Chapter Text
It’s raining.
Big fat drops of water splashing on the floor and falling all over his face and body, he already feels the cold and humidity getting inside his clothes, making him uncomfortable. Not that he thinks he was comfortable before -not that he remembers what he was doing before- but the floor is rough and hard under him and it smells like wet asphalt and trash.
He tries to open his eyes, but his eyelashes seem to be glued together and he can’t unstick them even when he tries his hardest.
He tries to talk, to open his mouth to ask for help, but no sound comes from his throat. His lips don’t even open.
(There’s something too wet and sticky on the center of his chest)
It’s just the sound of the rain, far away murmurs of a crowd, and the sound of his own breath with him.
It feels like the start of a nightmare.
His heartbeat is starting to speed up in panic, which is weird because Dick Grayson doesn’t panic .
( Keep moving , it’s the only way. You won’t start crying and yelling if you keep moving and keep your voice steady , be brave )
There are police sirens in the distance, someone at his left gasps, someone -a kid?- at his right starts to wail so loudly he wants to cover his ears. A girl screams.
The spell breaks, Dick finally opens his eyes.
Grey sky, heavy black clouds, drops of water sticking on his eyelashes.
Slowly, Dick sits up and watches his environment carefully. He is in the middle of a street surrounded by a bunch of panicking kids, toddlers crying with red faces, and bigger kids covering his ears with their eyes shut. Every single one of them looks like a mess, a girl in front of him is covered in puke, at her side, a toddler is exaggeratedly drenched in water. They’re at least fifty.
The second thing -third? fourth?- he notices is a small kid on his left staring at his chest with mute horror. One side of his head is tangled in what seems to be mud and blood, but he doesn’t seem to realize it in his apparent shock.
Dick drops his gaze to his chest. His chest feels fine, but his shirt is dripping in blood being washed away by the rain. The puddle of water around him is brownish-red.
Shakily, he touches it with the tip of his fingers. It’s still warm.
He suddenly understands the bigger kids.
(“Give us the kid, nobody has to get hurt.”
A gun shakily pointed in their direction, aiming for B but Dick is too close, and the man doesn’t wait for orders to shoot.
A gunshot. Other officers and people screaming in horror. Too many people.
Red carmine blooming in his chest. A metallic taste in his mouth.
Careless.
“Dick!” )
Dick closes his eyes, his eyes burn but he shoves down the hysteria threatening to invade him and takes deep breathes to try to calm himself.
Dick is cold, scared, and confused, and the police that starts waving between them just worsens his condition.
***
They divide them into smaller groups to go in police cars and ambulances to bring them to the hospital, some kids get towels or blankets but those are only the toddlers and the bigger kids. Dick only sits quietly on an ambulance -he will not get close to a police car- and tries his best to not to stare at the toddler drenched in blood in front of him.
They shoved him with the kids more gruesome-looking, and Dick would try to soothe the sobbing ones if he wasn’t busy trying to not freak out too.
The trip passes in a daze and at the end he lets himself be tugged away for the nurses with the rest of his group.
They take turns to take a quick shower and change into nondescript clothes, the nurses help them with their hair -most of them have blood stuck on it- and they bathe some catatonic kids and sit them in the same room again with juice boxes. They take blood samples and search for injuries they don’t have.
There’s a woman in police uniform in the room talking to one of the kids closest to the door with a notepad in her hands. She talks to the kids one by one, and by the time she gets to Dick his hands are shaking so badly around his juice box he is afraid of dropping it.
“Hey, honey,” she says when it’s his turn. Her voice is gentle, but she’s a police officer, and his heart races, “I know you’re tired and confused, but I would like to ask you a couple of questions.”
Dick keeps his eyes on his juice, but he nods to show he is listening.
“How old are you?”
Under his nails he notices dry blood stuck on them, Dick didn’t wash his hands well.
“Almost nine,” he answers quietly.
(“We could go a road trip for your birthday in a couple of months,” Bruce tells him during breakfast, “After you can officially stay with me.”
Dick smiles so big his cheeks hurt.
“Yes, please,” he says enthusiastically, and he doesn’t resist adding, “you’re getting soft.”)
“Almost nine? That’s a big number,” the woman tries to inject cheer into her voice, but when Dick doesn’t say anything, she keeps going sad “what’s your name?”
Dick curls around himself, doing everything in his power to not look in her direction.
“Dick Grayson,” he whispers.
The woman stops, and Dick swears she murmurs a ‘ shit ’ under her breath.
“Okay,” she says with a voice weirdly high, “thank you, that’s all, hon, drink your juice.”
She moves on, but Dick doesn’t open his juice box until she is gone.
***
There’s a calendar over the door of the room he is sharing with six other kids, they must have misprint it because the date on it marks thirteen years in the future. He stares at it while the other nurses are busy trying to organize the other kids in the hospital litters until one pulls him gently away.
He lays in the litter they gave him but he can’t bring himself to sleep, not when his nails are dirty and the kids around him are sniffling and crying quietly.
When the clock above them marks almost nine O’clock the door opens again, making every single kid in his room give up the pretense that they were sleeping.
A teen in a red costume comes in, he seems tired, but he smiles at them anyway. His eyes are hidden under a black mask, and he has yellow belts crossing his chest on an X.
The closest kid from the door gasps.
“You’re Red Robin!” he squeals, his eyes shining, “you saved my mom once!”
Red Robin?
Something ugly curls on Dick’s stomach.
“Yes,” Red Robin confirms, smiling at the kid, “I know you all are probably sick of questions, but I’m here to find what happened to you to help.”
Dick sits up.
“Are you related to Batman?” he asks, ignoring the rest of Red Robin’s sentence.
Red Robin seems taken back, but other kids also seem interested in his question -almost like they haven’t heard of him either- and Red Robin catches quickly their curiosity.
“Yeah, I’m his partner,” he says sheepishly, “now, what I wanted to ask is if-”
“Is Batman in this hospital?” Dick interrupts him again.
Red Robin’s eyebrow twitches, the room fills with excited whispers.
“Yes, but he’s busy with other room and you could help him if-”
Dick doesn’t wait for him to finish, he stands up promptly and dashes to the door, other kids follow him along, probably thinking he is going to search for him just to meet him. Dick thinks Red Robin could stop them, but he just stands on the looking like he doesn’t know what to do. He probably doesn’t want to upset them further.
Dick saw the other kids being put on the same corridor as him, so he doesn’t have issues to just open every door he comes across to check in every room. The other kids help too.
In one he finds a blond woman dressed in purple, but he closes the door on her face because it’s not what he is searching for.
Finally, one kid screams an excited ‘ Batman! ’ and all of them rush to the room.
Dick let them enter first, watching how the kids surround the man mixing with the children that were already in that room.
Red Robin comes in a little after, flushed.
“I’m so sorry B, I tried to stop them but they were too excited,” Red Robin half-lies, looking ashamed.
Batman doesn’t say anything but he smiles a little at the kids, and Dick tries to pick up the differences, the subtle changes on his suit, the changes on the material, and the wrinkles around his mouth that weren’t there before. His eyes burn, but he waits patiently until the others get tired and start following Red Robin Back to their room.
Dick wonders where the nurses are.
He follows from afar but doesn’t enter his room again and waits outside the one where Batman is to have at least a bit of privacy.
Red Robin pokes his head out to call him in, but Dick makes him puppy eyes and mouths him a “ just a minute ” and that shuts him up quickly.
Batman doesn’t stay too long inside, he gets out and gently closes the door with a troubled face. He doesn’t seem to notice him.
Dick wants to hug him, cry on his shoulder and beg him to not let him go. He wants to ask him to bring him home, to read him a storybook before he sleeps, and to kiss him on the forehead. Dick wants him to tell him what’s going on, what happened?
“Red Robin?” he hisses at him instead because rage is the easiest thing he can feel, angry tears sprouting from his eyes, “how dare you ?”
Batman doesn’t startle, but it’s a near thing. He turns around a bit too quickly and stares at him. Dick can see his eyes behind his mask widening.
“That was a nickname from my dead parents,” Dick keeps going on, trying to keep his voice down but still upset, “you didn’t have any right to-”
His voice breaks, he tries to go on but, to his horror, what comes out it’s a sob.
Tears start tickling down his face, making his sight blurry. It’s been a long day -long afternoon and night?- and like this, he can almost pretend this Batman is his Batman .
Dick hides his face between his hands.
“Dickie-” Batman says sounding breathless, “you are here.”
Dick doesn’t say anything, he just muffles his sobs, feeling ashamed to have lost his control in front of the man. Batman doesn’t help. Dick almost wails when Batman gets on his knees to get him on a crushing hug. The material of his costume is hard and cold, and Dick feels angry with himself when he finds himself feeling comforted all the same.
“I hate you,” Dick sobs, gripping at Batman’s cape anyway.
“Sweetheart,” Bruce’s voice -not Batman’s- comes out in a strangled thing, “you are here, you’re okay.”
Dick can’t keep his rage when Bruce gets like that, he lets it go for the moment to focus on Bruce’s reassurances against his hair and his fussing.
Dick lets himself enjoy it for a minute and then he pushes him off gently from him, just in time for the blond girl to come out of the room where she was.
They must make a curious sight -Batman sitting on his knees along with a crying kid- but they must have seen kids worse than him because the blond girl doesn’t even blink and just gets closer with a soft expression.
‘ You are just upsetting the kid, ’ she signs at Bruce like Dick can’t see her hands, “ let me do this,”
Batman stands up from the floor without a complaint, but his eyes don’t leave Dick sobbing form.
The blond woman in purple bends her knees to his height, the lower half of her face is covered, leaving a distinct pair of blue eyes and eyebrows exposed.
Now, that makes Dick stop crying so hard.
“Where is the mask for your eyes?” he sniffles.
Dick is sure the woman -teen? - is smiling at him from the way her eyes get a wrinkle in the edges. She is pretty.
“I don’t have one, normally people don’t look too close to faces in the dark,” she tells him in a secretive whisper. Behind her Red Robin comes out Dick’s assigned room, “It works as fine as a face mask, hon, don’t worry about it,”
Eyes and eyebrows are too distinctive. Maybe it could work better if she didn’t put her bright blond hair loose on display and stayed in the shadows. If he ever saw her a second time he thinks he could recognize her on the spot.
Batman always made sure that Dick stayed in the shadows when they went out, careful that no civilian ever saw them working together because he knew they would recognize him easily after the whole show Batman put to kidnap him. The few times someone saw him he always had room for deniability, after all, dark-haired boys are more than common.
But blond teenagers’ girls with blue eyes, mid-length waved hair, and thin eyebrows going under a bright light on her own volition? Dick thinks he could get her identity in five minutes with access to the police database. Batman must be getting sloppy if he’s working with someone so careless.
Dick rubs his eyes, finally feeling calmer.
“You’re dumb,” he tells her because it’s true and he’s grumpy, “you’re going to get yourself and all your friends compromised and then killed.”
Her face is priceless, Dick would enjoy it more if he wasn’t so tired.
“That’s rude,” she says with less gentleness in her voice, almost rash.
Her voice rattles something inside him. Normally he would be able to ignore it, but he feels raw and drained, and every single of his walls are down. If she gets more upset and raises her voice at him, he doesn’t think he could handle it without a breakdown.
He tears up again.
“I just want to go home,” he chokes up.
Bruce’s hands twitch like he wants to touch him, but he doesn’t. Dick understands him, really, -he doesn’t want to get compromised in front of them- but it still hurts him deeply.
The purple girl looks panicked at his tears. She does some aborted movements with her hands that only make him flinch. Red Robin gets closer to tug at the girl’s wrist gently to make her step back.
Dick stays in his place, crying quietly.
“B?” Red Robin asks for instructions, sounding uncertain.
Bruce put’s a gentle hand on his shoulder, making Dick fight to not lean into him.
“I’ll bring him to his room, wrap up the rest, we don’t have more time,” Batman says, and without another word, he leads him to the room where he was before.
They enter quietly to a room full of snoring and tired kids, but Dick knows it’s not secure, it never is in the open. Anyone could be listening.
Batman still tucks him on the bed and fixes his hair, getting it out his face, just like Dick remembers he did last night- or more like Dick’s last night because, despite Dick trying to ignore it, a lot of time seems to have passed and he doesn’t know how to feel about it.
Dick wants to curl around him, but he knows Batman can’t stay.
“I’ll bring you home, I promise,” Batman whispers, “even if I have to bribe the whole foster system, all right?”
Dick nods and he doesn’t grip at him like he wants to, or begs him to stay. He doesn’t make it harder for both of them.
He briefly thinks about asking him to be kidnapped again, but he hastily drops the idea.
The last time -a couple of hours for him- didn’t end so well.
“I’ll be nice,” he murmurs, closing his eyes because he doesn’t want to see him go, “just hurry.”
Batman lets his hand linger on his hair before removing it slowly.
The last thing Dick hears before the exhaustion takes him is Bruce’s footsteps going away.