Dreams - with Dick.

[the2ndwonder]

The dreams hadn't stopped.

Every night since she'd arrived.

Months before that. Without fail.

They're still the same - the variations are more frequent, but at the core, they always remain.

She is always fighting. She is always outnumbered. She is always in pain.

They'd faded, a little, since she'd shown up on the sand-white shores.

The sticky humidity of the jungle mixes with the heat of battle.

The pain was worse then it had been - mostly because she sat bolt upright, the half-hoarse scream dying in her throat before it was fully realised - and her ribs echoed her voice, the only partially healed bone protesting the sudden movement.

He's been waiting for this. Listening for it. Every night since she got here. Most nights, she whimpers in her sleep without waking up. He's let it go because she needs rest to heal. But tonight Donna
screams and the bed screeches against the floor and Dick's there before his shorts are half on and the kiss to Tim's shoulder has cooled.

Arms opening to pull her in while he's still yanking up his shorts, his movement to the bed is careful by contrast. A controlled lowering so that he doesn't jostle her ribs. "It was a dream, Donna."
Not 'just' a dream. They both know that dreams have power. "I'm here now."

"It's always the same dream," she said tiredly, not protesting as he lowers himself to the bed. "As- As before. I never told Diana." She never got the chance. "Gothic battles." How he'd described it the last
time they'd talked about it. Her skin looked off-color in the moonlight, the pain of sitting up making her look almost pinched. "Was I loud?"

"Not loud enough to wake anyone who wasn't already listening for it." Worry in his tone, he kisses her forehead then tilts her head up to look in her eyes. Even before his adjust fully to the moonlight
wash, he sees the strain around her eyes and mouth. "The dream is part of you. Just like my dream about not catching him when he falls." Him, the little black-haired boy with blue eyes, who might be Jason, Tim, himself...recently it's Bruce. Since he got the suit.

She closed her eyes. "I- It's starting to go away, a little bit. More than it was, anyway." One breath, in and out - still shaky, still hurting, but one breath. Then another. When she opens her eyes again,
they're a little clearer, a little more steady. "I keep feeling like it's- it's because I'm destined for... something." She shook her head minutely. "This may be selfish, Dick, but I don't really want to be destined for anything."

Eyes closing, he shifts again, settling her to rest against his chest. He knows now what he didn't before - what the dreams are about, and he can't lie to her, but maybe she doesn't need to know. "The
dream's part of what happens for you, after you died and before you came back. But you didn't die here, so it won't happen the same way. Maybe it won't happen at all." She's been here days and days now, but
he still can't stop rubbing his cheek against her hair, smelling that scent that's unmistakably his sister. "What's selfish, D, is how much I missed you," he says softly, confessing, before moving past it. "There's nothing selfish about not wanting to be a pawn in someone else's game."

"That's not selfish," she said, full of exhaustion that sleep wasn't going to fix. "That's human, Dick." She turned, and looked up at him. "I hope it doesn't happen at all. I- As much as we can be,
being who we are - I just want to be normal." She threaded her fingers with his. "Not leaving what we are behind, but just..." She trailed off.

"Does that make sense?"

"Not for me. I miss..." Dick shrugs, breath blowing the short ends of her hair where it got damaged in the fight. He misses what...people almost dying so he can have a job to do? Insane supervillains
destroying entire cities? "Making a difference. I've never wanted to be anything but what we are." But he wants it so that everyone else can have the lives they want, especially the people he loves. And with
everything she has to suffer... "It makes sense for you, sweetheart, and whatever you want, whatever it is, you know I'll do everything I can to help you have it."

"I know, Dick. You know it's the same for you, too." She exhaled slowly, and then - because it had been eating at her, she asked him a quiet question. ". . . What happened? Those two years. What happened
to you and Roy?" And everyone, she wanted to ask, but... but Dick and Roy were what was important. The rest she'd just learn in time.

He tears up before she's even finished asking. Even knowing she's alive at home. Even having her in his arms now, remembering those two years - two long, hard years, when he and Roy had gone from boys to
men, from rivals to friends, from Titans to Outsiders to Leaguers and halfway back - hurts. How much of it had happened because they lost her, when she'd been the one who made them whole? "It'd be
easier," he says after a rough breath. "To tell you what didn't happen. The long and short of it is that I walked away. I couldn't do it anymore after you died, because it hurt too much to keep losing
family. He lured me back with an offer to lead a team that was strictly professional, not friends, not family, just associates. It didn't stay that way long, because it couldn't. Not with us, it never
can, because that's the promise we made each other - not just for the world but for each other." He remembers how betrayed he'd felt when he realized he cared about the Outsiders, and how much more when he found out... "Bruce was backing it, but he never told me. He worked through Roy and Roy never told me either. We shattered again, and it took a long time to rebuild. At home, with you and Kory and Wally all finally home, we're still just working it out again."

Her breath caught, and she listened, sitting perfectly still until he'd finished, then let out her breath in a rush. "Hera," she said quietly, her face buried against his neck. Her next words were quiet - a mere shadow of her normal voice. "Because I died?"

She couldn't really lean up, but she leaned back some, enough so that she could kiss his cheek. "I'm so sorry, Dick." That was quiet, too. All she could remember was her saying that she was
glad - that she was glad that she'd finished it, even if she'd died, and him saying he hated her for it, in a way.

And now, she could understand why.

"You dying was a wake-up call for all the Titans. Not just Roy and I. Young Justice grew up and we..." Dick rests his head thoughtfully on top of hers. They'd had this conversation at home or versions of it,
but it was different there. "We stopped being sidekicks and second-stringers. The entire world went crazy for about two years and it's getting darker. There wasn't time for our personal soap opera. Roy's League at home now. He's the best dad in the world, too. I moved to Manhattan after things... devolved...in Gotham, and got a real job." So many things he wanted to tell her about him that she didn't know. The year off, Babs, Tim, the Cloisters, Blockbuster...even Catalina. He stops his mouth against her hair or the words will come tumbling out in pure relief of having her here. Roy..it aches like freezer-burn that he's gone, but talking to Donna's still and always been easier.

Her eyes were dark with unshed tears, her head tucked under his chin. "You left Gotham?" The three words were soft and she'd not pulled away - couldn't, really, trying to digest what happened. "Why Manhattan? Why not Bludhaven?" She was still trying to- When she looked up, when she just saw him, he was Dick - the boy she'd grown up with, but there were times- That hardness wasn't him. That darkness wasn't- It was Batman. Not her- not their Robin. Nightwing. Solid, but still Dick.

Was it solely because of her? Was her death what pushed him so far- She couldn't keep thinking like that.

"Are you sure you want to know, sweetheart?" He'll tell her, he's never lied to her, and he's not going to start now. The soft blur of pain in his voice serves warning. The truths aren't pretty and maybe
she'd rather not. "It wasn't... I wasn't..." Dick stumbles over words, forces his fingers to stay gentle instead of clutching. Without the shield of lies, without the cloak of being a Bat, talking about
it...unvarnished emotion. After all this time, that's hard. "I screwed up. A lot. Maybe it's better if...maybe you'd rather keep looking at me the way you always have."

Maybe he needs her to see him the way she always has. Back at home, Donna accepts, she sees who he is. But she had two years and all of that experience too. If she doesn't...She will. That's stupid,
dream-time fear talking. Donna loves him and Donna will always forgive him.

She did pull back then, to look up at him. "Dick," she said softly, the word itself a sort of soothing endearment, her fingers skimming his back. "You know I will always be beside you. I'll always
love you, no matter what you do, and how you change." She paused for a moment, then continued. "And if I know what happened, it makes that easier, not harder. I can't imagine there being two years that are
just... missing. You know I don't-" She stopped, closing her eyes and swallowing.

This isn't about you, Donna. This is about what happened to him to turn him into Batman.

She opened them, her eyes searching his. "Please tell me."

"I know." He sits up, nodding, and pushes a hand through his hair. While he tries to figure out where to start, he shifts to sit with his back to the wall and spreads his legs for her to curl up against him
if she wants. His mouth quirks in a wry, pained smile. "Are you sure you wouldn't rather talk about the destiny you don't want?"

Before she can answer, he shrugs it off, knowing she wouldn't take the bait even if it was appealing bait. "It probably starts with Azrael. Not being Bruce's choice when Bane broke his back." He knows this
about himself; his shrink told him. But she hadn't needed to. "Even though I cleaned up the mess Azrael made, I never really felt like Bruce believed in me after that. Bludhaven was my chance to prove I
could do it on my own. I didn't need his blessing or his support." His gaze flicks up to meet hers in the half-light through the window, soft and shadowed. "Nightwing was that, after he fired me. After Jason. But it never seemed to stick, no matter what I did. I just kept trying and trying and trying. Tim came to visit me, because he wanted to see me, and I practically accused him of spying. Of course, knowing Bruce and Tim and me, that wasn't a stretch but still. Tim."

It's all tangled up in his head and he knows he's not telling it well, but he also knows Donna will hear everything he doesn't want to put words on. Like how much he'd needed Bruce's respect and even his permission to exist independently. She'd hear it, and because of Diana, she'd understand it.

That much, she knew. Well, most of it. "I know, sweetheart," she murmured, hearing what he wasn't saying, her fingers skimming his hair. "What came after?" It wasn't so much the chronicled events as
what happened to him. Why he left. What happened while she was gone. What happened after (apparently) she was alive again. "Did he send anyone to look in on you?" Was Tim spying?

"Tim told him I had everything under control." Dick knows that the way he knows which way is down in the middle of a quad. He just does. Sighing, he reaches up to take her fingers, pulls them to his lips and kisses the tips, then sets them on his chest under his own hand. "I did. As much as anyone could." Thinking back, he knows that, too. He'd done right by Bludhaven until the end. "But the corruption ran so deep. Blockbuster had his hand in everything. Everywhere I turned. Everyone I helped. Everyone who came after me. They were all tied to him somehow. It was all tied to him."

Dick runs his other hand through his hair and blows out another long sigh. He looks off over her head at the shadows on the wall. "There was a girl. Tarantula." He closes his eyes and forces out her name:
"Catalina. She was an amateur. I should never have gotten involved with her."

I never should have gotten involved with her.

She wasn't able to stop her brows from shooting up in surprise- That was a rare thing for Dick to say about anyone. "What happened?" She said it quietly, her hand smoothing over his arm, his back. Her words were soft and quiet, not demanding or intrusive - because this... somehow, she got the feeling that it wasn't ... something he talked about much.

The more she touches, the more she asks, the more he pulls back, shuttering himself against the roiling emotions. Breathing tight, he takes her hands again and puts them on his chest, giving her a steady,
quelling look, then leans in to kiss her forehead with a cooling detachment. "This isn't easy to talk about. Even with you."

It was different, telling Bart, because it had been an object lesson. Sensei to student: I fell, I recovered, so will you. This is confession, therapy, maybe absolution.

"Even now." Because he got over it at home. He did what needed to be done. He forgave himself. But digging up Catalina with Tim changed everything and without work to redeem himself in, it's fresh again.

"I should've known better. I'd seen it before with Tad. Confusing justice with vengeance. Putting us in place of the law. Catalina had a spark, passion. She wanted to do what was right, but she couldn't stay
inside the lines. So when Blockbuster came down on me like God to Job, she took the bait and I let her." It isn't making sense, he knows, but he has to tell it his way. "Blockbuster went after Babs first. Because of me. Then he went after Oracle and Dinah and I both almost died saving her. After that, his attacks on me became systematic. I didn't know until the end why, but his mother died in a car accident caused during a chase and he blamed me for it. I took what mattered most to him, and he did the same to me. Burned down the apartments I lived in, killing--" His voice wavers, but only briefly. "So many innocents, including Yoshka, my uncle...my last living blood relative. He burned
down Haly Brothers and I couldn't save them all. One of the elephants had to save me." If he says her name, he'll break, so he keeps going, moving past it, not stopping to think about the gray trunk wrapped
around his waist hauling him to safety and the burns she suffered. "Catalina, at first, she'd been working for him. She saw what he was doing. She fell for me. I should've seen it..."

She can feel him pulling away from her, and it's never been like that - not when it's been something serious. There had been times with the Titans - of course there had, when he'd been angry and she'd been
defiant, and they'd drawn the line in the sand, but this - this was different. She watched him, staring at his face and his eyes, not his hands holding hers against his chest, where she can feel the beat of his heart under her fingers.

Tad. She filled in what she remembered of him - precious little, wearily told over coffee while they'd sat on her couch on one of the rare mornings that he wasn't in Bludhaven. She's trying to
piece it together, even though she knows that somehow, this is the telling, for him. It's the telling, not actually giving her the information even though she doesn't have enough to fill in the blanks.

He burned down Haly Brothers. Her fingers twitched in his - everything was past tense, he had to be dead, but that he made Dick hurt - the sudden flare of anger and protectiveness was one
that was as hard-wired into her as the heart that beat in her chest and the blood that flowed through her veins.

And this - this Catalina. She was working for him. For Blockbuster, and she'd fallen for him - that was the piece that was still missing. What happened. Did she die? Is that why he regretted even knowing her?
Part of her wanted to ask - but she knew, somehow, that he'd continue- that she'd get that last, missing piece that explained why- why this pushed him so far. Why- and she'd not thought of him as her Robin in years, but why her Robin had left all that made him bright and had shifted into something that was tempered harder then steel. There was something about it - that inflexible center that was surrounded by what was familiar - it almost scared her. Almost.

Donna doesn't say anything and for that, he's grateful. Profoundly grateful. This...this isn't about him as much as it is about them, he realizes. About getting right with Donna again, even though
she doesn't know anything's wrong. For him in the sense that he's making sense of it again, looking at it from a different place, turning the pieces like a half-done jigsaw to see how they fit together. How he does, now.

He stares without seeing. Or at least the black hair his gaze kisses off of isn't his sister's. It's thinner. Longer. Bound in a ponytail. The face masked in red and yellow - like a Flash, or Speedy, soothing in the familiarity, reassuring, when it should've been a warning. "I talked her into ending it the right way. We got him on tape, I did, admitting to everything. He would've gone done for everything - uncoerced confession, I never even hit him. Just kept dodging out of his way." That seems like a metaphor now. Blockbuster's ham-fist smashing down on everything around him while he ducked, spun, and
dodged, missing blows never really intended to kill him. At least not his body. "We took it to the D.A. Catalina's brother."

Dick shakes his head now, wincing for his own failures. "We only had one copy. Went straight there, too excited and too beat up to think to copy it. He was a good guy, her brother. He was one of the good guys." There's a hint of something almost plaintive in his tone. We should've been able to trust him. "He broke it. Broke the damned disk in half, then quarters, then shards. To protect his sister."

Emotion dies in his face and his affect goes flat. Beneath it, he hurts still, shredded by more than CD shards dredged up in telling Tim. "After that it was fast. A reporter, Maxine, figured out who I was. She didn't have to tell Blockbuster. He already knew. She came to tell me. Blockbuster murdered her while we were talking. Shot her through the skull." He didn't need to tell her that at that range, he'd been splattered with her blood and brain matter. "He threatened everyone. All of you. Even people I'd met on the street, he said, marked for death just because we'd shook hands." Worse than the threat had been how he'd known. How Blockbuster with his elevated IQ and resources had discovered Nightwing's deepest weakness and greatest fear. "Catalina showed up. She had a shot. She told me to step aside and let her end it."

Now he looks at her. Owning up to what he did. "I walked away." He'd said 'no' but not until after. It didn't matter. He'd let her do it.

That was the difference between them. The vital, deep down difference.

Bats - Robins, Bats, all of them - didn't kill.

The endearments didn't come - they weren't appropriate or needed. She knew him- god, she knew him better then she knew Diana. She nodded once, slowly, her eyes watching his face. She sucked in a breath, and would have kicked herself as she winced if it wouldn't have made it worse. She wanted to ask what happened then. What happened after this Catalina - this person that Donna currently wanted to snap like a twig, the muscles of her back tightening painfully - after she'd taken that choice. If she'd been anyone, if she'd known him at all-

Obviously she hadn't. Her palms itched to touch him, but she held herself back. If he wanted to continue, he would. If he didn't, he'd comment on the wince or the way she was sitting. For all that she
hated herself for wincing, it at least gave him an out.

He almost takes the out. Almost insists they should wait until she's better and rested. His mouth opens to say it. His fingertips graze the healing bruises on her face and lifts her hair off her cheek. But his hand falls away, his breathing skips and turns erratic, shallow. "It was never going to end, Donna," he says, a plea in his tone for her understanding. A plea that he knows, even right now, he doesn't have to make. Wonders kill. Diana killed Maxwell Lord and almost ended her friendship with Bruce over it. But he trained his Titans in no-kill fighting, and Donna has always been a Titan even more than a Wonder. "I failed you. All of you." Sighing heavily, he settles his hands back onto the bed sheets. "I'm sorry."

"No," she said, and it's fierce as hell. "No, Dick. No. You have never failed me." She was who she was - she was a Wonder, and the one thing that they didn't let happen - that was this. They had reasons that they didn't abide lies; Donna had gotten to the point that, back home, she could actually sense it.

"If anything else, if I let you believe that, after I came back, I failed you, sweetheart. We failed you."

"You didn't. None of you did," he assures her. Whatever he feels, none of them let him believe for a second he'd lost their respect. Sometimes he didn't know why, but he'd been telling them all their
whole lives together that picking yourself back up is the job. He ducks his head again, bowing it. "But it's my job to be the good example, not the bad one. It's taken a long time to get back to where I feel like I'm that guy again."

He sighs and pushes his hand through his hair again, relief competing with frustration and turning his calves and feet into a mass of cramps from tensing and flexing them to keep from moving. If she wasn't hurt, he'd be pacing, stalking at the window with his back to her. Telling this twists him up tight. It'd be easier not to look at her.

"I let someone else think for me, and it went wrong. And I knew better. I just didn't have the strength left to care."

She doesn't keep arguing - it will get both of them nowhere, and it's not the time anyhow. If he doesn't realise that he's allowed just as much as the rest of them to be the bad example, that he doesn't have to be the shining one, then they had failed him.

"I know, Dick." She said it quietly. "There's only so long that we can all go doing this before we get so worn down that things happen." She still wasn't touching him - she could feel him want to move, and
shifted enough that he could move and pull away if he needed too.

Abruptly, he doesn't have the strength or the will to tell her about Catalina and him. Another day maybe, or maybe he and Tim will work it out and he won't need to tell anyone else. It's enough for tonight. And besides...

He settles down, willing his shoulders relaxed and his mind quiet. "We fall. We pick ourselves and each other back up. Which I'm doing a hell of a job of right now, pouring my heart out when you need sleep. I'm sorry, sweetheart. That was selfish of me."

She touched him then, her fingers brushing the hair out of his face. "Honey, never, ever apologize for pouring your heart out to me. Besides, I asked." She was, though, starting to look grayer in the
soft light from the moon. "Promise? I can hold you up as much as you do the same." She shifted, not caring that it hurt as she hugged him once, her head fitting under his chin. "I love you. No matter what
happened, and no matter what happens. We're family."

"You did ask, but usually I've seen you often enough to have the common sense to wait until you're not gray from lack of sleep." He shifts, sliding down on the bed and lifting her so very carefully with him, because he wouldn't hurt her or see her hurt for the world. "Titans together, always." Kissing the top of her head, he closes his eyes and quiets his mind so he can at least rest with her. "I love you, and I'm here now. Sleep."

She couldn't really fight it - not with his tired she was, and how warm he was. She curled in his arms, finally managing to fall back asleep - and, for once, there were no dreams.