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Dick couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t hungry.

He couldn’t remember a time before the starvation had settled into his bones, corrupting his very flesh and blood until it was sewn into every tissue and sinew, until it lived in his very atoms. Sometimes he imagined it as a black hole lodged beneath his ribs, an impossible thing with an appetite large enough to swallow stars and entire galaxies. Other times, he imagined a starving beast curled around his heart, all teeth and claws, gnawing at him from the inside whenever someone he loved looked away.

Whatever it was, it had always been there. He knew that much. 

It had been there long before his muscles learned the precise mathematics of a high-wire balance, long before he knew what it felt like to have the spotlight on him and long before the world taught him how easily affection could curdle into something ugly. It had been there before the deaths, before the blood, before he became the darker man he sometimes barely recognized in the mirror.

Perhaps it was a congenital defect, a cosmic cruel joke coded into his DNA. Perhaps he’d been cursed in his mother’s womb, the disease already infecting him before he ever drew his first breath, until he was an infant brought into the world with a throat already dry and hands already clawing for other people’s attention, adoration, love. Created with the Hunger for their everything.

Perhaps he’d been born wrong.

It was easier to believe that than to consider the possibility that the world had simply taught a child to be hungry and then punished him for it.

It was a sickening kind of hunger that he had. 

It wasn't a craving for bread or meat. Not for any kind of food, though when Alfred was still alive, he would have argued otherwise given the number of times he’d caught Dick stealing something from the kitchen between meals. No, Dick’s Hunger was a little harder to satisfy. A little more embarrassing to admit to.

He hungered for human devotion in whatever form it might take: a hug, a softened tone, a hand lingering on his shoulder, even something as small as a glance. The black hole beneath his ribs had no standards. It would take whatever it could get, swallowing every scrap of affection before he could stop to wonder whether he’d earned it. He hunted for other people’s eyes, their warmth, the fleeting and volatile currency of their affection, and hated himself for how quickly he learned to recognize the difference between being looked at and being seen.

For his early years, he had been a scavenger, begging for scraps of attention from strangers and acquaintances alike, gorging himself on empty pleasantries as he flew above them, performing for their adoration and cheers. 

Dick had learned early that people were generous with their affection when he gave them something to love. A smile, a perfect landing, a joke delivered at precisely the right moment. He could make a room adore him, could coax applause from a crowd that knew nothing about the boy beneath the costume.

For a while, that had felt like enough.

Hunger had been young then, too. Easily distracted by the noise, dazzled by the lights, content to lap up the attention like a stray animal offered fresh milk. Dick hadn’t understood yet that applause always ended, that crowds eventually went home, or that being adored for what he could do wasn’t the same as being loved for who he was.

He understood that now.

Hunger also understood that now. It had grown up with him. It knew the difference between adoration and love, even when Dick pretended there wasn’t. It knew that a crowd, their cheers, their praise could adore him and still leave him alone at the end of the show. Beyond family, no one ever stayed. At least family stayed. At least they ensured he wouldn’t go hungry for long. 

Until they didn’t. 

Their love, their affections, their everything was gone with a snap of a fraying rope. 

Suddenly, after that night, the beast had nothing.

It didn’t understand death. It didn’t understand that love could remain in the world even when the people who had given it were gone. It only understood absence. It understood that Dick could reach for someone who had always been there and close his hands around nothing.

For years afterward, he would mistake the ache of missing someone for the certainty that he had been abandoned. He would learn to swallow grief before anyone could see it, to turn loneliness into work, to make himself useful enough that nobody would have a reason to leave him behind again.

But Hunger had never learned the difference between being alone and being unloved.

Technically, neither had Dick.

He grieved, unconfused and starving, for a long time.

Meanwhile, as he mourned, his Hunger adapted on its own, becoming just as dark, frigid and focused as he was. His target changed, his age and trauma narrowing down the scope of his greed. The noise had quieted, funneling down into a singular, sharp point. He didn’t want the world anymore. He wanted only a few now. 

Over the years, he had devoured every scrap of affection his siblings offered, scraped the plates clean of his friends’ loyalty and drained his past lovers until there was nothing left to give. He was an utter glutton for being wanted. 

Yet he had always pacified his self-hatred with a single, comforting truth: the worst of his starvation had only ever belonged to one person. 

He could sustain himself off the others, but Dick knew that he only truly wanted him. 

He stared at Bruce and the sheer scale of his own greed made him want to claw his own skin open. 

Bruce was his father, his partner, his brother, his best friend, his everything. He was the person who had taken a grieving child into his home and given him somewhere to belong. The person who had taught Dick how to fight, how to survive, how to get back up when the world knocked him flat. The person who had made a family out of broken people and somehow convinced Dick that he, too, could be one of them.

It was only natural that Hunger had latched onto him.

Bruce was home. Bruce was safety. Bruce was the hand that caught him when he fell and the voice that told him he could do better when he failed. Dick had spent years learning how to be Robin, how to be Nightwing, how to be the kind of son Bruce could be proud of that, somewhere along the way, he had begun to believe that if he could just be good enough, useful enough, indispensable enough, Bruce would never have a reason to let him go.

It was pathetic and stupid.

But Hunger wasn’t rational. 

Dick didn’t just want the man’s approval. He wanted his time, his attention, his quiet smiles. He wanted to be the person Bruce called first, the person Bruce trusted without hesitation, the person whose absence Bruce would feel most keenly. He wanted to consume every last scrap of his father’s affection and keep it somewhere safe, where nobody could take it away.

He wanted all of Bruce that the man had to offer.

Yet, he reasoned with himself, even as all his relationships around him fell apart, dropping like flies when he grew sick of their affection and went back to Bruce’s, that it wasn’t all that bad. At least it was focused. Focused on a good man, on another who needed him as much as he needed the other. At least no one else had to get hurt. 

Until Hunger found someone else.

Dick really hadn’t meant for it to happen. He hadn’t gone looking for another person to give the thing beneath his ribs a home. He’d spent years convincing himself that his devotion to Bruce was proof that he wasn’t as selfish as he feared, that his need could be contained as long as he directed it toward someone who loved him back.

Then Grant happened.

And Hunger, that greedy, ravenous thing, had lifted its head and recognized another source of warmth.

Now it wanted him, too.

For years, Dick had thought he was only capable of loving one person too much. Apparently, he’d been wrong.

Now he stood across from Bruce with a second name lodged in his throat and he couldn’t decide which was worse: that he wanted Grant so desperately that it may very well kill him one day or that some small, ugly part of him was terrified Bruce might discover just how badly he wanted them both to stay beside him. To love him. To give him everything they had, until there was nothing left.

God, he hated it. Hated this Hunger in him. 

It was bad enough to be a bottomless pit, but to expand? To need Grant with the same feral, gut-wrenching urgency he reserved for Bruce alone? It was sickening. And worst of all was what Grant actually was. 

He wasn’t a sanctuary or a gentle protector like Bruce. He wasn’t this well-known guardian, a beacon of Hope and Justice. He wasn’t a hero. 

No, Grant was a mercenary. A killer whose hands were permanently stained with the copper tang of someone else’s ending. 

To crave a murderer’s love, to beg for scraps from a man who dealt in death, didn't just make Dick greedy anymore—it made him irredeemable.

Unfortunately, Hunger didn’t care about the bodies. It didn’t recoil from Grant’s past or ask whether the people he’d killed had families waiting for them to come home. It didn’t care about the contracts, the blood or the fact that Grant could look at death with a familiarity Dick would never entirely understand.

It only cared that Grant could look at Dick and make him feel wanted.

Which Dick hated, hated, hated. 

He hated Grant and all his glances. He hated Grant and all his lowered voices and calming touches. He hated Grant and all the things he made Dick feel. 

He also hated that Dick knew love wasn’t absolution. He hated that he knew that caring about Grant didn’t erase the people he’d killed and that understanding a man wasn’t the same as excusing him. He hated that he could acknowledge every ugly truth about Grant and still want to be the person he came home to.

Perhaps Bruce truly did see something in Dick that he, himself, couldn’t. Perhaps Dick had spent so long starving that he’d stopped asking what he was willing to swallow to feel full. Perhaps Hunger had become something worse. Desperation, with teeth. A vile mass willing to swallow another man’s sins if it meant finally being allowed to feel satisfied.  

His Hunger is why he understood how they’d ended up here. It was also why he couldn’t let the conversation end without fighting for what he truly wanted.

“You’re asking me to choose.”

Bruce stood across from him in the Batcave, his cowl tucked beneath one arm. He looked tired. Not angry, per se, though there was definitely some tension in his jaw and something impossibly guarded in his eyes. Unfortunately for the other, Dick knew that look. He’d seen it after bad missions, after close calls, after the kind of nights that left Bruce staring at the monitors long after everyone else had gone home.

He’d seen it when Bruce was afraid.

“I’m asking you to consider what this relationship is costing you,” Bruce replied.

“That’s not what you said.”

“Dick—”

“You said I can’t have both.”

Bruce exhaled slowly. 

“I don’t know how you expect this to work. Grant—” Bruce spat out his lover’s name like it was something revolting in his mouth and Dick wanted to smack him for it just as much as he wanted to beat Grant when he did the same whenever he mentioned Bruce’s name out loud, “—is a mercenary. He’s killed people—still killing people. He has a history of violence and I have every reason to believe he’s dangerous.”

“You have every reason to believe he’s dangerous to other people,” Dick clarified, even if his argument was weak. “That doesn’t mean he’s dangerous to me.”

Bruce narrowed his eyes. 

“Doesn’t it?”

Dick opened his mouth, then closed it. What was he supposed to say? That Grant had never hurt him? That would be a lie, even if Dick didn’t mean physical harm. That Grant had always been honest with him? Another lie. That Dick hadn’t spent months concealing their relationship, dodging questions and making excuses whenever someone got too close to the truth? That would be another lie he’d have to add to his tally against Bruce. 

Hell, when it came to Grant, he doesn’t think he’s ever lied so often to Bruce’s face. He’d even lied for Grant before they’d ever been together.

Plus, Bruce already had it in his head that Grant had all but kidnapped him even if Dick had explained that no, Grant didn’t over a dozen times. Even if he’d explained that there were other things in play at the time. Even if he’d explained that they’d felt the need to keep the investigation away from people who might interfere, especially including keeping it away from people like Bruce. Even if he’d explained for the millionth time that Grant hadn’t forced him anywhere and that Dick had gone willingly.

Even if he explained it over and over, even if he used the Lasso of Truth on himself, Dick knew that Bruce still wouldn’t believe him. 

Or perhaps he did believe Dick had gone willingly and simply couldn’t accept that his son would choose to go anywhere with a man like Grant.

He wasn’t sure which possibility hurt more. 

“He didn’t kidnap me,” Dick repeated himself for the nth time, rolling his eyes. “I’ve told you that.”

“And I’ve told you that I still don’t trust that.”

Ouch. 

“Because you weren’t there!” Dick exclaimed, exasperated. 

“Because I wasn’t there,” Bruce repeated, his voice tightening as he continued on, “and because I had no idea where you were, who you were with or whether you were even safe—which, you ended up not being safe at all! Do you understand what that felt like?”

Dick frowned. Bruce knew that he did.

Bruce knew that Dick understood exactly what it felt like to wait for a phone call that never came because his oldest and first partner was too stubborn to just open up and let Dick help him. To imagine every possible disaster and blame himself for not preventing it because if he had just been a little faster on his way home, maybe he could’ve stopped the Joker before he killed Jason, before he killed Raya and Jimmy and everybody else Dick cared for. To love someone so much that the thought of losing them made every other concern seem irrelevant.

But he realized why Bruce said that when they both knew that Dick understood that.

Bruce was scared. He was scared and he was lashing out. 

Dick understood that. He understood what fear could do to a person. He knew how it could make someone reach for control when everything else felt beyond their grasp. He knew it did specifically to Bruce. He’d seen Bruce become quieter after a bad night, more watchful after a close call, more determined to account for every possible variable when someone he loved had nearly died. 

He understood that instinct that they both shared. That instinct to protect what little you had left.

What he struggled to understand was why that instinct of Bruce’s always seemed to become a little more unforgiving when it came to him. He loved it, don’t get him wrong, but he wasn’t truly worth it. So why? Why Dick? 

Perhaps Bruce had been so frightened by Dick’s disappearance, unable to control anything and being forced to leave into the hands of others to find him, that he simply couldn’t separate the fear of what might have happened from the belief that Grant had caused it. Perhaps the thought of his son choosing to disappear with a mercenary was more frightening than the thought that someone had forced him to go. At least coercion would have meant Dick hadn’t chosen to put himself in danger. At least then Bruce could have blamed someone else.

But Dick had chosen.

He’d chosen to follow Grant into an investigation that Bruce knew nothing about. He’d chosen to keep their movements secret. He’d chosen not to answer the calls, even when he knew Bruce would be worried sick. And then he’d come home and expected his father to accept that everything had been fine, that there had been a perfectly good reason for keeping him in the dark.

So he could understand why Bruce had been hurt.

What he couldn’t bear was knowing that he’d given Bruce a reason to doubt him.

Because Bruce hadn’t just been afraid of losing him. Bruce had trusted Dick to come to him when something mattered, to tell him when he was in trouble, to let him help. And Dick had made a conscious decision not to do any of those things. He had made Bruce feel as though he was no longer someone Dick could trust.

Dick didn’t know how to explain that he hadn’t hidden the truth because he didn’t love Bruce. He’d hidden it because he loved him so much that the possibility of disappointing him had become unbearable.

Yet he’d done it anyway. In Dick’s mind, there was no betrayal worse than the one he had committed. Whatever Bruce had hidden from him, whatever decisions his father had made without consulting him, Dick had always found a way to understand. He had always found a reason to forgive him.

But Dick just couldn’t seem to extend himself the same mercy.

Bruce had raised him. Had held him together when the world had taken everything else away. Had given him a family when Dick thought he had lost the only one he’d ever have.

And Dick had repaid him by purposely hiding things from him. By betraying the man’s code. By breaking the promise they made when he first became Batman’s Robin. 

Worst of all, he hadn’t even had a good reason like Bruce would have. His reasons were only selfish. He’d done it because he wanted something Bruce wouldn’t understand. Because he’d been afraid that if he told the truth, Bruce would take one look at Grant and see only the bodies, the mercenary contracts, the violence Dick himself couldn’t pretend didn’t exist.

He’d just been afraid of losing them both.

So he’d lied, and in doing so, he’d given Bruce more reasons to distrust the man Dick was trying to defend. 

At least his other lies before this had always been for the better. Other lies, he never felt guilty over. Those other lies were for his selfish desire to protect and save all those he could. 

They—Dick, Bruce, all of the Bats—have made lies for reasons like that. It was normal for them. 

Honestly, it would be difficult to even try to remember all of the times Bruce had purposely withheld information from him. The missions Dick hadn’t been told about until afterward. The decisions Bruce had made on his behalf because he believed he knew what was best. The secrets Dick had discovered by accident, and the conversations that had ended with Bruce insisting that certain things were better left unsaid.

Dick had been angry then. Actually, to be more honest, he was furious every time the man kept something big from him—big like his bloodline, big like a death, big like family members returns and arrivals. 

Still, every time, Dick had told himself that Bruce had his reasons. That being Batman meant carrying burdens other people couldn’t understand. That sometimes, keeping a secret really was the only way to protect someone.

Even when Dick had been entrusted with the mantle of Batman himself, he had somehow managed to convince himself that Bruce understood things he never could. That his father had earned the right to make those decisions and Dick had no choice but to accept them.

He had been angry with Bruce. Sometimes, he had been furious. But he had never seriously considered making Bruce choose between him and the family.

However, this lie was also fundamentally different from all those previous lies. This lie was born from Hunger. It was something Dick had been greedily trying to keep for himself, storing away the truth like a dragon protecting its hoard.

Worse yet, he wanted Grant and he wanted Bruce, and he hadn’t wanted to give either of them up. His lies had been selfish. His secrets had been selfish. His entire relationship had become one long exercise in taking what he wanted and hoping nobody he loved would notice the cost. 

“I know I should’ve told you,” Dick admitted.

Bruce’s expression softened a fraction. “I wish you had.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to control your life, Dick,” Bruce lied with a heavy sigh. Both of them knew that, if given a chance, Bruce would absolutely control Dick’s life. He was too paranoid, too obsessive, too scared to not take that chance if it was given to him. “I don’t want to tell you who you’re allowed to love.” That at the very least was true. Sure, Dick always knew who Bruce supported and did not like as much, but the man never stopped him from being with anyone. Then again, he’s never been with a person who still went out to kill even as Dick dated them. “But I can’t stand by and watch you put yourself in a position where you could get hurt because you’re determined to believe the best in someone who has done terrible things.”

Dick felt his lips wobble as he murmured, looking down at the ground.

“But what if I know he’s done terrible things?”

Bruce fell silent.

“What if I know exactly who he is?” Dick continued. “What if I know what he’s capable of, and I still—” He stopped before the word could escape. 

He was going to say he still loves Grant. 

It was such a small word for something that had made his life so complicated. He’d said it to Grant, eventually, though it had taken him longer than he’d expected and wanted. He’d said it in moments when neither of them had been prepared for the truth, when it slipped out between arguments or settled into the quiet spaces between them.

Regardless of when, where and how it came out though, he meant it every time.

That was the part he couldn’t explain to Bruce. He couldn’t explain how a man could be capable of terrible things and still be gentle with him. How Grant could be stubborn and secretive and infuriatingly determined to carry every burden alone, yet somehow make Dick feel less alone himself.

Loving him didn’t erase what he’d done.

It didn’t make those deaths disappear. It didn’t absolve Grant of responsibility or make Dick’s concerns about him vanish.

Dick knew that.

He just couldn’t make himself stop loving him. He tried. He failed. 

He didn’t finish his sentence, but they had always been good at reading between the lines.

Bruce looked away.

Perhaps he was ashamed to see what a failure his eldest had become to fall so easily. Perhaps he was disgusted to hear how Dick had fallen for a murderer. Perhaps he just couldn’t bear to face him for another reason Dick couldn’t think of at the moment, but was definitely worse than anything he did think of. 

The longer Bruce looked away, the more Dick wished he’d lied again, his stomach twisting. The black hole beneath his ribs seemed to widen, swallowing the last of the warmth in the room. He could almost feel Hunger stirring, restless and furious, its claws scraping against the inside of his chest.

Say something, it demanded. Apologize. Take it back. Tell him Grant means nothing. Tell him you’ll end it, that you’ll do whatever he wants, that you can still be the son he thought he raised.

Dick could practically hear the words forming in his own mouth.

He’d spent his entire life learning how to make himself wanted. He knew how to smile through pain, how to soften an argument, how to offer someone the version of himself they would find easiest to love.

He could do it now. He could make Bruce look at him again. All he had to do was surrender.

Except… he couldn’t have done that. Because  Grant was home now. Grant was no longer a distant possibility or a name Dick could avoid saying aloud. He was no longer just a feeling he could convince himself that would eventually fade if he ignored it long enough. He was a person Dick had chosen, a person he loved, a person who existed in the same world as Bruce and the family Dick had spent his life trying to protect and Dick wanted him so very badly. 

Grant was real and Dick loved him and he couldn’t bear the thought of turning that love into another secret he had to carry until it rotted inside him.

If he lied, he would just have to keep it up, desperately trying to hold onto the two things he wanted most of all that, apparently, could not exist together. He’d have to make up more lies, hide more times, betray Bruce and Grant too many times than he liked to even think about. 

He couldn’t lie again. Not about something that was so important, so integral, to him now. He was exhausted and done with the lies, no matter how small or white they may be. 

“You can’t have both,” Bruce said. There was no anger in his voice. That was what made it unbearable. Instead Bruce sounded broken and exhausted himself, like a man who had already spent too many nights imagining what might happen if he let this continue.

Inside Dick, Hunger recoiled from the words as though Bruce had struck it. For one ugly, desperate second, Dick wanted to tear the choice apart with his bare hands, to make Bruce understand that there was enough room in his gaping maw of a heart for both of them if only everyone would stop insisting that his love had to be rationed. 

Bruce finally looked back at him.

“I won’t try to help you make the family accept him when they ultimately won’t. I won’t pretend I’m comfortable with you being involved with someone whose past makes me question whether you’re safe. And I won’t support a relationship that I believe could destroy you.”

Dick swallowed.

“So I have to choose.”

“I think you have to decide what kind of life you want.”

It was a reasonable answer. An answer from a father who loved his son and was frightened of what he couldn’t control. 

It was also an answer that left Dick with nowhere to put all the love he had.

He wanted Bruce. He wanted the family. He wanted the home he’d spent years building and rebuilding, the people who knew him better than anyone and still called him theirs.

Yet… he was a selfish, hungry creature that wanted Grant, too.

He wanted the man who carried around his favorite chocolate just for him and who could recognize his footsteps in a hallway. The man who didn’t ask him to be Nightwing, or Robin, or the responsible one who always knew what to do and instead could take charge when he needed a break yet was too stubborn to ask for one himself. The man who looked at Dick as though there was something worth keeping despite all he had come to learn about him. Who wanted to stay despite Dick’s biting words, his poisonous glares, his vicious rage that never seemed to entirely fade. The man who was the only one who could probably, completely, damningly understand him in ways that even Bruce struggled to understand.  

He wanted both.

And he hated himself for it.

Hunger had never been satisfied with what it was given. It had always wanted one more glance, one more embrace, one more promise that he mattered. Now it wanted two homes, two futures, two people who had every reason to be afraid of what the other represented.

It wanted Bruce to accept Grant without reservation. It wanted Grant to fit into the family without anyone asking him to answer for the blood on his hands. It wanted everyone to make room for Dick’s happiness without asking him to acknowledge how complicated that happiness was.

It wanted the impossible and it made Dick one of the greediest people he knew. 

For goodness sake, there were people who had lost their families and would have given anything to have what Dick had. People who would have considered themselves lucky to have a father who worried about them, who cared enough to be afraid.

Dick had all of that and somehow it wasn’t enough.

He wanted more. He wanted a life that didn’t require him to surrender one love to prove the other was real. He wanted both of their everythings and wanted it at the same time. 

What kind of person did that make him?

Beyond selfish, cruel and greedy, he wasn’t exactly sure what it made him. 

Maybe Bruce was right. Maybe Grant would destroy him. Maybe Dick was so desperate to believe in the man he loved that he’d stopped seeing the danger everyone else could see. Maybe he was just a fool.

But if loving Grant was a mistake, it was one Dick had made with his eyes open. He couldn’t pretend ignorance simply because the truth was inconvenient.

“I don’t want to lose you,” Dick confessed, sounding like a quiet child, scared to be abandoned.

Bruce’s face spasmed momentarily. “You won’t.”

“But you’re asking me to give up someone I love because you’re afraid of what might happen,” Dick countered, sounding like a petulant child, one who had been given everything and still demanded more. 

“I’m asking you to take that fear seriously.”

“I am!” Dick’s voice broke which only made it all the more humiliating and childish. “I am taking it seriously! I am taking everything about this seriously. What he’s done. What I’ve hidden from you. The fact that I might be wrong about him. The fact that you might be right.” He looked down at his hands. “I’m just asking you to understand that I can’t stop loving him because you don’t trust him.”

Bruce didn’t respond immediately and Dick wanted to cry. He wanted to be able to easily explain that loving Grant wasn’t a decision he’d made to hurt Bruce. That it wasn’t an act of rebellion or an attempt to replace his family. That he hadn’t fallen in love with Grant because Bruce had failed him or because he wanted to prove that he could make his own choices.

He’d fallen in love with him because, somehow, somewhere along the way, Grant had frustratingly become someone Dick couldn’t imagine losing. It was a loveliest curse he’d ever been under. 

That was all.

It should have been simple.

He knew the man was dangerous. He knew Grant’s hands had done things Dick could never condone. He knew the same stubbornness and violence that made Grant so frightening could also make him cruel, so apathetic to other people’s suffering that even Dick sometimes struggled to be around him.

He knew all of that.

He knew all of that and he loved him anyway, just as Grant loved Dick despite all of Dick’s many, many flaws.

After a few moments, Bruce finally said something, his voice quiet. 

“I don’t know how to protect you from this, Dick.”

Dick wished he could make Bruce understand that he wasn’t asking him to stop being afraid. He was asking him to let Dick be afraid too and make his own decisions anyway. He was asking Bruce to trust that the boy he’d raised had grown into a man capable of making his own mistakes, even if those possible mistakes frightened them both.

But he didn’t know how to explain that without sounding ungrateful. Without making Bruce feel as though everything he’d done for Dick meant nothing.

So he said nothing.

For a moment, Bruce looked at him as though he were searching for something. An apology, perhaps. A promise, maybe. Some reassurance that Dick would come to his senses, that this was a temporary lapse in judgment rather than a choice he’d already made.

Dick wanted to give it to him.

God, he wanted to.

He wanted to tell Bruce that he was right, that he would end things with Grant, that he would go back to being the son Bruce understood how to protect. He wanted to take back every word that had brought them here. He wanted to be twelve again or eight or any age at which he could crawl into his father’s arms and trust that the world would be put right for him.

He wanted to be a good son. 

He wanted his everything to look at him the way he had when Dick was little, when a scraped knee and a trembling lip were all that were needed to earn a gentle hand on his shoulder and assurance that everything would be all right. 

But Bruce wasn’t reaching back for him.

His father looked away, jaw tightening as he turned toward the monitors.

“I think you should go.”

Dick stared at him.

“Bruce—”

“Not tonight, Dick.”

Bruce didn’t face him, instead electing to reach for his cowl. The conversation was over. 

Dick’s eyes began to burn and he was a child again.

He was supposed to act like the grown man he was. He was Nightwing, he was supposed to act like it. He had stood in front of monsters and gods and things that should never have existed, and he had survived.

And yet, standing in the Batcave while Bruce refused to look at him, he felt like a little boy again. He felt small and frightened and confused as he stood in a huge, dark cave that had once felt like home, knowing that he disappointed one of the people he loved the most. He was a child again, desperately searching for the right words, the right apology, the right way to make himself good again. 

Hunger woke beneath his ribs, thrashing angrily and crying like a child as well.

It’s black hole was opening wider and wider until Dick could barely breathe around it. Every instinct told him to fix this. To take back what he’d said, to promise Bruce that he’d end things with Grant, to offer up his own happiness as proof that he was still worth keeping.

He could still make this better.

He could still make Bruce love him.

Except he couldn’t. He couldn’t because he was just a little boy who had done something wrong and couldn’t figure out how to make it right. Because he was just a little boy who wanted to be good so badly that he would have given anything to know what being good was supposed to look like and yet would still fail.

His eyes still burned. Dick looked down quickly, hoping the shadows would hide the tears gathering along his lower lashes. He was too old for this. Too old to stand in the Batcave and feel as though his entire world depended on whether his father would forgive him. Too old to want to be held. Too old to need reassurance that he was still wanted. Too old to be this hungry.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Bruce’s hands stilled briefly around the cowl.

For one wild second, Dick thought he’d turn around. He waited another second. A ridiculous, pathetic second in which some small part of him still expected his father to turn around, call him back and tell him they would figure it out together.

He didn’t.

Dick swallowed against the ache in his throat. He waited another moment, giving his father every opportunity to change his mind, to call him back, to tell him that they could figure this out together.

Nothing came.

Finally, Dick turned toward the stairs.

He made it halfway before he stopped.

He wanted to look back. He wanted to see Bruce watching him go, to know that the silence was hurting him too. He wanted some small indication that leaving the cave wasn’t the same as being cast out of the family he’d spent his life trying to deserve.

But he was afraid that if he looked back and found Bruce still turned away, something inside him would break.

So he kept walking.

He left the cave with his heart aching and his hands empty, carrying the knowledge that there was no choice he could make without losing something.

He could choose his family and spend the rest of his life wondering what might have happened if he’d been brave enough to choose Grant.

Or he could choose Grant and spend every holiday, every birthday, every quiet moment wishing he could go home.

He just wanted to be a good son. He just wanted to be a good man. He just wanted to love someone without having to justify the wanting.

Most of all, he just wanted to stop being so very hungry.

But as he stepped into the night, Dick knew that was the one thing he couldn’t ask for.

Hunger followed him out of the cave, a starving beast curled around his heart, its claws sunk so deeply into him that he could no longer tell where it ended and he began.

He’d always wanted too much.

And he’d never learned how to live with less.