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Amy doesn’t know how Dick does it - how he can be so cheery the morning after they’ve been called in on a murder-arrest. He comes in whistling, with a spring in his step. He does look tired though, a heavy shadow under his eyes, so Amy wouldn’t put it past him to try and make the atmosphere around them lighter for their own sake.
Amy squints as she waits for the coffee to brew, leaning against the break room entry. Although this could just be another day in the sun for him too, she muses. It never fails to darkly amuse Amy that the sunniest officer in the precinct has probably dealt with the darkest of shit that Bludhaven has to offer. Amy wonders if Dick’s ability to track the hardest and darkest cases is a Gotham thing.
Amy knows that Dick came to Bludhaven to establish himself outside of Gotham, a place he described when he started as ‘a little too much of his father’s city.’ Amy thinks she can relate, it’s why she moved from her home town suburb to Blud - something new and not under the purview of people who have known you most, if not for all of your life. A new place to establish roots. She doesn’t think she could have gotten as high up in the police department back in her town, if even entered it. She’s making a difference here.
All of the officers in the precinct are making a difference here, she thinks. Amy’s done a lot to help the commissioner clean up their own force, taking cues from Gotham’s very own Commissioner Gordon (especially when dealing with Bludhaven’s newest masked vigilante), but cleaning up the force wouldn’t mean anything if they didn’t already have good cops to help and train and justly enforce.
For all of his disarming smiles and corny one liners, Amy knows that Dick is a good cop - probably one of the best cops she’s ever had to work with actually. He understands the law and enforces it, but is also empathetic to kids, to victims, to little old ladies crossing the street, to even the teenagers in the precinct’s holding cells when they get caught for shoplifting.
Amy can’t believe she had such reservations about Dick before - as a police officer obviously she knows she wasn’t unbiased in her views but she really thought he was just another fresh face either too naive to be faced with the reality that is crime in Bludhaven, or already part of that crowd and trying to become an in. She’s glad to have been wrong about him. Not only do they have a good cop on their team, she’s also made a good friend.
A weird friend, but a friend nonetheless.
A friend, that now that Amy is thinking about it, she knows everything and yet nothing about him. Amy could tell you his favorite cereal, his favorite color, heck, his favorite sibling of the day, and while all of that is substantial in knowing Dick, it was only all the small things the Bludhaven Police Department seemed to know of him.
They know he was adopted by his current father, but they have never met him. They’ve only met his siblings through pictures or the short, facetime lunch calls. Other than those snippets, Amy really doesn’t know anything else about his family. Every other detail has to be discovered on its own and sometimes through consistent questioning.
Actually, the most blatant thing about Dick is that he’s a Gothamite.
It’s so obvious when you know what to look for and with Bludhaven being the sister city to Gotham, they know. Amy’s sure that within his very first day here a majority of the cops in the building already clocked him as a Gothamite.
It’s that damn shadow of his.
Dick’s shadow is darker than all of theirs. At first, Amy thought it was just the lighting or that she was just seeing things, but over time even the rest of the precinct has realized it too. They all swear that Dick’s shadow has a life of its own.
Dick’s shadow is restless even when he’s sitting still, the shadow’s legs bouncing and fingers drumming out some unheard beat, arms waving and hands peace-signing when it realizes another officer is watching it. When he walks by, Dick’s footsteps leave little shadow footprints that linger for a moment before fading into the floor. When it does sit still, it always looks towards Gotham no matter what direction Dick is facing.
She swore it was just exhaustion-induced hallucinations at first, maybe even a little gentle hazing spread around by the others, because the rest of the office can’t be having one giant shared hallucination, right? Not when they see the same things, the same patterns of movement in Dick’s shadow.
Officer Anderson swore it was a Gothamite thing — that it’s the Gotham Curse. Amy scoffed at him. That’s just a myth used to scare children, there’s no actual curse. She’s been to Gotham before and the people she met didn’t have shadows like that .
A shadow that seemed sentient, that seemed alive.
Amy hates that the shadow sometimes makes her second guess Dick. She knows that he’s a good guy, that he’s a good cop. But she couldn’t stop the way her stomach dropped and the hair on her arms raised all the way up when she and Dick apprehended a violent abuser just last night, Dick’s blue eyes going glacial blue when the man started gloating in their faces about how he’d be released in a day or two even though he was responsible for the death of his own family.
Dick’s shadow had gotten darker the flintier Dick’s eyes became, its hands elongating into claws, dripping liquid tar into the shadows of their cruiser by their feet. When they were loading the man into the car, the mixed shadows coalesced into some plasma like sludge, crawling and clawing up the man’s legs, fully shackling him when he was seated in the back of their cruiser.
Amy drove them back to the precinct, watching from the corner of her eye as Dick took measured breaths. The tendrils of shadows tightened and loosened their manacles around the man in the back with the cadence of Dick’s controlled respiration.
Amy hadn’t realized she was holding back most of her own breath until she was back home, sitting in her driveway from a long night, the chill of Dick’s presence slowly melting from her. The thermometer on her dashboard said that it was a clear seventy-five degrees. Her hands were still shaking.
Amy wants to be afraid of Dick, knows that she and the rest of the precint should be.
But she isn’t and can’t make herself be.
Amy shakes herself out of her little morning stupor when the coffee maker dings as it finishes brewing. She pours herself a generous cup and heads over to the pen. She asks Dick if he’d like to go out for lunch with her and a few other officers when she hands him a file on their next case.
She knows that his shadow does weird things; if it’s a Gothamite thing or a Dick thing doesn’t matter. He’s still the person who picks up coffee for all of them without asking, who tells jokes and gives advice like a dad, who remembers everything about everybody in a way that makes them feel appreciated, herself included.
He’s their office’s own little boy wonder, shadow and all.