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Imagine Dick Grayson falling in love with you.
It happened so slowly, so quietly, that he could believe that he wasn't falling in love at all.
It was in the little things, the way it always was.
The way his gaze lingered, when he was sure no one else can see it: at the line of your shoulders, and the way the tension would leave them as you laugh at whatever joke he made. At the gleam of intelligence whenever you find something interesting, at the way you would slowly piece together clues just as well as any vigilante.
(And he thought to himself that perhaps Bruce would have liked you.)
His gaze lingered, most of all, on the corners of your lips whenever you smile.
(Here, he should not have allowed himself to think about what it would be like to kiss you there. Whether you would laugh or smile into the kiss, and the sound would vibrate down to his chest or whether you would simply kiss him back.)
(He should not have allowed himself to think of dangerous things.)
(And yet he did so anyway.)
Imagine Dick Grayson falling in love with you.
And it happened so slowly, so quietly, that he could believe that he wasn't falling in love at all.
At least until he heard Alfred speak.
"You're a good man, Master Dick."
The old butler said it casually, in the same tone he would use to describe the weather or a particularly mundane bit of news. It looks like we're in for a spot of rain tonight. I heard that another criminal escaped Blackgate again.
You're a good man, Master Dick
Dick blinked, caught off guard for a few seconds. Looked around as if to remind himself where he was.
Movie night at the Clocktower. Rain falling softly against the rooftops, because the rain never stopped in Gotham. Barbara and Tim on a quick supply run for snacks.
And Dick.
Dick had been staring.
You had been laughing at something in your video game, and he couldn't help but think about how the sound of it warmed him from the inside out.
There was a smear of dried blood on your cheek. Your own, perhaps or someone else's.
(He was sure it wasn't yours. He had checked you for injuries as soon as you stepped into the tower.)
And all Dick could think about was how much he wanted to reach forward and wipe it away with the edge of his knuckles.
Dick blinked away the image.
(It was hard. God, it was hard.)
He fixed his own face into a smile. Relaxed, easy. A smile that was more reliable to him than his domino mask. When he next spoke, his voice was light, teasing.
"Now, what brought this on, Alfred?" he asked.
The old man didn't answer right away. Instead, he set the table in front of Dick. Fixed the teacups and the plates with the sort of meticulous care that told him that it was a question Alfred didn't want to answer.
First, the tablecloth, worn thin with age but still a gleaming white. Then, the platters of sandwiches. Smoked salmon sprinkled with dill. Thin slices of cucumber slathered with cream cheese. Slabs of grocery store white bread smothered in cheap peanut butter and cheaper jam.
The last one, Dick knew was for him. Alfred served it to him with an expression of distaste, though the two of them had long learned to live and let live with each other's preferences.
"Thanks, Alfred," Dick said, looking down at the plate.
The crusts were cut off, the same way they were always were since he as a kid.
It was nice to know some things didn't change.
"Now, what's this about me being a good man?" Dick said.
His grin was real this time. Dick always was a sucker for compliments. And while Bruce was a miser when it came to them, Alfred was a little more generous.
Alfred glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. He knew that look. It was the same look the old butler gave him when he was nine-years-old, standing in the foyer of the Wayne Manor and swearing that he didn't know who broke the chandelier.
Or who ate all of the imported chocolates from France.
It was a look that said that Richard Grayson wasn't fooling anyone.
Except this time, Dick had incurred no property damage that he knew of, and he certainly hadn't eaten any imported chocolates in the past few days.
And yet, it always made Dick feel as if he did something wrong and that he should probably confess to it.
"Come now, Master Dick," Alfred said. "I may be old, but I'm neither blind nor deaf. And I'm sure if I started showing signs of dementia, you boys will be the first to tell me."
"What are you talking about?" Dick asked.
Alfred must have seen something sincere on his face, at least Dick hoped he did. A vigilante's life was so rife with lies that sometimes Dick worried that he wouldn't be able to look honest if his life depended on it.
The old butler pulled up a chair to sit across him, and Dick winced at the sound of metal scraping against stone.
"I'm talking about that little crush of yours. I'm talking about her."
(Dick didn't mean to think of you. Really, he didn't. But sometimes his thoughts rushed too fast for him to catch, like the shadows of fish darting underneath the waves of Gotham Bay. And suddenly, he was thinking of your laugh again, and the tension leaving your shoulders at a joke he made, and the corners of your lips and whether or not you would smile if he kissed you or if you would simply kiss back.)
"I don't know what you're talking about." Dick knew he said it too fast for it to be believable.
(He was thinking of the broken chandelier again, the chocolate wrappers he hid under his bed. He was thinking about how he had never been able to lie to Alfred his whole life.)
Perhaps it was this that made Alfred take pity on him, because he didn't aswer. Instead, he glanced across to the Clocktower to the corner you were sitting in.
With Jason.
You were playing with an old, borrowed Switch, and he could still see the dried blood on your cheek, and Dick thought that if it had been him, he would have wiped it away already.
But Jason was reading some horror novel or other, and he didn't notice. A traitorous thought wormed its way across Dick's head.
(Dick would have noticed.)
Another thought quickly followed on the heels of the first: Dick is an awful brother.
He looked away, stomach clenching so painfully that he wondered why he thought he was ever hungry in the first place. He pushed away his plate, feeling ill. The tablecloth wrinkled, the teacups rattled dangerously as if threatening to fall over.
"We do not get to choose who we love, Master Dick." Alfred's voice was already soft, low, and still Dick wanted to snap at him to keep his voice down.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Dick said again.
This time, it comes out through gritted teeth.
Alfred didn't look at him (and Dick felt a sharp relief in that, because he used the opportunity to steal another glance at you. And he felt a longing so profound that it was a wonder that Jason never saw it on his face).
Instead of answering, Alfred carefully rearranged the rest of the setting on the table.
Delicate porcelain cups, some chipped from long years of repeated use. Alfred's cup was decorated with smiley faces and childish scribbles. A red #1 was scrawled over its surface.
It was the only thing there that seemed less than professional.
Dick recognized one of the drawings as his: a blue robin drawn near the bottom.
He didn't mention it.
Instead, he watched as Alfred poured the tea.
First Dick, then his own.
Before Knightfall, and before the fire, Alfred used to make tea with herbs from the Wayne greenhouse, carefully picked and dried before being served on the table.
Dick recognized the brew by scent, if not by name. Lavender, chamomile, clove. A few other herbs he couldn't name.
He remembered that Alfred used to serve this whenever Dick came home after a long patrol, sopping wet and miserable, Bruce's criticisms still ringing in his ears.
He served it again when Dick and Barbara first broke up, the first of a string of on-again-off-again relationships before things between them finally fizzled out for good.
He served it the night of Jason's funeral, when the old man's hands had shaken so badly that the tea had spilled across the worn while tablecloth and nobody had bothered to clean it up.
(The thought again, like a knife twisting in his gut: Dick was a terrible brother.)
He took a deep breath, forced his voice to take on a lighter tone, as if his own thoughts weren't crushing him.
"There is nothing to talk about, Alfred," Dick said.
(Smile, smile so no one knows what's happening. Smile so they think that everything's all right.)
"There isn't…there isn't anything."
Alfred's face was impassive.
"If you say so, Master Dick," he said.
The old butler pushed the teacup towards him, just the same.
Lavender, chamomile, and clove. Some other herbs he'd never been able to name.
(Long nights on patrol.)
(The night he and Barbara broke up for good.)
(It had been, he remembered, a week after Jason's funeral.)
Dick tried again, fumbled through his words in a way that was unfamiliar to him.
"Even if there was, I don't…I couldn't…" He couldn't even voice his own thought.
(Some things are too terrible to say out loud.)
Alfred took a deep breath, sipped his own teacup. The blue robin gleaming at him in the dim light.
"I didn't say you were going to do anything, Master Dick," he said quietly. "I said that you were a good man."
Something in his chest caved, like the crumbling of loosened rocks, just before everything came crashing down.
"A good man wouldn't think about…he wouldn't…" His mouth felt dry. He swallowed and tried again.
And the words that come out next felt like broken glass. They cut him on the way out. "Jason's in love with her, Alfred."
Dick glanced at you, at Jason. And he did not miss the way Jason leaned his body toward you, the way he inclined his head whenever you spoke. When was the last time he had seen his little brother so relaxed?
"Yes," Alfred said.
He said in the same voice he used to call Jason a good man. Like it was the weather or some mundane bit of news. As if it was a truth so simple that it was barely worth mentioning.
Another sip. The tea was almost gone now.
"He looks happy, doesn't he?" Alfred asked.
And Dick looked. Really looked. You playing some video game on an old, borrowed Switch. Jason flipping through his book with the sort of forced casualness that told Dick that he was anything but.
The two of you in your own shared space.
And when Jason reached out to wipe the blood off your cheek, Dick's felt something bitter rise in the back of his throat.
(He was going to be sick.)
"Yeah," Dick said quietly. "He does."
A beat.
"He deserves it."
(Deserves her.)
Alfred didn't answer. Instead, he poured another cup. Stirred in the milk so slowly and so carefully that the sound of the spoon scraping against porcelain set Dick's nerves on fire.
"And yet," the old butler said in a slow sad voice. "You love her, too."
(It hits him like a knife to the gut: the simple truth of it. Jason was in love with you. And Dick Grayson was in love with you. And he was longing so badly to be in the space Jason inhabited that he could feel his soul half-hanging out of his body, the ghost of his fingers brushing the corners of your lips so that he can feel them curve upward when you laugh.)
"Yes."
He said it in a single breath, as if it had been punched out of him, the word exploding from his lungs. It should have been screamed, for all the damage it did to him. Instead it was whispered, like something shameful.
Alfred didn't answer.
Didn't even look at him.
"Shouldn't you be calling me out?" Dick forced on a smile, as if it was a joke.
(Smile, smile, smile.)
"Telling me what a bastard I am?" he continued. "I'm in love with my brother's girlfriend."
"Do you intend to do something about it?"
The question caught him off-guard. He could feel his smile slip, and suddenly, he was left defenseless.
"What, like steal her from him?"
Alfred took a sip. "Something like that."
For a moment, Dick let himself think about it. Tried to imagine himself beside you instead of Jason. He wouldn't be reading, Dick had never been much of a reader. Instead, he would be sitting beside you, playing whatever video game you had with you. Maybe you'd be laughing as you beat him, or pouting as he beat you.
Maybe you'd be sitting on his lap, and he hated himself as he thought about how perfectly you would fit against him.
He would have no trouble touching you. He would have no trouble wiping the blood off your cheek.
But then he thought of Jason.
Jason who never took off his helmet, until he met you. Jason, in a dingy donut shop, asking through gritted teeth what sort of flowers to buy you. Jason, who must have noticed the blood the same time Dick did, but spent forty minutes trying to force himself to touch you, because it would mean showing you the scars on his hands.
(And yet he did it anyway.)
Jason, who is finally learning to let himself be happy.
"No," he said.
The truth of it was not explosive, like before. It did not come screaming out of him. Instead, it settled in his gut as heavy as a stone, where he knew it will sit forever.
"Of course not."
Alfred looked at him, smiled over the rim of his cup. And Dick was reminded what the old butler told him before this whole conversation began.
A good man.
Perhaps he was.
Dick watched you quietly across the room as you laughed, as he watched Jason lean in just to hear you laugh, and his fingertips ached with the urge to trace the the upward curve of your lips.
But instead, he wrapped them around his tea cup. Took a sip. Let it warm him from the inside.
He just wished it didn't have to hurt so much.