batchilla

[batchilla]

I love not living in the same country as you because if you do it will be your burden to eat them not mine.

Thank you so much for reading! Probably the most unusual reoccurring plot thread of this story (peeps war of attrition) would not exist without our silly DMs.

Can’t believe they’re making you work you should be paid to tell wonderful stories full time.

Your new partner is Grayson.

He’s a weird guy.

Not necessarily a bad guy, but a weird one.

He’s not cold, in fact he’s rather friendly. However, when you really consider it, he volunteered very little information on his personal life. Reasonable, you suppose. So long as he has your back in the field and gets his reports done, you don’t need to be best friends.

Your new partner Grayson is a recent Gotham transplant. You’d never personally been, but you weren’t oblivious to how utterly mad the city was. You could hardly blame him for getting out.

Your new partner Grayson, tenses up whenever someone mentions the Batman, or any of the nutcases he fights. You don’t pry.

You do your own research.

Your new partner Grayson watched his parents die. He’d been taken in by Gotham’s favourite son, a man he seemed reluctant to speak of. He’d had, and lost a brother, to the most deranged man Gotham, if not the world, had ever known.

You stop mentioning Gotham around him after that.

Your new partner Grayson is a weird guy, who seems constantly surprised whenever you demonstrate competency.

At first you’d suspected sexism. It wouldn’t have been your first partner to have that failing.

After a few days though, you catch him being equally surprised when officer Jackson makes a connection on a string of breaking and entries, and realise that perhaps he’s just not used to the cops not being utterly reliant on a very scary angsty furry and a small child without pants.

Your new partner, Grayson, is a weird guy, who disappears sometimes. Middle of a chase he’ll be gone, and you won’t see him again for sometimes as long as hours, before he’s back. More often than not, somehow through some insane luck, the perp will have been taken down by Bludhaven’s new vigilante, and tied to a lamppost for you to find. You both hated and envied his luck.

Your new partner Grayson was a weird guy… and he was a damn good cop.

He made connections like no one else. It was like he had some sort of sixth sense. You’d asked him once, about how he seemed to know all he did. How he seemed to have access to a whole other database of clues you just couldn’t see.

And he’d smiled that cheeky smile of his, and told you he’d been consulting an oracle.

Your new partner, Grayson, moves like nothing you’ve ever seen.

You’d initially attributed it to his past as an acrobat. The way he could simply parkour over and around anything in his way, run faster then he had any right to, chase down a perp like a bloodhound.

It was more than that though. You’d say without hesitation that if you were in a firefight, he’s who you’d want at your side. You must’ve owed him your life three times over by now. Even in those situations though, when no one would have blamed him for the use of lethal force, he never had.

You’d been pinned down by a smuggling ring. You, Grayson, and ten of them - all armed to the teeth.

He’d been incredible. Superhuman, almost.

Someone had shot out the lights. He’d told you one of the smugglers must have missed. You’d never once believed him.

Ten smugglers. You’d managed to knock out and cuff one, unwilling to risk taking a shot blind.

The other nine? Those had been your partner. He had them unconscious in a heap by the time your eyes had adjusted.

No bullet wounds. He’d done it hand to hand.

You didn’t know exactly what he was hiding, but you knew he was hiding something. You decided not to call him out on it. Not as long as you trusted that whatever he was using his … inexplicable skills for was good.

And trust you did.

Grayson was a good man. Even knowing little about him

Which was why this betrayal hurt so badly.

“Say again?”

You’d sat in relative silence in an unmarked police car for about half an hour on a stakeout, and Richard Grayson had just said the worst sentence you’d ever heard. You’d never been so utterly horrified.

“Peeps popcorn.” He says, holding up the tupperware containing an atrocious biohazard, grinning from ear to ear.

“One more time please?” you fight to keep up your faked anger, but fail in the face of that fucking smile.

Honestly, it should be some sort of crime to smile like that. Like everything would work out in the end, so long as you could keep him smiling at you.

“Peeps. Popcorn.” He says it a third time. He’s trying and failing not to laugh at her, at the way her mouth twists and flails to maintain a frown.

He was tempted to tell her it was in vain. He’d broken Batman, and he’d make her smile too.

Honestly, she had such a pretty smile. Not that he’d say that, she was his partner, and they needed to keep things professional.

“It’s my turn to provide stakeout snacks, and so,” he lifts the lid of the peeps popcorn balls.

“Peeps popcorn.”

She rolls her eyes, and looks out the window of the passenger side. But she’s smiling. “It is one of life’s great injustices,” she huffs “that you can eat like that and maintain your… impressive physique.”

Dick feels his chest puff out a little. While he had been able to tell all along that she had a crush on him, but he’d never risk acting on it. Still, it felt nice to be complemented by her.

“Seriously, do you clock off and just do the ninja warrior course all night or something?” She muses, her head against the window, looking at him out of the side of her eye.

“Not exactly,” he replies, sitting back in his seat, bringing his foot up onto the cushion. “Try one.” he presses, poking her side with the container.

She takes one, rolling her eyes and nibbles at the neon cluster of popcorn.

“No. no.” she gags, “oh that's nasty. Oh, it's so sweet. Why? Why Grayson. Why would you do this to me?” she asks, setting the sticky concoction on the divider between their seats.

Dick just laughs “I am determined to make you a peeps convert.”

“Never, regular marshmallows are fine.”

“Peeps are rainbow.”

“How old are you?”

“There is no age too old to enjoy whimsy, Detective.” he responds, biting into his own.

“Besides, are you implying that rainbow marshmallows are irregular? In this day and age? Tut tut.”

“We are not making me out to be a homophobe over peeps!” she protests, still laughing, slightly taken aback at the audacity.

“If you say so.” he says, stretching his arms over his head and into the backseat. Stakeouts were terrible. He was not built to sit still in a confined space for hours at a time. However, this one provided a useful opportunity he cannot afford to waste.

Not to torment her with his war of attrition for peeps supremacy - though that was fun.

He needed to be sure of something else.

“Well. You being wrong about peeps aside. I … wanted to check back on a file from a few months ago. You uh… you didn’t move the Holt murder file, did you?”

“Holt.” she clicks her tongue in thought “the guy with…” she gestures to her chest.

“That's the guy.”

“Not knowingly. I haven’t had cause to reopen it. No new leads. I tried to track down the kid… He didn’t want a bar for me. Guess I can’t blame him. I offered the help I could… but well… the last time someone helped him his dad got brutally murdered. He’s staying in the tent city by the docks, best I can figure.” She seems to feel guilty as soon as she says it, but Dick doesn’t blame her.

He had paid for that room. If he hadn’t… who knows what might have happened?

“But if someone moved it?” he prompts, not wanting to dwell on that gnawing guilt.

“Wasn’t me.”

Your new partner, Grayson, was a weird guy who ate strange and terrible foods.

He blames himself for what happened to poor Mr Holt. Because he was good to the core, and somehow that had led to something utterly twisted.

He’s also standing on your balcony. On the 20th floor.

And it all makes sense now.

Your apartment isn’t particularly nice. It was small, and frequently disorganised. Especially when you got overly invested in a case.

You’d been texted many gifs of the conspiracy board meme by friends over the years.

Work life balance? Not something you’d ever seen much value in.

And now, your unfairly attractive new partner Grayson was in your apartment, in full vigilante getup.

You need to find a way to be normal about that in ten seconds or less, because he’s staring at you, and you're staring at him, and it's starting to get awkward.

“Hello.” you eek out.

He greets you as Detective, followed by your first and last name.

Unusually formal, for him. Unless… unless he somehow thinks a few inches of fabric in the shape of a wingding is going to fool you.

Unless he thinks he’s got you hoodwinked.

“Nightwing… to what do I owe the pleasure?”

He leans in the doorframe, his hands braced against its top, so he is leaning into your space without touching you, and giving you plenty of ability to step back if you so chose. You don’t.

“I have reason to suspect there’s a serial killer moving though Bludhaven. And that whoever they are, they have someone in your precinct on the payroll.”

You fold your arms, bristling.

“Not sure I appreciate the accusation.” Sure, the bludhaven police department was ridiculously corrupted. But you’d hope that your partner would have at least the trust in you not to think you’d help a serial killer.

“No accusation.” he reassures “a request for help. I need someone I can trust inside the department. And my source says that’s you, sherlock.”

His source? Was he kidding?

No. No he wasn’t.

Oh this was madness.

This was hysterical.

He really, truly thinks that you can’t know him outside of his streetwear. And he’s trying to pass it off like he doesn’t know himself either.

Perhaps you should tell him you know.

But… Grayson and his peeps tomfoolery isn’t the only one who can have fun.

“So… you’re asking me to… what, exactly?” You prompt, unfolding your arms, willing to give him a chance.

Nightwing offers you a smile. It’s slightly different from Richard Graysons.

It’s just as sunny, and it makes you feel just as warm and fuzzy and giggly inside. You have to fight even harder to stop yourself blushing, given how much less this getup leaves to the imagination then his usual dress pants, shirt and tie.

But it’s a little more … brazzen. Flirtatious. More… cocky. Sure, He was always at least a bit of a show off, but as nightwing? He was one of the most capable, incredible people alive, and he wasn’t shy about it.

Oh, you were doomed. But that was a problem for later.

“I’m asking you to keep an eye on the ‘heartless’ case. Holt… he’s not the only one and I think there’s going to be more. And, to be blunt?”

He stands up straight, and puts an arm on your shoulder.

“It’s a big request. But you might be the only person in that station who I have real confidence in.”

You wonder what that says about his relationship with himself, but like so many things with Richard, you don’t ask.

“I can do that.”

“And I understand that it’s dange— I’m sorry, did you just agree?” he cuts himself off, staring at you.

You laugh then, just the once.

You owed him your life many times over as his partner. But as nightwing?

Since he’d come on the scene, you’d actually felt like something mattered. Like change could happen.

Like someone was willing to help the people of Bludhaven not to reap a profit, but because the system you’d once hoped to help restore was broken at its very core, and restoration wasn’t the solution - reformation and fundamental change was. And you didn’t know how to do that.

But then Nightwing had come onto the scene, and started kicking the asses of the worst of the worst, and you had felt like you had when you’d joined the force, bright eyed, bushy tailed, and determined to make a difference.

Before the incident. And every other day, when you’d felt that optimism slowly being crushed to death, into a fine powder and blown away in the wind.

“Yeah.” you say, and agreeing to help is one of the best feelings in the world. You get to help. To make a real difference.

“Bludhaven owes you a hell of a lot, Nightwing… seems like the least I can do is tell you if anything weird comes up.”

“Right. Thank you.” he clearly wasn’t expecting this. Maybe he’d thought it would be a harder sell.

“If I do… have anything for you, how should I alert you?”

He passes you a wingding. “Put this in your window. I’ll check in every few days.”

You raise an eyebrow “all your fancy tech and you don’t have a phone”

He shrugs “phones are traceable. Plausibly just something you picked up on a case as a trinket that you ‘forgot’ to log in evidence left on a windowsill? Lot harder to trace.”

“Fair.” you acknowledge.

“Besides.” he steps backwards onto your balcony once more “your place is on one of my main patrol routes. Can’t let anything happen to the best looking detective Blud’s got.”

You scoff, without any real offence. You know he’s only playing, and that he does, as Richard, respect your intellect more then your appearance - but you suppose as ‘nightwing’ he doesn’t know you that well.

“I think you mean best detective full stop.” you respond, and he gives a small bow of playful deference.

“But of course, sherlock.”

And then he’s gone.

That night, you don’t sleep.

You felt so stupid. He’s nightwing. He’s been nightwing the whole time.

The skills. The disappearing. The way he seemed to just… know things.

The way he tensed whenever someone mentioned Gotham.

… the timing of Robin reportedly becoming a child again.

Had your new partner, Grayson, been Robin?

Had he been using the Batman's archives to solve cases? Was that his so called oracle?

… wait.

Was Bruce Wayne the FUCKING BATMAN?

You screamed into your pillow. You were laying awake, face down in your bed, because now you had realised far too many things in one night.

The first: Your new partner is Nightwing.

The second: Bruce Wayne might be Batman.

The third: you, enchanted by that fucking perfect smile, had agreed to help track down a serial killer stealing hearts.

The fourth: Your new partner, Richard Grayson, between his stupid snacks, the Alfred Pennyworth foundation he’s been working to get off the ground, and his work as Nightwing, will save Bludhaven, you know it to your core.

And the fifth. The worst, and scariest part of your night: You may very well have fallen in love with him.

Chapter two Chapter three

If you read this far, reblog?

Divider credit: @strangergraphics

Tag list:

@jasontoddproblems

@sunnie-angel

@stormz369

First time writing Dick! Feedback is welcome.

[batchilla]

Chapter four - Horror movie behaviour

Red Robin had stayed maybe an hour more to discuss other suspects. He hadn’t pushed about Rodwell, but something about how his gaze had kept drifting to her picture made you think he wanted to.

He left eventually, needing to get back to Gotham, and you had all but fallen into your bed, fully clothed, laying atop the covers, and passed out. You awoke to the sun streaming in through open curtains, feeling groggy, dehydrated, and sure that your time spent living like a pack rat as of late was about to brutally catch up with you.

You don’t care. You can’t. Not now that you know he’s safe. You drag yourself into the kitchenette of your apartment and regain sympathy for your neighbours. The smell is ripe. Or is that you? When did you last shower?

You flick on the coffee machine and pour some cereal. Only to discover the milk has soured. Of course.

You clap your hands together as you come to a new plan. Shower, fresh clothes, and you’d bring in coffee and pastries for the pen. That should score you some points towards keeping - or regaining your job.

Peeling off your clothes and stepping into the hot water, you rehearse your argument.

“I know I disappeared, and that is unacceptable. But please understand I was under extreme stress given the loss of my partner due to presumed death…” You sigh as you lather yourself in body wash. No. No, that won’t work. You can’t appeal to Captain Harrison’s sense of humanity or compassion - you seriously doubt he can even spell the word empathy, let alone demonstrate it.

“You can’t fire me. You don’t have any other female detectives. How would that look?” As you massage in shampoo, you consider it. It’s low. Manipulative. While it’s true his sexism had kept other women out of the bullpen and you got in because he couldn’t deny all the women in his force without being suspicious… It feels slimey to use it. Mc Elroy wouldn’t hesitate to go lower, and that ran in laps around your brain as water circled the drain. You had told yourself that you were looking out for the little guy. That you picked your battles to try and do real good.

What good have you done?

You have agreed to help Nightwing - to help Dick, and for all your scheming and red string what have you done?

Nothing about the system has changed. You have done nothing but fall apart when Dick couldn’t come to your window.

Distantly it registers that you are no longer standing. You have curled up on the floor, back to the tiled wall and knees to your chest. That while you cannot feel tears for all the other water, you must be crying by the heaving of your chest.

You scream. You are so tired and feel so ineffectual and useless and for the first time in so long you feel you have an excuse to leave the force and its corruption and find something that doesn’t wear away at your soul…

But you are going back. Not just going, you are going to have to swallow your pride and plead to be granted your perch back in Bludhaven’s finest, the vultures of misfortune.

You wipe your snot on your forearm and let the water wash it away.

Strangely your little tantrum had helped. You were going back.

You had to go back. You HAD made a difference.

Mc Elroy made a comeback, but you had still kept him off the force for months by speaking out and when you had the bastard that was helping Heartless, you would turn your gaze and fury on Mc Elroy in force. You would watch him like a dog and you would not be complacent again. You’d have his balls on a fucking platter one day.

And no, you hadn’t made grand systemic change. But the urge to was new, inspired by the literal superheroes that were now dropping into your little apartment. You had however, done your best to do right by every case, no every victim, that had crossed your desk, and that had mattered.

You were going back. You were going to get whoever was helping heartless. No you haven't done it yet, but plenty of cases take time. You just had to stick with it.

You push yourself off the tiled floor and to stand. You are about to reach for your conditioner, but instead go very, very, very still.

It’s hard to hear over the crash of water on tile. But there is someone breathing in your bathroom.

The wooden stick holding your loofah isn’t very heavy, but it is the best weapon adjacent thing available to you and would surely hurt when cracked over this creep's head. Then, you’d run for the bedroom where you kept your gun in the top draw when not affixed to your uniform.

You raise it over your shoulder as you throw back the curtain, only for it to be caught by a black gloved hand with blue stripes along the fingers.

You aren’t sure if it is a name or an insult but you yell it all the same. “DICK!”

He’s not even looking, that awful, privacy respecting, heart attack inducing, wonderful man.

By the way he laughs, guilty and uneasy, he must take it as the latter.

“Sorry! Sorry! Please put down the bathing suplies!”

“What is wrong with you?”

You scold, letting the curtain fall back as you turn off the water and grab your towel.

“In my defense-” Dick cuts himself off as he starts out overly passionate, takes a deep breath and tries again.

“I saw the windding on my way across town and let myself in and then well, I don’t make a habit of following attractive women into the bathroom, but you screamed and I thought maybe you needed help. Once you stopped and seemed okay I… look. Sometimes you follow a woman into a bathroom because she’s screaming bloody murder and then you realise that if you leave and shut the door she’ll hear and get freaked out but there’s no not terrifying way for there to be a man in your bathroom so you can’t just sing out… and while you’re trying to work out what to do you get attacked by a loofa. Ya know?”

As you wrap the towel around yourself you take a deep breath. “Can’t say that’s ever happened to me, no.”

Nightwing chuckles wryly. You laugh too. “But I - I’m not mad. I see the logic. Thank you for… coming to help.”

“Anytime. I’ll uh… I’ll be outside.”

It was only a white lie. Not even a lie really. He had seen the wingding. So what if his little brother had said she was in a depression spiral so he’d come to see if there was anything he could do to help? He had seen the wingding coming in.

And it was bad. He made himself useful bagging up some of the takeaway and cracking open a window, but the state of the apartment was nearly as bad as Wally’s room had gotten back in the young justice days. And his dear partner didn’t have super speed to make the tidying easier.

The red string board was near unreadable for the sheer quantity of sticky notes and string. His own face stared back at him. Had she not taken it off out of suspicion he was the suspect still, or because she was reluctant to accept the notion that he had died in that fire as he had wanted everyone to believe?

It had hurt hiding from everyone. Lying was a necessity of the burden he took on, but that didn’t make him somehow immune to the pain of imagining his civilian friends - of imagining his partner - fearing for him. Grieving for him.

He is roused from his thoughts by her reappearing. Having dressed in black slacks, a white top, and a blue jumper.

Nightwing blue? Or did he need to spend time with his younger brothers to have his ego checked?

“Are you okay?”

I’m sorry. Please forgive me. The words burnt unsaid on his tongue, but Nightwing hadn’t faked his death as far as she knew. He had no blame in her mind and owning to it would raise to many questions.

“No.” she admits, sitting on the couch, and he moves to join her.

“Want to talk about it?” he offers, wrapping an arm around her. She snuggles closer and every part of him aches to never let go of this moment. Of her in his arms and safe, the two of them together in a way that can never truly last outside of it.

“Red Robin filled me in but…” she sniffs. Dick hands her a tissue.

“I spent the last… however long… thinking the man I love is dead.”

Dick feels himself tense. “...oh?”

He needs to swallow, because his heart probably shouldn’t be next to his Adam's apple.

She gives him a strange look. Pained and hurt and lost and almost angry.

“My partner. Grayson.”

Contray to what his shower deliema and subsequent loofa attack may suggest, Dick wasn't an idiot. He was one of the worlds foremost detectives. It was incredibly difficult to shake him.

But here he was, holding and attempting to comfort his dear, beloved, yearned for partner while she confessed love - not the passing affection or attraction he had known she felt for him but love - for his alter ego. And he could do practically nothing about it due to the blue V shaped bird on his chest and the black mask on his face.

"But… is he… not a suspect in your investigation?" He asks, his tounge feeling thick and heavy and terribly clumsy in his mouth.

"He is, He was. It isn't him. I know I pointed out a good deal of suspicios circumstances but I … I know he is innocent in this."

She knew he was innocent. She loved him.

He should be all but over the moon. Except he felt numb. Hollow even.

She loved him and he had decived her their entire time of knowing each other. She wanted him and he wanted her in turn and he couldn't ever do a thing about it because even if she found it in his heart to forgive his many, many, many lies, the need to lie would put her in danger as long as she was in her life and he could not let that happen.

"He's a lucky man" he manages after a long and terrible moment of silent guilt.

It hadn't slipped out per say.

It was more that in the recovery of your distress, his closeness after missing him so long, and the self hating guilt of what you would need to do to stop the Heartless mole, you were simply to tired to keep up your act or keep any more secrets from him.

So you tell him the truth. Of why you helped him and of what you know - at least in part.

"He's a lucky man" Dick says awkwardly, and you can't help but smile, supressing the urge to hit him on the arm. You wished for a return of the notion but figured he would not give it in the mask. You'd have to wait - which would be an agony - but no matter what he would say when he last said it, you were sure he would at least do it kindly.

"Do you think he knows?" You ask, wiping at your eyes, smiling as you try to enjoy your game once more.

"I- I doubt he deserves you either way." he croaks, his gloved palms running over his thighs.

"Not what I asked." is your reply. Dick is quite for a moment, his jaw working overtime.

"Well, you may be my favourite detective in Bludhaven… but he seems like a particularly talented one. He … might have worked it out, yeah."

You do laugh then. It's freeing, and had he not been there it seemed unlikely you could have done it. It erupts out of you like a shaken bottle of lemonade.

"Oh I don't know - he may need it spelt out for him. I agree he's an incredibly talented detective… but he does miss some rather obvious hints from me. I- I sampled peeps popcorn for him, and I don't think I would do that for anyone else."

"Peeps popcorn? That sounds… well it sounds pretty tastey to me. Sweet, crunchy, foolproof, cheap, makes you think of a carnival… I have a new favourite detective in bludhaven. You lost serious points for this anti peeps behaviour." He teases, his mask shifting up to accomodate his mask.

"Take your sides. I am and always will be right." You say, pushing off the couch.

Dick doesn't get up just yet, looking at you from his spot on the couch. "I missed you"

he mutters, soft, but you catch it all the same.

"And I you." you reply as you shove your things into your purse.

"So… you'll need your job back yeah? I - I think I can help with that. Or at least I can get you help. I have a good relationship with Mayor Zucco and I can ask her for a letter to back up your reinstatement."

You take a deep breath, and you nod. "I would… appreciate that. I hadn't been quite sure what to do."

"Hey. I aim to serve and protect bludhaven. And her people are better served and better protected by having you on their police force."

You can't help but feel warmed by the pure sincerity in his voice. To be belived in by him, it feels almost recklessly uplifting. As though you could do anything at all. It was giddying.

"You flatter me."

"It's not hard to do. Just need to be honest."

The mayors email is remarkably effective to restoring your positon, and remarkably fast. You almost don't want to know what he has on the Mayor.

It did not howerver help the fact that your reinstatment was clearly against Captian Harrison's wishes, based on the tone of his welcome and the fact that he'd already had most of your personal possessions are in a box in lost and found. Someone has taken your good pen.

It's on officer Jame's desk. Prat. At least hide it.

You set your laptop on your desk and open your inbox. As you skim through for anything particularly urgent, Dick comes swanning into the bullpen. Someone gasps.

You do to, performativly, a few seconds later. "Dick!"

It's less of a performance to push back from your roller chair and cross the room to hug him, pressing him tight against you as you act as though this is the first reunion, for his benifit, and the first you've heard of his saftey for the beinifit of the many prying and peering eyes.

He smells diffrent than this morning, the sweat smell that lingered on his nightwing suit gone and replaced with his regular cologne, mingling with the clean laundry smell of his recently washed shirt and his shampoo, it was enough to send your head spinning with a strange sense of coming home.

"Missed you." he mumbles, his chin resting on the top of your head.

"Fuck you. You scared the snot out of me!" you scold, trying to sound angry but similing anyway.

"And m'sorry. Terrible thing to do to the best partner a detective could want." He says sincerly, squeezing your shoulders.

"Never do that to me again." You insist.

"I solemly swear to never deliberatly have a group of assasins try to kill me, set my home on fire and be forced into witness protection for my own saftey - because it would upset my partner." He says very seriously.

You nod, and take a step back from him. "Good. Good. I will hold you to it."

As you step away, a group of uniformed officers and a few detectives move forward to shake Dick's hand and welcome him back.

You try not to be jealous. He'd been on the run for his life - a reason you agreed was valid to miss work - and your distress and grief was not seen as the same in the slightest.

But something, no someone, or rather their abscence, catches your attention. Officer Janet Rodwell had not moved from her place by the watercooler, her cup crushed, water on her shoes, looking queasy.

You try to meet her eyes, and she turns away.

But you do not surrender easily, and cross the floor towards your friend and ally. Something is wrong, very wrong, and you refuse to let her face it alone.

"Janet? are you okay?" You ask, moving to stand in her path, tilting your head to the side in concern.

She blinks rapidly, wringing her hands. "Yes. Yes of course I just didn't expect to see y- him back so soon."

You nod. It had gone over very well, all things considered. "mm. Things are really looking up. I- I do feel bad."

Janet clapses into her chair, her fingers drumming on her leg as she stares at the laminate wood surface. "For what?"

"Well I said I would watch your back. And then I completly fell apart and abandoned you to the wolves." You admit, sitting on her desk.

"You were grieving. Hurting. I understand." she still doesn't look you in the eye.

"I have some work to do, so if you don't mind?" she contines pointedly, and you take your cue to leave.

As you return to your desk, Dick is looking through his own files, and offers you a warm smile as you sit down.

"I hope Janet is okay. She seems stressed. Or ill."

"It would make sense," Dick says, hand on his chin.

"What, with her son's health."

"Yes…" you mutter, chewing on the inside of your cheek.

"He has a bad heart doesn't he?" you feel your brows go heavy and sink down your face in thought.

"Say uh Dick…" you shut the laptop.

"Who was in charge of the barricade in the Heartless case?"

"Would have been in the notes that went missing." he says thoughtfully.

You nod. Its a thread. You need to get back to your board. You need to think and you cannot do that properly right under the nose of the woman you are coming to suspect. You slip your purse into the draw of your desk and then lock it. Then you wait.

Ten seconds.

Thirty seconds.

A minute.

Two minutes.

Three minutes.

Four minutes.

Five minutes.

Six minutes.

Seven minutes.

Eight minutes.

Nine minutes.

Ten minutes.

Elven minutes.

Twelve minutes.

Thirteen minutes.

Fourteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes.

Sixteen minutes.

Seventeen minutes.

Eighteen minutes.

Nineteen minutes.

Twenty minutes.

Twenty agonising minutes you look busy and wait, till you look over your side and groan in frustration. "Dammit I left my purse at home. I- I need to run and get it. I will be back before you have time to miss me."

Dick looks up at you from his files in confusion. "But I thought-"

"I left it behind. I have to go Dick." you tell him firmly and he seems at least to understand that there is urgancy in your voice.

You stare at your board.

“Is that an objective opinion?” Red Robin had asked you.

It most certianly had not been.

Janet Rodwell had motive. Her little son in desperate need of care. Of a heart. Of exactly what this sick fuck had been harvesting.

She would not have had access to the files traditionally, but given her specific pain and her likely involvement in the case, if your memory severed, no one would have raised an eyebrow to her curiosity.

Her pledges to look out for you - your return of them. Had she been toying with you? Was the commradiere real?

She'd been horrified to see Dick back - was it because he was onto her?

Or… no. She hadn't said Dick to start.

She had begun to say something else. "Y-"

You.

You rip the picture down off the wall and glare at it. She was working for him but… was it a true choice or was it the last desperate attempt of a mother not to burry her little boy?

But how many parents had been burried as children wept because of the involvement of Janet?

You had been so blind. But more then your own foolishness want taunts you is the betrayal. That and the sickening thought of if you had been the friend you had wanted to be would she have confessed?

You watch the sun set over- not that wasn't right it wasn't time yet. But the sky was strangly dark as your gaze fell on the wingding and the dust it accumlilated in the deepest depths of your depression. Strangely dark and … what was that red glow on the greying blue horizon?

There comes a knock on the door. Dick, you assume, here after waiting a suitible time to avert suspicion and to crack open the case.

You pick up the wingding and wipe it on your sweater as you open the door, the picture crumpled in your other hand.

It is not the kind eyes of Dick Grayson that greet you.

Dick is not making a joke or calling you sherlock of Bludhavens best detective or offering awful snacks or terrifying you in the shower.

Janet looks at you with eyes red from witholding guilty tears. She sighs as you take a frightened step back.

"I'm sorry to." she croaks.

"It would be better for you if he had really died. Then maybe you wouldn't have to."

Janet isn't very big, you'd stand a chance. But she saw more feild work then you did, and you'd just come from a significant time rotting, you'd been far fitter before that.

Hopefully, despeartly, you near pray you will get the chance to tell him yourself. But somehow you doubt you will have that joy, or many others in your short remaining life.

Janet lunges at you. You lunge at Janet.

She would have a gun. You know she has one issued to her. She is not going for it. So, it stands to reason she is not wanting you to die by a bullet.

you kick out at her chest. She dodges you, and grabs your arm as you try to move away.

The photograph falls to the floor.

You can't throw a wingding, but it is sharp, so you slash out with it, cutting her face but crucially missing her eye.

She yelps in pain and you look around, frigtend and desperate you dive for your phone. The screen glows a strange red and pulses like a heartbeat. You have been hacked. Cut off.

This was planned, and properly. Not a hit because of what you know, you must have been an intended target for some time. You feel your chances at survival slipping through your fingers.

You scramble for the paper. It costs you lowering your gaze and your back. You get the paper but bending to retrive it results in a blow to your spine as Janet hits you from above and behind with a lamp.

You hit the rug with a grunt, and as Janet flips you over and wraps her hands around your neck, in a last ditch of effort you stab her picture through the wingding and hurl it out the window as hard as you can. Glass breaks. Dick would be able to work it out when he saw the broken glass that something had happened, and the missing photo would tell him at least the who if not how you came to know it. Then with that he could trace back the same things you had.

She has not simply shot you. This attack was planned and she works for heartless which means you…you are an offering. You, for whatever reason, will be the next person found with a hole punched through your heart and nothing in your chest. You have time, at least till her boss arrives.

But as the acrid smell of smoke hits your nose with the breaking glass, you realise with dread that time will not be enough to save you.

Dick is not coming. Not now. Not for hours.

The reddening sky. The grey cloud blown by the wind, faint yet still detectable to the nose - after all, humans are well equipped to detect and flee from our most primal fears.

Dick, Nightwing… neither is coming. He is not coming. The smoke, the red glow in the distant city… you know the spot well. You spent long hours staring at it when you thought him dead.

Your partner, Grayson, is not coming to save you, because he is busy.

Haven is on fire.

Before you get mad at me. I am NOT sorry and I will do this again. Thank you for reading - I hope you enjoyed it, I would offer to pay for therapy but uh... I am very small and I have no money.

Comments and reblogs are my coveted beloved! always happy to yap!

banners are by @toxisyddy. Thank you to everyone who has commented or sent asks.

And as always this story would not be here if not for the lovely @sunnie-angel and her fabulous beta reading abilities so go check out her blog!

[batchilla]

Chapter four - Horror movie behaviour

Red Robin had stayed maybe an hour more to discuss other suspects. He hadn’t pushed about Rodwell, but something about how his gaze had kept drifting to her picture made you think he wanted to.

He left eventually, needing to get back to Gotham, and you had all but fallen into your bed, fully clothed, laying atop the covers, and passed out. You awoke to the sun streaming in through open curtains, feeling groggy, dehydrated, and sure that your time spent living like a pack rat as of late was about to brutally catch up with you.

You don’t care. You can’t. Not now that you know he’s safe. You drag yourself into the kitchenette of your apartment and regain sympathy for your neighbours. The smell is ripe. Or is that you? When did you last shower?

You flick on the coffee machine and pour some cereal. Only to discover the milk has soured. Of course.

You clap your hands together as you come to a new plan. Shower, fresh clothes, and you’d bring in coffee and pastries for the pen. That should score you some points towards keeping - or regaining your job.

Peeling off your clothes and stepping into the hot water, you rehearse your argument.

“I know I disappeared, and that is unacceptable. But please understand I was under extreme stress given the loss of my partner due to presumed death…” You sigh as you lather yourself in body wash. No. No, that won’t work. You can’t appeal to Captain Harrison’s sense of humanity or compassion - you seriously doubt he can even spell the word empathy, let alone demonstrate it.

“You can’t fire me. You don’t have any other female detectives. How would that look?” As you massage in shampoo, you consider it. It’s low. Manipulative. While it’s true his sexism had kept other women out of the bullpen and you got in because he couldn’t deny all the women in his force without being suspicious… It feels slimey to use it. Mc Elroy wouldn’t hesitate to go lower, and that ran in laps around your brain as water circled the drain. You had told yourself that you were looking out for the little guy. That you picked your battles to try and do real good.

What good have you done?

You have agreed to help Nightwing - to help Dick, and for all your scheming and red string what have you done?

Nothing about the system has changed. You have done nothing but fall apart when Dick couldn’t come to your window.

Distantly it registers that you are no longer standing. You have curled up on the floor, back to the tiled wall and knees to your chest. That while you cannot feel tears for all the other water, you must be crying by the heaving of your chest.

You scream. You are so tired and feel so ineffectual and useless and for the first time in so long you feel you have an excuse to leave the force and its corruption and find something that doesn’t wear away at your soul…

But you are going back. Not just going, you are going to have to swallow your pride and plead to be granted your perch back in Bludhaven’s finest, the vultures of misfortune.

You wipe your snot on your forearm and let the water wash it away.

Strangely your little tantrum had helped. You were going back.

You had to go back. You HAD made a difference.

Mc Elroy made a comeback, but you had still kept him off the force for months by speaking out and when you had the bastard that was helping Heartless, you would turn your gaze and fury on Mc Elroy in force. You would watch him like a dog and you would not be complacent again. You’d have his balls on a fucking platter one day.

And no, you hadn’t made grand systemic change. But the urge to was new, inspired by the literal superheroes that were now dropping into your little apartment. You had however, done your best to do right by every case, no every victim, that had crossed your desk, and that had mattered.

You were going back. You were going to get whoever was helping heartless. No you haven't done it yet, but plenty of cases take time. You just had to stick with it.

You push yourself off the tiled floor and to stand. You are about to reach for your conditioner, but instead go very, very, very still.

It’s hard to hear over the crash of water on tile. But there is someone breathing in your bathroom.

The wooden stick holding your loofah isn’t very heavy, but it is the best weapon adjacent thing available to you and would surely hurt when cracked over this creep's head. Then, you’d run for the bedroom where you kept your gun in the top draw when not affixed to your uniform.

You raise it over your shoulder as you throw back the curtain, only for it to be caught by a black gloved hand with blue stripes along the fingers.

You aren’t sure if it is a name or an insult but you yell it all the same. “DICK!”

He’s not even looking, that awful, privacy respecting, heart attack inducing, wonderful man.

By the way he laughs, guilty and uneasy, he must take it as the latter.

“Sorry! Sorry! Please put down the bathing suplies!”

“What is wrong with you?”

You scold, letting the curtain fall back as you turn off the water and grab your towel.

“In my defense-” Dick cuts himself off as he starts out overly passionate, takes a deep breath and tries again.

“I saw the windding on my way across town and let myself in and then well, I don’t make a habit of following attractive women into the bathroom, but you screamed and I thought maybe you needed help. Once you stopped and seemed okay I… look. Sometimes you follow a woman into a bathroom because she’s screaming bloody murder and then you realise that if you leave and shut the door she’ll hear and get freaked out but there’s no not terrifying way for there to be a man in your bathroom so you can’t just sing out… and while you’re trying to work out what to do you get attacked by a loofa. Ya know?”

As you wrap the towel around yourself you take a deep breath. “Can’t say that’s ever happened to me, no.”

Nightwing chuckles wryly. You laugh too. “But I - I’m not mad. I see the logic. Thank you for… coming to help.”

“Anytime. I’ll uh… I’ll be outside.”

It was only a white lie. Not even a lie really. He had seen the wingding. So what if his little brother had said she was in a depression spiral so he’d come to see if there was anything he could do to help? He had seen the wingding coming in.

And it was bad. He made himself useful bagging up some of the takeaway and cracking open a window, but the state of the apartment was nearly as bad as Wally’s room had gotten back in the young justice days. And his dear partner didn’t have super speed to make the tidying easier.

The red string board was near unreadable for the sheer quantity of sticky notes and string. His own face stared back at him. Had she not taken it off out of suspicion he was the suspect still, or because she was reluctant to accept the notion that he had died in that fire as he had wanted everyone to believe?

It had hurt hiding from everyone. Lying was a necessity of the burden he took on, but that didn’t make him somehow immune to the pain of imagining his civilian friends - of imagining his partner - fearing for him. Grieving for him.

He is roused from his thoughts by her reappearing. Having dressed in black slacks, a white top, and a blue jumper.

Nightwing blue? Or did he need to spend time with his younger brothers to have his ego checked?

“Are you okay?”

I’m sorry. Please forgive me. The words burnt unsaid on his tongue, but Nightwing hadn’t faked his death as far as she knew. He had no blame in her mind and owning to it would raise to many questions.

“No.” she admits, sitting on the couch, and he moves to join her.

“Want to talk about it?” he offers, wrapping an arm around her. She snuggles closer and every part of him aches to never let go of this moment. Of her in his arms and safe, the two of them together in a way that can never truly last outside of it.

“Red Robin filled me in but…” she sniffs. Dick hands her a tissue.

“I spent the last… however long… thinking the man I love is dead.”

Dick feels himself tense. “...oh?”

He needs to swallow, because his heart probably shouldn’t be next to his Adam's apple.

She gives him a strange look. Pained and hurt and lost and almost angry.

“My partner. Grayson.”

Contray to what his shower deliema and subsequent loofa attack may suggest, Dick wasn't an idiot. He was one of the worlds foremost detectives. It was incredibly difficult to shake him.

But here he was, holding and attempting to comfort his dear, beloved, yearned for partner while she confessed love - not the passing affection or attraction he had known she felt for him but love - for his alter ego. And he could do practically nothing about it due to the blue V shaped bird on his chest and the black mask on his face.

"But… is he… not a suspect in your investigation?" He asks, his tounge feeling thick and heavy and terribly clumsy in his mouth.

"He is, He was. It isn't him. I know I pointed out a good deal of suspicios circumstances but I … I know he is innocent in this."

She knew he was innocent. She loved him.

He should be all but over the moon. Except he felt numb. Hollow even.

She loved him and he had decived her their entire time of knowing each other. She wanted him and he wanted her in turn and he couldn't ever do a thing about it because even if she found it in his heart to forgive his many, many, many lies, the need to lie would put her in danger as long as she was in her life and he could not let that happen.

"He's a lucky man" he manages after a long and terrible moment of silent guilt.

It hadn't slipped out per say.

It was more that in the recovery of your distress, his closeness after missing him so long, and the self hating guilt of what you would need to do to stop the Heartless mole, you were simply to tired to keep up your act or keep any more secrets from him.

So you tell him the truth. Of why you helped him and of what you know - at least in part.

"He's a lucky man" Dick says awkwardly, and you can't help but smile, supressing the urge to hit him on the arm. You wished for a return of the notion but figured he would not give it in the mask. You'd have to wait - which would be an agony - but no matter what he would say when he last said it, you were sure he would at least do it kindly.

"Do you think he knows?" You ask, wiping at your eyes, smiling as you try to enjoy your game once more.

"I- I doubt he deserves you either way." he croaks, his gloved palms running over his thighs.

"Not what I asked." is your reply. Dick is quite for a moment, his jaw working overtime.

"Well, you may be my favourite detective in Bludhaven… but he seems like a particularly talented one. He … might have worked it out, yeah."

You do laugh then. It's freeing, and had he not been there it seemed unlikely you could have done it. It erupts out of you like a shaken bottle of lemonade.

"Oh I don't know - he may need it spelt out for him. I agree he's an incredibly talented detective… but he does miss some rather obvious hints from me. I- I sampled peeps popcorn for him, and I don't think I would do that for anyone else."

"Peeps popcorn? That sounds… well it sounds pretty tastey to me. Sweet, crunchy, foolproof, cheap, makes you think of a carnival… I have a new favourite detective in bludhaven. You lost serious points for this anti peeps behaviour." He teases, his mask shifting up to accomodate his mask.

"Take your sides. I am and always will be right." You say, pushing off the couch.

Dick doesn't get up just yet, looking at you from his spot on the couch. "I missed you"

he mutters, soft, but you catch it all the same.

"And I you." you reply as you shove your things into your purse.

"So… you'll need your job back yeah? I - I think I can help with that. Or at least I can get you help. I have a good relationship with Mayor Zucco and I can ask her for a letter to back up your reinstatement."

You take a deep breath, and you nod. "I would… appreciate that. I hadn't been quite sure what to do."

"Hey. I aim to serve and protect bludhaven. And her people are better served and better protected by having you on their police force."

You can't help but feel warmed by the pure sincerity in his voice. To be belived in by him, it feels almost recklessly uplifting. As though you could do anything at all. It was giddying.

"You flatter me."

"It's not hard to do. Just need to be honest."

The mayors email is remarkably effective to restoring your positon, and remarkably fast. You almost don't want to know what he has on the Mayor.

It did not howerver help the fact that your reinstatment was clearly against Captian Harrison's wishes, based on the tone of his welcome and the fact that he'd already had most of your personal possessions are in a box in lost and found. Someone has taken your good pen.

It's on officer Jame's desk. Prat. At least hide it.

You set your laptop on your desk and open your inbox. As you skim through for anything particularly urgent, Dick comes swanning into the bullpen. Someone gasps.

You do to, performativly, a few seconds later. "Dick!"

It's less of a performance to push back from your roller chair and cross the room to hug him, pressing him tight against you as you act as though this is the first reunion, for his benifit, and the first you've heard of his saftey for the beinifit of the many prying and peering eyes.

He smells diffrent than this morning, the sweat smell that lingered on his nightwing suit gone and replaced with his regular cologne, mingling with the clean laundry smell of his recently washed shirt and his shampoo, it was enough to send your head spinning with a strange sense of coming home.

"Missed you." he mumbles, his chin resting on the top of your head.

"Fuck you. You scared the snot out of me!" you scold, trying to sound angry but similing anyway.

"And m'sorry. Terrible thing to do to the best partner a detective could want." He says sincerly, squeezing your shoulders.

"Never do that to me again." You insist.

"I solemly swear to never deliberatly have a group of assasins try to kill me, set my home on fire and be forced into witness protection for my own saftey - because it would upset my partner." He says very seriously.

You nod, and take a step back from him. "Good. Good. I will hold you to it."

As you step away, a group of uniformed officers and a few detectives move forward to shake Dick's hand and welcome him back.

You try not to be jealous. He'd been on the run for his life - a reason you agreed was valid to miss work - and your distress and grief was not seen as the same in the slightest.

But something, no someone, or rather their abscence, catches your attention. Officer Janet Rodwell had not moved from her place by the watercooler, her cup crushed, water on her shoes, looking queasy.

You try to meet her eyes, and she turns away.

But you do not surrender easily, and cross the floor towards your friend and ally. Something is wrong, very wrong, and you refuse to let her face it alone.

"Janet? are you okay?" You ask, moving to stand in her path, tilting your head to the side in concern.

She blinks rapidly, wringing her hands. "Yes. Yes of course I just didn't expect to see y- him back so soon."

You nod. It had gone over very well, all things considered. "mm. Things are really looking up. I- I do feel bad."

Janet clapses into her chair, her fingers drumming on her leg as she stares at the laminate wood surface. "For what?"

"Well I said I would watch your back. And then I completly fell apart and abandoned you to the wolves." You admit, sitting on her desk.

"You were grieving. Hurting. I understand." she still doesn't look you in the eye.

"I have some work to do, so if you don't mind?" she contines pointedly, and you take your cue to leave.

As you return to your desk, Dick is looking through his own files, and offers you a warm smile as you sit down.

"I hope Janet is okay. She seems stressed. Or ill."

"It would make sense," Dick says, hand on his chin.

"What, with her son's health."

"Yes…" you mutter, chewing on the inside of your cheek.

"He has a bad heart doesn't he?" you feel your brows go heavy and sink down your face in thought.

"Say uh Dick…" you shut the laptop.

"Who was in charge of the barricade in the Heartless case?"

"Would have been in the notes that went missing." he says thoughtfully.

You nod. Its a thread. You need to get back to your board. You need to think and you cannot do that properly right under the nose of the woman you are coming to suspect. You slip your purse into the draw of your desk and then lock it. Then you wait.

Ten seconds.

Thirty seconds.

A minute.

Two minutes.

Three minutes.

Four minutes.

Five minutes.

Six minutes.

Seven minutes.

Eight minutes.

Nine minutes.

Ten minutes.

Elven minutes.

Twelve minutes.

Thirteen minutes.

Fourteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes.

Sixteen minutes.

Seventeen minutes.

Eighteen minutes.

Nineteen minutes.

Twenty minutes.

Twenty agonising minutes you look busy and wait, till you look over your side and groan in frustration. "Dammit I left my purse at home. I- I need to run and get it. I will be back before you have time to miss me."

Dick looks up at you from his files in confusion. "But I thought-"

"I left it behind. I have to go Dick." you tell him firmly and he seems at least to understand that there is urgancy in your voice.

You stare at your board.

“Is that an objective opinion?” Red Robin had asked you.

It most certianly had not been.

Janet Rodwell had motive. Her little son in desperate need of care. Of a heart. Of exactly what this sick fuck had been harvesting.

She would not have had access to the files traditionally, but given her specific pain and her likely involvement in the case, if your memory severed, no one would have raised an eyebrow to her curiosity.

Her pledges to look out for you - your return of them. Had she been toying with you? Was the commradiere real?

She'd been horrified to see Dick back - was it because he was onto her?

Or… no. She hadn't said Dick to start.

She had begun to say something else. "Y-"

You.

You rip the picture down off the wall and glare at it. She was working for him but… was it a true choice or was it the last desperate attempt of a mother not to burry her little boy?

But how many parents had been burried as children wept because of the involvement of Janet?

You had been so blind. But more then your own foolishness want taunts you is the betrayal. That and the sickening thought of if you had been the friend you had wanted to be would she have confessed?

You watch the sun set over- not that wasn't right it wasn't time yet. But the sky was strangly dark as your gaze fell on the wingding and the dust it accumlilated in the deepest depths of your depression. Strangely dark and … what was that red glow on the greying blue horizon?

There comes a knock on the door. Dick, you assume, here after waiting a suitible time to avert suspicion and to crack open the case.

You pick up the wingding and wipe it on your sweater as you open the door, the picture crumpled in your other hand.

It is not the kind eyes of Dick Grayson that greet you.

Dick is not making a joke or calling you sherlock of Bludhavens best detective or offering awful snacks or terrifying you in the shower.

Janet looks at you with eyes red from witholding guilty tears. She sighs as you take a frightened step back.

"I'm sorry to." she croaks.

"It would be better for you if he had really died. Then maybe you wouldn't have to."

Janet isn't very big, you'd stand a chance. But she saw more feild work then you did, and you'd just come from a significant time rotting, you'd been far fitter before that.

Hopefully, despeartly, you near pray you will get the chance to tell him yourself. But somehow you doubt you will have that joy, or many others in your short remaining life.

Janet lunges at you. You lunge at Janet.

She would have a gun. You know she has one issued to her. She is not going for it. So, it stands to reason she is not wanting you to die by a bullet.

you kick out at her chest. She dodges you, and grabs your arm as you try to move away.

The photograph falls to the floor.

You can't throw a wingding, but it is sharp, so you slash out with it, cutting her face but crucially missing her eye.

She yelps in pain and you look around, frigtend and desperate you dive for your phone. The screen glows a strange red and pulses like a heartbeat. You have been hacked. Cut off.

This was planned, and properly. Not a hit because of what you know, you must have been an intended target for some time. You feel your chances at survival slipping through your fingers.

You scramble for the paper. It costs you lowering your gaze and your back. You get the paper but bending to retrive it results in a blow to your spine as Janet hits you from above and behind with a lamp.

You hit the rug with a grunt, and as Janet flips you over and wraps her hands around your neck, in a last ditch of effort you stab her picture through the wingding and hurl it out the window as hard as you can. Glass breaks. Dick would be able to work it out when he saw the broken glass that something had happened, and the missing photo would tell him at least the who if not how you came to know it. Then with that he could trace back the same things you had.

She has not simply shot you. This attack was planned and she works for heartless which means you…you are an offering. You, for whatever reason, will be the next person found with a hole punched through your heart and nothing in your chest. You have time, at least till her boss arrives.

But as the acrid smell of smoke hits your nose with the breaking glass, you realise with dread that time will not be enough to save you.

Dick is not coming. Not now. Not for hours.

The reddening sky. The grey cloud blown by the wind, faint yet still detectable to the nose - after all, humans are well equipped to detect and flee from our most primal fears.

Dick, Nightwing… neither is coming. He is not coming. The smoke, the red glow in the distant city… you know the spot well. You spent long hours staring at it when you thought him dead.

Your partner, Grayson, is not coming to save you, because he is busy.

Haven is on fire.

Before you get mad at me. I am NOT sorry and I will do this again. Thank you for reading - I hope you enjoyed it, I would offer to pay for therapy but uh... I am very small and I have no money.

Comments and reblogs are my coveted beloved! always happy to yap!

banners are by @toxisyddy. Thank you to everyone who has commented or sent asks.

And as always this story would not be here if not for the lovely @sunnie-angel and her fabulous beta reading abilities so go check out her blog!

[batchilla]

I do not force xreaders to be blank slates. I do not leave hate comments if a xreader character behaves in a way I wouldn’t. I don’t demand part two’s. I let the writer take me on a journey and enjoy the fic as they intended as it is their labor of love. And if I don’t enjoy the fic? I EXIT THE FIC AND SAY NOTHING TO THE AUTHOR!!!

[batchilla]

Chapter four - Horror movie behaviour

Red Robin had stayed maybe an hour more to discuss other suspects. He hadn’t pushed about Rodwell, but something about how his gaze had kept drifting to her picture made you think he wanted to.

He left eventually, needing to get back to Gotham, and you had all but fallen into your bed, fully clothed, laying atop the covers, and passed out. You awoke to the sun streaming in through open curtains, feeling groggy, dehydrated, and sure that your time spent living like a pack rat as of late was about to brutally catch up with you.

You don’t care. You can’t. Not now that you know he’s safe. You drag yourself into the kitchenette of your apartment and regain sympathy for your neighbours. The smell is ripe. Or is that you? When did you last shower?

You flick on the coffee machine and pour some cereal. Only to discover the milk has soured. Of course.

You clap your hands together as you come to a new plan. Shower, fresh clothes, and you’d bring in coffee and pastries for the pen. That should score you some points towards keeping - or regaining your job.

Peeling off your clothes and stepping into the hot water, you rehearse your argument.

“I know I disappeared, and that is unacceptable. But please understand I was under extreme stress given the loss of my partner due to presumed death…” You sigh as you lather yourself in body wash. No. No, that won’t work. You can’t appeal to Captain Harrison’s sense of humanity or compassion - you seriously doubt he can even spell the word empathy, let alone demonstrate it.

“You can’t fire me. You don’t have any other female detectives. How would that look?” As you massage in shampoo, you consider it. It’s low. Manipulative. While it’s true his sexism had kept other women out of the bullpen and you got in because he couldn’t deny all the women in his force without being suspicious… It feels slimey to use it. Mc Elroy wouldn’t hesitate to go lower, and that ran in laps around your brain as water circled the drain. You had told yourself that you were looking out for the little guy. That you picked your battles to try and do real good.

What good have you done?

You have agreed to help Nightwing - to help Dick, and for all your scheming and red string what have you done?

Nothing about the system has changed. You have done nothing but fall apart when Dick couldn’t come to your window.

Distantly it registers that you are no longer standing. You have curled up on the floor, back to the tiled wall and knees to your chest. That while you cannot feel tears for all the other water, you must be crying by the heaving of your chest.

You scream. You are so tired and feel so ineffectual and useless and for the first time in so long you feel you have an excuse to leave the force and its corruption and find something that doesn’t wear away at your soul…

But you are going back. Not just going, you are going to have to swallow your pride and plead to be granted your perch back in Bludhaven’s finest, the vultures of misfortune.

You wipe your snot on your forearm and let the water wash it away.

Strangely your little tantrum had helped. You were going back.

You had to go back. You HAD made a difference.

Mc Elroy made a comeback, but you had still kept him off the force for months by speaking out and when you had the bastard that was helping Heartless, you would turn your gaze and fury on Mc Elroy in force. You would watch him like a dog and you would not be complacent again. You’d have his balls on a fucking platter one day.

And no, you hadn’t made grand systemic change. But the urge to was new, inspired by the literal superheroes that were now dropping into your little apartment. You had however, done your best to do right by every case, no every victim, that had crossed your desk, and that had mattered.

You were going back. You were going to get whoever was helping heartless. No you haven't done it yet, but plenty of cases take time. You just had to stick with it.

You push yourself off the tiled floor and to stand. You are about to reach for your conditioner, but instead go very, very, very still.

It’s hard to hear over the crash of water on tile. But there is someone breathing in your bathroom.

The wooden stick holding your loofah isn’t very heavy, but it is the best weapon adjacent thing available to you and would surely hurt when cracked over this creep's head. Then, you’d run for the bedroom where you kept your gun in the top draw when not affixed to your uniform.

You raise it over your shoulder as you throw back the curtain, only for it to be caught by a black gloved hand with blue stripes along the fingers.

You aren’t sure if it is a name or an insult but you yell it all the same. “DICK!”

He’s not even looking, that awful, privacy respecting, heart attack inducing, wonderful man.

By the way he laughs, guilty and uneasy, he must take it as the latter.

“Sorry! Sorry! Please put down the bathing suplies!”

“What is wrong with you?”

You scold, letting the curtain fall back as you turn off the water and grab your towel.

“In my defense-” Dick cuts himself off as he starts out overly passionate, takes a deep breath and tries again.

“I saw the windding on my way across town and let myself in and then well, I don’t make a habit of following attractive women into the bathroom, but you screamed and I thought maybe you needed help. Once you stopped and seemed okay I… look. Sometimes you follow a woman into a bathroom because she’s screaming bloody murder and then you realise that if you leave and shut the door she’ll hear and get freaked out but there’s no not terrifying way for there to be a man in your bathroom so you can’t just sing out… and while you’re trying to work out what to do you get attacked by a loofa. Ya know?”

As you wrap the towel around yourself you take a deep breath. “Can’t say that’s ever happened to me, no.”

Nightwing chuckles wryly. You laugh too. “But I - I’m not mad. I see the logic. Thank you for… coming to help.”

“Anytime. I’ll uh… I’ll be outside.”

It was only a white lie. Not even a lie really. He had seen the wingding. So what if his little brother had said she was in a depression spiral so he’d come to see if there was anything he could do to help? He had seen the wingding coming in.

And it was bad. He made himself useful bagging up some of the takeaway and cracking open a window, but the state of the apartment was nearly as bad as Wally’s room had gotten back in the young justice days. And his dear partner didn’t have super speed to make the tidying easier.

The red string board was near unreadable for the sheer quantity of sticky notes and string. His own face stared back at him. Had she not taken it off out of suspicion he was the suspect still, or because she was reluctant to accept the notion that he had died in that fire as he had wanted everyone to believe?

It had hurt hiding from everyone. Lying was a necessity of the burden he took on, but that didn’t make him somehow immune to the pain of imagining his civilian friends - of imagining his partner - fearing for him. Grieving for him.

He is roused from his thoughts by her reappearing. Having dressed in black slacks, a white top, and a blue jumper.

Nightwing blue? Or did he need to spend time with his younger brothers to have his ego checked?

“Are you okay?”

I’m sorry. Please forgive me. The words burnt unsaid on his tongue, but Nightwing hadn’t faked his death as far as she knew. He had no blame in her mind and owning to it would raise to many questions.

“No.” she admits, sitting on the couch, and he moves to join her.

“Want to talk about it?” he offers, wrapping an arm around her. She snuggles closer and every part of him aches to never let go of this moment. Of her in his arms and safe, the two of them together in a way that can never truly last outside of it.

“Red Robin filled me in but…” she sniffs. Dick hands her a tissue.

“I spent the last… however long… thinking the man I love is dead.”

Dick feels himself tense. “...oh?”

He needs to swallow, because his heart probably shouldn’t be next to his Adam's apple.

She gives him a strange look. Pained and hurt and lost and almost angry.

“My partner. Grayson.”

Contray to what his shower deliema and subsequent loofa attack may suggest, Dick wasn't an idiot. He was one of the worlds foremost detectives. It was incredibly difficult to shake him.

But here he was, holding and attempting to comfort his dear, beloved, yearned for partner while she confessed love - not the passing affection or attraction he had known she felt for him but love - for his alter ego. And he could do practically nothing about it due to the blue V shaped bird on his chest and the black mask on his face.

"But… is he… not a suspect in your investigation?" He asks, his tounge feeling thick and heavy and terribly clumsy in his mouth.

"He is, He was. It isn't him. I know I pointed out a good deal of suspicios circumstances but I … I know he is innocent in this."

She knew he was innocent. She loved him.

He should be all but over the moon. Except he felt numb. Hollow even.

She loved him and he had decived her their entire time of knowing each other. She wanted him and he wanted her in turn and he couldn't ever do a thing about it because even if she found it in his heart to forgive his many, many, many lies, the need to lie would put her in danger as long as she was in her life and he could not let that happen.

"He's a lucky man" he manages after a long and terrible moment of silent guilt.

It hadn't slipped out per say.

It was more that in the recovery of your distress, his closeness after missing him so long, and the self hating guilt of what you would need to do to stop the Heartless mole, you were simply to tired to keep up your act or keep any more secrets from him.

So you tell him the truth. Of why you helped him and of what you know - at least in part.

"He's a lucky man" Dick says awkwardly, and you can't help but smile, supressing the urge to hit him on the arm. You wished for a return of the notion but figured he would not give it in the mask. You'd have to wait - which would be an agony - but no matter what he would say when he last said it, you were sure he would at least do it kindly.

"Do you think he knows?" You ask, wiping at your eyes, smiling as you try to enjoy your game once more.

"I- I doubt he deserves you either way." he croaks, his gloved palms running over his thighs.

"Not what I asked." is your reply. Dick is quite for a moment, his jaw working overtime.

"Well, you may be my favourite detective in Bludhaven… but he seems like a particularly talented one. He … might have worked it out, yeah."

You do laugh then. It's freeing, and had he not been there it seemed unlikely you could have done it. It erupts out of you like a shaken bottle of lemonade.

"Oh I don't know - he may need it spelt out for him. I agree he's an incredibly talented detective… but he does miss some rather obvious hints from me. I- I sampled peeps popcorn for him, and I don't think I would do that for anyone else."

"Peeps popcorn? That sounds… well it sounds pretty tastey to me. Sweet, crunchy, foolproof, cheap, makes you think of a carnival… I have a new favourite detective in bludhaven. You lost serious points for this anti peeps behaviour." He teases, his mask shifting up to accomodate his mask.

"Take your sides. I am and always will be right." You say, pushing off the couch.

Dick doesn't get up just yet, looking at you from his spot on the couch. "I missed you"

he mutters, soft, but you catch it all the same.

"And I you." you reply as you shove your things into your purse.

"So… you'll need your job back yeah? I - I think I can help with that. Or at least I can get you help. I have a good relationship with Mayor Zucco and I can ask her for a letter to back up your reinstatement."

You take a deep breath, and you nod. "I would… appreciate that. I hadn't been quite sure what to do."

"Hey. I aim to serve and protect bludhaven. And her people are better served and better protected by having you on their police force."

You can't help but feel warmed by the pure sincerity in his voice. To be belived in by him, it feels almost recklessly uplifting. As though you could do anything at all. It was giddying.

"You flatter me."

"It's not hard to do. Just need to be honest."

The mayors email is remarkably effective to restoring your positon, and remarkably fast. You almost don't want to know what he has on the Mayor.

It did not howerver help the fact that your reinstatment was clearly against Captian Harrison's wishes, based on the tone of his welcome and the fact that he'd already had most of your personal possessions are in a box in lost and found. Someone has taken your good pen.

It's on officer Jame's desk. Prat. At least hide it.

You set your laptop on your desk and open your inbox. As you skim through for anything particularly urgent, Dick comes swanning into the bullpen. Someone gasps.

You do to, performativly, a few seconds later. "Dick!"

It's less of a performance to push back from your roller chair and cross the room to hug him, pressing him tight against you as you act as though this is the first reunion, for his benifit, and the first you've heard of his saftey for the beinifit of the many prying and peering eyes.

He smells diffrent than this morning, the sweat smell that lingered on his nightwing suit gone and replaced with his regular cologne, mingling with the clean laundry smell of his recently washed shirt and his shampoo, it was enough to send your head spinning with a strange sense of coming home.

"Missed you." he mumbles, his chin resting on the top of your head.

"Fuck you. You scared the snot out of me!" you scold, trying to sound angry but similing anyway.

"And m'sorry. Terrible thing to do to the best partner a detective could want." He says sincerly, squeezing your shoulders.

"Never do that to me again." You insist.

"I solemly swear to never deliberatly have a group of assasins try to kill me, set my home on fire and be forced into witness protection for my own saftey - because it would upset my partner." He says very seriously.

You nod, and take a step back from him. "Good. Good. I will hold you to it."

As you step away, a group of uniformed officers and a few detectives move forward to shake Dick's hand and welcome him back.

You try not to be jealous. He'd been on the run for his life - a reason you agreed was valid to miss work - and your distress and grief was not seen as the same in the slightest.

But something, no someone, or rather their abscence, catches your attention. Officer Janet Rodwell had not moved from her place by the watercooler, her cup crushed, water on her shoes, looking queasy.

You try to meet her eyes, and she turns away.

But you do not surrender easily, and cross the floor towards your friend and ally. Something is wrong, very wrong, and you refuse to let her face it alone.

"Janet? are you okay?" You ask, moving to stand in her path, tilting your head to the side in concern.

She blinks rapidly, wringing her hands. "Yes. Yes of course I just didn't expect to see y- him back so soon."

You nod. It had gone over very well, all things considered. "mm. Things are really looking up. I- I do feel bad."

Janet clapses into her chair, her fingers drumming on her leg as she stares at the laminate wood surface. "For what?"

"Well I said I would watch your back. And then I completly fell apart and abandoned you to the wolves." You admit, sitting on her desk.

"You were grieving. Hurting. I understand." she still doesn't look you in the eye.

"I have some work to do, so if you don't mind?" she contines pointedly, and you take your cue to leave.

As you return to your desk, Dick is looking through his own files, and offers you a warm smile as you sit down.

"I hope Janet is okay. She seems stressed. Or ill."

"It would make sense," Dick says, hand on his chin.

"What, with her son's health."

"Yes…" you mutter, chewing on the inside of your cheek.

"He has a bad heart doesn't he?" you feel your brows go heavy and sink down your face in thought.

"Say uh Dick…" you shut the laptop.

"Who was in charge of the barricade in the Heartless case?"

"Would have been in the notes that went missing." he says thoughtfully.

You nod. Its a thread. You need to get back to your board. You need to think and you cannot do that properly right under the nose of the woman you are coming to suspect. You slip your purse into the draw of your desk and then lock it. Then you wait.

Ten seconds.

Thirty seconds.

A minute.

Two minutes.

Three minutes.

Four minutes.

Five minutes.

Six minutes.

Seven minutes.

Eight minutes.

Nine minutes.

Ten minutes.

Elven minutes.

Twelve minutes.

Thirteen minutes.

Fourteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes.

Sixteen minutes.

Seventeen minutes.

Eighteen minutes.

Nineteen minutes.

Twenty minutes.

Twenty agonising minutes you look busy and wait, till you look over your side and groan in frustration. "Dammit I left my purse at home. I- I need to run and get it. I will be back before you have time to miss me."

Dick looks up at you from his files in confusion. "But I thought-"

"I left it behind. I have to go Dick." you tell him firmly and he seems at least to understand that there is urgancy in your voice.

You stare at your board.

“Is that an objective opinion?” Red Robin had asked you.

It most certianly had not been.

Janet Rodwell had motive. Her little son in desperate need of care. Of a heart. Of exactly what this sick fuck had been harvesting.

She would not have had access to the files traditionally, but given her specific pain and her likely involvement in the case, if your memory severed, no one would have raised an eyebrow to her curiosity.

Her pledges to look out for you - your return of them. Had she been toying with you? Was the commradiere real?

She'd been horrified to see Dick back - was it because he was onto her?

Or… no. She hadn't said Dick to start.

She had begun to say something else. "Y-"

You.

You rip the picture down off the wall and glare at it. She was working for him but… was it a true choice or was it the last desperate attempt of a mother not to burry her little boy?

But how many parents had been burried as children wept because of the involvement of Janet?

You had been so blind. But more then your own foolishness want taunts you is the betrayal. That and the sickening thought of if you had been the friend you had wanted to be would she have confessed?

You watch the sun set over- not that wasn't right it wasn't time yet. But the sky was strangly dark as your gaze fell on the wingding and the dust it accumlilated in the deepest depths of your depression. Strangely dark and … what was that red glow on the greying blue horizon?

There comes a knock on the door. Dick, you assume, here after waiting a suitible time to avert suspicion and to crack open the case.

You pick up the wingding and wipe it on your sweater as you open the door, the picture crumpled in your other hand.

It is not the kind eyes of Dick Grayson that greet you.

Dick is not making a joke or calling you sherlock of Bludhavens best detective or offering awful snacks or terrifying you in the shower.

Janet looks at you with eyes red from witholding guilty tears. She sighs as you take a frightened step back.

"I'm sorry to." she croaks.

"It would be better for you if he had really died. Then maybe you wouldn't have to."

Janet isn't very big, you'd stand a chance. But she saw more feild work then you did, and you'd just come from a significant time rotting, you'd been far fitter before that.

Hopefully, despeartly, you near pray you will get the chance to tell him yourself. But somehow you doubt you will have that joy, or many others in your short remaining life.

Janet lunges at you. You lunge at Janet.

She would have a gun. You know she has one issued to her. She is not going for it. So, it stands to reason she is not wanting you to die by a bullet.

you kick out at her chest. She dodges you, and grabs your arm as you try to move away.

The photograph falls to the floor.

You can't throw a wingding, but it is sharp, so you slash out with it, cutting her face but crucially missing her eye.

She yelps in pain and you look around, frigtend and desperate you dive for your phone. The screen glows a strange red and pulses like a heartbeat. You have been hacked. Cut off.

This was planned, and properly. Not a hit because of what you know, you must have been an intended target for some time. You feel your chances at survival slipping through your fingers.

You scramble for the paper. It costs you lowering your gaze and your back. You get the paper but bending to retrive it results in a blow to your spine as Janet hits you from above and behind with a lamp.

You hit the rug with a grunt, and as Janet flips you over and wraps her hands around your neck, in a last ditch of effort you stab her picture through the wingding and hurl it out the window as hard as you can. Glass breaks. Dick would be able to work it out when he saw the broken glass that something had happened, and the missing photo would tell him at least the who if not how you came to know it. Then with that he could trace back the same things you had.

She has not simply shot you. This attack was planned and she works for heartless which means you…you are an offering. You, for whatever reason, will be the next person found with a hole punched through your heart and nothing in your chest. You have time, at least till her boss arrives.

But as the acrid smell of smoke hits your nose with the breaking glass, you realise with dread that time will not be enough to save you.

Dick is not coming. Not now. Not for hours.

The reddening sky. The grey cloud blown by the wind, faint yet still detectable to the nose - after all, humans are well equipped to detect and flee from our most primal fears.

Dick, Nightwing… neither is coming. He is not coming. The smoke, the red glow in the distant city… you know the spot well. You spent long hours staring at it when you thought him dead.

Your partner, Grayson, is not coming to save you, because he is busy.

Haven is on fire.

Before you get mad at me. I am NOT sorry and I will do this again. Thank you for reading - I hope you enjoyed it, I would offer to pay for therapy but uh... I am very small and I have no money.

Comments and reblogs are my coveted beloved! always happy to yap!

banners are by @toxisyddy. Thank you to everyone who has commented or sent asks.

And as always this story would not be here if not for the lovely @sunnie-angel and her fabulous beta reading abilities so go check out her blog!

[batchilla]

— DC Line Dividers

for my dc people ^^ tbh these are just some very basic ones i made for my writing blog but wanted to share in case anyone else wanted to use them! all dividers are free to use! credit is not required <3

(if anyone wants colours changed/other variations just shoot me a message! i have too much free time rn :,)

[batchilla]

.

I miss ur writing :(

me too but you know who else actually actively exists and is even better?

@sunnie-angel

[batchilla]

It’ll still be by a lot but there might end up being six total chapters not five. Who can say. Not me I just work here.

Good news ladies non binarys and gentlemen it seems YKIKR part 4 will be the longest part to date and by a lot.

[batchilla]

Good news ladies non binarys and gentlemen it seems YKIKR part 4 will be the longest part to date and by a lot.

[batchilla]

still thinking about this reply I got 2 years ago from a British person

because mmm yeah that’s a spice blend that rocks…

[batchilla]

Oh you’re tired?? Well i know a GREAT place to nap it’s called my chest with my arms holding you ever so gently yeah it’s got great reviews

[batchilla]

asking for praise for a thing you made feels so humiliating like oooh look at me I’m a little animal and I did a trick and made a thing can I have pets and treats about it. and then somebody tells you it’s good and you understand why golden retrievers are the way they are

[batchilla]

[batchilla]

LOOK IT'S MY MENTAL ILLNESS REMERGING I will never be normal about this fic. if I am normal about this story, shoot me its an alien doppelgänger.

The Awakening

conrad oxford x reader summary: conrad awakens to a world that isn't quite what he remembers. healing will be a long road. a complete (mostly) canon compliant rewrite of the king's man (no knowledge of the movie is necessary to read) tags: grief, swearing, light suicidal ideation, angst, off screen death, injury recovery, yearning rating: mature | wc: 12.1k a/n: it has been.....a very long time since the last update. to make up for it, this chapter is quite long though it does get quite dark in some places. please send all the love to @batchilla for beta reading this and keeping me going during my hiatus. part 8 | series masterlist | ao3

The world seeps back in in pieces. First sound, the sound of your lovely voice. Must be a dream for there is no power on earth that could make you change your mind once it was made up. Had Conrad's eyes not felt like 5 kilogram weights were attached to his lids and that his body was as weak as a doormouse, perhaps this could have been any of the many long days spooling out in his memory. Touch comes next. Soft flannel sheets, the comfortable worn-in cotton pyjamas he'd refused to replace, the warmth of a fire. Smell sort of slithers in unnoticed. A deep inhale just like any other and then there's the scent of laundry soap, faint traces of woodsmoke, the astringency of antiseptic and something vaguely medicinal he can't quite place. He feels weak, newborn and coltish.

There's a voice still chattering away, one he recognizes. Strange, though. It's not a voice he'd expect to hear, not after…

"—can't remember it snowing this heavily since we were oh, perhaps eleven?" you murmur, as if from a very far distance.

"Sounds like Christmas," he murmurs. He'd shout it if he could, if he thought his throat would sustain it, simply to hear more of your voice. The excited noise that could only have come from you could kindly be compared to a pig's shriek but it's the sweetest thing he's ever heard.

The room is not quite dark, the lights glowing merrily against the darkness. It's familiar. All too familiar. In fact, if he didn't know better he'd think that he was in his own home in his own room. But that can't possibly be correct, otherwise you wouldn't be there with him.

"I'll have you know it's past Christmas," you reply. "You've gone and slept through all the holidays."

He gapes at that. It had been— sometime in March he thinks, when he'd— there's something there. Something terrible on the tip of the tongue but with the fog in his brain he cannot quite breach its sealed walls.

He hardly notices you fetching water for him until the glass is pressed to his lips, one of your hands supporting the nape of his neck. The contact burns, a shiver sent right through him that you misunderstand to be from the winter chill. He needs no mirror to know that heat has suffused his face.

"What else have I missed?" he asks, leaning back on the pillows with an exhausted air. It is galling, how weak he is from the mere effort of drinking with help.

"You should congratulate me," you tell him authoritatively. "I'm engaged."

That's worse, worse than when the— the something hit. His stomach flipping inside out and the air ripped from his lungs worse than when the earth had opened up. When? When had it opened up beneath him? His tender heart still bleeding, ribs cracked open for your disdain at its meagre offering.

"Whu—but—" he splutters incoherently. "To who? Thomassen?"

You sigh shaking your head in disappointment. "Well I've only gone and told you five times already."

He stares mouth agape, eyes starting to water from devastation. He's late. He's too damn late. First with understanding his own feelings, then that stupid letter and it's poor excuse of an apology. Now, now he is perpetually too late and it is all simply his fault. He stares down at his hands fisted in his blankets dejectedly. What is he to do now? Any well wishes will be a lie and he cannot lie to you anymore. Not if he is to earn your forgiveness back.

"To you, you silly sod."

His head snaps up with a force that immediately sends his vision lurching. So it's not— there's still— how?

"Though don't think that I won't be keeping you to your promise of earning back my trust. Honestly, what were you thinking?" you admonish him and he deserves it.

"But I haven't— I haven't asked you yet," he croaks, confusion plain as the nose on his face. He glances at your hand, the same hand that had cradled him so steadily. "You haven't got a ring."

"Well no, but your father did make a rather impassioned speech to mine about how you'd been planning to ask for his permission upon your triumphant return — do try not to forget the details this time — and now as far as the world knows, we're engaged. I won't have to be sent off to the Colonies to some awful finishing school and I won't have to marry Lucius Thomassen or your father anymore."

And it's all— you're speaking too fast, the words melting into the felted haze of his woollen thoughts, tangled and dense. Impenetrable.

"This time? Wait what do you mean you won't have to marry Father?" he gasps, floundering on the shores of confusion. Father? What's Father to do with anything? Oh God, Father.

"Well you've woken up four or five times already," you tell him.

How many times has he woken? How many times has this conversation played out? Is he…why can't he remember?

"But not for very long and you never seem to really remember what happened the last time," you continue, patting the back of his hand gently. He wishes he could reach out and capture your hand with his, the only thing that feels real when the rest of reality is unmoored from him. "I don't really expect you to remember this conversation either."

"Yes but my father?" he tries again, the issue still totally and bewilderingly unexplained.

"Yes, shall I ring down for him?" you say helpfully. Helpful, he knows you're only trying to be helpful but Conrad isn't sure that he's prepared to face him yet. "He'll be so disappointed if he misses you waking again."

He sputters again, not knowing how to couch it in terms that will not make him seem like his wits have been permanently scrambled. How can he express the terror and the longing that seizes him at the thought of facing Father again? For as much as he had wished desperately to be back in front of the man, to tell him that he was right, that war was not at all what he thought it was, there still lingers the shame at not having been able to prove the man wrong. To have returned, meek and childlike, after all his determination to strike out into the world on his own.

Too wrapped up in his thoughts and their disconnect from his tongue, he does not prevent you from going to the door and ask for someone to fetch the Duke.

"You should know," you tell him, plopping back down into your seat. "That your father's likely to make a fuss and Polly might even shed a tear, which is to be expected and you aren't to make a fuss over it, but I should warn you now, Shola has shaved his head. Oh! And the nurse is likely to ask very prying questions which you do not like answering but answering them will only make her stop prying faster."

Again, it's all too fast too much. Too many names swirling around in his head with accompanying details to keep straight. Words losing all meaning as they enter one ear and gets so firmly twisted up that their meaning lands in another country. No he far prefered it to those precious few snatched seconds when the world had still been coming into focus and all that existed was him and you in this cocoon of a room.

"I think you know me better than I do myself," Conrad says still bewildered. He hopes you do, hopes you know him well enough for him to find his way back to.

"Only at this moment," you tell him. "After this, I know you only as well as you allow me to."

It feels like a warning.

The nurse's ministrations do go remarkably quicker once Conrad submits to them. It is mortifying to know that his show of acquiesence is just that, a show. That it would take far too little effort on the nurse's part to overcome his protestations and that his dignity hangs by the thread of a cobweb. An illusion that all involved pretend is far more real than it is.

It is under her hands and her dispassionate questions that Conrad becomes aware of the curious situation of his missing leg. Staring down at it, he cannot quite reconcile the stump of it to the flesh that had just been there to his memory. If he concentrates hard enough, he swears he can feel his toes wiggling into the mattress. He can't— he can't quite bear to look at the stump yet, mind and eye skittering away as the bandages are changed. An audience, always there is an audience.

His father who he cannot bear to look at, the throng of conflicting feelings getting all mixed up in Conrad's chest, too large to take shape on his tongue. Conrad knows the man's heart better than ever and still he does not know if he can forgive him as much as he loves him. Polly with her understanding eyes and the determined set of her mouth. He can rest easy with her keeping watch, knows that she won't let anything bad happen but still it rankles. To have gone away to prove he was no longer in need of protection only to come back more desperately in need of it than ever. Shola, with his endless patience and eternal understanding. Conrad can't bear it sometimes, that understanding. It's not— nothing's the same. 

He's so terribly exposed all the time. His room isn't his own anymore. Though there would be people to come in, to clean and light fires, now it seems that people never leave. There's no privacy in his sickroom. Conrad had burned with shame the first time he had seen you clutching his old toy in your lap while one of the maids had laid out fresh bandages on the chaise for the doctor's approval. You hadn't remarked on the childishness of keeping it nor mocked him for the sentimentality of it all, merely asked him if it was alright for you to hold it for him.

There is a weakness in him, bone deep. Perhaps it had always been there, perhaps it had slithered in along with the seeds of self doubt when he had been old enough to realize that his father would never see him as more than an extension of his mother. He knows if he would ask the doctor, that it would all be attributed to the weeks spent unconsciousness. But it's not just the weakness of his limbs that worries him. There is a part of his spirit that was carved out, left behind on that field in France. An insubstantiation of his being that he is spread too thin to hide. A tattered old rag held together with shoddy repairs, the remains of a military uniform once worn with pride. He isn't that man anymore. He isn't that boy. Fatigue chips away at him in the daylight but at night his visions keep him wide eyed and awake.

Everyone's so— so bloody kind. The last thing he'd remembered is the white hot indignation burning on your face, mud clinging to everything, the noise. And then to wake up to…well this. Soft sheets and soft voices, everyone being so considerate. Whatever he wanted at the drop of a hat when he still wasn't sure that any of his men were still breathing. He doesn't want to ask. If he asks, then he will know and there will be no amount of wishful thinking that can keep them in his mind as they were on that last night, drunk and blazingly alive.

Loss is a keen thing, even when it isn't articulated. Not all of them came back, this he knows even without the confirmation. Loss too is not so unfamiliar an emotion. But there is something so different to knowing that his mother died and his father forever changed because of it and another to know that there are many men who did not make it home because he failed them. He led them knowing that they would be going to their deaths and yet he survived. It's fitting, then, that he did not escape the experience unscathed. The dead might even say that he deserved it. 

Conrad wakes to you sitting by his side, a book resting on your lap as you curl your legs under you. He takes the opportunity to observe you, before all the observation in the room is turned on him. You look….different than he remembers. His last memory is of you striding away in anger, determined not to know him, back straight and unbowed. There is something more fragile in your expression now even when you are not absorbed by him. Every night when you leave for the day there is fear in your eyes, a quiver to your mouth that you resolutely ignore. At the same time you argue more, hold steady through protestations and exhortations about what you should be doing, what Conrad needs from you. Loss had already been changing you but now, now he hopes you are someone he still recognizes. 

"Talking to your grave was easier than talking to you now," you say, eyes still on the book as you turn the page. 

Chagrined, Conrad averts his eyes, embarrassed at having been caught staring. Ashamed too, at how his ability to hold a decent conversation seems to have evaporated around the same time he had been weaned off the stronger opiates. 

"There's too much to say," he settles on at last. "And too few words to say it all in."

Quietly you close your book and place it aside, turning the full force of your attention to him. 

"We can talk about the weather and what the characters are doing in whatever book I currently happen to be reading to you," you tell him seriously. "But because you are you and I am me, eventually that won't be enough for either of us anymore." It's said without judgement, yet Conrad feels it all the same for he knows it to be true. The bond that the two of you had built was never meant to be fed only on platitudes. 

"You went to my grave," Conrad says weakly, staring at the pale back of his hand where it lies on the sheet. 

"Oh, many times," you tell him earnestly. "Perhaps more often than was healthy. I think that at one point your father tried to stop me but I wouldn't heed him. Tried to lock me out of the mausoleum, he did, but I wasn't having any of it."

Conrad laughs, unable to regret how quickly his sides start to hurt from the movement.

"No," he gasps through his laughter. "I don't think my father's ever managed to make you heed him."

"I'd rather like to think that in a contest of wills, he would heed me," you agree, mirth creasing your face in a way that reminds him of a half memory, a conversation that might or might not have truly happened. 

"Did you— there was something about my father," Conrad stumbles through finding the words. You immediately begin to fidget, hands playing with the fabric of your skirt as you avoid meeting his gaze. "I can't— I don't remember what it was that you said or even what you meant by it." 

Your shoulders meet your ears before you being to speak, embarrassment crawling across your face. "I— yes. About that. I didn't— well you hadn't remembered most of our previous conversations and, well, I wasn't exactly thinking about how you'd receive any of that. If you remembered it all."

You pause and he simply stares back at you. Absolutely nothing has become any clearer only now he has an awful suspicion that a great deal had happened and he was not going to like much of it. 

"I….mighthavebrowbeatenyourfatherintomarryingme," you get out all in a rush. Conrad blinks.

"I think you'll have to repeat that," he says.

"I might have brow beaten your father into marrying me," you repeat again, wincing. 

"I beg your pardon?" Conrad says dumbly. He knew that he had sustained a head injury but he had not realized that it was causing him to hallucinate. "I could have sworn you said that you made my father marry you."

"Well—" you hedge. "I'd only gotten as far as convincing him that proposing was a good idea."

Conrad blinks. And then he does it again. 

"But he's so old!" is what falls out of his open mouth. "Why would you ever—"

"You were dead," you cut him off. 

Those three words dig under his skin and plant themselves there, sparkling shards that tear him open anew with every breath. Dead. That's what he had been. It's what he feels like some days with all of their fussing over someone he's not sure he still is anymore. 

"I didn't mean to be," he says, throat scraped raw as though he'd been screaming. 

"I know," you tell him plainly, eyes meeting his. 

And that's the truth of it isn't it? He had promised to come back, that the same fate that befell George would not be his, and then fate had made a liar out of him. He had never— he hadn't even realized that anyone had thought him dead until stiff faced his father had told him. Dead. Not just a noun but an adjective. One that he doesn't know what to do with because he's never wanted it. 

"But you were dead and so was George," you continue, voice growing thicker. "And without an heir my father went looking for a legacy and found it in Lucius Thomassen. I would have been sent to America and then into that man's open arms."

"And you did not want to go." 

You level him with a look that Conrad is no longer sure that he can fully read. "I couldn't go. If I went away, I'd leave Georgie behind. And I thought I'd leave you here with him."

Conrad knows that he came close to dying. As far to the edge as he could go without coming back. Funny how he'd never really stopped to think about what he'd leave behind in his wake. What losing him would do to you. And there he had been, promising all kinds of things in that letter. That damning letter. He wonders if it ever found it's way to you. He's not quite sure what would be worse, if it had never arrived and you'd simply acted as you did, or if all that had befallen you had been a consequence of his own making. Dying, that had been the easy bit. This, this reconciliation, of coming back home with his tail tucked between his legs with all of the things he'd broken to get his way still waiting for his apologies, is far harder.

"And so Father agreed to help?" Conrad asks. 

"No," you tell him. "Rather I had to twist Polly's arm so she would twist his. Terrifying woman but she's got him so completely wrapped around her little finger that getting her on board was the most nervewracking part."

"Wrapped around her finger? Polly?" Conrad's not sure why he's surprised. His father had kept her on much longer than a nanny was typically working and she was allowed a degree of freedom behind closed doors to challenge him that Conrad had never paid much attention to.

"It's a very good thing I didn't put money on you knowing then," you sigh. "Yes she's got him wrapped around her finger because he is rather hopelessly in love with her."

"OH," Conrad says rather dumbly. Many things are beginning to make sense. "Oh I suppose they are quite enamoured." 

"They've no plans to marry at the moment if you were worried about gaining a new stepmother," you tease him. 

Conrad pales. If he hadn't— if you had— there had been a very real chance that he might have woken from not dying to you as his new stepmother. The same thought also seems to have occurred to you because you flinch, breaking eye contact. 

"I'd rather— rather it was Polly than anyone else," he ventures at last. 

You nod, tightly. "Yes well suddenly you weren't dead and none of those plans mattered anymore." 

With Herculean effort, Conrad reaches out, the pale full moon of his palm facing up, a silent request for your hand. You give it to him with a sigh and he sequeezes your hand with all the strength that he can muster. It's not much. 

"I'm glad that I'm not dead," he says quietly. Holding your hand like this is a small marvel. Warm and alive, not something that he had hoped to ever be allowed. The sensation of your palm against his sparks something, another hazy half memory that stubbornly refuses to crystallize. Muzzy headed and heavy lidded but safe. Cared for. 

"Me too," you breathe out, adjusting your seat so that you can hold his hand more comfortably. "Was that so very hard to speak of?"

"Yes," he says sadly. "And you did the larger part."

The two of you lapse into silence but neither of you let go, your hands resting twined together on the duvet cover.

Conrad wakes to night drawing thick curtains across his room and his father standing at the foot of his bed. The man is a statue carved from limestone, one hand wrapped around the carved finial for support. Strong, his father has always been so strong but now there is this awful fragility that belies it. Not the grand figure of his childhood but a man too. Conrad can tell the moment his father realizes he is awake, a metaphorical crack resounding through his demeanour. He moves to leave, the shadows cutting his profile out of ice and Conrad cannot help but feel that same small child that had just lost his mother. 

"Wait," he croaks, and his father freezes. "You don't—" Conrad wets his lips, "—you don't have to leave."

It seems an eternity before he finally inclines his head. Slowly he makes his way around the bed to one of the empty chairs that has permanently flanked Conrad since his arrival. Conrad does not recognize the shuffle of his father's gait. When he was little and on nights such as this where neither of them could sleep from the fresh nightmare of losing one more person in their dwindling family, he would come sit in Conrad's room. The trademark shuffle of his gait made lopsided by the one leg that dragged from it's injury is no longer there. His injury is no longer there. His footsteps are no longer the same soothing sound any longer, a sharp reminder that no matter how the patterns may remain unchanged, the both of them are not who they once were. 

His father sits — not in the chair that you had occupied only hours ago, no that seems to be reserved for your exclusive use by order of an agreement that Conrad was not present to witness — and stares. Conrad does his best not to squirm under the gaze, the heavy weight of his limbs finally a boon for something. Sleep still clings goopily to his lashes and his throat is unbearably dry but all of Conrad's words have deserted him after that first courageous sally. 

The moon cuts a silver blade across the floor and the Oxford men sit in silence. Conrad's breathing is loud in his ears. He cannot face his father's disappointment but he also cannot continue without giving his apologies for— for everything. His tongue darts out to wet his lips but the rush of nerves has dried his mouth further. Before he can open his mouth to speak a glass of water enters his vision. He accepts it without meeting his father's watchful eyes. 

"I'm sorr—"

"I'm gla—"

Their voices overlap and chagrined Conrad lapses back into watchful silence. Where before he would push back, test the waters until his point was said even if it was not heard. Now he is silent because he cannot be sure of how he will be received. The boundaries have shifted and Conrad does not know how to find them without first tripping headfirst over them. 

"I am glad that you are awake, even if it is at a late hour," his father finally says. His voice hardly shakes. 

"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting so late," Conrad says through his newly wetted mouth.

The silence builds again, only this time, neither of them move to break it.

"— and if you keep up with these exercises for the next few weeks, we can see about moving you to a wheel chair and out of this room," Doctor Llewelyn says, packing up his equipment. 

Conrad can only grunt, sweat still dewing his skin. The exercises had been hard, his blood pumping wildly for the first time in months as he had struggled to waken his muscles. Weak, he feels so weak to be reduced to such a wet rag of a human being after such basic exertion. There was a time where he had done this all without barely a thought. He had run, danced, fought in practice and to save his life and now all of it seems so far away. The realm of possibility has grown so small to his jaded eyes. So he will practice holding objects of increasing weight and he will try to extend the amount of time he can sit upright unaided but for what? The opportunity to sit in a chair and be moved around by other people. To be at their mercy. No more furtive rides on Morgana. No more climbing trees. He promised to chase after you and now he can't. Might never be able to again.

Polly sets her mouth in a determined line, the entire routine committed to memory already. Conrad already knows that there will be no escaping her watchful eye or tender ministrations. He knows that one day he will be grateful for it. But that is not a day that will come soon. The burning frustration is still too fresh in his mind and strumming across his emotions. There is only one upside to the whole ordeal and it is that you are not present to see him struggle like a child with the simplest of tasks. At least in that one small thing, Conrad can feel that his dignity remains intact. 

"I know you won't want to but you'll need to do them anyway," Polly tells him, handing him a glass of water. Both of them pretend not to notice how badly Conrad's arm shakes as he brings the glass to his lips. 

"I know," he says rather peevishly. 

"If you can sit in the chair you can sit in a bath," she cajoles him and Conrad hates it. He knows she's placating him and he hates that it's working slightly and he hates it more that even she has started to treat him like a petulant child. 

"I know," he says again. 

She sighs and hands him a wet rag to refresh himself. It's too damp, large droplets sliding down the back of his neck and dampening the pillow below him. He huffs, attempting to expel the anger in his lungs. Polly is not the problem, he is. 

"I dislike being this helpless," he says more softly, handing her back the cloth. "The exercises remind me of how little I can do." 

Polly nods in silent understanding and Conrad feels even more wretched than before for directing his bad mood towards her. She settles in the chair beside him, a sheaf of paperwork pulled from who knows where in her lap. Biting her lip, she pauses before putting pen to paper.

"This won't be forever you know," she says hesitantly. Conrad simply stares at her.

"I'm quite sure the lack of leg will be permanent unless you know something I don't," Conrad says dryly. 

"The leg won't grow back but your sense of self will, soon enough," Polly rejoinders in a tone that she's always used, the one that suggests that though she finds his cheek amusing it is not useful in the moment. "You'll get out of this bed and out into the world. You won't be the same but it won't be either."

Conrad digs his fingers into the coverlet, the fabric crumpling under his grip. It all sounds so easy, too easy. His screaming muscles say otherwise. 

"I'll have to take your word on it, but I don't know that I have your faith in me," he says.

Polly gathers her papers together, folds her hands over them and turns to look at him seriously. The dark fabric of her clothing would make anyone else look severe but on her it only looks comforting, a reminder of Conrad's younger memories. 

"I have always had faith in you," she says voice steady. "And I always will, despite any ill conceived decisions you might make."

Overwhelmed by her uncharacteristic display of honest emotion, Conrad simply nods, eyes darting back to his white knuckles. The change in scenery draws his gaze back to his leg and its missing half. Conrad struggles to remember a time when Polly was not a constant presence in the house. She was there when he lost the last of his teeth. She is here now when he has lost his leg. 

"Yes well— I think I'm rather about to make another ill conceived decision by asking what I should call you now," Conrad says scrambling to change the subject. "Nanny won't do anymore and Stepmother feels rather formal." 

In the long years that Conrad has known her, Polly Wilkins has very rarely been visibly stunned. In fact, he could probably count all those times on one hand if he worked very hard to examine his memories. This is one of those times. 

Her mouth hangs loosely open, eyes wide. Curled into her lap, her hands do not shake. They are not still either. But it is the set of her shoulders, the still, stiff way that she holds herself like prey trying very hard not to be seen by a much larger predator, that belies her tension. Nanny Wilkins has never inhabited her body with anything but ease. It would almost be a point of pride for Conrad to have caught his stalwart guardian so off guard if it weren't for how awful inspiring such discomfort in her makes him feel. 

"Was that– I'm sorry, that was rude of me," he stammers, tongue clumsy in his mouth. He feels eight years old again and guilty over accidentally closing a door on her fingers. 

"No, I–" she pauses, wets her, then continues, "I suppose I had thought there would be more time to prepare myself before breaking the news. You're taking it rather...more in stride than I expected."

Conrad can feel his brows rising in confusion. "Why wouldn't I? It's the most natural thing in the world, though I feel silly for not having seen it sooner."

She smiles faintly, a sun just cresting the horizon, her features warming over. 

It takes two weeks after the arrival of the wheelchair for Conrad to actually make use of it. The chair is large, made of good solid wood , the best that money can buy. It is also heavy. Unwieldy in a way that Conrad slowly dreads to think on and too big for practical use in his room. To use it — really use it and not simply as a fancy ornament — requires him to descend to the lower floors of the house, a feat that he has not achieved since being carried in by a cadre of orderlies. 

"…an orderly or footman will have to carry you down to it, but I would recommend practicing simply sitting in it to start before having someone push you around," Dr. Llwellyn instructs, snapping the top of his bag closed. "Otherwise your strength is coming along nicely with the exercises I've recommended and the wound is healing nicely."

Which wound, Conrad wants to ask. The one in his head where the memories of war had all been dug out and smeared so thickly with viscera that he still cannot remember much? Then there's the scars that litter up the side of his torso. Or what about the one in his heart that threatens to swallow him whole sometimes in the dark of night? But of course it must be the missing leg that Conrad still swears he can feel at the strangest of moments. 

"Shola can do it," the Duke says, cutting through Conrad's thoughts. The man standing near the back of the room merely nods his assent. 

Something hot and panicky twists in Conrad's chest. "Another day," he mutters, trying not to let the feeling bubble up to the surface. Is this what the rest of his life to be? Carried like a child or injured pet from place to place, never under his own power but at the mercy of someone else's? Having to trust that others will always do as he asks and take him where he commands? The doctor still talks to him now but if he were to get worse, how quickly would the man start talking athim? Shola who had carried him as the youngest of children now carrying him when he should be—

"It's important that you try—" his father starts but Conrad interrupts him, voice sharper now.

"Another time. I'm tired."

It is childish, what he does next, but it feels like the only thing that will dissuade his father. Conrad turns on his side and nearly pulls the covers over his head. From under the flannel sheets he can hear the faint shuffles and bumps of people filing out, a heavy sigh and the door finally swinging shut behind them all. 

"So you do not wish for me to carry you."

Conrad definitely does not jump at the sound of Shola's voice coming from just beside his head. He most definitely does not use language that would have his father looking on in disapproval.

"It's not personal," Conrad rushes to say. "It's nothing against you— just, I'd rather have no one carry me at all."

"My aching back thanks you for your generosity," Shola says wryly, leaning back into the chair next to the bed. The shiny dome of his shaved head is still a shock. "Now," he says, pulling out a notepad and pencil from the inner pocket of his suit jacket. "What else is there that you do not want?"

Slowly Conrad pushes himself up off the mattress, leaning on his elbow to peering at Shola's face. 

"I'm afraid I don't follow."

"Well," Shola starts. "You do not want to be carried down to your wheelchair. It follows that you do not wish to be carried through the halls or to your bath."

Conrad valiantly tries and fails not to flush. 

"It is the same principle, but they will require different solutions," he continues. "It is easier for me to start with a list of everything that needs addressing and then adjust them to your preferences." 

Hope, an eagre, hardscrabble little thing flares in Conrad's chest. He does not have the ruthlessness in him to suffocate it. Neither does he have the strength. 

"Yes well, that's all good said and done but you can't just remove my need to be carried." It's a fact that Conrad aches at.

"No," Shola replies, looking at Conrad rather seriously. "But I can make it so that you can carry yourself. Railings around and near the bath with a wheeled stool to pull yourself along the rail, perhaps a handle hanging from the ceiling to pull yourself up or a bath modified to hold a small bench — these are all things that can be done easily with a bit of care." He hums, tapping the end of the pencil against the notepad. "The stairs will take some more thought." 

By some miracle, no bug flies into Conrad's open mouth. He has to swallow around the sudden lump in his throat.

"I want to go outside." He clears his throat. "I want to go outside, under my own power. I know can't run or climb, perhaps riding isn't fully impossible but goodness knows if anyone can figure it out, you can Shola. But I hate being stuck in this room until someone can take pity on the poorly invalid. It's worse than before I left because Father might have treated me like I was incapable of anything but at least I could leave the room when he was being an ass!"

Conrad almost wishes he could swallow the words back down his throat. Shola has been an odd mix of friend and servant to his father for almost as long as Conrad can remember. Conrad's feelings — as twisted in on itself as they are — put Shola in a terrible position. Before Conrad can murmur his apologies, Shola cuts him off with a nod. 

"The Duke is many things, an ass not the least of them."

"Shola!" Conrad chokes on a laugh. 

"But your independence does not need to rely on him becoming a better man. Perhaps we will work on a new leg for you, hmm? Prosthetics have come a long way you know."

The enormity of the idea is enough to make Conrad's head go silent. A leg. A new one. Likely nothing as good as his first — how strange to think of a first and second leg — but still more than this empty space under the blankets. More long weeks of exercises that make him sweat and shake, months to refine and make the appendage usable, but at the end of all that? To walk on his own? Could it really be—

"I thought— I thought you were against anything God did not mean for us to have," Conrad tries to explain his thoughts clumsily. "You do not like to fly because humans were not meant to have wings."

Shola nods gravely.

"And my own two feet shall remain planted firmly on this earth until humans begin to be born with wings," he says with great gravity. "But God gave us all brains and surely he meant for us to use them. To create with them in his image. And so while we may sometimes be misguided in the directions we take our minds in, I do not think that he will begrudge us for trying something as well-intentioned as this."

Shola smiles, then, a suspiciously wet and teary thing. Conrad's answering grin is no less watery.

"I should like to try creating with you, if that's all right," Conrad tells him.

"But of course you'll have to!" Shola says with faux indignation. "How else are we to get your leg right?"

It takes two weeks after the arrival of the wheelchair for Conrad to sit in it and it takes another four weeks after that for the first sketches of the leg to become real. Optimism is a heady feeling, a slow steady stream fed from a spring that has not dried up yet. The prospect of it is enough that Conrad can bear the long weeks of waiting for the reward will be well worth it. In the meantime, he throws himself into his exercises, into trying out whatever clever systems of pulleys and handrails Shola has devised for him this time. 

You ask but Conrad will not allow you to see him in his chair until he is ready. There is already a keen embarrassment at struggling to get the damned chair to move biting keenly under his skin without adding the burn of your eyes watching him. Likely you are not fully truthful about excusing yourself to spend time with Morgana as he labours to learn the chair's balance and operations. He can live with the white lie. So what if Morgana is being led around by one of the young boys that works in the stables at the same time you were meant to do it? Conrad has no evidence that you are not simply out of sight, no matter how curtains twitch suspiciously from upper windows or doors close too quickly down the hall. 

Today is not one of the days where he can lie to himself as easily as though he were breathing. It is one of those days that he's taken to calling a stormy day in the privacy of his head. The kind of day where pain rolls in on the horizon and all of his emotions grow dark and ominous as rain clouds. Perhaps it is a tad dramatic of him, but this is his mind and his is in charge of labelling things as the feeling takes him. The name is fitting today. He had woken to a dull ever present ache in his side, the webbed scarring only hiding fractures that had not healed well under battlefield medicine. A throbbing pain in concert with his heartbeat pulses in his stump injured leg. Everything is too tight across his skin and the food you and Polly watch him choke down is strangely flavourless. He has to grit his teeth before even starting his exercises and swallow his tongue when his father 'happens to be walking past'. 

The fall is unexpected but perhaps it should have been. One of his own bright suggestions had been to add walking — if it could be called as such — from his bedroom to the attached bathroom using the railings and small wheeled stool Shola had created. Practice for his new leg one day. It had been a bad idea to insist on doing it today, on top of his usual regimen, but Conrad could not stop himself from forcing his body to move through the motions anyway. They were so close, he and Shola, to having the first prototype made physical. If Conrad was to use it, he would need to be ready. Ready feels a long way from the floor of his bedroom gritting his teeth so he will not howl in agony and frustration. 

A small mercy, the floor had rushed to meet the side of his injured leg rather than the spot where it had been stitched back together. The impact with his hip had shuddered down the length of it, lighting lighting up his marrow. Conrad swallows down the acidic bile that burns the back of his throat. Hands are reaching for him, pulling him up, each grip feeling like a hammer on his rubbery egg shell skin. Voices are calling out but the cotton in his ears lowers them to underwater murmurs. It hurts. 

Everything hurts. Conrad can feel the burn at the back of his eyes even as his stomach churns again. His body aches. He is all of three years old again experiencing the worst pain of his short life and all he wants is to be gathered up close to someone's chest, the pain sung away with a lullaby he does not quite understand. Time shatters inwards and suddenly everything is too real. He fights the hands caging him down, the very feel of the soft cotton neckline choking away his breath. Voices cry out as the hands slip and Conrad hits the mattress of what must be his bed, jarring his leg awkwardly again. He thrashes, the pain leaking out of him in a low moan hissed between his teeth. His foot gets tangled in the blankets. 

"—rad, Conrad!" 

Your face, lips pressed thin with worry, bobs into his field of view. 

"Conrad you need to stop! Please, just stop moving. Stop fighting us," you beg. 

He wants to snarl back in your heartbroken face. He's not fighting anyone, you're fighting him. Him and his smashed up stitched together body that doesn't know up from down anymore. He is bloody well trying. It feels like being back in the muck and the mud, the effort it takes to get his limbs back under control. Fine tremors run up and down the length of him. Sweat turns his skin tacky, hair sticking to his forehead and the nape of his neck. Panic recedes, replaced by shame.

The burn of it matches the heat of exertion colouring his cheeks. He averts his gaze from yours, eyes catching on the damned rug that had started this whole mess. 

"Conrad?" Polly's weight barely shifts the mattress but he is acutely aware of the difference anyway. "What would you like? The Doctor left some morphine for when the pain is particularly bad or willow bark extract which is less strong."

"Not. Morphine," he grits out. Already he can feel the siren call of its dreamlike embrace. He can't go back to that. He won't sleep away the moments when he is needed again. 

Polly nods in grim understanding. Conrad tries not to read pity in it. 

The medicine goes down unpleasantly but it goes down. His leg still aches. Conrad wants to hide away for a hundred years until the pain and the humiliation are both distant memories. That is not an option. 

"Out," he grunts through his still tense jaw. "I'd like to be alone now." He stares up at the ceiling. The shuffling in the room eventually quiets. Gingerly he tries to relax the fists his hands have balled up into. 

Something looms in his vision. His hand snaps out to catch it before it can make contact with his fragile skull. Blankly you stare down at where his hand has caught around your wrist, the wet rag starting to drip water into his eyes. With a huff he releases you. You reach out again and he bats you away. 

"What," he hisses.

"You're sweaty," you reply. "I'm trying to make you less sweaty."

You reach out again and he leans out of the way, the movement causing the pain to flair back up. 

"I don't need or require your help for such a thing," he replies tightly, now acutely aware of how sticky he feels. 

"I know," you tell him, finally giving up and wringing the cloth out into the washbasin balanced on one of the chairs beside his bed. "But I want to do this for you."

"I don't care what you want, I don't want you here. Get out."

Eyes wide you plead with him. "You're not listening to me! You don't tell me anything these days, you won't let me be here for you or care for you—"

"I don't need taking care of from you!" he shouts. "I might be a bloody invalid that will never walk again but the last thing I need is you stripping the last of my dignity from me!"

His hands have curled back into fists again. Distantly Conrad hopes he does not break the skin of his palms. Shame burns brightly along his cheeks, licks down his spine until he can feel it in his belly. Pain wears away at his already thin veneer of gentlemanliness. He doesn't want anyone to see him like this. He doesn't want you to see him like this. Worse than helpless. The antithesis of everything he was supposed to be. He was supposed to go off to war and comeback a hero. He's a hero now alright — there's a medal floating around the house somewhere according to the tales he's been told — but he doesn't feel like one. All the fairytales and bedtime adventures had their heroes come back victorious or dead. None of King Arthur's men came back maimed in their glory. Now here he is, weaker and half the man he was before he left to prove himself. 

"Would you leave me to some fucking peace?" he spits out. Conrad wishes he could take the words back for the way your face crumples, then smoothes itself into a mask of anger.

"Fine then! You were a much better listener when you were at peace!"

The room just about rattles from the strength you put into slamming the door shut. With a groan Conrad turns and buries his face in the pillow behind him. He screams from the agony in his leg and burrowing in his chest. He screams until he is no longer shaking only from pain but exhaustion as well. He would cry, but he finds himself oddly empty. Awkwardly he turns his head to the side so as not to suffocate. Wouldn't that be a story for the papers? To survive war only to die in bed from his own sense of dramatics.

Someone has moved the picture of his mother from the table by the chaise to his nightstand. It sits proudly on top of the stack of books you had been working through reading to him. From his vantage point, he could almost imagine that it is not only his infant self she stares down at but him now, in the present. With a hand still not fully steadied after its ordeal, he reaches out and brushes a finger across the glass. 

"I know I'm being beastly," he murmurs. "But I don't know how to stop. Everything's — everything's too much." 

He hums, then picks the picture up, turning to his side to relieve some of the pressure on his bad leg. 

"I wish I had known you better. Sometimes I wonder what you would think of all of this and then I am abruptly reminded that I don't know you well enough to say. The words go missing." He sighs. The sun would have to shine today to mock him. "But then that's my burden, isn't it? Not yours. I had to go on living and growing up around the space where you used to be. You simply….left." The house settles and creaks in the distance, wind blowing past the windows.

"You know, sometimes I wonder if that was for the best. Father still thinks of you as a saint. You never swore bloody murder while trying to drink a glass of water or said the most hurtful things you could to drive everyone away on purpose. You left us. And we were left with our memories to paint over the rough patches until all that was left was a wonderful wife, a doting mother, a spirited philanthropist. No ugly details."

A droplet of water falls onto the glass covering the picture. Conrad quickly dashes it away. It still leaves a wet splotch behind. 

"I get so angry sometimes at you for not being here and then sometimes I'm so grateful that you're not here to be disappointed in me too." He sucks in a breath around the lump in his throat. "If I'm being honest, I'm jealous of you." 

It's the worst thing he's ever said. It's also true. 

"For you, it was over. The pain and all the heartache ended in an instant. You've never disappointed anyone." He heaves out a sigh. "Not like I have."

His fingers tighten around the picture frame. The tips of them go white, circulation cut off. 

His father. Polly. Shola. You. His men. Archie Reid. 

The litany of names thunders in his head. No one has told him much of anything but poking gingerly around the spotty edges of his memory, he knows it was nothing good. He wasn't good enough for any of them. He didn't save them. He couldn't even save himself. 

"Sometimes, Mother, I wish I had joined you," he breathes out. Conrad's throat is thick with some unnamed emotion. "Because then I might still have been a failure but I wouldn't be the massive disappointment I've become. Everyone else would be—"

"No," your voice cuts in curtly. "We would not."

Startled, Conrad jumps (he will deny this later). The photograph nearly goes tumbling from his suddenly slack grip. Athletically if not gracefully you catch it before it can go crashing to the floor. 

"I thought I told you to leave," he says barely above a whisper. A new kind of shame burns through him. Those were not thoughts he had wanted to confide in another. Ever. Especially not after he's been so purposefully cruel. He waits, eyes fixed on the frame in your hands, for the cruelty to be reflected back upon him. It's the least he deserves.

"You did," you agree, voice still tight. "And after I had gotten the dramatics out of my system, I didn't listen." 

You pass the only real picture Conrad has of his mother back to him. He tries not to read forgiveness into the brief brush of your hand against his. 

"You were an ass," you tell him plainly, arranging your skirts to perch delicately on the seat next to his bed. He cringes back in response, ignoring the dull pain in his leg. You sigh heavily. "But so was I."

That was….not what he had expected to come out of your mouth. Recriminations, maybe, or perhaps a demand for an apology that you rightly deserved. 

"That's not tru—" he starts to say.

"But it is," you cut him off. You level him with a steely eyed look and he swallows the rest of his protests reflexively. "Neither of us were very good to each other." You pause for a moment, biting at your bottom lip as you string your thoughts together. 

"We were not very kind to each other." Looking down at your lap, you twist your fingers around each other anxiously. "We shouldn't— I don't ever want to leave things between us that way. Because last time—" your voice breaks. "—last time you were dead before we could ever make amends. So."

Carefully Conrad places the photograph on the pillow beside him and reaches out to clasp your hand. Blindly he roots around for one of the clean handkerchiefs he suspects Polly has been stocking in the drawer of his nightstand. Wordlessly he hands it to you, not remarking when you gently dab one handedly at your face with the white linen. 

Of course it would come down to this. The unspeakable weight of the grief between you hangs like an albatross around his neck. He did this. Conrad doesn't know how to fix it. He doesn't know if he can. 

Shakily, you inhale a steadying breath. 

"I'm sorry," you say. "I didn't mean it, not truly. You might have been a better listener— oh do shut up — but every single other part of my life was far worse off with you dead."

Conrad supresses a surprisingly watery smile at your affectionate eye roll. He doesn't deserve your kindness.

"Well," he says with false jollity. "I don't think my forgiveness is quiet necessary—" your hand tenses under his, "—but it's yours regardless." Your whole body seems to exhale. "Now," he says a little more seriously. "I was awful to you earlier when you were just trying to be kind—"

"You were in pain," you rush to reassure him only this time he cuts you off.

"Yes," he agrees quite readily. "I was." Still am, he thinks to himself. "That might have been the cause but it isn't an excuse for making you a target. So I am going to ask for your forgiveness on the condition that you only give it when I've earned it."

You roll your eyes at him and this time he does laugh. 

"Well you can start earning it by not wishing you were dead."

His laughter stops. Uncomfortable now, he can't hold your searching gaze. 

"It's not— well, those were just ramblings. I'm in pain, remember?" The excuses fall weak even to his ears. He moves to withdraw but you catch his hands with yours, nails digging into the pail flesh of his hands.

"No," you tell him sternly. "No. You were never any good at lying to me. If you really want to earn my forgiveness, then this is what you have to make up for."

Conrad wets his lips nervously. His eyes dart everywhere but your face. Fear, anger, blame. He doesn't want to know what emotion plays across your face.

"What, you want me to earn your forgiveness for thinking about dying?" he asks incredulously.

"I want you to earn my forgiveness for dying," you tell him. Conrad ignores how tightly you cling to him, jaw going slack.

"That doesn't make any sense," he says dumbly.

"I'm aware," you mutter frustratedly, releasing his hands to twist the handerkchief between your fingers. "But you died. You chose to leave and then you died. And I'm well aware that you didn't choose to be killed but it felt like that all the same. You can't—" your voice cracks. "—you can't make that choice now. I will never forgive you if you if do. Do you hear me? That's what you need to earn my forgiveness for."

Conrad thinks that if there were any more of his heart left to shatter, it would be ground to dust by the tears in your eyes alone. It hurts, deep in his chest, that aching scraped raw part of him the lives between muscle and bone. He didn't choose to leave — he'd never meant to permanently — but he'd left all the same. Left in a way that sometimes still calls to him in an abstract way, a false promise of softness and slumber. He can't answer that siren song. He won't. That is his penance for not meeting his end in the dirt. Blood pounding to his veins trying to find a limb that doesn't exist anymore, a heart longing for a life that got left behind and boxed up before he could truly understand what it was he was losing. 

There's more that needs to be carefully parceled away. His love, for a start. It might be his to give but its never been a burden he would force upon you. Now, now his eyes have been opened. His loss was devastating. Culled you at the knees and brought you low enough in a life that already was tinged with enough loss. How can he do that to you again? Ask to be made the centre of your life when he already knows just how to break you? He might have been the picture of health and vitality before he left but now he can barely make it across the room without crumbling. He's glad that you never got his letter. He isn't the same man that wrote it. It wouldn't be fair of him to hold you to it. You've implied if not said outright that forging a new status quo on the ruins of the old is what you need. How can he deny you?

"I won't," he says thickly. Strangely he is dry eyed. "I won't. I swear to you now that I won't make that choice."

"I'll be holding you to that," you say stiffly, already trying to compose yourself again. "Now will you take the damp cloth? You're starting to smell worse than Morgana."

Henpecked and suitably chagrined, Conrad accepts the offer. 

"My quarters need to be moved to the ground floor," Conrad tells his Father. He and the Duke don't so much talk to each other but at each other these days. His Father folds his newspaper and puts it down on the luncheon table beside his dishes. The silverware glows, a delicate shimmer in the early spring sun. 

"You've been in your current room since you were a boy," he says non comittally. 

Conrad's fingers spasm around his finger. Precisely he puts it down on the white tablecloth. It's a farce they play at, him and his father. Normalcy. One that his father insists on. Perhaps if they play pretend well enough, it will come true. But after these meals — one shared together each day — Conrad will trundle off in his wheelchair. He can get farther now, across the entirety of the first floor with only a few short breaks. 

"That is true," Conrad says evenly. "Now they need to be moved."

Orlando takes off his reading glasses, folding them up and slipping them into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He pins Conrad with a look. 

"After my injury—" Conrad wants to scream. Very politely he manages to restrain himself. "—I found great comfort in familiar surroundings. I would wager it helped me a great deal."

"You were still in possession of your leg," Conrad retorts. "It may have not worked as well as it once did, but it was not rotting in an empty field. Now you are in possession of two working legs." Conrad bites back a sigh before his well-reasoned argument can turn into a bloodletting. "The challenges you faced were quite different. In the end they did not turn out to be quite as… permanent as mine. I require my quarters moved to the ground floor if I am ever to begin living a life that is truly mine again."

"I'll have the servants—"

"They've already been told," Conrad interrupts, voice steady. "I simply wished to inform you."

Of all things, his father smiles. Uncertain of the cause, Conrad cannot help but flounder. 

"You've grown into your own man when I wasn't looking," Orlando says fondly. 

Conrad splutters. A footman steps forward, offering a fresh napkin and a fresh cup of tea. Gratefully Conrad accepts both. 

"Shall we continue this conversation in my study?" Orlando asks, rising from the table. Still off balance, Conrad simply nods and lets the bite of the wheels across his palms ground him. 

His father does not leave him behind but matches Conrad's pace, seemingly in no real hurry to arrive at their destination or their conversation. He waits for Conrad to enter first, then gestures for another footman to move away one of the chairs set before the cold fireplace so that Conrad might sit as an equal next to him. Conrad tries not to shiver under the painted stare of his mother looking down on them as he locks the wheels of his wheelchair. 

"Rhubarb cordial?" his father offers, the ruby liquid now occupying the crystal cut decanter that used to house his father's fine liquor. Conrad nods cautiously.

The drink isn't bad. It goes down easily, tangy sweet and full of spring. There's a hint of something else, something—

"Is that thyme?" Conrad asks nearly incredulous. 

His father smiles again, the small secret kind that only looks like the thinning of lips. 

"It is," he answers fondly. "I've been experimenting in my free time, just as you and Shola have been."

Conrad swallows. He can still taste the rhubarb. Ice cubes clink in his glass as he rests it on the arm of his wheelchair. 

"I wasn't aware of that," Conrad says neutrally. 

His father simply inclines his head. "I hadn't thought you would be. It's a rather new hobby I've picked up. All the options for non-alcoholic drinks that Cook could come up with were simply unpalatable."

Conrad levels his father with a surprised look. "You're not drinking?" 

The lighting is darker here than in the dining room, burnished wood keeping the room intimate and stately. Not a dust mote dances through the air. It smells exactly like his father. Leather and old books, wool and ink. The customary bitter rich scent of the whiskey his father had once favoured no longer underpins it. Instead, something sweeter, lighter. 

"No," his father says at last. The two of them fall into silence. In the bottom of his father's glass, the nearly melted ice cubes clink. Conrad does not know his father anymore to know if silence is a cue to leave. They have spent so much time in silence that to break it now feels akin to breaking them. 

Conrad's father clears his throat. "Did anyone tell you just how bad it got when you were— when you weren't here?"

Conrad forces himself to relax back into the cushions of his seat. "I have heard some of it, though it was rather of a personal nature to the teller."

Orlando nods, then throws back the last of his drink and places the empty glass on the table beside him. 

"Your death destroyed the last thing I had thought myself capable of loving," he says plainly. The pain of that loss, just a memory now, still haunts the slope of his brow. "With what felt like no reason to bear the loss, I quite lost myself to drink."

Conrad frowns at the incongruous image. His unflappable father, always so certain, always so sure of himself, and the heavy lidded blank stare of the drunk he'd run into in outside the training facility. Those pieces don't click together, a mishapping of gears that won't let the machinery run. 

"I find that hard to imagine," Conrad says truthfully. 

"And I found your death hard to think on," his father shoots back. He sighs, regretful now, and resettles his weight in his chair. "It turned me into a person that was unrecognizable. I refuse to be that man again. So no, I do not drink. Not since I put down that last glass."

Something has settled in Conrad's throat. It is a living thing, choking him out of air. Reflexively he tries to swallow around it, but the motion is futile. Vulnerability is new between them. Was never a mainstay of the childhood he had grown out of. Now absolution and confession are the language of their relationship. He does not know when it will end. 

"I hadn't intended to— I am sorry," Conrad says, voice hoarse around the thing that will not name itself in his throat. "I am sorry for what my leaving did to you."

"It seems that I still have things left to teach you," Orlando says wryly. "It's a boon to an old man like me, to have a son that won't run out of need for his father. You needn't apologise to me for my own mistakes, Conrad. Your own, certainly, but a gentleman does not need to apologise for the winds of fate. Express condolences perhaps, but not for things far out of your own reach."

This is far more familiar territory, one they've tread many times before. If Conrad closes his eyes he can see the moments blurring together. When he was nine and watching his father adjust his appearance before going out and getting a lecture on looking one's best. Or at thirteen and being instructed not to take his lot in life for granted, that only luck separated him from the people whose livelihoods they held. That last fond time as he was fitted for a proper suit, his father's stare a blessing and a warning in the mirror about the privilege of care. 

"My condolences, then, on that dark period," Conrad corrects. He does not quite preen at his father's approving stare, but it is a near thing. The approval of his father has always been the headiest substance he has ever tried. 

His father stands then, swift and unimpeded by injury. He refills both of their glasses officiously, turning to toast the portrait of his former wife.

"I seem to recall a time when you were afraid that I did not take you seriously, that I did not consider you a man in your own right," Orlando says to Emily's flattened features. Conrad blanches. "While you were correct on that matter, you were partially mistaken. My fear stemmed from the fact that you were becoming your own man. That frightened me."

Conrad settles his drink down and wheels himself half a rotation forwards. How funny to think in rotations and half turns now instead of paces and steps. 

"It's not that I didn't think you cared for me, it's only that I worried I didn't make you proud—"

"I love you," Orlando says, finally turning to look at Conrad. "You are my son and I love you, let's have no confusion on that."

A feeling like champagne bubbles rushes through Conrad's veins, tickling at his nailbeds and swimming to his head. Warmth laces through his marrow, heating up his cheeks and settling into the space between his lungs and belly. The Oxford men are not effusive. They are not the most emotional of creatures under normal circumstances. Things haven't been normal for quite some time. 

"I hope you know that I feel—" oh sod it, if ever there was moment for British reserve to go hang itself, its this. "—I love you too Father. I only wanted you to be proud of me."

Orlando clasps Conrad's shoulder, fingers digging in tight around the bone as if he's afraid Conrad will fade away to nothingness before his eyes. 

"I was," he says, voice choked with emotion. "I still am."

His father blinks, as if coming back to himself. Slowly he retracts his hand and already Conrad misses the contact like another piece of himself. 

"I told anyone who asked and even those that didn't about you," Orlando continues. Conrad swallows futilely, throat dry and chest burning. "Your regiment, your company. You wouldn't write and so that was all I had, but I must have bored the Lords to death speaking of you. I kept that last picture of you up there—" he gestures to the mantelpiece, "—so I could watch over you. That was precisely the problem." 

Conrad's fingers spasm around the armrest of his wheelchair. His pulse thrums, little drumbeats in his wrists and temples. He stares at his lap, at the leg that suddenly isn't there anymore. 

"Your mother's last wish was that no harm should ever come to you."

They do not speak of that day. Ever. Not the dust under Conrad's nails, the bloody grit that had smeared across his cheek as his father held him close. The still lump of his mother's body, wrapped up in his father's white jacket fast turning crimson. She had smiled at him. That was the last time he saw her. Smiling. 

Then shots ringing out across the plain, Shola tackling him to the floor of the cart even as his father fell in the dust. Wood painted black and stamped with dusty footprints pressing into his cheek, the tips of his fingers. By the time he had gotten back up again, dazed and ears ringing with flecks of paint stuck to his knees, his mother had disappeared. They do not speak of it. 

"That was an easy task when you were a child. As long as you were within arm's reach, I could assure myself that you were safe." Orlando turns back to the portrait of his dead wife. So still, so painted. "Only you grew up. No longer a boy, your own man. But the kind of man I was proud to call my son was not one who would allow me to keep him by my side forever. Not when there was good to be done in the world."

Something twists bitterly in Conrad's stomach, the rhubarb cordial curdling. Everything he had hoped to hear from his father, had longed to hear. Now it is served up to him in friendly shared drinks, on a crystal platter, and he is choking on it. 

"Trying to keep you safe was never about not seeing you as your own person," Orlando continues, oblivious to the sour churning of Conrad's bile. "Only that it was easier to keep you safe if I continued to treat you as I did when you were a child. I wanted you to come into your own without ever seeing the worst mankind has to offer."

"You were right," Conrad grits out, thyme still lingering on his back molars. "It was worse than you said. Killing— taking another person's life, it was… I was wrong. I did not even manage to save—"

"You didn't die to kill another person," Orlando interrupts, staring at his son with fierce eyes, glassy but not from drink. "You risked your life to save one."

Conrad nods, tersely, the fight leaking out of him in fits and starts. His father attempts to lean on a cane that is no longer there, clutching at the mantlepiece instead. 

"Your things will be moved to the guest wing on the first floor before the end of the week," his father says more evenly. "Have Shola send me the calculations for the renovations you two have planned and I will release the funds for them."

"Thank you," Conrad says. He's not sure what exactly it is he is thanking his father for. The honesty? The money? Love he thought was not there? His father's blessing? Perhaps all of it.

part 10

[batchilla]

august inspired the thought of you pretending to have a wardrobe malfunction and asking your knight to help you with it, and also, your knight requesting your assistance with their armor without actually needing it

[batchilla]

'old friend' is about the homosexualest thing you can call somebody. you might as well be fingering them

[batchilla]

looks inside procrastination -> it's anxiety -> looks inside anxiety -> it's fear -> looks inside fear -> it's shame