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Published:
2025-08-11
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1/1
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do you ever think of me and my two hands

Summary:

“Would you change what you did if I yelled?” he asks.

Voice full of promise, Dick answers, “No.”

It’s not disappointment, as such, that courses through him, just something terrible that already existed, ossifying in his lungs hard enough to make breathing hurt.

“That’s what I thought,” Roy says blithely.

Relief is a pipe dream. A brief insight into Roy Harper's headspace after Infinite Crisis (2005).

Notes:

hey guess who's back wow i haven't published anything in 8 months sorry about that

timeline shenanigans: uhhh, takes place after infinite crisis (2005) #7 & outsiders (2003) #30-33 which is the tie-in. roy launches an attack against the society with the earthside outsiders where he pretends to be slade. it's a good time. he also answers barbara's distress call to deal with the global prison breakout (IC special: villains united). i borrow the premise of dick being injured and laid up in a bed from nightwing (1996) annual #2 but i made it a JLA medical facility as opposed to barbara's apartment. he was in an induced coma for 3 weeks after the crisis so you can pretend that that's what is happening here but also... you don't have to

dick's own comic (nightwing #117) places him in blüdhaven during the crisis but dan didio wanted him dead so he's also taking a hit for bruce from alexander luthor in IC #7 aka he's somehow in two places at once. i'm not touching all of that. godspeed

fic title from never love an anchor by the crane wives aka quintessential dickroy song. many thanks to my beloved liz for the beta <3

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

Work Text:

“Hey.”

Dick looks up from the medical cot, performatively scanning Roy, all the way from the frayed Hudson sweatshirt— the one he stole from Dick during the worst of his addiction, looking to fill the lacunae in him with something, anything when even the drugs stopped being a comfort— to his beat-up Vans.

Something that Roy almost wants to call relief— but isn’t stupid enough to, even in the privacy of his own head— flickers across his face. Thready-eyed from pain, but still finding the time to be worried about everyone except himself: the Dick Grayson special. 

Business as usual, then.

(His own relief at finally seeing Robin feels wishbone hollow.)   

“Donna?” he rasps, even though he must know; in fact, Roy would bet Lian’s favourite plushie that it was the first thing Dick asked about when he woke up. 

Roy almost laughs. It’s just— 

It’s so hypertypical of Dick to want his paltry reassurance after months of denying every overture Roy made. Their miserable life raft of a team that was built entirely out of distrustful shades of compromise, his own attempts at trying to gut himself depthless into the kind of person who could work in the shadows, Renegade’s gloved fist leaving the beginnings of a blood-red bruise against his zygomatic bone. 

Look. 

Roy’s used to people being predictable, alright? Once upon a time, before grief had split them open to entrails and entropy, he used to think that nothing Dick could do would ever truly surprise him. Sure, he might not know exactly what manipulative thing Dick was willing to do, just that Roy wouldn’t be surprised when he did—

But then they lost Donna and Dick self-destructed so fantastically that even being peripherally caught in his orbit felt too much like deconstructed voyeurism. 

“Not yet back,” Roy answers. He wonders if that sounds as miserable as he feels, so he adds, veering dangerously close to patronizing despite his best attempt not to be, “I’m assuming fixing a cosmic storm isn’t exactly a two-day patch job.”

Dick nods but the air in the room corrodes anyway; fireflies in a jar, trapped with only gossamer luminescence to keep them seeing and no way to look. 

“Connor and Mia okay?”

“Everyone’s fine.” Roy doesn’t have to supplement with Except you because Dick speaks tacit silences better than him. 

(Always has, always will. A half-life of gestures overwrought with meaning tends to make you an expert in these kinds of things.)

“Get it over with, then,” Dick says, bland like shock. 

It doesn’t even hurt. Dick has been unreachable to him for so long, now, that Roy lives with the injury instead of around it.

It became his whole life before New Cronus and he doesn’t know how to escape its weight, yet— Roy’s never been any good at leaving. Just being left.

(This, Roy has discerned, is the trick to Dick Grayson: 

He found the one person in the world who made his circus smile feel as bright as it looks. It ended— well, for lack of a word that could actually articulate the sheer hurt both Dick and Bruce hoard with them with a fervor too much like religion— terribly. 

So, now Dick spends his life loving and having people— but only just so. His audience, at a distance. His magnetism, turned inward and weaponised into coilguns that he bleeds himself on. His devotion, choking but relentless.

What Roy always fails to account for:

Dick Grayson is not the type of person that you leave. You get pulled into his orbit purely because he’s him and then you stay there. 

Caught. Always caught.) 

Roy settles into the chair next to the bed. Sighs audibly, a little theatrical. “As though me saying something has ever changed anything. I’m a pretty patient guy, Dick, but even I know when to call it quits.”

Dick’s knuckles clench white-hot around the blanket, his body pointedly canted away from Roy but thrumming with a desperation so thick that it coats Roy’s tongue like ash. 

He thinks about pressing his fingers to Dick’s pulse-point, sliding his palm down the bird bones in his wrist to interlock their fingers like a spine, maybe even dropping a kiss into his hair. He thinks about it with an intensity so painful that it cleaves through him, severing his heart into two.

(A litany during those early weeks of providing intel for the team:

Roy, wanting to beg, Tell me what to do so you’ll stop hurting me, except they both already knew the answer.

Roy, making sacrifice after sacrifice, hoping it came across as bold instead of desperate, knowing it could only end in a mistake but hoping for a different outcome all the same.

Sunk costs.)

“Sure, but it might just make you feel better to yell at me,” Dick says, breaking the soupy silence with something one could almost call sincere— but Roy knows better. 

Dick rarely talks about his feelings in a way that wouldn’t send a psychiatrist running out of the room. Even here, awash in the antiseptic neon, he looks so unnatural, so removed— as though Roy could pluck him out of the League’s medical bay and dump him anywhere, everywhere— and Dick would just disappear. Bleed away into nothingness.

(The thing that really cuts, though, is that Dick wouldn’t even care.)

Something must show in his face because Dick’s gaze sharpens— even through the cocktail of drugs he must be on; a butterfly pinned in place, torn-winged but stubbornly aflutter. 

(Bruce-approved drugs, probably. Ones that definitely don’t do nearly enough for the hole in his chest because Dick is a control freak and Bruce is an even bigger control freak and together, they indulge each other in their control freak tendencies till they’re both miserable.) 

“C’mon, Tim and Babs already threw down the gauntlet. It’s only fair you get a shot in, too.”

Oh. 

So that’s what this is— guilt. Tim’s best friend dying at Dick’s side, Dick laid up in a hospital bed after he took a hit that should’ve killed him and didn’t. 

Softly, with something painfully tender rising up in him like a swell, “Wouldn’t be very sporting, Rob.”

Dick goes flatter. “Hasn’t stopped either of us before.”

Roy caves. 

(Looking back, Roy will not regret the caving. By the time that they will realise what they’ve set into motion with the Outsiders, paying for a man’s freedom in blood, there will be bigger things to regret.)

“Would you change what you did if I yelled?” he asks. 

This is the game he has to play to wrestle Dick out of his own head, something that isn’t the miasma of Batman-and-Robin. This is the game Roy has had to devise through their desolation because the only other person, who knew how to do right by Dick without drawing blood, died.

It’s a terrible game. 

(She’s back now but it doesn’t mean that they can stop playing.)

(Roy won’t win this round but with a Dick Grayson who is as desperate as he is dangerous, not losing is its own victory.)

Voice full of promise, Dick answers, “No.”

It’s not disappointment, as such, that courses through him, just something terrible that already existed, ossifying in his lungs hard enough to make breathing hurt. 

“That’s what I thought,” Roy says blithely. 

Dick doesn’t slump at the recrimination that he all but pleaded for and yet, something about him just sags— as though the strength of his own conviction has sapped out the rest of his energy. 

(Dick, Roy thinks inconsolably, is a masterful liar but the most dangerous lies are the ones he tells himself.)

“You need anything when I swing by with Lian tomorrow?” 

Blue eyes clamp shut, something devastated skittering through the air. It’s more than Dick has let Roy see in a long time. It rings empty anyway. 

“Roy.” Dick won’t beg— not about this— but the wretchedly wounded way he says Roy’s name is as good as it.  

Irritation splinters through him, and what a glorious respite it is, from the anxiety and the grief and the everything that comes with loving Dick Grayson the way Roy Harper does. Steely, Roy tells him, “She was worried.”

“I don’t want her to see me like this.”

Like this. 

Such a convenient way to describe the swathe of bandages around his torso, peeking through the thin hospital gown. Or his crumpled expression, equal parts hunted and haunted. Robin— all grown up but looking somehow smaller than he ever did in the underoos. It’s a hell of a thing— how Roy is capable of forgetting that Dick can look like this because all the times that he doesn’t, the illusion is just so goddamn convincing.

“Tough luck, Grayson. My daughter wants something and it is within my power to give it to her. I’m not going to deny her— not even for you.”

Dick smiles at that, which wasn’t Roy’s intention, but it’s a sunbeam breaking through grimy glass all the same. “I don’t need anything.” It doesn’t last. The curve of his mouth twists into something that Roy never sees coming— no matter how often it happens. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “My apartment blew up, remember? And then my circus. Oh, and my city. Can’t forget Blüdhaven.”

Even if you could, you would never let yourself, Roy thinks with frustration but it’s almost fond. This, at least, is familiar footing— a holdover from their Teen Titan days. Roy doesn’t need to invent new ways to destroy them both for Dick’s guilt complex. 

“Shit happens. You wanna sit and blame yourself for all of it, be my guest. Donna will knock some sense into you when she comes back anyway.”

Dick finally opens his eyes— beautiful and so, so blue— only to lazily salute Roy in acquiescence. 

Roy can’t help himself, then; he drags his knuckles across Dick’s cheek slowly, with feigned carelessness even, but he’s never been the actor Dick is, so it just comes across as agonizingly reverent. Dick makes a noise like he’s been punched in the gut and then he leans into the touch greedily.

When was the last time Dick let someone touch him in a way that wasn’t a precursor to violence, Roy wonders, heart aching. 

(God, Roy can never step off this loop, can he?)   

Quietly, because he couldn’t bear it if he was the one to shatter this, “Get some rest, Boy Wonder.”

“You, too, Speedy. You look worse than I feel.”

Roy gets up, then, gently smushing the hollow of Dick’s cheekbone in farewell. 

Something perilously close to hope unfolds in him at the prolonged contact. Donna will be back soon; they don’t have to keep picking at their shared wound anymore, they can just wait for it to scar over. He’ll bring Dick some real food tomorrow— none of the gruel Alfred probably has him eating. Cheesecake from that place near the old Tower, maybe.

It’ll be good. It has to be.



Notes:

i haven't written fic in a minute so i'm not too pleased with this but you gotta get back on the horse or whatever. be kind mwah