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By the time Dick makes it to the address scribbled on the flimsy white card he’d scrapped every dreg of pride for, it’s pitch dark outside and his vision is murky at the edges. He’s angry, and there’s an alien overlay that has sunken into his veins, travels through his blood stream and coats every beat of his heart until he feels wrapped in a thick, cloying ichor that’s inescapable and madness incarnate. Tangling with Blood had been a bad idea, particularly with the way his stars had lined up, and he has no one to blame for it but himself.
He’d known he was floating on a precipice, that his fury had twisted and turned and his shields and the energy to contain them were going to dip. He hadn’t cared, it hadn’t seemed pressing, in the wake of all the new recruits of the remnants of the blood cult that had been seeping up from underground in his temporary home. He’d gone into the situation believing he could handle it. Point to his pride: he’d succeeded.
But Blood was insidious, and blood was binding, and all it had taken in the end was a few tantalizing drops shared from one and then the other to let the darkness that had festered in Dick since he was very young to reach out to the darkness brimming in the epicenter of the ritual he’d interrupted.
His breath stutters, the paint chipped door in front of him disappearing for a long fuzzy moment, vision instead consumed by the sight of Brother Blood’s tongue as it had licked indolently at the smear of Dick’s blood that had splashed onto his wrist. The hooded stare, and the way Dick’s fury had eclipsed into something euphoric for three heart beats too long.
He comes to with a jolt, and more pain on his head, the sway of his wavering balance sending him roughly into the door he’d zoned out in front of, and he curses softly even as he bangs a fist a little miserably against it after.
The sky above the pollution is dark today. The hazy glow of street lights outside is the only thing that lights the path, ominous and harsh and fake. Dick feels the darkness like an oppressive weight, used to its embrace but feeling unaccountably smothered by the lack of stars.
There’d been no moon tonight, when he’d been scattering the Church of Blood.
He doesn’t quite realize he’s still fumbling with the door in clumsy knocks until his fist misses, swinging on empty air and knocking his wrist against the doorframe. It takes all of his effort to focus - he came too far to see the witch he’d been avoiding in the neighborhood, and he’s aware that this is possibly going to make things worse instead of better.
If he’d felt like he had the time he’d have come during the day. He’d have brought a better offering than the crumpled little package half crushed in his jacket pocket. He’d have showered to get the stink of blood off.
It takes the fuzzy thoughts, coming in sluggish order, of: The witch is a plant, the witch is a strange droning of words he can’t make out and the sharp clicking of something that zips up and down his spine when he hears it in lost familiarity and crashing waves, the witch is invisible, to looking down and seeing a young girl stare up at him with wide dark eyes.
“Huh,” she greets, dark hair pulled into twin ponytails, a pink scrunchie on the left and a yellow one on the right. She’s wearing pajamas, with little yellow and blue dolphins printed on white cloth. Slippers, with little bunny faces.
This…is not what he expected.
Her nose wrinkles. It scrunches up her whole face, and some part of Dick’s sluggish brain wonders if he smells.
He must. He grimaces back, shuffling a little in place and tries to discreetly sniff his shoulder.
“Witching hour was thirty-two minutes ago,” the teeny witch says flatly. She sounds incredibly unimpressed. It’s probably fair.
“Witching hour…is bad, though,” Dick says. Or tries to. He’s not sure how much are words and how much are just sounds, but he’s pretty sure it skews in the wrong direction from the way she squints at him.
He tries very hard to order his thoughts.
Thirty-two minutes ago, he was hunting down this place through the heavy weight of his limbs and the hot screaming of his blood and fighting the urge to cry and throw up and maybe rip up a building from its foundations. Or scream.
The screaming would have been worse.
Thirty-two minutes before that , he’d been stomping on a member of the Church of Blood with ragged breaths and an unhinged feeling snaking in every direction from the general vicinity of his throat, feeling like he had blood in his teeth.
…He might still have blood in his teeth.
“You’re sticky,” the girl complains, and Dick has enough wherewithal to know that she is just a girl. Too young, and maybe the witching hour is more than just witches in bad moods - maybe it really is a peak of power, though Dick had thought that was a slanderous rumor. “Tacky sticky,” the girl continues. “Daddy says blood magic is for the Sleeping Gods and posers.” She leans forward, feet firmly planted on her half of the door, dark eyes critical. “You don’t look like a god.”
“There was…a Church,” Dick says, and wonders if this is an interview. He really should have made his way here before this. There’s no good first way to meet a witch, but there are less bad ways.
The outside of the building had been growing little posies. They’d been little pockets of crystal light, guiding his way.
“Is that where you were born?” she asks politely. Her hands have folded behind her, and she’s rocked back again, but the longer Dick stands in the semi-open doorway the more of his vision clears. It’s not cleansing, but he can feel the gentle thrum of warding, and something about the witch-plant looks bizarrely animated and threatening for a moment before he coughs into his shoulder and it’s just a hanging potted plant.
Dick was born in a hospital, to bright lights and warm hands and a tired, sweet voice that had been lilting and kind.
He wished he could go to her, to that voice he’s half-forgotten except for the way it mostly made him feel, and the wistfulness is abruptly traded out for a lick of hurt-filled rage that pierces through his temple painfully.
“Daddy,” Dick hears, the tiny witch’s little voice rising just as the black crawls across his vision again. “There’s a drunk vampire on our doorstep.”
He’s pretty sure it’s the wards and not the ground he hits when he passes out.
~:~:~:~:~
“So how does watching dolphin documentaries way past bedtime turn into answering the door to strangers,” Roy asks without hope for an answer, studying the passive sack of madness that had dropped not-dead-enough on his doorstep.
“I didn’t know he was a vampire when I opened the door,” Lian protests, dramatic and nasal with a clothespin plugging her nose shut padded by a ripped in half cotton ball, the last of his garlic clutched in one hand and munching on the garlic toast she’d refused to eat for dinner with her pasta rebelliously.
Roy had made plans with Jade two months ago to wean her off monster cleansing tropes. Neither of them had gotten around to it, so probably this is somehow his fault.
He’s pretty sure Lian knows, though, that weaponizing garlic is more about insulting the senses than chasing away the undying. It’s keeping her occupied, at least, obediently just inside the little kitchen and biting more toast with a viciously satisfied look on her face.
Joke’s on her. She’s absolutely going to have to re-brush her teeth.
“He’s not a vampire,” Roy says belatedly, because he hasn’t quite pinned down what his late night interruption is aside from suspicious and alive.
He’s got the markings of blood drunk, though. His mouth has smears of it, flaked across pale skin, and his nails have blood caked under them, knuckles split open and seeping sluggishly. His jeans are stained, and even if he hadn’t look it; he reeked . The iron coming from him tings coppery in the back of Roy’s throat sitting a few feet away.
“Well he’s not a god,” Lian complains, and even as she says it her voice lowers a little and she shuffles a half-step back respectfully. Roy bites back a smile. She tacks on blithely, “And there’s real magic under all the gross stuff.”
It’s true. It had been what had saved his guest from being placed under a binding hex with Roy’s personal markers, which would stop any sympathetic witch who wasn’t an idiot from undoing the multitude of curses Roy had intended to put on him when he’d poked his head out at his daughter’s initial call to the panic inducing sight of a full grown man falling into his fucking residence at damn near four in the morning.
Today was a bad day. The night was a long one, and his temper had barely settled in the wake of Lian’s restlessness, her body too young and mind too ready for whatever intake she could get on a night of a lunar eclipse.
Desperate, with an eight year old considering mutiny and a mint clacking around against his teeth, he’d put her onto a dolphin documentary and left her to her own devices.
She insisted the vampire had knocked.
Roy had his doubts.
He also had less than zero patience for anyone dumb enough to antagonize a witch on a night where neither moon nor star would pay witness to their crimes. Normal denizens getting up to nonsensical rites and rituals and stumbling their way to accidental power? Fine. The occasional lost familiar or creature of mischief getting bored and restless? Sure, Roy got bored too.
Humanity playing with blood magic?
Roy would rather give Vandal Savage his fucking spleen than help them.
A magic user knew better. Roy was shit at detangling the components of a soul, pinning down the natural flow of innate magical power on a good day was difficult, on a night like this it was….
Well, he’s pretty sure the guy isn’t only human at any rate. There’s something Old in his blood, even if Roy can’t figure out what it is, and it’s getting constricted and boiling under the oppressive curse that had seeped into the guy’s bloodstream at some point in the night.
Roy’s pretty sure he’s not looking at an acolyte of that irritating blood cult that’s been gaining cancerous footholds in the neighborhood. The guy’s a victim.
“Next time I tell you to not answer the door,” Roy says grimly, fingers skimming over a dark jacket and wondering if using leeches was too spiteful, “don’t answer the door.”
“He needs help,” Lian says, spine stiff and head ducking down a fraction. “They did something weird to him. Right?”
“Yes,” Roy admits, because he’s never going to lie to Lian and also she’s better at seeing the things he feels out mostly by accident and instinct.
Like hell he’s going to be responsible for potential self confidence issues. Also, because they’re in the neighborhood, and it really is important, “Those posers probably tried to nab this guy. Convert him.”
“Because of his magic,” Lian says, a little more subdued, cheese crumb on her cheek. He doesn’t spell it out for her.
Magic was magic, and if it’s in the blood it’s potent. Easily transferable and incredibly volatile. The daughter of a witch was an easier target in many different ways to a full grown man.
She looks grim when he glances toward her, and the sight hurts his heart a little bit, because she’s so serious and so cute and he knows what she’s going to say even without it resonating in the air between them before she ever opens her mouth.
“Daddy, fix him.”
“Of course, squeaker,” Roy answers, “that’s what Daddy does.”
Even if he hadn’t been a victim, Roy might have saved him just for the smile Lian gives him right then.
He looks back down to the prone figure on his living room floor, idly wondering if his features are natural or a side effect of his magic. He’s deceptively cold when Roy puts a hand on his chest, and doesn’t quite apologize for what he’s about to do.
There are a lot of people with fine, lethal control of their magic and skills. People who have spent half their lives and longer dedicated to studying and training and learning what they can do and how to maximize their ability. Comparatively to most witches Roy knows, he’s about as graceful as a giant hammer.
He’s a cursebreaker at his core which makes this easy, but there’s nothing kind about the way he rakes his hand down a firm torso and claws into the man’s belly. There’s an iron pit of something rotted there, and the sharp bite of copper on Roy’s teeth gets worse as the man writhes under his fingers.
A tug of resistance. A thick, cold, squish of something drags between his fingers and he covers the man’s mouth before he can open it all the way to convulse or throw up or scream.
Milky blue eyes roll open, the whites of them darkening in corrosive red as the veins burst and then bleed black in a wash of more of that biting cold. The copper tang changes against his teeth and settles ashen and gritty on his tongue, and Roy gets the successive realization that the blood cult is legitimately blood occult and that they’d fucked with a fae before the punishing rebound skirts up the skin of his arm and the markings Brave Bow had painstakingly gifted to him that had long since been reinforced by Ollie’s bastardization and Connor’s experimentation and Jade’s paranoia glow violently in response.
He hears a squeak and the slam of the kitchen door Roy had installed when he’d first moved in, and all around his living room the wards he’d worked into the property light up in shimmering, unnatural blue. Grins with all his teeth when bloodshot eyes roll to glare up at him, and takes more than a little satisfaction in the way he doesn’t let the curse get a chance to so much as name itself before he’s ripping it out of the tender stomach he’d buried his hand into.
Blood and viscera, which was probably par for the course for the Church of Blood but entirely unwelcome in the soft cushioned flooring of Roy’s living room splatters wetly in thin clumpy streaks along the wallpaper.
~:~:~:~:~:~
Dick wakes up to the tiny witch hovering over him, sucking on a red popsicle with a sort of vicious mutiny that makes Dick’s stomach cramp from a mix of nerves and genuine pain.
“You’re gross,” she accuses, which is not the worst thing Dick has ever been called but feels incredibly egregious while he’s laid out like this. “I thought fairies were supposed to be fussy and live in forests.”
“I’m not a fairy,” Dick says, not up to the task of being offended. “And that hasn’t been true since the 1800s, probably.”
“1873,” she says proudly, and Dick doesn’t know that as a fact but her smile looks a little bit like bullshit. Reminds him, alarmingly, of his little brother.
“1872,” a different voice corrects, and Dick rolls his head slowly to stare blankly at the hallway opening where a man that much more closely resembles the witch’s description leans with arms crossed against the wall. Red hair, straight and falling to his shoulders, one arm decorated with a sleeve of tattoos that are half-ink and half stenciled in abstract designs that Dick recognizes as protective wards he doesn’t usually see outside of the Cave, the Tower (either of them), or Tim’s apartment. “Officially.”
“I thought you were sleeping,” the tiny probably-not-a-witch accuses.
“Surprise,” the witch says blandly. Dick realizes he’s staring with a slow blink, drags his eyes up (the bulge of those arms isn’t an illusion, the man really is built like that, top heavy and grounded, and something that has no business being awake stirs with lazy interest in counterpoint to the tender pain of his stomach) and grins sheepishly at the flat, green-eyed stare leveled down at him.
“You should be sleeping,” the girl amends, with enough matronly concern that Dick wonders if she’s a familiar. “I can watch him.”
“You can scram.”
“Dad,” Dick startles, doesn’t mean to, and winces when it gets both of their attention. Not a familiar, not a witch - not even an apprentice, the witch’s kid (oh, man, had he fallen on her when he-) scrunches her nose and bites down on the edge of her popsicle. There’s a little smear of red on her chin that Dick thinks might be intentional. The way she grins to show off red-stained teeth absolutely is.
“Lian ,” comes from the hallway, firm but overlaid with exasperation, and Dick is familiar enough with both giving and receiving that tone to know he’s finding this behavior funny, even if he’s aware he should be admonishing it.
Dick can sympathize. He’s feeling a little fond even if this is entirely at his expense. It’s probably at least a little bit his own fault, anyway.
They swap places after a brief moment of silent mutiny, Lian heaving a sigh and dragging her feet to her dad and then past him back down the hall. The witch - Harper, Dick’s mind sluggishly provides, and he doesn’t remember if that’s from a source or the result of whatever happened while he was passed out - watches her go. Steps into the room proper after a minute and circles around to settle on an armchair which is about when Dick realizes he’s sprawled out on the couch.
“You were out for about 9 hours,” Harper says. “My wards didn’t like you trampling all over them and then dragging in a blood curse.”
“Ah,” Dick says carefully. “That was considerate of them.” It really was. He’d expected to lose a day - maybe longer - for being a stranger sticking his foot in unwelcome places. That was without taking a vulnerable kid into the equation.
Dick wouldn’t have been that considerate.
“Since you’ve gone and made it my business, I’d recommend not picking fights with strange zealots who like to take over underground catacombs and call them churches.”
It’s less a surprise that Harper knew about the curse than that he’d chosen not to do anything about it. They’d both been here longer, as far as Dick could tell. But, then, at least part of the reason Dick had interfered at all was so that more magic wasn’t thrown unaccounted for into the mix.
“They were bad neighbors,” Dick says. It takes a little bit of effort to try and sit up, but neither Harper nor the wards make any sign of stopping him and he’s used to ignoring his own body’s protests.
“I genuinely hope you don’t think you’re better,” Harper says. Dick eyes him, but there’s no sharper hint of reprimand in his tone, and there’s a reluctant curl at the corner of his mouth like maybe he’d be smirking if Dick had been here under better circumstances.
And, well.
Fair enough.
“I actually did bring an offering.”
It had been meager, and taken some last-minute research and a lot more guessing than Dick was comfortable with. His own fault, though.
“We’ve never met,” Harper muses, “but you brought my preferred focus stone - uncut. It’s still in your jacket pocket.”
What?
“I took the pumpkin seed packet and twenty dollars instead.”
“That’s not equivalent.” Dick wasn’t an expert, not even close, but he knew how much Zatanna tended to charge for curse breaking. And he knew it was pricey even with League discounts and ‘personal friend’ adjustments. The focus stone alone wasn’t intended to cover the help so much as land himself treatment as a first installment. An assurance Dick could get something of quality in exchange when he wasn’t at immediate risk of possession or exhaustion.
“Eh,” Harper shrugs. “It wasn’t that hard. You didn’t even scream, so I didn’t have any angry neighbors hitting my walls with broomsticks or marching to my door. You wouldn’t believe how awkward it is trying to cover with local authorities.”
Dick blinks.
“Okay,” Harper concedes, “maybe you would.”
“No one charges twenty bucks and pumpkin seeds to remove demonic curses made from human sacrifices,” Dick says.
“Firstly, it wasn’t demonic. It was, at best, infernal-adjacent.” Dick had been subject to enough lectures to know the difference was as good as negligent on this plane. He squinted, blinked once into fae-sight and was met with the exact unimpressed look he’d been getting since he woke up from a much smaller, rounder face.
“You’re a lot like your kid,” Dick says. Harper rolls his eyes.
“Second, pumpkin seeds are resilient and promote prosperity and growth. It’s refreshing.”
“...Compared to cult death,” Dick prompts. He’s hoping for clarity, but what he gets is a half shrug and a non-committal see-saw of Harper’s hand.
“You really want me to be sweet on you, buy me some new carpet.”
“Carpet?”
He points in lieu of an explanation, and Dick peers at the far corner of the room and presses a bracing hand against his stomach at the large dark oval that has stained the beige carpet. The wall looks a little water stained, too.
“Uh. Sorry.”
“Better the carpet than a Kryptonian legend running around drunk on blood magic.” If Dick were a lesser man, or even less experienced, he might have reflexively tried to deny it. Instead he slumps back into the couch, flexing fingers scrubbed suspiciously clean of any of the blood he’d known was stained into the skin yesterday.
“I’m not actually Kryptonian.”
“If that’s supposed to be an explanation for why you ran around underneath Gotham’s ugly sister city’s underground without that nifty suit, it’s not a good one.”
“No,” Dick chuckles, running his hand through his hair and taking the chance to briefly side-eye the innocuous glyph traced into the pattern of the wallpaper in a repeating pattern on the wall behind him. “It didn’t feel like a task for Nightwing,” he admits.
“And it felt like a task for Dick Grayson?” Harper asks dubiously.
“I was here first,” Dick says. It’s a shitty explanation. It’s the kind of reasoning that would get Babs glaring at him and Tim staring blankly and Stephanie gearing up for a powerpoint lecture. But it’s also the kind of answer that Bruce and Jason might feel in their bones, that makes Duke give that little half-smile.
“And so,” Harper says reasonably, “we’re back to pumpkin seeds.”
Dick bites back another reflexive denial. He thinks about it.
Cautions, “That’s an old way of thinking.”
A broken curse in exchange not for the concrete present but for a potential future.
Enduring. Resilient growth, eventual prosperity. A bountiful future.
Harper has a daughter. A legacy witch, and Dick has just cleared out an infestation from a backyard they share.
This is a deal, not binding and not founded on traded favors so much as common character. Dick had taken out the Church of Blood’s outreaching branch because he couldn’t abide his people falling victim to it. Harper had saved him from the consequences because he’d had a curse, and a witch couldn’t abide one festering on their doorstep.
It’s the kind of deal that would drive Bruce crazy. That he could never trust.
It’s the kind of deal that Dick’s entire life had been founded on, before it twisted inside out and changed irreparably.
“Well,” Harper says, “I’m a little bit savage.”
Dick’s lips twitch.
“You know I’m going to bring you a cat come Halloween.”
Harper grimaces, but there’s a telling gasp from further down the hall and the girl - Lian - is back, vibrating in spot and knuckles white at the edge of the entryway.
“Lian-”
“It’s a deal!” she declares, a fissure of green sparks spidering along the wall damningly before sinking into the wallpaper.
“Lian,” Harper says, long-suffering.
“The fluffiest one!” Lian says, and Dick sends his newfound witch friend a pitying look even as he opens his mouth. Harper glares at him, preemptive but not proactive enough to stop his promise of, “The cutest fluffiest one I can find.”
~:~:~:~:~:~
Four months later, Damian has kittens and Bruce is on the verge of war with his youngest over acceptable living spaces and foster homes.
Two months after that, Dick has an impish grin on his face Roy Harper has learned to be leary of, standing politely on his doorstep in a bout of uncharacteristic manners and a box of kittens dutifully in his arms.
He gets the door slammed in his face.
Joke’s on Roy:
Dick’s got the entire box through Lian’s window two minutes later before they’re caught red-handed in the act.
Lian, covered in kittens with glittering eyes, seals his fate: “Daddy, look! He’s an Oath Keeper!”
“Wonderful,” Roy says, the way most people might say ‘Go die.’
As far as friendships go, Dick’s had worse starts.