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John Constantine’s face fills the largest of the monitors in the cave, each of his angular Romantic Hero features magnified to movie star-proportions; if Bruce was here, Dick is certain, he would hate it. “Uh huh,” he says, as soon as Dick finishes, nodding knowingly. “Sounds like your garden-variety haunting to me.” He grins through the camera, pearly-white and smug. “Any of you come into contact with the other side in your illustrious careers?”
Dick pinches the bridge of his nose. Beside him, Jason’s tone promises violence. “You’re really not as funny as you think, Constantine.”
“Sorry.” Constantine does not sound sorry at all. “Couldn’t help it. You Bats are a right freaky lot, aren’t ya? I swear, one of you drops dead every other week just for the hell of it. Getting all of you at once is like completing a collector’s set. Speaking of, I was sorry to hear about the big guy. How long’s it been this time, then?”
Dick swears he can hear Jason’s teeth grind from across the room. “If you’re talking about the funeral,” Tim says, cold as the arctic. “Two months.”
Constantine hums. “You reckon it’ll stick this time?”
“The next time I lay eyes on you in person, Constantine,” Damian growls, “I will impart upon you something that will certainly ‘stick this time’--”
Dick sighs, sharp. The room falls silent. “Can you help us?”
Constantine’s face sobers. “I wish I could, Grayson,” he says. “I mean that. But I can’t leave Istanbul. I’m in the middle of a house of cards that could all come tumbling down if I pull out now. I’d only be playing the role of magician’s assistant, anyway. Don’t let the movies fool you: Stock exorcisms don’t work. You’ll have to find the source, and no one knows that dusty old house better than you. Plus,” here he winks, but only at Dick, “I don’t have the legs for it. Despite what the succubus I sent back to the underworld told me last week.”
“Right.” It is what Dick was expecting, but not what he had hoped. “Thanks, John.”
“Hey.” Constantine’s voice softens. “Stay in touch, yeah? I kid, but a dead Batman is enough to kill the mood. A dead Nightwing, and that’s the end of the social season.”
“Your concern is appreciated,” Dick says, and ends the call.
Jason looks down at him with a frown that is not so much irritated at Constantine’s swagger as it is softly concerned—at what, Dick doesn’t know. Stephanie is the first to voice what they’re all thinking, because she’s always been particularly good at that: “So. What’s the over/under on the manor being haunted by Bruce’s ghost?”
Tim grimaces. Dick feels a headache coming on. “I guess, given his last mission, it’s not impossible,” Tim says. “But, uh. It’s not really his style.”
Annoyance flashes across Damian’s face, but he isn’t the impatient eleven-year-old he once was. He reins himself in with restraint that makes Dick’s chest ache; then he says, with vulnerability he never would have allowed himself four years ago, “If it is Father… His spirit may not behave in the ways we are accustomed to. Death has a way of—of changing you.”
Dick wants to hold him; Dick wants to run. Jason shifts, clears his throat. “I’m with the kid, for once—we all know how that merry-go-round fucked me up in particular—but…” Dick feels the furtive slide of Jason’s eyes toward him. “I gotta bring it up. Are we sure Bruce is actually, y’know. Dead?”
Sucking, vacuous silence descends over the cave. Dick feels four pairs of eyes flick to him and skitter away again. The headache is fast becoming a migraine. “As much as I appreciate the kid gloves you’re all handling me with, they’re really not necessary,” he deadpans. “I plan to give every theory its due diligence.” He swivels the chair back around to the monitors. “Thanks for sitting in on the call with me. Go get some rest. I’ll give you an update in the morning.”
“Um,” Tim starts, at the same time that Jason scoffs “Fat chance” and Damian declares, “I’m staying with you.”
Dick rolls his eyes. Were they always this hard to deal with? “Have you already forgotten that the house is quiet when you’re here? Can’t exactly investigate something that doesn’t happen. No point in all of us losing sleep if we get nothing out of it.”
Jason turns away from the others and lowers his voice, so that it’s just the two of them. It’s been just the two of them a lot lately. “Dick. You’ve got no idea what this thing really is. You’re going to look me in the eye and tell me you think it makes sense for you to face down a potential hostile alone?”
There is a voice in Dick’s head, one that sounds frighteningly like the creak of a rusty door, scratching in the walls, footsteps down an empty hallway. He thinks, If things were different I would tell you everything. He thinks, If things were different, we wouldn’t be alone.
He says: “It’s my case, J. I appreciate your help, but I don’t need your approval.”
It’s not quite a reproach, but the threat is there. Dick nearly expects Jason to recoil, then lash out in turn—but Jason isn’t like that anymore, either. They’re all older now, older and wiser. And more tired.
Jason sighs, far more weary than angry. “Fine, then. Come on, boys and girls. Nightwing needs to brood. No use for us here.”
This time Damian does look ready to protest, but even with the vertical advantages he’s gained in the past few years, he’s still no match for Jason. Jason herds Tim, Damian, and Stephanie up the stairs, then pauses at the entrance and turns. “Dick.”
“Hm?”
“You don’t have to become him. I know you think you do—but you don’t.”
Dick listens to the door seal shut behind him.
#
Dick opens his eyes to darkness outside his window and the sound of footsteps in the hall.
For a fraction of a second he thinks it’s Damian, on his way to the kitchen for a midnight snack; or Tim, still awake in the smallest hours of the morning, despite it being his night off patrol. Then he remembers that Damian is with the new Titans, and Tim hasn’t lived in the manor in years; that the house is empty, and it is just him.
He gets up and goes to the door. There is no one in the hallway. The steps fade around the corner, heavy-heeled and steady, so familiar Dick could pick them out in his sleep. He thinks he hears a voice, barely a murmur, deep and muffled in the way that voices sound when you hear them through the wall in the dead of night. Dickie, it maybe says. It maybe doesn’t say anything at all.
His feet carry him forward, down the hall, past the looming portraits of the Wayne generations that haven’t been on display since Dick confessed they frightened him at eight years old. When did Bruce put them back up? Did he ever even take them down? He turns the corner and finds, still, no one; but he hears the voices now for sure, growing clearer with every step. They drift from around the cracked-open door of the bedroom at the end of the hall: Two voices, distinct; one soft and high, the other deep and low as the rumble of the earth. “I can’t,” says the child’s voice, tripping over a hiccup. “I really, really can’t.”
“You can,” says the other, steely, unyielding, allowing no weakness. “You have to move on. You have to learn to live again. And when you do, you have to decide: What kind of life is it you want to lead?”
He reaches for the door. A hand closes around his wrist.
The rough, warm touch is like an electric shock, jolting the world around him. He whirls around. “Dick,” Jason says, looking at him like Dick is a stranger. “What are you doing?”
“Jason?” Dick attempts to pull his arm back, but Jason’s grip only tightens. “Why are you here?”
“The fact that you really thought I’d leave you alone,” Jason returns, steadily, “just goes to show exactly why I couldn’t.” His eyes flick over Dick’s shoulder. “Is it in there? In Bruce’s room?”
Dick blinks, opens his mouth; realizes, for the first time, just where they’re standing. “Yes,” he whispers. He reaches for his belt a second before remembering he’s in his boxers. “I don’t have…”
Jason sighs and reaches into his pocket to pull out what Dick recognizes as the rosary Constantine sent over via zeta tube—either cursed or charmed, depending on who you ask. “I really hope this doesn’t work,” he mutters, moving past Dick towards the door. “If this is what turns me back onto religion, my mother’s going to be rolling in her grave…”
“Wait.” Before Dick quite knows it, he’s catching at Jason’s arm. “You can’t.”
Jason’s brow ticks up. Then his face softens. “Dick,” he says. “We can’t beat it if we don’t know what it is.”
“No.” Dick shakes his head, and as he does, he feels the brush of a heavy hand over his brow, large enough to cradle the curve of his skull in its palm. “You can’t—it’s—”
Private.
Jason gently pulls away. “We’ve handled much worse, Dickie. Besides, I’m about ninety-nine percent sure Constantine is just jerking our chain.” He turns and pushes open the door.
The room is quiet, a nighttime vista of heavy mahogany gilded in moonlight. There is no one, nothing; the bed is empty, the desk lies under a coating of dust. Jason cautiously paces the perimeter of the room and comes back around to where Dick lingers in the doorway, unable to cross for a reason he cannot quite articulate. “Dick,” he says. In the soft silvern darkness his eyes are gentle and Lazarus-green. “There’s nothing in here.”
Dick swallows, steps back; turns so he doesn’t have to look. “I’ll see if the monitors in the cave picked anything up.”
Jason just looks at him. “Right,” he says.
Dick starts down the hall, past the shadows that leak up through the floor, past the empty walls. He makes it down to the grandfather clock in the foyer before he realizes Jason has followed him. “Dick,” he says, just before Dick opens the entrance. “Have you gotten much sleep lately?”
Dick hesitates—then meets Jason’s eyes, like ripping off a bandaid. Relief sweeps over him when he is met with blue instead of green. “I’m fine,” he says. Jason blinks at him with skepticism. “I just—the sooner we figure this out, the better. The house is too sensitive a target. We can’t risk compromising the cave.”
Jason keeps Dick pinned under his stare for a moment longer. “Yeah,” he says, at last. “I’m with you. But Dick—” He stops short; sighs. “I hate that I have to say this. But you know we can’t risk compromising you, either, right?”
“I…” Dick’s mouth is dry. “Of course.”
“With Bruce gone or”—Jason grimaces—”god knows where… This whole thing falls apart without you, boy wonder. We don’t really go on without you.”
Dick feels his heart stutter in his chest. The cold vise he didn’t even realize had closed around his shoulders eases, just a little. Instinctively, he steps away from the clock, away from the part of the wall that is always a little cool from the draft in the cave. In that moment, Jason feels like the only source of heat in the entire house. “‘We’?”
Jason’s gaze flickers away, embarrassed. Then it returns again, resolute. “Me,” he says, quietly. “I don’t really go on without you.”
Dick swallows, hard. “Okay.”
“Okay?” Jason asks, and he’s smiling now, that crooked, curling grin.
“Yeah.” Dick reaches out, takes Jason’s hand in his. His hands are cold as ice, but Jason’s is warm. Dick thinks, I have this, I have this; I must have this.
He takes a deep breath and lets the voices fade into the settling of the house.
#
In the morning, the space in the bed beside Dick is empty. The curtains are drawn back, the sun hot on his face. He lies there for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the light; then he reaches out and sweeps a hand over the opposite side of the mattress. The sheets are cool under his palm.
He sits up. The house is quiet. There are no clothes on the floor besides his own, no sounds of running water coming from the shower. Yet somehow, Dick knows that Jason is still in the manor somewhere, within reach. He knows it because he knows what it feels like to be alone, and right now, he is not alone.
The kitchen: Jason always liked to make breakfast whenever he stayed over—before. Dick drifts down the hall toward the stairs, rubbing the last dregs of sleep from his eyes. Judging by the brightness of the sky in the windows it must be at least mid-morning, yet he can’t quite shake the weight of exhaustion draped around his shoulders. He doesn’t know why he feels so drained: He hasn’t taken a patrol in days, too wary of what the hostile force that could have infiltrated the manor might have done to his gear. Maybe Jason’s right; maybe I do need to get checked out, he thinks, grimly, as he rounds the corner. I can’t let Tim, Steph, and Cass pick up my slack forever.
He almost doesn’t hear it at first, faint as it is: Laughter, just a trace, drifting through the halls. He’s halfway down the stairs before it slows him in his tracks. “Jason?” he calls out, hesitant. There’s no reply; at least, nothing Dick can make out. There’s only that sound—that laughter, throaty, staccato, ricocheting off the walls. It grows louder and higher, until Dick becomes certain it’s not just his own footsteps echoing back at him; not just the wind, whistling in the eaves. Then it takes on a maniacal, gleeful edge and Dick’s blood runs cold, his mind reeling that he didn’t recognize it earlier—
A scream pierces through the manor. It is guttural with agony; it is the sound of someone in unimaginable pain. Dick breaks into a run, sprinting down the stairs two at a time. “Jason!” His heart hammers in his throat; fear, pure and clean and sharp as ice, slices through his veins. How did he get in? How did he get past the defenses? How, how, how—
A concussive force shakes the world around him. He stumbles and crashes onto his knees. For a moment, the roof, the walls, the ground trembles like it will all fracture apart. Then the shaking stills, but the quiet does not return: Something is banging on the floor beneath him.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Steady and insistent, like a battering ram against a barricade, like a buried heartbeat. Dick stares at the spot in horror. He breathes out, before he quite knows what he’s saying: “Jason?”
A pause—then the pounding resumes with greater force, desperate and rapid. Dick falls on the floor, clawing at the polished wood, scrabbling for a grip. “Jason!” he yells. His throat begins to close, as if he can feel what Jason is feeling—as if he is interred there beside him, locked in the dark earth, where Bruce and Dick buried him with their mistakes. He tears at the wood with all of his strength, but the thick, lacquered mahogany of the coffin lid remains impervious—
“Dick!” A tight grip clamps down on his shoulder and yanks him back. He loses his balance and sprawls inelegantly on his tailbone. When he looks up, it is into a spritely, sharp-chinned face under a mop of unruly curls that he has not thought of in so long he nearly forgot what it looked like. Now it is so broken he can barely recognize it: Blood matting the curls into filth; high cheekbones distorted and mottled; the eyes, even half-swollen shut, burning acid green—
The world shudders and resets itself. Jason—grown Jason, his Jason—looks down at him with stark fear. “Dickie,” he says, helplessly. His hands are closed, tight, around Dick’s wrists. It is only when Dick spends some time blinking at them that he realizes it is because his fingertips are bleeding.
Dick’s eyes slide past Jason to the floor. It is just the floor; there is nothing—and no one—underneath it.
Over Jason’s shoulder, Dick catches sight of another frightened face. “Damian?”
Damian swallows. “We heard you fall down the stairs…”
Dick’s fingers, where the skin has been scraped off, start to throb. His heart plummets into his stomach. “I’m—I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“You were shouting, Grayson,” Damian says, slowly, like each word is a step through a minefield. “What did you see?”
Dick fights the urge to close his eyes. Somewhere in Jason’s face, there is still that impish fifteen-year-old, impulsive, open, scraped and bruised but far from broken. Sometimes Dick can still see him: The person Jason might have become if he was not murdered as a child. Smooth skin that battle scars and worry lines now mark, clear eyes unclouded by the constant twisting psychological torture of resurrection. I wish—I wish...
“Ghosts,” he whispers. “I’m seeing ghosts.”
#
“I’m not picking up any fear gas.” Tim says this carefully, as if somehow it will set Dick off. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t any; Scarecrow could’ve changed his formula from the last time…”
Dick scrubs a hand over his face. Jason stands at the kitchen counter, assembling a platter of sandwiches and pretending not to eavesdrop. Damian sits beside him, poring over the same reports on his own tablet, scowling every time Tim says something “too obvious” or “not helpful.”
“It’s fine, Tim,” he says. “I doubt Crane’s behind this: We have continuous surveillance of his cell in Arkham and he hasn’t budged in months.”
“That…goes for all the usual suspects, actually.” He hesitates. “Joker included.”
Dick sighs. “I know.”
“Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t him, it just—”
“I know, Tim,” Dick says, sharper than he’d like. He’s getting pretty tired of everyone walking on eggshells around him. “It’s okay. I’m open to the possibility that I’m just going crazy.”
Tim looks to Jason; Jason walks over and hands Tim the platter of sandwiches. “Tim, Damian,” he says. “Can you give us a minute?”
Damian bristles. “I’m not leaving Grayson.”
But something in Tim’s face must convince him: Dick watches as the defiance drains from Damian’s posture, until he is reluctant and resigned all at once. “Come on,” Tim says, quietly, getting up from the table. “Let’s go down to the cave. Maybe we’ll find something in the archives that can help us.”
Jason waits until Tim and Damian are out of earshot before taking a seat. “Hey.”
Dick snorts. “Hi.”
“You okay?”
Dick’s fingers ache in their neatly wrapped bandaging. “Jason,” he starts. He looks into Jason’s eyes and find them searching him in turn. “Last night…”
Jason’s brow furrows. “Last night?”
Dick’s chest grows cold. He looks away. “I’m fine.”
Jason opens his mouth to say something; changes his mind halfway. “Dick,” he says. “The mission. With Bruce. What happened?”
Dick tenses. Not this. Not this. “You know what happened.”
“Except I don’t, not really.” Jason huffs. “All I know is that Bruce is gone, but i don’t know how, or why, or where, not really, because you won’t tell--”
“And that’s all you need to know!” Now Dick really does snap; now the venom leaches out of him. “Bruce isn’t here anymore, Jason, and that’s all you need to know because I’ve got the rest handled.”
Jason stares at him. Then he laughs like he can’t quite believe his ears. “Handled? Dickie, I just caught you trying to find buried treasure under Wayne Manor—and giving yourself a skinning in the process. If this really is a new enemy, one who’s managed to get past all the defenses Bruce put on this place, then you’re going to need all the help you can goddamn get. And if it isn’t—”
Dick flinches, before the words are even out. Maybe Jason sees it; maybe Jason is just a better man than Dick. The hard edge to his voice softens. He sighs. “Then you really need all the help you can goddamn get.”
Dick gets up and goes to the cave, leaving Jason alone at the table.
#
The cave was the first place where Dick knew the real Gotham: Even on the nights he climbed out of the window of his new room in Wayne Manor to run the streets alone at eight years old, determined to avenge his parents’ deaths, he never felt he truly understood the city until Bruce walked him down the winding stars hidden behind the grandfather clock and into a vast underground cavern filled with shadows and promise. Even in the years when they barely spoke, most of Dick’s vigilantism based out of the walk-in closet in his shitty apartment, there was always a part of him that uncoiled the moment he stepped back in the cave—a part of him that knew he was safe.
Now Bruce is gone, and Dick sits in his chair at the console, combing through the environmental input from the manor’s plethora of monitors and sensors data point by data point. His Nightwing suit is pulled up to the waist, forgotten when he picked up the first anomaly in the manor’s climate readings. The report tells him that, between the hours of four and five this morning, the ambient temperature in the northwestern wing dropped by thirty degrees; the rest of the house never wavered. For a moment the numbers blur and the cave fades and he is eight years old, so small the pajamas Alfred gave him hang off his shoulders, so cold in the vast empty manor that could not be any more different from the crowded, chaotic circus he called home that his fingernails turn blue. When he works up the courage to creep into Bruce’s room at night, long before finding out about Batman, Bruce is always warm under his covers, and does not mind when Dick puts tiny, freezing hands into his.
“Don’t you wish you could go back?” Dick starts and whirls around. He knows the face that is looking up at him, yet it has become like a stranger’s—crystal-blue eyes and a sixties schoolboy haircut and, god, was he ever really that young? Was he ever really that soft? “Before everything that came after? Don’t you wish you could go back and stop it all from happening?”
The child steps closer, within arm’s reach. Dick stares at him with so much terror it threatens to close his throat, with so much longing his chest aches from it. He blinks to clear his wavering vision and only then realizes he is crying. “I…I miss it,” he whispers, a confession torn from deep inside him. “But I wouldn’t change it.”
The child pulls a face, clearly skeptical. Dick remembers practicing that expression in the mirror, moving his thick tufty eyebrows up and down and watching them wiggle like caterpillars. He remembers his mother, clicking her tongue disapprovingly, saying, “Dick, don’t make faces when other people are talking. It’s not polite.” “Wouldn’t you?” he asks, high, reedy voice sharp with disbelief. “Even if you knew what would happen to Jason and Barbara and Stephanie? To Sarah Essen? To Wally, to Lian, to Donna…”
“Stop,” Dick says.
“All the mistakes,” the child says. “All the people lost. The normal life you’ll never know because of the path he let you follow him down. You’d repeat it all? Even if you knew better?”
Dick swallows. “Bruce made mistakes because no one else had done what he did. But that doesn’t mean I’ll repeat them.”
The child takes another step closer, and as he does, his face blurs and morphs: Skin darkening, eyes dulling, hair growing short and bristly and jaw strengthening into a semi-permanent frown. Face bruised and broken, a hole opening in the chest of his red Kevlar bodysuit and spilling out his life. Damian shows him a sardonic smile; behind him, the shadow of the Heretic looms. “Richard,” he says, softly, chidingly. “You already have.”
Dick jumps out of the chair. Damian lunges forward and grabs him by the arms. “Richard!” he snaps. “You’re scaring me!”
The cave spins; the emptiness overhead expands like an inflating balloon, trapping Dick in the center of a vacuum. Distantly, he hears, “Drake! Help me hold him down!” Then there’s a sharp sting in the side of his neck. A moment later, heaviness spreads like thick syrup through his limbs. He stumbles back, then collapses to the cold concrete floor. As he lies on his back, losing consciousness with each blink, he sees Damian’s face hovering over him, whole and unbloodied again but more terrified than Dick has ever seen him. “Richard,” he murmurs; he sounds like he is losing something of himself. “What is happening to you?”
Dick does not get the chance to answer before the world goes dark.
#
Dick draws in a deep, steadying breath. He does his best not to scream; he thinks it probably won’t help his case much if he screams. His efforts are rewarded when his voice comes out calmer than even he dared to hope. “Guys,” he says. “I know you mean well. But this is ridiculous. Please let me out.”
A beat of silence. Then, from the other side of the locked door to Dick’s bedroom, Jason’s voice, forced-cheerful: “Sorry, Dickie, no can do. Just sit tight for us while we figure out what’s happening to you, okay?”
Dick huffs. He resists the urge to stomp his feet. “Don’t you think you might need, I don’t know, me to figure out what’s happening to me?”
“Whatever it is, seems like it’s accelerating,” says Tim’s voice, in that too-patient, too-reasonable tone he uses when Jason and Bruce are fighting, or Damian is demanding an unrealistic level of responsibility, or Dick has failed to take care himself for the past several weeks and is in the middle of a meltdown. “Right now, the best thing we can do is make sure you’re safe while we follow this up. Even if that does mean, um—”
“Locking me in my own room?” Dick snaps. “Like a kid on a timeout?”
“Think of it more as a scheduled break,” Tim returns, unphased. “You could use a day off.”
Dick lets his forehead thump against the door. He hears Jason sigh. “I know this is like telling water not to be wet, but try not to worry. We’ve got you, Dick. You’re not alone.”
Dick thinks they wait a while for him to respond: He doesn’t hear their footsteps carrying them away for another minute. It is only then that he lets out the breath he is holding and turns. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s kind of the problem.”
The door on the other side of the room looks the same as all the others. It stands as if it has always been there, unobtrusive, unyielding; it stands as if the rest of the house could fall down around it and it would still be there, calling out to Dick, as if it has not just spuriously appeared overnight but instead existed from the day he stepped foot in the manor, pulling him in. Dick knows that there is only one door to his bedroom—but right now, looking at the second one, he does not believe it.
For a second, he considers doing as he’s told: Crawling into bed and pulling the covers over his head and letting his team handle everything until the world is set right again. The moment passes as quickly as it comes. He crosses the room and pulls open the door.
The hallway he steps into does not fit into the schematic of Wayne Manor that Dick has in his head, yet somehow he knows exactly where he is. He follows it to its end and finds himself in a room that looks like the kitchen, but cannot be the kitchen, because the kitchen is on the ground floor and he is on the third. Yet there is the stove and the refrigerator, the polished mahogany cabinets and spotless marble countertops, the sturdy oak table that Bruce’s great-great-grandfather built in his carpentry shop and passed down through the generations. And there, seated at that table, are Ioan and Mary Grayson, dressed in their show costumes, primly eating a dinner of beef stew and cabbage rolls.
When Mary looks up and smiles, Dick feels as if he has stepped into the sun. “Hello, my robin,” she greets him. She gestures to the third plate. “Come eat.”
Slowly, Dick crosses the kitchen and folds himself into the empty seat. His mother looks just how he has immortalized her: Thick, dark hair clipped into an elegant knot; soft coppery eyeshadow and deep red lipstick, the color of cherries, the one his father bought her in Paris; the string of Romani prayer beads around her neck that she never took off. Next to her, his father grins and winks at him around a mouthful of cabbage, laugh lines crinkling at the corners of his warm brown eyes. It hits him like an electric shock, how young they were when they died: His father thirty-one, his mother barely thirty. If I make it to next year, the thought comes to him, I’ll have outlived them both.
“How are you, son?” Ioan asks, in that rich Balkan accent Dick remembers from his dreams. “Are you doing us proud?”
Dick swallows past a throat dry as sand. The tears that leak down the crevices of his face taste like the ocean. “I’m trying, Da.”
“Ioan, you always put so much pressure on him,” Mary says chidingly. “As long as Dick is trying his best, that’s all we can ask of him.”
The lights flicker; the scene shifts. The stew and cabbage becomes crisp fingerling potatoes and a pristinely carved roast. Dick looks up from the table to find himself gazing into paler, sharper features, dignified in a crisply pressed dress shirt, salt-and-pepper hair combed to the side. A face that Dick has only seen in paintings and photographs raises his brows knowingly at Dick, as if they share a mutual secret. “Trying his best,” says Thomas Wayne, “and honoring his responsibilities. That’s the way of Wayne men, isn’t it, son?”
Martha heaves an airy sigh and reaches for her wine glass. “Thomas, he’s eleven. You can wait until he’s at least got his learner’s permit before you start training him to take over the company, can’t you?”
“It’s the family business, Marty,” Thomas says. He pins Dick’s gaze and holds it; Dick sits there, paralyzed. “It’s his legacy. He has to know that. He has to understand that.”
“I’m sure he’ll understand plenty, dear, but right now all he needs to understand is how to do his algebra homework…”
Dick gets to his feet. As he steps away from the table, the kitchen draws away from him, falling down a lengthening tunnel; the last he sees of it, looking over his shoulder, are his parents sitting around their dinner of stew and roast, cabbage and potatoes, watching him with all their expectations laid out on their faces. He turns and walks forward and finds himself once again in the cave, in the back away from the monitors, where all of the costumes the various Bats have worn over the years rest in their glass cases. Barbara’s Batgirl armor; the Red Robin cowl; the tattered remains of the suit Jason died in. At the very back: The first Batsuit, so much lighter than it is now, so much of the face exposed.
“Dick?” Tim’s voice, startled. A moment later, he strides out from the bay of monitors, looking irritated but not surprised. “How did you get past—” He stops short, his entire body flinching back as if in collision with something solid. He looks up, then down again; his face contorts in first confusion, then horror. “Jason. Jason!”
The door to the case swings open with a faint, pleasing hiss. The fabric of the suit is soft and textured and warm in Dick’s palms, as if it is still drenched in body heat. He remembers deep, dark winter nights tucked against this suit, the weight of a bulletproof cape draped over his shoulders. He remembers seeing it for the first time, framed in moonlight, a manifestation of all his dreams and nightmares flashing across the sky.
“What the hell is that,” Jason says, and he’s pointing at Dick—or rather, at something over Dick’s shoulder. Dick turns and finds himself on a familiar road: The long, empty stretch of Highway 61 that leads into Gotham from the south, with the most iconic view of the city—towers and skyscrapers like the turrets of a castle—laid out along the horizon. After the earthquake that turned Gotham into a no man’s land for a year destroyed it, it was never rebuilt—yet now it unfurls before Dick like the yellow brick road to Oz, wind-sharp and darkly glittering. As his eyes adjust to the night he sees a familiar black car parked by the side of the road. The headlights are on; the armored siding is lifted up, and the door is propped open.
Dick hears Tim and Jason and now Damian’s voices behind him, the words “portal” and “signature” and “readings” spoken with increasing urgency, but they fade and blur into the soft static of the night. A figure emerges from the driver’s side of the car and unfolds to his full height with the rasping whisper of Kevlar against asphalt. Their eyes meet across the road. Dick feels his heart somersault in his chest.
“Are you ready, Dick?” Bruce asks, expectantly.
The sound of frantic pounding momentarily draws Dick’s attention away. Jason is slamming his fist against the invisible wall that separates Dick from the rest of the cave. He shouts something, but it is so muffled Dick cannot make out the words. Some distant part of his brain remembers to focus on Jason’s mouth. He reads, without really meaning to, It needs you to go willingly. You can’t.
“Dick.” Bruce is stern, almost disappointed. Dick swallows past the knot in his throat. The shadows are so strange at this time of night; it is hard to make out Bruce’s face.
“My suit is still in the cave,” he says, part apology, part plea. But even as he says it he knows it will not work. There is only one inevitable conclusion—only one path Dick Grayson’s life can follow now—and he has already seen it; already accepted it.
“Your suit is right there,” Bruce says, and points to Dick’s hands.
Dick! An odd whisper in the wind; Dick thinks he must be imagining things. You have to fight it! You have to come back!
The only part of the suit left to put on is the cowl. Dick pulls it over his head and finds it fits perfectly. The car sits empty with its engine humming, waiting patiently; beyond, Gotham beckons, open and hungry, whatever walking inside it once again walking alone.