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Dick Grayson didn’t always hate summer. More than half-a-millennium ago, when the sun wasn’t his ultimate nemesis and he could sweat and play and preform in the scorching heat all day, summer had been wonderful. Dick didn’t sweat anymore. His blood didn’t pulse when he ran leaving him exhausted and out of breath but content in a way he hadn’t quite been able to replicate since. Heat just built up outside his frosty skin, he could tell that it was hot, but anything short of the burn of the sun itself couldn’t really give him the experience of heat. It was like trying to explain the colour blue to a man born blind. The world always had an underlying chill, even when he knew everyone else could feel the heat. There was no joy left in summer for Dick. It was just a collection of humid months with shorter hunting hours and higher risk of melting if someone left a curtain open by mistake.
More often than not, it was also season of relative solitude as lethargy infected every resident in the mansion, leaving them idle and uninterested in each other.
“Come on, Barbara, don’t make me go alone,” Dick pleaded up to the high rafters of the mansion library.
Barbara Gordon was a woman he had loved before many times and suspected he would love again someday. As it stood, they were each content to call the other their best friend, and nothing more.
“Not tonight, Dick,” Barbara absently said. She wasn’t a great best friend.
“You know you need to get out more,” Dick said.
“And I will, just not tonight, I need to rearrange everything now that this order finally came in,” Barbara said. She swooped down to another box and dragged a long nail through the tape.
“And I’m going to lose you to those books for weeks after you’ve gotten yourself set up, come on, one more night before you read for the next month straight,” Dick begged.
Every other month large shipments of fiction and non-fiction and volumes of poetry and plays would appear on the doorstep to the mansion. The order was organized by an old flame of the head of the house, a miss Selina Kyle. Selina was more worldly and savvy than most of the rest of the undead community put together. Not that those living under Wayne’s roof were allowed to complain about that. The manor was better off as far off the books and the grids as possible anyways. It made things easier for when the Wayne family decided it was time to move on, taking their mansion with them. Magic filled most of the gaps advancements in human technology left in their lives, but there were some things that the family could not manufacture for themselves. When miss Kyle and mister Wayne were on speaking terms, she was not only willing, but eager to provide him and his brood with all the entertainment they could read. Dick would lose Barbara to the flood of new information for weeks, during which time she would scour the order from one cover to the next three times until she was satisfied she was up-to-date.
“I can’t, go ask Tim or Cass, or I’m sure Damian would love to go with you,” Barbara suggested.
“I don’t want to babysit, I want to go out,” Dick said.
“Then go out, I’m not stopping you,” Barbara said. She took an armful of books and rose off the floor to search the high shelves for where they belonged.
“I don’t want to go alone,” Dick said.
“Well, I’m not going with you, not tonight,” Barbara decided.
Dick sighed dramatically. Barbara was not swayed. She was too busy forcing old books to the side to make way for the new.
“At least tell me I look alright.”
“You’re beautiful, as always,” Barbara said without looking.
“Babs,” Dick protested.
Barbara looked down. “You look great, let Jason know our order came in.”
“One of these days, you’re going to regret abandoning me like this,” Dick vowed.
“Uh-huh, I’ll see you in the morning.”
Dick turned, letting the big rain jacket that only had a little blood left on it flair out behind him.
The further Dick descended the large hill the mansion had settled onto the more the grotesque and pungent summer evening beat against his delicate senses. According to Tim, who always kept one ear to the world outside the mansion, school had officially let out the week before and the evidence suggested he was right. Dick could hear screaming and laughing and could smell booze and weed on the other side of town near the harbour.
Stupid teenagers made easy hunting, but their families made such a fuss, and the whole city would be left on-edge when children went missing, sometimes so much so that the mansion needed to move early. Dick never felt right hunting so young in the first place, so year-end high school celebrations were generally out of the question.
Which left Dick turning to the rest of the town. The summer night was gross. Everything reeked of sweat and heat, booze, and weed. It wasn’t so great to smell the remains of a busy day that Dick would never be able to participate in, or even witness. This town was one of the worse the mansion had moved to in the past few decades. There weren’t a lot of good towns left, in Dick’s recent experience. He missed the days when they could deposit the mansion deep in a forest somewhere and feast on the nearby towns while they were incapable of defending themselves. There are more people condensed into more space and more mouths for the mansion to feed since those times. A mansion on a high hill with no roads leading to it was a rare and pleasant spot.
Really, there were few things Dick found to admire about the new world he had survived into. It was rotting and torturous to such fragile senses as his. The free newspapers he picked up every time he went into town always wailed about something miserable the humans had done. It was hard to believe they were the species that thought they ruled the world. If vampires weren’t sunlight-intolerant, Dick was certain the humans would have been overrun centuries ago, and he wasn’t certain they wouldn’t deserve it.
There were good things, of course. Technology had risen to a stage that it had long surpassed magic. Time could be dedicated to so much pleasure, gone were the days when brewing for hours at a time was the definition of fun, the world was crammed with exciting and interesting things to do. And Dick couldn’t get his hands on a quarter of them. Which didn’t leave Dick bitter at all.
The middle of the night, all alone, on the wrong side of the street from the boxes of newspapers, pondering the complete failure of the human race that didn’t fill Dick with the purest feeling of frustration that had ever been felt even a little bit was where he was when it happened.
Roy Harper had made a mistake when he told his daughter she could watch Predator with him before she went to bed. She didn’t have school for the next three months, so it wasn’t like she had big plans the next day, he genuinely didn’t see the harm in letting her stay up an extra hour or so, expecting her to fall asleep halfway through. Halfway through the movie was when she had hunted down her Nerf gun and started running around the house screaming that the Predator was going to get them, and daddy needed to get off the couch and run.
It had been more than a year since Roy had last strapped Lian into her car seat in the middle of the night and driven around town until she passed out, he hoped it would still work.
“Lian, you okay back there?” Roy asked when he heard the window pull down. He had tried childproofing the car, but they were complicated and a pain in the ass to figure out how to unlock.
“Don’t worry, daddy, I’ll get him!” Lian cried.
A glimpse in the rear-view mirror and Lian still had her seatbelt on, thank god, but that was hardly stopping her from half-hanging out the window, pointing her Nerf gun at a lamp post coming up.
“Lian! Get back in here!” Roy shouted, he reached back to grab her by the edge of her shirt and yank her back in her seat.
“But daddy, he’s gonna get us!” Lian insisted.
This is really what Roy deserved. He tried so hard to be a good dad, he tried to learn from Dinah back when they lived with her, but Dinah was a passible role model at best, and Roy was left the kind of parent who lets his six-year-old watch the Predator and hang out windows. “Don’t you ever do that, okay? I don’t care that they would do it in a movie, you keep yourself inside the car at all times, do you understand?”
“But daddy—!”
“No, Lian, that’s very dangerous, you’re going to get hurt if you do that, understand? Never again.”
“Daddy, look out!”
Roy turned back around just in time to see a man fly over the roof of his car, an untied converse landing on his windshield. Lian started to scream.
“Oh my god!”
Dick was at a loss. One second he was on the way to the newspapers, the next, he was lying on his back on the still-warm asphalt. One of his shoes were gone. He heard a door slam shut.
“Fuck, Lian, stay in the car!”
Dick sat up just as a man arrived to help him sit up.
“Oh, thank god you’re not dead.”
Dick Grayson and Roy Harper both got a good look at each other for the very first time in that next second. Roy’s first thought was relief, he hadn’t killed a man with his car, he was still a responsible parent, no one was going to take his baby away. His second thought was that his accidental victim was attractive. Really attractive, almost inhumanly attractive. Dick’s first thought was that the man in front of his was very handsome, Dick really had a thing for redheads. His second thought was more of a question as to how humans were supposed to behave after being hit by a car.
“I’m sorry,” Dick said.
The man stared at him, then he laughed a little. “I’m the one who’s sorry, I just hit you with my car,” Roy said.
“Oh, you’re welcome,” Dick said.
The man laughed a little more. It was a panicked and awkward laugh, like he didn’t really know what else to do. “Are you okay? Can you stand?” He offered Dick his shoe back.
“I’m fine,” Dick insisted. Roy offered his hand and Dick climbed up the man’s arm to get back on his feet. Goosebumps spread over Roy’s arm when he touched the man’s frozen skin.
“You’re freezing,” Roy observed. He was wearing a coat too. A very ugly bright blue rain coat just one shade away from physically hurting the eyes.
“I have a circulation problem,” Dick said. He pulled his hand away into his ugly rain coat.
“Right, sorry, can I give you a ride home? Or to the hospital?” Roy asked.
“No!” Dick shouted a little too loudly and a lot too quickly. Bringing the attractive man who hit him with a car home would definitely get him killed, and hospitals asked too many questions and drew too much attention. “Really, I’m alright, I’m just going to go get a newspaper and you can go home.”
“I have insurance, if you need help to cover for anything, there has to be some way I can help,” Roy insisted.
“I’m not hurt, I’ll be fine,” Dick said.
“Are you sure? I hit you pretty hard, you flipped right over the roof, are you sure you aren’t bleeding or nothing’s broken?” Roy asked.
“I’m just fine, I don’t think you really hit me,” Dick said.
“You flipped over my windshield,” Roy said.
“Did I really?”
“There’s a dent in my hood to prove it.”
“I think that was there before.”
“I definitely hit you with my car, please, at least let me give you a lift back to your place, where do you live?” Roy asked.
“I don’t live anywhere,” Dick said. Technically not untrue, and Bruce or Tim or somebody had always told him the best lies had some truth in them.
Apparently, Dick’s lie wasn’t great, because Roy’s eyes went wide when he realized not only had he hit an extremely attractive man with his car, but he had hit a homeless man with his car. Homeless, clammy skin, running cold in the middle of summer, Roy had a feeling he could sympathize better with this guy than either of them could have expected.
“Then come to my place, just for the night,” Roy said.
“That really won’t be necessary,” Dick insisted.
“Please, I hit you with my car, let me do something to make it up to you, You can stay until breakfast tomorrow morning, I know how much a place to sleep and some food can mean in a situation like this.”
Dick was completely lost.
“Did you kill him?”
Dick and Roy both turned when Lian crawled out of the car and ran over to meet them, holding her Nerf gun tight.
“No, honey, get back in the car,” Roy said, Lian attached herself to his side.
“I’m okay,” Dick assured her.
“You’re not bleeding any,” Lian said.
“He didn’t really hit me, it was an optical illusion,” Dick said.
“Your shoe was on my windshield,” Roy said.
“Actually, I believe you’ll find both my shoes are on my feet.”
“Only because I just gave it back.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“He has a construction,” Lian declared.
“A what?” Dick asked.
“She’s just repeating something she heard in a movie somewhere, but a concussion isn’t a bad idea,” Roy agreed.
“I don’t have a brain, can’t get a concussion.” And unless Roy’s car was secretly lined with silver, Dick physically couldn’t be hurt at all.
“Look, can you just accept my help? I’m gonna feel bad about this forever if you don’t let me do something, anything.”
“We should take him to a hospital,” Lian decided.
“No hospitals,” Dick snapped.
“No hospitals, I get it, just please, one night, just so you have someone there in case a lung collapses in the middle of the night,” Roy begged.
If Roy was an asshole and didn’t have a kid, the decision would have been so much easier for Dick. He would go to the guy’s house and it would be an easy hunt. But Roy was nice. And handsome. And he had a kid he needed to take care of. And he was really handsome. Really, really handsome.
“Okay.”
“Perfect, oh, my name’s Roy Harper, by the way, and this is my daughter, Lian,” Roy said.
“Dick Grayson,” Dick said.
“Nice to meet you,” Roy said.
“Nice to meet you,” Lian echoed.
“Right,” Dick agreed.
“This way,” Roy said, leading Dick to the car, Lian went scrambling for her own car seat.
Fingers tickled underneath Dick’s jaw. They traced along his neck and hairs stood on end one at a time as they drifted closer and closer to the small set of scars left by canine punctures. Dick grabbed the offending hand and sat straight upright.
Breath caught in Roy’s throat when Dick moved suddenly, then he heaved a relieved sigh. Dick blinked a few times as he tried to piece together where he was. Thin rows of sunlight peered into the room, where the curtains didn’t quite completely match the window’s proportions. The sunlight crossed right where Dick’s hand gripped Roy’s wrist, Dick felt his knuckles sizzle and he released his host. Roy settled on the corner of the bed.
“Thank god,” Roy said, “I thought you were dead, again.”
“What are you doing in here? Why were you touching me?” Dick asked. He pulled the blanket closer around himself, hiding his burnt fingers underneath and trying to hide as much skin as he could from the small offending invaders.
“I was just checking for a pulse. You’ve been sleeping for more than twelve hours.” Only twelve? Damn, that meant it was still daylight. “I got worried, and you were lying so still, and it didn’t look like you were breathing.”
“Was there something wrong with my wrist?” Other than the fact there wouldn’t be a pulse there.
“I tried, couldn’t feel anything, I was about to call an ambulance, to be honest, I thought you were dead, again,” Roy said.
“How dare you!” Dick accused. That sounded like the sort of thing humans would get offended by. “I am a completely alive human being! I breathe and I have blood, my lungs and heart work just fine and everything.”
“Relax, I never said you didn’t,” Roy said. He had a funny look on his face.
“Well, good, all my organs work, and I am alive.” A lie.
“Except the brain,” Roy recalled from Dick’s nonsense the night before.
“All my organs except for that one work,” Dick decided. Better to stick to his guns.
Roy snickered and his shoulders dropped a whole inch. “Are you feeling any better this morning?”
“Just tired,” Dick admitted.
“Are you hungry? Lian made pancakes, they’re cold by now, she threw a bit of a fit when you never showed up, actually, but I could heat them up no problem,” Roy said.
Pancakes sounded incredible. Not that he would know, but from pictures he had seen pancakes looked wonderful, sweet and fluffy, he had always wanted to try them. Unfortunately, he did know what would happen if he ate human food. Pancakes weren’t worth it.
“No thanks, I ate earlier,” Dick said.
“You mean before I hit you with my car?” Roy asked.
“Yes,” Dick agreed.
“That was more than twelve hours ago, you sure you don’t want anything?”
“Really, I’m good, just tired.”
“No water? Nothing?” Roy asked.
“Nope, definitely not.” Water was even worse than food, it didn’t even have a fleeting moment of good taste.
“You still haven’t thought of anyone you want me to call?” Roy asked.
“No one,” Dick assured. No one he knew owned a phone anyways, no matter how they pleaded for Bruce to give his permission to buy just one.
“Well, I’ll be around all day, if you need anything, just let me know,” Roy said.
“A place to sleep for a few more hours should be all I need, I promise I’ll be out of your hair as soon as the sun sets,” Dick assured.
“Hey, take your time man, you’re in a tight spot, and I didn’t help any last night, if I can help at all, I’m here,” Roy said.
“A tight spot?” Dick asked.
“I’m not gonna ask you for any of the gritty details, what’s your poison or any of that, but if you need anyone, even if it’s just to talk to, I get it, I was there a few years back, it’s tough.”
“Right, that spot,” Dick blindly agreed.
“Sorry, that probably sounded like some preachy bullshit.”
“No, it’s um, it’s a nice offer, I’ll think about it.”
“Cool.”
“Tell Lian I’m sorry I can’t eat her pancakes,” Dick said.
“She’s fine, she’s sulking in her room a bit, but she’ll get over it in no time,” Roy promised.
“Still, I feel bad.”
“Hey, don’t feel bad for her, she’ll use your weakness to bully you into whatever she wants if you show fear,” Roy warned.
“She’s a kid, not a wild predator,” Dick said.
“She’s my kid, what’s the difference?” Roy asked, and he sounded a little proud.
“She’s a toddler, I’m a grown man, I can handle myself,” Dick vowed.
“She’s six, six-year-olds are crafty,” Roy said.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Dick decided.
“Well, I’ll let her know you’re sorry, come out and face her whenever you’re ready,” Roy said.
“I will,” Dick said, “not now, later, still tired.
“Right.” Roy remained sitting on the bed a moment longer. “Well, we’ll be right outside if you need us.”
Roy closed the door behind him. Dick pulled the blanket completely over his head and folded his arms over his chest. His fingers, where he had touched Roy’s skin, were still warm.