Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I am waiting for you. I’ve put out the light and opened the door. So come in any form you please. Burst in as a gas shell. 

—Anna Akhmatova, “Nasmert.”

Six-foot-three two-thirty black shroud knives lethal masculine humanoid motive unclear.

“Batman,” it crows, “Batman, Batman, Batman.”

It stabs him. The knife catches his last rib. Fake rib. He feels the knife grate against the bone. Feels the bone chip. The pain is hot. The blood is hot. The night is dead-June, tin-roof, white-hot. 

Batman throws a heavy cross. The air whips, rustles. Turns. His fist does not connect. The thing’s moved. The air is empty. He throws another. It moves. Again. This time he sweeps out a low, fast kick and the black figure thuds against the ground, metal scraping. 

He slams a boot against its throat. Keeps it there. Pressure. Enough to hurt. Nearly enough to crush—that takes seventeen pounds of pressure.

“You,” it says, harsh and hoarse and bitter-bold with no air, “will die.”

Batman slams his left temple against his shoulder. Touch-linked activation of the cowl’s MCP. His vision lights up in full color. He takes in the sight of it. Then.

More pressure. “Who are you.”

Goggles. Leather chains of knives cross-chest. Beaked mask. Chin knocks against his boot. Hands wrap around his ankle. It hisses. 

“We are the city.” 

“Wrong,” Batman says. Fifteen pounds. Sixteen. “Try again.”

A grunt. A shink. Wet hot agony unravels in Bruce’s knee calf ankle and it is only when the sharpness gives way to the dogged, humid sting of empty air that he realizes the thing has sunk its metal claws into him, and dragged. Through the suit. Through the boot. 

Batman slips his foot to its chest. Considers. Calculates. Stomps. The chest buckles in like a twig bird’s nest—cracks hard, loud, fast. 

The thing’s insides must be pouring out inside the slick black suit—it can’t be human, he’s been thinking, knows now—but it mounts Batman’s thigh then chest then shoulders and slams him down to the hard ground. 

Its knees brace around his split sides, squeezing. 

His mouth is open. Dry leaves from the roof brush the inside of his mouth, crinkle against his teeth. He spits. The leaves come out red in his adjusted night vision. He looks up from the sight of the long gray-red ground in time to see the wide black arms heaving downward. A glint of gold. 

“Batman,” it says again, voice muffled by the heavy fabric over its lips. “The Court of Owls has sentenced you to die.”

He waits for the blade to fall. It does. Before it reaches, he lurches forward. His head barrels into the thing’s cratered chest. It drops the knife. He seizes its legs by the ankle, the thing thrown over his back with its shrouded head dragging on the ground, and then throws it forward. 

It skids to the ledge on its chest, strewn claws raking through the grooves of the tin roof. It cocks its neck to look back at Batman. There is a pop. 

He breathes heavily. Stares. The thing’s black face is longer now—broken jaw, suggests the voice in the back of his head—and the leather strap holding its amber goggles is split, leaving one shining lens drooping down its cheek like a figure from a child’s nightmare. It breathes too.

Batman has won. It knows that. Its chest concave, its face mangled. It lost. 

Robin would say, Rain check on the dying, and cuff his hands behind his back. 

Stepping forward, Batman says, “Enough. It’s over.”

“It’s not,” it crackles. It should not be able to speak. “We never said tonight.”

A hand extends lightning-fast. Then another. Then the thing pulls itself off the ledge of the rooftop, and falls five stories to the hard, gray ground.

Batman lurches forward, arm outstretched a second too late; the movement scalds the nerves starting where the knife is still embedded in his side. He rushes to the edge of the roof anyway, uselessly, the metal surface slick with black blood, and peers down, bracing himself for the inevitable: the aorta emptied out into the pavement, skin split over bone, the peek of pink intestine, the body. 

There’s nothing. No blood. No body. There isn’t anything but the bay of the sidewalk meeting the bitume and a dull, round glimmer. 

The good thing about getting stabbed is that he has a weapon to analyze. The bad thing about getting stabbed is that he nearly bleeds out in front of the steering wheel. 

He wakes up in a cold cot in the eastmost part of the cave. He opens his mouth to ask Alfred the question he always does, How much? but snaps it shut and listens instead on intuition. He hears the drip of water off stalactites, the cooings of the bats. The obnoxious ding of the heart monitor. An unusual rustle, crunching. 

He cracks one eye open. 

“Jason,” Bruce breathes, startled. 

Jason takes another bite of his granola bar, undoubtedly stolen from one of the many boxes stashed around the cave. There are hiding places in dark little crevices of the cave, filled with old candy and abandoned Rubik’s cubes and pens. 

A few pieces of granola crumble onto Jason’s red windbreaker and the manila casefile of suspects’ inked black fingerprints open on his lap. He takes a second to flash a weak smile at Bruce before returning to his snack. His eyes and cheeks are beet-red and swollen. Alfred is nowhere to be seen. 

“20 percent,” Jason answers unbidden, voice bumpy. “I think. But the inside of the car looks a lot more like 80 percent of you to me.” He reaches up to flick the blood bag at Bruce’s right, stray pieces of granola from his jacket shaking onto the ground as he does. 

“Jay—” 

Jason looks down instead of up at the sound of his name, eyes shiny with tears that he’s holding back for what Bruce is sure is the second time tonight. His arms wrap around himself. Cheeks suck in defiantly. Bruce can hear him straining to keep his voice level: “What?”

Bruce cranes his neck forward experimentally, and when it doesn’t literally kill him, he sits up as much as he can, side twanging hard. He reaches for Jason’s shoulder and rests a hand there. 

“I’m sorry you had to see that.”

The words have hardly left Bruce’s mouth when Jason throws himself forward into Bruce’s arms, squeezing his neck tightly, breathing fast. The scratchy plaster from Jason’s bright blue cast chafes against Bruce’s neck, but he doesn’t say anything, just props his chin on Jason’s shoulder and holds him tight.

Jason has never liked to see Bruce injured. It somehow doesn’t compute in Jason’s tricky, brilliant, kind, compassionate, little eleven-year-old brain that Bruce feels the same way because the child throws himself at any criminal who moves and managed to fracture and bend back his distal radius on the cave’s pommel horse by trying to execute a Kolyvanov he saw Dick do in an old video without supervision or training. It only needed a cast, and Jason used the pain management techniques Bruce taught him so he barely cried, but finding him curled on the ground silently shaking made Bruce’s heart bump for weeks. 

“Just,” Jason huffs, face warm against Bruce’s neck, eyelashes wet. “Just don’t do it again.”

“I’ll do my best,” Bruce says, but he will probably have bled out again before this coming Tuesday. He keeps his hand on Jason’s back, presses his chin into the mess of soft, dark curls, and breathes in for a long moment, sighing. “Where’s Alfred?”

“Cleaning up your blood, probably,” Jason bites out, and then he shifts. “He went to get more medical tape.”

Upstairs second-floor linen closet with a bird’s eye maple door. One room down from Dick’s old room. Four up from Bruce’s. Opposite side of Jay’s. It shouldn’t take long.

Bruce’s eyes narrow. 

“When was this.”

Jason pulls back finally, swiping a hand over his eyes as Bruce’s hands fall lamely back to the sheets of his cot. He sniffles and tries to hide it by speaking quickly. “A couple minutes ago.”

“And he’s not back by now?” Bruce keeps the worry out of his tone for Jason’s sake, but he holds him tighter; the paranoia surges back up in him again the way it always does. 

Tonight has made him paranoid. Gotham has few certainties. Gotham is constantly being rebeaded, restrung. But Bruce looked into the Court of Owls himself as a teenager. The hymn was the one of the first things he investigated for his parents’ deaths. It was a dead end. It didn’t exist. People like to think tragedies are part of something greater, are woven into a net for the rich and the powerful so that they can feel safe. People like to blame something greater, something that undercuts it all. Bruce knows the truth. There was no Court of Owls to blame. There was only desperation, one man with a gun.

So he knows the thing tonight was a copycat—a metahuman tapping into an established name and established fears. Still, it moved unnaturally, and watched him. What if it followed him home?

“My knees aren’t quite what they used to be, Master Bruce, you’ll have to forgive me,” says Alfred, approaching from the stairs with a silver tray balanced on his white gloved fingertips, and Bruce goes so still with relief that his bones nearly creak. A stupid fear. A foolish one. Alfred presses the back of his hand to Bruce’s forehead even though he’s not febrile. Pushes a lock of hair back softly. “17 percent.”

Bruce almost smiles. “Jason already filled me in.”

“Quite the expert on blood loss, aren’t you, Master Jason?” Alfred says, looking down at Jason with a soft expression, eyebrows lifted to look impressed even in the dignified, perennially underwhelmed manner he has.

Jason goes bashful, ducking his head again and knocking his ankles together. He folds the manila casefile on the arm of his chair shut.

“It was just an estimate. It wasn’t right all the way, I just—I’ve just been reading lots of cold cases lately.”

Bruce and Alfred share a look. 

“Still,” Bruce says, trying not to be too morbid. “Good work, Jay.” 

“...Thanks. As long—as long as I don’t have to do it again.”

“I daresay he won’t be acting strenuously any time soon, Master Jason,” Alfred says, glancing pointedly at Bruce as he sets down the tray. “You needn’t worry.”

Jason leans to the side to peer at the contents of the tray and grabs its gray thermos, before looking at Bruce with a grin, swollen eyes pulling up a little.

“What,” says Bruce. 

“You’re on the ice chip diet,” Jason says. 

“What, Alfred, no,” Bruce says. “No. No. Why.”

Alfred shakes his head.

“It’s procedure. Rehydration. Making sure you can swallow. We go through this every time. I don’t know why you always act so shocked.”

Jason giggles, the sound a little less damp. Bruce glances at him, for a second, and plays it up a little. “Because it’s inhumane, Alfred. Don’t I deserve food? After being stabbed?”

“I deserve peace and quiet, and yet.”

Bruce’s jaw snaps shut. Alfred tells Jason to go to bed soon and tells Bruce not to exert himself because they have a busy day tomorrow, and Bruce and Jason share a look and say sure, and Alfred tuts knowingly before going back upstairs. 

“...Jay,” Bruce whispers when the light from upstairs is gone. 

“Bruce.” The material of Jason’s windbreaker whispers. 

“Did you see a bag of evidence in the car?”

Jason’s gaze lights up in understanding. “Give me a second.” He stands and disappears into the depths of the cave before returning with a brown paper bag, cracking it open as he walks back toward Bruce’s cot. “Goggles?”

Bruce takes the bag from him and edges one knee out of bed, then the other, squeezing his eyes shut when a dull pain followed by a wave of unsteadiness crashes over him. He unscrews his eyes, puts careful pressure on his injured calf, and ignores the weight of Jason’s wide, concerned gaze as he walks to the lab, pulling the IV with him.

Jason follows with an outstretched hand, grabbing for the bag again, but Bruce lifts it over his head. 

“Give it back, Bruce, I can do it, let me do it.”

“Do what,” asks Bruce, holding the bag aloft.

“Um—” Jason pauses, shoulders sinking before they square, eyes flashing with determination, “Whatever you need to do with them, whatever test you wanna run, you just shouldn’t be doing them when you’re—-”

“I’m fine,” says Bruce at the same time Jason says, “still recovering and Alfred said to wait and you’re not waiting.”

“I don’t need to wait. I’m an adult.”

Jason is frustrated. Bruce can tell by the way he goes stiff. Arms clamped to his side. Head pressed down. Shoulders up brows down fingers curled. Big eyes. 

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

Bruce pauses. “A man fell off—something fell off a building tonight, Jay.”

“Something almost killed you tonight!” Jason exclaims, the dam broken; he stamps his foot and the sound cracks against the stone floor. Then there’s silence: only the rustling bats, water off the dripstones. His voice falls, arms wrapping around himself: “And you don’t, you don’t get to, you don’t get to—

Bruce stares at him. Dark shining tinge under his eyes. The way his socks are pulled up at uneven heights but his shoes are better taken care of by their owner than any of Bruce’s. The old cigarette burn behind his left ear.

“Jason.” It’s like instinct. “I’m sorry.”

He sets the bag down. 

Jason doesn’t cry, this time. He just stares at Bruce for a long time with tightly wound arms and an inscrutable look. It is not. It is not inscrutable to Bruce, who reads the hurt and fear in his boy’s eyes. Then he softens, because he is eleven, and forgiving, and good, and says, “Okay.”

And then he says, “You can’t be getting hurt when I’m not there to watch your back.”

Bruce bites the inside of his cheek. Jason isn’t allowed out when he can’t even put pressure on his wrist, which has meant that he has spent the bulk of his summer vacation’s nights inside working on old casefiles instead of fieldwork, and he realizes with a wince that this anger has probably been building for a while. Bruce squats, and grabs Jason’s hands to hold between his own. 

“I won’t.”

Jason stares up at him darkly. “You just rubbed your fingers together.”

Bruce shifts on his feet. “Did I?”

“That means you’re lying,” Jason says, eyes narrow, and a part of Bruce is effervescently proud at his little boy and his detective work, as much a part of him that is startled by the fact that he let his guard down enough to have a tell at all—much less one he’d done enough for Jason to notice. He’ll have to work on that. “I can tell.”

“...I will try not to,” Bruce amends earnestly, flattening out his hands to prove his intention, and that gets a rough, scoffing laugh out of Jason, whose cheeks dimple before he schools his face back into something serious to intimidate Bruce, who tries to makes himself look thoroughly abashed, even though it means his cheeks ache from the effort of not smiling at Jason. 

“That’s good, I guess,” Jason says carefully, looking at Bruce with his brows pressed together like he’s trying to gauge whether he means it or not. “Don’t lie to me, okay?’

“I will try not to do that either.”

Jason shifts. “Now go eat your ice chips.”

“That I am not willing to try.”

Jason doesn’t try and hide his laugh at that, and grabs onto Bruce’s arm. “You’re on the ICD. Rules are rules, Bruce.”

“You don’t even know what ICD means.”

“Ice chip diet, obviously.”

“...Obviously,” Bruce concedes when Jason looks up at him. “What about the petits fours upstairs?”

“The ones Alfred made for the gala?"

“Unbelievable,” is all Alfred will say to him the next day when he unhooks Bruce from his IV. Burnt eggs and lukewarm melon slices are all that Alfred makes him for his breakfast. Alfred is so incensed over the disappearance of the petits fours he made specifically for tonight that he even says he’s going to abandon Bruce to his own devices to pick a three-piece for the gala, which is fine with Bruce but a serious change from Alfred’s usually fastidious bottom line. 

Jason suffers no such consequences and gets a stack of Belgian waffles at breakfast, which Jason attributes to his privilege as Alfred’s ‘favorite.’

“Alfred doesn’t have favorites, Jay.” Bruce takes a sip off his coffee and sets it back down to flip the page in his newspaper.

“No,” Jason agrees sympathetically, leaning over the table to grab powdered sugar for his waffles, “he only has the one.”

Bruce lifts his newspaper over his face so Jason can’t see his smile.

Bruce doesn’t even make it to the society pages before Jason asks if they can train. “I got to learn how to fight when I’m injured, right?”

Peeking over the Gazette ’s business section, Bruce decides that Jason makes a point, even if this is clearly a ploy to get back in the field after last night’s episode. 

They only go over positions—can’t risk more injuries ahead of the gala, so no sparring. Even without the exertion and through the handful of anodynes he swallowed down with his morning coffee, Bruce’s ribs ache.

“See how you have to leave the arm to your side,” Bruce says near the end of the session, when Jason realizes he can’t deliver a cross hook in the air while defending an unswingable wrist. “Think about if your shoulder’s hit. What happens then.”

Jason’s eyebrows scrunch up in thought. 

“You couldn’t roll them...so you couldn’t avoid huge hooks. And you won’t be able to use as much force. And so you’d have to use legs, right? But not too much that you’re off-balance. Is that right?” he asks eagerly.

Bruce is removing the focus mitts from his hands, back turned, but the words combined with the thoughtful, eager dark-haired boy in his periphery and old instinct almost have him saying balance isn’t anything you’ve ever struggled with before he catches himself. 

He turns, and sees Jason, and tells himself not to be surprised. 

Jason’s eyes are wide. He bobs up and down on his toes. Bruce knows his expression: ready to be proud of himself but only if Bruce tells him to be. He wants Bruce to say that he’s proud of him. 

He takes a deep breath. “Correct.” Pause. The right thing to say is. “Good work today, Jason.”

Jason looks at him for a minute. Then he smiles shakily until his freckles stretch and tells Bruce to wait while he runs upstairs to get his book because he’ll be right back so don’t go anywhere, B, okay? 

“I’ll be here,” Bruce says roughly, to Jason’s disappearing back,“I still have to examine the goggles.”

The door at the top of the stairs closes with a scraping sound, sieving out the warm light of the manor, and Bruce is left alone. 

There is the familiar thought: that he could call. It occurs less and less these days, but it hasn’t stopped. Not for years now. Bruce slides his phone out of his pocket and thinks about dialing that Manhattan area code, about the voice that would pick it up—if it would sound the same—if the voice would pick up at all.

What would you say? Bruce thinks wildly as if the line is already ringing, holding the phone tighter before his grip suddenly slackens again, dropping his hands back down again in resignation. What is there left to say? 

Nothing that he has ever been able to say with his throat. 

Bruce weighs the phone in his hand a moment longer, and puts it back into his pocket. 

It isn’t cold feet. It’s not. He’ll do it the very next time he gets the chance. After all, what is there to be afraid of? The boy he raised, the boy who used to eat peanut butter out of a jar on his kitchen counter? He’ll call Dick. It’s just that this case takes priority right now—cases always do.  

Bruce rubs his fingers together. 

Then he shakes his head. 

The case. He needs to return to the site of last night’s episode to see if any blood remains on the roof—any potential tissue samples. The case needs them sorely. He only recovers one print from the goggles. A fraction of a thumbprint. None from the blade that went through Bruce’s side. 

It should be distinctive. Numerous ridge bifurcations. Rare arched pattern. 

He runs it through every database he has access to: nothing.

Absolutely nothing. He turns the goggles over. The broken strap is simple, the sort of sauvaged, top-finish leather Bruce’s father used, grandfather used. Old. Imputrescible. Costly. 

Even the darkened amber lenses are surprisingly intact, in a few pieces instead of a hundred and still in the frame. 

The goggles’ frame is made of something like riveted brass, or maybe a darkly tinted silver, extending in long cylinders from the nose to the glass; the metal is unscathed after an unfathomable drop. The knife is of the same material. He turns it over in his gloved hands. He’ll need to run a Rockwell test, a Brinell test, XRD, something. The metal is strange. It feels cool even through the latex membrane. 

Who makes this? What sort of man has this? What sort of man just vanishes? “Bruce?”

It takes Bruce a second to remember that’s him.  

When he finally turns, Jason’s back, sitting on the stairs, a book open in his lap, an odd look on his face, half-lit by the light flooding in from the now-open entrance to the cave. Bruce realizes he must have been sitting there reading silently this whole time with a pang to his chest. “...Alfred just said it’s time to get ready for the...gala. I wasn’t sure if you heard.”

Bruce closes his eyes. Then he opens them, repackages the goggles, and comes up the stairs, offering Jason a hand up as he passes him. “I hadn’t. What would I do without you?”

“Probably, like, drown,” Jason says absently as they head up, already looking at his book again, engrossed, but there’s a giddy smile on his face when the words finally catch up to him and he knocks his head into Bruce’s ribcage at the top of the stairs as he hugs him tight. 

The process of Bruce’s clothes selection goes like this. He puts on his mother’s Roman glass ring. He picks a charcoal pinstripe suit. He selects his cufflinks. He goes out.

“Deplorable,” says Alfred, passing by with Jason’s pressed suit jacket. “Do you want to look as though you belong to the mob, Master Bruce?”

He changes into the ash gray suit. 

“That is even worse,” says Alfred from the hallway, brow furrowed as if bewildered. 

He settles for solid black, which makes Alfred say, “Unbelievable,” again but is decided on too late for him to do anything but huff about in the car, and Alfred is too polite to complain about anything in front of Jason so Bruce simply bears the weight of Alfred’s disapproving gaze in the rearview mirror and wonders with a chill what the last stage of his vengeance in the name of petit fours will be. 

“Jason,” Bruce feels like the absolute worst person in the entire world, unbuckling his seatbelt in the back of the Royce, “can you put the book down please.”

“One second.”

“You said that two minutes ago.”

Bruce’s eyes flick to the rearview mirror. In it Alfred meets his gaze, and raises a brow, and exhales. He does not say, Unbelievable. But he may as well have.

“Master Jason,” Alfred says.

Jason sets the book down on his lap instantly, cufflink scraping against the hardcover. His shoulders tense then slump, defeated. “Yes?”

“I believe you are to attend the fundraiser soon, are you not?”

“Um. Yes.”

“And I believe the stated location is inside the hall, not inside our humble vehicle, is it not?”

“...Yes.”

“Wonderful,” Alfred says crisply, exiting the car and opening Bruce’s side for them to climb out of. “I’m very glad we’ve cleared this up. I’m sure you boys will have an excellent evening.” 

He waits expectantly, holding the door open. Bruce waits too, but Jason only shifts uncomfortably, eyes pleading and cast toward his lap. He wraps his fingers around the book’s spine and squeezes. “Do we have to?”

Bruce takes a deep breath. “Jason.”

“Bruce,” Jason shoots back half-heartedly, still looking at his folded hands atop the book instead of Bruce. 

“I know that you.” Bruce stops. “I know the—hm. I know these parties are often unpleasant. The people are unpleasant. But they’re necessary. And they’re important to me. They’re part of being a Wayne, and it’s a responsibility that I have, and that—you have too now.” Bruce knows that Jason does not enjoy the pinched cheeks or the condescension or the heavy looks and hushed words people send his way. But. Maybe if he addresses the issue out of hand. “Mrs. Cunning will not be in attendance tonight. She will never be invited again after the way she spoke to you last time. You don’t have to worry about her.”

Looking down more pointedly, Jason mumbles something Bruce can’t make out. 

“What?”

“I said people are going to talk,” Jason murmurs, louder, scuffing the toe of his loafer against the back of the driver’s seat. 

“People always talk. People talk about me all the time.” Bruce brushes off his knees and grabs Jason’s hand. It’s little, under his, and full of brown scabs. “You’ve heard them.”

Jason turns his cheek into his far shoulder. “Yeah, they all say you’re a big boob,” he mutters sullenly, scuffing his shoe again with more force. 

Alfred exhales sharply through his nose by Bruce’s side.

“Jay, it doesn’t matter what they say.”

Jason whips around, eyes burning with an intensity that startles Bruce yet again. He yanks his hand out of Bruce’s. “It does matter! It matters because they’re talking about you! It’s not right! You didn’t even do anything!” he cries. 

Bruce has never been good at finding the words to say. At three particular words. At any words at all, really. He can’t even think them. Trying to speak them brings bubbles in his throat that choke him. He hasn’t been good with actions either, hasn’t even been good enough, but they’re easier, and he understands them, so he holds Jason’s hands between his own and holds them and lets Jason break down again in dry, tearless sobs that make his face red, and slowly the tension seeps out.

Jason talks about justice like it’s carved into his sternum, like he carries it around everywhere he goes. He’s selfless and lionhearted and so loving but he’s a child, and Bruce knows the hurt that he has, that he carries, and the way the words sting into him too, not just for Bruce’s sake.

“Robin,” he says, because it is what he can say. Jason straightens immediately, meeting Bruce’s eyes, shoulders squaring. Bruce raises his brows. “You can handle this.”

Alfred always has them arrive an hour early to oversee final touches to the venue and make Bruce greet each new arrival as they trickle in. 

It gives them time to cool off. 

Jason is sitting on top of the granite countertop in the bathroom while Bruce runs paper towels under cool water to put them over his face, his bravado mostly back. Bruce paid the bathroom attendant to wait outside.

“If anyone asks,” Jason scrubs a hand over his swollen eyes, “I’ll just tell them it’s because I’m black Irish.”

The edges of Bruce’s mouth pull. He lays a damp paper towel over Jason’s red cheeks and undereyes. 

“We burn easily,” Jason explains matter-of-factly. 

“I see,” Bruce says. “Remind me to make you wear sunscreen next time you go out.”

Jason’s jaw drops open. “That’s not necessary. That’s—that’s discrimination.”

“It’s not discrimination. Melanoma doesn’t discriminate.”

“Why are you so obsessed with melanoma. Ugh.” Jason’s eyes are closed as he leans back to let Bruce apply another wet towel. 

“It’s one of the most pressing health concerns of our time. It could happen to anyone.”

Jason dislikes sunscreen. Isn’t used to it. 

He isn’t used to so much. Bruce thinks about it, sometimes, and grieves. For those years, those hurts, that little boy. He thinks about it and his chest pangs. Jason being even younger than he is now with no one to look after him. The endless cycle of ear infections he had when he first came home because the abandoned apartment he lived in was so full of mildew, how the infection made it hurt to even open his jaw, could have cost him his hearing. He doesn’t dare think about the rest. He can’t. That’s his child, how could anyone do that to their child—to this child?  

His throat feels tight. He presses the back of his hand to Jason’s forehead, brushing back a curl that’s fallen out of its gelled place. “Are you feeling any better now?”

Jason peeks a bright eye open. He gives a tentative smile. “Yeah.” 

Bruce lifts up the paper towels to see. The skin is less violently red.

“Good.” The air is back in his throat, dry and bubbling up and thick. He swallows, rubs a knuckle against his cheek. Turns the words out anyway. “I’m proud of you, Jay.”

Jason’s smile grows into a beam that’s almost blinding with his chipped front teeth and deep dimples. Then, slyly, “Does this mean I can bring my book in?”

“...No.”

“But it’s the part where Edmond tells Maximillian his true identity!”

“No.”

“The youngest Crowne boy was arrested in Singapore last week,” Laura Moxon tells Bruce giddily as soon as she sees him, “Heroin. Heroin. He’s never getting out.” 

“It’s outrageous, Darla, it’s practically criminal. More taxes on the only people keeping the city running? Am I right, Bruce? It’s that councilman from downtown, it’s all him—doesn’t know his place. Hasn’t got a clue how things work in this city. Not a clue. I’m telling you,” Irving Needham insists to Bruce over hors d'oeuvres later in the evening. “No, it wouldn’t bankrupt me, Bruce, but it’s the principle of the thing.” 

“What I heard about you and Teresa surprised me, you’ll have to explain yourself. You need to start settling down soon, it’s not right for a child to grow up in that big old house with you and only you,” Andrea Young says, rubbing his arm up and down and having the uncommon decency to talk about him to his face, at least. 

“Dropped right out of school up in New York for that girl, I heard, absolutely shameful,” Dana Cooling whispers surreptitiously to her husband when Bruce passes by, gaze clinging to his back like cinderblock weights. “Now look what happened. It makes you wonder why the man’s allowing it at all.”

“—old traditions, Lincoln March, now there’s a revivalist,” Bruce catches snippets of conversations—“messing around with some jeans model,” someone hisses—“first time in years, necessary more than ever”—“what did you expect from a child brought up that way?”—“done more for this city than anyone, it’s our history, it’s our right”— “costing us, has to be done—”

Bruce allows it. But only because they’ve already paid—exorbitantly—for their places at this fundraiser. $6.7 million already, not accounting for any spur-of-the-moment donations made throughout the night. That counts for something. That outweighs something. The Martha Wayne Foundation is about reuniting families split up by poverty, feeding those in need, supporting the most vulnerable. It’s his mother’s cause. It’s a noble cause.

But Jason was right. All anyone here can do is eat each other alive like piranhas in sheath dresses. 

“People are the worst,” Jason says as they make their way to the table, nose scrunching when they pass a group of teenagers, though he’s been by Bruce’s side all night and Bruce hasn’t heard a bad word cross anyone’s lips about Jason. Galas tend to put people in bad moods on their own. 

Alfred said the host table’s seating chart changed at the last minute. He said it with a straight face and glinting eyes, which means that this is no doubt the last salvo of his vengeance. 

Bruce’s only solace is that Alfred wouldn’t place them with anyone too intolerable with Jason around or at an event in Bruce’s mother’s name.

This tentative hope in mind, Bruce replies, “Not always.”

Jason pulls a chair out with his good hand. “Rich people are.”

“Well,” Bruce says. 

“I’m right,” Jason says. 

“I didn’t say you weren’t.”

“You were thinking it.”

“You realize that not only am I rich people. You’re rich people too, Jason.”

“I’m not rich people,” Jason says. 

“You’re wearing a four-thousand dollar suit and Ferragamos. You’re rich people.”

“I,” Jason says, “am going to lead the revolution. That’s not something rich people do. You, on the other hand, are rich people, because you aren’t cool like that.”

Bruce tilts his chin up to the ceiling. “Because rich people are the worst. Is that right.”

“Name one rich person you like.”

“You.”

“We’ve already established I’m not a rich person!” Jason giggles, slumping and burying his chin into his arms where they’re folded on the table. “If you can’t name any, you must hate rich people too.”

“I do not hate rich people.”

“Brucie!” calls a voice, and then Prescott Belmont is walking toward their table. 

“Oh, fuck,” Bruce mutters, and Jason grins. 

Jason gets extremely close to cup his hands around Bruce’s ear and whispers loudly, “In case you were wondering, being right all the time is really great.”

Bruce tries not to grimace at the loud, hot breath at his ear, but he strings his lips up in a smile for Belmont as the man sits down, keeping his gaze forward. “Is it.”

“It is,” Jason says. “It’s everything it’s cracked up to be.”

“Uh huh,” Bruce says drily. “Sit down.”

Jason obeys and falls back into the chair next to Bruce, waving cheerfully at Belmont across the table with a practiced smile on his face, fully aware of Bruce’s distaste for the man. 

Belmont’s a stockbroker with two daughters of his own, who sit near him on his side of the host’s table, and something about him grates Bruce incessantly. 

“Would’ve gotten up to shake your hand, boy, but my feet are aching. I need to sit down for a while. You would not believe the day I’ve had.”

Bruce hums, gripping the stem of the flute tightly until his knuckles creak. It’s filled with ginger ale instead of champagne. “Knowing you, Prescott, I think I would.”

Belmont throws his head back in a laugh. 

Bruce feels every second of forced laugh-filled conversation after that tick past. 

Scrambling for an excuse to let the aching edges of his false smile rest, Bruce feigns an apologetic look across the table when the waiter sets down their meals. “One moment, please,” he says, and grabs the knife and fork beside Jason’s plate before the boy can start carving into it himself with one hand and break through the plate. 

Jason slumps against Bruce’s arm while he cuts, cheek pressed into Bruce’s elbow, knocking his own, braced wrist against his water glass boredly while Bruce finishes cutting the steak, which he won’t like anyway because it’s rare and which Bruce told him not to order. 

“I could do it myself, you know,” says Jason.

“You and what hand,” Bruce asks, and Jason kicks Bruce hard in the ankle. 

Bruce chances a glance across the table to see Prescott Belmont draped over his chair to face the woman in the shining gold dress next to him—a last minute plus-one, must be, because Bruce doesn’t recognize her, and he knows exactly who makes it on the Foundation’s guestlist. Long neck. Dark hair, high cheeks. She reminds him of a less adroit Selina. Without the eyes that follow you, the duende. 

Belmont’s hand is one her arm, his jaw by her earlobe, and Bruce gets caught up in reading his lips in profile: discuss it at the meeting tonight certainly there must be consequences there have to be consequences it’s foul, while his daughters dip their fingers in their drinks and run them around the rims of their crystal glasses to make a hum and who could let their own and the woman says  everyone here will agree and stops, suddenly, at the sound of scraping. 

The table goes dead-silent, staring at Bruce. He glances down, surprised. There’s a groove in the plate where his knife dug into the glass.

“My apologies,” says Bruce quickly, hushedly, placing the silverware down. “I just—what meeting, exactly?”

Belmont blinks. 

“Meeting? No one said anything about any meeting, Bruce.”

“Alfred,” Bruce says on the ride home, Jason fast asleep in the seat beside him. “Do you know of any meetings?”

Alfred’s eyes flick to his in the rearview mirror, finally free of ire. “I believe there is a gathering in the Watchtower tomorrow night, but you’ve already expressed your disinterest in that.”

“Any others.”

“None that I am privy to, sir.” Alfred pauses. “Though I hope you’ve reconsidered attendi—”

“No,” Bruce says, firmly, leaning back. “Thank you, Alfred.”

The car falls into silence. Bruce locks his arms together by the passenger headrest, and shuts his eyes. There’s a bend where the road turns to gravel that always signals that they’re almost home, and Bruce has counted seventeen minutes before they reach it. Nineteen before Alfred has pulled into the driveway. 

“They were talking about him tonight, Alfred,” Bruce says finally when Alfred turns the car off and the whistling of AC disappears. Cicadas creak outside the car doors. 

Alfred stares ahead. Bruce traces the line of his neck and shoulders with his eyes. There is a long pause as the air in the car begins to stagnate. 

“Anything of note?” Alfred asks at last.

Pressure builds in Bruce’s throat. He shakes his head, curling his toes in his loafers, unable to speak. College. That girl. 

Alfred is not facing him or looking into the rearview mirror so he doesn’t see the motion. Instead, he waits a moment more—maybe for Bruce’s response, which he cannot muster aloud—before there is a tic in his cheek and he draws his head up and down once in a sharp, resolute nod. He gets out of the car and opens Bruce’s door, the summer wind rushing in immediately with the loud sound of the cicadas. 

Bruce bends as he exits the car so his head doesn’t knock against the too low bridge of the door. Then he gathers Jason’s sleeping form in his arms and steps out onto the cobblestone path in front of the door where Alfred parked them. The lamplights’ reflections against the shining, black exterior of the Rolls Royce paint a yellow streak on its side rivaled only by the pale, flat disk of the moon above. 

Alfred closes the back door and reaches for the driver side handle, then he turns back around. There is a softness in his blue eyes. Pity.

Alfred says, “You’ve had a long night, Master Bruce.”

Bruce says, too quickly, “Good night, Alfred.”

He watches the older man maneuver stiffly back into the driver’s seat to deliver the car to the garage where it belongs, tracking the movement of the brakelights until they disappear around the house. 

He carries Jason up to bed. Halfway up the stairs, Jason stiffens in his arms and then slackens again. Bruce does not say anything. When he lays Jason into bed and pulls up the striped sheets and comforter, he hesitates, half-bent over the child, whose eyes are squeezed shut with a force only someone who is awake and trying to pretend not to be could muster. 

Dim light from the window slats across his freckled skin. Bruce pauses, then ghosts a kiss over his forehead and stands back up to leave, heading to the door.

There he pauses, one hand around the doorknob, throat still tight. “Good night, Jay,” he whispers, stepping out into the pitch-black corridor, not pausing when he passes the closet with the bird’s eye maple door or the locked room next to it.

Chapter Text

“You didn’t miss much this time,” Clark says the following Thursday night, approximately two and a half hours after the week’s League meeting was slated to begin.

Despite the casual tone, Bruce can see the tightness in his shoulders from the weight of the world rests and the tired look on his face, and it makes Bruce narrow his eyes.

He pushes the creeper out from under the car to give Clark A Look nevertheless.

“Did you expect otherwise or.”

“Don’t be like that. It was a slow week. I know Guy isn’t Hal, but if you’d give him a chance,” Clark falters when Bruce’s expression doesn’t change, cheeks tucking into dimples as he lets out a laugh, shoulders lightening like the weight is gone, if only for a moment. 

Bruce huffs, pleased. 

Clark's fingers curl around the knees of his jeans while he squats next to the car, slapping the side of it gently, eyes lit up with fondness. “Well. I’ll be sure to tell Hal how much you missed him when he gets back.”

Bruce rolls back under the car without a word. 

That doesn’t stop Clark, who slides on his back to join him under the car, where they lay in silence staring up at the shredded undercarriage of the car before Clark continues, gesturing vaguely with his hands. 

“That’s the nature of having members lead their own League meetings about their areas of expertise. You can’t think J’onn enjoys hearing you dredge up cold cases in meetings.” 

“The cases are always relevant. They aren’t space gossip.”

“It’s not space gossip, Bruce. It was relevant to a rapidly escalating situation. Not that you’d have heard of it, but the refugee crisis in the—”

“Vega System,” Bruce finishes distastefully, “which is in a system Oa declared off-limits to Lanterns. Gardner’s ‘information’ is nothing but hearsay.” He glances back at the other man, tilting a wrench to make his point. “Ergo.”

Bruce watches Clark mull on his words. “And this is different from how you conduct casework in Gotham how exactly?”

“Hn.” Bruce scowls, jutting his chin up, almost scraping it against the underside of the car. “Did you come down here to talk about Gardner or to do something actually productive.”

Clark turns so he faces Bruce, one cheek smushed against the black stone of the cave floor. His brow is raised, his gaze almost as tender as it is amused. “I can multitask.” 

But he doesn’t, thankfully. He doesn’t talk about Gardener at all as they replace the tires together and painstakingly mend the splintered underside of the car. Fries developed a new cryogenic laser rifle with the stock of a Mauser C96 and double the capacity of his previous guns. It had wreaked havoc in Gotham three nights ago. The icicles tore up the Batmobile’s treads and obliterated its underside, leaving him using his secondary car. Bruce lifted the gun’s functional prototype from Fries’s lab with the thought that he might be able to devise some throwable freeze pellets with it, but between the half-hearted assasination attempt and the gala this week, he hadn’t even had the chance to look at it, or to fix the car.

When they finish the repairs and crawl out from under the car, Clark leans on the hood of the car. Bruce joins him, listening to the crackle of the police radio and the drip of stalactites. 

Clark’s arms are wrapped around himself—a smear of oil on his right wrist where the plaid yellow flannel of his shirt ends—and the minutes are quiet until out of the blue, he repeats himself. “This time.”

“...What?” Bruce asks, thrown.

Clark stares ahead, mouth pursing as he settles down further on the hood. “You didn’t miss anything this time. I want you to promise me you’ll come to the next one.”

Bruce shakes his head in confusion. “You know where I stand Clark. You know Gotham always comes first.”

Clark lets out a frustrated breath. 

“Of course I do. But you can’t protect Gotham if there’s no world for Gotham to exist in. It’s just one night, Bruce. Once every two weeks, I know you can manage that. You need to show your commitment to the League.”

“Commitment,” Bruce says, flatly. “I founded the damn League.”

“No,” Clark says. “We did.”

Bruce digs his tongue into the center of his cheek. Shuts his eyes, opens them again. There is something at play here. Clark isn’t usually cryptic. Not like this. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Clark doesn’t react visibly, but Bruce knows him better than anyone. He hit the nail on the head. 

“I’m not telling you anything that’s not mine to tell. But you need to be there. People will expect it.”

“You’re being evasive.”

“And you’re being childish,” Clark counters, but then he sobers abruptly, black eyes solemn. “Promise me.”

Bruce says, “I’ll try.”

Clark says, “If that’s the best I can get.”

Bruce scoffs. It is.

Exactly two weeks later there is bedlam on the streets. Firefly burns down no less than three courthouses, the flames devouring two night watchmen, one overnight janitor. He tries to set fire to St. Emmeline’s orphanage, and the interior is razed, but sandstone doesn’t burn. It’s three before Garfield Lynns is in custody, writhing, eyes salt-white, skin red, having burned himself. 

Batman is standing two meters away from Gordon and five from the last smolders of the Central Arraignment Courthouse, singed cape flaring in the smoky summer wind, when he hears the Commissioner raise a hand to his ear, sigh: “God. Get the ME out there.”

“Commissioner,” Batman says, low.

“Councilman Edelman,” Gordon says immediately, dragging a hand over his face, “was murdered in his bedroom tonight. Stabbed, what. Lord . Twenty times.”

Bruce does not make it to the League meeting appointed for that night. 

“Clean as a whistle,” Gordon says roughly, shoveling the nicotine gum into his mouth and throwing the wrapper on the ground before unhappily bending to pick it back up. The rings around his eyes are dark, his hands shaky. He pinches the bridge of his nose and screws his eyes shut; sighs. “Some drug misdemeanors as a kid like anyone else but clean. People voted for him. I voted for him. The, the radical reform business.”

19, 20. 21.

“Your men missed one,” Batman says, low. The gouge is hidden by the fleshy part of the corpse’s armpit. “There’s more than twenty.”

Gordon inhales sharply. 

Blood’s soaked Councilman Edelman’s cotton pajamas through entirely with dark, unbroken lengths of red, except for the glints of gold in his shoulders and his mouth. Not the killing blow—the gaping, through-and-through hole in the center of his chest that could only have been done by a longblade—but contributions. 

Knives.

Symmetrical, each grip-deep in the body’s shoulder, pinning him to the wall. Only the ending tip of the other hilt peeks out between the clamp of pink teeth and dark tongue. The knife went in through his mouth and out through the back of his skull, fixing him to the wall before his shoulders were similarly pinned. 

Batman draws nearer to the body. They’re throwing knives. The metal’s too red to be true gold, but maybe an alloy. Maybe something else. 

Almost identical to the knife Bruce himself was stabbed with.

The blades are thicker at the grip. The circles of the handle and the circles of the blade in flight aren’t the same diameter. Unbalanced throwing knives have less predictable trajectories. The center of gravity is different. They require more skill. Much more.

The knives all hit their mark. The Court of Owls is feeling realer. This is no isolated incident. Bruce shifts.

The goldish blades don’t remain in the other eighteen gouges, which are just empty pockets of flesh and air.

A detective—corrupt, dark hair, left cheek mole, heavy size-10 tread: Benjamin Menendez—comes forward, addressing Gordon. “Sir, we found another knife in the hall. Same as the ones here, bagged it up. No blood, doesn’t look like.”

Gordon casts a long, terse look until Mendendez nods sheepishly and disappears around the corner. Then he looks at Batman, smudged glasses slipping down his nose. “You want that one?”

“For research,” Batman confirms roughly.

“I’ll have it put aside.” Gordon’s eyes flick up toward the ceiling.  He looks back at the body and shifts, talking motive. “Money, you’re thinking.”

“The council’s revised municipal tax proposals are.” Batman pauses. “Unpopular among some.”

There’s a long silence, filled with the pop of the crime scene photographers’ cameras; the dull bustle of the CSIs; the slow drip of thick, dark blood to the mahogany floors. 

“It’s a shame.” Gordon breaks it, gray eyes sharp. “It always is. It is. He was 28 years old. That’s a boy. That’s a boy. Had a mother somewhere, a father. Somebody’s baby. Shame. Always is.”

Bruce calls Lucius in the morning. “Can we move some money around.”

Lucius says,  “We can move some money around.”

Bruce is sitting at the long, dark mahogany table in the dining hall with a newspaper in front of him, Jason a few seats down paging through Anne of the Island. There is a chip in the wood in Bruce’s spot. It is where he always sits: second from the end. Or. Ninth from the other end. His father had made it when he cut open a turkey wrong, blade sliding low and fast. Alfred hid it with an ochre tablecloth and crisp white napkins, but Bruce knew exactly where to press to feel the groove it had made. 

“Your breakfast, sir,” says Alfred now, and settles the plate down noisily, an explicit sign of his displeasure at the sight of a phone at the table. 

The silverware clatters against the porcelain. 

“Thank you, Alfred. It looks good.” It doesn’t. Bruce surreptitiously covers the scrambled eggs with the Gazette. 

Black ink bleeds down into them.

“The money, Bruce.”

“Yes. St. Emmelines.”

“Verb. Give me a verb to work with here.”

“Use.”

Lucius sighs, deeply.

“It was burned last night. A former occupant who was abused there as a child. Firefly. That’s what the papers are saying, you know.”

The papers say, EX-PRIEST CONVICTED FOR LARCENY and SECOND BODY FOUND UNDER SULLIVAN BRIDGE and STOCKS TUMBLE FOR 2ND QUARTER. NEW SUSPECT IN GRISLY PELAZZIO MURDERS where they have not bled into the eggs. No mention of a fire.

Lynns’ story happened too late to be printed for the morning edition.

“And you.”

“And I would like to use the money that is earmarked for —”

“No.”

“...I see.”

“You cannot touch the money that we have already designated. You cannot. You can- not. Do you know what that means, Bruce? It means it’s not allowed. Not even for you. That would open us up to, God, I don’t want to think about it. It’s too early.”

“Then I would like to use the money that is not earmarked,” Bruce says carefully. 

“That doesn’t exist,” Lucius says. “This is a Fortune 100 company. Nothing’s going to waste, nothing’s lying around. Maybe there would be if we were still under Earle—”

Bruce grunts in displeasure at the mention.

“...But you run a tighter ship.”

“You said we could move the money around.” 

Another sigh. “We can.”

“But nothing earmarked,” Bruce reminds him quickly, and Lucius huffs out a laugh, and Bruce nearly smiles. Jason shoots him a startled look from across the table. 

“You cause too much trouble when you’re up this early. Can’t imagine what you’re doing.”

“Move it from my personal accounts,” Bruce says, to which Lucius replies, “ Obviously.” Bruce pauses, and then is unable to help himself, eager to share. “Jason’s getting his cast off today. Our appointment with Leslie’s at nine.”

“Been eight weeks already?”

“Nearly nine.”

“Time flies when they’re young like that.”

Bruce pauses, biting the inside of his cheek. The taste of metal floods his mouth. “I know.”

After the cast comes off, Bruce takes Jason out for lunch in Robinson Park to celebrate. Hot sun beats down on them, and Bruce can feel the too-thick collar of his turtleneck growing damp with sweat as they wait in line, Jason glancing up at him skeptically from time to time but holding in his words until he can’t anymore.

“I thought you couldn’t eat hot dogs cause,” Jason starts. 

“I can eat some,” Bruce says awkwardly, handing the money over to the vendor. “ A dank,” he mutters quickly, and the vendor nods and hands him their food, wrapped in checkered paper. Bruce nudges Jason’s shoulder so they get out of the way of the people in line behind them, and then hands him the chili dog he ordered for him as they walk to the park bench they scoped out on their way to buy lunch. 

Soda residue makes the wood planks shiny and the bottoms of Bruce’s trousers stick to the bench. He grimaces. The grass in the park is rough and more yellow than green, scattered with crushed soda cans and shiny wrappers. This part of Gotham looks worse in the daylight somehow. 

Litter flutters as the wind starts up again, and Bruce leans his chin back so the breeze catches the damp skin of his neck. 

Bruce unwraps his own hot dog carefully, peeling back the paper. Then he pauses, glancing around the park and back at Jason, who is sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin, almost halfway done already, having made good use of his newly free hand. 

A plastic bag floats past. Loudly.

Something must show on Bruce’s face. 

“What?” Jason says around the food in his mouth. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” says Bruce. 

Jason sets the hot dog down beside him and eyes Bruce with such skepticism that he almost laughs, but he doesn’t. Instead, he shifts, experimentally lifting off the bench to see if the soda residue’s glued him to the seat, and stands up fully when it hasn’t. He hands Jason the hot dog. 

“Hold this.”

“What, can I have it?” Jason asks, clearly not invested in the food anymore despite his words. His eyes are sharp. 

Bruce walks quickly and snatches up the rustling bag, scooping up the cans under the oak tree nearby as well before dumping his armful of trash into a metal bin and returning back to the bench in a matter of seconds. 

He turns his hands over in his lap. Filthy now. He tugs on the sleeve of his turtleneck with his thumb and forefinger.

The hot, city breeze blows past them again, laced with a hint of the spice from the kosher vendors, tangs of sweat from the men selling cold water bottles on the curb. 

“You might as well,” Bruce says, on an impulse just like before. 

“Might as well what?”

Bruce chews the inside of his cheek. “You can have it. I’m not hungry anymore.”

“But this was—” Jason cuts himself off, and hums. Bruce isn’t sure what, exactly, it is that he knows, but children, he’s learned, have a way of picking up on things you wouldn’t expect them to. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. I hope you’re not just saying that and expecting me not to just to be polite because I’m gonna.”

They sit in silence until Jason finishes his lunch, Bruce’s hands braced between his knees with white knuckles. 

Bruce counts. Like he always does. He counts the number of people that pass by: a white-haired 50-something, an off-duty cop, a white man in cargo pants with the demeanor of a Marine out to kill somebody who never hurt him. 21 people, in total. 

He is engrossed in the way a white man by the lamppost across the street shakes his leg out and curls and uncurls his toes in his socked foot, his shoes nowhere to be seen. The man drums his fingers against the long black pole of the streetlight in a staccato that Bruce cannot help but try and keep measure for even from 50 feet away. His pinkie hits the pole first. Ring finger, middle, then pointer. Stop. Pinkie again. Encore.

A car horn goes off.

Something crinkles. 

“I’m done,” Jason offers quietly. Bruce looks over at him, startled. It’s not that Bruce forgot he was there. It’s just that he gets so caught up, sometimes. 

Bruce wishes he was better—that he was more present, more attuned to their needs when it was not a matter of life, or death, or medical tape. He has been trying so hard and so much to give Jason precious, normal things like today was supposed to be—but already Bruce has ruined it, caught up in the workings of the world. Guilt rolls over in his stomach, and he bites down on the inside of his cheek before he looks at him again. Jason has packed the checker paper wrappers into a dense ball that he rolls between his fingertips. 

“All right,” Bruce says.

“Do you...do you want to go home?” 

“Do you?”

“No.” Jason looks like he’s picking his words carefully, eyeing Bruce. “I—” His eyes fleet back down to his hands, and he presses them together, crushing the paper ball. “Nevermind.”

“Jay—” 

“Could we go to the bookstore?” Jason asks suddenly, looking back up again with determined eyes. “The one right over there.”

Bruce feels a tension in him ease. This he can do. 

“Of course,” he says, and if he hadn’t already figured it out, he would know it was the right choice by the way Jason’s eyes light up and his mouth breaks into a gap-toothed grin full of relief.

Jason stuffs the paper ball into the pocket of his purple sweatshirt and rolls on and off the balls of his feet as he waits for Bruce to get up—his side of the bench had not been as saturated in soda as Bruce’s and he laughs as Bruce mutters about it.

Jason drags him across the street to a bookstore Bruce hadn’t even known existed. 

It’s tiny, easy to miss—a cramped, old, little space that smells like mildew. Bruce could probably tell it if he saw it from the rooftop, but he can’t even remember the last time he went anywhere near Robinson Park during the day, but it must have existed here long before that. Its outdated organizing system nearly gives Bruce nausea. Barbara would have a field day. 

Outside there is a little hooded alley, perfect for sleeping in and hiding from the harsh Gotham rain if your body was small enough to fit, and the little German woman at the counter—five one port wine stain hundred pounds even—has a familiar, watery blue gaze that catches on Jason and doesn’t quite let go until it flickers to Bruce, and then it sharpens, an arched, white eyebrow raising. 

Jason would have fit in that alleyway, Bruce realizes with a hard pang, and he must have, judging by his clear familiarity with the shop. 

Bruce hovers awkwardly in the classics section near the entrance. 

Meanwhile, Jason takes off in the store, assembling a collection of spine-cracked paperbacks that he hands off to Bruce every time he passes him. Bruce flips through the titles idly.

Jason’s in the midst of a Dumas kick right now, but he’s also dipping into Canadian literature. Box Socials and Butterfly Winter sit atop The Woman Who Did, and yet another copy of The Optimist’s Daughter even though Jay’s already got at least two of every Eudora Welty publication in existence.

“Don’t you already have a couple of these?” Bruce holds it up when Jason comes back to add another book to the stack.

“This one has a different cover,” Jason says like Bruce is stupid. 

“Ah.” Bruce’s mouth threatens to twist upward. He carefully sets the yellowed book back down to the stack in his arms and nods seriously. “I see.” 

Jason grins. “Seeing’s sort of the whole point of the book.”

Bruce is well aware. Jason has made him read it and has reread passages aloud more times than even Bruce could count, finger tracing under the print. “Have you found anything new you’d like to read?”

“I don’t think Ada has Twenty Years Later. I couldn’t find it.” Jason’s voice drops conspiratorially, eyes wide as if to convey a great, embarrassing failing that they shouldn’t even be discussing. Then he clears his throat, straightening back up. Bruce notes the casual use of a first name. “We can check out now if you want.”

“Only if you’re ready.”

Jason stands up on his tiptoes, shrugging. “I think I got everything. How many’s that anyway?”

Twelve, Bruce thinks immediately but doesn’t say. Jason sometimes gets cagey about having things bought for him, done for him. It’s a large lifestyle change to go from the streets to the golden child of a millionaire. To being ‘rich people,’ even if Jason denies it. “Just a couple.”

The elderly clerk—Ada, apparently—gives Bruce a long, scrutinizing look as he steps up to the register, but her whole countenance melts when Jason pops up beside him. 

“I haven’t seen you in so long, Liebling,” she manages in thickly accented English, stripping the tags off of the books with her gnarled hands and coke nails. “I thought maybe something happened.”

Jason shakes his head no, cheeks reddening. “I’m all right, Ada. Um, this is Bruce, my...grown-up.”

“I...Hi.”

“I have not seen you around here before,” Ada says in a hard voice. 

He slides his card over the counter shakily and she snatches it up. He clears his throat. “I don’t live around here. I haven’t been here like this in a while. There’s—more...litter than I remember. I don’t know when it got so,” he falters. 

“So foul,” finishes Ada in a disinterested tone. She runs his card and slaps it back on the counter for him to pick up. Then she bends behind the register to grab a brown paper bag and places the books into it before gingerly handing it to Jason. 

“Yes.” Bruce shifts. “Yes, I suppose so. Have a good afternoon.”

He makes to leave, but Jason stays where he is, arms folded atop the counter, until Ada ever-so-gently presses a wrinkled hand to his cheek and then turns and walks away from the register. 

Only after she’s disappeared into the stockroom does Jason turn around, the brown bag bunched in his hands, eyes bright. “I’m ready now.”

The bell above the door jingles as Bruce holds it open for Jason, the crisp, hot, mildewless air blowing past them the moment they step outside. Jason’s elbows knock against Bruce’s as they walk back to the car and Bruce is hit with such an overwhelming wave of fondness for the little boy next to him that he almost can’t breathe. 

As they walk, Bruce wraps an arm tight around his boy’s shoulders, ducking a little to press a rough kiss to his forehead. “Jason, you know I—” the bubbles are back in his throat, choking him, but he manages anyway. “You know I love you,” he says, low. “So much.”

Jason looks up at him wide-eyed and serious. Wind blows his curly bangs in all directions. Then his lips string up and Jason hugs the brown paper bag to his body tightly and says, “I know.” And then he says, “I love you back.”

Bruce’s chest aches. What did he do to deserve him? What did he do to get him?

Jason knocks his head against Bruce’s ribcage to burrow closer in his hold, and Bruce squeezes him, wondering if he could get away with never letting go. 

“Oh, wait!” Jason says  suddenly, stopping in his tracks, slipping out from under his arm. “There’s a trashcan in that alley, I still have to throw this away.” He digs into his pocket and pulls out the balled up wrapper and jogs over to the wire trashcan a few meters from the backway. Then he freezes. “...Bruce.”

Bruce hastens over, wrapping a hand around the brick corner to peer down the alleyway. 

“What happened here?” Jason breathes. 

The walls of the alleyway are severely damaged, bricks pushed back by a large impact so far that the mortar looks half empty. There’s dirty footprints smeared into the ground, details mostly obscured but impressions still painted in dried blood that blends from red to black. There was a hard, bitter fight. 

Weighed down by the dark blood seeped into it, there’s a scrap of fabric in the corner of the alley that the wind hasn’t carried away. Bruce kneels to pick it up out of the thickening blood; it’s white fleece on one side and printed-on gray fabric on the other. That side says, GREA , before the rest of the text is cut off.  

As he unfolds it to read it between his fingers, something falls out, clattering to the dirty ground. Bruce sets the fabric on his bent knee to look at what fell, and when he does, he stiffens at the sight of a gold knife. 

“Jason,” Bruce says softly. “Contact Gordon.”

Jason is sitting on the ground outside the alleyway with the paper bag in his lap, tracing the names crudely carved into the sidewalk cement. He looks up when Bruce approaches. “Shouldn’t we have taken that piece of fabric? That could have been from the victim.”

“The police need it for their investigation.”

Jason scoffs. “They never do any investigating. It’s always us. It’s always been us. They’re all dirty.”

“Think about it this way.” Bruce glances back at the taped-off alleyway and CSIs now milling around, putting his hands in his pockets. “Evidence has to be present in police investigations for the prosecution to put the offenders behind bars. If we hide it from them and then pass it on, it won’t be admissible. You’re not doing this because we trust the cops. We’re doing this because we need as much proof as we can to go through the system.”

Jason stares up at him knowingly. 

Bruce sighs, looking away. “It also would have looked suspicious,” he concedes.

Jason stretches his legs out in the street, scraping the backs of his sneakers against the rough pavement. 

“Besides. I may have obtained a flake of dried blood from it regardless.” Bruce pulls out a dime bag with a tiny chip of blackened blood. “Gordon will pass on the results of the rest.” 

A grin finally spreads across Jason’s face, eyes crinkling. “Not bad, old man.”

“Old,” asks Bruce immediately. 

“Old,” says Jason, reaching a hand up for Bruce to help him up. Tucking the sample back into his pants pocket, Bruce obliges. “You thinking the Court of Owls? The whole Talons and granite and lime thing. You said Edelman was killed at the scene so this couldn’t be his blood, but those knives look just like the ones you brought back.”

“Identical. But the Court doesn’t usually kidnap its victims. They left Edelman where they killed him as a message. The Court’s been quiet for at least twenty years, and it’s only coming out now.” Bruce shakes his head. “24 hours ago they were a myth and now they’ve struck twice. They’re escalating. Changing.”

“That sounds dangerous,” Jason says. 

“Hm,” Bruce grunts. “It is.”

Jason glances over his shoulder at the crime scene, where cops and CSIs mill around, then back to Bruce with a shine in his eyes. “Sounds like you could use someone watching your back.”

Bruce allows a small smile. “Not until after you’ve completed physical therapy and training. Your muscles have probably suffered.”

“Bru-uce.”

“A good day, sirs?” Alfred asks when they get home at a quarter to seven. 

Jason looks up from the book he’s already halfway through, closing it over a thumb to keep his place. “We found a crime scene,” he says brightly.

“Oh,” Alfred says. “How delightful.”

“The Court of Owls, Bruce’s thinking. How was yours?”

“Slow, Master Jason, and quite quiet without you here, until Mister Kent arrived.” Alfred turns his gaze to Bruce. “It sounded as though he had a message for you that was rather urgent.”

Clark is waiting for him in the kitchen. Jason waves awkwardly at Clark and ducks down to the Cave to get a jump on recovery training while Bruce pretends to ignore the man at his counter and starts to redress last night’s burn wound on his arm in silence. 

Bruce rolls up the arm of his turtleneck and removes the cotton clinging to his forearm. 

“You didn’t come,” Clark accuses finally. In the reflection on the window above the sink, Bruce can see the way Clark’s brow is furrowed, his elbows propped on the tabletop. “You promised me that you would come.”

Bruce twists the sink on, running cool water over his burn. “Firefly killed three people. A councilman lost his life last night.”

He studies the reflection: Clark rubs his hands over his face and steeples them over his forehead, letting out a long breath. When he opens his eyes, there is less disappointment than before.  

It’s not an apology, just understanding. Bruce nods, and rewraps the wound, turning around to face Clark at last.

Clark eyes him, gaze flitting to the bandage on Bruce’s arm, and his face is unreadable only a minute before the corner of his lips starts to push up like he can’t help it. He leans back in his chair, flicking the spoon in his coffee. His features go soft and his voice drops into a low, warm, almost conspiratorial tone. “How did you end up taking it?”

“Firefly was brought into custody at three-oh-two this morning. The Commissioner oversaw it until another mur— ”

“No,” Clark smiles at him fondly, eyes sparkling and crinkling at the edges. “When Dick told you.”

Bruce freezes. 

“Dick?” he asks cautiously, keeping his voice level. 

“This morning. He was planning on talking to you one-on-one after the League and the Titans finished discussions, but when you didn’t show up, he said he would just come by around this afternoon to talk to you before his team left. Off-planet mission.”

“Did he,” Bruce pauses, “say that?”

Bruce and Dick haven’t spoken in two years. The tension between them is too thick to solve. Still. Dick is like a phantom limb. A constant tightness in his chest. In the middle of a fight, Bruce will turn and expect a body fighting at his left in a defense that does not exist any longer (Jason does not gravitate to any one space), and sometimes he will come across an old casefile and head to Dick’s room to leave it on his desk for him to find and read and theorize with Bruce about it for hours the way they used to before he realizes that Dick will not ever read it because Dick will not ever come home. He knows they don’t fit together anymore like they used to. Dick has said that much—screamed it at him. Bruce has said the same, and he said it first, said it harsher. 

Those words fall out of Bruce’s mouth without problem—without fail—words he hates and regrets immediately but cannot take back unless he wants Dick to know how utterly dependent he was on him and the things his memory brings. 

They just don’t fit anymore. It’s a wonder that they ever did. Like the Rubik’s cubes Dick used to twist incessantly, anxiously, when he was young, but Bruce cannot align the pieces together right even though he once knew how. Even though he once knew Dick. Better than anyone, better than himself. 

“He didn’t come?” Clark asks, shifting. 

“No.” Before he knows it, Bruce’s heart is thudding. Clark can hear. He forces himself to slow it down, to swallow the anxiety and the old hope flaring in his chest with reality: He and Dick do not speak. Dick resents him. He has every right to. They will probably never speak again. His throat tightens. “Jason and I were out, but Alfred would have told me, would have—called me.”

“That’s not good. He said he was coming this morning. He said he was coming to talk to you. He had news.”

Bruce swallows the hard lump in his throat. He knows Dick Grayson, or did once. Knows how similar they are, how the same things eat them up at night like rust gnawing at the same stick of iron. He understands him. 

Bruce says, “Maybe he just got cold feet.”

Alfred vouches that Dick never came to the Manor and the security reel proves it. Clark cannot hear Dick’s heartbeat in Gotham. He broadens it, and he can’t hear it anywhere on Earth. Nor can he hear Donna Troy’s, or Koriand’r’s, or Victor Stone’s. They were set to leave before four, Clark tells him; it was for a peace mission, helping negotiate for refugees. Bruce pulls up satellite footage, which shows a spacecraft departing at that time bearing the Titans insignia. 

“He must have run out of time,” Clark tells him, with poorly concealed pity, “I’m sorry. I’m sure he’ll tell you when he gets back.”

“You knew what it was weeks ago,” Bruce says abruptly, decoding the motive behind Clark’s insistence that he attend the meeting. “He told you. You knew. You know.” 

He knew before Bruce was even aware that there was a secret; the blow to his deductive abilities is a tiny fraction of the pain that Bruce’s chest takes on. Clark’s expression doesn’t change. 

“I did,” he concedes. “I do. But I can’t tell you. It’s not my news to tell, Bruce.”

 Everyone seems to know what Dick is doing except him. His ribs feel swollen. “Go home, Clark. I have cases to work on.”

Chapter Text

Bruce sits at the computer with his hands pressed into his face. Light from the screen peeks through the cracks in his fingers. 

Jason is experimenting with putting weight on his wrist by the practice mats, paying no attention to the analysis Bruce is running on the blood sample from the alleyway on the computer. It’s because Jason can’t see him that Bruce allows himself this moment of indiscretion, breathing ragged breaths into his palms. 

It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does. 

It makes sense, after all. Dick thought Clark should know whatever this secret is before Bruce because they have always been close. Clark could manage the touch and the words that Bruce never could. Clark had never told Dick to give Alfred his key because he wasn’t welcome anymore. 

Bruce’s fist clenches suddenly, nails biting painfully into his palm. The sting makes his eyes water.

Clark said to wait for Dick to tell him, but Bruce cannot help himself any longer. 

He has starved himself for years of knowing what the boy has been doing, averted his eyes when Jason watches the old Robin’s practice tapes, stayed silent when socialites at galas gossip about him dropping out of Hudson, flipped the page quickly when the Gazette mentioned the Titans. He has kept the room with the locked maple door a museum to visit. He has held onto the ache in his chest. 

It isn’t his business, and Dick is eighteen and not his boy anymore. But after a brush this close after all these silent years, Bruce can’t hold on a moment longer.

Glancing hastily over his shoulder to see if Jason is watching, Bruce stabs in the keywords. Richard Grayson. 

The computer sets the loading bar and blood results to the side, pulling up a screen of news articles that go on for pages. The publications are Manhattan gossip rags but at the top are five articles that share the same AP headline. 

TRUE LOVE: SUPERMODEL KORY ANDERS AND WAYNE HEIR ALLEGEDLY ENGAGED

All at once, Bruce feels blood drain from his face, fingers stilling over the keyboard. He reels with a loose jaw and slack shoulders, leaning close, reading and rereading the words like it will make them make more sense. The date beside the article says June 29. Nearly three weeks ago, he calculates automatically. 

Pictured below the title are Dick and that alien girl leaving some party, beaming and shiny-cheeked in the nighttime paparazzi flashes and— 

Reckless, Bruce thinks, mouth sharp and unthinkably bitter. And reckless.    

His chest feels numb.

Swallowing the lump in his throat, Bruce closes the window, gazing blankly at the results of the DNA analysis that come up. 0% match, he reads dimly, barely processing. Probably not the victim: likely inhuman source. High volume of foreign substances.

Dick is—getting married. It’s a reminder that the boy who used to sit on his kitchen counter and eat marmalade is grown up. The boy whose shoes he used to tie. The boy who used to pull back his too hard punches on robbers and grab him by the elbow and say his name. 

It’s been three weeks. Three whole weeks since the rags got a hold of—undoubtedly more since it actually happened. Bruce is clearly no longer part of his life. He has known since Dick was sixteen and out of breath from yelling and stepping out the door that he was no longer Dick’s life, but he thought—he thought he could be a part of it. He wonders what, exactly, gave Dick pause today. 

Bruce thinks, He didn’t want me to know. He wanted to hide from me. If this was fixable, he’d have come today. 

Bruce thinks, dreadfully, He’s never coming home.

He stands up abruptly in front of the computer and walks upstairs as if he’s in a dream, hands ghosting along the picture frames barnacling the walls until he comes to a familiar brown maple door. He opens the door and picks up the old, fuzzy blanket on the bed and wishes, desperately, that Dick would. 

He attends every League meeting after that, desperate for updates, caught in the vague hope that Dick will be here again and tell him himself. 

Hal Jordan attends his first League meeting in six month with a purple-black stain peeking from the edges of the left half of his mask and a tired grin and says, “I heard you missed me, Spooky.”

Another time, Barry says, “Grodd went away too easily. He’s got to be planning something; this felt just like a set-up for something, something big. He made a dig about magic.”

“Batman,” Diana says once, “perhaps I could borrow Robin on a trip to Thrace. I think it would benefit him to—”

 “No,” Batman says immediately. “Too dangerous. What updates do we have about the Vega system refugees dispute.”

Clark eyes him carefully. “No updates. Their last transmission expressed concern that a regime ship would be blocking communication capabilities and that it was looking more like months than weeks. But Wonder Girl said everyone onboard was fine at that time.”

“Hn,” Batman says. 

There is too much. There is too much. The Court of Owls goes silent and Edelman’s death and the kidnapping go unsolved because there is nothing to chase off the scent of a secret or inhuman blood. Gordon quits the nicotine gum and is back on cigarettes before he knows it. “It’s not giving up,” Bruce overhears him tell Barbara at a police gala, “Lord, Barb, you don’t know what it’s been like, these days and nights.” Falcone sparks a turf war.  

School starts. Recovered, Jason gets to be Robin again. He turns twelve in August. Alfred takes him to see Hamlet at the theater and Bruce does not go. Jason says he understands.  Bruce sits in his study and shakes until they get home and his heart can beat again. Jason begs Alfred to sit down with them at the dinner table for once and the play is all they can talk about. The actress for Ophelia was poor. Horatio stole the show. Bruce is silent. That night Two-Face murders a judge and her husband before Bruce puts him back in Arkham.

On New Years Eve it snows lightly on patrol and Bruce uses it as an excuse to call it in early, and they fall asleep in the living room while Keeping Up Appearances drones on the flatscreen and when he wakes up there is a soft head on his chest breathing in and out and he wants to steal the moment away in his head to make it last forever. On New Years Day Bruce gets dosed with fear gas and receives two broken ribs, and Jason nearly strangles Crane to death. He is grounded. 

Jason says, “But he was beating you, Bruce, he was going to mur—” as Bruce tells him he is benched for two months at least. 

He says, “I had to, I had to, Bruce, I had to.” 

He says, “You can’t just take this from me! I was—he was—please.”

Bruce does not say, “I am trying to protect you.”

Batman is staking out Black Mask’s latest shipments alone on the ledge of a warehouse when he hears the almost silent snap of a cord, the shift in the snowy February air that marks a presence.

Batman retracts his binoculars and rolls them back into his belt but doesn’t turn, waiting for the attack to begin. Only it doesn’t. 

All there is is a dragging sound—metal on cement.  Like a dragon scraping its hard, scaled belly against the floor of a cave. 

“Batman,” a voice says, “the Court of Owls has sentenced you to die.”

Turning, Batman sees a Talon with a sword dangling from its hand, tip of the blade dragging against the rooftop through the thin layer of dirty snow. 

“Tonight?” Batman asks drily, and that sets it off. 

The thing darts forward, swinging the blade out in a long arc over its head. Batman dodges right, arms tucked into the cloak of his cape. “Do not speak to me.”

“You’re not the one from before,” Batman observes flatly, ducking yet another wide arc of a swing and readying for offense by grabbing a batarang from his belt. “Your voice is different. Lower.”

Talon seems to know what Batman does before he does it, because at that moment it throws its katana to the side, leaving the blade skittering to the edge of the rooftop, and ducks to the ground before surging forward and knocking Batman off his feet, slamming him hard against the cement rooftop, the batarang only glancing across its chest before it bounces to the ledge. His head knocks against the hard iron pole of an antenna, the metal slicing through the cowl. Pain pulses through him. The back of his head grows wet and hot against the cool cement and dirty slush. 

Batman reels, breath knocked out of him by the muscular figure on top of him. It skitters like a cockroach, kneeling over his bent-in chest and wrapping a wide hand around his throat, pressing a thumb to the bevel. 

Grabbing its wrists, Batman tries to pry its hands away from his throat, but it does not budge much, hands raising only enough for him to rasp out, “Why did you kill Edelman?”

“The Court does as it wishes,” Talon says, voice a snakelike hiss. It is straddling his ribcage, and now it moves one of its knees up to slam hard against the inside of Batman’s right elbow, making something crack. Batman lets out a pained breath, grunting, right arm dropping uselessly from the Talon’s wrist to the cement rooftop. 

This one, Bruce realizes through the white-hot haze of pain in his arm, is better than the one before—more precise, more skilled. 

“Why now,” Batman chokes out as a thumb presses down hard on the hollow of his throat again, deeper. His left hand scrabbles at the thing’s wrist, which is armored and black like a beetle. “After all this time.”

“What they wish,” croons the thing, cocking its black head. “When they wish.”

They, Bruce registers immediately, they, not ‘us.’ That’s telling—division, hesitation, alienation, or something like it.  

“Then why haven’t you killed me yet,” Batman pants, eyeing it as he squirms under the pressure in his neck. His eyes feel as though they might pop out. “Or are you going to kidnap me like your last victim.”

The vice-grip on his throat loosens a fraction at that as the Talon jerks backward in surprise, and the new influx of air he gets from gasping gives him the ability to rock forward hard, breaking free from its grasp and getting to his feet before kneeing the Talon hard in the stomach. It stumbles back at that, keeling over for only a second. 

That’s all Bruce needs to stop swaying, gripping his busted right arm with his left. He cracks his neck to the side and gets ready to fight mostly with his legs. 

The Talon slowly straightens back up. White moonlight glints off of the perfectly reflective amber goggles. It snatches a blade out of the bandolier on its chest in a single, smooth motion. “You are sentenced, Batman, to die. You cannot escape it. If not tonight—then soon. Our last messenger was a test of your abilities, but we are in no hurry. You cannot stop our mission.”

It used ‘we’ this time, Bruce thinks, and that’s his last thought before he realizes there is a knife plunged in the symbol on his chest. Blackness overtakes the amber in his vision, slowly at first, then all at once. 

“This is why you aren’t Alfred’s favorite,” Jason says when Bruce comes to in the cave. “You get stabbed too much.”

Bruce’s eyes are gritty. He blinks the feeling away, the LEDs and stalactites above gradually coming into focus, but then they’re too bright and he screws his eyes shut again, head thobbing painfully.

“Bad?” Bruce rasps after a moment. His throat is so dry it cracks. 

“Bout a pint and a half. You’re lucky I got there when I did.”

Bruce’s eyes shoot open and he turns his head in the direction of the voice. “When you did,” he asks, low and fast.

Jason is wearing a black zip-up over his red tunic and he shifts in his seat, the edges of his mouth hardening defiantly as he looks at Bruce. “Yeah. When I did. You needed Robin. If I wasn’t there, you would’ve died. You needed me.”

“You know grounded means grounded under all conditions.” Bruce stares sternly across at the boy, blood rushing loudly in his ears in terror. “You disobeyed direct orders.”

“Are you kidding me?” Jason looks incredulous, leaning in to grip the cot’s armrail, eyes wide. “I broke orders to save your life. That’s why you set up the vitals monitor in the suit in the first place, isn’t it? So if your partner’s in dangerous condition, you can get to them?”

Bruce shuts his eyes yet again. The loud voices and bright lights make his head pound. The stitches he can feel at the back of his skull pulsate with every throb and the hole in his chest is agonizing even through the medication no doubt flowing through his IV. He takes a second to think, and then he feels his shoulder slump minutely in guilt. “You’re right.”

“I di—wait, what? I am?” 

“You are.” Bruce sighs. “I...apologize.”

“Whoa,” Jason breathes. 

“I just.” The Talon had a knife in his chest before Bruce ever even saw him coming. Bruce has been doing this for more than a decade. Jason’s been doing this a year and a half. He wouldn’t stand a chance against that Talon, lightning-fast and strong as he was. Bruce can’t even entertain the thought of what might have happened. Cold hands close back around his throat and squeeze. “That was dangerous, Jason.”

Jason goes quiet. Then there’s a hand on his shoulder, patting it through the crisp sheets. “Everything we do’s dangerous, big guy.”

Eyes still shut, Bruce brings up his good arm to rest his own hand over Jason’s. They sit together in the still, companionable silence until Jason asks, “Who stabbed you anyway?”

“It was a Talon. The Court.”

“Like from the Edelman case? Like the one who stabbed you before?”

“Yes.”

“I thought they’d gone under. We haven’t seen anything in months, not since that—that alley thing in July.”

“They haven’t.”

Jason shoves Bruce’s shoulder lightly where his hand rests. “I figured that out myself, thanks. Why are they so obsessed with going after you? That’s twice now. Are you just super stabbable or something?”

Bruce exhales sharply through his nose. “No. No, they keep phrasing it as sentencing. As if it’s decided upon by a court.”

“The Court,” Jason corrects jokingly. 

“That’s it,” Bruce realizes, the pieces all clicking into place. He sits straight up and immediately regrets it when his head shatters into a cacophony of pain around his stitches and his chest pangs hard. Grinding his teeth to bear the pain, he stares intently at Jason as he explains. “The Court is the ‘they.’ The Talons are just servants.”

“Um,” says Jason, withdrawing his hand. “Okay?”

Bruce drags a palm over his face, frowning at the twang of the IV needle being pulled at the movement. This goes so much deeper than Bruce thought. He doesn’t know why the Court reared its head last June in the first place, but he should have taken the threat more seriously then. If Talons aren’t members of the Court but servants, they’re probably trained from birth and genetically modified. 

That would account for the inhuman blood he picked up from that alleyway by the bookstore, Bruce realizes, suddenly seeing all of the loose threads he let lay come together. 

That sort of training and brutal efficiency means that Talons are a threat to all of Gotham, not just whoever gets sentenced. Anyone who gets in their way is in danger. Although, Bruce’s apparent hasn’t been carried out particularly efficiently. 

For all that the last Talon was dangerously skilled, Bruce escaped with a dislocated elbow, a stab wound, and his life; not a very good assassin. At least the first Talon in June had made more of an effort, costing him serious amounts of blood. A messenger, this Talon had said, as if it was some sort of test of Bruce’s abilities. Bruce’s mouth twists; if they’re planning something for Gotham, Batman must be in their way.

“Maybe you can get the Talons to revolt against the Court,” Jason jokes, throwing a hand over the arm of the chair and pitching his voice low and strident. “‘Throw off your chains, owl freaks. Unite!’”

Concealing the smile that startles out of him in his shoulder, Bruce huffs. “What have I told you about communism in the Cave.”

Jason heaves out a long sigh, rolling his eyes. “That it has no place here.”

Stepping experimentally out of the bed, Bruce grips the IV pole, sharp pain shooting through his chest before abating gradually. Then he stops, considering. “But you may have a point.”

“That’s two on my things-I-never-thought-Bruce-would-say bingo card tonight.”

“What?”

“What?” Jason asks, too fast. He shifts. “How are we going to communism the Court? The Talons don’t seem all too receptive to you.”

“No.” Bruce agrees. “The Talons are just a physical threat. They only follow the Court’s bidding. It’s the Court we have to track down.”

Jason perks up at the last part with poorly concealed hope.

“Does this mean Robin’s back?”

Bruce grips the IV pole harder. Even if the Talon didn’t seem too interested in actually killing him, it still managed to wound Bruce more than anyone else has in months in a fight that only lasted a few seconds. The Talon’s knife had been as long as Bruce’s hand from wrist to fingertip. Against Bruce’s bullet-resistant, reinforced kevlar, it had only sunk in a few inches of its length.

It would pass right through Jason’s thin, red tunic. Bruce can already see the sharp tip of the blade piercing through the back of Robin’s bright yellow cape, and he shakes his head furiously to banish the image burning into his brain. 

“Not yet.” Jason’s head hangs, and a pang passes through Bruce’s chest. “I need you here to look through old cases to see if there’s any police record of them in the past.”

Jason wraps his arms around himself. “I thought you said you looked into it when you were a kid and you didn’t find anything.”

“I was wrong,” Bruce admits. “And I didn’t have the training you do.”

Jason hums, gaze falling to his lap. Then he says, “I didn’t mean to, you know. I’m sorry.”

Bruce stares at him, not comprehending. “For what?”

“For Crane. I just—you don’t know what it’s like. I thought you were going to die. I thought you were gone.”

Bruce’s heart sinks. “Jason...”  

He reaches out a hand, but Jason moves away, standing up abruptly from his seat, and it falls helplessly to his side. 

“Forget it,” Jason says. “I’ll start looking for murders.”

“Jason,” Bruce says to his back. Jason’s shoulders are stiff as he stops midway to the computer. Bruce can see the cigarette burn behind his ear fully now, and his mouth twangs hard. “I do know.”

“Nothing,” says Gordon, a puff of smoke escaping his lips. “Quiet.”

“Won’t last.”

“No. Never does.” 

“The Edelman case.”

Gordon’s gray brows rise. The smoke lifts in the night air. “From a year ago?”

“Seven months and eight days.”

“You’d know.” Gordon takes another slow drag, brow creasing. “Forensics came back with nothing, they said. No fingerprints or aberrant DNA, clean as can be, if I remember right. Lord, feels longer than seven months ago.”

Batman’s mouth twists in irritation. What was special about the Court’s kidnapping? How was that victim able to draw blood when Bruce couldn’t even do it to a Talon? How can the Court go up in smoke any time anyone gets close?

They appear only when they want to, disappearing immediately after, making them all sitting ducks. 

Jason had found threads over the years that might be tied to them—dead politicians, murdered bankers—but also to anyone else in Gotham with a grudge. The police reports distort every inch of the stories. In the Edelman casefile Barbara procured for them, the given impetus is suspected robbery and the ME report recorded just three stab wounds instead of the 21 there had been. 

“Menendez wrote the report,” Batman offers raspily, probing to see what Gordon knows. “He’s on the take.”

“One of Falcone’s, I know.”

“Anyone else.”

“He’s a Detroit boy. Not stupid enough to double-cross the Roman.”

Gaze skimming across the dark rooftops, Batman purses his mouth. His elbow twangs in memory of the last time.  There is no sight of a shrouded, yellow-eyed figure on the horizon; still, he feels eyes on him. His voice comes out hushed. “What do you know about the Court of Owls.”

“Gordon doesn’t know anything about the Court.” Bruce strips off his gauntlets, stepping out of his costume. He had kept his actual encounters with the Talons to himself, unable to shake off the feeling of being watched and painfully aware of the verses. Speak not a whispered word of them or they’ll send a Talon for your head. 

Jason squints in confusion, kicking out a foot against the batcomputer console to stop spinning in the chair. “But I thought everybody from Gotham knew the rhyme. It’s just that we all thought it was a myth.”

“He’s from Chicago. He wouldn’t have heard it, not as a child.” Bruce shrugs on a long-sleeved shirt, coming to brace his still-healing arm against the top of the chair Jason sits in, gazing at the computer screen. “He said Menendez was too smart to cross Falcone, but the report was clearly altered.”

Jason taps the keyboard and pulls up the police document. 

“The Court must have their hand in everything. Deeper than we thought.”

“But if it’s so deep, how come they haven’t done anything for so long? How come we didn’t know they were real, really real, until now? It doesn’t make sense.”

Bruce stares at the autopsy report, eyes slitting. “No. It doesn’t.”

“Who are they even? They must have headquarters—you said you saw two Talons so far, and if there’s enough to control Gotham like the rhyme says, then they’ve got to be, right? So where are they? Why can’t we find them?”

“They’re good.” Bruce’s mouth tightens further, remembering the fights. “We have to wait for them to strike again.”

It's two weeks later. Bruce can tell it’s the same Talon from before the moment he lays eyes on it across the WE building. There’s a nick in the leather bandolier that holds its knives where Bruce slashed it with a batarang. It walks with a controlled power in its shoulders, a knife in its hand. 

“Batman,” it says. 

“I’ve been sentenced to die,” says Batman. “I’m aware.”

It draws to a stop three meters from Batman. Moonlight catches the hooks of its sheaths and blades, draping a white outline around the edges of its black shroud and reflecting flat, white discs on the amber goggles. It twirls the knives between its fingers expertly. 

“Tonight.”

Cold air bites at the skin exposed by the cowl. Batman raises a brow that the Talon cannot see. His sudden smirk pulls at the cut on his lip, stinging in the February chill. “Do you know how often I’ve heard that.”

The Talon lurches forward like a tree branch in a storm.  A flurry of cuts skims Batman’s suit, even as he ducks back and dodges. It’s like the Talon knows where he’s about to move and compensates for it. When Bruce throws a high kick meant to catch its neck and topple it to the ground, it seizes his thigh and yanks outward. 

Batman only escapes total dislocation by slamming his forehead against its head hard, knocking it backward and startling it into dropping his leg. But the Talon uses the momentum to bend all the way backward, bracing its palms back against the hard rooftop in a handstand, feet hooking under Bruce’s arms and throwing him up into the air in an immense show of strength. 

Bruce goes up and lands down hard on his still-recovering right arm, which erupts in white-hot pain. Grunting, he slams his palms down to the ground and gets back up. Not tonight. Not tonight either. 

Charging forward, Bruce rams his ducked head into the Talon’s throat and pins it to the ground, the same way it had him pinned last time, his knees bent over its powerful, thrashing wrists. The metal claws on its fingers dig in again and again, sinking deep into the fleshy muscle of his thigh in sharp, agonizing stabs that gives into desperate, almost frantic scratches when Bruce yanks the bandolier of knives from its chest and throws it across the rooftop, letting the harsh wind steal it away. 

Finally getting a chance to look at it stilled, his mind races to catalogue every detail. Five-eleven one-seventy masculine highly trained humanoid. Correction. Humanoid maybe. No man would have been able to survive what Bruce put its predecessor through, and the blood at the kidnapping site by Robinson Park had been spliced and unique. 

They had never found the victim. That sends another spike of pure adrenaline down Bruce and his mouth curls into a sneer, the edges of his lips pulled down further by the pulsing throb of his carved-up knees. Blood rushes in his ears. 

His teeth grit, upper teeth slipping over bottom in a painful scrape that jostles the cut on his lip. Frustrated, he yanks at the bottom of its shroud and the claws immediately vacate the muscle around Batman’s knee, leaving the hot blood pouring out of his leg to chill in the cold air. Both hands slip out from under Bruce’s knees, making him drop forward—knees slamming into the ground. 

Its hands scrabble brutally at his gauntlets where he grips the bottom edge of its shroud, talons raking deep grooves through the reinforced material, grazing the flesh underneath, and it hits Bruce like a blow that it’s been too good for this all along—it’s too good to be pinned like this. It let itself be.

“What are you?” Batman hisses.

With that, Bruce yanks the shroud and goggles off. He registers the meta-like appearance first—drained, pale skin and brilliant veins—before the Talon’s features burn into his memory alongside a thousand others of the same face, same bright eyes. 

Bruce’s heart stops.

“Dick?” he breathes.   

His spine seems to buckle, fingers unclenching around the black shroud in his hands. It escapes between his fingers, caught in the harsh spring wind and flies away. 

Dick’s eyes are blown wide, all-pupils, and his mouth opens for just a second before it snaps shut again and then there’s an iron fist slamming against Bruce’s exposed mouth, rattling his teeth. 

Bruce jerks back, but the sudden pain only makes him slam his hands down into Dick’s shoulder and pin the body below him more firmly. He stabs his tongue into the pocket where the blow loosened a molar, and reels. What is Dick doing here? Why is Dick acting like a Talon? Why is he attacking Bruce?

He presses harder on the boy’s beetle-armored shoulders; cries, “Dick, listen to me—”

It’s too much to ask—it was too much to ask when Dick was Robin and under his thumb, but now Dick thrashes violently with the force of ten men. Still, Bruce holds on with absolute determination. Dick is not getting away from him. 

But when Dick manages to free a shoulder and then an arm from his hold, Bruce realizes what he has to do, even if it’s almost impossible now that he sees his boy’s face, stark and gaunt and wild and familiar. 

“I’m sorry,” Bruce breathes into the night air as he slams a fist into Dick’s temple exactly twice with all the strength he has, knocking him out, wild eyes rolling back in his head.  

He has no clue how long unconsciousness will last in whatever state the Court has put him into. Genetic enhancement—injections—it could be anything. That sort of two-part hit would have shattered anyone else’s skull, but when Bruce hovers a palm over Dick’s mouth and nose, there’s breath, just as he’d expected. He has no clue what Dick is doing here like this. 

Bruce gathers Dick in his arms, stumbling a little under the unexpected weight. Dick is heavier than he remembers. Taller, too, and he stops after he throws out his grappling line to stare at the young face pressed into his shoulder, cast in the low light of midnight. It’s different. 

His cheekbones stick out more, jaw more cutting and slightly longer. His hair drifts over his forehead in soft, loose curls. A wet cut in his brow. Black circles ring his shut eyes. His voice had been different too, edged with a hard rasp.

What happened here? Bruce tightens his hold until he reaches the Bat-Mobile, placing Dick carefully in the backseat and settling into the driver’s seat himself, almost unable to process what has happened. It feels unreal. His arms feel empty, throat a pinprick. He grips the steering wheel, reeling. 

Bruce switches the comms on. “Penny-one.”

“Sir?”

Glancing at the prone figure in the backseat, Bruce swallows hard. “Get Robin out of the cave and the medbay prepared. We’re going to have a visitor.”

Chapter Text

“Lord God, gather your servant in,” Alfred mutters at the sound of Bruce approaching, his back turned. He speaks over his shoulder as he smooths out the sheets of a cot, voice rising now that he intends to be heard. “Anyone we know?”

Bruce shifts his hold on Dick, arms under the strong loop of his shoulders and his knees. 

“Alfred,” Bruce says after a moment, voice rough. 

Alfred doesn’t turn, fluffing the thin pillow with a hard, impatient hand. “We’re dangerously low on plasma after your last encounter with the Court, I do hope no transfer will be needed tonight. Nor any night, but I know that hardly—”

“Alfred.”

The man turns, one gray brow raised at Bruce’s interruption. His gaze drops from Bruce’s face to the body in his arms, and in an instant, his face goes white as a knuckle, features slackening, eyes glued to Dick. “...No,” he moans. 

Alfred surges forward to grab him, and Bruce lets him take the weight of Dick’s upper half, hands falling to Dick’s ankles. Alfred wraps his arms around Dick’s armored torso, hands desperately mapping out around his throat until it finds the thready pulse there, and then Alfred’s eyes fall shut and a low breath like nothing Bruce has ever heard escapes out of the older man. 

His chin drops into the crown of Dick’s head, mouth disappearing into the sweat-mussed, dark curls as he croons. “Oh, my dearest boy, my boy, my child.”

Bruce stands there awkwardly, gripping his heavy, intricately designed boots and bearing most of his weight as Alfred holds the rest of him. He shifts, eyes feeling hot. 

Alfred takes a long, deep breath before his eyes open again, looking devastated as he meets Bruce’s gaze. “What happened to him?” he demands hoarsely, tone a stark contrast to the tender, wrinkled hand frantically brushing up and down Dick’s pale cheek. 

“He’s alive,” Bruce avoids the question, speaking quickly. “He’s not hurt.”

Alfred says, “What happened, Bruce?”

Bruce says, “I don’t know.”

The wave breaks. 

And then, helplessly, Bruce says, “The Court.”

Alfred and Bruce sit facing each other in stiff chairs across the medbay, a sleek table between them with two untouched cups of tea. 

Alfred’s hands are knit together tightly, veins bulging under his knuckles, and a thumb and forefinger occasionally come out to pull down the white sleeve of his suitshirt in a tic then dart back. He’s shaking his head back and forth quickly. “You can’t.”

“We don’t know,” Bruce explains quietly, “what sort of state he’ll be in when he wakes up.”

“You can’t.” Alfred’s voice is thin and strong all at once. “That’s your boy, Master Bruce.”

“The Court’s done things to him. Mental things. Unthinkable things. Must have. You didn’t see him. You didn’t see him.” Bruce glances at the nearby cot, its occupant stripped of weapons and handcuffed to the armrail. He keeps himself from shaking with pure force of will.

“That’s no reason to shackle him like some kind of animal!” Alfred spits, nostrils flaring. He sits up, posture somehow growing even more tense, and his hands break free of their knit to spider over the table. “You raised him from the time he could hardly tie his shoes and now you want to chain him until he—”

“He doesn’t remember, Alfred. Not anything, not the rule.” He pauses, watching Alfred shake with fury. “The Court wanted an assassin.” 

“You,” Alfred seethes and then stops, squeezing his eyes shut. He pinches the edge of his shirtsleeve again and then does not let go. Bruce can see his fingertips go white with the force of the pressure. “Do not get to hold him to your bloody rule when he’s gone through the ordeal you’ve described. Not when he’s had no choice. Not when I’ve done as much myself.”

“That was a war,” Bruce says quietly, eyes intent. He rubs his fingertips together. “That was different.”

“It wasn’t, not if they’ve twisted his mind. You can’t, Master Bruce. You can’t be holding this against him.” Silence. “Please.”

The checkered, high-watt lighting of the cave buzzes overhead, painting Alfred artificially pale and underscoring every hard line in his face, the shine in his eyes. The sound is loud. The table is a confessional. 

Bruce says, “I couldn’t.”

Bruce says, “I never could. Even if he did it and he meant it. I could never hold it against him. I could never do anything but forgive him.”

Bruce says, “He didn’t remember. He didn’t know any better. No recognition. He knew enough to find me and there was something that he seemed to understand about me and us and himself but he didn’t know.”

Bruce says, “He could have killed me easily, and he didn’t, not then, not tonight. He could have. Maybe he was going to. But, Alfred, when he was standing there, I couldn’t predict him. I couldn’t even tell. I didn’t suspect at all. They’ve done things to him, done something to him, and I didn’t know it was him until the mask came off. He was different. Like a new person. Maybe he could have done it. I couldn’t tell you. But I... I didn’t know him.”

Bruce says, a crack down the center, “That terrifies me.”

Alfred’s eyes are tekhelet blue. The silence settles. Then Alfred stands, chair screeching loudly as it is pushed back. He walks away, hand skimming atop a set of drawers to pluck up the key to the handcuffs. 

The weight in Bruce’s chest, his throat, keeps him down. By the time he manages to stand, Alfred is already at Dick’s bedside, taking the boy’s wrist in his hand and gingerly inserting the key into the lock. The cuffs click, catching the light in a fleeting glint before falling to the ground with a clatter—and the sound makes something happen, and Bruce can see Dick’s eyes dart beneath their lids.

The boy jolts up violently, dark, wild eyes shooting open, and his hand lashes out to seize Alfred’s wrist where it wraps around his. His arm draws back as if to yank and then a needle slides into his neck, and he convulses once, briefly, before his eyes shutter and he goes slack, falling back to the pillow. 

Bruce withdraws the syringe in his hands and places it on the bedside table, breathing heavily. It clinks. 

Alfred is running a hand up and down his reddened wrist, eyes still locked to the boy in the bed, dark hair spread beneath him. 

“No handcuffs,” Alfred says at last, voice tremulous but firm. “No handcuffs. I insist.”

“The sedative won’t last more than a few hours.”

Alfred’s eyes flash up to his. They’re wet. “So be it.”

Bruce looks down at the boy between them, and nods. 

Bruce sits at his bedside for hours. He concocts another sedative from the chair and readministers it. Dick’s veins are usually tricky. Now they are black as night and everywhere, easy to find. Dick doesn’t stir as the needle goes in. Bruce stares at him numbly. 

Alfred flutters around the cave, hands on his own cheeks, his chin, his shoulder as he frets. He ascends the stairs just once to grab a bundle of keepsakes and returns with a worried look that softens when he sees Dick still there, as if he’d expected him to go up in smoke the moment he left his sight. 

Alfred deposits the items on a chair on the opposite side of the bed as Bruce, his bent back blocking Bruce’s sight of the objects. When he turns around, he’s unfolding a brown wool blanket. Dick had bought it for a few thousand forints when Bruce had brought him along to Dunakeszi when he was twelve and had kept it at the foot of his bed ever since. He hadn’t taken it with him when he left. Bruce remembers walking into that museum of a room for the first time afterward and being shocked—hurt—that it too had been left behind. He sat on that empty bed for a long time.

Now Alfred carefully tucks it around Dick like he’s a little boy, taking care to keep his touch light so as not to provoke an attack like last time and then glances up at Bruce.

“Master Bruce,” he says, and there’s a note in his voice, “perhaps you could gather some items for me.”

“I,” starts Bruce.

Alfred gives a wan smile. “Excellent. Fetch the game under the hatch by the dinosaur.”

Bruce immediately knows what he’s talking about, another of the last Robin’s little hiding places. He nods and stands to oblige, and when he does, his knees crack. His legs feel stiff as he treads to the trophy hall, and when he’s by the moss-green hindlegs of the tyrannosaurus, he feels himself be overtaken by the same anxiety as Alfred and glances frantically back over his shoulder: Dick is still there. Pale and unconscious, but there. 

He relaxes, turning back to himself, and bends down to release the hatch. 

Inside are a few Superman trading cards. At ten, Dick had been reluctant to part with his Green Lantern cards but had relented with Roy’s trade on the terms he get all the ones with Clark, and Bruce can so vividly remember the sight of the boys on the floor in the den ripping open packs with their teeth that it makes his chest ache beyond belief for a moment. He shakes his head to clear it. Underneath the cards lay a Rubik’s cube and a neon yellow hardback Hardy Boys book—not one of Jason’s, which means his youngest hasn’t found this little hideaway like he’s found the others. 

The thought gives Bruce pause: Jason. He grips the Rubik’s cube and hastens back. 

Alfred is kneeling by the bedside, murmuring something in Dick’s ear when he returns, and he cuts off and straightens as Bruce appears, making Bruce stop in his tracks, feeling like an intruder. 

“Very good, sir.” Alfred nods as he takes the Rubik’s cube and turns its top level just once before setting it down on the bedside table, voice strained. He reaches out a thumb as if to stroke Dick’s forehead, hand hovering an inch above skin so no real contact occurs. “I hypothesize being surrounded by familiarities may help return him to himself.”

“...Good. Good. I hadn’t thought of that.” He shifts on his feet. “Is Jason—?”

“He had already had breakfast when I went up, independent child. He knows that he is not to come down here under any condition.”

“Did he ask why?”

“Yes, though I didn’t tell him.” Alfred tuts. “It would hardly do for him to meet his brother when he is so indisposed.”

‘Brother?’ Bruce thinks, startled. 

Brothers are lines who share a common origin, relatives with the same parent. Dick and Jason. The word makes Bruce’s heart bump, his mouth tick up with warmth, despite the heavy, cement-like dread growing in his stomach.

They are brothers, aren’t they? 

Bruce steeples his hands together in his seat beside the bed, deep in thought. 

Dick hasn’t stirred in four days. Bruce has kept him sedated to try and figure out a solution before he wakes up, but there’s been nothing fruitful. Bruce has spent most of the time staring at the face he hasn’t seen in years, taking in every new scar and every changed feature. Everytime he looks at him, it’s like a punch to the gut. 

How long was Dick with the Court? How long did they have him? How long did Bruce not know? And what did they do to him?

Bruce spent this past year resenting him for cutting Bruce out of his life when a fairytale cult had him in their clutches. Bruce spent this last year pretending it didn’t hurt and that Dick had never existed to him. 

Dick never must have gotten cold feet the day Clark said he was going to come. Bruce had thought he had been unwilling to share that part of his life with him, but Dick was always too good and too fearless to let anything stop him. He must have come to Gotham, and that must have been when the Court got him. The kidnapping in that alleyway, Bruce realizes numbly. 

They had been so close. And then—this. 

Guilt squeezes every cell in his body. His eyes slip shut out of the pain encircling his chest. How could he? How could he have missed all of the signs? How could he have not known him immediately? How could he have ever hated his boy? 

You’re my boy, Bruce thinks fiercely. His eyes slide open, catching on the unconscious figure in the bed. His heart creaks in his chest. My ticking timebomb of a boy. 

Bruce had told Alfred the truth when he said he could hardly recognize Dick. His eyes, Bruce would know anywhere—dark as brick and bright. But his eyes were almost always covered, and the edges of his form were different. He was taller and more muscular, shoulders broader, neck longer. He fought differently. 

Not like Bruce taught him. 

If Bruce’s theory is right and the Court grabbed him that day back in July after Firefly, in the kidnapping in that alleyway, then they had months with him. Months to mold and warp and change him. 

It doesn’t take long for things to change forever. It takes a few seconds between 10:47 and 10:48 and every night the world turns itself out. 

Dick might never be the same. 

Dick would never attack Alfred. Even in the old days, it wasn’t unheard of for Dick and Bruce to go at each other, but Dick would never dream of saying a harsh word to Alfred, much less seizing him. What if things can never be the same? 

The thought won’t let Bruce breathe and it makes him desperate. He shouldn’t—it roused Dick when Alfred did it and sparked an attack—but he cannot help himself. He slips his hand into Dick’s and squeezes hard. Dick’s fingers are limp under Bruce’s touch. 

But the calluses on his palm are the same as they ever were. 

Bruce feels himself uncoil for the first time since he brought Dick home, the last vestiges of energy, all his rage and tension, seeping away from him all at once in a fleeting moment of precious relief. Things may not be the same, but this, at least, is familiar ground. 

Dick’s hand in his, Bruce lets himself fall into the darkness of sleep. 

“Do you think it’s time?” 

Bruce looks up the microscope where he is studying a sample of Dick’s tissue cells. Chemically modified, for certain, but as he flicks through the slides with gritty, ever-distracted eyes, he can’t tell with what. Alfred’s voice is quiet and almost tremulous, and his hand is clasped over his mouth like he is anxious, standing just a few feet away from Bruce before he answers his own question. 

“I think it’s time.”

“Time?” Bruce says, voice rough from disuse and exhaustion. He feels his brows furrow in confusion. 

Alfred drops his hand from his mouth, lips pursed tightly but still trembling. “We ought to wake him.”

“What,” Bruce says, freezing. “Alfred—”

 Shaking his head, Alfred says, “It’s been nearly a week. If he’s been damaged by the Court like you said, waiting will do us no good. We have to act. We have to remind him who he is; no injection is going to fix this.”

“No.” Bruce shakes his head back, firmly. “Absolutely not. He’s not ready.”

Alfred inhales sharply, shutting his eyes before he opens them again, a cutting look in them. “Is it him that’s not ready? Or, perhaps, yourself?”

His words carve through Bruce like a knife, and he sits back, staring at Alfred with wide eyes.

Alfred stares back, gaze hard. Neither of them speak. The drips off of the stalactites sounds loud in the silence. 

“Alfred,” Bruce manages at last, stunned and hurt. 

“There is no antidote to this, Master Bruce. There is no clever maneuver out. It will take work. I sincerely wish it did not have to hurt so much for you, or him, or— myself, but keeping him drugged and unconscious isn’t bringing our boy back. And keeping him this way will not mean he is as he was. It’s just putting off the inevitable.” 

Bruce swallows. “What if,” starts Bruce. “What if he never—”

“Think not of it now, my boy,” Alfred says, tone softening. He starts to lift a hand in Bruce’s direction before he lets it fall back to his side. His eyes are lidded. Even pained, he seems to know Bruce better than himself. “That is a bridge we will cross when we come upon it, not before.”

Staring at the man who raised him, Bruce takes in a long breath, then switches off the microscope light. He nods curtly. “Tomorrow. We won’t dose him and he should be up in the morning while Jason’s at school.”

Alfred nods in return, eyes mild.

The next morning, Bruce goes upstairs for the first time in nearly a week, trying to get a taste of normalcy after days downstairs. It shouldn’t feel as final as it does, like this is the last glimpse of life as it is for him. Jason looks surprised when he sees him in the kitchen making coffee and throws his arms around Bruce, burying his face in Bruce’s back. 

“Are you okay!” Jason yells, squeezing Bruce tight.

Bruce’s heart feels too heavy to smile, but he feels his lips perk up tiredly anyway, prying Jason’s fingers out of his shirt so he can turn around and face him. “I’m fine.”

“No wounds?”

“No wounds.” Bruce lifts his arms to prove it, his long, dark sleeves covering the bandaged scratches on his arms and pants covering the gauze wrapped around his still-gouged knees. 

Jason rocks back onto the balls of his feet to check, concerned expression shading into suspicion as he eyes the deep lines on Bruce’s face. “Then what’ve you been doing down there for like ten years? Why can’t I go down? Alfred wouldn’t tell me anything.”

Bruce clumsily pours coffee into his mug and takes a hasty sip. It burns his tongue. “It’s—it’s complicated, Jay.”

“What kind of complicated?”

Bruce falters. “The complicated kind.”

We’re letting your brainwashed older brother come off his drugs and seeing if he attacks us or knows anything about us.

Jason’s eyes narrow even further. 

“Would you mind if I drove you to school today,” Bruce asks quickly, over the edge of his mug as he takes another sip, tongue burning. It’s a non-question. 

The suspicion recedes but doesn’t disappear even as the side of Jason’s mouth ticks up. Jason shifts self-consciously, cheek bending in as he bites it. “Yeah.”

An overwhelming wave of fondness comes over him, fighting off the dark, anxious weight, if only briefly. “So you would mind, then,” he deadpans. 

“Bru-uce,” Jason groans. 

Bruce scrapes his knuckles over the top of Jason’s head, smiling through the heavy feeling settling in his stomach. What did he do to deserve him? “Get your backpack and we’ll go.” 

They take the Aston, which isn’t a good idea because Bruce’s fingernails dig deep crescents into the soft leather steering wheel the moment he gets his hands on it and Jason picks up on it immediately. 

“Bruce?” Bruce glances over at the sound of his name to see Jason staring at him like he’s trying to muster the nerve to say something, hands folded together over his khaki uniform shorts. Pine trees smear together outside the window. “You missed the turn.”

“Shit,” Bruce mutters, veering into the far-left lane to make a U-turn, one hand on the back of Jason’s seat as he does. His nails slip further into the steering wheel until they meet the hard metal backbone. “It’s going to be fine. We’ll get there in time.” He glances at the clock, frowns, presses the gas a little harder. “It’ll be fine.”

Bruce screeches past the rest of the carline to the chagrin of the yellow-vested safety officer, who he waves off, with six minutes to spare. He leans over to press a rough kiss to the crown of Jason’s head and rake a hand again through his messy, dark hair. “Have a good day, Jaylad.”

Jason opens his door and slips one arm through a backpack strap before he looks back over his shoulder, mouth pursed like Bruce is an antique pot he’s appraising. Then he leans back in and quickly presses his mouth to Bruce’s forehead in return, and says, “You too, B,” before he scurries off into the ivy-covered building, shrugging his backpack on fully. 

Bruce blinks furiously at the disappearing back, eyes burning hot. He swipes a hand over his eyes and it comes back wet and he ignores that, barely processing the drive back home until he’s hitting the bend where dirt and bitume give into gravel by the big oak tree. He heads in through the garage and peeks in the kitchen to see if Alfred is there, which he isn’t. He takes the moment of solitude to get his breathing in check, dropping his phone on the counter. He braces his hands against the granite, hanging his head between his shoulders. Then he plunges down into the Cave, where Alfred is sitting by Dick’s bedside with a hand pressed over his mouth just as Bruce expected. 

Alfred looks up as Bruce joins him, voice muffled between the cracks of his fingers. “It shouldn’t be long now until it wears off.”

“No,” Bruce agrees stiffly, swallowing.. 

“He’s a strong lad. He’ll make it through. While you were gone, I was telling him of when we—when we held him after Two-Face. Before that terrible ordeal with Shrike. It was so long ago, but it feels like yesterday, doesn’t it? As if no time has passed at all.”

“Eight years.”

“Oh, don’t say that. I feel monstrous. Monstrously old.”

Silence softens the air between them. Alfred pulls a handkerchief out of a pocket and dabs his eyes with it, gazing down at Dick lovingly. 

“What shall we say to him?” Alfred asks in a whisper. “When he wakes up?”

Bruce swallows again. “I don’t know.”

“Will he remember us?”

“He didn’t remember me. He didn’t seem to recognize you either the last time he was conscious.”

As if remembering, Alfred rubs his wrist. “You had also hit him quite hard, if I recall.”

Hope flares in his chest, before Bruce’s mind shuts it down, words spilling out in a detached, clinical voice. “It wasn’t just head trauma. The Court manipulates Talons into total servanthood. There must be some form of extreme psychological torture to ensure that kind of devotion.”

He’ll never be the same, Bruce cannot verbalize, because that might just make it true. And he cannot risk it being true. He cannot bear it. He could more easily bear Dick forever in this nebulous, unawake state than that. 

“I suppose we shall see,” Alfred says, clearly unsupportive of that diagnosis by the way he sticks his nose up in the air and sits down haughtily beside the bed. 

Just in case, Bruce darts to the armory and brings back reinforced handcuffs, one for each wrist. He knows he shouldn’t, but after what happened when Alfred unlocked Dick last time, he can’t take any risks. He secures them around Dick’s wrist under the watch of Alfred’s disapproving but passive gaze and sits down in the other chair by the bed, waiting for Dick to wake up.

Bruce counts the minutes as they flicker past on his wristwatch. It is approximately 11:58 when Dick first moves, fingers curling and uncurling just twice by his side. It is half past noon when Dick opens his eyes, and yanks an arm only to strain against the reinforced handcuffs, chains rattling as he jerks upright. 

His gaze roams wildly across the cave and the knick-knacks and Bruce and Alfred and there’s a hint of hesitation before he pulls even harder. 

Bruce steps in front of Alfred protectively, blocking him from view. His whole body is tense. Before anything else, Bruce has to know. He has to be sure. “Do you know my name?”

Dick’s jaw snaps shut, eyes startling—brilliant with dark color and pupils enormous. Black-blue veins shade his smooth face, and the muscles at his neck are so tight they jut out. This is him in live motion, and Bruce’s heart jackhammers. 

“Do you know my name?” Bruce demands harshly.

It feels like Bruce is made of a sheet of glass, the way Dick is staring right through him. Then his intense gaze flicks to the side, taking in the stalagmites and batarangs strewn over the nearby worktables, and his mouth curls. “Batman.”

Bruce stares at him. 

“Batman,” Dick spits again. 

“No,” Bruce says at last, softly. “That’s not it.”

Dick’s head cocks to the left sharply, fast as lightning—neck cracking. Bruce can see him recalculating and coming up with the same conclusion, expression hardening. And then as if reading from a script he memorized, Dick’s eyes glance up and then back, brows lowering, and he says, “Batman, the Court of Owls has sentenced you to die. Your fate will come to pass.”   

Bruce’s heart breaks in two, lungs emptied. 

“What, pray tell, my dear boy, has the Court granted for me?” Alfred asks suddenly, stepping out from behind Bruce and placing a gentle hand on his bicep as he passes. His bright blue eyes are shiny, voice tremulous but endlessly kind, and at the sight of him, Dick freezes. Alfred takes this as a sign to continue carefully, raising his pointed chin. “Do you know my name?”

They are completely still. Then Dick shifts back, voice softer. 

“Who are you,” Dick whispers, eyes narrowing, knuckles white, “who am—” he falls silent. 

Chapter Text

Bile pushes up in Bruce’s throat, stomach full of dread. He grips the hard jut of his own collarbone, nails curling. They bite through the fine fabric of his blue dress shirt and skin breaks. 

“In all,” Alfred is saying from across the soundproofed room, “I think that went rather well.”

They’re in the space that surrounds the Cave’s interrogation room, noise-blocking, green-tinted glass walled around them. Dick can’t hear them deliberating in here. Alfred glances back over his shoulder to peer through the glass at the far end of the cave, where the boy is still cuffed to the bed. 

Bruce stares at him in dark disbelief, heavy hands dropping to his side. “Are you joking.”

Alfred turns back to Bruce, one eyebrow lifting, head tilting just so. “Of course not. He responded well.”

“‘Well,’” Bruce repeats, incredulous. “He didn’t recognize either of us.”

“That’s simply not true.”

“He called me Batman.”

“Is that not what you are?”

“You know what I mean, Alfred. He wouldn’t—call me that. Not with the cowl off, not if he knew.”

 “I see.” 

Bruce’s fist clenches. “He didn’t recognize me. He didn’t recognize us.” 

It’s all his worst fears come true.

Before Bruce knows it, Alfred is in front of him, studying him thoughtfully. Alfred’s collar is bent up on one side, no doubt a result of his anxious fidgeting throughout the day. His face is well-lined, brows knit the way they used to be when he had to explain something thoroughly to have even a hope of getting a younger Bruce to stop, like detailing how removing earthworms from their damp, dark environment could kill them, therefore he would do well to leave them alone, wouldn’t he, young sir. That look.

It’s like getting slapped in the face.

“Let’s work through this, shall we?” says Alfred—a statement more than an offer or question—in a hard voice. “The boy was stolen Lord knows how by this Court of Owls, a terroristic clan of murderers and high class personages with grudges. With severe psychological torture, if your theory is to believed, he was bent into carrying out their will, something we both know Master Dick to be quite resistant to. Yet he resisted an order to kill you when he needn’t, and despite apparently being capable of bending your steel batarangs in half, he has not broken the chain you have so diligently attached to him, reinforced though it may be.” Silence vibrates between them. “I’d venture that he’s doing far better than well. What’s more…” he falters, trailing off. 

“What’s more, he recognized me,” Alfred finishes softly, “I believe, somewhere deep down. And somewhere deeper still lies himself.”

Pressure wraps around Bruce’s chest. He peers through the green glass to stare at Dick, who is watching him with a cold, hawklike intensity, eyes glued to his, chin tilted down to his chest. Bruce cannot swallow through the lump lodged in his throat.

“It’s only a matter of finding it. Coaxing it out.”

Bruce’s eyes burn, and he looks away. He doesn’t dare hope.

Bruce waits for Dick to remember. He waits to hear his true name in the tone that vibrates in his memories every second of every day. He waits, and nothing comes. 

“The Court will find you,” Dick says, every time. His eyes are shut, skin shining, voice perfectly low—a shadow of what it should sound like and what it should be saying. 

Bruce says nothing, until he doesn’t.

It’s the collision that gets him. The collision of what Bruce recognizes and doesn’t. He knows that boy in the bed, and doesn’t. He knows those curls and nose and eyes, not those hands or tics or veined skin like dirty glass with cracks in it.

Bruce feels eyes on his every motion. When he sifts through cases at the computer. When he twists the ring on his finger. When he sits at Dick’s chained bedside and stares in silence. 

Dick is wordless—just a sharp, flickering gaze. The pale lights wash him out, accentuating his dark features and waxy skin. Bruce cannot stop turning Alfred’s words over in his head.

Bruce folds his hands neatly in his lap, rumbles. “Why haven’t you escaped yet.”

Silence fills the Cave. Dick doesn’t react at all besides a slow, inscrutable tilt of his head, curls dropping from his forehead to hang in the air. 

And then Dick suddenly lurches forward, chains rattling like heavy thunder as he strains, and the violence of the thrashing makes Bruce press his back harder against the chair, swallowing hard as his heart thuds in his chest. 

He stands stiffly. Leaves. 

Alfred finds him two hours later in what used to be his father’s study with his head in his hands. 

“Master Bruce?” he says.

“It’s hopeless, Alfred. He doesn’t remember. He hasn’t given the blanket a second glance even. He doesn’t know my name. He’s gone.” 

Bruce lets out a shuddering breath. His chest feels hollow as air. There’s no way, no word to describe how much it hurts, the loss of that little boy at his elbow with soft eyes and a softer smile. The brightest light in his life, the lightest light. He can picture him so vividly too, as if it was just yesterday that he saw his own tentative hand on a child’s bony shoulder in the reflection off a new, gleaming black gravestone in the slushy snow and yesterday that they were in perfect harmony high above the city’s black grime and dim lights. But that was so long ago—the worst part, in the end, is how long it’s been. 

Who he knew and what they had is no more, and Bruce has nothing to show for the final two years of Dick’s life except a number he was too scared to call. What he had is all he will ever get. What he had is all there is and will ever be.

This is agony. He lets out a last, rickety breath, wet-hot eyes sliding shut. “He’s gone,” he whispers, brittle. 

“Good heavens, sir, really?” says Alfred. “It’s hardly been two days.”

Bruce drops the hands from his face. They thud against the wood of the desk, splitting open the perennial brown scabs on his knuckles as he gazes incredulously across at Alfred. The dull sting doesn’t cut through the numbness, but the anger does. 

“How can you be so laissez-faire about this?” Bruce demands. His voice is sticky. “Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? They took him. He’s gone.”

Alfred’s eyes flash indignantly. “What I can’t understand is how you are giving up so easily. Are you not the man who’s weathered a thousand evil-doers? Are you not the man who escapes deathtraps nightly?”

“You’re the one who said this wasn’t something I could outmaneuver,” Bruce hisses through his teeth like the words are poison, hands scrabbling back up into fists. 

“That didn’t mean to give up!” Alfred throws his hands up. “There are a great many things we ought to try before we call him ‘gone.’”

Bruce slams a hand on the top of the desk and shoots to his feet. Alfred takes a step back. Something in him burns, and smolders, and cracks in two. “Like what? Like what, Alfred? The blanket, the Rubik’s cube—they didn’t work, because there’s nothing there. Nothing! He doesn’t know my name and he doesn’t know yours! He doesn’t even know his own! We’re nothing to him. It’s like he never even existed at all. He’s gone!”

“Fine!” Alfred shrills. “Say he’s gone! Where do you go from here?”

That gives Bruce pause. He falters, jaw snapping shut so hard his teeth rattle. Alfred’s chest is heaving, eyes gleaming with tears and lips screwed up so tight it warbles his words. 

“You brought him up, you brought him back to this home. Where do you go from here, Master Wayne, with that boy then? Ah? Throw him in Arkham? Hand him over to the police? Perhaps even return him to the streets for his captors to find? They’ve taken him, so you say, so it should be no—”

Bruce growls ferociously at the mere thought. “Of course not,” he spits out. 

“Then what? Then what? You can’t simply let him fester in that bloody cave for the rest of his life! You can’t simply chain him to a bed for the next thirty years! Every person needs sun and skies, not chains. You’re as good as his Court if all you ever do is that!”

“Don’t say that, don’t you dare say that—”

“Good lord.” Alfred’s glare is more than aghast. “That was exactly what you planned, wasn’t it, boy? Answer me. Answer me!”

It isn’t. He hadn’t thought that far ahead.  

“Alfred,” Bruce says, trembling and ragged, after a long moment, cheeks hot with the tears that spill down his face. “I don’t know what to do.”

Alfred’s gaze doesn’t soften in the slightest, forever coal-stern. “There’s nothing to do but charge on.”

So Bruce sits and waits once more. In his dreams, the black figure plucks his chest apart rib by white rib to feast on his wet heart with sharp teeth and enormous, undark eyes. He wakes up to cold sweat and a throbbing, racing pulse.

He prays to hear his name. He hears Batman once and Bruce never and is petrified by ice-cold fear every time his gaze falls upon the boy he once knew in waking.

“I can’t.”

“You know I wouldn’t be calling if it wasn’t serious. Morgaine le Fey got a hold of a crystal in Bournemouth. Diana thought she had it covered but we haven’t had contact with her or Flash since they went to deal with it. Zatanna called it the Maukolum Stone, she thinks she’s using it to generate a pocket dimension and consolidate power for something greater. This is all hands on deck.”

“Not now, Clark,” Bruce murmurs into the comm, voice heavy—grizzly. “I can’t.”

Alfred is standing silently behind him in the green-glassed room, having followed him when Bruce got the call. They have been spending nearly everyday downstairs. Bruce feels the weight of his gaze on the nape of his neck. 

Clark makes a low, sympathetic noise. “You have to. This is everyone. Even Robin if he can. What she could do if—” 

Bruce swiftly removes the comm from his ear and rolls it between his fingers, fighting the urge to crush it into pieces of dust. 

“...The League?” asks Alfred.

Bruce doesn’t answer. Alfred clicks his tongue.

“Very well. I’ll contact Master Jason’s school and inform them he’ll be accompanying you on a business trip for a while.”

At that Bruce starts, whirling around, the heaviness of his chest breaking apart into slabs that reveal the sharp feeling underneath like lava underlying rock. 

“Alfred, no. I can’t leave you alone with him,” Bruce whispers furiously. 

“He’s getting better. When he looks at me, he remembers me. I can tell that he can. He simply has to keep fighting whatever it is that holds him back,” Alfred insists, but Dick is not getting better at all. Bruce has seen the way his dark gaze lurks and how his face has gone unchanged. He is even more silent now than before. In the week since he has woken, Dick has only spoken five times, the number dwindling dangerously low before stopping completely the past three days. 

Grasping it, Bruce snaps the comm clean in half, swallowing tightly. “You don’t know how strong he is. How dangerous.”

“Then do you trust me?”

“What?”

“Do you trust me?” Alfred asks, lips pressed together. His voice is hard-edged, brows stern. “Do you think me incapable of defending myself or him, if need be? The world needs you, Master Bruce.”

With one last, long look over his shoulder at Dick, Bruce forces himself up the stairs, gripping the Robin costume in his hands. It feels like he’s fighting against gravity, every step slow and hard. 

The weight pulling him down lessens a little when he finds Jason at the kitchen table, head bent over his homework. His pencil flies over his paper before he sees the shadow that spills over the table from Bruce’s form and looks up. Bruce is keenly aware that they have not seen each other in more than a week, but Jason takes just one look at the uniform Bruce is gripping and his face lights up, throwing the pencil aside. “Mission?”

“Mission,” Bruce replies grimly. 

Batman crushes the gem underfoot like an old cigarette. Red shards scatter across the rough ground and le Fey shrieks in bloodcurdling rage. The flat gray borders of the dimension she created begin to splinter like the gem, cracking to reveal the real world with its blue skies and rocky stones, and Flash dashes forward to bind her, yanking her sleeve-covered wrists behind her back. 

She doesn’t resist, bones audibly creaking and skin alight with the power draining from her. 

A cool breeze carries from the seaspray across the rocks—the first hint of moving air Bruce has felt since Morgaine le Fey. It bites at the hot skin of his stubbled jaw, brisk and salt-sharp. 

When le Fey finally goes fully limp in Flash’s arms, he looks up at Bruce, a wisp of thin white-blond hair flying out of a cut in his red cowl. “How did you know destroying the gem wouldn’t destroy the pocket dimension and take all of us with it?”

Jason answers for Bruce. “Because then she would have been destroyed too. ”

Turning in the direction of Jason’s reedy voice, Batman’s cape swishes, edges swirling around his dark boots. Jason is settling down onto the hard juts of stone they stand on. There’s a long, wet slice down the center of one of his palms, and he carefully rests that hand on his knee instead of letting it bleed on the ground and leave behind DNA. 

A loud, veiny wave washes over the British shore. Bruce can hear it crash against the rocks and watches Jason’s eyes track the motion through his domino mask. 

Then Robin’s gaze rises to meet his. “Time to go?”

“Yes.”

Flash makes a noise. “You’re not staying to oversee the transfer? You always do, Bats.”

“Hn. More pressing matters. Robin.”

Jason follows him back to the jet without a word and buckles himself in. Glancing over at Bruce occasionally, he clicks on the dashboard display, inhaling sharply when the date comes up in bright letters. Bruce’s chest seizes too, but he hides it under an impassive veneer and a frown.

“March 3?” Jason breathes. “It didn’t f—we weren’t there that long, it wasn’t weeks. That much time didn’t pass, I know it. Did she do something to us?”

“Call Penny-one.”

“But—”

Bruce shakes his head curtly. “Time works differently in pocket dimensions. It’s to be expected. Call Penny-one.”

“I had a book report due,” Jason murmurs, before his mouth twists downward. He taps the button to link to Alfred’s line. A dull crackling noise fills the pressurized air. 

Alfred doesn’t answer, and Bruce shifts.

Fear drags through his veins like a knife through skin. When the empty radio still doesn’t fill, Jason raises a hand to turn it off, but Bruce encircles his wrist with a sharp, tight hand, stopping him short before finally, slowly unhanding him.

The longer the radio goes with no response, the deeper Bruce’s nails drive into the steering console, until they begin to bend back from the pressure. His teeth nearly pierce the thick muscle of his tongue—tinges of blood filling his mouth. 

The yellow sun is just beginning to set over the dark, shiny Atlantic when Alfred’s voice finally crackles over the line, voice bright and fast and hushed as if he’s distracted; jittery. Breathless. Instead of loosening with the fast flush of relief, Bruce’s hands only clench further, jaw setting with worry. “Oh, sir—sirs—I presume the mission went well?”

“It took a lot longer than we thought it did,” Jason says, sullenly, at the same time that Bruce says, low and dangerous, “You didn’t pick up.” 

“Ah, ah, of course, I do apologize, sir. I’m afraid I was outside, I must have missed your transmission, I didn’t think to bring a radio with—me. Mistakenly, I assumed the mission might take rather a while longer, magical ones so often do, and with no transmissions for this last fortnight, I hardly expected—”

“Al,” Jason says. “You’re rambling.”

“My,” Alfred takes a hasty breath, “apologies, I suppose I’m usually better at waiting.”

Bruce’s eyes slit. There’s a touch of giddiness in Alfred’s voice. 

Something is afoot.

“We’ll be back within the hour. Robin will change before we land; no need to prepare the cave,” he says, measuredly.

“Very good, sir. I, well—it’s been quite the time since you’ve been away. Quite the advancement.” 

With that, Alfred cuts out. Bruce swallows in anxious, wicked anticipation. Alfred wouldn’t give anything away in front of Jason, but desperately Bruce wishes he could have so he could know. Two weeks and an ‘advancement.’ 

The space the static occupied in the air goes silent and still, tension suddenly thick like rind. 

Jason is too good to not pick up on it. Obediently, he heads to the back of the jet to pull out and change into a soft pair of shorts and a long-sleeved shirt from a compartment. But when he comes back, his fingers nestle into each other, and his voice is hushed and vulnerable. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No.”

“But there is something wrong.”

Bruce’s fingers dig into the steering wheel. He can’t tell him. Not yet, not when the future is so unclear. Now when he doesn’t know what they’re heading back to. Silence.

“I haven’t seen you in forever. If I did something wrong and you just won’t tell me, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Bruce. But I—are you ever going to let me go down there again?”

Bruce doesn’t answer that either, because he doesn’t know, can’t know, teeth aching with the not knowing.  

Jason’s breath breaks off into a scoff, and the pressure in the jet’s air supply seems to grow somehow, and Bruce knows he has done something wrong but is too full of terrible, quivering, existential fear to know where to begin.

Bruce lands the jet offsite, changes into slacks and a sweater, and drives them back to the Manor in a car from a safehouse, that ride silent too. When Jason steps out onto the gravel ahead of the cobblestone driveway, he doesn’t look back. Bruce watches him march inside with balled, shaking fists and loud steps.

Shaking his head and biting the end of his tongue, Bruce hates himself. He weighs the car key in his palm and curls his fingers around it, letting the hard metal edges bite into his skin. Foolishly, he supposes, he had thought going on the League mission might even sate Jason’s urges for Robin somewhat and give him time to sort out the situation with Dick downstairs. Misguided, clearly. Now he’s isolated both of his boys when he’s only ever wanted to keep them safe. 

Bruce slams the car door. The sound reverberates in the quiet night air. A white hairline crack creeps up the window, lit by the horned moon in the yellow sky. 

Fearing the worst, Bruce steps into the cave.

The first thing Bruce notices is that the bed is empty, unfilled handcuffs dangling off the rail, thin silver chain catching the light. Bruce’s stomach plunges even further, panic ratcheting through his veins. Alfred is nowhere to be seen. His fists clench and he scans the area frantically, turning in a tight circle, which is when he sees Dick, leaning against the chair by the computer. 

His eyes are clear, vibrant, and dark, and his mouth drops open when he sees Bruce. His muscles are loose under the simple black sweatshirt and pants he wears. 

Bruce stares across the cave at him, tension suddenly prickling in the cold air, mouth dry. And then Dick says— 

Dick says, “Bruce."

Bruce stills, mind grinding to a complete and utter halt. 

“Say that again.”

A slow, dazzling smile breaks across Dick’s face, like sun through clean, brilliant glass, an open window. Dimples pillow in either cheek next to his white teeth. “Bruce.”

“Oh, God,” says Bruce quietly, and Dick splays his hands out a few inches from his sides in the tentative little invitation for a hug motion he’s had since he was nine years old that Bruce never thought he would see again, and all at once, Bruce knows. Dick is back. Bruce spans the length of the room in two seconds flat to seize his boy in his arms again, crushing him to his chest. “Dick.”

Dick’s arms wrap tight around Bruce’s back, hands meeting in the middle while he props his head up on Bruce’s shoulder, pressing his face into his neck, familiar at last, familiar once more. Bruce can’t tell if the searing tears on his jaw are from his own eyes or Dick’s or both.

“Hey, big guy,” Dick whispers, breath white-hot and shaky on Bruce’s skin. “Hey.”

Bruce brings a hand up to rest in Dick’s black hair, tangling his fingers in the curls and squeezing hard on the nape of his neck to keep his boy there. He buries his chin in those curls, pressing rough kiss after rough kiss to the crown of his head, furiously trying to get his ragged breathing under control. 

“Dick,” he chokes. 

Dick lets out a wet laugh all of a sudden, burrowing deeper into Bruce’s arms, cold nose buried in Bruce’s shoulder, damp eyelashes skirting his neck. That’s it. That’s everything that Bruce has been missing. 

“What, you miss me or something?” Dick asks tremulously, teasing and kind and so quiet Bruce can barely hear it. 

A teary, incredulous laugh makes its way out of Bruce’s throat as he grips Dick closer still, hands trembling. Is this real? Can this be real? The body in his arms is, and he clings to it, accepting everything as it is. If it’s a dream, so be it, as long as he is here with Dick alive and like this for now. It nearly chokes him: “Richard John Grayson, you are never allowed to do that again.” He presses another fierce, possessive kiss to the side of that precious head, grabbing the slender neck tighter. “Do you hear me?” he growls. 

“Understood,” Dick mumbles, shaking. “I understand.”

Bruce feels fingers claw the back of his sweater, nails biting through to Bruce’s back, but he can’t bring himself to mind when Dick is back in his arms, whole and alive and remembering. He wants to sob.

Hot tears fall out of his eyes faster now, streaming down his cheeks and into Dick’s mussed hair. He lets out a long, trembling sigh and holds on with every ounce of might he has, grateful for every second. Desperately, he adds, “Dick, you know I—”

“I love you back, B,” Dick interrupts quickly, voice hushed and choked, hot tears burning through the fabric on Bruce’s shoulder, “I love you so much back.” 

Bruce grips him even tighter. 

When they can finally let go of each other, Alfred appears. Bruce has a sneaking suspicion that he had been watching from the top of the stairs for a while but nothing to prove it. He has a platter of hot tea for them and a damp washcloth he fusses over Dick with, dabbing the reddened tear tracks down his face and cooing every time Dick lets out another wet, hiccupping breath. 

Bruce uses the hard back of his hand to wipe away his own tears, staring at the beads collected on his knuckle before he looks back up at his boy and Alfred with a lump in his throat. “I hope you know you’re never leaving this house again.”

Dick lets out a high laugh, hushing when Alfred scolds him gently and has to readjust his grip on his jaw. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yes.” Bruce takes a sip of the boiling hot tea from the platter and winces, setting it back down on the table that sits between him and Dick. His fingers can’t stop trembling. Blood pounds in his ears so he can barely hear himself. “Alfred, this tea is sweet.”

“There we go, my darling boy, there w—” Alfred cuts himself off and turns to look at Bruce with an appalled expression and a lifted eyebrow. “That’s because it’s not for you, Master Wayne! Heavens!” Turning back to Dick, his tone softens again, becoming almost shy as he runs the washcloth down his cheek. “I do hope you haven’t grown out of orange tea.”

Dick gives another soft laugh, cupping his hand over Alfred’s. “With extra honey?”

Alfred tuts. “I can’t imagine you drinking it any other way.” Then, quickly—hesitantly—he presses his forehead to Dick’s, before stepping back abruptly and trading the washcloth in his hand out for a cup of tea, passing it to Dick, blinking a few times as if to gather himself. He stands back with his hands knit together, waiting expectantly. 

Drawing his knees up to his chest, Dick takes a sip. His mouth twists, shoulders slumping as he looks up at Alfred with large eyes. “It’s perfect, Alfie. Thank you.”

“Well,” says Alfred dismissively, as if his eyes aren’t more tender than Bruce has ever seen. “I certainly hope so. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve had someone to make it for. I worried I had fallen out of practice.”

Bruce meets Dick’s big, damp eyes playfully as he takes a sip out of his own cup, even though Alfred’s made it clear they were both for Dick and Dick’s taste in tea was always far too sweet for Bruce’s taste. “Clark says tea is your superpower, Alfred. I doubt you’re even capable of falling out of practice.”

“Alfred, I hate to ruin the moment,” Dick says, voice still rough but teeming with a light that makes Bruce feel like he’s curling up next to a fire, “but, um, Bruce is over there drinking my tea.”

Alfred looks back over his shoulder at Bruce, jaw slack. “Have you no shame, Master Bruce?”

“He doesn’t,” Dick croaks. “I really don’t think he does.”

“Shush,” Bruce says, but what he really means is, Please talk forever and ever. 

“60 over 40,” reads Bruce, stripping the blood pressure cuff off of Dick’s arm, trying not to cling. “Low.”

“Quite low,” Alfred adds worriedly. “You need fluids. Are you feeling at all lightheaded?”

Dick shakes his head, hopping off the examination table and rolling down his sweatshirt sleeve. Bruce starts when he realizes Dick is almost as tall as him, taking a step back as he rolls up the valve. 

“I suppose I should have checked for this when first you woke, Master Dick, but I’m afraid it didn’t cross my mind.” Alfred presses the back of his hand to Dick’s forehead when he passes, prompting Dick to lay a quick kiss against the man’s cheek on his way back to his tea. Alfred blushes. 

“It’s all right. You were—otherwise preoccupied, Al.”

“Yes, I daresay I was.”

Bruce glances between them, making eye contact with Alfred as if to say, Can I ask? Alfred shakes his head no briefly, but the look on his face is not dire, only fond. 

“I’ll make sure dinner tonight is sodium-rich, that ought to help your blood pressure. Any suggestions, sir?” Alfred asks, and Dick opens his mouth. “We are out of parmesan, I’m afraid, so crab-stuffed mushrooms are off the table.” Dick’s mouth snaps shut, shoulders coming up in a shrug.

“I’ve suddenly got nothing.”

“Master Bruce?”

Bruce is paying rapt attention to the dear interactions of Dick and Alfred, circling around the Cave and each other, and it takes Bruce right back to the early years, and his heart feels painfully full. It takes him a second to register that they’re both looking at him, and he stares back at them hungrily, taking them in: a little older, but no less precious to him, no less close. “Nothing,” he says, off-beat, “from me either.”

“Very well,” Alfred sighs. “I’ll manage, somehow.”

“It can’t be time for that yet, Alfred,” Bruce says when the man starts up the stairs. “Stay a while.”

Alfred stares. “It’s nearly nine, Master Wayne.”

Is it really? Bruce starts, checking his wristwatch. He must have lost track of time. It had hardly been after six o’clock when he’d returned, the low, early golden glow of the sunset silhouetting Gotham outside the jet’s windows and the crescent moon a low, faint impression. 

But sure enough, Alfred is right. Bruce drops his wrist back to his side, surprised.

He and Dick watch in silence as Alfred heads up the stairs, warm yellow light flooding the rough-hewn stone staircase as he opens the door behind the grandfather clock, disappearing again with his lithe figure as he seals it behind him, stone grinding.

Bruce stares at where the light used to be for a long time, mustering his courage. His throat feels like it’s been ripped open. “I did.”

“What?” Dick asks, hoarse voice startling in the quiet.

Shoving his hands into the pockets of his slacks, Bruce’s gaze flickers down to the floor in front of him. “I missed you.”

“Oh. Oh.”

“Not just when you were with the Court. Before.”

“Bruce—”

“No,” Bruce interrupts fiercely, shaking his head, biting back the sting in his eyes. “I didn’t tell you then, and I almost never had the chance so I’m going to tell you now.” 

Dick turns to face him. His expression is unreadable, and Bruce’s chest pangs. What happened to the days when Dick had been eleven and Bruce had known his every thought by the twitch of his fingers? 

His gaze drops to Dick’s hands, which are wound around one of Alfred’s blue glass Murano teacups and perfectly still. Bruce searches desperately for some insight toward what Dick is thinking but comes up with nothing. He hungrily tracks the movement when Dick sets the teacup down on the silver platter beside him, and then Dick is stepping forward again, arms winding around Bruce’s neck. His pointed chin props on Bruce’s shoulder again, and Bruce’s jaw comes to rest on the crown of his head automatically, like shards of a mosaic falling perfectly into place. 

“Thanks,” Dick whispers, barely audible—a rasp. Bruce can feel Dick’s Adam's apple bob as he swallows. “Thank you.”

“I almost lost you,” Bruce whispers back, gripping Dick hard. And it’s then that he realizes the gravity of the statement. He was almost gone. And even before the Court, they were never bound to speak again. He pulls him closer, hand raking through his hair. 

Dick hums quietly. It’s surreal having him in his arms again after all these years. It’s like a dream. Bruce thought he’d never see him ever again, the bridge burned beyond repair. All he’d ever have was an empty half in his heart and a room to sit in. And yet here he is. 

Maybe Dick’s emotional exhaustion does them in, or maybe Bruce is the one to give, drained from the last week of le Fey’s tricks and the high of having him back. But one of them buckles first, taking the other with them, and they both drop to their knees, arms around each other. The Cave floor is cold, rough. And they sleep. 

Bruce stirs sometime past three, head hazy and chest free of the ache that’s plagued him for so many years. The Cave is almost pitch black. The dim light of the off computer confirms what his internal clock tells him. Something itches at his left arm, which is otherwise so numb he can hardly feel it. Squinting in the low light, he catches a blue glint off shiny hair and relaxes, the form beside him suddenly wonderfully familiar. 

He raises the back of his left hand to stroke Dick’s cool cheek in the dark. The boy mutters in his sleep, shifting away from the touch before turning back into it. The arm Dick’s head rests on is full of pins and needles, but even still, he can feel the tension in the boy’s body, all restless, unreleased movement. Even the thought of that makes Bruce want to sob, regardless of his sleepy, sated state. It’s the same.  

There’s a warm weight over his legs, and from the faint illumination of fuzz and the warmth of his lower half, Bruce realizes it’s a blanket, probably the brown one from Dunakeszi. He settles back down. 

Breath comes too easily like this. Bruce has to blink to keep himself from drifting back off, staving off sleep just for a while more. Light reflects off something on a table nearby, and when his eyes have adjusted to the darkness as much as they can without MCP, he makes out the impression of a glass. Two tall glasses with a much smaller cup next to it and a larger, reflective dome behind that. Alfred must have brought dinner into the Cave and left it covered when he discovered they fell asleep, laying the blanket over them in the meanwhile. 

But the light catches much lower on one of the tall glasses than the other like one is empty and the other is not, and the smaller cup has a rouge tint in the quiet illumination. Dick must have woken up at some point and drank, Bruce deducts drowsily. His gaze flicks over the rest of the Cave, but there’s nothing else to see. 

Listening to the steady breaths of Dick at his side, Bruce lets himself untense, lets the dark retake him, easing into perfect, dreamless sleep. 

He wakes to bright lights and Alfred’s squinting face a foot above his, combover flopping over his gleaming forehead. “Ah, you’re up.”

Bruce screws his eyes shut again. 

“No, I’m not.”

Alfred tuts. “You sleep like an ox.”

At that, Bruce peeks one eye back open, still heavy with the remnants of sleep and blinded by the blurring overheads, chest still and full of calm. His voice is rough. 

“Are oxen well-known for their sleeping habits.”

“Not particularly,” says Alfred, “but then neither are you.”

“Hn.” Bruce drags the back of his hand over his face to wake himself up, hiding a yawn. He glances over his shoulder, cheek brushing the cool stone floor as he gazes at Dick, whose forehead is creased with worry even in sleep. He studies him hungrily, still amazed that he’s here so close and so real. It makes him so giddy he can’t stop the upturn of his mouth. 

His soft hair spreads against Bruce’s navy sleeve, cheek pressed into his bicep. It’s preposterous how different he looks now from before the mission—soft-edged, almost exactly like Bruce remembers, as if the whole thing was just a dark, twisted nightmare. But the boy’s veins creep darkly around the edges of his cheeks, especially vibrant on his closed, shiny eyelids—like a thin, blue spiderweb. A reminder.

Bruce brings up the hand of the arm Dick is sleeping on to stroke a thumb over his forehead, as if the worried press can be wiped away like washable paint. Bruce would do anything for it to be that easy. The soft brush of his touch makes Dick murmur, face screwing up before he blinks blearily up at Bruce. “Bruce?” he rasps. 

Bruce’s heart throbs painfully. A soft smile twists his mouth. 

“Go back to sleep, Dickie,” he whispers.

Dick’s turns so he’s facing upward, cracking his neck to the side and swallowing visibly. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he mutters benignly, drowsiness taking the edge off his voice and filling Bruce with heart-cracking fondness. He glances up at Alfred, shielding his eyes from the bright overheads with a cupped hand. “What time is it?”

“Half past ten.”

The only reason Bruce doesn’t jerk upward is the head resting on his arm. Instead, he blinks up at Alfred in disbelief. “In the morning?”

“If the sun in the sky is to be believed, yes.”

Bruce drags a hand over his face again, palm catching the rough, scratchy stubble on his jaw. Eleven hours straight. Bruce can’t remember the last time he slept that long without it being medically induced. In his mid-twenties maybe. 

Suddenly, the weight is gone from Bruce’s arm, and he misses it immediately even though Dick is sitting up just a few inches from him. Bruce wants to grab him again and pin him under his arm where he’ll be safe, to tamp down the heavy, protective feeling coiling like a snake in his stomach, but instead he only watches intently. 

Dick’s back curves as he stretches his arms out and bends his head down, spine popping audibly. 

Alfred’s face sours at Dick’s contortions, and he quickly busies himself with the platter laying on the table nearby that holds the glasses and dome Bruce saw last night. Peering down, Alfred lifts the silver dome and huffs. Bruce gets a glimpse of two plates with fresh greens and dark brown steak, a faint smell radiating in the space. Alfred looks back at Bruce and Dick accusingly.

“You hardly pecked at your dinner,” Alfred scolds Dick, re-covering the plates. “Oh, don’t give me that look, boy. I see you touched the water. I know you were awake.”

Dick straightens up slightly, fingers gripping one of his knees. He laughs hazily. “I only woke up for a few minutes. I wasn’t hungry. I bet Bruce didn’t touch anything. I did better than him, at least.”

Sighing deeply, Alfred gathers the tall crystal glasses onto the larger platter, daintily picking up the tiny, red-stained medicine cup beside them. “I see you drank your elderberry syrup last night at least. Is your throat doing any better?”

“A little.” Dick drops his chin down to bite at the collar of his black sweatshirt, the tell he’s had since he was a little boy. Bruce is nearly bowled over by the immensity of his fondness and relief that that hasn’t changed before he considers that it means Dick’s lying. From the quick glance that Dick gives Bruce, he knows Bruce has picked up on it. 

“His throat?” Bruce rumbles, sitting up, and Dick shoots him an upset glare over his shoulder, as if he’d expected Bruce to stay quiet about it.

“My throat, because I am right here with you, actually,” Dick says quickly. 

Bruce gives him a brief, unimpressed look before returning his attention to Alfred. “You’ve never been trustworthy about when you’re injured or sick. What’s wrong with his throat.”

Alfred grips the platter. “Listen to him. He sounds dreadful.”

“Hey, you try getting crushed by Bruce in your sleep,” Dick retorts weakly, but with his ears pricked up, Bruce picks up on it. Dick’s voice is gravelly, strained, and hoarse, as quiet as someone yelling in a padded room. 

The voice had been one of the reasons he had—stupidly—missed the fact that the Talon he kept encountering was Dick. There was a clear difference between the raucous, reedy childhood tone he was used to and the low, rough, fabric-muffled hiss he first heard on that snowy February rooftop. 

Reflecting as he carried his boy back into the Cave for the first time, Bruce had mournfully brushed it off as a boyish voice change, yet another thing Bruce had simply missed the transition for. But apparently it’s something more, and Bruce clenches his fist because he’s missed this too. 

“It’s just—” Dick’s jaw snaps shut, one shoulder coming up in a jerky shrug. “It’s just a frog in my throat or something.”

Dick is like Bruce—well-skilled in hiding his tells and giveaways when he doesn’t want them to be seen, because those things in front of the wrong people can make you vulnerable. Dick doesn’t bite down on his collar as he says this, but the grind of his teeth suggests that he desperately wants to.

“I’ve been giving him elderberry syrup as long as he’s been, ah, amiable to it, but it hasn’t seemed to have done much.”

Alfred and Dick share a brief look, and Bruce wonders what happened before Dick was amiable and what happened to make him remember. What miracle was worked. He’ll have to probe Alfred about it later. 

For now, though, Bruce lets the subject rest. Dick’s concealed discomfort is enough for Bruce to settle for now. But they will be discussing it later. Bruce will make certain of it. 

Dick presses his mouth to his kneecaps, folding up to wrap his arms around his legs. “It really is better, Alf. I appreciate it.”

“Of course, Master Dick. I only wish you appreciated my meals as much.”

“Goodness,” Dick rasps. “It’s from all angles today.”

Alfred smiles, eyes crinkling. “Welcome back, Master Dick.”

Bruce stands, arching his spine in a stretch. A pained grunt escapes him before he can stifle it. 

Dick shoots to his feet, hands flying to Bruce’s back and shoulder, bracing him as if afraid he’ll crumple to his feet. “You okay?” Concern streaks through his tone. “Your back?”

Bruce grits his teeth at the sharp pain in the small of his back. He arches his spine further, pushing himself, until there’s a quiet, sullen pop, like his body begrudgingly conceding. The ache recedes quickly. “It’s nothing.”

“Oh, it’s age,” says Alfred, who had taken a worried step closer when Bruce groaned, now heading back over to the stairs with the tray. “Your back isn’t as it used to be. I’m quite familiar with it.”

“You haven’t aged a day since I met you, Alf,” Dick says in that soft, stern tone of his, hands still on Bruce’s back, gaze pinned to Bruce’s. His voice drops. “It’s because you slept on the floor. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Bruce turns and grabs Dick’s wrists, holding them in his hands, finding his low, steady pulsepoint and looking him in the eye. Bruce can’t get over how real, how different, how the same Dick is. It makes him want to cry. This is more than he could ever have asked for. Dick’s expression is worried, lips pressed together, and Bruce rushes to make it go away. “I imagine it was still softer than the medical bay.”

At that, Dick’s mouth twists into a small, tight smile, head tilting in concession. “You’re not wrong. That was the best sleep I’ve had since I…” his face falls, expression going distant. 

Bruce squeezes his wrists, and Dick looks back up, coming back to himself. Me too, Bruce wants to say, because of you. Bubbles fill his throat again, though, as he takes in the network of black-blue veins again. 

The grandfather clock door snaps shut, tearing Bruce’s attention away and giving him a moment to clear his throat before he turns back. With Alfred gone, Bruce has no one to turn to for guidance on whether it’s appropriate to ask now or not. 

Bruce wants to know what happened to Dick. He has to know. What the Court did; if Dick did anything that crossed the line. He wants numbers and dates to pour over so he can distance himself from it like a casefile, so he can have the full story and find the perfect solution that will make everything right again the way it used to be. They’re already one step of the way there. Dick is already back here, almost in his arms. It’s almost too good to be true.

But even if Alfred coaxed a miracle out of Dick’s psyche, there’s a darkness in him—in his veins. He’s still slightly cagey, like a flighty animal.  The Court had him in their clutches for months upon months and carved him into a Talon. Bruce has him back now, a fact that he is keenly, achingly aware of in every precious instant, but he worries that they’re whittling him down ever further. Like a wood sculpture being chipped more and more. 

Bruce desperately wants to know so he can make everything better. Everything is already so much better than he could have dreamed. But two weeks ago, Dick was baring his teeth and snarling at them. Three weeks ago, he was trying to kill Bruce. Now Dick is here with his old tells and his smile and soft, calloused hands holding Bruce exactly when Bruce needs him to. 

He can’t go too fast. He can’t compromise what they have. 

If he pushed Dick away again after having him so close—even for only just this one night, this one day, even after these torturous last weeks—it would destroy him. It would kill him.   

A darker part of him wonders if not knowing might kill him first. 

“I’ll see about replacing those cots,” Bruce rumbles to catch his attention. 

Dick lets out a shaky breath, and Bruce’s chest eases as color comes back to his face. “...You’ve been saying that for years. It’s never going to happen.”

“I mean it,” Bruce murmurs back. 

A little noise, not a laugh, but nearly. And it is so dear to him.

“You always say that too.” 

“Then hold me to it,” Bruce says. “Hold me to it this time.”

Chapter Text

Bruce changes the magnification on the microscope.

Human cells. Less wrong than the last time he stole a tissue sample from Dick, but still wrong. 

Taking a deep breath, Bruce pushes the stool back and glances over at the medbay, where Dick has pushed two of the cots together to make a larger bed. Which he’s still only occupying half of in sleep, Bruce notes with a rush of fondness.

Tomorrow, he’ll ask Dick if he’d like to head upstairs. The hospital bed in the Cave was never more than a temporary solution—a place to put the body in his arms down and a way to restrain him. It kept Jason safe upstairs. 

But now that Dick is back to himself, there’s no need for it. 

Even on the off-chance that this is a long con by the Court, there’s been ample opportunity for Dick to slit Bruce’s throat and be done with it. Bruce knows that there’s no real chance of it—especially not when Dick didn’t kill him that night on the icy rooftop when he could have. 

Bruce knows Alfred’s kept up his room, removing any trace of dust from and relocking the door when he leaves; he checks. If Dick wants, they can push the bed over to the other wall so it faces the window. Yes, he’ll like that. 

He can even have the room across from Bruce’s if he wants—it’s larger, more fitting for an eighteen year old. His things from his old room alone wouldn’t fill it, but once they ship his things down from Manhattan, Bruce is sure there will be more than enough. 

He makes a mental note to locate Dick’s apartment in New York. Halfway out of inability to think of him and halfway out of being unable to find it with any cursory searches before his darker impulses dissuaded him, Bruce doesn’t have its address. A bitter taste floods his mouth. 

How long had he gone without Dick when he didn’t have to? 

They had fallen back together so effortlessly once Dick remembered. They didn’t even speak of what they had said before, it was like nothing ever happened or had to be forgiven, Bruce could have had him back sooner if he had only had the nerve—

Bruce shakes his head to clear his thoughts, and frowns. The frown softens as he imagines introducing Dick to Jason.

It wasn’t like they ever spoke about Dick, but the same way he sucked the air out of every room he was in and pulled eyes like a magnet, Dick had always had a presence in the manor without ever being there—a closed door, a meticulously kept bedroom, picture frames Bruce hastened past, and recorded training sessions Jason obsessed over. 

Will Jason be excited? Starstruck? Bruce wonders eagerly, unable to contain his excitement and the fond feeling overtaking him. Jason might be shy at first, he usually is around strangers, but their easy personalities will click soon enough, Bruce is absolutely certain, and they won’t be strangers long. 

Maybe Dick can even drive Jason to school some days. Alfred never lets anyone sit in the front with him when he drives the Royce, and it drives Jason up the wall. He likes it when Bruce drives him, but Bruce is up before noon so seldom that it happens rarely—precious moments where Jason has to yell his review of his latest book over the air from the window and the blare of The Clash from the speakers, or when their drives are quiet and companionable like last time. Dick wakes up as early as Alfred some days—or at least he used to—and it’ll fit into their routines like a puzzle piece.

This is not to mention the extra help in Gotham—Dick’s detective work and fighting skills couldn’t have done anything but get stronger, and once Bruce takes down the Court of Owls from the inside and it’s safe for him to go out again, the field will be waiting for him. The field will even be...

Bruce jolts. The field. He needs to go on patrol. 

Hours had flown past when he and Dick were speaking about nothing—such and such new souvenir or villain-gun in the cave, how the Penguin’s been doing, if Barbara was going back for yet another degree—Bruce being careful to steer the conversation from anything too potentially triggering but unable to stop himself from getting wrapped up in it and unable to tear himself away. Bruce doesn’t regret a second of it, even if it’s made him late for patrol.  But now it’s been too long since he was last out in Gotham. 

Tuesday crime is muted with even the docks quiet. The waves catch the reflection of the half-moon in their dark sheen, the image breaking peacefully with each new push of water. Even Gotham seems to know Dick is back—soothed as much as Bruce is, and he lets out a long breath over the docks.  Before he knows it, it’s time to head home again. 

The roar of the Batmobile cuts off as Bruce clambers out and pulls back the cowl. He takes in the empty bed and sees Dick awake and sitting on the edge of a table flipping through a casefile, and the engine cut-off makes Dick stand and look toward him, and when their eyes meet, Dick’s gaze drops, and something shifts. It takes just a second too long for Bruce to realize that something is turning terribly, desperately wrong. 

Because then Dick’s whole body is tensing, like a cat in a thunderstorm, practically vibrating with how perfectly still he is, and the casefile slides off the table, photographs fluttering slowly to the floor after it.

Ice washes Bruce’s veins. 

Almost numbly he follows Dick’s gaze to where his eyes are burning holes into the insignia on Bruce’s chest. Suddenly, his memory transposes an image of Talon over Dick now, and it’s with a pit in his stomach that he realizes he’s holding himself that same way, the same string of the shoulders, the same roll of the arms, and fists clenched. 

“Take that off,” Dick says, still. “Take that off right now.”

“Dick.”

“Take it off!”

Bruce sheds the outer layer of his chest armor immediately. It clatters loudly against the floor. 

Dick’s shoulders roll as he watches, gaze following the armor as it falls and stilling when it hits the ground, and his eyes are huge and unclear. 

Tentatively, Bruce covers the yellow bat insignia with his foot, kicks it behind him, and when it’s out of sight—really, truly out of sight—Dick finally relaxes, slumping like he’s suddenly sapped of energy, and it all happens so fast. And then it’s over, and quiet for a long time. 

“Dick?” Bruce whispers. “...Dick?”

Dick doesn’t answer, his face is pale, slack, tipped down, and Bruce wants to say, Robin, because he knows it will work, but even now, he can’t. He just can’t. So he stalks forward and in two steps has Dick by the shoulders instead, pulling him back up and pressing a hand to the back of his neck to prop his chin up on Bruce’s shoulder, where he can feel the erratic, trembling breaths he takes in. 

His other hand hovers over Dick’s back for a moment before the hesitation subsides and he does what he used to do when Dick was eight and stricken with a nightmare and used to shuffle up to wherever Bruce was working and stubbornly pretend he didn’t know why he woke up until Bruce got up to put him back to bed and rub circles on his back. Alfred used to do that to Bruce when he was little. 

It didn’t make anything particularly better. Or stave off nightmares. Or make either of them sleep any better. But it was all Bruce knew to do when he sat on the edge of the bed, because he didn’t know how to pull covers up to Dick’s chin and say, Let's talk about it. 

It doesn’t make anything better now either. A long time passes before Dick’s arms come up from his sides and wrap around Bruce in return, nails biting through the black undershirt Bruce always sports beneath the suit.  Bruce can feel the skin on his back begin to break under Dick’s touch, says nothing. 

When the nails furled in the fabric shift to balled fists, Bruce opens his mouth to speak and Dick beats him to it, pulling back. “I can’t. It’s Batman.”

His voice is hushed as he asks, “Batman.”

“It makes it like. Before.” 

“Like before,” Bruce asks quietly. 

Dick swallows visibly, eyes pinned to Bruce’s shoulder like he doesn’t register the question. Bruce nudges his chin with a gentle hand to get his attention, but that only makes Dick’s gaze fall lower toward the center of Bruce’s chest. Dick’s hand drops to the center of his ribcage, fingers ghosting over the fabric covering the raised skin where Bruce was stabbed like he’s finding his way around a dark room by touch. 

His eyes grow even darker, mouth twisting. 

“I did this,” Dick says. 

“No, you didn’t.”

That’s what makes Dick finally look up at him. A thumb presses sharply into the fold where the staples bring the still-sore skin together, making Bruce stiffen, still silent, but the point’s been proven, and Dick nods his head distantly. “I did this.”

“No. No, the Court did this. The Court did this to you.”

“I did this to you. I tried to kill you. Didn’t I.” Dick looks at him pleadingly, eyes shiny, and he lets out a shaky laugh. “Didn’t I?”

“It wasn’t you.”

Dick says, hushed, “What if I do it again?”

Bruce seizes him ferociously then and shakes him hard as terror floods him. “You won’t. You’re back now. You’re back now. Do you understand?” he growls.

“What if I do? What if I kill you?”

Bruce’s hands slip weightlessly down Dick’s shoulders to his elbows and maintains his gaze pointedly. “Then,” Bruce whispers, and means it, “I die, and I forgive you.”

“No,” Dick says, horrified. Dick shoves him hard in the shoulder, making Bruce stagger back, hands falling back to his sides. He shakes his head violently, hair getting in his eyes. “No, shut up, shut up, Bruce, why would you even, why would—” 

An hour later finds them still in the Cave together, quiet again. Dick is staring blankly at his palms like he doesn’t recognize them, Bruce staring only at him. 

Finally, finally, Dick opens his mouth, shuts it, opens it, and Bruce perks up to listen, straightens before the words catch up to him and pull him into the riptide to drown. “I don’t know if it’s safe for you to be around me. For me to be around you anymore.”

Bruce’s eyes shoot to Dick, scowling fiercely as a pit buries into his stomach. “That’s the opposite of the truth. Dick, that’s not true.”

“I nearly killed you.” Dick looks up hollowly. “When I saw you in that costume, that symbol, it was like I was—it was like I was theirs again. Everything else I got back just shut off.”

  Not theirs, Bruce thinks sharply. Dick has to stay. There is no other option. “You didn’t even attack me,” he rasps.

“But I had to hold myself back. I almost did.”

“If there was enough of you to hold yourself back, then it doesn’t matter,” Bruce says, and Dick is shaking his head back and forth. 

“You don’t understand. I was holding myself back before too, all those times we met on the rooftop. I’ve been holding back, but I don’t know if I can keep doing it. I don’t know what’s going to trigger it—I know that symbol d—I know Batman does, they c-conditioned me for that, and Alfred’s helped me separate you out from him in my mind, but anything could happen.”

All the Court’s sentences must provoke conditioned responses. But what does that mean really? What did they do? Bruce has to know. He clenches his jaw as he nods curtly, coming to a resolution. It can’t go on like this. He has to know and the bullet is in the chamber, What did they do to you? on Bruce’s heavy, clumsy tongue. 

Before he can say it, Dick is speaking quietly. His mouth is pale, it barely moves. “I think it would be best if I left before I hurt you any more. Before I get the chance.”

Dick may as well have stabbed him again. Twisted the blade. It would hurt less, because the frenzied, panicked terror that washes over him makes it hard to breathe, impossible to think. 

But he doesn’t have to think to let the automatic, black curtain fall and the order snap from his mouth, flat and even, low and impenetrable, “Absolutely not. You can’t be alone right now.”

“I won’t be alone, I’ll have—” 

Bruce’s mouth sours even more. “The Titans aren’t on-world. The Vega mission is ongoing.”

“What?” Dick pales. His eyes fly to Bruce’s in alarm. “But that was—that was supposed to be months ago.”

“Refugee negotiations are taking longer than anticipated,” Bruce says measuredly, hating the Vega mission for its reminder that Bruce failed him in so many ways, but thankful for it keeping the Titans away. They would be too much to deal with right now, especially with how unbalanced the situation is. Still, Bruce should have done more to check that Dick had actually gone on the mission after missing the drop-in at the Manor he planned, but instead he had let his fear of confronting the boy and being rejected stop him. 

“Transmissions?”

“Knocked out.”

Dick drags his hands over his face, and Bruce hears him to take a deep breath before his fingers fall to expose his gutted-looking eyes, and Bruce inhales sharply in turn. “You don’t understand. It’s worse for me to be here. I didn’t—you don’t know what I can do. You don’t know what they did.”

“Then tell me.”

Dick’s eyes flash and he scoffs and abruptly turns so that Bruce can barely even see the side of his face. “You don’t—”

“Tell. Me.” Bruce gives the order roughly, and Dick exhales shakily, and there’s a beat and then. The wave breaks again. It always does. 

“There’s a room,” Dick says. 

Bruce stares at him. 

“It’s white,” Dick says. 

“They put you,” Dick says. “They put.”

“Dick,” Bruce says faster, and something like hot metal and dread is settling in his gut, heavy and molten and burning holes through his stomach.

“They put you in there when they get you. You’re all alone for all of it but you can hear them and they tell you to stop screaming. Because no one can hear you but them. But I—I just keep screaming and you’re there forever. It’s like. Something rips. In your throat. You know? And then it wasn’t white.” Dick draws his shoulders up jerkily. “It was red.”

Silence. 

“Um, what they give you, it doesn’t—it doesn’t a hundred percent repair what happened before you got it. It heals what you get. Cobb told me that. Later. He waxed, like, poetic about it. Because it didn’t fix what Amelia did to him, his heart, and it’s not the same at all. You can’t tell him that. Your voice’s a goner.” Break. Breath. Whisper, “But once they give it to you, there’s just nothing, just this coldness and absolutely nothing, like you’re dead...There’s nothing you can do but scream. And if you can’t scream.”

Bruce exhales raggedly. 

Dick says, “So that’s what they do first.”

Bruce watches through pulled back curtains as Jason stomps around outside in the snow—undoubtedly soaking his leather school loafers, and can’t help but smile. 

Alfred’s already got one hand on the handle of the town car and he turns back to Jason to yell something Bruce can’t hear, but it makes Jason stop playing and get in the car. 

But not before Jason looks over his shoulder and dead into the window Bruce is looking through. Bruce’s heart leaps into his throat and he slams the curtains closed. 

He waits three breaths, four, then checks. The car’s gone, and regret suddenly replaces the panic. 

Jason’s been avoiding him since they got back. Which is Bruce’s fault. He’s been downstairs almost all of the time, never anything but acutely aware of their distance. Dick is…

Adjusting. Slowly. Bruce is sure that moving him back up to his old room would move the process along, but they can’t yet, so Bruce hasn’t even brought it up to anyone. That would put Jason in the crossfire. And Bruce is not willing to risk that. Until they’ve figured what exactly will provoke him, Dick and Jason can’t meet. That means staying downstairs. 

He’s doing it for both of them. Taking one last look out the window with a sigh, Bruce descends the stairs again. 

“You shouldn’t give me a weapon. I could kill you with this.”

“You could kill me with a lot less.” 

Dick’s eyes fly up to meet Bruce’s sharply. The batarang wobbles loudly on the metal table where Bruce sets it down, bladed steel edges scraping. 

“You could have killed me before, too. Killing isn’t an act. It’s a choice, and you didn’t make it.” 

“You don’t know what I did,” Dick replies quietly. 

Dick always knows exactly where to hit, and Bruce’s mouth bitters. No, he doesn’t. And the possibility terrifies him down to the marrow in his bones. Even though it’s one that he…

“I was sentenced to die,” Bruce states instead of lingering on it, and Dick flinches. “But you didn’t kill me.”

“Batman isn’t exactly an easy target. That’s why they sent Cobb to investigate at first.”

That first Talon in June, Bruce deduces. “Cobb,” he asks. 

Dick doesn’t say anything. 

“Was not supposed to kill me.”

“No.”

“And you were.”

Dick’s gaze slides from Bruce’s to focus on a point in the distance. The batarang gleaming on the table catches the light from the overheads and reflects light on his face. He speaks faintly. “They thought I was good.”

Bruce swallows the lump rapidly solidifying in his throat. He does not want to talk about this. He wants to know everything that happened. He could not bear to hear it. He needs every scrap of information he can find. The contradictions smother him, whipping his heart back and forth. 

What Dick told him a few nights ago about the white room—the cold—it barely scratched the surface. There’s so much more, and it guts Bruce that he doesn’t know even though it might gut him more to know.   

Bruce should say, “Did you kill anyone?” should say, “Can you describe in detail the nature of your attackers, their transgressions and your own?” should say, “How do I fix this for you?” 

He clears his throat. He pushes the batarang an inch closer to Dick (it scrapes). He says, “We are going to desensitize you to certain stimuli.”

Dick raises a single brow, unperturbed by the abrupt subject change. “You are not trying to Little Albert me. I know you’re not.”

“The opposite...imprecisely. Latent inhibition. You should be less susceptible to reactions if you’re extremely familiar with the stimulus.”

“Does that work after the fact?” Dick frowns. “Besides. I’m already familiar with the stimulus.” 

On cue, Bruce pushes the batarang closer to Dick, who leans backward and then scowls when he realizes what he’s done but doesn’t go nearer. “Reports from New York rarely mention Nightwing using weapons besides batons.”

“Escrima sticks. They’re called escrima sticks.”

“I am aware.” Bruce pauses.  “...For arnis. I didn’t teach you arnis.”

“No,” Dick agrees, then glances up at him and suddenly reaches for the batarang with barely shaking fingers. “What now?”

And it goes well enough. Gradually, Dick doesn’t react as much to the symbol on the batarangs. But Bruce doesn’t dare expose him to the suit again yet. That’s terrifying—it was terrifying, not for Bruce’s life, but seeing Dick have to exert that willpower over his own instincts, the unfamiliar flash in his eye. 

It’s best to do it right. Slow. He drives to a safehouse in the city to go on patrol from to be careful. And right after Dick gave Bruce his key, Bruce was swept up and angrily cut off access to the batcomputer and its various resources from afar, which he’s regretted something awful in the years since but is grateful for now. If the batsuit—if Batman—set Dick off so much, Bruce worries that exposure to the digital files, up to date since the Court reemerged, will trigger something too. It’s best to keep him away from that while they can. He has access to the old, physical casefiles, Jason’s preference because they remind him of books, and Bruce has seen him flipping through them quickly. 

Bruce is doing what he can. He is trying. And he is so fiercely, furiously grateful to have both Dick and Jason there, and safe, and alive. Things are still rocky with Dick’s wellbeing and his relationship with Jason, but if Bruce just does enough, everything will come back together. 

That doesn’t stop the dreams in the meanwhile, though. Every night. 

They’re especially bad tonight, and when he finally thrashes himself awake, he stares at the dark ceiling with his chest heaving, cold sweat all over him. He can feel his racing pulse in his wrists, temples, every last thud. He waits for the terror—the dread—the cold feeling of worry to go away, but it doesn’t, just breaks into a million splinters like broken candle ice, and he finally braces a fist against the sheets and sits up.   

1:03 slices through the blackness in blaring red above over a blocky March 20. The alarm clock takes a second to register. 

He shuts his eyes to the painful light, and just like that, the dream’s white-faced and wide-eyed figures in black are dancing across his eyelids again. They draw nearer and nearer than they ever did in the dream so he opens them back up and stares grittily into the pitch blackness and the shine off his bureau. 

He should have gone out on patrol tonight, decided not to, made a mistake. It’s not too late to. 

Maybe that will make this feeling go away. He pulls himself off the bed and onto the frigid floor but a new fear replaces the old one, and he jerks the hour hand on the grandfather clock to ten so harshly it nearly bends on his way downstairs. The sight sends a shock of relief over him. 

Dick is still there, not gone, though not on the medical bed like Bruce expected either. 

He is laying on his back on the floor holding out a yellow casefile to read it, his hair plastered to his forehead like he was working out. And he is not white-faced or shrouded in dead black or holding a knife. His eyes are not replaced by huge, dark, amber holes like they were in the dream. Like they were two months ago. They are just black. They follow Bruce as he approaches, sits down near where Dick’s head lays. 

“Morning,” Dick offers in greeting, flashing a small smile before he goes back to the file and flips a page with a thumb. 

Bruce rests his hands on his knees and tries to keep them from balling into fists. “You should be asleep,” he says instead of any of the other things rattling around his head, and he says it flat. 

A dimple curves into Dick’s cheek and then he’s looking back up at Bruce again.  Automatically, Bruce’s chest eases a little again.  “It’s only one.”

“You should still be asleep.” Pause. Then (inevitably), “What case is that.”

Dick’s smile falls. He sits up, balances the open casefile on Bruce’s bent knee. Joseph Edelman’s gap-toothed grin stares up at him. Jason must have printed the digital files and put them together. Ice-cold dread washes over Bruce all over again. “Did you.”

“No.”

“Were you.”

“No,” Dick says, mouth twisting. 

Bruce relaxes imperceptibly but he knows Dick perceives it anyway. “Good.” Dick nudges his shoulder. 

The timeline didn’t match up anyway. Dick couldn’t have killed Edelman if he hadn’t even been taken yet. 

Quiet fills the cave apart from the buzzing overhead and the bats. Bruce drags his gaze back up to Dick, who leans his weight back on his palms. The veins on his cheeks are receding everyday, bluer than black now, but his bones jut out and his undereyes are dark-ringed. The shine on his cheeks from whatever workout he just did makes him a little less dead by obscuring the waxy pallor. 

Just the thought strengthens the ice-feeling, and he frowns. 

“Nightmare?” asks Dick. 

Bruce grunts. 

“Bad?”

“No,” Bruce lies. 

“Would sparring help?” Dick’s eyes glint. 

Bruce glances over at the training dummies. One has been absolutely obliterated. He lets his gaze slide back to Dick, who grins sharply. 

“What?” Dick asks innocently. “Sparring always helps me.”

“Mm,” Bruce says, and they fall back into silence. Dick inches closer to him so he can keep looking over the file. Bruce flips the pages for him. Dick reads fast, but he slaps Bruce’s hand away when he tries to turn the next section on the pages with pictures, expression sad and fleeting, something that Bruce can’t quite name. It is almost enough to know that the dream was not real, and he is still here, and Dick Grayson is still Dick Grayson. Almost. “Do you know what today is.”

“Lying about nightmares day.”

Bruce affects frowning deeply, which makes Dick laugh softly over his shoulder and makes Bruce’s own lips quirk up instinctively at the sound. Then Bruce dogears the corner of the manila folder, falters. “The 20th.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

Bruce raises his eyebrows, still not looking up from the folder.

“Oh.”

The uptick turns into a tired but full-fledged smile. “Happy birthday, Dick,” Bruce whispers fondly.

“I—thanks,” Dick mumbles back, shifting so his arms wrap around his knees. Bruce looks at him, all nineteen years of him, remembering him, and then he says, “Next page.”

Bruce obediently flips the page, revealing the doctored ME report and the slashes over the generic body outline in the wrong places. Dick runs a finger over the throat of the outline, pauses. 

“This is faked, yeah?”

“There were over twenty stab wounds.”

“And this says three,” Dick says, very quietly, and props his chin on Bruce’s shoulder, giving a low and distant hum that immediately puts Bruce on edge. “That sounds like him.”

Bruce has learned not to ask who. It will only make himself sick. Something vengeful and protective coils in his gut anyway, curving his nails into the thin exterior of the folder until they break through. He bites the inside of his cheek and it bleeds, and he asks, “Next.”

“Next,” Dick says. Bruce turns the page, and Dick laughs. Bruce feels the sound as much as hears it because Dick is so close. 

“Dick,” Bruce starts, and Dick stops laughing and pulls away, dragging his hands over his face. 

“I’m sorry,” Dick says through the cracks in his hands. 

“It is all right.”

“You don’t have to do the robot schtick with me, you know. You don’t have to lie. I know what it is.” There’s a long pause. “I wasn’t laughing at the case.”

“I know.”

“I just.”

“I know.”

“It hasn’t been a very good year.”

Bruce thinks about the empty room upstairs, the key he demanded back but never ever wanted, the pit in his stomach. The area code that reminded him how damn far Manhattan was from Gotham. 

“It is all right,” Bruce says again, a rotted away imitation of comfort, and Dick laughs emptily again, and Bruce shifts and wraps an arm tightly around him, and closes the casefile on his lap. He does not add it is all right now. 

They sit in silence for a long moment before Dick takes a shaky breath and speaks into Bruce’s shoulder, voice still-hoarse, and fond, and uncharacteristically hesitant, but Bruce can tell he’s trying to lighten the atmosphere, and would love him more for it if he could possibly. 

“Do you...remember when I turned eleven and you finally let me go out on my own? That one was probably my best one. My best birthday I think. It was raining the whole night.” Dick pauses, swallowing a little laugh. “I almost slipped off the edge of the Regal, I was so excited. And then Alfred had those muffins waiting for me when I got back instead of cake.”

“You always liked the rain,” Bruce offers gruffly after a long moment, because he is not supposed to say, I know. I followed you the whole damn night. You nearly gave me a heart attack when you fell. 

“Yeah. It makes everything all clean. It’s just nice.”

“Do you r…” Bruce makes a neutral sound, fingers stilling where they lay over the closed file. He hesitates. “The thank you note you wrote me after.”

Pause. “What about it?”

It was a neon yellow card with a puppy dog on it. Dick must have bought it from the convenience store by his middle school. He left it on the desk in Bruce’s study the day after that first solo patrol. It had layers upon layers of loopy, imprinted handwriting like someone had written out what they wanted to say very hard on a paper laid overtop it. The writing had less words than what was imprinted. In thick black ink, it just said, Bruce thanks for all of it. “...Why?” Bruce whispers. 

Dick’s nose scrunches. “What sort of question is that, B? I don’t know. That’s what you’re supposed to do when someone gives you a gift, isn’t it? Write them a card or a letter or something. Say thank you.”

“You could have just told me. We lived two rooms apart.”

“I don’t know. I like getting letters. You can hold them and read them again. And they’re...tangible. That’s nice. Remember all the ones Raya used to send me?” Shift. “...Don’t feel that special. I think I got Alfred one too,” Dick mumbles. 

“It was only once,” Bruce adds hesitantly, not letting it go.

“We don’t exactly celebrate birthdays every year, Bruce. What’s got you thinking about that card anyway? And why a card? You want to talk about things I wrote, I used to write you letters all the time.”

“No, you didn’t.” Bruce would remember that. He remembers every last detail of the handwriting on the yellow card, the curved line on each letter t. 

“Yes, I did. When I used to run away all the time as a kid. I used to leave you all those letters. You remember.”

Oh. 

Bruce does. Screws his lids shut tightly, eyes suddenly searing as he visualizes what he’s repressed, buried deep like treasure, only treasure does not hurt nearly as much as these memories do. A heavily-inked yellow legal pad that Alfred thrust angrily into his hands. An index card on his desk. A scrap of folded-up notebook paper taped to the computer. All the different runaway notes from all the runaway years at nine and ten and twelve and fourteen and a half-million times at fifteen.  Dear Bruce I guess it’s time for me to move on I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do if I’m not allowed to help you anymore you don’t want a partner and you don’t need a son I’m sorry I failed you thanks for teaching me how to be strong goodbye Dick. Stop making Bruce think about it. Stop it stop it stop it. Stop it. Make it stop. He tries to clasp his lips together so he can’t speak, but for once, the words come out anyway, loud and dense and terrifying in the still, dark silence. 

“When you used to run away,” Bruce says—roughly, harshly, accusingly, “you used to come back.”

Something shifts, and Bruce can feel it, like the snap-second of silence after the pin comes out of the grenade. Can see the incredulous, angered look flash through Dick’s eyes. Can feel him pull away. 

“That isn’t fair,” Dick says. “You know that isn’t fair. I wasn’t the one who ran away that time. That wasn’t me.”

Bruce staggers up, letting the casefile fall to the ground, and Dick shoots up too. 

“Bruce,” Dick warns. “Bruce.”

“I have to go on patrol,” Bruce tells him woodenly—and leaves.

It’s like Bruce can’t remember all the things he used to do, his mind tripping him up at every time. Even patrol is botched, empty. It’s like all he’s capable of is pushing Dick further and further away every time he speaks and he doesn’t want to fuck it up anymore so he just stops, and eats his breakfast alone and miserable and goes to work without talking to either of the children or even Alfred most of the time. 

But that only lasts a few days because it hurts too much, and he finds himself going back down the stairs to see Alfred and Dick playing chess.

“Alfred, could you give us a moment.”

“Ah, of course, sir.”

Bruce slides into the seat across the table from Dick that when Alfred leaves. “We need to talk.”

Dick props a hand on his cheek. “I think that might legitimately kill you, Bruce.”

“I—hn,” Bruce starts. He scours the inside of his mouth for the words but they’ve evaporated, leaving him with nothing to say, staring helplessly at Dick, who sighs and pushes the chessboard aside, picking up the slack. 

“You?” Dick prompts. 

“I would like to.”

“Would like to…?” He looks unimpressed, but then his lips quirk up sympathetically, maybe pityingly, as if he knows exactly where this is going, and that makes it easier for Bruce somehow, to know that Dick knows what he means. What he is trying to say. Dick’s always known, and that’s what makes this, all of this, so much worse. 

“Do you remember when you used to tell me everything,” Bruce asks quickly, hushedly. 

He’s sorry he said it as soon as the words come out of his mouth, because it is not the thing he came here to say, the thing that always catches in his throat, the thing that petrifies him so much it makes him pluck out and misremember the bad memories like peeling ugly wet scabs off skin, the thing he never seems to be capable of saying at the right time for the right reason in the right way. 

His whole being sinks, feeling like he’s exposed himself somehow, and he starts to reach for some other topic to distract the boy, but before he can, Dick speaks, and he goes completely still to listen, mind quieting in an instant. 

“Yeah.” Dick gives a soft, scoffing laugh. “I do. Before everything got so...”

“So,” Bruce repeats; a sentence in itself.

There’s a brief silence.

“Bruce,” Dick says. “I want you to know I—I never wanted us to grow apart.”

Cold hands are gripping Bruce’s heart. 

“I didn’t either,” he murmurs, wide-eyed and stiff, desperate to make the right move. He cranes his neck forward. “It just happened.”

Dick inhales sharply, shuts his eyes. “That’s the thing. That’s the thing, Bruce, is it didn’t just happen,” and somehow Bruce has ruined it, and his breath vanishes from his throat.  

“What do you mean. What does that mean.”

Dick opens his eyes, an emotion Bruce can’t quite name passes over his face, softening his features and lowering his brow. 

Bruce’s waiting, but Dick doesn’t say anything else, and Bruce can already feel him slipping out from between his fingers; the memory of the brass key Alfred angrily handed to him two years ago a ghost sensation in his palm. He blinks hard as if to make it go away.

And Bruce twists his mother’s ring hard. 

Clark’s grin is insufferable.

“What?” Bruce finally snaps when the rest of the League sans Diana has cleared out. 

Diana laughs. “Don’t be like that. It’s good news, Bruce.”

“Names.”

“What Wonder Woman meant to say, Batman,” Clark corrects indulgently, “was we’ve finally made contact with the Titans. Donna said they’re on their way back as soon as their repair job’s done. Sounds like a great time to reach out to anyone you’ve been missing.”

Bruce stiffens. 

Diana touches his shoulder. “I’m sure that Nightwing will be happy to see you. You’re still important to him, Bruce, even if you’ve had your struggles.”

“I’ll even tell you the second I hear his heartbeat on earth,” Clark offers kindly. “His is steady, 76 beats per minute. He loves to brag about that.” He laughs.

Bruce clamps down hard on his tongue. He knows from tests that Dick’s pulse runs erratically now, and the realization that there must have been a moment where Clark stopped hearing Dick’s heartbeat on earth makes wet, hot hands scrawl and thrash against the inside of Bruce’s stomach, throat, making him sick. 

“Nightwing never left earth,” Bruce grits out through the thick taste on his tongue after a long silence punctuated by Clark and Diana’s expectant, sympathetic gazes. 

“...What?”

“That’s impossible, Donna would have—”

His cape swishes as he turns away from them, trying to manage his expression. “He was being held by an underground cult. The Court of Owls. Brainwashed.”

“And you didn’t think to tell anyone? To alert any of us?”

“We—I only recovered him in February. I erroneously assumed that he was with the Titans...that he just hadn’t wanted to see me.” 

Bruce slowly turns back around.

Clark is rubbing the bridge of his nose—kind, chiseled face twisted into something angry and disappointed and worried all at once. “God, Bruce. I don’t even know what to say. Is there anything we can do for him until the Titans arrive? Would seeing—?” 

“No,” Bruce replies quickly. “He’s...still struggling. Even remembering me. They conditioned him. These violent responses. Seeing anyone else would only make it worse.” He catches himself rubbing his fingers together through his gloves guiltily and immediately stops it, scowling, and he balls his hands into fists instead. 

When Bruce gets back from the Watchtower, he’s drawn into Dick’s old room, running his fingers along the desk’s wood and picture frames looking for dust that isn’t there. Pale blue light from the tail-end of sunset streams through the shuttered windows. 

The color of the sheets have changed since Bruce was last in here. Alfred, no doubt. Bruce lays a knuckle against the now white-striped fabric folded crisply over the comforter and frowns.

Until the Titans arrive, Clark said, and Bruce can’t stop turning the words over in his head. The Titans coming back doesn’t mean anything immediately. Dick has to get back to his right mind—his completely right mind—before he can make any big decisions, like leaving, and now that they’ve mended things…

Dick will stay. Of course he will. Won’t he?

God, Bruce doesn’t know. He needs to find Alfred. Alfred will know. 

Alfred is in the kitchen, chopping celery root for rémoulade, which approximately no one likes. The knife comes down loudly on the wooden cutting board, crisp white and brown slivers spilling onto the counter. Bruce makes his last footsteps heard and waits to be acknowledged, hands tucked into his pockets, but the knife just keeps going down. 

“Alfred.” Louder. “Alfred.”

The butler doesn’t so much as glance back at him. “Sir?”

Bruce opens his mouth, shuts it. Works his jaw, and what comes out isn’t what he intends. It never is. His teeth knock together. 

“That night. When I brought him back.”

“You’re speaking of Master Dick, I presume?” interrupts Alfred loudly, pausing only to roll up the folded sleeve that crept down his wrist. 

“Er.” Bruce pauses. “Yes. Him.”

“Are you planning to speak any more of him or am I simply to reflect on it? No?...I believe it was approaching three in the morning on a terribly cold night and—”

“You,” Bruce cuts him off. Gestures helplessly, awkwardly, at Alfred’s turned back and the knife that keeps coming down even though the butler can’t see him.

“Yes?”

“You saw how he was,” Bruce manages. “You saw what kind of shape he was in. He lashed out at you and you still. He. He tried to kill me that night. But you…”

Alfred interrupts again with a tone like he’s reassuring a child, tutting. “He would never have tried if he was in his right mind.”

“I am aware,” Bruce grinds out, suddenly frustrated. 

“Then what is the problem?”

“You brought him back.”

Alfred slams the knife down and whirls around furiously. “I know that you are not insinuating what you seem to be, Master Wayne.”

Bruce feels his eyes widen. “No, of course not. I would never. I’ve wanted him back home more than anything and having him back, even given the—circumstances—”  he breaks off, exhaling. “But how did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That he would get better,” Bruce whispers. “You didn’t hesitate or give up, you didn’t compromise at all, even after all those years and the brainwashing. I still don’t know what you did while we were gone.”

Alfred sniffs. “Compromises are for lesser souls, Master Bruce. No one who truly knew that boy would ever be able give up on him. You would have seen that too if you weren’t so clouded by your emotions, understandably so, given your—shall we say— scuffles with him. I daresay that he was on the way to recovery even before your little trip to Bournemoth: a purer heart than that boy’s would be hard to find.”

That’s what Bruce has needed to hear for months now. To know that Dick is still the same. Was always going to be. It feels like so much has shifted, changed. Even just between them. Even before the Court found him, twisted him.

Somewhere along the line Dick went from the little boy who told him every secret and every dream, good or bad, to a fearless teenager purposefully careening down paths as far from Gotham and Bruce as possible. To someone who didn’t need their shoes tied before elementary school and wanted independence more than Bruce’s protection.

It was so hard. It is so hard. And that was why Bruce set the bridge on fire before it could get crossed in the first place. 

Dick was Bruce’s whole world for so many years. Dick gave him something to fill his heart with and fight for instead of against for the first time in his life. With Dick’s presence ripped out from under him like a rug, Bruce had begun to cast doubts on those bright, early years and doubt their connection. Maybe it had only been grief and need and desperation. Maybe it had never meant to Dick what it did to him. Maybe Bruce had just put all of it on a pedestal. 

When Bruce took Dick in at 25, he did not know what any of it would mean—would become. Everyone told him he had no idea what he was getting into. It wasn’t just food and shelter and pats on the head. And it was not. It was late nights on Robitussin and bending his nails back with all-consuming anxiety over innocent school trips and gunshots and screaming, crying, sobbing and getting the best friend he ever had out of a traumatized, stubborn, loud, impossibly kind eight year old boy. 

He had no idea how much it would mean. 

A part of Bruce—an awful, selfish, jealous part that is not small—says that if the Court of Owls is the cost for having Dick back, so be it. That is a price Bruce will live with to have Dick back. And now that he is back, Bruce cannot fathom how he managed to live with the estrangement before, cannot fathom the pain or the distance or doing it ever again. It cannot happen again. Be allowed to happen again. And there was no other way for them to pick up where they left off. There was no other way for Dick to come back.

But the logical part of Bruce tells him that the only reason the Court was able to lay their filthy hands on him was because Dick had come back to Gotham. To share news of his engagement, which makes Bruce feel lightheaded, derealized all over again. Dick can’t possibly be that grown-up.  Bruce can’t possibly have missed that much.  

Dick would never have had to come to Gotham—and pass through the Court’s clutches—if Bruce had simply showed up to that League meeting and spoken to him afterward.  Or even if Bruce had managed to press CALL. Or if Bruce had never pushed him away in the first place. 

“...Do you think he’ll stay?” he rumbles at last, clearing his suddenly full throat and blinking his hot eyes. Once the words start coming, though, they don’t stop, rationalizing and re-rationalizing all the reasons Dick should stay. Has to stay. “Do you think he would leave here and go back to New York? You can’t possibly think it would be safe. We have no idea how far the Court of Owls goes. If he was poised to kill me, it’s not safe to expose him to anyone else. Dick could hurt them. They could hurt him. He doesn’t have to stay downstairs, but i—” Bruce cuts off suddenly, ears pricking up at the sound of a breath, the pitter-patter of familiar feet slamming down the hallway. 

Alfred’s gaze snaps to Bruce’s in realization, and Bruce’s heart plunges as he rushes down the hall to see the wide-open grandfather clock and scrambles down the stairs. He hears the voices before he sees anything, prays to God that Robin was not one of the Court’s targets.

“—ied to kill him, you almost killed him! It was you! All this time!”

Dick’s voice is soft and low, coaxing like he’s talking to a wild animal, hands held out—seemingly unaffected. “Come here. Come here. I’m not going to hurt you. I wouldn’t.”

“But you’d hurt him,” Jason spits, hands balled into fists at his sides. 

Dick recoils like he’s been struck, wide-eyed. And that jolts Bruce back into action, pushing him down the rest of the stairs.

“Jason!” Bruce barks, snapping out a hand. “Get away from there.”

Jason lurches backward and Dick doesn’t move an inch. Bruce is far from frozen, pulling Jason away from where Dick is to the ledge by the stairs, and Jason tries to squirm out of his group uselessly, thrashing until Bruce releases him. As soon as Bruce lets go, Jason jerks his chin up and gestures wildly before speaking like he can’t believe he has to say it. 

“He was the one that stabbed you! He tried to kill you, he almost killed you, you had to be on the ICD! He isn’t sorry , I know you said he didn’t know any better or whatever but, B, that doesn’t matter, he can’t take it back, it doesn’t matter. He can’t be here. You almost died! And just…!” Jason’s eyes flash, he lets out a strangled, guttural yell. 

Dropping to his knees, Bruce grabs Jason by the shoulders again and shakes him roughly, fingers digging in. “Just what?”

Jason’s mouth trembles. 

“Aren’t I enough for you?” Jason whispers. “Why do you got to have him too?”

Bruce’s heart snaps in half. “Jason,” he breathes, startled.  

Then he stands and brings Jason with him, seizes him up in his arms and holds him like a baby with his feet dangling, propping his chin on Jason’s curly head and trying to blink away the hot sting in his eyes, and quick as it came, Jason’s trembling burns back into anger. Jason beats Bruce’s chest and kicks at his shins and lets out upset, strangled grunts as he tries to struggle away, and Bruce lets him. And holds fast. He doesn’t know what to say. 

He never does. 

“Let me down!” Jason howls, but his voice is thick and wet, cracking, and he sniffles, and it’s all muffled against Bruce’s shirt. “Let me go-o, you stupid fucking old man, I hate you! I hate you!”

“I don’t actually hate you,” Jason admits sullenly, sniffling, once he’s calmed down, rubbing a hand over his eyes. Then he scrabbles the orange slice out of Bruce’s outstretched palm and shoves it into his mouth. “I didn’t mean that. I was just trying to protect you.”

Bruce’s mouth ticks up sadly. “I know, Jaylad.”

They’re in the kitchen, alone, the remoulade forgotten, Bruce surrounded by orange peel. He offers Jason the last part of the clementine, and Jay chews it silently. 

The quiet stretches for a long time. Then Jason swallows loudly and coughs. Bruce stares at the rind covering in the counter and sweeps it into his hand and deposits it in the trash before returning. 

“Is that why you wouldn’t let me go downstairs?” Jason asks, voice damp. 

“Yes.”

“And that’s him?”

“That is Dick.”

“He used to be Robin.”

“And now you are.”

“And he was the one who tried to kill you all those times.” 

It’s not a question, and Bruce’s head snaps up warningly, making Jason bow his head. “Jason Peter.”

“...He was, though. You said.”

“You shouldn’t have been eavesdropping. You...misconstrued it. He was under the Court’s control. They…” Bruce suddenly wishes the orange weren’t gone so he could have something to rip apart, presses his empty hands together hard instead, “manipulated him, toyed with his brain. If you knew him, you would know he would never do that. Not in a million years. He’s too good.” Alfred’s words echo through his head. 

“Oh,” Jason whispers. 

“He’s better now,” Bruce adds hastily, staring fiercely at the countertop. His mind is racing. Dick didn’t seem to react to Jason with any of the Court’s conditioning. Hope blooms in his chest. Moving him upstairs is becoming a realer and realer possibility. “He’s better.”

“Is he...” Bruce sees Jason fidget with the hem of his sweatshirt, “staying? Maybe if he went home, we could—or is he going to—I just—does he have to be here? Why is he...here?”

Bruce shuts his eyes, comes to a final, stone-hard resolution, and it settles his soul. “This is his home, Jason. Of course, he’s staying. He’s still recovering.”

“But you said that—”

Bruce shakes his head firmly, and Jason falls silent. “He’s family.”

“Oh.”

Bruce unknits his hands and flattens them out on the table. Color rushes back to his knuckles. “Would...you like to meet him. Formally.”

Jason scrunches his face up. 

“Call me Dick.”

“Jason. Todd.” 

Dick offers a tentative smile, eyes turning into crescent moons. He’s sitting criss-cross on a table with a breezy air as if the last half-hour of burning, screaming tension didn’t even happen. “I know. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Jason is pressed suspiciously, protectively up against Bruce’s side in the cave, head brushing Bruce’s elbow, keeping a good two meters between him and Dick. His hazel eyes squint, and he crosses his arms, scoffing. “Like what?”

Bruce realizes with a start that he didn’t even know that Dick knew Jason existed. It makes sense—the papers went crazy over the second Robin, no chance Dick could have missed, even as faraway as he was, but Bruce had always put out the possibility like a match with wet fingers, obstinately pushed it from his mind. The realization makes Bruce anxious. Does Dick know he’s Robin? What does Dick think? He shifts, staring intently at Dick.

“Like that you’re a great Robin. My...team’s a really big fan of yours. I don’t know if you know about Wonder Girl, but she thinks you’re adorable.”

“...Wonder Girl? Did she really say that?” 

“Among other things. That’s Donna, she’s the greatest. And an expert on all things pixie-boot related, so she’s a great judge on that.” Jason laughs delightedly for a second and then suddenly stops himself, mouth slamming back into a hard, guarded frown, and Dick smiles a little wider, anyway, knowingly, and Bruce is a little blown away by his ease, even though he should not be, after all these years. It is something entirely different to know something and to see it in action for the first time in so many years. Like this, Bruce almost forgets the dark veins, haze obscuring it. “And I know that you’re a huge reason why the Magpie case got wrapped up so smoothly.”

“All I did was figure out where her lair was,” Jason mutters, hugging himself, but he’s preening, clear as day.

“Yeah, which is only the hardest part,” Dick insists softly. “I don’t see B doing that.”

“He didn’t help at all! He was unconscious for like ten whole hours! Gordon and I had to do everything because he got shot.”

“Oh, that’s classic Bruce.”

Jason’s laugh doesn’t cut off that time, and Jason nudges his head against Bruce’s arm again so Bruce wraps it around his shoulders and squeezes tight, fighting a smile of his own. Something light and fond bubbles up in his chest. Dick is exceptionally good at prying people open, and Jason is exceptionally good at being easy to adore. 

Eventually, Bruce sends Jason up for bed, leaving just the two of them behind in the cave. Dick unfolds his legs from under him where he sits atop a table, exhaling forcefully like it takes some effort before glancing up at Bruce through his bangs, brows raising.

“He seems like a great kid.”

“You should hear him talk about how punching rapists is praxis. He has...many thoughts on the subject.”

Dick smiles, giving a soft laugh. “Oh, wow. You really met your match with that one, huh?”

Bruce hums. 

“Can I...ask you something else?” Dick asks, and doesn’t wait for an answer. His voice drops to a hushed murmur, face darkening. “Are you having heart problems?”

Bruce starts, the tension in the room suddenly increasing tenfold, to Bruce’s bewilderment. “What.”

“You can be honest with me. You have to be.”

“No.”

“No, you can’t be honest with me, or no, you don’t have heart problems?”

“No, I do not have heart problems,” Bruce replies mechanically.

“Then why was Jason talking about you having a fucking cardioverter, Bruce?” Dick demands quietly. “Were you just not going to tell me?”

“Cardiov—oh. Oh. ICD is what Jason calls—it stands for ice cube diet. For throats. He finds it humorous. I don’t think he knows that it means anything else.” 

Silence.

Humorous, Dick finally mouths back strangely, jaw working even as his face goes perfectly blank. There’s an odd, distant note to his voice. “...Oh. Sorry for assuming.”

“It was a perfectly reasonable assumption.”

Dick shakes his head anyway. “No. No, I’m sorry. Of course. I should have guessed it was an inside thing, I shouldn’t have pressed. Sorry. That was stupid. I just—nevermind. ”

They fall silent, and Dick doesn’t try to fill the space with words for once. So Bruce does. “I should apologize too.”

Bruce’s words make something flash over Dick’s face, eyes widening, washing away the strange, pensive look he had before and replacing it with something Bruce almost thinks is hope, which doesn’t make sense. The press of his mouth pulls at the dimples in his cheeks, but he’s doing anything but smiling as he gazes at Bruce solemnly. 

“I was trying to keep Jason away from you until you got better. His words earlier were uncalled for. He didn’t know the situation in full. At all, really.”

The expression falls from Dick’s face in an instant, and it’s a look that Bruce knows like the lines on his hand: disappointment. What has Bruce done now? How has Bruce let him down so quickly with just a few sentences? What did Dick hope he was saying? 

“Not that you would ever hurt him in your right mind,” Bruce tries hastily. Then pauses. “It was out of an abundance of caution, Dick, because of the Court. Even if you hadn’t been under their influence, I didn’t know how you would react to him.”

Then another look that Bruce knows passes over Dick. He is grateful for the familiarity again, to be out of the pit of the unknown that he keeps finding himself in—it’s the same look that Dick would fix on him during stakeouts when they had to be absolutely silent, a near impossibility for Dick when he was younger. Mouth pressed tight, biting the inside of his cheek to keep the words and the urge to speak down.  

There’s no reason that Dick can’t just speak whatever he wants to say, so when he finally opens his mouth, Bruce relaxes minutely. 

Dick says, gently, “All right.”

But the look doesn’t go away. Neither does the disappointment. 

“Batman,” Canary calls after him as he stalks away from Croc’s tied-up form. She grabs his elbow roughly, and he scowls, whipping around. “I heard. Is Nightwing okay?”

Bruce growls. Clark and Diana were the only ones that were supposed to know. Dinah was sharp and persuasive enough to have pulled it out of them, but it’s more likely that the secret’s out for the whole League to know now. The thought makes Bruce’s heart thud in his chest, mouth taste like hot ash, expression going bitter. 

Whatever Dinah sees makes her face fall. Her grip slackens on his arm. “That bad?”

The opposite, in fact.

He had breakfast with Dick this morning, discussed Riddler’s latest string of robberies. He finally suggested moving Dick back upstairs, and Dick gave him a strange look but didn’t say anything. Dick caught sight of him suited up and only paused, flinched— nothing else. There’s no other word for it but improvement.

What looms over Bruce’s head and shows on his face like a dark, swirling hurricane is the ever-nearing return of Dick’s team. Which Dinah seems to think is the solution rather than the issue, because then she says, like it’s a comfort, “The Titans are going to be back any hour now, Bruce. It’s going to get better.”

 Bruce forcefully yanks his arm out of her grip. “They’ll only make things worse. He needs space to recover,” he snarls, instead of lying, because it’s every bit as effective. Then for good measure, "To remember."

Bruce is never more grateful for the fact that Dick is upstairs now than when the alert flashes over the bottom of the computer screen. Ship arrival at Port 2-11. His fingers hover frozen over the keyboard, the automatically pulled-up cam footage of a slightly singed spacecraft coming into view. 

Bruce bites down on the hard muscle of his tongue. It bleeds. He erases the footage and alert-window. Then he finishes typing his report, nineteen point five pages, and goes upstairs at four in the morning without speaking to a soul. 

He wakes up. He finds Dick outside in the later half of the morning. The air is frosty. Alfred’s serviceberry tree is brilliant white. Dick’s feet are bare, knees pulled up to his chin where he sits by the grass. 

Bruce pads out to where he sits and settles down next to him. “Dick?”

Dick’s mouth twists. 

“It’s cold,” he rasps after a long moment, faint. “It’s so cold.”

He flexes his fingers out slowly. His knuckles are bright white, fingertips drained of color, and Bruce feels his brows drop low on his face as he frets over how long Dick has been out here. 

“Dick,” Bruce tries, worriedly, and it takes a second for Dick to tilt his head, blinking. 

“...Mm-hmm?” 

“It’s time to go inside.”

“No,” Dick mumbles, shaking his head. “No. I’m tired of being inside. It’s March.”

“It’s 35 degrees. How long have you been out here. You’re going to get sick.”

Dick doesn’t answer. 

“Dick.” Bruce shakes him hard. “Dick.”

“Stop,” Dick says weakly, sounding annoyed in a vague, distant sort of way, reaching up sluggishly to grab Bruce’s wrist. Bruce lets him just to see. It takes him too long to wrap around his wrist, but once he’s holding it, Dick’s grip is vice-like, though it loosens after only a few seconds, eventually slipping altogether. Dick brings his other hand up to scrub across his face, shivering. “Not long.”

“Long enough,” Bruce says, shifting back on his knees to position himself to pick Dick up and carry him back inside. 

“Stop.”

 Something about the tone—level and authoritative and grown-up —makes Bruce do just that, falling back compliantly to sit. And then squint unhappily. 

Not that Dick notices, busy pressing his other hand to his face as well, burying the heels of his palms into his eyes, slightly too-long bangs curling over his fingers. He’s swaying slightly, just sitting there, and it’s hard to believe that an order came out of Dick's mouth like this. 

Bruce plants a hand atop Dick’s head—his hair is already ice-cold—to angle him toward Bruce. “Dick,” he starts. 

“No,” Dick repeats hazily, hands already sliding down his face like he doesn’t have the strength to keep them up. “I want to be outside. They never let me be outside unless it...you were... you wanted me in the cave. Alfred let me be outside. That was one of the first things he said to me when you were gone. He said let’s go outside. It was even colder...then. Scarves.” His hands slip down until Bruce can see his eyelids, squeezed tight. They fall the rest of the way down. His voice slips into an impossibly small whisper, like he’e telling a secret. “...It’s cold now too.”

“Yes, it is. Which means that you’re at risk for frostbite, or hypothermia, which can be deadly.” Bruce frowns deeply. Even if Dick had been outside in the admittedly bitter cold long enough for hypothermia to set in, this behavior is atypical. He’s been trained to maintain his faculties in extreme cold. This isn’t even below freezing. And this sort of reaction isn’t speaking to the symptoms. This is something different, which makes alarm and anxiety wash over him like the cold air. 

“Not for me,” Dick whispers, voice trailing. Eyelids fluttering, his head tilts down into his knees, but when it hits, he stiffens, like the contact woke him up. “Nothing is. Not anymore. It just makes me. Makes me. I don’t know the...I don’t know the word.”

Anymore pulses through Bruce’s head, sharp teeth reopening the cut on his tongue from just last night. The Court. “Dick,” Bruce rumbles urgently, moving his hand to drag Dick into a tight hug that the boy slumps into bonelessly. Bruce’s eyes fly wide open when he feels the alarming chill radiating from his skin. “I need you to tell me what the cold does to you now.”

“What’s the word.”

“Dick. Listen to me.”

That clearly doesn’t work, and Bruce scowls. What Dick implied—that it’s not deadly for him now—isn’t something Bruce is willing to gamble his life on. Bruce takes hold of him again like he’s nine and not nineteen, and hoists him and starts back inside. Dick, clumsily but expertly, inserts two fingers in the space between Bruce’s ribs, making him stagger but not stop, and even this dazed, Dick sighs like he’s distantly disappointed and finally answers, head buried in Bruce’s shoulder. 

“Freezes you. Makes everything stop...slow down. Like you’re dead,” Dick mutters, and Bruce’s heart clunkers to a hard and heavy stop. Then Dick adds, “But not. Makes it...sleepy.”

Bruce can suddenly breathe again, letting out a long, shaking breath and tightening his hold on Dick. “Soporific,” he rumbles finally when they’re almost inside, working open the passcode-locked door with one hand. 

“What...?”

“The word.”

“You’re so pretentious,” Dick breathes, and then goes entirely slack in Bruce’s arms. 

So Bruce finds himself sitting next to an IV pole and medical bed yet again, ankles crossed and hands steepled under his chin, staring at Dick, trying not to be scared. 

Whatever this is is the Court’s doing. His hands press together harder, knuckles back cracking with the force.

He watches Dick’s face in sleep, mostly completely—terrifyingly—still but gradually regaining color and expression as the warmed IV fluids circle through. Albeit not much color. His tan’s subsumed into something tinged and ashen, like his skin’s becoming thin, see-through, because the blue-black veins that Bruce thought were fading have returned in full force, the only brilliant color on Dick’s face. 

Bruce watches, and grabs his hand because he can, squeezes it tight, and sets his jaw. He’s focused on Dick for a long time, rightfully so. This is his child. This is his child who he let slip away for so long, his child who was hurt and broken and had his screams sieved out of him by monsters. He wouldn’t tell Dinah that Dick had improved, and he has, but this just reaffirms for Bruce that Dick needs him. Needs to stay here. To be safe. But it is time that Bruce dug back at the people who did this to him. 

He rubs his thumb in circles over the top of Dick’s hand as he waits. He’s just beginning to feel Dick’s fingers twitch in his when he starts at the sound of a voice.

“Oh, dear. Back to where we started, I see.”

Bruce glances up at Alfred. “The cold,” he rasps in explanation, and Alfred tsks in understanding.

That gives Bruce pause.

“You knew,” he asks, and then the pieces come together, eyes narrowing. “He said you brought him outside.”

Alfred smooths the blanket on the bed. “Yes. While you were in Bournemouth, I thought a change of scenery might aid his recovery. It was February. I bundled him up as much as he would allow in that state and all the times after, but the cold...causes unconsciousness if he isn’t warm enough.”

Bruce falls into sullen, thoughtful silence that lasts between them. At least until Dick wakes up, eyes splitting open wildly, black and alarmed and clearly disoriented. The expression on Dick’s face as he tenses reminds Bruce of when he first woke all those weeks ago, unfamiliar and violent, and Bruce lurches back, chair scraping. 

“Master Richard,” Alfred offers crisply, and Dick’s gaze flashes toward him, and then he stops trembling, and just like that the moment breaks into pieces like glass. Dick’s eyes don’t leave Alfred as he sits up, the butler gently placing a hand on his back to steady him, and Bruce’s chest settles too. 

That night after patrol, when Alfred is doing stitches on his arm, he lets it slip. “This proves it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What the Court did to him. It’s not over.”

“No. These things never are.”

Bruce drums his fingers. “The Titans aren’t qualified to deal with the consequences. Just imagine if they had been the ones here this morning instead, what they would have done.”

Alfred’s cold hands draw back. 

“I’m afraid I don’t understand what they have to do with this. I believed them to be on a mission far from earth.”

“They were.”

Alfred goes quiet for a long time. “His friends must wish to see him. You can’t truly be trying to deprive him of that.”

“I know,” Bruce murmurs, a flash of panic overtaking him, raking a hand through his hair. Alfred isn’t understanding. Alfred doesn’t get it. “I know. But I j—we can’t overwhelm him, Alfred, you don’t understand how vulnerable he is.”

“Sir,” says Alfred, softly.

Bruce says, “You saw him. You saw him.”

What Bruce does not expect—but should have—is the Titans not waiting. Barging in before the next night’s League meeting. 

It’s not all of them, just two, but the anger in the taller one’s eyes when she sees him makes up for their lack of numbers. She shoots up from the table where she sits next to a careful-looking Superman and the chair clatters to the floor.  

“You’re going to take me to him,” Starfire says. 

“Batman,” Donna cuts in carefully, stepping between the two with her hands up and sending a sharp, warning look back at Starfire. Only then does Bruce catch the reflection of orange-gold light off her lasso that originates from Starfire’s clenched fists. “Kory knows him better than anyone. If there’s anything that could help him get back to...well, him, it’s Kory.”

The words sting. 

“You don’t understand,” growls Batman.

She does not know the truth—his own doing for what limited, warped information he presented to the League, but it gives her even less right to make assumptions, demands. She does not know. 

“Then enlighten us,” challenges Kory, jutting her head over Donna’s shoulder to glare at him. “Because it’s been months since we’ve seen him and we’ve had nothing but the scraps of information you give the League.”

Charged silence prickles between them. 

Bruce did not expect it to be so soon, to be like this. He thought he would have more time. The hard feeling in his chest grates hard against the heart pounding against his ribcage, like massive tectonic plates scraping against each other, and then one finally slips free, and Bruce’s teeth cut deep and hard into his tongue, filling his mouth with the taste of iron and something even bitterer, more hopeless, and angry. Defeated. 

“Koriand’r,” Batman barks finally, jerking his head to the transporter. “Come with me.”

Chapter Text

Starfire doesn’t come immediately. She takes the time to change into a jean jacket and pants, and when she returns to the hangar, she has a folded gray sweatshirt in her arms—Dick’s, he presumes, but he doesn’t recognize it, and the realization makes his jaw clench. 

“You wasted time,” he tells her harshly when she’s near. 

She shifts the unfamiliar sweatshirt in her hands, shoulders squaring back as if she’s preparing for a fight. “If he doesn’t remember anything, familiar objects—”

“He remembers,” Bruce bites out. “He remembers enough.” 

“I wouldn’t know,” says Starfire, chin tilting up, eyes narrowing. 

The rest of the journey is silent, Batman steering the jet with tight hands and a constant eye on his passenger, reassessing her. Loose cannon. Willing to use excessive force even on allies, if the brief flare of her powers when she stood behind Donna was any indication. Emotional. 

She’s an incredible physical presence, too—she could easily hurt Dick, or Jason, or Alfred. Bruce feels the scabs on his knuckles threaten to burst as he grips the steering mechanism tighter, teeth grinding.

When he finally guides them into the Cave and lands the jet, he doesn’t open the doors immediately. 

Better than anyone, echoes in his head. Better than anyone. Better than anyone. She knows him better than anyone. 

He pries his mouth open to speak, and his stomach is sinking like a pit.

Better than Bruce. 

“You,” he starts, and stops. “You have to be—be gentle—” 

“I know,” she says, pauses. “I am.”

Her voice is much softer than before. Nearly a whisper. When he glances at her in his periphery, he’s startled by the softness of her features: the downward tilt of her brows, the pull of her frown, the lines of worry that mark her dark, golden skin. 

It’s been months since the Talon got Dick for Bruce. But it’s been even longer for her, Bruce realizes for the first time. 

Fingers trembling beneath his leather gloves, Bruce slams the button to open the hatch and unbuckles his seatbelt. Starfire does the same, standing. 

He starts down the hatch but she seizes the edge of his gauntlet hard before he can, and he whips around to face her. 

“Let go of me,” he growls, perfectly low and still in the compressed air, looking her in the eye for the first time. 

Her eyes move and change, tendrils of pale green and lime constantly curling and uncurling like smoke against her bright sclera. Her grip slips down to the tip of a hard fin on his gauntlet, holding his entire being still using only her fingertips

She says—“You have to be gentle too.”

Bruce snatches his arm out of her grip the moment her hold loosens and slams down the hatchway. 

She follows him with defiant shoulders and as they offboard into the darkness of the Cave, she turns again, not touching him this time but calling after him as they plunge deeper and deeper into the Cave. 

“You don’t even know how—you don’t even know what you are to him,” says the girl, like a realization; her voice is soft, almost pitying, and Bruce is so tired of the pity, how it makes his eyes burn, “He—”  

She cuts off at the sight of a figure, going perfectly still.

“Kory,” Dick rasps loudly from across the cave, lurching up. “Kory—!” 

“Dick,” breathes Kory, like a whole new person, scraping a denim sleeve over her suddenly wet cheeks and crossing the cave in a lightning-fast, desperate bound. Bruce watches as they seize one another, arms wrapping around and around until Bruce can’t tell her blue denim from Dick’s faded sky-colored sweatshirt. “Baby.”

“I missed you,” Dick says into her, forehead pressed into her lips, hair caught between her fingers, and then he ducks his head into her shoulder and buries it there. His fingers ball up the orange emblem sewn in the back of her jacket. “I missed you, I missed you more than anything. God, Kory.”

Dick somehow moves even closer so there’s not an inch between them, collarbones touching; he brushes a hand against her jaw and whispers—Bruce is too far to hear, but he reads his lips—‘I thought- ’ 

“Master Bruce,” Alfred says quietly, appearing from beside the computer and looking at him. “Give them some privacy.”

Bruce sits in the kitchen for a—long time. Long hours. Hands steepled over the cool granite countertop. He stares at the red blinking time on the oven, watches as the lit-up squares flicker in and out to make new numbers. 1:30. 1:31. 1:32. 5:09. 6:45.

The sun comes gray, spilling from the wide windows to the pristine white tile. 

Alfred comes down at 6:59 and makes him coffee with the French press, setting it in front of him wordlessly. Jason follows shortly after to eat peanut butter out of the jar when Alfred isn’t looking and dump blueberries and banana slices into his oatmeal before Alfred drives him to school. 

When they’ve left, Bruce stares at the now-cold coffee in front of him and pours it down the sink and treads silently downstairs, teeth slicing through his tongue to fill his mouth with copper. 

Was that long enough, Alfred? he thinks poisonously. Did I give them enough time alone? Was that enough time without me? 

His fingernails carve into his palms where his hands curl into fists. 

He stops half-way down the stairs. 

Dick and Kory are curled around each other, a tangle of blue and black and gold, her head on his chest; his chin propped over her thick, red hair. Fingers coiled around each other and not letting go even in sleep. Dick’s knuckles are white where they wrap tightly around her wrist.

Bruce can’t see her face because her long, bright curls hide it while she sleeps. But he can see Dick. Dick’s cheeks look soft and not hollowed out, his brow smooth and uncreased, his eyelashes a shadowy black train track. He looks fond, young: perfect there. 

Bruce stares. Counts the beats of his heart. Counts the rise—fall of Dick’s chest. Nine. Ten. 

His own chest settles. And by himself Bruce heads back up the stairs. 

Lucius calls him in for the quarterly at noon, and for lack of anything else to occupy the cavern of his mind, Bruce comes, and Lucius clasps his shoulder good and firm as they walk together to the boardroom. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Bruce. Everything okay?”

Bruce stares down at the floor, thinks for a minute. “Maybe,” Bruce starts, stops.  “I think it finally is,” Bruce says, softly. 

It is not. It is anything but okay. 

“Alfred, she’s an unknown.” Panic rises high in Bruce’s throat like dirty water. He yanks his hair back with a trembling hand, nails biting into his skin.  “How could you let them go with her?”

When he got home, the house was empty, and silent as a tomb.

Alfred’s eye tics exactly once. 

“I did not ‘let’ them. As you will note, Master Dick is an adult, one who happens to be engaged to Miss Anders. She is hardly an unknown. And when Jason wished to go with them, I saw no reason he shouldn’t.”

What if they don’t come back? “What if something happens?”  

“I believe his fiancée is a warrior princess with unthinkable powers. I daresay Master Jason will be fine, especially considering his own training. In fact, Miss Anders seemed rather enchanted by the lad. Not that I can blame her, that darling boy,” Alfred adds calmly, a touch of warmth coloring his voice at the end.

“And Dick? What if—” Bruce stops short. His throat closes. Chokes him dry. “What if the Court takes him again?”

His car keys are already back in his hand before he registers Alfred’s vice-grip on his upper arm, yanking and yanking and yanking him back and shattering his urgency-clouded haze. 

“Master Bruce!” Alfred cries, aghast, after a moment. “They went to a park! A park! Have you gone mad?”

Bruce works his jaw tightly, heart still pounding. “Alfred—”

“I have indulged your actions, your—fears long enough, Master Wayne, far too long, but this—” 

“Alfred, the Court could grab him again any time they wanted to, don’t you understand that they’re still out there—” 

“Oh, and you’ve done a bloody good job of fixing that so far, have you?” Alfred finally snaps , eyes flashing like a turned-over ember. His chest heaves under his dark coat and white shirt, and Bruce staggers back, silent, stunned. “Just as you’ve done with fixing the boy’s memory, I suppose? Or raising either of them, or meeting their—”

Alfred must see something on Bruce’s face, something—gutted, because all of a sudden, he softens. Cuts off. And all of a sudden, the hand is no longer crushing his bicep—it comes to his cheek, initial roughness swallowing into something unspeakably gentle. Bruce blinks away the sudden prickling that smears his vision. 

A calloused thumb rubs pityingly at his cheekbone, and Bruce does not shove the touch away. 

Alfred’s mouth twists. Long, sad sigh, sad blue eyes. “...Master Bruce,” he laments, there is no other word for it—and it’s then that Bruce pulls back. 

The hand falls, dropping against Bruce’s shoulder and then back to Alfred’s side, where it twitches. 

Bruce swallows the quickly hardening lump in his throat. “You’re right.”

Alfred starts. “Lad…”

“You’re right,” Bruce says, “And I won’t waste any more time.”

If Bruce does this, it will fix things. He is sure of it. 

He sequesters himself in the Cave to draw up the action plan, tracking down the Court’s past movements step by step. 

The Court is still out there. But now he’s found their base, the crack in the wall where the cockroaches spill out—deep underground in the granite sewer system. 

It requires some modifications to the freeze-gun that shredded the Bat-Mobile’s undercarriage all those months ago, which Clark helped repair. The ice structures Freeze’s rampage had left in the ground had later required Superman’s heat vision to melt because they had not melted on their own. 

To remodel it, he deconstructs the gun, its pieces methodically strewn across the large metal worktable in the cave. 

The Court is riches and discontented influence—whispers at parties and milky faces across banquet tables at Gotham’s center. Bruce cannot, in one fell swoop, pull out the heartroot. 

But he can saw down the tree—the Talons. The Court’s only physical arm. A contained, cryogenic unconsciousness. Just like Dick, blacking out in his arms from the cold a few mornings ago. 

Maybe it is gentler than they deserve, but this will make Dick safe. And maybe, on some deeper level, it will be an artifact for Dick that proves that Bruce is trying, that Bruce is worthwhile, maybe it will prove if even just a fraction just how much that Bruce—

That Bruce—

Blood floods the inside of his mouth as his teeth pierce his tongue. He can’t even manage it in his head. That’s why he needs this act. Needs something to show for all of his...for how he cares for the boy he raised. Dick is not material, but he’s always been attached to gestures: the very thing Bruce had to fight tooth and nail against himself to provide. Maybe Koriand’r—maybe the Titans—can do that. But Bruce can still protect Dick in this way, and maybe that will be enough to stay.  It has to be.

He is rescrewing a piece to the gun when the door to the cave grinds open and feet sound down the stairs.

“Bruce, did you know there’s apple snails all up the wall around Lake Flattery?” Jason is yelling, eyes bright as he tumbles down the stairs. “Well, not them exactly but the eggs, tons of their eggs, there were thousands, it was crazy. And Kory said they’re invasive on account of she knows a lot about birds because she reads a lot about earth, and she knows kites eat them and that’s good for the environment. I thought Flattery was too polluted for anything but—”    

He stops short. 

“B?” he hesitates. “What are you doing?”

His voice is very small. 

With effort, Bruce sets the freezing contraption down. “I’m working on a case, Jay,” he says very quietly. 

“Oh,” says Jason.

“How was the park.”

“It was...good.”

Bruce holds the words in his mouth. “And. Were they.”

Jason steps backward toward the staircase, eyes still chained to Bruce’s. 

“Dick’s nice. When you get to know him. And Kory is really cool, and pretty, and nice. And cool. Did I alre—”

“You did.” Bruce shifts. His mind is still racing with the idea of taking down the Court, but Jason’s evaluation of Dick’s...fiancée holds weight. 

“I’m going to go,” Jason says in a strange voice. “Upstairs.”

Bruce glances back at the weapon. It’s almost done. He’ll venture back upstairs for a moment—if only to reassure himself that Dick is still there and has not left—and then he’ll return. 

“I’ll go with you,” Bruce says, and Jason nods slightly, just a small jerk of the chin before he scurries up without Bruce anyway, and that’s when Bruce realizes that Jason was scared. 

Not from the beginning as he was coming down the stairs, but the moment he saw Bruce’s face. 

Bruce wonders what he saw there that was so frightening. 

When he passes by a mirror above a bureau upstairs, he realizes. There’s a strange pallor to his face, the gulley of his cheeks carved out, and his mouth is a long, thin line below his sunken-in, intense eyes. He looks dire. He tries to soften himself in the mirror, but he cannot, so he shakes his head and tries to find Dick. 

It’s with singular determination that Bruce brushes through the rooms of the Manor, heart jumping a little every time the room is empty; he tries to reassure himself that the boy is probably just in his actual room, which holds out, when he knocks on the door with his knuckles and receives a raspy answer: “Come in.”

Bruce’s heart settles a bit.

Dick and Kory are tucked into either corner of the seat by the window, which is wide open to allow the sounds of the outdoors and the soft blows of spring wind and sunlight in. Kory is braiding her hair, which is an absurd length, spilling onto the floor, while Dick simply watches through the window with an arm propped on his knees and secured under his chin. 

When Bruce comes in, he unfolds himself in greeting. “How was the meeting?”

“Satisfactory.” 

“Those are the best kind,” Dick replies wryly, a dimple appearing in his cheek. A silence hangs in the air between them when Bruce doesn’t offer anything else. 

But then Bruce’s eyes drop to the design on Dick’s sweatshirt, the same one he didn’t recognize before in Kory’s hands. Dick follows his gaze. 

“Great Frog,” Bruce reads quietly. 

Dick half-smiles, presses a knuckle to his cheek. “Yeah, Great Frog merch. I’m about the only person on earth that bought any. Well, besides Kory now, I guess, because she bought this one. Still for me, though. The one I bought got shr...got shredded by…” he trails off softly, expression going distant. Kory squeezes his bicep, and he glances back up, blinks, shaking his head as if to clear it. His cheek pulls, like an attempt at another smile with the energy just not there, and that face, that face is when it hits Bruce. The scrap in the alleyway by Ada’s. GRE.

A final, cold wave of anger rolls over him, hardening his resolve. Bruce grinds his teeth. The Court couldn’t leave just one thing intact, one single thing untainted. Bruce will—he’ll—  

“Have you spoken to Roy yet?” Kory asks Dick quietly. Dick shakes his head, voice dropping. 

“Not to anyone really, besides—” 

Kory is already ducking down to grab at her denim jacket; she pulls a phone out of the pocket, their own little world, and Bruce takes a jagged step back, and leaves. 

It happens in the dark. Bruce’s night-vision lets him see it all. But it happens in the dark. The ice crystals thick as barrels that erupt. The ropey, black-covered arms that steal toward him and must have black blood slowing inside black veins as the temperature dips. The way they all freeze. 

He installs sensors along the granite and limestone that should tell him if temperatures ever surge, just in case. 

They are alive—Bruce can’t kill them, even if he tried—but they won’t hurt anyone like this. Not ever. Not tonight. 

It’s past three when Bruce slinks back into the cave, flexing his fingers to return feeling to them even through his thermal gloves.

“It’s done, Alfred.” Bruce shells off the armor. Alfred is dark-eyed and silent. “It’s done.”

The quiet hangs. Bruce starts to go upstairs, but Alfred catches his elbow. 

“Breakfast,” he says, in a tone Bruce cannot define, “will be at eight.”

“I can’t imagine I’ll be awake.”

“You most certainly will.”

Bruce shakes off his arm and heads up. He cracks open the door in the middle of the hallway only a sliver, watching as the blue slats of light from the window stream out into the hall—catching a glint of red hair, the sprawl of Dick’s arm, the soft up-down of breathing. He closes the door softly, waits. Then, to let himself breathe, he checks on Jason, who stirs when the door creaks. “Bruce?”

Bruce pauses again, hand stilling on the doorknob. “Go back to sleep, Jaylad.”

The shadows shift. He’s sitting up, sluggish and quiet. “Is everything okay?” 

“Everything’s fine now.”

“Are you better now?” 

“...Yes.”

Jason slumps. “Okay,” he says faintly. “...Love you.”

Bruce shuts his eyes tight. When he opens them again, the boy is curled up and already fast asleep. His throat goes tight like a vice. It is not easy. It is never easy. But with Jason, it is easier, somehow, to manage, to whisper: “You too, sweetheart.”

Bruce goes to bed.

Bruce misses breakfast. By approximately six hours. He gets the feeling something important happened.

“Late night?” Dick asks, perched alone on the kitchen countertop as he butters toast. 

“Yes.” Bruce hesitates. Dick deserves to know. But how to tell him. “Where’s.”

“New York,” Dick says.

“Is she,” Bruce says, “coming back.”

“To Gotham?” Dick says.

Bruce grunts. 

Dick offers the toast to Bruce, surprising him. “I don’t think she has any plans to right this second.”

“I see.” Bruce’s thoughts race. Does that imply the end of the engagement? Does that mean they are through? Does that mean Dick is staying? Why else would the alien leave? But it is much simpler to ask, “Is this for me.”

“Yeah, course. You didn’t have breakfast. I sort of lost my appetite anyway.”

Bruce shifts, laying the toast aside. That certainly implies that— 

“But later, do you want to get takeout? Szechuan or something before I head out? Or we don’t have to if you don’t want,” Dick rambles. “God, yeah, sorry, I don’t even know if you like that anymore. We can just—”

“I do,” Bruce says, off-beat, “like Szechuan. I have always liked Szechuan.” Dick knows this. Bruce used to order it to Wayne Enterprises when Dick dropped by the office after school on Thursdays.  Then, the rest of it registers: Bruce hushes. “Head out.”

Dick brings his knee up to his chin. “Yeah.”

“Head out,” he murmurs again. 

“I’ve got to get home soon.”

“You are home.”

Dick’s expression wavers. “I mean New York.”

Bruce falters in the silent kitchen. He opens his mouth. Closes it.

“With the Titans,” Bruce asks hushedly. Dick’s dark gaze flicks to the side, then back to Bruce.

“New York is where we’re based, yes,” Dick is saying, carefully, like Bruce is a wild dog that must be watched lest it bite, but Bruce can barely hear the words over the throb of fear, and betrayal, and loss in his head. The panic. This isn’t going the way he wanted. This is familiar, but it isn’t right, it isn’t supposed to be going like this, it isn’t supposed to be falling through the cracks in his hands.

Dick is going back to New York. Bruce was not enough. And in the moment, Bruce could say, I ended the Court for you, you’re safe now, did you know that? but that is not what comes out. It is not that simple to say. So.

Instead. 

Bruce brushes him off. Voice rising, sharpening, rough like rock. “You don’t know what you’re capable of, Dick. It’s not safe for you to be around them—anything could trigger it.”

There is a long beat. Nothing changes for a moment, Dick’s large, inscrutable eyes on his without any emotion at all, before his feelings shudder all over his face and the small, rough, unsurprised breath of laughter he lets out sounds like he’s been holding it in for years. 

“...It’s not safe for me to be around a circle of highly trained metas who’ve saved the world numerous times, but I can be around a person I was programmed to kill? Around a twelve year old kid no problem? Is that what we’re going with? ...Or do you want to tell me the truth for once in your life, Bruce?”

“This is the truth,” Bruce says, scraping his fingertips together. His mind races, sprawling for justification. “You tried to kill multiple people. We still can’t be sure if you actually committed murder. If you cared about your friends, you would understand that you’re a danger to them right now—”

“A danger. I’m a danger. I’m a danger now. ”

 Bruce’s chest heaves. “Yes.”

Dick turns around for a long, suspended moment so Bruce can’t see his face as if to ratchet himself down. When he twists back around, there isn’t anger. When he twists back around, it’s with a sad look, dark look, that look and Bruce plunges back into that night two years ago, hoarseness in his throat, the glint off the key, the ridges against his palm, and the boy out of his sight for what he thought was for good. 

“We could have left this on good terms,” says Dick. 

“I wanted us to leave this on good terms. I thought we were making progress. I thought you had changed. I was ready for things to have changed. That was why I was going to come here. I wasn’t coming here for the Court to get me, Bruce, I took a chance and I was in Gotham to tell you about my life,” says Dick. 

“Dick,” Bruce chokes desperately, hands curling by his sides.

“But you don’t change. You never do. You’re the same as you ever were. You never change, Bruce, you never let go, because if you did, I might have come back before.” The words hang, then Dick lets out another rough, incredulous laugh, scraping a hand through his hair as his eyes slam shut. “Not that that was ever an option. Not really, huh, B?”

The air thickens in his throat, on his tongue. He can’t even swallow: He didn’t know that. That Dick would have come back, if he had been allowed, if Bruce had never said what he had. 

Maybe then it would not have taken an engagement and a death cult to look him in the eye once more. 

“I never meant—” to drive you from this house to push you away to ruin everything, except he did. He did. There is no way to resuscitate Get out of my cave give Alfred your key on your way out, to bring it back or kiss it better. But he wants to. “I never—I—Dick. Dick...Robin.”  

“I know.” Gentle, like he’s talking to a child, apologetic, hoarse. Dick’s cheek pulls. “I know. I know you, Bruce. I know what you meant and didn’t mean. Of course I know, I always do.

“But you’re so—desperate for control sometimes that you can’t see that you’re pushing too far and pushing people away. I love you. I love you. I would die for you. I mean it, Bruce. Anything. But you make it so hard to be near you, sometimes, it’s always the same. It would be different if you changed or you said sorry or you recognized it, at least, and then I could forgive you like that, like that. But you never do. Ever. It’s never different. I see what you’re doing, you’re willing to do anything to get what you want and you, you—”

“I wanted things to be the same,” Bruce confesses, voice quiet. The words rumble in the low silence of the Cave. “I just wanted you to be safe. To be back home.”

I was willing to do anything to make it happen. 

Dick stares at him. His body telegraphs his every emotion the way it always has. His fists are balled so tight they shake. Shoulders so stiff they’re perfectly flat. His feet are already lifting, ready to leave.

Dick’s black eyes blaze. 

“I’m sorry,” Dick says, and he truly sounds it, “That things can’t be the way you wanted.”

Chapter Text

There is no letter. Alfred folds up the coffee-colored blanket abandoned on the cot in the cave and disappears with it in his white-knuckled hands. Dick is there and then he is gone. That is the end. That is how it ends.

Bruce is well-versed in the art of walking past the maple door in the middle of the hallway without looking at it. 

A long time ago, when Bruce was nine years old and still not improving, Alfred contacted yet another therapist, the fourth of what was a long and unsuccessful list. After a sullen, silent appointment in the Manor’s study where Bruce sat with his arms crossed and answered no questions, the therapist pulled Alfred aside and closed the door. Bruce sat outside with his ear pressed above the doorknob, straining to hear every hushed word from her and offended protest from Alfred. 

“—ealthy, not functioning like you’d want, even two years on. We see the fixation on the wrong thing, on the loss. Loss is what takes it. Grief is realizing what you’ve had is all you are ever going to have. There’s no one way to grieve, but this isn’t —well, he isn’t—”  

“I believe the boy knows perfectly well what he does and does not have, madam,” Alfred replied, voice terse and tight and flooded with poorly concealed protective rage, “And as such I believe neither of us have any further need of your services.” Bruce scurried to hide behind furniture before the door swung open, and when the hasty click-clack of her heels faded down the hall, Alfred snapped, “And out of the corner with you, Master Bruce, for shame.” 

But. Maybe.

It is in the realization that that is all you are ever going to get. 

So Bruce sits on the empty room’s empty bed with striped sheets, thinks about the things he had once and the things he didn’t. The things he will never ever have.

And grieves. All over again. 

Bruce writes:

Dick. I am sorry if I

He rips the paper off of the notepad and crumples it up. That isn’t good enough. He starts again. 

Dick. You do not have to come home if you don’t want to. But you can if you do. This is your home too. I am sorry that I did the things that I did.

I am sorry I told you to leave Alfred your key and made you feel unwanted. I am sorry that I tried to control you and keep you from the world. I am sorry I squeezed you out of your life and mine. You never were unwanted. I could never say that but I should have found a way. I was worried you would not want me first and I was afraid. This is unacceptable and is a symptom of something bigger; I will be addressing these issues forthwith and apologize for the pain I have caused you, though I know words do not do enough. I am going to try.

You are the greatest young man I have had the honor of knowing, even if this is as far as I might be allowed to know you. You always will be. I am proud of you and to have known you. Knowing you when I did changed me for the better. 

I have enclosed a key if you would like it, but you may come in without it, of course. The house is always open for you. Regards, Bruce. 

Bruce hesitates. He crosses out the last two words. Writes two more. 

Love, Bruce. 

Bruce clicks the pen shut against the desk and stares at the letter, written on his personal stationery—a large white W emblazoned on the top. He picks his keyring from beside him and removes a thin, brass key. He holds it between his fingertips and stares at it for a long moment. It catches the light. 

Then he folds the paper into thirds and tucks the key inside. This is a letter he will not send, words he will not mail. It is not cold feet (this time). He does not want to bother the boy who saved his life, and changed it; he doesn’t deserve to, anymore. He is lucky to have gotten what he did. He cannot count the debts he owes. And what, exactly, he’d trade for one more last chance doesn’t matter. Instead, he opens the topmost drawer of his bureau and gingerly places the letter inside. 

Bruce closes the drawer.  

“Have you ever tried not letting them escape?” Jason asks a beat cop as she perp-walks Poison Ivy to the detainment truck, bright green leaves still tangled in his curly brown hair. “I think it would really make a dent in all the, you know, escapes.” 

“Good work, Robin,” Batman rumbles, placing a hand on Jason’s shoulder when the truck has pulled away, and it stays there until they reach the Bat-Mobile.

Tonight they go home and Bruce reveals that Wonder Woman asked if Robin wouldn’t like to come on a mission to the ruins near Tsarskoe Selo.

Robin’s jaw drops and he lurches from the seat where he is still picking dandelions out of his pixie boots. “Can I, B? Can I?” 

 “If you want to,” Bruce says with the force of all of his chest. 

 “If I want to? Are you kidding?”

And the next week, Bruce lets go and Robin goes and the house is empty. Bruce worries and misses him and has fears crawling out of his skin like fatty white maggots but bears it, and Alfred touches his shoulder and says, “Good work, sir,” in a tone that makes sir sound more like darling boy. 

Letting go is hard. But Jason comes back in a week with one of the cheap ushankas they sell at every tourist stand and Russian chocolate bars and green bandaids on all his fingers and a grin bigger than Bruce has ever seen, and Bruce thinks, I could bear it all and more for you and for this. 

Long after midnight and Jason has gone to bed, Bruce sits upstairs in his study with his mouth full of bitter Alyonka chocolate that Jason had forced into his hands. He has a huge stack of paperwork from WE and a 10-K to flip through in the soft, warm light of what used to be his father’s den before it was his. Nighttime is bright and black outside the window, clouds purpling around the tiny stars, and Bruce thinks, God, am I sorry, and then he stands up, knocking his Montblanc fountain pen to the floor, and nearly cuts himself on the paper he grabs. It’s only when Bruce is driving eighty miles an hour under those same dark, clear skies and clouds and stars on the countryside roads back home from the nearest 24-hour post office that he realizes what he’s done and wonders if he should have avoided that last intimacy and just left it as Regards. 

“So,” says Dick Grayson, months later, in a scuffed denim jacket with a new scar on his chin, standing in the late summer sunshine on Bruce’s doorstep like he isn’t a year out of an underground cult with alloys in his veins and a vice-grip on his senses and half-a-year out from breaking Bruce’s heart. “I wanted to give you this.”

He holds out a long white rectangle. Bruce reaches out for it, then hesitates, unsure, and Dick picks up on it immediately.

“God, it’s not anthrax, B, it’s a, it’s, just open it. Okay?” Dick grabs Bruce’s half-outstretched hand and wraps it around the paper—an envelope, Bruce realizes belatedly, distracted by the strange, abundant delight on his Dick’s tan face—for him so he has no choice but to hold it. Then Dick bounces back on his heels, rocking up and down like a pleased little boy. He beams, gesturing. “Open it.”

Snapping out of his shock a little, Bruce pretends to tuck it into his pocket to buy time to think. “Later. Alfred’s expecting dinner to start any minute now,” and Dick says, “Bruce,” and Bruce asks, “What, is this something that I can’t open in front of him.”

It’s half-intended as a joke, because he is not sure there is anything real left of him to bare after that letter, but the thought that it is leaves him startlingly tender. 

Is that it? Is this for Bruce and Bruce alone? Something for Bruce, just Bruce, from Dick. Not bitter-tinged like the chickenscratch letters Dick used to write on yellow legal paper when he decided to run away every few months because he was young and fearless and wanted something besides a life trapped in bricks, or hard and cold like the reports he’d type in on his computer night after night exactly like Bruce did. 

Maybe this is for him and no one else. Not like hushed, overheard kitchen talks over orange tea at four in the morning between Dick and Alfred when they thought Bruce was still sequestering himself in the cave, or the way Dick would end his calls with Roy and snap his jaw shut the moment Bruce entered the room. Maybe it is like the yellow card. It feels like the heat from the sun above is piercing through his skin, leaving an unmovable warmth in the center of his chest. It feels like he is looking into a sun with bright, black eyes.

He watches for Dick’s tells, which have faded and percolated and changed over the years as he’s grown, as Bruce has known him less and known him more, but his eyes don’t flick. He doesn’t bite down on the collar of his shirt like he used to. Bruce waits for his chin to tilt up, the sign that Dick is bracing for a fight, a blow, backlash. An I got your letter but it’s too late I don’t forgive you I’m only here to rub salt into you. He doesn’t have the key with him or he wouldn’t have knocked. But Dick is smiling, a dimple curving itself into either cheek. 

Dick is acting like everything is okay. But it isn’t. Bruce knows that now, and Bruce knows that Dick has always been a performer to the very end.

“No,” Dick says, grabbing Bruce’s free hand and squeezing it, swinging it in the distance between them, thumb on Bruce’s pulsepoint. The contact makes Bruce go stock-still, frozen in place, arm swinging stiffly. “I have a separate one for him. And for Jason of course. I just figured you should be the first to know.”

So Bruce slides his index finger along the seal of the ivory envelope while staring wide-eyed at Dick, who finally lets go of his hand so Bruce can remove its contents. 

He hides his desperation for answers under the smoothness of his movements, but the questions pound in his head: Did Dick even get the letter? Did it send? 

It had to. He wouldn’t be here otherwise.

Unless he would. Wouldn’t that be Dick Grayson? 

“Read it,” says Dick, quickly, wringing his newly empty hands, smile shrinking but not disappearing. He gives nothing away, lends Bruce no answer. 

“I am.” Bruce leans against the doorframe and looks down, praying that Dick isn’t just handing him back the letter. It’s not handwritten—not the letter he sent, then—and Bruce’s heart settles a fraction even before he reads the indigo print aloud. “Together with their families, Richard Grayson and Kory Anders invite you to join in their joy as they share their marriage...”  Bruce swallows, thickly, “vows. Saturday, August 29 at 2 o’clock.”

There’s a long moment, between the lull of Bruce’s voice and the start of Dick’s while the sun beats down and the birdsong is shrill and soft. 

“We blew past the other date while I was, I was down there, so we had to reschedule,” Dick explains quietly. Bruce can feel the weight of his gaze but can’t meet it, his eyes still glued to the invitation. “It’s at Kory’s favorite garden in Manhattan, it’s a really nice place, private ceremony, of course, it’s just that the media is going to hear about it soon so I just wanted to. I just. I thought you should be—I thought you could be the first to know.” 

“This is,” says Bruce. 

“Yes?” says Dick eagerly—Bruce looks up—his eyes are huge.

“Soon.”

“Yes,” says Dick, shoving his hands in his pocket, chin tilted up defiantly. “It is.”

“I’ll have to—”

“You don’t have to come, Bruce, not if you don’t want to. But I’m not cancelling it just because you don’t. You’re not the end-all of my life, anymore. I mean, I care about you, I do, but,” Dick says, pauses. “I thought you’d want to know. I wanted to give you an option.”

“Don’t interrupt me.”

“I’ll interrupt you as much as I want, you don’t own me.”

Bruce studies him: five-foot-eleven, dark-bright eyes, brown skin, good-looking features, hair longer. The hardness in his tone. It’s familiar, it’s back to normal almost. The real normal, not the fleeting, too-good, nostalgic kind. Except for the faded blue that still underscores his veins, the shallow slit on his brow. The low, catching rasp in his voice that’s here to stay, it seems. 

The thought hits him again. And questions, more than even he can count. How could anyone do this? How could anyone do this to their child, to this child—to his Robin? And that letter, did it send? And did Dick read it? 

And just maybe, does he know how sorry Bruce is? 

Bruce doesn’t know. He wraps his hands tightly around the paper because he does not have any answers to hold onto. He does not have the boy— young man who is standing in front of him either. Not really. Not in the way he once did. But that does not mean that Dick is not here. And there is a paper in Bruce’s hands, even though it is not the one he sent, and the sky above is still hot. 

“I know firsthand that Alfred raised you better than that,” Bruce says, stepping back inside, the cool air rushing over him. He blames the cold for the prickling heat in his eyes, the dryness overtaking his suddenly-full throat, and holds open the thick, dark door. “I’ll have to have him clear my schedule that day. Now get out of the sun before you get melanoma; I have a case I’d like to discuss with you after dinner, if you’ll have me.”