#nightwing headanon

[river-bottom-nightmare]

Dangerous Dick Grayson headcannons please?

i’m a little hazy from all the timber week writing but i hope these are to your liking babe

dick's the one who started the gotham's habit of looking upwarda. previously, a low level mobster or thug would dash into a building, or corner themselves into presumed safety, or just believe they'd managed to twist and turn around the city enough to lose any vigilantes on their tail, all the while checking wildly around themselves to ensure they weren’t followed. it's easy for the gcpd to storm into a building, guns up and whipping them left and right like madmen, making sure to check every crevice and hidden corner to find who they're pursuing. but none of them ever thought to look up, which is where dick his every time, without fail. you don't forget the first time a whirlwind of bright colours, brighter laughter, and a mean right hook descends on you from above.

they say that every performance has a bit of truth to it, a hint of the actor shining through the character, but that small pearl of honesty was surrounded by a bed of lies that created the show. one performance dick perfected was his poker face, unreadable when he wants it to be, perfectly and falsely clear when he decides to make it so. it's fun in a relatively low-stakes game with his family, but undercover operations are much more lively when some pretty little thing interrupts high stakes poker games and cleans everyone out. playing for money is all well and good, but it's when people start betting bits and pieces of information, of contacts, of blueprints, of plans, that the job starts getting interesting. dick locks his poker face neatly into place and completes the mission, neatly patting down the urge to laugh.

he's more than famous for his acrobatic skills, but dick's hand-to-hand prowess is the best sort of unnoticed. the sort that's been forged and shaped by batman, tempered by shrike, honed by the justice league, fine-tuned by metahumans on the group of young gods he calls the teen titans. dick's fast, is the thing, and when a relatively slim and short guy starts going up against brawlers three times his size, he learns real quick how to use his speed to his advantage, how to shift his balance to always come out on top. (birds fight differently than bats, dick says, and though they may not show it, his younger siblings and hanging off every word.)

back before the sprawling reach of vigilantes, back before there was a bat for every corner of the city, gotham only had two guardians: batman and robin. dick and bruce hauled the city out of the darkness, and they managed it mostly alone. with alfred's assistance of course, and jim and later barabara, but those first couple of years? it was just the two of them. as such, bruce taught dick everything nearly he knew, thinking one day dick may have to guard the city alone. he drilled dick in combat and taught him to case a crime scene in seconds, to slink his way around computer systems the way he does the vents of a house, to think differently than most because being a detective required an imagination that was a hop and a skip away from average. most vigilantes now have their own specialty, but dick was trained in an age when that luxury wasn't available, when being a jack of all trades, master of none, was better than master of one.

and the thing was, dick knew people. a magical fiasco? he had zatanna's fondness and constantine's respect, and he'd take care of whatever warlock had decided to test their luck flanked by two of the most powerful magical beings in the business. espionage trouble? he has slowly growing allyship with midnighter, and anyone who learned to swim with the sharks of gotham's upper crust could survive almost any social situation intact. interdimensional threat? he's considered an anchoring point, a constant, in countless other universes. and he has hundreds of people at his back in every one. if dick grayson himself wasn't dangerous enough, the number of people whose loyalty he's won sure is.

#scribbles from the swamp #dick grayson #nightwing #dc #dick grayson heacanon #nightwing headanon #dc headcanon

[river-bottom-nightmare]

dick always liked to peel pomegranates. sure, he loved eating them, staining his lips the slightest shade of red and laughing as jason tried a single seed for the first time with hesitance.

but dick always took a sort of special pleasure in splitting a pomegranate in half, then in fourths, peeling back the pith and plucking the seeds. he would run his nails through the bed, and as the seeds fell from the fruit into the palm of his hand, juice ran down his fingers, trickling over his arms like rivulets of flavour, like crimson contentment, like a fucking baptism.

dick used to be a rather angry person. that was what jason had learned, had committed to memory. he realized soon enough that his predecessor held little ill will towards him, the seed of anger due to everything robin being planted over with time. but he was furious at bruce, at alfred for not taking his side, at himself for not forcing bruce to listen to him. his bright, blinding smile could burn, his eyes could shatter ships in bottles.

yet those afternoons, those highlights of jason's month. those days when dick ruffled his hair like it was easy, like it wasn't costing him a piece of his willpower to do so, god those days were azure. dick took him to the library, to the zoo, to the ice-skating rink, in attempts to fathom out jason's interests. he failed to realize that jason's favourite afternoons were these, sharing a meal in dick's apartment, watching with idealistic rapture as dick peeled mangoes with his teeth and ate pomegranate seeds like candy.

jason was never any good at it. his fingers weren't as nimble as dick's, short and stubby with youth where dick's were long and limber, artist's hands, stained with fruit juice and markers and never, ever blood. (they both had callouses lining their fingers, rough and uneven and in almost the same places.) even now, jason grumbles in frustration as he accidentally rips off a chunk of the fruit with his over-large hands.

"you have to be gentle with it," dick says. dick himself had become so much more gentle, so much more tender since he'd left. dick as jason remembered him was a pounding jugular vein, an oil-painted explosion, a fucking storm amongst men. he'd tempered after jason's death. jason came back to a brother who never forgot what he did, never hesitating to draw his escrima and strike, never withholding his sharp tongue. never forgetful but,,,,,,willing. willing to shelve his reservations and talk through intel and eat fruit together, like the old days.

dick still peels pomegranates with the ease of a scarf in the wind. jason has to take care not to crush every seed he plucks. the juice runs down his fingers like damned blood, but it isn't like jason's hands aren't already stained red. it isn't like jason hasn't already been to hell, and it isn't like jason hasn't already come back.

he's back now, his anger flaring louder than dick's ever did. but he's sitting here, peeling pomegranates with his brother, eating the seeds without a single hint of fear because, despite all evidence to the contrary, jason is undoubtedly, unquestionably alive.

--

found a couple of photos of me and my cousin eating pomegranates when we were kids today and was feeling ~emotional~

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#scribbles from the swamp #jason todd #red hood #dick grayson #nightwing #dc #jason todd headcanon #red hood headcanon #dick grayson headcanon #nightwing headanon #dc headcanon