A Reminder to Walk Your Pet Vigilante
Times passed fairly quickly over the next week-and-a-half.
Not too quickly, like it sometimes would when he was burying himself in work or dead-end cases, but also not slowly—like when he was trapped at one of Bruce's socialite galas that seemed to drag on for days.
It was nice, if not a little weird.
By the tenth day however, Dick was going stir-crazy.
He was lying face down on the couch, wondering how easy it would be to suffocate himself in the throw pillows, when the Team's apartment door slammed open.
(It was a little bit his apartment room now, too. And no, he wasn't possessive about his things.
But it was his. Just a little).
He sat bolt upright on the couch, only feeling the slightest twinge in the healing cuts along his back and side. His ribs still ached—one did not simply recover from a bruised ribcage in a week—but he could at least move without wincing now. So. Yay.
It was the little things that made life neat, like no longer feeling excruciating pain every time he took a breath.
Wally's head appeared above his, the speedster suspending himself across the top of the couch. "Hiyah."
Dick smiled up at him, the expression a little bit lopsided from the still-healing cut in his lip. "Hiyah."
"So," the speedster gestured for him to move his legs, collapsing onto the couch like someone had just let the air out of his tires. Not that he had tires.
Dick frowned. Could a speedster use tires? Could they strap tires onto themselves like the wheels of a car and zoom through the streets?
. . .Dick needed to get out of the apartment before he attached a pair of tires to Wally's legs.
He tuned back into Wally's never-ending stream of consciousness, where the speedster was questioning him,"—what'd you do today?"
Wally asked this everyday, and everyday Dick had the same answer. "Nothing. I lapped the apartment room. I paced back and forth, thinking about the ever increasing encroach of the world's inevitable end. I laid on the ground and despaired. Made a smoothie."
"One of those things is not like the others."
"Shut up."
The speedster did not, in fact, shut up. Dick hadn't really expected him to though. Asking Wally to stop talking was like asking Bruce to stop brooding.
Only possible when they were unconscious.
"Well, have I ever got a surprise for you then." Wally said, grinning crookedly. "We're going case-solving tonight."
It sounded too good to be true, which meant it probably was. Dick narrowed his eyes at him, "What do you mean?"
"We've been talking about it—"
"Talking without me? How very rude of you."
"—and Kaldur agrees. We should open a line of communication between you and Griffin."
Dick frowned. "I already have an open-line with the commissioner." He waved his (admittedly dead, he hadn't bothered to charge it in a few days) phone at the speedster. "Her number's on here, in case you forgot."
"Hard to forget when we had to fight you for it," Wally gestured at his own pale arm, where there was a barely noticeable mark from Dick grabbing him last week.
In his defense, Wally had been trying to steal his phone.
You didn't take things from a Bat without getting a little ouched-up in the process, it was basically a law.
After they'd finally managed to pry his phone out of his hands, Kaldur had insisted they give Griffin a call and inform her of the detective's newest injuries—which they blamed on a hit-and-run while Dick had been "walking around looking for trouble and answers".
They couldn't exactly say he'd been beat up as Nigthwing. And the whole 'hit-and-run' thing was true, kind of. He'd just been hit-and-run by a one-eyed mercenary, not a car.
Griffin had politely thanked Kaldur for the information, asked to be put on the line with the detective, then proceeded to cuss Dick out with some of the foulest words he'd ever heard.
His ears still rang with the sound of them.
Then Griffin had said she was proud of him for prioritising his health and sentenced him to another two weeks of vacation time.
"You're making up for all the vacation time you skipped out on while working, okay? Don't beat yourself up about this. I'll see you when you're healed, Grayson."
The words had calmed him down a little, even if he wasn't exactly overjoyed to be stuck with the Team in their tiny apartment.
Past him would be horrified by his current situation.
Past him was also kind of a dick though, so.
Dick shrugged, unrepentant. "I warned you not to try and take it from me."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever." Wally flopped back against the couch cushion, his socket feet dangerously close to Dick's face.
"Get those away from me." Dick pressed a hand against Wally's face and pushed at the other man until he rolled away across the couch. "I saw you kick Conner with them yesterday. Don't pretend it didn't happen. They're dangerous."
Wally huffed but tucked his legs beneath him obediently. "They'll be back from their shopping trip any minute now. I ran home when Kaldur and M'gann started arguing about what fruit to get."
Dick snorted. "Nice."
"I think Conner was right—"
The door flew open on its hinges again, Conner slouching inside with at least a million plastic grocery bags weighing him down.
Was it just a hero thing, not being able to open the door like a normal human being?
"—behind me," Wally finished, shooting the super-clone a wide smile. "How did it go?"
Conner nodded at Dick, then carried the bags over to the counter, completely ignoring Wally on his way over.
"What's up with that?" Dick whispered, watching as Conner started unpacking produce with a little too much gusto. It looked like he was trying to beat the vegetables into submission. "Did one of the leeks hit on M'gann? Is he angry at the asparagus?"
"Ha, no." Wally grinned. "He didn't know what her favourite type of squash was and had to guess instead."
Dick stared, convinced (and half hoping) that his ears had just malfunctioned. "Excuse me?"
Wally's grin turned downright nefarious. "Oh, you heard right. He has a whole thing about needing to know everything about her. Some sort of relationship voodoo."
Before they could explore that. . .situation any further, the door was flying open again and the rest of the Team poured inside.
M'gann had somehow ended up not carrying any groceries—which explained why Conner had been carrying twice as many—and immediately floated over to one of the empty armchairs, her skin morphing from peach to its familiar green.
Dick had adjusted to an entire person floating around the apartment surprisingly quickly. There'd only been a couple early-morning scares, where she'd been hanging out near the ceiling and Dick had almost called an exorcist before he realized it was her.
She'd stopped purposefully trying to scare him after he'd flung an entire mug of coffee at her face on reflex (it was the nearest huck-able object).
It'd been an accident and he'd apologized immediately after, but there was still a faint red mark on her forehead from where the mug's handle had made impact.
"Dick," Kaldur huffed as he dragged a bag of what looked like—dried seaweed?—over to the counter. "We have good news."
"Wally already told me about the consolation mission."
Every hero in the room shot the speedster a Look. Dick had been told the Look was a hero thing and therefore he couldn't understand it (he's pretty sure Conner had been trying to tell a joke when he'd told him that), but they seemed to do it a lot when they were annoyed.
"We'll suit up after we eat," Artemis said. "And Wally?"
"Yeah?"
"Try to keep your mouth shut."
The speedster saluted her. "Yes ma'am."
Crossing over the rooftops of Bludhaven was a lot less effective with a group of brightly coloured hero proteges trailing behind him, like kids on a group field trip.
"Can you be any louder?" He turned to Conner, staring pointedly at the cracks that had formed in the concrete beneath the clone's feet. "I think they might not have heard you on the ground floor, maybe you should stomp again just in case."
"I think we need to take our vigilante on more walks," Artemis piped as she popped up behind them. She, at least, knew what the word stealth meant. "He's getting a little aggressive. Maybe we should try socializing him? Take him to a vigilante park for a nice vigilante playdate?"
He took it back, she didn't have an ounce of stealth in her. Only loud bones. Loud, annoying bones. "Very funny."
He both felt and heard Kaldur approaching, one of the perks (or downsides, depending on how he looked at it) of being linked up with the team via M'gann's telepathy.
It had been incredibly weird to hear all their voices in his head, especially when Wally kept losing his train of thought mid-mental sentence and going on thought tangents about the dogs he'd been seeing.
Dick had been adamant against anyone screaming around inside his brain until M'gann had assured him, privately while all the others were suiting up, that no one would be able to rummage in his thoughts.
They would only hear anything that he intentionally broadcasted at them, and they would only feel the barest trace of his emotions while linked.
After that, it'd only made sense to agree.
Besides, it was a nightmare trying to imagine putting one of his own state-of-the-art and therefore very-very-expensive comms anywhere near Conner's fists or Wally's absent mind.
Kaldur dropped onto the rooftop beside them, Miss Martian coming out of invisibility at his side. "We're all still alive and accounted for?"
"I might have pushed Kid Flash off a roof about two blocks back," Dick said, widening his eyes innocently.
The speedster appeared at his side in a flash of lightning. "Not true, I got distracted by a mugging."
Kaldur dropped his forehead against his knee, heaving a sigh that probably—no, definitely echoed down into his very bones. "I thought we agreed not to make any public appearances tonight."
"Stopping a mugging is hardly a public appearance," Wally said, and for once Dick agreed with him. "What'd you expect me to do? Just let them rob the guy?"
"Fine, you did good Kid Flash.
The speedster preened under the attention. "I know."
Dick pretended not to see the way Artemis was rolling her eyes and instead focused on the task at hand. A task they were all being annoyingly secretive about.
"Am I allowed to know what we're doing here, on this desolate rooftop, at a time where I would very much rather be sleeping?"
Kaldur smiled at him, the expression looking especially savage in the semi-darkness. "Not this rooftop, the next one over. And as for what we're doing out here, I scheduled a little meeting with our mutual commissioner friend."
Dick's mind immediately went to Commissioner Gordon, but that didn't make any sense. The man was an entire city away in Gotham and had never met the Team before.
That, and Wally had mentioned 'connecting' his vigilante persona to Commissioner Griffin.
Which left. . .
"You didn't," he said, quickly turning towards the roof that Kaldur had pointed out. There was a dark figure silhouetted against the sky, a trench-coat snapping in the high-winds of the rooftop.
It was appropriately dramatic. Dick approved.
"Oh yes we did," Kid Flash's grin was even more feral than Kaldur's. "Commissioner Griffin is just dying to talk to you."
"I hate all of you."
"Noooo, you love us. There's no going back, we're teammates now."
"We can't be teammates after I bury you all alive."
Wally squeaked, holding his hands up in front of his face like that would protect him from Dick's wrath.
It wouldn't, especially not after Dick broke those very same hands and made true on his threat of throwing the speedster over the roof's edge.
Dick imagined the sound Kid Flash's body would make when it hit the ground and smiled.
He saw M'gann shoot him a very wide-eyed (but borderline amused) glance in his periphery, which meant he'd probably thought that louder than he'd meant to. Oops.
Kaldur spoke, "We were discussing this—"
"Without me," Dick noted again. They seemed to do all their discussing when he wasn't around, which was almost impressive since he'd been stuck in their living space for the past week.
"—and we figured it would be beneficial for the Commissioner of Bludhaven to be aware of the city's vigilante, especially since there are so many. . . unflattering rumours about you."
Meaning the deaths of the Gang, whose murders his vigilante persona was still technically suspect in.
"It's too risky," he shook his head, crossing his arms over the blue icon on his chest. "Griffin's smart, and trained in identifying and cataloguing body language. She'll recognize me immediately."
Dick was also trained in altering his identity and body language, but they didn't need to know that yet. Or ever, preferably.
He still needed some secrets, after all.
"You can say no," M'gann added. "We wanted it to be a surprise" –everyone gave Wally the Look again, the disappointed-hero one, and the speedster flushed— "but if you say no we'll drop it. It's your identity, and we would never want to pressure you into exposing it."
They all nodded, even the rather embarrassed looking Wally.
It felt like there was a lump in Dick's throat, like he'd swallowed something wrong or was dying. Or choking. Or choking and dying. "Thanks. That—that means a lot."
He thought about it for a moment, weighing the pros and cons. Weighing the possibility of exposure, dismissing Bruce's cloying words of Do not trust, do not take unnecessary risks from the back of his head.
"Alright," he stretched out his grappling arm in preparation of the swing to the neighbouring rooftop. "Let's go."
He had a very strong feeling he was going to regret this later, but that was a problem for future Dick to worry about.
Present Dick had much bigger problems, like the fact that he was touching down on the roof of a nearby building that his boss was standing on. While he was in-costume.
Chances of her recognizing him as the detective were slim—with his un-styled hair and the general darkness of the city's nightlife—but there was still the potential of her figuring out who he was.
If Bruce were here, he'd currently be throwing an apoplectic fit. Passed out in the background, seizing and foaming-at-the-mouth on the pavement.
Dick had to shake off the interesting mental image of a rabid Batman as he approached the lone figure.
She was silhouetted against a background of smoggy light pollution, cutting a bold figure against the shredded clouds and flashing orange-yellow lights of a distant highway. She also didn't hear him coming.
"Commissioner," he said into the stillness, generously pretending not to notice the slight twitch of her shoulders as she spun towards him, hand flying to her hip holster.
"Woah," he put his hands up, palm out. "Let's not pump me full of lead, yeah?"
To her credit, she did a good job covering up her obvious startle. "You're not the person who contacted me. Why are you here? I thought I was meeting with—"
Kaldur stepped forward, a bridge of glowing water disappearing from where it'd helped him bridge the gap between the two roofs. "It's alright, Commissioner. He's with us."
"'Us'?" The commissioner asked, only for the rest of the Young Justice team to join Kaldur at Dick's side. "Ah. Well, this is certainly unexpected."
Dick couldn't stop the snort that worked its way out of his nose. "Tell me about it."
"We're not that bad," Kid Flash muttered, only to by ignored by both Dick and the Commissioner.
"Last I heard, you were all hunting him. I thought he was your primary suspect for the murders?" The Commissioner, impossibly, didn't seem surprised by this development.
Then again, the first time Dick had ever seen her surprised had been—he checked the non-existent watch on his wrist—fifty seconds ago when he'd spooked her with his greeting.
She probably could've been a Bat in another life, in another universe.
"Recent evidence suggests we might have been a little hasty with the whole 'Nightwing is evil' manhunt," Artemis said. "Very compelling recent evidence."
Griffin didn't ask for clarification. She stared at each of them carefully before finally fixing her gaze on Dick. "Understood. Now, tell me everything you've learned, slowly and in detail. Detective Grayson's vacation was recently extended, and I'd like to prove that my department is capable of solving at least onecase without his presence."
Dick felt his lips twitch into what Artemis had started calling his 'insufferably smug smile'. He felt her boot connect with the back of his shin, like she knew exactly what expression he was making.
Kaldur shot both of them a glare that very much meant Behave.
Did that mean he was officially part of the Team now? If Kaldur was including him in the I'm-not-mad-just-disappointed stare?
Dick grinned at the thought, then continued.
"You might want to sit down for this," he warned, and then he proceeded to tell them everything.
(A/N): Thanks for reading yall, your reviews fuel me like crack:)