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The first time that Dick sees Barbara dance he’s supposed to be training with Bruce. His last class ran long and he decides that cutting across the rooftops is the fastest way home if he doesn’t want to be late. He’s careful not to be noticed, this small kid hanging off of concrete ledges with a backpack bouncing on his shoulders.
When he was younger (when he was in the circus, when he was part of The Flying Graysons, when his life was perfect) his mother used to put chalk-dusted hands on his cheeks and call him her little robin. And he supposes that there is something slightly bird-like and delicate about the way the toes of his sneakers press against the bricks before he leaps, just like when he used to trapeze through the air, the closest Dick’s ever felt to flying.
Commissioner Gordon and his daughter live in a decent part of the city, or as decent as Gotham gets anyway, their apartment almost a third of the way between Dick’s high school and the Manor. It has two windows that face the alleyway and one that looks right into Barbara’s bedroom. Sometimes, when he’s doing a solo patrol, Dick leans over the roof of the complex across the street and checks to see if the curtains are open. And he’d feel like a total pervert, maybe, if he’d ever seen anything more than Babs doing homework; her head bent down and glasses low on her nose with a notebook balanced on bare and freckled knees and a pencil tucked between her teeth as she flipped through thick college textbooks.
He doesn’t have time to stop and watch her study today though, because he should have been home at least ten minutes ago and Bruce has this thing about punctuality. But as his fingers touch to the cold metal of the fire escape, he sees a quick streak of red hair and pale skin, and ever curious, Dick pulls his hands back, sits low on his heels and watches.
He knows that Barbara dances, because she’s mentioned it (detourné and don’t over-extend, Boy Wonder) and he’s heard Bruce tell her that her dancing bleeds into her fighting (and Dick just knows that it wasn’t meant as a compliment), but he’s never actually had a chance to see it.
Her window is open and the alley is narrow, so he doesn’t have to strain to hear the sounds of Chopin or Mozart or Tchaikovsky. (And Dick is sure that there’s a difference, but he wouldn’t be able to tell you, despite the fact that Bruce has season tickets to the Gotham City Orchestra and forces him to put on a tux and be bored for hours upon hours. But this? This is so, so very different.)
Dick watches as Barbara moves with the music, her back arching as she spins slowly. He watches as she gently, gracefully, lifts her arms and legs. He watches her feet effortlessly glide across the floor and then through the air. He watches as she closes her eyes and bends and twirls and leaps.
And he watches as she turns and catches him watching her, her cheeks flushed pink with what he guesses is embarrassment, but could just as easily be anger.
“Hey,” he half-shouts from where he’s perched (oh, little robin indeed), and throws his hand up in a wave.
Babs also throws her hand up, not in a wave, not exactly, and pulls the curtains closed. Dick doesn’t miss the smile on her mouth.
When he sees her a few days later she knocks a fist, hard, into his shoulder and says, “Well, hey there, Boy Pervert!”
Dick nods curtly in return. “Miss Gordon.”
And she laughs, because maybe she thinks that he’s a little bit charming or whatever, and ruffles a hand through his hair.
He thinks about her sometimes.
He stares up at the ceiling and slides his hand past the sheets and then beneath the elastic of his shorts, palming his cock.
He thinks about how she looks when she’s dancing. He thinks about how maybe he could make her look like that (happy, but still kind of serious, and maybe even studious, with a pinched little line between her eyebrows) with her back arched and her eyes shut.
He thinks about her red hair spilling over his thighs and her fingers pressing down hard on his hips, pinning him against the bed as she lowers her lips onto him. He thinks about her, as he slowly works his palm up and down the shaft of his dick, pretending that the awkward pressure of his fingers is actually her mouth.
And he even thinks about her with that book on her lap and her glasses sliding down her nose, her freckled knees and the pencil between her teeth, and yeah, maybe he is a total pervert.
But he thinks about her and he only feels vaguely guilty when comes (too fast in his fist) and then wipes away the stickiness in his hand on the underside of the bedspread.
Sometime in early April, Barbara lets him walk her home.
She just shows up at his school and sits on the stone steps and waits for him.
“Babs? What are you doing here? Did Bruce send you? Because that’s really embarrassing. Like, for both of us. I’m a senior, I don’t need a babysitter.”
Barbara just looks up at him, her cheeks pink from the cold spring air, and with a tilt of her head, says, “No, dummy. Walk me to my apartment.”
So he does just that, because Dick is pretty sure that he’ll never be able to say no to her, and he holds her hand the whole way there, their fingers twisted and tangled together with his thumb pressed to the inside of her wrist. Babs hums, something slow and elegant that Dick feels as if he should know, but of course he doesn’t, as she jumps and skips over stray puddles left behind from the rain with the sort of grace of a proper ballerina. (He supposes that this kind of counts as the second time that he sees her dance.)
And Dick tries to tap his thumb to her wrist in time with her humming, but he’s always a second or two ahead or behind.
Barbara just laughs, smiling and teasingly, and says, “Keep up, Boy Wonder.”
The week before that, she lets him put his hands under her skirt.
He’s supposed to be studying for this calculus test that he has next week, but he can’t concentrate with Barbara sitting next to him.
Lately, she’s made it a habit to stick around the Manor after they’re done training (“Dad’s picked up more night shifts,” she says, slim shoulders up to her ears as she shrugs). And even though Dick is pretty sure that she can still read in her own bedroom, on her own bed, he doesn’t think he can complain about having her this close, with their hips and thighs touching.
She’s getting over a cold and her lips are chapped and cracked and her nose is red and she sniffles every few minutes. And really, all Dick can think about is running his fingers through her hair and kissing her.
“You’re staring,” she says, monotone and bored, her eyes held on the page of some ancient poetry book. “It’s creepy. Stop it.”
Dick shrugs, says, “You know, don’t—” He stops, deciding against telling her not to flatter herself, because, really, she’s absolutely gorgeous and she probably knows it. Instead, he huffs out a breath, then continues, “I wasn’t staring. Okay?”
“Yeah, sure. Okay.” Her fingers flip over the thin pages of her book and, without looking up, she says, “You’re still doing it.”
He gives a heavy sigh and tries to shift away from her, but she tugs on the sleeve of his shirt and then slowly slides her leg beneath his, hooking her foot around his ankle. His cheeks burn pink, hot flush creeping down his neck and chest, but he ignores it and focuses on his homework. From the corner of his eye, he can see her carefully dog-ear a page in her book and set it down, turning to face him. She doesn’t speak, only purses her lips, and sniffs.
“So,” he squawks, briefly glancing up at her and tapping his pencil against the corner of his textbook. “Um, do you know how to find a derivative of an integral?”
“No,” she answers. Her voice is sort of soft and hushed, like they’re in a library. Slowly, she pulls her glasses from her face, folding them up in her hand, and then looks at him clinically. Studying him. “Have you ever kissed a girl, Dick?”
His throat feels dry and he sputters a bit when he tries to swallow what little spit that he can. He considers lying, telling her that he’s kissed handfuls of girls, thank you very much, but he just nods and says, “Yes. Some.”
“Oh, really?” she asks, smug.
“Why? Have you?” he counters.
She laughs, wiggling her bare toes along his calf, and with a smirk says, “Maybe.”
And Dick doesn’t know exactly how to respond to that, so he asks again, “Are you sure you don’t know how to find the derivative? Because I feel like it’s probably something that’s going to be on the final, which means it’s probably something I should know.”
“Nope,” she says. “Sorry, kiddo.”
“Oh. Well, good enough for me.”
Barbara laughs again. And when she moves her fingers over a spot on his wrist in between his shirtsleeve and his watch, it’s really all Dick needs to shove his calculus homework off of his lap and run his fingers through her hair and kiss her.
She kind of tastes like cheap, drugstore chapstick (like cherry and wax and something slightly medicinal), even though her lips are rough and dry, and she lets out this little surprised gasp-hitch-moan when Dick touches his tongue first to her lower lip and then to her own tongue and he can feel himself instantly harden at the sound.
When she crawls onto his lap, Dick is embarrassed at how quickly his hips reflexively push up to meet hers, his hands curling under her thighs and pulling her closer. But Barbara just smiles in between kisses and lifts his hands a little bit higher, nodding as if to say, it’s okay. It’s okay that they’re making out in his bedroom; and it’s okay that she’s grinding down onto him; and it’s okay that if she keeps going like this with her lips and her hands, that he’s totally going to come soon; and it’s okay, because it’s them. It’s Dick and Barbara and it’s okay.
His fingers lightly pluck at the edge her panties, tugging at the elastic and slowly pressing into the wetness he finds there. And there’s another little gasp-hitch-moan (except less gasp-hitch and totally more just moan) and Barbara’s head falls back a little and her mouth slacks open and her hands grip at his shoulders and that’s really all it takes for him.
Dick tries to warn her. Says, “Wait, no, sorry!” all furiously panicked. But it’s too late.
“Oh,” she says softly. “It’s okay.”
Sliding off of him, she places a quick kiss on his cheek before settling back into the pillows and returning to her book.
And then, without looking up, Babs says, “Remember what I said about staring? Stop. It’s creepy.”
The third time that Dick sees Barbara dance, it’s because he asks her to.
She protests at first, shaking her head back and forth. “What? No. No, way. Why?”
And he wants to say, because it’s when you’re the most you, when you’re just being Barbara, and not Batgirl and not the Commissioner’s daughter, and I want to be the person who sees you like that, I want to be the person who you let see you like that, because you’re pretty much the best thing ever, like in the totality of the universe.
But Dick can’t just say something like that, so instead he says, “Please?”
She huffs out a breath, but she smiles when she does it and says, “Fine. Just for you, Boy Wonder.”
“Man Wonder,” he corrects. “No, wait. Hunk Wonder.”
“Don’t push it,” she warns. “Also, gross.
“Yeah, okay,” he agrees with a nod. “Now make with the twirling and whathaveyous.”
Barbara rolls her eyes, but puts on some type of classical music (Dick still doesn’t know the difference between Bach or Vivaldi or, oh my God, there are just so many old dead dudes who wrote music with no words) and raises her arms above her head and starts to dance.
And watching her dance, just for him, just because he asked her to, might be the second closest that Dick has ever felt to flying.