Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Kill whatever killed your father,” your life turning to me again said before your death. Hard to grow old still hungry. 

You were still hungry at your death.

Frank Bidart.

Alfred comes and sits on the end of Dick’s bed, just like last time. “Sir,” Alfred falters.

Dick looks away. Alfred reaches for his hand, and Dick pulls it out of his grasp, shoving it back under the covers. 

“Master Dick,” Alfred croons, sounding pained for him. “It isn’t — he only wanted to — ”

“Save it,” Dick whispers harshly, and Alfred does, because he’s good like that. Because he knows what it’s like to be human, with feelings and needs and emotions. The lump in Dick’s throat hardens as Alfred dutifully lets the silence sit. The words Dick prepared steamroll out of his mouth anyway as he squeezes his hot eyes shut. “Just save it, Alfred. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear any of it.”

Alfred says nothing. 

Dick should be grateful for that. That’s what he wanted, what he wants. For Alfred to just leave him alone and let him wallow in the depths of his misery. For Alfred to leave him alone to mourn.

“I hate him,” Dick whispers instead. 

Alfred shifts. A hand lays itself over Dick’s knee, covered by the duvet. 

“I hate him. I hate him. He doesn’t get to just do this to me. He doesn’t just get to take it. It was my mother’s. How could he take that from me? I would never set his mom’s pearls on fire or anything. Alfred, I wouldn’t. I’d never. This is the last thing I had of — ” Dick’s throat closes, choking him. His cheeks feel hot, and dimly he realizes it’s his own tears. “Robin was the only thing I had that was mine.”

Alfred squeezes his knee tightly. “My boy...I’m so sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. But you must know everything he does, he does to keep you safe. He wouldn’t — I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if you ever...well, it doesn’t even bear thinking about, child.”

Last time Bruce took Robin away, Dick was twelve with a broken arm and smithereens for ribs, but even then he was sitting in bed, all bandaged up just like he is now, when Bruce stalked out and Alfred crept in to pick up the pieces.

Back then, Dick had said, “What am I supposed to do now?” and now it falls out of his mouth fully formed without him ever meaning to say it. 

Last time, Alfred tutted at him for asking such a pessimistic question, cuffed him tenderly upside the chin and let his hand stay there, said, Perhaps he will reconsider. 

Now, instead, Alfred makes a low, sympathetic noise. 

His voice slips to a murmur. “I don’t know, Master Dick.” He swallows audibly. “I don’t know.”

“You’re not eating.”

Dick glances up emptily. Bruce is staring at him with that blank, unnerving expression, looking like a slab of stone someone drilled eyesockets into.

It’s their first dinner together since the Joker nearly killed him and Bruce subsequently fired him. Dick’s been taking dinners alone in his room instead, an indulgence Alfred never ever allowed before. It goes to show how much Alfred must pity Dick these days, now that he roams around the house like a recovering ghost. 

“I’m not hungry.” 

“Alfred made this specifically for you.”

“There’s nothing the matter with what he made,” Dick says quietly. “I’m just not hungry.”

Bruce’s eyes slit. 

“Is something,” Bruce hushes, “...wrong.”

Dick pushes his plate away. It clinks against his glass of water, startlingly loud in the tense silence. Bruce’s cheek tics.

Is something wrong? Is something wrong?

Is Dick no longer Robin? Is Dick fired over something that wasn’t even his fault? Fired over an injury that he’s had far worse than? Did Bruce strip away something that wasn’t his to take? Is Bruce unrepentant? Is Dick slowly going insane and wasting away over having absolutely nothing to do and no way to help? Does all of that hurt worse than the literal bullet Joker put in his shoulder? 

They stare at each other for a long, long time. 

And then Bruce says, “I see.” But he doesn’t. Dick knows he doesn’t. Dick doesn’t think he ever will. 

Losing Robin is a lot of things. Dick can honestly say he expected most of them.

Dick has been afraid of it for a long time. Robin was the tendon between him and Bruce, between the muscle and the bone. It was always in the back of his mind exactly what that tendon snapping would mean. 

So Dick anticipates the anger and the grief, the fear and the dread, the panic, the hopelessness, the listlessness — the feeling of energy thrashing under his skin with nowhere to go. 

But what he doesn’t anticipate is the loneliness. 

Losing Robin is like losing everything, even his friends.

How is he supposed to tell them he was fired? That he wasn’t good enough? It’s humiliating. It’s mortifying. 

All Dick wants to do is tell someone, curl up in their lap and cry, and hear them be angry for him, but he can’t, because it means they’ll know. They’ll know that somehow, somehow, Dick wasn’t good enough. 

So Dick wraps his arms around himself and stops looking at his phone, and it’s not a big deal. Donna’s busy, Garth’s under the sea, and nobody’s seen heads or tails of Roy in months. And God knows Wally’s got bigger things to do than worry about Dick. They probably don’t even notice, But Dick misses them something awful in his self-inflicted exile. 

When he finally gets back to school, the official story is he got caught in the crossfire of Joker’s escape, which isn’t even a lie. His friends there pick up on something (though he isn’t sure quite what), eye him, ask if he’s all right, and Dick can’t even muster the energy to string up his lips when he lies. “Yeah. Course.”

They don’t know, or understand. 

Dick isn’t sure that anyone could.

It’s three weeks after the Joker shot him, and Dick’s head cocks. 

The door to his bedroom is ajar. Just slightly. Not tightly closed like he left it before school this morning — like he always leaves it now so Bruce gets the message: Don’t come in. You’re not welcome.

Dick glances back down the hallway. Alfred headed right into the kitchen after he got Dick home from school, and Bruce is at work, which means that whoever did this…

Dick’s jaw sets.

Cautiously, he pushes the door open with two fingers. 

His backpack slips off his arms the very second he sees the person sprawled on his floor, jaw dropping practically to the ground. 

The person’s head lifts up as the door creaks, body straightening clumsily as if they can’t do it fast enough, and their face lights up.

“...Miss me?” grins Roy Harper.

And all of a sudden, if only for an instant, it’s like the weight that’s been living in Dick’s chest is just gone. 

Dick doesn’t know what happens in-between, but then he’s laughing like a crazy person and holding on tight to his best friend’s neck, the two of them swaying so much they end up falling apart and crashing to the ground, fortunately on Dick’s good shoulder. 

“What!” Dick whisper-yells at the ceiling, giggling. His gaze slides over to the boy yanking himself up into a sitting position beside him, unbelieving. “You're — you’re  — ”

“I’m!” Roy agrees goodnaturedly through his own laughter. 

Dick pushes himself up and just plain gapes at his best friend for a good, long moment. 

Roy looks tanner, skinnier than before in a way that makes the bone-hook of his nose sharper in a weird way, but he’s alive. Wonderfully, beautifully alive. 

It’s silent. 

“...You’re not dead,” Dick breathes finally, staring at him in wonder.

Roy pretends to check his pulse, 

“No. Not yet,” he adds, wiggling his eyebrows. 

Dick rolls his eyes even though he’s beaming ear to ear. He rakes his hands through his hair roughly, still reeling. It feels like his chest is an opened sodapop. 

“Where have you even been all these months, Harper?”

Roy scratches the back of his neck. “Oh, boy. All over the place, Dickie. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” 

Dick waits expectantly for Roy to tell him all about it anyway, to regale him with his adventures, but he…doesn’t. 

Instead, Roy’s gone silent, squinting across at him and studying Dick the way he had studied Roy just a second ago. Roy must see something there that he doesn’t like because his expression changes to one almost worried, mouth twisting. 

Dick’s stomach twists. God, is losing Robin that obvious? 

“Are you — ” 

“Yeah,” Dick interrupts quickly, “Yeah. I’m okay.”

“...You sure?” Roy sounds skeptical. 

Dick mimes checking his pulse too, waits a second. Watches Roy’s shoulders relax a little when Dick flashes a soft smile at him. “Not dead yet, at least.”

There’s still a glint of concern that lingers in Roy’s eyes, but he sighs, smiles, obviously relieved, and Dick feels relieved, too, for having passed it off. Dick knows it’s not a lie that can last forever, but it still lodges a lump in his throat and a dead, heavy feeling in his chest to think of admitting to one of the best heroes he knows that he wasn’t good enough. 

“Well, good. Cause I’m hijacking you whether the old man’s okay with it or not.”

“He’s very much not,” Dick mutters instantly, tacking on, “I’m...grounded,” when Roy lifts a brow in question. There. Half-truth. That’s good enough, right? Then, Dick pauses, brain finally catching up. He blinks. “Hijacking?”

Roy grins crookedly. And the next thing Dick knows, they’re sneaking out of Dick’s window in broad daylight, loudly shushing each other so Alfred doesn’t hear. Even though the climbing makes Dick’s injured shoulder feel like it’s on fire, it’s the best Dick’s felt in days. 

Dick pauses once his toes hit the ground, and then he turns to Roy, watching, for a second, how the sun glints off the shiny tip of his nose and makes his hair more orange than red, and suddenly the words crowd out of his mouth. “The answer’s yes, by the way.”

Roy’s nose scrunches in confusion. “Answer’s yes to what?”

“Missing you.”

And then Roy’s strangely tan, strangely bony face breaks into a big, warm grin that feels like throwing open the windows on a hot day. He guffaws. “I missed you back, boy wonder.”

The sky’s getting dark, the sun only a carved-out, applemeal colored speck on the horizon by the time they first get to the beach, and it’s completely black by the time they return to the sand with their haul from a late-night convenience store. 

Roy pitches a fire on a line of driftwood, and Dick laughs as Roy jumps back when the sparks catch faster than he anticipates. 

“How come I’m being laughed at when I’m the one saving us from the elements, From freezing with hypothermia? You want to try? No? That’s what I thought.”

“It’s sixty degrees out, Roy. We’re not going to freeze.”

“You never know when hypothermia’s going to strike,” Roy says solemnly. Dick reaches into the plastic bag from the store and throws an ice cream bar at him. 

Roy’s character breaks, and he falls back into the sand beside Dick laughing, letting a companionable silence hang between the fire’s fingersnap noises and the unwrapping of their ice cream. Roy sighs, and it sounds like a breath he’s been holding in since the day he was born. “Tell me something, man.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Just anything. How’ve you been? How’s the team been? I feel like I missed so much.”

That’s because you’ve been impossible to find for six whole months. We were beginning to think you were dead, Dick thinks with a touch too much bitterness, but he bites his tongue instead. He shreds the edge of his paper ice cream wrapper. “...Garth started wearing pants.”

“Stop lying.”

Dick can’t help it. He smiles. “I’m not. I mean, tights, technically, but big moment for him.” He finds himself warming to the topic, finding it easy to talk to Roy there on the beach, almost as if nothing’s changed at all since they were kids and did this sort of thing all the time. “The HIVE’s been quiet for a while so they’re probably putting the finishing touches on their plan to get our identities and murder all of us, so nothing super new there.” Roy smiles. “And then Wally, his dad sat him down at the table back in June, and had a long talk with him and apologized. I guess he said he was going to try and be better, and then he hugged him for a really long time.”

“Dunno if I buy that.”

“Yeah. But that was two months ago, and things have been better since then. At least...um, last I heard. We haven’t...really spoken in a minute.” He pauses, glancing down at Roy. “What about you?”

Roy, lying down on the sand to the left of where Dick sits, blinks. “What about me?”

“What have you been up to?”

“Aw, come on. I don’t want to talk about me. You know I don’t like bragging.”

Dick’s eyes practically roll back into his head. “No, really. What have you been doing all these months? Finding yourself or something?”

Roy sucks his teeth, the firelight flickering over his face as Dick stares down at him. His gaze is fixed firmly on the sky — the little fingernail moon in the dark — and then suddenly his face twists, and he scoffs, self-deprecatingly, bitterly. The change is so sudden that Dick starts. Roy’s voice is rough and fast.

“I don’t know, Dickie. I wish I had been. I wish I had been finding myself. I feel like I’ve just been — getting everything all twisted up instead. You know? Like I don’t know what’s right anymore. I don’t want to — I can’t tell you. You’d think less of me.”

“Roy, I’d never.”

Roy’s gaze finally meets Dick’s. Dick’s mouth goes dry.

“I’d never.”

Roy’s mouth twists, and then he’s silent for a minute. He sighs. His voice is almost inaudible. 

“Maybe one day I’ll tell you everything.”

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah.” Roy exhales, screwing his eyes shut. “Yeah, maybe.”

The fire crackling is the only sound for a good minute. “You don’t have to,” Dick says at last. “You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. But if you ever — ” Dick falters, cringing at how inadequate it all sounds. “If you ever do...I’m here.” 

The silence comes back, and it stays for a long time. 

“There’s this girl,” Roy says. “There’s this girl.” And he doesn’t say anything else, and they sit there in silence watching the fire. 

Dick thinks for a while, sitting there silently next to his best friend, about filling one of their plastic water bottles up with sand or snatching up some seashells to remember tonight by. But that feels too sentimental, too pathetic, and Dick wonders if he didn’t push too far and ruin the evening anyway by asking Roy about what he’s been doing the last few months, so he doesn’t. 

“C’mon,” Roy says when the fire dies a while later, exhaling. “We should get you back home soon.”

Roy tosses the wrapper from his ice cream onto the charcoal when he braces his hands on his knees and stands. Its edges curl a little and blacken. It makes a noise like someone biting into an apple, and staring at it, Dick wishes so badly that his stomach aches that Roy hadn’t said that. 

He doesn’t want to go back home soon. He doesn’t want to go back home at all. 

But he doesn’t say that out loud. He doesn’t say anything at all. Instead, he swallows, and nods, and presses his own wrapper between his fingertips, surreptitiously hiding the precious little paper relic in the knit pocket of his sweater instead of throwing it into the fire.

Alfred flicks a light on in the Manor the second Roy’s truck rolls through the gate.

Dick can tell it’s Alfred because it comes from the window by the butler’s room — a bright orange square lighting up in the middle of the pitch-black night.

Roy’s right hand, resting on the edge of Dick’s seat, knocks against his shoulder as if to say, You going to be okay? 

“Yeah, course,” Dick replies quickly, swallowing. “I’ll be fine. Maybe they didn’t even notice I was gone. It’s not like Bruce and I have been talking anyway, and, I mean, it’s 3 a.m., he probably isn’t even aw — ” Another window lights up on the east side. Bruce’s side. 

They exhale in unison. 

“...Nevermind.” Dick thumps his head back against the seat, and screws his eyes shut tight, sighing.

“Hey.” The hand grabs his shoulder proper. Dick cracks an eye back open  —  Roy’s leaning over with his crooked, chip-toothed grin, all lit up by the glow from his dashboard. “If you don’t want to be here, you don’t got to. Skip school tomorrow or whatever. I can turn around right now, just say the word. I don’t have any place to be.”

Dick considers it. 

He really does. 

Until he catches sight of the illuminated windows again. He gives Roy a weak, apologetic smile. “...I should probably head in before I make things any worse.” 

Roy’s mouth ticks up on one side, sort of wry, sort of resigned, like he knew what Dick was going to say before he said it. Like an adult winding up a children’s toy and being unsurprised when the jack in the box pops. 

“Figured.”

Dick unbuckles his seatbelt and opens the door, and when he closes it behind him, he pauses, palm flat on the handle, brows furrowing. Roy has the windows rolled down like always, so Dick can still see his silhouette in the dark, the stray strands of hair, the line of his arm reaching for the gearstick.

“Hey,” Dick says finally, hesitating one last time. “Um, thanks for coming to see me. I know you didn’t have to.”

“Yeah,” Roy says, “I did.”

Dick shakes his head — smiles softly to himself in the dark. Lifts his hand from the door with some effort, then looks up, almost shyly. “Night, Roy.”

“Night,” Roy says, after a second. And then he drives away, leaving Dick alone in the driveway in the lights Alfred flicked on. He stands there a minute or two longer, before he can finally push himself up the rest of the way to the door.

The second he opens it, he wishes he had driven away with Roy after all. Coming down the stairs with a dark expression is Bruce, eyes intense. Dick’s suddenly so full of dread his teeth ache. “You’re up late,” Dick jokes weakly as the door clicks shut behind him.  

Bruce stops on the last step, about twenty feet away from Dick. “Are you injured.”

Dick swallows. This is bad. “B — ”

“I said,” Bruce murmurs, eyes burning into Dick, “Are you injured.”

 “...No.”

Bruce exhales shakily, shutting his eyes. And just like that, the surgical coldness is gone for a second, replaced by the Bruce that Dick’s been dealing with since the Joker shot him: the strange, anxious one who won’t let Dick do anything. There’s a part of Dick that pities him, for being so deeply, inescapably afraid of whatever it is he’s so scared of, but a larger part says — says —  

“Then what were you thinking, Dick? I told you Robin was done. And I meant it. You’ve disobeyed for the thousandth time — ”

“...What? What are you even talking about? ” Dick backsteps, startled. “I wasn’t out as Robin. I couldn’t if I wanted to, could I? You locked me out of the Cave, remember? I don’t even have access to files anymore, much less my costume.”

“Then where were you?” 

“I went to the beach with Roy.”

Bruce’s expression flattens, voice dropping like a pin. “You expect me to believe that.”

Dick’s mouth begins to tremble, part anger and part oncoming frustrated tears. Absurdly, he wants to stamp his foot, like some sort of child. His voice shakes like crazy. “It’s the truth. I expect you to believe it because it’s the truth, B. I expect you to believe it because we’re supposed to be partners. Or at least we were. Maybe we’re not anymore because you got scared but we used to be. I thought that meant something, B. I thought you thought of me better than that. You know I wouldn’t lie to you. You know I don’t lie to you. If you want to,” the lump in Dick’s throat makes it hard to speak. “If you really want to know, we went to the beach and had a bonfire. That’s it. Sorry I didn’t tell you. Okay? Sorry. Sorry, Bruce. I’m sorry. But I don’t — I don’t know what you expect me to do if I’m not allowed to be Dick Grayson and I’m not allowed to be Robin either.”

His chest heaves. Bruce stares at him, and for a second, he almost looks human — emotion in his black eyes and something like pain written on his face — and Dick jumps on the chance to use it. 

But he jumps on it too soon.   

“Please let me have Robin back. Please. Please.”

Bruce’s mouth moves, and words don’t come out. His eyes shut, then open, and hope stabs its spidery legs into the inside of Dick’s chest. 

And then Bruce says, “No.”

Dick’s eyes sear, and whatever’s in him collapses into rage. 

“Why? Why? What was so different about this time, Bruce? I’ve gotten shot before! You get shot once a year — why was — ”

“Because I thought you died, Dick!” Bruce snaps. “I saw the Joker shoot you, and I thought that you — ” 

“So? Back when Two-Face — ”

“That was different,” Bruce snarls, eyes sparking dangerously. “That was different.”

“How?”

“Because that was before I knew how much I — ” and Bruce stops. He stops himself right there. He stops, mouth snapping shut. Teeth sliding, the silence so abrupt it crackles. 

He stops, like he almost just gave himself away.

“Before you knew how much you what, Bruce?” Dick demands in a whisper, fingers curling slowly at his side. The tears building behind his eyes aren’t from the anger anymore.

Bruce’s mouth twitches. He shakes his head twice, very slowly. 

“This discussion is over,” Bruce hushes, voice tight, after a long time has passed. He steps back once, stiffly, starting to turn. “Go to your room, Dick. It’s over.”

“No, it’s not.” Dick shakes his head furiously, starting after him. It’s like every fear and insecurity inside his chest is pouring out. “Before you knew how much what? How ‘inadequate’ I am? How much better off you are without a stupid fucking kid as your — ”

Bruce is starting up the wide, elegant stairs with his hands braced in his pocket, but at that, he whips around, as if startled. “That is not — ” 

Dick scoffs and raises his chin to meet Bruce’s gaze derisively, but then falters.

Bruce is staring at him. Like a mine elevator snapped off the track, plunging down the shaft and scraping the walls. His eyes have that manic, dazzling intensity they get sometimes when a villain goes too far, when a socialite slyly insults his parents, when for some reason, there is no more veil between the man he pretends to be and the man that he is. All that mechanical, one-minded drive, all that passion, all that fear that Bruce has never been able to shake away, all that fear that he will never ever give away . It’s Bruce, pure and undiluted. 

It’s scary. 

Dick has never been scared of Bruce before. Not for a long time. 

Not like this. 

Dick’s voice disappears from his throat. Suddenly, he feels impossibly small, and the silence and the stairs and the man standing on them feel impossibly, crushingly large.

Bruce swallows visibly. His cheek tics.

“That is not what this is about,” he rasps finally, lamely, voice with none of the intensity of his gaze. His eyes do not leave Dick, do not blink. “This is over, Dick. Go to your room.”

Dick feels the nails digging into his palm break the skin. He watches Bruce turn and ghost across the stairs in silence.

Dick holds in the tears until he’s in his room. 

“I saw you outside with Mr. Harper before Master Bruce’s...exchange with you. It was good to see some life back in your eyes, Master Dick,” Alfred confides in a whisper not long after. His eyes shine fondly as he peeks through the doorway. “You can’t know how it’s hurt to see you so sad of late.”

Dick’s vision swims with tears, the lump in his throat hardening so he can’t reply. He turns his face away.

Alfred makes a soft, hesitant noise, lingering in the doorway to try another tactic. “...Have I perchance told you I love you yet today?”

It’s a little game Alfred and he have played since Dick was eight. Dick gives a wet, sad laugh, and the tears finally spill out again. He digs the heels of his palms into his eyes in a vain effort to somehow keep them back.  “No,” he whispers. 

“Well,” says Alfred, “I love you today.”

“I love you back,” Dick immediately chokes through tears. He inhales wetly, voice dropping into a shaky whisper. “And I’m sorry I made you sad, Alfie. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’ll try to be better. I just...I...”

Alfred tuts gently. 

“I won’t hear anything of the sort, child. I didn’t mean to give you another burden to take on. I know you’re grieving. You deserve to grieve your mantle. It only hurts to watch because I love you so much. My happy little boy.” A noise comes from Alfred that sounds suspiciously like a sniffle. He clears his throat, voice strange, and quickly changes the subject. “Good night, Master Dick, and do take heart. Tomorrow will be better.”

“It’ll be different.” 

“I daresay that’s the best part.”

“That’s the worst part,” Dick says before he can stop himself, voice cracking with bitterness even though it’s almost silent. “I don’t want it to be different than it was. I want it to go back to normal. I want Bruce to go back to trusting me. I want to be Robin again.” 

“Oh, child,” Alfred whispers, and Dick flops into his pillow to cry all alone. 

The door clips shut quietly, Alfred dutiful as always in respecting his nonverbal request to be left on his own. He doesn’t even venture in to grab Dick’s laundry like he usually does at night. The only thing he takes with him is the hallwaylight. The dark floods back over the walls. 

And then Dick’s alone — just like he wanted. 

But as soon as he is, he wishes more than anything, even more than he wishes for Robin back, that he wasn’t.

It’s two weeks later, Dick is chewing on the cap of a pen in the middle of English class, and he gets an actual, physiological feeling. Like suddenly there’s magnets in his chest. It makes Dick say, “May I be excused for a second?”

It’s a feeling. It’s instinct. But there’s no reason for it.

He winds the bookmark hall pass between his fingers as he steps out. The hallways outside the classroom are empty. The courtyard is empty. The bus lot is empty. Everyone’s in class right now — it’s eight a.m. It’s gated. There’s security outside. It’s safe, Dick concludes finally, wandering Gotham Academy’s sage-green halls, and then he frowns. Deeply.

There is no such thing as “safe” in Gotham. 

Dick bites his lip. Then climbs up to the highest building’s rooftop to double-check from a bird’s eye view just in case, and when he pulls himself up, it’s like the magnets in his chest go perfectly still, clinging together. 

Because standing across from him on the roof is a man, covered in gray and white and weapons, grinning from underneath his cowl:

“Hello, Robin.”

Dick should be stiffening because this man has a katana and professional-grade weapons dripping off of him. He should be alarmed that this guy is at Dick Grayson ’s school and calling Robin’s name. He should be worried that he’s facing someone in full armor while wearing nothing but his school uniform and boat shoes. 

He should be playing the confused rich boy act and say, honestly, for once, ‘I’m not Robin. You’ve got the wrong guy.’

He should be running the other way. 

There are a thousand things that Dick should be. 

He isn’t any of them. 

Instead, involuntarily, Dick finds himself bouncing on the tips of his toes, almost physically unable to contain his simmering excitement. 

This is exactly the kind of thing he’s been missing. 

The guy’s head tilts in confusion a second before he charges at Dick, who lurches expertly to the side, blood pounding in his ears while an overjoyed bark of laughter escapes from his throat. 

Dick slams a heel into the man’s jaw, and the guy stumbles back, but not as far as he should. Dick pauses — maybe he’s rustier than he thought without Robin — but takes advantage of the small gap it gives him to push off of the rooftop and onto a nearby one, then another and another, leading the guy away from the school as he pursues Dick doggedly. 

For a minute, besides the guy not seeming as affected as he should by Dick’s hits, it’s perfect.

It really is everything Dick has been missing, and more — leaping across rooftops with someone hot on his heels, dancing between swipes of a blade and swings of a fist, feeling excitement and adrenaline and like he’s just plain alive again. 

Like he’s him again.

Even though his hair is sticking to his forehead with sweat, his face aches from smiling this much. He can’t remember the last time he smiled this much. 

And he can feel the guy getting frustrated, too — he’s good, he’s really, really good, Dick can tell, and if Dick hadn’t been throwing everything he’s been storing up for the last month at him, if Dick had let his guard down one single centimeter, he probably would have been shish-kabobed on that sword a while ago. 

Guy’s clearly not used to losing, which makes it all feel even better. 

That is, until the guy isn’t losing anymore.

From out of nowhere, there are thick, meaty fingers closing around Dick’s throat and squeezing so tight his eyes pop, vision whitening on the edges. He hoists Dick up, one-handed, by his throat, his feet dangling uselessly above the ground. 

Dick chokes.

“Hi, Robin.” The man grins, green eyes glinting through the holes in his cowl. There’s sweat glittering down the side of his face, his heavy breath warm on Dick’s skin. “You’re as good as they say, you know.” 

His grip tightens, cutting off the last of Dick’s air, thumb jamming down hard in the hollow of his throat. 

“You’re just not as good as me.”

Dick tries to claw the hands away from his neck in vain. It’s useless; the man is inhumanly strong. 

The guy chuckles, something jangling as he does. Dick shouldn’t waste his last air and seconds of consciousness on something so useless, but that sound draws him, like a bell, fixing his attention on the man’s collarbone even as his head starts to pound with the lack of oxygen. 

The man follows his gaze and grins even sharper, yanking out a chain from under his collar. It’s a dogtag. 

“Oh. You want to know who I am, little boy?” The grip loosens only a fraction, but Dick’s throat whistles as he sucks in the little air he can get greedily, still digging his fingernails into the man’s hand. 

The man raises the dogtag, and there’s something written on it, Dick assumes, but his vision’s way too blurry to read. 

“I’m the person who’s going to kill you and your friends next. The HIVE said to do you all at once, but I can only imagine how your little team is going to fall apart without a leader.” Dick hears something shink in the man’s other hand: a blade, he thinks dimly, blinking furiously. “After you, it’ll be the girl — ”

And no. Just no. 

It takes every ounce of Dick’s strength to swing his legs up, but he somehow manages it, foot cracking up against the man’s jaw hard enough for him to drop Dick, who slams down hard on his bad shoulder. Dick chokes, mouth full of spit, but he slams his elbows against the ground, pulls himself up, and runs. 

Behind him, the man gives a guttural yell, followed by pounding footsteps.

Dick’s head pounds with the lack of oxygen as he tears across the rooftop. Two roofs ahead, there’s the bank building, which has no handholds to speak of and a roof at least twenty stories up from where they are now. He can’t go forward. He snaps his head to the side, desperately searching for another option. 

There’s an apartment building they just started construction on a few weeks ago to the left. It’s too early for construction today, Dick’s brain supplies automatically, like a calculator. That means less opportunity for collateral damage, less civilians in the crossfire. 

He yanks his body into a turn, jumping and picking into a run along a wooden ledge on the construction site. Turning costs him some time, though, and the guy’s strange, newly damp breathing is suddenly close, too close. Five yards? Three? 

Fingertips graze one of his shoulder blades. This isn’t fun anymore. This isn’t fun. It’s not —  

Dick is going to die here. The man is right behind him, and as soon as Dick stops running, it’s going to be over. He tries to swallow, but his throat is too swollen. Another graze, scratching down his spine hard, and he missteps, ankle twisting as the sole of his foot lands on the side of the narrow ledge — he stumbles. This is it. 

But it’s not. Because the very same second that he stumbles, weight slamming down, the ledge breaks. 

Dick’s head cracks against a cement pillar, and he’s out before they even hit the ground.

Dick comes to with a shudder. The mouth in his blood is thick. 

No. That’s not right. Is it?

Dick swallows slowly, painfully pushing himself to his knees before opening his eyes. Slowly, he works his tongue around his mouth. 

The blood in his mouth is thick. Like gelatine. He spits. It dribbles slowly out of his lips. 

He stares as a molar drops noiselessly to the ground with it. 

His fingers tremble on the way to his lips, coasting over the wetness there and onto the skin of his face, but he can’t bring his fingertips to touch the edge of his skull, so they just hover a millimeter over his skin. When his hand falls back to his lap, it’s red anyway. 

“Hh,” Dick gasps. Everything hurts, but in a slow, numb, pounding way that Dick knows means he hasn’t even begun to feel the half of, as if the full force of it is being held back like the millions of pounds of pressure behind glass at an aquarium.

It takes a moment before he even registers the screaming. 

Dick staggers up, forcing himself toward the sound, but the screaming doesn’t get louder like it should. 

It dulls, and has stopped altogether by the time Dick drops down on his knees next to the man who chased him here. The effort makes his vision smear. 

When it clears, he exhales sharply. 

The man who chased him is on his back — a long wet rebar through the center of his chest.

There’s tiny, foamy white bubbles pouring out of the side of his mouth, frothing on his tongue, and his whole mouth is slack and open. But he’s not screaming anymore. He’s just still. 

Clumsily, Dick puts two fingers together and starts to pull up the man’s cowl to feel for a pulse, but he stops short, his own slow heartbeat dragging to a total halt. 

“Oh, God,” Dick whispers. 

With the mask pulled up just to his forehead, Dick can see him clearly — the square face and chin sandpapered with rough, babyish stubble. The sweat beading on his skin. The soft bulge of his cheeks and the wide, unfocused green eyes that blink hazily up at Dick. And then, the worst of it all: 

He can’t be any older than Roy.  

Dick falls back lamely on his haunches. 

“You’re just a kid.”

The man —  guy — kid — teenager? — just stares right at Dick, mouth dropping open slackly. 

Dick swallows thickly, tongue brushing the sharp corner of his broken tooth and slitting, filling his mouth with more blood. But there’s a familiar resolve that settles in him, the sudden confidence that comes with being Robin. And this is part of a routine he’s done as Robin far too many times. 

“Hey. Hey, can you hear me?” Dick croaks, gently, fumbling for his pulse again. The guy’s skin is burning hot, inhumanly hot, and his pulse is thready. Dick’s stomach twists. Not good. “W-would you tell me your name?

The guy’s jaw works, Adam’s apple bobbing, but nothing comes out. 

Dick catches a glint of silver, and he gingerly pulls at the chain around the boy’s collar that he had flashed earlier, unfastening it so he can put the dogtag in his hand and actually read it.

“Grant?” Dick’s voice fails him, so he clears his throat. “Grant Wilson. That’s a very nice name.”

When he was Robin and someone was dying, he would talk and put their head on his knees and touch them and ask them their name. Would find someone in the crowd later on who knew it; would be the one to deliver the news.

He digs his thumbnail into the G engraved on the metal, clears his throat painfully. “...You got parents?”

Grant makes a gurgling noise. 

“That sounded like a yes.” Dick falters, searching desperately for something comforting to say to a dying kid he doesn’t know the first thing about. He’s done this before, but he’s drawing a blank on tact. “I’m sure they love you. They probably...I don’t know a whole lot about parents, actually. But I’m sure they love you. Parents do that.” 

Grant says something unintelligible, more gasp than sound. 

Dick just stares.

The gurgling strengthens, and there’s a wet-snap noise, like a hole sucked into water. A limp hand reaches up to throttle Dick’s neck, apparently having not given up on trying to kill him yet. 

Dick catches the weak wrist, slipping the dogtag into a zipper pocket in his sweater so it doesn’t jangle, and shifts so he’s holding Grant’s large, sweat-damp hand instead of being choked by it. He clumsily presses his thumb into Grant’s palm. 

“No. No. You’re okay,” Dick breathes. “You’re okay, Grant, okay? You’re not on your own. You’re okay.”

“I’m g’nna k-ll you,” Grant chokes out finally. It’s a hiss; he sounds like he’s melting from the inside out, voice gooey, punctuated by slow, wet gasps. His eyes loll. “I h-h… ave to k’ll you.”

Dick’s cheek pulls. 

“That’s not going to happen.”

Grant gives a high, frustrated, dog-like keen, back arching like he’s trying to force himself up before he can’t hold himself up anymore. His spine slams back against the ground, cries growing louder. The rebar is bright red. 

Dick watches. A thin, wet line streaks over Grant’s cheek from his eye and into his ear, and Dick mutedly realizes there’s something dark pouring out of Grant’s ears. 

Grant’s keens gradually bleat into sobs, then pants, and Dick squeezes his hand, feeling a little bit like this is the last loop on a rollercoaster. Dick leans his back against a nearby pillar, his own body pounding and sticky-hot. Dick hardly notices that his own eyes have drifted shut until Grant whimpers — speaks — again, and he forces them back open.   

“My d’d. My dad.” Grant’s unsteady breathing hitches, but at least he’s not trying to kill Dick anymore. Instead, he sounds almost on the verge of tears. “He….‘E w’s right-hh about me.”

Dick blinks, suddenly feeling lightheaded and faint. He dazedly watches a bubble track down the side of Grant’s mouth before blinking, getting back to himself. “...Yeah?” he breathes. “About what?”

Grant’s opened eyes flick to his — looking brilliantly green against the pure red sclera. “He ruined me,” Grant snarls. 

But Dick doesn’t hear that. Dick doesn’t hear anything.

Everything’s gone black. 

It’s all flashes. There’s sirens. Someone smells like cigarettes and coffee and the ozone-y scent of the bat-signal and they’re yelling, they’re saying, “Is that — move, Montoya, I know that boy,” and he feels hands all over him. Then it’s black. There’s beeping and cold fingers that taste like hand sanitizer in his mouth. Then it’s black. 

It’s black. It’s black, and someone is holding his hand. 

Dick curls his fingers up. The person curls their fingers back. He peeks an eye open.

Alfred is sitting by his bedside with shining, downcast eyes and an unused sudoku book folded over his lap, looking pale and washed out against the drab hospital walls. 

He doesn’t notice Dick at first, eyes focused emptily on his lap, so, gently, Dick scratches his nail against Alfred’s finger a second time to get his attention. 

Alfred jolts and turns, mouth forming an ‘o’ before he covers it with a palm and shuts his eyes. 

A wet trail slinks down his face before he can gather himself, and he squeezes Dick’s fingers tightly with his other hand in the meantime. 

When he finally opens his eyes and turns to Dick, it’s with a watery, beatific smile, gaze roaming hungrily over Dick’s face. 

He reaches out as if to brush the side of Dick’s cheek with his knuckles but must think the better of it, because he hesitates, and runs a knuckle down the slope of Dick’s nose tenderly instead. 

“Oh, dear. Oh, dear, Master Dick. That’s about all I can say, child.” Alfred’s voice trembles, breaking into a damp, relieved laugh. “You’ve certainly kept us occupied, haven’t you?”

Dick stares. 

“How do you feel?”

Weird. Bad. Not bad. Light and woozy and not all-there. His dry tongue scrapes across his teeth and falters in the back of his mouth at an unexpectedly empty tooth socket. 

He squints in confusion up at Alfred, who doesn’t show any sign of understanding Dick’s silent question: ... Teeth?

In the end it’s not Alfred’s voice that answers.   

“Mandibular right third,” Bruce says, hushed, “partial mandibular right second.”

Dick glances up sluggishly. Bruce is standing in the hospital doorway with his suitjacket crumpled in one fist and his wide, immense dark eyes boring into Dick’s. 

They stare at each other in complete silence. When Dick tilts his head experimentally, just a millimeter, Bruce’s eyes speed to track that movement, too, flickering back to remeet his eyes with unnerving, almost desperate intensity. 

The hospital lighting doesn’t do Bruce any favors either. It looks like there’s a net over his face, the overheads highlighting every crevice and wrinkle. Strangely gaunt. 

Strangely gutted.

“You look old,” Dick blurts, voice scraping.

Bruce’s mouth flattens like a frog, and suddenly Dick grins, pressing his face into the pillow to hide his giggles. 

“The doctor did mention that he’s on rather a lot of drugs,” Alfred whispers to Bruce. 

“I can see that,” Bruce hushes. “Alfred, would it be possible for — ”

“Oh. Now? Oh, well, of course. I’ll leave you to it. Master Dick, sir? I’ll be back shortly.”

When a door shuts, Dick slowly draws his face out of the pillow to stare at Bruce, who stares back ardently. 

Bruce flexes his fingers awkwardly, then shoves them into the pockets of his slacks. Dick’s gaze flickers up from Bruce’s hands then to his face, then back to his pockets. 

The silence stretches a moment more before Dick slowly scoots over on the hospital bed to create space, a silent invitation. 

Bruce blinks furiously, glancing off to the side for a moment. 

“Dick, I’m not sure if that will work anymore,” he says hastily. “I don’t think we’ll both fit.”

“Yeah, cause you got big,” Dick says. 

“No, you — ” Bruce catches himself, sighs. “You were about four feet tall last time we tried.” 

Dick stares at him. Then Bruce’s mouth ticks up to the side; not up, not down — simply to the side. But fond, and he carefully climbs into the cot, lying stiffly beside Dick. There is almost enough room. They lie there in silence for a long time. 

Then he hears Bruce give a long, trembling sigh. 

“Do you know,” Bruce says, very, very quietly, almost as if he is afraid someone might hear him; afraid Dick might hear him, “that I love you very much.” 

Dick pauses, eyes stinging. “I dunno.” He shrugs, voice dipping into a whisper. “I guess.”

Bruce quietens. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“It isn’t.”

“No,” Dick agrees, after a second. “It isn’t.” 

Bruce gives another sigh. “I’ve missed you.”

The dusklight from the window shines onto the ceiling, and Dick stares at it. The edges of his vision are getting dark again. Drugs, Alfred said. Huh. 

“I’ve missed being around you. I’ve been trying to give you space. I know I’ve hurt you.”

There is a long quiet. “You could unhurt me,” Dick finally whispers, with some effort, glancing hopefully over at Bruce. “I know how.” 

Give Robin back. Just give Robin back.

Bruce’s eyes shut. He carefully wraps an arm around Dick’s shoulders and pulls him close, and doesn’t say anything else. 

At least, if he does say anything else, Dick’s not awake for it. More and more darkness is starting to vignette his gaze. Dick stares at him for one last moment and adds, in a fervent murmur into the man’s collarbone, “Cause I’m not any safer like this.”

Bruce stiffens, just before the world bleeds to black again. 

When Dick wakes up next, he’s alone. The part of the bed where Bruce was is empty. 

But then the door of the hospital room clicks open, and Dick sits up so fast it makes his head throb. Dick knows in his heart that it’s going to be Bruce coming back. Who else could it be? 

No. Dick knows. It’s going to be him.

It’s going to be Bruce, and Bruce is going to say, I’m sorry, and there’ll be a token in his hands, like a bat-a-rang or a belt or something, and that token will mean a whole awful lot. He won’t say it, of course, but that token will mean, You’re Robin again. I was wrong and you were right, Dick. Please forgive me and take Robin back and keep it forever and know that I will also be buying you that elephant you’ve been asking for since third-grade. That’s exactly the sort of big gesture thing Bruce does so he can avoid putting it into words. 

But then a shoe squeaks, and Dick’s stomach plunges. It’s not Bruce. 

Sure enough, Commissioner Gordon shuffles in awkwardly, holding a slightly deflated, metallic gold balloon shaped like a star. 

Gordon awkwardly sets the weighted balloon down so it sways in front of the nurse’s whiteboard. He jerks a thumb at it. “Got that for you.”

“Thanks,” Dick rasps, mustering a tiny smile instead of the sneering Obviously on his tongue.

Gordon winces at the hoarse sound of Dick’s voice, head tilting sympathetically. “How’re you doing, kid? You all right?” When Dick shrugs, he winces again. “Well, that’s better than how you were when we brought you in. I was on-scene when we found you, and then on the ride here, the EMTs were saying — well, all sorts of things.”

“You rode along in the ambulance?” 

Gordon hesitates.  “I wanted to make sure you were going to be okay.”

There’s a quiet, and Dick’s smile becomes a little more genuine as he gazes up at Gordon, whose lip ticks up under his fat, caterpillar moustache. “Thanks,” Dick says again, earnestly. “You’re a real good egg, Mr. Gordon.”

Gordon barks out a startled laugh, eyes sparkling. “I didn’t know kids still said things like that. I didn’t think adults still said that.” Gordon laughs again, dabbing at his eyes with a sleeve. “Lord, I don’t think I’ve heard that since I was your age.”

“But I’m sure people said it all the time about you back then,” Dick insists. “Probably still do when you’re not around.”

Gordon shakes his head, smiling, and for a second, Dick is actually glad that it wasn’t Bruce who came in, because Bruce tends to suck the air out of a room. Granted, it would be easier to explain why a random mercenary was out to kill Dick Grayson to Bruce than to Gordon because he knows about the HIVE, but —  

Dick suddenly stiffens, remembering. “Commissioner?” Gordon looks up. “...Is Grant okay?”

Pause. “That the guy’s name?” Dick nods. “You know him from somewhere?”

“Oh, no, he just tried to kill me,” Dick says. “I don’t know him, I just wanted to know if he’s okay.”

“Well, he won’t hurt you anymore, Dick. I can tell you that.”

“He’s dead?”

Gordon nods. 

“Oh.” 

Dick shouldn’t feel as guilty as he does. Grant was the one who chased him and broke the ledge, got himself impaled. He tried to kill Dick. 

But it’s a hard thing to swallow that he was just a kid — just Roy’s age. It’s always hard when someone dies in his arms, but normally Dick is Robin when it happens. 

Normally, there’s more of a psychological distance. 

“I...oh.” There’s another silence, and Dick swallows, finally meeting Gordon’s bespectacled gaze. “Um. Would you by any chance happen to know where Bruce is?”

“He hasn’t come by?”

“He did, but I fell asleep, and by the time I woke up, he was gone.”

Gordon purses his lips, says he’ll stay until Bruce comes back, even though Dick assures him that isn’t necessary. Most of an hour ticks by before Alfred returns with a basket in his hands, the same basket of soft foods and goods he always brings when they’re injured outside of the cave, and he looks surprised at the room’s occupants. He nods curtly at Gordon, who takes his leave now that Dick’s not alone. 

“Where did Master Bruce mention he was going, sir?” Alfred asks as he unpacks. “He was meant to stay until I returned.”

Dick’s stomach sinks even further. “He didn’t say.”

Dick doesn’t see Bruce again in the hospital. Not for his whole stay. As the hours tick by with no sign of him, Alfred’s frown carves deeper and deeper, even though Dick can tell he’s trying to hide his displeasure from him. 

But Bruce’s absence is a word with one definition. 

Dick isn’t getting Robin back. And maybe Bruce is too ashamed of that now to show his face, but that doesn’t change anything. 

It’s like Dick switches to autopilot. The days in the hospital pass in a blur. 

(“Did he say why he was attacking you?” the officer taking his statement asks. “No,” Dick lies, because the HIVE’s too closely tied to secret identities to share. Bruce hasn’t shown up to counsel him on what identity-protecting story to give, so Dick’s just cutting the incriminating parts out altogether. “The commissioner said you knew his name. First name ‘Grant,’ last name what?” “Only know his first,” Dick lies, because — well, he doesn’t know why he does that. It just happens; he keeps the secret. He just goes quiet and stares at his lap until the interview’s over.) 

And when it’s time to go home, Dick goes without protest. He slips on the clothes Alfred brings, but pauses as his finger slides into the pocket of his jumper Alfred brought from the manor. 

Inside are the scraps of ice cream wrapper from that night on the beach with Roy, and it registers, vaguely, that Grant’s dogtags are still in the pocket of the other sweater, the one he got strangled in. 

Dick bites his lip. It’s a stupid idea, but once it’s in his head, he can’t get it out. 

He has to get them.

By the time Alfred’s done checking the discharge papers, Dick’s already slipped out and back in from the evidence area, where the police haven’t even taken the items from yet. Classic Gotham incompetency. 

The dogtags jangle against the wrapper in his pocket. 

“Ready?” he asks when Alfred walks back into the room, looking up innocently from the bed as if he never left. 

Alfred’s smile is pinched. “Of course, sir.” 

They drive home in silence. 

Dick sticks his hand into his pocket and grips the chain as the trees outside the car window become familiar. The idea hardens. So does his resolve. 

If Bruce won’t let him be Robin, then at least he can do this. 

Bruce can’t stop him from doing this. 

The man is enormous.

6’5, probably, arms the size of Bruce’s, with salt-white hair and a matching beard. He doesn’t particularly look old enough to have hair that color, but Bruce is only 30 and already starting to gray at the temples, so Dick doesn’t think too much of it. 

What does pique his interest is the black eyepatch over his right eye, and the shiny pink scar peeking out from under it. Very pirate nouveau.

“Slade Wilson?” 

The man folds his arms over his chest, and for some reason, staring back at some random guy while Dick stands on a doorsteps feels just like staring directly down the barrel of a gun. 

Dick shifts. 

He begins running through possible escape routes in his head, tracing back the way he came, without taking his eyes off the man in front of him. 

And then the man. Speaks. It’s like someone walking their fingers over a piano very. Very. Slowly. “How did you get this address?”

For some reason, that snaps Dick out of the nervousness he was in. 

He doesn’t answer, of course. It’s not as though it would be easy to explain his research process, which was long and arduous without the use of any of Bruce’s files or programs and made doubly so by the fact that documents about Grant Wilson’s family appear to have been almost entirely (and deliberately) scrubbed from existence. 

But it’s the way the man asks the question — Dick could almost laugh. The man (who is Mr. Wilson, Dick’s suddenly, inexplicably certain) is talking in a voice meant to intimidate . In fact, his whole schtick is intimidation. No one stands like that unless they’re trying to capital-l Loom. 

Which is a less than effective tactic on someone who grew up taking piggyback rides on the Dark Knight’s shoulders.

But then Dick pauses once more, not because of who he’s talking to or how he’s there, but because of what he’s there to say. “I’m here about your son.”

Slade shifts. 

He doesn’t do anything else. Not a single muscle in his face even twitches. 

Dick shoves his hand into his pocket, hesitates. Then he pulls out the dog tags, the chain dangling off his fingers. 

He has a script all dolled up in his head. He talked about you. He gave me a message, kind of. He wanted me to tell you that you were right. I don’t know about what, but he said that you were right about him. And he wasn't alone when he died. 

It’s what he came here to do, after all. 

But when he watches Slade’s eye follow the chain to the name on the tag and stop short, lips pressing into a startled, hard line that Dick just knows is grief, all he can say is, “I’m sorry, Mr. Wilson.” 

Slade doesn’t look away from the tags, tongue darting out to wet his lips, and then he takes a very small, almost silent breath that trembles in the air. 

The chain of the dogtags is snatched out of the air so fast and so hard it cuts Dick’s fingers.

Then Slade snaps the tags in half with one hand like a saltine cracker, balling that fist. “Get out.”

Dick swallows. “He wanted me to tell you — ”

“I don’t care.” Slade’s eye gleams, voice rough. “Get out. Get out. Or I’ll kill you.”

“He said that you were right,” Dick speaks over him. Slade stills. “He wanted me to tell you that you were right about him. And I know, I know it doesn’t mean much, but he wasn’t alone when he died.” 

Then — Dick gets out. 

(Seven times. 

Slade watches the last active video feed transmitted from Grant’s suit seven times. 

“Oh, God. You’re just a kid,” whispers the boy in the video. The boy who holds Grant’s hand as he dies. The boy who was just on Slade’s doorstep. The boy who gave Slade the dogtags. 

The boy who outmaneuvered his son like it was nothing. 

Slade stares silently at the screen as it begins its seventh loop. Slowly, he uncurls his tightly clenched fist, flexing his fingers. The tags don’t drop from his hand when he loosens his grip: The metal edges are impaled in the center of his palm, hanging in the air.

“Hello, Robin,” starts Grant’s voice before the fight begins.

Biting hard on his tongue, Slade yanks the pieces out of his skin, one by one, without so much as glancing down at his hand. He turns off the audio of Grant’s desperate, petering last moments but lets the video loop, his blood smearing on the keyboard as he does. 

Slade’s eye burns — wet; hot; smearing. But it fixes on the boy on the screen anyway. 

It doesn’t move away.)

Bruce still isn’t home when Dick slips back in after giving away the dogtags. Alfred is. He’s dusting the front room, and his gaze catches on Dick when he pads through the foyer. Then, hastily, Alfred looks away, as if he didn’t see a thing, and carries on. 

It doesn’t feel “good,” exactly. It’s not a good feeling to tell someone that a person they love is dead. It never is; it’s not like it erases what happened, like Dick can just not think about it anymore. The shape of Slade’s grief  —  the line of his mouth, the circle of his clenched fist  —  is burned into Dick’s mind, probably for eternity.

It doesn’t feel good. But it was right. It was right, and Dick did it. Dick did it, he did it, he did something. 

And that’s the thing that makes it bearable. 

“What’s this?” Dick laughs when Roy tosses him a helmet a week later. “You a stickler for safety all of a sudden?”

It’s night. They’re being quiet. They’re in the driveway. 

“Yours,” Roy says, glancing back. 

Dick quiets, blinking furiously down at the helmet in his hands for a second. It’s just barely discernible as red in the dark. 

“C’mon, Grayson. You coming or not?”

Dick puts it on. “I’m coming.”

Roy revs the cycle when Dick gets on, and Dick wants to hiss at him not to do that, what if he wakes up Alfred or worse Bruce  —  

But he swallows the words, and glances back at the dark windows, and when he turns back, Roy’s looking at him. He flicks the visor down on the Dick’s helmet and smiles crookedly, teeth catching the low light. 

“What?”

“Nothing,” says Roy. “Nothing, just.”

“Just?”

“Just glad you’re not dead. Flasher said nobody’s heard from you. Said no one’s seen Robin for a while either.”

It’s been more than just a while since Dick last saw Roy, which was long before Grant. It’s been even longer since Dick saw any of the others. “You’ve been talking to Wally?” 

“Got a burner phone couple days back. It won’t last too long, but I got one for now at least. You didn’t pick up when I called or I would’ve talked to you. Just thought not picking, that...wasn’t like you. Everything good?”

Under Roy’s intense gaze, Dick’s grateful for the helmet obscuring his face, the sudden, inexplicable anger that flushes over him. “Yeah. Of course I’m fine. Everything’s great. Are we going someplace, or what?”

Roy’s mouth presses. “Yeah,” he scoffs. “Yeah, whatever, leader-mine.”

The brief annoyance that flashes over Roy’s face before he turns away reminds Dick of Grant, face contorted with rage and bloodthirst and then with pain and death, and Dick’s fingers spasm, clench around the fabric on his knees. 

His fingers don’t unfurl until Roy’s pulled over. They end up sitting on a curb outside a jazz club in Jersey City, the club’s neon signs turning Roy’s face costume jewelry green. Unable to stop himself, Dick leans forward, squinting. “What happened to your face?”

Roy’s hands instantly dart up to the three deep scratches on his jaw as if to hide them, but his touch is strangely soft, and he glances away, cheeks darkening. “Nothing,” Roy says quickly. “What happened to yours?”

Dick’s face is still blacked with bruises from Grant.

“Nothing,” Dick echoes softly, leaning back. They stare. And then, slowly, in sync, they smile at each other. All at once, Dick feels the tension in his chest melt. Like someone stole it away.

For a second, he can forget about not having Robin, about boys who die in his arms and parents he has to tell, about the way Bruce hasn’t spoken to him since he got out of the hospital. 

Instead, he lies down so his back’s on the concrete and he’s staring up at the sky, and laughs, which makes Roy suck his teeth and shake his head, still smiling. His heart beats good and slow.

“You’re turning into an enigma, boy wonder.”

“Moving in on your mystery-man territory, huh?”

“Mine or Bruce’s,” agrees Roy, and Dick’s smile disappears. Of course Roy notices. 

A darkly lit face suddenly appears in his vision as Roy leans over him, blocking out the streetlights and stars with long hair and a serious, searching expression. Dick squints at the green glow off Roy’s hair, squirms. It’s long. “You going to start wearing a ponytail soon?” he tries weakly for a distraction. 

“Maybe,” Roy says dismissively, brow furrowing. “You and Bruce — ?”

“Yeah.”

“Bad?”

 Dick squeezes his eyes shut tightly. 

“Yeah.”

He hears Roy shift above him, his fist braced just to the right of Dick’s face. He slowly reopens his eyes, and suddenly Dick feels like he’s the one dying in someone’s lap, being asked his name, and spilling out his guts because it’s the last chance he’s ever going to get. His eyes start to burn, and he’s mortified to realize that he’s… crying. 

He covers his face with his hands and tries to breathe. 

“Dick,” Roy breathes, surprised. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Dick mumbles through his hands. “I don’t — I can’t — ”

But that’s a lie, too. It’s all he’s ever wanted. The words are out of his mouth before he knows it. 

“He doesn’t want me to be Robin anymore.”

Roy freezes. “What?”

Dick swallows, and says nothing. He doesn’t say: It already happened. 

“Dick, what does — what?” Roy sounds dumbfounded, breath hitching. “He can’t. You’re. But that doesn’t — but you’re Robin.”

Dick hums miserably, dragging his nails down his face to finally look back up at Roy, whose expression hardens from astoundment to sudden certainty when he gazes down at Dick. 

“You’re Robin,” Roy says. “I don’t even know what any of this looks like without you. I mean, Dick. Dick. You’re Robin. You have to be. You’re going to fight him on it, right?”

“I am,” Dick says, “I am.”

Later, Roy scribbles down the number to his latest burner phone on the inside of Dick’s arm, even though they both know Dick could memorize it in one go and that Roy won’t have hold of that phone for long anyway. After he’s finished, he doesn’t cap the pen, just stays there for a second, before he finally lets Dick’s arm drop back down. They’re outside the Manor gate. “Don’t tell anybody,” Dick pleads quietly. 

Roy nods. 

“Thanks. Roy?”

“Yeah?”

Dick falters. “Thanks,” he echoes dumbly. “I just — thanks. Drive safely, all right?” He touches the helmet gently, pushing it toward Roy, who feigns a small, encouraging half-smile.  

And then he’s gone. Dick swallows as he glances back to the large, imposing shape of the manor through the iron gate, all its dark windows, resigning himself to going back inside.

He climbs up to the window of his room and pries his way in, unwilling to face the chance of seeing Alfred or Bruce if he enters downstairs. And this time, fortunately, he doesn’t get caught. 

It’s almost 5 a.m. — he should probably get to sleep. Then again, he hasn’t had to go to school since he was discharged from the hospital, with the excuse of still ‘recovering.’ Besides, he doesn’t think he could go to sleep if he wanted to anyway, still wired from letting Roy know even a fraction of the truth. So instead, he lies awake until Alfred comes to rouse him for breakfast downstairs like normal. 

But Alfred doesn’t come in like normal. 

The man pads in more than an hour after the time when breakfast normally starts with a tray bearing orangeslices and toast with powdered sugar, and says, “Ah.” His throat bobs. “You’re awake.”

Then Alfred sits gingerly on the edge of Dick’s bed, the tray balanced on his lap. 

“Your father,” begins Alfred, like he is unloading a gun.

“He’s not my father,” Dick hushes instantly. He sits up, enormous eyes glued to Alfred, who will not meet his gaze. His heart’s dropped to his ankles. “He’s not my father, Alfred. Whatever this is, please don’t — ” 

“Master Bruce was meant to tell you himself this morning, for it was his decision,” says Alfred, “but in his absence I must be the one — ”

“Alfred. Alfred, please. Please.” 

Alfred reaches out a hand, placing it gently over Dick’s. “It seems I will be overseeing your studies from this point forward.”

Dick takes his hand back. 

Alfred flinches as if it burned. “The school wasn’t secured. It’s to keep you safe. It’s — child, it’s for your own protection.”

But they both know exactly who it’s protecting. 

It isn’t Dick. It never was.

(Roy and Dick were best friends since the second they locked eyes. It had been an instant thing. A magnetic thing. A click. Like remembering they were friends, even though they’d never met before. But when Dick was ten, there was no such thing as Roy Harper yet. There wasn’t Donna or Garth or the Titans. There was only Wally. 

Dick only slept in Blue Valley once in his whole life. It was back then when he was ten and Kid Flash was brand new. Dick remembers every second of that night. It was dark, there were mockingbirds crowing loudly outside, and they’d been way too excited to sleep, crowded together in Wally’s twin bed. Wally was eating through a whole jar of vitamin fruit gummies that smelled like fake oranges and the whole room smelled like wet hair because Wally didn’t use shampoo. They’d been speaking low and whispery, even though it was 4 a.m. and Wally’s dad was out, but Wally’s voice had vibrated and loudened with excitement when he asked, “How is it? Living with Bruce, I mean?”

And Dick had almost told. He had wanted to tell so bad . Had wanted to tell for so long. 

He hates me. But I think he loves me. I think he’s jealous that I don’t hurt like he hurts. I think he’s going to throw me back in the orphanage when I stop being useful, when he stops wanting me. I don’t know when that will be. The boys at the orphanage said he was going to stick his fingers in my mouth. He hasn’t done that yet. But they said he would and I don’t know when that will be. I’m scared of him. Not cause of that, or cause of Batman. Cause he just does things sometimes, cause he just decides things sometimes, and I never know when it’s going to happen. He doesn’t tell me and sometimes it doesn’t make sense what he decides and I don’t understand him. I want him to touch me but I don’t want his fingers in my mouth is that okay. Is it. He hasn’t hugged me I want him to hug me. One time I had a nightmare and I woke up in the middle of the night and he was standing in the door looking at me and I wanted him to go away but I wanted him to stay, too. I wanted him so bad. No one touches me I like Alfred he touches me sometimes but he’s an old man and it’s not the same. I like it there better than the circus sometimes did you know that? But I don’t want to be there and sometimes I even think about leaving in the middle of the night and stealing my costume to take with me but then I feel bad why would I even think about that that’s not being grateful. I could never do that. I could never leave, never ever,  I don’t think I could ever leave unless he kicked me out and maybe that’ll happen soon but I don’t know when. I want him I love him I love him so much. I have to be useful I’m trying to be worthwhile I want him to love me back. But I never know what’s going to happen and it makes me scared. They’re going to rip it all out from under me but when is that going to happen? When’s that going to be? I never know what he’s going to do I never know why he’s going to do it. It’s so scary. I know his tells I know him better than anyone I try to understand but sometimes I don’t. He gets mad when I get hurt. He stays away when I get hurt. I wish he wouldn’t. I’d do anything for him, Wally. But he doesn’t make sense. I think he’s fucked in the head like fucked fucked, Wally. I think he scares me bad, Wally, I think he loves me too much. He scares me. Wally, I’m so scared. 

He said, “I — ” and the door slammed open. There was a man with sweaty curls sticking up on his head, black silhouette in front of the yellow hallway light. There was a man who smelled like Schlitz and chew and he was seething. Rudy, with eyes like a wild dog. 

Dick remembers Rudy yelling, but he does not remember what he said. It was toward Wally. Wally hadn’t washed the plates in the sink or had scraped the car door or something, something reprehensible, unforgivable like that. Dick remembers a belt coming out of belt loops and looking like a snake in the hallwaylight silhouette. 

Then Rudy’s gaze had fallen on the lump on the bed that was Dick, and his jaw audibly clicked. Arm stilled. 

Dick stared back. 

“You have a friend over,” Rudy had rumbled after a long time. Dick remembers that crystal-clear.

“I have a friend over,” Wally repeated. He sounded very brave and very sure, even though he was quiet. Like saying you cannot do it here you cannot do it right now so in this moment I am safe. Except his voice wavered ever-so-slightly toward the end, and the effect suffered for it, because it made Dick remember that Wally was eleven and trembling under the sheets barely an inch away from him.

Rudy shut the door hard. Slammed. It got dark again without the hallway light. Wally gave a long, quiet breath. 

Dick didn’t. His breath was stuck in his throat.

“Wally — ” 

“Don’t,” Wally said. “Just — don’t. Okay? Please. I’m sorry about. I’m. I. I don’t want to tal — I don’t want to right now please sorry.” 

“Okay,” Dick said. There was a long silence. Someone grabbed someone’s hand first. Wally’s palm was sweaty and his fingers were tight and Dick could feel the hard thump of his pulse. 

And they were quiet. Dick didn’t say anything else. Dick didn’t say anything at all. He felt cold and sick and guilty and ungrateful and his stomach churned.

How could he complain? How could he feel scared? 

So after that, he doesn’t complain. He never does. He does not tell. Not the whole truth. Not to anyone. Not ever.

But that once — that one night in the dark with the smell of orange gummies and his best friend — he almost did.)

“He’s only doing this,” Alfred says there on the corner of Dick’s bed,  “because he loves you.”

And maybe this is true. And maybe this is what Dick has always wanted: for Bruce to love him. For some real, hearable admission to hold in his skull that says, I love you, I am not sending you away. Maybe if Dick can twist it enough, this can be that artifact. This is that proof he has been looking for. Bruce loves him so much that he will do anything: He will whittle Dick’s life down until it is unrecognizable  —  unwantable  —  just to keep him safe because that is how much he loves him. 

But learning that he will no longer be allowed to leave the house for school makes Dick realize something else, too. Two somethings. 

1. This is too much. 

“Alfred,” Dick says. 

“Master Dick?”

“I’d like,” Dick says, “to be alone now...please.”

Alfred places the tray of one toastslice and many orangeslices on Dick’s comforter, stands, and lingers with his hand on the doorknob, glancing back. Then he swallows, bows his head, and leaves. Without one single word more.

The last time Alfred respected his request for space and left him alone, Dick regretted it immediately. All he had wanted was for Alfred to come back and hold him. 

This time, all Dick feels is hollow. 

2. He doesn’t want to be loved if being loved is like this.  

Dick lies awake on his side all night in the darkness, hand under his cheek, staring emptily at the wall he can’t see in the blackness. 

There aren’t warning footsteps, so he knows when the hallwaylight floods through the opening door, it’s Bruce. The second he hears the door begin to click open, Dick screws his eyes shut and pretends. And waits. 

Waits for the bed to dip. Waits for a heavy hand to fall on his hair, or maybe the back of his neck. Waits for Bruce to say, ‘I know you’re awake, Dick. You don’t have to pretend. Just tell me. How do I fix this?’

Dick waits for that. Dick waits. Dick waits, and waits, and waits for the opportunity to say: ‘You can’t.’ 

Instead, he hears Bruce exhale shakily. 

Then he hears the bedroom door close, with an infinitesimally small click. 

Alfred tries with homeschooling. Dick will give him that. 

He tries. He says, Have I told you I love you today? and only lets his expression fall a little when Dick just stares at him. He breaks his rules and permits Dick coffee, treats, late nights, which Dick doesn’t take. 

But Alfred never says, I’ll talk to Bruce. He never says, How could he do this to you? I will not let him do this to you. 

Maybe that’s too much to ask. Because Dick is letting Bruce do this to him, too. 

Dick is letting it happen. 

Why is he letting it happen? 

Dick slams his teeth down onto his tongue, angry at himself. 

“Perhaps you could contact Mr. Harper,” Alfred suggests quietly as he comes to gather Dick’s dishes. He pauses for a long time as he sees that the food on them is untouched.  It’s only the second day since the news that Dick would be taken out of Gotham Academy, but it already feels like the ten-thousandth. 

Alfred’s long fingers twitch at his side, and his voice grows faster, picking up urgency, and maybe desperation. He glances back at Dick. 

“Have a visit, perhaps return to that beach. I…I wouldn’t tell Master Wayne if you did, you know. You could do it while he’s out tonight. Child, if that would make you happy, I would — ”

He cuts off as Dick raises his gaze, his chin,, ever-silent.

“I wouldn’t tell him,” Alfred promises hushedly, eyes fervent, as if willing Dick to understand. 

It’s a forgive-me. It’s a mercy. It’s Alfred, like always, trying desperately to make it better. Alfred leaves with that plea, and Dick feels a small stab of hope, which is enough of a push to fish out his phone. 

But Alfred’s Mr. Harper doesn’t pick up. Dick tries three times. The hope shakes out like dust beat from a carpet, and a bitter taste fills Dick’s mouth. It shouldn’t — he knew Roy’s burner phone wouldn’t last long, he knew Roy was too busy doing whatever mysterious things he does to ever really have time for Dick. He knew that. He doesn’t have a right to be bitter about it. 

But it feels like the walls are closing in even faster now. It feels like he’s choking — like he’s trapped in a cage that’s getting smaller and smaller by the day. What is Bruce going to take away under the guise of keeping him safe next? He already stopped talking to Dick. He already took Dick’s school. He already took Robin. 

What’s there left for him to take?  

His freedom? 

Dick sits there on the bed, and grips his phone until the screen cracks in his hand. The little screenshards skitter across his bedspread. Dick’s heart is pounding so loud he can’t even hear himself think. 

Not that he needs to think to do what he does next. It’s pure motion, like his body is just a frame in an animation, caught between one second and the next with no control over the next page. 

It’s automatic: It’s shoes: It’s standing: It’s one step, two: He leaves through the window, alone, and runs.

There’s an awkward flagging of an empty cab that’s rolling back from the Drakes, but the second he’s in the city proper it feels as if he can breathe again. It’s only been two days since he went to Jersey with Roy, but it feels like it’s been decades since he’s seen other people and walked alongside them. It’s a good, dark night, and Dick would like nothing better than to climb to the roofs, but that would dramatically increase the chances of an encounter with Bruce, so he doesn’t dare. 

Selfishly, though, Dick almost wishes there were a mugging happening in one of the many alleys that he passes, if only so he could stop it. In fact, he’s so caught up in peering down alleyways that he nearly misses the way the telltale glow of the white martini on the sign makes his white sneakers seem to glow. He misses which club he’s in front of entirely until the bouncer sighs and there’s a clinking noise, and he finally looks over. 

“Lucky,” sighs the bouncer in front of the Iceberg Lounge, “that you’re pretty, kid.”

Dick’s brain short circuits. He looks behind him, trying to figure out who the bouncer is talking to, before it sinks in. “Me?”

Dick looks forward again to find the bouncer holding the dark blue queue rope in his hand, chin tilting toward the open door. When Dick still doesn’t move, he raises a notched eyebrow. 

“You coming?”

Dick backsteps, hesitating. Then crosses the threshold. 

Dick is looking for trouble. He misses feeling toothbone snap under his knuckles. Something hot and dark and sparkling racing through his veins. He misses Robin. 

Misses how it felt.

No, he doesn’t go into the Iceberg Lounge with the specific intent of overhearing a looselipped, traitorous goon of Sionis’s slur out just enough information about the location about what’s got to be a human trafficking ring that’s getting new cargo tonight, but when it falls into his lap? Well, what sort of upstanding ex-vigilante wouldn’t take that into their own hands? Like he said: Dick is absolutely looking for trouble.

The problem is, trouble looks back. 

The place is easy enough to slip into, but the sight inside is enough to make Dick’s stomach churn. It’s no run-of-the-mill ring — Dick’s still trying to process what it is. There’s girls, mostly white and mostly down-to-the-bone, in cages — some cagemetal bars oxidized and brittle, others sleek and silver-new. 

Dick thumbs the cuffs of his sweater sleeves over his fingerprints and immediately sets to work on the lock of the nearest cage. The area Dick slipped into doesn’t have guards — Dick guesses its organizers didn’t count on people getting this far into the complex — but someone’s going to come in and scope the place out with the growing volume of the girls inside the cages. When they saw Dick, they started yelling, crowding together to fight to the front and grab the bars with desperate hands and even more desperate eyes. 

“Who are you?” one asks, reaching through the bars before the force of the crowd yanks her back in. “Are you one of them?

“Shhhh,” Dick begs, glancing back at the door, then adds in a whisper, “I’m going to get you guys out.”

The yelling — the hands foaming out of the bars — doesn’t abate. It’s not like Dick isn’t used to working with noise or under pressure, but trying to break a heavyduty lock in near-darkness with his sweatersleeves over his fingers, no tools, and dozens of frantic nails scraping against his arms is far from the most conducive environment. 

Then, a creak.

The room fills with dim green light, flooding from the now-opened door behind him. 

Dick’s stomach sinks. The girls hush, the room filling with the sound of shifting shoulders and skin brushing against skin; they fall back from the edges of the cage like a seatide. It’s suddenly utterly silent.

Dick turns around slowly, dropping the lock. It jangles loudly against the bars. 

There are four men in the doorway, three of them holding guns pointed at Dick, silhouetted by the light from behind them. One with a gun steps forward. 

“Hands,” he says, real low, “up, sweetheart.”

The room is impossibly still, but Dick’s mind is racing. They’re looking at Dick, who doesn’t have a mask or a costume to hide his identity. If Dick is too good in taking them down, they’ll put it together who he is — who he was . But if Dick doesn’t give himself away by getting out of this, what are they going to do to him?

“I said, put your hands up. You’re real fucking lucky the boss’s guest of honor ain’t here.”

Dick just stares at him in silence. 

Then the man’s gun clicks. 

Dick exhales sharply. Guns are danger. Guns are adrenaline. Something switches in Dick’s head, and it’s all that wanting for trouble that hasn’t burned off yet, and Dick moves. 

He moves fast. 

He gets three of the guys down cold before something craters into his side, boiling his skin and muscle and making him stagger and look down. There’s a hole in his hoodie; there’s a darkness spreading, wet and shining in the low light. Dick looks back up just in time for a huge, pale hand to take Dick by the neck and crush his skull against the wall. 

“Who is h—?”

“How did he know about this place —?”

“Just some punk fucking kid, he hit Matty and now Matty won’t wake up.”

“Shit. He breathing?”

“Or something. You seen what he did to Harper?”

“Saw. He work for somebody, you think?”

The world passes in and out of blackness. Dick thinks he’s moved, dragged, at some point. Hands on his face. In his mouth, against his gums, his tongue. Getting shot’s old fare. So is head trauma. 

“Black hair. Teenager. You don’t think it could be…”

“Ain’t he dead? Joker shot him, I thought. Nobody’s seen him in —”

But the pain he finally wakes up to is excruciating in a way that Dick is less familiar with. It’s volcanic, blue-hot agony against the soles of his bare feet that makes Dick lurch awake and thrash, kicking his legs violently, only to find his ankles cuffed together and to a pole. His hands are duct-taped behind his back, too, each of the fingers carefully bound together. He pants, gasping in hot, not-enough breaths. 

Suddenly, there’s a hand seizing his foot again, and Dick’s breathing, ragged from the pain, stutters, his vision clearing as he takes in what’s before him. 

They’re in a different room from before, but probably still in the same complex, judging by the same greenish darkness and dim light. Unlike the other one, though, this room has thick, paint-chipped poles, like the one that Dick’s bound to, throughout. Leaning against one of the poles is a fair-haired man, and crouching in front of Dick, holding a foot that’s been stripped of shoe and sock in one hand and a leather belt in the other, is a darker-haired man.

That man’s grin darkens. “Robin.”

Dick’s head drops back against the concrete floor, thumping. (Bad idea. Bad idea. Stupid motherfucker.) “What?” he affects confusion, and he doesn’t have to fake the breathlessness of his voice. 

The pain in his feet is throbbing. It’s like nothing he can remember feeling before, and Dick’s well-versed in torture. 

“Don’t play dumb, baby boy,” the man says. “The others, they never saw you in real-life before. I know you. I’ve seen you. You remember me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The dark smile brittles and chips away, pulled like a tooth — fast. “You don’t fucking remember me?” 

“No, because I’m not Robin, I don’t know what you —”

“You don’t remember me?” the man snarls, yanking Dick’s leg so hard that Dick is shaled forward on the concrete — for a second, Dick’s afraid that if the man does it again, he’ll pop the joint out of the socket. “You’re Robin, you don’t fucking remember what you did to me?”

Dick’s chest heaves up and down. He stares the guy in the face, making his eyes wide and innocent, but that only seems to make the man angrier: He growls, deep in his chest, and the nails around Dick’s ankle screw in, just before the other hand brings the leather belt down hard on the sole of his right foot .

Dick’s whole body reverberates . His whole body fucking strums. 

Dick curls in on himself and trembles. Dick’s eyes singe , and his teeth slam down so hard on his lip that they pierce straight-through, but he succeeds in preventing himself from letting out a whimper. The whip comes down again, and Dick writhes. 

“I’m not,” he insists hoarsely. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.”

He doesn’t even bother racking his brain to remember this man — Dick’s got a killer memory, but there’s been thousands of men that Dick fought, beat, humiliated. Of course he doesn’t remember this guy. 

The belt — again. Dick screams.

“You knocked my fucking teeth out,” the man snarls, and it’s. It’s. Well. 

It’s the almost worst possible thing that Dick could hear in the charged, heavy, expectant seconds that follows. For a long moment, Dick stares at him in stunned silence, eyes hot and stinging wet from the pain.. 

Dick doesn’t remember the guy. 

But it checks out. 

He really likes kicking people in the mouth.

He can’t help it. Despite the tears, despite the pain, despite the darkness of the shithole room that they’re in, a hysterical laugh scrapes out of his throat. He laughs so hard it makes tears come, makes himself curl up into a ball. 

So the belt comes down again. 

And again. 

“Mr. Sionis?”

Roman sets down the crystal decanter and glass. Eyes slitting as his lips slit into a dangerous smile, his head swivels toward the lackey in the doorway. “Thornton. Didn’t I say that we weren’t to be interrupted in our negotiations of Mr. Wilson’s prices?”

The man who shuffled in’s eyes dart uneasily over to where Slade is sitting with his sword over his lap. Slade smirks beneath the mask. 

“Yes, sir, but the others thought you should know: At the compound, they found an intruder. Robin, they think.”

Slade doesn’t straighten in his seat. 

Roman, however, stiffens, rolling his shoulders tightly. His mouth tics, fingers winding around the glass. “Robin is supposed to be dead.”

The lackey watches Roman carefully. “He’s not in the mask, but the guys all think the kid is Robin. And if Robin knows about the operation, then Batman —”

“Yes, Thornton, I was able to put that together,” snaps Black Mask. 

Slade raises his chin. “Now more than ever, I suppose you understand the importance of having a professional at work, in light of, well…”

“Shut up, Wilson,” Sionis spits, mouth curling. He’s not a particularly intelligent man — nor a particularly wise one, to be talking to Slade like that — but he’s at least competent enough to know how much he needs Slade now. “One-and-a-half?”

“Say one-and-three-quarters,” says Slade leisurely. “For the trouble. After all, a Bat wasn’t included in my estimate for guarding a human cargo shipment.”

“I should hardly think a child would mount a challenge to the kind of man you’re reputed to be. The kind of man I paid you to b—”

“You’ve paid me nothing,” corrects Slade, swishing the whiskey in his own glass casually before meeting Sionis’s eyes, “yet.”

People have trouble holding Slade’s gaze. Maybe it’s the eye. 

Roman is no exception. 

Sionis swallows, fists balling at his side so tightly they tremble. Then, like a flip is switched, they unfurl and Sionis claps his hands together, smiling thin as paper as he whips around to face the lackey: The show is back on. “Well, Thornton?” His voice ledges high toward an almost manic tone, before dipping back into something dark, low, and ground out. “Pay the man.”

“A pleasure,” says Slade, $1.75M richer, setting the untouched glass on the nearby desk. 

Sionis doesn’t need to know that Slade had been irrevocably bound to going to Sionis’s little cargo holding from the second the henchman came in with the news of who exactly had snuck in.

The pain makes the world flicker in and out of focus. 

Sometimes, Dick can see the leather belt and its silver buckle as it flies through the air. Sometimes, it’s just blurry shadows. Sometimes, he can’t see anything at all, eyes squeezed shut.

 Sometimes, he can hear the sound of leather on flesh, of jeering, of the man’s incensed words. Sometimes, there’s only a dull ringing in his ears, drowning out everything — even his heartbeat. 

Right now, the men’s taunts are ebbing into that dim ringing in Dick’s skull again. Dick can hear that strange hum and his own ragged breathing and nothing else, until a series of sharp, loud pops pierce through the haze. 

Eyes screwed shut still, Dick listens to his own breathing. The pain is still there, but there aren’t any new additions. The belt isn’t coming down anymore. 

Dick waits with bated breath. This has to be a trick to lull him into a false sense of security, but still, nothing happens. 

Finally, Dick dares to peek his eyes open and recoils when his eyes adjust. Immediately, he lurches backward, but he brings his legs up and then extends them to kick the huge black mass of a thing that’s right in front of him. Instead of staggering back, the thing just grunts, barely budging, and Dick panics. His feet feel like they’re about to drop right off of his body and just hang there on strips of dead muscle like wet clothes hung out on a line, but somehow, his brain lets him scrape through the pain: He tries the only thing he can think of, which is swing his ankles together in a link and then try and lock the thing—metal armor, cold, cold, cold, Dick processes deliriously—in a Kimura hold. 

Obviously, it fails. The thing just rips Dick’s limbs off of it. That act is done with such force that for a second, the blackness in Dick’s vision is coming from inside his eyes, not from the dark room. Dick pants, gasping in cold rough, dank air that hurts going down his throat while he tries to dig up more energy. But there’s nothing. There’s nothing. His body won’t move anymore. It’s out. It barely has enough in it left to hurt. 

So Dick doesn’t really react when he, dimly, hears the thud of footsteps—the click of steel on concrete. It’s deliberate. It has to be. 

Dick squeezes his eyes shut, still panting. He curls his fingers where they’re splayed out on the concrete, but it’s all he can manage. He can’t even lift his wrists up. 

He hears the thing crouch. When the sound of fabric folding and armorplates nudging hits Dick, he turns his face away from it, screwing his eyes even tighter. The cold concrete that his cheek presses against is fuzzy with dirt. Dick can feel it getting in his eyelashes, which are wet and hot with—

Well, with—

The sudden realization makes Dick furious, embarassed at himself. You can’t fucking handle that? he seethes. His fingernails scrabble into the palms of his balled fists. And now you won’t even fucking open your eyes to look at this guy? You’re that much of a coward?   

Dick grits his teeth and whips his head back around, throwing his eyes open. And then he feels the anger chasm out. The anger’s gone. Replaced with the brick in his throat. The shock. The incredulity.

Face barely a foot from Dick’s own, Slade Wilson’s crouching in front of him, a metal mask dangling from his fingers and leaving his face exposed. It’s shadowed and green in the almost nonexistent light, revealing only a glint of his eye, his nose. 

Slade stares at him for a long time. And then he says, “Get up, Dick Grayson.”

The seconds after Slade finishes speaking seem to last forever. It’s like the air is full of static. It’s charged. It’s hard to breathe. 

“How do you know my name?” Dick whispers. 

Slade tilts his head slowly, and Dick’s gaze slides down his face to the vague silhouette of hard armor. Dick swallows. 

Then Slade stands, puts his mask back on (there’s a crack in it), and stretches out a hand. He doesn’t say a word, and Dick just stares at the outstretched glove. 

Then, his injured fingers trembling, Dick takes it. 

Slade’s grip is good and firm, and Dick is suddenly being yanked to his feet, his arm wound around the older man’s broad shoulders. Slade’s armorplates dig into Dick’s ribs. Because Slade is so much taller than him, it takes a second before Dick’s bare feet brush the ground, but when they do, it’s an agony like he’s never felt. 

By now, the rabid primacy of not-getting-killed is gone, and really, truly gone; now that the adrenaline has receded, he feels every nerve ending crackle and scream. The pain has him on the verge of unconsciousness. 

Still, he doesn’t dare whimper — that’s showing a weakness, pathetic, dangerous. He wouldn’t even do that in front of Batman, so he certainly won’t in front of an apparently highly trained, highly armed virtual unknown. He is going to walk if it kills him. He can’t stop himself from tensing, though, and that’s enough for Slade to notice. 

There’s a scoff. The arm wrapped around Dick’s ribs tightens. 

“I’m not fucking stupid, kid.”

Then Dick’s feet aren’t on the ground anymore. 

The second-last thought he has before unconsciousness takes him fully is that someone is picking him up and carrying him in the dark, as if he were a little kid.

The last is that it’s almost nice.

It’s black when Dick wakes up. He’s in a moving vehicle — can sense that without opening his eyes. He elbows himself upright, ignoring the ache in his ribs and the scarily thready, throbby feel of his pulse. He’s in the backseat of what looks like a tactical vehicle, or maybe just a jeep. The darkness through the windows is only broken by the slight glow off the speedometer. It silvers Slade’s profile — the gleam of his hair. 

Dick’s throat thickens as memory of the last few days washes over him. The trafficking ring, the shocks, the cage. Slade. 

“Where are you taking me?” he asks, when he can finally work up enough spit. 

It comes out less than a rasp, and it feels like holding a gunbarrel down his pharynx and firing. 

Slade doesn’t even glance at him in the rearview mirror. Instead, without taking his gaze off the road — which isn’t even visible, the headlights off: all black and dark — he reaches over into the passenger seat and throws a metal flask back at Dick. 

“Safehouse,” Slade rumbles, speaking only once he hears Dick twist off the cap. When he doesn’t hear any other sounds, his gaze finally flickers up to the mirror, meeting Dick’s authoritatively: “Drink.”  

“Don’t tell me what to do.” The words that come out surprise himself. It’s generally not good practice to backtalk men with guns who are driving you to unknown locations when you’re injured, even if they just rescued you from a cage. Dick knows that. Somehow, the words come out anyway, bold and Robin-like. “I don’t know you. You probably poisoned it.”

“Hn.” 

Slade’s eye crinkles for just a sliver of a second in the rearview mirror, though his gaze has gone back on the road, and it makes Dick sit up and lean forward, as if pulled by a magnetic force, a clothesmoth to a sparkling lightbeam, suddenly wide-awake. Violently awake.  He tries to replay the moment in his head.

‘Hn.’ Dick’s grip tightens on the flask. In Bruce, ‘hn’ is the equivalent of a chuckle; it’s an accomplishment that Dick hasn’t won in almost two years. 

It’s a Chekhov reaction only, but right then in the car, there’s an instant where he feels pleased — proud. 

It’s a stupid reason to do it, but it makes Dick grip the metal tighter and then take a long swig from the flask. The water’s warm. It’s tinged with a metallic taste from the flask, but it doesn’t taste poisoned. 

It’s also very possibly the best thing he’s ever had, after so many days of no water at all. It takes more discipline than it should to rescrew the cap after just one sip, clumsy trembling fingers making the metal scrape loudly. 

But there’s a sly, instinctive part of Dick that flashes back to the addictive, pleased feeling he mined from the hn , and so he rasps, “You keep water in your flask?”

“Tiberium, actually.”

Dick’s heart actually drops for a moment, then settles as he realizes, and he allows himself a tiny, genuine smile in the dark, huffing out a note of — something. It’s not laughter. It’s barely a breath. “No, I’ve gotten mixed up with tiberium before. This isn’t it.”

“You haven’t had it properly dispersed in water then.”

“Fuck you,” Dick says, bonelessly.

Dick stares down at where his hands should be in the dark. He can’t see them. He can just barely catch a glint of light off of the flask. Then he unscrews the cap again (the sound of the metal cap twisting off is loud; he makes sure Slade can hear it) and drinks the rest of it down greedily, knowing the tiberium claim isn't real. His throat loosens the smallest fraction. 

“...Thanks,” Dick adds in a whisper, after a long silence. 

Slade doesn’t say anything at all. 

There’s another hour of silence in the dark. The headlights are off, so the only clues Dick can get as to where they are in the country happen when they pass by mile markers, which are few and far between on the tree-laden roads they speed through and mostly unlit besides. His body aches all over. Dick should ask where the safehouse is. He should ask if Slade’s going to take him home. 

He doesn’t.

Dick doesn’t even register falling asleep again in the car. But when he wakes next, he’s in an actual bed. 

It’s twin-sized with a pilled blue comforter that smells like it hasn’t been washed, or used, in years. There’s another undressed twin bed across the room, and this one is undressed.

The walls around Dick are wood. He realizes he’s in a cabin. More slowly, he realizes that his injuries have been treated. There are bandages around his feet and side. A splint on his broken thumb — he hadn’t even noticed it was broken. When Dick ghosts a hand under his bangs, he finds a neat traintrack of stitches along his skull. He runs his thumb over the inflamed sink-and-swell like a slow caterpillar. 

Most surprising of all, Dick realizes that when he gingerly draws himself off of the bed to stand, the soles of his feet only smart.

At least a hard 5 or so on the pain scale, which is a lot, on the Dick-Grayson-pain-scale, but compared to what it was? It feels like a miracle. Still, Dick keeps one hand on the wall as he cautiously pads out of the room. 

The only other space in the cabin is another, slightly larger room. A scrunched kitchen and a table and chairs. Along the walls are wire racks with cans of preserved fruit; otherwise, the space is completely void of any decoration. 

Slade is sitting at the table and polishing a break-action rifle, and it’s — it’s strange to see him again somehow. 

Last night, his face had been mostly obscured by the dark. The last time Dick saw him in full light, it had been when Dick found Slade’s address. That was only a week-and-a-half ago, but it feels as if it’s been longer. 

Of course, Slade looks exactly the same — tall, dark tan, eyepatch, scar, and hair the color of teeth. But it’s jarring to see him in a casual, long-sleeved black shirt and slacks after seeing him silhouetted in armor. 

Who even is he? Why was he there? Dick desperately wants to know. But it seems unwise to reveal that he apparently doesn’t know as much about Slade as he thought he did, so instead, he asks another question. 

“This is the safehouse?” he rasps.

“This is the safehouse,” Slade agrees coolly, wiping down the rifle’s receiver. He arches an eyebrow as he meets Dick’s gaze. “Albeit not the one I intended. Kulova’s men trailed us longer than expected. Or what was left of them did, I should say.” He tilts his head toward the cans along the wall, slinging one arm over the back of his chair. He is just enormous. He is just simply an enormous man. “Help yourself.”

Dick shakes his head gently and remains standing where he is, wrapping his arms around himself. “Where are we?”

“Eastern Connecticut.” Slade’s voice is flat, dry, and rumbly. 

“Where exactly.”

“A safehouse of mine in eastern Connecticut.”

Dick scowls. “Why’d you bring me here?”

“Like I said. Kulova’s men followed us. I presumed your partner wouldn’t like it if a ring of human traffickers trailed us to his little cave.”

Pure ice washes over every last inch of Dick’s skin. 

“I don’t know what y — ”

“Don’t,” says Slade, that slow dark piano-key voice, “play games with me.”

It feels like everything has shifted, has gotten charged with magnets, has started spinning. Dick feels dizzy with how fast this has changed, swaying where he stands in front of the biggest man he’s ever seen. He swallows, and his throat is so thick it’s as if he hadn’t bothered.

Oh, God. Slade knows about Batman.

“You don’t need to worry about your identities being disclosed. It wouldn’t benefit me in any way at the moment,” Slade offers, as if he’s being magnanimous, and then he hms, quietening. “Grant’s suit had several recording devices. I watched through the sections that preceded his death several times. I heard his exchanges with you. I...saw what you did.” 

Slade’s empty fingers twitch, and he picks up the cloth and resumes polishing the rifle with carefully controlled force. 

“He was right, for what it’s worth: You are as good as they say, Robin. The kimura hold you attempted in our fight last night, you recall? It was ambitious. It failed obviously — but startlingly well-executed nevertheless. For any child, much less one who had just been tortured.”

Slade isn’t rambling. Dick isn’t sure that a man like that even could. But it’s impossible to miss the dramatic veer from talking about Grant to Dick, how the fixation shifted, as if Grant is simply not to be discussed. 

It reminds him of the way Alfred phrases things sometimes: ‘something that doesn’t bear thinking about.’

And for some reason, that breaks through the extraordinary tension and alarm bells in Dick’s chest, softening him all over. It’s so human. It’s so fatherlike. Grieflike. It’s so familiar that Dick aches. 

“I do recall,” Dick says gently. “...But I’m not a child.”

Slade scoffs. “Fifteen.”

“I’m almost sixt— ”

“Fifteen and seven months is not ‘almost.’ You said Grant was a child.”

“He was.”

“He was nineteen.”

Dick falters only for a second. “He was a child. He was your child.”

“And you’re not a child?” Slade raises a brow, then pauses and huffs. He grabs a can off of the wall himself and stabs a knife through the top of it, sliding it across the table. “Sit down, kid. Eat.”

Dick just stands, still trying to formulate an answer to the question. No, Dick isn’t. It just doesn’t apply to Dick like that. Dick saw his parents’ skin slip off their bones like silk gloves off a hand, saw their guts inside out, and now Dick doesn’t have parents anymore; instead, he has a man who won’t look him in the eye after he gets hurt, who stands in silence in the doorway when Dick wakes up from nightmares. 

Dick isn’t a child because Dick can take care of himself. Does take care of himself. He knows right from wrong. 

Dick grew up young. He had to.

“Sit,” Slade repeats, and finally, Dick does, the words sticking to his tongue 

“I’m not a child. I was trained from the time I was eight years old.”

“I trained Grant from age seven.”

Dick feels his brow furrow. “You trained Grant?”

Slade inclines his head to the left, which must mean yes. 

“Why?”

“Why did your father train you at eight?”

“That was different,” Dick says quickly. “And he’s not my father. I asked for it. It was my choice. I needed to bring the man who killed my parents to justice. He needed to face the law.”

“Not very successful, were you? Zucco died of a heart attack before the case even made it to a grand jury.”

Dick stiffens. His jaw clicks with how quickly it slams shut. It’s one thing to know about Batman and Robin, and it’s another to know about Dick’s parents’ killer. The discomfort—the how and why—must write itself on Slade’s face because Slade tilts his head, then scoffs. 

“A young boy shows up at the doorstep of one of my most secure safehouses and tells me that my son is dead. Reviewing the footage from my son’s last moments reveals that he had been trying to fulfill a contract but was, despite being trained by me, losing the fight, as well as the fact that the boy in question was in fact Robin. You expect me to have not done any research?”

Dick is silent for a long time. “...Why were you at the trafficking ring?”

Slade’s eye flickers down, then back up to Dick, a brow arched, sardonic. 

“I’m sure you’re well-acquainted with my work from your mentor’s files.”

At that, Dick conceals a wince. 

They’re definitely not evenly matched in terms of research on one another, although Slade apparently doesn’t know that. 

Dick hasn’t had access to the files in the cave since Bruce fired him. That was two weeks before Grant came after him. Finding Grant’s birth certificate and birth parents through other channels had been more difficult than it should have been, like someone had scrubbed the documents from existence. 

Eventually, Dick had managed to dig up old service records for a Slade Wilson, but nothing else and no address. For that, he’d had to borrow an old, barebones version of the League’s facial recognition software to track him down without anyone being notified. Dick hadn’t had the chance to dig too much deeper; he’d wanted to give the news and get out before Bruce had the chance to find out he left. 

But the implication that Bruce has files on Slade—and now that Dick’s thinking about it, the implication of exactly what kind of man hangs around trafficking rings in armor and lives out of safehouses—   

Dick narrows his eyes, pretending to know exactly what Slade’s talking about. “Then why’d you save me?”

Slade doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“Consider it a repayment,” Slade says finally. “I don’t like being in debt.”

 Dick’s brows furrow in confusion. “You weren’t.”

Slade scoffs. His tongue darts up to his canine as he stares at Dick like he’s seeing something strange and unintelligible. Then, he shakes his head. One arm thrown around the back of his chair, he reaches forward and shoves the can of fruit toward Dick again. It’s pitted cherries. 

“Eat, kid.”

Dick hesitates. And then—he does. 

Slade is chopping firewood. 

Connecticut—at least eastern Connecticut, home of this-safehouse-in-particular—is cold. Dick doesn’t mind it.

The sky is gray, the tree trunks medium-thin, striped, and gray, too. All of their leaves are crunchy and stacked on the ground, and they’re loud. Loud when they rustle and move in the wind and even louder when Slade Genghis Khans his way through cities of them as he stalks back and forth every so often to retrieve more firewood.

Dick watches in silence, sitting on the outjutting of the cabin’s window. He folds his hands in his lap. 

Kulova, Dick thinks, trying to see if the name of the trafficker who Slade mentioned should mean anything to him. 

Kulova. 

Dick doesn’t think so. So far it means jackshit. 

There are a lot of bad people in the world. Dick hasn’t met the half of them. Sometimes, in Gotham, it’s easy to think that your criminal database covers every bad guy that ever was, because it seems to have half Gotham’s whole population inside. 

A fresh chill runs through the latest gust of wind.

Dick shrugs the big dark green flannel Slade gave him closer, winding its cuffs over his fingers. 

Dick’s head really hurts, but he’s not about to ask Slade for an ibuprofen. The sting in the soles of his feet has started up again, too. Still, it’s nothing like the gaping hole of flesh and electric muscle that it felt like last night in the darkness, so Dick can deal with that, too. He just needs to distract himself. 

But Kulova is not a line of thought that goes anywhere, he doesn’t want to think about Bruce or Alfred right now, and he’s afraid to even wonder if the girls in Sionis and Kulova’s cages are all right. There’s not a lot that can serve as a distraction. 

Suddenly, firewood on the stump splits in two like a tree struck by lightning. At first, both halves of the split log stay upright.

Then one side lilts left and falls into the crisp gray leaves on ground. Then the other. 

Dick’s eyes slip to the stump, which is cut down the center, too. An inverted triangle sits in the middle of the flat stumptop, where Slade has been delivering the blow of the axe, but then, as Dick stares, the slit is hidden again, by Slade placing in a new log. Dick tracks the line of Slade’s hand up to his face.

Slade seems to know the second that Dick’s attention falls on him: He looks up. Their eyes lock in the dry air. Suddenly, Dick’s mouth and throat feel funny. The axe comes down again, and the wood’s in half. Slade’s eye never left Dick. 

“How much firewood do you need?” Dick says quietly. It would hurt if he spoke above this kind of crackly rasp, so he doesn’t bother. If Grant got his powers from Slade, that means the enhanced hearing was genetic. “You planning on staying a while?”

Somehow, in the seconds since their gazes met, Dick’s slipped back into that weird, hyper-competent state. The almost-Robin state. What he’s really asking is: Are you keeping me here? Am I stuck here? Are you going to let me go home? 

Or am I going to have to fight you for it?

Slade gets it. “It’s for tonight. We leave at 4 a.m. tomorrow.” 

Dick starts. Of all of the answers Slade could have given, Dick wasn’t expecting that one. Not for the answer to be framed like that, at least. The surprise—the…what is this feeling, exactly, anyway? Disappointment? That can’t be right—must show on Dick’s face because Slade clocks it immediately. 

Slade’s eyebrow lifts, interest clearly sparked. He tilts his chin, eyes slitting.  “You sound surprised.” 

“No,” Dick snaps. “No. I just—that’s soon.”

“‘Soon’?” 

Dick’s mouth clicks shut, thoughts freezing. There’s a silence, except for the leaves and the wind swirling. Dick’s hands have gone perfectly still on his knees. He knows what it must have sounded like to Slade: like Dick doesn’t want to go back. And that feels like a dangerous thing for Slade to know, especially when Dick doesn’t know the first damn thing about Slade. 

“I meant that’s sooner than I thought,” Dick corrects weakly. 

Slade is a big tan figure against the gray rings of the trees, the dead leaves, and the axe handle. His hair is white, but his eyes and the coat over his turtleneck are dark brown. For a second, when there’s a blow of thin snow, it’s like Dick sees an x-ray of Slade, except instead of bones, it shows all of his orange and black armor from the night before. But then the x-ray is gone, and Slade is just standing there in brown wool, before a pile of firewood and a mutilated chopping block. 

“Of course,” Slade says curtly. 

Dick can’t stop the rush of heat that floods his face. At the brushing-off of exactly what Dick wanted brushed-off. At how the moment just gets to be over. His face stings, warm, in the cold air. All Dick can do for several minutes longer is watch as Slade continues chopping wood in silence. 

And then Slade says: “You’re good, you know.”

“What?” Dick breathes, startled again. 

Slade hasn’t stopped working. “You’re good at it.”

“‘It’?”

“The fights,” Slade says. “The hunt. You’re good at it.”

Dick sits back, pressing his spine against the windowpane, making some of the snow crusted around the muntin bar crackle down Dick’s hair and flannel in hard, sharp flakes. “Thanks.”

Dick’s face hasn’t stopped feeling flushed. Even his fingertips feel warm, and he rubs them together, and then against the thighs of his pants, almost willing them to go numb with the cold again, but the warmth won’t stop. It’s only getting worse. It’s only spreading into the center of his chest. 

“Thanks,” Dick repeats quietly, swallowing hard. A beat passes. “Yeah. I liked it.”

The implication—the past tense—comes down like a swing of the axe. Slade doesn’t ask: You don’t like it anymore? but the question is there nonetheless in the dark, leveling, curious gaze that Slade sends across the space between them. He’s stopped chopping the wood now. 

Dick’s throat goes tight. 

Slade doesn’t outright ask, so Dick doesn’t have to say, ‘I’m not Robin anymore,’ or ‘I got fired,’ or some half-truth, the kind that Dick tells Roy. 

“I’m not who you think I am,” Dick says only. Sort of quiet. Sort of fervent. Sort of warning. 

Part of Dick is expecting Slade—whoever Slade actually is—to get it and see through Dick instantly. When he understands, he’ll react the way that everyone will: with derision. Incredulity at first, but not surprise. 

But Slade doesn’t react with either. All he says is: “No?”

Dick exhales shakily. “No.”

Slade’s chin tilts up like someone’s put a knife under it, thinking, tiltng slightly to one side as his eye narrows, understanding. Dick braces. And then — 

And then Slade smiles. Brilliant white teeth. A dimple. Creasing his eye. He looks—Slade is not a man who looks many things, but if Dick had to give the wild feeling riding that smile a name, he would call it excited. And then it’s like a car switching off its brights on a long dark road: It’s gone. Like it was never there at all. 

“Here,” Dick says. 

“What?” says Slade. 

“Here. Stop here. Stop right now.”

Slade does. The car skids to a stop along the side of the road, the tan leather interior of the car lit up by the dim morning light and the still-on highmast lighting. It’s coming up on seven. They got an early start. The sign next to the high mast they’re under says, “Welcome to Jersey City.”

“Wrong shithole, kid,” Slade says, but seems to understand, because he doesn’t turn the car back on. 

Alfred and Bruce knew the second that Roy’s truck rolled through the Manor gates. If Slade were the one dropping Dick off, it wouldn’t just be two windows lighting up orange in the middle of the night: It would practically be a five-alarm fire. They would see Slade, and Dick would have to explain. 

Dick is so tired of explaining. Especially to them. 

Some explanations are going to be unavoidable: the state of his face, his feet, his disappearance. 

But Dick doesn’t think he could explain this, too. Besides, Dick isn’t sure he could stomach being back at the Manor. Not just yet. 

“Thanks,” Dick says curtly, opening the cardoor. Slade says nothing. Dick steps out, closes the cardoor. Nothing. 

And then Slade says, “Kid.”

Slade is reaching over the passenger side, holding a small slip of black paper. Dick takes it gingerly. It’s matte, and doesn’t catch the light. Pressed into it is an indentation—no ink—with ten digits. Dick stares at it a second more, then hands it back to Slade, whose face flickers with something like amusement. “Hn,” Slade says, almost failing to not-smile, and something twists sharply in Dick’s insides. 

The almost-smile is gone from Slade’s face as fast as it came, though. It’s replaced by a professional, almost bored expression, as detached as someone thumbing through a box of cigarettes, and it’s paired with a slow, uninterested, rumbling drawl. “Distress code is Kenilworth.” Beat. “If.” On anyone else, saying one word might have sounded like trailing off; from Slade’s mouth, it’s unambiguously deliberate. 

If you need it.

“If,” Slade repeats, then tucks the slip back into his pocket. His arm remains outstretched across the passenger seat, and Dick remains standing outside of the car, watching through the rolled-down window. Slade pauses. “Because it would be a waste.”

Dick wanders around Jersey City for a couple hours, glancing up at the blazing casino lights, the OPEN signs that unlight just as Dick is walking by. It’s not as nice without Roy. It’s not as fun. 

The drugs make Dick’s feet hurt less, but they still hurt, and the drugs are beginning to burn off anyway. By noon, Dick walks into a hotel, and asks the receptionist if he can make a call. 

With good traffic, Jersey City is two hours, and some change, east of Gotham. Alfred is there in one-fifteen. 

Alfred hugs Dick so tightly that they both topple over in the middle of the hotel lobby. Alfred strokes his hair and cries in public. Dick feels happy. It lasts whole seconds. 

But the feeling creeps back in when they roll through those gates together. In the daytime, it’s harder to see, but Dick can still make it out. There’s a light on in Bruce’s study. When Alfred and Dick begin to walk up together, Dick sees the curtain over the window in Bruce’s study rustle—then slip closed. 

Suddenly, Dick would rather be sprawled on cold concrete, getting his feet whipped with a leather belt, than take one more step up the stairs to the Manor. 

What happened? Alfred asks. Dick says that he was angry, so he left. Dick says that he tried to interfere with a crime and got beaten. Dick says that he escaped.

That night Dick stirs when the bed dips under someone’s weight. He keeps his eyes closed, his body slack in a convincing imitation of sleep. A large hand falls gently on the crown of his head, brushing through his bangs. 

Then it stills. “I need to develop a report,” says Bruce, “complete with a full account of the last four days.” 

Dick breathes, says nothing. Bruce tries to exhale, but it comes out stunted. And something breaks.  

“What do you want, Dick?” Bruce whispers after a long time. It sounds loud in the silence, but his voice sounds thin and taut. “I don’t know how to make it better anymore.”

I don’t think you ever did, Dick thinks bitterly. 

The fingers curl in his hair. 

“I know you’re awake.” Another silence. “Tell me how to make it better. Please.” 

Dick doesn’t move. There are knuckles on his cheek. 

“What do you want? How do I fix it?”

The air in the room is still. The hand doesn’t leave, like it’s trying to drink up every second of contact, like it’s afraid that if it lets up Dick will disappear into thin air. 

Slowly, never giving up the ruse of sleep, Dick shifts to his other shoulder, turning away from the man on the bed. The hand falls away. Dick hears it hit the sheets limply. 

The door shuts a few minutes after that. The hallwaylight disappears, darkness flooding the room again. Dick furls his fingers into his pillowcase, and wishes, for the second time, that he had told Bruce after all. 

Told him: You can’t.

Slade listens, with a brow raised over his sunglasses, the entire time that Dick talks. He waves the waitress away from their table each of the three times that she approaches, not ever turning his head away from Dick. 

When Dick is finally finished, Slade is quiet for a long spell. It’s been one month. When Dick called the number he memorized off of that card, Slade, voice muffled by the metallic tings of colliding blades and shouting voices and wet noises, said, Kid. He said, I didn’t expect that you woud be in mortal peril so soon. 

I’m not, Dick said only. And Slade had laughed. 

Now, Slade leans forward slowly, tilting his head just slightly—one centimeter, one-half—tongue coming up to touch his sharp canine in intrigue. “It’s not what you think it is, kid. It’s not that kind of work. I certainly don’t know if it’s your kind: It’s a lot of moving around.”

“Fine,” says Dick smoothly, “I hate staying in one place.” 

Throwing his arm back over his seat, Slade barks out a rough laugh. And then, and then, and then he smiles. Slade has a nice smile, nicer than you would expect from a man like that. White, and sharp, and clean, startling against his dark tan, creasing his skin. Crooked, just a little. He places his thumb under his chin, index finger raised and pressed into his cheek, and appraises Dick a second longer with those dark eyes, and then sobers, all at once, smile plucked out of existence like it was never there at all. Again. 

“All right,” Slade murmurs suddenly, serious, intense eyes locked on Dick. “If you think you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

Dick watches him, sets his jaw. “All right,” he echoes. 

Slade’s eye flicks leisurely out the window. “We leave in seven minutes.” He does not glance at his watch. “Use them,” he says, “or don’t. You’ll meet me by the black Bimmer. Tinted windows. License plate— ”

“2F-3567,” Dick finishes. “I saw it when you came in.”

Slade raises a brow, looking not exactly surprised but still vaguely—impressed. Dick shifts under the weight of his gaze, chest vaguely warm, like a used gun, or maybe a wild animal under a hot tire. Dick’s heart thuds.

“Good boy.” When Dick gets up to leave, Slade lifts two fingers, like he’s been doing all morning. Dick stops immediately. A pleased look flashes briefly over Slade’s features before disappearing completely, melting into another serious, professionalized expression.  “You’re going to leave your communication devices. Preferably deactivate them yourself. You don’t want me to be the one to do it, I assure you, kid.”

In response, Dick’s fingers wrap around the cracked-screened phone in his pocket, and don’t let go even as he crosses the threshold of the restaurant’s doorway into the outside world. The air’s brisk, the dry wind sending chills up Dick’s spine and numbing his hands as he stabs the digits onto the screen. 

Something like six minutes left now. Each ring of the line seems unbearably long, and Dick is starting to feel foolish. Of course no one would pick up, this number was only ever a temporary line, Dick knew that—but then the ring cuts off. It’s a hazy voice, scraped with sleep.

Slow.

“...Dick?”

“Hi,” Dick breathes too quickly, clutching the phone tighter to his cheek. “How’re you?”

“I’m…good. It’s the middle of the night here. What’s up with you, kid? Why do you sound like there’s something wr— ” There’s a strange female voice in the background speaking softly (Vietnamese maybe) and something rustles on the other end as Roy puts the phone down for a second to reply indistinctly. Then he’s back. “What’s going on with you, kid? How can I help? I’m sort of, er, abroad right now, but I can be there in a couple hours if you need me.”

Dick goes quiet. He doesn’t know exactly what to say, for once, and so he squeezes his eyes shut and tries to picture Roy right now—dark room, sitting on the edge of a bed, the light through a crack in the curtains catching on his hair as he presses his phone to his cheek. Dick reopens his eyes, which are suddenly stinging.

“You’re starting to scare me here, wonder-bread. Talk to me.”

Chewing his lip, Dick glances back through the shining window of the restaurant. Slade’s gone, the table they were at completely empty. 

“Is it Bruce?”

A waiter behind the window snags Slade’s coffee cup with two fingers and disappears to the other side of the pane. 

“Is it something with Al? Did you get Robin back? C’mon. Come on, talk to me here, baby boy.”

Slade must already be at the car. It’s got to have been more than five minutes by now. Dick glances at a trash can—he’ll snap his phone in half when this is over and throw it out. He took the tracker that Bruce doesn’t know he knows about out of this jacket before he left home. Before he left the Manor, that is.

“Dickie,” says Roy, and it’s soft. It’s desperate. And that — that’s what Dick wants, isn’t it? That’s what he’s always wanted, isn’t it? 

But it’s Roy, not Bruce. 

It’s not enough.

“What’s going on?”

Dick wets his lips, opens them, closes them. There’s a long beat, and he glances back one more time at the empty table through the window. His voice comes out a whisper, like it’s a secret.

“I think I’m leaving,” Dick whispers. “I think I'm not coming back.”