Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“What happened?”

“It started . . .”

He couldn’t remember when, exactly, he was able to pinpoint that something was . . . something. It was part of that weird haze of memory, or maybe lack thereof, a rushing, rolling sequence of events that Dick knew had happened (they had to have happened, or else why would– they had to, had to– it was his f–) but couldn’t actually remember happening. But he could remember that at some point, something had stood out to him, something different. Or maybe it was because it was actually the same, and that was wrong.

“–A while ago.”

But something had been off. Off in the way that Dick could tell the weather would turn bad after spending his first years on the road with Haly’s, when he’d step outside in the morning, and there wouldn’t be any clouds marring the clear blue of the sky, but he’d still sense a sort of heaviness to the air. An anticipation that bubbled with the sight of a blue that was a bit more gray than usual, something that could mean so many things other than rain. But after spending so much time on the road, moving, living, breathing with the traveling circus, he couldn’t help but inherently know that the next morning the ground would be wet with more than just dew.

He thought that maybe he’d noticed sometime in the first two or three weeks after becoming leader of the team. That happened in . . . he thought it happened in April. He hated that month, but at least April had become more bearable since Jason, and now maybe since Tim. Like he was slowly filling in the gaps his first family left, growing his third family, printing more names on his heart.

“It was April, I think.”

He’d been training Jason, then. Only after he’d been kidnapped a while ago, some months ago. Time still blended together for him, even looking back. But Jason wanted to defend himself, he’d said. Robin knew better. Dick knew better. Jason wanted to defend others.

That was . . . bad. But good? Dick was proud of his little brother, but also scared for him. Scared that Jason would be consumed by a Gotham darker than even he knew of. Eaten alive. Dick didn’t want that for him, didn’t want Jason to know how robins were born. It wasn’t that Jason was entirely innocent; he knew what Gotham was like, but he didn’t . . . know, know. Not completely, and Dick didn’t want him to know what his city was really like, not in the way that Batman and Robin knew. It was bad enough he already knew Gotham in a way that Jason Todd knew.

So Dick would teach Jason how to defend himself, but he would try to keep Jason as far from his streets for as long as possible in the meantime.

In April, or maybe it was May, but Dick thinks it was in April. That was when he first discovered the offness. But really, he thought that the reason he’d discovered the somethingness in the first place was because he’d finally realized that something had changed without him realizing it, though not really. It was more like a chink had been found in their armor. A sheen of rust over a normally well-oiled machine. Something that they should have noticed the first time but didn’t, and then it grew like a weed among flowers, unnoticed until one weed multiplied into many.

There was a . . . a mission, he thought. Something routine, covert but not. Like usual. Though they’d been getting better at that, especially since Robin had taken over as leader. His brain was a bit more hardwired to stay . . . hidden than Kaldur. It made sense; Kaldur was a soldier, Robin an . . . agent, maybe? Was there a word for what Robin was? (a– stude– firs– child– sold– but wasn’t Robin his mother’s name for him?) But he did stay hidden for over five years, so he supposed he had to have some sort of skill in the matter.

But the mission had gone mostly smoothly. That much Dick remembered. They’d headed back to the cave. Robin had begun to fill out a mission report after the debriefing, like usual. He’d noticed something. Something . . . something– What was it? He’d taken care of the debriefing and had filled out the mission report fairly easily, but something about the mission had just sort of . . . bugged him.

“There was a mission, and something just felt– nepažįstamas,” he tried In Lithuanian, and then again in Polish, “fatalny,” before finding a similar word in English. “Off.” It didn’t quite capture the weirdness of the matter, though. That panging, anxious feeling in his chest.

He couldn’t put a finger on it, because it wasn’t really any one thing, or even a lot of little things. It was just like that feeling you got when you knew it was about to rain, even if there was no real evidence of an oncoming storm.

And it wasn’t like he could feel some sort of tropical depression brewing, either, the mission just felt . . . not off, really, just . . .

But maybe that was it. Maybe it was because, for over a year, there had been something in the background, something that they kept missing over and over again that the “offness” Robin hadn’t noticed in the beginning was too familiar to seem “off” anymore.

Out of curiosity, or maybe it was paranoia. Fear? No, Dick couldn’t remember that familiar coldness of Scarecrow’s fear toxin overtaking him, so it couldn’t have been that. Maybe it was . . . it didn’t matter. He’d made the decision to scour old mission reports anyway. Maybe if he hadn’t–

“I started to look into it.”

He’d gone back to the beginnings of their team, but he distinctly remembered realizing that the offness in their missions hadn’t begun until after the Light’s attack on the Watchtower. On the League. Though there was something to that . . . like that was just a coincidence. Or maybe correlation. Important, but not the cause. There was something important around that time that Robin had discovered, something he was trying to remember and it was right there but every time he tried to reach for it–

After the Light’s attack on the Watchtower, that’s when it began. The offness. In all of their missions. It was during a time period that the Light was off-kilter and the League was recovering, so it made sense that they’d missed something, Dick supposed, attributed it to something that wasn’t the something that Dick was sure he used to know–

He’d been looking for something, anything that would explain the strange feeling that he had about the whole situation.

And he found a couple of weird things. Regular, unexplainable villain things that Robin really had no chance of finding out what they were about simply because he wasn’t a part of that organization, no matter how much he may speculate. But there were also some discrepancies. Little details that didn’t line up.

“Couldn’t really find anything but more . . .neliniște,” he murmured under his breath in Romanian, struggling to find a way to describe it. That sense of . . . something he couldn’t describe. The wrong that he couldn’t know or describe without knowing what it was. He cursed under his breath in his mother’s tongue. “Wrongness,” he tried again, though that word still tasted. . . off, wrong on his tongue. Off in the same way the thing he didn’t know felt like a stone in his stomach.

And then there was that mission. He’d found . . . maybe something out. He didn’t think it was the important thing, but maybe a thing that led up to that important something? And he couldn’t find it in any of the mission files anymore. How, he didn’t know, or maybe he did, now. He thought he just didn’t want to think about it anymore.

Santa Prisca. That was an important name. Bane wasn’t. Important. In this case, anyway. But he’d had clients for his venom. Important names, but not . . . not important for anything else. Because they had this sort of bland quality to the memory. Like it was only important to the process of discovering the important thing, but they weren’t important for anything else.

That was how he was figuring out his mix of memories, now. How the remnants, broken pieces of his mind tasted. Peeling back different layers that were all torn and mixed up now. He was having a bit of trouble keeping track of which was which. But everything was all so confusing, so rushed during that time. Though only for him. His family was great (were they? At the time Dick had thought they were, but then–). School was great. The team was great.

Right, team. Team. Santa Prisca. Venom. Names. Blake Inston. Anaise Pyg. Gordon Scops. Ivanko Pemba. Sorii Cloud.

“I figured something out– I, I don’t remember what,” he admitted, clutching at his hair. “Nothing big, at first, but later–” He couldn’t make himself look up.

He could remember the names because they weren’t important. But he couldn’t recall the connection he was sure had existed there. Because the names tasted bland by themselves, but put together, they tasted almost like that spicy poor man’s dish his mami had made him so long ago. He knew the ingredients; his mother had written them down in a small book that one of his mami’s circus friends had mailed Dick for his birthday a few years ago. But it was just the ingredients. She hadn’t written down very clearly what to do with them. And trying to remember the connection between the names was like tasting that dish in his memory, knowing the ingredients but not how they go together. And any time he tried to figure it out, figure out that recipe, it tasted . . . wrong. So wrong.

But at the time he’d figured out a connection. Or maybe that hadn’t come until later.

But if he thought about the names themselves, which were unimportant by themselves, he thought that he remembered realizing that those names had dealt with allies of the Light, danced around the outskirts of the Light’s dealings, but had avoided dealing with the Light itself.

It was odd, but not incriminating. The only thing that could possibly be even remotely considered evidence was the coincidence that all of the names followed some sort of common thread, one that Robin couldn’t even put his finger on, but that he still knew was there. That he knew he used to know. That he knew was the important part.

But he did know that those names were common. Not to the world, but to the something important. An organization? A person? Used a lot, not for important things, but used repeatedly for a variety of . . . deals, contracts. Contracts? Used for things that wouldn’t lead back to the important thing, but those different names were still all used by the same entity.

That. That was part of the recipe.

But not all of it, just a piece. But he’d found that. Maybe he could find the important part. Refind?

Those names were used for deals with the Light’s allies, but not with the Light itself until shortly after their defeat at the Watchtower. After that, the names popped up more commonly. And in deals with the Light itself. Even after their failure, which was a puzzling (troubling? Should it have been?) thought.

An ally? A competitor?

Someone who could keep up with the Light until the criminal group had shot themselves in the foot with their attack on the Watchtower. Which . . . wasn’t all that encouraging, honestly, if they not only considered themselves in the big leagues, but were also considered to be in the big leagues by the big leagues themselves.

Because the Light had taken extensive measures to prevent this new . . . someone, something from being discovered. Because even while being watched closely by the JL, by Batman, none of the heroes had noticed anything remotely wrong, which just meant that the Light had been devoting a lot of resources to keeping their new . . . something secret.

“I think I’d figured out that the Light had a new . . . союзник–ally, maybe. quel est le mot– frenemy? But I didn’t know.”

It had all just been speculation, at the time. Robin had known that Batman wouldn’t believe him, wouldn’t . . . not trust, because B did trust him, but something else that Robin couldn’t name that was a source of contention between them. Something . . . hidden. And maybe Robin wanted to hide something from Batman like he knew Bruce was hiding from him.

So he’d made up the excuse that Batman wouldn’t believe him so that he could hide something, prove that he could do to Bruce what B was doing to him. Prove that he could elevate himself to the same unequal footing that he’d always tried to convince himself hadn’t existed between the two. That was something Dickcould realize, now, with the passage of time. With perspective.

So he’d decided to keep an eye out, gather concrete evidence, first. Discretely test the waters of a couple of his theories. Or, really, theory. Because it was just one theory that might not be nothing. But it might be nothing.

“So I looked into it.”

-x-x-x-

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was busy.”

Dick was training Jason and was in school and getting to know Tim, and Robin was leading the team and helping the League and training Barbara. Well, Oracle. Robin was training Oracle. But he was training Barbara to be Oracle, so really he was still training Barbara. And he had to keep reminding himself to be Robin, not Dick or Richard. And Robin wasn’t Barbara’s closest friend. That was–

“Dick–” he began.

Lucky Robin was someone she thought knew everything, when he kept slipping up. It was easy to do that, with someone he’d shared the second half of childhood with. (First part of adulthood? He’d grown up so fast, hadn’t he? Why had B–) Because while Robin knew a lot of stuff, he also knew things about Barbara that only Dick Grayson knew. Again, he was lucky that Robin was on some sort of pedestal for her.

He also sort of hated it.

Because she was supposed to be a, a, a what? A peer? That’s what his team was, and he could sort of appreciate now that those first months when the team didn’t know that Robin and Robin the First Sidekick/Child Partner were the same person were sort of pleasant. Less stressful, to be honest, without them looking at him, to him. For answers. For advice. For inspiration.

“I just couldn’t tell you, okay? You know what–” He took a deep breath.

But that’s just what Barbara was doing. And he didn’t really want that. He wanted them to be equals in a different sense. Not like Batman and Robin, because they were equals without being peers. And not like the team, because they were peers without being equals.

“I couldn’t tell you, so I told someone else.”

He thought he wanted her to be something in-between.

That’s what it was. He wanted her to be Robin’s friend, too. Not just Dick Grayson’s.

It took him a while to realize that meant he needed to give her the same trust she was giving him.

So he’d asked her to help. Because Barbara was smart in a different way than Robin was, even if her hacking skills weren’t quite up to par with his own yet. They’d get there, though. She was nothing if not a quick learner.

He’d told her about the team, about the Light, gave her mission files (not even somewhat redacted except for aliases) so she’d know what he knew. Then he’d told her about the not-offness offness that he’d suspected had been going on for a while.

Called it training.

She agreed to help. It was a good first step.

“Barbara helped.”

-x-x-x-

“What else do you remember?”

Robin also thought something happened in August. Maybe multiple things, things that also ran together in a haze but at least he could partly remember the things that happened. He’d gone on the offence against the Light, though not as blatantly as the League was in keeping them from becoming too strong again.

He’d been on the offence on the outskirts of their operations, sending the team on missions to test his theory. He hadn’t found anything substantial at the time, but it was during August that he and the rest of the team had finally met a few of the Light’s new members.

“The Light was growing, again.”

They were trying to repair their ranks, it seemed. Recruited mercenaries, assassins. Killers. Almost like they were preparing for a war, Robin would have said if he didn’t know any better. Because he’d been keeping a close eye on their operations, their deals, and they were sort of . . . typical. No investments in any sort of heavy technology or bioweaponry. Or at least no investments in the like that were out of the ordinary for Lex Luthor.

They were just investing in . . . people. Dangerous, skilled people.

Dick remembered meeting Talia again during that time. Fighting her. He couldn’t remember if he’d won or not. Or if it was important if he had or not, or if she’d said something that was important.

Which was frustrating on an entirely new level, knowing that she had this sort of upper hand on him now. It wasn’t like he’d had the upper hand before, but now she definitely had something to lord over him.

He hated her.

“Talia.”

She hated him, too, though Robin had never really been able to pinpoint when, exactly, their mutual hatred had started. And it wasn’t even as deep of a hatred for him as it was for her, it was more surface-level for him. Like it was something he was expected to do, except he was the only one expecting it of himself. It was just a child’s continued hatred, maintained simply for the sake of proving a point, though Dick knew just how powerful a child’s hatred could be. From experience.

So maybe she’d been the one to hate him first, and he’d just retaliated. Though sometimes that woman could really get on his nerves like nobody’s business. But then again, it might have just been the concept of her and Batman’s on-again, off-again relationship that bothered him, and not actually the woman herself. He always did prefer Selina, especially since she would often take him on some of her outings when B was getting on his nerves. (She liked to get on his nerves too.)

He didn’t exactly know why Talia directed so much of her energy into hating a ten year old. Or maybe he was eleven. The early years sometimes blended together for him. But he thinks he was ten. Sometime early into the founding of the League, or maybe the process of founding it, he thought was when he first met her. But Robin thought that maybe it was because of her obsession with Batman.

B as the perfect specimen. Gross, but she and her father had always had this sort of weird obsession with B that Robin always seemed to get in the way of. Bruce tried to explain it to him, once, but Dick hadn’t really understood how Robin had gotten in the way of Batman’s value to them. He still didn’t, to be honest, and he didn’t care enough to ask again. Especially not with how things were between him and B lately.

Talia hadn’t always been involved with the Light, preferring to stay behind with the League and keep things running while her father was more hands-on with the whole world domination thing. So when she’d shown up, it had been a bit of a warning sign to Robin and the rest of the team that something was . . . wrong. And he knew that maybe Batman was beginning to think the same thing, though he had been a bit . . . pre-occupied at the time.

Something was going on there, he thought, but Dick still didn’t really want to find out, to be honest.

It could have been any number of things. Maybe Robin was just looking too deep into it.

He suspected that Batman thought it had more to do with the League of Assassins than the Light’s mysterious new partner. He thought that B didn’t know anything about the new partner at all.

And really, wasn’t that a surprise. That he’d picked up on something that Bruce hadn’t. Though it made sense, considering that B didn’t deal as much with the edges of the Light’s plans as Robin did, especially since he was able to organize the team’s missions mostly on his own, now, as opposed to when Kaldur was leader.

So maybe it wasn’t that, but Robin thought it was. It was just another bit of non-evidence evidence that he could add to the ever-growing list.

“Her joining seemed . . . not off, but odd, I guess. So I tried to figure out who else joined.”

After Talia’s appearance, Robin had taken a closer look at the Light’s membership, and had realized that there were a few discrepancies. The Brain, of course, was still in League captivity, though his seat at the table hadn’t quite been filled yet, unless that was Talia’s purpose. She hadn’t said anything (that Robin could remember, that is) about the matter, though, and she usually liked to flout stuff like that in Robin’s face. Since she hated him (which was sort of funny, and Robin enjoyed to hate her right back, anyways).

Also in August, Aquaman and Kaldur had discovered the identity of Ocean-Master to be none other than prince Orm. Evidently, that development had caused the Light to terminate the Atlantean villain’s position of leadership in their organization.

After Talia, when Robin was looking into the Light’s membership, he’d found strong evidence to suggest that he was replaced by a different Atlantean. Black Manta.

The Light had also recruited three other enforcers (and possibly Talia, if she hadn’t taken The Brain’s position) aside from Sportsmaster that Robin knew of, as well as a plethora of new operatives, mainly killers with a variety of skills in weapons and fighting techniques. Ra’s al Ghul also seemed to have taken somewhat of a step back with his involvement in the Light’s plans. It seemed most likely that Talia had stepped into his place to act as his hand in those matters, leaving The Brain’s position still open.

Since finding all of this out, the team had had several encounters with a variety of these new Light members, Robin going toe-to-toe with more than a few of them himself. But he was still no closer to figuring out who the Light’s new partner–frenemy?– was, only how far their reach extended.

Because for as much as the Light was receiving some form of aid from their new allies, they were also preparing for . . . or against . . . something.

“It was almost like they were building an army.”

Maybe it was some sort of war. Except the weapons used would be men, not metal.

-x-x-x-

“When did you know about–”

Something changed. And that’s where it got . . . fuzzy. In later years, Dick thinks that he finally understood how he described it. And maybe that’s why he was lenient. Pushable. Or maybe it was because it was him, and he could never stay mad at him for long. But remembering those moments, Dick thinks he gets it. Understood.

Because something had changed, he’d found evidence. Damning, concrete evidence. He remembered the Light slipping up, or maybe an enforcer. One of the ones that wasn’t Sportsmaster. He knows who it was, now, but he didn’t, then. And maybe it didn’t matter, even though he knows it does, now.

“I– don’t know,” he lied.

He’d said something. Something that he normally wouldn’t trust . . . but, there had been this small grain of truth to those mocking words.

Robin had led the team on a mission to infiltrate a facility on an island off the coast of Yemen that he’d suspected was connected to Ra’s League of Shadows. Assassins. Whatever they were calling themselves these days. He didn’t expect it to be a direct connection, but then, he didn’t want it to be. The organization that he was trying to track down was dancing around the outskirts of the Light’s plans, or lack thereof, so far. Associated, but not involved.

Which meant that Robin needed a look at the facilities and plans that weren’t directly connected to the Light’s strange new partner.

He’d wanted to get a close look at the inner workings at the machinations that were at the bottom of the Light’s list of priorities, the designs that they didn’t bother to cover up as closely as what they deemed were actually important.

No, they weren’t stupid, and they would still take precautions, but they wouldn’t be as careful, and they would hopefully leave behind some small hint that Robin could use to put a face to the greater scheme of things.

The League was busy trying to figure out the Light’s main plans, anyway, and were too busy to concern themselves with what the team was doing, as long as they weren’t getting themselves in trouble. Which they weren’t. Robin had plans for his plans, and it was arguably safer for them to infiltrate this poorly guarded, mostly unmanned facility on the outskirts of League territory than it was for them to hang out in Mount Justice, which was publicly known as a former League hideout.

“I planned a mission.”

At any rate, things had actually gone according to plan for the most part. And even when that plan had run off the rails when Conner had accidentally triggered an alarm, Robin had had a backup plan that they were able to follow. Things were going great, until they accidentally stumbled on one of the Light’s enforcers, who was there to facilitate some sort of deal.

“It went well.”

Unfortunately, Robin and the team had shown up too early to get a look at who the Light was making a deal with, so the mercenary-assassin man was able to warn the client to not show up. But while Robin was fighting with the mercenary, a hulking beast of a man with a penchant for sharp, pointy things, he’d said something.

Not anything obvious, or even remotely conclusive. It was more like . . . an inside joke that he wasn’t supposed to be able to get.

Robin had put up a good fight, though the man was able to get away when Kaldur and M’gann had finished off their set of mercenaries and rushed to his aid. But before he’d retreated, he’d taunted Robin about his talkative nature during their fight, referencing an old poem that Robin had heard before.

Something about a squirrel or some other type of small animal listening better by speaking less. It’d been hard to hear over the sound of screeching metal and the concussion he’d been sporting at the time, but Robin had gotten the gist of the message.

He couldn’t trace his exact route of thought after that, and his concussion hadn’t exactly helped, but Robin had found a new connection that had allowed him to string together all of the little bits of evidence he’d been trying to fit into the puzzle. The common thread connecting all of the names and the dealings and the small details.

“I think I found evidence, or connected the dots. Not all the way, but enough.”

After that, things got fuzzy. Blurred. Like watching one of those old black and white movies, but the film was irreparably messed up and jumping around, and you weren’t sure if the pieces of film you had seen were actually real or not.

Dick mostly remembered that time by the emotions he’d felt. Flashes that he was more or less able to track his memory by, but he’d just been so . . . mad. Angry. Bloody furious. It was like there was so much red running together that there was no room to focus on anything else except for the red. Nothing else surrounding that red mattered, just the anger.

It wasn’t often he got like that. But B had a way of bringing that sort of anger out of Dick, in a way that nobody else ever could. He knew where it hurt, how to make it hurt, and granted he didn’t ever try to use those pressure points against Dick, even in anger, but there was still an imbalance. An inequality in power between the two of them. It was hardly ever used, or at least used effectively, because Dick was too proud for Bruce to succeed in his times doing so. But it did succeed in making him angrier.

He tried not to be that angry. Ever. It didn’t mean that his attempts were successful, because he always seemed to be at least a little bit angry. At Gotham. At Zucco. At Bruce. At the circus. At himself. But he was very good at bottling it up, wrapping it up with layers of duck tape on an old cardboard christmas tree box. So although he was always a little bit angry, he didn’t often “get” mad.

But when he did, it was . . . cathartic, in a way. Harmful, yes. But he never regretted it. Until Jason, until the first time he’d realized that Jason had heard, had decided to keep listening. Had decided that Dick Grayson when he was angry was evidently a side of his brother he’d wanted to see, as much as Dick wanted him to never see him and Bruceact in that way.

Because Jason hadn’t come from a good home. And while he’d never mentioned his parents fighting in a manner like Dick and Bruce, Dick still wanted the manor to be a safe place for him. And it wouldn’t be one if Dick kept exploding at Bruce. After that, he’d tried ever harder not to get angry, and while it worked most of the time with that new, iron resolve he’d found, iron can be beaten and melted, and it was hard to stop himself when his kettle was about to boil over.

Dick talked to Clark about it, once. (Or, well, Robin did. But it was Dick who was doing the talking, because Robin didn’t get angry hardly ever.) That anger that always seemed to be inside of him, stronger after being bottled up than if it were let out consistently. Clark had almost understood, Dick thinks.

As Superman, Clark could only feel a sort of righteous anger. A Superman anger, one that was safe if it was used in the right way. Acceptable. But for as much as Clark was Superman, he was also still Uncle Clark, kind, easy-going Uncle Clark. The best man he knew. Dick couldn’t see Uncle Clark as dangerous, so it didn’t quite feel . . . the same.

Dick’s anger tended to break things. Hurt, like cut glass. Clark seemed to label his anger by the intent behind it, but labeled his anger by the aftermath it left in its wake, and it was never good, always destructure.

So maybe that’s why things were so blurry. He was so focused on his anger, on the aftermath, that he couldn’t see past the ruins of his own life to remember what else was going on around him. Tunnel-vision. Selfishness, maybe.

All he could remember was that he had found evidence, not what that evidence was. He’d gone to Bruce, or maybe it was Batman. He didn’t really remember that part, either. And Dick felt like it mattered, whether or not he’d approached Bruce or Batman as Dick or Robin, and maybe things would have turned out differently, if he hadn’t let parts of his life bleed over, if he hadn’t let parts of Bruce’s life bleed over.

(But there was just so much damn blood, getting everywhere, all over him, thick and sickly and– there was just so much– so much of it– where was– not again–)

Gotham tended to do that. Bleed. Bleed over, bleed out. It was like a disease, a sickness that clung and rotted, one that you couldn’t get rid of.

“I was going to go to you but–”

He’d found evidence. He’d gone to B. Jason had tried to stop him. He remembered that. Not from going to B, but to ask him about something.

Training. That’s what it was, wasn’t it. Yeah, he remembered that. He wanted to train to be a robin, and Dick had disagreed. Vehemently. But Bruce had overheard.

“We fought,” Dick remembered.

And of course B knew that Dick was making sure Jason would stay safe, and he’d taught Jason how to defend himself, as well. But they’d both had this silent agreement not to force the life on Jason (Dick didn’t want this life for Jason, at all, and wasn’t he–), that Dick knew for sure, but as soon as Bru– as soon as Batman knew that Jason wanted in, he’d thought that he had no right to take that opportunity from Jason.

No, they had every right. Jason wasn’t broken like they were, Jason still had hope of living a better, a normal life, recovering from his old one. He didn’t need to stitch himself back together with the broken pieces of Gotham like Dick and Bruce did. Jason just needed a family.

He needed to be a kid, not a soldier, a weapon in a war fought with men (not little boys, not little brothers) instead of metal.

Then they’d fought. Viciously, bloodily. But only with words. And not even over what Dick had wanted to talk to Bruce about in the first place. The two of them had fought. Bad. Maybe the three of them. He couldn’t remember if Jason had tried to jump in, but he remembered Alfred being there at some point, and then Jason not. That sort of eased the guilt a little bit, but there was this sort of . . . brokenness between Dick and Jason afterwards, and Dick didn’t know how to bridge the gap, how to fix it.

He couldn’t fix it.

And of course he and Bruce weren’t on talking terms after that, like all of their fights.

It was weird how much he remembered the moments but not the whole. He remembered fighting, but not the fight. Like pinpoint moments in that conversation–argument–fight– were so big, so loud that they expanded and covered up all of the actual details of it.

 

Or maybe it was just how Dick remembered it. Or didn’t remember it. Whatever. Because he remembered all of their other fights so, so well. Or did he? Weren’t they mostly the same thing, over, and over, and over, and over again?

Sometime in the week after, Dick had fled to Metropolis to figure out what he needed to do. To breathe, really. He needed the height, the distance from both the ground and from B.

He’d had a talk with Superman. Dick, not Robin. It was good.

He knew he was right, and being up high,

Flying,

That had helped.

He decided that he was better off figuring it out on his own. Or really, just without Batman’s help.

“I thought I could do it on my own.”

He couldn’t.

-x-x-x-

“And Kaldur?”

“That wasn’t planned.”

His first opportunity came in October, he thinks. When Kaldur approached him with a sort of proposition. Though that hadn’t been his intention at first. At first, he’d been… scared. Confused.

Maybe seeking advice, and shouldn’t that have been a scarier thought than it was, especially since Kaldur was an adult, at least in American terms.

It was a few days after their little game of truth or dare. Kaldur had left for Atlantis for a little bit, and had been in the city when the new Atlantean representative of the Light had attacked. It had been a bloody, harsh battle.

But Kaldur was a soldier used to war. They’d won. Lost lives, but still won, kept him from enacting whatever sort of plans he had in store for Prince Orm (he’d been put into custody the week prior). Robin hadn’t known the details; he’d been a bit preoccupied with the real information that Kaldur had brought back.

That Black Manta was his father.

They’d talked, and Robin hadn’t even considered the fact that as leader he should have been looking for how to use that bit of information to his advantage. But Kaldur used to be leader, as well, and while he hadn’t noticed the same patterns that Robin had, he’d noticed Robin’s distance from the team, the renewed efforts he’d put into his research recently.

He’d known there was something wrong, something that Robin was looking into, just not what. He’d asked, and Robin had answered. Because they’d just been talking.

“But it became the plan,” he remarked.

But then Kaldur had a proposal, and suddenly Robin had realized what he as leader needed to do. What he needed to do to figure out who the Light’s partner was.

Kaldur had a proposal, and Robin listened.

“It worked,” he tried to convince himself.

One week later, Aqualad defected from the team, and Kaldur went behind enemy lines.

-x-x-x-

“You had a responsib–”

“I know,” Dick cut back, anger gnawing at his edges again. But he couldn’t afford to lose himself this time. Not again.

The team fractured more than a little, and Dick could still remember the way little pieces of him had broken with it, knowing that he’d agreed to it. Knowing that he’d decided to keep it from the rest of the team.

“I'm our leader. I know that. I promise, I know that.”

Somehow it had felt like failsafe all over again. Like not telling the team about his suspicions about the supposed zeta beams, like dragging Wally down with him to his death just so he wouldn’t die alone.

He hated the secrets, but he had been so used to living in the dark that it was all too easy to step back into it.

“That’s exactly why I couldn’t tell them.”

But he couldn’t tell them, or it would jeopardize it. The mission, their safety. And, oh, how he’d hated himself for even thinking that, for prioritizing the mission again in such a Batman-like fashion, even as he was in the throes of another argument with Bruce about Jason and the Mission.

“Mission comes first, right?” he chuckled darkly.

But, also, it was a little bit different. He couldn’t tell them or else it would jeopardize Kaldur’s safety. If they didn’t act just right, as if they really, truly believed that Kaldur had changed, switched sides in the wake of a devastating discovery, then it would all fall apart. Kaldur would be thrown to the wolves, torn apart by the Light even as he attempted to infiltrate them.

He kept telling himself it didn’t make him like Batman, because Batman put the mission first so that the mission would succeed. Robin put the mission first so he wouldn’t get his team killed again.

“I don’t regret it,” he confided.

He still can’t make himself regret what he did. He knows that it was right, as much as it hurt. Hurt them, hurt himself.

It was a hard choice, but as leader he was called to make those hard choices. That was why he’d said yes, because he’d known what Kaldur hadn’t up until that point, when he’d pulled Kaldur into his investigation. That the Light had a partner. A someone or someones that they both feared and needed.

And the league had no idea who. Had no idea they even existed

“It was a good plan. A good opportunity.”

Dick hated himself for taking advantage of his friend’s situation like that, even if it were Kaldur who’d suggested it. If Robin could have done it himself, he would have. And he’d searched for an in, even briefly considered pretending to defect to Talia’s side, despite the fact that they hated each other.

“He wanted to go. Not more than me, but I couldn’t.”

Kaldur . . . he was in the perfect position, as much as Robin had hated to admit it. Black Manta had welcomed his son with open arms, and though a new member of the Light, he was in a good enough standing that Kaldur would be able to eventually gain access to some of the Light’s plans if he played his cards right.

“Why not?” he pressed, and didn’t that hurt. Wanting to send him away (again).

Because Jason. Because Tim. Because Alfred. Because Bruce.

And Robin had needed to stay back to stay in contact with Kaldur, guide him and direct from behind the scenes in a way that Kaldur simply wouldn’t be able to do as effectively. Not to mention the fact that there was no quick “in” for Robin as there was for Kaldur; crafting a new identity even to join the lower ranks of the Light would have taken several months, whereas Kaldur had been able to join his father in less than a week. He’d gained Manta’s trust in less than a month.

“I thought I was needed here.”

Robin had wondered, more than once, just how far Kaldur’s relationship with his newfound father went. He didn’t question his friend–his brother’s– loyalty, but he worried for Kaldur’s resolve. He would follow through, complete his task, earn his father’s trust, but Kaldur had such a kind soul. Open, welcoming. Trusting. He was wise and strong in his action and care, but betraying a father-figure who genuinely seemed to care for him, regardless of the fact that he was undoubtedly a villain?

That would hurt him. Leave an impact. Leave scars.

That was in October. It was December when–

Dick remembers an argument. No– that wasn’t quite the right–

There was a fight, a big one. Dick, Bruce. Jason. Over Jason. Even after Dick and Bruce had clashed over whether Jason should train to be a vigilante, after Dick had thought he’d managed to convince Bruce to keep his little brother out of that life, Bruce–B– Batman had still–

Dick had found out that B (was it Bruce or Batman who had done it? Dick still didn’t know, and maybe that’s part of why it had hurt so badly, because Dick had just begun to realize that B was letting the lines between Bruce and Batman blur a little) had been training Jason behind Dick’s back, while Robin was occupied with searching for the Light’s partner and dodging B’s scrutiny and avoiding the Light and their new associate and their new members from finding out that he was onto them and patching the team back together after Kaldur’s “defection” and helping Barbara and going to school and mathletes and gymnastics and being Richie and Robbie and Robin and Dick and Richard and managing Kaldur’s undercover work and sanity and–

Robin had just been so busy, and Dick’s little brother had slipped through the cracks. Sure, Dick had kept up with Jason’s defense training, and had even helped Tim a little bit here and there, but he’d definitely pulled back a little on the training after his argument with Bruce, not to mention he’d been so busy–

Busy, like that was a good enough excuse. But B had taken that opportunity to try and pull Jason into the vigilante life.

And Dick had been so– so mad. Furious. They’d fought, brutally, with words again. It was as bad as it had been after Two-Face, all those years ago, when Bruce had tried to fire Dick from being Robin. It hadn’t stuck, of course, Dick was too stubborn for that. Robin wasn’t just Batman’s sidekick, like Wally and Roy had been to Barry and Oliver, he was Batman’s partner, first, before that term ever started being used.

So of course B hadn’t been able to keep him off the field, and while that fight had been hard, heart-wrenching, this was . . . Dick had been more than disappointed, angry, he’d been betrayed. By his father. By his brother. Because he’d explained to Jason why. He had. And Jason had been mad, but he’d understood, until he didn’t. Until the kidnapping when Dick had seen the switch flip in his little brother’s brain and Dick realized he’d needed to go on the offensive to keep his Jaybird too busy with self-defense training to go to Bruce instead. Like he’d done anyway. Or rather, it sounded more like Bruce had gone to Jason, maybe.

Dick knows that the details mattered, but in his anger, he couldn’t remember how it had gone down, his memory washed in that same sort of furious red color that made it hard to see anything else.

“What happened next?”

B and Dick had fought, and then Dick had stormed off to Mount Justice, not even caring at that point that Jason had of course heard most if not all of that argument. (How many arguments had Jason heard? At least Tim and Selena didn’t know the worst of it. Or Alfred, Dick thought, surprisingly, though the old butler definitely knew that things were tense between the two. But it wasn’t any better that Jason knew, had listened in on their increasingly more frequent arguments more than once before.)

“The last mission. It was Kaldur’s best chance to prove his allegiance to the Light.”

He’d gotten to the cave. Dick remembers that. He remembers a message from Kaldur. The mission they’d been planning to solidify Kaldur’s new allegiance to his father by proving he’d severed his connections to his former team. An important step, one that they had anticipated not happening for another two weeks.

But after this, he would finally be able to tell the team, which was just about the only good thing about the timeline being pushed up.

“We were going to tell the team after that.”

Because the team’s reactions would be real (Dick was a trained performer, he would pass scrutiny no matter what) if they still thought Kaldur had changed sides, and their reactions would sell the whole bit. Convince the Light that Kaldur had truly joined them. And then after that, Robin could let the team know, and they’d be able to act well enough after that that there wouldn’t be too much questioning about it. Not if they reacted right during this mission.

But of course he’d needed to add one more thing to his already entirely too-full plate.

Rao, he’d been only fifteen. Why did he feel like he was pushing fifty?

They’d needed to leave immediately, with barely any time for Dick to catch his breath before Robin was needed to lead. He’d felt frayed at the edges, all angry and jagged, vulnerable.

Raw.

He thinks that’s why it happened. Why he made the mistake that would cause so much to–

It caused so much pain, hurt. Regret.

Regret, though he regretted none of his actions. They’d been necessary. More than anything, he regretted his own shortcomings.

Dick can’t even remember what the mission had been about, because the mission itself hadn’t even been that important, if he was being honest. Or at least, the team’s mission hadn’t. Kaldur’s mission was to earn the Light’s trust once and for all by “injuring” Robin, proving that he didn’t care for his team anymore. That he was fully and completely on the Light’s side.

Kaldur had been there, and Black Manta, a few of the Light’s other members, the Team. They’d been fighting.

Dick wishes that he could say that it had been the heat of the battle that had gotten to him, but if anything, that had allowed him to think even clearer. He doesn’t quite know yet if that was for better or worse.

No, he’d been distracted by the fight. By Bruce. By Jason. And he’d forgotten that Kaldur wasn’t supposed to be his ally, leaping at the Atlantean to push him out of the way of one of Artemis’s arrows, an arrow that Kaldur had forgotten was actually supposed to be aimed at him.

“But, well–”

He’d saved his friend, and they’d both paid the price.

They’d both looked at each other, and Robin had understood the price he’d needed to pay, then, but he thinks that Kaldur hadn’t known. He couldn’t have, of course, but Robin wishes that they had known, all those months ago. Maybe then things would have turned out differently.

“I planned for it, but I hadn’t– we didn’t plan it.”

Robin had come up with so many contingencies that he hadn’t thought he’d needed to use. He’d given Kaldur a special paralysis agent that he would be able to use against the Team to suspend all extraneous bodily functions for a short period of time, in case his father had ever ordered him to kill a team member.

Of course, Robin hadn’t expected it to be used on him, but he had come up with contingencies in case something similar had ever happened.

So when Robin had saved Kaldur, and everyone had stopped to watch, everyone had seen the former Aqualad kill Robin with the same water bearers they used to spar with before he kicked him off the edge of a short cliff.

Conner, blinded by grief, hadn’t heard his slow but still-beating heart. Artemis, blinded by disbelief, hadn’t seen the acceptance, the conflict on their faces, or the way that Robin hadn’t quite . . . died right. M’gann, blinded by anger, had torn apart Kaldur’s mind without paying attention to anything she might have found inside.

At least, that’s what Robin had heard had happened.

Later, he was told that twelve hours later, Batman learned that his son died. Twenty-two hours after that, Robin’s dead-man’s switch went off, and Oracle informed the team that Kaldur had been undercover since October. Forty-eight hours later, the team attempted to bring Kaldur back, but M’gann was instead kidnapped to restore their teammate’s mind. Twelve hours later, Kaldur asked where Robin was; no one knew.

Kaldur believed he killed his friend, and stayed undercover to finish the mission.

“I was supposed to come back.”

-x-x-x-

“You did,” Bruce insists, one hand settled on Dick’s shoulder. But when his son finally looks up, all Bruce can read is the pain riddled in the broken set of his posture.

I did this, something inside of Bruce whispers. Maybe the guilt, or maybe it came from the same place that Batman was born out of. The responsibility he shouldn’t have taken on when he was eight years old.

He shouldn’t have– and then he did it again–

Dick asks Bruce a question with his eyes, something unspoken and never actually said aloud They’ve always communicated in this way. They were partners. Close. Family, even though only in name for two more years, despite Bruce’s best efforts, though now he realizes that he probably should have asked Dick that question at another time, a better time.

But the question is something they both wonder.

(“Did I?”)

Chapter Text

Chapter Two:

December 30, 2012

It was dark when Conner went to bed, and darker still when he woke up. The bed felt unfamiliar, different from the one that he was used to falling asleep and waking up in back at Mount Justice, but it didn’t remind him of the tube that he first woke up in, so it was okay. It was warm, and the hand-quilted blankets draped around him were about the furthest thing he could get from the hell that was Cadmus. The bed itself was soft, worn, rickety. Used. Homey.

It wasn’t home, but it felt like it. He wondered if it was because of who he was. If DNA could stretch that far. Logically, he knew it wasn’t possible. But it was so confusing, sometimes. Conner often wondered which parts of him were Clark, which parts of him were Lex. Or if he was just as much his own person as a child was to his parents.

But their DNA wasn’t just close, not just hereditary or fifty/fifty from each parent like most children. He’d studied heredity and cloning and genetics so much that was all that ran through his head somedays. He knew more than enough to understand that he wasn’t their . . . child, or anything. He was their halves, meshed into one. Except it wasn’t even half and half like sharing, it was half and half as in, he stole fifty percent of everything from both of them. Or stole from Clark and gifted from Lex. Whatever.

He was two half-baked photocopies pressed into one picture frame, and it meant his brain was in this constant state of crowded and his skin was in a constant state of crawling and uncomfortable. He felt like such a fraud, all of the time, even if he’d only ever felt like himself.

A cheap knockoff of Superman and a . . . whatever he was of Lex. He tried to avoid thinking of that whenever possible.

But that was the thing, wasn’t it. When he’d first been . . . born, reborn. Whatever. When he’d first been found by the team, he knew that he was supposed to be another Superman. Hence the name Superboy. That was who they’d first seen in him, regardless of who he grew to mean to them in later time; there was always that legacy, that expectation looming over his head.

And he’d outgrown his anger over that for the most part, but it was always just so confusing. How much of Conner was Clark? And then when he’d found out about Lex, how much of Conner was Lex? And was there any part of Conner that was just Conner, or was he a weird sort of amalgamation of Clark and Lex, two mortal enemies and opposing ideologies, and was that why he was always so angry, pent-up, torn apart by a sort of internal war he didn’t understand? Because there was bound to be some sort of conflict when you pushed two opposites into the same teenage body.

Or was he just normal, and conflicted because he wasn’t supposed to be here, morally?

He’d talked with Clark about it. The cloning. The man– Kryptonian– obviously hadn’t been very open to the idea in the beginning, but he’d been worn down by Robin.

Robin. There was a thought. The one he’d been avoiding, if Conner was being honest, while he lied in a bed that wasn’t his.

It’d been almost two weeks since Robin. Since December twentieth. Since Conner heard his teammate’s heart stop beating. The change had been so drastic. Sudden. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard death, of course. But it’d sounded so– so different, this time. Because maybe this was the first time it had meant something.

One moment, there, strong, steady, beating, a small flicker before there was this sickly sluicing of Kaldur’s water-blades, and then the heart had just . . . stopped. Ceased. Went kaput, as Wally would say. Probably. He never knew with the speedster, especially now.

He wished he had x-ray vision, but he was glad that he didn’t have to see the way his internal organs would have begun to shut down, the blood in his veins pause in its usual flow. And then Robin had sunk to the ground, Kaldur’s foot pressing against the young boy’s chest before tipping him over the edge.

And Conner had been . . . not angry, maybe, not like M’gann. Her anger had been justified, her actions– not. Never. But he’d been devastated, blinded. His vision had flooded with blurred emotion, just like he’d get in those early days when he’d welcome the anger, just because it made him separate from Superman. Different, his own person. Even if in all the bad ways. (Was that Lex’s influence, or Conner’s?)

M’gann, though– she’d been angry, which was a puzzling thing to think about. Because usually it was Conner who was angry, and shouldn’t he have been? One of his former best friends had just killed the kid who was like a brother to him. And he hadn’t been angry, just . . . really, really sad. Devastated. Crippled inside. But M’gann had reacted in her anger, directing all of her hate toward one of their old friends.

Regardless of if she thought her actions were justified, she could never be in the right. She’d abused her power. Abused her friend. In her grief, yes, but it was still so, so wrong. And that hadn’t been the first time, either.

Conner had noticed, several times, the brush of M’gann’s mind, the way her thoughts would stretch out unconsciously from their mind link to interrogate a criminal or some other villain. And that hadn’t seemed . . . evil, but it hadn’t sat right with Conner, either.

It felt too much like what they did to him at Cadmus. But it had always seemed . . . maybe not accidental, but like she just didn’t understand how wrong that was. And she’d always respected Conner, so he’d tried to put it out of his mind.

But Kaldur . . . that was. That was so, just, wrong. Evil. Regardless of what he’d done, he was still Kaldur. Still someone they used to know, live with, love. He’d been a brother. And she’d torn him apart.

Conner couldn’t be with her, knowing that. Knowing that she was capable of that. It scared him. Not really of what she could do to him, because he still loved her enough to know that she wouldn’t (she wouldn’t), but of the fact that he could ever let himself grow comfortable around a M’gann who was growing too similar to the villains she hated. Queen Bee, Psimon.

They’d found out two days later that Robin and Kaldur had been gunning an entire undercover operation behind the team’s backs. (And hadn’t that hurt, the betrayal, the secrecy, but . . . logically, it had made sense, and he’d been angry, at first, that familiar red washing over his senses, but then again, they were supposed to have been told about the operation after that mission, and Conner knew he wasn’t exactly the best actor, so was it his fault, but he was just still so mad, but he couldn’t stay mad knowing that his friend had died.) Conner forgave them.

Kaldur was innocent.

But he’d still killed Robin, though, hadn’t he?

They’d gotten Kaldur back to his right mind two days later, and had been forced to tell the Atlantean that he’d killed his teammate. And Kaldur had been . . . broken, almost as broken as his mind had been. He’d been unable to offer an explanation from the disconnected bits of memory that M’gann was able to heal (and didn’t that just allow Conner another wave of rage to wash over him, the sheer disappointment he’d felt in his girlfriend, his best friend?).

He’d stayed undercover to try to find answers. He’d suggested that maybe it was a fake-out. Gave them a bit of false hope. They’d returned to the mission site a day later, but all they’d found was more false hope rummaging through the strange refuse of the battle and tracking the trail of blood that was Robin’s. They’d seen the depth of the cliff, the length of Robin’s fall after the villain had kicked him off the edge. He wouldn’t have survived.

Wally had still held out hope, a bit of that hero worship from his early days as Kid Flash keeping him going.

But Conner knew. He’d heard Robin’s heart slow to a stop. Jerk to a stop. Heard his organs stop moving, his blood stop flowing, the life drain from his eyes. Heard the fall, the snap of bones.

Conner knew.

-x-x-x-

The last thing Dick could clearly remember was the look in Kaldur’s eyes, a sort of regret that they’d both hoped it wouldn’t come to. It had, and it was Robin’s fault– he could remember that, as well. Easily, in fact. Everything else, not quite as easily.

He couldn’t force his eyes open, and he felt like he was drifting in Gotham Harbor. Cold, weightless, except everything felt heavy. His eyes, his head. His limbs were like anchors holding him down against a cold surface. The bottom of the harbor, maybe? But it didn’t feel quite as sandy or soft or sharp.

Where was he? He hated the not-knowing of it all, the uselessness, the helplessness. It had been so long since he’d felt like this, and it was . . . not scary, but– Dick honestly couldn’t tell. It had been so long since he recognized what real fear felt like; he was so used to judging based on Scarecrow’s fear toxin. Though he was partially immune to that, as well, by now.

Was he breathing? He thought he was, but he might not have been. He might have been dying, or possibly still in a weird state of almost-dying. Oh, that was right. He had been almost-dead, there, for a bit. Maybe that’s what it was, he was still recovering from that.

Dick drifted, for a little bit longer. Or maybe longer than a little bit. There wasn’t a good way to track time when it was just Dick in his own head, when he couldn’t keep track of his breathing or the usual restlessness of his limbs.

It was some time longer than that when feeling started to trickle back into his limbs, bringing with it a familiar sort of prickling of cramped limbs– how long had he been out? He was probably in the medical wing of Mount Justice or something, or more likely the Batcave, which meant it was surprising that someone hadn’t come and checked on him yet. Actually, Dick could vaguely register the fact that he was still in uniform and mask, so he was actually probably at Mount Justice. Though maybe that was another effect of the paralytic drug he’d given Kaldur those months ago. He didn’t think it was, but it was possible it was something he’d forgotten since it was just one of many contingencies, especially since it was one he’d never thought they would use.

Where was Bruce at? He was probably going through Dick’s–Robin’s– files on the undercover op he’d been running with Kaldur. There was no way he didn’t suspect something after Robin had not died after, well, dying, and of course he would look into it, especially after confirming that Dick was alright. Which he obviously was. Probably.

His limbs did feel really weird, almost like he’d been drugged rather than the semi-poison he’d actually been administered.

Dick suppressed the groan in the base of his throat as he peeled open his eyes, the dim light directly above him sending dark spots skittering across his vision. He tried to roll his head to the side, but found that he still couldn’t. He tried to focus on blinking. Which took a lot of effort, to be honest.

A lot. Which– no, that wouldn’t make sense.

He’d probably just been given a couple of drugs which were making him drowsier than usual, probably to accelerate his healing process. He wondered what had happened to him after he’d passed out. His body did hurt, like, a lot now that he was thinking about it. Which wasn’t all that weird, since he was used to being in pain. Came with being a child vigilante and all that.

His joints sort of felt . . . pointy. Was that a word to describe it? He was being forced to trudge through like five or six different languages in his head at the moment, which was not a fun experience when he was still failing to completely open his eyes.

Oh– wait, there it was. Dick could see the ceiling now. It was gray, but the texture was sort of . . . off. Sort of shiny. Maybe Bruce had updated the medcave since the last time he’d been in there . . . last week. Two days ago. Huh.

The Watchtower, then? He hadn’t been in the Watchtower’s medbay in several months. That was probably it, though the light was a bit too dim for any sort of medical facility he’d ever been in.

Robin’s brow furrowed, and some of the old adrenaline from the mission started to pump through his veins again. He no longer felt like he was floating, only weighed down by something incredibly heavy.

Or restrained, more like.

Fiică de cățea, he cursed.

He tried to move his arms, and while his limbs still felt heavy, he was lucid enough to realize that he wasn’t stopped by his own lack of strength, but rather straps of cold metal. He tried to rotate his wrists through the straps, but he soon recognized the sound of creaking hinges as the door to the room swung open.

Robin froze, not even daring to return to his original position, just shut his eyes and forced his body to sink back into the hard surface beneath him. With luck, whoever it was would assume he’d simply moved around in his drugged stupor before falling back into unconsciousness, seeing as such a thing was not entirely unusual with most drugs.

And he had been drugged; the effects of the heart-slowing poison would have worn off ages before anyone would have been able to transfer his body anywhere. He’d probably been drugged several times, to be honest, seeing as B had made sure that he’d be able to resist most types of poisons and drugs and other such things. It came in handy when he was kidnapped as Robin just as much as he was as Dick Grayson, or, rather, Richie Wayne. Richard Grayson-Wayne? (The name wasn’t official, he felt the need to add, only what the public called him. He would always be Dick Grayson.)

“Nice try, kid,” a roughly familiar voice said, the voice quiet but not unassuming. It was strong, sturdy, sort of gravelly. Older man, roughly mid-forties. American accent, but a man who’d spent time abroad, with the vague European-ness of his tone. And if Robin had to guess, probably ex- or current military of some sort, just going off his choice of words.

Robin didn’t bother to keep his eyes closed, only attempted to crane his head to see who it was, but he was just out of his line of sight.

“I have to say,” the man began, before Robin could attempt any sort of an admittedly doomed interrogation, seeing as he would have been starting it strapped to a table, “You put up a good fight the first time we met.”

Robin furrowed his brow. That bit of a clue ruled out innocent bystander and recently encountered foe, and he obviously wasn’t some run-of-the-mill crook that happened to get lucky. They’d met before, and obviously on not good terms. Yeah, definitely not a friendly, he thought, discreetly testing the strap on the other side of his body again, out of the man’s line of sight.

“What do you want?” Robin asked, his voice a bit hoarse but still strong in its defiance. “Who–”

“I expected that from someone trained by the Bat, of course,” he continued as if Robin hadn’t heard anything. Three heavy but quiet footsteps sounded against the floor as he inched closer, though he was still standing just past where Robin’s field of vision ended. Some sort of material– leatherlike, perhaps armor– rubbed against itself. “What I didn’t expect–” He paused, presumably in contemplation. “Was for you to impress me,” he continued at last.

That– Robin didn’t know if that was good or bad, yet, honestly. He didn’t even know if this person was sane. Probably not, if he’d passed through Gotham at any point in time, but his accent was the sort of American that was almost impossible to pinpoint. Very average. Manufactured to sound bland, forgettable, unplaceable, though that had no sort of impact on the steel of intention that cut through every word he spoke.

“Imagine my surprise when what was supposed to be a routine contract–” (hired mercenary, Robin guessed, or assassin. . . probably affiliated with the Light, then, considering his most recent battle was against them. Not Atlantean, maybe League of Shadows?) “–was interrupted by a team of brats. Largely incompetent, except for one. I’ve no doubt we would have succeeded if their leader wasn’t so . . . impressive,” he said, his pitch dropping on the last word.

Okay, definitely bad, Robin decided. Impressive definitely meant bad news for him. Maybe some sort of revenge? Though he was going through a lot of effort when he couldn’t just slit Robin’s throat. The amount of drugs needed to keep him under would have been expensive with how resistant he was to most strands of any type of hallucinogen, knock-out, kidnapping, torture, you name it, type of drug. So Robin must have really mucked up some sort of important operation (maybe for advancement?) for him to go to these sorts of lengths.

Unless the man was just some sort of weirdo who had some sort of adrenaline high for torture or something. Those were always freaky and uncomfortable to deal with.

“Again, whatd’ya want?” Robin asked. He was reminded that Robin’s own vaguely Gotham accent underneath his very-generally-American tone was just as manufactured as the man’s own.

“An empire,” the man said, and then there was a whisper of motion that Robin assumed was some sort of shrug or other arrogant gesture. “Early retirement,” he said, possibly joking, “Though I do enjoy what I do,” he mused. And like hell was Robin going to let this man have the space of mind to ponder retirement when he was still strapped to a metal table. He could do that after he finished kicking his ass.

“And what’s that?” He pressed, though he’d already come to a decision about what sort of profession this man likely worked. His accent was too cleanly American to be League, and Robin could smell one of the Al Ghul’s minions from a mile away, especially one of Talia’s.

No, he was some sort of mercenary. Likely hired by the Light when they’d boosted their ranks recently. Robin’s goal was to keep the man talking while he silently fished one of the lockpicks hidden in the reams of his right sleeve, away from the man’s light of sight, and kept the rest of his muscles perfectly still, though not relaxed. That would be too obvious, considering his situation. He controlled his breathing and kept his eyes strained in the man’s direction.

“I’m a mercenary, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed.” He had.

“And you work for the Light.” Robin stated confidently, rather than asked, in an attempt to get some information he hadn’t been able to confirm completely past a reasonable assumption. Because if he asked, that would be giving up the information he didn’t already know for certain.

“With,” the man corrected, and stepped a bit closer. Arrogant, then, Robin decided. The man was only a few feet from him now, and Robin was half a second from unclipping the strap at his right hand. He’d already outlined his next steps in his head while listening to the Merc prattle on.

Unlock right wrist. Pop left thumb out of place, slide hand out. Dodge blow, grab red laser pen from belt. Free ankles, roll away. Fight. Hopefully, probably win.

“Mmhmm,” Robin agreed sarcastically, if only to ruffle the man’s feathers and distract him from the slightest click that he effectively muffled with the flesh of his arm. “I’m sure that’s what they’ve told you,” he placated.

“You know,” the man said, taking another tantalizingly close step toward Robin, ignoring the jab. “You were getting decently close. Kept it up, and you might’ve had them.”

Them.

He knew.

The man knew about the ally. Frenemy, or whatever.

Robin didn’t try to move out of the now-unlocked handcuff, the bait of information luring him from a more surefire path to freedom. If the man continued to move any closer before Robin decided to make his move, it would be much harder to free his ankles. He’d have to strike first, and at a disadvantage, too.

But—

But.

Robin didn’t move a muscle.

The man continued; they both knew that the conversation had taken a turn. That he’d captured Robin’s attention, for real this time. Because evidently they both knew that his thoughts had only been toward escape up until that point. “You grabbed my attention in battle,” he then said, “But you kept it by keeping up. Something not even the Bat was able to do.”

Hah! Dick thought bitterly toward Bruce. Maybe if the man hadn’t been so busy training Jason to be– okay, decidedly not going into that when he needed to keep his cool, Robin decided.

“You were always . . . there. At the edges, where it mattered. Again, impressive. And you kept up with me in a fight. Not many can do that.” Okay . . . back to Robin. What about the Light’s ally?

“But you’re still . . . raw. Trained, but not honed as sharply as you could be. You had the potential to be great, you know.”

Had. Not have.

Back to the death threats, apparently. And Robin didn’t think he was going to get much of anything from the man while he thought he had the upper hand, since Robin was still (mostly) restrained to the table. It was time to turn the tables.

Quick as a flash (heh. Dick thought of Wally.), he snapped both wrists from their restraints, not even wincing as his bones and flesh contorted around the metal. He slipped the craftily hidden laser pen from his belt with practiced ease (seriously, why let him keep his utility belt even after removing his weapons? Was the man an idiot, or just that arrogant? Robin had been doing this whole vigilante thing for seven, almost eight, years. He knew a thing or two, by that point.) and leaned to cut a sharp line through his left ankle restraint just as a slice of metal slammed past where his head had just been.

The man reacted quicker than he’d anticipated, and then quickly turned his miss into a smooth arc to come back around for Robin.

He rolled off the table, left wrist still disjointed and right ankle at a weird angle.

It was still strapped to the table. He winced at the painful twist of his muscle (mentally noted to himself to be careful not to move too quickly on the tender joint or else he might sprain it) and made to cut through that restraint as well. The laser burned off the outside of his boot in his haste as another arc of the weapon swung his way.

And by weapon he meant a freaking sword.

Robin dropped behind the table completely, his head ducked below it as he rolled again. He slipped out a birdarang (because at least the man had had enough sense to take away his staff and the more obviously hidden weapons) from one of the more hidden folds of his uniform and gripped it securely in his right hand. He quickly snapped his left thumb back into place.

“Impressive,” the mercenary hissed from out of sight. (Robin was starting to get annoyed at the man’s incessant use of that word.)

Robin wished he’d at least gotten more than a flash of black as to a clue who the man was, but he’d only barely managed to roll around the base of the table before the mercenary had easily vaulted over the table to where he’d just been.

Robin immediately started for the door, skidding slightly in his haste as he scrambled upright.

But a heavily muscled and sturdily armored body immediately slammed into his back. Robin’s face smashed against the ground, the side of his head catching the concrete floor and flooding his vision with a dizzy blackness. He could still feel that the flood of drugs had not-quite completely drained from his system, which didn’t make things any better for him.

The mercenary’s knee dug painfully into his back, and his arm was twisted at what should have probably been an abnormal angle but was actually somewhat normal for him. It still hurt like hell, though, considering that he didn’t feel all that flexible after his muscles being shot for the past who knew how long because of the drugs and the paralytic poison.

Also his head. Did he mention that? His head hurt a lot.

“Impressive,” the man repeated as Robin’s vision began to clear. He took that as a chance to try to see who the man was, craning his head back as far as he could. The mercenary leaned over his shoulder until a two-toned mask was right in Robin’s face.

“But you will be much, much better,” Deathstroke promised.

Chapter Text

December 31, 2012

M’gann felt guilt. Every day. She didn’t feel guilty, not as guilty as she should, as she knew Conner wanted her to be. Because in her heart she knew she would still do it again, knowing what she’d known in that moment, no matter what details had come to light later.

But she did feel guilt. The pain, though not the emotion.

She felt guilt when she wandered the halls of Mount Justice and didn’t hear the echoes of her friends laughing on a day she knew they would have spent together. The family she’d found on Earth. When she slept alone in her bed, when she thought of how Conner had reacted.

And he wasn’t . . . wrong, as much as it pained her to admit it. As much as the moment, those feelings, her actions had felt so horribly right to her in the moment. But he also couldn’t quite understand.

She was a martian. A white martian.

And it wasn’t an excuse, not really. It might would be better if it was, she thought. Because that would mean she knew she’d done wrong and was willing to change.

But she wasn’t.

And that was the crux of it.

It was who she was, and Conner had never seemed to mind before. That’s a bit of why it hurt so much, him leaving her. Because she thought he’d accepted her for who she was. He hadn’t minded her true form, even if it wasn’t something she felt comfortable wearing anymore. It felt more like an ill-fitting coat than anything else, now. But it was that he couldn’t accept . . . her, anymore. The way the mind came so easily to her, felt so comfortable to live in; it was her people’s language, something she’d known for far longer than she’d known earth’s ways. He used to accept that, despite his initial misgivings, but now. . .

It hurt. A lot.

Her people back on mars hadn’t accepted her, either.

They’d taunted. Bullied. Hurt. Her.

Conner had hurt her. Hurt her a lot.

Was it deserved? She hadn’t deserved what they’d done to her, either, just because they’d feared what she could never do to them, out of fear they’d do it to her. But did that mean that if she deserved what came from Conner (karma? She’d heard about that a couple of times. Was that what this was?), she deserved what came from them? Her supposedly real family, by blood?

Or was she reading too much into things? Bringing up old hurts to defend herself against new hurts. Defend herself from the consequences of her actions, of acting how she wanted because of who she was and how she came to be.

Where did the right end and the wrong begin? The victim and the victimizer.

She thought she’d been the victim, hurt by the grief that Kaldur had caused her.

But then she’d hurt him right back. And she knew that was wrong. But it wasn’t . . . revenge. It was lashing out to hurt him because she had been hurt, all over again, and she hadn’t been able to do that back on Mars, but it was safer to do that on Earth, she thought.

She’d thought wrong. It wasn’t safe to be herself on earth. To reach out and make Kaldur feel the same hurt she had.

That was what she had intended, at first. Make him see how he’d hurt them, understand his betrayal so he’d want to come back to them and apologize, just so she could turn him away in her bitterness and feel . . . what?

Vindicated? A sort of sick satisfaction left over from her fantasies of punishing the green martians who had ostracized her?

When did the victim become the victimizer? Maybe Conner was right, and she was wrong. Not just in the wrong, but who she was.

Maybe she was too hurt to be a hero.

But . . . that was who she was. And everyone had always been told it didn’t matter who you were. Anyone could be a hero. Like in the movies, right?

So why couldn’t they just like who she was, and let her stay that way?

She remembered when she first tried to reach out to her teammates’ minds. She’d wanted them to feel familiar to her, in a way that the other martians had never let her get close enough.

They’d recoiled. Scared, terrified out of their minds. She sort of vaguely maybe understood, now. That fear of intimacy, of being seen, like she’d been afraid of being seen as a white martian. But then they’d seen her, and they hadn’t judged. So why couldn’t they have trusted her (continued to trust her) to not judge them in the same way?

But she could never make herself understand why humans were afraid of being known, when it seemed like that would solve all of their problems. But they only showed little bits of themselves to different bits of other peoples’ selves, making themselves over a little bit different each time for every different person they met. It was all so confusing, keeping track of the changes in humans’ minds as they flip-flopped back and forth between their different personalities depending on who they were with or who they wanted to be that day.

It was much easier as a martian, recognizing your own mind and the minds of other martians’, orderly and set-straight, one for one person, only bodies changing and not brains.

She could still remember how Robin’s mind felt. Robin, not Robbie. Robbie was . . . M’gann didn’t know how to explain it. Robin was who she knew, and Robbie was still familiar, for all that he was still Robin. But they were also two separate, whole people. Completely. There was a clinical divide between the two personalities that had confused her.

They both . . . felt the same, behind the screen, but there was just that. A screen. Then the screen would change, like a film over a projector, except she was so busy watching the movie she forgot there was a person operating the machinery.

Regardless of the larger divide between Robin and her than with M’gann and the others, the way he’d always been so, so guarded, even during mental links, his emotions less likely to bleed over than the others (oh, but those few times she had felt them? A breath of clear-cut, fresh air, the purity of wind itself burning her lungs and the joy, the fuzzy excitement of flight. She knew what it felt like to be a robin, in that moment, in a way she hadn’t understood all that time ago when they’d been sitting around the campfire. Or that wisp of smokey anger, fierce and furious and red-hot when Robin’s face had betrayed nothing.), M’gann still missed him. Missed his mind. The change that came with him.

She missed Kaldur, too. The Kaldur she used to know and the broken husk he had become, more fragmented now than he had been when she’d entered his mind.

And wasn’t that a puzzle. She still hated him. She could be honest about that. But there was this depth of eternal sadness that welled up inside of her when she thought about how intensely she hated him. For breaking her family. For breaking Robin. For breaking what she had with Conner.

(No, that last part was her, wasn’t it?)

And she’d still had to fix him. Even after what he’d done. And while she hadn’t been able to find all of the facts in his mind, she could sense the emotions of every forgotten moment clear as day. The others couldn’t understand.

He hadn’t felt any regret when he’d shoved his blades into his younger brother’s heart (and didn’t that make it hurt worse, to see that Kaldur had still considered Robin his brother even as he killed him?).

And that made M’gann hate him.

She still fixed him, even if it was more or less in hopes of mending her relationship with Conner. She couldn’t find the good in letting that traitor walk around. But Conner . . . did.

He was so good.

He used to be so good to her, too.

But fixing Kaldur couldn’t fix what had broken between them.

Conner had called it trust, the thing that had been broken. But she didn’t think it was that. He wouldn’t still be on a team with her if he couldn’t trust her.

She thought it was because he’d finally realized what she was. A monster. And he’d decided that he was better off not loving the monster that he’d always sworn wasn’t her.

She felt so . . . empty. Consumed by guilt, but not guilty. Lonely, wandering the halls that were just as lonely as she was. It used to feel like home.

She’d found a home on Earth, with these people who had left her. (Robin, in death; Kaldur, in betrayal; Conner, in fear; Zatanna, in running; Artemis, in want; Wally, in desperate hope.) The people she missed.

And now it was just like Mars all over again.

-x-x-x-

Robin didn’t know how much time had passed. Didn’t know how long the actual kidnapping had lasted, or how long he had waited after he woke up. It was easier to pass the time that way, when all you had to do was wait for time to pass you by. Dick used to be terrified of that. Letting time get ahead of him, back when he’d been a child and terrified that it had been chasing him down to kill him before he could drag Zucco down to hell with him.

So Dick had let time pass him by for those first couple of . . . hours, days? Weeks. He knew he’d held out a long time. Locked in a little black box with only a bucket. No light, no bed. Just box. Then the door would open and a bright light would tear into his sensitized eyes, and he’d be trapped again with nothing but his own fidgety, trembling self, his limbs afire and burning like dry ice, something in his skin that clawed to get out.

He remembered boredom as a child. In those first days at the manor, on the stakeout after as Robin. Waiting in line with Bruce. It had been hell, at the time. Or close to it. Purgatory.

Dick was wrong. This was hell. It was fire in his bones, burning his blood to ashes. It was wanting to move but being cramped and tight. It was wanting to hear his mother’s singing voice, his father’s laugh, Bruce’s chuckle, Jason’s curses, Alfred’s tut-tuts, Tim’s small, aggravated huffs, but only getting box, quiet. Silence. Agonizing, terrible silen– It was an urge to fly but being chained to the ground. Dick had wanted to tear his nails from his fingers just in the hope of burning them as kindling to see anything other than the darkness that was too close around him.

But he’d lasted. At some point, hours of hungry and then not-hungry after being hungry for so long later, Deathstroke (and that was his name, Robin remembered, and even remembered their fight, something that had seemed so inconsequential at the time. Just another baddie. Not like he was the greatest mercenary in the world, or something.) had come to fetch him, drag him into the welcome-unwelcome light and over to a bin of water. Several times over, he would drag Robin out for different reasons.

Waterboarding was a reason. At least he knew how to handle that. It was far better than the box, though he was thankful Deathstroke hadn’t seemed to catch on to how much he hated the box. The water was almost refreshing in the way that it drowned him and drowned his senses. Like a restart button.

Drowning him didn’t work, unfortunately, so it was back to the box. Robin thought it was because Deathstroke didn’t quite know what to do with him. How to break him. Which– fine, not fine. He didn’t quite know. Because time, not time.

Deathstroke had it in his head that Robin would somehow make the perfect apprentice. A successor to the empire he had been building for himself. Well, Robin had already filled the role of mentor and somewhat-sorta-father-figure in his life; he didn’t need another crazy, fashion-challenged fighter to fill that role. It was already taken by one bat-dressed man.

Saying it like that made it seem a lot less horrifying than it actually was. Because he didn’t seem to be giving up. Deathstroke didn’t seem to like the idea of admitting defeat, which apparently included leaving him the hell alone and letting Robin get on with his life.

He wanted Robin. Kept calling him impressive. There was this weird mixture of insult and pain and compliment and respite (but never rest) that kept him constantly on edge, always tense. He would call Robin impressive and then slice off the tip of his ear. Congratulate him on holding out and then shove his head under water. Applaud his persistence and then curse him when he held out.

It was like the longer Robin held out, the more Deathstroke wanted him.

And all the while, he whispered promises of an empire, of greatness, of punishment and death.

It was a sick game. It made him sick. Deathstroke was a sick man.

Because Robin would lose either way.

Because he couldn’t give in, but he was making it worse, making Deathstroke more desperate to have him the longer he held out and proved he was “worthy” and it was so sick sick sick, sick sick, sick. He hated it. Hated him. Hated Deathstroke. More than Talia, even.

He avoided causing any permanent damage, at first. Tried to break Robin’s mind, first. And the only consolation in that was that he wanted Robin, not Dick; he was unbothered by whoever was under Robin’s mask, had it in his weird little mercenary brain that disrespecting the mask wouldn’t earn him any brownie points in the future, that he wanted Robin giving up his identity to be the final test of submission (get a life).

Well, Dick had asked. He almost wished he hadn’t. But at least he knew his identity was intact, and it wasn’t like Deathstroke would be able to get any answers from Robin’s blood, thanks to Bruce documenting Dick Grayson and his family’s blood and DNA entirely differently in all databases except for his own.

It meant that he wouldn’t be able to get to Dick’s family.

But it was a tense sort of almost-trust that he’d been forced to place on Deathstroke. To trust that he was as sick as he seemed, that it was all actually as much of a challenge (not game, that was Gotham Rogue territory) as he said it was, and not a twisted method of reverse psychology or something.

Dick also avoided eating anything that was offered to him. Because drugs and poison. He was pretty sure it was somehow already in his system, but he couldn’t figure out if that was just the box or not.

He vaguely remembered a chapter on that in a psychology book about Stockholm syndrome and Robin had deemed it best to avoid confronting some sort of survival dependency problem for as long as possible. Or at least until Batman came to save him.

The desensitization came first. The extreme sensitization interspersed between that. (Oh yeah, he’d almost forgotten about that. The long periods of absolute nothingness before being assaulted with sound and light and texture before box again. Never being allowed to sleep for more than a few minutes.) Which shouldn’t have been as bad as it was, but he hadn’t known how much time had passed him by. It had screwed with his head more than it should have.

Batman would have been so disappointed.

But he’d held out until the drowning, which was a cake walk after box. He’d even managed to get on Deathstroke’s nerves a couple of times with a few well-aimed quips before the mercenary attempted to drown him again.

Then there was the shivering in the box again, but the sort of forced movement had almost sort of helped with that. Because although he couldn’t move around in box, the shivering was doing all of the moving for him. Economical.

After some amount of time, Deathstroke had turned to more physical means. Nothing . . . too permanent. Because Robin wouldn’t be as valuable to him if he was recovering. Because training.

He would bring Robin out of the box or room or whatever that hellhole was and beat him. Except that Robin had to fight back, so he couldn’t even have a choice in whether or not to be complacent to his own murder. He would’ve at least liked a choice. But no, he was forced into the humiliation of not even being able to defend himself, of barely being able to stand but still forced to hold a weapon that felt so wrong and comfortable in his hands, remember easier times with Bruce but have to fight to survive when all he wanted was to–

It hurt, a lot. Deathstroke was good at pain.

He didn’t know how long those times lasted, either. He remembered biting down on wood a lot. A fever, at one point. Burning. Cold. Sharp. Hot. Screaming.

But he hadn’t given in. That was the important part, not what happened in between. Right?

(One day, he woke up with a new scar that he knew wouldn’t go away, no matter how he clawed at the skin of his shoulder, the puckered flesh in the shape of an s. He’d felt dirty, claimed in a way he’d never wanted to be claimed, and it would never leave it was on him forever and wasn’t his body his own whatever happened to and where was Batman? Where was Bruce in all this? When was he coming and why hadn’t he come already and God he just wanted to gnaw his own shoulder off with his teeth he felt so disgusting and–)

Right. The in between didn’t matter. He was Robin–Dick. Robin. He was Robin. And Robin was strong. He was light. He was hope. He was not whatever Deathstroke wanted to turn him into. He couldn’t taint his parents’ legacy like that.

Time passed. A lot of time, he knew that. Box, then out of box, then box again. At some point Deathstroke grew tired of not leaving scars or causing permanent damage. Twisted his knee out of place, broke two of his fingers, fractured his left arm. Did some other things, too. Time passed. There were no breaks. Except his bones.

A lot of time had passed. He knew that, but not how much time was a lot, at this point. Enough for Deathstroke to grow tired of him and leave him in that damn box again.

The next time he was pulled out of the box, though, the man looked smug. Too smug.

And Robin knew. Knew that he’d lost something, though he hadn’t known what. His first thought had been for his identity, his family put in jeopardy because of the barest amount of trust he’d put into the consistency of what Robin couldn’t understand about the man. (What was scary was that the man wasn’t even actually insane, not even a little bit, not even at all. He just liked doing what he did.)

“I win,” Deathstroke told him, hands clasped behind his back in a sort of pseudo-military stance after he’d thrown Robin to the floor. No chains.

Big mistake.

He’d learned several times over by now that he couldn’t take Deathstroke in a fight. That the first time had been a fluke, or maybe a test. (A creepy thought, to know that Deathstroke had kept his eyes on Robin for so long.) He certainly couldn’t win a fight with the greatest mercenary in the world (Evidently. The name Deathstroke had always been a rumor, a name in one of Bruce’s files without a face or alias to attach to it, so he had only learned the bare minimum facts. Mercenary. Rich. Had an empire. Basically what the man had already told Robin. Except he was apparently also considering retirement. Go figure.) in the state that he was in.

But surely Deathstroke had some sort of technology somewhere around here. If he could just get away from him long enough to find some sort of control room, or computer, laptop. Phone, whatever. He could get a message out to Bruce or the League or–

Wait. I win?

Deathstroke’s words finally clicked in Robin’s tired mind. He huffed. “As if, asshole.” He rolled the exhaustion from his neck as he lolled his head upwards to stare the mercenary defiantly in the eye. “I’m still standing.” He flicked his eyes to where he was sitting on the ground. Sue him, he was tired. He’d been tortured for . . . however long it had been. He didn’t feel too much older, though, just a little closer to being dead. The usual. “Figuratively. But I think that means I win,” he argued, if only for the sake of arguing. His throat felt sore. Well, his entire body felt sore. But that included his throat. He was just trying to ignore the state of the rest of him.

Deathstroke had stripped him of the rest of his tools, though thankfully not his uniform or mask. He did stink, though. He wondered if that was the repellent or if it was just the mercenary’s perverted idea of ultimate victory that kept him from discovering Robin’s identity. Though technically he still wore his disguise, seeing as it was waterproof. It was definitely starting to come off, however, and he just sort of hoped that Deathstroke either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care.

Wait– Robin was an idiot.

He’d definitely been here at least a–

Черт, he cursed. He’d been here a week, at least, if his Robin get-up was starting to peel off.

That didn’t bade well. Most kidnapping cases in Gotham were solved within the first three days, otherwise you could probably consider them dead. He didn’t quite know what the projected timeline for vigilante kidnapping was, though he suspected that more than a week passing wasn’t exactly a good sign for him.

His team would come. The League would come. Batman would come.

Somebody would come for him.

If he didn’t escape first, that is. He’d already made four attempts, each one ending badly for him. His side still hurt from where Deathstroke had–

“This is your last chance to accept. Be my apprentice, run my empire–”

“Yeah, no thanks,” Robin interrupted, the words falling from his mouth before he could even register what he was saying.

The mercenary kicked a steel-toe boot expertly into his head. Robin saw it coming, and only barely dodged to make the blow a glancing one, though his head still rang when it slammed to the floor. He groaned and rolled over as Deathstroke gripped his hair in one hand and forced him to look up.

“Don’t interrupt me, boy,” he said, his words and tone not even angry. Just– they were just words. Like he was unbothered. Like he truly believed he’d won. “You don’t–” He slammed Robin’s head down to the ground before shoving him to the side. “–have all of the facts.”

He stood up, and Robin huffed in pain before shoving himself off the ground with as much force as he could muster. It was a slow process, his muscles aching and his joints burning, the pressure stabbing into his broken fingers and arm, his skin tight and his head ringing. He missed feeling like he was in control of his body.

He looked up at Deathstroke from between the greasy strands of his hair. The mercenary wiped a hand against his arm, much to Robin’s indignation.

Asshole.

“Then–” Robin choked on his own saliva, and turned to the side to spit out a glob of blood. Lovely. “Enlighten me,” he gritted out.

Чертову, was he tired. It was all he ever felt like, these days.

“They aren’t looking for you, you know,” Deathstroke began.

Yeah, right, Robin thought, and rolled his eyes. Then told him, “Clearly you haven’t met my mentor, Batman the control freak?”

“They think you’re dead.”

Oh.

That–

That put a dampener on Robin’s plans.

“You’re lying,” he said, because he could. Because he needed to– to believe. Believe that they were still coming for him. That somebody was searching for him. No body, no crime, right? Bruce would come. He was too paranoid not to. He knew how things like this worked. He was Gotham’s bat, after all.

And Robin could still tell them he was alive. And then they would come for him.

He just needed a computer. And he also had that tracker– Who was he kidding? Deathstroke obviously would have searched for trackers first thing he did, and even if he didn’t, if the tracker were to work, he would have been back at the mansion already if anyone had decided to do something about it.

But he could still find a computer. Some sort of technology. He was good with tech. It was probably one of the only things he could beat Deathstroke at, if he was being honest. That much was obvious after . . . well. Pretty much the entire last week.

“Lying is for the weak.”

No. No, no. No no no–

Robin didn’t doubt that Deathstroke was telling the truth, for some reason. As much as he hated the man, Robin had to admit that he’d always stayed true to his word. (“This is going to hurt.” “Have it your way.” “You’ll regret saying no.”) He had some sort of moral code that Robin couldn’t decipher, that couldn’t make sense to him, but one he stuck to nonetheless.

“They won’t come looking for you again. Ever.”

 

Please, no. Don’t let them be–

“Robin is dead. But I left them a present in your stead. Nanoscopic probes set to detonate at the press of a button.”

God, no.

Deathstroke saw the look on Robin’s face, his own full mask betraying nothing. “Don’t worry, they’re still alive.”

Thank God. Robin’s heart unclenched.

“All you have to do to keep it that way–”

God–

“–is say yes.”

No.

He’d frozen where he’d stayed on the ground, listening to Deathstroke’s ultimatum as if the whole experience were a fever dream. He could still feel the pain riddling his body, thrumming with the quick beat of his heart. He hadn’t given in, yet, and he could still hold out, he knew. But for how long?

Long enough to get to his friends, to Bruce, before Deathstroke did? Warn them? He didn’t have the time, the skill. He wasn’t in a position to save them, right now. He needed– he wished he had access to any sort of technology. He’d take a wristwatch at this point; Bruce had once shown him how to fashion a radio out of that and parts of his uniform.

“Well?” Deathstroke hummed.

No. No no no no.

He hated this man.

No, he could never betray Bruce, betray what the man had given him, taught him–

He’d taught Robin to save people.

And there was still hope. He just needed a plan. He just needed to prepare.

Prepare for the inevitable, the improbable, against others, against himself. Prepare.

No.

“Okay.”