Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

II

Next morning, hard rain pattering on the roof of the car, the windshield wipers sluicing a thick plane of water back and forth, cars creeping slowly and cautiously over the tarmac. Rose was asleep in the back, stretched across the seats with her feet propped up on the window, a blue sock bunched in cords at one ankle. Slade was steering with his fingertips and holding the top of a paper cup of coffee in his palm. 

He said, “Who’d you call?”

Dick startled, lifting his chin out of his hand. The rain had a musty, earthy scent but he still couldn’t convince himself there wasn’t the slight tang of gunsmoke. “What?”

“Your little trip to the convenience store. Who’d you call?”

The windshield wipers squeaked. Dick ground his molars together. Let himself be angry for three seconds and then told himself to get over it. “She told you that, too?”

Slade’s eye found him in the rearview mirror. “Should I be expecting the cavalry to come down on us any second now? Do I need to remind you that if that’s the case, Rose’s little gift stays right where it is.”

“No, I know. I didn’t . . . I only called someone to tell them to stay out of it.”

“That so?”

“I’m telling you it is.”

“Okay.”

Dick tugged the seatbelt away from his bruised throat and looked out the window. Vetiver smudges of matchstick trees and bleached bone, cloud-choked sky. Slade’s uncomplicated acceptance did not make him feel any better. Instead, something fetid and rotten turned in the center of him with all the cold gravity of a black hole.

He caught Slade’s eye again and said, “The one thing I did right. What was it?”

When Slade lowered the coffee cup, there was a thin smile bisecting his face. He put the cup down and said, “Where’s your gun?”

“In my bag.” 

“Take it out. Unload it.”

“It’s unloaded. Slade—”

“Reload it, then unload it. Show me.”

Dick retrieved the gun and its bullets from his backpack. The magazine made a heavy thunking sound as he slammed it back into place, then undid the last five seconds. The bullets, pattering into his lap like rain. Faster, this time, though he hadn’t really been trying to make it so. “Happy?” he snapped.

Slade said, “Close.”

…

The storm got so bad they decided, grudgingly, to stop and wait it out in a small suburban town in North Carolina. The tension from the day before had dissipated somewhat in the car, and as they parked and stretched under the streaming awning of a 24-hour convenience store on the side of the road, Rose hopped on the balls of her feet, clutching Slade’s arm and bothering him until he agreed that fine, they could go sit in an actual restaurant to have dinner.

The actual restaurant ended up being a grimy looking pub, which did not put Rose off that much. They sat at the bar and ordered burgers. Slade got a beer. Rose got a coke. Dick blew bubbles into his water until it sloshed over onto the counter and he sopped it up with his sleeve. A few regulars, old grizzled guys in trucker hats, lounged in the booths, playing cards. After Dick finished his food, he went over to them, came back a few minutes later with an extra deck. 

“How’d you do that?” Rose asked suspiciously. 

“The power of conversation. You know how to play trash?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re about to learn.”

Halfway through teaching Rose the rules, Dick looked up and caught Slade watching them with two fries pinched unmoving between his fingers, his other hand twisting around his glass almost unconsciously. His gaze was fixed on Rose as she plucked her cards and slammed them down on the shaky bar top, a furrow of concentration cutting between her eyebrows. He was looking at her like he was seeing her for the first time.

Rose smacked the bar again and the foamy crown of Slade’s beer tipped precipitously towards the lip of the glass. When Dick turned eighteen, Bruce had decided to let him have his first taste of beer, in the kitchen of the manor, under supervision. It was one of the last memories he had from that period of time where he capitulated: said, okay, reacted like he was supposed to, played all the parts out to completion, nevermind that he’d already drank beer a few times by then. It had been fine, good even, at the time, but now that he thought back on it the whole thing seemed weird and stilted, two strangers playing father and son.

“You’re losing,” said Rose.

“Shit,” said Dick, pulling a card.

Dick won the game. They started again. Slade finished his beer and ordered a jack and coke. Dick caught the bartender’s attention before he turned aside and said, “Make that two.”

Rose foisted an accusatory glare on him. “You said you didn’t drink.”

“Not usually,” he said. “But, hey, if your dad’s paying . . .”

Slade raised his eyebrow. “Oh, I am, am I?”

“Well, you did take his money, Dad,” said Rose, a sharp-edged smile in the corner of her mouth. Slade rolled his eyes upwards, and it was like yesterday was just a funny joke. Like nothing bad had happened at all. And when Rose put a stack of cards into Dick’s hands and the bartender set the drink down before him he saw in the panopticon of its crystal sides how he could get used to this, he could stand it, he could, if he had to.

There was an explosion of riotous laughter from the table of old men, and Rose flipped out an ace, grinned viciously, and swept all of Dick’s cards into her pile. “You’re done,” she said, and Dick’s glass clacked against his front two teeth as he swallowed hard and thought, if she asked me now, I’d say not I don’t think so but no, Rose, he’s not coming for me. Not anymore. And this time, he knew that in the quarter-moon of Rose’s exposed face there would be a smile that she couldn’t hide.

A susurrus of fabric and plastic crinkling and Slade held a carton of cigarettes in his raised fist. “I’ll be nearby if you need me,” he said, mostly to Rose. 

Dick watched his retreating back slip out the rear door of the pub and turned to Rose. “You wanna learn how to play Solitaire?”

He left Rose there with a promise to be back soon and stole out the door into the alley. A porch awning on the second story created a small, rain-free apse. Greasy puddles pooled in the slopes and cracks of the stone street. Slade was leaning against the wall, a thin grey cloud of smoke and a gleaming ember eye in its center.

“What, you smoke now, too?” he said. “Really in your rebellious age. What did he do to you, kid?” He tucked the cigarette between his lips and held his hands up to either side of his head, pointing his index fingers straight up to indicate who he was.

Dick crossed his arms and tried to stir up more than one resigned spark of anger, but he was too hot and gauzy from the whiskey. “Shut the fuck up,” he said anyway, surprising himself. No intent, all reflex. Someone said something nasty about Bruce: defend Bruce. “Shut up about him. Don’t bring him up to me ever again.”

Slade’s face was wide-open in surprise. Then he said mildly, “Must have been really bad.” He puffed a coil of smoke around his cigarette, offered it to Dick. Dick shook his head, leaned against the wall beside him.

“You don’t know anything,” he said tiredly. It didn’t matter, not here, not with him, but he felt like he had to say it anyway. “You know, parents usually do better the second time around. Fuck everything up with the first and then learn from all their mistakes and know how to make it right for the next.”

Slade tensed beside him. “You talking about me or him?”

“I’m talking about you.” Dick dragged his hand over half his face, dug his knuckles into the concavity of his cheek until he felt the grooves of his teeth on the other side. “I’m trying to start a fight. Jesus, Slade.”

At that, Slade let out a laugh. “Why?”

“Why? I don’t know, because what else do I know how to do?” 

Some of the humor left Slade’s face. “You are good at it,” he remarked.

Dick eyed him sidelong. From this close, he could see all the parts of Slade he couldn’t see when Slade was Deathstroke. The bristle of white stubble on his jaw, the crow’s feet perched in the corners of his eyes, the curled cowlick of his hair at the back of his head. The watch on his big, hairy wrist, the knob of his wristbone. Dick felt his heartbeat in his temples, the insides of his elbows. Slade caught him looking, turned and blew a puff of smoke directly in his face. Dick leaned in.

Slade leaned back. “What are you doing?”

A coy non-answer sprang to the tip of Dick’s tongue. He pressed it to the roof of his mouth. “You know what I’m doing,” he said.

They stared at each other for a longer unbroken moment. Then a rolling tide of motion: Slade shifting in front of him, leaning into Dick to pin him by the shoulders, then kissing him, startlingly hard. His stubble scraped Dick’s jaw. His mouth ground Dick’s lips into the ridged bottoms of his two front teeth. It took two seconds for Dick’s body to start up like a car back-firing, and then he was kissing back, suddenly overly cognizant of all the saliva pooled in his mouth, the wet weight of Slade’s tongue, the flinty taste of nicotine, their lips meeting and sliding together and apart, suction and pop, like air pushing out of a stiff knuckle, like an explosion wrought miniature, hammer striking gunpowder.

He breathed in hard, nose pressed to Slade’s cheek, and before he could think better of it wriggled his hand between their bodies to palm Slade’s crotch. 

Slade plucked him away by the wrist. “That’s,” he said, “enough.”

“Slade,” said Dick, emblematically.

“You were drinking.”

“I had one drink.”

“You don’t drink. You were drinking.”

Dick felt his expression flatten, the slats of blinds pulling shut. “Slade,” he said again.

“Kid,” Slade countered. Like he hadn’t just kissed him. Like Dick hadn’t just felt him. He released Dick’s wrist and stepped back, leaving a band of shocking cold on Dick’s forearm as he pulled away.

Dick said, “Do you think that I don’t see how you’ve looked at me?”

Slade, lifting the cigarette he hadn’t let go of, paused for a half-second—a catch that may have, on someone else, been a wince.

Now Dick felt that familiar surge of anger. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

Slade’s eyelid twitched. “Go back inside,” he said, and turned away.

…

They were driving through the night, still going south but winnowing a little bit west now. The rain had petered out, finally, leaving the road glossy and foggy with rising wet heat. Dick was driving. He and Slade had not looked at each other once since getting into the car, something that Rose had clearly noticed but was choosing not to comment on in a surprising show of mercy.

He was trying not to think about it.

Rose had her chin in her hand while she stared out the window. She’d taken off her eyepatch, and there was a pinprick of green light reflected in the smudged glass. When Dick glanced in the rearview mirror to check on her, she was rubbing her pinkie finger against the curve of her eye socket.

Dick fiddled with the radio station, Rose slept, and the watery sun unfolded its pale light across the sky. Slade filled the gas tank while Dick and Rose pushed quarters into a vending machine and tore open bags of Fritos and M&Ms. Slade wordlessly took the keys from Dick and got into the driver’s seat. Back on the road, Dick meant to stay awake but passed out despite himself, woke up again to Slade laying on the horn and the sun beating down.

An endless array of red glowing brakelights stretched out before them. They were on a long, multi-laned bridge, braking quickly.

“Traffic?” Dick scooted upwards, his voice cracking. The river on either side of them was a wide, grey sleet of shining water. He squinted his eyes against the glare. Rose tapped him on the shoulder with a water bottle and he took it with a nod.

“Just started,” said Slade.

“You should cut by everyone on the shoulder,” Rose suggested.

“That’s dangerous,” said Dick, “and illegal.”

“Right,” said Rose, “not like being a vigilante.”

“We don’t know what the traffic is for,” said Dick, ignoring that. “If it’s because there was a crash, trying to speed around would be—”

For a second, he didn’t know what had cut him off. Then his body slammed into the taut tension of the seatbelt, his head snapping forward, chin into his chest. A cacophony of popping and crunching rattled through his brain, and he saw their rear windshield turn opaque with a thick webbing of cracks as another car slammed into them from behind.

Their car leaped forward. They hurtled towards the back end of the Honda Civic in front of them. Dick threw his elbows up over his face, and they collided.

…

Dicks’s head pounded. He peeled his eyes open, took stock of himself. He couldn’t have been out for longer than ten, twenty seconds. The deflated white skin of the airbag was lying in his lap. The front of their car was crunched up like an accordion’s ribs, smashed into the equally destroyed tail of the Honda, which was half-turned sideways and had its nose knifed into the side of a blue beemer. Alarms were blaring, headlights flashing, smoke curling up in spiral plumes. Constellations of glass and torn metal scored the asphalt.

Dick lifted a hand to his face. It was shaking—his hand. His face was wet and sticky, from his eyebrow to his jaw. Blood gumming his eyelashes. He blinked hard.

“Rose,” he said. He wriggled in his seat, wrestling with the stiff arm of the seatbelt. The backseat was intact except for the broken glass puncturing the vinyl seats. Rose was upright, blinking, dazed.

“She’s fine,” said Slade. He was struggling with something, but he didn’t look hurt. The driver’s side window was shattered, but anything that could have cut him must have already healed itself. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” 

“Your head.” Slade’s hand shot out, his thumb sweeping into the corner of Dick’s bloody eye and over his eyelid.

“I’m fine,” Dick insisted. “The glass, I think.” His seatbelt finally came unlatched. Now he could see that the dash of the car had been crushed down onto Slade’s lap by the force of the front-end impact, trapping him in the driver’s seat. Slade had his hands in between his thighs and the bottom of the wheel, the muscles in his forearms tensing as he shifted it incrementally upwards. 

Dick peered out his window. The car they’d hit had dived sidelong into the driver’s side of the car beside it. Its alarm blaring, its windows a netting of shattered glass just barely holding its frame. Rosettes of smoke unfurled from under the crunched lip of the hood. 

He fumbled for the doorhandle. It didn’t open. He threw his shoulder into it until it did and he tumbled out into the street, his head spinning. “Grayson!” Slade called, but Dick ignored him, pushing himself to his feet and hurrying towards the t-boned car.

The driver of the car in front of them, a young blond woman, was standing half out of her car, her phone held to her ear. She looked fine, and she caught his eye and mouthed ambulance, pointing to her phone. Dick gave her a nod, wished he didn’t, slowed down as his vision doubled and spun. His neck felt numb and hot at once, and he thought he might throw up. Whiplash, if he was lucky. Concussion, if he wasn’t.

He pushed it out of his mind and circled around the car, yanking open the passenger side door. The teenage girl inside looked at him with wide eyes. Her hands, where they gripped the seatbelt at her chest, were shaking.

“You okay?” he asked, glancing past her. The driver was another girl. She’d been cut by broken glass somewhere on her head and her face was vivisected by thin streams of blood as she blinked around dazedly. The interior structure of the car had held up, so she was probably fine, but she looked, admittedly, pretty bad. 

“I’m—I’m,” the girl in the passenger seat said.

“You’re fine,” Dick said. “It’s okay. Feel pain anywhere?”

“N—no.”

“Can you move your legs? Can you stand? Okay, take my hand. It’s okay.”

Dick helped her clamber out of the car. He wouldn’t have moved her without paramedics here, but he was worried about the smoke from the hood. The girl held his hand so tight he felt his pulse in his fingertips, and it put a fist in his throat all of the sudden. This was the kind of grip people trusted themselves to him with when he was saving them, but that was when he was Nightwing, or Robin, and they knew him, in some way. This was just Dick. Just some random guy in a four-car pileup holding out a hand and saying he could help. And she took it without question.

A horrible longing pierced through him, so bright and fierce it nearly repulsed him. And then in a second it was gone, because a hand was grabbing his arm and yanking him away. “Move,” said Slade.

The jolt of motion made his stomach lurch and he stumbled down to his knees. Slade snagged the collar of his shirt, like he thought Dick was going to crawl away. Over his head, Slade said, nonsensically, “You too. Come on.”

“One second,” Rose snapped. “Here. Take this.” Her black and white sneakers darted into view.

“You got the keys?”

“Yeah. It’s this one.”

Slade grabbed Dick under the armpits and hauled him to his feet. In the distance a siren wailed, long and thin. Slade pushed him into the backseat of a sedan, the engine growled and coughed, and the car lurched forwards. Dick rolled over on the seat and looked at a cross on a long beaded string hung from the rearview mirror, rocking wildly from side to side as Slade jerked the car onto the shoulder of the road and pressed the gas, and said, “Did you steal someone’s car?”

“Put your seatbelt on and shut up,” said Slade. “You’re concussed.”

“Daddy,” Rose gasped, just before the beige interior lit up red and blue. Another siren whined, obnoxiously loud and close behind.

“Shit,” said Slade.

“You stole a car,” Dick pointed out, twisting to look out the rearview window. A single cop cruiser was chasing them.

“You wasted time,” Slade replied. “What the hell were you even doing?”

“People were hurt. I was helping.”

“You are concussed.”

“I’m fine. I’ve been concussed before. I could have—”

“And you,” he interrupted, and Dick was confused until he saw that Slade was glowering at Rose over the center console. There was a thin red cut on her cheek. She clenched and unclenched her knuckles around the middle of her seatbelt. “You know better than that.”

“I know, Daddy,” she said.

Slade’s eyes flicked between the road and the rearview mirror. “Rose,” he said, “get me my gun.”

“No,” said Dick. They both looked at him in the mirror. “You can’t kill them.”

“You’re gonna stop me?”

“It would be stupid to kill them.”

“It would be stupid to let ourselves get arrested.”

“Then let me do it.” Silence fell swiftly. The red and blue lights rolled around the interior of the car. Dick clenched his jaw and said, “Rose, give me my backpack.”

She handed it to him and stayed angled around to watch as he withdrew the Mark II and snapped the magazine into place. He knew how to hold it the cop way, all careful and intentional lines. He blinked until his vision settled. He rolled down the window and the wind tunneled inside.

He wasn’t worried about making this shot. Even if his hands were a little unsteady, his head still pounding. He had good accuracy and a lot of practice with projectiles, usually while moving at high speeds. He wasn’t worried about that. What he was worried about was hearing the gun go off.

Rose said, “Come on, Renegade.”

Dick hooked his shoulder out the window and stared down the nose of the gun. He shot once, missed, shot a second time and hit, the tire exploding outwards, the cruiser veering into the guard rail and screeching to a halt, the hot gun kicking back into his hand, his shoulder, and him, closing his eyes, ears ringing and nose stinging and the pain in his head beating like its own heart. 

…

They drove through the rest of the day, detouring briefly north and then creeping back onto their route southwest. Squat, orderly houses turning into curving roads thronged with thick-limbed trees into the flat expanse of the highway. After a few hours Dick peeled himself off the backseat and Rose said, “Dude, are you done freaking out?” and he said, “I’m not freaking out. I’m concussed,” and tried to lay back down. But Slade pulled them over on the shoulder and told him to get in the front.

“You can’t sleep,” he said. “Your head.”

“Aw, you worried about me?” Dick said, but it lacked the light air he’d been going for. Slade just fixed him with a cold look. Dick slid into the passenger seat with a shiver, pulled the seatbelt out far and let it snap against his chest as its slack length rappelled back up.

Slade turned the key, then said, “Clean your face up before we have to stop somewhere. You look freaky.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Here,” said Rose, scooting forward to offer a blue plastic package to him. “I have makeup wipes.”

The bright acidic smell of the wipes made his head feel worse, but it did the trick. The blood had come from a cut in his forehead that was long but shallow. “Where’s the first aid kit?” he said, balling up the wipes and stuffing them into his pocket.

There was a brief, corrugating silence.

“I gave it,” said Rose. “I gave it to those girls.”

Dick stared at the back of her head. Neither she nor Slade said anything else, but Dick recontextualized everything that had happened after Slade had grabbed him by those girls’ car. It probably didn’t even matter, with the ambulances on their way, but still. She had done it.

“Oh,” he said. He wound his fist tight and pressed it hard into his abdomen. He tried to catch Rose’s eye in the rearview mirror, but she wouldn’t look at him.

…

The motel they stopped at that night had a pool. They smelled it before they saw it, the sharp tang of chlorine, as soon as they got out of the car. Dick’s head had finally settled, so he joined Rose in eyeing it interestedly over the chain link fence while Slade checked in. Slade came back with only two keys, but Dick just resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He had a different fight to pick tonight.

Leaning on the fence between the parking lot and the pool, Rose turned to Slade with a wide eye. “Can we go swimming, Daddy?”

Slade gave her a stoic onceover, then Dick one as well. “Do what you want,” he said, and trudged away.

Rose’s face fractured. It was the outcome she wanted but clearly not the way she wanted it. Dick nudged her shoulder. “You got a swimsuit?”

“No.”

“Well, swimming in clothes is always more fun, anyway. Come on, let's go.”

They dropped their bags on the concrete. The pool was small, avocado-shaped and translucent green from lights burning along its inner sides. There were three once-white folding chairs arranged around it. They kicked out of their shoes and socks, and Rose complained that if she couldn’t take her shirt off he shouldn’t be allowed to take off his, so they got in the pool nearly completely clothed. The water was a pure shock of cold that made his head pang again briefly in sympathy. His shirt billowed around him underwater and stuck to his skin when he came up. Rose waded along, one hand gripping the lip of the pool, the other holding her hair up in a snarl. 

“Hey,” he said, curling his knees up towards his chest to tread water. “What you did, earlier. That was nice of you.”

Rose paused. “I don’t know why I did it,” she said tonelessly. “It was stupid.”

“It wasn’t.”

She threw her arm up with a splash. “What does it matter anyway?” she snapped. Dick straightened up, startled by her ferocity. “You’re gonna do what he wants. I’m gonna do what he wants. He always get whatever he fucking wants!” She dropped her hair and splashed towards the deep end. 

“Hey, whoa,” Dick called, swimming slowly after her. She reached the far end of the pool and clung to the lip again, hooking her elbows over the edge. He floated beside her, suddenly awkward. She so rarely expressed such vitriolic disagreement with Slade. She had never even said a bad word about him giving her that kryptonite eye, nothing besides a fairly minor smidge of wariness.

“Rose,” he said. “I’m gonna fix this. You know that, right?” He touched her shoulder so she would look at him, then pointed to his own eye. “I promise. I’m gonna fix it, no matter what.”

Rose took a deep breath that trembled in her shoulders. Her face twisted. “You think I’m just a stupid, silly little girl.”

Dick blinked, thrown once again. “What?”

“You think I’m a stupid kid who can’t make her own decisions. Well, news flash, Dick.” She had, it seemed, figured out how to put just enough emphasis on his name that it sounded like she meant it in the less polite way. “I’m not Grant. I’m not Joey. And believe it or not, I’m not, fucking, blinded by—I mean I—” She threw her fists up again, a noise of frustration tearing through her, droplets of water sending ripples through the pool water. “He’s my dad, and I know what he is,” she said. “I know. You think you’re so sanctimonious, saving the poor little girl. I don’t need your saving and I don’t want it.”

She pushed off the pool wall and kicked away from him again. The green water churned. Dick watched the eddies of foam form and break. He pressed his palms against the concrete and lifted himself out of the pool, turning to sit over the edge with his legs still in the water. Rose had reached the shallow end again and stood with her arms crossed over her chest and her sodden t-shirt sticking to her back. 

“I’m not a victim,” she said calmly. “I’m not a normal person.”

“Okay,” said Dick.

“I’m a villain.”

“I know, Rose.”

She sniffed. “You don’t seem like you do.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m not going to say sorry for believing that there’s something in you that is capable of change. But I’m sorry I made you feel like I think you’re a dumb kid.”

“Don’t,” Rose said. “You’re not sorry. It’s who you are. It’s so . . . ugh. It’s so annoying. You’re so good and righteous and annoying. Even when you’re being bad you’re still good. When I’m trying to be good, I’m still bad. And what’s going to actually happen afterwards? What then? You go back? You just go back and forget about all of this?”

“I don’t know exactly. But it’s not what you think. There’s no back. Not anymore. Not for me.”

She whirled around. The water cast its green glow on the underside of her chin. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m telling you the truth. I made a choice when I decided to do this. The kind of choice you don’t walk away from. I’m here, Rose. I’m really here.”

Rose exhaled sharply. “God, just shut up, Dick.” She never usually called him by his name. It kept hitting him like a fist to the chest. “Were you always this annoying or was it part of the vigilante training regimen?”

A laugh burst out of him, thankful for the break in the tension. “No, I was plenty annoying before Bruce got ahold of me. I used to—ah, nevermind.” He slipped back into the pool. The water closed over his head, bubbles running their tiny fingertips up his face. Sometimes he felt like he tricked himself, letting a good memory of the past sour like milk left out overnight. He would teach his gymnastics class of tiny students how to tuck their heads down when they somersaulted and suddenly he would be imagining the terror twisting their faces as they watched their parents hurtle towards the ground. Or Tim would unknowingly echo something Jason used to do and he would catch himself thinking, how long do I have left with him now? 

He came back up and the incognate sounds of midnight rushed to him, insects chirping, hotel’s vending machine humming, water slapping against the smooth sides of the pool. He swam around while Rose waded in the shallow end. She pushed her eyepatch up to the crown of her head and rubbed her eye. He didn’t bother chastising her; it was the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere and there was no one else in the world right now but them.

“I used to have this idea, I don’t know where from,” she said abruptly. The surface of the water caught her voice and stretched it into an echo. “That my mom would always have been my mom, no matter who my father was. She could have had me with any other man and I would still have been me. Would still have been hers. I don’t know, maybe that’s just how you feel when you’re a daughter. Or when you spend the beginning of your life with her and not with him.” She shrugged, but her shoulders stayed drawn up towards her ears.

“Now, of course,” she went on, “I think I was so wrong. There’s no way a me who wasn’t born to him would be like this. There’s no part of me that’s not because of him.”

“Not true. There are lots of parts of you that aren’t him,” said Dick.

She scoffed. “Please.”

“Really, Rose . . . you’re funny. God knows you didn’t get that from him.” A flash of a smile, there and then gone. “And you’re empathetic. You might not think so, or you might think that’s bad, but you are and it’s not. It’s good. You’re good.” He cleared his throat. “You didn’t get that from him, either. And there are probably parts of you that you got from your mom, and you don’t even realize it. Things that you think are yours alone, but they were hers, too.” 

Rose shrugged, avoiding his eyes.

“You have to,” he said haltingly, aware that they were skirting around something, shying away from it, but not brave enough to be the one to face it. “You have to just believe it.”

She skimmed her palms over the quiet surface of the water. She reached up and slowly slid her eyepatch back into place, her hand caging her good eye from view. “Can we go inside now,” she said. 

They dripped their way into the other motel room and changed. Dick felt as drained as if they’d just gone forty-five rounds in hand-to-hand combat, and he hadn’t even yet had the fight he meant to have tonight. He collapsed on the foot of the bed while Rose used the bathroom. He heard the shower faucet stutter on, and then she peeked around the edge of the door.

“Dick?” He pushed up on his elbows to meet her eye. “He’s never going to let you go,” she said.

Dick blinked. In his mind the hotel walls rippled, spiraled, the plastic-sheeted paintings sliding sideways, the carpeted hallways twisting into familiar velvet rooms. “I know,” he said eventually. 

After she closed the door, Dick gathered up his things, sidled up to the next door over, and knocked. Slade let him in silently. Dick dropped his bag and stretched his wet clothes out on the radiator. Aside from the TV stand, there was no other furniture in the sparse room.

“Okay.” He hung his last sock over the peeling paint of the radiator and straightened up. His conversation with Rose was spinning around his head. Slade was watching a baseball game on the TV, the stoic plane of his face reflecting flashes of color and movement. “Slade. We need to talk.”

“Didn’t talk enough with Rose?” Slade said.

Dick refrained, with great benevolence, from rolling his eyes. God, these two. They were almost worse than him and Bruce. “Okay. I don’t know how you expect me to teach your kid without ever talking to her, but alright. Fine. You know what, I don’t want to talk anymore.” He threw his arms out. “Fight me.”

Slade picked up the remote and lowered the volume. “Be serious.”

“I am serious. If I’m your apprentice, you should train me, too, right? So come on. Let’s train.”

“You didn’t say train,” Slade said. “You said fight.” 

Dick shrugged.

“You’re concussed.” Even as he said it, he slid his legs off the side of the bed and stood. 

“I’m not concussed. Just bad whiplash, I think. But I’m good now.”

“Good.”

“Good,” Dick echoed. An implacable riot of anger was rising fast in him. “I’m telling you I’m fine. I’m proving that I’m in. When are you gonna give me a real fucking gun?”

Slade’s mouth thinned. His fist snapped back. Dick blocked the first blow with his forearm; he missed the second one. Then his elbows were holding him off the floor, the left side of his jaw pulsing with dull pain. He tongued between his teeth and the inside of his cheek, tasted metal, grinned and watched a slow teardrop of blood stretch between his lip and the dusty green carpet.

Slade said, “I’ll give you one when you’re worth one.”

“When is that? Haven’t I done enough?”

Slade tilted his head. “You could have shot that cop. You chose not to.”

Dick scoffed, climbing back to his feet. “You wanted me to shoot through a windshield to attempt a head shot between two moving cars? Are you insane?”

“You can do anything, can’t you, boy wonder?”

“You want me to kill someone.”

“I thought that was obvious.”

“That’ll prove it to you?” He felt like laughing. His throat spasmed, squeezed.

Slade narrowed his eye, then nodded slowly.

Dick held up his fist, opened his hand. “Slade, I already did.” The alarm clock ticked softly. On the TV, the announcers talked over each other, their voices notching higher and higher. “I killed someone. I did it. I did it before this. I—I killed Blockbuster. He knew my identity. He blew up my apartment, got a bunch of people killed at my old circus, just . . . he wouldn’t stop. There was someone else there,” he winced around it gracelessly. Slade was silent. “And she told me to move out of the way so she could shoot him. So I. Moved out of the way. And she shot him.”

“Who?” Slade asked instantly.

Dick shook his head. He pulled a screen down in his mind, precluded himself from thinking any farther down that night and the days in its wake. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. I helped her kill him. I already did it.” 

Slade caught his wrist. “So you really do have nothing to lose,” he said quietly. “Then, why so resistant? Still holding out hope that the big bad Bat will take you back, if you beg for forgiveness hard enough?”

Dick jerked his wrist, but Slade didn’t let go, so they took one step backwards-forwards together, a four-legged beast. “No,” Dick said. “No, I—” He backed into the wall. The TV speakers poured noise into his right ear. Slade’s face was abalone-shell white in the dark of the motel room, his eye febrile, bottomless.

“I don’t want to,” said Dick. “Kill people. I don’t want to be a killer.” By which he really meant: I don’t want there to be a part of me that does.

Dick knew he was capable of it. He had been capable of it for most of his life. But he always remembered it most clearly in the worst circumstances. Like: thinking of Jason’s body laid out in his casket. How he knew, now, what pulverized bones looked like, straightened into neat lines under bloodless skin, pulped flesh reinflated with formaldehyde, limbs stitched back together with thick black floss. Like: the collapsed rubble of his apartment building, the burning tendrils of the circus tent, the miasma of smoke and charred bodies smothering the air. And Tarantula standing in the stairway, feet planted, elbows locked, muzzle of the gun like an unblinking eye looking straight through him to Blockbuster. Dick thinking nothing, one long wordless gasp of static, and then: finally. 

Slade’s other hand rose. Dick wished Slade would hit him again and also wished he felt more disappointment when Slade didn’t, and instead clasped that hand around the back of Dick’s neck. “I can make you want it,” he said.

Dick shook his head again. “Slade,” he said, but it didn’t sound like he meant no. 

“Nothing,” said Slade, very seriously, “no god or man in this world, can give you your innocence back. You understand that, don’t you?” At some point their grip had shifted, and it was Dick holding onto his arm, now. “No amount of repentance will guarantee you forgiveness. That is not how this works.”

“I know,” said Dick, barely more than a whisper.

Slade squeezed his hand. His thumb in the valley between two peaks of Dick’s vertebrae. He could snap Dick’s neck, if Dick didn’t slip out of his grip first. An electric current rippled up Dick’s spine, a warning alarm of danger, and with it, always, the excitement, the inexorable dauntless thrill. 

“But I,” Slade said, “don’t care. I don’t need you innocent, kid. I don’t need you good. I just need you to want it. And then,” he slid his hand around Dick’s neck and dug his thumb into the soft side of Dick’s throat until Dick’s pulse jumped to meet it, “I’ll gladly give you a real fucking gun.”

Dick surged forward and kissed him, teeth-first. Slade pushed back; Dick’s mouth throbbed where Slade had just punched him, and he felt a burst of hot blood as someone’s canines caught the split edge of his lip. A small, dizzy part of Dick waited for Slade to stop him again, but he didn’t. He put both hands around Dick’s face and kissed him as demandingly as he did everything else.

Dick went forward and Slade backed up. They stopped against the foot of the bed and Dick gripped Slade’s shoulders and pushed him down, then got down between his knees.

“Grayson,” Slade said. His hand shot out and grabbed a fistful of damp hair at the back of Dick’s head. Dick tugged against it until his scalp stung.

“Shut up,” he breathed. Having Slade’s hands on him like this was both sickening and invigorating. The logical side of his brain was experiencing its own four-car pileup, nothing but stuttering, screeching flashes of motion and the bitter, smoky tang of ambergris and cigarettes. He fumbled with the button and zipper of Slade’s trousers for a few seconds and then blinked owlishly up at him. “Help me out here?” 

Slade huffed, half a laugh, snatched his hands and moved them aside to undo his pants. He smelled like calone and salt here. An ant-trail of coarse curly hair marched down his abdomen beneath the elastic line of his boxers. Dick ran his thumbs down it and then wrapped his hand around Slade. Slade shifted forwards and touched his thumb to the tender underside of Dick’s left eye, a heavy whoosh of breath going out of him fast. Dick mirrored him, inhale, exhale, then took Slade in his mouth.

Slade said,  “Grayson—” His grip in Dick’s hair turned a little mean, and Dick let himself be pulled away, a shiver skidding down the knobs of his spine. A spiderwebsilk string of saliva stretched between them until he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

“Can we not talk?” he said.

“You?” said Slade, a little too incredulously. “You don’t want to talk?”

“Yeah, I’m full of surprises.” He pointedly looked down. “You don’t want to talk either.”

Slade’s fist tightened in his hair again, to pain and then something past it, some immovable place that might be comfort.

“Fine,” said Slade, with a small, mirthless smile. “Let’s not talk.”

He guided Dick to him again and Dick opened his mouth. Pressed forward, modulating his breathing, until the end of Slade’s cock was nosing into the roof of his mouth and his sinuses were pinching tight, tears building behind his eyes. Let Slade kind of take over when he wanted to, moving his head, moving into his mouth, Dick pushing his tongue against him and swallowing hard when he had to, everything getting wet and hot and unstoppable. His mouth stung, his split lip torn open again, the cut leaving a thin pink-saliva trail up and down Slade’s cock that made a shock of dizziness wring through him every time he blinked his eyes open to see it. Slade breathing heavily above him, Dick’s fingernails digging into Slade’s knee, which suddenly moved under him, and then an atomizing weight between his legs.

Dick lost his rhythm, choked, entirely by accident, suddenly pinned into his body where the ridged rubber sole of Slade’s boot was pressing down onto his crotch. He squeezed his eyes shut and shifted his knees open wider, his whole body going warm, drunk-warm, half-asleep-warm.

“Jesus,” Slade said, puffing a laugh that should have made Dick angry but only made his stomach tighten and yeah, Jesus, there was something wrong with him. Slade muttered something else that he didn’t hear, and cupped his hand around the back of Dick’s skull. He held him in place, thrust forward once, twice, and came. Slade’s chest was heaving and the v of his shirt collar was splotchy with sweat, his body giving up the kind of exertion that Dick could usually only wring out of him from several rounds of no-holds-barred combat. Dick’s heart was beating so fast. He steadied Skade’s softening cock with his hand and slid backwards slowly. Slade watched his eyes jump around, then leaned forward and stamped his thumb over the sealed line of Dick’s lips.

“Swallow,” he said. When Dick did, Slade’s fingers chased the convulsion down his throat. Dick glanced up, met his gaze for a sliver of a second and then hid his face in the bunched up fabric at the inside of Slade’s knee while Slade pushed his foot down incrementally harder.

“Fuck,” he said. Blood rushed to his cheeks.

“Thought we weren’t talking,” Slade said. More composed than Dick, but still winded. 

“Fuck you,” Dick said, his hands spasming around Slade’s knees. His body was getting its wires crossed. His heart still thought he was fighting.

“Uh huh,” said Slade. He tilted his foot, bringing his heel down hard. Dick gasped, a bolt of pleasure splitting quickly into pain. “That why you’re getting yourself off on my boot right now?”

Dick thunked his forehead into Slade’s leg. Talc and sweat, and the bitter tang of Dick’s own breath, thick with his blood and Slade’s come. “Please—”

“What? Please get you off? Please let you come?”

“Shut up,” Dick groaned. Slade was as still as stone as Dick grinded his hips against his boot. He could feel the corrugations of the sole even through his jeans.

“I don’t think that’s what you want to say,” Slade said. “Try again.”

“Slade—” Sweat was beading at his temples. The muscles in his thighs were starting to twitch. He felt slightly feverish and partially insane.

“Dick,” said Slade, his voice low and dropping lower, and he held Dick firmly in place as Dick shuddered. “Come on. Be a good boy and ask me for permission.”

Dick muffled his moan in Slade’s trouser leg, feathery bursts of color exploding behind his tightly-shut eyelids. The walls of the motel room collapsed, the curtains unspooling, the roof buckling brick by brick to reveal the pitchblack tapestry of night. He could be anywhere. He could be anything. And some part of him he couldn’t name said, it’s done already, it’s already done.

“Fuck,” he said, “Slade. Please. Make me—make me come.”

The damp heat of Slade’s breath brushed his ear. “Go on,” he said, stepping down, down, down. Dick’s hands curled into fists, then let go.

…

The motel had a very nice, albeit modest, complimentary breakfast assortment. Dick wandered around the platters laid out on the lobby counter, bookmarked by a shuffling older man in a powder grey suit and a sleepy-eyed young mother with a toddler balanced on her hip. He snagged a coffee and a juicebox, spooned some yogurt into a bowl, and sat at one of the circular tables arranged in the breakfast nook.

He was scraping his plastic spoon across the bottom of the bowl when Rose came around the corner, the sleeves of her sweatshirt pulled down over her hands, her left cheek lined with pillow-creases. “Morning, sunshine,” said Dick, laughing when she glowered back at him. He finished his yogurt while she puttered around the counter and came back with a plate of thin, syrupy pancakes and a paper cup of black coffee.

“Did you get any sleep?” she asked, sipping her coffee.

Dick took an extra slow final bite of yogurt and said, “A bit. Felt every spring through the mattress, but I’ve had worse.” He had, first, laid on the carpet for long enough that Slade had left him there and gotten into bed alone. Then he’d peeled himself up and showered, and it had seemed ridiculous not to just share the bed at that point, so he’d crawled in beside Slade, gingerly, and they slept without touching. Slade had still been asleep when Dick got up this morning.

Rose made a face, rolled her shoulder. “Like what?”

“Like sleeping on a fire escape. In the rain.”

“Dude.”

“I can’t say I always make the best decisions.” He chewed on the straw of his juicebox. Rose sawed her pancakes into triangles. The toddler at the other table was covered in syrup up to his elbows, the mother blowing on the surface of her coffee and murmuring to him absently.

He finished his juice and crumpled the box, and when he looked around Rose was watching the kid too, her curled knuckles rubbing at the crease where her eyepatch met her face.

She caught him looking and dropped her hand. “What happened to your face?” she asked mildly.

He touched his fingertip to his scabbed over split lip. “Just the crash.”

“Uh huh.” She narrowed her eye, and Dick felt a quick guilty flush as he realized he was doing what she’d accused him of last night: treating her like a stupid kid.

But he was not going to start making up for that by telling her things she did not need to know about her father. Or him. “It’s fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.” Rose’s sour expression soured even more. She half-turned in her chair, her fingers drifting back to her cheekbone.

Dick rolled his dented juicebox between his hands. “Is it bothering you?” 

“It’s whatever.”

“It’s really not. If it’s bothering you more, we should—”

Rose leaped to her feet. The chair clattered to the linoleum floor with a clang that had everyone’s heads swinging towards them. “You are so fucking unbelievable,” she said.

Dick held up his hands, pried them apart and slid them together. “Rose—”

She stepped away, spun back, and leaned over the table, jabbing a finger at his chest. “Don’t,” she said, “do it for me.”

She whirled around, and no sooner had she disappeared around the corner than Slade appeared in her place. He watched her stormful retreat before looking back at Dick sitting opposite the knocked over chair, his hands still held uselessly up before him. Thinking: okay, is it done, then. Is it done.

“Well,” said Dick. “Good morning.”

…

An excruciatingly long hour of silence in the car. Dick was twitchy and awkward in the driver’s seat, but at least he had the excuse of funneling his attention into driving. Slade and Rose said nothing to each other. It reminded him of how Slade had looked at Rose when they played cards at the bar: nearly-spooked, wrong-footed. He could bark orders, give corrections, check in—he could talk easily enough with Ravager. But with Rose: silence.

Finally, as Slade directed Dick to veer off the highway, he said, “We need to ditch the car. It’s likely been reported stolen by now. Cops’ll find us.”

“And I can only imagine your solution is stealing another car.” Slade gave him a dour look through the rearview mirror that Dick countered with a bitter smile.

“No,” Slade said. “We can walk from here.”

Dick did a double take. “We’re that close?”

“Mhm.”

“Really?”

“Careful,” said Slade. “Almost sounds like you don’t trust me.” It was phrased like a joke but there was no humor in it. A hinge of uncertainty swung open in Dick’s chest.

They pulled into a gas station. Dick spun the keys around his finger as he stood, stretched, cracked his back and his neck. Slade nudged the passenger door closed and said, “If you want any more food, speak now.”

Rose shrugged, leaning against the car and crossing her arms. Slade stared at her for a moment longer before he sighed silently and turned aside.

Dick hesitated a moment, then trailed Slade into the store. He peered at picked over stands of chips and pretzels and wandered into the freezer aisle near the bathroom, where Slade was staring intensely at a line of energy drinks. Dick snagged a bottle and then Slade’s jacket sleeve. “Slade,” he said. “I—we—” 

The look Slade gave Dick was so impersonal they could have been strangers who brushed shoulders and bounced off each other in the street. Dick didn’t know if the emotion squeezing a hand around his heart was relief.

“Nevermind,” he finished.

Slade smiled with half his face. “Go wait in the car,” he said, and disappeared behind the bathroom door.

Dick stood by the freezer for a moment longer, staring after him, wordless. Whatever he had done, whatever Slade saw in him, he couldn’t be sure of—he had not yet met that version of him that Slade wanted, no matter how hard Slade tried to convince him it existed. Something else in him had always pulled him back. But he knew now that it was not worth pretending he had never glimpsed it. 

He backtracked out of the store. The little bell over the doorframe tinkled faintly. He realized he was still holding the Gatorade bottle, unpaid for, and his hand convulsed around it. Blue, his favorite. The red Gatorade he’d bought when he’d got that phone was Tim’s favorite flavor, which he had grabbed only because he had been thinking about him.

He looked back through the glass door papered with peeling ads. He had maybe two minutes, maybe three. Not so much a chance, but maybe a headstart. 

He turned towards the car, where Rose was leaning on the hood, arms crossed over her chest, looking as sullen and bored as any other teenage girl stuck on a roadtrip with her dad but in every way as unmistakable as the black slash dividing her face, and thought, if this doesn’t pull me back, nothing ever will again.

He marched towards the car. Rose straightened as he drew near. “Rose,” he said, quietly and tersely. She twitched towards him, shoulder-first. And he outstretched his hand, in his upraised palm, the car keys.

Rose stared at them, understanding immediately. “No,” she said. “You can’t.”

“Rose—”

“No, I’m still here. I’m still here so you can’t—”

“I—”

“I would have run away,” she blurted out. “I would have run away, but then you said you would stay if he—and I wanted you to—so I stayed. So that you would stay.”

Dick fell silent. And he understood, for the first time, the actual boundaries of the covenant he had struck. The palimpsest the two of them made, overlaid over each other, erased and recreated and faintly still there. The deal wasn’t just with Slade. It was with her, too.

Don’t leave him, it demanded. Let him fix this. I will stay, if you stay, too.

He curled his fingers around the keys until the teeth bit his palm. “Come with me,” he said. 

“Dick,” she said. Which wasn’t no.

Dick threw open the driver’s side door. He jabbed the key towards the ignition, and the teeth scrabbled over the smooth surface of the console and then sank in. Rose opened the passenger side door and stopped, one black and white sneaker balanced on the threshold, the ends of her shoelaces caked in mud.

The bell on the gas station door rang out. “Come on,” he said, and tried to mean everything all at once: I have to do this and I don’t think I can do it without you and it doesn’t matter the bad things you’ve done because you wanted to do the good things too and I’m sorry he loves you and is going to kill even you, I’m sorry he loves you so much he can’t see anything past it and I’m sorry you love him too.

Rose threw herself into the car and slammed her door shut, and Dick put the car in reverse and stomped the gas pedal down to the floor and as they screeched out of the gas station Rose whirled around to peer out the rear windshield and demanded, “Did you hear that? Did he call for me?” and Dick said, “I don’t know, Rose. I didn’t hear anything.”

…

After their falling out, if it could even be called something so toothless as that, Dick had kind of thought that was it. Jason had died. Bruce was unreachable. Dick had left his keys in the manor and walked away thinking he had, at last, found the part of himself that knew disenchantment. He was done circling around Bruce’s gravitational force. From now on, they would be nothing more than strangers, passersby who had merely bumped shoulders on the street.

But then, when Dick had been going to sleep in New York that night, he had squeezed his eyes shut and wished, very clearly and very hard, that he was a kid again, eight-years-old and ignorant of everything he knew now. He drew it up in his mind’s eye, shedding each age and burden like layers of skin, peeling himself back to the clean, simple shape of a skeleton, the grey clump of ash where his heart was that knew only how to long for him and probably always would.

They drove down roads hemmed in by leafy green trees, flat yellow hills, sheer rock faces hugged by mesh safety netting. Dick’s heart was still thumping when Rose yanked her eyepatch off and asked, “So what now? This car is still stolen. The cops are probably after us already, especially since we stopped at that gas station.”

Dick eyed the rising needle of the speedometer and the waning one of the gas gauge. “Yep,” he said.

“But . . . if they catch us, they’ll know. Everything we did.”

“Someone should know.”

“But they’ll arrest us.”

“It’s okay,” said Dick. “They’ll come after us, yeah, but they won’t catch us. He’ll find us first.”

Rose’s eyebrows bent upwards. “Deathstroke?”

“No.” Dick pressed on the gas. His fist clunked onto the center console between them, and he said, “Not him.”

In the corner of his eye, in the doorway of his memory, he saw Bruce in the passenger seat, whiteknuckling the overhead handle while Dick leaned so close to the steering wheel the tip of his nose brushed the leather as they made small spasmodic circles around the driveway. And then, when Dick had focused too much on the clutch and forgot to steer, looking up just in time to see the fence of tree trunks growing larger in the windshield, Bruce had grabbed onto the wheel and jerked it hard, wresting back control and turning them quickly away from collision. Deflated, Dick said, I had it, which he didn’t, and Bruce, amused, said, Did you?

“But,” said Rose, sounding, for the first time, scared, “but . . .”

“It’s okay,” he assured her, not knowing if he believed it, knowing it was the only thing he had to believe in. The engine hissed. The road spun underneath their tires.

Rose shuffled her feet and said, “Can you put the radio on?”

…

When the orange light in the dash clicked on in the blue evening they parked at a truck stop, between a copse of scraggly trees and the black belt of the highway. Dick rifled through his backpack, produced the Mark II, and stuck it nose down in the center console, where anyone might glimpse it through the window. Rose watched him do it, her fingers twisting together in her lap, the same way she’d watched him run through several red lights and past every stop sign. He rubbed his hands over his face and she, apropos of nothing except maybe Dick’s internal monologue, which was mostly what the hell do I do about her eye now, said, “I don’t need him to take it out.”

“What?”

Rose’s eye beamed its tiny green light into the dark inside of the car. “The hard part was putting it in. The easy part is taking it out. That’s it: you just take it out.”

Dick wanted to scoff but all the air fled his lungs. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. He could have done it all along. You could have done it all along.”

“Why didn’t,” he started. Rose’s face shuttered, her shoulders rising. Dick’s fingernails were biting into his palms. He forced his hands to uncurl. “That—that aside, I mean, how can you be sure that that’s true? That it’s okay?”

She shrugged, her gaze sliding away from him. “Because I did it once before.” She bent down and rifled through her backpack, then remerged with a small, thin knife. Her mouth was a matching flat line.

It felt imperative, suddenly, that he say stop. And then no matter what happened after, it was her decision. No matter what, he would have tried. He would say it. And then she would take the knife and cleave them anyway. Slice the scaly armored pelt of responsibility away from him. And it would be Rose’s choice alone. Rose, alone.

“Rose,” he said. Which wasn’t stop. 

She lifted her hand and slid the blade between the greyish hard matter of her kryptonite eye and the wet bright line of her bottom eyelid. There was a catch—she flinched, and then shoved it in. A tiny bead of blood bloomed on her eyelid and burst, spreading tiny red tributaries down her face. Dick folded his sleeve over his wrist, raised his hand, and wiped her cheek.

She looked at him, the malachite glow of the kryptonite trapped in the pane of the blade. Her chest was palpitating fast, but her eye was steady. “I have it,” she said. 

“I know,” said Dick.

They held each other’s gaze for a moment longer. Then she said, “Just tell me when it’s over.”

She twisted her wrist hard. There was a faint grinding sound, rocks shifting against each other, the start of an avalanche. She jerked away from him, her face turning towards the window, a small splatter of blood arcing across her jeans—and then a pop of air, a balloon bursting, a lightbulb fritzing out. 

The green and grey eye rolled out of its socket and plopped to the floor, trailing a short tendon of braided wires from its back. It glowed like a heart might glow, a tiny fist of a heart pulsing in asthmatic ripples on the car mat, a heart that rolled knuckle-over-knuckle towards the door and banged against her sneaker softly, like a knock. Like an invocation, or a prayer said over the lattice of interlocked fingers: something unanswered.

Rose scooped up the kryptonite eye and put it in the center console beside the Gatorade bottle and the gun. They were both staring at it when the beam of light seared through their rear window, a lone yellow headlight like a single eye, or a searchlight, when Dick turned the key and the car shuddered and fell silent and he said, “It’s over.”