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"Where is he?"
Dick stirred awake to a voice he couldn’t quite place.
"He's sleeping now, baby."
Oh. That was Roy, speaking to Lian. She was the first reason that Dick chose to lay low at Roy’s place—though "lay low" was a charitable description of running away, which is what he’d done. He never really left Gotham on a high note, did he?
The second reason Dick chose Roy’s place was that he never had to tell Roy why he was there. They knew each other too well to push into each other's soft spots, and there was also a distance between them—a healthy distance, built by time and space, Dick reminded himself—that meant he didn't feel obligated to explain himself.
"I'm gonna wake him up. Just for a second, Daddy."
Dick tried to open his eyes and a migraine made itself known. He was laying on his stomach: the best position for nausea, which he felt the stirrings of in his stomach. He hoped he didn’t throw up on Roy's sheets.
"He'll be awake tomorrow."
"Tom— Tomorrow?" Lian shrieked. "He gets to sleep the whole day?"
"Mmhm. You can wake him up tomorrow morning."
"But I need to show him—"
"You'll show him tomorrow."
Lian squeaked and Dick imagined Roy coming at her with tickling fingers.
"It's dinner time now, c'mon."
Dick meant to get up. He hadn't seen Lian in over a year. He wanted to see her, even if the thought of dinner made him want to hurl.
He fell asleep.
The next thing he knew he was on his back and hearing, "Uncle Dick. Uncle Dick!"
Lian had her head pillowed on her arms on the mattress. The second she saw Dick’s eyes open she smiled and turned bashful. "Do you want breakfast? Daddy's making pancakes."
Dick patted the mattress in her direction. "Morning. Pancakes s'nd good."
Maybe he still had a bit of a headache.
Lian suddenly remembered to whisper. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah."
"You were really tired, 'cause you slept like, eight hours at least."
"Mmhm." Nausea suddenly spiked through him and Dick levered himself up on his arms, hoping the change in position would help fend it off. "Hey, Lian. Do you think you could go find my bag?"
Lian squinted a little.
"Don't look in it, though. Promise me."
Her eyes lit up. "A present?" she shouted and ran off.
Dick hurried into the bathroom and stood hunched over the toilet for ten minutes before he accepted the fact that he was not going to throw up and he just had to deal with the uncomfortable lurching in his stomach.
He checked the time and saw he had a text from Bruce: When you get back to Gotham we can talk.
He turned off his phone.
He was acting like he was eighteen years old again. Bruce brought it out in him, or Gotham did. It made him want to run away and change himself until Gotham—or Bruce—couldn’t recognize him.
But he wasn’t eighteen anymore, he didn’t have the Titans to run to, and he’d already transformed himself as much as he could. He’d fulfilled the urge to run away and make himself unrecognizable when he stayed at the Tower for the first fourteen months of his transition, years ago, now.
He was grateful to have Bruce. Grateful that Damian had a father. But being around him for too long made time spool backwards, like he was trying to cram himself into his teenage Robin body. Dick had done so much since then—so much had been done to him— Of course there was no room.
God, he had a headache.
Out in the kitchen of the small apartment, Roy was wearing red plaid pajama bottoms and a tank top, with a huge bowl of pancake batter next to the stove. Dick stopped, watching for a second as his breath pinched in his chest. He remembered Titans Tower and Roy’s even tinier apartment in Brooklyn. Everything was the same and different.
Lian had a pancake in two hands as she glared up at the top of the fridge, where Dick could see his own backpack.
"Morning," Roy said over his shoulder. He pointed with his spatula. "Lian said you told her not to peek. I'm helping her out."
Lian plastered herself to Dick's side. She kept hold of her pancake with one hand, and the other one left grease stains on Dick's shirt.
"Morning," Dick said. "I see you found it."
"Yeah, and I didn't look but he took it and hid it."
Dick patted Lian's head. He knew this was mostly a joke, but he felt uncomfortable being the good guy to Roy's bad guy. He hadn't seen Lian since she was five, in that apartment in Brooklyn.
Roy just laughed and flipped another pancake onto the growing pile next to him.
When breakfast was over Dick got Roy's okay to give Lian her gift, which was a couple of sheets of stickers she could use to decorate her skateboard and journals. Roy made her wash her hands first, and then she ran off to put it to use.
"Thanks," Dick said. Most of his two pancakes were still on his plate, but not because they weren't good. "I'm not that hungry, I can—"
Roy kept Dick in his seat with a hand on his shoulder. He pressed him down gently and Dick relaxed into it without meaning to. Roy turned to start doing the dishes.
"Heard you got knocked in the head pretty bad."
"Heard? From who?" It wasn’t exactly a secret what with his left eye and temple a massive spot of red and purple. The bruise didn’t swell too badly—which worried the doctors more than if it had. Dick had to go through about seven scans over the span of three days before they were satisfied that they hadn't overlooked internal damage. With Bruce hovering over him like he was ten years old again.
Roy said, "Wouldn't you like to know?"
Probably Babs.
"We have a 'Dick's in crisis' group chat," he added.
"I'm not in crisis."
"Awesome." Roy winked over his shoulder as he dried his hands. "I'll let everyone know."
Dick might have confessed something then. Increasingly stupid options flashed through his mind. Well, actually, if you want to know— Or, How do you stand living in the same city as Ollie? Or, I know we weren’t really living together during the Outsiders, so could we not-really-live-together now?
Thank god, Lian returned to save him. Roy’s attention shifted to her and he grinned.
"Sweet tattoo."
"Thank you." Lian fist-bumped him and turned to Dick. She had a sticker of a skull on fire stuck to her forehead, and she held out a pink, flowery heart sticker on her pointer finger.
Dick carefully peeled the heart sticker away. "Thanks."
Lian beamed. "Put it on!"
He stuck it on the right side of his forehead, opposite the bruising. "I love it." With both their attention on him he felt uncomfortably in the spotlight. "Hey, you were going to show me something?"
"Oh yeah! My dad took a picture!" Lian spun and held out her palm to Roy. Roy took his phone out of his pocket and held it high in the air as he put in his passcode, fending off her attempts to grab it.
"I’m opening it, I’m opening it," he said.
"I can do it, I know your password, Daddy."
Roy shook his head with a grin at Dick and handed his unlocked phone to Lian. She ran up to Dick and opened the gallery. The most recent photo was a picture of her in this apartment’s living room, doing a middle split on the brown carpet.
"Wow! That's awesome, Lian."
"I practice every day. Well, most days, because sometimes I have homework or I'm tired. But even on the days I go to daycare I practice at daycare."
Dick held out a hand and got a high five, and then Lian clung onto his fingers.
"Daddy says I'm going to be as good as Nightwing."
Roy coughed. His blush clashed with his hair in the way Dick always loved.
"But," Lian said, glancing at Roy like this was an often-tread conversation, "I'm a girl so I think I'll be as good as Catwoman."
Dick stopped his eyes from bulging. Catwoman? Like, the criminal? He shot a glance at Roy, but Roy was still red in the face and avoiding eye contact.
"Or your mom," Roy said.
Lian rolled her eyes. "No one’s as good as Mom."
"Yeah, you’re right," Roy conceded.
Dick remembered having the same teasing arguments with Damian every night in the Batmobile until Damian finally cracked a reluctant smile. He’d felt so out-of-place, like an imposter, but here in Roy’s kitchen watching him and Lian do the same thing, the warm ache of familiarity grew in his stomach.
He should turn his phone back on soon. A stab of pain shot through his head immediately following that thought. He was going to take that as a coincidence, not causation.
"Uncle Dick?"
Both Lian and Roy were looking at him with frowns. Lian looked a lot like her mom, but some of her expressions were all Roy.
"Hm?" Dick asked.
"Wanna play swords?"
Dick’s eyes widened and he looked at Roy.
"Ah, not with a concussion," was Roy said.
Dick was intensely curious by what Lian meant by "swords," but he kept his questions to himself as Roy skillfully distracted Lian with a bag of markers and a YouTube video of someone drawing a cute cheetah.
Lian wanted Dick to sit next to her on the living room carpet and draw too, but Dick’s headache only grew so instead he laid down in Roy's bed for a while.
He tried to sleep but he couldn’t. He held his dead phone in his hand, thinking of different texts he could send Damian and discarding every option. The kid deserved more than a text. Dick would go back to Gotham soon and talk to him, and then maybe next time he had to run away he could do it more like an adult and less like a teenager. In his head he crafted a speech he would never give to Bruce.
After maybe fifteen minutes, maybe an hour, Roy came in. He shut the door quietly behind him.
Dick rolled onto his back. "Thanks for letting me stay. I'll get up if you—"
Roy waved him away and sat on the bed. "Scoot over." He tucked a hand under his head and laid back next to Dick, on top of the covers. "Lian's having lunch."
"I'm not really hungry."
"Mm."
Dick stared at the ceiling. The mattress bent and tried to pull him down towards Roy.
Bruce tried to ground me, like I’m a child again. As if he never stopped seeing me as one.
Dick imagined saying it.
Like he wants to hide me away and protect me from the entire world. As if he's ever been able to do that.
He and Roy both breathed quietly. Roy said, "You still got that sticker."
"Yeah?" Dick lifted his hand to his forehead. "Well, Lian gave it to me. I'm keeping it."