Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Vengeance is in my heart,

death in my hand,

Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.”

— William Shakespeare

Dick wakes up.

Immediately, he decides he regrets this. His head is pounding like nobody's business, and his mouth is painfully, excruciatingly dry. His stomach roars with an intense hunger, his skin itching fiercely, feeling cracked and more acrid than a desert. The skin around his shoulders and along his back throbs. At the same time, a near-painful pressure builds up behind his right eye in insistent pulses.

He's lying face-down on something cold and smooth — a lab table, most likely. It's not the first time he's woken up like this, immobilized and with only a foggy recollection on how he'd gotten there. Usually after operations, the scientists like to keep them restrained in a lab to better monitor their vitals, rather than just toss them into their cells to heal on their own.

(They're valuable, after all. Wouldn't want to risk losing one of their precious lab rats to carelessness.)

Normally, he wouldn't be phased. Just another day trapped in hell. This time, though… it feels different. Wrong. Even more so than usual.

When he pulls at the feeling of wrongness, there's a vague tug at his mind, trying to pull him to some distant echo. He clenches his eyes shut and tries to dredge up any memories from the past few hours —

(Harsh lights, sterile walls. His voice pleading, frantic and desperate. Four voices screaming in terrible harmony.)

He flinches hard, screws his eyes tighter as if that can silence the sudden onslaught of noise, growing from a far-off whisper to deafening in a matter of seconds. His muscles tense almost involuntarily, straining hard against the restraints.

They… what did they…

He wants to see his friends. He needs to see his friends, to reassure himself that they're still here. Not okay, not in the slightest, but at least still breathing. At least still alive.

Fortunately, now that he's awake, the guards will probably take him back to the cells soon. And as much as he hates those cells — each of them tailored to account for their unique powers and talents, making escape nigh impossible — they're preferable to a lab table. The entire time they've been here (weeks, surely. Probably months. Maybe even a year or more. Dick's long since lost track, and the sedation drugs they continually pump into his system don't help), their captors have taken to dragging them out and forcing them through test after test, operation after operation. Wally thinks they're designed to measure their power levels and figure out the key components behind their powers and skills.

Whenever they weren't being prodded at like science experiments, they'd been in their cells. Five cramped blocks, with titanium walls and barely enough room to stand up straight.

As non-supers, Roy and Dick were tested on less often, but it still happened fairly frequently. It must be his turn again. He's still not sure what their endgame is, why they're testing their powers, or what they're looking for in him and Roy, but whatever happens, he just has to hold on.

("Wonder Woman will come for us," Donna had stated, in the beginning, before the scientists had stolen her conviction.

"Flash will come for us," Wally had claimed, in the beginning, before the scientists had stolen his smile.

"Batman will come for us," Dick had insisted, had continued to insist, even as the scientists stole his soul, because he saw the hope gradually dying in their eyes as the months wore on with no end in sight. He needed something to offer them, to offer himself, no matter how hollow his words rang, no matter how little he believed himself anymore.

No one had come.)

He'll be back in his cell soon, with the other Titans. None of them smile anymore — they barely even talk now, too exhausted, too little energy to waste on such a small, inconsequential thing — but they're together. As long he has them, he can endure.

Just hold on, he whispers to himself, like he's done countless times before, like if he lies enough times he'll start to believe it (he doesn't). Everything will be okay. Someone will come eventually. Someone has to come.

But his stomach is practically eating itself in its hunger, his body seems to be shriveling up from lack of water by the second, and the urge to move is building by the second. The world is tinted oddly, different colors overlaying and blending with each other, as if his brain cannot determine what color things should be.

His friends should be back in their cells, waiting for him to come back. But Dick can feel it deep in his gut. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.

The doctor walks into the room a while later, a power-dampening collar in hand, and he knows her name, he knows he does, but he can barely focus past the pain and the dryness and the hunger. A strange sort of energy is running through his veins, an urge to go go go. He's a vigilante at night and a performer at heart, he knows what it's like to feel restless, trapped by the limitations of his own body, but this is different. He can't quite put his finger on why; it just is.

As four guards step in behind her, the doctor gives him a smile, the warm expression all wrong on her face. Because she's been the force behind every test, every poke and prod and bit of pain. She's the reason they're shadows of who they used to be.

Whenever any of them had cursed her name or begged to be let go or done anything to signify their hatred for what was being done, she had just given them that sweet, sickening smile and told them, "Don't worry, it's for a good cause. We're revolutionizing science like never before!"

She'd done it even when her scientists were breaking bones and slicing off fingers to test the extent of their healing. She'd done it even when injecting them with experimental serums that left their blood on fire. She'd done it even when he and his friends were screaming in agony. When their cries turned into broken whimpers and sobs, because they no longer had the strength to hold them in.

She had smiled and justified it all as scientific progress.

Dick hates her, maybe even more so than the Joker. Even lost in insanity, at least Joker never tried to claim he was doing what he did for anything other than his own twisted amusement.

(And she has to be taking at least some pleasure in their pain. They're gone through a few too many operations without anesthetic for that to not be the case.)

"You're awake!" the doctor exclaims now, and though Dick can't see her from his current position, from how long she takes to get from the door to inside his field of vision, she's feeling leisurely today.

"What did you do to me?" Dick demands, except his voice comes out slurred and jumbled, incomprehensible even to his own ears.

The doctor stares at him for a moment, then lets out a delighted laugh. "It worked!" Her voice sounds off, a bit distorted and slow.

"What worked?" he tries to ask, but once again his words are impossible to understand.

"All tests indicated that the operations were a success, but of course we had no way of knowing for certain until you woke up. To hear you using it without even thinking about it — this is marvelous! Groundbreaking!"

"What did you do to me?" Dick snarls.

The doctor just shakes her head, almost like she's an exasperated but fond mother. The movement seems ridiculously slow, up until she reaches down and latches the power-dampening collar around his neck. "I know, Subject One, it's quite the exciting achievement! I can't wait until we begin testing your new capabilities. I wonder, with only the key organs, if you'll be at the same level as them?"

She gestures to the guards, and they unlock his restraints, hauling him up from the table. His knees buckle the moment his feet touch the floor, forcing the guards to completely support his weight. Dick and his friends had given up pointless defiance a long time ago, but this time he resists, doing his best to twist around and face the doctor. He ignores how his back throbs viciously at the motion.

"What did you do?" he hisses, but his venomous tone is undercut by the panic and horror creeping in. Because she can't be implying what he thinks she is. She's cheerful and uncaring in her cruelty, but even she can't be that cruel, even she can't be that twisted, even she wouldn't go that far —

("They want to know how our powers work," Wally had hypothesized, "what parts of our bodies are the source of them."

"The operations were a success," the doctor had said, and shortly after, "…with only the key organs."

Bile rises in Dick's throat.)

"Don't be too rough with him," she tells the guards, ignoring him completely. "He may be hardier now, but we don't know how long it will take him to heal fully — with luck, it will be as fast as Subject Five — and we need him in good enough shape for the testing."

"Yes, Ma'am," one guard says, and they drag him from the room.

The fear in his gut twists harder when he sees no sign of his friends. Only five cells, silent and cold and empty.

They've never been empty all at once.

"Where are my friends?" Dick pulls as hard as he can at the guards' grips, his voice gaining a frantic, desperate edge (she wouldn't, she can't have).

The guards just force him into his cell. His knees smack against the cold, metal floor, and he throws his hands forward, catching himself before his face follows suit. Behind him, a low hum of energy sounds, the indication that the energy barrier on the front of the cell is activating.

Dick barely hears it. He's too busy staring down at his hands — only, they aren't his hands.

Dick and the other Titans had practically grown up together. He knows them, inside and out, every single inch, like the back of his hand. And that's how he recognizes that he's not looking at his own right now.

And when he flexes his trembling fingers, sees the thin scar that angles across the knuckles from the ring finger to the thumb, feels the calluses on his palm that perfectly match up with how Roy holds his bow, he feels a horrible, sickening lurch in his (empty, hollow, so so hungry) stomach.

(She can't have —

But she did.)

They aren't his hands. They're —

Dick throws up.

The first thing they measure is his rate of healing. Having only recently come out of surgery, it's a convenient place to start. Fortunately, for the moment, they seem to be content with only watching his recovery from that, and not from deliberately inflicted injuries (all of Wally's broken bones had healed, though some crookedly, but he lost most of his fingers when they wanted to see if he could undo amputation. The stumps healed over well enough, but the fingers never grew back).

Despite where the power came from, Dick can't stop himself from staring as the incision lines gradually fade, the injuries knitting themselves back together until only faint white lines remain. The healing moves sluggishly at first, then picks up speed after a couple hours, until even the faint lines disappear too.

The real tests come a couple days later, once he's declared sufficiently healed. The doctor puts him through a variety of exercises, all meant to determine the exact level of his new (stolen) powers. Dick has a modified power-dampening collar around his neck the whole time, the same sort they had used on all the Titans. They could turn it on and off as they pleased, and if he or his friends still got too unruly for their liking, the collar would deliver a paralyzing shock.

It's highly effective, and if Dick despised it before when all it did was shock him, now that it actively suppresses any powers, he hates it with every single cell in his body.

They force a bow into unwilling hands — Roy's bow, he realizes, the same one he'd been using when they'd been captured — and Dick hates the way it fits seamlessly in his Roy's grip. He'd known how to use one, of course, and had decent aim, but he'd never been a crack-shot like Roy or Oliver.

When they bring out the targets, he hits every single one dead-center. Even when nausea rises in his throat and he feels as if he's about to throw up again, Roy's arms never waver. They're steady as a rock, not a single tremor to be found.

Dick's tempted to make a break for it. He has a bow and a quiver with a dozen arrows left and all of Roy's skills to back them up. There's five guards in the room, plus the doctor standing behind a glass wall and watching several monitors. If he started with the guy to the left, then continued counterclockwise, he might be able to take them all down before they reached him. Then he could run to the door, hack into the console, use the remaining arrows to fight his way out. Use the bow as a staff once he ran out, or take one of the guards' weapons.

It's a nice fantasy, but that's all it is: a fantasy. Alluring and hopeless.

Dick knows, without a doubt, that it wouldn't have worked. He doesn't have good enough control over Wally's speed to properly utilize it, not yet. Without that, he won't be able to get his collar off in time. Every guard carries a remote controller for it, and it's very likely at least one of them would be able to activate it before he got to them. Even if he managed to reach the hallway outside, another guard can just use their controller and stop his escape in its tracks.

Roy's hands tighten around the bow, threatening to splinter the wood. Dick glares down the shooting range, letting the bow fall to the side against his thigh. Even when he has a chance, it's no chance at all.

(Still, he's tempted. Better than just giving them what they want.)

"If you would resume shooting the targets, Subject One," the doctor says when he doesn't move. She's standing behind a glass wall, observing him closely. "I'm getting excellent data. It's fascinating, comparing your stance, technique, accuracy — everything, really — to Subject Four's."

For a moment, Dick is floored by her callous remarks, even though he ought to be used to it by now. Then, anger flares to life.

How dare she? Roy is dead. She mutilated his body, defiled it, all for the sake of her experiments. She forced Dick to take skills that were never meant for him, that he never would have wanted, let alone at the expense of his friends' lives. And now she wants him to use Roy's archery expertise, so she can compare their abilities? So she can see if her experiments worked? So she can have some data?

Dick feels his face twist, a dark rage bubbling up inside his chest. And he… he knows this kind of rage, has felt it before. Last time, it had consumed his senses, tore apart his restraint, made violence hum beneath his skin with an intensity that could only be satisfied with blood. It's been years since then, but he's never forgotten the rage that had spurred him on as he beat the Joker to death.

Back then, it had been because of Jason and Tim. Now, it's because of his best friends.

It spreads throughout his whole body, until he's so angry he can barely think. Donna's blood roars, and his gaze tunnels until all he can see is the doctor's sickening smile. Before he even realizes what he's doing, he's swept the bow up and around and released an arrow right at her head.

The doctor yelps and ducks, her arms flying up to cover her face. The arrow's impact leaves a spiderweb of cracks in the glass, but before he can follow up with another, the guards yell, the collar sparks, and then his world explodes into agony.

(When he wakes up later, he's not sure, but he thinks his only regret is that the glass was in the way.)

Dick never asks what exactly they did during the operations (his friends' screams already haunt him all day and night; he doesn't need or want to know what the doctor tore from their bodies and replaced in his own), but the doctor likes chattering on about anything and everything to do with the experiment. Trapped in place, Dick has no choice but to listen, no matter how much he doesn't want to.

That's how he knows that it's not just Roy's hands and arms but most of his upper back and shoulder muscles too. The main parts of the body that are used to shoot a bow-and-arrow. Roy's spent years perfecting his skills, training those muscles in the art of archery from any position, and now Dick can use a bow as effortlessly as he.

From Garth, they took his lungs and right eye (Dick hopes grimly that they at least had the decency to kill him outright, rather than let him suffocate silently and half-blind. But based on some of the doctor's comments, he has the horrible feeling that wasn't the case). Dick can breathe in both air and water now, and though he's never had any real potential for sorcery before, the pressure behind Garth's eye is building by the day. He has yet to display any hydrokinesis, but he can definitely feel the potential for it, a tingle down Roy's arms and a tugging sensation in his gut.

The power of the Amazons, meanwhile, seems to be passed on through their blood. Donna may not have been born an Amazon, but her sisters welcomed her with open arms regardless, granted her the gifts of the gods. Her blood had contained those same gifts, and now that very blood runs through Dick's veins. He carries the power of the gods inside him, yet he'd give it up in an instant to have her back.

And inside his chest, Wally's heart beats a familiar rhythm. Dick knows that rhythm as well he knows (knew) his own, from a lifetime of teamwork and sleepovers and friendship. When they were children, they would curl up together inside a makeshift pillow fort in the living room, eating popcorn and mocking bad movies. The steady sound of Wally's heart had always eventually lulled him to sleep. Now he can hear it every time he closes his eyes, a constant and mocking hammering in his ears.

It used to be that listening to that heartbeat was all Dick needed to feel safe and secure, pressed close against his best friend. Now, the only thing it does is remind him of how utterly alone he is.

The doctor, the guards, the scientists, it's their fault, hisses an insidious voice inside his head, and the darkness curling inside him has never felt more like resolve.

They deserve to be hurt, and Dick's not sure whether it's the ghosts of his friends or his own pain speaking, but he lost the ability to care a long time ago.

They deserve to die, and Dick sets his jaw and doesn't disagree.

Dick has spent his whole life flying, learning to move like the laws of gravity just don't apply to him. Whereas Bruce is a boulder, a solid and immovable force against Gotham's criminal underbelly, Dick has always been a child of the air, of motion and freedom and fluidity. If he could choose one superpower, anything at all, he'd pick flight in an instant.

And yet the first time he truly flies — the first time he simply wills his feet to leave the ground and they do — he suddenly finds himself doubled over on the ground, the steel floor pressing into his knees, the flight cutting out as quickly as it came. The world spins dizzyingly, and nausea twists inside his stomach.

Flying has always been freedom but this… this is just a mockery. Another manifestation of the bars around him.

The doctor glances up when he doesn't immediately rise. "Please resume, Subject One. I'm quite excited to compare results — I'm already seeing very intriguing parallels between you and Subject Two."

Their bodies are still in here somewhere, he remembers abruptly. He'd already known that — the doctor would hardly throw them away, not when that'd be such a "waste of scientific potential" — but it only just now hits him. After everything they've sacrificed, all the blood they'd shed and bones they'd broken for the world, the doctor has relegated them to nothing more than a science experiment, a way to satisfy her sick curiosity.

His friends deserve to be treated with respect. They should be buried, laid to rest in a place where the grass is always green and the sky is always clear, where the sea laps gently at the shore and the wind is a warm breeze. They should be left in peace, not — not cut into, carved up, rotting in a clinical labs for the sake of research.

They should, but they aren't, and that only provides fuel to the fire.

The doctor frowns when several seconds tick by without movement. "Come now, Subject One, this defiance is pointless by now. Think of all the breakthroughs you're delaying by being obstinate."

Roy's hands press hard against the floor, itching for a weapon he doesn't have. Dick feels lightning spark through his veins in preparation for action, and the insistent pulse behind Garth's eye grows warm, a powerful energy straining to be let loose. The guards around him tense, as if they can sense the raging violence brewing under his skin. Their hands dart toward their controllers. When Dick curls Roy's hands into fists, the steel floor crumples under his grip.

He can still hear his friends scream when he sleeps. For once, he wants to hear them scream like that.

"Subject One," the doctor warns, and a hint of anger finally begins to creep into her voice.

The collar buzzes against his throat, a reminder of the cost of disobedience.

Dick grits his teeth, releases the floor, and gets up.

One day, he vows. One day, I'll make them pay.

"Batman will come," he says to himself, once, his voice filling the empty space.

After that, he never says it again. He stopped believing that a long time ago, and his friends are dead now. There's no one left to reassure, to help support as they crack and fall.

His eyes close, but the steady thrum of magic under the surface of Garth's never stops. Wally's heart keeps beating in his ears. His friends are dead. Even if someone came now, it wouldn't matter. All they'd be saving is a hollow shell of a man and a collection of stolen parts.

Even if someone came now, it'd be too late.

Dick leans his head back against the cold wall, the hum of Garth's magic ever-present under his skin, but he doesn't cry. He'd cried in the very beginning, when he was just starting to break, but now all he feels is a horrible, numbing emptiness.

"I wish I hadn't been the one to live," he whispers to himself, and the words echo in the silence all around him.

Weeks pass. The doctor smiles and keeps experimenting. Dick stops talking at all. The silence from the other cells stretch on. Hatred roots itself firmly in his chest.

No one comes.

A few days before the fateful operations, Wally had asked, "We're never getting out of here, are we?"

Dick looked over and saw him slumped against the wall. His whole being screamed of hopeless defeat: his posture, his tone, the distant look of his eyes. Something had cracked in him — cracked in them all.

"No," Garth answered quietly after a long moment. "No, I don't think we are."

If Dick could, he would interject here, offer something encouraging, no matter how much of a lie they all knew it would be. "Batman will come," he'd repeated frequently, whenever they'd brought this topic up, but he had no strength anymore. His resolve and hope had been chipped away, but by bit, and now all he could do was resign himself to his fate.

Donna said nothing in reply to Garth, but her silence spoke volumes. Roy didn't even look up, chin dropped to his chest and arms wrapped around his knees.

"If they haven't found us by now," Garth continued, "I don't imagine they ever will."

"Yeah. Thought so."

Several minutes passed without a word. Dick closed his eyes so he didn't have to look at the desolation in everybody's faces. He missed his family. Bruce and Jason and Tim and Damian. Cass and Steph and Barbara and Duke. He tried to recall the last time he'd seen them, what he'd said, whether he'd told them he loved them or not, but all he could think about were endless tests and excruciating pain and dying spirits.

"I wish I could've seen them all one more time," Donna said softly. "Said goodbye to my sisters. Told them I loved them."

"Me too," whispered Wally. "I told Linda I'd be home in time for dinner, that night. Swore it, up and down. She'd laughed. The last thing I'd said to her was some dumb joke. I don't even remember what anymore. And then I left. I didn't even say goodbye to the kids. Why didn't I say goodbye to the kids?"

"You didn't know," Dick murmured. "None of us knew we wouldn't be coming home."

Somehow, Wally's entire body slumped into itself even more. "And now we're going to die here."

"We're not dead yet, Walls," Roy said, the first thing he'd said in days, but his gaze remained locked on the floor. It was obvious he didn't believe himself in the slightest.

Wally just shook his head and stared at his cell's titanium ceiling. His eyes were hollow and his voice dull. "Aren't we?"

An opportunity comes in the form of a trio of little mistakes.

The guards are well-versed in handling every one of his friends' powers — they'd stopped every single escape attempt in its tracks, before the Titans became too beaten-down to try anymore. But it's been (months? Years?) a long time, and all it takes is one slip-up. One underestimation.

Dick might have his friends' powers, but he's one man. And it's easier to watch one person than five. The guards were as cautious as ever when he'd first woken up from the operations, but as the weeks stretched on, they've grown lax. Lazy. Creating little openings that might be exploited.

And then, as he's being escorted back to his cell by three guards, Dick finally sees his chance.

The first guard is a few paces ahead, his posture the slightest bit slouched, clearly inattentive. Meanwhile, the second's guard's grip on Roy's bicep is loose, and it's obvious she's not expecting any resistance. So when the third guard carelessly drifts a little too close, the angle of the controller on his belt is just right for Dick to tear himself free of the second guard and slam a fist against the controller.

There's a low beep as the power dampeners in the collar deactivate.

The first guard spins around, and the second started to reach for her own controller the moment Dick moved, but his control over Wally's speed is much more refined now. It only takes him a single breath to yank the devices from their belts, destroy them, and then take out the guards themselves.

For a moment, Dick just stands there, stunned by his sudden success. Then he shakes himself back into focus, takes a deep breath and reaches up to grab the collar with both hands.

The controllers can activate the collar, but they can't unlock it. The only thing that can do that is a key the doctor carries at all times. He has a maybe a minute at most before someone notices the disturbance on camera and stops him with a shock. Assuming the doctor is still in the room he'd last seen her in, even with Wally's speed, he can't reach her without alerting someone on the way and stopping his escape in its tracks.

So instead, he begins to pull.

Donna had tried this multiple times before, Garth too, and every time they never got more than a few seconds before they were stopped. Whatever the collar was made out of, it was unbelievably strong, strong enough to resist all their attempts.

But now, as Dick pours on the pressure, it begins to give way, bending and buckling under Roy's hands. He grits his teeth and tightens Roy's grip, muscles straining, pulling on it with every iota of Donna and Garth's strength that he can muster.

There's a crack and a snap and then finally, finally, the collar breaks.

Stray sparks dance across his neck, but he barely feels them, buried under the elation of being free of the collar at last.

A door to his left bangs open, and two guards rush in. And for the first time in longer than he can remember, the still-sparking pieces of the collar clutched in Roy's hands, finger indents clearly visible in the metal, Dick grins.

An instant later, he's moving. The two guards drop nearly simultaneously, courtesy of two twin blows caving in their skulls, but Dick has already darted past them and into the corridor beyond.

He could leave right now, could just run to freedom and leave the whole facility behind — but everyone who helped perpetuate this, they would go unpunished. And he won't let them get away with this, to walk away with no reprisal. He's going to make sure they never do this to anyone ever again.

And he knows exactly who to start with.

By the time he reaches the room he'd been testing in not even ten minutes ago, the facility is entering lockdown. Steel security doors are slamming down to block off pathways, including where he wants to go. Dick just curls his lip and stalks forward, flexing Roy's fingers. If they think this is going to stop him, they have another thing coming.

He starts to reach forward, intending to tear the door out with Roy's bare hands, but then he pauses, grimacing as the pressure behind Garth's eye swells. It usually follows a steady rising-and-ebbing pattern, but this time the pressure doesn't let up. Rather, it grows rapidly, the intensity quickly exceeding past levels. It feels akin to someone banging on a door, demanding to be let out.

So for the first time, Dick lets it.

A beam of energy bursts free and slams into the door. The metal folds immediately, and the energy sends it flying into the far wall, now nothing more than a smoking, scorched hunk of steel.

The doctor is still there, he notes with satisfaction, standing near a table. She'd dropped her clipboard when he'd torn the door apart and scrambles back now, eyes round with shock.

"You…" she stammers. "How did you — "

Roy's bow and a quiver of arrows are still lying on the table. Dick picks them up, and while he hates the way it slots easily in Roy's hands, it's never felt more right. This bow doesn't belong to them, and he won't let them touch it ever again.

"Get — get back in your cell, Subject One," the doctor demands, but it's undermined by how badly her voice shakes.

Dick sneers — like hell he's going to listen to her — but before he's decided how to best respond, a second door opens and a wave of guards charge in, wielding a mixture of stun batons and small arms.

They outnumber him two dozen to one. They have electrified batons and guns. He has a bow and arrow. But when Dick turns to face them, neck free of the collar, the guards visibly pale.

For the second time in months, Dick grins.

Individually, each of the Titans were a force to be reckoned with. Now when Dick fights, he has behind him the speed of Wally, the precision of Roy, the strength of Donna, the magic of Garth.

The guards never stood a chance.

(Vibrating hands, razor-sharp arrows, an energy beam powerful enough to rend steel, super-strength that can shatter bones — with the exception of Roy, his friends often fought non-lethally, but that doesn't make their powers and skills any less capable of murder.)

The doctor quails as he demolishes two dozen armed guards in barely a minute. Dick lets the last man drop bonelessly to the ground, an arrow in his gut and neck less broken and more crushed, and turns toward her, his expression twisting into something cruel. She presses her back against the wall as he stalks in her direction, a hungry wolf cornering its prey. He moves with a regular speed now, rather than Wally's, and relishes in the way the terror in her eyes grows with every step.

They cut any mercy out of him long ago, but he wouldn't have spared her even if they hadn't. Not after everything.

"Please," the doctor begs as he draws close, her whole body shaking. "Please. I… I have a family. I have kids! Please!"

Dick had begged too. "Not them!" he'd cried. "Please, not them! Take me instead! Kill me instead!"

He doesn't remember the operations they'd performed on him that had given him his friends' powers, his friends' organs, his friends' lives, but he does remember the way they'd screamed.

"Yeah, I had a family too," Dick murmurs quietly, coldly, the ghosts of his friends howling in his ears. "And you killed them."

And for a moment, as he summons the energy beam from Garth's eye, he thinks he feels a sense of deep satisfaction. This is the woman who helped torture his friends, the woman who smiled excitedly and chattered on about "amazing breakthroughs" and "revolutionizing science like never before" as they lopped off Roy's arms, removed Garth's lungs and eye, drained Donna's blood, cut out Wally's heart.

How fitting it is, then, that what she gave him has proven to be her end. How fitting that Garth should help to kill her now.

Yet even as her body lies smoking on the ground, that satisfaction dissolves into nothing, and Dick realizes that it was never there in the first place. A byproduct of his imagination, searching desperately for something that might fill the endless, aching void in his chest, in Wally's heart.

But nothing and no one can replace the Titans. His friends. His brothers and sister. His second family.

(They would've hated this. Hated what he's going to do. Hated what he's letting himself become. But they're dead. They can't hate anything anymore.

They're dead, and if he has to burn down the whole world to punish those responsible, then that's exactly what he's going to do.)

Dick leaves the doctor's scorched body where it lies and turns toward the rest of the base, where he knows the other scientists and guards and every single person who helped do this to them is hiding. Donna's blood roars in his ears, courses through his veins. Garth's eye glows dangerously, already searching for his next target. Wally's heart thunders, the only sound that keeps pace as he slips into slow-time. Roy's hands wrap around his bow, smoothly nocking an arrow with the ease from a thousand repetitions.

Nothing can replace them. Nothing can fill the hole in his chest. Not even vengeance. But that sure as hell doesn't mean he's not going to try.