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Dick opened the door to his room, and they were there, waiting for him.
Dawn and Hank. Standing beside each other, united in their simmering rage. Hank with his enormous muscles and square jaw always looked imposing, but Dawn somehow matched his wrath even with her short stature and pale beauty.
Closing the door, Dick looked furtively around to see if his hallucination of Bruce was in the room, but thankfully his projection of his dour guardian was nowhere to be found. A nagging thought at the back of his mind suggested that his subconscious need to be reprimanded would not project if someone real were about to scold him.
“I know,” he put both hands out in front of him. “I shouldn’t have faced Slade alone. I know that. I thought – I mean, with everything I’ve done. It just needed a -”
He dropped off, but the unspoken word sacrifice hung in the air between them.
Hank and Dawn kept staring at him, their faces tight and eyes boring with their righteous anger, the same way Batman used to do when his Robin wasn’t listening or following orders.
“I’m really sorry,” Dick said. “Really, really sorry.”
“Not yet,” Hank crossed his arms. “But you’re about to be.”
Dick stepped back, not even aware of moving, but Hank barked, “You run, and we double what you got coming.”
“I’m not running,” Dick blurted as his heartrate spiked. He glanced back and forth between the two, his former girlfriend and his—what was Hank to him? Friend? Enemy? Frenemy? “I’ll stand here, and you can ream me out.”
Hank stepped closer, and Dick tried not to flinch away. His instinct for self-preservation screamed at him to back away, to shield his face, to crouch down, anything!—but he forced himself to stand still as the huge man came at him.
Hank didn’t throw a punch. Instead, he grabbed Dick by the arm and pulled him towards Dawn. She waited until both men stood in front of her before speaking to Dick for the first time. “You do not offer yourself as a sacrifice. You do not go to confront villains without your gear. You do not leave without telling us. You absolutely do not try to appease a killer like Slade.”
Dick opened his mouth, but Hank landed a heavy hand on the back of his neck and growled, “You listen to Dawn.”
She continued in her clear, scolding voice, the voice of a woman with strength of conviction and no-nonsense in reprimanding a fellow superhero. “We don’t want to hear explanations, or excuses, or how Bruce weaponized your childhood. We are a team, Richard Grayson, and we have to hold each other accountable. If any of the children went off and did what you did, I would be saying the exact same things.”
Dick felt the pressure building up behind his eyes. He hated these moments, usually when dealing with Bruce in some way, when he had to feel vulnerable and achy and sorry. So much easier to be cocky, joking, and in control.
“I wanted to chain you up for a month,” Hank said in a low voice. “But Dawn had a better idea.”
Dick tried not to wince. Hank’s brawn and fury were always scary in a physical way, but there was no doubt in his mind that Dawn was the smarter one, the more-insightful, more-devious member of the pair that could pin down truths and articulate them with devastating effects when she wanted. If they ever turned evil, they would be unstoppable supervillains.
“We don’t have time to torture you with regret, to punish you with silence and have you mope around here for weeks under a cloud of guilt,” Dawn said. “We need something that will be fast and effective, and that we can tell the children you’ve been punished so we can deal with Slade and this new Superboy and all Jason’s ridiculousness.”
Dick waited for her to announce his sentence, his mouth dry as he heard his heartbeat in his ears.
“Hank and I are going to spank you,” she said.
Dick jerked back, but Hank kept a firm hand on the back of his neck, effortlessly keeping him in place.
“What? Shit, I’m an adult! You can’t spank me. That’s something for kids or sex time or . . .” Dick trailed off, trying to think when else you would have cause to spank someone. A frat hazing?
“Did he just say ‘sex time’?” Hank asked Dawn. His tone implied that she was crazy to have ever found anything appealing about Dick as a romantic partner.
Dawn ignored both of their words. “Hank’s going to sit on the bed. You’re going to lean over his lap, and we’ll take turns punishing you.”
Every instinct in Dick was telling him to run, and his heartbeat was so fast it made him dizzy. The idea of the pain didn’t bother him, but to have these two spank him, to submit to them and do this humiliating, wretched thing, to lean over Hank’s lap – he simply couldn’t fathom it.
“If you go willing,” Dawn said in her calm voice, “we will just use our hands and the brush.” She motioned to the bed where a wooden-back hairbrush lay. Beside it was a leather strap, 3-inches across, which she acknowledged next. “If you fight us, we’ll use the strap. If you keep fighting, we will open the door and call all the children to come watch. They’re down a floor with Superboy and Starfire right now, but if we call them…” she glanced at the speaker on the wall which connected to an intercom throughout the Tower.
All of his life, Dick had hated feeling trapped: trapped by his parents’ death, trapped by Bruce’s ideas about crime-fighting, trapped physically by villains. His two worst recent moments had been him strapped to the chair in the asylum and when Trigon had infected him with evil, and both times had involved being trapped in his own mind. Options and choices appealed to Dick, a way to choose his own fate.
He looked at Dawn, wondering if she knew him well enough that she understood he needed choices, needed to select the lesser of all evils to function. The strap sounded (and looked) terrible, and he couldn’t imagine having the others come watch. Jason would be obnoxious, but Gar and Rachel watching their fearless leader be punished, and Starfire –
“Okay,” he choked out. He took a step forward, but Dawn put a hand on his chest.
“No, you’re hyperventilating. We need you calm.”
Dick wanted to object, but his brain was short-circuiting at how vulnerable he would have to be in the next few minutes.
“Hank,” Dawn looked at her partner, “lift his arms up and steady him until his breathing calms down.”
Hank’s huge hands each griped one of Dick’s elbows, and he found his arms lifted with his hands above his head. It was reminiscent of the posture he had adopted when facing Slade and taking off the bulletproof vest. Did they know about that, about how he removed his one protection and braced himself to be shot by his archnemesis?
He hadn’t felt so scared then as he did now, feeling the intimacy of the two who had stripped down to the core of those emotions that he tried forever to hide.
“Dick,” Dawn put a soft hand just under his throat, “I need you to take deep breaths. Hank and I are here because we love you.”
“Eh,” Hank made a doubtful sound behind him but continued to hold up Dick’s arms with his ironlike grip.
“We love you,” she repeated. “We love your strength, your selflessness, your zest for life, your care for others, your need to help people, your craving for justice. We love all your complicated feelings and brooding and despair, and that smile you wear when things go right. We’re going to punish you because we love you, but we need you to be here with us. We need you to feel this moment and not try to escape it.”
His heartrate started to calm, but he felt the overwhelming need to cry. His eyes were burning, but they didn’t well up, not yet, and he managed a short nod against her hand.
Dawn reached up a few inches and pressed two fingers just under his jaw, feeling for his pulse. “He’s getting better,” she told Hank. “We need to get some water into him before we start though.”
Hank held Dick in place, arms still above his head, while Dawn took a bottle of water off Dick’s nightstand, snapped off the top, and brought it to his mouth.
He gulped it down, feeling several drops escape to trickle down his chin. The action pressed the need to cry even harder on him, to let tears escape his achy eyes, but he couldn’t – not yet.
“Okay,” he swallowed. “I’m ready.”
Hank let go of his arms, but Dawn caught his hand and squeezed it as they approached the bed.
Hank sat down, angling slightly to the left so Dick could bend over and put his torso on the bed. This way Hank could use his right hand.
“Don’t worry,” Dawn said. “I’ve trained myself to be ambidextrous so I can use either hand.”
That was not comforting in the least, but Dick just stood, trying to figure out whether he needed to remove his clothes or not. He could easily pull down his pants and compression shorts underneath, but that would mean baring his privates. Dawn had seen him naked many times in their dating period, and Hank had seen him in that way that you see people of the same sex in changing rooms even though you aren’t really looking but just want to clean up as fast as possible. He did not want to remind Hank that he used to sleep with Dawn, and as his shirt wasn’t quite long enough to cover…
“Pants down, shorts on,” Dawn instructed.
That was easier. Dick unbuttoned and unzipped, toeing off his shoes to step out of his dark gray pants. Dawn took them and folded them with her efficiency as she instructed, “Over Hank’s lap.”
Dick wanted to protest, to explain to her that, unlike girls, boys have things between their legs that make laying across someone’s lap without rubbing or friction really, really difficult. He wasn’t interested in Hank sexually, but bodies were still bodies, and with adrenaline pumping through him, the fear of getting spanked would get confused into the thrill of arousal.
“Give me a low pillow,” Hank motioned towards the bed.
Several thin decorative pillows were in front of his sleeping pillow, a holdover from childhood when Alfred insisted that a bed wasn’t properly made until decorative pillows hid the white sleeping pillows. Dawn took one of the thinner ones, and Hank placed it over his lap.
“You boys,” Dawn rolled her eyes.
Dick wanted to protest that she knew nothing about it, didn’t know how awful it was to live with a body that would betray you and show a clear sign of arousal whenever it wanted, so you wore tight shorts in the hopes of keeping everything down but girls were always flirting with you and offering themselves to you because they found you so pretty and appealing. At least when Dawn was aroused, it didn’t show as much.
He wanted to complain, but she had his hand, and he bent over Hank’s pillowed lap. The position felt awkward as Dick’s legs were long and his knees couldn’t bend too much against the side of the bed.
“Pull your feet up,” Dawn instructed. As soon as he obeyed, he felt something under his knees, and looking back, he saw that she had placed a footstool for him to rest his knees on.
The woman thought of everything.
“Adjust him back a little,” Dawn told Hank. “We want his shoulders on the bed, but he needs to have his rear curved some so we have room to spank. Feel his tailbone, Hank? We don’t go up that far and risk damaging his kidneys. He’s got a few bruises on the front of his thighs, but the back looks fine. Dick, do you need a pillow for your arms?”
Dick had crossed both arms under his chin to support his head, and he was about to answer that he was fine when Hank snapped,
“Stop babying the guy.” Then he landed the first slap.
The sound made Dick tense, and the pain that followed burned. Hank had walloped him right in the middle, and the guy’s hand was huge.
Another slap, another - the sound seemed overwhelming, and how could a hand hitting a bottom covered in underwear hurt so much?
Dick tried to brace, to not squirm, to not whine, but Hank spanked him so fast and hard that all logic quickly escaped Dick’s brain. He knew the man was at the peak of his health and strength, that he could beat all of them (maybe not Superboy or Starfire) in sheer muscle force, but Dick had not planned on a hand destroying him so fast when he was only getting hit on the rear. Hank’s free arm had grabbed Dick around the waist and pinned him in place, a heavy weight that didn’t even seem bothered by Dick’s small shifts and squirms to alleviate the pain.
Usually, during a fight, his body worked through pain and injury on adrenaline highs, and later he patched himself up with medication, cold packs, hot showers, and sleep. But here, without anything to do or think about, without the need to look out for incoming threats or to counter blows, the pain built up in a matter of minutes.
“I’m sorry,” he blurted out. “I promise you, I am!”
Hank landed an almighty blow and paused before saying, “Okay, I warmed him up for you.”
Dick’s eyes went wide, and his mouth opened to express his horror, but nothing came out.
“Thank you, dear,” Dawn squeezed Hank’s spanking hand.
From the corner of his vision, Dick saw Dawn pick up the hairbrush.
“I’ll do a second coat,” she tapped the brush on her palm, “and then you take on his thighs.”
Dick lunged forward, trying to grab at the covers of the bed as his instinct for flight kicked in, but Hank pulled him back with both arms.
“Settle down,” Hank ordered. “It’s Dawn’s turn. If you kick her, we’re going to tie your legs down on the footstool. This is punishment and it’s not supposed to be easy.”
Dick made a whining noise because his usual quick wit for comebacks had disappeared.
“Let’s talk about why you’re being punished,” Dawn whacked the hairbrush down on his right butt cheek. She smacked the left before continuing, “We’ll start at the very beginning and note everything you did to earn this.”
Hank’s spanking turn had been done in silence, but Dawn’s came with a scolding as she smacked away at his rear. “You went to face Slade alone. You didn’t gear up. You didn’t have an escape plan. You didn’t call for help. You didn’t tell any of us.”
Each sin had come with a smack, but on the last one, she spanked him fast and hard with the brush.
“Please!” Dick gasp out. “Please, I’m sorry. I won’t do it. Ow! Ever again!”
“Once you were there,” she didn’t sound out of breath or even tired, “you tried to negotiate with that monster. Starfire told us about how you took off the bulletproof vest and that was nonsense to bring in the first place because he is a good enough shot to get you in the head.”
Another barrage of smacks, and Dick found his eyes welling up. He searched desperately for something to hold onto—physical or mental—but nothing was within reach.
“It was Jason!” he hated how wet and distraught the words sounded.
“It’s always going to be someone,” Dawn brought the brush down hard, and Dick jerked against Hank’s hold. “It will always be us on the line, but we do not sacrifice ourselves to appeal to killers.”
“I needed to save Jason!”
“Jason was dropped from a skyscraper because Slade wanted to watch you watch him fall to his death. If you had waited, we could have come up with a plan. Starfire and Rachel can lift up objects without touching them so they could have figured out how to save him.”
“But Bruce made me responsible for Jason and -”
“No negotiating with monsters!”
Two solid whacks more, and Dawn said, “Your turn.”
Hank slapped the back of Dick’s right thigh, just below the hem of his shorts, and the tears came.
Hank kept swatting, moving back and forth of his thighs to spank that sensitive bare skin, and Dick began sobbing.
The tears came, and he made a sad sound as he covered his face and just wept. The tension drained away as the spanking continued, and he felt exhausted as he cried, but it wasn’t the terrible grief he usually felt, the guilt he carried every day as a reminder of his failures.
No, this was crying from punishment. This was catharsis and relief from having two friends, two wonderful teammates, take him in hand. Despite the tears and the pain and Hank’s awful hand that kept delivering without pause, Dick felt so grateful for their care. He had planned to go back to his room and lie in the dark, desperate for sleep, while the events of the night played through his head on an endless loop. Instead, he had his burden removed, and though he couldn’t articulate anything more expressive than gasping out sobs and scrubbing away tears, he wanted to say thanks to both of them.
“Dick?” Dawn asked. “Are you still with us?”
He nodded, his breath coming out in hitches.
“All right,” Dawn said, “I’ll go over once more with the hairbrush. Hank, hold him tight.”
When Hank put his right hand around Dick’s waist, the heat of Hank’s spanking hand came through Dick’s thin shirt. It was a small sense of satisfaction that Hank, with all his brawn, probably felt soreness from walloping Dick so many times.
“Once last time,” Dawn spoke to Dick, “and then we’re cleaning you up and putting you to bed. We’ll stay with you until you drop off, but you are sleeping tonight.”
Her tone invited no argument, and Dick managed a shaky, “All right. I am sorry.”
“I believe him,” Hank quipped. And then Dawn started.
The hairbrush went over his bottom, reigniting the flames that had already been stoked, and then his thighs got smacked with equal force. Dawn didn’t hit as hard as Hank, but she had the trick of smacking down and then smacking down again on the same place that make Dick shudder involuntarily. His legs did kick out without him meaning to, but as they didn’t move more than a few inches, neither Hank nor Dawn scolded him.
“The punishment is nearly over,” Dawn announced. “Can you tell us what you’re sorry for?”
“Everything,” Dick gasped. “Leaving, fighting Slade, no gear, not telling, not thinking, not behaving, all of it. I’m sorry. I hate disappointing you. I love both of you, I really do.”
The words rushed out with him barely recognizing what he was saying, but he would agree to anything to having the spanking over. The bed under him felt so soft, and he wanted to be finished with the punishment so he could just rest.
Two more whacks with the hairbrush, and then Hank’s spanking hand loosened to slap him across the bottom with a final, “Don’t do it again.”
Dick felt the tears rolling down his achy face, but then Hank was pulling him up to stand. The shift in gravity and his leg muscles lengthening under sore, sore skin made him gasp and sway with a dizzy rush. But Hank was there, holding him steady, while Dawn pressed near and soothed,
“Shh. There’s our good boy. All forgiven now. Shh, just breathe.”
Dick wanted to stop crying, but he couldn’t manage more than swiping at his wet face. Dawn had a box of Kleenex and gave him two soft tissues. When he smeared them across his face with a shaky hand, she took out another and dabbed at his eyes and nose.
“Medicine now and then bed,” she said once she had most of his face clean. She had several bottles of ibuprofen and vitamins that seemed to appear out of nowhere, and she gave him another bottle of water to get them down. Dick took the pills with a slight concern that Dawn might be clairvoyant to anticipate everything he needed, but then Hank lifted up his arms again so she could take off his shirt. In only shorts and socks, Dick felt childish and small.
“In bed,” Dawn pulled back the covers. “If you can’t sleep on your front, at least get on your side. Scooch to the middle so Hank and I can cuddle you as you drift off.”
“Ugh,” Hank complained. Apparently, he was down for the punishment part, but the sentimental gooeyness at the end didn’t still well with his tough-guy persona.
“Hush,” Dawn smacked him lightly on the rear, but Dick couldn’t care less about their light tiff.
He got into bed, careful to lie on his right side with his rear angles so only part of his sore thigh touched the mattress. Dawn covered him up, and Dick thought he wanted nothing more than to sleep.
He was wrong. When Dawn came to sit on the bed on the side he was facing, and Hank sat on his other side, it felt even better to sense them close, guarding him from each side.
And then Dawn brushed back his hair, combing her fingers into his sweaty locks.
“Too much,” Hank objected.
“Fine, you brush his hair and I’ll take his hands. I swear, men sometimes!”
“I don’t like you fussing over him.”
“We punished him so we have to be the ones to get him to sleep.”
Dick blinked in confusion, but then Hank’s huge hand was on his head, pushing through his hair to rub and massage his aching scalp. Dawn took both of Dick’s hands in hers, and her skilled fingers worked through his exhausted nerves, massaging each finger and joint by pressing on nerve connective tissue. Hank’s other hand rubbed the back of Dick’s neck and pressed strong fingers into the tired muscles that had tensed during the spanking.
Despite the burning ache of his bottom and legs, Dick soared with the pleasure of their care. He lay there still and compliant, the absolute bliss of just getting to rest while two sweet people looked after him. It felt better than sex, better than the thrill of beating down an opponent, better than when Bruce offered him the chance to be Robin.
Half asleep, he tried to mutter his thanks, but he wasn’t sure anything came out.
They didn’t stop, and he finally gave into sleep.
Outside the closed door in the hallway, Rachel pulled back from the wall. She had been alerted to Dick’s stress even from a floor below, and when she had approached his room, she had heard loud slapping noises.
Dick’s room was a sacred place in her mind, a place where their fearless leader took care of adult things and needed privacy. When it was her time to do laundry, she left Dick’s folded pile of clothes outside his shut door, not brave enough to go inside and put it on the bed like she did with Gar and Jason. Even Hank and Dawn’s room wasn’t as mysterious and awe-inspiring as Dick’s; they were together and probably had sex a lot, but Dick was alone, she thought, and somehow the idea of seeing him changing or sleeping made it too weird. As leader of the Titans and therefore Lord of the Manor (if the Tower could be a manor), he wasn’t like other people so she couldn’t imagine him doing normal things like showering or brushing his teeth or, heaven forbid, using the toilet.
When she had heard the smacking noise and then sounds of pain behind his closed door, she wanted to help, to stop anyone from hurting him, but she had frozen at the door, not able to reach for the knob. Leaning against the wall, she projected just her face through until she could see.
The sight of their fearless leader over Hank’s lap getting spanked was enough to slam her back into her body.
Oh, horrors!
She put her hand over her eyes as if that would erase what she had just seen.
And then she projected back into the room enough to gauge what was really going on. Dawn was spanking Dick now with Hank holding him, but Dick seemed to be letting them and Dawn was talking about punishment so …
Rachel had pulled back into the hallway, but she couldn’t make herself walk away. The sounds of spanking, Dawn’s scolding, and Dick’s soft cries continued. Rachel stood in front of the door, a self-appointed guardian of whatever was going on between the adults in Dick’s room. The thought of Dick getting spanked and crying made her cheeks flush and her stomach flip. She felt both dread and intrigue, like she had when watching a scary movie as a child with wanting to run away and wanting to immerse herself into the horror of the situation completely.
When they finally fell silent, she peeked back in the room to see all three adults on the bed with Dick tucked in the middle, fast falling asleep.
Could she ever look Dick in the eye again? Was that how they were taking care of problems now? Spanking each other when someone stepped out of line?
The thought that she might be punished that way sent Rachel scurrying down the hallway and back down to the lower floor.
Starfire met her in the hallway. “What’s going on?”
“Oh,” Rachel blinked fast. “Um, it’s Dick. Um – Hank and Dawn are … punishing him.”
“Hhmm?”
“You know, yelling at him for going off and getting caught,” Rachel tried to mask her face.
“I think he deserves a little more than yelling,” Starfire said.
“Uh, um, well, it was pretty bad, and now they’re making him go to sleep. He needs to sleep because he’s all tired from … the yelling.”
“More trouble than he’s worth,” Starfire shook her head before turning back to the medical bay.
“Yeah,” Rachel said, “totally.”
She followed the older woman back to where Gar was watching Superboy. The events of the scene in Dick’s room kept playing through her head, and she couldn’t figure out what it meant.
Regardless, she knew for certain that she would be on her best behavior from now on. Surely, if spankings were to be dealt out at the Tower, one of the boys would act out before she did. With so much tension and inner squabbles and short tempers, it had to lower her chances of reprimand, at least a little.
She might have to start projecting a physical barrier of protection around her own bottom and legs as a good defense.