Anonymous asked: "You're everything to me, yet I'm nothing to you." With Dick & Damian

"Grayson?" Damian asks from behind him, but Dick doesn't move or acknowledge his little brother's presence in any way. He just keeps staring at the city spread out below him, the noises of pedestrians and traffic muffled all the way up here. But Damian hates to be ignored, so Dick isn't surprised when Damian stomps over to him with a scowl. "Grayson, what are you doing up here?"

Dick shrugs, a sad smile pulling at his lips. He'd stopped asking that when his feet first started to take him up here years ago. "I like the view."

Damian hesitates, obviously uncertain how to continue. "Father's looking for you," Damian says after a quiet minute or two. "He sent me to find you."

"Bruce knows where I am," Dick says, chuckling softly.

After all, it's true. Bruce knows exactly where Dick goes when he starts feeling like this. Like the weight of the world is too heavy for his average shoulders. The answer is up high. It's always up high. Bruce used to find him on the roof of the manor or in the chandeliers, or even in the attic if Dick really didn't want to be found. Bruce had found him anyways.

I'm a detective, Bruce used to say when Dick had asked him, how?

Tim and Jason and Alfred and Cass all know of his penchant to disappear for a few hours, too, just looking to be above everything. Wanting to fly and to not feel that weight for a little while. But this is probably new territory for Damian, Dick realizes. He never did this while the two of them were partners, too wary of letting himself act as any sort of negative influence for Damian while wearing the cowl.

Actually, now that he thinks about it, Dick had stopped doing a lot of things like this to make Damian more comfortable, to give Damian someone a little better to look up to. This is the first time since Bruce had died and come back that Dick had actually let himself breathe, he thinks.

But for some reason, Damian just plops down on the ground of the roof of Wayne Enterprises. Just sits down right next to him, and watches the city with him.

"You know," Dick says—mumbles, really, because this is hard to admit, "You're everything to me." He pauses, let's that sink in, but Damian doesn't say anything. Doesn't agree or disagree, so Dick keeps going. "We're partners, we're brothers, and I love you so much, Dami. But—sometimes. Sometimes, I feel like I mean nothing to you."

There's silence for one, two, three, four, five seconds, and then—

Damian scoffs. "You're an annoyance," Damian says in that false bravado, but there's something to his words that has Dick chuckling slightly, even if it's tinged with a slight sadness. Damian continues, though, "But I will admit you're more tolerable than Drake or Todd. Pleasant, even. But only sometimes."

Dick doesn't always think that he doesn't mean anything to Damian. It's just times like this, when it's hard to believe even Bruce and Alfred and Wally and Barbara and everyone he loves—when it's hard to believe that they love him back. They're hard, and he doubts it sometimes. It feels like he's spread his heart too think, and he doesn't know if he's capable of understanding another person's feelings.

Only sometimes, though. The other times he doesn't have to remind himself, because he can hear it in Damian's words, and his voice, and his actions. Damian loves him, whether he can admit it or not. Damian's so much like Bruce sometimes, it's scary. Too incapable of telling people how he really feels.

But Dick's good at reading people.

"Thanks, Damian," Dick says.

Damian nods once. "Of course," he says quietly. "We were the best, after all."

So, these are prompts from tumblr, and instead of just posting them to ao3 as an archive, I'll be posting them all as individual stories throughout the next coming weeks. Some of you may know this from tumblr, but I'm studying abroad in Italy, and it's hard to find time to write with the schedule I've had the past few days.

Also, there are a lot of prompts I've written for the angst prompts, and I think I've been ignoring for far too long.

(P.S. Teach Me to Dream is on it's way soon. I've got one more scene to write and then I'm going to edit and post. Thanks for being patient. It's been a crazy few days.)