Chapter Text
Bruce finds him sitting outside a small cafe. Perhaps find is the wrong word to use. The cafe is tucked into a side street that’s easy to miss at first glance, but Dick’s not trying to hide. He’d geotagged it with the selfie he’d posted barely fifteen minutes ago, with the caption: ‘ Can’t tell you how happy I am to try this coffee again! ’
Bruce doesn’t know when Dick visited Rome last, when he would’ve had the chance to find a favourite cafe in a quiet neighbourhood that most tourists would likely never visit.
There’s so much he doesn’t know anymore.
He takes the empty seat across from Dick. There’s no flinch, no surprise. Bruce doesn’t meet his gaze until he’s managed to order a coffee in suitably stilted Italian for an American tourist.
Dick folds his newspaper in half and sets it aside with a small sigh. It’s almost casual, the way he leans back in his chair and waits. Almost. Dick has always been a master at hiding his tells, but Bruce—Bruce notices. He can’t stop himself from noticing; the hard edge in Dick’s eyes that he can’t meet, the way his body has been angled towards him since he sat down, like he’s a threat .
“What are you doing here, B?” Dick asks coolly, and Bruce suppresses a flinch.
When he says ‘B’, he means Batman .
Bruce shifts in his seat, hands fisted in his pants. He doesn’t know how to answer because—Batman didn’t come to Italy. His gaze cuts over Dick’s shoulder, away from those rain-dark eyes that see too much of him.
Twelve hours ago he’d been in the cave, organising evidence to hand off to the GCPD, when he’d received an alert. Dick had posted on Instagram. In Rome.
Bruce had seen Dick—dishevelled hair, small, jetlagged smile, alive —and all he could remember was his son’s limp body and the crippling fear that had consumed him. Batman had only spoken to Nightwing a handful of times since he returned. Bruce hadn’t spoken to Dick at all.
So he’s here. In Rome. Sitting across from his son who’d begged to live and who Bruce had forced to die.
The waitress sets his coffee down with the kind of small, charmed smile that Brucie Wayne has grown used to ignoring.
He curls his hands around the steaming demitasse. Carefully, he says, “we haven’t spoken.”
Dick’s expression twists, any mask of indifference gone with the sharp downturn of his mouth. It’s a precursor to a molten rage, the kind that had them screaming at each other for hours, fire and venom and all the wrong words. Bruce braces himself to be burned. Then Dick’s gaze flits to the family sitting a table away with two small children and a muscle in his jaw flickers.
He’s always had more control than Bruce.
“No, we haven’t,” he grinds out instead. Dick picks up his coffee, slender fingers stretched around the porcelain. There’s a thin, white scar on his index finger. It wasn’t there before he left.
What else has Bruce missed? Birdwatcher’s reports were straightforward and stripped down to everything the mission required and nothing a father did. But he’d never asked. He thinks the parts of himself that were good at being a father had been strewn across the cave floor with the bloodied glass, neatly swept away by Alfred the next morning.
“I’ve got something to ask you,” Dick says finally, over the rim of his coffee, “but I don’t think I’ll get a straight answer.”
Bruce sits up straighter. Nods once. Dick’s resigned stare is the closest thing to a truth serum Bruce will ever answer to.
“Spyral. You know, after the incident.” Dick references his death so casually that Bruce digs his fingernails into his thigh to keep from cutting him off. Doesn’t he know that without Dick, Bruce would be utterly and completely lost? That Bruce would break every rule he had for Dick? No. How could he? Instead of telling him this, instead of rejoicing that he was alive, Bruce had thrown him across the cave and forced him to stay dead. “My world changed. Everything I did for the mission… I guess I changed too.”
“You haven’t. You haven’t changed.” Bruce leans forward, bordering on desperate. “You just think you have.”
“What about you? Have you changed, Bruce?” Dick swallows and gazes down into his cup, at his reflection, with a faraway look in his eyes. When the dark liquid ripples, his lips thin and he sets it down a little too hard. “Or are you just here to use me again?”
Italian sunshine washes over the street with a gentle warmth that Gotham rarely sees, but the intensity of Dick’s scalpel-sharp stare makes Bruce feel colder than he ever has before.
Bruce isn’t here to use Dick again. He followed him halfway across the world to… to see that his son is alive and not that still-warm corpse that haunts his dreams. To find out if what he’s done has broken them so thoroughly that they can’t be fixed.
He looks away. He can’t say it out loud. Can’t bear to make an autopsy of himself if Dick will just leave him on the table, sliced down the middle and ribcage cracked open. He might deserve it, but he can never let it happen. He’s more fear than flesh, these days.
“If there’s another mission…”
“No,” Bruce says, voice hoarse, “there isn’t.”
“If there is , you call me.” His voice drifts across the table, soft as a killing blow, “ just me.”
“Dick, my boy—”
Dick flinches like he’s been shot, but his next words are cold, quiet. Bulletproof. “I’m not your boy.”
His chair scrapes against cobblestone as he stands, placing a neat handful of euros on the table and sliding his sunglasses over his eyes.
His lips are twisted into a small scowl, but his voice is almost soft when he says, “I told you things wouldn’t be the same, B.”
There’s a finality to the way he says it. Like it’s a sentence of execution. Like this small cafe in Rome is the final resting place of Dick and Bruce, as Dick and Bruce. He feels it like a noose around his neck.
***
Dick is too well trained to be found when he doesn’t want to be. So, when Bruce finds him seven hours later, sitting on the edge of a clay-tiled roof and watching the twilight blanket over the city, he knows it’s because he’s letting himself be found.
He’s still wearing his sunglasses. Bruce understands. They hide his eyes, but they don’t carry the same weight as a mask. It’s easier to be like that. He’s spent half of his life in the cowl for the same reason.
“Do you,” Bruce tries, the words coming out more hesitant than he’d like, “remember when we came here the first time?”
He remembers it clearly: the charity auction, a young Dick peeking out from behind his legs and speaking in choppy Italian with a distinct Roma accent. After the auction they’d driven nearly four hours to Pisa just so Dick could have a picture of himself pretending to push up the Leaning Tower.
It had been one of the best days of Bruce’s life.
“Yeah,” Dick says softly.
“You cried the whole flight home.” Bruce braves a step closer. A small one. “I thought that I’d done something wrong—that I’d ruined everything.”
“I hated the manor. If I had it my way, we would’ve stayed in Italy for the rest of my life… I liked staying in a hotel room with you. It made you,” he takes his sunglasses off, cradling them in his lap with a small, bitter smile. “It made you feel more real.”
“Dick—”
“On the trapeze you always use a safety net,” Dick says suddenly. “You only take it out of the act if you trust your partner completely.” He looks up and all the words die in Bruce's throat. He looks so tired, and so young. “That was the first time since my parents died that I felt like I didn’t need a safety net. Because… you’d always be there to catch me if I fell.”
Bruce sucks in a sharp breath, the words a physical blow.
“I’m sorry,” he rasps, vision blurring. He kneels at Dick’s side. “Dick, I’m so sorry. For all of it.”
Bruce roughly wipes his unshed tears away. Dick looks caught between concern and confusion, and he realises that Dick has never seen him cry before. He only ever cries when someone he loves dies. When it’s too late.
“I never should have taken you in.” He flinches, but Bruce presses on, voice thick, “I’ve put you through so much. Firing you. Sending you undercover. Everything I’ve done. When I saw you at the circus that night, I thought… I thought if I could take away even a fraction of your pain, it would be worth it. But when you became my ward, you became the son of a man and,” he lowers his head, “the son of a curse. It’s my… it’s one of my deepest regrets. But Dick, please, I need you to know. I love you. I love you and you are my son.”
Dick scrabbles up onto his feet, chest rising and falling unsteadily. He stands just out of reach with a guarded expression, like a cornered animal. They both know that if Dick wants to, he can disappear much quicker than Bruce can follow.
Bruce rises with him, and waits.
“You don’t get to do this to me!” Dick snaps, shoving Bruce. He’s forced to take a step back. “You don’t get to treat me like—that. And then come back and make me feel like this! You always do this. You tear me open and then give me a scrap of affection and expect me to come back like a dog .”
“That’s not,” Bruce winces. “I never meant to—”
“You hurt me, Bruce.”
Bruce lowers his head. “I know.”
Unlike Bruce, Dick lets his tears fall. The wind sweeps his hair across his face like dark brushstrokes. He looks like a classical painting; a lone figure against the horizon, eyes shining with despair and anger.
“I don’t deserve this.”
“... I know.”
Dick hunches down and scrapes a hand over his face. His eyes are red-rimmed. Bruce imagines his look the same.
“What do you want, Bruce?” His voice is small, nearly carried away by the breeze.
He doesn’t know what to say. Bruce wishes, desperately, that he could channel Clark or Barry and find the exact right things to say to him. Something good and kind and gentle, the words that Dick deserves to hear. But for everything Bruce trained himself to be, he always falls short. Instead, he says, “let’s spend all my money on fancy clothes and fancier wine.”
Dick lets out a weak chuckle. “Why?”
“For old time’s sake.”
For the love that used to be here. For the love that Bruce hopes is still here. Dick looks up at him. His eyes aren’t nearly as dark, but they still remind him of rain. The gentleness of it.
“We never did anything like that. I was only ten.”
The corner of his lip twitches upward. “Rome is more fun when you’re older.”
Bruce holds out a hand to help him up, telegraphing every move because he’s—he’s all too aware of the hurt they’ve inflicted. Dick hesitates for a moment, then takes it.
“I want crab-stuffed mushrooms first,” he mumbles, letting Bruce pull him up.
“Anything,” Bruce promises.