Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The hunter blows in one early spring afternoon, just when the sun is shining soft and buttery through the windows in a promise of warmth to come. He barges through the storefront and pushes past Stephanie playing a game on her phone behind the counter and kicks open the door separating the store from the living areas beyond and storms into the kitchen.

Dick looks up from where he’s cutting up an apple for a muffin recipe and blinks in mute surprise at the interruption.

“I need you to remove a curse,” the hunter says, and Dick wants to say I know, I can smell it- because he can, he can smell leather and gasoline and a sickly-sweet blackness that clings to the hunter’s soul and eats at his flesh. He’s panting hard and leaning against the doorframe and shaking and sweating like he’s coming off a bad high.

“You need to leave,” Stephanie says. Dick can’t see her around the hunter’s bulk but she sounds ready to go a round or two. On a good day it’d be a tight match; with the hunter looking ready to drop any second, she’d bowl him over by breathing on him.

“It’s all right, Steph,” he says, readying his very best Customer Service smile- but the hunter chooses that moment to drop, his eyes rolling back and his knees folding and his body dropping to the floor. It takes some time, he’s a tall man, he’s got a long way to go. And when he finally lands, that means there’s six-foot-something of leather-wearing, curse-bearing hunter passed out cold on Dick’s kitchen floor.

Stephanie puts her hands on her hips and blows her bangs out of her face with an annoyed sigh. “Well, that’s great. Want me to drag him out back, boss?”

“No,” Dick says, and mournfully sets his apple aside. The recipe was promised to be so easy even a child could make it, but the batter is already a worrying shade of grey and prone to random bubbling. Calling it a bad job and stopping now is probably only saving him some grief down the road. “He won’t wake up unless the curse is removed, and I don’t need dead bodies in the alley. Get him on the couch, please.”

He helps her move him, even though she could pick up the hunter and two of his friends by herself, if for no other reason than to make sure she doesn’t hurt the guy. He also recruits her help in ridding the hunter of his boots and his leather jacket, then sends her to go close up the store when the jagged black lightning-strike curse lines on the hunter’s skin begin to writhe and reach out for them. They itch over Dick’s skin like spider feet but find no purchase. The symbols, when Dick presses his fingers to them and forces them to hold still, are not balanced and profound. They’re bathroom graffiti, angry slashes and sharp angular curves, quick and sloppily done. This hunter had pissed off someone, worked them up into the sort of irrational foaming-at-the-mouth fury of someone who has found flaming bags of dog crap on their front stoop one too many times, rather than the proper calculating rage of a powerful practitioner.

“Professional pain in the ass, huh,” Dick says to the hunter. “I had better not regret this.”

Then he finds a loose end near the hunter’s left elbow and takes a handful of curse lines and pulls.

“It says to soften the butter first,” Stephanie says. She’s eating ribbons of apple peel and sitting on the counter, phone propped up against her knee so they can both easily see the recipe on the screen. “Did you soften the butter?”

“I melted it.” Dick looks into the bowl of batter, take two. It has big gluey lumps that neither of them can identify. “That’s softened, right?”

“Too soft, maybe,” Stephanie says, then cuts off whatever she's going to say next and leans forward to peer around the doorway when there’s a thump and an oath from the other room. Dick leans back as well, and sees the hunter picking himself up from face-down on the floor next to the couch with one hand clapped over his mouth. He makes it just in time to stick a plastic bin under the hunter’s nose as the retching begins.

“Where am I,” the hunter demands between heaves. He’s throwing up oily black slick, the physical vestiges of the curse leaving his body. He’s lucky Dick gave him an emetic instead of letting it go as nature would otherwise intend.

“Give it a moment, it’ll come to you,” Dick says, not unsympathetically, and goes to get him a glass of water.

A few minutes later, the hunter is sitting on the ground with his back to the couch, his face pale and his eyes glassy. His left arm is laying limp across his lap, wrapped tight in bandages that smell of an herb poultice. “What did you do?” he asks, glancing at Dick. At least it seems he’s remembering now.

“Removed the curse, as asked,” Dick says, and the hunter goes very, very still.

“We didn’t discuss price,” he says, watching Dick carefully, as a mouse would a lazy cat. And he’s right to. It’s never a good idea to be in a practitioner’s debt- payment will come due, one way or another.

Dick dips a hand into his jeans pocket and pulls out the paper he’d written out the receipt on and holds it out. “One hundred and fifty-two dollars,” he says. “So we’ll call it an even two hundred with service charge.”

“Two hundred dollars,” the hunter repeats flatly, taking the paper and glancing at it without seeming to really see it.

“For my time and to cover the cost of supplies. That poultice includes bark from a rowan tree in the Himalayas, it’s not cheap stuff.”

“That’s not what,” the hunter begins, then bites his tongue and looks away.

“Yeah, well, asking for payments of firstborns and cherished memories went out of style a couple hundred years ago,” Dick says, because he’s been through this enough times to know the script by heart now. “If you really want something a little more ritualistic, I can arrange that.”

The hunter’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut, head down and eyes up and on Dick, watching him through his lashes and dark bangs. He looks like a little boy being scolded for sneaking cookies.

Stephanie rises up on her toes and leans against Dick’s shoulder to stage whisper near his ear, “Go for ritualistic. Take his soul.”

“Fuck off,” the hunter says instantly, sitting up a little bit, good hand reaching for his belt and the weapons Dick has already relieved him off. Something bright and acid-colored washes over his bottle-green eyes and he glares at her. “No one asked you, harpy.”

If it had been as recently as half a year ago, she would’ve taken it as an insult, or freaked out over his apparent ability to see through her human disguise, and probably tried to rip his head off. But this Stephanie is a Stephanie who babysat Damian Wayne for thirty-nine straight hours while the rest of the family suffered a minor meltdown, and came out of it with new wisdom and a few scars and much thicker skin. She just offers the hunter a lazy glare and a careless one-finger salute. “So I’m gonna head home, if you don’t need me to drag his heavy ass around anymore,” she says to Dick.

“Thanks, Steph,” Dick says. “Take tomorrow off, I can fill in.”

“Right. See you later, boss,” she says, and heads through the door into the store to get her stuff and leave. She’s barely out the door before the hunter goes grey and grabs for the bin again.

“You’re going to be doing that for hours,” Dick tells him, trying to drown out the noises for his own sake. “You can crash on the couch tonight, we’ll discuss payment in the morning.” It’s early yet to be going to bed, especially for Dick whose sleeping habits are eclectic at best, but it’s better than staying out here and listening to the sick.

“You’re letting me stay,” the hunter says around the heaves. “For free?”

“Drink the last of my coffee and I’ll turn you into a frog,” Dick replies, and heads back to the bedroom. He can suffer through a full night’s sleep for once. The hunter starts to say something but has to stop talking, and Dick closes the door behind him and whispers a word and the muffled noises all stop, the bedroom isolated in silence.

Dick sighs, then shrugs, then goes to bed.

He doesn’t sleep soundly, hasn’t for months, years, ever. He sleeps in spurts and snatches, catnaps in the day and a few hours at night. He’s always been that way- his mother told him once, a long time ago, that it’s the magic singing under his skin, keeping him awake with its noise and movement and busyness. It jolts him awake at two-fourteen a.m. and he gives up after twenty minutes of lying to himself about how he will definitely fall back asleep if he just lies there, and he gets up to check on his guest, who is surprisingly still there. He collects the bin for a thorough cleansing and checks to make sure the bandages aren’t coming unraveled and gets fresh water and ibuprofen.

The hunter is awake, he knows, awake and focused on Dick’s every move. He’s pretending to still be asleep so Dick sets the water and pills on the coffee table and leaves him be. He heads into the stock room instead, sorting through the piles of cardboard boxes and thick manilla envelopes with international postage and the occasional wooden box with protection spells carved into their sides, feathers and teeth and skins, stones and powders and a glass vial of metal dust that flows and clings to the glass like honey.

He is aware, for a single long moment, of someone coming to stand in the doorway behind him, moving silently on socked feet. He doesn’t react in any way, and the presence retreats without a word, soundless as it came. Another long quiet moment, and then between the rustling of the papers he’s sorting Dick can hear the quiet groan of old springs as the couch receives the hunter’s weight once more. He smiles to himself and shifts up on his knees to better reach the filing cabinet and focuses on his work.

The hunter is gone when Dick, awoken from his nap against the pillow he’d left in the storeroom for exactly this purpose, stumbles out into the kitchen in the morning. It’s still early enough that the light outside is grey more than golden, but the coffee maker is already murmuring to itself as it works. Dick squints suspiciously at it- he can practically hear Tim’s voice in his head, get a Keurig you troglodyte, except Dick’s coffee maker works just fine and he’s not one to fix what isn’t broken.

There’s paper on the counter beside it, two crisp one hundred dollar bills and his receipt on top. Dick picks one of the bills up and feels the stiff newness of its edge with his thumb, feeling- bereft, somehow. He had almost been- but none of that, he tells himself, he didn’t even know the man’s name. Payment made for services rendered, brief association over.

He sets a mug for the coffee on the counter and goes back to his bedroom to get dressed for the day.

“And that was it?” Steph says when she comes in the next morning. She’s bartering for information with half the donut section of the nearby up-scale grocery store: fancily iced long johns filled with cloyingly sweet whipped cream, round donuts overstuffed with tart lemon curd, a gorgeously soft bun that shed cinnamon sugar everywhere. Dick had offered her a permanently installed Employee of the Month plaque after she’d let him have the entire cinnamon bun without protest. “You woke up and he was gone?”

“He made me coffee?” Dick offers, not knowing what she’s looking for. He doesn’t tell her that he’d been asleep in the stock room- the stock room’s wards are all turned inward, making sure nothing unsavory slips under the radar, and Steph will yell at him for hours if he admits to allowing himself to be so vulnerable around someone so unknown. Worse still, she might tell Alfred, and then Dick will just be straight-up screwed.

Stephanie squints at him, like she can tell he’s leaving something out, but the lemon round she’s eating saves Dick by dropping a generous glob of curd onto her shirt. By the time she’s done wiping it all up, she’s lost track of whatever thought she was having, and simply says, “Better off that way, we don’t need his kind around here.”

“His kind? What, hunters?” Dick demands, feeling wrong-footed and defensive. She can’t mean hunters, she knows who Dick is, who his family is- but Steph waves a hand, waves the thought away.

“Trouble,” she says, and Dick nods to that, because, yeah. He had been that. “I mean. When was the last time you cursed someone like that?”

“Never,” Dick replies without hesitation. He thinks for a moment and smiles at a memory, all voice-cracking yelling and dramatic gesturing and Barry laughing himself sick in the background. “I cursed Wally with freckles one time.”

Stephanie stuffs the rest of the donut into her mouth to forestall another curd droppage and says thickly around it, “Didn’t Wally already have freckles?”

“Not nearly so many as he has now, if you ask him,” Dick says, and Steph snorts and swipes a thumb over the bridge of her nose, where she has her own collection of freckles. They’re faded with age, charming on her girlishly pretty face, nowhere near the impressive leopard spotting Wally sported long before Dick cursed him.

“You’re a menace,” she tells him, and dives into the donut box to retrieve the two-thirds of the oversweet long john that Dick hadn’t been able to eat. “Did we really have to help him?”

“Wally?” Dick asks, playing obtuse in the hopes she would drop it. He dusts the cinnamon sugar off his shirt, his hands, the counter between them. “Well, yeah, he is my friend.”

“The hunter,” Steph says, not to be put off, pivoting slowly on her heel to glare at him while he goes over to unlock the door and flip the sign over to Open. There’s no customer loitering outside waiting for their golden chance to interrupt an awkward conversation, unfortunately.

“It’s fine,” Dick says, and she looks at him with a look of soul-deep exhaustion. He decides to take it as sweet that she worries so much.

“All right,” she says. “But if he turns out to be trouble, I get to say I told you so every single day until you die.”

She hates it when Dick tousles her hair, so he does exactly that as he walks past. “Had a call-in last night, I’ll be writing the spell out if you need anything,” he says.

“Every single day, Grayson,” Steph calls after him, then mutters something presumably unflattering under her breath, and Dick smiles as he closes the door behind him.

He doesn’t look up when the door opens. He doesn’t need to.

“It’s been barely a week, surely even you can stay out of trouble for that long,” he says to the feathers he’s pricing. It’s hard judging the worth of items that are so hard to come by as to be priceless, but are otherwise useless.

“Had to wait until your guard dog left,” the hunter says evenly, lingering at the displays near the door like he thinks he might need to bolt. “I didn’t want her ripping my throat out over a misunderstanding.”

“She wouldn’t, it’s bad for business,” Dick replies. Five hundred dollars? Fifty cents? Rarity compounded by difficulty in acquisition, versus being utterly indistinguishable from the mundane. He could pluck a chicken and no one would know the difference.

The hunter gives up on pretending to be browsing and comes over to the patch of countertop Dick has claimed for the afternoon. He looks at the feathers, reaches for one and hesitates and glances at Dick for permission. He has pretty eyes, Dick thinks distractedly.

“What’s this from?” he asks, picking one feather up after Dick’s nod.

“Cockatrice.” Dick tosses his pen on the counter and leans back to watch the way the hunter studies the feather. Clinical, interested, brief. “How much would you pay for that?”

The hunter flicks his pretty eyes from the feather, to the blank price tags, to Dick. “Twenty per for the first three, and keep the others back until you see how well the first batch sell.”

Dick scoops up the pen again, drawing a loose and looping 20 on three of the tags with the pen in his right hand and double-knotting each string around a feather shaft with a single twist of his left wrist. The hunter places his own feather back down and eases his weight back a little, probably not having expected such casual use of magic right in front of him, even for just a harmless little trick.

“How’s the arm?” Dick asks as he slides open the cabinet door to put the feathers in the counter’s glass display case.

“Fine,” the hunter says. “I kept the bandages on until the… stopped.” He fills the pause with a gesture, scurrying his fingers like a spider’s legs, like curse lines squirming on bare skin.

“That was good,” Dick says. He closes the cabinet door and leans one hip forward against the counter, and he and the hunter look each other over for a few moments. Probably the man learns all sorts of ultra-observant things about Dick, but all Dick gets is that he has an old scar through the corner of his eyebrow and his hair is mostly grown out from an undercut. “Did you need something else?” he asks finally.

“To apologize,” the hunter says, and Dick straightens a little in surprise. “I was rude last time. I didn’t think you’d help me, but I had nowhere else to go.”

“Because another practitioner cursed you?” Dick swallows a scoff and turns away, busying his hands with sorting through the boxes on the counter beside him. “I don’t take sides.”

“So I heard.”

Dick looks at the hunter again. Not that he means to question good intentions, he likes giving people the benefit of the doubt, but that tone, the fact that the hunter was here at all- “How likely is it that you’ll get cursed again?”

The hunter smirks, lazy and handsome and defiant. “Pretty likely,” he admits easily. “Got a card I can hold onto just in case?”

Dick does not, to the despair of all the people in his life who are very smart at the whole making money thing. He circles the counter to the register and prints out a length of blank receipt paper, then takes it back to his current work area to write his number on it.

“My cell,” he says as he hands the paper over. The hunter takes it carefully, holding it by the edges as if to not smudge the ink. “That way Stephanie won’t hang up on you.”

The hunter stares at the paper for a long moment, and Dick slowly realizes that this is the first thing he’s done in the entire encounter that the hunter hasn’t prepared for. Even pricing cockatrice feathers hadn’t caused a hitch in his stride, but now that they’re even just a little bit off-script he’s visibly struggling to find his footing. Probably trying to readjust his world view to account for practitioners of magic being people too, with cell phones and protective friends and functional moral compasses. It was a concept many in his line of work had a hard time with.

“I’m Dick,” he adds, because he’s that kind of bastard, and the hunter finally looks up at him.

“Jason,” he says, after another measured silence, and gestures with the receipt paper. “Thanks, for this.”

“Best get going, Steph only went to get us lunch,” Dick says, and the hunter nods once and disappears the receipt into the pocket of his stupidly cool-looking leather jacket.

“See you around,” he says as he turns away.

He reaches the door just as Stephanie does, and holds it for her like a proper gentleman, and she stands in the doorway to stare after him until the door swings shut and forces her to back up into the store proper. Then she turns her suspicious squinty stare on Dick instead.

“Do I get to do the told you so dance now?” she asks as she unloads bags of food onto the counter. There’s enough to feed a small army, or one hungry harpy with a light lunch left over for her human boss.

Dick hesitates, still watching out the door in the direction the hunter- Jason with the pretty eyes- had gone. “Probably soon,” he admits. “But not yet.”

No, not yet.

Chapter Text

The normal day in the store, in Dick’s life, goes like this:

He opens at eight, or close enough. There’s never any customers waiting in person, although he usually finds written requests for his services taped to the door or sometimes even painstakingly fed through the rusted-over intake slot on the store’s old mailbox, from customers who can’t come out in daylight or risk being associated with a practitioner but still need his help. There’s always a small pile of packages by the back door, and he spends the time out front minding the store as he opens boxes and sorts through mail and organizing spell requests. Stephanie comes in around ten, when she’s not showing up early and exchanging donuts for gossip, and Dick retreats into his work room in the back to work on spells while she minds things up front.

Early lunch hour is Crazy Hour, as Stephanie puts it, the point in the day in which people suffering non-life-threating magical emergencies finally admit that getting a good night’s sleep isn’t going to solve their problem. The day after Jason’s visit, Stephanie calls Dick up front to deal with a shame-faced but unrepentant middle-aged woman, who is extremely reluctant to admit that she drugged her husband with a sex potion she bought online in order to spice up their love life. She leaves, furious and still defiant, with a Gatorade bottle full of restorative potion in one hand and a list of marriage counselors Stephanie helpfully put together in the other.

Stephanie takes a break mid-afternoon- there’s something she finds suddenly fascinating at the local coffee shop, and she always comes back from her break anymore smelling like coffee and sighing wistfully, but she won’t tell Dick anything and he likes having unbroken bones too much to go check it out for himself. Then there’s the evening rush, and Steph earns her pay by dealing with the casual browsers and the non-magical daredevils who fancy themselves risking life and limb by stepping over the very threshold while Dick hides in the back and pretends to be doing something constructive.

Dick closes up officially at seven, and Stephanie usually leaves then, although nighttime is when their community starts coming to life. Three nights after the woman with the Spanish fly’d husband is the full moon. Dick spends the night sitting on a cheap plastic lawn chair just outside the back door, playing games on his phone and handing out resistant charms and potions to help maintain control and ointment to rub on joints offended by the transformation to people who come up to him with hoods pulled over their faces and claws pushing their nails out.

Sometimes, he gets a call on his phone after he’s closed up. Sometimes, he spends a while at his kitchen table, talking Damian through his latest bout of growing pains, or telling Tim about his day in order to bore the kid to sleep, or just chatting with Alfred about nothing in order to reassure both of them that all is right in the other’s world. Sometimes he even gets a knock on the door, and Cass will have dinner with him and help him clean up and watch him with her quiet smile while he talks about nothing much at all.

If he wants to talk to Bruce, Dick has to be the one to reach out- but that’s a thing, a whole Thing, and he’s learned to live with it, and it’s better than any of the alternatives.

He doesn’t cause trouble, and anyone who comes in looking for it inevitably leaves disappointed. It’s not much, but it’s his life, and he’s happy enough with it.

Which is why it’s so frustrating that he can’t get that hunter out of his head.

“Wake up,” a voice says, a hand shoving at his shoulder.

“I’m awake,” Dick protests instantly, sitting up from where he’s been drooling onto his workbench because that was an important part of the spell, obviously. He looks back at Stephanie, who has an odd glint in her eye.

“Guess who’s here for Crazy Hour,” she says, then applies just enough of her inhuman strength to lovingly haul him out of his chair and force him to scramble his feet under him in order to follow her.

The visitor is Jason, of course, hands in his pockets and eyes scanning the shelves as he idly wanders through the store. Dick stalls out in the doorway, scrubbing the drool off his chin and briefly regretting not moving the pen on his workbench that he can now feel perfectly imprinted onto his cheek. Then he moves forward, because Jason looks up and sees him, and because Stephanie is behind him and giving him gentle pushes that feel ready to escalate into shoves. She follows him into the store and plants herself at the register, clearly intending to go absolutely nowhere.

Jason ignores her like a champ, just wanders over near Dick with his hands in his jacket pockets and a well-worked carefree expression that Dick doesn’t trust for an instant. The last time had been a test, and it’s feeling like this time is too.

“So what does I don’t take sides mean to the son of the city’s chief enforcer?” he asks, wide-eyed and innocent for a man who just delivered one hell of a sucker punch.

“Oof,” Stephanie breathes out from the register, and disappears back into the back without another sound. She can spot an explosion on the horizon and knows how to avoid the shockwave.

“It means I help whoever needs it,” Dick says, steady and patient. He’s got a firework-flash temper and a lot of people know it, and his track record at not being baited into a fight over any and everything Wayne related is not great.

“Even the ones who have beef with your family?”

“Does Bruce know you’re here? Operating in Gotham?” Dick leans forward against the counter, watching in expectation. He has no idea of the answer to that- he and Bruce don’t talk business, the few times they talk at all. But Jason doesn’t know that.

Sure enough, he hesitates. It’s just a tiny thing, but it’s enough.

“Bruce knew what I was when he first took me in,” Dick says, softening a little. “In those days he was a plain old hunter, like you. Now he’s keeping the peace between people like you and me, instead of punishing people like me for existing.”

“Completely changed his worldview, huh?” Jason asks. He recovers fast, Dick will give him that.

“Something like that,” he says, and that’s all the more Jason will get out of him on that subject. “Is that going to be a problem?”

It is, sometimes. Hunters roll into Gotham, thinking they’ll have free rein over the city’s magical and creature communities, and take it badly when someone they thought would be one of their own shows them to the city limits and politely- inarguably, warningly- invites them to come back after they’ve learned to coexist. If they behave themselves, if they show they are willing to compromise and aren’t out to punish people for the mere crime of not being human, then Bruce will let them stay and might even pass along a name of someone who’s disturbing the peace. It would be regrettable, if Jason were to fall into the former category.

“So when I got back to my hotel yesterday and found him sitting in my room, it was a good thing I didn’t mention you’ve known about me for a couple of weeks, then,” Jason says.

Dick closes his eyes for a moment, focusing on breathing and not reaching for his cell phone to, for the nth time, explain to Bruce socially appropriate ways to interact with people.

“Probably, yeah,” he says. “And I’m sorry about that. We’ve tried for years to get him to behave like a civilized person, not some sort of nightmare cryptid, but.” He gives a what-can-ya-do shrug, because honestly, what can he do?

Jason smiles at that, a brief flash of genuine humor that he covers quickly by ducking his head and looking away, and Dick relaxes a little and gives a relieved smile of his own. If Bruce didn’t think Jason could mind his manners, he wouldn’t still be in Gotham at all, never mind allowed within a mile of one of Bruce’s kids.

“Speaking of,” Jason says, making eye contact again. “I was actually planning on coming here even before I met his majesty. Needed to ask you a question about that curse.”

“Still thinking it’s likely to happen again? Who cursed you, anyway, if that’s not privileged information?”

Jason moves towards him, slipping a hand into one of the pockets of his honest-to-god cargo pants- Dick’s taste is predictable, not refined. “Probably, and no idea. It was-” he pauses, flicks a quick look away then back to Dick, considering how much Dick needs to know. “There was a lot going on. All I know is something scratched my wrist. I thought it was glass from a broken window at first, but the wound was too shallow. Then a couple days later,” and he gestures around the shop.

“Must’ve used a relay,” Dick says, and explains at Jason’s patiently questioning expression. “You take something like a ceramic plate, write the curse out on it, break it, and break the victim’s skin with one of the pieces, and the curse will transfer to them.”

“A curse like that can’t be easy to write out,” Jason says thoughtfully. “So someone came prepared.”

“It seemed personal, and whoever wrote it out was pretty mad,” Dick says, and Jason smirks.

“I’ve pissed off a lot of people. Comes with the job.” He pulls his hand out of his pocket and holds out a flat black rectangular token. It’s Dick’s turn to wait, to ask permission with a glance, and he takes the token only after he’s gotten the nod.

It’s wood, thickly glazed, carved with protective sigils. It’s also cracked in an almost perfect line down the center, the heavy glaze the only thing holding it together. Dick smooths a thumb over the pattern of sigils- he knows them well, he’s drawn them out in practice dozens of times- and looks up again.

“It was supposed to hold against curses,” Jason says. “I’m guessing using a relay overwhelmed it.”

“Yeah, this has forgotten what it feels like to be alive,” Dick agrees, gesturing with the token. “These particular sigils work best on a living thing, or at least something that remembers life. You’d need to replace this with a new one cut fresh from the tree once a month. If whoever sold you this actually cared about your wellbeing, and not just your money, they would’ve given you this as a tattoo instead.”

Jason hesitates, and Dick flounders for a moment. Way to assume, dumbass.

“If permanent isn’t your style, I’ve got something like this that will actually last a while.”

“Sure,” Jason says, and paces alongside Dick as he circles around behind the counter. “I was looking earlier, didn’t look like you don’t have anything like that.”

Dick snorts. “Well, no, not out where people can see them. I don’t need tourists ending up on someone’s radar because they’re walking around with protection like they’re expecting something to go down.” He stops at the wooden stand the register is on and retrieves a tackle box from one of its shelves and sets it on the countertop nearby. The latch looks ordinary, janky plastic and set slightly askew in its slot, but Dick runs a thumb over it carefully and the air visibly shifts as the shielding around the box relaxes. He flips the latch and carefully turns the tackle box so Jason can see into it as the lid lifts and the shelves inside accordion upward.

“Something like this,” and he hands the token back over, “is for emergencies only, not long-term use. You can make it work for you if you keep replacing it, like I said, but that would get expensive fast.”

Jason looks the contents over, his brows furrowing slightly in an otherwise hidden frown. The bottom half of the box has the carriers, flat metal chips and bone cubes like old dice and jagged chunks of preserved wood and even a couple decent-sized chunks of hematite. They’re all blank, power in potential, awaiting their purpose. The top shelves have papers tucked into every compartment, most of them a neon-colored post-it note rolled up like a scroll to make it fit in the small slot. The one Jason reaches to touch snaps back with a small electric shock, like touching a metal doorknob on a dry winter day, and he snatches his hand back in surprise.

“The carrier for the most part doesn’t matter, so that’s just whatever appeals to you,” Dick says without mentioning the no-touching rule, considering that a lesson well learned. “You’ll want to avoid something with more aggressive properties, though, so something like a shark tooth won’t work well.” He reaches around and picks out a post-it and unrolls it to show Jason the single line of neatly printed symbols on it. “These are the actual protective spells. This one,” and he glances at it, “protects against curses of bad dreams and troubled sleep.”

“Mix and match,” Jason says, rubbing his offended fingers against the palm of his hand. “So what would you recommend?”

“Given that the only thing I know about your hunting style is that you like to make dramatic entrances, possibly through windows?” Dick asks wryly. He turns the tackle box back towards him and traces his fingers over the spell-scrolls, testing the resistance in the air around them. The one he settles on is eye-searingly pink and the sigils on the paper are complex and small, printed on two lines to indicate two different sides of the carrier. “This, probably. It doesn’t provide absolute protection from curses, but it helps prevent initial contact and boosts your resistance to the curse’s effects if it does manage to get hold of you.”

“Like a curse vaccine,” Jason says.

“Yup. On the one hand, you probably won’t need any outside help even if you get slapped with the same curse as the one you had before, you should be strong enough to fight it off alone with this to help. On the other hand, you can’t really stack these things or you’ll start negating the protective effects, so you won’t have the absolute protection you probably wanted. On the other other hand, that,” and he jerks his chin to the wooden token Jason is still holding, “was doing literally nothing for you, so.” And he shrugs. Not a great sales pitch, but it’s not like anyone is grading him.

Jason picks out two metal chips, thick rectangles of tempered steel with rounded corners to prevent injury. “How much and how long?” he asks.

“Mmm, seventy-five per, and maybe ten minutes,” Dick says, taking one of the metal chips and holding it up to the post-it to compare size. When he looks back up, Jason is staring at him.

“Ten minutes,” he echoes, clearly disbelieving.

Dick goes back into the tackle box and retrieves an eyedrop bottle and a small pair of scissors. He cuts the post-it in half, carefully skimming between the two lines of text, and then droppers some of what is definitely not eye solution from the eyedrop bottle onto the metal chip. One half of the post-it goes over the chip, text side down, and Dick smooths it down and presses it against one palm, trapping it between his hands. A step back to make sure nothing else is in the way, a moment of concentration- then he opens his hands again, and the paper falls away in a pink sludge, and the sigils are seared perfectly onto the steel.

“I inverted them when I wrote these so I can just do that,” he says, indicating the other half of the post-it before handing the chip back to Jason so he can see for himself.

Jason takes the chip and wipes his thumb over the sigils. It’s hard to say, but he seems impressed, and- it’s a simple thing, it’s not even all that clever an idea, Dick is sure he’s far from the first person to have come up with it, but it makes him feel stupidly happy, that he impressed the boy with the pretty eyes.

“Wouldn’t inverting them cause issues?” Jason asks, handing the chip back so Dick can do the other side.

“Oh, yeah, that’s why the one bit you. They stay in the time-out box because of that.” Another moment’s effort, and the first chip is done. He hands it back again and goes digging into the cabinet shelves for another post-it. “The magical vaccine comparison was pretty good, but it’s also kind of like a bone marrow transplant- it’s supplementing your natural defenses, so it’s got to adjust to you to work properly. Keep it on you at all times, try to keep it against skin, let your body get used to its effects so if and-or when something does happen, your body isn’t trying to fight off the helpful magic as well as the hurtful one.”

He’s about to add a comment about not punching holes through the thing when he looks up and sees Jason is ahead of him. He’s got a long smooth cord that he’s tying in efficient knots around the metal chip, securing it so there’s no chance of it slipping out but not crossing over the sigils. When he ties the cord around his neck the chip falls just below the collar of his shirt.

“There’s no ritual or whatever to writing out the spell?” he asks.

“The rituals are in the ink,” Dick says, taking a fountain pen out of the tackle box. “One to carry the protective magic, one to transfer from paper to metal.” It’s less a ritual and more a couple of hours sweating over a boiling pot on the stove, all told, a chore only in that if he takes his eye off it for too long the temperamental shit will boil, or not boil properly, or simply feel abandoned and sulk, and not be good for anything but standard writing. He knows better than to give away trade secrets though- people are always so disappointed at how much of magic is lifted straight from a home ecs class.

Jason takes his wallet out and starts pulling out bills as Dick carefully draws out the sigils on the new post-it. It’s all tens and twenties today, soft and wrinkled like they’ve been run through the washing machine a couple of times. He counts out five of each and Dick rings him up while waiting for the ink to dry on the post-it.

Then there’s nothing else for them to do but wait, when there’s no warnings left to give, no social transactions to use as a smokescreen. For a single moment they exist together, and Dick thinks maybe, he thinks this is it- he doesn’t know exactly what he’s waiting for, but he can see Jason take a breath to talk and finds that he’s holding his own.

Then the buzzer above the door chimes as someone comes into the shop, and the moment is shattered. Jason steps back, pivoting to one side so Dick can see past him to the man who walked in.

“Um,” the customer says, giving a nervous little wave. Almost every single square inch of visible skin is covered in bright purple dots, like the chicken pox on steroids. “I’m sorry, I went to the doctor but she told me to come here?”

Jason turns back towards Dick, probably to hide the silent laughter he hasn’t managed to stop. It takes him a moment, then he clears his throat and schools his expression.

“I’ll just,” he says, and produces a cigarette pack from a jacket pocket and tips his head to indicate the door.

“I’ll bring it out to you when it’s ready,” Dick says, and Jason nods and ducks away and heads out, careful to give the other customer a wide berth.

The poor man seems unaware of what he interrupted, or indeed of Jason’s presence at all. “Can you help me?” he asks, focused wholly on Dick with a pleading expression a coon dog would be proud of.

Dick blows out a breath, gives himself a second to quietly mourn the almosts and would-have-beens, then summons his Customer Service smile.

“I can certainly try. Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

It takes forty minutes, instead of the promised ten. Dick ushers the spotted man- now slightly less spotty, although it will take a couple weeks for it to die down completely- out the door, and Jason is standing under the awning of the empty store next door and listening intently to something on his phone. He nods and flashes a small smile when Dick passes over the charm, and then he’s gone, heading off down the street like he’s got somewhere he needed to be ten minutes ago.

Dick heads back inside and looks at the tackle box, now on the floor and pushed back out of the way against the wall, and sighs. He’s heading over to recast the containment spell on it when Stephanie comes out of nowhere to put a hand on his arm and he nearly startles out of his skin, and she startles in turn, like a pair of cats setting each other off. When she settles, she looks up at him with worried blue eyes.

“Oh, Dick,” she says. “No. Bad idea. Bad idea.”

“Bad idea what?” Dick says. She just stares at him, and he can feel his hackles rising. “Nothing happened. He just wanted protection charms. Did you see the purple polka dot man?”

She shakes her head, not even dignifying that with a response, and moves away. She stops when she reaches the counter though, one hand hovering just above it.

“Okay, I wanna be all silently disapproving and everything, but first- are the polka dots contagious? Because dude was touching everything in here.”

“No, you’re good,” Dick says. Stephanie still pulls her hand away from the counter and stares at it suspiciously.

“I’m getting the lysol,” she says finally, and heads back into the back, presumably to retrieve the cleaning supplies necessary to blitz the store.

Dick lets her go and focuses on the containment spell on the tackle box, and ignores the part of him that’s whispering nothing happened, nothing happened- but you wanted it to.

Chapter Text

The fourth time, Jason calls, and Dick answers just before it goes to voicemail.

“Yeah,” he says as greeting, trying to draw a respectable glyph with the ink brush in his off hand- some things require accommodation, and simply will not work if there is no struggle or sacrifice or minor spillage of ink.

“Grayson?” Jason asks. He sounds distracted. That’s both of them, then.

“Speaking,” Dick says, then his left hand fumbles the brush and what was almost a perfect swoop becomes a jagged lightning bolt, and Dick has maybe ten seconds to try to smooth it out before the ink seeps into the heavy paper and sets. He hears Jason talking in the background, sounding- not urgent, but not relaxed either- he’s never called before, just wandered in when it suits his needs. Dick’s focused on the glyph and says, “Yeah, sure,” without listening to a word of it- he fixes the curve, manages the tail-end tuck, it’s actually coming out okay.

Then Jason says, “I’ll text you the address, see you in ten,” and Dick jerks his head up and says, “wait, what?”, but Jason’s already hung up.

He gets the text a moment later, an address for a pet shop that’s a twenty minute walk from his place. Dick resigns himself to being late and fishes a shirt from his I will be seen out in public pile- he also has an at home all day pile, and never the twain shall meet- and changes as he’s heading out the door.

He’s hot and sweaty and disgruntled by the time he finds Jason standing across the street from the pet shop. There’s ink on his hands that stained the sleeves of his nice shirt and now that he’s had time to think about it, it’s possible he left a line off the glyph, and it’s going to bother him until he can go check to know for sure. And then there’s Jason, looking cool as always in his stupid leather jacket and biker boots, frowning impatiently like he has any right to be annoyed that Dick is late.

“Take your time,” he says laconically, stepping away from where he’d been talking to a loitering bystander.

“I didn’t give you that number so I could be your on-call practitioner,” Dick snaps, even though he’s sorely undermining his own point by being here at all.

“You must be Glinda,” the other man says, and Dick realizes abruptly that he isn’t a loiterer at all, but another hunter. God, he was so blinded by Jason that he hadn’t picked up on any of the clues at all, and they were fairly obvious- the longbow on his back, for one. “I’ve heard good things,” he adds.

Unfortunately for him, Dick isn’t in the mood to be charitable. “No idea who you are, he hasn’t said a word about you,” he says, jerking his chin towards Jason.

“Ouch,” the man says, and the sarcasm in his voice sounds old and well-worn. He turns towards Jason with obvious expectation.

“Dick Grayson, witch,” Jason says, and jabs a thumb at the other man. “Roy Harper, hunter. There, you’re acquainted. Now if you’re done being hissy, the store manager in there is a fellow practitioner of yours who’s doing bad shit. But he’s got warding on the doors that we can’t get past, so we just need you to go in and break it. You don’t need to do anything, just give us the signal and get out of the way, we’ll take care of the rest.”

“You think it’s the first time I’ve been in the field,” Dick says, not a question but a realization. He wants to laugh, wants to say you remember who my family is, right, but he doesn’t. He’s worked too hard to separate himself from them, to get out from under the sheltering and smothering shadow of Bruce Wayne and make a name for himself based on his own merit, to be invoking that now.

“We don’t need a good-witch-bad-witch showdown,” Roy says, and Dick looks past them to the pet shop. It is warded, he can see it. He can’t detect any trace of foul magic, but the right combination of containment spells and dampeners would allow the metaphysical version of a meth lab to set up shop right next door and even the most sensitive practitioner would never know about it.

“Or you could go back home and let him keep doing who-knows-what to all those puppies and kittens,” Jason adds, and- that’s it. Dick snarls at him, but he’s already crossing the road, carried by the image of Damian’s reaction alone.

The door has a string of sleigh bells tied to it, and they chime cheerfully when Dick opens the door and comes in. It feels for a moment like he’s walking through cotton, the wards dragging at him, trying to repel him- but then he’s through, and the clerk at the cash register hasn’t even looked up yet.

“Need something?” he asks, and Dick hesitates on the stoop. The wards are inverted. He has a feeling that leaving the shop will be a lot harder than walking in had been.

“No thanks, just looking around,” he says, and glances back. Jason and Roy have followed him across the street and are waiting just this side of the corner of the building, out of easy sight. Roy gives a big cheesy grin and a double thumb’s up, but Jason is watching him with steady expectation, and Dick thinks he may even be worried.

The clerk looks up at him, and Dick can’t loiter in the doorway any longer. He comes into the store, keeping his hands low as he gestures, plucking at the wards like spiderweb strands to find where they all connect. If the clerk is a practitioner it won’t take him long to pick it up on it, and while it’s not illegal for practitioners to own pets or go shopping, this whole place feels wrong now that Dick’s on the business side of the warding. He doesn’t need the clerk any more suspicious than he already is.

The focal point of the warding is near the back of the store and below, probably in the basement. Dick doesn’t need direct access, just to get close enough to unravel one knot and destabilize the whole thing.

The front area he’s in has gerbils and guinea pigs in a big partitioned cage with no roof and a bottle of hand sanitizer with a sticky note that says Use Me! with a smiley face on it. The area he needs at has a display rack with strings and feathers and a multi-tiered cat tree at the end of the aisle. “Actually, my brother has a cat and it needs a new scratching post. Do you have those?”

“That way,” the clerk says, and points helpfully, and Dick goes with a murmured thanks. The clerk watches him go, considering him carefully, and Dick doesn’t look back. He circles the cat section, positions himself so the display rack is between him and the clerk and stops there.

They really do have scratching posts, carpet and sisal and flat cardboard pads. Dick picks up one of the cardboard pads with one hand and pulls at the wards with the other, gentle, unobtrusive. The wards spring back when Dick pulls, fighting him. They’re meant to keep some serious bruisers in check. Dick puts the cardboard pad down and picks up one of the sisal posts and picks curiously at the cord, testing it. The sisal cord is glued down at the base, which is helpful.

The clerk is leaning halfway out of his seat now, and beyond him Jason is waiting two steps from the door, ready to move. Dick dares to meet his gaze and tips his head to the side, indicating as clearly as he can to move away.

It’s a moment’s work to conjure his own ward, wrapping it into the sisal cord as an anchor. He wanders away from the display rack, looks at the fish tanks on the back wall, wanders away from the clerk at the register, winds his thread of magic in amongst the store’s wards. He does a whole lap and Jason is gone again when he walks past the door, and Dick can only hope he and Roy are far enough away for what’s about to come.

He makes it to the register and sets the post on the counter. The clerk scans the tag and rings it up, glancing at him all the while. Finally he cracks, and turns to Dick and says, “You look familiar, do I know you?”

“Nope,” Dick says, then twists his hand down and says another word, melting the glue holding the sisal cord in place. He grabs the suddenly-loose end of the cord and pushes the post off the counter, unraveling the cord as it falls and sending a shockwave through his own single thread of magic, which is woven now into the warding covering the whole store.

Every single pane of glass in the windowfront explodes inward.

The clerk ducks and yells, his voice lost in the sudden cacophony, birds screeching and dogs barking and an alarm going off. Dick drops the cord and backs away, and the man comes back up with- shit, he comes back up with a shotgun- but there’s suddenly something between them, a ginger-haired blur that grabs the gun by the barrel and points it at the ceiling with one hand and lays the clerk out with a brutal uppercut with the other. And there are hands on Dick, pulling him back to the questionable shelter behind the rodent cage.

“Are you all right?” Jason demands, half-yelling to be heard over the alarm.

“Fine,” he says, and looks at Jason, who is standing surprisingly close. He reaches up and picks something out of Dick’s hair, a single shard of glass that had made it past the hasty shield Dick had tossed up.

A sharp whistle jolts them apart, Jason flinching and looking guilty, and they both look over to Roy. He points with the shotgun towards the back of the store, the other hand holding the clerk down. “Shut that off, would you?”

Jason goes before Dick can even process what’s being asked of them, and a moment later the alarm stops. Dick takes a deep breath and smoothes his palms over his thighs. His hands are shaking, his magic rattled by the backlash from the severed ward.

“That was easy,” Jason says as he comes back up to the front of the store, sounding disappointed.

“Not that easy,” Dick says, and when Jason glances at him, he adds, “Those wards were meant to keep things in, not just out.” He looks around the store, listens, watches- there’s dogs barking and birds screeching, rodents bouncing off the walls of their cages, fish darting around their tanks. And in the corner near the counter, a grey parrot standing on top of its cage instead of in it, head still tucked under its wing in spite of everything.

“Grayson,” the clerk says, apparently recognizing him, glaring up at him. “Thought you didn’t take sides.”

“Well, guess that answers the question of do you know what your boss is doing here,” Roy says with a philosophical shrug.

“Where is your boss? Downstairs?” Jason asks.

“Got a call and left for lunch,” the clerk says with a sneer. “He was supposed to be back twenty minutes ago.”

The hunters exchange a loaded look at that, then Roy gets to restraining the clerk, starting with the all-important gag. Jason turns to Dick and starts to say something, then stops and follows his gaze to the bird.

“Shit,” he breathes. A moment later Roy looks and then echoes him with considerably more energy, because he’s much closer to the bird than they are, and it’s finally starting to move. He jumps the counter and darts away as Dick steps forward, readying a more thorough shielding spell. Jason moves with him, that acid green flashing through his eyes again.

The bird lifts its head, and Dick’s breath catches, because it’s twisted grotesquely, a long toothy snout taking the place of its short curved beak. It’s big enough to bite off a hand, to rip out a throat. It grumbles and fluffs its feathers out and shifts in place, and its talons look long and sharp like daggers.

“Can you…?” Roy asks, and makes a gesture that could mean just about anything but most directly translates as make spaghetti. Then he looks at Dick, and Dick realizes what’s being asked of him.

“What, fix it? Not a chance. That’d take a specialist in chimeras, and even then if it was born- hatched- like this there’s probably nothing anyone can do.”

“It’s just a bird,” Jason says quietly, the glow in his eyes fading. “If we can get it in the cage, it should be fine.”

There’s a long moment where no one breathes, let alone volunteers to attempt to stuff the murderbird back in its cage. Finally Jason grunts and steps forward. The bird swings its head around to track his movements with one eye, rearranging its deadly feet on its perch again, but otherwise doesn’t react. Dick follows, slow and careful, wary of seeming like a threat but not wanting to let Jason outside the range of his shield spell. Roy eases back and to the side, angling himself to cover the bird with the clerk’s confiscated shotgun.

The bird stays calm, feathers smoothed down and alligator-jaws closed. Jason approaches it with nonsense words in a soothing tone, dares to reach a hand out, as the bird shuffles again and holds out one foot as if to step onto the offered perch of his arm. Those talons flash like knives in the light, and Jason hesitates.

“Where’d that scratching post go,” he says, eyeing the bird’s feet, watching how the talons clench into fists.

Going around means getting close to the bird, so Dick borrows Roy’s idea and slides over the counter near the register instead, slow and steady and no sudden movements. He lands awkwardly on the crash pad that is the clerk’s body and ignores the irritated grunt that gets him to grab the post from where it had fallen when he broke the wards.

It’s almost anticlimactic after that. The bird relocates onto the post and only mildly complains when Jason, handling an armed bomb levels of careful, maneuvers it back into its cage. All three of them breathe out a collective sigh of relief when the door closes and latches shut. Jason retreats instantly and tosses the scratching post aside.

“Okay,” Roy says. “Do you happen to know a specialist in chimeras we can call?”

“Uh,” Dick says, because he does, but he’s imagining Gar’s reaction to Dick giving his personal number to a pair of hunters and trying not to flinch.

“Or that you could call yourself,” Roy amends easily, no harm no foul. He gestures towards the bird. “Just anyone who can handle this.”

His hands are still trembling, fine little tremors that are spreading to his forearms and turning muscles into jello molds. He’d pulled more power for the ward than he thought. “Yeah, I can call someone, let you know what he says. Should I-?”

He makes the mistake of pointing, aiming in the general direction of his store. It leaves his hand unsupported, unable to steady itself against his body and shaking badly for it. Roy nods in agreement and turns away, apparently content with the arrangement, but when Dick looks over Jason is watching him with narrowed eyes, and he knows he’s been caught.

“You walked, right? I’ll walk with you.” He circles back around to Dick’s side, tossing one last “you good here?” over his shoulder to Roy, and escorts Dick out when he gets a confirmation. His hand hangs in the air close to Dick’s shoulder, like he might need guidance or possibly support, but he doesn’t quite touch.

They’re halfway back to the store, Dick set in stubborn silence because he’s not going to be the one to crack first, when Jason finally caves.

“What happened?” he asks.

“Put a little too much oomph into breaking the wards,” Dick says. “It’s fine.” It’s full-body lassitude, exhaustion crawling over him by inches as his magic feeds on his physical strength to replenish itself, but it will recover long before it sends him, shaking and weak as a newborn, to bed for twelve hours.

Jason looks him over, and Dick wonders if that strange glow can see plain truth as well as true forms. If it does or not, he doesn’t use it now, simply looks away.

“I shouldn’t have called you,” he says, almost to himself. “You told me you don’t take sides, I was just- I didn’t know it’d be like that. I thought you could just.” He stops, apparently not knowing the words, and Dick fills the rest in on his own. Easy in, break the wards, easy out, probably wait an hour or so before sending the hunters in so the clerk wouldn’t connect them to Dick- except breaking the wards had probably been- maybe, just a little- noticeable.

“Yeah, well, it turns out I do take sides when someone’s hurting innocents,” Dick says. “I chose to go in there, you didn’t have a gun to my head.”

“Right,” Jason says, and maybe that would be enough for most people, but he still won’t look at Dick, and that’s enough of that.

Dick stops in the middle of the sidewalk so suddenly Jason carries on for three steps and has to turn and come back. The anger surging through him is a nice counterpoint to the slow, creeping exhaustion from his magic.

“Look,” he said, stern and unflinching, “I didn’t take this shit from Bruce when he was legally responsible for me, I’m definitely not taking it from you now. I make my own choices, I will deal with the consequences, and there is nothing you can do to stop me.”

For a single second it looks like Jason is actually going to be insane enough to risk arguing. Then he snorts, smirks. “Sorry,” he says, a sardonic drawl. “Didn’t mean to hit any nerves there.”

“Pull that weight of the world crap on me again and I will feed you to Steph,” Dick warns, then pointedly steps around Jason and carries on down the street.

Jason catches up a moment later and Dick can tell by the easy way he relaxes into step beside him that it’s back to business as usual. “You’ve got my number now,” he says, and Dick nods. It will be pathetically easy to figure out which of the two calls he’s received today are from Jason, even before taking into account that the other call was Stephanie double-checking his lunch order. “Since you’re a big boy who can handle himself, I’m gonna head back. I don’t want to leave Roy alone when we have no idea what’s in that store. Call me and let me know what your friend says?”

Leaving him here to fend for himself is not the grand gesture of respect Jason is pretending it is- the store is in sight, halfway down the block, and Dick is clearly capable of getting himself at least that far. But Dick decides to stand down and forces himself to relax.

“Send me a picture of the bird when you get back there,” he says, wishing he’d thought of this before he’d left. Before he’d let Jason usher him out like a border collie at a sheep’s heels.

And then. He hesitates before he opens his mouth, but the words sit lightly on his tongue: you want to go grab coffee or something after this? But that would be weird, wouldn’t it, given the mood they’re trying to leave behind. And what if- god damn insecurities, Dick is far too old to be worrying over these like a teenager- Jason isn’t actually interested? What if he flirts by default, the way people accuse Dick of doing sometimes? What if he says no, and it gets weird? Worse yet, what if he says yes and figures out that Dick is somehow both a total mess and completely boring at the same time?

So the words stay on his tongue, and Dick looks away.

“Yeah, I’ll call you,” he says.

“Okay.” Jason’s clearly confused by Dick’s mood shift, but wary about asking. “See you around?”

“Sure thing,” Dick says, and forces himself to keep going as Jason jogs away.

Stephanie is on break, doing whatever she finds so interesting at that coffee shop, so she’s not there to watch him stagger and sit down hard on the barstool she keeps at the register. It won’t knock him out, no, but he’ll need a good meal and a day or two to fully recover, and it’s obvious he needs to pick up a workout regime again. This is embarrassing.

He pulls out his phone to text her and ask her to bring him a muffin or something, then scrolls through his contacts until he lands on Gar. It has an old picture, a teenaged Gar squished in the middle with an equally baby-faced Wally and Dick on either side, Gar’s arms around their shoulders to hold them captive against him. It makes Dick smile, a soft pang of nostalgia.

He sends a text to Gar too, then calls, not at all surprised when it rings through to voicemail. Then his phone buzzes, and he looks and sees he has a text with a picture from Unknown Number, the same number that had called him earlier. He forwards the picture of the alligator-bird to Gar, complete with a string of question marks because, no, seriously, what the hell.

He saves Unknown Number in his contacts, naming it J after a long moment’s thought. Then he puts the phone down, tests his legs and finds them solid enough, and heads back into the kitchen to get something to eat.

He leaves the store sign flipped to Closed for the rest of the day.

Chapter Text

Steph shows up to work an hour early with a donut box again, and Dick knows he’s in trouble. She opens it to show him three of the cinnamon sugar buns he’d inhaled last time, and he moves straight past in trouble to genuinely scared.

“Are you quitting?” he asks, already resigning himself to knocking on the door of Wayne Manor, mouth full of crow, asking for help because the person who actually kept this store running had gotten a better offer-

“No, and stop that,” she says, taking him by the elbow and pulling him back into his kitchen. She deposits him at one chair and takes the one across from him, donuts between them like a trap. “You’re not gonna like this. Take a donut.”

He takes a donut. “If this is about me overextending the other day-”

“You know I used to go out with your brother, right?” she interrupts, which is fair enough.

Dick did know, although he’s a little fuzzy on the details. “Was that before or after you hit him in the face with a brick?”

“He dumped me for someone else,” Steph says easily, sounding as though they had settled their differences enough to laugh about it now. She takes one of the other donuts, a monstrosity with chocolate cereal sprinkled over the frosting, and prepares to take a bite.

“He was- Tim Drake dumped you. Within six months after I caught him practicing making out with his pillow, he was seeing two people.” Dick has to stop and sit back to consider that.

“Okay,” Stephanie says, wide-eyed. “Not that I’m not interested in hearing every single humiliating detail about that, because I absolutely am, but we need to stay on topic here, so we’ll revisit that later.”

“It was Kon, wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was Kon, now focus.” Stephanie abandons her donut to lean forward. “I’m telling you that so you know that it’s not some sort of prejudice or something. I do really believe that people like us and people like them can be together.”

“Bricks aside.”

“Dick-” Steph begins, making it clear she means the invective, not his name. “Eat your donut and shut up.”

He eats his donut and shuts up.

“When it started and it was just a cute little crush, that was one thing. Embarrassing for you, really, but harmless. But now you’ve gone legit stupid over it, and I kinda think we need to talk about it?” She squints at her donut, flustered- she’s no better at emotion talk than Dick.

“You think I shouldn’t have gone into that pet shop,” Dick says. She’d been oddly reserved with her opinion over the whole thing, aside from agreeing that Dick probably needs to work on building up some magic muscle again and begging time off to hang out with Gar. She’d come swanning in after her free afternoon with a giant tye-dyed stuffed elephant and obnoxiously colorful sunglasses, and happily confessed that they’d gone to the arcade and cheated at all the games, and Dick had taken the stuffed elephant and asked no questions.

“It could’ve been a trap,” she says severely, and Dick looks at her again. She’s paler than normal, fingers clenched into fists on the edge of the table. There’s a feather or two peeking through in her hair, subtle patterning for more emerging on the skin of her forearms, her disguise slipping with the strength of her emotions.

Now is absolutely not the time to mention that Dick knows he can trust Jason with his life, and in fact already had the very first time they’d met. He reaches over to take one of her hands in his, risking her grip crushing his fingers when she twists her wrist to grab him in turn.

“I’m fine,” he says, letting her feel that as well as see it, and the feathering fades away again. “Nothing happened. Nothing will happen. You were right, it was stupid. I won’t do anything like that again.”

“No,” Stephanie says, somehow reading between the lines and a different kind of upset now, and lets go of his hand. “No, no, not what I meant. I mean, yeah, I want you to be more careful, but Dick. You really like this guy, don’t you?”

He owes her that much. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” She smacks both palms onto the table hard enough to make the donut box jump, and blinks at it a little sheepishly, clearly forgetting her own strength for a moment. Then she looks at Dick again. “I had Tim confirm with Bruce that your boy’s legit, which you apparently didn’t bother to do.”

No, he hadn’t called up Bruce to ask if Jason had lied about meeting him. He could only imagine Bruce’s reaction to that. “I prefer to trust people.”

“Yeah, and I don’t, so here you go,” she says, and hands him a neatly folded piece of notebook paper with Jason and Roy’s names and phone numbers written on it in Tim’s near-illegible scrawl. “Have you even thought about asking him out or have you been too chicken?”

“I thought about it,” Dick protests.

“Didn’t do it, though,” she says.

“Well, I’d just yelled at him for trying to be nice to me, so it didn’t seem like the best moment.”

“Huh.” She picks up her donut again and pries a piece of cereal out of the icing-cement and tosses it into her mouth. “You’re right, that wasn’t great. But we’ll work on it.”

“We?” Oh, this is not going to go anyplace Dick likes, he can tell already.

“Yeah. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna interfere or anything, just cheer from the sidelines.” She hesitates, looks in the donut box like it suddenly holds the key to all the secrets of the universe. “Gar told me about you, you know. He said that you go hard in relationships, that you’re an all-or-nothing kind of guy.”

Dick takes another bite of his cinnamon sugar bun and says nothing.

“I just. I’ve known you for, what, eight years? And in that time, you’ve never been interested in anyone. Well, Barbara, but she’s awesome and everyone loves her.” She looks at him again, leans forward a little more so he looks back at her. “I just want you to be happy, okay? And if that punk-wannabe hunter does that, then I’m on board. Just understand that I think you have bad taste in men.”

“Mm-hm.” Dick nods thoughtfully, then says, slowly and carefully, “You hit Tim in the face with a brick because he dumped you for Kon, and you’re criticising me?”

“Are you taking a shot at Tim or Kon there?” Stephanie counters. “Because I’ll have you know, I have impeccable taste.”

The mood finally successfully shifted away from the heaviness at the start of the conversation, Dick grins and takes another bite of donut. Then he nearly chokes, because there’s the distant sound of the James Bond theme coming from the storefront.

“Isn’t that your phone?” Stephanie asks, and he nods and darts out to the store to grab it. She follows, asking, “and isn’t that Alfred’s ringtone?”

“Yeah,” Dick says thickly around his mouth full of cinnamon sugar. He swallows, braces himself- he can’t sound alarmed, can’t sound like he’s expecting bad news, if he answers the phone every time like he thinks Alfred’s calling to tell him someone’s in the hospital he’ll give the old man a complex, even if that’s his immediate impulse because Alfred rarely calls otherwise. He presses the Answer button when he can put a good enough face on it and says, “Hey, Al, what’s up?”

Alfred huffs, caught off-guard by the casual nickname. “Really, Master Richard,” he says, the full name treatment in retaliation.

“Sorry, Alfred. Did you need something?” Dick says, relaxing despite himself. Alfred wouldn’t be fussing over names if this were an emergency.

“Yes. I called to extend you an invitation to dinner at the manor tonight.”

“Oh.” Dick hasn’t had dinner at the manor since- well, the last time Alfred called. Tim had wound up in the hospital after a conflict with another hunter, and Bruce dealt with it badly, and needed all his children at hand in order to feel secure again. “Any, uh. Particular reason?”

“No one is hurt, Master Dick,” Alfred says calmly, and Dick lets himself relax the rest of the way. Stephanie, standing worriedly at his elbow, gives him a look, and he gives her a thumb’s up in return. He doesn’t know what this is, but it isn’t something that will likely end with her having to ride herd on Damian again. “Miss Cassandra merely made a comment the other day that reminded me how long it has been since this family has come together without some sort of emergency.”

Never, that’s how long. They have never all sat down for dinner together. Dick was out of the house, couch surfing at his friends’ places, when Tim first and Cass moved in within months of each other, and then a few years after that Damian came into the picture. By the time Dick and Bruce found their footing again, Tim had moved out. Now he has his own apartment that could double as a nuclear waste storage facility, Cass is at the manor part-time with the rest of her life a mystery that she will not explain, and Damian has grown from proper terror into a young teenage boy, which is essentially the same thing. Dick can’t think of a single time when they were all in the same building without said building being in a hospital, let alone the same room.

“So, dinner?” Dick asks, and shrugs helplessly at the baffled look Stephanie gives him.

“Yes. Be here by five thirty, please.”

“Not a request, huh,” Dick says wryly.

“Wear something appropriate,” Alfred says, which is as good as a no.

There’s a little bit of polite small talk after that, which is visibly killing Stephanie so Dick drags it out a little longer than he would otherwise. Finally he has to hang up, and sets his phone aside with a sigh.

“So dinner with the family, huh?” Stephanie asks immediately. “That’s cool, a little bit of socializing won’t hurt you. You and Gar only hung out for a couple hours and you didn’t even leave the store.”

Dick is not at all interested in explaining why his once-close friend circle has more or less fallen apart, with Dick self-exiled to Gotham. He’ll tell her one day, maybe, when he can say Donna’s name without choking on it. “What did you tell Tim about Jason when you called?”

“Nothing, just that he came into the store once or twice,” she says as he follows her back into the kitchen, where she retrieves her donut.

“Please don’t tell him about the pet store yet. Him or Cass.” He has no idea what Stephanie’s role in the family at large is, if she’s in contact with Cass or not. Damian, she would rather cut out her own tongue than talk to again, so there’s no worries there.

“Still haven’t met Cass,” Stephanie says. “She was doing her whole avoiding new people thing when Tim and I were going out, and we were never at the manor anyway. But sure, bossman, no telling people about the pet store. They’re never gonna find out, ever.”

By which she means Bruce likely already knows, and is reserving judgment until he figures out how to handle the situation. Dick can deal with that. Not talking about shit is seventy-five percent of his and Bruce’s relationship.

“Thanks,” he says, quiet and heartfelt, and she smiles at him in return.

For a moment, they eat their donuts in peace, Dick idly brushing the cinnamon sugar off as it sprinkles lightly over everything. Then Stephanie says, “So are you gonna ask him out next time or am I gonna have to annoy the shit out of you first?”

“You’re not allowed to bring in donuts again,” Dick says. “These are betrayal donuts, and I am not falling for it.”

“That sounded like a no,” Stephanie says.

“I think there’s someone in the store, I’m gonna go check on that,” Dick says. He takes his cinnamon sugar bun with him, and snags one of the other two, before he goes back out front, where there is absolutely no one.

“We’ll talk later,” Steph calls up after him.

That’s honestly what he’s afraid of.

He shows up at five thirty-seven, knowing he will be taken to task but ultimately forgiven for those seven minutes, and is left standing on the stoop for another four minutes before the door finally opens.

“I was here mostly on time,” he says, launching into his defense immediately because seven minutes is acceptable but anything beyond ten is unforgivably Late.

“Yeah,” Tim says, and swings the door open wider, an invitation in. “Don’t worry, he hasn’t even noticed. He’s got a different target.”

Tim leads him into the dining room- not the formal dining room, which can seat twenty, but the dining room that had once been a parlor or something before a ten-year-old Dick commanded a table be set up in it so he and Bruce could eat together while seated in the same hemisphere. Damian is circling the table with plates in hand, slapping them down just gently enough to avoid breaking them, and Cass is drifting behind him with two fistfuls of silverware that she is piecing out. They very pointedly skip the head of the table, only laying out four places.

Ah.

“Where,” Dick begins, looking at Tim, who shrugs.

“He was here about twenty minutes ago, but he got a call, grabbed a couple rolls, and left.”

“No marmalade?” Dick asks. Bruce has a massive sweet tooth he has managed to mostly wrestle under control, but it peeks out every so often. He usually takes advantage of any bread-type side dish by slathering it with as much marmalade as can adhere to the surface.

“He took the jar,” Tim says, and Dick winces. Oh, someone is in trouble tonight- two someones, actually, since Alfred was presumably in the kitchen and witnessed the theft.

“Should I-?” Dick looks through the doorway into the kitchen, which is radiating a very calm silence.

“It won’t help,” Tim says.

There’s a muted thump, and Dick and Tim both look over to see Damian has smacked the last salad plate down onto the tablecloth. “Will you two speak in complete sentences?” he snarls.

He’s gangly and awkward, a growth spurt on the horizon, and his voice has taken to scaling multiple octaves within a single sentence, and Dick wouldn’t be surprised to hear he’s had at least once acne freakout. He’s still so insecure it almost physically hurts to look at him. Dick shoots Tim an apologetic look and gets an eyeroll and a nod. Then he sweeps over to Damian, even going so far as to loop an arm around the boy’s shoulders when reaching for him doesn’t cause him to tuck down like a hostile turtle.

“Hey, Dames,” he says, pulling the kid in for a proper hug. He’s all long bones and pointy angles, and he’s tense in Dick’s hold, but he relaxes fractionally, and that’s enough.

Dick steps back fast- Damian tolerates hugs from him because Dick respects his boundaries- and holds out his other arm, and a moment later Cass is tucked up against him. She squeezes with strength just this side of bone-breaking, then lets go as well, and taps one finger to her lips. Nonverbal tonight, then.

“So what’s up with you three?” Dick asks, looking over at Tim to make sure he understands he’s not being excluded. “Anything new in your lives?”

Cass shakes her head, but she’s smiling like she knows something they don’t. Let her keep her secrets. Dick isn’t brave enough to try to pry them out of her.

Damian clucks his tongue, relaxing even more now that the physical contact is limited to one arm over his shoulders. “School is boring,” he says. “I’ve told Father the curriculum isn’t challenging enough, but he won’t let me leave.”

“The Hannigan kid isn’t bothering you anymore?” Tim asks, cautious and daring, risking conversation so long as Dick is between them.

Instead of snarling defensively, or waving it off arrogantly, Damian actually flushes, the tiniest brush of pink over his cheekbones, and looks away. Dick and Tim share a surprised glance, then both look to Cass, who purses her lips for a moment before deciding to share.

Punched him, she says, then curls one hand into a fist and taps it gently to her own mouth before bringing her hands back down to add, broke two teeth.

Tim looks delighted, but thankfully turns away, fussing at the place settings to hide his reaction. Dick rides out the wave of disappointment, the urge to scold, and speaks only when he can keep it out of his voice.

“So how long were you suspended for?” he asks.

“Two weeks,” Damian says. “And Hannigan has not spoken to me once since I returned.”

Tim snorts loudly. Cass ducks out from under Dick’s arm to go bump him aside with a hip, fixing his fixing of the dishes. Her hands are far too busy for the task, talking to Tim privately, so Dick turns to Damian and lowers his voice.

“I’m sure Bruce and Alfred read you the riot act, right?” he asks, and Damian nods and side-eyes him, probably wondering if this is merely verse three of the You’re In Deep Shit song. Dick nods in return, and then smiles. “Next time he starts getting on your case about it, ask Bruce about Harvey Dent.”

“The district attorney?” Damian wrinkles his nose, still a surprisingly adorable gesture even though he’s growing out of the baby-face button nose phase. “He and Father are friends.”

“Yeah, now,” Dick agrees. “It was a can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em friendship. I went to a Widow and Orphans fundraiser dinner one time and Harvey told me all about how they used to go home bloody, fighting each other over the dumbest stuff. Then one day the school bully decided to take Harvey’s side against Bruce, and Harvey just.” He snaps his fingers, the same gesture Harvey had used that night, fourteen-year-old Dick eating the story up while Bruce groaned and begged Harvey not to encourage him. “Flipped, like that. And after that, it was Bruce and Harvey against the world.”

Damian loosens up a little bit more, gaze almost predatory as Dick hands him a weapon to undermine his father with. “Interesting,” he says, and Dick can see him filing that away for later use. Damian is strategic enough, Dick knows he’ll use it to best effect.

Then there is a noise, a throat clearing, and Dick looks up to see Alfred in the kitchen doorway. “As Master Bruce apparently has somewhere better to be, I have put the food out on the counter in a buffet,” he says, and oh yeah, he’s pissed. “Feel free to help yourselves.”

All four of them hesitate a good minute even after Alfred disappears from the doorway, none of them quite daring to approach yet. Finally Cass takes a plate and, tense and prepared to bolt, heads into the kitchen. Damian, not to be outdone by anyone, grabs another plate and follows.

“This will be fun,” Tim mutters as Dick moves over to him.

“Something going on in the world I should be aware of?” he asks. Something going on in the world that Jason might be involved in.

“One of the big names is causing trouble, we don’t know who yet,” Tim says, taking both of the plates still on the table and handing one over to Dick. “Cursed a drifting hunter, funded some black market chimera maker, stuff like that.”

So he’d landed in the middle of something big enough to warrant Bruce’s personal attention, big enough to justify Bruce blowing off Alfred. That was… not reassuring.

“I think I uncursed that hunter,” Dick says, slow, careful, feeling his way out onto the tightrope. Tim looks at him, genuinely surprised, which is a good start.

“Is that why Steph called about them?” he asks. “She didn’t mention that you helped him with a curse. Was there any sort of signature?”

“No.” Curses don’t work like that, but some practitioners favor certain curses to the point of artistry, which can be as good as signing it with your name. Dick doesn’t bother explaining that to Tim, who should already know that. “They used a relay. It was a killing curse, he barely made it in the door before he passed out, and he wasn’t going to wake up again.”

Tim nods, but says nothing, because Damian is coming back in with his plate heaped with enough food to feed seven people. Alfred has a strict rule about no business talk at the dinner table, strict enough to linger even when Alfred himself is off sulking in another room. Cass follows a moment later, a roll stuffed into her mouth. She waves Dick and Tim on into the kitchen with her free hand, and they go.

It’s a more peaceful meal than Dick expected, with Bruce gone, Damian disarmed by being trusted with a secret, and Tim distracted by a new problem to puzzle over. Cass mourns the marmalade and sneaks rolls off her brothers’ plates when they aren’t paying enough attention, and Dick speaks up only to keep the conversation flowing and the few occasions he needs to intervene before a fight breaks out.

It’s nice, and he can almost believe this is something they can do on a regular basis without killing each other. Almost.

When dinner is over, and Tim is holed up in the basement-slash-cave to fit the new details Dick gave him into the big picture of Gotham’s underworld, Dick heads into Bruce’s office to raid his liquor cabinet.

Alfred is in the library, ostensibly cleaning but really just drifting along and looking at the pictures on the walls. There’s a veritable photo album up there, starting with Thomas Wayne’s baby pictures and going all the way uninterrupted to Bruce’s ninth birthday, then jumping forward to Dick’s first Christmas in the manor. Alfred has stalled out at the big ornately framed portrait picture of the Waynes as a happy family, Thomas holding baby Bruce and Martha grabbing Alfred by the arm to hold him hostage and keep him in frame as the photographer snapped the picture. He turns away quickly when he hears Dick behind him.

“Master Dick,” he says in greeting, then turns and sees what Dick’s holding. “Oh, I really can’t-”

Dick takes his life into his own hands and says, amiable and gentle, “Alfred, hush,” and pours out two tumblers of a single malt that probably costs more than he makes in a month.

Alfred huffs, but thankfully does not take Dick to the cleaners over his nerve, and takes one of the tumblers with a murmured thanks. They stand together, looking at the picture Alfred had been staring at.

“How do you plan on getting home?” Alfred asks finally, when Dick refills his glass with far too much scotch and holds the bottle out in offer. Alfred holds out the tumbler and Dick splashes a healthy amount in for him as well.

“Tim’s gonna drop me off.” He braces the bottle against his hip and puts the cap back on with one hand, flashing Alfred a grin of victory when he manages to not drop anything. “I know this wasn’t what you wanted.”

“I apologize for that,” Alfred begins, but Dick snorts.

“It’s not your fault, we all know how Bruce is.” He leans over and bumps Alfred’s shoulder with his own. “I was just going to say, next time you should join us.” He indicates the picture with a wave of his glass. “You’re family too.”

“We’ve had this conversation before, Master Richard,” Alfred says, trying to sound stern and instead sounding so unbearably fond.

“Yeah.” Dick doesn’t bother responding beyond that, just stares into his scotch. He wants to tell Alfred about Jason, wants to admit that he’s making an idiot of himself over a cute guy. Alfred won’t blink at the pronouns, and will be happy that Dick is interested in anyone at all, considering how long it’s been. But he doesn’t know how to begin, and doesn’t want to end it with and we’re probably never seeing each other again unless he needs something from me. Enough that Stephanie is getting herself involved in something that’s probably hopeless.

“I’m heading out,” he says after a while.

“Thank you for coming, Master Dick,” Alfred says with a soft smile that is as good as a hug.

“We’ll do it again sometime,” Dick promises on his way out the door, and Alfred nods.

Dick deposits the scotch back in Bruce’s office and the glass in the kitchen, then goes downstairs to pry Tim away from his work to drive him home, and tries not to notice the empty spot at the table when he walks by.

Next time, they’ll do it right.

Chapter Text

It’s a nice night, the wind warm with the first blush of summer, a distant radio playing something Dick half-remembers from his teenage years, the sun setting and painting the horizon a beautiful array of colors. He sends Tim home to continue working on whatever was so important and drags the bar stool out front to sit on the sidewalk and enjoy it. He’s had perhaps half a glass of scotch too much- he was never a heavy drinker, and suspects his magic leaves him even more of a lightweight- he’s not drunk, barely tipsy. Comfortable, loose, mellow.

He has his eyes closed but he knows Jason is coming long before he actually gets there, can feel the tiny shard of his own magic woven in the charm Jason now wears over his heart coming home to him.

“Thought you didn’t close for ten more minutes,” Jason says eventually, when they’ve shared a few moment’s worth of silence.

Dick finally opens his eyes and looks at the Closed sign in the door. He’d sent Stephanie home when he left for dinner, and had taken down the note he’d left on the door explaining that they were closing early when he’d gotten back. There are tentative hours written on the Open side of the sign, complete with question marks after each stated opening and closing time. He hadn’t realized Jason had bothered to look.

“Had dinner with the family,” he says. Why not tell him, really.

Jason either knows just enough to realize what a statement that is, or simply picks up on it from Dick’s general attitude. “How’d that go?”

“Well, Bruce waited until only twenty minutes before to bail, so better than I expected,” Dick says, and immediately winces and rubs at his face with his hands. “Shit, sorry, that was bitchy.”

“Don’t apologize, I get it,” Jason says.

“Really?” Dick looks up at him and says, common sense far too slow out of the gate,
“Wanna trade tragic backstories?”

Jason, thankfully, smiles instead of pulling away. He turns and leans his shoulders back against the wall near Dick, legs stretched out long before him and one foot hooked over the other ankle. “What makes you think I have a tragic backstory?”

“I have never met a healthy, well-adjusted person in your line of work.” Dick thinks that one over for a moment. “I have never met a healthy, well-adjusted person, period.”

There is something terribly soft in Jason’s gaze for a moment before his expression shifts into a careful blankness and he looks away. The fabric craft supply store across the street from Dick’s place is run by octogenarians and twenty-somethings hipsters and closes at the wholy reasonable hour of five p.m., but the front window stays lit up until eight, shining a soft white light on the quilts and knitted blankets in the display window and casting false moonlight onto the street. Jason seems fascinated by the knitted fishnet, complete with gaps the size of baseballs, that the sign in the display next to it dares to call a blanket and promises is light and breathes well and is perfect for summer.

“I actually came by to talk business, kind of,” Jason says.

“Oh?” Dick asks, and wishes he has something to do with his hands. He feels suddenly restless.

“Your friend finished with the bird today. He says it’s a perfect chimera.”

“So it can’t be fixed,” Dick says, and tries not to wince at his own words for the second time in three minutes. A perfect chimera doesn’t need to be fixed, that’s the whole point of perfect, and Gar would have his head for suggesting otherwise.

“Guess not.” Jason pushes himself off the wall and stands up straight, and he still won’t look at Dick. “The clerk cut a deal.”

Tim had said as much on the drive home, before the conversation got derailed by Stephanie sending Tim a text and leaving him to wonder out loud why she’s suddenly so obsessed with sending him links to body pillows with anime girls on them. Dick gives it three days before he puts the pieces together and then there will be hell to pay. “For info on his boss?”

“Yeah,” Jason says. “He’s not a witch so they went easy on him.”

Now it’s Jason’s turn to wince, and he spares Dick a quick glance, probably trying to gauge his reaction to that. Dick shrugs, because it is what it is, but Jason doesn’t relax again. He shifts his weight from one leg to the other, arms coming up to fold across his chest, before he goes still and unwinds again, hands sliding back into his jacket pockets. Uncomfortable, then, and aware enough of himself to recognize his own defensive posturing. Dick’s mellow mood is souring, and it annoys him, because he doesn’t know what he did wrong or how to recover their footing.

“Understanding that I know how you feel about being protected, and that I’m risking life and limb here,” Jason begins, then shifts in place again. “I think you should be more careful, for the time being. Until things quiet down a little.”

Dick can’t help but laugh a little at that, incredulous. “Be more careful? What, you think that clerk’s gonna come after me?”

“I was thinking more his boss,” Jason says. He’s tensing up too, the quiet conversation moving more towards antagonistic, and Dick doesn’t know how to stop it.

“Believe it or not, I don’t hang my security only on that ten dollar lock,” Dick says, indicating the store door. “Nothing gets through that door that means to harm me or anyone else in there.”

Jason steps forward to look around Dick at the door, then into the promised safety of the store where Dick most definitely is not, then back at Dick again. His expression says everything.

“You can take care of yourself, I know,” Jason says when Dick opens his mouth to say exactly that. “Just- as a favor, for me, please?”

Fairly safe to say that a practitioner bold enough to curse a hunter would take offense at that curse being lifted. Dick probably put himself on this asshole’s radar just by helping Jason the first time, long before the pet store business. He probably missed a similar not-lecture from Bruce only by the grace of that phone call that pulled him away. Dick takes a breath to fight and lets it out in a sigh, suddenly too tired to bother. “Fine.”

“Thanks,” Jason says. “And thanks again for all your help.”

There’s something very final in those words. “But you’ve got it from here?” Dick asks, raising an eyebrow at him.

“I think that’s for the best,” Jason says. “You make your own choices, but so do I, and I’m choosing not to put anyone else in the line of fire.”

“Nice line,” Dick says, feeling oddly chilly despite the warm breeze. “Did Roy get to hear it too?”

Jason snorts. “A couple of times over the years, and he’s told me to go fuck myself every time. So I’m stuck with him, if that makes you feel better.”

It doesn’t, really, but it would be wildly hypocritical of Dick to start criticising Jason’s bad choices now. “All right,” he says, and thinks what if you get cursed again and the charm can’t beat it, what if you need my kind of help and get hurt or worse because you won’t ask for it, why does this feel like we’re breaking up.

Jason looks down at him, looking frustrated like Dick is the one who’s being stupid and unreasonable here. For a moment they just stare at each other, and then it suddenly clicks.

“Oh, you want me to go inside now,” Dick says, pointing helpfully at the door, as if Jason wouldn’t understand the concept of inside otherwise.

“Take your time,” Jason drawls. And really, he’s lucky Dick is so gone on him, because instead of making him eat those words, Dick actually gets up and grabs the stool he’d been sitting on.

“Because you asked so nicely,” he says, sarcasm as deflection so he doesn’t sound so needy when he adds, “If you need my help, give me a call. I really can take care of myself.”

To his credit, Jason actually looks sincere when he nods. He holds the door open for Dick, even though his help isn’t really needed, and hangs awkwardly in the doorway. He’s said thanks, he’s gotten what he wants, all that’s left is to say goodbye and leave, and he seems surprisingly reluctant to do that. He finally settles on a stilted, “See you around, then,” which just sounds stupid when he very clearly doesn’t intend for that to actually happen. Then he ducks away, and the door swings shut, and Dick is alone in the dark shop, and not nearly drunk enough for what just happened.

Well, shit.

The worst part is, it will get better. It always does.

The first day dawns hot and muzzy, the air so thick with humidity you could cut a slice of it with a knife, the storms rolling lazily in mid-afternoon. Dick wakes up at the kitchen table, the last can of Monster that Stephanie thought she had hidden in the store cabinets lying on its side and spilling onto the table in front of him, a low-grade headache throbbing behind his eyes. He gives himself one day to sulk, one day where Stephanie is walking on eggshells around him- she thinks it’s to do with something happening at dinner, and he doesn’t bother to correct her- and customers mind their distance and their manners a bit more than usual when they look at him and see- whatever is happening on his face.

Then, the next day comes, and Dick is not better, but willing to pretend. He’s been through worse- he’s proposed to the woman he loves and had her say yes with one breath, then explain with the next why they never can. He’s watched the woman who was as good as a sister to him die. He watched his parents die, and spent the rest of his childhood raised by a man who very much lives up to the World’s Okayest Dad mug Tim got him as a mean-spirited gag gift a few years back. He’ll survive this, like everything else.

It helps, that Gar crashes the store on the second day, loud and lively and accepting no excuses. He drags Dick out to a movie the first night, a whirlwind tour of Gotham’s finest pizzarias the second, and stays in and plays packmule with Dick as Stephanie completely reorganizes the storefront the third. He’s taking the alligator bird to a chimera sanctuary that he’s on good terms with, and has to wait until transport arrangements come through. He’s good about not dwelling on the good old days, as much as it’s clearly killing Stephanie to not be hearing all sorts of embarrassing stories about teenaged Dick.

He tells Gar about Jason, that third night while Stephanie works on the other side of the room and pretends not to be listening. Gar was there, when Dick and Kori had had to break up. He’d helped Wally follow the trail of magical destruction and hunt Dick down when he went barhopping to try and drink the pain away. He knows what I think I would have really liked him means. They break into the chocolate, because Gar doesn’t drink and starts looking a little traumatized whenever he sees Dick near alcohol, and then upgrade to homemade s’mores with a little magical fire. He crashes on the couch that night, falling asleep as human but in the morning Dick wanders past a fully-grown tiger with his head and one leg on the couch and the rest of him spilling onto the floor.

When he leaves, things get quiet again, and Dick remembers what he had been trying to forget, and lets himself dwell on the melancholy. It will get better. It always does, eventually.

He just doesn’t want it to. Not yet.

The eighth day after Dick’s dinner with his family, the door buzzes an arrival at nine thirteen a.m. Stephanie isn’t due in for at least another hour, so it has to be a customer, as rare as those are first thing in the morning. Dick’s on the stool, feet hooked into the shelf under the register to provide a counterbalance as he leans back so his spine is parallel to the floor, and the solar system spins above him with a lightbulb as the sun and whatever innocent bystander items his eye happened to land on as the planets. It’s actually good exercise, keeping everything moving at different speeds and, in the case of some of the biggest moons- starring a handful of marbles as Earth’s moon, Saturn’s behemoth Titan, and the three moons of Jupiter he could name off the top of his head- in different directions.

He sits up, and Callisto falls and Jupiter itself wobbles, although Jupiter is a fist-sized chunk of bismuth and is not the most aerodynamic planet to start with. He’s just in time to watch the customer make a surprised noise and duck under the wide arch of Planet X- the pad of unused post-its. “Sorry, hang on,” he says, trying to figure out how to push it all up so it’s not at throat-height for the average man.

“You’re good,” the customer says, and Dick knows that voice, brief though their meeting was. And sure enough, when he finds safe harbor in the black space between the orbits of Pluto- the not-lost earring from a pair Stephanie had lost in the store- and Neptune- a bottle of ice blue Gatorade- and straightens up again, Dick recognizes him instantly. “This is cool,” Roy Harper says, eyeing the solar system as it swings idly around him, a sealed manilla envelope pressed close against himself as if to protect it. “Do you do birthday parties?”

“Not for cheap,” Dick says, letting himself lean backwards again, although not as far this time. With some intense concentration and a moment of swearing, he gets Callisto airborne and orbiting properly around Jupiter again without causing total galactic collapse. “So can I help you with something?” he asks, daring to sit up again, slow and careful. The sun flickers dangerously for a moment as he loops the thread of power back onto itself- the web of magic holding the whole thing aloft feeds through the sun, so if it goes, the rest of it will too- before it all steadies out again and spins on without his support, completely self-sustaining now, and Dick shoots Roy a grin simply because he needs to share this victory.

Roy watches the planets drift by for a moment, then ducks under Neptune and Uranus- Dick’s phone- in one go in order to approach the cash register. “When you told Jay about the relay, we went back to the.” He pauses, looks at Dick consideringly.

“Wherever you were when Jason got cursed?” Dick offers, far too used to those sort of awkward pauses to be bothered by it. So many of his customers want his help without having to share embarrassing or sensitive details, and he’s learned how to fill in the gaps himself.

“Yes,” Roy says with a smile. He reaches over and places the envelope on the counter gently. It clatters dully as it settles. “The curse was on a statue that was broken during the, ah, excitement. These are all the pieces we could find that had writing on it. I was wondering if you could look them over and give me a name, or anything else.”

Dick looks at the envelope but doesn’t reach for it. “Does Jason know you’re here?” he asks. “Not that you need his permission, but I don’t need to be dragged into a lover’s spat, either.”

“Oh, don’t worry, he’ll only be mad at me,” Roy says lightly. “And we’re not.”

“Not what?” Dick asks, distracted, as he finally takes the envelope and unfolds the metal tines of the brad holding it shut.

“Lovers. If you were wondering.”

“I- wasn’t?” Dick says, looking back up at Roy, and the two of them stare at each other for a second or two. He wasn’t wondering before, but he is now, and also wondering why Roy would share such a personal detail with someone who might as well be a total stranger.

Like most redheads, Roy blushes easily and deeply. He clears his throat and nods towards the envelope. “Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?” he asks, a clear attempt at changing the subject.

“No, the magic’s gone out of it,” Dick says slowly, reluctant to be redirected. Why would Roy think he cares- he opens the envelope and carefully slides a piece out and undoes the styrofoam film wrapped around it. It’s dried clay, unfinished and unpainted, with blurred fingerprints pressed into its surface. Something small and hollow, and not professionally done, the clay poorly mixed and crumbling at the edges even with gentle handling. “You don’t have the whole thing,” he says, not asking.

“Maybe half, if we’re lucky,” Roy confirms. It’s clever, really- the statue made a great relay, sharp enough to break skin but fragile enough for the pieces to be ground into dust once the curse was transferred and the relay’s work was done. Dick turns the piece over to study the actual curse. It had been seared onto the clay, the same slashes of lettering that had been oozing over Jason’s skin when he crashed into Dick’s kitchen.

“Just to be clear- I’m not asking for anything that’ll get you into any more trouble than you already are with this guy. Look it over, tell me anything you think might help us figure out who it is, and you’re done.”

It’s less galling when it’s Roy telling him that, probably because he means it purely professionally without a single ounce of it’s for your own good. It also helps Dick look at it from a purely professional angle himself.

“I’m not giving you any names,” he says finally. “I can tell you basic observation stuff, but that’s about it.” He’s not sure how he’d feel about setting a pair of hunters on a fellow practitioner, even one who’s done shit like this, but thankfully the subject is moot- Dick knows exactly two people who could do something like this, and neither of them ever would. He can tell them what to look for, aim them in a general direction, but that’s it, and that’s good enough for him.

“Whatever you can tell us,” Roy says, and for a moment he looks tired, his charming front slipping a little. “We’re beating out heads against a brick wall here. I’m just using all available resources.”

“All right,” Dick says, not unsympathetic. “It’ll take me a couple days, if that’s okay, this is gonna need some delicate handling.” As he speaks, he turns the clay piece wrong, and a big chunk of the corner cracks off in his hands. It’s not the part the line of curse lettering crosses over, thankfully, but both Dick and Roy go perfectly still for a few moments to see if the cracks are going to spread, then share a look over fragments.

“Take your time,” Roy says wryly, as he eases back a step and holds up both hands, as if to demonstrate to the clay chunk that he is not a threat. He goes a hair too far and avoids getting clipped on the chin by Saturn- a peach from the kitchen- only by a last-second dodge, then a backwards lean around Titan. For a moment Dick is about to apologize again, but Roy comes back up grinning, no apology necessary. “So how much?”

“Uh,” Dick says, carefully putting the statue fragments down. “Fifty, at the most. We can discuss it more when you hear what I have to tell you later.”

“Sounds good.” He ducks under Saturn’s orbit and watches as Jupiter sails by, its three moons locked into orbit around it. “These aren’t,” he begins, indicating Jupiter, then pointing into the glass displays.

“What, magic?” Dick asks, and shakes his head when Roy nods. “No, I wouldn’t do this with something that might misbehave like that. These are all just mundane items.”

“Right,” Roy says, looking at Jupiter again- in fairness, bismuth does look pretty alien to someone who’s never seen it before. Dick keeps it stocked because people buy it since it looks weird, and for the minerals and crystals crowd. Roy ducks and weaves past the inner solar system, pausing at Earth- an actual globe, albeit one the size of a golf ball, that also doubles as a pencil sharpener- before moving on.

“You’ve got Jason’s number, so just give him a call when you’re done, I can handle him yelling at me,” he says once he reaches the relative safety of the outer planets again with their wide gaps between them.

“Sure thing,” Dick says, focusing on wrapping the film around the clay chunk again. He can’t just lay a protection spell over it to keep it from crumbling more, that’ll sear off the remains of the curse. He’s going to have to be subtle on this one.

The door buzzes with Roy’s departure a moment later, and Dick realizes he was probably rude at the end there, just ignoring the man until he left. Nothing to be done now, though, so he takes the envelope carefully into his work room and puts it gently on his desk. He won’t be able to do anything with it until Stephanie’s there to mind the store. He lingers nonetheless, just barely touching the envelope with his fingertips. He could feel it, when he held the piece with the curse imprint on it- an echo, a whisper, fury at a stymied plan, revenge in every line drawn onto the statue. This was not some small-timer trying to throw a hunter off their scent. This was someone who fully intended to kill Jason, and genuinely believed they could get away with it. There would be consequences for going after this asshole, and they would reach everyone even remotely involved.

Curse lines squirming on Jason’s skin, Bruce’s seat at the dinner table empty, Tim sleep-deprived and staring into a computer screen as he tries to put the pieces together, and Dick thinks- yes, it’s worth it.

Then he goes back out front to watch the planets some more.

Chapter Text

The first part is unwrapping the pieces, taking pictures of each one with his phone- magical versus practical- and then rearranging the pictures until they’re in some attempt at the proper order. It’s hard enough even without considering the missing pieces, the statue small and oddly shaped and the curse wrapping around it. When he finally has the pieces put together, he fills in the rest of the curse as best he can, careful to leave gaps and drop whole letters so he doesn’t trigger his own copy of it. It’s not a killing curse, despite what he told Tim- true killing curses are rare, and take massive magical effort, and can’t be inflicted via a relay- but it’s a cheap shortcut to the same destination, inducing unwaking sleep until the victim dies of dehydration.

Next is the tracing- a pure white cloth, untouched by bare skin and kept in a sealed wood cask to protect it from magical influence, draped over the largest clay chunk with the biggest piece of the curse writing on it, and the hours-long work of knitting a spell to raise the ink up into the cloth without smearing it or damaging the underlying magical fingerprints.

He sits back for the first time in an hour, and blinks and pushes his hair out of his eyes, and blinks again. He’d been expecting proper ink, and had hoped to learn something of the curse-caster’s style- did they buy it pre-cooked? make their own, steeped with their own magic?- but what rises up on the cloth is a very familiar, unmistakable shade of red.

“Blood?” he asks of no one. Blood is a horrible carrier, for all that people love the symbology. Blood from non-magical sources resists magic, and blood from a practitioner has its own magic and will resist being shaped by anyone, even its donor, into something it isn’t intended to be. It makes for a decent potion ingredient under specific circumstances, but to write out a spell in blood? Theatrics for theatrics’ sake, sacrificing practicality for the mystique of it all. Dick, who put together a solar system and called it exercise just this morning, finds himself snobbishly disapproving of the sheer unnecessity of it.

It’s too bad the magic itself will have caused the blood to degrade too much to get DNA off of it, he thinks as he stands up and steps back to open the door. The air in the hallway outside is noticeably cooler and smells like whatever incense Stephanie has burning in the store, and he’s finally feeling the stiffness in his limbs from sitting unmoving in one spot, the stickiness at the small of his back and his hairline from sweat, his palms clammy from too long in latex gloves.

“Hey,” a voice says, and he abandons his stretch to step out into the hallway, where Steph is standing, looking oddly worried.

“Oh, hey, I needed to ask you-” he ducks back into his work room and grabs the white cloth, no special handling needed now that it’s absorbed the curse writing. He spreads it out, careful nonetheless not to actually touch the lettering, and adds, “Does this look like blood to you?”

“Sure,” she says, clearly distracted. “You’ve got a customer.”

“Can it wait?” Dick asks. He’s at a safe stopping point, but he doesn’t want to lose momentum now.

“Dick,” Stephanie says, and it finally clicks, how weird she’s being. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

She gestures, and he follows her into the store, where there is a young woman. His first thought is wow, that purple chicken pox is really getting around, because she’s spotty just like the man who came into the store when Jason was buying charms. Except-

“I slept late this morning,” the woman says. She’s clearly hungover, remnants of last night’s makeup smeared on her face and her hair clumped with dried sweat. “When I woke up, I looked like this. And about an hour ago, uh.”

She holds out her arm, and Dick comes around the counter to take it gently, grateful for the gloves he hasn’t bothered to take off yet. He taps one finger gently to the object protruding from her skin- a clear tube that looks almost like a sealed-off plastic straw with something dark inside.

“Pinfeather?” he asks, and looks over at Stephanie, who molts once a year and knows her stuff.

“Yeah,” she says, and looks at the woman. “Any chance of non-human heritage? Harpy or siren or something, within the last three or four generations?”

The woman bears up under the question well, which is more than can be said of most people suddenly finding their humanity in doubt. She goes pale, and her hands clench into fists, but she answers steadily enough. “Not parents or grandparents, but anything farther back than that, if they were hiding it…” She shrugs, which is fair enough.

Most of the spots are still spots, still just speckles of odd color on her skin. Very few have even started to raise up, and only one or two are sprouting feathers. Dick strips one glove off, since they’re now just in the way, and rests his fingertips against the spots to feel the magic behind it. It’s nothing fancy, just a weird mesh of magic that feels like it was trying to be three different things at once.

“Good news,” he says. “I’ve seen this before and I know how to treat it. It’ll take a couple weeks for the spots to fade entirely, but the feathers should stop growing in immediately.”

“And the bad news?” the woman asks with a nervous smile. She’s not letting herself relax just yet.

“No bad news,” Dick says easily. “It will take about an hour to cook up the potion you need, and in the meantime, I’m going to ask some questions.” He pauses, and she nods, still braced for fight or flight. “You were partying last night?”

“Clubbing,” she says. “My friend Maggie, she turned twenty-five. We hit a few places to celebrate.”

“Call everyone you were out with last night,” Dick says. “Tell them to come here, even if they’re not displaying symptoms. And then write down the names of all the clubs you hit last night, and anyplace else you went yesterday where you ate or drank anything, or maybe even breathed in something strange. Also, sorry, what’s your name?”

“Sara.”

“Sara,” he repeats, and smiles at her, and she finally relaxes. “I can fix this, easy. You’re going to be okay.”

She smiles back, wobbly and tiny but sincere, and Dick excuses himself and moves away towards the back. Stephanie follows him for a few stops, stopping with him in the doorway.

“Okay,” she mutters, glancing over her shoulder. “Once is a freak accident, dude did the magic equivalent of getting struck by lightning. But twice?”

“Yeah, someone did that to both of them on purpose. And they’ve been working on the.” He pauses. “I’ll say spell, but that’s not all it is. Someone is getting very creative here, and they’ve found a way to accelerate the process.”

“Which means there are guinea pigs, other victims who didn’t make it here,” Stephanie says grimly.

“I need to get to work on that potion. Can you keep her company, and when her friends get here, try and keep anyone from freaking out?”

“Sure thing,” she says, looking back at Sara, who is scrolling on her phone.

“And.” Dick starts, and squeezes his eyes shut. He really, really doesn’t want to do this, but. “I’m gonna head out for a bit after I’m done with her. I think I need backup on this one.”

“Oh,” Stephanie says, then, as it clicks, “oh.”

“Yeah,” Dick agrees flatly. “So I’m.” He gestures towards the kitchen.

“Good luck,” Stephanie says, meaning it in more ways than one, and Dick sighs.

“You too,” he says, looking at Sara again- she’s calm now, but when her friends start showing up, herd mentality will take over.

They share another look, gathering strength, then go their separate ways and get to work.

He gets to the manor about ten minutes after Damian is due home from school, timed so Bruce is definitely around but hasn’t been home long enough yet to get caught up in something. He comes in through the garage and breezes through the kitchen on his way to the basement, and passes Alfred, who is sitting in the sunlight at the kitchen table with two cups of tea and reading what looks like a true crime novel.

“Should we be worried?” Dick asks.

“Were I going to snap, Master Dick, it would have happened years ago,” Alfred says, sounding bored. “Send Master Timothy upstairs when you get down there, please. He promised me seven hours ago he would get some sleep soon.”

“Gonna drug him?” Dick asks, eyeing the untouched cup of tea.

“I should be appalled to find myself stooping to such measures,” Alfred responds haughtily, which is not actually a no.

Dick moves on, grateful that he is spared Alfred’s attention- his own eclectic sleeping habits had been the old man’s despair when Dick was young. He heads to the elevator tucked away in the back hall by the grandfather clock that has always towered over him, suffers through the eye-sear of the retinal scan and selects one of the two buttons available in the elevator car and descends into the Cave.

Once upon a time, Thomas Wayne had had some grand idea about merging the separate human and magic cultures within Gotham into one inclusive society. He’d started excavating the vast cave beneath Wayne Manor to that end, for unexplained reasons. Then he and his wife were murdered in the street in front of their nine-year-old son, and Bruce had shifted gears from forging a new, better city to punishing people who tried to make a bad situation worse. To that end, the Cave has become his command center and hub of intelligence, a secret to most and hidden from all but a select few.

Tim and Cass are sitting in the same oversized chair at the main computer, Tim wedged into the corner against the arm and leaning on Cass for support. He’s talking, gesturing with one of those cans of coffee that warm up if you snap the seal at the bottom, and Cass is picking at the keyboard with a look of intense concentration. If Tim has reached the point where he can’t even type for himself…

“Hey,” Dick says, leaning a hip against the chair and spinning it slightly so Cass at least is no longer directly facing the computer. He talks to her, because she’ll know what he means when he says, “Alfred wants Tim upstairs.”

She considers Tim for a moment, then looks back at Dick and nods once. Message received. Dick moves away while she begins to squirm free of Tim’s lean to rise to her feet. He knocks on the door to Bruce’s downstairs office- the one civilians won’t see, no matter how lost they get while wandering through the manor- and enters without waiting for a response, draping himself in the couch positioned against the wall to the soundtrack of Tim’s complaining.

“That’s not going to work on me,” Bruce says mildly, not looking up from the paperwork he’s studying, and in his careful nonchalance he looks so much like Alfred had in the kitchen that Dick just has to grin.

“He only had one extra cup of tea, you can relax.”

“Hrm.” Bruce writes something down, a note in the notebook he keeps on hand because Tim has never managed to convince him to skip the written word and go straight to digital recordkeeping. “I am meant to apologize for missing dinner last week,” he says.

“You know that’s not actually an apology.”

That gets him a glance. “All right. I’m sorry I missed dinner last week.”

“Okay.” Dick sits up properly, both feet on the floor and everything, which is a pretty big concession from someone who barely knows how chairs work. “But you didn’t miss dinner, you skipped it. There’s a difference.”

Bruce closes the notebook and sets his pen aside, then lays down the papers in his other hand. He turns in his chair to pin Dick with his unsettlingly intense deepwater-blue stare. “I’m sorry I skipped dinner. Something came up that, in hindsight, could have waited a few hours. I shouldn’t have left.”

Dick doesn’t know what to do with that, especially since Bruce seems to be waiting for a response. He pulls his phone out of his pocket. “It’s fine. I actually didn’t come here for that, I wanted to see if you’ve seen anything like this before.”

Bruce takes his phone and looks at the pictures Dick has pulled up on screen, from Sara the no-longer-feathered girl. She had allowed the pictures on the proviso that they did not include anything that could be used to identify her. Bruce swipes until he hits the selfies Steph had taken to provide a buffer between Sara and the pictures of the curse pieces, which are not Bruce’s business, then swipes back over Sara again.

“I had someone come in with the same thing a couple weeks ago, minus the feathers,” Dick says. “Thought it was just some freak accident and sent him home with the cure. Then today, this girl comes in.”

“What spell is it, do you know?” Bruce asks.

“It’s not.” Bruce looks over at him in surprise, and Dick explains as best he can. “It’s a mix of spellwork and physical magic, like something induced by potion. It doesn’t balance well, so I can undo it pretty easily, but that it happened twice means it wasn’t an accident.”

“Send me those,” Bruce orders as he hands the phone back, apparently clever enough to realize that going into Dick’s texts himself will not end happily for him. “Do you have contact information for these people?”

“The first guy, no. I was busy with other customers and just got him what he needed and got him out the door. He even had Steph freaking out a little.” He pulls out a paper from his pocket and hands it over. “This is from the girl today. She and her friends went out last night, this is a list of all the places they went. I had her call her friends in and most of them were starting to grow spots. Either she had a higher exposure or she’s just less resistant to magical influence, I can’t really say.”

“I asked for contact info,” Bruce says, taking the paper nevertheless.

“And I can give you hers and her friends, if I think you need it.”

Bruce hrms again, focusing on the paper in his hands- but Dick can see the corners of his lips twitching up, pride not quite smothered by irritation. Of all of Bruce’s weird assortment of family members, Dick wins the most likely to tell Bruce Wayne to go fuck himself award hands down, has already won it seven times to his recollection. Somehow, as much as Dick’s independence irks Bruce, it also makes him smile, as if in gratitude that he didn’t completely screw up raising Dick.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Dick asks, knowing Bruce might not answer honestly if he’s trying to keep Dick out of something. But Bruce shakes his head, his expression just tired instead of his legendary poker face.

“Never.” He sighs, a big sigh from a big man, and slumps just a little into his chair. “Something new.”

“Joy,” Dick agrees, utterly sarcastic. “So will you look into it?”

“Yes,” Bruce says simply, sitting forward again and tapping at something on the touchscreen laptop on his desk.

“Will you keep me in the loop?”

That one gets him a pause, disguised as Bruce focusing on the laptop like he can’t multitask like a goddamn pro. Finally he says, “We’ll see,” which every kid knows is a no, but I don’t want to argue about it.

Which, fine. Dick has other things to worry about and two little brothers he can squeeze information out of later. He slaps his hands on his knees. “Well, this was surprisingly painless. Alfred really chewed you out over skipping dinner, huh?”

“I can start a fight, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Bruce offers warningly.

“Nah, I don’t have the time, I have to get back to work.” He stands up and hesitates for a moment, looking down at Bruce sitting at his desk, alone, in a damp dim cave.

If he had been nine years old, or twelve, or even fifteen, he wouldn’t have hesitated. But there’s a lot of water under that bridge these days. It takes gathering his courage up with both hands for him to take that last step forward and lean down, wrapping his arms around Bruce’s shoulders in a hug. The man tenses for a moment before relaxing and even bringing one arm up to squeeze Dick tight against him.

“Show up to dinner next time or I’ll help Alfred hide the body,” he says to Bruce’s shoulder, and because they’re so close, he feels the hitch of the silent laugh in Bruce’s chest.

He lets go, and Bruce does as well, and he steps back and looks away, trying not to wish for better days. “Gotta go. See you around, old man.”

Bruce grunts at that, already going back to work- but he speaks up right as Dick’s at the doorway. “Dick?” he says, and Dick stops and looks back at him. “Be careful.”

It sounds more specific than a general take care of yourself. Dick nods and heads out, and Bruce doesn’t stop him.

Cass is alone in the kitchen when he makes it upstairs, studiously pouring a mostly-full cup of tea down the sink. She looks up and smiles when Dick comes in.

“Tim asleep?” he asks, and she nods.

“You’re leaving?” she asks, and when he spins his car keys around his finger in emphasis, she nods again. “Good. We’re getting coffee.”

“All right,” Dick says, because there is absolutely nothing to be gained by arguing with her. “Anyplace in particular?”

“I go to a place every day. They know me.” That’s a loaded statement, they know me. For Cass, it most likely means the people working there weren’t assholes about it the first time she showed up and tried to order nonverbally.

“Every day, huh?” Dick asks, out the garage door to his car, Cass beside him.

“Decaf,” she says, and holds up a hand to show how steady it is. She’s seen Tim wreck himself on the rocky shores of caffeine addiction, she knows better than to go down that route.

“Well, Steph’s on break soon anyway, I have some time to kill,” he says, and holds the car door for her like a gentleman, and minutes later the manor is in the rearview mirror and retreating fast, and Dick can finally breathe again.

There’s a decent line at the coffee shop, but Cass settles into place with ease, shoulders squared and gaze fixed on the cash register. She still doesn’t do well in large groups of people, especially with strangers at her back, so Dick stands a step and a half behind her and won’t let the impatient woman behind him bully him into encroaching into Cass’ space, and as a reward he gets a quick smile and a fractional relaxing of her shoulders.

The girl at the cash register has dyed hair and a nose ring and seems genuinely happy to see Cass, greeting her by name and asking if she wants her regular, her gaze flitting from Cass’ face to her hands, and Dick smiles. Yeah, they know her here. Cass places her order, then points at Dick and says, “My brother too,” and his smile grows almost dorky. He places his own order and lets her pay, then lets her chase him off to pick out a table in the busy ship while she stands at the opposite end of the counter where customers receive their drinks and closely observes how many sprinkles are making it onto her drink.

And then his view is interrupted by five-foot-seven of furious harpy, as Stephanie pulls out the seat opposite him at the small table and sits down in order to lean forward.

“What are you doing here?” she hisses.

“I- what?” he asks, so startled by her appearance that words escape him.

“Did you follow me?” she demands.

“No?” Dick says. “I’m here with Cass. Is this where you come on break every day?”

“Cass,” Stephanie echoes. Her eyes are electric blue instead of the more human-looking sky blue and her pupils are tucking into slits, feathers poking up here and there. Any sort of illusion spell or don’t-look glamour would take too long and be too complicated to just slap down, and he doesn’t want to get Cass banned from her favorite coffee shop by association with their brand of weirdness, so he eases his hands into the air in classic I Surrender pose.

“My sister,” he says calmly, trying to calm her down in turn. “She was at the manor and she invited me to coffee when I was leaving. Why would you think I followed you?”

Thankfully, she settles down. “I don’t know, after that shit I gave you about Jason, I just figured.” She shrugs.

“What about Jason?” Dick asks, and they both stare at each other as they put the pieces to their own separate puzzles together.

“Nothing,” Stephanie snaps out, voice tight, but now that Dick has recovered his mental footing he’s putting the pieces together. Steph comes here every day at the same time, she thinks he knows why she comes here, she referenced his crush on Jason.

And right on cue, Cass appears at the table, drinks in hand and gaze on Stephanie. And Stephanie-

Is blushing.

“Oh,” Dick says simply, looking between them- Cass also comes here every day, she said as much.

“Dick?” Cass asks, setting both drinks down so she has her hands free, just in case.

“Cass,” he says, and Stephanie blushes even harder. “This is Stephanie, you know her, she works with me?”

Cass is looking between them, and Steph is shaking her head at him whenever Cass isn’t looking at her. “I know her,” Cass says, finally looking at Steph again. She doesn’t smile, but then Cass generally doesn’t smile for new people. “Dick talks about you.”

Stephanie smiles wanly at the table. She’s bright red now, and probably feeling some emotional whiplash from the one-eighty she’s pulled in the last two minutes, and Dick is about to throw her to the wolves. Just the one wolf, really.

“I’m sorry to bail on you,” he says to Cass as he rises to his feet, and Steph’s eyes go wide and she snaps her gaze up to him. “Steph came to tell me about an emergency at the store, I really need to get back to it. But she can stay here and keep you company, if you’d like.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Stephanie mouths at him. Then she pastes on her sickly smile again as Cass looks at her.

She is hiding nothing, Dick wants to tell her. Cass knows. Cass probably knew the second day Stephanie rearranged her break so she could ogle the pretty girl at the coffee shop every day. Cass doesn’t miss things like that, which is why Dick is offering, instead of simply leaving.

Then Cass smiles, and looks at him. “All right,” she says, and hands him his drink before lovingly pushing him aside so she can take his vacated chair. Dick maneuvers around her and stops at Steph, leaning over just enough to speak for her ears alone.

“You’re right, you’ve got great taste.”

“I am going to kill you so very dead,” she says through her bad smile.

“You’re welcome,” Dick says, then ruffles her hair just to see if she can turn any more red. One last smile and a wave goodbye for Cass, and he heads for the door.

At least someone’s luck is turning up good.

Chapter Text

Stephanie comes in right on time the next morning, and stands in the doorway with her bag clutched to her chest, staring down Dick sitting at the register. They stay in their separate corners for a long moment, watching each other silently. She hadn’t bothered to come back to work after the whole coffee shop thing, which Dick decided was well deserved.

“Donuts,” he says eventually.

“You don’t deserve donuts,” Stephanie says. Going with cranky, then.

“No. Donuts, as in do you want, not did you bring.” He points to the counter near him, with the paper bag with the logo from the fancy grocery store on it.

She cranes her neck and sniffs at the air- harpies are always hungry, although thankfully they're omnivorous and not strictly carnivores- but then rocks back onto her heels and turns her sour look on Dick again. “You were right, those are betrayal donuts.”

“So you don’t want any?” Dick asks, and Stephanie twitches, tries to hold her ground- then strides across the room and snatches the bag up, prying up the tape sealing it closed and sticking her nose into it.

Eventually she surfaces with a lemon curd round in hand, turned so the bitten part is facing up to prevent curd droppage. “You’re not asking how it went,” she says suspiciously.

“How did it go?” Dick asks dutifully.

“I shouldn’t tell you. I should leave you to wonder.”

“Okay.” He shrugs and picks up his phone, then looks at her again. She’s still staring at him, squinty-eyed and waiting. “You know, I think I’m dealing pretty well with the fact that you’ve been perving on my sister for, what, three months? Better than you are, anyway.”

Steph relaxes, just a tiny bit, even as she makes a rude noise and shakes her head. “Yeah, no, we’re not doing that. No talking about Cass again, ever. No comments, no sarcasm, no mocking-”

“How is any of this even remotely fair?” Dick asks.

“You never said no mocking you about Jason, you just kept pining like a lovesick schoolgirl. Ah-ah!” She wags a finger at him when he opens his mouth to protest. “Conversation over, back to work.”

“All right.” He stands up, making room for her at the register. “But before the official Cass moratorium kicks in, can I say one thing?”

Stephanie looks up from her donut, wary but minus the strange tension she had come in with, now that she knows nothing has fundamentally changed between them. “Maybe,” she says.

“She was here when I came out to open up and I had to tell her you don’t come in until later. She should be back any minute now.”

It’s a beautiful thing to watch, the way Steph lights up like the dawn. She shuts it down again immediately, pasting a poor-fitting scowl over it, but there’s no hiding the sudden rise in her spirits. She looks at him again, sees the grin on his face, and rolls her eyes and lets her smile creep back in. “Oh, shut up.”

“For real though,” he says, risking life and limb by reaching snake-strike fast into the donut bag and grabbing one blind. “I’m just glad that you’re both happy. That’s all I care about.”

“No mocking,” Stephanie says, once she’s done growling over the loss of the donut.

“No, I had my fun yesterday.” There’s a familiar figure walking down the sidewalk on the other side of the street, glancing back and forth for cars before she starts across, and Dick retreats back towards the back rooms. “Just one more thing you seem to have forgotten, in terms of future mocking.”

“What’s that?” Stephanie asks as she takes her seat at the register. She hasn’t looked outside yet, so she’s still actually listening to him.

“She’s Tim’s sister too,” Dick says, and heads back into the back.

The door closes behind him, but not fast enough to cut off the sound of the store door buzzing, and under that, Stephanie’s quiet but heartfelt, “Oh, shit.”

He meant what he said, about Cass and Stephanie being happy. That doesn’t mean his bitter black heart doesn’t ache with jealousy at the sight of them together, talking and smiling, Cass walking Stephanie through the alphabet in ASL. He eventually banishes them for crimes of overt grossness around noon, pushing them out of the store and ordering them to come back in an hour with food, and barely has the time to sit down at the register before the door buzzes again.

“What’d you forget?” he asks, already ducking down to look through the shelves under the register. Steph has to leave her phone plugged in to charge on one of the lower ones because the cord isn’t long enough to reach higher, and has walked out without it more than once as a result.

“I didn’t,” someone who is very definitely not Stephanie says, and Dick sits back up so fast he nearly clocks his head on the lip of the counter.

Jason.

Okay. Jason’s back, less than two weeks after making it clear he was pumping the brakes on- whatever they had going on. Back, and looking as calm and unruffled as ever, in jeans he’s walked the hems out of and a shirt that promises he’s saying hi to your dog, not you, leather jacket and careful slouch completing the look. That’s fine. Dick can absolutely be a professional here.

“Sorry, Stephanie just left, I thought you were her coming back for something.”

“Yeah, I saw her leave.” Jason allows himself three whole steps closer to the register, so he’s not standing awkwardly by the door anymore but instead is standing in the middle of the room. Thankfully there are no other customers for him to be an obstacle for.

“Can I help you with something?” Dick asks, even though he figures he already knows what’s up. Jason showing up barely more than twenty-four hours after his partner visits, that’s not a coincidence.

“Roy told me he dropped off the curse pieces here, to have you look into it.”

“Yeah,” Dick says, starting to rise to his feet, preparing to head back and grab the curse pieces, the cloth he’d imprinted the blood-ink onto. “I’m not done yet, unfortunately, an emergency walked in a few hours after Roy and it took up most of the day-”

“I’m just here to get them back,” Jason says. “He shouldn’t have dragged you back into this.”

Ah.

Dick hesitates, then sits back down. If that’s how this is going to be. “All right. Have Roy come in and I’ll get them back to him.”

“Excuse me?” Jason asks, eyebrows arching. “Have Roy pick them up?”

“He brought them in. He is the client, in this case. I technically shouldn’t even have acknowledged their existence to you.”

“This is the curse that almost killed me, and I’m not technically allowed to know about it?” Jason paces closer. He doesn’t have to try to loom, he’s a big man, it comes naturally. But he’s chosen a bad target- Dick grew up with Bruce Wayne, who is an even bigger man and looms with the same unconscious ease as most people breathe. It takes some serious looming to intimidate Dick. He tilts the stool back on two legs and braces a foot against the register shelves and stares up at Jason with his very best not impressed expression.

“I told Roy when he came in that I wasn’t getting in the middle of this.” He gestures between himself and Jason, then indicates a third point, far away. “He agreed. Part of the price.” Not exactly how it had gone, but Roy probably wouldn’t naysay him. “So this is me, staying out of the middle of it.”

Jason huffs and looks away. When he looks back, his expression is more one of reluctant amusement rather than controlled annoyance. “All right,” he agrees. “I take it this means you won’t at least tell me what you’ve got so far?”

“It would be a little hypocritical of me to do that now,” Dick admits. “And I don’t have much anyway.”

“Your emergency.” Jason actually comes within arm’s reach, leaning his hip against the countertop near the register and looking down on Dick again. It feels different this time, not an intimidation tactic. “Any chance there’s a connection?”

Dick had considered it, truth be told. He’d been considering it before he even left for Wayne Manor yesterday. Two practitioners acting up at the same time- but Gotham is a big city, and mad as a bag of wet weasels, so it’s hardly impossible. And the two styles couldn’t be further apart, one a wannabe mad scientist cooking up weird magic with some semblance of a grand plan, even if it was a bizarre one, the other a powerful practitioner with a flair for the dramatic and no qualms with killing that was overreacting in the moment to a hunter’s presence. Hard to get those to gel together into one person. “Depends. Does your guy have a penchant for feathers?”

“Not so far as I’ve seen, just overpriced art and overpowered curses.” Jason looks like he doesn’t know if he wants to ask, but also knows Dick won’t tell him anything if he does.

“Then probably not.” Dick lets the stool fall forward onto all its legs again. “Not that I’m trying to chase you off or anything, but is that all you wanted?”

“Sorry,” Jason drawls, pointedly looking around the otherwise empty store. “Didn’t realize I was keeping you from something. I can head out if I’m in the way.”

“You can stay as long as you want,” Dick says, then closes his eyes and violently represses the urge to just thump his forehead against the countertop a few times. Very subtle, Grayson. “I’m stuck up here until Stephanie gets back anyway.” Oh, much better, make it sound like dealing with him is an obligation, that fixes it.

“That’s great,” Jason says, sounding like he actually means it, but then he pushes off from the counter and moves away. “I really should be getting back, though. Busy night planned.”

“Right. It was good seeing you again,” Dick says, a little disappointed and mostly just very confused. What even was all of this? He didn’t even try to argue when Dick said no, just accepted defeat quickly and quietly. It was almost like he was just using it as an excuse to visit- but he’s leaving now, nothing accomplished.

Jason pushes the door open, then hesitates for a moment before grunting in irritation and stepping back to pull the door shut when the buzzer wouldn’t stop buzzing at him. He taps his fingers on the handle, like he’s gathering his nerve for something, and it’s so out of character for him that Dick is starting to get worried. “How about,” he says, looking nowhere in particular before finally glancing back towards Dick. “After this is over and everything’s calmed down, would you like to go grab a drink or something?”

It takes a minute and a couple of false starts to process that, which is not at all helped by Jason’s earnest expression and those pretty eyes watching him. “I- yeah, I’d like that,” Dick says finally. Feeling warm and slightly giddy, which he knows will grow into full giddiness soon enough, he asks, “So you’re planning on sticking around?”

“If I’m not run out of town by a pitchfork-wielding mob, sure,” Jason says, relaxing a little and offering a one-shoulder shrug and a small smile.

If, for god’s sake, the man said if. Dick hooks a foot beneath the lowest shelf and forces the stool he’s sitting on back onto the ground from where it had been starting to levitate. It’s almost embarrassing- he hasn’t slipped up like this since his voice stopped cracking. Even Kori, whom Dick had loved with all the passion and wholeheartedness a young man was capable of giving his first real romance, had not inspired a loss of control to that degree.

“So until then, I’ll see you when you have everything from the curse pieces,” Jason says.

“Yeah, I’ll call you.” Dick glances down at his phone, which is beside the register. It helpfully pulls up Stephanie’s contact info and connects through to call her without his input, and he has to hammer the End Call button to disconnect it before her phone starts ringing. She will not appreciate him cutting her lunch with Cass short just because he’s suddenly burning to get back to work on that curse. “Shouldn’t be more than a couple days.”

“All right. See you then.” Jason offers him one last smile, then opens the door again and heads out, leaving Dick once again hovering a few inches off the ground and wanting to squeal like a little girl.

He has a little less than an hour to get this out of his system and get himself under control before Stephanie returns and gives him all manner of hell for the rest of his life. After this is over, he doesn’t even know what that means, some indefinable time in the future, and that if is still hanging heavy in the air- but any attempt to bring himself down to earth bounces off the bright shiny happiness that is pure he likes me too. He can handle whatever happens, so long as he has that to hold onto.

It takes a long time for his feet to touch ground again, and he’s never been happier in his life.

His phone is a too-bright blur in the darkness of his room, curtains pulled to block out sunlight and aggressive birdsong. It says Bruce, and Dick drops it twice before finally pushing the proper button and propping it against the pillow near his ear.

“What,” he says. It’s fuck-you a.m., and he’s spent the past two nights working overtime on store stuff and the curse pieces. He is hanging up fast and going back to sleep.

“Are you awake?” Bruce asks, which seems unusually cruel, even for him.

“No. Time zit.”

Bruce had once been responsible for keeping young Dick on a relatively normal schedule, as much as he had wanted to run around the manor like a cat with the midnight crazies at two in the morning and nap for hours in the afternoon. He knows what Dick really means with that nonsense. “Seven fifteen. You should be getting ready for work.”

“Work is there.” He flops a hand in the direction of the store in a half-hearted gesture, as if Bruce could see it. “Don’t need to get ready.”

“Dick,” Bruce says, impatient. “I need you to wake up. The people with the spots, how do you help them?”

It takes a moment to translate that. “Potion.”

“How much can you make at one time, and how long does it take?”

“Big pot, one hour.” This is not heading in the direction of him going back to sleep, so he resigns himself to waking up properly. “Um. Two gallons, maybe?”

Bruce grunts. “Get what supplies you need and head to the manor. Alfred should have the equipment for as much as you can make.”

“I can’t just.” Why are words so hard? “Not that easy, Bruce, I need to see the spotty people. I need to make sure nothing’s changed.”

“Dick-”

“No, Bruce,” Dick says, because he doesn’t need to be awake at all to disagree with Bruce. “I’m not brewing potions blind. I need to see one of them.”

Bruce chews that one over for a long minute before finally admitting, “No one is showing symptoms yet, so I can’t say who’s been exposed or not.”

“Then I’m really not doing that. It’s not a flu shot, Bruce. You can’t.” He makes another gesture, just as useless as before. “It’ll mess you up if you don’t have the spots.”

Bruce says something to someone else, his voice muffled and distant like he pressed the phone to his shoulder. After a moment he comes back and says, “Tim is on his way to pick you up.”

“Okay,” Dick says, and throws back his covers, misjudges the distance to the edge of the mattress, and falls out of bed. A moment of blind groping and he retrieves his phone and asks, “And go where?”

“We found the source of the exposure, the club your customer got her spots at. We have the staff and some of the customers from last night for you to check over.”

“Oh.” Bruce usually has someone else to cover the magic angle in these kinds of situations. Probably Nygma’s rehabilitation didn’t stick as well as Bruce keeps thinking it will, and he’s back on the wrong side of that revolving door in Arkham. “I should get dressed, then.”

“That would be nice,” Bruce says, his tone so flat Dick can’t tell if he’s being sincere or achieving new heights of sarcasm. Smart money's on the second one.

“See you in a minute then,” Dick says, and hangs up after Bruce’s vague noise of agreement, then slumps against the carpet and sighs.

Then he shoots Steph a text she’ll see when she wakes up, and gets up and gets ready for what’s likely to be a very busy day.

There are places that are not meant to be experienced outside of their prime hour- schools or shopping malls at night, eerie in their unnatural stillness. Nightclubs come at it from the other end of the stick. The magic is gone from this one especially, now that Dick’s experiencing it while the morning rush is stalling traffic outside and a few stubborn birds scream at each other from rooftops. It smells like chemicals from a fog machine and old sweat, and the rarely-used overhead lights show off all the questionable smudges and smears on every surface. Dick’s going to need at least three showers to feel clean again.

Tim brings him in through the delivery entrance in the back, avoiding the first scattering of reporters gathering at the main entrance and the bulk of the police officers in the actual club, and leads him into the small handful of offices set off the rear of the second floor that overlooks the main dance area. They’re stalled at the door by Bruce himself, who sends Tim away with a single nod.

“Is that the owner?” Dick asks, leaning a little to look past Bruce at the man in the office. He probably looks prettier under the strobing blue lights of the dance floor. In real-light conditions, he’s clearly on the wrong side of forty and not dealing with it well, his greying hair thinning and his suit wrinkled from being worn for too long.

“Can you tell if they’ve been exposed to the spots just by looking?” Bruce asks.

“Theoretically, sure, this thing’s got a unique magic-print. But I’ve never tried it before.”

Bruce steps out of the way, and Dick looks at the club owner again, bringing every magical sense he has to bear on the man. A moment later he breathes in and rocks back on his heels.

“Yeah, okay, he’s definitely been exposed. It’s not as obvious, because it’s not manifesting physically yet, but it’s there.” He looks up at Bruce, who looks tired and grim, and knows Bruce is already aware of what he’s about to say. “You have another problem, you know.”

“The staff and some of the guests are on the dance floor. Look them over, but stay on the balcony. They won’t be able to see you as easily.” Bruce shuts the office door and makes as if to move away, then stops.

“An incomplete guest list, courtesy of credit cards used at the bar,” Jim Gordon says as he walks up, gesturing with a stack of papers so fresh off the printer they still smell of ink. “You’ll need a copy, I’m assuming,” he adds to Dick.

“He’s not here for fieldwork,” Bruce says easily. “He’s here to make sure the spell wasn’t altered so the cure will work appropriately.”

The commissioner looks at Bruce, then Dick, his caterpillar eyebrows raised in question. Clearly he’s no more interested in taking sides in this than Dick was between Jason and Roy. Dick takes pity on him. “Thanks, Mr. Gordon, but Bruce will have more luck with that.”

“All right.” The commissioner tucks the papers under his arm and looks at Dick again. “So what’s our other problem then?”

Dick looks between the two older men for a moment before mentally shrugging and going for it when Bruce doesn’t seem to object. “That man in there is about as magical as a turkey baster. He didn’t do this.”

“Wouldn’t a powerful enough witch be able to cover up any traces of magic on himself?” the commissioner asks.

“Technically, yes. And technically a three-pack-a-day smoker could take a shower for an hour and put on brand new clothes and be able to convince most people that they’d never touched a cigarette in their life. But a fellow smoker would know.” Dick indicates himself at the end there, the metaphor clear.

Bruce and the commissioner exchange a glance, and Dick knows they’re debating leaving him out of the loop. But eventually Bruce sighs and turns to him.

“It’s already on the news. Everyone who came to this club in the past two weeks is going to be advised to call into the station, or visit a local practitioner.”

“And yes,” Jim adds. “We’re looking into clubs the owner here had any history with and other places who might benefit from this club going out of business, as well as the people here. We know what we’re doing, Dick.”

He says it gently, because he knows Dick wasn’t criticizing or belittling them. Dick barely hears it, though, his mind leaping ahead. If the weirdo mad scientist had done this to sabotage this place, then that meant they knew Bruce would be looking into his weirdo magic, which meant-

Bruce is talking to Jim, and a moment later Jim leaves and Bruce comes around to stand before Dick. He waits until Dick looks up at him before he explains. “Tim and I believe this place was chosen as the testing site after you cured the first victim.”

“So they knew we’d figure it out, and used us to publicly shut this place down. For business.” A nightclub can’t survive this sort of bad press, and they all know it, and Dick hates, hates, being used like this. Hates that he inadvertently dragged his family into it even more. If he had only asked the first man a few more questions, even just what’s your name, if he hadn’t been so hung up on Jason being in his store-

“I know, Dick,” Bruce says to Dick’s racing thoughts, not one voiced out loud but all familiar to him anyways. “The best way to prevent this from happening again is catching this person first. And you need to focus on the cure.”

Dick takes a deep breath and nods, putting a lid on that anger and pushing it back, down, buried deep. These people have been here for hours and are probably scared and definitely want to go home, and he can get help with that. This is something he can do. Finding the lunatic and stopping them from poisoning anyone else, that’s Bruce’s job, and he’s good at it. Dick can trust him with it, as much as he currently aches to find the asshole and maybe break their face a little.

“Okay,” he says when he’s- not good again, but less inclined towards violence against parties unknown than before. “I can tell you who’s been exposed, but I’m going to need to look someone over up close, so I can see if they’ve changed the spell again.”

“I’ll arrange it,” Bruce agrees, easing back again now that Dick’s calmed down. “But for now-”

“Yeah, I’ll just- give me a moment, please?” Dick asks, and Bruce watches him for a moment before giving a nod and moving away.

It takes a moment, two- then Dick has the last of the anger firmly on a leash, and he moves towards Bruce and the balcony so he can see the people down below.

Time to help, the only way he can.

Chapter Text

The spy comes in the day after the nightclub, early in the afternoon, when Cass is over with lunch and she and Steph have successfully chased Dick out of the kitchen and into the front room. He’s an unremarkable-looking man, khakis and poorly-fitting suit jacket over a button-up shirt, non-prescription glasses and a chunky watch, and Dick only figures out what he is by luck. He comes in and circles the store twice after a quick just looking, thanks, to Dick’s query if he could help him.

He lingers, he looks too closely and too long, he studies things that aren’t for sale. Dick wouldn’t have noticed it too much, except he turns at just the right angle, and his pants are sagging like there’s something heavy on his waist, and Dick knows what that means.

The store’s defenses won’t let anyone in with the intent to hurt him- but Dick doesn’t trust luck. He slides his phone closer and taps subtly at the keyboard, barely sparing it a glance. A minute later, Stephanie breezes in from the back rooms, sparing the man a single glance before she looks at Dick.

“What’s up, boss?” she asks as Dick stands and moves closer to her.

“Your break’s over,” he says, and she blinks at him in confusion- her schedule isn’t set in stone, and Dick’s been even more flexible lately since Cass has been coming around and he actually does feel kind of like a jerk for the whole scene in the coffee shop- but he dips his head when he’s close enough to her and whispers into her ear, “gun.”

She responds well- she’s fairly bullet-proof, guns aren’t the threat to her that they are to humans. Her smile suddenly shows far too many teeth, more threat display than social nicety, but she doesn’t outwardly react and, impressively, doesn’t immediately look at the man to check for herself. “Sorry. I did say I was gonna clean off the counters today, right?” She ducks into the back rooms for half a second and comes back with the lysol wipes, kept close at hand now that the purple polka dots have proven to be spreading, even though Dick has assured her multiple times that antibacterial wipes won’t actually help anything.

She comes around the counter so she’s between the man and Dick, who is not bullet-proof even if he is handy with magical shields, and brushes against the man as she changes course abruptly to approach the counter near the register to wipe it down. His jacket pushes back and- yeah, he’s definitely packing. But also- Dick blinks and frowns, feeling it itch across his skin with a sudden awareness-

“Sorry,” the man says to Steph. “I’ll just get out of your way.”

She’s not looking at Dick, can’t see him trying to catch her eye and signal her. He looks around in frustration- a direct move, especially from him, would tip the man and his employers off- and sees Cass standing in the doorway to the back rooms.

She makes a single gesture- what?.

Dick turns so his back is to the man. His watch. Left hand..

She peers around the door for a moment, then looks at him and nods once. Use gloves, he adds, and she’s gone a moment later.

The buzzer from the store door drowns out the sound of the back door opening. Dick gives up all pretense and bolts to the front of the store, all but pressing his face to the window, Stephanie wedging herself in next to him so they can both watch the man walk away down the street. Just as he’s reaching the edge of their range of vision, he jerks and stumbles and catches someone who he had knocked into. A moment later, and Cass walks past the store, head down and hair shielding her face. One hand is closed into a fist and pressed against her belly.

“Come on,” Dick orders, nudging Stephanie aside so he can flip the Open sign and throw the lock on the door. He heads into the back, Steph on his heels every inch of the way, and swings open the back door just in time for Cass to reach it and duck inside.

“Here,” she says, holding out her fist and uncurling it to show the man’s watch.

“What?” Stephanie asks as Dick shoos them both into his work room and grabs his own pair of latex gloves. “Did we pickpocket a guy with a gun for a reason?”

“Yes,” Dick says, taking the watch from Cass carefully, handling it by the very end of the strap.

“It’s not even a Rolex,” Stephanie continues.

“Well, you can tell the bird man you’re not impressed with his taste in spyware when they catch him,” Dick says, turning the watch over to look at the back of the dial. He drops it onto the desk, using a spare glove pulled from the box as a cushion to prevent direct contact. “Watch.”

The two women obediently watch, and Stephanie sucks in a breath as the symbols slowly appear on the once-blank surface. “What the hell,” she says.

“It’s imprinting the living spells,” Dick says, and when he gets two blank looks that tell him that means absolutely nothing to either of them, he explains. “Some spells are always active, constantly running in the background, like wards or illusions. They’re called living spells, because they’re basically boring pets, like a goldfish- setting it up is the hard part, but after that you just check up on it a few times a day and do some basic maintenance once in a while, and it’s always there, doing its own thing. This,” he gestures towards the watch, “is loaded with spells that wait until they come into contact with living spells, then translates them into a code the practitioner has worked out and imprints them onto this watch.”

Cass gets there first- her face twists into a frown before she marshals herself and wipes all emotion away. Stephanie is half a second behind her, and she’s the one who sucks in a sharp breath and says, “The store’s defenses? Were they trying to-?”

“Probably,” Dick agrees.

They exchange glances, then shift until they’re shoulder-to-shoulder, a tangible line of defense that can’t be cheated or undermined. “That’s not happening,” Cass says simply.

“I’ll put a layer of wards on top of what I’ve already got and change them up every couple of days,” Dick says, already exhausted just thinking about it. Laying in wards is hours of work, and changing them frequently? Necessary, now that someone’s apparently trying to sound him out, but still a logistical nightmare.

“Your home too,” Cass adds. “Separate from the store, and no one but us comes in.”

“How do you know it’s the bird man?” Stephanie adds, using the family’s name for the practitioner with the feather fetish.

How to explain, to two people who do not use magic in any capacity themselves, how each individual piece of magic feels? The bird man’s polka dot magic feels painstaking, laborious, yet somehow still slapdash, like seeing the smartest kid in class scrambling to finish the homework as the bell is ringing. That sense of hurry is here too, even though he would have had all the time he needed to magic up this watch.

“I can tell,” he says lamely, and Steph and Cass look at each other again, this time commiserating over having to deal with him and his vagueness. “Yeah, roll your eyes, but first prove me wrong.”

“Okay,” Stephanie says, folding her arms across her chest. “But why the gun, then? He would’ve been in and out without any of us noticing if he wasn’t carrying.”

“He was just hired muscle, I’d be surprised if he knew what the watch was. I wouldn’t have known, except- see that second line?” He indicates the watch, the two lines of imprinted symbols crossing haphazardly over each other, one bold and deep, the other faint and hard to see. “The big one? I’d have to crack the code to be certain, but I’m pretty sure that’s from where it came into contact with a disguise spell.”

“A disguise spell- my disguise spell. Because I got near him.” Steph grins at Dick triumphantly. “Did I screw them up?”

“Yeah, you did. It’s loaded with concealment spells but they didn’t prepare for it to come into contact with a disguise spell, so I sensed it when it broke cover to start imprinting you.”

Stephanie is practically bouncing in place in excitement. Cass leans into her, bumps their shoulders. “Good for you,” she says, like Stephanie had done that on purpose, and Steph’s grin grows even fiercer.

For Dick’s part, that barely-leashed anger from the nightclub is back, and it brought backup. This asshole used him, used his family, and now is coming at him on his own turf. He turns back to the women. “Steph, you’re gonna go back out front and open up. If anyone wants to see me, I’m busy in the back and can’t come up front for a couple hours. If it’s an emergency, call me.”

“You’re not leaving,” Stephanie protests. “You just said-”

“I’m going with Cass,” he says over her, then looks at his sister. “I’m going to put this in a sealed box, and we’re taking it to the Manor. Bruce has a sealed room set up in the Cave, we can look this over closer there without worrying about tracking spells, or it imprinting the manor’s defenses.”

“Oh.” Steph says it for both of them, she and Cass relaxing in sync.

“Okay? Is everyone happy with that?” Dick asks, edging towards meanness in his misdirected anger.

“Yeah, sure. If gun guy comes back looking for his watch, I just lie?” Steph asks, sounding like she hopes he does, and hopes he threatens her, or maybe just twitches funny, so she’ll have an excuse to re-landscape his face with her talons.

“He had it when he left the store, no need to lie about that,” Dick says.

They all hang there a moment longer, each one waiting for someone else to move first, before Dick gestures out towards the hallway. “I need to get to the storage room,” he says.

“Right, sealed box,” Steph says, and she and Cass part to let him through, then peel off to head to their assignments now that they’re moving. Dick looks back at the watch, trying to judge if it’s smarter to take it to the box, or bring the box to it- then stops, and looks near the back corner of the desk, where there is a manilla envelope filled with carefully rewrapped statue pieces, and a white cloth folded on top of it. He had sent a text earlier, hadn’t wanted to risk calling and interrupting something and figured a single text was safer, and hasn’t gotten a reply yet.

He leaves his work room and goes into storage, retrieves a sealed box and brings it back and transfers the watch and invokes the spell to seal it properly. He turns and heads for the door and veers back at the last possible second, snatching up the cloth and tucking it carefully into the pocket with his phone, just in case.

Then he heads out again, shutting the door carefully behind him.

“You’re angry.”

Dick stirs, looks away from his blank stare into his reflected gaze, and looks at Cass properly. He hadn’t realized he’d been projecting that loudly, although with Cass it didn’t take much. “I’m not angry,” he denies, and amends at the look she shoots him, “I’ve plateaued.”

She pauses- too weird for her, then, she’s gained a lot of ground since Bruce took her in but some of the more obscure phrases still throw her. “At Bruce?” she asks.

“No,” Dick says, and that much at least is one hundred percent true. Bruce hadn’t been at the manor- no one had, save Alfred, who had had to leave soon to pick up Damian from school and did not know when Bruce would be coming home. Dick had called and left a message, left a note in his office in the cave, left a message with Alfred, and had called it good. After spending twenty or so minutes in the sealed room, watching the watch to see if it would imprint any more spells or if the sealing would hold, he’d headed out and asked Cass for a ride back home, claiming he didn’t want to leave Stephanie there by herself for long.

He feels a little bad about that one.

“You need to be smart,” Cass says, which could mean anything, coming from her. Everyone is dumb in one way or another when compared to the blunt wisdom of Cassandra Cain.

“I’m being smart,” Dick says. It’s not even a lie yet.

“You’re angry,” she repeats, frustrated now, and Dick keeps his mouth shut and looks out the window again.

She pulls around into the employee lot behind the store, where she always parks so she doesn’t have to deal with parallel parking on the side of the road. She leaves the engine idling as Dick opens his door and unbuckles his seat belt, then hesitates.

“You going to Tim’s?” he asks, and she shakes her head.

“Back to the manor. Bruce will have questions.”

They watch each other for a moment, a gulf of unspoken words between them- does she know he’s lying? does she know how truly angry he is?- but Dick reaches out and puts his hand on her wrist, and she slips her own hand down to wrap around his for a moment. “Thanks for the help,” he says.

She squeezes once, hard, and says, “Be smart.”

He gets out of the car and heads towards the back door into his store, listening to the sound of tires scraping over the poorly-patched pavement of the lot. His hand is on the door handle before he dares to pause and look back, and he catches sight of the very tail end of Cass’ car as it pulls out of the lot and onto the road. Not waiting to confirm that he actually went into the building, amatuer mistake. He steps away from the door and pulls his phone out of his pocket to check the text he had received while cooling his heels waiting for Bruce, then starts walking.

Now he’s not being smart. A none-too-small part of him is hoping that he’s wrong about that only being a scouting mission, that his antagonist will see him walking down the street without harpy or hunter glued to his side, and take a swing at him. Hell, at this point he’d take a mugger with a really bad sense for easy prey. Bruce had taught him some hardcore self-defense a few years after taking Dick in, citing that magic could be stifled or fail, or he could run into a more powerful practitioner, so Dick needed the fallback of also being able to defend himself physically. Right now Dick just wants to put his fist through something, although of course the universe fails to oblige, not even giving him someone bumping into him a little too hard.

Then he reaches the address from the text, and his anger twists sideways into nervous anticipation. It’s just a cheap restaurant, barely one step above a sports bar, but after how they ended it last time- Dick ducks his head and goes inside, asks at what would be the maitre d’s stand if this place charged an average of eight dollars more per plate of food, and is led outside to the patio seating. The patio wraps around the back of the building, and Jason’s taken up the table at the far end, so he has a building on two sides and shrubs and trees on a third. He’s already sipping at what looks like an iced tea, and sits up attentively when the waitress leads Dick to the table.

“Just water, thanks,” Dick says to her when she lingers to ask his drink order, then looks around again as she walks away. This is a pretty good attempt at privacy, especially since their places at the table puts Dick’s back to the other tables, so any patrons behind him won’t get a look at his face. “Feeling paranoid?” he asks, not bothering to mention that it’s well earned, just not for the reasons Jason thinks.

“I plan on living to retirement, thanks,” Jason says. His mood is hard to pin down- he’s genuinely happy to see Dick again, but he’s hesitant as well, shifting in his seat and fidgeting with his phone. He seems to realize what he’s doing even as Dick observes it, and forces himself to settle down. “So you said you’ve gotten what you can off the statue pieces?” he asks, and when Dick nods, he gestures across the table. “You first then.”

You first means Jason has something to say after that, like they’ve figured something out or something’s happened. He lets it go, because you first also implies that Jason is going to share whatever he knows with Dick. He shifts in his seat in order to pull the cloth from his pocket, slowly unfolding it and smoothing it out against his leg as the waitress returns with his water and pleasantly asks if they’d like to order food. Jason sends her away with a charming smile and an order of fried jalapenos, then leans forward attentively as soon as she’s gone.

“I didn’t bring the actual statue pieces, they don’t transport well,” Dick says, and Jason shrugs and waves a hand dismissively, obviously not concerned with their fate. “But I got this off of them.”

Jason reaches out, waits for the nod, and takes the cloth to look at it closely. “That looks like blood,” he says finally, which was honestly all Dick expected him to get from it, for all that the curse itself is a piece of weirdness.

“It is. I tried pulling more from it, but all I can tell you is it’s human, freshly spilled when it was written, probably the practitioner’s.” Jason looks at him, expression questioning, probably reading into his derisive tone. “It’s stupid, using blood for this. Blood makes for a horrible vehicle for curses and spells, and they probably lost more writing that curse out than they would have if they’d gone to a donation drive.”

“So, dramatic asshole, then,” Jason says.

“Yeah, but a smart one. The basic curse is stripped-down Ptolemaic.”

“Egyptian,” Jason interrupts, looking briefly alarmed, as well he should- the ancient Egyptians were versatile magic-users, exalting in the sun and glorifying nature, and vengeful as all hell. Most of their magic is beautiful and powerful and was preserved to become the basis for a significant percentage of the healing and renewal spells known to date, but the few curses that survived to this day are to be feared.

“Greco-Egyptian,” Dick corrects. He tugs at the cloth until Jason releases it and spreads it down on the table, tapping a finger to a few different letters. “This is Egyptian translated to Greek, then transferred into curse format. And this,” he taps a different part, “is nothing I recognize. They used the structure of the old curse and tacked on something of their own invention.”

Jason chews that one over for a minute, frowning down at the cloth. “So how hard would it be to merge something you invented with an established curse like that?” he asks. “Like, slapping a bumper sticker on, or swapping a Pinto’s engine for something in V8?”

“More the second one,” says Dick, who knows just enough about cars to know that Pintos are bad and V8s aren’t. “Definitely not something easy to do. As near as I can tell, with the understanding that I probably only had about half the curse itself to look at, they modified it on the spot in order to be able to cast it faster and with a different method of infliction. The Egyptians didn’t use relays.”

Jason sits back with a sigh. “So he’s smart and quick-thinking, that’s great,” he says, then sits up and shoots Dick a sharp glance before looking over his shoulder again. Dick scrunches the cloth up and tucks it into his fist just in time for the waitress to sweep over with a plastic basket of crispy golden jalapeno goodness. She doesn’t linger, clearly sensing that she’s not wanted, but her interruption brings an awkward silence even once she’s gone.

Dick watches as Jason tests the sauce that came with the basket, nibbling at a jalapeno with suspicion before deeming it acceptable and dipping the untouched end into the sauce. “That’s pretty much all I’ve got,” he admits. “I was hoping to get more from the blood, but the curse burned everything useful away.”

“That’s fine,” Jason says. “That’s something we didn’t know, at least. Here.” He wipes his hands on one of the paper napkins that had come with the basket, then spins his phone around and slides it across the table. “This is the security footage from the store across the street from the pet shop, and that’s our guy.”

His phone is showing a grainy black-and-white video of a man, tall and gangly and average-looking, standing on the sidewalk outside the pet shop and talking animatedly to the clerk that had been arrested. Dick watches it for maybe ten seconds before saying, “Might be your guy, but don’t bother putting out an APB on that face. It’s a disguise spell.” He looks up and sees Jason’s expression, and realizes, “But you already knew that.”

“I figured.” Jason shrugs. “If I were going to roll into Gotham and start stirring up shit, I wouldn’t be showing my real face anywhere Bruce Wayne might see it.” He nudges the basket of jalapenos over in invitation before continuing. “Any chance you can see through it?”

“Not on this.” Dick takes a pepper but turns down the sauce with a shake of his head. “In person, maybe. He’s just a human with a false face, it’s not nearly as good as a disguise spell for a non-human. You can’t- with your eyes?” He gestures helpfully.

“In person, maybe,” Jason echoes, his lips twitching up in what wants to be a grin. He picks up another pepper and dips it in the sauce but stops there, watching as the red seeps up into the breading. “A hunter friend of mine who’s a couple hundred miles down the East Coast saw a guy casting a curse almost identical to that one,” he says finally, nodding to indicate the cloth still wadded up in Dick’s hand.

Dick swallows his last bite of fried pepper, feeling it settle into a suddenly leaden stomach. So that’s what you first means. “Ah,” he says, taking another pepper even though he has no intention of eating it. Jason had said if, this quicksand pit of disappointment is entirely the fault of Dick’s own unrealistic expectations. “So you’re leaving Gotham?”

“Don’t think so,” Jason says, and Dick’s mood instantly u-turns for the second time in twenty seconds as he lets himself hope. “There’s other things to do here, and after what you said about him making that curse up on the spot-” He shakes his head. “Feels like bait to me.”

“You think he wants you to follow him out of town,” Dick says, and Jason nods. “Was your friend able to tell you anything new about him?”

“Only that he had pink hair, so just another disguise spell,” Jason says. He tosses his soggy pepper onto his napkin and looks at Dick again, his gaze intense. “So we’re still on for later?”

Dick manages to temper his reaction this time, leaning back on the anger that hasn’t abated, simply been left to simmer on the back burner, to prevent a similar response as last time. “Yeah, of course,” he says.

Of course- he glances around, at the table and the food between them, the restaurant- Jason seems to come to the same realization as him and shakes his head.

“This wasn’t a date,” he says firmly. “I don’t talk business on dates.”

“Right,” Dick agrees with a smile, more amused than bothered by the claim. He pushes Jason’s phone back across the table to him, then groans and pulls his own out of his pocket to double-check the time. “I need to get back to the store before I’m forbidden from ever leaving it again,” he says.

“What, blondie can ground you?” Jason asks on a laugh, but sobers quickly at the slight wince Dick. “What happened?” he demands, suddenly sharp and keen.

“Nothing serious. I did my job and someone noticed it, and Stephanie is overreacting.” Underselling it, trying to soften it, but Jason’s expression has gone blank and Dick knows fun time’s over. And that was without mentioning the gun.

The waitress is tending to another table near the other end of the patio, so Jason signals her over and asks for the check. “Did you drive here?” he asks when she’s gone again.

“It’s a nice day, I walked,” Dick says, not bothering to mention that getting his car would have involved trying to sneak past a hypervigilant harpy.

“I’ll give you a ride back, then.” He fishes his wallet out of his jacket pocket and sorts out some bills, holding them out to the waitress when she returns with the check with a command for her to keep the change. Dick raises an eyebrow at that, and Jason catches sight of it when he’s rising to his feet. “Still not a date,” he insists, softening a little nonetheless, and Dick grins.

There’s a gate at the other end of the patio, so they don’t have to walk through the whole restaurant awkwardly pretending they don’t know each other. Jason holds the gate for Dick like a gentleman, then leads him over to his car, an utterly unremarkable sedan that is nothing at all like the sleek, fast motorcycle Dick has been imagining. It’s not a long drive back to Dick’s store, and Jason spends the whole time in thoughtful silence, only reacting when Dick directs him to park in the back lot. They sit in the silence after the engine cuts off and the radio stops chattering at them, Dick not sure what’s going through Jason’s head and willing to wait it out.

“How serious is this thing that Stephanie is overreacting to?” Jason asks finally.

“I don’t know,” Dick admits. “But Bruce is on it. And I-”

“Can take care of yourself, I know.” Jason taps the steering wheel with his fingers, the same nervous fidgeting he’d shown in the store just before asking for that hypothetical date. Finally he relents and looks at Dick again. “So I was thinking, my schedule’s wide open now. We could have a real first date, if you wanted.”

Dick only keeps from levitating the entire car because he knew it was coming and braced himself for it.

“Sure,” he says, trying to play it cool, but ruins it by smiling bright and helpless.

Jason nods, his answering smile smaller but no less bright. He glances away, then shifts in his seat, and Dick only just now realizes how close they’d been, forced into close quarters by confinement in a car and leaning closer. “First things first, gotta convince Mom to let you out to play after this,” he says, nodding towards the building, where Stephanie is standing, hands on her hips and eyes narrow, in the doorway.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Dick promises as he climbs out of the car. Stephanie’s not as mad as she looks, he can tell, and if he can avoid her figuring out that he walked to the restaurant in the hopes that someone would try to pick a fight with him, he might even escape this lecture-free.

“Talk to you then,” Jason agrees, then Dick closes the car door and heads over to the building.

“You’re lucky I didn’t tell Cass about this,” Stephanie says when he gets near, then leans over a little. “But first, is that who I think it is? And was that what I think it was?”

“Inside,” Dick orders, gently herding her back through the door. “I’ll explain in a minute.”

She huffs and lingers but ultimately shifts it, and Dick turns to swing the door closed behind him, then gives Jason a wave as the car begins pulling away. Tomorrow, tomorrow, no longer an if.

Damn, he’s got it bad. But he’s smiling so hard his face hurts, and it’s the first time in a long time that he’s been this happy, and the anger left to simmer is all but forgotten, and he thinks- yeah. It’s worth it.

Chapter Text

Dick doesn’t sleep well that night, for once nothing to do with the magic buzzing under his skin. The emotional whiplash of the afternoon’s attempted violation followed so soon with his not-really date with Jason and the promise for more- he floats through the rest of the day, and wanders uselessly from room to room after closing up, and opens early the next morning for lack of anything better to occupy himself with. He receives no mockery from Stephanie, who’s been pretty floaty herself recently, although less literally.

The mockery comes from a different quarter.

“What is this,” a voice asks, coming from the store and approaching the kitchen, where Dick has claimed a chair and challenged himself to stay in it a whole five minutes this time. It’s not even noon, far too early to call- or should he just accept that nothing about this has been conventional and he needs to just go with what feels right?- but he’s been unable to sit still long enough to focus on anything. He spins in his chair- still sitting in it, just sideways now- and watches as Tim ducks through the doorway. He has a mostly-empty bottle of expensive vodka in one hand and a plate in the other.

“Uh, you drank your lunch?” Dick tries. The plate is his, but the vodka will need some explaining.

“It was floating in the hallway,” Tim says, depositing the plate into the sink with all the surety that that is where it belongs that would be expected of a young man who has had staff to clean up after him for ninety-five percent of his life. Dick hasn’t been to Tim’s apartment since he first helped his brother move in, and quite frankly he’s a little scared of what previously unknown life forms he might have to fight for couch space if he visits now.

“Automatic emotional response, like blushing,” Dick says, narrowing his eyes at the plate when it rattles in the sink. It behaves itself and stays put.

“What emotion makes you float things?” Tim asks.

Dick loves Tim, he truly does. But there’s a reason Tim hadn’t known Dick and Kori were together, seriously together, until he came over and found Dick drowning his sorrows after their break up. “Just happy, is all.”

Tim makes a noise of acknowledgement and pulls out his phone to scroll through it. A moment later he flips it over and shows Dick the screen- his text history with Steph, most notably the giant Dick’s got a date! in a font that somehow sparkles, and the ten thousand emojis she sent afterwards.

“That’s all, huh?” he says with a sharp grin.

“Yeah, okay,” Dick says, folding his arms across his chest and staring up at Tim with all the older brother authority he can muster. “And that’s all you’re going to know about it until we establish some ground rules.”

“That hunter you uncursed, right?” Tim continues, all innocent expression and raised eyebrows.

“Steph!” Dick hollers, leaning forward and around Tim. She probably has music going and can’t hear him, and he’s got two minutes to go in the chair.

“I actually figured that one out myself,” Tim says, and gestures with the hand holding the phone as he talks, point A to point B to point C. “You’re seeing someone, you've been acting weird for a couple weeks now, the only new thing in your life is the hunter. And then,” and he ends with a sweeping gesture towards Dick, no doubt meaning how he responded just now. Which- fair.

“There’s one new person in my life, so clearly that’s who I have to be dating? I’m not that much of a recluse,” Dick protests.

“Not trying to judge or anything, but ever since Donna died, you kind of have been,” Tim says. “You know Alfred asked Steph to come work for you so he’d have someone to keep an eye on you, right?”

“I figured that out when I caught her calling in a progress report in the first week,” Dick says calmly. He’d been mad at first, had even considered firing her outright, but common sense had prevailed- he couldn’t run the store alone, and at least Stephanie was someone he knew. He nods towards the vodka bottle. “Is that to celebrate? Was I that much of a lost cause?”

“No,” Tim says, visibly shifting gears. “This is from the nightclub. It’s the vehicle for the bird man’s magic.” He sets it on the table, and Dick leans forward and actually looks at it, and yeah, he can feel the magic in it now.

“Bruce wants me to take a look at it?” Dick asks, then glances up at the silence. “Bruce doesn’t know you brought it,” he says, not asking this time.

“You’ve done all the magical work on this case so far, there’s no point in bringing in someone new now,” Tim says resolutely. So Bruce hasn’t come home yet and heard about the watch, or at least hasn’t told Tim that someone was trying to find Dick’s weakness.

“All right,” Dick says. The bottle has clearly been run through evidence, smudges of black dust rubbed into the label and ground into the grooves on the cap, but Tim isn’t handling it with gloves, so it’s safe for him to touch. He slides it close and tilts it, watching as the magical residue clings to the bottle and the surface of the vodka, a transparent rainbow film like the skin of a soap bubble. “He’s going to figure it out as soon as I call to tell him I have something, you know.”

Tim shrugs, unconcerned- he doesn’t have the confrontational history with Bruce that Dick does and doesn’t know firsthand how many bridges Bruce is willing to burn in the name of for your own good. “He spent all yesterday sitting in on GCPD interviews and he’s got a couple names, all we need is a good lead on the practitioner and that’s it.”

Dick shrugs as well and, his five minutes over, stands up and grabs the bottle to take it into his work room. He can make himself focus on this.

“Oh, and Dick?” Tim says, and picks up Dick’s phone from the kitchen table, where he had been staring blankly at it before Tim had come in. “The whole dating thing really only works if you call him.”

Dick doubles back to grab his phone and point a finger directly into Tim’s face. “Leave him alone,” he orders sternly. “No abusing your creeper power to try and drive him away.”

“I wouldn’t,” Tim protests, like he hadn’t done that exact thing to every other dating-age family member at least once each- Cass only once, and that was a lesson well learned.

Dick leaves Tim to stew in his hypocrisy, and probably gossip about Dick’s love life with Steph, and closes the work room door behind him. The vodka bottle goes on the bench, and then Dick hesitates, staring at the phone in his other hand.

Finally- the coward’s way out- he sends a text. You free for lunch tomorrow? He sets the phone aside, not expecting anything- only for it to ping with an incoming text before he can even take his hand away from it.

Sure. When and where?

Noon. You choose where im not picky. He debates fixing his grammar for an embarrassing moment before accepting that this is who he is as a person and sending it as is.

Let me look up a few places, I’ll get back to you.

He grins like an idiot, grateful there is no one around to see him, and sets his phone aside. Overthinking it, of course, his main enemy in almost every relationship.

The vodka bottle sits on the bench, a silent accusation, and Dick sits down and reaches over to it. With an actual sample of the hybrid spell the bird man’s been using, Dick can break it down to its base components, the spells and the potions that have been batched together to whatever purpose the bird man is trying to achieve. With that, he can not only better counter the spell’s effects- not that treating eighty-odd people from the nightclub for purple spots hadn’t been so much fun- but he can help identify the practitioner behind it.

He glances at his phone one last time, then grabs a shallow glass dish from the shelves over his work bench, takes the vodka bottle and unscrews the cap, and gets to work.

He surfaces three hours and seven missed texts later, and something- not excitement, but maybe satisfaction, the puzzle pieces all locking neatly into place- fizzing in his veins. Oh, he’d been so wrong, but in such a vindicating way.

He looks at his phone, the missed texts, and feels a twinge of disappointment in himself. He’d responded to the last one, finally, to make the pinging stop. They’re on for tomorrow, lunch at a cafe just down the street, with an admittedly ominous refusal to elaborate on his I need to talk to you about something from Dick that Jason, thankfully, doesn’t seem to have taken too badly. If they’re lucky, this whole mess will be cleaned up by then, and Dick can quit trying to split his attention between this and Jason.

The glass dish is empty of vodka now, the alcohol forced to evaporate, the sticky bubble-residue of magic clinging to the dish. It had been smeared across a sheet of paper that had turned blue where it touched, an enspelled chunk of wood that was now scorched. Dick picks up the third item from his desk, a single grey feather with a strip of leathery skin still attached at the base of the shaft, and heads out of his work room.

“Tim still here?” he asks as he comes into the store.

“Nope,” Stephanie says, not looking up from her phone. She’s missing out on her daily coffee date with Cass for him, he realizes. “Take it you caught a big break and need to head to the manor?”

“You can head out too if you want, I’ll open up when I get back,” Dick offers.

“I’m not gonna skive off work every time you have something to do out in the real world, boss,” Steph says scoldingly. “Just this time, come straight back? No more unauthorized dates.”

“Unauthorized,” Dick echoes, and Stephanie grins at him with far too many teeth.

“You did call him, right?”

“I regret not firing you that first week,” Dick tells her, and she laughs.

“See you in a bit,” she says, and he waves her off as he heads back into the back, the door shutting firmly between them.

He’s three steps out the back door when something makes him pause, an awareness that prickles up his spine and pools like hot breath on the back of his neck. He looks around, subtle at first and then obvious, intent, and sees nothing out of the usual. He looks again, checking for magic this time, and sees nothing still.

He shakes his head, shakes it off, and continues for his car, and makes a mental note to get to work on that extra warding as soon as he gets back.

The voice that greets Dick upon his entry into the cave is not one he expected- thick and nasally, a bird’s angry squawk more than a person’s words. He silently moves to follow the sound of it and stands just outside the doorway into Bruce’s office, watching him watch a recording on his tablet.

“Penguin?” he asks, when Bruce’s posture does that subtle shift that tells Dick he’s been noticed. About six seconds this time- either Dick is getting better at sneaking, or Bruce is losing his edge.

“Oswald Cobblepot,” Bruce corrects, moving one hand and muting the tablet. There are no lights on aside from the glow of its screen, and Dick can still see movement in the way the light shifts, so he’s still watching it. Something about it must be bothering him.

“Yeah. Penguin.” Dick comes into the doorway and hesitates. He’s not sure how welcome he’ll be when this conversation really gets going. “He’s not a practitioner.”

“He has the money to hire one, and the Iceberg Lounge would benefit from other clubs closing down.”

“In Penguin’s most convoluted scheme yet?” Dick asks. “I know he’s got a whole motif going, but do you really think he’s out there trying to turn people into birds to drum up business?”

Bruce doesn’t actually sigh, but his frame shifts like he did. He taps at the tablet again, and the light goes still. “Using a nightclub as a spreading point makes no sense if there’s no business angle,” he says. “A restaurant would be a more obvious choice.”

Dick takes one deep breath, two, braces himself. “Anyway, I came for a different reason than to poke holes in your logic. You know about the pet shop.”

It’s not a question. Bruce rubs at his face with one hand, then rests his chin on his fist and regards Dick with a steady gaze. “Yes.”

“And you know Tim brought me this.” He takes two steps into the office and puts the now-empty vodka bottle on the desk, then retreats back to the doorway.

“And I know about the watch, since we’re stating the obvious.” Bruce frowns at the bottle, then looks back at Dick and waits. Stating the obvious and being bitchy about it, great start.

“I pulled the sample apart-” Dick begins.

“You should have told him no.” Bruce speaks over him, cold and inevitable, an avalanche with a voice. “Less than twenty-four hours after someone attempted to breach your security, and you were involving yourself in this case again-”

“I was involved from the moment I helped those girls, Bruce,” Dick says. Two can play the interrupting game, even if Dick’s not nearly as impressive at it. “That put me on this guy’s radar, not anything else I’ve done for this.”

“Not even when you went to that pet shop?”

There is a single moment, hanging crystalline in the air between them, and Dick knows- if Bruce figures out he did that for a crush, that’s probably the end of the civility between them for a while. He can easily see this spinning out into a baseless argument that shakes the cave and leaves nothing accomplished except hurt feelings and even more bad blood between them.

He holds his breath, he waits for the accusation- and when it doesn’t come, he steps forward again and puts the grey feather on the desk in front of Bruce. “It’s chimerism,” he says simply.

Bruce picks up the feather and rolls it between his fingers, then looks at Dick again. “The feathers?”

“Chimerism,” Dick repeats. “It’s chimera magic. I didn’t see it until I actually had the spell to look at- Gar always handled chimera stuff, and I’m shit at it anyways.” Chimerism is a whole separate field of magic, one Dick has never even dabbled in and has no talent for, not least because of how uncomfortable it made Gar.

“The practitioner at the pet shop was chimerizing animals,” Bruce says, stating the obvious once again.

“Specifically birds,” Dick says. “There’s never been a known case of human chimerization, but apparently our guy is going hardcore Fullmetal Alchemist, because he’s figuring it out. He’s chimerizing these people.”

The reference sails over Bruce’s head but the message sticks the landing. He looks at the tablet again- question: what does Cobblepot gain from chimerizing people? answer: nothing immediately obvious- and frowns. “Then this practitioner was also responsible for the hunter with the curse.”

“Tim got me that hunter’s number a while ago when Steph called to check that they were legit. I called him and set up a meeting for tomorrow, I can ask him what he knows about this guy then.”

They’re edging a little too close to territory neither of them want to be on. Bruce shifts forward in his chair, his face close enough now to the tablet that Dick can see him clearly. He’s unshaven, bags under his eyes and skin pale.

“Make it in a public place,” he says- hard to veto it, when he’s the one who vouched for Jason in the first place.

“Stupid question, but when was the last time you slept?” Dick asks.

“Let me know if he has anything useful,” Bruce orders, turning back to the tablet and clearly dismissing Dick.

“I don’t negotiate with zombies,” Dick says.

“Try not to get involved with anything dangerous,” Bruce adds, not rising to the bait.

“It’s fine, I know this guy’s magic now. If he tries anything I’ll see him coming from a mile off.” Dick steps back. “I’ll call you tomorrow, then?”

Bruce grunts, and presses play on the tablet, watching with furrowed brow as he continues to poke at whatever it was about Penguin’s interview that so bothers him. Dick watches him for a moment, then turns away with a shrug. Dodged a bullet there, even if it would have been nice for Bruce to- but no. Dick knows better than to wish for Bruce to change.

“Good luck,” he mutters, and heads back upstairs, leaving Bruce to sit alone in the dark once more.

It takes the better part of an hour to get Stephanie to quit fussing over him and poking at him the next day, switching with dizzying speed between worrying at the risk he’s taking by going out in public and giving him very bad dating advice. She also pokes at the warding Dick had spent the night putting in, watching it flex and shiver when she touches it, arcane symbols carving themselves into the air like light refracting from a prism. She only lets him leave when she’s satisfied that he’s sufficiently covered the building, and is annoyed enough to be snapping at her, and as a result he’s almost late to a lunch date at a cafe that’s a five minute walk down the road.

He is unaccountably nervous, which is ridiculous- he and Jason have gotten along from the start, only a few minor hiccups, and they both like each other and both know it. Still, no internal assurances will calm the flutter in his stomach when he approaches the cafe and sees Jason waiting at the door. He’s gone for classy, a button-up shirt with his sleeves rolled up, clean jeans with no tears in them, no sign of his near-trademark leather jacket.

“Sorry,” Dick says as he walks over, watching Jason’s gaze trace lazily up and down his body and suppressing the shiver that wants to follow. “Had to escape the clutches of a power-mad harpy.”

“Take your time,” Jason says laconically, then pulls the door open and holds it for Dick.

It’s a typical neighborhood cafe, small and simple with food that is mildly underwhelming and mildly overpriced, a sign at the door that invites them to seat themselves and menus available in the table centerpiece that also holds the ketchup and the salt. Steph had picked up lunch here for them a few times before vetoing it because it was too boring, and the menu is as basic as Dick remembers. He picks out the first thing on the menu to catch his eye, and requests water when the hipster-waiter comes over to ask their drink orders, and scans the room when he has a moment to check for any sign of magic in use.

“Bored already?” Jason asks, and Dick looks over to find he’s looking over his own menu to watch Dick’s gaze wander.

“Nope,” Dick says instantly. “Just checking for trouble.”

“You expecting any?” Jason seems more interested than troubled by the prospect, curiously, considering he kicked off this latest spree of mother-henning.

“Honestly? I don’t know.” Dick shrugs a little. “Everyone else seems to be, though.”

Jason sets his menu aside. “Can I ask about that, now, since we’re not pretending to be professionals anymore? Or is that not first date appropriate?”

“What? My family?” Dick asks, and sighs when Jason nods. “No, it’s fine, just complicated.”

“All right, start small. How’d you wind up in that store?”

“I wanted to help people, and I couldn’t think of a better way to do it than let them come to me.” Dick hesitates, then peels the bandages off his heart and shows Jason some of the scar tissue underneath. “There was a group of us, we were going to change the world, but my. My closest friend in the world, she died, and I couldn’t be with them anymore. So I went off to do my own thing, and ended up with the store.”

To his credit, Jason doesn’t fumble his way through the awkward condolences people feel compelled to give after hearing something like that. He just nods thoughtfully, and quirks a smile when Dick closely investigates the drinks the waiter delivers to their table. They are declared magic-free, and Dick and Jason order their food, and the waiter leaves with the bored look on his face not having budged an inch.

“So what about you?” Dick asks when he’s gone. “How’d you get into hunting?”

“Nothing too tragic,” Jason says, which- most hunters’ stories begin with tragedy, so it had been a minefield question to start with, one Dick wouldn’t have asked if he’d let himself think about it for more than a few seconds. “I had a job with a free clinic as a kid, and the doctor running the place was getting hassled by a local gang that had a leader with a few magic tricks up his sleeve. So I started hitting the local magic hangout spots, trying to get advice on how to convince him to fuck off.” He glances away, out the window as if looking towards something, and Dick wonders if that clinic is in this very city. Is Jason a native Gothamite? Dick doesn’t even know. “Had to break a few bones, but he got the message. And then one of the people I asked for help asked if I could do her a similar favor, and...” He shrugs.

“So I’m not the first practitioner you’ve worked with, then.” He’d thought so at first, when Jason had been so alarmed at the thought of being in Dick’s debt, and later with the curse charm.

“You are. The places I was going, the people I was talking to- they’re not exactly your type.” Jason looks at him for a moment, expression contemplative and perhaps a touch shy. “You’re not what I was expecting.”

Dick takes a long drink of water to give himself time to fight off the blush that rises up. “Neither are you, for me,” he admits. “You can ask Steph, I’ve been a little bit stupid over you since the second time we met.”

Jason snorts. “She and Roy should get drinks and bitch about us being idiots,” he says, and Dick chuckles.

The food arrives then, brought over by a different waiter who smiles and hangs close to watch them take a few bites before asking how everything is. It’s disconcerting, especially after the first waiter’s indifference, and Dick politely but firmly sends him on his way. Jason waits until he’s gone before he opens up his burger, peeling off the brown-edged leaf of lettuce and frowning at the meat’s doneness.

“It’s okay,” he says when Dick asks.

“Yeah, I should have told you they’re not great here,” Dick admits.

“I could’ve done better in my own kitchen,” Jason says, and takes another sulky bite of the burger. Apparently it’s disappointing but not on a level worth kicking up a fuss.

“You cook?” Dick asks, surprised despite himself, and gets a nod and questioning lift of an eyebrow. He fills in the natural response and grins a little. “Yeah, I can, if you count mac and cheese from the box as cooking.”

“I do not,” Jason says disapprovingly through a mouth half-full of burger. Alfred would be appalled.

“For the best anyway, I gave up keeping the pots for cooking and the pots for potions separate pretty much immediately. I don’t know if I’d trust anything more involved than a grilled cheese cooked in my kitchen.”

Jason swallows hard, almost choking for a moment, and Dick watches him with a frown. “Sorry, is that a no on talking about magic?” He- honestly, even for Jason, he doesn’t know if he could push aside such a large part of his life, his identity, or even if he’s willing to try.

“No,” Jason says firmly, as if he somehow knows what Dick is thinking. “I’m just not used to it being a casual topic of conversation.”

Dick hums and picks at the fries that came with his sandwich. “I’ve never had to hide it, so it’s never been anything but a casual topic for me,” he says.

There’s a pause, then a hand on his, warm and strong and callused. Dick freezes and stares at it- they’ve touched before, Dick when they first met and he had to help Stephanie haul an unconscious Jason around, Jason at the pet shop when the clerk had pulled the shotgun- but this is different. Deliberate.

“It’s fine, I’ll adjust. No big deal.” Jason squeezes his hand a little when Dick looks at him again, offers a shy smile in return when Dick smiles and nods.

There’s a moment of fragile peace, as they both go back to their food- then Dick pauses.

“Uh, how quick is that adjustment period going to be?” he asks. The door to the cafe is behind him, so he can’t turn around and look without making it blatantly obvious what he’s doing.

“What’s wrong?” Jason puts his burger down and drops a hand under the table- foolish to think he’d be unarmed just because he’s on a date.

“Someone just walked in with a disguise spell,” Dick says, aching to look for himself but forced to trust Jason to do it for him. “And when I say someone- I forgot to tell you something, by the way.”

Jason looks over his shoulder to the door, and the green light washes over his eyes. Then he jerks his gaze down, looking down at his plate, letting his hair fall in front of his face. “Does it have anything to do with the bastard that cursed me? Because he’s standing about fifteen feet behind you.”

“Yeah. He’s the guy. The case I’ve been working for Bruce, he’s the one- he’s been trying to chimerize people, turn them into birds. And he’s the bastard who cursed you. We’ve been after the same guy this whole time.”

“Huh.” Jason dares another glance, the green glow still in his gaze. “His hair really is pink under the spell.”

He looks down again, and when he looks back up his eyes are normal. He keeps a steady gaze on DIck, probably tracking the bird man with his peripheral vision. “He’s heading towards a table on the other side of the building, we’ll be out of his sight once he sits down. Is he doing anything?”

“Magic-wise? No.” Dick’s got his guard up, shielding spells ready to go, but aside from maintaining the disguise the bird man is doing absolutely nothing magical.

Jason shifts his weight in the chair and produces his wallet. Second date in a row he’s footed the bill, Dick’s gotta make sure he gets the next one. “When were you going to tell me he was still in town?” he asks, not angry yet but heading down that road.

“Sometime at lunch. I just-” saw Jason’s forearms, bared by the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt, and bluescreened. “Got distracted.”

Jason actually looks at him properly, and grins sharply at whatever expression is on Dick’s face- he can feel the flush heating his cheeks and hates it. “As soon as we’re outside, call Bruce or whoever you need to,” he says as he tosses a hundred down on the table- far too much, but the point is to get to safer ground. “And try to keep your head down, he kept looking at you.”

Dick stands when Jason does, thinking at first to look and see if he could actually see the man, but his head swims with the blood rush from the altitude change, and then Jason is beside him, between him and the rest of the cafe.

The hipster that was their first waiter tries to protest as they head for the door, but they ignore him, Jason herding Dick with his body as if afraid Dick’s gonna double back and try to pick a fight here and now.

“Still nothing?” he asks as soon as they’re outside, the door closing safely behind them. Then he swears, approaching his car for a few steps before stopping, wobbling a little as he turns sharply away. The tires are flat, Dick sees.

“Still nothing,” he confirms. He pulls his phone out to call Bruce. “My store is-”

“Yeah, come on,” Jason says when Dick doesn’t finish his sentence. What does deflating the tires accomplish when they’re a five minute walk from safety?

They head down the sidewalk together, shoulder-to-shoulder. There’s only a handful of people out even at this time of the day, the street not busy enough to justify any real foot traffic. Jason scowls at anyone who gets too near, but there’s something wrong with him- he’s blinking hard and fast, and he runs into Dick a couple of times like he’s having trouble balancing.

Dick, for his part, is also having problems. The sunlight reflects off his phone screen and scorches his eyes, blindingly bright, and when he turns it so it’s in the shade he can’t quite focus on the screen. It’s ever-so-slightly fuzzy, like he’s just woken up and his eyes are still adjusting, and his depth perception feels off.

Then Jason staggers for real, running into Dick hard enough to make him drop his phone entirely, grabbing him with two shaking hands and a grip that is far too weak.

“Shit,” Jason breathes, pushing away only to stagger again, falling against Dick’s shoulder and threatening to send them both over. He’s heavy, and Dick’s dizzy. “Shit. The waiter. The second one. The food.”

“What?” Dick asks, not following the sentence fragments.

“Drugged,” Jason says, eyes blinking hard. Losing the fight against sleep.

Ah. Dick’s been so on-guard against a magical attack, he’d outright forgotten there are other ways to hurt people.

The world is woozy and greying out at the edges. The drug has a harder fight in for it with Dick, but it’s still winning. He hauls Jason another few steps down the sidewalk, annoyed at the few people around them, wanting them to stop him and offer their help, wanting them all to disappear. The harder he works at it, the faster his heart beats, the faster the drug circulates.

There’s a blanket in the window next to him, piles of yarn and needles on top. The knitting shop across the road. Dick can’t take another step and Jason is deadweight against him.

“Sorry,” Dick says, and puts one hand on Jason’s chest. The hunter droops against him, barely conscious. That will help with the landing, at least.

Then Dick channels all his remaining focus into one blow, and Jason is propelled backwards across the street, crashing with a tremendous noise through the front window of Dick’s store. He barely has time to see the glitter of warding on the air sealing shut where the glass once was, snapping down protectively around everyone inside, including Jason.

Then there are hands on him, voices in his ear, hauling him back and yelling at him, at each other, and Dick’s knees fold and his eyes close and the world fades away.

Chapter Text

He stirs, not awake, barely aware. There’s pressure on his wrists and his arms won’t move right, his mouth is dry and his breathing seems stifled.

A hand presses on the back of his neck, thumb pushing hard into his pulse point. “Behave yourself, sweetheart,” a voice says in his ear. He shakes his head, rolls his shoulders, shakes the hand off. Tries to think through the fog.

“What is this?” a new voice asks. He knows it, remembers hearing it recently, but he can’t begin to place it. He tries to remember- where is he? What does he remember? Steph in the store, him annoyed and her concerned- was there more? Something happened after that, he remembers dropping his phone, the world running together like spilled paint.

The hand comes back, tangles in his hair and lifts his head up. Something pulls weirdly on his face. “The Wayne boy,” the person behind him says. Dick tries to jerk free- pain is very distant right now, locked away with rational thought.

In front of him is a pale, round face, eyes wide and nostrils flaring. Penguin, he thinks, and hears Bruce’s voice correct him, Oswald Cobblepot, and for a second he’s in the Cave, cool damp air and tablet light glowing eerily on Bruce’s face.

“What about the hunter?” he asks.

The hunter- Jason-

“Someone,” a finger traces down his cheek, and he flinches. “Decided to be a hero. The hunter got away.”

He remembers- piecemeal, shotgun-blasted- Jason at the cafe, sleeves rolled up. Gaze soft and intense. A hand on his, squeezing, a promise of acceptance.

“He went through a window, though, so he’s either still at the store or in a hospital somewhere,” the person behind him is saying. And Dick remembers that too, Jason boneless as a doll as he hit the window.

Penguin makes a rude noise and waves a hand, and someone else walks away, feet loud on the floor.

“What do we do with him?” The hand in his hair releases him and he stays upright.

There is something in his mouth, heavy fabric taking up space and pinning his tongue down. And the pull on his skin- tape. They have him gagged. He tugs at his wrists, just testing, and feels the sticky pull of tape there too. His fingers curl and twitch- but then something sharp jabs at them, stabbing like a needle into the heel of his hand, and he jerks away.

The man behind him hums, and he twists to look over his shoulder. Bubblegum-pink hair, a few weeks grown out of a buzzcut. A big pink coat that reminds him of a ringmaster’s. A manic grin, showing more teeth than is comfortable for a human. He sees Dick looking and grins harder and ruffles Dick’s hair.

“Can you transform him?”

“I don’t know,” the pink man says. “I haven’t tried it on someone with magic yet, and he’s a strong one.”

“Will he still have his magic afterwards?” Penguin asks, sounding interested now. Not good, probably.

“Be interesting to find out,” the pink man says.

Dick struggles for real now, twisting his wrists and pulling, skimming his fingers along the tape in the hopes of finding the end. He’s remembering more- Jason in the cafe, eyes acid green as he watches something over Dick’s shoulder, flat tires, dropping his phone as Jason’s full weight landed on his shoulder.

They have him gagged so he can’t speak, but Dick’s not one for spoken magic anyways, it’s imprecise and takes too long. His hands are free to gesture, but his wrists are trapped together and unable to move, and he can feel the blood trickling down his palm from his last attempt at coordinated hand movements.

“Well, whatever you do with him, he can’t stay here,” Penguin is saying. “They had me in for questioning about all of this. This will be the first place Wayne comes looking for him.”

He’s in a chair, barely, turned sideways so his left shoulder is pressed to the seat back. His feet aren’t restrained in any way, and he slides them under the chair, tensing in preparation.

“I’ll take him to the testing area, then,” the pink man says. One hand lands on Dick’s shoulder, the other wraps around his fingers and squeezes tight enough to hurt.

“The hunter knows about that place,” Penguin warns.

“Then your men had best deal with him,” the pink man says pleasantly, his tone cheerfully threatening. Penguin snarls at him but turns and walks away, and the pink man chuckles.

The hand on Dick’s shoulder slides up his neck and into his hair once more, pulling his head back again. The other hand disappears off him as well, only to reappear in his line of sight a moment later, cupped palm full of a faintly pink powder. Dick braces against the chair, tries to push back against the body behind him, but the pink man gives his head a shake and tuts at him.

“Oh, relax,” he says, and tosses the powder into Dick’s face. He tries to hold his breath but it’s useless, the powder lingering in the air, coating his skin with sticky graininess like pulverized cotton candy.

“I’ll wake you back up before we get to the fun part,” the pink man promises, his voice already distant and echoing- Dick’s barely awake from the first drugging.

The hands leave him, and Dick falls, and is gone again before he hits the ground.

The light wakes him up, bright and piercing. After that comes sensation- the vague hot throbbing of pain that will ignite into proper fire soon- and hard on the heels of that comes the memories, and Jason sits up fast. Too fast, his head swimming, his skin pulling in a way he knows means stitches.

“Whoa, easy,” a familiar voice says, a comforting hand on his shoulder, and Jason doesn’t snap that wrist in three places only because it’s Roy.

“Dick,” Jason says. His mouth feels dry and cottony. “They drugged us- where-?”

“Yeah, no shit,” a new voice says, and Jason looks over to find Stephanie Brown standing at his feet. She’s got her arms folded across her chest and her eyes narrowed, and she’s just this side of going full harpy. “What the hell happened?”

Jason levers himself up onto his elbows and looks around. On a couch he’s slept on before, in a living room he knows. Shirtless, his back and shoulders littered with patches of taped-down gauze and the strange pulling sensation of stitches. The metal charm Dick had sold him once upon a time is still warm with his own body heat, resting against the skin just above his heart.

There’s a patch of gauze on his right forearm, just below his elbow. He peels it up and checks and, yeah, that’s Roy’s needlework.

“We had lunch,” he says, because he can practically feel the furious impatience baking off of Stephanie like summer sunlight off of blacktop. He has to go slow, still trying to piece things together into the proper order himself. “We talked about his friends, and cooking?” Is that right? It seems like such an inconsequential thing. “And then the- that practitioner he’s been after-”

He should have known. Dick had responded to every threat so far with flippant dismissal, Jason should have known, should have called it quits and gone back to the store, when Dick was so much as considering taking this latest one seriously.

“Call Wayne,” he orders, swinging his legs off the couch and sitting up properly, preparing to stand, even though his head swims with the motion. He’d been allowed to keep his jeans on, probably because his shoulders took the brunt of the damage, and even his socks and boots.

“Been and gone,” Roy says, standing up himself. He goes away and comes back a moment later, and tosses a heavy bundle into Jason’s lap- a shirt, probably not shredded and bloody, and his leather jacket. He’s regretting not wearing it for the date. It’s survived far worse than going through a window, and would have spared him about half a pint of blood loss. “Seemed like he had a lot he wanted to say about sharing information, but that’s gonna have to wait until after he gets Dick back. Something to look forward to.”

Stephanie hisses at that, and Roy leans away from her, and Jason groans between them. Roy uses sarcasm to deflect tension, and Stephanie’s not in a mood to be deflected.

“The practitioner walked in,” Jason tells her. “He kept staring at Dick, so as soon as he went to sit down, we left. But the waiter drugged our food, and.” He shakes his head.

“I told Wayne we first ran into our pink-haired friend when we were busting up one of Penguin’s smuggling houses,” Roy says. “He didn’t want to stick around to wait on your Rip Van Winkle ass after that.”

“Penguin,” Stephanie echoes, still visibly pissed but gritting her teeth and talking around it. When Roy nods, she snorts. “So Bruce is going to the Iceberg Lounge to have a chat with him, but he’s not gonna be stupid enough to keep Dick there. Where was that house?”

“We went back there later, it’s empty,” Roy tells her. “But we hit four other spots before we hit gold there. They could still be at any of those, or none of them. Penguin’s got money, we have to assume he’s got a few places even Wayne doesn’t know about.”

“The practitioner is the one who grabbed Dick,” Jason says. They’d run into the pink bastard at the last place, sure, a house full of mediocre art and crates of guns in the basement, but that hadn’t been his place. “That was his play, he would’ve known how to knock Dick out without giving him a chance to fight back.”

He remembers something else- a night that feels so long ago now, a quiet house, creeping around with silent steps, investigating rooms. Dick in the storage room, sorting papers and checking labels. And another room, what would have been a guest bedroom in a normal house, filled to the brim with magic paraphernalia and with a work bench against one wall, shelves of paints and inks and containers, walls covered with photocopied pages from books and old drawings and handwritten notes, meticulously labeled vials and wooden boxes with seals taped over the lids, baggies filled with claws and teeth and feathers and skin and scales and rocks and leaves and pieces of wood. A busy, chaotic room, organized by methods a casual onlooker could not discern. A room so thick with magic that it presents a tangible barrier at the door.

“The basement at the pet shop didn’t look like a work room,” Jason says, and the other two go still and silent for a moment.

“What?” Stephanie demands after several moments.

From his spot on the couch, Jason can see down the hallway leading to the bedrooms, and the door to the work room is open just enough for him to see a sliver of the chaos inside. He points towards it. “That’s Dick’s work room, right? Where he does all his real magic?”

Stephanie looks, then turns back and nods, her impatience growing.

“So for a magic-user who’s trying to chimerize people- which is a whole new type of magic, right?- he’d need a set-up like that.”

Roy moves towards the hallway, one eye on Stephanie to gauge the likelihood of her objectiong. He looks, and comes back a moment later, a darkly satisfied smile on his lips. “You know, now that you mention it, I do remember seeing something like that recently.”

Stephanie’s mood is shifting from frustrated anger to vicious anticipation. “Let me guess, some empty warehouse down by the docks,” she says.

Roy and Jason exchange looks. “How about that abandoned K-Mart out on Bannister Street?” Jason offers.

“Hmm. Equally creepy, less stereotypical, but still obviously a bad guy hangout. Four out of ten.” She pulls her phone from her pocket as she’s talking. “You think that’s where they have him?”

“I think it’s a good place to start,” Jason says. He shakes out the shirt Roy had given him and pulls at the hem, considering the daunting prospect of lifting his arms enough to pull it on. He doesn’t want to know how badly cut up he is, and tries not to think about how many stitches he’s going to rip out before this is done.

“I’m gonna call Bruce,” Stephanie says, and is dialing the number and walking into the kitchen for privacy before either of the hunters can even wince at the prospect. Roy shakes his head after her, then looks at Jason again.

“You know we have another problem,” he points out. “That building didn’t have any serious protections when we first broke in, but the pet shop-”

“Yeah,” Jason agrees. They’d been content to rely on regular, non-magical security at first, probably to avoid connecting Penguin to anything magic. But after Jason got cursed at one of Penguin’s base of operations, they’d given up the act and stepped up security a lot. Getting in now is going to be a lot harder than it had been the first time. “How long was I out?”

“Five hours, and lemme tell you, between her and Wayne it’s been so much fun,” Roy says, jerking his chin to indicate the direction Stephanie went. Five hours, damn it- five hours of Dick in the hands of people trying to turn humans into birds. Shit.

He risks standing up, swaying dangerously for a minute while Roy holds him steady with a hand on his shoulder, then bites the bullet and pulls his shirt on. It hurts, cuts pulling and twisting, stitches straining, but it’s manageable. It will have to be.

“Went straight to voicemail,” Stephanie reports as she comes back into the room. “So I called someone better, she’ll be here in a few minutes.” She stops and looks at Jason, then looks at something beside the couch. Jason looks as well- a wastebasket full of bloody gauze and towels and what’s left of the shirt he was wearing, all studded with the occasional glitter of glass shards. “You gonna be up for this?”

“There’s going to be some kind of warding on the building, like what Dick’s got here,” Jason says, ignoring the question as he doesn’t have a clear answer. He definitely should have worn his jacket. “Is there someone you can call to get us past it?”

“Well,” Stephanie says. “Not really like what he’s got here, or they wouldn’t be able to get Dick in there.” She sees the confused look on Jason’s face and explains, albeit with the uncertainty of someone who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about, but is confident in their ability to mimic someone who does. “They probably would have had to compromise most of their magical security because they were bringing a hostile practitioner in. Unconscious or not, any warding would have read Dick as a threat, and would try to keep him out. And that shit takes time to set back up, so they should be down to the basics now.”

“Should be,” Roy echoes.

“Would it make you feel better if I said oh no, we’re screwed, we’re never gonna get in there?” Stephanie snaps, turning sharply on her heel to face him. Her feathers bristle, claws tapping against each other as if to confirm they are still out and sharp. Roy rocks his weight back on one foot and weathers the storm with a look of resignation, not giving her anything solid to rail against, and Jason looks at them both and wonders how many near-fights he had missed in those five hours.

“Is there anything you or your backup are going to need for this?” Jason asks, trying to bring a sense of- not peace, that’s not even close to what’s going on inside his head. Control, is a better word, rage tightly wound and tucked away, focus like a blade of ice cutting through the useless bullshit of hot rage. “We need to be ready to go as soon as she gets here.”

“No, but here.” Stephanie heads back into the kitchen for a moment and comes back with a bottle of water and a granola bar. “Drink that, eat that, and don’t pass out on us.”

He’s nowhere near passing out, not now that he’s standing upright and has pure bullheaded stubbornness on his side. Still, he eats and drinks as ordered, while Stephanie paces and clicks her claws and Roy quietly stays out of her way with the exhausted look of a man who has been besieged for hours and isn’t keen on doing anything that might restart the war.

She’s just checked her phone for the third time, and Jason is seconds away from suggesting her friend meet them en route so they don’t all go insane with waiting, when there’s a noise- a thump, a choked-off shout, muted by walls. Stephanie perks up and immediately beelines for the doorway, so Jason tosses the granola wrapper and the mostly-empty water bottle at the wastebasket near the couch and follows, Roy right behind him. She leads them down the hallway that divides the store from the living area and unlocks and opens one of the doors and steps outside into the early evening sunlight.

There’s a young woman there, dressed in black with an expression as blank as a mask, holding a man twice her size on his knees with a simple one-handed wrist pin. The woman looks incredibly bored.

“He was trying to get in,” she reports to Stephanie, flicking a glance that borders on expressing actual emotion at Jason and Roy, although Jason can’t tell what emotion it might be.

“Good luck with that, this place is at defcon one,” Stephanie tells him with a snort. “You one of Penguin’s goons?”

The man looks up at her and sneers, speaking thickly around an expertly broken nose. “I’m not telling you shit.”

“Cool, then you’re useless.” Stephanie nods at the other woman, and her free hand moves- Jason sees the motion in her shoulder, even if he doesn’t quite see the hand itself- and the man slumps unconscious to the ground as she releases him.

“He’ll stay here,” she says easily.

“What the fuck,” Roy murmurs softly, but apparently not quiet enough, because Stephanie turns to them with a grin.

“Oh, Dick didn’t tell you?” she asks, clearly knowing that he damn well hadn’t. “This is Cassandra Cain, Dick’s little sister and my new girlfriend.”

Cassandra Cain- and what hunter hasn’t heard the name Cain?- looks at them with expectation. “You know where Dick is?” she asks.

“You know what? This is actually pretty on-brand for the Wayne family. We think we know where he is, you ready to roll?” Roy says. Cain nods once, and pulls car keys from her pocket, and Roy follows as she leads the way to her car, leaving Stephanie and Jason by the store for a moment.

“The wards will hold?” Jason asks. He doesn’t want to think on it- them getting Dick back safe and sound, only to find Penguin or the pink-haired bastard had set fire to his store in retribution.

“Yeah.” Stephanie looks him over again, gaze frank and assessing. “For real this time, are you good for this?”

Jason takes a deep breath just to feel the way his skin shifts over his ribs, feeling for the bright flares of pain. The worst of it is centered over his left shoulder blade, what feels like a dozen stitches under a patch of gauze bigger than his outstretched hand. He’s had worse, fought through worse. A little bit of blood loss isn’t going to faze him.

“Let me put it this way, I’m not staying here waiting for news,” he says, and she snorts and nods at that.

“Then let’s go get our boy,” Stephanie says, and Jason grins sharp and feral, and they head towards the car together.

Chapter Text

He wakes up all at once- not slow this time, not in pieces, but with a snap as a loud metallic bang shakes through his bones from skull to fingertips. He tries to sit up and can’t, arms stretched out before him, the surface he was slumped forward onto- a table?- jarring and juddering an inch or two towards him as he jerks back. There’s a camp lantern on the other side of the table, casting bluish-white light and sharp slanting shadows across the room, and Dick squints against its obnoxious light to try and see what’s restraining his hands this time.

There’s another bang, and Dick looks up to see the bird man standing on the opposite side of the table, a hammer in hand. He grins his horrible grin and waggles the hammer at Dick.

“You’re more use to us undamaged,” he says. “But if I see anything I don’t like-” he wiggles his fingers at Dick, drawing them through the air in a basic spell-casting gesture- then smashes the hammer onto the table, inches away from Dick’s unprotected hands. He flinches despite himself, and the bird man laughs and ruffles Dick’s hair as he walks past him. Dick cranes around to watch him and sees a full set-up- an array of beakers and burners that an alchemist would be proud of, piles of feathers and vials of blood, glyphs and sigils drawn onto the walls. And, strangely, a vending machine, dusty and empty and the glass front long shattered. He turns back to look around but the rest of the room is unhelpful, bare and dim and smelling of dust and faint mold, all dramatic angles and shadows from the lantern that serves to deepen the darkness more than repel it.

He looks at his hands again. Still taped, not together but to the table, from wrist to fingertip. Given time to work at it, he could probably get free by alternating pulling and twisting until enough of the tape comes up off the table, but it’s doubtful he has that time. He doesn’t look back, dares to flex his fingers and see how much give he has. If they’re planning to chimerize him- he thinks they are, vaguely remembers Penguin talking to the bird man about it- then they can’t drug him again, can’t risk it reacting with the chimera potion. Which means he has time, even if the bird man has found a way to speed up the transformation, time and coherency.

Fast magic is big and flashy, and takes words of power to shape it and gestures to direct it, and he can give neither. But the table is metal, probably solely for the satisfying sound of the hammer smashing its surface, and metal conducts temperature beautifully.

He shifts his hands as best he can, pressing his fingertips down hard and lifting the heels of his hands, and breathes out. Feels the magic channel through him, slow and subtle as always. Fast and flashy is for when he isn’t going to get fingers smashed.

The bird man sweeps past him and sets a glass half-full of some clear liquid on the table by the lantern, and Dick freezes for a second- but he doesn’t touch the table itself, instead focusing on mixing up the potion in the vial still in his hands.

“It’s only viable when ingested, I’m afraid,” he says. “I’ve been working on a more efficient distribution method, but so far.” He shakes his head with a heavy sigh. Then he pours the vial’s contents- familiar soapy opalescence- into the glass and swirls it around with a lazy twist of his wrist, like he’s being bored to death at a cocktail party.

He sets the glass back down before coming around the table and disappearing behind Dick for a moment. Then there’s a noise near his ear, and the tape gag pulls up in a single painful rip. Dick immediately leans over, away from the bird man standing at his right elbow, and coughs and works at it until he manages to spit the fabric in his mouth onto the floor. He swallows hard, trying to work some saliva back up.

A hand digs into his hair and pulls him back up, the bird man leaning over him, draping his body over the back of the chair Dick’s in, chin resting in a strangely cozy manner on the top of Dick’s head. “Would you like to see?” he asks, and does not wait for an answer, just shifts his hand from Dick’s hair to his jaw in order to turn his head in the proper direction, other hand gesturing above him.

He’s sitting next to a door, he realizes, positioned perfectly so he can see into the room beyond when the door swings open. There’s nothing but unending gloom at first, maybe a single shape that turns when the door creaks. Dick gets the sense that the other room is much larger, and filled with living things, the sounds of shuffling and hissing breaths and faint scraping all echoing oddly. The bird man gestures again, and the lantern rises and swings steadily through the air, drifting through the doorway- there’s a cheap wooden plaque with the words Employees Only on it.

Then the lantern makes it through the doorway and its false-bright light shines on the shape in the gloom, and Dick’s breath catches. Feathers, bright blue and old-penny green, framing a human face with a short curved beak pushing out grotesquely where the nose should be, over a human mouth- hands in the feathers, fingers short and stunted- feet twisted and scaled and capped with short sharp talons that slide without purchase over the tiled floor. The chimera tilts its head, watching the lantern with the sharp curiosity of a smart bird, but there is nothing human in the intelligence at work in its eyes.

“What are you doing with them?” Dick asks once he’s worked up enough spit to form the words, his voice still hoarse and papery. He already knows how, and he isn’t sure he wants to know why, so what’s the plan will have to do.

“What do you mean?” the bird man asks with a manic laugh. “They exist, is that not enough? Must they have a purpose?”

“What does Penguin get out of this, then?”

The bird man hums, clearly unconcerned with the answer. “A new way to punish his enemies, a new commodity to sell on the market- people are always buying weird things, and when they hear that these are the first of their kind, well.” He shrugs, Dick able to feel the movement where he’s still leaning on him. “He funded my research, so I can’t complain.”

Funded his research. Like there’s anything legit going on here. Dick bites back the scoff, mostly because his mouth and throat are still so dry it would be more painful than it’s worth. The bird man brings the lantern back into the room and finally moves away, and Dick takes advantage of his back being turned to test his progress. His fingers are numb, and it’s spreading up through his hands, but there’s a lot more give than there was before. Just a couple more minutes-

But time is up. The bird man picks the glass up off the table and swirls it again, watching its contents spiral with a content smile. Then he hesitates, gaze going distant, and Dick tenses.

“We have company,” the bird man says, voice distant with distraction, but then he brightens and gives another insane grin. “Good news- your boyfriend survived. Better news, he’ll be joining you soon enough!”

Dick pulls back with his hands and feels the give. It’s not enough yet, but it will have to be. “You have a weakness,” he says.

“I have a what?” the bird man asks, still not paying too much attention to Dick, which is a mistake. He’s relaxed, gotten comfortable with his control over the situation. Dick slides back and down in his chair, legs pushing forward under the table for leverage and a better angle.

“You have-” Dick begins, then wrenches backwards with both hands, the tape- stiff with cold, adhesive losing its grip on the now-icy metal of the table- tearing up and away, and Dick is free-

“-a weakness.”

“Um, okay,” Dick says, slightly alarmed. He and Donna are alone in the basement of their co-rented house, where all the physical training and sparring takes place because Donna shows her love through beating the snot out of her friends, and she’s standing between him and the door and is closely inspecting a dulled practice knife and talking about his weaknesses. This will definitely end well for him. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Almost. But this isn’t about everyone, this is about you. You have a major weakness, and you don’t even know what it is.”

Dick eyes the door again, looks at Donna and calculates his odds- then shifts his weight off the balls of his feet, resigning himself to his fate. “All right, tell me.”

“Bruce taught you self-defense, right?” she asks.

“Yeah, and? I thought you approved.”

“I do, it just introduced a weakness that-” and she moves, fast as greased lightning, practice knife going for his face, free hand a fist heading for his abdomen, and Dick-

Hesitates.

She hits him like a train, knocking the air clean out of him and slamming him onto his back, only the padding of the floor mats saving his skull from cracking open. He wheezes, wanting to curl into a ball but unable to because of a buck-sixty of muscular Amazon sitting on his chest.

“See?” she asks, tapping him on the face with the practice knife before setting it aside. “You froze. You know a dozen spells that could have knocked me on my ass that you could’ve cast in the time it took me to reach you, but you didn’t know which one to go for, so you froze. The greatest weakness of the most powerful of magic-users, my aunt says.”

“Get off,” Dick gasps, and she does, even generously helping him to his feet and then over to the wall so he can lean against it. The knife to the face had been a feint, thankfully, but he’ll have a bruise in the shape of her fist on his belly for a week.

“Bruce did right, teaching you to defend yourself physically as well as magically,” Donna says, tone and posture gentling as she pats his shoulder. “But that also made it worse, because now you have another set of options to think through in the heat of the moment. And the rest of us, we’ve been enforcing it by saying things like we’re sparring today, so no magic allowed. We set up rules that won’t exist out in the real world.”

“You think people are routinely going to be trying to kill me?” Dick asks, finally straightening up. “I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but becoming some kind of masked vigilante or cop or something is not it, Donna.”

“It only takes one,” Donna says, her eyes distant and sad. He leans his shoulder into hers for a moment, permission for a hug or another punch or a change of subject, whichever one she needs. He knows her scars, and she knows his, and they both know how to give the other a safe space to just breathe.

She shakes it off easily, and looks at him with determination. “So you’re going to decide here and now how you’re going to respond in a situation like that, and we’re going to train you on it until it’s second nature. Got it?”

“Got it,” he says, and she nods and walks away, getting two steps before-

She telegraphs her movement- this close, she could have him back on the ground before he could even see her move, so she lets him know fractions of a second before it actually happens. This time, the fist is heading for his face. He ducks, catches her by the wrist, the shoulder, twists and uses her own momentum to propel her face first into the wall with a burst of magic to boost his own comparatively lackluster strength.

She bounces off the wall with enough force to break a normal person’s nose, and for a split second Dick worries that he’d gone too far- but she comes up laughing, hair in her face and blood on her lip.

“There, that’s it,” she says, wiping the blood from her nose with one hand. “Physical first, magic second?”

“Yeah,” Dick says, still buzzing with adrenalin and shocked at his victory. “Less choices that way.”

“Right.” She steps back again, scraping her hair out of her face and up into a quick bun, and Dick swallows his groan, because that means she’s just getting started. “So now for the hard part.”

“Great.” Dick’s been through this with Bruce, training until his muscles were jelly and his fists were red. He likes the physicality of training, likes the routine, but he’s not looking forward to getting his ass kicked eight ways to Sunday.

“This will save your life someday, Dick,” Donna promises him solemnly. “You’re going to live to be an old, old man, and you’ll have me to thank for it.”

That softens him, melts away what little resistance he’d had, and he sighs and comes with her back over to the mats. “So bring it on, then,” he says grimly.

She does.

They each have one second, perhaps two, to react after the tape rips up and Dick’s hands are free, and the bird man-

He grabs for three different spells at once, fingers twitching and lips forming words, and he hesitates.

Dick doesn’t.

The table skids forward, propelled by a kick, and slams into the bird man’s gut and bends him double over it. Then it rockets up, propelled this time by magic fuelled by raw fury, and levers itself right into his face. There’s a satisfying crack of breaking bone, and Dick shoots up to his feet, hands flexing. His fingers are stiff with cold, trailing icy magic like comet tails.

The glass is on the ground, broken, its contents splashed harmlessly onto the tile. The bird man is cupping his broken nose, eyes watering, clearly knocked for a loop. There’s no question about what needs to be done first.

Dick turns away, goes over to the vending machine, puts both hands on its side and- as he had with Jason- gives a hard push. It doesn’t have a sense of drama to lean and teeter, just falls straight over and lands on the table full of bad magic, shattering glass and snapping wood and splattering liquid.

There’s silence between them when the vending machine falls still, the table crushed under its weight, not a single vial or beaker left intact. Dick turns back to the bird man, who has blood on his fingers and a strange look on his face, and says, “You’re not doing this to anyone, ever again.”

There’s noise in the big room outside, the chimeras flapping about and screeching in bird voices, probably upset by the sound of the vending machine falling over. There’s new light in this room, the lantern rolled into a corner and turning the room into something straight from a haunted house, except now the bird man’s hands are glowing. Dick has his rage, but the bird man is angry now too, and Dick’s seen what he can do when he gets angry.

“Well,” he says, teeth flashing like a predator’s fangs in his own light, “since you insist.”

He goes for fire to answer Dick’s ice, and a quick shield spell holds off the flames themselves but not the heat that bakes sensation back into Dick’s numb fingers. He holds the shield against the onslaught, reaching out at hip-height with the other hand, snaking and subtle.

The lantern rockets out of its corner, crashing into the back of the bird man’s legs and causing him to stagger. He makes the mistake of looking down, and Dick turns away, bringing up his arm to cover his eyes just as the lantern explodes like a flash grenade and blinds them both.

There is a table and a chair somewhere between them, and now no light. Dick goes for brute force and aims a blast of raw power in a chest-height line across the entire room. The door blows off its hinges and flies into the big room beyond, the walls groan and crack, something falls from the ceiling- and then, a meaty slam, as a body being introduced to the nearest wall with extreme prejudice, and then a groan. He had put a level of strength behind that blow that he would have used on Donna, so the sign of life is something of a relief.

He moves forward, careful but quick- his head hurts and his throat is sore and his fingers now burn in worrying way. As soon as he catches his breath and gets back to his feet- which will take a minute, his ribs are going to ache if they aren’t broken- the bird man will be ready to go again. Dick’s tired and worn out and needs to end this, because he won’t last through round two. He barks his hip on the table, shoves it aside, feels his foot catch on something and moves towards it.

The bird man puts out a hand for a shield, but the spell is geared against magic, and brushes against Dick like smoke as he crouches down over the man.

“Dirty pool,” the bird man says, and from the sounds of it, he’s still, still grinning. Dick wonders for half a second if it’s psychological, then decides he doesn’t care. He curls a hand into the broad lapel of the bird man’s stupid pink coat and drags him up and punches him, sharp short blows that further wreck his nose and probably take out a couple teeth- twice, three times, then once more for good measure.

Then he lets go, and the bird man falls and wheezes on the floor, slumped boneless in a way that could only be achieved by unconsciousness, and Dick kneels over him and gasps for air and tries not to smell the blood on his hand. It’s over. It’s done. He needs a phone, and he can go home and sleep for a day and apologize to Jason for throwing him through a window and figure out how to fix these chimeras because he can, he has to, he didn’t stop this soon enough so he has to fix it-

Footsteps behind him, and he jerks up and around, ready to fight, ready to cast another spell- light plays on his face and blinds him and he jerks away. It stops on the bird man before redirecting to Dick, who probably looks a little wild right now.

Then a familiar voice says, full of awe and just a touch of fear, “Holy shit.”

The hardest part of storming the abandoned K-Mart slash magical mad scientist lab is finding a place to park where the car won’t get noticed by cops or tagged by the pink bastard. They settle for the apartment complex and hoof it across the grass lot behind the building, then what used to be a parking lot, the pavement sun-blasted and cracked and about as smooth as the surface of the moon.

The main doors are still chained and boarded, and were the night Jason and Roy hit this place looking for Penguin, but there’s a set of double doors near the back that has a shiny new lock and chain to replace the one Roy had taken boltcutters to weeks ago. Stephanie steps forward without hesitation and closes a fist around the lock and pops it clean off, letting the chain slither down and pool at her feet.

“Ready?” she asks, and when she gets three nods in reply, she swings both doors open and steps back immediately.

It’s still dark, still smells like dust and stale air. Roy has both hands full with his bow so Jason breaks out the flashlights, shining one into the gloom and handing another over to Cassandra. “How’s your night vision?” he asks.

“Shitty,” Stephanie says easily. “Harpies are day dwellers. Got another light?”

He doesn’t, but Cassandra passes hers along without comment. Clearly, if splitting up is needed, they’re going to stick with their original partner.

“What’s in here?” Stephanie asks as they move into the darkness, her voice low.

“This is the storage area, there’s nothing in here,” Roy says. “The set-up was in the employee break room, north wall near the west corner. We’re gonna have to cross the main room to get there. They left the shelves and the clothing racks so watch where you’re going.”

“Any defenses?” Cassandra asks, the first thing she’s said since leaving Penguin’s man unconscious on the ground outside Dick’s store. She paces her words carefully, like she needs to make extra sure the right ones are coming out of her mouth.

“Not then, but it’s been a few weeks,” Jason says.

“No magic either,” Stephanie adds, and no one bothers asking if she’s sure about that. She wrinkles her nose and glances around. “Does this smell like a trap to anyone else?”

“Oh yeah,” Roy says with a grin. “So let’s not disappoint our host, shall we?”

They reach the door into the main area of the store right as he finishes, and there’s a moment of silent debate before Jason takes up place at the door, ready to open it, Cassandra with Jason’s flashlight in hand, near him but on the other side of the doorframe so she will be able to spring out at anything that tries to rush the door. He waits for the nod and swings the door open and steps aside so he’s not trapped between it and the wall, and immediately-

“Shit,” Roy says, bow coming up and easily aiming over Cassandra’s head at something, Cassandra herself recoiling and falling into a defensive position- but nothing rushes the door, and after a moment they both relax the tiniest amount. Jason takes a step forward and looks around the door to see what startled them so badly, feeling Stephanie crowding up behind him to check for herself.

It’s- it was- a person. It’s a chimera now, Jason supposes. It turns its head to watch them with its blank human eyes, and taps its taloned toes on the ground and ruffles its feathers. Its beak is black and long, its dark feathers shining in the light with oily iridescence, and something about the whole thing makes Jason think of a crow.

Stephanie hisses, long and low and furious. Her own feathers are showing again when Jason glances over at her. As revolting as this is for him as a human, he can only imagine how insulting a harpy must find this.

Cassandra eases a step forward, scooting along the wall to stay well away from the chimera, which tilts its head and watches and does nothing else. Jason uses the chimera to track her progress once she’s out of sight, and knows she’s returning a few seconds before she does. She comes back to the doorway and says quietly, “There are many more. They are not moving.”

“So don’t set them off,” Jason says, and gestures for her to move on. Roy goes next, bow still ready but aimed at the ground as he tries to accomplish the impossible by making himself a smaller target. Jason follows when Stephanie doesn’t, stepping out into the main room and trying not to stare.

There are many more, Cassandra had said. Jason watches as Stephanie shines her light around and stops counting when he hits fifty. They all have turned to look, and the crow one drifts a few steps along after Stephanie as she comes through the door. He feels like they’ve wandered into a minefield.

The shelving units are only waist-high but they’re scattered haphazardly through the room, with a big peninsula of shelves sticking out from the wall in the direction they need to go. They’re going to have to leave the safety of the wall to get to the break room. Despite Jason’s earlier thought, they fall more easily into pairs based on who went through the door first, Roy at Cassandra’s back and Stephanie close enough to Jason that he can feel her breath stirring the stale air. They split off, carefully threading around the chimeras, who turn in creepy silence to watch as they pass. A few, like the crow, follow.

Stephanie is looking like she’s regretting turning down a weapon. “So fucked up,” she whispers, then pauses to turn and stare the crow down. It stops walking, just tips its head to the side and watches them, but when she turns away it immediately moves to follow her.

Jason glances over to check on Roy and Cassandra and finds he can’t see them- there’s a living wall in the way, the chimeras clustering around them, moving with them and maintaining distance. There are feathers rustling all around them, claws scraping over the tiled floor, and- it’s his turn to tip his head bird-like- are those voices?

Then there’s a bang, distant but loud, and all hell breaks loose.

The crow gives a cawing croak, throwing its arms- wings?- out. Stephanie yells herself, and whirls around to face the sound, the light swinging dizzyingly across the chimeras. A second later something large and dark slams into her- the crow, Jason realizes when it croaks again. She goes down under it easily. Jason jerks forward, catching the crow by one arm-wing and wrenching it off her-

Hands converge on him, at least half a dozen, drag him back. Something curved and wickedly sharp tears at his shoulder, cutting at the leather of his jacket, and claws rip at his calves. The crow tears free and goes right back for Stephanie, who swears loud and lively, and Roy is cursing somewhere as well, and Jason can feel the pinpoints of pain from ripped stitches and the warmth of blood on his skin.

He throws an elbow back and catches a chimera in the beak- he sees blue-green feathers, a curved beak like a macaw’s- twists around and buries his fist in another’s gut. They’re not strong, not coordinated at all in their movements. Stephanie rolls them over and the crow gets pinned easily under her weight, thrashing uselessly and not anywhere near throwing her off.

“Don’t kill them, we might be able to change them back,” she yells to the room as a whole.

Jason shakes the third chimera off with and buys distance by shoving his shoulder against its chest, and there are so many more already filling in the gaps. “Great, make it harder,” he snaps. The macaw is back on its feet, feathers standing up and beak clicking-

The arrow takes it through the leg, just below its knee, and it goes down again. The next arrow catches one that had been sneaking up behind Stephanie, and the third through the shoulder of another crow-chimera. And then Cassandra comes through, sweeping low and taking the crowd out at the knees, dropping chimeras left and right with quick sharp jabs to their temples.

“Permanent maiming it is,” Roy says cheerfully as he slips in beside Jason, always a ray of sarcastic sunshine. He slots the next arrow back into the quiver and turns his bow sideways to block a pair of approaching chimera. “How’s the head?” he asks quietly.

“Swimming,” Jason admits. Stephanie has watched and learned and uses Cassandra’s jab to put the crow out of its misery, and they’re all clustered together now in a tight little knot, the chimeras a seething circle around them-

First- a brilliant explosion of light, source indirect but reflecting off the walls, so bright even here that the chimeras all shriek and turn away, blinded. Second- moments later, a thump, so deep and powerful Jason feels it shiver through his bones rather than hears it. The walls tremble, and a ceiling tile falls to the ground somewhere nearby, and the chimeras scream.

Roy rolls his shoulders, steps forward, and shoves, sending the two chimeras on his bow sliding backwards. “Go,” he orders simply, and Jason goes.

The chimeras are disorientated, blinded and yelling, and it’s easy for Jason to simply bulldoze his way through. Stephanie catches up after three steps, alternating between jabbing punches and whacking with the flashlight. There’s a row of shelves in the way and Jason simply vaults it, feeling the pain ripple along his back and not caring- that had been magic, that had been a fight, and what were the odds of Dick winning?

The door to the break room is blown off the hinges. The vending machine that had once stood nearby is now on the ground, broken glass and spilled liquid spreading from underneath it. Stephanie barges in on Jason’s heels and flashes the light around, catches it on the figures on the other side of the room and snaps it back over them.

“Holy shit,” she says.

Dick kneels in the pool of light, panting and wild-eyed, hands bloody, and the pink bastard is on the ground under him and not looking to get up anytime soon.

Jason snatches the light out of Stephanie’s unresisting grip and moves across the room, crouching down near Dick but not threateningly close. “Hey, it’s me,” he says, uselessly, when Dick flinches, and shines the light upwards so Dick can see his face. “Just me.”

The fierceness melts into something soft and exhausted, and Dick croaks out a single hoarse, “thank god,” before he collapses forward against Jason, arms around his neck and face pressed against his shoulder. Jason eases back so he’s sitting properly, Dick pulled halfway into his lap, and returns the hug.

He gets a moment or two to revel in the feel of it, Dick safe and whole and in his arms, before another body presses in close. “This is sweet and all, but we gotta shift it,” Stephanie says.

“It’s fine, he won’t wake up anytime soon,” Dick says, sounding so much like his sister- he’ll stay here- that Jason has to smile. Then he shifts up, preparing to stand.

“The chimeras freaked out and started trying to kill us when you did whatever you did to make all that noise,” Stephanie explains. “Cass and Roy are out there but there’s a lot of bird people too.”

“I can help them,” Dick says, suddenly desperate, and Jason can feel him shaking in his arms. “I can- someone can fix them, turn them back to people, so don’t-”

“We’re not,” Jason says calmly, trying to soothe. “But she’s right, we need to leave. Can you walk?”

“Yes,” Dick says and, to his credit, proves it technically true by making it to his feet and managing two whole steps before he stumbles. Stephanie ducks in under his arm, catching him easily, and he sighs tiredly and leans into her.

“You’re not looking so hot either,” Stephanie says to Jason, which he thinks is unfair, considering he managed to stand back up without whimpering. “Am I gonna have to carry both your asses, or can you at least make it to the exit?”

“Just try it, harpy,” Jason says flatly, and she grins at him as he walks past them to the door.

The room outside is quiet and still, a concern, all things considered. Before he can really worry, a flashing light catches his attention, and he follows it to its source, tucked into the northwest corner. There are no chimeras nearby, and all the ones farther away seem uninterested in moving closer, so Jason heads over.

“As soon as all the one near us were down, the others started losing interest,” Roy says as soon as Jason is close enough to not have to shout. “We think they’ve settled down and will leave us alone when we try to leave, but we didn’t want to test it. How’s Glinda?”

“Fine, Robin Hood,” Dick lies, and eases off Stephanie a bit in order to give Cassandra a tight one-armed hug, which she returns with care.

“The bird man?” she asks.

“Not going anywhere anytime soon,” Dick says. Stephanie gives him a tug and repositions his weight against her, and he goes easily enough.

Roy looks him over, then stares hard at Jason for a moment before jerking his chin towards Cassandra. “All right, Killer here in front, I’ll take the rear, deadweight in the middle,” he says. Both Dick and Stephanie start to protest immediately, Stephanie probably against the idea of being classed as deadweight when she’s anything but, until Cassandra shushes them all and swings her light over the chimeras again.

They move out eventually, when Cassandra decides it’s time and starts walking, Jason on her heels. She leads them through the room in a circuitous path, avoiding the shelves and the chimeras as best she can and giving wide berth to the area with the downed chimeras. One of the standing chimeras starts following them, and Dick nearly knocks himself and Stephanie both over by trying to get a closer look at it, but Stephanie hauls him back on track and stares at the chimera until it stops moving.

And then they’re at the door to the storage room, and through into safety, the door closing behind them and leaving them all breathing hard and staring at each other.

“Is there a lock on that door?” Stephanie asks. Roy, leaning against said door just to be sure, checks it and shakes his head.

“Needs a key. But we can rig up something with that chain on the outside doors.”

“Someone should stay here,” Dick says. His voice is rough but steady. “Make sure none of the chimeras get out. I know the transformation spell, I can probably reverse-engineer a cure.”

There’s a brief pause and a noticeable lack of volunteers. Then Roy shrugs. “I’ll stay.”

“So will I.” Cassandra takes her car keys out and passes them over to Stephanie. “Hospital,” she says.

“I don’t need-”

“Yup,” Stephanie agrees, jostling Dick and cutting him off mid-sentence. “I’ll send Bruce over, if he ever bothers to answer his phone. You too, Todd, I can smell that blood.”

Dick looks briefly distraught- and Jason can guess what he’s thinking, that Jason is bleeding because he couldn’t find a better way to protect him- but Stephanie turns away and drags him along, and she’s strong enough that he really has no choice but to go with her. Jason follows, and Roy and Cassandra behind them, and they all step out, blinking and wincing, into the evening sunlight.

“What time is it?” Dick asks.

“Seven, maybe?” Stephanie offers. She looks across the parking lot to the building where they left the car and sighs, then turns to Jason. “Can you hold him while I go get the car?”

“I’m not-”

“Sure,” Jason says, and Stephanie ducks out from under Dick’s arm and gently pushes him into Jason, then takes off across the field. Behind them, Cassandra and Roy fuss over the best way to wrap the chain around the door handles, and beyond them, Jason can hear the distant omnipresent sound of city traffic and a few early crickets.

Dick is shaking like he’s cold, even though it was almost stiflingly hot inside the old K-Mart, and Jason wraps an arm around him and pulls him in close. It will take him a while to get over the sheer terror of waking up and knowing Dick has been taken, but this is a good place to start. It helps that Dick sighs and leans into him, relaxing and trusting.

“So,” he says eventually, and Jason makes a questioning noise when he hesitates. “Not that that wasn’t fun and all, but I’m thinking, for the second date, we should probably just keep it at my place.”

Jason laughs at that, presses his face into Dick’s hair and catches his hand and gives it a squeeze. He hadn’t even stopped to consider- but Dick sounds uncertain himself, like he genuinely thinks Jason might leave him over this.

“Yeah,” he agrees, and Dick relaxes again, and all is right in the world once more. “Yeah, we can do that.”

Chapter Text

They make entirely too big a deal about it at the hospital. They had installed him in one examination room, and swept Jason off to another with comments about torn stitches and blood loss, and sent in a doctor to look him over, and they all speak to him gently and with soothing calming speaking to a victim voices, and Dick would be out the door and gone if Stephanie weren’t all but surgically grafted to his side.

They finally have to let him go with nothing more than a prescription for some special ointment for his fingers that he isn’t going to get filled, and leave him and Steph both sitting in the lobby waiting for Jason. Dick studies the blisters on his fingers- they’re all on his left hand, the hand he’d held the shield spell with, and are the result of exposure to heat, no frostbite for him. Lucky.

“So how bad was it,” he says finally.

“Pretty bad,” Stephanie says, then pauses, both of them looking over when the main entrance doors slide open before returning to the conversation when it’s just a man cradling a probably-broken arm. “I definitely could’ve handled it better. Your boy held his shit together really well, all things considered.”

“Hunter,” Dick points out. “Don’t freak out, just get out there and do something about it.”

“Wow, really? Wish I’d thought of that,” Steph counters, and Dick bites his tongue and looks away. After a moment she sighs and leans over, pushing against him with her shoulder. “Sorry. You just had me really scared. Don’t you ever do that again, got it?”

“Wasn’t the plan the first time around,” Dick says.

“And when things have calmed down I am gonna do the told you so song so many times,” Steph adds. “And you owe me betrayal donuts every day for, like, life.”

“I owe you a raise,” Dick counters, and she huffs a laugh.

“Well, I’m not arguing with that,” she says.

The doors open again, and they both look, and this time-

“I’ll wait for Jason,” Stephanie says, and Dick spares her a quick thanks before he’s on his feet and crossing the lobby.

He’s expecting relief, yes, but the quiet kind, cool and professional and distant. Bruce surprises him by meeting him halfway and, before Dick can do more than take in a single breath to speak, sweeping him up into a tight, fierce hug. He’s a big man, and a strong one, and for this moment he’s the only thing in Dick’s world, feeling like home and safety and all those comforting things, and Dick takes back every mean thought he’s ever had about him.

Someone tries to navigate a wheelchair past Bruce and bumps into him instead, and he steps away, guiding Dick with a hand on his shoulder back out the doors to stand in the comparative peace and privacy of outside. A nurse follows a few steps behind, already taking a cigarette pack from his scrubs pocket and shaking a cigarette out, but takes one look at the scowl Bruce directs him and decides to take his break later and does a sharp heel-face turn to head back inside.

“Any chance we could skip the lecture I’ve already heard from three different people?” Dick asks once they’re alone. The car ride to the hospital hadn’t been fun, what with both Steph and Jason reassured that Dick was alive and fine, and commencing with tag-teaming the stop being a self-sacrificing bastard speech. Even Cass, right before they’d gotten in the car, had looked him in the eye and sternly said don’t do this again, which for her is the equivalent of a twenty-minute scolding.

Bruce frowns, and Dick knows that no, he’s still in for that. But he relents and says, “We can discuss that later,” and, well, it’s something. “How are you?” Bruce adds.

“Fine,” Dick says, and Bruce watches him and waits, and Dick feels himself starting to crack and decides to simply let go. “Angry. Furious- is there something beyond furious? Did you go there?”

“No, I came straight here once I got Stephanie’s message,” Bruce says calmly.

Dick looks away, remembers the feeling of the bird man collapsed under him, his blood on Dick’s fist, his face a wreck, still grinning, still laughing, still mocking- “I wanted to kill him,” he admits to the wind. “I- I can’t even say I wouldn’t have, if Steph and Jason hadn’t walked in right then.”

Killing is a hard line for Bruce, one Dick’s never dared to cross. He half expects Bruce to pull away from him now, to freeze over and retreat, for that one last chance at things ever being good between them again to crumble into dust.

The hand still on his shoulder squeezes. “I’m glad you didn’t,” Bruce says simply.

Dick’s eyes are wet and he has no idea how that happened. He squeezes them shut and that fails to solve the problem, only leaves his lashes sticking together and the world all blurry. “Not gonna tell me I should be better than that?” he asks.

“You are better than that. He’s still alive.” Bruce gives him a gentle tug, turning him so they’re facing each other at least, even if Dick’s still looking at the hospital building and the sky beyond it. Cloudy, Gotham’s specialty, dim orange with the city’s reflected light. “Dick, look at me,” Bruce orders, and Dick does, thankful for the darkness that will hopefully hide the wet shine in his eyes. “Do you think I would have reacted any differently, if he had managed to chimerize you?”

It makes something clench in his stomach, the thought of the bullet he had so narrowly dodged. He’d had options, ways of fighting back that none of the bird man’s other victims had. Most of them probably hadn’t even known there was something they needed to fight against.

“I can help them,” he says, not very coherently, but Bruce keeps up with his thought process with ease.

“You will,” he promises.

It’s what Dick needs to hear, far better than any hollow reassurance that it’s not his fault, not his responsibility- an acknowledgment that it will be done regardless. He relaxes under Bruce’s heavy hand and stoic acceptance, and shivers.

“Okay, I might have lied about being fine,” he admits, suddenly feeling jelly-limbed and shaky.

Bruce’s grip grows firm again, and he starts walking, towing Dick with him. “You’re coming back to the manor for tonight, per Alfred’s orders, so take it up with him,” and Dick bites his tongue, cutting off his protest mid-word.

“Can it wait? I need to talk to,” he tries again, since outright refusal isn’t going to work.

“The hunter you’re dating?” Bruce asks, and Dick freezes for a good three seconds and stares at him, wide-eyed and too shocked to marshal any sort of denial. Bruce looks at him and sighs. “You’re not subtle.”

“You didn’t say anything,” Dick accuses.

“It’s not any of my business,” Bruce says, and- honestly, that’s about the best response Dick could have asked for, from him. The alternative doesn't bear considering.

But still- for all their ups and downs, their storms and droughts, this is Bruce. “I really like him,” Dick admits. “Not in the propose in four months kind of way, don’t worry, I’ve outgrown that.”

Bruce’s face does an interesting thing where he clearly wants to express relief, but knows it will be taken as offensive if he does. “I suppose I can’t complain, considering today,” he admits.

“Yeah. And if you did, I’d have to ask if you’re still justifying seeing that were-cat by saying that at least she only steals from rich people. So it’s good you didn’t.”

They’ve reached Bruce’s car, and Bruce has deposited Dick at the passenger door and circled to the driver’s side as Dick spoke, and now they’re staring each other down like a couple of old west gunslingers over the roof of the car.

“I’m not asking permission, Bruce, I’m asking you to not be a giant asshat about it,” Dick says.

Bruce stares at him for a moment longer before he takes out his cell phone and hands it over the car to Dick. “Call Stephanie and have her bring him to the manor, if you think he’d fare well.”

“Against who? Damian’s half his size and Tim-” he stops, thinks that one through. Nothing unites Damian and Tim like having a common enemy. “I’ll tell him which window to climb through.”

“If you stay in the common area, I will keep Damian and Tim away from you,” Bruce says, and Dick side-eyes him.

“Are we allowed to sit on the same couch, or is that too scandalous?”

“My house, my rules.” He opens the door and slides into the car without a chance for rebuttal, and Dick rolls his eyes and texts Stephanie the updated plan while he gets in.

“So what’d Penguin have to say?” he asks. Change of scenery, change of subject. Nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that being in this car with Bruce is the safest he’s felt in years.

“That he wants to speak to his lawyer,” Bruce says, starting the engine and backing out of the parking spot. He must have really been worried, Dick thinks- he doesn’t leave tire tracks or run any yellow-turning-red lights, driving instead like he actually had to pass a driving test instead of with his usual lunacy. Like he’s got something fragile and important in the car with him.

“He knew about the chimeras,” Dick says. “I was- I think I was at his club. But he was definitely there, and he and the bird man-”

“Eduardo Flamingo.”

“Seriously?” Dick asks, and when Bruce nods, he shrugs and continues. “He and Flamingo- seriously, Penguin and Flamingo?”

“Dick,” Bruce says.

“Penguin was the one who suggested chimerizing me in the first place,” Dick says, forcing the words out before he gets derailed by the sheer ridiculousness of it. “And Flamingo told me that Penguin bankrolled the whole thing.”

Bruce says nothing, but the leather of the steering wheel creaks in protest when his grip goes white-knuckle tight on it. “He’s in custody for unrelated charges, I’ll call Jim and talk to him in the morning,” he says finally.

He’ll make a deal, and they both know it. He probably kept his hands clean, doing everything through proxies and shell companies, and the only proof they’ll get that Penguin actually knew what Flamingo was doing is Dick’s testimony. And eyewitness testimony was dodgy enough without considering that the eyewitness in question was drugged almost to the point of incoherency during that conversation.

On the other hand, Bruce now has a very personal reason to dislike Penguin, and that’s not an easy burden to live with.

Bruce’s phone pings with an incoming text in Dick’s hand. It’s a message from S Brown, complete with profile pic of full-harpy Stephanie doing her very best duck lips- it’s Bruce’s private phone, nothing business on it, so he lends it out to his kids often, and has quite the interesting camera roll as a result.

“Steph says she’ll pass it along,” he reports.

“All right,” Bruce says, and looks Dick over when they’re at the next red light. He doesn’t like whatever he sees- which is probably just simple exhaustion- judging by the way his face pinches. “If you keep your door open, you two can go to your bedroom.”

Dick gasps and turns to him. “Really?” he asks, hopeful and dramatic and so very sarcastic.

“Never mind, permission revoked,” Bruce says with a sternness that doesn’t actually hide his smile, and floors it as soon as the light turns green, and as Dick laughs, that tiny smile grows into something a little more real.

Tim is waiting at the front door, arms wrapped tight around himself and eyes smudged with sleep deprivation. Dick takes one look at him, then looks over at Bruce and says, “Give us a minute?”

Bruce nods, and stops for a moment so Dick can get out before driving on to the garage. Tim comes over immediately, one hand out to brace him as Dick wobbles.

“Was it the vodka bottle or bringing you to the club?” Tim asks, trying for wry. His hand is shaking.

“It was when I cured his first victim,” Dick says, taking Tim’s hand in his to hold it steady. It continues to vibrate- so, caffeine, not just emotion or lack of sleep. “I figured out how to undo his work, he was going to be coming after me sooner or later. It wasn’t anything you did.”

Tim is, if anything, even less for the physical displays than Bruce. He stares at their hands for a good long while, and Dick knows it’ll take a couple thousand repeats in order to actually sink in, so he squeezes once and lets go.

“One day I’m going to figure out a spell to swap all your coffee to decaf and all your energy drinks to apple juice,” Dick tells him lovingly.

“I will literally kill you,” Tim deadpans, but something tight in his expression, his voice, loosens a little.

“Well then, you’ll definitely need to rest up for that, so good thing you’re gonna sleep for a week first.” He moves towards the front door, Tim falling into step with him, and puts a hand on his brother’s shoulder. Tim might not be much for physical affection, but Dick is, and he’s had a bad day. “Damian not awake?” he asks.

“Grounded. He snuck into Bruce’s car and was with him at Penguin’s club, and there was an. Incident.”

Tim’s face, when Dick looks over, is a perfect study of plausible deniability.

“Okay,” Dick says, since he clearly isn’t going to get any more out of him. “Any news on the chimeras or Flamingo?”

“Flamingo’s on the way to the hospital, we got the call ten minutes ago.” Tim glances pointedly at the hand on his shoulder, at the bruised and split-skinned knuckles, and Dick quashes the urge to hide it. Too late now. “The chimeras we didn’t really know what to do with. Bruce is gonna give them a few more hours to calm down, then see if they’ll let us move them.”

“They don’t like loud noises,” Dick says, and Tim nods once, probably because Cass or Roy already told him. “And I should be able to help turn them back, I know Flamingo’s spell pretty well now.”

They’re inside now, and there’s a small form at the top of the stairs, spying on them through the bannister posts. Dick makes a come here gesture, and Damian looks around one last time before all but flying down the stairs and sliding to a halt inches away from Dick.

“You need to rest,” he says, sounding deeply appalled.

“I should eat something first,” Dick admits. “But I’m only going to sleep when you do, so…” And he shrugs, helpless, the decision out of his hands. Tim stares at him, narrow-eyed, and Dick feels compelled to add, “You’re actually vibrating, Tim.”

“I will see to it he rests after eating,” Damian announces grandly, which is a pretty big promise, considering he seems to be hiding from both authority figures in the manor, and the kitchen is the domain of one. But Tim is sagging as well as vibrating, adrenalin clearly winding down now that he has in-person confirmation of Dick’s wellbeing.

“Fine,” he says with poor grace, and stares at them some more before he finally walks away. Dick waits until he’s just out of earshot before turning to Damian.

“Did you try to stab Penguin?” he asks, wondering if he should be disapproving or proud, grateful when Damian shakes his head and he doesn’t have to summon up the emotional energy for either.

“No,” Damian says, then bares his teeth at Dick and adds, “I bit him.”

“Okay, Wild Thing,” Dick says after a few moments of mouth-flapping silence, because what else was he supposed to say to that? “Let’s go get some snacks and you can tell me all the details.” It sounds like a friendly invitation, and absolutely is not.

Damian looks proud enough on his own, though, and together they head for the kitchen.

He doesn’t know where his phone is. He knows why he doesn’t have it, remembers dropping it, but he hasn’t had the time or spare thought to ask after it since the showdown with Flamingo. He doesn’t have his phone, and he gave Bruce his back to distract him from the prisoner child who had escaped banishment in order to eat ice cream and reheated pasta carbonara with his older brother, and he has no way of knowing if Stephanie’s sent another text. He doesn't know if Jason has decided to brave the manor and its batshit inhabitants another day, and Dick really shouldn’t be bothering to wait up for him.

He’s halfway asleep when his bedroom door creaks open, and he smiles into his pillow at the silhouette in the doorway.

“I’m not up for much, and I doubt you are either,” he says, shoving a hand out and up, tossing the covers back and patting the mattress in invitation. “But if you just want to crash, I don’t mind.”

Jason comes into his room, glancing briefly over his shoulder before stopping to remove his jacket and boots. He moves carefully, stiffly, like a marionnette with an inexperienced handler.

“Bruce said,” he begins.

“If you start letting Bruce push you around this early on, he will never ever stop,” Dick says.

Jason tries to settle himself so he’s sitting with his back to the headboard but grimaces and rearranges himself, bit by bit, until he’s lying on his belly beside Dick. It’s a big bed, there’s plenty of room even for two full-grown men to share it without touching, and they don’t- except for the hand that Jason puts over Dick’s, threading their fingers together and giving a squeeze.

“Sorry about the ruined date,” Dick says after a while.

“Pretty sure it won’t be the last,” Jason says, and as bad as the actual words are, the meaning makes Dick smile a little bit stupidly. He’d said that already, hadn’t he, that this whole mess wasn’t enough to scare him off.

“Don’t let me sleep too late, I’ve got a lot of stuff to do tomorrow,” Dick says. Jason sounds, looks, wide-awake and not inclined to sleep anytime soon. He already has his phone out, probably to commence mindless surfing once Dick’s too deep asleep to be woken by the light.

“Go to sleep,” Jason orders, and Dick closes his eyes and settles a little more comfortably and lets himself drift.

The last thing he remembers, and it could be wishful thinking, is the bed shifting and a gentle kiss being pressed to his forehead.

Chapter Text

There are three of them in the room, crowding the poor man, so Dick pulls Bruce back and lets Jim Gordon do his job. He takes a seat in the chair near the man’s bed and waits until there’s some coherency in his expression and his eyes are tracking before he starts talking.

“Sir?” he asks, and all eyes land on him. The man in the bed struggles but manages to sit up, blinking fast like he’s trying to shake off interrupted sleep. “I’m Commissioner Jim Gordon. Can you tell me your name?”

“Yes, I-” the man says in a voice rough with disuse, then coughs. Jim reaches over to nudge at the unopened bottle of water on the table near the bed, and the man takes it and opens it and chugs half of it in three swallows. “Sorry,” he says, eyes drifting around the room.

“Your name,” Jim repeats.

“James Dietrich,” the man says.

Bruce pulls out his phone- his work phone- and immediately starts looking him up. Dick watches for a moment, then looks back up at Jim when he starts talking again.

“Can you tell me what day it is, Mister Dietrich?” he asks.

On Bruce’s phone there’s a newspaper article, a small piece from upstate New York mentioning the disappearance of a hardworking surgical resident named James Dietrich, complete with a worried soundbite from his girlfriend and a couple of quotes from his hospital’s PR team that make it clear they think he’s cracked and run away from the pressure. The article is dated-

“February the. Twenty-third?” the man offers.

Jim is too professional to flinch, but Dick looks up at Bruce and catches his eye. Late February, jeez.

“It’s not February,” the man says, looking over Jim, then back at Dick and Bruce. None of them are wearing winter-appropriate clothing. Hell, if he’s really paying attention, he might notice that the air blowing through the vent in the wall beside him is cool, not warm. “What happened? Where am I?”

Jim looks back now, and gestures, and Dick steps forward. “You’re in a hospital in Gotham,” he says as Dick approaches. “You were taken captive by a magic practitioner who was experimenting on people.”

“Magic experiments?” He looks sick.

“May I?” Dick asks, and when he gets a blank look in return, he holds out a hand in question.

“This is Dick Grayson, he’s been working with us on your case,” Jim says.

Dietrich turned an accusing stare on Dick. “Are you,” he begins, and makes a gesture like waving a wand.

“Yes,” Dick says. “But I’m one of the good guys.” And he holds his hand further out, and Dietrich stares some more before he finally lets Dick take his hand.

As he had with all the others before this man, Dick lets himself sink into his skin, feeling for any trace of magic whatsoever. As he had with all the others before this man, he finds nothing- no magic on him, in him, clouding his brain and warping his flesh.

He lets go and steps back. “Don’t worry, you’re clear of all magical influences now,” he says.

“Is that all?” Dietrich asks. “Can I go home? Where’s my-”

He makes the mistake of trying to move his leg, and collapses down to curl over his left knee, his breath hissing out in startled pain. Dick retreats a few steps and glances at Jim.

“You were shot with an arrow,” Jim says with more aplomb than Dick would have been able to manage under the circumstances. “You’re welcome to leave anytime, but I recommend you talk to the doctors first.”

“An arrow? What is going on here?!” Dietrich demands incredulously, which Dick thinks is pretty fair.

“If you give me your girlfriend’s number, I can call her,” he offers. Jim shoots him a look- it’s not proper procedure, but it’s also not the first time Dick’s made this offer to various people in the same situation, and Dick has already challenged him to define proper procedure in this case anyway.

Plus, calling the girlfriend means he gets to excuse himself from the room, and he’s never comfortable when people start asking about their arrow-related injuries.

Dietrich gives him the number, and Dick dials it on his new phone before heading out the door and closing it behind him. He pauses before presses Call though, and collapses back against the wall behind him, his breath blowing out of him in a huge, tired sigh.

All seventy-four of Flamingo’s chimerized victims are human again, James Dietrich the last of them to recover from the transformation back. They did it- he did it. He won.

He lets that settle in for a moment, eyes closed and head tipped back, a weight off his shoulders, a pressure around his throat loosened.

Then he brings his phone up and prepares himself for an emotional conversation, and presses Call.

He has Bruce make an extra stop on the way to drop him off back to the store. The selection is limited, because it’s midafternoon, but he’s had a big victory today and feels he deserves a prize. He ends up coming through the front door into the store because of it, the two paper bags big and unwieldy and the store door far easier to push open with a hip than the heavy back door, and because he’s coming from an angle they aren’t expecting him, he sees-

They hear the buzz, and spring apart, but Dick still says as he comes in, “What happened to no canoodling in the store?”

“Canoodling,” Cass echoes, breaking the word down by syllable.

“For real, Dick, how old are you, eighty?” Steph adds. “Also, are those betrayal donuts?”

“I’ve told you, two feet between you at all times until you’re past that relationship stage where you’re the only two people in the world. You had a customer standing there for five minutes last time, trying to get you to notice them,” Dick says, and drops one of the bags into Steph’s grabbing hands.

“Canoodling,” Cass repeats, her expression curious and thoughtful, and Dick knows she’s figured it out by context, and is slotting it into her mental dictionary. Then she turns a sharp glance on Dick. “Donuts?”

“Ask her,” Dick says, pointing at Steph, who is hunched over the donut bag like a hungry hawk over its prey. The two women eye each other for a moment- girlfriends or not, donuts are sacred- before Steph comes over and lets Cass look into the bag. And that, Dick thinks fondly, is how they know it’s true love.

“How’d it go at the hospital?” Steph asks as she produces a Boston cream for herself and peels up the serving paper he’d wrapped each donut in. Cass is taking each donut out to unwrap and inspect it, then patting the paper back down and putting it back in the bag.

“Great,” Dick says. “The last one woke up, he’s fine. No lasting effects.”

“Good,” Cass says, and picks out a simple glazed ring that she’d passed over three times before. She’s leaning into Steph, shoulder-to-shoulder. So much for two feet at all times.

“You’ve got company, by the way,” Steph says, pointing helpfully towards the back. Dick perks up, but forces himself to stay calm- Jason’s been out of town the past couple of days, gone up the coast to help out that friend he mentioned and Roy, now that he’s healed up enough for physical activity. It’s probably not him. No need to get his hopes up.

“And Wally,” Cass adds, and Dick stares at her blankly for a moment before she explains. “Wally called.”

“Oh, yeah,” Dick says, and watches as Steph and Cass exchange looks. Wally calls sometimes, trying not to lose contact completely, and Dick always finds a reason why he can’t come to the phone, because the last time he’d heard Wally’s voice had been at their own private wake for Donna and he wasn’t sure he could deal with that. But now- “He’s probably just checking in, I told him I was gonna call earlier but then Bruce showed up and I forgot.”

“You- wait. You called Wally?” Steph asks. Cass, as if sensing what’s coming, straightens up so she’s supporting her own weight.

“Yeah. I figured, you know, it’s long past time.” He shrugs like it’s nothing, like he hadn’t been so scared that they’d written him off as a lost cause and moved on without him, like he hadn’t held Jason’s hand tight enough to bruise for the entire phone call.

Steph abandons the donut bag and sweeps around the counter to wrap Dick up in a hug. “It’s about damn time,” she says, then jerks away and punches him in the shoulder. “You absolute asshole, you have no idea how many people have been so worried about you for so long. Don’t ever do that again, you hear me?”

Cass has come over as well, even though she looks less relieved and more confused- but then again, she’s one of the few people Dick actively kept in touch with, and as such doesn’t understand how far he’d recoiled in his grief. She also looks ready to take up Steph’s fight, and is bracing herself to do so, and Dick holds up both hands in surrender.

“I won’t,” he promises.

“Good,” Stephanie says, and hugs him again for a moment before stepping back, linking arms with Cass to draw her away, and Dick slides past them to escape into the back.

And in the kitchen- in spite of his attempts to strangle unrealistic hopes, it still settles something torn loose in his chest by Steph’s casual announcement that he had company- Jason is sitting at the table, tapping idly at his phone. He sets it aside and stands up smoothly when Dick comes in, and wraps his arms contentedly around Dick’s waist when Dick simply walks into him.

The kiss is nothing special- there had been literal fireworks the first time, which Jason thankfully found flattering even while Dick turned nine shades of red and had to leave the room to wrestle his magic back under control- but Dick smiles into it all the same, and drapes his arms over Jason’s shoulders to hold him even closer.

“Someone’s in a good mood,” Jason says, like it isn’t taking every ounce of his impressive self-control to not smile back.

“Why shouldn’t I be,” Dick says. “I just officially pioneered a whole new field of magic.”

“Officially? So the last guy was clean?” Dick nods, and Jason hums thoughtfully, one hand sliding up Dick’s back to toy with the hair at the base of his skull. “Too bad your new field is dependent on someone else being an asshole and pioneering their own whole new field of magic.”

“And my very supportive boyfriend is home early from a trip,” Dick adds pointedly.

“Congratulations,” Jason says solemnly, and kisses him again before shifting away. He doesn’t go far, just moves away so he can walk without tripping over Dick, and pulls Dick with him over to the table so they can sit. Dick pulls his own chair around so they’re sitting on the same side, and Jason says nothing, just digs a donut out of the bag Dick had dropped onto the table earlier. He passes the cinnamon sugar bun over without even needing to look at Dick, and Dick takes it with a smile.

“So how was it? Find anything?” Dick asks.

Jason also picks out a glazed ring, and if Steph were in here, she and Dick probably would have exchanged despairing looks over their partners’ boring tastes. “Didn’t find anything, although we didn’t really expect to. Flamingo probably only went there to try to draw us away from Gotham.”

Dick nods. “So you’re in Gotham for good, then?” he asks. He’s not as nervous now, not after everything.

“No shortage of people causing trouble in this city,” Jason agrees. “Also.” And he hooks a foot around the leg of Dick’s chair and scoots him a few inches closer, close enough that he can just lean over and rest against Jason. “There’s a few things worth sticking around for here.”

“Yeah?” Dick focuses a moment and leaves the cinnamon bun hanging in midair when he lets go and turns to face Jason. They kiss properly this time, a warm and thorough greeting, Jason’s hand skating up under Dick’s shirt to trace over bare skin, Dick’s fingers digging into Jason’s hair. They only part when Jason pulls away, leans forward into Dick to drop his donut back on the table.

“Door to the store closed?” he asks, and Dick tears enough of his attention away from the man under his hands to double-check.

“Closed and locked,” he confirms. Not that Steph was going to risk coming back here anytime soon, no one’s walked in on anyone yet and that’s a record none of them are keen on breaking.

Jason nods at the floating cinnamon bun. “You’re gonna drop that,” he warns.

“Really?” Dick asks with a grin. “You think you’re that distracting?”

And Jason just looks at him, eyebrows raised, smiling slow and dangerous at the challenge, and presses against Dick’s back to pull him properly into his lap.

The bun hits the ground within minutes, and neither of them notice.