Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jason kept The Brick.

Dick isn’t sure why that revelation hits him so hard. It’s not as if he’d expected Jason to bin it the second he buried its buyer. His little brother is a hoarder at heart, particularly when the item hoarded is books. The streets denied him the ability to keep much, forcing him to leave things behind in the name of survival, but once given a stable home with ample storage space he’d gone feral. His room at the manor still has one wall lined end to end with bookshelves, although Dick had noticed they were a little less overflowing than in his memory.

This is why. He’d brought a selection here, to his Crime Alley apartment, The Brick chief among them.

He hadn’t looked for The Brick in the manor, hadn’t given it a second thought, but now it’s right here in front of him, looking as pristine as the last time he saw it, the thick spine firm against the fingers he runs down it. It has him feeling oddly emotional.

It’s a remnant of a happier time for Dick, a kinder time.

It’s a reminder of what he sacrificed that happiness for.

He’s jolted from his melodramatic waffling when Jason hobbles into the bedroom on his crutches.

Instantly his attention moves from the books to his brother, and he catches himself before he can jerk forward to offer his help — help in what, Dick isn’t sure. Jason is perfectly sturdy, balanced, in no need of any assistance, and he wouldn’t appreciate the attempt.

It’s the big brother instinct to protect and assist that dictates Dick’s every move. Always, even when there’s nothing he can do in the moment to satisfy it, it urges action.

“You can throw any of those books in,” Jason says, oblivious to Dick’s internal distress. “I’ll read all of them.”

“As if you don’t have enough books available in the manor,” Dick replies. He’s proud (relieved) that he manages to keep his voice steady.

Right now, when that protective instinct is directed at his injured brother, it makes him extra antsy. Probably something to do with him falling off a roof — Dick (rather understandably, to be fair to himself) has issues with people he loves falling.

To be fair to Jason, though, it wasn’t exactly falling. Pushed would be more accurate: pushed into the fall.

They’re all trained to fall, of course they are. Bruce and Dick both watched that night as his parents plummeted; add on top all the time they spend running around on rooftops, and, well. Falling was always going to be a crucial part of the Bats’ curriculum.

That training isn’t a guaranteed save. You can practise for hours, day after day after day, and sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes you just land wrong.

And Jason landed wrong.

Dick had listened from his usual nightly position on the comms to the initial cry, the hauntingly familiar thud, the bitten off scream—

He didn’t see it happen, hasn’t sought any footage since. He isn’t sure if the lack of visuals is helping, or if his imagination running in all sorts of green-tinted nightmarish directions is infinitely worse. The frequency of his nightmares have increased massively since dying. Now, in the oldest, the original, the eternal recurrence, Jason’s face blurs into his parents’ as they fall.

But Jason is fine. Jason is fine! A broken leg, a few accompanying bruises, that’s it. He’s fine.

Dick is— Dick is also fine. Mostly. He’s on edge and jittery and overprotective, but he’s fine.

He keeps having moments like this, minor incidents setting off every long established alarm in his mind, ranging from large things like Jason breaking his leg on what should’ve been an ordinary patrol to issues as minor as stumbling across The Brick. Something to do with the Pit and the League rewiring his brain to put him even more on edge than his original Bat training did, if Dick had to guess. Regardless of the source, it’s annoying.

It’s at its worst at nights, when his father and siblings are out in the unforgiving battleground that is Gotham and Dick is stuck, useless, on the comms.

He’d requested it. He’d needed it, the break from the chaos of vigilantism, the opportunity to breathe, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself from heading down to the cave and silently jumping onto the comms.

If he had an available suit, an identity, he’d have been back out in the field that first night, unable to stop himself. In some ways, he’s grateful that Jason’s claiming of Nightwing stripped him of the option. In others, he’s cursing his helplessness, stewing in the green as he fears for his family.

Damian suggested one night, quietly, after muting both their comms, that Dick get an early night. Stop torturing yourself, was the translation.

Dick had grinned, ruffled Damian’s hair and relished the contact, and stayed seated.

He reaches over now to do the same to Jason, his brother unable to duck away without risking overbalancing, and the resultant scowl dilutes the green. “We came here primarily for clothes, but no, you just want books. It’s a good thing I came along or you’d have nothing to wear.”

Jason’s scowl deepens. He shrugs out of his backpack — currently containing perishable food from his kitchen; Jason will never be prepared to needlessly waste food — and drops it on the bed. This is a more impressive feat than it usually would be, given the impediment of the crutches. “You won’t find it so funny when I steal all your clothes to make up for it.”

Dick almost, almost, cracks a joke about the Robin suit, and Nightwing after that.

It’s not the time. Not for either of them.

This is one good thing to come from the broken leg, though: Jason’s moving back into the manor for the recovery months.

He’s been in the manor almost full time anyway. Dick hadn’t realised this wasn’t the norm at first, until Alfred commented on how nice it was to have the whole family back under one roof and everyone looked at Jason before Dick and Damian.

Dick doesn’t know what caused Jason to move out. He’s scared to ask, in case it disrupts this temporary cessation. The rare nights since Dick’s return that Jason spent elsewhere has left Dick a ball of anxiety and illogical anger, unable to relax into sleep with his brother so out of reach.

Damian noticed. On those nights, he’s taken to padding into Dick’s room, settling himself into Dick’s large bed (over twice the size of the tiny cot the League had granted him and wow he’s missed the space). Wrapped around his brother’s smaller frame, syncing his breaths to Damian’s as they slow into sleep, Dick is able to rest.

It’s not a perfect fix. His sleep is always light, even for vigilante standards, but now the slightest atmospheric shifts have him jolting awake in a panic.

The rarest nights, when Steph is persuaded to stay overnight after patrol and training, are the best. Dick hates having her almost always out of reach, more than he ever did in the last timeline, and the knowledge that she’s safe in the room next to his, with Tim opposite her and Jason and Damian fanning out to either side, present and home and safe—

All that’s missing is Barbara, but she’s usually in her clock tower, which is second only to the manor when it comes to security. It’s easier to convince the green of her safety.

Jason could probably manage on crutches in his own apartment, if he was stubborn enough to want that. Previous timeline Jason would have been impossible to drag to the manor, injured or not — it took years before he began to relax that stance.

This Jason caved after about a minute of needling.

And now he’s shuffling over to his closet and rifling through neat piles of clothes. “Seriously, throw in whatever books will fit,” he says, grabbing a stack of jeans and lobbing them to land not so neatly beside the backpack on the bed.

He busies himself with his clothes, and Dick leaves him to it, turning back to the books.

It’s a relatively meagre selection, compared to the packed shelves of his room at the manor. Only one bookshelf, not quite full. Dick registers the presence of most of Jason’s old favourites: his first edition Pride and Prejudice; his less fancy Pride and Prejudice, the copy he actually reads from, leaving the first edition as decoration; The Count of Monte Cristo; a whole string of Sherlocks; Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden…

And the Brick.

Dick grabs one of the carrier bags they brought along and slides in Jason’s absolute favourites from that group, the ones he knows his brother returns to time and time again.

After a moment of deliberation, he adds the Brick on top.

“I was thinking,” Jason starts, and stops, his fingers tapping a restless pattern against the armrest of the car door.

He doesn’t continue.

“That must have been difficult,” Dick says, going for the easy joke.

Jason doesn’t match his gentle mockery. The tapping evolves into drumming.

“You could be Nightwing again, while I’m out of commission.”

Dick risks a stunned glance over at his brother. Jason stares resolutely out the passenger window.

“You don’t have to. I know you wanted a break from that lifestyle. But I obviously can’t for a while, and I have people under my protection that could do with a Nightwing. Besides, you don’t exactly have an identity to go out in the field with even if you are ready to go back out since I kinda stole yours, so it’s there. If you did want it. I wouldn’t mind.”

This is a problem. This is— this is a huge problem.

See, Dick is pretty sure Jason wants to hand Nightwing back permanently. Not out of any personal desire to give it up, but because he thinks it rightfully belongs to Dick. It doesn’t matter how many times Dick assures him otherwise, Jason still feels guilty about his inadvertent identity theft.

Dick doesn’t want to encourage that mindset, doesn’t want to give Jason any ammunition to compound that belief, but—

He does want to be back in the field.

He’s been sketching a few costume ideas, drawing on abandoned concepts of what had eventually become Nightwing (not Discowing, though — Discowing stays firmly locked away where no one can mock him for it), taking ideas he’d liked but ultimately discarded and trying to build something new out of the scraps.

Those ideas are nowhere near ready, but his body is. His mind is.

Out on the streets he can protect his family. Instead of listening through a green haze as they throw themselves into danger, he can be there at their sides, assisting them, making sure they’re safe—

He wants that.

And one last run as Nightwing, a farewell tour, sounds more appealing than he’s willing to admit to Jason.

If he phrases it right, if he can convince Jason that he’s only saying yes to look after Crime Alley while he can’t, if he makes it clear that this is only a temporary measure—

“Okay,” he says. “If you’re that worried about your people then I’m happy to keep an eye on them for you.”

He chances another glance across. Jason doesn’t look back at him, remaining firmly turned away, but his shoulders slumps — relief or sorrow, Dick can’t discern which.

“We still have your old suits, the ones designed around your acrobatics, or we could adjust one of mine to fit your proportions if you wanted to pass as me.”

Straight to business. Maybe agreeing was a mistake.

Too late to walk it back. Yours, he means to say. It’s only temporary. I’ll make it work for me.

“Mine,” is what he actually says. “No point messing with the measurements of yours when it’s only temporary. Besides, our combat styles are so different that people are bound to notice either way.”

His attempt to drag it back into the intended message is flimsy. It doesn’t feel successful.

“Yeah, okay,” Jason says. Dick isn’t sure if he imagines him slumping further. “I’ll get you my main patrol routes and a list of people to check in on.”

Dick’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. Yeah, he’s fucked up. He was supposed to say no, he should’ve said no—

“Okay,” he says, echoes, fighting to focus on the road even as green panic claws at the edges of his vision. “That’ll be really helpful.”

Jason’s not wrong, is the thing. He has people that need his protection. There’s only so much Steph can do alone in the cesspit that is Crime Alley; a firm hand is required to keep it in line, and that has always been Jason.

For a short time, that will have to be Dick.

He’s committed now. It’s only a couple months. It’ll be good for both of them — Dick to get back out there, Jason at the end when Dick gives Nightwing back and he maybe hopefully please realises that it’s wholly his mantle now.

It’ll be fine.

Chapter Text

His Nightwing suit feels like coming home.

It needs a few adjustments to fit a body that has changed a lot in the years since it was last used, with height growth and weight change and an increase in muscle mass from the League’s training, but the blue bird splashed across his chest is unchanged, still exactly as he designed it, and it’s home.

He built this identity from scratch. When he’d lost everything, Bruce, his home and his identity as Robin, he’d begun anew with Nightwing. It’s him, in a way that he’d outgrown as Robin.

He’s missed it. He will miss it.

This isn’t the design he died in, the version of the suit hung up in a case just like a tattered Robin suit hangs in his memories. He bypassed that one. He didn’t think it would do Bruce and Jason any good to see him in a suit marred with their own memories. The exact details of the suit don’t matter to Dick, though: V or bird, extra stripes or not, it’s still Nightwing. It’s still home.

He waited for Bruce to leave with Tim before suiting up, because Bruce would never have let him back out so quickly. Not without time to wrap his head around his son’s march back into danger.

Dick gets it, but he’s not prepared to yield to it.

He takes Jason’s bike because it’s got all sorts of upgrades that his old ones lack, getting closer to the technology he remembers and longs for from the other timeline, waving to Damian and Jason as he passes.

They’ve swapped places, him and Jason, his brother filling Dick’s usual place alongside Damian on the comms. He looks resigned to it, for longer than the months his recovery will take. Fuck. Dick will have to find a way to properly convince him sometime.

Not now. His head isn’t in the right mindset for convincing stubborn brothers that they haven’t lost the identity they’ve spent years building. He’ll use his patrol time to think about his argument.

He parks Jason’s bike on the edge of his territory and grapples up to the nearest roof. The rush of it, the blast of air in his face, the achingly beautiful feeling of flying that he’s gone so long without—

Dick has missed this.

He lands neatly, like it’s been a day instead of years since he last grappled anywhere. The instinct is buried deep, like the trapeze: unforgettable, innate.

He takes a moment on the roof, breathes it in, observes the city he fought so hard to return to from his preferred angle of up high. Gotham’s smog is thick in his lungs, its greyness vast and enduring and dull, its streets rife with crime.

It’s beautiful.

That permanent green tint to his vision seems to recede a little when faced with Gotham’s oppressive grey.

“Hey, Nightwing,” Barbara’s voice crackles in his ear. “It’s good to have you back.”

“It’s good to be back,” he admits to her. On this private channel, where Jason can’t overhear and take it the wrong way, he’s willing to voice it. Barbara won’t tell.

Dick takes a deep breath, one last moment to himself, and leaps from the roof.

He runs one of Jason’s preset routes, one they’d agreed on together as perfect for his first patrol. It hits all his major areas, covers all his protected people. It’s eye opening, actually, a window into what drives his brother’s vigilantism. He’d only ever gotten brief glimpses of Jason in his Crime Alley element last time, getting most of his information from the inhabitants’ very vocal defence of their Red Hood whenever pressed. Now he experiences it first hand. The people trust Nightwing in a way they’ve never trusted Dick. Most of those that Jason told him to talk to instantly recognise him as a different person, but he repeats phrases and comforts that Jason drilled into him and in increments, in small and steady steps, they relax.

Jason is incredible. The work he’s done, single-handed, to improve the lives of Crime Alley’s residents is impossibly immense. Dick is so proud of him. He should have been proud of the Red Hood, too.

Topping all that off, Jason proves himself as a brother by adding his newest sister to Dick’s list.

Keep an eye on Steph, had rounded out his instructions. She’s a fast learner, but she’s still so new, and she’s out there alone. Babs will alert you if she needs immediate help, but check in on her every now and then, yeah?

So Dick’s first night back as Nightwing ends with him seeking out his sister.

They still haven’t spent too much time together in this timeline, him and Steph. Their interactions have been mostly confined to the cave, during her end of patrol training sessions that he endeavours to always be present for. It’s hard to keep her around outside of this — the times she does stay the night she gravitates towards Tim and/or Jason, understandably, and she has a habit of excusing herself whenever Dick does find his way to them, like she’s trying to make room for sibling bonding that doesn’t include her.

It’s annoying, but he gets it. He’s a stranger, an unfamiliar insertion into her life, and despite his impromptu speech in her room he can tell that she still doesn’t consider herself family, doesn’t think of herself as someone he should care about.

Joke’s on her. Dick loves her more than she could ever know.

They have time to rebuild their relationship, and Dick’s determined to speed that process up as much as possible. Jason’s current incapacitation makes him unable to fulfil his usual role as Steph’s chauffeur back and forth from the cave. The role has been temporarily taken up by Bruce, but Dick has volunteered a couple of times — he’d been fighting to take over full time until Jason’s leg has healed, but Bruce is noticeably reluctant to let him or Damian outside.

Given his own paranoias, Dick can’t blame him too much.

But this is the perfect opportunity for Dick and Steph bonding. He may have fucked up with Jason by agreeing to this, but now he’s committed he might as well make the most of it.

So after a brief detour to disarm a would-be burglar, Dick makes his way back to the rooftops and reopens his private channel with Barbara.

“Hey, O. Got eyes on my partner in crime?”

“...you’re going to have to be more specific. You’ve got a lot of people that could be considered partners out tonight. If you want I can put you in contact with Batman—”

“Please don’t.” Dick shudders. He’s putting off the inevitable lecture and paranoid hovering as long as he can, thanks, he doesn’t want Bruce to know he’s back in the field for as long as he can get away with.

Barbara knows this, or she wouldn’t have bothered in the first place. She’ll be smirking on the other end of the line.

“My partner in crime,” Dick stresses again, then when Barbara either doesn’t get his magnificent pun or intentionally leaves him hanging (the latter is more likely), he adds, “...alley.”

Barbara sighs. She rattles off a string of coordinates, not bothering to acknowledge Dick’s linguistic genius.

He’s missed her.

He thanks her, ignoring in turn her dismissal of his brilliance, loving that he can participate in their back and forth once again. Steph isn’t far away, only a couple blocks north, so Dick mixes parkour and grappling to reach her, making the most of every leap and bound, cherishing the feeling of flight.

And then he drops, controlled and silent, cherishing that feeling too, to land next to Steph and the two muggers she’s in the process of tying up.

“Hey, Batgirl!”

Steph jolts violently, accidentally kicking the unconscious mugger at her feet in the process. Remorseless, she collects herself, tilting her head back to look pleadingly at Gotham’s grey sky. “Did none of you learn from the brick incident?” she asks the air. “I swear the next time I give someone a concussion I’m refusing to take responsibility.”

Ha, that means her first meeting with Tim went similarly in this timeline.

(Poor Tim. That concussion had not been fun for him.)

She turns, her mouth opening to doubtlessly continue her tirade, but stops dead once she has Dick in full view.

“Oh,” she says. “You’re not— oh.”

Dick offers a short little wave. “What’s this about a brick?”

Steph visibly collects herself for the second time in as many minutes. “Long story. Sorry. Hi. I got a quick glimpse of your colour scheme and assumed it was Nightwing. Not that you’re not Nightwing, just not the Nightwing I was expecting, even though the other one wouldn’t be out in the suit right now anyway, I forgot about the whole broken leg thing for a second there—”

She cuts herself off, grimacing. Then again: “Sorry. Hi, Nightwing.”

“Hey.” Dick chooses to be merciful and not pick at her ramblings. “Busy night?”

Steph sighs, crouching again to finish securing her mugger. Dick slides past her, pulling out a zip tie of his own to deal with the second. “When isn’t it a busy night?”

She usually has Jason around, sharing the territory with their more experienced brother. Without him active, Steph is left to cover Crime Alley solo. It must be a lot for her, this early into her vigilante career.

Dick knows the pressures of the solo gig, of braving it alone for the first time, of having all the trust and expectations and lives bearing down like the heaviest of loads. Difference is, he’d been part of a double act for years before branching out. Steph went straight into it solo — with Bats milling around, sure, firmly on their radar from the start, but lacking close allies, devoid of the same support structures that buoyed Dick and Jason and Tim through their early years.

From Dick’s observations, Steph has been drawn into the tight knot circle that is their family much more quickly than last time, easing that start somewhat, but even so. In this timeline she’s still so new to vigilantism. This is probably the first time she’s spent extended periods without Jason in the background easing her load.

Of course her nights are all busy.

He huffs an agreement, keeping all that analysis to himself.

Steph stands back up, leaving the mugger safely tied up at her feet. “I didn’t know you were starting up again,” she ventures.

Is she afraid of upsetting Dick, or is she herself upset to have been left out of the loop?

Either way, Dick can solve it. “Nightwing — the usual Nightwing — asked me to cover for him. We didn’t warn anyone beforehand. Batman and Robin should still be out of the loop, as long as Oracle hasn’t filled them in.”

There. Confirmation that Steph wasn’t maliciously or individually excluded, delivered in a lighthearted manner to ease any discomfort she may have while in Dick’s company. He’s acing it.

“Ah,” Steph says, a knowing look settling on her face. “You’re ducking Batman’s overprotectiveness, aren’t you?”

She’s familiar, then. Good. That means he’s either already exerted it on her, or on one of the others while in Steph’s presence. Bruce tends to try and conceal the extent of his paranoid concern for his children around all but those closest to him, afraid they’ll use the ones he loves against him. 

He knows Steph can’t have been a vigilante for all that long, she must have been Spoiler for far shorter than the last run if she’s already Batgirl, and to already be so highly regarded… it’s a good sign.

His mugger safely tied up, Dick straightens up, letting something desperate fall into his expression. “He’s impossible, isn’t he?!”

“He’s going to be, once he realises you’re back in the field,” Steph laughs, and fuck he’s missed her too, her energy, her refusal to bow to anyone, Batman least of all, the way she instantly livens up the room (or the dingy alley, in this case) with the chaos and joy and life that swirls in her orbit like a really fun whirlwind.

And he’s always had an extra connection to Steph. He can say that about his relationship with every sibling, honestly, but it’s undeniably true of Steph.

Barbara was the Batgirl to Dick’s Robin, but the Batgirl to Dick’s Batman was Steph.

During that awful time, where everything collapsed around him, it was Steph that stood at his side in Gotham. Damian, too, but Damian was new, a dependant, a Robin. In the field, Steph was the closest he had to an equal.

For a while, in the early days when Damian was still a stranger and they had yet to click, it felt like Steph was all he had left.

He’s missed her. He’s missed so much.

Dick groans, letting his natural theatricality take over. “Want some company? I could do with a friendly face before I’m subjected to that.”

And Steph smiles. It’s not her usual megawatt grin, still tentative and unsure of her place alongside Dick, but it’s still a smile, it’s a positive reception, and that’s a win. “Sure.”

He smiles back. He tries to match its intensity to her own — he doesn’t want to overdo it, doesn’t want to push her away in his attempts to draw her close. “Lead the way.”

It’s weird to think of Stephanie Brown as Batgirl.

The second Batgirl, specifically. The problem isn’t that she’s Batgirl at all, that part was expected, just— not so soon?

They’ve skipped right over Cass’s tenure in the role, jumped past Steph’s short lived stint as Robin. Dick isn’t quite sure how that happened. He didn’t do anything before his death to instigate this change — not intentionally, at least. But Steph generally seems much better integrated into the family than she had been at this point in time before, even with her insecurities about her place among them.

Bruce adores her, like he adores his sons. It took him longer to warm up last time, longer too for him to get over her disastrous run as Robin. The Batgirls have barely interacted while around Dick, but Barbara too must be fond, to have passed on her mantle so early. It was huge when she gave it to Cass, bigger still when she finally acknowledged Steph as its inheritor.

Things seem so much better for Steph this time, the trauma and discord passed by in favour of acceptance. This Steph has never even been tortured, brought to near death, forced to fake the real thing—

Steph’s life has been changed for the better. All Dick had to do was die.

“My noble chariot is this way, good lady.” Dick bows, gesturing in the general direction of where he left Jason’s bike.

It’s been about an hour of an enjoyable joint patrol. They’re calling it a night, which means Steph’s night is actually just starting; her training sessions only last an hour, but that hour is so intense that Dick would argue it’s equal to the entire night that precedes it.

Steph matches his energy, as he knew she would, dropping into a curtsy and holding out the ends of her cape as if it were a dress. “After you, good sir.”

He leads the way back up to and over the rooftops and, as they drop down next to the bike, ventures, “By the way, loving your personal touch to the Batgirl colour scheme. Don’t tell Oracle but I think it works even better with the eggplant.”

And he knows how Steph will react to that too, it’s a recurring inside joke that originated between her and Tim and had nothing to do with Dick, but she’ll be thrilled by his ‘unknowing’ participation, and—

Steph frowns down at her suit. “Thanks? I guess you could call it eggplant, but I’d go with a simple purple.”

—and Dick’s brain stalls.

No. That was— that had nothing to do with Dick, his absence surely shouldn’t have affected something as minor as a running joke about the colour of Steph’s suit—

The green churns in his gut; its tint sharpens into a bold frame. What did he do to cause this?!

It’s inconsequential, really. In the grand scheme of things, if Dick had to lose something in this changed timeline, then a dumb joke is nothing.

It could’ve been so much worse: a sibling could have been permanently stripped from the family, or injured, or killed.

It’s so inconsequential, but all the same, it hurts.

“Eggplant is a good colour,” he manages through the screaming in his mind. “It’s a compliment.”

Steph studies her cape. “I’ll remember that you’re an eggplant fan,” she says, and it’s so wrong, but Dick pushes it aside to smile the expected smile, press down the green that wants to paint everything in its sickly shade, and move on.

Chapter Text

The expected lecture from Bruce never comes.

His father is absent from the cave when Dick rolls in with Steph at his back. He’s able to brotherly bother all four of his present siblings (because Tim is here, which means Bruce has to be around somewhere), shower, and change into civvies before Bruce finally emerges with timing that has Dick incredibly suspicious.

He must know. Batman is the most overprotective, paranoid stalker that Dick has ever met. There’s no way he doesn’t know how Dick spent the night, but he doesn’t comment, doesn’t utter a single vague hint, condemning or otherwise.

It should be a relief, but instead it leaves Dick bobbing in a sea of green unease, waiting for the storm to drown him.

He heads out the next night anyway, choosing to start with Steph this time, and they’ve been at it for all of half an hour when they run into Robin and Batman.

In Crime Alley, where they never go, because Nightwing and Batgirl have it covered.

Dick’s first thought is there it is.

His second is overridden by mindless, raging green.

He’s always been quick to anger when it comes to Bruce and his hovering. Things have been better between them in this timeline, far far better; Dick is more mature with another lifetime of endless unresolved arguments under his belt, and he knows now that Bruce is just Like That, will never stop being Like That, and the easiest thing for Dick to do is grit his teeth and ride it out.

But holding himself back in this timeline means that if (when) he finally snaps, it will be an unprecedented explosion, erupting seemingly from nowhere to an external perspective, and it will hurt this Bruce more than it ever did before.

He strangles the green, breaks its neck like a hunter killing its prey, and shoves it deep back down where it can’t ruin his relationship with a dad whose greatest crime is the terror that haunts his love.

“Well,” he says, lighthearted and casual and fine. “This feels excessive.”

“Oh boy,” Jason mutters over the comms, which Dick would label an overreaction if he wasn’t battling hard to not overreact himself.

Batman grunts. “We have a lead that brought us here.”

He probably engineered a lead to bring them here.

“Great!” Stay chipper, stay Dick, don’t let the kids know about the fury he’s fighting, they don’t need to worry about him, he’s fine. “Fill me in and I can take it from here. I already have a list of people and places to hit from Nightwing, I can squeeze in one more, easy.”

“I actually wanted to use it as a learning opportunity for Robin—”

“Great, I’ll take Robin with me. I’ll trade you for Batgirl.”

“Um,” Tim says.

“Whoa,” Steph cuts in over him. “Wait—”

“Get her out of Crime Alley for a bit. There’s a big old city out there that she’s barely seen, it can’t hurt to change things up for once!”

Dick is bound to the Alley himself, his promises to Jason a tether that stops him storming out into wider Gotham, but he can at least try and force Batman out of Nightwing’s territory.

Batman is frowning at him, that little downturn of his lips that gives it away when his expression is otherwise inscrutable beneath the cowl. “I also wanted to deal with it myself.”

“Then you and I can handle it, and Robin and Batgirl can go have a learning opportunity together on the other end of Gotham.”

It’s Dick’s trump card. It gives Bruce what he wants, at the cost of sending the kids out on their own. That’s a sacrifice he won’t make. He’s always been cautious with his Robins. He may be willing to let Steph patrol solo in Crime Alley, where she has Jason available in the area to run to her aid if need be, but letting her loose in wider Gotham, unfamiliar territory for her, with only fellow child Tim for company? Tim, who was always kept close in the other timeline, after what happened to Jason. Tim, for whom Dick’s death this time would surely have provoked similar coddling.

Bruce’s desire to watch over Dick will not supersede his desire to protect the kids.

Sure enough: “I don’t see any reason for us to split up—”

“There is a rather large disturbance at the docks,” Damian interrupts, the absolute godsend that he is. “The GCPD are quickly becoming overwhelmed.”

Dick smiles, victorious. “I think you and Batgirl should go handle that.”

Batman looks from Dick to Steph to Tim, over in the direction of the distant docks as if he can see the incident from here, back to Dick, and Dick can see the exact moment he capitulates.

“Robin, fill Nightwing in. Batgirl, with me.”

“Is no one going to ask what I want to do?” Steph grumbles even as she follows. “Am I expected to drop everything to do whatever it is you decide?”

If Batman responds, Dick doesn’t hear it, the pair too far away now with muted comms. Every growing inch that separates Batman from Dick allows for a gradual but steady receding of the green, for Dick to wrestle it further and further under control until all that remains is a faint flickering frame on the edges of his vision.

He’ll have to apologise to Steph later, if she survives a grumpy thwarted Batman. Dick did just throw her under the bus meant for him. He’ll make it up to her.

With them gone, the green diluted, Dick looks to Tim.

Tim stares back at him with thinly veiled panic. “Uh...”

Dick takes pity on him. “Don’t worry, I know there’s no lead to fill me in on.”

And Tim deflates. “Okay, good, because I have no idea what he wanted me to say.”

Poor Tim. Bruce really threw him under the bus too.

Out of curiosity, Dick switches to a new channel on the comms, one containing just Tim, Damian, Jason, and himself. “Is there actually something going on at the docks?”

“Of course,” is Damian’s instant, affronted response.

Dick waits.

“We are talking about the docks. There is always something happening at the docks.”

“Didn’t you mention something about the GCPD being in trouble?” Jason chimes in, lazily, his amusement clear in his tone. “I don’t know where you’re getting your info from, but from my surveillance it looks like the docks couldn’t be less populated with cops if it tried.”

“I’m sure they will arrive soon enough to deal with the inevitable disturbance, and given the state of the GCPD they will indeed become quickly overwhelmed. It will be true soon enough, if it is not already so.”

Oh, Damian. Recently free of the crazy cult that raised him for the second time, and he’s fighting all the obedient instincts they trained into him to lie to his father. All because Dick had a minor breakdown under the tiniest bit of pressure. Damian— he’s such a good kid, now and in the past timeline. He’s too good for Dick.

All his siblings are too good for him, really. Dick knows they all have his back like he has theirs, loves them all the more for it, but Damian, he gets Dick these days in a way the others never will. It’s such a lifted weight to have just one person who remembers, one person he can talk to about what once was, even if he refuses to burden his littlest brother with all his troubles.

In a multitude of ways, Dick is so grateful for Damian.

“Oh, so we’re all just lying to each other tonight,” Tim sighs, oblivious to Dick’s internal musings. “That’s how it’s going. Great.”

“Speak for yourself, baby bird,” Jason says, and oh, that’s adorable, when did he start nicknaming Tim— “I haven’t told a single lie. Don’t lump me in with you miscreants."

Damian huffs. “I have not spoken falsely either. It simply is not true yet. Robin is the only liar among us, which speaks volumes about his character.”

“Hey, that was B, not me, you little—”

“Well, I appreciate the assist,” Dick jumps in before they can really get going with the yelling at each other, hoping Damian picks up on the deeper sincerity. He should — he picked up on the need to intervene, after all. “We should probably get going. Got to be productive enough tonight to justify not dealing with that lead B was so hung up over.”

The blend of resignation, exhaustion, and horror that smears itself across Tim’s face is truly a sight to see. “He’s not actually expecting us to handle that, right? It doesn’t exist!”

Jason barks a laugh. “Good luck.”

“Copulated,” Jason announces suddenly into a conversational lull.

After a pause, in which Dick and Tim exchange confused glances, Damian takes up the burden of responding. Slightly distant in Dick’s ear, as if he’s turned away from his mic to address Jason directly, he asks, “What are you on about now?”

“Copulated. Populated with cops. Cop population at the docks. Copula— no. No, I just heard it, never mind.”

Tim’s laughter drowns out the muffled sounds of Damian’s muttered response in Arabic, not all of which Dick’s time in the League helps him to understand but he gets the general derogatory gist. 

“Although it wouldn’t surprise me if that was actually what the cops were up to over there,” Jason muses, which sets Tim off again just as he was calming down.

“Imagine,” Tim recovers enough to wheeze. “B waltzes up to the docks expecting an emergency and gets copulating cops instead.”

“Population: copulation,” Dick offers up.

And Tim is gone again.

Once Tim gets his laughter under control, he and Dick work together well. Not as well as Dick’s muscle memory thinks they do, not when only one of them has fought in tandem before and when Dick keeps accounting for the greater experience of the Red Robin that lurks in his memories but is yet to exist in this reality, but as the night goes on they adjust, they learn, and they do good work together.

Tim loosens up over time too, any initial hesitance seeping away with every second he spends stuck with Dick. His little brother has been distant at home, absent, wherever possible — not obviously, not openly, but Dick knows Tim, knows how he’ll happily hurt himself in a misguided attempt to help another. That familiarity with his brother’s self-sacrificing tendencies made it hard not to notice Tim slipping out of rooms or, when escape wasn’t an option, sequestering himself in a corner in hopes of being forgotten.

Dick thinks he’s trying to allow the family — which in his mind, as in Steph’s, does not include him — to reconnect without his intrusion, and, when Dick is alone and actively seeking Tim out, his brother is suddenly nowhere to be found. He’s been doing his best to drag Tim into things, but there’s only so much he can do in the face of such resistance. When he really wants to, Tim can be sneaky.

Here, though, there’s nowhere to escape to, no one to direct Dick’s attention towards. 

This wasn’t Dick’s plan for the night, but he can adapt.

So, once they’ve grappled back up to the rooftops after securing their latest batch of muggers, Dick turns to Tim and asks, “How are your parents these days?”

He’s angling for information on Tim’s home life.

Currently, Tim is still stuck with his neglectful parents — or not stuck with them, as the case may be, with them too busy off who knows where to bother parenting their son. Yes, it means he’s able to stay overnight at the manor, practically live there, and that’s as helpful as it was last time, but sooner or later his parents will return to Gotham, drawing Tim back into their orbit, and sooner or later they will hurt him.

Ideally, Dick wants this wrapped up before their next appearance in Gotham. Bruce aware, custody gained, and no one suspecting Dick of possessing any unnatural knowledge. That last point is where he’s stalled — he knows, of course he knows, knows enough to get custody ripped from the Drakes in a heartbeat, but he can’t justify that knowledge.

So he’s grabbing the opportunity, and tonight’s expected Steph bonding has transformed into intelligence gathering disguised as innocent Tim bonding.

“Uh, they’re good, I think,” Tim says. He shuffles in place. “I haven’t really seen them since I moved into the manor.”

And not for a while before that too, Dick is willing to bet. Like last time, they probably haven’t realised their son has vacated their home to move in with the neighbour.

Dick hums an acknowledgement. “Still busy with their… archaeology, right?”

This perhaps isn’t the subtlest line of inquiry, but it’s not impossible for Dick to know that much about the Drakes. They ran in the same circles, after all. Their parents are ‘friends’, as meaningless as that term is when applied to people whose only interactions occur at galas and business meetings.

“Yep.” Tim pulls out a batarang, starts fiddling with it, inspecting it. For what, Dick couldn’t say. “Very busy doing… important archaeology things.”

Uh huh.

“So you live with us while they’re abroad, is that the current situation?”

Okay, that’s subtlety thrown out the window, but at most this will be considered weird, not suspicious. Dick just needs enough information to justify digging further, so no one thinks it strange when he insists that Bruce needs to adopt Tim, and—

“Actually…”

Tim is carefully not meeting Dick’s eyes, looking out instead over their city. The batarang is held in a tight grip in one hand, barely at the right angle to avoid slicing open his own palm, his other hand tracing along the side of the sharp edge. Dick isn’t sure why he seems uncomfortable — that’s the exact situation that occurred last time, once they realised how alone Tim was at home, and he knows Tim’s been living with them. They must be at that point already. Aware of their absence, but not yet of the full extent of their negligence, of the need to take Tim away from them—

“I kind of live at the manor even when they are home?”

Dick absorbs that, and all the implications it carries, then: “You’ve already been adopted?!”

It bursts out of him before he can suppress it. He regrets it instantly, hates how much it gives away, but—

Tim’s already been adopted. He’s confirming it, nodding, he’s already been adopted, it’s official, he’s already been adopted—

Dick didn’t consider this possibility.

Steph’s journey has noticeable differences from last time, but Tim’s seemed generally the same. Dick hasn’t looked too deeply into it because he didn’t think there was anything to look into. A Bat dies, Bruce goes off the deep end, and Tim volunteers himself as Robin. It all seemed the same.

The same, except Tim has already been adopted.

Tim is hunching in on himself. He still hasn’t turned around. “Is that a problem?”

He frames it as a retort but Dick knows his brother, and he hears the unspoken hurt, the vulnerability that laces the words, the undercurrent of despair.

Tim already doubts his place in the family, and Dick seemingly just confirmed that he is indeed an unwelcome addition.

Shit shit shit—

“No,” he blurts, “not at all! I’m just—” completely and utterly thrown “—surprised. What happened to your parents?”

It’s blunt, potentially incredibly hurtful, but Dick isn’t doing his best thinking right now.

The Drakes must be dead. It’s the only explanation. Something Dick did earlier must have accelerated their ends, sped up Tim’s timeline to force Bruce and his endless supply of adoption papers to run to his Robin’s rescue—

“Nightwing— the other Nightwing— discovered just how much time they spend away from home, got angry, and yelled at Batman until he adopted me?”

And— what?

Dick is the problem.

His little breakdown over Steph’s life improving with his absence was an overreaction, really, he’d gotten over it fairly quick. 

But Tim makes two, and an ugly pattern is forming.

He checks up on the Drakes to be sure, and yep, they’re very much alive, living it up in Guatemala. Tim hasn’t had to suffer extra years of their neglect. He hasn’t had to witness their gruesome deaths. He hasn’t— this is so much better.

And the key difference, the one change that instigated all of this, is Dick.

The thing is, in the last timeline he knew something was wrong with Tim’s home life. He would’ve had to be blind to not notice, or as blinded by grief as Bruce was. It came up a few times. He and Alfred would discuss their separate observations; he’d mention it to Bruce, gauge his reaction, use it to temper his own concern. Mostly, he chalked it up to his own overprotectiveness, which had dialled itself up to eleven after what happened to Jason.

He knew. He just didn’t realise the extent of it, or wouldn’t let himself accept the truth of it, not until far too much time had passed.

But Jason noticed.

Jason noticed, and he acted on it. Jason saved Tim much earlier, was around to ease Steph’s transition to the family too (where was Dick for that? why wasn’t he more involved?). Jason took Dick’s place, stepped into his role as the oldest living brother, and he did it better.

Dick is the problem, and the best thing he ever did for his family was to die so Jason could live to save them.

Chapter Text

So Tim doesn’t need as much saving as Dick thought. That’s fine. It means he can safely shift his attention to the one sibling he can still help.

He’s held himself back so far, focusing on those in the most immediate danger: first Jason and his fast approaching death, then escaping the League with Damian, and then, mistakenly, undertaking a rescue attempt on an already rescued Tim. And, like with Tim, he may possess all the necessary information, but he can’t act on any of it without giving too much away.

He had to prioritise. He had to. Pushing her into the background felt like a betrayal, but she handled herself for all that time before. He had to trust she could again.

Now, though, it’s time to search for Cass.

He can’t justify putting her off any longer. He doesn’t want to, never wanted to in the first place, but where he had other means of gleaning information from Tim, he has none for Cass.

He’ll never be able to explain why he’s searching for a random assassin he’s never met. He might as well go for it, do it anyway and bullshit excuses as he goes.

So Dick throws caution to the wind. In his free time, where previously he would have sought out a sibling with the goal of reconnection, he instead heads down to the cave and spends hours at the computer. The family members that are currently present still get time carved out just for them — he would never wholly turn his back on them — he simply… doesn’t prioritise them the same as before.

Damian understands, once Dick explains in hushed tones after he is dragged by his littlest brother into a bedroom that is currently empty but in the last timeline belonged to Damian. His accelerated entry into the family means he joined before Cass this time, and as Steph stole their absent sister’s identity, Damian has accidentally stolen her room.

Damian hates it. He also refuses to ask to make the move across the hall, having struck upon the same problem that continually plagues Dick: he can’t come up with a convincing reason why.

They keep finding themselves in his old room anyway, despite its eerily stripped status with the bed in the wrong place and no evidence of any members of Damian’s personal zoo.

No one else has commented on their unexplainable draw to that room. Dick is sure they’ve noticed.

Some days, Damian will join him at the computers, pulling a chair over to sit at his side and provide commentary or suggestions or corrections. Other days Dick will start a new research session only to find careful annotations and compiled links already waiting. With three people sharing the burden of the comms, Damian is left with enough downtime to make progress while Dick is busy being Nightwing.

Most of the time, when Jason is in the cave he’s tinkering with the helmet Dick gave him. He’s already got a row of silver coloured prototypes next to the partially disassembled blue of the original, each with a slight variation on the design as he tries to perfect the design.

On rare occasions, however, he’s the one that finds his way into Dick’s company, settling opposite in his usual seat during patrols, his injured limb propped up pillows that are now moulded into the shape of Jason’s leg. He asked, once, what Dick was doing. Since Dick’s cautious non-answer he’s been content to sit in silence, working on something of his own. He hasn’t asked again.

Rarer still is Bruce. His father likes to lurk in the background, the cave’s shadows following him around. They’re his personal chorus of supernatural devotees, clinging like a second cape as he stands at the computers (and honestly, standing, who stands to work at a computer outside of an emergency), or checks over their vehicles and gear, or sets himself up on the training mats for a lengthy work out session, or— or any of his countless excuses to spend time in the cave. When he inevitably loops slowly around behind Dick — not as subtle as he thinks — Dick calmly switches windows to the game of Solitaire he keeps running in the background for this exact purpose.

He’s under no illusions about how easily any one of his family could hack into his work (with the possible but in no way guaranteed exception of Steph, who might not have hit that part of her Bat training yet). He’s not deluding himself into thinking that Bruce hasn’t already read everything — that he isn’t catching up every night, devouring each update like its his daily newspaper and he has no other access to the news.

In all honesty, there isn’t much for him to read. Even with all the advantages of their extra knowledge, it’s proving difficult to trace a trained assassin who spent half her life dodging the attention of the League of Assassins. Their notes consist of far too many question marks.

Dick expected as much. That’s his brilliant little sister, after all. She would never have survived to meet them if she hadn’t been this good.

Unfortunately, it’s not helping them meet her any quicker this time around.

Dick takes out his frustrations on patrol, on the petty criminals and the mob bosses and the rogues in equal measure, easing its green tint step by step with each crime interrupted and each victim saved. He takes it out in spars with his family — especially Bruce, who can hold his own against Dick in a way the others can't quite manage, lacking his experience (Tim and Steph), his size (Damian), and his two unbroken legs (Jason). He unleashes it on the training dummies he eviscerates while Bruce is busy torturing Tim, Steph, and now Damian too with his training from hell, using the inanimate forms as victims for the green rage that will overtake him if he keeps it bottled up — all while Jason observes silently from the sidelines.

He still needs to talk to Jason. He should stop avoiding it, sit his brother down, and express as clearly as possible that Nightwing now belongs only to him.

Right now, though, his priority is Cass, and his frustrations from his failures at finding her would only bleed into any conversation with Jason. That's not fair on his brother. He needs to be level headed for that. 

And, after Cass, he’ll have to start thinking more in depth about Duke. Duke, who has always sheltered in the back of his mind, the final piece of the puzzle that is their family — or, he will be final, once Dick eventually succeeds at slotting Cass into place — but there is nothing he can do for Duke right now even if he didn’t have Cass to prioritise, not when Duke and his parents are safe until—

until—

did— did Dick seriously forget about the Joker?

He did, he actually did, how the hell did he manage that—

The man who killed Jason in a time that no longer exists, who killed Dick in this one that replaced it, hurt Babs in both, robbed Duke of his family before and has every chance of doing so again; the eternal tormentor of his family and Dick forgot about him.

He’s just— he’s had a lot to worry about, sure, juggling protecting his siblings and restructuring his relationships with them all and evading suspicion from them and Bruce (especially Bruce) and— it’s been a lot, he died in the middle of all that, but even so—

He prioritised his siblings above the instigator of so much of their suffering. Normally, that would be the right call, to always put them first, but if he wants to protect them, to truly keep them safe, then something must be done about the Joker.

Well, it’s not as if he’s made any progress with Cass tonight, beyond decorating their notes with more question marks (he’s particularly fond of the muted orange word art he’s added as a header to each page, although he suspects Damian won’t approve). He minimises the document, pulling up their database of files in its place, and opens the file on the Joker.

His eyes are drawn before all else to condition: comatose.

And next: a flood of green.

That’s not part of the file, that’s all him and his fucked up brain, his red blood and green lazarus combined into a murky brown, more green than red, more ethereal fury than his natural anger, absorbing all of him until all that’s left is a raging shell.

He saw the profile image next, that was the problem — Dick doesn’t know how he overlooked it to go straight to the status, but now he’s seen it and he can’t unsee it, his red grin and green hair, nauseatingly familiar, swaying overhead as Dick’s vision blurs, from tears or blood or brain damage or a combination of the three, mocking, taunting, laughing as he swings the crowbar again and again and again—

He drops his head into his hands, scrunches his eyes tightly closed, and tries to remember how to breathe.

It doesn’t help. The green is a near-permanent imprint on the backs of his eyelids, the black of darkness now a much missed thing of the past. He has to focus all his energy on taking deep breaths to stop it overwhelming him entirely, part distraction, part bodily requirement that he’s forgotten how to automatically fulfil.

Okay. Maybe Dick’s a little more fucked up from his death than he thought. He truly hadn’t expected such a violent reaction to a photo of the man.

It’s fine. He’s fine. It’s not like it’ll be a problem for long, once Dick figures out how he’s going to deal with him and the threat he poses.

Or not, as the case may be. Comatose. His job may have been done for him.

He breathes deeply again, and again, and again, more of the green leeching away with each harsh inhale and slow exhale until he’s closer to the faint green tint that is his norm these days than the bold vibrant green that had overtaken it.

And then he opens his eyes to try and find out what the hell happened to render the Joker comatose.

He doesn’t get very far. Hits the contents, skims over the long list of links to the more detailed reports, one for every incident, every encounter, every night, lands on abduction of Robin III and hosp—, and he’s blinded once more.

Tim. Tim. The bastard took Tim, hurt him most likely, while Dick was stuck useless, helpless on the other side of the world, and—

It’s while he’s breathing — heavy, with a tinge of panic — through that realisation and the renewed burst of green that accompanies it, his head firmly planted back in his hands, fingers rubbing a soothing pattern into his temples as if he’s dealing with something as comparatively simple as a migraine — it’s then that Bruce makes his presence known.

“Dick,” is all he says.

Emotionless, to an average person, but Dick has a lifetime of reading this man under his belt, and he hears the unspoken fear concern terror love that cocoons the words, smothers them, suffocates them.

He drops one hand from his head to the keyboard and without opening his eyes hits the alt tab combo to switch to Solitaire. Probably (certainly) a pointless act, but it comforts him to go through those motions.

“Hi B,” he replies. It’s all he offers.

Bruce shuffles forward a single step, the thunk of his shoes against the cave floor — regular shoes, from the sound of it, not the Batsuit, he’s come down from the manor — echoing like a death knell.

Then, to Dick’s surprise: “I’m worried about you.”

It’s an eternal truth for Bruce. He never stops worrying about Dick, about all of his children. Usually it’s expressed through actions, often overprotective and smothering and infuriating, with what they want barrelled over in favour of what he thinks they need. He cares in his own way: silent in speech, impossible to ignore in act.

Bruce is not a man of words. They’ve all learnt to read him anyway. He is rarely so open with his thoughts, rarely rips out his soul and exposes it in words.

That he’s resorted to language so plain — it says everything.

Even so, Dick really doesn’t need this right now.

Dick sacrifices one breath to make space for a sigh. Time to stop pretending. “What, did your light entertainment reading stop being fun when I switched into the files?”

The accusation goes unacknowledged. “Why would you want to look at his files?” is what gets asked instead — a tacit confirmation of what Dick already knew.

He squeezes out a sound, an amalgamation of laugh and groan, amusement and resignation. “I don’t know, Bruce, maybe I want to be up to date on the latest with my murderer.”

It’s low, he knows it’s a low blow to state the facts so directly, he saw first hand how Bruce reacted each time it was brought up when the dead son was Jason, after all, but if Bruce can be unnaturally plain then surely Dick should be allowed to match it with bitter cruelty.

If Bruce is stung by it, he doesn’t react verbally. He steps— closer, Dick thinks, although he’s not at his best right now, it could just as easily have been a step back.

“The last time you looked into something behind my back,” Bruce says, voice deceptively steady, “it got you killed.”

Oh, wonderful, he’s getting all the lectures in at once, all the why did you lie and what were you hiding and why are you lying and what are you hiding in one messy bundle. This is exactly what Dick needs right now. Bruce couldn’t have picked a better time.

“I’m worried about you,” is said again, like a plea, like a mockery, like a curse.

Dick breathes. Breathes and breathes and breathes, in out in out in out. Breathes with the ever-slimming hope that it will help ease the rage. It was easing it, before Bruce inserted himself into the equation, undoing all of Dick’s hard work in the process. Where each breath previously subtracted from the green, now it only adds.

He doesn’t want to lash out at Bruce. He’s trying so hard.

But then Bruce asks “can you please look at me?” and the final thread holding Dick together snaps.

He drops his hands to slam them against the desk, pushing back and up with the motion so that he’s standing, glaring, seething. He has just enough vision left to see Bruce recoil, at the violence of the move or at whatever expression Dick has on his face. Either one.

Maybe his eyes are glowing. Jason’s used to do that, on occasions marred by extreme anger, with a spectral green tint lurking even when he was calm.

“Can you leave me alone?” he spits, watching in real time as Bruce pastes over his surprise with an infuriating calm.

“If you’re attempting to assault the League then you can’t do it alone,” Bruce replies, which throws Dick for a loop until he remembers Cass. They started their research where she started, in the League, but Bruce doesn’t know she’s their goal, he’s extrapolating with the information he has and that has clearly led him to a very wrong conclusion, and— “Let us help you.”

Dick barely registers the offer of support instead of the shutdown he’d expected. He’s too busy laughing — an ugly sound, twisted by green and hate and hurt. “Oh, I am long past needing your help.”

Bruce flinches. Minute, but Dick knows him, can recognise far smaller reactions than that. He pushes the responding flicker of guilt down deep, shovels an unhealthy covering of green over the top, and commits.

He tried to hold this back. He tried. Bruce brought this on himself.

“I haven’t answered to you in a long time, in case you’ve forgotten. Not since I was Robin. I worked alone in Blüdhaven. I chose to come back to Gotham — chose it, not because you ordered it, I chose to return — to work with you, not for you.” 

He can barely hear himself over the dull ringing in his ears, can hardly breathe through the sickly green clogging his throat, smearing itself across over his eyes, pulsing like a threat in his lungs.

“I don’t need you anymore.”

The worst part is, it isn’t even true.

It’s a bundle of old grievances, past timeline old, ones he’s long since learnt to live with. Loving Bruce means submitting to his oppressive form of care, and Dick has made his peace with that.

Bruce has gone carefully blank, calculatedly so, a blankness that Dick knows denotes hurt. That’s what he wanted, isn’t it? For Bruce to hurt like he hurts? To understand even an ounce of the stress he’s put Dick under as he tries to conceal everything from his overbearing, prying father, even though Bruce can’t possibly know how deeply Dick has dug his well of hidden information, can’t begin to fathom the true extent of Dick’s secrets. He just— he wants Bruce to hurt.

He’s… not sure when he shifted from righteous anger to this.

Even recognising it isn’t enough to stop him now.

“I’ve been through so much,” he continues, stuck on a green-fueled autopilot. The confession alone is like acid on his tongue. “You weren’t there. I was alone in the League, and I made it through without your help. I survived it, but—”

“No you didn’t!”

It’s the first crack in Bruce’s vocal calmness. It’s enough to halt Dick in his tracks.

“You didn’t survive, Dick. That’s the whole point. You died.”  

Is— is he crying?

He is, wet tracks forging a path down his cheeks, his breaths almost as rough and choked as Dick’s own. He’s been deathly still for most of Dick’s ranting, but now he’s trembling, minute, always minute, but never imperceptible. The image in front of him is so at odds with the image Dick has of the man in his mind that for a second he thinks the Pit has developed a new way to mess with him, but no. It’s all real.

Dick’s fingers tighten around the edge of the desk — when did he start gripping the desk like it was his only lifeline? When did— what’s happening to him?

Bruce is still talking. Dick has to fight to tune back in.

“I lost you once and it almost killed me. Please don’t make me watch you walk to your death again.”

And—

And Dick gasps at that, chokes on green, what little had receded with his guilt flaring back up at the accusation that it was his fault.

It was, of course it was, but it wasn’t due to his own idiocy. It was purposeful — not the original intent, but an acceptable alteration. It was Dick or Jason, and that was the easiest choice he’s ever had to make. There was no alternative. He tried so hard to find one, to divert Jason from his course, but there was no other way. If Bruce only knew that he’d understand, he would, he’d understand everything, but—

But Dick can’t tell him, can he? He can’t tell him any of it.

He can’t do this. He can’t be here. The longer he stays, the worse he’s going to make an already shitty situation.

With Bruce, you always have to be the one to walk away.

He lets go of the desk, an act that takes all of his willpower, a slow peeling of one finger at a time, and stumbles away. He barely remembers to shut down the computer, doing so forcefully, cutting the power instead of closing each program manually. It’s only as he’s pulling away that he remembers how pointless it is. There’s nothing on there that Bruce hasn’t already seen.

Bruce says something, but Dick doesn’t hear it. He shoves away the attempt to grab his arm, to stop him, and Bruce doesn’t try again.

Inordinately glad he’s already in the Nightwing suit, Dick grabs the nearest bike and runs away.

Chapter Text

Jason enters the cave to the sound of a receding motorbike and the sight of Bruce staring into the distance, looking faintly devastated. Instantly he jumps to full alert.

“B?” he ventures, shuffling closer. The crutches make the job harder, even after the weeks stuck using them, adjusting to them. If Bruce chose to avoid the confrontation, Jason wouldn’t be able to follow at any meaningful pace.

But he doesn’t. He twitches minutely, recognition of Jason’s presence, but offers up no more.

“Bruce,” he tries. “What—?”

He doesn’t know how to end the question. He can’t remember ever seeing his father like this. Distraught, yes — only the once, while holding his son’s dead body; a very unforgettable once. Detached, also yes — in the aftermath, when none of them had known how to cope with the loss. But this, an almost melding of the two, like his long-buried emotional core is rising up and going to war with the vigilante instinct to shovel his feelings even deeper down — this quiet distress is an unknown, and Jason is unnerved.

His aborted question gets an equally absent response, so he tries yet again. “Are you okay?”

Now Bruce turns to look at him. He blinks, slow, as if his subconscious had noted Jason’s entry, heard him speak, but failed to pass the memo on to his conscious mind. “Jason.”

He’s been crying, some distant, screaming part of Jason observes. Is crying. Silently, minimally, to the point that Jason only noticed once he moved, the light hitting his face at a new angle and lighting the residual tear tracks like a signal.

If Jason wasn’t afraid before, he is now. He’s been rocketed back into the shoes of his child self, his Robin self, watching in horror as his rock-solid father falls apart before his eyes. He’s fifteen again and his world is ending; he’s eighteen and on a precipice, waiting for the inevitable fall.

Alert, unnerved, afraid.

“Are you okay?” he repeats, not knowing what else to do.

Bruce’s gaze drifts away again, back into the distance— no, not the distance, it’s not entirely mindless, there is a subject— then sharpens, finally focusing in full on Jason. “Jason. Yes. I’m fine.”

Jason has rarely seen a lie so blatant, and he’s been lied to a lot in his life.

“What happened?” he urges, instead of calling Bruce out.

Bruce must be really off his game, because where he’d normally resort to a stern dismissal if not total silence, here he says, near-desperate, terrifyingly vulnerable: “I don’t know how to help him.”

The attention he granted Jason was short-lived. His gaze has drifted again back to the computers, back to whatever happened over there to haunt him.

Jason is still processing the admission, formulating a response, looking for an angle from which to push, when Bruce stands. It’s a sudden motion, and Jason has moved so close that it throws him off balance.

Bruce steadies him, a warm hand on his shoulder, then withdraws as quickly as he’d stood.

And then withdraws entirely, making for the stairs without another word. Jason watches him go in equal silence. There’s no point in chasing him down or demanding answers. He won’t catch up easily, not on crutches, and if his questions have remained unanswered thus far then unanswered they will remain.

He stands in the chill of the cave, waits until Bruce has receded entirely and no sound echoes down the stairs, then makes for the computers.

Their array of computer stations have grown exponentially since Jason’s introduction to the cave. The primary Batcomputer remains in its central position, their first resort when time is of the essence, but for those that prefer to sit when using a computer (so everyone except Bruce, and him too when he’s injured enough) a secondary cluster has formed in the corner.

Alfred, their primary user, has long since claimed his preferred station. Damian, too, restricted to the cave, has made himself at home at the computer opposite. Neither Tim nor Steph have spent enough time in the cave during patrols to choose a favourite. Neither had Jason, until recently, but he’s since gravitated to Alfred’s side, opposite the station that is favoured by Dick.

Dick, who is rarely at the computers at the same time as Jason, always one of them out as Nightwing, the other cave-bound for the night. Dick, who has recently been down here nightly, religiously, before patrol. Dick, who chose one of the computers that puts his back to the wall, the empty space behind him unused; anyone approaching to read over his shoulder would not be able to do so without being incredibly obvious about it (for all his prowess as Batman, Bruce has yet to learn how to fool his kids).

Dick, who will let Damian sit at his side and make quiet suggestions, but when Jason had dared to ask what they were up to he was brushed off with a blatant dodge of the question.

(Damian occasionally makes loud suggestions about where to move his Solitaire cards. It’s become increasingly clear to Jason that the League’s education did not extend to card games. His awful advice is fooling nobody.)

Up to now, Jason hasn’t pushed. He’s left that to Bruce and his obvious lurking. Jason learnt the opposite lesson to Bruce — the last time they were in a scenario like this, Bruce didn’t push either son until it was too late, leaving them to their own devices until one’s stubborn idiocy got the secret keeper killed; Jason, stubborn idiot that he was, did push, push and push and push, until he pushed his secretive brother into his grave.

Let Bruce be the stubborn one this time, if it makes him feel better. Jason, meanwhile, will be off to the side, benched temporarily, without an identity for his eventual return now Robin has been passed down and Nightwing passed back to its rightful owner, waiting on the sidelines where he can’t do anymore damage.

What is the use of a memorial when the memorialised is no longer dead? Dick is alive. Jason’s adoption of the Nightwing mantle was only ever meant to honour his brother; he never meant it to evolve into his own unique identity. The escrima sticks of all things have exemplified this philosophy. Jason has never favoured them, forgets he has them most of the time, usually resorts to the same fists that served him best as Robin. He carries them anyway.

Nightwing isn’t his. It should never have been his, really, but he didn’t know how else to honour Dick. Now Dick is back he can honour himself, and Jason can step back out of the role, out of the field, out of the way where he can’t fuck up that monumentally again.

Stick to comms. Let Dick take over in the field. Help train the kids, maybe, Jason could be good at that. Not combat for Damian: the kid far outclasses him already, but it’ll be a while before any of them feel even a little bit okay with letting him out in the field and there’s plenty of work to be done in the cave. Definitely combat for Steph: he’s still in a constant state of terror when it comes to her, afraid she’ll fling herself into the deep end and quickly find herself submerged.

Following his new ideology he’s been biting his tongue, stifling his irritation, keeping to his seat opposite his brother and saying nothing.

But they’re hiding something, Dick is hiding something from all but Damian, and Dick has an unexplained history of keeping important information to himself.

Jason learnt not to push, not to act without ensuring he has all the knowledge. He also learnt that Dick will conceal that knowledge from him. The solution: emulate Dick’s underhanded secret gathering without bothering Dick about it directly.

So he cycles around to Dick’s preferred computer and boots it up — which isn’t strictly necessary, he could access Dick’s work from any of the stations, but Jason is a theatre kid at heart and drama runs in his veins. If he’s getting caught by Dick or Damian, he’s getting caught making a point.

He brute forces his way into Dick’s account, a trick he expects to only work once before his entry point is sealed by their master hackers, but like the last time he did this it’s not about stealth. It’s about opportunity, and seizing it.

To his surprise, the desktop greets him with an error message inviting him to reopen all the improperly closed software.

Convenient. Jason takes that opportunity too, letting Dick’s activity restore itself. To his amusement, a half finished game of Solitaire overlays the rest. Maybe Dick should have chosen a cover game that Damian actually knew how to play, or at least taught him the basics of this one.

He closes out of it, and Dick’s poorly hidden secrets unfurl before him.

First: a Word document, coded, which they rarely bother to do when their work is contained within the family. Going to the effort of encrypting it, even beneath a code that any one of them could crack, is a dead give away: Dick has something here to hide.

Jason quickly emails the document to himself, deletes the evidence of doing so, grimaces at the garish word art that embellishes the top of every page (really, Dick, orange question marks?), and moves on.

Second: files. A lot of files. The common theme seems to be the League of Assassins, which is not that much of a surprise, really, given where Dick’s spent the last few years, but it’s also very concerning, because why? What purpose does Dick have to be digging into his captors’ history like this?

Jason starts to skim more slowly, taking in more detail before moving on, and in doing so he observes the same trends popping up — or, the same one trend popping up: the League across a specific ten year time frame. This would align with the obvious theory, that Dick is looking into something he learnt during his time with the League, except for the glaring issue of that time frame. It predates Dick’s tenure there by a good number of years, covering his early teen years, long before Jason himself took over as Robin.

Even if his focus is Damian, for whatever reason, it still doesn’t work. He wasn’t born until the very end of the period. There’s just not enough overlap. It must be something from before them both, preceding Damian’s birth and Dick’s arrival, something one heard about and informed the other of, or them acting on a hunch, or—

…or it could be something tied to whatever Dick claimed to be looking into when Jason got him killed, or it all could be irrelevant bullshit, because the final file is the Joker’s.

Of course. Of fucking course. Jason should’ve known — it always comes back to him.

He’s learnt so many lessons from then. Trust your brother to know what’s best for you; don’t trust him to trust you with all the facts. Trust that your father loves you; don’t trust that it’ll always be enough. Die for your siblings if that’s what it takes to protect them; kill for your siblings when that’s not enough.

That last one, it seems, refuses to stick.

He did nothing after getting Dick killed, and it got Tim captured. He let Tim talk him out of ending it then, and now Dick’s dancing with death once more. It’s a cycle, a doomed narrative, with one obvious answer that Jason knows — he knows! — is right, but keeps failing to commit to, faltering each time at the final hurdle. Until now he’s been weak, backing down because— because what? Because it was easier to stand aside? To throw his siblings into that murderer’s path because it was easier than staining his hands red to save them?

No more.

He was wrong when it was Cluemaster, overprotective of Steph, overcompensating for past mistakes. Arthur Brown didn’t deserve it — prison, yes, but not death.

But the Joker?

The Joker deserves to die.

Chapter Text

Dick wishes, not for the first time, that Cass was here. She's always the best when it comes to comfort. She can always tell when the only thing you need is silent support. Beyond that, he wishes she was here simply because he misses her. She’s his sister, and she’s out there somewhere in the world, and Dick can’t find her.

Cass isn't here, and in the gaping void of her absence Dick finds his way to Barbara instead.

Not to imply that Babs is lesser. Far from it. Her form of comfort is just different — less comforting, really, and more a silent encouragement to grow up and sort out your mess.

On second thoughts, maybe that's exactly what Dick needs right now. His oldest friend, the Batgirl to his Robin, the one person he can always trust to tell it to him straight, to help him sort out his twisted thoughts. Things are definitely twisted right now — that’s one fact he doesn’t need to be told. 

The green is still lapping at the edges of his vision, is still churning choppily in his lungs. His breathing is still a little wild, uneven, off-kilter.

He’s not— he’s not okay, is he? He can’t be, not after what just happened. He—

No. He’s not thinking about it. He’s going to Babs, and he’ll sit on a desk in a carefully chosen way to cause minimum disruption while occupying the maximum amount of space. She’ll roll her eyes, complain under her breath, but there’ll be no bite to it because if it really bothered her then he wouldn’t do it. They’ll talk a bit, he’ll shut up while she answers calls and gives directions and generally does her job, and in the brief flashes of the downtime she treasures like gold they’ll carry a conversation in half sentences and facial expressions.

They’ll be Robin and Batgirl, Nightwing and Oracle, Dick and Babs. It’ll be normal, like old times. Everything will be fine.

He drops into the Clock Tower as silently as he’s able, after dodging every trap and camera that he knows about, and Babs says, “Hey stranger.”

She doesn’t turn around, but she’s got his face blown up on the biggest of her screens. She likes to present herself as the only sane member of the family but she has the same flair for drama as the rest of them.

“Well, who’s that handsome young man you’re looking at?” Dick asks, digging deeper than usual to draw out his reserves of boundless enthusiasm and quips. “Are you looking at a shortlist of the coolest people in Gotham?”

He waves at the open air and watches the motion repeat on the projection.

“No, this is my personal list of people I can easily blackmail, and he’s at the top.”

She’s joking, but unfortunately for Dick he probably is at the top of that list. She sent him a screenshot of a section of her material once, in the other timeline, and that microcosm was enough to keep him awake at night for months. 

He goes to reply, but Babs holds up one hand to stop him, the other going to her ear. While she relays information to Spoil— to Batgirl, Dick hoists himself up onto her desk and gets comfortable.

As predicted, Babs huffs and readjusts his leg, moving it a little further out of her way, but doesn’t kick him off entirely. Dick doesn’t think the move mattered in any meaningful way to her beyond friendly spite. With that tacit permission, he leans back against the wall and distracts himself from his still-whirling thoughts by watching their tracker dots run around the map.

It takes him a second to parse the current icons and their meanings. They’re mostly the same as he’s used to, with just a couple key differences that throws him off momentarily. The black bat for Bruce and the red R for the current Robin are enduring staples from before he died, and the purple bat of Steph, white of Alfred, green face of Babs, and yellow police badge of the Commissioner are familiar additions from before even that.

The most striking change is the presence of two Nightwing symbols: one styled after the V symbol, a couple shades lighter than the blue of the suit itself, overlapping with Babs' marker on the map; the other bearing the bird symbol, a darker shade of blue, currently heading out into the city. 

Dick and Jason, sharing a costume, an identity, but not a tracker. Seemingly Babs has improvised her own way of differentiating between the two Nightwings.

He’s not sure what Jason is doing out in Gotham when he was reading in the manor library last Dick saw him, and he doesn’t remember hearing about any personal plans for the night beyond the usual comms assistance. He must be out as a civilian, given that his leg is still in a cast.

They all have trackers implanted in their bodies as well as their suits now, a decision made after gaining almost as many non-field operatives as those out on the streets, allowing them to add Alfred, Damian, the benched Dick, and now the injured Jason permanently into their systems. Dick is sure that Bruce only bothered to get their consent for that because he included Babs in the operation. Had he been working solo, he would’ve found a way to implant them secretly and Dick wouldn’t have found out until now, staring at the map wondering when Bruce found the time to violate his privacy once again.

He should stop thinking about this. He came here to calm down, not rile himself back up.

Almost as striking as the double Nightwing situation is Damian’s tracker: a neon pink dot at odds with the green that Dick is used to associating with his brother. When Babs turns to him, done for the moment with her job, he nods to the display and asks, “Pink?”

“I’m running out of colours,” Babs says morosely.

“Does everyone have to be a unique colour? You’ve already got two shades of blue.”

“And I’m not happy about that! It’s so much easier to read at a glance when everyone has their own colour.”

Dick pats her sympathetically on the shoulder with his foot. “We’ll get a memo sent around: no more family members allowed because Babs has run out of colours.”

She thunks her head sideways to rest on his foot. “Not just yet. I’ve still got orange, brown, and grey available. You partial to any of those or will I have to inflict one of them on Jason?”

Cass likes dark colours. Grey could suit her. It could also work for Damian if he’s ever able to escape the pink — he did run around in grey for a while in the other lifetime. Orange is the closest available colour to Duke’s usual yellow, but maybe he could convince Babs to switch her dad to orange and leave his yellow for Duke. Jason will be staying as the permanent Nightwing so he should keep blue. Dick knows he prefers red, but Tim got there first this time, and blue will match his suit better. As for Dick himself…

“Not really,” he says. “Although I’m willing to take pink off Damian’s hands. I’m always partial to a bit of pink.”

“You have always looked fabulous in pink,” she sighs.

She’s pulled back to work then, leaning forwards to get a better look at her myriad of screens as she talks to Steph. Dick settles in to watch, letting the steadiness of her voice and surety of her presence wash over him.

Like with Steph, with Tim, Jason, even Damian — everyone, it feels like — Dick hasn't spent much time with Barbara since his return. He's tried, but between his six siblings (four present, two absent), a father (who he's not thinking about right now), and an Alfred, he's been stretched thin. This is two birds with one stone — giving himself a moment’s reprieve, and getting some quality Babs time in.

More than anything, unlike a certain someone, Babs has this magical understanding of a wonderful thing called privacy. She has access to everything in this family, more than anyone else, but she only abuses this privilege when she senses the need.

She’ll know he’s been digging in their files. She’ll know what just happened. But she knows where the line is, knows how to stop before stepping across it. She won’t have read any of his documents, won’t have watched any more of the argument than necessary.

If he doesn’t ask for her advice, then she won’t mention any of it. She’ll go at his pace.

If there’s one thing Dick wants right now, it’s to not have to think.

Unfortunately, he did come here for advice as well as comfort. This easy familiarity that they’ve fallen back into like no time has passed — it’s been lovely, and it has already helped. The iron vice that had clamped itself around his lungs, squeezing the life out of him, has loosened, and if Dick squints he can almost convince himself that there’s no green infecting his vision. He’s still not right, not fully, but he is feeling better.

He didn’t want to fight with Bruce, but he did. He doesn’t want to think about it, but he should.

When Barbara finishes up with Steph and refocuses her attention on him, she clearly registers his change in intent. She tilts her head ever so slightly to the side in invitation and waits.

And waits.

Dick huffs out a stressed breath of air and lets his head fall back to hit the wall.

“For what it’s worth,” Barbara says, giving up on him starting them off, “I’ve missed you. I haven’t had the chance to say it yet, but I’m really glad you’re not dead.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about this,” he matches, gesturing with his foot to her wheelchair. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”

“It is what it is,” she says with a sad, twisted smile. “We both went through some shit.”

It is, perhaps, his greatest regret: failing Barbara.

He’d hoped— well, he’d hoped he’d have more time. That he’d save Jason, get back to Gotham, and have time to warn her. 

He had years. Years between waking up and Jason’s death, and he was so laser-focused on being there for Jason that he never bothered to create more than the most basic plans for helping the others. He had years, and it never occurred to him to just… warn Barbara.

Ten seconds. Hey, have you heard how more and more people are being attacked in their own homes? Yeah, they knock and let themselves in when you answer. It’s scary to think what could happen if we open the door to strangers! It would’ve required some workshopping, but the essence of that is all it would’ve taken to instill a life-saving paranoia in his best friend.

But, foolishly, he assumed he’d have all the time in the world, after.

Something of his inner turmoil must present itself on his face. That or Barbara can read him too well, because she sighs and says, “It sucks, and it won’t ever stop sucking, but I’m at peace with it. As much as anyone could be, at least. I’m okay. Are you?”

And. is he?

He bites back the immediate urge to say yes, to laugh it off and move swiftly on. Barbara has been honest with him. He owes her the same in return. It’s a struggle to know how to answer — he wants to be fine, but he didn’t want to snap at Bruce and look how that turned out. Clearly he can’t always have what he wants. He knows he’s not as okay as he was before, that’s obvious, he’s not entirely an idiot, but there are scales to these things, right? It’s never as simple as black and white. He might not be entirely okay, but he could still be more okay than not, and sometimes he really thinks that’s the case.

Those sometimes, though, came before today.

“I don’t know,” he confesses. The words feel like oil on his tongue, thick and polluting and wrong. 

Barbara eyes him, from head to toes and into his soul. Then: “I’m worried about you too.”

It sounds very different coming from her, which Dick has enough self awareness to recognise is unfair. From Bruce it sounds like overprotective smothering and oppressive mistrust and continual intrusions upon his privacy. From Barbara, it sounds overwhelmingly like concern.

“You don’t have to tell me all the things you’ve been hiding. I trust you. If you do ever want to talk, I’m here. You know that, right? I’d listen, and so would Bruce.”

Dick knew they’d figure him out eventually. He even expected them to clock that something was off after his increasingly desperate attempts to save Jason became more and more reliant on his future knowledge. What he didn’t expect was how guilty Barbara’s easy acceptance of it would make him feel.

He closes his eyes. “I’m not trying to keep things from you,” he says, almost pleading. “It’s not malicious. I just can’t. I can’t talk about it. Not yet. Not even to you, and definitely not to him.”

She drops a hand on his knee and squeezes gently. He braces himself for another interrogation of some sorts, even a gentle one, so he’s unprepared when she says, softly, “He’s just worried too.”

“I know.” Dick exhales. “I know, I do, I just— would it kill him to sit down and tell me that, instead of stalking everything I do and pouncing to interrogate me the second I show any weakness?”

Barbara shoots him a wry, exhausted smile. “He wouldn’t be Bruce if he learnt to communicate.”

Dick laughs, short and equally exhausted. “No, I guess not.”

Steph’s voice intrudes on their moment, tinny and quiet as she emanates from Barbara’s comm. She squeezes his knee again then withdraws to respond, their conversation paused but not over.

Dick lets his head drop back against the wall again, the exhaustion travelling from his laugh through his entire body. It’s freeing, in a way, to finally have explicit confirmation that both Bruce and Barbara know he’s keeping the full truth from them. The horrible middleground of knowing they were probably aware but not having that confirmation, of living in a weird Schrödinger’s-awareness-of-lies situation, of waiting for the inevitable confrontation… at least that’s over, now.

He’ll have to explain eventually. They (Bruce) won’t let him continue this way. He isn’t sure why he kept it all to himself in the first place, looking back, other than out of fear. Fear of being ignored, dismissed, convinced he was insane when he knew he wasn’t. Then it was too late, the moment passed, the ruse carried too long to be dropped.

Now he should tell them. It’s only fair.

But the thought of admitting it all makes him feel sick.

More importantly — Jason. He can’t tell Jason. He would only blame himself more than he already wrongly does for Dick’s death if he knew that originally fate selected him. He can’t tell Jason, and he can’t tell everyone but Jason, and he doesn’t want to burden Tim and Steph with this knowledge, and the idea of telling Bruce is almost worse than telling Jason.

If— when— it would be Babs. He could tell Babs. But not yet. He’s not ready.

His gaze flits back to the map of trackers, watching Jason’s deep Nightwing blue drift deeper into the city, following as the purple bat representing Steph responds in real time to Babs’ directions, cutting north then west then north west across a rooftop in Crime Alley, pausing to engage with her target, then—

The alarm cuts through his temporary peace like a crowbar to the back of the skull.

It’s the alarm. The one they all dread. The alarm that signifies him, because he built himself into enough of a problem to demand his own unique alarm, one that originated in use by Barbara then spread first to the rest of the Bats then to Gotham as a whole. Him. The Joker.

Everything goes green.

It’s rage, it’s nausea, it’s terror. It’s the breath stolen from his lungs, choking on the green replacement. It’s a rejection of this reality in favour of a kinder one that doesn’t exist. It’s losing his sense of place and time and being in favour of fury, panic, fear.

“Shit, Dick,” floats to him as he flounders in his sea of green. “Breathe.”

Something lands on his arm. Something is touching him and Talia is touching him, whispering acid green poison into his ears, and he is touching him, hitting him, over and over and over with that fucking crowbar, steel against skin, dirt in his diaphragm, green on green on green—

He jerks away. He can’t see anything, the green enveloping all, a curtain separating him from the rest of the world. It’s all green.

“Dick,” someone— Babs— says again, distant, as if emanating from the other side of a closed door, and for some reason it unleashes a tidal wave of green-tinged fury that dwarfs the panic and terror with its all-encompassing oppression.

He’s so angry, but he’s not mad at her. Isn’t he? No.

He’s mad at the Joker, for killing Jason, for threatening his life again, for killing Dick and never letting him rest. He’s mad at Talia. Talia hurt him. Talia set him free. Talia hasn’t come for him despite his obvious defection, but then she wouldn’t dare, not when he is so plainly under Bruce’s protection. Bruce, he’s mad at Bruce, why is he mad at Bruce…?

Talia isn’t here. Bruce isn’t here. It’s just— Babs. Just Babs. He’s not mad at Babs.

Except he is. He’s so angry it consumes him, transmuting him into a pulsating mass of rage with no firm target except a manipulator who isn’t here and a father who doesn’t deserve it and a million other people and no other people, so it lashes out at whoever’s closest and right now that’s Babs. He’s not mad at Babs. He’s furious. He shouldn’t be.

He can’t see, he can never see anymore, not anything that isn’t green. She’s there, she’s right there in front of him, she just had her hand on him, she’s pulled back now but there’s only so much space for her to retreat into, she must still be there but he can’t see her.

“Babs,” he wheezes, stretching a hand into the green void—

And she catches him, her hand clutching his, no other contact when that lifeline is all he needs. “I’m here,” she says. Touch is good, when it’s her. Something beeps in the background, signalling something Dick should be able to parse, but it goes over his head in this moment. If Barbara acknowledges that call to action, she doesn’t do so verbally, or in any way that Dick can recognise in his current state. “You need to breathe, Dick.”

All he ever does these days is breathe. Ineffectually breathing, in and out.

But Babs is telling him to do it and she’s the smartest person he knows, so he tries. 

He’s on the floor, papers scattered like flowers around him. Babs is leaning as far forward as she can to hold his hand. His head is pulsing, his heart racing. Green bile coats his throat like a tenth layer of paint, thick and clogging and entirely too much. He wants to be sick. He wants to sleep. He wants this all to end.

“Hey, you with me?”

Is he? She sounds muffled, distant. It’s taking him an eternity to parse her words, hearing but not immediately comprehending. He feels untethered, unbound to the earth except for her hand in his. It’s not the first panic attack he’s ever had, but it’s a strong contender for the most intense.

And he thought he might be okay. What an idiot.

“Yeah. Sorry,” he croaks, forcing the words through the blockage in his throat and just about remembering to keep breathing around them. Through his post-panic sluggishness, one singular thought emerges from the haze. “I thought— comatose?”

The one singular fact he’d managed to read in his file. Comatose. That implied safety, to Dick, even if only temporary. He didn’t think it’d be this temporary.

Barbara seems to grasp the direction of his thoughts from that fragmented chunk: a Batgirl reading her Robin, a Babs understanding her best friend. He half expects her to dig deeper into what just happened, but she’s apparently willing to leave that aside for now in favour of dissecting the trigger and easing his fear. “Yes, he’s still in a coma. He hasn’t escaped. Even if he woke up, there’s no way he’d be able to walk out of that hospital room any time soon, let alone fight past the guards. Security is extremely tight in there.”

“Then—?”

She looks away from him for the first time to check her screens. He maintains his iron grip on her hand, forcing her to twist awkwardly to see, but he can’t bring himself to let go. She doesn’t complain or try to free herself.

“Someone’s in there,” she says, bringing to mind nightmare scenarios of the Joker’s goons attempting to recover their boss’ body, however comatose he may be, then, “Jason?!”

That shocks Dick into letting go, allowing Barbara, once she’s glanced back at him to assess his status, to get a better look at the screen. “Jason? Jason’s in there?”

And now that’s creating even more nightmarish scenarios of the Joker waking up, attacking Jason, who’s capable of defending himself but so was Dick and look how that ended, and that was without the impairment of a broken leg.

“He hasn’t tripped any other alarms,” Barbara is saying. “Only mine. We’re the only ones who know he’s there.”

That makes sense. Security may be tight, but they’re Bats. Stealth is second nature to them. The Joker may struggle to sneak out, but Jason would have a much easier time sneaking in, even with a broken leg and crutches.

“What’s he doing?” Dick rasps. He reaches one hand up to grab the edge of the desk he was sitting on before he flung himself off it, using that and the wall to drag himself up to stand.

“If I had to guess,” Barbara says in a tone that Dick recognises as forced calm, “I’d say Jason intends to kill the Joker.”

And Dick must still be stuck in his sheen of semi-hallucinatory panic because that doesn’t make any sense.

If this was his last lifetime, with Red Hood Jason, then yes, sure, that’s an average Thursday for them. The Joker exists, and Jason expresses a desire to see him dead. Maybe even makes an attempt to do the deed himself. Nothing unusual there. In this timeline, when Jason is Nightwing instead, never died, never suffered with the League, never became a crime lord…

His little brother isn’t a murderer. Not anymore. Dick saved him from that, didn’t he?

Barbara looks at him. Just… looks. “You don’t know.”

Dick makes a helpless little hand gesture, an expression of confusion and a request for more information and evidence of how lost he is right now, all at once.

“Jason’s the one who put him in the hospital in the first place. Almost killed him after he kidnapped Tim.”

That— no.

“No,” Dick voices. “No.” He leans forward as far as he can without toppling over, which isn’t very far, to squint at the relevant screen. That’s a hospital room, that’s a prone figure lying in the sole bed, and that’s his brother standing at its foot, making no attempt to conceal his identity. “Why—?”

“Batman and Robin haven’t started patrol yet,” Barbara murmurs, more to herself than to Dick. “Batgirl is closest. Sending her isn’t ideal, but she’s the only one nearby and she’s talked him down from murder before. She’s capable as long as I can get her in there undetected.”

“Whoa, stop.” It’s like the world has continued revolving without Dick, leaving him stuck in the reality he thought existed but is apparently more fucked up than he thought, and he’s scrambling to catch up. “Steph stopped him from killing the Joker?”

“Steph stopped him from killing her father. Tim talked him out of killing the Joker.”

Dick digests that. It makes about as much sense to him as the rest of it, which isn’t much at all. “Jason tried to kill Cluemaster?!”

What the actual fuck has Jason got against Cluemaster?

“He thought it was the best way to protect Steph. She disagreed.” Barbara presses a hand to her ear instead of providing desperately desired elaboration. “Batgirl, I need you over at—”

“No,” Dick blurts. “Stop.”

She hesitates, and for a second Dick thinks she’s going to continue anyway. “...hold on. I’ll get back to you.” Then she’s waiting on Dick, waiting for his brilliant alternate suggestion, waiting for him to say whatever it is he’s going to say so she can get back to helping the others clear up his mess, the mess he knew wasn’t entirely cleared up but which he thought he’d left in a better state than this.

He hasn’t wrapped his head around any of this, but he knows one thing: “Let me go talk to him.”

Barbara looks at him again, her eyes piercing and judgemental and sympathetic all at once. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You can barely stand.”

That’s not entirely untrue. His legs are wobbly, conjuring images in his mind of the newborn fawn struggling to stay upright, and his head is clouded by green fog. He stops leaning against the desk as if that will do anything to convince Barbara, trying to hide how dependent he is on the wall to keep him steady. “Let me go. This is all because of me, right? I can get through to him.”

His hands are behind his back, pressed tight between his body and the wall. It hides the residual trembling.

Maybe she sees the sense in his argument, maybe she takes pity on him, maybe she sees how badly Dick needs to be the one to fix his own fuck ups — whatever the reason, perhaps even against her best instincts, Barbara relents.

“Go,” she says, and Dick goes.

Chapter Text

By some miracle, the Joker is still alive when Dick slips in through the window of the hospital room.

Jason is exactly where he was on the footage, that compressed scene now blown up wide in front of Dick’s eyes. His brother’s knuckles are white as he clings to his crutches, almost statue-still at the foot of the bed. Where Dick hid his trembling behind his back, Jason’s is on full display.

His arrival can’t have gone unnoticed, but Dick steps forward anyway into the light of the dim fluorescent bulb that emanates from the ceiling, illuminating Dick’s section of the floor in a paltry glow and leaving the rest of the room in the early stages of shadow. It feels like a parody of some shitty film: the hero engaging in a grand announcement of his arrival as he prepares to save the day.

Dick doesn’t feel like much of a hero these days, but it doesn’t matter. Jason needs him.

He collates the fragmented pieces of himself, his shattered composure and his lost purpose, into one being with one enduring purpose: saving Jason.

“Jay? What are you doing in here?” he asks, which feels like a stupid question given where here is, as well as what he’s just learned from Barbara (information which he really wishes someone had bothered to tell him earlier), but he asks anyway. With any luck Jason will just be window shopping and ready to leave, and they’ll be able to laugh about this in the future.

Fate is never so kind.

“I’m sorry,” Jason says, unmoving except for that persistent tremble.

He really wishes Jason would stop apologising. “What for?”

“I don’t know. For wanting to kill him. For not killing him. For letting him kill you.”

“That wasn’t your fault, Jay. It was never your fault.”

He says it as gently as he can, knowing full well it won’t sink in. If he keeps repeating it then maybe one day it might.

It’s breaking his heart to see Jason this way. Dick knew something wasn’t quite right, he saw it, he identified it, but he attributed it all to the Nightwing identity issue and pushed it aside. He forgot about the Joker, forgot about Jason’s insecurities over what happened to Dick, and focused all his attention on the siblings that didn’t need him.

He shouldn’t have put the Nightwing debate off for so long— no, his real failing was not joining the dots to figure out the real root of the issue. If he’d sorted himself out sooner and just spoken to Jason about it, even if about the wrong thing, then this might have been avoided.

Too late for that now.

Three Jasons exist in Dick's mind: the lost, the left behind, and the regained. Robin, Red Hood, Nightwing. One child doing his best in a cruel world, one resurrected from a brutal death, one surviving the brutal death of his brother. Three disparate branches of trauma, three distinct layers of pain. So similar, yet so divorced from one another, the differences a rift Dick doesn't know how to breach.

But he’ll try. For Jason, he’ll always try.

“You don’t have to avenge me,” he says. “I’m not asking you to. You don’t have to force yourself to kill for my sake. You owe me nothing.”

“I owe you everything,” Jason hisses, moving for the first time to half turn towards Dick. He seems to surprise even himself with the ferocity of it. “You died both for me and because of me. He killed you. He hurt Barbara, he tried to kill Tim in the exact same way that he killed you, and he killed you. We will never be safe while he’s alive. This—” he gestures with one hand, crutch and all, to the prone figure on the bed. Dick has carefully not been looking, but with the invitation his gaze flickers over without his consent. It’s a lot of bandages. A lot of tubes. A lot of specialised equipment keeping a still body alive. “This guarantees nothing. Only killing him will ensure our safety— everyone’s safety!”

Dick thought he might fall apart at the sight of his killer in the flesh. The green barely even flickers at the sight; his vision hasn’t been this clear in a long time. It turns out that staying strong for Jason is far more important.

But Jason’s words are illuminating. The Joker didn’t just abduct Tim, didn’t just try to kill him. No, it was a recreation. No wonder Jason is so traumatised. No wonder he wants the Joker dead.

“I know what needs to be done,” his baby brother says, a sad smile creeping onto his face. “I keep getting so close. Why can’t I take it all the way…?”

Dick isn’t as okay as he thought, isn’t as okay as he tried his best to project to his siblings even if Bruce and Barbara saw right through him. As it turns out, neither is Jason.

Tim and Steph don’t need him. They were better off without him in this timeline. He doesn’t need to try to save them when Jason has that covered. All along it should have been Jason that he focused on helping. He helps Jason, Jason helps Tim and Steph, and it passes down in a neat lineage of support and love.

Maybe it’s not as black and white as that. Maybe the mess that is his mind these days has oversimplified a far more complicated issue. Maybe one day, when he actually is okay, if he ever reaches that point, he’ll be able to see that.

“Because you’re not a killer, Little Wing.” In this timeline, despite evidence to the contrary, Dick knows it to be true. At the end of the day, this Jason has never killed, and Dick intends to keep it that way. “You’re not, and you don’t have to be, and that’s fine. It doesn’t mean you’re weak. It doesn’t mean you’re failing me, or anyone else. It means you’re a good person.”

Jason laughs, a wet, broken sound. “I put him there, Dick. I damn near killed him in the process. If your metrics for goodness rely on not being a murderer then I am hanging on by a thread.”

Dick sorely wishes he had all the information. Hell, he’d settle for more information. He’s gotten too dependent on knowing things — with Ethiopia, even as Jason kept swerving all attempts to save his life, Dick still knew what was coming next. He still had that to plan for. Now that all he has to go on is an incomplete mosaic of partial facts, he’s floundering, unsure of how best to proceed with their positions reversed and Jason possessing all the knowledge.

Well, most of the knowledge. He’s only got half the story, after all. Meanwhile, Dick is stuck working with those partial explanations he only just got from Barbara, and it’s hard to make comparisons between this better timeline and a worse reality that Jason doesn’t remember and can’t be told about.

He does the best he can with what info he’s got to work with.

“You’re a good brother. You know that, right? You don’t have to kill him to prove that. I’ve seen how you are with Tim and Steph, what you did for them while I was gone. You’re the one who noticed that Tim was being neglected and got him adopted, and you’re the one who tried to  protect Steph from her supervillain father while bringing her into our family.”

They never needed Dick. They always needed Jason.

“You’re a good brother,” he repeats. “Killing was never a requirement for that.”

Jason grimaces when he brings up Cluemaster. Dick latches onto that reaction, filing it away with the rest of his horribly sparse information on what happened while he was gone. Jason didn’t kill Cluemaster. Steph had something to do with that, according to Barbara, but maybe his intent was cut short by the same thing that stopped him when it was Tim and the Joker.

Jason doesn’t want to kill. Dick has to believe that. He doesn’t know what else he can believe in if he’s fucked his brother up enough for that to no longer be true.

His lack of information has struck again, because Jason is saying, “I didn’t notice anything was up with Tim. That was all Steph, and she figured it out the first night they met. And you have no idea how bad I was with them both — I pushed Tim away, I ignored Steph’s wishes… they’d have been better off without me.”

Well that’s just ridiculous. If only Jason knew how much worse their siblings had it when Dick was their Nightwing, their (not so) dependable older brother. 

His current tactic doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere good, so he pivots before he can dig the hole too deep. “Okay, then do it.”

That catches Jason off guard. “What?”

“Do it.” Dick shrugs, affecting a casual disinterest that they both know to be false. “You’re not wrong. If anyone deserves to die, it’s him, so do it. Kill him. I won’t stop you.”

Jason stares at him with half-wild eyes. “You don’t mean that.”

Dick nods his head towards the hospital bed in a wordless invitation.

Jason bites his lip, his eyes darting back and forth from the bed to Dick and back again. He nods, a motion whose purpose seems to be more about convincing himself than anything. “Okay. Fine. I will.”

“Okay,” Dick says easily.

“Okay.” Jason nods again. “Okay!”

He shuffles over to the side of the bed, deep into the shadows, with only the faint glow of the monitors to illuminate his actions. Dick holds his ground, watches, and places his faith in his brother.

His brother, who is staring at the tubes and wires connected to the body in the bed, equally unmoving.

They stay like that for seconds, minutes, an eternity, a still painting brought to life but not into motion, and Dick waits.

And Jason gasps, “I can’t do it. I can’t— I can’t do it. Why can’t I do it—”

He’s fighting for breath in a horrible echo of Dick’s own struggles with respiration. That sight, of all things, is what breaks the spell holding Dick in place, reminding him a little late that there’s nothing stopping him reaching for his brother.

They meet where the light fades into shadow, and Jason falls into his open arms. It’s awkward, unnatural, the crutches jabbing into Dick’s side. That doesn’t stop Dick tugging him in as close as possible, one arm wrapped around his shoulders, the other cradling the back of his head. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not!”

“It’s okay,” Dick insists. Jason is right: it’s not. But it will be. Dick will make sure of it. He won’t rest until they’re both okay, no matter how long it takes.

They’re almost the same height. Jason is thinner than in the other lifetime — the childhood malnutrition clings to him even now without the intrusion of the Lazarus Pit to undo its damage — but still a sturdy figure. It’s sobering, how much his brother has grown from the child he was in Dick’s memories, how much he’s changed from the man he was in the other life.

“You don’t owe me anything,” he repeats. “You’re a good person. You’re not a murderer. I love you.”

In a small voice — one that reminds Dick more than anything of a much younger Jason, of a Jason who can’t comprehend why Bruce would take issue with his Robin’s increasing violence when Batman is no better — his brother asks into Dick’s shoulder, “Why did you lie to me?”

He’s not referring to what Dick just said, and suddenly they’re having an entirely different conversation.

He knew Bruce would demand answers eventually. He wasn’t surprised when Barbara requested the same. In his heart, he knew Jason would want to know too. It was always a matter of when.

It’s not as if it’s an unfair request. Dick died, and he knows Jason blames himself, and he left so much unexplained about his actions. There was enough tension around it at the time, let alone by now, with time to fester. Years spent never expecting an answer, then the months since Dick’s return carefully dodging the subject. He knew Jason would not have peace of mind until he could dissect exactly how and why it happened, but he let himself ignore the issue in the naïve hope that it had neatly sorted itself in his absence.

He knew better, and yet he still made every mistake.

The problem remains: Jason blames himself, and that will only get worse if he knows the truth. He doesn’t want Jason to blame himself. He doesn’t want Jason to tie himself in knots trying to understand the unexplainable. He doesn’t want Jason to hate him, and he fears that whichever route he picks will inevitably lead to that outcome.

He has to tell him. He can’t tell him. If he doesn’t tell him, this will never end, and they’ll keep spiralling in destructive circles until it gets one of them killed again. The truth will break him. The truth will break them both.

He wishes he could provide a simple answer. A simple resolution. He wishes one existed.

The key issue in this moment seems to be the dishonesty, so Dick falls back on what honesty he can muster. “I was panicking. I didn’t know how to protect you. I did whatever I thought was necessary and I didn’t think much of it through.

“I would do anything to protect you,” he says, and it’s as true now as it was then, as it always will be. “I need you to know that. I will always put you first.”

Jason absorbs that. He takes his time, and that time stretches uncomfortably, leaving Dick with the urge to move, to say something else, to fill the void in some way. But he doesn’t. He restrains himself, and waits for his brother’s response.

Eventually, with a determined undercurrent: “I want to know everything. Every detail you kept from me. If there’s one thing you owe me, it’s that.”

Dick swallows. The top of Jason’s head is pressed against his throat — he will have felt that motion. “I can’t.”

His brother stiffens in his grasp, moving like he intends to pull away, and Dick tightens his hold. “I will,” he promises before he’s fully thought it through, but he means it. He means it. “You’re right, I do owe you that. I just— I can’t. Not yet.”

It’s one thing to fall apart in front of Barbara, or to let his rage consume him while arguing with Bruce. It’s another entirely to bare his soul to a sibling, to expose his vulnerabilities, to admit— well.

Jason needs this from him. Dick needs this too.

He sucks in a shaky breath, then confesses aloud for the first time: “I’m not okay.”

Jason goes still again. His face is still hidden against Dick’s neck, his reaction concealed from view. Dick holds him, cradles him, gives him the time to work through it all in his mind. If there is one thing the two of them have been consistently denied, it’s time when they need it. He had years to find a better way to avoid Ethiopia, and in the end it still wasn’t enough, leading them here. Dick had to die instead, ruining Jason’s trust in him in the process.

Never enough time, but Dick can grant him this.

He holds his brother and waits for his verdict, until:

“I’m holding you to that,” Jason says, slow. “Tell me when you’re ready. I’ll wait— not forever, but I’ll wait for you to be ready.”

It’s not an easy acceptance, not like it was from Barbara. It’s an acceptance that’s been fought for, a hard and tiring fight, one that’s ended with Jason unsatisfied and Dick blinking back tears. It’s the best they both can offer the other.

“I love you,” he says again. In it lies a silent sorry, a quiet thank you.

“I love you,” Jason returns in a mumble, muffled into the crook of Dick’s neck. “I’m sorry.”

Dick can’t tell if he’s referring to the Joker or to Dick’s mental state, but either way his response is the same: “New idea, how about we stop being emotional and apologising needlessly and get out of here before we’re caught.”

Jason huffs something that might have been the beginnings of a laugh and pulls away. This time, Dick lets him. “You’d be fine. You’re in costume.”

“Yeah, it’s not me I’m worried about.” He steadies his brother, helps him get the forgotten crutches stable beneath him before backing off. “Go on, I’ll be right behind you.”

His brother only manages a couple of steps before processing the implications of that. He pauses, turns back. “You’re not…?”

Dick lets himself look over at the prone figure in the bed, at the tubes and wires and machinery. He seems so vulnerable like this, so impossibly unthreatening. It’s hard to imagine that something so helpless is the cause of so much of their troubles. “I need a moment.”

Jason hesitates, glancing between them. For a second Dick really thinks he’ll refuse to leave.

Then he glares. It’s a weak glare, by Jason’s standards, but a glare nonetheless. “Five minutes, then I’m coming back and dragging you out.”

Despite himself, Dick smiles. “Five minutes.”

Getting out the window stealthily with a broken leg and crutches is a feat, and he’s impressed when Jason manages it for the second time that night. He sacrifices a minute of his five (he truly expects Jason to hold him to that timeframe) waiting to ensure that Jason really has left, then spends another on scouting the room for cameras, microphones, hidden alarms — anything that could have captured this whole mess — and disables the few he finds.

When he’s checked as thoroughly as he can, he steps fully out of the light and into the shadows that encase the bedside. He turns his head away from the glow of the silenced monitors, moving his face out from beneath their sickly green light, and strokes one hand along the breadth of the tube that supplies oxygen.

Jason was right about one thing: their family will never be truly safe while the Joker still lives. His siblings may not need Dick anymore, may be just fine without him, but they don't need the Joker either. One last gift from their big brother. No more clowns.

Dick is a killer by necessity, not by choice, but for one man he can make an exception. It’s not the first time he’s allowed himself this one kill. With any luck, it’ll be the first time it sticks.

He wraps both hands around the tube and squeezes.

Chapter Text

It’s an easier kill than he ever faced in the League. He doesn’t have to watch the life drain from his victim when said victim is already lifeless. He simply… squeezes. Squeezes, checks the monitor to confirm the flatline, and leaves. That’s it.

It’s the least guilt he’s ever felt after murder.

Less guilt does not equate to guilt free, which is a fact he knows intimately but is rather suddenly rediscovered when Jason drags him aside the next day in a panic to tell him, “The Joker is dead."

Dick paints on his best surprised face.

It hasn’t hit the media yet, or it only just has. He’s been checking periodically but the GCPD have managed to keep that information successfully locked down so far.

Bruce sequestered himself down in the cave before anyone else in their family of late risers managed to drag themselves awake, passing a message through Alfred to request uninterruption. That in itself was rather telling, but Bruce hadn’t seen fit to fill the rest of them in. Dick’s been stuck trying not to check the news too often or too obviously, waiting for the cat to claw its way out of the bag without letting on that he was the one to stuff it in there in the first place.

The cat’s out now, scratching and tearing at everything in sight, and his brother is looking at him with poorly disguised terror.

"Did you—"

"He was fine when I left him," Dick says, cutting him off before he can launch any accusations or shoulder any guilt. He isn't sure which way Jason intended to lean. "I glared at him a bit, told him to rot in hell, etcetera. Didn't expect that to become relevant quite so soon."

If it was going to be an accusation then Dick has preemptively claimed innocence. If self-blame was Jason's intent — which, selfishly, is closer to what Dick wants in this moment, but only for the moment! — then he has only been nudged further in that direction.

Either way, Jason only looks more panicked. "Did I…?"

He trails off himself this time, no interruption from Dick required. "No," he hurries to say when it becomes clear that Jason's run out of words. "No. This was always a possibility with his condition. Nothing you did in that hospital room could have caused this."

"But I put him there! I gave him the injuries that killed him!"

“And you had good reason.” When Jason goes to protest, Dick rushes to block him. “You did. He would have killed Tim. You did what you thought was necessary, and it was.”

Jason is bloodlessly pale. Most of Dick’s guilt stems from causing this, rather than the act of murder itself. It’s always the consequences that get him, always slipping past his defences and causing more trouble than he ever could have considered. Always the damn consequences.

“I went too far,” Jason whispers. “I killed him. I’m a murderer. I killed him.”

Dick grabs his little brother by the arms, demanding his attention, commanding it. “No, Jason. He killed himself. None of it was your fault.”

He doesn’t think Jason believes him, but it’s the best argument he’s got.

Damian is next to find him, slipping out of his old, still empty room as Dick passes to pull him inside. “He’s dead.”

“Yeah,” Dick breathes, bracing himself. He isn’t sure who, if anyone, is going to be accusing him, but out of all the contenders Damian has to be near the top of the pile. No one knows Dick — the current version of him, time jumper and all — like Damian.

But he also knows that Damian tends to idolise him. That could cloud his judgement. Few of his siblings have ever looked at Dick and seen a killer, even when Damian knows exactly what the League is like, all that they demand of their assassins. The clue is in the name, but Damian has lived it twice over, and now so has Dick.

Damian doesn’t say anything more. He nods once, sets his shoulders like he’s marching off to war, then steps forward into a hug.

It’s a steady motion, deliberate and telegraphed. Dick embraces him back, relishing the contact that even now feels so foreign, their time kept apart in the League still having a stranglehold on them. Each hug— no, every touch they share, every skim of their hands or brush of their shoulders— it’s all one massive fuck you to the League and those instilled instincts to shy away from each other.

Damian holds the hug for far longer than he ever willingly would have before, and Dick doesn’t call him out on it. Then he disengages, steps back, looks up at Dick with an assessing gaze. Nods once more, satisfied with whatever he finds, and slips wordlessly out the door.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Tim is saying as Dick approaches the kitchen, and he quickly backtracks as quietly as he can (which is near silent, with his training) to listen in from around the corner.

“You’re not the first to tell me that,” Jason sighs. “But it was. It is. You were there, you of all people can’t go around proclaiming my innocence—”

Tim cuts him off with a vehemence that takes Dick by surprise. “Yeah, I was there. I was tied to a chair with broken ribs, in agony, terrified that I was going to die. You saved me.”

“And even then you were yelling at me to spare him.”

“Which you did! You even ran back into that warehouse to spare him from the explosion he set!”

That part is news to Dick.

“He was going to kill me, exactly how he killed Dick, and it was— I read the report about his death. It has all the gory details written with this clinical detachment that you’d think would make it less painful to read but it really didn’t—”

“Yeah,” Jason croaks. “I know. I read it too.”

Dick also read it, back when it was a report on Jason’s death. He has to assume that the key details are the same, and those details were brutal. He’d thought reading it might fix something in him, heal even a small part of the gaping wound that Jason left behind. All it did was tear that wound wider.

“I was so scared,” Tim says. His voice wobbles. Dick leans his weight back against the wall he’s hiding behind, tilting his head back to rest as he listens helplessly, so close to his hurting brothers but with an insurmountable gulf between them. “I didn’t want to die, and I especially didn’t want to die like that. You saved me.”

Jason sighs, a heavy sound. “It doesn’t matter. I’d already saved you by the time I started hitting him. All I had to do was knock him out and get you both out of there. I took it too far, and now he’s dead. That’s on me.”

Dick could fix this. All he has to do is confess. He could walk around this corner right now, tell them exactly what happened during the five minutes he spent alone in that hospital room, tell them everything. It would be so easy.

But like with Babs yesterday, like Bruce too, like all the other opportunities he’s had to tell his family the truth about his situation, the words clog in his throat like a sticky green mucus and he can’t.

Some part of Dick is surprised when Barbara pulls her chair up next to him in the lounge, settling to join him as he watches back to back episodes of a cartoon he’s never seen before and honestly couldn’t name now despite having sat through four episodes already.

In the event that Bruce called a family meeting over this — which Dick hadn’t thought likely, but it was always possible — then he’d expected Barbara to remain in her clock tower with all her tools of surveillance. It’s a lot of effort for her to drag herself all the way to the manor for a discussion she could contribute to perfectly well over comms.

The part of him that wasn’t at all surprised feels a bitter rush of vindication when she says, with no preamble, “I won’t cover for you again.”

When he’d cleared the hospital room of recording devices, he’d noticed Barbara’s. He knew where to look. He’d seen through it from the other side, so he could work backwards to figure out the angling with relative ease, and his familiarity with her preferences and set ups helped him pinpoint the exact location.

He’d noticed it, and left it alone. He didn’t see the point in tampering with it. Barbara isn’t stupid, she can piece together Joker alive when Dick enters plus Joker dead when Dick leaves to reach the obvious answer with or without the cameras.

If anything, he’d been caught off guard when she hadn’t immediately contacted him.

“I didn’t ask you to cover for me,” he notes, normal volume. The first thing she did when she entered was to turn the television up. The cartoon clangs and yells neatly drown out their conversation from anyone who could eavesdrop.

“I know,” she says. She keeps her eyes firmly on the screen. “But I did, and I won’t say anything. Only because it was him.”

He gets that. He’d almost predicted it. If there’s anyone in this timeline who can understand his issues with the Joker on a level that personal, it’s Barbara. It can’t have been easy for her to know that he was still out there. His comatose status was irrelevant: as long as he lived, he was a threat.

If she’s feeling even half as much unfiltered relief as he is, however weighed down by guilt as they each may be, then she understands. Condones, maybe not, but understands.

Cautiously, uncertain of the reception it’ll get, he drops his hand onto the arm of the sofa, palm up in offering. There’s a second that stretches into an eternity before she places hers on top, links their fingers, and squeezes.

She looks at him now, for the first time since she entered. “Please talk to me.”

The circumstances have changed considerably between yesterday and now. Between her concerned but willing to give him time, to him falling apart on her floor then murdering a defenceless monster.

There’s a hint of desperation haunting her plea. Dick doesn’t think he can bear it.

He looks away. He keeps looking away as she untangles her hand from his, the cartoon washing over him without retention as she wheels herself silently away.

Bruce remains in his self-imposed exile down in the cave all day, until he doesn’t. Until Dick rounds another corner and stumbles onto the worst possible family member facing down a perpetually guilt-ridden Jason.

He may have been so preoccupied with his own guilt, with evading suspicion, with waiting for Barbara’s reaction, that he forgot to worry about the reaction of Bruce — notoriously anti-murder Bruce Wayne — to a death that is supposedly Jason’s fault.

He has to speak up. Fight through the green wall that blocks him from confessing, ignore that him and Bruce haven’t spoken since they argued yesterday, and take the heat away from his brother. It’s fine if Bruce hates him for it. He can make his peace with that. What he can no longer bring himself to do is stand uselessly to the side and let Jason shoulder the blame and guilt and hate that should all rightfully rest with Dick.

Selfish. He’s been so selfish. Didn’t he just resolve to prioritise helping Jason…? How quickly that fell apart in favour of protecting himself.

When he forces himself out of his own head and back into the scene playing out like a bad dream in front of him, it’s to Bruce saying, simple and devastating, “You killed him.”

Jason’s breaths stutter, his guard dropping for a fraction of a second before he hauls it back into place. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. I killed him. I murdered him. I’m not— we don’t kill.”

His voice breaks a little at the end despite his clear efforts to keep it steady, and Dick’s heart breaks with it.

Bruce is watching Jason closely, still ignoring Dick in the background. “I don’t see the problem.”

That tips Jason over an edge. He groans, throwing his head back. “Don’t do that,” he begs. Eyes closed, face tilted up to the ceiling. “Don’t mess with my head. Just give it to me straight. Please. I can’t take anyone else trying to talk me out of my guilt.”

“You killed him, yes. You regret it.”

It’s questioning while somehow not sounding at all like a question.

Jason swallows. Nods. Hoarsely, as if on the verge of tears, says, “Yeah. I regret it.”

“We knew this was a possibility. I reacted at the time, and I meant it. I stand by it. I don’t condone what you did, but I still love you, and I’ll never stop loving you. You had good intentions, and you made the right choice in the end. We all make mistakes, Jay. This one doesn’t have to define you.”

It’s shockingly diplomatic, from Bruce. A stunning display of emotional tact. Dick honestly didn’t think he had it in him.

“It’s happened. You can’t change it. You can only control what you do going forward.”

The words hang suspended in the air, like the last breath before plunging underwater, like the first breath after resurfacing. An ending, or a beginning, or even both. There’s power in the pause.

Then the moment fractures, and Jason crashes forward into his father. Bruce tugs him in as close as he can and holds him tight.

Dick hovers in the distance and swallows his confession.

He stands there uselessly until they ease apart, Jason’s hand coming up to rub tears away from one eye, Bruce’s thumb brushing tenderly under the other. Jason breathes, slow and deep, his shoulders rising and falling with the motion. It looks like it settles him as much as Dick is unsettled.

Bruce drops his hands onto Jason’s shoulders and says again, “I love you.” Jason echoes it. They share another little moment that Dick looks away from, affording them the illusion of privacy a bit late, but he doesn’t know what else to do.

Then Jason is leaving, walking past Bruce towards the lounge, and for the first time since their fight Dick is alone with his father.

It’s only been a day, but it feels like so much longer.

Bruce steps up to him, stopping before he gets to close, leaving the same distance between them that he’d left for Jason. Dick gets the distinct impression that he’s being handled. Once upon a time he’d have called it out. This time, he stands silent and still, and waits for the verdict.

When it comes, it hits like that one guy he trained with in the League who took great pleasure in punching him in the solar plexus. All that weight and power crammed into verbal form: “I love you too. You know that, right?”

Dick lets himself feel it. Lets himself turn the words over in his mind, lets the truth of them sink into his skin like a second layer, a restriction and a comfort in equal measure. He does know it. He almost forgets it, at times, but he does know it.

He emulates Jason, trying for that deep, settling breath. It doesn’t have the same effect on Dick.

He can’t do this. Not right now. Something has been ruined between him and Barbara, and in trying to save Jason he’s just found another way to ruin him. Part of his mind is always, always, thinking about Cass and Duke, the absentee siblings. Another is stuck with those who are present, whether they need him or not. Bruce— he can’t. It’s all too much.

Bruce might not know the truth of what happened last night, but Dick does. How is he meant to look his father in the eye knowing he’s broken his most sacred rule?

He killed with the League, yes, but it was different. It was. It had to be different, or Dick couldn’t have survived it. He had no choice: every murder he committed with them was an act of survival, and Bruce would not have approved but like Barbara and the Joker he would at least have understood.

But Dick and the Joker — that was a choice. There was no metaphorical gun to his head, or to the heads of his siblings. No, just Dick, his murderer, and his refusal to let any guns, metaphorical or otherwise, get anywhere close to those he loves. Not again. Never again.

He can’t even blame the Pit. Not when his head was about as clear as it’s ever been since his death.

Bruce doesn’t know any of that, and Bruce loves him, and Dick loves him too but he’s not sure he deserves to and he can’t bring himself to say it in return.

So he doesn’t. One thing at a time. He can start trying to fix what he’s broken with Bruce once he’s sorted out the mess he’s left festering between him and Jason, once and for all.

Dick follows Jason into the lounge, leaving Bruce standing bereft in the hall.

Chapter Text

“You didn’t kill him.”

Jason is sitting in the same spot on the sofa that Dick claimed only hours earlier, staring intently at the television, his broken leg propped up on the coffee table that he’s dragged closer. The programme’s changed to another cartoon. Dick vaguely recognises this one, but he still couldn’t name it even if his life depended on it. It’s a lot calmer than the last, with characters doddering around the house in a simulation of domestic serenity instead of beating each other up in the street. The volume is still turned up from Barbara’s visit — convenient, for the conversation Dick intends to have.

“Sorry, was it not you standing in the background as Bruce and I discussed it? Do I need to raise the alarm about an imposter? I think it’s pretty well established at this point that I did.”

Jason doesn’t look up, or away from the television. He’s still, but tense, irritation or discomfort or distress or a combination of all three vibrating just beneath the surface of his skin.

“You didn’t kill him,” Dick repeats, unable to bring himself to sit down. He hovers behind the sofa instead, his hands firmly shoved into the pockets of his jeans, watching the cartoon mother comfort her child after a nightmare. “I did.”

Jason freezes all at once, then eases in agonising increments. “No you didn’t. You can’t trace my actions back to anything you did. Attempting to blame him would be more reasonable than blaming yourself.”

“No—” Clarity is required, it seems, no matter how much Dick would rather be anywhere else doing anything else. He owes Jason his honesty. He owes it to his entire family, but none moreso than Jason. “You didn’t kill him because he didn’t die of the injuries you gave him. He died because, after you left me in the hospital room last night, I killed him.”

“For fuck’s sake, Dick,” Jason hisses, finally twisting to face him, and the venom in it catches Dick off guard. “I thought— didn’t we get over this yesterday? I don’t want your lies. Not even to protect me.”

Dick forces himself to move, to climb over the back of the sofa to settle on its arm, facing Jason. “No more lies, which is why I’m telling you this.”

He’s found a genial tone somewhere along the way, pasted it neatly over the top of his speech. It’s wrong. It’s the sort of disingenuity he wields against criminals, not his brother. He can’t figure out how to strip it from his voice.

Jason matches his movements, hefting himself up to sit on the opposite arm, dragging his injured leg along in his torso’s wake. “Why are you doing this? Why can’t you let it lie? It happened, and I hate myself for it, and I just want to move on!”

Guilt gnaws at his bones, his lungs, his heart. He embraces it; it’s deserved. He plows on regardless.

“Jason,” he says softly, and waits for their eyes to meet. “You left. I cleared the room of recording devices. I turned off the alarms. I suffocated him. I left, rejoined you, and pretended nothing was wrong.”

He watches in real time as the full implications sink in, as Jason realises that he’s not just trying a new protection tactic but might actually be telling the truth. It kills him to watch his brother’s faith in him falter. He maintains eye contact all the same.

Disbelief wavers in Jason’s voice as he asks, “If that’s true, why didn’t you say something then? Or earlier, when I was freaking out about it and you had every opportunity to speak up?”

“Because I’m a coward,” Dick admits. “I’ve been trying to confess all day and failing. It’s not fair for me to keep lying about it, to stand by and let you take the blame and carry the guilt. I’m sorry I left it so long. I just— you deserved to know the truth first. I’ll go tell the others now.”

He starts to slide off the sofa, already trying to gather the courage to repeat this with Bruce—

“No—” Jason lunges across and grabs at Dick’s arm. He sinks back down onto the sofa proper, and Dick lets himself be tugged along until they’re both seated, half facing each other, Dick’s arm still held in a vice grip. “No. Don’t.”

Jason’s still processing, he thinks, staring down at the material of the sofa as if it’s hiding all the answers, seemingly unaware of his injured leg dangling at an odd angle off the edge. Dick’s hands itch to correct it, to ease what must be an uncomfortable position for his brother, but he doesn’t think Jason would be particularly receptive to such aid right now.

“I don’t understand,” Jason says finally. “You’re not a murderer. You talked me out of it only to do it yourself? That doesn’t make sense.”

Dick brings his free hand up to rest it on top of Jason’s. “It’s the League of Assassins, Jay. They don’t let you not kill. I don’t like it, I don’t want to kill, and I’m not planning any more murders, but I’m not an innocent here. My slate isn’t clean.”

Jason is pale. “So, what, it was an order from the League? One last command you couldn’t refuse?”

“Oh, no.” It’s a nice easy out he’s accidentally crafted for himself, but he’s not going to take it. “This one was entirely voluntary.”

“Then why—?”

“Because you weren’t wrong.” Dick smiles, the sadness and bitterness creeping into it. “He deserved it. I couldn’t rest knowing that he was still out there, that he could hurt our family again. That he could hurt you. I wasn’t going to stand by and watch you force yourself to be something you’re not when I could take that burden from you.

“I said I’d do anything to protect you. I meant it. You, and Tim, Steph, Damian, Babs. I’d do anything to protect you.”

The raw honesty of it scratches at his throat, threatens to consume him with its intensity.

“I didn’t ask you to do that for me,” Jason whispers.

“I know,” Dick murmurs. “I didn’t want you to. I just want you to be safe without destroying yourself to achieve it.”

Jason believes him now. Dick can read it in the blankness of his brother’s eyes. He’s looking at Dick like he’s a stranger, like Dick his brother is still buried six feet under while Dick the stranger sits in front of him and confesses to murder.

This moment right here is the closest Dick will get to regret. The thought that saving his family might cost him… them. Their trust, their faith, maybe even their love.

He doesn’t regret, though. Close, but no. He’d sacrifice anything to protect them. He’d thought death would be the greatest extreme to prove that point, but this emotional wound hurts more than the crowbar.

Then Jason surprises him by asking, “Does it really matter who killed him?”

Dick frowns, because yes. “I’m not letting you take the blame for my crime any longer.”

Jason’s not looking at him again, staring intently down at their still-intertwined hands. “We were only in that hospital room in the first place because I went there to kill him. I still believe it was the right thing to do, but I was— I couldn’t see it through. You could. You only did what I wanted to do.”

“But you didn’t—”

“I’m still guilty,” Jason declares. His eyes have lost that scary blank quality in place of determination, a determination which, given the circumstances, Dick finds concerning. “He might have died from the injuries I gave him. He would have died if I’d been strong enough. It’s not fair if everyone turns on you and forgets about my role in it.”

“Almost killing him isn’t the same as actually killing him, Jay. It’s not fair for you to carry that burden when you’re not guilty. I can’t ask that of you.”

“You’re not asking. I’m telling you it’s the obvious way forward.”

Dick– he didn’t expect this. It warms his heart, to an extent, to have Jason willing to leap to his defence like this. At the same time it undoes the whole point of the confession. Dick’s purpose is to protect his siblings. He can’t continue to idle away while Jason shoulders all the blame and guilt that is rightly his. What Jason wanted to do, or tried to do, is irrelevant. What matters is what he did do: nothing. Dick was the killer, and Dick should suffer the consequences.

“No,” he says, pulling out of Jason’s grasp and neatly evading his attempt to grab his shirt and keep him in place. “That’s not happening.”

His previous cowardice seems to have evaporated in the face of Jason’s stubborn selflessness. He makes for the door, guiltily relieved that Jason is still hindered by his broken leg and can’t easily follow to stop him. That relief lasts until he’s almost escaped out into the hall, until Jason calls after him:

“You tell anyone you did it, and I’ll tell them you’re lying to protect me.”

Dick pauses in the doorway. Half-turns, slowly. “They wouldn’t believe you.”

“Wouldn’t they?”

It’s— well. Bruce might not. He probably doesn’t have the greatest faith in Dick’s honesty right now. He couldn’t judge with Tim and Steph, except that in this timeline they’re both more familiar with Jason, and more likely to trust him. Damian is a wild card, closer to Dick but well aware that he’s sacrificed himself for Jason once already. It could go either way, except: “Barbara knows. I’m sure she’d be willing to unearth the footage that’ll back me up.”

Jason frowns. “I thought you said you got rid of all recording devices.”

“You think I could win against Babs in a surveillance contest?”

Jason pauses, thinking it through, and Dick considers escaping before he can come up with a retort. Unfortunately for him, Jason gets in there first. “If Barbara was going to expose you, surely she would’ve done it by now. The fact that she hasn’t leads me to think that she won’t.”

Shit. Yeah, Dick really doesn’t know whose side she’d take if it came down to it, but he’s not confident enough that it’d be his.

“Maybe she’d tell the truth to shield me,” Jason continues to Dick’s despair, “but I’m getting the impression that she’d back me up if I asked her to.”

Dick isn’t confident at all, and those aren’t odds he’s willing to play with. Not when it’s Jason on the line.

It’s Jason on the line either way, unfortunately, and as ever Dick can’t find a way around it.

He’s just resolved himself to honesty, and even more recently forced himself to honour that commitment, and here he is allowing Jason to talk him into getting away with more lies. Lies by omission, in this case, but lies nonetheless.

“I thought you wanted honesty from me,” he says in one final attempt at persuasion, voicing the contradiction that Jason has backed him into

Jason shrugs. He still looks a little shell-shocked, but he recovered quickly on the whole to turn this situation on its head, to Dick’s dismay. “And you’ve given me honesty. A little delayed, sure, but you got there in the end. I don’t remember saying anything about being honest with the others.”

The dig stings a little, but Dick won’t complain when it’s more than fair.

He doesn’t like this — doesn’t like anything about this — but Jason seems set on this path. Dick knows all about how determined Jason can get once he gets an idea into his head.

“You’re sure?” he sighs finally, accepting defeat. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I know.” Dick was worried that Jason didn’t know, that he was doing this out of some misplaced obligation, but he sounds genuine. He sounds like he cares about Dick, like maintaining his status in this family is more important than the truth. It shouldn’t be so shocking to Dick, to be cared about, but he’s spent the last couple years with a bunch of asshole assassins and a Damian forced to hide his love, so he’s a little out of practice when it comes to receiving familial affection.

Jason retains that genuine care when he adds, firm, “I want to protect you. You’ve always protected me. Let me protect you for once.”

It occurs to Dick then that maybe this whole sibling thing goes both ways. The overwhelming love he feels for Jason, the desperate need to shield him from all harm — Jason feels it all too in reverse.

He’s been having a lot of realisations in the past couple days. He’s not sure how many more he can take.

But this, in the grand scheme of things, is a relatively small ask. It’s no Ethiopia, no plea to go face the Joker alone to die instead. Just a shouldering of blame that does in part rightly rest with him. Only very slightly, and Dick would never say it to Jason, but he has to admit the truth of that. Overall it is, comparably, very safe.

He doesn’t like it, but if it prevents any more dangerous attempts at protection then Dick can bear it.

He sighs again, and caves. “Fine.” He dives deep internally to dig out his Brother Mode™, draping it around himself like a worn but well-loved shield. “Fine!”

He hefts himself over the back of the sofa to drop into place next to Jason again. Reaching over, he tugs his brother into a side hug, careful not to jostle the injured leg too much in the process. “If you change your mind at any point, for whatever reason, you absolutely have my permission to tattle on me,” he says into Jason’s hair.

“Okay,” Jason says with an equivalent false cheer, matching Dick’s energy as he allows himself to be manhandled. “I won’t, but I’ll keep that in mind for other scenarios.”

“Hey, no. No. That’s a one-scenario-only deal. No other tattling allowed.”

Jason shifts a little under his arm, resting his head on Dick’s chest in a position that doesn’t look comfortable but which fills Dick with warmth. “Try and stop me. That’s what brotherhood is all about, right? Excessive tattling? And you just gave me blanket permission!”

“And now I’m rescinding it. No tattling.”

Their banter is strained, tainted by the weight of the conversation that preceded it, but it’s familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s them, a them that’s only recent appearances has been even more strained by the weight of the much-needed conversation that’s been lurking unspoken in the background of every interaction.

This is already better. It’s amazing how much communication can fix. Dick should have had this realisation sooner — he could have avoided so many of their family’s issues if he’d just taken the first step and talked.

But that was then, and what will be. Now: Dick holds his brother, buries his face into Jason’s curls, and loves him.

He’s died for this boy. He’s killed for him. He’d gladly do both things a thousand more times if that’s what it took to protect him, in any timeline life sees fit to throw him into. He has no intention of letting Jason go anywhere close to those lengths, but in this, he supposes he can relent.

At least Jason knows the truth. Jason knows his own innocence. Dick will have to content himself with that.

He hates to interrupt this moment of peace, but there is one final unspoken conversation that really needs to transition to spoken, and if he doesn’t do it now then he may never work up the courage again.

“While we’re here—”

Jason groans before he can finish, pulling out of the hug to position them face to face once more. Dick instantly misses the contact. “Oh, hell. What else have you done?”

“Rude,” Dick scoffs, as if it isn’t an entirely valid question at this point. “No, I just want to clarify— you know Nightwing is yours, right? I’m only covering while you’re out injured. I never meant for it to be permanent. It’s yours now; I don’t want it back.”

Jason stares down at his leg, at the source of this whole mess. “It was yours first. I don’t have any right to it, especially after I tainted it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You haven’t tainted anything.”

Jason fixes him with a Look. “The Joker.”

Dick makes a little hand gesture that he hopes conveys how little he’s following.

“I adopted Nightwing to honour you, then I damn near killed a man while wearing it.”

Oh. Huh. Dick hadn’t thought about it like that. He was too busy feeling a mix of touched that Jason had taken up his mantle, pride in how he’d made it his own, and a jealousy that he’s not proud of to have lost a second identity to his brother.

There’s an obvious counter, and Dick is more than happy to raise it. “And I did kill that man while wearing your adapted version of the suit,” he hums. “I think we’re more than even on the whole tainting each other’s suits thing.”

Jason opens his mouth to retort, pauses, closes it again. Thinks about it. “That’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same, Little Wing. Nightwing is yours now, and it’s up to you what you do with it. I’ll be proud no matter what. And you can’t expect me to be mad at you for protecting Tim.”

The retort comes quickly this time: “Then by that logic I can’t be mad at you for protecting all of us.”

And now it’s Dick’s turn to flounder. “Well. No. I guess not.” He grasps blindly for a way to twist this in his favour, finds it, and follows it to its endpoint. Funnily enough, it’s also where they started. “Which makes us inarguably even, right?”

Jason leans back against the arm of the sofa, crossing his arms and adopting a comically grumpy expression. “Maybe,” he allows. “But I don’t like it. You’re back now. I never would have taken Nightwing from you if I’d known you were alive.”

Technically Dick was still dead when Jason adopted his mantle, but he declines to mention that little fact. “Surprise! I’m alive. And surprise! I want you to keep Nightwing.”

Jason doesn’t seem convinced, so Dick carries on talking. When in doubt, fill any and all space with chatter. Meaningful or meaningless, it doesn’t matter — the other person rarely cares. “Besides, I’ve got ideas for a new identity ready now. It’ll be devastating if I never get to unleash that brilliance on the world.”

Jason flings himself to the other end of the sofa at that — which, in his current state, ends up as more of a spirited shuffle an inch or two away. “Oh, no. No. I saw your original sketches for Nightwing. That one with the deep v neck—”

He shudders, and Dick groans. He thought he’d hidden those early designs well enough, but apparently not. Even in an alternate timeline, Dick can’t escape the judgement for Discowing.

(It’s not even that bad of a design, why won’t people let it go—)

“I discarded that one for a reason,” he laments, which isn’t a lie. He just neglects to mention that the reason in question was to escape the taunts rather than any loss of faith in the quality of the design.

“You didn’t discard the Robin costume though.”

“Okay, no, because the Robin costume was designed around my unique skillset as an acrobat, and if you had such an issue with it you could’ve—”

“Robin is meant to be a symbol. I didn’t want to make it obvious that I was a different person—”

“You were very visibly younger than me!”

It’s a stupid argument, one they’ve had multiple times before, but right now it’s refreshing. Jason’s grinning. So is Dick. Their relationship hasn’t become defined by difficult conversations and an undercurrent of tension. They can still have these moments of levity, can still exist as brothers and not just two separate bundles of sentient trauma.

Dick didn’t ruin everything when he died. They’re okay. Individually it’s harder, but together the two of them are okay.

Jason kicks him (with the unbroken leg, thankfully), bringing him out of his internal musings. “So, how terrible is your new plan? I need to either talk you out of it or prepare my fake compliments for if that fails.”

Cheerfully, Dick kicks him back (also avoiding the broken leg). “My ideas are either absolute genius or somewhat uncomfortable, depending on how you feel about certain things.”

“That’s not ominous at all,” Jason deadpans. “I’m gonna need you to elaborate.”

“First of all, I was thinking of a return to red. Well, more orange, really, otherwise Babs will never forgive me for switching from one shared colour to another.”

He’d thought he was done with warm colours, but life has a funny way of diverging from expectation. Blue is still his preferred colour, but it’s Jason’s now, and he’s made his peace with that. There are only two colours he’s determined to avoid: blue, to give Jason space, and green. He’s had more than enough of green.

It wasn’t colour that drew him in the end. It was the symbolism. 

“But the main thing that I want your approval for…”

He gets Jason’s approval, and the approval of the other relevant parties, and he sends his favourite design off to be made reality.

If Bruce is hesitant to let him back into the field on a permanent basis then he hides it admirably. If Barbara has any compunctions then she keeps them unvoiced.

On Jason’s first day back as Nightwing, newly helmeted in a shining blue, Dick soars at his side in the oranges and golds of Flamebird.

Chapter Text

Only three days after Jason’s return to the field and Dick’s debut as Flamebird, Jason interrupts the casual chatter that Dick, Steph, and Damian have been engaged in over the comms for the past half hour or so to announce: “We just had a run in with an interesting figure.”

Dick pauses on the rooftop he’s on, catching Steph by the arm before she can leap to the next without him. “Anything to be concerned about?”

It’s been a cold night, and quiet. Fewer and fewer criminals are keen to stay out late as winter roots itself more and more firmly in the chilly air. It’s one of the few reasons Alfred succeeded in forcing Bruce to take the night off — that, the concussion he picked up the night before, and the remaining four in the field promising to stay safely in pairs. Even with all that, it had taken a lot of convincing.

Dick had noted Jason and Tim dropping out of the conversation and was getting close to checking in with them himself. Thankfully, they’ve beaten him to it, lessening his ever present paranoia just a little.

“She wasn’t familiar,” Tim responds. “But she’s definitely a trained fighter. She— we—”

“She saved our asses,” Jason interrupts. “Don’t tell B. We were outnumbered, and she dropped in from nowhere—”

“No, we had it handled! She just… helped. Sped it all up.”

“We were fucked, and she speedily unfucked us.”

“You’re okay now?” Dick cuts across their arguing to confirm. Unfortunately, he doesn’t trust them to lead with that information. For all he knows, one or both of them is steadily bleeding out while they bicker. It wouldn’t be the first time.

To his relief, they both chime in with confirmations. Bruce would never take a day off again if one of his kids got seriously injured in his absence. On that note, Jason is probably right: Bruce doesn’t need to know the full extent of this incident, whatever it turns out to be, not if they’re all fine. They can downplay the severity of it, spare him a heart attack or a resurgence of his ever-present overprotective smothering. That’ll be fine.

Not that Dick would be the one telling him anything right now, but still.

“Could you describe the girl?” Damian asks. Dick probably should have asked it before him, immediately after confirming that both their brothers are still intact and relatively uninjured, but at least one of them is focusing on case relevant details. It’s fine, it gives Dick more space to take over the absent Bruce’s job of being overly concerned about physical health.

Someone has to do it. It’s a role that has never not been filled in their family. They all freely complain about Bruce, but will each leap to take over the smothering when he’s unavailable. Hypocrites, the lot of them, and Dick worst of all.

What is murder in the name of another, if not an act of overprotection?

“Friend of yours?” Jason quips in response, rather than provide a simple answer. He’s good at the whole older brother thing. Really good at it. He’s got the perpetually annoying part of it down to an art form already. Dick is so proud.

“Obviously not, when you have yet to provide any identifying information about her beyond her gender and fighting capabilities. How could I recognise her from your limited description?”

“She had a hood and a makeshift mask that covered the lower half of her face,” Tim reports before Jason can. “I didn’t get a good visual of her otherwise.”

Damian scoffs. “Of course not. I should not have expected anything of value from you.”

“We were a bit busy!” 

At Dick’s side, Steph looks torn between leaping to Tim’s defence and letting the argument play out. She hasn’t taken well to Damian’s continual needling of her friend. Dick’s not entirely comfortable with it either, but where Steph has always been ready to back Tim up, Dick has guiltily stayed silent and left them to it.

He gets what Damian is doing. He does. He’s not sure it’s the best way of achieving his goals, but he doesn’t have a better suggestion for his brother. After Tim’s confused hurt the first time it happened, he’s settled into responding in kind, and that’s the biggest reason Dick hasn’t intervened. Steph’s backed off too, a little, willing to let Tim fight his own battles until she thinks he needs support.

Dick judges that she’s seconds away from providing that support when Jason beats her to it: “I didn’t get anything more either. She was gone before we could say thanks for the save—"

"We would've been fine!" Tim continues to futilely insist.

"—let alone who are you? I’d like to see you do better in those circumstances, kid."

“Maybe I could if you’d let me out in the field—”

“I’m trying to track her from your current location, but I’ve not had much luck so far,” Barbara chimes in, cutting off the evolving argument between Damian and Jason. Unlike when it’s Damian and Tim, their conflicts are usually down to Jason being Jason. It’s (usually) much less fraught.  “She disappears from my radar pretty quickly after she leaves you. I’ll keep working on it.”

Barbara is usually quieter than the rest of them on comms, too busy juggling twelve things at once to have time to join the banter, but her silence has seemed… more, to Dick tonight. It’s also very possible he’s overthinking it. (It’s also very possible that he’s not).

“Maybe she’ll reappear sometime,” Steph says, assisting Barbara in dragging them back on topic. “Maybe next time Nightwing and Robin are in serious danger she’ll pop out of the shadows to save them again.”

“We were fine,” Tim mumbles morosely. It’s a token resistance, at this point.

Jason hums. “These things are never a one off. Not in this city. We’ll see her again, I’m sure. It’s just a matter of when.”

Ominous! Jason should really know better by now. Voicing such things is never advisable, no matter how true they may be. He’s all but guaranteed her future reappearance with that. Dick will have to complain loudly and annoyingly when his prediction inevitably comes true.

Business concluded, the conversation blends back into casual chatter. It really is a quiet night, even by recent standards. The air is still, unchanging, a silent sanctuary on the rooftop Dick and Steph have paused upon. He's content for the moment to remain there, letting the voices of his family wash over him.

They may be missing a couple members, even though only Dick and Damian know it, but that doesn't mean he should take those they have for granted. He doesn't want to take them for granted. They're here, safe and well, and he loves them so deeply that it hurts almost as much as it did to be apart from them for the past couple years.

He's so caught up in these thoughts that he misses it.

It's Steph that clues him in, and only because she happens to be facing him. Her eyes widen, her hands going to where she keeps her batarangs despite her current lack of training with the weapon, and Dick is turning in reaction to her reaction before she can voice anything.

He didn't recognise any change in the atmosphere, didn't hear any approach. Situational awareness is crucial in their line of work, and for all his talk of protecting his siblings, Dick dropped his guard enough for someone to sneak up on him and Steph. This failing would be a massive cause for concern in any other situation

Not this one, though.

“Cass?”

The name spills from his lips before he can stuff it back inside.

It is her. Cassandra Cain, in all her glory. Cass, his sister. Her outfit is a budget version of one of her later costumes, the hood and lower face mask that Tim described paired with a plain long sleeved shirt, trousers, and sneakers, all in muted greys and blacks. It’s easy to see how Tim and Jason could fail to identify any of her key features, especially if she was moving as swiftly as Dick knows she can in a fight, but right now she’s stationary, and Dick could recognise any of his siblings beneath their masks. It’s her.

It wasn't his own poor situational awareness that missed her approach. It was Cass' Cassness, her impossible skill at stealth. It's a multifaceted relief: Dick didn't almost get Steph killed with his incompetence (Cass is just too good; it wouldn't have been his fault), and it's Cass.

 It’s Cass.

Now that she’s been presented as an option it seems obvious to Dick that she was the one to help their brothers. He can’t imagine anyone else in the role of what was mere moments ago a mysterious saviour. Now all he can think of is Cass Cass Cass.

Over the comms, in the distant part of his brain that remains alert even when otherwise shutting down in sheer shock or undiluted relief, he registers a sharp intake of breath from Damian. They spent all this time searching for her and here she is, depositing herself in their laps.

Steph says something at his side; someone else speaks over the comms. Dick doesn’t pay any of it any attention. His world has narrowed, sudden and sharp, to him on this side of the roof and Cass standing opposite. To him and her. His sister, finally, finally.

She’s here. She’s home. She’s here and she’s safe and he loves her so much, no matter what.

Cass' face, carefully blank when Dick first turned, lights up when he says her name. Recognition of some sort, he supposes, although of what he’s not so sure. She won’t know him. She won’t even know how to speak, let alone understand his speech, or even her own name. That hurts, but not more than it hurt to not know where she was. They’ll figure it out. All that matters is that she’s here.

For her part, Cass beams at him like he’s the one person who can save her and says: "Brother."