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Antarctica is unforgiving. The coldness creeps underneath his clothes, bites into his skin to chill his bones. Dick doesn't stop. He has lived too long, has suffered too much to give up now.
He thinks about Kory, about his family - Mar'i sitting in school, writing her algebra test and little Jake at home... learning to fly long before he can walk.
He makes it to Clark's fortress in record time.
His hair might be salt and pepper now, his sight narrower, but, since that fateful day three years ago, he has not aged a day.
The defrosting of Slade's chamber seems to go slower than usual, but Dick has not been here for decades. His memory might be failing him.
When Slade opens his eye, he doesn't seem surprised.
Their souls were connected for thirty years, merged on more than one occasion in the most horrible ways Dick can imagine. Of course, Slade knows.
"You look good, Grayson."
Dick bares his teeth at the arrogance. "You would say that."
His right eye is gone. He can still recall the burning overwhelming his body when the bullet hit, a goon shooting through Batman's cape right into his eye and through his brain. He died, he truly died, and he should have stayed dead.
The soul bond shouldn't have been able to heal him, not with their connection separated by Raven, but he had caught glimpses of the man he should have been destined to love once again. At first, he had thought them nightmares, but his nightmares were full of swords in his heart, burns on his skin, and touches that made his skin crawl, his throat close up. Those glimpses had been better, ghost-like as they were, tinted with appreciation and that all-encompassing feeling he had only ever felt through the bond.
"I could have loved you," Dick nearly chokes on the words, all the while remembering everything Slade has done to him (before they knew and after), but that doesn't make his words any less true. Their bond simmers underneath his skin. Its traces linger. He is good at forgetting, at denying, but not that good. He hates it.
"Yes," Slade speaks, something urgent behind the word, something hungry. Unhinged.
Over the years, Dick forgot why they came to this point in the first place, now he is becoming painfully aware again. Slade was good once, good enough to be a sometimes ally, good enough to try if nothing else.
"You've been haunting me," Dick continues, surer this time.
Slade smiles. "The bond is trying to fix what has been broken."
He has not moved yet, and Dick wonders if the backlash Raven mentioned all those years ago does not affect Slade's mind or soul at all but his body. A defense mechanism, maybe, to not break what has been destined not to be broken. Dick hates destiny, maybe even more than Bruce.
Twenty-two years ago, he loved destiny, had hunted after his with an open mind and open heart... then destiny had brought Slade Wilson.
"Boy," Slade says, and Dick snaps his gaze back to the glinting eye. The color twists like quicksilver. Madness.
"No, I'm here to end it," Dick grits out and steps forward even though he wants to recoil from the man who raped him, killed him, tortured him in every way possible.
"You can't end it, Kid," Slade replies gruffly, still so sure of himself, "You're mine."
"I'm not," Dick grits back, hates how close he has to be to... to the monster. He puts his hand over the intrinsic symbol on Slade's chest and gasps when the symbol over his heart heats up in response. It slithers underneath his skin in an eager greeting.
For a moment, it leaves him breathless because the bond -- the bond is love and understanding. It elevates him, and he craves for Slade, for the beginnings of nightmares that seem so sweet, but. But!
He knows how they end.
Slade crashes against his defenses with a burning sensation Dick is all too familiar with, but he has prepared for this. He has prepared with Damian and the knowledge of the Al'Ghul. Dick lets his consciousness expand, imagines Nightwing rising, spreading his wings and then pulls it all back in. He takes the connection, the shrapnel of himself that previously belonged to Slade, back.
Dick gasps, grasps for the symbol over his chest as he stumbles back. It hurts, feels as if his heart is slowly pulled apart, but he has died twice - and too many times by Slade’s hand while caught in his mindscape-, he has felt worse.
When the pain recedes, the symbol over his heart is burned, charred at the edges. White flaky skin falls to the ground like ash.
Carefully, Dick looks up, and his heart skips a beat when Slade seems to look through him. It's an eerie image.
Dick shudders. After Raven destroyed... frayed their bond, Slade's influence had been weakened, blocked maybe. Now Dick can feel that he is truly gone that while he has gathered the last piece of his soul, another piece, nearly as much his as the one he had gathered, has left him.
Dick flails out for the button to freeze the containment, and Slade's gaze snaps to him, but there is no rage, only wonderment – fear too, maybe – before he freezes, never to be woken again.
After enduring for twenty-two years, five months, three days, six hours, forty-five minutes and seventeen seconds, Dick allows himself to cry half crumbled on the floor of Superman's fortress.
Finally, he is free.