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The circus is the place for freaks.
"Just put it on," Dick sighed, and as he held the sweatshirt out with both hands he remembered that bit of wisdom peddled outside of shops in street thoroughfares. At six years old, he went to the butcher's to pick out cuts of meat for his parents. The butcher's assistant grimaced at him and called him by that name he never liked, Gypsy.
Bruce grimaced at him, too. But he wasn't in the habit of calling Dick by any name at all when frustrated. Perhaps that was what had been plucking at his heart strings lately. "What was it you said when you were younger? 'I don't want to'?"
"That was different," Dick said, and he picked at the spare thread coming loose from the stitched logo bearing the name HUDSON UNIVERSITY absentmindedly. "You were dolling me up in those big puffy dresses, the ones with the itchy underskirts."
"For a case. What is this for?"
"It's for me. You know, leaving home, going to college."
Bruce stared at him as if he were a foreign presence, his mouth pressed into a thin line.
The Manor was quiet. Had been for the past month. It wasn't the sort of quiet Dick was accustomed to, the lived in kind that whispered in the corners of the library; the study; the Cave. It was as silent as if they were supposed to be in mourning — and for what, he couldn't fathom.
He had only been accepted into university. The letter had come in the mail two weekends ago on thick, creamy cardstock. Addressed from Hudson University to a Mr. Dick Grayson (boy, did that make his heart sing), there was the letter nestled in with token artefacts. Namely an accompanying pamphlet, which bore details about his potential enrollment along with other sundry facts to do with the university's history and acumen. Thought is at the core of our tradition was scrawled in small cursive letters at the bottom of the pamphlet's front page.
Dick sure was doing a lot of thinking lately. Between a record number of solo patrols and the impressively stiff cold shoulder Bruce had been giving him, he was left with ample time to himself. He thought about it as he rounded the corner of the staircase up and away to his bedroom. He'd seen the inside of this room more in the past two weeks than he had in the past two years — it was that bad. Awaiting the scythe of loneliness as if it would cleave his head from his shoulders, Bruce was pushing Dick away to mitigate the fallout. And Dick, for one, was through with it.
His stomach broiled. In the cabinet in his bathroom there was a sachet of medicine to take stuffed in with his other necessities. Peering inside, he took stock of what else he had: a bottle of Pepsid AC, aspirin, a couple of birth control pills, some tampons. The last two he wasn't going to need anymore. Birth control for certain, and the tampons probably not from what he'd read. Once he got — he dwelled on the word — pregnant, he wouldn't have what little period he did have anymore. According to the books, anyway. Once it took… and it would… everything would be fine.
He thought briefly, his gaze lingering on the products disposed of in the trash, about whether or not his mother would approve of what he was going to do. If she was watching him at all from somewhere, what was she thinking? What was his father thinking? These thoughts he let himself ponder least of all.
Dick squared his shoulders and kept an eye on the clock. It was nearing evening. The schedule he kept on his wall — a mirror of the one in the Cave — informed him that he would be patrolling with Bruce again, just like the good old days. That meant all he had to do was be patient; to think it all over one last time.
Who was Dick Grayson without Robin?
Dick tended not to ask himself this question.
He knew, on the one hand, that being Robin wasn't just about saving people or flying in the air where nothing could catch him. It had something to do with maintaining the only connections he had left. The memory of his parents; the Titans; Bruce. On the other hand, he was so entrenched in being Robin that it was scarcely possible to imagine himself as something other than. And without the ability to divine alternate realities, he couldn't take a look into a world where he wasn't Robin to puzzle together what such a strange place would be like.
He didn't want to picture it in the first place.
In the locker room, he eyed the R sewn onto the suit and took a moment to appreciate it. He'd have to put the gloves and cape away for a while soon, but that didn't mean he wouldn't be reunited with it. He wasn't going to enroll in Hudson University, after all was said and done. And that, Dick felt in his heart, meant Bruce would be normal again. Or as normal as the Batman got.
Bruce came into the locker room, already half dressed in the Batman costume. His eyes were averted away from Dick. Dick remembered with a rueful smile how two months ago — for Bruce's birthday — Bruce hadn't been able to keep himself away.
"Hey, Bruce," Dick said. "Can we talk? After patrol."
Bruce hummed. He fixed with Dick with the hard glint in his eyes that meant he was apprehensive, though he wasn't going to express it. So it was a date.
On patrol they passed an uneventful night, made more tolerable by the sweet spring breeze that rippled through the trees in the parks they passed by. April nights in Gotham were given to calm weather, and the groundwater puddles from the previous night's rain had faded into glistening tear-like droplets by the time they arrived on the scene of the city's furor. There was a robbery at a corner store near the city bank; a thwarted assault; and a taunting group of drunkards. Light work for the likes of a city such as theirs. Some part of Dick was soothed by the idea — if nights like this could still exist after eleven years, surely the city could hold out nine months more. Or however long it took for him to come back to the field. If that's what it took to keep Robin, he didn't mind.
At the end of the night, they went home. No sitting out on the rooftops like they used to. Even so, Dick could tell Bruce wasn't ready to rip off the Band-Aid, to expose the elephant in the room.
Inside, he sat on the console of the Batcomputer, his thighs warming with the subtle heat of machinery under him.
Bruce faced him, his posture stiff but not unwelcoming. "You wanted to talk to me about something, earlier."
Dick kicked his feet underneath him — a nervous habit. "Yeah, I did."
"What was it?"
He took a deep breath to relieve the irritation he was feeling in his sternum. He didn't want to ruin the rose film that had come to coat such a quiet night, so he started off small. "I just wanted to ask if I could sleep with you tonight. You know… it's been a while."
A pinched expression flitted across Bruce's face. "Dick… No. Not— not tonight."
Dick crossed one leg over the other in what he hoped was a seductive manner. "Why? You've been avoiding me, but you won't tell me what I did wrong. Give me a reason, Bruce, a good one — I'm right here."
Bruce slumped into his chair. A weary frown traced the thin lines around his lips. "You're going to college, Dick. That's what boys your age do, and you're not — young boys your age are not — supposed to be with men like me."
"C'mon, Bruce," Dick sighed, and he shifted to lean a little closer. "That's really not good enough. You expect me to believe you just figured that out now? Well, I don't care. There's always the possibility that I don't go to college, anyway."
They stared hard at each other. It was clear they were reaching an impasse.
"Dick," Bruce warned. "You know I'm right, and you had best get away from me."
"No," Dick said. "I don't want to."
Bruce frowned, but the tension in his shoulders was alleviated by a fraction. "You're still taking birth control."
"Yes," Dick replied, and though it was a lie he didn't feel half as bad as he would have otherwise, knowing it was for a good cause. If he didn't do this, it was clear Bruce would expect him to attend Hudson University and be like everyone else, far from him and the Manor and Batman and Robin.
"Fine," Bruce said. "Go take a shower."
It was the first time in almost three weeks since Dick had seen the inside of Bruce's bedroom. Nonetheless, his side of the bed remained untouched, and most of his clothes remained in his side of the closet. With them hung the Hudson University sweatshirt he'd presented Bruce with when he got the letter. Ouch.
"You really don't like the idea of me going to college deep down," Dick said, laying lengthwise across the bed on his stomach. He was naked, and Bruce stood behind him, lifting his sleep shirt off his head.
Bruce paused. "Don't say that. You should go. You have to. And —" he swatted the back of Dick's thigh with one of his hands "—I taught you better than to play at psychoanalyzing me."
"You're just scared," Dick continued, "because you know what the people out there call me when they want to get under your skin. Pretty boy. Sometimes pretty girl, if I catch the light a certain way."
Bruce bristled. "What are you saying, Dick?"
"That you have to take this seriously while it lasts, for my sake." Dick turned, the jut of his shoulder in artful alignment with the rest of his body. He spoke as if he'd already decided to go. He spoke as if he were holding back the gravity of the situation — and in a sense, he was. But not quite the way that Bruce interpreted it as.
"Enough." Bruce encouraged Dick to situate himself so that he was laying under him, not quite trapped but not free, either. "Don't say that I'm not serious, that's not it. Dick, you—" His eyelashes fluttered dolefully, in a way that appeared too vulnerable for someone of his station. Dick wondered if perhaps he hadn't put too much drug in Bruce's drink; he was getting overly sentimental.
"Shh, it's okay," Dick soothed. "Nothing's going to change."
Like that, they moved the most natural way they knew how. It was fitting for a conception. Bruce ascended to some place beyond his usual stoic self: his head buried at Dick's neck, he peppered him with kisses all over his collarbone, his neck, his face. His pace was slow and conscientious — Dick would go so far as to describe it as mindful. He didn't fret about Dick's birth control or protection as he had on most of the previous occasions they'd had sex, because he was stripped of inhibition. Did that make it worth it, or was Dick trying to assuage his own guilt?
"Come on, you can go faster," Dick whispered into Bruce's ear. His hands were anchored at Bruce's back, and his body was sweaty with all the extra effort it was taking him this time. Something about being off birth control made his hormones surge and his vagina feel hotter than it had any right to be.
Bruce sucked a bite on his neck in response. After a moment or two, he acquiesced, and Dick let himself get lost in the rhythm. Things were going to be alright, he wasn't going anywhere. He believed what he said fundamentally — that nothing was going to change. Nothing save his body as it grew with their child. He felt it, as they both drew closer to their finish — everything was going to be alright.
The sun rose the next day with little fanfare. Tendrils of light pressed at the backs of Dick's eyelids, and at their prompting he opened them to the dark satin bedsheets he was so accustomed to. As victim as Bruce was to work's rhythmic march, his bedroom was the definition of restful. If Dick for some reason couldn't sleep, he could trace the waving patterns on the curtains in the dim until he was able to put his mind at ease.
By six-thirty a.m., however, neither Bruce nor Dick could stay in bed any longer. There was an energy charged in the air between them, a subtle thrumming that curdled in the acids of Dick's stomach.
He felt more certain than before that he was going to be successful. Come next week he'd be staring at one of those little drugstore sticks, two thin lines marked in go-getter red on the display. Of course, if he repeated this bit of intuition to anyone else, they'd think he was delusional. But he really felt like he was in tune with his body, the blood and meat working through all those vital invisible phases to bring him a baby. His and Bruce's baby.
What would it feel like when it started kicking? He wondered. What about when his organs began to compress his bladder? Or when he was kept awake by cold sweat and nausea?
Upright in bed, he watched as Bruce opened the curtains to let the full dint of the sun's power come to greet them. Clad only in his boxers, he cut a figure that was ruggedly masculine. He took up space. When Dick looked at him, he sometimes saw the mark of Thomas Wayne's early teachings in Bruce. A man who wrapped himself in sturdy cloth for all the world to see, and within — deep within — had naught but his own melancholy. So different from the place Dick's own father had occupied in his life.
In morning hours like these, when there was nothing else to do but face the day, Dick liked to coax Bruce back to him for a short while. Blow off steam before everything else got ahead of them. That morning, he didn't. He stole a kiss from Bruce above the newspaper he was reading, pleased by his amiable mood, and retreated to the shower.
While in the shower, he wondered whether the baby would be more like Bruce or him.
Only time would tell.
Eight days later Dick visited the drugstore. He had read in textbooks and magazines that it would be possible to tell if he was pregnant as early as one week after conception. He waited an extra day for good measure, and then set out to procure his necessaries in disguise. Posed as a well-to-do lady simply popping in for confirmation of the inevitable — "my husband and I have been trying lately," he simpered to the woman behind the counter — he procured several of the standard Clearblue tests before he adjourned to the bathroom of a discreet café off the main street near the hospital.
He locked the door behind him. Looking in the mirror, he saw the reflection of everything he was not. Itchy wig, infernal blouse, irritating skirt: the clothes only served to heighten his feeling of vulnerability.
The stick was thin in his hand. Just two lines were all it would take to confirm the presence of the anchor he knew was mooring itself in his stomach.
Two little red lines. His hand shook, shimmying the skirt past his waist and his briefs down his legs so he could situate himself comfortably over the toilet bowl. The instructions said to suspend the stick in his urine stream for five seconds. The mechanism inside would detect his hCG level, and then those two little red lines would appear. He was sure of it. You're pregnant, those lines would tell him. You're going to have a baby. You're going to transform. You're going to be — he took a deep breath. No good would come of letting himself catastrophize.
He stared at the stick, wet between his fingers. There they were, those two little red lines.
He was going to be a parent.
At first, he didn't know how to tell Bruce. Confession of this order was a momentous thing: one he wasn't prepared for. Still, he was resolved to be forthright. The point wasn't to stow away somewhere for the nine months that would pass before he was due. The point was to cement the fundamental connection they had. Look what we have, and what we're going to have. The problem was, the honesty the situation required — I'm pregnant, Bruce, the child is yours — invited questions. You're on birth control, Dick. Why did it fail? Why did you suspect? You've missed periods before. Where is the test? Why didn't you tell me right away? He and Bruce both were detectives. There was a natural instinct in the two of them to sift through the threads of a situation until they had wrought every bit of suspicion into the ironclad truth.
At the weekend succeeding that hallow moment in the café bathroom, Dick mulled the state of things over in his mind. He and Bruce had an unspoken agreement between them, following the events of that night. Dick resumed sleeping in the master bedroom with Bruce, and did everything as he usually did. Save for initiating sex. On Thursday, he should have started his period, and if Bruce knew he hadn't… Well, it would be obvious then that he'd stopped taking his birth control some time ago. The only reason he had a period was because of the birth control, after all.
During the night he adjourned to the bathroom alone and pretended to dispose of period products he didn’t have. Bruce didn't say a word. Neither of them were keen on disturbing the fickle peace between them.
It happened on Tuesday. In the dim of the bedroom, Dick watched Bruce prop himself up on his elbows, positioned before the proverbial feast. He'd given Dick that look earlier in the night that suggested he wanted something out of him. Thirty stories up, it made Dick's heart pound. He gave in without a fuss.
"You ended early this week," Bruce said. He pressed a kiss to Dick's bare thigh. "You're not usually early."
"You're stalling," Dick replied, with a little airy laugh. A swarm of butterflies battled each other in his stomach. It wasn't time for the moment of discovery. Not yet, not yet. "How about you take my mind off things."
Bruce pursed his lips. The lines at his mouth crinkled sharply. He was searching through all the oddly-glimmering fragments that twinkled in Dick's eye, sifting through the bits that looked too golden to be good. This was the problem. Up close and personal, it felt like the whole truth of what he'd done was writ over his forehead in large, bold letters. Maybe in a complete sentence, or in a single word, like DECEIVER. He felt deceptive. Was it wrong to want what he wanted?
"You're hiding something," Bruce accused.
"No, I'm not," Dick insisted. He plastered on his grandest smile. "Don't keep me waiting."
Hands wandered to his chest, his abdomen, his thighs. Nothing was out of the ordinary. Everything was normal.
Lower, lower. A familiar tongue swept the corners of his mouth. Fingers penetrated him. Everything was usual. Nothing was out of the ordinary.
Pleasure. There was skill in the hands that roamed his changing body. The hands that pressed in close at his hips knew nothing of what was happening to him. Fingerprints dug in close to his skin. All was well. Nothing was out of the ordinary.
…No. Who was he kidding? Something was out of the ordinary.
He heard himself say the words as if he were in a stupor. They were languid, careless, left behind in the heat of the moment. "Be careful, Bruce."
Bruce stilled to listen. Dick continued. "You don't want to hurt the baby."
Dick was weary. Three weeks before his due date, he was heavy with child and sequestered to bedrest.
Sometimes the first pregnancy is difficult, the doctor said. It's normal to experience these troubles.
Dick felt like he was full to bursting with troubles. He had to wear maternity clothes he didn't like; his range of motion was limited; his chest was always leaking. Pregnancy, in short, was taxing.
He tried not to think about how trying labor would be. He turned his mind instead to tranquil thoughts of the nursery-in-progress and soft classical music. Soon he was asleep.
When Bruce came home, he crept into the master bedroom — careful not to disturb Dick too much — and laid his ear to rest gently on his bare distended stomach. "You're working hard," he whispered. He could hear the signs of life within, the baby restless to be born. "I know you're anxious to resume your duties as Robin. Don't worry. After the baby comes, you'll be busy."
He ran his hand through Dick's short crop of hair, his eyes fixated on the attractive glow illuminating his skin. "Besides, the baby will need a sibling. Don't you want to have another?"