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Dick Grayson has always been just a bit of a people pleaser. Gar or Vic may say otherwise sometimes, especially with how often he would brush off their attempts to make him join them in some kind of game, but it’s the truth. For as much as the fearless leader Robin hated older heroes trying to order and coddle them, and as much as he was notorious for not listening to them and doing his own thing, young circus boy Dick Grayson would do most things if only to please those around him. It turned into a weird mix when someone knew both sides and thus both sides began to show, but that’s just part of the secret identity bit, wasn’t it? Dick was raised to perform, and so he did just that- perform as if his life was on the line.
Well, he says as if, but- now it kinda was. Not just his own life, either, but Wally’s, and Donna’s, and Kori’s, and the rest of his team’s lives, too.
Dick will never forgive himself for getting so utterly played at his own game. Slade took his growing obsession with taking him down and turned it on its head just so he could pass his skills and legacy onto Dick. He hated it, with such a burning passion, but Dick was horribly selfish. Even if Slade had made him kill more people than the amount of Titans there were at this point, Dick would never be able to make himself act out enough to get out. Not if his team, his family, were on the line.
That’s not to say he doesn’t act out, though. He’s Robin, the first sidekick- going against authority was in his veins, and Slade would be a fool to not know or expect that within the first few weeks of having Dick in his stupid little paws.
That’s why his friends were still alive, even after Dick refused to kill the little girl who witnessed their assassination attempt. That’s why Dick is in a pitch black room with no way out, ribs aching and jaw swollen with a bruise. Slade had (rightly so, because he always was) thought that sensory deprivation and time stuck with his thoughts would teach him and remind him how close he had gotten to getting his friends killed. That’s why he was stripped of his mask- night-vision hardly let the whole sensory deprivation do its real job, so that was that.
Not that it could really do it’s real job if he was stuck in a room with walls and a floor and not suspended in the air or water. Suck that, Slade. Even if the walls are simply sheets of smoothness, Dick is very capable of disrupting that. What’s a bloody and aching fist on top of the injuries he already has anyways? It’s not like Slade will let him die, not if he wants an apprentice still.
Sure, thoughts still plagued him. The pile of bile splattered onto the floor in one of the corners was testament of that (and another fuck you to Slade, too, because the putrid stench drove away the deprivation of his sense of smell). Dick knows that he nearly . . . he almost messed everything up. He almost got Wally killed. He almost got Donna killed. He almost got Gar and Vic and Rae and Kori killed. It sat heavy in his lungs, like lead, as he punched the walls to create some kind of unique texture for him to feel. It spilled over as tears now, as he traced the jagged edges of the holes he made, as he gave into spite and smiled viciously through heaving sobs.
He would have never forgiven himself if this had caused Slade to go over the edge and kill them off. People are precious. Life was precious. He hates that he values his friend’s lives over all else. He always will though- always- because Robin had once upon a time looked into the mirror and admitted to himself that he will never be like Batman. He will never sacrifice the people who look to him to lead, the people that trust him, the people who love him. Robin had decided just then that he doesn’t want to be Batman anymore, staring at exactly at what made him like the man already.
Maybe that’s why he’s let himself drift off and away- just so he doesn’t have that overhanging influence grafted into his heart more than it already is. Or maybe he’s shut that sick of the coddling, who knows. It was hard to read Batman, even for those who know him under the mask, and Dick can say with certainty that it was even harder to understand your relationship with him at the same time. Even if he had become an expert on reading what the older vigilante was feeling at any given time, he’d never be able to tell what exactly Bruce felt about his presence in his dad’s life. It made Dick want to scream on the best of days, and on the worst of days, Dick wanted to rip all the hair out of his head to get himself to stop thinking about it.
Dick Grayson is inherently broken. Robin even more so. That never, in a million years, mattered though, not when he had people in both lives that needed him to be his very best regardless.
(Maybe that explains his relationship with Batman well enough. Broken people flock together, it seems.)
It doesn’t matter if they don’t know. It doesn’t matter if they think Dick has betrayed them and turned to the dark side. It doesn’t matter if Dick hasn’t had a single bit of positive interaction in a month. He’s letting Slade get to him, he’s letting Slade take hold of his mind and break the precious part of him that’s able to say no.
Robin would be screaming. He would be planning exactly how to get out and enact justice onto whoever had wronged the people hurt. (He’s one of them now, too.)
Dick Grayson doesn’t care. He just cries and muffles it with a bloody fist shoved in his mouth.
Slade’s probably satisfied with this result, anyway.