Chapter Text
Dick Grayson is, to most people, the embodiment of sunshine captured in human form.
It doesn’t matter where you meet him - on the streets, in the cave, under a mask or out of it. He’s warmth and laughter, easy confidence and brighter days wrapped up in a single person.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, he’s exactly that.
That other one percent however?
That’s when something slips. When the clouds come out and the storms roll in.
Not all at once. Not in any way that’s easy to name.
Just small fractures. Subtle shifts. Reactions that don’t quite fit.
The kind of things you only notice if you’re really paying attention.
And even then…
Dick never gives you enough to understand why.
It starts in the cave like most fights do.
It was late, or early morning depending on who you ask, when Dick’s bike finally peeled into the cave.
The rest of the bats had already returned from their patrols and had turned in for the night. Tim was the only one still awake, finishing up the last of his reports as Dick stalked in.
Tim frowned as he caught sight of his brother’s disheveled appearance. The shoulder of his suit was torn and his knuckles were raw. He seemed to be favouring his left knee as he walked.
While it was normal for them to return home most nights with injuries, it was rare when they didn’t, Dick seemed to be racking up more hits than anyone else. Black eyes, scrapes, you name it.
And Dick didn’t seem to care.
“You alright?” Tim asked.
“Fine.” Dick replied shortly.
“You sure? You seem-”
“I said I’m fine!”
Tim startled at the steel in Dick’s voice. The clear message to drop it.
He hesitated a moment, debating the benefit of pushing the issue before deciding to leave it.
“If you say so,” even though he was doubtful he switched topics. “Just a heads up I finished looking into those smugglers you’ve been tracking in Blud. Files on the desk.”
“Cool.” Dick turned away, not even bothering to look at the file and heading to the locker rooms.
“That’s it?” Tim blurted before he could stop himself. Confused by the blankness in his brother's voice.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know, maybe a thank you,” Tim could feel his own temper rising.
“What for? Doing your bloody job?” Dick scoffed. “You volunteered to do that, remember? You want me to give you a gold star for a job well done?”
Tim blinked at him, “what?”
“No one forced you to do that Tim! So don’t act like I owe you something for it!”
Tim could feel the heat rising in his face, the way his cheeks flamed in embarrassment. “Okay, seriously, what has gotten into you lately?”
“Nothing.”
“Really? Cos you’ve been acting like a jerk all week.”
“I said I’m fine!” Dick interrupted. “I’m busy, that's all. In case you’ve forgotten, I do have a life and a city to care for.”
He snatched the file off the desk and stormed out of the cave, kicking up a cloud of exhaust, tyres squealing as he accelerated down the drive.
The cave fell quiet again, the echo of the engine fading into nothing. Tim stared at the spot where Dick had been only moments before, more confused now than ever.
“What just happened?”
After that Dick’s behaviour gets worse if that's possible.
Damian went to Blüdhaven a few days later.
Not unusual. He’d been Robin to Dick’s Batman once. If anyone could get through to him…
He came back in under an hour. That alone was unusual behaviour, normally you had to pry the two of them apart..
But the red in his eyes was worse. Bruce had only seen Damian cry maybe a handful of times in his life. He carried himself like emotion was a weakness he’d been trained to exercise.
But when Bruce tried to pair him with Dick that night—
“I will patrol with Drake,” Damian said stiffly.
That was the mother of all red flags. Damian didn’t choose Tim over Dick. Not on a good day, and definitely not on a bad one.
No one ever found out what had happened in Blüdhaven.
Only that Damian had left calling him Grayson, and came back refusing to say his name at all.
Not that the others were having much better luck.
Alfred’d had to break up a fight between Jason and Dick before it could get physical. Jason had been angry that Dick had hijacked an op he’d been working towards for months, he managed to get in with the core members of the gang and was about to make his move.
That was until Dick had come through the roof swinging. Jason had been forced to blow his cover to protect him. The gang had refused to speak to him since, ruining Jason’s chance at using them to work his way up the chain to where the bigger fish waited.
Dick hadn’t seemed to care. Rather than de-escallate things, it was almost as if he were doing his best to rile Jason up. To goad him into striking.
Jason’s eyes were glowing a bright green by the time Alfred managed to force them apart.
Steph had ranted to Barbara for a straight hour in the watch-tower after an attempted joint patrol with Dick turned sour.
Steph and Dick had the most similar personalities out of all the bats. They were both bubbly, positive people who always enjoyed a good pun.
Steph had thought she could use that common ground to bridge the gap Dick seemed determined to dig between himself and the others.
Her first attempt at a joke had been ignored. Steph had tried a couple more times, falling back on old material that normally always managed to put a smile on Dick’s face no matter his mood.
No this time.
He had told her to stop joking around and focus on the mission.
Steph pointed out that there was no harm passing time on a stake out with a few jokes to stave off the boredom.
Dick had snapped that this wasn’t a game, and that if she was going to treat it like it was she should quit right now before she ended up in the ground.
Safe to say their shared patrol didn’t last very long.
The only one Dick hadn’t seemed to have a go at was Cass.
Though that had less to do with restraint and more to do with avoidance.
Cass noticed. Of course she did. But it wasn’t just her who saw it, it was all of them.
The way he would avoid lingering in any room she was in, always arriving bang on time and being the first to leave.
Leaping from rooftops before she had a chance to catch him.
Dick was a performer, he had been since birth. He’d grown up under the spotlight, first with the circus and later Gotham. Same act, only thing that changed was the audience.
Point being, Dick knew all too well how to fake being ok. How to fake a smile, paint a pretty enough picture that people are so focused on the colours, they lose sight of the cracks forming in the background.
Cassandra wasn’t most people. She didn’t listen to words - she read movement, breath, the space between things.
And everything about Dick said wrong. Even in the brief moments they shared, she could see the storm raging inside him.
She couldn't shake the feeling that this was why Dick was avoiding her.
Not because she’d push - but because she wouldn’t have to.
That she would see through to the heart of the matter and make him face it.
He couldn’t bear to do that. So instead he ran.
It wasn’t sustainable. Eventually something had to give.
She just hoped that when it did, someone would be there to catch him.
Eventually things came to a head.
Dick sensed Bruce’s presence even before the other man spoke. Years of dealing with his paranoid lurking had taught him a thing or two.
“The hell do you want now?” Dick didn’t even bother turning around as he ground out the words. He didn’t need to. He could already picture which one of the hundreds of brooding faces he’d collected over the years Bruce would be sporting.
He was in no mode for a lecture.
His body was itching to be out on the streets, to fight. To give his mind something to focus on other than the grief mounting under his skin that begged to be freed.
“We need to talk.”
But since when has the universe ever given Dick what he wanted? “Busy,” he grunted, running a new line through his grappling hook.
“Dick,” Bruce placed his hand on Dick’s shoulder but quickly retracting it when the other whirled to face him, a hand clenched round one of his escrima’s.
Bruce let his hand fall, eyeing Dick carefully and seeing the tension radiating from him. “Oracle told me that you’ve been landing more people in the hospital.”
“So?” Dick shrugged. “Keeps them off the streets where they can hurt innocents doesn’t it?”
Bruce gaped at him, “that is not the point! You have been using excessive force where the situation doesn’t call for it!”
“Tell Oracle to mind her own business,” he snapped, catching movement as the rest of the bats trickled into the cave.
“And while you're at it, save the anger management lecture for the actual killers on your squad.” There was a sharp intake of breath - he didn’t bother looking to see whose.
“I’d start with the trigger happy one if I were you.” Dick pointed his thumb at Jason.
Jason let out an almost indiscernible growl at that. But something made him hesitate before he could lash out in kind. It wasn’t like Dick to throw that kind of stuff in their face, especially not Cass or Damian, who’d simply been products of the environment they were raised in.
“Dick!” It appeared Bruce agreed with Jason if his tone was anything to go by.
“If this keeps up I will have no choice but to bench you!” Bruce warned.
A peal of laughter burst from his eldest at the threat. Unlike normal though, there was no humor in the sound. “Bench me? And how exactly do you plan on doing that old man?” He spat the words.
A flicker - just a small flicker - of surprise crossed Bruce’s face.
“You don’t control me.” Dick went on, each word sharper than the last. “ I’m not one of your little pets, your soldiers - oh, sorry,” Dick’s lip curled, his voice laced with sarcasm. “You prefer the term ‘children’, don’t you?”
“Dick-” Bruce tried, a little taken aback by the venom in the younger man's voice.
“I was your ward, nothing more.” Dick interrupted before he could finish. “And that relationship ended when I was 16, when you kicked me to the curb, remember?”
Jason’s eyes flicked uneasily between the two. He remembered their screaming matches all too well, and this certainly looked like the beginning of one.
The others still seemed caught off guard at Dick’s openly hostile attitude and Jason was forced to acknowledge that they’d probably never seen the ‘golden boy’ as anything other than his normal happy-go-lucky self.
“And in case you’re forgetting, I don’t operate in Gotham anymore. So how exactly are you going to bench me when I don’t answer to you?”
Bruce never had been one to back down from an argument. “You’re still part of this team,” he said, voice steady. “And we have rules for a reason.”
His gaze hardened slightly. “If you can’t follow them, you don’t go out.”
Dick glared at him. “Yeah, well maybe I’m tired of doing things your way, playing by your rules! What have you actually accomplished?”
The tension in the room skyrocketed.
“Sure, you put a few people away in Arkham but does it stop the crime? No! The inevitable break out occurs and then what?”
“Maybe this isn’t the time for-” Tim tried.
“Butt out Replacement!” Dick spoke coolly.
The words washed over Tim. He'd been called that before, of course he had. Jason used it more than his actual name at times, but over the years it had faded more into a term of endearment than an insult.
The way Dick said it now, it held the same anger and loathing it did when Jason first came back.
“Dick that is enough,” Bruce broke in firmly. Dick being angry at him was nothing new, but he’d never seen him act so coldly towards any of his siblings. Not even when Jason was first brought into the picture and things between him and Bruce had been unpredictable.
“Couldn’t agree more!” Dick’s grin was closer to a wolf showing its fangs than anything that resembled a smile. “Now where were we? Ahh yes, breakouts happen and then what? They kill people, innocent people, who did nothing wrong-”
Something in his voice shifted. Not louder, not sharper - just heavier. A quiet weariness settled into it, the kind that comes from carrying something too big for far too long.
“Nothing to deserve it, and yet they end up dead all the same.”
No one spoke.
There was nothing to say to that.
Dick wasn’t wrong. How many people had Joker killed in his schemes? How many innocents had lost their loved ones to the villains of this cursed city?
His gaze met Bruce’s, “although I suppose you should be used to that. You seem to leave a trail of bodies wherever you go, don’t you?”
Bruce stumbled back as if Dick had physically struck him.
He may as well have.
“Master Richard!” Alfred’s voice cracked in the silence, “that is over the line!”
Dick hesitated, he’d known that the moment he said it but had been unable to stop himself. “I…” He dropped his gaze to the floor.
“My boy,” Alfred softened his tone, stepping closer. “Whatever pain you’re carrying does not give you leave to wound others with it.”
“Dick,” Bruce managed to find his voice, “if something's wrong we can fix it-”
That was apparently the wrong choice of words to use as Dick broke in, “Fix it? Fix me you mean?”
“That’s not what I meant.” Bruce tried.
“Right. Of course.” All the anger was back in his voice as Dick steamrolled over Bruce. “Something has to be wrong with me if I disagree with you. Heaven forbid I have my own opinion rather than just falling in line like a good little puppet.”
Cass stepped forward frowning, signing ‘big brother’ as she did.
Dick ignored her the way he’d been doing for days. “No. No, you know what? Screw this!” He slammed his newly repaired grappling line down on the desk hard enough for something to crack.
“I don’t what I was thinking coming here tonight,” he cast a baleful glance around the room. “There’s nothing for me here.”
Alfred was a heartbeat too slow in reaching out to stop him.
Dick stalked towards the cave’s zeta tubes, barely avoiding shoulder checking Jason as the younger man was forced out of his path.
An automated voice calling his codename, a flash of light and he was gone.
The weight of the silence that followed pressed down on them like a physical thing.
For the first time, they glimpsed what happens when Dick Grayson breaks.