It was an odd sensation, climbing in through your own window like you had the idea of robbing yourself or something of the sort. As it was, the window in question was actually very difficult to pry open - as much as Dick wanted to take pride in this as one of his ways of keeping out criminals and other such unwanted guests, it was really just an old window that didn't much appreciate being opened. He had almost given up trying to get in and was considering how much damage he would do to the door and himself if he tried to kick it down when finally, whatever was locking down the outer glass gave way and the window finally slid up, black specks raining down from it in the process.

Hoping with everything he had that the specks weren't bugs, Dick squeezed through the opening and tumbled into his living room, somewhere between gracefully and pathetically. Rolling to his feet, he turned and slammed the window shut again against the chilly night air that promised October was drawing to a close and November was soon to be knocking on the door with all of its icy malice. As soon as he was sure that the window was shut and the blinds were down and maybe even the peephole on the door was covered, Dick ripped off his mask and let it fall on the couch, followed by his damp gloves. His boots were abandoned by the door and he began struggling with the zipper behind his neck as he made his way to the kitchen to start the coffee pot.

Yes, it was nearly one o'clock in the morning, but homework called, as did work work, and eventually he would need to organize his patrol notes into something more than an incoherent conglomeration of late-night babbling about drug-dealers with bad mustaches. Coffee was a must if Dick had any hope of doing any of the above in a reasonably coherent manner and besides, tomorrow was Friday and then it was Saturday and on one of the upcoming days he could catch up on sleep.

Once the coffee pot was off on its mission to brew some more mediocre, grainy joe, Dick skittered back to his bedroom to finish stripping off his soaking uniform. It was drizzling outside, the annoying situation where it seems as if the sky is leaking just slightly and the plumber upstairs is not very handy at his job. After nearly four hours on the streets, the drizzle had thoroughly soaked through Dick's gear and onto his skin and he was fairly certain it had even gone a step further and leaked into his organs and bloodstream.

As soon as the soggy Nightwing suit lay forlorn on the carpet, the shower was on full-blast and Dick was in the process of melting in the steamy-hot cubicle of heaven. Eventually the water turned cold and he was forced to abandon the oasis of bliss, vowing to pay his utilities bills the next day as he struggled into dry clothes and violently scrubbed his wet hair with a towel. It was getting long - the hair, not the towel, though a case could be made for the latter as well - and it resembled a rather spiky, ugly nest on top of his head, but haircuts were for the weak and Dick could survive a little volume. Alfred might not approve - Bruce probably wouldn't either - and Dick's head officer as the station kept making side-comments about owning a nice razor, but Dick had found that having short hair still triggered memories of the time after his rescue from hell back when he was thirteen.

Of course, his hair was hardly the most prominent reminder. Even now as Dick pulled a pair of athletic pants over his legs, he had to be careful to maneuver them around the hard metal brace encasing his knee so that they wouldn't snag on the edges. Every time he reached for something with his right hand he saw the shiny metal casing enclosing his fingers, down his wrist, to the middle of his forearm. Every time he now went to sign his name with his left hand, because his right wasn't adept enough for writing anymore, and watched the ugly scrawl grow under his undertrained hand, he remembered. Every time he looked in the mirror and saw the scar over his eye, or felt a headache pulsing from the occasional bout of blurry vision, he remembered.

After five years, he told himself he was over it. Well, maybe not over it, but he had come to terms with everything and learned to live around it. But it would be a lie to say that he didn't still wake up every now and then, covered in sweat, screaming silently as Merida descended on him once more, whispering haunting words of passion and horror. He wasn't perfect and he wasn't Superman - in the literal or figurative sense - and the memories of the event still bothered him. Still troubled him. Still haunted him at night when a single light would flicker on somewhere out his window and he would remember.

But he was also human, and humans healed. He was better now than he had been at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. He was nearly nineteen and, in some ways, many ways, he was better than he had ever been. He understood the world and the people in it in a deeper way than he imagined he would have had he never been locked away for three months with a megalomaniacal psychopath. He would still trade it all for the experience to be forever erased from his mind and body, but such genies did not exist and so he lived on. He had respect now from people older than himself that saw his scars and, even if they didn't know the story behind them, knew he had gone through some sort of hell and come out still fighting. He had that respect from most, except perhaps the one he craved it from so bad.

Leaving home had been hard, but not nearly as hard he had imagined when he'd been younger and schemed about it late at night with Wally and Artemis. It might have helped that he and Bruce hadn't been on good terms for the months leading up to the departure. Or the fact that Wally and Artemis had already took off for Stanford the year before. Or that he was almost an adult and had been accepted to Blüdhaven University and had a job at the police station and, with the help of a certain flying man, had created for himself a new persona to roam the streets of his new home. As he'd looked back one last time, that dark night when the rain had sluggishly leaked from the sky, and seen Alfred watching him from the window of the drawing room, because of course Alfred knew, and the old butler hadn't made any move to follow him or summon Bruce or even say goodbye, he'd known that it was time to leave. That had been almost a year ago.

Jason had been performing admirably as Robin, if not more violently than Bruce would have liked, and he and Dick had grown close over the years. But because of Jason, Dick wasn't needed anymore. Batman had a partner, Robin, and that was how it was supposed to be, and he didn't need another. Dick had felt a sense of loneliness those last few months, after Wally and Artemis were gone indefinitely and the Team was filling with younger, fresher faces, that he hadn't felt since he'd first come to the Manor as a newly orphaned child. It wasn't a feeling he'd ever wanted to experience again. So leaving had been hard, but it had also been easy.

After pulling on a pair of sweat pants and a baggy, ratty sweatshirt, Dick collapsed on the couch in the small living room and wished not for the first time that Alfred was there to make him dinner. Living off of takeout had been fun the first two days or so, and even peanut butter and jelly and frozen dinners hadn't been too bad, but after he started getting on a first name basis with the three Chinese delivery guys and the entire kitchen smelled of peanut butter, home cooked meals sounded like something out of a fantasy novel. Fantastic and utterly unattainable.

Alfred probably wouldn't have had any qualms with driving down and dropping off a fridge full of food, but that would have severely lessened the effect of Dickleaving and claiming himself independent. He could hardly say he was stepping out from under Bruce's overbearing shadow if Bruce's butler was still feeding him on a weekly basis. At least Barbara had her occasional moments of thoughtfulness and would sometimes bring something her dad had made with her when she visited.

He and Barbara had been on-again-off-again for who knows how many years; probably since Dick had been old enough to understand that after you kissed a girl, you usually asked her out instead of letting her detangle your darkest secret and subsequently hate you for the next four months. So it was with most of his friends it seemed.

When Artemis and Wally had finally told Dick that indeed they were going to Stanford and becoming the preppy college-kids they'd never dreamed about being, he hadn't talked to them for three weeks. Sure, it was probably immature, but he'd only been sixteen and had a solid two years of immaturity left. His relationship with them now was rocky - probably more stable with Artemis because she always hated him for something or another so one more reason wasn't a real detriment to their friendship.

With Wally, however, things were difficult. Dick wouldn't say that he was still bitter about the speedster's decision to up and leave and pursue higher education over late nights in tights, but he was. It was Wally's decision, sure, but... Dick still felt like he'd been abandoned. It had been him, Wally, and Kaldur who had first started the Team (maybe Conner too, it was debatable). To have Wally walk away from it felt like abandonment. And with Roy off who knows where, trying to find his other self, clone, whatever, Dick felt... alone.

Dick eventually forced himself to get up again as his stomach continued to complain incessantly. Dwelling on the past was not going to make dinner, unfortunately. If it were the case, Dick would be eating four course meals six times a day. It really was a bad funk that he was stuck in. Pulling bread and peanut butter from the cupboards, he attempted to divert his overactive mind to other thoughts, like whether the specks of green on the bread were some type of seed or something more sinister. He was interrupted from his smell-test by the sound of a key turning in the lock of the front door.

It swung open after a moment and a very flustered Barbara spilled in, her hair wildly strewn about her face. Her cheeks were a light pink from the night air and she was dressed in a jacket and gloves with a scarf trailing off behind her.

"Oh, so you have my key then," Dick sighed, dropping the bread on the counter and deciding that it wasn't worth dying from mold poisoning for a sandwich made of peanut butter. He could just eat the peanut butter plain for the same affect.

"Yeah, you gave me one last week." Barbara tossed a single key to Dick and he caught it, the metal clanging softly against the metal on his hand.

"Oh yeah." Dick dropped the key on the counter. "I should probably get another one made."

"You don't have a spare?" Barbara started unwinding her scarf from her neck and peeling off her gloves.

"No. When they say 'efficiency', they go all out."

"I brought you food." Barbara detangled herself from a bag draped across her back and pulled out a white takeout container. "It's from the restaurant."

Barbara was currently undercover as a waitress at a restaurant in downtown Happy Harbor, doing a bit of investigative work on the manager for the Team. The food at the place was to die for and as an employee she got discounts on all the food at the end the of the night. Dick happily snatched the carton from the girl's hands, not the least bit guilty about resigning the peanut butter to the cupboard for another night.

"You're the best," he sighed, moving over to the kitchen again to hunt for a fork.

"You only tell me that when I bring you food." Barbara didn't follow him and instead claimed her favorite spot in the armchair to the right of the couch, kicking her booted feet up on the coffee table.

"Hey, no shoes in the house," Dick scolded, returning to the living room with a fork in hand, the delicious aromas already seeping out of the container of bliss.

Barbara ignored him, pulling out her phone and staring at the screen, her eyebrows drawing together.

"What?" Dick collapsed on the couch again, propping up his bad leg and popping open the takeout carton. It was some type of pasta with a smattering of shrimp and scallops, draped in a creamy sauce and topped with fancy little green things. Alfred would have been ashamed of his lack of knowledge of spices.

"It's my dad. Just said that he would be working late tonight."

"Doesn't he always?" The first bite was like tasting an angel, in a non-cannibalistic way.

"He doesn't usually text me about it. Must be something important." Shrugging, Barbara pocketed her phone and turned her attention back to Dick. She was still living at home, keeping her dad company and lending Batman the occasional hand in Gotham when she wasn't running with the Team. Sometimes it made Dick a little a jealous that she spent more time with Bruce than he did, even if it was caped and masked, but he had to remind himself that that was kind of the idea behind his leaving in the first place.

"Anything from the Bat?" Dick tried to wait to speak until he didn't have food in his mouth, but found it harder than originally conceived.

"No.... You?"

"I don't talk to him anymore."

"He was at the cave last night with Jason."

"And I wasn't."

"Sometimes you are so stubborn."

"I try."

"Chew and swallow, Wonder Boy."

Dick gave her something between a glare and a grimace as he struggled to swallow the copious amount of food he found in his mouth. Barbara watched him eat for a moment, though Dick could tell her mind wasn't really on his chewing and swallowing. Her eyes weren't focused and one of her fingers was tapping on her leg - in Morse code - like she did either when she was thinking or when she was nervous. When he was a little over halfway through his food, Dick took a moment to set his fork down and was about to speak when Barbara beat him to it.

"Did you see we made the front page?" She reached over the side of the chair where she'd dropped her bag and pulled out a newspaper, slightly damp and crinkly. She tossed it across the coffee table to Dick and caught it, unfolding it as he set the takeout container on the table.

The front page was nearly completely filled with a large picture of a flooded street in downtown Happy Harbor, Superboy and Wonder Girl framing the image on either side looking tough and a little muddy. The caption read: "Team of Young Heroes Mops Up Trouble Once Again in Downtown Happy Harbor".

"Clever," Dick grunted, sitting up and casting a look around the living area. "Of course Conner and Cassie are the poster children."

"Well, they are the nicest looking," Barbara smirked.

"I take that as an insult." Dick's eyes fell on the pair of glasses strewn across the end table to the side of the couch and he threw himself in the direction of them. Managing to secure them, he slipped them on scanned to the article. Of course they got most of the story wildly wrong; Clayface hadn't been working alone - in fact, he'd merely been a pawn in a bigger game the Team had been playing for months now - and there was no mention of Robin's daring endeavor in the pipes that had set the stage for the ultimate takedown of Clayface. There was plenty of attention paid to the new addition to the Team, Wonder Girl (and how wonderful she was) and Superboy's role in punching Clayface repeatedly which, apparently, was a huge help getting the monster blown up.

"Media," Dick sighed. "Jay's gonna be pissed."

"I thought he didn't like having his name in the paper?"

"Not as Jason, no. But as Robin, he would volunteer to be the front page every week."

Barbara laughed. Dick continued reading, scowling a bit more at the blatant lack of accurate reporting. Somehow, over the past years, he'd grown protective over the Team, now that he was their leader and everything, and if the media had to dig their noses into their missions then the least the reporters could do was get it right. Beast Boy had done more on this particular mission than Conner and he wasn't even mentioned.

"Have I ever told you how smart you look when you wear glasses?"

Dick glanced up at Barbara.

"Or how cute you look when you're angry? You get a little crease between your eyebrows and I can practically see your mask lines."

"You probably can. I ran out of solution to dissolve the gum...."

Barbara was suddenly sitting next to him on the couch, gently knocking the paper out of his hands. She curled her feet up underneath herself and reached out to touch Dick's face.

"There is one problem I have with the glasses." Her fingers latched onto the frames and gently tugged them off Dick's face. "They block your blue eyes. Have I ever told you blue's my favorite color?"

"No."

"Probably because it's not."

And then her lips were colliding with his and Dick felt the world melt away as he and Barbara slipped into some other reality where it was only the two of them and the sound of rain gently pattering on the window. Dick felt light - lighter than he'd felt in a long time - as the weight of the past weeks, months, years, lifted for but a moment. For but a moment he could be happy - totally and completely happy.

oOo

Dick woke up to the sound of his cellphone buzzing on the counter. Groggily he sat up, wincing as sore muscles stretched and protested his movement. After a long glance across the apartment, he sighed and leaned back against the couch, deciding that the call wasn't important, whoever it was. It stopped buzzing after a few seconds and Dick leaned his head back, staring up at the ceiling and vaguely wondering why he had been sleeping on the couch and not his bed. Before he could come to a conclusion, his phone started buzzing again and Dick was up and across the room before he was even aware of what he was doing. He was too polite.

"Hullo?" He answered groggily, not bothering to check the caller ID.

"Why don't you ever answer your damn phone?"

"I just did," Dick sighed, sinking onto a stool by the counter. "What's up, Jay?"

"You never called." Jason sounded peeved.

It took Dick a moment to remember. "You mean called Alfred? I never said I would."

"You told me after the mission!"

"I told you to tell Alfred I would call him. I never actually meant to."

"Why the hell not?"

"Bruce is gonna be mad if he hears you swearing."

"Shut up, Dick."

"Why are you so upset I didn't call anyway?" Dick rubbed a hand across his eyes, forcing his exhausted body to wake up faster. He desperately needed some coffee.

"There is a reason why Alf wanted to talk to you."

"Because he knows I won't talk to Bruce?" Dick stood up and wandered over to the coffee machine, pulling the pot out from under the spigot.

"There's some stuff he needs to talk to you about."

"That Bruce told him?" Flipping the faucet on, Dick started to fill the pot, trying to keep his emotions under control. Steady, like the water. Relax, Jay means well.

"Why does it freakin' matter?"

"I don't want to talk to Bruce."

"This isn't Bruce!" Now Jason sounded fed up and angry.

Knowing he was treading on thin ice and not wanting to destroy the relationship he had with his brother, Dick flipped open the lid to the coffee maker and carefully started pouring water inside. "Okay, what does he want to tell me?"

"If you called him, he could tell you."

"Why can't you just tell me?"

"Why can't you just call him?"

Deciding to play it Jason's way, Dick finished pouring the water and moved to throwing away the old filter and grounds. "Because I'm sure Bruce will be right there waiting to butt in."

"Get over yourself." But Jason sounded more resigned than anything.

Dick knew his strained relationship with Bruce was hard on Jason - the kid was seeing the only real family he'd ever known be torn apart, and for that, Dick was sorry - but he also knew he couldn't spend the rest of his life crawling back when Bruce demanded. He needed distance from the man and if Dick still wanted to have any connection to the Team and his brother, then he needed to not talk to Bruce for a while. Things would only get worse if he did and Jason probably knew this deep down because he was a smart kid.

"I'm really sorry, Jay."

"Yeah, well this is important. I really think you need to talk to Alf. I'll make him promise not to let Bruce in the room or anything. Bruce doesn't even need to know."

Dick knew that could never happen, but he heard a note of fear in Jason's voice he rarely heard. He also knew the kid really would try to keep Bruce out of the picture - he was a rebel in his own right, more so than Dick could ever be, and spiting Bruce was something of a pastime of his.

"Okay, fine, I'll talk to Alfred. But quickly."

There was some shuffling on the other end, then, in the background: "Yeah, he says he'll talk. Hurry though, apparently he has places to be or something."

Dick rolled his eyes, letting a small smile creep onto his face. Jason knew how to push Dick's buttons like no other, but he was also absurdly good at somehow improving Dick's mood.

"Master Richard?" Alfred's voice crackled through the phone.

"Hey, Alf," Dick smiled, remembering that he had been preparing coffee and setting about to find the bag of grounds as he let the familiar voice bring him back home.

"I hope you are doing well and not eating too much takeout."

"Don't worry about me, I know how to cook - you did teach me." It was true, however little Dick actually utilized the skill. "Jason said you had something important to tell me?" Finding the coffee, Dick shoved a new filter in the machine and started dumping in the grainy brown powder.

"Indeed. While Master Bruce was on patrol last night, he came across some... rather undesirable rumors."

Of course this had to do with Bruce. Forcing himself to stay calm and not snap at the butler, because the man really didn't deserve it, Dick closed the lid of the coffee maker and turned it on. "What?" He asked, turning to the cupboards to look for a mug.

"In the underworld, there seems to be rumors of some type of new... operation happening involving DNA experimentation and human mutation."

Dick froze, a mug clasped in his damaged right hand, his heart leaping to his throat at the sound of the words. No, it had been five years, this was different, it wasn't the same, it was just a coincidence, baddies got involved in things like this all the time. Nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that would in any way tie this back to -

"The rumor is," Alfred continued, his voice as steady as ever, but suddenly quieter, subdued, solemn. "The head of the operation goes by the name of... Doctor Donovan."