Breakfast was quiet. It wasn't a peaceful quiet though. It was one that hung over the group and sucked all the positivity from them. The only sound was coming from eating and from their forks tapping against the plate. Every so often one of them would cringe at making too loud a noise. Last night was rough. Dick was up two more times with nightmares. He'd ask for Bruce each time but he never came. Jason had comforted him for the first time, second overall, whilst Tim went to fetch their guardian.

"He's your kid!" Tim yelled after once again the man refused to comfort the crying child just minutes away from him. A child he was supposed to care deeply about.

"And I'm busy trying to help him. The nightmare is temporary but this could be permanent!" Bruce replied. He needed to figure this out. What if this wasn't healthy? Who knows what the side effects of sudden age change could be. They could be working with a time limit they didn't even know about and he still didn't know who to blame for the situation in the first place. 

When he returned Dick was half asleep anyway, too tired to comprehend that Bruce wasn't going to come for him. He mumbled something about redheads but they couldn't follow what he was trying to say. His sleepy slurs distorted his sentence. He fell back asleep but they knew he wouldn't stay down. Although they happened a lot less when he was older when Dick had one nightmare they persisted during the night over and over. He'd come down the stairs that morning and you could tell he'd had a rough night even if he denied the accusation. At least his younger self insisted on receiving some sort of comfort, unlike his older self that would rather die from fright. Sure enough, he woke up again. Since it was five in the morning, Bruce would be asleep so he couldn't use the excuse of researching things to avoid taking care of the boy. Jason told Dick to stay put, giving him his phone to mess around with, then went to his bedroom.

"Bruce, get up. He needs you."

"He'll be fine," Bruce mumbled. He was so tired. The adrenaline of the events had left him exhausted. He'd basically passed out when he finally dragged himself up to bed. He didn't want to upset Dick if he got agitated from his lack of sleep. 

"Bruce."

"It's fine. He'll go back to sleep."

So they were all pissed off with Bruce and Bruce was too headstrong to admit that he had been in the wrong.  

Finally, the silence was broken. Dick had been having a back and forth in his head as he tried to predict how the argument that was bound to come would go. He'd come up with a few come backs in case it devolved into insults. It hardly did and when it did, he was the one who started it because he felt like he was losing and couldn't think of another way to get the higher ground. He placed down his fork and looked over to his guardian. The man had his face buried in the newspaper as if to avoid conversation. That wouldn't last long. "I was up three times last night," he stated. The paper wasn't put down. He frowned. "You didn't come once."

"Your brothers had it handled," Bruce responded from behind the black and white wall he'd made for himself. 

"But I don't know them. No offense but I'd rather be comforted by someone I know."

"No offense taken," Tim stated on behalf of his siblings. 

"Then I'll have Alfred listen out for you." Dick's eye twitched with pure anger and he snatched the paper out of Bruce's hands. 

"You're my guardian! You're supposed to listen out for me!"

"You're not to snatch Richard, you know better," Bruce scolded, ignoring his outcry. It was just so much easier to deal with the snatching. Maybe he was getting lazy. It'd been a while since he dealt with a nine-year-old. Damian had been a handful and he guessed that zapped away the last of his parenting skills for children. Dick stared at him, almost too shocked to maintain his frustration. 

"Really? That's what you're focusing on?" He threw the paper down with a huff as he got his second wind. "I hope I do find a way to grow up so I'm old enough to leave and never come back!" he yelled, running to the safety of his room. 

"Dick, get back here!" A slam was his response. He sighed and looked around the table. In the doorway that connected the dining room to the kitchen, he spotted Alfred. Every one of them was staring at him with a varying degree of contempt. "I'm tired."

"And he's in a time that he has no knowledge of, having nightmares about people he doesn't even know and he doesn't know how long he'll be like this. It's pretty obvious which one is worse," Tim snapped back. 

"Drake and I don't agree on much so it should be telling that on this occasion I find myself agreeing with him," Damian added. "I'm no happier about the situation than you but when you fostered Grayson at nine, you made a promise to look after him and care for him like a father. Right now, you're no more than a terrible babysitter." The billionaire sighed and glanced longingly at the stairs. It's not like he meant to be awful to the kid he was just a different person from back then. He was tougher. He expected his kids to know that he loved them even if he hardly showed it. Now Dick was too young to catch the reason why he didn't come last night. Bruce assumed that even if he did, he wouldn't care. At the end of the day, he was a child who really needed a dad. That dad was him. He got up from his seat wordlessly and ascended the stairs. He needed to take responsibility. He needed to be a dad. 

SORRY FOR THE SHORT UPDATE BUT I'LL HAVE MORE OUT SOON