Chapter Text
The first time, it’s not even a big deal. It doesn’t feel like a big deal to him at the time, and Dick can honestly say that if Bruce did the same thing to one of his siblings, he’d probably just yell at him for a bit.
Dick is supposed to be studying criminal law, but it’s really, really, really boring. He wants to get to fighting the bad guys already, or at least doing some fun flips. Even stretches would be better than hunching over the dining room table like this. Dick can feel his eyes drooping as he rereads the same sentence again and again.
Something strikes him in the back of his head, startling Dick to attention. “You need to focus.” Dick whips his head around to see Bruce standing right behind him, hand raised. “If you don’t finish this chapter by tonight, it’ll disrupt the whole training schedule.”
Dick just stares.
Bruce sighs. “Dick, are you even listening?”
The thing is, it didn’t hurt. Not really. It just made a bit of a weird sound in Dick’s head and startled him. And stung a bit, but Dick has had worse pain from a mild headache. By now, the sting is pretty much gone, anyway. Dick turns back around to look at the criminal law textbook. He can’t tap his foot—the dining room chairs are too tall—so he twists his legs around the chair’s legs, contorting them to get out the sudden anxiety spreading through him. It didn’t hurt, but it was mean, and Bruce isn’t supposed to be mean. Distant sometimes, sure. But not outright mean. “That was mean,” he tells Bruce quietly. “You can’t do that.”
Bruce doesn’t disagree with him outright, but he doesn’t agree with him either. “Focus, Dick.”
“I’m trying,” Dick whines, kicking his legs. He can feel Bruce behind him, hear him shifting. It’s distracting.
Bruce walks back into Dick’s line of sight, sitting a seat away from him to work on some Wayne Enterprises paperwork. “Try harder.”
“Meanie,” Dick mutters, hunching back over the textbook. Bruce doesn’t dignify that with a response.
The first time it’s a real slap, it’s after Bruce has spent thirty minutes ranting about how Dick’s reckless mistake cost them the drug ring. How people are going to die because Dick didn’t wait for orders. Dick is on the verge of tears, but he isn’t gonna cry just because Batman is yelling at him, so he gets angry instead.
Bruce tries to “bench” Dick for a week, screaming that he clearly hasn’t learned his lesson. Like that makes sense! Dick is Robin, and Robin is Batman’s partner, not his sidekick. Bruce has no authority over him, none!
Bruce insists. Dick insists better.
The slap comes out of nowhere. It’s certainly nowhere near as hard as Bruce could make it, but Dick isn’t thinking about that. All he can think about is his cheek exploding in pain. And Dick is Robin. He knows what to do when he’s attacked. So Dick punches Bruce straight in the stomach with all the force he can muster. Bruce doubles over, and in an instant, Dick realizes what he’s done. He shoves down the humiliation rising in his gut. Bruce slapped him, and Dick attacked him in return. He evened it out.
Only, Bruce had slapped Dick because he wasn’t listening and he messed up the mission and he wouldn’t stop arguing. Dick’s the one who turned this into a fight. Is Bruce going to punch him back? Dick can’t win a fight against Batman!
They both just stand there, frozen for a moment, hearts beating wildly, fists clenched.
“Robin might not be Batman’s sidekick,” Bruce says, voice cold. “But Dick Grayson is Bruce Wayne’s ward. You’re benched for two weeks, now. Go upstairs before I make it three.”
Dick scurries upstairs.
In his room, Dick finally lets himself cry. The humiliation returns in full force, roiling in his gut. But there’s also a fire there, something angry. Bruce is supposed to be kind and good and nice. Bruce told Dick he’d be safe at the manor. Bruce told Dick that everything was going to be okay. But Dick’s not okay. This is not okay. Bruce was supposed to respect Dick, and this feels like anything other than respect.
“I could run away,” Dick mutters. “I could. That’d serve him right.” He could be Robin on his own, with no Batman! But that would also mean no training, and no food, and no warm bed to sleep in. And that would be far worse than a sting in his cheek that probably won’t even bruise.
He could tell the social worker. But then again, she probably wouldn’t care. It’s just a slap. Dick’s parents would never hit him, he’s always been certain about that, but he knows other parents sometimes slap their kids. And Dick isn’t even Bruce’s kid, so Bruce doesn’t have to go easy on him. Dick gets worse injuries weekly as Robin. This doesn’t even count as an injury. The only reason it’s got him so freaked out is because it comes from Bruce’s palm and not a criminal’s fist.
And if the social worker does think it’s an issue and takes him away from Bruce, then where will Dick go? Back to juvie, where the other boys beat him? To another foster parent? Dick may not have understood everything they were saying, but the boys in juvie had told him that even if social services put him with a family and didn’t just lock him up forever and ever, he was gonna get hurt. When they had learned that Brucie Wayne wanted to adopt him? Even one of the boys who had beat Dick up pretended to feel bad for him.
Dick shudders, before wiping his face with a wad of tissues. Bruce would never say it, but Dick is lucky he ended up with a guardian whose worst crime is a slap. Besides, Dick gets to be Robin!
…after his two week “benching” is over, anyway.
The slap doesn’t bruise. The next one doesn’t either. It just sort of happens, every so often, and Dick stops thinking so much about it. When Bruce boxes him on the back of the head to knock him out and keep him from following Bruce on a potentially dangerous mission, he wakes up dizzy and betrayed, but not particularly surprised.
Over time, Dick realizes that Bruce is…kind of bad at communicating. Dick is starting to really understand his whole language of grunts and everything, but sometimes Bruce just doesn’t know how to tell Dick that this argument is actually over, not just kind of sort of over but still allowed to continue, or how to get his attention, or how to keep him from succumbing to exhaustion in the field. And Bruce communicates by fighting, even more naturally than he communicates by grunting. So it makes sense, really, that this is how Bruce expresses himself.
And if it’s so wrong, surely Alfred would say something. It mostly happens in-costume, where things are much higher stakes, but Bruce has definitely hit him in the manor before. Dick thinks Alfred has seen it. Alfred must’ve seen it, right? And Bruce must’ve learned from somewhere. Alfred is old. Old people are used to things being much harsher, Dick knows. Plus, Dick is pretty sure he’s seen Alfred slap Bruce! So, it’s definitely not a big deal.
It still hurts, though.
Dick can’t pinpoint the exact time when it stops. Sometime around when the winter when he’s eleven, but he can’t actually remember the precise timing because his brain doesn’t generally consider the occasional hit an important enough event to log. He’s far more concerned about how long he’s benched for, or whether Bruce is okay, or even whether he remembered to do his homework before patrol. It’s not like it happens all the time, anyway, and it’s a lot harder to realize that something is absent than that it’s present.
So, it stops, and Dick doesn’t even realize it at first. And then he does realize it, but he figures he must’ve somehow gotten better, and that’s why Bruce hasn’t slapped him again. But Dick hasn’t gotten that much better.
Dick isn’t entirely sure what to do. He doesn’t want to bring it up to Bruce, because what if Bruce just, like, forgot he could do that or something? Dick doesn’t want Bruce to start again. He’d rather a slap than listening to Bruce yelling about everything he did wrong, but they go together instead of one substituting for the other. And it’s painful and frustrating and it’s just—he prefers it this way.
But as time goes on, the thoughts begin to buzz at the back of his head whenever he talks to Bruce. He thinks that maybe, this time will be the one where Bruce breaks his streak. Wonders about it constantly. It’s ironic; Dick was never particularly scared of getting slapped when he was actually getting slapped, but now that Bruce has stopped, he’s constantly on edge. His anxiety eats away at him until Dick eventually caves. He goes to talk to Bruce in his study.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You just did,” Bruce says with a chuckle.
Dick rolls his eyes. “Another question, B.”
“Sure, Chum. Just give me a minute to finish up some paperwork.” Dick sits down on a cushy chair in front of Bruce’s desk, peering over at the mountain of documents Bruce is sorting through. They’re all boring legal stuff, but he needs something to settle his nerves. Repeating his question over and over again in his head is only making him more nervous. “Alright,” Bruce says, after what feels simultaneously like a couple seconds and a whole hour. “What is it?”
Dick digs his fingers into the soft chair cushion. He practiced what he was going to say in his head, but he’s suddenly at a loss for words.
Bruce’s brows furrow, his face softening. “Is everything okay, Dick?”
You can do this, Dick tells himself. Maybe Bruce feels bad for hitting him or something, and just didn’t know how to bring it up. It’s really the only reason Dick can think of, given that ‘he just forgot he could’ doesn’t exactly fit Batman. This is a good conversation. “I was just wondering,” Dick says.
The room is silent for a moment. “Wondering…” Bruce prompts.
“We fought three days ago and you just sent me to my room. And a week before that I fell asleep while you were talking and you just kinda shook me awake nicely. And before that…” Dick shrugs. Bruce is silent. He clearly doesn’t understand. “You haven’t hit me in a while,” Dick says eventually. “I was just wondering why.” He winces at the phrasing. Hit sounds a lot worse than slap, and it’s almost always just a slap.
But Bruce doesn’t call Dick out on it. Instead, he shifts the papers on his desk to allow him to clasp his hands, leaning forward slightly. When Bruce speaks, his tone is not quite clinical, but not particularly emotional either. “I’ve found that research suggests corporal punishment may lead to poor socio-emotional outcomes. Increased stress. Even impaired cognitive development.” Bruce sighs. “That’s not my intention. I want you to grow up well, Dick. Going forward, I made a decision as your guardian not to strike you.” He unclasps his hands, leaning back. “Is there anything else you wanted to ask me?”
“No,” Dick says, and all but runs out of the room.
So, Bruce didn’t feel bad. He just did research. Typical.
Dick doesn’t know why he’s so disappointed. It means the same thing for him anyway. But part of him wanted Bruce to feel bad, just like how Dick feels bad. And that part of him is scary.
Well, not just that. There’s also the fact that Bruce’s decision is based off of the findings from scientists somewhere. All it would take was for a different set of scientists to get a different finding and be slightly more convincing about it, and Bruce would be right back to hitting him. And besides, Bruce ignores the experts all the time—there’s a reason Alfred has to coerce him into obeying Leslie’s orders. So, really, this isn’t much of an assurance.
Maybe, just maybe, Dick is provoking Bruce. Not starting fights, but…not letting them go, either. Pushing, and pushing, and pushing, because Bruce has got to snap, right? A few months ago, he would’ve snapped long before this point.
Bruce doesn’t snap.
Five weeks after the conversation in Bruce’s study, Dick finds himself slamming his fists into Bruce’s chest again and again. He’s not trying to hurt him, but he’s not trying not to either. Dick is hurting Bruce. Dick is hitting Bruce. And Bruce just keeps holding his shoulders, not so much as shaking him.
Blow after blow reverberates through Dick’s fists. Why won’t Bruce just freaking hit him already? Dick did everything wrong. Started the fight, escalated it, hit Bruce not just first, but second and third and twentieth too.
Another punch. Dick is crying. Tears are streaming down his face. He needs Bruce to hit him. He needs proof.
Another punch. Please.
Dick winds his arm back up for yet another blow, only to find his elbow dropping, form going from poor to nonexistent. He collapses forward into Bruce’s chest.
Arms wrap around him, pulling him close, holding him. Dick buries his face in the Kevlar of the Batman costume.
Something inside of him releases, like an exhale after surfacing, only he hadn’t even realized he’d been underwater. As one hand rubs circles in his back, Dick knows that Bruce won’t change his mind.
And he tells himself that he was always safe. That it was never that bad. But the safety Dick feels as he burrows into Bruce’s embrace somehow feels new.
Years later, when a fist cracks against his cheek, Dick is shocked.
He really, really shouldn’t be. He just thought—
But Dick isn’t a child anymore. Bruce isn’t his guardian. And as Bruce screams that Dick is to blame for Jason’s death, he can’t help but think that his former mentor isn’t entirely wrong.
When Dick shows up at the manor a few months later with Tim, Bruce doesn’t mention that Dick shouldn’t be there, not after Bruce kicked him out. In turn, Dick doesn’t mention the punch. It was just once. Bruce was angry, hurting. Bruce doesn’t owe him anything.
It’s fine.
It’s fine.
It’s fucking fine.
It happens again.
But Bruce had thought that Commissioner Gordon was dead, and Dick had been trying to pull him away, and really, it’s not that bad. He covers for Bruce with Babs, and he’s not even entirely sure why. Maybe he’s just used to lying about his injuries, from eleven years of getting beat up by criminals and telling the school it was just gymnastics accidents. Or maybe, it’s from the beginning, from the three years before Bruce read a bunch of studies and decided to change his methods, from the time Dick sat in front of his social worker and told her, “no, Bruce didn’t put that bruise on my face,” and didn’t entirely know if he was lying.
And then it happens a third time, but this time, it’s definitely Dick’s fault. He hits first. He hits second.
Bruce hits third.
Tim and Cass and Babs watch the whole thing go down, as Bruce and Dick fight. Dick knows he shouldn’t do this, but Bruce is going to burn his entire civilian identity, and Dick can’t let him. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Bruce leaves. Dick is left with nothing except pain.
Bruce apologizes, months later. Apologizes, and Dick is filled with disbelief. Because this time, it really wasn’t Bruce’s fault. Dick waves the apology away, unable to enjoy what should have been vindicating but instead feels like bugs crawling just beneath his skin. But if Bruce apologized for this of all things…
…maybe he won’t do it again.
And for a while, things are better. (Ignore the hand around his throat—Bruce was losing his mind.)
Bruce doesn’t hit Dick. (Ignore the fingers digging into his radiation burns, the words that twist his soul into knots, the screams that echo in his ears—it’s not a fist or a palm, so it doesn’t count.)
Bruce would never hit his children. (Ignore the past—everything is fine now, and that’s what matters.)
Dick doesn’t know when it gets bad again. Maybe he’s a lobster boiling slowly in a pot, or maybe he’s just so practiced in the art of lying to himself that even his trained memory hides the moments away in the sea of inessential detail. But he comes to suddenly, lying in the remnants of Jason’s memorial, glass shards cutting into his bleeding back. And Dick is confused and horrified and scared…but not the least bit surprised. This is a line, he thinks. This is a fucking line. Part of him is relieved. Most of him is terrified.
“It can’t be the same again,” Dick warns Bruce. If Bruce stops, concedes, agrees to let Dick stay, maybe it’ll be okay. “I’m not your boy!” He screams, like that’ll make a difference.
Dick goes to Spyral, in the end. When Bruce wants something, he always gets it.
Dick tells himself it wasn’t real. It was a messed-up timeline. No one was acting like themself, with years of history erased. In the end, that period is just memories.
It wasn’t Bruce, not truly. It wasn’t the Bruce who raised Dick since he was eight, who swore never to strike him again, who broke his promise three times but apologized the third. So, Dick leaves it aside and lets things be the same once more. He drowns out the false memories with those of joy, of respect, of love.
For a while, it works.
And then, it doesn’t.