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The first Batman toy Dick buys is a bit of an impulse purchase. He hasn’t slept right in days, doesn’t trust himself to wander too far off campus without a real reason, and the good dining hall is closed already. The school store is still open, though, and he’s going to find himself something fast (if terrible) so he can take an early night, when he sees it.
It’s a new display. Batman’s gotten steadily more popular over the years (and Robin, too, on occasion) but this is the first time he’s seen real merchandise, something more than a headline printed on a t-shirt or the occasional homemade logo stitched onto a backpack. It’s a crappy little plush toy from a no-name company that goes under the next time the reputation tanks, and it’s not entirely flattering.
Still, Dick thinks it’s cute. Scowl aside, and Bruce scowls enough, really, the thing has a cape and a cowl and a removable utility belt he loses sometime that first summer. The felt’s worn through in places by graduation, and one of his ears has fallen off, but he still sleeps with the toy under his pillow. Talks to it, sometimes, when no one is around.
(Tim stalks ebay for a replacement when he notices Dick collects the things. That one’s in pristine condition in a glass case on public display at the library, under both of their real names. Because that was never the point, really, but he loves Tim for the gesture, and while he’s fine letting a five dollar beanbag get beaten to shit as he tosses it in box after box, it feels a little different at two orders of magnitude and three years’ search.)
But he takes it back to his dorm room with a microwave pizza, eats in a shorter time than it took the thing to cool, all while his tiny little Bats is staring at him, judging. He almost promises to eat healthier. He almost promises to get up early for a run. Even though it isn’t actually Bruce looking at him, even though he’s been dodging Bruce’s calls, because Bruce probably would say something about that.
But when he tucks it under his chin, he feels a hand in his hair as Bruce tells him he’ll always be there to catch him, and the warm shadow of a chair pulled up right against his bed, and it’s the first full night’s sleep he’s got since term started.
He does go running early that next morning.
He goes running with the toy shoved in his pack almost every day, right until the day the doll falls out and almost goes down a storm drain, and then it’s back to sitting on his pillow all day every day while Dick tries not to have a heart attack over something so trivial. By then, dozens of companies have gotten in on the Batman cash cow, and he buys a key clip instead, terry cloth and cartoony, that sits on his belt loop or his buttonhole or his backpack, depending on what he’s doing at the moment.
It takes him a while to realize he’s starting a collection.
The Titans mock him for it. It’s good natured even if it doesn’t feel like it, because Dick knows if he bothered to explain why it makes him want to cry when they say things, they’d stop, but on the other hand – he leans into it. He has a whole coffee table filled with the special editions in the lounge, and the others keep adding to it. He didn’t notice at first, but it definitely gets more cramped over time, and he’s only bought two or three himself.
This is not to mention the throw pillows and matching fleecy blankets, and the knockoff footstool someone (probably Roy) found and put in a place of honor in the kitchen, and which they all use to get the mugs off the top shelf regardless of what powers they could use instead. The mugs which often feature Batman. Or Robin. Or any of the Titans, or the Justice League, or any bad pun about superheroing in general.
There’s a whole shelf of Batman toys that Donna started the first time she found out they made a deluxe edition Wonder Girl teddy bear that’s almost four feet tall. Just so she could get the whole collection. Just so she could make a shelf for each of them, and claim it’s for everyone’s merchandise, not just the giant teddy bears.
Still. They’re poking fun at Dick, and at this point, he doesn’t even blink when a never-before-seen miniature Batman appears in a previously empty spot. Or when calls to TV channels make up a huge portion of the phone bill. Where else were they going to get the life-sized bust sitting just outside the bathroom, anyway?
They see the couple of plushes decorating his bookshelf, and they see one of the first posters of Robin decorating his wall, and they see the limited edition mousepad that was a free gift with purchase for, well, he’s not exactly sure what Garth bought, or whether he even wanted it, though Kori proudly reminds him at every opportunity that their matching tacky t-shirts came with the makeup – and of course she had to get two. She needed the Batman and Robin themes.
(They make him try them both on, and are very disappointed that he only looks ridiculous in the bright red and green. Blue and black, unfortunately, suit him.)
What they don’t see is the replacement for his college comfort object when it nearly falls apart on him. Bruce hands him one of the WayneTech prototypes without a word, and it’s an apology of sorts, and a reassurance that’s a lot more sure. They hug and then they pretend the fight never happened, as they’re wont to do, and still, the slightly lopsided, off-color thing hides under his pillow where none of the other Titans will see it.
Or, if they do, at least they know better than to poke at it. It’s hardly a well kept secret in a tower full of detectives, but at least they know to treat it as one.
He whispers to the thing about mundane shit a lot of the time. Someone cut him off in traffic. He ordered the wrong coffee and now he’s just going to have to suffer through no sugar so the other Titans don’t look at him funny. Wally stole his favorite sweatshirt.
And he tells it about the important things, too, silently, in his head, where even the Tower’s security can’t catch it, because maybe it’s kind of funny if they catch him on camera calling them all assholes, but it’s less funny when he’s talking about how he almost killed someone, not because he wanted to, but because he wasn’t careful enough. Got distracted and didn’t pull his kick at the last second, punctured a lung. Threw a stick straight through someone’s window because he was too angry to concentrate, hit them on the head.
Thinks, maybe, some of the people they fight deserve to die.
That one retires, too, when the Titans do.
Babs gets him one as a housewarming gift, and she’s careful with it, because she’s the only one who’s really known what they mean to him the whole time. She knits it while she’s trying to get speed in her hands to compensate for the chair, and it’s pretty good for something she tried to knit as fast as she could. He’s seen her knitting furiously as she goes over something on seventeen monitors at a time, and the fact that she doesn’t stab herself – isn’t knitting supposed to be relaxing?
The little Batman is one of her first projects, because she’s never been one to start on the shallow end of a new skill, and she doesn’t seem inclined to make another because, while she can now throw a batarang faster than any of them, mashing every single technique she can find into a project she’s devised on the fly is no longer what she considers the best way to practice that sort of skill. She’s the only one to present the thing with any ceremony, but she does, placing it gently in his hands and describing, in detail, the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it, unlike the sweater, which she just sort of drapes over a chair on her way out.
Dick keeps that one on the bedside table, lurking just behind his lamp, watching over him from the shadows. Someone breaks in once, and of course they don’t steal a little knitted doll, just as lopsided as the other three, but still. He takes it home and leaves it in his room at the manor, along with the other important ones.
Damian gave him one as a sort of fuck you that first Christmas. Dick still isn’t sure if he noticed the collection and wanted to hand over the most generic present possible, or if it was some sort of complicated plot to…call him a child. Or say Batman would always be better than him. Or make them all out to be heroes off an assembly line. Or something.
That one is just a generic Batman plush, a tie-in with one of the movies, he thinks, but the tags have long since been ripped off. It has a ribbon with a complicated bow around its neck, though, something Damian added later when he felt a little sheepish about the whole thing. Dick isn’t sure exactly when, just that he woke up one day and noticed the ribbon in Nightwing blue, and the case still locked tight. Still just the slightest bit dusty.
Next to it is Jason’s. The one he wrecked. The one he put back together. That was early on, when the collection was a handful of things he bought at the school store, supplemented by slightly too on-the-nose fanmail from people who heard Gotham and thought it would be funny, not that he ever really replied.
Jason was mad about something or other, took it out on the nearest target. Dick never learned whether it was about him and his happy-little-rich-kid toy collection, or it was just an effigy of Bruce Jason wanted, but either way he’s sure that Alfred took him aside and explained why exactly Dick was just a little too twitchy about something that probably shouldn’t be meaningful. Why he, to this day, keeps a plush Batman everywhere he keeps a bed.
Jason never said anything to mock him about sleeping with a dolly, at his age, the humanity. Jason never said anything at all. Jason just handed him this thing without looking at him, this carefully pieced back together Dark Knight, this thing that had been torn to shreds more thoroughly than if Ace had done it. It wasn’t even one of the important ones, and…it must have taken days and probably Alfred’s help. Dick keeps it around because he can see Jason’s work in the stitches like handwriting.
He’s still never mentioned it, but it stops an argument with Red Hood in its tracks one time, and Dick is actually surprised because he hadn’t thought it was quite that important from the other side of the event. He didn’t think Jason would remember it.
It’s there with the one Tim 3D printed when he figured out that Dick wasn’t really a collector after all. And the one Alfred taught him to sew on, even if, being realistic, Alfred was the one who did most of the sewing, and Dick just cut the pieces to shape. And the one the Titans went out and hand-picked together as a Welcome Back gift, stuffed lovingly by all of them and dressed in what doesn’t quite have a bat on it.
And then there’s the first one, from before Batman toys were a thing, from before people were sure Batman was even real at all. Carefully stitched out of baby soft fleece and one of Bruce’s old capes, with little buttons for eyes, and Bruce’s smile picked out in careful embroidery, all in Bruce’s mostly-capable hand.
Because Dick wakes up crying that first night Bruce takes him home, and Bruce sings him to sleep again. And he wakes up most nights after that and Bruce mumbles at him, strokes his hair, tells him platitudes and assurances. And even after he’s Robin, even after he’s exhausted, leaping rooftop to rooftop, throwing things at Bad Guys, and winching the lot of them up to dangle from the rafters, he still wakes up some nights.
And those nights, sometimes Bruce is too tired to wake up, too. Sometimes he finds Dick in the morning still sobbing to himself and has to call in to the school. Sometimes he can’t get his son to fall asleep again without gathering him close and carrying him downstairs to the couch and lying that they’re going to leave in about an hour and a half and tucking him in while cartoons play in the background.
But still, Dick is adamant he sleeps better those nights, because when Batman is there, no one has to be afraid.
“I’m always here for you,” Bruce says.
“I know,” Dick tells him.
“Not just as Batman,” Bruce says, “I’m here for you, too.”
“I know,” Dick says, even though he still insists Batman is the one that makes everything better, Batman is the one who stops anything from going wrong.
“I have nightmares, too,” Bruce says, and places a little kiss on Dick’s temple. “Batman always chases away my nightmares. So I think…”
Dick waits attentively, staring at Bruce like moving might make him vanish, even still, even after this long.
“So I think that Batman should always stay with you, just to chase the nightmares away,” Bruce says, and tucks the little toy in with Dick, and ruffles his hair.
Dick doesn’t get a chance to really examine the doll until morning, because he falls asleep too quickly. But Batman does, indeed, keep the nightmares away.