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“Dames?” Dick shoulders his way through the door, footsteps light as he enters the room. “Kiddo?”
Damian barely looks up to greet him. He’s curled in his bed, blankets tugged up around his shoulders. Titus, lazily, picks up his head and regards Dick for a moment. Then, he sets his head back down into Damian’s hip, letting his eyes slip shut. If Dick didn’t know better, he’d call this the perfect day in.
Of course, he did know better. There was a reason he hadn’t been sleeping lately. A reason why Damian hadn’t been, either, and why he was still in bed despite it being far past noon. Thinking about it made Dick’s heart ache.
“Hey, Dames,” Dick says, again, slipping close. He sets a hand down on Damian’s side, leaning over so he’s in Damian’s line of sight. His little brother’s gaze looks far away - like he’s looking straight through him and the wall; like he’s seeing something a million miles away. “You with me?”
There’s a little hum, followed by a slow, listless blink. Damian blinks thrice more before he re-fixes his gaze onto Dick, but his expression hardly changes as clarity returns. He still looks lost, or like he’s looking for something else that’s lost.
“Grayson?” Damian says, slowly, like he’s testing out the word. Then, after a moment, he says it again with more conviction. His expression finally shifts, right into his patented scowl. “What?”
Dick swipes his thumb over Damian’s shirt. His hand feels large - or, maybe, Damian just seems so small. It’s been like that a lot, recently. Dick remembering how little and young Damian is, he means. “I was gonna ask if you wanted to go out to dinner with me, but you didn’t answer me when I called.”
“No.” Shaking off Dick’s hand and Titus’ head, Damian shifts so he’s facing the other direction. Titus just readjusts and returns to his previous position, a little whine slipping out. “Just leave me alone.”
There’s two options here. Dick can push or he can relent - pull Damian up and out of his stupor and prove that he’s not alone, or leave Damian alone to stew in whatever’s going through his head right now. The first option might make Damian mad at him, but isn’t that better than this? The despondency?
“Alfred said you didn’t eat lunch or breakfast, Damian. You have to eat something.”
Damian lets out a tt. “As if he cares,” he murmurs. “It’s not like Father does.” Slightly louder, he adds, “Go away.”
Dick closes his eyes and tries to think over everything again. He doesn’t want to leave Damian alone - but pushing boundaries isn’t the right way to go about this. “Okay, if you really, really want me to go, I will. But - Damian, I’m worried, okay? I’m worried about you. And Bruce is worried about you, too. So is Alfred, by the way.”
He can pretty much hear the eye-roll as Damian says, “But?”
“This is hard for all of us. Bruce isn’t - he’s not good with grief.” Every part of him longs to reach back out - to take Damian into his arms and cradle him until everything fades away. “But. That doesn’t mean he loves any of us any less. He just - he just needs some time, okay?”
Making excuses for Bruce hurts worse every time he says them. All of them need some time - him included.
Because - here’s the thing. Here’s the problem.
Tim is dead. Tim - Dick’s little brother gone and dead, not even leaving a body. Steph told them all about how she’d screamed into the comms after he told her that he appreciated her and then let the line go dead. Bruce hadn’t told them about his own last moments with Tim, but they all knew that whatever they were, they were tearing him apart inside.
Dick can’t even remember the last thing he’d said to Tim. Something - something boring, probably, like did you eat today or when’s the last time you slept. Did he remember to say, you know I love you, right?
He wonders if Damian’s having the same crisis. Was their last interaction some sort of fight? Were Damian’s last words an insult?
“Talk to me,” Dick says. “Please?”
Damian, a little viciously, rolls back to face Dick, pushing himself up into a sitting position. “He sacrificed himself,” Damian snarls. “Is that what you want to know?”
It’s painfully clear that Damian’s avoiding the obvious - that he’s not yet really accepting that Tim’s the one who’s dead. ‘He’ sacrificed ‘himself’, not Tim sacrificed himself. Damian’s not willing to admit that it’s his brother who’s gone - and how much he’s hurting hurts Dick in return.
“I already know that,” Dick says, quietly. “Tell me something about you, kiddo. What’s going through that big head of yours?”
Damian doesn’t snarl out anything against them - doesn’t say, My head is average sized, Grayson, in his holier-than-thou voice. Instead, he just drops back down and curls up again, hands curled into fists and pulled up to his chest, back turned towards Dick.
“Leave me alone,” Damian says, again. His voice is dull, quiet, and completely un-Damian-like. Dick bites at his lip and draws in a breath, trying his hardest to give Damian a sliver of space. “He’s gone. So what?”
“You don’t mean that.” The words slip out before he can think better of it, scolding and hurt. “Damian-”
Instead of replying, Damian curls up further, forehead nearly reaching his knees. Is there really nothing Dick can say? Maybe - maybe he was right, when he’d said they all needed some time. Maybe with some time, Damian will start talking about what he’s feeling. He’ll admit that he misses Tim, that it hurts that Tim’s gone.
Because Dick knows Damian doesn’t hate Tim. Knows that he never really did - that he was just afraid, for the most part, and didn’t know how else to deal with what he was feeling beyond getting aggressive.
Dick’s - Dick’s making excuses, again. He rubs a hand over his face and sighs, throwing caution to the wind as he lays down beside Damian. He throws out an arm, ghosting right over the top of Damian’s head. If Damian wanted to lay on his upper arm, he could.
“If you want to talk about it,” Dick says, “then I’m here. It hurts me, too, you know? One of my little brothers is gone. And we don’t know if he’s going to come back or not. I miss him, you know? He’s not - he won’t be here to crack jokes with, anymore. Or to patrol with. To tell that he’s so smart.”
His voice waivers and breaks. He swallows back the noise that threatens to rise up and blinks back the tears that rise up. Maybe it’s not the smartest decision to tell Damian all of this - to let it all spill out. There’s always a lot of maybe’s when it comes to Damian, though. Leaps of faith seem to work best.
“I don’t remember the last thing I told him,” he admits. “I don’t really remember the last thing we did, either - if it was lunch or a phone call or something else entirely. I wish I did. But - also I don’t know if it’d be worse if I did, you know?”
Damian’s voice is soft - almost easy to miss, if he hadn’t been listening intently for it. “I know,” he says, and Dick wishes he knew what it meant.
He fights to keep his expression from turning grave. “It’s okay to be upset. Or to say you miss him and that it hurts.”
“It doesn’t.”
It’s a lie. They both know it, and they both know that the other knows, too. “Well, if it did, that would be okay. Bottling things up is what Bruce does, you know? And it’s - it’s not really healthy. Bruce works himself into the ground because he’s trying to hide from what he’s feeling, which just makes him get mad.”
“I know,” Damian repeats, a little louder.
“And Alfred’s probably just going to cook up a storm. He throws himself into cleaning the house and taking care of us, but. Sometimes you just have to force him to sit down. Actually, he should be in the library right now - I told him to make some tea and read a good book.”
No response this time. Dick’s not sure if he’s still looking for one, at this point - doesn’t know if Damian’s even listening or if he’s gone back to staring at nothing.
“As much as I hate to admit it, I don’t think I know what Jason does. When he was younger-” Dick cuts himself off, twining his fingers together. “I guess I just don’t know how Jason grieves.” He tries to adopt a more light-hearted tone. “He might throw himself into fights to distract himself. That seems like something he’d do, right?”
Another beat passes - and then - “And you?”
“Me?” Dick blinks, a little surprised that Damian had even asked. “I talk about it.”
I talk about it and I throw myself into fights and I let it consume me. I don’t get off the couch for weeks and I get violent and I-
The way he says it makes it seem like he’s the best at dealing with his grief - but he’s not. Not really. When Jason died, he tried to kill the Joker. He got mad at Bruce and yelled - he avoided home for a bit, until Tim came along, and then he yelled some more before he threw himself back into their lives. He’d be damned, he told himself, if he made all the same mistakes he’d made with Jason with Tim.
“I don’t,” Damian whispers. “I don’t-”
“Don’t?”
Damian squirms, and then rolls over again so his chest is facing Dick. He doesn’t look up - doesn’t try to meet Dick’s gaze as Dick turns to look at him. He just looks down at his clasped hands and looks so small.
“I don’t want to think about it,” he admits. “It’s easier if I don’t.”
“But you are,” Dick points out. Damian wouldn’t have hidden away in his room, fading away day by day, if he wasn’t thinking about it. “You’re thinking too much, aren’t you?”
Hesitation lines his words, which come far too late after a moment of silence. “Yeah.”
“That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. But maybe it’d help if you told me about it, okay?”
It’s then that Damian’s hand shoots out, grabbing ahold of Dick’s. “Not right now,” he says, like he’s begging Dick to promise him.
Everything in Dick’s chest aches - but this is Damian trying to bridge the gap, to prove that he doesn’t want to drift away. He wants to work through it, but he just needs time. Dick can give him that. Dick can give them both that.
“Not right now,” he agrees. “But eventually.”
Damian nods, so Dick presses him close, and they take all the time that they need.