Chapter Text
V.
“You’re Richard Grayson?” one of the new uniforms asked. She gave Dick an incredulous once-over. “Ward of Brucie Wayne, billionaire next door? Why the f*ck are you here?”
Dick had laughed at and deflected similar comments ever since he joined the Blüdhaven Police Department almost a year ago, but he was short on caffeine and sleep, so his response lagged behind his partner Amy Rohrbach, who drily contributed, “why aren’t you in university is what I want to know.”
Dick groaned, rising from his desk toward the finicky coffee machine. “You can’t get rid of me that easy, Ames.”
“You’ve got money and brains, Grayson,” Amy argued, following him. “I’ve never had a partner with that winning combo before.”
“Ex-ward.”
“What?”
“I’m not Bruce’s ward anymore,” Dick said over the hiss of boiling water. “Ergo, no more money. The brains are debatable.”
Amy snorted. “Don’t bring that up with Redhorn.” Dick’s new partner reminded him of his partners on the Justice League, on the Titans. He could pick up the faint, carefully concealed concern in her voice as she pushed brusquely on, “You could get scholarships. Lord knows that’s what my kids are getting with my salary.”
“Please don’t mom me. Thank Superman.” The moment dark liquid stopped filtering into the pot, Dick poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it straight, the liquid too hot but the bitter grounds and jolt of caffeine so good.
There were other ways in which Amy resembled the superheroes Dick knew, and they unsettled him instead of comforting him. When she surveyed his slouched form, his too large uniform, it was like she could see the injuries he’d acquired last night hurtling through a window and earning a shallow stab wound in his upper thigh for his troubles.
Dick should be pleased that there were cops like her in BPD. It would mean after he cleaned out the corrupt ones, there would be trustworthy, well-meaning individuals to rise to the occasion.
But he didn’t like Amy’s efforts to discern his other occupation.
“You’re tough,” Amy allowed suddenly, surprising Dick. He gulped down his coffee too fast. “And you’re smart. Doesn’t matter if you’re poor. Don’t think I’m not relieved I got stuck with you instead of some kid who just wanted to wave around a gun. But you could do good outside of the uniform, too.”
“I know,” Dick said earnestly. He really did.
That seemed to anger Amy instead of appease her. “Then, get a f*cking education! Go to university without Wayne’s money instead of dealing with assignments way over your pay grade, like the cartel and crazy vigilantes like Nightwing–”
“I gotta get that evidence into storage,” Dick said, not at all smoothly, but he’d learned that it was more effective to cut off Amy instead of reason with her when they both knew she was right.
Despite what he refused to tell her, Dick realized his role at BPD was temporary. As Robin, he’d developed a sense for when people were on his tail. He could tell that Amy was on Nightwing’s, and soon enough, she’d close in on Dick Grayson, too. He was partly impressed, partly resentful, and partly ignoring that impending reality.
Until that day, however, he would don both of his uniforms.
The beat cop blues and pilled slacks that earned him suspicious glances and outright attacks on his person in the streets–
And the blue-striped Kevlar that allowed him to fly and strike as Nightwing, Blüdhaven’s protector.
Though it was hard not to be tempted by Amy’s wisdom after nights of following up leads only to be blocked by cutthroat mercenaries and well-trained guards hellbent on protecting the identity of their client. Last night, Dick crawled back into his apartment through his window, woke up early to cake his bruises with make-up, and slogged through the fatigue and aches to the station because one more absence and he was, according to Redhorn, out on his ass.
Dick knew solo work was difficult. Almost impossible. If Batman deigned to work with a partner, the odds were well stacked against him.
Still, he wasn’t as isolated as he’d been last year. With no more terrible secrets his friends could plainly discover, Dick made trips to the new Titans Tower and helped train the new team members. Occasionally, he exchanged friendly if tenuous greetings with Clark and Diana when their paths crossed outside the Watchtower. Both were no doubt aware of his fallout with Bruce without understanding the entirety of its nature, but they continued to support Dick from a distance, Diana with her immortal compassion for flawed humankind and Clark with some amusem*nt at Dick’s new moniker, inspired by the myth of the famous Kryptonian refugee.
He hadn’t seen Bruce Wayne or Batman since he arrived in Blüdhaven.
He told himself that was fine, not another whipcord to flagellate himself with alongside the empty spot on his nightstand where the urn used to sit. He’d scattered the ashes over the Pacific when he healed enough to make the distance.
Nightwing could survive and overcome the trials of Gotham’s sister city without the Bat’s assistance. Especially without his new Robin’s.
But crime was a tide that was sometimes contained within one city’s borders and at other times spilled out into its neighbor’s, the ripple effect threatening to dissolve all order and stability.
Disregarding Amy’s advice, Dick put on his other mask and rode his motorcycle to the docks on the edge of the bay, where the line between Gotham and Blüdhaven was thinnest. He knew this was where he’d find the latest shipment; if he could just trace the drugs to one shadowy kingpin in his city–
“Holy sh*t!”
He sounded older than the first time Dick heard his voice, but it was the same boy:
Robin.
Dick watched the teenage hero, dressed almost identically to his Robin, descend onto a mountain of paid muscle and subdue him with a few well-placed kicks.
Dick knew all about him: Jason Todd, omega orphan from Crime Alley, apprehended by Batman when he stole the tires off the Batmobile. In any other circ*mstance, that information would have made Dick howl with laughter. And Jason was good. Rough, somewhat awkward with a fourteen-year-old’s gangliness, but he was a strong fighter, a decent strategist, and a staunch survivor.
Dick hated him.
“Didn’t expect to see you here,” Jason said, whistling as he circled around Dick. His motions reminded Dick of a curious songbird. A cautious scavenger. “The old man’s gonna be pissed.”
Jason knew about him, too. Of course he did. Batman not bringing him up to speed would have been a grave tactical error.
There were many ways Dick could have replied. He went with the first thing that came to his mind when he heard Jason approach:
“Language, Robin.”
Behind his mask, Jason’s eyes widened in shock, and then they narrowed. His petulance was something fierce.
“f*ck you, Dickiebird,” he said, puffing his chest, the letter R gleaming under the moonlight.
Something roiled in Dick.
There was a flash of movement from his peripherals, Jason going on edge, but Dick beat him to it with a backward thrust of his escrima stick. A scream tore through the air on crackles of electricity, followed by the strong odor of melting polyester and burning flesh.
Jason looked nervous, admiring, and envious all at once.
Flicking his deactivated weapon beside his hip, Dick told Jason, “No names in the field, Little Wing.”
Jason startled, and then flushed so darkly it was visible beneath his mask and the duskiness of twilight. He gritted his teeth, apoplectic with rage. How Bruce had found himself in the predicament of picking up another highly expressive child Dick didn’t know. It appeared that he needed something to balance out his own repressed humanity.
It was haunting, seeing Jason as Robin suddenly still and turn toward the shadows. Perhaps just as much as Dick also picking up the almost indecipherable rustle of Batman’s cape on the wind.
In the maelstrom of emotion Dick expected to feel seeing Batman again, he hadn’t anticipated his body reminiscing on wanting Bruce and fighting alongside him; his mind recalling his determination to carve out his own path without looking back; and his heart remembering the love and betrayal.
“Robin,” Batman said. For a moment, Dick thought he was addressing him. His masked gaze was on Dick as far as he could tell. Then, Batman dropped chalky blocks of the very substances Dick was looking for into Jason’s hand. “Analyze these in the Cave.”
“Uh,” Jason said, “sure thing, boss–”
“That’s mine, B,” Dick bit out, charging forward.
Jason flinched, getting into a fighting position. Batman didn’t move.
“This isn’t your territory, Nightwing,” he said in a low, impassioned voice.
Robin isn’t your job anymore, Dick.
Dick pointed his escrima stick at the bay. “Gotham and Haven share this port. Which means this case is as much mine as it is yours.”
“We got here first, Goldie!” Jason argued, stepping toward Dick before Batman restrained him with an unyielding, pitch-black arm.
“You lack the equipment to analyze the drugs,” said Batman.
Dick scoffed. “You think I don’t have my own chem sets?”
“Whatever you built with your limited funds or are currently borrowing from the Titans without League permission–”
“I’ve been doing this on my own for a year–”
“You know the Cave is better equipped–”
“I know I’ll never see that evidence again if the Bat has it under lock and key–”
“Jesus f*cking Christ!” Jason shouted.
“Language, Robin,” Batman growled.
Glaring at Dick as if he’d telepathically communicated this admonition to Batman, Jason shot his grappling hook toward the nearest building and said, “I’m driving the Batmobile, bossman. You hash it out with Bluebird.”
Batman could have easily pursued Jason. He didn’t, staring at Dick as the engine of the Batmobile roared to life in the distance, followed by the clamor of it peeling through the rain-slick streets.
Dick realized that Batman wasn’t just looking at him. Behind his frosted lenses, he was scanning Dick from head to toe, analyzing the integrity of his new uniform, gauging the subtle favoring of his right leg, evaluating how the black-and-blue fiber intimately contoured his body. Seeing the ways he changed and stayed the same.
The charitable and insufferable part of Dick appreciated Bruce’s concern. The hard and logical part bristled under his judgment and the actions to contain Nightwing that Batman was no doubt formulating.
“I’m not doing this here,” Dick said, removing his own grappling hook from his belt. Batman didn’t move. Dick hesitated. “If you want to follow, be my guest. You have permission to enter Blüdhaven this one time.”
Batman wasn’t upset by the implication that he required Nightwing’s permission. Dick suspected before this when he didn’t find the caped crusader in the worst, most decayed parts of Blüdhaven that Batman established this rule for himself: to respect Dick’s agency by letting him protect his city on his own terms.
Or he simply didn’t care enough to help him anymore.
Dick flew to a highrise halfway between the bay and his apartment building. For once, as they surveyed the teeming city below, it wasn’t Dick who broke the silence:
“Not here,” Batman said, always contrary.
Dick was about to complain before he followed Batman’s sightline to his apartment complex. He let out a sharp, vexed laugh. “Of course you know where I live. You probably even know about the hideous color of the wallpaper. It’s not my fault. Landlord still won’t let me change it.”
“You were gone for a year,” Batman intervened, his voice hard.
“Longer than that,” Dick corrected, even though he knew that wasn’t what Batman– no, Bruce– meant.
“You left Gotham almost two years ago, and you’ve been in Blüdhaven for half that time.” Bruce loomed over Dick even though Dick had acquired more muscle to offset the way his body deteriorated right after the pregnancy. “Where were you?”
I followed Deathstroke across the Americas as he tried to teach me to kill, and I tried to forget about you; Slade didn’t kiss like you, not one bit, and I can only guess how he would’ve f*cked.
I discovered that you and I made a baby together, Bruce– a baby– and I got it killed halfway around the world because I couldn’t figure out who I was without Robin.
I was so lost, B.
“...Should be easy enough for you to figure out, Batman.”
Miraculously or perhaps not– Batman has always been highly attuned to Robin’s body language, Bruce to Dick’s– the intimidating aura diminished. Bruce almost appeared vulnerable. Worried. Hurt. “I thought you were dead.”
“Then, why didn’t you come looking for me?” Dick asked, letting his own woundedness bleed through.
Bruce said nothing.
He withdrew.
Anger and grief flared in Dick. “I know why. You were too busy training your new protégé.”
Bruce growled at the acid in Dick’s voice, always quick to self-defense. “That’s unrelated.”
Throwing his hands into the air as he paced the ledge of the highrise, Dick shouted, “You picking up another parentless omega after you kicked me out aren’t related to each other?”
“You left.”
“Keep telling yourself that, and maybe next time around, Jason will believe it–”
“No names in the field–”
“How long do you think he’ll last? A decade like I did before everything he knows and cares about is ripped away from him? More likely five years, based on the state of his training. Robin’s nothing without his acrobatics, and you are no expert gymnast–”
“That’s none of your concern, Nightwing,” Batman said coldly, using every scare tactic he had, every control measure he possessed. Only those never worked on Dick.
There was one more accusation– one awful, old, guilty transgression– that Dick could have lobbed at Bruce, breaking off things between them for good.
But it would be equally devastating for both parties. At this point, he didn’t think he’d recover.
Turning his back on Batman to face his city, Dick said, “I’ve got a case to solve. I’ll trust you to find your way back on your own.”
“This isn’t a solo mission,” Batman asserted.
Dick noticed he didn’t offer to help. To take Dick back to the Cave with him. “Too bad for me.”
If Batman was ready to argue further, he was interrupted by the faint static of Jason speaking over his comm link.
Dick took one step off the ledge, spread his arms wide, and fell.
While Dick predicted that his and Bruce’s relationship from here on out would always be haunted by Jason, he hadn’t realized his presence would be so physical or persistent.
“Not you!” Jason cried out in irritation as he lowered himself into the alley.
Dick echoed that sentiment to the n-teenth degree, glaring through his mask. “You’re the one who crossed into Haven,” he argued, even though he wanted nothing more than to retreat to his apartment.
“Whoops,” Jason said without a hint of remorse. He surveyed the scene: alphas lying facedown on the crimson-painted asphalt, their guns crushed into glistening fragments. The initial admiration he had displayed for Nightwing’s heroics was utterly absent in his methodical look. “I thought I heard someone in distress, and unlike the old man, I don’t have bat sonar for wherever you show up.”
You was spat venomously.
“This isn’t your city,” Dick replied with equal rancor.
“You and the Bat’s weird f*cking rules,” Jason hissed, kicking one of the unconscious alphas with vicious pleasure. His scowl at Dick took on an air of frustrated confusion. “What happened to you?”
Dick assumed Jason was referring to the way he’d gotten distracted during the fight, barely managed to subdue his attackers, and was crouched over himself like he was hiding a life-threatening injury. Jason didn’t have the faintest notion of the rest of it.
Dick wasn’t injured, but the nature of the pain radiating from his chest was grueling anyway.
Anxiety cut through the disdain on Jason’s masked face. It was a very Robin expression, care and conflict. “Maybe I should call B–”
“Don’t,” Dick commanded. Jason flinched, and the reflex to fight manifested in his twisted features. “It’s… an omega thing.”
“Oh,” Jason said, his aggression fading. The tips of his ears glowed so hot that Dick would have assumed he was an embarrassed young alpha had he not known the truth. “...heat stuff?”
“Yeah.”
In an indirect, roundabout way, it was true.
Right after the baby died, the milk came. In copious amounts. Dick’s skin stung as unbearable pressure built up in his chest. In the confines of his apartment, he expressed just to make it stop, but releasing the tension only encouraged his sore, trembling body to keep producing something the child he birthed would never drink. When his health dipped during the roughest phase of Nightwing’s initiation, he stopped lactating.
Then, Dick saw Bruce again, and the mess of hormones caused his chest to swell painfully tight, but he couldn’t coax out drops of breastmilk if he wanted the flow to cease. And he did.
It was a torment, an excruciating reminder.
With the stealth Dick knew Jason possessed but was unwilling to officially recognize, the teenage omega came up soundlessly beside him.
“Do you… need help getting back to wherever it is you go?” Jason sounded extremely uncomfortable. “I know you’re the prodigal son” –Dick winced, sincerely hoping Jason didn’t notice and that the boy had never told Bruce something similar– “but if you need an assist, Robin’s good at that.”
I know, Dick didn’t bark, because for the first time, he didn’t feel unadulterated resentment for the other Robin. “I’ll be fine on my own.”
Jason almost looked disappointed. He stepped back, his gloved hand falling to his grappling hook.
“Wait,” Dick said, and Jason froze. “If you really want to help” –Dick held a USB in the air– “you can de-encrypt this.”
Immediately, Jason scoffed, more in the nature of spirited competition than dismissal. Then, in the space of a second, his face warped with angry, monstrous suspicion.
Dick wondered if his moods had been liable to swing so violently when he was fourteen.
“I’m not trying to use you,” Dick promised, remembering where this boy came from. That thoughtless trust for him would have meant pain, humiliation, exploitation. “Look, I– Batman wasn’t completely off base when he said my version of the Cave is lacking.”
The admission stung, even if Dick obviously recognized that his one-bedroom would never compare to the Cave. Jason no longer appeared so merciless, which was some relief.
And Dick was out of other options. His pride wouldn’t let him run to Titans Tower after what Bruce said, and Barbara’s pride– righteous anger at him for dropping off the map, Dick admitted when he was lucid– meant his calls didn’t only go unanswered: they were impossible to place. It was truly impossible to contact someone you royally pissed off when they controlled the region’s technology.
Dick didn’t need Jason’s hostility on top of everything else, even if he was only willing to extend him a piece of tech and not his friendship. “I need this to help the people of Blüdhaven, Robin.”
This time, Jason didn’t seem moved by the appeal to his alter ego. “So this is about Batman’s mission.” He sounded remote, detached.
“My mission,” Dick argued idiotically, but his chest was so choked and tender it felt like a bed of bruises.
Jason crossed his arms. But– he plucked the USB from Dick’s fingers.
“Whatever.”
He leapt over Blüdhaven’s ruddy horizon.
When Dick never received the de-encryption, he hated Jason, himself, and Bruce all over again.
A month later, the flow of milk ceased.
When Dick saw Jason again, it was snowing, and Robin was bleeding out on the top of an old, graystone building.
Nightwing hadn’t been looking for Robin or Batman while intruding in Gotham. His intention was to get in and out as quickly as possible, not because he particularly cared about incurring the wrath of the city’s protectors, but because Nightwing and Officer Grayson were running out of time.
Amy was putting the pieces together. Maybe her entreaties that he go back to school– a mistake he’d never repeat after Hudson University and the business major he’d pursued because he was eighteen and madly in love with Bruce– were to prevent her placing him in handcuffs and one of BPD’s tiny cells.
If Dick made a breakthrough, he might convince Amy that Nightwing wasn’t a threat to Blüdhaven.
That Officer Grayson wasn’t endangering what little good existed in the BPD.
That Dick had a place in the Haven, because he certainly didn’t in Gotham.
He wasn’t returning because he wanted to.
As he soared over the skyline, determined not to reminisce on similar escapades through Gotham’s atmosphere, he spotted the familiar Grayson family colors. They lay atop an eerily still figure, their blood staining the snow.
Dick landed sharply. He nearly plummeted from the sky.
For a second, he hadn’t seen Jason. He saw himself. His parents. Then, he remembered who this boy was.
Still, he checked Bruce’s student’s vitals. He wasn’t responsive, but had a pulse and steady breathing. He didn’t appear to be drugged or poisoned. His head wound, the source of the bleeding, suggested a concussion. As did his eyes flickering open and barely seeing Dick, if the lack of visible animosity suggested neurological impairment as opposed to a radical shift in opinion.
“Robin,” Dick said firmly, the way he spoke with the young heroes he trained. “Where’s B? ETA for Batman.”
Jason groaned very quietly, trying to turn away from Dick, the source of the noise.
“Report, Robin,” Dick said more insistently. “Where the f*ck is he? I don’t see a comm, which is a huge oversight for–” Dick realized. “Does he know you’re out here?”
This time, Jason’s moan had an emphatically argumentative bent.
“sh*t,” Dick breathed. “Well, let’s hope his stupid microchip works.”
Jason came back to life, rasping incredulously, “he chipped you?”
“He didn’t chip you?”
“Like I’d… f*cking let him.”
A frustration Dick had never felt, not even when he was leader of the Titans, shook him and didn’t let go. “I heard you haven’t joined the Titans, either.”
“Bruce… didn’t…”
“Batman didn’t let you?”
Dick wondered if he was the reason Batman prohibited another Robin from temporarily nesting in the Tower. At various points throughout their partnership, Bruce had resented the paradoxical independence Dick cultivated with his fellow heroes. Robin becoming someone others depended on for guidance was one of the many things that led Dick and Bruce to come apart.
“You can’t go out into the field without anyone to call for backup!” Dick told Jason.
Jason would have glared if he could get his eyes to focus. “Got O, so… more than… you.”
So he’d heard about that. “Whose only recourse is to call B.”
“Agent A,” Jason retorted.
Dick hadn’t forgotten about Alfred, but he’d made a concerted effort not to dwell on him except when he was at his lowest. Otherwise, it was too much to keep from seeking him out in Wayne Manor.
When Jason lapsed into unconsciousness again, Dick weighed his options. He couldn’t take Jason to his apartment, because that could mean practically inviting Batman to pick him up. He also couldn’t drop Jason off at the Manor because it would mean landing himself on Bruce’s doorstep. And Bruce had sabotaged his newest student by barring him from vital allies in New York.
He wouldn’t leave Robin here.
Alfred answered, as he always did, on the third ring.
“Hey, Alfie,” Dick said, grinning despite the lack of anyone to see it. “Can you help me with the new kid?” His voice trembled.
Alfred arrived with such haste that Dick couldn’t understand how he lacked his own meta-abilities or blanket permission to break Gotham’s traffic laws.
“Master Dick,” Alfred said, eyes crinkling fondly and a bit sadly. “How is Master Jason?”
Dick ignored how the new title was warmly granted: Master Jason. “A bit knocked around. Probably has a concussion, but he’ll be fine. I think. Flew the coop, it seems.”
“It’s a Cave, genius,” Jason argued, trying to support himself with his own power but only managing to squirm where he was leaning against Dick.
“I see,” Alfred said, unsurprised.
Jason looked apologetic. Of course he did; everybody in Wayne Manor loved Alfred, and they regretted inevitably disappointing him. Dick wished he didn’t have to see this– Jason’s chagrin making him appear young, acutely his age, the uncanny likeness of what he had with Alfred an apparition, a reflection in a funhouse mirror.
“Thank you, Master Dick,” Alfred said gravely when Dick propped Jason up in the backseat of the Bentley.
Dick shrugged, causing Jason to whimper in pain and then weakly punch him. Dick could barely feel his blow.
Closing the car door, not looking at Jason or Alfred, Dick said, “Hard to break old habits, especially in Gotham.”
“I see.” Alfred spoke with the same arcane, knowing tones he used to address Jason’s rebellion. It made Dick as unsettled now as when he was eighteen.
“I better go before B notices.”
Nodding, Alfred closed the door around the driver’s side. Dick expected to watch him depart until he said, “Where shall I escort you, sir?”
“Oh– no, I’m not– you don’t have to–”
“Master Bruce will not discover that I’m gone for several hours,” Alfred cut in primly. He sounded particularly proper when he was flouting his employer’s rules. “And I suspect that at present you are not allowed to go around Gotham without a chaperone.”
That startled a laugh from Dick, deep in his gut. He even wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.
“Just like old times, eh, Alfred?” he said wistfully.
“Yes,” Alfred said softly. “Indeed.”
Dick stroked the smooth, black exterior of the vehicle. Then, he slipped into the passenger’s seat, barely feeling the nudge of Alfred driving away.
For the first time, he didn’t know what to say. Even when he was a new addition to the Wayne household, he’d vented to Alfred about Bruce’s frequent absences and lack of affection for him.
Alfred, as usual, was silently navigating Gotham’s convoluted roadways while fully aware of Dick’s tense body language beside him.
“Alfie!” Jason called out from the backseat.
Both Alfred and Dick went into emergency mode, preparing to respond to medical complications or serious injuries they’d overlooked.
“Did you know that Bruce microchipped Dickiebird?”
Calmed, Alfred looked askance at Dick. Dick didn’t know what he intended to ordain in his blank face. Maybe the deliberation with which Dick kept it emptied of emotion, aided by the black stripe of his mask.
“I do, Master Jason,” Alfred confirmed.
“It’s not there anymore,” Dick argued.
Jason ignored him. “I’d never let anyone do that to me, just cause I’m… an omega… but, cause Dickie’s his favorite–”
“Because Bruce is paranoid,” Dick said vehemently, and with additional fervor, “I’m not his favorite.”
Jason scoffed.
Dick wished Batman had let Jason join the Titans so he could throw him around on the sparring mats, just enough to wear away his edges. Instead, he pointed out, not hiding his bitterness, “You’re the one wearing the suit.”
“Yeah,” Jason asserted. “Robin’s mine. So don’t… take him away from me.”
Alfred was staring at the both of them while not staring at them.
Jason closed his eyes and regulated his breathing in a well-feigned semblance of sleep that would have fooled most people. Although Nightwing wasn’t most people, Dick couldn’t determine how to best respond to Jason’s declaration– his plea– before Alfred raised the partition.
Alfred always offered Robin, especially a wounded one, his unconditional assistance and support.
“Master Jason means no harm,” he said, his eyes on the headlight-painted road.
The fury Dick tried to tamp down around Jason bubbled up. “Does Bruce?”
“Master Bruce did not know what to do without you.”
Dick’s complaints that he did it to himself, that makes the two of us dissipated when Alfred continued in what counted as a mournful register given his stoic demeanor, “I daresay he still doesn’t.”
Dick fell back against the leather in exhaustion. In defeat. “I can’t go back, Alfie.”
“Why not?”
“You know why. Bruce fired me.”
“He didn’t intend to drive you out. And you have a new position, as I understand. You are now Nightwing, if your current ensemble is to be believed.”
Dick glanced at the rearview mirror. Jason was turned resolutely toward the window, his fist clenched on the dense fiber of his gold cape, the vibrant colors of his leotard flashing beneath the passing lights.
“I don’t have a place there anymore,” Dick confessed. “Not just because he’s Robin. He’s also Bruce’s foster son.”
“You did not need to be adopted to have a place at Wayne Manor before,” Alfred argued. “Wayne Manor will always be your home.”
That was exactly what he wanted to hear, but–
“That’s not enough.” Because this wasn’t Jason, wasn’t Barbara: this was Alfred, who witnessed Bruce and Dick struggle to self-enforce appropriate boundaries when Dick turned sixteen; who turned a blind eye when Bruce and Dick couldn’t stop themselves from making out in Bruce’s study or f*cking in the Batmobile; who put food outside the bedroom door when Bruce and Dick were in the throes of shared rut and heat. “You know why.”
“...I do, my boy.”
The simultaneous grief and acceptance in Alfred’s statement rocked the foundations of Dick’s solitude, his secrecy.
“And there’s,” Dick found himself saying. He let himself say. “Something else.”
Alfred sensed the shift in his voice and gazed at him and asked, “What happened to you, Master Dick?”
Even though Jason couldn’t hear them, Dick could feel his probing gaze burning through the partition.
He couldn’t.
When they reached the district, Dick swung out of the car with a short, “Thanks, Alfred.”
Alfred took his hand, as if to shake it. When Dick withdrew, he was holding the USB.
“Master Bruce wouldn’t let Master Jason leave with it, I’m afraid,” Alfred explained.
Dick looked at Jason through the window.
The other Robin wouldn’t meet his gaze. He stared determinedly toward Gotham as Alfred drove away.
The last time Dick saw Jason, there was unnatural stillness to him. Not the rigidity of a physical injury but overflowing anger and sorrow only just held at bay.
It was too close, too much.
“B told you where I live?” Dick asked, because Jason wasn’t just anywhere in Blüdhaven. He was standing by the window of Dick’s shoddy apartment.
For the first time, Jason wasn’t Robin. He was a fifteen-year-old boy– from his research, Dick knew when his birthday had passed and promptly forgot about it– in a dark hoodie, a threadbare t-shirt emblazoned with the logo for the Gotham Knights, and faded jeans. He didn’t fit the generic image of the adopted son of a billionaire.
Jason’s freckled face, sans domino, was reflected back at him on the grimy glass.
“I figured it out by myself,” he told Dick. His bravado was forced. If he was really proud of his admittedly impressive accomplishment, he would have leveled Dick with that look, part aggressor and part bystander caught in the crossfire between Dick and Bruce. Jason gazed at the windowpane instead of through it until he asked, “Well?”
“Well what?”
Jason stepped away from the glass, his sneakers brushing against the Persian carpet Dick got for a steal at a nearby flea market. “Where’s the this is my f*cking city, get lost spiel?”
Dick chortled before he could stop himself. It wasn’t a terrible impression of Nightwing’s baritone. He was also exhausted from his limbo at work. Both occupations. “Figured me out, too, have you?”
Jason wasn’t amused, although he quirked an eyebrow, surprised. Dick had caught a similar expression behind his mask. Then, suddenly, he was barely-controlled rage again. No: anguish.
Like something was tearing him apart.
“Bruce thinks I killed someone,” Jason said, first like he had to force the words out and then as if they were spilling from him. “A piece of sh*t abuser of an alpha– his omega preferred suicide to–” With a sharp intake of breath, Jason stomped into the heart of Dick’s apartment, yelling, “he would’ve deserved it! We found her hanging from a f*cking pipe! Her bruises hadn’t even healed. Who cares if Garzonas’s enabling father got himself killed because he thought that f*ck-up deserved to be avenged?” Tearing at his hair, Jason roared, “he abused his power to cover it up! To prevent Gloria from getting justice! They’re the ones who treat life and death like a game!” Gasping hard and fast, then slow and brokenly, Jason whispered, “...they’re the ones who are playing around with other people’s lives.”
Dick didn’t know what Jason wanted from him.
Or he did– he knew it intimately– but he didn’t know how to give it.
“Bruce’s going to fire me,” Jason said hollowly. “Isn’t he?”
Dick smirked, and it looked like Jason might have tried to kill him, too, had he not said, “If you’re looking for someone to plead your case, let me suggest Alfred. Or Clark, depending on the mood B’s in. Unless you want the perspective of someone who got Robin taken away from him, in which case… I don’t know what to tell you.”
You didn’t last as long as I thought, but then I’d never expected you? Did you really kill Garzonas? You’ll be alright?
“I didn’t even want this!” Jason howled, no more carrion but raptor as he stomped across the floor. “I didn’t sign up to be Robin! I wasn’t a f*cking volunteer!”
Just as Dick was losing his patience and what little benevolence he possessed for his successor, Jason asked, shaking with fury or old fear, “Do you know what they say about the real dynamics between the Dependent Duo in Crime Alley? When Batman hauled me away in his car and locked me in his basem*nt, do you know what I thought the alpha was going to do to me?”
“He’d never,” Dick argued, too hard, too passionately, from too many years of fighting the same battles for Bruce.
Jason caught something of the strangeness in Dick’s voice. He shook his head. “No– I– of course not. He’s Bruce.” He stared at Dick; Dick never knew how large his eyes were, the warm, transparent blue of old soda bottles, when they were hidden behind the mask. “He didn’t do anything to you.” Compared to his earlier meltdown, Jason’s voice was strikingly subdued. “Right, Dick?”
Dick didn’t know the right way to respond. But he didn’t hesitate:
“What do you think?”
He laced his voice with the right amount of derision and comfort. He spoke with his hand on his hip, casual, open.
Because it was true: Bruce didn’t do anything like Jason feared to Dick. Because, as it was becoming more and more clear to him, the two of them and what they wanted from Bruce were vastly different.
Jason appeared to take what he desired from Dick’s statement. Although his wariness lingered, it was gradually replaced by hurt, then frustration, then resignation.
“Look,” Dick said, because he was learning that he’d gotten Jason completely right and entirely wrong. “You’re his son, alright? Bruce adopted you. He’s not… he’s not going to let anything happen to you.”
For the first time, Jason looked like he wholeheartedly wanted to believe something Dick was telling him.
But– “I f*cked up,” he said, clipped words like bullets dug from his bleeding chest.
Dick fell onto his beaten couch. “Join the club.” He desperately craved a beer, but if he lifted one from his fridge, he was sure Jason would take it. The way he took almost everything else. “Let us not forget our most important absentee member: Batman.”
Jason snorted, but his eyes were too febrile, his complexion too sallow.
“Jay,” Dick said, and Jason startled, almost imperceptibly but enough for Dick to determine how the nickname unbalanced him. “If B is… let’s go somewhere, alright? I’m in dire need of a vacation.”
“A vacation?” Jason couldn’t have sounded more incredulous if he tried. He looked at Dick as if he was mad.
“Preferably on-world,” Dick replied. “I’m still responsible for Haven, but it’s not exactly easy living here. Makes me want to go scale physical mountains instead of metaphorical ones. Peaked with snow that isn’t narcotics.” Tipping his head back, Dick closed his eyes. “Hard to believe I never got around to the Alps when I was in Europe.”
The sofa dipped, and Jason asked, “That’s where you ran away to? Europe?”
As Dick’s heart stuttered, he realized he’d never stop f*cking up. Leaping off the couch, he headed to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and stole a can of beer.
“Don’t tell B,” he said, trying to keep his tone light as the froth spilled over, cool and pale on his fingers.
Jason magically appeared beside him, procuring his own can before Dick could slam the door shut.
“You didn’t snitch on me getting my skull bashed in Crime Alley, so” –Jason took a generous sip of his beer– “Fair’s fair.”
“You’re underage,” Dick said reflexively, reaching toward the aluminum, but Jason ducked and continued drinking.
“Hypocrite,” Jason said, and Dick couldn’t do this anymore.
“Why were you in Crime Alley?” That wasn’t where he deduced Jason getting injured. He must have flown a distance before he collapsed from his injuries.
Jason grimaced at the memory. “The same reason I was in your city the first time. Thought I heard someone who needed help.” The can crinkled under his fingers. “There’s a lot of people in Crime Alley who need Batman and Robin’s help and never get it.”
So Dick had failed Jason then and now.
But he didn’t have to keep doing it.
“Not a bad call, Robin.”
“Don’t need your f*cking approval, Wing.”
Jason appeared unintentionally pleased to receive it, however. Dick should’ve known a child from Crime Alley devoted to protecting omegas from abusive alphas would nurture some hero worship for the first Boy Wonder.
When Nightwing discovered the criminal backing behind the corruption in the BPD, he’d have to catch Jason up on his Robin training the Grayson way.
Maybe burn some of the new allowance Jason was receiving on ski slopes in the Rockies, the way heirs who didn’t shoulder impossible, secret duties to the world were supposed to.
A day after Jason showed up in his apartment, Batman followed.
No– Bruce.
In an inversion of their assigned roles, Dick found Bruce standing inside his door in his snug Merino wool sweater and dark slacks while Dick entered through the window, the blue stripes of his uniform emerging from the shadows.
Without the cowl, Dick could spot the new strands of silver woven into Bruce’s temples, but in an unsurprising act of self-betrayal, he found that Bruce still looked good. As handsome and intransigent as ever, going by the grim set of his chiseled jaw.
“No key, no entry,” Dick told him, locking his window and setting the alarms.
“Jason was here,” Bruce said, never one for small talk or setting guidelines for reasonable behavior.
“So you did chip him.” Because he didn’t think Jason would lie about that, given his adamant refusal, Dick added, “you know you’re not supposed to do that without consent, right, Bruce?”
“Why was he here, Dick?”
It had been two years since he’d heard Bruce say his name, a fact Dick processed and put away. “Something about Batman accusing Robin of killing an alpha.”
Bruce knew that was why. His heavy silence confirmed it. “There were three casualties,” he said eventually.
“That doesn’t mean they were Jason’s fault,” Dick said, surprising himself by thoughtlessly coming to Jason’s defense.
His support didn’t appear to surprise Bruce. Even though he was free of the tens of pounds of ceramic armor and gear, he looked more weighted down than ever. “Everything has consequences. That’s why we follow our code. Our rules. He has to learn that.”
Oh, did Bruce know that.
Did Dick.
“What do you want, B?” Dick asked, Bruce’s exhaustion becoming his. They were good at this, terrible at this, sharing everything good and bad between them. “For me to tell you the gentlest way to let him go?”
“No,” Bruce said through gritted teeth, his brow granite-smooth. “Your current case is too much for you, Dick.”
“Not this again,” Dick said, heading to his bedroom to strip out of his suit. “I thought we were both pretty clear on the fact that I don’t work with you anymore. Meaning, I get to make my own calls without you Bat-growling criticisms in my ear.”
Over Dick’s shoulder, he caught Bruce watching him angrily. Hungrily.
It was both thrilling and maddening to know that he still had this power over Bruce.
“This is bigger than corruption in the Blüdhaven Police Department,” Bruce argued. “It involves networks of criminals Batman hasn’t been able to dismantle in Gotham.”
“So it comes back to your control issues,” Dick laughed. “Great argument. Oh, and thanks for preventing Jay from giving me the information I requested. Made me feel much safer.”
“You need to listen to me.”
“Not anymore.”
Dick suddenly became aware that Bruce wasn’t lingering on his doormat anymore. He was standing close by, in the entryway of Dick’s bedroom, and Dick had peeled his uniform away, clad in nothing but his charcoal briefs. The gaps in his curtain threw scattered light over his bare chest and thighs.
Bruce was carefully examining how the light and shadow played over his musculature. Avidly taking in everything that even the form-fitting fabric of the Nightwing costume couldn’t convey. When he reached out–
His hand hovered over the raised iridescence of Dick’s new scars.
But he didn’t touch.
Still, Dick imagined feeling the atoms vibrating in his skin.
Bruce looked at him. Dick knew what he wanted to ask but couldn’t: Where did you go, Dick?
Dick looked back, knowing what he could’ve said but wouldn’t: I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you, B.
Bruce’s fingers almost brushed against Dick’s unclothed chest before his hand fell.
Dick released a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. He grabbed a pair of sweatpants from the floor, dragging them over his hips. A day-old Henley followed.
When the cotton slipped away, his apartment was empty.
Except for another USB Bruce left on his kitchen counter.
Dick didn’t know whether to mourn Bruce deeming him incapable of containing Blüdhaven’s disrepair on his own or this sign that he still had a partner in him, someone to count on, even though Dick would never be enough.
He learned that Jason died after he returned from an off-world mission with the Titans.
His intergalactic travels hadn’t been planned, but his old team needed him, and he needed to put more distance between himself and Bruce. Their proximity across neighboring cities inspired both fantasies of Bruce renewing his pledge of loyalty to Dick and nightmares of their nameless child burning in a fire.
Of all the things Dick expected to return to– unfulfilled aspirations to forget about Bruce, a Haven that continued to deteriorate– he never imagined a newspaper reporting on the tasteful funeral for Bruce Wayne’s foster son, Jason Todd-Wayne.
Bruce hadn’t even attempted to get in touch with Dick to let him know Robin was dead.
Viciously beaten to death, he learned, by the Joker.
Jason died halfway around the world because he wanted to know the woman who had given birth to him.
Dick entered Gotham for the first time in years. He didn’t see the familiar landscape fly by him as he sped through the streets on his bike, only registering the precipice Wayne Manor stood on emerging from the post-rain mists and the waterfall he drove through to enter the Cave.
Bruce was there, part Batman as he sat in his armor and gauntlets at the computer, and part grieving father with his cowl shed to display the deep lines on his pale face.
Despite the despair that Dick recognized sitting just below the surface, a bereftness that probably summoned the gruesome murders of Martha and Thomas Wayne over twenty years back, his first thought was to weaponize his words and tear through the rest of Bruce’s bulletproof disguise, breaking him down with demands to know how he could let this happen, why he didn’t tell Dick, why he didn’t protect Jason–
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Dick said instead, throwing his helmet onto the cave floor, the metal and glass echoing across the hollowed-out walls. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
When Bruce refused to turn toward him, Dick unleashed his aggression by grabbing him by the arm, pivoting him in his chair.
“Talk to me, B!”
An impulse toward violent retaliation, hot and mindless and cruel, crossed Bruce’s face. Dick nearly staggered back at the irrational intensity of it, so uncharacteristic of the man he knew.
Instead, he bracketed Bruce in his seat, arching gradually toward him.
Instead, Bruce used one motion to rise to his feet, bend Dick backward by the waist, and fasten their mouths together, rough and messy. Dick could taste the salt and copper from Batman’s brute force. His split lip didn’t convince Bruce to stop.
Dick should have. He should have recognized this self-destructing thing Jason’s death had turned Bruce into and abandoned it to drown in grief and a mountain of mutilated criminals.
But Dick was mourning, too.
Mourning the boy he could have, should have been: a faithful son who loved Bruce like a father.
Mourning the Robin he should have taught how to fly before he sank down to the earth and nested inside it with the bones and the worms.
Mourning the brother he should have stood by in his final moments.
The family he continued to lose.
“Ah!”
Bruce was spreading Dick’s naked thighs wide with gauntleted hands and twisting him open with efficient, martial motions.
Spine pressed against the cold smoothness of the console, Dick’s shirt was rucked up to his collarbone, his underwear and jeans hanging off one ankle. Except for his cowl, Bruce was still encased in Batman’s dense armor.
“Take it off,” Dick gasped, reaching for the gaps in the plates and rocking himself onto Bruce’s thick, gloved fingers. “Bruce–”
He broke off in a cry as Bruce forced his way inside, refusing to give Dick a moment to adjust before he slammed in again, hard and deep and fast.
It was impossible to hold onto Bruce at this angle, in this position, with all his coverings, Dick’s slick hands and thighs slipping on the ceramic.
Grunting and sobbing at the pressure of Bruce’s body inside him, almost too much to contain, Dick tangled his fingers in Bruce’s hair, letting Bruce bear the weight of his splayed, trembling legs.
Bruce heaved Dick more intimately into his thrusts. He bit the column of his exposed throat. He increased his velocity and power to a degree Dick scarcely believed was possible until his hoarse screams were reverberating throughout the Cave.
The weight of Batman’s armor atop him, holding him down, was almost crushing.
Dick couldn’t remember if the baby weighed this much.
Bruce apparently didn’t sense its absence in the cradle of Dick’s pelvis, the cushion of his thighs, the tracts of firm skin on his abdomen. The dark nipples he bruised with his teeth, the buttocks he squeezed in his fists. The bleeding lips he sucked into his gnawing mouth. The tear-spangled eyes he gazed into, unable to avert his ferocity and unwilling to spare himself the pain of Dick staring back at him.
Dick almost tried to kick Bruce off when he nearly crushed Dick’s hardness in his gauntlet and plowed into him with his savage f*cking, but then Dick’s climax was wrenched from him, as if it was something physical Bruce could tear from his body, and he shouted and clenched and quivered around Bruce while he came.
Bruce spent himself, rough and scalding, into Dick’s spasming flesh.
Their breaths were too harsh in the dripping quietude of the Cave. Rocks grating against the cave’s dolomite orifice.
Bruce pulled himself from Dick with a slick, suctioning squelch. Dick winced at the emptiness and the burn. Coming down from his org*sm was like a drop in adrenaline and dopamine after a fight: disorienting and slightly sickening.
“Go,” Bruce said, not pausing to smear the sweat from his face before he lowered his cowl.
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Dick said, tugging his briefs up over the dampness between his legs. “You should have told me about Jason.”
“He was my son!” Batman roared.
“Trust me, I know!” Dick shouted back. “Doesn’t mean I can’t care about him! Jay was wearing my colors, using my name! And he was a well-meaning, unprepared kid who shouldn’t have… damn you, Bruce.”
Batman never looked so lethal to Dick. So vengeful. As if Dick had sacrificed Jason to the Clown Prince of Chaos simply to wound him in the worst, most intimate way that only the first Robin, only Dick Grayson knew how.
“You’ve made it clear this isn’t your city anymore,” Batman growled. “That this isn’t your home. Your family. So, leave.”
It was as if Bruce had punched him.
Keeping down the f*ck yous and sorries and I wills, Dick yanked his jeans up and fused the teeth of his zipper and crammed his buttons into place and wrestled himself into his jacket. He gazed at the gold, emerald, and scarlet of the first Robin uniform preserved in its glass case beside the second Robin’s bloody and tattered memorial before he drove away from the grounds of Wayne Manor, from Gotham.
The USB Jason encrypted for Dick didn’t lead to him discovering the criminal masterminds in Blüdhaven. Still, Nightwing saved Amy and her family from being murdered by the corrupt contingent in the BPD, culled much of the illegality and immorality from the force, and got a stay of execution as Amy rose through the ranks and tried to repay Nightwing.
Then, Deathstroke rolled into town with a hit on Captain Rorhbach. Though he paid Dick the courtesy of letting him know before he assassinated her, there was no way Nightwing could stop him.
“Don’t do this, Slade,” Dick begged, bleeding on the roof of his apartment. Slade had found it easily.
Slade’s mask was cracked and his uniform torn, but he was otherwise unaffected by Nightwing’s assault.
“If you’re trying to appeal to my compassion, Grayson, you truly learned nothing from your apprenticeship,” he said, almost bored.
“You should’ve been a better teacher,” Dick growled, trying to generate any strategy but coming up blank. There was no way he could subdue Deathstroke on his own; he’d barely been able to repel him with the Titans.
Case in point, Slade said coolly, “Like the Bat?” Then: “I didn’t see his brat’s stuff in your place.”
Panic rising despite his attempts to control it because Slade knew, he was going to kill Amy, he could tell Bruce–
“That’s because there isn’t any,” Dick said.
Slade heard it: the rawness. The embitterment. The self-hatred.
And he didn’t mock Dick or exploit his vulnerability.
Dick knew why. He’d been there when Slade held fast to Grant and felt the life leave his firstborn’s body.
Nightwing had also been in the Tower when Joseph “Joey” Wilson selflessly came to warn the Titans about the danger his father posed– and then joined them as the hero Jericho.
Slade knew what it meant to lose his children, too.
Not that it would stop him from ruining Nightwing by killing one of the few good cops in his city as Slade’s employer closed in.
“What,” Dick said, licking the blood from his lip, “what if I bought out your contract?”
Eventually, Slade asked, very skeptically, “You want to buy out my thirty thousand dollar bounty?”
Dick combined his savings with the trust funds he’d received from Bruce but had never touched until this day. When he handed Slade thirty thousand and one dollars and fifty cents, Slade laughed at Dick’s change and his attaché and left Blüdhaven with a living, breathing Amy.
But not before Nightwing had desperately sought her out and she heard the unmistakable Dick Grayson in his voice.
She told him to make a choice: a human or a hero.
He chose what he always did.
He held fast to the mask and deposited his badge on her desk.
