Archive of Our Own

---

The first thing he knew was the light.

White and merciless, pressed against the inside of his eyelids like a thumb against a bruise. Dick Grayson surfaced toward it out of a dark so complete it had no texture, no temperature, no end — the way you come up from the bottom of a lake you'd forgotten you were drowning in. Only he hadn't been drowning. He'd been done.

Sound arrived before sense. Voices, overlapping, sharp-edged. Yelling. The particular acoustics of the medbay — the way a shout bounced off the tile and the glass cabinets and the steel tables, turning anger into something that rang.

"—you had no right—"

"He was dead, Jason. He was—"

"He was dead and you made that choice for him! You don't get to—"

Dick's eyes opened.

The ceiling of the Wayne Manor medbay swam into focus, familiar as his own heartbeat: the pale acoustic panels, the recessed lights, the corner where a water stain had been there since he was a boy and had never once been fixed because Alfred said fixing it would ruin the room's character.

He was on a bed. Sheets tucked around him. Something thin and cold running into the crook of his arm.

And his family was at the foot of it, arranged like a painting of a shipwreck.

Jason had Bruce by the front of the cowl-less Batsuit, which meant Jason had his hands on Bruce, which meant Jason had crossed a line Dick had never actually seen him cross before, because for all the shouting and the leather and the guns, Jason Todd had never once swung at Bruce with real intent. His face was a mask of grief twisted into hate. His knuckles were white.

Tim stood behind them, half-poised to intervene, his own face bloodless and furious in a way that had nothing to do with stopping the fight. Damian was braced in the doorway, arms crossed, lip curled — but his eyes, green and too bright, kept cutting to Dick and away, to Dick and away, like the sight of him hurt. Barbara sat in her chair at the console, very still, very quiet, which was the most dangerous way Barbara Gordon ever sat. Her hands were folded in her lap. She was staring at Bruce, and the look on her face said she had already chosen which side of the room she stood on and it was not his.

Alfred stood nearest the bed. A tray in his hands. Gauze. Antiseptic. The old man's face was unreadable, which meant he was holding something down so hard it might break him.

"…Alfred?" Dick said.

His voice came out wrong. Scraped. Like it had been dragged over gravel on its way up his throat.

The room went silent so fast it was like a door slamming.

Every head turned. Jason's hands fell from Bruce's suit. Tim took a half-step forward. Damian's arms dropped to his sides, and for one unguarded second he was nine years old and terrified, before the mask snapped back into place.

"Richard," Damian breathed. Then, louder, almost angry: "You're awake."

And Dick felt it, then. The thing that had been waiting at the bottom of all that dark, the shape his mind had been circling without wanting to touch.

He was awake.

He was alive.

His hands came up in front of his face — his hands, his skin, the small scar on his left knuckle from a training accident when he was twelve, the callus on his palm from the bars. He turned them over. They were his. They were warm.

"I was dead," Dick said. Not a question. He could feel it the way you feel a limb you've lost, the ghost of the amputation. He had been dead. He had been finished. He had let go of everything — the weight of the name, the ache in his shoulder that never quite healed, the long tired list of everyone he'd failed to save. He had set it all down. And the peace of that, the rest of it, was still clinging to him like cold water, and he had been yanked back up out of it, and now—

"How?" Dick whispered. His eyes moved around the room, from face to face, looking for the answer in the way they wouldn't look at him. Tim's jaw was tight. Barbara's eyes had gone wet and hard at once. Jason had turned away, one hand pressed over his mouth.

And Bruce.

Bruce stood at the foot of the bed like a man made of stone and guilt. His hair was uncombed. There were shadows under his eyes so deep they looked bruised. He had the look of a man who had not slept in days and would not sleep for many more — the look of a man who had done something terrible and was still deciding whether he regretted it.

"Bruce," Dick said slowly. "How am I alive?"

Bruce's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"The Lazarus Pit," he said.

The words fell into the room and lay there.

Dick felt them go in. Felt them land somewhere deep, in the hollow where the memory of being done still echoed.

The Lazarus Pit.

The green.

"…No," Dick said. And then, because the word was too small, because it couldn't possibly contain what he meant: "No, Bruce. No. You— I asked you. I asked you—"

His voice cracked on it. He sat up too fast, and the world tilted, and something in his chest heaved —

The green. It came up out of him all at once. A tide of it, hot and bright and furious, filling his mouth and his nose and his lungs like he was drowning again, and the rage—

The rage was enormous.

It wasn't his. It couldn't be his. Dick Grayson did not hate like this. Dick Grayson did not look at his father — at the man who raised him, who held him when his parents fell, who taught him everything — and want to break his jaw with his bare hands. But the thing inside him, the thing the pit had poured into the hollow where his death used to be, looked at Bruce and saw only the hand that had dragged him screaming out of the grave, and it wanted.

"Get Alfred out," Dick heard himself say. His voice was not his voice. It came out low and wrong, with a growl underneath it, like an animal learning to speak. "Get everyone out of this room. Right now."

"Dick—" Bruce started, stepping forward.

"Don't."

The word came out of him with a force that surprised even Dick. He was out of the bed — he didn't remember moving, didn't remember the sheets tearing, didn't remember the IV ripping out of his arm and blood beading up dark against his skin. He was on his feet, and the medbay tile was cold under his bare soles, and he was shaking.

"Don't you touch me," Dick said. "Don't you come near me. I can feel it, Bruce. I can feel what you put inside me. It's— it's screaming in here. It wants—"

He couldn't finish. Because the thing in him wanted to kill the man who'd loved him, and Dick Grayson did not want that, and the two wants were tearing him apart from the inside like a thing with two hearts.

"Everybody out," Jason said suddenly, roughly. He was already moving, herding Tim toward the door with a hand on his shoulder, his other hand extended back toward Damian. "Out, out, out. Baby bird, you too, move—"

"I am not a—"

"Now, Damian."

Barbara's chair hummed. She went last, pausing in the doorway to look back at Dick — and there was so much in that look. Grief. Relief. Fear. And something else, something that cut Dick deeper than any of it: I'm sorry.

Then the door closed, and Dick was alone with Bruce and with the green.

---

It had been a Tuesday.

Dick remembered that with strange clarity, the way you remember the weather on the day of a funeral. An ordinary Tuesday. Cold rain over the Narrows. He and Bruce had been working a case — a new player in the arms trade, someone shipping military-grade hardware through the old docks, someone with a symbol painted on the crates that neither of them recognized. A stylized eye. Open. Watching.

They'd split up on the roof of the Meridian warehouse. Standard pincer. Bruce took the north face; Dick went in low through the loading bay, and the rain was coming down so hard it sounded like applause on the corrugated roof, and he remembered thinking, I need to call Damian. I promised I'd—

The bullet hit him in the back.

No. Not a bullet. Something worse — a dart, thick as a pencil, punching through the Kevlar at the base of his spine where the plates didn't quite meet, and the cold that flooded up his veins wasn't shock.

It was poison. Fast poison. League poison, the kind that stopped your heart before you finished falling.

Dick hit the concrete. He remembered the taste of blood and rain. He remembered trying to lift his head and finding that his arms had stopped answering. He remembered the man who stepped out of the shadows — tall, shaved head, a tattoo of the open eye crawling up the side of his neck — and the way the man had looked down at him the way you'd look at a dog you'd just put down.

"Grayson," the man had said, almost kindly. "The Demon's Head sends his regards."

And then Dick had heard the whump of Bruce's grapnel, the roar of his father's fury descending out of the rain, and he had thought, Good. He's here. He'll—

The dark had taken him before he could finish the thought.

He hadn't been afraid. That was the strangest part, the part he couldn't explain to anyone who hadn't been there. He had been dying — bleeding out on a warehouse floor with League poison in his blood — and he hadn't been afraid. He'd been tired. Bone-tired, soul-tired, the tired that comes from twenty years of being the one who catches everyone else. And the dark had been so quiet.

He'd let go.

He'd been so ready to let go.

---

"Was it Ra's?" Dick heard himself ask. He was standing against the far wall of the medbay now, his back pressed to the tile, because putting something solid between himself and Bruce was the only way he could keep his hands from doing what the green wanted them to do. "The tattoo. The eye. Was it Ra's?"

Bruce shook his head. "A splinter faction. Former members of the League. They'd been selling the poison on the side — enough to fund their own operation. Ra's didn't sanction it."

"But you found them." It wasn't a question.

"I found them." Bruce's voice was flat, careful, the voice he used when he was holding something back. "They're in Blackgate. All of them."

"And me?" Dick's voice shook. He hated that it shook. "I was dead, Bruce. How long was I dead?"

Bruce was silent for a long moment. Then: "Forty-three minutes."

"Forty-three—" Dick's laugh came out broken, wrong. "Forty-three minutes. And you— where did you even—" He stopped. The pieces were assembling themselves in his head, and he didn't want them to. "You had a pit. You had one ready. You kept a Lazarus Pit somewhere, for— for this. For the day one of us—"

"Not for this," Bruce said, and there was something raw in his voice now, cracking through the flatness. "I didn't keep it for this. Dick, I didn't— when I got to you, you weren't breathing. You didn't have a pulse. I carried you out of there and you were gone, and I—"

"And you couldn't let me go." Dick's voice was quiet now. Quiet and terrible. "You couldn't do the one thing I asked you to do."

Bruce flinched. Actually flinched, like Dick had hit him.

"Dick—"

"I told you." Dick's hands were shaking. He looked down at them — at his own hands, at the tremor running through them — and the green surged up his throat again, hot and furious, and he swallowed it down like bile. "I told you, after Jason. Do you remember? I came to you and I said — I said if it ever happened to me, if I ever went down and didn't get back up, you had to let me stay down. You had to. I made you promise, Bruce. I made you promise on—"

"I know." Bruce's voice broke on it. "I know what you asked me."

"And you did it anyway." Dick's voice rose, and the green rose with it, and he felt his own face twist into something that wasn't his. "You dragged me out of the only peace I've ever— you put that inside me—" He gestured at his own chest, at the thing clawing at his ribs. "You made me this. You made me into— into one of them. The ones who come back wrong. The ones who can't—"

He stopped. He was breathing too hard. The green was singing in his blood, and he could feel what it wanted, and the wanting was so loud he couldn't hear himself think.

"The rage is temporary," Bruce said quietly. "The effects of the pit— the agitation, the violence— they fade. In a matter of weeks, sometimes less. You'll—"

"You don't get to tell me it's temporary!" Dick roared it, and the sound of it — the sound of his own voice coming out like an animal — stopped him cold. He pressed both hands to his face. His palms were cold. His skin was hot. "You don't get to tell me how I'll feel about this later. You don't get to tell me it'll fade. Jason—" He dropped his hands. "Jason came back wrong for years. Jason came back and he was so angry he tried to— and you saw what that did to him. You saw what it did to all of us. And you put me in the same green water that did that to your son, because you couldn't—"

"Because I couldn't lose you!" Bruce shouted it, and the shout echoed off the tile, and then the room was very quiet.

Bruce stood at the foot of the bed, breathing hard, his hands clenched at his sides. His face was a ruin. All the masks were gone — the Bat, the billionaire, the stone — and underneath them was just a man, a tired, grieving, desperate man, the same man who had once held an eight-year-old boy on a rainy street in the Bowery and promised him a home.

"I couldn't lose you," Bruce said again, quieter. "Dick. I know what I did. I know I broke your trust. I know I broke my word. And I know—" His voice caught. "I know you were at peace. I could feel it. When I carried you out of that warehouse, you were so— you were done, and I could feel it, and I brought you back anyway. I chose it anyway. Because I am selfish, and I am broken, and I have already buried more sons than any man should have to bury, and I could not—"

He stopped. His eyes were wet. Dick had never — in all the years, all the blood, all the nights on rooftops — Dick had never seen Bruce Wayne cry.

"I could not bury you," Bruce finished. "I'm sorry. I know it's not enough. But I am sorry."

The green howled in Dick's chest. It wanted blood. It wanted to make Bruce sorry in a language Bruce would understand — in bruises, in breaks, in the sound of bone giving way. It was so loud. It was so hungry.

And underneath it, small and faint, like a voice calling from very far away, Dick could hear the boy he'd been. The boy on the trapeze. The boy who had trusted this man with everything he had left in the world.

He loved you, the small voice said. He loves you. That's why he did it. That doesn't make it right. But that's why.

The green surged.

Dick turned and put his fist through the medbay wall.

The drywall exploded. The stud behind it — steel, because of course Bruce had reinforced the medbay walls with steel — rang like a bell, and pain lanced up Dick's arm, real and bright and clean, and for one blessed second the pain was louder than the green.

He pulled his hand out of the wall. His knuckles were bleeding. The blood was red. His blood. His.

Behind him, Bruce hadn't moved.

"I'm not going to forgive you," Dick said. His voice was hoarse. "Not today. Maybe not ever. I don't— I can't even think about what you did to me right now, because if I think about it, I'm going to—" He stopped. Breathed. The air tasted like dust and copper. "I need you to leave this room. I need you to give me ten minutes. And then I need you to tell me the truth about what's going to happen to me now, because I can feel this thing in my blood, Bruce, and I need to know if I'm going to hurt someone I love."

Bruce stood there for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and walked to the door.

He paused with his hand on the frame.

"I would do it again," he said, not looking back. "I need you to know that. If I had the choice again, standing over you in that warehouse with your heart stopped and the rain coming down — I would do it again. I would burn the whole world down to bring you back. That's not a justification. That's just the truth of what you are to me."

He left.

Dick stood alone in the medbay with his bleeding hand and the green and the ghost of his own death, and he did not know which of the three was going to kill him first.

---

Alfred found him twenty minutes later, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, staring at nothing.

The old man didn't say anything. He just knelt — slowly, carefully, the way he did everything now, with the weight of his years settled into his joints — and took Dick's hand in his own, and began to clean the blood off his knuckles.

Dick watched him work. The precise movements. The cotton swab. The antiseptic that stung and then went numb.

"I was at peace," Dick said quietly. "When I died. I want you to know that. It wasn't— it wasn't scary, Alfred. It was just quiet. It was like the end of a very long day. And I was so tired. I didn't realize how tired I was until I wasn't anymore."

Alfred's hands didn't stop moving. But his jaw tightened.

"I know Master Bruce has already apologized," Alfred said. "And I know it wasn't enough. Nothing he can say will be enough. But I will tell you this, Richard, because I was there, and because you deserve to know the whole of it: he did not make this choice lightly."

"He made it at all."

"Yes." Alfred wound the gauze around Dick's knuckles, neat and snug. "He did. He made it at the cost of your trust, which he values above nearly everything else in his life. He made it knowing you would hate him for it. He made it knowing that he might lose you forever — not to death, but to his own actions." The old man paused. "He made it anyway. And I have spent forty years watching that man carry the weight of every choice he has ever made, and I have never seen one sit on him heavier than this one."

Dick was quiet for a moment. Then: "He kept a pit ready. How long?"

Alfred's hands stilled.

"A long time," he said. "He found it years ago, after Master Jason— after the first time. He had it brought here, sealed, hidden. He never told anyone. Not even me, not at first. I found out when he came home carrying you, and he went down to the sub-basement, and I—" Alfred's voice faltered, just slightly. "I followed him. I thought he had lost his mind with grief. And I stood in the doorway and I watched him lower your body into the green, Richard. I watched him do the thing he had sworn he would never do, for the boy he had sworn he would never lose."

Alfred finished the bandage. He didn't let go of Dick's hand.

"I should have stopped him," the old man said quietly. "I have asked myself, every hour since, whether I should have stopped him. And I have not been able to answer. Because the man I would have been, the man who would have stopped him, is not the man who has watched you grow from a boy into a man, who has bandaged your knees and your heart more times than he can count, who loves you as surely as if you were his own blood. That man could not watch you die, either."

Dick looked down at his bandaged hand. At Alfred's hand over his.

"I don't know what to do with this," Dick said. His voice was very small. "I don't know how to be alive when I already let go. I don't know how to be him — how to be the person who catches everyone — when there's this thing inside me that wants to break everything I love."

Alfred was quiet for a long moment.

"Then don't be him," he said. "Not yet. Be the man who is angry, and who is hurt, and who is grieving — for your own death, if nothing else, because you are allowed to grieve that. Be the man who doesn't know what comes next. The rest of us will hold the line until you do."

Dick laughed. It came out wet and broken.

"You always know what to say."

"I have had a great deal of practice," Alfred said, "with a great many boys who did not know how to be alive. You are not the first, Richard. And with any luck, you will not be the last."

---

Jason found him on the roof.

Dick had climbed up there without really deciding to — his body knew the way even when his mind was a storm. The rain had stopped. The sky over Gotham was that deep bruised color between night and morning, and the city lights were starting to go out one by one as the world turned toward dawn.

The green was quieter now. Not gone — he could feel it coiled in his chest like a sleeping animal, its breathing slow and patient — but quieter. He could think past it. Barely.

Jason landed on the parapet beside him with a soft thud and didn't say anything for a long time. They stood together, looking out at the city, two men who had both died and come back wrong.

"You know I hate him for it too, right?" Jason said finally. "Not for this. For the other time. For letting them— for not—" He stopped. Scowled. "He doesn't get to keep doing this. He doesn't get to keep deciding that his grief matters more than our— our rest. Our choice. He did it to me by accident and he did it to you on purpose, and I want you to know that I'm on your side. Whatever you decide to do about it. Even if what you decide is to walk out that front door and never come back."

Dick was quiet.

"I remember being dead," he said. "Is that— did you— when you came back, did you remember?"

Jason was silent for a long, long moment.

"Yeah," he said finally. His voice was rough. "I remember. It wasn't— for me it wasn't peace. It was just nothing. Cold nothing, and then the green, and then the screaming. But I remember what it felt like to not be here anymore. And I remember how wrong it felt to be dragged back. Like being woken up in the middle of a surgery. Like—" He shook his head. "There's no good way to say it. It's a violation. Plain and simple. Somebody reached into the one thing that was finally, finally yours — your own ending — and they took it away from you."

Dick nodded slowly.

"I was at peace," he said. "I keep saying that, and I don't think anyone really hears it. I was done, Jason. I had done everything I was supposed to do. I had saved the people I was supposed to save. I had loved the people I was supposed to love. And I was so tired. I didn't know how tired until I wasn't anymore." He looked down at his hands. "And now I'm back, and I'm full of this— this green— and I'm supposed to just... be grateful? Be glad to be alive? Everyone keeps looking at me like I should be happy, and I'm not. I'm furious. I'm furious at him and I'm furious at the world and I'm furious at myself for being furious, because I know he did it because he loves me, and I can't— I can't hold both of those things at once."

Jason was quiet for a long time.

"Nobody's asking you to be grateful," he said finally. "And if they are, they can answer to me. You're allowed to be angry, Dick. You're allowed to be angry for as long as you need to be angry. That's the thing nobody tells you about coming back — you don't owe anyone a clean recovery. You don't owe anyone a thank-you for being alive. You owe it to yourself to figure out what being alive means to you now, and that might take a while, and that's fine."

Dick turned to look at him. Jason's face was half in shadow, but his eyes were steady.

"How did you do it?" Dick asked. "How did you come back from the anger?"

Jason let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

"I didn't," he said. "Not all of it. I'm still angry. I'll probably be angry until the day I actually, finally die for real, and I'm told that's supposed to be a tragedy but honestly? It's just who I am now. The anger is part of me. It made me into someone who does things differently than I would have before. Someone who—" He shrugged. "Someone who shoots first and asks questions never, but also someone who shows up. For the people who matter. I channeled it. That's the trick. You can't get rid of the pit, Dick. You can only decide what you're going to point it at."

Dick looked out at the city.

"What if I don't know what to point it at?"

"Then you point it at the people who put you in the ground in the first place," Jason said. "There's always more of them. And if you need help finding them, I know a guy."

Dick laughed. It was a real laugh, rusty and surprised, and it felt like the first true thing he'd done since he woke up.

"Thanks, Jason."

"Don't mention it." Jason clapped him on the shoulder — a brief, rough gesture that was more affection than Jason would ever admit to. "And Dick? For what it's worth... I'm glad you're back. Even if you're not. Even if you hate it. I'm glad you're here."

He was gone before Dick could answer, a shadow dropping off the parapet into the darker shadows below.

Dick stood alone on the roof as the sky lightened, and the green stirred in his chest, and for the first time since he'd woken up, he thought maybe — just maybe — he could learn to live with it.

---

The door to Bruce's study was closed.

Dick stood outside it for a long moment, listening to the silence on the other side. The house was quiet. Everyone else had gone to ground — Tim to his room, Damian to the training cave, Barbara back to the Clocktower with a look that said she would be back the moment he called. Alfred was in the kitchen, making tea he wouldn't drink.

Only one door left. Only one conversation left.

Dick knocked.

"Come in."

Bruce was sitting at his desk, not doing anything. The Batcomputer screens were dark. A cup of coffee sat in front of him, cold and untouched. He looked up when Dick came in, and the look on his face was the look of a man waiting for a verdict.

Dick closed the door behind him.

"I'm not going to forgive you," he said.

Bruce nodded. "I know."

"I'm not going to pretend this didn't happen. I'm not going to pretend I'm grateful. And I'm not going to let you pretend that bringing someone back from the dead is ever anything but a violence, even when it's done out of love."

"I know," Bruce said again.

Dick crossed the room. He didn't sit down. He stood in front of the desk, looking down at the man who had raised him, who had buried him, who had refused to let him stay buried.

"But I'm not going to leave," Dick said. "I thought about it. On the roof, with Jason. I thought about walking out that door and never coming back, and I think— I think a part of me will always want to. But the rest of me knows that walking out wouldn't undo what you did. It would just mean I lost my family and my death. And I've lost enough."

Bruce's hands were trembling, very slightly, where they rested on the desk.

"Dick—"

"I'm not done." Dick's voice was quiet but firm. "I'm angry at you. I'm going to be angry at you for a long time. And you're going to let me be angry. You're not going to try to fix it. You're not going to make it about your guilt. You're going to sit with what you did, the same way I have to sit with what you did, and you're going to let that be hard."

Bruce nodded. His jaw was tight.

"There's one more thing," Dick said. "And I need you to hear it, because it's the only thing I can't live with you not understanding."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small folded piece of paper. He unfolded it carefully — it was old, worn soft at the creases, the ink faded. A letter. A letter Dick had written years ago, after the first time he'd almost died, after he'd seen what losing Jason had done to Bruce. A letter he'd kept in his gear, in a sealed pocket, so that if he ever went down and didn't get back up, someone would find it and know.

He set it on the desk in front of Bruce.

"I wrote that after Jason came back," Dick said. "I wrote it so that if I ever died for real, you'd have the words I couldn't say out loud. And I want you to read it. Not now. When you're alone. Because I need you to know that I loved you when I died. I loved you with everything I had, and I was at peace, and I was proud of the life you gave me. I went into that dark loving you."

He paused. His voice wavered, just slightly.

"And I need you to know that what you did—" Dick's hand moved to his own chest, over the place where the green was coiled. "What you did to me, you did to a man who loved you. You reached into the peace of a man who loved you and you pulled him out of it. And that's not something I can un-know. That's not something either of us can un-know. But I'm telling you now, so that when you read that letter, you understand the full cost of what you chose. You didn't just bring back a soldier. You brought back someone who trusted you completely. And you broke that trust in the one way I never thought you would."

Bruce looked down at the letter. His hands were shaking now, openly.

"I'm so sorry," he said. His voice was barely a whisper. "I know it's not enough. I know nothing will ever be enough. But I'm so sorry, Dick."

Dick stood there for a long moment. Then he reached out — slowly, carefully — and put his hand on Bruce's shoulder.

"I know," he said. "That's the worst part. I know you are."

He left Bruce alone with the letter, and the dawn came up over Gotham, and somewhere in the house a clock chimed the hour, and Dick Grayson stood in the hallway with the green coiled in his chest like a sleeping animal and the ghost of his own death settling into his bones, and he began, very slowly, to figure out what it meant to be alive when he hadn't asked to be.

---

Three weeks later, Dick stood on the roof of the Blüdhaven police precinct and watched the sun come up over the city he'd chosen. His city. The one he'd bled for, and nearly died for — twice now, if you counted the warehouse, and he was learning to count it.

The green was quieter now. It didn't roar anymore. It sat beneath his ribs like a second heartbeat, like a thing that had learned his name and decided, for now, to keep it.

He still dreamed of the dark. Of the peace. Of letting go. He still woke some mornings with the phantom weight of his own ending pressing down on him, and he still had to talk himself out of the rage on the bad days.

But he was here. He was alive. Not because he'd chosen it — that was the part he couldn't forget, the part he wouldn't let Bruce forget — but he was here, and he was learning, slowly, what to do with that.

His phone buzzed. A text from Damian, of all people: You missed training this morning. Father says you are "processing." I told him that was a stupid thing to say. You cannot process while lying in bed. Come spar. I will not go easy on you.

Dick smiled. It felt real.

He typed back: On my way. Don't hit the shoulder.

The reply came almost instantly: I will hit exactly the shoulder. That is the point of sparring.

Dick laughed out loud, alone on the roof, with the sunrise warm on his face and the green quiet in his chest and the long, hard, unasked-for work of being alive stretching out in front of him.

He didn't know if he'd ever forgive Bruce. He didn't know if he'd ever stop mourning the death that had been taken from him.

But he knew he'd go spar with his little brother. He knew he'd answer when Barbara called. He knew he'd be there, the next time Jason needed someone to stand beside him in the dark.

He was alive. Not because he'd chosen it. But he was alive, and he had people who loved him, and for now — for today — that was enough to point the green at something that wasn't his family.

Dick Grayson took a breath, and let it out, and stepped off the roof into the new day.