Chapter 3: The Sign on the Door
For the record, he did try.
He sat in your folding chair with his freshly wrapped arm and his chin still tipped up, and the white lenses of the mask went very wide, which you hadn't known they could do, and he said, in the rough fake voice, "I don't know what you're talking about, ma'am."
"Ma'am," you said.
"Citizen."
"Your lip, Grayson. I put that strip on myself. I know my own work."
He opened his mouth. He closed it. Then he did the thing that you'll replay later, alone, at the back counter with a cold cup of coffee: he laughed. Not the bright counter laugh. A short, helpless huff through his nose, like a man who'd been caught stealing cookies by somebody he was secretly hoping would catch him.
And then the cough-bell went in the front room, and a woman's voice called "BPD, anybody hurt?" and by the time you turned back to the chair, it was empty and the alley door was swinging.
The woman was Sergeant Amy Rohrbach of the Fifth Precinct, forties, sensible shoes, and the first cop in Blüdhaven you have ever seen read four men their rights in a row without once glancing at your register. She looked at the pie case. She looked at the zip ties. She looked at the bloody steri-strip wrappers in your trash can and then at you, for a long, dry moment.
"Anonymous tip," she said.
"Must have been."
"Uh-huh." She put her notebook away. "If my partner shows up tomorrow looking like he lost a fight with a box cutter, I'm going to assume he was rollerblading."
So that's how you spend Friday: knowing that at least one other person in this city is in on it, and that she knows you're in on it, and that the only person who hasn't said a single word to you about it is the person it's about.
Friday, 4:07. Nothing.
You'd expected that. You'd told yourself to expect it all day, through four hours of fitful sleep in your apartment upstairs and a long argument with the glass guy about how fast a new pie case could get here. Teo swept up and said nothing. Marisol came in early and said a great deal.
"He'll come," she said. "He's embarrassed. Men are like cats. When they fall off the counter, they have to pretend they meant to."
"He did fall off a counter. He vaulted it."
"Was it beautiful?"
You didn't answer. She took that as a yes, which it was.
At 4:22 the bell coughs.
He's in the jacket. The brown leather one, collar up, with the left sleeve pushed carefully up his forearm so it doesn't sit on the bandage. Haley is on her red leash beside him, ears doing their asymmetric thing, and she spots Teo and loses her entire mind. Dick lets the leash go and she hops-runs the length of the diner on her three legs and throws herself at Teo's shins and Teo says "mi reina" and goes down on one knee on the clean floor like he's proposing.
Dick stays by the door. He looks like he hasn't slept. He looks like he's not sure he's allowed past the mat.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
"I was going to bring flowers. Everything was closed. I got you this." He holds up a bodega bag. Inside, it turns out, is a box of steri-strips, the expensive kind, and a pack of mint gum.
"It's an apology," he says.
"It's a restock."
"It's a restock-slash-apology. A restockpology."
Teo says, from the floor, "Two out of ten."
"I'll take it," Dick says. He comes a few steps further in. He looks at the stools, at the shattered space where the pie case used to be, and his face does something that hurts to watch. "I'm sorry about the case. And the meringue. And the. Everything."
"How'd you get hurt?" you say.
He blinks. "What?"
"Tonight. You've got a new one, right there." You point at a raw scrape along his hairline that he's tried to comb his hair over and failed. "How'd you get it?"
It's a test. He knows it's a test. You watch him know it, watch the lie come up into his mouth, the cabinet or the bike or the very aggressive Jason, and watch him decide not to.
"I fell off a building," he says. "Fourth floor. I was showing off for a pigeon."
Marisol drops her pen.
Teo says, slowly, "Eleven out of ten."
It takes them about ninety seconds to clear out, which is the fastest you've ever seen either one of them move. Marisol suddenly needs to check the oil in her cab. Teo suddenly needs to take Haley for a walk, a long walk, maybe to Gotham, and grabs the leash and the bag of bacon ends and is out through the kitchen before you can object, and you hear his voice in the alley telling Haley that her father is an idiot but a good one.
Then it's just the two of you and the hum of the fluorescents and the coffee maker clicking as it cools.
He sits on the third stool. You stand behind the counter. It's where you've been for six weeks and it feels completely new.
"Okay," you say. "So."
"So."
"How long?"
"Nightwing?" He scrubs a hand through his hair and winces when it hits the scrape. "Since I was old enough to vote. Before that I was... someone else. In Gotham. It's a long story and a lot of it isn't mine to tell." He looks up. "I know it's a lot."
"Gotham," you say slowly, putting it together. The circus. The Graysons. The rich guy who took in the orphan from the trapeze; you remember it from the news, way back, a lifetime ago, one more Gotham headline. And suddenly you know exactly who taught him to talk to a pie case like that, and you decide very firmly that you don't want to think about it right now.
"Yeah," he says, watching the thought cross your face. "That's the long story."
"Does Rohrbach know?"
"Amy knows I'm a pain in her ass." He tries to smile. "I've never told her. I think she's decided it's better if she never asks."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
That one lands. He turns his mug a quarter turn, and then another, and then lays his hand flat on the counter like he's making himself stop.
"Because people who know get hurt," he says. "That's not drama, that's just the math. Every single person I've ever told has ended up in a room with somebody who wanted to use them to get to me. And you were." He stops. Starts again. "You were the one place in this city where I didn't have to be either of them. Not the cop who won't take the envelope, not the guy on the roof. Just a guy who likes pancakes and gets yelled at for not sitting down fast enough. I didn't want to wreck it."
"You think I didn't know?"
"I think you knew something."
"I've been cleaning your face for six weeks, Dick. I know what a fist looks like and I know what a fall looks like and I know what a guy looks like when he's walking toward the cannery at quarter to five instead of toward his bed." You put the coffee pot down, because your hands have started doing that thing his do, the needing-to-move thing. "You didn't keep me out of it. I was already in it. I was in it the first time I said 'chin' and you actually did it."
He goes very quiet.
"Why here?" you ask. "There are diners closer to the river. Why Dot's?"
"Honestly? It was on the way home." His mouth twitches. "The first night. I'd just gotten tossed into a dumpster on Ferry and I wanted coffee that didn't come out of a machine. And this place was lit up, and I came in, and you looked at me and said, 'Don't drip on my floor.' And I thought, oh. Okay. I'm coming back here."
"I said that?"
"You did. You also called me 'champ.' Very sarcastically. It was the best night I'd had in a month." He looks down at his hands. "After that it wasn't on the way home anymore. I'd just go out of my way. Patrol, then here, then home. Every night. Because it was you."
The coffee maker clicks. Out on Ferry Street a garbage truck groans past and throws its lights across the wall, across the empty booths, across the third stool from the end.
You come out from behind the counter.
You've never done that before. Not with him. The counter has always been there, a long strip of chipped Formica keeping things safe, keeping you the person with the kit and him the person with the excuses. You walk around the end of it, past Marisol's empty stool and the ghost of the pie case, and his whole body turns on the stool to watch you come, and you stop in front of him close enough that his knee brushes your hip.
"I'm still mad," you tell him.
"Okay."
"You took a box cutter for Teo."
"Teo had a skillet. I was protecting the guy with the knife."
"Shut up." Your voice doesn't sound like your voice. "You could've told me. You can tell me. That's the deal from now on, okay? You come in here hurt, you tell me how. The real how. Even if it's stupid. Especially if it's stupid."
"Even the pigeon?"
"Especially the pigeon."
He's looking up at you. From this close you can see a little fleck of darker blue in his left eye, and the yellowing ghost of the bruise along his jaw, and the thin pale track on his lip where your butterfly strip was. You put your thumb on it, very lightly. He stops breathing.
"Hang on," you say. "One second."
You walk to the front door. Dot's Diner, Ferry Street, open twenty-four hours since 1974, through two recessions, the cannery strike and the flood of '98. Aunt Dot used to say the day she locked that door was the day they'd carry her out in a box, and when they did carry her out, you couldn't bring yourself to lock it even then. You flip the sign to CLOSED. You turn the deadbolt. It squeals like it's waking up from a long sleep.
When you turn around he's standing. He's crossed half the diner without you hearing a thing, because of course he has. He stops just short of you.
"First time?" he asks, nodding at the lock.
"First time in my life."
"Huh." His eyes are doing the counting thing, but not exits this time. Just you. "No pressure."
Then he lifts one hand, slowly, giving you all the time in the world, and touches two fingers to the underside of your jaw.
"Chin," says Dick Grayson.
You tip your chin up.
He kisses you like he does everything that isn't lying: completely, and with a terrible lack of caution. His hand slides up into your hair. The bandage on his forearm is rough against your neck. He tastes like mint gum, and you realize he bought it on the way here, that he stood in the bodega on Kane at four in the morning choosing a restockpology and thinking about exactly this, and you laugh into his mouth and he laughs back and neither of you stops.
When you finally come up for air, his forehead is resting on yours and the deadbolt is digging into your back and you don't care at all.
"You owe me a pie case," you say.
"I'll put in for it. Line item. Vigilante property damage."
"With who?"
"There's a guy in Gotham who owes me about fifteen years of allowance."
You're about to ask what that means, exactly, when he goes still against you. Not the good kind of still. The rooftop kind.
He's looking past your shoulder, down at the floor by the door.
There's a card lying on the mat. It wasn't there two minutes ago. Someone slid it under the door, the door you just locked for the first time in fifty years, while the two of you were standing right on the other side of it.
Dick bends and picks it up between two fingers like it might bite. Heavy cream stock. On one side, in neat ballpoint: Lovely evening. My employer would very much like to meet the woman who said no.
On the other side, embossed in gold, there's a single letter.
D.