Chapter Text
It’s 8:30 a.m., after a long night of patrol, and Dick Grayson still hasn’t gotten any sleep. He couldn’t – he tried for an hour and a half before calling it. But he didn’t have anything to do during the day, now that he left his day job, so he’s just stuck with his stupid thoughts and loneliness and wondering if he could’ve done something different, if somehow, he could have saved Bruce.
He’s been tired since Bruce’s death, honestly. He’d never have admitted it out loud, but he wasn’t expecting to outlive Bruce – spending most of your formative years fighting and seeing friends injured or dying tends to put a pretty realistic assessment of your own mortality, and he’s been painfully aware that he’s just one stray bullet away from death. Even though Bruce is as well, though, it never felt like that. And besides, Dick has already lost two parents, he couldn’t really bear to imagine losing any more.
So now, he’s just unable to sleep and trying to figure out how he’s going to get enough energy to go on patrol again when the workday ends for most people, since the patrol hours got extended a lot with no Batman and the criminal underworld in chaos due to rumors.
He finds himself unwittingly in front of Babs’ apartment, not remembering when he decided to walk there, but clearly his legs decided that’s where he needed to be – in the presence of one of his oldest friends and his currently “on pause” fiancee – though whether they were ever getting “off pause” was a question that he couldn’t really bring himself to think about right now.
He sighs and figures he might as well knock on the door while he’s here. A couple seconds later and he’s looking down at the most beautiful woman he’s seen in his life, even with heavy bags under her eyes from lack of sleep, a giant baggy T-shirt with some coffee stains, and limp, haven’t-showered-in-four-days hair.
Babs takes off her glasses and rubs her face quickly. “Dick, what are you doing here?”
Dick shrugs, wondering halfway if this wasn’t a bad idea, if he shouldn’t still be working. In the apartment behind Barbara, he can see there’s a bunch of monitors set up to help her with her work – even though she’d said she felt like she lost her edge when the Birds of Prey disbanded, she’s still being Oracle. Right now, he’s pretty sure she’s the only one keeping Batman’s allies together with her intel and reconnaissance, and she’s definitely the one sending out missions and monitoring the situation best.
“Can I come in?” Dick asks.
Babs nods and rolls back a pace, letting him enter the room, and then re-shuts her door. He can see her quickly punching in a code and arming a security system – even though she just moved in, she already has it set up the way she wants.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” she says as she gets back in front of her monitors and quickly shuts them off. “Or – ”
“You don’t have to stop doing what you were doing,” Dick says as he meanders over to the kitchen. The apartment isn't big enough that he has to shout, they’re still practically in the same room. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“I was going to take a break anyway,” she says. “I’ve been at it all night, and things seem to be mostly wound down. If there’s a red alert, it’ll pop up, but in the meanwhile…”
“Time to rest?” Dick asks. He pours himself a cup of coffee and scoops in three spoons of sugar. “You want a cup?”
Babs shakes her head. “ I intend on getting to sleep sometime ever, Dick.”
Dick downs his coffee all in one go. It’s a little stale, it’s been out for a while, but that doesn’t really matter right now. He’s just hoping the caffeine will help him focus.
“How are you holding up?” Babs asks.
Dick shrugs. “I guess okay,” he says. His voice feels flat as he says it, and he knows she’ll know it’s a lie. She’s nice enough not to call him on it, though. She just wheels over to her couch and transfers. Dick walks over and sits next to her.
“How are you holding up?” he asks. Even though she wasn’t as close to Bruce as he was, they were still friends, and she has had to get back into Oracle pretty hard to manage things since his death.
Babs doesn’t answer, though. She just smiles slightly and shakes her index finger at him in admonition. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing, Dick Grayson.”
Dick tries to return her smile. He’s not quite sure he succeeds. “What am I doing? If I have ulterior motives, I’m unaware of them.”
“And that’s what makes you so cute.” She leans back a little, resting in the cushion, and she still has her slight smile but he can tell she’s being serious. “Worrying about me. Or I should say, worrying about everyone but yourself.”
Dick sighs. She’s right, of course. She’s always right. But he likes to comfort his friends. That’s a good thing, right? And besides, right now, it feels like his problems are of the nature that they can’t be fixed. Better to focus on problems that can.
“And you weren’t just worrying about me?” he asks. “It hardly seems fair, if you can worry about me but I can’t worry about you.”
“Yes, but as a technonerd, my brain comes equipped with multiple microprocessors, so I can compute all my worries in parallel at the same time.”
Dick rolls his eyes. “Let’s be serious for a moment,” he says.
She straightens out. “Fine. You first.”
Dick grimaces. “I guess I walked into that one.”
He sighs. He leans back on the couch and tries to think of the right way to say this that won’t sound… well, that won’t worry Barbara.
“I guess,” he says slowly. “I guess I feel like it’s all falling apart. Everything Bruce built. And it’s up to me to keep it together.”
“Why you?”
He shrugs. He’s tried to figure out how to articulate that. “I guess I’ve been with him the longest… I’ve been ‘at this’ for close to twenty years…”
“I’ve been ‘at it’ for around fifteen. Cass has been at it for twenty-two years – since birth.”
“I guess.”
“I think you need to get over yourself,” Barbara says.
“Excuse me? I thought you wanted to comfort me!”
“I didn’t say that. I want to reality check you, Dick. Sometimes, you wind yourself up. And if you think this is something you have to do alone, you’re going to burn out.” Unspoken: like before, when he was trying to be a cop in Bludhaven, manage a relationship, run the Outsiders, and be Nightwing.
Or maybe Babs wasn’t even thinking of that, and that’s just him projecting.
Barbara keeps going: “I’m not going to deny that everyone does better with you here, Dick. You have a lot of experience getting people to work together and managing everyone’s emotions and expectations in a way where they’re happy, which I don’t always have.”
Dick snorts a little.
Barbara gives him an incredibly unamused look. “Fine, which I don’t usually have. We’re better with you here. But we’re not better with you running yourself to the ground, and you’re not the only one here. Every one of Bruce’s allies would be willing to step up if it’s required of them.”
Dick rubs his face. “Fine. I can see that.” He gives her a sidelong glance. “You know, I don’t like you. You know me to well.”
“I don’t like you either, Hunk Wonder.”
Dick frowns a little. It’s normally just one of Babs’ many nicknames for him, but right now it just seems like a reminder of the past. He pushes through though. “So isn’t it your turn now, Babs? You can’t just trick me into talking about my problems without you talking about yours.”
“I mean I could,” she says. “But I’m nice, so I won’t.” She sighs and starts stretching out her arms.
But there's a long silence. She seemed like she was going to talk, but she doesn't.
“Babs?” Dick asks.
“I know you want to help,” Barbara says, in a way that Dick immediately knows she'll follow it up with but you can't.
“But you can't,” Barbara finishes. “My issues are... I can't 'pep talk' my way out of this.”
“Oh, but I can pep talk my way out of Bruce dying?”
Dick grimaces the instant the words are out of his mouth. He knows he's being petty. But he also knows she's being an idiot.
“No,” Barbara says, glowering. “But you need to stop wearing yourself to the ground. I don't have that option. There's no one else who can do what I do – ”
“Oh, Babs, get off the cross; we need the freaking wood!”
Barbara does what she normally does when she gets mad. She tenses up, doesn't say anything, and just continues that glower.
Dick stands up, to give her some space. She starts transferring to her chair, and Dick is guessing that any hope of them relaxing went out the window. But she wanted to reality check him but didn't want one herself?
“I know that Oracle stuff has been overwhelming you,” Dick says, because he's not an idiot. And he knows – from what he's learned from other people – that Oracle had a really stressful job during that whole 'the world is literally ending' thing. “But you're not literally the only person on Earth who can hack or manage information systems! Ask someone to tag you out! Heck, ask Vic – ”
“I'm not asking your friends to solve my problems.”
“Then don't ask him as my friend, ask him as a fellow professional or whatever,” Dick says.
Barbara's knuckles turn white as she grips the handrims of her chair.
Dick pinches the bridge of her nose.
How can she be so right about recognizing when he's making bad decisions but so wrong about recognizing when she's making those same decisions herself? He's been here, he knows this, he knows how it ends.
And he also knows how damn tempting it is to think that if you just did something different, you would've been able to do everything all alone. You wouldn't need anyone's help. You wouldn't risk them getting hurt.
“I'm sure Cyborg has bigger problems than what's going on in Gotham,” Barbara says curtly. Stupidly, if she expects him to believe this is a confined-to-Gotham problem, when Oracle operates literally everywhere.
“I think you do, too,” Dick says. “But you're still here. Still helping out.”
Barbara swallows. She wheels past him, going back to her computer station. Her back is to him and he can see her shoulders are tense.
“Dick,” Barbara says. “I'm trying really, really hard to not do something I'll regret. So please, just … stop trying to help me.”
… Dick guesses he should stop.
Pushing people never does any good. It just gets you in a fight.
He just can't stand seeing her this way.
“I'm going to shut up now,” Dick says. “And I'm gonna leave. But next time you call, I will be there, so don't hesitate to call, okay?”
Barbara looks over her shoulder at him. There's a tear escaping her eye, and Dick knows she hates that, so he doesn't mention it. But she nods, and says, almost in a whisper, “Thank you, Grayson.”
And Dick leaves.
He knows that things have been bad with Barbara. That they've been bad since... possibly for over a year. She had that Braniac tumor. Her dad got shot. They all failed badly during the gang war.
Dick just doesn't know what to do. Babs is hard to get to. She's so damn proud. She'll never ask for help. And it's part of what makes them click so well, but also part of what makes their fights bad. Because it's so easy to just say “hey forget about this stupid emotional stuff and let's work” and then. Never address anything.
And he can't.
If Babs is digging herself in a hole, he can't help her out of it. She won't let him. The only thing he could do is get dragged down with her, and he can't afford that right now. So even though he feels like a complete asshole, he tries to put her out of his mind and focus on his mission. And it's exactly what she would be telling him to do, if she could.
.
.
.
Dick grumbles as he rides up the elevator to the penthouse.
He was rudely awoken from his mid-morning nap by a call from building security, and he is not happy. And he has to come as Dick Grayson, because the security sounded like they were expecting Dick Grayson to come, not Nightwing or someone who could get across town in three seconds flat on a jet-powered glider. God he misses his jet-powered glider.
Either way, he’s not super enthused to have to come back here and talk to the landlord. He doesn’t even know why Bruce has a penthouse. He’s pretty sure Bruce used it to have date-nights in the city back when he was young and trying to keep up the playboy persona, just because it’d be awkward to take a lady back to the manor you have a kid at, but Bruce hasn’t been trying to maintain that persona in years. Dick thinks he just got tired of it and the pretension and lies. Or maybe he just realized it was less endearing in his mid-forties than it was at thirty, and harder to justify the many scars he’d picked up over the course of his life.
Dick finally gets to the top floor. There’s a security guard there who seems surprised to see him. “Are you the property owner?” he asks.
Dick shakes his head. “Bruce is out of the country.” He doesn’t know why they’ve been going with that – he’s dead , he’s never coming back. But no one’s been able to admit that he’s dead to the public, they’ve been too worried about other things to manufacture an excuse. “I’m should also be listed as a resident here, though.” He mentally snorts at that image, because no one is a resident of the penthouse. No one lives here.
“Right,” the security guard says. “Then you’ll probably want to see this.”
He unlocks the door and leads Dick in. The penthouse looks mostly like it did last time Dick saw it – fake plant by the doorway, large circular couch in front of a TV, giant window with – with –
“Who cut a hole in the window?!” Dick asks, running up to it. The hole is circular and about a foot in diameter. It reminds him kind of how Catwoman would get into places, but he’s not sure she’d fit through this and she wouldn’t be a huge enough asshole to rob Bruce’s places when he’s dead. He thinks.
“That’s what I was going to talk to you about,” the security guard says. “So… someone’s definitely been breaking and entering, right?”
Dick nods. “We sure as hell didn’t do that.”
“I’ll call the police,” the guard says, but Dick holds his hand up to stop him.
“I’m going to look around,” Dick says.
“Sir, it could be dangerous,” the guard says. “Let me.”
Dick grimaces. Stupid secret identities. This had better be a regular breaker-and-enter-er, or he’s going to feel really bad for letting the guard peek around the corners first.
As they walk through the kitchen, Dick checks the garbage disposal. There’s been something put down there. He unplugs it and starts to investigate and the smell hits him all at once. Ugh. Practically an entire box of lo mein.
“I’m going to clean this out – ” he says, head still buried in the sink, when there’s a loud thwuck. Dick jolts up, hitting his head on a pipe as he gets out and –
The guard is on the ground. Standing above him and holding his own baton is a kid who can’t be older than ten. Dick sighs when he recognizes him – they’d only met briefly before, but it’d be hard to forget Bruce’s incredibly rude, raised-as-an-assassin biological son.
He looks just like him Dick thinks as he sees him, even though the kid is at least 50 percent Talia. But the shape of his cheeks, the turn of his eyebrows – heck, even his scowl are just reminding him of Bruce.
“Grayson,” the boy says, swinging the baton through the air. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
“Why not? It’s our house .”
“‘Our’?”
“It belongs to Bruce’s family.”
“Then it belongs to me.”
Dick grimaces. “Look, you can’t just – wait, have you been living in here?!”
Damian tilts his head up slightly and attempts to look down his nose at Dick. “Of course I have. It’s my birthright, isn’t it?”
Nice to see Dick’s memories weren’t embellished at all, and the kid was just as abrasive as Dick remembered him being.
“And the food in the garbage disposal?” Dick asks.
Damian makes a face. “It was strange. I was attempting to rid myself of it.”
“Yeah, good job.”
Damian scowls. “I expect you’ll inform my father of my presence here,” he says. “It hardly seems like you to keep secrets.”
Shit.
Damian doesn’t know Bruce is dead.
Dick pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to figure out how to break the news to an emotionally-volatile ten-year-old. If he felt like it, he could just dump the news-breaking of it on Alfred, but that would be a jerk move. Alfred gets the short stick of dealing with Wayne family emotional fallout enough as it is.
Still, he needs to at least gain enough of Damian’s confidence that the kid won’t run away, because he’s guessing Bruce wouldn’t want him to lose his son. Great, there’s that side-order of guilt no one asked for.
“Why don’t you want him to know?” Dick asks.
Damian shrugs. “It’s hardly as if I fear him knowing of my presence. I merely… there’s a slight possibility he might construe it wrong.”
That’s one way of putting it. “Because you tried to kill Tim?” Dick asks.
Damian’s scowl intensifies.
“Look – Damian, was it?” Dick asks, even though he does remember the kids name. “You can’t just live in – ”
“Ugggg,” moans the security guard, sitting up. Damian draws back his baton, preparing to whack him again, but Dick grabs his wrist to stop him.
“Did you see the guy who got me?” the guard asks, rubbing his head. He looks up at the tiny Damian, who’s holding the baton, and says, “That can’t possibly be right.”
Damn, Dick doesn’t want Damian to get sent to jail. “I am so, so sorry,” Dick says, helping the guard up. “I think we scared my little… brother.”
“Brother?” Damian asks skeptically. “I mean, of course I’m his brother.”
“How many kids does Mr. Wayne have ?” the guard asks. “And how’d you get my baton?”
“Well, your grip was rather feeble – ” Damian starts, but Dick cuts him off.
“Yeah, I’m so sorry about this,” Dick continues. “His mother must have dropped him off without telling us.”
Damian snorts, but doesn’t deny Dick’s story.
“It was really unprofessional on our part to not check where he was,” Dick says. “I’ll… I’ll pay for your medical bills.”
“What medical bills?” Damian asks. “You don’t need – ” Dick covers Damian’s mouth with a hand.
“Thank you,” the guard says. “I think I have a concussion.”
Damian only lets Dick’s hand rest on his mouth for a moment, next thing Dick knows the kid has grabbed his hand, leaped up, and brought his other arm down right on where Dick’s elbow joint would have been if Dick wasn’t a hair faster. He was trying to break his arm, hyperextending it at the elbow. As it happens, he only succeeded in whacking his forearm into Dick’s triceps, which is definitely going to bruise later.
“Ow,” Dick says, and Damian says, “Don’t touch me, circus brat.”
Dick groans.
The security guard looks between the two of them in confusion.
“It’s fine,” Dick says. “It’s a family problem. We’ll be fine.”
The guard writes down his contact information, so Dick can reach him later to help, and then leaves. Dick glowers at Damian the instant it’s safe.
“What?” Damian asks. “You should be glad I didn’t bite one of your fingers off. What did you expect, manhandling me like that?”
“I don’t know, that you’d be quiet for two freaking seconds while I tried to get you out of a criminal charge?!”
“A criminal charge? That’s rich, I didn’t do anything criminal!”
“You assaulted a man!”
“I just hit him on the head!”
Dick rubs his temples and lets his hands drag down on his cheeks in exasperation.
“Enough over-dramatization, Grayson. Take me to my father.”
Oh great. Now that they’ve properly antagonized each other, the “Bruce is dead” talk is going to go over even worse than it would otherwise.
For a moment, Dick feels anger bubbling in his stomach. It’s not fair, he thinks, that he should have to think of a nice way to say this to Damian when Damian’s met the man once or twice and Dick has lost his father figure of sixteen-plus years.
Dick gestures at a stool – of course Bruce’s penthouse kitchen doesn’t have chairs and a normal table, it’s just got a bar and stools – and takes a seat on another one himself. Damian hops up nimbly and easily on the stool, like it wasn’t at his chest-height.
“Damian, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about Bruce, but first I need to ask you some questions.”
Damian frowns, but says, “That’s fair, I suppose.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she just get up and leave – ”
“I left her, Grayson,” Damian says. He looks a little down and pokes at the bar’s countertop, unenthused. For one brief moment, the anger and scowl on his face seems to dissipate and he says in a much quieter voice, “I… I couldn’t be with her right now.”
“Did something happen?”
Damian shakes his head. “Of course not!” he exclaims. Back to the downward set eyebrows, scowl, and proud and loud voice. “But you clearly need me in Gotham more, with how things are going on. Someone needs to show you amateurs how it’s done, and it’s clear my father isn’t keeping as tight a rein on you as he should.”
Dick sighs a little. He’s having a hard time recovering his earlier annoyance at Damian, with how sad he looked for a moment. That’s his problem, Barbara would say, he’s just too damn nice and worried about everyone else.
“Okay,” Dick says. “And what have you been doing in here?”
“Living. Monitoring the situation in Gotham. There’s a distressing uptick in crime, and certainly disturbing false rumors are going around about the state of my father…” Dick can tell that Damian must be watching his face, because the kid trails off and narrows his eyes in concern. “They’re true, aren’t they?” he asks.
“I’m sorry,” Dick says.
“You’re sorry?!” Damian snaps. He hops off the stool and pushes Dick a little, but he’s too small and Dick’s too ready for him for him to knock him down. “What do you have to be sorry about? You’re probably happy! Now you get to inherit – ”
Dick grabs Damian’s wrist and the boy tenses up completely when he does and Damian draws back a fist, clearly ready to punch him in the face. “Damian, I am trying to be nice here,” Dick says through clenched teeth. “But you aren’t the only one who’s missing Bruce. He was like a father to me.”
“And he’ll never be able to be like a father to me now!” Damian says. He quickly twists his wrist out of Dick’s grip and takes a step back, putting him outside of Dick’s guard. “It’s clear coming here was a mistake – ”
“It’s not,” Dick says quickly. He doesn’t know why. Doesn’t know why he feels like he has to stop this kid from leaving, but he does. He doesn’t know if Damian will go back to the League of Shadows if he doesn’t, and he doesn’t want either Bruce’s son or any kid at all to be stuck there. “Look,” Dick says. “I know it’s rough – ”
“Tt. It’s not rough.”
“I know it’s rough, but don’t you want to at least get something real in your stomach? You can’t have been surviving on only ‘strange’ food for this long.”
Damian purses his lips, but his stomach rumbles.
“Alfred's a really good cook,” Dick adds.
“He’s adequate,” Damian says, and Dick resists the urge to ask if the kid thinks anything or anyone is better than adequate. “And you’re avoiding the problem. Why aren’t you more upset?”
“I am upset,” Dick says. “It’s all right if I don’t drop to my knees and cry in front of someone I just met, isn’t it?”
Damian clicks his teeth together. “Fine,” he says. “That seems reasonable. But I don’t require your help or your food. I can take care of myself.”
Dick sighs. This is going to be really painful for his ego, but he figures it’s the only option to keep an eye on Damian and keep him from running off. “Well, maybe we need you,” he says.
Damian blinks. “You do? I mean, of course you do. What for?”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everyone is stretched really thin right now. Gotham’s in chaos. We need every single one of your father’s allies on deck.”
“Fine,” Damian says. “It seems logical that you need my skills if you’re to triumph in my father’s absence. I have doubt of your prowess in military tactics or covert missions.”
Charming kid. But Dick nods. “We’ll find a place for you,” he says. “I’m sure of it.”
Damian makes a tt noise again, and the two of them are off, back to the Batcave and to protect Gotham.