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“I’ll confront him for you.” Jason dry swallowed a couple advil. “Where the fuck do you keep your brooms?”
“Uuurrrhghgg,” was Dick’s reply, mind still muddled from sleep and a hangover.
“We didn’t clean all this shit off the ground before we drank ourselves to sleep.” Jason motioned to the ground. “Where do you keep your goddamn broom.”
Dick rubbed his eyes. “I don’t.”
“You don’t what?”
“Keep a broom.”
“You don’t-“ Jason barked a laugh. “Of course you don’t.”
Dick took a moment to replay their conversation and then felt an anxious pang of alarm. “No, you can’t confront him, Jason, don’t.”
“You’re gonna tell me you don’t believe Bruce ever loved you, and expect me to forget it that easily?”
“I was drunk, Jason,” he pleaded. “I didn’t mean it. Please don’t tell him.”
“Look, he already hates me,” Jason grinned without humour. “I bring it up to him, we have a nice big argument, you don’t have to tell big bad daddy bats yourself, and it isn’t possible for him to hate me more than he already does. Sounds like a win to me.”
“I don’t mean that he doesn’t love me.” Dick grimaced. “I really don’t, so don’t tell him.”
“You sounded like you meant it.” Jason countered gently, far more gently than Dick knew how to handle. He could deal with his little brother when he was angry, or sarcastic, or bitter. He knew how to appease and calm down the situation.
He didn’t know how to divert gentleness.
“I just.” Dick scratched at his scalp. “I just feel like sometimes he doesn’t love me enough to listen to me. He… he cares about me, deeply. But I just wish he would try to understand and respect me.”
Dick couldn’t place the emotion on his brother’s face. “Give me an example of Bruce at his worst towards you.”
And well, he couldn’t actually give the worst example, because he didn’t want to escalate the situation more that he already had, and he didn’t want to paint Bruce in such a bad light when there were reasons why he’d acted that way. Especially since Bruce and Jason were halfway reconciled at this point and he wouldn’t dare to jeopardize either of their happiness.
If he gave Jason too mild of an example, he would know it was a lie, and demand a more truthful answer. But if he gave too harsh of a conversation, Jason might decide to go up in arms against Bruce. Or, worst of all, he might just scoff at the fact that Dick thought it was such a big deal. Jason himself had been through… far too much. And there was a good chance that he wouldn’t see the issue in what Dick found traumatic.
“I can literally hear you thinking of how to appease me.” Jason rubbed a hand over his face. “I’m not going to deck you if you give me the wrong answer.”
Dick laughed, bitterly and incredulously. “First of all, ouch, stop psychoanalyzing me. More importantly, why are you being nice to me? You never bothered to care about me before.”
And he would have bitten off his tongue if it could have erased the self hatred that flashed over Jason’s face. “Look, I’m a shitty person, okay? But I try, sometimes, and I guess you’re lucky today is one of those days.”
“No, you’re not a bad person, I’m sorry-“
“It’s fine, it’s true,” Jason waved him off. “Don’t change the topic.”
Dick started to protest, but Jason leveled him with a glare that his hangover induced headache had not equipped him to deal with, so he just sighed, and settled on a medium-bad example to share. “Fine. So Bruce fired me from Robin when I was like eighteen, right, and-“
“Bruce fired you?” Jason’s face scrunched in disbelief. “What does that even mean? Was he paying you to be Robin?”
“No, I just –“ Dick thought over the wording himself and realized how odd it was. Why had Bruce phrased it like that? “Well, I didn’t follow his orders the way he wanted, and he said he didn’t want a partner in the field who refused to listen to him. So he told me to leave the Robin uniform behind and get out.”
“He always made it seem like you’d just outgrown the role.” Jason shook his head. “He’d always compare me to you, and how I wasn’t as good a Robin as you were, and how you were good enough to go out and be your own hero now.”
“That’s how he talks about it with me now, too,” Dick admitted. “I’ve made some jokes, in passing, about him firing me, and he just talks about it like we used to disagree because I was young and trying to prove myself.”
“He kicked you, his teenage son, out of his house, and now he tries to make it sound like it was your fault.”
“It sounds bad when you say it like that,” Dick laughed nervously. “It’s not like… like if I hadn’t apologized and asked to stay in the Manor, he wouldn’t have let me. He just didn’t want me to be Robin. It’s not that bad.”
“It is. That. Bad.” Jason emphasized. “Whether he would have carried through with the threat or not, it is emotionally abusive to make an ultimatum like that and then deny ever having done it. That’s gaslighting at its finest.”
“I’m not saying it was right.” Dick shifted his weight. “But it’s in the past. It’ll do more harm than good to bring it up with Bruce now.”
“But this isn’t the only time he’s changed the narrative on you, is it.”
“Jason…”
“Is it, Dick.”
Dick closed his eyes. “No.”
“Goddammit.” Jason growled. “How many times are you gonna let him treat you like this before you decide enough’s enough?”
“Jason, it’s not worth it.”
“Fuck you, yes it is!” Jason yelled. “Better than this bullshit martyr suffering in silence thing you have going on!”
“It’s not worth it.” Dick gritted his teeth. “Please just drop it.”
“If you’re just scared of him, I can do it, I’ll talk to him.” Loud, exasperated, Jason threw his arms in the air. “If you’re so worried about your Golden Boy status.”
“I TRIED!” His voice was somewhere between a yell and a shriek, but he couldn’t seem to decrease the volume. “I have tried arguing with him and I end up more confused and somehow always in the wrong. I have tried leaving and getting space from him as Nightwing, with the Titans, living in Bludhaven, and he always finds a crime-fighting reason for me to come back to Gotham. I don’t give a shit about earning his approval anymore, but I can’t jeopardize our family’s stability just because he gets under my skin sometimes!”
Jason looked very much taken aback, but Dick couldn’t force himself to stop.
“He needs me to be the glue that holds everyone together! He needs me to be the brightness to his dark, and Tim and Damian need me to be strong and kind and supportive, not antagonistic and ruining the mood of their dad so he can take it out on them while I get to relax on my own in Blud.”
He clenched his fists hard enough that he could feel his nails biting into his skin. “I can’t talk about how bad it is with anyone in the hero community, because if they don’t believe how hard it is to live with then they’ll be judgemental and, and condescending with me, and I can’t deal with that right now. And if they do choose to believe it then they’ll want to take action against Bruce, and I also can’t deal with that, because Gotham needs Bruce, and I can’t have it on my conscience that I made the lives of everyone in an entire city even more miserable. And our family is finally pulling together, and I need family, I need it, and I know that’s so selfish but I need my family, Jason, I’m sorry, I won’t do anything to break us apart.”
Jason seemed to be about to disagree, so Dick hurried to add, “and I’m not saying I have all the answers, I’m not. I just don’t see a better alternative. I hate seeing Tim become more and more like Bruce in ways he tried so hard to resist when he was younger, and I hate seeing Damian as – not as my Robin. But I can’t interfere, I can’t, I don’t have the right, I’m not either of their parents, and Damian deserves to know his dad after not knowing him his entire childhood with the League, and Tim is almost an adult and he can make his own decisions, and-“
“Take a breath,” Jason interrupted simply.
Dick took a quick one, almost out of spite, and then realized how much he needed the pause. Came back to himself enough to notice the hot angry tears burning down his face, and how his fingers and palms throbbed with how tightly he was clenching his fists.
“I know I should be doing something else,” Dick spoke, quieter this time. “I know whatever I’m doing is wrong. But I just don’t know what else to do.”
His body was trembling; vibrating. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Fucking hell, Dick. You don’t need all the answers. You’re just one guy.”
“But you’re right, I should be, I should be doing something more-“
“Not alone, you aren’t. We’ll figure it out.”
“I can handle it. I’m the oldest.” Dick tried to sniff all the congestion from his nose so he didn’t sound so pathetically crybabyish. “You don’t deserve dealing with this.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Jason’s voice was a mixture of an attempt to be gruff and being on the verge of tears.
Dick must have closed his eyes again, because he felt the hug before he saw it. He gladly returned it though, wrapping his arms around his little (taller, bigger, stronger, younger) brother.
“I don’t mind helping. Sometimes. Even if I pretend I do.” Jason’s arms around him felt clumsy and unsure, and somehow that made Dick even more grateful for his brother’s attempt at comfort.
“Thanks, Little Wing.”
“You gotta stop calling me that, you know. I’m taller than you now.”
He choked out a laugh. “Never."