it's a long climb up the dusty mountain

Chapter 2: Day 1 (Dick)

Dick wakes up at 10:58 am, two minutes before his alarm, and his first thought is Bruce did something stupid.

By the time he reaches the bathroom he’s remembered what Bruce did, and it sounds just as stupid now as it did last night. They joke about Bruce and his penchant for adoption, but picking up a couple of kids from an alternate dimension? New versions of kids he already has? That’s taking the joke a bit far.

He channels his irritation into morning stretches. Then a shower. The exertion soothes his racing mind, and the manor’s infinite hot water supply soothes his muscles. This is far from the worst thing Bruce has ever done. It isn’t even in the top thirty. Dick can’t even really blame him for rescuing two kids from an evil mirror dimension. As if any of them would have done any different. The trouble now is making sure that Bruce gets those kids the help that they need. That’s where he’s gone wrong before.

At 11:48, Dick wanders into the kitchen, looking for something to eat and some advice from the wisest person he knows.

“Morning, Alfred.” He hops onto a stool at the breakfast bar.

“Good morning, Master Dick.” Alfred turns from the stove to greet him. His eyes are warm, and Dick slides right back into their old routine.

“Bruce filled you in on the situation?”

“He did,” Alfred says. “I prepared breakfast for our new arrivals and brought it to their room a few hours ago—though from what Master Bruce told me, it may be some time before they are comfortable eating full meals.”

That makes a depressing amount of sense. “Did you talk to them?”

“I did not,” Alfred says. “I believe they were still asleep when I knocked. I will attempt to make contact at lunch.”

“Did he tell you…” Dick hesitates halfway through the question, and Alfred lets him. He always has room for his own thoughts, his own doubts, when he talks to Alfred. “Do you know if they had an Alfred in their dimension?”

“They did not.” Alfred’s lips purse slightly, and Dick knows there must be more he’s not saying. That’s alright. He can get all the gory details later. The present moment is for breakfast and problem solving.

“So—” he says. Alfred sets a plate in front of him—breakfast quiche, savory crepes, and chicken, with a heaping side of fresh fruit. “Thank you. So they shouldn’t have any negative associations with you, right?”

“That is Master Bruce’s belief,” Alfred says. “We do not know for certain, but I agree that it is a theory worth testing.”

Someone moves through the doorway from the dining room. Dick turns just in time to see Bruce shuffle by, a steaming mug in one hand and a file folder in the other. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a week.

“Good morning,” Dick chirps. Bruce gives him a sideways glance. “We were just talking about your new kids.”

Bruce’s glare intensifies. It’s unfortunate for him that that particular look stopped intimidating Dick years ago. “How old are they, anyway?”

Bruce takes a long sip of coffee before he answers. “Your alternate is fifteen,” he says. “Jason’s alternate is ten.”

If Dick thinks about that for too long, he’s going to ruin his breakfast. “Okay,” he says. “And I’m guessing they’re also orphans?”

Bruce sets his coffee down on the counter and takes a paper from the folder. He hands it to Dick and picks up his coffee again, all without saying a word.

The paper is a mission briefing. Dick scans over it, expecting to see something about inter-dimensional travel; he stops when he sees the words peritraumatic dissociation.

He looks up at Bruce. “What is this?”

“Pertinent background information,” Bruce says. He looks about ten percent more awake. “Please hold all questions until you’ve read the entire thing.”

With that, he exits the kitchen. The tea kettle whistles. Alfred lifts it off the heat.

“Tea, Master Dick?”

“Sure,” Dick says. “He didn’t sleep at all last night, did he?”

“I suspect not.” Alfred pours the water. He already has three mugs set out on the counter.

“Did he give you one of these?”

“Master Bruce briefed me on the situation before I began preparing breakfast.”

Someone taps Dick on the shoulder. He starts, turns, and gets an armful of Cass as she tucks herself into a hug. “Good morning, Cass.”

“Afternoon,” she signs, and slides onto the stool next to him. Alfred sets a plate in front of her. “Thank you.”

The paper lies on the counter next to his plate. Dick turns it over. The paper is a special Bat-prototype, designed to disintegrate in twelve hours to prevent security leaks. That still gives him—if his suspicions are correct—at least eight hours to read it. He has time to finish eating before he sees just how bad the damage is.

Cass points at the paper with a questioning look. “What is that?”

“Bruce’s latest adoptions,” Dick says. “He made a dossier.”

“Adopted? When?”

“Last night.”

Dick sees the exact moment that Cass connects the dots and realizes where Bruce got the kids from. She narrows her eyes. “Not adopted,” she signs.

“What do you mean?”

“Not adopted.” She repeats the signs with more emphasis. The next sign after that is one Dick has only seen her use on patrol. “Kidnapped.”

“Indeed,” Alfred says. “And from what Master Bruce has told me, he is not the first to do so.”

⁂

Dick has always known that he got extraordinarily lucky with Bruce.

He knew when he was nine years old and the man from the circus, the man from his parents’ funeral, got him out of juvenile detention and took him to a big house up on the hill. He knew when he discovered that that sad, quiet, lonely man was really the Batman. He knew the first time he went to Bruce’s room with a nightmare and the man wrapped him in a blanket and sat with him until he fell asleep. Dick wasn’t grateful; he was small and grieving and angry, and he wouldn’t be grateful for anything for a long time. But even as a child he knew how incredibly lucky he was that the man who took him in turned out to be kind.

He didn’t have to be. Bruce is obsessive, controlling, and stubborn; those tendencies may have waned over the years, but Dick knows how easily they still get the better of him. How easily they could have turned him bad. One of Batman’s greatest weapons is fear. It would have been easy for Bruce Wayne to wield that same weapon over his house.

So the idea of an evil Batman never surprised Dick. He’s seen it before, in brushes with alternate timelines and dimensions and whatever else, and it makes perfect sense to him. Even the knowledge that such a Batman might also have a Robin—it’s sad, but easy to compartmentalize. Dick has seen all kinds of child abuse over his years as a vigilante, and it never gets any less horrific, but it does get less shocking.

So none of this is a surprise, right up until he reads the words sexual abuse.

Prolonged physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, the mission brief says. In terse, blunt language, it continues: Richard John Grayson, fifteen years old, shows signs of post-traumatic stress, anxiety, disordered eating, compulsive sexual behavior, peritraumatic dissociation. Jason Peter Todd, ten years old, is marginally better off, only because the abuse didn’t last as long. There are no pictures, but Dick already knows their faces. At fifteen he still had round cheeks and a gap between his front teeth; he wouldn’t hit his last growth spurt for another year. And Jason… Dick didn’t know Jason until he was twelve, almost thirteen. Even then he was small, and it took him forever to build up muscle. To think of him even younger, enduring this kind of abuse at the hands of someone who was supposed to protect him…

He’s starting to realize why Bruce was so shaken last night.

The manor feels stifling. He walks outside, where biting cold wind whips his hair and clouds hang low overhead. February in Gotham is always miserable, and Wayne Manor is no exception. The rose bushes are pruned back into thorny stubs; the cherry trees lining the hill are bare. The whole world is black and grey.

Richard John Grayson, fifteen years old, still became Robin. He did not have a choice in the matter. He was an accessory, at the very least, to multiple murders. Dick reads that sentence again. Then his eyes flick up to the words disordered eating on the previous line, and he thinks about how many thousands of calories he had to eat every day to maintain a healthy weight as a teenager. He thinks about how long it took Jason, his Jason, to get comfortable eating full meals. Then he can’t think anymore.

The stone bench is rough on his back. He feels it through his shirt. His spine curls against the hard surface; he has five, ten minutes before it starts to hurt. The air is cold. Windy. He should have worn a jacket. The sky overhead is a flat grey void. He can’t even make out individual clouds.

Cass’s face looks down at him. Dick looks back.

“Move,” she says.

When he doesn’t respond, she nudges his shoulder. Dick levers himself up and Cass sits next to him, tucked into his side. She has a jacket on. She points at the paper in his hand. “Are you done?”

“Yeah,” Dick says. There’s no point in reading it again. He couldn’t forget a single word on that paper if he tried.

Cass takes it from his hand and tears it in half. Into fourths, into eighths, and she scatters it in the rosebeds. In a few hours the paper will be a little more soil.

The cherry trees make jagged dark lines against the sky. The wind tangles his hair. Dick’s ears are numb. He should go inside. Cass takes his hand.

“Worried,” she says.

“Yeah,” Dick says.

“Sad.”

He nods.

“...Scared.”

That one is harder to admit to.

“That could have been me,” Dick says. Cass rubs her thumb across his palm, tracing his calluses. “I didn’t know what kind of person Bruce was when we met. I didn’t know him at all.”

He could have chosen not to go with Bruce, but staying in juvenile detention wasn’t any kind of choice. He would have died if he stayed there, and both of them knew it. In another world, Bruce Wayne used that fact to his advantage.

“Cold,” Cass says. It takes Dick a minute to realize she’s talking about the weather. She drops his hand and signs, “Go inside.” She gestures between them. “Make tea.”

“Ask Alfred,” Dick says, just to be difficult. Cass gestures to both of them with more emphasis. Then she grabs his hand and pulls him up off the bench. “Okay, okay!”

⁂

The manor is quiet this time of day, with Bruce and Tim at work, Duke and Damian at school. Alfred is busy in the laundry room, so Dick boils the water and takes it off the heat before it can whistle. He brews a pot of chamomile tea. Cass perches at the bar across from him.

“Bruce told you?” Dick sets a timer to steep the tea. He doesn’t have Alfred’s preternatural ability to keep track of background tasks; if he doesn’t use a timer, he will forget that the tea leaves are in there.

Cass shakes her head. “I listened to the computer file,” she says. “And. I saw them. When Alfred brought lunch. They are… scared. Confused. Tired. Sad.” She pauses, eyebrows drawn in thought. She signs, “They expect to be hurt.”

“Did you talk to them?”

Cass shakes her head.

“Why not?”

“Scared of Alfred. Scared of me.”

“Scared of Alfred? Really?”

She shrugs. “Scared of everyone.”

They sit in silence until the timer goes off. Dick discards the tea leaves.

“They haven’t left the guest room, have they?”

Cass shakes her head.

Maybe they feel safe in the guest room—or maybe they’re too scared to leave without express permission. If Bruce put them there—and Alfred has been their only point of contact since—it’s probably the latter.

“...I bet they’re pretty bored in there.”

Cass shrugs. She certainly understands the concept of boredom, but she doesn’t have the intimate familiarity with it that Dick does. If it were him stuck in the guest bedroom with nothing to think about but his own thoughts, he would be climbing the walls. And it is him stuck there—a version of him, at least. “We should introduce ourselves.”

“Scared of us,” Cass reminds him.

“Yeah, maybe. But avoiding them won’t make it better.” And he’ll be back in Blüdhaven tomorrow, and he doesn’t visit the manor much these days, and he really wants to meet the new kids while he has a chance. “We can bring books and toys and—do you still have crochet supplies?”

Cass nods.

“Mini-me might be into that,” Dick says. They’ll have to figure out nicknames for the kids, or having another person around named Dick is going to get confusing fast. Not to mention suspicious, when Bruce gets around to the official adoption papers.

Cass tilts her head. “You should talk,” she says.

“Your talking is fine, Cass,” Dick says. He wonders if his double knows ASL—he was passable, at fifteen—or if the evil Batman (the Badman, ha) robbed him of that, too.

Cass shakes her head. “You should talk,” she says. “To them.”

“Okay,” Dick says. “Fine. But you have to come with me.”

“Scared?”

“No. I want you to meet them, too.”

“That makes us even?”

“Exactly.”

She shrugs. “Okay. You get the books.”

Dick compiles a stack of books, titles that he remembers Jason talking about. Alice in Wonderland, A Wrinkle in Time, Pride & Prejudice, Redwall. He adds Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew for good measure. Then he stops by his own room for a basket of fidget toys—his phone number, scribbled on a scrap of paper—and of course his secret weapon: Zitka.

He meets Cass outside the guest room. She has a crochet basket with several balls of yarn and a couple of the big plastic hooks that are hard to improvise into weapons. “Good?” she says.

“Great,” Dick says. Before he can think better of it, he knocks at the door.

He hears a muffled sound, maybe a voice; then the door opens. Dick notes that it wasn’t locked. A young teenager steps into the doorway, and Dick’s own face looks back at him.

Was I ever that young?

Dark blue eyes widen as they meet Dick’s face. They dart down to the things in his arms—the stuffed elephant perched on top of the books—and widen still further.

“Hi,” Dick says. He puts on a reassuring smile. It feels silly to introduce himself to himself, but he doesn’t know what Bruce told them, so he forges ahead. “I’m Dick. This is—”

The boy bursts into tears.

Dick falters, caught between a desire to comfort and a fear of making it worse. His double cringes away, but he doesn’t close the door.

“Dick!” says a small voice, and then another boy appears in the doorway, just recognizable as Jason. He looks so much younger than Dick expected—so young that he still has baby fat on his cheeks. Dick feels a stab of something like nausea, something like anger.

His double curls around little Jason, bundling him out of sight of the door. Shielding him. “I’m sorry.” He swipes at his face with a too-big sleeve. “I’m sorry, I—I’ll go with you, I promise—”

Dick backs up a step. Then he sits down cross-legged in the hallway and sets the books in front of him. “That’s okay,” he says, voice calm and soothing. “You’re okay. It’s fine if you cry. We’re not going anywhere. Take all the time you need.”

“Dick,” little Jason whispers, “let me—” Little Dick pushes him out of sight again. He turns back to the hallway with tears in his eyes and a bright smile on his face.

“Sorry, sir,” he says, and his inviting tone clashes so horribly with everything else that Dick holds back a wince. “Did you want me in the hallway, or—?”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Dick says, a little too quickly. Compulsive sexual behavior flashes through his head and he feels sick again. “You can stay there if you want. We won’t come in. We just wanted to check on you and—bring some stuff you might want.”

Dickie—that’s a fine nickname for now—glances at Zitka again, so quick he must be trying to hide his interest. “Thank you, sir,” he says, in that same sickly-sweet voice.

“You don’t have to call me that,” Dick says. “Like I said, my name is Dick, and this is Cass.”

“Hello,” Cass says, signing it at the same time. Dickie glances at her, but he’s clearly identified Dick as the bigger threat. His eyes are solemn and wet, despite his cheerful smile.

“That’s a funny name,” Dickie says. It sounds teasing, flirtatious, but his eyes are deadly serious.

“Yeah,” Dick says softly. “It’s short for Richard. My parents didn’t know it had a double meaning in English.”

The smile falters. Dick goes on. “I could have gone by something else,” he says, leaving out that it was Bruce who first asked him if he wanted a different nickname, “but after my parents died… I didn’t have a lot of things to remind me of them. It was their name for me. I wanted to keep it.”

The smile falls away. Dick doesn’t want to make the kid cry again, but he needs to establish a connection. Needs to tell him I’m like you, I am you, and you’re safe with me. He picks up his stuffed elephant. “You know Zitka, right?”

This time Dickie stares at Zitka for a while. Then he nods. “I think you should keep her,” Dick says. “Catch.” He tosses her. Dickie catches and holds her, eyes wide. “I brought you some books, too,” Dick says, sliding them forward. “And fidget toys. Keep them as long as you want. Cass?”

“Crochet,” Cass says. She holds up the other basket. “For you.”

Dickie picks the items up very slowly. He holds each of them for a few seconds before passing them to Jason, who’s still mostly out of sight behind the door frame. Dick stands up, and the kid freezes. Dick backs away.

“If you need anything else,” he says, “you can always tell Cass. Her room is just down the hall. You can tell me, too, but… I’m not around as much.”

Dickie gives him a searching look. He clutches Zitka to his chest. “Where do you go?” His voice is quiet and a little hoarse. It’s nothing like the saccharine tone he used before, and that feels like a victory.

“I live in Blüdhaven,” Dick says. “I’m pretty busy there, but I try to stop by when I can. If you want to talk to me, you can call.” He takes the slip of paper from his pocket and holds it out. “Cass will let you use her phone.”

Slowly—very slowly—the kid reaches out and takes the paper. He keeps watching Dick. His face is blank, almost unreadable, but his hand is shaking.

“Overwhelmed,” Cass signs. “Go now.” She takes Dick’s hand.

“It’s good to meet you,” he says, with a little wave. Then he lets Cass lead him down the hall. Dickie watches them go.

⁂

Dick finds Bruce in the Batcave that evening, before he leaves. It’s an hour-long drive between Gotham and Blüdhaven, and he has a full night of patrol ahead of him, but this is important.

“I think they should stay with me.”

Bruce glances up from the Batcomputer and gives him a questioning look. “The kids,” Dick says. “Dickie and Jay.”

“Why?”

“Because they might not be comfortable here.”

“Why you?”

“Does the Justice League know about them?”

“They will,” Bruce says. “Eventually.”

“Right,” Dick says. “Well, that limits your options, and—” He stops. “Wait. Does Jason know?”

Bruce looks away, which is answer enough.

“You haven’t told Jason?”

“Jason will not speak to me.” Bruce’s voice is tight.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t speak to him! You have another version of him living in the manor!”

“Jason doesn’t visit the manor,” Bruce says. “Information is on a need-to-know basis, and he doesn’t need to know.”

“Oh my god.” Dick presses a hand to his face. Any other time, he would leave this alone. He’s already on thin ice bringing up Jason at all. But this is ridiculous. “You cannot keep them a secret forever.”

“I’m not…” Bruce makes an irritated noise. “I will inform the Justice League. When I can trust them not to interfere and destabilize the situation.”

“What about Jason?” Bruce doesn’t answer. “I think he has a right to know.”

“When Jason elects to visit the manor,” Bruce says, as if grinding every word out through sheer force of will, “he will have a right to know what happens here.”

This is exactly why he doesn’t talk to you. That sentence will turn the argument into a fight, so Dick doesn’t say it. He takes a deep breath and tries to remember his original point.

“Okay,” he says. “Fine.” He’ll tell Jason himself, if he has to. “What if they don’t want to live here? The kids. What if they don't feel safe with you?”

Bruce stares for a moment, not quite making eye contact. “The manor is the safest place for them to be,” he says, in the slightly blank tone that means he’s hiding some emotional reaction.

“I know that,” Dick says. “But that’s not how trauma works. You’re probably one of their biggest triggers.” Bruce flinches—a tiny motion of his face that almost no one else would notice. “It’s not your fault,” Dick says, a little softer. “It’s just how things happened.”

He takes a deep, centering breath. Bruce says nothing; after a few seconds, Dick keeps talking. “It doesn’t have to be forever. They could sleep over for a few days, then come back. Something like that. Just so they know they have somewhere else to go.” He knows all too well how stifling the manor can be. “It might help them recover. That’s all.”

Bruce turns back to the computer. That might mean the end of the conversation, but Dick hasn’t heard an answer one way or the other, so he waits.

“They are not your responsibility,” Bruce says, five minutes later.

“I can still help out.”

“Hosting two severely traumatized children in your home is more than ‘helping out’.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Dick says. “And hey, Damian turned out pretty good.”

He’s joking, but Bruce’s face twitches like he’s trying not to grimace. “Damian,” he says, “is not your responsibility either. He never was.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Bruce gives up the fight and grimaces. Dick crosses his arms and takes another deep breath, trying to smooth his hackles down. It doesn’t matter what Bruce says about Damian. They aren’t talking about Damian. It was a joke, and Dick is talking about the new kids, because he cares about them. He doesn’t want to start a fight. “I just want to help,” he says. Would it kill you to accept help for once in your life— “If they don’t mind living here, then fine. That’s great. But if they’re unhappy here, and you need an alternative, I want you to call me.”

Bruce watches him for a long minute. He might as well be wearing the cowl, for how inscrutable his face is. “I understand,” he says, finally. “I will… keep the offer in mind.” Then he turns back to the Batcomputer.

That’s probably the best response Dick is going to get. He takes a deep breath, reminding himself once again that he does not want to pick a fight with Bruce. They’ve been doing better—ever since Bruce came back and took up Batman again and Dick went back to his own life. Bruce has made an effort to communicate, with words. Dick has made an effort to maintain boundaries, both his and Bruce’s. It’s been easier for them to get along, easier for Dick to remember that he really does care about the brooding, silent, repressed disaster that is Bruce Wayne.

But sometimes Dick still wants to scream.

He stalks over to his motorcycle instead. He made the offer; what Bruce does with it is up to Bruce. All Dick can do is wait and watch. One benefit of having half a dozen siblings is that someone is always ready to complain about Bruce. If—when—the situation goes south, Dick will know about it.

He turns back to say as much—to warn Bruce not to fuck this up—but Tim is already there, next to the Batcomputer, deep in conversation with Bruce. Then Damian is over by the lockers, pulling his armored tunic over his head. Cass runs through a warmup on the mats; after another minute Steph joins her, already half in costume. The Batcave fills with pre-patrol chatter, and Dick knows that anything he says now will be heard by everyone. One downside of having half a dozen siblings is that gossip travels faster than light.

So Dick starts his motorcycle and turns his thoughts to the night ahead of him. He made the offer; he can’t control what Bruce does with it. He can only control himself. Still, Dick has a feeling—not entirely triumphant—that Bruce will come around. Whatever weird guilt complex he has about this, it’s not worth re-traumatizing his children. He’ll see that.

Dick just has to be patient.

⁂