I Took Him In as a Boy, Now I'm Taking Him as a Man

The stone was cold beneath my gauntlets, a familiar anchor in the Gotham night. Below, in the alley’s artificial twilight, the fight was almost over. It was a simple warehouse bust, a new crew of smugglers who thought they were clever. They weren't. Not when faced with him.

Nightwing moved through them like water, a blur of black and blue. Every motion was economical, precise. A spinning kick that sent one thug into a pile of crates. An elbow to the throat of another. He used his escrima sticks not just as weapons, but as extensions of his own limbs, deflecting a pipe swing and using the momentum to hook the man’s leg and pull him off balance. I had trained him. Every block, every parry, every acrobatic dodge was a reflection of my teaching, honed by his own unique, almost joyful, fluidity.

A familiar sense of pride swelled in my chest. It was the feeling of a master watching his student surpass him in certain arts. But tonight, it twisted into something else. My focus narrowed, the tactical analysis dissolving. I wasn’t watching the fight anymore. I was just watching him.

The cheap industrial lights caught the sweat on his neck as he ducked under a clumsy punch. I followed the line of his jaw, sharp and defined, clenched in concentration. The fabric of his suit, designed for protection and stealth, did nothing to hide the power coiled in his body. It pulled tight across the broad, solid muscle of his shoulders as he threw a man twice his size over his hip. I watched the muscles in his back and thighs contract as he launched himself into a backflip, landing silently behind the last conscious smuggler.

The pride was still there, but it was darker now. Possessive. It wasn’t the satisfaction of a mentor. It was the raw, proprietary feeling of looking at something that belonged to you. The thought was a foreign object in my mind, sharp and unwelcome. Mine.

I tried to shove it down, to reclassify the feeling as paternal, as the simple admiration for the weapon I had forged. But it was useless. A low, insistent heat was building in my stomach, a purely physical reaction to the sight of him. The boy I raised was gone. In his place was this man—strong, beautiful, and deadly. And looking at him, truly looking at him for the first time in what felt like years, was threatening to undo me. He subdued the final man, securing his hands, his breathing the only sound in the sudden silence. He stood, rolling his shoulders, and I couldn't look away. I was trapped on my perch, a voyeur of my own creation, drowning in an impulse I refused to name.

I dropped into the street, my cape flaring out like black wings. Another night, another drug deal to bust in the industrial district. My movements were more brutal than usual, fueled by a restless energy I couldn’t burn off. I wanted the ache in my muscles to override the one coiling lower in my body. I wanted the impact of my fists on bone and flesh to erase the memory of watching him.

It wasn't working.

Even as I disarmed one dealer and sent another crashing into a dumpster, I was aware of Nightwing. He was a flash of motion on my periphery, a silent partner whose presence was a constant, distracting hum beneath my skin. I tracked him without looking, a subconscious calculation of his position, his speed, his safety.

I had a man pinned against a brick wall, my forearm pressed against his throat. He was telling me what I wanted to know, his words coming out in panicked gasps. My focus was absolute. I was Batman. This was my world. Control. Order. Discipline.

Which is why I didn't see the second man. He came from my blind spot, silent as a wraith, a long, thin blade held low. I registered the flicker of movement a half-second too late. My body tensed for the impact, for the sharp, piercing pain.

It never came.

Instead, a solid force slammed into my side. The air left my lungs in a sharp grunt as I was thrown off balance, stumbling hard against the rough brick wall. For a disorienting second, the world was nothing but a tangle of limbs and the scent of night air and sweat.

Dick.

He was pressed against me, his body a shield for my own. His chest was hard against my back, his arm banded tight across my torso, holding us steady. The momentum had wedged his thigh high between my own, a solid bar of muscle and heat. I could feel the frantic beat of his heart against my shoulder blades, the warmth of his breath, hot and panting, directly on the exposed skin of my neck.

A jolt, sharp and purely physical, shot through me. It wasn't adrenaline. It was something else entirely. Something base. Every point of contact was a brand. The solid weight of him, the strength in the arm holding me, the undeniable pressure of his groin against my lower back. A thick, unwanted heat pooled in my stomach and shot straight down, making my cock ache with a sudden, shameful hardness inside the confines of my suit.

My breath caught. For that single, suspended moment, the chaos of the fight faded into a dull roar. There was only the solid reality of his body against mine, a perfect, maddening fit. The sensation was so overwhelming, so explicitly possessive, that it felt like a violation. Like he was staking a claim without even knowing it.

He pushed away just as quickly. "Watch your six," he murmured, his voice low and tight with exertion. He spun away, his escrima stick a blur as he met the attacker I hadn't seen.

I was left leaning against the wall, my system screaming with a feedback loop of shock and raw, undeniable arousal. I turned, my movements stiff, and faced the man I'd been interrogating. My fist connected with his jaw with a force that was entirely unnecessary. It was a desperate, violent attempt to punish the feeling, to beat it back into the dark recesses of my mind where it belonged. But it was too late. The physical memory of his body pressed against mine was already seared into my nerves.

The silence in the cave was a living entity, thick and suffocating. It was broken only by the low hum of the Batcomputer and the soft clicks of the keyboard beneath my gloved fingers. I brought up the security footage from the warehouse district, my jaw tight. Dick was behind me, stripping off his own gauntlets and mask, the soft sounds echoing in the vast space. I could feel his presence like a change in the air pressure.

I didn't need to review the footage for tactical errors. I needed to see it again.

I fast-forwarded to the fight. My movements were efficient, brutal. His were something else. I watched him, a predator in his element. Then I found the moment. The attacker in my blind spot. The blur of motion that was Dick. I slowed the playback to a crawl, frame by frame.

His body hitting mine.

The impact. The way my back arched into his chest. The way his arm wrapped around me, pulling me flush against him. I zoomed in. The resolution was military-grade, crystal clear. I could see the muscles in his jaw clench. I could see the heat of his breath misting for a microsecond in the cold night air, right where it had touched my neck. I paused the frame there. His thigh was driven high between my legs, the fabric of our suits the only barrier. The angle of the camera showed the undeniable pressure, the way my body had been forced to accommodate his.

My own body reacted to the memory, to the image on the screen. A low, heavy pulse started behind the zipper of my suit. The ache from the alley hadn't subsided; it had settled deep in my groin, a persistent, demanding throb. I was fully hard, pressed uncomfortably against the reinforced material. The thought that he could have felt it, that he might have known, sent a wave of hot shame through me.

"Bruce?"

His voice cut through my concentration. I cleared the screen instantly, my fingers moving on pure reflex, bringing up meaningless schematics.

"Something wrong?" he asked, his voice closer now. I didn't turn. I could picture him perfectly—face bare, hair damp with sweat, his eyes full of a concern I couldn't bear to look at.

"The mission is over, Dick," I said. My voice was a low growl, colder than the cave's air. I kept my eyes locked on the screen, on the meaningless lines of a blueprint. I needed him gone. I needed him away from me before I did something I couldn't take back. Before he saw the truth of what was happening to me right here in my chair.

"I know, I just—"

"Go," I cut him off, the word sharp as a shard of glass. "Get cleaned up. I'm finishing here."

The silence that followed was different. It was stunned. Hurt. I felt it without seeing it. A few seconds passed, then I heard the soft tread of his boots as he turned and walked toward the elevator. The sound was a retreat. An admission of defeat.

The moment the elevator doors slid shut, sealing me in the silence of my own making, I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding. My shoulders sagged. I leaned forward, resting my forehead against the cool edge of the console. Alone. Finally.

My gaze drifted back to the monitor. I brought the image back up. The frozen frame of his body pressed into mine. The heat in my gut coiled tighter, a vicious, undeniable snake of pure lust. It wasn't pride. It wasn't mentorship. It was carnal. It was wrong. And as I stared at the man he had become, the only thing I could think about was the solid, branding weight of him, and the desperate, sickening need to feel it again.