Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Dick wakes up in the care of a local couple on the edge of the Rub' al Khali, he took a day and a half to make up his mind. 

Not about the baby. That choice was made long before he'd passed out, a parched lump of meat left to shrink away and crumble to nothing in the desert with that small bundle of hope cradled in his arms. The little girl who had survived her first ten days of life in a burning wasteland of sand and sky didn't belong to Spyral, ARGUS, Midnighter, or even him, anymore than the moon could belong to one man's lover, lassoed down to Earth for only their eyes to admire.

She was free. He wasn't. 

Dick spent the better part of the afternoon and evening floating in and out of consciousness, the light caress of a damp cloth pressed to his face and neck like a single bucket of water trying to douse an entire forest fire. He must have vomited twice because he passingly noted the sour taste of stomach acid in his mouth with nothing to digest but the back of his own throat. Despite failing to form a single straight thought since his first waking, he had a sense of urgency as if he had somehow left the stove on back in his cramped apartment in Bludhaven and it made him more anxious to realize that Bludhaven was gone. Gotham was gone. His parents fell without a net. His little brother was dead. Nightwing was dead.

The ghosts of his past and the monster on the other side of the edge left his heart racing all through the night.

"Shirb."

Dick took the glass offered to him with his stiff fingers and managed to swallow three miraculous gulps of liquid with the help of his caretaker's steadying hands. 

After several more short sips of fluids throughout the morning, Dick was feeling more alive than he had any right to be in months. There was a funeral and a grave back in Gotham that said otherwise and he was feeling utterly sick with himself for having left behind two companions in the desert on his quest to save one child's life, never mind the fact that his conscience kept telling him that he was going back for them, that he wasn't too late. Dick was determined to make it so, but he couldn't help but feel the shadow of doubt, lingering heavy on his chest as he lay on the hard tablet of clay they called a bed. 

By noon, Dick managed to throw himself off the cot and lay in a heap of limbs on the floor, like a marionette with all his strings cut, eaten away by acid. Then his addled brain thought up a ridiculous idea as he lay there contemplating on the floor; his Hypnos implants were fried, the nanobots on his raw skin were fried, his status must be listed as MIA on Spyral's servers by now, and he had missed his check-in with Mr. Malone by who knows how many days now. He could run. They had no use for hanging leverage over a dead man's body. He wasn't a Flying Grayson, he wasn't Robin, he wasn't Nightwing, and now... could he bring himself to leave Dick Grayson behind? The crumpled man turned his head to the makeshift crib sitting on the other side of the room.

"What do you think, darling?" Dick rasped weakly, his tongue feeling thick and clumsy in his mouth. "Is Dick Grayson still worth something to this world? Or am I just another washed-up, one-hit wonder?"

No answer. Dick hadn't been expecting one, given the stupidity spilling from his chapped lips. Meal times were usually followed by nap times, so Dick wasn't really surprised the baby was giving him the cold shoulder, too tired to answer his long-suffering questions that he already knew the answers to. 

Because even if his act was stale, if the world was throwing rocks at him and the monster moaning boooo! just over his shoulder, Dick would always laugh his lively laugh and snark back with all his might. Come on, big boy! I'm still waiting for you!

Dick hummed in halfhearted agreement to the ceiling, "You're right, kid, I'm an idiot. But I'm at the end of my rope here. You understand, right? I just— I just wanna go home. Please, let me go home..."

No answer. 

"...Please..."

"Who would miss me, if Dick Grayson had never been born?"

Bright beams of light shone through the curtains from the late afternoon sun. Dick's body was draped over a wide chair with one, hobbled leg half an inch shorter than the other three, worn down to its splinters underneath as if it had been bearing the weight of the seat for far longer than the others. Which was the strangest thing, since the chair was quite nice and you would think all four stakes should have been nailed in at the same time unless the sitter had a habit for one leg over the other. Or maybe the parts all came from different trees. A sycamore, juniper, acacia maybe if he was that unlucky—

"Waa—Waaaaaaaah!" The baby wailed a loud string of discontent and impatience at Dick. 

Dick sluggishly reached an arm over the rail of the crib and brushed the baby's soft cheeks with his limp fingers. "Shhhhh, it's okay," he hushed. "I'm sorry, I was rambling, my bad. Shhhhh, good girl... good girl..."

At some point, the husband and wife dropped in to check on the baby and tend to their overgrown charge, but when they tried to rub some kind of salve onto his skin, Dick refused with such vehemence that the new mother left the room in a huff. The man placed a gentle hand on his blistering shoulder and looked at him in honest understanding, and Dick felt another wave of guilt hit him like a slap to the face. 

What the hell was he thinking? If Dick Grayson had never been born. Everyone likes to imagine that they've made a lasting mark in the lives of the people they encounter, that their existence can be validated by the stamp of approval of others. Good or bad, the nature of the influence never mattered so much as the fact that someone cared or loathed enough to remember. That moral and immoral high you get when someone seeks your company; that giddy bubbling in your chest when someone takes a moment out of their schedule to include you, to think about you, because of something you did; it was like an addiction with social benefits and a lot more self-satisfaction, a drug that all humans craved. 

Dick wanted to believe that he didn't need to justify his worth with that kind of egoism. He loved his friends, his family, missed them so achingly much despite whether or not they loved him back, in spite of the mistakes he made that hurt them and the rejection he deserved because of it. 

And if any of the people whose lives he touched, who colored his life in turn, decided to forget about him—well, maybe he was okay with that. Nothing would change even if they did; Dick would still end up where he needed to be, doing what he needed to do for all the precious things he left behind, up on the big top platform. 

He was a safety net.

The baby started babbling when a puff of hot air breezed in from the balcony, sending peaceful ripples through the purple curtain over her head and the velvet cloth shimmered its interwoven sequins in comfort. Dick leaned back on his chair, hearing the creaks of the old wood, but feeling safe in the knowledge that the weathered pieces were still holding firm and probably would for many years to come. He could imagine it, a little girl sitting in this chair, poking her hands through the bars of the crib to touch her younger sibling's soft palms.

The man—because that's what he was, not a hero, or a spy, at least not right now—closed his eyes and quietly released the breath he had been holding on to since dawn.

"Don't look at me like that. I thought you agreed with me on this."

The sky outside was a burst of fiery red, bleeding up into the deep, darkness of night overhead, hues of blue speckled by stars like a brocade of lapis lazuli slowly creeping towards the oval sun on the dust-clouded horizon. With lethargic movements, Dick had removed the cotton shirt and loose trousers given to him by the kind couple, tugging on his beaten runners and frayed combats in the process. His fingers slipped over the belts multiple times and Dick cursed his usually unwavering hands at their sloppiness.

The baby's whines grew more distressed as she stared at him between the poles of her bed, her limbs jerking and squirming indignantly and Dick hobbled over to the crib to reassure her again. Both mother and father were out at the moment; the wife was outside herding their camels back into the stables and the husband would be returning soon from a trip to the nearest city for a doctor in Najran. 

"Hold on, what's this?" Dick gasped in mock horror as he teasingly tickled at one kicking foot. "Ah, I see, you were crossing your toes! Sneaky little she-devil. You're too young to know that trick already."

He was rewarded by gurgles of laughter like the trilling chirps of robins that used to nest in the tree by his bedroom window at Wayne manor, or even the ones that lived outside his quarters back at St. Hadrian's. And suddenly, the image of his mother and father came to mind so strong, Dick felt his stomach flip as if those rocks falling on him in his fevered dreams had actually managed to knock him over the edge. He hadn't felt so lost and helpless in so long that the memory swallowed him up whole, unguarded in the moment. He was five years old and had just learned how to unlock the hatch at the top of the ladder in their modest trailer. Pushing his head up through the open trapdoor, his body tingling with excitement and keen on adventure waiting on the other side, the first thing Dick had seen was a ventilation ridge like another miniature house sitting atop their roof. And beneath the small alcove that the ridge provided, two robins stood amongst a pile of twigs and grass stalks, fretting over their work and molding it into some semblance of organization. Dick had wanted to touch them, maybe feed them like the doves they trained for the magic show, but before he could even slip out of the hatch, he felt strong hands gently pulling him back and then his father was carrying him down the ladder back into the living room of their trailer home.

What on earth were you doing up there, Dickie?

Rather than feel ashamed for doing something against the rules, Dick had ignored his parents' inquiring gazes and told them he wanted to help the birds living on their roof. His father squeezed his shoulders warmly and his mother knelt in front of him with a gentle smile on her face.

That's very sweet of you, dear. But, they can't stay with us. The circus will be on the road again in a few days and if they lay any eggs, it would be terrible if the mommy and daddy bird came back to find that their home and baby are gone.

Dick had nodded his head swiftly, eager to show that he understood. He told them the baby bird would miss its parents too if they never came back and his mother had kissed his nose, his father planting one on his forehead, before they left the trailer together to eat dinner with the rest of the circus troupe.

Dick winced when he pulled on his tattered gloves and used one knuckle to rub away the wet heat building up behind his eyes. The gloves were stiff and darned through at the heels and fingertips, still caked in sweat and blood from his blistered, broken skin, but the poor feeling crawling out of his shabby clothes and into his flesh shook out the remnants of peace and comfort he'd gathered in the short time he had spent in this humble abode, and Dick let it shake him back to reality. 

"Gaaa—aaakaaa—koo," the baby cooed, still staring and worriedly shaking her limbs at Dick.

"I'm all right," Dick assured her, assured himself. "I'm here. I'm okay."

Once again shirtless, donning the rags of his uniform and carrying no trace of treatment or evidence of life on him, Dick hopped on to the balcony rail. He waved one last goodbye to his eleven-day-old charge.

"Have a wonderful life, little robin."

The man who had brought a miracle to the loving family living at the edge of the desert, fled from that oasis as suddenly as he had appeared.

In the dying light of dusk, Dick Grayson trudged back into the rolling dunes and disappeared into the night, his footprints tumbling away with the scorching wind.

Agent 37 was found collapsed twenty miles away from the nearest civilization, twenty-four hours later.