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Dick knew that he needed to get up, that he needed to do something, but he couldn’t seem to get his body to move.
Gotham had been saved, Babs and Tim and Gordon all rescued. Scarecrow was back in prison, Two-Face, Killer Croc, Riddler, Firefly, Professor Pyg…basically everyone except Penguin, and without anyone to sell his guns to, he was just another corrupt businessman.
And Bruce was dead.
Dick had heard the news, laying on the bare mattress where the Arkham Knight had put him. He’d been in so much pain, his body wrecked from the inside out and nearly frozen after being abandoned in a concrete cell for hours. When he’d first felt a gloved hand on his shoulder that night, he’d been convinced it was a hallucination, so sure that he had been left to die in that place.
Then his earplugs had been removed and the Knight had spoken for the first time, and Dick had been so sure it was time for more pain that he’d completely shut down. He couldn’t even register what the Knight was saying, was barely aware of being picked up and moved, he was sunk so deep in his own head in that hidden place where pain and torment couldn’t find him.
It was one of the first things Bruce had taught him.
Bruce. The thought echoed in his mind as he first came back to himself. His hearing was still his own, but his eyes were gritting and sore under the contacts still keeping him blind. He’d shifted in discomfort, and felt true shock to realize his arms and legs were free. His tongue ached with the taste of blood when he moved it, but he could no longer feel the metal stud Slade Wilson had forced upon him.
There was a sharp pain in his body, somewhere deep and significant, that felt dangerous when he breathed too deep.
“...reports from Wayne Manor show that the incendiary device was placed underneath the grounds, the assailants using the sewers and unknowingly causing a collapse into a series of natural caves beneath the building. More at 11, but first, we go to alleged Batman and billionaire Bruce Wayne’s funeral, where nearly every major Gotham figure is putting in an appearance, except surprisingly, Wayne’s former ward Dick Grayson, who has yet to appear at any events—”
“I know you’re awake,” said a low voice, young but scratchy, as though its owner was more used to yelling than to speaking.
With a shaking hand, Dick clumsily pried the lenses from his eyes, waiting for the man to try to stop him.
He didn’t. Dick threw the lenses to the side, staring up at a grimy ceiling for a moment, before lifting his head to take in the room for the first time.
It was as empty as the bed Dick laid upon; a small room with a built-in kitchenette, a tiny table on one wall covered in mechanical parts, and a small TV in one corner with a cardboard box for a console.
A man was hunched over in front of it, his legs crossed and his head bowed low over something. The TV continued to play scenes from a crowded church, masses of mourners in black suits and dresses filling the screen.
“Bruce is dead?” Dick croaked. He knew he should feel something about that, but it was like the world had been muffled; he could hear his heart pounding in his chest, but he couldn’t feel…anything.
The man snorted, standing and walking over. Dick got a good look at his clothes. This was the Arkham Knight.
There was a lurch in his stomach. He hadn’t heard the Knight’s voice at the barrack where Slade had brought him, not before they’d strung him up and stuck the earplugs in, but that didn’t mean that his appetites were any different from his men’s. Why else would he have brought Dick here, laid him down on a bed?
Dick found he was grateful, to wake up unfucked, that nothing seemed to have happened while he was asleep.
Then the Knight knelt down, and Dick got his first look at the man’s unmasked face.
“...Jason?”” Dick breathed, a hand coming up before he managed to stop it, inches from the Knight. The other man just closed his eyes, and Dick placed trembling fingers on the skin beneath his eye. There was flesh, real skin and bones, under his hand.
All at once, Dick’s eyes filled with tears, and he snatched back his hand to cup his own mouth. Curling onto his side away from the rest of the room, Dick tried to contain his sobs. Jason was alive, Jason was alive!, but Bruce was dead. Dick was ruined, and Bruce was dead.
“Dickiebird?” Jason asked, his young voice uncertain. Dick just shuddered harder, unable to calm himself down or uncurl at all. Jason. Jason was alive. But Dick was ruined.
And Bruce was dead.
A warm hand brushed the hair from his neck, stroking his head gently. It was enormous, that hand, and a distant part of Dick marveled at how big Jason had gotten, so different from the lanky teen he’d once known.
He wanted to laugh. He couldn’t stop crying. He wanted to explain, to beg for forgiveness, to ask how?
The breaths were shaking through him, harsh as nails through his lungs. There was a loud sigh.
“You need to calm down, Dickie,” Jason said, and there was a slight pinch at his neck. “This kind of stress isn’t good for you. We can try this again in a little bit.”
The feeling of a sedative was quickly spreading through his body, but there was no room to feel despair or betrayal. Dick pushed himself into the darkness, eager for the reprieve. It was too much. He didn’t want to think.
Jason was alive. Dick was ruined. Bruce was dead.
When Dick woke up, he was alone.
He could almost pretend that Jason was a hallucination, that nothing had happened at all, except he was still on a mattress on the floor in the same dingy little apartment. The Arkham Knight’s helmet was on the table, and there was a pile of newspapers by the television.
His bandages had been completely refreshed, his injuries cleaned and re-wrapped. It must have happened while he was unconscious. He waited for the panicked, sinking feeling in his stomach that he got on the very rare occasions someone entered his space while he was asleep, but somehow, it didn’t come.
Dick could see the front page from where he laid. The Manor was recognizable even from its wreckage, the charred remains of the front steps he used to race up and down on his way to school, the tree that once housed his tire swing.
Somewhere in there were the bodies of Bruce and Alfred, supposedly. Tim would know, would be working to get their bodies out, if he hadn’t already. If there were any bodies to get.
Tim would know. Dick could call him, could ask.
He could go down there himself, could dig Bruce out of the rubble, could look at the incendiary device and start looking for clues and patrolling the streets and planning how to answer the inevitable questions that will come up when people start to ask what Dick Grayson knew about Batman.
Dick didn’t get up. He stayed on his back, on the mattress, and blinked away long gulps of time.
He’d fallen asleep before Jason came back.
Jason was curled up next to him on the mattress.
Dick had finally managed to haul himself out of bed, to take a shower and give his teeth a thorough brushing. He’d done the lightest set of stretches he knew, the ones his parents had shown him for the days when he was seriously injured.
And then, because there was nothing else expected of him at that moment and because he had been exhausted, he’d curled back up on the mattress and gone back to sleep. When he next came to, he’d realized there was a warm body next to him.
There was a careful line of space between them, but only a line; Jason had curved his body against the curves of Dick’s back, like Dick’s skin had a 2 inch force field and Jason was desperate to break through it.
Peering over his own shoulder, he studied Jason’s sleeping face. His expression was smooth and clear, and his features somehow looked much younger without any animation. The “J” carved on his cheek was especially gruesome in the weak morning light.
Dick didn’t know how long he’d been in that apartment. It felt like a long time. He hadn’t touched anyone’s skin in all that time, and hadn't been touched by Jason at all.
He looked at that familiar and yet so different face, one that he’d never really taken the time to study until it was gone, the photos on the Batserver on rotation during the months they’d spent looking for someone they never thought they’d find.
Without giving it much conscious thought, Dick shifted his foot back a little bit, hooked it around Jason’s ankle.
He closed his eyes, and went back to sleep.
Dick woke up, swelteringly hot.
There were two thick, burly arms wrapped around him, one around his waist and one across his shoulders. A heavy leg was thrown over both of his, pinning him to the mattress, and he could feel warm, even breaths against his shoulder. The thin quilt that Dick had been given was draped over them, a layer too much letting the body heat build, but Dick could not reach out to tear it away.
It was funny. Jason and Dick had only shared a bed once, before Jason’s disappearance. It had been the first day that they met. Dick had come back to the Manor for the first time since he’d left, to find the entire house empty. Exhausted but still needing to talk to Bruce, he’d drifted back to his original bedroom and slipped out of his suit for a nap.
He’d woken up to find a stranger’s hand, hovering inches from his shoulder, and a little face peering into his. Reacting on instinct, he had wrestled the figure away from him, pulling his attacker into a headlock even as he felt a hand wrap under his thigh to try and unbalance him.
It was only when Alfred turned on the light that he realized the familiar fabric under his hands had been the Robin suit. His suit, on the body of someone else. And it was only when he saw that the new kid—the so-called new Robin!— had a face that was bright pink and eyes that were avoiding direct contact, did he remember that he was stripped down to his boxers, and had been holding the poor kid’s face against his bare underarm.
“What’s funny?” the older, more battered Jason asked sleepily, somehow nuzzling in closer. He sounded grumpy, and so casual, so unexpecting, that the smile on Dick’s face grew into a full on grin, and kept growing in a startled, rusty laugh.
Maybe there was an alternate world out there, somewhere, where he and Jason had actually grown up together, become real friends and teammates and somehow fallen into bed together. Where they were laying on a mattress in a proper frame, in a 2 bedroom apartment where Babs stayed the night and Tim came to play video games and Bruce even popped by for dinner once in a while.
Maybe that world didn’t have a Scarecrow or a Joker, didn't have people in it whose only goal seemed to be to cause more harm to one another. Didn’t have moms that fell from high places, or dads who disappeared into flames and smoke when you really needed them.
Maybe in that world, they really would laugh themselves awake on a dreary morning, before getting ready to face the day.
“Dickie, you need to calm down,” said Jason, his arms and legs constricting tighter around Dick’s body. Dick shook his head, couldn’t stop the sounds from coming out of his mouth. He shook and shook and shook with laughter.
“Dickie, you need to learn how to keep this under control,” Jason said, lips pressed into the corner of Dick’s mouth. The arm around his shoulders moved to pin his elbows to his side, the hand around his waist releasing to reach for something behind them. There was a tearing, of some kind of plastic packaging, and then there was another pinch at Dick’s neck.
“You’re going to be okay, Dick,” was the last whisper Dick heard before the world went dark again.
Dick could feel Jason’s eyes on him. He wasn’t stupid. He’d been a superhero since he was 8 years old, and it wasn’t just the Gotham elite that had gotten weirder about him, the closer he got to 18. He’d learned very, very early what a dangerous gaze was, versus one that was merely watching.
Jason was somehow doing both.
Standing at the kitchen sink, Dick was washing the pan he’d used to cook eggs that morning. For the first time in who knew how long, he’d woken up hungry. He’d been wrapped up tight against Jason’s body, arms and legs entangled, as had become the usual way he woke up.
It should scare him, should be the thing that sent him running for the doors, and sometimes he did have moments where he froze, the memory of different hands keeping him pinned for something very different sending the blood pounding through his heart, the fear so overwhelming he forgot again where he was.
But Jason’s arms always let him go when he wanted to leave, and really, that was the most important difference. There weren’t a lot of people in Dick’s life who’d let him go without first deciding that they wanted to release him.
So. Eggs. Dick had woken up hungry, and that was the only thing he’d found in the fridge. He wasn’t sure what Jason liked, he’d never seen him eat anything, much less breakfast, but when the other man staggered into the bathroom, Dick dutifully began whisking another 3 eggs.
Scrambled was how Alfred had made his eggs, at least. Bruce had liked hard-boiled, and Alfred himself usually liked them sunny side up, but as a kid, it had always been scrambled.
The eggs were now steaming on a plate, Dick was washing a pan, and Jason was watching him.
“Go on, eat,” said Dick without turning from his task. After a moment, there was the scrape of metal fork on plastic plate.
Dick had moved onto wash the other sundries in the sink, a couple of glass mugs, a cereal bowl with a cereal he didn’t know they had, when a large hand placed a new plate in the sink, the other hand gripping the counter. Dick’s hips were between those two hands, and he could feel a chin rest on his shoulder.
Jason was dangerous, because Jason’s gaze was hungry. And yet, for all skin contact they’d shared, his hands never went anywhere bad. Jason was confusing, because somehow, he seemed hungriest to just touch Dick. To just have him close.
Dick turned off the water, drying his hands with a dishrag. He took a deep breath, and turned around, leaning his ass against the counter.
“Hey,” whispered Dick. Like this, their faces were only inches apart.
Jason’s eyes were so blue, staring back down at him. Every line of him was straining towards Dick, curved around him as though caught in some unseen gravity, keeping him teetered and yet at a distance.
His hands stayed locked on the counter. Dick grabbed him around the back of the head and threw their bodies together, legs and hips and chests and mouths.
Strong arms locked around him, across his back and under his butt, lifting him into the air so that their lips were more properly aligned.
God, Jason was good with his mouth. Dick didn’t want to ever, ever let go.
The first time they have sex was bad, very, very bad. Dick froze up like a deer in headlights, Jason didn’t seem comfortable with hands at his chest or his shoulders or his neck, and neither of them remembered about condoms until after they’d made a mess of the sheets.
They didn’t try anything penetrative. Dick was still sore inside, still saw traces of red on the rare days he allowed himself to use the bathroom. He didn’t know if he’d let anything inside of him again, like that, or at least not for a very, very long time.
But the kissing. God, the kissing. It was still really, really good.
They got about a month together, before someone found them. Dick had hoped it would be Barbara, maybe Tim, that his family would come get him even though he couldn’t bring himself to go to them.
But when he woke up blindfolded, his naked arms and legs tied to the bottom legs of Jason’s small table, his knees and thighs spread terrifyingly wide, he knew that something had gone very wrong.
There was a rope wrapped around his neck, keeping him flat on his back with the edge of the table digging into his neck. He still bucked so hard he nearly strangled himself when a huge, gloved hand glided teasingly up his inner thigh, slipping under his boxers.
“Hello, little bird,” a smooth, dark voice said into Dick’s ear.
Every muscle in Dick’s body went taut, his throat closing to the point that he couldn’t even gasp out a sob. Dick hadn’t heard that voice since its owner had strung him up in a room full of men, all ready and waiting to fuck him. Since he’d been forced to entertain more cocks than he could remember, before being tied even tighter and abandoned in a cold, dark cell.
Dick wished he could say he hated Slade Wilson, but all he knew in this moment was fear.
“How sweet,” said Slade, running his hands down Dick’s flank now. “Already trembling for me. Why so scared, little bird? I’ve never hurt you, not really. And look! I'm the only one who's come looking for you. Somehow, the famous Dick Grayson disappeared without a trace, and yet no one else has bothered to investigate. No one seems to even care that you’re gone, now that the Bat is dead.”
Dick was stupid for it, but he flinched. He couldn’t help it.
There was low chuckle, and then thick, gloved fingers tugged the bandana free from Dick’s eyes. He blinked, his eyes adjusting to the lowlight in the living room and the way his head had been forced all the way back.
Jason was sitting in one of the dining chairs, his arms tied behind him and a thick rope around his neck, its long end snaking down his body, keeping him bound to the chair. A band of duct tape was wrapped around his head, tight enough that it cut into his cheeks, keeping his lips closed.
He didn’t try to speak at all, but his eyes burned as they traced over Dick’s displayed body. Dick longed to offer a reassurance, to communicate something between them, but Jason’s eyes never met his.
A pair of massive thighs entered his vision. He glared up at Slade, smiling so genially down at him as he circled the table, hands tracing lines into Dick's bare skin.
“What do you want?” Dick demanded, his throat dry and his voice hoarse. He didn’t talk much, anymore.
“What’s this?” Slade said archly. “Is that anyway to talk to the man who has come to rescue you?”
Dick had known Slade Wilson for almost 15 years, had been stalked and harassed and generally bothered by him for years before their last encounter left him hanging from the ceiling. Whatever it was that Slade wanted, it had never been to rescue him.
“Thanks, but I’m good here,” Dick snapped back. There was a slight give at his left wrist. Maybe he’d be able to get a hand free.
Slade tutted. He leaned in between Dick’s spread legs, a heavy weight across his hips and torso, pressing down harder on him than before.
“Come on, Robin. Come play with me. We’ve had such good times over the years.”
Distantly, Dick could hear Jason snarling something from behind the gag, but it wasn’t understandable. And Dick couldn’t take his eyes off of Slade’s searingly blue one, keeping him pinned much better than the ropes or the weight.
“You had me raped, over and over.” Dick’s could feel his chest struggle to move the air through his body.
“Little bird, I’m the only one here who hasn’t raped you,” Slade said, soothingly.
Dick almost laughed—that didn’t mean much with only two of us in the room, Slade— before he remembered. His head flew back so he could look at Jason, strained, upside down view that it was.
“You’re lying,” Dick’s mouth said, even as his eyes took in the heavy look on Jason’s face, the way his posture had suddenly gone ramrod straight.
“I’m not lying. I may have given you away, but I have never taken advantage of you, little bird. Even when you were a teenager, and so helplessly, hopelessly lonely that you were practically offering yourself to me, I never accepted, did I? Not like your brother, over there.”
The jab at Dick's long history with Slade Wilson, the things Dick had done to survive him, was a barely noticeable flicker in his chest, as his heart filled with a new kind of dread.
“Jason wouldn’t. He couldn’t have,” Dick whispered. Slade laughed.
“You think one of Scarecrow’s men left you in Arkham? You think one of them made off with you and decided to just abandon you somewhere? Everyone single one of those guys were ready to fuck you until your body gave out. They were going to leave you hanging from that rafter until you were ruined beyond compare, and then they were going to keep fucking you anyway.
Only two people with access to those bunkers and those forces would have kept you alive. One of them is me. The other one is your little friend here, only he couldn’t resist sampling the goods first.”
Dazedly, Dick continued to shake his head in denial. He remembered the final participant in his gang rape, remembered the way those final hands were the cruelest, the way that man’s cock hurt so much more than anyone else’s. He’d used no prep, no lube save what was already in him and Dick had felt something tear within him during that assault. Something that was still broken inside of him, an ache that he wasn’t sure would ever go away.
Jason was staring at him now, blue eyes meeting blue eyes, but there was no denial on his face. Just a thick, frightening anger, his face screwed up into a scowl as he fought against whatever restraints were keeping him in the chair.
And fear, Dick realized. Jason was frightened. But not for him, no, Dick was tied down, basically naked at the mercy of someone who had been tormenting him since he was 14 years old, and Jason wasn’t scared for him. He was scared of him, like Dick was about to do something grievously horrible to Jason in that moment.
Like Dick was about to leave.
“The Bat is dead, little one,” Slade whispered into Dick’s skin. “You’re going to be no help to your little protege, who already took your place in Gotham. Your old friends haven’t even come looking for you, and you’ve been squatting in this hovel for days with your own rapist.”
Dick was crying, he realized. The water was pouring out of his eyes now, and his chest hitched on every breath.
“There isn’t anything else for you, sweetheart,” Slade said, pushing the hair from Dick’s face. “I’m the only one that you can’t hurt, who hasn’t hurt you.”
Jason was saying something, was screaming something into his gag, but Dick couldn’t understand it. It was like Slade’s voice was the only thing in his ear.
“What do you say, princess?” Slade places a hand across Dick’s throat, keeping his face pinned. “Are you ready to accept what we all knew was inevitable?”
Dick’s voice was so, so dry. But he knew Slade could hear it, when he croaked out a small, wounded sounding, “yes.”