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There are bills waiting on the counter. Bills, bills, bills, there are always bills waiting on the counter.
“Maybe we could chill,” he sings softly to himself as he hunts down the checkbooks from their spot in Em’s office. Softly because it’s 4am, and if he wakes Em up she’ll sit with him instead of going back to sleep, and she’s got a doctor’s appointment after work today and then Dennis’ play at the school tomorrow and—huh. Maybe he should be a little more worried about when he’s going to get any sleep.
Well. He’s survived on less.
Em’s paycheck bounced last week, some issue with a misprint of the routing number that the bank swears up and down has been fixed and that the money’ll be there by next Tuesday, but—but it’s not there now, and bills are due. So he’s grabbed both the book for their joint account and the one for the account-that-shall-not-be-named, the one Bruce refused to take out of Dick’s name several years ago, with seven semesters of tuition left sitting in it.
There’s still life insurance left—rest in peace, Jimmy, you were shit at tennis and shit at not getting murdered, Dick thinks, and then feels awful, because James was his friend, and Emily had loved him, and how is it fair that he’s sitting here thinking awful jokes to himself while James is dead and Dick’s married to his widow—that’ll cover the mortgage payments until they run out, but that’s in a separate account only Em can sign off on checks from, something to do with the terms of their prenup, so Dick pushes it aside.
There’s not much in the shared account—a bit leftover from the month Dick spent working as a cashier while he cased that place downtown, but Dennis hit another growth spurt this month, and only some of Tim’s hand-me-downs were approved by Emily for public wear.
He does the math in his head, what needs to get paid now versus the likelihood of racking up overdraft fees if there’s any emergencies between now and next Tuesday that won’t take credit, and lets Bruce’s money cover the rest.
It feels like blood money, even if it is his. Or maybe it’s that he has it at all—that he’ll use it to cover the credit card bill but hasn’t thrown it towards Em to take those classes at GC-cubed and start working as a licensed nurse rather than a certified assistant. It wouldn’t be a huge difference, that extra hundred or so a week from the pay raise, but it adds up to several thousand a year, enough to break even on the mortgage payments and start towards some of the smaller bills, the gas, the electric, the groceries.
It’ll take a year, though, and the life insurance’ll run out long before then.
That’s probably what bothers him so much about the tuition account. That he’s working 80 hour weeks for a job that doesn’t pay, a job that’ll likely leave him dead, and leave Em at 0 for 4.
At least there probably won’t be much in the way of funeral expenses. Dying in this line of work more often than not doesn’t leave much of a corpse.
He shakes away the exhaustion induced thought and focuses on signing away his dumb little numbers and letters, then doublechecks that the coffeemaker is set and’ll actually come on in a couple hours before heading upstairs.
He should probably shower—but he’ll wake Em if he uses their bathroom, and he’ll wake Dennis if he uses the one in the hall, and if he lugs himself back downstairs to the in-law suite, which, no, Em’s mother cannot move into, because Em’s mother, bless her heart, cannot know that her son-in-law moonlights in kevlar—well, actually, last laundry day had been his turn and he knows he never got around to putting towels back, so that’s a moot point. Instead he strips and crawls into bed, waits for Em to stir a little and shift to settle against him.
He’s not sure if he’s slept at all yet or not, when he feels Emily waking up and finds himself staring at a nonexistent spot on the ceiling. She stretches away from him and towards her dresser to turn off her alarm clock—she always wakes up a few minutes before it goes off, but that never seems to stop her from setting it—then notices that he’s awake, too. When she looks over at him, Dick smiles back, more instinct than choice.
“Morning,” he tells her, and she scrunches up her face in response, a decent facsimile of Dennis when Dick wakes him up on Saturdays for the morning cartoons.
“Not for you,” she declares. “Go back to sleep. I’ll bring you your coffee before I head out.”
“You don’t have to—” he starts to protest, but Em cuts him off by simply getting out of bed and heading into the bathroom, so he gives up in favour of rolling over and closing his eyes again.
She does bring him that coffee—black, in the mug with the panda that says “I can hardly BEAR Mondays”—before she heads off for work, but she also gives him an admonishing look when he thanks her for it and takes a sip.
“You got in pretty late last night,” is all she says, which means he must have woken her up after all.
“I’ll take a nap after I drop Dennis off,” he tells her.
“One condition,” Emily laments. “I gave you one condition, Dick Grayson, no more lies and I’d let you stay. One condition.”
“Technically, Emily Grayson,” Dick can’t help but retort. “I didn’t say I’d take a nap today.”
“Oh, of course,” she says through a laugh. “Outsmarted again through sheer common sense.”
She seems a little worried underneath the joke, though, the kind of worried that builds up overtime and leaks out at little moments. He’s gotta do something about that.
Right now, though, he doesn’t have a clue, so he kisses her goodbye and finishes his coffee.
Once Dennis is at school, he heads for the Clocktower. The case he’s been working’s a Blüdhaven one, but he’s got the samples here in Gotham and Babs is just that much faster at running them. Plus he knows for a fact that Black Canary was in town last night, and their mutual-annoyance-based friendship dictates that it’s his turn to embarrass Dinah.
He successfully catches Dinah mid-walk of shame—dressed in one of Babs’ approximately five hundred college sweatshirts, this time from Harvard Law—and sticks his tongue out at her.
“Dick’s here,” Dinah yells back to where presumably Babs still lies in bed, before turning back to Dick.
Dick takes a moment to prepare himself mentally to win this round.
“You know,” she tells him, “make fun as much as you like, but at least I’m gettin’ it.”
She’s got a point. Dick sighs his concession.
“Next time,” he promises. “I’ll get you next time.”
“Sure you will,” Dinah agrees, and leaves Dick to his surprise-appointment with Babs.
They talk shop for a minute or thirty while Babs gets around to running to his samples-slash-eating-her-breakfast. Once tests are all in progress and she’s onto her second coffee, though, she twists conversation back around through some ungodly sleight of hand, and does what Babs Gordon does best—take every little complex feeling Dick’s struggling to put to words and compress them all into a single sentence like it’s the simplest thing in the world.
“Dude, you gotta get a day job.”
Dick doesn’t even bother making his reaction a question.
“How.”
Babs blinks in surprise. “I… that was… you know I’m not actually omniscient, right? I was just whining about you showing up and drinking my good coffee during workday hours. What’s going on with your… brain stuff?”
“Well, with eloquence like that, it’s easy to see why I might confuse your admirable intelligence with omniscience.”
“Answer the poorly worded question or I dump that mug in your hands down the drain,” Babs threatens.
It’s his fifth cup this morning, which, in hindsight, he probably should be cutting down on his caffeine intake anyways. Doesn’t sound super convenient dealing with withdrawal migraines any time vigilante bullshit invariably sends him off-grid.
“It’s just,” he starts, stalling as his mind grapples for the right words. “She does so much, right? Like… you levels much. Or, that’s what it feels like, at least.”
“Makes sense,” Babs says, and graciously doesn’t bother pointing out that no one does Babs levels of much except for Babs. “The whole parenting slash hospital job combo adds up to a lot of hours.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Dick agrees. “And it’s not like I’m sitting around twiddling my thumbs or anything, but it’s just…”
“It’s just that money is exchanged for goods and services?” Babs correctly guesses. “If you’ve got a lot on your plate, Dick, you know Bruce would—”
Dick groans loudly rather than listen to the end of her sentence.
“I’m a whole entire married adult man, Barbara, I shouldn’t have to be relying on—”
“Lower your goddamn voice,” Babs tells him, decidedly not a suggestion, and Dick realizes that he has, in fact, raised his voice significantly.
“Sorry,” he tells her, and means it.
“I get it,” Babs says. “I mean, start yelling a second time and you’ll discover the exact limits of my forgiveness, but I do get it.”
She’s looking at something on the wall as she says it—a diploma, Dick realizes—probably from one of the schools Bruce paid for, if present conversation is any indicator.
“You want my advice?” Babs asks, then before Dick can point out that he’s here, isn’t he, clarifies her question. “I mean, really, truly, do you want me to give you advice? I’m not looking to waste the energy if you don’t.”
“Please,” is pretty much all he can say.
“Stop running from whatever Bruce is begging to give you. If it’s a loan, if it’s the mortgage, if it’s a fuckin’ monopoly railroad, just take it and make something that’s yours with it.”
Dick lets her words float around for a minute that turns into more before he remembers she probably wants some form of reaction to indicate that he’s present in this moment.
“It’s—” he starts, then tries again. “It’s the…”
“Oof,” Babs says, cringing in a way that makes it clearer than anything that she knows exactly what money he’s not talking about. “He kept that around?”
“I think technically I did,” Dick says. “Or, like—it’s his in my name, or whatever.”
Babs nods, then frowns. “Wait, so you kept that around? Just sitting there?”
“Seemed poetic at the time,” Dick admits, and she makes a face in response.
“That’s so much money to not have invested,” she says. “Dick, that’s so much money.”
“Well,” Dick says, because he’s known this all along and has no other defense. “Too bad I never finished that business degree?”
Dropping Dennis off in the morning was easy. Picking him up is a little bit harder—not all the school staff know Dick just yet, and while it is a public school, the district’s a little wealthier, a little whiter. They’re not always sure what to make of Dick pointing at a little blond-haired, blue-eyed cretin and saying “yep, that one, ignore the last name.”
You’d think a kid perking up and excitedly calling out someone’s name would be enough to sort out the situation, but apparently when that name is “Dick” it actually just complicates things further.
Once name-related miscommunications, both first and last, have been resolved, Dick gets Dennis settled into the car, returns the little electronic pet dinosaur that he’d almost forgotten to take away before school started.
Dennis has explained the minute differences between a tamagotchi and a giga pet and a digimon and a whatever-the-hell too many times to count, and Emily’s done her fair share of explaining why it’s a helpful tool for teaching kids responsibility, but every time Dick hears the little buttons beep, he feels more and more inclined to side with the teachers on this one.
“Alright, Den,” Dick says once they’re successfully back at home, Dennis’ dino presumably fed and watered and whatnot. “Apples, crackers, or celery?”
“Do we still have the good crackers?”
Dick checks the pantry, and determines that they do, in fact, still have a sleeve of the “good” ones left before they’ve gotta open the generic storebrand box, so he pulls them out and slathers on some of Dennis’ gross fake-peanut-butter stuff.
The allergist says it should be fine to give him real peanut butter now—at home, that is, because it’s point blank banned at school—but even with a epipen ready, Dick’s a little nervous about sending his stepson into anaphylactic shock, so he leaves the real-peanut-exposure up to Emily.
Em’s mom has her book club until 4 today, so Dick stays with Dennis til she shows up, talks him through his math homework and lets him sneak in a forbidden tv episode while they wait.
Grandma is under the impression that Dick works as some kind of freelance consultant for Waynecorp where he gets to pick his own hours, which is sort of true, if you think about all that tech in development that Nightwing tests out.
It’s 4:17 by the time she arrives and wishes Dick luck at his “meeting,” so he doesn’t stick around long for pleasantries.
If he’d made it out maybe ten minutes sooner, he could have swung it, but now he’s been solidly roped into crossing the bridge and heading out to Blüdhaven in an awkward in-between where it’s not quite late enough to justify a public appearance as Nightwing, and it is quite late enough indeed that he’s stuck fast in rush hour traffic.
He’s gotta follow up on the leads he’s worked today, though, gotta follow up before they scatter into the wind, so he lets himself fall into the flood of folks too scared to live in Gotham commuting back to their suburban homes, and suffers through his own commute to work, staring down strip malls and red lights and weighing the emotional and financial toll of tricking Bruce into building a private tunnel from Gotham to Blüdhaven.
He works his case.
He heads home around ten—damn early by vigilante standards—knowing if he’s lucky he’ll be catching Emily just before she goes to bed, and steadfastly turns his thoughts away from Dinah’s earlier needling. It’s not that they never get time alone together, just that the concept of actively having to schedule it—well, that’s still a little foreign to Dick.
He does end up thinking back to earlier, though—back to earlier with Babs, not back to earlier with Dinah—as he drives by some of the same strip malls he’d stared down earlier, their parking lots mostly empty, “space for lease” signs now visible glowing in some of the windows.
It strikes Dick that if he’s going to spend any more time thinking about exactly how he’d like to take Babs’ advice in building Bruce’s money into something of his own, he should probably repeat the conversation with his wife, first.
“Babe?” Emily asks when he opens the cracked bedroom door, softly but not sleepily—so for once he didn’t wake her. “You’re back earlier than I thought you’d be. You coming to bed?”
“Need to shower first,” Dick tells her. “Just be a minute.”
“How ‘bout an extra pair of hands?” Em suggests, and he really does need to talk things out with her soon.
But soon doesn’t have to be tonight.
“Sounds lovely,” he tells her.