Chapter Text
Dick can’t afford to accept the numbness that fogs his mind. The haze would be his death, or… more importantly, Damian’s.
He has a charge now, a ward, a—not son. Not his son, Dick reminds himself, lips moving over the words as they become a physical reminder. Faced away from the boy and the mugger he’s hogtying, Dick gets away with the slip but it’s one of many.
He has been losing himself more and more lately. Losing time, sitting down to work, hands at the keyboard and blinks. Blinks and an hour has passed. The only thing to show for it are the thirty four pages of a single word typed over and over: fault. Minuscule font. No spacing.
My fault
At fault
Fault lines
Fault
Fault
Fau|
“Batman,” his Robin says, suddenly at Dick’s side and close enough to be toeing the edge of his cape. Damian doesn’t show concern for anything with two legs and no feathers, but maybe if Dick had more than two hours of sleep in the last three days he’d notice the slight question in the word.
Unfortunately, Dick is too busy flinching away from the kid. He catches the twitch of muscles and schools himself still, but the damage is done. Damian’s scowl deepens; add it to the growing list of failings rolling through a constant list in Dick’s head.
“It’s a schoolnight, Robin; return to the Cave.”
“Batman—” Damian tries to argue just like he does every night, but it’s worse tonight. Dick has gone out too many times without him, has come back bruised and bleeding. “It’s hardly time, and we still have half our route to clear.”
Heavy with guilt, Dick turns away. “Don’t make me say it again.”
But Damian doesn’t move for a long moment, he simply watches Dick, seeing all too much before taking a grapple gun in hand and firing off, flying up to the nearest roof. Dick follows.
Then all Dami says is, “No.”
“Return home.” It’s an order, a call to heel. If Dick weren’t exhausted and drowning in grief and rage, maybe he’d laugh and recall a time when he went toe to toe with Bruce when the Bat tried to send him home early too, but he can’t. Dick doesn’t have the strength for it.
“Fine,” Dick sighs, wary and unwilling to fight him, knowing if he continues down this road with Damian it will only end with him saying something he would regret or, worse, losing the kid back to the league like he’s threatened a dozen times before.
He switches comms lines, reaching out to Oracle. “O, Robin is switching to patrol line J.” It will take him through the business district and less crime-ridden territories.
A quiet route, or as close to it as Gotham gets.
Damian startles and scoffs. “There is nothing to patrol in—”
“Understood,” Babs says, shortly. She and Dick may not be on speaking terms, but Batman and Oracle can’t let past hurts get in the way of their duties. They work through it.
Dick turns back to Damian, cape flaring behind him.
“You only have two choices.”
Damian just watches him, glaring behind his domino, his jaw working as he chews over his words. He’s thinking them over, planning them like knives to be thrown, measuring how much force, what angle, how deep to cut.
Dick braces himself, but knows that when Damian opens his mouth, he will deserve whatever comes out.
“You can’t keep sending me away because I remind you of him,” Damian spits. “You’ll have to look at me eventually because I’m still here.”
He can’t fight his flinch.
But Damian is already gone, swinging off into the dark.
And Dick is left alone except for—
“That was uncalled for,” Babs says softly in his ear, but Dick doesn’t know what she is referring to, what Damian said or Dick sending him to patrol on his own. That’s a lie. He knows what she means.
The guilt only compounds.
It was earned, Dick almost says. Damian isn’t wrong, no matter how hard it is to hear. But-but he and Babs are like that anymore. He can’t just fall back into her orbit, into her arms and bed because it only hurts them both.
He has to be done with that part of his life.
They can’t continue down this cycle.
Dick swallows his words and bites out instead, “Do you have coordinates for me?”
Oracle huffs, a derisive sound like she can’t believe she reached out hand to help and it got slapped away, like she knows better. That too is something Dick can’t comment on.
“There’s a disturbance near the museum,” she says, voice modulator back on. “No alarms have been set off but something's up.”
“Show me going.” Then Dick turns off his side of the comm—a message to leave him be unless there's an emergency. She can still reach him, if she needs to but it’s as close to privacy as he can get right now.
He hopes there’s something going on at the museum.
Something distracting.
***
It’s the ears that give him away. Tim would recognize the curve and point of Batman’s cowl in any shadow.
Breath locked in his throat, Tim thinks for but a split second, a passing thought that Bruce has returned, come to call Tim home but… no. Dick is a good mimic, but the sheer menacing aura, the shadow of violence doesn’t hover with him in the shadows. Dick looks like he’s still trying not to quip.
Tim moves fluidly to his feet, clocking every exit and escape, but Batman blocks the best one and edges in front of the other.
His only way out is up—where Dick will be able to follow—or back under the door, caught and caged.
Or… through.
“The bat and the cat, it's a tale as old as… us,” Tim laughs lightly. He doesn’t feel it in the slightest; humor is far from his mind.
Dick doesn’t react beyond a single hand forming a fist.
This is not the man Tim once knew. This isn’t the laughing hero with a repertoire of puns, always ready with a whip and grin.
The man who stands before him is a doppelganger, an uncanny apparition as terrifying as he is familiar.
Tim has seen this all before, grief weighing heavy on those caped shoulders. A mirage settling over past and present, he also sees the moment it shifts.
Pain to rage.
Safe, steady ground. An anger that warms.
Tim edges back, giving space without truly stepping back. He has no escape, no solid plan, but that hasn’t stopped him before.
He may be cornered, but Tim has an unseen advantage: he knows who he’s dealing with.
And Dick just needs to be provoked, a little more prodding and he’ll lose it. One way or another.
Tim cocks his hip, tilts his head, and purrs, “Aww, did you send the little bird home so we can play?”
Batman doesn’t reach for a weapon; he just moves.
Fists, it is.
Well, for Dick anyway. Tim focuses on avoidance, endurance, and annoyance.
“You look—” Tim lurches away from a kick and throws himself into a flip, buying a breath of space before they’re moving again “—younger. Like a kid playing dress up.”
The silence is odd. Worrying.
Not a quip.
They move and fight in relative quiet, surrounded only by the squeak of rubber soles on marble, rustle of his cape, the susurration of fabric.
Dick throws his body into a punch. Tim lunges out of the way, met with a flurry of attacks, but he’s prepared.
Not much has changed in Dick’s style over the years, but Tim has only gotten better. Faster. Stronger. He’s gone up against worse people than Batman, scarier motherfuckers that won’t just break him but kill, and he walked away the victor. Time and time again.
Tonight will be no different.
They circle and spar. This is a dance as much as it is a fight. Dick is playing with him, angry, yes—rage telegraphs in his every move—but this is to let off steam. He doesn’t go for the ending blow just as Tim doesn’t reach for his whip.
Tim hums when they break away from another bout, shooting him a conspiratorial grin.
“Did you steal batsy’s costume just to play with little ol’ me?”
Dick huffs, the smallest of sounds no more a laugh than it is a push of air, but Tim takes it as a sign of life and doubles down.
“Oh, I do love a good role play,” Tim drawls between controlled breaths.
And finally, finally Dick breaks.
“How about we skip the foreplay and jump straight to you in cuffs, kit-cat?”
Tim wants to laugh, or hell, cheer. It feels like a win even as he takes a punch to his shoulder and buckles a bit before recovering, feeling like he clipped a semi-truck.
He avoids a kick, spinning away, there and gone.
“Kit-cat?” Tim snips. “What, am I not pretty enough to be your kitten?” Swiping with his clawed gloves, Tim carves a mark into Batman’s chest plate and cuts through several layers of his suit fabric—not enough to harm, after all this too is a tease. An affronted action just like his words, as he says, “You hurt my feelings.”
“Sorry, Cat, I’m in no mood to play.”
I know, Tim thinks, not trusting his mouth as Dick kicks him back and in the wall. Tim’s breath leaves him in a woosh. A good thing because his next thought is incriminating: And whose fault is that but my own?
Tim thought Dick wrote him off years ago, but he was wrong and that makes everything so much more difficult.
And distracting.
Batman is upon him, pinning Tim to the wall, and just like that, he’s lost. It’s over. Fuck.
But for a long strange moment, neither of them move.
Dick pants, warm air fanning Tim’s face, mingling with his own in the space between as the world fades to just them.
They are alone. The museum is silent and still in the aftermath.
His spine aches but that, too, fades.
Tim could break the hold; he knows how. But… he hesitates. He lingers like a fool, but–but how long has it been since he’s been held? Touched? The hands that grip him are bruising, yes, but at least they don’t let go.
Figure it out Dick, Tim thinks, searching the shadows of his gaze, half-desperate. Save us right here, right now. Connect the dots.
Tim is handing them—and himself—to Dick on a knife, all he has to do is lick it off the blade. He could tell him and defy orders… but too much hinges on Bruce’s acceptance.
His return to Gotham.
To home.
Tim can’t risk it, Bruce’s words still ring in his ears… but it’s not a failure if Dick connects the dots. Right?
That would be enough. Tim wouldn’t have to be alone, they could figure it out together. Like old times.
But Dick doesn’t—he doesn’t do anything.
His gaze, what little of it Tim can read, is far off and unseeing. Vulnerable. And if Tim were here to hurt him, kill him, it wouldn’t take much. His chest aches.
How easy someone could go for the kill…
Tim doesn’t move. He hardly breathes.
“I am haunted, but never by who I want,” Dick says. A murmur, a breath. He didn’t mean to say it, probably doesn’t even realize he did.
“Unwanted,” Tim responds loftily, trying to play it off as a tease even though the word is dulled by cotton in his ears and is lost under the racing beat of his heart. “Well, you know how to treat a man.”
But the joke—if it even counts as a joke—falls onto deaf ears.
Dick tips his head, a finger stroking over the soft crushed velvet of Tim’s voice modulator obscured as a stylized choker.
Pulse hammering, Tim can only hope the tell-tale scar on his neck remains hidden.
Stray can be uncanny to the dead boy he knew, with similar silken hair and the same pale skin, but the scars Tim received as Robin would give the whole game away; not many men survive a slit throat. But then Dick’s finger drops and something minute shifts through him and Tim knows he’s out of time. If he wants to avoid capture tonight, he has to move.
Now.
Tim launches into action. He pushes off the wall with his hips to dislodge the bulk to Dick’s weight, and throws his elbow. He can go through the motions with his eyes closed, instinctual and unfaltering. So when, in the back of his mind, a thought pierces like a knife Tim still carries through even as he reels.
Does Dick know this is the move he taught me? Does he find it eerily familiar?
Perhaps it is just common enough to pass. Maybe the hours they spent working on it, training together have faded to the back of Dick’s mind, hazed over in the fog of time like it never truly happened.
Tim can’t ask. He can only move.
Fight.
He steals Nightwing’s moves, blending them with Ra’s, Shiva’s, and Tim’s own.
But the electric pellet Tim throws at him is certainly from Dick’s own playbook though Nightwing’s escrima makes no appearance.
Tim slips the pellets from a hidden pocket and throws them the moment Dick opens himself for attack, not expecting Tim, Stray, to be so prepared and underhanded. They land and scatter, but just as he practiced, one—one single pellet—connects with a chink in Batman’s armor near his throat.
Dick curses, a half-bitten sound, as he seizes and collapses.
It won’t keep Batman down for long, but Tim only needs seconds.
He flees, disappears into the shadows, and is gone by the time Dick stumbles to his feet.