Title: Take Your Pick
Summary: Every time one of his little brothers scare him by getting badly hurt, Dick gets revenge on them in one of the simplest yet cruelest ways. He paints their nails. Crack!fic? Oh yeah. Complete and utter crack!fic. One-shot. Please read/review!
Characters: Dick Grayson (as Robin, later as Nightwing), Barbara Gordon (as Batgirl, later as Oracle), Jason Todd (as Robin, later as Red Hood), Tim Drake (as Robin, later as Red Robin), Damian Wayne (as Robin)
Genre: Humor/Family
Pairings: Slight DickxBabs, Big brother!Dick/Jason, Big brother!Dick/Tim, Big brother!Dick/Damian
Rating: K
A/N: This was just too funny. 'Neat-oh is a genius. :D I had to write it. Enjoy!
Headcanon (from incogneat-oh on tumblr): Whenever any of the boys gets injured seriously enough to miss a week or more of patrol, one of the other boys (read as: DICK) will paint their nails. If he is feeling kind, you may choose fingers or toes. Sometimes he will give an option between two colors (okay, so we got hot pink– lovely, I know– or blue but here is the catch if it's blue I'm doing a coat of glitter-polish over the top, so what's it gonna be?). If the injuries are especially bad, he will paint both finger and toenails. It's "punishment, deal with it", and started with Babs and Dick when they were baby vigilantes. (Babs is a bully.) As a result, the manor has an embarrassingly large nail polish collection for a house with no ladies.
"Okay," Barbara announced, walking into the room with a plastic bag in one hand and a large smirk on her face, "you get to choose the color."
"What?" Dick glanced at her, confused. He was sitting on the couch, bored out of his mind and flipping channels for the fifty-millionth time. Several days ago, he'd been hurt on patrol. Being the universe's most paranoid being, Bruce wasn't letting him go out again (although Barbara agreed with him that Dick shouldn't be patrolling when he had gotten a concussion and been shot several times).
"You get to choose the color," Barbara repeated, sitting down next to him and setting the bag on the floor next to her. "Keep the TV on if you want."
"Are you kidding? I've gone through every channel several hundred times in the past two hours," Dick said, turning it off and tossing the remote aside. "So what color do I get to choose?"
"Red or green?" Barbara dug through the plastic bag. Dick tried to peek around her to see what was inside, but she purposely blocked his view.
"For what?"
"Just answer!"
"Um…" Despite his efforts, Dick couldn't see what she had in the plastic bag, and it frustrated him to no end. "If I answer, will you let me see what you have in there?!" he demanded. Barbara nodded, keeping her back to him so he couldn't see her smirk growing. "All right," Dick said, satisfied with the deal and confident that it couldn't be too horrible. After all, Barbara wouldn't do anything that mean to him. "Red."
"Okay." Barbara pulled something out of the bag, but her hand was closed around it, so Dick still couldn't see it. "Red it is."
"Babs!" Dick whined. "You said you'd let me see!"
"Hold still," Barbara instructed, turning back to him and grabbing his hand. Surprised, a slight blush colored Dick's face, followed instantly by a smile at her. She definitely likes me, he thought smugly. After all, she was the one who was holding his hand.
"Can I see now?" he pleaded.
"Uh-huh," Barbara said in a distracted tone, shaking the object in her left hand. Then she opened it and turned back to Dick.
Dick's eyes widened in horror. "Babs," he said slowly. "Is that supposed to be…"
"Nail polish," Barbara said, smirking even more. Horrified, Dick started squirming, trying now to break free of the grip that she had on his hand. "At least I let you pick red or green!"
"You can't put nail polish on me!"
"Who says? It's a free country!"
"Not—if I—don't want you to!" Dick yelled, struggling. "I do have a sense of pride, you know!"
"You're practically under house arrest anyways; it's not like anyone's going to see you wearing nail polish!"
"Bruce and Alfred will!"
"Too bad!" Barbara yanked him by his wrist hard enough that he stopped struggling for a moment. "That's what you get for scaring me!"
Dick was silent for a few moments, staring at her with a mixture of shock and surprise. Throughout his time as Robin, he'd gotten so used to Bruce's no-nonsense attitude about this sort of thing: never worrying, just forcing him to stay home for an amount of time. Even if he hadn't adopted Bruce's attitude about everything, it was easy to not think about the worrying other people did.
"…just don't do too much," he finally said in a resigned tone, angling away slightly and closing his eyes in the hope that it would make this less painful. He stuck his hand out in Barbara's direction, wanting to get it over with. Barbara smiled, took his hand, squeezed it once, and started painting.
"Oh, Jaaaaaaybirrrrrrd~" Dick called in a sing-song voice. "Come on out~"
That's not a good tone. Jason quietly opened his bedroom door, peeking out cautiously. Dick was standing a few feet away, a mischievous grin playing at his lips. Definitely not good, Jason thought, trying to close the door again before his older brother could notice that it was open. Maybe Dick would believe that he was asleep or something. Hopefully he wouldn't come in and try to 'wake him up' or anything. Jason was already in a bad mood, having been forced off patrol for the next several days because of getting hit by Scarecrow's fear gas and then beaten, and the last thing he wanted was one of Dick's attempts at making him feel better—a.k.a. pranks to make Dick feel like the world was going to keep spinning as normal.
"I know you're awaaaaaaaake~" Dick continued, stepping closer. There was a gleam in his eyes that announced that he had seen Jason open and close the door. Jason swore mentally and slowly opened the door again.
"What do you want, Dick?" he said carefully, not wanting to trigger any stupid thing that Dick thought was his big brotherly responsibility to do.
Dick held up a DVD case that, despite everything, made Jason's eyes light up a little. "Since you're on house arrest and Bruce is at some company thing-or-another, I figured we'd have a chance to watch your favorite movie," he said, grinning. "Unless, of course, you don't want to watch Sneakers, in which case I'll head on back to Blüdhaven…"
"No!" The word came flying out of Jason's mouth way too fast. Dick smirked and grabbed Jason's wrist, tugging his willing little brother along.
"Then come on."
Once they were in the other room and had the movie set up, Jason actually did mutter a quick, "Thanks," under his breath, his eyes darting away to look at anything in the room but his brother.
Dick gave a real smile. "You're welcome." He hit 'play' on the DVD, and his smirk became something to be cautious of again. "But don't thank me just yet…" he added, pulling something out from his pocket.
He burst out laughing, mainly because he was certain that his expression had been the exact same the first time that Barbara pulled this on him. "What in the world are you carrying nail polish around for?!" Jason demanded, scrambling away from him.
"Long-standing tradition," Dick said, still laughing as he opened the nail polish container. "Now do you want blue or red? You're getting glitter over whichever one you pick, so don't let that go into account on your choice."
"Neither!" Jason's eyes were huge, staring at Dick in a 'you're completely insane!' way.
"Go on," Dick urged. "Take your pick. Unless you want me to choose for you."
"I said neither!" Jason backed away to the wall, a deer-in-the-headlights look frozen on his face. Grinning, Dick got up, went over to him, grabbed his wrist, and dragged him back to the couch despite Jason's struggling and attempts to shove him away.
"All right, little wing," the older bird said, thoroughly enjoying being the tormenter rather than the tormented. "Blue it is."
Tim had no idea what in the world was going on when he woke up to find his older brother painting his nails and humming, a smug 'ha!' expression on his face. Quite honestly, he was afraid to ask. He nearly pretended he was still out, just to avoid it, but Dick noticed he was awake.
"It's about time, Timmy!" The nail polish was instantly forgotten, and he pulled Tim into a crushing hug, taking the young bird even more off-guard. "Don't ever ever ever scare me like that, okay? That's one of your little brother responsibilities, is to not scare me half to death!"
"Wha—"
"Killer Croc got you from behind." That was Barbara, turning her wheelchair to face him.
"About thirty-six hours ago!" Dick's tone and expression were torn between fury and relief. "You were unconscious when Bruce got to you! And you haven't woken up until now!"
Tim blinked several times. Now that they mentioned it, his head was throbbing a little, and his body ached all over. "Sorry," he said quietly, since noise wasn't helping his head.
Dick seemed to finally relax. "Just…promise me that you won't do that again, okay? I'm serious, little bro. You really did scare me half to death. And Bruce, too, even if he's too stubborn and bullheaded to admit it."
Tim looked down at his right hand. "I will if you explain why you painted my nails orange," he said, staring at the three completed fingernails.
"'Cause I ran out of red."
A glance at his other hand proved that it was incomplete as well. "…how?" Tim said slowly. A touch of sheepishness graced Dick's smile as he gently pulled the blanket off of Tim. The young teen groaned mentally when he saw that all ten of his toenails were painted a bright red, almost pink. "Dick, why in the world are you doing this in the first place?" he asked, almost worried to know the answer.
Instantly, Dick pointed at Barbara. "It was her idea," he said without a second's hesitation. "She started it."
Damian was unconscious.
That was the only way Dick could get away with this with him. Awake, Damian was dead serious about his threats to break Dick's arm if he didn't get the nail polish away from him. When he was out, though, Dick was fairly confident in his ability to finish the job before he woke up.
"Okay," he said quietly, "so we got hot pink– lovely, I know– or blue. But here is the catch: if it's blue, I'm doing a coat of glitter-polish over the top, so what's it gonna be? Take your pick, 'cause you know he'll hate it either way."
"Why in the world do you keep so much nail polish again?" Jason asked, crossing his arms. Still, there was a slight gleam of interest in his eyes.
"For the sake of doing this," Dick replied. "Got any preference on what color Little D gets?"
"Hot pink." Tim's smirk was possibly more evil than Dick's had ever been. "Definitely hot pink. And then take a picture and send it to everyone we can think of."
"You've gotten a lot meaner about this, you know," Jason said to Dick. "At least you let me pick the color the first time."
"Lucky," Tim muttered. "I was unconscious when he started doing this to me."
"But I put the glitter polish on Jaybird no matter what color he picked," Dick said, absentmindedly opening the hot pink nail polish and gently tugging off Damian's gloves. "I didn't do that to you so much."
"What?!" Jason stared at them both. "You're kidding me, right?"
Holding up a finger as he started applying the nail polish to Damian's left hand, Dick said, "I didn't as much. I still did."
"You never gave me a break with it!"
"That's 'cause you're more stubborn about it. Tim learned quicker to just go with it."
Glancing at Jason, Tim mouthed, 'Only because that was the only way to make him quit doing the glitter polish and the purple.'
"Purple?" Jason repeated. "You've definitely gotten meaner, Dickie-bird. I always got red or blue."
"Robin or Nightwing," Dick agreed in a distracted tone, moving on to Damian's next finger.
"If you gave the replacement a break with it, you have to at least put the glitter polish on Damian," Jason said, crossing his arms. A hint of sulkiness entered his voice at the fact that Tim had gotten out of part of the torture. "He deserves it even more."
"That's for sure," Tim agreed, taking the glitter polish and setting it next to Dick.
"Uh-huh." It was questionable how much of this Dick was actually hearing and how much he was just replying to automatically.
Jason looked at the glitter polish, at Damian, at Dick, back at Damian, and back at the glitter polish. "Actually," he said, "we get to put the glitter polish on him."
"Sure," Dick said, finishing off Damian's left hand and switching to his right. "You've gotta give it about five minutes to dry before you do anything more, though."
Picking up on the look Jason gave him and his tone of voice, Tim suggested, "Why don't you get some sleep, Dick? It's been a long day for everybody."
"Let me finish this first."
While Dick worked on Damian's right hand, Jason and Tim had a whole argument through looks and glances alone over which one of them got the glitter polish and which one got to paint Dick's nails neon pink and orange on every other fingernail. Within seconds, it was decided. Tim got to create a source for headaches. Jason got to sentence Dick to his own constant torture of his little brother.
They could worry about what they would do to Dick's toenails when they reached that point.
A/N: …I'm fairly certain this is one of my favorite things I've ever written. Simply because it's the first, I think, to qualify as complete and utter crack. *breaks down laughing again* *starts coughing from Joker-laughing so hard and has to quit* Anyways…*coughs* Reviews, anyone? :D