buggery | Knowing (fic)

I can not believe that I finally wrote my first Batfic and it's... it's... completely gen. I'm almost as thrown by that as by having actually managed to articulate a story in only 500 words, cos Jack don't do short-shorts. I had a short story rejected for publication once for no other reason than that I could not pare it down under 1000 words. Feh. I blame it on the challenge.

Final version here now. Effusive thanks to Val for beta advice and being there.

For Jae's Defining Moment challenge -- Dick Grayson, 500 words exactly.

Knowing

If he'd known it would be his final performance, that night, it might have felt different. Sometimes he'd thought about that, lying insomniac in a strange bed, during that between time when he'd wondered if he'd ever fly again. Maybe he wouldn't have been able to go, foreknowledge paralysing him, blanking the familiar routines from his mind. Worse, maybe he would've tried and frozen, fouling the precise timing, maybe letting Mom or Dad fall, maybe falling himself. Maybe he would've been perfect, and enjoyed it more to make up for his imminent loss.

Somehow that last scenario seemed most impossible, if only because nothing in Dick's life, ever, had been as good as performing, and so nothing could surpass it. He'd reveled in precision, in minutely timed motions that let the Graysons clasp in midair, fly free, tumble, clasp and fly again. Exerting such control over his body was ecstatic joy; at the same time, part of him gave up thought to just live each moment of flexing muscle or freefall. Flying was something he could never have given up, maybe -- and this was the possibility that haunted Dick's darkest nights -- maybe not even if that would have saved his parents.

It wouldn't have, though. Even if it would, how could he have known? The future was like that, mostly, unknowable, even for events so life-altering; maybe especially those. But sometimes it was impossible not to know, and at least once the change Dick saw coming remade his world just as thoroughly.

He'd known, even before Bruce said, "Take some time to think about it, you don't have to decide today," that, much as he wanted to, he couldn't say yes then. It looked too odd already that the wealthy stranger had even offered; Dick knew the extended circus family well enough to sense the general unease Bruce's interest in Dick had kindled, though he wouldn't realise what fueled that unease until long after he'd moved into Wayne Manor.

He'd known he wanted to go, and he'd known Bruce knew it. And it was that earliest demonstration of the kinship between them, their ability to communicate nonverbally and understand one another instantly, that he'd used as the final wedge of argument to convince Bruce to let Dick into the whole of his life, that later night that changed the nights of Dick's future forever.

He'd known. It wasn't that they'd both been orphaned, though Bruce told him about that, as much as he'd thought necessary, at the time, for Dick (and others) to hear. It wasn't the grief in Bruce's eyes needing Dick to assuage it; anyone who could see that knew it could never be lessened. It wasn't that there was no place for him now in the circus, because there would have been, circus folk took care of their own.

Dick had looked up at the towering figure of "Mr Wayne," watched him move, and known this was someone who could teach even a Grayson something about flying.

/ / / / /

the rest of the ficlets posted in my LJ