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At the last exit before Blüdhaven, a lurching realization in Dick’s gut told him he’d left his spare escrima sticks at Barbara’s place. He spun his bike around in traffic, tires squealing and horns honking a cacophony around him as he swerved into the other lanes, heading back north.
I think maybe we shouldn’t see each other anymore, she’d said, and Dick understood it, he did, all her reasons so obvious in retrospect, all the ways he’d been a goddamn idiot. So, he’d slip in quick and quiet and grab his escrima sticks and get gone again before she even knew he was there. Otherwise she’d run into them later tucked into the spot between the side table and the couch, tidying up or retrieving something else dropped into the gap. Maybe she’d cry again, and he wouldn’t be there to do anything about it, which was why he couldn’t ask her to leave them with Tim, or Bruce, or even Alfred, and god, the last fucking thing he wanted to do was go to any of them with his fresh fuck-up and heartbreak—
About the time his bike curved around the exit for Gotham, Dick could half-admit that he was grasping for any excuse to be close to her, because he didn’t want to be alone in his apartment with his thoughts, because he couldn’t actually believe it was over.
Knowing wasn’t enough to make him stop.
He curbside-parked two blocks from her apartment and trusted the bike’s Bat-modified security to stop any enterprising parties from stealing it. Gotham might not be Blüdhaven where the corruption ran deep as a vein of mold all the way through fruit, but he’d grown up here, and he hadn’t forgotten this city’s own variety of crime. In his years as Robin, he’d seen the festering worst of it.
The clock tower ticked half-past two as he stole up the stairs. With any luck, Babs would be sleeping soundly, not sitting in front of her computer setup and watching her proximity alarms go off. At the top, Dick paused to rotate his arm at the shoulder, stiff and cold from the ride and throbbing sore in the deltoid where Deathstroke had shot him. (But Deathstroke hadn’t shot Amy; she was still alive and well and, as one of the very few honest cops Blüdhaven had, that was the important part.) He fit his key into the lock, took a breath before turning it. Go in, get his escrima sticks, get out. Simple. Maybe check in on Babs if she was sleeping…
That’s creepy, Grayson, just get this over with.
Right. He squared his shoulders and turned the handle as quietly as he could.
The voice that greeted him turned the blood in his veins to ice.
“— all exactly what you wanted,” Slade fucking Wilson, Deathstroke the Terminator was saying.
“I didn’t want you to shoot him,” Barbara said testily. “I didn’t want you to get him fired, Slade.”
Slade’s answer came through tinny and slightly distorted—through a speaker, meaning he wasn’t there in person, a nearly nonexistent silver lining around a very dark cloud. Dick crept into the apartment and closed the door behind him by careful inches, stepping on the memorized spots between creaking floorboards.
“You didn’t tell me what shape he was in. The Nightwing I know would have dodged that shot easily,” Slade said. “I did as you asked, Gordon. Went to Blüdhaven. Played the ghost in the attic. Rattled my chains,” he went on, the words sounding like they might’ve come through a smile, through laughing at his own joke. “I accepted a contract with the intention of throwing it. Do you have any idea what that means to me?”
“Oh, your word is your fucking bond. I know,” Barbara griped. “We all know. Fucking over some two-bit,crooked cop in Blüdhaven can’t count for much, or else you wouldn’t have done it. Stop pretending like it does.”
Flattening his back against the wall, Dick inched towards Barbara’s computer room and peered around the corner. The monitors washed the room in soft, white light and contrasting shadow. On the center one, Slade stood at a kitchen counter, stirring something in a ceramic bowl. He faced the camera, catching him from the waist up as he seasoned whatever it was with salt and stirred again. Without his Deathstroke mask and armor and assorted weapons, in only a white t-shirt and the eyepatch covering his right eye a shade of silver that almost matched his beard and hair, he was undressed as Dick had ever seen him.
His single, blue eye flicked up to the camera lens. “It counts for enough,” he said flatly, dangerously. “In any case, Grayson is no longer working for the Blüdhaven police department, and the ‘two-bit, crooked cop’ won’t be stealing the kind of money he’d need to hire another hit anytime soon. I’d say that concludes our business, wouldn’t you?”
Barbara huffed through her nose. “Fine,” she said. “I guess that’ll teach me to save your life.”
“Please. You were saving Canary’s life, and I was just along for the ride. Not that I’m ungrateful,” Slade said. “After all, I did offer you a favor, which has since been repaid. Next time you want an errand boy, it’s going to cost you.”
“There won’t be a next time, Deathstroke,” Barbara said scathingly.
“You have a good rest of your night, Oracle,” Slade said, bringing a glass of amber liquid into the frame and raising it in a toast. He reached forward with his free hand, and the feed cut to black.
Resting her head in her hands, Barbara rubbed her temples and cursed under her breath. She wheeled her chair back from the desk, maneuvered it around, and yelped at the sight of Dick in the doorway behind her before he could even consider hiding again, his mind a ten-car pileup, his feet rooted to the spot.
“Jesus!” Barbara held a palm over her heart, eyes wide behind her glasses. “Dick! What are you doing here?”
“I left my escrima sticks,” Dick said defensively, the excuse even flimsier out loud. He plowed past it, gesturing expansively at the computer array. “What the hell was that?”
“Dick, we’re not—” Barbara stopped, swallowed visibly. “We’re not dating anymore. You can’t just come in here in the middle of the night and—”
“Catch you talking to Deathstroke?” Dick asked, cutting her off.
She folded her arms across her chest. “How much did you hear?”
“I think I got the highlights,” Dick said, he fucking hoped, because the idea that there might be more than that extended well and truly beyond his capacity to deal with tonight. “You sent Slade to Blüdhaven?” he asked, disbelief raising his voice at the end to make it a question. “To attack me? To almost kill my boss?”
“To remind you!” Barbara burst out. “Of what Nightwing can do and what Officer Grayson can’t do!” She tucked a lock of red hair behind her ear and sighed. “It was a bad call, and it got out of hand, and for that, I’m sorry,” she went on quietly. “He wasn’t supposed to shoot you or get you fired.”
“Just make me quit,” Dick said, the answer falling into place.
To her credit, Barbara didn’t deny it. “You should have quit a long time ago.”
“That wasn’t your call to make,” Dick said. “I was doing good work, Barbara! I was helping people, and I was going to—”
“Get yourself killed!” Barbara shouted, flaring up again. “You’re human, Dick! You can’t burn the candle at both ends forever! I tried and I tried reasoning with you like a normal person, and then I realized”—she flicked her fingers open beside her head for emphasis—“you’re not normal. You and Bruce get so wound up in—”
“Don’t bring him into this!”
“—in saving everyone else that you forget to save yourself!” Barbara said, undeterred. “So, I thought I’d fight crazy with crazy.”
A short bark of a laugh broke out of Dick, teetering on the edge of hysterical. For a minute, he studied Barbara, the familiar sweep of her red hair, the light of computer screens reflecting off her glasses, arms still folded inside the sleeves of her favorite sweater. The brilliant, beautiful woman he loved and the impossible task of reconciling her with the distorted, funhouse mirror of what he’d just walked in on.
He licked his lips and asked, “What about Amy?”
“Arnot tripped one of my alerts when he started searching for how to order a hit—actually, several of my alerts due to being about as graceful about it as a bull in a china shop,” Barbara amended with a half-smile. “I posed as a knowledgeable scumbag and convinced him Deathstroke hated Blüdhaven’s resident vigilante enough that Arnot could low-ball him for a measly thirty grand.” Her smile faded, and she said more seriously, “Amy was never in any danger, Dick.”
“She didn’t know that,” Dick said. “My god, Babs, she’s not even a mask! She’s a regular person! She’s got a job, and a husband, and kids!”
“A husband and kids who might’ve gotten killed in the crossfire if I let Arnot find someone with the intention of finishing the job,” Barbara countered. “She’s a cop in Blüdhaven, Dick. Give her more credit than that.”
Dick ran a hand through his hair, nails scraping his scalp. “Did Slade—did he threaten you, or—” he tried to say, grasping for a way to make this make sense.
“Are you even listening?” Barbara asked before he could finish. “No! This was my idea, all of it!”
“He knows who you are,” Dick said as Slade’s words played back in his head, his “I did as you asked, Gordon” nearly lost in the jumble of everything else.
“He knows who I am because he knows who you are,” Barbara told him. “If he wanted to use that to fuck us over, he would’ve done it already. I don’t need you to save me,” she said with hard finality, as if willing him to believe it. “Trust me, he’s way more worried I might hack into his accounts than about anything you could do.”
The truth of it hit him like a sucker punch. “Babs,” he said, at a loss.
“It’s late, and I’m tired,” Barbara said. “Get your escrima sticks and any other knickknacks you were going to use to bullshit your way back here, and go home.”
Everything in him wanted to stay. Wanted to drop to his knees before her and bury his head in her lap, wanted to turn the clock back days or weeks or years to before he fucked this up so badly, before he’d pushed her into the kind of desperation that made asking Deathstroke for help look like a good idea. To say, I will forgive you if you can forgive me, and then we can forget this and start over.
Instead, Dick nodded, stepped back, and retrieved his spare escrima sticks from the spot where he’d left them, between the side table and the couch. Considerately, he’d thought, out of the way of Barbara’s wheels. The memory tasted bitter now.
“Leave your key on the table,” Barbara called behind him.
Without looking back at her, Dick took the key off the ring and set it down. It clinked like a coin against the glass top. He left it there and walked away, out of her door and down the steps and back into the streets, like leaving part of himself behind.
*
Dawn creased the eastern sky as Dick climbed down the fire escape to his apartment. After the ride home from Gotham, twenty minutes at faster-than-highway speeds and too fucking long, he’d thrown on his suit and spent the next several hours running across the rooftops, itching for a fight. And Blüdhaven had delivered, his escrima sticks coming down on would-be joyriders hotwiring a car near Melville Park, a convenience store hold-up in Avalon Hill, a brawl in the Zee Moores that might’ve been gang related or might’ve just as easily been the pent-up rage of poor, desperate people packed in too close.
The first two, he’d dodged the wildly-fired bullets and left the perpetrators bound and incapacitated for the police to handle; the last, he’d simply broken up the fight and sent the brawlers running home. A night in jail would help neither them nor the overstretched Blüdhaven PD, he’d reasoned, and never mind his split knuckles or throbbing arm or the long, nasty scratches torn through the side of his suit where one of them had thrown him into the wrong part of a barbed wire fence.
By the time Dick jimmied open his window and stumbled over the sill, he was sore, and he was tired, and his mind was blessedly empty, and he wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed until nightfall.
And that, of course, was exactly when the hair stood up on the back of his neck, his instincts blaring with the urgency of an air-raid siren. Someone else was here.
Someone else was sitting on Dick’s couch in exactly the same position as the last time Dick had come home and discovered he’d broken in. The absence of the Deathstroke armor provided a marked contrast, one that offered less of a comfort than Dick would’ve liked. Slade wore a dark blue jacket over a white t-shirt—possibly the same one he’d been wearing in his video call with Barbara just a handful of hours earlier—his ever-present eyepatch, and jeans tucked into boots. The fucking jeans nearly undid him, the whole picture so jarringly normal that Dick couldn’t wrap his exhausted mind around it, couldn’t do anything except stare.
As Dick stood there poleaxed, Slade folded the newspaper he’d been reading and set it on the coffee table. “You look like shit,” he said, getting to his feet. “Take your suit off and meet me in the kitchen.”
“What?” Dick asked, finally unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth.
“The kitchen has better lighting,” Slade told him, clearly participating in a different conversation than the one Dick thought they were having. When Dick didn’t move, he said, “You can walk on your own, or I can drag you.”
Fighting Deathstroke usually meant relying on speed, striking fast while staying out of reach, something Dick’s battered body crankily informed him it wasn’t up to. Slade could drag him, with one hand tied behind his back, without even breaking a sweat.
Dick didn’t take his suit off, but he did follow Slade into the kitchen, his hands preemptively twitching towards his escrima sticks with every step.
The kitchen failed to yield any horrors or obvious traps, which didn’t mean there weren’t any. Dick stood cautiously in the doorway as Slade sat at his table, which had been cleared of papers and dirty dishes and everything except the first aid kit that now occupied its center. Its lid yawned open, bandages and antiseptic lined up in neat rows. Dick looked at Slade, looked at the first aid kit, and willed his sluggish brain to put together what he was seeing.
“Have a seat, kid,” Slade said, holding his hand out to the other chair.
Dick’s brain finally arrived at the party. “You’re here to patch me up?”
“Now, how did you figure that out?” Slade asked, pulling the question out into a drawl. “You must be some detective.”
This had to be a joke. Or a trap. Or he’d passed out after climbing through his window and was in the midst of a very weird dream. “I, uh. I appreciate it,” Dick lied awkwardly. “But you really don’t—I mean, I can do it myself.”
“Are you left-handed?” Slade asked, eyeing the jagged cuts along Dick’s right side, across his ribs and around to his back.
“I can handle it,” Dick said again, shifting slightly to hide the worst of his injuries.
“Only if your definition of ‘handling it’ is attempting to sleep it off and hoping that doesn’t get infected. Listen, Grayson,” Slade said abruptly. “I’ll make this simple. You can either let me do it, or I can make a call to Wayne Manor. Up to you.”
Like Slade hadn’t beaten him to shit before, hadn’t shot him mere weeks ago and continued on his way without so much as a backward glance. The new, apparent interest in his well-being came from so far out of left field that it felt extraterrestrial in origin , and Dick didn’t trust it for a second. But Slade, regardless of his real motivation, absolutely would call the manor, and Dick absolutely wouldn’t be able to stop him, and the very thought of Alfred answering the phone to hear Deathstroke reporting him injured made his heart feel faint.
Slowly, Dick removed his mask and escrima sticks and set them on the table, peeled off the top half of his suit and laid it over the back of the empty chair, then sat gingerly on the edge of the seat. His heart beat a little faster in his chest, proximity to Deathstroke igniting his fight-or-flight response. Dick breathed out, forcing his body to relax.
“Shy, Grayson?” Slade asked, leveling a look at the material of the suit still covering Dick’s legs. “You didn’t strike me as the type.”
“My legs are fine. I don’t particularly think you want to see me with my pants off,” Dick said lightly, going for humor.
In response, Slade snorted and pulled a washcloth from the kit. “I’ve seen a penis before.”
“What, just the one?” Dick asked and immediately regretted it, biting his tongue before it could say anything stupider. What the hell did that even mean?
“I was in the army, kid,” Slade said. He stood and went over to the sink, wetting the washcloth under the tap.
While Dick sorted through the possible implications of that—whether Slade meant the forced closeness of barracks and showers, if he’d just casually dropped that he’d had gay sex in the army, why the hell Dick cared whether he’d had gay sex or not—Slade returned and lifted Dick’s arm up, positioning him to reach his side. Dick hissed as the cloth dabbed across his wounds, the lukewarm water quickly cooling in the morning air.
“Do I get to know why you’re doing this?” he asked.
“Oracle informed me you overheard part of our conversation last night. She seemed to think you were about to do something stupid,” Slade replied easily. “I gave her my word I’d make sure you were still in one piece, and I always keep my word.”
Out of a dozen possible follow-up questions, all Dick could manage was, “Why?”
“Your girlfriend convinced me I have a vested interest in staying on her good side,” Slade said and sprayed his open wounds liberally with antiseptic.
“Shit!” Dick swore in pain and surprise. He closed his eyes and said thoughtlessly, bitterly, “She’s not my girlfriend anymore.”
“She ended things,” Slade said, and it wasn’t a question. He made a considering noise in his throat. “Well, look on the bright side. At least she didn’t shoot your eye out.”
Dick laughed, the sound startled out of him before he could stop it. He looked to Slade in panic, didn’t know if he was supposed to laugh at that, but only saw the slightest curve of Slade’s lip as he reached for the antibiotic ointment. He tolerated the smearing of it over his side, the application of the first bandage taped across his skin.
“You’ve done very well for yourself here,” Slade said unexpectedly. “Going through the academy, getting hired as a police officer to take down the corruption from the inside—if you’d asked me, I’d have called it impossible.”
He taped on another bandaged, continued, “It won’t last, of course. I’m sure you’ve seen it already: officers stretched too thin to remember they took an oath to protect and serve, not beat someone for breaking a window because they’ve had a bad day.”
“That’s very civic-minded of you,” Dick said, stung by his cynicism and digging into the pressure point where he could.
“Being aware of the problem doesn’t mean I care to solve it, Grayson,” Slade said. “Still, there are people alive right now who wouldn’t be if you hadn’t done what you did. You should be proud.”
A treacherous warmth spread through Dick’s chest. “Careful, Slade,” he said. “I’m beginning to think I impress you.”
“You do impress me,” Slade told him, and the warmth practically glowed. “I’ve been impressed by you since I failed to capture you for H.I.V.E. I had a plan for everyone else,” he said with just a hint of self-deprecation. “You, without your friends, without any powers, I thought I could subdue easily. I was wrong.”
“I remember,” Dick said stiffly because it wasn’t a pleasant memory. He’d escaped by the skin of his teeth, saved his friends only with Joey’s help. Slade’s then-living son, stopping his misplaced revenge against the Titans for the one that died trying to fight them.
And now Joey was dead, too. Dick searched Slade’s face as if to find the cracks and fissures the deaths of his children had left behind, a pain he couldn’t even begin to imagine. Maybe he should be grateful Joey’s death hadn’t driven Slade crazy with grief and lashing out at him and his friends again—maybe Slade had gone crazy, right through the other side and into some barren wasteland that passed for being sane.
Slade taped on the last bandage and said, “You just haven’t been living up to my expectations lately.”
“I don’t care about your expectations, Slade,” Dick snapped.
“Of course you do,” Slade said as he took Dick’s left hand and began examining his knuckles. He knew what was coming, but still winced as Slade sprayed the antiseptic. “You’re a show-off, and you crave approval.”
“Not yours,” Dick insisted.
The smile he got in answer crinkled the corner of Slade’s eye. “But you like it anyway,” he said.
It might’ve been the way Slade said it, or that his face was very close, or that he was holding Dick’s hand like he meant to kiss the back of it in some period-drama parody, or just that he could make his hands and his voice very soft when he wanted to. Whatever the catalyst, it funneled down into one thing: Dick closing the minimal distance between him and Slade and kissing him full on the mouth.
Only long enough for Dick to feel more than hear Slade grunt in surprise, to catch the slightest hint of whiskey on his breath. He jerked away in the next second and jumped out of his chair so quickly it would’ve fallen if Slade hadn’t caught it.
“Oh, god, I’m, I’m sorry,” Dick said, tripping over the words. “That was—I don’t know what I was—I mean, I wasn’t thinking.”
If he’d had time to think about it, Dick might’ve expected violent retaliation or at least sneering disgust, but Slade regarded him with his expression unreadable, his eye impassive and fixed on Dick’s face, and all he said was, “Sit down, Grayson. We’re not done yet.”
“No, no, it’s ok, I can do the rest,” Dick babbled, his busted knuckles definitely manageable, Slade didn’t need to be here for—
“Grayson,” Slade repeated.
“Really, it’s fine, you should probably go—”
“Dick.”
The runaway words stopped like they’d hit a wall.
“Sit. Down.” Slade’s voice came out a growl.
Dick sat.
His face flared as Slade took his hand again, but if Slade noticed, he fortunately kept it to himself. Dick barely felt the ointment go on his knuckles, the series of band-aids applied to hold it in place. He’d been stressed lately. That was all. The combined impact of losing his job and his girlfriend and grappling with the stubbornly resilient organized crime in Blüdhaven had clearly caused some sort of mental break, if some part of him had gone and decided to kiss a murderer old enough to be his father.
“There,” Slade said, satisfied with his work, and let Dick take his hands back and run them nervously down his thighs. He was trying to plan a graceful exit when Slade took his left elbow and asked, “How’s you arm?”
“It’d be a lot better if someone hadn’t shot it,” Dick said pointedly, but let Slade peel the bandage back and inspect Alfred’s stitches.
“I wasn’t aiming for you, kid,” Slade said. “If you’d met me on a level playing field like you should have instead of playing cops and robbers, I never would have hit you.”
He placed the antiseptic and antibacterial ointment back in the first aid kid, closed the lid, and got to his feet. Dick stood with him because Slade towering over him sparked unease (because their relative positions had put Slade’s crotch level with his face). Retreating a few steps, Dick leaned against the counter and racked his brain for something to say.
Slade beat him to it: “Take a week off.”
“What?” Dick asked dumbly.
“A full week. Seven days,” Slade specified. “You need time to heal.”
“I can’t take a week off,” Dick protested, squinting at Slade for an ulterior motive. “I don’t know what you’re planning here, but—”
A loud sigh cut him off. “Nothing I’m planning has the first thing to do with this cesspool of a city,” Slade told him. “A week, Grayson,” he said again, moving towards him, closer, until the tips of their boots nearly touched. “Or I will come back and make myself very annoying.”
And Dick didn’t doubt it, either due to Slade’s evident promise to Barbara, or some other, awful reason Dick would discover eventually and kick himself for not seeing sooner. He looked up at Slade, and up, and up, Slade with nearly a foot of height on him and considerably more muscle mass. But Dick had grown up with Bruce head and shoulders above him, and he stuck his chin out defiantly.
“I will try to take it easy for the next week, if only because you aren’t the first person to tell me that, and the others that have are ones who actually give a shit about whether I live or die,” he said. “That’s the best I can offer.”
“I don’t care why you do it. I just care that you do,” Slade said indifferently. “You are going to get yourself killed if you keep this up.”
Dick scoffed and asked, “Saving me for a future investment, Slade?”
“I could get a lot of money for killing you,” Slade told him musingly. “You want to die that bad, you can always give me a call.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Dick said acidly, sticking his chin out further.
A mistake, because Slade pressed the knuckles of his first two fingers up under Dick’s jaw, holding him in place. Dick saw it coming a mile away, Slade slow and telegraphed and giving him all the time in the world to move, but he didn’t. He let Slade kiss him, deep and thorough, the swipe of his tongue across his lower lip, in his mouth. Just enough to make Dick’s toes curl, to make it clear that Slade could be good at this, could make it good for him if he wanted to.
Then, Slade stepped back out of his space. “One for the road,” he said, and winked, and Dick blushed all the way up to the tips of his ears.
“Take care of yourself, Dick,” Slade said, turned, and left without another word.
Stuck against his kitchen counter like he’d been pinned there, Dick listened to Slade move through the apartment, the sound of the door opening and shutting, his footsteps on the stairs. After a minute, he shook himself and went to lock the door—for all the fucking help that had been lately—and checked his windows for good measure before making his way into his bedroom on unsteady feet.
He stripped off the bottom half of his suit and fell into bed, into the warmth of sunlight seeping through the curtains. Dick ran his fingertips across his lips and tried to sleep. Tried to forget the phantom feeling of Slade’s mouth on his.
***