Chapter Text
II.
Although Dick usually bore galas with a modicum of grace, he couldn’t think of a place he wanted to be less than at Brucie Wayne’s thirtieth birthday party.
Not party– soirée . An extravaganza. So said the planning committee, an egalitarian group of alphas, omegas, and betas determined to sleep with the billionaire birthday alpha on his once-in-a-lifetime night, going from debauched twenty-something to seasoned bachelor.
Dick was running so single-mindedly from a member of the committee who had decided to get his opinion on what Bruce was looking for in a fling that he rammed into Jim Gordon.
They crashed onto the polished redwood floor, Jim’s barely-touched glass of champagne drenching the both of them. At least that persuaded Dick’s pursuer to change tracks, following other leads into Bruce’s trousers. Dick had never been more relieved or mortified to run into Commissioner Gordon.
“f*ck, I’m so sorry, Jim!” he said, scrambling to help the man to his stained loafers.
Ignoring his ruined suit to raise an eyebrow at Dick, Jim replied, “Unusually colorful language from you, Mr. Grayson. I was expecting gee whiz, I didn’t mean to muck up your snazzy threads, Mr. G.”
Dick lightly elbowed Jim, who chortled. “You thought I’d call your second-hand monkey suit snazzy? It’s like you don’t know me at all.”
Rolling his wet sleeves, Jim asked, “Why were you taking down innocent bystanders in such a hurry?” His gaze sharpened behind his champagne-flecked lenses. “Alphas bothering you again, my boy?”
Dick snorted, sponging the dampness from his dress whites with a monikered, silk napkin. “Today’s been all about Bruce. Admirers of every gender, race, creed, and age are hurling themselves at him and those unfortunate enough to be connected to him.”
“Ah, that explains the willingness of civilians to come up to me and make smalltalk,” Jim said sagely. “Where’ve they holed up Wayne? I should give him my gift before I get into another accident.”
“Who knows?” Dick asked, too acidly, causing Jim to express his bemusem*nt and paternalistic concern.
“Either I’ve got to remind partygoers about the laws against harassment or you about the ones against underage drinking. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so riled up.”
“I’m parched as Roland Daggett’s beachfront resorts. It’s just been a long night.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Barbara intervened, linking her arm with Jim’s and looking at Dick. “Maybe it’s time to call it quits, Dickie.”
Never had Barbara seemed so prescient. “On it, Babs,” Dick assured her.
“You responsible young people,” Jim tutted, patting Barbara’s hand. “Dissertations on one side, and extra classes at Hudson U on the other. Though I don’t suspect you’ll get any studying done tonight, Mr. Grayson.”
Because Jim’s intuition could be as unerring and uncanny as his daughter’s, a moment later, raucous laughter crested over them, alongside blaring music from the live orchestra and the popping of champagne bottles. Never had Dick seen Wayne Manor in such a state of disarray, because that’s where Bruce had agreed to let the soirée-extravaganza committee host this mad event– in his precious family home.
Dick couldn’t even complain about it with Alfred, who was holding the whole thing together by directing caterers and waitstaff to administer canapés and Dom Pérignon to guests as if it would prevent them from damaging priceless antiques.
“You’ve got good heads on your shoulders, Gordons,” Dick said. “Jim must get it from you, Babs.”
Barbara laughed, and Jim playfully cuffed her shoulder.
“Wayne must get his good qualities from you, too,” said Jim. “Even though this shindig doesn’t put them on display. It’s almost like going back in time and seeing the persona instead of the man I’ve gotten to know and respect behind it.”
“It’s unusual for Bruce,” Barbara noted, whose vision exceeded that of even the scarily impressive Jim Gordon.
“He’s been stressed lately,” was all Dick allowed himself to say. Even that felt like too much.
Barbara gazed at him, the crystals of the chandeliers reflected in her lenses. Then, she softly shook her head and drew her father aside.
“We’ll let him deal with what he needs to, then,” she said.
“Oh, hold up!” said Jim, pressing a thin, narrow box wrapped in unassuming brown paper into Dick’s hand. “Pass this on to Wayne, will you, son?”
“Roger, Commish,” Dick said, tucking the package into his pocket.
“You do him credit,” Jim said. “Even if the world might not see him for who he really is.”
While Jim bowed out in contentment, Barbara took one last look at Dick before they exited out the Manor’s immense doors, leaving the pandemonium behind them.
Dick meant what he said: he really was trying to call it quits. To forget about what happened between him and Bruce in the Cave.
He just wished it wasn’t his hardest and longest running mission to date, starting when he was sixteen with no clear end in sight at seventeen and counting.
At least Bruce seemed equally if not more determined to put things behind them. Although Dick suspected that he’d use any opportunity, including the big three-o, to further deepen the divide between Brucie and Batman, he hadn’t expected the degree to which Bruce would lean into the play-alpha aspect of his act as well.
Dick almost gave into the impulse to flee every time an alpha looped too intimate an arm around Bruce’s shoulders, a beta laughed too flirtatiously at his rehearsed inanity, an omega leaned in too close to sniff his aftershave, only Dick didn’t have anywhere to run.
He had half a mind to call Wally to zip him over to New York.
Instead, he waltzed into the heart of the chaos: the throng of guests surrounding Bruce Wayne like the rings of Saturn. Dick had seen them in person and could attest to the likeness.
“There you are, chum!” Bruce said with a broad, tipsy smile; Dick suspected he’d been nursing flutes of sparkling water all night. “I didn’t mean to get caught up with our many guests.”
“Me neither,” Dick lied in turn, struggling to resist the wave of party-goers jostling him closer to Bruce. “Happy birthday, Bruce.”
“Thank you, Dick,” said Bruce. He was so close that Dick could smell the familiar notes of his cologne. Rich cedar and bergamot.
“How sweet,” Vicki Vale said, uninterested.
“Thirty-years-old,” drawled some CEO Dick vaguely recognized– GothCorp’s Ferris Boyle. “Now you really are a dirty old man, Wayne. Be especially careful what pots you dip your fingers into, hmm?”
Bruce laughed, his eyes flinty.
When Ferris mysteriously tripped, it set off a domino effect: he grabbed one guest, who toppled into another, and another, and another, who eventually fell onto Dick.
Dick set right the chain of clumsy, drunken guests by stumbling backward into Bruce’s chest. As the guests fought with each other and fussed over their rumpled clothes, Bruce gripped Dick’s upper arms, his strong chest expanding against the curve of Dick’s spine.
“My dry cleaning is coming out of your embezzling paycheck, Boyle!” Veronica Vreeland declared viciously.
Summer Gleeson was close behind, plucking her recorder from her purse.
“You’ve got something on your clothes, too,” Bruce said amidst the clamor, speaking into Dick’s ear.
A frisson of awful, undesired excitement coursed through Dick’s vertebrae, from his hairline to his tailbone. “I forgot.” He felt Bruce shift by degrees behind him. “I ran into Jim Gordon earlier. Literally. He had to go, but he wanted to congratulate you.”
Something akin to regret disturbed the illusion of Brucie, depthless and derelict reveler. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to see him before he left.” With an unusually Batman-like grunt, Bruce drew himself and Dick away from the crowd. “I’ll help Mr. Boyle cover any dry cleaning and outfit replacement costs his generous funds don’t cover,” he told his guests before he departed.
Furor overflowed from the displaced heart of the party, which grew quieter and more indistinct as Dick surmounted the old steps of the Manor alongside Bruce.
Once they reached the second floor, dark and silent unlike the incandescent liveliness below, Bruce stood at a distance.
He dropped the facade. Although he was still clad in Brucie’s party get-up, confetti sprinkled on his vest and a smear of lipstick on the handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket, his shoulders were squared, his hands tensed at his sides.
In the dim light, he looked like a man in the company of specters, not carousers.
“I’ll go get changed,” said Dick, grateful for the excuse to disappear and painfully aware that it was only a temporary solution. The way every carefully planned avoidance and scheduling conflict had been between them for months. “You get back to the party, Bruce.”
Bruce looked extremely pained by that proposal.
Because it was both his screw-up and his birthday– because Dick’s feelings weren’t something he could lock down under kilos of bulletproof armor, whether he desired to or not– Dick told Bruce, “But let me give you my gift first.”
He could barely read Bruce’s cynicism in the darkness.
“I didn’t get a chance to wrap it and tie it up with a bow, but I think you’ll appreciate it all the same,” Dick elaborated.
He walked ten feet down the hall before he realized Bruce wasn’t following him. Bruce was stationed motionlessly at the head of the stairs, the luminance from the party below reflecting on him in twinkling, there-then-gone fractals.
“Or I could give it to you tomorrow,” said Dick, blasé and scrupulous. “In which case, I think I’ll wash up before the champagne glues my dress shirt to my skin.”
Dick had gone down the corridor and wrapped his hand around the brass doorknob to his bedroom when he felt Bruce’s presence directly behind him.
With the cool determination of someone who had opened far worse doors– to labs with genetic engineering, to assassins lying in wait on the other side– Dick entered his room.
It had been a while since Bruce stepped foot in here. He hadn’t had to after the nightmares of Dick’s prepubescence lessened and he resolved to deal with the subsequent ones on his own. Dick couldn’t remember the last time Bruce sat on his bed and pressed a worried hand to his brow when he was recovering from an illness he couldn’t power through or drug away.
Bruce’s expression was neutral, his body language unchanged, but his visual inspection of the room was slow and meticulous. He observed the familiar posters, possessions, and superhero paraphrenia. He looked vaguely amused by Dick’s old Wonder Woman merchandise and critical of his Superman products, ironically manufactured by a subset of LexCorp. His eyes lingered on the new materials– gag gifts from Roy, Donna, and Garth; real mementos from Kory, Raven, and Vic; books and sets and devices Bruce didn’t recognize.
He appeared to put it all together in a revised mental picture. Dick wondered what that image was, the new and old one Bruce held of him in his mind.
“Where’s your gift?” Bruce asked.
Dick had made no move, offered no explanation, merely leading Bruce inside.
“Here. It’s the gift of solitude.” Dick turned the doorknob again and let in a sliver of sound. “I’ll even suffer through my Pérignon-stained tux and GothCorp’s alpha ambassador so you can enjoy it. Just know this gift expires at sunrise. No extensions or transfers. You’re welcome.”
Emotion flickered over Bruce’s face– surprise, appreciation– something too complex and ambivalent to quickly dissect.
Before Dick could exit, Bruce was behind him again, his hand pressing the edge of the door and sealing it shut.
“Thank you, Dick,” he said, not like how he spoke downstairs; his smooth pretension gave way to a rasp of a voice, Bruce’s throbbing, palpable silence.
“What are partners for?” Dick asked quietly, ignoring how that query made his chest sting. The alcohol hadn’t even dried to his dermis and hair follicles yet.
Bruce didn’t respond. His fingers also didn’t lift from the doorframe.
“You should get changed first,” he advised.
Dick mentally inventoried a staggering list of reasons for why that wasn’t wise, but Bruce had likely created the same if not lengthier compendium.
“The five minutes are coming out of your gift,” he warned. Bruce wasn’t swayed. “Fine. Have it your way, B. I guess we wouldn’t want your esteemed guests to think Richard is a lush, no matter how sloshed they already are.”
Bruce watched him cross the room, rifle through his closet, and pull a faded, powder-blue Henley off a hanger. It wasn’t the kind of top one wore to Brucie Wayne’s birthday spectacular. Dick wore this shirt when he lounged at Titans Tower post-mission, the smell of popcorn and antiseptic wafting through the common space.
He didn’t know what he expected when he exited the ensuite: shockingly enough, it wasn’t Bruce’s continued presence. He was discombobulated enough to mention, “You’re still here.”
“Doesn’t it defeat the purpose of the gift if I go back out there?” Bruce asked, almost sort of smiling. Part of his diversion might have stemmed from the bat-adorned coasters on Dick’s desk he was refamiliarizing himself with. “Barbara’s gift-giving habits haven’t changed.”
“Did she crochet you another Batproduct?”
“Batsocks,” Bruce said dryly.
Dick couldn’t help but laugh. It was strange– he hadn’t laughed in front of Bruce in some time.
Bruce’s guarded enjoyment acknowledged that as well.
“I won’t tell Babs you liked my present better,” Dick vowed, grinning as he passed by Bruce. “I’ll leave so you can enjoy it.”
“You don’t have to,” Bruce claimed.
The smile slid off of Dick’s face, but Bruce couldn’t see it. “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the gift if I stay?”
“No.”
“You know why I can’t, B,” Dick said, for the first time, since neither of them had spoken about it.
Bruce very clearly did know, given his foreboding expression, intensified by the light filtering through the curtains and defining the adamantine planes of his face.
“It was a transference of intense emotion from narrowly surviving our deaths and fearing that the other had perished,” he said sternly. “That was all.”
“Then why are you still giving me the run-around and cold shoulder?” Dick argued.
“It’s not that simple,” Bruce replied.
“I could say the same about your misattribution of arousal theory,” said Dick. “If you mean it wasn’t as simple as us almost dying and losing each other the way we’ve done countless times before, then yeah, I know. Because I tried to tell myself it was anything other than the truth, but I can’t do that anymore–”
“That’s enough.”
“Why did you do it, Bruce? I know why I kissed you, because I’ve been left with only one possible explanation. You can figure it out– you’re the World’s Greatest Detective.”
“You don’t know what you want, Dick,” Bruce insisted.
“Is that your masterful deduction?” Dick pressed. “Then you’re really off your game tonight, despite reaching the big three-oh milestone.”
He didn’t know which one of them moved first:
Only, Dick was glowering inches from Bruce, Bruce’s hand was flattened rigidly against the bat decoration, then suddenly they were fastened together, Dick pressed against the bespoke lines of Bruce’s suit and Bruce’s fingers digging into Dick’s cotton-soft, blue shirt.
Dick ran his hands along the sides of Bruce’s face, lowering Bruce into his mouth.
Bruce propped him against the door, locking it and biting Dick’s lower lip to gain access– startled, overwhelmed, delighted– to the back of his tongue, the entrance of his throat.
The upper floors of Wayne Manor were no longer silent as the crypt: the discord of the party below became murmurs, dampened by the redwood and carpets. In contrast, every sound in the bedroom was sharp, crisp, clear: Dick’s low moaning, the rustle of clothes, the wet glide of joint lipsteethtongue, Bruce panting into Dick’s ear.
“B,” Dick gasped, fingers knotting into Bruce’s hair, arching into Bruce’s body– they shouldn’t have been doing this, they weren’t supposed to be doing this– slotting Bruce’s thigh against his pelvis, inciting a jolt of pleasure. “Oh, Bruce…”
With an answering growl, Bruce manhandled Dick up his immense form, and Dick responded how he did to Batman’s maneuvers in the field: with perfect understanding.
He jumped the remaining distance between them and wrapped his legs around Bruce’s waist. He could barely lock his ankles around him. Despite his alias, Dick knew he wasn’t as light as a bird, especially not at seventeen, with additional pounds of muscle on his longer, broader frame. Still, Bruce lifted him as if he weighed as little as his namesake and then tried to draw the same birdsong from his throat.
“Don’t stop,” Dick chanted for him. “More.” He refined his fidgeting into vigorous rocking, sinuous rolls. “Keep going.” His fingers hovered above Bruce’s belt, hooked onto the solid ridges of oblique muscles framing Bruce’s narrow hips. “That’s it, B,” he sighed, unable to do more than tug Bruce’s shirttail from his trousers and cling to his warm, shifting skin.
Bruce had no intention to stop.
The kissing had long devolved into uncoordination.
When Dick’s org*sm seized him, it seemed to take hold without warning. The mortifying realization that he was going to ejacul*te in his briefs, the way he feared doing at fourteen, drifted further from his consciousness as the presentness of toe-curling, nail-dragging pleasure ratcheted up his spine.
Then, it reached the tipping point, and he found himself thrashing against Bruce and the door, ruining his new articles of clothing. Bruce, having read the tells of Dick’s body better than he did, slipped his fingers into Dick’s mouth to muffle his cries.
The calloused fingertips, the bones of Bruce’s knuckles, the width and length of his forefinger and middle finger were utterly foreign sensations. Dick had experienced duct tape strapped across his mouth but never bare skin, Bruce’s bare skin, slipped between his teeth.
Bruce tasted how he smelled: faintly spicey. Like the fragrance of worn leather. The tang of titanium. With the oral finesse Dick used to pick locks when his hands were occupied or needed freeing from cuffs, he sucked Bruce deeper inside, swirling his tongue around his digits, gently gnawing on his joints, and then pressing down to swallow.
Bruce’s answering noise was rough and inhumane. Although Dick always carefully watched Bruce– although Robin always meticulously observed Batman– it wasn’t like witnessing Bruce come apart.
He could barely focus on Bruce’s release because his own aftershocks had transformed into a second surge, a shockingly potent echo of his first undoing. Bruce’s climax was a punishing climb, reached only after aiming impossibly high, the way he did with all pursuits. He had more stamina in this one activity, Dick assumed, because he had more practice, more partners.
Dick’s brief, caustic reaction to that knowledge was almost immediately swept away.
Bruce bit back a sound, low and reverberating, pumping erratically and then stilling.
Dick followed with a whine, overwrought as he sagged in Bruce’s arms.
Bruce lowered them both to the ground on his knees.
High on endorphins and fear, Dick almost made some quip about a birthday gift.
As if cosmically ordained, Jim’s gift tumbled out of Dick’s pocket and onto the floor. Moving fluidly despite his exertion, Bruce retrieved the wrapping paper and twine.
Even though Dick didn’t want to– he suspected what would happen next– his legs were tangled around Bruce– Bruce’s forehead was pressed to his shoulder– Dick summarized, “Jim.”
Wordlessly, Bruce undid the knot and peeled back the seams of the construction paper. A pouch lay inside. A pen case, Dick realized, when he spotted the practical but handsome fountain pen.
The embossing along the clip turned Bruce to stone.
Dick had to contort to read the custom inscription: To one of the best men I know.
Recovering his voice more urgently than the last time, he said, “that hasn’t changed, Bruce.”
Bruce clearly wasn’t convinced, picking himself off the floor and binding the pouch.
“It can’t be like this, Dick.” His voice was like sandpaper, coarse and erosive, as if he could wear away the spurs in their relationship.
Logically, Dick knew the same.
But he could get himself to articulate it no more than the partygoers a floor below could fashion their frenzy and fervor into words.
Summer came unseasonably early to Gotham, right at the end of May, muggy and portentous.
Although sweltering climates were stimulants for crime not only all over the world but across the galaxy, heat waves in Gotham were a disaster and a half.
Poison Ivy’s brutal brood would flourish; Harley Quinn would vacation by terrorizing beachgoers, already more prone to heat-induced panic and rage; the Riddler would spend too much time indoors and come up with tick, tick, ticking brain teasers; and Mr. Freeze would have mental meltdowns that led to deluges from frozen pipes in July.
Which meant Batman and Robin would be out reigning in more chaos than usual, saving more vacationing citizens than usual, and running more on willpower than usual as they sweated and toiled.
Dick remembered his initial awe watching Bruce beat down his foes wearing Kevlar and pitch-black armor in ninety degree heat, the residual warmth from the sun still radiating from the concrete. It was difficult enough for Dick to tolerate Gotham’s dank nights in Robin’s uniform. That feeling intensified when he adopted leggings and a leotard reinforced with dense-woven fiber.
It was almost untenable when temperatures hit the triple digits.
That was true outside under the sun’s glare or trapped indoors, especially in the stagnant interior of Wayne Manor.
“You’re going out, sir?” Alfred asked incredulously, listening to the news. It was darker than usual since he’d drawn the curtains to keep the house cool. “I heard other highschool summer programs were canceled today. I know Hudson University has a reputation, but I hope not for heatstroke.”
“H.U. did close,” Dick was forced to admit, “so I thought I’d study in the air-conditioned bliss of the library.”
“Surely our library is adequately stocked and well-ventilated,” Alfred argued, always piqued by the topic of the old mansion’s lack of central cooling.
“What can I say, Al– I’ve been spoiled by blasting my unit at the Tower,” which was where Dick would have been if his constant presence wasn’t beginning to arouse Donna’s concern and Roy’s suspicion.
Alfred shook his head, saying, “I knew you and Master Bruce were dependent on your technology, but I never realized to what extent.”
Dick lingered at this mention instead of running out even faster.
That was partly why he was dead set against getting cooped up in the Manor. Bruce had been exiled from Wayne Enterprises because he couldn’t come up with a good reason for why spoiled slacker Brucie would trudge through one hundred degree temps to be at the office.
Which meant Bruce had locked himself in his study while Dick made plans to ride away from the Manor at the sun’s zenith, likely sweating profusely on his motorcycle in the glass-and-asphalt inferno of downtown Gotham. The way Bruce was no doubt doing in the cloistered darkness of his antique study, listening to cicadas scream through his open window and getting no relief from the heat.
For Bruce, that was smarter, safer than sharing the same room as Dick.
Dick had to agree, loathe as he was to admit it.
“Well, do give my regards to Ms. Gordon,” said Alfred.
The rising temperature must have been affecting Dick more than he thought, because he hadn’t fully considered the ramifications of taking his textbooks and issues to Barbara’s workplace.
Alfred noticed Dick’s absent-mindedness. He appeared surprised.
Lowering the volume on the television, he asked, “is everything alright, Master Dick?”
Dick knew Alfred was asking about more than forgetting Barbara and his reckless enterprise outside the Manor. No one was more present in the Manor or attuned to its occupants than Alfred.
“It will be once I cool my head,” Dick told the both of them. “I’ll see you later.”
Alfred nodded and turned off the tv.
Flouting safety precautions, Dick left his jacket and gloves in his room, mounting his bike in his bare essentials. Even that was sweltering, the alloys blistering under his bare fingers and between his denim-clad thighs.
He couldn’t fathom how Bruce felt this and then fenced himself in bulletproof armor anyway. He was truly a glutton for self-punishment.
Because Dick was something of that, too, he glanced over his shoulder at the window of Bruce’s study. As expected, it was barely cracked open, the minimal breeze making the curtains pulse instead of flutter.
Bruce was standing at the window, relaying information to his earpiece, for Wayne Enterprises or the Watchtower. Two of his buttons on the collar of his polo were undone, revealing the sheen on his sternum and coarseness of his chest hair.
He was looking at Dick.
Lowering his visor, Dick raced away.
“Now it’s really time to put the books down, Dickie,” Barbara said; the PA repeated their announcement that the library would close in five minutes; the lights were shutting off in the stacks. “You can do what you want in the dark of your workplace, not mine.”
“You have a way with words,” Dick said truly.
“Will it finally convince you to pack up?”
The sleeves of Barbara’s cardigan were knotted around her tweed skirt as she prepared to exit the too-cool library for the scorching outdoors. Dick preferred his goosebumps.
“Maybe a cone from Cherry on Top will,” he negotiated, cramming his books into the section of his bag designated for civilian life, not the uniform and gear in the hidden compartments.
Barbara looked far more speculative than the call for fast food warranted. They sometimes did this, grabbing tacos or frozen yogurt together after her shifts. Barbara would get to discuss the cases she was working on independently of Batman and Robin, and Dick would get to indulge in the kinds of food Alfred prohibited in the Manor.
“Fine,” she eventually acquiesced. “But I hope you brought your wallet, because Bruce is treating.”
Her way with words– benign but denotative– never failed: Dick rankled, because that suggestion would always rankle, except now he didn’t know how much to show.
Barbara observed him carefully.
“You’re the one blessed with a paying job, Babs,” Dick said even as he lifted his wallet from his bag. His funds were well-stocked; he wouldn’t touch the Bruce-supplied part of them. Although Richard Grayson wouldn’t deign to work, and Bruce wouldn’t condone another occupation, Dick knew his way around procuring income the way Bruce could manipulate off-shore shell accounts.
“Of the two,” Barbara said primly, waving to her coworkers, stepping past the metal detectors, and locking the doors. “Bruce can consider this part of his annual donation to Gotham’s underappreciated public libraries.”
“How’s the unpaid job?” Dick said, curious and also seizing on the opportunity.
Out in public, Barbara relayed in code her occasional partnerships with Black Canary and Detective Montoya to thwart pervasive cybercrime in Gotham.
“It’s actually made me consider getting a team together,” Barbara said, sounding surprised by herself. “Thank you very much, Gina,” she told the beta serving the bustling ice cream parlor, slipping a generous tip into the jar on the counter.
“You?” Dick asked, also caught off-guard. “Yeah, more cookie bits, Ronnie, with the sour gummies and pop rocks,” he confirmed to the appalled alpha.
“Don’t make me feel guilty about betraying Alfred,” Barbara said dryly, taking a bite of the pistachios and sour cherries on her kaimaki confection.
Because Dick felt guilty enough for the both of them unrelated to his dietary choices, he asked in the vacant oven outside the shop, “The independent and copyrighted Batgirl wants a partner?”
“It’s been nice working with someone who has my back,” Barbara admitted. “And helping undergrads makes me wonder what it would be like to be somebody’s mentor. Like you and Bruce.” Before Dick could react, she asked determinedly, “What’s going on with you and Bruce?”
With anyone else, Dick would have pretended, downplayed, or denied. Because he respected and feared Barbara too much to try, he said, “Growing pains. That’s all.”
Barbara considered that, and Dick didn’t, quickly finishing his ice cream.
“Not what one would expect in a partnership as old as yours,” she said, licking her scoop. “Oh, this is good. Want a taste?”
“Babs,” Dick said, aware that she was both trying to alleviate his stress and get him to accidentally impart more information.
Barbara gave a semi-apologetic shirk of her shoulders and wiped her hands on her paper napkin.
“I just want you to be okay, Boy Wonder,” she told him.
“Bruce and I always get by in the nick of time, by the skin of our teeth,” Dick replied, tossing the point of his waffle cone high into the air and catching it in his mouth. “Why should this be any different?”
“That’s why I worry.” Barbara froze as her earpiece, tuned to the Gotham City Police Department, went off. “The Syndicates are going at it ten kilometers southeast of Amusem*nt Mile.”
That was another thing about the oppressive heat in Gotham– once the sun went down, gangs staged their bloody insurrections.
When Dick swung by on his motorcycle, his cape streaming behind him, Lincolns and Cadillacs were caught in a torrent of gunfire. Fire hydrants burst, the slick roads sending cars careening into storefronts and each other. Balls of flame ignited on the wreckage. The clouds of gunsmoke and choking, manufactured humidity made this one of Gotham’s quintessential summer storms.
Hours later, Barbara helped the GCPD contain the gang violence from spilling onto the expressway; Dick dispersed the mobsters near the carousels, ferris wheels, and other shoreside attractions; and Bruce hemmed in the Syndicates’ fleets from the tank-like walls of the Batmobile.
Dick could tell Batman was affected by the heat when he emerged from his vehicle. Although most of his body was covered with the exception of his lusterless lips, the air around him was too friable, too sharp.
“Jesus Christ, we must’ve hit the boiling point already,” said Jim, wiping his sweat with the end of his tie. “We scared off Tomassos and Calabrese, but Falcone and Maroni–”
“We’ll get them, Commissioner,” Batman growled.
Dick revved the engine of his bike.
High on the cables of the bridge, Batgirl gazed at him and Bruce, and then she swooped down to assist Renee Montoya.
On nights pushing 104 degrees Fahrenheit– whenever both the Falcone and Maroni families and their blood feuds were involved– Batman and Robin’s missions became particularly hazardous, half-formed. Dick’s bike ended up shattered and melted, and Bruce could follow the trail no further through Falcone’s labyrinthine strip club, fight club, book-keeping complex.
His frustration filled the Batmobile like volcanic fumes. Unlike other times when Robin counseled Batman from the passenger’s side, Dick was too fired-up to try.
Robin’s mask ripped off more easily than usual, the adhesive wet with sweat.
“Falcone still has people in the GCPD,” said Batman, pressing the gas pedal to the floor of the car, racing through the humid blackness at a velocity that would cause lesser drivers to crash and burn.
“We should update the files on his and Maroni’s suspected associates,” said Dick, swiping the sweat from his face first with his gloved hands and then with his bare skin when it wouldn’t stop dripping into his eyes.
Parked in the Cave but still seated at the wheel, Bruce finally took off his cowl.
He had pushed himself harder than Dick realized.
Sweat ran in bright rivulets from his dark hairline, beading the cords of muscle in his neck and clinging to his strong, furrowed eyebrows. The usual evenness of his skin tone was mottled with high color in his cheekbones.
Dick probably looked no better.
That would explain why Bruce was staring at him so intently.
Every preceding instance of irrationality paled in comparison to Dick launching himself from the passenger’s side and onto Bruce’s lap.
He knew how to stretch across the console and fit himself in the compartment of the driver’s seat– he had done so in extraordinary circ*mstances, when Batman was slumped against his chair, the car turned on autopilot, Robin balanced on his armored thighs and administering antidotes or tourniquets.
Dick had never joined Bruce in the driver’s seat to lick the sweat outlining the cupid’s bow of his upper lip with glistening silver.
Suddenly no longer capable of bearing the heat but not on his own body, Bruce disarmed the security protocols hardwired into Dick’s belt.
When he freed the metal from Dick’s waist, he discovered the line of Dick’s leggings beneath the hem of his top.
And he pushed his fingers beneath the seam.
Dick gasped at the feel of Bruce’s gauntlet, cool and smooth, on his bare hip. Then, trailing up his inner thigh. Then–
“Relax,” Bruce said, quiet, calm, and resolute. It was the ghost of other instructions Robin received from Batman. Requests Dick heard from Bruce.
Dick tried to relax his inner muscles around the intrusion. He wasn’t entirely unpracticed at it; during his heats, his most frustrated moments, and his most lovesick ones, he would lie back on his bed or step onto the edge of his bathtub and open himself up with his fingers and tools. He knew how to position himself, touch himself, bring himself to release.
But he had no idea what Bruce’s fingers– Batman’s gauntlets– would feel like searching the heat and softness inside him.
When Bruce’s forefinger slipped out, Dick almost reacted with the same defensive protests he formed at any notion that he’d somehow disappointed Bruce or hadn’t risen to the occasion.
Then, Bruce started unclasping his gauntlet.
Dick promptly assisted him.
With one hand, he helped Bruce take the thick fiberglass off. With his other hand, Dick offered another form of assistance, reaching between his own legs and making himself more pliant, slick, accessible.
That hastened Bruce, who undid the last latch at the same time Dick did.
Bruce joined him, sinking in beside Dick, helping stretch him open with his large, bare fingers.
Dick automatically forced down his cry: being Robin meant never revealing when he was overwhelmed; being Bruce’s partner meant proving how he measured up; being who he was meant pushing above and beyond his limits to obtain what he longed for.
To distract himself, to unclench around Bruce, to quell the noises rising within him, Dick reached for the rest of Batman’s armor, deftly defusing the mechanisms and clumsily prying away the plates when Bruce crooked his fingers just so, deep and hard.
He could have sworn he identified smugness on Bruce’s shining, sweat-dampened face, alongside hunger.
That was the deciding factor. Canting his hips, Dick drew Bruce in more sharply, more wholly; ducking his head, he let his tongue melt within the sultry terrain of Bruce’s mouth; exploiting his dexterity, he drew rare shivers and twitches from Bruce’s chest and pelvis.
After Dick circumvented the security features of Batman’s belt, he curled his hand around Bruce’s hardness.
A vein throbbed like a faultline in the cut of Bruce’s jaw, and even though he exercised too much self-control to buck his hips forward, his whole body jolted. Dick lurched in Bruce’s lap and on the point of his fingers and couldn’t repress his whine.
Bruce halted at that. His eyes, screwed shut at the onslaught of sensation, snapped open and stared straight at Dick.
The silent, layered, multi-part communication– that was the Bruce Dick was familiar with. But the nature of what he was conveying drastically departed from the nonverbal cues Bruce had given before.
Dick followed the flex of Bruce’s bare arm to the hidden compartment beneath the steering wheel, where he kept his undercover equipment: lighters and cigarettes and Matches Malone’s other effects. Flasks of whiskey.
Foil packets containing condoms.
Dick couldn’t tear himself away from the lust with which Bruce viewed his fingers disappearing between Dick’s legs, even though it made the inside of the Batmobile feel sweltering, half-divested though they both were of their uniforms.
Dick tracked Bruce’s close examination of his muscled abdomen.
Bruce watched him with infinite care.
“Dr. Thompkins,” Bruce said, rugged and hushed.
“The implant’s from six months ago,” Dick answered, his voice also husky. He had a birth control implant ever since he reached adolescence; Leslie always ensured it was up-to-date. Sexual or not, for omegas in Gotham, including Robin, especially Richard, unofficial hostage extraordinaire, possessing the most reliable, infallible form of contraception was a necessity.
Not that it made Bruce’s ruminations any simpler or less grave.
Dick endured the way he endured Batman’s pronounced and haunting silences on the other end of a distant comm-link, hoping, willing for Bruce to not disappear, wrenched away from him.
Even though the part of Dick that was shed and pooling on the floor of the Batmobile demanded that they both clamber out and return to being the model people they were a year ago.
Dick wanted to say something; he didn’t know what to say; he couldn’t speak.
He inclined his head ever so slightly forward, like a skylark on a branch.
Bruce blinked at him. His eyes were dark, but the overpowering hood of shadow slipped away. What remained was the man beneath, perspiration sprinkled like salt water on his bare skin.
Dick could taste it on his lips when Bruce bent forward and met him in the hot, almost stifling air.
They were still kissing when Bruce opened the compartment and tore the aluminum envelope of the condom. When Dick widened his stance and Bruce gripped his waist.
When they both slowly lowered him down.
Stuttered, sonant gasps interrupted the kiss as Dick struggled to adjust to the pressure and extent of the incursion. He knew Bruce was a large man; he knew he was strong. Dick was strong, too, so he drew upon that to overcome the feeling of being split apart by something hot and endless.
“You’re doing well,” Bruce gasped, the very way and not at all how he sometimes said it, and his praise did something to Dick.
He keened and clenched as he greedily took the remainder of Bruce into his body.
Although the Batmobile was more spacious than ordinary automobiles, the driver’s seat still didn’t provide much leverage for two occupants. That was Dick’s saving grace, because when Bruce finally deemed it appropriate to move, his thrusts were shallow, gradual, hypnotically rhythmic. Despite curling his thumbs into the dimples on the small of Dick’s back, Bruce didn’t force him to move. He kissed Dick just enough to let him catch his breath while Bruce pushed in and out.
It was shocking, not at all surprising how like B it was.
“B, I’m,” was all Dick could choke out, the slow swivel of his hips not enough, just enough to set his innermost muscles squeezing Bruce’s erection like a vise, wringing him for exquisite pleasure-pain in Dick’s core.
Bruce gritted his teeth and plunged further, faster.
Dick moaned, moving– his back arching against the steering wheel, his pelvis pushing forward onto Bruce’s lap– in deference to a lifelong of acrobatics and all the physical arts with which he previously understood his body’s thrills.
Bruce synchronized with his exceptional physical mastery, the exertion of their preceding mission glistening on his shoulders and biceps and pectorals.
Dick couldn’t tell who finished first when it happened. They were moving so coordinately, their skins fused from the heat, it was as if the climax was a bond. An expansive shattering and release shared between two beings, him and Bruce, before Dick’s withdrew inside him, trembling and warm.
Then, he experienced the cool-down, the air-conditioning fanning over his sweaty, aching skin.
Bruce was facing him as directly as if he were still wearing the cowl, even though his demeanor was more openly conflicted.
Dick couldn’t help it: he smoothed out the wet strands fringing Bruce’s temples the same way he tamed his cowl hair.
“...you look like you fell into one of Ivy’s pop-up swamps while Killer Croc was taking a swim.”
Some of Dick’s derisiveness was lost in the extreme raspiness of his voice.
Bruce’s unmasked reaction was half pleasure, half self-reproach.
“Now you look like Two-Face,” Dick complained. “And I really don’t want to be in this situation with Harvey Dent.”
“You won’t,” Bruce promised darkly, before he remembered his restraint and said, “are you hurt?”
“Minimal damage, Batman.” Psychological damage was rarely a part of their mission reports. Noticing the contracting muscles in Bruce’s arms far more clearly without their armor, Dick added, “I’m sore, which is different, so if you pick me up and I reflexively kick you, it’s not due to internal hemorrhaging.”
Either Dick’s assurances or the frayed wispiness with which they were spoken were insufficient for Bruce.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Dick,” he said, frighteningly raw.
“Then, don’t say it like that’s how it’s got to be. You’re Batman. You don’t break so easily.”
“So I told myself,” Bruce said bitterly, glaring at the discarded helmet. “Batman isn’t the one who violated his underage ward.”
“Robin didn’t let himself get violated,” Dick insisted, grabbing his domino in his fist. “I wasn’t an unwilling participant. I wanted this as much as you did.”
It was shocking, flattering, dismaying how much Bruce disagreed with that in terms of body language and micro-expressions alone.
Dick wanted to ask when Bruce realized he wanted this.
But he also couldn’t.
Bruce apparently read that from his silence.
Softly, scathingly, Bruce explained, “when you were sixteen, you hadn’t reached the age of consent. Seventeen isn’t the age of consent either. And even if–” Bruce knotted his jaw, dragging his hand through his hair. “The power of legal consent doesn’t change the fact that I’m the one in control–”
Dick scoffed. “I’m not sure if that’s what you just demonstrated–”
“I have financial control over you, the power to pull you out of school, to disinherit you, Dick,” Bruce said fiercely. “Therefore, I should also have the power to resist my urges. I do, but I made the conscious decision not to exercise it.”
Despite the bone-deep, post-mission, post-coital fatigue, Dick was vibrating with anger.
“So I’m the one without power just because I was unlucky enough to be born thirteen years after you?” he seethed. “Then why didn’t you try harder to stop me from putting on the cape when I was nine? Why sit back and watch me join– no, lead– a group of underage heroes fighting against adult megalomaniacs and intergalactic dictators and ancient demons? I’m not your charge, Bruce. I’m your partner, your peer, your equal. Robin is a hero with or without Batman!”
“I know,” Bruce said. “That’s why you need to fight this battle, too, Dick.”
Dick’s mind and body never reacted so mutinously to a direct command from Bruce. Instead of fighting, he slouched against Bruce’s half-naked body, listening to his heartbeat: athletically efficient, but quicker, more agitated than usual.
“That doesn’t mean I want to be without you, B,” said Dick, lulled by the soft rise and fall of Bruce’s chest. “And if you don’t want to be without me, then…”
Bruce said nothing, letting Dick lie still on top of him.
Changing not only in the confines of the Batmobile but also after patrolling in one hundred degree heat followed by sex was not a tangled, sticky trial Dick previously experienced nor one he cared to repeat. Maybe when he reflected back on struggling into his pants in the passenger’s seat and Bruce grimacing at his unmistakable hiss of pain, he’d laugh– one day.
Right after he stumbled out of the Batmobile, however, he helped Bruce enter the mission info on autopilot; pretended to shower in the locker rooms when he really just let the hot water sluice over his sweaty, achey flesh; and was far too relieved to ascend from the Cave and find Alfred with a pitcher of fresh lemonade on the polished kitchen island.
“You are a lifesaver, Al,” he said, pouring himself a tall glass. “Seriously. This city would burn without you.”
“I’m not entirely unaware,” Alfred answered self-assuredly. He cleaned the condensation dripping from Dick’s glass onto the marble with a tea towel, remarking, “it appears to have been a particularly challenging night. I hear Maroni suffered some losses, but Falcone’s activities remain unencumbered.”
“Yeah,” Dick said irritatedly.
He took a big swig and was startled by the stinging in the back of his throat. He had forgotten about that strain. He also forgot to hide it in his speech.
“Too sour, Master Dick?”
“Babs and I got ice cream beforehand,” Dick replied, deliberately mellow. “It’s probably thrown off my sense of taste.”
“Your just deserts, then,” Alfred said unrepentantly.
Dick spluttered. His throat was on fire. “Was that a pun? The heat’s even getting to you.”
“I have fared well in far more tropical regions. Jungle missions in M16 led me to maintain a cool head and develop a perfectly refreshing lemonade recipe. The tartness is key. That is what quenches the thirst.”
“Sure,” Dick replied, struggling to sustain the usual rapport, the acid biting his tonsils. “But would a little honey really be too sacrilegious?”
Alfred appeared to mentally debate that and decide it wasn’t. He bestowed a honeypot and a teaspoon onto Dick before he resumed cleaning dishes.
“Thank you, Alfred,” Dick said, refraining from being liberal with his spoonful because even when Alfred’s back was turned, he was utterly aware of what was going on around him.
Alfred huffed.
Then: “If anything, the lemonade should be watered down by the ice that melted while you and Master Bruce lingered in the Batmobile.”
The teaspoon rang too sharply against the crystal of Dick’s glass.
Throat searingly tight, he looked up.
Alfred was turned away, cleaning his knife, cutting board, and juicer in the sink, the scent of citrus sharp in the air.
Dick knew how well the Batmobile was barricaded. Black-out windows, an armored hull that barely shook during earthquakes and explosions. He knew that parked earlier as it was on its platform in the Cave, it would have been a dark, motionless, and soundless cage to all onlookers.
But he was also speeding through his recollections to place condensation on the computer’s console, formed as Alfred waited for Dick and Bruce to exit the car, his pitcher sweating in the cool darkness.
In the final week of June, the Titans wrapped up a lengthy and arduous mission. It was the kind that engendered somber reflection on how closely they operated to death and subsequently compelled them to drink and revel to cope. Dick, who had planned exactly when their mission would end and worked fastidiously to make that happen, ignored Wally’s calls to binge on takeout and retreated to his quarters.
There, he stripped out of his Robin uniform. He made up for nine days without showers with a thorough scrub. He combed his hair with gel to diminish the shagginess. He dressed his wounds carefully so no blood would get onto his clothes.
The dark suit he donned was supplied by Alfred. It was a variation on a simple, black ensemble he altered every year Dick lived in the Manor. The design remained consistent; only the mold to Dick’s body changed.
When Dick exited his room, those who lounged in the common space paused to stare at him. Donna whistled, but her heart wasn’t in it. Gar tried to say something, but his words were lost in the gluey mass of pizza between his gorilla jaws. Kory looked sad, but her sympathy was misplaced.
Young adults who weren’t them, or the young adults they were when they forgot to be careful and instead were cruel, might have asked who died?
Dick wouldn’t have answered.
Bruce had shared many things with the Justice League and their associates over the years, but beyond Clark and Diana, the anniversary of his parents’ deaths wasn’t one of them.
Dick was straddling his new motorcycle on the bluffs outside the Tower when Roy, watching the tide and ruminating on something or someone he wouldn’t reveal to Dick, mentioned off-handedly, “So, that’s today, huh.”
“Yeah, it is,” Dick said, because Roy would know because Oliver Queen would know.
Roy assessed the mourning clothes Dick wore as solemnly as Robin’s uniform. “I thought you were coming to hate the old man,” he said, the piercing, defiant way he spoke about Oliver.
“Don’t call him that,” Dick said, because the crash of the bay, the roar of his engine, partly drowned out his words. Because Dick wasn’t Roy, and Bruce wasn’t Oliver. “He’d hate it.”
Roy, having heard enough, turned back toward the oceanic turf, his mind elsewhere. Inside and outside the Tower, the Titans continued to survive tribulations far beyond their years. But then, that was what made them and those in the Justice League heroes: striving to be larger than life and their individual miseries.
Inside the Manor was quieter than Dick expected because Bruce, of all people, wasn’t there.
Dick tried to be understanding, he did. When the day of his own parents’ murders came around each year, he was known to do some truly idiotic and self-effacing things.
But Bruce had castigated him for that then, so Dick felt no remorse complaining to Alfred now: “I didn’t get anything on the comms or in Titans Tower, so where is he? I tried the Watchtower and Gordon– nothing. Is he wrapped up in a secret mission today of all days?”
“I don’t believe he is, though it wouldn’t be the first time,” Alfred said, a little testy but mostly tolerant. “That was how he initially coped. That was why Batman began.”
Dick was unable to stop checking the gilded face of the grandfather clock, which opened the secret entrance to the Cave when the hands aligned at 10 and 48, the moment Martha and Thomas died, but now the hands froze at 2 and 32. He felt extremely uncomfortable merely sitting under the scrutiny of their portraits instead of doing something, and he was in the middle of weighing the merits and drawbacks of marching out to the edge of the grounds on his own to pay his respects when–
“He didn’t leave because of me, did he?” Dick asked.
He didn’t mean for his query to come off as subdued and troubled as it was, but maybe everything was more tenuous on a day like this.
Alfred froze while arranging a huge bouquet of lilies; they were Martha’s favorite flowers. Remembering that this was Dick, not Bruce, more open and supplicating than apt to communicate via withholding, Alfred calmly reassured him, “Of course not, Master Dick. Master Bruce cares too much to do that.”
Cares about you went unsaid but not unconveyed.
Dick sank into his chair, viewing the chandelier shining overhead. “...If you say so.” He wished he could hang from the light fixture like he did in his youth, practically hollow-boned and endlessly forgiven by Bruce, even when he brought the crystal tiers crashing down onto himself.
Alfred opened his mouth to speak when they heard steps– measured, balanced, martial. The secret pathway in the wall slid open even though the clock read 2:50.
Bruce emerged, but not in the condition Dick expected, if he expected to find Bruce miraculously manifesting from Cave at all.
Bruce was a little scrapped up but not obviously harmed, clad in a wool zip-shirt and soft-shell pants, the cable of a grappling hook coiled around his bicep. Dick didn’t think he’d seen Bruce like this except for that one time Dick flew the Batplane to Tajikistan to rescue Bruce from the Pamir Mountains. A month before then, Bruce had flown the same plane to save Dick from Ra’s Al Ghul, whom Dick had been too unprepared and foolish and alone to repel.
That was the first time he’d met Talia. The first time she and Bruce kissed.
The memory of then nameless anger flashed hotly through Dick, and he was possessed by the irrational notion that Bruce had absconded to Pakistan, to an omega with topaz eyes and burnished skin, when he saw the cobwebs and translucent insect wings threading Bruce’s dark clothes.
“Were you climbing the walls of the Cave?” he realized disbelievingly.
Bruce somehow looked as stupefied as Dick sounded, gawking at Dick like he was the one out of place in his black two-piece instead of mountaineering gear.
Alfred’s ability to be or pretend to be unfazed was unparalleled. “Couldn’t you have removed all of your outer layers, Master Bruce?” was all he asked. “I have no desire to clean bat droppings on the upper floors of the Manor as well.”
“You won’t need to, Alfred,” Bruce assured him, regaining his composure and deadpan delivery.
“I’ll contact Dr. Thompkins about the recency of your rabies vaccination,” Alfred replied, retreating for the first-aid kit.
“Within the last two years,” Bruce answered for himself, and then he excused himself.
Full of surprises, he didn’t head in the direction of his bedroom like Dick predicted. Instead, he entered his study.
Dick followed, felt ridiculous for wondering whether he should knock, and simply pushed the door open, knowing Bruce would have locked it if he didn’t want company.
The door opened for him.
“So,” Dick said, leaning back on the door to close it, “spelunking’s a new way to commemorate your folks. Thinking of making it a tradition? You couldn’t get Alfred to pass on the memo?”
“I didn’t think you’d be here,” Bruce said, but not in response to Dick’s question– like it had been on the tip of his tongue since he rose out of the Cave. “Clark has kept me updated about your deep-cover in Metropolis. He lost contact with your team on Saturday.”
“As we planned,” Dick almost protested, but there was something more important: “of course I’m here. Did– did Clark really think I wouldn’t be?”
Did Bruce?
“He didn’t believe it was in your nature,” Bruce answered about Clark and, Dick thought, himself.
“Good,” Dick said, even though it didn’t feel like a victory correcting the things that had gone so wrong between them.
Like the fact that it had been months since he took a step into Bruce’s study. It had been longer still since he sat in his usual spot on the corner of Bruce’s highly organized desk. He recalled many instances hovering over Bruce and providing much of the banter in their dialogue while Bruce sat in his chair, engaged in rote activities like reviewing his finances while ostensibly handing them off to Brucie’s accountant.
Dick’s spot was still clear even though everything else was different. That included Bruce stripping down to his athletic clothes, glistening with mineral dust like a sculpture at the Gotham Museum of Art, while Dick stood in his tailored suit, his hair styled and the underside of his jaw spritzed with cologne.
Bruce appeared to notice the change, too. He saw it when Dick reclaimed his position on the edge of the desk and crossed his legs, the wool straining against his muscled thighs and tapering at his ankles. Even when Dick leaned back, open and trusting as always, the dark leather of his belt snatching his waist, something was different.
Sitting on Bruce’s desk felt like extending an invitation, one they were both trying to resist.
“I didn’t think you’d be rock-climbing in the basem*nt,” Dick reached for in the spirit of that trying.
“You didn’t look hard enough,” Bruce said, both admonishing and a little pleased with himself.
“It’s not like it was a high statistical probability,” Dick bristled instead of admitting he was also minorly impressed by Bruce concealing himself among the limestone formations. “You do know it’s not a literal crawl space, right? Who would’ve thought you’d be squeezing yourself into the cracks in our bat-covered ceiling?”
Dick felt all the more foolish because he should have thought so, the same way he knew why Bruce was currently in his study. His father’s old study.
Bruce had told him about being a boy and falling through a hole. He’d fallen into the living, breathing darkness of the Batcave. Before he knew it was part of an intricate system of tunnels running below the estate, before it was the Cave, he thought he’d fallen into the underworld.
Then, Thomas Wayne repelled down and helped him climb up.
“Alfred had the flowers covered,” Bruce explained wryly and misleadingly, putting his cable and his gloves down in a space that wouldn’t interfere with his– his father’s– curated collection of things.
“You ordered the flowers, even if Alfred picked them up,” Dick argued as Bruce pulled his plastic-covered mourning clothes from the closet. “I got him to do the same for my mom and dad’s bouquets.”
“Red peonies and snowdrops,” Bruce said immediately. Gently.
“Perfect memory as always, B,” said Dick, because of course Bruce would remember. His memory was one of his greatest tools and burdens. That Bruce remembered Mary and John’s flowers flooded Dick with warmth while also prickling him with pinpoints of pain. “So you should know I’ll always be here on this day, just like I have been…. unless you don’t want me to be.”
“It’s not about what I want, Dick,” Bruce said, ragged, laying his suit on the back of his chair and looming over Dick. His fists curled on the edges of the desk, caging Dick in, holding himself up. “When I was a child, and I fell into the darkness, my father pulled me back into the light.”
“And when I was a child, because you couldn’t keep me out of the Cave, you think you condemned me to the dark?” Dick asked furiously. “I’m not a boy you failed to save.”
“This is about the kind of man I turned out to be,” Bruce exclaimed. “My father lived and died saving people, while I have had to stop myself, you have had to stop me from inflicting the same harm I suffered onto others. I could never be the man he was.”
“Yeah, you’re not your father, B,” Dick agreed. “And I’m not you. Whatever you saw in the orphaned omega you took in almost ten years ago wasn’t the same as the alpha longing for the father who pulled him from the darkness. That’s not what I want, even if it’s not about what people like us want.”
“I want what’s best for you,” Bruce said the way he spoke about wanting the best for the city: like an aspiration he had yet to accomplish, a noble ideal he could not yet live up to.
Bruce was so close that Dick could smell that particular odor of wet stone from the Cave; Bruce had to smell the notes of blackcurrant and patchouli in Dick’s cologne.
His nostrils flared; Dick felt his own mouth go dry.
The way Bruce was looking at him was the furthest thing from Thomas Wayne’s faultless martyring, his self-sacrifice:
Bruce watched him with selfishness.
“I know you want what’s best for me, I really do,” Dick told him. “And I want you to realize that, too, instead of trying to become a man you aren’t.”
Whether or not Bruce knew–
– he didn’t stop himself from lowering to meet Dick’s lips, kissing him soundly.
Although Dick had perched on Bruce’s desk many times, this orientation was completely new: Bruce bent over him, his hands migrating from the polished wood to the trim of Dick’s suit to the seat of his pants, squeezing.
Dick made sounds he never did in Bruce’s study, trying to agitate him in an entirely different way than when he’d tease and cajole him out of his work. Now, he kissed him wetly, gasping and groaning and sighing, making the mahogany creak as he shifted to draw Bruce between his legs.
Bruce was a man of old-fashioned tastes, as Thomas Wayne was certainly before him, but it wasn’t because he shared Thomas’s interests. It was because Bruce prized mementos. He held onto things that represented causes, places, and people he cared for, so that when his time with the objects of his attachments had passed, he still retained pieces of them. A typewriter with a fresh ribbon that Dick could never understand Bruce needing sat on the far corner of the desk; he had watched Bruce change the ribbon but never witnessed him press down on the keys; calligraphy pens hung upside-down in an ebony stand; an inkwell was positioned beside them.
Dick only realized the inkwell had fallen and spilled open once he felt dampness bleeding through his suit and onto his skin. That flicker of sensory recognition was quickly replaced by the total awareness of Bruce pressing Dick onto his back, the silk lining of his jacket providing a cushion against the wood, in a position Dick had also never occupied in Bruce’s study:
Lying flat on the desk and blinking rapidly at the high ceiling. Gazing at Bruce over the expansion, contraction of his ribcage. Noticing Bruce kneel between his bare thighs.
Dick lost his awareness of the study altogether when Bruce licked into him.
He had to stuff his fist into his mouth and bite down, hard. The pain-pleasure helped remind him where he was: Bruce’s study, reinforced but not soundproofed, part of the segmented echo chamber of the Manor. The compulsion to bury his teeth into his knuckles became grateful eagerness to do so when he began to sob at the sensation of Bruce sucking and spearing and nibbling him open.
At some point, after he’d tugged the black fabric down to Dick’s ankles, Bruce also repositioned Dick’s knees over his shoulders, the length of Dick’s calves braced against Bruce’s solid back. It made it easier for Dick to use his lower body to rock himself onto Bruce’s tongue, his upper body muffling himself so he couldn’t vocalize his pleas.
The study swirled around him and ceased being visible altogether when Bruce’s meticulous, excruciating work brought Dick to the edge, and he jerked against him with a voiceless gasp.
He filled Bruce’s mouth after Bruce alternated from licking to probing with his fingers, and the muscles in Bruce’s larynx constricting to swallow made Dick shiver and finally call out, “Br-Bruce– B.”
Once Dick could raise himself onto his elbows, perceiving the room around him with a wholly new vertigo, he prepared to return the favor.
But another feature of the study drew his attention: the spilled inkwell. Bruce noticed it, too.
When he withdrew from Dick, his fingertips were stained with black.
Dick wondered if he had looked similar hours ago, bats eclipsing him with their dark, membranous wings.
He wondered if Bruce had looked as foreboding and afraid as a child, waiting in the dirty, sooty, excretory abyss for someone to provide illumination.
If there was anything Dick knew from his years in the spotlight, it was that you had to dress the part. So once he stumbled out of Bruce’s study with some of the least grace he’d ever exhibited, Dick secured another black suit and tie from the back of his bedroom closet and changed out of his stained ensemble.
Alfred said nothing. He didn’t need words to convey his disapproval of the slightly rumpled and dusty wardrobe. However, he also didn’t ask why Dick felt the need to change, a fact for which Dick was grateful and wary. He wondered if his memories of the study’s thick doors were accurate.
He hoped so when Alfred said, a touch sadly, not concerned, “I believe it is time for you and Master Bruce to be on your way.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to come, Al?” Dick asked, and not because he could have used an intermediary. Some years, Alfred accompanied Bruce and Dick to the graveyard, but not recently.
“I have already greeted Master and Mrs. Wayne,” Alfred explained, following Dick to the foyer. “If you would give these to your mother, Master Bruce, I would appreciate it.”
Dick wondered if his surprise at seeing Bruce waiting for him near the front doors was like Bruce’s discovering Dick at the Manor. Even though rationally, emotionally he knew Bruce would be there, it was still somewhat like discovering a bruise: an unusual tenderness.
Whatever unease he felt after leaving Bruce in the study faded as Bruce wordlessly took Alfred’s bouquet, Alfred watching him with immeasurable fondness, Bruce preciously handling the flowers so as not to crush them.
Bruce was beautiful and humbled despite the finery of his mourning clothes, double-breasted and velvety as a bed of ashes.
Death had its own landscape contiguous with Wayne Manor. Over the years, Bruce informed Dick that the rolling hills of the cemetery, connected to the Cave and other subterranean channels on the property, were known as the Catacombs. That was how Martha Wayne understood the overlapping spaces of life and death near the property.
The graveyard was public, not private grounds, and it was where John and Mary Grayson were buried. The second time Dick met Bruce, he’d been there, paying for the funeral, which Dick resented as he did everything else in the wake of his parents’ murders, until the media circus clued him in on why someone like Bruce Wayne would bother.
It had been a shamefully long time since Dick visited his parents’ tombstones, even though he could hear Dinah in his head telling him that there was no shameful way to grieve– to live on. He still thought about his mom and dad even if he didn’t go to their graves like clockwork. The way Bruce did.
Mary and John’s headstones were chafed and warm from the midsummer heat. It was perhaps the closest Dick felt in years to touching them in the flesh. That made his vision swim. He stared until the picture he had of his parents’ graves clarified, solidified.
“Vă iubesc și mi-e dor de voi amândoi atât de mult, știți?” he said, wetly. “Sper că oriunde ați fi, zburați.”
Then, Dick returned to the path.
This time he wasn’t surprised Bruce had waited for him. It was unexpected when Bruce raised the blossoms of the bouquet towards Dick.
Dick was touched. “It’s alright, but thanks, B,” he said, smiling. “Anyway, ‘Alfred’ got these especially for your mom, remember?”
Bruce was kinder than the poor joke deserved, and he walked more slowly alongside Dick.
The headstones for Martha and Thomas Wayne were surprisingly austere, given their class and reputation.
“What they didn’t leave to me they willed to hospitals and mental health facilities,” Bruce said proudly and mournfully when Dick was ten.
“They’re not here– they’re in the alley, where they were last left breathing,” Bruce said vengefully when Dick was twelve.
“Fancy crypts are not how they wanted to be remembered,” Bruce said purposefully when Dick was fourteen. “The same goes for our legacies.”
This time, as he stood before the graves, Bruce said nothing.
He merely lowered the bouquet onto the earth, the soil slightly wet and richly colored.
Dick remained beside him.
When he was nine, he held onto Bruce’s leg. When he was eleven, he pressed into Bruce’s side. When he was thirteen, he touched Bruce’s shoulder.
Slowly, Dick laced his fingers in Bruce’s.
Bruce didn’t draw away.
Dick gently squeezed.
Bruce remained holding onto him until they walked back to the Manor.
Then, the second, more professional part of their commemorations began.
After a subdued dinner with Alfred, which Dick tried to finish with as much gusto as he could muster and Bruce with simple efficiency, they went down to the Cave. There, they donned their costumes and slipped into the Batmobile.
Dick spied the ceiling, considering how Bruce had clung to the stalagmites and scoured for the gap he initially fell into as a boy. He sat in the passenger’s side of the Batmobile and remembered taking Bruce into his body.
Batman drove swiftly to Crime Alley. Patrolling there on that night well past the hour when Martha and Thomas were shot was part of maintaining his responsibilities to them and renewing his purpose to himself.
The Wayne family murders had a big presence, not just in Bruce’s life. They were more widely known as the Park Row Tragedy. On the twenty-sixth of June, like a toss of Two-Face’s burnt coin, there was a fifty-fifty chance that either the underserved section of Gotham would get respite or it would erupt into chaos, almost as if to memorialize the specter of violence instead of the compassionate spirits of those slain.
Tonight seemed like one of the lucky nights.
“Nice to see Park Row getting a break for once,” Robin told Batman as they stood on the top of a new apartment complex. “Without the Rogue Gallery constantly coming in and destroying things, it’s actually pretty cool. I think that’s a new Somali restaurant in the entertainment and culture district. Maybe we should drop in– I wouldn’t mind malawah or farina for breakfast.”
Batman grunted, surveying the shops, schools, parks, clinics, and theaters. Even for him and even for Crime Alley, that was too much to take in. Especially the sight of glowing movie titles and showtimes on the theater storefronts.
“We can cover more ground if I take the west end, and you–”
“No.” Batman’s bass was uncompromising. “No splitting up.”
They never separately patrolled Park Row. On their own, Batman couldn’t watch out for Robin and guns.
“Fine,” Dick allowed, even though Batman’s perennial lack of faith in Robin’s abilities to protect himself grated on him the same way it did every year. No– worse. But Dick kept it under control, beneath his bright colors, his flippant tones: “But let’s go to the other sectors before sun up or the residents complain about us stomping on their ceilings. Again.”
Batman didn’t even grunt this time, but he did shoot his grappling hook.
Overall, it was a peaceful night. Even when there was a sudden series of shouts, and the shattering of glass, and three figures hurtled from the eighth floor of an old apartment building.
“Robin,” Batman said, diving with his arms outstretched.
“I’ve got the kid!” Dick shouted, because he realized the figure falling the fastest was a child , wiry and flailing for something to grab onto.
Using high speed and force, Batman caught the two adults and kept ahold of them, cresting in the air, while Dick folded his body to hurtle through the telephone lines and nab the boy, rolling them onto a fire escape.
Although the fall was jarring, when Dick unfolded his cape, the boy– an omega with wide, blue eyes, familiar in their awe– was a bit shaken but unharmed.
“Be more careful around balconies, alright, kid?” Robin advised. He shot his grappling hook and flew them back up to the apartment, to the boy’s shock and excitement.
When they landed, the boy grumbled, a bit breathlessly, “...not my fault those thieving alphas can’t take a punch.”
“Wait, what?”
The boy opened his mouth to speak, but then he leapt over the broken glass of the sliding door, calling out, “No, I’m alright, ma! Just stay in bed and rest like the doctor said.” As he vanished inside the apartment, he said, “thanks, Robin. Flying was pretty cool. Even worth getting thrown out my window.”
While Dick didn’t want to appear as if he condoned that sentiment, even if he not so secretly shared it, it seemed more urgent to find Batman and his criminal rescues.
As Dick thought, the alphas bloodily suffered from Batman’s barely-contained wrath being in Park Row, seeing a boy being attacked and, as Dick discovered from the metal shards on the roof, being held at gunpoint.
“I think they got the point, Batman,” Robin said, positioning himself in front of the semi-conscious alphas, careful not to shield them but also not to let Batman remain close. “The boy’s alright. Quippy.”
After a moment– during which the alphas groaned; during which Crime Alley teemed with the rush of cars and the faint sounds of music and chatter; during which Dick held Batman’s gaze through the mask– Bruce regained control.
“They work for Two-Face, meaning this wasn’t a simple break-in,” he said. “Commissioner Gordon will have to press them for more information after he books them.”
When Batman turned a corner to call Jim, and because his captives were now extremely unconscious, Dick grumbled to them, “you couldn’t have chosen any other night, morons?”
Jim Gordon was of the same opinion. After he arrived with a squad car, he shook his head, told Batman “nice work”, and disappeared with the strobe lights and sirens.
By contrast, the Thomas Wayne Memorial Clinic, just a couple streets down from where its namesake was shot, was blissfully quiet. That didn’t stop Leslie from working into the early morning, pausing to smile when Batman appeared in her office, Robin sitting on the windowsill.
“It’s good to see you, Bruce,” she said not as a throw-away greeting but instead because of the deep well of humanity within her. It never failed to amaze Dick, because she remained connected to it even in the most demoralizing circ*mstances. “You, too, Richard.”
“Hiya, Leslie,” Dick said, waving a gloved hand and dangling his legs over the edge.
“I’m assuming this isn’t just to follow-up on Alfred’s call concerning rabies vaccinations,” said Leslie, sounding mostly certain but not entirely dismissive.
Batman ignored that question and asked his own: “Are you alright?” This was Bruce talking, not the caped vigilante.
Leslie shrugged her tired shoulders. “Some ups and downs in the experimental trials for recovering addicts and cancer patients, but thankfully no more hold-ups or break-ins. We’ve had a few in the last month.”
Batman growled at that. “You didn’t call me.”
“Some were family members desperate to get medicine for their loved ones,” Leslie explained forgivingly. “Others desperately needed to sell the drugs to get mobsters off their backs. Those I can give you the names for, if you want to find them and talk to them.”
Batman recorded Leslie’s information into his gauntlet. It was extensive and would require hours in the Cave to crystallize into coordinates and motives– time they didn’t have at present.
“Not tonight, B,” Dick told him, balancing on the windowsill. “We’ve got other priorities.”
Batman was about to argue when Leslie said, “That’s right. The clinic will be fine in the meantime.” She looked up at Batman from her chair with a nostalgia that made Dick think she must have done something similar over twenty-years ago, kneeling to make eight-year-old Bruce not feel so small or alone. “Thank you, Bruce. Please take care of yourself. And know that they’d be proud.”
Batman stared through the white lenses of his mask, and he nodded, and he slipped past Dick on the windowsill, grappling up to the top of the clinic.
Before Robin could follow him, Leslie added, “You take care, too, Richard. I’ll see you in a couple months for our annual.”
“What would I do without you, Dr. T?”
“Maybe try your best to avoid getting new scars in the meanwhile,” Leslie advised, a little archly. She was a good if exacting personal physician.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Dick said, even though he and Leslie knew it was an empty assurance.
The alley where Thomas and Martha were shot wasn’t empty in the same way. In the dark silence, there were strange, deviant forms of liveliness and activity: rats slithering along the holes in buildings where their nests lay, roaches flapping their amber wings, spiders creeping up the wet walls, rainwater and other refuse gleaming and rippling with the city’s movements.
Monarch Theatre was closed and gave off no light. That didn’t stop Batman– Bruce– from watching it from the alley for a long time.
Robin lingered alongside him, knowing Bruce needed the time it would take. Even when Bruce hadn’t known Dick, he’d spent hours with the newly orphaned circus boy, waiting as Dick processed his parents’ sudden deaths at the base of the trapeze. Bruce must have been trying to offer Dick what Leslie had offered him.
No wonder things were knotted into such a mess between them. The further they got, it only seemed to grow more netted and complex.
“What’s wrong, Robin?” Batman asked, startling Dick from his reveries. He didn’t think Bruce would have the presence of mind to pay attention to him.
“Nothing, Batman,” Dick lied. Batman noticed that, too. “Long night, is all.”
Silently considering, Batman summoned the Batmobile from across Park Row. When they drove off without a backward glance, Batman said, eventually, “you should recover from your deep-cover with the Titans.”
That was Batman code for here, at the Manor. And thank you for tonight.
“Does that mean you’ll do my mission report for me?” Dick asked, which was Robin code for okay, yes– thank you, too.
“I didn’t say that,” Batman responded, the scarlet lights from stray planes and satellites blinking above them in the purple-black sky.
Dick felt tired, though not with the usual post-extensive mission heaviness. It was in an unburdened and boneless way. He was almost dozing off by the time he input the last details of his report in the Cave’s computer: victim, 10 or 11, male, omega; ill mother; absent father; untrained fighter; mouthy and bold…
Batman noticed him beginning to sag in his chair. His masked gaze followed the slanted column of Dick’s neck. “The report is adequate– without that last description.” Before Dick could protest or erase it, Batman commanded, “Decontaminate yourself and go to bed, Robin.”
Yawning and stretching– tingling comfortably as Bruce watched him stretch– Dick said, “You, too, Batman. We’ll get the other bad guys in the morning.”
Batman grunted and resumed typing. In the locker rooms, Dick luxuriated under the hot spray the way he couldn’t spartanly sanitizing himself prior to heading for the Manor. By the time he emerged from the showers, steam wafting from his wet hair, Bruce had finished typing and merely meditated at his seat, his cowl removed. He completed his own decontamination process swiftly.
Dick waited until Bruce reemerged in his night clothes.
Then, all of a sudden, he was standing in the second-floor corridor with Bruce, and the night felt like it ended too soon.
Like it had when Dick realized he loved Bruce in a different way than he thought over a year ago.
But he didn’t feel the panic, the urge to fly away from everything, including that feeling, the way he did then. Instead, he said tranquilly, “Goodnight, B.”
“Goodnight, Dick,” Bruce replied. He appeared as at peace as a man like Bruce could be.
There was something they hadn’t done in years. The first time, it had been after a fencing session, and Dick was heartbroken and wound up learning about Tony Zucco, so Bruce held him and comforted him. On another anniversary of this day, which one Dick couldn’t place, he’d tried to return the favor and embraced Bruce while he grieved.
It hadn’t felt like this: slipping easily into Bruce’s arms, his head tucked beneath Bruce’s chin, as if the one place he wanted to rest his cheek on was Bruce’s chest. Dick’s fingers linked around Bruce’s back, not only to hold him together, but also to bind the two of them. When Bruce enveloped him entirely in his might and his care and his warmth, it felt like Dick could dissolve into air.
He meant to pull away. To indulge in this, allow himself to give Bruce this much, before he retired, somewhat healed, at the other end of the Manor.
Because today was when Bruce would remember that honoring his parents his legacy required disciplining himself and sacrificing his base desires to save Gotham from its own darkness. This was when he’d cast aside everything and everyone that distracted from that calling, and Dick could make Bruce do that to him no more than he could bear it himself. He’d learned that over and over from their horrible distance this last year.
But instead of removing himself, instead of feeling Bruce push him away, Dick looked up, catching Bruce’s gaze.
His lips were parted around a wordless welcome when Bruce dipped inside to accept it.
Dick answered with a gratified groan, wrapping his arms around Bruce’s shoulders and half-lifting himself off the floor. It was easy for Bruce to clasp him by the waist and swing them through the door of his bedroom, falling back against the wood as Dick scrambled up, up, up into his embrace. Instead of helping Dick climb, Bruce bent low, his broad thumbs pushing into the corners of Dick’s lips.
It required Dick drawing on all his experiences being gagged to keep from choking on his saliva. A single bead trickled down his skin, one Bruce brushed away with his forefinger curled firmly beneath Dick’s chin. Making his mandible soft, the hinges of his jaw flexible, Dick let Bruce probe and fill the soft linings of his cheeks with the hard corners of his thumbs. Once Dick opened wide for him, Bruce used his tongue and teeth to take what he wanted, deep down his throat.
Dick hadn’t realized Bruce could kiss like this– that anyone could kiss like this, but of course it would be Bruce, sweeping and inexhaustible– nor did Dick think himself capable of making the sound he did– brokenly lusty. Bruce responded with a hushed, carnal noise. They were caught in a feedback loop, Bruce consuming Dick’s desire and directly feeding him his own.
When Dick bounced back on Bruce’s bed, and Bruce climbed over him, making them both sink into the plush mattress, Dick said, “I forgot… how ridiculously… huge… this thing is.”
Bruce paused. No longer feeling Bruce’s teeth grazing his Adam’s apple, Dick cursed himself. If only he’d recovered his mental capacities to refrain from speaking before his physical ability to do so.
“That wasn’t code for stop,” Dick said, his hands plastered to Bruce’s warm skin as he reached under his shirt. When Bruce remained immobile, his face buried in the crux of Dick’s neck, Dick traced the knobs in Bruce’s vertebrae down to his ass and clutched the gloriously hard muscles to slot himself fully into Bruce’s pelvis. Thankfully, he could still feel the erection straining against Bruce’s sweats. Unfortunately, that probably made Bruce feel worse. As much as Dick wanted this, he never wanted to force Bruce, not on a night when he was already so vulnerable.
Slinking up the immense mattress to sit upright, his legs crossed beneath him– like and not at all how he sat on Bruce’s bed as a child– Dick said in a scant whisper, “Unless you don’t want to.”
Bruce studied him.
His lips were shining, his pupils blown.
But he was still lucid, cogent.
When he reached out, it wasn’t for Dick’s shoulder, the way Bruce provided comfort after Dick outgrew sleeping off his night terrors in Bruce’s company– instead, Bruce pressed down on the center of Dick’s chest and lowered him onto the pillows.
“When you want me to stop,” Bruce spoke in Dick’s ear, his voice a low rasp, “you’ll tell me clearly, Dick. No codes or ambiguity.”
Dick thrilled at Bruce’s words, then Bruce’s tongue skating along the inside of his ear, causing him to shiver.
“You, too, B,” he panted, his hands creeping up Bruce’s shirt, over his stomach. “My vibrotactile morse code has gotten pretty rusty.”
Using his fingertip, he tapped dots and dragged dashes onto the exposed strip of Bruce’s belly, and Bruce shivered at the feather-light skating along his skin.
That prompted a laugh that Dick couldn’t suppress. Bruce usually made an effort to appear unaffected when they did something like this– administering pleasure without losing himself in his own. For a moment, Dick worried that this would be what caused Bruce to pull back into the shell of a man he was supposed to be again, carefree laughter and roaming fingers.
Instead, Bruce leveled Dick with a wry look. Then, he slid a pillow beneath Dick’s hips, lowered the briefs and pajama bottoms, and inserted his fingers to jab and twist his own sensual code in the recesses of Dick’s flesh.
Yelping, Dick arched off the pillowcase, his back rising from the cool cotton and mulberry silk before he limply collapsed onto the memory foam core.
Bruce was surprised, too.
His two fingers glided silkenly, deeper than either he or Dick expected.
“I didn’t know you would still be so affected by what happened earlier,” Bruce gruffly ruminated, repeating the motions and techniques he used in the study while Dick whined and squirmed anew. But Dick could sense the lie in his voice: the teasing edge. “Or that your decontamination protocols included this.”
“Nine days is long for deep-cover,” Dick argued, squeezing his inner thighs around Bruce’s wrist as he continued to flick, stroke, and tunnel.
The mission had been a long time, and it had been a long day, and the hot water in the Cave was too tempting to pass up– and of all the things Dick expected tonight, it wasn’t this.
Bruce made a sound, pleased and provocative.
Dick pulled him down for a kiss to quiet him.
The quiet didn’t last for long: as Bruce searched the interior of Dick’s body, he hummed atonal chords of want with each new centimeter he coaxed open. As Dick hastened Bruce to shed his clothes, helping tug his shirt over his head and shove his waistband down to his knees, he urged him forward: “I’m good, B, please– are the condoms in the– yes, let me– finally; hurry; here– I need you–”
When Bruce pushed into him, he folded Dick in two, pinning his legs against his chest with the sharp angle of one long, exquisite stroke.
“Holy f*ck,” Dick whimpered, because this wasn’t how it had been in the Batmobile, sucking air in through his teeth as he struggled to accommodate Bruce’s mass.
Now, Bruce was taking him– Dick was taking him in– with such ease that all of Dick’s nerves were alight.
Instead of retorting language, Robin– Dick hadn’t heard that admonishment in years, and he didn’t foresee a reappearance– Bruce grunted in approval, possibly agreement, clearly longing, and repositioned himself so he could put his whole weight behind pistoning in and out. Dick was filled so boundlessly and smoothly that he wanted to weep.
This wasn’t penetration– it was permeation.
The sheer membranes within himself were absorbing Bruce, unbearably and beautifully inflamed as they tried to transgress the separations of latex and skin.
Dick rocked with the rhythmic flow of Bruce’s body.
He clenched and facilitated the increasing steepness of Bruce’s thrust.
He opened the more Bruce abandoned his reservations and fears within the sanctuary of Dick’s body.
If giving himself away thusly was alarming for Bruce, laying himself so bare and exposed, almost turned inside out, was terrifying for Dick.
“Slow down, Bruce,” he begged. “That’s it…” he said as Bruce moderated his tempo, his thrusts more measured and lasting. “Can you– ah, yes!” he gasped as Bruce bent them into a pose Dick doubted few without their training could sustain: Dick supporting himself on the meat of his shoulders, the cradle of his pelvis elevated and spread around Bruce, who dug bruises into Dick’s skin as he dragged him into the patient and relentless snap of his hips. “It’s okay; let go for me, let go,” he urged as Bruce’s movements grew more erratic, more unrestrained, burying Dick in the cocoon of the pillows, duvet, and mattress. “B,” he called out with as much love as he could, recognizing the final tell of Bruce’s climax: his startled gasp, as if he couldn’t believe that he could experience something so uncomplicatedly good, before he spent himself inside Dick’s body.
Full-bodied shudders wracked Bruce. He trembled so thoroughly as he bowed over Dick that Dick was possessed by the mad notion that if anyone were to come through his bedroom door right now and witness what was happening, they might think that Bruce was sobbing.
Throat too sore and full to speak, Dick’s transmitted his affection through Bruce’s feverish skin, pressing light kisses on his jaw and mapping abstract patterns along the ridges in his back. His lungs burned with a wordless scream once Bruce used his fingers and knuckles to resume his place inside Dick, his other hand groping and digging, their mouths sealed together.
Dick’s org*sm was like the best of stealth maneuvers: soundless and utterly debilitating.
He didn’t begin to come out of it– black spots dancing in his vision, blood rushing like howling wind in his ears, his heart pounding, his body convulsing in paroxysms of pleasure-pain– until he could register Bruce massaging circles onto his back.
As fiercely as Dick typically resisted displaying vulnerability to Bruce, being bracketed by his bulk, his name warmly spoken to him by Bruce’s lips pressed to his ear, took the 200,000 volt electric edge off his unprecedented aftershocks.
Closely attuned to Dick, Bruce sensed when the aftershocks dwindled into afterglow. In a full-body twist that should have been too agile post-coitus, he flipped them over.
Dick reclined on Bruce’s body, and Bruce lay on the tousled bed coverings.
His bangs were plastered against his sweaty brow; his eyes were wide and pale in the darkness; his expression was painfully earnest. He’d never looked so young.
Dick smiled and patted the side of Bruce’s face. “Hey.”
Before he succeeded in tucking the stray strands of hair back behind Bruce’s ear, Bruce took his hand and pressed a kiss to Dick’s palm.
Dick loved him so much.
And he wished he was brave enough to tell him.
Instead, he crawled to a seated position on Bruce’s lap. A muscle ticked in Bruce’s jaw, but not out of annoyance, and not entirely in pain.
“How long d’you think Alfred will let us sleep in tomorrow?” Dick asked with a grin.
Bruce crooked an eyebrow in play exasperation and tacit understanding.
Then, he groaned when Dick slid down his body, determined to get his turn after the study.
When Dick awoke the next day, it was nine in the morning. Silver-gold sunlight translucently overlaid the lavender hues of the room.
The other side of the immense bed dipped and settled back after Bruce rose from it.
He paused to brush Dick’s hair from his half-lidded eyes before he resumed his daily activities.
