Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

His memories of the circus have an otherworldly sheen to them. Bathed in soft shadows, blinding in their phosphorescence— silken and always, always slipping away. Sometimes, Dick thinks someone else lived them and he's just a placeholder, a stopgap of storage for all that abundant, inexhaustible love. 

The night Mary and John Grayson fell to their deaths, his world was a stop-motion film. Frames that are burned into his mind. Entire moments that he was frozen still while the world around him detonated into motion.  

(Batman, a smarting, shocking burst of swooping sharpness in his world of cardinal blurriness.) 

Someone had screamed Don’t look but Dick hadn’t listened.  

Now, with the passage of time and the objectivity adulthood lends, he doesn’t know if he can hold it against that eight-year-old boy for drinking in the sight of his parents’ bodies. The last time he would ever see them. The last time he ever saw them.  

Snap. The unnatural seventy-three-degree angle of his mother’s neck.

Snap. An intracranial hematoma, the blood pooling around his father’s skull in the sawdust.

Snap. Their open, unseeing eyes.

Snap. The scene of Dick’s earliest crime.  

Dick has been looking his whole life.  

---

The lock seems undisturbed but then again, it’s an absurdly simple cutaway lock. Dick can have it undone in less than thirty seconds; his last recorded time for this one is fourteen seconds (a record that has, till date, only been beaten by Bruce). That is why he knows it wouldn’t take any effort at all to give it the appearance of being untouched.  

With steady hands, he unlocks the door and scans his surroundings one last time.

Nothing. Just like the last four times he did this today. 

It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you. 

(Here’s the thing: Dick knows exactly where he inherited this particular trait.) 

He does it once more for good measure. 

Then, why, oh, why does he feel so unsettled? Like he’s being tailed. It’s a familiar feeling, Dick can’t deny that; he has spent half his life pursuing and the other half being pursued. Sometimes, when Dick dreams, he’s flying through a thick fog, heart hammering, the onset of adrenaline. He can’t remember if he’s going after someone or if they’re coming for him: chasing or chased, predator or prey, flying or falling.

This morning, when he woke up, it took him seventy-three seconds to remember who he is and who he wishes he could be. He took his breakfast with the sorry beginnings of an anxiety attack.  

You’re free, Dick reminds himself. Not always safe, not always happy but unshackled. Uncaged. Free.

There are no faceless agents with swirling features following him or God forbid, the looming shadow of Batman. No one knows he’s here. No one should know.

Dick forces himself to relax. He shrugs off his jacket and begins to unload the paraphernalia weighing it down.

Calling this place a house would be generous, even for him, the circus brat that he is. 

(He’s no stranger to cramped quarters and small spaces. There are times he wonders how he ever survived the transition from Haly’s Circus to Wayne Manor. Dick Grayson, who was brought up on the cacophony of voices and touches of the circus, never a heartbeat away from joy and community, living a half-life in the silence and stillness of Bruce Wayne’s reliquary to Martha and Thomas Wayne.) 

But it’s a place to sleep and eat. He does not take it for granted. The woman who left it to him was kind, in the way that is borne of desperation— a kindness that is the last act of survival. But it doesn’t matter where it comes from, when it’s the last thing you have left to offer. Dick knows that better than most.  

He first met her when he was trying to fight off a bout of nausea after playing a round of darts with someone whose uncanny aim and sharp smile had reminded him too much of Roy. She had taken a good, long look at him— failing to calm himself down and said, matter of fact, “You will be fine, my boy. You just have to remember to breathe.” 

(People have this habit of burying him in endearments he hasn’t asked for; son and gorgeous and pretty boy and Dick hates it. But she had looked at him with a cursory, almost perfunctory amount of concern, and in that moment, half divorced from his own mind— he had been so grateful for the dry, underwhelming reaction.) 

She must be dead by now.  

In one fluid motion, he volleys a switchblade towards the darkness. 

“I could have killed you in about thirty different ways by now, Grayson,” says the unmistakable voice of Slade Wilson as he plucks the knife from mid-air with one large, gloved hand. 

Dick doesn’t think he could respond appropriately even if he knew what to say because the likelihood of the identity of his intruder being Deathstroke the fucking Terminator had been so remote that Dick hadn’t even accounted for it as a possibility. He’d assumed it was someone looking for a fight based on the shape and size of the shadow. Briefly, he had considered that it could be Bruce before refusing to entertain that train of thought any further. Sloppy, a voice inside his head says.

His brain comes back online. 

“Only thirty? Guess it’s my lucky day.” 

Slade snorts as Dick flicks on a lamp.  

“Most people who come to find me in their,” a disdainful pause, “Accommodations usually have something different to say.”  

Slade’s derision settles something in him. This is unexpected— Dick isn’t prepared for an encounter with one of the deadliest mercenaries with nothing but a few low-grade weapons and no tactical gear— but the jibing and sniping? It’s familiar: a routine and a comfort, in equal measure. 

“I’ve never been most people to you,” Dick remarks, sitting down on one end of his bed because Slade is occupying the only other place of seating in his room. Idly, he considers the odds of the chair collapsing under Slade’s weight since it’s mostly just restructured cardboard. It would be decidedly funny.  

(That’s precisely why Slade won’t let it happen. Not much is funny in Dick’s life, these days.) 

Slade’s answering leer is familiar, too.  

“How did you find me? More importantly, how did you remember to find me?” Dick asks in the silence that follows. 

“You’re not as unpredictable as you like to think, kid. It only took me a week. The Bat will descend soon.” 

A non-answer. Of course. The day anybody in his life tells him something straight, the world might just stop. “That’s odd considering I’ve been here much longer than that and have no Batman to show for it.” 

“Only because he hasn’t known to look. Bruce Wayne will chase you to the end of the world. He already has.” 

Slade could be talking about anything. Dick and Bruce’s history is rife with bitterness borne of gasoline. It doesn’t take much ammunition to set it all ablaze. But here, in the still quarantined wasteland of a city Dick once fiercely swore to protect, it can only mean one thing.  

(At the circus, Madam Fortuna could read futures from the barest of tea dregs. Here, too, Slade can scatter the ashes of Batman and Robin as he pleases with the barest of matchstick truths.  

Tea-leaves and ashes and Dick Grayson. Not much left behind: better off left unread, untouched, unseen.) 

“Don’t rewrite history, Slade. That wasn’t the end of the world. That was just you deciding 100,068 innocent lives were all worth sacrificing just to get back at me.”

In the lamp-lit shadows of the room, Slade’s eye glints with something unreadable.  

“I’m not in the habit of giving you what you want,” he says, rolling his eye. Dick has never been able to get past the strangeness of the action on him. Good to see it’s just as jarring in the after as it was in the before. “You would have welcomed death then, just as you did in Bulgaria. Some would say I did you a favour.” 

“No,” Dick hears the steel in his own voice, surprises even himself with it. He didn’t think he had any spine left. “What I did for your daughter was a favour. What you did to my city was unconscionable. Didn’t you get a good look around when you were stalking me? You ruined these people. The ones who aren’t already dead want to be. You should’ve just killed me, instead. That would’ve been a fucking favour.” 

Slade is up with his sword at Dick’s carotid before Dick has even begun to side-step the motion.  

“Is that what you want, Robin? Because contract or not, I can make it happen.” 

Dick stares back at Slade. He’s aware he’s not blinking. In the worst (and best) of his dreams, Slade has the same bored, almost serene expression on his face before he puts a bullet through Dick’s head.  

He feels no fear. That’s not all it is, though. He didn’t fear Slade even back when he was Robin. But it’s a different thing entirely to face Deathstroke— no suit, no gear, no team to fall back on— and not even feel his heart skip a beat. Slade could kill him right here, right now and nobody would know. He’d just be another body lost to Blüdhaven.  

Maybe, this time, he’ll get it right. He had tried when Chemo had dropped, but Bruce couldn’t leave things well alone.  

(Story of his fucking life; Bruce unable to let things just be.) 

Slade’s gaze, razor-edged as he watches Dick breathe carefully, that same brute laser-focus that Dick often finds himself on the receiving end of when it comes to erstwhile foes. 

The blade is cold. It almost feels nice. It’s like he’s behind layers and layers of frosted glass, watching this happen to someone else:

Dick Grayson, forever a spectator to his own life. 

He presses closer just to see what Slade will do. Dick’s not calling his bluff, not really. It doesn’t matter to him if Slade does what he says he will. But it’s the nature of the beast, isn’t it? Dick’s a detective.  

(He’s just like Bruce; he can’t let things be, either.) 

The corners of Slade’s mouth lift in a grim smile.  

“So, that’s your problem. I thought it was just bravado, but you really do have a death wish, don’t you?” 

He smiles back, letting his teeth show. The thing about Deathstroke is that Dick’s actions always have an equal and opposite reaction. 

“Do you want to be alive, Richard?” 

Dick shrugs, unmindful of the steel at his neck. One misstep and he will be dead. He can feel the beginnings of blood. “Do you want me to be alive, Slade?” 

The mercenary draws back. In two short steps, he’s back in the abandoned chair, sword sheathed, like the last few minutes never transpired. Maybe that’ll be Slade’s play. It would be an uninteresting one, though and for all the things that Dick can say about him, Slade has never been uninteresting.  

“Your friend from Kandahar had some fascinating things to say about you but he never mentioned that you’re more suicidal than usual.” 

Tiger. Of course. He should’ve known. Tiger may be fond of him, but Dick had always known he was just an ally, never a friend. He would always put Spyral’s interests before Dick: a character trait that is a comfort in its predictability but a hassle in its consequences.  

(They’d run into Slade on the outskirts of Sofia, chasing after some rerouted organs. It had been a good fight— the kind that makes your blood sing and leaves you breathless with anticipation. He’d had a devastating adrenaline crash after. Thought, grimly, to himself, Well, this isn’t too different from patrol. I’m just the guy I would’ve put behind bars, now. 

Dick had known the moment he knocked Slade’s katana out of his hand with a complicated aerial twist that Slade would know exactly who he is. He’d let himself be held in Slade’s subsequent chokehold and relished the intimacy. Here was a man who had known him since he wore the leotard and who knew exactly what price-tag a secret carried.  

Slade had stared at him with such fierce determination; like he could will the Hypnos tech to stop working and show him exactly how far Nightwing had fallen through sheer resolve. Tiger had broken the moment with an attempt to free Dick that Slade had parried casually before Dick got his head back in the game and shot at Slade’s kneecap. Not like it would have had any long-term consequences for Slade. No, as always, Dick would be the only one to suffer those. 

They’d escaped with the primary organ harvester instead of the organs and then Dick had been too busy swallowing down the guilt and subsequent nausea at the things he was doing, who he was doing them for. But there had been a moment. A brief one. 

“You know Deathstroke,” Tiger had remarked, disguising his curiosity with dogged focus on maneuvering their extraction jet. 

“I know you’ve read my file, T. I know a whole lot of people.” 

He’d thought that would be all Tiger said because he had been ready to launch into a carefully crafted, obnoxious rant on how he knew Superman so well that he spent every alternate Thanksgiving at Superman’s parents’ house and how many people could say that?  

But Tiger had stopped toggling the jet controls abruptly and said with a sombre look on his face, “You know Slade Wilson.” 

He’d thought about the press of Slade’s large hands around his throat, wondering when exactly he turned into someone incapable of having a normal reaction to violence directed his way. The person he had become, so starved for trust and affection, he’d been willing to bet against Slade’s contractual obligations. This awful sinking feeling in his stomach, Nothing will never be the same again. I will never be the same again. 

“Yes,” Dick had said and shut down a rare occurrence: further attempts at conversation initiated by Tiger.  

What a horrible thing for someone to have witnessed, let alone Tiger, who would sooner throw Dick off the plane than show any kindness to him. What a horrible, horrible thing to be seen like that: up close and personal.) 

“So, that’s how you remembered to remember me.”  

“Kid, I could never forget you.” 

That. That was a loaded statement. Like a gun. There could only ever be blood at the end. 

And yet. There was a warmth blooming. He would never be on the same page as Slade about justice or morality or anything, really, and Blüdhaven would forever be a noxious wound, but he would always have Slade’s respect, Deathstroke's misguided attention and affection.

Some of it was the Joey of it all, their shared grief.

But the rest? The rest was all Dick. He would always be Robin to Slade.  

It’s a terrible thought to have when he knows there are people in this world who will forgive him his many, many transgressions and love him if he could just find the courage to reach out. Good people. Donna, Roy, Damian.  

(Not Bruce. Never Bruce. He will always fall short of Batman’s measuring stick.) 

Slade will always want him. Wants him, even now. Probably did something repulsive to gain Tiger’s favour and find Dick. Has invested so much effort and time into being a nuisance to Dick. Will welcome him with open arms even if Dick doesn’t reach out.  

“Like I said. Lucky me, huh?” 

There’s the slightest pull to Slade’s cheekbone and it’s Pavlovian, really, how Dick feels himself smiling back. It isn’t just Slade. It’s him, too. He may have never wanted Slade’s approval, but it sure beat not having it.  

“Why come here instead of returning to your precious Titans? Even you must’ve learned some things are beyond saving, by now,” he asks.  

Dick doesn’t have to be a mind-reader to know exactly what, or who Slade thinks is beyond saving. It must be visible in his expression because Slade adds, “He’s done just fine by himself all this time.” 

Has he? Dick doesn’t think so.  

Bruce adopted Jason only to fuck up so monumentally that Jason died brutally and then clawed his way out a coffin so he could be a literal ghost to haunt Bruce instead of a mere metaphorical one. And that’s not just on Bruce, it’s on Dick, too. His first brother, wearing his family’s colours, six feet under the ground before Dick even got off Tamaran.  

There’s going to be times when you’re going to want to talk to someone. Call me at this number. I’ve been where you’re at and I’m a good listener.  

Tim— earnest, devoted, barely trained Tim— left at the mercy of a homicidal impostor Batman. Stephanie, chasing after shadows, desperate for approval only to meet the same fate as Jason. Cass— incomparable and endlessly compassionate— forever subsumed in the tug-of-war between Bruce and Batman’s matchless expectations. Damian— their dead Robin. 

He swallows roughly, “I think there’s a whole host of vigilantes in Gotham who would disagree with you.” 

“Some people aren’t meant to be fathers. Trust me, I would know,” Slade says dryly.  

He does not remember the tenor of John Grayson’s voice anymore, but he knows exactly how he felt when he chased away Dick’s nightmares— safe and accepted and loved— like no monster would get past him, like John Grayson would have cut off his own arms before he ever let someone hurt Dick. His father would’ve never beat Dick into submission to infiltrate a place where he could trust no one, love no one and lose all sense of himself without even a contingency in place. 

“He isn’t my father,” Dick says quietly. My father died when I was eight-years-old and I think it would have been better if I died with him. I should’ve died with him.  

Slade looks at him with a doleful expression, the planes of his face glittering with an emotion that he directs at Dick way too often: pity.

It makes him, suddenly and sharply, burn with white-hot rage.  

He throws himself at Slade, directing all his momentum into an uppercut. Just one good hit. Just enough to see him bleed. To hurt.   

Dick gets his wish before Slade forcefully throws him back. And still, still— the furrow in his forehead, the turn of his mouth, remain unchanged despite the blood trickling down his jaw. All that pity.

What the hell is Dick supposed to do with it? 

As quickly as the rush of anger arose, it abates, leaving him breathless. What is he doing? What does it say about him that all it took was one off-hand truth for him to immediately resort to violence— this guttural need to hurt?  

And it was the truth. Because Dick can renounce Bruce under every star on every planet, but it doesn’t change anything.  

Dick has dealt in facts most of his life.

Fact: Bruce is his father in all but blood.

Fact: If he called Bruce right now, Bruce would come running.

Fact: Bruce might have adopted him to bandage the wounds they couldn’t stop tearing into each other, but those early years were some of the best of his life.  

His memories as Robin are glossy. Hyper-pigmented. Bursting with both colour and emotion. His love for that time in his life, for Bruce— is so huge and cavernous, like the ocean— that everything else that has come after has felt like being thirsty in a desert. They may have tiptoed around the words for far too long but there had been something warm, if not always paternal, in all of those initial interactions with Bruce. For all that things are bad and ruined between them now, Bruce is his family.

He doesn’t want to see Bruce, but he misses him with all his heart. Despite everything.  

Plainly, softly, he delivers this truth, a sinner at confession, “I wouldn’t be who I am without him.” 

Slade settles down in the chair again, gaze contemplative. “Is that a good thing?” 

“I wouldn’t be who I am without him,” he repeats firmly. 

“Then why haven’t you gone back to Gotham and celebrated your homecoming? Or even told anyone that you can go home now?” 

He doesn’t— he doesn’t have an answer to that. Slade knows this. Dick knows Slade knows this.  

“Like I said, kid. Just because some people are fathers doesn’t mean they’re meant to be.” 

And there’s grief in Slade’s voice, too. A son who died in his name, hating him till his last breath. Another that he had to kill. A daughter who gave him an eye but turned on him the moment she saw better with the remaining one.  

Dick is so, so tired. His shoulder hurts. “Why are you really here, Slade?” 

(Blüdhaven’s fate might have been signed the very day Dick chose to save it, but he can still serve penance for all that remains. More importantly, here, he can do no harm: here, he can hurt no one, and he won’t be hurt either. Here, Dick Grayson isn’t anyone’s son or teammate or brother or agent. He’s no one. He helps them rebuild brick by brick and doesn’t ask for more. And perhaps the most important one— he isn’t responsible for anyone’s life, not even his own.) 

Slade smiles, teeth flecked with blood— a beautiful, awful thing. “There’s a new H.I.V.E. knock-off in Algiers. I still have your old suit. Are you ready to be a good guy again, Grayson?” 

Dick blinks, uncomprehending for a second.

Then, it sinks. Slade Wilson came here to a city that he nuked just to get back at Dick for saving his daughter, with an offer to destroy the organization responsible for his son’s death to— 

To what? Throw him a lifeline? Remind Dick how to be a vigilante again?

Because Dick hasn’t forgotten. He never can. 

And then he laughs. He was wrong, earlier. The things in his life? They’re fucking hilarious. 

“You can’t be serious,” Dick says with disbelief.  

Slade’s voice is as dry as sand, “Deadly.”  

“I don’t need to be saved, Slade, least of all by you. I’m happy here.” 

It’s Slade’s turn to scoff with disbelief, “I know you like to put on a show, but you can’t seriously be so far gone in your act that you’ve started to believe your own lies.” 

He feels that low-simmering irritation that is a constant of interacting with one Slade Wilson.  

It’s exhausting. He’s exhausted. He slumps further into himself. He wants to tell someone, tell anyone. I don’t think I can be saved, if there is anything left at all to save. The grave Bruce built for this ruse might’ve been missing the real Dick Grayson’s body but it sure as hell has his everything else.  

“Go home, Slade. There’s nothing for you here.” 

Slade’s gaze is as scornful as it is searing. He feels the weight of that eye on his sore shoulder, the sliver of scars peeking from underneath his henley, the array of plastic bottles and dull knives scattered around. 

But finally, finally, Slade moves towards the door.  

“You know, the kid I knew wouldn’t have let him win. He had more fight in him than that.” 

You don’t know even know what he did. What I let him. What he asked of me. Like a dog begging for scraps. Dick doesn’t say anything, just meets Slade’s scrutiny as intently. He doesn’t have to. It’s written all over him: Here lies what remains of Dick Grayson’s mind in what doesn’t feel like Dick Grayson’s body. Don’t return to Batman. 

Slade leaves as soundlessly as he arrived. There one moment, gone the next. A mirage. He could’ve imagined it. 

Dick tucks a switchblade in his pants and goes to bed. 

---

He dreams in technicolor. The circus, always.  

It’s an old scene, one he has lived and breathed and one that has persisted in the lines of his memory despite the passage of time. He was happy here, once. He wants to be, again. 

Slowly, nebulously, the sawdust around him transforms into sand. The big top, here one second and then gone, the next. Suddenly, he’s bearing down against hot desert air.  

He has to save the girl. He has to save her. She deserves a better death— stolen from her mother, orphaned at birth, dying in this lonely place. More importantly, she deserves a life. He keeps walking. 

There’s a figure looming in the distance and if he can just make it there, she’ll live. She must. They’ll know what to do. They can save her. But the figure keeps moving away the closer Dick tries to get. Every inch of him hurts. He’s so, so thirsty. He swallows down rising bile. Tries to convince himself he's almost there. Tells her to do it, too.  

She’s crying. Dick tries to soothe her, but the sand is in his eyes. There’s no one here to help him save her. And Dick can’t do it alone. He thinks he might be crying, too.  

When he finally collapses in the sand, it feels like rolling around the circus ring with Zitka. He could almost pretend he’s there. It’s a good lie; it’s a really good lie.

He can’t keep his eyes open any longer. There’s a familiar, scarred hand on his brow. That’s a really good lie, too.  

---

The dream isn’t any more unsettling than his usual ones. A lifetime’s worth of grisly crime scenes, hallucinatory toxins and witnessing innumerable death is good cannon fodder for bad dreams. It would be a disservice to call them nightmares because he has lived nightmares. If pressed, Dick could even count this one as a good dream. Nothing truly horrifying happened.  

But it burns something awful in his chest all the same. He’s so fucking alone. He is no one and most days, it’s all he wants. If he can’t hurt anyone, if no one can hurt him, isn’t it better?  

And still. His traitorous heart: full of want. Always, always wanting. If only he could go home. Belong to a person or a place— it doesn’t matter which. He wants, so so badly.  

---

“So, what’s your story, Rob?” Leroy asks. 

Leroy has a quiet air of authority to him. East European, but an accent interspersed with that familiar nasal New Jersey undertone. Late forties, around 190 pounds. He has remarkably steady hands. I used to be a doctor, he said when Dick pointed that out over darts. There was something that looked a lot like regret in his expression. Used to be. Dick doesn’t need to ask why that’s changed.  

Some of the construction crew asked him to join them for a round of beer. Most days, Dick declines because he doesn’t want to become a real person to anyone here. They’ve lived through the destruction of their city and stuck by it. Dick cannot claim the same. He is not owed any of this. 

But Rob is a quiet, serious man who keeps to himself and never complains about any of the tasks assigned. Rob is strong— he can lift bags of cement endlessly, untiring. Rob’s first language is not English. Rob looks like he’s from nowhere at all. Rob doesn’t like whiskey because his old man used to be a drunk, but he can handle beer. 

“I have no story. I just grew up here and want to do right by whatever is left,” Rob says with a small smile. Rob belongs here. Rob bled and sweat for this city. Rob can be as brazen and fearless as he wants. 

“You don’t have any family?” 

Maya’s a bit of a wildcard. She burns bright— angry one moment, contemplative and worried the next. (She reminds Dick, painfully, of Damian.) She carries a cane because her bones are weak from all the radiation. Rob has been teaching her how to swing it around to apportion maximum damage in case she’s ever attacked. She was in one of the hot zones when the radiation dropped. She has a son who died. 

“No.” 

“What about your parents?” Leroy again. He’s looking at Rob intently, gaze discerning.

(What does he know, Dick wonders. Whatever he thinks he might understand, Dick knows it will never be even close to the truth.) 

“My father’s a drunk. He beat me so I ran away. Haven’t looked back.” 

The people around him commiserate sympathetically— soft cries of outrage and consolation and Dick feels a hot, sharp curdle of shame. The world would keel over before Bruce ever let go of his control issues to become something as mundane as an alcoholic. And as for running away? Dick always comes back.  

The conversation moves on. Some gossip about the mayor in Gotham, the merits of democracy. Dick tunes it out, sipping his beer carefully. He watched Leroy pour it and only took a sip after everyone else had. Naively, he thought this would fix that inescapable feeling of want in his stomach, but it just makes him feel guilty. Rob is not real.  

Dick Grayson doesn’t feel real, either. 

---

A few days later, in the refuge of the anonymity that is afforded by the darkness, Dick pulls out a Spyral-issued burner phone. His hands are shaking but he tinkers with it till he’s certain they won’t know he has it and that it’s being used at all.  
 
(Debugging tech always reminds him of laborious hours spent in the Cave at Bruce’s side. Bruce used to give him tasks like that all time when he felt Dick getting too antsy. He wasn’t so good at being still, back then. But Bruce had been exceedingly patient and had known exactly how to redirect some of Dick’s unfocused energy. They would work in an easy silence and sometimes, Bruce would squeeze his shoulder and Dick would soak up the affirmation like a hungry, little thing.)

He used to call this number all the time, even when he knew the other person would never answer it again.  

Hey, it’s me. Tim stopped by again today. He’s a good kid. I don’t deserve him. I think what I’m doing is going to blow up in my face. I can’t see a way out. I’m not sure I want to.

And later, leaning against the spire of the Chrysler, he used to try to gather the courage to either call or jump.  

We haven’t seen each other since you left for New Cronus. My city is a radioactive wasteland and it’s my fault and it’s like I’m seventeen again, running away to New York. I miss you.  

He never did end up doing either.  

Because he lost her once. And even though she came back, the version of him that didn’t know what it was like to hold her corpse, still warm to the touch, died with her and no matter what he does, Dick can’t make him come back. In some ways, there is solace in that. He had weathered the worst thing that could have happened. And it had been excruciating, each breath a reminder that he would never leave that awful crater in San Francisco, but it had already happened. It was done. 

“Who is this and how do you have this number?”  

Donna’s voice is like an adrenergic storm: like all this time he had been stone and now he can remember that he is flesh and blood and bones.  

“Don? It’s me,” he says, voice quavering.  

“Is this a joke? Because it isn’t fucking funny.”  

Donna sounds close to tears.  

Before she was Troia, before Dick Grayson ever knew a world without Donna Troy, a Wonder Girl who was welling up meant unchecked anger and the promise of a devastating confrontation. Robin had pointed out the tell fondly only for her to train herself out of it. He had apologized, explaining that he didn’t think it was a bad thing at all, but she had said, with a steely look to her, that she didn’t want to give Man’s World any more power over her than it already thought it had.  

Dick feels a lump in his throat that he’s the reason she’s showing such an old tell. 

“The last time you took me flying, I asked you to throw me in the air and you weren't sure because I had a sprained ankle, so I told you that you’ve never let me fall and you’re not about to start now. You said you’d follow me to hell when I was Batman. When you broke up with Roy, I snuck out the Batplane and took you out to an ice cream shop in Italy that my parents took me to. Your favourite drink is a peppermint latte, but only the one from that awful bakery near your old apartment,” he chokes out, words rushed and stumbling over each other. He can hear his heartbeat in his ears. 

“Dick,” Donna’s voice is so, so full of relief: palpable with joy, even. How could Dick have ever doubted her? 

“Donna, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” he starts, heart still thundering, hands shaking with the onslaught of adrenaline-fear-exhilaration, but she cuts him off. 

“None of that. Where are you? I’ll come to you.” 

And so, Dick tells her. 

---

Donna’s arms around him alter something in him— like an electric shock; sharpening his lacklustre world into a kaleidoscope of colours, viciously ridding him of the vipers of his loneliness— intrinsically jolting something in him from dead to alive. 

He thinks that maybe he had forgotten he was Dick Grayson but being wrapped up in her crushing grip reminds him of it. He melts into it. He can feel her crying in the crook of his shoulder and he thinks he might be the worst kind of person in the world to put Donna through his bullshit.  

“I’m so sorry, I’m really, really sorry,” he murmurs, and he thinks he sounds close to tears, too but because she’s Donna, because she knows him, she tells him, “It’s okay. I forgive you. I forgive you, okay, Dick?” 

The relief is like free-fall. A quick, sharp tugging in his gut and he comes out steadier for it, landing on his feet like a Grayson always does.  

Time passes like molasses. He thinks he could be happy here, shepherded in his best friend’s embrace, forgiveness imparted so freely. But eventually, Donna pulls back, arms still around him and eyes him with a certain kind of wonder he doesn’t think he has ever deserved and says, voice brittle with steel, “You can’t go back, Dick.” 

Is she talking about the wasteland that is Blüdhaven or Bruce? Dick doesn’t know. He thinks he would’ve known, before. Before he was a dead man playing a sacrificial lamb, before she was dead in his arms. It’s harder to be certain, now. The years they lived out of each other’s pockets seem like lifetimes ago. His and hers. 

“I—” he breaks off, helplessly.

He doesn’t know how to even begin that sentence, let alone end it. Once upon a time, Dick could tell her anything and know she would understand. He doesn’t know whether that still holds true. He’s scared to find out.  

A brief, complicated expression flashes across her features and Dick can see the etchings of grief there. What a world, where they both know what it’s like to lose each other. What a world, where they both came back but can never forget when they were gone. What a sorry, sorry world. 

He can see his own thoughts reflected in the soft lines of her face, but Donna is unmistakably stronger than him because all she says is, “Come on, Boy Wonder, I have a spare room that’s calling your name. I believe we owe each other a few stories.” 

She once told him she’d follow him to hell. He’s pretty sure the reverse is also true— there is nowhere he doesn’t trust her to lead him to.  

“Alright,” he says, voice steady, sure, certain and it’s worth every single second of this past week he spent agonizing over calling her, just for the look on her face. 

---

(Here’s the thing: Dick wakes up from dreams that feel like memory and knows he’s missing something. The absence remains, chiselled into his gyri and sulci by shadows that disperse when he tries to enshroud himself in them. After a lifetime of being the light in the darkness, he can’t blame them.) 

Here’s the thing: He knows when he’s being watched. 

“That’s creepy,” he says, eyes still closed. He’s tempted to see Donna’s expression, if only so he can compare it to what he imagines his was like, mirrored devastatingly on Roy’s, back on New Cronus. But these days, Dick is, first and foremost, a coward. 

“It’s only creepy when it’s your deranged mentor or one of your equally deranged Bat-brood doing it,” she criticizes but he can hear the smile in her voice.  

He shuffles to the other side of the spare bed and opens his eyes, only for Donna to tuck herself in next to him and close hers as she leans against the headboard with a sigh.  

Will he ever be able to meet her gaze without that hot convulsion of shame in his stomach? She looks tired— like she didn’t get much sleep after their talk last night. All the details of Dick’s latest failure set out on display, ready to be picked apart at a moment’s notice. And because it’s Donna, she did it with her characteristic kindness that only served to make him feel like absolute scum.  

His guilt, that she told him very gently to let go of, but which he holds onto with a conversely proportionate vice-like grip, bubbles in him— sharp and acidic. How many times will he come crashing into her life, letting her pick up all his pieces? How many times will she be forced to save him? Dick is so tired of owing.  

She interrupts his self-absorption with her usual lack of tact, eyes still shut, “No. You being alive is the best thing that has happened to me in months, and I won’t let your stupid, misplaced guilt ruin it.” 

Despite himself, he smiles, “You’re not even looking at me! Maybe I was just admiring your bedhead.” 

“You’re forgetting that I know you,” she singsongs and well, that’s not an argument he can ever win, let alone one he wants to have. 

(Sometimes, he thinks that he was born knowing her. Sometimes, Dick finds himself, a bloodied apology on the tip of his tongue— Sorry I made you wait, sorry that you were alone, sorry that the scales were tipping before they ever balanced.) 

She does. She knows him and he knows her. Better than anyone in the world, maybe.  

It’s why he made an autopsy of himself, shared more about the truth and tangle of Bruce and Spyral than would ever feel good. His insides flayed in demonstration because if he can’t trust Donna not to slice him open further, he can’t trust himself. 

“You do,” he says finally and it’s a severely laconic notion compared to the vast cornucopia of his love for her. So, he rises, slipping his head in the curve of her neck, burying his head in her shoulder.  

Donna lets out an almost imperceptible, content sigh before resting her head on top of his. The New York sunlight filtering through her grimy windows bathes the room in a golden warmth and listening to her breathe, feeling the expanse of her each inhale and exhale, he feels the most centered he has since his world pinwheeled out of control: once, then twice and then over and over. 

“I thought I had ruined this. That I would never have it again,” Dick divulges quietly. 

“You could never ruin it— and you’ll always have it when you want it. Even when you don’t,” she affirms.  

“That sounds less like reassurance and more like a threat,” he jokes. 

“It is a threat. If you think I’m letting you out of my sight any time soon, you’re mistaken.” 

“Hey, I didn’t stop you when you went on an insane space mission to fix a rip in time after you just came back.”  

“You wanted to,” she teases. 

“Of course I wanted to. Plus, I could’ve really used your help with those OMACs,” he retorts, trying to inject some levity in his tone because he still remembers the overwhelming fear that squeezed his heart when Donna told him her insane plan to stop the end of the universe— the possibility of a reality where he would lose her when he had just gotten her back.   

“You managed, didn’t you?” 

Dick doesn’t respond, letting the memories wash over him. Surviving a crime means bearing witness to the crime scene— and just like a part of Dick is still trapped in that Murder Machine, waiting for Batman or death— a part of Dick is still buried in that crater where he held Donna’s dead body to his chest. Dick can never forget the fact that he lived there, once. 

“Move in with me,” she says, abruptly enough that Dick jolts up like he’s been struck, accidentally bumping their heads. That might bruise, a distant part of his brain catalogues even as he tries to process her invitation.  

Is she serious? Most days, Dick doesn’t feel like a real person. Most days, Dick wakes up poorly, a litany of facts he repeats in his head over and over till he feels solid enough. 

Your name is Dick Grayson. Your mother, Mary Grayson, called you Robin. Your father, John Grayson, taught you how to break your fall. Generally, you are an orphan. You used to be Nightwing.

“I know people joke about our co-dependency, but I don’t think we should give them ammunition. Besides, I’m a terrible roommate,” he deflects, pulling back from her. 

Donna pins him in place with a hard look, “Dick, you can’t go back. I know you— you’ll go back to Gotham, get sucked into his orbit and pretend like everything you told me didn’t happen.” 

“I won’t pretend,” he quietly rebuts. It’s the truth. Dick has imagined it, more than he will ever admit, even to Donna— pretending that everything Bruce and he did to each other was just a bad dream— like he can still wake up from it and run to Batman for comfort. But he has always known. Even when he was no longer Robin, freshly fired, trying to find some anchor, any saving, he had known— there is no going back.  

(Here’s the thing: Dick wakes up from dreams that feel like memory and knows he’s missing something.)

(Here’s another thing: It can never be like before.)

Donna must sense the depth of this confession, because she looks momentarily relieved, before she frowns, “But you’ll go back to Gotham?” 

The truth is Gotham is hungry. A black hole, always waiting to devour more than he can offer with each passing day. Gotham is bad for him.  

He thinks of the lonely, grieving kid Bruce brought to the Manor, hungry for a kind touch; the times he would get hurt as Robin, wishing desperately for the press of Bruce’s palm against his head— all the times he was reckless, unsure if he was doing it for the rush of risk or for the occurrence of hurt, so he could at least have some physical proof of that gnawing, searching pain. 

(Here’s the thing: Hungry isn’t a feeling. It’s an existence.) 

(Here’s another thing: Dick will spend his whole life trying to outrun Gotham.) 

“I don’t think so,” he tells her honestly.  

Donna’s subsequent relief is a tangible thing and Dick feels terribly guilty.  

“So, why not stay with me? You like New York. And once I tell the others that you’re alive, they’ll feel better knowing I’ll be right here to stop you from doing something as stupid as going on another suicide mission for Batman.”  

Donna’s voice is escalating with despair and Dick can’t take it. 

Pointedly ignoring the crux of her question, he fires one right back at her, "You mean to tell me that you haven’t already? Your communicator has been going off for the last six minutes.” 

She rolls her eyes in exasperation, very much aware of his deflection but willing to let it slide for now, “Have some faith in me. I just told them I have some important news. I didn’t say anything else otherwise Wally would’ve vibrated through my walls long ago.” 

He feels caught. Reaching out to Donna was one thing; it’s Donna. But he doesn’t think he can handle Roy’s rejection or reaction, which will probably be incandescent fury. Or Wally and Garth, who won’t be just angry (not to mention hurt) but even worse— disappointed.  

“Don,” he gulps weakly. Under the cover of the duvet haphazardly wrapped around them, he presses his thumb to his index finger, then his middle, ring and pinkie— tightly— willing, commanding his body to not betray him. Dick will not check out of his own mind in her fucking spare room. He will never be able to look at himself in the mirror if he does. 

“Dick.”  

That’s her team-leader voice. The one where there is no realistic choice but to listen to her; bend to her indomitable will because it’s the best course of action.

“You’ve been through hell because of Bruce. You need to be around people who don’t grunt at you in disapproval every time you don’t jump through a hoop.” 

He tries to regain some footing in this conversation, “Come on, he doesn’t bother with grunts. He just looks at you, all gloomy and disappointed.” 

As soon as Donna answers her communicator, it’ll stop being just him and her. There will be other people, their hurt and grief and resentment. He’s been alone for so long; but amongst his oldest friends, his safety net, he can hurt and be hurt. 

(Dick hasn’t been Nightwing in a very long time; which is to say, he’s not brave enough to be fearless in the face of all that risk, anymore.

At Spyral, there was no one to trust and no one to hurt. Trust was a dimly obscure luxury he couldn’t pay the price for, because the cost was failing, unable to go home. There might have been the faint inception of kinship with Helena and Tiger, but he had always known that they were chasing their own targets. All those agents and intermediaries, following their own code, willing to pay prices they deemed vindicable and Dick, stuck in the quicksand of his crumbling morals. 

After the Old Gun died, after Dick got him killed— he had stood in his room at St. Hadrian’s, knowing he didn’t belong there— in that tangled web of spies and double-agents, with no one to trust, no one to love, no one to save, and yet, yet—

The thought of going back to Gotham to a Batman he didn’t recognize, to another dead Robin— his dead Robin— had had him swallowing down a scream.) 

(Here’s the thing: You back a man into a corner, and he may come out swinging. But you bury a man in the acceleration of expectation, and he learns to meet it.) 

(Here’s another thing, perhaps the only one that matters: Sometimes, Dick thinks he resents Bruce so much, it feels devastatingly like love.)

Donna’s face softens, for reasons Dick does not know and is terrified to learn. What does she see when she looks at him? 

He knows his body and his face haven’t betrayed him— knows exactly what he looks like, a supplicant prostrating to her heart. What does she see that she’s willing to go easy on him? He has an almost insane, manic desire to shake her shoulders and make her tell him.  

“Dick, I won’t tell them till you say it’s alright, okay? But staying in New York is non-negotiable. I need to see you every day.” Here, her voice breaks, fissured with grief so potent that he feels the crush of debilitating guilt. “Just so I know this isn’t a dream. And you could probably do with sleeping in a place where you don’t jump at the slightest sound.” 

His shoulders— tense, take a long, long moment to relax again. “Okay,” he breathes out, tasting the shape of the word in his mouth. The intoxication of this brief, undeserved reprieve leaves him breathless, almost dizzy with relief. “Okay,” he repeats, just for good measure. 

This time, he can feel the easing up of tension in his whole body and he doesn’t care what it looks like. She nods, a quick bob, before tucking her head in the crook of his shoulder. He puts his arm around her, letting her sag against him. 

“Why on earth would you buy an apartment on the ground floor?” Dick asks facetiously, knowing Donna will see it for peace offering that it is: the implicit understanding that to be in each other’s shared orbits as badly as they both want, they’ll need a place high, high up.  

Donna smiles, one of those rare, breathtaking ones where her whole face lights up with happiness.  

There was a time Dick thought he would never see it again. His heart staggers, bowled over by the utter relief and gratitude that despite all that they have lost, he can still have this: Donna, smiling, by his side, here. 

“You know I love you, yeah?” she asks quietly. 

“You too,” he chokes. 

---

At some point in the tepid dawn, he takes a scalding shower while Donna makes them breakfast. It’s good— eggs scrambled the way he likes, coffee strong the way she always makes it— but he can hardly taste it, his worry about the unread alerts on her communicator caustic, burning a hole in the lobes of his brain where all his regrets live. 

(One of his worst fights with Roy, as he had watched blood trickle down Arsenal’s cheekbone with a sick sort of interest, was when Roy had hurled, You’re too busy being needed to ever need anyone, Dick.  

He cannot remember why they were even fighting in the first place but at that time in his life, Dick had been at his worst, grieving dead Robins and Titans alike; he had pulled a page from Batman’s playbook and warped Nightwing into something to be feared by even the worst of Blüdhaven. 

And Roy’s words had hurt. Viscerally, like a gaping wound that would never close, bleeding more than he ever would from any punch Roy could ever inflict on him.

How Roy could cut him to the bone so easily— be so close, the unwavering faith of Speedy covering Robin’s six— but still fail to see how fucking selfish Dick is.) 

If the other Titans find out that Dick intentionally and deliberately delayed their inevitable reunion, their grief will be compounded with hurt-resentment-fury and Dick’s relationships will bear those additional scars.  

(He worries how much more corrosion they can bear.) 

Dick was taught to minimize damage: non-lethal punches, nerve strikes designed to subdue, de-escalation tactics. How can he prolong their mourning, especially when he has the power to end it so quickly?  

Garth’s quiet reassurance and comfort every time he stayed late at the Tower to avoid seeing Bruce in the worst of those Robin years. Roy’s life-raft of a team, despite his own ever-present grief, all so Dick had a coping mechanism that didn’t involve turning into Bruce. Wally’s steady friendship and attempts to get Dick out of his own head despite his myriad other responsibilities.

How can Dick still doubt them? 

They love him. If man is the sum of his actions, the Titans have consistently showed him that they will move heaven and earth to catch him. He cannot selfishly delay his own pain at the expense of drawing out theirs. And for what? The hurt will be there today, and the hurt will be there tomorrow. Already, he has done the unthinkable, the indefensible— and let them think he’s dead. 

He swallows the dregs of his steaming coffee, focusing on the burn, the sharp feeling of pain. It clarifies his mind; he ignores all the coping mechanisms that have been drilled into him to focus on it, so he doesn’t have to think of childhood vows and broken promises. 

“Donna,” he says, voice echoing strangely even in his own ears, “I think you should call the others over.” 

Donna looks over at him, face carefully neutral, “Are you sure?” 

And because he doesn’t want to lie to Donna any more than he already has, “No. But do it anyway.” 

---

The Flash doesn’t vibrate through the walls of Donna’s apartment; instead, there is a rapid series of knocks that bring the ghost of a smile to Dick’s face. All those times Robin had to physically hold back an impatient Kid Flash, only for his best friend to finally learn some semblance of restraint. Donna opens the door, letting him in to her living room where Dick is wearing holes in her rug with his neurotic pacing. 

Wally West enters with a hurried smile, talking about a million different things at once but the second he sees Dick, he vibrates straight through the walls and out.

“Well, that could’ve been worse. He could have punched me,” Dick quips, stomach sinking, if only to distract himself from the dam of hurt; he can handle Wally’s evasion— he can. Donna is looking at the spot on the carpet where Wally has left a speed-burn, face just as stunned by Wally’s departure as Dick feels. 

It feels like hours, as he stands there, willing himself not to cry or run away or scream in frustration. You have no fucking right; he repeats to himself furiously only for Wally to phase back in with a Justice League embossed lab kit.  

Oh.

Oh. 

Even with all his mounting dread and anxiety, he can’t help but smile as he extends his arm out for Wally to draw some blood samples and tissue swabs.  

(For a singular moment, Dick lets himself imagine a world where the results come back negative. What if he is an impostor, living Dick Grayson’s life, carrying Dick Grayson’s hurts and no one even told him? Would it be a precursor to more misery, or would it just be a relief?) 

A strained silence envelops the apartment, all three of them suspended in a state of unnerving motionlessness. He thinks this might be the first time both he and Wally have been and remained this still. When they were kids, Donna and Garth would have to sit on them to keep them in one place. Somewhere in the second year of operating as the Teen Titans, Dick officially lost count of the number of times Roy exasperatedly locked one of their fidgety limbs in place with his weathered hands.  

The kit begins to analyze the data and Wally’s composure finally breaks; he looks at Dick with a heartbreaking mixture of hope and grief glittering on his face. 

(Dick can understand that. If a previously dead Wally stood in front of him, it would be crippling to see someone presumably wearing his face— standing right there— and force himself to remain stalwart in compartmentalized objectivity till he could confirm the identity of the person. Every second of the interaction, he would have to try to ruthlessly squash the creeping hope of Could it be, and that awful oscillation would eat away at him.) 

It doesn’t take longer than a few minutes— but even a second is a long time when you're Wally West— before the screen lights up with an Identity Confirmed message. Wally takes a rapid, stuttering breath before he launches himself at Dick.  

“You— you are the worst kind of best friend. An absolute fucking— like a train wreck of a human being. Completely the— the worst. If I ever have to mourn you again, I will never forgive you,” Wally spits out, equal parts furious and grateful, except he’s talking at a hundred miles an hour. But that’s okay. Dick has known how to understand the gist of Wally’s speed-talk since he was twelve years old. 

“I’m so sorry. I thought I had no choice,” he rasps.  

Dick feels like someone has sucked out all the air from his lungs and replaced it with ash. Wally’s reverent gratitude, his bruising grip, his overwhelming grief, that familiar smell of ozone— it’s all too much. He can feel his muscles quivering under Wally’s grip.  

“I know, okay? I’m just happy you’re okay. You’re okay, Robin,” Wally assures him and it’s a testament to how long and deeply they’ve known each other that Dick can feel his panic abating at his friend’s conviction. If Wally says he’s okay, he must be.  

He doesn’t deserve the Titans.  

(A secret whispered in the sanctum of the darkness when there’s no lying left to do: Dick is all wrong— rotten to his core. In that first week at St. Hadrian’s, he had been convinced that he was rotting, all the way from his middle and that everyone could smell it. This all-consuming, all-pervasive fear that all that damage on the inside was manifesting on the outside and now everybody could see it coming out of his pores.) 

(In those busy years that the Titans roster changed every week, Wally once told him, You get real mean when you’re angry. Dick doesn’t like that he does— hates it, even— and still, he doesn’t how to stop it. Doesn’t think he even could. 

Years of his instincts about people honed to cut into weaknesses with surgical precision, used to hurt. It’s why he rarely bothers to rein in the worst of his impulses when he’s arguing with Bruce. Between the two of them, there is enough ammunition to sling back and forth to set fire to the entire East Coast and Bruce always gives as good as he gets.) 

Like a broken record: he doesn’t deserve the Titans. 

Wally finally draws back, scanning his face with this all this naked hope, confirming something for himself that is far beyond Dick’s detective skills before changing gears, “What the hell happened? How much of it was real? How much of it was Bruce?” 

Dick would laugh if he knew it wouldn’t make him look insane. Instead, he takes a deep, painful breath and starts talking. 

“I was emotionally compromised. Superwoman and Owlman, two members of the Crime Syndicate captured me. Superwoman bound me with her lasso so I couldn’t escape. There were no feasible exit strategies that didn’t result in loss of life. At Arkham, Owlman unmasked me and aired it on live television. I tried to ally with him so I could—” 

Wally cuts him off with a horrified expression on his face, “Dick, stop. Don’t. Not like that.” 

He complies immediately, mind spinning— didn’t Wally demand answers? Doesn’t Dick owe him this?

He chances a glance at Donna, who is staring at him with abject pity and dawning horror. She looks just as wrecked. He’s about to snap out an emphatic What? but, the voice in his head commands him to examine their points of view. Assess the situation, Robin. 

He slowly inhales. It takes him a few seconds, but he thinks he understands why Wally made him stop. It’s the way he was delivering it— clinically, coldly, like a report— a report to Batman. 

(That racking sense of impostor syndrome possesses him with renewed fervour. He feels like a stranger living in Dick Grayson’s skin, acting out Dick Grayson’s life but missing all his cues.) 

A mistake. He knows better. Even a little stuttering over the facts or hints of his voice fluctuating would have gone a long way to lend credibility. He knows how to make it sound real.

After all, he was there; he was the one it happened to.  

(He hasn’t thought much about his time as the Syndicate’s prisoner and victim beyond pitilessly defending his choices to an unrelenting Bruce. He doesn’t think he can do it here, in the nascent light of Donna’s living room, with his two oldest friends as his audience.) 

So, all that comes out is a subdued, “Alright.” 

Donna reaches out, hesitant and cautious, like he’s a caged animal.  

(Most days, he feels like one.) 

But Dick knows Donna’s touch like memory; her hands— gentle despite the violence they can mete out— have never intentionally hurt him. He grips her wrist with one arm and pulls Wally towards him with his other in a sloppy embrace.  

“I wish I had never hurt either of you. You know that, right?” he murmurs. 

“Of course we know that,” Wally whispers back.  

It’s the way he says it. Like it’s an unassailable, undeniable fact of life. The sun rises every day in the east and Dick Grayson wishes he had never hurt Donna Troy and Wally West. It cements something solid and real in Dick, anchoring him to the strength of their love for him.  

---

“Were you able to get in touch with Garth? Roy said he would be over ‘soon’, but he and I have very different interpretations of soon,” Donna asks after they’ve disentangled and settled down on her mishmash assortment of couches. 

“He probably has to find a sitter for Lian. Your message made it seem like it was a situation. You know, like one that could potentially turn into a local threat,” Wally answers, face fond. 

“It did not!” Donna defends at the same as Dick exclaims, “I could, at the very least, be a city-wide threat. Don’t insult me.” 

Wally groans, “Man, I can’t wait for Roy to knock some sense into you two.” 

Dick rolls his eyes in faux annoyance before casually slipping in, “Garth’s coming?”  

(Dick hasn’t seen Garth in a very, very long time. His last distinct memory of Tempest, blurred and jaded by the dolor of losing Bruce right around that time, is Garth visiting him in the Bunker, seeking advice about taking up Atlantis’s kingship. It had been nice— a welcome respite from his duty-grief-devotion to Bruce. He hadn’t known it would be the last time they would see each other. He wishes he had known. He thinks he would’ve done it all differently.) 

“No, he’s too busy telepathically talking to his fish to come see his recently turned dead-to-alive best friend,” Wally japes but his tone is a little too serious, probably picking up on Dick’s insecurity. 

He had forgotten what it’s like to be surrounded by people that know most of his playbook because they were right there when he was developing it. It sends a shot of warmth down his spine.  

"Mocking him is not as fun when he’s not yet here to be mocked, Wally,” Donna says, eyes tracking Wally’s fidgeting hand before gravely warning, “If you so much as phase through even one more thing in my apartment, so help me God.” 

Wally immediately stills, a sheepish expression on his face. 

Dick laughs, “Bold words coming from someone who was responsible for like, seventy percent of the money we had to spend on all those kicked in doors at the Tower.” 

Donna glares at him, her face screwed up in exaggerated betrayal, “I would’ve never let you do the accounting if I knew you’d hold it over me for the rest of our lives.” 

“No one else was willing to do it!” 

“I was!” 

“Yes, because letting the Amazon who spent most of her life in a place that doesn’t even exist on a map do our taxes would definitely have been the better choice,” Wally says amusedly.  

Donna just sticks out her tongue in retaliation, but Dick loses his desire to taunt her in one fell swoop when he sees her communicator flash.   

She catches on immediately. Of course she does. In a tone that she can’t quite manage to wrestle into casual, “Roy and Garth are on their way. Garth got caught up in some territory dispute.” 

“How can you possibly dispute over something that covers seventy percent of the Earth?” Wally asks half-seriously. It’s a noble attempt to mitigate Dick’s steadily rising trepidation but all he feels is the dull pain of shame for letting himself forget even for a moment.  

Still, he endeavors, “You’re so impatient, Flasher,” gesturing at Wally’s resumed fidgeting, “One would think you’re the one who hasn’t seen them since you died and infiltrated a super-secret spy society.” 

An abrupt, tense silence follows Dick’s nervous joke— he feels sick with apprehension, regretting every awful choice he has made in this last year that has led him to this moment— before they both huff out pained laughs.  

“Is that what you were doing? Being a broody James Bond?” Wally cries out incredulously. 

“Like I’m not cooler than James Bond? Could he do even half the shit Nightwing gets up to?” Dick offers just as ridiculously. 

Both Donna and Wally laugh indulgently at that, and Dick feels some of the nerves settle. Eventually, probably sensing Dick’s rising defenses, Wally slowly begins to tell them what he has been up to. He’s in the middle of talking about the now third time that he and Bart almost accidentally dismantled the time stream, something that makes both Dick and Donna grumble out loud, when there’s a sharp knock on the door. 

Dick feels the hitch in his breath, the rising inches of his shoulders, the spike in his heart rate. Already, he’s losing control. What will he do when he really faces them?  

Donna goes up to open the door.  

“Sorry, sorry. I stopped to pick up some coffee because the last time I had coffee that you made; I didn’t sleep for thirty—” 

Roy stops dead in his tracks when he sees Dick sitting on the couch and then his face contorts into an all-too-familiar expression of fury even as Garth unceremoniously pushes him aside to see why he stopped mid-tirade. 

In a very, very tight voice, Roy directs his questions to Donna and Wally, “You guys ran tests? It’s really him? No clones or shapeshifters or magic?” 

(No matter where he goes, how fast he burns, how monumentally he fucks up, he always ends up right here— begging for absolution from the Titans because nobody else will give it to him.) 

Dick tries not to shrink in on himself. Wishes furiously that he could just disappear. Garth, who was moving towards him in an almost trance-like state stops abruptly at that.   

“It’s him. It’s Dick,” Wally confirms, a tremulous exhilaration in his pitch.  

Garth approaches him guardedly, like he’s afraid this is a mirage— and Dick feels suspended in Garth’s disbelief. In this moment, despite all his usual compulsions to run, he is immovable in the plight of Garth’s unfaith. He will stay forever frozen, forever compensating. It is both his curse and blessing.  

(Fact: The urge to run has never gotten him anywhere good and here, surrounded by the people who have caught him each time he fell, it never will.) 

“I am very glad that you’re not dead, my friend,” he ultimately says before wrapping his arms around Dick. There is a pronounced strength to Garth’s powerful frame, and it jars something in the pit of his stomach. When was the last time he held Garth, was held by him in turn? Why can’t he remember?  

What a terrible thing to have lost. What an even more terrible thing to have not been aware of that loss.  

He shuts his eyes and lets the familiar scent of the sea lap over him. Garth, who moves with the ebbs and flows of the ocean. Garth, who understands Dick’s subservience to the pace of his circus heart better than most. Dick has missed him so, so much. 

“I don’t think I can tell you how much I—” Dick chokes on the sentiment because with that avowal comes a reminder, perhaps, the most important one— it’s Dick’s fault. Like a record on loop, I hurt you and I can never take it back.  

But Garth understands him, so all Dick hears is his familiar rumble, “Me too.”  

Dick pulls back, meets his friend’s tempered look. He thinks if he speaks, everything about this moment will dissolve. The walls will close in, and Dick will be back where he started— wishing desperately to go home. But Garth looks at him with relief and there is no demand for Dick’s guts, no exaction of Garth’s pound of flesh— just the steady acceptance of an old friend.  

The kindness catches him off-guard. Leaves him weak at the knees.  

He has to rebalance himself to find his center because Roy, never one to be left behind, has recovered from his lethal cocktail of fury, grief and amazement. 

“Where the fuck were you?” he demands. 

(Here’s the thing that Roy has always understood about him: Most days, Dick believes in Bruce more out of habit than faith.) 

(Here’s the thing that Roy can never understand about him: Dick cannot hate Bruce, no matter how hard he tries. His devotion for Bruce has survived death and life. It is only right that it will survive purgatory, too.) 

“Why, did you miss me?”  

It’s a gamble to joke about this. A very big toss-up.  

(Sometimes, Dick and Roy are two unstable bombs, only waiting to detonate in each other’s vicinity just so they can cause each other maximum damage. But most of the time, Dick and Roy send each other proof of life like clockwork, in the form of updates: the sweet thing that Lian said at school, the insane thing that Tim did right under Bruce’s nose, the picture he saw that reminded him of Donna, the sniper set up that reminded him of Roy.) 

Roy gapes at him, features slack with incredulity, and then gapes some more— like he really can’t believe Dick said that. As though Dick hasn’t always had some innate talent for pissing him off.  

He’s just thinking that he’s made a massive miscalculation and should throw a tactical retreat when Roy grabs him and pulls him in a bone-wrenching hug. Immediately, Dick melts into it, tension unspooling like taffy.  

“I’m sorry. I wish I’d never done it,” he confides in Roy— and it’s only as he’s saying it that Dick realizes how much he really means it.  

In his present— amid the only four people in the world who love him unconditionally, whose fury at Dick’s awful, awful lies is tempered, bringing into sharp relief their gratitude for Dick’s breathing, living body— he hates Bruce so fervently he thinks he could suffocate from it.  

(Here is Dick’s biggest failure: letting Bruce do this to him, to them.) 

(Some crimes are unforgivable, and Dick is both judge and jury: Bruce Wayne, guilty; Dick Grayson, guiltier.)  

There are many, many affiliates of the JLA and JSA that specialize in undercover work. Skilled operatives who wouldn’t have succumbed to Hypnos or Minos or any of the rest of it. It didn’t have to be him. Was Bruce punishing him by sending him there? Or pushing him away? Does it even matter? 

“Good because I won’t let you do it again,” Roy mutters darkly, fingers pressing against the cord of muscles in his back. 

“That a promise, Speedy?” Dick goads— if only to savor this adjournment from the inevitable game of questions he can never sufficiently answer. Dick is always found lacking. But he feels Roy’s answering laugh. It’s like a shot of liquid electricity.  

“You bet it is, Shortpants.” 

Roy’s voice is too hoarse to be humorous. He says it like an oath.  

(Here’s the thing: Guilt is tedious and exhausting but it is Dick’s gravity.) 

(Here’s the thing: There are some debts you can never repay.) 

(Roy, keeping him afloat when Donna died, when a solitary bad call snowballed into a series of them that left Blüdhaven burning in a downpour of radiation. Roy hadn’t asked or told. Just handed out lifeline after lifeline because Roy Harper was in the business of saving, because no one except Dinah and Hal had done it for him— an implicit I’ll keep you here even if no one else can.) 

Roy doesn’t let go for a while and Dick has no intention of being the first one to pull away.  

The last time they were all together like this, it had been in Dick’s apartment in New York, right after they dealt with Trigon’s millionth attempt to possess Raven. Roy had mocked his job as the Cloisters curator all night while Garth had been oddly fixated on Dick’s newfound love for skydiving. Wally had finally opened up about Jai and Irey’s speed-aging. Donna had complained about Kyle and Jason and Bob and drank all his tea. 

It had been a good night— surrounded by his oldest friends, the weight of all that affection and history— one of the first where he felt truly settled after Blüdhaven.

And then Bruce had died.  

And wasn’t it just like Bruce to die on him the moment Dick found his first semblance of peace?  

(In the pre-dawn, after they had left, Dick had tidied up the spare blankets and dirty dishes, feeling empty and hollow and remembered with the gut-punch of clarity, why he didn’t like hosting people in his spaces.) 

(Here’s the thing: It is easier to leave than to be left.) 

---

Eventually, they all settle in lazy sprawls but there’s an undercurrent of tension buzzing in the confines of Donna’s apartment. Dick positions himself on the floor, leaning against Garth, who’s sitting on the couch with his back straight, all straight lines and right angles— a king. 

“It’s the Titans forever, you know?” Garth murmurs to him. “I know it is easy to sit here and say that like it’s nothing but—” 

“It’s not nothing,” Dick says firmly. Those lonely years in those winding Manor corridors, haunted by the ghosts of Bruce’s grief; Dick’s wild animal desperation to be touched and looked and loved— beyond his latest error, whether he completed his homework, whether he finished his patrol reports. Days where he went without anyone saying a word to him beyond Batman’s orders. And then, the Teen Titans— a blustering storm of companionship and love and adventure. “It’s not nothing,” he repeats.  

Garth runs an affectionate hand through Dick’s hair, the pressure of it dizzying and he presses his head briefly against Garth’s thigh, reveling in the luxury of a kind touch— grateful that Garth can’t see him. Just his friend’s shallow, steady breaths— like the beat of the sea. 

“So, what happened?” Wally’s voice breaks the moment. 

This time, Dick inhales long and deep, holds it in for a few seconds. Then he starts talking. He pitches his voice to a shaky thing, reminds himself that this is just another type of performance.  

(An orphan’s very first lesson at Gotham City’s Youth Center: You must be wary of what you reveal because you can never, ever take it back.) 

“Damian wasn’t my Robin anymore but when he died, I felt like a part of me died with him.” 

(Bruce, after Jason, had been a horrible thing— sucking out all the air in the room with his grief. There had been no place for anyone else to feel anything. Yet, Dick had tried— nights spent wanting Batman to want to come home alive from his latest bout of suicidal guilt. Because Dick still needed him. There is so much to regret.) 

Donna looks at him poorly concealed sympathy. He doesn’t think he can bear it, the weight of her unconditional love and empathy, so he presses on.  

“I was all messed up, wasn’t thinking straight. I hadn’t been for weeks. I was dropping off Zsasz at Arkham when Owlman and Superwoman got the drop on me. They were part of the Crime Syndicate— a crazy supervillain society trying take over our Earth. There was no way to free myself because Superwoman bound me with her Lasso; it looked just like Diana’s, but it was a Lasso of Persuasion. So, there I was— injured, alone, with no escape route in sight. I thought that was as bad as things could get. Then, they unmasked me publicly.” 

Wally is staring at him intently when he interrupts, “Hang on, I don’t remember that happening. I feel like I would remember if your secret identity got outed. No one has asked me whether my best friend is a crime-fighting vigilante.” 

Dick ignores the ache in his chest at Wally’s undisguised suspicion; he wouldn’t believe himself either. He doesn’t know how to explain those later months at Spyral; they feel like a fever dream— allying with people he would have put behind bars in a different time, chasing agents and sunsets with Tiger, that single mindedness determination to just get it all over with, no matter the cost.  

(Here’s the punchline: He had been willing to pay that cost— a world where no one remembered Dick Grayson.) 

(Here’s the thing Dick has been wondering since: Would it have been for the better?)

“That came later. A friend and I used an all-powerful satellite that can erase any trace of a person— records, memories, minds.” 

“Then how do we remember you?” Roy asks.  

Helena’s raw intensity and affection: Your people are your heart. And after everything you’ve done, I couldn’t see it broken.

“My partner set up a list of exceptions. A group of people who would remember me no matter what.” 

Donna is looking at him keenly. He can’t figure out why— she has heard all of this before. A more honest, unfiltered version where he wasn’t trying to minimize the damage to his friends or himself. What has she deduced from hearing it a second time?  

(Bruce used to listen to audio recordings of his case notes over and over, the rare times when he couldn’t crack them. And each time, each retelling added something to his deductions till he eventually solved them.) 

What will Donna find this time around? 

“So, you got unmasked and then used super-secret, super-dangerous tech to dupe the world into forgetting it happened?” Roy asks cynically. 

“Pretty much,” he says, awaiting Roy’s verdict like a noose around his neck. 

But Roy, like always, surprises him, “Good for you.” 

(He doesn’t have to ask Roy about his sardonic tone. They both know exactly who was running around unmasked not too long ago.) 

“So, the Crime Syndicate captured you. Then, what happened?” Garth asks. 

“The usual— they wanted information about this Earth, and I didn’t want to give them any. Eventually, they hooked me up to this device called the Murder Machine."

“Seriously?” Wally asks, frowning, “That’s a little on-the-nose for someone calling themselves the Crime Syndicate, isn’t it?”  

Dick snorts, leaning back, letting the touch from Garth ground him because more and more, he feels like he’s watching someone else tell this story from behind walls of ice. “It’s based on Apokoliptian tech— S.T.A.R. labs built it to hold Doomsday. It was exactly as fun as the name sounds.” 

Here, Donna— who has been watching him shrewdly all this time— picks up for him. He sends a grateful smile her way. It doesn’t do much to cover the sudden, warm burst of affection he feels for her endless compassion, but he thinks she knows. 

“The device was a bomb that would disengage only if Dick’s heart stopped. There was a countdown monitoring his heartbeat and the detonator was hooked to his heart. Batman, Lex Luthor and Catwoman got there 5 minutes before it went off. Batman tried to disarm it, but nothing worked. Every time he disconnected a relay, it fixed itself,” Donna describes, voice pained.  

Dick feels a sharp pang of guilt. Just because Donna wasn’t there to see it doesn’t mean it’s easy for her to talk about, either. This is not her burden— she shouldn’t have to carry it along with all her grief. 

“I begged him to leave but he said he wouldn’t abandon me,” Dick says quietly, only realizing he even said it when Garth’s hand in his hair stills. 

There is naked, unabashed pity glittering on Wally’s face and Roy looks like he’s swallowed something sour as he mutters with unveiled contempt, “That’s a first for him.” 

(Here’s the thing: Wally moved out of his parents’ house as soon as he was able to; Wally never gives him any more grief than necessary about Bruce.) 

(Here’s the thing: Wally understands, intimately, the way a parent can fail you. But Roy understands, better than anyone, what happens when your entire self is wrapped up in the person who is both: father and not-father, mentor and inhibitor, the one who leaves you and the one you don’t want to leave.) 

Dick doesn’t think he can rise to Bruce’s defence, not when he’s still trying to reconcile all the different versions of Bruce that exist, both in his head and reality. Bruce, who was staunch in his desire to stay with Dick, despite knowing it would kill them both. Bruce, who abandoned Dick in a web of lies without so much as a contingency in place. His father, his executioner.  

(Sometimes, when Dick sees moving shadows, he is convinced it’s Batman— his salvation and damnation. But when he moves towards them, there’s nothing there, just darkness. He tries to convince himself that the heady feeling choking him is relief. It never works.) 

Dick continues from where Donna left off, “The countdown was about to end so Luthor made an executive decision to save many lives over one. He used a cardioplegia pill so the bomb would disarm. Then, he resuscitated me with an adrenaline shot.” 

“What is that?” Garth asks. 

“They use it to stop the heart and paralyze the heart muscles temporarily during surgery,” Dick answers, pointedly avoiding looking at anyone now.  

He knows he owes them the truth, but he is so tired. He doesn’t want to think about how even his own heart stopping didn’t belong just to him— he had to share his own death with Bruce’s grief.  

(The thing is: he spent so much time in Spyral wishing that Luthor had just suffocated him with no contingencies instead. Then, Dick wouldn’t have been there after.) 

But here, amid his friends, who haven’t left him despite his failures, he thinks he was wrong. Damian’s alive, again. The Titans caught him when he fell, like they always do.  

Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing, after all. 

“Your heart stopped. You were really dead, then?” Wally asks, a near child-like disbelief in his voice. He sounds like he used to when they were fourteen and the Teen Titans were dealing with the worst kind of scum— unable to understand the why and the how of those people’s motivations. It breaks Dick’s heart. 

“For a few minutes,” Dick manages to reply. Wally immediately makes as though he’s going to lean over to touch Dick or maybe even hug him, but Donna gently pulls him back with a firm hand. He’s lost all control of this conversation; he has no idea what he’s revealing with his body or words.  

(He misses Cass something fierce.) 

“I’m sorry,” Garth speaks softly, and Dick can only nod in acquiescence.  

(You aren’t supposed to remember your own death.) 

He takes a deep breath and soldiers on. He needs to re-focus on the facts instead of getting lost in the memories of the feeling of Batman’s gentle hand, and later, Bruce’s unrelenting fist against his cheek. 

“Eventually, Batman and the others defeated the Syndicate. They freed the League. I was injured so I passed out on the ride over to Gotham. When I finally woke up, Bruce said he had a mission for me. My unmasking meant my identity was public knowledge, which was the perfect cover to infiltrate Spyral.”  

(Here’s the thing: Most things in his life have started with a fight in the Cave.  

The Cave. How did Bruce ever get around to explaining that destruction to Alfred or any of the others? How did no one ever question it?) 

“Spyral was a covert op founded during the Cold War and till now, we had had no idea that they even existed. It specializes in intelligence. In fact, Spyral had nearly every superhero’s secret identity. But their agents were also involved in other underhand stuff— smuggling alien arms, harvesting meta organs, espionage.” 

(At St. Jude’s orphanage, Sister Mary Elizabeth had once told him about the binding of Isaac in Genesis: Abraham— willing to sacrifice his son; Isaac— forever changed because now he knows he is cherished; and God— commanding the unthinkable only to step in at the last moment and let them off the hook, uncaring that nothing would ever be the same again. 

In the middle of Bruce’s grief and fists, all he had thought was: If I had stayed dead, I wouldn’t have to see what my death did to you. I would have been spared at least that.) 

“He wanted me to let everyone think I’m dead. I begged him not to ask that of me— I didn’t want to lie to my friends or my siblings. But Spyral was extremely dangerous. They had been operating right under our noses the whole time. He said it hurts him to ask this of me.” 

(Bruce had said that he knows it hurts them both but he doesn’t give in. Give in to what? Dick is still wondering.) 

Dick is hardly aware of the fevered pitch he has taken on, how shallow his breaths are, how his ears are ringing. He feels light-headed with anger.  

In his peripheral vision, he’s faintly aware of Donna and Wally approaching him. He hasn’t finished, though. He needs to make amends— he needs them to know what was asked of him, what he did.

(He needs to pay.)  

“I was so fucking angry. After everything I’ve done for him, for Gotham, for Damian, how could he put this on me? Damian’s alive, now. Bruce brought him back with a Chaos Crystal shard.” 

(You know how much Damian meant to me, Bruce. Just say the word, and I’m at your side on Apokolips to the bitter end.) 

“He said I was the only one with the skills to complete the mission successfully. I don’t know whether he was lying to himself or me. I can think of ten people who wouldn’t have fucked up half as—” 

He is abruptly cut off when he feels Garth’s hand on his mouth.  

When did he move it from Dick’s hair? He didn’t even notice. There’s a strange buzzing in his ears. He can hear his blood pulsating. 

“Dick. You have to breathe. Come on.” 

That’s Roy’s voice. He trusts Roy with his life. If Roy wants him to breathe, Dick will do it for him.  

He pushes away Garth’s hand with numb fingers and inhales noisily. 

“Do it again, okay? Breathe in, hold it for a few seconds and then breathe out.” 

Dick follows the instructions. He’s good at that— following instructions. Bruce’s good soldier. Does Bruce have his suit up in a case? With that same awful epitaph? What would Bruce have done if Lex Luthor hadn’t saved his life? What a joke— Bruce has spent his entire life preparing for worst-case scenarios, coming up with contingency plans to take his friends and allies out and subsequently alienating everyone in his life— only to owe Lex fucking Luthor a blood-debt. It’d be funny if it weren’t so fucking sad.  

“Hey! Breathe, dammit.” 

There are spots dancing across the back of his eyelids. The ringing in his ears is only getting louder. His entire body feels like pins and needles. There are large shapes vibrating anxiously in his sight line. Vaguely, he registers someone’s palm against his cheek and when he looks down at it, he recognizes the calluses. Calluses borne of a lifetime of perfect aim. Roy.  

“Dick, Robin, Rob. Come on. Take a deep breath.” 

“I think I’m having an anxiety attack,” Dick wheezes. His voice sounds like it’s coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once. 

“Yeah. Even those of us who aren’t genius detectives kind of figured that out. Take another breath. Come on, follow my lead, okay?” 

He looks back up at Roy’s face hovering in front of him— his forehead is creased with worry lines and the corners of his eyes are taut with concern. Dick wants so badly to make that look vanish from his face.  

Dick takes in a deep breath. He visualizes the oxygen in the air inflating his lungs.  

He holds it till Roy tells him to let go and does it over and over, Roy’s calm voice a soft balm to the sting of his fury and panic.  

Slowly, moment by moment, breath by breath, the world comes back into focus. The shapes become Wally and Donna, the pressure on his spine registers as Garth, the hand on his cheek, Roy.  

Oh.  

If a person could die from shame, now would be the time for him to spontaneously combust.  

“You back with us, Rob?” 

Rob.  

In the ashes of Blüdhaven, he’d told the people at the Wall his name was Rob and tried to find something, anything— familiarity, love, affection— in people calling him that. But it’s different when it’s Roy calling him that. It’s so, so different. He was missing this. 

“Yeah,” he rasps out. 

“Here,” Donna hands him a glass of water.  

Dick drinks it slowly, savouring it, an unwelcome reminder that there was a time not too long ago when this was his only wish— the only thing standing between a girl’s life and her death. He forces himself to remember; he is not there now. 

He’s in Donna’s apartment in New York City— where all his Titans are looking at him with transparent concern and love. He can see it in their body language— the soft turn of Donna’s wrists, the gentle set of Roy’s shoulders, the barely visible thrumming of Wally’s fingers, the warm press of Garth’s tense thighs. He can see it in their expressions— all their distress and affection and watchfulness; the way they’re looking at him— like he’s somebody worth fussing over, like he’s something precious.  

It cracks something open in his chest. 

In a rough voice, “I was pretty much at the end of it. I won’t say my little nervous breakdown was well-timed or anything, but it could’ve been worse.” 

Wally and Roy let out near identical scoffs of disbelief, while Donna sighs loudly and pointedly, her expression the one she reserves for when Dick has said something monumentally stupid. He’s pretty sure Garth is looking at him the same way.  

Then, Wally’s lips twitch into a smile and Dick immediately smiles back. It’s such a reflexive action. God, Wally’s inconceivable Blue-Valley optimism and fondness for Dick’s awful jokes. Dick loves him so much. 

“You’re really something else, huh, Grayson?” 

---

He lets Donna tell the remainder because he’s pretty sure Garth is not beyond using some deeply uncomfortable form of magic to keep him shut up. They’ve all migrated to the soft carpet in a jumble of limbs and throw pillows— like they used to when they were kids.  

It’s nice. Grounding, even. The odds of him forgetting who he is in this all-too-familiar arrangement are laughably low. His head is in Donna’s lap and Roy has his fingers pressed against Dick’s ankle, where they are tapping out the beat of a song that feels suspiciously like the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun. He’ll have to make fun of Roy for that later. For now, he shuts his eyes and lets the intimacy and warmth of their voices lull him to sleep. 

---

Dick wakes up slowly, the afterimages from his dreams sticking to him like melted candy— itchy and nauseating.  

(Here’s the thing: Dick doesn’t remember the sound of his mother’s voice anymore. He doesn’t know when he lost it, but he grieves the loss of it as much as he grieves the loss itself.)  

(Here’s another: He knows exactly what a rope snapping sounds like. Even now. Especially now.) 

He keeps his eyes shut, letting his nerves settle.  

At some point, one of them—Wally, probably— placed a pillow underneath his head and threw a blanket over him. His heart twinges at this small act of consideration. He cannot remember the last time he woke up without worrying that he would be literally and metaphorically stabbed in the back.  

There’s a soft murmur of voices coming from somewhere to his left. Donna’s lilt is easy to identify— Donna is one of the people Dick knows best in this world; he would know her blind. The other voice is hoarse, the cadence melodic and that’s easy, too— Roy. No voices that are frenetic with energy like Wally’s or deceptively calm like Garth’s.   

So, no Garth and Wally. Unsurprising. They don’t live in New York and they’re the main line of defence for Atlantis and Keystone. Of course, they cannot stay here forever. It must have already been difficult enough to drop their responsibilities and spend the whole afternoon here, listening to Dick and his excuses. 

“… don’t know how much he’s still hiding,” Donna is saying. 

“No, we don’t. But I’d bet he’s hiding much more than he told even you. That’s just how it goes with him,” Roy responds, voice disillusioned in a way that makes Dick’s heart sink.  

The thing is— Roy’s not wrong. For two people who spend half their time finding newer and more creative ways to antagonize each other, they know each other far too well.  

(When they were on the Outsiders together and his life was crumbling to pieces in front of him, Roy would take one long considering look at him and ask him to spar. He doesn’t know how Roy had known— he could deliver his words perfectly, keep his body lax, smile the right amount and Roy would still catch on to Dick’s need to gain an iota of control by hitting something— even if it was his best friend in a contained environment.) 

Roy’s always known his tells. He is hiding a lot; he doesn’t know how to put any of it in words. He can’t talk about any of it— a suffocating shame balloons in him every time he remembers the way Bruce threw him around the Cave before Dick started fighting back.  

In those early days, when he was trying to get Spyral to recruit him, he would compulsively go over the fight with Bruce in his head and wonder what he could’ve done to change the outcome.  

(What if he dodged that first hit? Nine out of ten times, Bruce hits left. He should’ve dodged it. He was trained to.  

What if he hit first instead? He’s faster than Bruce and he doesn’t overthink his moves as obsessively as Bruce does. It usually gives him an edge in their spars.

What if he had made himself lose? He could have pulled a convincing enough performance. Dick has been getting away with lying to Batman since he was a pre-teen.  

What would Bruce have done then? Kept going till Dick passed out or fought back? Would Bruce have even regretted it? Would Dick?) 

An endless loop of questions and hypotheticals that no one can give him answers to except one man; Bruce, the source of all his problems, the architect of all his heartbreak. 

Eventually, Dick had told himself he was thinking like an insane person, and he didn’t have the luxury to drive himself insane when there were lives and identities on the line. 

“He said he won’t go back to Gotham. That’s something, at least,” Donna says. 

Bitterly, Roy says, “Sure, for now. Then Bruce will call, and he’ll go back running.” 

“You didn’t see him, Roy. I picked him up from where he was living in some hovel on the outskirts of Blüdhaven.” 

“If he went back to that cesspool, it’s even worse than we know. You didn’t see him after the Society bombed it. Losing his city, losing you— it was— he was just always ready to go out on a wing and a prayer. Didn’t care if he made it back.” 

Donna doesn’t say anything in response to that, but he knows she feels guilty. He wants to get up and comfort her, convince her that it wasn’t her fault— but he feels frozen, finally getting an accounting of his sins.  

Eventually, Roy tiredly admits, “I don’t know which one of you was worse off after losing the other. He was passively suicidal, and you weren’t much better. I can’t do it again, Donna. Any of it.” 

“You won’t have to. We’ll keep him here, okay?” 

“If I had a dollar for every time I’ve said that about him…” 

Donna laughs weakly at that before Roy adds, “I just don’t want to see him like today ever again— dissociating right in front of us. Fuck.” 

Softly, Donna says, “Me too.”

Then, she raises her voice a few decibels, “Dick, honey, you heard that, right? Roy and I have demands to make of you.” 

Ah, fuck.  

He should’ve known he wouldn’t get away with faking sleep around these two for too long; it’s a miracle he got away with the amount of time that he did. 

“He always has demands,” Dick replies, sitting up slowly and stretching his limbs. He sees Donna’s feeble grin and Roy’s thin smile, so he carefully extends his right leg, stretching it up, up and further till he can pull it behind his head.  

Donna’s smile widens and Roy rolls his eyes with fond amusement before they both chorus, “Circus freak.” 

He pokes his tongue out and untangles his limbs, rising steadily and dropping himself next to them on the couch.  

Roy immediately puts his arm around Dick’s shoulders and Dick lets himself sink into it.  

“Been working out, Harper?” he asks, poking Roy’s bicep. 

“All natural, baby. You like it?” 

“Donna has quality over your quantity. I’d still pick her,” Dick says mock-seriously just to see the identical grins bloom on their faces.  

A beat before Roy asks, “How much did you hear?” His tone is unquestionably gentle. Dick hates him a little for it. 

“Enough,” he shrugs. 

“And you don’t have anything to say?”  

Roy’s pulling out all the stops, the raised eyebrow, the pursed lips, the dizzying pressure of his arm. Too bad Dick’s had years to immunize himself to Roy’s brand of interrogation. 

“Not presently.”  

Roy rolls his eyes, smacking Dick on his head, lightning-quick, before they fall back into silence.  

The sky outside is already darkening: the promise of winter where the nights are unbearably long.  

(He misses Bruce so much: the Bruce of years ago, not the jaded old man Batman has warped him into. The Bruce he remembers hasn’t withstood the passage of time— he has become unrecognizable and in turn, made Dick unrecognizable. 

Dick used to have a backbone, didn’t he? There was a time he wouldn’t have let Bruce force him into letting his friends and family mourn him.  

Or has Dick always been like this? How many times have Donna and Roy told him his devotion to Bruce is going to get him killed? How many times has Dick wanted it to?) 

“What are you thinking about, Boy Wonder?” Donna asks softly.  

So much kindness in her heart, so much softness in her voice— all directed towards him. Dick has no right— he has done nothing to deserve any of it. He hurt her. Irreparably, irrevocably, irredeemably.  

It was visible to him the second Donna landed at the Blüdhaven city limits. The dark shadows in her face, the way she had grasped at him like she was seeing a ghost. Because once Dick knew what it felt like to hold her corpse in his hands, body still warm to the touch, he never recovered. Not even when she came back. And Donna’s just like him in all the ways that matter.

“I hurt you. How can you forgive me? How can you be this kind to me? I haven’t done anything to deserve it, Donna,” he whispers, fighting back the tears welling up in his eyes. He screws up his face, so he doesn’t have to let them fall, so Donna doesn’t have to see them fall. 

“You know why. You’re Dick Grayson and I’m Donna Troy.” 

Who is Dick Grayson? Dick doesn’t think he knows.  

(Here’s the thing: If man is the sum of his actions, Dick is no one at all— a chameleon dissolving into his surroundings; a cheap trick to be played when there are no pawns left to maneuver; a dirty, immoral thing crawling back to the embrace of his fallen God, begging for absolution.) 

(Here’s the thing: Dick has been playing a losing game his whole life.) 

(And here’s the kicker: It’s one he’s had to become awfully good at.) 

“I don’t even know who that is. How could you?” 

“Dick, I’ve known you in a hundred universes and lifetimes; and there hasn’t been a single one where I haven’t loved you.”  

He doesn’t think he could hold back his tears even if he tried. He’s not seventeen anymore; he’d long since decided to live with the pain of being Dick Grayson when you love a person like Bruce Wayne. He made his bed: there is no sparing him from a doom of his own making. 

But he cries anyway. 

“We didn’t do right by you,” Roy murmurs. “I should’ve dragged you out of that house the second I met you.” 

“You were just a kid. You didn’t know any better. Besides, I didn’t exactly do right by me either,” he acknowledges, wiping his tears away roughly. 

Roy looks at him, stricken, like Dick has taken a hammer to his heart, “You were just a kid, too, Dick. You were just a kid.”  

It hits him like a gut-punch.  

(It has never just been about Spyral. Spyral is a moment, a decision, marred with corrosion and blood, but just one moment, all the same. 

What Bruce and Dick have done to each other is years in the making. A litany of crescendos that never culminate into a showstopper because they are forever chasing each other like an ouroboros.) 

He begins to sob in earnest: loud, guttural wails— sounds that he didn’t know he was previously capable of making. Ensconced in Roy’s arms and Donna’s embrace, he mourns: for the person he used to be, for the person Bruce used to be. 

Donna and Roy understand that innately— Roy, who lost his daughter and his arm in one fell swoop; Donna, who has so many lifetimes and histories encased in her. 

“It’ll be okay, Rob. You’ll see,” Roy whispers, holding on to him tightly.

Dick tries to let himself believe it.