Title: Better Than The First Time
Rating: T
Word Count: 1,700+
Pairing: Dick/Zatanna
Summary: He's Hollywood's golden boy and she's just the normal, childhood best friend he left back home
For: an anon

Note: This is a fill for my au meme, but it ended up being longer than my usual drabble length, so I decided to post it as a ficlet.

Better Than The First Time

She freezes as soon as she rounds the corner.

There's a man standing on their front steps, talking to her dad. And she knows him.

"Zatanna," Bruce greets her warmly as she walks over to him and her father, and she smiles at him, climbs the steps so he can pull her into a hug. Her heart's beating a mile a minute in her chest and she's pretty sure he can feel it. When he pulls away, he smiles, but it's almost apologetic at the edges. Yeah, he definitely felt her heart pounding.

"It's nice to see you, Uncle Bruce," she says, meaning it. After all, she really has missed him, even if his being here has her panicking for other reasons.

"I've missed you. You look so much like your mother," Bruce says softly, tucking a finger under her chin like he always did. Beside Bruce, her father smiles gently. His eyes still water whenever they bring up her mother, but it's very sweet. For him, her mother was always the one.

She understands completely.

"Are you guys moving back for the summer?" she asks, hoping her voice doesn't come out as nervous as she feels for the answer.

But before Bruce can reply, someone yells, "Dad!" from next door, and they look over to see a head of floppy hair with a white stripe falling over a set of dark eyes. Jason. He's Bruce's second-oldest – all of which are adopted, for one reason or another. Bruce and Selina are kind of like the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of Gotham, except better in every way possible.

"Yes, Jason?"

"Alfred's looking for you," a younger voice answers. Tim. He looks a little less boyish than she remembers. He's definitely growing into his looks.

"Alright," Bruce calls back before turning to her and her father again. "I'll be seeing you at dinner?"

Her father nods, and Bruce descends the steps and walks next door where Selina is standing in the driveway, with Damian in her arms and Tim and Jason on either of her sides. She smiles kisses Bruce when he reaches her, and the three boys pretend to be grossed out by it.

Three…

Maybe he really didn't coming home with them.

... ...

She's just stepping out of her bathroom when she hears a ping against her window.

Her heart skips a beat, because it's a very familiar sound. She used to hear it all the time last year, especially last summer. It was something she always looked forward to, something she missed when it stopped, and now that it's back, she's not prepared.

She's in flannel shorts and an off-the-shoulder sweater with paint stains on it from days of set painting with the drama department. She's really not prepared.

Still, it's pretty much a reflex to walk and pull her polka-dotted curtains aside, and the first thing she sees through the glass is a pair of bright blue eyes.

Dick Grayson.

God, it's been months since she's seen him. "Hi," she breathes.

"Hi," he mouths back, and she unlocks the window and slides it up, letting the breeze hit her face. She hadn't even realized how warm it was in her room until now. And Dick's actually sitting in his window casually, his legs dangling two stories up. She used to scold him about putting himself in danger like that, which obviously only made him do it more.

"I didn't realize you were back," she admits, and he gives her a look. She rolls her eyes. "Well, you could've not come back with your family."

"You would've missed me too much," he laughs. She bites her lower lip from telling him just how true that really is. "Besides, I was really homesick, anyway."

"Yeah?" she asks.

He shrugs. "I don't know. Can you be homesick for a person?"

She feels herself blush. Honestly, she's half-convinced she might be dreaming this right now.

Dick Grayson has been her best friend since they were in diapers, and up until last summer, she's always thought her attraction to him was just… Well, she never thought she liked him as much as she did until their families went camping together and they sort of just happened. They were unofficially together for all of last semester and their friends wouldn't stop bugging them because they were juniors in high school and according to them, they'd been in love with each other since they were in Kindergarten.

(Neither of them wanted to admit their friends were right.)

But then he told her at the last possible second – as in, the night before – that he was moving because Selina was going to be producing this huge movie and they didn't want to split the family. She remembers him being mad at his family for making them move, and she was… well, mad at him, but only at first. The she was just at the fact he was leaving.

Finishing the last half of junior year was awful. They never formally broke up, nor did they mention it in their e-mails, which grew less frequent as the weeks went on, and…

Now he's here, sitting in his window as if nothing changed. As if he'd never moved and become a Hollywood heartthrob, and as if she didn't go the past few months feeling her stomach flip whenever she saw his picture on a blog or in a magazine or on her television screen.

She swallows a little, feeling a lump forming. She will not cry, she will not cry. "That's called missing someone, detective."

He chuckles and swings his legs back inside his room, still looking over his shoulder at her.

"Then I really missed you."

Her lips part, but before she can say anything, he disappears behind the wall. "Dick?" she asks, and she hears a familiar sound and feels her heart drop. "Dick, don't!"

But it's too late. He's at the window again, sliding a wooden board across the gap between their houses through her window, creating a makeshift bridge between their rooms. He sticks his head out and lifts himself onto the windowsill again, then steps onto the board, and she shudders anxiously.

"If you hurt yourself, I'm going to kill you!"

He just laughs, striding the short distance along the wobbly board, and she steps aside as he slips into her room. "There. Now you can't kill me."

"I can't believe you did that."

"Well, you should. I used to do it all the time, remember?" he asks.

"What if you hurt your face?" she teases. "Then what would all of the Hollywood girls think of you?"

"Who cares? It's not like any of them are you, so."

"You don't mean that."

He meets her eyes, and she's aware of how close they're standing. She bites her lower lip, and he grasps her chin with his fingers, nudging her lips back apart with his thumb. "And why wouldn't I mean that?" he asks in a low voice. She tries to look away, but he holds her chin in place, making her face him. "Feelings don't just change over a few months."

"Yes they can," she whispers back.

"Mine don't," he argues. "Not the ones I have for you. Those took almost our entire lives to build up, 'Tanna. They're here to stay."

"Well, I don't know," she shrugs, and she has no idea why she feels her eyes watering. Now that he's here, she has no idea why she's trying to push him away. (But that's a lie, because yes, she does know why. She's just saving herself from when he has to leave again.) "It wouldn't be fair for a fling to hold you down."

"A fling?" he repeats. His voice cracks a little, and she can hear the hurt. "Is that all that was to you?"

"No."

"Then why'd you say that?"

"I don't know!" she kind of hisses, then whispers softly, "I don't know."

He brings his other hand up, cradling her face in his hands with his thumbs wiping away the tears from the corner of her eyes. "Do you know your feelings for me?"

She nods, and he waits for her. "They haven't changed at all since you had to leave," she tells him. "I still love you."

He smiles at her – really smiles – and she closes her eyes when he slides his lips over hers. She feels his fingers in her hair, his other hand sliding down to settle at her hip, and she fists the material of his sweater in her fingers and kisses him harder, more desperately.

God, she's missed him.

... ...

They're sitting on the loveseat of his living room after dinner, her curled into his side with his fingers tangled in her hair again, massaging her scalp lightly. They're not really paying attention to the conversations around them or the rather heated game of Clue that Jason, Tim, Damian, and Cassandra – the only sister to the four boys – are playing.

They're not really paying attention, that is, until she hears Bruce say something about the moving vans coming tomorrow.

She gives Dick a strange look, and he's just grinning widely.

"What is she talking about?" she asks him. She's aware that everyone's now paying attention to them, but she doesn't care right now. She wants an answer.

"They're dropping our stuff off tomorrow."

She rolls her eyes. "I get that part, but what do you mean? Are you staying for the whole summer then?"

Jason laughs. "You complained how in love with her the whole time we were gone, and you haven't even told her this yet? You're so weird."

"You're the weird one, Skunk."

She hits Dick's shoulder to get his attention again. "What's he talking about?"

Dick laughs. "You never gave me a chance to tell you," he explains, and she gives him a look. "Selina got offered to be a screenwriter for a TV show that's being produced locally that I've been offered a role in. It's basically about a kid hacker being recruited for some sort of Team. I haven't really gotten the details yet."

"It's being produced locally?" she repeats. "As in…"

"I'm here to stay."

She sucks in a gasp, but she doesn't realize that she's laughing until everyone else is around her. She throws her arms around him and squeezes him tightly, and despite their family being right there, she presses her lips to his as desperately as she had earlier in her room.

They have months of catching up to do.