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It’s officially thirty days since their last major patrol incident.
For the record, Bruce has always been against the concept of counting up from this kind of thing. It feels like tempting fate. He’s already catching enough flak from Alfred for allowing the child to come out in the field with him, and letting Dick gleefully tally the days since one of them was injured feels like the worst kind of hubris.
As the number ticks up, Bruce gets more and more apprehensive of the streak being broken. Racking up such a large debt of good luck means that equilibrium will be restored in a more and more dramatic way as time creeps on. And Bruce has enough things to worry about without the ever-present reminder of the universe’s fickle nature. He’s already constantly checking to make sure that Dick hasn’t been stabbed or abducted or hit by a car or tied to train tracks or drowned or strangled.
The counter makes Dick happy, though. He follows it like he would follow a sports team, if either he or Bruce cared about those, and he beams every time he gets to erase and rewrite the number one higher. Dick barely smiled the entire first six months he stayed with Bruce, so Bruce allows the counter to continue existing.
He’s regretting that decision today, because after Bruce has had to watch a stray chunk of rubble strike Dick’s shoulder hard enough to send the kid down to the ground, Dick’s reaction had been to give Bruce the most heartbroken look and beg not to have the counter reset.
“Let me see,” Bruce insists, gesturing at the arm that Dick is clutching to his chest.
“It’s, it’s not major,” Dick promises, his face all screwed up in the beginnings of tears. His fingers clutch at his cape, and he drags it over the shoulder and arm that he’s trying to keep hidden. “It isn’t, I’m okay!”
Bruce tries to reach out and yank the cape out of the way, but Dick twirls out of reach. Letting out a sharp hiss of exasperation, Bruce barely resists the urge to grab the kid and drag him closer. He’s trying to do the responsible thing by checking on Dick’s injury, but he isn’t going to use force to do it. And the longer he spends doing this, the more property damage the man commandeering the crane is going to do.
“Fine!” Bruce snaps. He gives Dick a glare and points to the wall they’re hiding behind, giving a very clear don’t move warning before rushing back out to the fray.
Bruce hadn’t taken the time to talk to this gang before they started trying to kill him for interfering, but he’s seen enough of their weirdly high-tech all-black outfits to know that they aren’t just a random group of vandals trying to wreck the slow progress on the backup seawall project for shits and giggles. They’re too pristinely dressed to even be a well-coordinated group of people who have some political motive, too.
He’ll figure out what their deal is once the construction site isn’t under imminent threat of crumbling and spreading hundreds of pounds of dust and debris into the neighboring apartment buildings. The man up in the crane is turning the entire machine wildly, sending the five-hundred-pound lifting hook in a wide, deadly arc, slowly but surely going to obliterate some scaffolding. It’s taking time to build up momentum, so Bruce doesn’t have to get up the ladder just yet.
Bruce charges a purposeful path through the twisting arrangement of scaffolding, drawing attention to himself and away from Dick, and the warning shout of one of his opponents does the rest of the attention-getting for him.
Ahead, there are two of them attempting to tamper with a concrete mixer. A well-aimed shot sends his harpoon through the wrist of one, forcing her to drop the bag of white sugar she’s holding. Using the momentum of the taut harpoon line, Bruce launches forward to slam his fist into the other guy’s jaw.
A thin wire wraps around the front of his throat and sharply yanks back. If it weren’t for the reinforced neck of his suit, he would be in the middle of being strangled at the moment. As it is, he only struggles to breathe for a second before he slices through the cord with one of the knives embedded in the chest of his suit, and then whirls around to take out the person who’s jumped him from behind.
Clattering metal on metal echoes through the air. Bruce turns his head up to look, momentarily distracted, and sees a grappling hook hooked around the safety railing of the crane’s control booth. As Bruce takes a swing to the ribs with a short length of pipe, he grits his teeth and wrenches his gaze away, new anger keeping him moving.
If that grappling hook belongs to who he thinks it belongs to, Bruce is going to ground that kid until he’s old enough to go to college.
He fights his way closer to the base of the crane. The group of vandals isn’t huge, and several of them have scattered by now. Bruce is left alone for just a moment, giving him time to look up and see Dick leaping out onto the still-moving arm of the crane. A second guy, separate from the one in the control booth, is climbing up the ladder to chase after Dick.
Bruce doesn’t even double-check his surroundings for straggling opponents before bolting for the base of the crane.
His grappling hook reaches up to the control booth railing. The crane has been doing its languid back-and-forth motions for almost ten minutes now, and the hook is swinging much higher than it was. Bruce squeezes through the gap underneath the bottom bar of the railing, forcing his way into the control booth.
Through the front window, up through the crisscrossing support beams, he can see Dick up on the arm, luring the man further towards the edge. He’s hopping between the support bars, laughing, taunting, with absolutely no regard for the fact that he’s ten stories off the ground.
Bruce’s mouth is dry. He sees like a prophetic vision the potential of Dick losing his balance, plummeting, hitting pavement in a splatter of gore, just like the rest of the Flying Graysons.
Bruce elbows the operator in the face, crunching bone against the headrest of the seat. While the guy swears and reels with the impact, Bruce grabs onto the scruff of his neck and throws his head down onto the console. It’s not until the entire machine starts to make a horrible grinding noise, and the unconscious guy falls to the floor, that Bruce realizes he’s hit the emergency stop button.
It’s a sloppy mistake. Bruce’s heart jackrabbits, hitting the base of his throat.
The arm jolts as it begins a controlled stop. Bruce’s head snaps up to look through the front window again, and watches both Dick and his pursuer stumble, losing their balance.
The bottom of Bruce’s stomach drops. The windows of the booth are thick plexiglass and he can’t smash through them, so he bolts back the way he came and claws his way up on top of the control booth to jump out onto the arm.
His movements feel too slow. He crests the roof of the booth and gets one foot flat on the top to begin to run again.
Despite the time he’s had to spend climbing, he finds that neither Dick nor the guy have fallen down. As Bruce watches, too far away to do anything, the man lurches forward to grab Dick’s arm.
Dick dodges, his feet expertly following the narrow support bar he’s balanced on as he completely jukes around the man who had previously cornered him at the end of the arm. He laughs behind the guy’s back, delighted by his own trick.
“Try a little harder!” Dick crows, projecting through the harsh wind like the performer he is. His feet leap to another beam, finding perfect balance like the soles of his shoes are magnetic.
The man lurching around near Dick, with one hand clutching a long knife, is almost as well-poised. Dick has the superior skills, but the man’s wingspan is longer and as he swipes wildly, he comes much too close to slashing across Dick’s chest.
Bruce breaks into a full run, finding his balance on the thin maintenance bridge, and barrels forward to put himself between Dick and the man who’s turning around to lash out at him.
Dick has been chased out quite a ways. Bruce has to span about twenty feet to get to him. And Bruce only makes it about ten of those feet before the crane arm hits the end of its emergency stop and grinds to a complete halt.
The momentum change hits all three of them. Bruce drops onto hands and knees, finding his center of gravity.
He watches in blank terror as Dick loses his footing, too far ahead for Bruce to grab him.
Dick tilts off-balance, the shock hitting him like a physical blow. He’s falling, tipping over the edge, and he’s looking right at Bruce with the worst look of surprise.
Bruce doesn’t think. He just scrambles forward, taking three big steps, not even fully getting his feet underneath him before diving over the edge to catch his kid.
The momentum of Bruce catapulting himself towards Dick means he makes a near-violent impact as he wraps his arms around him. A dull thud of Dick hitting the immalleable armor of Bruce’s suit would make Bruce’s stomach churn if he wasn’t running on pure, terrified adrenaline.
Dick latches on right away, still not even opening his mouth to scream, and Bruce twists them in the air to put Bruce closer to the ground. If all else fails, Dick will have a softer place to land.
They’re falling so quickly, everything is just a streak of color as it passes by. Bruce knows that there’s a harpoon at his wrist that would slow their fall long enough for him to find his grappling hook. He blindly fires it.
The shot goes wide, missing by a mile. Bruce stares upwards, feeling wind whistle past his ears, and thinks blankly that Dick’s about to have a third adult in his life take a fatal fall.
In the corner of his eye, he sees something swinging at him.
An object collides with his side so hard he loses his breath. Bruce turns his head and reaches out an arm just quickly enough to hook an elbow around the enormous hook of the lifting mechanism of the crane as it swings past.
A tugging, dragging pain rips through his shoulder. It doesn’t stop moving at the spot it’s supposed to, dislocating in one motion. Momentum halts Bruce, but Dick keeps on his downwards trajectory, almost sliding out from under Bruce’s arm bracketed around his middle.
Bruce tightens his arm around Dick’s ribs, and Dick clings on around his neck, squeezing tighter than the garotte had earlier.
Night air swooshes past them. Slowly, Bruce’s stomach returns to its correct position.
They swing in a slow arc, swooping through the air as the lifting hook continues its lazy path.
Dick is perfectly still. Heights don’t bother him, but his calm demeanor doesn’t mean that he’s necessarily fine with what just happened. Bruce can’t feel Dick’s lungs expanding or retracting, but he can feel shallow puffs of air on his neck that say that Dick is at least conscious.
Bruce squeezes the arm he has around Dick, trying to get the kid’s attention. All he gets is a faint wheeze in response that says he’s squeezing too tight.
“Hold on,” Bruce rasps.
Dick tightens his hold even more. Bruce reluctantly lets go, leaving Dick suspended only by his own arms. Bruce moves as gingerly as possible to make sure that Dick won’t fall, and finds his grapple.
He manages to wedge the hook into a secure enough position, and then pries his arm off of the lifting mechanism to begin to lower the two of them downwards. They continue swinging, disconcertingly unconnected to anything as the crane hook sweeps through the air, and their return to the ground comes with a skid across the unfinished concrete.
Bruce runs several steps to keep his balance and then ditches his grappling hook entirely in favor of getting out of here as quickly as he can. He runs towards where he parked his car, stepping around the broken, bleeding body of the man who had fallen off the arm of the crane.
When they get back to the car, Bruce finally slows down enough to let Dick go. The kid slides to the ground on shaky baby deer legs, eyes staring wide at empty space.
Bruce stares at him for a second, then reaches out and pushes the kid’s t-shirt sleeve out of the way to look at the spot where he’d originally been hurt. There are the beginnings of a couple of bruises, but nothing horrible. On its own, it wouldn’t have necessitated the resetting of the patrol incident counter.
Dick’s eyes focus a little, drifting up to Bruce’s face.
Bruce feels a sudden rush of emotion that he doesn’t know how to deal with. He thinks it’s anger, so he snaps, “What was that?”
Dick jumps. He shakes his head, not quite able to gather his words. His lips clamp into a tight line.
“I said to stay here.” Bruce feels like all of his skin is itching; the fabric of his suit is getting too heavy and constricting as he gets more agitated. He repeats, “What was that?”
“I was helping,” Dick finally says, his voice very small. He points over Bruce’s shoulder, trying to illustrate a point that he’s having trouble putting into words. “I was--I didn’t, you weren’t…You needed the crane to stop and I was gonna do it, I just didn’t know there were two guys up there--”
“I told you not to keep fighting,” Bruce says, voice raising just a little bit to overlap Dick’s. “Why do you never listen to me?!”
His loud voice scares Dick even more. The kid ducks his head, the motion too abrupt to be anything but a flinch.
Bruce’s blood freezes, driving him to the brink of shivering. He feels like he’s going to shake apart.
Dick’s hands are trembling. He’s on the verge of tears for the second time tonight.
Bruce forces himself to take a breath, to take a step back. He slowly takes a knee, lowering himself to eye level with Dick. He holds out the arm without the injured shoulder.
Despite how scared he’d been moments before, Dick immediately bolts forward to hug him. He hooks his hands together behind Bruce’s back, squeezing as tight as he can.
It’s still foreign to Bruce how someone could be so forthright in asking for comfort like this. Before taking Dick in, Bruce hadn’t been hugged since he was eight, though even before that the occurrences were sporadic. Dick, though, takes every opportunity to reach out and hold onto Bruce. Bruce is still getting used to it.
“We’re safe,” Bruce says. Robotically, feeling like an alien as he tries to remember how his mother used to hug him, Bruce pats Dick’s back.
The parenting books that Alfred keeps slipping his way would probably tell him to say something like that was scary, huh, or I’m sorry for putting you through that. He can’t make himself say more than he has, even though he knows he should. His heart is still beating too hard and he feels a belated nervous sweat beginning to bead on his neck. Everything feels like too much, except for the trusting arms holding onto him like a lifeline.
Dick eventually pulls away on his own. He loosens his vice grip and steps back, looking up at Bruce with wide watery eyes, waiting for Bruce to be the adult in this situation.
Bruce has had quite a while to come up with something to say, but he hasn’t succeeded. He tries not to show his panic, and what finally comes out of his mouth is, “The counter got up to thirty days.”
Looking devastated, Dick nods. “We’re gonna have to start all over.”
“Do you want a milkshake on the way home?”
Dick lights up. He dries his tears and asks, “Really?”
“A month is a milestone.”
Dick nods vigorously. He bounces on his toes, before running towards his side of the car to get in. Maybe he thinks that Bruce will change his mind if he delays at all. Maybe that fear isn’t unjustified.
Bruce gets to his feet and unlocks the car, dropping into the driver’s seat. Dick climbs up into the car and clicks his seatbelt, drumming his hands on his knees expectantly.
Over time, Bruce thinks he’s getting better at understanding Dick’s moods. Right now, the kid is still jittery and could be easily nudged into desperate sobs, but if Bruce handles this well then the kid will be fine until he gets home and crashes into bed.
“Can I get chocolate?” Dick asks, overly concerned that Bruce won’t let him choose the most basic flavor of milkshake ever invented.
Bruce nods, putting the car in reverse.
“It’s the best one,” Dick explains, “except sometimes I get strawberry because the color is better, but when you get those sometimes it has pieces of strawberry in it and that’s gross. Do you think it’s gross when they put chunks in them?”
“Pulp,” Bruce says.
“ Ew!”
Bruce peels around the corner to start on the way to the only McDonald’s that’s still open at this hour.
Dick continues to elaborate on the pros and cons of different flavors, going on and on in a way that makes Bruce second-guess his decision to give the kid any more sugar. He talks all the way to the drive-thru, only quieted once when he thinks Bruce isn’t going to order a milkshake for himself and he gets all worried and overly sad about it.
Bruce orders himself a vanilla milkshake so Dick won’t look upset anymore. He hasn’t had one in about fifteen years, though he supposes that part of the experience of letting the incident counter exist is to reward himself and his kid at some point.
By the time they reach the cave again, Bruce is no longer worried that Dick is one wrong remark away from dissolving into weeping. He’s more worried about Dick being too sugar-high to get any sleep, but as Dick leaps from the parked car to run to change into his pajamas, straw in his mouth and one hand flapping his cape behind him, he finds that his face has softened into a near-smile.
The smile immediately vanishes when Alfred emerges from the elevator, one eyebrow raised at their late-night junk food, but it was nice while it lasted.