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His pulse did not lie.
It is Slade’s prevalent thought as he stares at Dick from his bedroom doorway; he is deeply asleep and clearly not at all in the right frame of mind with how easily Slade broke in. He barely stirred. Slade wants to wake him up both abruptly and softly. He wants to shoot him in the thigh and watch him bleed on the floor. He wants to crush him. He wants to crush him to death, again.
He steps further into the moonlight, cutting the room in two with a partial darkness, unsure if the pang of betrayal in his jaw was from the lie or the carelessness of it all. A floorboard creaks under his boot, and he stares down at it.
“Caught,” Dick croaks. Unmindful now, Slade leans back against the windowpane.
“Anyone ever teach you not to sleep with the curtains open?”
“All the time,” Dick replies, and he is chewing on the corner of his thumb like a kid left home sick with glassy eyes and the bed hair to match, layered in three comforters and buried in pillows. The mural that paints Dick’s life both starts and ends at the trailer where he spent his early childhood.
Slade has missed something important.
“You have to eat.”
Dick’s gaunt cheeks make his eyes seem hollower than they are. Slade recognises the signs—he has known the kid long enough to know his thought pattern, to differentiate an action borne from Dick and an action borne from the hand above him.
“Withholding your basic needs isn’t contributing anything more to your situation, and neither is wallowing in pity. Have you eaten anything since you got back?” A short shake of Dick’s head. “Are you going to ask for help, or should I just shove a granola bar down your throat and call it a day?”
“Help,” Dick says. His mouth twitches, uncomfortable, and Slade leans over the bed to look at him, squinting down at his pallor.
“Are you fucking high?”
“Yes,” Dick says.
“Where?”
“Top drawer.”
Slade tugs open the bedside drawer, and a familiar collection of bottles rattle together. He takes a breath through his nose.
“And how long have you been riding truth serum?”
Dick makes a show of lifting his hand out from the blankets, tilting his imaginary watch towards him.
“Month and a half,” he replies. Slade slams the drawer shut.
“You’re a fucking idiot. A jobless fucking idiot.”
“Why are you so pissed off? You don’t get to show up out of nowhere and give me a dressing-down—you, of all people, do not get to do that.”
“If you’re going to act like a child, then expect to be treated like a child.”
“You kiss your kids with that mouth?”
“Bold of you to assume I ever kissed my children.” Slade stands and tears the blankets back. “You’re going to shower and eat, and then we’re going to talk.”
“Are you going to hold my hair while I puke?”
Slade lifts him up easily, 120 pounds of sweating, shaking limbs that clamber to steady themselves as Slade forces him on his feet.
“Shower,” Slade instructs. “Now.”
“You don’t want to join me?”
“You’re emaciated. If I’m joining you, it’ll be to make sure your head doesn’t crack open on the tile, and I’m not feeling very generous tonight.”
Dick considers this. “… Can I eat first?”
Slade makes eggs over easy, pairing it with toast smothered in butter and an overly large glass of orange juice that is just nearing its best before date. It takes all of an hour for Dick to finish eating before he bunches his fists in his sleeves, tucking his arms around himself with Slade watching.
“Do you like being miserable?”
Dick’s mouth twitches. The bags under his eyes aren’t dark but they are present, and the grease in his hair fosters dandruff in his curls.
“You kill people for a living,” he points out.
“And I enjoy what I do.” Slade’s expression is one of an adult humouring a child. “I don’t begrudge your line of work, Grayson. Do I think your skills would be more beneficial in a different field? Yes, but there’s an equal balance regardless of where you stand; my problem is you specifically.”
“Oh no,” Dick bemoans sarcastically.
“Yes,” Slade continues, “because you hate your job so much that your life has gone to shit, and you haven’t done your laundry 6 weeks.” Slade leans forward, conspiratorial: “I did your laundry while you were asleep.”
Dick snorts, slumping back into the breakfast bar seat.
“Spyral was unnecessary,” Slade says, “and you were sent there with so much conviction by Wayne that at this point his irrationality is more of a danger than the fact that you have milk a month out of date in your fridge.”
“I drank that yesterday.”
“Stop making jokes. Look me in the eye.”
“You’ve only got the one, man.”
“Grayson.” Slade’s palms lay flat on the counter. “Spyral is a drop in the fucking ocean, and the fact that Bruce Wayne is Batman is no secret. It hasn’t been a secret for a long, long time.”
“Do you have a point you’re getting to?”
“I’m trying to put things in perspective for you. Ask him. Call him right now and ask him how the year you spent undercover is benefitting his control over crime trade in Gotham or protecting the world for that matter. Ask him if it was worth it to beat you within an inch of your life.” A thought occurs to Slade. “Or maybe I’ll just ask you.”
“Slade—”
“Was the price of your life congruent with the Batman’s mission against Spyral?”
Dick’s jaw trembles with the weight of honesty.
“Was giving you brain damage worth the betrayal against your brothers?” Slade poses. “Was faking Richard Grayson’s death worth the loss of trust?”
“You’ve made your point.”
“Answer me.”
Dick doesn’t. Slade leans close.
“It must hurt to keep it all in, all the time. Does it hurt?”
“Yes,” Dick hisses.
“Do you want to be alive?”
Dick doesn’t answer.
“Do you, Richard Grayson, want to be alive?” Slade repeats.
“No.”
It is disappointing and it is true, and in some ways, it is how vigilante life is meant to be lived.
“You’re stupid,” Slade says. “I can’t protect you from this.”
“When have you ever protected me?!” Dick exclaims. “Our interests rarely align—we have stood a handful of times as partners, but we have never been equals, Slade, you made sure of that.”
“On average 1400 contracts come out with your name on the list, weekly. Your legal name. Comparatively, Nightwing’s name shows up over 27,000 times fortnightly and that is only within the US. There are billions of people in the world and more of them are aware of you than you are of them. You could defeat a handful at most, but after that you are more likely to be indisposed. Do not underestimate what I have done to keep your shitty corner of New Jersey under the radar.”
“What,” Dick croaks, “so only you get to ruin my life?”
“Yes,” Slade replies simply. “And apparently your father.”
Dick makes a face, as if about to reply, but it turns pale, sickly. Slade hands him a ready bowl and Dick drops his head down, throwing up the entirety of his breakfast.
“I don’t feel good,” he whispers. Bile glistens his lips and when Slade approaches, he rests his sticky cheek against his chest. Slade only slides his hand up into Dick’s hair, scratching his scalp.
“It’s what you get for turning yourself into a junkie,” he says. “What do you think your dumbass brother is going to think when he finds out you’re shooting up?”
“You won’t tell him.”
“No, you’re going to. Now show me your other arm.”
Dick does and Slade rolls back his sleeve, almost rolling his eye.
“You’re the adult equivalent of a hormonal pre-teen.”
“You met me when I was 12,” Dick points out, and doesn’t flinch as Slade twists his arm uncomfortably. “What does it feel like to be a parent, and to have your kids hurt themselves because of you?”
“I don’t know, kid, what’s it feel like to cut yourself?” He peers at one of the more open wounds near Dick’s inner elbow. “What’d you use, one of your tchotchkes?”
“Pocketknife. Don’t call them tchotchkes, they’re antiques.”
The four shelves covered in dust and memorabilia beg to differ.
“They’re tchotchkes. You would’ve had more luck cracking open a pencil sharpener.”
“What the fuck,” Dick slurred, and threw up again.
“Why do you even give a shit?” Dick asks nearer to midday, waist-deep in unscented bath water. “How do you even remember me?” His voice is muffled as Slade cups his jaw, brushing at his molars with mint-free toothpaste. He pulls back and Dick spits into the bath. The answer cannot be simple, nor can it be so complex as to lose meaning—but then, Slade isn’t sure at all. Maybe he just wants something to dote on, and years of violence and tinnitus has all but bore him down to baser instinct. Maybe he just wants to be still.
“Agents are fitted with identity protection implants, Dick continues. “You should have never been able to recognise me in Roskilde, let alone remember that you encountered me afterwards.”
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not, but it bothers me.”
Slade touches his face, thumb pressing the corner of his lips.
“You never had to reply to me.”
“You’d have never let me get away if I didn’t.”
“I might have for a good enough reason,” Slade replies. Dick leans into his touch, takes the tip of his thumb against his teeth.
“There’s never a good enough reason for you.”
“No,” Slade agrees.
“I got in trouble after we met,” Dick whispers. “They interrogated me for hours. Made me—” his breath hitches. “Every time I tried to remember you, I started burning. I was in that room for days just burning. I couldn’t even remember what I looked like, or what my parents looked like, and I just screamed until I couldn’t scream anymore—but I woke up, and they asked me how I was feeling. The pain never happened. It was in my head, they promised.” Dick closes his eyes. “I needed it sometimes, like letting myself get hit so I could focus.”
“Do you want me to hit you?” Slade asks. Dick looks at him, unreadable.
“I don’t know,” he replies quietly. “It would be easier if you still wanted me dead, then I wouldn’t have to ask. Or choose.” He licks his lips. “I was scared for a while that you raped me in Roskilde, or if I was just misremembering from whatever they put me under, because I could remember your hands, and I couldn’t remember ever feeling your hands before that time, but I have, haven’t I?”
Slade leans his cheek on his shoulder and Dick rubs his wet fingers against each other, smearing nothing but leftover soap suds too weak to create a lather.
“You wouldn’t do that to me,” Dick says roughly. “Not to me.”
“No.”
“I don’t count what’s happened to me as rape. Not even—you know, most of it was just circumstance.”
Slade watches the warm morning slowly grow behind the frosted glass of the bathroom window. Dick leans closer to the bath edge, as if to soak the coming warmth, or to be closer to his escape.
“What do you count?” Slade asks. Dick lifts his hand to his mouth, chewing at his thumb nail.
“When I would get benched as Robin for not doing my homework, or whatever, I would still sneak out. Alfred knew, ‘cos he’d be waiting up in the kitchen in case I needed to be patched up, but he never told Bruce.” He shifts, uncomfortable, but relaxes quickly, and the words flow from his mouth with the cadence and clarity of someone firmly distanced. “I got unlucky one night and jammed my grappling hook. I was just going to walk back to my bike and head home, but some guy pulled me into an alley and shoved down my leggings. I fought. I really—really kicked and screamed. He raped me anyway.”
“I’m not sure you would be telling me this if you weren’t still under the influence,” Slade mentions. Dick rubs at his eye.
“No, probably not. I’ve never told anyone that. I’ve barely let myself think about it.”
“You’ve gone through an ordeal—” and briefly, Slade remembers a vague memory of his grandmother, the way she would call everything an ordeal from rain to sunshine. “It’s only natural other traumatic experiences would surface.”
“Stop trying to comfort me, you’re awful at it.”
It is a small wonder that Dick Grayson is not more afraid of things that have proven to hurt him; it is a wonder he still flies when his parents fell, it is a wonder he sleeps soundly in a room with a man who has hurt him in ways far beyond the physical.
“I am in a valley, and you are in a valley.” Slade recognises the words, his head tilting.
“Maybe,” he agrees, “but it’s the same valley.”
“You love me,” Dick says, like fact, like he himself is capable of differentiating love and control or love and possession. “We should get a house with a fence.”
“When you’re sober.”
“I’ve still got gravel in my knees from when I fell at three. It’s the same gravel. They’re still my knees.” Dick pauses. “Would you stop being Deathstroke?”
“Would you stop being Nightwing?”
“Nightwing’s dead already.”
“Stopping isn’t some impossible feat,” Slade explains. “My job isn’t a compulsion, and neither are my morals.”
“I don’t know if that makes you seem better or worse.”
“I’ll stop when it stops benefitting me, how about that? I’m good at what I do. Why shouldn’t I do it?”
Dick doesn’t reply, a weary expression furrowing his brow. He closes his eyes and tips his head back, as if to sleep.
“You ever think we’re just biding time?” he asks, quiet, drawling the words as the realisation trickles out. “Roleplaying domesticity and normality. Am I going to come home one day to you in an apron? Are we going to apply for joint taxes?”
“I was thinking Greek for dinner tomorrow night,” Slade replies, and Dick peels open his eyes to hint a smile.
A week passes before Dick can stand properly on his own two feet, and another before he writhes comfortably as Slade blows him on the dining room table.
“Bruce wants me back in Gotham soon,” he says wetly, breath hitching as Slade presses into him.
“We’re talking about your father now?”
“No better time than the present.”
“He calls your tolerance forgiveness and you let him get away with it. You might want to take a page out of your brother’s book and start blaming him for a change.”
Dick keens as Slade wraps a hand around his cock, tightening his arms around Slade’s neck. He digs his nails in sharply, lips dry and bitten on the underside as he speaks.
“You think I don’t? It’s not forgiveness or tolerance, it’s accepting that I cannot fucking change someone who doesn’t want to change, not even for his kids. I was a kid and he turned me into a symbol. People tell me all the time how Robin and Nightwing both taught them about strength, but I’m not strong. I’m fucking—I’m barely fucking surviving. You can’t even call it perseverance. I was a kid and he turned me into his mother.”
Slade looks at him doubtfully. “Is this turning you on?”
Dick shrugs. “A little.”
“If he wants to keep believing in his little nuclear fantasy, then he needs to learn that he will lose his children indefinitely. You’ve given him more chances than he deserves, and somehow, he keeps fucking it up more and more.” Slade lifts Dick’s thigh. “You’ll stay here because you want to be here. You’ll visit Gotham if you want to visit Gotham. No more, no less.”
“My big scary man,” Dick teases. “You going to protect me?”
“If you want to call it that.”
“I want you to cum inside of me.”
“That can be negotiated.”
“Name your price.”
“Be a good boy for once,” Slade replies. Dick narrows his eyes, but his cock twitches against Slade’s palm.
“You play dirty.”
Slade leans down to kiss him, wet and dragging, barely a kiss at all.
“You’re staying in Philly.”
“’kay,” Dick murmurs, licking the spit from his lips. “Okay.”
Slade is on contract in Montreal when Jason sits beside him, face covered with a dark balaclava and a gun strapped to his back. Not the Red Hood, then, but someone else entirely.
“Nice night we’re having,” he says pleasantly. Slade’s shot rings out, and a half-mile away a broker’s brain splutters over an anglicised portrait of himself. “Heard some interesting news from Ravager last night.”
“Is that so?”
“And you’ve got Batman in a right tizzy,” Jason adds. “You’ve certainly made your rounds.”
“Was there something you needed, Todd?”
Jason tosses him a thumb drive that skitters to a stop near his elbow.
“It’s the only copy left,” he says, and hooks his hands in the brace of his vest, tipping back on the soles of his feet. “He tried wiping it off the face of the Earth.”
“Batman?”
Jason shakes his head. “Nightwing.”
Slade turns his attention away from the kill and to the thumb drive instead, picking it up and turning it between his fingers. “Colour me intrigued. What’s in it for you?”
Jason shrugs once. “He’s my brother. Hurt him and I’ll kill Rose.”
“Really?” Slade asks.
“She trusts me.” Jason’s eyes are hollow in the dark. “It’d be easy, don’t you think?”
“You’re overestimating how much I care.”
“I think it’s an accurate estimation.” Jason lifts a hand and gives a short salute as he turns on one foot to leave. “Be seeing you, Slade.”
It is not startling in any sort of way, but the footage brings Slade pause. He knows what it looks like when Nightwing feigns attacks, or directs his strength towards defence, but this is neither of those things. It is Dick, giving up. It is a child unsure as to why their father is hitting them. Why are you hitting him? Slade asks the grains of pixels, the blurred shadow of the Batman’s cowl. Because you know he is already at his lowest. Because you know that in order to focus, Dick must be hit. Dick is a collector of Batman’s worst moments and of Bruce’s greatest and worst achievements; he remembers too much to be allowed leniency or love of any naked kind, and yet Bruce asks him to keep hold of it, to bury it, and to continue without a sweat.
The bedroom window slides open, and Nightwing climbs through, clasping it shut behind him.
“New apartment?” Slade asks. From the loungeroom balcony Dick has an unobstructed view of Morrison Harbour.
“It’s temporary,” Dick replies, fiddling to unzip his suit. “Shoes off, I don’t need dirt on the carpet.”
“What happened to Pennsylvania?”
“B showed up while you were away.” Dick peels away his mask and tosses it on the bed, rolling his suit away from his shoulders and down his arms. “It got messy. I’m handling it.” He straddles Slade’s lap in the desk chair, Nightwing-blue pooled around his waist as he tucks himself close. “Everyone remembers me now. There was a big old line out the door of people ready to yell at me.”
“You should have called.”
“I had it handled,” Dick says again, and presses an open-mouthed kiss to Slade’s jaw. “How long are you in Gotham for?”
“I had only intended to get you and leave.”
Dick fiddles with the collar of Slade’s gear, unmindful.
“Give me some time,” he says eventually. Slade will not ask how long, or how much some time is. He has given his offer, and the ball remains firmly in Dick’s court. He has done enough. He has done more than enough. He has provided and withheld in equal measure, and he has shown, thoroughly, his intent. It is through fault of Dick’s if his relapse into Batman’s hold proves permanent.
June and July pass with equal opportunity but remain the quieter months of the year. Pasadena is familiar in a way Gotham never pretends to be and Dick waits in line at Erewhon with a basket full of Jason’s 22-dollar premade smoothies. He throws in a jar of granola for good measure.
“Nice ankle tan.”
Rose’s sunglasses are overly large, swallowing her petite face as she peeks over his shoulder into the basket. Dick moves it to his other arm and offers to hold her hand.
“You’re weird,” she says, but clasps their hands together.
“You stalked me to California to talk about my tan,” Dick points out.
“I was already in California,” Rose corrects. “Are you taking a Zeta back to Gotham?”
“It’s Jason’s birthday tomorrow and he wanted smoothies.”
“I’ll take that as a yes. Do my taxes pay for your extracurricular Zeta-Tube use?”
“You pay taxes?”
“I don’t think so. No one ever taught me about taxes. I don’t even know if I have a credit score. Or investments. Am I meant to have investments?” She shakes her head. “I’m not stalking you.”
The line shuffles forward.
“I’m here about dad,” Rose says.
“I haven’t seen him in a few months,” Dick replies. “I think he’s in Kuwait at the moment.”
“Oh, so we’re playing dumb?”
“Ask what you want to ask.”
“You lived a whole life before either of them was in your life.” Rose is bitter but accordant with the way she shows her sympathies. “I think you forget that a lot.”
“We’re similar that way.”
“We could both leave if we wanted.” She lifts her sunglasses and looks at him, her eye startlingly pale against her skin and tied-back hair. “He is going to fucking ruin you. You can both want good things—he can want to be a good partner, or a good father, but there’s no foundation. He’s going to hurt you the same way he hurt us, and you’re going to go back to him and not ask yourself why, because he’ll have made you think it’s right.” There’s stress in her jaw, a heated flush on her young face. “Hell,” she says, “maybe you’ll even gouge out your eye.”
In the same way which change is infinitely possible, Dick also believes that it is not. Bruce and Slade both are defined by their inability to be changed—or rather their inability to be changed again; it had taken a singular experience to peel back platitudes and the façade of a human frame that most are left to wonder if there had been any honesty to it at all.
“He takes care of me,” Dick protests, but Rose shakes her head.
“I thought he was going to take care of me too. It’s calculation, Dick, it’s—it’s ownership.”
Dick wouldn’t mind ownership if it were like this. He unclasps their hands and opens his arm in offering and after a hesitation, Rose pushes him, then settles against his side. He holds her how he thinks his mother might have held him a long time ago—in the ways he can’t quite picture now, all six-feet bundled in the arms of someone who got married at 19.
“You’re a good girl, Rose.”
“I’d still save him even knowing what I do,” she said. “I don’t think that makes me good.”
Tomorrow, Jason will have his sleeve bundled against his own bleeding nose as he sips at the thick concoction of strawberry, kefir, and almond milk. Legs crossed beneath him and stitching the gash on his shin, Dick will be mindful of the numb sensation crawling his mind.
The ballroom is daintily lit for the holidays, the scent of fresh pine and decanting wine cloying with overwhelming perfumes. Dick keeps an arm loose around Damian’s shoulders as they make their rounds through the gala, all smiles and charming dialogue, though when they pass a buffet table Damian takes the un-touched champagne from Dick’s hand and sets it down.
“You’ve got to pay the hand-holding tax now,” Dick warns, a joke, but Damian fits himself against Dick’s side again, and starts them walking another round of the party. “You okay?”
“I am old enough now that I do not require lies to keep me at bay,” Damian says. “I have immense investigative capabilities.”
Dick stops them. “I never doubted that you didn’t. What’s this about, kiddo?”
“You aren’t happy,” Damian rushes, “and I cannot understand why. You are finally home, you are with your family, you should be happy.”
It is a kind way of thinking that may have been true to Dick once upon a time.
“I’m sorry I’ve worried you,” Dick says, and Damian shakes his head. “Confused you, then,” he amends.
“I—I am your Robin,” Damian interrupts, a struggle of vowels. “I am not your son.”
“I know.”
“I do not believe you do.” Damian meets his eye, wise beyond his years but vulnerable in the way children can only be. “I am glad you are not my father, because regardless of blood and regardless of obligation, you chose me, and I chose you. And I choose you still, regardless of your choices.” He looks away. “I want you to be happy. That… that would make me happy.”
“This has been bothering you for a while, huh?”
“Terribly.”
Dick pulls him into his side again. Damian’s tall enough now that Dick can lean his cheek comfortably on the crown of his gelled hair. There is a flash of a camera somewhere to their left.
“Don’t worry about me,” Dick tweaks his nose “Why don’t we just get out of here and get some fries? Jason’s probably bored out of his mind too.”
“Last I saw he was accosting Stephanie by the fireplace.”
“Accosting?”
“They were also spitting alcohol into the flames.” Dick pinches the bridge of his nose, but before he can further that train of thought—Dick sees him.
Slade’s well into what must be his second drink, by all standards dressed down from his usual get-up, but no less elegant. Dick cannot fathom how he hadn’t spotted the other man. Damian follows his gaze to the bar and harumphs.
“He has been here all night. Waiting for you, I imagine.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I assume you knew.” Damian’s eyebrows furrow. “Shall I accompany you?”
“No, I’ll be all right.” Dick nudges him. “Go find Steph and Jay if you can. Your dad would kill them if they set fire to the curtains again.”
“They will do it regardless of my presence.”
“Please?”
Damian rolls his eyes—rolls them, Dick thinks, like a real teenager should—and disappears into the crowd. When he turns to go to the bar, Slade is already watching him.
“Contract?” Dick asks before Slade can get a word in. Slade offers him the remnants of his drink—ginger ale overly diluted with ice. Dick smacks his lips together.
“Just passing through,” Slade replies. “Your sister has been keeping an eye on me all night.”
It takes a second to spot Cass’s slim figure in her floor-length dress, but when Dick does, she juts her chin, slight. He waves, and beside him Slade draws a vague circle around his own face, then flattens his hands across each other in a sweeping motion. Cass promptly delivers him the middle finger.
“I taught her that,” Dick says proudly.
“I’m surprised she’s here.”
“It’s the holidays.”
“You look tired.”
“Here I thought I looked nice tonight.”
“You look lovely tonight,” Slade agrees, “but that wasn’t my point.”
“Are you here for Senator Reeves? Because, and you didn’t hear this from me, I honestly think Bruce wouldn’t care if you were.”
“Like I said, I’m just passing through.” Slade pauses. “I’m here for you, Robin.”
“You’re the only person who still calls me that.”
“Would you like me to stop?”
Dick looks up at him. “No.”
Slade takes the drink from Dick’s hand and places it on the bar.
“Where’s your room?”
In wildest dreams would Dick ever imagine Slade in his childhood bedroom, but he stands in it now with the gait and grace of a thief, touching each forgotten piece of memorabilia, each wrinkle in the bedsheets. It has both changed and remained the same since his first night in the manor, with glow in the dark stars still peeling paint from the walls.
The twin-sized bed barely fit Dick at 16, and definitely doesn’t fit Slade as he sits on the very edge, folding his jacket over one arm, and then over the footboard.
He waits. Dick wonders if he will ever tire of waiting.
“I thought you were just going to leave me behind. You didn’t reply to my message.”
“You asked for time.”
“It’s been months.”
“I’m back,” Slade starts, “for good, but I don’t want to stay in New Jersey.”
“Take the country out of the boy,” Dick begins, but Slade tugs him sharply by his belt-loops. “I’m amenable to suggestions.”
“Missouri.”
“Naples.”
“Italy?” Slade asks, surprised.
“No, Florida.” Dick laughs at Slade’s expression. “I don’t mind Missouri, but I’d prefer Illinois.”
“I have a place in Louisville.”
Dick leans down to kiss him. “New York. You can apologise to Rose.”
“I don’t need to apologise to her.”
“She’s a teenage girl,” Dick points out. “There are a million and one reasons you could apologise to her. You can start by teaching her about finances.”
“Let me rephrase—Rose doesn’t want my apology.”
“So it won’t matter if you do. I don’t want to live directly in the city. I want a backyard. I want Bruce to apologise to me.”
“Rose and I aren’t you and Bruce,” Slade says. “You can’t fix us as a surrogate for yourself.”
“You didn’t even try.”
“No,” Slade agrees. “He didn’t.”