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January.
Dick is sprawled flat on his back, panting so hard that his vision is black. He can feel sweat dripping down his hair like a gutter. His lungs have never hurt this bad, his bones have never hurt this bad, and Dick has never lost this bad in his whole life.
Slade tts. And then —
“Not,” he says, “bad, kid.”
And it’s like all that pain and exhaustion just evaporates.
Breath hitching momentarily, Dick forces his vision to focus, squinting and dragging his knuckles along his eye sockets. A blurry hand is being held out to him.
Immediately, Dick takes it, and Slade yanks him up. Dick’s sweaty clothes make a peeling sound as they come off the rubber mat, like a wrapper off a melted candy bar. The speed with which he turns upright makes Dick’s head spin again, and he stumbles just slightly, head bowed down, shoulder jostling against Slade’s.
“Shouldn’t’ve tried the last hold,” Dick wheezes.
“No,” Slade agrees coolly. “Not against me.”
Slade’s hand releases Dick’s sweaty fingers, and the brace of his shoulder pulls away as Slade steps out of the room altogether, leaving Dick alone, standing unsteadily in the center of their training area.
He squeezes his eyes shut again, shoulders hunching. His legs tremble. His pulse is throbbing in his ribcage and his ears, and when he rakes his fingers through his hair and down to cover his face, they come back sopping wet. Despite that, Dick can’t help but feel — giddy.
Not bad.
Not bad. Not bad. Not bad, from Slade of all people?
He drags his hands down so they don’t cover his face anymore, exhaling shakily and grinning.
It hurts. This whole thing hurts. He’s going to have bruises on his spine for weeks after today. Giving up the only life he ever knew to get trained by the world’s top mercenary hurts. But more than that, it feels good.
February.
It’s a five-star hotel in Tunisia, and Slade’s booked out the penthouse. Dick’s sitting on the table, legs crossed, eating oatmeal with blueberries and watching the news.
—Lane told reporters she was grateful, as always, for Superman being there in the nick of time. In other superheroic news, across the bay, activity on social media reflects a growing concern that Batman’s young partner, Robin, hasn’t been seen in several months. This absence has sparked public speculation that the so-called boy wonder is dead, fueling outcry from children’s rights organiz—
The TV clicks off, all black.
“I fucking hate CNN,” says Slade.
“Dead,” says Dick, biting the metal of his spoon. “They think I’m dead.”
“That’s a good thing,” Slade says. “Believe me, kid.”
Dick glances back at him. Slade’s at the other end of the table in a black dress shirt, a cup of coffee, the remote, and a grapefruit peel by his wrist.
He looks — and maybe this is the Fundamental, Underlying Thing — like Bruce, almost. If Bruce had a pirate eyepatch and hair the color of teeth.
Their eyes lock. Under Slade’s intense, riveting gaze, Dick slides the spoon out between his teeth, and the metal sheeeenks a little bit under the pressure.
“If they thought you were alive, they’d be trying to find you,” Slade says, “and as I understand it, you don’t want to be found.”
But the thing is — that? That statement’s as loaded as a gun.
Because what does Dick want?
- To learn whatever Slade can teach him, so that he can be better. So that he can be the best. Be...enough. That was why he finally negotiated this one-year contract with the man who had wanted to train him since they first fought — why he stepped away from the Manor in the dead of the night without leaving so much as a note.
- To not be found, so that this learning can continue unimpeded, so that he can be his own man and make his own life, free of Bruce and all his screaming, his distance, his expectations, his disappointment, his rules, his smothering, his not-love.
But, paradoxically, maybe most of all, he wants Bruce to try to find him anyway.
Wintergreen’s one of those men who nick themselves shaving. He has a bristly gray lampshade moustache, no beard whatsoever, and razor marks on his throat. One of them’s still wet. One of them’s still bleeding.
It’s the first thing Dick notices when Slade finally introduces them, and it makes Dick’s tongue stick to the roof of his mouth. It makes Dick go silent.
The introduction doesn’t go as planned. Dick’s known about Wintergreen, of course — but in an abstract sense. He knows that’s Slade’s number-two, and Dick’s caught halves of conversations between the men over comms, even if he doesn’t quite understand the relationship there. He’s never actually come face to face with him before, though.
Ironically, they were supposed to be en route to Berlin right now to meet Wintergreen there, but Slade got wind that in the early hours of this morning, Wintergreen had gotten got somewhere in Thuringia on his way to the rendezvous point. Now that they’ve arrived, Wintergreen’s captors are unconscious, and the room they’re in is husked with the glow from a single yellow lamp. Wintergreen’s duct-taped to a wooden chair with a red cushion, and, also, chained with an iron collar around his neck.
“Losing your touch?” Slade sneers, reholstering his weapons.
Wintergreen doesn’t react to that dig, though. Or at least, he doesn’t bristle — not the way a normal person should when that look is on Slade Wilson’s face and directed at you.
Instead, his eyes hone in on Dick, who busies himself with knifing the tape around the man’s wrists and studiously trying not to stare at the cuts in his neck.
“This the kid?”
“That’s me,” Dick says under his breath.
“Yes,” Slade says, a moment later, as if Dick never spoke at all. “My apprentice.”
Wintergreen scoffs and rolls his jaw back, scrutinizing.
There’s a silence, then, “Pretty,” he offers, rough and indifferent, detached, like someone at the market talking about the price of a fish.
And that’s all he says.
When the tape’s cut, Dick quickly backs into the corner and lets Wintergreen and Slade talk. He watches silently. He wraps his arms around his ribs.
It’s clear there’s things they won’t say in front of Dick, that they’re going to speak about him tonight when Dick is no longer in earshot. It’s also clear there’s an intimacy there, for all that Slade still isn’t letting up that impenetrable, cold facade.
From their murmurings, heads bowed together, Dick thinks he catches, “— just had to steal the Bat’s one, didn’t you?” followed by “He came to me.” Later, just before they leave, almost vulnerable and so quiet that Dick has to strain to hear it: “What took you so long to get here?”
But it’s hard to focus on the words they’re saying.
Dick’s gaze just keeps falling back to the cuts on Wintergreen’s neck.
They’re unmistakable. They weren’t inflicted by the captors — they aren’t kerf marks, they aren’t bruises, they aren’t do-as-I-say-or-I’ll-slit-your-throat marks. They’re from a razor. They’re from an old man’s hands shaking while he shaves. Wintergreen must have made them himself this morning before he got caught.
It doesn’t compute in Dick’s head. It doesn’t add up — why a man whose hands shake would know Deathstroke, would have this sort of bond, this sort of value to Slade, who’s disgusted by imprecisions and uselessness— by weaknesses like that. Slade would never have those marks.
Dick’s never seen Slade’s hands shake. Not even once.
“Stop flinching,” says Slade.
“I’m not.”
Slade yanks the gun from Dick’s hands and shoots. The innermost circle on the target smokes, hollowed out and blackened. “Like that.”
“I did it like that. I hit the center even. I know how to shoot a gun, Slade.”
“You’d never guess it,” says Wintergreen over his shoulder as he carries a large, armored box out of the truck. Dick shoots him a dirty look, which he probably can’t see in the darkness.
They’re somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee, staying in a cabin. The landscape’s a pretty scene, dense and mossy and leafy and green and wet, but Dick can’t see it anymore because it’s all pitch-black, except for the LED lamp balanced on the railing in front of the porch.
It’s the middle of the night. They’ve been out here for hours.
“No,” agrees Slade. Suddenly, there’s warm metal back in Dick’s hands. “You wouldn’t. Again.”
It’s two a.m. before Slade’s satisfied with Dick’s lack of jerking back when he fires a gun, and Dick can finally toss the Glock onto a nearby table.
His biceps feel oddly tense, his palms numb-hot from the metal.
His aim with the target’s exactly the same — perfect, right in the center, like it was from the start. The only thing that’s changed is his lack of recoil, and suddenly it feels so pointless that Dick is suddenly furious at wasting the whole evening.
It’s not like his recoil was even affecting his accuracy. And it’s not even like he’s going to use guns when the year is up and Dick goes back to vigilantism and good guy-ism.
(It’s definitely not that there’s a lingering, phantom discomfort, a disapproval burned into his mind from all those years of watching Bruce’s eyes flash at gunshots.)
Dick swallows, resentful, and he can’t stop the scoff that scrapes out of him, or the words that follow it.
“Waste of bullets,” Dick mutters as he turns away, eager to slump into bed to get at least a couple hours of rest before the whole cycle starts again tomorrow.
There’s not even a split-second.
Long, hard fingers lightning around Dick’s elbow, yanking him back so fast and hard he staggers, breath catching. His upper and lower teeth knock violently against each other.
Dick’s head whips around to stare at the man, wide-eyed. Alarm bells clang wildly in his head, but Slade doesn’t do anything else — just watches Dick with that dark, piercing gaze. And then:
“It was,” Slade’s low, hard voice drags like a knife over stone, “a waste of both of our times.”
Dick’s heart pounds, adrenaline still kicking through his veins. He braces for a fight. He shifts his left foot back, knowing that Slade favors starting attacks on that side.
Here it is. This is the other shoe dropping. Slade’s been patient — strangely patient, for all his excruciating standards — since he’s been training Dick, and Dick’s let his guard down some, but he should never have been so stupid as to forget just who he’s dealing with here. Dick’s pulse skips harder, thudding in his temples.
Slade’s going to fight him. Slade’s going to put him in the ground for this. There’s no way that Dick gets out of this with a slap on the wrist, with a verbal warning, not after a show of disrespect. Slade doesn’t take that.
God, how could Dick have let this happen? How could he have gotten comfortable enough to slip up? How could he have forgotten? Slade is a coldblooded killer. Dick’s seen it firsthand.
He swallows, tensing, and braces for the fight when the low light catches on Slade’s face as it tilts.
“You knew how to do it correctly. In the future, don’t let other people’s beliefs affect your performance.” Slade’s mouth curls. “Training resumes at five-thirty this morning as usual.”
And then, he turns sharply on his heel, and walks away. His footsteps crunch on the leaves.
Dick watches Slade’s silhouette disappear into the cabin, Dick’s voice caught in his throat.
One of Dick’s hands ghosts up to the elbow that Slade grabbed, fingers covering it, and he glances down at his arm.
It’s too dark outside to see it right now.
But the next morning, when he wakes up, it’s blackened in the shape of a hand.
Dick stares at it in the bathroom mirror. He takes a long breath. Then he pulls on a shirt and washes his face. He gets ready for another day of training.
It’s easy to forget sometimes how much Slade is holding back, and it’s easy for Dick to ignore that Slade could kill Dick the way Dick could kill mosuitoes: with just a press of his fingers. Somehow, though, getting reminded of Slade’s strength doesn’t make Slade scarier. It doesn’t make Dick want to run away. It makes him want to get closer, for some reason. In fact, moments like last night— when Slade could go so much farther but doesn’t — make it hard to remember exactly what Slade is.
It’s moments like last night that make Dick start to stub his nails into the mortar and begin to let all his walls down, brick by brick, so much more than he should.
March.
Dick slams his foot upward. It connects. If Slade were a normal man, his collarbone would be in smithereens.
As it is, the force only pushes Slade back. Just two backsteps, his head bowed down.
Dick is breathing hard. He’s sweaty again, with exertion, but his gut keeps twisting for no reason, like guilt.
And then — Slade looks up, and he’s grinning. A little. His white teeth are stark against his dark tan. It’s a disconcertingly nice smile for the kind of man Slade is: It makes Slade’s eye crinkle.
It makes Dick’s breath catch in his throat.
“Good,” says Slade.
Dick stares at him for a second, not processing, his overexerted heartbeat and breathing pounding in his ears. Then it sinks in. And he laughs, dizzy, breathless, disbelieving. Good.
He grins back.
Dick’s seventeenth birthday comes and goes without a mention. He watches the news. He eats a Quest bar.
April.
He thinks about: “Good.” He thinks about who he never heard it from.
May.
Ra’s al Ghul has him pegged the second he walks in.
Dick’s lucky, he supposes, that in what’s basically a conference of supervillains who would give their entire (considerable) net worth to know who the Bat is, Ra’s waits to confront Dick until they’re fully alone.
(Seriously alone: A half-hour before the conference ended, Slade had given a curt nod and disappeared to speak privately with Luthor.)
“I had wondered,” Ra’s murmurs, “where you disappeared to, child.”
Dick says nothing. The room is empty — an old hall in League of Assassins headquarters filled with eerie, luminous mosaic walls.
“I never thought we would find you here of all places.”
Ra’s steps closer to Dick, the end of his long green coat dragging, like a dragon’s belly scraping against the floor.
Dick’s heart should be pounding, because he’s full of dread, just fizzing with it. But instead, it feels like his heart is barely beating at all, every thump slow and anticipated.
Suddenly, Dick is painfully aware of the black armor up to his collar — and the stark nakedness of his face besides the fall of his hair. He can only imagine how pale and frozen he must look.
Ra’s is only a few feet from him now.
“Working with Deathstroke?” Ra’s tuts, shaking his head. “Little wonder the detective hasn’t found you yet if Wilson’s been the one hiding you. No, I suppose the larger wonder is…” Ra’s arches a feathered brow, “why.”
Dick’s cheek smashed against the sharp gravel, Slade’s body pinning him to the ground. “That was hardly a fight at all, kid,” Slade murmured in his ear before he pulled off of Dick, replacing his body weight by slamming his knee on the small of Dick’s spine and keeping it there. “I’m disappointed, honestly. You trying to lose?”
Dick’s fingers spasmed and curled into the pea gravel in silence, and then, slowly, Slade shifted. Removed his knee. Slade gave a rough, startled laugh as he made the realization, and Dick heard him sit back, then stand.
“You were,” Slade murmured, sounding almost delighted. Or — at least, as close as a man like that could get.
Dick rolled over and pulled himself up, brushing the debris from his face and his clothes, heart jackhammering as he stared Slade in the eye. Dick swallowed hard.“I have a deal for you.”
Slade huffed, like that was quaint, the corner of his lip upturning. “...A deal?”
“A deal,” Dick said. “One year.”
“What leverage does he have over you, child?” Ra’s asks, tilting his head. “Ah? A threat to the detective’s life? A threat to your own? Who are you trying to save?”
Dick’s teeth slide over each other.
He doesn’t say anything. He would never tell Ra’s anything anyway — there’d be no benefit — but this conversation is making Dick sick. Because Slade doesn’t have any leverage over him at all.
This is Dick’s choice.
Most of the time, that doesn’t bother him. Slade quietly obliges the part of the contract that said Dick wouldn’t help him kill — wouldn’t be involved in any murders. And Dick can mostly tell himself that it’s training, that it’s just strategy, that it’s a temporary thing — some bad company for a lot of future good and a lot of future living things. People that he’ll be good enough to save that he couldn’t have saved before. There are a lot of things that Dick will be good enough to take care of once this is all done.
And most of the time, he even enjoys it. The getting-better. The danger, the risk. The adrenaline. The fact that Slade wanted him and has been impressed by him as long as he’s known him; the fact that he thinks Dick’s worth something.
But the idea that Ra’s, a legendary (if evil) mastermind, can’t comprehend why Dick would be working with a known killer unless it was blackmail...
Well, it makes the reality of what Dick is doing bite a little harder. It makes Dick feel filthy.
His mouth is glued shut, spine tense.
It’s dead quiet as Ra’s watches him, awaiting an answer.
Then there’s a click, and it’s like a vacuum getting cut open. Air rushes in. A door’s being opened, then closed. Slade’s sharp, unmistakable, assured footsteps start then stop, and Dick can feel his presence a few feet behind him, and his shoulders involuntarily loosen. Slade’s mere proximity makes him feel like he can breathe again, even though Dick hasn’t even turned to see that it’s him — doesn’t dare to turn his back to Ra’s.
“Al Ghul,” clips Slade, and Dick’s nails curl into his palm.
Ra’s smiles — there is a dimple under his eye — teeth glittering.
“Deathstroke,” he says. “I was just getting acquainted with your young protege.”
“Ra’s knew,” Dick says when they’ve left later that night, when they’re alone in a hotel six hours away from 'Eth Alth'eban. Dick’s heart hasn’t stopped pounding all evening, and his fingers keep curling and uncurling and curling. Maybe he’s panicking. Just a little. “He knows. He knows my identity. He knows Batman’s. What if he tells —”
“He won’t,” Slade says coolly. He’s disassembling a gun.
Dick bites the inside of his cheek. Right. Slade’s right. Ra’s wouldn’t tell. Not for no reason. It’s knowledge that Batman doesn’t have, and knowledge is leverage. It’s power. He might taunt Bruce with it, but he won’t say it outright unless it’s to his advantage. But then again —
“Talia might.”
Slade scoffs. “You really think her father would ever let her be privy to this kind of information?”
“No.” Dick shuts his eyes and gives a long exhale, dragging his hands over his face. Suddenly, Dick wants to go and lie down forever. He wants five seconds where his heart isn’t hammering in his ears so that he can stop and think about what he’s doing. About the trade-offs he’s making, about Slade, about leverage, about living things, about the people he’s not saving right now, about the people he’ll save in the future. He needs to rerun the calculus. Everything just feels like it always moves so fast.
Instead, slowly, Dick slumps.
“No. You’re right.”
Something hard hits his lap. It’s the gun — reassembled. Dick looks back up.
Slade’s standing in front of him, expression unreadable. “Get up,” he says. “Target practice.”
Okay. Right.
Five seconds was always too much to ask.
The best thing he can do is just forget everything that Ra’s said. Put it out of his mind for good. Scrub out the regret and doubt. Swallow the memories of Bruce and all the guilt, scrape out the distracting thoughts of the future and what he’s going to be when this is all done. Focus on training, on running, on dodging.
And yet —
(“What leverage does he have over you, child?” Ra’s asked, tilting his head. “A threat to the detective’s life? A threat to your own? Who are you trying to save?”)
Who are you trying to save?
“We should get a fish,” Dick blurts, a week and two countries later.
Slade flicks to the next page in Le Figaro. “The market on Rue St Ferréol sells handsome cuts of plaice if you’re so inclined.”
“A living one,” Dick says, and Slade finally deigns to look up, a single, elegant salt-white brow arched. “Like, a goldfish.”
“No,” Slade says.
“You didn’t even think about it.”
Slade returns to his paper. “Because it’s stupid.”
“That’s because you haven’t thought about the tactical benefits.”
“Which are.”
“Ineffable,” Dick says, “and impossible to list in their entirety.”
“This argument is highly convincing and well-worth the time of someone whose billable rate is in the millions.” Slade takes a sip of his coffee without glancing up.
“You charge based on the job, not hourly,” Dick counters, because it would probably be weird to say: I want to take care of a living thing. I think I miss that.
June.
It’s summer in Cambodia, and Slade is keeping secrets.
It’s unsettling. Slade’s not usually one for secrets: He wants what he wants. And if he wants something, he’ll take it.
If he wants something, you’ll know.
He’s not forthcoming, per se, but he doesn’t hide. He answers Dick’s questions — not that Dick normally asks very many.
It’s part of why this whole thing feels real, feels authentic, especially when Dick holds it up to the light next to his working relationship with Bruce.
But here in the car, with Dick’s hair plastered to his forehead in the crushing heat as he watches Slade speed while he whiteknuckles the stripped steering wheel, it’s apparent that Slade is hiding something.
“Are you ever going to tell me why we came here?” Dick asks again.
Slade doesn’t reply.
In about ten hours, though, the answer’s abundantly clear, and the floor is cobblestoned with bodies. Dick’s blocking the little girl’s view of the corpses by angling her so she’s facing him where he’s crouched in the corner. He’s holding her little elbows.
“You’re all good,” Dick says, flashing a smile he doesn’t feel while his stomach churns, “You’re all good, kiddo. You’re okay. You’re okay. They’re not going to hurt you. Not anymore. Okay?”
She’s crying.
Dick squeezes her elbows, and she shakes. He brings a hand up to cup her cheek.
“You’re scaring her,” Slade growls, and Dick looks up sharply.
Slade’s standing across the room, the nectarine of his armor colored red and wet. His blade is still in his right hand, his left fingers open and dangling motionlessly, as if he doesn’t know what to do with them. He doesn't move any closer.
“How am I scaring her? I’m not the one who did this,” Dick hisses back over her shoulder, flicking his gaze toward the litany of bodies.
Then Slade steps forward. It’s like a gunshot the way it happens. The little girl recoils when she hears the sudden sound, throwing herself at Dick as if he can protect her, breathing violently. Her arms noose his throat, and Dick swallows and hoists her up as he stands. Fingernails scrabble at the part of his neck left exposed by his armor. Dick turns around.
Slade is staring at him. Dick can tell through the mask.
He doesn’t say anything, though, not until Dick’s carried the girl as far as Slade is. Then Slade says, “You’re scaring her,” again, and there is the tiniest roughness to his deep voice — like a shredded rope.
Slade’s hard, gloved fingers scrape across Dick’s jaw, confusing him — in all likelihood, bruising him, too.
It’s only when Dick glances down at the little girl’s dark-wet white hair — when Slade’s hand drops away, covered in red that wasn’t there before, that Dick realizes what he meant. What Dick was getting on the girl; what made Dick so scary to her.
Dick was covered in blood, too.
July.
But Rose is a — Rose is a good addition. To this thing. This thing that they have.
The two of them get on like wildfire. Dick gets to help with training her. Mostly, once she gets over the crying and the being scared, which she does fast, she’s an awful, terrible, no-good brat. Dick loves her for it. She’ll climb into his bed and tell him to leave, and Dick will push her off the mattress.
She keeps coming back, though. Probably because it’s the only sort of human touch she gets.
Slade’s her dad, and there’s a weird mirror-version of that protectiveness that lingers after they get out of Cambodia, but by and large, he doesn’t treat Rose too differently from Dick. It’s mostly the same: mealtime, training, work, training, mealtime, rest. Repeat. With the occasional weighty glance added in. Dick gets the feeling that he’s the one who’s most attached out of any of them. Or, at least, so he thinks until:
“How old are you?” Rose demands one morning. It’s six a.m. Dick is making breakfast on the stove in the hotel room in Acapulco. They’re alone because Slade is out: a term that means different things at different times but with which Dick is never involved. (There are things — there are times — about which Dick does not ask.)
“Seventeen.”
“How old do you have to be to get married?”
“Depends on the country,” Dick says. “Hey, do me a favor and grab the remote. Channel three, please.”
Rose frowns for a second, and then clambers over and clicks on the TV. “What about in this one?”
“Mexico?” Dick pauses. “I think it’s the same as the US. Without parental consent, not until you’re eighteen.”
Más recientemente, Wayne Enterprises ha efectuado grandes inversiones, says the newscaster, making Dick glance up sharply from the stove, stiffening, en bienes raíces residenciales en Matamoros.
“So we have to wait a whole year?”
Dick blinks. Blinks again. Then turns, very slowly, to squint at her, not comprehending.
“...What?”
The newscaster chatters on about Bruce Wayne and his investments.
“Unless your parents consent, we couldn’t get married until you’re eighteen.” Rose brightens, as if struck with inspiration. “You do have parents, though, right? So we could find them. I figure Daddy’ll say yes for me no problem, but —”
“What,” Dick repeats, even though he doesn’t give her time to answer. “Wh...my parents are dead.”
“Oh.”
Dick blinks again, finally snapping fully back to himself. “And, Rose... what? We’re not getting married. You’re seven. You’re like a, a, a little sister to me. Marriage is for when you love somebody.”
The tea kettle on the stove is whistling urgently, Dick realizes distractedly, and he pulls it off the heat, and when it’s off, he turns back around, although there seems to be a tea kettle whistling in his mind now.
“But I do love you,” Rose says. “I don’t love anybody but you.”
“I know,” Dick says, flustered, “but you — you don’t love me like that.”
Rose’s mouth trembles. And then she storms off to her room, slamming her door and leaving Dick alone with the stovetop and a spinning head.
“The good news,” Dick says, two-and-a-half weeks later, “is that Rose is speaking to me again.”
Slade’s blade shinks the air where Dick’s collarbone would have been if he hadn’t lurched backward at the last possible second. Instead, only his t-shirt’s collar gets nicked. Slade grunts. “Sloppy. Don’t get distracted.”
Dick doesn’t let that stop him, though. “I think she was just embarrassed about the marriage thing. I understand. When I was at the circus, I proposed to this girl, Raya, eight different times, I think, because I wanted her to stay, but her family only summered with Haly, so I was always scared every fall when she left that she would never come…” Dick falters, “back.”
Slade’s blade meets Dick in an arch between them, metal screeching, but suddenly, Dick can barely focus on the swordfight.
...Never coming back.
Huh.
August.
There are questions that Dick doesn’t ask. For example, there’s that cabin — the one in Tennessee, where Slade made him shoot that gun until almost dawn — that Slade favors, and they stay at it often. Dick’s gleaned that it used to belong to Slade, back when he had a wife and a family, back when he had Grant. Dick knows that because he’s found childish carvings in the wall that say GW.
Those are the only initials carved there. But there are two twin beds in the smaller bedroom, like there was once someone else, too. That doesn’t mean Dick asks, though.
Dick doesn’t ask about Grant himself much either, for that matter.
Dick’s read Grant’s file, was at the end of his sword, was there when the older boy died. That was why he first crossed paths with Slade, after all.
Maybe asking about Grant would be the kindest thing to do: to let Slade talk about his son, to listen. But that scab feels far too wet and new to lift even after all these years. So Dick doesn’t ask.
Dick doesn’t ask about a lot of things.
Dick doesn’t ask about where Slade goes when he’s out. Dick doesn’t ask how Slade and Wintergreen know each other. Dick doesn’t even ask what the end of their little one-year contract for Slade to train Dick is going to look like.
What Dick should ask is whether Rose knows about the contract. Whether she knows that Dick is only there temporarily — is never coming back. Is probably never going to see her again, never going to pinch her sides or flip her upside down or draw pictures on her band-aids again once he leaves. Because when he leaves, it’s going to be for good — on a couple levels.
Does she know that? Was that why she made that clumsy, hamfisted proposal: So he would stay?
Did she know?
Dick certainly hasn’t told her. It feels like a — complicated thing to explain to a seven-year-old. Sure, telling her is another thing he should do. That’s obvious. But since Dick’s been with Slade, normative questions like that have felt so much harder.
So he doesn’t ask Slade.
And he doesn’t tell Rose anything about leaving, either.
At some point, Slade begins to grasp his shoulder when they pass by in the hallway or at the end of a training session. It’s a firm squeeze, an exertion of pressure. Just a passing gesture.
Sometimes, Dick thinks about what it must mean for men like Clark and Slade to be able to learn how to hold things without pulverizing them with their strength.
Sometimes, when it happens, Dick has to remind himself how to breathe.
It’s another swords day when Dick finally works up the nerve. They’re training at a safehouse in Nantucket, and the sword Dick pulls today has an inscription on the hilt. A name. A carved-in set of initials.
Dick stares at it.
GW.
“Kid,” says Slade impatiently over from the mats — a warning. Slade doesn’t like wasting time. That’s been well-established.
Dick hesitates, then turns around to face him, the sword laid in his outstretched palms, inscription face-up. “This was Grant’s.”
Slade’s expression doesn’t even flicker. “Yes.”
Do you want to talk about your dead son? Dick can’t find a good way to translate that into something palatable, so he says, earnestly, kindly, “He was a good fighter.”
It’s true enough. Grant came as close as anyone to killing the Titans.
Slade pauses.
And then he says, “Hn.” He says, “Not nearly good enough.”
September.
Slade’s back is turned as he pours coffee. “You should consider it.”
Dick looks up. “What?”
“The work,” Slade says. “You should consider it. You’re good at it, kid.”
Dick processes. “I’m only here for a year, remember?”
Slade turns around with his coffee, taking a sip and arching an eyebrow — expression skeptical and cold and strangely, terrifyingly knowing.
October.
“It’s a bloody preschool in here again,” says Wintergreen when they’re back at Slade’s old haunt. They’re leaning over the wooden railing of the porch, watching Rose and Slade spar. It’s the first time Wintergreen is laying eyes on Rose. He’s been away, in Scotland, Dick’s pretty sure.
Then Wintergreen spits out of the side of his mouth. Which. Gross.
Dick says as much. He also says, “Play nice,” mostly because he can.
He gets on with Wintergreen now. He’s even mostly sure that Wintergreen is amused by him — maybe even likes him.
And Wintergreen, whether it’s by virtue of being older or British or in that same strange subordinate-yet-paternal-yet-caustic-yet-grudgingly-affectionate role, cuts a disconcertingly Alfred-like figure.
(Dick tries not to think about Alfred too much these days.
But sometimes, especially when he’s with Wintergreen, the wondering is inescapable. What does Alfred think? Does he believe Dick’s dead like everyone else does? Is Alfred grieving? Or does he think Dick just ran away? Does he blame himself for pushing Dick away when he should really blame Bruce? Does he ever go stand in Dick’s old room in silence? Does he ever rub the collars of Dick’s old sweaters between his fingers?
Does Alfred miss Dick?
Because Dick —
Dick misses him.)
There’s a radio that Dick brings with them anywhere they go. He always keeps it under his pillow at night to play the news. Right now, Rose is fiddling with it between intermissions of wet, shuddery sniffling and scraping the heel of her palm over her eyes.
They’re sitting cross-legged on Dick’s bed in the pitch-dark. Rose had a nightmare. She says it’s her first one. She says she never had a nightmare before. Not even once.
She says it was of Slade running her mom through with a sword.
The newscaster’s tinny radio voice is drowned out by Rose’s hitching, gasping breaths.
“But that’s the thing,” Dick’s murmuring, half-absently, because he’s bone-tired. Slade worked him for 32 hours straight in endurance training, and he can barely keep his eyes open, much less make his mouth form wordshapes. “Nightmares aren’t real. It’s over now. You’re all right. It can’t hurt you.”
“Yes, it can,” Rose moans, the words caught up in a sob that wracks her spine and makes her hyperventilate. The force of it startles Dick. He’s never seen this from Rose before, not since that first night they found her. “What if he — what if he does it to me?”
“He wouldn’t. Rose, it was just a bad dream.”
“He does it to other people. And he doesn’t even like me. He thinks I’m useless. He thinks I’m stupid.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Dick says immediately, voice sharp. He sits up. “I was there when he found you, wasn’t I? He wanted you. He even yelled at me for scaring you.”
Rose sniffles again, and then glances up at Dick through her lashes. “...He did?”
“He did. Because I was all covered in blood. And he doesn’t think you’re useless. Slade isn’t the type to keep useless things around.”
Rose shrugs and turns the dials on the radio with a little too much force, making it clkclkclk. There’s a long silence, her damp breathing slowly starting to even. Then, hesitantly, hastily, like she has to spit it out to work up the nerve to say it at all:
“Can I sleep in here tonight?”
“Yeah,” Dick says tiredly. “Of course.”
Immediately, she plunges forward, burying her elbows in his ribcage and her face in his elbow. He feels the sleeve of his shirt grow damp — feels the fabric suck-in, suck-out with her breaths. She’s out in a matter of minutes, but she kicks in her sleep so much that Dick, for all that every cell of his is exhausted, can’t follow her into sleep for longer than a couple minutes without being jarred awake again.
He sighs, not bitter, but resigned, and fishes for the little rectangular radio again with his free hand. He places it on his collarbone, props his chin on it. Closing his eyes, he switches the channel back to Gotham 93.3. They’re close enough to Jersey that the signal picks up.
Dick listens to Vesper Fairchild’s voice at low-volume describe the state of Gotham City. The air’s a brisk 40 right now, and we’re expecting about four inches of rain by this evening, a new record for the month of…
Inhaling raggedly, Dick swallows, scraping the back of his hand against his suddenly hot eyes, and blinks furiously at the ceiling in the dark, trying not to let out any of the sounds in his tight chest. He’s surprised at himself for this unexpected flood of emotion, this sudden feeling of loss.
It’s so hard to keep quiet that he can barely breathe, choking himself.
But he must be successful.
Because Rose doesn’t stir.
It’s a strange moment for the homesickness to set in, but once it’s there, it’s crushing — and constant.
Oh, God, oh, God, spins in his head again and again. What have you done? What did you do?
It’s just one year, Dick tells himself. It’s already almost over. Then you can go home.
You chose this, he reminds that part, the voice in his head almost sneering. You were enjoying it. You really think things can go back to the way they were before? You think Bruce is going to accept you after this?
No, he doesn’t. That was the whole point: He didn’t want things to stay as they were.
But maybe now that it has changed, now that he changed it, now that he’s changed —
He wants the old things back.
Rose wakes up at some time later that night, head pressing so hard into Dick’s arm that it’s full of pins and needles, and Dick’s grateful for the dark because it hides what a disaster his face must look like, the teartracks, the hives from crying, the sudden oh-God-oh-God-ness.
“Dick?” Rose whispers sleepily.
Dick just hums because it seems the safest option — it seems like the only way to not let his voice crack pathetically, like a brittle crystal right in half. The sound is surprisingly smooth, unsuspicious and almost nonchalant. Rose doesn’t notice a thing.
“Could you turn off the radio? It’s dis…distracti…it’s too loud.”
Dick swallows, and clicks the volume down one last time from one to zero. “Yeah,” he manages hoarsely.
Eventually, the little breaths on his skin even out again.
Dick’s alone once more in the silence and the dark.
He tries to bury all the things he wants deep in the dirt of his mind. But they dig themselves up again anyway.
(“Good,” Bruce would say, “You did well. It’s okay. I forgive you.” And Alfred would be there, too, when Dick came back, and he wouldn’t be mad at Dick at all for leaving, for doing what he did, and he’d hug Dick tight like he was a little kid and Dick could stay the night at the Manor and everything would be good again.)
But deep down, Dick knows that that could never happen. He knows he made his choices. He knows that he’ll never get open arms again — not after leaving and letting them think he was dead, not after working with a killer.
They would hate him. They’ll all hate him.
Dick swallows. He can’t focus on that. Just focus on now. Right now.
Rose nestles closer, and Dick squeezes her hard, for the sake of having something — anything — to hold onto.
Dick can’t go back.
It’s a realization that he can’t just shrug off. It sits in the back of his mind, and it stays there, like a lonely person’s corpse left to rot in their apartment once they finally die. No one’s coming to remove it.
It torments him. But Dick can’t just walk around the place mid-panic attack, so he tries to distract himself.
That’s why, the next day, a heavily caffeinated Dick watches Slade train Rose. He doesn’t even like me, Rose had said, which Dick had always thought was impossible. Sure, Slade didn’t seem to like Grant — “not good enough,” Slade had told Dick, an inversion of the old Shakesperean absence-fondness trendline — but the revenge against the HIVE he had vowed in Grant’s name? That was nothing short of passion. That had to be love. Slade just had a strange, terrible way of showing it. Besides, love and like weren’t one and the same.
And so Dick’s eyes flicker back and forth when the two take to the mats.
The training —
Well.
It’s forceful. It’s not nearly as intense as Dick’s own training with Slade, which has turned the color of his skin from brown to semi-permanent bruise-blue (but also made Dick better beyond his wildest imagination). But it’s harder than Bruce ever trained Dick when Dick was eight, and Rose is still seven for another month.
It’s also strange — in another way.
Fighting is tactile by nature. Dick likes that about it. Dick’s always liked that about it. Liked that a hold was a hold, whether it was a hug or a choke lock. Liked that he could always find some kind of reason to touch Bruce’s wrist when they sparred. To hold onto it for a couple seconds after the bout ended, and savor it and bottle the feeling up to preserve it for when he’d need it later.
But it’s like Slade is trying not to touch Rose at all, not more than he absolutely has to. It’s nothing like how he fights with Dick — and it’s certainly a far cry from the way he’s been reaching out and touching Dick recently, a hand on the shoulder, a clasp on the arm.
With a sinking feeling, Dick wonders if he didn’t accidentally lie to Rose after her nightmare about Slade liking her afer all.
Later that evening, still mostly dazed from lack of sleep, Dick’s sluggishly tearing open a pomegranate with his palms while he sits on the countertop, and Wintergreen says, “He had another one, you know.”
The pomegranate splits, getting the juice and a couple stray seeds to fall down his wrist. Dick bites the heel of his palm where it’s red, licks it up.
Back turned from him, Wintergreen’s washing dishes, and the absurdity of the sight — well, it isn’t lost on Dick, even now that he’s addled with exhaustion: One of the most intimidating men imaginable, killcount that outnumbers the stars in the sky, just standing there with a scratchy green scrub pad and tiny rainbow soapbubbles clinging to his armhair.
Dick watches, the edge of his palm still in his mouth. Slowly, he sets it down, suction popping, but he doesn’t speak for a good minute.
The air feels very still, very chilled all of a sudden.
“Another what?”
“Joey,” says Wintergreen, like that explains everything. Which could literally not be farther from the case.
“Who’s Joey?”
“Grant’s brother. Slade’s —” long pause. “He was a — he wouldn’t’ve lasted long anyway.
Dick says, “Joey.”
“Joe. Joseph. I don’t know if he ever mentioned.”
“He didn’t,” Dick says.
But then he thinks of the second twin bed in the wood cabin, and his mouth twists.
“No.” Wintergreen hushes. “I suppose he wouldn’t.”
Dick weighs the pomegranate in one hand, then the next. The sound of the fruit shifting in his palms is loud — there’s no background noise, nothing but that still, charged silence now because Wintergreen’s stopped scrubbing the dishes. Instead, Wintergreen is bracing himself against the countertop with both hands.
It’s a terrible thing to say, callous and unsympathetic in a way that makes Dick want to stand back and have a good hard look at who he’s becoming, but, “Did he actually like that one?”
Wintergreen would normally laugh at that. By now, Dick knows him pretty well. Dick’s knowing him better and better everyday. Maybe one day soon he’ll even work up the nerve to call him Billy. So normally, Dick knows, he’d laugh. But he doesn’t laugh now — not at first, anyway.
And then he does, and it’s low and hard and wrinkled, like the skin of dried cranberries: It’s bitter.
“Was his favorite,” Wintergreen murmurs roughly. “Didn’t know one single thing about him, was too afraid to touch him, even. But loved him like nothing. Like nothing.”
Dick’s mouth suddenly tastes like aluminum.
“He was a good boy. Sweet boy. He was good. Don’t know how something like that came from Addie and Slade.”
The scrubbing starts back up again, vigorous. A little violent. A tragic way for a cast-iron skillet to go, Dick thinks, but even in his head, the stupid joke doesn’t land right, not with the way his skull is ringing. Is that what touching means? Did Dick read all of this wrong? Is Slade afraid to touch the things he cares about? That would mean that he does care about Rose, just like Dick had originally thought. But that would also mean that Slade’s feelings toward Dick were — less warm than Dick had begun to think. Is Dick the one who’s on thin ice? Useless, unwanted, ripe for being speared through the chest like Rose’s mom in that nightmare the second Slade feels like it? The second Dick stops being useful?
Dick’s stomach wrenches. But then — Wintergreen resumes talking.
“I think you remind him of him.” Wintergreen’s nose twitches, and it sounds like there’s saliva in his mouth, like he wants to spit real bad. “I think you started reminding Slade of him sometimes."
Slade is still training Rose one-on-one downstairs right now. He’ll hear more about it tonight when she cracks open his door and sits on the end of his bed and picks at the scabs on her knees and keeps him awake into the long hours of the morning.
So right now, they’re alone. It’s just Dick and Wintergreen in the quiet kitchen right now, and Wintergreen’s back is still turned, and even though Wintergreen’s words scrub away his earlier concerns, Dick suddenly feels sick.
Feels like he just accidentally read the last chapter of a book first. Like now he knows something he shouldn’t, and he can’t take it back. “...Oh,” Dick whispers.
Sometimes, Dick catches Slade looking at him. Sometimes, he doesn’t catch it, but he still knows it’s happening — can feel the weight of an eye on his back like a gunbarrel jutted against a spine in an old-time, classic movie hold-up.
That’s a good way to put it: It’s like a gun.
It’s like at any time, it could go off.
November.
—ow Jones closed at record highs last night. In other news, in Gotham—
“Why do you—?”
“Shh, shh, shh,” Dick says, jolting upright and turning up the radio, suddenly tense.
The Gotham Knights lost in a stunning 2-43 defeat to the Coastal City Comets, disqualifying them from continuing on in the championship, the reporter finishes, anticlimactically, and Dick wilts and flops back down in bed, excitement (hope) thoroughly extinguished. He turns the volume back down to a murmur and tucks the radio back under his pillow.
It’s a little past twelve in the morning — an early night as far as Dick is concerned.
Rose is sitting on the other end of his bed with a book in her lap; Rasselas, Dick’s pretty sure, definitely an assignment of Slade’s and almost certainly out of Rose’s comprehension level. She’s not a big reader.
“Why do you always listen to the news?” Rose perseveres, frowning.
Dick falters.
“I don’t like silence,” he says, after a second, because he doesn’t know how to say:
How else do I hear about everyone? How else do I see them? How else am I supposed to know what they’re doing?
He doesn’t know how to say, I miss them, aloud anymore.
Because it’s not like he can call.
It’s not like he can ever go back.
This is what Dick will have to subsist on for the rest of his life: flittering mentions of billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne on the radio, flashes of superheroes on CNN, and quotes in the paper. Even once this has ended, Dick will never have the nerve to see them in-person, to see the hate on their faces, to tell them what he’s done.
And this is ending. Fast. The time is winding down. Four weeks wiles into three. Dick feels that gunbarrel weight on the back of his neck from Slade’s gaze more and more.
And that’s another thing: Slade.
Dick doesn’t know exactly how to act with Slade now that he knows what he knows. That Slade sees some strange second chance with Joseph — Joey? — in Dick, that that’s why Dick gets the passing touches while Rose gets nothing but glances.
There’s a comfort — no, comfort isn’t the right word. There’s a relief, maybe, or redemption in the fact that Wintergreen said Dick only just started to remind him. As in, Slade’s original interest wasn’t rooted fully in that resemblance, but in Dick’s own merits.
And there's a relief, too, in knowing that someone can still see good in Dick, even after he’s been submerged in Slade’s world of depravity. Even if that someone is just Slade himself. Even if it’s just a projection of someone Slade lost.
So Dick just tries to act as if nothing’s changed. As if no discovery ever happened. For example:
“Rose’s going to be eight next week,” Dick murmurs one night when Slade and he are tailing a former senator over the rooftops of Boston, just as he would have said it if he’d never known that I remind you of your dead son.
Slade doesn’t say anything in response. Dick doesn’t try again, and he doesn’t try to force Slade to do anything. Knowing what he does, he thinks ruefully to himself that he might actually have some leverage. But thinking of using it just feels twisted.
That’s why when Rose’s birthday comes, it’s just the two of them. Dick says, “Whatever you want,” and Rose says, “Ummm. Could we spar?”
Dick cringes.
“I meant more like — the aquarium or the museum or something.”
“Oh,” says Rose, “…I guess. Can we spar tonight then? ”
“Afterwards,” Dick promises.
They go to a natural history museum in ballcaps and sunglasses, and Rose is thoroughly unentertained.
Rose is a kid. A baby, really. Dick knows it. He knows that he knows it better than Slade or Wintergreen, but he didn’t realize he knew it better than Rose herself. There’s a space at the museum with sand and buried fake bones where little kids can unearth fossils by brushing the sand off of them with big paintbrushes and Dick says, “Do you want to try?” and Rose looks up at him with the darkest, sourest, most genuinely unamused look that Dick has ever seen from anyone whose name was not Bruce Thomas Wayne.
Dick gets it, then. Because Rose is a kid, yes, has nightmares and tantrums and immaturity and a terrible poker face when she lies and the loudest, most obnoxious shrieks of laughter Dick has ever heard — but she’s also not a kid at all.
Not in the way that counts. Not in the way that other children are, where they can be swept away by idle amusements or little games.
Because Rose knows carotids and jugulars and cigarette smoke and human trafficking and her dad’s beetleshell armor, and it’s hard to go back to playing with big resin dinosaur bones in sandboxes after that.
“Can we leave?” says Rose when her patience has finally run out, and Dick closes his eyes, which have begun to burn. He swallows thickly, screwing his eyes tighter before inhaling sharply and reopening them.
“Sure,” he manages to sound collected. “Yeah, all right. You want ice cream or something before we go back?”
At that, Rose pauses, glances up at him, head tilting. Then she grins, and the heaviness pickaxing inside of Dick’s chest falters for a second. He smiles back, a tiny thing.
“You seem like a really good older brother,” the teenage girl who sells them ice cream says when she sees Dick strip off his scarf and wrap it around Rose’s neck when Rose’s flies off. He’s pressing his elbows down on the top of Rose’s head, crossing his wrists. The cashier hands over Rose’s waffle cone. “My brother would’ve never taken care of me like that. He would’ve just let me freeze.”
Dick smiles with his teeth. He doesn’t say that if he hadn’t given Rose his scarf, everyone would have seen the cigarette burns on her throat from the men that Slade had stolen her back from.
Naturally, he also doesn’t say that this isn’t his baby sister; it’s his mercenary-foe-turned-mentor’s youngest kid.
He doesn’t say that because that would be conspicuous. That would call attention that they don’t want. Secrets have no place in a stranger’s hands. And he doesn’t say it because, almost as soon as the thought crosses his mind, Dick realizes that his second objection isn’t quite — the truth, anymore.
“You want to spar right when we get back or wait?” Dick asks as they descend the museum ice cream shop’s big marble steps, rapidly flexing and unflexing his fingers inside his jacket pocket, still reeling from the realization.
Rose stiffens. “Oh. Are we going home?”
“I thought you said you wanted to go.”
“I didn’t,” Rose stops on the steps for a second, quiet, “mean go back there.”
Dick stops on the steps, too, turning to look up at her from a couple feet below.
Rose flushes. “Never mind,” she says hastily. “We can — I want to spar right away. Right when we get back.”
But Rose doesn’t have a poker face yet, and the lie practically drums out of her words.
“Rose —”
“I wanna go home,” Rose declares, too loud to be believable, staring intensely at him. “Let’s go.”
Then she starts back down the stairs, and all Dick can do is follow.
They don’t end up sparring after all. Rose goes to her room and slams the door, and Dick helps Slade with a contract for Luthor — nondeadly, clinching a USB from some laboratory — and feels himself rotting for every second of it.
It’s a little past one in the morning when Dick and Slade get back. There’s light streaming from under the crack under Rose’s door. Slade disappears to his quarters, but Dick hesitates in the hallway, biting his cheek. Then he presses forward.
Dick’s hair is still sticking to his forehead from his post-mission shower, and the beads of water still clinging to his wrist drop onto the doorknob as he raps his knuckle gently against Rose’s door. There’s no response; Dick pushes in anyway.
“Hey,” he murmurs. “It’s late. Why are you still up?”
“Why are you coming into my room in the middle of the night?”
Dick slips in, shutting the door gently behind him. He presses his back against the door and opens his mouth, then shuts it. He drags his finger around the doorknob a couple times in silence before he speaks again.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Dick says.
(For slipping information out of Star Labs to Lex Luthor that he’s probably going to use to help destroy the whole world oh God oh God what have I done I told myself it was fine because I didn’t kill anybody because it was just a data drive but it’s not and I can never go back.)
He swallows hard, shaking his head as if that will dislodge all of the thoughts in his head.
“Sorry that I made you go to the, er, kids’ part of the museum. I know you’re a little above that. I know you didn’t want to go to the museum at all for your birthday. I shouldn’t’ve made you. You just wanted to spar. ”
That’s why he’s really in here, when it comes down to it: because this is easier. Because Rose and birthdays and apologies and interpersonality and emotions and people and talking are so much easier than the guilt and the shame and the sin of what he’s doing for the Lex Luthors and crooked politicians of the world. It’s like that moment right before you hit the crest of a somersault, before gravity has begun to pull you down.
Rose hesitates, then shakes her head. “I liked it.”
Dick smiles, thin. “No, you didn’t.”
Rose glances down. She’s under a blanket in bed, and gingerly, she reaches out to touch the tiny lumps that are her toes so that she doesn’t have to look at Dick.
“I liked not being here,” Rose says, in a small voice. “I liked being with you.”
“Rose —”
And then her eyes flash up, suddenly burning with accusation and rage. “And you’re going to be gone soon,” she bites, “and you’re going to be gone, and you’re going to — you’re going to leave, and I’m going to be here all on my own, and it’s —”
So she does know.
Dick’s stomach twists, and he makes an aborted step forward.
“Rose, I’m —”
“I don’t wanna talk about it. I don’t wanna talk to you. I don’t want to — I want you to leave me alone. Leave me alone!”
They stare at each other. Rose’s little chest is heaving, her face red from yelling and her eyes dark with rage.
“Just go away.”
Dick stands there a second longer in silence. And then he goes, with a small nod.
Dick doesn’t get the chance to approach her again. The very next day, Wintergreen’s there, and he takes Rose early in the morning. Slade tosses Dick a duffel bag with Dick’s armor, and Dick holds the familiar weight in his hands, picturing the all-black metal and Kevlar underneath the zipper and fabric. This means: another mission. This means: just them. Means: far away.
“Where?” Dick says.
Slade’s eye flicks to his. “Russia.”
So that is it. There’s less than one month until the deal is up, and it’s a contract spurred by a feud between members of a rich crime family in Voronezh. It goes fine, until the end. Because at the end —
There’s a cluk.
There’s Russian shouting, there’s more gunshots, there’s nothing coming into his eardrums that sounds like Slade’s voice. It’s hard to tell what’s what, though, so Dick could be wrong. Suddenly, it’s like trying to make out a picture on a negative film when the film is all rolled up, so every picture’s on top of one another in a big dark smear.
Then it’s quiet — suddenly, there’s a large, hard hand on the gunshot in Dick’s side. It’s pressing.
“I don’t,” starts Dick.
“Shut up,” says Slade. “Shut up.”
“I don’t think that’s very good,” Dick whispers. Dick doesn’t know what ‘that’ is, exactly.
But things — in general — aren’t very good. His mouth is wet. His throat.
Somehow, at some point, Dick ended up slumped against the crown molding on the ground, the tread in his boots dragging against the rough brown carpet as his ankles writhe and twist with every extra ounce of pressure from Slade’s hand. Dick’s teeth are chattering. Very cold. It’s very cold. He’s never had blood loss do that to him before. This time feels different.
Slade’s putting more pressure, and there’s so much blood now that it squelches under his fingers.
He squints up at Slade, whose face is still hidden by the metal shell of his mask. Dick’s back is pressed harder against the wall, Slade kneeling beside him and keeping him upright with just his hands—the one that’s not in Dick’s side is pinning Dick’s shoulder to the damask wallpaper behind him.
“I said,” Slade grits, “to shut up, kid.”
Dick wants to grab something, but he can’t really feel his hands. He can only feel the gloved ones over the gunshot wound. It’s hard to keep his head up, and then he can’t at all, so his chin slips to knock against his collarbone. That’s when Dick’s eyes fall on the black and orange hands trying to keep his insides in.
They’re shaking.
“You wanted me,” Dick said on the rooftop in New Jersey eleven months ago. “You said you wanted to train me, so here I am — offering.”
“Hn,” Slade said. “What changed your mind?”
There are worse ways to die, Dick thinks. It’s the last coherent thought in his head before everything fades away. There are worse ways to die than bleeding out while someone bruises you with pressure. Like burning. Like drowning.
At least like this, someone is touching him.
Slade’s question had knocked Dick silent. What changed your mind?
It wasn’t any one thing. It was a cascade of them, like one birthday candle used to light all the others.
It was sitting alone in the League’s medbay after one of the closest calls of their lives, listening to Ollie scream at Roy that he needed to be more careful because Ollie couldn’t lose him; it was seeing Ollie’s face, red from weeping and anxiety and raw with fear, and Dick’s toes curling with jealousy.
It was the hours he put in, and the silence he got for it. It was the fights, the I’m sorry s met with Then do better s. It was how Dick could feel the tendon between them beginning to thin — to snap. It was the dinners alone at the table. It was Bruce glancing over at Dick when a socialite called Dick his son and correcting her: ward. It was how every time, Dick got closer and closer to winning a spar with Bruce but never did, and the silent, unreadable look in Bruce’s eyes when Dick inevitably failed. It was how Bruce eventually cut their training short, then stopped it altogether, so that Dick didn’t have any more chances to even try to win. It was how Bruce hadn’t touched him in months, hadn’t hugged him in years.
It was remembering all the times he had woken up in a hospital room with only Alfred or with no one at all. It was how Bruce always, always said, “Do better.”
It was how Bruce couldn’t even look at him anymore.
On the rooftop back in January, Dick swallowed, then tilted his chin up and looked Slade in the eye. “Does it really matter?”
“Yes,” Slade said coolly. “It does.”
“I want to be better,” Dick said. “And you can help me.”
Slade looked at him. Somehow, Dick knew that the man saw that there was something else underneath that statement, too. It was strange feeling seen.
It was everything Dick had imagined it would be.
“I see,” Slade said.
After Voronezh, Dick doesn’t expect to wake up.
But when he does, Slade is sharpening a knife.
That’s the first thing he notices.
Only after Dick hears the unmistakable scraping noise does he register the feeling of sheets on his skin, the feeling of a thin mattress under his back. He opens his eyes.
Slade is sitting in a chair at his bedside, left ankle crossed over his knee, with a blade and a leather razor strop in hand.
His eye slowly flicks over to meet Dick’s. Their gazes lock. Slade’s eyebrow arches. Neither give a single word.
“You’ve been out since Tuesday,” Slade says then, suddenly.
“What’s,” starts Dick.
“Friday. The 11th.” The blade sheenks in the strop.
Dick sits up, carefully, and the blade stops as Slade’s attention focuses wholly on him and sets the strop aside.
Everything aches. Dick’s arm trembles as he leans on it. There’s a thickness under his shirt that means hard, tightly wrapped bandages, but he would know that from the throbbing there anyway, or at least from the memories that are trickling back in. Russia. Mobsters. Gunshots.
He exhales shakily.
And then his arm gives, and Dick crumples right back into the mattress, spine-first.
There’s a silence. Then:
“So I’m not dead?” croaks Dick, squinting up at the ceiling as if it will reveal proof to the contrary, as if it were some kind of — eschatological ceiling, and not just the familiar balsam criss-cross of Slade’s cabin back in Tennessee.
“Do you feel dead, kid?”
“A little,” admits Dick. “If being dead feels like getting shot by Russian mobsters and then loaded with morphine.”
“Percocet,” Slade corrects.
“Percocet.” Dick balls the fabric of the sheets between his fingers, mouthing the word a couple times at the ceiling mockingly for good measure, eyes wide.
“Hn,” says Slade, and the sound immediately bends Dick’s lips into a small, pleased smile. His fingers curl in the sheets.
When Bruce makes that noise, it’s amusement, startled and grudging and half-hidden though it may be. The fact that Dick is able to amuse him always makes him feel smug and giddy; it isn’t just anyone who can win a smile or a huff of laughter out of the Batman.
In fact, Alfred used to tell Dick it was only him. It used to make Dick so proud.
That’s when Dick remembers it wasn’t Bruce who made the sound — remembers that he hasn’t seen Bruce in almost a year, has been gallivanting across the map with a killer.
His smile drops. It’s like the strange loopiness of the drugs burns off all at once, replaced with a sober, sinking dread.
He turns his head slowly to stare up at Slade, as if to make certain that Bruce hasn’t somehow materialized next to his bedside and taken Slade’s place.
But there Slade is — that leather knife-sharpener still in his hand while he sits at Dick’s bedside. He looks so different from Bruce that Dick suddenly feels stupid for ever even comparing them. For so much as thinking they resembled each other. Even down to his coloring, Slade’s like the x-ray negative image of Bruce, the color of bone.
There’s the dark tan, the shock of white hair and beard, the crescent moon scar above one eyebrow, the black eyepatch hiding his right eye.
Dick’s gaze catches on Slade’s left eye — the brown, unhidden one. There’re dark rings under it. There are creases between his brows, telltale leftovers from too much furrowing — too much worry.
...Worry about Dick. Worry about him.
Dick’s pulse picks up, mouth going dry at the realization. They stare at each other in silence. Finally, Dick wets his lips.
“Thanks,” he says quietly, “for the percocet.”
Slade stares. Then huffs out a rumbly bark-laugh, looking away. “Anytime, kid.”
“And for —” Dick falters, “for not, you know.”
“Leaving you to die?”
“Yeah,” Dick breathes. “That.”
Slade tilts his head down briefly, previous amusement suddenly wiped away, replaced with a forcedly blank expression.
“Would’ve been a waste of my training and time if I had. Invested a year in you.”
“Oh,” Dick says. “Definitely didn’t do it because you like me.”
“No,” Slade agrees. “Don’t be stupid, kid.”
A moment. And with that, he stands, and claps a hand on Dick’s knee over the covers. The hand is heavy. It stays a couple seconds.
“You want the remote?”
Dick manages to tone down the knowing beam stretching his face into a crooked smile. “Please. I’ve missed three days of CNN.”
Slade’s backward glance is unamused, and the remote lands hard in Dick’s lap. It shouldn’t make Dick laugh. It shouldn’t make Dick as giddy as it does.
It shouldn’t make him feel proud.
A part of him, way deep in the back of his skull, is hissing at him — telling him not to be, but Dick can’t think of a reason why.
His heart’s beating all fast.
Do you know what this would have looked like if Dick were still in Gotham? If Dick had gotten shot there? He would have woken up alone, had to cobble together the puzzle pieces from the gauze around his chest, gotten a visit and hot tea every few hours on Alfred’s rounds, and never seen Bruce for a second. He would never have seen Bruce until he was finally useful again, until looking at Dick didn’t send Bruce spiralling into that stupid, selfish, constant what-have-I-done grief and I-caused-this-you’re-hurt-because-of-me riptide, which he would paper over with that same, inscrutable neutrality as always.
Dick would have woken up alone.
Instead, Dick is here — with someone who grabs his shoulder and tosses him remotes and says things like, “Good,” or “Not bad, kid.”
And affection is a dirty game, but there’s that selfish thrill that Dick has won more of that than Slade’s own eldest son — than even his blood daughter.
Dick was the only kid Bruce had, and even then favoritism had been out of reach.
Everything had been out of reach with Bruce. Nothing was good enough. Nothing was even good. Here, at least, things make sense. Here, there’s logic and reason and something almost like what normal humans have instead of silence and compulsions and hanging on for dear life to wrists during spars for a shred of contact.
You should consider it: the work, Slade said, and Dick has never considered it more than he is right now . Considered balling up the contract’s term limit, extending it. Sticking around.
Dick never stuck around before, did he? He bounced around the world with the circus. He bounced around foster homes and orphanages before Bruce took him in, and even that didn’t last. But here? Well, here has Rose. Here has Slade. He could do it. He could stay. So why is there still a voice in the back of his head telling him not to?
Slade’s hand is on the door, poised to leave, when Dick finally realizes exactly why his mind’s been telling him to sober up. His smile craters. Suddenly, his body goes numb with dread.
“Slade.”
“What?”
Dick’s fingers curl around the remote. “The guys who shot me, they’re —”
Slade smiles. That stark white smile. That disarming one that makes his eye crinkle.
He chuckles, low and fond and warm and rumbly like bramblebush.
“Get some sleep, kid.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
Dick feels like his skin’s been replaced with ice. He can’t move; he’s frozen there, the remote clutched in his hand, his wrist thrown over the knee propped up under the covers. The only thing that seems to be moving is his heart, which is steadily climbing up his throat.
Frozen, Dick lies there, staring up at the ceiling for a long time. Long enough that the light creeping through the slats in the blinds turns cinnamon-colored instead of white. Only when it finally seeps into darkness can Dick drag himself back upright and stagger down the fall.
“Get up.”
Rose rubs her eyes blearily. “What?”
“Get up,” Dick orders again, rough, throwing off her comforter despite the throbbing in his side. “Now, Rose.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Get,” Dick says, low, dark, “up.”
Her mouth presses defiantly, her bone-colored curls horning her head against her dark blue pillow. And then, as she stares up at him, her expression shifts, sobers, acquiescently. She buries deeper into her pillow. Her voice drops into a tiny, scared whisper. “What’s going on?”
Dick swallows. It’s dark in her room. “Just get up, Rose. Right now.”
She stares up at him with big eyes, and he stares down.
Then, slowly, she lifts her arms up, as if he’s going to carry her. She’s too old for that. There’s no time for that. There’s no time for anything.
But Dick swallows again, and he picks her up. “What do you want to take with you? It can only be what you can carry.”
Her breath hitches on his collarbone, and her head knocks against his jaw as she strains to look at him. “What do you mean take with me? Where are we going?”
Dick doesn’t answer as he ducks to stuff some stray clothes into a backpack.
Three shifted vehicles later, they’re in a hotel room outside Connecticut. The TV is blaring. There’s two full beds, and they’re lying on the floor in the gap between them, the backs of their skulls propped against the nightstands. One of the white duvets is pulled over their laps. It’s the best strategic position — out of the immediate line of fire if anyone were to enter through the door or window.
Rose is eating one of the overpriced M&M packs from the hotel room fridge, which is going to put a not-insubstantial dent in their tight budget. Dick won’t say anything about it unless she goes for a second.
“You know,” Rose says, licking the rainbow stains on her palm and then rubbing them against the comforter, “I don’t think he’s going to try to find us.”
“You don’t, huh?”
—Special news bulletin: in New Jersey, Batman and Robin were spotted delivering the Joker back to GCPD custody on Saturday night, following the mass criminal’s latest rampage, which killed five cu—
“Uh-uh,” says Rose. She leans her head against Dick’s arm. “He doesn’t like me enough to.”
Dick rubs the edge of the white quilt between his fingertips.
He remembers the desperation in Slade’s knuckles that June day in Cambodia, the roughness of his voice when he spoke. How he had chastised Dick for scaring her by being covered in the blood that Slade had been the one to draw. How Wintergreen had described the touchless, intense way Slade had loved Joseph.
“He loves you,” Dick says. “He’s a bad man, Rose, but your dad does love you. He —”
Then his brain stops. His stomach drops down to the center of the earth, and he sits up so fast he feels sick, attention knifed to the television in the center of the room. Without Dick’s arm, Rose’s head thumps against the carpet, and she sits up, outraged. “Hey!” Dick barely hears her protests. All Dick can focus on is the TV.
They’re showing footage now. Batman and Robin , the newscaster had said. Batman and Robin. Batman and Robin. Batman and.
Batman and Robin in Gotham, the TV said. But Dick isn’t in Gotham. So how could Robin be there?
“Dick? Are you okay? You look like you’re going to throw up.”
There’s a tug on Dick’s shirt. Nauseous, the room swimming, his head swimming, the M&M colors spilling out of the brown packet and over the blanket swimming, Dick swallows, and allows himself to be pulled back to the ground, skull thumping against the rough carpet with a crack, and Dick thinks about the last time he was slumped on the ground with hands on him. Now, little hands pull at his arm. Rose is sitting up, shoving at him, her eyes wide.
“Dick? Dick?”
Dick swallows again, shutting his eyes. The carpet prickles the back of his neck, the blanket pulling under his chin as Rose tugs, and suddenly, a total sense of calm washes over him. Everything is gone. The anger, the wanting, all of it.
“Dick, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Dick says softly. “Lie down. I’m fine.”
There’s a quiet. Then the sound of fabric rustling, and then a head lays itself over Dick’s chest, Rose’s lank hair pooling in the crest of Dick’s throat, her breaths sucking the cotton of his t-shirt in—and out. The news anchor talks on, and without opening his eyes, Dick thumbs the off-button on the remote, puts the remote to the side, and presses his now-free hand over the back of Rose’s skull. They breathe in at the same time, and the sound is loud in the newfound silence.
“...Dick?” Rose asks at last.
“He’s not going to find us,” Dick says very quietly. Rose’s nose nudges Dick’s collarbone as she shifts, but Dick presses his hand against the back of her neck and she stills. “But he loves you too much. He’s going to look.”