Work Text:
--
Dick can’t wake up. It feels like there’s a weight pushing down on his ribs, compressing his lungs. He wants to snarl and bite, tear apart whatever is touching him, but his hands won’t move, won’t—He thinks he trashes in his sleep, growls at someone. (Is it sleep? He can’t remember going to sleep, the last things he remembers is—)
The crash.
There’s a woman in the car with him, telling him about the mob, about the way Travers is using his connections to direct the stolen artifacts to routes that won’t get intercepted at the border. Anna. She’s leaving soon, taking the first plane and fleeing now that she’s betrayed her boss. He doesn’t know yet, but she’s afraid. Too afraid to think of a more inconspicuous way out.
And she stops talking because there’s something wrong with her, her scent warps, goes bitter and angry, so angry, and her eyes go black, and when she lunges at him the car swerves and hits the barrier, and rolls—
There’s sand and water all around him, slowly filling the car, shrinking the space around him more and more. It feels like a grave, closing in on him, swallowing him. Anna must have gotten out, or maybe she already got buried by the sand and salt.
The car, it’s a car not a coffin, and Dick knows how to get out of a sinking car. But he can’t breathe, and there’s something wrong with him. All the air left in this—this car tastes bitter and full of tar. There’s not enough of it, Dick can’t inhale, tries and fails again and again. He claws at the walls, at the sand, at everything.
Until he gets out. Dick stumbles and falls to his hands and knees and coughs up the salt and water, but not the bitter tar. It lingers in his throat, burns more than the brine.
He’s shaking.
There are voices nearby, and then screams, and Dick’s head snaps up. Everything is blurry, but he stumbles towards the sound, and somehow the tar flows into his muscles and burns and makes him stronger.
Someone reaches for him, and he snarls and fights. Fights and then runs, and there are enemies somewhere nearby, he knows. He has to fight, he’s made for fighting and fighting and never stopping.
He stumbles when the tar inside him starts boiling, burning him up. Inhale, exhale, and his racing heart skips a beat. And then two. As the world turns dark around him, Dick thinks he can smell something familiar. Steady rage and—
That’s the last memory before Dick faints at someone’s feet.
---
Slade wakes up and Nightwing is flying, jumping through the window.
“—you wouldn’t succeed. And that always—”
It makes him so mad, watching Grayson fly away, not even a little his (like he knew from the start he never would be, but Slade saw a chance, and couldn’t not take it). After Slade did his best to poke at all the facets of Nightwing’s despondency, played everything right, and somehow got outplayed. By Grayson. It makes Slade see red, and the anger drowns out the pride at the kid having the guts to even try. Slade doesn’t lose.
-
Slade wakes up and he’s watching the world from above, watches it explode in green, and he feels betterworsevictorious—
-
Slade wakes up and Nightwing is on the ground, too much space and concrete rubble between them to reach him. He’s not moving, shot in the chest and not by Slade. And Slade is down, defeated and some kind of weight is dragging him down, slowing the regeneration. So he closes his eye and loses.
-
Slade wakes up and Nightwing is as defiant as he’s ever been, unbending and somehow always winning this battle of wills no matter how hard Slade hits. Grayson takes Rose away with just a few clever lines and a show, turning truth into a weapon. Slade sees red, and there’s a grenade in his hand. He keeps losing again and again.
-
Slade wakes up.
“—always gets you mad.”
Nightwing is flying away, and Slade feels—
Rage.
--
The world is spinning. Swirling in two directions at once, making Dick feel nauseous in his bones. He opens his eyes. Sometimes keeping his eyes closed is the worst with dizziness. It does help a little, being able to focus on something other than the darkness behind his eyelids.
He tries to rub the dregs of unconsciousness out of his eyes and can’t. There’s something holding him in place, not letting him move his hands from where they’re—he looks up and yeah—tied to an ornate headboard with a sturdy looking rope.
“Finally awake?” a familiar voice asks from somewhere far too close. Dread pools into Dick’s head and almost chases away the dizziness. How did he not notice someone next to him on the bed?
“Yeah,” he says, voice sounding like he’s eaten glass.
When he turns his head, there’s Slade, next to him on the bed, sitting against the headboard, a bunch of gilded pillows strewn around him and for some reason a bottle of champagne in his hand. There’s nothing he can determine from Slade’s scent. It’s all muddled and conflicting.
“Fever’s gone down too. Congratulations, you’re alive,” Slade says, flat and sounding not too pleased about it. Which is probably fair; Dick knew Slade wouldn’t let Dick’s defiance go, that there would be fallout. Especially after Rose turned up in Dick’s new apartment not too long after Dick’s ultimatum, alone, without Slade shadowing her steps. He knew it was suspicious how easily Slade let her go.
He didn’t even show up when all his villain buddies tried to use the chaos of the crisis to end the world or something equally predictable. Was he planning his revenge the entire time instead?
“Fever?” he asks to stall for time.
“You went berserk,” Slade says, easily like that’s not one of the most horrifying sentences Dick has ever heard.
“What? No I—there was something wrong with…” he can’t remember why, but he knows he felt the anger like it wasn’t part of him. He wouldn’t go berserk, there’s no way Dick would ever let his emotions get so out of control, no way he would risk lives that way.
“You crashed a car. You’re lucky you only got bruises from that.”
Yeah, Dick can feel a lot of bruising all over. “No, I know, I remember. The crash.” He swallows, tries to get his mouth to stop feeling bone-dry. “What happened to Anna?”
“Travers’ little traitor? Dead. The guards put her down when she tried to rip Travers’ throat out in berserker rage.” Slade recounts it like it’s a boring piece of trivia instead of someone’s life. Dick grits his teeth to stop calling Slade a monster. He still needs to get out of the ropes around his arms before he can punch anyone.
“That’s not possible. Why would she—” Someone going berserk is rare. Both of them doing so are near impossible odds, especially outside some harrowing life or death disaster. But Dick does remember the way she lunged at him with an enraged growl. After she… “There was—something. Her eyes.” Dick thinks about it, tries to piece everything together in his still foggy mind. “She was poisoned.”
“Both of you were. All your muscle mass made the drug slower to act, so she went wild first from what we could tell.”
“We?”
“Travers’ guards and I.”
So it wasn’t just Dick’s imagination, those blurry fights after he got out of the wreck of the car. Dread seeps around his thoughts, but ironically Slade is what reassures him—if Dick had killed someone while out of his mind, Slade wouldn’t hesitate to gloat about it at the first chance. Him not doing so means whatever happened, at least Dick didn’t do that.
That’s one worry assuaged. One out of many.
“Why am I here? Where is here?” Dick warily asks. If he encountered Travers’ people when he was in a blind rage, he should be dead, just like Anna. Instead he’s here, on a four poster bed in a room that has honest to god treasure chests and—is that a throne on the other end of the room? Instead Dick is here. Did Slade tell Travers who Dick is?
“One of Travers’ personal rooms. I made sure there are no bugs, but that’s as much privacy as we’re getting.”
“Privacy.” Why would they need privacy? Is Slade going to give Nightwing an ultimatum of his own? “And you didn’t answer my first question. Why am I still alive?”
“Careful, kid. That doesn’t sound much like gratitude,” Slade drawls and states a swig of champagne straight out of the bottle.
Gratitude. Did Slade save him? If so, Dick has so many questions, starting with how and why. And most importantly, what is Slade going to ask in return for it? Dick isn’t going to go back on their deal, isn’t going to let Deathstroke work in his city, not for anything. If that’s what Slade wants, he’s not getting it. Nor Rose.
The knots on the ropes are trickier than he thought. To stall some more, Dick tilts his head at the bottle and asks, “What’s the occasion?”
It makes Slade’s expression go from flatly displeased to a mean smile. Dick tries not to shudder, but his scent must fill with apprehension lightning fast.
“You should have some too,” he says. Without warning he puts the neck of the bottle against Dick’s lips and tips it up until bubbly sweetness spills into his mouth. The cool glass disappears and Dick tries to swallow without accidentally drowning. He hates drinking while lying down. “It is, after all, our wedding night,” Slade adds.
Dick chokes on the champagne and coughs for a long minute until he can breathe again.
“It is what?” He must have heard that wrong.
“Our wedding night. Or would you prefer we call it something else when I’ll fuck you and claim you?” Slade drawls in a low voice, and Dick can feel it vibrate through his bones. He knows there’s red splashing across his face, and he hopes however futilely that Slade will think it’s all anger.
“Why would we—” He starts, then rethinks. “Why am I alive? What did you tell Travers?”
“Smarter than you look, Grayson. I told him you’re mine. Kept his guards from shooting you full of lead. For now.” That seems unlike Slade, to be honest.
“It was him that poisoned me in the first place!”
“Most likely. He was aiming for the traitor, you were just collateral,” Slade agrees. Takes another swig of champagne. “But you did a lot of damage. He’s not very forgiving, I’m sure you guessed that.”
“If he was that upset, he would have just killed me. How did that lead to marriage?” Dick asks, because calling it that instead of bonding should make him think of the process less. But he’s still thinking of it.
“Local laws say spouses are responsible for each other’s actions. So I said you were mine. It’s a good thing you were already drenched in seawater and sweating poison so he couldn’t tell anything from your scent.”
“And he didn’t just kill us both because—?” Dick is reasonably sure Travers has the means to, if not kill, then do serious damage to even Deathstroke.
“He wants to hire me,” Slade shrugs, like it’s no big deal that he’s volunteered himself to get bonded to Dick. For absolutely no reason or benefit to Slade.
“He wanted to have leverage over you. And you gave it to him?” Dick asks, incredulous.
“Would you prefer I let you die?” Slade asks.
No. No, Dick prefers being alive, but he definitely expected Slade to let him die. Maybe get a few shots in himself for good measure.
Oh.
This is the revenge. He wonders why he didn’t realize sooner. He knew Slade was mad at him.
Holding Dick down and fucking him until he screams doesn’t seem like the kind of thing Slade would go for; he never made a serious pass at him, not even when they were both pretending Dick was Renegade. But maybe that’s the point. Humiliating Nightwing thoroughly without doing anything that would break their truce. With the pretext of saving him.
“Instead you offered to bond with me?”
“Like I said, down here if you’re mine, your consequences are my consequences.” And Travers wants to be on Deathstroke’s good side.
“And what, now he wants proof?” Dick asks and can hear the edge of hysterics in his own voice. “We could just not and say we did,” he tries. Slade already lied about it once. Why mess with a good thing?
“Kid, you aren’t covered in seaweed anymore. The moment you walk out, they’ll be able to smell the lie.”
Damn. Slade isn’t wrong. He doesn't need to have a bite on him, asking him to bare his neck is taboo just about everywhere. But they do need to smell like they’re bonded. And the only way to do that without mating bites is to have sex. Without the bite the temporary bond will fade fast, but it only needs to last long enough for them to leave.
“So we’re here, because…”
“Travers is graciously letting us use his compound to recover from your ordeal.”
“So we’re trapped here.”
“Knew you were smart,” Slade says, almost genuinely complementing, and despite the situation Dick feels a moment of warm glow at the praise before he snuffs it out. He doesn’t need Slade of all people to acknowledge his skills. He especially doesn’t need Slade finding out from Dick’s scent and knowing his opinion matters to Dick. “Don’t worry, as soon as you can walk out of here without exposing us both, we can go.”
“What does he have on you? You could just walk away.”
“I could. But if I turn down the job now, well.” People like Travers make an art form of not taking ‘no’ well. Slade could probably get out of here and past the many very armed guards and whatever other protections this fortress has. But Travers would do his best to wreck Slade’s reputation if he couldn’t wreck Slade. And everyone knows there’s nothing more important to Slade than his reputation.
While Dick silently agonizes over his situation, Slade drinks more champagne.
“So.” Slade leans closer and tries to pour more champagne into Dick’s mouth. When Dick turns his head away, Slade grabs him by the jaw and tilts his head back. The glass against Dick’s mouth feels warm now, and the champagne is still sweet. Slade watches him swallow and slowly tips more into Dick’s mouth, then watches his throat move as he swallows again.
“Cheers to us,” Slade says, and before Dick can swallow another mouthful, rips away the bottle and presses his mouth to Dick’s. The openmouthed kiss tastes sweet at first, and then like alpha, and it makes Dick want to snarl. But Slade keeps him in place and kisses him a minute, two, more, until Dick is breathless and used to the taste of alpha enough that his instincts no longer go haywire.
When the kiss breaks, Slade licks off the trails of sweetness off Dick’s skin where the drink spilled past his lips. Slade’s tongue traces his cheek, over his jaw and—Dick pushes him away harshly, when Slade tries to put his mouth on Dick’s neck.
“Took you long enough,” Slade says when he stops laughing.
Dick huffs and throws the ropes off the bed. His hands feel surprisingly okay for having been tied up for who knows how long.
“The knots were good,” Dick says, even though he shouldn’t feel defensive about taking his time to get out of restraints made by Deathstroke.
“Were they,” Slade drawls with a far too amused smirk.
“That’s wow, I can’t believe your sense of humor is that bad.” Dick has no hope of hiding the embarrassed flush on his face. It’s not like anything he says or does will be more embarrassing than fucking Slade after he so confidently announced his win when he made him leave Bludhaven. Though if this is the only thing Slade wants as payment for everything, for staying away from Bludhaven and Rose both, Dick will be getting off easy.
Ugh, phrasing; Slade’s bad sense of humor must be contagious.
Dick gets up from the bed to distract himself from the inevitable a little bit longer. He looks around as he’s stretching out his muscles and Slade watches him do it. The room is huge and a lot more stolen artifacts and treasures are displayed carelessly around it than Dick would have ever guessed Travers owned. This is so much bigger than his sources made it out to be. Not that he can do anything about it right this minute. He isn’t Nightwing in this room.
The sleeves bunch up at his shoulders when Dick stretches his arms up. Huh. He’s wearing clothes several sizes too big on him. They must be Slade’s—they’re about the right size and they faintly smell like him too.
“You dressed me?”
“You took a swim in the ocean.”
Makes sense. And Dick is happy not to wake up in wet, sand-filled clothes. Still, why does he feel like Slade didn’t do it because he was concerned about Dick’s comfort.
He walks around the room, inspects the treasures and the throne; who keeps a throne in their bedroom? If he keeps moving, he’s sure he’ll figure out a way he can get out of this. He always does. He just—
“I know what you want, Grayson,” Slade croons against his ear, suddenly right behind him. Dick’s hairs stand on their end and a shudder runs down his spine. Slade’s hands land on his waist and he freezes up. “You’re a romantic aren’t you? You wanted your wedding to be special,” Slade says and he sounds only somewhat mocking.
Dick swallows when Slade turns him around slowly, like he’s being careful with him.
“So pretend this is it, that it’s your very special wedding night,” Slade whispers, lips brushing Dick’s ear. “I’ll make it good for you. Promise.” His voice is like dark molasses, slow and thick.
Dick knows he’s lying, he knows.
But when Slade dips him into a kiss, he doesn’t protest. He wraps his arms around Slade’s shoulders and kisses back, gives in to the sting of another alpha’s taste on his tongue.
Slade undresses him easily, and sheds his own clothes just as fast. He must have seen Dick naked not very long ago when he took off the wet clothes, but his eye still turns dark when he looks at Dick now. He traces scars across Dick’s ribs, down his abs. Then presses a kiss to one right over Dick’s collarbone and makes Dick shiver. It’s just touching. But the way Slade does it, almost reverent, is getting to Dick.
When Slade is done mapping his scars, he pushes Dick backwards one step, two, until the backs of his legs hit the—the throne. He pushes Dick down onto the edge of it, and goes to his knees before him, still watching him like he wants to devour him. Slade is. Really committed to this play-pretend.
Hands on Dick’s knees, and Slade pushes his thighs apart and gets closer, close enough to kiss again. Instead he reaches for something to the side, and Dick is confused when Slade picks a crown out of the pile of treasure stacked on the floor. A crown. That’s so absurd and over the top it’s exactly the kind of thing Dick isn’t surprised Slade would do. Crown himself and fuck someone on a throne. It makes Dick laugh out loud.
Except Slade doesn’t put the fancy crown on his own head. He reaches up and sets it—on Dick’s head. The weight of it shocks Dick out of his laughter. He has no idea what this is, but it’s too much, this game Slade is playing.
Slade watches him, and Dick can’t take the stark hunger in his gaze. So Dick makes it stop, kisses Slade and shivers and doesn’t growl when Slade’s palms slide up his inner thighs.
He should, Dick should have been fighting the moment another alpha tried to touch him. But Slade is so careful and slow it’s confusing Dick’s instincts just enough. He does snarl and flash his teeth when Slade’s fingers brush over his ass, but Slade wraps one hand around his back, keeps him close and kisses him again. By the time the kiss stops and Dick, breathless and dazed, can breathe again, Slade’s fingers are already sliding into him.
Dick only notices then that his nails are digging into Shade’s shoulders hard enough to make him bleed. He tries to relax, to unclench his hands, but his muscles won’t obey him. A low growl spills from his throat when Slade pushes another lubed finger in.
“You’re doing good,” Slade whispers against his face like he isn’t afraid to have his throat torn open by Dick’s teeth. “Very good. You’re so good for me.”
That’s what makes Dick stop growling and let out a strangled moan.
“You like being good for me,” Slade says like it’s a surprise. Like he didn’t already know what all of this was doing to Dick. Like he couldn’t smell how desperate Dick is for this, even with all of his instincts rebelling against it.
“You’ll like it even more in a minute,” Slade promises. He stops preparing Dick, and spreads more lube over his own cock. It’s, oh, it’s a threat not a promise.
Dick has been too distracted to think where this is going, but now he looks, and. Slade is so unfairly huge. It’s never going to work. Slade’s cock is the revenge. Dick wants to laugh at how ridiculous a thought that is, but he can’t tear his eyes away from Slade’s hand, sliding up and down his cock all shiny with lube.
“I don’t do this,” Dick says, urgent and breathless at the same time, a suppressed growl at the back of his throat choking his every word.
Slade inhales sharply, surprise and greed in his scent. “So this will be exactly like you imagined your wedding night. A first, to make it special,” Slade says, dark and hungry, the scent of lust pouring off him getting even thicker. He presses close, lines up and—pushes in.
Now Dick fights him, lashes out, claws at his shoulders and his back as Slade slowly, steadily pushes his cock deeper inside him. Dick is panting, crown knocked off sometime during his one sided fight, muscles all aching from trying and failing to stop Slade. Everything inside him aching from Slade making a space for himself. They stay right there, Slade fully inside him, and just look at each other for a long minute.
Dick tries to relax, but it’s impossible, so he wraps his legs around Slade and crosses his ankles behind Slade’s back. And tries to roll his hips, just a small twitch that makes both of them exhale like they’ve been punched.
“Slade,” Dick says, and has no idea what it is he wants to tell him. He just—it’s not really a game, he’s here with Slade not some faceless fantasy. It has been Slade from the start.
“Yeah,” Slade answers just as senselessly. He smells like satisfaction, like too many things for Dick to disentangle.
Slade pulls back and thrusts his hips forward. Dick hisses at the ache, and then again when Slade keeps going, starts fucking him like he means it, no longer slow and careful.
And it’s nothing like how Dick imagined, because he never imagined it being so much. His every nerve ending feels overloaded, his every muscle frozen, undecided between fighting and giving in.
“I said you’d love this,” Slade growls against his neck. And he’s right, Dick does love it, even though every second of it makes him feel like he can barely stand another moment of it. He loves the way every thrust stings, hurts enough to send a thrill of sparks up his spine.
Slade fucks hard, ruthlessly, and Dick can feel it where Slade’s knot is already starting to fill out. Soon enough Slade’s thrusts get sharper, harder, and Dick is about to follow him over the edge, if he could just stop clawing at Slade and get his hand on his own cock. It feels nothing like he’s used to, but he just needs a little more and he knows he’ll come.
Slade’s faltering thrusts stop, and Dick feels him start to come, to mark Dick from the inside, and no, Slade can’t stop, Dick just needs—
He rolls his hips against Slade, pulls him closer with the legs wrapped around his waist; he just needs another few thrusts. The friction, the pressure is perfect and he tenses up and—pulls Slade closer.
Slade’s knot, already too big, forces its way inside Dick’s ass. Someone shouts, and Dick thinks it might be both of them. The world whites out and Slade’s knot is inside him, tying them together, bonding them together. Dick comes and comes and comes, and feels Slade’s knot, god, Slade is knotting him, and this wasn’t supposed to happen, and Dick feels his body overload and his teeth ache, and he does the only thing that he can and—
Bites.
Down.
The taste of blood spills into his mouth.
Slade spills into his mind, and for a moment he can taste both their confusion like a feedback loop. And then he understands, no they understand.
‘No,’ Dick thinks, and Slade echoes that thought, affronted in his shock. And then Slade understands, and the taste of his thoughts changes to victory, to triumph and a ‘yes’, and ‘mine’.
His thoughts press down on Dick’s mind like the weight of the whole world, push him and claim him and make him submit. ‘Submitsubmitsubmit,’ and Dick is drowning.
But he can’t, he doesn’t submit, no one has ever made him. He pushes back, somehow. He just has to bear this strain until Slade backs off. Just until then. He can always take just a little more. He pushes as hard as he can and—
Slade isn’t stronger than him. He’s never going to own Dick, and they both know it, and Dick focuses his whole willpower at that thought.
He does better-worse than just push Slade back out. Dick isn’t ever going to make Slade submit and he knows it, so he pulls back too the moment he realizes he’s done more than just expel Slade’s will. But for a moment he’s tempted. What if he just tried?
The backlash from straining their new and extremely unexpected bond hits them both hard. They groan and then whine at the blinding headache. Dick is close to passing out when he feels Slade pick him up and walk the both back to the bed. They’re still tied together, that’s—
That’s Dick’s last thought before he passes out.
---
Dick dreams, and the world is on fire, and then a poisonous wasteland. There’s so much fighting and explosions, and loss loss loss swirling around all of it, suffusing every red-tinted flare of new violence flashing past him. None of it is real, nothing looks like a memory of anything Dick remembers happening. It feels so real, though. The heat of the fire and the fury, the betrayal. The—the gravel and pieces of concrete wreckage digging into him as he somehow watches himself bleed out from a distance. It makes no sense.
He feels the heat of walking through a desert, looking for something, so angry. The cool recycled air of a sealed bunker when he finally finds it, still angry at—. And then the heat again, when he turns some kind of dial and the device before him flashes and burns him. Burns him out of existence.
Dick wakes up gasping, feeling phantom wisps of flame consume him.
“What,” he gasps out, “did you do?” There’s silence beside him, but he knows he’s not alone. He can feel Slade’s presence like it’s a permanent part of him. It is, from now on, and Dick can’t avoid thinking about that forever, but he wants to avoid it as long as possible.
There’s something like ‘What did I do?’ pressing against his thoughts. He almost hears it in Slade’s voice, despite it not being a sound at all.
The moment he bit Slade, when he tasted blood flashes in his thoughts, and he’s not sure if it's his own memory or Slade’s. This additional input in his mind is confusing. He breathes in carefully and tries to dissect the image. It doesn’t have that edge of pleasure-pain-shock he would expect, so it’s most likely not his own memory. So he stares at the white ceiling and focuses as hard as he can on the memory of Slade’s knot pushing inside him and catching, tying, trapping them together.
He hears Slade inhale sharply and lust spills over between their minds from both of them. Oh. So it’s not that feelings don’t get passed across the bond, it’s just that Slade was shielding his own before.
Now that Dick’s very explicit point making has broken the barrier, he can feel so much from Slade. Fading satisfaction and then a slowly building heat and want that feels familiar because that’s exactly how going into rut feels like. Dick’s alarm at the thought of feeling Slade’s rut is overshadowed by the thought of sharing Slade’s rut, and then by everything else he feels of Slade.
There’s anger and an echoing sense of victory, which makes no sense. Why would Slade feel victorious after Dick so thoroughly proved the bond is at least equal, that he won’t bend to Slade’s will not even when their very souls are inexorably linked?
There’s the possessiveness, like thick smoke trying to wrap around every part of him, and of course Slade thinks Dick is his now. He wants to explain in no uncertain terms that Slade will never own him. But he’ll do that when he’s not covered in marks the shape of Slade’s hands and teeth, and isn’t still full of his come.
So, victory, possessiveness and anger, which feels so familiar somehow because—
In a flash Dick turns and stares at Slade, wide eyed and incredulous. Slade is on his side, head propped up on one hand and watching him already. “Slade,” Dick whispers, “what did you do?”
The dream wasn’t a dream, it—But none of that happened. How?
Slade only smiles, shows his teeth and puts his free hand on Dick’s hip. Squeezes in something between a threat and an invitation. He doesn’t make the mistake of trying to push his control onto Dick’s mind, but there’s other ways he can push.
‘Don’t make the same mistake twice,’ whispers a low voice in Dick’s thoughts, and he’s somehow completely sure he wasn’t meant to hear that. Slade’s teeth trail down Dick’s neck and he can feel Slade. Can feel the force of his urge to bite down like an inferno, like the sun. As teeth break his skin, Dick tilts his head back and thinks this is a mistake, too. But it’s far too late to go back on it.
--
Slade wakes up and he’s watching the world below. There’s simmering rage flowing through Slade’s veins. There are voices all around him and he wants to kill someone, make the red covering his sight spill out and be washed off by blood.
“—five minutes with him, Slade. Nightwing will believe anything.”
“I could make that acrobat so madly in love with me he’d tear out his own heart.”
-
Slade wakes up and breaks open a vault beneath the desert, hidden from the world so well only one person alive is supposed to know about it. But secrets are Slade’s specialty, even if he has to steal them from his employer.
Slade thinks ‘I won’t make the same mistake twice,’ and burns.
-
Slade wakes up and thinks, ‘So could I. I can do better.’
--
