Work Text:
Dick hated getting captured. Hated the way it meant he had no clue what was going on. And he certainly also wasn’t a fan of the pounding headache whatever they’d used to knock him out left him with.
It was supposed to be a simple mission. Get in, get the intel, get out. The kind of mission he and Wally had done together hundreds of times before, dating all the way back to their days as Kid Flash and Robin.
“Flash, you alright?”
He got no response.
Dick couldn’t see much, his eyes still adjusting to the darkness of the room. But after a few moments, he could make out the presence of a small blinking red light a few feet to his left.
The blinking lit up another face- Wally. He looked alive, the brief glimpses Dick could catch of his partner when the light blinked on told him that much at least. But at the same time, the longer Dick studied that blinking light- and the collar it came from, the more his stomach sank.
It looked like a suppression collar, not a brand Dick was familiar with- possibly something off market. But if it was a suppression collar that was very very very bad. The idea Wally in a suppression collar easily ranked in Dick’s top 5 worst nightmare scenarios.
After Wally had come back from the speed force the league had put him in suppression cuffs, in case the speedforce tried to pull him back in. However, after a few hours of stability (all of which Wally had spent in and out of consciousness in the med-bay aboard the Watchtower under close observation) his vitals had started spiraling out of control.
They’d nearly lost him again before the medical team had thought to take the suppression cuffs off and his vitals had stabilized again.
Even now, well over a year after Wally’s return and his stepping up to the Flash mantle they still didn’t know exactly what had happened with him in the speedforce, but they knew cutting his body off from it for too long would send his vitals into free fall.
“KF? You hear me? Flash? Please answer me.”
Dick tried to keep his voice calm, but the panic slipped through.
He had no way of knowing how long they’d been out. How long the collar had been on Wally. No idea if maybe he was already too late, if his- no, he couldn’t think that way.
He took a moment, pushing the panic aside, to take stock of himself and his bindings. They hadn’t put much effort in restraining him- clearly having decided that the Meta was the bigger threat (in any other circumstance Dick would have been insulted but considering their circumstances he was glad they’d underestimated him as the relative unknown).
The knots tying his wrists behind his back were almost laughably easy to undo. If they hadn’t somehow gotten their hands on suppression tech and gotten the drop on both Nightwing and the Flash, Dick would have thought they were amateurs.
“Ugh.”
Dick almost gave himself whiplash, with how quickly his head snapped to look back to Wally. It felt like a weight was lifted off his shoulders when he saw his partner try to prop himself onto his elbows and struggling to support his own weight.
“Hey, KF look at me” Dick finished freeing his hands and scootched himself along till he was right by Wally’s side, taking his face in his hands. “I’m going to get us out of here, ok? And we’ll get you help.”
“Rob?” Wally’s voice was weak, far weaker than Dick was used to, and he was slurring his words just a bit. Not so much it would be immediately noticeable to most people, but enough. Especially considering Dick wasn’t most people. He was Nightwing, he’d been Robin the child wonder, and most importantly he knew Wally. Loved him and cherished him, and he’d spent many many hours observing his boyfriend over the years- enough that even if he hadn’t been trained to note everything, he’d have still noticed Wally wasn’t alright.
“Hey love, I’ve got you. Hold on a moment for me alright?”
Dick shifted Wally so his head was rested against Dick’s shoulder and then let go so he could untie the remaining rope holding his ankles together.
Once he’d freed himself from his bindings, Dick got up, bringing Wally up with him.
“You think you can walk KF?”
“Yes” Dick hesitantly let go, and Wally nearly collapsed back down to the floor.
“Alright, that’s a no then.”
He adjusted the speedster’s position against his side so he’d be able to support him as they made their way out together.
Miraculously, they only ran into three goons on their way out, all of which Dick dealt with quickly and easily. The hardest part was finding their way out of the building, and Dick thanked just about every celestial being he’d heard of possibly existing for the fact they remained mostly undetected.
Wally seemed to be fading right in front of Dick’s eyes, and that was what pushed him forward to keep moving- even once they’d made it out of the facility. Dick couldn’t stop, no matter how tired he was, or how his own head felt like that headache was certainly starting to settle into a concussion, because Wally needed him.
If it wasn’t a monumentally terrible idea, Dick would have broken the suppression collar the moment they made it out of the building. But with Wally’s weakened state the risks posed by possible security measures built into the device, and the high likelihood of an electrical short circuit shocking the both of them, Dick knew that while it hurt to see Wally suffer, waiting on the extraction he’d dialed for the moment they were far enough away that there wasn’t a risk of being caught on the local comms system, would be his best chance.
After that, things had gone in a blur. A team had come to collect them, and Bruce had wound up having to pull Dick away from Wally so that the medical team could focus on him without having to move around a heavily concussed and clingy vigilante.
Dick vaguely remembered being put through his own medical examination (a moderate concussion, considering the blow had been hard enough to knock him unconscious. Medics had told him he’d been lucky not to suffer any short-term memory loss) and he knew he would be benched for at least the next two weeks, with very limited access to screens.
He also knew he’d showered at some point. His skin felt clean and the bit of blood from a cut on his head was all cleaned away. He was also no longer wearing his Nightwing suit, trading in the skintight, reinforced high-performance material suit for a domino mask, a comfortable pair of sweats and a hoodie that he distantly recalled as having belonged to Wally once, with the logo of his old school faded on the back.
Wally meanwhile had stabilized, and after a brief check-in once the collar had been removed, promptly fallen into a deep exhaustion induced sleep.
Dick, despite being exhausted, had installed himself at Wally’s bedside the moment the medical team had let him go, and kept watch while his boyfriend slept.
The mission itself had been a failure, and another team (possibly with a bit more firepower) would have to go in in the future to retrieve the information Dick and Wally had been after- once they found wherever the group had moved to.
But for now, Dick wasn’t worried about that. Instead, he focused on carding his hand through Wally’s hair, reminding himself that his partner was ok. That they were both ok, and everything would be alright.