Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays
'Cause no matter how far away you roam
When you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze
For the holidays you can't beat home sweet home!
Dick Grayson listens to the familiar, slow-flame drawl of Perry Como emitting from the sidewalk speakers inexpertly hidden along the salt-stippled avenue of shops. He drops from the curb without a hop to his step and shoves one of his gloveless hands into the front pocket of his jeans. It isn't cold enough for him to see the huff of his breath on the air, but it is early enough in the morning that he wouldn't be out here if not for the giant travel mug of coffee resolutely grasped in his other hand.
The Blüdhaven strip mall is safe and dead at this hour on a Tuesday, which lends a qualifying moroseness to the airing age-old Christmas melody. He hears the refrain chase him, tinnily, all the way to his car, and he fingers the cell phone in his pocket. He wonders about calling Babs, but even though she isn't strictly out on the streets with them, she's just as much in on the nightlife too, and it'd be a sin to wake her this early only for a maudlin earful.
Four days ago, he'd gotten into another fight with Bruce. Four days later, he can't let it go. Because he – Dick Grayson – went and picked a fight with Bruce Wayne two weeks before actual Christmas just so that Bruce wouldn't because Bruce always did. Dick has worn Batman's cowl and Dick has filled Batman's boots, but never before has he so badly misstepped into his father's shoes.
Ever since his juvenile abdication from all things Bruce Wayne, and even though Bruce and he are more or less civil with each other now, the holidays have a way of stirring Dick's mercurial temper to a melancholy cocktail of nostalgia and the bitter aftertaste of knowing he'd lost those formative years – those family traditions – completely independent of Bruce's crimes of passion. There's irony somewhere in that, he guesses, and a double-dose of it, but Dick is nothing if not sentimental. He has the tendency to chalk up the past to self-blame, whether or not it actually was Bruce who had fanned the fitful flames of Dick's anger. Still, it had always been Robin's duty to counterbalance the Batman, to be the yin to his yang and negate Batman's darkness for him with a simpering buoyancy. So every time he's stormed out just because of Bruce being Bruce, the fault lay indisputably with Dick. It has to.
By the time he arrives back at his apartment, Dick's travel mug is empty and his mood is half-full. He disentangles himself from his scarf with quick tugs of his hand. The tightness around his throat does not yield.
"Sweet Jesus, Dickless," he hears Jason say, "you have failed me for the last time."
"What did I do now?" Dick asks very amiably, shoving away all pensive introspection as he enters his kitchen to find all three of his little brothers glued to their cell phones. There is still a prevailing stress in his eyes, a dejected slouch in the incline of his shoulders where they lean so he can peer over Jason's head. Nothing is more important to him than his family, but lately he's realizing more and more that his family isn't all he wants; he wants for his family to want him right back. He looks past his brother's large, scarred fingers that are frantically tapping away at Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.
"You have no pears in your Market Box. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Stalin– don't you know that pears are the hardest to come by?"
"Sorry, Jaybird. I don't play much anymore." Dick tosses his jacket over the straight back of Jason's – his – chair. "I'm tapped out; my loan is up to one hundred and fifty thousand Bells," and, even as he says this, Dick pulls his phone from his pocket, logs into the game, and presses at the screen a few times. "I have seven pears. There you go. I put them up for twenty Bells, just for you."
"–Acquired," interjects Damian, with spectacular self-satisfaction, at the same time Jason goes, "–One hundred and fifty thousand Bells? How the hell– Dami, you fruit-thieving little shit," he growls, in the same breath, "–did you get yourself in so steep?"
"I'm on, like, the fifth loan, I think. And it's for one hundred and fifty thousand."
"You mean you actually pay them off? What is wrong with you?"
"It's a game about debt," Tim peaceably inserts, without looking up. His fingers flit across his phone screen as deftly as they do his remote hacking device. "Paying off your loans is virtually the only thing you're supposed to do, Jason."
"No, it's a game about making a freaking killer-sweet pad, with all the things. Did you get it, Dicky?"
"Those pears will be the building blocks of my empire, Todd." Damian, again. Smugly, again.
"Fuck your empire. Apollo wants his pears. I will never get that zipper shirt," mourns Jason, not quite sincerely enough to muster tears.
"Yeah, I got it," Dick answers when he is finally allowed the chance to. He holds up the gift card. "But I'm still not sure why you see fit to get Bruce a Starbucks gift card for Christmas. Doesn't it seem a little... I dunno... bourgeois?"
"Spoken like a true trust fund baby. Shut up," Jason adds, shutting down the argument toward which he's riling Dick. "And anyway, Batman is by the people, for the people."
"I'm just saying. I-am-vengeance grappling to an LED marquee and paying for a Venti Mocha Frapp, with a gift card?"
"You don't know Batman the way I do." Well, that was true. Each of the Robins knew Batman differently from the others. "He loves that shit. Ask Alfred. They're opening a Starbucks by the precinct and Bruce will flip his wig when he finds out."
Dick shrugs neutrally, noncommittally, and allows Jason to steamroll over his shameful flare of jealousy. There is ice in his chest, scaling his clavicles, and he ignores the nagging familiarity of it just like he ignores the familiarity by which Jason speaks of Bruce. "Little D, the lady at Suncoast says that you can design your own PopSocket for Al. Through the website."
"Hand me your laptop, Grayson," demands Damian, without more than a second's thought. "I will investigate."
"Okay, but," he warns, "if you need to use your own editor, I haven't got Photoshop on here."
"Tt."
"I can get you Photoshop, Dick."
"Because you're a pirate, Timmy," scoffs Jason, "and Dick is a trust fund b–"
"Or maybe, Jason, I'm not a trust fund baby and that's why I don't own Adobe anything," Dick shoots back, using his full name now. He's nettled by the tone being used on him, for a topic that is so sore with him. The ice bracketing his heart suddenly thaws into a puddling sob of frustration, which goes angrily suppressed. He knows how flammable his own temper is, which colors him all the more upset, enough to turn away from Jason so that he is facing and simultaneously avoiding Tim's stare.
Tim sees how Dick's eyes are flashing dichotomously – an electric blue set in a face schooled of any outward expression – and intervenes before Jason can bring up the point of that ubiquitous knife pressed between them: that at least Dick had actually gotten to live to his age of majority. "Did you pick up gift tags?"
Dick throws out a sideways glance, barely the formality of miffed scrutiny in the stillness of tundra. "Yes, I got gift tags. Because we're all so hopelessly impaired–"
"Drake, your camper is cliché."
"It's the most wonderful time of the year. And I'm trying to complete all of the Christmas Event Challenges."
"That's all that's inside it; Christmas crap," pipes in Jason, "except for– what is that?"
"It's a slipper rack."
"Okay. Damian, I'm gonna have to go with you're wrong on this one. Tim's camper is so Tim."
"This is card stock. Why would they stick stickers on card stock?" Tim gripes from where he's meticulously, conspicuously peeling something off of the backing of the gift card.
"..." And Dick takes the few long moments of sibling banter for what they are: a breathing spell. He collects himself, cards his unruly black hair into tufts, and compartmentalizes.
When dealing with Jason Todd, taking anything personally was taking tinder to kindle. Jason knew Dick, and Dick knew better; it'd never been about himself. Maybe when he was younger he'd thought so, but the eldest had long since come to learn that Jason's best defense was his best offense; barreling heart-first into things, to disarm or to destroy, because he'd grab at anything if it belonged to him – and his brothers, Jason finally ascertained, were his brothers. On less malevolent days of the week, not unlike ordinary sibling rivalry, Jason's possessiveness usually manifested itself by way of teasing just this side of too-fierce. In sharper, more extenuated circumstances, he cut to the quick, navigating the veritable minefield of responsiveness and gut feeling and leaps before looks. In a civilian, Jason's behavior was the very antithesis of vigilanteism. In a younger brother, it was arrested development. Which makes sense, because he'd died a child, and every time Dick is reminded of that it is harrowing pain, and it is thankfulness, softening the edges all around the insults Jason's whetted to the hilt, that his brother is alive.
After a self-possessed sniff – in farewell to his pride, he convinces himself – Dick rests his palm on Tim and gives his bedhead a good tousle. In a smoothly paved voice, he asks, "'You still workin' out? Rerack?'"
Damian Wayne barks a laugh, and immediately Jason jumps on the bandwagon. "'How's it going, brosephine?'"
"'We don't always have to talk about training, you know. There's plenty of other stuff goin' on!'" Dick, quoting from their favorite, the jock type animal. Who happens to also be a bird named Jay.
"'Like...um... You know... How 'bout that weather?'" supplies Jason.
Dick dissolves into laughter. Gasps, "'Did you know that just talking about your muscles can make them bigger and stronger?'"
"I hate you both."
"'Sue me! Rerack!'"
Dami enters the fray. "'How's it going, Drake? Training like a madwoman?'"
Jason stops short. "Demonbird, you play as a female character?"
Damian colors. "The videogame is not gender-specific with its dialogue."
"Isn't it?" Dick considers, curiously.
"How would you know?" challenges Jason – who does play as a female character – as he squares his broad shoulders and tilts his chair onto its back two legs.
"Jason, how do you not know what Damian's character looks like," Tim asks. Don't you see it wandering all over your world?"
"We're not friends."
"We are so, Todd!" And the beat where Damian's accent lands is given an irregular emphasis.
"Fine. How in blazes would I know if we're friends? I cannot even begin to fathom the nickname you chose for yourself. And I have a bazillion names on my friends list, ninety percent of which is in Kanji."
"...Is it?" Dick, still stumped and not following the tangent of conversation at all.
"'Macmoo,'" Tim offers, taking a sip from his empty coffee mug.
"Alright, kiddies. Giddyap," Jason says, and really pronounces it that way. He stretches himself to his full height, and then some – easily six feet four on his toes for the assuaging pop! of his back. His arms arch up and he towers over the fridge. "Go get dressed, Cretin," he orders lovingly and gives his littlest brother, who barely comes up to the bottom of his chest, a fond forward shove toward the bathroom. "I'm starving to death."
As his sibs depart the kitchen, Dick angles himself for a fast escape to the dishwasher, but Jason steps in front of him, purposefully overbearing. "Uh-uh. You too, Dicky."
"Jay, I'm already good to go." He indicates his faded jeans, his windbreaker that's fallen from the chair during Jason's see-saw sitting. "Besides," Dick japes, lamely, "you don't get to tell me what to do; I'm the big brother."
Jason opens his mouth to say one thing, closes it, then reopens it to say something different. "You have a funny memory." Jason sighs, puffs up his cheeks, then sighs again. "It's reticulated."
"Like it's a giraffe's ass?"
"Like it's circling around the same platitudes over and over and getting shakier every time it has to."
Dick falls silent, but he doesn't withdraw his gaze from Jason. He looks measuringly at his brother for a time, beyond teal eyes and need-to-know bases, beyond, even, shared pasts and shared costumes and shared fathers. Rain was cobalt, like the grooves in his irises reflecting at least an alchemic silver lining if not his brother's whole love.
Raking up the quiet, Jason speaks, "Trust fund baby? Seriously, that's what got under your skin? Which of the implications was worse? That you were a snob or that you were a Wayne. Or weren't a Wayne, as it goes."
"Both! Neither. It was you wanting to hurt me because of it," Dick snaps, instantly pissed off again. He ignores the tension line at one corner of his brother's mouth, breaking it apart in his mind and scattering it to pieces. It's only flesh, after all.
"Fuck you, Dick," Jason says, in a low voice. His pulse is hammering. Common courtesy dictates he not raise his voice inside of doors and out of anger. "Not everybody has to love you all of the time. You didn't for me. You aren't for Bruce."
"I do love Bruce." He's a father to me, as much as you are a brother to me, he doesn't say.
"Then why don't you tell him that and stop dragging me down the roads of your guilty conscience."
For the gravid space of a breath, it really seems like Dick is going to lose his temper and explode into dynamite violence. Then he winces, as if going against a great backlash. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to take any of this out on you."
"That's exactly what I mean, Dick." No moniker for his name this time. "Forget about walking on eggshells; you are an emotional rhino in a china shop." Jason fumbles a cigarette to his lips. "Except the china shop is holiday hullabaloo." He fishes for his lighter, mumbling something about how his skinny ninny brother is a rhino, and can he believe this.
"I just miss knowing that I can't lose my family at even the best of times. Don't smoke in here."
And because Jason's feeling generous, he obeys, but he doesn't remove the stick from his mouth. He rolls it with his tongue, longingly, between the borders of his lips. Nicotine is his sunrise; his lips, the horizon.
It is then that Tim and Damian file back into the room.
"I thought we were going for brunch," says Dick in a flat voice, nonplussed when Tim, wearing a tasteful burgundy button-up, makes his way to the coffee pot for a second mug. Damian is wearing black slacks that look as though they'd been recently pressed by Alfred.
"That, too," Jason remarks, in an offhand way. "But first you're getting your Christmas present early, Dickface. Now go change. I'm cashing in on a few favors for this one."
It isn't until they are all four crammed into Jason's beat-up '93 Mazda – with Dick wisely refraining from asking if it's a stolen vehicle – that Jason spills the beans, reveals that they're going to get their picture taken together, but doesn't point out that Dick hasn't hung a single portrait on a single wall of his apartment in any of the years that he's lived there because Dick won't hang anything if he can't hang a picture of his family, and that's why Jason's taking them to the seedy studio of an even seedier acquaintance to get this done.
"You mean... You guys didn't stay over just because Alfred cleared you out so he could wrap presents for under the tree?"
"Cripes no. Don't ask stupid questions. You know how many rooms are in the Manor and you know how resourceful Alfred can be. We came because I rallied the troops."
And Dick is moved to tears. His eyes are hot and runny, even after he adjusts the sticking vent in the dashboard. In the rearview mirror he watches Damian glaring balefully out of the window, but Dick knows by Damian's acquiescent silence that the littlest bird isn't actually bothered in the least. Dick sees Tim's tired reflection but knows by the tall mug Tim's holding that he doesn't mind trying.
Dick scrubs his face with his knuckles. "You know, Jay, you don't have to start a fight with me every time you want to make me feel better." He raises both hands in a gesture of truce to ward off Jason's dark scowl. "Though I appreciate the effort!"
"I wouldn't have to if you didn't always make it so hard for yourself. Self-saboteur. Quit flattering yourself. And anyway... It kinda wasn't completely your fault. I was being... well... you-ish."
Dick chuckles but wetly, in pieces over this whole being loved thing, and leans his head wordlessly against the passenger-side window.
After a few miles, he is distracted by a murmur coming from Jason – not so much by the sound as by the gravitas of the timbre applied to meet Dick halfway. It's another Animal Crossing quote, of all things, and considering that Tim had formulated a calculation for the minimum mandatory animal conversations Jason was likely to play through in a given day, it isn't at all surprising to Dick that Jason can recite verbatim:
"'Everything you hold dear is under attack, and they're going to do whatever they can to take it away.'" There is a considering lull – and Dick's smile is lopsided and peaking – before Jason gives him a hard look. "'It's you...versus the ants.'"
Dick sits up straight. He reaches for a knob and clicks on the radio. It is Perry Como again, crooning the classic. Dick turns it up.
"Thank you, Little Wing."
"Merry Christmas, Big Bird."
Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays
'Cause no matter how far away you roam
If you wanna be happy in a million ways
For the holidays you can't beat home sweet home!