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“Oh, Master Richard. To what do we owe the pleasure?”
Dick really doesn’t mean to lie the first time. He doesn’t.
It’s just that he’s spent the past three days blindfolded in the dark of a warehouse on the wrong side of Jersey state lines and come out of it with one too many bruises for critical thinking. That, and what’s maybe gearing up to a fractured rib, not to mention the spoils of a man who’d been far too into knives for Dick’s liking.
Not that he has anything against knives, when they aren’t being used to threaten civilians, it’s just that this guy seemed to enjoy them in a way that went, uh, beyond straightforward villainy.
It’s that in the past three days, Dick hasn't spoken a word apart from cut off cries of pain around a dirty gag and hissed instructions for the civilians - read: fellow captives - to “Move. Now. Quiet.”
It’s that he’s definitely had worse, seen worse. Hell, he’s done worse on occasion.
If the road gets hazy on the drive back to Bludhaven, that’s no one’s business but his. He drops a collection of bedraggled civilians with the necessary authority, waves away offers of concern, and escapes up to the nearest roof with an inelegant scramble, all he can manage after the aforementioned three days without sleep or food or basic medical care.
But it’s all fine, really. Dick makes it through the window of his apartment and cleans himself up well enough, does what he can with some bandages and a couple rows of stitches. It’s not his best work, but his hands are shaking and it makes the detailed stuff inconvenient. Besides, the majority of the bruising is hidden easily beneath an old Superman sweatshirt; even the one on his jaw is hard to spot with the hood up.
It’s the next step that stalls him. Food.
Dick isn’t quite as inept in the kitchen as certain members of his family like to imply, not burn-down-the-house-with-the-microwave levels of useless.
At least, he didn’t think he was until he was staring into a fridge full with two moulding takeout boxes, a bottle of mustard, and a strange wrinkled lump that might once have been an apple.
And, okay, maybe it’s not just the past few days that have been crazy.
It’s been a long week, or two, and the whole hostage situation thing is really just the last in a series of slip-ups that Dick can’t contain, no matter how hard he scrambles. The mustard stares at him, lopsided on the second shelf and, Dick thinks, unnecessarily judgemental.
He takes a breath in through his nose, pointedly ignores the way it shakes on the exhale. It’s fine. He can order something. He can slip out through the window or walk out the door and go to the fucking corner store like a normal, hungry person.
Dick slams the fridge door closed.
He goes to the manor.
***
Dick really doesn’t mean to lie. He doesn’t.
It’s just that he makes it halfway across the entrance way before Alfred appears, soundless from the shadows of the halls beyond. And the words seem to echo off marble, ricochet between Dick’s temples with a distinctive painful thud at each side of his head.
“Oh,” Alfred sounds surprised. He never used to, when Dick came home. “Master Richard. To what do we owe the pleasure?”
It’s a purely perfunctory question, a request for information above anything else. Dick’s given Alfred a hundred sit reps a hundred times over, but this one feels wrong, somehow, in the shadow of the darkened hall, where quiet presses in around them with a stilted sort of embrace, tight and dull. It feels claustrophobic, like being grounded, or too injured to flip between rooftops when his whole body is singing for action.
It’s really all Dick can do to flash a smile and shrug it away, metaphorically, of course; he’s not sure his torso could handle anything resembling a real shrug at the moment.
And that’s when it comes out, the not-really-a-lie, unintentional as anything,
“I was hungry.” He lets a familiar amused sheepishness bleed into his tone. “And in the area. You’re the one who’s always saying we have Batburger at home, right?”
Alfred sniffs a little, half-amused and trying not to show it. Usually, Dick loves when he manages to pull that look out of him, but tonight the victory is fully accidental.
“Far be it for me to stand in the way if you’ve finally decided to take heed of my balanced dietary advice.”
By now they’ve reached the hallway, and Alfred collects an abandoned hamper of laundry from where he’s clearly set it aside on his way to the door. He motions towards the kitchen with one elbow in a gesture that somehow manages not to be awkward. There has always been a fluidity to Alfred that Dick can’t quite put his finger on, like no matter how many years pass, he stays free of the creaks and stutters of age. It’s an observation that never fails to taste a little like relief, curling warm in the base of his stomach.
“There are leftovers from dinner in the refrigerator,” Alfred says now. “A risotto. Or I could make you something else, if you prefer?” His expression has gone serious again, and it’s a look all too close to calculated for Dick’s liking.
Dick tacks on the smile again, the metaphorical shrug one, and shakes his head.
“Nah, that sounds great.” He waits until Alfred has nodded and turned away to tack on a “Who knows” I might get lost and find all the snacks instead.”
The answering eye-roll is loud enough it might as well have a sound.
“Please eat a real meal first, Master Richard. You look like you need it.”
And what, Dick wonders, as he picks his way down to the kitchen, is that supposed to mean?
Sure, he’s had a rough few days, but it’s nothing new in their line of work. Hell, Alfred has watched Bruce go through far worse a hundred times over and still make it to a 9am board meeting the next morning. That man can roll out of bed and tie a double windsor on two hours of sleep with three broken fingers.
Not to mention Tim, who’s something of a master of hiding even the most worrying of injuries. Or Jason, who walks through life with the bravado of someone allergic to vulnerability at the best of times.
Dick shouldn’t look like he needs anything, besides someone to cover his shift at work next Thursday, which he’d been meaning to ask about three days ago, before the whole hostage thing. It’s not just his vigilante life that’s been slipping through the cracks.
But really, it isn’t his fault that the mayor chose to announce a charity event in celebration of the grand, 100 year anniversary of Arkham’s opening barely two weeks before the date.
A move that screams suspicious in ways that goes far beyond questionable uses of tax payer dollars. It’s an all hands on deck sort of thing. A calling Nightwing in from Bludhaven sort of thing. Well, he’s here now, at least. There’s one thing he’ll be on time for.
He wonders if that might be why the house is so quiet now, with Bruce and Damien out on increased shifts of patrols. It’s expected, with the Arkham buzz, but it only adds to the quiet now.
His recent memories of the manor are undeniably bittersweet, but fraught as the years have been, they’re anything but quiet, full of raised voices and pounding adrenaline. The sharp sting of regret.
The kitchen looms ahead, dark and empty, its ceilings too high and its tiled floors too long. It makes Dick think of a warehouse, and that makes him think that if he doesn’t get some food in him soon he might actually crack apart at the seams, fully and ridiculously.
Jesus, Grayson, everyone has a tough few days now and then.
He turns on the light; walks to the fridge.
He doesn’t necessarily intend to follow Alfred’s instructions to the law until he’s already reached for a neatly labelled container marked “risotto” and the date. Like his brain has latched onto the closest available plan and run with it, without any conscious input from the rest of him.
Screw it, Dick’s tired and he’s hungry. And Alfred is better at logistics at the best of times.
And the plan does go smoothly, all the way through bracing a hand against the side of the fridge and bending at the knees to reach, so as not to bother his aching rib. It goes fine until the whole process is interrupted by the pad of footsteps and a soft “oh.”
Dick straightens as quickly as he dares, risotto in hand.
“I didn’t realize you’d be here,” Tim says. He’s hovering in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest, his hands mostly obscured by the too-long sleeves of an oversized sweatshirt. His hair is tousled, from running fingers through it, Dick suspects.
He looks so cozy that it makes Dick’s heart hurt a little.
“I could say the same to you, Timmy.” He smiles, and even that small thing seems to calm some of the tension in Tim’s shoulders. “Just came by for some dinner. You know I can’t resist Alfred’s cooking.” Tim nods along, shuffles a step over the kitchen’s threshold. “You hungry?” Dick asks. “I can heat up some for you too.”
“I ate earlier,” Tim says. “Just getting some coffee.”
The remnants of older brother indignation rise to the surface at that - “Should you be having caffeine at - “ they fade quickly. “What time is it?”
Tim’s expression slips into a frown.
“Just past ten.” He motions to the clock above the far counter like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, which it pretty much is.
Time is one of the many basic human resources that seem to have vanished into vagueness, just to the wrong side of Dick’s understanding, in the past week.
“Right,” he says, instead of the rest of it. Then, since there’s still a question lurking that Tim has not-quite-artfully dodged, “So why are you here?”
Things between Tim and Damien have been fine lately. Fine, as in they’ve moved from a decidedly negative category, into one characterized by tentative neutrality. On Tim’s part, at least. Damien mostly seems confused about the whole situation. But he was confused back when he was still trying to commit grievous bodily harm (alright, murder, it was attempted murder) so Dick isn’t sure how much that counts as progress.
Bruce and Damien are out on patrol, he assumes, which is why Tim is here at all. Why the house is still and silent in a way Wayne manor never felt as a kid, even though Dick now knows that it’s probably the way billionaire mansions are supposed to feel: sleek and pristine and strangely unlived in.
He wishes Tim could have been around back then for a whole number of reasons, but one of the biggest is so he could have known what the place was like before Jason’s death shattered any attempts at domesticity. Maybe Tim could have known the house as one with the kind of family he deserves, the kind Dick is woefully aware that none of them can be for him, nowadays.
The coffee machine whirs to life, and Dick hides an embarrassing startle at the sound with, “Espresso? Really?”
He wrinkles his nose performatively, ignoring the way the expression pulls against the sore place on the underside of his jaw.
“It’s not worth drinking anything else,” Tim busies himself with the puck, packing grounds in with methodical movements.
“It’s not worth vibrating out of your skin and then shitting your brains out?”
Tim snorts. “That sounds like a personal problem.”
“So,” Dick tries again, when it appears that his question will indeed be left hanging. “Night off from patrol?”
And that is another part of Tim’s presence that sets off the potential of alarm bells. It’s a strange time for any of them to be home.
“Bruce and I had a disagreement." Tim inserts the wand into the espresso machine, a state of the art Breville thing that Bruce acquired years ago in a not so veiled attempt at welcoming Tim to the household.
It’s the same over the top, throwing-money-at-traumatised-children shtick that Bruce has always favoured. Something appreciated, certainly, and Tim is clearly putting it to good use, but it’s also a gesture that can’t help but be done at arms length, the kind that rattles with emptiness.
Or maybe Dick is just the privileged vigilante adoptee of more privileged, more established vigilantes.
Maybe he's just hungry.
Dick considers the microwave for a moment, then opts for a spoon instead, scooting onto the closest bar stool with a huff of a noise that he hopes is covered by the whir of the coffee machine.
He has to close his eyes at the first bite of risotto, against the bliss of flavour and texture - and food. God, Dick’s so fucking hungry.
He eats another spoonful.
"What kind of disagreement?" He asks, once he's swallowed.
Tim pauses in the act of reaching into the fridge.
"Bruce thinks I should be benched for a few days," he said, finally. "I disagree.”
Right. There’s definitely more to this story. Dick swallows down a sudden and acute jolt of fear along with his next bite. If something happened in those three days lost in humiliating failure on a warehouse floor, something important, he would know by now. He would have emerged to missed calls and unanswered com pings piled up without an answer.
Besides, Tim seems alright.
“I’m not Robin anymore, he can’t tell me…” The fridge door bangs closed with slightly more force than necessary. "He thinks I'm tired."
Tim spits the word out like a curse.
"You are making a latte at 10:30pm." Then, at Tim's expression, "Sorry, flat white. I know."
"He gets less sleep than I do!" He punctuates this with the screech of the steamer, and Dick waits until the milk is frothy and poured to the edges of the coffee cup.
"In his defence, you don't really seem to be resting, baby bird."
"I’m fine," Tim repeats. "He's just being paranoid because I got impaled."
“You got -” Dick chokes on his next bite of risotto. “What the fuck, Tim?"
"It wasn't bad." Tim takes his first sip of the coffee and something in him seems to visibly uncoil. "It barely nicked me. Bruce is just being paranoid. He gets stabbed all the time."
That, at least, is true.
Dick presses a hand to the counter, ready to push himself back up, but Tim closes the space between them himself, walking over to stand across the island. He sets his flat white down, fiddles with the mug’s handle.
“I have case work to catch up on, anyway.”
Dick narrows his eyes. “You do need to sleep to heal from a stab wound, you know.”
“I am sleeping.” Tim sips his coffee, then amends, “I will.”
Dick’s stomach takes the opportunity to growl threateningly at him, tempted by the reappearance of food. It isn’t any happier than he is by this particular distraction. He takes another bite of risotto.
“How did it happen?”
Tim makes a face. “I was too slow. There was a small explosion and I got thrown into a -”
“Wait, an explosion?”
“That makes it sound worse than it was. There wasn’t a bomb, or anything.”
“Jesus, Tim! That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“Calm down.” Tim’s clearly embarrassed, or maybe just tired of what has clearly been an ongoing argument, one that Dick can’t help but be glad he seems to have lost. “There’s just a lot happening right now. We’re spread pretty thin, with everyone out on their own missions. That’s why I came back, more than the impaling thing.”
It makes sense. The Arkham anniversary, the string of chaos chasing them across the city faster than they can wipe it out each night. Dick’s been dealing with his own version of the thing an hour south. He knows, and he knows that Tim knows, because he’s better at keeping up with newsfeeds and dark web chatrooms than anyone else. Dick wouldn’t be surprised if Tim knew about half the messes Dick’s grappled into at the last moment before Dick himself even picked up on a single raised voice.
With an effort, he pulls his attention away from the half-empty risotto to eye Tim’s coffee mug, already down to dregs.
Tim is watching him with an unreadable expression on his face, a carefully blank mask that he’s always worn with far too much familiarity, inscrutable as any domino.
“It’s good you could get here early,” Tim says, finally. “We might need your help before Thursday, not that I’m,” he motions to his own side with an annoyed flick of his wrist. “Out of commission.”
“Don’t say that,” Dick admonishes, softly. He’s usually able to do this sort of thing with more energy. It doesn’t sound all that reassuring, tinged in exhaustion. “You’re the smartest person I've ever met, Timmy. And I’ve never seen you take a day off helping people in your life. That includes us.”
Tim’s eyes flick down, and he hides what looks like a flush by throwing back the end of the coffee.
Dick hides a smile around his next bite of risotto. At least he hasn’t lost his touch completely.
“I’d better get back to it,” Tim says, but he pauses again on his way past to tap a finger against the counter, a vague, contemplative movement. “I’ll see you later.”
“Night,” Dick calls after him, pointedly.
Tim doesn’t grace that with a reply.
Dick really isn’t sure how he does it, going without sleep for stretches that would flatten Dick like a pancake if he tried. Case in point, the past three days which started to catch up with him an embarrassing number of hours into the whole ordeal.
Dick’s head pounds with it, the sleeplessness, or something nebulous close to it. The kitchen is full of corners, he thinks, more than he’s noticed before in all his years of living here. There are the edges of the island, the square ends of each marble countertop, the triangle shadows of each cupboard door, row after row of them. He watches as they swim, in and out of the starkness of overhead light.
They look like rooftops, all the corners. Little platforms far below, wavering in and out of reach.
Dick’s never felt vertigo in his life, but he wonders if that’s what he’s feeling now, wavering through shadows.
“Master Richard?” The voice startles him back to awareness. “Are you quite alright?”
“Yeah Alfie. Sorry, just distracted.” Get a fucking grip, Grayson. “I'm a bit, uh, you know. Tired.”
Alfred favours him with a noncommittal hm.
“I had kind of a crazy week.” Tim’s words come back to him, spread thin. “I think we all did.”
Dick stretches a little, careful of his right side, rolling stiffness out of his neck, shoulders and back still complaining from the nights on a cement floor. Not to mention another fuck-knows-how-long slumped against a marble counter top. His rib protests the motion, throbbing to life again with a vengeance.
In the half-dark of the hall light, Alfred frowns.
“Are you injured?”
“No,” Dick says, quickly. “I mean, not really. It was just a rough patrol, you know.”
Patrol three days ago, he doesn’t say. Maybe I’m getting rusty.
Alfred merely nods in the direction of the hallway.
“Might I suggest a bed, in that case? If you’ve finished disordering the kitchen.”
“Hey, I haven’t even touched the microwave!”
But Dick allows himself to slide off the stool and follow Alfred down the hall, led by some long-ago formed instinct. Where Alfred goes, he will follow; there’s usually something nice at the end, like food or comfort, or a nice, warm bed.
He lets himself wander through a doorway into the cool dark of a bedroom, and fold down to sit on the mattress with a frankly embarrassing sigh of a sound, like his strings have been cut.
Dick gets his phone out of his pocket with only minimal fumbling, and sets it on the bedside table. That’s a problem for tomorrow. He blinks, and in the moment between one second and the next, Alfred is beside him again.
“I couldn't help but notice.” Cool fingers graze the aching point of his jaw, gentle and unexpected. “Would you like some ice for this?”
“It's just a bruise, Alfred.”
Alfred cocks his head, eyes crinkled with something adjacent to a smile, that isn't.
“Lord knows these are frequent enough in this house.”
The unexpected redundancy of the statement makes him laugh, the first one in days. It’s true. More than. Dick hasn't bothered to think twice about a bruise since he started learning to tumble at five years old.
Alfred's face softens too, at the sound.
“Very well.” He turns to go, but pauses at the threshold, his next words addressed out to the silence of the hall. “But sometimes small hurts require treating as much as the big ones. Left to fester, they can grow just as painful.”
Dicks throat feels suddenly tight. He has to take a moment to swallow before he can get out a little noise in the affirmative.
“Goodnight,” Alfred says, but he sounds much farther away than before.
“Goodnight, Alfred,” Dick maybe replies, but he’s not entirely sure whether the words come out or not, because the next thing he knows, he’s falling.
***
Dick only ever falls in dreams.
Which, okay, sure, he’s had the odd grappling mishap and embarrassing injury-based stumble, but falling, straight and fast and horribly imminent, only ever happens asleep.
It’s strange, when it does, because he’s always aware on some level that he’s still on solid pillowed ground, his face buried in the threadcount of a sheet that’s swallowed him whole.
He’s there, but he’s somewhere else simultaneously. It’s that when he first started learning trapeze, the backs of his knees bled, and his parents had smiled and one of the other acrobats had offered him a high five before declaring that he was “One of us now!”
“First blood!” Someone else called out across the tent. His parents shushed them, after that.
It was necessary with any new impulse, for the skin to build a callous, but that level of excitement over a bleeding six year old was deemed unreasonable, even in their circles.
They probably shouldn’t have bothered, either way, because only a handful of years later, Dick got quite the fill of blood, smoke and screams and the cloying taste of something inevitable in his throat.
He’s seen blood on a pretty much nightly basis after that: Gotham’s, Bludhaven’s, his own.
And now, tonight, with his eyes squeezed shut and the cool dark of a silk pillowcase against his forehead, the backs of Dick’s knees are bleeding.
The muscles in his thighs scream with the effort of maintaining, each part of him alight with pain like a live wire. He’s being moved by a force he can’t see, pushed forward and back by a wind that isn’t solid enough to have sound. All it does is push.
And push and push at the ever-weakinging grip of shaking muscles.
Dick can’t call for help, of course, because there’s no one here with him, in the dark nothing space in the silk-pillowcase-and-eyelids. Dark like the inside of a circus tent and empty like a cave of state of the art vehicles, gleaning that same nothing right back.
Another gust hits and Dick lurches sideways in an attempt to redistribute his weight, to compensate for the new force, but all it does is tear the skin of his legs further. He feels wit dripping down his calf, hot and dark. And Dick is no stranger to blood, but by the time he considers giving up, it doesn’t matter anymore. The blood is hardly the strangest part of the whole thing.
He’s one of us now! after all.
So, the next time the wind blows, Dick lets it take him. He slips away, on legs sticky and red, or maybe he lets go - he’s not sure yet if there’s a difference.
And he falls.
And falls.
And the dark rises up around him and the silence pounds at his eardrums and there is no ring leader to announce his descent and no thing solid enough to grapple from and the walls are too smooth to reach for and Dick still falling. Dick is falling, and the last time he fell he got sand in his teeth and he hated the texture, and the gritty taste of it and Dick is -
Buzz.
***
Buzz.
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
A beat of nothing.
The buzzing starts up again, insistent.
For a moment, it’s dark. For a moment, Dick can’t breathe.
Buzz. Buzz.
With an effort that rivals the time he went three rounds with Victor Zsasz in one night, Dick gropes in the direction of the bedside table and closes his fingers clumsily around his phone, only to immediately fumble it away when he’s assaulted by an angry voice and the hum of what sounds like a bike in the background.
“Where the hell have you been?”
It takes a moment for his sluggish brain to pick itself up again, from the pillow, from the bloodsoaked sand at the bottom of a tent; another before he can answer.
“Jason?” The word comes out ragged, in a single slurred syllable.
Dick drags a hand over his face and hopes Jason won’t notice.
“Oh,” Jason notices. “Is it a bad time?”
“No - no, it’s -”
“Good, cause I don’t give a shit what kind of time it is! You ignored me all night.”
Distantly, Dick’s aware that his legs hurt, the afterthought of soreness, rather than the thing itself. The same way his muscles sometimes protest if he goes to bed dehydrated after a particularly intense workout.
He stretches his knees a little with a soft, unintentional huff of hair.
“Ignored you?”
“Yeah. I called like, three times.”
Dick blinks into the dark of his elbow, momentarily startled out of the slurred motion of his thoughts.
“Three times?” He repeats. His voice sounds better now, at least. Less like a rusty pipe stuttering uselessly against a revving engine. “That’s not very many. I’m pretty sure I called you three times the other week when I saw a cute dog.”
“Yeah, and that was stupid. Three calls is life or death, Dickface.”
The background hum fades, like Jason has stopped the bike.
Has he reached wherever it is he's headed, Dick wonders, or pulled over just to talk?
Something about that prospect makes the clenched thing in Dick’s chest unfurl enough for him to lift his head and look at the phone properly. The small digital numbers blink 2:18am. A scroll of his thumb reveals not three, but five missed calls from Jason over the past two hours, along with a few increasingly annoyed texts.
There’s also two from Babs, which he makes a mental note to respond to once he’s more capable of following a thought in a straight line from one side of his brain to the other.
Case in point, Jason is still talking, “- Christ, are you even listening to me?”
“Yeah,” Dick sticks the phone back against his ear. “Yeah, sorry. I’m here. Just…tired.”
“Oh, sure.” Dick can practically hear the accompanying eye roll. “Nothing tires you out like a week-long hostage situation, does it?”
And just like that, the clenched thing returns with a vengeance, a physical weight settling over his chest, chasing the air from his lungs and squeezing uncomfortably at the muscles around his sore ribs.
He allows himself a single too-short breath of a sigh.
Then, he gets into it:
“How do you know about that?”
“I’m a fucking crime lord - “
“You’re not really anymo- “
“I mean I’m not stuck in your goody two shoes bat-approved networks, okay? I talk to criminals! And they don’t usually brag to me about spending the week torturing Nightwing in New York! What the hell were you doing in New York?”
“Isn’t that supposed to be the other way around? I thought they were the ones who hated Jersey.”
For a moment, Jason relents, his anger switching targets. “No, I definitely hate them back.”
“Of course you do,” Dick mutters.
“And I hate you too!” The line crackles a little under the renewed intensity of Jason’s hiss. “Right now.”
“It was only three days. And what do they even have to brag about? I escaped! And brought all the civilians out with me.” Dick takes a breath. “They’re misrepresenting the situation completely.”
“What about the torture part, asshole?”
Ah, right.
Dick shifts a little, in a move purely intended to take pressure off his bruised side. It definitely does not fall under the category of guilty fidgeting.
“That’s blowing things out of proportion too,” he says, finally. “They just kicked me around a little.”
Jason’s only response is a noncommittal grunt, so Dick swallows and keeps talking.
He’s not sure why it’s so hard at the moment, the talking.
Dick usually loves talking; he can and has held full conversations in his sleep, but tonight, all he can really muster is the knowledge that Jason likely won’t leave him alone until he relents. So, Dick resettles against the pillows and scrambles at the edges of his thoughts until he can say,
“They didn't capture me or anything. I caught up to them late and there were so many civilian hostages in the mix, it just seemed easier to go along that way. Get out the back end, you know?” A beat of pointed silence follows. Dick can’t help himself, “What, no bisexual jokes?”
“I’m a fucking ally,” is Jason’s response, nearly a growl.
He sounds angry all of a sudden, and something tells Dick it has very little to do with bisexuality, allyship or otherwise.
Jason’s clearly freaked out, about this or something adjacent that Dick hasn’t clocked yet. It’s touching, really, like it always is whenever Jason lets down the literal and metaphorical mask, allows some of that fiery protectiveness to slip through. It reminds Dick a little more each time just how much he missed it.
“I’m fine, Jay,” he says, finally, gentle as Jason will usually allow. “It’s nothing to worry about, just a few bruises.”
And Dick isn’t lying, is the thing. There isn’t any lasting damage. He’ll be sore for a few days and then move on, just like every other time he’s copped a hit on patrol.
Only this time a few assholes had to go and brag about it to Red fucking Hood.
“You sure?” Jason asks now, which for him is practically fawning. “You’re being kind of…weird.”
Dick snorts, curling his legs underneath him a little. He notices vaguely that they don’t hurt anymore, the remnants of dream slipped away to tangle in the sheets at his ankles.
“Yeah, I’m sure. I’m just tired, that’s all.” He takes a brief moment to wonder if he should, then admits, “I, uh, came to the manor. Alfred fed me. So, everything’s looking up.”
Jason gives him a vague little Hn in response.
Then, another flurry of questions:
“Did you hit your head?”
Kind of. “No.”
“Any knives?”
Tim’s the one who got stabbed. “No.”
“What about – “
“Jason, seriously! I’m fine!”
Dick isn’t lying. He is fine. But this line of questioning is also bringing them dangerously close to something that very much isn’t: fine or anything close to it.
It’s the same something that’s left dark edged, two-pronged bruises along Dick’s side and a rib complaining when he turns too sharply in the wrong direction. It shouldn’t be affecting him like this, Dick knows. He shouldn’t be blinking away the glint of a swinging warehouse bulb off metal or remembering the squishy sound of it against his flesh.
And that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it? Dick is fine.
He’s so fine, in fact, that it’s not even his own blood splattering in the coiled recesses of his memory, or his involuntary cries of pain.
Dick is curled up in bed with a few bruises and a headache. Dick got smacked around with a crowbar for a couple days and here he is, good as new. Still so very blisslessly alive.
There’s silence on the line between them, and he can hear Jason breathing. Soft sounds of the city beyond. It’s more comforting than it has any right to be.
Comforting enough, maybe, to lull him into a false sense of security, the undeniable evidence in steady exhales against his ear that his brother is right here with him. That Jason’s fine too.
It makes Dick want to take a two-pronged metal thing to the wall he’s forced up between himself and the truth of it. He wants to scream. He wants to lock Jason in the tightest hug he can and never let him go. He wants, in the deepest most illogical depths of himself, to say he’s sorry.
Dick wants to say, “I know what it felt like now. I know how much it hurt you and I will never forgive myself for any of it.”
He wants to say, “We should have been there.” and “We should have stopped it.” and “I should have been there.”
Dick cannot say this.
And not in a please don’t discuss the colour of my underwear at a gala, Dick way. He really, truly cannot say this. He can’t even hint at it, can’t so much as breathe in its direction because then Jason will hang up on him. And Dick will be stuck here, laid out in billionaire sheets in the cool luxury of oblivion, while all the way across the city, Jason falls into a shadow that Dick swore to himself he would never see again.
It was a naïve oath, certainly, but a necessary one. It allowed Dick to keep doing things like sleeping and smiling and generally interacting with the world without putting his fist through it.
He squeezes his eyes closed, clears this throat in a move he hopes isn’t quite as obvious as it feels.
“Look,” he says. “I should probably –“
But before he can fumble together anything half-assed about sleep and painkillers, or even anything more drastic, like fake a bad connection to escape, he has to sit back and hear Jason say:
“Right. I get it. I’m not great at the feelings shit, but you really don’t sound great. Will you at least tell someone? Even if it’s not me.”
That’s about when Dick bursts into tears.
They’re quiet enough, thankfully, just trickling silently down his face, over his nose and the sore part of his jaw.
“It’s not that. It isn’t. I just –” his breath hitches, traitorously against the phone. Dick wonders if he’s been hit in the ribs all over again. “I would do anything. Everything. To keep you safe. You know that, right?”
“I can take care of myself,” comes back immediately, like an instinct, a necessary precursor to the much quieter: “I know.”
“Good. That’s good, Jay.”
They’re both quiet, for a while. It’s nearly silent, save for little snatches of city noise on each of Jason’s exhales. It’s a different sort of silence than before, less stifling. More of a choice, than a lack. Dick hopes, vaguely, that the silence means Tim has gone to bed too, somewhere down the hall.
“The guy said it was three days,” Jason says, finally. And Dick doesn’t bother to grace it with a response, until he adds, “I’m guessing you didn’t get much sleep in there?”
He can’t hold back a chuckle. It comes out embarrassingly watery. “Not really.”
“Maybe that’s why your brain is falling out of your ears, hm?”
Dick’s been staring at a shadowed spot on the ceiling long enough that its edges have blurred, in a way that has very little to do with tears. “My brain’s fine.”
“Right,” Jason mutters. “You should sleep.”
“And you should -” He spends a single, valiant moment wracking his brain for an appropriately scathing older brother comeback, and falls distinctively short. “You should come for breakfast in the morning.”
Jason snorts. “Will you be awake for breakfast?”
“Brunch,” he amends.
There’s a soft scuffle against his ear; Jason’s on the move again.
“I’ll see what I can do.” Then, “Go to sleep, Dickface.”
And before Dick can so much as protest that he was asleep, thank you very much, before he was so rudely awakened by a phone call, the line goes dead.
He tips his head back against the pillows for a moment, hand still tight around the phone, and allows himself a brief moment of nothing.
The backs of his eyelids are free from bloody sand this time, just dark, with a faint bluish tint. It reminds him of the colours of his suit, defined edges of it blurred into a strange amorphous bruise. Riddler might have something today about it - like that one about the newspaper, black and blue and red all over.
He’s not now, though. Not anymore.
Dick adjusts himself, slow enough that his ribs barely even twinge at the motion.
He might be able to drift off again. It’s not so long until brunch, after all.