Chapter Text
In his dream, the city is on fire. There are voices. He can never hold onto the words only the shape of them, someone saying his name like it’s the last true thing left standing, someone else saying I’m sorry, spide—, I’m so sorry, and underneath all of it, a sensation he has no name for at five, at seven, at seventeen; the specific, unbearable feeling of being unstitched from the inside out, one thread at a time, while the people who love him watch it happen and can’t stop it either.
He is falling. Not from a great height, not at first. It starts small: a school gymnasium, fluorescent lights buzzing, a girl with red hair laughing at something he said. Then the floor tilts, the way the floors do in dreams and he is falling through it, through the gym and the school and the city beneath it, past a kitchen where an older man is reading a newspaper and an older woman is humming over a stove, past a girl with blonde hair who is saying something has to give, Peter, something always has to give and then he is falling past a man in red and gold who is saying I’m sorry kid, you did everything right and then there is no more ground to fall toward an no more sky to fall from, just a name being unstitched from a universe one syllable at a time.
“Peter.”
“Peter.”
“Peter Park—”
He wakes up the way he always wakes up. Silent. Eyes open in the dark, heart racing, hands already checking sheets for blood that was never there and with no memory of what any of it means, only the aftertaste of it, sour and heavy behind his ribs, the way it always is.
Peter Grayson-Wayne has had weird dreams since he was old enough to remember anything at all, since the night his parents fell, since Bruce Wayne carried him out of a tent that smelled like sawdust and popcorn and something underneath that he didn’t have a word for yet.
He has never told anyone about the dreams, the nightmares. Not Alfred, who would worry. Not Dick, who has enough ghosts of his own and doesn’t need to inherit his little brother’s. Not Bruce, who would do that thing he does where his face goes very still and very far away, like he’s already decided the conversation is over before it’s begun.
Peter has gotten good at carrying things quietly. It’s sort of his specialty.
Alfred knocks twice, precisely, the same rhythm he’s used for thirteen years. “Master Peter. Half past six.”
“I’m up,” Peter says, to the ceiling, and means it eventually, a few minutes later when his heart starts calming down and he gets out of bed.
He showers, dresses, knots his tie with the specific, joyless efficiency of a boy who’s had a great deal of practice getting ready for a day he doesn’t particularly want to be in and comes downstairs to find a breakfast table already occupied, which happens rarely enough these days that he almost stops in the doorway out of surprise alone.
Bruce is there, Damian too and Tim, heads bent close together over something on the table between them, voices low and quick in the specific cadence of people discussing something they intend to keep discussing only among themselves. The conversation stops the second Peter’s foot crosses the threshold, cut off clean, mid-sentence, the way it always does.
“Morning,” Bruce says, folding whatever it was closed, smooth, practiced, like it never happened at all.
“Morning,” Peter says back and sits down, and doesn’t ask, because he’s learned by now exactly what asking gets him.
This is how it always is. A room that goes quiet when he enters it. A family that has an entire language it speaks fluently and simply chooses, every single time not to teach him a word of it. Like watching a play about a family from the front row. He can see every gesture clearly. He still can’t get on stage.
He butters his toast and listens to Damian complain about a training regimen Peter doesn’t even know exists, catches the flicker of Tim’s eyes checking to make sure he isn’t listening too closely, and eats his breakfast like a guest at a table that’s technically had his name on it since he was five years old.
“Big test today?” Bruce asks, which is the kind of question that sounds like interest and costs nothing to ask.
“Chem,” Peter says. “It’s fine.”
“Good luck,” Bruce says, already looking back down at his phone and that’s the whole conversation. Peter finishes his toast and doesn’t particularly mind, because minding it has never once changed anything.
“Master Tim, Master Damian, your car will be round in ten minutes,” Alfred says, sweeping through with the coffee pot. “Miss Brown and Master Thomas will meet you at the gate, as usual.” He glances at Peter. “Master Peter, your own transportation is arranged for a quarter past seven, as always.”
It’s such an old, unremarkable piece of furniture in his life that Peter’s stopped noticing the shape of it: Tim, Damian, Duke and Steph all pile into the same car most mornings, off to the same ordinary public magnet school across tows, backpacks and easy, half-asleep bickering, while Peter, alone, gets driven twenty minutes in the opposite direction to Gotham Academy, the private school two zip codes over that costs more per semester than most of Gotham’s resident make in a year, where every single classmate knows exactly who Peter Grayson-Wayne is and exactly how far down the family’s actual priority list he sits. Being a Wayne, at that school, has never once bought him anything except a more expensive audience for being exactly the kind of afterthought everyone at home has quietly decided he’s allowed to be. He’s the name on the tuition check and the spare to Bruce Wayne’s chosen heirs, and everybody there has always known it.
He leaves before the others do, most mornings, alone, the way he leaves most things.
He’s seventeen. He’s a junior. He has a 4.0 GPA he’s never once been congratulated for at home, a robotics elective he’s technically too advanced for, and exactly one friend in the entire school, a quiet kid named Owen who eats lunch with him on the days Owen isn’t homesick, which is often enough that most days Peter eats alone, headphones in, a book propped against his tray, performing the practiced posture of someone who wants you to believe he prefers it that way.
He doesn’t prefer it that way. He’s just had a lot of years to get good at looking like he does.
Gotham academy lets out at three-fifteen, and Peter Grayson is always the last one out of the building, not because he’s slow, but because there’s no particular reason to hurry toward a manor that will be as empty when he gets home as it always is.
The Carrigan twins find him in the parking lot most Tuesdays, which has become enough of a patter that Peter has started timing his exit around their lacross practice schedule with the same precision he’d apply to any other variable he needed to engineer around. Today he miscalculated by four minutes.
“Grayson.” Mark Carrigan says his name like it’s a joke that’s been running so long nobody remembers the original punchline. “Aren’t you tired of being the charity case nobody wants to claim.”
“Wayne Foundation paperwork still going through?” his brother adds, grinning. “Or did they finally figure out the Bruce Wayne’s orphan quota’s full?”
Peter could say something clever back. He’s got six options queued up before either of them finished talking, each one calibrated for maximum damage and minimum consequence, yet he says none of them because the math on this has never once favored him. He picks silence. He adjusts his backpack strap and keeps walking, and behind him Mark laughs like he’s won something.
He takes the bus. He’s had a car available to him since he turned sixteen and a license since six months after that. He’d gotten the license through a driving school in the end, some instructor named Gary with a coffee stain on his tie and infinite patience for parallel parking, because the person who was supposed to teach him never quite got around to it. Bruce had promised, the week before Peter turned fifteen and a half, that they would start on weekends, out on the back roads past the property line, just the two of the, the same way he’d once thought him how to drive a bicycle.
The first Saturday, Peter was downstairs by eight, keys that weren’t even his yet sitting hopeful on the counter, and Bruce found him there an hour later, already dressed for something else entirely, looking faintly startled to see him waiting at all.
“Pete. Hey. I’m sorry, something came up. I promise, next week.”
“Sure,” Peter had said, fifteen years old and already fluent in the particular art of being let down, and still, for just a few seconds, foolish enough to let himself believe the word might mean something this time. “Next week.”
Next week, Bruce was gone before Peter even came down for breakfast and the week after that he was supposedly in a board meeting that ran long enough to swallow the whole afternoon, and by the fifth missed Saturday, Peter stopped coming downstairs at eight at all, and quietly signed himself up for Gary’s class instead, because at fifteen he’s already learned exactly how this particular story went and saw no reason to sit through the ending one more time.
Peter never mentioned it again. Neither did Bruce. It went, like most things in the manor, into the same silent pile as everything else that never got said out loud, one more small, ordinary promise that simply stopped existing rather than ever getting broken to his face.
The manor, when he finally walks up the drive, is dark.
Not unlit, exactly. But dark in the way that means empty, the particular hollow quality of a building with nobody actually breathing inside it, and Peter who has lived here for thirteen years and still hasn’t built an immunity to what feels like walking in at the end of a bad day. He thinks, sometimes, lying awake after some nightmare, that the manor is less like a home and more like a museum he’s allowed to sleep in. Beautiful. Cold. Full of people who love each other in a language he was never quite taught.
“Alfred?” His voice goes nowhere, swallowed up by ceilings built for a much larger family than the one that’s apparently in residence today. “Dad?”
Nothing. He checks the kitchen, the library, the study with its closed door that he’s learned through years of careful trial, opens onto nothing more interesting than a desk and several locked cabinets. He finds it as empty as everything else.
What he does is what he always does on the afternoons the house swallows itself like this, he make himself a sandwich he doesn’t really want, sits at the enormous kitchen island built for a family that’s never once all been in the room at the same time and do his homework with the television on low for the company of other people’s voices, even fictional ones.
Alfred comes in later that evening, looking faintly more tired than he did that morning, with an explanation that amounts to nothing, an errand, a delivery, something with the bones of a lie that Peter has stopped bothering to pull on, because it has never once gotten him anything but another vague non-answer.
“Master Peter,” Alfred says, setting down his stuff and surveying the homework spread and the half-eaten sandwich with something that might be apology if either of them were the type to name it out loud. “Master Bruce said business is keeping him longer than expected. He sends his regrets.”
“Sure, no problem,” Peter says, not looking up from his textbook. “He always does.”
Alfred doesn’t have a response to that one either. He just goes to start dinner properly, the real version, the one Peter won’t actually be hungry for after the sandwich, and the two of them spend the rest of the evening in the specific, practiced silence of two people who have both, in their own ways, learned exactly how much truth this house can hold before something has to give.
That night, the nightmare comes the way it always comes, falling, falling, a name being screamed and Peter wakes at two in the morning with his heart going too fast for a reason he’s never once been able to name, in his room on the third floor of the east wing that doesn’t have a single poster on the wall. Because some part of him, very small and very old, has never quite believed he’s allowed to stay long enough to need one.
He doesn’t go looking for anyone for comfort. He’s tried that before, a long time ago, and learned what he found at the end of that particular hallway. He gets up, drinks a glass of water in the dark kitchen, and goes back to bed alone, the way he always does, and doesn’t think too hard about the fact that somewhere underneath the falling and unstitched name, there’s a flicker of something that feels almost like a warning, a held breath right before disaster, that he’s never once knows what to do with except wait for it to pass.
It always passes eventually. It has, so far, always just been nerves.
He has no reason yet to think it might be something else. That’s about to change faster than he could have prepared for.