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“Stop it!” Dick yelled, writhing against the knee that was digging into his back. Pain bloomed between his shoulders but he didn’t stop struggling.
He couldn’t stop struggling.
Jason needed him.
The small vampire turned in the cage, whining as he stared at the sunlight. His delicate, leathery bat wings were flat against his back and twitching madly with Jason’s growing panic.
The roof of the building cut a stark line in the dirt. One side was shade and the blinding, bright sunlight.
Jason’s cage was in the shade now, but…
It kept being pushed forward and as the sun travelled across the sky, the line grew closer to him too.
It was a waiting game. Between the laughing knights and the sun.
Jason cried through his panting. He was already too hot with sunburns littering his pale arms. He anxiously circled like an animal, unable to stand in the cramped space, and desperately tried to push himself further away from the sunlight. His wings kept banging against the top of the cage, flaring out like they wanted to fly him away from his captors.
At this age, Jason wouldn’t be able to survive full exposure for more than an hour but the pain would set in immediately.
At this age, Jason would boil alive in his own skin.
It would be agonised, slow death.
“Please!” Dick howled, fighting at much as he could. The edges of the knight’s armour bit into his skin and the weight of a full-grown man pressing down on his thirteen-year-old body might as well have been a boulder. One that laughed as the Constable pushed Jason’s cage towards the line.
Jason was trembling like a leaf inside it as he was forced closer to open sunlight. His eyes were wide and panicked, his breath as quick as a bird’s in his too-thin chest. His face was red and blotchy and he silently screamed for help when he met Dick’s gaze.
“Please stop,” Dick begged, tears pricking at his eyes. Jason was so scared, but resignation was being to settle there too. “You’ll kill him!”
The Constable stopped pushing but his foot stayed threateningly on the edge of Jason’s cage. He could kick Dick’s little brother to his death at any moment.
“Well,” the Constable said with a wicked smirk. “He should have thought about that before he let himself become a monster.”
He pressed his foot down and the metal whined underneath the force.
Dick glared with as much venom as he could.
“You know that is false,” he hissed as vicious as a kicked snake. “You knew our mother. You knew that Jason was born a vampire just like her.”
The Constable’s smile grew and he leaned down into Dick’s face. He didn’t seem to care that the movement pushed Jason’s cage further into the sun. The light swallowed a quarter of his cage; Jason screamed, rattling the bars as he frantically flinched back and his wings flapped madly.
“And where is your mother now?” The Constable whispered into Dick’s face. His breath was wet and smelled like the graveyard stink of cigar smoke.
His piggish dark eyes were as black as night and his cruel smile was a cracked crescent moon on his face.
“Oh that’s right…” he taunted, brutal joy slipping into his tone. Dick was shaking in rage and the knee pressed into his back was the only thing keeping him from flinging himself at the man and trying to scratch that viciousness off.
“I killed your bitch of a mother. I tied her to a stake and I waited for the sun to come up.”
Fury pulsed under Dick’s skin, more fury than he ever thought he could fit into his body. He had been there. He has seen his adopted mother burn to death and cried as random villagers held him back from rushing to help her. He had seen as they laughed when she screamed.
They had said she was a murderer and had killed the Drakes’ little boy.
The boy had disappeared, but it wasn’t Dick’s mother that had caused it. She had been with Dick and his little brother that night, teaching them how to cook potato soup.
But that hadn’t mattered to the Constable.
A little boy disappeared and became a reason for the Constable to finally do what he had wanted to do for years.
“I watched her writhe on that pole for hours. It was hypnotic, one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.”
The Constable turned back to Jason, and the tiny vampire froze inside his cage. Dick sucked in a breath, motionless as the predator rounded on his little brother.
“I can see her in him. He is her spawn and he’s inherited her teeth.”
Jason hissed, bearing his tiny fangs.
They weren’t even full-grown. They were still his baby fangs, meant for playing and nipping instead of piercing flesh. Dick knew that from play fights that had both of them wrestling on the floor like puppies. Jason had bitten him during their tussles, but he had never drawn blood; his jaw wasn’t strong enough for that yet.
He was still a baby. Just an innocent little kid. He hadn’t done anything wrong.
The Constable still looked at Jason like he was a monster.
“He already has the taste for blood,” the Constable said, looking too eager as his leg tensed in preparation. “It’s best to nip it in the bud before it becomes out of control.”
He wound his leg back and kicked Dick’s brother into the harsh afternoon sunlight.
Jason instantly screamed, collapsing onto the bottom of the cage and thrashing in agony. Blisters were rapidly forming on his skin, angry red marks that were eating across his pale skin. His body was contorting in pain, and he flailed with the death throes of an animal.
His wings, his delicate, baby soft leather wings, were burning, singing at the edges like paper.
Ten minutes. Dick had ten minutes until his brother went still and crumbled into ashes.
“Let me go!” he screeched, fighting as much as he could and clawing and kicking at the men holding him down. There were so many hands on him, pinning him to the ground, pulling him back. “I have to help him! Please, I have to save him!”
But Dick wasn’t strong enough. He could only keep watching as the only family he had left, whimpered and cried and burned.
Everything hit him all at once.
Realisation that he couldn’t do anything to stop his brother’s death.
Cold horror that he was going to watch Jason die.
Memories of his Mama’s screams layering over Jason’s and all of them echoing in his head.
It was his Mama’s death all over again. Dick was powerless to do anything to help his family all over again.
He couldn’t…
He couldn’t…
Jason…
“What… What are you doing!”
A voice broke through the air and Dick’s face whipped up to a man on a horse. The sunlight was so bright that it burned his eyes to look up and he couldn’t see the details of the man.
But he felt the knee on his back startle back and the pressure pushing him into the ground lessened.
It was enough for him to struggle out from under the knee, crawling across the dirt on his belly before he could finally get his feet under him.
Dick launched himself at his brother, crashing into the cage and frantically tugging it into the shade. Jason whined and cried inside of it, repeating Dick’s name in frantic pleas.
“It’s okay,” Dick tried to calm Jason down and keep his own voice level. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
“Please,” his baby brother begged, “Dick it hurts.”
Dick’s eyes skittered down the younger boy’s body. The angry red burns were still peppering his skin, but Jason’s rapid healing was already starting to get to work on his wings.
“I know it hurts Jay,” Dick said as his shaky hands tried to figure out how to unlock the cage. They needed to get out of here. He needed to get Jason into someplace cool and dark so he could recover. And once, Jason was fed and healed, they could disappear into the night (even though it would rip out Dick’s heart to leave the only home he could remember without anything more than the clothes on his back).
“But we’re going to get you out of here and it won’t hurt anymore.”
“Please,” Jason cried, his tears rolling down his cheeks. “It hurts. It hurts. Stop it, it hurts.”
“What are you doing?”
Dick froze, just as he was trying to slip some picks into the cage’s lock.
Was that the only thing that the man knew how to say?
Slowly, he turned and looked up.
Up, up, up…
This was by far the largest man that Dick had ever seen, and he seemed even big with a huge cape around his shoulders and a gold circlet on his head.
Wait… golden circlet?
Realisation struck him like a sucker punch.
This was Bruce Wayne, Lord of the Land.
“Boy,” Lord Wayne spoke again, his voice as rough as gravel. A thrum of anger rolled like thunder in his tone. “I said, what are you doing?”
Dick flinched back, aware of how big the man was, how his hands could grab Dick at any moment, how Dick didn’t stand a chance of fighting back.
But he didn’t back down.
“Go away!” Dick spat, shoving his body in front of the cage to block Jason from view. “He’s mine!”
Fury flashed through Lord Wayne’s eyes, and a shiver of fear instantly raced down Dick’s spine.
“No,” the man above him growled, and suddenly one of those huge hands was coming towards Dick.
He wanted to run but he couldn’t leave Jason, so he turned and latched his hands around the bars of Jason’s cage so at least they wouldn’t be separated.
Lord Wayne grabbed onto the back of his shirt, trying to tug him up like a puppy by the scruff. But Dick wouldn’t let himself be taken away.
“No!” Dick yelled, holding on to Jason’s cage.
“Let go of the vampire,” the man growled, giving Dick a little shake.
“No! You can’t hurt him!” Dick shrieked, his eyes closing as tears threatened to come out again.
“Well, I’m not going to let you torture him anymore,” the man growled, giving Dick a harder shake that sent his teeth rattling in his skull. “Let go of that poor child.”
He… what? He wasn’t going to hurt Jason. He was trying to stop Lord Wayne from hurting Jason.
“He’s my brother,” Dick yelled, trying to whip his head around so he could bite the man’s wrist. “I’m just trying to protect my brother!”
The hand holding him stilled. “What did you say?”
“Get your hands off my brother,” Jason’s shaky voice growled, breaking into the conversation. He was still a bit breathless from being tortured. He tried to hiss at Lord Wayne, but it was weaker than it should be and it broke Dick’s heart. “We just want to go home.”
Lord Wayne was silent and Dick felt himself be lowered until his feet were both back on the ground.
Immediately, he whipped around, tense and ready to attack in case the man tried anything else.
But instead of grabbing Dick again, the man shuffled back and crouched so he didn’t seem nearly so big.
Only then did Dick notice that the Constable was lying on the floor, unmoving and as still as a corpse.
He glared at the body. “Did you kill him?” Dick spat, wishing he could spit on the man’s face.
“No, I do not kill.”
“You should kill him,” Jason mumbled from behind Dick. “For what he did to Mama.”
Lord Wayne’s face crinkled and suddenly he looked like a confused puppy more than a terrifying force of nature.
Carefully, Dick went back to his lockpicks and kept working on getting his brother free. It only took him a couple of seconds before he was able to click open the lock.
“What did he do to your mother, little ones?”
“He burned her,” Jason said as he crawled out of the cage and into Dick’s arms.
Something anxious finally uncoiled in Dick’s chest as he gathered his little brother up. Jason was too warm, but so thankfully alive when he settled against Dick’s chest. The boy’s wings came up on both of Dick’s sides in a hug; Jason was holding on to him, just as tightly as Dick was holding on to Jason.
“You’re not from around here,” said Dick, part-comment and part-question.
Lord Wayne shook his head.
“The Constable killed our Mama two years ago. He said she had murdered a little boy, but she didn’t. The boy disappeared and no one found him, but it wasn’t Mama. She was with us, but nobody cared because she was a vampire.”
Dick looked sadly down at his little brother. “Constable hated vampires. Mama did nothing to him but he wanted her dead.” A sob was threatening to rise in his throat. “He wants all vampires dead and now that she’s gone… she can’t protect… Jason is…”
He glared up at Lord Wayne, clutching his little brother as close as he could. “I won’t let him kill Jason. I won’t let anyone hurt him anymore.”
“I don’t want anyone to hurt your brother either,” the man assured, his voice so much more gentle than it had started out as. “I want to protect him too.”
The man reached up and unclipped the cape from his back. He silently offered it and Dick snatched it from his grasp. He instantly swaddled the little vampire in the cloth, putting a protective barrier between his sensitive skin and the harsh, noon, sunlight.
“I’d like to protect both of you if you’d let me.”
Dick didn’t look at the man. He stared down at Jason’s face. Those huge, innocent eyes were blinking up at him, completely trusting him. Like he didn’t have any doubts that Dick would keep him safe and know what to do.
But Dick didn’t know what to do.
He was only twelve and maybe he could keep them hidden, but if they were captured again...
He couldn’t fight against full-grown men. He hadn’t been able to stop the Constable when he had dragged them out of their house. He was years away from being strong enough to be intimidating.
And he wasn’t sure they could wait years.
He looked at Lord Wayne.
“What do you want us for?” Dick asked suspiciously. “Why would you protect us?”
The man tilted his head a bit in confusion. “You’re children. You deserve to be protected. And you’re on your own. You need a home. I would offer to take you to an orphanage if that would make you more comfortable but…”
His eyes went down to Jason’s wings.
“I think we both know that they would never accept a vampire child and I would rather not separate you two.”
Dick held Jason tighter.
“No, I don’t want to be separated. He’s… we’re the only family we have left.”
“And I won’t try to separate you.” Dick glared venomously at the man and he sheepishly amended. “I won’t ever try to separate you again.”
Was… was it really that easy? A Lord in shining armour to come save them? Dick didn’t trust it for a second… but he also didn’t think he had a choice.
“You don’t have to make a decision now,” the Lord said, standing up. He looked smaller, kinder, now that he wasn’t wearing the dark cape. “But perhaps, after a meal? I have food, and I’m willing to offer your little brother blood and a dark place to rest. Would you like that?”
Yes. Dick would like that. He knew Jason would like that too.
Slowly, he rose to his feet, and Jason stumbled next to him but steadied as he leaned on Dick.
“One meal,” Dick growled, keeping Jason safely behind him. “Only one meal, alright?”
“Alright.”
Maybe this was stupid, but as he put his hand into Lord Wayne’s, a little spark of hope flickered in his chest.
It also helped that the Lord didn’t stop Jason and Dick when they both leaned over to spit on the Constable as they walked past them.
(Dick thinks that he saw Lord Wayne give the Constable a little kick too.)