Chapter Text
Dick is going crazy. It is the only explanation. That, or Batman has discovered a secret cloaking ability that he forgot to share with everyone else.
It is practically in the handbook for Gotham that the darkness embodied cannot be found unless he wanted to be. But Dick thought, objectively, that he had a pretty significant leg up in that department, considering things. Evidence presently shows, however, that Dick cannot find Batman. Like any true detective, as trained, Dick ends up at the logical conclusion. Ergo, crazy.
“Nightwing.”
Great. Now he has voices in his head to match. Huffing in amusement, he taps his comm. “What can I do you for, O?”
“Do you see him?”
Ever the performer, Dick swings himself in a slow circle, arms raised as if to greet an old friend. His gaze skips over sprawling piles of trash, dented rusted pipes, and red brick walls that hold an unnerving number of cracks. The walls of the empty alley stares back. He imagines the bricks laughing at him.
“Nope,” he says, “He’s not here. You sure you sent me to the right place?”
“Now why would I waste both your time and mine?” is the rebuttal. For all the seemingly harsh words, the delivery is softened by a sweet teasing lilt, obviously said with an amused grin. A pause, interspersed by the faint clacking of keys. “Huh. You weren’t lying.”
“Lying? What-,” Dick spins, and spots it on his second rotation. Across the street from the entrance to the alley, a camera above the pharmacy jerkily moves slowly from one side to another. “Right. So. Why did you send me here if you could see yourself?”
“It’s been a slow night,” Barbara offers, a grin in her voice, “Nice pirouette.”
“Oh, for the love of-“, Dick starts, slapping his hand to his face in a cartoon show of exasperation as a grin splits his lips, listening to Barbara chuckle. He hopes the camera doesn’t feel awkward to be caught in the middle of their little back-and-forth. He wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight if it did. With a resigned sigh, he gives the camera a little wave back.
Settling, he tries to give the alley another once over with the attention it deserves. The problem is, though, is that it doesn’t require much. Hundreds, if not thousands, of near identical alleys litter across the city and this one is no different. The only unique factor in this particular alley’s favour - if you could call it one - is the number of brick walls it was composed of. Most alleys trudged through life with two walls, parallel, never meeting. This one, however, has three, meaning: a dead end.
“I’m struggling here, O,” Dick admits defeat. There is nothing that needs consideration, or reading into. It was like playing spot the difference between two pictures that were the same. “There’s nothing.”
“Batman never sends out check-in alerts,” Barbara says quietly. She pauses, thinks, and concedes, “Well, not unless he was dying.”
Dick sobers. When his comm had received the hold-tap-hold-tap signal, he had startled some pigeons by abruptly halting in his tracks on a random rooftop in the West End, certain that he had misheard. His initial thought had been that it was a mistake, but Batman never made such careless mistakes. Barbara had silently sent him Batman’s actively transmitting location, clearly feeling as caught off guard as he had been.
“His tracker says he should be right where you’re standing.”
He hums, pondering. He eyes the alley some more. The sewer grate cover catches his eye, and winks at him.
“Oh, for fucks sake.”
“Nightwing. Report.”
Dick is moving towards the grate before Barbara has finished her terse reply. “O, he’s in the sewer.” He pauses. “Maybe he dropped his comm.”
It is a perfectly plausible explanation. Their honing system is primarily based on communicator location. If Bruce had in fact misplaced his comm, it would explain why his location hadn’t moved in twenty minutes, and why any attempt at hailing him had gone ignored.
Barbara hums in his ear, noncommittal. It is clearly not a hum of agreement, more of a noise to placate. It’s a nicer delivery than Batman doesn’t drop his comm, you idiot, which Dick already knew was the truth, because Batman doesn’t make mistakes. He had thrown the theory out anyway to act as a barrier to a flood of worse hypotheses.
As he pulls open the drain access, the smell is transported to him in a revolting rush of warm air that hits him squarely in the face. He snaps his head to the side as his stomach turns at the overwhelming stench. There is speculation that he should be accustomed to the unique fragrance of the city’s underworld, yet no matter how many times he traverses these myriad of decaying subterranean tunnels littered with dead rodents, he still has to steal a moment to steel himself.
He shuffles himself to the rim and imagines he is swinging his legs over the edge of a diving board that hangs over a heated pool in some luxury resort, and not a sewer. Dick braces himself, reminding himself of how much he totally loves Bruce, and pushes off from the edge, swinging the grate shut on top of him.
He lands calf-deep in what he hopes is mainly water. The darkness is immediate. This in itself is nothing unusual or unexpected, but for once, instead of comforting, it’s unnerving. Dick does not pride himself in being able to read a room, having been told it is one of his lacking qualities, but the dark feels sinister, malicious, a closing door at the end of a long hallway.
Robbed of sight, he stills and listens. From the echo of his entrance, he estimates fairly confidently that the tunnel is on the smaller side. He doesn’t test it, but he could probably touch each wall with his fingertips without moving, including the ceiling. It hadn’t been a long fall. From above, there is the endless rumble of the city, but it is muted by thick brick, far away. Moisture drips from unseen places, landing on audible planes of wet stone and unidentifiable liquid. Infrequently, from varying spots within the immediate vicinity, something scratches against the ground and scurries along. He shivers.
In a space so disconcertingly quiet, Dick starts when his comm clicks to life. “Anything?”
He opens his mouth to answer in the negative, but something stops him. In the corner, a shadow had twitched.
Dick crouches with a speed his knees detest. He closes his mouth, and tap tap taps his comm. Going silent. He gets a quick tap back in confirmation, before his comm goes dead, the faint humming that would normally be unnoticeable, disappearing.
He strains his eyes. As they adjust to the darkness, he begins to make out a hunched figure, one that he had evidently missed. The shadow is tucked neatly in the furthest corner from the grate, where dim light is attempting to crawl through the gaps. The shadow is a fair size, a rounded ball of black. It would have been indistinguishable from the dark wall behind, if Dick were not trained to spot the shape of that cowl in any form or place it appeared.
Dick lets himself relax slightly, his legs untensing from their launch position, relieved in the very least to have eyes on the source of his anxiety. Not that said anxiety is now totally absent.
They both know that the cowl has state-of-the-art night vision, better than any on the market. He also knows, that Bruce knows, that Dick doesn’t have his vision gear currently on. Why hadn’t Bruce said anything?
He considers his words, and settles on, “B?”
Across from him, Bruce seems to jerk at the sound of his voice. There’s a lengthy pause, and when he speaks, it’s a quiet grumble. “Dick?”
Dick frowns. He is not overly fond of the uncertainty in Bruce’s tone, nor of the use of his name. Dick, personally, has no qualms with names in their nightlife, when used sparingly and carefully, but Bruce? It’s practically unforgivable. As with most things, Bruce was militant about the use of names and identifiable traits in the field.
A small part of him, the part that is stubborn, the part that had strained against Bruce’s shackles as a teenager, the part that rears its ugly head every now and again, wants to needle, snap, rage. Punish him for making him worry. Another part wants to rush to him, to grab his shoulders and shake. He ignores both.
“Are you hurt?”
Bruce doesn’t shift, doesn’t move. After a moment, Dick is wondering if he even heard the question, before he says, “No.”
“That was quite the pause there.”
A beat.
“I like to think before I speak.”
The unlike some people goes unspoken. It’s enough of a Bruce answer that Dick hesitates, stumped. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is probably a duck. But what if the duck doesn’t act like a duck. The moment that he had established that Dick was an ally, normal Bruce would have been up, out of the corner, and halfway to the surface by now. Probably a what took you so long on his lips, or perhaps a gruff you didn’t have to come, I had it handled.
“Not that I don’t believe you, B, but you’re acting really weird,” he says. The shadow, the not-Bruce-but-somehow-Bruce, stays seated in his corner, unmoving, not protesting. Dick wishes he could see him, see evidence of health, see him with his own two eyes. He shifts slightly on the balls of his feet, and reaches for his belt. He tries to sound assertive, in control of the situation, how Bruce would want him to be, when he says, “Let’s light this baby up, shall we?”
Dick already has the spine of a glow stick between his two thumbs, pressing downwards, when Bruce chokes out a panicked, “Wait-“.
The glow stick snaps.
Several things happen at once.
There is a crash from the corner of the room as the glow stick casts its dim red light on the stale air of the tunnel. In the split second Dick has of vision, it’s to the sight of Batman barrelling towards him like a charging gorilla.The red gloom illuminates each rivet of the batsuit, each sharp curve, the bitter twist to his lips, while casting the rest in shadow.
Dick hasn’t been scared of Batman in a long time, maybe not ever. But in that split second, he feels cool ice leak down his spine and he could swear his heart stops.
He has his mouth open to shout (perhaps) but to scream (most likely) before he is tackled, hitting the ground with the weight of two fully grown men in peak physical condition. He would have been grateful for the slight cushioning the water provided if the liquid wasn’t simultaneously trying to invade his mouth to snatch his thanks from him before he had the chance. His face breaks the surface for a split second and he splutters, gasps, before he sinks underneath the weight of the shadow.
A memory comes to him then, unbidden, of water-based training, and Dick feels slightly hysterical as memory-Bruce says, sternly, you can drown in as little as an inch of water, dick, you need to take this seriously. Are you even listening to me? Dick can’t remember what he had been doing to prompt such a reprimand, can’t remember what he had said back, but he does remember Bruce’s face relax with a snort as he had shoved little Dick off the chair, who had hit the floor with a squawk.
But, now, there are hands on him, grabbing, roaming his body. Not to pull up, out of the water, as he is expecting, but pushing down. It is instinct to react, but Dick cannot get the leverage to escape the pressure. His legs are up, wrapped around the waist of his attacker in a second, trying to unbalance him, flip him, but the weight on him is stone, unmovable. Something wrenches in his leg, strained, but Dick sets the pain aside.
He thinks it’s been less than a minute, but close to one. When he opens his eyes underwater, they sting, and he is drowning in darkness. Strange edgeless shapes move over him in the dark. His hands scramble across the ground underwater, searching for some sort of weapon within reach, a solid rock or something with a point. An oddly shaped lump grazes his fingers, but he casts it aside. Too small, too light.
There is nothing. Dick raises his empty hands, aiming for what he thinks is a neck, but they are easily swatted aside as if they were a bothersome wasp. In retaliation, the fly swatter locks on the source of the problem: the hive.
A fist connects with his jaw. Before the pain can even register, something heavy and solid comes down on his chest and Dick feels something give under the pressure. Agonising heat spreads through his body like wildfire, radiating from the epicentre of his chest. The calm, robotic part of his mind helpfully supplies, cracked ribs. His lungs squeeze and instinctively, Dick gasps.
Diffusion is a process resulting in the random motion of molecules by which there is a net flow of matter that moves from an area of high concentration, to regions of a lesser concentration. All this to say that water floods into Dick’s mouth and decides to set up shop.
I’m going to drown. The thought crosses his mind as a newsreel in neon flashing lights. Before he can react to it, compartmentalise it, the weight on his torso is suddenly gone.
Dick bolts upright. His chest protests violently, but he cannot regret the decision when oxygen is flooding his lungs and driving the greying edges of his vision away. Adrenaline pumps through his veins. There is a high-pitched buzzing in his ear that gradually becomes less muffled as his gasping lessens. It’s only when his lungs are full that he realises it isn’t buzzing at all, but a voice. One that has apparently been talking for a while, if the tone is anything to go by.
“-wing? Oh, for fucks - Dick? Dick!”
Dick would love to answer, would love to ease that voice into a relieved timbre, if only to help his pounding head. When he thinks about it, he actually would love a lot of things. For example, a warm bath. An uncracked rib, maybe. Though most of all, if it weren’t too much to ask, perhaps a father figure that were not actively trying to kill him. Speaking of.
The glow stick must have got lost in the struggle, floated somewhere else. From what he can see, and it isn’t by much, the shadow has retreated to his corner once more. Dick wants to ask him where he found the gall to be panting as hard as he himself is, considering only one of them has been deprived of oxygen recently.
His instincts tell him to fight back. Move forward, take advantage, fight back, return the pain. But something stops him. Because, for some reason, the shadow has stopped, had stopped, from a situation it clearly had an upper hand in. Dick wants to know why.
“Nightwing, report.”
Fire is spreading through his chest, but he pushes the feeling down, breathing shallowly through the pain. He takes the space given to him and slowly rises to his feet, feeling worse with each degree in altitude. He eyes the dark mass. He might have imagined it.
“Dick, please.”
But, no. The shadow twitches again, as if it too could hear Barbara. He keeps his eyes on the huddled, silent form, and clicks his comm. “O?”
A gush of air hits his ear, a clear gasp of relief. “Dick, what happened? Your vitals-“
“Diva down, Oracle,” Dick interrupts, more of a rasp than he would like. It’s enough of an answer for the both of them. Informative, with a lightness that reassures of his health.
“Batman’s compromised?” Barbara is back to straight business, tone unruffled and authoritative. Trust her to professionally paraphrase.
The shadow has started to tremble, shivers wracking its body, practically vibrating. Dripping from head to toe, Dick sympathises, but doesn’t imagine it’s for the same reason.
“Yeah, you could say that,” Dick says quietly. “He seems stable for now. Strategic retreat?”
“Get out of there. Be careful.”
Slowly, he backs up until the drain access halos above him. As he moves, the figure seems to almost relax, which Dick thinks is quite insulting as the non-injured party in this scenario. He glances up quickly and confirms that the rungs of a short ladder hang tantalisingly out of reach. He’s going to have to jump, lever himself up, and push open the grate. Oh, and keep an eye on the hulking dark mass in the corner that he is sure is watching his every move.
Easy.
He knows this is going to hurt. The pain is his chest has receded to a dull burn that rests securely on bearable but is edging on intolerable. Dick hopes he doesn’t pass out. It would be no good to fall, hit the water, and finish the job Bruce started. He just can’t think about it. So in one movement, he swings his arms up and jumps, grasping onto the lowest rung of the ladder.
At least he thinks he does, for the next thing he knows, he is swinging in mid-air. His mind tunes back in from static white. There is fire burning along each nerve in his body, and his chest is screaming. Hanging, his torso is extended entirely, which on a normal day is quite pleasant, but now, is agony. He is stretched like pig over a burning fire, his skin roasting and shrivelling with each second spent dangling.
From far away, a voice comes to him. Do not let pain arrest you, it says, sounding awfully like Bruce, let it trigger you. Pain is a motivator, not a hindrance.
Dick breathes through his mouth in short, shallow bursts. He separates the heat from his mind and lets it reside in his body. His mind clears.
Stupid, he chastises himself, looks down quickly. But for all the length of time he was vulnerable, a sitting duck, the shadow has not moved. In fact, through the slowly clearing white noise, Dick hears a voice.
“It’s ok, Dick,” someone is saying, a soft rumble, quiet, “You did it. Breathe.”
The shadow is back to being Bruce, apparently. In the befuddled moment that follows, all Dick can manage is a croak of, “What?”
Dick must sound worse than he feels, which is pretty fucking awful, because Bruce just doesn’t do words of encouragement. He simply expects more, he doesn’t foster it. Bruce demands, he orders, because he knows you can do better.
“You with me?” Bruce says, and isn’t that just rich. Dick feels like dropping down and taking a swing, but doesn’t dare. If he lets go of this ladder, he’s not getting back up. Already he can feel his hands slipping.
He settles for a hum of acknowledgement.
“Listen, Dick,” Bruce says then, and it’s like someone has lit a flame under his ass with the urgency in his voice. There is a slight panicked edge to his tone that sticks out in how unusual it is, how otherworldly. Hanging like a coat out to dry, Dick hates how he automatically snaps to attention, like a some loyal dog. “Run. It’s locked onto you. You need to run.”
Dick can’t think, can’t even begin to untangle what that could possibly mean. But he doesn’t have to, not when Bruce barks, “Go.”
Dick heaves himself up. Biceps burning, sightless, he snatches onto the next rung. He pushes through the pain, and suddenly the rung is a trapeze, and he is flying, because his legs are swinging free, he is climbing higher and higher, and a soft breeze caresses his face as he comes within touching distance of the grate. At the top, he pauses, considers.
Fuck, he thinks. He curses himself. Why did past him have to shut the damn grate? There was nothing for it. He clenches his teeth, lets go of the rung with one hand, and fumbles in the dark above him. He pushes up.
Cold air blasts his face as light billows into the tunnel. It initially feels delightful, yet the air soon turns frigid on the wet skin of his face, the breeze quickly crystallising the water in his hair. Alfred, he knows, would be having a fit. His pet peeve is anyone going outdoors with wet hair, but Dick thinks he has a pretty airtight defence for the court. After all, his hair was dampened without consent. If he lays it on thick, Alfred might even light the fire in his room like he used to do when he was kid, when he was cold and lonely, and missing everything he had with everything he had.
A low guttural moan is coming from below him, ricocheting off the walls of the tunnel, rising into a deep echoing wail. There is a white heat that suddenly pierces deep through his calf, but Dick can’t stop. He hauls himself out of the sewer with a grunt, his wet suit weighing him down by what he estimates to be at least two metric tons.
Feet on the ground, he wants to stop, contact Barbara, get a plan in order. It is probably the most logical course of action, but you need to run is a siren in his head. Water splashes violently below, something surging through the shallow depths. He remembers, it’s locked onto you.
So, he does what he does best, and flies. The shadow may have had the home advantage in the dark, but they are in his playground now.
As he grapples upwards, suspended in flight, he takes stock. The air resistance helps to dry the droplets on his suit, his skin, but in its place it leaves a bone-deep chill that contrasts sharply with the deep heat that is emitting from his chest, his jaw. There is fire in his chest and ice on his skin, with a nice liquid lava finisher, dripping down his lower leg, that he had almost forgotten about. He looks down.
It’s a fucking batarang.
He folds himself at the waist and reaches down to yank it out. Medically, it would be preferable to leave it in, but Dick’s preferences for most things in life were often left on the back burner. He doubts having a three inch projectile sticking out of his leg is the best look. As he tucks the batarang into his waist belt, Dick figures - and it might be cockiness, or just confidence in his own abilities - that he will survive the night and live to see another day. When he does, and when they save Bruce (who would hopefully be fine and not be dying himself), Dick is going to kill him himself.
The funniest thing about the whole situation is that he isn’t even supposed to be in Gotham tonight. It had been a spur of moment thing, a shrug of why not, a slap on Bruce’s shoulder with try to keep up, old man. He distinctly remembers saying, offhandedly, what’s the worst that could happen.
Dick wants so desperately to go back in time and strangle his past self, grab his wrist and slap it on the dining room table, snarl touch some fucking wood.
As adrenaline fades to a low hum in his body the further he goes, he begins to feel lightheaded. He knows that most likely, the cause is his brief encounter with oxygen depravation, but he reasons that part of it is from relief, to be in the air and not trapped in at all sides. He immediately feels guilt drip down his spine. How can he feel relief when Bruce has clearly lost his fucking mind?
He lands on some rooftop, doesn’t pause as he casts his grapple again. He has no idea where he’s going, just to some place further away, some place that he can stop to get answers. Perhaps Bruce was gassed with fear toxin. He doesn’t have a rebreather attached to his cowl, whoever it was could have gotten lucky. Yet, Bruce doesn’t seem to be in the throes of terror. Inflicting it upon Dick is apparently his goal.
The theory doesn’t stand. In the air, he feels weightless, and it relieves the pressure in his chest, but the back of his head is prickling. He glances over his shoulder, and sees a shadow.
Fuck. He clicks his comm to life. “O? Where’s B?”
Even when he knows it’s coming, it still sends a chill down his spine to hear Barbara reply, “Still in the sewer.”
He recalls an oddly shaped lump, too small and too light. Bruce had dropped his comm. The confirmation that he was right doesn’t feel as sweet as he thought it would. “Try again.”
“What?” Barbara says, and he has clearly caught her off guard. The question is rhetorical, not meant to be answered, so Dick waits. Keys clack in his ear, and she must be pulling up feed from the secondary backup locators hidden on the batsuit, because she then says, quietly, “He’s gaining on you.”
“Yeah,” he breathes.
“I can send -”
“No,” he interrupts, sharply, before Barbara can get ahead of herself. His jaw protests the movement. He can deal with this. Tim or Damian, or Cass or Steph - none of them need to be near this. Bruce would never forgive him if he set the others in his sights while he was like this. Dick doesn’t think he could forgive himself.
His mind races to place each one on a map, categorising their risk level in proximity to Bruce. It startles him how quickly his mind has accepted Bruce as a threat, easily classifying him as such despite previous exposure to the contrary. Tim should be in the cave, working out the kinks of the case he’s been obsessively working on. Steph has the night off, and only god - and Bruce - knows where Cass is. All Dick knows is that presently, she’s not in Gotham. Damian should still be brewing resentfully in the manor, his arm in a sling. It is hard to argue with being benched when your forearm is split in two.
“Nightwing,” Barbara starts, and mentally, Dick braces himself. “You can’t do this yourself.”
“I’m not,” Dick answers and he is surprised to find that he means it. Already, in fact, his aimless swinging is heading for Park Row, his subconscious directing him towards what it apparently interprets as aid.
Interesting, Dick thinks.
Barbara must still be tracking his movement, must have figured out where it is that he’s heading, because all she offers is a succinct, “Be careful.”
The comm goes quiet. He picks up the pace, and he knows he is bordering on reckless. Jumps are made before the grapple line is taut, and the sharp pull in his shoulder as he is launched through the air tells him that his line distance is too wide.
Dick doesn’t even dare to look behind him for fear of seeing the shadow snapping at his heels. He had a nightmare that was like this when he was younger. His dream would start as normal: flying above Gotham, weaving through rooftops, soaring through the air. Until suddenly, he wouldn’t be, and he was be falling down and down and down, into a slithering chasm of darkness that enveloped him whole.
But when he woke up, he always knew that at the opposite side of hall were arms that would wrap around him so tightly and securely that the darkness lost its grip of terror on him. Only this time, there was no Bruce to tell him it was okay, that he was safe. This time, Bruce was the darkness, waiting for him to fall.
At some point, Dick stops. It could have been five minutes or perhaps fifty, but it doesn’t really matter, because suddenly he is there, in front of him. Across the rooftop, still and waiting.
“Jason,” Dick breathes, unexpected relief softening its edges. It is a benediction.
“Dick,” Jason spits. It is a warning, a curse, and a question, all in one spoken word. The modulator contorts his voice, but it cannot hide the venom. “Start talking.”
Dick blinks. In the scenarios that had raced through his head, a chance to explain himself without an abrupt delivery of lead into a - hopefully, non-vital - part of his body has been startlingly low on the list of possibilities. A civil conversation is further than he had expected to get. Thrown off an unwritten script, he falters.
Ca-Click.
Jason flicks the safety off the gun. The one that had been raised and then unerringly trained over the centre of the blue design on his chest during his musings.
Ah. Perhaps mistaking Jason’s hesitancy as leniency had been a premature assessment. The idea of a civil conversation had been an overreach, clearly.
The red helmet tilts slightly. Paired with a feigned sigh, there came a prompt of, “Awfully kind of you to offer some free target practice.”
Okay.
Dick took solace in the fact that his finger was yet to find the trigger. Instead, it lay almost teasingly beside it, like two dozing lovers lazing in bed, unhurried by the outside world. Small consolations had to be taken when presented. His own hands, hanging limply at his sides, empty, flicks up at the wrists. Not as a condition of full surrender, but as a pacifier. In their world, to concede to such a visible and obvious threat, it was practically the plea of a peasant marked for the gallows kneeling before an unforgiving king.
He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He felt like he was drowning on solid land, a fish out of water. As if miming, he even felt his lips part of their own accord, then close again. His chest thrums with pain, ebbing in waves, and only one leg is bearing his weight. Yet, he feels behind himself in an odd way, a voyeur of his own body and mind. Perhaps this is the inevitable adrenaline crash, the shock settling in.
But- no. That theory didn’t hold any weight. There is an argument that Dick is in more peril now than he had been in before. Standing across from him, barely ten feet away, is a man who had and would kill if provoked, and he had presented himself as an easy target, practically on a silver platter.
He is running out of time. Bruce will be catching up to him- them soon. Yet, all he could get out was another pathetic croak of: “Jason.”
“Yes,” Jason agrees easily, “That’s been established.”
His tone of endless patience is betrayed by the minute shifting of his posture. Dick could tell that it is his presence, his words - or lack thereof - that was unbalancing him. Betraying his uncertainty, the rooftop gravel under Jason’s feet crunches with the slight transfer of weight from one leg to the other.
“Listen,” Jason starts, his tone growing irritable. His free hand begins to snap sharply at catches along the side of his helmet, tugging roughly. “The only reason I haven’t pulled this trigger is that I’m not even sure if you-“
“He’s coming,” Dick blurts out, interrupting the beginning of Jason’s tirade. It was as if the sudden revelation of a familiar, if hostile, human face opposite him had tugged a cord within that shattered whatever reservations had been holding him back. But, god, were the words he chose not so sinister, so -
“Ominous,” Jason murmurs, ruefully. To himself, most likely, but it is unsettlingly quiet on the rooftop, enough for the comment to drift over the rooftop in the slight city breeze. Dick mentally thanks him for the assist.
Louder, Jason says, “Who are you talking about? And why should I care?”
Internally, Dick winces. There really wasn’t any tactful way to bring up the topic of Bruce to Jason. It was sort of like ripping a bandaid off a grizzly bear. Dick braces himself, screws his courage to the sticking place, and answers both questions in one with a quiet, “Bruce.” He pauses. “Bruce is coming.”
To his credit, Jason does not go for the nuclear option as he had expected. Instead, he flicks the safety back on, slipping his gun into his thigh holster in one smooth, practised motion. In the ensuing silence, he seems to mull over his next words as he crosses his arms. Dick cannot help himself as he instinctively relaxes, while another part of him begins to produce the seeping feeling of dread.
“Does Bruce explain why you look like you’ve gone a round with Deathstroke?”
“Uh,” Dick starts, victimised, unable to help himself, “Like, six rounds, at the very least. I-." He cuts himself off abruptly.
“What now?” Jason exasperates, his head tilting back as his eyes search the skies for clarification, or for, perhaps, resolve. His head drops back down. “Dick. Dick. Have you hit your head?”
Dick flaps a hand in Jason’s vague direction as he studies the skyline, an appeal for silence. Jason raises his eyebrows in indignation and defiantly opens his mouth.
There. The noise. Dick pivots on his heel to face the direction of the offending noise, his leg smarting at the move, but keeps his head turned slightly to listen. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jason suddenly snap his mouth shut and do the same. So, he heard it too. The noise is almost imperceptible, inaudible. But not quite. He waits, beginning a mental timer as he strains to hear.
Kah-shik.
Out of time. His raises his hands to rest lightly on his escrima sticks, a familiar and comforting presence.
Kah-shik.
Definitely louder. Definitely closer. Dick has been in the business too long to not recognise the sound of a grapple release system. By the side glances that Jason is subtly throwing him, he knows it too.
Right on cue, his comm purrs to life with Barbara saying, “Nightwing. Batman must of dropped the tracker I had on him. Last known location within a hundred feet and closing.”
When the hulking form lands on the roof, it is with a stumble, but he remains on his feet. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jason startle: a slow blink, and a tilt of his head.
If Dick had been able to properly see Bruce back in the sewers, he would have instantly clocked something wasn’t right. The glove of his right hand is notably absent; otherwise, the batsuit is impeccable. The exposed skin of his lower face and hand is unblemished, no mark to be seen, but it is his body language that is throwing Dick for a loop.
Bruce settles into a crouch at the perimeter of the roof, hunched like a gargoyle. He wavers in a way that makes Dick’s palms itch. His considerable bulk is soft at the edges, the boundary of his body disappearing into the night as he practically vibrates in place.
Perhaps the most jarring aspect of his appearance, however, is his expression. His mouth is shuttered, unmoving. Unusually, the lenses of the cowl are flipped up so his eyes are exposed. What they show is a dead stare with a wild gleam that has the hairs on the back of Dick’s neck raising. His mind begins to whisper: danger danger danger.
Beady holes of black glint in the dimly lit space between them, analysing.
“So,” Jason says, quiet, eyes trained on Bruce yet clearly directing the remark to him. Dick feels strangely honoured to be included in his little aside, until he hears the ending. “He’s sharpened his stick at both ends.”
Dick has an incredulous, “What the fuck does that even-?!” bursting out of his mouth before he is quite rudely interrupted by a batarang rushing towards his rightfully confused face.
Before he can react, a flash of red soars across his vision and bats the projectile off course. The helmet bounces once, twice, and then skitters across the gravel with a metallic screech.
“Fucking move!”
Dick snaps out of it, and fucking moves. He tucks and rolls out of the path of the next batarang, and continues dodging the next couple aimed his way. His chest protests while his leg puts forward its own argument, but he shoves the burning pain to the side.
As he moves, Jason tries to circle Bruce, who is steadily advancing with an unnerving focus as he launches projectiles. It’s only when they are within an arms length of each other that Bruce pivots, slashing at Jason with the sharp edge of a batarang. With a speed at contrast with his not-inconsiderable size, Jason leaps out of the way, the batarang nipping at the edges of his jacket.
A move like that could have gutted him. Dick sees Jason’s face contract as he retreats. He is sure that the shock present on his face is evident on his own, perhaps without the vague look of surprised admiration. Neither of them are exactly incompetent in a fight. There are days that he feels confident that he could beat his former mentor, and nowadays, Jason’s strength and bulk on a bad day rivalled Bruce on a good day. Dick knows this.
He also knows, however, that Bruce is disciplined in the knowledge of his own strength, and holds back as Batman. This not-Bruce doesn’t seem to follow the same regulations. From the sudden hesitancy that Dick reads in the line of his body, the brief eye contact, Jason knows this too.
As if sensing his thoughts, Bruce does not advance on Jason. Instead, he turns his attention to Dick. He growls, low in the back of his throat, a sound more animal than human, ghoulish. Then he attacks.
Dick evades the first few punches easily enough, as sloppy as they are, which speaks volumes in of itself. He even sneaks a few of his own in. He decides against pulling his hits, not when he’s striking pure kevlar. He would feel bad about it, but Bruce doesn’t even flinch, not even when he gets a lucky strike at his jaw.
The violence is vicious. Bruce strikes with the speed of a viper and with the strength of a gorilla. He hears Jason snarl, sees a red river streaming from his nose.
He can’t pinpoint when the tide turns, but suddenly he is only reacting, purely on the defence. He is tiring quickly. With each swing of an arm, he can feel his chest pulse. With each kick, his calf throbs. He flips backwards, and he doesn’t know if his leg will let him land it.
He stays vertical, but then a foot hooks his ankle. Suddenly he is staring at gloomy clouds, the back of head hitting the roof with a sickening thump that makes his eyes water. In the haziness that follows, he senses a weight settle on top of him. His mind goes white. There is a high-pitched whine in his ear.
But the hands don’t find the seam of his suit. Instead, two hands - one gloved, one cold and calloused - wraps around his throat and squeezes.
His hands claw uselessly at the batsuit. His heels dig up rivets in the gravel. He thinks dizzily, Batman never leaves a job unfinished.
As time slips by, he is left suspended in an odd grey area of half-unconsciousness. Everything starts to drift lazily away. There is a part of him that panics, but it is far smaller than the part that is sort of relieved. Nothing hurts here. He is hovering inside his own body, not touching his physical self. Within this fuzzy space, he is at peace.
From a distance, he feels the vice grip around his throat suddenly rip away as the weight on his chest disappears.
When Dick logs back into consciousness, what greets him first is the sight of Jason’s broad back towering over him. Shoulders heaving, his hands twitch erratically from where they hang at his sides, near his holsters. Hearing follows sight, and he tunes back into the sound of Jason swearing.
“- fuck are you doing?! That’s Nightwing. You know, Dick! Wake up, you stupid fucking old man,” Jason hisses, “You’re going to kill him. Can you even hear me? You’re going to fucking kill him. Whatever this is, you need to fucking fight it!”
There’s an hysteric edge to Jason’s voice that Dick has never been privy to before. He cranes his neck up, his head the weight of a bowling ball. Bruce is on his knees a few feet in front of Jason, who stands rigidly between them, spitting venom. He is bent in two, his forehead kissing the rooftop as his hands grasp at his head. His eyes are screwed so tightly shut that his eyelashes have disappeared into his face.
Dick drops his head back onto the roof. It takes too much effort to hold it up. Logically, he knows that the body is designed to forget pain. Otherwise, no one would ever have more than one child. It can be hard to recall what a specific injury felt like, even if it was hell at the time. He just wishes this body would really speed up to the point of amnesia.
There is not one part of his body that doesn’t hurt in some way. Sandpaper lines the inside of his throat, and the outside is warmed by a band of heat. The back of his head throbs with each beat of his heart. His chest feels like it’s caved in. His legs ache with a burn that, oddly, take him back to the circus.
With the rumble of Jason’s voice in the background, he ponders half-deliriously. There is something he’s missing, something that tickles in the corner of his mind. He racks his brain for an answer, casts his mind back to analyse the night. Lying eagle-spread on the rooftop, he pinballs along his memories, bouncing across points of reference, searching for an eureka! moment.
He was raised by a self-proclaimed detective. With how strange Bruce has been acting tonight, there has to have been some consistency, some pattern he is missing. The record scratches, skips to the beginning. Dick had found him in the sewers, sitting blind in the -
His mind screeches to a halt, leaving skid marks.
Dark.
“Get the cowl off,” Dick says, or tries to, at least. It’s more of a painful croak, his voice breaking halfway through the delivery. He sounds pathetic, like he’s going through puberty again. He tries to clear his throat, but when lava bubbles up his oesophagus, he gives up and settles for the least amount of words needed. “Helmet on.”
Amazingly, Jason seems to understand. He shoots him a withering look over his shoulder that is half who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, half, what the fuck are you talking about, and half, oh, you’re alive.
Too many halves. Oh well, that’s not too surprising considering his brain is at half-mast. What is surprising, though, is that Jason doesn’t verbalise any objections, and simply nods.
He steps slowly to the side, keeping a hand raised between the two of them as if they were two preteens scrapping in the playground. Dick huffs. Surely there’s a part of Jason that realises how ridiculous they must look.
He loses time. Suddenly, in what feels like from one blink to the next, Jason has his red helmet in hand. For a split second, Dick thinks he’s going to bail on them, leave them like this, but then he remembers what he had said to him. Oh, yeah, right. The plan.
Jason moves back into his original position, and hesitates. He sympathises. Convincing Batman to de-cowl while outside the batcave is like arguing with a brick wall. Yet, it seems like tonight is the night for surprises.
“Do it,” Bruce snaps, seemingly aware, yet his eyes are still screwed shut.
Jason doesn’t hesitate. He lunges forward, rips the cowl off, and slams the helmet on Bruce’s head. Like a puppet with its strings cut, Bruce pitches forward onto the rooftop, and then flops onto his back. Objectively, it is quite a comical scene. Dick flicks his eyes up and shares a blank look with Jason.
There is a moment of tranquility. Three spots of stationary fog appear on the roof as they breathe in the silence. Bruce’s chest rises dramatically, once, twice, then he speaks. When he does, he sounds slightly surprised, but sincere. “Thank you.”
“Uh, a ‘thank you’? You can shove your fucking-“
Only Bruce doesn’t seem to hear, or perhaps he doesn’t care for the end of the sentence, because after a brief pause, he reaches into a compartment on his belt. Neither Dick or Jason can inspect the new prop introduced to the scene before Bruce is uncapping the tip and stabbing it into his own thigh, as if it were an epipen.
Bruce falls still, his arm flopping from his side. Dick sees Jason start forward reflexively. But the puppeteer has left the building, and all is left is the physical form.
He would like to say that he sees Jason finish the movement and stop at Bruce’s side, but things are starting to get a bit wavy in the visual department. Someone may be talking, but someone else is turning up the TV static in his skull, and he feels himself-
fall.