always with the Dick jokes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
irrelevant) wrote2010-05-09 09:09 pm
irrelevant) wrote2010-05-09 09:09 pm
ficlets: DCU
Gloaming
Dick Grayson, Bruce Wayne | G | 415 words
A/N: Heavily influenced by Dick’s characterization in Dark Victory.
"Is this what you want?"
That's all anyone asks him anymore, seems like. The cops, the nuns, the judge in her fancy chair---even Alfred.
Do the clothes fit, does the food satisfy? Is the room to your liking, Master Dick? If not, there are others...
They keep giving him choices, but there's only one he wants to make and it’s the only one he can't make because it was made for him whether he wanted it to be or not.
The Bat's the only one who gets it. He doesn't ask what Dick wants, he already knows. He doesn't wait for someone else to decide, he makes the choice himself, then follows through.
"Is there... anything in particular you'd like?" Bruce Wayne asks. "I've never had--that is, I haven't lived with anyone but Alfred for a long time. I know birthday presents are supposed to be surprises, but--"
"It doesn't matter. I'm not picky." Dick shoves his hands into his pockets and looks out the high windows of Bruce's study into the back garden.
The trees are bare, and so is the ground. Bruce Wayne's gardeners come every day and the leaves never even get the chance to pile up.
"We could go somewhere, if you want. For a week or so?"
Haly's winter quarters are in Florida. His parents... it happened in June. It's November, now. It's winter.
"That's okay," Dick says. "I'd rather train."
"Dick."
He knows Bruce is behind him; thanks to the Bat he even knows where. He wishes the Bat was here, but right now it's just Bruce and his choices and the clean, bare ground outside.
Bruce steps closer until Dick can see his reflection in the window, just the outline of him. He says, "I didn't want this to become your life as well."
Dick wants to tell him it's not his choice, except it kind of is. He sucks his impatience down into his lungs, lets it trickle back out, spent and used-up as old breath.
He says, "It'd be good to have a full flying rig down there."
For a few really long seconds, he doesn't think Bruce is going to say anything. There's a sound like the rush of wings and then Bruce says, "All right. It's almost six. Go tell Alfred I'll be fifteen minutes late for dinner."
Dick nods and, still not looking at Bruce, he turns and wanders out of the room.
He never liked Florida much, anyway.
El Dia de Los Muertos
Jason/Tim | PG-13 | 276 words
It's worth it for the look on the kid's face. For the tic at the corner of his mouth and the blind blink of his eyes.
Jason wraps his fingers around the kid's wrist, and he's surprised when he’s allowed to. Small bones, small hand; he pulls it up to his newly shaved head and presses it against his skin, making the kid touch, making him feel.
He didn't come back clean and new. There was blood in his mouth and in his eyes; wet all over him, blood and mud and rain sticking Bruce's fancy-ass burial suit to his body. His insides were fucked and his outside almost couldn't hold them in.
He lets go and the kid's fingers twitch once and start to move, grazing bump-bump-bump over what's left of the stitches.
"Twenty-four there," he says, "Hundred and fifty-six total."
The slide of fingers stutters, stops... starts back up. "Why did you--why?" the kid says, still touching. Still counting.
Sometimes he needs to see. He can always feel, but sometimes the white in his hair isn't enough. He needs to see what's under it.
He doesn't say any of that. Grabs the kid's chin and makes him look at him. Two birds, no bush. Four hands.
The kid's mouth tastes like the blood from his chewed-on lower lip. Bad habit, chewing your lips, making yourself bleed. Some of the bad guys have really good noses. Jason bites down, widening the tear, and the kid moans into his mouth, still touching, both hands, ten fingers on three surgical scars.
Jason has more scars under his clothes, everywhere. So does the kid.
Jason touches all of them.
The Bleed
Earth 51!Bruce/New Earth!Jason | NC-17 | AU | 1026 words
A/N: I want theirviolent paranoid sociopathic version of happy like nothing else in this or any other universe.
It’s not Earth as he knows it. It’s not his Earth. But it is an Earth, one with a Gotham and a living Robin who is not his Robin.
This of course means that there is also a Batman who isn’t he. Or there was.
“Bruce.”
Yet another Robin, or rather a Robin who used to be. This one is even less Bruce’s Robin than the other—he’s the Robin Bruce needed but wasn’t allowed to keep. He’s the Robin Bruce wants, a revenant, a gift this world’s Bruce Wayne and Batman threw away.
Bruce can’t comprehend his other’s reasoning. He can’t understand how any version of himself, no matter how deluded, could have without truly having, with all that having entails.
“Sorry,” Jay says. “Probably should’ve taken you to my place.”
Bruce lets the drape fall from his hand. It settles, half covering the window, feeding the darkness that lives in corners, under beds, within the shadowed angles of half-closed doors. “It’s better that you told them,” he says, and the sound Jay makes isn’t really a laugh.
“Yeah, letting Dick find out—”
He knows what his own Dick’s reaction would have been. This other’s might not have been as extreme, but there are degrees of extremity. “Come here,” he says, and Jason leaves the doorway and crosses the room like the obedient boy he never was.
He stands in front of Bruce with his arms loose at his sides and his head thrown back; he’s defiant even when he’s certain of approbation. He’s broader everywhere than Bruce remembers, and it feels too greedy, too extravagant to be able to look at him and see the evidence of age and aging, feel it in the solid musculature giving under his hands gripping Jay’s bare shoulders.
“Dick intends to offer me the suit. Soon, I think,” he says, and gets another laugh that isn’t.
“Poor Dickiebird. Poor, poor miserable little bastard. He’d do it right now, but he can’t ‘cause that would be disrespectful now, wouldn’t it?”
Bruce feels his fingers dig into Jason’s flesh; he forces them to relax, then to let go completely. “Disrespect is in the eye of the beholder. Don’t turn it on your brother. He’s done nothing to merit it.”
The shadows surrounding Jason’s mouth writhe. “Yeah, right,” he snorts. “Because Dickie always treated me like the little bro he never had. Oh wait, that’s because according to him, he didn't get one until darling Tim-may. Jesus, Bruce, your bastard is less of an asshole to me.”
“Damian,” who is unique to this universe, insofar as he is aware, “isn’t mine. I’m not entirely certain he’s a Wayne.”
He steps away, intending to find a light switch and flip it, but Jason grabs his sleeve. Bruce lets himself be held in place.
“Gonna step up?” Jay says. His eyes are white-out lenses: no pupils, no mask.
Bruce thinks he may like the red domino and jeans better than the suit he designed. He says, “No,” and doesn’t qualify it, and Jason’s hand tightens, pinching his skin.
“Fucking deserter.”
“No.” He squeezes Jason’s wrist, just enough to make him let go. Jason jerks his wrist free and his upper lip lifts, curls, something feral at bay, but not, Bruce thinks, rabid. Not yet. Before Jason can snarl at him he says, “Dick isn’t ready to accept what I have on offer. He may never be, and it’s not my place to force him. Or Tim.”
He sees the punch coming; this Jason still telegraphs his intentions if you know what it is you’re seeing. Bruce knows and he sees and he has Jason on his back on the bed, his fingers on all the necessary pressure points, one knee planted a bare inch from Jason’s scrotum.
Jason bucks against his hold and Bruce lets his knee press... “Motherfucker—” Predictable boy.
“On occasion,” he says, and presses again, and Jay’s whine is canine enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck.
“Fucking kill you—Christ." Because Bruce just bit his nipple and now he’s licking it, licking Jay, swathes of wet up his chest and chin to his mouth.
“Leave town,” Jay moans into Bruce’s mouth. “Could—we can—”
“Perhaps.” He mouths it against Jay’s throat, kisses the words onto his skin, “Or you can kill the Joker. Again.”
Jason shudders, arches up into Bruce’s hands and his mouth, into Bruce’s weight as though it’s something he needs, his burden to bear, gladly.
Bruce bites down and sucks, marking him. Spreads him open and touches him, leaving something of himself every place skin touches skin. Thin sensory layers of DNA to be sluiced off, gone in one showering.
The bruises are less transitory. Bruce leaves handfuls of them, purple-red bracelets circling Jason’s wrists. Starbursts on hipbones, impatient smears across the straining spread of Jason's inner thighs.
This isn’t Bruce’s Earth; he’s not its Batman. Dick will be. But Gotham, any Gotham, will still need Bruce Wayne whether or not he wears the cowl. It's taken Bruce a lifetime to learn that, and the boy beneath him, sweet and hot on his tongue, is further proof.
Jason shouts when he comes in Bruce’s mouth. He tastes like salt, like heat and blood and Troia’s tears.
She cried while she killed Ultraman. Her cheeks were still wet when they arrived on Apokolips.
“Gonna fuck me or stare at me?” Jason slurs. His thighs are an obscene splay. He’s fucking himself slowly with two fingers.
Bruce says, “I try not to limit myself. Make yourself hard.”
He watches Jason sweat and pant, listens to him curse him and the other Bruce and every Batman who might ever exist or ever have existed. Before Jason can come, he pulls Jason’s fingers out. “I’m going to fuck you now.”
He comes with Jason’s shouts in his head and blood from Jason’s bitten lip in his mouth. He falls asleep next to a dead man and wakes up in Gotham.
One thing, he thinks, is not like the others; which one, he’s not sure, but he is a detective. Eventually he will know.
In This Together
Steph/Damian (Batgirl/Robin) | PG | future!fic | 918 words
A/N: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jbadgr, because she loves them too.
Robin says, “Guards are switching out. We should do this now.”
Steph lowers her batnoculars (they totally are shaped like a bat) and frowns at him. “We’re supposed to wait for backup. Red said—”
“Since when do you do what Red Robin says?” He crosses his arms, and she can almost see his scowl through the lowered white-outs.
She crosses her arms right back at him; she learned from the best, baby, and Oracle’s crossing of the arms is a killer. “I don’t,” she says, “but you know, twenty of them and two of us. We could probably take them, but back-up is a good thing when you can—hey, are you looking at my chest?”
“No,” Robin says, and turns his head enough that she can see the little bit of red running up his cheekbones.
“Oh, you so were.” She grins, because she knows from teenage boy Robins, and Damian is a little snot, but he’s still a teenage boy Robin.
“Can we get back to the subject?” he snaps.
“Which is…?”
“You’ll do what Batman or Oracle or even Red Robin tells you to do before you’ll listen to your partner.”
And she opens her mouth because that’s just bullshit, and she—
Should be saying something about Batman or Tim or both of them, but—
He’s—
Her partner. Robin is her partner, and that’s been true at various times in her life, but never more than it is now.
Tim was her crush, her teacher, best friend, brother, not quite lover. He broke her heart and she ripped him a new one, and she thinks now that that’s the only way it could have gone for them.
Damian… she had no expectations there. No preconceived ideas except for the one where he was a stuck-up jerk, because he really, really was. Still is, in a lot of ways.
But it’s been five years since Bruce climbed out of the grave they collectively dug for him in their heads, and although Damian is Robin, Tim is still Bruce’s partner. Not in the everyday sense of the word, but when Batman needs backup, it’s Red Robin who gets the call.
Nightwing went back to New York and left a sucking hole in Damian’s worldview; Steph wants to punch herself in the mouth for just now getting that Batgirl is Robin’s stopgap. Or, she thinks, watching him watch her, maybe not. Because stopgaps are temporary and this—
Five years.
“Okay,” she says, crouching down next to him. “Hit me.”
He jerks his chin at the ‘nocs. “Three o’clock from the back warehouse. You tell me.”
She raises an eyebrow (Bruce and Babs) but she also raises the batnoculars and looks. “Son of a bitch. They weren’t supposed to move until tomorrow night.”
“No.”
She gives Robin mental points for neutral instead of smug, and activates her comm. “Red, what’s your ETA?”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Damn it.” She switches to Oracle’s frequency. “O, please tell me Gold’s around?”
“She’s with Nightwing. Do you want me to contact B?”
She can feel Robin staring at her from under his hood. When she says, “No, we’ve got this, Batgirl out,” he doesn’t move, but she’s pretty sure his mouth looks less sneery than normal. She collapses the batnoculars and slides them back into their pouch, glancing down at the installation as she does. “You think we can handle this?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t,” he says, and there’s her nasty, irritable little Robin-jerk-brother-whatever. Damian.
Steph laughs as quietly as she can, which is actually pretty quiet because, you know, Batgirl. “It’s your call,” she says. “Whatever, I’m up for it. Partner.” She sticks her hand out, offering and meaning it.
The slight twitch of his hood would be anyone else’s jerk of surprise. It falls slightly back from his face and she’s surprised to see that sometime within the last few minutes, he flipped his lenses.
He looks from her face to her hand. Back up to her face, and she’s starting to get nervous, but how about that, he’s actually going to—wait a minute—
His gauntlet is locked around hers. Fingers threaded together, and he’s pulling her forward and—and holy fuck-
Her eyes are open and so are his. Their mouths are barely touching, she can feel his breath, taste peppermint in the brush of his (soft, boy) lips, and they’re just sitting here staring at each other over the bridge of their mouths. Then she blinks and Damian abruptly pulls back and lets go of her, and she lands on her ass because yeah, did not see that one coming at all.
Damian is on his feet, and it’s his hand out this time. Still speechless, she grabs his forearm and he hauls her up, and she notices, not for the first but definitely for the important time, that’s he’s almost as tall as she is.
He says, shortly, “Partners. Roof?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Batgirl’s grapple is in her hand. She sees Robin shoot his line, licks her lips and tastes him: fifteen and peppermint sweet. Takes a moment to watch him fly before she shoots her own line and follows her partner. She’s grinning wide enough to split her lip the way she already knows she’s going to split it on Robin’s some day soon, which is possibly the dumbest idea she's ever had, and Jesus, she's had some dumb ideas.
These bastards aren’t going to know what hit them.
Dick Grayson, Bruce Wayne | G | 415 words
A/N: Heavily influenced by Dick’s characterization in Dark Victory.
"Is this what you want?"
That's all anyone asks him anymore, seems like. The cops, the nuns, the judge in her fancy chair---even Alfred.
Do the clothes fit, does the food satisfy? Is the room to your liking, Master Dick? If not, there are others...
They keep giving him choices, but there's only one he wants to make and it’s the only one he can't make because it was made for him whether he wanted it to be or not.
The Bat's the only one who gets it. He doesn't ask what Dick wants, he already knows. He doesn't wait for someone else to decide, he makes the choice himself, then follows through.
"Is there... anything in particular you'd like?" Bruce Wayne asks. "I've never had--that is, I haven't lived with anyone but Alfred for a long time. I know birthday presents are supposed to be surprises, but--"
"It doesn't matter. I'm not picky." Dick shoves his hands into his pockets and looks out the high windows of Bruce's study into the back garden.
The trees are bare, and so is the ground. Bruce Wayne's gardeners come every day and the leaves never even get the chance to pile up.
"We could go somewhere, if you want. For a week or so?"
Haly's winter quarters are in Florida. His parents... it happened in June. It's November, now. It's winter.
"That's okay," Dick says. "I'd rather train."
"Dick."
He knows Bruce is behind him; thanks to the Bat he even knows where. He wishes the Bat was here, but right now it's just Bruce and his choices and the clean, bare ground outside.
Bruce steps closer until Dick can see his reflection in the window, just the outline of him. He says, "I didn't want this to become your life as well."
Dick wants to tell him it's not his choice, except it kind of is. He sucks his impatience down into his lungs, lets it trickle back out, spent and used-up as old breath.
He says, "It'd be good to have a full flying rig down there."
For a few really long seconds, he doesn't think Bruce is going to say anything. There's a sound like the rush of wings and then Bruce says, "All right. It's almost six. Go tell Alfred I'll be fifteen minutes late for dinner."
Dick nods and, still not looking at Bruce, he turns and wanders out of the room.
He never liked Florida much, anyway.
El Dia de Los Muertos
Jason/Tim | PG-13 | 276 words
It's worth it for the look on the kid's face. For the tic at the corner of his mouth and the blind blink of his eyes.
Jason wraps his fingers around the kid's wrist, and he's surprised when he’s allowed to. Small bones, small hand; he pulls it up to his newly shaved head and presses it against his skin, making the kid touch, making him feel.
He didn't come back clean and new. There was blood in his mouth and in his eyes; wet all over him, blood and mud and rain sticking Bruce's fancy-ass burial suit to his body. His insides were fucked and his outside almost couldn't hold them in.
He lets go and the kid's fingers twitch once and start to move, grazing bump-bump-bump over what's left of the stitches.
"Twenty-four there," he says, "Hundred and fifty-six total."
The slide of fingers stutters, stops... starts back up. "Why did you--why?" the kid says, still touching. Still counting.
Sometimes he needs to see. He can always feel, but sometimes the white in his hair isn't enough. He needs to see what's under it.
He doesn't say any of that. Grabs the kid's chin and makes him look at him. Two birds, no bush. Four hands.
The kid's mouth tastes like the blood from his chewed-on lower lip. Bad habit, chewing your lips, making yourself bleed. Some of the bad guys have really good noses. Jason bites down, widening the tear, and the kid moans into his mouth, still touching, both hands, ten fingers on three surgical scars.
Jason has more scars under his clothes, everywhere. So does the kid.
Jason touches all of them.
The Bleed
Earth 51!Bruce/New Earth!Jason | NC-17 | AU | 1026 words
A/N: I want their
It’s not Earth as he knows it. It’s not his Earth. But it is an Earth, one with a Gotham and a living Robin who is not his Robin.
This of course means that there is also a Batman who isn’t he. Or there was.
“Bruce.”
Yet another Robin, or rather a Robin who used to be. This one is even less Bruce’s Robin than the other—he’s the Robin Bruce needed but wasn’t allowed to keep. He’s the Robin Bruce wants, a revenant, a gift this world’s Bruce Wayne and Batman threw away.
Bruce can’t comprehend his other’s reasoning. He can’t understand how any version of himself, no matter how deluded, could have without truly having, with all that having entails.
“Sorry,” Jay says. “Probably should’ve taken you to my place.”
Bruce lets the drape fall from his hand. It settles, half covering the window, feeding the darkness that lives in corners, under beds, within the shadowed angles of half-closed doors. “It’s better that you told them,” he says, and the sound Jay makes isn’t really a laugh.
“Yeah, letting Dick find out—”
He knows what his own Dick’s reaction would have been. This other’s might not have been as extreme, but there are degrees of extremity. “Come here,” he says, and Jason leaves the doorway and crosses the room like the obedient boy he never was.
He stands in front of Bruce with his arms loose at his sides and his head thrown back; he’s defiant even when he’s certain of approbation. He’s broader everywhere than Bruce remembers, and it feels too greedy, too extravagant to be able to look at him and see the evidence of age and aging, feel it in the solid musculature giving under his hands gripping Jay’s bare shoulders.
“Dick intends to offer me the suit. Soon, I think,” he says, and gets another laugh that isn’t.
“Poor Dickiebird. Poor, poor miserable little bastard. He’d do it right now, but he can’t ‘cause that would be disrespectful now, wouldn’t it?”
Bruce feels his fingers dig into Jason’s flesh; he forces them to relax, then to let go completely. “Disrespect is in the eye of the beholder. Don’t turn it on your brother. He’s done nothing to merit it.”
The shadows surrounding Jason’s mouth writhe. “Yeah, right,” he snorts. “Because Dickie always treated me like the little bro he never had. Oh wait, that’s because according to him, he didn't get one until darling Tim-may. Jesus, Bruce, your bastard is less of an asshole to me.”
“Damian,” who is unique to this universe, insofar as he is aware, “isn’t mine. I’m not entirely certain he’s a Wayne.”
He steps away, intending to find a light switch and flip it, but Jason grabs his sleeve. Bruce lets himself be held in place.
“Gonna step up?” Jay says. His eyes are white-out lenses: no pupils, no mask.
Bruce thinks he may like the red domino and jeans better than the suit he designed. He says, “No,” and doesn’t qualify it, and Jason’s hand tightens, pinching his skin.
“Fucking deserter.”
“No.” He squeezes Jason’s wrist, just enough to make him let go. Jason jerks his wrist free and his upper lip lifts, curls, something feral at bay, but not, Bruce thinks, rabid. Not yet. Before Jason can snarl at him he says, “Dick isn’t ready to accept what I have on offer. He may never be, and it’s not my place to force him. Or Tim.”
He sees the punch coming; this Jason still telegraphs his intentions if you know what it is you’re seeing. Bruce knows and he sees and he has Jason on his back on the bed, his fingers on all the necessary pressure points, one knee planted a bare inch from Jason’s scrotum.
Jason bucks against his hold and Bruce lets his knee press... “Motherfucker—” Predictable boy.
“On occasion,” he says, and presses again, and Jay’s whine is canine enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck.
“Fucking kill you—Christ." Because Bruce just bit his nipple and now he’s licking it, licking Jay, swathes of wet up his chest and chin to his mouth.
“Leave town,” Jay moans into Bruce’s mouth. “Could—we can—”
“Perhaps.” He mouths it against Jay’s throat, kisses the words onto his skin, “Or you can kill the Joker. Again.”
Jason shudders, arches up into Bruce’s hands and his mouth, into Bruce’s weight as though it’s something he needs, his burden to bear, gladly.
Bruce bites down and sucks, marking him. Spreads him open and touches him, leaving something of himself every place skin touches skin. Thin sensory layers of DNA to be sluiced off, gone in one showering.
The bruises are less transitory. Bruce leaves handfuls of them, purple-red bracelets circling Jason’s wrists. Starbursts on hipbones, impatient smears across the straining spread of Jason's inner thighs.
This isn’t Bruce’s Earth; he’s not its Batman. Dick will be. But Gotham, any Gotham, will still need Bruce Wayne whether or not he wears the cowl. It's taken Bruce a lifetime to learn that, and the boy beneath him, sweet and hot on his tongue, is further proof.
Jason shouts when he comes in Bruce’s mouth. He tastes like salt, like heat and blood and Troia’s tears.
She cried while she killed Ultraman. Her cheeks were still wet when they arrived on Apokolips.
“Gonna fuck me or stare at me?” Jason slurs. His thighs are an obscene splay. He’s fucking himself slowly with two fingers.
Bruce says, “I try not to limit myself. Make yourself hard.”
He watches Jason sweat and pant, listens to him curse him and the other Bruce and every Batman who might ever exist or ever have existed. Before Jason can come, he pulls Jason’s fingers out. “I’m going to fuck you now.”
He comes with Jason’s shouts in his head and blood from Jason’s bitten lip in his mouth. He falls asleep next to a dead man and wakes up in Gotham.
One thing, he thinks, is not like the others; which one, he’s not sure, but he is a detective. Eventually he will know.
In This Together
Steph/Damian (Batgirl/Robin) | PG | future!fic | 918 words
A/N: For
jbadgr, because she loves them too.Robin says, “Guards are switching out. We should do this now.”
Steph lowers her batnoculars (they totally are shaped like a bat) and frowns at him. “We’re supposed to wait for backup. Red said—”
“Since when do you do what Red Robin says?” He crosses his arms, and she can almost see his scowl through the lowered white-outs.
She crosses her arms right back at him; she learned from the best, baby, and Oracle’s crossing of the arms is a killer. “I don’t,” she says, “but you know, twenty of them and two of us. We could probably take them, but back-up is a good thing when you can—hey, are you looking at my chest?”
“No,” Robin says, and turns his head enough that she can see the little bit of red running up his cheekbones.
“Oh, you so were.” She grins, because she knows from teenage boy Robins, and Damian is a little snot, but he’s still a teenage boy Robin.
“Can we get back to the subject?” he snaps.
“Which is…?”
“You’ll do what Batman or Oracle or even Red Robin tells you to do before you’ll listen to your partner.”
And she opens her mouth because that’s just bullshit, and she—
Should be saying something about Batman or Tim or both of them, but—
He’s—
Her partner. Robin is her partner, and that’s been true at various times in her life, but never more than it is now.
Tim was her crush, her teacher, best friend, brother, not quite lover. He broke her heart and she ripped him a new one, and she thinks now that that’s the only way it could have gone for them.
Damian… she had no expectations there. No preconceived ideas except for the one where he was a stuck-up jerk, because he really, really was. Still is, in a lot of ways.
But it’s been five years since Bruce climbed out of the grave they collectively dug for him in their heads, and although Damian is Robin, Tim is still Bruce’s partner. Not in the everyday sense of the word, but when Batman needs backup, it’s Red Robin who gets the call.
Nightwing went back to New York and left a sucking hole in Damian’s worldview; Steph wants to punch herself in the mouth for just now getting that Batgirl is Robin’s stopgap. Or, she thinks, watching him watch her, maybe not. Because stopgaps are temporary and this—
Five years.
“Okay,” she says, crouching down next to him. “Hit me.”
He jerks his chin at the ‘nocs. “Three o’clock from the back warehouse. You tell me.”
She raises an eyebrow (Bruce and Babs) but she also raises the batnoculars and looks. “Son of a bitch. They weren’t supposed to move until tomorrow night.”
“No.”
She gives Robin mental points for neutral instead of smug, and activates her comm. “Red, what’s your ETA?”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Damn it.” She switches to Oracle’s frequency. “O, please tell me Gold’s around?”
“She’s with Nightwing. Do you want me to contact B?”
She can feel Robin staring at her from under his hood. When she says, “No, we’ve got this, Batgirl out,” he doesn’t move, but she’s pretty sure his mouth looks less sneery than normal. She collapses the batnoculars and slides them back into their pouch, glancing down at the installation as she does. “You think we can handle this?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t,” he says, and there’s her nasty, irritable little Robin-jerk-brother-whatever. Damian.
Steph laughs as quietly as she can, which is actually pretty quiet because, you know, Batgirl. “It’s your call,” she says. “Whatever, I’m up for it. Partner.” She sticks her hand out, offering and meaning it.
The slight twitch of his hood would be anyone else’s jerk of surprise. It falls slightly back from his face and she’s surprised to see that sometime within the last few minutes, he flipped his lenses.
He looks from her face to her hand. Back up to her face, and she’s starting to get nervous, but how about that, he’s actually going to—wait a minute—
His gauntlet is locked around hers. Fingers threaded together, and he’s pulling her forward and—and holy fuck-
Her eyes are open and so are his. Their mouths are barely touching, she can feel his breath, taste peppermint in the brush of his (soft, boy) lips, and they’re just sitting here staring at each other over the bridge of their mouths. Then she blinks and Damian abruptly pulls back and lets go of her, and she lands on her ass because yeah, did not see that one coming at all.
Damian is on his feet, and it’s his hand out this time. Still speechless, she grabs his forearm and he hauls her up, and she notices, not for the first but definitely for the important time, that’s he’s almost as tall as she is.
He says, shortly, “Partners. Roof?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Batgirl’s grapple is in her hand. She sees Robin shoot his line, licks her lips and tastes him: fifteen and peppermint sweet. Takes a moment to watch him fly before she shoots her own line and follows her partner. She’s grinning wide enough to split her lip the way she already knows she’s going to split it on Robin’s some day soon, which is possibly the dumbest idea she's ever had, and Jesus, she's had some dumb ideas.
These bastards aren’t going to know what hit them.