Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first time Dick had come back from college, he’d been taken aback by everything that had changed in his absence. He hadn’t expected things to; half the rooms in the Manor were still furnished just as they had been when Bruce was a child, and all of the changes were practical, necessary.

The changes he’d come back to had been more of the same, really. Tiles in the kitchen replaced because of bloodstains that wouldn’t scrub out, an updated security system, new curtains in the parlor replacing the ones Alfred had always quietly grumbled at.

Nothing important, nothing like later when he’d dropped out and come home to a new Robin. Just a dozen small signs that life had moved on without him, that time hadn’t stopped just because he hadn’t been there to see it.

He’d been braced for the same thing to happen again. He’d been gone for twenty years; the Manor could have burned down and been entirely rebuilt in that time for all he knows; it could have been rebuilt as a fortress, or updated into a sleek, minimalist style, or fallen into complete disuse.

(He’d had nightmares about it falling into utter ruin, ash drifting across bleached bones in crumbling walls. Nightmares of it standing tall and proud while ivy slowly crept across it, and dust built up in its hallways, undisturbed.)

That it's still standing, still outwardly the same, is already so much better than he feared. He's as prepared as he can be to step inside and see what's become of it.

It's easier with Bruce right behind him, hand still tight on his shoulder as if fearing to let go. It's a reminder of what he should have known the first time: that no matter what else has changed, his family is here.

He had braced himself, he had thought.

And then he opens the door, and -

And he hadn’t been ready for this.

It looks just like he’d left it when he’d stormed out twenty years ago. The chandelier he’d once climbed on is still glittering before the grand staircase; the hatstand he’d always bumped into is still positioned right beside the door.

The jacket he’d forgotten is still hanging on its hook. No dust has been allowed to gather on the leather. It still hangs there, still waiting, as if he was never gone at all.

He picks it up, disbelieving, and the leather doesn’t crack in his hands. It’s been cared for in his absence, moved after all, but never for long; the wood behind it is slightly darker than all the rest, protected from the sunlight by its constant presence.

He doubts it would fit his shoulders now. It doesn’t fit him anymore, just the hook it had claimed.

It is ridiculous to cry over the leather in his hands. It hadn’t been an important jacket. It wasn’t a gift or a benchmark purchase or even his favorite. He had forgotten it entirely until the moment he saw it again.

Still waiting.

Then Alfred appears from the direction of the kitchen, a tray in his hands laden with a single plate of lunch, and the jacket is entirely forgotten in Dick’s lunge to catch the platter before it clatters on the floor.

He fails, mainly because Alfred catches Dick before Dick can catch the platter.

“Master Dick,” he says, voice breaking.

Bruce was right; Dick had never seen the butler so young. Bruce, at least, fits Dick’s memories of when he first came to the Manor, but Alfred has regressed ten years beyond that. He is the only thing that does not seem to have been perfectly caught in amber to await Dick’s return to youth and hope.

The shaking in Alfred’s hands is equally unfamiliar, as is the desperation of his embrace, but the words are just the same as every time Dick has left the nest, whether for a weekend trip or three months of fuming: “It is so very good to have you home.”

“It’s good to be back, Alfie,” he says, and his own voice is far from steady. When Alfred finally lets go, Dick steps back a little, careful to avoid the broken porcelain, so that Alfred can see who else has come home. “I, uh, couldn’t have done it on my own.”

“Master Timothy,” the butler breathes, and Dick can see the moment he understands. “You brought him back to us.”

Tim is hanging back by the door and might only be that close by virtue of how Bruce’s other hand is still firmly anchored to him.

“I’m sorry about the landscaping,” Tim blurts out, and - okay, yes, they’re going to have to do something about having landed the Javelin there, but Dick almost has to laugh at that being where Tim’s mind went right now.

He doesn’t have the full story, not yet, just what Tim’s told him, and there are far too many obvious skips there for it to be all of it. But Alfred’s response is still pretty much what he would have expected: Alfred scoffs, in a way that sounds a little like a laugh and a lot like a sob, and says, “You foolish, wonderful, impossible boy,” and then Bruce tugs him forward and Alfred is embracing him too.

When Alfred at last pulls his dignity back around himself, he insists on herding them all into the kitchen where he can whip up something he says is more appropriate for the occasion.

Dick looks around, expecting here to be where things have changed, but everything is - almost exactly where he left it. The fruit in the bowl on the counter has presumably changed, and the dates on the newspaper left beside it are new, but it’s like he’s stepped back in time, not flown across space. He’s home, and somehow not a single aspect of it has moved on without him.

Except, of course, for one.

He’d half grieved his whole planet, desperate hope and despair warring within him in equal measure. He’d faced the idea that even if they were still out there, somewhere, he might never again see another human face.

To lose one, in the face of that, ought to be easy. Jason has been a memory to him for longer than he was ever a brother.

But stepping back here, to a place where it is not only his coats still hanging on hooks to await his return - it makes it harder to breathe through, suddenly, that Jason is the one fixture of this house that is not here waiting for him.

Bruce sees the pain, but not the cause, and presses in with what small, warm assurances he can. “Your room’s just like you left it,” he promises. “And we can head into the city tomorrow and get you anything else you need.”

Things are the last thing on his mind right now, but he nods anyway. “Where’d you put the things from my apartment?” That they’d done something with them, he has no doubt. Bruce never would have risked Nightwing’s gear being discovered by an irate landlord.

But Bruce just blinks, confused, and Dick almost thinks for an incredulous moment that Bruce has actually entirely forgotten that potentially identity breaking location for twenty years when Bruce says, “I didn’t move them. They’re all still in your apartment. We can go there too, if you need to pick something up - “

“You’ve been paying rent on my apartment for twenty years?”

He concedes it might not be as ridiculous as it sounds once he says it. At first, of course, Bruce would have had no idea when he’d be returning, and it’s not as if paying for one low rent apartment would be a hardship for Bruce Wayne of all people; he’d been petitioning Dick to let him upgrade Dick to a better apartment as it was.

That had been what their last argument was about, actually.

“Of course not,” Alfred says dryly as he adds a hint of salt to whatever he’s stirring on the stove. “He bought the building.”

. . . okay, that sounds even more like Bruce.

Tim chokes off a laugh.

A little softer, Alfred adds, “I go up every week to do a little dusting. It should be aired out properly before proper habitation, but I assure you that proper war has been waged on whatever began growing in that fridge of yours in your absence.”

Dick makes the executive decision not to tell Alfred that technically that war had begun before his absence.

“If it makes you - uncomfortable, I can find someone to sell the building to,” Bruce says stiffly, and, well, twenty years ago Bruce having bought the building he lived in definitely would have started a screaming fight, but now -

“Actually, I think I’d like to just stay here for awhile if that’s alright,” Dick says, shoulders hunching in a little.

Because he’s an adult, and he’s Dick Grayson, and he should just land on his feet like the acrobat he is and keep moving, but he’s not ready yet to have his family not be there when wakes in the night and forgets that he’s beneath familiar stars once more.

The noticeable release of tension in both Bruce and Alfred’s shoulders answers that question pretty quickly.

Tim keeps trying to sneak away to give them some alone time, so Dick officially nominates himself to Tim-watching duty. When Tim tries it yet again, Dick doesn’t stop him from leaving with a well timed question or an arm flung around his shoulders like he has for the last two times; instead, he slips out after him.

Well, he says, ‘slips out.’ Bruce notices both of them leaving immediately and with a good deal of alarm. Dick makes the bat-signs for ‘wait’ and ‘trust me’ and gives himself a mental countdown of five minutes before Bruce comes after them anyway.

“I was just going to my room,” Tim says as soon as he sees Dick. The words are defensive, as if he expects to be accused of doing something worse.

“Cool! I haven’t seen it yet.” And then he does sling his arm around Tim’s shoulders so that the newest little Robin can’t eel away from him again.

Tim flinches a little before leaning into it. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” he mumbles. “I know you don’t - know me, really.”

“Not yet!” Dick says cheerfully. “But even though apparently we’ve got all the time in the world to fix that, I don’t see any reason to wait.”

He’d thought he’d had time with Jason. He’d been wrong.

He isn’t going to make that mistake again. He isn’t going to make any of those mistakes again. There aren’t going to be any more Robins flying solo; any more Robins falling solo. He doesn’t care if they can’t die here. This is Gotham, and he’s sure worse fates have reared their ugly heads in death’s absence. He’s going to be here this time, keep this one safe and loved and where he belongs.

Tim is still eying him a little dubiously.

Dick lets the smile drop. “Look,” he says. “I know from what you’ve said that you know a different version of me, and I’m sure that’s weird. I get that. So if I make you uncomfortable - “

“No!” Tim blurts out. “I mean. It is weird, a little, but you’re like - fifteen years older than him. You look different enough that I can keep you pretty separate. And you’ll probably end up looking like him eventually, but that’ll take time. I’ll adjust.”

“Okay,” Dick says. “But if you need anything from me while you’re doing that - or after - I’m here for you, kid, okay? We may not have had a chance to get to know each other too well yet, but - I owe you, baby bird. More than I can ever pay you back for. I know you risked a lot, doing what you did, and I’m not going to forget that.”

Tim's face was the first human one he'd seen in twenty years; he probably would have imprinted on him just for that. But Tim is also the one who brought him back, who's given him back everything he was losing hope of seeing again. And Tim is his brother, the last chance for a little brother he'll ever have. He's not going to fail this time.

Tim’s face has turned bright red, and he turns it away in a futile effort to hide. “Bruce needed you back,” he mumbles.

“From his reaction earlier, it looks like he needed you back too,” Dick says with careful lightness, trying his best not to scare him away. “So let’s try not to give him too many heart attacks today, alright? I think he’ll feel better if he can see us. You can show me your room later.”

Tim nods, only a little reluctant, and Dick returns triumphant with a little bird that does not, at least for the next few hours, attempt to sneak away.

It is only after Tim is safely in bed that Dick asks to see the grave. He suspects it is somewhere on the grounds, one small, devastating change at the center of all this careful preservation.

Bruce - wavers.

“I can show you the stone,” he says, “if you want.” But he isn’t looking at Dick in that way he has when he is deliberately refusing to be ashamed of something.

“But?” Dick prompts.

They are in the Cave. There are a few small changes here; equipment rearranged to deal with the new realities of the world.

A display case with Nightwing’s spare suit carefully preserved. Another with Robin’s.

Bruce is still stubbornly looking at the screen of a computer that is still very much blank. “Jason came back in Tim’s world.”

Dick’s breath catches. “How?”

But Bruce shakes his head. “No one knows.” His mouth tightens. “Or if they are, they aren’t sharing. Jason was - angry. When he came back. He didn’t - share everything.”

There’s more to the story there, but Dick is still focused on how it applies to their Jason.

“He clawed his way out of his grave,” Bruce says abruptly, and Dick has to take a moment to feel sick. “I couldn’t - I had to check,” he says, a little pleadingly, and Dick understands.

He swallows. “Did you - find anything?”

He knows Bruce didn’t find Jason alive. If he had, he would have said so long before now. But maybe - maybe he found something.

Bruce’s breath rasps when he speaks. “Bodies from - from right before, they don’t. They don’t decay like they should. Animals do. Plants do. But people - “

It is Dick’s turn to press close to Bruce, ignoring the chair back between them to press his arms around him.

“He looked like he was just sleeping,” Bruce says, and his voice holds more ruin than Dick’s nightmares ever could have conjured. “I couldn’t - I couldn’t leave him there. What if he woke up?” Bruce has finally turned a little, gaze locked on a little curtained off area of the medical cots, and now Dick’s gaze is glued there too.

He lets go of Bruce, limbs suddenly numb, and drifts over there.

Jason is behind the curtain.

He is laid out on a cot burdened with pressure sensors and monitors. The slightest disturbance will no doubt send them all shrieking loud enough to -

Loud enough to raise the dead. But they will only call if the dead have already been raised.

Jason looks small, surrounded by so many sentinels. Whatever injuries brought him to the grave are either hidden by his carefully pressed suit or stitched together by whatever holds all the rest of the decay in stasis.

He looks small, and cold, and utterly still, and if it were not for that last part, Dick would say that he’d been wrong before, and that in his absence time really had stood still, and nothing had changed at all.

He is glad suddenly, so glad, that Jason is laid to rest here, and not in the bed in his room because if he was there, Dick thinks he would be so, so tempted to peek in every night and pretend the huddled lump really was his Little Wing, grounded from patrol, just this once. Sulking, probably, not yet sleeping, and that he could slip inside and tease him into a better mood if he chose to disregard the sign on the door warning intruders to keep out.

He cannot fool himself here, breathing the cold, stagnant air of the cave.

But he also can’t imagine finding the gravestone on the grounds and insisting on lowering the figure back down into the unforgiving earth.

So he just swallows and whispers, “I got your calls, Little Wing.”

He had. Just as soon as he was within Earth’s atmosphere, they had all come flooding in as warning beeps on his carefully preserved comm.

“One more call, Jay,” he promises, looking at all the monitors just waiting for their chance to shriek. "Just call one more time, Little Wing."

It is a foolish, desperate bargain when he has already been handed so many miracles, but he cannot help begging anyway.

“I just need one more chance.”

Chapter Text

Jason’s not sure if the kids don’t notice the bloodstains, of if they’re too used to them to care. It could be either, this deep in the Narrows, but hands still stinging with bleach hope it’s the first.

He doesn’t normally clean up after himself, but last night’s fight had spilled from the alleyways to the space staked out by a rusting chain linked fence behind the youth center. The wire had sparked, twisted, and torn in the hail of bullets, and some of the bodies had fallen through.

(He’s been trying to be better. He’s been trying. He’s been - )

(It doesn’t matter now.)

The tortured shrieking of metal on metal as the kids push the ancient swings to their limit and chase each other around the concrete is not that much like the fight, but it starts the Pit whispering in his head all the same.

He leans his head against the sun scorched metal of the fire escape he's sitting on and forces himself to focus on the burn. He won’t let himself put his hand on the gun shoved into the holster around his waist, no matter how much it would steady the venom thrumming through his veins. Not here. Not when there are swings squealing just out of sight around the corner.

He doesn’t hurt children. He wouldn’t hurt children.

(But there are two little birds burning just behind his eyelids, far more than the metal does against his skin.)

(And he hasn’t seen either of those for so long now.)

He shouldn’t be here. He has no place being here, so close to the laughter he has to remind himself won’t be followed by screams.

But it is his fault that bodies fell here last night, and as careful as he has been to make sure no trails will lead here, he will wait, just in case, to make sure no trouble comes knocking to a place that should be safe.

It is not, of course, entirely safe. He winces at the memory of the rust, the sharp edges, the concrete. The way he has sat just a corner away all day, gun half visible beneath his jacket, and no one has come to demand why he is here.

The place was paid for by Wayne Foundation funds once, he thinks, but everything crumbles so quickly in Gotham, shiny bright hope corroded under wave upon wave of corruption.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world -

Yeats was right, he thinks, and he does not think about how Gotham’s center is gone, gone, gone, lost to him through time or death or the bright gleaming crowbar that had loosed the red tide under which his innocence had been drowned.

The center is gone, and everything gets worse, Gotham’s best and brightest defenders not quite enough to stem the tide, to tread water, to at least keep her steady if they cannot lift her up.

Everything gets worse, and he is so, so tired.

But the sun is starting to sink below the skyscrapers, always so quick to duck for cover, and soon the children will go home, and he can nap through the twilight until it is time to don his mask and march out to finish what he started last night.

Soon.

But the shadows are not content to wait.

One of them drops down beside him from the roof, and his gun is drawn and ready before he can think better of it. It is pointed, perfectly steady, at -

(It is not Batman. Batman is gone, and he will not - he cannot - )

(It is not his brother. Because if it is his brother, even after everything, he will have to stop thinking of everything that has happened as Nightwing versus the Red Hood, and start thinking of it as Dick versus Jason, and - )

(The things they have done to each other are nothing between vigilantes. Things to be pushed aside as soon as the next common enemy sweeps through, and never mind if neither of you trusts the other, if one of you flinches, if both of you scar.)

(If they are brothers, if they were ever brothers, if there was ever the smallest chance they could have remained brothers, then he will have to look at everything he’s done, at every grievance dealt and provoked and suffered, and he will have to look at the scorched remains of everything he did when he was still full of passionate intensity, and he does not think he will still be able to look at himself after.)

(He cannot forgive, and he does not deserve to be forgiven, and he wants to scrape off his skin, sometimes, because of the blood staining his hands and the way it creeps into his mouth and drowns his lungs and - )

(And yeah. He can’t look at that mess. Not tonight.)

(This is what happens when he has to deal with the Bats on this little sleep: he gets maudlin. He gets sentimental when he’s tired, and that’s all there is to it, okay?)

So it’s just a shadow, or a man, or the shadow of a man, and it actually takes him a moment to realize that it really isn’t the Bat, cause Dick (not his brother, not his anything, just Dick) isn’t in costume, not quite. He’s dressed to blend in with the crowds, and if his clothes are fitted to make sure he can fight in them, and if there’s armor hiding behind that jacket it’s far too hot to wear, no one else will notice. No one else has to know.

That’s the motto of their family the Bats, he thinks with a snort, even with each other. No one else has to know.

He doesn’t lower the gun.

Dick doesn’t sit, won’t give up that much reaction time, but he slides into a crouch that almost looks casual.

Jason thinks he’ll say something about the bodies last night. About all the nights before that.

About the tentative peace that had been building before -

Before Bruce ‘died.’ Before the Pit came crashing back down. Before he’d finally crossed so many lines that even St. Nightwing thought he deserved Blackgate - and then kept crossing them until he’d gotten himself thrown into Arkham.

Before a lot of things.

He’d been trying. He’d failed. He’d moved on.

And apparently Dick has too, because instead of saying a word about any of that, he says, “Tim’s missing.”

It takes a moment for this to sink in, and then he laughs.

He could ask why Dick thinks he cares, but that’s an old wound on Dick, almost scarred over, and it edges a little too close to something newly raw for Jason, so he lunges for a different weak point instead.

“Please tell me you didn’t just now notice he’s left Gotham,” he says. “Even I knew that.”

He doesn’t think about why he knows, about milkshakes on a rooftop on a night that still feels like an absurdist dream, when he’d breathed free air for the first time in weeks, and hadn’t quite believed it was real, that the terrible laughter was fading behind him, that it wasn’t all a trick, a trap, a nightmare waiting to spring.

He still does not quite believe it sometimes. It still does not make sense to him.

Tim’s explanations had been fierce with frantic conviction, but they had focused forward to his future, not on why he had freed a monster from his past. On why he’d decided that he, of all people, still had enough faith in Jason to break him out of that nightmare.

But explanation or no explanation, he had.

So, yeah. He owes the kid. Owes him for that fragile peace they’d been building before the Pit had seethed upward again; owes him his freedom and his sanity and - Anyway.

Possibly one of those favors should have been a concussion check, since the kid had been in a headspace to think him freeing Jason was a good idea, but, well. Too late to look at that gift horse’s mouth now.

“I’m not talking about him leaving Gotham,” Dick snaps, so unconcerned about the weapon still pointed at him that Jason has to hold himself back from proving Dick wrong just for kicks. “I’d been - keeping tabs. He was last seen with three of Ra’s people. Now he’s gone.”

The words circle oddly in Jason’s head. Turning and turning in the widening gyre -

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned -

The Pit seethes in his veins, and he thinks of bright metal beating down, down, down, of a hacked comm signal that had said that Dad Bruce the Bat was gone -

He thinks of a small, sharp boy, utterly convinced that it wasn’t over, even though the body had been found.

He thinks of a pit, bubbling green.

He has already started twitching into movement when Dick says, “I want you to watch the city while I go find him.”

He freezes.

Stares.

Dick is looking at him, steady, steady, steady, and it itches at his skin, because it feels like trust, like guilt, and he won’t take this, he won’t, he won’t -

“You trusting me with the Cowl, Golden Boy?” he asks, forcing his lips up into a smirk. “You trusting me to look after your precious Robin while you’re gone?”

They both know what happened the last time the Cowl was up for grabs. They both know what happened the last time Jason was anywhere near Damian.

“I’m trusting you with Gotham,” Dick corrects.

There is something unnatural about the way DIck is holding himself, and it takes Jason a moment to realize that it’s how still he is. There are no gestures Jason might take as a prelude to attack; no fidgeting, no absent acrobatics, no movement at all but the small twitches of breath and speech and the faint tremor of (exhaustion, anxiety, grief, terror) tension running through him.

Part of him wants to deny Dick this just for the sake of denying him; part of him wants to so that he can scrape off that itching feeling.

Part of him wants to take off across the world himself because he owes Tim that one or two or twenty, and he owes Ra's a good kick in the chest.

But.

But it won't mean much to the kid if Jason goes after him. It'll mean time wasted in negotiating how much trust he's willing to place in Jason's good intentions; it'll mean testing just how much control Jason has over the Pit.

Dick - Jason doesn't know what went down between the kid and Dick. It's not his problem. But he remembers arguing with Dick, he remembers the burning feeling of thinking the first Robin couldn't care less if he lived or died, and he thinks it'll mean something to the kid if Dick drops everything and runs after him.

Assuming, of course, the kid is still around to care.

And they can't both go, or there really will be nothing left in Gotham to stop the rising tide, unless someone's gone crazy enough to let Damian patrol alone.

So he agrees, but he doesn't have to be gracious about it. “It’ll be better than when you left it,” he drawls, letting his words drip with the implications of blood.

(It won’t be better. Things never get better.)

(But he lets himself sound convicted because that’s what they expect from him now, bloodthirsty certainty.)

It doesn’t stop Dick from nodding, a small tight jerk of a movement before he springs to his feet and flips off the side of the railing to the concrete far below, utterly convinced Jason won’t shoot him in the back.

“How long did it take for you to notice he’d left the city?” he calls after him, because he can’t stop picking at the scab, wanting it to bleed.

Dick doesn’t answer, just moves faster, off to save another little brother, trying to pretend he’s not too late.

Jason doesn’t call after him again because the crawling sensation of his own sins is still too close.

He doesn’t know how long it took for Dick to notice the first time.

But if it weren’t for Dick, Jason still wouldn’t know about the second.

He can still hear the children shrieking in the fading light.

He tries to pretend he doesn’t know what it sounds like when Tim screams from far more pain than even a Gotham playground can muster.

Tries to pretend he doesn’t care about the thought of what might be causing them now.

Tries.

Fails.

Gets up, gets moving, goes hunting for blood, for Gotham, for distraction something. Anything.

Tries not to wonder if Dick will come home.

(Dick comes home, and Bruce comes home, and the center is back, the center is spinning, wider and wider out of control, and he tries not to think about what it means that he cares about this, that he cares about any of it, that he can’t stop thinking and trying not to think of what it means that Bruce keeps vanishing to scour the globe and that Tim still hasn’t come home.)