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Dick’s game plan after his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day of dimension travel is to pack his things up, fly out to California, and hide in Donna’s arms until the world feels less shitty.
It’s a good plan. He’s really good at making plans, because he understands places and he understands people. He knows that if he fucks off to California, nobody is coming after him. Damian wants to talk, but cannot come because he’s not allowed to travel by himself. Steph wants to talk, but doesn’t know where exactly his address in California is. Jason and Tim want to talk, but neither actually care about Dick enough to make the trip out.
The only person who is the winning combination of wants to talk, is willing to come here, and can come here, is Cass.
Which explains why she’s on his doorstep now.
“Cass,” he says, opening his arms. “Lovely to see you.”
Cass hesitates for a few seconds, just to inform him that she’s monumentally pissed at him, which, alright, yeah, fair. Then, she leaps forward.
He wraps his arms around her. He breathes in deeply and feels like it’s the first breath he’s taken in days.
He loves California, loves the Titans, loves the freedom, but he did miss this.
“Hello,” Cass says into his shoulder. “Missed you.”
He smiles and presses a kiss into her hair. “I missed you too, Cassie. Did you come out alone?”
She nods. She steps back, but her hands find his, and she holds on tightly. Dick doesn’t exactly blame her for thinking he’s going to run off.
“Just me,” she murmurs. “Didn’t want to overwhelm you,”
She squeezes his hands. Dick sees her smile at him, and feels something inside of him settle. He smiles and leads her inside.
Here we go, he thinks. Out loud, he says, “Are you hungry? I can make you some food, or get you something to drink.”
Cass shakes her head. She heads for his couch, lumpy and worn in as it is, and makes herself comfortable. She kicks off her shoes. She brings her knees up. She wraps her arms around them.
Dick remembers doing the exact same thing when he was a kid. His world, once a caravan and the space between his parent’s arms, had shifted entirely. The manor was huge, empty, echoing, and in the face of all that silence, he would try to make himself as small as possible. Keep his cards close to his chest.
Cass is uncomfortable with the situation. Fair enough. So is Dick.
He goes over to his kitchen and pours them two glasses of water anyway, just to have something to do. He’s already feeling that restless urge, that desperate kick, the need to get away from this moment and lose himself in the next. He ignores it though, because he’s really good at that now, and sits down next to Cass.
He sets the water down in front of her.
“Thanks,” she murmurs.
“Anytime, Cass,” he says, and means it.
Cass fixes him with a look that feels like a glacier dripping down his spine, slow and heavy and devastating. She says, “You are okay,” and it is a statement.
He is. There is a pain inside of him, and where it once roared like a fire, now it is a mere ember. He holds it in himself and feels it flicker; never fading, never furnacing. He’s okay. He remembers seeing the hurt painted so clearly on that version of him, younger and more vulnerable and probably better than Dick will ever be, and remembers knowing that it will fade one day.
“I’m okay, Cass. You know I can take care of myself,”
He feels like, out of everybody, he got out of that encounter with the alternate universe the most unscathed. Tim, Jason, Steph, Damian… when all of them had met their counterparts, they had been challenged and changed for it . Seeing his younger self hadn’t been anything new or surprising for Dick.
All of his internal conflict resulting from that day had stemmed from interactions with his family. He doesn’t have any new trauma or revelations to mull over. He just has the same old hurts, same old pains.
Cass says, “You are always taking care of us, too,”
“That’s my job, Cass. I’m your older brother,” he says with a shrug. “It’s never a problem,”
Cass smiles at him. “In that universe,” she starts, her eyes sparkling. “You were… small.”
Dick laughs. “I was small at that age in this universe too,” he tells her.
“Still small now,” Cass says. Dick gasps in mock offense.
“Coming from you!” he exclaims, putting a hand to his chest. He raises another to his forehead, and pretends to swoon. “Oh, the betrayal,”
The display makes Cass giggle, burying her face in her arms as she shakes with laughter. Dick grins brightly, feeling good and whole and happy. Performing’s in his blood. The big brother thing he had to pick up along the way, but both are in his nature by now: combining them just gives him the best of both worlds.
He presses closer to Cass on the couch, letting her absorb his presence at her side. And the other way around.
Cass’ breathing steadies. They both sit there, listening to the drag and dispel of their inhales and exhales.
Finally, Cass breaks the silence. Out of everybody, Cass is the best at doing what must be done. It’s why she and Bruce are so close. Dick is reluctant, hesitant, tired, but Cass is none of those things.
She is something else entirely.
Cass turns to look up at him, and says, “I am not the others.”
Dick snorts. “Funny,” he replies, “I was just thinking that.”
Cass nods. “I am different,” she repeats, sounding more insistent. “Not Robin. Not…”
She pauses. Dick waits.
“Not yours,” she says quietly.
Dick breathes out. He gets it. He knows what she’s saying. He and Cass, Nightwing and Batgirl, brother and sister, but not Robin and Robin. It still stings to think about, but he gets it.
“Yeah,” he says. “I know, Cass. You’re… well, you're something else entirely,”
Cass smiles at him. She leans her head on her arms, and looks so normal and cosy and calm that Dick feels his heartbeat settle.
“We aren't home,” she says. It’s both true and false; Dick is home, but his home is the people, not the places. “But let's talk anyway?”
He remembers her, standing up for him, keeping him accountable. He remembers the quiet assurance in talk when we are back home, the steady knowledge that yes, they will get home, and yes, they will talk.
Dick leans back against the couch and closes his eyes. “Alright. Let’s talk.”
Cass shifts beside him. She says, “You don't have to tell anyone else. Just me. I won't snitch,”
That’s a big thing for Cass to promise. Cass, who does not believe in hiding or in secrets or in darkness. Dick cracks open one eye, and sees that Cass is holding out her pinky to him. He remembers teaching her that.
He smiles, and lifts up his own hand.
“Pinky promise,” Cass says firmly as their pinkies twist together. Dick nods.
“Okay,” he starts. “I. Um. I don’t… I don’t know how to tell this story. It’s not a good one, Cass.”
He’s never told anybody before. Prior to this moment, everybody had fallen into two categories. Either they already knew, or they never would. The tightrope stetches out in front of him, the sides dropping away, and he wonders how to navigate it.
Cass smiles and suggests, “Start at the beginning?”
Dick laughs softly. The beginning? What is the beginning? His days in the caravan? The night his parents fell? The first time he stepped into New York? Somewhere, anywhere, in between? He can’t remember anymore. Maybe he could’ve pinpointed it, if he had been paying attention, when it all started, or at least started to unravel, but now, this is all he can think of.
He says, “Once upon a time, an… um, a child, was born.” In his mother’s version of the story, it was always a prince, but he’s telling the story now, and he’s never felt like much of a prince. Not anymore, at least. “Born under the stars. His parents held him in their arms, and saw the big open sky above them, and the stars shining, and the birds soaring, and they knew.”
It’s hard to remember now, exactly what his mother had told him about his birth, and even harder since he has to try and translate it in his head. It’s a little embarrassing as well, and he’s glad that it’s only Cass, with her wonder and her dance. She, out of everybody, will probably get it the most.
Except… except maybe Damian. Dick doesn’t know for sure.
Cass says quietly, “They knew?”
Dick breathes in. Says, “They knew this child was going to be one of the wind, and the rain, and the sun.”
Cass lifts her head from her arms, hanging onto every word.
“So the child grows up,” he continues, going off script, “and everybody can see that he’s a child of the wind and rain and sun, and not one of the earth. His mother sees the way he soars when he runs, and the way he keeps his feet light, and the way he never looks down. They… the name his parents gave him is for the outside world, but in their own little world, his mother calls him a different one. She calls him Robin.”
Cass’ eyes go wide. Dick blinks, tries to smile at her, and realizes that he can’t. His face is frozen, except for his eyes, which he discovers are warm and stinging.
He hasn’t spoken about his parents to anybody in so long, he realizes. No time to as Batman, nobody around to as Batman, nobody around in Bludhaven, nobody speaking to him in Gotham. His life’s been a fucking mess in the past year or two.
Cass, quietly, cautiously, says, “Your mother gave you the name Robin.”
Dick takes in a deep, shuddering breath. “Yeah,” he replies. “She did. You can figure it out from there, right? The whole sorry story.”
There is a slow-dawning look of horror on Cass’ face. It’s a deep mix of sympathy and shock and realization, and it paints her features in so much darkness that Dick has to look away.
Cass says, “Tell me the rest anyway,” her voice trembling.
Okay. Dick breathes in, and out, and in. Okay.
“Robin keeps growing. Over the years, he flies higher and higher, learns to walk and talk and fall and smile and laugh. All the important stuff. And then one night… his entire life changes. Forever. A fall he can’t come back from.”
The dull ache in his chest that comes with thinking about that night is still present. Probably will never go away.
Cass shakes her head. Her expression, on anybody else, Dick would call a pout, but on Cass… On Cass, he cannot identify it.
She says, “But you came back.”
Dick smiles. Semi-successfully this time. He nods, saying, “Yeah. I did. I got dropped into darkness and I got pulled out of it, except by the end of it I wasn’t a boy of the wind and rain and sun anymore. I was a boy of the night.”
“Still Robin,” Cass says.
“Still Robin,” Dick confirms. “You know how it was. A freakishly bright costume, a loud laugh, a lot of really bad jokes—that was Robin, back then. The light to Batman’s shadow, or whatever the fuck it was that people said. I think Bruce told me that because he wanted to make me feel better about every villain laughing me out the door in those earlier days.”
Cass giggles. Dick smiles again, and it comes back even stronger this time. He feels less frozen. Excavated. Maybe this talking thing is a good idea, after all.
He sighs. “And, yknow, it’s great for a while. I love it. Being Robin makes me feel closer to my parents than anything else, apart from being on a trapeze, and I’m doing good, and saving people, and giving them hope. It was good. It was… really good.”
It was. Dick doesn’t know if he misses those days exactly, but when he thinks of them, he thinks of moments drenched in happiness, and brightness, and love. And he doesn’t miss the days, but he misses the feeling.
Cass asks, “What changed?”
Isn’t that the million dollar question.
“Everything,” he says. “Or nothing. Even now, I don’t really know how to explain it. It’s just… it was me and Bruce,” and that encapsulates it all, really. It’s him and Bruce. Nothing is ever easy.
Cass looks mournful. Dick’s glad that they met when he was mostly a grown up, because watching the way she is with Bruce, a 17 year old Dick would’ve probably had the same reaction to her that he did to Jason. And he regrets it so much, regrets the way he acted back then every day, but there is no better excuse in the world than being 17. Dick can’t hold that against himself. Not anymore.
Especially not now that he’s met and confronted a younger version of himself on the issue.
“So you become Nightwing,” Cass prompts.
Dick nods. “I become Nightwing. I move to New York. And Bruce…”
“Bruce finds Jason stealing tires,” Cass continues. “He gives what he is not allowed to give.”
Dick gives her the faintest of nods. “The rest is history. It… it stops being my story. Stops being my name.”
Cass hesitates. Then, very slowly, she reaches out and takes his hand. She squeezes it.
Dick is exhausted.
“Robin,” Cass begins. “Is yours. Smaller you was not exaggerating,”
Dick shakes his head. “No. It’s not.”
“It was.”
“And now it’s not. It’s okay, Cass,” he says. Now that he thinks about it, maybe that's where everything came undone. When Robin stopped being his, and started being Batman's. He doesn't have the energy to question it anymore. “I meant it back there, when I said I had let go of the hurt. I don’t mind anymore.”
Cass sighs. She signs unfair, and Dick remembers his younger self doing the same, angrily telling his Cass that exact thing. The thought makes him smile. The more that changes, the more that stays the same, or something like that.
Cass purses her lips and says, “I see why you don’t want to tell the others,”
Dick gives a rueful laugh. “Yeah,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “At this point, it really will only cause more problems. I might tell Damian one day, though.”
Cass, because she’s wicked smart and perceptive as hell, smiles at him knowingly. “He would like it,” she says. “That you chose him.”
He probably would, the little brat. It would probably puff up his ego to the roof. It would also remind Damian that Dick loves him.
Yeah. He’ll tell Damian one day.
Cass lets her knees down, stretching out her legs. She leans over to Dick and hugs him tight and brief, squeezing all of the air out of his lungs.
When she pulls back, her expression is all business, all matter-of-fact. “Bruce is stupid about you. Often.”
“He’s stupid about all of us, Cass. It’s how he shows love,” Dick snorts.
Cass shakes her head. “He is especially stupid about you. I'll talk to him.”
“You don’t have to,” Dick protests, because he doesn’t think that conversation will go down well at all. “Like, he’s probably the worst person to tell about this.”
Cass sighs. “Ugh,” she says, defeated. “You’re right.”
“Of course I am,” Dick jokes. “I didn’t spend all of those years mulling over this for no reason,”
Cass doesn’t laugh at the joke, which Dick expected. She just stares at him contemplatively.
“You are okay?” she asks, and it is a question this time. A question Dick knows the answer to.
He grins, and ruffles her hair. “My little sister came out all the way here to hang out with me, I got to tell her about my parents, and now we’re shittalking Batman together. How could I not be okay?”
Cass relaxes, and gives him a big, genuine grin. Dick wishes his parents could’ve met her. They would've loved the way she flies.
Cass would’ve made a great Robin, but Dick is dearly glad that she never was.