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Dick is flat on his back, staring at the familiar smoggy sky of Gotham City with no recollection of how he’s ended up in this position. He doesn’t remember the last thing he remembers, and the little alarm in the back of his brain that tends to sound like Bruce from his Robin days tells him, That’s not good . It’s complete with a flash of Bruce’s frown. The old one. From when he was a kid. Before the grief pulled the frown into a heavy scowl and furrowed brows and—
What was he thinking about again?
Right. Gotham and its smoggy, starless, light-polluted sky. The sky that’s been home for longer than it hasn’t, and isn’t that a wild concept.
He should probably be panicking about this, he thinks. Or doing something besides continuing to lie on his back and stare at the sky.
And yet, Dick doesn’t move. He’s tired. When he blinks, his heavy eyelids protest the action, and his consciousness is sliding away before he can think much more than I should probably call someone .
The next time he opens his eyes, the sky is gone. Instead, there’s a red helmet hovering above him. It takes a second for his brain to connect the dots.
“Jay…?” Dick asks, or at least, he tries to. He’s slurring his words. Is he hurt? Is there something wrong with his mouth?
“—listening to me?” the helmet—no, Jason—says. “Eyes on me, Nightwing.”
Nightwing?
Oh. Oh.
That makes a little more sense. Dick must have gotten hurt on patrol.
“How bad?” Dick murmurs. The helmet’s expression doesn’t change.
“I need you to tell me where you’re hurt,” Jason’s voice says. It sounds tinny, and Dick thinks it’s coming from the helmet. “I’d like a heads up if I’m going to have to perform emergency field surgery or some shit like that.”
“Hurt?”
“Are you bleeding anywhere besides your head?”
Dick’s eyes widen underneath his domino in alarm. “I’m bleeding?”
Jason’s voice sounds frustrated when he says, “Okay, let’s try this again . Fingers and toes. Can you move them?”
Dick can move them, but it takes a lot more energy to focus than he has at the moment. And even though Jason’s voice is saying something else, tinged in familiar anger, Dick can’t help but let consciousness slip away once more.
“He’ll have a nasty bruise and the hit may have knocked him for a loop, but he seems otherwise intact. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll see to cooking breakfast before the others wake up.”
“Thanks, Alfred.”
“Certainly, Master Jason.”
Someone is holding his hand. It feels nice, and Dick is asleep again before he can squeeze back.
“Do you think he’s gonna be okay?”
A snort. “It’s Goldie. He’s going to be fine.”
“He wasn’t making any sense.”
“Concussions tend to have that effect on people. You’ve had concussions before, Tim. You’ve treated concussions before. You know how they can scramble your brains for a bit.”
“I do know, but this feels different.”
“It’s not.”
“You don’t know that.”
Dick absolutely one hundred percent does not want to be awake.
He’s drifting. It’s somewhere in between awake and asleep, closer to awake than he wants because he can hear the heart monitor beeping in an annoying rhythm that makes his head pound.
He feels like he’s had his brain replaced with gauze, only someone decided to use the gauze as a pin cushion for a thousand needles of varying sizes and then didn’t bother to take said needles out before stuffing the gauze into his head.
His eyes are definitely open. The ceiling is familiar. He knows where he is, he thinks. It’s close to home, but he can’t nail down the name of it. Safe. It’s safe.
For some reason he feels like he should be seeing the sky above him. Not stalactites through the reinforced glass ceiling of the medical room.
“Go back to sleep, chum.”
And Dick does.
Dick’s eyes are open again. They’re heavy with exhaustion, but they’re open. He blinks, and though they stick a little on the way back up, they do open again.
He has a feeling that he’s been having trouble with that–the blinking thing–but he can’t really remember a certain instance.
“Hey, Dick,” comes Tim’s cautious voice from next to him. “You actually awake this time?”
Dick blinks successfully again as Tim’s face comes into view above him.
“This time?” Dick wonders.
Tim grimaces. “You had a couple of…incidents.”
Dick hums. Blinks again. “Kinda feel like I got hit by Wally going full speed, but I’m pretty sure that means I’m awake.”
“Sorry,” Tim says meekly, in a way he really isn’t anymore. “We had to cut back on the pain meds to make sure you didn’t, you know.”
“The dangers of brain injuries,” Dick sighs, relaxing his throbbing head back into the pillow. “Long’s it been?”
“Almost two days.”
Dick hums, not really surprised. His brain still feels tender and rattled, but he doesn’t feel quite as mixed up as he thinks he should be.
“Where’s everyone else?”
Tim perks up. “Patrol. I’m working comms tonight, but Bruce and Damian went with Cass to track a drug shipment to its source.”
“I’d love some drugs right now,” Dick accidentally grumbles out loud.
Tim muffles a short laugh. “Sorry, Dick. You’re stuck on a low dose right now, but I can get you an ice pack.”
“I’ll take it,” Dick sighs.
When Dick peels his eyes open once more, Bruce is hovering above.
“Come on, Dick. I need you to wake up for a few minutes.”
“‘m awake,” Dick tells him, not sounding the least bit convincing. “Tim’s getting me some ice.”
Bruce raises an eyebrow, reaching up and plucking something from the pillow next his head. When Dick squints at it, he realizes it’s a warm gel pack.
“Oh,” Dick says, blinking. “Guess I fell asleep.”
He glances back up to Bruce. There’s a tightness to Bruce’s face that means something is wrong, but Dick is still just this side of scrambled and the eggs his brain has become can’t think about why that’s important. Just that it is.
That’s also when he notices the splotch of discoloration lining Bruce’s jaw.
“Didja forget to duck?” Dick murmurs, eyes stuck on the bruise. “Maybe Jason can give you helmet tips.”
“You’re not as funny as you think you are,” Bruce says dryly.
“I’m hilarious, thanks,” Dick tells him. “Think that ice pack may not be as helpful as a fresh one, B.”
Bruce doesn’t even chuckle, and Dick blinks. He’s forgetting something.
Right. The weird tightness in Bruce’s face.
Dick eyes Bruce tiredly. “Did you wake me up just to say, hello? ‘Cause I’m always totally up for a random ‘ I love you’ , but that doesn’t really fit your emo, loner lifestyle, ya know?”
“How much do you remember?”
Dick doesn’t even bother to sigh, too used to Bruce deflecting emotions and going straight for answers. They’re weirdly opposites in that regard. Dick likes to dance around the subject, flighty like the acrobat he is. Bruce is a tank that steamrolls into interrogation whenever it’s an available option.
“Not much,” Dick tells Bruce. “Brief flashes here and there, but nothing concrete, and nothing I can really put into words.”
“What’s the last thing you remember doing?”
Dick scrunches up his face like that will help him remember. “I think I remember getting ready for patrol? Me ‘n Timmy were gonna separate and meet up in the Bowery.”
Bruce nods. “You didn’t lose much, then.”
It’s more of a relief to know than Dick had realized.
Bruce doesn’t move from Dick’s bedside.
Dick smirks. “You up for some tic-tac-toe?”
Trauma isn’t strange to Dick Grayson. He is Nightwing. He’s been Robin. He’s been Batman. He’s had tragedy after tragedy heaped upon him, and he’s nothing if not resilient, but that doesn’t mean he’s immune to the marks they leave on him.
Case in point, Dick wakes up screaming.
He lurches upright, wrenching his arms closer to his chest, a sharp pain pinching one of them that’s there and gone again before Dick can even think about where it came from. He scrambles from his bed, bare feet hitting the cold stone floor, and he’s barely aware enough to care about the fact that it’s freezing.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. He needs to get away. Every part of his being is yelling at him, run . It’s an intrinsic part of his very being. He’s flighty by nature. He can usually curb the instinct, but caught up in the throws of a nightmare he can barely remember, he can’t find the wherewithal to even try .
He blanks out at some point. One minute, he’s pushing bedcovers away and the next, he’s contorted into the smallest space he can find. He has no idea where he is, other than that he’s safe . He’s in a small space, up high, where no one can take him by surprise.
His heart thump-thumps in his ears for seconds, minutes, hours , maybe. He doesn’t know. He can’t focus on anything but the opening to his small alcove. It’s rocky, somewhere in the large cave system under the manor.
He doesn’t move an inch the entire time.
Eventually, sounds start to filter in beyond his heartbeat. There’s shouting, panicked noises that cause Dick to stiffen further. They come closer, then farther. Closer. There’s shouting again. Arguing. Steps thundering up the steps.
It’s quieter after that, but still Dick doesn’t move.
It’s another long while until he hears more noises. Murmurs.
Then, “Chum? Can you come out?”
He’s been found.
The voice is familiar, and the panic stays semi-quiet at the quality. The thought of leaving his small space of safety makes his breath hitch, but his body–trained for far too many years to respond to that voice in particular–relaxes enough for him to peek out.
It’s Bruce.
He’s in sweats and a long sleeved shirt. His hair is mussed-up, like he just woke up, but his eyes are wide-awake. He’s perched on the little shelf just below Dick’s small alcove. The same alcove Dick had always run to the first few years after he’d come to the manor.
“Hey, Chum,” Bruce says when Dick meets his eyes. “Are you ready to come out of there?”
Dick inhales sharply. His brain is still scrambled. His heart is still thrumming wildly in his chest. But it’s Bruce.
Bruce holds out a hand, and Dick reaches out to take it.
Later, when Dick is settled in his own bedroom instead of the cave, Bruce brings Damian and Cass in to keep an eye on him.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Dick mumbles, even as he accepts both siblings crawling under the covers with him. Cass flicks him in the head. Damian just shoots him a very unimpressed scowl.
“Obviously you do,” Damian tells him.
Dick blows out an exasperated breath. “It was a nightmare. I’m fine now.”
“If you’re bleeding, you get babysat,” Cass says simply, like it’s a rule that’s always been around and not completely made up on the spot.
“I’m going to use that one on you,” Dick tells her, gently brushing his fingers on the bandaged spot on his arm where he’d accidentally torn out his IV cannula.
Cass quirks an eyebrow and then kicks him under the covers.
Dick hisses as Bruce sighs. “Cass. Please don’t injure your brother further than he already is.”
“Sleep,” Cass says, flopping into him with a huff. Damian grumbles under his breath as he, too, settles in for the night.
Of course, she completely gets away with ignoring Bruce. Bruce just sighs again. Dick rolls his eyes and settles in. He catches Bruce’s eyes as the man sits in an armchair he’d dragged into the room.
“You gonna stay, too, B?”
“You look squished enough,” Bruce says, but there’s still something tight in his expression as he looks Dick over, tucked in with his siblings.
It’s prominent enough for Dick to say, “I’m okay, Bruce. It was just a nightmare.”
Bruce’s eyes tighten. “Hn.”
“It happens.”
“Someone should have been there to watch you.”
“It’s not your fault,” Dick tells him dully. The exhaustion of the night’s panic is catching up to him. It’s almost sunrise, and he’s been up on high alert for hours. “Stop brooding, B.”
“Go to sleep, Dick.”
“Stay. Sleep,” Dick says, voice going soft and pleading. Damian and Cass aren’t asleep, but neither interrupt. “Please?”
Bruce blows out a controlled breath. “I’ll stay.”
He doesn’t promise to sleep, but Dick doesn’t think he’ll be awake long enough to argue for it.
“Okay,” Dick breathes, eyelids heavy with oncoming sleep. “Night, dad. Love you.”
“Goodnight, Dick.”
Dick isn’t awake long enough to hear if Bruce says anything else.