Bruce. 

“I am not leaving you, Dick. I am not abandoning you.”

Bruce’s fingers fumble with the batarang blade, slick with Dick’s sweat and blood and trembling with Bruce’s rising panic. But he can’t afford to panic, so he brings his teeth down hard on his tongue. It punctures. 

It floods his mouth with blood. 

“You aren’t, Bruce. You never have,” Dick whispers— less than whispers. Bruce has to strain to hear his voice, and that makes him tear his gaze away from the bomb the Crime Syndicate strapped to his boy’s chest to look Dick in the face. “But you have to get out of here.”

 His eyes are large, even as swollen and bruise-ringed as they are, and they’re shining. Sweat glues his black curls to his forehead, and Bruce brings up a shaky, gloved hand to touch Dick’s face, gently pushing aside the hair from his forehead. 

Bruce applies more pressure as he holds Dick’s cheek, trying to impress his certainty into Dick as he growls: “The only way we’re getting out of here is together.”

 The red numbers on the counter tick down. 1:29. 1:28. The bomb is connected to Dick’s heart and will continue to count down as long as it’s beating. Which means Bruce has to defuse the bomb. There is no other option—no other option that bears thinking about. 

The Syndicate has already exposed Dick’s identity to the public and ruined his life. But they will not end it. 

Bruce will not allow it. He has to stop the bomb.  

But every time he disconnects a relay in the wires, it fixes itself. He growls in frustration. The bomb beeps. 0:54. 0:53. 

“...Batman,” Dick rasps, and Bruce can feel the effort it takes for him to say just two syllables, can almost taste the finality. The apology in them. 

He ignores it anyway, instead slicing through another wire, which promptly regenerates. He feels the panic scraping up in his throat. 

“Batman,” Selina echoes, that same note of pity and apology in her voice, just mixed with a sense of urgency, and Bruce snarls. Luthor’s Bizarro-creature grunts behind him. They’re rushing him. They don’t understand. This is not the end. Dick isn’t dying here. 

“45 seconds,” Luthor says. “If the bomb doesn’t stop, it won’t just be him who dies. We all will. I’m making an executive decision.” 

That’s when a blast hits Bruce between the shoulders, sending him flying. His body collides with a wall, and Bruce struggles to even get to his knees. His wrist is broken at the minimum, left knee and several ribs are goners, and the rest of his body throbs from the earlier battle with the Syndicate—he can hardly move. But he can lift his chin enough from the ground to see Luthor slap his hand over Dick’s mouth, see Dick’s panicked blue eyes fly to meet Bruce’s. 

“Luthor!” Bruce snarls, heart pounding desperately. He tries to will himself upward, but he can’t even stand, limbs buckling. Blood hammers in his temples, tongue thick in his mouth. Everything is moving too slow. “Luthor, you hurt him and I’ll kill you—” 

Luthor doesn’t even turn, hand still clamped over Dick’s mouth until something unthinkable happens. Something that Bruce will see every night for the rest of his life when he lays in the dark. 

Dick goes still. 

There is a moment of pure quiet. The bomb’s long, slow beeping stops abruptly. Bruce does not breathe. None of them do. 

Slowly, still enveloped by the thick, still silence, Luthor removes his hand, and Dick’s head slumps forward slackly, chin dropping against his exposed collarbone. His eyes are still open, but even from a distance, Bruce knows that they aren’t the bright, life-filled eyes of the little boy who used to count bullets by his side. 

The sound that finally breaks the quiet belongs to Bruce. He roars. 

-

Lex. 

Batman shouldn’t even be able to move after his blast, but somehow he draws himself back up and charges at Lex, slamming him against the wall and choking him with his enormous hands. The noises coming out of him are animalistic, like he isn’t even human anymore. 

If he would simply let Lex talk, he would understand that Nightwing can still be saved if given the shot in time, a period which is very rapidly closing, but it’s quite difficult to communicate that while being strangled. 

Ever dutiful, however, is his creature—Subject B-0, an imperfect, lab-grown clone of Superman that is devoted entirely to Lex. It charges at Batman, tearing him off of Lex and throwing him through the wall of the room they’re in with a guttural yell. Lex drops to his knees in relief. 

Catwoman gapes for a moment before running after Batman’s slack form, leaving Lex all alone with the bomb. Corpse? Body, he settles on. 

Lex growls as he rubs his neck, slowly drawing himself back up. This is his reward for trying to save the world? To save them all at the cost of one boy’s life—temporarily at that? 

Batman should be grateful. 

Lex removes the syringe from the same pocket he retrieved the cardioplegia pill, and without missing a beat, injects it into the boy’s heart, watching appraisingly as he steps back. 

And then...nothing happens. 

Lex tuts, almost sympathetic, flicking a finger against the boy’s—Nightwing, or Richard Grayson if the Syndicate’s broadcast is to be believed—cold cheek. “Shame. If only your little friend hadn’t wasted so much time trying to strangle me, the adrenaline might work.”

Up close, the boy is almost innocent-looking enough to make Lex forget how many millions in contracts and billions in plots have been wasted because of him. Almost. 

Lex is about to abandon the endeavor altogether when the boy suddenly wracks all over. He heaves an awful gasp, body shuddering and eyes squeezing tight before flying back open. 

Well. Interesting. 

Even more interesting is what the boy says, between coughs and flashes of wide, pained, confused eyes, which is: “Who are you?”

Lex arches a single brow high. 

Nightwing certainly knows who Lex Luthor is. They’ve had more encounters than Lex would like, and even if they hadn’t, Lex was formerly the President of the United States and is one of the wealthiest billionaires walking the planet. Everyone knows who Lex Luthor is. Especially do-gooders like Grayson. “...You don’t remember me?”

There’s a dawning look of confusion on the boy’s grimy, sweat-sheened face, and Lex quickly puts it together himself. 

The identity of one of the world’s most identifiable men is not the only thing he doesn’t remember. Likely a side-effect of the delayed injection, along the line of brain damage. 

Soon enough, Nightwing’s eyes roll back into his head, losing consciousness, and Lex can allow the smirk that the realization planted. 

He glances quickly over his shoulder. In the far, far distance, Catwoman is crouching over Batman’s still unconscious form. They certainly won’t be able to stop him if there’s a sufficient distraction when the Bat wakes up—say, for example, the ever-nearing threat of the Syndicate’s arrival and the fight that will inevitably unfold. It wouldn’t take very much at all to keep Batman away for a few hours after that, manufacture a convincing body double, and hide the amnesiac away where he can’t be found. Not very much at all for someone like Lex. 

And it would certainly be worth the reward—it would doubtless cause a dip in Deathstroke’s unfulfilled contracts, a decrease in foiled plots. Even thinking about the potential of having someone as interconnected as Nightwing in his pocket...

This, Lex grins, is quite the opportunity. 

Two days later.

?

He lurches upright, eyes flying open. His heart thuds in his chest, hand dragging over his collarbone and chest as if he can muffle it, but all it does is let him feel how hard he’s breathing. 

His eyes slip shut again as he slowly calms down, pulse steadying. 

Nightmare. That was all it had been. He laughs softly to himself, eyes still shut, at how foolish it was. A stupid little nightmare where he had been a child again, with a monster throwing rocks at him from a ditch, and by his side had been a man in black with...a strange face, or strange ears, or strange... something. 

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember exactly. Even just seconds after waking up, the memory of the dream is already fading, like grains of sand pouring out of a clenched fist. 

It had been a nightmare. Just a nightmare. 

He cracks his eyes back open, and his smile promptly drops. 

So does his stomach.

He’s sitting in a large, soft bed with pale green covers. The room he’s in is opulent, fitted with white French doors opened to allow the wind to tousle the curtains and let in fresh air. Sunshine pours in, birds chirping pleasantly outside. 

None of that is the problem. 

The problem is, he doesn’t know how he got here. What this place is. The problem is, when he instructs himself to retrace his steps to remember how he got here, he can’t. 

He can’t remember...anything. 

Stomach twisting, he slides out of bed and pads to the door, opening it cautiously to see what looks like the main area of a very expensive-looking apartment. 

There’s a bald man sitting at the elegant-looking table in the kitchen, delicately stirring something into his coffee, who looks up and beams when he lays eyes on him. His eyes crinkle. “Ah, good morning, Mr. Grayson. I expect you slept well?”

Grayson. He internally repeats the name, hoping for a flash of recognition. There’s absolutely nothing. It might as well be the word “sky” or “dirt,” for all it means to him. 

But when he weakly questions, “Grayson?” then it feels familiar on his tongue. Like his mouth remembers saying it, even if he doesn’t. That dispels his unease just enough to sit down stiffly at the table when the man beckons. 

All the while, though, he can’t stop his eyes from darting down to the silverware on the table; there’s part of his mind that is automatically computing how exactly to angle a grapefruit spoon into the man’s eye without killing him if need be, how to level a kick so precise under the tablecloth that it’ll break the man’s kneecaps without jostling the plates, and it makes his nose scrunch up. 

He...doesn’t know what’s going on, or understand these instincts in the slightest. 

The bald man doesn’t seem to have that problem, eyes illuminating with a knowing look as he figures it out. The man stares at him for a long time, slowly steepling his fingers under his chin.

“Mercy?” he finally calls over his shoulder, seemingly taking it well in stride. “Bring in Richard’s file please. It appears that we have a case of amnesia on our hands.”

-

Grayson . Richard . Dick. 

Richard J. Grayson. Richard John Grayson. Richard John “Dick” Grayson. Dick Grayson. Son of world-famous acrobats who were murdered, leaving him to fend for himself in foster care. Charitably sponsored by Lex Luthor—the bald man from the table. Fell in with the wrong crowd, or perhaps the right one, and fell into a certain line of work.  

“An operative of mine,” explains Lex, watching closely as Dick pages through the file. “I am an individual terribly concerned with the fate of this world and the people living on it. We shared an interest in that, you and I.”

Dick’s only half-listening. There are photos. Of him. Of someone he can hardly believe is him. Someone he doesn’t remember being. 

A little boy wearing a glittery blue show costume that’s so worn out at the knees his skin shows. A slightly older boy with dark, angry eyes and a bust lip. A photo of a young man with a prosthetic nose and jaw makeup, blood dribbling down the side of his temple, and it takes Dick a second to recognize that that’s him, just...undercover. That photo, like many of the other ones of Dick’s disguises as a young adult, has a subcaption: Robert “Robbie” Malone. There’s even one of an adult Dick, without any disguise at all, wearing a tuxedo and suspenders and holding a champagne flute while he talks to Lex, who’s dressed similarly. 

Dick barely recognizes himself, which—granted, is probably a given. 

But none of the photos have been doctored, he can tell. (How can he tell that? he wonders.) 

He finally glances up at Lex, who catches his eye and shrugs as if to say, What can you do? 

“Of course,” Lex sighs, “the world doesn’t take very kindly to being protected in public, ergo our need for secrecy.”

And that’s when he brings out another file, clipped with a photo of a red-and-black web and a white eye. If Dick is up to it, Luthor explains, there’s another mission waiting for him. Of course, if Dick wants to get out— 

Dick takes the file before Luthor can even finish that sentence. Lex smiles. 

Dick doesn't know anything about himself, but he doesn't have to in order to feel how his whole body prickles at the word mission. It means something. It means something big to him.

-

Bruce. 

The worst part of it all is that there is no escape. 

Every broadcast is dominated by the revelation of Dick’s identity. The internet is flooded with snapshots of Dick Grayson beside blurry images of Nightwing. Reporters swarm Wayne Enterprises. Did you know your ward was a vigilante, Mr. Wayne? Mr. Wayne! Did you know? 

When he walks through the Manor, all he can see are places where Dick used to be. In the photographs on the mantle, in the missing crystals where an eight-year-old accidentally brought down the chandelier—in the Cave, where the Nightwing suit is worn by a mannequin instead of flesh and blood. Dick is everywhere except for where he should be. There is no escape. 

And it is a strange, terrible thing to look down into the coffin and see Dick’s face. 

He looks peaceful. The blood is cleaned off. His eyes are closed. Makeup paints his face a shade lighter than it should be to disguise the bruises, skin smoothed with the rubbery effect of death. He is perfectly, awfully still.

Bruce wants to snatch the body out of the coffin and simply hold him. He got to hold Jason. He got to hold Damian. When their bodies were still warm. But he cannot hold his first. 

It would be a perversion. Dragging him out of the coffin he rests in and embracing Dick’s corpse like that in front of all the people who loved him, all the people who did hug him when they had the chance, unlike Bruce. It would be sickening to them. 

But this is the last time that Bruce will ever see him again, and he cannot remember when he last held him at all. Bruce squeezes his eyes shut fiercely, unable to stop the wet line that slides down his cheek and unable to look at Dick’s corpse one second longer. 

“I’m sorry,” Bruce tells Dick roughly, choking, eyes still shut, and then he hastens away from the crowd and the body for the last time. When he finally makes it back to the manor, the burning in his eyes takes hold, wracking him. 

One month later.

Dick.

Helena’s shoulder presses against his in the car. It’s their second mission as partners—Dick’s second ever with Spyral—tucked into an inconspicuous black car outside a pub in Leicestershire to track down a black-market meta bio-weapon.

Somehow, though, it feels as if Dick has known Helena for longer than just three weeks. Like he’s known her for years. Knows exactly what buttons to press to make her jaw work and make him grin.

It’s even stranger because given what Dick’s been able to pick up about himself, he’s more of a happy-go-lucky kind of person—easygoing and fluid. 

(“Well-trained,” purred the snarky man in black leather Dick fought atop a train during his very first mission, “disciplined, but not averse to improvisation. You fight like jazz.”)

Helena’s...not like that. At all.

She’s rigid and serious, bitter and perfect. Hard edges and glares.

But it works somehow. It feels familiar. It feels right. And it’s just about the only thing that has since he woke up in Lex Luthor’s guestroom with no memories to his name: working with someone like her.  

He’s so caught up in his thoughts that he misses it when she begins to speak, and starts, trying to catch up. “—glad you’re so confident that you’ve mastered the regional accent without any practice.” 

It only takes him a second to catch up and defend himself. “Well, I was confident in my use of the Hypnos last time, and that worked out fine, didn’t it?”

Helena’s gaze catches on his thoughtfully, chin tilting as if she’s appraising him. 

He’s right, though. Using the Hypnos last time had worked out well. Almost too well, a fact that surprised them both. It had only taken seconds to make the target think that he and Dick were the oldest, dearest friends, to make him perfectly loyal to Dick after just momentarily glancing into the swirling Hypnos in his eyes. 

That level of control normally takes years of practice, Helena had said quietly when they were back at Spyral headquarters. It was...almost impressive. How.

I guess I’m good at reading people. I guess I’m—good at knowing what they need to hear, Dick had said. What the mark had wanted more than anything was clearly a friend, so that was what Dick had made him think they were. That felt natural, easy, instinctive even; using the Hypnos had almost been an afterthought. I probably did it all the time. I just don’t...remember anymore.

“You were often exposed to East Midlands English in your past life, I suppose?” Helena asks dryly, but even though it’s only sarcasm, it gives Dick pause for some reason he can’t quite put his finger on. 

“Actually—” 

Dick is cut off by a flurry of sudden movement outside the pub. Dick and Helena lock eyes and head inside to talk to the pubgoers for information, eventually finding Dr. Ashemore, the ‘owner’ of the bio-weapon, and the conversation never quite gets picked back up. 

But it sticks with him. He is familiar with that accent. Terribly so. If he shuts his eyes and focuses hard, he can almost dredge up the faintest rhythm of someone using it in his head. Only he can’t for the life of him seem to remember that person’s voice or what they looked like. 

It’s a part of his “past life,” like Helena calls it. The life he doesn’t have anymore, the life he doesn’t remember. 

It’s out of his hands. 

He wonders if he’ll ever get it back. 

Four months later. 

Damian. 

There is a party. 

Infantile, for Damian’s tastes, with pizza and childish streamers clearly more for the sake of the others’ than his own, but it is still a gesture that makes Damian’s chest feel faintly warm. 

DAMIAN PARTY!! Brown scrawls on one of the banners, because it is a less painful way to say that Damian is alive, which would have to acknowledge the fact that he was not for over a year. 

A fact that no one here seems eager to acknowledge at all, at least not verbally. 

But they all acknowledge it at least implicitly by coming in the first place. Brown, Cain, Gordon, Todd, Thomas, Drake, Kane. Damian waits for Richard’s arrival, but he does not come, which displeases Damian immensely. 

If anyone should be here—if there is anyone Damian wants to be here—it should be him. 

Damian is...holding it together for now, offering tight smiles and curt nods and basking in the attention he craved for so long; he is glad to be back, to be sure. 

But there is a part of him that remembers the feeling of cold metal piping through his chest—remembers sliding down the sword. It makes wild, violent hands scrabble around the inside of his chest, bile rising in his throat. 

What he really wants is not this silly, crowded party, no matter how well-intentioned. He would much prefer a chance to just sit with someone and not be touched. To hear someone’s voice reassure him that Heretic cannot hurt him anymore. Reassure Damian that Damian is alive, rather than just taking it for granted and celebrating and talking around the fact. And he does not want just anyone to be that ‘someone.’

This lies at the crux of his displeasure, which is, he realizes a moment too late, noticeable.

“What’s wrong,” Father rumbles, catching his eye when Damian hesitates opening up a gift from Gordon, turning it around a time too many between his hands. The gift is wrapped in shiny blue paper. 

Father sounds urgent, almost desperate to resolve the problem. 

Since Damian’s been back, this is how Father’s been—overly, uncharacteristically concerned with Damian’s wellbeing, which would be perfectly reasonable given that he was dead just yesterday and that he is so naturally superior to the others in every way. 

Yet Damian has gathered that Father’s insistence on Damian getting his every whim has less to do with concern for Damian and more to do with Father himself, though he isn’t certain why. 

Pennyworth cuts in before Damian can answer. “I’m sure Master Damian is simply tired—”

“I’m quite well, thank you, Pennyworth,” Damian interrupts imperiously, before he hesitates, mouth screwing up, not saying what he had planned to. 

If Richard does not wish to see Damian now that he is back from the dead, then he has...no obligation to. There are any multitude of reasons. Perhaps he is too busy; it would be selfish to ask him to prioritize Damian. Perhaps he found another protege in Bludhaven more worthy of his time while Damian was away. 

Or perhaps he simply does not want to see Damian. 

Damian’s stomach clenches hard; he—has consumed an excess of sweets this evening. He’ll have to take care not to in the future. Yes, that’s it. 

Drake and Todd share a lingering glance before Todd turns back, jerking a shoulder at the gift. “Go ahead, then, brat. I want to know what Babs got you.”

Damian nods curtly, woodenly beginning to unwrap it before the prickling in his eyes begins to smear his vision, and suddenly the words blurt out, defensiveness warping the fear into betrayal and most of all anger. 

Grayson should be here. Damian wants him to be here. So why isn’t he?

“Is Grayson preoccupied in that disgusting pit he calls a city?” Damian spits, hands crumpling the blue paper into a ball. “Is he too good to come?”

Damian is shaking so violently with anger and the effort it takes to hold back the tears that it takes him longer than it should to recognize the perfect stillness the others fall into. 

The silence that falls between them is smothering. It is long, it is thick, and it is smothering.

“Damian,” Brown says finally. Her voice is gentle. And Damian knows what that means. What other words Brown softened to make this one, just like she softened the blow of the words on the banner. But it doesn’t soften anything.

It still feels as if Heretic’s sword has pierced through his chest a second time. 

-

Dick. 

“I had a dream once.”

They’re in a desert. The empty quarter. The sun is beating down. Helena fell at least a hundred miles ago, injured and unable to go on. Midnighter made it farther before he couldn’t. Dick’s still going, because he has the baby. She’s screaming. “Shh. Shhhh.” Dick ghosts his lips over her forehead, and she quiets, whimpers, and then screams again.

“Ah,” she sobs. 

“I know,” Dick rasps. “I know. I’m sorry.”

Speaking feels like raking strings of muscle from his throat. He doesn’t know the last time he drank. He left the last canteen he would’ve used with Midnighter when he fell, and that was...a while ago. The rest of the water they have is for her. So. Speaking hurts.

He continues anyway. “I had a dream once. Not that long ago.” He pauses, swallowing vainly to try and wet his throat. “I was on another world. It was night, and there was this man with me. He had these...funny ears.” 

Sluggishly, almost as an afterthought, he tickles her temples where the man’s long black ears had started in the dream. She giggles, making him smile slowly and give a soft laugh that scrapes his throat like a matchstick. 

“Right there, yeah? Just big long ears, isn’t that so silly?”

She cooes, grabbing his finger clumsily, and he stares down at her, still smiling, until he realizes his feet have stopped moving. 

He forces himself forward. The sand feels thicker than before, the sun hotter. The heat coats them. Sweat rolls sluggishly down his neck. 

He clears his throat again. Shakes his head to clear it. His thoughts are almost as slow as his feet; it’s like the heat has burned them all away, and he’s operating only on dim, mechanical muscle memory. “But so the...the man. He was trapped in this tree, and it was wrapping around him, killing him. And I was...I was different on this world. I was younger. He called me a name, I don’t...I don’t remember. But I knew that I had to save him.” His voice catches in his throat. “I had to save him.

“So I do. I get him out of the tree. But then there’s this big monster, and he’s chasin’...chasin’ us. And we make him fall into the ditch, but there are...rocks. He’s throwing rocks at us, and a rock fell...it fell...on...it fell on me. But you... you got to forget about the rocks, okay? Tell me you’ll do that. You’ll forget that. 

“You’re too little. You don’t have to worry about the rocks. You only have to remember that sometimes you stand on the edge. And there’s a monster on the other side...and you tell him…‘Come on...come on, big boy,’” Dick’s voice shakes when he raises it. “You...you tell him, ‘I’m still waiting for you.” 

The shift in volume makes the baby cry. Or maybe it’s the hunger, or the thousand-degree heat, or the physical weight of the sun beating down and picking scabholes in their skin. 

Dick licks his lips numbly, blinking slowly. There’s a long beat, or maybe a couple.

“Did that...make sense?” he whispers. Speaking hurts his throat. It hurts his everything. 

He can barely hear himself over the hissing of the shifting sand and the dull bum of his slow pulse in his temples. His mind isn’t working right at all anymore, he thinks. Everything is melting together like that Dali painting, but instead of clocks it’s his guts, his teeth, his brain. “Do you get it? The...story?”

She doesn’t answer, just crying and screaming instead. 

“Shh,” Dick says. “Shhhhh.” 

Then Dick’s not standing anymore. Suddenly, he’s on his back, he realizes dimly, staring up at the sun. When did that happen? The baby’s laying on his chest, still crying. The sand pricks his burnt skin and protruding bones, trickling into his ears and scraping his cheeks. He blinks blearily up at the sun. It’s bright.  

And then it’s not; everything goes dark.

In the end, it’s okay. The baby gets taken by a couple in the desert who hold  a water bottle to Dick’s lips, patient when it just dribbles down his trembling mouth instead. Dick instinctively lies that she died when he gets retrieved by Spyral so she doesn’t have to go through any more hardship. Dr. Netz excitedly informs him that he miraculously suffered no rhabdomyolysis. Helena drops off a Gatorade and lets her touch linger as she passes it to him, almost as blistered as him but wonderfully, beautifully alive. And Lex tells him it’s a shame that the biotech organ in the baby could not be retrieved but that they will be moving forward nonetheless. 

Great. It’s great. All of it. Great news.

Dick finds himself staring holes into the ceiling when he’s in his bed anyway. 

The dream had seemed so clear in the desert when he was relaying it to the baby. It had meant something then. He had been trying desperately to impress the lesson of it into her. For those last days in the desert, dazed with a baby in his arms, it felt like he had almost known who he was again. 

But if he made any realizations there, they’re gone now. Evaporated in the desert sun. The heatstroke blurred everything again. He can barely remember what he said to her now, much less what happened in the dream itself. The man with long black ears, the rocks, the faintest memory of a purple monster, and the strange certainty he felt in the desert are all he has to go by. 

It’s such a ridiculous concept that Dick can barely believe it has anything to do with his past life. But he remembers how real, how true it felt to say in the moment. 

He shoves a pillow over his head and tries to force himself to have the dream again. Tries to force himself to remember. 

(It doesn’t work.)

Three months later.

Dick. 

The second the pre-mission briefing is over, Tiger graces Dick with a final, repulsed glance and leaves. Dick stares at Helena expressionlessly. “He hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” says Helena—now Director Bertinelli, thus Dick’s change in partners. “He doesn’t even know you.”

“I don’t know me either, and I don’t hate me,” Dick tells her, and her lips tick up for a split-second before her expression schools itself into blank professionalism, making Dick’s own mouth quirk in return, pleased. Then he pauses, wetting his lips and tilting his head a little, and adds, “I’ll miss you out there, you know. In the field. We made a good team.”

“...Yes. We did. We were...sufficient.”

“Helena, this is a workplace. Don’t be so obscene.”

There’s that almost-smile again, and Dick grins so wide it almost hurts when she rolls her eyes and flicks a finger at the door. He misses her already. “Out.”

Still, Dick nods dutifully, only stopping at the door and turning to look back when she calls his name, a strange, uncharacteristic note lacing her voice. “Dick?”

“Yeah?”

She hesitates, red earrings casting glints on her face. “We’ll still work together, of course. When it’s strictly necessary.”

He raises a brow. “Which will be…”

“Frequently,” she says firmly, and then clears her throat and directs her gaze pointedly at her paperwork. “I’ll make sure of that. Now go. You have Kryptonite to obtain.”

-

“Do not engage with the target,” Tiger says over the comms. Tiger’s hiding in the alcoves of the party, keeping watch while Dick’s in the center of it in a full tuxedo. It’s a gala with socialites from all over the world. “Simply secure the Kryptonite and go. Do not depart from the plan.”

“But here’s the thing,” Dick says, departing from the plan. “I don’t like stealing.”

The idea of it just makes his skin itchy. Thieves are sort of the quintessential bad guys, and Dick may be thoroughly memory-less, but he’s not a bad guy. 

Agent 1 growls frustratedly in his ear, at exactly the same moment that the mark—a Spanish duchess with pretty eyes and a bright green ‘family jewel’ embedded in her necklace—catches sight of Dick. Her gaze brightens with intrigue, and maybe something even darker. 

“Do not engage with the target, 37. Remove the necklace and leave, per our orders.”

“That’s the actual definition of stealing.” Pausing, Dick switches tones and winks at a fellow partygoer as he hands off his untouched champagne flute. “Don’t get too wild now, you crazy kid,” Dick finger-guns the tuxedoed man, who looks to be in his mid-forties before he slinks off, lowering his voice again and bringing a finger up to his ear to continue talking to Tiger: “So I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to ask really, really nicely.”

Then, just as Tiger begins to growl out a reply, Dick switches off the comms, grins to himself, and closes the gap between him and the duchess. 

“May I?” he asks, feigning a quiet, awestruck expression that she returns wholeheartedly, and she eagerly takes his hand as they step out to dance. 

Her other hand fans against his shoulder. 

“You’re beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful, too.” He makes sure there’s a certain synergy to them, predicting her missteps before they happen and accounting for them so they seem perfectly, electrically in-sync. He keeps the motions of the dance quick so there’s no time to think and she’s almost breathless before two songs are over, slightly damp curls sticking to her cheeks. 

They make it four dances before Dick pretends to see the clock and slides his hand off of her back, pulling away, but her fingers wrap around his wrist. 

“Are you leaving? You can’t,” she says. “This could have been—”

Dick pretends to look appropriately heartbroken. “It would have been.” He tilts his head like he’s had a realization, turning his eyes pleading. “Give me something to remember you by. Anything. Please.”

His gaze drops. Her fingers roam around her throat, yanking at the delicate silver chains there. Dick grins crookedly.

Three minutes later, he’s working off his bowtie with the hard edges of the Kryptonite jutting into the center of his palm, suitjacket draped over an elbow. The adrenaline rush is making him giddy, smiling so wide it hurts. 

“Objective secured, Agent 1, no Hypnos or stealing necessary,” Dick sing-songs to Tiger as he clicks the comms back on. “You miss me while I was gone? Must have been so quiet.”

Tiger growls. “You’re an idiot, Dick Grayson.”

“That feels like you’re just too shy to say yes,” Dick says, when all of a sudden there’s a sharp tug at the back of his shirt. He whirls around. 

It’s the dark-haired, middle-aged man Dick handed his drink to earlier in the night, staring at Dick with an incredulous, almost desperate expression on his face, his fingers balled unexpectedly tightly into Dick’s shirt. 

His gaze is glued to Dick’s face as if he can’t quite believe his eyes. 

Dick fights a grimace. 

His Hypnos always prevents people from remembering his face and it can prevent them from seeing his face in real-time, which it usually does when he’s on the job, but since it would be strange for people to see a swirl-faced man twirling around a gala, he’d had that part turned off tonight. Which is starting to look like a mistake.

Dick papers on his most charming, most crooked grin, even though they’re already running a little bit behind schedule for extraction since his technique wasn’t strictly time-efficient. 

He activates the Hypnos, preparing to make the man forget that this strange little encounter ever happened at all when the man—the man says his name. 

His real name, and he says it the way Dick can say, ‘I don’t like stealing,’ like it’s something burnt into him, something he knows from the bottom of his chest, no thinking necessary. And his mouth trembles around the single word, eyes searching and desperate:

“Dick?”

Dick freezes, the words on his tongue disappearing into thin air. He jerks back, floundering but only able to go a small distance because of the vice-grip on his shirt. “How did you—?” 

“37,” warns Tiger in his ear. “We need to go.”

And it’s a split-second decision. The questions have been piling up in Dick’s skull for ages: What did he forget? Who did he forget? 

Now the questions are different: How does this man know the name of someone who, according to every last one of the files he’s read about himself from Lex, never ever settled down long enough in one place? Who spent his whole life wearing disguises and secrets like a second skin?

How did he know Dick in his past life? Who is he?

Dick wants to know. He wants to know so, so badly. 

But he’s not doing any of this for his own sake, to find out who he is—he’s doing this for the same reason Lex is: to help protect the world and its secrets. If this is what it costs, so be it. Besides, it’s just as likely that this man was an enemy of his as it is that he was a friend or confidant. 

Tiger’s voice makes him realize that. Tiger’s voice makes him unfreeze, glancing back up at the man who’s still staring at him with that strange, disbelieving expression. It’s a choice that belongs to Dick, sure. Technically. He can choose to stay and question this man on what he knows or he can choose to finish the mission he’s here for. 

But there’s a dark, familiar little voice in the back of his head that makes the choice for him, easy and fast like a snap of the fingers, like it’s not even a decision at all: 

The mission comes first. Always.

Dick lowers his voice. “I don’t know how you know who I am, but you don’t anymore. Okay? You’re going to forget you ever saw me at this gala.”

The man’s blue eyes swirl for a second as the Hypnos does its job, fingers slackening on Dick’s shirt, and that’s when Dick takes his leave, gripping the Kryptonite tightly in his hand and hoping he didn’t just make a mistake. 

-

Their orders are to hand off the Kryptonite to a contact in a tucked-away little cafe off the coast of Corsica. Given that Dick’s a little more visually discrete than Tiger, who’s 6’4, miles of scar tissue, and frankly gigantic, he’s the one to go in, wearing sunglasses and loose cotton. The waitress leads him to the designated window seat, and then it’s only a matter of waiting, which doesn’t take very long either. 

What does take a second is Dick registering the man who finally comes up to meet him. 

“Good morning, Mr. Grayson. I believe you have something for me.”

Lex Luthor settles into the seat across from him with a smirk, the coastal sunlight beaming off his bald head. 

Dick leans far back in his seat. 

“...You’re the contact?” he asks, not even trying to conceal his surprise. 

“Oh, I most certainly am. I told you I was interested in associating with Spyral. Now that I have an experienced, trustworthy element in place such as yourself, I can feel more comfortable doing so.”

He seizes the mineral out of the air when Dick tosses it to him, fingers closing hungrily around it. His lips spread as he turns it over carefully. After an uncomfortably long examination, his gaze flicks back up to Dick, a little wild, a little sharp, and almost crazed before his expression schools and he straightens. His smile, though, remains too sharp. “Worth every last penny,” he murmurs slowly, almost as if he’s speaking to himself even as he’s staring Dick in the eyes. 

“...Glad to be of service.”

Luthor barks out a loud laugh, gaze never leaving Dick’s as he leans forward. “Service, indeed. You can’t begin to imagine how devastating a simple crystal could be in the wrong hands.” He leans back in his chair, steepling his hands as his teeth flash with another smile. “Now. We’ve gotten the official business out of the way. Tell me all about your most recent escapades, Agent 37. I want to hear everything.” 

And Dick obliges, only hesitating when he gets to the most recent mission, admitting, “...There was a man at the gala. He recognized me.”

“Oh, I doubt that, Richard. Your Hypnos, you forget.”

“I didn’t have them switched on. It would have been conspicuous; I erased it all from his memory as soon as it was done, but before I did, he...called me by my name. Like he knew me or something.”

“I suppose it’s possible he was a counter-agent you encountered on a previous mission,” murmurs Luthor after a long moment, eyes flicking down in careful thought. He doesn’t look pleased. “I can’t say I was privy to the details of every person you encountered in our years together, but perhaps I can be of some assistance. I still know enough to identify some of the more notable ones.”

“6’3, 215 pounds, mid-forties, Caucasian, black hair, blue eyes, muscular build, northeastern US accent,” Dick rattles off immediately. Luthor blinks. There’s a beat, and Dick belatedly tacks on, “Scar under his right eye.”

“...It seems you got quite the look at him after all.”

“Only for a couple seconds.”

“Yet you retained all of that.” Lex catches Dick’s gaze carefully, tilting his chin. “And you didn’t recognize him?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“No...No. I suppose you wouldn’t, would you? That is the nature of amnesia. I can’t tell you much about this mystery man either. However, I might caution you not to trust someone simply because they know a great deal about you or even because they feel ‘familiar.’ Even if you suddenly ‘remember’ them. You yourself are in the business of lies and hypnosis, mindgames and memory manipulation. You know better than most how fragile a mind can be.”

Dick squints down at his coffee. “You make it sound like I can’t trust anyone.”

“That’s because you can’t trust anyone . I’m an exception, of course: I care about you, Richard. I do know you. But you’d be hard pressed to find anyone else of our moral uprightitude in our—in your —line of work. The world is made of lies and little else.”

Dick thinks about Ninel Dubkov, who only wanted someone to care about him. Dick had swung an arm around his shoulder, looked him in the eye, and made him truly believe that they were best friends. Ninel would have done anything for him. Ninel had trusted him. That had been a mistake. And that makes Dick feel filthy on the inside. Almost as filthy as the idea of having absolutely no one to turn to or trust. 

“Not in my line of work,” Dick echoes in a tight murmur, gripping the handle of his coffee mug. 

Lex’s answering look is nearly sympathetic. Nearly.

—

Five minutes after Luthor leaves the cafe, Dick hitches a ride in the copter. Tiger doesn’t spare him a single glance until they’re nearly back to St. Hadrian’s. But Luthor’s words won’t leave him.  “I can trust you, right?” Dick asks when they’re back in British airspace. “I mean, you can trust me. We’re partners.”

Tiger’s emerald green eyes flick over to his slowly, not at all unlike the calculated, languid glance of a big cat. 

“I,” murmurs Tiger after a long beat, and Dick leans in eagerly, “will kill you if you continue to ask idiotic questions.”

Dick leans right back, scoffing, and wraps his arms around himself in the seat. So that’s that then.

But later that night back at base, when he stands with a shoulder pressed against the doorframe silently watching Tiger pummel a boxing bag in the gym, Tiger doesn’t tell him to leave. Dick came here to ask the question again, but for some reason, he can’t find the voice to say it. He just watches as a sheen grows on Tiger’s forehead and the bag eventually swings off its hook and tears. Sand trickles out of it in a hush.

Only then with the bag out of the way does Tiger seem to realize Dick was there, startling. Dick hadn’t realized he’d been that quiet. Their eyes meet. 

There’s a long beat. Dick wets his lips, throat suddenly dry. 

Maybe Dick’s been treating this too much like it was with Helena. Too joking, too playful, too annoying right off the bat. Tiger’s different. Quieter. Rougher. Probably still resentful of Dick’s role in Alia’s death. Just...different. 

“Hey,” Dick murmurs finally, nevermind that he’s already got Tiger’s attention. It sounds loud in the charged, silent stillness between them. “...You want to spar?” 

And that is the first smile Dick ever wins out of Tiger—a quick, rugged flash of sharp teeth. It’s not the last either. It’s not quite fondness or friendship yet, and it’s certainly not trust. But if the promise of getting to beat Dick up is the first step there, then, well...Dick can live with that. 

-

(“What. What is this.”

“Sheer pira.”

“No.”

“Yes?”

Tiger’s face contorts with disgust as he removes a white bar from the plastic bag Dick dropped on his desk, holding it only with his fingertips. “This is not sheer pira. I do not know what this is.”

“It’s sheer pira,” Dick insists. “The lady I got it from said it was one of her best batches.”

“Why would you buy goods from a clearly demented woman.”

Dick fakes an offended look, letting his jaw hang incredulously even as a smile tugs at the corners of his mouth.  “Hey, I was just trying to do something nice for you. I can take it back if you really don’t want it.” He reaches for the bag.

Tiger slaps his hand away, hastily moving it to the other corner of the desk so it’s out of Dick’s reach. He scowls. “No. That is not necessary.”

Dick touches his tongue to a canine as he fights a smug smile, concealing it with a cough. He leans against the desk and raises his hands in admission. “All right.” He lingers a second more. If Tiger were Helena, he’d stay and annoy her and steal her pens. But he’s not, so Dick gently pats his shoulder and drags himself away. 

The next night, on his nightstand, Dick finds a small stack wrapped in baking parchment. 

When he opens it up, the smell of cardamom and rosewater hits him and fills the dark, empty room. Dick half-smiles to himself. He lifts up one of the bars—it does look different from what he had bought, softer and thinner and finely dusted with green pistachio. 

The taste is sweet. He imagines it in the hands of a much smaller Tiger growing up in Kandahar, maybe the Tiger Prince of Kandahar back then, and laughs quietly. He carefully rewraps the remaining sheer pira, sets them to the side, and tries unsuccessfully to think of an unobtrusive, unawkward way to tell Tiger tomorrow, Thanks for trusting me with this part of you, or something. 

He doesn’t ever figure out a good way, so he never says it. But he thinks he doesn’t have to.)

-

Four months later.

-

Bruce.

The dirt shoveled over Dick’s coffin has long been overtaken by brilliant green, perfectly maintained grass. It’s been one year today. 

Bruce stands awkwardly in front of the gravestone, fingers flexing in the pockets of his peacoat, which billows around his knees in the wind. He’s trying to speak. He just isn’t very good at it. 

Through all of this, with everything, Bruce has been trying. He just hasn’t been successful. He knows he is losing his way. His work at night has gotten sloppier, darker, more violent. Sometimes, at least. Some nights, he wants to rip out every last string of nerve in every criminal’s body. Others, his body feels so tired and weighed down that he can barely throw a punch. 

“I miss you,” Bruce manages finally. It is gruff and embarrassed, and Bruce is ashamed of that fact. Even when Dick is dead, he still can’t manage to— “I’ve been listening to the old recordings from your cases...your voice.” Pause. “It’s so quiet. It’s so quiet without you. I keep remembering when you were younger. You used to just—talk. When you moved out, I missed that because it was quiet.” Bruce’s throat hardens. “It was too quiet.”

He should talk next about Damian’s excellent grades. He should mention Barbara’s new job or Alfred’s latest recipe. Dick would probably like to know about that far more than about Bruce’s grief. But Bruce can’t bring himself to say any of it. 

There is no point to this anyway. Dick is gone. Bruce is talking to nobody. Bruce is talking to hardened calcium and rotted flesh under a meter of dirt and fresh grass. Not Dick Grayson. 

He doesn’t even want to speak. He just wants to listen to Dick again. To listen to constant chatter and teasing and jokes at Bruce’s expense. 

But listening to tinny, years-old recordings of a sleep-deprived voice think aloud about the motives for a particular murder or burglary are as close as he will ever get again. 

--

Dick. 

The mission’s in Gotham, which wouldn’t mean anything to Dick if not for the furtive, irritating glances Tiger keeps throwing his way every second they’re in the city. 

They’re in a hotel room, and Dick is sitting silently on the bed with his arms wrapped around his knees while he eats a candybar when Tiger does it for the fifth time in under an hour. That’s when Dick cracks. “What?”

Tiger abruptly looks away from Dick, glaring down at the gun he is polishing instead. “Hn.” He grunts. “Nothing.”

“It could not more clearly not be nothing.”

Tiger responds with silence. Dick frowns, trying to resign himself to 32 more hours of this before they can get back to St. Hadrian’s. He doesn’t even know why, exactly, it’s getting under his skin so much. 

It’s not like they haven’t been getting along recently. They’ve been getting on great for the past couple of months, have felt like real partners for a while now. There’s an affection to their banter, a genuine friendship, even if Tiger wouldn’t be caught dead admitting it. 

Maybe it’s that Dick isn’t used to Tiger being the annoying one. But he just can’t quite put a finger on just what he finds so annoying about Tiger simply staring at him. 

At least, not until he reopens his eyes after their exchange to see Tiger no longer polishing his gun but instead staring at Dick again. That’s when Dick realizes what exactly the problem is: 

Tiger’s looking at him as if he knows something Dick doesn’t. 

And that angers him. More than it probably should. Dick throws the chocolate bar on the nightstand and yanks on a jacket with more force than strictly necessary. 

“I’m getting some air,” Dick snaps, and Tiger immediately stands, eyes narrowing. The air seems to shift, suddenly thick with tension.

“No.”

Dick bristles. “...‘No?’”

“No. That is a terrible idea. Gotham is full of vigilantes at this hour, and we must be prepared the second the target arrives in—”

“Then you call me, and I’ll be there,” Dick says lowly, meeting Tiger’s green eyes,  “but we’re not going to pretend you get to tell me what I can and can’t do, Tiger.”

Tiger’s mouth snaps shut, expression unreadable as they stare at each other in hard, dark silence. 

Then Dick leaves, slamming the door behind him. For a second, he presses his back against the wooden door, head falling back to knock hard against it as his eyes screw shut tightly. 

It feels like he let himself slip somehow. Like he let a mask that he didn’t even realize he was wearing drop. His fingers twitch with pent-up energy, and another wave of it hits him, and he doesn't understand. Why is he so angry? Why is he so, so angry? 

He lets out a long breath, slowly drawing himself back up. All right, he thinks as he steps out into the city’s night air, trying to steady himself. Trying to calm down. Night out on the town.

It doesn’t work. The anger doesn’t fade away.

It’s like Gotham only makes it worse. 

-

Gotham is where his parents died. That has to be why it makes him so angry. That’s why.

But there’s another feeling clinging to him, too, as he walks through the dark streets and crowds. Dick doesn’t often feel out of place—he’s too good at fitting in and making people want him back—but he does now, walking with nowhere to go. 

There’re hands that grab at him as he passes a line outside a club, faces that flash crooked smiles at him, and people that notice him. He’s not blind. But there’s a loneliness that swallows him as he makes his way through them. It’s listless, making his mouth bitter. Seeing people out with their friends and their families, people stumbling around drunk out of their minds holding onto someone’s arms as they try to catch a cab home. 

Dick doesn’t have any place to go—not a destination in Gotham to walk to right now, but for the first time, he realizes that he doesn’t have a home either. 

Probably hasn’t since his parents died, but he doesn’t remember even that. No memories to his name. All he has is...what? A job working undercover for Lex Luthor? A private, bare room at St. Hadrian’s? Tiger and Helena?

That thought makes the bitterness lessen, if only a little. His lips turn. Frequently, she had said firmly when she became director. We’ll still be seeing each other frequently. 

He bites the inside of his cheek, eyes suddenly prickling. How did he do it before? In his past life, like Helena always called it? How had he done it without people? Without even one person? 

Had he been even more alone before Spyral? How had he survived? 

He’s broken out of his thoughts when the comm clicks to life in his ear, and he inhales sharply. It’s probably for the best that their mark’s arrived; it breaks Dick out of his pity party. “Time?” he asks. 

Tiger hums low in affirmation, and it even sounds a little like an apology. 

Dick softens, mouth twisting. The knots in his chest loosen a fraction. “...You miss me while I was gone?” he teases gently after a second, because it’s basically tradition at this point. He picks up his step, heading to the warehouse by the docks they’re supposed to find. Gladius operatives stole a drive from Spyral that they were supposedly meeting to sell to one Roman Sionis, and they’re here to take it back. 

Tiger hesitates. “No.”

Dick grins to himself, taking another deep breath as he switches on his Hypnos. Maybe he isn’t as alone as he thought. 

“Race you there, big guy.”

-

Tim. 

The thing is, Tim would recognize it anywhere. 

The somersault, four precise twists. 

When he catches Hood stiffen beside him, he knows he’s not just imagining things. 

“Dick?”

Dick.

The thumbdrive digs into Dick’s palm. “Extraction would be great any old time now, T,” he murmurs, turning tightly around yet another corner.

Whatever Tiger replies over the comms is drowned out by one of the capes that’s chasing him yelling, “Stop!”

Which, you know. If this is how vigilantism is done in Gotham, then Dick is severely unimpressed. No wonder Gotham’s the way it is. Or maybe Gotham actually is full of a wonderful, rare breed of criminals that’ll stop just because someone in a mask asks them to— Dick’ s not exactly qualified to say.

Either way, the ridiculousness of the command makes him smile, tongue between his teeth, as he darts around a shipping container. 

“Nightwing, stop!”

Dick raises an interested brow to himself at the name, touches a finger to his earpiece. “How’s that evac looking, Tony?”

“Don’t call me that,” Tiger snaps immediately. “500 feet to your left by the blue shipments. And don’t stop. The red one’s gaining on you.”

“Which red one?” Dick scoffs, glancing back.

The one with the hood, turns out. Who’s also the one that’s been doing most of the yelling. About 200 pounds of hard muscle and probably another 40 of kevlar and firearms. Dick rolls his eyes and cuts into a sprint that someone that heavy couldn’t possibly match—hears the guy grunt in frustration, and then try one more time, angrily, and almost desperately, “Dick, stop!”

And Dick does what he normally does. Which is to say, of course, the opposite of what Tiger tells him to do. 

He stiffens mid-run, the sound of his name in that voice ricocheting through his head. 

And then— 

He stops. Something pricks his neck.

-

Tim.

“You drugged him?”

“No,” Jason denies vehemently as Tim catches up, shaking his head, “I just—heavily tranqed him. That’s different. Plus, he’d already hesitated and started to turn around.”

They finally come up on the prone body, and Tim sucks in a sharp breath when he nudges the form with his foot, exposing the man’s face. 

His lack thereof.  

In the place where his face should be, there’s a swirl. Tim exchanges a look with Jason as he bends down. “I saw it,” Tim insists, brows furrowing. “He did a quad. He moved like Dick.”

And except for the missing face, he looks like Dick, too. His hair’s shorter, only grown out on the top and clipped on the sides, but a familiar black. Right skin tone. Tim hesitates, and grabs for the man’s wrist. 

Sure enough, there’s a faded scar in the palmspace between the wrist and the thumb, where Dick had once been grazed by a thug’s pocketknife. 

Jason exhales sharply. Tim can hear his breathing pick up, but Jason doesn’t say anything. Tim doesn’t either.

Tim lets his thumb slip down Dick’s wrist and rest on his pulse. He swallows, looks back up at Jason. 

“Get the car,” he murmurs, strained.

The ride back to the cave is tense. Tim sits in the back with the body and tries to think of how to phrase this for the others. Hi, everyone. I think the person we buried is still alive. I think he’s out cold in my lap right now. He tries to think of how they’ll react. Babs? Damian? Bruce? 

God, Bruce is going to flip. 

Tim is flipping right now. But then, thinking of Bruce makes Tim’s thumb falter over the comm in his hand before he activates it. 

What if—what if they’re wrong about this being Dick? This guy—this body —sure, maybe it could be his brother, Tim feels it, but how is that even possible? It isn’t. It can’t be. And if Tim drags the shovel out and breaks the grass, undigs that grave, exhumes the awfulness of this loss all over again just for it to not be borne out…

Could Bruce withstand that? Survive that? 

Could Tim survive being the one to have given him false hope just to crush him all over again? 

Slowly, Tim tucks the comm away, and grips his knees instead. They’ll have to make sure. Run tests back at the cave, a full body scan, and handcuff Dick (or not-Dick, as it stands) in the meanwhile. Then they’ll tell Bruce. 

Tim’s mouth is dry, but he can’t stop the question that breaks out of his mouth in a rasp. He looks up. “How is this even possible?”

Jason doesn’t answer. From the backseat, Tim can’t even see his face. But he sees Jason’s hands. They tighten around the steering wheel. 

—

Jason.

30 minutes later in the cave, Tim drops the tablet in Jason’s lap. Jason stares down at it. 

Then he picks it up. He scrolls through the lab results without a word, reading each page carefully and slowly. 

“Would you say something?” Tim asks quietly. 

Jason doesn’t respond, doesn’t look up. He just keeps reading the report. When he’s finally done, he clicks the tablet off, setting it to the side, and stares blankly at Tim, whose jaw works.

“This isn’t the time to pull a Bruce, Jason. Can you say something? Literally anything. I feel like I’m the only one going off the edge and you’re—”

“Are you surprised?” Jason interrupts, scrunching up his eyes. “Does this surprise you?”

Tim’s features set in disbelief. “Yeah, Jason,” Tim hisses, “Yeah, Jason, I am! I’m surprised our brother’s alive. I’m surprised because we saw him die. I helped carry his coffin. And I’m surprised that you don’t even care!”

Jason stands. They’re nose to nose—or would be, if Jason didn’t have about eight inches on Tim. 

“You think I don’t care,” Jason repeats, low. 

Tim’s glare wavers. There’s a beat, and Jason shuts his eyes, reopens them. Relents, and raises his eyebrows, huffing. 

“You weren’t surprised either,” says Jason after what feels like a long time. “I was talking about the DNA results. You didn’t need them. You knew it was him by the time you saw the quad.”

Slowly, not all at once, Tim’s shoulders slump. He steps back, glancing toward the containment cell where Dick Grayson is bound and unconscious. “I just don’t know how this is even possible. I saw the body. We buried the body. He was dead.”

Jason bites back a few choice comments about deadness. Instead, he says, “Think it has anything to do with the tech we pulled out of him?”

Their gazes flicker to the little steel pieces on a table near the body scan machine. Mechanical implants behind Dick’s eyes, alongside a comm, a couple weapons, and a tracker they found on his person. 

“I don’t know. I don’t know what he was doing. I don’t know why he was running from us. He had to have seen that it was us.”

“Bodysnatching?”

“God,” sighs Tim, digging his palms into his eyes.

“There’s also blackmail. Brainwashing’s a distinct possibility.”

“I take it back. I should never have asked you to speak.” Tim quiets. “How are we supposed to tell Bruce?”

“Maybe Dick can tell him himself once he wakes up. Assuming he’s normal and not murderous and still likes us.”

They glance at the body again, taking in the sight of Dick’s real face through the glass, unencumbered by the swirling effect the mechanical implants had caused. It’s gentle in sleep, and familiar, the same as it ever was. 

The sight of it makes Jason’s chest hurt, as if he held his breath underwater too long. He bites the inside of his cheek hard. It splits and bleeds. 

Sorry I tranqed you, Jason will tell Dick when he wakes up, and clap him hard on the shoulder but make it last just long enough that it’ll be possible for Dick to trap him in a hard hug. The kind of hug that sways. Yeah. Jason swallows thickly. That’ll be nice. Sorry I didn’t do it sooner, I mean. 

It’s only because Jason happens to guiltily avert his gaze from Dick’s face that he turns in time to see the tray fall, the porcelain clatter to the ground and shatter. 

Jason’s gaze slowly slides up from the white shards on the cave floor to the thin, white-gloved figure coming down the stairs.

Alfred’s eyes fly between the body in the interrogation room and Jason in horror. 

“We were—” Tim scrambles up, “We were going to wait to tell everybody until—we wanted to make sure that the results—”  

“It’s him,” Jason interrupts, and the cave falls silent. “It’s him.”

—

—

—

Dick. 

Dick wakes up, and he immediately knows where he is. It’s an interrogation room. Probably in the famed Batcave. 

There are handcuffs around his wrists. Good ones. Sure. But Dick’s Dick. He doesn’t break them off quite yet, though—it’s better to let the people who’ve got him think that they can keep him for now. 

Bringing his knees up to his chin to prop his socked feet on the edge of the table, he takes stock. Gun’s gone, knives and comm, too. Shoes gone, so no From Russia With Love -ing the blade in his sole. 

There’s also a strange dryness to his eyes that’s almost unfamiliar after so many months with the implants: Even his Hypnos have been removed. That’s deeply unsettling—they’re very specifically designed to be hard to remove.   

But fine. He’s charming enough on his own. 

So when the opposite wall swings open to reveal three figures of varying heights, he smiles. His good smile, the familiar one. The kind that makes Dr. Netz pinch his cheek and makes Tiger grumble—the kind that’s gotten him into and out of dangerous places more times than he can count. 

Here’s what he expects. He expects one of them—two are capes, Red Hood and Red Robin, who the briefing files mentioned and who chased him earlier tonight, but the third’s old, unknown, and bare-faced, dressed in a three-piece—to soften, maybe, or shift. Figures he can pick out the one who looks most affected and move them to pity him enough to let him go in a little while. Charm them, or something. (That, or he can take them out and escape on his own. He tugs surreptitiously on the handcuffs again. That would probably take less time.)   

But what he doesn’t expect is the way relief ripples over their shoulders. 

“...Hey, there,” Dick says carefully, still smiling, and he definitely doesn’t expect the way they smile back. The old one and the short one, at least, whose faces he can actually see. 

“Dick,” breathes Red Robin, starting forward. His grin is so big it makes his face look crooked, his mask lenses scrunched, shoulders slumped. 

Dick’s tongue touches his canine, but he doesn’t let his smile falter, tilting his head instead and letting it widen in an affectation of soft fondness instead. He’ll play along, as long as they keep revealing important things like that: So they’ve got his gun, Hypnos, and his real name. But then again, Hood called him Dick back at the docks, too. 

How do they know?

Did he tangle with the Bats some time before he woke up with nothing but debt in his memory bank last year? They look relieved to be seeing him, and that implies a more intimate—and more friendly—connection than just opponents. Was he undercover inside of Gotham, get under their skin somehow and get extracted without leaving them the wiser? 

He searches their faces and body language for some clue, but, wow, Dick’s never seen signals so mixed. There’s surprise, the kind that’s too much and makes you want to cry, there’s relief, joy, disbelief, affection, confusion, vulnerability, and is that even anger in Hood's shoulders?   

“Guilty as charged.” He catches the short one’s eye and smiles again with his teeth, then winds his bound hands over his head so they rest on the table instead of behind him. “Can I ask why I’m all tied up?”

“Can I ask how you’re back from the grave?” counters Hood roughly. 

His helmet’s modulator makes it hard to tell, but there’s something tight in his voice—an emotion, maybe not anger after all, that he’s trying to bury. Tough guy, Dick realizes, fighting a startled, endeared laugh.

But Dick doesn’t answer. Instead, he holds his wrists out with a raised brow, gesturing, but none of them makes a move to release the cuffs. Dick glances up at them appraisingly through his bangs. 

The old man’s holding something in his hands (the key to the handcuffs maybe? Something metal-ish, at least) but is the obvious lowest priority target. Dick’ll want to take down Hood first, then Red Robin. Dick sighs. 

“Grave,” he repeats at last, eyes flicking up as if trying to remember. “Grave, grave, grave. No, sorry. Doesn’t ring any bells. I think,” he says, the cuffs clicking off, “you might have the wrong guy, gentlemen.”

Hood deftly dodges Dick’s first swing, but ducking to avoid Dick’s fist only brings his chin into a collision with Dick’s knee, and then he’s down for the count. Dick grabs the edge of the table and puts his weight onto it, bringing his knees to his chest and kicking out at Red Robin’s shoulders. The kid staggers and ducks Dick’s next kick, but then there’s a sudden, sharp prick in Dick’s neck and an even more sudden darkness vignetting his vision. 

Dick slackens, slumping to the floor. Arms catch him, winding around his middle—the old man. The man drops the metal thing to the floor: a syringe, Dick realizes finally. 

Whatever they injected him with is fast and hard. 

Dick can’t move his suddenly numb limbs, but he manages to force himself to squint up at the old man, whose expression crumples and whose hand cups Dick’s cheeks with a tenderness that the sedative renders Dick unable to feel. 

Dick’s mouth drops open slackly. Even Dick’s eyes are beginning to loll against his own accord. He’s already barely conscious enough to catch what the man does next. 

 “My boy,” whispers the man, as if agonized. 

Before Dick’s eyes roll fully back into his head, they snap to meet the old man’s gentle gaze with a sharp panic, a sudden clarity that cuts through the heavier and heavier daze of the drug like a clean knife: He recognizes that accent. 

But then the blackness takes him. It takes him whole. 

—

“Do you know who I am?”

When Dick wakes up, he’s still in the interrogation room. He can tell by the smell of the cold, dry air, and he can feel resecured handcuffs on his wrist. 

His eyes flutter open. The old man from before is sitting across from him, staring intently. 

Dick doesn’t answer, squaring his jaw. He drags his dry tongue over his teeth, swallowing. The drug is still hazing his system, but he remembers the spark of recognition at the man’s voice, like a scrap of metal dragged along the ground. 

“Where are you from?” Dick asks instead of answering, voice low and quiet without the charm-pretense of earlier. “Your accent.”

“I daresay you’ve a suspicion of your own.”

“Leicestershire.”

“Loughborough,” the man agrees smoothly, but Dick can barely hear him over his own heartbeat, which is rising like a flood in his ears. 

That night at the pub with Helena on only his second mission. Glad you’re so confident you’ve mastered the regional accent without practice. You were often exposed to East Midlands English in your past life, I suppose? And Dick had faltered. He had faltered. Because he didn’t know what to say, or what to do with the familiar drumbeat of the accent in his head. 

Not that he knows what to say now, either. 

Dick keeps his face blank, and turns the question around. “I suppose you already know who I am.”

“Yes,” the man says. “You’re my—” pause. “You’re Dick Grayson. Of course I know you. I raised you myself.”

Raised me? Dick’s surprise must show on his face before he gets the chance to conceal it, because the old man’s expression flickers, like a smoldering emberpile bucketed with cold water. It’s suddenly knowing, almost grief-like.

“You don’t remember, then.”

Sometimes, Dick doesn’t even have to think about what to say. It’s an automatic thing—his brain shoots it out. Say this to make them like you. Say this to make them want you. Say this to suggest that the kingpin’s brother has been the one sabotaging the organization’s plans without calling attention to any detail that might reveal that the saboteur is actually Spyral. It makes him fast, efficient, always on-his-toes, which is part of why he’s so good at what he does at the agency. 

But now, it’s like he’s drawing a blank. Groping for carkeys that aren’t there. Gun out of ammunition. Silo empty. There’s just...nothing.  

All he can do is stare at the old man and the manifold wrinkles on his face—the absolute dread written over his expression. 

And Dick—somehow, intuitively, he wants to make that go away, he wants to make that better, there’s something in him that writhes at the idea of making this poor old man even vaguely unhappy, but he can’t seem to make his tongue cooperate with his teeth. And even if he could get his mouth to work, he wouldn’t know what to say. 

Because what would make this better? If Dick lied through his teeth and said he did remember? Maybe, but it’s got to be pretty much crystal-clear to him by now that Dick doesn’t. If Dick said sorry? Sorry for what? 

As the seconds drag on, Dick just finds himself floundering more and more, staring uselessly at the crowfeet by the man’s eyes and the folds by his mouth. His brain’s malfunctioning, but finally, somehow, it registers that if he recognizes the man’s accent, then this might just be legit. Maybe. Kind of? Definitely needs more detective work before that can be decided, though. That thought makes him straighten up, mind suddenly functional again. 

Detective work. He can do that. 

So Dick wets his lips. Catches the man’s gaze through half-eyes. “Tell me what you think I should remember.”

—

Alfred.

“Tell me what you think I should remember.”

Everything, Alfred thinks miserably, chest aching. 

Instead, he searches his mind for what Dick Grayson should remember. It feels like an impossible task all these years later, after so many other children, and it’s even harder because he doesn’t know what this boy remembers. Does Alfred talk about his siblings? About the games - Have I told you I love you yet today, young sir? No? Well, I love you today - that Dick and Alfred shared when Dick was small? Leafpiles? Afternoon teas? The griefs they unburdened only to each other when they thought Bruce was gone? 

Alfred blinks to clear the sudden sting from his eyes. 

Alfred stares at the liverspots on the back of his hands atop the table because his tongue feels too heavy to speak for the longest time. Finally, he clears his throat, ignoring the urge to ball his fists, to lurch over the table and hold Dick again, to rub at his cheek as if the memories are an artefact that can simply be unearthed and shaken free and shined back to use.  

“Your parents,” Alfred begins quietly. “Your parents were performers. Your mother called you Robin. You travelled with them in a circus—”

“Haly’s,” Dick says. 

Alfred’s heart thumps. “Yes. Yes, do you r—”

Dick’s eyes don’t show any hint of further recognition. He leans back. “The files,” he explains simply, even though that doesn’t explain anything at all. Dick’s mouth is still pursed, expression still appraising. 

Alfred slowly settles back into his seat, throat souring. What files? 

“They were murdered when they passed into Gotham, and you were taken in by Master Bruce. Bruce Wayne. I don’t know if you know his—well. He saw himself in you. He was orphaned, too.” Beat. “He trained you. You became Batman and Robin.”

Dick stares at him for a long time. In the silence, Alfred can’t help himself, distracted again. He rakes over the boy’s face: his features; the curl of his hair; the scar under his lashes; and the deep, dark, living eyes that Alfred had helped close before the second-worst funeral of his life. 

The wary eyes that are looking at him, now, like a stranger.

I used to hold your hand, Alfred wants to tell him. 

“You became family,” Alfred says instead. 

Dick draws himself up, back straightening—silent.

Alfred blinks, eyes hot. He looks away, hastening to continue before his voice finally gives.

“You became Nightwing eventually, of course. You left Robin. You left Gotham. But you are ever so loved, you’ve not even an inkling, everywhere you went, it was as if there were just more people who loved you. All your friends—and Bruce, and all of us…you can’t imagine how we felt when we thought that you were d—” 

Long beat. Alfred tries to clear his throat. It doesn’t clear.

“You were murdered in front of him—in front of Bruce.” He blinks furiously. “All of us thought you were dead,” his voice cracks, and the white-hot sheen in his eyes makes everything blurry, so he heaves in a trembling breath and smiles wetly, helplessly, splaying out his hands, “but you’re not. You’re not.”

“I’m not,” Dick agrees softly, eyes gentle. But they’re not gentle with understanding, not with affection. 

It’s indulgence. Decency. It’s kindness to an old man. 

It’s pity. It’s only pity, and a knife right through the liver. 

“Excuse me, please, sir,” Alfred whispers, rising unsteadily. “I just need a—I’ll only be a moment.”

As he staggers out of the interrogation room, his gaze hazes even more. There’s the smear of red, Timothy, and the cowhide brown of Jason beside him, and the humiliation—the shame—of being seen in such a state by Bruce’s children is almost too much to bear. But that’s when Alfred’s shoulder slams into a darkness with a familiar face, even through the film of tears. Dimly, he realizes he must have missed the sound of the car returning. 

Bruce reaches out to steady Alfred, who’s shaking.

“Alfred,” breathes Bruce, surprised. “What’s wrong?”

With the hand not keeping Alfred upright, Bruce pulls off his cowl. Through the tears, though, it doesn’t make any difference. Alfred cannot read Bruce’s bare expression: Does he know? Does he know that Dick is in there? Did the boys tell him? Or is that Alfred’s duty, too? 

Alfred can’t be sure, so he tries to swallow the tears to make room for that duty, but all he can do is smile wetly and hold out his arms again helplessly. The sobs scrabble out of his throat in wet plucks. 

“He’s alive,” Alfred whispers, cheeks aching with the smile. “He’s alive, sir.” His mouth is sticky and thick. He should say, But. He should say, He doesn’t remember us. But Alfred watches the darkness creak out of Bruce’s eyes for the first time in months and the way his mouth snaps up and vibrates like a stringbow and he can’t bring himself to be the one that crushes him again. 

Instead, he drops his trembling hand over the one gripping his shoulder and presses a kiss to Bruce’s black-covered knuckles, screwing his eyes shut. 

“He’s alive,” Alfred presses another quivering kiss as he feels a hot trail slink down his face. “Master Dick is alive. Our boy is alive.”

Bruce’s hand is under Alfred’s until abruptly, it is not. In two strides, Bruce has snapped away from him and toward the interrogation room. 

The door crushes shut behind him. 

Alfred takes a long breath, bringing his palms up to cover his eyes. 

“He doesn’t…remember us, does he?” Timothy asks finally, tentatively, after the silence has stretched itself thin. 

Alfred is glad for the hands over his eyes that prevent him from seeing the teenager’s face. 

“No.” He tries and fails to clear his throat once more. His fingers curl against his forehead, nails scraping the skin. “No, Master Timothy. He doesn’t.”

—

Bruce. 

From the second that it happened, Bruce tried to envision all the ways that his parents’ murders could have gone differently. 

When Alfred finally arrived at the police station and took Bruce in his arms, Bruce was already too caught up in trying to replay it to speak or to wrap his arms around Alfred in return. 

Bruce remembers Alfred crushing Bruce’s slack head into his shoulder as he carried him outside. He remembers looking down at the steps outside of the precinct, fingers twisting in Alfred’s coat, only really being able to see the imagined thing playing in his mind like a film: a bullet coming out of a gun, and then going right back in. Never entering his mother’s throat, his father’s side. 

But wanting desperately for it to be different had changed nothing. The bullet went out. It never came back in. 

Things can’t be reversed. They can only be stopped. 

That was the lesson that drove the last thirty years. But tonight, Alfred tells him, Dick is alive , and it feels like for once, somehow, a massacring, cosmic gun has been unfired. 

His breathing is ragged as he throws open the interrogation room door. 

“Dick,” Bruce whispers. 

The figure at the interrogation room table—dark hair, right skin color, (Bruce’s eyes dip to an exposed palm: even that familiar knifescar)—looks up, and it is him. It is him. 

“That would be m—” Dick Grayson starts to say, then falters, as soon as his eyes fall on Bruce’s face, eyes darting to Bruce’s shoulders, where the cowl is pooled, and then slowly back up. Dick’s expression freezes  

Bruce is frozen, too. What does Bruce say? What could Bruce possibly say? There’s been so many days over the last year that Bruce has had to swallow the hardness in his throat because Dick would no longer be there to hear anything he should have said—so many minutes where he’s longed to have Dick back for only a second to tell him something. But now that those seconds are somehow real and ticking by, he’s just…paralyzed. His eyes sting. 

Dick recovers first. God, he always does, and Bruce is so grateful for that that he could almost disintegrate. Dick’s eyes are still locked on Bruce, but narrowing now, and intense. His mouth opens slowly, then shuts again, briefly. Then—

“I know you,” Dick says quietly. 

Bruce’s fingers spasm, then go perfectly still at his sides. He suddenly feels cold.

“You know me,” Bruce repeats in his in-costume bass-tone, as if the cowl is suddenly back on instead of around his shoulders.

“Yeah,” Dick murmurs, still scrutinizing him. “I know you.”

But I know you implies I shouldn’t.

“You were at the gala in Spain,” Dick continues. Still with that piercing, narrowed gaze, like he can’t look away. Still in that quiet, barely-there voice, like if he speaks too loud, he’ll lose the thread of whatever he’s thinking. “With that duchess. Six months ago. I handed you my drink. You—” His mouth shuts quickly, but he doesn’t break the stare for a second, head tilting further. “You recognized me then, too.”

At that exact second, Dick gives a sharp, startling bark of laughter, widening his eyes emphatically as he rakes a hand through his dark hair, catching Bruce’s gaze wildly and not letting go. 

“This is real, isn’t it?” he asks, nose scrunching erratically. “You and—Red Hood and Red Robin and that man in the suit. You all knew me. Before. Didn’t you?”

Bruce can only stare. And then, very slowly, say, “I never saw you at any gala.”

Dick stares, features smoothing—like professionalism slipping back into place. He leans back in his chair. “You don’t remember.”

“It never happened. I would have remembered.”

 “No,” Dick says softly. “You wouldn’t.”

—

Dick.

“No,” Dick says. “You wouldn’t.”

Hypnos is a hard thing to wrap your head around, and probably it would be useful for Dick to explain it. But no words are coming to mind, not now that he’s staring at this man—not now that the man is staring back. 

Batman. The Batman. Who is exactly the figure that Dick saw in his dream, the one with the ears he told the baby in the desert about. Who is apparently Bruce Wayne, according to the old man from before. 

The man is wearing that same gutted, incredulous expression he wore when he saw Dick at that gala. Only now, there’s a newer hurt to it, too. 

It takes Dick a second longer than it should to realize that the hurt is because Dick doesn’t recognize him. 

That makes Dick’s neck prickle with hot guilt, which he quickly tries to quash, frowning. Dick doesn’t need to feel guilty for not remembering someone who’s keeping him chained up in a cave. Not to mention that it’s not like it’s his responsibility to remember anyone at all. 

But the guilt just doesn’t go away that easily: It keeps the words stalled in Dick’s suddenly dry mouth. And it’s that guilt above any other feeling that the man’s stare fills Dick with. Instinctively, Dick wants to apologize for failing to be whatever it is the man wants him to be. 

Somehow, Dick suddenly feels like he’s wearing a stranger’s skin, one that he isn’t quite big or good enough to fill. 

In the past year and a half with Spyral, Dick has gotten good at wearing other people’s skin. But he doesn’t remember ever feeling like this: as if he’s not enough. 

He doesn’t like it. 

He tries again to brush it off again, but somehow, the guilt has him speaking up instead, twisting upward in his seat, trying to abate some of the man’s hurt with a joke as if that will ease the guilt, too. 

“Don’t feel too bad, though,” Dick tries, with a weak smile, a tilt of the head, “I don’t think either of us are doing too hot at remembering things right now, huh?”

Dead silence. Then, excruciatingly slowly, Bruce Wayne’s stony expression twists. 

“You don’t,” Bruce starts and doesn’t finish. 

“No,” Dick answers honestly after a beat. “I don’t.”

“Not even,” Bruce starts to ask, and then stops. 

Dick shakes his head. “No. The…old man in here earlier, he told me I was Robin.” Dick blinks, glancing down at the table for a moment. “He said you took me in after my parents died.” His fingers drum hard on the table once, then he looks up. “Is that true?”

(Between his fingertips, Dick can almost still feel the glossy photos that Lex showed him at the breakfast table. The story Lex told him was so simple: circus, orphan, wrong crowd, wealthy benefactor. The implication of you-owe-me. 

The story made so much sense then. There was evidence. Lex had photos of him. But there were gaps, Dick realizes now. Gaps between the hard evidence that Lex had filled in for him. Gaps that Dick had just accepted blindly.)

Bruce doesn’t answer right away, still staring at Dick, mouth slightly parted. 

Then he says, “Yes.” His eyes shut, then reopen, so intense Dick wants to inch backward. He says, hushedly, quickly, “You were Robin. In the—early years. They died and I was there. You wanted to find Zucco, but they were keeping you at the Center, so you went out on your own to the Narrows. I found you there. You could have killed him, but you didn’t. Even then you understood the mission, and at their funeral, I offered for you to—I never wanted to replace your—but—” Bruce falters, features scrunching as if he’s angry with himself for not being able to articulate whatever he’s trying to say. 

It doesn’t matter, though. He’s already said enough to have Dick’s head spinning. Narrows? The Center? Zucco? Mission?

“The Narrows? The Center? What are…? I don’t—” Dick starts, then stops, trawling back over the words as if that will make something stand out and unlock everything. But there’s nothing. There’s absolutely nothing. 

Bruce is looking at him intensely, expectantly, a little desperately, as if he just laid out the clues for something profound that Dick should be able to put together, as if there are threads between the lines. 

But all Dick can do is lean back in his chair and shake his head slightly. There is a long silence. They stare at each other until Dick shakes his head slowly, one last time. 

“None of that means anything to me.” 

Bruce’s expression seals over completely. His hand spasms violently by his side, then crushes into a tight, still fist. Otherwise, he is absolutely motionless. Dick’s eyes flicker to the fist, like it’s a painting whose eyes he can catch moving if he stares long enough. But instead of any movement, for a long time, all there is that perfect, silent stillness. 

“I see,” Bruce replies, very quietly. 

Then he turns sharply. His cape thwips behind him. The door seals behind him with a muted thud. 

Dick blinks. Then he lets out a long, sharp breath, leaning back and tilting his head toward the ceiling. 

A couple of hours ago, he was eating a chocolate bar on a hotel bed, completely in the dark about every second of his past life. Now he’s a branch on the family tree of Gotham’s biggest extralegal head-trauma suppliers? Now the actual Batman is mad at Dick for not being able to make anything out of a jumbled, stilted three-sentence backstory?

“Hell of a day,” breathes Dick.

—

Jason. 

It’s not even half an hour later when Bruce finally emerges. Tim, Alfred, and Jason have all been watching the interaction play out on the live footage on the monitor, but they turn to him anyway when he steps out. 

“B,” starts Tim, reaching out, but Bruce just stalks right past him, marching across the Cave until he disappears into the elevator. A silence fills the air. 

Alfred’s mouth presses, and he starts to stand at the same time that Tim begins to step in the direction Bruce went. “I’ll go after h—”

“No,” Jason interrupts, and their heads snap toward him. “No. If the old man wants to go sulk because he got his feelings hurt, he can, but that’s not your responsibility.” He jerks his chin at the interrogation room, nose twitching when the motion jars the bruise forming there, courtesy of Dick earlier tonight. “You don’t want to know what he’s been doing since the Crime Syndicate? What he’s been doing with all that tech in his system?”

Alfred and Tim exchange a glance. 

“...He did mention a gala,” Tim says hesitantly, breaking the silence that had fallen. “In Spain. Didn’t he? He said he saw Bruce there. What was he doing at a gala?”

“And why was he at the docks tonight?” Jason gestures. “Only one way that we’re going to find out.”

Tim’s mouth twitches, and then he sets aside the tablet in his hands, moving toward the door to the interrogation room, leaving just Alfred and Jason by the monitors. Jason begins to follow, but then his gaze falls on Alfred, who hasn’t moved, as if he hasn’t been listening at all. 

Alfred looks pale and gaunt, staring at the ground. 

Jason’s mouth twists. “Alf…”

Alfred’s head snaps up, deadened expression immediately sealing over with a small, tight smile and too-bright eyes. Still, Alfred swallows visibly. “Don’t worry about me, Master Jason.”

If it were anyone else in the family, Jason would have denied that he was worried about them in the first place. 

Instead, Jason simply lets Alfred squeeze his forearm tightly when the man passes by him on the way to the interrogation room. Jason lets Alfred pull his arm up for a second.

When Alfred’s fingers slip off, Jason’s arm falls limply back to his side. 

—

Dick looks up when they open the door. He’s playing with the locks on his wrists. He sizes them up, eyes lingering on Alfred for a second longer than the others. He leans back and raises his eyebrows. “Batman,” is all he says. 

“What about him?” Jason asks coolly. 

Jason pulls out the chair on the other side of the table, sitting and crossing his arms over his chest. His heart is beating a little fast. Okay, more than a little fast, and hard. He’s more thrown than he should be by seeing Dick alive again, without a swirl face, up this close. 

When Jason speaks, Dick’s eyes fix on him and narrow. A lump hardens in Jason’s throat. Suddenly, Jason feels fourteen again, being appraised by his childhood hero after he replaced him, discomforted by the nearness and the scrutiny. Dick eventually leans back in his chair, but when he does, Jason finds himself leaning forward minutely before he stops himself. 

“He’s got a big stage presence,” Dick answers, shrugging slightly-too-casually. Something jangles, and Jason realizes it’s the cuffs they had on Dick slipping off and hitting the table. When did he—? “Serious points deducted for charisma.”

“Interrogation roomside manner isn’t one of his strengths,” Jason rumbles, and Dick grins fast and sharp, like somehow they’re best friends, head cocking again. 

“Is it one of yours?”

“Dick,” interrupts Tim, and the way Dick’s holding himself melts away into something perfectly neutral. Less magnetic. Instantly, like a tide pulling back, like a bone back in place. Suddenly, Jason realizes that that was Dick acting. It’s a performance to Dick. It’s manipulation. 

Something under Jason’s skin begins to scratch. 

“Red Robin,” mimics Dick, arching a brow. 

At the code name, Tim flinches, shoulders slowly slumping. “...You really don’t remember any of us.”

Dick’s gaze flickers to Alfred yet again so quickly that Jason just barely catches it. But then Dick’s attention is back on Tim, like he had never looked away, and there’s a strange expression on his face, his tongue between his teeth. There’s a hanging, heartbeating silence that makes Jason feel like something is about to happen. Like a wire is about to snap. A window smash.  

Nothing does. All that happens is Dick’s shoulders lowering an inch. 

“No,” Dick says at last. “I don’t remember you either.”

The silence returns. 

“I can tell you what the files say about you. I can tell you what I’ve picked up so far. But if you’re looking for anything else,” Dick trails off, letting the implication settle. 

“What about you?”

“What?”

“What about you?” Jason demands. His voice sounds rougher, harsher in the air than it did in his throat. “What the fuck can you tell us about you? You’re dead. You get fucking murked by Lex Luthor, we all mourn you, then you show up in Gotham with a gun and optical im—”

“Lex Luthor?” Dick interrupts sharply. “Lex Luthor?”

“Luthor took your life,” Alfred cuts in softly, “in front of Master Bruce. That was why we were all so sure that you were dead, child. He saw it with his own eyes.”

Dick’s eyes are dark. His jaw is taut: It works. His nose scrunches, the way it used to—does?—when he’s angry but trying to restrain it. 

“I’m not dead,” Dick says tersely. “I’ve never been dead. Not that I remember. But I guess that doesn’t mean—” he scoffs a bitter scrape-laugh, tilts his head to the ceiling. Sighs. “I work for Spyral. I work for Lex Luthor. I woke up without a memory, and he told me—he told me—”

“Luthor forced you to work for him?” Tim asks, stunned.

Dick’s nose scrunches again irritably. He screws his eyes shut. “No. I chose to. I agreed to.” 

“Did he lie to you?”

Dick cracks his eyes back open and gestures vaguely at Tim, Jason, and Alfred. “According to everything you’ve told me.”

“Then you didn’t choose to. You didn’t know any better. It wasn’t your choice.”

Dick’s eyes flash. “That’s not how —”

Jason and Tim share a glance. “Luthor must have brainwashed him into believing he worked for him,” Tim realizes aloud, slowly, brows furrowing. “He probably never even knew about us, just what Luthor told him. He didn’t choose to fake his death or work for him; he didn’t choose anything; it was all just a —”

“Hey,” Dick cuts in dangerously, eyes slitting, “you don’t know what I did or didn’t choose.”

There’s a long beat before Jason barks out a sharp, incredulous laugh. Three sets of eyes fall on him. 

Jason sneers, glancing at Tim. “Your DNA tests were a waste of time, kid. Only one person on earth is enough of a fucking control freak to get upset at people talking about the fact that he was brainwashed. ”

“Master Jason,” murmurs Alfred, eyes flashing warningly, “perhaps you’re allowing your emotions to —”

“Jason,” Dick says, sitting up. “Is that your name then? Jason?”

The fact that Dick doesn’t know his name doesn’t put a lump in Jason’s throat. Not one bit. He already knew Dick didn’t recognize him, so hearing his older brother confirm it out loud doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t.

Jason’s eyes sear, his pulse jumping.

“Yeah, that’s my fucking name. You know yours? You know yours, Richard? Or did Lex Luthor have to tell you that when you woke up, too? Were you just going around believing anything baldie told you?”

“Fuck you, Jason,” Dick snaps, eyes dark. 

“Fuck you,” Jason spits back, balling his fists. “I can’t believe I ever thought I mis—” Jason cuts off, scowling. “Fuck you,” he repeats, then slams the door to the interrogation room behind him as he leaves. 

—

Dick. 

There is a long, awkward silence after Jason slams the door. 

With Jason out of sight, the wave of anger induced by the guy’s taunting ebbs, and suddenly, Dick feels ashamed. 

He huffs a soft, self-deprecating laugh, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes and groaning. His toes curl in his socks (they still haven’t returned his shoes to him). “God,” Dick says. “God, I’m sorry. This is not a good first impression that I’m making.”

He hears the other boy shift. “More like 900th impression. Don’t worry about Jason. He was only acting up because he’s a softie on the inside. It’s just hard for him. He missed you pretty bad.” Pause. “We all did.”

Dick drags his hands down so he can see again, swallowing. He glances at the old man, Alfred, again, before his eyes dart back to Red Robin. “Not exactly a cakewalk over here either,” Dick counters weakly. “...I don’t suppose I could grab your name?”

For all that he should have been expecting it given the altercation over Jason’s name, the kid looks totally shocked that Dick doesn’t know his name. No, more than shocked. The kid looks like’s he’s been gutted. He chokes for a second before he manages, “I—Tim. It’s Tim.”

Dick musters a smile. “Hi, Tim. It’s good to meet you.”

The edges of Tim’s mouth flicker. He nods stiffly, smile too tight. 

Then another awkward silence sets in. It’s not like the silences that Dick has with Tiger or Helena. Dick feels comfortable filling those with space and chatter and teasing or letting them lie still and quiet. And those silences only happen in the first place because of who Tiger and Helena are: dark, silent types. 

This silence is different. Out of all of the Bats Dick’s met so far, Tim and Alfred seem to have the least trouble expressing themselves, which means that the reason that they’re not saying anything is that they don’t know what to say. 

And frankly? Neither does Dick. Dick’s already apparently pissed off the Batman and the Red Hood just by revealing the depth of his unknowledge. 

Okay, maybe the Jason thing is a little bit because of Dick’s temper, too, but it’s definitely not entirely on Dick. 

“...What’s the plan here exactly?” Dick asks at last, letting out a pent-up breath. “Am I free to go? Are you keeping me prisoner? If so, you’re probably going to need some better cuffs. These ones are pretty bad. And I’ve been tied up by people a lot stupider than you guys. No offense.”

Truthfully, though, Dick’s not sure that what they want matters all that much. Tiger’s undoubtedly alerted Helena that Dick dropped out of contact by this point, meaning that there’s probably an extraction planned, or that at least there’ll be a copter waiting for Dick if he escapes on his own. 

…Dick just can’t seem to figure out if he should want to escape on his own. 

His head is still spinning. Gotham. Batman. Siblings. Grandfather. Nightwing. That’s a lot on its own, and Dick hasn’t even begun to process the fact that Lex apparently killed and then manipulated him into joining Spyral, stealing Dick away from his family and his whole life. His past life. Which, well.

That puts a whole other bad taste in his mouth. 

What Bruce and Jason—and the aching hole in his memory—keep reminding Dick of is that his past life is very different from his, well, now life. The past Dick is apparently very different from now Dick. They’ve made that clear. 

What they haven’t made very clear is whether Dick should want to stay. 

He should! Right? Shouldn’t he? This is the only way Dick has to learn about who he used to be. This is his family — isn’t this exactly what he said he wanted just a couple of hours ago when he was roaming the streets of Gotham and feeling lonely? 

But the apparent difference between Dick as he was and as he is is making Dick feel like a disappointment. Feel inadequate. Feel like he’s failing, like he’s falling, like he’s constantly letting them down. Dick doesn’t know how to slot back into the role they have made up for him in their heads.

It’s one thing to make up a role on the spot — to perform. It’s another entirely to step into one that already exists, being graded on a rubric he doesn’t know the first thing about.  It makes him feel trapped. Scared to misstep. 

Besides, the welcoming committee hasn’t been very welcoming. He’s had two doors slammed in his face already. Or at least, the same door twice.

“We have rather a lot to show you,” Alfred answers at last, voice very soft. “Perhaps some of it could jog your memory. Won’t you stay?”

Alfred’s eyes are pleading and large. They’re nothing short of desperate. Dick swallows, briefly, and then gives a small nod. But he notices what Alfred said. What he didn’t say.

He very pointedly did not say: You can leave any time you want.

—

Tim holds the door to the interrogation room open for Dick.

The second that the door opens, the second Dick passes through it, he tries to think about all the ways to make it work. 

What if all of the knicknacks and gadgets and souvenirs Tim and Alfred show him dust the cobwebs off of his temporal lobe? What if Dick remembers? What if he could be the person who they wanted to come back? 

And if he couldn’t, wouldn’t Dick still be able to worm his way in with Jason and Bruce the way he did with Tiger and Helena? Dick can learn to understand them and try to give them something in him that they could use. Dick could relearn the vigilantism. Dick could learn to like the family again. Dick could learn to love them again. 

Couldn’t he? 

“Here it is,” Tim says eagerly, jarring Dick out of his thoughts. Dick blinks, stopping abruptly when he realizes Tim’s stopped moving. Well, stopped walking, really. Tim is still moving plenty; he’s bouncing up and down on his toes like a little kid, glancing back at Dick with poorly disguised hope. “Does it…?”

Dick arches a brow in question. 

Tim sort of jitters at the silence, shoulders rolling. He points ahead of him at a case among a row of glass cases with mannequins. Dick turns to look. 

The mannequin inside the case Tim is pointing at is wearing a sleek black suit with a blue v-shape. Dick stares at it for several seconds. Then his eyes slide back to Tim, who’s watching Dick closely with clear anticipation. When he doesn’t find whatever it is he’s looking for in Dick’s expression, his face falls, shoulders slumping slowly. 

Dick’s stomach twists. “Sorry.” 

“It’s —” Tim waves a hand, swallowing. “Don’t be sorry. It’s fine.” But that’s what Tim says about the big penny, too. And the computer. And the (sick) aerial setup. And the 16 other stops on their impromptu Batcave tour. 

When a half-melted candle in a silver holder doesn’t jog Dick’s memory either, Tim looks away from Dick again, turning back to the mannequin and blinking very quickly, as if he’s trying to get something out of his eyes. There’s a long beat. It’s followed by a long, long breath. 

“That was you, you know.”

“Me?”

“You. Nightwing.”

Dick startles. “This was my Nightwing suit?” He didn’t know that the suit was supposed to be his when Tim first showed it to him. 

Gingerly, Dick ghosts a hand upward, pressing his index and middle fingers gently against the glass as if to trace the blue v with his fingers. As if to feel the suit. The material looks like nomex, probably kevlar, which has a distinct feel to it. But with the case, all Dick can feel is cold glass. 

“Your latest one, at least. You made a couple different variants. Some with some yellow, especially in your Titans days. There was a red one, even. I like this one the most, though.” Pause. Then, in a very different, very small voice, Tim says, “Do you remember it now?”

Still staring at the glass pillar and the mannequin inside, all Dick can do is shake his head slowly. 

If this is him — if this was him — it’s like looking in a mirror and not seeing your reflection move with you. 

If this is him, Dick doesn’t recognize it. 

—

The older man, Alfred, told him that Dick had been Robin. As in, Batman &.  

Dick is familiar with Robin, of course—it’s an unmissable part of being a person in the modern world. Everyone knows about Robin, the spiky-haired, hooded little firebrand at Batman’s side. At least, that’s the current one, the latest in a string of many. A string that apparently began with Dick. 

It must be true. Dick must really have been Batman’s partner. 

(Still, that meeting with Lex in Corsica flashes back through his head—the sun glinting off of Lex’s head as he poured white wine into a glass, the words he said: I might caution you not to trust someone simply because they know a great deal about you or even because they feel ‘familiar.’ Even if you suddenly ‘remember’ them. You yourself are in the business of lies and hypnosis, mindgames and memory manipulation. You know better than most how fragile a mind can be. )

But if it’s true that Dick was Robin and then Nightwing—that this was his real “past life”—it still leaves the gaping questions of how and why Lex decided to lie to him, send him off to Spyral.  Not to mention the question of: What is he supposed to do now?

His fingers, still crossed tightly in his pocket, slip off of each other. Instead, his nails dig into his palms. 

“Anything yet?” Tim asks, voice small. 

Staring up at the throat of the huge dinosaur instead of at Tim, Dick shakes his head for the nth time. 

“Okay,” Tim says, also for the nth time, in a voice that only slightly betrays how not-okay he finds Dick’s continued lack of familiarity with a bat-infested cavern filled with toys. “That’s okay. Come on. Maybe upstairs’ll be better. You’ll be down here plenty later.”

Dick’s eyes narrow, and his head snaps to the side to look at Tim, frowning. “Why would I be down here plenty?”

Tim’s an older teenager—18 or 19 probably, with those just-crawling-out-of-adolescence diamond-shaped jutting elbows but a mostly grown-up voice—but at that moment, he looks like some little kid who isn’t used to getting attention and doesn’t know what to do with it when he gets it. He seems to flounder under Dick’s gaze, staring back with wide eyes like a deer in headlights. 

As they look at each other, Dick can see the second that Tim finally registers the actual question, unfreezing from the apparent shock of being looked at. 

Tim’s expression goes confused, brows furrowing as if the answer is obvious. 

“For when you get back on the streets. For when you’re Nightwing again in Gotham. No offense, but I don’t think B’s going to let you go back to Bludhaven right away. He gets sort of clingy after…things like this.” Pause. “Or maybe less clingy, per se, than…well, you know how he gets.”

No. Dick doesn’t know. That’s sort of the point. And—back on the streets? Nightwing again? Dick can’t even begin to process all of that yet, and he’s pretty damn sure he hasn’t expressed any intent to stick around. How can they just assume that he’s going to stay? To become whoever he was again?

Dick glances back over his shoulder at the costume in the glass pillar placarded Nightwing. It’s shiny, tight, and black, worn by that perfectly still gray mannequin. Dick likes the stripes running down to its fingertips, but that’s just about the only feeling it rustles up in him. That is, besides the weirdness of seeing something that you supposedly spent about half of your life in and not recognizing it at all. 

Mouth opening, he turns back again, but then he sees Tim and he shuts his mouth. 

Tim was—still is, even as Dick’s caught him in the act—staring at him. Like how those kids that don’t get attention watch everybody else and don’t realize that other people can see them staring because no one’s ever cared enough to tell them that before. What makes Dick hold back the words he was about to say is the expression on Tim’s face. 

Part incredulity, part admiration, part relief. 

Dick swallows, jaw tensing. That look — that makes Dick grossly uncomfortable. Dick hasn’t done anything to earn that. At least, not that he remembers, and that scrapes at his skin the way that it had with Tiger in that hotel room: Dick doesn’t like when other people know things he doesn’t. 

Besides, would Tim even recognize what Dick’s become? Dick has to imagine being a spy is pretty different from the whole vigilante gig. Dick spends his days lying and manipulating and not-technically-stealing-but-really-actually-functionally-stealing Kryptonite from duchesses. 

“Upstairs?” Dick says finally, keeping the tightness out of his voice. Tim nods, leading the way. 

Calm down, Dick tells himself as he goes up the stairs. Just calm down. The stairs lead to a door in a grandfather clock. Its door opens into a mansion, an expanse of dark gleaming hardwood and rugs. 

He steps out after Tim. The first floorboard out of the clock creaks under Dick’s foot. 

He sees Tim wince, shoulders rolling a little bit, like no one’s stepped there and made that sound (that mistake) in years. It certainly wasn’t where Tim had stepped when he emerged first. Tim had known better.

Dick’s nails break through the skin of his palm. 

—

Tim’s a just-barely-all-right tour guide. 

“Sorry,” Tim says, “I know I’m a terrible tour guide.”

“What, are you kidding?” Dick says. “You’re the best tour guide I’ve ever had.”

A small, pleased grin cracks Tim’s face, and he ducks his head. 

Dick runs his tongue over his stupid lying teeth. The truth is: Tim is rambling. About the crown molding, the vases, about the slight tear in the rugs (“from you and me when I was in sixth grade,” but not how or why or what they were doing). 

“I just know a lot about the house and the Waynes. I used to read all about it before I was,” Tim trails off and waves a hand vaguely. His cheeks pink. “I also read all about you. Speaking of…” Tim’s hand falls onto a doorknob, eyes flicking to Dick’s. 

“Here’s me?”

“Here’s you,” Tim says, heaving the door open. 

As Tim does, Dick’s breath catches. For all that he didn’t anticipate his “past life” being filled with vigilantism or rich men with big families, he’s wanted so badly for so long to know about his life before waking up in Lex Luthor’s guest bedroom. 

What if seeing his bedroom is different? What if it makes everything actually feel right? His childhood bedroom is different from a network of relationships that he doesn’t know how to take up space inside. Maybe this can tell Dick more about himself. 

They step into the bedroom in silence, the plush carpeting sinking under Dick’s socked feet like wet sand.

Dick’s heart sinks. 

The room is pristine. 

The centerpiece is a large, glossy circus poster above the bed: Flying Graysons. The bed itself is perfectly made, which makes sense, given that this place has an actual butler, but that makes feel the worst of all. His mouth sours. 

It’s not as if Dick doesn’t make his own bed. Whenever Helena drops into his room at St. Hadrian’s, she always points out that his room never looks slept in at all, which is itself a function of two things: Dick doesn’t sleep much , and he also has it drilled into him to tuck the corners as soon as he wakes up. 

But the corners aren’t tucked the way Dick does it. The sheets are folded so they lip the comforter, exactly the way Dick doesn’t like. It’s not his handiwork. It’s someone else’s, probably the butler’s, and that feels like just another checkmark in the list of things of his that have been scraped away without leaving a trace. 

God. Was Dick ever here at all?

Dick drags his knuckles along the sheet edge, frowning. He can feel Tim’s stare on the back of his neck like a physical weight, so he turns slightly, concealing his face as if he was distracted by the photoframe on the nightstand. He picks it up to continue the guise. 

In the photo, Dick’s squeezing a little boy by his side—a dour-looking kid with greenish eyes and a black turtleneck. Slowly, Dick squints, bringing the photo closer, then frowning again, forcing himself to not hold the frame so tightly. He tries to clear his throat casually, unsure why it’s suddenly tight. “Who is this?”

Tim peeks over his shoulder. 

“Oh. That’s Damian.”

“...Damian?” Dick tests out strangely. 

“You’re probably going to meet him really soon. We’ve been having a hard time tracking him down recently because he keeps moving and he’s worse than B is about checking in, but he’s going to go crazy once they get in contact with him to let him know that you’re not —”

Silence. 

“That you’re not dead,” Tim finishes quietly. “...Hey, Dick?”

It takes more effort than it should to put the photoframe back on the nightstand and let go, much less to make the act look casual, but finally Dick looks up. “Yeah?”

Tim shifts from one foot to the left. And for a second, Dick almost thinks Tim might surge forward and hug him. Dick’s heart thuds in his chest, anticipating. Dick’s fingers twitch hopefully. Okay, so maybe Dick was here. Maybe there’s no proof of it in his own memorybank or in his folded bedsheets, but he was here, and if they’re willing to come touch a stranger, that probably means he’s not a stranger at all, and maybe Dick can work with that. 

But then, Tim doesn’t. He doesn’t move at all. 

Instead, Tim says, “I’m glad you’re back.”

Dick is silent for a long time. 

“Yeah,” Dick says at last, softly. “...Sure.”

—

When Dick asks if he can have some time to himself, Tim hesitates.

“Come on,” Dick says. “I’m not going to go up in smoke.”

“I know,” Tim says, smiling weakly. “The others might kill me, though, if you let you go unsupervised.”

“I’ll stay right here,” Dick promises, holding up three fingers pressed together. “Scout’s honor, okay? I just — I need to process.”

“Oh. Well, I can help you process.”

“I need to process alone,” Dick corrects quickly. 

Tim sticks his hands into his hoodie pocket and shifts, clearly deliberating. He glances behind him at the door and bites his lip. He starts to open his mouth to say something, but then he pauses, frowning as a buzzing noise fills the bedroom air. He pulls a hand out of his pocket with a phone in his hand. He glances at the screen, then exhales and looks back at Dick. 

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

Tim nods, slipping the phone back inside. “I get it. But, um, Alfred just messaged that we’re going to do family breakfast at eight. So I guess I’ll be back here then to get you for that. Is that okay?”

Dick glances at the clock to the left of the bed. 07:14. 

It’s almost inconceivable that this time yesterday, Dick was throwing a duffel bag onto a hotel room bed while Tiger needled him about his bad driving. The memory makes Dick blink quickly. Everything feels like it’s turned inside out. Yesterday felt so simple, and Dick can’t help but want it back. 

“Sounds great,” Dick rasps. “Thanks. See you at eight.”

Tim hovers in the doorway for several moments before he leaves, fingers dancing around the doorjamb. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, glancing at Dick, before hs shakes his head to himself and finally draws up the nerve to leave. Dick watches the door clip shut. 

And then, finally, he’s alone.

Exhaling, Dick slumps back onto the bed, skull hitting the center of the quilt. His head bounces. 

Dick drags his hands down his face and groans. 

“What are you doing, Grayson?” he breathes. “This is what you wanted. This is exactly what you wanted. You don’t want to know where you came from? You don’t want people who cared about you?”

Just last evening, wasn’t Dick wandering around Gotham, whining about how lonely he felt? This is exactly what he wanted. 

…Isn’t it?

Dick digs the heels of his palms into his eyes. 

Eventually, he sits up. It’s pure accident that sitting up makes his gaze fall upon the photoframe beside the bed again. Dick and that boy—Damian.  

Dick’s jaw tics. He shuts his eyes and tries to scrounge up something, anything, in his memory about a Damian. But there’s absolutely nothing. 

There’s waking up in Lex Luthor’s guest bedroom. There’s Spyral. There’s Helena’s dark, clear eyes and shiny red earrings. There’s Tiger’s furtive glances and deep-in-the-throat voice. There’s just nothing before that. There’s just nothing else. 

No. 

No, that’s not completely true. That’s the most frustrating thing. There are baseless feelings. Arbitrary things, like the familiar drumbeat of Alfred’s accent or the fluidity Dick has in working with partners who, in hindsight, act a lot like the Batman. But it’s not like the memories are there and just hidden, ready to be unearthed and read as soon as someone blows the dust off. The memories aren’t there at all. It’s all gape, all chasm, all hole. All he has is the feeling around those places — instinct. The problem is: Instincts and feelings aren’t enough. They’re not nearly enough to build a life out of. 

Anyone would struggle to accept a whole life on the basis of an accent feeling familiar. 

But that doesn’t make Dick feel any less like a failure for not remembering. 

Dick sits on the bed, knees drawn up to his mouth, staring at the picture of himself and the little boy for a long time. Damian , he repeats again mentally. Damian.

Dick’s gaze slides over to the digital clock beside the frame, which reads 08:09 now. Time for breakfast. Tim must have forgotten. Or maybe he’s just trying to give Dick space. Dick grips his knees tightly. 

-

(Dick’s fourth mission with Spyral was taking down the man with guns for eyes. Dick talked him down when they were standing on a rooftop. There were two guns pointed at his chest. 

“I get it,” Dick said. “Guns make things go faster.”

The man’s guns clicked. 

“But what’s the damn rush?” Dick said.

And the man put the guns down. He lowered his hands to his sides. He did it real slow. And then, from across the rooftop, Alia had shot him right through the skull anyway. The man’s last act on the face of the earth was putting a bullet through her head in return. 

Tiger had blamed Dick for that. Tiger blamed Dick for her death—all the way up until they became partners months later. 

Dick remembers what happened in the immediate aftermath of Alia’s death. He remembers walking numbly down the hallway from the Director’s office with Helena, speckled with Alia’s blood like he was an eggshell, and getting slammed up against the wall by Tiger, who was breathing heavily through his nose. 

“You idiot,” Tiger had hissed, green eyes dark and shiny like the sea in some oil painting. “This is your fault. You think you can talk to people like that and change them? You think you can expect a man like that to —”

“He was going to come peacefully,” Dick remembers saying, with a cool detachment he didn’t feel. “He was putting down his weapons. She shouldn’t have fired.”

Tiger yanked Dick farther against the wall, seething. Dick had to stand on his tiptoes to keep his feet planted. “He was a killer! It would take someone incandescently stupid to believe that he actually bought into your pathetic little speech. You think just because you used to be a hero —”

“Agent 1,” Helena hissed suddenly, voice slicing through the hallway and silencing him instantly. “That is enough.” 

Tiger didn’t move, his face still barely an inch from Dick’s, his heaving breath hot on Dick’s cheeks. Then, slowly, he let go of Dick’s shirt, and Dick’s heels dropped back to the ground. Tiger stepped back, half-turned, and then stopped there, fists clenched. 

Dick watched, his own chest heaving. There was a long, tense silence. They stood there like magnets hovering in space, repelled by each other’s poles—but only so far, not hard enough to push each other out of sight. 

All Dick could hear was their breathing. And all Dick could think about was whose blood he was covered in. 

“...I’m sorry,” Dick said finally, and Tiger whipped back around. They caught eyes, each of them perfectly still and silent. 

Then Tiger gave a guttural snarl and threw his fist out. Instinctively, Dick caught it and twisted his wrist, and kicked him in the solar plexus, and Tiger snapped a punch upside Dick’s jaw. 

Helena broke them apart. 

Afterward, she pressed an icepack to Dick’s chin, letting her other hand curl around his knee tightly. Dick could almost feel his nerve endings jump at the touch. 

“He’s right, you know,” she said, and those same nerves shriveled. “It wasn’t your fault; he was wrong about that. But he was right that you give people too much credit. You can’t expect them to do the right thing just because you want them to so badly. You have to expect the opposite.”

All of this is to say: 

Maybe Tiger was right. Maybe it is too much to ask that people be good. That people be changeable. Maybe the way that Dick thinks things will turn out is naive. 

All of this is to say: 

Maybe, sometimes, Dick expects too much of people.)

—

But Dick does not expect Gotham’s cadre of vigilantes to be a jam-and-toast, sunshine-through-the-windows, sitdown-breakfast Norman Rockwell family. 

He isn’t expecting too much. Not of them. It’s not that Dick needs these people to be perfect. Dick doesn’t even need them to come close. All Dick wants is for things to finally click into place. To see a family — he doesn’t need a perfect one. Just one at all. Just one that Dick fits into. One that…wants him as he is. He wants one of them to reach out and touch him. 

God, Dick wants that. 

Instead. 

-

Dick steps into a yellow-tiled warzone that used to be a kitchen. The tension is so thick and crackly that the others don’t even seem to Dick in the doorway at first. In the center of the room is Jason, bent in half and clutching his face while Tim watches passively. On the other side of the kitchen amidst a mess of broken plates are three people that Dick doesn’t recognize—a furious-looking dark-haired young woman, a blonde, and a redheaded woman. The redhead is grabbing at the dark-haired girl’s balled fist, but she keeps brushing the hands grabbing her wrists off. 

“— do not ever,” she’s spitting in Jason’s direction, each word clear and carefully enunciated. The redhaired woman grabs hard at her wrist again, and the girl’s head whips around, short dark hair swaying. 

“Cassandra,” the woman scolds, and the girl yanks her arm back once more, eyes narrowing. 

“Stop,” she snaps, that same enunciating effect. “I’m not a child.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, you’re not acting like an adu…” the woman trails off when her eyes land on Dick, who’s hovering awkwardly in the doorway. 

The others follow her gaze, and the room falls dead-silent. 

“...Dick,” the redheaded woman breathes. 

“Oh, my God,” says the blonde girl, leaning forward over the counter, making some of the broken plate shards grind loudly against each other as they jostle. One falls off the counter and shatters into even smaller pieces. Dick tries not to wince. “I thought Tim was lying, but you’re really back! Bruce can stop being depressed now!” She pauses. “Not that, like. I mean, I know that’s not how depression works -works. But you know what I mean.”

Dick glances between the women and Tim and Jason. He steps slightly away from the newcomers, toward Tim and Jason’s side. “...You all right, man?” 

Jason finally stands upright, holding his cheek as he glares at the girl, eyes dark and burning.  “Hn.” He growls, and then spits to the side. It comes out pink. “Peachy.”

“He’ll be fine,” Tim says. “Probably.” He glances at the others then at Dick, smiling tentatively. “Uh, Dick, that’s Steph, the one with the purple jacket. That’s Cass, and then Babs is over there. Er, Barbara. But you always call her Babs. But…everyone else does, too, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“Not eeeeveryone. I’ve never heard Bruce call her Babs,” the blonde one interrupts. Then she frowns, and turns to Barbara. “Has he?”

There’s a silence until Barbara shakes her head, clears her throat, and shifts in her wheelchair. “No,” she manages at last, faintly. “He hasn’t.”

“I’ve never heard it from Alfred either,” Steph says, ticking off two fingers and holding them up. “Hey, where are Alfred and Bruce?” 

But nobody besides Dick really seems to pay attention to Steph. They’re all just staring at Dick expectantly. As if they’re waiting. As if there was a cue that Dick somehow missed. 

With a sinking feeling, Dick realizes that they’re waiting for The Big Moment: They’re waiting for Dick to go, ‘Oh,’ and remember them, just because they’re all gathered here, as if the full force of them would be enough to jog his memory. 

An awkward silence flatlines. 

“There are a lot of you guys, huh?” Dick says weakly instead. 

That is the wrong thing to say. Dick realizes it immediately. It’s like he’s not supposed to actually acknowledge the fact that he doesn’t remember them. Tim looks like he’s been burned, Barbara’s eyes flash, and Cass tilts her head sharply, frowning deeply. 

Steph’s eyes flick around the room awkwardly before falling back on Dick and doing her best to fill the silence. 

“More, actually, if you count Dami. Damian. Damian Wayne. The Dames-ster.” Involuntarily, Dick straightens, then quickly forces himself to relax before anyone can notice. “Does Damian know you’re back yet? Dick, you and him were,” Steph intertwines her middle and index finger. “I was Batgirling back when you guys were Batman and Robin.”

Dick blinks. 

“When I was what?”

“You were Batman. You were also Nightwing. And Robin. And, Cass, didn’t you say that Dick did a weird ‘Crutches’ stint undercover with the mob or something? Anyway. Killer CV. You sort of set an unattainable standard for all of the rest of us. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

Dick leans against the doorframe, and slowly shakes his head. “No one told me anything,” he says softly. 

 —

Alfred. 

“Master Bruce? Did you come back down here? I’m not going to scold you for running away earlier, although that was very rude indeed. But I am expecting you to join us upstairs for breakfast. I’m to begin making it as soon as I…Master Bruce?”

And I’ll kill you—

“Master Bruce?”

45 seconds. If the bomb doesn’t stop, Batman, it won’t just be him who dies. We all will. I’m making an executive decision. Luthor! Luthor, you hurt him and I’ll kill you—45 seconds. If the bomb doesn’t stop, Batman, it won’t just be him who dies. We all will. I’m making an executive decision. Luthor! Luthor, you hurt him and I’ll kill you—45 seconds. If the bomb doesn— 

Slipping silently down the last of the steps, Alfred nears and presses pause. The looped recording from the cowl of the moments before Dick died freezes on the computer monitor. Bruce’s head jerks up, his pale, bristled face greeting Alfred with a scowl. “Alfred—”

“This isn’t helping anyone, Master Bruce.” 

Bruce’s scowl deepens. 

“I need to know how he’s alive. I need to know how Luthor —”

“You’re missing the point. Abandon the hows for now. Your child is alive, and he is upstairs at this very moment. I watched you torment yourself over him for more than a year now. I won’t watch you torment yourself anymore, not when you don’t have to. Why can’t you allow yourself to enjoy this miracle?”

Very slowly, Bruce’s expression unlines. The anger disappears, but it’s replaced with something Alfred can’t quite name. Bruce shuts his eyes, exhaling sharply, and his fingers drag against console, curling. 

“He doesn’t remember us.”

Alfred shifts. “No,” he agrees stiffly. “No. But that will—”

“Alfred,” Bruce says, “he doesn’t remember me.”

The words lodge in Alfred’s throat. 

“Master Wayne…”

“I’m not his father, Alfred,” Bruce hushes, fists clenching. “Not — not like that. The only ties I have to him are whatever he thinks of them. The only ties I have to him depend on him knowing that I —” Bruce shakes his head quickly, raggedly. “I relied so much on him knowing. He always seemed to know. And if he doesn’t even remember, if he doesn’t even know—”

Bruce stops short, his chin tilted up by Alfred’s fingers as Alfred forces him to meet his gaze. Bruce’s reopened eyes are dark; they’re desperate. 

“He’ll remember,” Alfred promises. “It will just take some time.”

“And if he doesn’t? If he never remembers? If he never knows how much that I —?”

“Then he’ll learn,” Alfred says softly, but firmly, “because you’ll show him.”

He feels Bruce swallow thickly under his fingertips, and Alfred slowly drops his fingers away, letting his hand fall back to his side. He clears his throat. 

“Now. Come upstairs. I believe Master Timothy invited some guests for breakfast.” 

—

Dick himself is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the frame when they arrive. Walking next to him, Alfred can sense Bruce’s entire body stiffening as they see Dick’s back while they approach the kitchen. Both Alfred and Bruce walk without noise, but, like he has a sixth sense, Dick turns around as soon as they step foot into the long hallway anyway, gaze locking on theirs. 

Bruce stops entirely, a few feet from the entrance, stiffening. Dick’s eyes narrow. For a long, tense moment, they stare silently at each other. Then, almost imperceptibly, something in Bruce’s stance shifts. 

“Master Bruce,” Alfred warns under his breath. 

“I’ll be at the cemetery,” Bruce hushes, leaving.

Bruce has barely turned his heel before Dick is already darting after him, passing Alfred in the hallway with a strange, determined look. 

“Oh, oh, I — Master Dick,” Alfred calls, and the young man stops, looking back. Alfred raises his hands a little desperately. Alfred tries for a tentative smile, but it wavers. “I apologize for the delay, but breakfast is just a few moments away, I assure you. I was intending to make pancakes with blueberries — your favorite. I used to make them for you every day when you were small. You used to love helping me make them. In fact, when you first moved away, I gave you the recipe, but you said it wasn’t the same making them on your own. I’d love to make them again for you.”

Fingers tapping erratically at his thigh, Dick opens his mouth and closes it, glancing down the end of the hall where Bruce just disappeared. Then his mouth presses in resolve, he wets his lips briefly as if steeling himself to say something, and he turns back to Alfred. 

“Thank you,” Dick says a little hastily. “You’re really, really kind, but you don’t have to do the ‘master’ thing with me. And I’m not really a breakfast person, so I’ll be fine, but thank you again. I’m just going to…” Dick trails off, nodding at the direction Bruce went, and then he disappears, too, leaving Alfred alone in the hallway. 

Alfred’s outstretched hands fall limply back to his sides. 

The other children are watching in silence from inside the kitchen. 

“...He really forgot everything,” Stephanie says. “He didn’t even want breakfast.”

Barbara shakes her head. “He’s still Dick.”

At that, Cassandra’s eyes flicker doubtfully, accidentally meeting Alfred’s briefly before she looks away. Something ice-cold settles in Alfred’s stomach. 

—

Bruce. 

Bruce grips the shovel he took from the groundsmen’s shed, holding it lateral to the ground behind the manor. He can’t seem to bring himself to plunge it into the dirt. 

Richard John Grayson

Brother, Son, Friend

It is a strange thing. It is many strange things. 

Bruce has stood in front of this grave so many times before. 

It shouldn’t be easier to talk to a slab of engraved marble than a real person. It shouldn’t be that a slab of engraved marble exists at all when Dick was apparently alive this whole time. It shouldn’t be that Bruce didn’t know that Dick was alive. 

It shouldn’t be that things are the way that they are. 

There is a huge, hard lump in Bruce’s throat. 

“You don’t remember me,” Bruce tells the gravestone thickly as the heat beats down on the back of his neck. “I’m nothing to you now.”

The gravestone doesn’t reply. 

The wooden handle of the shovel creaks as Bruce’s grip tightens. He stares at the smudge of dirt over the firsgt letter R. And then Bruce stabs the shovel into the earth and begins digging, crashing the blade into the ground with every ounce of force he can. 

He doesn’t realize that someone is watching him shovel until he stops. He stops because the shovel plunges into something hard and solid, making something crack. Bruce grunts loudly. Sweat beads down his neck as he stares down at the hole, panting in the quiet air. Then.

“You buried a body?” a voice says. Bruce does not startle, but it’s a near-thing. 

Instead, Bruce only stiffens. He stands there, the tip of the shovel still scraping against the coffin, his feet sinking slightly in the loose silt. Bruce grunts. 

Dick would respond to that. Dick would say something that would make the thing in Bruce’s chest hurt less. Dick would be able to decode exactly what Bruce meant by the smallest noise. 

But instead, this Dick Grayson just moves into his line of vision, glancing briefly down at the deep, dark hole that Bruce is standing in before he looks back up at Bruce. He keeps looking at him as if he’s waiting for Bruce to answer. And that is when the reality of it sinks in: The Dick he knew, Dick as he once was, is still, for all intents and purposes, dead. 

“We buried him,” Bruce says. 

Him : the Dick who actually remembered Bruce. The Dick who knew exactly what to say and what Bruce was trying to say. 

The Dick who isn’t right in front of him, standing on the edge of the hole in the morning sunlight with his hands in his pockets and the light catching on his hair and not a memory to his name. 

“Here,” Dick says, bending, and somehow, it’s like the amnesia hasn’t taken away from at least this part of their partnership: Bruce understands exactly what Dick means. 

Still, Bruce hesitates, standing stiffly for a second before he gives in. Then they take hold of the coffin and pull it out together, and then they stare at the dark mahogany lid, splintered where Bruce’s shovel struck it. Grunting, Bruce lifts the lid. Inside is a skeleton, perfectly decayed into the perfectly fitted suit Dick was buried in. The decomposition is exactly as advanced as it should be. The rot has made the bones brown. 

There is a long moment. 

“Luthor,” Bruce says. 

“Luthor,” Dick agrees quietly. “He’s good at body doubles.” He nudges the coffin with his toe. “I’ve seen better ones, though.”

Bruce has seen better ones, too. The perfect nails on the double’s fingers give it away. Still, this exact image — Dick’s remains, Dick’s last scraps, Dick’s not-even-a-corpse — is exactly the sight that plagues Bruce’s nightmares and will forever. It is not Dick, not really, not physically. But it would have been, and somehow, emotionally, it feels like it is him after all. 

Bruce and Dick stand in silence for a long time, the warm wind blowing. The black tie of the decomposed body double’s suit flutters in a gust. It even smells like decay. 

“You resent me,” Dick says quietly, breaking the silence. “Don’t you?”

Bruce’s hand spasms. He jerks his chin to his chest hastily, surprised. He tries to cover it. 

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” Dick says. “You do. Because I’m not him. You resent me for being something different from what he was. For not remembering. I can tell.”

Bruce exhales sharply. It’s unsettling how well he knows him even now. But it’s still not the same. 

“I don’t begrudge you having your life taken away from you, D—” he stops. “I don’t begrudge you anything. I—you are significant, to me, and I—”

There is another silence, the trees rustling. 

“...I wanted you back more than I ever wanted anyone else back from the dead. More than I ever wanted anything in my entire life.”

This Dick doesn’t understand the immensity of that statement. He couldn’t possibly. 

Dick lets out a long breath, staring down at the skeleton. “But I’m not what you wanted to come back. Am I? You can’t even say my name. You can’t even look at me. I’m not him to you.”

“That’s not —”

“I get it,” Dick interrupts. Bruce goes silent once more. “I don’t think I’m him either.”

For the first time since the interrogation room, Bruce dares to look at him, really look at him, and he aches all over. Because despite it all, Bruce knows that he’s wrong. It is Dick. The hair, the eyes, the face. It’s him. The same Dick who at nine had to learn how to insert a large-bore needle into Bruce’s second intercostal space because Bruce had a tension pneumothorax after a gunshot in an alley.  The same Dick who used to fall asleep in his passenger seat. The same Dick who sat on Bruce’s counters and changed his radio stations and woke him up in the middle of the night to say his ankles hurt when he was having growing pains. 

Dick tilts his head back up so he’s staring at the sky and Bruce is staring at the long column of his throat. Dick lets out a soft sound — almost a self-deprecating laugh, but mostly a sigh. “You wanted me to be the way you remembered. But I’m different.” 

Bruce shakes his head slowly. “You’re still Dick Grayson.”

“But if you could put everything back to the way it was and restore all the memories, would you?”

Bruce shuts his eyes. 

Bruce is a psychosocial failure of a man. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know how he should answer that question. Dick may not know him anymore, but Bruce still knows Dick. This is a test, one of the ones that Bruce used to always fail because he was incapable of putting into words how much he valued Dick. Depended on Dick. Loved. 

What had driven them to opposite ends of the earth — what had shredded Batman and Robin into smithereens — was Bruce’s inability to respond correctly when Dick had tested that guardrail and asked that question. Subtly, implicitly, of course: That was the way they did everything. And that was why Bruce had thought that it was obvious. 

Dick was the most emotionally intelligent, perceptive human being Bruce had ever met. Bruce had thought Dick already knew. 

“Would you?”

Now, Bruce knows what he should say to redeem this moment. He should say that Dick being back is more than enough. 

But Bruce needs Dick. He needs Dick. Having Dick back is what he wanted more than anything. But Dick — this Dick, this in-between one who is the same person his son was and isn’t at the same time — was right. Because this Dick is different. And Bruce was never good at saying what Dick needed to hear.

Bruce answers honestly instead. 

“In an instant.”

Bruce stares at the remains as he says it. They don’t talk after that. Eventually, without a word, Dick leaves. 

Bruce grips the shovel tighter, squeezing his burning, wet eyes shut.

—

Cass. 

“Hey! Glad we found ya. We brought you pancakes,” Steph says. 

Dick glances over his shoulder. He’s sitting on a railing in the garden when Tim, Steph, and Cass find him. He flashes a small smile, and Cassandra shifts. It’s not a genuine smile. It’s…forced. Weak. 

“Uh, no, thanks. Like I said, I’m really not a breakfast person.”

Steph pauses. “I mean…you are, though. We specifically bonded over that. I like waffles, you like things with blueberries and other health-weirdo stuff. You were always like, Steph, try muesli, Steph, try my homemade gym-guy granola—”

Dick shakes his head slowly. 

“...I don’t eat breakfast. Sometimes, I’ll have an egg, but —”

“An egg?” Steph interrupts. “A solitary egg? Do you cook it with blueberries or acai or something healthy-weird?”

Dick squints, confused. “No, just raw.”

Tim and Steph exchange a look. “Dude, I don’t think you have amnesia. I think you have salmonella.”

Dick laughs faintly, propping his cheek on his fist. Despite the laugh, the smile that quickly disappears, there is an exhaustion to him, like gravity is weighing heavier on him than on the rest of the earth.  “Salmonella’s not real.”

“Uh, yes, it is.”

“I work for an espionage agency that keeps the world’s secrets,” Dick says tiredly, bringing a knee up to his chest. “Salmonella’s one of them. God knows if it was real, I would’ve had it by now. Spyral made it up.”

“Spyral?” Tim asks, and Dick tilts head in acknowledgment.  “How was that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Back when you used to work for them, I mean. How was it?”

If the others notice Dick’s posture shift again, they don’t acknowledge it. 

“Fine,” Dick clips. 

That the others do take notice of. They shift. Dick watches it happen, then covers his eyes with his hands, and sighs. 

“God, sorry.”

“Don’t be. I shouldn’t’ve asked. It’s still a touchy —”

“I’m not touchy,” Dick snaps, hands dropping hastily from his touchy little face. Then he swallows, scrunching his nose violently, and scoffs self-derisively. “Fuck.” He scrubs a hand over his face again. At first, his words are halting, but his voice gets fonder, softer, as he warms to the topic: “I don’t know how to put it. It’s a spy agency. Like any other. Except we have Hypnos, which can fry your brain if you use it wrong. I didn’t have to use them too much because I have natural wiles and charm unlike Ti—” pause. “...Unlike some of the others. I mainly worked in retrieving black market bioweapons. There was a lot of op work, undercover work, lying. Stealing, but not really stealing: I don’t like thieves. My partner gives me hell for that, but…I don’t really mind, I guess.” Sigh. “You asked how it was, right? I don’t know. I like the work. I like performing, I’m good at it. You know? And I like the people. Yeah, um.” Dick scrubs at an invisible spot on his pants, blinking quickly. His voice is thick. “I like the people.” 

Dick rubs his hands together, then looks up, eyes too bright. Then he looks down again, blinking, and when he looks back up, whatever feeling was there is gone from his face. 

“Well, yeah, but are they better than u—” Steph cuts herself off quickly, and then shifts her grip on the plate of pancakes, which are covered by Saran wrap. Cass can’t help but notice how pale her knuckles are where she holds the plate. “Well, yeah, but did you ever get to hitch a ride on top of any trains with Spyral?” 

Dick smiles thinly. “Couple times, yeah.” 

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Then — Dick fidgets for a second. He opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, but he doesn’t. He closes it. 

That’s when Cass makes a judgement call. “Go,” she says, turning to Tim and Steph.

Tim’s brows shoot up. “What?”

Cass shoos them with her hand. “Go away. Leave us alone.” When they don’t, looking confused, she widens her eyes. “Now.” They start to, then Cass says, “Wait.” They turn. “Leave the pancakes.”

“But —” starts Steph. Tim grabs her arm, and she frowns and slowly hands the plate to Cass, glancing over her shoulder at Dick and Cass as they walk away. 

When they’re finally out of eyesight, Cass unwraps the Saran, leans her back against the fence, and offers the plate to Dick, who shakes his head. 

“I wasn’t lying. I genuinely don’t like breakfast foods.”

Cass frowns. “I never said you were lying.”

Dick sighs again. He never used to sigh this much before, at least not when he had known she was watching. “No. You didn’t say that.”

Cass straightens, the wire of the fence digging into her shoulderblades. “I didn’t think you were lying either.”

“Everyone else does,” Dick says, and it is a moment of startling honesty. At once, Cass realizes that this is not the fake-smile game of before. There’s a sharpness to his diction, a bitterness. “Maybe they don’t think I’m actively trying to deceive them about it, but they don’t think it’s the truth. They think I really am whatever — whoever — I was before, and they think the way I am is an aberrance. Like, a temporary, correctable wrong. I can tell.”

Cass takes one of the pancakes and rolls it between her fingers. Then she crushes it in her fist and drops it to the ground. 

“You’re not the way you were before,” Cass says finally. “That hurts. You hurt Barbara, and Alfred. They were crying.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Dick says quietly. “I never meant to. It’s just — I can’t be the way I was before. I don’t even know who I was before.”

“You were Nightwing. You were my older brother. I used to let you cut my hair.”

Dick gives a small, strangled laugh. “Yeah? Was I any good at that?”

“No,” Cass answers simply. She points at her hair. “I look much better now. No bangs.”

There is a long quiet. Cass balls up another pancake. This time, she lets it drop down into the grass, where she stomps on it with her foot like a cigarette. 

Dick takes a long inhale. “Can I ask you something?”

Another silence. Finally, Cass nods. 

“You said I wasn’t the same. Bruce hates my guts for being different. And I feel it. I see it in the way that everyone else is acting that I’m not. But I guess I was just wondering — I guess I just —” Dick cuts off. His voice is suddenly very small.  “What was I supposed to be like before?”

Cass stares at the plate of pancakes, or what is left of them. They’re soggy and wet now, the dark blueberries bleeding more and more into the brown. 

“You were kind,” Cass says quietly after a long time, and Dick looks like he’s been stabbed. “You were patient. Um. Gentle. Gentle. That’s the word. You made jokes. Sometimes, they were funny. Others…hn. You used to give everyone everything. You used to know everything about everyone. It was like…it was like they were your whole world. I didn’t understand why Barbara liked you so much. But one time you picked me up from my ballet class on your motorcycle and you let me drive it even though I knew you never let anyone do that. You remembered when I said I wanted something. You…made me feel normal. You made me feel…happy. You made everyone feel happy. That’s a big deal to them.” Cass flutters a hand behind her, gesturing at the manor. She turns to face Dick, her throat suddenly feeling very tight. “They don’t get to be happy very often.” 

Dick is watching her very carefully.

Slowly, Cass holds out the plate. 

—

Thirty minutes later. 

—

Dick. 

The fork scrapes loudly against the porcelain as Dick uses it to push the last of the pancakes off of the plate and into the kitchen’s garbage can. Dick sets the dishes into the sink with a clatter and stares at them. 

When he senses a presence in the doorway, he sighs deeply and shuts his eyes, shoulders sagging. 

 “What can I do ya for?” he manages, injecting his voice with energy he doesn’t feel. 

No answer, so Dick turns around, only to see the hastily retreating back of a tall, broad man in a black shirt. Which is embarassng. Not just for Bruce, because he got caught but for Dick, too, because apparently looking at Dick is something you don’t want to get caught doing. Dick’s eyes begin to sear. He grabs the plate in the sink and throws it back down. 

The shards splash over the countertop, but it doesn’t make Dick feel any better, so he whirls around and races down the hall, grabbing the nearest doorjamb. 

He opens his mouth to yell after Bruce fucking Wayne and finds himself faltering, tears coming to his eyes, which makes him even more furious than before. Then the fury dissolves into helplessness. Like, fuck, he tried, didn’t he? 

What is he supposed to do? Somehow fulfill the megaton of emotional triage labor the Batman and his family need? Somehow know everything again and fit right back into place? Somehow become some paragon of virtue and big brotherhood? Reverse time? Beat the amnesia out of his skull? 

“Dick?”

Dick whips around, eyes still wet, to find Jason standing in the kitchen, a motorcycle helmet dangling from his fingers and a startled look on his face. 

“What?” Dick demands, voice breaking. When there’s no response, Dick forces, “What?”

Jason’s eyes widen emphatically. He gestures at Dick. Jason has an angry face, angry shoulders, angry hands, but he doesn’t look so angry now. He looks mostly concerned and surprised. “What the hell is going on?”

“Why are you here, Jason?”

“First of all, I grew up here,” Jason snaps. “I get to be here, especially when my brother comes back from the dead. Second, answer my fucking question.”

“First of all,” Dick mimics, voice sharp and high rising like a knife, “I’m not your brother, Jason. I’m not anyone to anybody here! Because I’m not — I’m not whoever you all built up in your head.” The burning in Dick’s eyes is almost too much. It makes it hard to see. “Bruce made that abundantly fucking clear.”

“Bruce?” Jason crows. “You’re listening to what Bruce has to say? God, what? Are you stupid, Dick? You’re — you’re —”

Jason breaks off with a hysterical laugh, meeting Dick’s eyes wildly, as if Dick will lock eyes and join in and say, Wow, sorry, I was being ridiculous. Instead, Dick can only stare, and Jason’s face slowly falls. 

“You are my brother, Dick,” Jason says softly, almost tentative, almost childlike, like it’s not something he’s used to saying out loud — like it’s the first time it’s had to be said out loud. Dick scoffs violently and turns around, raking his fingers roughly through his hair. 

“No,” Dick snaps, throwing his hands out desperately, “I’m not.” 

His chest heaves. And there is a long moment of silence. There is a moment at the threshold, where it is silent, where nothing has happened yet, and because nothing has happened yet, hope makes Dick’s breath hitch. Dick stares at Jason with wide eyes, waiting for him to say something. Praying for him to say something that makes it all okay, or all make sense, or all feel like Dick can actually fit back into this stupid dark city without being looked at like a thief who stole someone’s son away the whole damn time. 

Dick wants Jason to insist that Dick is wrong. Dick wants some reassurance, some unconditionality, something. Dick wants somebody to see into him and take care of him, because it seems like all anybody wants Dick for here is taking care of them. Dick wants somebody to want him as he is. God, maybe wanting’s too much, but Dick would accept it eagerly, hungrily, if someone here were just willing to take him as he is. 

But Jason’s apparently got the same hairtrigger temper as Dick, because slowly, slowly, his face crumples into rage, and the moment where nothing happens, the moment where everything is still fixable, dissolves into the moment where everything is happening and it can’t be repaired. “Well, you used to be!” Jason snarls, dropping his helmet to the tile, where its visor shatters, sending black plexiglass shards into the mess of white porcelain already there. 

Dick’s stomach twists violently. He schools his expression into cold neutrality. 

“Then I guess I came back wrong,” Dick says coldly. 

Jason flinches like he’s been stabbed, fingers spasming into fists at his side.

In an instant, Bruce’s voice echoes in Dick’s head like a heartbeat, and that’s when it clicks why Bruce was talking to Dick’s grave and not to Dick. It’s easier to want something than to have it. They like the memory of the old Dick more than Dick himself. And Dick being here, not remembering them, not knowing their injokes or their creaky floorboards or the invisible meanings between their words, that’s more painful to them than grieving. A loss is a loss, but this is fitting a sword into a bullethole. It’s only making the wound worse. It’s only making the wound deeper. 

It’s the first clear moment of understanding of these people that Dick’s had since he got here, and it accompanies a hard pang of pity that settles in Dick’s stomach. 

“I’m sorry,” Dick says finally, and, for the first time, really means it, “I wasn’t what you wanted.”

The air is still hot when Dick passes Jason’s huge frame in the doorway and crosses into the outdoors, the sun pounding down in blinding sheets that make the faraway hills of the cemetery wavy with refraction. Despite the heat, Dick just feels cold all over.

—

Jason. 

“Oh, Master Jason! I didn’t know you’d returned,” says Alfred when he spots Jason, smiling. Alfred steps the rest of the way into the kitchen, and his mouth, half-open in speech, slips shut. 

His blue eyes track the shards of porcelain and black glass sitting on top of the tile floor like dead fish, then up from Jason’s feet to his eyes, and then to the door to the outside, half-ajar and letting in the heat and the sound of insects. 

A small motion moves through Alfred’s shoulders. It’s not exactly shivering, nor wracking with a sob, but something moves through Alfred’s body. 

Neither of them speak, but both of them know what has taken place. Jason just stands dumbly in the center of the glass. 

Alfred straightens his shoulders, which are very still and stiff now. Then he nods quickly, just once. He grips the doorjamb behind him, clutching it with white knuckles. Then he turns and leaves, bobbing up the stairs with an odd, too-straight gait, leaving Jason alone. 

—

Dick.

That evening, Tiger finds him sitting on the lawn outside St. Hadrian’s at twilight and staring at a tree. The man stands next to him, and silently hands him a red-wrapped bar of chocolate. 

Dick accepts it without so much as a glance, and turns it over in his palm. “Do you remember,” he says, haltingly, “a couple years ago when they came out with aerated chocolate in America? It was in, like, 2010.”

“No.”

“‘No, you don’t remember’ or ‘no, you never had it’?”

“Neither,” says Tiger. “I was doing wet work in Ukraine.”

Wet work, Dick mouths soundlessly, staring at the ground. He taps the chocolate bar against his knee. There’s a pause. “It was good. You wouldn’t’ve liked it.”

“Hn,” says Tiger, and sits down next to him. He crosses his arms sternly over his knees, and lets the silence sit. But Dick knows he should—he should break it somehow. Say something funny. Something clever. Something. 

Wash away any latent concerns about his ability to serve Spyral to his fullest capacities, about his loyalty. That little traipse (kidnapping) in Gotham was a one-off. He came back. He’s here. He chose to be. He’s here for good. 

But those words catch in his throat. 

“It sucked,” Dick says instead, hushed. “They sucked. Just—the most dysfunctional people you can imagine. They,” Dick swallows, scoffs a sharp laugh, and rolls his head back, wry. “They even believe in salmonella. You know that?”

“Foolish,” Tiger rumbles. “You would have gotten it by now.”

Dick smiles thinly. “That’s what I said.” Pause. His smile dissolves as his voice drops. “You know what else? I don’t think a single one of them so much as touched me the whole time I was there. Not when I wasn’t being drugged or manhandled.” 

No reply this time, but that’s fine. That’s fine. Dick isn’t finished. 

“I wanted somebody to,” Dick whispers. “I just wanted somebody, anybody. God, I feel like that’s all I ever wanted. I would have liked to know where I came from. Not just the stuff in the files. My past life, all of that. 22 years of life that just got wiped away. I wanted to know. They knew. They sucked, but they were—like a family, you know? It should have been exactly what I wanted.”

“Yes,” says Tiger.

“It wasn’t,” says Dick. “It wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

Dick widens his eyes bitterly, even though he’s just looking at the ground. He scoffs. “You knew, too.” He tears the plastic corner off the candy bar, like yanking a petal off, like love-me-not. “We were supposed to be partners. You should have told me”

“I should have.”

Dick brushes off his knees and stands to leave. He drops the chocolate bar in Tiger’s lap. 

“Yeah,” he says. “You should’ve.”

— 

“Tiger knew.”

Helena taps the back of her earring into place. “So did I. We all knew about Nightwing.” They’re in her office. Her expression isn’t sympathetic, but it isn’t cruel either. “This is the business of secrets, Dick,” she says. “And everyone on earth knew yours.”

“I didn’t,” Dick says. 

“No,” she admits. “You didn’t. I honestly thought you were only pretending not to at first.”

Dick wonders if she knows about Lex. It’s impossible to tell from her expression. 

“Why would you send me to Gotham if you knew? Why would you risk me finding them and abandoning Spyral altogether?”

“But you didn’t, did you? You came back, and you’re here.” 

Dick tenses. “It’s my job, isn’t it?” he asks defensively. 

Helena lets her hair fall back over the earring, the red glass disappearing behind her dark curls, and looks at him. “It is.”

“So why send me to Gotham when you did ? You could have sent anybody else.”

Helena turns away, as if embarrassed. There’s a long, long beat, and then she says, hushed, “I thought you would want to know. I thought you would want to know about them.”

And for that, for once, Dick has no reply. 

—

Dick doesn’t go right back to his room after he leaves Helena’s office. He ghosts through St. Hadrian’s, dragging his knuckles along the sandstone walls. He had spoken to Tiger at twilight, and now it’s black outside with pinpricks. 

There’s a strange listlessness in him. There’s too much in him. 

He’s angry again. He’s angry at Lex for lying to him. He’s angry at Tiger for not telling him who he was. He’s angry at Helena for sending him to Gotham. He’s angry at his “family” in Gotham for wanting something that he can’t give . 

He’s angry at himself for not being able to give it. For not wanting to give it — for not being able to want them back even a little bit. He’s angry at himself for having amnesia in the first place. 

And he’s angry at himself for coming back here. Isn’t that the most pathetic thing of all? He came crawling back here, the one place he knows. Dick wants a home. This? This is not a home. It’s anything but. It’s not even the private school it pretends to be. It’s a moral cesspool of the world’s best liars and killers that Dick had to be manipulated into joining in the first place, but somehow it’s the only place in the entire world that feels familiar to him. 

It’s the one place in the world where he has people that he already knows he loves. 

Dick slams his fist into the wall. A nearby bird squawks and startles at the sudden sound. His punch leaves a large, dark crater in the sandstone. 

The skin sloughs off his knuckles like an orange peel. 

He swallows, and drops the fist back to his side, flexing his skinned fingers. He wants to do it again. He doesn’t.

Instead, he squeezes his eyes shut tightly and inhales shakily, hunching. The air is so still, so quiet that it’s smothering. 

And then, from out of absolutely nowhere, Dick is tackled hard from behind — scrabbling hands on his ribs sending him plunging to the ground. 

He throws out his hands to catch himself, flipping back upright and kneeling defensively to see who just —

Dick’s mouth goes dry. 

“You’re alive,” the boy in front of him says, chest heaving under his red tunic.

It’s Robin. It’s Damian.

It’s Damian, and he’s wet. His chin is all scab, his cheek all bruise. His damp black hair isn’t spiked up like it was in the pictures barnacling the walls of the Manor; it’s soft; and it’s begging, Dick thinks, almost reflexively, his fingers curling, for someone to ruffle it. It’s lank and windmussed and curling at the temples, blowing in the warm wind like he’s some sort of intrepid child-sized adventurer. And he does look like some sort of little adventurer finding a relic everyone thought was lost: He looks like he can’t believe his eyes.

He doesn’t look like the demon child the others described. He looks like a little kid. 

He’s also…smaller than Dick thought. 

He’s so much smaller. 

“You —” must be Damian. But the words hitch in Dick’s throat as he slowly draws up, and he for some reason can only croak, instinctively, weakly, bewilderingly, “…You’re alive?”

Robin — Damian — stares at him breathlessly for a long time. 

And then he charges forward, leaping and tackling Dick again. Only this time, Dick is ready for it. 

Dick catches him. 

He feels a pointy chin hook onto his collarbone ledge. He feels legs wrap around his waist — hands scrabble and drag on the back of his neck, the wetness of the costume bleed into his dry clothes. 

He feels, just a little, like something’s snapping back into place — not intensely, not hugely, but a little, the way you drive a halfway-in cork the rest of the way down a bottle or straighten your spine until it cracks. 

Dropping his chin down to the damp hair, Dick rakes a rough hand down Damian’s back, and lets his fingers curl. 

He inhales shakily, throat going tight. His grip on Damian goes tight, too.

—

Five minutes later, Dick is dragging the curtains in his room shut. They shink. Damian is sitting cross-legged on his bed, watching him. 

Satisfied with the privacy, Dick finally turns back around, leaning against the sill and crossing his arms as he stares back without a word. 

Damian doesn’t seem to expect this. It looks like he’s waiting for Dick to speak, which would be hard, because Dick doesn’t know what to say, or why he’s all — choked up, somehow.

The silence thickens. 

“It’s good to finally meet you, Damian,” Dick manages at last. 

And he’s expecting it, but it hurts, the way the kid’s face just craters. Trooper, though: He covers it up, schools his expression into something mostly not so stung. 

“Father said that you didn’t rem—” Damian cuts off sharply, looking away. “I just thought…”

Dick waits, but nothing else comes. He lowers himself further, taking a seat on the sill instead of leaning. His palms burn, suddenly, and he scrapes them against his pants, cheeks flushing in shame. 

It feels so strange that just a few minutes ago, the kid was in his arms. Now, even though they’re only five feet apart, it feels like lightyears. 

“I’m sorry,” Dick offers finally. He’s being honest — there’s a pit in his stomach that he didn’t get with the others, for all that he was around them longer than this kid. “I know I’m not what you wanted.”

Damian doesn’t say anything for a long time, mouth twisting. “Tt,” he says, at last, voice only wobbling slightly.

He swipes quickly at his cheek, then seems to remember his mask, and his hand falls violently to his lap. His fingers spasm then fist there.

“Yes, you are. I only wanted you to be alive again. You’ve — surpassed expectations in that regard. Although, I told Father you wouldn’t be felled by an imbecile like Luthor.” 

Dick huffs softly, incredulously, a little bitterly, rolling his head back and shutting his eyes. He covers them with his palms, and drags his hands down his face, exhaling. 

“Believe me, kiddo. Lex Luthor felled me plenty.” Dick sighs. “He’s the entire reason I’m even a part of Spyral.”

“Yes, but he didn’t kill you,” insists Damian, sitting up straighter. “Not permanently, and while you were strapped to a bomb. The only one of us that he could successfully take on in a fair fight is Drake. Perhaps Todd. Even Brown would vastly outpace him. He would never have stood a chance against you if things weren’t skewed.”

Dick reopens his eyes, shifting. 

Damian’s still watching him. He’s mostly still, mostly stoic. Spine dead-straight. No one could ever mistake who his father is, for all that Bruce and Damian’s features are starkly different. But there’s a wobbliness to the line of his mouth, and through the rips in his wet gloves, the badly scraped fingers he’s using to fist Dick’s bedspread look whiteknuckled.

That’s where Dick’s brain falters, gaze locking there. “You’re bleeding.”

“What?”

“Your fingers,” Dick points, voice hushed. “They’re bleeding. You’re hurt. You didn’t say anything about it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Damian says dismissively, hiding his hands in his lap and sniffing in a way that Dick’s sure is meant to seem imperious but comes off more as a sniffle. “It must have happened on the way here. I had to leave quickly. I was just — in haste.”

To see me, Dick fills in, heart panging. He grinds his teeth down on his tongue. And look how you disappointed him, Grayson. Just like everybody else. 

He swallows.

“Here,” Dick murmurs finally, kneeling down beside the bed. He reaches into the nightstand and rummages briefly with one hand before he can pull out an aid kit, and starts to go to grab the kid’s wrist. Then he pauses, fingers hovering in the air as he glances up at Damian, unsure if he’s crossing any lines. Damian’s whole body has gone perfectly still, like a cat. “Is this okay?”

The lenses of Damian’s mask are enormous. The silence that comes next is deafening and seems to last forever. There’s a long time. 

“There is no need,” Damian says stiffly, finally. His hands, though, haven’t drawn away from where Dick can grab them. Instead, they’re just there, for the taking. 

Dick grips the roll of bandages in his hand. “You’re bleeding. It’s the least I can do.”

There’s another silence. And then:

“I don’t need it,” Damian croaks. 

Dick’s hand falls the rest of the way down to Damian’s wrist, holding. 

“Okay,” Dick says. Then he takes off Damian’s gloves anyway. 

He cleans the scrapes. He blurs them with antiseptic, he wraps the fingers with bandages, but when he’s covered all of them he falters, and he can’t bring himself to let go of the index finger in his grip. Instead, his grip tightens. 

Suddenly, there’s chemical heat burning at his eyes, smearing his vision wet. His mouth works furiously, but nothing comes out. Nothing can. 

“I, um,” Dick says, blinking, blinking, blinking. It feels like his veins are going to raise themselves like scars and throb right out of his skin. Dick starts to nod, as if this is a completed business transaction, trying to pull himself away, but then he drags his eyes back up to Damian’s face, and he’s frozen there all over again, clutching one of Damian’s fingers even more tightly than before. 

Dick and Damian stare at one another. 

Slowly, centimeter by centimeter, Damian’s shoulders slump. 

“You don’t know me,” says Damian softly. It’s a realization. It’s a statement, not a question. 

“No,” Dick admits in a whisper, watching the little boy’s face raptly. He wants to reach up and remove the mask. What color are Damian’s eyes? Green, supplies the part of his memory bank that burned in every detail in the photo by the bed, but a stronger — or maybe, just more desperate — part of him says not to be too sure. Says, See it for yourself.’   

Damian’s mouth presses as he pauses. 

“...At all?” he asks in a very small voice, even though they both know the answer already.  

Dick wants to use his newly re-implanted Hypnos and tell him Yes. Dick wants to lie. Dick wants to lie so badly. He wants to be able to tell Damian the answer he wants to hear so badly. 

Instead, he shifts so his fingers envelope all of Damian’s hand, and squeezes it tightly. 

“No.”

Damian’s face changes.

“So none of this means anything to you?”

“No,” Dick denies, shaking his head violently. The intensity — the immediacy — of his answer surprises himself. But Damian’s mouth is already pulling and twisting and curling; he isn’t listening, his chee’s already flushing. 

He’s lurching up, his fists balling up inside Dick’s like he’s readying to pummel invisible opponents. 

“I didn’t say that. Damian, of course you d—of course it does.”

“I’m going to kill Luthor,” Damian spits. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to make him pay for what he did. He’ll never—”

“Damian,” Dick says, tugging his hand gently. 

Damian’s chest heaves hard, nostrils flaring, but instantly, his tirade stops. Just like that: like one word was all it took. His gaze flickers back down to Dick where he’s kneeling in front of him. Dick rubs the center of Damian’s palm. And slowly, Damian collapses back onto the bed, as if his knees give out. Then they’re back to staring at each other again. 

Dick can’t quite smother the sad smile that flickers over his face. “Hey,” he murmurs, even though Damian’s rapt attention has been nowhere but him this whole time, “I know I’m not…who you wanted. But I don’t think he would want you to have any blood on your hands for his sake either.” Dick hesitates. Then he can’t help himself any longer: He reaches out and touches Damian’s cheek. 

Damian swallows visibly. Then he presses his cheek to his shoulder, crushing Dick’s hand in between and keeping it there. 

Dick’s smile gets a little more wistful. His heart thumps. He circles his thumb along the softness of Damian’s cheek — and the comparison makes itself. The comparison cracks Dick’s ribs from the inside-out: the baby in the desert. 

Damian reminds him of that baby in the desert. Or, what it had really been: The baby in the desert had reminded him of Damian. 

There are so many things about the life that Bruce Wayne had described that don’t sit just right. Dick as a sidekick? Dick hates taking orders from people. Dick as someone with his own city? Dick gets itchy when he stays one place too long. All those people in that awful cold house who won’t touch each other, who stumble over feelings and emotions?

But there are also things that do. Alfred’s voice. Bruce’s darkness. A natural chemistry with a looming, silent partner. And most of all, Damian. Most of anything, Damian. 

“You want to know something?” Dick whispers, smiling even though his eyes are burning. “Can I tell you something?”

Damian nods slowly.

“I don’t remember you.”

The boy stiffens. 

“But I think you were mine,” Dick says. “You know that? You were mine.”

Damian opens his mouth to say something, but that’s when the door slams open. Their heads whip toward the sound. 

Standing in the doorway is Tiger, whose gaze flickers between Dick and Damian. Dick hastily stands up, dropping his hand away from Damian, and puts himself in between them. 

“What have we said about knocking, T?” he grinds out, but Tiger’s attention isn’t on Dick anymore. It’s lasered slightly below Dick’s shoulders and to his left, where Damian is stepping out from behind him. Dick bites his tongue to swallow a curse, splaying out his palm as if his spread fingers can hide a whole eleven-year-old. 

An eleven-year-old who seems determined not to be hidden. 

“The Tiger King of Kandahar,” crows Damian, sneering. “Tt. This is where you fled to?”

Tiger’s eyes slit. “Al Ghul.”

“I’m sorry,” Dick says, frowning, “are we all acquainted?”

“We are not acquaintances,” Tiger says sharply. 

“He said acquaint ed, idiot.”

Tiger’s nostrils flare. His head snaps to the side dangerously, eyes flying to meet Dick’s in indignation, as if to say, Are you going to allow this? 

After he realizes what just happened, it actually takes Dick another second to shake off a surreal delight of hearing the tables turn on Tiger’s tendency to call everyone (or maybe just Dick) an idiot before he snaps back to himself. “T,” Dick says, gesturing to the door, which Tiger immediately understands and closes behind him. Dick’s voice hushes. “What are you doing here?”

When Tiger turns back around, his eyes dart to Damian and he grunts in displeasure before he turns his gaze back to Dick. “You weren’t answering your comm.”

“We’re at base. You know I never keep my comm on me at base.”

“And I have told you not to do that. It’s foolish. What if someone needs to contact you?”

“Then they can come find me,” Dick gestures at the room, annoyed. “Our rooms are literally one hallway apart, Tiger. You can just come knock. I don’t understand why you struggle so badly with that. Helena never had a problem with it.”

“That is because Helena has always been soft on you!” Tiger snaps, and Dick scoffs, eyebrows shooting up, offended. 

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for making connections. Is that what you want to hear?”

“No,” Tiger growls. “What I want is for you to answer your comm.”

“What can’t just wait for you to find me? Why do you need to reach me by comm right now?”

“Because I don’t like to see people’s faces when I apolog—” Tiger cuts off abruptly, scowling. His cheeks don’t color, but his nose creases, displeased, and he growls, deep in his chest, frustrated.

Dick pauses, stunned. 

Without the bickering, the room falls dead silent.

Apologize? Dick asks him noiselessly, after a long beat, mouthing. 

Tiger balls his fists. He doesn’t answer.

Dick doesn’t get enough time to process that. He doesn’t even get enough time to reel. A hand is yanking at his elbow.

“Richard, how do you know this cretin?” Damian demands. 

Dick glances back down at him and then back at Tiger, who’s still hovering by the door with clenched hands, glaring at the ground. “I —”

Dick falters. 

“…We’re partners,” he says finally. 

Tiger looks up, eyes flashing in recognition at Dick’s I-forgive-you. Their eyes lock, and Dick tentatively ticks up one side of his mouth, where Tiger’s gaze flickers before returning to his eyes. Dick watches Tiger’s fingers slowly unfurl at his sides, shoulders incrementally slackening. Truce.

Damian doesn’t take Dick’s words half so well. He bristles. 

“He is not your partner,” Damian snaps. 

Dick raises a brow, turning his head down to look at him. That’s when Damian flushes, seeming to remember that Dick doesn’t remember. 

“I am,” Damian says more softly. “I’m your rightful partner. We were the best. The best ever. You said so yourself. We were even better than you and father.”

Dick’s heart plucks. 

He hesitates, and then he brings up a hand to ruffle through Damian’s hair, scratching the back of his neck and then laying his hand there on his nape. Damian turns into the touch very, very slightly, like a sunflower. 

“You’ve no need for him,” adds Damian in a murmur, making Dick smile. 

“Yeah?”

“Yes.” Damian seems to be bolstered by some thought, because he suddenly looks up, mask lenses wide, and Dick crouches, keeping his hand in place. “Yes. Richard — you don’t want to return to Gotham for the others, no?”

Dick sighs.

“Kiddo, it’s — it’s complicated. I can’t. They want somebody who was perfect, and that, that isn’t me. They want somebody that I’m not anymore. Or maybe someone that I never was: Maybe I was just pretending for a lot of years. But I can’t keep up that ruse any longer. I can’t be that person for them, because I’m not that person. Not anymore. I can’t be.” Dick huffs, and it’s damp, which startles him. He blinks, and finds that his eyes are wet, too. “I can’t.” He brings his other hand up to cup Damian’s jaw. “I wish I could. For you.”

Damian traps his hand again, pressing it to his shoulder. “You don’t know who you were,” he says. “But you do know me. I know you don’t remember me, but you felt like I was — like I was…”

“Yeah.” Dick exhales shakily. “I did.” 

“What if it wasn’t Gotham? What if it was just me?” 

Damian’s mask lenses are wide and fervent, and distantly, Dick hears the door click. Tiger must be gone. But he can’t bring himself to look at the door to check. All he can focus on is the little boy in front of him whose cheek is in his hand. 

“I’ve been traveling. All over. I’ve been trying to — atone. You could come with me.”

“Damian,” Dick breathes, startled. 

“You could come with me,” Damian says, eyes widening emphatically. “We could be together.”

Dick’s heart thuds.

Four hours later. 

-

Tiger.

His fist connects. The sandbag swings. 

It reveals Dick with his hands in his pockets. 

Tiger startles. He covers the reaction up. 

The bag swings back, curtaining Dick from view, so Tiger holds it, steps to the side, and stares. 

“…You didn’t go with him.”

Dick licks his lips, gaze fixed on the floor. He tilts his head, mouth moving, like he’s considering something, or maybe practicing it, before he finally looks up.

“No,” Dick says. “Come on, T. You didn’t think I’d just leave you like that?” 

He flashes a smile. It crumbles away completely when Tiger just stares at him. 

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Hn.” Tiger lets go of the bag again. It swings, blocking the other man’s form once more. “You overestimate how much I care and you delude yourself, Grayson. I was not looking.”

“You were looking at me.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“You were staring,” Dick says. “The whole staring process. With your eyes and everything.”

“Other organs are not involved in staring. There is no ‘and everything.’”

“Occipital lobe.”

“Tch.” 

Tiger punches the bag again. Hard.

There’s a silence. 

“Even if I did go back to Gotham, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t be Nightwing again,” Dick blurts suddenly, apropos of nothing, as if he just can’t keep it in. As if Tiger is stepping into Grayson’s own argument with himself. “Everyone knows my identity.”

The image of Ra’s al Ghul’s grandson sitting on Dick’s bed flashes through Tiger’s mind. He pauses, holding the bag again.

“The boy wasn’t asking you to go with him to Gotham. He was asking you to go with him.”

“It still wouldn’t matter,” Dick replies tightly, scoffing as he turns to the side. “I wouldn’t ever be Dick Grayson to him. It wouldn’t matter where we went. I would always be missing something. He’d tell a story and I wouldn’t know it and he would have to explain it. He would never get what he wants. I could never be what he wants. I’m not who he — I’m not him. It would just be disappointment after disappointment. And I couldn’t hurt him like that. I — I know I loved him too much for that.”

Tiger thinks about cratered apartments in Kandahar and his mother stooped crying over a broken red bathtub. Tiger thinks about the wet shape of his sister inside, and how Dick used the past tense of “love.” 

There is no such thing: It does not pass.

Tiger’s knuckles split with the force of his next punch. 

He pauses. Then he resumes, hitting. 

Dick watches in silence, for once. Tiger hits and hits. 

“You’re going to break it,” Dick says quietly. “If you keep hitting it like that.”

“Shut up,” says Tiger. He hits. Two minutes later, the punching bag snaps off of the chain again, thudding to the floor. 

Dick disappears briefly to grab a new chain while Tiger stands over the sandbag, chest heaving and fists balled. Dick restrings it when he returns, still silent, and puts it back up. Then he pauses, arm still reached up to the hook, eyes catching on Tiger’s hands. “You’re ble—”

“I know.” Tiger’s fists tighten. The red seeping through the white wrap on his knuckles stings.

As he gazes down at Tiger’s fists, Dick’s mouth tugs to the left, sort of fond. Sort of sad. 

That look on his face makes Tiger’s hands clench harder. “Grayson, the boy. Was he what you wanted?” 

Dick is the one who startles now, eyes darting up Tiger’s hand to his arm to his face. “What?”

“Was he what you wanted?” Tiger repeats. “You said your family wasn’t what you wanted. You said you wanted them to touch you. He did. He touched you.”

Dick just stares at him, lips slightly parted. He looks surprised, thrown-off. He’s staring as if Tiger is suddenly a confusing stranger — as if he’s never seen him before, as if he’s trying to scope out every last one of his intentions but can’t at all. Which is unusual, because every other time, Dick has proved frustratingly adept at piecing together even the slightest intimations of Tiger’s motives. 

Tiger growls. He thinks of Ra’s al Ghul’s grandson standing inside of Dick’s bedroom in St. Hadrian’s, staring up at Dick Grayson and wanting. Wanting desperately. Tiger thinks of bending over that bathtub in Kandahar and turning the valve so the water would run and clean and send the blood down the drain. 

Tiger thinks about looking at a sibling — what is left of them — and wanting. 

Desperately. 

“Was he?” Tiger demands. 

Dick’s mouth closes. He looks away, jaw working in silence for a long time. His eyes shut. And then, finally, softly:

“Yes.”

—

Dick. 

Here is the problem. Here is the big human problem. The biggest one. Something wants you, and you don’t want it. Death, for example. You run from it, but it counts the seconds on its hands and pinkie toes until it eats you whole. 

The inverse, theoretically equally awful, but made a little more awful because you’re the one who feels the absence: wanting something that doesn’t want you back, like an animal determined to slip away from your speartip when you’re starving, like trying to hope and getting dashed, like a job you get rejected from, like a bad bout of unrequited love. 

And even when you want something, and it wants you back, the sailing still isn’t smooth. Wanting’s a feeling, not an action. What you want is abstract: It’s not real. You make it up in your head. You imagine what it would be like to have that want met, and so what you really want becomes what you decided having it would be like. 

What you really want is that thing you made up in your head, the pretty shadow on the cave wall, not the real shadowpuppet in the scabby, ragged, dirty-nailed hands of Plato’s cavemen that casts it.  

You want the perfect older brother that exists in spits of memory and family photographs, who can catch inside jokes and avoid the creaky floorboards. You don’t want the real thing, the skeleton left behind after amnesia picked the good meat off the bones: a liar, a spy, who gets frustrated and angry and resentful with the people he should love and has awkward silences because he doesn’t know how to respond exactly right and wants to run away and be free and not tied down so badly it could break his ribs. 

You don’t want something that will never match up. 

That’s the biggest human problem — it’s wanting. There’s no winning. Not even if it’s reciprocal. You’ll always be disappointed. 

Worse, you’ll always disappoint them. 

The only solution to the problem is to not want anything at all. If you don’t take the gambit, you can never sink your ship. 

—

But Dick stands there in front of Tiger and a freshly restrung punching bag, sand crunching under his Spyral-issue sneakers, and he remembers a scabbed chin fitting into his collarbone and arms around his neck and a sopping wet costume bleeding filthy water from who-knows-where into his shirt. He remembers holding Damian Wayne tighter than he knew he could hold anything. He wishes he held on longer. He wishes he could do it again. 

He wishes he could be the old Dick Grayson, if only for Damian Wayne’s sake — if only so that he could have earned the right to hold Damian again. Dick doesn’t want his old life back. But he wants that. Desperately, he wants that.

That’s the second-biggest human problem. You know you shouldn’t. But you want anyway. 

You can’t help it. 

—

“I’m going to go grab some bandages from my room,” Dick tells Tiger after a long silence. “You’re going to fuck up your hands for good if you just keep going with them raw on the bag like that.”

Tiger says, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Dick agrees, turning. 

“Grayson,” Tiger calls suddenly, just as Dick reaches the doorway. He stops and looks back. They stare at each other. Suddenly, Dick’s mind races back to that first time they really connected as people who didn’t have to just be partners. It was right here in this room, with Tiger and a punching bag, too, followed by a bout of intense sparring. Dick’s mouth goes a little dry, throat a little tight. Tiger doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then he says simply, “Goodbye.”

Dick grips the doorjamb. His gaze drops to the floor — he doesn’t think he can look at Tiger straight-on right now. He imagines the scrape of Tiger’s beard and the clearness of the man’s eyes on the shiny hardwood instead. Then he smiles ruefully at the ground, tongue touching a canine. “You’re not going to say the thing?”

“Hn,” Tiger says. “It was implied.”

Dick peeks back up from the floor at that, meeting Tiger’s eyes through his bangs and letting his smile soften. 

“You are an idiot. But…not for leaving,” Tiger adds. “Just for all of the other reasons. There are plenty.”

“I’m not leaving, Tony,” Dick says. “I’m just grabbing you bandages. I’ll be right back.”

(Somewhere much farther down the list of human problems ranked is this: Humans lie. Not always to deceive. Sometimes, to make things easier, to make things softer. To, say, have plausible deniability if your espionage agency’s investigation of your reneging of your contract involves reviews of your communications with others. Sometimes both. 

It’s fortunate, then, that high on the list of human virtues is this: People understand why you lie. And also: People let you.)

—

Dick doesn’t go back to his room. He doesn’t fetch any bandages. And he doesn’t go back to the room where Tiger had been. He’ll never go there again. 

Instead, Dick steps through St. Hadrian’s tall iron gates and into the city. He disappears into a crowd. He’s gotten good at that in Spyral — at being a face lost to a swirl of thousands of others and to the mechanically engineered swirl of hypnosis-inducing cortical implants. Or maybe disappearing was a skill he mastered long before in Gotham, during that childhood he doesn’t know. 

He steps into a phonebooth and stares at his own face reflected in the clear windowpane—unswirled and unobscured, for once, by the Hypnos. He almost doesn’t recognize himself. 

He watches his reflection frown as he realizes he barely knows what he looks like. 

The next thing he watches his reflection do is pick up the phone and dial. 

-

Two days later. 

-

Alfred.

The kitchen is near and loud enough that Alfred can hear the sounds of steel clattering and scraping over the dull chatter of the bistro’s few other patrons. 

Alfred presses his fist underneath his chin as he glances toward the entrance for the hundredth time, only narrowly avoiding startling when a figure in a corded, navy blue sweater settles in the chair across from him from the other direction entirely.

Alfred sucks in a sharp breath. 

Hungrily, he once more rakes his gaze over the young man — the dark, waved fringe over his forehead, the tiny swerve of a dimple in his cheek — until satisfied with the lack of any readily apparent mortal injuries. But the inspection does nothing except sharpen the persistent stab of longing in Alfred’s chest. 

Alfred blinks when he realizes there are words already being said, snapping back to himself. 

“Thank you for meeting me,” Dick is saying softly, and Alfred cannot shake his head fast or hard enough. 

“Child,” he breathes, “thank you. Know that I don’t say this to cause you any guilt, but I’ve been doing little else but praying for a call like this since you left.”

Dick looks down at the tabletop, cheeks pinking. And, suddenly, he looks so much like — is — the boy that Alfred raised that he can’t stand it a second longer, not like he did before. Gently, he grabs Dick’s hand, curling his fingers tight against the calloused palm and relishing the touch.

Alfred should expect it, of course. For all that this Dick Grayson resembles his, is his, he does not know Alfred. Not intimately. 

Not at all.

But he can’t quite hide the way it stings when Dick’s fingers stutter and then pull back, disappearing beneath the table and leaving Alfred’s palm face-up, his empty, wrinkled thumb twitching in mid-air; the way it aches when surprise of all things flashes over Dick’s face instead of comfort or contentment when he registers the touch. 

“Regardless,” Dick says hastily, “I appreciate you coming all the way to London so quickly.”

I would travel much farther for you, Alfred thinks, but doesn’t dare voice. 

“I saw—” Dick is cut off by the arrival of the waiter, cheeks coloring briefly with frustration. He doesn’t let it show for very long, though. Mostly, Alfred is still distracted enough by seeing his boy (his dearest of all of the children Master Bruce has brought into their lives, if such an impermissibility is to be admitted) alive and well and in front of him that he barely catches whatever Dick says to the server, but he catches enough to allow himself a brief tinge of pride that death, amnesia, and espionage haven’t dulled his charge’s manners. 

“The same,” Alfred nods at Dick when the waiter turns to ask his order, before he returns to the kitchen, leaving them alone once more, a brief silence setting in. Alfred waits patiently for him to continue. 

But Dick doesn’t continue. At least, not at first. Instead, Dick runs a finger along the rim of his water glass, glancing down briefly as if the lemon slice on the edge can steel his resolve. Inhale. Then.

“...I saw Damian a few days ago. He found me. He, uh, tackled me, actually.” Dick’s mouth turns up slightly, fond. He meets Alfred’s eyes, expression startlingly open and intense. “He’s an incredible kid.” Pause, the intensity dissipating. “I guess meeting him…he just got me thinking.”

Alfred’s heart thuds. He doesn’t dare hope. But the voice in his head lurches: About what? About coming home? Are you finally coming home? Please. 

“I see,” Alfred says calmly instead, restraining himself. He folds the napkin in front of him, grateful that it is cloth and not cheap paper so that he cannot rip it with the force of his vice-grip. “May I inquire as to what thoughts he provoked?”

Dick’s finger stills on the glass rim. He shuts his eyes. 

Then he exhales sharply, and reopens them. That intensity is back, and something stirs in Alfred’s stomach, and like a twinging knee before a violent rainstorm, Alfred’s hand, still outstretched and empty on the crystal-white table cloth, twitches just before Dick brings his own hand over it to seize it firmly. 

“I want to be a part of his life,” Dick says, all in a rush. “But I want to be — I want to be what he deserves.”

Alfred grips Dick’s (warm, living, real) hand tightly. 

“The problem is that I’m not what he wants. I’m not what any of you want.”

Alfred rears back in shock. “Child, why on earth would you think you’re not already exactly what he wants?”

Dick laughs self-deprecatingly, shaking his head.

“Are you kidding?”

Alfred squeezes. “Not in the slightest.”

“I’m pretty messed up, Alfred. I have anger issues, for one.”

“Anger issues?” Pressing his lips, Alfred shakes his head solemnly. “Oh, dear. I’m afraid you’re right after all. Our family only accepts paragons of emotional stability.”

Dick stares at him a long time before he huffs another small laugh, an incredulous one, a tentatively hopeful one. 

Alfred feels the warm fingers underneath his own curl, making him smile so fondly that his cheeks ache. “Trust me, child. I am well-acquainted with your temper. As is our Master Damian. You two often fought as partners.”

“...There’s also the fact that I don’t remember being partners. I don’t remember anything. I’m not the person that you knew. Cass told me that, you know. I know that I’m different now. I changed.”

Alfred is silent for a long time. It’s something that he’s been grappling with, too. The Dick Grayson in front of him is different, by necessity, in little and big ways both: a spy instead of a vigilante, a person who doesn’t like breakfast anymore, someone no longer comfortable with the family. There’s sameness, too, though. He still tilts his head the same way. He smiles the same way. He has the same tenderness in his expression, the gravitational force that winds him around Damian. 

The difference is not irreconcilable. 

More importantly, Alfred is used to Dick Grayson changing. 

“You’ve always changed, dear boy,” Alfred says, bringing his other hand up so that Dick’s palm is cupped between both of his. “That’s what makes you different from your father and me. That’s what makes you better.” He pauses. “And it would be nothing short of an honor to be able to learn to love you another time. As many times as it takes.”

—

After they leave the cafe, they walk slowly down a promenade by the Thames. It’s quiet. Dick has his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground, deep in thought. 

Eventually, Dick looks up. “Do you have to be getting home soon?”

“No, I have all the time in the world,” Alfred assures him, then pauses, wringing his hands briefly before daring: “...Would you care to accompany me when I do?”

Dick tilts his chin up so his face is horizontal with the low gray sky and exhales. 

“I don’t think I belong in Gotham. I think I would feel…trapped.”

Alfred tries his best to put aside the sudden plunging feeling in his chest. He smiles ruefully. “You felt that way before, too, you know.”

Dick’s head snaps toward Alfred. “What?”

“You left Gotham to escape from your fa—from Master Bruce’s control, his shadow. You went to California and then to Bludhaven to make your own life away from his name.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you that first night. There just seemed to be too much to cover.” Alfred’s mouth twists. “For what it may be worth, I’m also sincerely sorry that we drove you away several days ago. It must have been terribly overwhelming.”

Dick ducks his head in acknowledgement but doesn’t say anything, veering off the sidewalk and bracing his arms on the railing overlooking the Thames. Alfred follows him, a couple steps behind. Gingerly, Alfred ghosts a hand over Dick’s elbow. 

There’s a silence as Alfred tries to muster his courage again and find the right words. A gull with a black head swoops past them, squawking intermittently. 

“I...know I have no right to ask this of you,” Alfred murmurs finally, “but would you humor an old man?”

Dick looks over his shoulder, catching Alfred’s gaze. His dark eyelashes are stark and long against the paleish clouds, and his eyes are capturing, despite their apparent confusion. “Ask me what?”

Alfred’s fingers tighten imperceptibly in the cableknit of the sweater they’re holding onto and then let it go entirely. “Would you tell me where you are going, if it’s not Gotham? Just so that I can be sure that you’re — well, just for my own peace of mind. I won’t tell Bruce, not if you don’t want me to.”

Dick’s face is inscrutable. He turns back to face the river, gripping the railing. Alfred watches to see if his knuckles turn white — by virtue of his upbringing, Dick’s always had a strong grip, one that Alfred often used to meter how his charge was really feeling. But they’re not white at all. They don’t speak of any anger, or fear, or tension. The grip is only just-enough. 

“I told you,” Dick says. “I want to be what Damian deserves.”

Oh. 

“You already are.”

“I’m going to try to be,” Dick corrects. And then he releases the railing altogether, placing his hands neatly into his pockets instead. “Thank you for meeting me. I think I just needed to speak to someone who understood.”

Alfred knows a goodbye when he hears one. “If you ever need someone to understand again…”

Dick smiles gently, and Alfred’s heart hurts. “I’ll call.”

“Do you need help finding our Master Damian?”

“No,” Dick says. “Besides, I have another visit to make first.” He starts to turn away so that all Alfred can see is his back, and then Dick stops abruptly, and pivots back.

He hesitates another time, glancing briefly upward as the gull dives close to them and squawks. Then he turns fully, presses a quick kiss to Alfred’s cheek, and turns once more, walking away into the street. He disappears into the crowd.

The skin that Dick’s lips touched burns in the midday air, and Alfred ghosts a hand over the area. He stares over at the railing where Dick had just been. His gaze lingers there. Then, fingers still pressed to his cheek, he glances back at the street, teeming with people, where Dick had gone. 

— 

“England? What were you doing in England?” Bruce asks that evening when Alfred is back from his plane trip, when he is folding linen for that night’s dinnertable. 

Alfred looks down at his hands. He thinks briefly of the other hands that they held just a few hours ago. 

“Nothing, sir,” he says. “Nothing at all.”

—

Lex.

“What a pleasant surprise.”

The figure sitting on Lex’s countertop grins, kicking their ankles together. “You don’t have to lie just to make me feel better, Lex.”

Flicking on the lights, Lex drops his suitjacket onto a nearby sofa and locks the door to his penthouse behind him. He never takes his eyes off Grayson, who’s slinking off of the counter like a cat.

“Oh, don’t tell me you don’t think you’re pleasant. I have several case reports that would argue just the opposite.”

“No, no, don’t get me wrong. I am pleasant,” laughs Grayson goodnaturedly. He’s wearing steeltoe boots, a dark blue cableknit sweater, and khakis with a thigh holster. It’s a particularly odd infusion of country club propriety and danger, and it manages to distract Lex long enough to almost miss the boy’s next words. “But this can’t be a surprise. You’re too smart.”

Lex’s sharper smile clicks into place. Surreptitiously, he lets the slender, cylinder-shaped alarm to alert Mercy drop from the inside of his sleevecuff and into his palm. He presses it. Whatever Grayson is trying to pull is not long for this world. 

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Richard.”

“You don’t remember?” Grayson asks innocently. 

Lex’s smile tightens. “Remember what, precisely?”

Reaching to the counter behind him, Grayson produces a manila file. He gestures with it. “I get it — memory’s a fickle beast. Especially at your age. I’m talking about all of this.”

“What is ‘this’?”

Dick throws the folder. It hits Lex’s chest and splits open, sending photos and thin sheets of paper flying everywhere. The sound of flapping fills the silent penthouse for several long seconds. 

One glossy rectangle that flutters to Lex’s feet shows a small boy stepping on the loafers of a large, tuxedoed man, mid-dance, in the middle of what looks like a large ballroom, replete with crystal chandeliers and shining floors and a well-dressed crowd. 

Lex, slowly, looks up from the photo, meeting Grayson’s neutral gaze. Without the flutter of falling paper, the silence is almost a physical thing, sucking the air and the sound from the room. Lex arches a brow. “I repeat,” he says, low, “what is this?”

Grayson’s eyes crinkle. 

“That’s me.” 

“Agent 37 —”

Grayson throws out a hand, fingers splaying toward the pictures strewn over the room. “This is all me. And I don’t remember any of it because of you. But you remember Nightwing, don’t you?”

Mercy should have been here by now. Why isn’t she? “Is that a threat, Richard?”

“Why?” demands Dick. “You going to call your big scary henchwoman if it was? The one who’s unconscious in the elevator?”

For a moment, the tension is so thick that it begins to cut against his skin. The silence pulsates like a heart.  

“So I’m going to repeat,” Dick says lowly. “You really don’t remember this?” His hand flicks to the mess on the ground.

That’s when Lex begins to laugh. 

Grayson’s eye tics violently, hand spasming at his side into a tightly clenched fist. 

Lex’s grin sharpens. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you, Mr. Grayson? Yes, I remember you. Oh, yes. I remember killing you with a single pill. That was all it took, Richard. One little pill. I remember how you looked at me. You were scared. Do you know why? Because the end of the day, for all of your tricks, for all of your bravado, all your rooftops and gadgets and gunshots, you’re just a scared little boy. Do you know how I know that? You fought me. You thrashed. You even tried to bite me with those pretty little teeth of yours. Left me a nasty little scar, see?” Lex raises his left hand, where there are little, nearly invisible brown crescents. He stalks nearer to the young man. “You were afraid to die. And do you know why you fought me?”

Grayson’s neutral expression is long-gone, replaced with rage. He says nothing. 

“Because you knew I was in control,” Lex answers. “I am always in control. So yes, I know Nightwing. And I know you, too, Richard Grayson. I studied you after I first realized you were ripe and amnesiac enough for a change in career. I know everything about you. I own you. I control you: now and forever. You see, once I knew Richard Grayson was Nightwing, it was easy to see that Bruce Wayne was Batman, Damian Wayne was Robin, and…well, we’d be here all evening. I know all about you, Richard. I know what you’d do to protect the lives, the identities, of all of the people who you remember loving now, apparently. All of the people that I can touch. So I’m going to ask you one more time. Answer very, very carefully.” Lex pauses, taking in the boy’s face, his narrowed eyes and pulsing jaw. “Are you threatening me?”

There’s not even a half-second. “Yes.” 

Lex startles, then rolls his shoulders. “Very well. Tsuchig—”

Slamming Lex to the ground, Grayson has his hand inside of Lex’s mouth before he can complete the triggerword. Grayson plants a knee on Lex’s sternum and pins Lex’s wrists with his free hand. 

“This is as gross for you as it is for me,” Grayson says, “but it’s your fault in the first place. It’ll be over soon.” Lex’s eyes must flash with alarm because Grayson shakes his head. “Not like that.” Grayson pauses, shifting, and then his sclera begin to swirl — then the air behind him begins to swirl — then everything begins to — “You’re going to forget everything you know about my identity. You’re going to forget everything you know about the identities of Batman and everyone associated with him. You’re going to delete all of your files, and your backups, about my family, and then you’re going to forget you did that, too.

“I’d do more,” says Grayson, sitting back as the air resettles and the swirls dissolve, “and it’d save a lot of people a lot of trouble. But I have this thing about free will. Unlike some people.” Grayson pats Lex’s cheek with the back of his hand. Then an expert pressure finds Lex’s trapezius, and the world turns dark, dark black. 

—

Dick. 

Dick fishes his Hypnos out of his eyes with his bare hands in Lex Luthor’s guest bathroom. Blood crescents at his lower punctum before streaking down his cheek. He watches it come down in the mirror reflection for several silent moments before he realizes that, before he knocked Lex out, he called the Bats his family. 

Dick’s eyes dart downward. That was just a slip of the tongue. Dick is willing to learn about them again, now that he’s made his decisions, but they’re not his — 

A phantom memory of Alfred’s hand heats up Dick’s left palm, which he scrapes against his pants. He swallows. He looks back up at himself in the mirror and drags the heel of his palm over the streak of blood running from his eye. He splashes some water from the sink onto his face, tosses the Hypnos into the toilet, and flushes it with his foot. 

On his way out of the penthouse, he gathers the photos and files gingerly and grips them to his chest. He takes a second once-over and sees one last photo he had neglected to grab, because it was hidden under Lex’s expensive-loafered feet. He slides the photograph out and stares at it. 

It’s Bruce and Dick. Dick is little in the photo, young and short enough that Bruce has him on his own big expensive-loafered feet. Dick’s head must have been moving wildly when the photo was taken, because his face is blurry, but Bruce’s face is crystal clear. It’s wearing an expression unlike any that Dick ever saw on it while he was in Gotham. Mid-laugh. Crinkle lines around eyes that don’t look like gravepits. In his tuxedo, with Dick on his feet, Bruce looks strangely, effervescently happy, almost glowing. He looks fond. More than that, he looks — 

Dick swallows, pressing his mouth. He hesitates, beginning to tuck the photo in with the rest of the folder file, but then he stuffs it into his back pocket instead.

It’s something Dick will have to grapple with later. It’s something that will have to wait, because right now, Dick’s running late for a flight to southern China. 

He spends the length of the flight jagging his knee against the seat in front of him and gripping the armrests so hard he has to give the flight attendant his most extra best smile: the one that gets him out of things. He wonders, briefly, when they land, if Dick should have something prepared to say when Dick sees him. He tries his best to brainstorm what it should be — what tone it should take. 

Earnest? Excited? Apologetic? Should he give some sort of speech about how he’s going to try? Should he try and meter expectations of what he remembers?

He still hasn’t figured it out by the time he hits the last location off of the GPS tracker to somewhere just outside the Nanling. The air is thin even just near the mountains. It knocks all of the air out of his chest when he hears, “Grayson?”

Dick turns, seeing Damian with half of his mask torn off, revealing scratches and a green eye that looks vivid against the busted, brilliant red blood vessels. The lump in Dick’s throat hardens. Weakly, he lifts a hand to wave. 

It’s just as well that he didn’t have anything to say, Dick realizes when Damian knocks them both over by charging at Dick with his arms out. His eyes have begun to burn, and his face is already aching from his smile. It turns out that all Dick needs to say, through choking in a couple breaths and choking out the cloud of dust that rises when they fall, is, “Hey, kiddo.”