tw. mentions of suicide, main character deaths, grieving

Dick got the call from Bruce just after midnight.

He was mid-patrol in Blüdhaven, crouched on a rooftop overlooking a weapons drop, when the comms crackled.

"Dick."
Bruce's voice wasn't clipped like usual. It wasn't calm. It was... tired.

Dick stood, heart stalling.

"What happened?"

There was a long pause. Then:

"Melina's dead."

The words didn't make sense at first. Not in his brain. Not in his chest.

He didn't speak. Couldn't.

Bruce kept talking, but Dick wasn't hearing the details. Just fragments. Suicide. Gunshot. Husband. Maeve found her. Alone.

Then silence.

Dick didn't remember leaving the roof. Didn't remember landing. One moment he was standing in the city air, and the next he was back in his apartment, breaking down in the dark.

He hadn't spoken to Melina in weeks.

Not since the last time he came by the apartment before she ended things. When she made some dry joke about him being "too pretty to be on their street." She'd laughed, but her eyes looked so tired.

And now she was gone.

He sank onto the floor beside his bed and let the grief come.

For the things he never got to say.

For the feelings he never let surface — not when she was too busy surviving, and he was too afraid of making her one more thing he couldn't protect.

He loved her.

Maybe not in the way most people got to love — with dates and promises and soft mornings — but in that quiet, aching way where every time she was near, he felt steadier. Needed. Real.

And now she was gone.

Another ghost in a city full of them.

Later — Wayne Manor,

Dick walked into the Manor like a shadow, his steps too quiet, his eyes red. Alfred met him in the hall and didn't say a word — just rested a hand on his shoulder. That was enough.

He found Maeve in the spare room. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, Melina's jacket clutched to her chest, hollow-eyed.

Dick dropped to his knees in front of her.

"Maeve..."

She looked up slowly. "She's really gone."

He nodded, swallowing hard. "Yeah."

"I didn't get to save her," Maeve whispered, voice breaking. "I wasn't strong enough."

Dick reached forward and took her hand, voice shaking. "She died saving you, Maeve. She died making sure you got out. You don't carry her failure — you carry her love."

Maeve collapsed into him, and he held her tight, grief spilling between them like open wounds.

That Night,

Dick sat alone in the cave, suit still on, blood drying on his gloves from some street scuffle he didn't even remember.

He looked at the screen in front of him — security footage Bruce had pulled from the house.

Melina's final moments. The lipstick message on the mirror.

"Tell Dick I'm sorry, that I truly do love him."

He stared at those words for a long time.

Then, softly — more to himself than anyone else — he whispered:

"You don't have anything to be sorry for love."

Then he turned off the screen, buried his face in his hands, and let the silence close in.

The only sound was the hum of the Batcomputer and the soft scrape of Dick's gloves being ripped off, tossed to the floor like they'd betrayed him.

"Where was he?" Dick finally asked, his voice low, controlled — the kind of control that only came from barely clinging to the edge of something feral.

"Ethiopia," Bruce said. "He went after his biological mother. It was a trap. The Joker got there first."

Dick's jaw clenched. "You let him go alone?"

"He didn't tell me until it was too late," Bruce answered.

Too late.

Dick slammed his fist into the desk. "Of course he didn't! You shut him out every time he got too loud! He was screaming for help and you buried him under mission files!"

The cave echoed with the impact.

But Bruce said nothing. He just stood there — silent, stiff, grieving in that maddening, empty way of his.

Dick turned away. He couldn't look at him.

Later That Night,

He found himself in Jason's room at the Manor. It still smelled like old leather, cheap cologne, and whatever takeout he used to sneak past Alfred.

There was a photo on the desk — Jason, Melina, and Maeve. Smiling. Like they'd actually had a moment of peace.

Dick picked it up and sat on the bed, staring at it until his vision blurred.

"I should've told you I was proud of you," he whispered. "You were loud. Messy. Angry. But you were real. And you loved hard, even when you didn't know how to say it."

His voice cracked.

"You didn't deserve to die alone in a warehouse with that monster laughing. You didn't deserve to be a lesson in what happens when you love too much."