Work Text:
“—and the number of civilians you put at risk with your reckless behavior—”
“Okay, that’s enough.” Dick sidles his way in front of Bruce, his tall ears twitching in warning. Behind him, Tim and Steph have very clearly gotten the point of the lecture, their ears pinned back to their heads, tails curled between their legs. And after the night they’ve all had—which involved over two hours mucking around in the Gotham sewage system—absolutely no one is in the right mindset to be receiving or giving a verbal teardown.
He steps closer to Bruce, inches away from the tip of his snout. “They know they messed up, and no one got hurt, so how about we save the rest of this for after we don’t all smell like literal shit?”
Bruce snarls, lip curling back over his sharp teeth. Even among wolves, Bruce is large and intimidating; the image of him ready to tear someone’s throat out easily strikes fear in the hearts of criminals and the Justice League alike.
Dick, who can tell the difference between when Bruce is making a threat (not this time) and when Bruce is instinctively reacting to being challenged (yes this time), just gives him an unimpressed look and bats his spongy black nose with a paw.
Bruce rears back and stops snarling, but there’s still a growl low in his throat telling Dick to step aside.
Dick raises his chin, tips his ears back, stomps his foot, and growls right back. He’s exhausted and his fur’s matted and prickly with dried sewage, so he doesn’t really want to tussle with Bruce right now, but he’ll do it if he has to.
Bruce opens his maw to snap his jaw, and Dick bats his nose again before he can, with a pointed look to say he isn’t playing around.
Bruce stares him down and Dick tenses, ready to pounce—but then Bruce draws back and turns away with a grunt, as if to say all of this is Dick’s problem now.
Which is, honestly, not an unusual way for their arguments to end.
Dick sighs, shaking his ears free of tension, and turns to the other two, who both still look miserable.
“We could’ve handled it,” Tim says, though his arms are folded over his chest and his skinny black tail is curling around his own leg.
“Yeah,” Steph says, golden ears still drooped. “No point having him mad at you, too.”
“Trust me, he’s not mad,” Dick says. When Bruce is truly angry, the air gets so thick with the scent of it that even Dick can hardly bear it. Now—he’s grumpy, but not more so than the rest of them. He reaches out and scratches the tops of their heads, between their ears. Tim leans into the touch slightly, and Dick smiles at him. “How about we wash up and crash in the den tonight? You too, Steph.”
Steph’s gaze flicks over Dick’s shoulder to Bruce, which is fair—they’ve all slept together in the little makeshift den in Dick’s apartment before, but the den at the Manor technically belongs to Bruce, so Dick is technically overstepping boundaries by inviting others into it.
Technically.
But Dick honestly can’t remember a single time Bruce was the one to initiate a stay there. It was a young Dick nearly bursting into tears at the thought of sleeping alone that got Bruce to unlock the door to the den, and it’d been so bare and the air so stale that Dick suspected Bruce hadn’t stepped foot in the room since his own parents died. But despite his initial reluctance, Bruce has always seemed to sleep better when surrounded by his pack.
So Dick doesn’t really feel bad about dragging people into Bruce’s den, because no matter how much Bruce likes it, he’ll never ask for it himself.
“I’ll talk to him,” Dick says. “You two go on ahead.”
Tim grabs Steph’s arm and tugs her away while Dick makes his way over to Bruce, who has his sewage-covered rear parked in front of the Batcomputer and is pretending not to pay him any attention. Dick’s sure he’s heard every word.
He leans with one arm on Bruce’s shoulder; Bruce, as usual, doesn’t react. “You should join us, once you’re done brooding.”
Bruce types a few more sentences into the mission report before answering. “You think I was too hard on them.”
Dick hums. “I get why you’re upset, but the point of the lecture is to make sure they understand what they did wrong so they’ll know better next time. Do you think Tim doesn’t know exactly why their plan went wrong? Or that Steph didn’t learn her lesson the second she saw that civilian fall in front of her?”
Bruce pauses in his typing. “Why do I get the sense I’m the one being lectured now?”
Dick smiles. “Maybe a little,” he says, and nips at the edge of Bruce’s ear in gentle admonishment.
Bruce flicks his ear into Dick’s face, and turns and snaps his jaw in Dick’s direction, but it’s an empty gesture, as is the way Dick plants his paw on the top of Bruce’s snout.
“Join us tonight,” Dick says.
Bruce wiggles his nose out from underneath Dick’s paw and noses lightly at his neck before turning back to the computer. “Go. I’ll consider it.”
It’s not exactly an agreement, but at least Dick can say he tried. He turns toward the showers and sees both Tim and Steph’s tails ducking out of the doorway.
“You guys don’t have to be so worried,” he says once he joins them in the little locker room. “Bruce isn’t going to eat me.”
Tim’s tail twitches with embarrassment. “I know that.”
“We just wanted to make sure you weren’t fighting over us,” Steph says.
Dick smiles wryly. “We’re not fighting, but trust me, even if we were, it wouldn’t be your fault. Every relationship has a bit of healthy conflict, right?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t say you guys are healthy, exactly,” Steph says. “But hey, if you’re happy, we’re happy. Also, does this mean we can stop pretending it’s a secret now?”
Dick pauses, nose twitching in uncertainty. “Secret?”
Tim whacks Steph on the stomach with his tail. “Steph.”
“Oh, come on,” Steph says, grabbing Tim’s tail and holding on even as he hisses and tries to pull away. “It’s been years. Don’t you think they get tired of having to hide it?”
“Hide what?” Dick says. “And who’s they? Me and Bruce?”
“Let it go, Steph,” Tim says, grabbing his own tail between his paws and yanking it out of Steph’s grip to hug protectively against himself. “They’ll talk about it when they want to talk about it.”
Dick plants his fists onto his hips. “Okay, can one of you please explain what you’re talking about?”
“Nothing to explain,” Tim says, and then he practically shoves Steph toward the showers.
“You’re both still in your suits,” Dick calls out after them, but neither of them pause before ducking around the corner.
Dick sighs and scratches his head. He won’t pretend he and Bruce haven’t kept secrets from the rest of the pack before, but he’s pretty sure there isn’t anything they’ve been hiding lately—and definitely nothing that’s come up during their conversation tonight.
Something to worry about for when he isn’t more sewage than rabbit.
He takes his time shedding his suit and washing off before making his way into the den, where Tim and Steph have already made themselves comfortable.
The den is probably Dick’s favorite spot in the Manor—it’s a small, cozy room with a fireplace and a recessed floor creating space for a cushioned pit full of pillows and blankets. It’s big enough for maybe ten people, though they’ve unfortunately never actually had that many people piling in at once. Maybe one day.
Tim and Steph are already cuddled up together in the middle. Steph is flat on her back, her ears flopped onto the floor and her thick fur back to golden and gleaming; Tim is curled against her side, but his head lifts when Dick enters the room. Steph doesn’t move.
Dick eases himself into the den behind Tim, licks his paw, and gently grooms Tim’s ears until he settles back to sleep. Dick tugs a blanket over them and closes his eyes.
He wakes sometimes later to Bruce slinking in. His footsteps are near-silent, but Dick prides himself on always being able to notice when Bruce is sneaking around. He turns his head, lifting an arm in invitation as he meets Bruce’s eyes in the darkness.
Bruce pauses for a second, then crawls into the den and gently takes hold of his ear, tugging until Dick relents and rolls away from Tim. Bruce makes a few careful circles around Dick before settling down curled around him, the way he always prefers to sleep—not that Dick minds. He finds it comforting, to have Bruce warm and heavy beside him.
Bruce licks the back of Dick’s head, grooming the fur there, and Dick shoves his fingers into the coarse, dark fur of Bruce’s arm slung over him, closes his eyes, and rests.
He wakes up again later to Bruce sneaking out of the den. According to the clock on the wall, it’s way too early for Dick to be getting up on his day off, so he lets Bruce go and snuggles back up to Tim instead.
Tim blinks sleepily at him. “Was that Bruce?” he says quietly, so as not to wake Steph.
Dick nuzzles their cheeks together and pets Tim’s side. “Go back to sleep.”
Tim yawns and stretches a little, limbs and spine and tail stretching into an arch before he returns to his curled-up position. “Steph’s right, you know,” he mumbles, eyes closed. “Y’don’t have to hide when it’s just us. Not unless you want to.”
Dick blinks, still petting Tim. “Hide what?”
“You and Bruce,” Tim murmurs sleepily.
Dick stares at him. He feels his nose twitch in his confusion, but it’s not like he can scent out what Tim’s talking about. “I still don’t get it,” Dick says finally. “What exactly do you think we’re hiding?”
But Tim’s already asleep.
Dick’s day off stops being a day off when he wakes up again to a text that Amber had sprained her ankle and needed someone to help cover the afternoon classes at the studio, and he finds himself hopping out of the Manor with barely even a moment to say goodbye.
Tim and Steph’s strangeness slips his mind completely, until he finds himself back in Gotham two weeks later, lounging in the Belfry with Babs as they wait for Bruce and Cass to show up.
If anyone else were likely to know what’s going on, it’d be Babs—and Dick can always trust her to give it to him straight.
“Hey, Babs,” he says as he flops upside-down on the couch, ears brushing the ground. “Do you think I’m hiding something?”
Babs’s ears and lips twitch in amusement, and she looks up from the little tracking device that she’s tinkering with. “Is this a trick question?”
Dick narrows his eyes at her. “Is that a trick question?”
“I don’t mean this in a bad way, necessarily,” Babs says, “but when aren’t you hiding something?”
Dick sighs and reminds himself that he did want her to give it to him straight. “Okay, more specifically, do you think me and Bruce are hiding something, together? Something big?”
Babs sets the tracking device down, arranges her spotted tail into her lap, and rolls her chair to the couch. “Okay, what exactly is this about?”
“Something Tim and Steph said a couple weeks ago,” Dick says. “They were acting like—like they know that we’re Santa and don’t know why we’re bothering trying to keep up the charade. Problem is, I have no idea what they’re talking about, and I think Tim thinks that he’s doing me a favor by not just saying it directly.”
“I see,” Babs says. “And you think I’m not nice enough to spare your feelings.”
“Oh, I know you’re not nice enough to spare my feelings.” Dick plants his paws on the floor and handsprings off the couch into a seated position on the floor. “Hit me.”
“I mean,” Babs says, swiveling her chair toward him, “I can’t tell you for sure what they’re thinking…”
“Baaaaabs.” Dick lets his ears droop and widens his eyes in his best woeful pleading expression.
Babs groans and shoves her paws in his face. “All right, all right, put those eyes away, geez. Just—take a second to consider what I say before freaking out about it, all right?”
“Why would a secret that I’m theoretically keeping freak me out?”
Babs just gives him a look, and he holds up his paws in self-defense.
“I’m pretty sure,” Babs says, “that they think you and Bruce are mates.”
Dick stares at her. “What?”
“I said what I said. You figure out what you want to do with that,” Babs says, and rolls her chair back toward her workstation.
Dick bounds after her. “Wait, why would people think we’re mates?”
“The whole pack hierarchy thing aside, you’re very…” Babs frowns a bit as she reaches for a clamp on the shelf over her head, but it’s more a frown of thought than of effort, so Dick doesn’t move to help her out. Finally, Babs grabs the clamp and says, “Close.”
“Of course we’re close,” Dick says. “Wouldn’t it be weirder if we weren’t close?”
“I mean, yes, but—” Babs pauses for a second, seeming to consider her words. She puts the clamp down on the table. “Look, I’ve literally had to sit there and watch him wag his tail the second you’re anywhere nearby.”
Dick frowns. “Bruce doesn’t wag his tail for me.” He’d notice.
“Because he catches himself before you actually get there,” Babs says. “But seriously, everyone can tell when you’re near because his tail will start doing the thing. And you do it too.”
“What?” Dick reaches behind himself and puts a paw over the fluff of his tail. “You know that’s not how my tail works!”
“Your nose twitches.”
“Does not.”
“It does,” Babs says. “And it’s super embarrassing.”
“You’re lying,” Dick says. Babs tells things to him straight, yes, but also sometimes Babs tells him things just to fuck with him.
“You’re literally doing it right now,” Babs says, and Dick is horrified to realize his nose is actually twitching and that he actually does notice the scent of Bruce approaching the Belfry.
He slaps his paws over his nose just as Bruce and Cass step through the door, and Dick stares in horror as Bruce lifts a shoulder and turns his nose like he’s surreptitiously sniffing himself.
“Is,” Bruce says, carefully, “something wrong?”
“Nope!” Dick squeaks, slamming his paws back down to his sides.
Bruce turns to Babs like she’d possibly have something to say, but she just gives Dick a pointed look and rolls away to the computer. “Cass, did you bring those files?”
“Yes.” Cass crosses the room, rubbing affectionately against Dick’s side and giving him a knowing look as she passes by. Her gaze flicks to Bruce, and Dick knows for certain that she thinks the same thing.
If even Cass thinks it—
Bruce strides into the room, stopping beside Dick with a frown. “You’re sure everything’s all right?”
“Absolutely,” Dick says, trying to keep his voice from squeaking. Bruce is standing very close. Do he and Bruce always stand this close? Is this a normal distance for not-mates to be standing from each other?
Bruce puts a paw on his shoulder, and Dick nearly jumps out of his fur, heart pounding, and Bruce flinches back like Dick had hit him.
Dick reflexively grabs Bruce’s retreating paw and pulls it back to his own shoulder. Dick is softer in a way that he knows has always scared Bruce a bit—rounded ears and smaller claws where Bruce is all sharp points—but Bruce has never really hurt him, and Dick has never feared that he would. Bruce rests his paw on Dick’s shoulder, his claws gentle points of pressure against Dick’s back as he studies Dick’s expression.
Dick hides his nervous shifting by stepping closer to Bruce and nuzzling him with a cheek. “I’m fine. Really.”
Bruce takes one of Dick’s ears between his teeth and tugs.
Dick bats at his chin. “Really.”
Bruce huffs, but pulls back—though not without one last admonishing tug. He doesn’t believe Dick, but he’s not going to press, and that’s good enough for now.
They amble over to Babs’s computer setup, and stand there leaning shoulder-to-shoulder—normal for them. Normal in general between pack members, Dick thinks.
But maybe not normal for Bruce.
Dick pretends not to see the knowing expression on Babs’s face.
“For fuck’s sake, can you stop bouncing around already?” Jason says, lowering his binoculars and shooting Dick an irritated look. “We’re on a stakeout. They’re gonna see you.”
“They’re not even supposed to show up for another hour,” Dick says, but he stops pacing and settles down next to the wall that Jason is perched on top of.
Jason doesn’t need Dick here; really, Dick should’ve just gone with Bruce, but everything and everyone’s been getting to his head—even Damian the other day had looked at him while they were reading in the library and said I take it from your behavior that Father’s home? and Dick had wanted to curl up and die.
So when Bruce proposed they team up for the night, Dick had maybe turned him down a little too strongly, and the flash of hurt that crossed Bruce’s face also made Dick want to curl up and die.
He can’t win.
Jason whacks Dick’s ears with his tail without lowering his binoculars. “What’s gotten into you, anyway? Haven’t seen you this hopped up in ages.”
“Do you think me and Bruce are mates?”
Jason fumbles his binoculars, but he manages to catch them. “The hell? What kind of question is that?”
“Just wondering,” Dick says. “Everyone else seems to think so.”
Jason pauses. “So you’re not?”
“So you thought so, too?”
Jason shrugs, fiddling with the binoculars. “I mean, definitely not at first. Not when I was Robin, I mean. I wasn’t even sure if you two were still packmates or if you’d broken off from him.”
“Honestly, I wasn’t sure either,” Dick says, tipping his head back against the wall and stretching out his legs. “You know… I was pretty jealous of you back then.”
This time Jason does drop the binoculars, and doesn’t even react when Dick snatches them out of the air. “You?” Jason says. “Why the hell would you be jealous of me?”
Dick shrugs, only a little self-consciously. He’s had a lot of time to come to terms with how he felt back then. “You’re a wolf.”
Dick knows that Bruce had never really understood how to handle Dick, partly because Bruce was just way too young to care for a pup himself, but also because Bruce was a wolf raised by wolves and didn’t have the first idea of what to do with the little bunny that had fallen into his lap.
It was hard not to see Jason as Bruce taking his opportunity to do everything correctly from the start; and conversely, it was hard not to feel like Dick was a living representation of all of Bruce’s mistakes. They’re past that phase of their lives, and Dick knows now that isn’t how Bruce sees him at all—but he still remembers how much it had ached.
Jason makes a chuffing noise and tackles Dick sideways to the ground.
“Hey!” Dick folds in his legs and kicks Jason in the chest, sending him flying back. Jason leaps at him again, and Dick grabs onto him and rolls with it as they nip and claw at each other.
They haven’t played like this in ages, not since Jason was younger and things were—well, not less complicated, precisely, but complicated in a different way. But Bruce is vicious even when he’s tussling for play, so Dick isn’t lacking in experience wrestling with wolves, and it doesn’t take him long before he has the upper hand.
“What was that for?” Dick says once Jason’s tapped out.
“Just knocking some sense back into you,” Jason says, flopping onto his side and letting his tail flick against the cement. “You’ve never let being a bunny stop you from being the best at everything you stick your little nose into. And trust me, it doesn’t matter if you’re a wolf or not. When it comes to Bruce, you’ve got no competition.”
Dick leans with his elbows propped on the arm of the Batcomputer chair, staring at Bruce’s face. Bruce glanced at him when Dick first arrived, but has been ignoring him since, and probably would ignore him the rest of the night if Dick let him.
Dick stands. Bruce still doesn’t move, even after Dick entertains himself by flicking Bruce’s ears, or when Dick licks his paw and spends a few minutes grooming the sides of Bruce’s cheeks, or when Dick drapes his arms over the back of the chair and Bruce’s shoulders and buries his face into the back of Bruce’s head.
“Did you know they all think we’re mates?” he says through a mouthful of fur, which means it comes out completely unintelligible.
Bruce doesn’t even stop typing. “You know I can’t understand you when you do that,” he says, which begs the question of how often Dick does this, and how he didn’t realize for so long that it’s weird for Bruce to have let him.
He pulls his face away and leans up so that he can put his chin on the top of Bruce’s head and stare at the reflection of Bruce’s face on the monitor. “Did you know they all think we’re mates?”
This time, Bruce does stop typing, though his expression doesn’t change. “All?”
That’s not the right question to ask; in fact, it feels like a stalling tactic. Dick rounds the chair and crosses his arms. “You knew.”
“Dick—“
“How long have you known? And why didn’t you tell me? No, why didn’t you tell them?”
Bruce hangs his head slightly, ears drooping, and Dick doesn’t think he’s ever seen Bruce look this obviously guilty before. “I… didn’t see the harm in it.”
“In letting them think we’re mated?” Dick says. “That’s a completely different pack dynamic!”
“Is it?” Bruce says, finally lifting his head, though his ears stay flat. “Completely different.”
“Of course it is,” Dick says. “If we were mates, then I’d—”
“Be my partner?” Bruce says. “My second?”
That’s true, admittedly. Dick thinks Babs had even mentioned it vaguely—that Dick’s position in the pack hierarchy is one that’s traditionally taken by a mate. He’s the one to challenge Bruce, most often, and also the one Bruce defers to the most often. It’s unspoken that he’s the pack leader when Bruce is gone, and the others turn to him for guidance as much as they do Bruce. But—
“I can be your second without being your mate.”
“Yes,” Bruce says, and nothing else.
Yes, Dick can be Bruce’s second without being his mate. That’s what he is, and it’s just that everyone else wrongly assumed otherwise.
And Bruce never stopped them.
“Bruce,” Dick says slowly. “Do you… want us to be mates?”
“I don’t know.”
Dick considers that answer. Puts it up against everything he knows about Bruce, and the way Bruce is holding himself carefully still right now—ears stiff and alert, tail stiff against his back.
“You don’t know, meaning you actually don’t know what your answer is?” Dick says. “Or you don’t know, meaning your answer depends on my reaction?”
The minute flick of Bruce’s tail is the only thing that gives him away—that, and the way he’s refusing to look Dick in the eye.
Dick takes Bruce’s paw, pressing against the delicate pads underneath. A ripple works its way underneath Bruce’s fur, and he turns slowly to look at their paws, and then at Dick’s face.
“Dick?” Bruce says, uncertainly.
“Do you know how courting works?”
Bruce’s brow furrows. “I—yes?”
“Well, I just thought,” Dick says conversationally, “that if you knew how courting worked, you’d know that if you wanted to be mates with someone, you should start with that.”
“I—” Bruce says, stilted. “I wasn’t sure you’d be receptive to that.”
“You could try asking me.”
“I was worried you would…”
“Run away?” Dick says wryly, remembering how he’d panicked and avoided Bruce after finding out about his damn nose.
“Exactly,” Bruce says, expression equally wry. “I’ve scared you off once before—for good, I thought. I don’t ever want to do it again.”
That’s fair—but that was also a long, long time ago. They’ve both changed since then, and they both understand each other a lot better than they had before.
“If I run now,” Dick says slowly, “it’s because I’m hoping you want me enough to chase after me.”
Bruce’s paw twitches under his, claws unsheathing slightly as he catches Dick’s meaning.
Dick shivers in anticipation. There are few things rabbits in courtship enjoy more than the chase.
“You want me to chase you?” Bruce says, his voice almost a growl.
“I want you to catch me.”
Bruce catches Dick’s ear between his teeth, tugs, then says, “Go.”
Dick smiles, nips playfully at his cheek, then turns tail and runs.