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Dick moved like smoke through the broken window, landing without a sound on the catwalk above the warehouse floor. The air inside was stale—motor oil, rust, and mold. One breath and he knew no one had been here in at least a week. That tracked.
Below, the server tower blinked with lazy indifference. He scanned for tripwires. Heat sensors. Nothing serious. Low-level gang op, B-team tech. This wouldn’t take long.
He dropped down, the metal groaning under his weight, but only just. One foot behind the other. Routine.
And then—
Movement.
Off to the side, crouched behind a crate, a flicker of red. Short. Slim. Bright domino mask.
Dick didn’t pause, didn’t slow. He kept walking, because he knew what it was.
Jason. Or at least, the version of Jason his mind had decided to drag up tonight. Robin-era Jason. Thirteen and cocky. Bird-boned and fire-eyed. Still all edge, not yet firepower.
Dick didn’t look again. Didn’t need to.
Jason was a goddamn linebacker now. Six foot, built like a tank, voice like gravel and bourbon. That kid in the crate didn’t exist anymore. Hadn’t for years.
And at least—thankfully—it wasn’t talking.
He reached the server, plugged in the drive, and kept his back to the hallucination. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Complete. Pull and go.
Dick didn’t let himself glance back until he was on the roof again, wind in his hair, Gotham’s rot in his lungs.
He didn’t see the hallucination disappear. He never did. It never left with a goodbye or a fade-out. It just stopped. Like flipping a switch. One second it was there—watching, judging—and the next it wasn’t.
The city blurred beneath him as he swung from rooftop to rooftop. His grip was sure, but his head buzzed. The wind felt sharp tonight, like it was peeling him open one layer at a time.
He was two blocks out from the Narrows when the voice hit, smooth and venomous.
"How can you live with yourself after letting me die?"
Dick’s breath caught in his throat, but he didn’t miss a beat. Grapple line. Anchor. Swing. Land.
No flinch. No acknowledgment. He’d been through this before. It was a trick of the brain, chemicals or stress or both.
Still, it dug under his skin like barbed wire.
“You knew the Joker was escalating. You knew and you still let me go out there alone.”
Dick clenched his jaw. The hallucination was picking a new angle this time. Less regret, more accusation. Its voice was sharper than usual—colder. Like Jason, but scrubbed clean of all the things that made him human.
He didn’t look. He didn’t have to. He could feel the figure keeping pace beside him, as if perched on the ledges too, flickering in and out of the corners of his vision.
“Did you hate me that much?”
Dick's landing faltered—just slightly. Not enough to fall. Not enough to notice, unless you were watching closely.
“You were supposed to be my brother. But you bailed. You ran off to play Nightwing and left me to fill the cowl-shaped hole in Bruce’s chest.”
He wanted to yell that it wasn’t true. That he had fought to keep Jason out of the field, that he had warned Bruce that Jason needed more time. But hallucinations didn’t care about truth. They just knew where it hurt.
His gut twisted.
He powered forward anyway. Faster. Like he could outpace it.
The hallucination stayed with him, voice right at his ear now.
“You only started caring after I died. That’s when I became real to you, huh? A tragic headline. A lesson learned. A gravestone to cry over when the cameras were off.”
Dick swallowed hard. His throat was dry. The wind cut at his eyes. He told himself it was just the cold.
“What did it feel like, Dick?” the voice asked, suddenly softer. More intimate. “When you saw my body? When you realized you couldn’t save me?”
He landed on the final rooftop before the manor grounds, breath catching as the question echoed in his head. It wasn’t new. It had just never been so direct .
His voice stayed silent. His body stayed moving.
But his mind—the part of him that remembered every cracked bone, every report from the explosion, every missed call and ignored instinct— that part screamed.
He hit the tree line like a shot, darting through the brush toward the hidden entrance to the cave.
By the time the steel doors hissed open and the cool, artificial light of the Batcave hit his face, Dick’s shoulders were drawn so tight they ached. His eyes burned. Maybe from the wind. Maybe from something else.
The cave smelled like gun oil and clean metal. Familiar. Sterile. Safe, technically—but not comfortable. The cold floodlights bleached the shadows out of his suit, the silence broken only by the low hum of machines and the rhythmic tapping of Tim’s fingers on the keyboard.
He dropped from the entrance platform and landed with practiced ease, knees bending, boots hitting the floor with a soft thud . He rolled his neck, once each way. Trying to shake it off. Trying not to think about voices that weren’t real and a face that hadn’t aged.
He was halfway to the gear lockers when Tim’s voice floated over, casual but focused. “Wing, how’d it go?”
Dick pasted on a smile without thinking. Reflex. “Great. Got the information we needed.”
And maybe if he’d kept walking, that would’ve been it. But Damian was already striding toward him, brows pinched, cape swishing behind him with more drama than necessary.
He stopped inches away, arms crossed. “Did the new gas mask work?”
Dick blinked at him. “Why would I have used a gas mask?”
The shift was immediate.
It was like someone flipped a switch in the room.
Every head turned.
Tim stopped typing. Bruce, who’d been silently looming by the med bay, straightened. Jason, leaning near the bikes, snapped his head up like a wolf catching scent.
Dick swore they all stared at him like he’d just said, “Hey, I took a joyride in Scarecrow’s toxin stash, that’s normal, right?”
Jason was the first to move.
He didn’t bark or curse. Just walked over, fast and quiet. His eyes were locked on Dick like he was trying to solve a riddle that didn’t want to be solved. His expression wasn’t angry—it was concerned . Sharp. Focused.
Before Dick could take a step back, Jason’s hands were on his face. Gentle, but firm.
“Look at me,” Jason said. Not a command. Just quiet, grounded instruction.
Dick let him. He didn’t fight it.
Jason turned his head to one side, then the other. Checked his pupils. Tracked his eye movement. Touched under his jaw like he was feeling for a pulse. The contact should’ve felt weird—it was Jason —but it didn’t. It felt like something between a battlefield check and a brother’s worry.
Jason’s brow furrowed deeper. “Because there was a shit ton of leftover fear toxin in that building,” he said finally, voice controlled and low. “You didn’t smell it?”
“I mean…” Dick hesitated, trying to recall. “There was a chemical smell. I thought it was just oil or rust.” He blinked. “Oh. Is that why the hallucinations were worse this time?”
The silence was instant and heavy.
It didn’t settle—it hit .
Jason’s hands froze on either side of his face.
Bruce stepped forward from the shadows, cape brushing the floor behind him. Full Bat-mode. Unreadable face. But Dick could feel the tension rolling off him like heat off pavement.
Tim slowly pulled his hands away from the keyboard, back going stiff. Already working the angles, already pulling up case notes in his head.
And Dick… yeah. Maybe he should’ve kept that last thought in his mouth.
Jason’s hands didn’t drop. If anything, they tightened just slightly against his jaw—fingers twitching like he was resisting the urge to grab Dick by the shoulders and shake some damn sense into him.
“You have hallucinations often?” Jason asked, voice low, too still.
Dick winced, forcing a smile that didn’t come close to reaching his eyes. “Only once in a blue moon.”
His voice was light. Too light. Like if he didn’t treat it seriously, maybe no one else would either. But the silence that followed told him the room wasn’t buying it.
Especially not Bruce.
“You had hallucinations,” Bruce said, his voice sharp and cutting, “and didn’t tell any of us?”
It cracked like a whip across the cavern.
Oh no. Here we go.
Dick turned slowly, trying to keep his shoulders relaxed even though every muscle was wound tight. “We weren’t talking when they started,” he said, careful not to raise his voice. “Didn’t think it was a big enough deal to call about.”
Bruce stepped forward, boots heavy against the concrete floor. “When did they start?” he asked, tone flat—but something in his posture gave him away. The tension in his jaw. The clenched fists at his sides. “Why didn’t you tell me when we were talking again?”
Dick sighed, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. He could still feel Jason’s eyes on him, tracking every micro-expression like a threat assessment.
“Not long after Jason died,” he said finally, the words stiff in his throat. “And I knew how to deal with it by the time we talked again.”
Bruce didn’t respond. He just stared.
But Tim did. He’d been quiet, half-hidden behind the glow of the console, but now he looked up, eyes sharp with thought. He mumbled something under his breath—formulas, maybe. Psychological triggers. Fear toxin residue ratios. Then, louder:
“If it started shortly after Jason died… what are your hallucinations of?”
Dick froze.
Every instinct screamed don’t answer . Don't drop that weight into the room. Don't give guilt a face and a name.
He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He couldn’t look at anyone. He stared at the floor. At his boots. At a scuff on the edge of the platform.
And then—quiet as a breath—he felt it.
A small, sudden pressure against his side.
Damian.
The kid had wedged himself right up next to him, arms wrapped tight around his waist like a vice. His head tucked under Dick’s arm, face hidden in the folds of his suit. His grip was fierce, like he could physically hold Dick together if he just held on hard enough.
“You don’t have to deal with it alone, imbecile,” Damian mumbled into his ribs, voice muffled and full of conviction.
Dick’s chest cracked open a little.
He smiled faintly, one hand coming down to rest against Damian’s back. “I taught you that.”
Damian didn’t respond, just made a sound that was somewhere between a grunt and a sigh. But he didn’t move either.
And Dick—he couldn’t lie anymore.
He couldn’t keep pretending this didn’t matter.
He drew in a breath. Let it out slowly. “I saw Jason.”
The effect was instant.
Jason inhaled sharply, the kind of breath that hit like a punch. It came out ragged, almost a gasp, and this time he didn’t bother hiding it. His hands dropped from Dick’s face like he’d been burned.
Tim looked up, jaw tensing slightly. Still straddling that impossible line between concern and analysis, but the look in his eyes had softened. “Did you continue to have hallucinations of him after he came back?”
Dick nodded, once. Small. Almost ashamed. “Stayed the same,” he said. “Only difference is… now he’s older.”
Jason flinched.
His shoulders pulled in like he’d been struck, and for a second he looked younger—like the weight of everything he carried had doubled in an instant.
His voice, when it came, was barely audible. Rough. Broken.
“I’m sorry, Wing.”
And Dick’s heart… it clenched hard.
It twisted low in his chest, hot and sharp, like guilt had hooked its fingers inside him and yanked. This— this exact thing—was what he’d tried so hard to avoid. Not the questions, not the confrontation. But the way Jason looked now. Like someone had carved him open and left nothing but blame behind.
The voice Jason used wasn’t angry. It was small. Quiet.
And Dick couldn’t take it. Couldn’t take the weight in those words. The way Jason said sorry like it was something he owed just for existing.
“It’s not your fault,” Dick said, firmer this time. He met Jason’s eyes, didn’t look away. “If anything, I’m to blame.”
Jason didn’t give him a chance to spiral. He closed the space between them and wrapped his arms around Dick in a hug that left no room for protest.
There was no hesitation in it. Just force and steadiness. The kind of hug you give someone who’s drowning.
Dick stiffened, startled, but only for a second. Then he let himself lean into it, shoulders dropping as he exhaled into the contact.
Jason’s voice was low, buried somewhere near his ear. “Shut up, dickhead.”
Dick huffed a laugh. Watery. Real.
Damian, still pressed to his side, got caught in the hug too—trapped between both of them. He didn’t move. Didn’t protest. Just stayed there, arms still looped around Dick’s ribs, like he’d decided that was where he was staying and no one was going to change his mind.
And then, from across the cave, Tim finished typing something with a sharp clack . He stood from the computer and walked over to Bruce without a word. Grabbed him by the arm.
Bruce looked like he was about to speak—mouth opening, brow drawn in that classic Bat-glare—but Tim didn’t let him. He just pulled.
And somehow, without much resistance at all, Bruce let himself be led into the mess of it.
He wasn’t the first to hug. But he was the one who completed the circle. A large, steady presence at their backs. One of his hands came up to rest lightly on the back of Dick’s head, the other settling over Jason’s shoulder like an anchor.
No one said anything for a while.
The Batcave—usually humming with machines and alerts and mission data—was silent. No alarms. No blinking screens. Just the soft shuffle of movement and the quiet, collective breathing of a group that didn’t say family out loud. But this… this was what it looked like.
No one let go.
Not for a long time.
There’d be questions later. A breakdown of symptoms. A medical scan. Tim would want full reports. Bruce would want a plan, a schedule, something actionable. Jason would worry quietly and hover even when Dick told him not to. Damian would pretend like it never happened—except for the fact he wouldn’t leave Dick’s side for the rest of the night.
But for now?
They just held on.
And it was enough.