Written for tarrinatopaz – Wing!fic to Katy Sagal's "Bird on a Wire."
Gotham seldom enjoyed pleasant weather, but the insistent downpour of the last two weeks seemed to be the city's response to the loss of her Robin. On the day they had buried Damian, it had begun to softly rain, gradually increasing with each night, and had yet to stop.
Dick found the rain peaceful, meditative even … a way to zone out when the day was over and the others had retreated to their own hiding spots for the night. For his own decompression time, Dick had a favored window seat in particular where he could see the cemetery from the second floor music room and just be for a little while.
Most nights, he fell asleep there. Heck, some afternoons Dick fell asleep there while Bruce and Tim went to WE and Alfred performed duties in the Cave. It was on one of those days that Dick woke up with a protesting neck and the certainty that he had missed dinner.
If Alfred hadn't bothered waking him for food, then the others hadn't come home for it either.
Outside, the rain continued to fall, a comforting constant, and Dick rested his forehead against the cool surface, splaying his fingers over the window pane as if he could touch the rain spilling over the outside of the glass.
His gaze had been drawn to the cemetery like it so often had before, and at first—it was nothing. Just another pretty statue in a small cemetery, the figure of a child-sized angel surrounded by giant wings as it perched on the marker.
Except no such statue had ever been placed in the cemetery … and that the stone in question had absolutely no adornment by Dick's own request.
Dick pressed against the glass, but the rain was too thick. He thought he saw movement though, and that sent him flying from his perch, grappling through the hall past a soaked and befuddled Tim. His younger brother's room had a balcony, and Dick flung himself over the edge in a move that made Tim shout. Dick barely heard it, already swinging down from branch to branch in the nearby tree. He slipped from the water and worn wood on the second to last handhold, falling the last seven feet, but Dick didn't notice the twinge in his ankle either.
The sprint across the lawn in the rain was the longest run in Dick's life, and he gasped out something—a name, a plea, something that never quite made it to his own ears, but caused the figure in the rain to turn towards him.
Dick lunged, tackling the boy from the stone and taking them towards the ground. The small warrior twisted at the last minute, causing Dick to take the brunt of his own fall and landing atop the acrobat. "Be careful, idiot," is snapped, but Dick didn't need the voice to confirm an identity. Not even the rain could hide the familiar face at this distance, and Dick sprang upright to hug the boy to his chest.
His hands encounter a wall of feathers—not stone, not statuary or symbolic hallucination—but actual feathers, gray and sodden from the rain. Damian pulled back, hugging his bare chest with a quiet "Tt" as he looked away.
"Damian," came the hushed whisper, "Are you real?"
Damian looked as though he wasn't entirely certain of the answer himself. There was a body six feet beneath them, and wings sprouting from small shoulders … but Damian's weight had been real, tangible and his skin, while wet and raised with the cold of the rain, still had some warmth to it. Damian opened his mouth as if to answer, but Dick didn't wait for it. He dove forward and yanked his brother into his arms a second time—wings and all.
Childish hands made their way around Dick's neck and clung back just as tightly. "Sort of … does it matter, Grayson?"
"Not at all," Dick promised. "Not at all."
I saw a young man leaning on his wooden crutch. He called out to me: "Don't ask for so much!"
And a young woman leaning in her darkened door; she cried out to me: "Why not ask for more?"
- Katey Sagal; "Bird on a Wire"
