Pairing: Dick/Future!Damian. In case anyone still doesn't know - Dick Grayson (Robin I) is the current Batman (Bruce is dead. Though he'll probably get better and stage a comeback), Damian Wayne (Bruce's son with his crazy assassin stalker Talia al Ghul) is the current Robin, but he has his eyes on that cowl...

Warnings: None. Damian is 20, Dick is 33. Is all legal and fine.

Summary: Dick needs to talk things over with Damian so he can move on. The first thing he needs to establish is whether or not the whole affair was only in his own imagination.

A/N: This just appeared in my head fully formed while I slept. I am but the conduit.

I always imagine Dick as bisexual. I don’t know why - maybe because I long so much for a non-depraved bisexual character to exist.

“Come on Dick,” Barbara said, bringing the steaming cup of coffee to her face to blow on it and sip. “What was wrong with this one, exactly?”

Dick sighed as the wind on the clock tower balcony ruffled his hair. “Nothing. Nothing was wrong with her. She was nice.”

“‘Nice’?” Barbara made a face. “Translation: you didn’t find her attractive.”

“There's no reason why not - she was hot by anyone's standards – but... there was a lack of chemistry, I guess.”

“You have to stop letting the excitable women you save take you out for dinner.”

“It is getting a little awkward,” Dick agreed, “dating in spandex.”

“You seem down.”

“It’s just... I don’t know. It feels like I’m not going anywhere... romantically – you know? Feels like I’m stuck. I haven’t felt anything for anyone since...”

She stared at him and waited for him to finish.

“Ok, I’ve been thinking about Damian,” he admitted.

“I’m not the big arrogant jerk’s number one fan or anything – but... he did seem to make you happy.”

“Did he? I mean, did I seem ‘happy’?”

“Happier. Noticeably less of the Bruce-brand brooding, y’know?”

“I don’t remember,” Dick responded, frowning. “It’s like that whole year is a blank. I mean, it’s not that I don’t remember facts and events. Just... how I felt about it all. We lived together, we seemed to be getting along. Then I went back to New York to help out for a while and he... didn’t argue. Just said ‘ok’... so I went.”

“You didn’t expect him to go with you, did you? Gotham still needs a Batman.”

“No... but I thought he’d argue about it.”

“You wanted him to throw himself at your feet and start sobbing? Grab on to your ankles to stop you from going?"

“Hey, I am not that egotistical!” Dick spread his arms and Barbara flashed one of her smirks. “But you know, I did expect a little more than just ‘ok’.”

Barbara shrugged. “Damian’s not like us. He was raised by thieves and assassins... it doesn’t take a genius to see that he finds it hard to express emotion. I’m sure he cared for you.”

“How could he not, right?” Dick waggled his eyebrows. “I’m incredibly lovable.”

“You know... you really should talk to him.”

Dick shot her a suspicious glance. “We’re not going to get back together.”

“Did I say you should?”

“You’re giving me that look,” Dick wagged his finger. “The Joy of Meddling look.”

“Seriously Dick, talk to the kid. At least... figure out what happened, maybe it’ll stop you going crazy.”

“Hey now – ‘crazy’?”

Barbara smiled and took another sip of coffee. “Crazier.”

“I want a divorce,” Dick announced as the elevator doors opened onto Damian’s workshop basement.

“Why?” Damian called, not looking up from the Batmobile’s engine. “Who was foolish enough to marry you, Grayson?”

“It’s metaphorical. A metaphorical divorce.” Dick elaborated, moving to one of the work benches and picking up various tools and items of electronics he found there one after another in mild interest. “Y’know, establishing grounds for the relationship’s failure, sorting out of the assets... hey, is this my set of hex keys?”

“It was father’s. Therefore mine.”

“Y’know, technically, legally, I’m his first son–”

Damian finally raised his head, blowing a strand of sweat-dampened hair back off his forehead and glaring at Dick, who lounged against the computer console. He was wearing the coat he had designed for himself as Batman, but not the mask. “What do you want?”

“I want... what the experts on the daytime chat-shows like to call ‘closure’,” Dick grinned uneasily and made air quotes. “So I can move on... stop feeling like I’m in relationship limbo. You know?”

The other man frowned in irritation. “Why should I care about who you’re mooning over – isn’t Gordon your gossip partner? Talk to her.”

“Damian, I’m talking about you. About us.”

“‘Us’?” Damian flashed a single set of air quotes back at him with the hand not holding a wrench.

“Yeah, remember that year when we lived together as man and, uh... other man? We slept in the same bed nearly every night – remember that?”

The younger man raised one eyebrow and focused his attention back on loosening a recalcitrant valve. “That qualifies as a ‘relationship’ does it?”

“Well, in most western cultures, the practice of living – and having, um, fairly regular intercourse – with someone is described by that term, yes.” Dick blinked. “Don’t you think? I mean, it was intense, wasn’t it? It must have been, because I’m an intense person, and you’re like, ten times more intense than me and...”

“Babbling, Grayson.”

“Well, help me out here!”

“Tch! What do you want from me, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” Dick threw his hands up and then planted them on his hips, feeling awkward and exposed. “... For you to say I wasn’t imagining the whole thing?”

“Not the ‘sleeping next to’ and ‘intercourse’ parts, no. I distinctly remember that those things happened.”

“But according to you, it wasn’t actually a 'relationship'?”

Damian shrugged, an uncharacteristic gesture for him. “We had sex and we lived together, now we don’t. Those are the facts, as Drake the ‘master detective’ would say. Everything in-between is unquantifiable.”

“You mean emotions are unquantifiable?”

The other man shrugged again – and seriously, when did Damian start doing that?

Dick ruffled the shaggy strands of hair falling against the back of his own neck. “Well, maybe this is where the ‘talking’ part comes in. I mean, I’d like to know what you thought about it. What you felt about it... if anything. It’d be good for us, I think, if we could open up a little.”

Damian bowed his head and the shadows from the spotlights were such that this action totally obscured his features. “Why now? Why not last year... or twenty years in the future? Why specifically now?”

“Because I’m stuck... I feel like we never really ended it, just drifted apart, you know... geographically and otherwise. And I... I think maybe part of me still thinks... well, still thinks it’s in love with you.”

There was a discernible pause before the other man responded in a flat, incredulous tone: “you were in love with me?”

“Yeah. Weren’t you... with me, I mean?”

“You never said anything at the time,” Damian glanced up from his work briefly, his face looking taut and angry.

“No, I guess I didn’t. I thought you knew – it’s generally assumed feelings must be involved when people are together for that long...”

“Is it?”

Dick moved away from the console and towards Damian, who continued determinedly not looking at him. He reached out a hand with the idea of laying it on the other man’s shoulder but found himself hesitating and drawing back. Damian might be twenty and of comparable height and build to Dick now, but in his face it was still possible to see traces of the lost, frustrated child who responded to friendliness with scorn and thought all touch was an overture to violence.

In response to the tentative gesture, Damian turned his head slightly and shot Dick a wary, uncertain look like he also had no idea how the exchange was going to play out, the side of his mouth twitching. Dick suddenly had an absurd urge to lean in and kiss Damian, just to find out if he still did it exactly the same way – eager and endearingly clumsy, his teeth pressing into the edge of Dick’s top lip.

Instead he took a step back and shoved his hands into the pockets of the jeans he had thrown on over the Nightwing uniform along with a black long-sleeve sweat-shirt. “Damian... I know I’m not going about this the right way or anything, but I just want things to be better. I think maybe we could at least be friends again.”

“We were never friends.”

“But we were something, weren’t we?”

“Something,” Damian agreed, slamming down the Batmobile’s hood.

Dick turned and mounted the flight of stairs to the upper level, pausing by the elevator doors. “Look, I kinda ambushed you tonight... so, I’m sorry. Maybe we could meet someplace... more neutral to have this conversation.” In public, where you can’t scream at me or decide to challenge me to a duel. “Have coffee with me tomorrow?”

Dawn was creeping through the blinds as Dick got out of the shower and pulled on a pair of boxers to climb into bed. Just as he closed his eyes, his civilian cell phone chirruped.

“How’d it go?” Barbara cut in as soon as he answered. He could hear the sounds of her rapid-fire typing over the line.

“Disaster. For some reason I forgot that talking to Damian is like banging your head against a wall.”

“So we haven’t yet established the cause of the relationship’s death?”

“Or if there was one in the first place, no. He looked at me like he had no earthly clue what I was talking about.”

“So you just let him stonewall you with his autistic vulcan act? You’re losing your touch, Grayson.”

“Not completely,” Dick sighed and rubbed his eyes. “We’re meeting tomorrow. I somehow got him to agree to leave the house during daylight hours.”

“A date, huh?”

“If it was it’d be a first.”

Barbara gave an incredulous snort. “How did you two idiots even get together in the first place?”

Dick yawned. “The morning of his eighteenth birthday I woke up in bed with him climbing under the covers with me. He just said ‘it’s time, Grayson’. I was like, ‘huh, time for what?’ and then he put his tongue on my nipple and I said ‘OH!’. Obviously he had it all planned out: reach majority, inherit title of Batman, make conquest of former mentor.”

“Maybe it was a trade-off. ‘You give me the cowl, I give you my virginity’. Seems fair.”

“... I’m hanging up now, Barbara.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Ok, but you know, you will eventually have to get your own life. I’m just saying.”

Dick clicked the phone shut and closed his eyes, drifting off by mentally composing and discarding versions of his opening lines for the following day’s conversation.

'Hi Damian, so was I really bad in bed or just really annoying? Was it the way I always took your clothes and your bikes instead of buying my own? Feel free to jump in and stop me if I guess it...'

A/N: Dick Grayson: the man to whom relationships just happen... like hit and run accidents – BAM!

In the next adventure: our dynamic duo have the world’s most awkward non-date. Dick makes the mistake of criticising Damian’s technique, er, off the field.