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The stone floor isn't so far away now, in the rub of cold tile on Dick's skin. Smooth as the texture he'd brushed against in the Batcave, face-down on epoxy-slick rock. Only difference is there's no more blood. He took a wet rag to his face earlier and cleaned the evidence clear so that the swelling is what remains. A purpling bruise keeps it company, pain thrumming in pulse-flutter pulse-flutter beats where Bruce has his fingers pressed to it. No gloves between them to stem the ache of raw touch. Zing! He flinches. So reactive. So…
"Easy," comes the directive, a trainer's voice -- the voice that casts Dick in the role of a bred-in-captivity owl being taught to understand its boundaries. A finger drifts to his jawline, probing for a fracture. Dick swallows down a wince and his Adam's apple bobs. "Not broken," is the verdict. Delivered with enough conviction that Dick has to believe it, an echo of You were supposed to be one, too.
"Get in the tub." Dick does. He sits halfway up with an arm behind him to steady himself. Just like in the Cave, only– a half-hearted facsimile of it, a false reproduction. Bruce isn't quite kneeling. He's looming in that characteristic way of his, hair gel locking his short tousled waves in place against gravity. And he’s wearing a full set of those workout clothes Dick sometimes borrows when he can’t find his spares, biceps tugging at a familiar grey track-zip, quads hugging matching sweatpants. He’s not naked, like Dick. Not exposed. Always with a form of defense against him, when Dick has none.
Dick looks to him anyway, like always. Awaiting a decree, or a moment where his words fit, slip into the conversation as easy as the water taking refuge from the waterfall spout laves his body. Bruce has cork-stoppered the fleeting flow of honesty there was between them in the Cave. Each phrase as laconic as the last, there’s no room for Dick to speak at will. Neither is there room for him to be terse. He stares at the back of his hand, obscured by the current of bubbling in the tub, and then back at Bruce.
Bruce meets his eyes with an inquisitive glance. “Dick.”
“Bruce. I–” He falters. What is he supposed to say, in this situation? He could be honest. He could say something earnest like, ‘Sorry I was meant to be an agent of your demise, I didn’t know.’ Something nonchalant: ‘I was just going home, I didn’t mean to freak out on you.’ He could make a joke: ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have wasted my vacation days at Arkham.’ He could say anything witty to make it all worth his while, if he weren’t reeling, if he weren’t thinking about that tell-tale doubt. If the water weren’t inexplicably purifying the jumble of thoughts in him into a nothingness deep enough he just barely can’t reach out to the bottom to lift the residue. There’s hardly a drop left for him to alchemize into a product gold and gleaming, worthy of proffering in apology or explanation. So his hand is forced into desperation, into a guttural, incoherent, “Bruce.”
It’s not meant to sound chastising. He didn’t mean to – push a boundary. Again. He’s trying to keep his feelings to himself, or he was. But it must sound – echo – with a ring Bruce doesn’t want it to, because his face turns all pinched and guilty. Remorseful.
“You feel like you don’t get to choose.” Lathered-soap hands reach out to massage his scalp. “You think I’m doubting you.”
A popped-bubble breath hikes its way up high into Dick’s lungs. “You do, don’t you. Doubt me. You limit my options so I have the illusion of choice. You don’t think I can choose.”
“I don’t.” Bruce doesn’t specify what he doesn’t think, doesn’t believe, doesn’t… whatever. He washes behind Dick’s ear. Methodical in the way that means he’s thinking about how exactly he’s supposed to say the words curled around his tongue. It could be ‘I don’t think you can choose’ that unfurls itself from his palate, or ‘I don’t doubt you’, or something else entirely. After years of knowing the man, Dick still can’t be sure.
“That tickles,” he says in interlude. Bruce sneaks his hand away from the back of his neck to his shoulder. Hums an affirmative. Not unlike how he hummed the lyrics to Row, Row, Row Your Boat with his cuff-links pinned back to his sleeve garters and his back hunched over a shaking Dick in the tub, the very night that marked one year to the day his parents died in their act.
Two minutes pass, marked by the discarded watch he gives cursory glances to as he did all those years ago. “I don’t think you’re wrong,” comes the admission at last, and this, Dick can’t believe. The idea of betrayal glints in his minds-eye. This, too, another item on his list of what Bruce doesn’t understand.
“That’s not true. Or else, I wouldn’t be here, like this. You’re– taking pity on me. I don’t know. But you’re not–” most definitely not “ – letting me choose.”
Shrewd blue eyes bright as the days Dick rarely remembers for the nights he’s learned to thrive in level him with a careful look. “I don’t think I misunderstood you. You said ‘we are who we choose to be.’ But beyond that, ‘choice’ itself implies a line of reasoning based on our own free will. We choose what we do. We choose one action over another in order to clarify ourselves. I cannot make choices for you. Ergo, I cannot limit your will.”
A hand snakes down to brush Dick’s bangs out of his eyes and he stays it, clasping onto Bruce’s wrist. “Have you ever,” he breathes, a little harsh because he’s had a version of this conversation in his head a thousand times and it never fails to frustrate him, “considered that choice exists as the junction between wills? That I chose my path because I crossed yours, and I want to choose again, but – you won’t let me.”
“I won’t let you.” The tone is deadpan. Bruce’s lips parting in a subtle arcing O is the sole symptom of his surprise.
“Yes.”
Bruce’s lips twitch downward, now, into a frown. His wrist turns a fraction of an inch in Dick’s grasp. It looks to him like a reversal of that day in Arkham, how his wrists had then been locked in the grip of Batman’s gloves, the momentum weaponized through his body, the conduit. A beacon for their act of trust. “Explain to me how that’s true.”
Don’t shake, just breathe, you can do it, Dick. He steels himself, preparing his body, the weapon, for the words he’s dreamt of articulating all this time. “You won’t let me, because my choice would mean you letting me in.”
“Tell me what you’re trying to say,” that voice quivers. Bruce is understanding, putting together the puzzle pieces Dick has strewn out of his heart’s Pandora box on a whim. A box never meant to be open, beaming with its ugly face. Maybe it shifts him like the E.M.P.s do. Maybe it’s nothing, or maybe, it’s the wisp of a hazardous thought, as dangerous as if the Court’s plans for him had materialized.
His eyes water. What choice does he have but to show that ugly face of his, singular as it is? “You don’t know how awful it is. What I’m going through.”
“Tell me, chum. Don’t hide.”
Those fingers – they tilt his face closer to the light washing from above, all the better to peer at. To expose him, to make him more naked than he already is. And Dick – all Dick can do is accept it.
“You don’t know how… how I want you.” The words are tacky on his tongue, dipped in the bittersweet syrup of acknowledgment. “How I need to be at your side. I mean, sometimes it’s demeaning, being at your beck and call. Mostly, I crave it. I need it. And I – you were – missing, possibly dead, and then you come back and you – you isolate yourself from me. Again. You keep me away, even from the vestiges of what happiness I know I can’t have. You were so good with me when my parents died, but you don’t seem to get the gravitas of what it would mean to me if you died. How the world would stop spinning. That thought came to me one night, and it filled me up with fluid until I was anchored in an ocean of regret I couldn’t remember setting sail for. But it must’ve been there all along, because now – I can’t do it. I can’t go without telling you. I can’t…” His body sinks lower in the tub. The hand on Bruce’s left wrist loosens to cover his face, to hide some of the shame curdling as bile in his throat.
Bruce’s gaze lowers. His fingers loosen around Dick’s jaw. It throbs with the change in pressure. Not broken, but bruised. A shade of the mottling color his heart will soon be. He knew this would happen. It’s always when he’s most vulnerable, with Bruce. And doesn’t he do that to himself? He’s still here, still wearing his threadbare heart on his goddamn sleeve after years, it’s been years, he wants to rip it off like an iron-on patch with his hands – which he could do, if Bruce is going to doubt him, doubt his choices, he wouldn't go the way of dear great-grandfather William Cobb but he could… he could… prevent himself from being miserable, vulnerable, shored up in a bathtub naked under Bruce’s critical eye, Bruce who’s mouthing, in blurry periphery….
“Dick. Dick. Listen to me.”
The fog clears. Bruce is holding both his hands in his own, staring into him with a rare intensity that’s not fondness and not expectation but a new emotion. Dick remembers berating him earlier, calling him out for protecting himself from needing to have a damn human emotion. But it looks so wrong, to be scrutinized in the here and now by the arrival of said emotion, that he feels a stray tear threatening to dot his eye.
“Can you hear me?” Bruce asks. Dick nods.
The stare intensifies. “I only need you to let me know one thing, Dick. Honest.”
Dick nods again.
“Is this your choice?”
Dick nods a third time. That’s the charm – Bruce relaxes. A thing as incredible succeeds it. He leans in, hands situating Dick so his back is to the basin of the tub in a slosh of water. His lips, plush as a nostalgic and comforting memory like Zitka, slot over Dick’s own. They kiss gently for several moments that have the edges of reality Etch-A-Sketched away into something infinite, if he cares to squint.
When they part, Dick is stunned, eyes wide as a cat’s. In reverb of Bruce’s words, he whispers, “What are you trying to say?”
Bruce answers, simply, “I’m choosing.”
One motion, smoother than the tiles at his back, has the hand that sent him careening to the Cave’s floor buoyed in his hair, encouraging him to align his gaze with Bruce’s. Gentler still than their first kiss, a puff of air ghosts his nose where Bruce angles his face to plunder his lips, searching patiently for treasure in the deep ocean Dick has surrendered to him.
But he’s so – needy, he – he needs more than this. The ugly face inscribed with its grave sins of desire wants more. It has Dick clawing at Bruce with slippery hands, urging him, pleasepleasepleasecanyoutakeme?
So Bruce gives him more, feeds the ugly face its due, leaning as far over the rim of the tub as he can without falling in, caging Dick between his forearms so the back of his head hits the tile and he becomes but prey, bird-to-bat-to-bird and back again the count of their score. It’s not not enough, but he aches something awful in his mouth, and it could be that Bruce sucking on his tongue puts pressure on the tooth he knocked out (a wisdom tooth, no less), but it also could not be that. It could be the monster in his sternum crawling up the long well his throat feels like, searching for its next bit of satiety; it could be the ugly face lodged somewhere beside it, begging still to be taken, to be desired. Who is Dick to deny a monster he created its hunger? And who is he to turn his face from respite?
“Bruce,” he draws out, a single long, yearning call looped around the gaping wound where his tooth once was. “Please, can you–”
“Easy,” Bruce shushes, long eyelashes fluttering near to the nape of Dick’s neck, at the crossroads between his jaw and the spot where Dick knows somewhere inside him there lies a nerve, a nerve that can’t sing with pleasure like the ones that’d light up if Bruce just listened, but a nerve all the same, and a part of him besides. Bruce marks there, and he lowers, teasing.
“Bruce,” he pleads. His voice cracks. “I need you to take me.”
Tongue against his skin, lighter than before. A put-upon sigh so fake Dick would crack a wry grin, if not for the chorus of pleasepleasepleasecanyoutakeme, IneedIneedIneed burning in his core.
“Out.” Bruce orders, gesturing to the mat in front of the tub, but he coaxes Dick’s body out of the bath himself, grip strong as shivers shake Dick through until he’s picked clean to the bone far past vulnerability into sheer delight. This is happening. This is – he needs, he wants. This is –
Bruce wraps Dick in a towel perfunctorily, patting him dry with efficiency. He makes a confused noise, to which Bruce leans in close, the zipper on his jacket cold against his navel. “Don’t worry. I’m going to take you,” he murmurs into Dick’s ear. “But I want you to see.”
See what? Dick wonders, a thought clear as a bell through the haze of pleasetake and Ineed stringing ‘twixt one tin-can ear and the other.
He’s led to the low storage counter positioned center stage in the corner of the expansive bathroom, flanked by full-length mirrors at the sides. The mirrors, he doesn’t notice at first. Pressed into the countertop, the flesh of his ass imprinted on its edge, he’s busy feeling how naked he is anew, his bare erection a sore temptation to rut against the promising dent in Bruce’s sweatpants. But Bruce turns Dick’s head with one firm hand, once to the right and once to the left, and makes him look. The undercurrent within him thrums louder.
“Sweetheart, what do you see?” Bruce questions. His thumb and forefinger come together to pinch the little bit of skin at Dick’s hip, delicate as he’d handled the implant tooth he punched out of Dick’s mouth.
“I see you and me. Hungry.” Mirror-Dick mouths the words to the tune of the vocal, like the sound comes first before the action. His bare neck is a Doric pillar, sturdy and absent decoration; it meets his shoulders in a swell of entasis, as enticing as aesthetic.
“It’s more than that, surely,” Mirror-Bruce smiles into the skin on display. His slim, down-turned nose buries itself near Dick’s collarbone, and makes of them a curious statue. “Starving. For better or worse.”
Gaze skirting from Mirror-Bruce to real-Bruce before him, Dick sighs into the nascent curls tickling his neck, brushing above where Bruce suckles a bite on him. His shuddery moan almost cuts off the words Bruce whispers – but not quite.
The hand settled on his hip adjusts to fondle his jaw, applying different ranges of pressure to the inflamed mark of altercation. “I want you to look, Dick. If we’re going to do this, I need you to see. Properly, now.” His thumb in the hollow of his jaw-hinge prompts Dick to seek out the wall of mirrors on the right hand side of the room. “Can you stay like that for me?”
“Yes,” Dick whispers. His cheek lies cool on quartz, the other, bruised one left for inspection as Bruce undresses.
First, the hoodie: the zipper slides down until the pull comes away from the retainer box with a kacherk. Then, the sweatpants, limbs tugged free from each pant-leg and discarded in a heap with the hoodie. Bruce stands in his old-fashioned boxers, unbuttoning the button fly to release his cock from the fabric without taking the boxers off altogether. Another armor, another barrier between them.
“C’mon, Bruce,” he pleads, capturing the rapt attention of Mirror-Bruce. “Not like that.”
A moment of hesitation. Bruce doesn't like the thought of total vulnerability. But he hooks his thumbs under the waistband and shimmies his boxers off his body into the heap of clothes, reaching into a drawer below Dick to uncap a bottle of lube and spread it thick over his ass in smears.
Finally.
One finger prods at his entrance, circling muscle. Familiarizing him with the touch. Another finger spreads his hole for leverage, so that Bruce can slip the edge of his thumb in just past the nail to knuckle.
“Don’t be a tease,” Dick groans.
Bruce fits in his index finger, hooking the end to push the fleshy spot that has his toes curling. Another finger, and Dick is panting, watching Mirror-Bruce piston all three in and out. His expression is determined. Single-minded as if he’s working on a case rather than dismantling Dick for spare parts.
His hips buck up, it’s good, this is – this is a string inside him vibrating on a pleasure-harp. A cry falls from his lips, a curving bit of passion that’s positively seductive on Mirror-Dick. Mirror-Bruce stays his hips with wet-dry grip, two hands anchored on either side of his hip-bones.
A packet rips. He can’t see what he’s supposed to make of its metallic reflection, but if it’s a condom, so help him, he’s not going to stand for it. It won’t feel real if there’s one more wall between them, he knows. “Jesus, Bruce. Just once, don’t–”
“I’m not,” Bruce rumbles. “This has to be the real deal.”
“Then what’re you–?”
“Open your mouth.”
It’s as the old adage goes: you say jump and I’ll ask how high. Dick opens his mouth. No complaints. A bit of gauze teases his tongue. He understands from Mirror-Bruce’s body language what he’s supposed to do, so he latches onto the finger offered him, sucking lightly at the tip. Mint floods his mouth in stages where Bruce’s finger works at his teeth, creeping to the absent wisdom tooth and the nerves underneath it that pulse faintly.
“Owshh,” Dick half-mutters half-slurs, drool pooling at the corners of his mouth. Bruce doesn’t stop poking at his lack-of-tooth nub, stimulating the pain there like he had the bruise.
“Shh, Dick. You need a distraction.” Mirror-Bruce pets his hair. The gloves protect his hands so his naked grasp is soft even without water to temper it. His buttersilk lips graze his temple in apology, a stark contrast to the aches penetrating his face, his chest, his mouth, his ass. “I’m a little bigger than you think.”
There’s no way, Dick thinks. There’s no way it’ll feel any different from the toys he’s tried out, the dildos and vibrators and plugs he’s employed to keep himself from running on empty. Bruce’s cockhead at his rim, leaking and slick like the lube, tells him so, idling innocently at the cleft of his cheeks. Playing up the fantasy.
It’s oh-so-different when the tip pops in. One inch, two, three, four, five stretch him far enough so that his eyes water. Vision blurs a little. Mirror-Bruce’s eyes flutter shut in fractals, and his head sinks low to Mirror-Dick’s shoulder, arms wrapped around his torso.
“God, Dick. You’re doing well. Opening up for me. Can you take a little more?”
Dick murmurs a yes around Bruce’s finger in his pleasure-pain haze, torn between struggling to take more of Bruce’s cock – not just thick, but longer than what he’s used to – and losing himself entirely to subspace, to how sated and desired it makes him feel to be full. Bruce takes the sign to sink a little deeper, and deeper still, until his balls are a flush weight against Dick and they are joined together entirely, nothing left to keep them apart.
His bottom teeth scrape on the finger toothbrush, nipping lightly at Bruce’s skin. He has to communicate in sounds and signs now, touch and primal instinct. His mind is jumbled, not bad, not conflicted, just good. Just feeling. Feeling him and Bruce together. The stuff of dreams for him, really. Countless wet-dreams had in the dead of night and daydreams indulged in his free hours at work; they’ve culminated into this moment, Mirror-Bruce and Mirror-Dick and Dick and Bruce tied as one in echoing sights, sounds, touches. He nips again when Bruce doesn’t do anything but sigh into his skin, kissing at his neck and collarbone. The nip means ‘It’s okay, you can move.’ Maybe if he were feeling more impatient it would mean ‘Move, damnit.’ It doesn’t. He’s not impatient. He’s high as hell on his feelings.
Mirror-Bruce thumbs his jaw, the bruised side, once before he telegraphs a long glance with real love in it into Mirror-Dick’s eyes. “Watch close, Dickie,” he warns, as if there’s the danger of Dick looking away from something so breathtaking as the sight of them here and now. “I want you to know this is real. This is proof.”
If Dick could speak at all, he’d laugh and tell Bruce not to hold out on him. Instead he groans, both appreciative and wanting, his lips a starfish sucker on the leeching mint flavor and Bruce’s finger underneath it. He likes real. He likes Bruce popping the cork-stopper on his fountain of truth and his heart. He likes the physicality and the warmth and… Oh fuck, this is real. They’re chest to chest. Skin to skin. Another nip and Bruce gets the message, because they don’t need words. Not really.
They don’t need words to move together in gentle strokes. They don’t need words at all. It’s the image of them that’s indelible, as Batman and Robin, as Batman and Nightwing, as Bruce and Dick. It’s the image he’ll remember, reflected onto his retina, chanelled through the mirrors. It’ll be the image he thinks of, replays when he’s alone. It’s the image that spells promise, same as the act itself.
If next time – and there will be a next time if Bruce is balls-deep in him without a condom – they fuck with Dick face-down on the epoxy-shine floors in the Cave, will he see himself reflected in them all the same? Will he see the evidence of his desire clear and consummate? Will he look pretty and debauched and right at home in Bruce’s arms as he does in this moment, or will he look like a thing to be punished for a future that never occurred? For Talon. For whatever else is out there.
He doesn’t know, but this is real. He sees it, sees them. Bruce’s body close to his, in the flesh and in the mirror. Tousled hair coming undone as his hips roll faster, as he chases the monster out of Dick’s chest and makes a beautiful honest thing of the two of them. The near soundless stutter twitching his lips as his orgasm approaches and one hand fucks Dick’s mouth on his fingers as the other jerks at Dick’s erection in the rhythm he shouldn’t know Dick likes best, brutal want crowned by the thoughtful gesture of his sweetest dreams. The satisfied slump of his shoulders, cum and sweat sticking them together in a mass of heaving chests.
The glow alight in his eyes, peering out of his fringe to grace Dick with a featherlight peck to his forehead.
He sees it all. He’ll remember it all, and hope to make more memories, memories that set him aloft the way he captures Bruce’s mouth with his own, the way he tilts his head so he can look for a change. So he can witness what a good thing this is for himself.
Memories that’ll last him past the aftercare, past the wonders of skipping patrol to lie in bed, past the morning and far into the future of whatever it is they are, whatever it is they’re becoming. Memories that will remind him of his choice to pursue this, pursue them. Dick & Bruce, Bruce & Dick.