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Unless there’s a major crisis, it’s a rare night when Batman and Nightwing patrol together alone. Tonight had been one of those nights, and to Dick’s surprise, absolutely nothing had gone wrong.
When Bruce had called him over, he’d expected trouble. But not only had there been no ghastly murder or prison break or uncomfortable conversation, even regular crime had seemed down – there had been a few muggings to stop, then, even though they were both far too old for it now, Dick had managed to talk Bruce into a game of rooftop tag, like they hadn’t played since Dick had been ten and Robin. They had chased each other across the roofs for hours.
It had been a very good night.
Now, Dick walks out of the showers, stifling a yawn with the back of his hand, hair still damp and a new bruise blossoming red along his jaw and a gleam in his eye as he grins over at Bruce in his usual chair in front of the computer.
“Tonight was fun,” he says. “Remind me again why we don’t work together more often?”
Bruce raises his eyebrows. “Because we argue all the time when we try?”
Dick laughs and admits, “That’s true. I gotta head back tonight, I have work in six hours. See you next Sunday?”
He grabs his bag from where he left it, stowed under Bruce’s desk, and starts for the door, only to stop and turn back around at the sound of Bruce’s voice: “Dick, wait.”
“Yeah, B?” He’s ready to tense up – a couple hours ago, he would have. Bruce telling him to wait almost never ends well. But he’s been relaxed for a while now. Bruce hadn’t been moving with any noticeable difficulty; they hadn’t disagreed on anything all night; he knows the rest of the family is unhurt; and if there was something imperative they discuss, they probably would have done it by now. It’s unusual that Bruce would call him over with no emergency, but not unheard of. Maybe he was just feeling sentimental. “Something wrong?”
Bruce says, “I think it’s time we face the fact I can no longer be Batman.”
“Oh, yeah?” Dick says. He sits down on the table across from Bruce, mildly amused and only half paying attention now. He’s heard this before – preparation for what’ll happen if he can no longer fight crime in cape and cowl, a range of contingency plans ranging from the practical to the absurd. It used to make Dick mad, or scared, or both. But it’s been a long time since the height of Bruce’s self destructiveness. The contingencies don’t have to mean what they once did. “What’s the plan this time?”
“I don’t know,” Bruce says. “What do you think?”
“What do I think?” Dick repeats. “What, hoping I’ll give you an excuse not to retire?”
“No,” Bruce says. “I was thinking more along the lines of if you’d like to take it on yourself.”
Dick stills. “Say that again.”
Dick had meant it rhetorically, but Bruce does. Dick runs through it all in his head. He’d missed it the first time – that change in tense. I can no longer be. This isn’t preparation for some future moment.
“As in…now?” Dick asks. It sounds stupid, he knows it, but it’s the only thing he can think to say. Bruce rolls his eyes. His heart isn’t in it – he’s playing at his usual attitude. Too bad Dick’s always been able to see through his performances.
“I can keep doing this for a few more weeks or months. Maybe a year. You’d have time to sort out whatever you need to as Nightwing, if you decide to do it.”
“If?” Dick repeats. He’s repeating a lot, it seems, but he doesn’t care – it’s giving him time to think. If only his brain could resume functioning enough to take advantage of that time. “Since when do you talk in ifs?”
Never, in Dick’s experience. Bruce lies, manipulates, pulls strings – he is and always has been a force of nature, all inexorable willpower and overwhelming certainty. He’s gotten better at asking rather than telling, demanding, over the years, but he still expects to get his way. When he talks about the future, it’s always a question of when not if.
Except, it seems, for now.
“I’m not going to push you either way,” Bruce says. “Not again. This is your decision.”
Dick drags a hand over his face. “Dammit, Bruce.”
Once, those words would have been the lead up to a fight, but now, the tension is broken by Dick’s laugh. It’s not a real laugh – it’s nervous, more than anything, a release of tension that would be borderline hysterical if it lasted longer than a couple seconds. “Seriously, give a guy some warning before dropping something like that on him.”
“Is that a no?”
Is it?
Dick’s not twelve years old and chasing praise and approval anymore. He’s not eighteen and angry and trying to make it on his own. He’s been Batman and led the Justice League and proven himself a million times over. He knows this is a job he can do. But now…
If he does it, it won’t be because Bruce is gone, dead, lost in time, fighting against impossible odds to come back. It’ll be because Bruce is not and will never again be able to do it himself. There is a sense of finality here, and it makes Dick want to run.
He doesn’t.
He thinks, then asks, “Do you actually want me to have it? And don’t give me the I want it to be your choice spiel, give it to me straight. Is this something you’re okay watching me do?”
Bruce scowls at him. “Do you really think I would offer it if I didn’t think you could do the job? You’ve already done it. I know you’re more than capable.”
Dick works his jaw. “So do I. That’s not what I asked.”
“You’ve long earned it. If anyone should have it, it’s you.” Bruce pauses, and it’s only the fact that he’s so clearly trying to get to a point that stops Dick from snapping again. “For all the things I own, not much of it is anything more than a thing.”
What?
Dick can only blink at him. Bruce keeps talking. “I used to think maybe the house. But you’ve been living alone since you were eighteen. When I was gone, you didn’t stay here. So that just leaves Batman. The one thing I have that’s real, that matters to both of us. The only part of me that…that I can give you that means something. You don’t have to take it. But I have to give it.”
Dick opens his mouth. Closes it. Scrubs his hand over his face again. For the first time in a long time, he’s at an absolute loss for words, which is only slightly less strange than the fact Bruce isn’t.
Bruce isn’t one for talking. It used to hurt, when Dick was younger, in those years between him reaching his majority and Tim taking up Robin – all the ways he’d felt unwanted and replaced, unseen and uncared for. It had taken years to rebuild their relationship, years to understand the meanings behind Bruce’s elaborate metaphors and grand gestures. Now, he’s comfortable with the way can you watch Gotham for the weekend? means I trust you, the way a gruff thank you means I love you and a pat on the back means I’m proud of you and breaking into his apartment and upgrading his security isn’t meant as a controlling invasion of privacy but as an I need to know you’re safe. So comfortable that this kind of directness is freaking him out. And Bruce isn’t done yet.
“Batman is yours,” he continues. “You understand what it means. You know Gotham and you know me. The League has loved you since you were nine. And I trust you more than anyone. It’s yours to do with whatever you want. I know whatever choice you’ll make will be the right one.”
Dick takes a few moments to breathe around the lump in his throat. Bruce doesn’t seem to mind. They remain there in silence for a while, Bruce in his chair and Dick perched on the edge of a table, arms wrapped around his shins. It’s Dick that speaks up first.
“I used to think you’d die wearing it,” he says, and he’s not looking at Bruce anymore, but at the cowl in its case, the cowl that suddenly looks very heavy.
Uneasy lies the head that wears the cowl, he thinks, and has to bite his lip to hold back an inappropriate giggle.
It’s a common misconception that Batman doesn’t sleep. There’s an element of truth in it, perhaps – Bruce pushes himself hard and makes use of every waking moment. He dedicates every day to Wayne Enterprises and every night to cleaning up the streets. When he has a case to solve or there’s an Arkham breakout, he drives himself into the ground until the crisis has passed, barely eating or sleeping until the threat has been neutralized. But most nights in Gotham aren’t like the worst ones. And most nights, barring the nightmares he’s had for years…Bruce Wayne sleeps like a baby. It was Dick who couldn’t turn his brain off when he was Batman, too distracted by thoughts of the legacy of the man whose boots he’d been trying to fill to rest.
Dick can see the reflection of Bruce’s nod against the glass. It’s slow – not an agreement, but an acknowledgement.
“I didn’t,” Bruce says. “Most of the time, anyway.”
Dick turns to look at him directly. “Really?”
“I wasn’t wearing it for long before you,” he points out. “Not so long that I’d had much reason to believe it’d kill me, or time to consider the possibility. Then after you got here…I had a reason to make sure I stayed alive.”
Dick laughs again, hollow, this time.
“Wow,” he manages. “Hell of a speech, Bruce.”
Amusement tugs at the corner of Bruce’s mouth. “So what do you think?”
There are a million obvious questions, from the easy – when are you going to tell the others? – to the slightly less so – why now? – to the critical – what’s the plan if I say no? Dick doesn’t ask any of them.
“Give me a couple days to think about it,” he says instead, and Bruce nods, looking oddly relieved.
“Of course.”
“Thanks,” Dick adds. Bruce shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “No. Dick, thank you.”
When Dick needs to clear his head, he still runs straight to the tallest building he can find and throws himself off the edge, waiting until the last possible second to catch himself and grapple back to the top, then hurls himself back down to repeat. Tonight, it doesn’t help.
He wants to talk to Donna. No one knows him like she does, knows his issues with the Batman mantle and staying still and building something of his own. But this is a problem for Bats, no matter how much it’s about him. Not one she can help him with. So he keeps jumping and trying to think.
Being Batman would mean giving up Nightwing.
Giving up Nightwing doesn’t mean giving up what Nightwing stands for.
He stopped hating wearing the cape and cowl a long time ago.
He stopped hating it when Bruce was gone and Damian was his Robin, but Damian’s nearing eighteen, and Dick knows better than anyone that the time is coming when he won’t want Robin anymore.
Gotham has plenty of vigilantes and there are other cities that need protection.
Gotham is the closest thing he has to a hometown, and terrible as it can be, he loves it enough to keep coming back.
He lands back on the roof of Wayne Tower and starts pacing back and forth. He knows this roof well. The tallest building in Old Gotham, rebuilt after the earthquake just as it was. Many things about Gotham have changed since Dick’s first day in the city, but this roof isn’t one of them.
God, he’s spent so long here.
He’d arrived a couple months shy of his ninth birthday and left a week after his eighteenth. He’d grown up treating these roofs like his own personal playground. He’s come back over and over, whenever Bruce called for help, and even moved back whenever he had to be Batman. This is home, in every way that counts.
So how could he possibly say no to protecting it like he had for years?
It won’t be the same, he thinks, and then says aloud. “It won’t be the same.”
He moves to jump off the roof again, only to stop at the swish of a cape and the quiet murmur of a familiar voice: “Nightwing.”
The other reason he’s unsure.
Cass.
The person he most needs to talk to.
The person he least wants to.
“Black Bat,” he says, and steps away from the edge, turning his head to look over at her. He manages to smile. “Hey.”
She smiles back and comes to stand closer to him. “Hi.”
Dick looks at Cass out of the corner of his eye, and his stomach prickles uncomfortably in a way he hasn’t felt since Bruce returned, all those years ago, and took back the city and the cowl and the Robin. Cass looks back at him evenly, and it takes everything he has to not tense up under her piercing gaze.
He’s not used to feeling uncomfortable in his skin. Never minded how much more easily Cass can read him than just about anyone else has ever been able to. But now is different. Because even though he knows his sister so much less than he knows his brothers, he knows one thing for sure – she wants the Bat. She’s always wanted the Bat.
She has the Bat.
She’s been wearing the symbol on her chest for years. Her becoming Batman would barely be a change at all.
The prickling in his stomach worsens.
Being around Cass is usually peaceful, because as much as he considers himself a talker, he and Cass don’t need words. They can communicate through movement and gestures, every exchanged look carrying as much weight as a whole verbal conversation. But right now, he wants to start babbling, fill the silence with something, anything, just to distract – her? Himself? – from all those topics he doesn’t want to confront. Most of the time, it would work – his cheerful ditz persona has been honed to perfection over the years, an armour effective enough that most people don’t realize there’s anything beneath it at all.
Too bad Cass isn’t so easily fooled.
It’s one of the reasons she would be a great Batman. He’s always known that. But if Dick learned only one thing from Jean-Paul…that one thing would be that the only thing he hates more than the cowl is watching someone else wear it.
He doesn’t hate the cowl. Not anymore.
Cass wouldn’t challenge his right to bear the mantle. Not when Bruce has left it to him. But…well. He’s been able to consistently beat Bruce in sparring matches for years. He’s still not as good as Cass.
He turns to look at her head on. She, already looking at him, asks, “What’s wrong?”
Nothing. Everything.
He could say I don’t want to talk about it and Cass would let it go. But this isn’t just his business to keep to himself. Regardless of what he chooses, Cass has a right to know. He blurts out, “B asked me to be Batman.”
Not quite the truth. Not a lie, either. But what else could he say? How else could he possibly sum up the conversation from which he’s still reeling?
“I see,” says Cass. “That’s…good.”
But her shoulders are tense, and there’s a note in her voice that’s almost painfully familiar.
“I should go,” she adds. “Make sure the rest of the city is quiet.”
He could let her go. He nearly does. But that tension in her shoulders, set in her jaw, edge to her voice…he can’t let her leave like that.
In an instant, he knows what he’s going to do.
“Cass, wait,” he says. She pauses, tilting her head to the side – an oddly birdlike gesture for the only of his siblings to never use the name Robin. His voice nearly catches – he knows what he’s going to do, what he has to do, but even so, the words are hard to form. But he manages. Reluctantly, he says, “I have an idea.”
He lands lightly on the roof beside his sister. She’s sitting down, legs dangling over the edge and swinging back and forth. The sight makes him smile, and he joins her. “Batman.”
“Batman,” Cass replies.
“City’s quiet tonight,” he says, and she nods.
“Yes,” she agrees, and surprises him by adding, “We can…talk.”
“Talk?” he repeats. “Sure you want to do that?”
This time, her nod is sharp and decisive. “I have questions.”
For a moment, his stomach pangs as he looks at her. This isn’t a conversation he wants to have, but he nods back. With a little luck, the questions she asks aren’t the ones he would in her place. “Go ahead.”
Cass, being Cass, asks the one question he’d hoped she wouldn’t. “Why?”
“Why?” he echoes. Cass just stares at him, unimpressed by the attempt at playing dumb. He doesn’t relent, though, and eventually she sighs, and gives in.
“Why give it to me?”
“Oh, you know,” he says, waving a hand. “It’s not like I ever really liked having it anyway.”
“Lie,” she says at once, and he huffs a laugh. It had taken so much effort to ensure no one knew he hated it when he’d first put it on. Now…
“Yeah,” he admits. “Maybe.”
“So?” she prompts. “Why?”
“It’s not that I’m giving it up,” he points out. “I’m still keeping it to work with the League. We’re both Batman now.”
“That’s…not an answer,” she tells him. “Stop avoiding.”
He sighs, but can’t stop an indulgent smile from creeping across his face. Doesn’t bother trying. “You’re not going to let this one go, are you?”
She shakes her head.
“Okay,” he says. He jumps to his feet. “But we’re moving first.”
It’s not that he had a place in mind when he’d insisted they move before speaking. It’s more that he needed to think, and he’s best at doing that when he can move. So now he moves, fast enough to keep ahead, but not so fast that he loses Cass. They cross rooftops, passing through Midtown and Burnley and the Diamond District and winding up in Cathedral Square.
That’ll do.
Dick is tempted, briefly, to perch on top of one of the cathedral’s many gargoyles, but no – he’s with Cass, tonight, and he’s promised he’ll answer her question. If he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it right, from somewhere she can see his face. The gables it is.
Cass’s wells of patience have apparently run dry, because as soon as they’re situated, she asks, “So? Why?”
Dick sighs. He knows the answer to that, sort of, but he’s never sympathized more with Cass’s frustration with words. How does one begin to describe why they’d done something when the why wasn’t about logic or fact but intuition, emotion, a sense of right and wrong? He eventually settles for saying, “You’re family, Cass.”
She scrunches up her nose at him, as if she’d been expecting a better answer than that after he’d insisted they move before he’d talk.
“I know,” she says. She does and she doesn’t, Dick thinks, because as much as she can understand from nonverbal cues, as much as she believes in the Bat, as much as she doesn’t need verbal affirmation to know she’s loved, it’s one thing to know she has a family and another to know what that family means. “But…so is Tim. You didn’t give it to him.”
“No,” Dick agrees. “I didn’t. Because Tim doesn’t need it. Think of it like…how you gave Steph Batgirl.”
Cass cocks her head, but doesn’t say anything, eyes still fixed on him.
“Bruce…had to give Batman to me,” he tries to explain. “Because –”
He cuts himself off. “Well, it’s something he felt he needed to give me. And I know how much the symbol means to you. I guess I’m…okay with sharing?”
Cass frowns. “So…you gave it to me because I wanted it?”
“What? No!” Dick wishes he could rake his fingers through his hair or pinch the bridge of his nose, but he’s wearing the Batman cowl, not the Nightwing domino, so he settles for opening and closing a fist a couple times. “I gave it to you because you’ve earned it and because you need it. Because you’re a Bat as much as I am. Because as much as either of us can do it like Bruce did, we’re not him and we don’t have to.”
He pauses, searching for the words. Cass is staring at him and he can’t tell if she gets it or not, so he keeps trying. “The Bat…it’s family, Cassie. It belongs to Gotham…and it belongs to us, too.”
He’s not explaining this right, and they shouldn’t be using names in the field, and he doesn’t know how to get his point across, but Cass is nodding now, and that’s enough. He doesn’t understand her completely, just as she doesn’t understand him, but they both understand enough.
“Do you…want to go find some trouble?” she asks, and he cracks a grin.
Yeah, he thinks. This will be enough.