Archive of Our Own ^beta

Here’s Bruce’s funeral procession of a month: on Monday, the sun briefly stopped working due to a curse of magical origin; thus Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were spent racing around the globe to address the effects of the sun electing not to function. Admittedly, the only thing Bruce remembers about the following Friday are two blips of wakefulness, due entirely to Jason’s elbow needling him in the solar plexus and briefly eliciting a plea for mercy. Over the weekend, by some stint of foul luck, Bruce also managed to irritate Alfred on a subject Alfred hasn’t yet disclosed, which is Bruce’s least favorite way of being criticized. The temperature plunged Saturday night, too, the cold tugging into every passed-over bullet left embedded in his body. The ensuing chill and mystery have vexed Bruce out of his living skin for days. By the time another Tuesday came around in search of his personal torment, he’d had maybe three full nights of sleep since the first, if he’s lucky. His internal narrative has been reduced to a glum series of swears, and a faint—but passing—desire to take a dive off a building. There’s a certain level of sleep deprivation where the back of his mind becomes half-convinced death is the only way he’ll ever sleep again. It fades with time, as all things do. 

After he records his notes for the night—once by voice, once on the Batcomputer, lastly in a journal, he’s been told he just likes to hear himself talk—he considers his multiple spreadsheets of to-do lists. After a certain number of plates enter the air, it’s necessary to organize them by the average amount of time they might need to be in the air, thus a laminated series of ever-changing color-coded spreadsheets on a binder ring dictates most of Bruce’s life. In these strange intervals between Bruce’s central nervous system thinking the apocalypse is imminent, and Bruce’s central nervous system realizing the threat was averted, he has pitifully come to find this theater of order grounding.

So, in spite of the ache behind his eyes, he hoses dried blood out of the Batmobile until thin, coppery water runs into the long drains cut into the floor. He tosses his cape over the still-dripping hood and hoses off a mixture of blood, mud, pollution, grit and gravel; the worn, threadbare ends of all of his capes end up stained with a permanent rust after about a week of use. He scrubs down the rest of the costume, then, and squeegees the swirling gray water-silt into the drains, which feed into a water purification system before the water runs back into the watershed. He unpacks his utility belt and re-stocks its compartments, leaving a clutch of dull batarangs by the forge on the far side of the Cave, where they’re cast; he plucks a ceramic honing rod off a hook on the wall and leaves it out, as a sort of visual reminder. His hands are too unsteady to bother with it now, and he’ll be apoplectic on principle the rest of the whole day if he chips more than two.  

There’s something centering hidden inside of this small, monotonous work, the way it all seems to absorb the harder, rougher edges of guilt. The soreness of something accomplished is almost a form of peace. By the time Bruce recognizes he’s forcing his own eyes open every five seconds, he’s gone ahead and dusted shelves of case files, taken chemical and drug inventories, and doubled back to wipe down and polish the Batmobile’s interior and exterior. There’s always more work to be done, looming ahead; and nothing is more frustrating than having to pause during a crisis to attend to faulty equipment. For all of three minutes, Bruce surveys his work and dares to feel some satisfaction.

Then he realizes that it’s Tuesday, a school day, and he’s at least three hours late to waking Jason up. His youngest son turns out to be thrilled to mock his father for this.

“Promises are promises, s’all I’m saying. I thought you were supposed to be the World’s Greatest Detective. You can’t even read a clock, and the door is, like, a big clock, I think you’re doin’ all this so wrong, Bee,” Jason sniffs, at the end of one of these tangents. 

The boy leans forward in his iron patio chair, straining to reach his glass of orange juice, which he protectively wraps with both hands, gingerly airlifting it to the safety of being clutched to Jason’s chest.

“I thought children were supposed to enjoy sleeping in,” Bruce grouses.

Jason snorts. “But you made me miss math. We’re doing—Mrs. Atkinson called it PEMDAS. And it’s cool. And I’m not a baby.”

Bruce attempts to hum in a way that might convince his eleven year old that he agrees, because there is absolutely no way Bruce will be able to keep a straight face if he has to concur out loud. He truly feels he has justifiable reasons for this: one, Jason is wearing one of Alfred’s sweaters over his Gotham Academy uniform, a cherry red one that’s so large it’s mounded at his wrists like great wool chain-bound cuffs; two, the patio chairs are just a bit too tall for Jason’s feet to do more than toe the ground, so his sneakers scrape at the tile; and three, the boy now has a mustache and matching goatee of pulpy orange juice. 

“You’re very mature for your age,” Bruce supplies, when Jason’s been eyeing him longer than a minute or two.

Bruce isn’t lying—Jason is a remarkable boy—but he finds himself eager to protect what childhood Jason has left, in the event that Jason still wants to embrace it someday. From time to time, the boy seems eager for it. Saturday night, Robin had held patrol up to play basketball at a community court in the Narrows, with a fence low enough Batman could boost them over it. Batman stood watch while they played. Over the drive home, Bruce had asked Jason why children his age were stuck playing ball at nearly two in the morning; the answer provided Bruce with two more GCPD officers to build a case against, perhaps terrorize a little by cover of nightfall. Jason’s already asked to swing by that area again, around the same time. 

“’zactly,” Jason mumbles, through a mouthful of well-buttered English muffin.

The wind ripping across their coast looses a napkin, which tears off into a drift of scattered autumn leaves. The smell of sea salt presently mixes with the sweet, musty smell of all that freshly decaying vegetation; small drifts of foliage have lined up at the roots of trees, underneath the patio furniture. Through the thin wood there are winks of canary yellow leaves, though the top of the canopy refuses to quite let go of its summer green. The morning sun bronzes the yellowing, dew-damp clover and wispy tussocks of sedge, and as the eye traces this path of burning gold, it slants across the neighborly surf, dotting the swirling depths with daylight-borne stars. Shorebirds swarm at the rocky edge of the estate, gulls, a couple ruddy turnstones, a few peaky willets. Bruce is forced to admit that daylight occasionally has its pleasantries. Despite years of trying, Bruce has failed to come up with a combination of words in the English language that would describe how badly he wants to see his children at peace. Of everywhere in this estate, Jason’s single favorite place is here, a ridge of life, a moment of calm. Bruce sometimes thinks he’s just starting to understand why. The thin wood hosts a number of American woodcocks, a bird Jason is particularly spellbound by. 

“Finish your eggs, Jaybird,” Bruce murmurs.

Jason stills, but within a few seconds settles into a precious glower, stabbing at his ketchup-covered scrambled eggs with a certain defiance. The boy initially restricted how much he ate in front of adults because he didn’t want to appear greedy, lest Bruce decide Jason wasn’t worth his time; finish your plate began to feel more like threat than concern, or invitation. After having worked through the misunderstanding, Bruce finds terms of endearment seem to help. To his credit, Jay’s just cleared his plate when the patio door swings open, and Alfred returns. There’s one set of footsteps too many.

“I was just so hideously interrupted, we’ve just the rudest intruder,” Alfred chirps, as he holds open the door, back stiff and straight. Bruce presumes this means Dick has stopped by. “Lad, I do apologize, but we’ll have to get you to school, now, or you’ll be marked absent. It’s all the blasted traffic, you know.”

Across the table, Jason’s dark eyes go wide—it’s definitely his older brother.

Jay drops his fork with a crash. “Dick!” he squeals.

Bruce twists in his chair. Dick’s leaning against the doorjamb, wearing a navy Hudson University tracksuit that Bruce decides he will utterly refuse to be infuriated by. Such a reaction would be childish, and therefore undoubtedly beyond him. What nags him relentlessly is that his eldest son is wearing head-to-toe merchandise, all advertising an institution Dick personally couldn’t bear to attend for one complete scholastic year. This is maddeningly counter-intuitive. Regardless, Bruce would rather miss a target with his grappling hook and free-fall on the strip in the middle of a high summer crowd of tourists than let on that he is so much as disquieted by this, so it’ll never matter, because Dick will never be allowed to know. It’s just that it’s false advertising, and Bruce won’t hear that it isn’t. 

“Hey, li—” Dick had begun, but Jason had launched himself out of his chair and thrown himself around Dick’s middle, armed with nothing but sheer impulse.

Dick hugs back, after a startled beat, but then Jason realizes he forgot to ask, and squirms out of Dick’s range as fast as he can manage. Oh, poor kid, Bruce thinks.

“I’m sorry, I’m—I’m so s-sorry,” Jason stammers, starting to trembling all over.

Dick snaps out of his unease and chuckles, sliding into a crouch. “You’re good, kiddo, promise. Took me by surprise. Be smart today, yeah?”

Jason swallows, once, twice, three times, and then leans a bit forward, so Dick pulls him into a one-armed hug. He ruffles Jason’s feathery, ginger hair, knocks their foreheads together, and then releases the boy. Jason makes an unintelligible noise as he backs away, cheeks beet-red.

Alfred herds Jason towards the hall. “We’d best be off, then, gentlemen.”

“Have a good day, Jay,” Bruce calls. 

Dick sweeps the door shut, once Alfred and Jason have passed the kitchen. He claps his hands together, rubbing his palms together in a nervous habit, all the while rocking back-and-forth on the balls of his feet; one would be grievously mistaken to think this excess of motion is a lack of control. Bruce finds his eldest often capably masks himself through this motion, through this relative illusion of nonchalance. At times, this omission is truly unintentional—unintentional, not uncontrolled. The trick is to look for evidence that it’s deliberate. If nothing surfaces through careful observation, then the boy probably doesn’t realize he’s doing it. 

“Look, look, look, before you tell me that I have to give you warning before I show up,” Dick rambles, as he rounds the table to Bruce’s left, “schedules exist to be followed, yadda-yadda, interruption of routine is—”

“Was I going to tell you any of that?” Bruce interjects, because of the bazaar of happenings that make him angry, putting words into his mouth is one of his least favorites.

Dick pauses, then, halfway through commandeering the seat Alfred had sacrificed in the name of furthering Jason’s education. “I mean, based off the look on your face, yeah.”

“I didn’t realize the single expression I am capable of could convey every intricacy of human communication. My bad on that.”

His eldest drops down into the chair with a clang, breathing an airy laugh. “Fair point. So, I figure we need rules for this. Rule number one is that you don’t immediately try to micromanage every move I make.”

Bruce flattens his mouth. “What is the ‘this’ that we need rules for, Dick?”

“The rules are for after I tell you the thing I have to tell you,” Dick says, shaking his head, as if Bruce’s question is fundamentally nonsensical. His thick, dark curls bounce across his angular, tan face. “Rule number two is that I’m doing completely fine, so you don’t need to ask that question. Everything’s going great. The Titans are great.”

Bruce scowls and leans back in his chair, folding his fingers over his abdomen. The rough scars skating over his palms catch the wool of his sweater. “Let me know when you arrive at a thought.”

“Gladly, you asshole,” Dick says, dipping his head to hide his broad grin. “Rules three, four, and five are that I’m good at this, okay? Remember that I’m good at this, I’ve been handling Titans business, I’m not totally, completely inept. You don’t get to be on my case about it.”

“I think you’d have an easier time having a thought if you’d stop obsessing over mine,” Bruce snaps. “Richard John Grayson, if you don’t spit the question out in the next five seconds, there will not be enough of my sanity left to ask it.”

Dick vibrates in his chair, chuckling even as one leg jostles so much that it throws the frame of his body up and down, up and down; he chews on his lip, gears clicking somewhere behind his light eyes.

“Do you think we could spar a little?” Dick asks, finally, after an eternity and a half of waiting that puts Bruce through a physically agonizing level of impatience.

This fucking boy, Bruce thinks, forcing himself to not pinch the bridge of his nose, or sigh, or place his head in his heads, or any number of things that would betray any sort of internal response.

“Why do you think you need new rules for something we’ve been doing since you were nine?” Bruce asks, brows furrowed.

Dick tilts his head from one side to the other. “I don’t know, I just thought I’m not... I’m not Robin anymore. I’m on my own, now, right? That’s what I wanted, so I have to do it on my own, and I’m doing it. I’m doing just fine. You have a whole new kid, I thought maybe you... moved on, I guess. You never asked to train with me, after I went to Hudson.”

Bruce cocks an eyebrow. “You’re correct, I didn’t ask. You opened this conversation, like most, with a preemptive ‘fuck off.’ I was under the impression such a thing wouldn’t be received well. I... wouldn’t call that moving on.”

Admittedly, this newly-identified, diamond-hard reality sparks an anxiety within him; he knows on a level below the subconscious just how long it’s been since he trained with Dick. They’ve worked together dozens of times over the last few years, but work and learning are two different things, two different ways to be needed by the same person. He’d be lying through his teeth if he said there wasn’t a part of him that isn’t delighted by this ask. It’s Dick’s hesitation that cuts him, unexpectedly. Bruce is far from a good man by his own estimate, and he understands he’ll always leave much to be desired as a father. The recognition that his callousness has already lost parts of these relationships brings out a new subspecies of this fear in him. Sometimes he remembers that his future is, most likely, a lonely one; he will inevitably do or say something that routs his sons, reveals to Clark what everyone else already seems to know. Love will always be something just out of Bruce’s reach. At least the woodcocks are fellow year-rounders.

“Oh,” Dick says, eventually. “Huh. I guess my opener was, before I say anything, remember to shut the fuck up. Why’s the kid freeze up like that, by the way?”

“Because of a series of extremely understandable psychological responses that, if you’re really curious, you can ask him about yourself, instead of trying to get it out of me.”

Dick jerks forward with a laugh, raising his palms in surrender to the morning sun. “Okay, okay, fair, fine. Will you tell me if that was the right-ish thing to do, at least?”

Bruce lets out a breath. “It was. Why do you need to spar with me?”

Dick drums his hands on the mesh-topped table, rattling the plates and trays still out; such as Bruce’s largely untouched plate, which he keeps forgetting is even there. He can’t afford to attract more of Alfred’s ire, and nothing is more offensive to Alfred than electing not to eat when he cooks. However, Bruce would rather lick wet concrete than eat a mouthful of egg. 

“It’s not... we’re good,” Dick says, slowly. “But I’m off. I don’t know how to describe it—I’m just... off. No one on the team really gets it, is the problem, how the threat level can be higher but I’m still out of practice—and I try training with them, I do. But they’re holding back so much, and they don’t have the grasp of hand-to-hand they would if they didn’t have, y’know, god-like power n’all. I had a run-in with Slade last week, and almost got you a songbird shish kebab sent home. I’m fine, but I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m better than this, I know I am.”

Bruce snorts, to hide the way songbird shish kebab kicks his heartbeat just that much faster. “Hand-to-hand combat with a metahuman is a fundamentally different form of combat. Hand-to-hand combatants with no additional skills have to know where your nerve clusters are. They have to know where your lymph nodes are, how little pressure it actually takes to crush a windpipe. Any being with powers will, by default, never need to get close to you to kill you. You’re just out of practice at close range. Your dramatics are unnecessary.”

Dick groans with pent-up frustration, dropping his head against the table. The iron vibrates into Bruce’s folded elbows. “Of course you know what I’m—it can’t be that easy, can it? I feel like I’m going crazy. Off the clock, I’ve been drilling as often as I can, but my reaction time just isn’t budging.”

There’s no practical hope of sleep with yet another problem to whittle away at in the back of his head.

“Shall we?” Bruce stands, rolling his shoulders as they pop and crack.

He tabs the off-hand as often as I can for later rumination. If Bruce still knows Dick at all, it’ll come up again, quite possibly reveal itself to be the primary issue at hand. His eldest son has a rather nasty habit of running himself into the ground before he even registers he’s undertaken the process; this has been true for so long that Bruce has long-standing concerns about the working conditions found at C.C. Haly and Norton Bros. Circus. In Dick’s eyes, there is no line of questioning more insulting, but for this, Bruce is prepared to wait. Certainly, they’re not as close as they once were, but he’s still involved enough to know that Dick’s joined a new troupe, begun performing again. As often as I can must be a debt paid on top of work with the Titans and the circus and the recent undercover forays into Blüdhaven, in pursuit of a establishing a whisper network before formally addressing the city as Nightwing. The true nature of the endeavor before him is becoming clearer. 

“Oh, now?” Dick squeaks. “I don’t mind waiting until you have a minute, I was just—nearby... okay, yeah, sure. Might as well, saves time.”

On the bright side, Bruce now possesses the license to steal the rest of Alfred’s coffee, since he’d declined in that lovely hour-long window when he’d assumed sleep would possibly happen to him today. Dick nibbles on a bit of toast while Bruce downs what’s left of Alfred’s preferred sugary swill, and then upends the coffeepot into the empty mug, a more suitable replacement.

They meander into the house and then westward, towards the grandfather clock, and then down the stone staircase that spirals into the deep behind it. Dick chatters constantly, but Bruce has no more ability to follow it than a drowned-out backing track. It’s some story including Gar, Kory, some amount of accidental arson, and a llama. The purpose of the llama was impenetrable until Bruce recalled that ‘Gar’ refers to Beast Boy, which admittedly doesn’t happen until after they’re already downstairs.

Bruce busies himself with switching on the overhead lights he’d just turned off, truthfully as an excuse to drink more caffeine in desperate fashion. In a perfect reflection of the hundreds of hours they’ve spent together, doing just this, Dick is on the mats by the time Bruce makes his way back. He leans against the yellow-painted hazard railing in front of the gym area, a deep recession into the Cave’s left-hand wall; the railing splits the walkway to the gym from the depressed garage space, behind and below. As he watches the boy warm up, Bruce’s eyes stick on an odd, jerky asymmetry; at a distance, the gap in otherwise smooth motion becomes obvious. Dick had shucked his crewneck for the t-shirt underneath, but it’s too loose for Bruce to make out the edges of a bandage.

Evidence it’s deliberate, Bruce thinks.

“What’d you do to your left side?” he calls. “Anything to do with Deathstroke?”

“No, I just fell stupid getting away,” Dick answers, rising out of a split with a stumble—his left ankle gives in. “He didn’t touch me. He just... almost did.”

What Dick refers to as a ‘warm-up’ is a fracture of both biology and physics to anyone watching. It is both impressive, and infuriatingly impressive. Stumbling is not something Dick Grayson does in front of another human being if he can ever help it; to someone whose childhood was spent as a world-class performer to sold-out crowds, that’s missing a cue. If Dick could have hidden that misstep, he absolutely would have.

Bruce harrumphs. “You’re too used to having multiple teammates who can fly.”

Dick, with one leg held straight in the air and folded behind his head, shoves a finger at Bruce. “Remember how the first thing I said was, in fact, shut the fuck up, boss?”

“I’m not criticizing just you,” Bruce growls. “Not everything is a personal slight. This happens to me if I’ve spent too much time working with the Justice League. I find that contact reinforces defensive instincts. Defensive combat is not inherently a negative skill to work on. All you’re doing is remembering everything else you know. The dramatics are entirely unnecessary.”

Polishing off what is so tragically the last dregs of his coffee, Bruce kicks off the railing and crosses into the gym, stooping to leave his mug sitting on the bench pressed right up to the wall. He digs out a roll of tape from the plastic bin shoved underneath the seats, and starts the methodical process of taping his hands; split your knuckles enough over one lifetime, and the skin stretched over the bone gets too thin to heal correctly. Bruce’s knuckles are a permanent ruddy purple. When he turns, Dick’s watching him, red-taped hands fumbling with the velcro straps of a pair of fingerless, padded blue gloves.

“You are the last person who gets to tell me that I’m dramatic,” Dick chirps. “Hey, geezer, how long’s it been since you last slept?”

“As of right now? The night before I adopted you,” Bruce answers, snide.

Dick grins. “You’re such an asshole.”

At first, Bruce just watches Dick run a handful of different flow strikes on a human-shaped practice dummy. The sound of each strike lands like the rapport of a short-barreled shotgun through a front door lock, one after the other, fast as anything; Bruce stretches, watching Dick run through right cross, jaw, eyes, or right body shot, left uppercut, collarbone out of the corner of his eye. Aside from the left side injury, which has left Dick stiff through that half of his body, there’s nothing that immediately catches Bruce’s eye as too dangerously out-of-practice. The boy is more unsteady than usual, but that’d likely be a product of as often as I can.

“Okay, let’s try something,” Bruce says, waving Dick over to the center of the mats. “I want you to do whatever it takes to keep me from tapping you, short of unnecessary maiming. If you really can’t avoid it I’d like to keep at least one arm and one leg. Sound fair?”

Dick beams, lopsided, a touch breathless. “It’s your funeral, Bee.”

The first two rounds don’t show Bruce any side of Dick he isn’t well-acquainted with; sometimes the boy gets overeager and misses openings that would have saved him time and energy, had he not been so married to the performance aspect of his style of combat. In their third exchange, Bruce throws a feint to the right as a distraction to take Dick’s ankle out from under him, and in those thirty seconds, Dick’s eyes widen. He drops to the mat, breathing hard, the force of his fall rucking his shirt up. There, on Dick’s left side, laid a swath of white bandages, stained here-and-there with yellow fluid. The bandages didn’t necessarily cover the whole surface area of the burn, and Bruce finds this concerning. Five distinct points poke out from underneath the edges, small and pointed at the tips, scouring Dick’s brown skin a red-purple, and Bruce realizes he might break every object in this room if he doesn’t start box-breathing at that actual second.

“I think,” Bruce grits out, forcing his breath to be short, sharp, and even, “that I have located your problem.”

Dick swears and yanks his shirt down, shoving himself to his elbow and worming backwards. “I know what it looks like, but it’s not, I swear to God. It’s not that. I swear to God it’s not that—it’s also not that other thing it looks like. I promise it’s neither of those things. It is a totally and completely unrelated thing.”

“So far, I think it’s lying about your health in a situation where I could have hurt you very severely,” Bruce says.

He steps forward and leans down to pull Dick upright, in order to avoid the boy putting that ankle under more stress. Once Dick’s asleep he’ll need to slip off and call Leslie; if he doesn’t give Alfred sufficient warning both of them will be by even somewhat close to the advent of dinner, Bruce’s life will not be worth living. Dick sways on his feet. Bruce reaches out to steady him, unnerved, but Dick knocks his hand away.

“I knew you’d lose your absolute shit if I brought it up at all,” Dick snaps. “Let’s not pretend like you ever let me really explain anything, you just default to your own opinion—is it an actual crime to not want to hear someone talk shit about my girlfriend?”

Bruce closes his eyes. “Believe it or not, I don’t find my opinion of the princess of Tamaran to be relevant. If you’re going to insist I do, fine, yes, I’d like her to avoid scarring my son for life, but I don’t personally consider that an opinion as much as it is a fucking plea, Richard John Grayson. Medbay. Now.” 

Something in his voice or manner must have been effective, because Dick studies him only for a few seconds before slouching off to the medbay, grumbling; interestingly, now the boy’s been caught out, that left ankle seems to be giving him more visible trouble at a walk. Bruce lingers, peeling the gloves and tape off his hands, attempting to pull a rational, reasonable state out of his mind. The thought that Dick’s been operating in the field in this state has delivered a not inconsiderable amount of adrenaline into his bloodstream, but the crash when it levels off is harder the more exhausted he starts. Clark, theoretically, is supposed to visit the house later; maybe he’ll salvage the day then. When he’s stopped trembling and almost drifts off where he’s standing, Bruce shakes himself. 

He retraces Dick’s path down the stone walkway; it slopes gently down to the medbay, which resides, by necessity, on the same level as the garage. Dick is sitting on the edge of one of the cots, right leg bouncing furiously. Now that he’s looking, there’s a certain slump that shouldn’t be there. Bruce should’ve noticed it on sight.  

Bruce sighs. “Dick—”

“Kory didn’t mean to. You have to believe me. Trust me, she didn’t mean to,” Dick interrupts.

Bruce quirks a brow. “That maybe isn’t the reassurance you think it is.”

“You have no idea what Kory’s been through—not a single fucking clue—so don’t explain my girlfriend to me, got that?” Dick growls. “I love her, and since you have no idea how that works, it means I tell you to be quiet when you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bruce tilts his head. “That so?” 

“Yeah, it fucking is!” Dick rages on. “You can’t even imagine how hard it is for someone to control power like that under that much stress, you have no idea how guilty she feels. It was an accident. She... she was having a nightmare, Kory didn’t know it was me, alright? That’s all I can tell you, because it’s none of your business. You just have to trust me.”

Bruce squeezes the bridge of his nose between his fingers, briefly considering the merits of just turning around to hunt down earplugs before proceeding any further. “Richard—”

“She won’t even touch me anymore, so what’s the point!” Dick yells, voice cracking.

Sensing he’s stumbled across a proper psychological meltdown, by now, Bruce feels comfortable letting go of his far-fetched dreams to get a word in edgewise.

Dick sucks down air, running a hand through his dark curls. “She won’t even... I don’t want to hear it right now, okay? She’s probably going to break up with me over it. If I’m not mad at her, you definitely shouldn’t be.”

Bruce folds his arms. “I’ll be glad to learn where I said I was angry with Kory.”

“Oh, come on, it’s basically all over you! Look at you, you literally look like you’re chewing glass, and maybe also got all your teeth ripped out,” Dick exclaims, gesticulating like a windmill in Bruce’s vague direction.

“All that, from my singular facial expression?”

Dick spreads his arms. “It’s not like you’ve ever had a problem letting anyone know when you’re disappointed—which is fucking always!”

Bruce arcs his head backwards, letting the rectangular industrial lights burn into his retinas, re-printing again and again on the back of his eyelids. It must have genuinely been easier to gentle a mustang—Clark would certainly know if that were true. There has to be some unaccounted for sin of hideous magnitude for which he’s failed to repent, the moral lapse spawning whatever this month has been. To be reasonable, he should issue warning to Clark that the most athletic act he’ll be capable of by this evening will be passing out in his bathtub.

“Well, y’know what disappoints me? You’re Clark’s best friend,” Dick continues, lilting his voice for emphasis in a way Bruce finds especially patronizing. “You of all people should know that mistakes like this happen! You know how scared he is of hurting anyone, how guilty he feels over just the idea, and I’m pissed on his behalf that you—”

“Richard John Grayson, I understand!” Bruce intervenes, raising his voice until it rings along the cavern. “For the love of all that’s good in this world, shut your mouth. Stop talking. Although this is clearly the most improbable idea you’ve ever considered in your entire life, I want you to at least imagine a world where I understand, and stop talking. I’m going to re-bandage that wound, you will go upstairs, and you will rest. You can be as alone as you please then.”

Dick gapes, initially, but then as Bruce continues, his teeth click mulishly together. The boy’s expression settles into something glum. For a moment there is just blessed, blessed silence, and a precious moment to inhale, clear his mind. Dick raises the hem of his shirt up while Bruce moves to the massive, three-basin sinks along the far wall, and he scrubs his arms down practically up to his shirtsleeves. After, he hunts down medical tape, non-adhesive dressing wrapped in paper packaging, a few gauze rolls alongside a few pre-wrapped gauze squares, and a small bin of tepid water, foaming with a gentle soap. By the time he returns, Dick’s peeled off the old bandages, brandishing a dark, broiling, recent burn in the precise shape of a long, lithe hand. Some of the blisters have already popped, but the ones that remain are the size of quarters, filled with straw-colored fluid. The fluid isn’t abnormal, but the redness spikes Bruce’s worry—ideally Dick would’ve waited for someone with sanitized hands to touch the wound. There’s blood welling where Dick had impatiently ripped off the bandage.  

“You said you understand,” Dick says, slowly, as Bruce surveys the damage.

“Congratulations, I was starting to think you were suddenly deaf,” Bruce says, stretching a pair of gloves over his hands. “Hn. Next time, kid, wait. Tearing something off a burn that size isn’t a great idea.”

“Oh, no, yeah, I figured that out about three seconds after I did it,” Dick murmurs.

Bruce dabs gently at the contours of the burn, focusing his attention where the swelling seems the most vitriolic, where there’s torn tissue, or where it looks like blisters have burst. The boy doesn’t say anything more, immediately, but that’s unsurprising—it must be painful. Once the wound is cleaned, Bruce dries the excess moisture cautiously by patting it down with a square of gauze, avoiding the still-intact blisters. Satisfied, Bruce sets off in search of their drawer of burn salves, trashing that pair of gloves in a bin as he goes; he emerges with a tongue depressor and a bottle of the antibiotic salve Leslie has indicated for use as a first resort. After another round of washing his hands, he pulls on another pair of purple nitrile gloves and uses the depressor to spread the salve directly on the unwrapped nonadhesive bandage, square by square until all the edges of the burn are covered. 

“Your reaction time is probably fine,” Bruce says, haltingly, as he tapes down a final layer of gauze squares, “but what you need more than anything is rest. I don’t know if you’ve realized that you’ve taken on three full-time, high-activity roles without sacrificing anything to make that level of effort possible. You may be leading a team of people with god-like power, but you still have none of it. Do you understand?”

“Yeah,” Dick mumbles.

“I am in no position to judge Kory, I barely know her,” Bruce says, although Dick stiffens underneath his hands, “but it’s not a condemnation of her character for me to argue that you are not sacrificial. I believe you if you say this was a one-off mistake. You’re right. I have to trust you. Accidents happen, but you should never tolerate a pattern. Do you understand?”

Dick heaves a sigh. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I’m sorry I jumped down your throat. I just... I really like her, y’know? I think I’m in love. I don’t want to lose her. This is the only time something like that’s ever happened. She just had no idea where she was. She thought she was—uh, in space, somewhere. You remember how that would happen to me when I, uh, was little? Man, it was terrifying.”

Bruce rips a piece of medical tape free. “Move slower. Take it one step back for a few weeks. Don’t share the same room. If the relationship’s going to last, it’ll still be there afterward.”

The moment the words fall to the floor between them, Bruce sees his catastrophic error: that bit of advice is all too sage for a man Dick assumes has never been in a serious romantic relationship; the phrase I understand implies some depth of knowledge on the subject; and Bruce only truly lost his temper once Clark was mentioned, but not before. Any reasonably competent detective would have the mystery solved by sundown. Maybe he’ll get lucky and the pieces will drift away from Dick’s notice, and also perhaps the American woodcock will stop rocking back and forth, and maybe every mountain range on Earth will fall back down into the magma of the mantle all at once. 

“Sit up, kid,” Bruce orders, beckoning Dick forward with his hand as he does.

Dick’s face contorts with agony, so Bruce slips a hand underneath his eldest’s lean shoulders and braces him there for a minute and a half. Once Dick’s bearing his own weight, palms pressed flat to the cot, Bruce unravels a roll of gauze around Dick’s middle; when Bruce is done taping the bandages down, Dick drops the hem of his shirt and exhales, shaky. 

“What have you been taking for the pain?” Bruce asks.

Dick coughs, blanching. “Uh... I think I had some Tylenol yesterday.”

Bruce squares his jaw, and takes a second to stare at the ceiling. “It’s like you delight in saying sentences that take years off of my life.”

Behind him, Dick’s cackling, as if this morning alone hasn’t permanently capped Bruce’s life to the age of sixty two. Bruce sifts through the drug cabinet until he locates a bottle of lower-dose painkillers and a package of edibles, marking their absence off on a clipboard nailed to the wall. He scribbles the time, dosages, and Dick’s initials down on a post-it note and smooths it by the clipboard. Ideally, it’ll be the first thing Leslie sees. He presents this and a banana-flavored meal replacement shake pilfered from one of the fridges to his son.   

“You are aware I flew myself here, and have to fly myself back to New York, right?” Dick says, blinking down at his cupped palm.

Bruce bites his tongue. “Yes, it was equally reckless then. Your point is what, precisely?”

Dick pops the pill with a quarter of the shake. “You’re such a hypocrite sometimes I don’t know how the ground doesn’t open up and swallow you,” he mutters afterward, tossing back the gummies.

All Bruce provides in response is an aborted noise in the back of his throat, unimpeachable on its face. “Finish that. You should move before all the drugs kick in.”

The boy tips back the rest of the banana shake, tossing it behind him without a thought when he finishes it—this threatens to make Bruce laugh. Dick swings his legs over the side of the cot and, more or less, stumbles to his feet.

“Oh, shit—do you ever stand up and the world does this big loopy thing?” he says, while Bruce grabs him by the shirt to stabilize him.

“That’s called dehydration,” Bruce snaps, shoving Dick in the general direction of the lift. 

Once they’re inside, Bruce depresses the button indicating the second floor, and closes his eyes to count backwards from twenty seven.

Dick, evidently, has other ideas, and somehow has come to the conclusion that their earlier conversation should continue. “You never mentioned you and Diana were a thing.”

Whatever Bruce had been expecting, it most definitely wasn’t that; the shock forces a wheezing laugh out of him. “More pertinent question, why do you think Diana’s taste is that bad?” 

“It’s not my fault you’ve been leaving me out of all the League gossip, apparently,” Dick says. “But I’m... I’m sorry, for what I said before. I didn’t know. I guess that would’ve been shitty whether I was right or not.”

“Oh, because I’m just licking my wounds over here,” Bruce says, dryly. The elevator chimes and jerks to a stop. “I don’t care, Dick. C’mon. You’re almost there.”

The lift opens into the north hall, a couple meters before the entryway to the foyer’s second-level banister. Bruce nudges his eldest forwards and then to the right, following the west hall to the far end, towards Dick’s bedroom. It hadn’t, ultimately, been the best idea to bring a nine year old home and then immediately ask him to choose between one of seemingly infinite, ornate rooms to call his own. The process ended up taking several hours, but at least they could say Dick absolutely had the single room he most wanted—it also ended up being the single farthest bedroom in the entire house. Bruce shoves the door to Dick’s childhood bedroom open with his shoulder, careful to dodge the faded piece of construction paper that reads THE BIG TOP! in glitter and macaroni noodles; groaning, Dick stumbles ahead of him to the bed, flopping onto it face-first.

“Tell J’onn I’m sorry I got in the way of your hot date tonight,” the boy moans.

“Why—” Bruce breaks off with a startled hacking, “why J’onn?”

Dick rolls his shoulders, jostling the mattress. “I just know that guy’s probably a charmer. Plus, he exclusively wears hotpants. Obvious bonus. Don’t you feel just a little weird being self-conscious next to a literal Martian? Talk about unrealistic expectations, I can never be a dragon. Do you think Kory secretly expects me to turn into a dragon? I can just never be that, it’ll never last, I think I’m doomed.”

“You’re only one of the best acrobats and martial artists in the world. Sure, your life is just made for mediocrity.”

Dick laughs, but it peters out in a breath. “You mean it, though? I’m not... losing anything?”

Bruce softens, and stoops to squeeze Dick’s shoulder. “You know well that my expectations of your capabilities are high. They are that high because of your skill, not in spite of it. I would tell you if I thought your abilities were seriously degrading. I think you just have no idea how tired you actually are.”

“Oh. Uh, huh. Now that you mention it, the idea of moving suddenly sounds so, so bad, and—just sort of not good, as an idea, or option for my future,” Dick babbles. He wriggles an arm free and thwaps it, boneless, against the comforter. “I’m sorry for living up to my namesake earlier. I shouldn’t have said any of that. Will you tell Hal Jordan that I’m sorry I implied the crazy, romantic summer fling he had with the Batman that one time didn’t actually happen? If I shouldn’t insult your game, I shouldn’t insult his game either. So sorry on that. My bad, man. Oops. Must’ve burned, dude.”

“Why are you apologizing. You haven’t been able to really insult me since the day after I brought you home,” Bruce sighs, electing not to dignify this specific angle of attack any longer.

However, he can’t bring himself to lower his hand; one minute stretches into two, and Bruce can’t bring himself to budge, half-bent down cupping the bony point of his eldest’s shoulder blade. Dick’s breathing spools longer and longer. He certainly doesn’t seem to mind. Within an instant the raw underbelly of Bruce’s mind is convinced that Dick is hiding something more serious, a dangerous, degenerative disease, or an injury elsewhere that’s thirty minutes from going septic. Tellingly when he closes his eyes he sees the back of Dick’s head as a russet clog of gray matter and shattered chunks of cranium. When his mother had been shot, he had pressed the trembling side of his hand to the cobblestone to sweep knots of brain and bone and blood back into his mother’s skull, grit, dirt, glass and all. If he could keep the gore from spreading, she’d rise up right off the ground like nothing had ever happened.

Dick raises his head, curls burying most of his face, hauling Bruce out of his ruminations. “Holy shit, you didn’t say anything after I brought up Hal, and I’m actually gonna need verbal confirmation on that. I’m gonna really, really need clear verbal confirmation on the meaning of this prolonged silence, the one we’re having at this moment. Look, I know your whole dealio is prolonged silence—and looking grumpy as shit, just like that, for no reason whatsoever—but you’ll need to quantify this silence damn near mathematically, immediately. Oh my God, did you make Hal Jordan my new stepdad?”

Bruce dips his head. “Can I ask you something?”

“Me? Sure, yeah, anything.”

“Why is the only thing you want today my suffering?” Bruce asks, plainly. “I just don’t understand. What is the purpose of perpetually seeking my torment? This can’t possibly be useful. If the Spanish Inquisition ended centuries ago, why are you attempting to train for it as a career path today? Elucidate, I beg you.”

Dick burrows his head back down into the mattress, giggling. “I’m nosy, Bee, what do you want from me? This is entirely your fault. You asked me if I wanted to learn how to solve the bad dude crimes and I said yeah, welcome to the trade-off. You never expect the Spanish Inquisition, true, but I have literally no idea why you’re still surprised at the Robin Inquisition. You were on the ground floor. You are the ground floor. That’s why Alf walks all over you, hah.”

“How little have you had to eat or drink recently for a painkiller to kick in that fast,” Bruce says, thoughtfully.

Dick sings a low note. “Uh, an amount I’m not going to say—pleading the fifth, ‘scusey—because I can feel you glaring at me with seriously rude intent. On the bright side, if you’re secretly in love with the King of Atlantis, I’ll... hydrate better. That’s, uh, how that works. You’re required to let me believe that was a good one.”

Bruce frowns, but finally peels his hand away from Dick’s back. “I’m increasingly concerned what kind of taste you think I have. Stay here. I’ll be back in a moment.”

“I was going for a little vanilla, damn, so it’s a little freakier than I’m assuming, got it. You know Red Tornado is gonna have a hell of a time explaining to Jay about the birds and the bees, right?” Dick calls after him.

Bruce slams the door shut as his only response, partially because he’s honestly a tad offended on Red Tornado’s behalf. Red Tornado is, and has been every single time Bruce has had the pleasure of working with him, a consummate professional. Red Tornado would never be so childish as to use the Justice League as a dating service primarily for people who choose to make a lot of incredibly stupid choices. This is an integrity Bruce had lost by the time the first draft of the League by-laws were written. He ambles down to the kitchens and puts together a platter he knows Dick will at least pick at even over a sour stomach; yogurt, granola, fruit, nuts, anything that appears to be vital to the diet of a songbird, particularly. He snags an aluminum bottle of water out of the fridge, inclining his head to listen to Alfred’s approaching dress shoes click against the tile behind him.

“Every single day of my life, those Americans of yours are getting worse at driving—it’s positively abominable, the state of manners these days! I’ll set the scene: four way stop sign. One man right in front of me is driving approximately half of a pick-up. I’m not too terribly convinced that automobile made it to its garage, I’ll tell you. Then there’s a bloke to my right, flashing his hazards. The woman to my left, Hummer. It was near in both lanes, it was! Where on this bloody Earth would anyone ever need a car like that? You don’t need a car like that! That was when I knew I would lose the whole day, just about, to seething privately, for the final nail in the coffin of chivalry is surely here. A Hummer! Well, how’s Master Richard, then?”

Al’s tirades typically have multiple layers of meaning, underneath the bare facts proffered; this is both Alfred announcing his entry, and initiating a hopefully long-lived ceasefire. As he rambles, Al swings off his sport coat, shakes it out with a flick of the wrists, and primly hangs it from a hook by the entryway. Alfred follows Bruce’s path, replacing the tops on the quart of yogurt and the fruit, before ferrying both off to the fridge.

“Thanks,” Bruce grunts, perturbed, as usual, to find that objects don’t simply disappear when he’s done with them. “Dick showed up with a burn. It might be infected. There’s something wrong with his ankle, too, I don’t know what. I need to call Leslie.”

“Oh, you’ll do no such thing, are you mad? You’ll do exactly what you ought to have done three days ago, and go to sleep,” Alfred scoffs, re-sealing the granola with far too much flourish to be natural. “We both know quite well you’ll accomplish nothing but fretting, anyway, and what good is that if the boy’s not even nearby to see it? At that point, it’s simply moping—yes, it’s moping. How dare you make that face at me, you know well just how very right I am. You are a moper on occasion, it’s true. You may not contradict me, Master Bruce, we’ve discussed this.”

Bruce works his jaw. “I’m not sure,” he says. Literally speaking, the day has to end at some point. “How was Jay?”

“Ever so hopeful his brother will remain. I’m afraid I got his hopes up on the subject, so I’m glad you’ve managed to talk Richard into it. Oh, I’ve six for dinner! How exciting,” Alfred exclaims, clapping his hands. “I’ve just the recipe I wanted to test properly—I’d printed it out, but, hm... I can’t quite remember where I left it. What bother. No, I suppose that’s five, I’m still fighting you over toast, hmph.”

Presently, Bruce finds himself captured by Alfred’s casual assumption that Clark would be at the Manor, later; Bruce hasn’t mentioned any of Clark’s plans. In fact, he rarely ever has to, because the truth is that—inexplicably—Clark is at their house so often Alfred simply has the cause to assume. Unsettled for reasons he can’t name, Bruce retreats without a word, returning to Dick’s bedroom.

Dick’s room is kept neater these days than it ever was when he lived out of it—the boy has a predilection for organized chaos—but it’ll always feel achingly familiar. The posters on the wall range everywhere from Prince to The Matrix, flecked with felt flags for Gotham’s major league baseball team, and hundreds of stickers from different restaurants, bands, museums, galleries, and events from Gotham City smoothed over decades old wallpaper. Polaroids pinned by colorful thumbtacks and labeled in blocky blue sharpie form chaotic clusters: tween Dick and Donna in every kitschy photo-booth on the East Coast, back when Donna was half a foot taller; Dick and Wally beaming, performing their blurry secret handshake in matching corsages, bound for a high school prom in Central City. One is a flash of an emerald green hawk dropping out of the sky overhead, talons racing forward. Bruce wonders what the story behind that one is. The timeline of the photographs cuts off right before the growth spurt Dick went through after dropping out of Hudson, and Bruce’s chest aches all the more.

Dick has burrowed underneath his royal blue comforter, but he’s left the corner of the bed’s vacant side turned down. This is an invitation, without the agony of putting such a thing into words. Bruce’s heart flips. He sets the tray and the aluminum bottle on the nightstand by Dick’s head.

“You don’t have to finish this, but you should try to eat at least a bit of it. You’ll want something real in your stomach.”

Dick moans into his pillowcase. “Sounds gross. Like, totally, absolutely gross. Never in a million years. Ooh, bluebs. Oh, no, my one weakness, how could it happen to me.”

Indecision keeps Bruce standing there, dumbly, looking between the turned-over corner of blanket and the doorway; before long the act of making a decision becomes seemingly impossible. Increasingly he becomes aware that he’s yet to move. Perhaps that’s Dick’s voice, speaking to him in bleary tones. With the awareness comes Bruce’s knees unexpectedly buckling—easy enough to disguise as a stumble backwards—and he scrubs at his sore eyes, once he recovers, like it’ll help him focus.

“—stand over me to make sure I eat some yogurt, it’s just pushy, yknow? Yo, Earth to pushy?” Dick is babbling, although there is, in fact, a spoon in his hand.

“Good job,” Bruce rasps.

To avoid a few more hours of mockery, because with Bruce’s recent luck he’ll likely pass out in the doorway, at this rate, Bruce rounds the bed and sits on the edge of other side. He hesitates to stand even as the dizziness passes. He’s gratified when Dick worms closer, perhaps because of the evidence that, sometimes, at least, the boy wants to. Maybe they’re not losing pieces of their relationship, the way Bruce is terrified they are; perhaps they’re merely struggling to learn something new, and this is nothing more than a change in seasons. In the event that Bruce is catastrophically wrong, there’s always the woodcocks.

“I was thinking,” Bruce begins.

Dick snorts, the sound dampened by the mounds of linens he’s pulled around himself. “Oh, no. Not that, anything but that. You take that back. That’s a threat.”

Bruce tamps down his irritation. “Your work in Blüdhaven is largely undercover currently, correct?”

“Wow, exactly, that was specifically the thing I told you not to have an opinion on, and you were like, why do we need rules? This is why we have to have the rules,” Dick huffs.

Bruce shakes his head, curtly. “Well, it’s not an opinion. It’s an offer. I could do some of that undercover work for you. If—”

“Okay, cowboy, let me ask you something,” Dick says, raising his head and leveling a bit of a glare Bruce’s way, although the effect is lost beneath his curtain of hair, “are they my sources if you were their main contact? The whole idea of a whisper network—and it was you who told me this, you bitch—is the relationship you have with your informants. Is it supposed to be a relationship built on trust, or is it one built with the substitute teacher you’ll never see again? I can’t ask someone to rat on the operations of a guy like Blockbuster unless I show that guy I’ve got his back.”

“Bitch?” Bruce asks, after a moment. The argument is a fair one, so, naturally, Bruce resents it enormously. “Unoriginal, really.”

Dick rolls over to raise his hands up. “I have the ‘I’m on so many drugs right now’ immunity necklace so on, it’s not even funny. You drugged me. I’m the victim of peer pressure, here. Bitch is bitch, which is you.”

Bruce chews on the inside of his cheek, while Dick wriggles back down. “It’s just an idea. Keep it in mind.”

“You sure you wanna start this argument all over again, Cryptkeeper?” asks the lump of cotton. “Look, maybe I don’t know everything—big maybe, huh—but I’m sure Alf’s not thrilled about at least two life decisions you’ve ever made.”

Bruce exhales, slowly. “Fine. Can we at least compromise?”

Dick peeks out one baby blue eye, brow raised curiously. “Go on, Skeletor.”

“If you want me to trust you, it can’t get this bad, Dick. It... it can’t. If you won’t let me do the work, then... let me do this.”

Incredibly, Dick manages to remain quiet for a breadth of time measured in minutes rather than seconds; Bruce had begun to study a photograph of Roy Harper, smiling face smeared with smashed birthday cake. He can’t quite place Roy’s age—Roy grew up fast. Most of Dick’s friends will always feel like children, to Bruce, particularly after years of getting knocked over by one or more Teen Titans racing through the halls of his house. For instance, Donna’s marriage is utterly surreal; to Bruce, she was twelve and whining about how Diana was braiding her pigtails too tight just yesterday afternoon. Roy has carried an age beyond his years since the day Bruce met him. Idly, he wonders why that is.

Finally, Dick murmurs, “I scared you pretty good, huh?”

Long after Dick’s fallen asleep, Bruce admits, “Like you wouldn’t believe,” to the shadowed room.

It takes quite a bit longer for Bruce to relax; he finds himself toying with Dick’s hair, wrapping the boy’s curls around his index finger. There are dark shadows underneath his eyes, and his kid is far too lean for Bruce’s liking, cheeks too hollow, collarbone too angular. He could never confess this to anyone—and by anyone, Bruce means the entire human population, excepting Alfred—but the older Dick gets, the easier it is to see his father in him. Considering Mr. Grayson met his fate skull first, this is seldom a rosy musing, and usually an ill-fated hope that he’ll do right by the Graysons’ child. Whatever labor conditions they had faced in life would end for their son. Bruce can only imagine what the Graysons would think, to see their son now; surely they’d want Bruce’s head on a pike, and perhaps they’d be right to.

Underneath this bed, there used to be a worse-for-wear Nike shoebox filled with postcards Dick would shyly shuffle through, dated in ballpoint, printed with faded vistas sourced anywhere from Fargo to Texarkana. The Graysons kept a detailed timeline of their performances, of their lives, on these cards, and the diversity of locales impressed Bruce from the first. Sioux City would exchange for Rapid City: which would exchange for Tupelo; which would exchange for Birmingham; which would exchange for Wausau; which would exchange for Apalachicola. Bruce supposed Dick would’ve taken that shoebox to New York with him a long while ago. In a house occupied by a vast amount of objects, what many would mistake for treasures and precious heirlooms—it’s all rot with good aesthetics—there is no other article whose absence Bruce feels so cleanly. The gutter can keep his mother’s eleven million dollar pearl necklace. All he can think to want is that lump of cardboard.

Next Bruce knows, an entity has shaken his arm. He doesn’t recall falling asleep, nor dreaming, but he’s wide-awake within seconds, perceiving the shape of someone sitting on the bed beside him. He can track the figure’s eyeshine in the dark, two half-moons of faint blue, like seeing a cat at the end of the street late at night. Bruce forces himself to box-breathe. The light reflected by the tapetum lucidum—or whatever causes eyeshine in Kryptonians—is a reminder that he’s never hiding from Clark, whether that’s a truth he cares for or not.

“Hey, hey, it’s me,” Clark hums, holding his hands up, out, and level with his jaw. He waves his hands as if to demonstrate being unarmed. “Just me, sorry, I should’ve let you sleep, probably. Alfred threatened me basically with death for waking you up, but I figured you’d want to be asked to see Jason, ‘fore he knocks out.”

Bruce blinks at him, then at the heavy black-out curtains. His heart still lopes through his chest. “What... time is it?”

“A little after ten. At night, to be clear as crystal.”

“Fuck,” Bruce hisses, rubbing his eyes, dragging his fingers down the inner corners. His temples ache, and far-off nerves all over him burn and pull—like a white-hot needle being pulled through muscle fiber.

Clark’s hand finds his left knee over the comforter, draws small, concentric circles over the fabric with his thumb. “Pretty nasty burn that kid has,” he says, softly.

“That kid is going to give me a heart attack,” Bruce all but wheezes, letting his hands fall to his lap.

“Oh, good, so you’ve seen it,” Clark says, a corner of his mouth quirking upwards.

Bruce shakes his head, rubbing at his mouth. “What did Leslie say?”

“She benched him for two weeks, which went about as well as trying to bathe a cat. He’s been sulking with Jason in the den ever since. I think they’re watching movies. They had a pillow fight n’everything, earlier.”

“Maybe I should just let Jason enjoy this,” Bruce grunts.

“Jason’s about as happy as a clam, I’d say,” Clark chirps. His hand roves up Bruce’s thigh. “Leslie’s stayed the night, it’s been pouring all afternoon—she didn’t want to make the drive. I don’t think you’re gonna get a better time to take it easy.”

“Well, aren’t we just hosting a fucking slumber party,” Bruce mutters.

Clark laughs. “Yeah, Jason said it felt like an episode of Full House.”

“What do I run here, a fucking Disney channel program? What an insult,” Bruce grouses, knocking his knee against Clark, who rises, even as he’s still laughing.

Bruce tosses the covers back and clambers to his feet, only for the world to tilt rather suddenly, gnawed away by jet-black stippling. When his vision clears, his cheek is pressed against Clark’s shoulder, Clark’s hand is at his back, and Bruce’s temples now throb.

“You’re not cleared for any floor-induced concussions, that’s not allowed. Hey, did you eat today?” Clark asks, frowning.

To be frank, Bruce doesn’t remember anything he ate in the last three days, which is typically an indication the amount was a critical nothing. Now that he’s searching for the sensation, he can locate the cramping muscles in his abdomen, can register that it’s not twisting around old scar tissue, but his stomach itself. It’s increasingly easy these days to mistake hunger for any other pain, and within that haze, it disappears entirely.

“I’ve been told I am a hypocrite,” he says, muffled against Clark’s flannel.

The material feels like flannel against his mouth, at least, and knowing Clark, there is an extremely small chance of him wearing a different kind of shirt in a casual setting. Plaid might as well be tattooed to the man’s chest. Even if he occasionally selects an alternate type of shirt, Clark will almost always double back to his closet in order to put a plaid shirt on top of that, and the only exception to this rule is Carhartt. No one in the universe has ever had more opinions about the state of the modern Carhartt garment than Clark Kent has; despite dozens of hours of bitching, he wears Carhartt shirts, coats, and hats with a zeal that borders on the religious. Clark Kent owns the following hats and will be wearing only these hats until the day he dies: a 91’ John Deere ballcap faded a mint green; a mesh green ‘87 Bass Pro Shops ballcap inherited from his father; and essentially every winter hat Carhartt has ever manufactured. Embarrassingly, Bruce is entirely capable of listening to Clark rave on the subject for hours without lapsing in attention. These days he has to pretend to be busy just to save face, it’s maddening.

Clark chuckles, squeezing him gently. “Yup, big time, I’m aware, we’ve met. I think it’s real funny. I get so many I told you so’s, and that’s as good as gold with you, y’know? C’mon, move your feet. Walk on.”

Bruce, without moving an inch, growls, “I am not a cow.”

Clark swats his side, chuckling. “It’s just how you ask a horse to—nevermind, city-slicker. Let’s go.”

“I would hardly call this the city. There’s an entire family of woodcocks out there.”

“Poor city-slickers,” Clark opines, as if Bruce’s point didn’t exist. “None of you have ever seen a blade of grass. Never slipped while feeding the hogs and learned the hard way that ain’t a single fella in history ever lied about how fast a hog will turn on you.”

Bruce snorts. “Thank you for turning the Farmer’s Almanac into my own personal radio show.”

Clark grins. He knows he’s hopeless, because Bruce thinks this is breathtaking even in the dark. “Shows how little you know. Walk on, boy.”

Clark kisses at him, which Bruce believes is theoretically another joke about horses. As much as Bruce loves him, Clark never recovered from reading all eight thousand of The Black Stallion books as a child; Bruce knows this because Clark’s bedroom at the Kent Farm has an entire bookcase of battered, beloved copies. The memory of that shelf has stuck with Bruce for nearly twenty years. Unfortunately, the love of his life has been emotionally cheating on him with the conceptual idea of an equine this entire time, and the condition is incurable.

Clark leads him down the hall. “The ankle’s just a nasty sprain, at least. After a round of heavy duty antibiotics, the burn should be fine. Was just on the edge of infection, really. What else? Oh, yeah, the pillow fight. Thing about that is, they used goose down pillows—don’t look like that, that’s your fault for even havin’ ‘em—what? They’re five hundred dollars a pop, probably, heck, I don’t know. It’s something awful.”

“How’re... things?” Bruce mumbles, running his palm against the unfamiliar stubble along his chin. “On your end.”

“Aw, not too bad. Jimmy’s folks are in town, I haven’t heard from him in days. He’s a mama’s boy, I swear it. Lois’ cold is fine, she was on a date in Gotham the other day, actually. I think her name was Katie? My folks are just glad the whole sun kerfuffle happened after the new barn was raised, the snow would’ve flattened the old thing.”

“Sun... kerfuffle. Hn.”

Unfortunately, it is categorically true that by the time they’re approaching Bruce’s actual bedroom, Clark is most of the reason Bruce is upright; three days is likely closer to his last meal than not, which is a discomfiting thought. Clark’s hand burns at the middle of his back. There’s something that only happens to Bruce when Clark touches him, a sense of lightness, this feeling as though he can breathe again although he never has before, like latent jolts of electricity thrilling the heart well after the storm has raged on somewhere new. Whenever they’ve been apart for more than a few days, Bruce finds it next to impossible not to skip to the end; therefore, despite how obviously unwise, in spite of his established curse of permanently poor luck, he turns shoves Clark against the wall just a few feet from his bedroom, and presses their lips together.

There’s no way it can be that pleasant of a kiss—it was impulsive more than anything—but Clark melts into the touch. He swipes his tongue over Bruce’s bottom lip, then pulls away to laugh, breathy, like the pathological fucking tease he is.

“I can’t tell if I should be impressed or worried that you’re this horny, still,” Clark whispers.

“Flattered,” Bruce hums, against Clark’s pale throat, with Clark’s pulse loud in his ears. He’s waited all day for this. He’s so glad he waited for this. “You should be flattered.”

Any other month, and he could’ve just skipped directly to getting fucked senseless, or at bare minimum the next best thing, falling asleep in his enormous heated bathtub until he’s formally flirting with moderate heat exhaustion. However, Bruce’s luck has not merely run out but has flown backwards; he should’ve recalled, from prior such experiences, that anything can get worse, so long as he is sufficiently and personally involved in the procedure.

“Hey, Jay fell asleep on—” and then, a crash and a shriek at the end of the hall.

Bruce leaps away from Clark even as both of their heads whip in the same direction. Dick stands there, wide-eyed, in rumpled, button-down red pajamas, among a puddle of water and clear, shattered glass. So, to clarify, here’s Bruce’s funeral procession of a month: on Monday, the sun briefly stopped working; thus Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are a frigid blur in which he sat down only to fly from one place to the next; Friday, allegedly, took place; he spent the weekend failing to convince his mammalian hindbrain that the sun is fine; and, in the course of less than twenty four hours, despite having narrowly avoided this once today already, Bruce has still somehow managed to upend a secret kept for almost twenty years.

“You’re fucking my uncle?” Dick shouts, one aghast hand laid over his sternum.

His eldest tentatively crosses the epicenter of glass—visibly unbalanced—but the boy marches down the hall with a remarkably bright fury anyways.

“Is there any chance you’d be willing to kill me now,” Bruce whispers.

Clark snickers. “That’s the only way this could go worse. I tried to tell you, bud. I did try to warn you years ago, I know I did.”

“Shut it, Clark.”

Up close, Dick’s pupils have neatly devoured his iris; Bruce is glad at least the boy didn’t immediately revert back to Tylenol every other day, at least something today was constructive. Bruce peers down and notices Dick’s ankle is encased in a brace, badly hidden underneath his wool sock.

“My eyes are up here! Bruce Thomas Wayne, I expected better of you,” Dick hisses, face flushed, holding one finger up so that Bruce is given the distinct sense he’s being criticized by a character from Mean Girls. 

Beside him, Clark tries and fails to stifle a laugh.

“Now I feel like killing you,” Bruce snaps at him.

“Uh, best out of three?” Clark asks, even as his hand remains firm at Bruce’s back.

Dick squawks with sheer outrage. “What are you two even doing in front of me right now? How old are you two? Is this junior high? Are you supposed to be doing all this flirting? Can I not walk through a hallway of my very own home without—there are children in this house! I was children! I was a children once!”

Bruce rolls his eyes. “You’re just learning this now. Therefore, I think a pretty decent job of protecting the children was done, but what do I know.”

Again, Dick makes the approximate death-throe-honk of a bird caught in a jet engine, flicking his hand between Clark and Bruce, seemingly with no real purpose to the motion. The aggravation of arguments with Dick; the boy is always trying to manipulate you into remembering just how funny he is, so you break character first. It’s an elegant racket that’s wildly effective at disarming almost anyone, even Bruce.

“Do you know how many edibles I’ve had today?” Dick growls. “I don’t either, so how dare you do this to me today. Today, on the day of my granddaughter’s wedding, on the day my pony won the big race, on the day Die Hard started filming—”

“It sounds like at least eight,” Bruce interrupts. 

“—so it was eight, so I met God today, so that’s what I did today, while you deflowered my weird uncle!” Dick shrieks.

Clark bravely, bravely tamps down a laugh, through a strangled series of choking gasps. “I really, really am sorry for—”

Dick silences him at once merely by flinging out a hand, which somehow also required him to toss his head so that his curls bounced a little more emphatically than they otherwise would’ve. After years of studied practice Bruce can largely hold onto a placid expression, even when Dick is throwing out show-stoppers, but it’s only just. It’s only just, which is divinely enraging.

“And let’s just be so honest about what transpired here today,” the boy says, taking his voice low only to raise the volume explosively, “neither of you were leaving the appropriate room for Jesus! I don’t know shit, but that certainly didn’t look like the width of at least one Jesus to me! Alf is two things—British, and not interested—you fucking doorknobs! Okay, Alf is a lot of other things, but you can’t tell me this wouldn’t be a viscerally uncomfortable situation for him, and Bruce Thomas Wayne, other people have boundaries.”

Clark turns to Bruce, grinning. “Other people do have boundaries, Bruce Thomas Wayne.”

“Best out of five,” Bruce snarls.

Dick’s mouth falls open in abject horror. “This is flirting, it’s been flirting this whole time. Oh my God, this is flirting, you’ve always been flirting right under everyone’s noses, and you’ve used everyone else’s inner ‘they were just good friends’ bias to get away with it! How long has this been flirting? I guess since we’re all getting to know each other so much better right now, for the record, I might not be entirely straight either. It’s been a weird early twenties, I dunno what to tell you. What’s fucking heretical is that I should’ve known that by now! Because, apparently, I am up to my ears in, surrounded by a moat of, rich out the wazoo with—”

“Would you get to the point?” Bruce asks.

“Apparently I am just up to my neck in gay dads! You guys are just coming out of the walls—or the closet, heh—apparently you understand,” Dick says, throwing his hands in the air. For a moment, he pauses, and then his eyes widen, and he looks directly at Clark. “Oh my God, you’re fucking my dad.”

“Sorry about that,” Clark says, earnestly.

“’Scusey, you’re jumping my dad’s bones?” Dick roars, and surely this is the sole example of anyone being able to sound angry pronouncing ‘scusey.  

“Not without permission. I wouldn’t, uh, necessarily call it that, really,” Clark stammers, flushed a brilliant cherry from the roots of his hair to the collar of his shirt. “I would maybe consider calling it making love? Sometimes it’s pretty romantic, I think, to be honest, if you can believe that—”

Bruce closes his eyes, rocking his head back. “Out of five. Don’t even bother with red solar radiation, that’s no longer necessary to kick your ass.”

While glaring daggers at Clark, Dick mutters, “It better be,” which is not an interaction Bruce had ever predicted possible, and thus finds encountering in the wild dizzying.

Bruce has been developing a theory that Dick has already figured out employing the word dad disables enough of Bruce’s brain that it makes him much, much worse at following threads of conflict, much less responding to those threads in a timely fashion. Quite literally, Bruce honestly can’t think of verbal responses at the rate Dick does; so, if the boy can shut him up long enough, Dick can, essentially, drown him out. It is beyond aggravating how well this tactic works. Even cognizant of the manipulation, he hasn’t really heard a full sentence since the word dads took a melon-baller to his prefrontal cortex. 

“How long have you been keeping this from Jason? My little brother?” Dick demands.

Bruce winces. Clark chooses right then to whistle a jaunty little four-note tune, and Bruce could honestly throttle him, he really could.

“Since... before he was born,” Bruce says, slowly.

Dick’s eyebrows shoot to his hairline. The air between them shifts. Bruce watches the knowledge inscribe itself across Dick’s expression, from surprise, to anger, and then, most painfully, to disappointment. 

“How long have you been understanding?” Dick sneers, words hard and even.

“Since...” Bruce tilts his head back and forth, hating himself even as he says it, “the third time we met.”

“Didn’t even finish the League by-laws first,” Clark adds, mournful.

Dick’s mouth falls open, as this would’ve been just weeks after the Graysons were murdered. “Wait, wait, wait, the—you—when I got my first real Superman autograph?”

Clark nods, with most of his upper still fire engine red. Even his hands are a little blotchy; Clark blushes with all of the force within him.

“My first baseball game?” Dick gasps. When Clark just bobs his head some more, he squeaks, “My middle school graduation? That time we went to Six Flags and I thought it was so boring, so you took me flying afterward, and we promised we’d never tell Bruce about it ever? Every time you ever took me to iHop? Our iHop pilgrimages—they’re—they’re scandalous now!”

Bruce’s eyes flick between them. “Why the clandestine iHop gatherings?”

“Someone has to take some responsibility for the cultural education around here. Have you even seen that library down there? Legend has it, there hasn’t been that many white people in one place since Woodstock, tell you what,” Clark grumbles.

“Woodstock was already forty years after the last time anyone used that library, why are you in that library?”

“You mean this constant commitment to the bit you two do was just flirting the whole fucking time!” Dick yells, flinging his arms around like an orchestra conductor. “Oh, the humanity—and you let me guess Hal fucking Jordan before I guessed my own weird uncle, and I thought weird uncles were the last thing sacred to the United States! Nah, it really always is just oil and death all the way down, huh? Ah, the glory of one nation founded under land speculation. Does anyone have any standards anymore?”

“Please don’t reference that conversation,” Bruce says, pained. “I think you owe Red Tornado an apology, at any rate.”

“You’ll never make me!’ Dick cries.

Clark clucks his tongue. “Ah, I like that guy, always on time, always emails back asking about how your day was. Nice guy.”

For a moment, their voices come to a standstill; having burned through his outrage, Dick starts to wilt.

“But I... we were always together, then, I don’t understand... but I love you guys. I get lying for identities, but... I love you guys,” Dick murmurs, suddenly limp, drained of anger. He again glances between them, and then focuses on Bruce, looking more than a little lost. “Why lie... to me? How long... how long have you really not trusted me?”

Bruce sighs. “Would you give us a second.”

Clark ducks his head. “I’ll handle that glass situation, over there. Jason’s in the den downstairs, right?”

Dick nods, mutely, and Clark strides off, which is phenomenal, because the man has the audacity to be fucking whistling. Wearily, Bruce flicks a hand at his bedroom door and stumbles into it more than he really shoves it open. Dick shuffles inside behind him, worryingly silent. It’s pleasantly dark, the light falling inside around the blackout curtains a gray navy, shreds of the balcony light trickling in.

Bruce gestures in what he mostly prays is the direction of the bed. “Sit.”

“I’m not a kid,” Dick says, voice hard.

Bruce could point out every word that left Dick’s mouth just a few minutes ago, but there wouldn’t be much point—that was the show. This is the truth.

“I’m not asking just for you,” Bruce snarls, more or less collapsing on the edge of the bed when his knees knock into it.

Dick lowers himself down, minding his ankle. “Sorry,” he says.

“Don’t be. For the record,” Bruce pants, “this was not Clark’s choice. You’re not angry with him—you’re angry with me. This was... my decision.”

Dick exhales. “Yeah, I figured you’d be behind ‘let’s make your whole life a lie’ in the end, you didn’t even need to—I can’t believe you. I knew there was something fishy since this morning, but I never thought—I thought we weren’t supposed to lie... about stuff that matters. Newsflash, but this matters to me! A lot!”

Bruce closes his eyes. Admittedly, he’s usually bluffing when he says he’s beyond Dick’s ability to insult; the thin grain of truth behind this bluff, though, is that Dick will always be able to cut him very deeply with the truth. 

He jerks his chin at Dick’s ankle. “So, when were you going to tell me about that?”

“What? Who told you—like that even matters, you figured it out anyway,” Dick mumbles.

“Occasionally my paranoia is reinforced, you mean.”

Dick’s shoulders sag. “Your paranoia that I’m not good enough , you mean.”

“No, my paranoia that I’ll... bury you,” Bruce says, brows furrowed in confusion. “You can’t honestly be worried I think that. You were leading a team at half the age I was when I started out, that would be irrational of me to think.”

“Oh, uh, I—well, now, see... um, there’s maybe a citation or two needed,” Dick stammers.

“You were clearly... not wrong in your judgment that... these matters are not my strong suit.”

Dick makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. “Understatement of the century and also millennia, are you serious? I wanna kick your ass so bad right now. So much for all that trust talk, it’s like every single time you’re human for half an hour, you have to punish me for getting my hopes up. It’s—” 

“If you want an explanation,” Bruce rasps, “you will have to let me speak, eventually.”

The tone he’s attempting to strike is firm; he ends up somewhere east of undone, but, by some miracle, it renders Dick silent just the same.

“I didn’t just decide to... keep it from you, one day. You were very young. You’d just lost your parents, and you liked Clark enormously. When Clark and I... it was never all at once,” Bruce says, stilted. “I never thought it would last. In that respect, I am just as surprised as you are now, believe me. Because you are right. I had wanted what you had with Clark to remain unaffected... when the inevitable came to pass. I never wanted you to think worse of him.”

“So what was your excuse when you figured out that was never going to happen?” Dick huffs.

Bruce looks at him, bemused by the implication that losing Clark someday is merely theoretical. “It’s not?”

Dick gawps at him. “Literally the only reason I didn’t suggest Clark when I was being a shit earlier was because I thought that’d be too good to be true. Are you joking? You nerds are made for each other, if you haven’t gotten sick of each other by now, it’s never happening.”

“You learn something new every day.” Bruce swallows. The bemusement has become quite a different thorny feeling entirely.

“Wait, what, that’s it?” Dick says. “What are you saying? You actually hid all this just to spare me, what, some mild divorce trauma?”

Bruce frowns. “Mild divorce trauma?”

“Oh my God,” Dick laughs, breathlessly, “you—this is nuts, Bee. I’m gonna try and see if I got it. You hid being in love—for the entire time I’ve known you, which is, get this, the entire time I’ve known you—because you might break-up. Which, by the by, happens to everyone doing the romance thing, I don’t know if you noticed. But, in that event, I might have felt even a little bad about my good pal Superman, which is so illegal you hid this stupid huge part of your life for the entire time I’ve known you. Because it could theoretically make me think bad of Clark, which would, theoretically, make me a little sad. I’ve got it?”

“Sounds... about right.”

Not after a thousand lifetimes could he have predicted it, but the next Bruce knew, Dick’s arms were wrapped around him in a crushing grip. He can nearly hear his ribs creak.

“What are you doing?” Bruce barks, with some alarm.

“I’m happy for you,” Dick mumbles into Bruce’s neck. “This is a thing called ‘being happy for you.’ You’re such a doorhinge sometimes, but man, have you got it bad. I’m literally thrilled for you. The emotion equals joy. I’m a little mad still, but I’m a little less mad. You do this thing where you’ll do something so nuts, but then you give this pitiful little explanation and I’m just here, like, look at that guy, he’s as good at peopling as pugs are at breathing. That’s just his best. I feel like my best is a solid French bulldog, by the way.”

“The emotion equals joy,” Bruce repeats, confounded. Gingerly, he squeezes Dick in return.

Dick pulls away, but he knocks his head against Bruce’s shoulder as he does. “You really did get it, though.”

“He broke some of my ribs, once. Unintentionally, of course. I ignored it, and attempted to hide it, because I thought that would be sparing him some guilt. When he figured it out, we... that was our worst fight,” Bruce says. “If Kory loves you, minimizing something like that will make her angry. Unfortunately, I do know that much about how it works. I... apologize. For lying to you.”

Dick shrugs. “I get to torture you for the rest of your life over it, so, honestly, from a certain angle, this is nothing but a win for me. New dad who stepped up rolled out, and he’s literally Superman, I’ve vetted him already, we had two feelings and the house isn’t on fire, and I get to see the look on Jason’s face when I announce this at breakfast tomorrow to embarrass you.”

“I won’t be there, embarrass me all you like. I hope to be unconscious,” Bruce mutters.

Dick side-eyes him. “Is that express permission?”

“Why not. Yes, it is, you’ve broken me over the course of today, is that what it’ll take to skip to the part where I am unconscious?” Bruce says, shortly.

Shooting off the bed with an ally-oop, Dick babbles gratuities—the intensity of the response has Bruce mortally terrified for the rest of the month—and scrambles out of Bruce’s room. A please watch your ankle is barely halfway out of Bruce’s mouth before Dick’s shut the door. The boy must pause to talk with Clark, though, because Bruce is certain he remembers the airy contours of their conversation, tones quiet and heartfelt, teeth-achingly saccharine; next Bruce knows, though, Clark is nudging him awake, where he’d fallen asleep on the edge of the bed.

“I’m guessing... you were listening to all of that,” Bruce rasps.

To his surprise, Clark’s fingers cup his jaw, tilting Bruce’s head forward gently. Clark presses a kiss just below his hairline. “Y’know, I didn’t really need to. I was listening to that family of woodcocks of ours complain about the rain, honest. Go on, take it easy.”