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Even when he’s careless, he’s cognizant. Some part of Bruce is out of control, voice rising, but only because the other part is fully aware. The roof is high, the other kids home for the night or sent elsewhere. He can afford to be loud.
“It was a bad plan!” he says, nearly a shout. “Reckless.”
“It was calculated,” Dick snaps back, blue lines of his suit slashing through the darkness in sharp gestures.
Bruce looms over. “You could have endangered everyone there!”
“I know what I’m doing!”
It shouldn’t be such a fight, but Bruce has felt the tension simmering between them for weeks. He can’t even put a name to why, ever refusing to confront any emotional issue until and unless it hits a nadir.
Dick’s growing independence in New York, maybe. The stress of Jason’s increasing presence, negotiating a messy place in a messy family. Disagreements over whether Cass should be encouraged to return home or left uninfluenced. Tim’s subtle but noticeable distance. Damian’s silent preference between caretakers, which none of them dare speak aloud lest someone shout he’s my son and be unable to take it back.
Whatever it is, it’s been simmering.
There was a mission tonight that wasn’t even a loss, just a near one. The week is too warm for winter suits, but too cold to be comfortable without. Bruce hasn’t slept in a day. One edge of the cowl has been digging into his face ever since a no-name with a bat got a lucky hit on him hours earlier. It all builds up. And it boils over.
Dick takes deep breaths, pulling himself down, but Bruce is only ramping up.
“If you knew what you were doing, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“There’s no situation!” Dick’s voice is forced to its normal volume, but barely. “It turned out well. Everyone is safe.”
“They nearly weren’t!” That stupid edge presses into his nose, one more irritation he can’t take. “You endangered—”
“Like you’ve never endangered anyone,” Dick fumes.
Bruce sucks in a breath, hand raising to fix the cowl.
Dick flinches back.
The motion of his chest is just visible in the dim light, too fast. He stands three feet away. Out of arm’s reach.
For five seconds, no sound hits the rooftop but wind and honking cars below. Bruce focuses on his own breathing, carefully even. The cowl’s irritation turns into an afterthought. Neither of them look away.
Slowly, he lowers his hand.
“I wasn’t going to…”
“Yeah,” says Dick. His voice says unbothered, but his body language reads wary tension. Even as he visibly lowers his shoulders, makes a show of being relaxed, the undercurrent remains.
“If I don’t know the plan,” Bruce says, forcing his voice to stay low and level, “I can’t integrate to it. Maybe if you’d discussed it with me instead of improvising on the spot…”
“It’s fine,” says Dick, backing up to the parapet. He keeps his face to Bruce. “It was reckless anyway.”
He’s agreeing just to agree though. Bruce can tell. Five minutes ago, Dick was insisting that there was no time to discuss and improvisation was unavoidable.
Bruce has never been good at speaking to his children. He doesn’t start now.
“I gotta…” Dick jerks his thumb off the roof.
When Bruce says nothing in response, he artfully slips off the side, grapple in hand. A moment later, Bruce can see Nightwing’s form swinging away.
He drives to the safehouse.
Dick only keeps the one in Gotham. There are so many other places for him to stay here. He knows a dozen of Bruce’s hideouts, not to mention the Manor. Somehow, Bruce doubts he’ll be staying there tonight, though.
The apartment is a run-down thing, chipped façade on the building and broken blinds. He’s never understood why Dick bothers having a safehouse in Gotham at all. Perhaps for the privacy.
Bruce can admit it’s an ironic thought to have while climbing in the window.
Dick needs a better security system. Bruce makes a mental note to tell him so, and then unmakes it. Dick is sensitive to criticisms of his capability or breaches of his independence when he’s upset. When they come from Bruce, at least.
That’s more self-awareness of the effect he has on his eldest than Bruce cumulatively has most months. It’s necessary. If Dick immediately kicks him out for some perceived slight, then he can’t…
Can’t get what he came for, whatever that is. Undeserved absolution, perhaps. His own comfort.
Bruce is well aware he’s a selfish man at heart, when it concerns those close to him and not the nameless throngs of the city. Cities are easy. He says Gotham asks everything of him, but she doesn’t ask for emotional awareness and understanding. Just blood and sweat.
Dick doesn’t return in the hour. Bruce combs through the apartment, knowing he would disapprove. He catalogues every weakness and hole in security, wondering how long he’s supposed to wait before bringing them up, or if he ever can without damaging his relationship instead.
The bathroom is an anomaly for being fully livable and well-stocked. The living space has two chairs that don’t match, pointed at nothing. The dining table is unbalanced and cheap, and the light fixture above it hardly deserves the name, just a dangling bulb with a plastic shade.
The kitchen is filled with nonperishables, fridge largely empty, cupboards stacked. In the slim cabinet beside the oven, instead of baking pans, sits a single bottle of scotch.
Bruce doesn’t drink, as a rule. Bruce also breaks all of his rules sans one. Dick doesn’t drink, as far as he knows.
He has no idea how often Dick breaks his own rules.
Bruce strips from the batsuit to his soft, under-layered long sleeves, sits at the rickety dining table under the single-bulb light, and sets the bottle in front of him. It feels like a night to break his rules. He thinks that’s another selfish impulse. If he drinks before Dick shows up, he can only make things worse.
Assuming Dick shows up. If Dick returns to the Manor, Bruce will hear of it and follow suit. However, if Dick eschews Gotham entirely to return home…
Bruce turns the bottle between his hands, and waits.
Dick shows up.
He either knows Bruce is there before he opens the door or is far too practiced at hiding his emotions. When he locks the door and turns to face Bruce, his face is resignation without surprise.
Dick pulls off his mask. Bruce doesn’t ask how he got up the stairs in uniform without being noticed. Too many potential missteps that might start a fight.
He’s never been good at speaking to his children.
“Hey,” says Dick, leaning against the wall.
Bruce nods in response.
Dick watches him, mask rolling between his fingers. The predawn brightness still hasn’t broken, full night hanging like it might never leave. Bruce doesn’t know what to say. He might be under interrogation, for all the warm tones of Dick’s lamp hardly resemble precinct fluorescence. He’s aware of why he’s here, cringingly suspects Dick is too, but actually putting it to words is its own burden.
Bruce takes a breath. Concise, efficient, and then it will be out of the way. “The nose of the cowl was digging into my face. I needed to adjust it for comfort.”
“I know,” says Dick. There’s no way he could, not so specifically, but they both know that’s not what he’s responding to.
The fridge buzzes loudly. Quiet neighbors. Quiet at four in the morning at least.
“Do you?” asks Bruce.
He saw the flinch. He knows the answer. The no isn’t an indictment of Dick, unfortunately—Unfortunately for the both of them, Bruce’s pride and Dick’s…
The mask skitters on the table, bumping against the bottle where Bruce has placed it, a macabre centerpiece. Dick picks it up as he sits across from Bruce, wrapping both hands around the glass. Surely notes the unbroken seal. Surely knows it came from a cabinet Bruce had no reason to look in.
“Do you remember the first time?” Dick asks, not looking up from the bottle. His voice is low. “I locked myself in my room for hours, while you were trying to apologize in the hallway. I missed dinner. Alfred didn’t know why I was so upset. You told him you’d yelled at me.”
Dick exhales something too breathy and twisted to be a chuckle.
“You did yell at me.” His fingers rub over the label, eyes bitter. “But I guess you didn’t want to mention the rest.”
Bruce petrifies to his chair. He would like to be anywhere else, and simultaneously couldn’t move for any armageddon the world can conjure.
After a long moment, Dick sets the bottle on the table, elbow placing beside it and chin finding the backs of his fingers.
“I don’t remember why I finally came out.” He looks at Bruce, worn in every inch, too exhausted to be unkind when he adds, “But I guess you don’t remember what I’m talking about at all.”
Bruce remembers.
He remembers the beginning Dick skipped over. That flash of all-consuming anger getting the better of him for the first time since Dick had entered and brightened his life. He remembers Dick’s eyes welling up with tears right after, scared and betrayed in a way harder hits in the field had never evoked. How small he was, darting up the stairs before Bruce could get a word out.
I hate you! Go away! through a locked door. Alfred had taken him to task in harsh whispers for upsetting the boy, not even knowing what he really should have taken Bruce to task for.
He remembers what Dick has forgotten too:
There wasn’t any mark on his cheek when he’d finally emerged, some small relief, but his eyes were still puffy and red from crying.
His frozen lungs crackle into motion to speak.
“You were hungry,” he says, hoarseness putting gravel in his voice. “We…It had…occurred right before dinner. I finally convinced you to come out to eat.”
He doesn’t remember most of what he said. The babbled apologies had fallen out of him faster than he could think, horrified and more out of control of himself than he’d been in—in a decade. Since he was a child. The visual is locked in his mind, though: Dick’s red face and miserable expression. Hint of hope. Angled dead on, because Bruce knelt down to ensure they were on the same level, direct eye contact.
He can’t get himself to offer the same courtesy to the adult Dick sitting across from him, gaze hanging just below eyeline.
“I promised you it would never happen again,” he says. Dick had hugged him then, and Bruce had squeezed back and tried to put his apologies into that too.
He hadn’t known what the hell he was doing with a kid, had said that too, I don’t know what I’m doing; I’m sorry, wanting Dick to understand. He wants to say it now too: I didn’t know what I was doing. He hadn’t ever meant to become a parent, only realized too late that was what he’d done by taking in an orphaned child.
But it’s an excuse, a justification that Dick doesn’t deserve to be subjected to now—didn’t deserve to be subjected to then—so Bruce holds it back. He leaves it at the recollection, I promised you it would never happen again.
Dick twists his lips up, though not in a smile, eyes seeing something far past the table. “You were almost right.”
Bruce’s hand flexes under the table before he can stop it. He desperately wishes that he didn’t know what Dick’s cheekbone feels like under a gauntleted fist.
Dick exhales, heavy and shaky. Bruce carefully encloses one hand in the other, and tucks them in his lap. When he looks up, Dick has planted both elbows on the table, framing the bottle, and is watching him intently.
Bruce holds as still in his gaze as he would in a freeze ray. The air is as tense, too, pulled taut like a rubber band, certain to either snap back or just snap. He doesn’t dare speak. Not before whatever Dick is about to ask or demand or plead—and Bruce already knows he will have no excuse for not answering to it.
Dick’s voice is much more hesitant than anticipated when he finally breaks the silence. Bruce shouldn’t be surprised, but is, when he asks, “And then…Jason?”
For a moment, Bruce wants to play dumb. But Dick knows he’s not.
“You’re aware,” he begins slowly, “that we’ve fought, as the Red Hood and—”
“You know what I mean,” Dick snaps. He’s wrong, for the first time. Bruce thought he was being thorough. “I mean when—Not in costume. I mean before.”
“No,” Bruce says. “Never.”
“Never like never, or never like me, never?”
Dick clearly doesn’t say it to hurt him, but it still stings.
Bruce has to work his jaw to release. “Never like never. Not once. I…I knew what a mistake I’d made, with you, and I…”
Changed and grew and never did it again, he’d like to say, but that timeline doesn’t line up. The first time Dick was a child and Bruce had only just realized he was something like a parent, but that, “You were almost right,” lingers, Dick’s cheekbone under his gauntlet, and that was after Jason.
“Never,” he repeats instead.
Dick nods slowly, expression pinched. Bruce can’t tell if he’s relieved or hurt by the answer. Likely Dick doesn’t entirely know himself.
“Tim?” he asks.
Bruce shakes his head. And then, because if he has ever owed Dick anything, it is full honesty in this moment, adds, “I threw a mug at him. Early on—very early on—when I still didn’t want him as Robin. He didn’t leave.” He realizes how that sounds, and shakes his head again, more forcefully. “Not that that…It’s not okay. But it was only once, and I never…”
He rubs the loose fist of his right hand, which has crept up to chest level, unable to speak the words.
“No,” he finishes, answers, hopes it’s true enough.
For all his determination to be honest, Bruce doesn’t think he can bear the slow rundown of each of his children, so speaks up again before Dick can continue. “That—that time with you is the only time I’ve ever struck a child.”
“Not all of them are kids anymore,” Dick says. He doesn’t flinch at the word, struck, the most blatant they’ve gotten. If it bothers him as much as it does Bruce, he’s good at hiding it.
“I know,” Bruce hastens to agree. “I know. Still, none of them. Ever. Not outside of costume.”
Dick nods slowly. “And a mug.”
“And a mug,” Bruce hoarsely admits.
“And me.”
Bruce sucks in a breath. He lowers his head, but can’t repeat it.
“And when they were in costume?”
“Fighting Jason,” Bruce lists off, “before I knew who he was, and then when—whenever I thought it was the only way to stop him from killing. Once when Cass and I were both drugged. But never just to hurt them. Not even when one of them had tried to kill another.”
Dick curls his lip. “Is that supposed to impress me?”
“No. Of course not.” There is little about Bruce to be impressed by. Far littler than most outside this room believe. “I just mean…There’s nothing else. You know all of it.”
“Now,” Dick tacks on.
“Now.”
Dick watches him carefully for a long moment. “If you’re lying…” he starts softly.
“I’m not.”
No telepath in the world has made him feel so exposed as Dick’s cold blue gaze in this moment.
The slightest incline of a head, the hint of belief, is more benediction than Bruce deserves.
“If you ever do lay a hand on them,” Dick amends, not needing to finish the sentence.
Bruce nods, lips pressed tight. “I understand.”
It hangs in the air for a second, and then Dick exhales and stands.
The drag of his chair against the hardwood is like the breaking of a seal. Whatever invisible shackles held Bruce to his seat release, but exhaustion drops on him just as heavily. He doesn’t stand. He can’t imagine standing right now, unless Dick tells him to leave.
It would be logical, this being Dick’s apartment, but he gives no sign he will. Maybe the sanctity has already been ruined by Bruce’s presence, or the history he dragged with him.
Dick retreats from the little pool of lamplight over the table. The ambient city lights outside distinguish the movement of his shadow, but they’re faint enough that Bruce feels like the only island in a pressing darkness.
Dick left the bottle. Bruce tries not to think about what exactly that means.
“Dick,” he says, when the shadow is at the door. Dick turns his head, a sliver of street lamp through the broken blinds illuminating a strip of his face. “I’m sorry. I am sorry, for what I did to you.”
He wishes he could make out Dick’s full face, not just the gleam of one blue eye, tensing of a cheekbone that he’s felt under his fist, tiniest blip of a pursed lip.
“Your guilt never did me any good, Bruce,” Dick says.
He slips out the door. In the silence, it’s like he was never there.