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Dick is nine when his parents die. He is nine when Bruce gets fast tracked for a license to foster, and he is nine when he becomes a ward of the state, and a ward of Bruce Wayne.
The first month is filled with tantrums and meltdowns and aggression and grief. Bruce takes it all as best he can, and when he can’t he has Alfred, that steadfast rock to fall back on. It’s not what any parent would want for their child, Bruce knows, but he’s doing the best he can and slowly, carefully, the storm settles, and the clouds lift. A year passes, and Dick turns ten, and a new vigilante appears at Bruce’s side, a Robin swift and cunning and light as a feather.
“Thank you,” Dick says, and “You’re awesome!” and “I love it.”
Dick smiles, and Bruce thinks he’s doing things right.
Dick turns eleven, and his caseworker starts coming by more often, knocking on the door one week, and then again the next.
“I’m conducting a home visit,” she says the first time Alfred leads her into Bruce’s study. He stands politely, bewilderment professionally masked with kind hospitality.
“I would like to talk with Richard,” she says the next time, and Bruce offers the west wing sitting room before leaving them in privacy.
“What’s going on?” he asks, holding the door as she shrugs her jacket on to leave. Dick is gone, upstairs behind a slammed door that seemed to shake the entire house.
Ms. Lee scrutinizes Bruce for a second before she says, frankly, “You’re being investigated, Mr. Wayne. Some concerns were brought to my attention. I am simply following up on those concerns. As long as Richard is happy and well cared for, you have nothing to worry about.”
“Right,” Bruce says, “yes,” and then as she leaves, “Have a nice day.”
Dick doesn’t come down for dinner, and doesn’t come down for patrol.
“What happened?” Bruce asks the next day, over breakfast and exactly zero hours of sleep. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” Dick says, glaring at his cereal. “I hate her. And I’m not going to school.”
“Yes you are,” Bruce says. “School is important, Dick.”
Dick looks up, a fierce, black anger seeping into his voice. “I’m not going, and you can’t make me!”
Bruce lets him have one day. He phones in to the school and informs the secretary that his child is ill, come down with a bug. Nothing to worry about, and Bruce will make sure he stays on top of his schoolwork. Alfred makes popcorn and Bruce brings it to the theater, where he and Dick spend the day watching Looney Toons and Planet Earth. Dick falls asleep at noon. Bruce wakes up at four, and finds a blanket tucked neatly around his shoulders, Dick drooling onto his lap.
Dick returns to school the next day, and over the course of the week, the welfare check and Ms. Lee are forgotten.
On Tuesday Dick goes to school with a black eye and a long, bandaged gash on his arm. On Tuesday Ms. Lee and two police knock on Bruce’s door, and inform him they’ve come to take Dick away.
“It’s only temporary,” Ms. Lee informs him in a clipped voice, and Bruce knows she doesn’t believe her own words. “Over the course of the last two years, his teachers have reported an increasing amount of unexplained bruises and broken bones. We will be removing him from your care while we review your case.”
Her tone leaves no room for argument.
“Dick,” he says, knocking on the boy’s door. Dick is sleeping, taking a nap before he heads down to the cave to help Alfred on comms. “Dick?”
Dick opens the door, peering out through sleep crusted eyes. “Dinner?” he asks, and Bruce wordlessly shakes his head.
“Pack your things,” he says quietly, calmly. If he lets even a spark of the terror burning within him ignite, he will be consumed.
Dick almost throws a fit. He almost fights back, he almost runs and hides and Bruce sees it all when he first lays eyes on the officers, and Ms. Lee standing in the doorway. “No,” he says, going stock still in front of Bruce. “No!” he begs, turning around, “No, you can’t - I didn’t even...”
Bruce is hollow. He’s hollow, no room for terror, no room for fury, only space for an aching, hurting emptiness. He can’t do anything wrong. If he wants Dick back, he has to cooperate, and Dick must do the same.
“Only a few days,” he says, still quiet. “Only a few days, Dick, I promise.”
Dick almost falls apart. But his eyes find Alfred, standing silently by the stairs, and his eyes find Bruce, helpless in the hall, and when he offers a wavering smile it is built on nothing but trust.
A week passes, and Bruce is called in to a hearing. He’s questioned about his past, and he’s questioned about his job and how many hours he works and when he is home for the boy and when he is not. Dick calls him the first three days, and then he calls him the fifth day, out of breath, and he explains that Mr. Sanchez caught him on the phone, and Ms. Lee said they weren’t allowed to talk.
Bruce should have known. Bruce never should have picked up, but he does so anyway, he does so always because it’s Dick.
Robin reappears on the tenth day, and Bruce nearly has a heart attack at the costume Dick is wearing. There’s no armor, no weapons, no protection. It’s red and yellow fabric sown at the school’s workshop, the R drawn crudely on with black marker, the mask strapped to Dick’s head with elastic.
“For the love of God!” Bruce snaps, and the next night he brings Dick’s suit, and makes him change into it before they even think about continuing patrol.
“I want to come home,” Dick tells him each night.
“My license is still under review,” Bruce tells him every time, the words bitter and gray in his mouth.
On the seventeenth day, two and a half weeks after Bruce’s fostering license is revoked, Dick takes matters into his own hands.
It happens when they’re in a dead-end alley off Robinson Park. Bruce sees the hit coming. He knows Dick sees it too, the man before him drunk and slow and sloppy. Dick stands squarely in the man’s sights, chin high and on the balls of his feet just as Bruce taught him.
Dick sees the fist swing, and Bruce counts two seconds when he has the chance to duck, when Bruce expects him to duck. Dick doesn’t duck. The fist slams into his face instead, the boy crumples wordlessly to the ground, and Bruce’s vision goes white.
Bruce takes him to a safe house, because he doesn’t trust either of them if he takes Dick back to the cave.
“Why wouldn’t you get out of the way?!”
Dick reaches up a finger, tracing it lightly over his swollen cheek. “It looks bad, doesn’t it,” he says, something calculating in his tone, something cold in his eyes. “It looks like I got punched in the face.”
“If you can’t take care of yourself-”
“I can’t be Robin,” Dick says. “I know. But I can come home.”
It’s the first time something of emotion has entered his voice all night. Bruce clenches his fist, pushing it into the table, pushing away all his anger and fear. Empty. He is empty. He doesn’t know why Dick took the hit. He doesn’t know what Dick means, and it scares him.
“Dick. You could have dodged. You didn’t.” These are the facts. These are what Bruce knows.
Dick curls his hand into a fist, and brings it to his cheek. He looks up and meets Bruce’s gaze from the other side of the mirror.
“I’ll tell them it was Mr. Sanchez,” he says at last. “I’ll tell them he beat me, he beat me real bad, and then they’ll see I was better off with you.”
“It wasn’t though. Henry Sanchez never hit you.”
“They don’t know that,” Dick says. “You don’t know that either.”
“I do, Dick, I just saw the man that punched you! It wasn’t Sanchez.”
Dick doesn’t say anything. He gives Bruce a blank look, a look Bruce struggles to return. It’s not true! he wants to shout, You’re lying. Because the first thing he’d done, when Dick was taken away, was a background check on the family he was placed with. Henry and Laura Sanchez, a couple in their fifties with two grown children of their own, have been fostering successfully for nearly twenty years. Some placements have worked and some have not, but never has there been a whisper of violence or molestation. The children return for the holidays, all the neighbors are on good terms. Despite having lived in Gotham his entire life, Henry doesn’t have any criminal charges to his name and Laura has only one, a shoplifting incident when she was nineteen.
So Bruce has checked. He had been thorough, he had been certain, he had been secure in the fact that if Dick was not happy, at least he was safe. But now Dick is lying to him. Now Dick is pulling on Bruce’s nightmares, those terrors that keep him up into the early hours of the morning. What have I missed, what have I dismissed, what have I lost to negligence...
“Tell me that Sanchez hit you,” Bruce says, voice low and steadier than it has any right to be, “And I will take him down with everything I have. Tell me that he hit you and I will go there right now and have him arrested. You will be placed with another family, and Ms. Lee’s investigation will continue as if nothing had happened.”
Dick doesn’t say a word.
“Does he hit you?”
“No.”
One word, clear, perfectly pronounced. It doesn’t bring any relief at all.
Dick doesn’t call the next day. Bruce doesn’t realize he’s waiting until Alfred quietly and pointedly clears his throat, and informs him that he has a meeting at Wayne Enterprises in half an hour. And here he is, sitting in his office, watching the phone like a man expecting a watched pot to boil.
He goes to his meeting. He goes shopping, because Alfred deserves the world and Bruce feels himself overwhelmed by the sudden, compelling urge to do something. He spends twenty minutes in front of the milk case, trying to remember what kind of milk they usually get. He spends ten minutes trying to remember whether Dick likes Cocoa Puffs or Choco Puffs better, and nearly has a nervous breakdown when he tries to call Alfred and realizes he left his phone in the car.
If Dick calls, Bruce won’t be able to answer. If Dick needs help, Bruce won’t know until it’s too late.
He gets back to the car with both cereals and six different kinds of milk, and when he checks his phone the notifications are empty. Nothing. No unanswered calls or unread texts. Bruce lets his hands fall to his lap, and rests his head against the wheel and breathes. He is empty. He is nothing. He is doing what he can, and it has to be enough.
Another day passes, and still no call. It’s okay, Bruce tells himself, he and Dick aren’t supposed to be talking to each other anyways. Maybe the Sanchez’s caught him again, and Ms. Lee took his phone. Maybe Dick is actually busy, actually in school, and he doesn’t have time to call Bruce. Maybe...
(And maybe it’s not Dick’s phone that’s locked away. Maybe it’s Dick, and maybe Dick wasn’t lying, because Bruce knows better than anyone just how easy bruises are to hide, he knows how corrupt this city is and how fast a man can turn.)
It’s just past noon when Bruce dons his suit and flees, out of the daylight and into the shadows and into a world where he has at least the illusion of control.
He finds the Sanchez’s apartment. He climbs the building across from them, scaling the cracked mortar and brick until he can see through the window, into the hallway and into a bedroom and into the life of another. The sheets of the bed are blue. The walls are an off white, and from his position Bruce can make out a packed suitcase at its foot, clothes neatly folded even as the lid remains open. Ready to leave, at a moment’s notice.
Dick had only packed the essentials when he left. Only enough clothes for a week. Only his school books, and an extra jacket for the cold. All his favorite books remain at Bruce’s. All his favorite clothes, all his collected toys and bits and pieces of paraphernalia, all the photographs, both from the circus and from Bruce. Zitka sits on his pillow, waiting patiently for his return.
There’s movement in the hall. A figure appears, an eleven-year-old boy tearing into the open space and nearly crashing into the opposite wall. He whirls around, and even though Bruce can’t hear anything, even though he’s too far away to see the expression on Dick’s face, he finds he doesn’t need to. The way Dick’s shoulders are up around his ears, the way his hands are held out in front of him, fists clenched, says everything.
Mr. Sanchez follows him into the hall. They exchange words, and then Dick reaches forward with both hands and shoves, pushing suddenly and violently against Mr. Sanchez’s chest. Mr. Sanchez stumbles a step back, and Dick turns once more to run, slamming his bedroom door behind him.
Dick slides neatly under the bed, so fast Bruce nearly misses it. Mr. Sanchez remains in the hall, shoulders slumped as he considers the closed door. He reaches up his hands, pressing them into his eyes. Then he slowly reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone, and turns away to disappear further into the house.
Bruce watches, and waits, and two hours later neither Mr. Sanchez nor Dick have made a reappearance.
Two and a half weeks, and Bruce’s license is still under review, and three officers show up on his doorstep, and conduct a search of his house.
“What’s happening?” Bruce asks, straightening his tie as he tries to run a discreet hand through his hair. “What happened?”
“Have you been in contact with Richard Grayson of late?” the leading officer asks, and Bruce shakes his head because no, no he hasn’t. He hasn’t heard from Dick since that night, when he took a punch to the face and told Bruce it was Mr. Sanchez.
“Is he alright?” Bruce asks, because that’s the only reason they must be here. Something must have happened, something must have gone wrong and Bruce wasn’t there -
“Master Bruce,” Alfred says quietly, catching his elbow as he paces from one room to the next. “Please take a seat. You’re looking unwell, lad.”
If Bruce could focus, he could figure this out. If he could compartmentalize, if this were anyone else, he would be able to ask the right questions and follow the right leads, and he would be able to find out what was going on without stepping foot outside his house.
All he can see is Dick, and all he can hear is You don’t know.
He can’t. He can’t think, he can’t breathe, there’s a buzzing in his ears, a strange echo, and it takes him an embarrassingly long time to realize that he’s panicking. In and out. Five, four, three, two, one. Safe. Empty. Nothing.
Alfred stays with him for the remainder of the visit. The officers search the manor, and find nothing.
Bruce finds Dick four hours later, tucked away in the ruins of Amusement Mile. He’s wedged between a rotting dumpster and a rusting popcorn cart, face buried in his knees with his arms wrapped around his legs. There’s a fading poster above him, torn half away, but Bruce would know those colors anywhere, he would know that design, that font.
“Dick?”
When Dick looks up, his face is dirty and streaked with tears. He’s still crying, and when Bruce steps forward his breath hitches and he looks away, brow furrowing as he tries frantically to collect himself.
“What happened?”
“I...” Dick swallows, rubbing at his eyes. “I just... I want...” he can’t seem to get the words out, fingers tightening around his legs even as new tears well up. There’s the bruise, as big as a man’s fist and bigger, blood hemorrhaging until nearly half Dick’s face is purple and black. It makes Bruce’s chest hurt to look at, and he finds he has the sudden, irrational urge to take Dick to the hospital. To make sure his cheek isn’t broken, to make sure he doesn’t have a concussion. But that’s no longer his job. It can’t be, not until his fostering license is returned.
“Everyone’s looking for you,” Bruce says, when Dick fails to continue. “I had three officers at my house this morning, I thought something had happened, I thought -” he takes a breath, takes a pause to still his racing heart. “God, Dick. You have no idea the things that went through my head.”
“You don’t care,” Dick snaps. “You don’t even care, you promised it would only be a few days! And I’ve waited, B, okay? I did, I t-tried so hard to be good, but it’s been three weeks a-and... do you even want me back?”
Bruce can’t breathe. The wind is knocked out of him, a punch to the gut, and he can’t breathe, and Dick is crying again, and Bruce has to say something because it’s not true, does Dick really think - ?
He does.
“Of course I want you back,” Bruce tries to say. It comes out as barely more than a whisper, barely louder than the debris blowing across the pavement. “I want you back!” Bruce says louder, and this time his voice cracks, and Dick looks up at the sound, movement sharp as their eyes connect.
“I just want to go home,” Dick chokes. And then he’s crying for real, sobs shaking his small frame, and Bruce doesn’t hesitate. He reaches forward and yanks Dick to him, pulling him roughly and swiftly against his chest. Bruce hugs Dick, and a few seconds later small arms snake around Bruce’s middle, and Dick hugs Bruce back. Bruce doesn’t know if Dick means the manor, or the people in it, or if he means here, and the circus and his parents and the life he used to live. It doesn’t matter, because Bruce can’t give him either.
“One more week,” Bruce says at last, when Dick’s sobs have quieted and the sky has grown dark with twilight. “We’ll wait one more week, Dick, you and me. We’ll wait it out together, and if nothing changes...”
If nothing changes...
“We’ll run away?”
“Together,” Bruce says. “We’ll run away together, and we’ll go to... Tibet.” No one would find them there. No one would even get close.
“Tibet,” Dick sniffs, something small and vulnerable entering his voice. “I think I would like Tibet.”
“Give it one more week,” Bruce repeats, something heavy settling in his chest, something dark with promise and unyielding in resolve. “I’ll book the flights today, just in case. If nothing changes, if there is still no progress, I’ll come for you, and we’ll run away together. Dick?”
Dick lifts his face, eyes dark and serious in his pale, bruised face.
“I promise. Do you trust me?”
After a long, weightless moment, Dick answers “Yes.”