Chapter Text
Contrary to popular opinion, Richard Grayson did have self-preservation instincts.
You didn’t survive as long as he had in the cape community without learning how to keep yourself safe—both in the mask and outside of it. You learned to read the warning signs early: the creeping exhaustion, the way injuries lingered longer than they should, the subtle slippage between functional and barely holding it together. You learned when to slow down before your body or your mind made the decision for you.
Ideally, you never let it get that bad. That ranked high on Dick’s list of priorities, even if it didn’t always look that way from the outside.
The first time he walked into a support group, it wasn’t for himself. Roy had invited him—casual, unassuming, like it wasn’t a big deal at all. Dick spent the entire session sitting back in his chair, hands folded, wondering how anyone could bare their soul to a room full of strangers. When it was over, he left with a new, quiet respect for Roy’s dedication to healing.
The first time Dick walked into a support group for himself, he didn’t stay long enough for introductions.
He stood in the doorway. Took in the circle of chairs, the carefully neutral smiles, the coffee that smelled faintly burnt. And then something in his chest locked up. He turned around, left, and spent the rest of the evening pretending he hadn’t done that—pretending he had never needed to.
That what had happened to him was something he could handle on his own.
And for a while, that worked.
Until it didn’t.
Eventually, he found a compromise. In-person was too close, too exposed, but an online group worked well enough. No faces. No masks to manage. Just voices and usernames and the option to log out if it became too much.
Somewhere along the way, he realized he was… okay.
Not fixed, this kind of injury wasn't the kind that got fixed. But better. Less heavy.
He got better at looking himself in the mirror and not hating what he saw, which was improvement.
He never told anyone in his life about it. He didn’t see the point in exposing himself to their reactions. Because he already knew what those reactions would be, because in many ways they already knew.
It wasn’t as though Dick’s sexual history was a secret.
That was the thing. If it had been hidden, maybe he could have protected it—decided who knew, and how. But everyone knew something. They just didn’t see it the way he did, and he was too tired to keep trying to explain.
The Gotham crowd knew about Catalina. Barbara talked, she had every right to discuss her feelings on with whomever she wanted. and Dick didn't begrudge her that, well not outwardly, internally he had his misgivings about airing of dirty laundry but that started to feel controlling and gross and reminded him even more of Catalina, and so what if Barbara insisted it was his fought? To a certain extent she was right, he should have listened to her about distancing himself. Still, it hurt when he remembered Barbara had decided to break up with him because Catalina had assaulted him in front of her and then blamed him for it. At the time, it hadn’t seemed worth correcting. Relationships were messy. People drew their own conclusions and he knew that the other Bat's knew peripherally Barbara's side of the story, that they had never once asked him for his side had already told him what he needed to, and he wasn't interested in intentionally having his heart broken by his family verbalizing all the shit he already had thought about himself.
And what was he supposed to say, exactly?
I didn’t cheat. I dissociated for five weeks and let myself be raped by a woman Barbara warned me about but I was too stupid to listen?
No, better let the past remain in the past right?
The Titans knew about Miriam. They’d known at the time—had opinions, jokes, a few raised eyebrows, and even one or two slaps to the face, literal and figurative. They weren’t entirely wrong in their perceptions. He was a detective. He should have known the difference.
But he hadn’t.
And the fact that he hadn’t—even if he should have—meant something more than blame. Mirage had made choices too... but importantly hers had been intentional.
And they all knew it. His team, his friends knew what Miriam's powers were, they knew she'd pretended to be Kori, they knew he'd fallen for it. That he'd consented to sex with his girlfriend, not with Miriam, but it hadn't mattered because he should have known, and they had told him so at the time. And then the Team hadn't let it go, they sided with Kori, joked about it, judged him for it. That he would make another 'mistake' and fall into bed with every pretty villainess of the week.
And he tried to not let it get to him. He knew they didn't mean any harm by it.
But it did hurt.
The original Titans knew about Liu, at least in broad strokes. Roy, Wally, and Garth had clapped him on the back, congratulated him on “becoming a man.” Donna hadn’t seen anything wrong with it—she’d have been a hypocrite if she had
Donna had been engaged then.
To Terry.
Ten years older.
A professor.
At the time, none of them had been thinking very hard about what that meant.
They’d been young. They’d been dumb. They hadn’t known better.
Dick told himself that for years.
Still, sometimes he wondered what it might have been like if someone had pulled him aside. Asked him if he was okay. If he was managing. Because sixteen and homeless wasn’t a great starting point for anything, let alone a relationship. And falling into something with a woman nine years older—one who had actively sought him out because of his proximity to Bruce—should have raised more alarms than it did.
He hadn’t blamed them then. It was easier, even now, not to. Hindsight made critics of everyone. He should have warned Donna about Terry—nineteen and twenty-nine was a disaster waiting to happen, teacher or not—but he’d seen his friend in love and trusted her judgment. At sixteen, with no real relationship experience of his own, it hadn’t felt like his place to speak up.
Besides—what did he know about healthy intimacy?
His primary model for relationships during his formative years had been Bruce. That alone explained… a lot.
It took years—textbooks, distance, other voices—to dismantle the belief that he’d been clever. That he’d been in control. That he’d seen the manipulation coming and stepped into it anyway because he thought he could handle it.
Statutory rape was still rape.
That realization hadn’t come all at once. It crept in sideways, uncomfortable and persistent. He had consented, yes—but consent didn’t mean understanding. It didn’t mean safety. And it didn’t mean he hadn’t paid for it afterward, in trust issues and blurred boundaries he still struggled to enforce.
Understanding where he’d started had helped him understand Miriam. Catalina. Everything in between.
Not as a list of bad decisions—but as a pattern learned too young, and unlearned too slowly…and still something he was figuring out how to deal with properly.
Dick hadn’t really been thinking about the implications of what he was saying when he sat beside a teenage girl crying into her hoodie about her school teacher being a fucking scumbag, about how stupid she felt for believing him.
He just talked. Because he didn’t want her to feel alone.
Nightwing suit still on, knuckles aching from having already punched the lights out of a man his own age, Dick couldn’t stop seeing the difference between them. All he saw when he looked at the sixteen-year-old girl was a baby. A child. Fat still clinging to her cheeks, knees all angles and awkward growth, no matter how hard she’d dressed to look older. She was a baby.
Barely older than Damian.
He sat down beside her and talked.
And she listened.
When he walked her out to the waiting police officers, his stomach twisted and his chest felt too tight, but beneath it all he felt—lighter. Just a little.
He knew that telling someone was part of healing. Even a stranger. Even another victim. Saying it out loud had helped more than he’d expected.
He didn’t realise he’d been recorded until afterward.
Turns out the creep teacher was also an amateur streamer, and the feed caught everything.
Rookie mistake.
When he woke the morning after and found far too many text messages. Checking his notifications had his stomach drop, ‘Nightwing’ was trending and this was where he learned of his mistake.
Nightwing was synonymous with sexual assault survivors—in all the ways he’d never intended to be.
---
Wally had always figured the past would eventually catch up with them. That was just how things worked.
He’d figured it would be the obvious stuff—early arthritis, a knee that never quite healed right, a shoulder that protested every cold snap. The kind of consequences you joked about over beers, half-laughing, half-resigned. He’d never imagined it would be this. Never imagined that what they’d missed would be so large, so quietly catastrophic.
Watching the footage the first time made his stomach sink. Watching it on repeat had felt like poorly thoujght out penance.
Most media outlets had at least had the decency to blur the kid’s face, but there was no blurring Nightwing. No mistaking the way he’d crouched down instead of looming, the way his voice softened without turning condescending. Wally had seen Dick talk to scared civilians a thousand times before—he was good at it, always had been—but this was different.
This wasn’t a hero calming someone down.
This was a survivor recognising another one.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat things,” Nightwing was saying. “From here on out, things are going to be hard. Really hard. There are going to be times you hate everything and everyone, and you think about giving up.”
Wally watched him hesitate then, just for a fraction of a second. Like he was weighing how much truth he was allowed to give her.
“But I promise you,” Dick continued, steadier now, “that things do get easier. And that this moment does not define you.”
The girl’s voice wobbled. “What if no one believes me?”
That pause again.
"Sometimes… some people won’t."
Wally flinched. Because that hesitation wasn’t uncertainty—it was experience.
“A lot of people won’t,” Nightwing admitted. “Some people find it easier to say it was your fault. But it wasn’t. And if you don’t believe that right now, take my word for it, okay?”
“But I—I went with him,” she said quickly, like she needed to get it out before he could interrupt. “I flirted with him. I led him on and—”
“And he was the adult,” Dick cut in, gentle but unyielding. “He had a responsibility to shut it down.”
She shook her head. “But—I—you don’t understand. I… he—”
“I do,” Dick said, meeting her eyes. “I understand. Because it happened to me.”
And that was the moment that replayed in Wally’s head.
I understand. Because it happened to me.
Dick said it with the certainty of someone who had taken the thought apart and put it back together a thousand different ways. Someone who had stopped arguing with the truth and learned how to live alongside it.
Dick had been raped.
The thought landed heavy and sickening—and then, almost immediately, came the worse part.
Because Wally hadn’t known but at the same time he hadn’t not known either.
He’d known in pieces. In all the ways that hadn’t added up at the time or after the fact because it was ancient history for him and hadn’t seemed important enough to examine too closely. Dick had talked about some random woman, she’d been older, much older to have good intentions. He’d told them as most teenage boys tended to do but Dick had had worn that uncertain half-grin—the one he got when he was looking to Wally and Roy and Garth for approval, trying to mirror their reactions before deciding how he was supposed to feel about things.
They’d laughed. Clapped him on the back. Told him he was lucky to get someone with experience.
Sixteen year old virgin and a twenty-something adult.
Wally’s stomach twisted.
Because now he could see it: the imbalance they’d ignored, the questions they hadn’t asked, the way Dick had learned early how to turn things into jokes so no one would look too hard. And how none of them had looked hard at all.
Wally himself had been what—eighteen? He’d only ever dated peers from his own high school. He could remember the brief, ugly pang of envy that Dick had managed to bag an older woman, chalking it up to his own lack of experience, his own teenage bravado and immaturity and he had two years on Dick.
And they'd joked, made comments, he knew Dick wasn't always comfortable with some of the comments made, he always assumed Dick just ignored them but maybe he'd felt like he couldn't speak up? Afterall, first people he'd come to about sex and him, Roy and Garth had practically made a joke out of the whole thing and congratulated the him about it.
God, he felt sick.
Wally stared at the frozen frame on his screen—Nightwing crouched low, eyes level with a girl who looked far too small for the world she’d already been hurt by—and felt something fracture in his chest.
Dick was telling her everything no one had ever told him.
His phone pinged with a message.
Dick had sent out a mass text.
"I am safe. Taking a break for a while. Only contact in case of emergency."
Wally closed his eye as he felt the phone keep buzzing with reply's that he knew Dick wouldn't answer, they'd fucked up. They'd been fucking up for years and the worst part was he had no idea how to fix it.