Chapter Text
The boy was sleeping right now, laying alone in that big bed which usually was only occupied by the adult leaguers, surrounded by monitors, looking painfully small and fragile.
At the moments like this, Clark couldn't help but doubt again that why on earth did they let such young children into their dangerous world.
But then again, it's already too late to let them quit.
It had been three days since Dick was brought to the med bay at Watchtower.
Yes, Watchtower. Clark was quite surprised when Bruce ordered the boy to be taken to here instead of his Batcave, which was out of the Bat's prototype since he always preferred healing himself in his secret base.
Then Clark understood: the man wanted the best for Dick. They not only had the best medical equipment here (a must if you needed to treat various kinds of humans, metahumans, aliens, etc. on a daily basis), but it was also nearly impossible for anyone to sneak into a satellite unnoticed without using zeta-tube, whether it was a group of junior superheroes or the famous League of Assassins.
The latter was the main reason, but the former one wasn't so far-fetched either after Dinah reported constantly that the team kept demanding to be informed about Robin's condition, and was getting more and more frustrated when they got nothing. Dinah and Red Tornado were supervising them closely right now, just in case.
After all, they did have a Bio-Ship.
The difficult thing was that they too wanted to tell the team what's wrong with their teammate. And that's where the problem came: they couldn't find anything wrong. The fact itself was, in fact, pretty wrong.
Their knowledge of Lazarus Pit was quite limited, to say the least. They never dealt with it before. Batman seemed to be the only one who had enough understanding about it, which Clark had no doubt that it came from his complicated history with the assassin association. Ra's al Ghul had made sure that only he had access to it, so it was quite a shock that the team managed to get close to one during the mission. It didn't help that the man also preferred using the traditional way to preserve information, named hand-write copies, unreachable by the model techniques.
From what they knew, the Pit was said to rejuvenate the injured, resurrect the dead, and kill the alive. It was also mentioned that it could help the user regain their youth, but this one was never proved and merely a rumour.
And there were side effects. Insanity was just the most famous one.
But Dick was none of the cases.
For once, he was still alive, and not the dead-then-back-to-life kind of alive. The team presented at the scene confirmed that Robin was pushed into the Pit during a mid-fight, and he did not have any fatal injury at that time. So he wasn't resurrected. But if he wasn't, then how did he come out alive and… completely normal and unscratched?
Okay, not really completely normal, but still far from what they had expected for someone who had taken a dip in the Lazarus Pit.
Disorientation seemed to be the only thing he was suffering. Dick had more or less slept through three whole days, and when he woke up, he sometimes acted like he couldn't understand his surroundings, be in and out until he went back to sleep. The other times he woke up with enough conscious and appeared to be his usual self, just complained about dreams and headache (or headagony, in Dick's own words). After taking a peak in his head, Martian Manhunter told them that Robin was also reliving all his past memories. All he saw was flying memory pieces. He believed that's the cause of his constant headache.
And that's it. That's all they could find. Dick should have already been released from the med bay if it had been another occasion.
It felt too easy and too lucky.
Which made everyone felt unsettled. Something felt amiss.
And anyone had met the Bat knew the man took no chance. He wasn't going to stop until he was absolutely sure that his son was okay.
He actually encouraged his co-workers to visit the teen hero, which was really, really, out of his usual character. Though the reason behind it was that he wanted as many people as possible to interact with his protégé and see if they could find something out of place. Which Clark thought was a little too desperate. Dick was the closest to him, and if the greatest detective himself couldn't spot anything wrong, he doubted anyone else could do it.
"Do you plan to just stalk me from there all day, or you actually wanna have a chat Supes?"
Superman looked up and saw the teen he considered as a nephew looked back at him with one eye open, an amused smile around the corner of his mouth.
Clark smiled back at the teen, flying closer to the boy.
He prayed everything turned out okay in the end.
* * *
It was easier for him to pretend to be Richard now.
At first, it was torture. They just kept asking. They kept asking questions he couldn't answer: How do you feel? Anything wrong? What do you need?
He couldn't answer any of them. You did not ask for a Talon's opinion, you only gave him orders, that was how thing should have been. His master never asked, and never let him ask. Asking and answering meant thinking, and a Talon did not think. A tool was a tool, after all.
When he didn't answer, the people- Richard's friends, Richard's family- asked more, and started touching him. He hated to be touched, so he flinched away, which backfired terribly. They asked more and touched more and kind of set into a dead loop.
But then he realized that they were not asking about him, they were asking about Richard.
So he went through Richard's memories and tried to copy the way Richard would have reacted. He started answering with things Richard had said before: I'm fine. Don't worry. You guys are just worrying too much.
It didn't work out as well as he thought would have been. These answers just led to more questions and more demands for his own words. He also found out that just copying the saying wasn't enough, he had to imitate the feeling and physical actions when it was said, which was another thing he wanted to avoid.
In the end, he managed to find a solution in Richard's memory. Every time the date of John and Mary Grayson's deaths came, Richard would lie in bed at that night, closed his eyes and told Alfred Pennyworth or Batman that he was tired and wanted to sleep. The two would then leave him alone.
He tried it with the people who kept asking about Richard, and it worked.
Now he just had to pretend to be asleep, and wait for the slumber to claim him again.
Every time he felt his conscious was slipping away, he hoped he wouldn't wake up again.