Chapter Text
“You should have left the dog inside,” Bruce growled.
He was still very firmly in Batman mode but Damian had long outgrown fearing him. After all, Batman was not like his grandfather. When it came to his family, he was all growl and no bite. If he ever did feel the need to launch any sort of physical attack against them, it was always aimed at restraining, never to cause harm. And anytime Bruce had no other option but to result to violence, he treated it like a personal failing of his own, as if he was personally to blame for not intervening before the situation developed so far. It was a strange change to how Damian had been raised.
And Damian knew that Bruce was actually very proud of him for thinking to handle the Haley situation. He had been so focused on ensuring the safest of Dick that he had not even thought about checking over the beloved animal. It had been Damian who had run all the necessary tests, Damian who had hastily created a sling to keep his precious three-legged cargo strapped to his chest as she slept off the drug the Court of the Owls had given her.
“I needed to ensure that she suffers no ill effects from the drug,” Damian explained. “You have your methods of protecting the vulnerable. Mine involves keeping the innocent close.”
To make his point, he combed his fingers through the small dog’s fur.
“They won’t have given her anything dangerous,” Bruce said. “This was an intimidation tactic, nothing more.”
“Who?” Damian asked, not looking away from the sleeping dog.
He knew his father would be able to handle sufficiently patrolling the area. It was obvious that his presence was not so much required to back up the dark knight but rather so that Bruce had at least one of his children safely at his side so that he could be sure they were safe.
“What do you mean?” Bruce asked.
“Who were they trying to intimidate? You or Grayson?”
“If they know Dick, they’ll know he didn’t intimidate that that age. Barely does as an adult.”
“So they are trying to intimidate you,” Damian mused.
“I don’t intimidate either,” Bruce growled back.
And Damian was mostly tempted to agree with him, but only because he had chosen the wrong word. The Bat didn’t get intimidated. It was not something it was capable of. But the Bat got scared. The Bat feared for the young he had reared, the family he had fought so desperately for.
What the court had done had been a threat. It was a silent promise that they could get to Dick Grayson if they so desired it. And yet it made no sense to Damian. If they wanted Grayson so desperately, why warn the man who would readily give his life to protect him?
“This situation doesn’t make sense,” Damian concluded with a scowl.
“It makes sense,” Bruce replied with a thunderous expression. “They’re toying with us.”
It wasn’t often that Jason and Stephanie were partnered up. Jason had his theories as to why but he figured it was mostly because Bruce felt so much more comfortable when he was with partnered with one of the great success stories, one of the responsible older kids (if you could call Dick and Babs responsible), rather than one of the impressionable junior heroes that Bruce was still trying to shape.
“So would Dick have founded the Teen Titans by that age?” Stephanie asked as they walked along.
It was an odd thing. They were patrolling the property to check that it had emptied of the home invaders that had stolen from them and Stephanie was merrily chattering away like they were just having an afternoon stroll. It honestly felt a little like talking to Dick – the adult Dick. Maybe that was why Tim had taken such a shine to her. He had had some sort of weird childhood crush on Dick’s Robin, right?
“Yeah,” Jason answered, frowning.
“And they just let him be leader? Like… Some of them must have been in their late teens when it started. So like post-growth spurt. And they just let him be leader. That version of Dick. Who I am pretty sure Bruce could fit in one of the compartments on his utility belt if he wanted to.”
Jason couldn’t help but smirk at the image. He didn’t think that Dick would have been particularly happy about it.
“Has he met Starfire yet?” Stephanie asked.
“He hasn’t mentioned her but he mentioned Red X and Starfire told me she fought Red X.”
“Because she’s tall. And surely she didn’t date Dick when he was this tall. He would have needed a stepladder to kiss her,” Steph remarked.
Jason shrugged, admitting that he didn’t know the intimate details about Dick’s teenaged love life and he wasn’t about to ask. Still, he could remember a story that Starfire had told him when they had been on a mission together from when Dick was about sixteen and crawling for every extra inch he was able to take from puberty (as if puberty had somehow owed him more than it had already given him by making him one of Gotham’s most eligible bachelors). The Teen Titans had been on a mission in space, which had happened far more frequently than even Batman knew about, when they had been forced to go undercover on an alien world. The aliens had seen Starfire, the tall, goddess-like alien princess and decided that she was the leader of the group. Dick, still relatively short and having showed Starfire public affection almost immediately had been presumed to be her concubine and treated as such. It was a story that Dick didn’t know Jason knew about and he was waiting for just the right situation to weaponize the information.
“Well you can’t weaponize it against him now,” Steph said.
“Why not?”
“He’s just a kid.”
Jason glowered.
“He’s my older brother,” he pointed out.
Stephanie shrugged.
“Not right now.”
“Can you cure him?”
Tim didn’t often have the pleasure of patrolling with Duke. Tim had pressures on him that occupied his daytime – a business to run, appearances to keep. They rarely crossed paths because of it.
Tim wished they did more often. Duke’s new perspective in the hero world was refreshing. Most heroes wouldn’t bother to ask if Dick could be cured because of course he could be cured. They hero community were able to reverse all sorts of conditions, break curses, cure alien diseases. They could fix this.
But Tim wasn’t sure they could. Dick was stable. It was a relief in a way. Dick’s cells had taken to the reversed-aging well. He wasn’t about to collapse with a heart attack or suddenly mutate into some sort of monster. But it was a stability that Tim wasn’t sure he could disrupt. And he was practically certain that he had no way to mess with the boy’s stable state without putting his life in danger. Was it worth risking the life of a happy and healthy teenaged boy to have a chance of getting back a young man they dearly loved?
Tim knew the answer Bruce would give. Bruce would want a second chance, the ability to shield Dick from the things he had failed to protect him from the first time. The fact that that second chance came with reduced risk of Dick dying… That only made it more appealing.
But Damian and Jason… They’d want their big brother back.
And Dick… What would he want? Was he even in a state where his opinion counted?
“I have to,” Tim said vaguely.
He scanned the dark trees at the edge of the manor property, almost hoping that he would see a Talon in the shadows so that he would have a way of diverting Duke’s attention.
“That’s not an answer to the question I asked,” Duke remarked, not unkindly.
“I can’t. Yet,” Tim admitted. “But I will work it out. Once we’ve drive back the owls, arrested the scientist behind all of this… Then I’ll have time to make real progress.”
It was not the first time Dick had been locked in the Batmobile for Bruce to protect him. He would say he doubted it would be the last but he liked to think that by the time he was an adult he was old enough and bulky enough that he could prevent his mentor from imprisoning him in such a humiliating way.
And the Batmobile was a pretty effective prison. It was built like a tank – it had been even when Dick had been a boy (for the first time). No one was getting in without a key and, when Batman enacted the ‘playpen’ procedure (Bruce didn’t call it that), Dick wasn’t easily getting out either. Still, he knew of a few ways.
He waited until it seemed as if he had been entirely defeated by the car’s security systems. He slumped back, looking dejected, feeling Alfred’s glances at him from the corner of the butler’s eye all but entirely dying away. And then he lunged forward. He flipped open a small plastic cap over a blinking red button and braced himself for the ejector seat to go off.
A flat buzz accompanied the compression of the button. The ejector seat did not deploy. Dick stared, looking at the screen inside the car.
“Ejection permissions shut down,” an electronic voice reported.
“Override RG01,” Dick growled, annoyed that Bruce had thought of it.
“Override blocked.”
“Emergency override RG01.”
“Override blocked.”
“Proctol 17. Password Don Carlos."
It was not a protocol Dick used very often. He only remembered the passcode because it was some character from some 80s adaption of Zorro Bruce had got him to watch. But it was Dick’s personal code, his passcode to transfer control of all of Bruce's technology to him in the event that Bruce was mind controlled, bodysnatched or otherwise turned evil.
It was meant to be irrefutable, a command that could not be overridden because surely that would be the first thing Bruce would do if he turned evil, try to shut Dick out of all the technology he might have been able to use to put a stop to him.
Still the system bleeped. The code was outdated. Dick wondered when hid passcode had changed. Did he still even have a control like that or had Bruce found someone he trusted more, given them the burden of being the one to stop him if he was incapable of making the right choice.
Dick glanced over to Alfred, seeing the butler looking back at him. Although the butler wasn't smiling, Dick could still see the amusement in his eyes. He fought the urge to glare back. That would not help his situation. Instead he pouted and climbed into the backseats where his small stature meant he was concealed from the butler.
There was little he could do from the back. Alfred knew that as well as he did. Still, Dick’s changing of seats was not to put him in a better position for the task of escaping but to ensure Alfred did not question when he could not see him.
Dick counted to ten, then looked around to make sure the butler had turned away. Then he, keeping as low as he could, slid back into the front seats, concealing himself in the driver's footwell. It only took him a few moments to remove a panel to expose the wiring and immediately he began poking around inside. It took him only a few moments to realise that he did not have the tools required to override any of the Batmobile’s security systems. He didn’t even have the ability to hotwire the car from inside. But one system was not as well protected: the comms system. Dick imagined Bruce considering a situation like this as he planned out the inner workings of the car, one with more sinister overtones. If Bruce had turned evil, if the Batmobile was overridden by some evil AI, and one of the Robins was trapped inside in mortal peril, Bruce would want them to have at least some way to call for help. Phones were out of the question – the Batmobile had an inbuilt communications scrambler – but the integrated comm system.
Dick quickly worked on the wires, getting the system ready. Then he tousled his hair. He drew in a series of rapid breaths in quick succession, causing his heart to beat faster, his breathing to turn into pants. Then he roughly rubbed his face, making it look flushed.
A moment later, he set the call into motion, sitting level with the screen.
He heard the call pick up and immediately launched into a panicked rant.
“Uncle Clark, it’s…!”
Jon was looking down the camera at him.
“Dick, what’s wrong?” Jon asked, immediately concerned.
“You need to get your dad now!” Dick urged. “It’s Bruce. He’s gone rouge. The court… They did something to him.”
Dick’s stellar acting was working perfectly. Jon was immediately hurrying through the halls of a house, looking for his father. Soon he found him, Clark and Lois sitting at a table together, both working on some newspaper piece. Jon rushed up to his father and put the phone in his hand.
“Dick? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Bruce. The court are controlling him. He’s locked me in here. I can’t get out. And he’s gone after the others. I… He wants to kill them, Clark. You have to help me get out of here!”
There was the sound of movement in the cave and Dick felt eyes on him. Superman stood there.
"Protocol 17. Passcode: Alpha-1-Indigo-3-North."
With a click, the Batmobile unlocked. Dick scrambled to climb out, grinning up at Superman.
"Thank you so much."
"Master Kent, what on earth do you think you're doing?"
Alfred was on his feet, shotgun at the ready as if he had been fully intending to take the shot. The Kryptonian slowly turned to look toward Dick.
“What’s going on, Dick?”
“I don’t know! Ask Alfred! He’s the one pointing a gun at you!” the boy yelped before running for the stairs out of the cave.