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After Bruce gets back, after the discussions about who was going to be Batman and so on, Bruce suggested a relocation back to the Manor.
Which made sense. It was Bruce’s home. It had more space. And it made a fresh starting place for Bruce and Damian to start working together, with fewer reminders of Damian’s partnership with Dick. Dick was fine with it. He hadn’t really ever settled into the penthouse anyway, and it made for an easy opportunity to move out and set up a new base as Nightwing.
When Dick announced he was looking at new places in New York however, Damian froze, in that way that Dick had been learning meant he was feeling very deeply inside.
…Dick suddenly realised that he’d never had the whole discussion with Damian that Nightwing wasn’t based in Gotham, and wouldn’t be based in Gotham. He butted heads too often with Bruce when they tried. It was…easier to have his own space. To not have to deal with Bruce’s general expectation that everyone defer to him.
Damian’s face looked blank. “You and Father said we were all moving back to the Manor.” There was a plaintive whine at the edges of his voice. “I was unaware you were not coming.”
That hadn’t actually been what was said. Bruce had announced what date the Manor was reopening and belongings were being transferred back. He might have said ‘moving us’ in references to Damian. But Dick had never committed to coming, and Bruce knew it.
Because. The thing was. Dick didn’t really have a room at the Manor right now.
Well. Not a bedroom of his own, that nobody else used.
There was a spare room in the family wing that he had been using, while everything around Bruce going missing and dying had happened, before he took on the cowl. The same one he had slept in on nights visiting Gotham when getting back to New York was too long a trip. It was tidy and impersonal and despite the fact Alfred made sure the sheets in the room were his favourite childhood colours and always ready for Dick to drop in at any time, it was also ready for anyone who needed a bed for the night. It wasn’t his.
“I don’t have a room, Damian. I don’t need one.”
“Point of order,” said Tim, who was looking uncomfortable. “That’s not technically true. There’s our room.”
“Your room,” said Dick. It was Tim’s space. The room was still half decorated with all of the stuff Tim had left behind when he’d left Gotham, and which he hadn’t bothered to move to either the penthouse or his new apartment.
“It was yours first,” said Tim stubbornly. “I’m not living at the Manor right now anyway, and I’ve still got those rooms in the stables. I’ll be fine.”
“No!” said Dick explosively, Bruce only a fraction behind him.
It had only ever been Dick’s room in a strictly theoretical capacity anyway. Sure, it was the room in the same location on the floormap that had been Dick’s childhood bedroom, but given that entire wing had been rebuilt after the earthquake it wasn’t actually his room. Dick had crashed in it on a couple of occasions when spending the night late in Gotham, after No Man’s Land and before the gang wars, but it had effectively been an extra guest room. Dick’s guest room, perhaps. Same as the room he used right now.
Telling Tim to take over the room had been Dick’s own idea, after Bruce finally decided he was in a position to offer to adopt Tim again, after everything. Something brothers do. A way to convince Tim that he thought the adoption was the right thing, after what he’d said the first time around. Tim liked gestures, and he liked symbolism, and he read far too deeply into things. Unknowingly, it had been their last little moments of siblinghood before Damian arrived.
Moving into Tim’s space, pushing Tim back into the riding stables, which had only been spruced up for Tim to stay in because he’d been so spiky about his independence? Look, Dick had made a bunch of mistakes in the last year, with respect to missing the messages that Tim might infer from events. But even he could see taking over the room and Tim moving out to his old ‘not an adopted child’ apartment was a flashing warning sign.
He'd promised himself to do better about this, and at making sure both Tim and Damian felt like family. To him and to each other. This was a lit fuse sizzling straight towards a bomb, and Dick had to defuse it before Tim took the wrong message and Damian realised the problem.
“Where were you thinking of putting Damian?” Dick asked Bruce. Damian had also essentially only been in spare rooms until the move to the penthouse. He’d started to settle in but hadn’t really fixed on anything or established his presence in a space. “Because there’s that room on the second floor that looks out over the back gardens...” It was spacious with large windows and a lot of natural light during the day, which Damian would like for his art. It was close to the staircase to get down to Alfred’s rooms if necessary. And it was firmly in the family section of the house, yet not next door to Tim’s room.
“Hnnnnn.” Bruce was clearly following Dick’s train of thought.
There were five bedrooms in that wing on the second floor. There was Tim’s room, on the front corner of the wing, with a view out over the driveway close to the central part of the building and the stairs up to Bruce’s apartments. There was Cass’ room, next door to Tim’s, directly opposite the bathroom. There was the guest room that Dick had been crashing in, just along from the other two, with views of the front stairs and heavy blockout curtains to keep it dark when sleeping in.
There was the space where Jason’s bedroom had once been, on the back corner of the wing. An empty room, the door facing Tim’s always shut. The only time Dick had looked inside after the Manor was rebuilt, he’d seen the bed in it was made up; he wasn’t sure anyone other than Alfred ever set foot inside.
And then, just across the corridor from the room that Dick used, right next to Alfred’s linen press for the wing, was the spare back bedroom.
It wasn’t where Alfred had put Damian originally; that had been in a guest suite at the other end of the floor, with its own contained ensuite and a door that could be locked from the outside if necessary, close to the stairs up to Bruce’s own bedroom. A place where Damian was constantly under observation. But moving him over to the family wing, though technically a downgrade in the size and features of the room, was a statement about being siblings. About being together.
None of them used the rooms in that wing very often, now. It would be quiet. But it was a space where they were together. Where you might crash for the night after staying late for an investigation and hear the sounds of someone else sleeping in the next room.
“The one opposite your new room?” Bruce asked.
It wasn’t his room. It was a spare room. But… “Yeah, that one.”
Dick could see the hope rising in Damian’s eyes.
“You know, you could actually move some of your junk back into that room, rather than leave it here,” Tim pointed out, in the most annoying way possible. “Might as well pile your unpacked boxes there as any other place until you find an apartment.”
Dick didn’t pull a face at Tim, because he didn’t want to dignify that comment with a response.
“It would be efficient to transfer them at the same time as the rest of the moving boxes,” Damian said in an idle tone of voice that was anything but.
“I’m not moving into the Manor,” Dick warned Damian. “It’s just for the nights I stay over in Gotham.”
“Of course.” The still, quiet way Damian was looking at him felt like a cat hunting; eyes trained on Dick, tracking and assessing everything.
Dick took a deep breath. In for a penny… “So which picture do you think I should hang over the bed? A Flying Graysons poster or a picture of Titans Tower?”
As Damian swelled up, frantically explaining how Dick absolutely could not have a picture of the Tower, had he forgotten everything he had taught Damian about secret identities, Dick bit his lip to hide a smile and tipped a wink at Tim.
“You know I vote the poster,” said Tim. “But whatever you like. You should make it feel like it’s yours.”
Bruce grunted. “The poster. It’s…how I remember you. When you first came to the Manor.”
Dick felt suddenly, unaccountably warm.