Étoile Polaire

by br1ghtmouth

Summary:

In the lead-up to the premiere of his first production as a principal dancer, Dick Grayson sublimates the slow crisis of his being a fallible body by letting other people’s hands do what they will to soothe.

(or, a rivals-to-lovers ballet AU while the world burns 💃)

Notes:

I used a lot of Martha Graham to build vis language for this one as I figured her Rite would have been closest/most in-spirit with the Massine, which I can never find!!!! please do comment if anyone knows of a good source for that choreo.

Outline is complete, will post as it's ready - enjoy :)

Chapter 1: Augurs of Spring

//

He prefers above all else the feeling of suspension. Call it maladjustment.

“It’s got a long name. Too many syllables. ‘Libidinous aggression,’ blah blah blah.”

When he looks at men like this through his eyelashes, like that, it’s the same kind of feeling: A leap, weightless as his grand jeté for as long as he can get it—forever, if he shuts his eyes. 

Dick Grayson never blinks first. He’ll tilt his head instead; “Or something. I don’t know. I didn’t finish college.” He’s never drunk, here. Not at this stage. Rarely ever; it doesn’t suit.

The stranger will move a hand up his thigh, the one Dick tells himself never hurts as bad as it feels after long days. Sometimes, a man’s fingers dig in. Others wait. Still others will keep petting, up to the dive of his hip that clicks if he isn’t thinking about control, control, controlling it—

“Come on.” Dick will stand then, his weight just so in the good leg. The angle of light loves him, falls on him like praise, and he knows it. He’ll smile with his curtain call come-hither canting into one dimpled cheek, and reach down to bring his quarry’s hand higher. Straight to his belt, if needed, but sometimes they spook. He tries not to unsettle the good ones too early. “You can do better than that.”

//

Dick blears to life with cottonmouth and a brief, dizzying pitch of confusion.

Studio apartment. Pink Floyd posters on the wall. Strains of drugstore incense cling the air.

He grimaces at a popcorn ceiling and holds in a groan with the dawning memory of failing to drag himself home instead of passing out, after. Staying over; rookie shit.

A pile of denim and cotton waits by the door. Dick liberates his clothes with a couple frantic, silent shoves. One leg in, and the other—he glances at the bed, its leftover sleeper still broad across the shoulders and snoring as Dick fastens his jeans before wrestling yesterday’s logo-faded tee over his head.

He slips out and down through the fire escape. At street level, Dick thumbs through reminders and notifications and kills the three Now You Fucked Up!! alarms he has set on his phone to rattle every five minutes at the top of the next hour. He leaves handfuls of messages read but unanswered, half of them variations of heyy from numbers he never bothered saving. Three missed calls go unmarked from last Thursday. With the front camera angled for a cursory appraisal of his reflection, Dick frowns at the traitorous bruisy-blue coloring his under-eyes with sleep.

He isn’t usually so sloppy at it, sex as exorcism for his insatiable (inconvenient, terribly) need to be wanted.

This season’s opener has confounded him, binding him hard to that line of sanity and madness one must devote to the practice of dance. They tell him it’s the role he was born to play, his premiere, an idea which has rooted hard in his brain despite Dick’s best efforts to shake loose its grip—the Rite of Spring, their Chosen One, a legacy thrust upon him to dance himself to death.

Figuratively, of course. He ignores the soft twinging in his right leg and skips with quicksilver ease down the stairs to the next corner’s eastbound subway platform, and thinks purposefully on the leftover, fragmented memories of being taken to bed and bent in half instead of his own cyclical miseries.

With each step unconsciously quickened to the rhythm of the music in his head, Dick clicks his back teeth together like a metronome and runs the rough texture of the dance through the gin of his ever-turning, waking mind. Call these indiscriminate nights with strangers not a symptom, but a consequence of this work: Where pressure comes in, pressure must also go out. Plain and simple physics.

He’s a glorified child with a principal role, and still wakes up most days thinking it’s one long dream. They open in two weeks. He insists to himself he’ll quit playing around like this after then. He’ll have done it. Things will be new, then.

Dick stares through a shelf of overpriced kitchen tools from three bodies back in line at the cafe two blocks from the theater, crawled into the hermit shell of the old convenience store which never used to have a wait and always kept a pot of unburnt coffee hot for anyone in the company arriving too close to call for comfort.

“Next?”

Dick puts on the wrong smile for daylight, all heat, before he can walk it back. The poor barista turns pink; Dick looks away, down at the menu. “Yeah, hi. Black coffee, two sugars, thanks.”

“Small, medium, or large?”

“Large, please.”

“Anything else?”

He glances up and finds that dazzled look still stuck there, different depending on its maker but always with the same angle of unwanted pique—as if the looker has decided they know him all the way to his dirt, by just looking. Richard Grayson can only ever be one kind of creature to anyone on the outside: Untouchable, perfect and prime.

No one, no matter even if Dick lets them inside him to the hilt, will ever understand how much he is able, patently needs to be touched.

He smiles, but flatly—forces it not to make it to his eyes. “That should do it, thanks.”

Bingo: the barista gives up on the sparkle and plugs at the plastic register buttons. “Can I get a name?”

“Oh, uh. Mark.” Another automatic smile as he clankers his change into the empty tip jar. Babs keeps telling Dick about the smaller spot another block up. He’ll have to start showing up early more often if he wants to avoid keeping up a fake name for someone he doesn’t want to run into more than once.

Dick shuts his eyes briefly at the tempting invasion of thought, to be seen and named and known. The deeper reason this production has him feeling like a livewire with shocking regularity is embarrassing, if he’s honest—attraction on the job, forbidden fruit, the look-don’t-touch gray area of it enough to make him—

“Next?”

Dick blinks. The barista is angled to look over his shoulder at the customer behind him. Dick moves aside with the abashed reminder he is, ultimately and to most every person in the world, just another body in the way of the next best thing.

//

He showers in the dressing room beyond the trap space, scrubbing himself swift of last night’s communicable cologne. Beneath the spray, Dick works himself off with a fistful of the same lavender body wash the theater has stocked since he began in the junior summer corps.

Forehead smeared to the wall tiles, wet hair dangling, Dick pants open-mouthed nonsense syllables over and through a sharp rise to climax. He bucks involuntarily when the snare behind his navel snaps, and catches his breath under the lime-tinged mist. Dick watches his issue drip in several long strands before sluicing it away from the grout with cupped hands.

The nondescript room awaits between an alley that cuts under the stage from left to right, and the entrance to the instrument pit. Dick knocks twice, and enters at the Yeah barked up from behind it.

Slade Wilson hardly spares him a glance from his makeshift desk as Dick sidles in and shuts the door again behind him. “You’re late.”

“The trains are fucked.”

“Like last week, huh.” Slade stands and gestures at the adjustment bench already levered to Dick’s exact length.

It was Bruce’s idea to bring in the in-house PT, for Dick alone and entirely behind the curtain. The board can’t know. If they think there’s any risk you might not be able to dance the whole run, they’ll try to double-cast. I’ll take care of it.

When he puts on that concerned, platinum-tier patron mask, one can hardly tell Bruce Wayne was a key figure in helping drag ballet kicking and screaming yet mostly intact into the twenty-first century. He was a god, once. Now he’s just the richest one among them with his own ailing joints.

Dick scowls as he slides off his shoes and sits up on the soft leather. He flexes and relaxes his legs out straight, examining the subtle muscle movement through his warmup shorts ridden up. “Yeah. Eastbound.”

Slade looks smug, but doesn’t press as he opens the faucet in the corner to wash his hands. Dick forbids himself from feeling that red, molten pinprick that heats up between his ribs whenever he’s here, alone, to be nothing but pliant.

“Was it the trains got fucked?” Slade muses lightly, shutting the water and toweling each finger carefully dry.

They’ve done this pas around their own natures since the time Slade was first able to melt the iron band around Dick’s iliac girdle with a combination of patience and firm hands, and Dick danced Debussy’s Faun without every third leap smarting for the first time in years. Dick glares at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

It isn’t fair, a smile from Slade: that scar across his blinded eye tugs fondly— Shrapnel, he’d explained as he pressed along Dick’s lower back that first session, his voice low and half-lost to furrowed concentration while Dick’s face turned pink at the press and proximity, his cheek fast to the headrest; Can’t see for shit at a distance anymore, but I survived it. Can’t say the same for the other guys.

He still wears his tags, Navy, which jangle and kiss cold along the strait of Dick’s bare spine when he’s worked his shoulder too hard. Bruce has already told Slade where to focus his maintenance between one dance and the next—Dick is ultimately unbelonging to himself, far better to be directed by others, so Slade crowds him into the table before every rehearsal seeking that sweet pop-pang of sudden, elusive release.

“You’re overclocking this hip.” Slade fusses fluently with Dick’s ankles, holding them in measure against each other, peering up the long column of his legs; Slade looks at Dick with the brow above his good eye raised.

Dick gives him a tart look. “I’m an adult.”

“You’re a principal dancer.” Slade slides a studious grip up Dick’s right calf.

So strange is the intimacy of touch there that Dick flinches, the back of his knee soft and secret and sensitive. “So, what, I have to be celibate?”

The laugh from Slade is subtle, throaty, horrifically inconvenient as he triages the long cord of Dick’s hamstring with the heel of his hand. Away in the corner of the floor, Dick counts the flakes in the wood grain.

“Hardly.” Slade sets his touch at the height of Dick’s hip through the leg of his warmups and kneads firmly. The muscle protests. Dick braces against the table. “But for your information, even the most athletic sex wouldn’t exacerbate this pull if the ones you’re going with know what the fuck they’re doing.”

“Noted.”

Dick grits his teeth, shuts his eyes, and relents to the scrape of his flesh’s slow and inelegant release under Slade’s expertise.

He’s tried to put it away. Attraction is distraction, always has been and always will be. But Slade touches him like a project, so like an understandable machine, that Dick is weak to memory and can only recall, and recall, and recall this special privilege of touch in all his weakest moments.

When he goes to bed with strangers, every one of them turns to Slade in the private dark behind Dick’s closed eyes.

The hip relents, though not entirely. Slade tapes him in an abstract array along his entire right flank, waistband and shirt and jock held aside while Dick carefully runs a barre set through his head on rote.

Slade shatters every ounce of that careful distance-making with a warm pat to Dick’s thigh before he tugs the warmups back on snug. “Take better care of my work,” he says, “would you?”

“Your work.” Dick snorts and gathers up to leave. “Prick.”

The faucet squeaks back open. “You’d have blown an adductor by now if not for me, Grayson,” Slade says over his shoulder, lathering between his fingers.

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

//

Bruce finds him in the house after rehearsal, his usual concern writ through with a mild relief. Despite himself, Dick bends like the last of the sunflowers toward all the light left in his patron.

“You looked strong,” Bruce says, and Dick swallows the urge to preen.

“Thanks.”

“It’s still helping, then?”

Dick tips his head back in the seat, lazily watching the stage crew practice a rep from one act to the next, and stretches his right leg out long over the back of the row in front of him. He kneads absently at the tape still anchored to his skin, holding him in place. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Bruce hems, obviously chewing his words behind his teeth. Ever the disaffected teenager unwilling to admit that ballet is the only thing that has ever made sense to his body besides desire, Dick watches him in the light gone weak this far back from the apron and waits for Bruce to speak first.

“Towards the end, in the Ritual Action, your movement could stand to—”

“Be more frantic,” Dick finishes for him, and feels Bruce’s stoney look at him from above. He gives it a few beats before turning to meet the look with his own. “You’ve said so already, I heard you. I’m just being careful.”

“Make it look less obvious, then. The board will talk.”

“Jesus, pick a lane,” Dick snaps, “do I hold back or not?”

Dick feels the simmering pin-down of judgement on him, the way it has always felt to be watched by Bruce Wayne from behind the casting table each season Dick reauditioned for the corps. He’s such a hardass, the cattle call chatter used to go in the waiting rooms and hallways, all of them waiting to be called and pretending not to care about what went on in that small, mirrored room before them; Can you believe he used to be considered avant-garde?

“I don’t know, Richard,” Bruce says with trained, slow evenness, “what does your body tell you when you listen to it?”

Dick sniffs a sigh through his nose and stands, scraping at the sweat-tacked hair stuck down along the back of his neck. He’s still four inches shy of Bruce’s height— Full all of fire, one critic said of Dick a few years back in a paper owned by Wayne Enterprises, but ultimately too compact to make much of an impression. The poor bastard was swiftly blacklisted from any future reviews, name made mud for attempting to dirty up Dick’s image.

‘Favoritism’ is a word Dick wishes couldn’t land so easily on him, but he can’t help who it is that wants to see him succeed. It’s far from his fault that the last generation’s crowning achievement sees so much of himself in a fuck-up.

He relents, dropping his head. “I’m sorry. I’m nervous, is all. It’s principal.”

“I know.”

Dick rolls his eyes. “Do you, though?”

“I’ve been in your shoes, Dick.”

Quite literally—it’s Bruce’s own choreography, one of many pseudonymous offerings Bruce left on the altar of hidden legacy under the name of Vespertilio before retiring to steer the ship from the money seat instead of continuing to break himself across its prow.

“I know.”

Bruce smiles to himself and puts a hand on Dick’s shoulder. “Do you, though?”

Dick shrugs him off, but not without affection. “I’m exhausted. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Try to be on time, would you?”

“You got it, boss.”

“Dick.”

He turns at the soft weight in the syllable, tugging at all the tethers around his heart so closely rein-trained to the concern of older men it’s nearly done him in for filth twelve times over. “What?”

Bruce’s expression is distant, as if seeing himself across a very long hallway. “. . . Nothing. Get yourself home safe.”

“Always do.”

Chapter 2: Dance of the Earth

Summary:

“People talk.” Dick nips a final drag and leers up at Slade through heavy lashes. “I know pretty well how I measure up to the competition.”

Slade hums, low and reined in his chest. “You do, do you.”

Dick leans in to stub out his ashes on the ledge by Slade’s hip. From so near, his smell is myrrh and oak and resin—Dick grins, his voice light; “I’m a goddamn superstar, Commander Wilson.”

//

“Well I said look, I don’t know who told, but it wasn’t me.” Barbara bends to re-stack a shallow tower of white shoes for next season’s Sylphides . “I don’t make a habit of gabbing about other people’s business, so sorry if everyone found out, but she was also telling everyone.”

The shoe room smells of satin, glue, and the warm sponginess of old wood. In his back pocket, Dick’s phone buzzes. He ignores it to toss a look at Barbara over the counter, and filches another handful of hard candies from the crystal bowl beside the check-in sheet.

“Yes,” he says with knowing weight, popping one in his cheek and pocketing the cellophane, “you do.”

“No,” Barbara replies with a sharp glance, moving a pair of misshelved slippers, “I don’t.”

Dick shifts his look dryly to match her narrowed eyes and gestures between them. “What do we call this, then?”

“The sacred cone of silence.”

“Oh, of course.” Dick’s phone goes again, and again he ignores it. “Duh.”

Barbara steers her chair deftly through the ceiling-high shelves and marks inventory on the sheet in her lap every third cubby. “If you can believe it, nobody ever has anything to say about you.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

“I’m serious, they’re convinced you’re involved with someone overseas.”

“Who knows?” Again, his pocket sparks: Vrr-vrr. “Maybe I am.”

Dick twists to glance at the screen tipped up past his belt: u around or what baby??

The name attached to the message is nothing but a row of eggplants.

“Is he rich?” Barbara sounds entirely unswayed, double-counting the new pointe shipment.

“No, but he’s hung. I gotta go.”

“Seriously?” Sitting up to pin him with a rancid sneer, Barbara stops Dick halfway out the doorway.

“Yeah.” Dick wiggles his phone in the air before pocketing it again and knocking twice on the door jamb. “Duty calls.”

“You’re such a fucking stereotype.”

“Thank you!” He calls up as the elevator slides shut, dragging him swiftly back to street level.

//

The address Eggplants sent him to come meet is a billiards spot in Old Gotham. As Dick approaches from the west side, he only vaguely recalls the place until he remembers why, at the sight of a sandwich board on the curb advertising a three-for-one well special. 

Dick slips neatly into the crowd and scans for his contact. Each flash of silvering hair or thick, tattooed arm inconveniently smarts his periphery, dredging up shards of Slade to jab at his memory with a warning itch—Come on. Don’t be stupid. Put it away. Not why you’re here.

Eggplants ends up parked at a table in the back corner just past the throw of a Tiffany lamp bleeding yellow over a fading play field. Dick sees him first, a trio of them holding court over two cues and a freshly-broken rack, and melts eagerly into the hunt.

“Start without me?”

All three men look up at him as Dick leans up against the blind across the felt from them. He grins, all show and more teeth, and polishes off the lowball glass nearest to him without deigning to ask to whom it belongs.

The fluent heat in each of their eyes is separate and the same. Along the back of Dick’s neck, the sensation crests—nervy and sick, beheld, a relentless unease alchemizing him at a rolling boil.

He needs it.

Eager for their hunger, Dick slinks around the table and into their fold to accept another stiff, anonymous drink from the tallest one. He dares them without words to begin vying for his favor, its weighty purl, with nothing but the angle of his shoulders.

//

The back hallway twists and bends like a serpent. He pets the walls of its belly with both hands flat for balance.

Dick follows a few stumble-steps back, giggling after the two men leading the way ahead of him—down the steps, down to where the kitchen breathes hot air and the restrooms wait to be occupied and vandalized and marked with every which-way fluid—

“Wait.” He paws out ahead of him and misses an elbow, but collides with a shoulder. Dick tosses his head and laughs. “Hey.”

The door hinges squeak. He wants it. The mirror is a scrim that shows him the faces of the ones who want him in return.

Dick’s pulse slams with that industrial fervor of final-act war drumming, and finally he can’t think. He shuts the door behind them, and wants it.

“Slut.”

There’s a hand in his hair and he’s smiling, and so are the men; there’s a stinging along the crown of his head, his invisible antlers their reins, and so Dick goes to his knees—

The door bursts inward.

Dick leaps apart from it, all flight with so much drink in him. With his back to the sinks, hands slipping on wet porcelain, he watches wide-eyed as another stranger whales brutal efficiency on the pair of pickups, and that’s . . . no.

Staring, stunned, he was fucking right—Slade Wilson is here in this too-small shit closet, and beating the blood out of the men Dick took the trouble and time to win all for himself.

“Hey!” he cries, but it’s lost to the melee. Slade is harrowingly efficient and brutal to behold: Two foes at once, and looking like he’s not even trying. He slams one of the men face-first into the mirror, which sends Dick pivoting smoothly to brace against the lean-to wall of the stall with no door; and before he can turn to see it, Dick hears the crude sound of Eggplants crumpling with his streaming nose in both hands.

Dick whirls with a glassy glare at Slade, and catches himself on the paper towel dispenser. “Stop it, you psycho, it was my ide—”

“Quit sniping fucking lightweights!” Slade roars at the ruined pair with his left knuckles split, and grabs Dick firmly by the elbow to pull him free of the bathroom.

Dopey-drunk, half of him still stuck on the hope of wiping his brain clean with the chance to devote himself to two cocks at once, Dick scowls his way out to the bar’s alley in tow and doesn’t dig his heels in. The strength still burning in Slade’s fury would render the effort useless.

Slade sits him firmly on a bench made of cinderblocks and one plywood plank. He moves to put a hand on the shoulder of Dick’s old letterman jacket, but stills when Dick swats him away.

“What the hell is your problem, are you fucking following me?!” Dick snaps. He fixes his own jacket with an obdurate shove and makes a rancid face. “Who sent you?”

He knows immediately how juvenile it sounds, all his old affect slipped in without the luxury of sobriety, and hates himself.

Slade’s mouth twitches. Still standing, he pulls a pack of kreteks from his back pocket and shoves one between Dick’s lips. “This is my neighborhood, you little punk.” He lights a match and leans in with a frown. “Are you doing fucking sex work?”

Dick glares at him in the quivering flame and leans the rest of the way forward to drag softly on the light, fair cheeks bending inward. A rush of fresh awareness sears through Dick’s head, unfiltered and bold, and he manages not to cough. He spits a paper fleck clinging to the tip of his tongue to his feet. “Who are you,” he growls, “my guidance counselor?”

Slade watches him for a steely beat, awaiting a real answer.

Dick looks away first.

The thrill goes out from him. Dick draws and exhales with a dry huff of laughter, resigned. Crackling, the tension between them ebbs. Slade’s hackles settle, but barely.

“No.” Softened, Dick examines the burn crawling its devouring up the slow end in shuddering orange. “It’s just a bad habit that makes me feel good.”

Slade lights his own smoke and keeps watching him. Silence persists beneath the throb of 1980s time capsule radio through the wall against Dick’s back.

“You shouldn’t be kneeling like you were back there.” Slade flicks ash to the gravel. “On tile.”

Jesus, he’s sick of being made into somebody’s child. Dick scoffs. “Or what?”

“The company is only half joking about insuring your legs, and the bathroom floor in a place like this is a one-way ticket to early bursitis.”

Dick doesn’t glorify that with a response any greater than a scowl.

Slade sniffs and takes a slow drag. “Your call, princess.”

Bristling, horrifically aroused at the casual ease of the nickname clearly mean to rile him, Dick barks a laugh that slaps its way up and along the high alley walls. “How else do you expect me to give the best head in Gotham?”

“I don’t expect you to do anything but arrive twenty minutes late with your fucking coffee and some amateur injury you earned from showing off for one of those inelegant meatheads who wouldn’t even know how to appreciate it in the first place.” Slade chucks his half-gone cigarette to the ground and grinds it dead with his heel, heavy boots shined and supple. “You think awfully highly of yourself.”

Breathless and trying not to preen at such a confused mix of praise and insult, Dick makes up his best fuck-me flattery smile. “I’m just going off what they say in the papers.”

“Which papers are you reading?”

“People talk.” Dick nips a final drag and leers up at Slade through heavy lashes. “I know pretty well how I measure up to the competition.”

Slade hums, low and reined in his chest. “You do, do you.”

Dick leans in to stub out his ashes on the ledge by Slade’s hip. From so near, his smell is myrrh and oak and resin—Dick grins, his voice light; “I’m a goddamn superstar, Commander Wilson.”

Easy as breathing, Slade reaches out and chucks Dick’s chin. “Call’s two hours earlier tomorrow, don’t forget.” His thumb roves, barely, against the pink swell of Dick’s chapped lower lip. “Learn how to respect my craft, would you?”

“Don’t tell Bruce I was here.”

“Don’t show up late to my table again.”

//

He goes home alone.

Dick sends Spring Rounds heaving softly through his earbuds on repeat, placating a strange absence of self by tapping Replay over and over to remain in the slink of the melody before it can crash fully to life into the wakening hunt.

He is every version of his triple-doubled reflection in the train windows, past and present and future here beside him. He’s too drunk to balance without leaning heavily into the side of the car. He should have just gone home, or taken Babs up on drinks. Damn it.

To be incomparable is to be always set apart and isolated for it. Devotion has rooted strangely in Dick from the first, over-close to the art which moves through him—nothing else sticks, not friendship nor love, nor any trust deeper than a partnered dance with a few good throws.

He was made to be a vessel. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Dick stares through the watery layers of his face looking back in scratched plexiglass, the tunnel behind it black as sin. The only true mirror of himself he’s been able to find, his body and all its wild capability, had been a single tape discovered the summer he was made to taste his first dose of company drudgework; It isn’t all about training, Bruce had told him, handing over the keys to the archival room. You have to study, too.

Through the film grain, dark-haired and so sinuous Dick marveled for nearly a full minute over that unknown twin of his dancing the Basil variation from Don Quixote thirty years ago . . . he realized the figure was Bruce, young and boundless and untouchable.

He vowed to himself that day he would grow to be that worthy, and more.

The train shudders to a stop at the City Hall platform. Dick leaves his many selves behind with the tracks, mounting the piss-whiff steps into the city’s night.

He has one more chance to push away all the usual clinging doubt before dress rehearsals start. One last run tomorrow to get it right, and prove he belongs here in the only place which has ever made sense to him.

One death for himself, before all the others rush in.

//

It begins with the rising of the sun: Life itself, condensed into a single ballet.

The score is the organization of chaos into particular sonic stripes which paint a dancing body as the bend of dawn itself. Behold, your sunrise. Become.

Dick’s pulse melds with the music, no pain but the sweet agony of effort-on-instinct—rushing pulse, streaming flesh, no intermission, straight through to the end.

The delicate deconstruction of brass golds the sky through the second act’s sunsetting, the orchestra grown monstrous in the fading light. Dick allows himself to feel it: the slow onset of the inevitable, that he alone can put himself on the altar and deliver them all from winter.

Alone at center stage, he is the liquid wail of the cello coming alive in the twist of ankle, knee, hip, his lines immaculate. The air from his lungs births the frenetic buzz from the higher strings. Alive, alive, as only he alone can be.

The flute plucks the young man into presence in his dreamlike fluttering throughout the company and he is more radiant, more real than any other body on the boards. There is only half a set on stage and barely a costume scrapping any of their limbs, but he could dance in a sack in the dark and you would feel it, wouldn’t you?

You would see him there, the melting almost-right of this tune like the stickiness of desire itself, uncertain and hot to the touch. He leaps like he’s made a pact for it. The dance is childish and hauntingly body-aware at once, and you are witnessing a boy beckoning the earth to swallow him whole.

Frantic, ripping winds and percussion rise as his mortality approaches and your hands are iron on the arms of your seat in the middle of an empty house. Languorous forms and all the yearning stretch of denial gut him with every plunging pirouette. He will give you your springtime. He will dance until every cloud breaks. He is the only future you can stomach.

He is the wind in the leaves and the fading spots on the shivering flank of a fawn. Hands touch him, and he bounds. They reach for him, and the boy soars.

He is fury and glory and the ineludible scream of progress itself. He is flying above the chasm between time and being, suspended forever in perfection, and you don’t know who could possibly be responsible for this but the God for whom you have not been able to reach since he was put down in front of your eyes.

//

Dick’s breath returns to him in doses; quick-slow, quick-slow, quick-slow.

From the wings, the house, the pit, the company’s applause rises to beat at Dick’s awareness like a disquieted, battering flock.

He is still half-gone. He is not of this time again, not yet. He can’t—

Give your left leg more to do up there tonight. Dick still hears it between his ears despite trying with every turn and jag of the dance to toss and dislodge it; Slade’s low, urging voice, his hands working Dick deeper and more slowly, finally able to take his time. If you had it folded up like you did at Breakers and it hasn’t started complaining yet, trust it more. Just try it.

His body is hardly protesting. His blood roars in his ears, new and thick with possibility like pouring oxygen.

Bruce’s silhouette comes into the Source Four staining Dick’s vision into the temporary blindness of his final, skyward gaze. Dick blinks to focus the hand held down to him, and takes it once he’s sure it’s solid. His gaze is overbright, but he gathers Robin in for a quick, sideways embrace made off as stabilizing touch.

“Perfection,” Bruce murmurs at his ear, “the balance, your tension, every step. Bravo. . . . Bravo, Robin.”

“Thank you.” Dick can hardly breathe, and nods all of a mess. “Thanks.”

His mind is mist, hips quicksilver, legs jelly, still spot-visioned by the white eyes of the lights. The only conscious thought beyond the thunder of Slade’s advice in his mind is a looping truth: I’m going to die for you four nights a week for the next two months, and it will be the best thing I know how to feel.

“How is it holding?”

Bruce hasn’t let go of Dick’s hand, nor his shoulder despite Dick’s skin slick with sweat and no need to lean. As the rest of the company begins to scatter and mill to the apron for notes, Dick weights either leg with a few experimental bends and manages not to cry when it doesn’t even buckle. Bruce’s face softens.

“Good,” Dick pants. “Well.”

“Is it?”

Shaking out his hair, rolling his shoulders and bracing for the onslaught of shaky weightlessness via adrenaline—Jesus Christ, he’s been suffering without merit for so long and didn’t know it; he needs to be alone to be still and weep and melt—“Yeah. The orchestra is rushing. But I feel good.”

//

He stands in the shower well after he’s been rinsed clean, long after the hot water runs out.

Dick feels about seventy-five percent back in his own body by the time he’s toweling off his hair, eyes red and nose softly plugged, more relieved than he ever knew he could be. Listless and glad to be last, he shuts his locker and heads for the loading dock exit.

“Hey.”

Dick stops, but doesn’t turn. He sags his head back, neck bent to the low ceiling, and gives the silence a moment. “Hey.”

“It was beautiful.”

“Take me home with you.”

Slade doesn’t laugh, exactly, but he sounds like he’s smiling. “You bold motherfucker.”

With his duffel slung over one shoulder, Dick turns to look at him in all the stark lustre of owning up. “You know how to handle me. Clearly. So take me home, and show me how to take care of myself.”

Slade’s eyes flash. His back teeth kiss in a clench. Dick holds his gaze.

“. . . What would Daddy say?”

“Fuck you, you know he’s not—”

“Yes,” Slade cuts in, stepping closer, and Dick isn’t sure why but shuts his mouth. “He is. He loves you; or rather, loves making you into exactly what he was. You know what I think?”

Dick stays silent. Slade takes another step closer—on the table, with his leg bent between them at this distance, Dick’s flank would just be beginning to tug with resistance.

“That was a question, princess.”

“What do you think?” Dick whispers, staring at the chain of Slade’s tags disappearing into his shirt at eye level.

“I think if I took you home, I’d ruin anyone and everything that came after.”

“You think awfully highly of yourself.”

“You really want to impress me? . . . Use your words.”

“Sure, why not.”

Dick shuts his eyes, surer now that he died out there on stage and this is some strange, offset afterlife, and holds in a wilting sound as Slade slowly kisses his neck—“Then nobody touches you but me.”

Stepping back from speaking against his skin, Slade plucks a hard candy from the cache in Dick’s jacket pocket. “Good show, Grayson.”

“Get fucked.”

Slade laughs in earnest, hearty and surprised, and leaves through the stage door.

Notes:

Spring Rounds aka the most beautiful thing Stravinsky ever bothered to write imo - thank you for reading so far!

Chapter 3: Glorification of the Chosen One

Summary:

Perfection is not an act of kindness.

What is it, then? Well, it’s survival. Nothing but a complete resistance to the truth of organic decay.

Notes:

[chanting] more id, more id, more id,

//

He was perfect until he wasn’t.

In all things, balance.

By at least in some small part of himself, Dick Grayson will always be sixteen and desperate, instead, to be more.

The leg went without ceremony: Strong one moment, gone the next. What he could easily do warm he rushed to do cold, and

pain —

Nothing like the color or sharpness of it in any known memory, no beginning and no end.

There is no fire like the brimstone hell from a central nerve which believes itself wronged. Dick’s chasing strangers started up in the fog-brained aftermath of Dealing With It, relearning how to be in a broken body. He told himself it had a purpose beyond his own selfishness. Being touched was a regular aversion outside of partnering work, but became an overnight necessity if he wanted to keep using his leg.

He had to remember. He had to depart. He had to sustain, and bear it, and enjoy it. He had to keep using his leg.

So he did.

Every miserable session Bruce sent him to in freshly-funded hospital wings on the shinier ends of town were an exercise in ridicule. When the first hour on a new physio’s bench didn’t magically fix him, Dick would give up; make himself late, pretend to forget appointments, stretch on his own at home with the guidance of internet videos and full-on skip appointments. But Bruce kept hiring doctors, a long chain of them as each one cut his protégé loose.

Delicacy is failure. To need fixing is Dick’s own shortcoming. Fuck any suggested surgeries, fuck pills, fuck dope. All he needs to transcend is as the rest of the greats before him: a role, a rival, and a few good lays.

He still finds guilt in Bruce’s eyes from the stage, blue bright as halogen in the dark whenever he watches his company at work. Whether for being unable to leash Dick, or for pushing him too hard in the first place, changes depending on the tenor of Dick’s mood on any given day. 

“Do you think your career is a game, Richard?” Bruce once asked from the doorway of the empty corps dressing room, nearing the end of Dick’s first full-time season.

Dick stripped bare of his belt, heedless of observation, every movement tuned just so to hide the fire which had begun crawling up his core since just past the second act. He twisted to grin over his shoulder, covering a sharp twinge.

“Yes, sir, I do. And I’d wager you’ll watch me win it someday.”

You see, Dick tells his medicine cabinet mirror talk show when he’s a few too deep than he ought to be all on his lonesome, heavy-eyed and maudlin with the heels of his hands pillared thoughtfully into the edges of his sink, it’s the only way I learned to make sense of myself; to tear away the distractions, nipping and slicing and criticizing. Perfection is not an act of kindness.

What is it, then? Well, it’s survival. Nothing but a complete resistance to the truth of organic decay.

//

“Ah."

“Easy.”

“I’m trying.”

“No, you’re resisting.”

“No, I’m-ah—!"

“. . . Sorry, you’re what, now?”

Dick frowns into the face pillow, his lumbar a balm of pins-and-needles dissipation so suddenly like a hot epsom bath he nearly fumbles at swallowing the wilted gasp.

He shifts slightly, testing, and finds an elusive freedom resettled along its track. “Nothing.”

“Didn’t sound like nothing.”

Pitiful, is what it sounded like. Dick follows the tap on his waist to sit up and let Slade get at his legs, the working-out progressing slowly downward from first that soft atlas where Dick’s skull meets his spine. Slade’s attention on him is rare with ease, borne from a wealth of time bought by Dick’s early arrival. Call it charity, but it’s more likely just the residual wet dreaming he’s now officially weathered more nights than not.

He can obey with the best of them. This is evidence. Dick can turn himself into a body that needs no more help, and if he says it to himself enough times, it will be true.

“You’re staring.”

“No, I’m not.”

From his low-pitched saddle chair, Slade looks flatly up the bend of Dick’s knee. One hand of his closes almost entirely around the most muscled swell of shin, by which he pulls Dick’s right leg out long, slowly, steadily until it sits straight by the ankle tucked into the crook of Slade’s elbow.

“Lean back,” Slade tells him, nudging hard with three braced fingertips just under the ridge of Dick’s iliac.

“Ow. How far?”

“Low angle of a curl-up, there. Hold. Right arm up.”

“Like this…?” Wincing, sweating and breathing steadily through it—the tug better than a pull, a tender pain, slow and steady so much more bearable than sharp, sudden, artless—Dick grips the opposite end of the bench to rig the tension all the way up his wrist.

Slade hums the affirmative, low and half-air in his chest with concentration. He begins the slow manipulation of Dick’s hip as if dowsing for a clean radio signal in the dark.

Christ.

Dick took every countermeasure this morning: Up before the sun even crested the skyline, hardly soaked in a cold shower, choked down a disgusting green juice, but couldn’t, wouldn’t, can’t put away the dream-print of Slade touching him there, just there, just like that—flat hand on the twitching slope of his thigh, up along the back to knead, seek, tend to him more reverently, more instinctively than any—

!!

air goes light light goes white

Dick’s mouth drops open. He departs from all things.

Gone.

clean and forgiven and free

“Hey.”

sting-sweet

“Hey. Dick.”

His head lolls as Dick turns to seek the bright, waking slap to his cheek with a groan. The world yaws back in on itself through the foramen of its own begetting.

Slade’s gaze on him is too-hot, urgent, as if the collision of two bodies could— “You all there, kid?”

Dick sits up carefully and shakes his head. “Yeah. Fuck.” He cards a hand through his hair and stares at his hip as if it will rear up and bite him. “yeah, what did—"

Slade remains close, still stabilizing Dick’s leg, crowded in to lightly slap his face. He looks disassembled, he— “Something let go.”

“Yeah.” Goddamnit, Dick’s voice is wet. He blinks; fuck, eyes too. “It. I, yeah, I felt.”

He stalls off with his mouth open, a puff of air, mute and mortified with relief.

He reaches for the old, misering hurt and feels nothing.

Slade doesn’t look away, nor let go of him. “My whole skeleton was out of whack after my first submarine,” he says with a softened voice, “I know the—"

“Can I . . . ?”

Dick tugs at his ankle and Slade releases him, leaning back in his chair with his hands spread in invitation to stand.

Carefully, Dick slips from the edge of the bench into the full length of his right leg.

Nothing slips, or grinds, or seizes.

No pain.

Dick tosses his head and coughs a breathless laugh, turned away as he can from Slade. “Jesus.”

“Give it a bend, here.” Slade leans in and sets both his hands to either side of Dick’s hips. “I got you, try it.”

“I don’t th—"

“Come on. I won’t let it hurt.”

Dick shifts slowly into a sideways lunge that always smarts, frantically ignoring the fact Slade’s thumbs are nearly touching at his navel. His eyes spring with tears when the joint doesn’t so much as creak.

Diving cleanly into a back bend, deep arabesque, he lets his leg rise and risks trusting it fully—

“Jesus.” Scrambling back down to both feet, Dick can’t bear the undeserved lightness; the ease. He turns away, curled in on himself, shielding his belly on instinct. “Thank you, I mean, I—fuck, I gotta go, it’s ten ‘til, it—"

“Dick—"

“Thank you.”

Slade stares at him. “. . . It’s what I’m here for.”

“I mean it.” Dick swipes messily at surging tears with the tips of his fingers, but can’t bring himself to look Slade in the eye again with his hand already shoving at the door. “Thank you, it’s—"

“Break the other leg.”

Despite himself, Dick hobbles over an indelicate laugh. “Sure.”

//

With shaking hands he makes up his face in the mirror. Dick pauses twice to roll the stiff eye pencil against the hot curve of the nearest vanity light, begging his fingers to lie still.

Painted and dressed, he marvels at the overabundance of lightness in his body: Fallible, crude, made better with obedience.

Yes, sir. Just as you said.

I learned it all the way through.

//

The lights dim.

He stands alone in the dark behind the curtain. The stillness from the house turns brittle with beginning. The second layer of his tights itch inconveniently against his back.

Amid the company in the wings flit their whispered spells in jargon, toi-toi-tois and some actual spitting from the bold and truly superstitious, break legs, break legs, use up the bad luck—until from the pit, the first bassoon wails into the silence like the very birth of birds.

Time goes still.

Start with what you know.

//

The edges of Dick’s apartment are fuzzy about their edges with sunrise. Half-conscious and hovering over his wheezing coffee machine, a quiet pride fills him as it tends to do lately while Dick gazes about the untidy little one-bedroom, empty of any hangers-on. 

After last night’s rehearsal, he and Barbara sat at the low corner table at the place around the corner from hers, where she could pull in her chair and listen patiently to Dick babbling into his cups about precisely how fucked he was over a fixation on a man easily twice his age, with the rancid taste of someone’s only-sort-of-hot uncle.

I get it, she said with a shrug, while Dick all but liquefied with embarrassment. He’s hung.

It’s not just that, though.

Yeah, he’s got magic hands, too. You looked like you were on strings up there.

I dunno. Maybe.

Barbara tapped their glasses together, her second to Dick’s fifth. You’re that thirsty, and you’d still grade him only-sort-of-hot?

He was whistling Jimmy Buffet, Babs, I can dock his points on the scale accordingly and still want him to plow me into next week. I contain multitudes.

Light breaks over the skyline’s split teeth as Dick sets his mug in the sink and rolls out his mat to stretch.

He held his line for years against Bruce’s offer to pay for some other apartment in, as Bruce would term it, a less let-go part of the city, for nothing but his own pride. By now, it’s only for force of habit and an unshakeable fondness for a blonde pigeon Dick has more or less trained to harangue him for part of his breakfast scraps every Monday afternoon that he insists on keeping this place as his.

His body is strong, raw and new and endless and his. One more rehearsal before it begins: final dress tonight, and then the baptismal performance.

Him. Not just an animate corpse for some semblance of chorus, but Richard Grayson: Chosen One.

Patrons will watch from the audience, hungry for him to show them something worth talking about.

Split low, his left leg aft and his right out fore, Dick rests his forehead on the carpet and denies the existence of an inconvenient pressure between his legs, unquelled for days, a rolling boil in his belly yet uncured by simple sublimation, and counts to two-hundred.

//

Each step downward into the belly of the theater is one more admission of his desire, that he still willingly goes to be touched even after such miraculous resubstantiation.

Maybe this is what real suffering is, the ecstatic sort: Reliving it every time, and learning how to like the fall.

Perhaps Jesus wanted it.

The walls are watching. Dick opens the door.

//

“Please.”

“So you know that one after all.”

“I’ve said thank you about a hundred times, haven’t I?”

He knows he’s got the right angle of his eyes by the way Slade’s shoulder twitches like withers, some eager ticking quelling with a hastened fist. 

“That’s not please.”

Dick tips his head, ear to shoulder, and swings his legs ever so slightly. “But this is.”

He spreads his knees slowly, thighs splayed flat and wide and nothing on under his last-of-laundry gray nylon shorts. Slade doesn’t look away from his face.

“Please,” Dick whispers.

“Please what?” He looks amused. Alert. Even his blind eye burns with all the presence of sight.

“I haven’t even—"

“Haven’t you?”

“I haven’t even touched myself.”

“. . . Prove it.”

Dick rolls his eyes. “See for yourself, I’m practically—"

“Prove it."

With the heavy gaze of one held by the side of his face to judgement’s bare iron, Dick braces his palms flat on the bench and rolls his hips obscenely forward against the naked seam of his shorts. His mouth falls open, silent and wet—Slade’s eyes flicker to the insides of Dick’s lower row of teeth, and then the pearling, shallow nudge of leakage through nylon.

Dick hooks his heels on the outer edges of Slade’s knees and teases his fingers along the hem of his own pullover. Magnetized, Slade’s fingers twitch closed around his ankles like manacles. “I’d—”

Two knock on the open jamb.

Dick’s heart dives south, Marianas-deep. He clutches the lifted fleece tight to his ribs just shy of his heaving diaphragm. Slade’s hands still their slow slide up the backs of Dick’s shins, but eddy with tension like a waiting current, thick with impatience.

“Curtain in thirty,” Bruce says, looking straight at Dick through the collision of cold vanity mirrors ringing the room—but leaves before Dick can even muster the breath to blurt the automatic Thank you, thirty, which dies on his snarking tongue.

“Yes, sir,” he breathes instead after Bruce’s departing, shoulders stiff as hackles, and dares himself to rise from the table to dress.

Chapter 4: Sacrificial Dance

Summary:

It hurts in new ways, every time, to be reminded Dick is not nearly as seen as he feels under his mentor’s eyes. Bruce reaches out to soothe him with a touch, their earliest language, but Dick twists away.

A rotten beat passes between them.

“Pick one,” Dick hisses, “do you want me to be normal, or great?”

“Robin—”

“Quit fucking calling me that, I am not you.”

Notes:

I am not immune to the narrative stakes of a flawless final dress rehearsal 🫡
Thanks again for reading!

//

Electric with mortification and so laid bare he can hardly see past the footlights, Dick dances without brakes and doesn’t mark a single step.

Two rest days yawn ahead of the stoic, whispering company like open wounds to be stanched with vices. He shouldn’t be left alone.

“You left too much on the stage.”

“Fuck off,” Dick pants, mopping at the back of his neck with a terry scrap and sulking beside the fly system.

“I mean it, Robin, tonight of all nights?! It’s bad luck.”

He winces and chucks the rag at Bruce, who balks with offended surprise but still catches it. “So I was supposed to fuck up?” He snaps. “First time I can show those stuffed shirts what I’m actually capable of since February, and I was supposed to pull a punch?”

“I expected you to—"

“You told me they would be watching!” Dick shouts, and can’t decide whether or not he’s talking about tonight, this, right now anymore. “I never know what the fuck you want from me, Bruce, am I supposed to be perfect or not?!”

“You’re supposed to at least be predictable!”

It hurts in new ways, every time, to be reminded Dick is not nearly as seen as he feels under his mentor’s eyes. Bruce reaches out to soothe him with a touch, their earliest language, but Dick twists away.

A rotten beat passes between them.

“Pick one,” Dick hisses, “do you want me to be normal, or great?”

“Robin—"

“Quit fucking calling me that, I am not you.” Dick draws up close and lets his voice drop even further into hushed fury impossible to press down. “I will never be you, because instead of gutting myself for some sense of tradition, or-or superstition, I know what’s real! I’ve dragged myself through shit to get here, Bruce, I’ve taken every opportunity in my own town hands and—”

“And who gave you those opportunities in the first place?”

Dick lets his mouth hang open around the arrested syllable, suckerpunched by such cold unfeelingness. Is this how it feels to be the one who wakes up second, finding the empty sheets?

“I never asked to be your project,” he whispers.

“Yes,” Bruce murmurs, “you did.”

Because they both remember it: Dick with his eyes bright, invigorated for the first time by something other than spending hours in the studio and too beautiful to say no, put it away, banish the thing that you were to the untouchable past amid those shelves and do not let him out again—I want a copy of this, he'd told Bruce, waggling the tape labeled ROBIN in the air, still half-breathless and pink in the cheeks and all of him vernal in evidence; I want to learn this one on my own.

Charging for the stage door, last one home, Dick swipes away hot, shameful tears with the ribbed cuff of his sleeve pulled down his wrist and is already sick of this feeling of bleeding out.

//

He haunts the corners of places around Breakers, looking sorry for himself and shaking off many sticking eyes, until there, at the third place he tries, Slade Wilson finds him across the bar.

Slade lowers the bottle from his lips and neatly excuses himself from a conversation as he pulls a leather jacket around his shoulders without looking away from Dick.

“Getting a little warm for that weight,” Dick says on his approach, nodding at the old patches affixed to flannel lapels. Slade stares at him, taking stock of the heavy redness in his eyes and the teared-up plug of his voice.

“Let’s go.”

“Hold on, I wanted a—"

His hand closes on Dick’s shoulder, and resistance melts. “Let’s go."

Slade marches them a brisk two blocks before hassling Dick messily into an alley around the next corner. He pins Dick at eye level, yanking him up to his toes by the front of his shirt, and leans in until their noses are nearly touching.

“Am I supposed to be flattered,” he growls, “or were you just prepared to spit in my face with the next son of a bitch who came sniffing at the right angle?”

“I keep looking for approval in places I’m not supposed to find it.”

His voice wobbles. Slade watches him. Somehow, Dick keeps it together.

“And I get it,” he says, his mind going misty with the overwhelming presence and smell of him from here, “because that’s what I do. I only know how to be a fucking puppet.”

“. . . And why should a run-of-the-mill brat get whatever he wants? Just because he wants it?”

“I’m the furthest thing from run-of-the-mill and you know it.”

Slade grips him by the chin with the hand not holding him up and shoves a rude thumb into his mouth. Dick closes his lips around it and lets Slade watch.

“You want it, too,” he says cleanly around the invasion.

“You remind me of someone.” Slade’s thumb counts along the molar ridge of Dick’s gums. “Call it nostalgia.”

Guiding Slade by the wrist, his fingers skidding along ropy tendons, Dick drags the wide pad of Slade’s thumb to the tip of his tongue and lets Slade be the one to pull it free in slow, half-conscious process.

//

He couldn’t look away for two whole minutes when he saw his own name at the top of the casting sheet. It probably came off like vanity, but Dick had no room left in him to care.

His audition for that season had been a mess, and everyone knew it. Depending on who told it, Dick Grayson was either hungover, had tried DP for the first(?) time the night prior, stumbled in strung out, coked out, pissed off, or had just gotten lazy. Pick a card, any card.

The truth of it was Dick Grayson, nervous for the first time in his life and unsure of where to step next. He’d been pinned down by the barrel of a master’s greatest run of roles staring him straight between the eyes, no longer the uninjured body and sure to come short of what was promised to him—

I want to dance that season someday, offhandedly during a private lesson once, all his fault, your Russes from the 70s.

Really?

Yeah. It’s cool. I feel like I’d be good at it. 

Would you call yourself Robin, too?

If I was being paid enough, maybe.

“You did very well.”

A hand on his shoulder, and everyone watching. Dick couldn’t turn around and only kept staring at his name tattooed in that tidy all-caps marker penmanship as unreadable in its tone as the voice through which it barks combination after combination, clap, clap, five-and-six, and so rarely metes true praise like that . . . but it was a farce. A gift. One last shove to convince a beloved broken toy to move properly again.

Dick had gone home, rented Good Will Hunting, and wept like a shithead through the whole third act.

The next morning came the fragile blessing of Monday. As Dick pushed open his window to put out the plate of his toast crusts for the pigeon, he thumbed away junk notifications until finally the single real message slid into view:

B
I am hiring you PT. No one has to know, and no cost to you. You will be magnificent.

//

“Tell me about him.”

“Who?”

“The person I remind you of.”

Slade watches Dick as the door falls shut. His apartment remains in the dark around them, a tall window letting in the moon from over the water.

“You really wanna know?”

“Would it implicate you in anything?”

Slade sniffs. In the blade of a shadow bisecting his face, sighted eye bright, Dick thrills at the twitch of his smile.

“I went on shore leave in Scandinavia, once. Made nice with a few merchant marine from France, one of them could bend like nobody’s business. Said he grew up in the circus.”

Dick takes a step back with each one of Slade’s toward him, and only stops when the smooth edge of a newspaper-cluttered breakfast table meets the backs of his legs.

“He taught me how to say it the way he did to the girls who hung out the windows across the street from the place I stayed.” Slade crowds him until Dick sits and spreads his knees to accommodate Slade’s waist between them. Headlines rustle beneath his thighs. “Princesse."

“You took him home?” Dick asks lightly, all air, no grounding left in him for the way Slade looks past every barrier he makes to cut straight to what Dick knows he wants, but doesn’t bother asking for.

“Oh, I took him home. Hardly let him leave once I had him prone, couldn’t get enough.”

“You said he was French?”

“Very.”

“How do I measure up,” Dick asks, dragging his heels down the backs of Slade’s shins as if resuming after all the in-between what they had started in the basement, “bendability-wise?”

“Spitting fuckin’ image.”

Dick lets his eyes fall shut and gives over to the guiding pressure of Slade’s hand flat against his chest, compelling, tending him down to his back. His heart drives eagerly at his ribs beneath it.

“I should be jealous,” he says to the ceiling flashed with the long warp of the window’s edge in silver light.

“You really shouldn’t.”

“He was French,” Dick says with meaning.

“And you’re human,” Slade says to the cords of Dick’s neck through a wet, open-mouthed drag. Dick goes slack and easy as Slade nuzzles curiously at his ear. A sound escapes him, half-laughter.

“Noisy,” Slade whispers.

“Sensitive.”

“Preaching to the corpse.”

Dick laughs, but chokes it down into a heedless whine when Slade’s hands drag up his waist and hold him there, firmly fixed in allowing him control of a long, filthy kiss.

“Princesse," Slade tries again, just at the break of their lips, and grins to feel the bone-deep shudder which racks Dick into unsettled overdrive.

“Please.”

“Please what?” Leaning back only enough to push Dick’s shirt out of the way, Slade kneads and plucks at Dick’s nipples with a delicacy unbelonging to his manner on the bench.

“I—" What, though? Dick is always pleading for something, but rarely ever knows. Steam, meet engine. He tosses his head, and Slade catches him like he understands; gets a hand in Dick’s hair, pulls just enough to tug but not sting, and holds him down with one cheek to the table.

He’s miserably hard in his joggers and wishes he could speak. They haven’t even taken off their shoes. Slade’s jacket still smells like the bar.

“Please,” Slade whispers at the height of Dick’s cheekbone, “what?”

“Tell me I’m good,” Dick begs, all wet, and stares at an unfinished crossword just past the focus of his eyes: six across, Common nickname for man’s best friend, four letters. His vision blurs.

“Oh.” Slade lulls him with a soft shh, unbitter and clean of any irony. “Good?” He pets at Dick’s hair, smoothing it back along his temple, and deftly tucks the longer waves behind his ear. “You’re not good, Dick.”

He’s crying the soft, silent kind of tears he perfected the first month he had to share a room with other people at summer training. Slade hushes him again, petting his hair, holding him down.

“Good is a fucking lie. That’s not the goal and you know it. You’re here because you want to be.”

“I—”

“You do, because you’re smart and you know what you need. What do you need, Dick?”

“I need you to want me,” Dick bawls, as if the words had been trying the whole time instead of bursting fully-formed from his brain.

“Oh, that I do. Don’t you worry.” Slade’s eyes on him crawl with the same deft heat of his hands. “Try again. What. Do. You. Need?"

Words are gone. Dick gives over to the inherent hilarity of being so thoroughly served in one fistful everything he has ever dreamed of having done to him, opens his mouth with a wail, and comes heavy in his jock belt.

He trembles the whole way through. The table creaks gently beneath them. As he bucks sweetly against the hold grown tight and needy in his hair, Dick scatters the papers beneath him.

When he can see again, Slade is staring down at Dick with a hunger only barely begun with being sated. “You,” he says with gravel in it, “are fucking magnificent.”

//

Finished up in full costume, Dick haunts the catwalk and collects himself well apart from the rest of the stage before curtain. The gathering audience is misty behind the pre-show scrim painted with its untouched wilderness.

He woke that morning in Slade’s wide, lofted bed after two full days of convalescent quietude, fucked stupid and back and resettled in some deep, long-untouched hollow of himself as a result. His phone has been turned off since after final dress, and he deleted every pending message without looking this morning while waiting on the subway platform by the wharf.

Footsteps approach up the narrow metal stairs. Dick bristles, but forces himself calm at the sight of Bruce. First come first serve to solitude in this, the most peaceful place amid pre-show humdrum.

“I’m sorry it’s taken me such a long time to accept that we’re two different people.”

Dick doesn’t look at him. “I hate the way you apologize.

Instead, he watches a particularly well-dressed couple find their seats in the middle of the orchestra rows. Mildly, Dick wonders after how they look when they’re fucking.

“How does your leg fe—”

“The nerve let go, didn’t I tell you? It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“. . . Good.” Bruce closes a hand on the catwalk rail apart from Dick’s own lean. He tries to pass it off as casual, but Dick sees his grip going white. “The other day, did he—"

“That’s nothing you need to be—"

“Will you stop interrupting me."

Bruce softens immediately, so gratifyingly guilty Dick can’t even be sore at his snapping.

“I was going to fire him, if.”

Dick lets him stall, deflated, before shrugging one shoulder. “I’m an adult, Bruce.”

They stare into the house together for a while. In his periphery, Bruce’s knuckles relax.

“Watch yourself around others,” Bruce says, peering up into the guts of the lighting rigs. “That’s all.”

“I’m careful.”

“You have a spirit that can’t be replicated. Some people don’t know how to handle that.” Bruce’s hand slides over, and Dick thinks of removing himself again but allows it to land on his wrist. “You know yourself best.”

“‘Start with what you know.’”

Stung, Bruce lets go of him and turns for the opposite wing without looking back. “Places in five.”

“In boca, old man,” Dick calls after him, and watches him go.

He shuts his eyes and bathes in the dull roar of a milling crowd growing like white mold around him. Past it, if he listens closely enough, lies the clarity of feeling like a talisman; a candy in the cheek; a rope to hold fast against a churning shore meets him: The final act, a bridge of hands beneath him, every one of them firm and endlessly knowing of his body’s next move and lifting him relentlessly into the brief infinity of flight.