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How to break the news to Bruce, hm…
Dick sighed and threw himself over the ledge, giving a dramatic flip and landing on the next building without ever using his grappling gun. Bruce wouldn’t have approved of a risky maneuver like that, but Bruce didn’t approve of anything Dick did these days.
But yeah, he’d probably find out if Dick didn’t tell him. Bruce was annoying like that. Get him a tail and a little red doghouse, because Bruce was damn snoopy.
Dick rushed across the rooftop and dropped down low, peering over the edge.
In the alley below, his quarry stood around, watching the street for any signs of trouble. Lucky for Dick, these were Bludhaven thugs, not Gotham goons. By sheer virtue of not having had to deal with Batman for the last, like, twelve years or whatever, Bludhaven thugs hadn’t learned to look up.
Dick could make the jump down, but he’d probably get at least a little injured, and that would freak out—
“Robin! Up there!” One of the thugs shouted, pointing—
Dick tensed, only to realize that the guy was hilariously not pointing at Dick. He was pointing across the street to another building. Poor guy had actually had the sense to look up, only to get distracted by a New Jersey state flag flapping in the midnight breeze.
To be fair to the guy, out of the corner of his eye, Dick could totally see the yellow flag getting mistaken for the yellow cape he wore as Robin.
Unfortunately for these guys, Dick wasn’t Robin anymore.
Dick was just mopping up the fight when his phone rang.
“Oh, mind if I take this?” Dick grabbed his nightphone (a play on Nightwing and the fact that he worked at night, a tidier label than batphone had ever been if he did say so himself) ((which he did)) (((unfortunately that was a bit of a self-own, but he’d done the best he could with the material he’d been given))) and waved it in the last thug’s face.
“Huh?” the guy seemed so taken aback by the request.
Seriously, these guys were rookies. No banter, falling for the most obvious traps. He’d need to make a trip to Gotham at some point just to keep from going soft.
Dick kicked the guy in the balls and followed the blow up with a solid right hook square to the guy’s jaw.
He answered before the third ring. “Hey, what’s—”
“Nightwing. Who is—”
“DICK YOU HAVE TO COME BACK HERE RIGHT NOW, BATMAN’S TRYING TO KIDNAP ME!!!!” Jay screamed in the background. Dick heard something crash.
…okay so yeah, he really probably should have mentioned his new brother to Bruce before Bruce’s snooping brought him to Dick’s apartment while Dick wasn’t there to make formal introductions.
“…I’m on my way.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Bruce promised, trying to look and sound as non-threatening as he was capable of.
He’d come to the apartment as Bruce instead of Batman, a decision that was likely either helping or hurting. Would this boy in Bludhaven take any comfort from Batman’s presence? Or would Batman’s reputation make him more terrified than he already was?
An empty pizza box flew through the air in Bruce’s general direction for about two feet before aerodynamics asserted themselves, and the box fell at the boy’s feet. The boy—the stranger child alone in Dick’s apartment—was running out of things to throw. The sparser the area around him grew, the more terrified the boy became.
Dick couldn’t get home fast enough. If he weren’t worried the boy would run off and get himself hurt, he would have left the room.
Where in the world did Dick get a kid?
Bruce had been keeping an eye on Dick as much as he could without making Dick any angrier than he already was. His restraint had a point, he’d been building to this for months. He had assumed Dick would be home in a little while and wanted to catch Dick before he turned in for bed.
In all that time, he’d never seen any evidence of this boy. It does explain his grocery lists. Bruce had been monitoring Dick’s grocery habits, and a few months ago, Dick had gone from shopping himself to ordering groceries delivered directly to the house.
Fewer trips out would explain why Bruce hadn’t noticed the boy, but it didn’t explain where he came from or why Dick had been hiding the boy from Bruce.
A window slid open with a near-silent hiss, and Dick tumbled into the room.
“Dick!” the boy shrieked, sprinting across the room to throw himself into Dick’s arms.
Dick wrapped the boy in his arms easily and affectionately. Bruce forced down the pang of missing Dick—his son was right there in front of him, he was hardly missing—and waited for Dick to calm the boy down.
“Shh, Jay, shh,” Dick hummed, smoothing down the boy’s sleep-mussed hair. “Did he hurt you?”
Dick shot Bruce a glance over the boy’s shoulder telling him to can it with any protestations. Obviously, the question was for the boy and not for Bruce. It was Bruce who taught Dick to redirect victims to calm them down in the first place.
The boy—Dick had called him Jay—sniffled and shook his head. “He—I was sleeping, and I thought you were back, but—”
Jay stifled a sob, and any annoyance Bruce held toward Dick evaporated. From the boy’s perspective, Bruce was a strange man walking into his house in the middle of the night. Any problems he and Dick had were secondary to making sure the innocent child felt safe.
“I’m sorry, little wing. C’mere.” Dick hoisted Jay up into his arms and carried him over to the couch.
“I—I thought—” Jay was sobbing, his cries muffled against Dick’s shoulder. “I—”
Dick shushed Jay and whispered, “Bruce wouldn’t do that. He would never hurt you, I promise.”
“You said Bruce is an asshole!” Jay cried. “You said he’s always bossing you around and trying to make you do stuff, and you said he’d make me leave!”
Dick cut a guilty glance to Bruce but shrugged. It wasn’t the time to argue the difference between loving surveillance and controlling behavior
“Okay, Bruce is definitely and asshole and bossy a lot—some of the time, but he’s not actually the worst. Sometimes he’s the best, like when he’s not breaking into my apartment at one in the morning for—” Dick paused and glanced at Bruce. “What are you doing here?”
Bruce had spent the last several months carefully avoiding stepping on Dick’s toes for this moment, an effort unfortunately wasted because he didn’t know about Dick’s mystery child.
“It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow.”
Dick narrowed his eyes. “This is an invite to Thanksgiving?”
Never before had the word thanksgiving been uttered with such annoyance.
Bruce sighed. “Alfred is going to be sad if you don’t come home. He hasn’t seen you in months, and you haven’t even called him. Is Alfred the worst, or—”
Bruce inhaled deeply to cut himself off. They shouldn’t be arguing in front of the boy. Dick, visibly gearing up for a verbal sparring match, paused and seemed to come to the same conclusion.
Dick glanced down at Jay, a wordless question being posed.
Bruce hesitated. He was fairly sure that Dick had legally kidnapped the kid. Bruce could not condone kidnapping children, even benevolently, but…
It was a special occasion, and Jay was very clearly attached to Dick.
Bruce nodded. “Alfred’s cooking enough for an army.”
Dick, for his part, squeezed Jay in tight hug and set his chin on Jay’s head. Jay sniffed and scrubbed at his face, seeming to collect himself. Jay shot Bruce a dirty look before Dick whispered something to him and Jay whispered back.
After a couple minutes, Dick raised his head and nodded emphatically. “We’ll come. Tomorrow.”
Bruce would have rather stayed to talk to interrogate Dick about where the hell he’d gotten a middle schooler and how long he’d had Jay, but that would need to wait.
Loathe as he was to admit it, there was a good chance he’d need to wait till at least Friday to ask. Dick had accepted the olive branch Bruce was extending, but branches could break and tempers could flare.
For now, Bruce didn’t get to know.
Instead, he realized as he nodded his goodbyes and left the apartment, he got to tell Alfred that their family had grown again while they weren’t looking.
Despite himself, Bruce couldn’t help but smile at the pattern. Alfred had taken him in, he’d taken Dick in, and Dick had taken Jay in.
Like father, like son.