The Long Way Around

Pairing: Dick Grayson/F!Kent!Reader

Word Count: 9.8k

Rating: Teen

Warnings: childhood friends to lovers, Kent!reader, longstanding unrequited love, rejection, jealousy, emotional hurt/comfort, canon-typical violence, brief injury, kryptonite exposure, angst with a happy ending

Summary: You’ve loved Dick Grayson for years, and he’s always known exactly how he feels about you—or at least, he thought he did.

It isn’t until you finally begin moving on that Dick starts looking back at the life you’ve built around each other and wondering when friendship became something more.

Author’s Note: written for this anon's request for my 1k celebration

as i was writing this all i could think was "dick you absolute walnut"

also sorry for not posting a single fic at all yesterday my wifi was out and then i kept getting distracted by things lol

The first time Dick noticed something was wrong, nothing was actually wrong.

The mission had gone well. Better than well, considering the four of you had spent most of the afternoon chasing an arms dealer through a warehouse district where half the buildings seemed to have been designed by someone with a personal grudge against fire codes. By the time the police arrived, the weapons were secured, the smugglers were unconscious, and Wally had vanished long enough to return with takeout for everyone.

It felt familiar in a way Dick had learned not to take for granted. The Titans were scattered more often than they weren’t these days, pulled between cities and teams and jobs and all the ordinary responsibilities adulthood had somehow managed to pile on top of saving the world. Once, gathering around a table after a mission had required nothing more complicated than walking down the hall. Now they compared calendars and took whatever evenings happened to overlap.

You usually stayed whenever everyone managed to end up in the same place. Dick knew that without ever consciously learning it. You stole some of Wally’s fries, complained about whatever takeout he’d chosen, then inevitably ended up beside Dick while everyone argued over what to watch. Sometimes you flew home to Metropolis after midnight, and sometimes you stayed in one of the Tower’s empty rooms. Once, after a particularly brutal mission and an equally brutal argument between Dick and Bruce, you’d fallen asleep with your head against Dick’s shoulder before anyone had even chosen a movie.