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comfyb · 13 hours ago

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prompt fill! someone requested dick grayson and the prompt "i don't trust anyone else." my brain is all vampires apparently, so i wrote a sequel to this short vampire au with dick grayson, bucky barnes, and tony stark.

warnings for general vampirism and some enthusiastic blood drinking. this one might end up cross-posted to ao3, since it's longer than what i usually post here.

---

Dick Grayson leaves the Tower at four in the morning, lively and warm, a healthy flush glowing along his cheekbones, and Bucky figures they’ve done good work, but they’ll never see him again.

“Dick Grayson, huh?” Tony mumbles, drooping a little against Bucky’s side. He gave more than he should have, but he always does. “Wow. Let’s go to Gotham more.”

“Rein it in, Stark,” Bucky advises.

Beside him, Tony scoffs. “I’m not the one still staring at his ass.” He pauses, hums thoughtfully. “Well, I’m not the only one.”

And Bucky doesn’t plan to stop either, but that’s not the point. “I didn’t have his teeth in my throat for fifteen minutes,” he volleys back. “And then the cuddling.”

“He was cold,” Tony says, unapologetically, “and then I was cold. And he smells really good, Bucky. What the hell is that? Can we bottle it?”

If you could get Dick Grayson in a bottle, no one would ever leave their homes again. The population would collapse. End times.

Might be worth it, though. It’s not like the current times are going so well that he’d miss them.

“Okay,” Bucky says, because Dick’s gone, turned a corner, left their lives. “Let’s get you some iron supplements and a cold shower.”

---

But Bucky’s wrong. Dick does come back. Four months later, looking even more ragged than the first time. He waits politely in the lobby of the Tower, tucks himself toward the doors, keeps his hands visible at his sides, smiles at the guards like they’re doing him a favor. When Bucky steps out of the elevator, Dick looks his direction but doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

“Hey,” Bucky says, slowing to a standstill a solid six feet out. “You’re in bad shape, huh?”

“Thanks,” he says. He does that smile again, the sad one that almost hides his teeth. He’s handsome enough that any smile makes an impact, but, having faced the absolute devastation of Dick Grayson smiling like he means it, this one rings hollow. “I just—look, sorry, I just wanted to ask a favor.”

“Sure,” Bucky says. “Whatever you need.”

Dick’s eyebrows pull together. “You don’t even know what it is.”

Out of sheer grace and goodwill, Bucky does not roll his eyes. “Yeah, I know your type. You’re not gonna ask for anything we wouldn’t want to give. You probably wouldn’t ask for a glass of water if you were on fire.”

Dick laughs, a little unevenly. “Blood,” he says, like he thinks he’s proving Bucky wrong. “I’m here to ask for blood.”

“Great,” Bucky says. “Whose, mine? Tony’s? The bagged blood upstairs?”

Dick blinks and then wavers, seems thrown for a loop.

“What, you bored of the regular stuff?” Bucky shrugs. “Steve’s is kinda zippy. Wouldn’t recommend it. Kinda burns. And Banner’s always a gamble, because sometimes the other guy shows up midway through. Barton’s actually really good, but Nat gets jealous, so you’ve gotta pretend you hate it the whole time or she’ll---”

“Tony’s,” Dick says, probably just to get him to stop talking. “And I want you there.”

These people, Bucky thinks, despairingly. These nice, good people. They always think they’re going to horrify him with what they need.

But the horror isn’t that Dick needs to feed. It’s that someone, somewhere, taught him he deserved to starve.

“Sure,” he says. “Come on up.”

---

Tony’s caught in a tricky bit of welding or something equally ridiculous, so Bucky escorts Dick Grayson up to Tony’s suite and is thrilled to find him utterly unimpressed. “Well,” he says, and then gestures in a way that almost hides the miserable twist of his mouth, “Bruce Wayne, you know? I used to live like this.”

Bucky wonders how Bruce Wayne is doing, and how his adopted son ended up haunting the streets of New York, desiccating by the day. Sometimes, people need their mistakes explained to them. One expeditious method Bucky’s discovered is defenestration. Maybe it’s all the time he spent in Russia, but he's found that nothing says You fucked up like getting thrown through a window.

“You want to live like this again?” Tony asks, breezily, as he saunters out of the elevator, already working on the buttons of his shirt. “Please, do me the favor.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bucky says, just so he can get out ahead of this, so he can point back to this exact moment later and say: I tried to get you to have a single ounce of decorum, you wayward libertine.

“I’m cultivating the world’s most evocative private collection of raven-haired vampires with impeccable abs,” Tony says. “Nat won’t dye her hair yet, but we’ve agreed to the occasional wig at public events.”

“Wow,” Dick says. “Evocative?” Which is far more encouragement than Tony’s ever needed.

“You wouldn’t describe yourself as evocative?” Tony shrugs out of his shirt, leaving himself in an undershirt at least one size too tight for decency. “Would you prefer 'exquisite?”

“Maybe ‘exsanguinated,’” Bucky interrupts, before this gets truly out of hand. “Tony, give him a break. He can’t think right now.”

Bucky can barely think right now. These days, he’s the best fed he’s ever been, but Tony, standing there with his throat and arms bare, practically begging to bleed, is making his jaw flex involuntarily, desperate to bite.

“Just how I like ‘em,” Tony says. He tips his chin to the side, raises his hands, makes a little come and get it gesture with his fingers. “C’mon, Grayson, this is my favorite part.”

“Fuck,” Dick says, so soft it’s barely a word, eyes pinned, pupils blown, damn near vibrating in place. “Fuck,” he says, again, like a prayer.

“I’ve got you,” Bucky says. “I’ve got him. It’s okay.”

Dick shudders across the room so fast that he’s a blur even in Bucky’s eyes, but he’s still impossibly careful when he bites, neat and sweet, an arm around Tony’s waist, hand caught up in that too-tight tank like it’s already so good he needs the anchor just to stay afloat.

---

Afterwards, after Dick swoops Tony up and carries him across the room, after he spills Tony across couch but doesn’t spill a single drop of blood, after he crawls half on top of him, murmuring things Bucky should probably have the grace to pretend not to hear, after he drinks right up to the edge of reasonable, Dick pushes himself away and grabs for Bucky instead.

“Barnes,” he says, stretched out, breathless, eyes twin black pits of need and want, “it’s—I can’t stop.”

“You did stop,” Bucky tells him.

Dick runs his tongue along his lip, leaves a smear of blood behind, and there’s no time at all between Bucky, staring at that red, and Dick tipping his chin up in offer, and Bucky leaning in to lick it away.

“Shit,” someone says, and that must be Tony, because Bucky’s lips are on Dick’s, tongue in his mouth, chasing the taste.

He’s heard a few rumors about Grayson, all those exes he has. Seems like half the masks on the East Coast have spent time with him, but that must’ve been before, because no one’s taught him how to kiss with his new teeth yet.

He’s eager, and desperate, and he catches Bucky’s tongue with one of his fangs with just enough pressure to break the skin. And then it’s Bucky’s blood in his mouth, and Dick Grayson moans like he wasn’t drinking a better, purer vintage sixty seconds ago.

Bucky moves to pull back, and Dick moves to follow, and Bucky’s flattered enough that he lets him get another mouthful before he puts his hands on Dick’s shoulders and pushes him away.

Dick’s strong, but Bucky’s stronger, and Dick seems delighted by that fact, grins wide, shows Bucky his own blood on his teeth.

“You’ve been holding out,” Dick says. And then, a second later, with the kind of sidelong hopeful look that must get him damn near anything he wants. “You did offer, right? Earlier?”

“That was a joke,” Bucky says. He heals fast these days, but there’s still enough blood in his mouth that he has to wipe some away with the back of his hand. “I didn’t think you’d like it.”

“I like it,” Dick says, transfixed by the blood on Bucky’s hand. “You taste good.”

On the other side of the couch, Tony makes a noise in the back of his throat. “Oh, no, don’t mind me,” he says, waving them off. “Keep making out in front of me and talking about how much you like tasting each other. That’s a very kind thing to do to me when I don’t have enough blood left to participate. That’s great. Appreciate it.”

Bucky, just to be an asshole, plants his knee between Dick’s sprawled legs and leans over him, pinning his shoulders to the couch, mouth hovering a spare couple of inches over Dick’s. “You know, Stark,” he says, “you can leave at any time.”

“Fuck you,” Stark says, watching as Dick playacts at biting, snaps his teeth up at Bucky. “My objections are entirely timeline-based. The content is great.”

Dick laughs and looks between them, can’t seem to decide which view he likes better. That blush is coming back, Bucky notices. He’s warm underneath him, relaxed, looks drunk on Tony’s blood.

“Feeling better?” Bucky asks.

“Yeah,” Dick says, a little breathless, squirming in his own skin like he forgot what he could feel like. Or never knew, maybe. “You feel like this all the time?”

“Well, the high’s not quite as high,” Bucky says, “because I don’t let the lows get so low. You drink any fresh blood since we saw you last?”

Dick hesitates, and some of that easy glow dims out of him. “I don’t trust anyone else.”

It’s a terrible, shitty thing. Dick Grayson, who led the Titans, saved the world, scared to the point of starving himself, scared of what he never asked to be made into.

Bucky used to be scared too. But if you don’t learn to live with your monsters, you can never learn to control them.

“You stopped without me,” Bucky reminds him.

Dick shrugs, shrinks inward, drops his eyes away. “But I didn’t want to.” There’s shame on his face, and fear, and guilt, and all the endless demons that took their bites out of Bucky too. “I wanted more. I wanted--- Barnes,” he says, voice dropped to a whisper, “I wanted all of it.”

Bucky hooks his thumb under Dick’s chin and lifts his head until he’s staring directly into his eyes. Nobody tells them, all these good people. Nobody told Bucky, either, and he tore himself to pieces until he finally figured it out.

“It doesn’t matter what you want,” he says. “It only matters what you do.”

#dick grayson #bucky barnes #nightwing #tony stark #winter soldier #iron man #vampires #tumblr fic #thepartyresponsible

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