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Published:
2025-05-31
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Summary:

Depressed and nostalgic is a bad combination on one of the planet’s most lethal men.

OR

Based on IzzyMRDB's response to a comment on their fic: "Wings of a Fledgling: Young Just Us"
"Nightwing can and would miss the entire point, and I feel like he would go "hey, this is a safe space, is someone forcing you to be a hero? I promise you that you don't, I'll take that pressure off your shoulders" and if Jason asked him to kill the Joker he would go "if that's what it takes for you to stop, aight"

Notes:

Izzy that comment has sat with me for literal years now. I've been through tons of ups and downs since I was last regularly able to comment on your fics but I'm getting through it and have even started to write again. It's not much, but this one is inspired by you. Thanks again for writing, posting and chatting with me in your comments!

-
This is the total opposite, and spiritual sibling, of Crash Out Cutches! We are disregarding the timeline effects on Dick and instead playing around more freely sand box style~

Which is to say, Dick is a lot more chill than he should be in addition to having the free time available to do all of, you know, this.

Let’s say the most predominate change is that Blockbuster’s mother did NOT die in traffic, so nothing out of the usual is really going down in Bludhaven (…yet ;) ). Also Jason is drawn the way they draw him more often now, i.e. he LOOKS HIS AGE.

{{Extra thanks to Kyraliah who encouraged me to write again.}}

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Dick reads Bruce’s files on the Red Hood.

It’s not hard, it’s not even hacking. But still, no one would be amused, or impressed, at his being nosy. Especially not after the guy leaves a duffle bag of severed heads for Batman to find.

Dick watches the videos and reads the profile and sees an angry, lethal, scared… kid.

There’s a teenager behind that mask. In the taffy pulled gait and in the way the boy forgets to duck under low hanging shop signs and tree branches. How he seems surprised as people flinch back from him, even through all the bluster and barking.

Dick is achingly reminded of Raven, flinching at her own shadow at times. Garfield, BB, puffing himself up, verbally and physically, at every chance to cover up just how damn scared and alone he felt.

Tim, the first time the kid broke a bone on an a larger opponent and froze as he saw them burst into tear filled screams of pain.

(Reminded of Jason, shaking in Dick’s apartment after an argument with Bruce. Jason, after breaking Gar’s nose in training and flinching for a hit that wasn’t coming. Jason, caught standing in front of the Tower fridge at night, looking for a snack he was beyond encouraged to eat. (Jason, in his torn Robin suit hovering in the corner of his eye. Jason beaten blue and bloody and dead because a pedophile had political connections, because a psychopath killed him, because his mother sold him out, because Bruce made the wrong call.))

Bruce, Dick decides, is handling this wrong. He’s seeing the symptoms and not worrying about the cause. Its not exact, but close enough to an old argument between the two of them over Gotham. Well worn and the both of them worn down.

(And, honestly, what had he wanted with those heads, anyway?)(Heads were gross. They leaked, rotted, smelled. Hands were easier to confirm ID and more easily preserved. ...and if that whole thought process wasn't a reason alone to try and get the kid out of this life he didn't know what was.) 

Dick knows scared kids, is the thing. He doesn’t like to see them as vigilantes to begin with, never mind whatever all this… arms-trading, drug-dealing, white-knight pimping seems to be.

But just like his other kids, just like him, what a curse, there’s not any stopping him.

Slow him down, maybe. Redirect him, absolutely. Nonnegotiable that part.

Seriously, what is the kid even up to? He’s all over the place and stepping on more toes than Dick cares to count.

That’s a lie. He knows.

Can’t help himself.

His apartment floor is invisible again. Carpeted in a cyclone of events and places and people. Black Mask is about three more deaths from noticing someone’s in his turf. The Penguin already knows but Cobblepott is old now. Was old when Dick was running around knocking off his bowler hat and pantsing him in his own club.

The kid is grabbing at everything he can reach and stalking the ten blocks of down town Gotham that make up the Alley like a raggedy eared kitten that’s just realized it’s the new Tom.

(Stars and sun, he missed Selina. He should try and drop in on her next time. Maybe she’d take in the stray for him. Theft was better than murder, right?)

But then, all that meant was it was time to quit the Batman side of things and start the difficult bit.

(He lets himself flop backwards, papers flying, and considers who’d be least irritating if he ends up with a bullet hole in him before all this is done.)(He stops after a moment. The list of who’s alive and not his junior is so short these days.)

Jumpy, is Dick’s lasting impression.

This Red Hood, still a crap name, is about a as expected.

The voice modulator was a surprise, but not a big one. Tone tinny but familiar. A few growled orders later at some goons who have not clocked that the boy isn't a day over eighteen if that, and he’s snuffing a laugh behind his teeth.

Its Batman.

The kid has programmed it to dip into the same hoarse register as Bruce’s distressed vocal-chords. He’s gonna have to get him to say a few lines on comms some day. Ideally just after Bruce barks them himself.

But he’s ahead of himself again.

The boy is jumpy with a capital 'J'. Paranoid, understandable given he’s scrambled to the top of a cesspit of humanity by means of sheer violence, and with a respectable reaction time.

He looks up too. A learned skill, not a natural one.

Not even the way most Gotham kids watch the skyline for glimpses of Batman and Robin. Red’s got a vertical twitch, like someone used to land on him from above a lot and he never learned to stop looking for them. (Its inconvenient. Turns his stake out plans of lounging around in the nice rafters into a more normal recon.)

It means approaching is going to be a pain.

Still, Dick thinks as he rolls along a steel beam to keep himself out of view, better to do it now.

He’s a performer, after all. He knows a set of warm up acts when he sees them. Let this kid get enough momentum and he’ll go from problematic to an actual problem.

And Gotham has enough of both.

Well, he won’t be fishing lead out of anywhere but it was close.

Worth it, though. Answered several questions Bruce had left out of the profile and that the soundless footage couldn’t provide.

League training, but not much of it. A few years or crash courses at most. It stuck out in his basic forms though.

(Or maybe it was just that it was the basis for Dick’s own forms as well and like recognized like. Bruce had learned on bent knees from Ra’s al Ghul himself after all. …They’d kept most of it out of Jason’s training. Tim was only now learning it to better counter most because they had Cass popping in and out of the cave and there was no stopping those two from creating mischief if an easier goal wasn’t presented.)

So not a mob kid or a mobsters kid looking to get some sort of revenge on Black Mask.

Not a Joker fanboy either. That ricochet shot was a nasty little trick, he was almost impressed. Not bad at guessing how Nightwing liked to dodge either. That helmet might have some sort of predictive software running, which could turn into a crutch or a weakness if Red wasn’t careful. (It was also just straight up bait for Mad Hatter, but that was an issue for another time.)

But despite the League training and software coding and crack shooting, Red was a local.

…It wasn’t impossible. He’d all but tripped over one of Talia’s trafficking camps when he was eleven. They’d shut it down, eventually, but it wouldn’t shock him if Bruce had missed more setting up shop after he… left.

There was no mistaking that accent, even through the modulator. Or his familiarity with the Alley and sections of Gotham proper.

Red was furious though. And thoroughly disillusioned with Batman and Robin. Had emptied an entire clip just at the sight of him and, hilariously, had cut his own helmet’s speakers off twice while shouting.

He was pretty sure he recognized some lines from Bruce’s favorite old dramas and Shakespearean plays scattered through the oddly pointed accusations. Which was cute where the bullet spray decidedly wasn’t. Everyone needed hobbies and as far as gimmicks went, having a researched monolog wasn’t the worst Dick had suffered.

Still, Batman and Robin he got. But why the vitriol about Nightwing’s absence? He hadn’t officially been in Gotham for years now and everyone knew it.

There were a few people that treated them like a sports team, though. They were few and far between but he’d seen more than one banner over the years, first when he was babysitting Jay and then settling Tim, that read things like “Welcome Home, Cheater!” with his insignia and colors splattered across it if he stayed around for more than a week or so.

(His heart had all but fallen out of him the first time he saw one with that line. It had taken Tim scoffing his way through an impassioned explanation, riled beyond his usual range probably based on how pale he’d probably shocked, for it to make sense and for the world to stop spinning.)

He wouldn't have pegged Red as one, but there really wasn't much milage he could get out of the vague accusations of "where were you" and "you don't belong here" and "you ruin everything!" (Okay, that last one was just mean.) without running into the fact that Nightwing was something of Gotham's prodigal son. 

Eh, he'd won over more stubborn people. How hard could it be?

He went with the tried and true Selina Method.

(Actually, he’d made good on an old promise and just up and stayed with Selina for a few days.

He’d complained, just a bit, about Red and gotten a laugh and a judgmental brow out of her for his honesty.

“Taking that stray in yourself, then?”

He’d groaned, loud enough that two more cats pounced on him to try and purr him better. Much to her amusement and his resignation.)(He passed out for six hours on that couch under a kneading pile of purrs.)(He'd have to remember that next time Tim tried to convince Alfred to let him keep a cat in the Manor, it was a fair argument in favor of the health benefits...)

Small movements. Let them come to you after the first few meetings. Leave the window open and always, always, have treats in your pockets.

Red wasn’t taking off his namesake helmet any time soon but that was fine. He was an Alley kid. They hardly ever ate out in the open anyway and there was a hungry teenage boy under all that tactical gear.

Dick brought four bags of food the last time and left with none plus the feeling that it was probably all inhaled that evening instead of being handed out like the first two had been. Man, had Red balked when Dick suggested he could have tampered with it. Even with that full helm on the guy looked like he was questioning everything he knew about this reality, just a stalled out blue screen, before swinging around to being pissed that he'd fallen for Dick's joke.

And even still, not a single bullet fired.

He doesn’t talk much, this stray.

Oh he rants at the drop of a footstep. Privacy blah freedom of the masses blah blah cleansing of filth from the streets blah.

But talk? Especially about himself? Not much at all.

Dick has participated in actual interrogations that were easier than this. From both sides.

It wasn't all ribbing and dodging and feeding his new neighborhood feral.

Red was still knee-deep in the Gotham crime scene, though Dick was glad his completely subtle and entirely mysterious deliveries of enough naltrexone and methadone to supply a clinic got the point across about the boy dragging his feet on getting the 'girls' he'd "inherited" clean. 

Red tried ambushing him all of the once. A meanly arrested fall off a thirty story building and the hassle of having to fish his guns from the upper floors of three different office buildings later was enough to make him cool his heels a bit. Was down right curious and even cordial the last two times they met up.

Dick didn’t buy it for an instant.

Red was plotting something, and was using these meetings to get as much a sense of Nightwing as he was giving away.

It probably helped that Dick had whole heartedly jumped into the last “Batman ain’t shit” rant, pixie-booted antedocts first.

(It’d been a long day. Week. Year, really.)(Tim didn’t really get trash talking. Oh he knew how be cutting, but it was the razor ice of the upper class. All tangling loops and social politicking followed by childish low blows.)(He was working on it, but Dick missed Jaylad’s abuse of the english language. Tim was still learning when to buck Bruce’s crushing grip and New Yorkers just didn’t swear the same.)

It was just a matter of lulling him just that bit further…

Well, he’d asked for it.

Up to something, he’d thought.

This… certainly counted. He has to take a breath and thank his lucky stars and compulsive need to know because he'd very nearly bolted and ruined his own plans at the first half of the madness the kid has laid out. 

...Laid out is generous, or maybe unkind given all the security and secrecy surrounding it.

This kid, whoever he is, knows how to keep a plan locked down. 

There were bits of it in code, solidly made, oddly familiar, but turned out that the info had to do with the Arkham security. Appreciated, as they didn't need that out in the wild but it also made working out the code the matter of minutes instead of the hurdle it was probably meant to be.

A lot of the so called 'plan' was left to inference as well. Insanely detailed sections fading away to bullet notes here or there or nothing at all. Blank spaces, like he couldn’t quite make up his mind or knew it so cold it didn’t need annotating. Which made it risky, to judge ir interfere but, well…

There wasn't, in any universe Dick could conceive of, a plan where Break the Joker out of Arkham as a key step was going to end well.

The few notes laying around about handing Batman a gun didn't seem any more well considered, though he hoped he was misjudging those. 

...Was it just symbolism?

Dick thought harder about those rants and which quotes had slipped in to that tinny voice.

But why a gun then? Because B didn't use guns, maybe, while Red used them almost exclusively?

Vicarious action? Acceptance? Some sort of weird, weapon based dominance play?

(Teenagers were so weird. He doesn’t remember being this weird.)

The gun part of the plan stuck in his mind, even as he reviewed the information Red had compiled on Arkham.

Dick knew the real reason B avoided guns and Batman never touched them, but that wasn't something they'd let slip into the masks beyond a general distaste for the weapons. He'd still been drilled and trained on how to handle them, for safety reasons more than anything else. Bruce knew how to as well and Batman, though he avoided it, had used them in a pinch and disassembled them in a fight every other night. Alfred had trained them both. Dick knew how to shoot, clean, and dismantle near anything with a chamber and a trigger by the time he was thirteen for the sole purpose of keeping as few similarities as possible. (Alfred was, maybe, almost as irritated with him as he was proud about his officer's exam scores.)

He absently shifts a paper pile a few centimeters back into place, mimicking their natural sprawl before he'd flipped through them. A kid who still used paper for plots. He could respect that. Sneaky. (Did he have to be so organized though? What unmonitored teenage boy used filing cabinets for their grand plans?) 

Another breath as he steps back and slips through the exit, up to the roof and calmly away. A calm he did not feel. At all. On any level. 

He knew the kid was angry, had some sort of clown shaped bone to pick with the Bat because, hello, the name, but this was something else. 

And unfortunately, he couldn't just let it go. 

(He sent Selina a text asking if she was still up on her first aid training.)(She sent a thumbs up emoji back and nothing else.)(Eh, good enough.) 

He waits till Red has his dominant arm elbow deep in the last take-out bag. 

"You never did answer, you know."

"About what," it's absent, idle. Red's still on guard, always is, local kid always were even as hard as they pretended not to be, but distracted.

He had started extending their time together under the guise of actually checking all the food Dick dropped off. It was a weak little excuse, especially as Red often forgot to finish the process, but hey, whatever the kid needed to feel safe or bargain to keep sitting where Dick could see him. 

"About the Hood." 

He watches rage ripple through the guy. Ah, Dick realizes. He's not even going to bluff about the word play there. Well, he did need those answers sooner rather than later. 

"He deserves to die." It's solemn for all its but spat. (Might've been spat but, well, helmet. Modulator.) "Deserves to rot." 

It rolls visibly through him. Thick arms tensing, spine snapping straight, chest puffing up. (Every inch that feral kitten making himself bigger, spine arching and tail standing on end.)

"Ignoring, disregarding, the entire graveyards he's filled alone, the thousands who have suffered, the- people he's crippled!"

For all that's it raw and honest, there's something rehearsed in his delivery. (...is he hearing the rough draft of the speech the kid has planned for Batman? Aw, Red.)

It's also a relief in there to hear that the "plan" really is to kill Joker and not, you know, do something insane like force Batman and Joker to fight to the death or act out a lethal play or something. (...the universe better not use that, so help him. He is NOT arresting some 'Shakespeare in the Park' theater troupe this fall.) 

"It's not like I'm talking about killing Penguin or Scarecrow or even Dent!"

Dick's ears prick at the name. Dent, hm. Not Two-Face. 

Very local, but not really the right age to have known of the District Attorney before his accident now is he?

Which doesn't add up. Gotham was all about its little facades, right down to the stained concrete kids of the Alley. 'Dent'... now that implied a connection.

(Unfortunately, it made about as much sense as anything else about Red so far.)

"I'm talking about him. Just him. And doing it because..." 

There’s a pause, a long one.

Dick gives him the grace to shuffle his cue cards. Turning the words over in his own head. Intonation and inflection were hard to parse through a modulation, but not that hard. 

He’d rushed it, Dick decided. Had started slow, pulling the words up by the roots in his memory and then made the rookie mistake of actually feeling it.

This was personal. Because... what, then?

"Odd of you to use his name," Dick threw him the line.

Like a mouse trap snapping shut. "Need his attention." 

"Batman's?"

"Sure," he says. The bag rustles, Red Hood lowering his hackles, and shoulders, as he intentionally turned away from him. 

Dick needed to throw the kid off balance. Red's breathing was audible through the helmet, modulator or no. The kid's pulse had to be racing.

He hems and haws, kicking his feet over the sheer drop. He's gotten nearly everything he needs but... something still feels off.

He's missing something. Something critical. 

"Feel like that's what the bag of heads was for."

The snort buzzes through the speakers in an ugly blast of static before the other tilts his head in a way that would have tossed hair over one shoulder if it were long enough. "You think?"  

(The cat comparisons were getting harder to ignore... was Red really preening over having left dead body parts in Batman's territory?)("Here, have the heads of these rats because you're a shit hunter.")(Now the question became: was it because Red didn't want Batman to die?) 

The laugh jerks out of him before he can stop it, more of a cackle than he usually permits now a days, and Red's preening increases. (It's entirely the fault of the his own imagination. He can’t shake the hilarious imagining of a large cat with a red helmet yowling in the rafters of the Cave as Bruce tries to have a call with the Justice League.) 

"Well," Dick says, easy as anything, winding that line he'd thrown into a noose. "It certainly wasn't for Joker." 

Then, before Red can reach for a gun Dick has already spotted, "Is he why you're in this life? Being a vigilante," he clarifies as Red snaps from furious to darkly amused out of nowhere.

The words 'You don't have to do this,' remain unsaid. The hypocrisy, after all, might just rear up and kill them both. 

Red's found something funny in what Dick's said in the meantime, "Yeah, you could say that."

Dick tilts his head, staring sideways into the helmet's white lenses. "Is that what it would take?" The kid flinches and Dick presses down on the opening like a wound. "For you to stop. For you to feel safe."

Red does not like that. The implication that he's not safe, that he can't keep himself safe. But its truth, sure as the fall that will kill the both of them if they were to take two steps forward.

He likes the implied ultimatum even less. 

More the fool him, then. (Ha.) That's not what's on the table here. 

"Is that why you're in it?" He fires back.

"I solved my parents murder when I was nine." Dick admits. "Everything else, well. I didn't think anyone was going to step up and do anything for me."

"How nice of you," he says, the word 'nice' as if it were slimy the same way all the north-eastern's seem to say it. Like its synonymous with 'fake' and 'liar.' "But some of us have to get our hands dirty." 

And then he's gone, body a long curve in the air before a grapple rappels out and whisks him away. 

Dick sits there with it for a long while. With the idea and the silence and the aching, festering burn in his knuckles.

Watches the dawn paint Gotham gold and black. 

So, that's what it would take. Theory confirmed.

He sits and shuffles the pieces he saw in that room. The notes. The code.

(The Memorial in the cave. The Hall of Heroes in the Tower. The flicker in the corner of his eye, the empty manor, the grief that seems to sit in his no-longer cracked knuckles and bleeds down his fingers when he leasts expects it.) 

...He can do that.

(It would have been over and done with not even two years ago, if not for Bruce.) 

The kid’s severely misjudged Arkham’s tertiary security level and operable sewer system.

He has time.

Babs leaves him on till the second ring and he knows, even before he asks, that this will decide it all for him either way. He's either about to be on a timer he can't fully predict or he'll have the last piece of a puzzle he never let himself complete before.

Committed, ha, either way. 

In the end, it wasn't wasn’t difficult.

He knew Arkham. Knew Gotham. Knew Joker.

It wasn’t difficult, and that was always the worst part. The idea lingered that something so important should be challenging, should be harder than it actually was, the way Bruce said it should be.

The way it felt when he was forcing his feet up the isle in that chapel. 

But it wasn’t. It was easy.

(Like swinging a punch.) (Like gravity.) 

The Joker dies on a Thursday afternoon. The news breaks Sunday morning.

(Sue him, he gives them a tip. Didn’t want the kid bolting or doing something stupid. He owed Sali anyway, for Felipe.

Sali Sawhit. Her pen-name was her full legal name, which had made them both laugh through the adrenalin buzz while shivering on the Crowne Pier's shore. He’d found her writing a blip of a blog and almost underwater in a pair of ugly cement shoes (which is a problem you can have, when you use your legal name to expose too recent true crime).

He pulled her out of the bay and put her in touch with Lois.

Now she had a series of rotating body guards and her own spread in the Gotham Gazette, and he had what passed for a friend in a woman who had no sympathies for gang rapists and the loyalty of a well fed law firm.)

“What did you do?!”

Dick leans back against the building and hums, not quite missing the cigarette as much as he misses the socially acceptable performance it would provide. A tiny act of stalling that people used to permit. Its not the question the kid wants to ask. That part seems obvious.

“That part seems obvious.” He says, thinking of the news headlines and parades and talking heads cheering one minute and ringing bells of panic the next.

Of Bruce, still in the cave, certain of the answer but grasping for pieces he’d never get. Because the easy answer was never enough for Batman. His greatest mystery always other people.

(Of Tim, holed up what has always been intended as his bedroom in the Manor, not a guest room as they all knew, and is only now actualized to that purpose. Whose father was killed by Captain Boomerang, whose son is showing signs of Speed Force exposure. Who Dick has already built a profile on. Another kid who he thinks could use, and provide, some help.)(Not anywhere near Tim, though.)

He stands. Brushes lines and ashes that don’t exist from his suit.

“He’s not coming back.”

Not this time. Not from that.

Bruce had never truly considered the possibility. Dick had written the protocols. Silly at first, the way any ten year old would be faced with the demise of a tormentor and told to be respectful. To take it seriously. And then progressively more full of vitriol and intent, until it was, literally, air tight. (Hmm. Too soon?)

“Why?!”

Weird question.

And not one anyone else was asking. Bruce knew. Tim knew. Barbara’s flowers arrived Friday afternoon. (Peonies. Jason’s favorite.)

The rest of the state was counting the reasons off in every form of communication people could talk through.

He doesn’t get an answer out. The kid didn’t need one from him anyway.

A sob. Wet and rough, even through that modulator. Crying in that helmet must have been something. Suffocating, Dick would guess.

But the kid was still more skittish than an Alley cat. Always half a word and a sudden breeze away from bolting.

A soft touch was just a suckers trap to someone who’d been so badly hurt, so Dick braced his moral spine against the impulse and pointedly turned his head away as he caught gloved hands shooting up to grip the sides of that red helmet.

“Aw, Red. I’m flattered,” he joked, voice lacquered with that rough skinned teasing he’d learned for the kid whose name only a handful of people knew was being remembered today. “but I don’t kiss kids so-“

The helmet clattered to the roof.

The world stopped.

Notes:

Extended Author's Notes are now located HERE on my Tumblr

 

This is the last time I write Dick's POV. I can NOT get a grip on his narrative voice and its driving me crazy.