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“I find myself in a bit of a conundrum.”
“Which is?”
“I’m in love with my best friend.”
To Wally’s credit, he didn’t even look away from the screen and continued to mash the buttons on the controller. Hell, he didn’t even blink. They were alone in the Tower today, between missions and everyone else busy in their own cities with their own mentors, leaving the two of them to waste the day away playing video games and eating junk food.
It felt good to relax and ignore a lot of his problems for a while, but there was something that Dick had been unable to ignore for months and if he didn’t say something soon he was going to explode, which is why he had suddenly just blurted it out to Wally.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, because you’re great, but you’re not really my type. I appreciate your interest though.” Wally’s character jumped into a hoard of thugs on top of a building and he was focusing on trying to take them all down in the time limit.
“Gee, thanks. Not you.”
His hands gripped the controller tighter and started moving his arms like he could make his character fight better with sheer will and enthusiasm. “Donna’s like your sister. That would be weird. Don’t be in love with her either.”
Coughing, Dick choked on the root beer that he was drinking and it almost came out his nose. Damn, that hurt. “Shut up.” Dick punched Wally’s shoulder, making his character fall from a rooftop, die and respawn at the beginning of the mission. That made Wally finally turn and glare at him. “I’m meant Barbara, you butthead.”
“Thought as much, but you should have used her name. You have too many best friends.” Wally hit pause on the game and looked at him. “You should tell her.”
“She’s got other things on her mind.” Dick flopped back on the couch dramatically, sinking into the cushions. What he wouldn’t give for it to come to life and swallow him whole rather than deal with his emotional turmoil. Stupid brain. Stupid heart. Neither of them seemed to be able to just turn off for a while. “More important things than dealing with my unrequited love.”
“How do you know it’s unrequited?” asked Wally, kicking his legs up onto the coffee table in front of them that was littered with their snacks. “She’d be lucky to be in love with you. Anyone would be.”
“I thought I wasn’t your type?”
“Just because the two of us aren’t meant to be it doesn’t mean you aren’t a catch.” Wally looked Dick over and sighed. He pulled the blanket off from behind the couch and put it on top of Dick’s melted form on the couch. Dick must have looked pathetic if Wally was trying to mother hen him like that. “Tell her.”
“It’s not the right time.” A lot had happened in their lives in the past six months. Barbara had been shot. Jason had been killed. Bruce was continuously furious all of the time. No one needed to see him moping around after a girl like a little lost puppy; especially not the girl herself. She was getting her life back together and shouldn’t have to deal with his mini crisis. Why hadn’t he figured this out at a better time? Or why couldn’t he at least still be in denial about it? It would be easier that way. Ahh, blissful denial.
“It’s always the right time to hear that someone loves you. It’s like a big word hug.”
“It’s scary,” groaned Dick back and he pulled the blanket up over his head. He knew he was pouting and whining and acting like a little kid not wanting to eat his vegetables, but that didn’t matter in front of Wally. The good thing about having a best friend was that you could tell them anything.
The worst part was that they would call you on your bullshit even if you didn’t want to hear it. Especially then.
“Ladies and gentleman, may I present Nightwing, hero and defender of Gotham and Bludhaven. His kryptonite is emotions. Don’t worry though, it was passed down to him from his Bat-father.” He could hear Wally’s voice dripping with sarcasm but didn’t budge from under the blanket. When he didn’t get a reaction, he heard Wally sigh. “You are such a drama queen.” He pulled the blanket back down off of Dick’s face. “Love is a great feeling. It doesn’t have to be scary.”
“Okay fine. Verbalizing it is scary.”
“You just told me that you love her and the world didn’t end.”
“And I was terrified to do that. Telling her is a thousand times worse.” But he had to admit that he felt a little bit better now that he wasn’t the only one in on the secret. “What if she doesn’t feel the same way?”
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not.” It didn’t. Not really. It wouldn’t change anything about the way he felt anyway. “I just don’t want things to change between us and to get all weird. I don’t want to tell her that I love her, hear that she doesn’t feel the same way and then have to see the… the… pity in her eyes when she looks at me.” He sat up but kept the blanket wrapped tight around his shoulders. “Look at Dick, with his silly little crush. He’s a delicate little flower who needs to be tiptoed around and be given gentle hugs and spoken to like he might shatter at any moment.”
“You like hugs.”
“Not pity hugs.”
“She won’t give you a pity hug.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Dude. She just went through something huge. She’s still going through something huge. She understands better than anyone about not wanting anyone’s pity.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. I’m right.” Wally started to stare very intently at his hands that were fidgeting in his lap. “Did I tell you I went to visit her in the hospital?”
“What? No. Neither of you said anything.” Wally just nodded and he turned a little pink. Dick poked him and he gave a little yelp. “What happened?” prodded Dick.
“She yelled at me for visiting her out of pity.” Dick winced in sympathy. He had been at the receiving end of more than one of Barbara’s anger explosions before and it was never pretty, usually because she was right to be dishing it out. “I deserved it. She wasn’t completely wrong. I didn’t realise it until later, but it was at least a little out of pity,” said Wally before he turned to sheepishly look back at Dick. “She and I are friends, but we aren’t that close. She pointed out that me visiting her in the hospital when I would never have seen her otherwise was more about making myself feel better and she didn’t want that.” Dick understood. She had been upset that he visited her in the hospital the first time when she had explicitly told him not to and she was one of his best friends. He could imagine how angry she’d be about Wally. “So no. She’s not going to give you a pity hug. Even if she doesn’t feel the same way about you, she still cares about you a lot.”
“Have you talked to her since?”
“We’re cool. We’ve texted, which is what I should have done in the first place. We’re texting level friends, not visit in the hospital after you’ve been paralyzed level friends. I’ve been sending her videos of people doing extreme wheelchairing in skate parks. She says she likes them.”
Dick smiled, because while he hadn’t heard about Wally’s visit, she had been sharing the videos with him too; he just hadn’t know the origins. “When did you get so wise?”
“I’ve always been wise, but no one ever listens. It’s a curse.” Wally unpaused the game and started the mission again. “But in this case, I had a feisty red head yell at me.”
“Story of my life. Too many best friends and too many red heads, and all of them yell at me.”
“You should make a Venn Diagram of where those all intersect. It would be an interesting thing to study.”
Dick watched as Wally’s onscreen hero ran through a dark all to pick up a weapon before heading back to the rooftop where he was about to be killed again. He didn’t have enough XP for it to go any other way, but Wally was stubborn. Wally cleared his throat, eyes glued to the screen. “So… Babs,” he began again, not dropping the conversation.
“Babs,” sighed Dick.
“Like, full on love. Not just a crush. Not just ‘hey that girl is swell’. Full on love with a capital L and heart eyes.”
Dick couldn’t hold back a grin even just thinking about how he felt about her. He was so deep down the rabbit hole. “Yep.”
“I repeat, you should talk to her.”
“We’re meeting up tomorrow for some sparring. She’s been doing weapons training now that she’s out of rehab and I want to see how it’s coming along.” She had been talking about her training with Richard Dragon and that she was learning escrima at a higher level, and yes, he did want to see her new skills, but…
“Or you just want to see her.”
Damn, Wally could read him like a book. “Yeah.”
“Because you want to kiss her.” Wally made kissy face noises at him and Dick hit him again, once again making Wally fall off the building again and die. “That was your fault. I had them that time.”
“No, you didn’t. And don’t be crude.”
Wally tossed the controller onto the table and grabbed a bag of chips, tossing one into his mouth and crunching it loudly, purely because he knew the sound of it irritated Dick. “I think it’s sweet that you are still innocent enough that you think I’m crude for mentioning kissing.”
“It’s not that… it’s…” Dick shook his head, embarrassed to be talking about this with anyone. Everyone had emotions. Why was it so weird to talk about them? “I don’t just want to kiss her.”
Wally snorted. “Who’s being crude now?”
“You are officially my least favourite of my best friends,” said Dick, rolling his eyes. “I just want… everything for her. I want her to be happy. I want to be the one to help make her happy. Somehow. In any way possible”
“You are a hopeless romantic to the core.” Wally sat back on the couch and dropped his arm around Dick’s blanket covered shoulders. “You know my opinion. Just tell her. No risk, no reward.”
“No risk, no heart breakage,” countered Dick.
“Minimal complete heart breakage potential. At absolute worst, she’ll let you down gently and you’ll still be friends. Yeah, you’ll be a down for a while, but that is when we solve your problems with ice cream.”
The worse that Wally suggested sounded terrible and he wanted to avoid it all costs even though he knew that in the grand scheme of issues ‘one of my best friends doesn’t love me as much as I love her’ is pretty minor. Still wanted to avoid it like the plague though. “And best case scenario?”
“That she is hopelessly in love with you too? We celebrate with ice cream. Either way, there will be ice cream. The difference is that celebration ice cream has better topping options.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Dick, chuckling. “Thanks, Wally. I take it back. You aren’t my least favourite best friend. Definitely top three. And not just because you are promising me ice cream.”
“On the podium. I’ll take it.”
Wally was right though. Dick was a vigilante. A hero. He had faced far worse things than being in love every day and had come out unscathed. Well, maybe a little scathed, but still intact. He could do this. He could finally tell Barbara the truth. He was brave enough to face that answer head on.
Maybe it was finally time to take that leap.