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Dick stays in the room with Damian when Alfred steps out to update Bruce. He barely notices when Alfred steps back in; barely hears the man gently suggest that he also get some rest. Dick is not going to leave Damian. Not when it’s Dick's fault that Damian is lying in this bed, unconscious and in critical condition.
He is so caught up in worry that almost doesn’t hear when Talia bursts in with her ninjas; almost misses her and Bruce destroying a good chunk of the ground floor east wing. It is only when Alfred murmurs, “oh dear” that he realises what is going on.
And then, without hesitation, Nightwing springs into action — stepping between both of Damian’s parents, heedless of the risk of getting between two fighters as experienced as they are.
“Stop!" he shouts, quite literally throwing his hands out. "Stop, this isn't solving anything…”
“Nightwing—!”
Dick ignores Bruce’s warning tone, and looks Talia in the eye. As Damian’s mother, she deserves that much.
“Talia… it's my fault Damian is in critical condition.” Dick swallows hard against the lump in his throat. “It's my fault he almost died, not Bruce's.”
"We were taking down H.I.V.E.'s henchmen together. He was by my side, until he wasn't. It was my job to check the gear before we left. I didn't, and it backfired. Badly. Damian… he means the world to me. So I understand how you feel, and I'm so sorry—"
“Don’t!” Talia roars, and Dick just barely keeps from flinching — not at the volume, but at the sheer hatefulness in her glare. “You don't understand how I feel. You're not his family. You're not anyone's family, Grayson.”
The silence in the wake of her announcement almost makes Dick recoil more than the words themselves do. It takes him a beat to gather himself, and let them roll off his back. To reach a hand out to delicately touch Talia’s shoulder, even as she turns her back on him.
“I understand you're grieving. I'll leave. I'm sorry.” It’s a relief when his voice doesn’t crack.
He walks away, not entirely sure where he’s going to go, when he sees the hole in the main wall, and the ninjas standing guard outside.
“You guys though…. I can fight,” Dick mutters to himself, but even as he says them, the words ring hollow. Fighting Talia’s ninjas would accomplish nothing — just as Talia and Bruce’s brawl accomplished nothing.
Dick blows out a breath, and instead withdraws to the Cave. He can keep an eye on the ninjas from there, and also on the data coming out of Damian’s vital signs monitor, which is remotely connected.
Moving as mechanically as the old grandfather clock, he winds the hands back and steps through the entrance to the stairs, taking them one by one.
He spends the next few hours there. He keeps to a far-off corner, but Bruce does not come down. The ninjas disperse. And finally, Damian’s vital signs stabilise, and he wakes up.
With a sigh of relief, Dick moves from the external CCTV cameras, to the interior ones that are hooked up to the Manor’s corridors and common rooms.
He watches patiently as Alfred moves in and out of Damian’s room. Bruce, he sees only once, when he leaves Damian’s bedroom in favour of the master suite that’s down the hallway. It becomes clear it’s for a quick change of clothes when he comes back out a few minutes later, wearing civilian clothing.
Talia does not appear in the feed at all; not until late afternoon, when she steps out of Damian’s bedroom. Bruce is with her. They walk together to the dining room, where a lunch of Alfred’s steaming hot mulligatawny soup and fresh soda bread awaits them in food warmers.
Alfred, meanwhile, has just entered Damian’s bedroom with a bowl of broth.
Dick wastes no time in seizing his opportunity, sprinting all the way up to the Batcave entrance — before slowing down and quieting his steps for the walk to Damian’s room.
“Ah, Master Richard… there is soup in the dining room.”
“All good, Alf, I just had a protein bar,” Dick lies.
“A protein—for heaven’s sake, Master Richard,” Alfred scolds. “That processed rubbish is nothing close to reasonably nutritious sustenance.”
“Eh, it does the job,” Dick says lightly. “Here, why don’t I help with that.” He gestures to the broth. “I bet you haven’t even had your morning cup of tea today.”
Alfred sighs. “I have not,” he concedes. “Very well. But please do come down for lunch when Damian has finished eating. Master Bruce and Ms al Ghul should be back here soon.”
“I’m not a baby,” Damian croaks, finally speaking, even as Dick takes Alfred’s place by his bedside.
“We know,” Dick says cheerfully. “But just indulge us adults this once, won’t you?”
“Tt. Fine,” Damian grumbles, allowing Dick to feed him a spoonful of broth.
They sit in silence until the shallow bowl is emptied of broth, and Dick has helped Damian sip some water.
As Damian settles back against the pile of pillows that Dick has just fluffed up for him, Dick says: “Hey, little D? I’m sorry.”
Damian doesn’t bother to open his eyes. “For what?”
“For not checking the gear before we left.”
Damian lifts an eyelid and stares at Dick. “That was my job, Grayson. As you well know.”
Dick shakes his head. “I’m older than you, I should have—”
“Self-flagellation does not become you, Grayson,” Damian says. He closes his eye again. “You always do this. You take the blame for things that aren’t even your fault.”
“It’s called being accountable, kiddo, and that’s my job when it comes to you,” Dick says. “You were my Robin once, and that—”
“Get out,” a voice says from the door. Dick turns, though he already knows who it is. Talia. She’s alone, and stares at him as forbiddingly as she did a few hours earlier.
“Mother—” Even without looking at him, Dick can tell that Damian is frowning.
Dick decides to interject, because arguing with his mother is the last thing that Damian needs now. His focus should be on recovery.
“It’s all good, Damian. I’ll see you later,” Dick says. He gathers the tray of soup in his hands and briskly exits the room.
Just past the threshold, he pauses, trying to find a kind word for Talia. But she walks past him like he isn’t even there; like he is less than the dirt on her designer shoes.
The door is shut unceremoniously in his face, and Dick just lets out a small sigh, before turning away.
The dining room is empty when Dick walks through. Bruce must have gone down to the Cave. Alfred is in the kitchen loading the dishwasher.
“Talia’s with Damian,” Dick informs him, passing over the tray. “I’ll get going — will you keep me updated on his condition, please?”
Alfred frowns. “I rather thought you might stay for another night, at least.”
Dick shakes his head. “I gotta get back. Anyway, it looks like Damian is in good company.”
Alfred closes the dishwasher, and straightens. “I heard Ms al Ghul’s words last night. Your response was very gracious.” He pauses. “You know better than to take them to heart, I hope?”
“Sure, Alf,” Dick says with a tired smile. He’s not in the mood to litigate this, at least not with Alfred.
He claps the butler on the shoulder, and makes his way downstairs. Lucky for him, he can get to his Night-Cycle without getting anywhere near Bruce, who is over at the main computer.
It’s not ideal to be out in broad daylight in his Nightwing uniform, but it is what it is.
***
Once he’s back in his apartment, a shower is Dick’s first order of business.
He briefly debates keeping the water cold; letting it freeze him as punishment for letting Damian get hurt on his watch.
Instead, he turns the lever left; not even flinching as blisteringly hot water rains down on his skin, turning it red and angry.
The literal dirt and grime is sluiced away. But all that does expose the wound inside him; the one that Talia re-opened so violently with her words.
You’re not anyone’s family, Grayson.
It had been natural, in that moment, to practice compassion. That was the kind of person that John and Mary Grayson had raised him to be, after all.
But as the words echo in Dick’s mind, over and over, two tears trickle down the drain alongside the steaming hot water.
One each for Mary and John, who had been Dick’s family in a way that no one could question. In a way that they would never even allow anyone to question.
When Dick gets out of the shower, he crawls under his covers and shuts his eyes to the world, even as he knows that will do nothing for the gnawing, empty chasm inside him that he usually pretends isn’t there.
***
Robin has gotten better at stealth, but Nightwing still hears him sneaking up long before he’s in the vicinity.
“I have a bone to pick with you.”
Nightwing doesn’t take his eyes off his binoculars. “Hmmm?”
“You were supposed to stay in Gotham for longer before coming back to Bludhaven.”
“You were injured,” Nightwing points out.
“Well, I’m not now,’ Robin scoffs. “But you haven’t been back to Gotham in weeks.”
Nightwing shrugs. “Been busy here, kiddo, what can I say? We haven’t got a whole Wing-clan here to hold down the fort.”
Robin’s voice is suddenly so low that Nightwing strains to hear it. “Is that what it is, or did you let my mother get to you?”
Nightwing doesn’t reply, but Robin steamrolls over his silence.
“I know my mother, Grayson. She said something to you, didn’t she?”
Letting out the tiniest sigh, Nightwing finally looks up at Robin. He’s got his usual Resting Annoyed Face on. But there is something tremulous in the shape of his mouth.
“What brought this on?” Dick asks gently.
“After she made you leave — which she had no right to do, I might add — she tried to criticise you for letting me get hurt. I corrected her swiftly and immediately of that impression,” Robin says.
Nightwing places a hand on his shoulder. “I appreciate the sentiment. Really, I do. But that wasn’t necessary. Don’t let me get between you and your mom. You should try to have a good relationship with her.”
“That doesn’t mean she can be disrespectful about you,” Robin says stubbornly, and the loyalty makes Dick ache. “Though really it should be Father who…”
“Let’s not go there,” Nightwing says, shaking his head, because they could stand here all night debating all the things that Batman should and should not do. “There’s a late-night food truck near here that does really good empanadas. I’ll buy you one, come on.”
“Aren’t you on a stakeout?”
Nightwing shrugs. “I got what I needed an hour ago, I was just hanging around just in case.”
“Tt. Fine.”
****
Days after Robin’s visit, he sits on the edge of a weather-worn Bludhaven rooftop, staring into the distance. This city is not magnificent the way that Gotham is magnificent, even at night in the rain.
Especially at night in the rain.
Even Gotham’s desolation is alluring, because it is a sign of the life that thrums through the city, down to its most forlorn places, during the most hopeless times.
Bludhaven, in contrast, gives nothing at all. Its modern skyscrapers are a soulless canvas forming an angular skyline.
It is difficult to lose oneself in vacant blankness. Instead, it forces Dick to look inwards at the things that he would rather not look at. To consider the weight of all the things that have happened. Of all the wounds that putrefy inside of him, even as anyone standing on the outside, looking in, might assume they have long since scarred over.
The Robin mantle falling out of his grasp — his loved ones hating him for faking his death, even though it all had been on Bruce’s orders —
Those damn orders, to begin with — and then Bruce just abandoning him in Spyral, halfway through.
Batman’s own words, his own voice, saying: With the girl, three words keep rattling through my mind. "Mother chose well." I've read Harper's transcripts, teacher evaluations, notes from meetings with counselors. If I were to choose a canvas on which to build a perfect partner, it would look like Harper Row.
They were right there in a flash drive that Bruce had left in the safe-keeping of Cassandra Cain.
A flash drive that Cass had, in turn, dropped in Dick’s lap. During a strange time when Batman was a cyborg operated by Jim Gordon, and Bruce Wayne was an amnesiac who just wanted to live a quiet civilian life with Julie Madison.
In that strange time, Dick had not had the luxury of time or emotions. He had needed to process the contents of the drive, and take action. To take charge of the family in Bruce’s absence, and to deal with the threat of Mother.
And when Bruce had come back, they still did not address the matter, because Bruce did not know how to, and Dick had always been so quick — too quick — to let him off the hook. Because he was too afraid of trying to force a confrontation. Because, in this case, Bruce’s sentiments about the makings of a perfect partner had not raised any questions – it had answered one.
One asked by an earlier log in the same stupid drive, which related one of Batman and Robin’s early encounters with fear gas. One that Dick remembered well, because the fearful visions had nearly rendered him catatonic before Batman shook him out of it.
He had wanted nothing more than to forget, but Batman had urged Robin to reveal what he saw, and Dick had finally relented:
In my worst nightmares, Bruce, you regret ever pulling me up off that circus floor. The gas revealed my biggest fear, Bruce. That you don’t think I’m good enough to be Robin.
There can be a violence to being so vulnerable, and what is Batman if not comfortable in emotional violence? That was perhaps why he had not addressed the very real fears surrounding Dick’s reveal. He had simply pulled his cowl back on and gone straight back to work.
But there it was, in that flash drive. Bruce’s real thoughts on the matter. Proof, in his own words, that he didn’t think Dick was good enough to be Robin.
Because if he were to choose a canvas on which to build a partner, it was not Dick Grayson.
So the fact that Bruce had done nothing at all when Talia had declared: You’re not anyone’s family, Grayson — not then, and not in the many weeks since —
Well. Bruce's lack of response said absolutely everything.
***
Like father, like son, except another few weeks go by in a somber haze before Bruce shows up.
And it’s not on a Bludhaven street or rooftop while Nightwing is on patrol, but on the one night that Dick has taken off to go undercover in a seedy nightclub.
Specifically, the part of the night that necessitates Dick allowing some guy to get his mouth and hands all over Dick’s body in a cramped corner booth.
Said guy is unceremoniously yanked back. “What the hell,” he snarls, even as he is bodily removed from the vicinity.
“Get lost.” Dick recognises the voice immediately, even though it is carefully modulated away from its usual tone and timbre.
Dick’s mark looks ready to argue, but a barely-dressed bottle boy — no doubt lubricated with a handy cash tip from Dick’s would-be white knight — appears suddenly to tug him away with a sensual smile.
White knight, dark knight. When Bruce — clearly wearing an EMP mask programmed to make him look like some anonymous stranger — slides in to replace the man, Dick forces himself to breathe normally; to get his anger and irritation back under control.
Bruce crowds Dick into the end-wall, which means Dick ends up in his lap, due to the lack of real space in there.
“Did you get what you need?” Bruce bends down to murmur in Dick’s ear, probably so he doesn’t have to shout over the EDM techno throbbing through the club floor.
“Yeah,” Dick says, in a clipped tone.
When Bruce doesn’t reply, Dick places a hand on the back of Bruce’s neck. To anyone who might be watching, it would look like an intimate gesture. But Bruce will know it’s the prelude to a nerve strike.
“Did you want something?” Dick asks pointedly.
“Was this really necessary?” Bruce mutters, his hand tight on Dick’s hip.
“Oh, so you’re here for a performance review? Screw you, B,” Dick retorts. The air suddenly feels hotly oppressive, enough that his blood begins to thrum.
He pushes Bruce back, and climbs over his lap to exit the booth.
Or, he tries to exit the booth. But Bruce grabs a hold of his wrists and yanks him back down, close enough that a bystander would assume they are kissing. An incorrect impression that would be aided by the poor lighting and awkward angle.
“What is wrong with you?” Bruce says very, very quietly, in that way where he barely moves his lips.
“You’re the one who just crashed my mission out of nowhere. And got rid of my mark even before knowing whether I got what I came here for,” Dick says, as evenly as he can regardless of the twisting in his stomach.
“You’ve been reckless and out of contact—”
Dick can’t cause a scene here. So he does the one thing that he knows will stun Bruce long enough for Dick to escape.
He kisses Bruce.
Trying to one-up Bruce never ends well, because the man always has a superior counter-move ready and waiting.
Which is why, perhaps, Bruce is kissing Dick right back. His mouth is hard and punishing. It’s all of Dick’s cliche fantasies of kissing Batman coming to life.
Dick is nothing if not stubborn. He grinds down into Bruce’s lap. He rolls his hips. He does that thing with his tongue that always makes people a little feral.
And, finally, finally, Bruce goes lax. He — groans. And Dick might almost think that he is enjoying this.
The problem is, Dick might be enjoying it, too. He feels himself hardening in his tight leather trousers, and he loses his entire nerve.
In one quick move, he bites down on Bruce’s lower lip, firmly shoves Bruce away from him, and slips off his lap and out of the booth.
Dick hustles down the light-up stairs, weaving through the mass of bodies heaving to the crackling guitars and jagged synths of whatever Eurotrance is blaring through the speakers. He makes it all the way to the club exit before Bruce catches up to him.
“Wait,” he says urgently, grabbing at Dick’s hand.
The hulking mass of a club bouncer steps between them.
“Is there a problem here?” The bouncer asks, raising an eyebrow at Bruce. Their arms are folded to their chest. They probably can’t take Bruce, but Bruce is also undercover. He isn’t going to try and act like a hero.
It wouldn’t even be that satisfying to see Bruce get thrown out, anyway; he’s taken worse hits to his dignity in the name of maintaining his Brucie Wayne image.
Dick deflates, letting out his frustration and confusion and latent sexual panic in one slight sigh.
“Just a misunderstanding, we’re all good,” he says, and this time he’s the one grabbing Bruce’s hand to pull him out and away.
They don’t speak as Dick leads them down several blocks, through a few confusing detours and counter-intuitive turns.
Just a week ago, while following his mark, Dick had set up a temporary safehouse here — a place to leave a few pieces of spare equipment and supplies until he figured out how to get the access card off the man.
He’ll need to return the card tomorrow, but with how much the guy had been drinking — and how much more he’s no doubt still drinking even now, thanks to that bottle boy — Dick knows he’s got quite a bit of time before the access card’s disappearance is noticed.
They take a cramped flight of spiral stairs all the way up four stories, to the apartment that is really more of a glorified attic.
But: it is a glorified attic with a kitchenette and a small bathroom. Dick probably won’t keep it once he’s done and dusted with this case. But it’ll do for tonight, and it’s more than sufficient for the conversation he’s about to have.
Dick locks the door behind them and throws a lamp on.
“Well?” He turns to face Bruce, hands on his hips. “Care to explain yourself?” He’s rather proud of how calm he sounds and how still he stands. Even if he must look ridiculous with his heeled ankle boots and kohl rimming his eyes.
Bruce has ripped off the EMP mask. His face is anything but calm. “I could ask you the same.”
Dick sighs. “Can we just try using our words today, Bruce? For once?”
“I did, earlier,” Bruce says, with steel. “You’ve been radio-silent for weeks—
“You know how to reach me over the comms,” Dick points out.
“—And you’ve been increasingly reckless in your cases here, I don’t know what you were even thinking in that club today—”
“You know damn well that I was doing detective work, given that you asked me if I had gotten what I needed," Dick snaps.
“And that was the only way you could think of? How many times have I told you to examine a case from all angles!"
Bruce isn't even wrong, not really. Dick had been veering reckless on this night, and the last few besides.
But at this very moment, he is not inclined to be gracious or accommodating or self-reflective. Not here, in this crappy little apartment that is not the Cave or Manor or the streets of Gotham. Not now, when they are dressed like neither of their real selves, but more like variations on “louche middle-aged fuckboy” and “hungry twink”.
And — sometimes, just sometimes, Dick just craves the freedom of acting like a stupid, impetuous little shit.
“I was trying to find someone to fuck me,” he all but snarls. Funny how those words come easier than, I’m not enough for you.
Bruce actually jerks back slightly, his eyes widening. It should make Dick feel bad.
But all the garbage feelings he has ever felt, the ones that he’s stuffed down and pretended don’t exist, decide to explode up and out. Verbal projectile vomit, as it were.
“I wanted to have a cock stuffed down my throat,” Dick says, his voice absurdly clinical for all the filth of his words. “And to suck on that cock until I was choked up with come. And then to be pushed against a wall and spread so wide open that—”
He’s not even halfway through his ridiculous tirade when Bruce covers his mouth with his hand.
“Stop it.”
Something about the panic and shock in Bruce’s eyes makes Dick furious. It doesn’t seem too far off from pity, and Dick has to wonder: who gave Bruce the fucking right?
He rears back, away from Bruce’s palm. “Why? Are you jealous?” It’s such a spiteful and stupid thing to say that Dick immediately regrets it.
Also, one more time for those at the back: It’s a bad idea to try to pull a fast one over Bruce. Because he’s smart enough to pull it right back over you instead.
Even as Dick wrestles with his regret, Bruce wraps his hand around Dick’s nape, and claws his fingers into in Dick’s hair. Then he yanks, hard, and Dick stumbles forward into him.
“And what if I am?” Bruce says in a low growl. “Should I punish you? Maybe that’s what you deserve.”
Dick has the sudden, deranged thought that Bruce is going to kiss him. Maybe not even that deranged because Bruce’s eyes flicker to Dick’s lips, and there’s a wildness in his eyes that is both thrilling and terrifying.
But then that vice-like grip on the back of Dick’s neck shifts, and Dick finds himself being turned around and shoved towards the couch. His knees hit the armrest, and he goes sprawling over the length of the couch.
He could easily roll off and disentangle himself; turn this into a fight. But his heart is racing with a different kind of trepidation and anticipation. He wants to see where this will go.
Because all these years later, he still craves anything Bruce will give him.
Bruce grabs Dick by the ankle, and pulls, dragging one boot off and then the other, throwing them to the grimy floor. Bruce’s bomber jacket follows — Alfred would not care to see eight thousand dollars of Tom Ford discarded so unceremoniously — and then Bruce is on the couch with Dick, moving Dick around like he’s a doll (a fuck doll, that unhinged voice in Dick’s head whispers).
Before Dick can even think to catch his breath, he finds himself laid across Bruce’s lap, face down. Ass in the air. Wrists caught in one of Bruce's sinewy hands, while the other snakes under Dick’s pelvis to undo the button and zip of his trousers.
A throw cushion or something would be useful now, something that Dick can easily bite down hard on. He makes do with his lower lip, grounding himself in the taste of blood. The iron tells him that he isn’t dreaming; that Bruce really is touching him so intimately.
That Bruce really is tugging Dick’s trousers down and off, exposing his bare ass to the cold air. Because Dick isn’t wearing underwear, isn’t even wearing a jock strap.
What he is wearing, though – what he had shamefully placed inside himself earlier, in a stupid murky desire to maybe seek some kind of relief once the mission part of the night was done – the thing that has also made him kind of uncomfortable and horny all night – and that also probably explains just why Bruce was setting him off more than usual; and why Dick was actively provoking him in return –
A butt plug.
A butt plug with a flared base shaped like the bat symbol, to be specific.
Bruce’s breath catches and quivers in the air, like a tuning fork that’s just been struck. And then:
Fwap.
Dick yelps as Bruce’s palm strikes his cheeks. Somehow, despite the fact that Bruce had positioned him precisely for this, he still hadn’t expected it.
“You really are a dirty boy, aren’t you?” Bruce says finally. His voice is low dangerously so.
It’s Dick’s turn to gasp, though he struggles to do so, sucking in a ragged breath.
Everything about this situation is so very much out of Dick’s control. Valiantly, he grasps for some kind of witty remark, some kind of snarky quip, but he still has nothing when Bruce’s hand comes down again.
Fwap. “And dirty boys deserve to be punished, don’t they?”
Dick’s body recoils violently from the sting of the smack — and also the bewildered awe of being spanked, as a twenty-something adult, by the man he has been hopelessly in love with since he was a boy. He’s maybe had a wet dream about this. Or two.
“Don’t they?” Bruce says dangerously.
“Y-yes,” Dick rasps out finally.
Fwap; and this time, Dick only just about stops himself from reacting visibly.
On the inside, though, the stinging is starting to transform into a tingling at the pit of his stomach.
“Yes what?” Bruce’s voice feels far away, almost, although objectively they’re physically closer than they’ve ever been outside of a training scenario.
Nevertheless, his words seem to whisper over the little hairs on Dick’s spine, raising them into goose flesh.
Fwap. Dick flinches again; not even in pain or shock but just to give his body something to channel its excited energy into. Bruce has got to be feeling the raging boner pressed into his thigh.
“Are you a good boy?”
“Yes,” Dick moans, his wrists struggling against Bruce’s grip, his hips bucking.
Fwap. “Yes - ?”
Dick isn’t sure why or how it clicks for him — the revelation is as inexplicable as the fact that he isn’t just hard, but that something is building in his belly; a fluttering that feels a lot like his nervous system working up to an orgasm.
But click it does, and it falls out of his mouth a moment later: “yes, daddy.”
This time it’s Bruce who groans loudly; his hand rubbing soothingly over Dick’s ass, before slipping in between Dick’s cheeks to lightly touch the plug with one steady finger.
“Oh fuck,” Dick gasps, because his nerves are already on fire and Bruce touching him so intimately, even if it’s just via the proxy of the plug, is vigorously fanning the flames.
“Who did you think about? When you put this inside yourself?” and Dick can’t help wailing, because Bruce is closer now to Batman’s growl than his usual tone.
At any other time, the answer would have been: Kory, Babs, nobody. Because Dick wasn’t even ready to acknowledge to himself who he liked to think about when he touched himself there.
Fwap! “Answer me.” Oh god, and that is definitely Batman, and he is mad.
With Dick’s skin stinging and his nerves crackling from Bruce’s earlier blows, it was already difficult to dissemble. Now, it is downright impossible. But Dick valiantly tries anyway. “N-nobody.”
Dick expects another smack, but it doesn’t come. Instead, Bruce’s large, calloused hand massages the curve of his rear, and tugs at the plug a little bit more.
Even that smallest movement has Dick convulsing; waves of pleasure pulsing through his nervous system, and crumbling what little conviction he has.
“You, it’s you, it’s always been you,” he very nearly sobs.
Bruce lets out a satisfied noise and pulls the plug all the way out, trailing lube. The squelching noise in the otherwise dead-silent attic makes Dick shudder.
His wrists are finally released, and he is lifted up by the shoulders. Bruce, still manhandling Dick like he weighs nothing, rearranges them so that Dick is sprawled over Bruce’s lap, facing him.
Dick immediately buries his face in the crook of Bruce’s neck, his face burning — shame and want all coming out in the crimson tinge covering his entire body.
“My good boy,” Bruce murmurs in his ears, rubbing his hands over Dick’s shirt, down his back and over his sides. “You’ve always been my good, sweet boy.”
The praise makes Dick’s breath hitch. It’s everything he wants; nothing he deserves.
A hand slides into his hair, guiding his head back just enough that Bruce can kiss him. It’s not rough and demanding like everything between them has been this whole night.
It is slow and gentle. Tender.
This, of all things, has drops of salt water trailing down Dick’s cheeks, smearing not just on his face but Bruce’s too.
He feels Bruce begin to pull away, but Dick clutches at his shoulders, keeping him close. He grinds his hips down, just like he did earlier that night in the club, except now the bare skin of his ass burns in the best possible way.
And this time, he can feel Bruce’s hardness through his trousers, beneath the hot pulse of Dick’s wet and empty hole.
It’s a shock and a thrill, the idea that he could evoke this reaction from this man, who has had the most stunning women in the world under his thrall.
Dick shifts one hand down to Bruce’s crotch, wanting to feel it properly. “Please,” he whispers, into Bruce’s mouth.
Please take care of me.
It’s not easy for Dick to surrender; to ask. To allow his body to shiver and tremble as it does.
What is involuntary is the flinch that follows the ask. Dick isn’t sure what even brings it on. He’s quite immune to the hurts that Batman has inflicted on him over the years, physically and emotionally, intentionally and inadvertently. He even knows to expect them by now.
But Bruce stiffens, and not in the good way — it is a sudden stillness, like he has suddenly remembered himself and all the ways that this is a terrible idea.
All the reasons he has given Dick over the years to fear even asking him for intimacy.
Dick keeps his eyes tightly shut. He doesn’t want to see the look in Bruce’s eyes as he disentangles himself and leaves without a word. He doesn’t want to know.
But then: hands, carefully cradling his jaw. Thumbs on his cheekbones, wiping his tears away.
Bruce’s forehead gently resting against Dick’s, whispering: “My brave, fearless boy.”
His fingers, so large and thick, checking – with such painstaking thoroughness – that Dick is still wet from the lube that he had so generously used on himself earlier.
Bruce’s soft admonishments, even as Dick impatiently pushes back down on his fingers, demanding more.
And finally, finally, finally, Bruce’s cock, slowly breaching that most intimate of spaces inside of him.
Albeit, with a condom between them. Dick supposes that whatever cover identity Bruce had come up with for tonight, it had called for him to carry a lubricated condom in a foil packet in his wallet.
Part of Dick wants to feel Bruce inside him without that sheath; but mostly, he doesn’t have any spare brain cells to even think about that right now. They’ve already gone from zero to six hundred in barely the span of an hour, here in this shitty, seedy Bludhaven apartment.
If there was any occasion that called for a quick, fast fuck, it would be this one. But their fucking isn’t fast. Dick is the one using the strength of his thighs and his core to move himself up and down Bruce’s cock, but Bruce’s hands are tight on his hips, controlling his pace — urging Dick to continue sinking down, even when he whimpers “I can’t, I can’t” at the idea of trying to take more of Bruce’s impressive length and girth inside him.
Bruce just brushes his lips over Dick’s temples, oh so delicately. “You can, Dickie. You excel at everything you set yourself to.”
It’s completely absurd as dirty talk, and yet. And yet. Dick moans, loud and long and wanton.
“You take me so well.” Bruce’s mouth slides down to the tender skin behind Dick’s ear, which he begins to nibble. “Just like I knew you would. My pretty bird. My precious Robin.”
My precious Robin. Dick is too caught up in the sinful hotness of having Bruce hard and erect inside of him or he might let out a hysterical, disbelieving laugh. As it is, his body stutters in its movements.
“Not your only Robin,” he mumbles, burying his face in Bruce’s shoulder.
“Hmm?”
Dick shakes his head. He’s not saying it again.
And then it doesn’t matter, because the next thrust of Bruce’s hips into his own has the world blinking out of focus for just a moment.
“Ah–” Dick shifts, trying to chase that spark igniting deep in his gut. He thinks, suddenly, desperately, that he wants to remember everything about this: the shocking fullness of Bruce inside him; how large his hands are around Dick’s hips. The bead of sweat running down Bruce’s temple – the heavy weight of Dick’s own cock, sliding between their shirts –
“Look at you,” Bruce sighs, in between sucking a bruise on Dick’s neck. “Always so beautiful. So perfect.”
It becomes almost meditative, just another physical exercise they are partaking in together; another training session, another skill for them to master in tandem.
When Dick starts to feel the tell-tale tightening in his gut, he fights back against Bruce’s unyielding grip on his hipbones, but Bruce stops him with a low command.
“Wait.” His nails dig in; Dick wonders idly if he will find crescent-shaped bruises there tomorrow.
“Fuck,” Dick whispers, hands spasming in their noose-like hold around Bruce’s neck. Damn the man to hell, it is just like him to hold Dick back like this.
Bruce digs for something in his pocket. A handkerchief, it turns out; some luxurious little thing in black-gold-blue paisley damask.
Bruce wraps it around Dick’s cock, and Dick wonders, deliriously, if teenage Bruce masturbated into a B.W. monogrammed pocket square instead of a tissue like most adolescent boys.
The soft coolness of the cotton feels shockingly good around the head of Dick’s cock; adding to the friction of Dick’s and Bruce’s shirts as Dick moves up and down Bruce’s lap.
Dick tilts his gaze down, biting his lip against the sight of Bruce’s fist wrapped around his length, and the firm briskness with which Bruce jerks him off.
“Let go, Dick,” Bruce murmurs, and even if Dick doesn’t want to please him so badly, his body is aching with suspended release.
But he doesn’t stop fucking himself on Bruce’s cock, even after he ejaculates into the handkerchief with Bruce’s name on his lips — or even after climax gives way to languor and overstimulation, and tears run down his cheeks. Dick keeps going until Bruce follows him over the edge, with a guttural sound as if the very air has been punched out of his lungs.
Nothing about this scenario is what Dick hoped for or dreamed or considered. He wonders if that is why he doesn’t so much experience an afterglow as a haze of guilt and self-loathing.
He is scum; the worst of the worst. The Talon that lies inside of him may as well have been brought to the forefront; that fallen bird whose electrum-fuelled blood flows through his veins even now, even still.
Robin was the good boy, but Dick lost Robin long ago.
As soon as it seems like Bruce is fully done – and boy, does it seem like his orgasm is even more drawn out than Dick’s was – Dick disentangles himself, hauling himself up and off Bruce's lap.
He leaves Bruce to gather himself. His guilt trip will catch up even sooner than that, no doubt.
Dick ducks into the bathroom. He left a duffel bag in here earlier, with clean underwear and sweats. Also, he just… really needs a rinse.
The water is cold and the cramped tub is way too grimy for him to want to do more than let the water blast him for a few seconds. He dries himself off even more perfunctorily with a microfibre towel.
But even after Dick is clothed again, he can’t quite bring himself to go back outside, knowing that Bruce is there.
Instead, he clutches the sides of the porcelain sink, staring at the spiderweb of hairline cracks radiating up from the drain.
“Dick…”
Dick’s eyes shift up to the mirror. His own reflection stares back at him, kohl clinging stubbornly to his eyelids despite the sweat and tears and cold shower.
Beyond his mirror self is Bruce, standing by the door. He steps in, tossing something in the trash can. The used condom, Dick realises, tied up.
Dick steps aside, letting Bruce rinse his hands off. His hair is damp, and his shirt and trousers are both a mess.
Otherwise, though. Otherwise, he doesn’t look very much like a billionaire playboy vigilante who just spanked his erstwhile ward, dicked him down good, and made him come into a handkerchief that probably cost more than most people's rent.
It’s such a fucking absurd thought that Dick begins to laugh before he manages to catch himself. He leaves the bathroom, making a beeline for the twin bed in the far corner, by the window.
Gracelessly, he flops down on it, smashing his face onto the pillow.
“Lock the door on your way out,” he mutters, when he hears Bruce step back into the main room.
He startles when the mattress creaks and sags next to him, instead.
“Dick. Sweetheart.” A heavy hand on his back.
The endearment – what? Their brief descent into madness is over. Bruce can pretend this never happened. But ‘sweetheart’ implies something has changed forever. Dick tenses, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But it doesn’t.
“You are my only Robin,” Bruce murmurs. “My fearless, graceful Robin. The only one I want like this.”
Dick keeps his face buried in the pillow. His shoulders hitch, against his will. He should feel special. He should feel good.
But he just feels pathetic. He just wants to cry, for the second time that night.
Because Bruce will send him away when it suits him, and Bruce will fuck him in this shitty Bludhaven apartment. He will call someone else the perfect partner for Batman. But he will not defend Dick to the mother of his child, and Dick cannot even blame him for that.
If Damian had been hurt even more grievously, if he had actually died–
Dick’s face burns with shame, but he turns it up nevertheless. The dim light of the moon and the floor lamp throw odd shadows over Bruce’s face. Almost forming a shadow cowl.
“I’m really not, not in any way that matters,” Dick says tonelessly.
Bruce doesn’t answer, but Dick can practically hear him do that slow blink thing he does when he’s considering all angles of a conversation.
With a sigh, Dick decides to spare him the trouble.
“If I were to choose a canvas on which to build a perfect partner, it would look like Harper Row,” he recites. “It was just an accident of timing and circumstance that brought us together. Maybe in a world where you met any of the others first, there would be no Robin, but something else entirely.”
There isn’t even a flicker of a microexpression on Bruce’s face in response. “Is this really about Harper?”
For fucking fuck – Dick forces himself to breathe in, and breathe out, before burying his face back into the thin pillow.
“I’m saying that I’m nothing to you, or at least, nothing that is real in any meaningful way. I’m not your sidekick, not your son, and it’s been made clear that I’m not your family,” he says, lifting his mouth just enough so that his voice isn’t muffled.
“Do you really think that I’ve never agonised over the fact that there was nothing to tie you to me once you turned eighteen?” Bruce says quietly. “But in the end, you were the one who chose to leave, as soon as you could. I had never asked you to do that, had never even planned to.”
Dick is taken back to another moment, in another lifetime, when the chevron of Nightwing’s costume was crimson red. When Dick Grayson’s dreams of reviving Amusement Mile were brutally crushed by the Joker, who had said: “Even after Batman gave you everything… you abandoned him.”
But that had been wrong, hadn’t it? Because leaving Gotham and Robin had surely hurt Dick more than it had hurt Bruce.
But the hand on his back presses down ever so slightly, and the pressure brings with it a tendril of doubt, snaking up his spine.
“I never even considered having a partner before I met you,” Bruce says, still quiet and pensive. “And if I had met all of the others first, Batman would have stayed working alone. As much as I care for all of them, none of them are my…”
Curiosity gets the better of Dick, and he rolls onto his back and props himself up on his elbows. In the dim light of the room, he has to tilt his head to get a better look at Bruce. He’s wearing a strange expression, something that Dick would describe as shy or bashful if it were anyone else.
Bruce clears his throat. “My friend.”
Dick raises his eyebrow. He can’t help but respond coyly. “A friend who you spank, and who calls you ‘daddy’?”
The slightest tint of pink colours the bridge of Bruce’s nose. It is shocking, if only because Dick always thought blushing was one of those minor involuntary bodily functions that the man had somehow mastered. “My friend and my partner, in every sense of the word.”
That makes Dick deflate again. He doesn’t deserve this. “Damian nearly died because of me.”
A real friend and a proper partner would never have allowed that to happen goes unsaid, but it is implied.
“Dick, do you really expect me to believe that you did not check your gear before leaving? After what happened to your parents?”
“Could have, would have, should have. None of that matters if someone ends up hurt or dead,” Dick says bitterly.
“But Damian is still here. He explained it to me himself: how you’d already checked everything once already. How he’d added more smoke bombs to his belt without telling you; the ones that we were supposed to be stress-testing first.”
“I should have still—”
For the second time that night, Bruce covers Dick’s mouth with his hand. “Stop it, Dick. Self-flagellation is my job, not yours.”
And that, that actually manages to strangle a laugh out of Dick. “Well, gee whiz. What’s the world coming to, if Batman is making jokes?”
Bruce’s mouth briefly quirks up in the ghost of a smile. Then, he shifts further down on the bed, and puts his hands out. “Come here.”
Dick hesitates for just a moment before obeying. He ends up turned around on the bed, with his head in Bruce’s lap.
Bruce pats his hair down, and the touch is so soft that Dick shivers. “What Talia said to you that night — it was so laughably wrong, I didn’t even think it was worth even responding to. And I… I was also too caught up in her criticism of me,” he admits.
Even as Dick rushed out of Damian’s sickroom that night, he had heard Talia snarl, in between the punches and kicks she was throwing at Bruce: Everyone who loves you dies.
“She has always been thoughtless in her pain,” Bruce says, lightly tracing the shell of Dick’s ear. “Damian was like that, too, when he first came to us. But you showed Damian a better way, Dick. You showed me a better way. You still do, everyday.”
As much as Dick always craves this man’s praise, he never actually knows what to do with it. Especially not in this moment, when he can still feel that overwhelming fullness of having Bruce inside him.
Dick doesn’t even realise he’s biting his lower lip, in the same tender spot that he chewed at earlier, until Bruce’s finger gently stills his gnawing.
“Even when Talia lashed out at you, you only gave her kindness and grace. You’re the reason why Robin became what it did. People were drawn to your light,” Bruce says. “And that’s why you aren’t just a part of this family. You’re the thread that binds us together. Our beating heart. My anchor.”
Dick screws his eyes shut. This is what he wanted, right? To be granted this halo of affirmation, this undeniable crown of validation.
So why does he still feel like some carved out husk; some hollow pit that deserves absolutely none of it?
Bruce continues combing his hand through Dick’s hair. “You’ve always been so good, Dick. The best of us, by far. But you’re just a boy, too. And I think… I think I was caught up in raising you on a pedestal to remember that. To notice when you are hurting. To reach my hand out to you, like you always have with me.”
Dick is trembling again. He feels like he’s going to shake apart from the inside. He covers his face with the crook of his arm, but Bruce carefully pulls it away; draws him up to once again sit on his lap.
“My beautiful boy,” he murmurs, one large hand wrapped over the back of Dick’s head, pressing it into his chest. “I’ve got you.”
Dick wraps his arms around Bruce’s torso, and buries his face in Bruce’s shirt, wanting nothing more than to make a home there. He lets the sound of Bruce’s steady heartbeat calm him down; allows it to bring him back to the ground.
When he thinks he can speak without his words cracking, he says, “I think I’m broken.”
“You’re not,” Bruce says. “But you do carry too many burdens on your shoulders, more than any one person should, and much of the blame for that lies with me. If anyone is broken, it’s me—for letting you feel that you are anything less than the best man that I know.”
Dick swallows. He thinks back to one of the first lessons that he had learned on the trapeze, even before he could properly walk. It was about the paramount importance of communication. Not just in the early days of learning your partner's body and tells, but as a consistent, ongoing practice. Not just on the bar, but off of it, as well.
It is, perhaps, a lesson that Dick could stand to re-learn.
So without opening his eyes, he leans just slightly back, tilting his face up. Asking, now, silently, for a kiss.
And immediately Bruce obliges him, with a sweet restraint that makes Dick ache with desire and longing, and with the love he will never not have for this man.
“Bruce,” Dick says quietly, when they part. His request for a kiss — hell, even his much-earlier entreaty to be fucked — was not quite as heavy on his tongue as this next one is. “Will you… will you work through this with me?”
There is a softness in Bruce’s eyes; the same understanding and kinship he’s always extended to Dick since the first day they met, when Dick has been brave enough to ask for it. “Of course I will, chum.”
Bruce wipes Dick’s tears with his thumbs, as if it is the most natural thing to do. “You...” He exhales. “You make me want to be better than I am. To be the kind of man that you don’t have to even ask that of.”
And this, this is something Dick can do – hold out his hand to the most important person in his world.
“Then let’s figure it out together.” His accompanying smile is tremulous, but Bruce’s eyes fall upon it in wonder, like it’s the most precious thing he’s ever seen.
He kisses it off Dick’s mouth with that same reverence, once, twice, five times. He holds Dick close, hugging him so tightly that anyone else might find it suffocating. But Dick only sees it as grounding; a succour.
“The car isn’t parked far from here,” Bruce says, after a few more hugs and kisses.
“The car or the car?”
“Yes.”
Despite himself, Dick bites back a smile. The Batmobile, then.
He climbs off Bruce’s lap, but doesn’t quite go as far as standing up. Instead, he leans heavily against Bruce’s side. A thought occurs to him.
“What did you do with the handkerchief?”
Bruce clears his throat, but doesn’t actually say anything. That vague hint of a blush makes a reappearance, this time on the tips of his ears.
Ohhh. Oh boy.
That –
That means he kept it.
The idea that Bruce wanted to keep a pocket square covered in Dick’s come (cumkerchief? Dick’s unhinged inner voice wonders) –
Somehow, that insane idea feels more irrefutable than any of Bruce’s tender praises and affirmations this whole night.
Dick doesn’t bother biting back his smile, this time. He reaches out to wrap one of Bruce’s hands in both of his own, squeezing tightly.
“Let’s go home,” daddy, he doesn’t say, but maybe, just maybe, he thinks it.
And maybe Bruce hears it, if the way his breath catches means anything.
He kisses the crown of Dick’s hair. My Robin, he doesn’t say. But Dick hears it, anyway, too.