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Dick was a sucker for the noise of the city.
He liked the theatrics of it all, of being Dick Grayson, son of billionaire, playboy Bruce Wayne, the last flying Grayson, the first Robin, Bludhaven’s very own Nightwing. He lived and breathed the spotlight in and out of the mask, wore it like a favorite coat, flashed a picture-perfect smile and waved the way he always had since he was a child.
The lights changed as he’s grown. From the hot spotlight of a big top, to the bright flash of paparazzi, to yellowed street lights and neon; it’s shifted, refracting across his history in colored lenses that highlighted every high and low in startling clarity. If anyone knew what it was like to be a protagonist, it was Dick.
But not every part of a hero’s life made it to page. That was another thing that Dick knew, an intimate familiarity with the quiet parts of a story. The moments that happened between the lines, the bits of throwaway prose and exposition that everyone skipped past in search of the real meat of a story.
He met you in those simple sentences, fell for you through every bit of punctuation and implication.
You weren’t anything special, and maybe that was why Dick was so drawn to you between the different plot points that seemed to haunt him so often. You were the spaces between words, the breath before a conclusion. You were magic hour, shining down on him in the quiet of a young night, the space between Dick Grayson and Nightwing.
He met you in the produce section when he was half-awake with an empty fridge at four in the afternoon.
He found you digging through a bin of cantaloupes, taking contenders out and pressing into them, sniffing them with the kind of concentration that he only ever dedicated to missions, and there was something about that that made his sleep-addled mind latch to you, drifting into your space and dripping ink across your seams while he lied about needing help picking lemons to excuse his gravitation to you
You knew who he was— most people did. But you just didn’t care. You walked him through choosing good citrus with the patience of a saint, repeating things that slipped past him through sluggish drags of attention, gracious and informative without being condescending or turning your nose up at a perceived inability and privilege that he didn’t actually have.
It was an inconsequential interaction, one that ended far too quickly for his liking and one that hung over his shoulder for the two weeks that it took him to run into you again, only partly by coincidence after seeing you leave a bar past last call time when he was patrolling one night. His decision to get a drink after a day of hell had nothing to do with you. The bar he chose, however, had everything.
You worked the counter like it was written into your blood, each movement another stroke of a pen across a page made with finality and the knowledge that it couldn’t be undone after being put down. He took a seat, and you flashed him a smile and called him sweetheart in a way that left him wanting to hear it without the bar between you, blocking him off from the sincerity that he’d craved while you reached after a good tip.
“Would you be opposed to me giving you my number?” Dick had asked, an unusual unsteadiness to his grin when you handed his card back at the end of the night. It was still early, by all means, but Dick Grayson never stayed out very late, not when his city still called to him like an old lover, craving another night spent tangled between compassion and duty.
You faltered, just a little. A stumble in your steady stride, like a misplaced comma in the middle of a sentence, or an interjection, cutting across the rails of your train of thought, just close enough for you to reach for the brake before it passed. Dick watched, picking apart each expression, each beat of hesitation while you searched for a rehearsed response that you just didn’t have. He read between each line with the precision he had picking apart a case, stripping back all the details and digging his hands into the simple facts beneath the fluff, hiding intensity behind an easy grin that bordered on that thin space between sincere and rehearsed, tipping too close to something pleading against the weight of all his training.
And then you recovered, straightening pages that he’d knocked loose and tapping edges neatly on the bar as you huffed a chuckle and flashed your smile like a shield to cover up your loose seams.
“Can’t promise you I’d use it,” you said back to him in that placating tone, reserved for men who didn’t like to take no. For people that you thought he fit in with; rich assholes that thought they were too big for their boots and expected everyone else to fall in line and rectify it. Even then, he knew the impression had already been made. Between the produce aisle and his offer, Dick had made himself an outlier in the monotony of your usual patrons. The scribbled number on a napkin was inconsequential, ultimately, because you had the choice to use it or not.
You didn’t. Not for a while.
It didn’t stop Dick from going to your bar every week, nor did it stop him from offering you that same, too-sincere smile and talking to you in a search for genuine connection. He wanted to convince himself he’d be fine when you inevitably told him to fuck off, but he knew it would never work. He was, despite all odds, infatuated with you and just how normal everything about you was. His mind was still stuck to that produce aisle and the way you weighed lemons in your hands to drop into a flimsy plastic bag he gripped a little too tight.
There was something poetic, something about wanting something that represented everything that Dick couldn’t have, and if he was any good with a pen and paper, he would’ve had the words down forever ago. He wasn’t, though, and the chapters of his life that included you weren’t interesting enough to make it past editing, so those moments fell between the cracks, sticking to his memory, but nothing else to make it tangible.
Dick liked it that way, as contradictory as it felt. It was his own pocket of normalcy, one that lay untouched by the rest of his life. It stayed the same, unchanging to the point of monotony that never seemed to drone on for him the way most others hated. Not Dick, though. Never Dick.
In fact, he got so used to how little those interactions changed, so content in letting the days slip by between your conversation, that when you finally used the number he’d given you that first night, it almost felt wrong.
It wasn’t some deep, meaningful text. It wasn’t some big turning point in the tentative friendship he’d managed to pencil in with you, forever waiting for the day he’d take an eraser to it to make room for another mission outline. You told him you were out sick for the week, and the world kept turning like it always had, striving towards the next twist in the plot that always came up eventually.
Dick didn’t go to the bar that week. He showed up at your front door with cold medicine, soup, and an apology for figuring out you lived in the same building as him, just two floors up.
His bar visits dwindled after that, replaced with weekends at the grocery store with you and taste-testing new recipes in your kitchen and begging you to play the guitar that he always saw sitting in the corner of your living room.
“Play something for me,” he suggested one afternoon, leaning forwards over your counter and watching as you plucked up another piece of cantaloupe from the chilled tupperware sitting between you. It was a funny thing, how the image of you like that ingrained itself into his mind. It was funny how he thought of you every time he reached for a plastic produce bag at the store.
You snorted, kicking your feet from where you sat on the countertop, and bit into the wonky square that Dick had tried to cut the day before under your instruction. It had sounded an awful lot like the first time you met; your easy instruction and demonstration, and Dick was convinced that you had to have been a teacher in some past life because there was no reason for you to be that good at instruction without some innate advantage over the normal folk.
As if Dick Grayson was normal. As if he was ever allowed to be.
You grinned down at him, sucking juice from the fruit when it tried to run from between your fingers and down your lips. The sun was still high in the sky, streaming in through the open blinds from your windows and making the mug in front of Dick sweat because you didn’t own any actual cups.
“What’re you gonna do in return?” you asked him, heels thumping against your cabinets and fingers tapping against the counter. If Dick were a better man, he would’ve fallen to his knees right there, palms pressed together to beg like you were something reverent. You’d hate it, he knew, shying away from the lights he found home in. The attention turned you away when you couldn’t control it, when you didn’t have the buffer of a bar between you and the offending party. You thrived where you couldn’t be seen.
He just laughed instead, grinning at you in the way he couldn’t stop doing anymore. Too wide for the cameras, too real to be marketed. His eyes crinkled, smile lines digging into his cheeks and making them ache. “What do you want?” he offered, like a fool who didn’t understand the kind of power he was giving you. He knew, though, had plotted his actions long before they ever made it to the page for you to bear witness.
You played for him before he left. A short little tune that stuck in Dick’s head to the point he was chewed out by Jason for humming it during a stake-out later that month. He didn’t stop humming.
Months passed like that, and just like at the bar, Dick grew complacent. This time was different, though. It was closer, more personal. You were at his doorstep and Nightwing was on the other side, looming over the domestic bubble that you brought into his life and waving a needle just for the drama of it all.
The night you found out was the same night he finally asked you on a date, half delirious from blood loss and caught between apologizing for getting blood everywhere and making bad jokes to ease you into having to stitch him up on your kitchen floor. Selfishly, Dick watched you, cataloguing each expression as you focused on your stitching and admiring the way your eyes glistened when you teared up from the stress.
You’d chewed him out for it when you were done, reprimanding him, not for being a vigilante or for not telling you or for bleeding out on your floor, but for the brief moment where you thought he was some creep trying to break into your apartment before he’d fallen through the window and broken your blinds. You were just relieved he was fine, you’d told him, sitting on the cold tile beside him with your hands stained with his blood, and the delirium told him it would be a good time to tell you he loved you, so he did.
You called him a fucking dumbass for it, then told him to pick you up for lunch on Saturday.
He called you a saint for putting up with him. You just laughed. Like it was easy. Like he was anything other than a burden.
You still welcomed him in so easily, still left the window unlocked for him and replaced the broken blinds with a curtain for easier access. He climbed through them again, still jittery from the feeling of flying that followed him around every night when he donned the mask and leapt across the Bludhaven rooftops with the ghosts of John and Mary Grasyon peering over his shoulder every time he let himself fall.
His feet hit the ground, silent from habit, rather than any intention. You were still up, Dick knew. He could hear your guitar from the kitchen.
He followed the sound, past your cabinet of mugs and two cups that he’d added just for himself, past the fridge that lacked a tupperware of cantaloupe because it was only the beginning of Spring, and past the basket of blood oranges that existed for the same reason.
Dick found you in your room, leaning against the wall as you plucked a complex melody from the strings of your guitar, notes weaving together and filling the space around you, beckoning Dick to a familiar comfort that he couldn’t seem to shake after how deeply entwined his narrative had become with yours.
The adrenaline of the night seeped from his body as Dick quietly made his way to your side, climbing into the bed beside you and practically melting into you as you played, never missing a beat even as he nuzzled into the place beneath your jaw. He sagged into you, feeling your vocal cords vibrate against him while he sank back down into the space between public figure and vigilante.
“Y’okay?” you asked him, voice low, resonating around the cavern of your mouth just so the vibration was more pronounced for him. He would’ve been purring, all content and relaxed, practically putty, seeping into you and trying to claw its way into your bones. Dick was nothing more than a man, though, so he was stuck wrapping his arms around your stomach and humming.
“Play something for me?” he requested, eyes slipping closed with the familiar phrase, body already going lax. His fingers tapped against your sides, meaningless little beats that you would chide him for because you’d mess up your tempo and blame him. He never minded. Less so when you started playing anyway.
It was so simple like this, with you. Nothing noteworthy, nothing of substance apart from just how much he adored you. Away from the spotlights and the city that he loved so much, Dick was slowly carving out a space in the shade, right next to yours.