ABRAÇOS GRÁTIS

Dick shook his head, looking absolutely wretched. He blinked hard twice then seemed to give up, his shoulder slumping forwards as a couple tears trailed down his face. 

“Bad fight,” he said, voice hoarse. “With Bruce. Can’t be there.” 

Okay, so no cosmic world-ending alien invasion. Clark rubbed his eyes as Dick’s words finished processing through his newly-awake brain, and…uh oh.

Oh, Dickie. The poor kid - well, not a kid anymore. He’d gotten even taller over the last couple months and was going to be eighteen in a couple weeks.

“Come on in,” Clark said. He stepped back and used his foot to shove the door open, wrapping an arm around Dick to usher him inside. “I’m so sorry, Dick.” 

A tiny, choked noise escaped Dick’s tightly-sealed lips, but he just crossed his arms over his chest and stared blankly ahead. 

The stairs creaked and Lois appeared, clad in pajama pants and one of Clark’s Daily Planet t-shirts. 

“Everything okay?” she asked, brow furrowing when she saw Dick. 

“It sounds like Dick and Bruce got into it,” Clark said, choosing his words carefully. Everything about Dick’s body language read the same as an easily-spooked horse. “So Dick is here for a little bit.” 

She hummed sympathetically and, stifling a yawn, came all the way downstairs. When she got closer to Dick, her face fell. 

“What happened, Dickie?” 

The duffle bag fell to the floor as Dick practically launched himself into her open arms and absolutely broke down into heaving sobs that shook his entire body. She hugged him tightly, murmuring soothing words against his hair, and Clark zipped upstairs to get his phone. Alarm and concern twisted together behind his sternum – Dick hadn’t broken down like this in years, even with the recent tensions between him and Bruce. What the hell had happened in Gotham? 

His phone screen lit up with an incoming call from Bruce – the third one, apparently. Clark immediately answered. 

“Clark.” Bruce sounded destroyed, wrecked. “Dick’s missing. I can’t find him, his tracker’s offline–” 

Normally Clark would hesitate to cut him off, but this time it was a mercy. “He’s here. In Kansas. Wally dropped him off.”  

After a couple seconds’ stunned silence, Bruce’s sigh crackled through the phone line, equal parts relieved and aching. “At the farm.”

“Ma and Pa are gone for a couple days,” Clark said. “Me and Lois are watching the animals. What happened?” 

As Bruce filled him in on the details of a particularly nasty blowout argument, Clark was glad he didn’t have to conceal his wincing. That was…bad. Really bad. Normally Dick didn’t go for the ‘you’re not my father!’ line, and Bruce… 

Had spectacularly dropped the ball by sending Dick away after that. 

For two of the smartest people in the world, Bruce and Dick were…well, a kind phrase might be emotionally illiterate. At least when it came to each other. 

Then again, most families were like that. 

“You need to come out here,” Clark said at last. “Give him tomorrow to rest and process, but get here in the evening.” 

“I can be there in three hours.” 

Clark took a second to translate “no, you need some time to regulate” into Bat-speak, then said, “I think Dick would respond better after he’s had some rest and some time to process.” 

Bruce’s silence somehow conveyed his frustration and his own grief, but eventually he grunted in the affirmative. 

“We’ll see you tomorrow,” Clark said, going for calm and soothing. “It’ll be fine.”

The next evening, Bruce arrived looking like he’d spent forty days wandering in the wilderness, with dark circles under his eyes and two days’ worth of unshaven scruff, his hair messy. He’d brought his own duffle bag, one that was styled similarly to Dick’s – the two were clearly part of a matching set. 

Dick had spent the better part of the day pacing around, chock full of nervous energy even after talking things out with Clark and Lois, until he disappeared into his guest room upstairs shortly before Bruce was due to arrive. 

Bruce had barely stepped foot across the threshold when suddenly Dick flew down the stairs and tackled him into a hug. Had Clark not been there, Bruce would’ve gone sprawling backwards across the porch. 

“See?” Clark said to no one in particular. “It’s all fine.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Bruce slept fitfully through the night. He woke up around seven and rather than trying to return to sleep, he got up, dressed in jeans and a button-down flannel – look, keeping an unremarkable  profile was important. Bruce Wayne being instantly spotted in Kansas at the same time Batman missed a night in Gotham felt like inviting trouble, which was the last thing he wanted to deal with right now. Despite the overwhelming distraught-fear-grief from realizing that Dick had vanished, Bruce had managed to put a little thought into packing. Sort of. 

He should have realized earlier that part of Dick’s behavior could be explained by his approaching eighteenth birthday. Waiting for Dick to come to him with his problems clearly hadn’t worked, and Bruce was endlessly frustrated with himself for not being more proactive. Of course Dick was his son in every possible way, legally and otherwise. He hadn’t understood that the looming threshold of adulthood was making Dick increasingly insecure about his place in Bruce’s household – in Bruce’s family. 

God. Lois had been right to call him a moron the night before. 

The scent of coffee drifted up from the kitchen downstairs, and plus the (perhaps) irrational urge to lay eyes on Dick spurred him out of his guest room. Across the hall, the door to the room that Dick had slept in was wide open, the bed empty. 

As much as Bruce wanted to tell himself that this wasn’t a problem, he hurried down the stairs. No one was in the living room, but the kitchen lights were on, so he checked there next. Lois was sitting at the round table with her laptop, an external harddrive, and an open copy of the day’s newspaper. A steaming mug of coffee sat precariously close to her elbow but she looked up at Bruce when he got to the doorway. Or, as Dick would say, when he loomed in the doorway.

“They’re both awake. I sent them outside to get apples,” Lois said before he could ask. The newspaper rustled as she yanked out a section and tossed it in his direction. “Clark’s making pie. There’s more coffee.” 

Okay. The apple trees were out front. That was fine. Really. 

Bruce picked up the sheaf of paper – ha ha, the comics – and, tucking it beneath his arm, moved on to pour himself a mug of plain black coffee. Rather than joining Lois at the kitchen table, he headed towards the living room and settled in one of the well-worn armchairs beside the couch. 

It just so happened that the chair faced one of the windows overlooking the front yard, where the Kents had a couple modest apple trees, and where Clark and Dick were busy collecting fruit. As soon as Bruce saw Dick to confirm that he was still there, that persistent pinched feeling near his lungs began to loosen. He couldn’t hear anything that they were saying out there, but Dick threw his head back and laughed at something Clark told him. 

That was a good sign, then. Dick seemed happy. At ease, even, in a way he hadn’t been in ages.

For a brief instant, the desire to stay here out in the middle of the country, away from Gotham and all its problems and griefs, hit Bruce like a locomotive. He’d do anything, go anywhere, to give Dick the kind of life that would let him look like that, comfortable and relaxed and content, all the time. Usually, the thought of giving up the cowl seemed like an impossible scenario. Like a fever dream, like the cowl and the cape had melted so deeply into Bruce’s nerves that it would always cling to him, shadowing his every move, seeping through his pores. But here, in the early morning light, with coffee and apple trees and Dick climbing up on Clark’s shoulders to reach a higher branch…

Giving it up seemed like the easiest thing in the world. 

Dick, of course, would riot. Forget running away from home, he’d probably figure out a way to kick Bruce off the damn planet. The kid who’d taught Bruce more about duty and responsibility than a decade in Gotham’s seedy underground could never stand by when there was something he could do to help the people around him.

Bruce smiled to himself and opened the funnies section of the paper. He’d just begun reading when a commotion at the front door heralded Clark and Dick’s loud, chaotic return – Dick was still on Clark’s shoulders and the doorframes were not tall enough to accommodate that much height, so they’d compromised. Instead of just hopping down, because that would be too easy, Dick leaned back, nearly folding himself in half in a stretch that made Bruce’s lower vertebrae ache from watching, while Clark ducked down. 

“Morning, B!” Clark said, too loudly and too cheerfully. He brandished a plastic bag full to bursting. “Got an early start.” 

He kicked his slides off and nudged them over towards the doormat. 

Dick effortlessly swung himself back up to a normal sitting position, shaking the hair out of his eyes. He toed off his own shoes and they fell to the floor with twin thunking sounds. When he looked up, he was grinning, face flushed from exertion. He saw Bruce, though, and sudden uncertainty flashed across his expression. He started to say something but stopped and tugged his lower lip between his teeth. 

Bruce’s first urge was to reassure him that everything was fine between them and drag Dick down into a hug, but he wasn’t sure Dick would appreciate that level of acknowledged emotional vulnerability in front of Clark and Lois. But clearly waiting for Dick to come to him hadn’t worked either, so…hm. Words had never been Bruce’s strong suit, but for Dick, he’d learned and would keep learning. 

“I can see,” Bruce replied, creasing his section of the paper and setting it aside. “Have you pressed my son into indentured service, or did he volunteer?” 

At ‘son’, Dick’s face pinkened a little further and he ducked his head, a faint, pleased smile playing at his mouth. God, he looked so young. How was he somehow both older than Bruce could believe and still young enough to seem like he should be bundled away in a bunker forever? Well, maybe, he’d never outgrow the latter one. 

“Hey, he volunteered,” Clark replied. He raised his eyebrows. “Only paid workers here, Corporate. And he was an excellent help.” To punctuate his point, Clark reached up and squeezed Dick’s knee in what was intended to be an affectionate gesture. 

In uniform and on the training mats, Dick’s reflexes were nearly preternatural. During moments like these, however…

“Tha-ANks!” Dick flinched, voice cracking halfway through the word. 

The facetiously innocent smirk that Clark pasted on bespoke imminent future mayhem – honestly, he was no better than Dick sometimes – so instead of intervening, Bruce silently took the bag of apples from him and delivered them to Lois. 

“Thank you, page boy,” she muttered absently, laser-focused on an article. That expression usually meant that she’d found an investigative puzzle to unravel, and interrupting her would be a task undertaken in only the direst of circumstances. Since she was too distracted to smack his hand away, he rustled around for a good-sized apple and returned to see what Dick had gotten himself into.

Meanwhile, Dick’s startled laughter echoed around the living room as he tried to bargain with Clark. 

“You don’t have to do this! U-Uncle Clahahark! Wai-wai-waihaihait–” any other protests disappeared into a familiar screech of sheer ticklish panic that made Bruce smile as he wandered back to the doorway, purloined snack in hand. 

Dick was somehow still on Clark’s shoulders despite his best efforts to escape, which seemed to mainly consist of winding his fingers through Clark’s hair and crumpling forwards, helpless with laughter as Clark squeezed at his knees and lower thighs. 

When he saw Bruce, Dick flailed out in his general direction, as much as he could while jerking and wriggling. “B! He’s killing mehehe!” 

“I almost forgot about this,” Clark said. 

Bullshit, but Bruce wouldn’t call him on it this time. “Oh no. Whatever shall we do, Dickie?” 

Despite his protesting, Dick’s giant grin looked positively gleeful even as he sputtered with feigned indignance. 

Clark winked. “You could help him.” 

“I could.” Bruce took a bite of his apple. He wandered a couple steps closer, intending to grab one of Dick’s outstretched hands and pull him back down to earth. 

Whatever Clark did, though, got a strangled snort out of Dick before his right leg flew out, apparently on sheer reflex, and though Bruce guessed what was coming and tried to duck, he wasn’t fast enough to avoid getting a socked foot straight to the jaw. 

Ouch. 

Sparking pain shot through his jawline and chin, not enough to indicate a serious injury but enough that Bruce hissed through his teeth before he could stop himself. 

Dick had gone entirely still and was staring in frozen horror. Instead of stepping back, Bruce deliberately set his half-eaten apple down on the coffee table and set about rolling up his sleeves. He didn’t look directly at Dick as he did so, but Clark was quick on the uptake. He flashed Bruce an encouraging grin and Bruce very heroically did not roll his eyes, focusing instead on pushing his sleeves above his elbows. 

Dick hadn’t said anything yet. He’d gone still like maybe that would hide him. Nice try.

Bruce finished securing his sleeves, taking some extra time just to wind Dick up further even though his son wasn’t saying anything. Then, cracking his knuckles, he held his hands out towards Clark. 

 “Alright, Give me my kid.” 

That shocked Dick into action as a relieved grin broke out across his face and he panicked, trying to successfully wriggle away. 

“Nononono!” he protested, his voice tightening with barely-suppressed laughter. He twisted his torso in an attempt to evade Bruce's outstretched arms, fruitlessly pushing at Clark's head and shoulders. “It was an accident, I didn't mean to!” 

Clark leaned down. The movement toppled Dick forwards and Bruce seized him by the waist, yanked hard, and successfully wrestled a squirming bundle of seventeen-year-old into his grasp. He adjusted his grip to cradle Dick like he was a much smaller child, arms braced under his back and knees. 

“An accident,” Bruce repeated. He let his voice drop to a deeper rumble that usually sent Dick into fits of anticipatory snickers. “Are you sure about that?” 

Dick's head flopped to the side, thunking against Bruce's shoulder. He grinned giddily up at Bruce, eyes watery from laughing. “Ye-yehes! Promise!” 

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Dick squirmed as currents of restless energy raced through his limbs. He wasn’t actually trying to get away, but there was too much fizzy feeling – the butterflies in his stomach, the humming in his arms and legs – for him to stay still. Plus, letting Bruce cart him around like a little kid was too close to admitting that he was having fun, and surely seventeen was too old to be flustered into a mess of giggles and wriggling by the looming threat of tickles from his dad. 

(His dad. His dad, no matter what.) 

So, as Bruce started towards the couch, Dick shouted for help again. “Help! Lois, they’re ganging up on me!” 

He heard her snort from the kitchen table and grinned. 

“Sorry, Boy Wonder,” she called back, dry amusement in her tone. “You’re on your own.”  

“Betrayal!” 

Bruce’s chuckle rumbled through his chest and Dick found himself leaning into him, some part of his mind instinctively soothed. As always, Bruce smelled like pine and vetiver, and the familiarity of it made Dick want to burrow into his arms for a nap. He resisted. Barely. 

“Don’t,” he said, kicking his feet. “B. I’m too old for this–” 

Ignoring his protests, Bruce dropped his legs to wrap both of his arms around Dick’s torso, pinning him to his chest in a backwards hug as he sat down on the couch, leaving Dick firmly trapped. 

Before Dick could really appreciate how screwed he was, Bruce prodded at his left side, right under his ribs, and Dick screeched out a startled bark of laughter. When his dad didn’t let up, Dick squirmed, trying to fold sideways or summon enough focus to get that evil hand away, but the jolts of electric ticklish feeling kept him in distracting fits of cackles. 

“Too old,” Bruce said, repeating Dick’s most recent protesting words. He’d leaned down to crowd up close to Dick’s ear.  “Somehow, Dickie, I don’t think that’s the case. You’re not too old…” 

Suddenly, both his hands were pinching and digging into those insanely sensitive spots right below Dick’s ribs. Dick shrieked, the adrenaline making him kick both his legs out as he tried to thrash or squirm or flail or find some kind of outlet for all the giddy ticklishness that was taking over his mind. 

“...I think you’re too ticklish,” Bruce finished. Even the vibrations of his voice tickled. Damn it. 

Dick shook his head, scrunching up his whole face as he tried to cringe away. His lungs burned when he managed to suck in another breath. “Gehehet – get out of thehere, you–BRUCE!” 

Those stupid butterflies returned to Dick’s stomach with a vengeance and he tried to wipe the stupid grin off his face but he couldn’t because – because Bruce started nuzzling raspberries and nibbles around his neck, and his scruff made it tickle so much worse, and no matter how many times this happened it still sent Dick into waves of helpless, screechy giggles. Plus, Bruce was still tickling at his lower ribs, having switched to crawling his hands slowly up each set, one at a time. Writhing, Dick tried to smack Bruce’s hands or wrists or reach up and whack him in the head – that got him a tasering poke to the underarm, so he changed strategies and pretended that he hadn’t just screamed. His arms were useless noodles by now; all he could do was hug himself for the illusion of protection.

Dick knew he probably sounded ridiculous with all the snorts, giggles, and screechy laughter that was bubbling out of him, but he didn’t have the energy to feel embarrassed just yet. He flinched upwards when Bruce’s hands shot into his armpits. 

“Bruce!” he gasped. “Bruce, waihaihait! NONononoOHOHO!”  He threw himself forward in a desperate escape attempt, only to feel one of his dad’s strong arms wind around his waist and haul him back. Dick tried to clamp his elbows down but that was useless at this point; Bruce’s fingers were already there, and keeping his arms pinned to his ribs just meant that any and all wheedling fingers would also nudge at his biceps and inner arms, and, well. Dick wasn’t sure he could deal with the high-pitched, shrieky giggles that would elicit. It wasn’t like Bruce and Clark and even Lois would be surprised, or anything, but he – he wasn’t a screechy little kid anymore, he was almost an adult – 

An almost-adult who did, unfortunately, spasm and sputter out a few of those giggles anyway because Bruce took a brief detour to skitter over his triceps. Rats.

“Careful, chum,” Bruce rumbled, staying in that tickly lower range. 

The sheer fondness oozing from his words made Dick feel like he was melting into a blushy, giggly marshmallow because that was his dad, the Batman, the  Dark Knight of Gotham who terrified humans and Metahumans and aliens alike, and – and all it took to make him soften was letting himself be hugged and tickled, because…because Bruce loved him. 

Because that was his Dad. 

Before Dick could dwell too much on that realization, Bruce continued on to tease him. “You wouldn’t want to get away, right?” 

Oh, right. Because his dad was also evil. Actually, real-life evil. Dick felt himself flushing a deep, mortifying shade of red, and he caught a glimpse of Clark watching him with an indulgent smile as if he knew exactly what Dick had just been thinking about. 

That made him duck his head to hide. “Fuck off!” 

A second pair of hands grabbed his ankles – Oh, so everyone was betraying him to the Tickle Monst-uh, to Bruce, okay – as Clark reached out and steadied his thrashing legs. 

“Thank you,” Bruce said. As if he hadn’t just switched to spidering his fingers across Dick’s stomach and sides. He clawed into Dick’s upper abs, vibrating his hand, and Dick strained to curl his legs up for protection. Unfortunately, no amount of ticklish desperation could overcome Kryptonian strength. 

“Of course,” Clark replied. For a grown man, he managed to pull off the ‘picture of innocence’ shtick disturbingly well. Maybe that was how he’d gotten so many good stories as a reporter. “For the record, I think the kick was on purpose.” 

“Shut up!” Dick squeaked. Squeaked. God, he might as well just bury himself underneath the Kent’s floorboards because he was never coming back from that one. “Don’t listen to him, Dad, he’s shit-stirring–” 

Bruce cut him off with a raspberry just under his chin that sent Dick tumbling into a puddle of hiccupy giggles. Trying to wriggle forward and out of reach just meant that he leaned further into the hands that were scrabbling all over his torso, and he was rapidly running out of energy to do more than just flop around. 

So, really, he wasn’t letting Bruce keep tickling him, he was just…saving his energy. Yeah. 

Clark tsked and, faster than Dick could follow, darted a hand up to squeeze at his knees again. “Language, Dickie.” 

“Nohohot that!” Dick cried, fruitlessly trying to squirm his legs free. He yelped when Clark did it again, then had the nerve to reach around and scribble at the backs of his knees. 

Bruce made an approving sound as he finally stopped his search for every single ticklish centimeter on Dick’s stomach, only to take up sporadic, alternating pokes into each of the tickle spots underneath his ribs again. The unpredictable frequency kept Dick jolting from side to side while Clark tickled behind his knees.    

“He’s wriggly,” Clark commented, a casual observation. 

Dick still felt himself blush even darker. 

“He is,” Bruce replied, his smile audible in his words. “He’s always squirmed around like a wriggly, ticklish worm.” 

Not fair! “I do nohot!” Dick tried to defend himself. It was a rookie mistake because that just made Bruce stop tickling him entirely, only to hover his hands above Dick’s stomach, wiggling his fingers without touching him.

“Hey!” Dick yelped. Seeing those fingers so close to him just made the desire to squirm worse, and he couldn’t even try to keep still. 

“I thought you didn’t squirm, honey,” said Bruce. “What’s got you all worked up?” 

Groaning, Dick whacked his head against Bruce a couple times, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off the threatening hands. “Don’t!” 

“Don’t what? Tickle you?” Bruce poked his stomach once, twice, then switched to nibbling little pinches up and down Dick’s sides. “Tickle you here, where it makes you giggle?” 

Wheezing around a fit of helpless giggles, Dick squirmed in and tossed his head back against Bruce’s shoulder, smiling up at his dad like a dork. “You suck!” 

He wasn’t expecting Bruce to lean down and kiss his forehead, but that only added to the endorphin high coursing through his bloodstream. All the laughing, combined with the onset adrenaline crash and the dopamine high from goofing off with Bruce and Clark – and the rush of relief that everything was okay, he hadn’t messed it all up irrevocably – made his head swim. 

Honestly, he didn’t know when the tickling had stopped for good, because the leftover ticklish shudders kept him in periodic fits of snickering laughter. He rolled over halfway onto his stomach and Bruce adjusted his hold, then tightened his arms again when Dick settled. Clark was still holding him by the legs, now more to keep him from sliding onto the floor than to hold him steady. 

“Hey,” Lois said. It sounded like she was standing in the doorway. How long had she been there? “My nephew is still alive, right?” 

The sudden rush of shyness was unexpected, but Dick was too tired to do anything except smash his face into Bruce’s shirt and groan. 

Apparently that was answer enough, and the three adults chuckled. 

“Jesus,” Lois moved closer, her slippers scuffing against the floor. She reached down to card her fingers through Dick’s hair and he leaned into the touch, practically purring. “He’s red to his ears. Haven’t seen him that tickled-out in a while.” 

“Oh,” Clark said. “Remember – gosh, was it the first or second time Bruce had us for dinner, with the chandelier and the stair rail?” 

“The first,” Lois replied immediately with a ruffle of Dick’s hair. “That was the first time I got to see Dick Grayson in action.”

Bruce’s torso rumbled as he laughed at the memory and, yeah, there was no way Dick was moving now. He wasn’t a little kid, but hiding in his dad’s hug seemed like the marginally less-embarrassing option if everyone was going to talk about the time he (successfully!) swung out of a handstand on the railing to the foyer chandelier. No one had told him when Clark and Lois would be there, and he hadn’t meant to startle Alfred, but… 

Well, it had been an eventful start to the evening. 

“Sorry, honey,” Bruce murmured. This time it was his hand that came up to rest against Dick’s head, all warm and solid and safe. “Are we embarrassing you?” 

“Yes,” Dick muttered, the words muffled by flannel. He didn’t really mind and he had the feeling that Bruce knew that. “I want a whole pie. For myself. Rec’mpn’s.”

Clark squeezed his ankles once before gently letting them go, presumably so he could stand up and get to work processing the pounds of apples into pie. Before Dick’s legs hit the floor, Bruce was already scooping him up into a better position. Someone nestled a throw pillow under between Dick’s head and Bruce’s lap, so Dick could comfortably lay on his side with his legs stretched out across the rest of the couch.