#dickrose

Prior to the Renegade arc, (AS FAR AS IM AWARE) Dick and Rose don’t have any interactions. They’d been in the same circles for a long time since Lillian died and Rose was involved with the Titans for a while, even babysitting Lian at one point, but even then there was never a significant enough interaction between them to put on panel. I’m saying this because I think it’s important that from whatever age she first moved to New York to age 17, Dick wasn’t a person to her as much as he was just the idea of a heroic leader.

In 2003 we see Slade hire his half brother to kill Rose’s foster family as a way to manipulate her onto his side. He starts drugging her and turns her into the second Ravager and she becomes an enemy of the Teen Titans. Now Dick is going through his own personal hell at this point so they don’t really cross paths at all until the Renegade arc begins in 2005. Now they are about 17 and 24. This is obviously where the meat of their relationship is as it’s pretty much the only significant interaction they have with each other.

Dick is in possibly the worst mental state he’s ever been in because he has allowed a man to die (also everything else that happened prior to that. Also the rape but he’s not ready to think abt that), and he’s terrified of Bruce finding out about it so he puts distance between himself and everyone he cares about before they have the chance to figure it out, which is encouraged by Catalina. Also not to mention he finds out Bruce almost adopted Tim after three years of knowing him even though it took him fifteen years to adopt Dick.

Bruce's opinion of him and his need to live up to Bruce’s expectations are driving factors in this whole arc. Now Deathstroke enters the picture as a Batman foil and asks Dick to train his daughter.

During this arc, Rose is insecure about her place in Slade’s life and does anything to gain his approval. Dick identifies with this and even tells her that he understands what that feels like. He sees himself in her and ends up rescuing her from her father within the same two issues that he reconnects with Bruce. So basically, one of his first acts as a reinstated hero was to remove Rose from her abusive situation right after enrolling himself back in his.

Rose romanticizes her relationship with Dick. He was harsh and mean to her for most of the arc, but he refused to engage with her sexually and he removed her from her fathers care and that was enough to make a knight in shining armor.

At first, there was a mutual animosity. Dick didn’t like seeing Rose’s relentless loyalty to a man who just uses her (self-recognition through the other), and Rose liked the false sense of power that came from treating Renegade like she and Slade owned him. He went from a legendary hero figure who she’s been aware of since childhood, to someone she could treat like a pet as long as he was under her father’s thumb.

At the time, she was actively being abused and had no autonomy over herself both physically and mentally. The crush she developed on Dick started as an inappropriate reaction to her situation, but developed into a desperation to be loved and accepted by someone who is so loved and accepted in the hero community. She went from desperately needing the approval of her father to needing everyone to know that she is nothing like him.

At a certain point in time, Dick felt like the only person who understood her. He saw her at her worst and saved her from it. But he’s not just any hero rescuing a damsel in distress, because she also saw him at his worst. She saw him at his rock bottom and helped him crawl out by being someone he could save. Someone who reminded him of himself.

Slade and Bruce were both abusive to Rose and Dick in whatever way you want to call it. I see what Slade did to Rose as an allegory for sexual abuse and Bruce and Dick were emotionally incestuous at best. But both can easily transition into literal sexual abuse. I like to think that Dick was so important to Rose for that short period of time because she identified with him as well. I want to see Rose trying to connect with Dick over their similar issues only for him to reject and deny it because Bruce is nothing like Slade and how dare she imply that. But at the end of the day in his gut he knows she’s right to an extent. She’s the only person that he can silently relate to because no one else would understand how deep and ugly that kind of relationship can cut you. She’s so desperate for someone to understand her and so judgemental of herself for her relationship with Slade, that she’ll accept anything of Dick without trying to save or change him. Bruce abused him and he still loves him and she gets that and that’s fine. Slade abused Rose and she still craves his affection and Dick gets that and that’s fine.

They’re a weird mix of safe and unsafe for each other, which is why their interactions are so limited. Dick is the one creating the distance by dropping her off with the Titans and rarely visiting, because once he is back at a stable place in his life as Nightwing and reconnected with Bruce, he doesn’t want to have that connection with Rose. He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to see himself as a hurt and lost seventeen year old through Rose or to see Bruce as an abuser through Slade.

—

That’s the end of my canon interpretation, but here’s a brief idea of the fic that lives in my head:

The liminal space that exists in the post crisis universe after New 52 took over. Bruce is alive and took Batman and Damian back, and Dick is kind of directionless and depressed. Rose has been with the Teen Titans for a while but things are tense and Kon just hurt her feelings, so she takes a break. What starts as letting her crash on his couch turns into a roommates situation (if one roommate didn’t cook, clean, or pay rent). Dick really does know it's a bad idea and he’s already having to shut down flirtatious “jokes” by the first night, but he lets it happen anyway bc he’s in a self destructive mindset.

Pathetically (affectionate), being around someone younger who sees him in such a good light despite everything, despite meeting him at his lowest, feels really good. Meanwhile, Rose has her little crush and just likes being around him, likes feeling worthy of being around this personal hero version of him that she built in her head.

That’s how it starts but eventually they eat away at each other through a mutual understanding that neither of them consented to. Rose feels like all of her trauma is on the table already, she’s already been laid bare for him to see. It feels unfair and vulnerable, but good in its own way. But when she locks into his issues, she rlly latches onto it. She loves seeing the darker parts of him, the parts that drove Renegade, because it makes her feel less bad about herself.

One night Nightwing and Ravager run into Batman and it’s like she can smell it on him, the shame, the love, the yearning. She’s borderline happy about it when she puts it together. Not sure if it’s because she’s happy to see someone with the same issues as her still manage to be such a good and successful hero, or because she’s happy to see that such a good and successful hero is secretly as dirty and disgusting as she is.

Dick refuses to talk about it, and refuses to admit there’s anything similar about them, about Slade and Bruce. This hurts her deeply bc all this time she thought they were identifying with each other but now it feels like what happened to her is too dirty and shameful for Dick to admit to, but still it’s something that he can’t budge on. He just can’t say that about Bruce out loud to Rose Wilson of all people (even if they talk around it and he knows she’s knows).

They have sex about it. It’s a compromise. There has to be some kind of emotional release and it wasn’t going to happen by talking it out. Dick feels guilty that he can’t give her that, so instead he gives her what her traumatized hypersexual teenage brain has been asking for for the past several months.

Of course she’s not that only unhealthy sexually traumatized one. Where she uses sex with men to recreate what happened to her in a safe setting, he uses her as a projection of himself to feel in control of his own abuse. Obviously there are also generally messy lovey dovey feelings towards each other and they act like that’s all it is.

Also side note I think isolation (via Dick distancing himself from the bats and not being on any teams atm) is a really powerful thing with unhealthy relationships, because you don’t have people around you calling you a stupid idiot who’s 26 and should not be touching the 18 year old girl you live with. You just have the hypersexual 18 year old girl subtly hitting on you day after day until you start to feel like maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.