always with the Dick jokes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
irrelevant) wrote2010-09-16 08:39 am
irrelevant) wrote2010-09-16 08:39 am
Entry tags:
[fic] while the bell tolls out the wee hours (DCU)
while the bell tolls out the wee hours
Golden Age DCU | Dick Grayson | one-sided Bruce/Dick | R | ~5100 words
warnings: underage, spanking kink that isn’t really about the spanking
notes: Golden Age Bats with some later canon retcons thrown in. Some of you may be familiar with Batman #10. This fic is a riff on a story from that issue. If you are familiar with the issue, you probably know which one I mean.
Dick opens his eyes long after he’s sure he can’t keep them closed anymore.
It doesn’t really surprise him that he managed to make it this long without blinking. What you believe you can or can’t do doesn’t mean spit about what you’re capable of.
His body is capable of pretending to be asleep for hours at a time. Maybe days. It’s not always capable of the real thing. Willing himself back to sleep rarely works after half an hour, and he passed the half hour mark more than an hour ago.
That he can’t manage actual sleep on demand feels like failure, even though Bruce says it’s not. It’s not failure if you work within the – the parameters of your known capabilities.
It’s not.
He tells himself that again, keeps telling himself while he waits for his eyes to get used to a new kind of blackness. It only takes him a few blinks to focus on the window.
The small wedge of glass visible between mostly closed curtains is dark, and the moon is completely gone. In the ash tree just outside, a bird is singing robin songs.
Not a robin. It’s a mockingbird, singing stolen songs long after every robin but one has gone south for the winter. Singing them way too early in the morning for them to do anyone any good.
He could get up and throw a batarang at the tree, just hard enough to shake the bird loose, and maybe even scare it away for a while. And then maybe he could get back to sleep.
Dick bites his lip. He rubs his hand back and forth over the worn satiny coverlet, and doesn’t get up. Getting up would be a failure as well as the worst kind of lie, the kind Bruce has always warned him about.
It’s okay to lie, sometimes. Some lies are necessary and even good.
Sometimes, Robin, the truth isn’t the right shape to fit the corresponding space inside someone’s head. Sometimes there’s no space for it there at all.
The truth isn’t always right for people, Bruce has told him, but it’s the only right thing for us.
Lie to them if you have to. Never lie to yourself.
On this not quite a day, the truth fitted snugly into its matching space inside Dick’s head is that there isn’t a hint of dawn in the sky. By the time the sun comes up, he’ll have been awake at least an hour longer than he has as of right now.
The truth is, he couldn’t go back to sleep if a chorus of mourning doves lined up on his window sill and cooed him into oblivion.
Actually, that kind of racket would keep a guy with one foot in the grave awake, but even if that stupid mockingbird suddenly decided to go find a tree in the next county, the strict truth of the matter is that Dick would still be lying here with his eyes peeled like a couple of green grapes on a sultana’s supper plate.
It’s almost, but not quite, like Christmas Eve used to be. Not now – not for years, now –but back when his parents weren’t… when they were…
Then. Back then.
He remembers, he’d get maybe two hours of sleep somewhere between midnight and four, and then he’d be awake until it was time to go bounce his parents out of their rented bed and drink clove-spiced cider in a puddle of secondhand Florida sunshine while his mom handed round their few presents.
Now Christmas day is Bruce and Alfred and a stack of presents that seems like it ought to go all the way to the drawing room’s high ceiling and beyond. The night before is eggnog in front of the fire with Bruce’s arms carrying him up to bed after, but the feeling – the expectation of something wonderful in the making isn’t there.
Not on Christmas Eve or Christmas.
Today isn’t Christmas. It’s his birthday.
It’s so close to morning, he can feel dawn skulking along the baseboards, waiting to pounce. In just a few hours, Alfred will get up and start the coffee. Gradually, the smell will creep out of the kitchen to fill as much of the house as it can conquer while Alfred makes breakfast for himself. He’ll read the newspaper and eat half a grapefruit, a poached egg, and two pieces of dry toast, and then—
Dick feels his breath catch. He forces himself to start breathing normally again, making sure he doesn’t make any extra noise. Bad guys aren’t the only ones who can hear that sort of thing.
In his head, Alfred has finished washing his dishes and is laying silverware out on the morning room table. Soon the scents of blueberry crepes and fresh-squeezed orange juice will join the coffee’s onward march.
In his head, Bruce has just gotten out of bed.
Most mornings, if Dick is still in bed, he’ll listen, half asleep, while Bruce shaves and bangs around the bathroom. The toilet will flush and then the shower will go on, and Dick will go back to sleep for a few more perfect minutes, knowing that Bruce will have him out of bed by the time he needs to be.
On every other day that isn’t his birthday, he won’t lie rigid beneath his covers, waiting to hear Bruce’s steps in the hall. He won’t wait until the last minute before turning onto his side and using every trick Bruce has taught him to feign the fuzzy drowsiness he knows he’ll never feel again.
On every other day of the year, he won’t lie awake for hours like it’s Christmas Eve without the Christmas part, waiting for Bruce to open his door.
It’s that same can’t catch his breath tug in his chest, the tight clump of his stomach into a ball that can’t hold anything but excitement. Heart in my throat, Duncan McGavin said yesterday when Dick kept him from getting creamed by a stray softball, and Dick’s pretty sure what he was talking about is a lot like the old Christmas Eve feeling.
He’s even more sure that lying awake in bed before dawn on his birthday is more like turning and seeing a softball coming straight for his face than it is waking up knowing there’s spiced cider and presents in his future.
He’s not certain why he’s so sure of this. He thinks it has something to do with the sick edge riding the balled up excitement in his gut. Like his stomach doesn’t know whether to make him turn a somersault or throw up.
He swallows until he’s sure it isn’t the second one, and then he lays his hands flat, fingers spread out. If he balls them into fists he’ll just thump the bed, and then bathroom door will open and Bruce will come through it, bringing morning with him, and right now that’s more than Dick can take.
It’s not Bruce’s fault. It isn’t.
It started as a joke, a really bad one, worse even than one of Robin’s puns. Bruce had… they’d been—
In the cave, nearly a year after Bruce stood up in front of the judge and said he’d take care of Dick for as long as Dick needed him to; that first decades-long year before Bruce finally let him out on patrol.
He’d just thrown Bruce without Bruce’s cooperation for the first time ever.
Bruce was laughing up at him from the mats like he hadn’t just landed hard on his backside courtesy of Dick. There’d been only the briefest hint of surprise on Bruce’s face when he hit, but Dick’d been sure he was about to get–
Well, to get lectured good and long, most likely, but then Bruce grinned at him, his eyes sparkling like they sometimes did after he came back from patrol, full of laughter and pride.
Pride for something Dick had done. Dick had made Bruce proud of him.
He’d knelt there on the pitted surface of the mat, panting lightly, listening to the rustle of the bats overhead and the distant bubbling of Bruce’s latest experiment. The tight tangle in his chest unwound, burst through him until all he could feel was Bruce’s pride filling him to the tips of his fingers, and Bruce’s laughter, tingling on his skin.
He remembers wanting to make Bruce look like that all the time, and then just wanting Bruce to look at him like that.
He remembers remembering.
He can’t imagine the expression on his face just then, but whatever it was made Bruce sit up like one of his spring-loaded gadgets going off. Just like that, it wasn’t Bruce sitting there anymore.
They were both wearing wrestling singlets. Bruce’s cowl and cape were in the closet, but it was the Batman who said, quietly, “Dick?”
“It’s my birthday,” Dick blurted. He swallowed hard, as though he could suck back the words, make them less impulsive. Less real.
Batman’s gaze flicked away from Dick’s throat back up to his face. “I know.”
It might have been surprise that made him flinch. He couldn’t be sure. “How come you didn’t say anything earlier?”
“I wasn’t certain if you wanted me to,” Bruce said. He was creeping back into the square of Batman’s shoulders, Batman’s command voice sinking under Bruce’s weird hesitance. “I didn’t wish to trespass.”
“You’re not!” Dick said quickly. “You couldn’t.” He looked down at his hands, fisted on his thighs. “It just…”
It had never seemed so real before. It was Dick’s thirteenth birthday and his parents weren’t going to be there, just like they hadn’t been there for his twelfth. They were never going to be anywhere again.
“What do you need me to do?” Bruce asked, and Dick looked back up at him, seeing the unease on Bruce’s face, not Batman’s, and understanding something else.
Bruce would be there. For as long as Dick needed him to be. He’d promised.
Dick didn’t decide to move. His body did it for him, flinging him across the mats and wrapping his arms around Bruce as tight as they could get away with. He felt Bruce tense up, just for a second, and then Bruce’s arms went round him in return; not tightly, but as sure as sunrise and crime and the clammy damp of the cave.
“Happy birthday, Dick,” Bruce murmured against the top of his head.
Dick nodded, rubbing his cheek against the worn cotton of Bruce’s singlet and the heat of his skin. Both textures were smooth: equally pleasant, but different somehow. Dick rubbed again, testing the differences, and felt Bruce’s laughter begin anew, under his cheek.
“Up you go,” Bruce said, lifting Dick away, pulling them both to their feet. “I have patrol and you, my fine feathered friend, have unfinished schoolwork, I think?”
Dick grinned at him, bouncing a little on the balls of his bare feet. The relief gonging in his ears was making him lightheaded, weightless. He had the strangest feeling that if he bounced high enough he’d take off like Superman and never come down.
“One more round?” he asked. “Since it’s my birthday and all.”
Bruce’s eyes crinkled in at the corners. “I suppose there’s time for one more.”
“Good deal,” Dick said, cartwheeling across the mat to crouch opposite Bruce.
They squared off, each to his corner, then closed and grappled briefly before breaking each other’s hold. Dick ducked a grab, somersaulting out of reach and coming up on Bruce’s left. “So what do birthday boys get when they take down the reigning champ?”
“Oh-ho, the robin is looking to trade his red breast for a cockerel's strut,” Bruce laughed as they started circling again. “One takedown and you’re ready to take on all comers? Tell you what.” He avoided Dick’s leg-sweep narrowly, nearly catching Dick out with a similar maneuver. “Throw me again and I’ll get you your own, ah… I believe the correct term is ‘wheels’?”
Dick gulped and froze not quite long enough for Bruce to try something. He had to force himself to keep circling. Painful experience had taught him to pay attention to Bruce’s movements or he’d be down before he’d even begun.
His body moved; his eyes and most of his brain noted the positioning of Bruce’s hands and arms, the shift of his feet, but a small, separate part of his mind worked over Bruce’s words, trying to nail down his meaning.
He was talking about a cycle – had to be! Alfred had seen Dick admiring an Indian belonging to the older brother of a classmate when he picked Dick up at school last week – he must have passed the intel on to Bruce, the sneak. In this case, though, if tale-telling got Dick his own bike, he was prepared to forgive and forget.
Bruce shifted his stance, dropping his shoulder. Dick came up on his toes in instinctive response. They lunged at the same time, locking arms in the middle of the mats.
“And if I don’t?” Dick said through gritted teeth.
Bruce’s teeth flashed. “Then you’ll have to take your lumps. Since it’s your birthday and all.”
For that same frozen fraction of a second, Dick didn’t have the first idea what he meant. But then… oh then…
“Bruce!” he wailed. “That’s for kids!”
Before the echoes of his cry had a chance to die away, Bruce had taken his legs neatly out from under him. Bruce’s hands closed around his wrists, the kind of cuffs even Dick couldn’t get out of. He looked up into Bruce’s face, alight with laughter, and heard his own whimper die strangling in his throat.
Bruce just laughed harder. “Dickie, do you know,” he said between chuckles, “I think sometimes we both forget how much of a kid you are. Let’s see if we can’t remind each other.”
Dick’s world went topsy-turvy. When things stopped spinning, he was staring at the mat, lying facedown with Bruce’s thighs digging into his stomach and Bruce’s hands keeping him in place. He gave a half-hearted jerk, testing Bruce’s hold. Nothing gave except Dick’s skin.
He was going to have some amazing bruises in the morning.
“Now, how does this work, again?” Bruce said thoughtfully. “It’s different when you’re on the receiving end.”
Dick started wriggling in earnest. He wriggled and whined and writhed and generally tried to make himself impossible to hold on to. Unfortunately, Bruce didn’t seem to be having any problem holding on.
“That’s right,” he said, as though he’d recalled something important. “Count off for me, won’t you, old chum?” he said to Dick, just as his hand smacked down on Dick’s behind.
Tears started at the corners of Dick’s eyes. His breath was knocked out of him on a sharp grunt. Bruce had stronger, harder hands than anyone except for maybe Dick’s father.
“One,” said Bruce, who’d probably figured out by now that Dick wasn’t going to have enough lung space to breathe, much less count.
“Two,” he said, his hand landing as firmly as it had the first time.
Dick gasped. The hand came down again.
Somewhere above him, Bruce was still counting. Under Dick’s singlet, his abused skin prickled and glowed until he thought it must be as red as his face felt.
It hurt, he was sure of that, but beneath the smart there was a kind of tingling relief in the space between each smack.
Bruce’s hand didn’t rise right after it smacked down. It didn’t rise at all, really, more like slid away down to where Dick’s singlet ended and his leg began. It slid down and down and a little ways out, and sometime while Dick was still tingling, the whole process started all over again.
By the time Bruce said, “Ten,” Dick thought he knew what to expect. He thought he’d filled his embarrassment quota for ten years. But then Bruce’s hand landed and he felt the tingle spread to somewhere else, and for four agonizing counts he tried not to move at all because moving made everything a hundred times worse than it already was.
It wasn’t that it’d never happened before. That started during the last year he flew for the circus; it especially happened right after a show or a really good training session.
These days it happened when he trained with Bruce, but no training he knew of involved getting bent over Bruce’s lap while Bruce spanked him and things got harder and harder all over.
When Bruce finally said, “And one to grow on!” Dick was throbbing everywhere he wasn’t tingling, almost as if there were tiny glowing spiders moving under his skin, tickling him with every step they took. He ached and he throbbed and he wanted to squirm out of his skin or just to squirm around on Bruce until he stopped wanting and throbbing and aching.
The ache between his legs, pressed up against Bruce’s leg, was the worst. Partly because of the throbbing, but mostly because as much as Dick didn’t want Bruce to notice, he didn’t see how that was possible.
Bruce’s hand lifted, settling at the small of his back and rubbing gently. “Remind me to start building your resistance to physical stimuli. Strange would have a field day with you as you are.”
Dick bit his lip to keep in one more noise that would disappoint Bruce, and hoped and hoped so very hard that Bruce wouldn’t notice anything.
Which was silly, because of, um, things poking out, but Bruce just kept rubbing warm circles at the base of Dick’s spine, not saying anything. Dick knew if he looked up, Bruce would be smiling. He didn’t, mostly because his cheeks felt like they were on fire – both sets of them.
Around and round went Bruce’s fingers. Dick was starting to feel less achy and his eyelids were drooping when Bruce’s hand slid naturally from rubbing into holding. Bruce lifted him up and put an arm around him, letting Dick lean against him.
Dick eased himself back into Bruce’s support, trying to find the least sore place on his backside to put his weight on. He snuck an arm around Bruce’s waist and did his best to ignore the lingering clench of need in his gut.
The warm rush of Bruce’s breath gusted across his neck when Bruce spoke. “It’s all right, Dick. Just an involuntary physiological reaction to stimulation. It happens to all of us.”
“I’m s-sorry,” Dick mumbled, and fell into Bruce, resting his hot cheek against Bruce’s chest so he wouldn’t have to look up.
Bruce didn’t let that go on for long. He nudged with his shoulder until Dick had to lift his head, had to sit up, and Bruce’s eyes weren’t sparkling, but they were warm, which was even better.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Bruce told him. He stood, offering Dick his hand, and lead him to outer cave where the cars lived. The same black R from the suit Dick hadn’t yet officially worn stood starkly out on a motorbike painted the deep red of his armored tunic.
No harm done, nothing to be sorry for, Bruce said, and Dick believed him. Then, he believed him.
It’s been three years since then.
Dick may not have had anything to be sorry for when he was thirteen, but he’s sixteen now. Three-hundred and sixty-five days is a long time to wait for something that’ll make him sorry for the next three-hundred and sixty-five days.
Out in the ash, the mockingbird has stopped singing. Maybe it finally realized November is the wrong month for a summer bird to be in New England, and went south.
As much as he wanted it gone before, Dick wishes it would come back. His ears are ringing from listening so hard, the silence is that loud.
It used to be, he didn’t need to listen, because the second thing Bruce did after he woke up was light up. Tobacco smoke would cloud the colors of Dick’s dreams and he’d wake knowing Bruce was sitting with his one cigarette per day clamped between his teeth, reading the front page of the newspaper Alfred had laid open across the foot of his enormous bed.
Last year, Bruce threw away his pipe and cigarettes. He said smoking was a tell, and bad for not only his health, but Dick’s and Alfred’s besides.
Alfred was kind of disappointed – he’d just given Bruce a black velvet smoking jacket for his last birthday. Bruce still wears it sometimes on those rare evenings they stay in.
Dick hadn’t said anything, just frowned at the discarded tobacco pouch and chewed on his bottom lip until Bruce told him to stop chewing and spit whatever was eating him out.
“Well,” Dick had said, his reluctance drawing the word out. “I thought – isn’t that part of the lie? The one about Bruce Wayne?”
Bruce laughed and ruffled Dick’s hair. “I’ll just have to get myself a less harmful vice,” he said, his tone telling Dick that as far as Bruce was concerned, that was that.
Which it pretty much was, at least until Dick ran across several related files on Bruce’s experimental computing machine while researching barbiturates and stimulants. By the time he finished reading, he never wanted to smell tobacco smoke again, much less inhale it.
For a month afterward, he’d watched Bruce like a hawk. Nicotine, his studies informed him, was a highly addictive alkaloid found in tobacco plants, making cigarettes one of the hardest drug habits to kick. Possible side effects included confusion, insomnia, anxiety, irritability.
Confusion may have been billionaire dilettante Bruce Wayne’s normal state of being, but Batman couldn’t afford that sort of handicap. Since his judgment was impaired, it was up to Robin to pick up the slack.
Not that there was any.
The only difference Dick could detect in Bruce or Batman post-nicotine as opposed to him pre- was a slight inclination to snap. He was quicker to call Dick out over mistakes, but even then he’d catch himself, rein his reaction in before it got out of hand.
Batman’s physical control was so absolute, not even nicotine withdrawal could throw him off his game. Bruce never smoked again, and never seemed to want to.
It hadn’t taken Dick long to realize that not only had Bruce once again beat the odds, he’d been right about everything else, too: he’d ditched an easy tell.
Bruce moves like a ghost when he wants to. Without that hint of tobacco smoke, Dick has to be paying close attention to catch a whiff of him, and recently he’s stopped wearing cologne or aftershave, making him even harder to detect. He could be beside Dick’s bed right now and Dick wouldn’t—
Breathing hard, he stares up at the poster directly over the bed from eyes snapped suddenly wide. He can’t remember closing them.
He wishes he had the tiniest bit of Bruce’s control. He wishes he didn’t have to stay here, waiting for the axe to fall.
He wants the cave and his uniform, wants to wrap himself up in gaudy color, curl the shadows around him like a bat’s wing.
It would be so much easier down in the cave, with Batman’s cowl hiding Bruce’s eyes and Robin’s domino and cape shielding Dick from himself.
In the cave, in uniform, the smack of Batman’s hand against Robin’s backside could mean anything, even...
Anger?
But… no, that’s not right. Batman wouldn’t hit Robin for any of the usual reasons a guy would lay into another guy. Bruce wouldn’t lay a hand on Dick if not for a silly tradition, and Batman’s thought streams flow down channels different from Bruce’s. For Batman to strike his partner there’d have to be—
Bruce calls them extenuating circumstances.
Some kind of charade, performed for people who need lies. Performed because… because the cave has been invaded and Batman wants his enemies off guard, or—
Maybe a take in. Of friends who have to see the lie. Wonder Woman. Lantern.
Superman.
They’d see Robin, upended over Batman’s knee, bright red yellow green squirming, Batman’s gauntlet smacking down, and they’d hear Robin’s soft grunt…
The shorts’d leave marks like nobody’s business for sure, what with all the armoring. They’d probably stick around longer than handprints.
And Robin would squirm some more, make it look good. Batman’s gauntlet would slide down to where the shorts ended and Robin’s skin began and squeeze briefly, telling Robin what he couldn’t say.
Good work, Robin. Well done, my friend.
Dick bites the inside of his cheek, but the miserable keening is too much to keep completely in even though it’s too loud for Bruce’s house. He clutches handfuls of soft sheets that are not a pair of hands strong enough, big enough to support all of Gotham and Dick’s bottom at the same time, and presses himself down against the mattress as hard as he can while he shakes and shakes.
His… he… between his legs. He’s…
It’s a sob this time, because he doesn’t want this to be happening.
He doesn’t want the shock of heat that goes through him every time he tries to move.
He doesn’t want to feel his pajama pants sticking wetly to his thighs, clinging to skin so sensitive it feels like it shouldn’t be touching anything but someone else’s skin.
Eyes squeezed shut, he hangs on to the sheets because if he doesn’t, it’ll be his hands doing the touching.
Bruce says there’s nothing wrong with – that. He says most everyone does it – girls too – and if they don’t, they ought to.
Most of the time Dick agrees, but he can’t, not like this. It would be-
betrayal
Wrong of him. To.
Touch himself when he can almost feel Bruce’s hands, when he knows…
On his stomach, shoving cloud-puffy pillows away. His hands scrabble at the sheets while his hips grind down into the mattress, while he gasps for the air that’s already in his lungs, drowning in oxygen and he can’t breathe.
His fingers find the top edge of the mattress and grab on. He shoves down against the bed one more time and tears his lip open on his teeth trying to keep the noise he needs to make trapped in his throat. For all of a second, he stops breathing.
The world goes away.
It comes back like a cat that’s gone missing for a day or two, sidling in at the edges of sight until it’s noticed, then acting like it was never gone.
A drop of red hits the white sheet and spreads. Dick sucks his lip into his mouth, exploring the tear with his tongue while the blood left in his body pounds at his temples. Something immense and wet swells up behind the backs of his eyes. He’s going to throw up or cry, and he gulps and blinks and swallows because he knows he can't do either of those things.
Sometimes, he cries when he’s asleep.
He never remembers, but so many times he’s woken in Bruce’s bed, his face tight and swollen with salt tracks. He’s always tucked under the covers with Bruce sitting up next to him, book in hand, his face dark and empty within the golden halo from the bedside lamp.
If he cries now, Bruce will hear. It doesn’t matter how many pillows Dick muffles the sound with. He could crawl under the bed, bury himself inside the ten tons of clothes in his closet, and Bruce would still hear.
Breathing only as often as he needs to, he peels the blankets away and sits on the edge of the bed. His pajama top is stuck to his skin in sweaty patches. He pulls it off and wipes his lip and his nose with it.
The pants are worse. He wriggles out of them as quietly as he can and tries not to not to smell everything he’s being doing to make them as wet as they are. He tries not to smell himself as he climbs down from the bed.
He doesn’t use the bathroom he shares with Bruce. He doesn’t dare.
Instead, he dips a corner of the sheet into the glass of water Alfred always leaves on the bedside table and cleans himself up as well as he can. He dries himself with his pajama top.
Then he puts on a fresh pair of pajamas and strips the bed, shoving the damp sheets and his stained pajamas into a laundry sack and hiding it behind a pile of boxes in his too-big closet. He’ll wash them himself when Alfred has his next half-day.
Back in the room, the closet door closed safely and soundlessly behind him, he stands in the middle of the carpet, staring at his stripped bed.
He needs to go downstairs to the main linen closet and get a new set of sheets. There’s still no approaching glow from the window, but there will be soon enough. He needs to go while he can, and hope that Bruce doesn’t hear him.
All around him, on every wall, the glass protecting framed circus posters catches what little starlight is left. On the desk, Dick can see the outline of the only photo in the room.
It was taken that last, awful day, before the bottom fell out. Before Batman.
A couple with a small boy had asked if Dick and his parents would allow a photographer to take a picture of all of them together. Dick ended up holding the kid on his knee. His mother’s hand was on his shoulder when the big flash popped, almost blinding him.
He can’t see anything but the light on black shape of the picture frame in the dark, but he doesn’t need to. He knows every detail of the photo by heart. His parents’ smiles live somewhere near the hollow center of his chest.
He needs to leave the room. Now, while he’s still on his feet, because he’s tired, dead tired; the kind of tired he was sure not even fifteen minutes ago he’d never be again.
Slowly, his feet dragging, he walks over to the desk. Taking great care, he lifts the photo in its heavy silver frame and tucks the stand flat. He turns it over, laying it facedown on his history notebook.
When he straightens and lifts his head, he expects to see Bruce standing in the open bathroom doorway in his dark blue bathrobe and striped pajamas, smiling. The door is still closed, though, the mirrored tragicomedy mask Dick brought back from their Venice case dangling undisturbed from its hook by long silver ribbons.
In its surface, dawn is rising up, triumphant.
Golden Age DCU | Dick Grayson | one-sided Bruce/Dick | R | ~5100 words
warnings: underage, spanking kink that isn’t really about the spanking
notes: Golden Age Bats with some later canon retcons thrown in. Some of you may be familiar with Batman #10. This fic is a riff on a story from that issue. If you are familiar with the issue, you probably know which one I mean.
Dick opens his eyes long after he’s sure he can’t keep them closed anymore.
It doesn’t really surprise him that he managed to make it this long without blinking. What you believe you can or can’t do doesn’t mean spit about what you’re capable of.
His body is capable of pretending to be asleep for hours at a time. Maybe days. It’s not always capable of the real thing. Willing himself back to sleep rarely works after half an hour, and he passed the half hour mark more than an hour ago.
That he can’t manage actual sleep on demand feels like failure, even though Bruce says it’s not. It’s not failure if you work within the – the parameters of your known capabilities.
It’s not.
He tells himself that again, keeps telling himself while he waits for his eyes to get used to a new kind of blackness. It only takes him a few blinks to focus on the window.
The small wedge of glass visible between mostly closed curtains is dark, and the moon is completely gone. In the ash tree just outside, a bird is singing robin songs.
Not a robin. It’s a mockingbird, singing stolen songs long after every robin but one has gone south for the winter. Singing them way too early in the morning for them to do anyone any good.
He could get up and throw a batarang at the tree, just hard enough to shake the bird loose, and maybe even scare it away for a while. And then maybe he could get back to sleep.
Dick bites his lip. He rubs his hand back and forth over the worn satiny coverlet, and doesn’t get up. Getting up would be a failure as well as the worst kind of lie, the kind Bruce has always warned him about.
It’s okay to lie, sometimes. Some lies are necessary and even good.
Sometimes, Robin, the truth isn’t the right shape to fit the corresponding space inside someone’s head. Sometimes there’s no space for it there at all.
The truth isn’t always right for people, Bruce has told him, but it’s the only right thing for us.
Lie to them if you have to. Never lie to yourself.
On this not quite a day, the truth fitted snugly into its matching space inside Dick’s head is that there isn’t a hint of dawn in the sky. By the time the sun comes up, he’ll have been awake at least an hour longer than he has as of right now.
The truth is, he couldn’t go back to sleep if a chorus of mourning doves lined up on his window sill and cooed him into oblivion.
Actually, that kind of racket would keep a guy with one foot in the grave awake, but even if that stupid mockingbird suddenly decided to go find a tree in the next county, the strict truth of the matter is that Dick would still be lying here with his eyes peeled like a couple of green grapes on a sultana’s supper plate.
It’s almost, but not quite, like Christmas Eve used to be. Not now – not for years, now –but back when his parents weren’t… when they were…
Then. Back then.
He remembers, he’d get maybe two hours of sleep somewhere between midnight and four, and then he’d be awake until it was time to go bounce his parents out of their rented bed and drink clove-spiced cider in a puddle of secondhand Florida sunshine while his mom handed round their few presents.
Now Christmas day is Bruce and Alfred and a stack of presents that seems like it ought to go all the way to the drawing room’s high ceiling and beyond. The night before is eggnog in front of the fire with Bruce’s arms carrying him up to bed after, but the feeling – the expectation of something wonderful in the making isn’t there.
Not on Christmas Eve or Christmas.
Today isn’t Christmas. It’s his birthday.
It’s so close to morning, he can feel dawn skulking along the baseboards, waiting to pounce. In just a few hours, Alfred will get up and start the coffee. Gradually, the smell will creep out of the kitchen to fill as much of the house as it can conquer while Alfred makes breakfast for himself. He’ll read the newspaper and eat half a grapefruit, a poached egg, and two pieces of dry toast, and then—
Dick feels his breath catch. He forces himself to start breathing normally again, making sure he doesn’t make any extra noise. Bad guys aren’t the only ones who can hear that sort of thing.
In his head, Alfred has finished washing his dishes and is laying silverware out on the morning room table. Soon the scents of blueberry crepes and fresh-squeezed orange juice will join the coffee’s onward march.
In his head, Bruce has just gotten out of bed.
Most mornings, if Dick is still in bed, he’ll listen, half asleep, while Bruce shaves and bangs around the bathroom. The toilet will flush and then the shower will go on, and Dick will go back to sleep for a few more perfect minutes, knowing that Bruce will have him out of bed by the time he needs to be.
On every other day that isn’t his birthday, he won’t lie rigid beneath his covers, waiting to hear Bruce’s steps in the hall. He won’t wait until the last minute before turning onto his side and using every trick Bruce has taught him to feign the fuzzy drowsiness he knows he’ll never feel again.
On every other day of the year, he won’t lie awake for hours like it’s Christmas Eve without the Christmas part, waiting for Bruce to open his door.
It’s that same can’t catch his breath tug in his chest, the tight clump of his stomach into a ball that can’t hold anything but excitement. Heart in my throat, Duncan McGavin said yesterday when Dick kept him from getting creamed by a stray softball, and Dick’s pretty sure what he was talking about is a lot like the old Christmas Eve feeling.
He’s even more sure that lying awake in bed before dawn on his birthday is more like turning and seeing a softball coming straight for his face than it is waking up knowing there’s spiced cider and presents in his future.
He’s not certain why he’s so sure of this. He thinks it has something to do with the sick edge riding the balled up excitement in his gut. Like his stomach doesn’t know whether to make him turn a somersault or throw up.
He swallows until he’s sure it isn’t the second one, and then he lays his hands flat, fingers spread out. If he balls them into fists he’ll just thump the bed, and then bathroom door will open and Bruce will come through it, bringing morning with him, and right now that’s more than Dick can take.
It’s not Bruce’s fault. It isn’t.
It started as a joke, a really bad one, worse even than one of Robin’s puns. Bruce had… they’d been—
In the cave, nearly a year after Bruce stood up in front of the judge and said he’d take care of Dick for as long as Dick needed him to; that first decades-long year before Bruce finally let him out on patrol.
He’d just thrown Bruce without Bruce’s cooperation for the first time ever.
Bruce was laughing up at him from the mats like he hadn’t just landed hard on his backside courtesy of Dick. There’d been only the briefest hint of surprise on Bruce’s face when he hit, but Dick’d been sure he was about to get–
Well, to get lectured good and long, most likely, but then Bruce grinned at him, his eyes sparkling like they sometimes did after he came back from patrol, full of laughter and pride.
Pride for something Dick had done. Dick had made Bruce proud of him.
He’d knelt there on the pitted surface of the mat, panting lightly, listening to the rustle of the bats overhead and the distant bubbling of Bruce’s latest experiment. The tight tangle in his chest unwound, burst through him until all he could feel was Bruce’s pride filling him to the tips of his fingers, and Bruce’s laughter, tingling on his skin.
He remembers wanting to make Bruce look like that all the time, and then just wanting Bruce to look at him like that.
He remembers remembering.
He can’t imagine the expression on his face just then, but whatever it was made Bruce sit up like one of his spring-loaded gadgets going off. Just like that, it wasn’t Bruce sitting there anymore.
They were both wearing wrestling singlets. Bruce’s cowl and cape were in the closet, but it was the Batman who said, quietly, “Dick?”
“It’s my birthday,” Dick blurted. He swallowed hard, as though he could suck back the words, make them less impulsive. Less real.
Batman’s gaze flicked away from Dick’s throat back up to his face. “I know.”
It might have been surprise that made him flinch. He couldn’t be sure. “How come you didn’t say anything earlier?”
“I wasn’t certain if you wanted me to,” Bruce said. He was creeping back into the square of Batman’s shoulders, Batman’s command voice sinking under Bruce’s weird hesitance. “I didn’t wish to trespass.”
“You’re not!” Dick said quickly. “You couldn’t.” He looked down at his hands, fisted on his thighs. “It just…”
It had never seemed so real before. It was Dick’s thirteenth birthday and his parents weren’t going to be there, just like they hadn’t been there for his twelfth. They were never going to be anywhere again.
“What do you need me to do?” Bruce asked, and Dick looked back up at him, seeing the unease on Bruce’s face, not Batman’s, and understanding something else.
Bruce would be there. For as long as Dick needed him to be. He’d promised.
Dick didn’t decide to move. His body did it for him, flinging him across the mats and wrapping his arms around Bruce as tight as they could get away with. He felt Bruce tense up, just for a second, and then Bruce’s arms went round him in return; not tightly, but as sure as sunrise and crime and the clammy damp of the cave.
“Happy birthday, Dick,” Bruce murmured against the top of his head.
Dick nodded, rubbing his cheek against the worn cotton of Bruce’s singlet and the heat of his skin. Both textures were smooth: equally pleasant, but different somehow. Dick rubbed again, testing the differences, and felt Bruce’s laughter begin anew, under his cheek.
“Up you go,” Bruce said, lifting Dick away, pulling them both to their feet. “I have patrol and you, my fine feathered friend, have unfinished schoolwork, I think?”
Dick grinned at him, bouncing a little on the balls of his bare feet. The relief gonging in his ears was making him lightheaded, weightless. He had the strangest feeling that if he bounced high enough he’d take off like Superman and never come down.
“One more round?” he asked. “Since it’s my birthday and all.”
Bruce’s eyes crinkled in at the corners. “I suppose there’s time for one more.”
“Good deal,” Dick said, cartwheeling across the mat to crouch opposite Bruce.
They squared off, each to his corner, then closed and grappled briefly before breaking each other’s hold. Dick ducked a grab, somersaulting out of reach and coming up on Bruce’s left. “So what do birthday boys get when they take down the reigning champ?”
“Oh-ho, the robin is looking to trade his red breast for a cockerel's strut,” Bruce laughed as they started circling again. “One takedown and you’re ready to take on all comers? Tell you what.” He avoided Dick’s leg-sweep narrowly, nearly catching Dick out with a similar maneuver. “Throw me again and I’ll get you your own, ah… I believe the correct term is ‘wheels’?”
Dick gulped and froze not quite long enough for Bruce to try something. He had to force himself to keep circling. Painful experience had taught him to pay attention to Bruce’s movements or he’d be down before he’d even begun.
His body moved; his eyes and most of his brain noted the positioning of Bruce’s hands and arms, the shift of his feet, but a small, separate part of his mind worked over Bruce’s words, trying to nail down his meaning.
He was talking about a cycle – had to be! Alfred had seen Dick admiring an Indian belonging to the older brother of a classmate when he picked Dick up at school last week – he must have passed the intel on to Bruce, the sneak. In this case, though, if tale-telling got Dick his own bike, he was prepared to forgive and forget.
Bruce shifted his stance, dropping his shoulder. Dick came up on his toes in instinctive response. They lunged at the same time, locking arms in the middle of the mats.
“And if I don’t?” Dick said through gritted teeth.
Bruce’s teeth flashed. “Then you’ll have to take your lumps. Since it’s your birthday and all.”
For that same frozen fraction of a second, Dick didn’t have the first idea what he meant. But then… oh then…
“Bruce!” he wailed. “That’s for kids!”
Before the echoes of his cry had a chance to die away, Bruce had taken his legs neatly out from under him. Bruce’s hands closed around his wrists, the kind of cuffs even Dick couldn’t get out of. He looked up into Bruce’s face, alight with laughter, and heard his own whimper die strangling in his throat.
Bruce just laughed harder. “Dickie, do you know,” he said between chuckles, “I think sometimes we both forget how much of a kid you are. Let’s see if we can’t remind each other.”
Dick’s world went topsy-turvy. When things stopped spinning, he was staring at the mat, lying facedown with Bruce’s thighs digging into his stomach and Bruce’s hands keeping him in place. He gave a half-hearted jerk, testing Bruce’s hold. Nothing gave except Dick’s skin.
He was going to have some amazing bruises in the morning.
“Now, how does this work, again?” Bruce said thoughtfully. “It’s different when you’re on the receiving end.”
Dick started wriggling in earnest. He wriggled and whined and writhed and generally tried to make himself impossible to hold on to. Unfortunately, Bruce didn’t seem to be having any problem holding on.
“That’s right,” he said, as though he’d recalled something important. “Count off for me, won’t you, old chum?” he said to Dick, just as his hand smacked down on Dick’s behind.
Tears started at the corners of Dick’s eyes. His breath was knocked out of him on a sharp grunt. Bruce had stronger, harder hands than anyone except for maybe Dick’s father.
“One,” said Bruce, who’d probably figured out by now that Dick wasn’t going to have enough lung space to breathe, much less count.
“Two,” he said, his hand landing as firmly as it had the first time.
Dick gasped. The hand came down again.
Somewhere above him, Bruce was still counting. Under Dick’s singlet, his abused skin prickled and glowed until he thought it must be as red as his face felt.
It hurt, he was sure of that, but beneath the smart there was a kind of tingling relief in the space between each smack.
Bruce’s hand didn’t rise right after it smacked down. It didn’t rise at all, really, more like slid away down to where Dick’s singlet ended and his leg began. It slid down and down and a little ways out, and sometime while Dick was still tingling, the whole process started all over again.
By the time Bruce said, “Ten,” Dick thought he knew what to expect. He thought he’d filled his embarrassment quota for ten years. But then Bruce’s hand landed and he felt the tingle spread to somewhere else, and for four agonizing counts he tried not to move at all because moving made everything a hundred times worse than it already was.
It wasn’t that it’d never happened before. That started during the last year he flew for the circus; it especially happened right after a show or a really good training session.
These days it happened when he trained with Bruce, but no training he knew of involved getting bent over Bruce’s lap while Bruce spanked him and things got harder and harder all over.
When Bruce finally said, “And one to grow on!” Dick was throbbing everywhere he wasn’t tingling, almost as if there were tiny glowing spiders moving under his skin, tickling him with every step they took. He ached and he throbbed and he wanted to squirm out of his skin or just to squirm around on Bruce until he stopped wanting and throbbing and aching.
The ache between his legs, pressed up against Bruce’s leg, was the worst. Partly because of the throbbing, but mostly because as much as Dick didn’t want Bruce to notice, he didn’t see how that was possible.
Bruce’s hand lifted, settling at the small of his back and rubbing gently. “Remind me to start building your resistance to physical stimuli. Strange would have a field day with you as you are.”
Dick bit his lip to keep in one more noise that would disappoint Bruce, and hoped and hoped so very hard that Bruce wouldn’t notice anything.
Which was silly, because of, um, things poking out, but Bruce just kept rubbing warm circles at the base of Dick’s spine, not saying anything. Dick knew if he looked up, Bruce would be smiling. He didn’t, mostly because his cheeks felt like they were on fire – both sets of them.
Around and round went Bruce’s fingers. Dick was starting to feel less achy and his eyelids were drooping when Bruce’s hand slid naturally from rubbing into holding. Bruce lifted him up and put an arm around him, letting Dick lean against him.
Dick eased himself back into Bruce’s support, trying to find the least sore place on his backside to put his weight on. He snuck an arm around Bruce’s waist and did his best to ignore the lingering clench of need in his gut.
The warm rush of Bruce’s breath gusted across his neck when Bruce spoke. “It’s all right, Dick. Just an involuntary physiological reaction to stimulation. It happens to all of us.”
“I’m s-sorry,” Dick mumbled, and fell into Bruce, resting his hot cheek against Bruce’s chest so he wouldn’t have to look up.
Bruce didn’t let that go on for long. He nudged with his shoulder until Dick had to lift his head, had to sit up, and Bruce’s eyes weren’t sparkling, but they were warm, which was even better.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Bruce told him. He stood, offering Dick his hand, and lead him to outer cave where the cars lived. The same black R from the suit Dick hadn’t yet officially worn stood starkly out on a motorbike painted the deep red of his armored tunic.
No harm done, nothing to be sorry for, Bruce said, and Dick believed him. Then, he believed him.
It’s been three years since then.
Dick may not have had anything to be sorry for when he was thirteen, but he’s sixteen now. Three-hundred and sixty-five days is a long time to wait for something that’ll make him sorry for the next three-hundred and sixty-five days.
Out in the ash, the mockingbird has stopped singing. Maybe it finally realized November is the wrong month for a summer bird to be in New England, and went south.
As much as he wanted it gone before, Dick wishes it would come back. His ears are ringing from listening so hard, the silence is that loud.
It used to be, he didn’t need to listen, because the second thing Bruce did after he woke up was light up. Tobacco smoke would cloud the colors of Dick’s dreams and he’d wake knowing Bruce was sitting with his one cigarette per day clamped between his teeth, reading the front page of the newspaper Alfred had laid open across the foot of his enormous bed.
Last year, Bruce threw away his pipe and cigarettes. He said smoking was a tell, and bad for not only his health, but Dick’s and Alfred’s besides.
Alfred was kind of disappointed – he’d just given Bruce a black velvet smoking jacket for his last birthday. Bruce still wears it sometimes on those rare evenings they stay in.
Dick hadn’t said anything, just frowned at the discarded tobacco pouch and chewed on his bottom lip until Bruce told him to stop chewing and spit whatever was eating him out.
“Well,” Dick had said, his reluctance drawing the word out. “I thought – isn’t that part of the lie? The one about Bruce Wayne?”
Bruce laughed and ruffled Dick’s hair. “I’ll just have to get myself a less harmful vice,” he said, his tone telling Dick that as far as Bruce was concerned, that was that.
Which it pretty much was, at least until Dick ran across several related files on Bruce’s experimental computing machine while researching barbiturates and stimulants. By the time he finished reading, he never wanted to smell tobacco smoke again, much less inhale it.
For a month afterward, he’d watched Bruce like a hawk. Nicotine, his studies informed him, was a highly addictive alkaloid found in tobacco plants, making cigarettes one of the hardest drug habits to kick. Possible side effects included confusion, insomnia, anxiety, irritability.
Confusion may have been billionaire dilettante Bruce Wayne’s normal state of being, but Batman couldn’t afford that sort of handicap. Since his judgment was impaired, it was up to Robin to pick up the slack.
Not that there was any.
The only difference Dick could detect in Bruce or Batman post-nicotine as opposed to him pre- was a slight inclination to snap. He was quicker to call Dick out over mistakes, but even then he’d catch himself, rein his reaction in before it got out of hand.
Batman’s physical control was so absolute, not even nicotine withdrawal could throw him off his game. Bruce never smoked again, and never seemed to want to.
It hadn’t taken Dick long to realize that not only had Bruce once again beat the odds, he’d been right about everything else, too: he’d ditched an easy tell.
Bruce moves like a ghost when he wants to. Without that hint of tobacco smoke, Dick has to be paying close attention to catch a whiff of him, and recently he’s stopped wearing cologne or aftershave, making him even harder to detect. He could be beside Dick’s bed right now and Dick wouldn’t—
Breathing hard, he stares up at the poster directly over the bed from eyes snapped suddenly wide. He can’t remember closing them.
He wishes he had the tiniest bit of Bruce’s control. He wishes he didn’t have to stay here, waiting for the axe to fall.
He wants the cave and his uniform, wants to wrap himself up in gaudy color, curl the shadows around him like a bat’s wing.
It would be so much easier down in the cave, with Batman’s cowl hiding Bruce’s eyes and Robin’s domino and cape shielding Dick from himself.
In the cave, in uniform, the smack of Batman’s hand against Robin’s backside could mean anything, even...
Anger?
But… no, that’s not right. Batman wouldn’t hit Robin for any of the usual reasons a guy would lay into another guy. Bruce wouldn’t lay a hand on Dick if not for a silly tradition, and Batman’s thought streams flow down channels different from Bruce’s. For Batman to strike his partner there’d have to be—
Bruce calls them extenuating circumstances.
Some kind of charade, performed for people who need lies. Performed because… because the cave has been invaded and Batman wants his enemies off guard, or—
Maybe a take in. Of friends who have to see the lie. Wonder Woman. Lantern.
Superman.
They’d see Robin, upended over Batman’s knee, bright red yellow green squirming, Batman’s gauntlet smacking down, and they’d hear Robin’s soft grunt…
The shorts’d leave marks like nobody’s business for sure, what with all the armoring. They’d probably stick around longer than handprints.
And Robin would squirm some more, make it look good. Batman’s gauntlet would slide down to where the shorts ended and Robin’s skin began and squeeze briefly, telling Robin what he couldn’t say.
Good work, Robin. Well done, my friend.
Dick bites the inside of his cheek, but the miserable keening is too much to keep completely in even though it’s too loud for Bruce’s house. He clutches handfuls of soft sheets that are not a pair of hands strong enough, big enough to support all of Gotham and Dick’s bottom at the same time, and presses himself down against the mattress as hard as he can while he shakes and shakes.
His… he… between his legs. He’s…
It’s a sob this time, because he doesn’t want this to be happening.
He doesn’t want the shock of heat that goes through him every time he tries to move.
He doesn’t want to feel his pajama pants sticking wetly to his thighs, clinging to skin so sensitive it feels like it shouldn’t be touching anything but someone else’s skin.
Eyes squeezed shut, he hangs on to the sheets because if he doesn’t, it’ll be his hands doing the touching.
Bruce says there’s nothing wrong with – that. He says most everyone does it – girls too – and if they don’t, they ought to.
Most of the time Dick agrees, but he can’t, not like this. It would be-
betrayal
Wrong of him. To.
Touch himself when he can almost feel Bruce’s hands, when he knows…
On his stomach, shoving cloud-puffy pillows away. His hands scrabble at the sheets while his hips grind down into the mattress, while he gasps for the air that’s already in his lungs, drowning in oxygen and he can’t breathe.
His fingers find the top edge of the mattress and grab on. He shoves down against the bed one more time and tears his lip open on his teeth trying to keep the noise he needs to make trapped in his throat. For all of a second, he stops breathing.
The world goes away.
It comes back like a cat that’s gone missing for a day or two, sidling in at the edges of sight until it’s noticed, then acting like it was never gone.
A drop of red hits the white sheet and spreads. Dick sucks his lip into his mouth, exploring the tear with his tongue while the blood left in his body pounds at his temples. Something immense and wet swells up behind the backs of his eyes. He’s going to throw up or cry, and he gulps and blinks and swallows because he knows he can't do either of those things.
Sometimes, he cries when he’s asleep.
He never remembers, but so many times he’s woken in Bruce’s bed, his face tight and swollen with salt tracks. He’s always tucked under the covers with Bruce sitting up next to him, book in hand, his face dark and empty within the golden halo from the bedside lamp.
If he cries now, Bruce will hear. It doesn’t matter how many pillows Dick muffles the sound with. He could crawl under the bed, bury himself inside the ten tons of clothes in his closet, and Bruce would still hear.
Breathing only as often as he needs to, he peels the blankets away and sits on the edge of the bed. His pajama top is stuck to his skin in sweaty patches. He pulls it off and wipes his lip and his nose with it.
The pants are worse. He wriggles out of them as quietly as he can and tries not to not to smell everything he’s being doing to make them as wet as they are. He tries not to smell himself as he climbs down from the bed.
He doesn’t use the bathroom he shares with Bruce. He doesn’t dare.
Instead, he dips a corner of the sheet into the glass of water Alfred always leaves on the bedside table and cleans himself up as well as he can. He dries himself with his pajama top.
Then he puts on a fresh pair of pajamas and strips the bed, shoving the damp sheets and his stained pajamas into a laundry sack and hiding it behind a pile of boxes in his too-big closet. He’ll wash them himself when Alfred has his next half-day.
Back in the room, the closet door closed safely and soundlessly behind him, he stands in the middle of the carpet, staring at his stripped bed.
He needs to go downstairs to the main linen closet and get a new set of sheets. There’s still no approaching glow from the window, but there will be soon enough. He needs to go while he can, and hope that Bruce doesn’t hear him.
All around him, on every wall, the glass protecting framed circus posters catches what little starlight is left. On the desk, Dick can see the outline of the only photo in the room.
It was taken that last, awful day, before the bottom fell out. Before Batman.
A couple with a small boy had asked if Dick and his parents would allow a photographer to take a picture of all of them together. Dick ended up holding the kid on his knee. His mother’s hand was on his shoulder when the big flash popped, almost blinding him.
He can’t see anything but the light on black shape of the picture frame in the dark, but he doesn’t need to. He knows every detail of the photo by heart. His parents’ smiles live somewhere near the hollow center of his chest.
He needs to leave the room. Now, while he’s still on his feet, because he’s tired, dead tired; the kind of tired he was sure not even fifteen minutes ago he’d never be again.
Slowly, his feet dragging, he walks over to the desk. Taking great care, he lifts the photo in its heavy silver frame and tucks the stand flat. He turns it over, laying it facedown on his history notebook.
When he straightens and lifts his head, he expects to see Bruce standing in the open bathroom doorway in his dark blue bathrobe and striped pajamas, smiling. The door is still closed, though, the mirrored tragicomedy mask Dick brought back from their Venice case dangling undisturbed from its hook by long silver ribbons.
In its surface, dawn is rising up, triumphant.
no subject
The truth isn’t always right for people, Bruce has told him, but it’s the only right thing for us.
God, the distinction between "us" and "people" is creepy but also terrifically accurate.
It’s that same can’t catch his breath tug in his chest,
I so admire the straightforward-yet-original twist you have with physical (as well as emotional) descriptions.
that first decades-long year
I'm not sure if this was deliberate, but I love how the description works as an emotional one for Dick *and* a meta-commentary for the reader.
He remembers wanting to make Bruce look like that all the time, and then just wanting Bruce to look at him like that.
He remembers remembering.
The *rhythm* here is just phenomenal, slightly stammering and so intense, and the content is even more...more.
Nothing gave except Dick’s skin.
Beautiful. In an ouchy-gorgeous way.
beneath the smart there was a kind of tingling relief in the space between each smack.
This is such a great way of capturing the need that I'm aghast.
He ached and he throbbed and he wanted to squirm out of his skin or just to squirm around on Bruce until he stopped wanting and throbbing and aching.
And I really love how he never names what's going on but feels it all the more intensely. So well-done.
He wants the cave and his uniform, wants to wrap himself up in gaudy color, curl the shadows around him like a bat’s wing.
!!!
(I just want to memorize that sentence; it's beautiful and so insightful.)
Batman’s cowl hiding Bruce’s eyes and Robin’s domino and cape shielding Dick from himself
...as is this one. Whoa.
The world goes away.
It comes back like a cat that’s gone missing for a day or two, sidling in at the edges of sight until it’s noticed, then acting like it was never gone.
This passage is amazing, too, with its *fitness* and accuracy and everything it manages to do so simply.
Bravo, dude. This is stunning.