Disclaimer: I only own the plot and my OCs. Anything you recognize as not mine belongs to Marvel Studios, Disney, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and/or their otherwise respective owners.
Author's Notes: Yay, I finally got around to writing this little (I know, "little" is a relative term) one-shot!
As I said before, I've had quite a bit of writer's block with this one. I finally decided to rewrite the same very, very basic premise that I used in the latest chapter of one of my other fics, life in technicolor ii, to see if it would work here, just used very differently, and it did! I'm very satisfied with the results. They're just what I wanted. :)
Anyways, story title comes from Bang Bang by will. . Next chapter of black and gold will be on posted on Saturday; yada yada, you know the drill.
As always, I hope you enjoy,
~TGWSI/Selene Borealis
~the black and gold 'verse~
~stupid is what stupid do~
Dick had been Robin for about a month now – not including the week of his heat – and so far, he thought it was going pretty well.
Just like he'd thought, despite how angry it had made Bruce, being a vigilante could be fun. Once he'd gotten ahold of using the grappling hook, there was nothing like swinging from building to building, feeling the wind rush through his hair. Running on rooftops and down streets was exhilarating, it made his heart pump in his chest and ears and made him feel alive like nothing else. The hours of reconnaissance that they often had to do were pretty boring, but they taught him many valuable skills, like patience and knowing when to pick a fight and when not to. And, of course, beating up the criminals was always a bonus, because he could move faster and with more flexibility than Bruce and Dinah, and thus he could take down the criminals in easier ways than they could. The only person he was second to in his swiftness and elasticity was Selina, but even then she'd been teaching him a few moves when they had free time or it was just them or them and Bruce patrolling together, like squeezing a perp's neck with his legs and swinging around to make them lose their balance and fall to the ground. Bruce wasn't entirely too enthused about that particular move, but he never said anything about it, and if he didn't say anything about it, then Dick wasn't breaking any rules. So, he was going to keep on doing it.
That wasn't to say that there weren't times when being a vigilante wasn't fun, because there were. The various criminals and villains of Gotham hadn't known what to make of him at first: Robin, Batman's first actual sidekick (because Catwoman and Black Canary were not, make no mistakes about that), a thirteen/fourteen-year-old (nobody was quite sure of his age, which was a good thing) omega. It was understandable, in a way, that Batman and Catwoman had become vigilantes – they were older and an alpha and a theta, respectively. A beta woman like Black Canary broke societal norms when compared to them, but she still made sense. But an omega who couldn't have presented more than two years ago? A kid? How could the criminals go after him when he was so plucky, always wearing a smile on his face, and perhaps reminding them of their own kids, omega and/or not?
Well, the answer was easy in that regard: they'd gotten over the few morals that they'd had left fairly easily, quickly going from not wanting to even fight him to maybe being a little careful about where they aimed their bullets. And that was one of the parts that wasn't fun, having to dodge bullets in the blink of an eye, because that was the only speed that bullets went at. And it wasn't fun getting injured, both because of the pain from the injury itself and the reactions of his adoptive parents. When he got home one night after getting sliced on his arm, for instance, Tony was downstairs in the kitchen instead of in bed for some reason or other, and nearly dropped the glass of water that he was holding.
"Bambino," he choked out, instinctively putting the glass on the counter before he was rushing over, his face pale. "Oh my God, bambino, what happened?"
"Everything's fine, Tony," he tried to reassure the older omega. "A burglar just nicked me with his knife and – "
"'Nicked?' Dick, this is a cut," Tony admonished him, because even through the bandages he could see the extent of his injury due to the two places where it had bled through a little. Bruce had said to just let it leave for the night; they'd reapply the bandages in the morning. "This is a slice."
"I think it's better than the slice the Riddler gave me when you found out I was Batman," Bruce deadpanned from the archway.
Unfortunately for him and Dick, he didn't serve as the distraction that he'd wanted. "I already knew then, don't try to rewrite history," Tony said absentmindedly. "I just – bambino, I don't like seeing you hurt."
"I know." Dick swallowed. "I know, Tony."
And yet another reason for why being a vigilante wasn't always fun, as mean as this was going to sound, was because of...Dinah.
Now, don't get him wrong, he liked Dinah. He hadn't met her except for once or maybe twice before becoming Robin due to how much she didn't want to blend her civilian and vigilante lives together, and he'd thought she was nice then. And she was nice. But the problem was, she was also very against him being a vigilante.
The first night he'd gone out as Robin, she'd taken one look at him on the low-rise rooftop that the vigilantes of Gotham had met up on that night and said, "So, this is him? This is your kid?"
"Yes," Bruce had replied. "Robin, this is Black Canary. Black Canary, this is – "
"Yeah, whatever," she'd cut him off, before heading over to the ledge. She'd added over her shoulder, "I'm assuming tonight is just the regular patrol, so I'm gonna be doing that. If something happens, contact me on the comms."
And then she'd been gone.
Dick had stared after her, his mouth slightly open, his mind swirling with thoughts.
If he hadn't known any better, he would've said that Selina had read every single one of the latter. "Don't take it personally," she'd told him after they'd gone over their briefing for the night, which had indeed been the standard patrol. She'd patted him on the shoulder. "Black Canary just needs some time to adjust."
But it was, simply put, almost impossible for him not to. He didn't think Dinah had said more than eighty words to him over the past month, again not including the week of his heat. She hadn't had him patrol with her to get a taste for what her own style was like, not like Selina had. She mostly just ignored him, or glared at him when she wasn't ignoring him, like Bruce and Tony allowing him to be Robin was a personal affront against her.
In spite of this, he tried not to let her behavior get to him too much. Yeah, he wanted to yell at her, but if he did that, wouldn't he be proving what she and everybody else said about him? That he shouldn't be Robin because he was too young, too weak, too much of an omega?
But some nights, it was hard for him to take his own advice.
Like this one, as it would turn out.
It was the first week of April, and the weather was getting better now that spring had officially passed with the equinox occurring the day before his birthday (which had also been the day after his heat had ended, although that was neither here nor there. He just wanted to say, sometimes the timings of his heats sucked. He couldn't wait for the day that Tony allowed him to use the heat suppressants he'd been developing that wouldn't lead to any nasty side effects like he'd experienced when he had first made them). The air was warmer and slightly better-smelling than usual, and the last of the snow had finally, at long last, melted.
Bruce got out of the Batmobile, having parked it in an abandoned tunnel connected to the subway system, and Dick followed after him. "Looks like a nice night," he commented.
"For the weather, maybe," Bruce replied blandly.
That was one thing he'd had to get used to. Even though he'd met Bruce as the Batman, he'd become accustomed to hearing his natural voice over the years: deep and gravelly, but not overly so. The voice he used as Batman, however, was much deeper, rasping in quality. Originally, he had just lowered his voice naturally, but Tony had developed a voice modulator after Bruce had found out he'd known the secret and accepted his help long before Dick had come into the picture, which was subtle enough that the modulating part wasn't immediately obvious and got rid of the strain on his vocal cords. Tony had done the same for Dick, too. Dick wasn't exactly a fan of the slightly higher pitch, because if it wasn't for his scent and his hair, he felt like he would've been mistaken for a girl, but it was whatever. Better safe than their identities being found out and the entire family being put in danger, right?
He and Bruce walked up the road, which went over the tunnel via a bridge, and then went over to a low-rise that had a bakery on its ground floor and apartments on the upper ones. They climbed up the fire escapes to the top, where Catwoman and Black Canary were already waiting for them. "You're late," Selina said in a singsong, pretending to inspect her nails.
"Only by a few minutes," Bruce retorted.
"That's still late." She lifted her eyes, sending Dick a smile. "Hello, little bird."
"Hi, Catwoman," he replied.
Dinah's face was hard-set, as it always was when he was around her. "Let's just get to it, shall we?" she asked, her voice almost snappish. "What's the plan? Are we going after the Dimitrovs tonight?" The Dimitrovs were one of the many crime families in Gotham, and the one that they'd been looking to take down over the past week or so.
"Not tonight," Bruce answered. "The Russian – " the codename for the leader of the family. Dick forgot what his real name was; it was a lot more boring " – is out of town. We want him here when we make the bust. Tonight is a typical patrol."
"Great," Dinah replied. As she also always did whenever Dick was around, she began to stalk off to the ledge, ending her part in the briefing session as early as possible.
Before she could get very far, however, Bruce spoke up. "Black Canary, wait."
The beta woman paused in her step, turning around. "What is it, Batman?"
He kept his request simple: "I want you to patrol with Robin tonight."
Dick's eyes nearly fell out of his head. He looked up at his adoptive father, unable to believe what he'd just said. As he'd said before, he'd never patrolled with Dinah. Hell, he was pretty sure she didn't even like him for the reasons he'd listed!
Dinah appeared to be of a similar mindset. "You told me I wouldn't have to – "
"I know what I told you," Bruce said, interjecting. "But things change. Robin needs to become accustomed to patrolling one-on-one with you, as you do him. You need to get used to fighting alongside each other for the safety of us all."
There was silence. Bruce's tone made it clear that he wasn't going to leave any room for argument with this, but still Dick thought that Dinah would try to protest anyways. The domino mask only hid her eyes and the upper portion of her face; it didn't hide her overall expression, and it was clear for him to see that she looked like she'd just swallowed a lemon.
Finally, just when he thought that there was going to be an argument between her and Bruce, she relented. "Fine," she said. Her face turned towards Dick. "But only if he can keep up."
So Dick thus began to spend the night patrolling with only Dinah, even though it was weird. She did go fast, faster than he suspected she usually did based off of the few times she'd patrolled with him and Bruce or him and Selina, but he was able to keep up with her. Neither of them spoke that much, the tension between the two of them thick enough that one might have needed a knife to cut through it. There was no point in trying to make the kind of conversation that he and Selina had when they patrolled together without Bruce and she would ask him about how his school and gymnastics practice (he'd kept on doing it for the sake of appearances and extra training, though he'd gone from practice three times a week to twice a week) were going.
The night was nicer in the terms of the level of crime along with the weather. The only criminals that they came across were the petty ones – burglars, street corner-selling drug dealers, and a couple of kids not even two years older than him committing vandalism, but not anybody worse than that. The burglars and one of the drug dealers did have guns, but they were no match for the Black Canary with her sonic screams and Robin with his fast-moving methods of attack.
Eventually, Dinah seemed to get bored. She let out a sigh and looked up at the moon – the only natural light that showed at night, because you couldn't see the stars in Gotham. "Let's take a break," she said. It sounded like a suggestion, but Dick had a feeling it really wasn't.
They went up to the rooftop of another low-rise. Dick sat on the ledge, his legs dangling over, looking down at the street below. There wasn't anybody out walking around; civilians didn't tend to do that in Gotham, not unless they really had to and even then, omegas and beta women weren't likely to go out without a male beta or alpha companion.
He also watched Dinah out of the corner of his eye. She stood with her back pressed up against the brick wall of the rooftop entrance a way's away from him, her arms crossed. The silence between them was just a thick as it had been before. Now, though, he did think about saying something to her, if only to try and dispel the tension, but he didn't know of what to say. And even if he did say something, there was no guarantee that she was going to reply.
His ears pricked as he heard her mutter something. He was too far away from her to get the gist of it, but he did pick up on: "...they're going to get him killed..."
It didn't take three guesses to figure out who she was talking about.
With a glare, his ears burning, he clenched the concrete of the rooftop ledge in his hands and focused solely on the street below.
What does she think she knows? he thought, seething. Even Selina's said that I'm doing just as good of a job as Dinah did when she first started! And she hasn't been doing this that long! It's only been, what? Not even a year and a half?
Before he could go down that path of thought too much further, another sound tingled at his ears. But this one was louder, even though it was coming from further away, and sounded not too dissimilar from the explosion of fireworks on the Fourth of July: pop-pop-pop!
Gunshots.
He got to his feet at once. "Black Canary," he said. "Do you hear that?"
"Yes," the other vigilante acknowledged, kicking away from the rooftop entrance. Even still in the corner of his eye, he could see the firm-pressed frown on her face.
He could tell what she was thinking: she was thinking about leaving him behind.
Well, he wasn't going to stand for that.
He got his grappler ready. "Let's go check it out!" he exclaimed.
Sure enough: "Robin, wait – "
Dick ignored her. "Come on!"
"Robin!"
He quickly got the grappler snagged on the rooftop ledge on the other side of the street, since the sound had come from that way, and used it to cross the gap. He heard Dinah curse behind him as she moved to do the same, but he didn't care about that.
He didn't want a nice night anymore, like he had before Batman had told him that he and Black Canary had to patrol together. He wanted something to do, something that would get his blood pumping in his veins, something that would stop that silence between him and her, because he didn't care whether she liked him or not. Really, he didn't. He just wished that she wouldn't make it so obvious.
Anyways, it looked that now, he was going to get that action that he so desperately wanted.
Dinah basically had to chase him the entire way to where the gunshots had come from. He could practically feel her becoming more and more pissed with every second that passed, but he didn't care.
(He was pretending that he didn't care.)
When they got to the area of the gunshots, an intersection with a few corner stores that was right on the edge of Coventry and the Narrows, Dick immediately sought cover on one of the rooftops to see what was going on and not be spotted. It looked like there was a small gang (or otherwise large group of gang-unaffiliated criminals) in the process of robbing one of the stores. He caught sight of at least five guys – well, four guys and what looked to be a female alpha, but that didn't mean that there weren't more of them hiding in their moving truck, or further down the street serving as the watch, or otherwise loitering around.
He heard Dinah come up behind him; he was practically able to feel the anger rolling off of her in waves. "You should have waited for me," she said.
"There was no time," he shot back. "What if they were hurting somebody?"
She didn't give him a response to that. He couldn't tell if that was because she was acknowledging his logic or she was just too angry at him to even get into it. "What do you see?" she asked instead.
"There's five of 'em," he whispered back at her. "Maybe more. The female alpha looks to be in charge of 'em all."
Indeed, it did appear that way. The female alpha was standing off to the side, supervising the men quickly going in and out of the shop, which looked to be some sort of antique or trinket store, taking several items on top of what had to be the money from the store's safe. Dick didn't know why they were taking the other items...until one of the items, an antique cabinet that two of the guys were carrying, had one of its drawers pop open. As the drawer fell to the ground, along with it went several bags of white powder. Drugs. Cocaine.
They weren't robbing the store, he realized, hence why the alarms hadn't gone off (he'd acknowledged that they hadn't in the back of his brain, but hadn't really given it much thought than that. In Gotham, there could hundreds of different reasons for why the alarms didn't go off when a store was being broken into, so he'd learned). This store was one of theirs, a front for their drug cartel as well as probably some sort of money-laundering scheme. Tonight they were just moving their main merchandise.
But then...why had one of them fired off a gun? To scare people away from seeing what they were doing? There were so many different methods available for that.
This gang was smart, but not that smart, apparently. He wondered which gang they came from. Definitely not one of the ethnic-based ones, from how the female alpha sounded...
"You idiots!" she shouted at the two men, walking over to them, along with a few more obscenities.
"Sorry, boss," one of the two guys said.
"Don't apologize!" she snapped at him. She waved a hand towards the cabinet. "Just...set that down! Put the bags back inside!"
They did as instructed, before nervously stepping away from the cabinet when she marched over to it. This caused her to become even more furious. "What are you doing, still standing here? Go back inside and get another package!" she ordered them.
They scrambled off back into the store. The other two guys just kept on doing their work, keeping their heads down and the like. But they must've incurred her wrath earlier too – maybe for the gunshots – because the female alpha huffed and said loudly, loud enough that Dick and Dinah could hear her even without her shouting, "Do I have to do everything around here?"
Then, as they watched –
– The female alpha picked up the cabinet like it was a cardboard box filled with nothing, carrying it the rest of the way over to the moving truck and putting it inside.
The atmosphere between Dick and Dinah changed rapidly. He could feel her dread setting in. "She's enhanced," the Black Canary whispered. "Super strength. We need to call in Batman for backup."
Dick could practically hear the snap! that his neck did as he turned his head to look at her. "What? No!" he protested, barely able to keep his voice hushed. It was unlikely that the people below them would hear them if he spoke at his normal voice from this height, but he knew better than to leave that up to chance. "We can handle this ourselves!"
Dinah stared at him like he was crazy. "You want us to go up as two against five when one of our opponents is enhanced?" she demanded incredulously.
"You're enhanced, too!"
"My enhancements are not the same as hers! And I need better help for this than just a kid!"
Dick's jaw locked at her words. It was bad enough that he'd already known that she didn't want him on the team, but to hear that all she saw in him was a combination of "the help" and being "just a kid?"
Yes, he was only fourteen years old, which many besides her considered too young for this line of work. But he was Robin. He was Batman's sidekick! And just because he was a sidekick, that didn't mean that he wasn't good at what he did. He wasn't as good as the Batman, he would acknowledge that, but even Catwoman only came in at a close second to him, she'd told Dick this herself. Bruce was the best as what they did. But that didn't mean Dick was helpless on his own or without the help of Batman and/or Catwoman. That didn't mean that he couldn't hold his own – "his own" being a relative term here, because he was still with Dinah and wouldn't be allowed to patrol on his own for ages yet, he knew, but still.
He wasn't going to yell at Dinah for what she'd said. As he had said before, it wouldn't be productive, and moreover would distract from what they needed to be doing, which was take down this gang.
No, instead, he was going to show her just how capable he was – how capable they were together.
"We can do this ourselves," he said, getting to his feet. "We don't need Batman."
"Robin, don't you dare," Dinah began to say.
But he was already jumping over the ledge.
Robin landed gracefully on the concrete below, but his footsteps were still able to be heard. The female alpha turned around from where she was walking away from the moving truck, back to the place she had been supervising before, and when she caught sight of him, her upper lip curled into a snarl. "Robin," she growled.
He played the persona that he always did as Robin: the happy-go-lucky sidekick of Batman, the light to the alpha's dark, even when the Dark Knight wasn't around. "Hey, lady," he quipped. "What are you doing? 'Cause it looks like you and these guys are – "
He didn't get a chance to finish his sentence, because although the female alpha didn't seem to have a gun herself (hubris,he thought. She probably thought with her enhancements, she couldn't be touched. She was going to find out just how wrong she was), one of the other guys did. He stopped everything that he was doing to take out his gun, aim it at Dick, and shoot it.
Dick dodged the bullets as best as he could. It helped that the guy didn't even have that good of an aim in the first place.
He heard Dinah come down from the rooftop above behind him. He quickly activated his comms, which also serviced as earplugs, as she stalked up so that she was standing in front of him.
Two of the guys were able to run out of the way, but the female alpha, the guy with the gun, and the guy standing behind him weren't that lucky. They were all subjected to her sonic scream, causing the two guys to collapse to the ground. But as for the female alpha –
– She seemingly wasn't affected at all.
Dick tried not to let his mouth drop open at this, but it was hard. He'd never seen somebody without the earplugs that the Batfamily wore able to withstand Dinah's screams before. And it wasn't like the female alpha was wearing earplugs that somebody had figured out to make like theirs – her ears were entirely devoid of earplugs, earrings, or anything else that could even maybe cause her to not be bothered by the noise.
The female alpha sneered at them. "Really? That's the best you've got?"
The remaining two guys got out their guns. Seeing little choice to do otherwise, Dick ran at them before they could do more than fire a couple of bullets at him, one of which whizzed past his cheek but that was the closest that any of them got, leaving Dinah to deal with the female alpha. Maybe, he acknowledged silently, maybe he should've let her call Bruce after all.
Whatever. It was too late to turn back now.
Dick kicked off from the ground and launched himself at one of the guys, wrapping his legs around the guy's neck just in the way that Selina had taught him, bringing him successfully to the ground. He used the guy's chest as leverage as he fell to go after the next one, winding him. With a punch to the second guy's head, he knocked him out, and used an expandable net that would stick to hard surfaces to keep the first guy on the ground without knocking him out.
This was the easy part, the part that they hadn't needed Batman's backup for. If it hadn't been for the enhanced female alpha, he and Dinah would've been able to do this practically in their sleep, not needing the help of Batman at all.
But, because of that woman...
Dick turned around, anxious to see what was going on in the fight between the female alpha and his patrolling companion. It was a close fight between the two of them. Dinah was using as many tricks as she could when her opponent was right up in her space and she didn't have time to reach for her utility belt, but it was clear that the female alpha was slowly gaining the upper hand. The hits that she was able to place were hard, brutal; Dick could tell even from a distance of twenty feet.
He started to run over without thinking about it, the need to protect his teammate, to protect Dinah, coursing through his veins.
Time wasn't on his side. Before he could finish crossing the chasm between them, the female alpha punched Dinah hard enough that she went crashing to the ground. He thought he might've seen blood immediately go flying out of her mouth, but he wasn't sure.
The female alpha leaned over her. "You're not that good without Batman coming to your aid, are you? You're nothingwithout him," she taunted. She wrapped her right hand around Dinah's throat while she was still on the ground, pulling her up by it, making the Black Canary gasp, unable to scream. "Soon, you're not going to be anything at all."
"No!" Dick shouted.
He was finally upon them. Once again without thinking about it, he leaped up and wrapped his arms around the female alpha's neck, doing his best to pull her back. Though she didn't look as strong as she was, he could practically feel the denseness of her muscles underneath her skin, far denser than what the average human's muscles would be, even if they exercised as much as Bruce did.
The female alpha growled as she took a step back, letting go of Dinah, causing the other vigilante to fall once more to the ground. "You little brat," she hissed, grabbing Dick by his cape and throwing him.
He was just able to flip in the air so that he would land on his feet, facing her. Panting lightly, he glared at her as he crouched down slightly into a fighting position. "'Really?'" he quoted back at her. "'That's the best you've got?'"
The female alpha growled again before she charged him. "I'll show you what's my 'best,' you omega slut, whoring yourself out to the Batman!"
He became enraged at her words, which he knew was what she was trying to do. She was trying to get him even angrier than he already was, so that he would become sloppy. But he wouldn't. He would tell her later just how much of a sickoshe was for even thinking that, how the Batman would never do something like that but it revealed far more about her than it did him that she thought it would.
For now, he focused on what he – and Dinah – needed to do. "Black Canary!" he called out as he ran away from the female alpha, avoiding a swipe that she tried to make for his head. "Call Batman and Catwoman! Tell them that we need backup!"
He didn't get a verbal response from her. He didn't think that she was knocked out from the female alpha's blow when he looked at her out of the corner of his eye, because he thought that he saw her reach up to activate her comms. But he couldn't be sure, too occupied in the chase.
He turned around to face the female alpha when he knew he couldn't outrun her, because she was gaining on him too quickly. He barely had the time to ponder his next move, his back metaphorically pressed up against a wall as she strutted forwards like a predator chasing down its prey.
His legs bending slightly at the knees, he prepared himself for her attack, his heart pounding inside his chest. He hoped that the move he'd just come up with would work.
And then she struck.
"What happened?"
"I'm fine, Batman," Dick said, smiling up at his mentor (and adoptive) father as he held an ice pack against his leg where it hurt the most. He knew that a horrible bruise already had to be forming underneath his suit. "The EMTs said they don't think I broke anything. They said it's probably just a muscle strain."
Bruce wasn't swayed by his verbiage. "'Probably?'"
The omega jutted out his in chin in a move that was probably a lot like his adoptive omither's. Well, you knew what they – meaning his parents both – would say about that. "Black Canary's the worse of the two of us," he defended himself.
The alpha looked over at their teammate in question. The EMTs were treating Dinah as much as she would allow while also getting the goons that had been knocked out from her sonic screams or by him ready for transport to the nearby hospital. The one goon that hadn't been harmed was already in the back of a cop car, glaring at them all murderously. The female alpha, meanwhile, had been sedated by the EMTs, so that she wouldn't be a danger to any more people – or herself.
Seeing that the Batman was looking at her, Dinah got to her feet and hobbled over to them, though neither of the EMTs who had been attending to her looked too pleased at this. "Batman," she said.
"Black Canary," he gruffed. He repeated his earlier question: "What happened?"
Dick opened his mouth, ready to get into how he'd moved to the side just in the nick of time when the female alpha had come after him and then stuck out his leg, which had resulted in him tripping her and his leg muscle sprain. She'd been so shocked from the unexpected move, because it was the kind of move that only a kid would make (he did acknowledge that he was a kid, but he wasn't "just a kid"), that she'd crashed into the ground, busting her lip in the process. Then, before she'd gotten a chance to get up, he had –
"Robin probably saved my life, that's what."
. . .
. . .
All of the thoughts that were swirling around in his head went and died right there. He tried not to let his jaw drop as a show of his surprise, but it was hard to do.
Had he seriously just heard her right?
Even Bruce seemed startled by her words – at the fact that she was saying them, Dick was sure, not at how unbelievable they might have seemed, because he hoped after a month of him being Robin that Batman had come to appreciate his skills. The alpha glanced at him, though his eyes were impossible to make out from behind his cowl. "Really?"
"The female alpha had me down on the ground," Dinah explained. "If Robin hadn't intervened in the way that he had, she would've strangled me."
There was a long pause. It wasn't because Bruce wasn't proud of him, the pride was basically emanating off Bruce in the slightness of his scent, but it seemed that Dick's adoptive father was mulling over the beta woman's words. "Good," he said at last. "This was the kind of situation that you two patrolling together was supposed to ensure."
Teamwork, camaraderie, and all that, Dick supplied for him silently.
Dinah briefly flicked her head over to where a police officer who looked to be the one with the highest rank was standing. "I think he wants the details," she said.
"That's a job for you or Robin," Bruce said.
"Stall him for us, just for a few minutes," she said. "I want to have a quick talk with Robin."
Bruce glanced once more at Dick, and then at Dinah, like he was uncertain, even though they had spent the night patrolling together, that that would be a good idea. But in the end, he must have come to the conclusion that nothing...toobad was going to happen. "Just a few minutes," he reiterated. "Then I'm taking Robin home to make sure that he truly hasn't broken anything."
Dinah gave a short nod.
In the ensuing silence as she waited for Bruce to walk all the way over to the head police officer on-site, Dick couldn't help but internally wince at the injuries that Dinah had received. Her lip was busted, and he could see two of the bruises that were already blooming on her skin from where her suit had given out and torn open. He also thought he might've heard one of the EMTs say she'd lost a tooth, but he wasn't sure about that.
Even if she had lost a tooth, however, the same virus that had given them the designations thousands and thousands of years ago had also given them another boon that other primates (and most mammals) did not have: they were polyphyodonts, meaning they could regrow permanent teeth, but only when there was no periodontal disease. Even then, the entire process took a couple of years, and required a high-calcium diet in order to sustain it. He'd learned all about this in health class at school, along with the theory that the virus had only made them polyphyodonts because the biting of the mating gland was such an important aspect of the bonding (and thus, reproductive) process. It was all really fascinating stuff; not really up his alley, because he wasn't nearly as into science as his adoptive omither was, but still interesting.
But, anyways.
"What you did tonight was stupid," Dinah informed him once Bruce was talking with the police officer, having watched him in her waiting for it to happen. She didn't so much as give Dick a chance to protest this, pressing on with, "I tried telling you that we needed to wait, then that we needed Batman for backup, and you didn't listen either time. All of this could have potentially been prevented."
Dick huffed, letting the ice pack rest on his leg on its own so that he could cross his arms – like a petulant child, he knew. "Yeah, well, stupid is what stupid do."
To his surprise, he watched a small smile form on Dinah's face. "Yes, that's true," she agreed. "I don't like you doing this, Robin. I don't think your parents should be allowing you to do this. You're too young. Watching you fight crime...I can't help but think you're going to get killed.
"But," she continued, once again before he could protest, "tonight...you proved me wrong in some of the things that I thought about you. You were able to hold your own and protect me when I couldn't do the same. That...says a lot about your skills."
Dick squinted his eyes at her. "So, what you're trying to say is: you accept me being a vigilante?"
She snorted and, from the way that her domino mask moved, he was pretty sure that she rolled her eyes. But, nevertheless: "I suppose I am," she said. "I worry about you out here. I'm not going to stop worrying about you; just the thought of what if you were my son, doing this..." She trailed off. Dick didn't know why she was thinking about her son when he was the same age as Peter, not him, but he remained quiet as she seemed to recollect her thoughts. "But, yes. Treating you the way that I have isn't likely to prevent you from being killed, anyways. It's better if we operate as a team, like Batman said. Although, I wasn't treating you this way because of you, but – "
"My parents," Dick finished for her. "Yeah, I know."
He mulled over everything that she had said for a moment, watching Bruce finish up his conversation with the head police officer. Then he held out his hand to Dinah. "If you can really accept me being a vigilante, then you're forgiven for the past month," he said. "But only if you can do that."
She appeared to consider this, the smile slowly returning to her lips. She grabbed his hand in hers and shook it. "You have a deal."
"Are you ready to go?" Batman asked forty seconds later as he came back over to them, sounding nonplussed. It looked like his conversation with the head police officer hadn't been very productive.
"Yep," Dick said, popping the "p" in the same way that Tony did. He winced as he got to his feet, his right leg giving a noticeable throb all the way from his thigh to his ankle. He didn't know which muscle he'd strained exactly to accomplish that, but whichever one it was, it definitely hurt. "Where did you park the Batmobile?"
"It's right around the corner."
He blinked. "Oh."
"The sergeant would like your statement before you leave the scene," Bruce told Dinah then, before they left. "Would you like us to wait for you so you can be tended to at the – ?"
This wasn't the first time that he had asked the question. It wasn't the first time, either, that Dinah cut him off, saying, "I'll be fine on my own."
"If you need further treatment – "
"I'll get it myself, or I'll come to the Batcave myself. I know my way there."
Bruce, at last, acquiesced to her. "Fine, then," he said. "Come on, Robin."
Dick followed after him. But, before they could get too far...he turned around to give a short wave to Dinah, in the same way that he often did with Selina. After a brief pause, the Black Canary tentatively waved to him back.
Huh. It was funny how her almost getting killed and him coming to her rescue to get her to do a complete 180 like that. Not that he was going to complain, but it was still, y'know. Funny.
Since the female alpha was knocked out, he didn't get a chance to tell her the litany of comments he'd come up with on the spot when she'd called him a "slut." But, as Dick rounded the corner, steps behind Batman, and saw that the Batmobile was indeed right there, he figured that he would get the chance to again eventually. It wasn't like the prison system in Gotham was particularly well-known for keeping its prisoners inside its prisons, after all.
(And he was right. Seven months later, when he and Bruce this time came across the female alpha again, she taunted both of them with the same comment. And after Bruce had handcuffed her with the set of cuffs he'd made able to withstand someone with Bucky's strength, which was a lot greater than hers, blood pouring down from the female alpha's nose and both of her eyes blackened, Dick had no qualms in cheerily telling her how much of a pervert she was.)
Word Count: 6,957