush through him at her words. It didn’t even register that she may have come on orders from the League. The only thing he thought about was Damian.
“I like to check up on him from time to time,” Talia continues. She doesn’t need to clarify who she means. There are only two people in Gotham who she would want to see, and she stopped caring about Bruce romantically a while ago.
“Is that all you want?” he questions very, very carefully. “To check on him?”
Amusement sparkles across Talia’s dark eyes. “That is all,” she confirms. “I am not here to take him from you.”
Dick is hit with a wave of relief, before her words fully process in his head. “From me?”
Talia jerks her bo staff, and it folds into itself until it’s the length of her forearm. She tucks it away in a pocket hidden somewhere in her robes. “Did I knock you in your ears too hard?” she asks, raising an eyebrow at him.
Dick scowls at her. “No,” he denies. His left ear does kind of hurt, though. “But I wouldn’t be the only one you’d be taking him away from.”
He refuses to use Damian’s name. He won’t even call him Robin. There are ears all over Gotham. The less criminals that know about Damian’s connection with them, or with Talia and the League, the safer he will be.
“You’re the only one it would really matter to,” she says dismissively. “The Bat has already lost a child before.”
Dick is on her in an instant, one escrima stick pressing her throat into the wall behind them, the other right against her stomach, finger hovering over the button to turn on the electricity. “Don’t talk about him like that,” he snarls.
He can tell that Talia knows he means Jason when she smirks at his reaction. She doesn’t retaliate, which means she’s not trying to threaten him. So there’s that, at least. “I only mean that it’s something he would know how to handle,” she explains, mirth dancing through her tone. “From what I can tell, you have been handling it quite poorly.”
He narrows his eyes at her, but his heart rate starts to pound against his ribs. “I don’t know what you’re implying,” he says slowly, “but whatever it is, you’re wrong.”
Talia gives him an unimpressed look. “Really, Richard,” she huffs in disappointment. “Surely you can’t think I’m that stupid.”
Dick moves his escrima sticks away from her and takes a step back. He doesn’t know how she could know. How often has she checked in? Have her ninjas been following them? How did he never notice them?
How did she know?
“You’re wrong,” he repeats, clenching his fists around his escrima sticks. Talia gives him a look that says I'm not buying your bullshit. It makes him wince internally.
“I checked on him while he was in your care,” she tells him. “That’s not how it seemed to me, and I only checked in on you once.”
Dick clenches his jaw. “That was then,” he replies. “This is now. His father is back.” Then, bitterly he adds, “I almost got him killed.”
Talia rolls her eyes. “So did I. On a daily basis,” she responds. “It’s part of the job.”
“It shouldn’t be,” Dick snaps.
Talia levels a stare at him. “The only person who almost killed him is the man who caused the explosion.”
Dick furrows his eyebrows. “How do you know about that?”
This time, Talia’s face shifts into something a little more annoyed. “He’s my son, Richard, whether you believe it or not,” she says. “I always know everything about him.”
She gives him another, more intense look, and presses the tip of her index finger against the left side of her chest. “Everything.”
And then Dick blinks, and she’s gone.
Dick checks up on her business over the next few days, but finds that whatever she’s doing is more of recruitment for more league members than active threats to Gotham or the continent, so he leaves her be. He knew she was lying about only being here for Damian anyway.
The day after Talia leaves the city, Dick visits Damian and finds that she left him a gift — a beautiful red and gold katana with jagged ridges and a tip so sharp that Dick barely touches it and his finger starts bleeding profusely.
When Dick returns to his apartment later that night, he finds that she has left him something, too. It sits on his kitchen counter, gleaming in the rays of the sunset.
It’s a silver pendant of two birds in flight. The bird on top is bigger than the other, and its eyes are made of deep blue sapphires. The second bird is smaller, beneath and slightly to the left of the upper bird, with glittering green emeralds for eyes. Both birds make up the entire pendant, attached to each other at the body of the bigger bird and the wing of the smaller bird, unable to be broken apart.
Upon further inspection, he finds that they are both in the shape of robins.
Dick takes it and locks it safely away with the birthday card that he never gave to Damian.
Dick dreams about Damian often. Sometimes they’re nightmares, like the one where Damian was shot and bled out on the streets of Gotham. For those, he wakes in a cold sweat, heaving for breath, and paranoid by every sound he hears.
Others, he dreams of escape. That after the end of the Professor Pyg situation, he packs up all of his and Damian’s belongings and leaves, suitcases in the back of his car and Damian in the passenger’s seat. Somewhere far away from Gotham and its dangers.
Those dreams are worse than the nightmares.
It’s quiet tonight, all things considered, Dick thinks to himself one night.
He’s sitting on the roof of the Blüdhaven Food Bank, legs dangling over the edge as he watches the few scattered cars drive across the highway. He’s also got a pint of banana split ice cream between his thighs, half of the tub already gone. His pager hadn’t gone off in over an hour, so he swung back around his apartment to grab the pint and decided to sit for an early-morning snack.
He realizes what he said only after he’s thought it. Eyes wide, spoon dangling from his mouth, he looks up to the sky and thinks, no, I take it back. I didn’t mean it.
For a few minutes, nothing happens. There’s no page, no sirens, so sudden gunshots or screams. He crosses his fingers, and then he crosses his toes for good measure.
It’s for naught. Off in the distance, Dick sees a swell of vines crawl around the top of a building — Dick thinks it’s one of the Italian chain restaurants — then disappear around the edges. Disappointment floods his body, and his entire body untangles and slumps in annoyance as he groans. Ivy.
He puts his spoon in one of his pocket compartments and closes the pint of ice cream, then chucks it into a trash can outside of the food bank (ironic, he knows). He has a feeling this is going to take a while.
He uses his grappling hook to cross over the highway to get to the building across from the food bank, then reclips it to his utility belt and jumps the roofs of the rest of the buildings between him and Poison Ivy.
He’s confused as to why she’s here. Usually Ivy doesn’t stray from Gotham, especially now that Harley has been staying with her. It’s not that she never comes to Blüdhaven — Dick has a scar the size of his thumb on his hip from the last time she was in the ‘Haven — but it definitely doesn’t happen often.
He decides to eavesdrop before rushing into anything in hopes of learning something that could be useful. When he gets to the rooftop overlooking the rather wide alleyway that Ivy has entered, he presses his body belly-down to the concrete of the roof and quietly crawls forward until he’s at the edge. There’s a short concrete barrier running along the edges of the roof, so he keeps himself as flat as possible to stay hidden behind it.
“...had nothing to do with that,” comes a voice that is very much a man’s voice, and therefore very much not Ivy.
“You and I both know that’s a lie,” replies another voice — there she is. “Do you take me for a fool?”
Ivy is seething. He can tell from the tone of her voice alone, but from his spot pressed against the concrete, he can see some of Ivy’s vines rise and snap forward, like vicious snakes. They make a weird sound when they rub together, barely perceptible to the ear. Dick thinks it’s akin to a hiss.
“That bitch got what she had comin’ to ‘er,” the man snarls.
There’s a crack, and then a very loud yelp from the man she’s talking to, and Dick decides it’s probably time to intervene.
The building isn’t very tall, so he leaps to his feet and over the edge. He manages to land on top of the man, who is now tangled up in Ivy’s vines and frantically struggling to get free. He’s only slightly disoriented from the fall, but before he can do so much as sit up with his arms, a thick vine wraps around his waist and slings him off of the man, then tosses him across the alley.
Dick hits the wall of the building he jumped from. It slams the wind out of him, but instead of throwing him against the wall again, the vines drop him. Dick falls a few inches to the ground, coughing and struggling for air.
Usually Ivy’s vines put up a fight. But this time, they leave Dick behind and go right back to the man. Two vines slightly thinner than the one that grabbed Dick wrap around the man’s neck, lifting him off the ground and strangling him.
“Ivy, stop!” Dick wheezes, finally able to get a few full breaths. He wastes no time in getting to his feet and charging her. Ivy whirls around when she hears him coming. She blocks his first swing, but it leaves her open below, so he jabs her hard in the abdomen.
She huffs in pain, flinching backwards, but grinds through it and shoves him away from her. She flings a hand out, and a massive vine swoops out from over her shoulder and slams full-force into his gut, sending him flying. All the while, the man is still dangling from two of her vines, kicking and gasping for air.
Dick stands up again, but he wobbles. He must have hit the ground harder than he thought. He pulls out his escrima sticks and fires them up, and the dark alley lights up with the blue glow they radiate.
Ivy glares at him when she sees them. “Don’t meddle in business that’s not your own, little bird,” she threatens.
Dick flips one of the escrima sticks and stalks towards her. “You made it my business when you crossed into the city,” he shoots back, then swings at her.
Ivy dodges, then slams her arm into Dick’s elbow. It bends from the blow, but Dick flips the escrima stick in his hand so that he can twist his arm and slam it into her shoulder. She grunts at the shock, but quickly gets two vines around his knees and drags him off his feet.
He lets out a very manly, absolutely and completely dignified yelp as he’s flipped upside down. His neck snaps forwards painfully. Ivy grabs his arms to pull him closer, then gives him a nasty uppercut beneath his chin. He yells out, but his hands reflexively unclench, which means his escrima sticks clatter to the ground.
Ivy easily uses a vine to click off their electricity, then waves at the vine holding Dick hostage. He struggles against it, but the vines just wrap around him like he’s filling in a damn burrito, then move farther back against the wall of the alleyway so that Ivy has more space to deal with the other man.
“Ivy,” Dick warns as he watches her approach the man, who is now sickeningly purplish-blue in the face. “Don’t do it.” He keeps trying to fight the vines, but they’re ridiculously strong — much stronger than normal. Or maybe he’s weaker. His head feels kind of woozy, actually.
She ignores him, of course.
“Ivy!” Dick shouts, trying to lunge for her, but the vines keep him still. The edges of his vision are getting… softer?
Ivy lifts one arm, and Dick yelps, “ No!”, but it’s too late. Ivy’s vine has snapped the man’s neck. She releases him, and his body drops to the ground like a deadweight.
Dick makes a noise of despair. “Why’d…” he says, trying to spit out why’d you do that, but his tongue is getting too big for his mouth, and the words just won’t come out.
“He burned down a greenhouse about eight hours ago,” she answers plainly, pulling Dick closer with her vines. “Claimed it was full of poison plants to infect the city.”
“W’s it?” Dick slurs.
“It was owned by a botanist,” Ivy responds, dry annoyance in her tone, “who was trying to grow every species of lily.” She stomps on the dead man’s face, just because. “Now her life’s work is gone thanks to this paranoid extremist.”
Dick grimaces. He knows the botanist she’s talking about. Dr. Melina had traveled all over the world to find both purebred and hybrid lily seeds. Her collection was featured in Times magazine last year.
“You don’t look so good, little bird,” Ivy tells him, frowning as she gives him a once-over with her eyes.
“I’m fine,” he says, proud that he managed not to string his words together. “Put me down.”
She raises her eyebrows at him, unimpressed. “You are down.”
Dick looks to his feet and sees them planted on the ground, though the vines are still around him. When did that happen? “Oh,” he says. “Thanks.” His head feels foggy, but not in the normal way that comes with Ivy’s pollen. “S’that why you’re in the ‘Haven?” he asks. He regrets it immediately, because the more he talks, the more his stomach lurches with nausea and pain.
Ivy frowns. “Partially,” she admits. “Are you aware that the Joker escaped last week?”
Dick nods, then closes his eyes when pain explodes behind his eyes. “Mhm.”
“The Bat picked him up that night, but not before he got a message to me,” she tells him, a sneer in her voice. “Apparently, Jonathan Crane is in the room beside Joker in Arkham, and they’ve been talking. Crane wanted me to give Joker some of my spores, for whatever reason, so Joker would bring them back to Crane.”
“Mhm,” Dick repeats. He’s trying his hardest to pay attention, but his face is getting hotter by the second. “D’you give ‘em to ‘m?” He tastes bile in the back of his throat. He tries to open his eyes, but they hurt too badly, and he has to shut them again.
Ivy makes a noise of disbelief. “Of course not,” she huffs. “You couldn’t pay me to help the Joker.”
He can’t see Ivy with his eyes closed, so he’s not sure why she gets quiet all of a sudden. When she finally does speak, he’s surprised to hear some concern in her voice. “What’s wrong, Nightwing?”
Dick swallows, trying to keep his stomach at bay, but it doesn’t help much. His throat feels like it’s lined with razor blades. “Pollen,” he stutters. He finds the strength to crack his eyes open and look at her. “Wha’d y’give me?”
Ivy’s eyebrows furrow in confusion. Slowly, she unravels the vines from around Dick’s body. “I didn’t give you anything,” she says.
Dick doesn’t have the chance to call bullshit, because as soon as he tries, a sharp, searing pain rips through his abdomen. He groans loudly, shooting his arm out to prop himself up against the wall.
Ivy sucks in a sharp breath of shock and, to his surprise, reaches out to help keep him upright as his knees buckle. Dick huffs out a hurt moan, heaving through it in hopes of easing the pain. Something is wrong. If Ivy didn’t douse him with her poison, something else has gotten him. Something dangerous.
“I–I have to go,” he pants, trying to pull away from her.
“Are you crazy?” Ivy questions, keeping her hands where they are. “Batman would kill me if anything happened to his golden boy on my watch. Now, how do I call him?”
Instinctively, Dick wants to tell her to press the emergency button on his belt. He’s very strongly considering it. But dawn is coming, which means Bruce and Damian are already back at the manor, probably getting ready for bed. Tim wouldn’t come, and if by some miracle Jason decided to help, Dick has no idea where he is or how long it would take for him to get here.
So instead, he says, “Don’t. Just f-follow the… the GPS.” There are tiny black floaters lined in green swimming across his vision. He thinks that’s bad. He’s pretty sure that’s bad.
“GPS?” Ivy asks. “What GPS?” But Dick is having a hard time hearing her over the ocean in his ears. She shakes him roughly, which only makes him cry out when pain wracks his body. “Nightwing! Where is the GPS?”
He doesn’t remember much between then and getting to his apartment, but Ivy gets them here somehow. She climbs up the side of the building and through his window with Dick and hurriedly pulls them into his living room.
They stumble as they hurry to make it to Dick’s couch. She drops him there, and he collapses sideways across the length of it, blessedly melting into the cushions, but also groaning in agony.
A hand rests on his forehead, and for a moment, he thinks it’s his mother.
“I don’t know who to call,” Ivy says. It sounds like she’s panicking. But why would she be? She’s probably going to kill him or something. “Nightwing, tell me who to call.”
Dick thinks he mumbles something, but he can’t be sure what he said, because he’s unconscious a second later.
There’s a heavy, painful beating in his head, like someone is taking a sledgehammer right to his head and the shockwaves are reverberating all across his skull.
A groan works its way up his throat, but it doesn’t even get halfway before Dick’s scrambling upright with a coughing fit. His throat is dry and scratchy, and it hurts when air rushes across it.
He desperately grabs a mug on the coffee table through tear-blurred vision, but when he presses it to his lips, he’s distraught to find it empty. He resorts to drastic measures: swallowing as much saliva as he can in hopes of bringing some relief.
It doesn’t help much, but he does stop coughing so hard that he can’t breathe, and he manages to get a few shaky gasps in. In turn, that helps mitigate the coughing as well. When he’s able to go more than a couple of breaths without coughing, he collapses backwards onto his couch.
… his couch?
Dick whips his head around the room, which only serves to make his headache worse. But he finds exactly what he was looking for — Poison Ivy in his kitchen, sifting through papers on his counter. She’s got one hip propped against the cabinets, and she’s staring straight at Dick.
So it wasn’t a dream. Fantastic.
“I’m angry with myself for not putting it together,” Ivy says, waving his unopened mail in the air before setting it back down. “I should have known that the richest man in Gotham with a tragic backstory and the vigilante with a no-kill code were one in the same.”
Dick feels his heart leap into his throat. “You looked?” he croaks. He doesn’t know why he feels betrayed by it.
“Of course I looked,” she replies. “I’m not a terrible person, but I’m not a good one, either.” She watches him for a moment, then picks up a coffee cup on the table and makes her way towards him. She sits down on the couch by his feet, which he kindly pulls in so that she has more room.
“I won’t say anything,” she says. “Life would be so boring if everyone knew who you were. Your family is the greatest wonder of the world, you know.” She hands him the cup. “Drink this. It’s an herbal tea I made. It will help the headache I’m sure you have.”
Hot shit, it’s a fucking miracle. He takes the cup carefully, sniffing it to see if he can smell anything bad, and looks at her suspiciously. She rolls her eyes at him.
“It’s not poison,” she says. “I didn’t bring you here and attempt to save your life last night just to kill you this morning.”
Dick snorts weakly, dropping his head back against the arm of his couch. What the hell has his life become? He’s lost basically his entire family, and now he’s taking tea with criminals he was fighting when he was fourteen.
“Thanks,” is all he ends up saying, sipping gently on the tea. It’s a bit bitter, but she’s obviously put a few spoonfulls of sugar in it to make it easier to drink. It’s… touching actually, that she would consider something like that, and then actually do it. And it soothes his throat immediately..
Ivy is silent for a stretch, and Dick doesn’t try to break it. The tea didn’t kick in immediately, and the quiet is the only sort of relief he can get for his headache.
“What do you think you were dosed with?” she asks after some time.
Dick shrugs, careful not to spill any of the tea. The warmth of the drink is seeping wonderfully into his fingers. “No idea,” he admits. “It didn’t feel like anything I’ve been exposed to before.”
Ivy frowns. “I think it could be from Chemo,” she suggests. “I saw on the news yesterday that people here were being hospitalized with mild radiation poisoning.”
It’s not a bad guess. Superman fought Chemo two days ago just three miles outside of Blüdhaven. It’s possible he was experiencing some sort of radiation poisoning.
“But why did I get symptoms only then?” he bounces back. “Radiation symptoms wouldn’t come out of nowhere like that.”
Ivy hums, considering this. There’s another stretch of silence before something horrified crosses her face. “The Scarecrow,” she says.
An ugly ball of hate solidifies like a rock in Dick’s gut at the mention of that man. He can’t think about the Scarecrow without thinking of the Major Incident where Damian almost died. “What about him?”
“Do you remember when I told you about the Joker giving me a message?” she asks. She waits for his nod before continuing. “When I told him no, he sprayed some sort of gas at me.” Her nose wrinkles in distaste, or at the memory of the smell.
“Of course, I’m immune to toxins, but if that was his venom or a chemical Scarecrow uses in his fear gas, it’s possible it was still on me, and still in my vines when I crossed paths with you,” she explains. “My leaves and thorns could have gotten any of the toxin into your bloodstream.”
Her jaw ticks, and she looks away. “I apologize.”
Dick, despite being sat down, feels very off-kilter. Is he dreaming? Has he died and gone to some weird place in the sky? Did he fall into a parallel universe where criminals are apologizing to him?
“Not your fault,” he says, trying to remain calm and not show how weirded out he is. “At least it didn’t kill me.”
Ivy nods slowly. “Yes, that would have been a shame,” she says. She looks back over at him and cracks a smile. “We need more people like you in the world, little bird.”
Dick draws his brows together. “Are you sure you’re immune to that stuff?” he prompts. “Because you’re a criminal. You shouldn’t want me out there.” Then, the question that’s been nagging him since he woke up, “Why did you help me, anyway?”
Ivy raises a perfectly-styled eyebrow at him. “I told you, the Bat would kill me if I let anything happen to you,” she scoffs. “Don’t get me wrong, blue, I’ll hurt you if you get in my way. But,” she shrugs, “if anyone is going to be out there trying to stop me, I’d much rather it be you.”
Dick kind of wants to take the compliment, but he’s not sure it should be a compliment at all. “Guess that makes me a shitty vigilante, huh?” he says, half joking and half self-deprecating.
He’s taken aback to see the seriousness in the glare she gives him. “Don’t twist my words,” she scolds. “You’re one of few heroes out there whose mission doesn’t exist from ego or selfishness, no matter how noble it is at the core. You just want to help because it’s the right thing to do, not because you feel obligated by the position you were put in.
She sighs, combing her fingers through her hair, then rests her elbow on the knee propped up on the couch. “You’re a good person. Probably one of the only real ones left.”
Dick feels oddly choked up. Maybe it’s because his headache is easing and his emotions are finally all coming to a head. Or maybe it’s because he hasn’t heard someone say that he’s good since he was a very young boy.
“Not all of us criminals are like the Joker,” she remarks. “Some of us want to help Gotham, just like you. We just go about it differently.”
“Illegally,” Dick points out. “Murderously.”
Ivy waves her hand back and forth. “Semantics,” she dismisses. “Point is, you’re the one real hope this world has, Dick Grayson.”
It’s startling, hearing his name come out of her mouth. It makes him a little uneasy. He’s even more uneasy when her face shifts into something more serious, more knowing.
“So there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have an arsenal of people come barging in here when you’re laid out, dying on your couch,” she says.
Dick’s nose prickles like he might cry, so he turns away and hides his face in his mug as he takes another sip. “I’m not as great as you think I am.”
Ivy makes a noise as if to say oh really? “You’re enough,” she says. “You’re trying. In a world like this, that’s what really matters.”
Dick lets that sink in. But when he doesn’t say anything in response, Ivy sighs, and Dick knows exactly where she’s about to go with this.
“Why didn’t you call your team, Wing?” she asks.
Dick closes his eyes, careful of his next words. Ivy may be being nice to him right now, but that doesn’t mean she won’t be looking for reasons to go after Batman and the others. “They were busy,” he tells her, which isn’t exactly a lie. “I was fine in the end.”
“After a lot of herbs that I grew from my own palms,” she shoots back. “You could have died last night, and you didn’t want me to call your family.”
Dick squeezes his eyes shut, ashamed. “Things are complicated right now,” he defends. “I just… couldn’t.”
Ivy obviously doesn’t like that answer. She purses her lips together and makes a disapproving humming sound, before leaning back and resting against the other arm of the couch. “I remember hearing about your parents’ deaths in the news, all those years ago,” she admits, then clicks her tongue lightly in disbelief. “I can’t believe that little Dickie Grayson is working with the Batman.”
Dick is sort of surprised to hear that. Nowadays, everyone associates him as Bruce’s first ward rather than a Flying Grayson. Most people don’t even know where he came from now. It’s been so long, it’s just not talked about anymore.
She pats his knee in a rare display of care. “You have a second chance at a family,” she says gently. “Don’t let it go just because there are issues.”
Dick makes a scoffing noise that gets caught in his throat. “They’re big issues,” he murmurs. “Really big issues.”
She shrugs. “Better to die trying to fight for them than die fighting with them,” she counters.
She leaves after that, leaving Dick to stew in his thoughts. He’d got a lot of time to ponder his life, since he’s definitely not going to be able to patrol tonight.
Ivy slides open the window beside the couch, wiggling her fingers so that her vines grow around her as a cushion of protection. “Take care of yourself, Wing,” she calls out from over her shoulder. “I won’t do this again.”
Dick nods and holds his mug out to her in thanks. “Stay out of trouble, Isley.”
She flashes him a mischievous grin. “Who, me?”
Then she turns tail and leaps off the fire escape, carrying herself away on her vines. One of them graciously shuts the window behind her.
Dick wants to feel better after their talk, but he can’t. The apartment is quiet and lonely without another person in it. Not to mention, the last twelve hours just showed him that a criminal thinks higher of Dick than his own family does. How is he supposed to rationalize that?
(Spoiler alert: he can’t.)
December rolls around. It’s the start of one of the most joyful times of the year, even in Blüdhaven and Gotham. Holidays galore — Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa; lights wrapped around trees and poles and lined across roofs; coffee shops selling out of hot chocolate. There’s wonder in the air. It’s the only month out of the whole year where Dick hears children laughing at night.
Even the god-forsaken snow seems softer, prettier in December. The cold gnaws at Dick’s bullet wound, but it’s worth it — because with the snow layered over the city like a fluffy blanket, covering the grime and blood and empty bullet casings, it makes the city look, dare he say, nice.
Tim leaves Gotham on the third.
He’s sluggish over the next few days. Slower at home, slower in the field, slower on patrol. It comes back to bite him in the ass at work, because of course everyone in the world is allowed to have an off-day except him.
He recently got a new partner because his old one moved to a different sector. Officer Jives is older, seasoned, and is most definitely not happy to not have received a promotion and a new title, but instead a new partner. He failed his detective’s exam twice, and that’s saying something, considering the corruption and illegitimacy of rankings in the BPD.
Throughout Dick’s shift, they break up a domestic rift in an apartment complex over rent, three muggings, two cases of disorderly conduct — both of them men, both of them drunk and nude — and stand guard with three other sets of officers while the fire department deals with a four-alarm fire. Dick will have to look into that once he’s off the clock to see if it’s suspicious.
They’ve just gotten back in the car after stopping for lunch when an alert comes through on the police scanner about a home invasion. Dick frowns — while not impossible, home invasions mostly occur at night when there’s less chance of being seen or tracked.
He watches from the passenger’s seat, confused, as Jives continues to munch on his leftover sandwich and not reach out for the radio. “We’re closest to the address,” Dick points out.
Jives groans. “You want to waste your time on a home invasion?”
Dick has to manually sort through the words so he can understand the utter bullshit that is behind them. “Right,” he says unimpressed, “because potentially saving someone’s life is a waste of time.”
Jives gives him a nasty look and grumbles under his breath, but he finally grabs the walkie and tells the dispatcher that they’re on their way, and to send for backup just in case. Then he hits the gas and speeds off, one hand on the wheel, the other still feeding himself his sandwich.
Dick gets more details from the call center as they make their way to the scene: suburban neighborhood, one-floor house at the end of the cul-de-sac, a teenage girl home alone and currently hunkered down in her parents’ closet, one suspect who got in through a window somewhere in the house.
They pull into the neighborhood and circle around a few streets before they actually find the house. They park in the road up against the curb, but even from a distance, Dick can see the splintery shadows of the broken window right beside the door. Jives alerts the center that they’ve arrived on the scene, and Dick waits for him before getting out of the car.
He lets Jives go first — his partner doesn’t like following, and Dick wants to keep the peace in a high-risk situation like this. They approach the house together. Dick opens his mouth to suggest they look for a key under the welcome mat or flower pot, but Jives slams his foot through the door before he can say anything.
And, well, that works too. Dick has kicked down his fair share of doors across both of his jobs.
They hurry into the house, and Dick calls out, “Blüdhaven Police!” at the same time Jives yells, “BPD!”
There’s a high, feminine scream from down the hall. They both rush towards the sound, Jives first and Dick behind. There’s a flat wall at the end, opening to another hallway, and a doorway a foot to the right. But instead of flattening himself against the wall to safely peek inside the room, like protocol states, Jives charges right in.
Shit, Dick thinks, raising his gun just as a shot fires from the depths of the room. In a split second, Jives lurches sideways out of the way, Dick fires his own gun at the dark figure that had been hidden behind Jives, and the intruder’s bullet lands in Dick’s right shoulder.
Dick drops to the floor on instinct, using the hand not holding his gun to put pressure on the wound. Another gunshot fires from inside the room, and the girl screams again. Dick hurriedly gets back to his feet, vaguely trying to keep his blood from dripping onto the carpets.
He raises his gun up to his chest despite the pain and peers around the edge of the doorway to check the room. Jives is standing over the intruder, checking for a pulse, but there’s too much blood coming from his head for there to be a pulse. Dick can see the girl hiding in the closet through the crack in the doorway, trying to muffle her cries behind her hand.
He keeps his gun raised, just in case, but reaches out to the girl with one hand and motions her over. She looks back at the probably-dead intruder laying on her parents’ floor, then scrambles to her feet and sprints across the room.
He steps to the side, expecting her to run out and straight for the door, but she goes right towards him and flings herself around him. She clings to him, arms around his chest in a death-grip as she shakes and sobs. He’s getting blood on her, but she either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
Dick meets Jives’s eyes. Jives nods to confirm the intruder is dead. There’s a sour look on his face. Dick drops his arms and holsters his gun, then wraps the girl up in an embrace. Her sobs get harder. He steers her back down the hall just as Jives kicks the intruder in the chest.
Geez, Jives.
They call for backup. Dick packs his wound with the emergency gauze in the first-aid kit they keep in the car. Jives handles leading the detectives around and updating them on everything. Dick sits with the girl on the hood of the cop car as they wait for the ambulance. He keeps an arm around her shoulders as she keeps her head on his good one. They don’t talk.
He tells the paramedics to check her over first, but he stays beside the ambulance so she’s not alone. Only when the paramedics give her the all-clear and sit her on the curb with a shock blanket and a bottle of water does Dick let them check out his gunshot wound.
They tell him they want to take him to the hospital.
“I’ll go on my own,” he promises. “Swear it.”
He won’t, but he has plenty of experience digging bullets out of his body and stitching them up. He’s done it so often that he can do it left-handed, something that only he, Bruce, and Jason are capable of doing.
He waits with her until her parents arrive. Her dad gets there first, tires of his truck screeching as he slams on his brakes and hops out of the car with the engine still running. She leaps into his arms in a very similar way she did to Dick.
While they’re hugging, the coroner’s office wheels out a large black body bag strapped to a stretcher. Thankfully, the girl’s dad has her squished to his front, so she doesn’t see a thing.
Dick is about to get into the car when her mom pulls in, half parked on the sidewalk and half on the road. She does shut the car off before getting out, but she’s lighting fast as she sprints towards her daughter and flings herself around her. Dick smiles.
He looks over the roof of the car when he hears Jives make a gruff sound. He’s rolling his eyes and scowling at something. “Predictable,” he mutters. “I stop the criminal, and you’re the one she flocks to.”
Dick’s shoulder throbs.
“She was scared and you were standing over a dead body,” he says flatly. Jives grunts, obviously annoyed. Dick raises an eyebrow at him. “Why do you want the attention of a teenage girl anyway?”
That gets him to shut up, at least. He glares viciously at Dick, but blessedly says nothing else and just slides into the driver’s seat. Dick follows suit, leaving the girl, her parents, and the body bag behind.
“Need a drop at the ER?” Jives asks, using his elbow to roll down his window while lighting a cigarette with both hands.
“No, the bullet only grazed me,” Dick lies. “They patched me up, so I’ll just go home and change and then head to the hospital.”
“Didn’t ask for the story, Kathy,” he bites, pulling away from the curb and into the road. Chatty Kathy. It’s one of Jives’s favorite nicknames for him, and, sadly, it’s started to spread across the precinct.
Dick goes home and patches himself up. He shoots off a text to his boss that he’ll be out for the rest of the week while his shoulder heals. The one good thing about the PD being so so corrupt is that he doesn’t even need to send in a doctor’s notice or anything; they just let him off. They know Dick isn’t, and will never, get involved in any of their shady dealings, so the less he’s around them, the better. They’ll take any opportunity they can get.
He kind of wants to talk to someone. He considers one of his brothers, but neither would answer, and Robin and Batman are still in the sky. He thinks about Babs, or maybe Clark, but it’s late and they’re both probably asleep.
He decides better of it, in the end, and just goes to sleep.
Dick used to love Christmas with Bruce.
The two of them would help Alfred decorate the manor from head to toe. They would go out together and find the biggest tree they could find and would drag it through the manor themselves, much to Alfred’s disdain. Bruce would dedicate an entire day just to decorate it.
There were at least three Christmas charity galas every December, and Dick was allowed to attend every one of them. One would always be hosted at the manor, where their tree would be the centerpiece of the entire party.
This lasted until Dick was eighteen. By nineteen, Dick was no longer going over to the manor, and he stayed in his apartment in Blüdhaven for the first time in ten years with a rinky-dink plastic tree and some burned sugar cookies.
Jason never really had a good Christmas when he was with his parents. Even when he was with Bruce, he didn’t really enjoy the Christmas spirit thing. Dick doesn’t know if Bruce did any of their holiday traditions with him. He never went to Christmas when Jason was there.
There was one Christmas when Jason was dead and before Tim came into their lives. Dick dropped by to be with Bruce, but every single light in the manor was off, except for the one in the room Dick knew to be Alfred’s from the outside.
Dick went back to Blüdhaven.
Christmas started to regain meaning in the manor once Tim moved in. Bruce was determined to not make the same mistakes that he did with Dick and Jason, and after all the neglect Tim had experienced, Bruce wanted to make Christmases something special for him.
Dick came to the manor every single year. Sometimes, at Tim’s prompting, he’d even spend the night on Christmas Eve.
Dick was on a mission two Christmases ago and couldn’t make it home. Last Christmas was spent only with Damian and Alfred, because Tim and Jason didn’t want to come. This year… well. Dick doesn’t know where he stands.
He still has the old rinky-dink Christmas tree. It’s a foot tall and sits on his coffee table. A poorly-strung popcorn garland is wrapped around it, and a few wooden ornaments he bought at a corner store are hanging off the brittle branches. There’s a short strand of mini colored lights on it, but half of them are burned out.
It sits there, the only light in the room on Christmas Eve as Dick watches holiday movies.
Dick had called everyone earlier. Tim and Jason, of course, didn’t answer, so he sent them both separate texts wishing them a merry Christmas. Neither has responded. Alfred did, though, and Dick got to talk to him, and then Damian, and then Bruce.
“You should come by tomorrow,” Bruce suggests.
“Yeah?” Dick asks, hopeful.
“Of course,” Bruce assures. “You’re always welcome here, Dick. Especially on Christmas.”
Bruce doesn’t do many charity galas anymore. The two of them haven’t picked out a tree together in almost a decade. Nothing will ever be the same as it was.
But it doesn’t matter. Because Damian nearly tackles him in a hug when he walks through the door on Christmas morning, and Alfred smells like snickerdoodles, and Bruce’s hug soothes the cavernous feeling in his chest.
The day goes really, really well. He has presents to open and presents to give. He’s mailed Jason’s gift out, but he doesn’t have Tim’s address, so he sets his present under the tree. That’s where he finds a gift for him from Tim — a flat rectangular box that ends up being a box of his favorite cereal.
Dick spends another hour or so reading more of The Odyssey with Damian. They’ve gotten about halfway through at this point, and Damian is starting to get very interested despite his attempts to appear unphased at all the action.
Damian ends up falling asleep on his lap towards the end of the night. Dick tries not to think about it, what he’s missing. He tries not to let it ruin his night. He keeps his thoughts to himself and holds Damian closer for just a little while longer, ignoring the dull ache in his shoulder from the bullet wound. It works out, too, because Bruce and Alfred don’t even notice.
Dick spends his break two days later sitting alone in a coffee shop while Jives is off at a corner store. A few people give his police uniform nasty looks, but for the most part, people hardly look at him and mind their own business.
One of those people is a father sitting with his two children in the corner. He has an extra-large coffee in front of him and a child on either side. His teenage daughter is taking pictures of the foam art on top of her latte, and the little boy is trying a sip of his dad’s coffee.
His dad is holding the cup, probably expecting the exact reaction that happens — the kid’s face twists up in horror and he flings the cup away from him. The dad has a good enough grip on it that he manages to not spill it, then sets it on the table a safe distance away from the boy. They both break out into laughter.
Dick leaves the coffee shop and throws out his mostly-full cup. He’s lost his appetite.
He’s sitting on a rooftop in Blüdhaven the next night, watching for any signs of crime, when something cool and stuff wraps around his wrist. He doesn’t flinch — she’s been tailing him all night.
“Hello, Ivy.”
Poison Ivy walks up to him, her bare feet wrapped in vines. How she’s not freezing standing on top of a concrete roof in the beginning of January is a mystery to him. “Hello, little bird,” she greets. She doesn’t sit down, but that’s fine. Dick doesn’t mind talking like this.
“Please tell me I’m not about to clean up a mess you made,” Dick says, begging.
Ivy lets out a soft laugh. “No mess for you,” she assures. “Now Batsy…”
Dick snorts quietly. Unsurprising, though a bitter part of him thinks, deserving.
The vines wrap around him more, not tightly, but around his back and across his shoulders. Something squeezes around Dick’s heart at the feeling.
“How’s your little one?” she asks.
Wow, he’s horrible at keeping secrets.
“He’s good,” Dick answers, continuing to stare out at the city. “How’d you find out?”
Ivy hums. “Harley,” she replies. “Her psychiatrist’s license may have been revoked, but she still has all that education in her head — especially now that she’s away from Joker’s toxin and her mind isn’t so screwed up anymore.”
Dick smiles at the information. Good for her. “I’m glad,” he says. She’s getting back on track. Not very much, considering she still engages in criminal activity, but any track is better than one that involves the Joker.
They stay like that for a while, taking in the city scenery. The smog is thinner tonight. Dick can see Orion in the stars. He wonders what Artemis thought when she saw her most admired warrior fall to Gaia’s scorpion.
“I can get you money,” Ivy tells him. “Say the word, and I can get you and Robin away from here.”
Dick continues to stare at the cityscape, mind trying and failing to understand exactly what he’s hearing. Slowly, he tilts his head up to look at Ivy, who is staring down at him with a calm, neutral expression. The vines around him draw snug.
“I can’t take him,” he replies. “It would be wrong.” Not to mention illegal.
Ivy shakes her head at him. “I don’t understand,” she says, “how you never became a villain. You had every right to. Everyone has wronged you at some point or another. This could be your chance to get out. To be happy.”
“I am happy,” he lies. Ivy doesn’t buy it, of course.
“Take him,” she urges. “Take him and leave.”
Dick shakes his head. “Weren’t you just telling me a few weeks ago how I needed to make up with my family?” he questions. “Now you want me to leave them.”
She watches him, cool and unwavering. “I changed my mind.”
He’s sure that part of it is for herself, so she can get two vigilantes out of her way. But that can’t be all of it, but he doesn’t know what else there could be. Something must have happened. She must know something that she didn’t before.
“I can’t,” he repeats. “I couldn’t just—”
Bruce would be hurt. And never forgive him. And he’d probably send the entire Justice League out for him, and then he’d be locked up forever and never see Damian again. Or Jason, or Tim.
“I just can’t,” he says, shoulders slumping in defeat.
Ivy frowns, though Dick notices the lack of surprise on her face. “Well, if you change your mind,” she remarks, “come find me.”
Dick tries to lift his hand to reach her, but he’s met with resistance. Confused, he looks down and finds his entire upper body has been wrapped in Ivy’s vines. They’re no longer trying to comfort him, but instead are restraining him.
Oh great. He’s been played.
He looks back up at her. She’s stepped away from him, but to her credit, there’s a twinge of regret in her eyes. Not enough to deter her, though. “I meant what I said,” she tells him, “but I also have things to do.”
Dick struggles against the vine as Ivy walks towards the edge of the roof. “The vines will dissolve in fifteen minutes. Hang tight ‘till then.”
With that, she lifts her hands, and a large plant with a giant pink flower in the middle rises from the ground. She jumps off the roof and lands perfectly in the center of the flower, and then the plant carries her away — right in the direction of the Blüdhaven Bank. Weird. Bank robberies aren’t usually her scene.
Dick keeps trying to free himself from the vines, but their grip is too strong. He can’t wiggle his arms or bend his body enough to loosen them or get a hand on a weapon. His escrima sticks are retracted and in a small holder in his belt, where all of his other weapons are. He tries to use his flexibility to get free, but he’s human and no match for the strength of Ivy’s super-plants.
He gives up after a few minutes. Maybe that’s too fast. But he sits there wrapped up in the vines, sinking into them. He hasn’t gotten a hug like this since Christmas at the manor — from Bruce. And that… that was the first hug from his father in quite a number of months.
Sue him. The vines are warm, and they’ve got Dick wrapped whole-body, like some sort of vigilante burrito. They’re tight enough that they feel like Damian, when he hugs Dick and squeezes him around the waist, or when Tim used to throw himself at Dick and latch onto him like a koala after a particularly hard fight and a long time in-between the last time they’d seen each other.
Dick closes his eyes and lays on his back. The vines kindly move with him, keeping him snug in their embrace. In the distance, he can hear the bank alarm start to blare, and immediately after, an alert beeps at him in the computer in his lenses.
Dick continues to lay there in the vines.
He listens to the sounds of the city around him — the bank alarm, the police sirens, people shouting at each other, a plane flying overhead. Far, far off, he hears the faint echo of a series of gunshots. He wonders if that came from Blüdhaven, or if it’s from the Iceberg Lounge in the northeast side of Gotham.
Eventually, fifteen minutes pass, and the vines slowly recede. When they’re gone, slithered over the edge of the building and dissolved back into the earth, Dick continues to lie on his back on the roof, staring up at the sky.
He calls Bruce once the police have left the scene to let him know that he spotted Ivy in the ‘Haven. She’ll be expecting him to do this, of course. They may be a perverted sense of allies, but Ivy is a criminal, and Dick is a member of the Justice League. It’s the way of the world.
Dick is starting to really hate his job.
He has made hardly any headway in cleaning up the BPD, save for one lieutenant and an officer he was able to connect with a string of operations led by Blockbuster. But Dick can’t trust the chief to do anything about it, so all he can do is hope that the DA can put the corrupt officers away, or else they’ll be right back in the PD and searching for the person who turned them in.
Dick is just… really tired.
When he’s not out with Jives, he sits at his desk and stares at his computer’s background. He thought it would be too weird to have a photo of him and Damian as his background, and he didn’t have a good photo of everyone in his family to use. Plus, that would have been pretty stupid, considering his surroundings.
He couldn’t bring himself to put a picture of his parents, either. It’s too hard to look at the life he lost so long ago. It reminds him of the life he has now, the one that he’s losing. The one he, maybe, has already lost.
There are criminals in the bullpen that are yelling, trying to attack their arresting officers or stage a breakout and get the ones that are locked up in the holding cell free. They’re unsuccessful — for as corrupt as most BPD officers are, they’re power-hungry and abuse whatever scrap they can get. They’ll keep the criminals in line. Dick doesn’t need to intervene.
He keeps staring at his background, a picture of the mountains somewhere in Canada. The peaks are snowy, and the lake below is frozen solid. There are lines cut all over the surface, which indicates that someone had been skating on it.
Dick thinks it would be nice to go to Canada one day and skate on a lake below the mountains. It’s a lot nicer than the Blüdhaven cityscape, that’s for sure.
He wonders if he had been smarter — if he had stopped caring about himself and focused on caring for Damian, and made the decision to hang up the cape earlier — where he would have moved them to.
Maybe he would have stayed in Gotham, so Damian could grow up in Bruce’s childhood home. But maybe not. Would he have moved them to the pretty mountains in Canada? Would he have moved them west, maybe in some obscure town in Nebraska where no one would know who they were? Or California, with an entire west coast for a child to explore? A rainy little city in Oregon?
Or would he have taken Damian out of the continent, putting an entire ocean between them and Gotham? Dick has always wanted to visit Italy. Or Greece. Dick thinks Damian would love Greece.
Would Dick have gone to Talia? Would he have worked with her to take down the entire League of Assassins so Damian could go home?
Dick reaches for his bottled water on his desk. He only notices his hands are shaking when he sees the water sloshing around inside the bottle.
He’s not sure what he would have done, or where he would have gone. But he does know one thing — regardless of the choice he would have made, at least he would still be with Damian.
Dick puts his head in his hands in misery. Why couldn’t he have thought to hang up the cape sooner?
Two-Face only makes things worse.
Dick hasn’t even finished zipping up his suit for patrol when Bruce contacts him with an urgent message stating there’s an all-hands-on-deck emergency in Gotham, and that he needs help.
He would have gone anyway, but when Bruce tells him that he’s got Jason, Selena, and Clark helping out as well, he completely ignores the break-in happening at Blüdhaven Bank in favor of rushing to Gotham as fast as he can.
“Two-Face has reappeared, and he’s coming back with a bang,” Bruce informs him while he speeds down the bridge that connects the two cities. “He’s planted bombs all over Gotham City.”
Something very similar to panic seizes in Dick’s chest. My family, he thinks with fright. Damian.
“The police have been dispersed to every side of the city,” Bruce tells him as Dick crosses into Gotham. “I sent Red Hood to cover the Alley and the rest of uptown; Catwoman has the Narrows, and Red Robin is covering the west side. Robin and I are heading south, so I need you to meet the set of police on the east side and start searching.”
Dick’s mind is racing at the implications of how serious this is. It’s been a while since there has been a threat of this magnitude in Blüdhaven or Gotham. At least there are police on the ground with each of his brothers. That way they’re not alone.
“Where’s Supes?” Dick asks.
“Superman is in the air. He’ll be listening for them and scanning the areas,” answers Bruce. “Keep your comm line open and stay in contact.”
“Will do,” promises Dick as he turns and heads for the east side. He watches as people frantically pack up their cars or try to make a run for the ferry on foot. They must be evacuating the city. “How many are there?”
For a brief stretch, Bruce doesn’t respond. Dick isn’t even sure the message went through, until Bruce’s side of the comm crackles as he tunes in.
“I don’t know,” he admits stoically.
Dick purses his lips and doesn’t ask anything else.
He’s going well over the speed limit, but with the amount of cars fleeing the city, the roads get clogged up fast. Dick sees the first of the congestion up ahead, so he veers off-road. He’ll take to the rooftops once he’s in the east, but his bike is still the fastest way to get there as long as he doesn’t drive on any actual roads. It also gives him a chance to use the scanner in his lenses to look for any explosives hidden that the search crews may have missed.
As he drives, he passes another motorcycle going in the opposite direction, followed by a set of cop cars. Dick gets a flash of red as the bike goes by, and he sends up a silent prayer to anyone who may be listening that they keep his brother safe, because it looks like Jason located another bomb.
He sails through the upstate on his way towards the east end. He remembers, out of the blue, that the east side is where Ivy and Harley live, because Ivy centered herself in the park. He’s sure both she and Harley are aware of what’s going on, but he thinks he should drop by their house just in case.
By the time he gets to the park, the squad of four police cars, two cops to each, are waiting for him. They’re searching the expanse of the park, probably to get a head start until he arrived. He slows to a stop and kicks up the stand, and clocks one of the officers hurrying towards him.
“Nightwing, sir,” the officer says in a rush, “we found a line of explosives around the side of the play area.”
Right. Straight to it, then. “Show me,” he orders, and the officer hustles them to the other end of the park, where the playground is.
Dick used to take Damian to this park. He always refused to ever play on the playground, but he enjoyed climbing the monkey bars and racing him around the park. Dick looks over at the monkey bars as they pass, and has to shake away the image of Dick standing under them while Damian tried to climb on top of them.
“Bomb squad?” he questions, turning away from the monkey bars.
“Nearest squad is uptown with the Red Hood,” the officer — his uniform says Daniels — replies. “Thirty minutes out at the earliest.”
Well that’s bad. That means Dick is going to have to disable this thing himself. He tries not to get nervous about it. He’s done this plenty of times before. It’s just… been a while.
Officer Daniels comes to a stop in front of a small group of police, anxiously speaking in hushed tones and staring at the bomb — a surprisingly small one. Dick tones down the relief he feels. Even the smallest bombs can be the most deadly.
“Stand away from it,” he orders, and like the Red Sea, the officers part. Some of them take several steps backwards, all the way back towards the cop cars. Dick doesn’t feel an ounce of anger at their actions. Most of them have families, and all of them have lives. He’s not going to judge someone for getting as far from a bomb as possible, especially when Nightwing is there to take over.
Dick taps on the right upper wing of his domino mask, activating the computer chip. He scans the device, watching as the computer highlights different wires, chemicals, and machinery, and reads the messages that the computer draws up for each piece.
The bomb is ticking down fast, but Dick’s scanner is faster. After a few, breathless minutes, the computer identifies which wire to cut — the green one. Dick presses his lips together. Why does everyone always use the green wire?
He flicks out a small knife hidden in one of his secret compartments and sets the edge against the underside of the green wire. He takes a deep breath, then slices the wire in half.
The timer comes to a sudden halt, and no one explodes.
He sighs out in relief. He stands, pocketing the knife, and sees the officers around him in various states of ease and distress. Dick feels his heart clench, especially at the few holding onto the pockets of their pants, where Dick is sure they keep their wallets and pictures of their loved ones.
He has a flash thought, Where is Damian?
“I’ve got to run,” Dick says to the nearest cop. “Stay here until bomb squad arrives and gets rid of it, and keep an eye out for Two-Face.”
The officer nods, and Dick runs off towards his bike, away from the scene. As he swings his leg around the middle, he wonders what he needs to do. An all-hands-on-deck situation like this is chaotic, no matter how much he or Bruce try to keep it as methodical as possible. He speeds away, heading back for the highway, listening to the police scanner to see where he needs to go next.
They’ve found a few more bombs, but some have already been deactivated, and others have bomb squads working on them. Nothing that he needs to interfere with.
His earpiece suddenly crackles, and a staticky, tinny voice says, “I’ve got a lead on Two-Face. Standby for coordinates.”
Bruce. There’s been no word on Damian or anyone else, so Dick is going to assume they’re all fine. Bruce would have called an emergency if something happened to one of them, especially Robin.
Dick still has Robin’s tracker in his computer system.
He sees a shadow, way up high, in the distance, and Dick immediately drives into an alleyway. He hides his bike behind a large dumpster, then grapples up to the rooftop. The person doesn’t turn around when he lands.
“You should get out of here,” he tells Ivy. “Two-Face has—”
Ivy twists her head around. Then, after a contemplative moment, spins around to look at him. “I’m fully aware of what’s going on,” she informs.
Dick pauses, then nods. He’s not surprised; Gotham criminals always know everything that everyone else is planning. She probably found out about this days ago. “So why are you up here?”
Ivy blinks owlishly at him. “Observing,” she answers.
Dick doesn’t ask what that means. The less he knows, the better. “Well keep a lookout for any bombs on your way out,” he orders, but really, it’s more of an ask. He’s sure Ivy knows it, “and disable any you find.”
Ivy tilts her head towards him in acknowledgement. “I will,” she promises. When she straightens, something flashes across her face in the dark. “Be careful out there.”
Dick sends her a lopsided grin. “Hey, this is me we’re talking about,” he says.
The smile Ivy gives him has something sad in it. “I know.”
There’s something charged in the air between them that has Dick’s smirk sliding off his face. He knows what she means. Sure, he’s a little reckless sometimes, but he can get on just fine. He has been — for twenty years.
“Lead was a bust,” Bruce says through the comm set. Instantly afterward, his mask alerts him of a new message from Bruce with a set of coordinates. “Continue with assignments. Nightwing, rendezvous at the location immediately.”
“This could be your chance,” Ivy says suddenly.
Dick furrows his eyebrows at her, reeling himself back into the moment and away from the existential crisis he was almost about to fall into. “For what?” he asks.
Ivy looks at him pointedly. “To take Robin and run.”
Shock zaps through his body at her suggestion. “What?” he repeats, strained. “The city is in danger, Ivy. I’m not going to abandon it or the people inside it.”
Ivy shrugs. “Gotham isn’t yours anymore, Batsy,” she presses. Dick’s heart jumps into his throat.
Fuck, how did she find out? That must be why she changed her mind about wanting Dick to make up with his family. She must have found out that Damian had been his Robin, and not the real Batman’s.
“Let the others worry about the city,” Ivy says. “Take your boy. Run.”
For a moment, Dick tunes into the noises of a city in a panic. But then he shakes his head. “No. That would be wrong. I won’t.”
Ivy sighs, like she’s actually sad for him. “Better than all of us,” she mumbles under her breath, so quiet Dick almost misses it over the sounds of the sirens down below. “Harls and I will keep a lookout. But we’re getting the hell out of here.”
Dick nods. He’s glad to hear it. “Good,” he tells her honestly. “Traffic is backed up all over the city. You’re better off using your vines as transport.”
Ivy worries at her bottom lip. “My plants would have to be humongous, and that would draw the attention of the police,” she responds. “Besides, I don’t know if I have the energy to make pants big enough to carry both of us out of the city and over the water.”
What has Dick’s life come to?
He presses against the side of his comm set to shut it off, then moves closer to her to tell her very, very quietly, “The ‘copters make rounds in grid lines across the expanse of the city.” He steadily meets her eyes, so that she knows he’s serious. “The next one will be flying over us in six minutes, if you can get Harley here in time.”
Ivy stares back at him, deep and unwavering. “She’s already here,” she says to him. From the shadows behind her, a hand shoots out from the darkness and salutes him, and half of Harley’s face peeks out with a ditzy grin.
“I know,” he says honestly. He clocked her the moment he landed on the roof. He glances between them, then tells Ivy, “Leave them alive.”
Ivy nods, a promise, and Dick nosedives off the roof. He gets his grapple out and swings towards the downtown area to meet up with Bruce.
He follows the coordinates to the roof of an office building that, judging by the stillness in the windows, has already been evacuated. He gracefully swings to the top, planting his feet right beside Robin, who is waiting for him at the edge of the roof.
“Wing,” Damian says when he lands. “I am glad to see you are unharmed.”
Dick unhooks his grapple from the ledge and smiles at him. “All good here, Little D,” he murmurs, putting his hand fondly on the top of Damian’s head. Then he turns to Bruce and says, louder this time, “What’s the situation?”
Bruce greets him with a terse nod. “I’ve got another lead on Two-Face’s whereabouts,” he informs. “It’s more solid than the last. I’m taking Catwoman to search the west end of the city with Commissioner Gordon and a bomb squad.”
Dick wants to ask about Catwoman, because that’s interesting, but Bruce continues speaking before he can.
“Our main priority is to find Two-Face before he can detonate any of the bombs, but we should disable the ones we come across, just in case,” he adds. “I want you to take Robin and scour your side of the city.”
Elation explodes through Dick’s system, and he has to fight to tamp it down. Damian fails, however, and whips around to look at Bruce with an emphatic, “Really?”
Bruce gives them a strange look from behind the cowl. “Yes,” he answers. “Why? Will this be a problem?”
Dick shakes his head and puts a hand on Damian’s shoulder. Damian instantly falls into place beside him, pressing just close enough that his arm brushes against Dick’s waist. “Not at all,” he assures Bruce, and has to hold back the it’ll be just like old times that threatens to slip past.
Bruce seems to believe them, and he nods in confirmation. “Keep your comms on and report anything you find,” he orders, already turning away from them. “I’ll update you on the lead when I find something.”
Dick lifts his hand in a playful salute. “Roger that, Batman.”
Bruce jumps off the roof and flies into the night. Across the way, on another roof close by, a slender, dark figure with triangles atop their head swings after him.
Dick looks over at Damian, unable to keep the grin off his face. He’s got his boy back, even if it’s only for a night.
“Where to, Nightwing?” Damian asks. It’s still weird to hear him address Dick that way instead of ‘Batman,’ especially when they’re on their own like this. Dick doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to it.
“Let’s finish searching the rest of the east side,” he decides. “I only got about halfway before Bats called me here. I found one, but I’m sure there’s at least one more somewhere.”
Damian nods in an affirmative. But then his face screws up, and he tilts his head up towards the sky. “It’s another helicopter,” he says. “They are incredibly annoying.”
Dick smirks, also looking upwards. “That’s because you’ve never ridden in one,” he responds. “We’ll have to rectify… that…”
He trails off as the helicopter flies over them. It’s too high up for him to see who’s inside, and they’re flying too fast for his lenses to zoom and focus in on them, but he sees a flash of red and black as it goes.
He glances over at Damian, but he’s already turned away and peering down at the city, probably trying to find the best place to head towards. Dick looks back up just as something falls out of the chopper. It drifts down slowly, blown about by the wind from the rotor blades as the helicopter flies away, towards the edge of the city.
A blue zinnia, pretty and perfect, lands at Dick’s feet. Damian doesn’t notice it, still looking out at the city. Dick picks it up, the corners of his lips tugging upwards into a small smile. He picks it up carefully, then sets it up against one of the ledge corners so that it doesn’t get crushed or fall.
He glances back at the helicopter, now a small spot in the sky, and makes his way over to Damian.
“Ready, Robin?”
Damian cranes his neck around with a wicked grin of mischief. “Ready, Nightwing.”
Dick swallows thickly at the words, then steps onto the ledge and lets himself fall. Damian cheers and does the same, and Dick grins. They shoot their grapples at the same time, and Damian follows right behind as Dick leads the way. Just like old times.
They spend the next half hour or so combing through the east side with the help of the police on the ground. They find another, smaller bomb on the side of a fifties-style diner, and someone calls in a report of one in the basement of the community college.
That one takes a while. The campus is already half evacuated when they get there. It seems to be fairly effective, so Dick and Damian head to dismantle the bomb while the police and the administration evacuate the students.
They take care of the bomb — though that one was a lot more complicated than the one on the diner or the playground — and spend the rest of the time helping people get on buses and in squad cars and directing them to the evacuation path to get them out of the city.
They’re loading the last set of people into a bus when Tim’s voice breaks through the comm set. “We’ve got him,” he alerts, voice tense and distracted. He’s obviously in the middle of something. “Everyone report to the incoming coordinates, ASAP.”
The coordinates pop up in the corner of Dick’s lenses. He hears Jason pop in for a curt, “Understood,” so Dick radios in and says, “Robin and I are on the way.”
The two of them swing away to where Dick had parked his bike. They pile on with practiced ease, and Dick revs the engine and speeds down the highway. He weaves between buses and cars stuck in the evacuation traffic, and is not at all ashamed to say that he rode the sidewalks most of the drive. You gotta do what you gotta do.
The whole time, Damian holds onto him from behind, arms hooked tight around his middle and small fingers clutching the leather of his suit. His chin is hooked over Dick’s shoulder to see, and every so often, he hollers in delight when they skid around a corner or jump over an obstacle in their way.
God, Dick has missed this. He’s missed this so much.
All too soon, they pull into the parking lot of the location: Hodgins & Lowe law firm. A memory dings in the back of Dick’s head: Robert Lowe was a friend of Dent’s in law school, and is now one of the co-owners of the firm. He also employed a few other people that he and Dent went to college with.
Whelp, this can’t end well.
Bruce and Tim are waiting in the alleyway beside the building. Dick can see Bruce’s mouth work around the words “Nightwing, Robin, let’s go,” that filter through the comms.
The sound of another motorcycle echoing through the air is the only alert they get before Jason pulls up beside them. He doesn’t acknowledge either of them as he hops off his bike and hurries over to where the others are waiting. None of them are in the mood to wait, apparently, because when they see Jason running towards them, they sprint for the doors of the firm. Damian, never one to want to be the last one in, starts after them.
“Wait,” Dick says, grabbing Damian’s shoulders to keep him from taking off with the others. “I’ve got an idea.” Damian tilts his head up at Dick curiously. Dick just grins and says, “Remember Plan S-dash-L3?”
The confusion on his face morphs into one of adolescent glee. “Yes!” he exclaims, pumping his fist in the air.
“Nightwing, report!” he hears Bruce snap through the comm set.
“Go on,” Dick says, and Damian immediately takes off running for the back of the building. “And be careful!”
He waits until Damian is around the side of the building before hurrying after the others. He finds them in the lobby, in the middle of an all-out brawl with Two-Face’s lackeys. He slots into place right beside Bruce, breaking up the mob that has formed around him.
“Where did you go?” Bruce asks between grunts. He grabs a lackey by his arm and his shirt and shoves him backwards, away from the group. “Where is Robin?”
“Executing a plan,” Dick answers, ducking under a right-hook.
“You left him alone?” Bruce exclaims.
Rich coming from the man who lets children fight crime with him. “He can handle it,” Dick assures, breaking the nose of the nearest person next to him. Rich, coming from him, who almost hung up the cape for Damian. But whatever.
“That’s not—” Bruce starts, but gets interrupted by a group of two men charging towards him. He ducks under a swing, then grabs the arm and twists it behind his back. He slams his foot into the man’s back and sends him flying into the other lackey beside him.
There’s a loud thud that comes from the roof. With a crash from above, glass rains down as Damian drops in through the skylight, tossing four flashbangs in different directions. “Take cover!” he shouts.
Bruce draws the cape up over his head while the others close their eyes and turn away to keep their eyes safe as the flashbangs go off. The lackeys around them shriek in shock and brief stints of pain. Damian hangs on the rope of his grapple until it’s safe to come down, then unhooks himself and launches right at the nearest lackey while the man is still blinded.
The flashbangs speed up the fight considerably by giving them the advantage. They’re able to take out four lackeys with ease, too disoriented to put up a good fight. It only takes a few minutes to finish up, and not a moment too soon, because they’re being left behind by the others, who are splitting up in different directions.
“Robin, join up with Hood and tie up the lackeys,” Dick orders, running after Bruce and Tim — who are running after Two-Face. “Don’t go anywhere without him!”
“Roger, Nightwing!” Damian calls out.
He follows them back down the spiral of stairs to the fourth floor. Bodies are sprawled out all over the place, dead and covered in blood. Dick gets into the room last, just as Two-Face puts a gun under the chin of one of the law associates — Dick’s lenses tell him the man’s name is Robert Lowe himself. In Two-Face’s other hand, flailing outward in a wordless threat, is a small black remote. The detonator.
“You rotten people!” Two-Face shouts. It’s unclear if he’s talking to them or Mr. Lowe. “Selfish. Liars. How can you say you stand for anything when you so clearly stand for nothing?”
Dick has a flashback of Ivy’s suggestion on the roof and the brief consideration he gave it. Gotham isn’t yours anymore, Batsy. Take your boy and run.
Tim clicks a button on his bo staff, and it doubles in length – long enough to reach Two-Face. It’s over, after that. Tim whacks the detonator out of Two-Face’s hands, Bruce tackles Two-Face to the ground, and Dick holds an electrified escrima stick to the criminal’s head to knock him out while Bruce ties him up. Tim takes the opportunity to check on Mr. Lowe.
Dick stares down at Two-Face’s unconscious form, his words echoing like a lingering nightmare. How can you say you stand for anything when you so clearly stand for nothing?
He thinks back to when he let Ivy rob that bank. When he let Tim walk away and off to search for Bruce alone. When he took Damian out as Robin for the first time. When he kept taking Damian out as Robin. Both times he ran from Gotham and hid in Blüdhaven. When he let jealousy keep him from bonding with Jason. And then when Jason died. And then when Jason came back. When he put Tim second instead of first. The girl that died in the storm.
How can you say you stand for anything when you so clearly stand for nothing?
Bruce hauls Two-Face out of the building and straight into the back of a high-security police transport vehicle. Dick watches from the rooftop of the law firm, keeping an eye on the transfer and searching for his brothers.
He spots Damian first, a few buildings down and two behind, patiently waiting for orders. Waiting for someone to come to him. How can Dick resist? He gets out his grapple and swings over, leaving Bruce and the scene behind.
He smoothly sails down beside the kid, landing a little too hard on his feet. Damian watches him coming and, once Dick is on solid ground, runs over to him. Dick grins as he approaches. When he’s close enough, puts a fond hand on the top of his head and draws him close.
“Nice job, kid,” he praises, holding out his other hand palm-up. “I told you you’d get to crash through a ceiling light one day.”
Damian nods, a pleased expression on his face, and enthusiastically slaps Dick’s hands with his own. “It was quite as exciting as I expected.”
For a single, brief moment, Dick feels like everything is back to normal.
Bruce drops onto the roof, and Jason and Tim are right behind him. As soon as Bruce sees Dick and Damian, his lips flatten into a thin, angry line. Something sad drops into Dick’s heart. Oh great.
“That was not something to celebrate,” Bruce scolds, stalking over to them. His body language conveys thinly-hidden fury hidden beneath his suit, and Dick knows they’re about to start fighting. His body does, too, because he automatically straightens up to attention, and adrenaline starts pumping through his blood.
“That tactic helped us stop Two-Face’s men and gave us the chance to go after him,” Dick defends, because he knows exactly what Bruce is talking about, the hypocrite.
“That tactic was reckless and stupid,” snaps Bruce.
Damian bristles at his tone. He steps forward, intending to say something, but Dick takes him by the shoulder and pulls him back without a word. This only seems to piss off Damian more, but he obediently falls back into place beside Dick and stays quiet.
From behind Bruce, Dick can see Jason staring oddly at Damian. When he looks over at Dick, there’s a strange look on his face. Dick doesn’t want to think about what it means.
“That’s the job, B,” he contends, steering his attention back to the conversation at hand. “If we hadn’t done it, we would have been too late to stop Two-Face from blowing that guy’s brains out — or blowing up Gotham.”
“Then you should have been the one to do it, because you have more experience,” argues Bruce. “What you let him do could have gotten him killed.”
That hurts for a number of reasons. Dick would never put Damian in unnecessary harm or fatal situations — except, you know, letting him be Robin. But also, Dick used that tactic plenty of times when he was Robin. But Bruce never showed this level of concern.
Maybe it’s because Bruce knows better now. That’s good for Damian, he guesses. It doesn’t make it hurt any less.
“He could handle it, and he did,” Dick points out. “I knew that. This is how he learns, if there’s ever a chance he has to do something like that on his own.”
“That’s not the point!” Bruce barks. “You should never have put him in that position.”
There’s a bubble in Dick’s chest that pops when he says that, flooding his system with overwhelming, head-spinning vexation from Bruce’s lack of regard for Dick’s authority.
“You’ve fought with him for eight months; I fought with him for over a year!” Dick shouts, unable to keep his frustration in anymore. “Don’t tell me what to do with the kid I trained!”
Eight months is almost a year, a horrible voice reminds him in his head. Soon, they’ll have been Batman and Robin for longer.
Bruce’s fists clench at his sides. “He’s my Robin, Nightwing,” he yells, “not yours!”
He’s my son, Dick almost says, but he manages to keep it in. Instead, he snarls, “I was your Robin, too, at one point.”
That seems to knock the wind out of Bruce’s sails. Jason, Tim, and Damian have gone deathly silent during the exchange. The longer it lasts, the more suffocating it gets. I was your Robin, too, is what he said, but what he means is, We all were. Where was this concern when it was us?
Itching to get out of here, Dick takes out his grapple and swings away, back to where he parked his bike. No one calls out to him, and no one comes after him, but he thinks he hears Jason snapping something at Bruce back on the roof.
It’s only when Dick crosses the line into Blüdhaven that he realizes he forgot to say goodbye to Damian.
He doesn’t speak with Bruce for weeks after that.
It reminds him starkly of what life was like when he first left the manor and moved to Blüdhaven. He was always intensely aware that Bruce was there, going about his days in Gotham while Dick went about his a city away. No phone calls, no messages, no uninvited drop-ins. Alfred called once, a few days after the incident, but Dick didn’t answer. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone, right now.
Anyone, of course, except Damian.
Damian starts calling him more often when he realizes that Dick has been dropping by less. Maybe he’s worried Dick will leave them all for good. Or maybe he’s just lonely. Either way, Damian calls him when he and Bruce get off of patrol. More than that, he gives him a nightly report.
They’ve never done a nightly report, even when Dick was Batman. Bruce used to do them with Dick when he was first starting out as Robin, as a way to reevaluate the night’s events and use them to learn and grow. Perhaps Bruce is doing that with Damian, and that’s why it’s familiar to him. But whatever the reason, however it started, Damian starts reporting.
Every night for three weeks, Damian calls him as Dick is getting ready for bed. He always starts out with a greeting — “Hello, Richard,” or “Good evening, Richard,” or even just “Richard” . Then he’ll ask how Dick’s patrol went, if there is anything of importance he needs to report, and when the all-clear is given, Damian will reveal the course of the night in chronological, detail-oriented order.
Dick loves every minute of it.
He’ll listen with his phone pressed between his ear and his shoulder while he does the dishes. He’ll listen on speaker with the phone on the sink as he showers. He’ll hold his phone to his ear with his hand while he changes into his pajamas and crawls into bed, and he’ll turn speaker mode back on and rest his phone down on his mattress beside his pillow.
He’ll listen as Damian tells him everything that happened that night, however long it takes.
Sometimes, Damian falls asleep talking to him. When that happens, Dick will stay on the phone for an extra few minutes, just listening to the kid breathe. A reminder that he’s real, that he’s okay. Then he’ll hang up, leave the phone where it is, and go to sleep.
He’s aware it’s not exactly healthy behavior for either of them. He’s not sure why Damian has started this (though he isn’t complaining), but Dick thinks he may be starting to develop an anxious attachment, either to himself or to Bruce, and is using Dick to cope. He should be an adult here, but Dick has long-since known he has an anxious attachment to the kid.
He’ll do something about it. Eventually.
The tension between Jason and Bruce finally comes to a head like two train cars crashing into each other at full speed.
What started as an easy patrol turned into another near-death experience for Jason. He’s not unfamiliar with that kind of thing, what with Ethiopia and his brief stunt as a drug lord, and he brushed it off as another day in the office. Bruce, however, was not as willing to move past it.
At least, that’s what Damian told Dick when he called him upon arriving back at the Batcave, along with an urgent request to come to the manor.
Normally, Dick lets Bruce and Jason yell and punch each other all they want. But Damian has never asked for Dick to come specifically to break up one of those fights, and there’s a level of concern in his voice that has Dick hopping on his bike and heading right for Gotham as soon as they hang up.
(And, it’s Damian. If he wants Dick there, whatever the reason, Dick will be there.)
Damian must have told Alfred he was coming, because the butler is waiting at the bike ramp at the entrance to the Batcave with a pair of sweatpants, underwear, and a Gotham Knights shirt folded over his arm.
The Batcave is empty except for them, so everyone must be up in the manor. Dick strips unceremoniously, and takes the clothes Alfred offers him with a thankful smile.
“Master Damian informed me you would be arriving,” Alfred tells him, eyeing Dick as he hops on one leg, trying to pull the sweatpants on. “I did not expect you to make such good time.”
Dick gets the sweatpants up and shimmies on the t-shirt. He shrugs, opening his mouth to say that he’s allowed to break speeding laws as Nightwing, but he stops when he sees the piercing look on Alfred’s face. Knowing, almost.
Knowing, obviously. Alfred was here the entire time it was just Dick and Damian. Of course he would know exactly why Dick was speeding.
Dick straightens his shirt by the hem, even though it doesn’t need straightening out. “He asked me, Al,” he says quietly. “How could I say no?”
Alfred’s look eases at the tone of Dick’s voice. “I did not expect you to, Master Dick,” he replies, resigned. “You never did learn how to say no to anyone.”
Dick has a feeling he knows what he means.
“Finally,” Damian’s voice calls from above, echoing through the Cave. Dick and Alfred both turn towards the sound and find him at the top of the stairs on the other side of the Cave, waiting with the door to the elevator open. “I believe Todd is about to pull out the gun he has hidden in his boot.”
That’s alarming. Dick hurries towards the stairs without another word to Alfred, happy to have the conversation interrupted. He hears Alfred following him, at a much slower, yet brisk, pace. The three of them pile into the elevator and ride it up in silence.
Dick wants to ask Damian how things have been (besides the current predicament). He wants to check the kid over for any injuries because, while he promised to always tell Dick when he gets hurt, Dick has a feeling that he and Bruce have not made the same agreement. He wants to ask Damian how school is going, because they haven’t talked in five days.
He doesn’t do any of that, though. It doesn’t feel like it’s his place anymore. So instead, he puts a hand on Damian’s shoulder, so that Damian knows he’s here, and because Dick desperately needs to get his hands on his kid in any way he can, because he’s missed him like hell.
He sees Alfred eyeing Dick’s hand, but neither of them say anything about it.
When the elevator opens, they walk the short hallway to the inside of the clock, then push it open. They let Alfred step out first, then Damian, and Dick closes and locks up the clock behind them. Dick isn’t sure where the others are, but he sure as hell can hear them.
He hears Jason, specifically, which isn’t unusual. He sounds a bit more violent than normal, though, so Dick wastes no time in rushing out of the study. He follows the sound of their voices, down the massive staircase, through a hallway, and down another, smaller staircase, until he lands on the first floor.
“They’re in the sitting room,” Damian tells him, so the three of them head in that direction, with Dick leading the way.
His reflexes kick in faster than his brain can actually comprehend what happens, which is a good thing, because he manages to get Damian and Alfred out of the way as a glass vase comes hurtling towards them. It smashes into a million tiny pieces when it hits the doorway.
Jason wasn’t aiming at them, if the surprised look on his face when he sees them says anything. He pauses, which makes Bruce and Tim both turn towards them. Bruce looks guilty when he sees Dick, like he knows that Dick is here because of the fight, but Tim doesn’t so much as twitch. Dick’s heart twinges, but he pushes it aside.
Sensing that Dick will be staying where he is, shielding Damian from any potential danger, Alfred goes over to Tim, because Jason wouldn’t dare try anything if it meant potentially harming Alfred. They’re also blocking the only other exit, effectively trapping Jason and Bruce in the room.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Jason spits at Dick, then looks down at Damian, who is pressed against Dick’s side from when Dick yanked him out of the way of the oncoming vase. “What, did the demon brat call you? Was the yelling too scary for him?”
Damian bristles at the condescending tone, so Dick puts his hand on his chest and pushes him a step back, just in case. “That was out of line, Jason,” he scolds. “Don’t take your anger out on other people, especially the ones who are worried about you.”
Jason snorts bitterly. “Right, so that just means I can take it out on Bruce.”
Bruce glares at Jason, turning back towards him. “This started because I was worried about you,” he says sternly. “You were reckless in the field and it could have gotten you killed. And you don't see a problem with it.”
“First of all, fuck you,” replies Jason. “I had my vest on under my suit. I was protected and I knew that when I made my decision. I’m not an idiot.” He bares his teeth. “Second of all, fuck you.”
Dick is already getting a headache from the volume level of their voices. “You know just as well as any of us that kevlar and a helmet are never surefire,” he reminds Jason. “It could have been an exploding bullet. It could have had poison. Neither of those shots would have been fired with the intent to kill you with the bullet.”
“The fact that you didn’t think of that is why I said you were being reckless,” Bruce adds.
“You weren’t even there, Dickface,” Jason spits. “You don’t get to say shit.”
Tim mumbles something under his breath on the other side of the room. Dick has no idea what he said, but he knows whatever it was, it would have hurt like hell to hear.
“Then I will,” Bruce says, diverting the conversation back to the two of them. “You made a stupid, reckless decision—”
“I was fine—”
“I didn’t know you had a vest on,” snaps Bruce, tone biting. “When I saw you run at a gunman that was shooting at you, I thought you were getting holes blown in you. I thought I was about to watch you be murdered, Jason.”
Jason rolls his eyes and crosses his arms angrily. “Wouldn’t be the first time,” he fires. Dick inhales sharply, and he sees Tim straighten up in shock. “Don’t act like you care about me, Bruce.”
Ire rages over Bruce’s face, but Dick can see the hurt buried deep beneath it all. Jason seems furiously proud at the reaction, until Bruce opens his mouth.
“Enough with this I didn’t care bullshit,” their father seethes. Dick blinks at him a few times, taken aback. His usual monotone voice is littered with infliction. With emotion. “I cared. I went after you to Ethiopia! I brought your body home in a coffin! I almost killed the Joker.”
Dick winces before Jason can even react. Bruce knows how sensitive a subject that is. And, as expected, Jason’s face clouds over with rage.
“Almost, Bruce, almost,” Jason hisses. “You couldn’t even kill the bastard that killed me. Gee, silly me, you sure do care.”
Bruce tugs at his hair in frustration. He runs a hand over his face, then looks at Jason with a dangerous look in his eyes. “Clark,” he says, unnervingly steady, “is the only reason the Joker isn’t dead right now, Jason.”
Dick’s jaw falls open as the room comes to a standstill. He doesn’t even think Tim or Alfred knew about that. Dick was the only one, and he only found out because Clark asked him to keep an eye on Bruce.
Jason stands in the middle of the room, eyes wide, mouth pressed in a thin line. He looks downright enraged, but Dick has seen that precise look before. The anger is a mask to cover the panic and confusion that he’s sure is washing through Jason right now. That information was not something Jason was prepared for.
“What are you talking about?” he asks, very, very slowly. Bruce looks away, almost as if he’s ashamed of what he’s about to say.
“I went after the Joker, after you died,” he explains gravely. “I waited for him. I had him cornered. I was going to kill him, and I knew it.” Bruce looks sick. “I wanted it.”
He takes a deep, shaky breath, like the memory is making him nauseous. “But then Superman found me,” he reveals. “He stopped me. The Joker had gotten diplomatic immunity inside the UN Office from Iran, and if I’d killed him, it would have created a diplomatic incident.”
Jason looks like his whole life is scrambling behind his eyes like eggs against a whisk. The room is sickeningly quiet, watching as Jason processes what he’s being told. He shakes his head, like it’s going to shake off what Bruce just said and get rid of it.
“But— you still didn’t go through with it,” he responds, still clinging to the idea he has believed for so long. “Even though you were going to, you didn’t. You let Clark talk you out of it—”
“Oh for God’s sake, Jason, what do I have to do to make you understand?” Bruce exclaims, voice strained. “I almost gave up my entire moral system for you. I made you a memorial.”
“A memorial?” Jason scoffs in disbelief, voice raising. “A memorial that says nothing except ‘a good soldier.’ As if that was all I was to you!”
“I didn’t know what else to put,” growls Bruce.
“How about my name?” Jason remarks. “So I’m remembered as Jason Todd, not just as Robin? Or even ‘he will be missed’? You know, like a normal memorial stone?”
“I didn’t need a stone to tell me that I missed you,” Bruce argues.
“Yeah?” Jason hisses. “Well how about ‘a good son,’ then?”
“How could I call you my son?” Bruce says, overwrought. Jason scoffs again, his body language saying there it is, like he’s caught Bruce red-handed. But Bruce isn’t done.
“How could I stare at your torn-up, bloody suit knowing that your dead body had been in it?” he laments. “How could I say you were my son when I was the reason I had to make a memorial for you in the first place?”
That stops Jason short, judging by the look on his face. Whatever he was about to say gets stuck in his mouth as he stares at Bruce.
It stops Dick short, too, if he’s being honest. In the immediate aftermath, he saw the way Bruce kept his composure all day, and heard him when he went to bed and broke apart, sobbing into the night. He saw how protective Bruce got over him, and how, once Dick went back to Blüdhaven, he was always calling to check up on Dick and would drop by in secret when Nightwing was patrolling the streets.
He noticed how, when Tim became Robin, Batman didn’t let them split up for months. Dick would find dozens of trackers in his apartment, phone, motorcycle, police uniform, and other places, all ones that he recognized as BatTrackers.
(He never said anything to Bruce about them, and waited to remove them all until Tim became Robin.)
Jason doesn’t know about any of that, and even if he did, he still would never understand how distraught Bruce was about his death — because to the rest of the world, nobody knew about Jason, and Bruce made sure to keep it that way. Of course, when Jason came back, he was part of the rest of the world. It looked pretty bad to him. Dick can't blame him. Bruce didn't do a good job of expressing anything to Jason once he'd returned.
Truth’s out now, he supposes. It’s about time.
“If I called you my son, that meant I was your father,” Bruce says, voice breaking with pain. It’s the most emotion Dick has heard in his voice since the day Jason actually died. “It meant I got my son killed.”
Dick sees Damian shift in his peripherals. It looks like he’s about to say something, so without a second thought, Dick slaps a hand over Damian’s mouth and draws him in, pinning his body to Dick’s. Damian harrumphs behind his hand, but obediently does not fight against him.
“I couldn’t…” heaves Bruce, hoarse. “I couldn’t do it.” He can’t look away from Jason. “A Good Soldier reminded me that you trusted me to guide you, and I failed, and that I couldn’t let that happen to anyone else in my care.”
His eyes are filled with sadness so earnest that it makes Dick have to look away. Bruce breathes out, and he makes a hurt noise when he does. “But I couldn’t sit in the Cave every day for the rest of my life and see ‘a good son’ there instead,” he continues, “because it would always be a reminder that I killed my son.”
The room is silently, suffocatingly still. The only sound is Bruce’s stutters for air as he miserably fails to keep his composure. Tim and Alfred are still standing off to the side, wide-eyed and gobsmacked at the turn of events.
“So…” starts Jason, cautious. “So you really did miss me when I was dead?”
Bruce blinks at Jason, bewildered. “Did I miss…?” he repeats in disbelief, exhaling harshly. “I’ve told you I missed you, Jason.”
“No,” Jason argues, pointing a finger at him. “No, you said that you regretted what happened and that you were sorry. That it was good to have me back. You’ve never said you missed me.”
“I have absolutely said I missed you,” snaps Bruce. “I said it on your first dinner back at the manor. I told you I’d missed you and you were furious I’d said it. You stormed out, and I refused to say it again because I wanted to keep the peace in any way I could.”
“We’d just gotten civil!” echoes Jason. “Of course I didn’t want to hear it! But it’s been years, Bruce. Hearing it again would have been nice.”
“I missed you!” Bruce shouts, and the ceiling light rattles. “Is that all it would have taken to get you to come home? I would have said it a thousand times, and I would have meant every one of them.”
He’s red in the face like he’s about to combust. Jason's eyes are suspiciously red as well , something Dick doesn’t ever recall seeing. In the chandelier light, he can see the glisten of a single tear track stretched down the length of Jason's left cheek.
Bruce takes one long step forward, but Jason doesn’t retreat. Bruce clasps both of his hands on each of Jason’s upper arms and squeezes them tight. They stare at each other in silence for a long stretch of time.
“I missed you,” Bruce tells him seriously. Truthfully. Assiduously.
Jason lets out a breath that sounds like the air has been sucked out of his lungs. His jaw visibly clenches, but instead of snapping something mean, he carefully reaches up and holds onto both of Bruce’s elbows.
“...I missed you too, old man,” he replies. His voice is like gravel. Neither of them says anything else, but neither of them lets the other one go.
The longer Dick watches them — father and son clutching at each other — the stronger the ache grows in his chest. He pulls Damian just the slightest bit closer, and Damian lets him.
Jason spends the night, that night.
Tim does not. He leaves a little while after Bruce confirms that he will be fine, and that the danger of Jason shooting him is gone. Dick stays, because he’s one brother closer to having his family back, and because he wants to stay with Damian.
Dick suggests to Tim that he stay, too, and that maybe they could talk. Tim declines. Dick suggests that they don’t have to talk at all, that Tim can ignore him all he wants, instead. Tim declines again, then leaves through the front door. A few minutes later, he hears Tim’s car peel out of the driveway, dashing Dick’s hopes that Tim might change his mind.
He doesn’t let it get to him, though. He’s got plenty of time to work things out with Tim. Right now, he’s got a family movie night to attend and a twelve year old to bully into snuggling with him.
Jason doesn’t sit beside Bruce, surprising absolutely no one. When Bruce sits on the couch, leaving an obvious open space for Jason to take, Jason sits in the recliner instead. The recliner is, however, a few feet beside the couch and the spot where Bruce is sitting, so Dick counts it as something. Bruce does too, apparently, because he smiles at Jason.
He smiles at Jason.
Hope blooms deep in Dick’s chest. He claims the open spot beside Bruce for himself, much to Bruce’s pleasure when he smiles at Dick (and God, did Dick miss that smile when he was gone) and ruffles his hair.
There’s a small gap between the arm of the couch and Bruce’s body, plenty of space for Damian to sit if he wants, as well as the open armchair diagonal to the couch. Instead, he takes the other side of Dick and presses up against his side — subtle, but firm enough that Dick knows that Damian is leaning into him.
Dick swings an arm around Damian without a second thought. When Alfred sits in the open arm chair, the only space left is the cushion beside Damian, where Tim should be.
Where Tim will be. Because Dick is going to get him back. If he has to give up Nightwing and Blüdhaven and grovel for the rest of his life, he will. He’ll do anything to fix this and fill that spot again.
Jason leaves in the morning, and so does Dick, who has to report back to work. But Jason returns two nights later for dinner and stays again, according to Damian, who has continued to call him almost every night and keep him updated on everything.
That’s good. It’s one massive step closer to the family being back together.
Sometimes, Dick feels bitter jealousy behind his teeth when he hears how Jason has shouldered his way into family dinners at the manor. But he has to remind himself every time that Dick can also shoulder his way into dinners whenever he wants. There’s not always a guarantee that Bruce will join them, the way that there is every time Jason drops by, but Dick knows he’s always welcome in the manor.
It’s just that, every time he walks into the manor, there’s a lingering echo of what used to be that seeps into Dick’s bones, cold and achy.
It’s another night at the BPD. Dick and some of his colleagues are signing out for the night, finishing up their reports for the day and all, for some reason, lingering around in Dick’s office. It’s not like he’s good friends with any of them — most of them, Dick only knows their last names.
But Dick had bought himself a donut this afternoon on his lunch, and if he hadn’t bought an entire twelve pack for the team to share, his would have been snatched in the first few minutes, and everyone would be cranky that they didn’t get a donut of their own. So now they’ve all congregated in Dick’s office while waiting on the night shift squad to arrive while eating Dick’s donuts and talking amongst themselves as Dick tries his hardest to finish his last report.
“How come you guys never buy your own donuts?” Dick asks them, tired, because they always flock to Dick like starved animals when he brings in donuts, but he never sees them with their own.
Detective Evans, Dick’s boss, pats his large gut with a low chuckle. “The ole lady told me to lay off the sweets,” he replies. “Can’t have her seeing the charge on the debit card and knowing what I’m up to.”
“Cash?” Officer Mathias suggests. Her lower face is covered in a dusting of powdered sugar.
Detective Evans scoffs. “No one uses cash anymore, Mathis.”
“Mathias.”
“Whatever.”
Dick rolls his eyes and continues typing. “And what’s everyone else’s excuse?”
Officer Alisha snorts. She’s sitting on the edge of Dick’s desk, swinging one leg back and forth. She’s one of the only officers in the department that Dick trusts. “With our salary? You wouldn’t catch me dropping thirteen dollars on a dozen donuts,” she argues. Which — point.
“Can’t have any donuts around my kids,” Officer Rodriguez answers. “If they find out I had one and didn’t bring any for them, I won’t stop hearing about it for weeks.” He sighs mournfully as he looks at his half-eaten chocolate-iced donut. “Sometimes I just want to buy one donut. Just one.”
Officer Jives makes a gruff sound as he stuffs his face with the last of his jelly donut. “Damn straight.” Dick scrunches his nose up at his partner when white powder flies everywhere from his mouth.
Detective Evans nods, wiping his hands on a napkin. “Very true,” he agrees. “Saves me from having to psychoanalyze my kids to determine which flavors they’d want, and keeps me from hearing a meltdown if I choose wrong.”
Officer Alisha sucks her teeth at him, slightly annoyed. “Or just learn your kids’ favorite flavors?”
Dick suppresses a laugh. Damian is easy in regards to likes and dislikes. He likes what he likes and hates what he hates. He’s straightforward and his favorite things don’t change much — and when they do, he tells Dick almost immediately. But Damian is older. Younger kids, like those of Officer Rodriguez and the grandkids of Detective Evans, are much more finicky.
Jives glowers at Alisha. “You obviously don’t have children,” he comments snidely. “Their best friend tells them blue is better than yellow, and suddenly their favorite color is blue.”
Rodriguez raises his index finger and shakes it around in the air. “For six whole years, Sofia’s favorite princess was Jasmine. One random day in September, she decided Tiana’s dress was prettier and became her new favorite.” He cracks a smile. “Didn’t tell any of us. We got her a Jasmine costume for Halloween and she bawled her eyes out.”
Alisha shakes her head. “Sounds like I’m not missing out on much,” she remarks. She’s mentioned to Dick before that she doesn’t want kids.
Evans nods with his whole body, leaning forward and rocking on his feet. “Parenting ain’t for everyone, that’s for sure,” he says. He shoves his hands in his pockets and looks over at Dick. “What about you, Grayson? Got yourself any kids?”
Dick says, “No,” before the question has even fully processed.
Jives snorts like a bull. “Course he doesn’t. He’s not married.”
“Hey,” Alisha snaps, sliding off Dick’s desk and standing on her feet. She was born out of wedlock. Dick remembers her telling him that, too. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
A shouting match breaks out between the people in the room — Alisha and Jives at each other, Evans trying to break it up, and Rodriguez trying to sneak out of the office. Dick doesn’t hear any of it. He’s stuck in place, staring blankly at the screen, reeling at how easily, automatically, he said the word no.
One of the most important devices that the Bats use when crime fighting is their grappling hooks.
Inside each hook is a reel inside that holds the rope. It loosens when the grapple is shot, and tightens when they press a button to keep the rope in place, usually if they’re hovering over something that they shouldn’t be touching, like Penguin’s acid.
Dick’s reel broke midway through swinging from building to building on patrol. It’s an easy fix, one that he is more than familiar with after almost two decades of being a vigilante. But he thinks, maybe, it would be a good way to talk to Tim. His little brother loves gadgetry and tech, and he would enjoy getting his hands in a grappling hook.
He offers, when he sees Tim in the Batcave the next day. Tim refuses.
Dick doesn’t fix the grappling hook and goes on patrol without it. The next day, he goes back to the manor to ask Tim again.
Tim is not there. Damian is, though. He’s teaching Bruce how to play chess, even though Bruce has been playing chess since he was seven years old. Dick watches in the hallway shadows for fifteen minutes. Damian calls Bruce “Father” a total of eleven times. Bruce calls him “son” nine times.
Dick leaves without a word. When he gets home, he takes a nap, and stays in his room until it’s time for patrol. The grappling hook remains untouched in his belt for the duration of his patrol of Blüdhaven.
When he gets home, he doesn’t go to Gotham like he has been, but instead returns to his empty apartment. He forgets all about the grappling hook by the time he’s shed his suit and fallen into bed.
It’s this short sequence of events that causes Dick to realize he’s let Damian slip through the cracks a bit these last few months, trying to convince himself to keep his distance. He is not going to let Damian walk out of his life the way he let Tim.
He determines this just a hair too late.
He goes back to the manor the next afternoon with the intention of whisking Damian off for ice cream under the guise of scouting out a location for a stake-out. But when he gets there, Alfred greets him at the door with, “Ah, Master Dick, what a coincidence. I was just about to call you.”
He loves Alfred. He does. But Alfred never calls unless he’s up to something, or unless something is wrong. Dick follows him inside and down the foyer, a pit of nerves growing in his gut. “Oh?” he questions. “About what?”
“Master Bruce would like to speak with you,” Alfred replies. When Dick asks what for, Alfred only says, “If you go downstairs, you will find out.”
Downstairs means the Cave. It makes Dick more relaxed. If it’s job stuff, there shouldn’t be much he needs to worry about.
So Dick thanks him and heads into the study. He slips through the clock then takes the elevator down, and then the stairs. He’s surprised, though, when he hears voices echoing through the Cave — voices that do not belong to Bruce.
He sees his father and brothers standing around the Batcomputer when he gets to the ground level. They all cease their conversations and turn to him when they hear him coming.
“Hey,” Dick greets, carefully eyeing Tim and Jason nearby, but keeping most of his attention on Bruce. “Alfred said you wanted to see me?”
Alfred, who has followed him down, comes around Dick’s side and stands beside him. Not by Bruce, or by Jason, like he usually does to keep them docile and behaved. If he’s standing by Dick, that either means he’s there for support, or there to keep Dick in line.
Uh oh.
Damian is not present, which is even more concerning, because since Bruce’s return he’s hardly kept the kid out of his sight. That means this is a conversation only for adults, possibly pertaining to Damian himself.
Uh oh.
It’s obvious that Bruce is going to start, but he doesn’t immediately. He just stands there, his face stony but blank, and stares at Dick. Dick can feel the back of his neck start to heat up, the way it used to do when he was a kid and got in trouble.
“You worked a Scarecrow case a year ago,” he says, eventually. “The resurfacing of the original A1-5 strain of his fear toxin.” It’s a fact, not an accusation. Dick nods in confirmation. “It eventually led to a fight in a warehouse, where Scarecrow and his men were later taken into custody.”
Again, Dick nods. He tries not to shift on his feet or break eye contact, but it’s hard. He remembers that night, when Damian almost died. When he did die, technically. He hates thinking about it, and he’s avoided bringing it up until now, except in his nightmares.
“One of his men got off on a seven month sentence,” Bruce explains. “He’s out on the streets again.” He stops, then adds, “Would you like to know how I know?”
Triple uh oh. That goon was talking to the wrong Batman. Whatever he said, Bruce had absolutely no idea what it was about. Dick made Alfred promise not to tell anyone about the incident once Bruce came back, specifically because of the Minor Incident that occurred during it.
“He was stopping a mugging when I arrived. He told me he’d begun to turn his life around, after seeing me and Robin,” Bruce says. “But it hadn’t been me and Robin; it had been you and Robin.”
Dick has no idea why this is important. Obviously that fight occurred when Dick was Batman, but Bruce has known that Dick took over as Batman while he was gone. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
“You broke his cover,” Bruce says. His voice is thick.
(“Robin,” Dick says on a sob, as Damian’s ribs crack beneath his hands. “Damian!”)
A small bubble of anger pops behind Dick’s ribs and floods through his chest. Damian was dying. He wasn’t concerned with keeping Damian’s cover when all that mattered was keeping him alive. “It was a tense situation,” he replies, carefully wording what he says. He has no idea how much Bruce knows. “But there are plenty of kids named Damian in Gotham. I’m sure the guy doesn’t know—”
“I’m not talking about his name,” interrupts Bruce, and Dick’s mouth clacks shut.
No. Shit. It can’t be.
“I don’t understand,” says Dick.
Bruce’s face has not changed once during this conversation, and it remains the exact same as he remarks, “He told me it was moving to see how much I cared about my son. It reminded him that Batman was human, and that his actions have consequences.”
Dick can feel his face going white at his words. He hears Jason murmur something off to the side. Tim has not moved, once, but his eyes are huge, like he had no idea about any of this.
“At first, I thought it was because you were trying to keep up the act that you were me,” continues Bruce, “in which case, Damian would be my son.” His jaw ticks, and it sends a bolt of fear through Dick’s nervous system. “But then he told me about the CPR.”
Dick’s heart kicks into a gallop. Fuck, fuck, fuck. This guy must have woken up while Dick was occupied with Damian. Of course he didn’t notice, too busy rushing Damian out of the warehouse and to the Cave. Somehow he saw everything.
Everything, including the Minor Incident, which is really not very minor at all.
“He heard what Damian called you,” Bruce tells him. “What you called yourself.”
(“B–Baba,” Damian wheezes.
“Shh, Baba’s here,” Dick sniffles, pressing his palm to Damian’s cheek to let him know he’s there. “Don’t try to move, habibi. Just stay with me.”)
Bruce knows. He knows.
Dick can see how Bruce registers the thinly-veiled panic that Dick is most definitely displaying. He can see it all click together in Bruce’s mind. That’s what this whole thing is about, Bruce is thinking, surely. Two fathers fighting over their son.
Bruce makes awkward eye contact with Alfred, then back at Dick. “I think maybe we should talk abou—”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Dick cuts him off, voice sharp, but strained. “I think everything has been perfectly clear over the last few months.” Stay steady, Dick, and you can make it out with your family still intact.
Bruce frowns. “Jason told me what you talked about at your apartment a few months ago.”
Dick shoots Jason a betrayed look. Jason shrugs, entirely unsympathetic. Rat fucking bastard.
“You’re Damian’s father, Bruce,” says Dick. It shreds his heart to say it. “It was a heat of the moment thing. He was scared and wanted his dad. You weren’t there, and I was. That’s all.”
(“Goodnight, Damian,” Dick says three months later.
“Goodnight, Baba,” replies Damian.)
Bruce’s hands clench into fists, then release. It's a method he uses to keep himself calm. “Dick—”
“I’m leaving,” Dick says abruptly. He spins around and stalks towards the stairs. “We don’t ever need to talk about this again.”
And that’s when Tim calls out, “You can’t keep running from your problems.”
Dick’s shoes make a skidding noise across the floor as he comes to a full stop. Carefully, he turns back around, eyes narrowed in Tim’s direction. Tim looks annoyed. Dick is going to rip his head off.
“You don’t have any right to tell me to stop running from my problems,” says Dick in a low, warning tone, “when that is all you have been doing.”
Tim crosses his arms. “We came to a mutual agreement to suck it up when we’re around each other,” he answers back. “This is bigger than that, Dick. This is Damian’s childhood and the parental figures that are involved in it.”
“You think I don’t fucking know that?” Dick snaps, which takes everyone by visible surprise. It’s not often that he curses out loud, even in high-intensity environments. “I wasn’t some glorified babysitter, asshole. I raised Damian for over a year. He was mine—”
He stops when he sees Bruce’s shoulders tense up. His throat clogs with agony and embarrassment, and he takes a step back. Fix it. Fix it.
“Damian was all I had, besides Alfred,” he tells them. “But Damian has his father back now. That’s what he needs. I’m not running from my problems, Tim; they were solved when Bruce came back.”
He spins around and stomps up the stairs, and no one comes after him. When he gets to the top, he looks back at Tim down below and adds, “And for the record, we made no such agreement. So fuck you for that.”
With that, he slams the elevator door shut and pulls the lever to take him up, out of the Cave and away from the people he thinks are his family.
(He thinks he hears Damian call for him as he hurries through the manor and out the doors, but he doesn’t stop to look back. After all, why would Damian need him when he has his father?)
Dick locks himself in his apartment for the rest of the night, and doesn’t go out on patrol. He curls up in his bed, clutching the stolen comforter in his arms as he cries.
He doesn’t know what to do. It seems like everyone has fallen back into place with Bruce’s return, except for Dick. Tim is back as Bruce’s right hand, Batman has a Robin again, Damian has his father and a real mentor teaching him, and even Jason is assimilating himself back into the family and the team.
Dick, though, is drifting. He can’t seem to find a place to fit. He’s not Bruce’s Robin anymore, and he’s not Bruce’s second in command. Tim has Jason for any older brother needs; Damian has Bruce for any fatherly needs, and Jason doesn’t care about having an older brother. Dick can’t even keep his own city safe. He could quit tomorrow and it wouldn’t do a damn thing to the city.
No city, no family, no identity. How did this happen?
He keeps the curtains closed and the lights off all through the night and into the morning. He skips breakfast, too nauseous to keep anything down so early, and eats three bowls of stale cereal for lunch.
Every time he goes to the kitchen, he feels even worse, because he sees the drawing Damian made him for his birthday hanging up on the fridge, and it reminds him of what he’s lost. What he’s losing.
He makes himself curry for dinner. It’s so spicy that it makes him tear up, and that just causes him to put his face in his hands and start crying again.
He’s dumping the curry in the trash can, bowl and all, when he hears his living room window slide open. Dick doesn’t even turn around to look at who it is. If it’s a criminal, Dick doesn’t have the strength to fight back. If it’s a family member…
Who is he kidding. Of course it’s not a family member.
He turns around wearily, thinking maybe it’s Ivy dropping in again, and is surprised to see Jason standing there where his living room meets the kitchen. So, apparently it is a family member. Dick mentally scratches buy a lottery ticket onto his to-do list.
“What do you want?” he asks, sniffling.
Jason’s face is stoic and blank. “You look like shit.”
It’s very reminiscent of the last time Jason was in his apartment. When Dick spilled his deepest, darkest secrets to him, and Jason went and told everyone. Fuck, fuck.
“What do you want?” snaps Dick.
Jason raises his eyebrows, green eyes shrinking just a bit as his pupils get wider. “Easy, Goldie,” he says. “I just wanted to check on you.”
Dick blinks repeatedly, partially because he can’t believe what he’s hearing, but also because his eyes burn from crying and he’s trying to ease them.
“I don’t even know where to start with that,” he tells the other man. “The fact that you’ve only been concerned once before to check on me, or the fact that you told Bruce everything I told you in confidence from that same time.”
Jason winces. “I did it for your own good,” he defends. “You weren’t doing so hot, and you deserve to be happy.”
Dick does not deserve to be happy. After everything he did, that’s the last thing he deserves. And Jason should know that. “Well that sucks for you,” he says bluntly, “because I’m the farthest thing from happy right now.”
He turns his back to Jason so he can wash his spoon in the sink. It’s the only spoon he has now. He doesn’t know where the others went, but they’ve been missing for a while. He thinks he may have thrown them out by accident.
“That’s why I’m here,” explains Jason. “I don’t think Bruce got his message across very well. If you’d go back and talk to him—”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Dick strains. He’s begging. Begging for Jason to drop this. Begging for this to stop. Begging for him to be able to hold what semblance he has left of his family, of his life, together.
“Do you want a drink?” he asks, his voice cracking as he grabs the sponge and wipes down the spoon. “I don’t have beer, but I have cranberry juice—”
“I don’t want a drink, Dick,” says Jason. “I want you to go talk to Bruce.”
“There’s nothing to talk about!” Dick screams, slamming his fists, the spoon, and the sponge down hard into the sink. The bones in his hand ache upon impact, and the sink warbles from the pressure. He spins around with the water still running.
“I’m not Damian’s father. Bruce is,” he snaps. “So if everyone could stop talking about it, then everything could go back to normal. I don’t know how else to keep telling you all, because— I know. He’s not mine, I know.”
Jason stares at Dick with wide eyes. “Jesus. You’ve got it so twisted in your head— did you ever see that therapist?” he asks, which only enrages Dick more. “You’re so desperate to keep the peace that you’re neglecting your own.”
Dick thinks he’s going to pass out from rage. Who does Jason think he is, telling Dick he needs therapy? If anyone needs therapy, it’s Jason. It’s everyone in this family, not Dick. Not just Dick.
“Get out,” says Dick.
Jason blinks, taken aback. “What?”
“Get out,” Dick repeats. “I’m done— I’m done talking about this. I’m done thinking about this. I’m done. I’m done. Get out.”
Jason stays put, continuing to watch Dick in shock and concern. “Maybe I should call Bruce.”
Dick stalks forward and shoves Jason back, hard. The man built like a brick wall actually stumbles back a couple of steps. “Get out!” Dick yells, banging his fists against Jason’s chest. “Get out! Get out!”
Jason roots himself firmly in place, letting Dick get his anger out. Dick, despite his fury, is too weak from all the stress to actually do much harm. But he keeps yelling, keeps pushing and hitting as tears and snot stream down his face. Jason takes it all with pursed lips and an occasional grunt.
Dick finally runs out of steam. His legs give out, and he collapses against Jason, who catches him easily and holds him up. Dick wails into Jason’s chest, choking on tears as he clings onto Jason’s soft cotton shirt. He’s not wearing his leather jacket. It’s weird.
“He’s not mine,” Dick sobs. His head is bursting with pain. “He’s Bruce’s. He’s Bruce’s.”
Jason keeps a tight grip on him, sighing softly into Dick’s greasy hair. “Why can’t he be yours and Bruce’s?” he asks quietly.
It just makes Dick cry even more. “He’s—He’s not mine,” he hiccups. “He was never m-mine.”
Jason makes a quiet mourning sound. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Dickie, but that kid has always been yours.”
Dick shakes his head, but Jason clamps a hand on the back of his head to keep him still. “Stop it. It’s time for you to listen, you stubborn shit,” he orders, but he doesn’t say it meanly. “You got me? Listen.”
Dick sniffles and tries to right himself on shaky legs, but he wobbles when he does so. Jason keeps a firm grasp on his arms to keep him from falling, then carefully leads them to the couch, where Dick can sit down. Still, Jason does not let go.
“I can’t imagine what you went through when Bruce was gone,” his brother starts. “I know I didn’t make things any easier, and I’m sorry for that. But I could tell right from the start that something was definitely weird between you and the kid, because it didn’t seem weird at all.”
Dick opens his mouth, and Jason promptly slaps a hand right over it. He pulls it back after a few seconds, knowing Dick’s nose is too congested for him to breathe, but Dick, for once, keeps silent.
“That kid was a selfish, malicious asshole when he came to Gotham,” Jason says. “And somehow in four months of you raising him, he was a completely different person.”
He wasn’t though, not really. He was the same spiteful, hot-headed brat he’s always been. Dick just got him to see that there were certain people those attitudes were to be directed at. All Dick did was teach him about empathy. To this day, Damian will still murder on command. Dick finds it endearing.
“Even after Bruce came back, it was obvious that kid had a connection with you that he just wasn’t making with Bruce,” continues Jason.
Guilt overwhelms Dick like a riptide. Jason, very sharply, whacks Dick on the back of the head. “Stop it,” he scolds. “That doesn’t mean Damian isn’t bonding with Bruce. The kid basically imprinted on you, man. Of course he’s going to trust you more. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t trust Bruce.”
Dick swallows down the words he wants to say at Jason’s warning look. He wipes his eyes with his palms, then swipes the back of his hand under his nose. Damn, he’s a mess.
“I’m not the only one who noticed it. Everyone knows,” Jason reveals. “You know it, too. But your guilt won’t let you admit it.”
Dick closes his eyes, squeezing out a few more burning hot tears that drip down into his lap. “I can’t,” he whispers. “What kind of son am I, to take away Bruce’s kid?”
Jason stares at him for a very long time. “I don’t even know where to begin with that,” he admits. “First of all, Bruce has a bunch of kids already. It’s not like you’d be taking his only chance to be a father.”
“How can you—”
“Second of all,” Jason continues, talking right over him, “like I asked before: who says he can’t be yours and Bruce’s? Bruce is your dad, but so is John Grayson, right? Two dads, one son.”
“John Grayson is dead,” Dick argues. “This isn’t the same thing.”
“Stop,” Jason responds, raising his voice a bit. “I told you to listen. So hear me when I say that Damian can have two fathers. And if you would have let Bruce finish earlier, you would have known that he was okay with that.”
But he can’t be. Nothing has ever worked out for Dick like this. Besides, there’s one other glaring problem. “But Damian doesn’t want—”
“Have you asked him?” questions Jason, which makes Dick’s mouth clack shut. “Because, since you’re blind enough that you can’t tell that kid worships the ground you walk on, there’s not a question that Damian would very strongly disagree with you.”
Dick’s head is spinning. Is it… possible? If Jason is picking these things up, and he’s hardly at the manor— but maybe he’s misinterpreting, because he doesn’t have all the context that Dick does. But… maybe Dick has too much context? Could that be a problem?
“You’re Damian’s dad, Dick,” Jason tells him. “And if you’d let yourself have it for five seconds, you’d see that Damian knows it, too. Not because he doesn’t know Bruce enough, or because you stole him, but because he chose you. Because he wants you.”
Jason takes a deep, measured breath. “The same way I want Bruce.”
Dick looks at his brother with wide eyes. Does that mean…? Another piece of his family, clicking into place. A long damaged bond, finally beginning to mend.
Dick doesn’t know what to do. He’s spent so long telling himself that he couldn’t have this, that he was being selfish and cruel. But maybe he was wrong. Was he wrong? He never let himself hope. Hope scares him nowadays. Every little dash of hope he’s ever had crushes him into bits every single time. He can’t be wrong again. His heart won’t be able to handle it.
But he’ll risk it, for Damian. He’ll risk everything for Damian.
“Talk to them, okay?” Jason urges. “I know what it’s like to push your family away when the only thing you want to do is be near them.” The hands on Dick’s shoulders clench ever so slightly. “I got lucky that you and Bruce never gave up on me. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.”
Dick inhales and stutters accidentally, but manages to take the next breath steady. “I’d never give up on Damian,” he says. His voice cracks embarrassingly in about four different places.
Jason smiles something sad. “I know.”
They get Dick cleaned up. It mainly consists of Dick sitting in the tub while Jason sprays cold water all over him. It shocks his system, definitely, but isn’t enough to stop his body from feeling like he got hit by a train. He’s shivering by the time Jason pulls him out, pressing three ibuprofen into his hands and a glass of water.
Dick takes them obediently, shakes himself out, then trudges towards the front door where his shoes are. Jason stops him with a hand on his wrist. “Where the hell are you going?”
Dick blinks slowly at him, trying to keep up with the words he’s saying. “To talk to Damian,” he responds.
Jason scratches his jaw like Dick has gone insane. “Okay, I’m definitely calling a therapist. We need to work on... whatever the hell this is,” he mutters, carefully dragging Dick away from the door and towards his bedroom.
“You need to sleep,” Jason tells him. “You’ll feel better and more clear-headed tomorrow. Then you can talk to them.”
Dick sits down on his bed, unsure of what to do from here. No one’s ever told him what to do like this since he was living at the manor when he was Robin.
“Night,” Jason says, closing the door.
“Wait!” Dick blurts, shooting to his feet. “Where are you going?”
There’s concern in Jason’s eyes again. “The spare room,” he answers. “You’re nuts if you think I’m leaving you alone when you’re like this.”
Dick doesn’t know what Jason means by like this, but he’s a little offended. This is his first breakdown in two years. Give him a break. He’s not crazy. “Okay,” he says, sitting back down. He feels better knowing that Jason will be here, safe under Dick’s roof and not out somewhere where he could get himself hurt. “Goodnight.”
Jason shakes his head. “Night,” he repeats, before closing the door again.
Dick lays back on the bed and gets under the blankets. He turns his head to look at Damian’s drawing, still sitting on his bedside table.
Tomorrow, he thinks as his eyelids finally give in from their heaviness. I’ll work this out tomorrow.
Jason was half right. He feels a little better after sleeping for ten hours. But his body still feels like he was hit by a tractor trailer and went tumbling down a mountain. His eyes are still a little sore and puffy, too.
He’s so embarrassed, crying like that in front of Jason. He’s not supposed to do that. He’s the one who’s supposed to stay solid so Jason and their brothers can cry to him, not the other way around.
But he remembers what it was about. What caused it. What Jason said. That little sliver of hope that unrooted in Dick’s chest last night springs to life once again. Maybe Jason was right. Maybe Damian does think of Dick as his father. And maybe Bruce is okay with that.
He shuffles his way down the hall and into the living room, where Jason is up and moving around the connected kitchen. He doesn’t turn around when Dick enters, but they’re Waynes — Jason knows he’s there.
“I made lunch,” Jason tells him, confirming Dick’s theory as he scoops something out of a pan and puts it on a plate. Lunch. He slept through the morning, then.
Jason puts the plate down on the kitchen table, where two other plates and a large plastic bowl are sitting. Dick’s stomach rumbles with both hunger and acid. He’s not sure how much of this he’s going to be able to eat.
“Whole-wheat toast and jelly, scrambled eggs with cheese,” Jason lists, ushering Dick to sit down, “halibut – baked in the oven, a dry salad, water, and a smoothie.” Dick opens his mouth, but Jason interrupts him. “Mangoes, bananas, pineapple, and vanilla yogurt,” he adds, pointing to the smoothie.
Dick was going to ask where Jason got all of this food, because Dick’s fridge has been near barren for a week. But Dick can’t remember the last time someone made him a meal (besides Alfred, of course), and he especially can’t remember Jason ever taking care of him like this. So he refuses to look a gift horse in the mouth and sits down without another word.
“You don’t have to eat it all now,” Jason tells him as Dick pulls the salad and the smoothie closer to him. Bright foods sound the most edible to him right now, compared to the heavier food like fish and eggs. “But you should eat it all by the end of the day.”
Dick is glad Jason took an upset stomach into consideration. He really didn’t want to fight with him just because he could only get a few bites in.
Dick eats the salad one forkful at a time and takes the smoothie sip by sip. They’re refreshing. It makes him feel lighter somehow, countering the way his tears and sorrow had been dragging him down yesterday.
Jason cleans up the kitchen while Dick eats. Neither of them talk, but that’s fine. Dick feels calmed by the sound of someone moving around. Someone else alive in his apartment, using it how it should be used — to be lived in.
“Babs is going to kill you, you know,” Jason tells him after some time. Dick snorts. “There’s no way she’s not going to find out about all of this.”
“You gonna tell her?” Dick asks. He doesn’t say it meanly or bitterly, and Jason doesn’t take it that way.
“No,” he says. “But I wouldn’t need to even if I wanted to. That woman will find out what she wants if she has to hack the Justice League computers herself.”
Ain’t that the truth. Barbara Gordon is a force to be reckoned with. She probably already knows. Dick would bet a lot of money on it — if he had any money, that is.
“Do you remember that time when we were on that mission with the Penguin together a few years ago,” Dick starts, “and she was monitoring us from the Cave, and we were taking too long so she hijacked the security machine guns in the Penguin’s wall and aimed them at all those lackeys?”
Jason chuckles at the memory. “Man, she reamed us a new one when we got back, as if we did anything wrong.” He shakes his head. “No wonder you two are so close. You’re both mother hens.”
“Hey!” Dick laughs, snagging a hand towel hanging from the stove and whacking him with it.
The shrill beeping of a pager cuts through the easy air between them. Jason frowns, pulling his pager — an honest-to-god pager, like it’s 2002 — off of his belt. He reads whatever message is displayed across the small screen, his frown deepening and eyebrows drawing closer together the longer he reads. Something that flickers across his face for a flash before it’s gone, and Dick knows Jason has made a decision about something.
“There’s a shooting on the south side,” Jason tells him, standing up from his chair. “I have to run.”
Dick’s lips pull downwards as Jason tucks his pager into one of the pockets of his cargo pants. “Do you need me?”
Jason gives Dick a very stern, very pointed look. “Absolutely not,” he responds, which kind of hurts, but Dick understands. “You go out there in the state you’re in and you’re gonna get yourself killed. Capice?”
Dick rolls his eyes, but he resigns to sit this one out. Jason can handle himself. Plus, he is still pretty tired. “Alright,” he relents. “But call me if you’re in a pinch.”
In a pinch, Jason mouths in bewilderment. Dick wants to fire back that he literally just said capice like some mobster (the irony of being in New Jersey is not lost on either of them), but he keeps the comment to himself.
But then, Jason points at him. “You,” he orders, “need to promise me that you will talk to Bruce and Damian about the whole father-son thing. Today.”
Dick starts to sigh, but he stops midway when he sees Jason’s eye twitch. He holds up his hands in surrender. “I can’t guarantee they’ll be free today, Jason—”
“Today,” Jason repeats, firmer. Almost like a threat.
“Today I will call them and figure out when they want to meet,” Dick reasons. “This is a sensitive subject and I’m not just going to demand things.” He gnaws a little at his bottom lip. “I’m not the one with the power here.”
Jason stares at him, flat and unimpressed. “You are, actually,” he argues. “You’re actually the one with all the power, but whatever. Call them today and figure this shit out, alright?”
Dick gives him his word, and just like that, Jason is out the window and gone into the afternoon shadows.
Dick procrastinates calling them for the next few hours.
The sun is close to being in that spot in the sky where it glares in everyone’s eyes. For a while, he hid his phone so that he didn’t have to see it and be reminded of what he has to do, but it didn’t really work, because the pressure and knowledge is still hanging heavily over him. Eventually, he sits down at his kitchen table and sets his phone in front of him, flat on the table. And then he stares at it for a little while.
Eventually, Dick bites his tongue and takes the plunge, refusing to think about it anymore. He presses Bruce’s contact. He holds the phone up to his ear, and every ring is emphasized by his pounding heartbeat.
Voicemail.
Dick frowns. After all of that panic—
He doesn’t try again. Bruce almost always has his phone on him, so when he doesn’t answer, it means the phone isn’t on him. He tries the landline for the manor instead. It rings, and rings, and rings. No answer.
Dick tries Damian’s phone. No answer. He tries the landline again. Still nothing. He calls Bruce. No answer. Damian, again — no answer, again.
He tells himself not to panic. They could all be napping before patrol. Bruce could be in a meeting at WE and can’t answer his phone. Maybe Damian left his phone somewhere in the manor.
He waits another hour before calling again. Not one of them picks up.
He tries Jason. Nothing. He tries Tim. Straight to voicemail. He tries the whole thing again another hour after that. Still, nothing.
Dick forces himself to walk to his bedroom rather than the front door. He lays down in his bed, almost mechanically. He shouldn’t go out looking. He’s not in the right mindset. But if he takes a nap, he’d be more rested and alert when he wakes, and then he’d be able to think straight and investigate. That’s kind of what Jason was saying yesterday. Yeah, that’s the plan. He’ll sleep.
He’ll lay down, close his eyes, or maybe stare at the ceiling for a while. He’ll relax — the sheets are cold and the duvet is soft and comfortable. He’ll just lay down and sleep for a while, and he’ll be ready to go. Eyes closed, mind blank, sleep.
Wow it’s hard to fall asleep.
Dread starts to set in. What if Jason was wrong, and that’s why they’re not answering? Maybe Bruce has told Damian everything, and Damian was weirded out. After all, he’s been calling Bruce “Father” ever since his arrival in Gotham years ago. Dick can count on one hand the amount of times Damian has called him “Baba,” and none have been recent.
Trying to sleep was a bad idea.
He considers, briefly, going to the manor. Surely someone is there — but maybe not, since no one answered the landline. Alfred would have, no matter what. So maybe he’s in the Cave, or out running errands.
So, logically, he could go to the manor. He looks towards his door, but he can’t bring himself to move. He’s too afraid of the rejection that awaits behind the manor’s front doors. He can live in delusion and hope for the rest of his life, but he doesn’t know what he would do if Damian were to tell him, You’re not my father. Or, even worse: I am not your son.
But… Jason said—
Dick squeezes his eyes shut and sits up. This is ridiculous. He’s overthinking, that’s what’s happening. He needs to not. He needs to stop thinking. He looks around his room and notices for the first time just how messy it is. Dick is surprised he’s managed to walk without tripping over scattered things on the floor and dying. He should clean it up.
And he will. Because cleaning means he’s not thinking about the whole situation, and if he’s not thinking about it, he can’t make a decision about whether or not to drive over to the manor.
So, he cleans. He picks up dirty clothes off the floor and throws away balls of tissues and trash. There is a hoard of cups and bowls along the walls and across his dressers. When he stacks all the bowls on top of each other to carry them into the kitchen— oh, there’s where all of his spoons went. There’s like, six in here.
He dumps all of the dishes into the sink. But he can’t just leave them there. Jason cleaned up around the kitchen for him; Dick can’t just let all of that hard work be for nothing. So he takes his kitchen sponge and sets to work, washing all of his dishes by hand. He doesn’t put any in the dishwasher, because washing takes longer, and he needs to kill time.
He dries them with a dish cloth, then puts them all away one by one. He thinks Jason would be proud of him.
When he’s done in the kitchen, he looks around. The kitchen is clean; his bedroom is sort-of clean — a lot cleaner than it was, at least. Oh! The living room. That needs tidying up.
He collects all of the dirty laundry thrown around and puts them in the hamper to wash later. He swipes crumbs off of the coffee table and cleans up spills and stains on the glass. He throws away some junk and puts the rest in the junk-drawer in the kitchen. He folds the blanket on the couch, then lays it neatly over the back of the couch. Then he takes the vacuum and vacuums his entire apartment.
He might be spiraling.
Eventually, he collapses onto his couch, drained. He rests his elbow on the arm of the couch and puts his cheek in his palm, letting himself relax for a few minutes. He still has some laundry he can do, and maybe he could clean out his closet…
He opens his eyes and looks out the window. It’s night. Huh. Dick feels guilty, knowing he made his decision the moment he started cleaning his room. But at least his apartment looks better, and he feels better, too. It feels a little bit lighter to be living here.
He lays his head back against the couch cushions and closes his eyes.
His phone goes off. It’s a loud, shrill tone that makes his heart jump in surprise, but his body seems too exhausted to physically flinch. He lets it ring, wincing at the loudness of it. There is blessed silence for about fifteen seconds before it starts ringing again.
Groaning, Dick answers it, not bothering to look at the caller ID. “Hello?”
“Richard?”
Dick sits up, accidentally kicking over the laundry hamper in the process. “Damian?” Finally. “What’s going on? I’ve been trying to get a hold of you and Bruce all day.”
“I apologize. We have been busy. The Scarecrow has escaped from Arkham,” Damian informs astutely. “We are on our way to apprehend him, and we require your assistance.”
Dick frowns, heartstrings tugging at the lie. “Bruce would have called me if he needed my help.”
“They do not believe that you are immune to the A1-5 toxin strain as I said you were,” Damian tells him. “And they believe you want space after the events of last night. Whatever that means.”
Dick’s eyebrows pinch together. “They?”
“Father, Drake, and Todd.”
Dick worries at his bottom lip. He opens up Google and types in the latest news about the Scarecrow. Sure enough, the entire page is filled with news reports about Scarecrow’s escape. This could still be a ploy to get Dick to interact with his family again, but if the Scarecrow really is out there, and Dick is immune to his toxin, it would be selfish to leave them on their own.
He wonders if it has anything to do with why Jason had to leave earlier. If he lied because he thought Dick couldn’t handle it.
He can handle it. If his family is in trouble, he’s not just going to sit around and hope for the best.
“Send me the coordinates,” he orders, throwing the covers off. “I’ll meet you there.”
Dick leaves his apartment as normal, but rides his motorcycle a couple streets down and ducks into an alleyway to change into his Nightwing suit. Then he hops back on and speeds out of Blüdhaven, following the GPS to the coordinates that Damian sent him.
It’s ironic. No matter what he does, no matter how hard he tries to leave it behind, he always ends up back in Gotham.
He ends up at the heart of the north side, right at the border of Crime Alley and the upstate, right at the base of a skyscraper. When he zooms in with his lenses, he can see the silhouettes of Batman and Red Robin in the window of one of the middle floors — the computer says level twenty-three, so Dick can only assume Damian is up there too, and probably Jason.
This is good. That means they’ve probably got a location on the Scarecrow If Dick can circle around from another angle, he can take the Scarecrow out without him being aware of Dick’s presence, or he can distract the Scarecrow so that one of the others can detain him.
He contemplates going some of the way up via the stairwell, but the skyscraper is tall, and if this is anything like the last few times he’s fought the Scarecrow, he needs to preserve his strength. So he makes his way up through the elevators, arms crossed and tapping his foot impatiently to the bland music coming through the overhead speakers.
The elevator dings as he reaches the twenty-third floor. He looks up as the doors open, and comes face to face with a group of men with burlap sacks and sewn-on faces over their heads. They weren’t originally looking at him, but at the tone of the elevator, they’d turned to face him.
“Oh great,” he grumbles, dropping his arms. There goes his element of surprise. Those plans never seem to work. He should have taken a page out of Bruce’s book and busted in through the window.
In a flash, he grabs a pair of wingdings and flings them into the crowd. The group of men lunge at him, but one wingding embeds itself into one of the goons. Dick evades the first fist swinging at his head and catches the arm of another man. He spins the man around in front of him to use as a shield, then plants his foot hard into the guy’s chest and sends him slamming into two other lackeys behind him.
He ducks around another fist, drawing close to the lackey so he can uppercut him right under the chin. The lackey stumbles, and Dick takes the opening to jab his hand against the guy’s neck, and the lackey drops, unconscious.
Something slices across his arm from behind. Dick hisses, then shoots a hand back to grab the arm of the lackey trying to go for his back now. He twists the arm around at the elbow, then spins around to face him. He catches the other hand flying towards his face, then draws him in using the holds on his arms and slams their foreheads together.
The guy yells out, and Dick whirls them both around so that the lackey’s body blocks an incoming hit from behind by another guy. Dick releases one arm to pull out his escrima sticks, and in a flash, he jabs both men right in their chests, and they fall to the floor in pain.
There’s one left. He’s panicking, which leaves him vulnerable and open for Dick to take advantage of. The lackey darts for him, dagger raised high above his head. Dick smacks an escrima stick against the arm with the scythe. When his body starts to jolt from the electricity, Dick takes the other and rams it against his side. The guy jerks around, gasping, and passes out before Dick even moves away.
He spins around and sees two of the previous lackeys struggling to get up, so Dick takes his sticks and slams one against each of their faces. They both hit the floor, finally unconscious.
Dick huffs out a breath, body already feeling the exertion, and leaves them where they are. He heads down the short foyer, then carefully peers down each end of the hallway to figure out where the others are.
He sees the tail-end of a black cape turning a corner, so Dick takes off after it. He tries to be as stealthy as he can with his footsteps, but there’s a dull, tight sense of fear buried behind his ribs knowing that Scarecrow and Damian are under the same roof.
He goes around the corner and just sharp enough reflexes to dodge a pitchfork being stabbed at him. Acting quickly, Dick grabs the long handle and starts fighting the lackey for it. He rams the guy up against the wall, then drags him forward and slams him backwards again. He does this a couple of times before gathering his strength in his biceps to twist the pitchfork to the side, spikes to the floor, and use the momentum to rock the handle smack into the lackey’s face.
He does this again, and again, until the lackey lets go instinctively to hold his nose — which is now most definitely broken. Dick takes the chance and slams his fist into the guy’s temple. He drops, so Dick knees him in the chest, then punches him again until he’s unconscious.
“Nightwing,” he hears. He turns around to find Batman and Red Hood standing on the opposite end of the hallway, surrounded by their own pool of unconscious men.
Despite the awkwardness from the last couple of days, Dick feels some of the tension flow out of him now that he’s not alone. He jogs up to them, saying, “Man, this place is crawling with goons.”
There’s tightness in Bruce’s shoulders, and Jason is uncharacteristically quiet. Dick squints at them, lips tilting down into a frown. “What? What’s wrong?” he asks.
And then he realizes. “Where are Robin and Red Robin?” he asks sharply.
Bruce grits his teeth. “Crane has them,” he answers, like it’s hard for him to say.
Like a flipped-switch, Dick’s chest hollows out with pure panic, and he feels the blood drain out of his face. No, no. Not again. The last time Damian was alone with the Scarecrow, he died. He drags a hand through his hair, breaths starting to shallow out.
Someone grabs Dick by both of his arms, and it’s only the sheer strength in Jason’s body that keeps Dick from flipping him slam onto his face out of instinct alone. Jason stays firmly on his feet, so Dick does the next best thing and grabs him at the elbows, gripping in tight, unmistakable fear.
“Calm down,” Jason tells him. “Robin and Red Robin are fine. We just have to get to them before they’re not fine.”
Right. Dick can still fix this. He can still get to Damian and Tim before something happens to them. He won’t let Damian die this time. He won’t.
“He took them to the building straight across from here. The fifteenth floor,” Bruce tells them. “The men here were a distraction. Whatever he’s planning, it’s being held in that building.”
Dick looks out the window. It’s another skyscraper, thankfully not a warehouse. Maybe there’s hope. He frantically glances around their surroundings, trying to figure out the best course of action. He likes surprise attacks. It gives them an advantage in situations where they’re going in blind, like this one — even if their rate of success is incredibly slim.
This is the upstate. Crime Alley is right next door, but they’re still not in the Alley. Everyone knows the Alley is the Red Hood’s turf, and everyone also knows that Red Hood isn’t on the best terms with Batman (even if Jason and Bruce are in a better spot now).
Scarecrow has to be expecting one of two options: Batman comes in, maybe alone, or maybe with Nightwing’s help; or, Batman stays away from the Alley and the upstate and Red Hood deals with this himself.
Dick tries to think about what Crane is reasoning. He couldn’t possibly think Batman wouldn’t come for Robin, even when the building borders Crime Alley. Batman isn’t afraid of the Red Hood, so while he may respect Hood enough to stay away from the Alley when he can, it’s still not the Alley, and Batman isn’t afraid to cross those boundaries if need be. Crane has to be expecting that.
He won’t be expecting Red Hood and Batman to work together, or work as well as they have been. Because to the world, Red Hood and Batman hate each other. They don’t know anything about Jason and Bruce.
Crane will be expecting Batman. He won’t be expecting the Red Hood.
“Batman can go in from the front entrance of the building, and I can come in from the top,” Dick orders. “Hood, you come in from the bottom after Batman and sneak up on the Scarecrow. You can distract him long enough for us to free Red Robin and Robin, and then the five of us can take him out.”
Bruce’s lips purse together. “I don’t know.”
“Shut up, old man,” Jason snaps. “We’re doing this his way.”
Bruce stares blankly unamused at Jason’s helmet. “We have to think about this rationally,” he argues. “There’s a chance that Scarecrow—”
“I really don’t care,” Dick interrupts, glaring at Bruce through his domino mask. “Two of ours are being held hostage in there with a chemical that could kill them both in minutes. There’s no time for discussion.”
“There’s always time for discussion,” Bruce fires. “We cannot afford to go in recklessly—”
“This isn’t recklessness.”
“Desperation, then.”
“Of course I’m desperate!” Dick huffs. “Robin is stuck in there with the same chemical that nearly killed him a year ago!”
“Which is why we have to do this systematically,” snaps Bruce. “We need to iron out a better plan.”
“There’s no time.”
“There is time if you would stop for two seconds!” Bruce barks.
“Damian might not have two seconds!” Dick yells. “Do whatever plan you want, but I’m going to get him!”
Bruce grabs his arm when he tries to turn away and pulls Dick in firmly, nose to nose. “Nightwing, that’s enough!”
Viscous fury pumps through Dick’s blood and slams through every vein in his body. He yanks his arm free, and then grabs Bruce by the collar of his cape and drags him forward. “You let your son die once,” he shouts, right in his face. “I won’t do the same to mine!”
He shoves Bruce back hard enough that there’s enough distance for Dick to sprint away and Bruce can’t snag him. He leaps off the edge, and he can hear the heavy boots hit the concrete of the roof as Jason follows suit.
Two robins in the air, flying.
Dick grapples to Crane’s building, swinging hard to propel himself as far as he can. Bruce said the fifteenth story, so he aims for the fifteenth window from the ground and hopes for the best, previous plan be damned. Glass shatters around his body as his feet break the window. He slides easily into the level and ends up crash-landing into the mass of lackeys. He manages to take three of them down with him.
There’s a lull for about three seconds as more lackeys swarm into the room, but it’s enough time for Dick to scan the area and— there. Damian and Tim, tied up in chairs and gagged on the other side of the room. They’re bloodied up pretty bad, and Tim already has a black eye forming that Dick can see from far away.
Rage curdles in Dick’s veins, and he swipes his escrima stick at the next lackey that jumps at him. How dare they put their hands on his brother like that, on his son. Dick— Dick will—
Dick will kill them.
The fight is, surprisingly, bloody. These lackeys are obviously better trained than the ones that were used as a distraction. They’re armed with daggers and pitchforks and scythes, and they’re agile in a way that Crane’s previous lackeys hadn’t been.
Jason has been shooting at them with rubber bullets, an upper-hand considering none of the goons have guns. Dick manages to evade most of the swings, but he only manages to take out half of them in his vicinity, and already his right cheek gets cut to hell and his left arm and chest are dripping blood.
Somehow, one of the goons trips Dick out from under him and bodily forces him down to the floor, the curve of his scythe inches away from the vulnerable skin of Dick’s throat. Dick is using both arms to keep the blade off of his skin, but the pain in his left arm is making it hard.
A set of batarangs sail through the air and embed themselves into the shoulders and hands of the lackeys surrounding him. Only a second later, Bruce crashes through the same window Dick did. So much for the element of surprise.
This is the kind of thing that made Dick go solo.
Dick uses the momentary advantage to bend the lackey’s wrist backwards, scythe and all, and kick him with both feet straight to the chest, knocking him clear off of Dick’s body and down onto the floor, hard. He swiftly kicks the man in the head to knock him out. He tries to make a break for Damian and Tim, but he gets blocked by another set of goons that come out of nowhere. Dick grits his teeth and jumps them.
Bruce, though. Bruce gets through.
A batarang to a shoulder of each lackey that crosses through them, twisting each one like a knife and using brute strength to shove each one out of the way with his grip on the batarangs, which dig each one deeper into their bodies.
They stumble over towards Dick and Jason. Dick electrocutes them, then sends them off to Jason, who shoots them. They manage to keep the lackeys at bay while Bruce sprints towards Damian and Tim.
He goes to Damian first. He swiftly cuts the ropes tying his body to the chair. This takes a hot second — Scarecrow used a lot of rope. But Damian is small, even compared to Tim, and he manages to wiggle free once the ropes are loose enough. He collapses onto his hands and knees and crawls away from the chair.
Fury floods through Dick’s body like a hot flash. He slams vicious hits of his escrima sticks into each of the goons — temples, hearts, groins. He gets them all on their knees, just enough so that Dick can leap over their bodies and sprint towards his son.
“W-Wing—” Damian sputters as Dick falls in front of him and gathers him up in his arms. Damian hisses in pain, but melts into Dick’s touch.
Dick doesn’t have the time to say anything, not even to draw the boy back to look at him, because he sees a sudden shadow move across his field of vision, and he screams, “Look out!” at Bruce right as the Scarecrow slams into him.
They go rolling around on the floor. Dick yanks Damian away from the tousle, skidding them both across the floor. Bruce manages to get the Scarecrow off of him, but he makes one fatal mistake — he throws the Scarecrow to the right, where Jason is. He obviously did it to keep him away from Tim. But Jason, however, is occupied with a new set of lackeys and can’t detain him.
It happens in a moment. Bruce makes a move towards Tim, but before he can get more than a step forward, the Scarecrow hurls a pitchfork at him. It lands a foot or so in front of Bruce’s boots, but before it hits the ground, one metal ball shoots out from each of the three prongs and embed themselves into the ends of Bruce’s cape, anchoring him to the marble floor.
Scarecrow uses the momentary distraction to lunge for Damian, but Damian evades him. Thinking quickly, the Scarecrow spins to the side and grabs Tim instead. He pins Tim’s arms to his side with an arm around his chest and drags him away in one quick sweep.
“Red!” Dick yells out, scrambling off the floor and to his feet. He follows them up the stairs without another thought, calling out to Damian behind him, “Stay with Bruce!”
Dick absorbs everything as he runs up five floors — a sweaty handprint smeared on the wall, drops of blood in a line heading up, a single piece of straw on a step. He takes it all in and passes every floor, because he knows where they’re going.
Another wave of adrenaline is starting to pump through him, along with a new sense of urgency, so he makes it to the roof in under a minute. He barges through the door, unlocked and cracked open, like an invitation to join them.
He sees nothing in his immediate vicinity. There are a few crates, a half-broken barrel, and what looks to be a bunch of old cigarette butts lying scattered on the rooftop. He takes a breath.
A throat clears to the right of him. Dick whirls around, escrima sticks bright and electrified. Scarecrow watches him through his burlap sack, Tim pinned against him with one arm, the barrel of his toxin blaster pressed right up against the side of Tim’s face in the other. They’re standing right at the edge of the roof.
Behind the two of them — the navy night sky sprinkled with glittering stars, behind a thin layer of smog, with the dark silhouette of the city of Gotham stretched out in front of him. An entire city, sleeping, none the wiser as to what’s happening. What Dick is about to lose.
He hears the door behind him hit the wall again, and three pairs of feet flood the rooftop behind him.
Tim struggles against Scarecrow’s grip, but he doesn’t have his rebreather on and Scarecrow’s toxin blaster is too close, which means he can’t make any sudden moves. Dick can get close, though. Maybe close enough to get the blaster pointed at him, so that Tim can strike and Dick can take the blow.
“Word through the grapevine is that you’re the birdy who’s immune to my toxin,” heckles the Scarecrow. He tightens his arm around Tim. “Is it genetic?”
That’s a threat, one that has Dick straightening his posture. Very slowly, Dick clicks off his escrima sticks, folds them up, and tucks them away. “Your quarrel is with me, so let him go,” he orders, reaching out towards them. “Now.”
(He should have known better.)
Scarecrow tilts his head, then shrugs. “Intriguing,” he says, then throws Tim off the side of the building.
Dick sprints down the roof and dives off before Bruce has even started yelling.
Tim is plummeting fast. Dick presses his arms to his sides and legs together and nosedives through the air, hurtling towards his brother. Tim’s cape is billowing all over the place. He’s frantically trying to grab it, to extend the wings, but even if he could, it’s not made of the same material as Bruce’s cape, and it won’t do much to help slow him down.
Tim flips around, trying to find a way to slow down. He ends up with his back to the ground, which means he sees Dick racing towards him.
Dick screams, “Robin!” and Tim screams, “Dick!”
Dick reaches out his arms. Tim misses his hands, but Dick is able to grab his cape and pull him into his body, getting an arm around his middle. Tim clings tight around his front, breaths coming fast against the side of his face.
Dick turns midair and pulls out his grappling hook. The rope isn’t long enough to reach the top of the building, so he shoots at the next broken window he sees. The hook catches, but the rope keeps spinning out.
Fuck. He never fixed the reel.
The ground is fast approaching. From above, Bruce is jumping off the side and falling towards them, trying to get to them. But Dick knows that he won’t make it in time. He’s too far away, and the ground is too close.
Tim must be able to tell, because over the air rushing around them, he yells again, “Dick.”
Dick stares up at the sky, where the grappling hook is spiraling them to their deaths, and Bruce’s figure is getting closer, but not close enough. The grapple is slowing them down, but just barely. He’s going to have to crash into one of the floors of the building.
“Don’t look,” Dick tells him.
He tightens the arm holding Tim. Tim presses his face into Dick’s chest and squeezes him harder. Dick lets go of the grapple for a half second, reaching up to get his hand around the rope and curls the other arm around Tim. He grips it as hard as he can, feeling the rope slide and tear at the fabric of his glove.
Dick uses any momentum he can muster up and uses it to swing himself backwards. When he’s worked up enough swing, he turns his body so that his back is facing the glass and slams into the closest window.
Glass splinters through his suit and embeds into his back. He feels something in his wrist pop as the reel pulls taught and yanks out of his hand. His head bounces, and his neck burns from the whiplash, but there’s something that cushions his head slightly so that he only knocks it instead of hitting the ground directly. His head explodes with pain nonetheless.
Tim slams against the front of his body, crushing his intestines and knocking the wind out of him and definitely breaking a lot of his ribs. He slumps against the ground, letting his arm fall away from Tim’s back.
Bruce’s boots hit the floor a second later.
(Of course, all of this happens in the span of about eight seconds, from the fall until the moment Dick’s eyes close. He blacks out to the sound of two other pairs of feet landing, and someone shouting, “Baba! Baba!”)
He thinks he hears someone talking to him through a hazy, white fog. He can’t pinpoint who it is, because the voice changes every time it speaks.
At first, he hears the words, “Just breathe. It’ll all be alright,” and it sounds like his mother. He tries to follow the voice — follow his mom — but it drifts away into the distance, and he loses it somewhere in the fog.
From up above him, someone says, “Nightwing.” It echoes all around him, and the sound travels away, and away, and away.
And then a voice, surrounding him from all corners, says, “Don’t leave us. Please, Dick, don’t leave.” And that… that sounds like Tim.
“C’mon, Dick,” Tim’s voice whispers. “Come on.”
The whispers get quieter.
Someone is holding his hand.
He wakes slowly.
He hears the beeping of a heart monitor first, then notices that, when he tries to move his hands, they’re stiff, like they have tubes and needles in them. Wherever he is must have loaded him up with the good stuff, because nothing hurts. But also, he can’t really move anything to make it hurt, so. Trade-offs.
Slowly, he peels his eyes open. They’re completely crusted over, so it’s uncomfortable as he unseals them. His eyelids are heavy, but he manages to see Bruce sitting in a chair beside him, even through the blurry vision.
“Dick?” Bruce says quietly, leaning forward some. “Can you hear me, chum?
Fuck, his head hurts.
“Hnm,” he moans weakly, eyes fluttering as he strains to look around. What’s going on? Where’s…? “Dame…”
Bruce shushes him softly, pressing one gentle hand on his shoulder to keep him still. Then he says, “Look,” and points to the other side of the tiny hospital room.
There’s maybe three feet of space between the bed and the wall, and crammed into a plastic chair inside it is Damian, fast asleep with his cheek resting on his arm across the arm of the chair. Relief blooms inside of Dick’s chest like a flower when he sees his boy sitting there, not a scratch on him except for a bruise on his cheek, little chest rising and falling with his breaths.
Dick sniffles. “‘S okay?” he asks, glancing to the left side of the room for a flash before looking back at Bruce.
Bruce nods. “Perfectly healthy and all patched up,” he promises. “I can wake him—”
“No,” Dick croaks. “Let ‘m sleep.” With the knowledge that Damian is safe and sound, his fears give way to another thing plaguing his anxiety. “Tim?” He grabs Bruce’s hand with his shaking fingers. “Tim?”
Bruce nods with an assured smile. “Tim is okay,” he promises. He squeezes Dick’s hand hard. “A broken leg, concussion, a pretty rough case of whiplash, and a hairline fracture in his hand from where he cushioned your head when you hit the ground. But he’s okay. You saved his life.”
Dick’s eyes sting painfully at the news. God, he thought they were goners. He was sure they were about to die there together the moment he got his arms around Tim. He just— he needed to get to his little brother. He needed to try. He’d abandoned Tim one too many times; he couldn’t do it again. He couldn't abandon him to die alone.
And to think, they lived.
Bruce doesn’t say anything else for a bit. Dick closes his eyes again for a bit, reveling in the relief that everyone is okay, soaking up the presence of his father and son beside him.
Speaking of…
“Y’can say it,” he whispers, blinking through the heaviness in his eyes. “S’okay.”
Bruce begins to protest, but Dick uses the strength he has to pinch Bruce’s hand. It probably felt more like a tap than a pinch, because Dick is seriously lacking right now, but it seems to convince Bruce anyway.
He lets out a weary sigh. “We never talked about what happened in the time I was gone,” he starts, albeit hesitant. “We should have. And that’s my fault.” He shakes his head, shame written all over his face. “I was so afraid that I would ruin what I’d just gotten back, I failed to realize that I was ruining it by avoiding it.”
“Y’didn’t,” Dick argues quietly. “Was nothin’—”
“It was, Dick,” Bruce argues, firm. “I thought you’d create a brotherly bond the way you did with Jason and Tim, but it didn’t work out that way. And that’s okay.”
When Dick had nightmares about Bruce finding out about the Minor Incident, not once did he think Bruce would say that’s okay. He’s formulated arguments and defenses for these types of conversations, but he didn’t think of anything to say if Bruce was okay with it, because he never thought he would be okay with it.
Not until Jason planted that seed, that maybe he would be.
“And not only were you forced to raise a child,” Bruce says, “but you were grieving while you did. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.”
Dick nods, eyes clenching shut and squeezing out more tears. It had been hard, especially at the start. Bruce had been in his life longer than his birth parents had, and he’d gotten ripped away from him in an instant, and then a murderous feral child had been plopped in his arms immediately after, and he had been forced to take care of him.
“It was foolish and inconsiderate of me to not think of the time you two spent together, and what it meant,” Bruce adds, gripping hard at Dick’s hand. “That’s on me, too.”
Dick sniffles, chest spasming with held-back cries.
“I know what it’s like to have your children be ripped away from you in a blink of an eye,” Bruce reminds him gently. “I would never wish that on anyone. And I’m sorry I let that happen to you.”
“Bruce…” Dick hiccups. Bruce shushes him, then lifts the corner of the bed sheet to wipe the tears off of Dick’s cheeks.
“Damian is my son, and Damian is your son,” he promises, voice filled with sincerity, “and I would never, ever take him away from you.”
A hurt, choked sound rips itself out of Dick’s chest. Bruce bends over and pulls him into his arms. It’s a bit of a stretch, so Bruce slides out of his chair and sits on the edge of the bed instead, readjusting Dick to a more comfortable position.
Dick is too weak to outright sob, but he hiccups and cries as tears stream down his face. He gets lightheaded very quickly, blacklight spots drifting into his vision. He slumps more into Bruce’s embrace, energy too depleted to do much more than shake and sniffle. Bruce just holds him through it all.
“Somewhere, I made you feel like my love for you was fragile,” Bruce tells him quietly. “It’s not.”
Dick makes another sound, weak and tired, but he presses his face harder into Bruce’s chest as his response. They’ve done this wordless dance for a while now; Bruce will know what it means.
Silence settles over the room. Bruce puts at Dick’s hair, and Dick keeps breathing. He listens to the steady beat of Bruce’s heart under his cheek, lulling him into a warm, fuzzy place. Bruce shifts after a while, laying Dick back against the soft pillows. Dick is too tired to do anything to help. He’ll let himself be taken care of, just this once.
“Get some more rest,” Bruce says. Through his squinted eyes, Dick can see a flicker of guilt across his father’s face. “I should have waited to have this conversation. We’ll talk more when you feel better.”
He pulls the blankets up to Dick’s chin, slipping his hands between the mattress, the sheets, and the hard metal of the bed, effectively tucking him in like he would when he was a kid.
“And we will be talking. A lot,” Bruce emphasizes. He caresses Dick’s hair again. “But we’re not going to worry about that now. You just focus on getting better, alright?”
Dick cracks a small, tired smile. “S’that ‘n order?”
Bruce gives him a small, sad smile in return. “No,” he says. “It’s an ask from your old man.”
Dick’s eyes sting with tears once again.
Dick begins waking up more often, and each time he does, he’s lucid for longer. After about a week, he’s able to talk and keep down solid food. Leslie has begun forcing him to stand up for brief stints at a time, to keep his muscles from atrophying. It’s horrible, and Dick wants to cry every time he gets to flop back down onto his bed, but he knows it’s important, so he doesn’t fight her.
And besides, he’s got at least one member of his family with him when he does it, always. Dick thinks it’s easier, when they’re there. It reminds him that he’s not as alone as he thought he was.
By the time he’s been in the Watchtower Medbay for two weeks, Tim finally comes to visit.
He’s been discharged for a few days, but he still has a cast on his leg and a brace around his hand, and he moves carefully to avoid aggravating his concussion. He comes limping into Dick’s room with his crutches one day when Bruce is down in the cafeteria, getting him more jell-o.
Dick is glad he’s no longer attached to the heart monitor, because it would give away the sudden spike in his heart rate.
Tim had visited once before, around the second or third time Dick woke up. He’d been in a wheelchair and medical gown then, much less injured than Dick but still badly hurt nonetheless. He hadn’t said anything and let Bruce do the talking. When Dick had woken up the next time, Tim was gone, and he’s remained away from Dick until now.
“Hey,” Dick greets quietly.
Tim makes his way over to the empty chair beside his bed, then carefully lowers himself down into it, propping his crutches up against the wall.
“Hey,” Tim replies.
There’s an awkward silence that stretches between them. Dick was the one who spoke first and broke the ice, so does that mean Tim needs to start next? Or should Dick start, since he has the most to apologize for? Does Tim even want to hear an apology, or is he just here to see how Dick is doing?
“Thank you for saving my life,” Tim says, which solves Dick’s dilemma and also makes him want to cry. (He’s been doing a lot of that lately. It’s starting to become a problem.)
Dick offers him a rueful smile. “I’m sorry I ever made you feel like I wouldn’t.”
Tim shakes his head, slowly, to avoid jostling his already-bruised brain. “You never made me feel like that,” he tells Dick. “I always knew that you would come for me if I ever needed you. That’s just who you are.”
He looks down at his hands, twiddling in his lap. “I’m sorry that I made you think I wouldn’t let you.”
Dick closes his eyes, bracing himself for the impending conversation. He’s hoping that, with their combined concussions, no one starts raising their voice.
Ha. Figures. The only way the Wayne children can talk civilly is when they’re too concussed to yell at each other.
“It’s my fault, Tim,” Dick says, opening his eyes again. “I should never have taken Robin from you. You were an incredible Robin, and it was yours. Not only that, but Bruce had made you Robin. You earned that title, and I had no right to take it away.”
Tim swallows thickly. “You’re right; you didn’t,” he agrees. “But I understand why you did.”
“It’s not an excuse,” Dick argues gently. “I could have made another persona for Damian. I shouldn’t have let him go out in the first place. He was too young.”
“In hindsight, you were right though,” concedes Tim. “Damian did need Robin. He was born and raised by the League of Assassins. You didn’t know what he was capable of, and you needed a way for him to trust you and connect to the Wayne family. Robin was that way.”
Then, he makes a soft, bitter sound. “I know all about the League, Dick. You might not have done the right thing with me, but you did the right thing with Damian.”
Something putrid and awful clogs Dick’s throat and eyes at the memories of what Tim went through when he was out looking for Bruce. “I never should have let you go alone,” he moans. “You were out there being tortured all by yourself—”
“I’m not mad about any of that,” Tim admits. “Yeah, I wanted you to go with me, and yeah, I was so mad at you for a while; but I was more than capable of doing it on my own. And in the end, I got help anyway.”
“But—”
“It didn’t register to me just how much you had on your plate when I first left on my mission,” Tim continues. “It wasn’t until I got back and saw everything you’d been doing that I understood why you stayed. Especially when you thought Bruce was dead, and the trip would be for nothing.”
“I should have believed you,” Dick counters. “You’re my little brother and my partner. I should have believed what you said.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” Tim disagrees. “I didn’t give you enough proof. That, piled on top of everything you were dealing with already… of course you didn’t think it was worth it to come. Of course you didn’t believe me. You made a calculated decision, just like Bruce taught us to. I don’t fault you for that.”
He sighs, then runs a tired hand over his face. It makes Dick’s whole body ache, just looking at him. He did this to his brother. He caused him all this pain.
(Logically, he knows part of it is from taking a twelve story plummet from a rooftop and somehow surviving, but it doesn’t register the same way the guilt does.)
“It was the Robin title that really upset me,” he confesses. “It didn’t feel like a promotion, or even a demotion. It felt like I was being replaced in the family. Like, now that Bruce was gone, you were the head of the family, and you were telling me that Damian meant more to you than me, when you hardly even knew the kid, and after he’d tried to kill us multiple times.”
Dick tries to keep a hiccup in, but it spasms painfully in his chest, and he fails incredibly. In fact, he has to gulp down half a bottle of water to stop a coughing fit that erupts because of it.
Tim stops him before he can reassure him of anything. “I know that I was wrong, and that’s not what was happening. I didn’t at the time, but I do now,” he says. “I knew for a while. It just…”
He cracks each of his knuckles, one by one. “It was hard for me to let go of that anger when it’s what got me through the League and finding Bruce,” he confesses. “But I should have, and I should have talked to you. You started hating yourself, and that’s when I realized I’d gone too far.”
Dick sniffles and reaches out a hand. Tim clasps their palms together without a second thought. Dick revels in it. It’s been so long since he’s gotten to hold his little brother. He’ll take any scrap of touch he can get.
“I’m gonna make mistakes,” he tells Tim. “I’m gonna upset you sometimes. But nothing in the whole world will change that you are always gonna be my little bro. I’ll do better to show you that.”
Tim smiles at him, the first real smile he’s given Dick in two years. It’s like a drink of water after being lost in the desert for so long. He can’t help but smile back. Dick ruffles his hair, and Tim leans into his touch. He eyes Dick lying in the bed, still hurt and still recovering. Something sad glosses over his eyes.
“After what Jason told us, on top of the conversation you had with Bruce a few weeks ago,” Tim mentions, “Bruce is going to make you talk to Dinah about all that, you know.”
Dick sighs, letting his head fall back against the pillows. “I figured.”
Tim shakes his head. “You’re a martyr, Dick,” he says. “You’ve gotta stop. You’ve gotta remember how much you’re loved and needed in this family before you kill yourself bending over backwards to find a reason why you’re not.”
That stings, but Tim is right. He’s not the only one who loves this family, and he needs to remember that.
“Fine,” he says, then pokes Tim in the sternum. “But only if you also talk to Dinah, about your inane need for perfection and refusal to accept help in any way. That includes trying to talk through problems rather than ignoring them.” He gives Tim a pointed look, to which the boy wilts at.
“Deal,” Tim agrees, though he sounds very reluctant. They even shake on it. “Now get some sleep. It’s past your bedtime.”
Dick shakes his head. “Not tired,” he admits. Not after the conversation he just had. (He’s got his brother back!!) He glances over at the TV, and the space on either side of his body. He scoots over a little, away from Tim, to make his right side bigger.
“Come lay with me,” he offers. “We can watch old TV shows.”
Tim worries at his bottom lip for a moment, before he nods decisively and, carefully, maneuvers himself into the spot beside Dick. They settle under the blankets as Dick starts scrolling for the throwback channels.
It’s a back-and-forth argument between The Three Stooges and The Andy Griffith Show, but then they find a channel that’s marathoning Gilligan’s Island, and that results in a unanimous decision.
Things aren’t completely fixed, of course. There’s a lot of trust-building that will have to go on in the upcoming months between the two of them. But the whole family needs to trust-build, so Dick is okay with it. They can do it together.
But laying in the dark hospital room as they watch old television like they did when Tim first moved into the manor, and as Tim falls asleep against Dick’s shoulder, he knows that everything is going to be okay.
Damian stays with him most of the time. That includes spending the night in Dick’s hospital room.
Bruce wasn’t very keen on the idea at first — only because he was worried about Damian being cramped up in a small room and sleeping in a small chair, Bruce was quick to reassure him. But Damian stole Dick’s escrima sticks and threatened Bruce with them, and Bruce gave in.
The first time that Dick was awake and stayed awake for the whole day, Damian pressed his face into Dick’s neck, and whispered, “I thought you were dead.” There was something wet on his shoulder.
Dick had held him in both arms with what little strength he had and said, “I’m here. I’m right here.”
Damian had pulled back, surreptitiously wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and nodded. “You are an idiotic, dim-witted buffoon to do what you did,” he’d scolded, glaring viciously at Dick. “I would have been furious at you if you had died."
Dick didn't have the strength to fight the fond smile that spread across his face. "You'd miss me that much, huh?"
Damian had sniffed pompously, turning his nose up. "Well," he'd said, "we never finished The Odyssey.”
That was the first time Dick knew that he and Damian were going to be fine.
After the first week of Dick being here, Damian moved from the chair beside the bed to the actual bed, curled up under the blankets with Dick. Bruce’s bug-eyed stare of shock is one of the funniest moments Dick has ever witnessed.
“He doesn’t do that with me,” Bruce tells him one night, when Damian is fast asleep in a ball and entirely covered by the blankets. He sounds sad.
Dick gives him a small, understanding smile. It had taken a long time for Damian to trust him enough to fall asleep around him. “He will,” he reassures. “Just give it time.”
After a few weeks, as Dick’s recovery progresses, Damian brings card games and smuggles in a bullseye and some throwing stars. He’s not exactly sure how, but he doesn’t question it. This is the Watchtower, after all.
Dick is feeling a lot better, and eventually, becomes strong enough to have a talk with Damian — one that he’s been sitting on for the better part of a week and a half.
Damian is sitting in front of him on the bed, packing away the cards after a riveting game of slapjack, when Dick says, “We need to talk about the Baba thing.”
Damian, to his credit, does not falter in his precise collection and packaging of the playing cards. “Alright,” he agrees. “You are my Baba. There is nothing more to it.”
Dick’s throat gets thick at his words. It's everything he has wanted to hear, and everything he has been dreading. Damian is concise, to-the-point, and nonchalant about it. There's a lot to unpack there. “Okay, that’s—” He’s not sure why he thought Damian would be nervous or unwilling to talk about this. But of course he’s not. Of course he’s abrupt with it. “But Bruce…?”
“Father is Father,” Damian responds simply. “You are Baba.”
Dick is... hurtling towards an existential crisis here, and Damian is sitting there, organizing card suits. He needs to get himself together.
“I don’t want you to have a poor relationship with Bruce because of me,” he tells Damian.
Damian finally looks up from the cards, eyebrows drawn together. “That is a ridiculous idea, Richard,” he scolds. Damian, all of twelve years old, is scolding him. “If I have a poor relationship with Father, that is his own fault.”
“But I don’t want you to have a poor relationship with him,” presses Dick.
“Good, because I don’t.”
Dick flounders at that. Well. That’s been his biggest roadblock from the get-go — that Dick would replace Bruce. And that Damian wouldn’t want him to begin with. But one minute of conversation has erased both of those concerns.
Now what?
Damian looks at him, then rolls his eyes. He sets the pack of cards on the bedside table and shifts around so that he’s completely facing Dick. Dick sits up as best he can. “I believe I have caused you to misinterpret my actions to fix the family as actions to distance myself from you,” Damian says, “and for that I apologize.”
Dick frowns. He starts to get a sinking feeling deep in his chest. “Fix the family?” he asks. “What are you talking about?”
Damian looks up at him with big, brown eyes, full of embarrassed determination. “You were the only thing I needed, Richard. I waited for the day you asked me to move to Blüdhaven with you, but it never came.”
Oh Jesus. “Damian—”
“I knew it couldn’t be because you did not want me,” Damian continues. “Then I saw how happy you were when you were staying at the manor when Father returned. And I heard you try to make amends with Drake, and how upset you were when he yelled at you that night in the Cave. When he told you we weren’t a family.”
Some sort of fiery fury alights in Damian’s eyes at the memory. “I decided to help, because I knew having the rest of the family back would make you happy.”
Dick’s jaw is on the floor at this point. He puts a hand over Damian’s, curling his fingers around it. They’re dwarfed, compared to Dick’s. “Oh kiddo,” he says, “that wasn’t your job; it was mine. I made a mess of things, and it was up to me to fix them.”
Damian shrugs his good shoulder. “It was up to me to help you,” he replies, "such as the day Todd and Father made up. I did not call you because I thought they were going to hurt each other. I called you so that Drake could see you.”
Dick blinks, bewildered. “You what?”
“Drake was not on patrol with us,” Damian explains. “He was originally with his Titans at Mount Justice. I called him and told him that Father was in trouble, and Todd was the reason. He used a zeta tube to get here, as expected, and ten minutes later, you arrived down in the Cave.”
Dick’s concussion must have scrambled more than he thought, because he has no idea how to comprehend any of this. “I’m not following,” he admits. “What does seeing Jason and Bruce fight have anything to do with me and Tim?”
Damian gives him a look as if Dick should be keeping up with him. “I thought that if Drake saw that Todd and Father can make up, you and he could make up,” he says, then scowls. “Of course, Drake proved far too stubborn.”
That sneaky little shit. He planned that whole thing. Dick wonders if he sparked the whole argument between Jason and Bruce to begin with.
“Well no matter how we got there,” Dick says, “we made up.”
Damian harrumphs. “Of course you two had to almost die for Drake to come to his senses,” he sniffs snootily. “Typical.”
Dick’s lips quiver upwards into a smile. “There’s nothing typical about our family, Dames,” he says. And damn, does it feel good to say our family again and know that it’s for real.
Damian nods, because of course he has known this from the beginning. But then, in non-typical Damian fashion, he glances away and begins fiddling with his fingers. “Richard,” he starts. There’s uncertainty creeping into his voice, a change in how sure he was just a minute ago. “I care about Father very deeply. I do believe I love him.”
Dick’s breath inflates his lungs and gets stuck inside. “That’s good,” he replies, being honest. “That’s really good.”
Damian nods again, but there's hesitation written all over his face for whatever he's going to say next. “You called me habibi once.” He pauses, eyes wide and holding the most vulnerability Dick has ever seen in them. “Did you mean it?”
Dick swallows thickly. “Of course I did,” he promises.
Damian takes Dick’s hand. Dick squeezes back as hard as he can. “Then you should know that you will always be my Baba,” Damian tells him. His voice is trembling, ever so slightly. “My Baba.”
Dick slings his good arm around Damian and drags him in. His entire body alights with fire, but he grinds his molars together and fights through it, so he can keep his kid in his arms. Damian holds on more gently, but holds on nonetheless.
“For as long as you’ll have me,” he assures, tears of joy and pain running down his cheeks.
Maybe Dick’s hearing is still shot to shit, but he swears he hears Damian sniffle into his shoulder. “Forever,” he says, voice shaking and a note higher than normal. It reminds Dick of just how much this kid has lost, and just how desperate he is to keep what he has gained. “Promise me forever.”
Dick nods, careful not to jostle his head too hard. “I promise,” he chokes, lips wet from his tears. “I promise.”
Chapter 4: Embed
Summary:
Embed
/əm·bed/Verb
1. to set or fix firmly in a surrounding mass
2. to surround closely
3. to fix in the mind, memory, etc.(collinsdictionary.com)
Notes:
You can find the link to Robert Fitzgerald’s version of The Odyssey here!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Seven Months Later
Gotham is cold and biting in the late November afternoon. It’s been colder than normal this fall, and the winter will only get colder. Dick pulls his coat tighter around him, burying his ears down into the collar. He’d forgotten his hat at home like an idiot.
Luckily, it’s a short walk from the driveway to the door. He doesn’t even have to stand and wait while he got the door open with his slippery glove-covered hand, because Alfred swings the door open before he’s even up the first step.
“Hello, Master Dick,” Alfred greets with a smile, ushering him inside. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
Warmth floods over him the moment he steps into the manor. “Happy Thanksgiving, Al,” he replies, leaning forward to give him a quick one-armed hug while balancing a glass tupperware container in his other hand.
When they pull away, Alfred spots the tupperware and frowns, very deeply. “I may be getting on in years, Master Dick, but my memory is still intact,” he clips. “I do recall telling everyone not to bring anything.”
Dick grins sheepishly at him, shrugging one shoulder. “C’mon, you know I couldn’t let you do all the work,” he remarks. “It’s cornflake-breaded chicken. You know Jason tears through the turkey and hardly leaves any for the rest of us.”
Alfred continues to stare at him unimpressed, but he sighs with a shake of his head and says, “I am sad to say that is true.”
Dick snorts, and together the two of them make their way out of the foyer and into the living room. It seems that he’s the first to arrive, because he doesn’t hear any arguing or objects breaking, nor did he see any cars or motorcycles in the driveway when he pulled in.
Footsteps barrel down the hallway, and Dick only has a second to brace for impact before Damian bounds for him and leaps into his arms. In a brief stint of panic, Dick catches Damian with one arm while balancing the heavy tupperware in the other. He doesn’t have a good grip, so Damian goes sliding down a bit, but his grip around Dick’s neck is strong enough to keep him mostly in place.
Alfred comes to the rescue and takes the tupperware out of his hands. Dick is delighted, and throws a quick, “Thanks,” over his shoulder as he gets both arms around his boy and hoists him up higher, in a much more secure hold. They remain there for at least a minute or two, holding onto each other in the quiet room.
“I missed you, Baba,” Damian says softly into his ear.
Damian saw him three days ago while shopping with Dick for the ingredients needed for his chicken breasts, but what can he say? He missed him, too. Three days is just too long.
“I missed you too, baby bat,” Dick murmurs, squeezing him tighter.
The moment doesn’t last. Another, heavier pair of footsteps sound from near the doorway and, to Dick’s amusement, Damian flings himself down and goes flying to the other side of the room like nothing happened.
Bruce walks in a beat later. One glance between Dick and Damian, now seated nonchalantly on the couch, tells him everything he needs to know — judging by the look he gives Dick. Damian clears his throat and hurries off to help Alfred in the kitchen while also searching for the newest addition to the family, Alfred the Cat.
“And you say I spoil him,” Dick chuckles as Damian calls out for the cat.
Bruce just smiles and pulls Dick in for a hug. Dick presses his face against his father’s shoulder and coils his arms around Bruce’s upper torso, breathing in the comforting, familiar scent of Bruce’s cologne.
“He’s been asking for a peacock,” he tells Dick when they part. He looks genuine.
Dick’s jaw drops. “You’re not thinking of getting him one, are you?”
Bruce shrugs. “Maybe. Depends on how well he does with Alfred the Cat.”
Oh boy. Bruce is going to let Damian have a whole petting zoo if he keeps this up. Bruce claps him on the shoulder and leads him to the couch. “How’ve you been, chum?” he asks.
They sit, and Dick kicks his feet up onto Bruce’s legs without a second thought. Bruce lets him. “Good,” he says honestly. “I bought a studio.”
“I heard,” says Bruce. “Damian was telling me all about the studio you bought.” He cracks a little grin. “He says it looks terrible.”
Dick grins, too. The building he rented inside of the ‘Haven Circle Strip Mall is small, and he’s only had it for a week and a half, so the boxes of gymnastics and acrobatic equipment are only just now being unpacked. It’s going to be a few months before he can get his studio up and open to the public, but Jason has been stopping by every few days to help him place the heavier equipment.
Of course, this comes with the stipulation that he gets ten percent of all income Dick makes when people start signing up for lessons, but it’s worth it. He gets to hang out with his brother, after all.
Plus, he calls Jason his business partner, just to piss him off.
“It’s a work in progress,” he tells Bruce. “But Babs has been drawing up some floor plans for what the place should look like to make sure everything fits, and she’s enlisted Damian to help come up with decorating ideas.”
Bruce seems pleased with the information as he motions Dick towards the kitchen. “Sounds like it’s going to be a smash hit when it opens.”
Dick retreats into the kitchen to help Alfred finish setting the table. Damian watches from afar, Alfred the Cat hanging in his arms as he pets him languidly, like some weird evil villain.
A series of quick, sharp beeps sound through the manor, alerting them that someone is walking through the door. Only a few moments later, Tim wanders into the kitchen carrying a large glass baking dish. Alfred exhales noisily when he sees it, but he walks over and greets Tim with a welcoming hug and takes the dish over to the countertop.
This leaves Dick and Tim alone for a few minutes while Alfred putters around the kitchen. Things are slightly incommodious between them still, but it’s gotten much better over the last few months.
“Hi Dick,” Tim says, before Dick can get out his own greeting. He’s smiling, still a bit awkward, but genuine nonetheless.
Dick smiles right back at him. “Hi, Tim.” He reaches out and ruffles Tim’s hair, which makes the younger boy laugh and bat his hand away. He’s gotten so tall.
Dick has missed his brother.
They catch up for a while, sitting on the stools at the bar while Alfred starts putting food into serving bowls. Every so often, they’ll look back at Alfred with slight concern and copious amounts of unplaced guilt.
“Are you sure you don’t want us to help?” Tim asks him each time.
Alfred points a serving spoon at the two of them accusingly. “You both stay right where you are,” he tells them. It’s a threat. “I do not like that you two are even in my kitchen right now.”
Dick and Tim exchange glances, trying to hide back their laughter. They’ve each only ever had one big blowout in the kitchen, but once is enough for Alfred to ban them from helping ever again.
“What are you two snickering about?” a voice comes from behind them. They both whip around to find Jason standing there, a pie in each hand — banana cream and apple, by the looks of it. Dick’s mouth waters at the sight of them.
“When did you get here?” Tim asks, startled to see him.
“Like a minute and a half ago,” answers Jason. His eyes follow Alfred, who comes around the side of the bar to begrudgingly take Jason’s pies.
“I am scheduling each of you an appointment with an audiologist,” he tuts as he carries the pies away. “I’m getting you all fit with hearing aids.”
Tim grins sheepishly, but Dick and Jason ignore the comment. All of the Wayne kids know the rule: anything for Alfred.
“Why is Al the only one doing anything?” Jason questions, narrowing his eyes when he sees Alfred continue where he left off with dishing up the food. He leaves his brothers and heads over to the stove, where the turkey is cooking. “Pompous rich people.”
“He wouldn’t let us help,” Tim argues, squinting at Jason in offense.
“Yeah, we offered but he said no,” Dick defends. “He doesn’t trust us in the kitchen.”
Jason glares at them, but any intimidation is lost as he slides two oven mitts onto his hands. “So because you two are incompetent when it comes to a basic life skill like cooking, poor Alfred has to pick up your slack,” he huffs, pulling out the tray from the oven.
Dick and Tim watch slack-jawed as Jason sticks two fingers into the turkey to… Dick isn’t really sure. Check the stuffing, maybe? And then he sticks a thermometer into the top of the bird, then swipes a finger over the skin and licks it.
“One sixty-seven,” Jason says. Neither Dick or Tim have any idea what that means.
Without looking, Alfred reaches over and shuts the stove off. Jason takes a spoon and scoops some of the juices up, then drizzles it over the turkey. Then he grabs the pepper shaker and cracks a little over the top of the bird.
“Hey!” Tim exclaims. “How come Jason gets to help?”
There’s a brief moment where a memory flashes across Dick’s eyes — an afternoon in the study, Damian on the couch, talking about Tim and Jason and Bruce. It brings Dick up short. Carefully, he leans away from the bar and glances around at his surroundings.
Bruce, in the other room, trying to find the football game; Alfred, whipping Jason with a hand towel for saying the turkey needed more salt; Jason, yelping and frantically apologizing while shielding his head with his arms; Tim, beside him — willingly — laughing at the other two; Damian, sneaking towards Jason’s pies.
He can’t believe how different things are.
Jason spots Damian a second before he gets his grubby fingers into the golden-brown crust of the apple pie. “Hey!” he hollers, brandishing a wooden spoon at him in warning. “Hands of you helions, or you get nothing.”
Damian falls back, scowling at him. “Baba,” he whines. “Reason with the criminal.”
“Technically we’re all criminals,” Tim says, voice muffled as he stuffs his face with Dick’s devilled eggs. “He’s just the only one who’s not pardoned by the Justice League.” Of course, with a mouthful of food, this comes out as, “Hs j’s th’nly oon wh’z n’t p’rdon’d.”
Dick makes a face at him, shaking his head, then turns back to Damian. “Sorry, baby bat,” he says. “No dessert before dinner.”
Damian shoots something off in Arabic, which Dick has come to recognize as, “This is a family from hell.” Or at least, something along those lines. He’s better than anyone else in the family at Arabic, but he’s still not great.
Jason makes a noise from the stove, which draws Dick’s attention back to him. Jason looks over at him with a look that says, Really? He points to Dick’s tupperware. “Of course you made something with cereal.”
Dick shrugs. Corn flakes are awesome, sue him.
Another half hour later and they’re all sitting at the dinner table. Bruce is at the head, as always; Alfred is beside him on his right, and Tim is beside him — and beside Dick, who is sitting at the other end of the table. Damian is to Dick’s right, and Jason is beside him.
It’s so reminiscent of the last big family dinner they had that ended in disaster and Tim disappearing off the face of the earth for a while. And now, here they are, passing around the food and laughing together, and Damian is sitting across from Tim and neither are trying to kill each other.
And Tim is beside Dick. Tim is handing him bowls of food with a genuine smile that means something, and he’s asking Dick about his gymnastics studio, and if he can come there when it’s set up and train in the off-hours. And Dick is agreeing, and asking him how his Titans are, and how his latest missions have been, and how apartment hunting is going.
He catches himself afterwards, when Alfred and Bruce are cleaning up the table to prepare for dessert. Dick makes a comment about buying a good, trustworthy coffee maker — because of Dick’s unfortunate incident in the middle of the night when he tried to make coffee after a long patrol and somehow set it on fire — and Tim laughs.
He laughs, tossing his head back a little, eyes gleaming in amusement at the story. He laughs at Dick, because Dick made him laugh.
God, he hasn’t done that in forever.
His eyes sting with tears, and the front of his head starts to ache a bit in the way it only does when he’s about to cry. He blinks rapidly, trying to keep his composure in front of his family.
Jason, thankfully, is distracted by shooting to his feet and intercepting Bruce, who is going after the pies before they’ve even been served. “Step away from the pie before I shoot you,” he warns. (Bruce looks exactly like Damian did when he was caught — like father like son.) Damian is distracted by the outburst.
Tim notices, though, the way he notices almost everything. “What’s wrong?” he asks, smile melting off of his face.
Dick hurries to rectify it. “Nothing, nothing,” he says, trying to keep his sniffle as quiet as possible. He puts his hand on Tim’s knee under the table. “I’m just really glad you’re here.”
Something crosses over Tim’s face — pleasure or regret, he can’t be sure — but he meets Dick eyes and says in earnest, “I’m glad you’re here, too.”
The pies arrive. The two of them pull away, and Dick surreptitiously dabs the corners of his eyes with his sleeves.
They demolish the pies. Jason’s apple and banana cream and Alfred’s pumpkin are gone without a crumb left in the tins. Even Damian, who doesn’t like sweets very much, has eaten his entire piece.
They stumble to the living room as a family and collapse on any surface, stuffed beyond belief. Dick doesn’t know how Bruce and Tim are going to go out later tonight — he’s sure he won’t be able to move until tomorrow afternoon.
Tim suggests they watch Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. The room erupts into groans, and Jason smacks Tim in the face with a throw pillow, but Dick raises his arm and announces, “I second the motion,” and Alfred pops the DVD in without another word from the peanut gallery.
Dick drifts into a comfortable, sleepy, food-full haze while the movie plays in the background. He’s flat on his stomach, sprawled out on one of the two-seater couches. At some point, Damian gets up from where he was seated and collapses on Dick’s back. He stays there, not asking for anything or trying to get his attention. Dick keeps his eyes closed and continues to drift.
Towards the end of the film, Alfred disappears upstairs. He’s back a few minutes later with an old, somehow working, polaroid camera. “I believe this is a good time to update that old photo,” he says to the room.
There are dazed murmurs of confusion, but Dick knows exactly what he means. His eyes fly open to look at Alfred in surprise, and, if Bruce’s face is any indicator, he knows what Alfred means as well.
“Come, up on your feet,” Alfred urges. There is a chorus of groans from the couches. Jason shoves his face into his hands and moans, "You cannot be serious."
So Dick takes the initiative and pushes himself up, which sends Damian tumbling backwards with a squawk of surprise. Once Dick is standing, the others resign themselves to the situation and hoist themselves up as well. Alfred stands before them, fiddling with a control on the camera, but Bruce walks up to him and offers out his hands.
“You too,” he says. Alfred smiles at him in only the way a father can smile at his child. Dick would know.
Situating themselves is a bit complicated. They all crowd in together, just like the original photo. Dick scoops Damian up into his arms, which Damian immediately fights him over — “Richard, we are surrounded by people!” — but he doesn’t try to get down, and he doesn’t tell Dick to let him go.
Tim taps twice on Dick’s shoulders, and is the only warning he gets before Tim launches himself onto Dick’s back. He stays there, just hanging on, and Dick frees one hand from around Damian to make sure Tim's legs are hooked around him tight enough. Jason stands beside Bruce, looking begrudgingly aquiescent, but puts a hand on Bruce's shoulder, and Alfred has his arms around as many children and grandchildren as he can fit in them.
Bruce holds the camera up and out as far as he can. “Say ‘Happy Thanksgiving’,” he prompts.
Everyone choruses it back, except for Jason, who says, “Hell no,” and then the flash goes off. It’s brighter than Dick anticipated, and he slams his eyes shut and instinctively flinches with his whole body. It makes him lose his balance, which starts a chain of events that lead to devastation.
Tim slips off of his back with a surprised yelp. Damian accidentally kicks Dick in the ribs, which forces him to buckle over and drop him straight into the floor. He lands on Jason’s foot, which Jason jerks backwards with a hiss of pain and stumbles into Bruce, who is knocked over as a result.
They all end up in a pile on the floor. Except for Alfred, who remains standing and staring down at them, unsurprised.
“Now it’s a Wayne Thanksgiving,” Tim snarks from underneath Dick.
Jason grabs his head and shoves it down underneath the bodies without a second thought.
(Later — when Jason is snoring on the two-seater, Tim and Bruce are engaged in a conversation about the football game, and Alfred is minding his business on the recliner with his book — Dick and Damian huddle by the fireplace with Bruce’s comforter wrapped around them as they finish the last book of The Odyssey.)
Notes:
Wow, I can't believe it's over. Thank you all so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Your love and support for my little fic has blown me away. I can’t thank you all enough for reading and giving this story love. I appreciate every single one of you <3
I’ll be posting another work in this series sometime soon. Right now I'm planning on a VERY short fic about the key moments from this fic, but from Bruce’s pov. I’m also considering another short fic, but from Damian’s point of view that showcases everything he tried to do on-and-offscreen to “fix the family.” I’ve also got a few other ideas that I’m not sure will come to fruition or not. Not sure when those will be out, but I’m hoping to start it soon, so keep an eye out on the series for any updates!
Thank you again and I love you all <3
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