Dolly Mixtures Musebox

Jason is stand-offish with Bruce and the other former Robins at the best of times, but they've all noticed him being more distant than usual recently. Bruce, of course, is fine to leave him alone and let him figure it out himself, but Dick doesn't want to leave it alone, he never does. As soon as he gets the full moon out the way he's going to get to the bottom of this.

It turns out he doesn't have to wait that long.

Dick's been a werewolf since he was a child, he was born that way, and back in those days full moon meant chains and cages or, if the schedule allowed, it meant the circus stopping as far from civilisation as possible so that he and his parents had room to run. Those full moons were always his favourites.

After his parents were killed it meant a special room in the batcave, at least until he got a little older and could seek out safe areas himself - parks where nobody went at night, places a wolf wouldn't be spotted and he wouldn't risk hurting anybody. He was still aware when he changed on a full moon, but he had far less control over his instincts, it was like being a passenger in his own body, only able to make suggestions and hope the wolf listened. He'd been six the first time he couldn't stop himself from killing a rabbit and he'd spent most of the next day in floods of tears - he can manage without crying these days, of course, but he still feels a little bad whenever a rabbit or a deer falls to the wolf's need to eat, no matter how much steak he tries to sate it with in the days leading up to the full moon.

He's never hurt a person and he hopes he never will.

He's also, in all his years, never seen another wolf in Gotham. It doesn't mean there aren't any, maybe they just spend their full moon elsewhere, but he's never so much as caught the scent of one before.

That night, he does - and it's familiar.

So he tracks the wolf, runs with it, goads it into playfights and races, anything to keep them entertained until the early hours of the morning when they're ready to flop into a pile of fur and sleep until dawn. Or, in Dick's case, until just before dawn, which is when he untangles himself and slips away, back to where he has his clothes stashed.

Once the sun has risen and he's back in human form, he goes back to his apartment for a change of clothes and a quick nap, and then around mid morning he's knocking at Jason's door with two coffees and a bag of breakfast food.

It wasn't that Dick objected, as such, to the idea of spending two weeks in the Caribbean with his boyfriend, it was just that, well, why did it have to be now?

He knew, really, that everybody was worried about him and that the last few weeks had been a lot, even for them, and that some time to rest and recuperate was exactly what the doctor ordered (loudly, and at length), but the idea of being in close quarters with Steve, without anything else to distract him, without any way to hide? It was daunting, to say the least. He hated that it was, because he wanted nothing more than to be able to enjoy this time with Steve, but he didn't know if he'd be able to.

The journey hadn't been too bad, as much as he didn't want to flash his father's cash he had to admit it kind of came in handy for situations like this, everything ran smoothly and he had just enough other things to think about that he didn't have to worry - in fact, he actually managed to let a little excitement overtake him. Two weeks with no villains to fight, no plots to stop, no cities to save? He couldn't remember the last time he'd had a break like that.
The fact that Steve insisted on carrying everything, regardless of how many times Dick pointed out he still had one good arm, had been a little frustrating, but more in a fond exasperation kind of way, he just hoped the other man didn't keep fussing like that, it was only a sprain.

Except now they're in their hotel room, and suddenly Dick has nothing else to think about, nothing but how difficult it was going to be to pretend everything was normal when he knew it really, really wasn't.

There wasn't anything strange about the evening when it started, he finished up his shift and swapped one uniform for another same as he always did, and patrol was relatively quiet.

Then he dropped in on a mugging in progress - only to find somebody else had beat him to it. Somebody with a very familiar R on their chest - and that was where the familiarity ended, because it sure as hell wasn't Tim.

He held back until the mugger was dealt with and the victim had long since fled, since the stranger seemed to have the matter well in hand and he didn't want to ruin anything by joining in the fight unexpectedly. He did step forward before the 'Robin' could disappear, though, head titled curiously.

"Funny, I'm sure Batman would have told me if he was hiring somebody else, I normally get to be on the interview panel." he quipped.

Things with Jonathan have been going really well, Dick can't quite believe his luck. There's a certain amount of balance to the world, of course, since Gotham is still being plagued by the mysterious Scarecrow and Nightwing is being run a little ragged trying to keep up with him, but at least after late nights and injuries and near-misses he always gets the chance to spend some time with Jonathan and that somehow makes it all better.

It doesn't hurt that, so far, he has managed to avoid the Scarecrow interrupting any of their dates, because at this point that would be unforgiveable.

Tonight there doesn't seem to be anything afoot, so he's decided to take a break from patrolling so he can actually spend a night in with his boyfriend for once; he shows up at Jonathan's door with takeout and DVDs... and then realises that he probably should have called ahead to check that Crane was actually free. Too late now, all he can do is knock and hope for the best.

It was actually several weeks after the news broke that Dick's prediction came true, at least in part. Batman definitely was lurking in Steve's apartment waiting for him to come home, but he wasn't so much standing in a corner as pacing backwards and forwards in the living room with an impatient scowl on his face.

Dick spends a lot of his life in a lot of very secure locations, the window for anybody wanting to cause him any sort of trouble was pretty narrow, and even in those narrow windows, who was going to bother him? Dick Grayson wasn't even on the radar of the kind of people Nightwing caused problems for, and he didn't exactly have enough of a routine for run-of-the-mill villains to catch him out.

Captain America, on the other hand, had plenty of enemies who were very much not run-of-the-mill, and they were low down and dirty enough to go to some pretty extreme lengths for their revenge - like paying off one of Dick's work colleagues to tell them where he'd be.

An after-work trip to a bar for a bunch of cops is the last place you'd expect a kidnapping attempt to go down, but all it took was a little careful engineering, a solo trip to the bathroom and a sharp baton to the temple that a half-drunk Dick wasn't quite quick enough to react to, Nightwing or no Nightwing.

So when Dick next woke up, he came to several realisations.

One, these guys definitely did not know what they had.

Two, his communicator and one or two other gadgets he kept secreted about his person were still exactly where he thought they'd be, because his kidnappers also did not search very thoroughly.

Three, number one was slightly negated by the fact that they definitely knew who might be coming for what they had, because he was pretty heavily trussed up and definitely well guarded.

and

Four, while the distress beacon in his communicator was hopefully still functional, the stabs of shattered plastic located by his questing fingers suggested that the communicator itself was most definitely damaged.

In short, he was in a very bad position - but not nearly as bad a position as his kidnappers were going to be in, that he knew for certain.

The second Steve entered the apartment, he would be swooped upon almost immediately by a very large, angry vigilante, and one single growled sentence.

"They've taken Dick."

Dick strode into the Batcave with a determined look on his face, probably more focused than he'd been on anything in a while. Was there some terrible villain on the loose? World-threatening events afoot? Some other disaster looming over them all? 

Well, sort of.

He was here to talk about feelings.

He came through the cave first because he knew this was the most likely place he was going to find Bruce, but he was willing to scour the whole house if he had to - and to lay in wait if Bruce wasn't here, because this was the first time he'd seen the man since Bruce got back from his cruise. He'd had his talk with Clark, and he felt pretty good about that, but Bruce wasn't going to get off that easily.

It was probably just because all the irritation he felt at not being told had been displaced by Clark's easy friendship, and it had been left with nowhere to go and ended up directed at Bruce, but whatever had caused it he was on the warpath. There would probably even be hugs.

"Anybody home?" he called out.