Chapter Text
“Much has been made of my loyalty to Julius Caesar; but Nicolaus, I swear to you, I do not know whether I loved the man or not.”
—Augustus, John Williams
I
“Could you please,” said Dick, “pick a show already?”
The technicolor TV screen blinked as Rose changed the channel again. “No,” she said demonstratively. “Everything sucks.” Click, blink. A gameshow host hyping up the crowd cut off mid sentence. Click, blink. Two detectives in long trench coats walking Dutch-angle down a greyscale hallway. Click, blink. Some public programming documentary, a bald old man lifting a plastic sheet of pennies. Click, blink. Click blink.
“Rose,” said Dick.
“This sucks. Dad should’ve brought me with him.”
“He’ll be back soon, and then you can drive him up the wall instead of me.”
Rose threw the remote at him across the gap-toothed space between their identical hotel beds. He let it thwack off his chest and into his lap. “You pick something, then.”
“Alright.” Dick palmed the remote and put on the guy with the pennies.
“No way.”
“Way.” Dick tucked his hands behind his head. The air conditioner clicked on with a hiss and a thrum, a burst of cold air startling goosebumps into existence over his skin. They’d been unceremoniously abandoned here by Slade an hour ago. Dick had assumed when he said he was going to get the car that that meant hitting up a secret garage or a rental agency, but now he was thinking that had been an unexpectedly naive presumption to make.
Rose made a sound like she was holding her breath, then said, “You’re really staying?”
The TV’s febrile glow sucked the color out of the unlit hotel room, made everything black-and-white, chiaroscuric. If he closed his eyes he could pretend he was anywhere else. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he said.
Rose shifted to meet his eye. With her eyepatch on, it was almost easy to pretend like nothing had happened, and she didn’t have that carcinogenic green time-bomb in her face. Like they were anywhere else, and not here.
“Are you?” she said tersely.
Dick smiled; he didn’t know what else to do. He stood up, stretched, charitably tossed the remote lightly beside her lap. Before anything else, the lock on the hotel room’s door lit up green and the handle turned and the door swung, heavily, inward. And Dick took a step back.
…
“Catch,” was all the warning he got before Slade tossed the car keys towards him. Dick caught them instinctively, then frowned.
“I’m driving?” he said.
Slade slammed the trunk closed. It was a hot morning, the sun a wide, lidless eye above them. Slade had his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows and Dick was already regretting his choice of a sweatshirt. Rose was lingering by the inn’s row of doors, picking a fight with the vending machine.
“What,” said Slade, “can’t handle a stick?”
Dick suppressed a scowl as much as he could, which was to say, not much. “I figured you would want to control where we’re going and how fast. Is this a test?”
“Is everything a test to you?”
“Don’t answer a question with a question.”
“I wasn’t answering.” With that dismissal, Slade twisted around to call, “Rose, come on. We’re ready to go.”
Rose obligingly untangled her arm from the vending machine’s guts, fists full of crumpled chip bags. “Coming!” She made a bee-line to the passenger side until Slade stepped in her way and pointedly opened the backseat door.
Rose huffed, but clambered in the back without complaint. The least Dick could do was not out-brood a teenage girl, so he wordlessly slid into the driver’s seat and started the car, his hand easily dropping to the gearshift. The first car he’d ever driven had been stick. Bruce had taught him, let him drive in stuttering circles around the driveway, the car leaping and jerking each time he pressed the clutch down too hard or too soft. Bruce had magnanimously said, you’re doing fine, it’s fine the whole time but his other hand had been whiteknuckling the grab handle over his head.
Dick grabbed the gearshift and pumped the clutch a little harder than necessary. As the car gunned out of the parking lot, Slade said, “Get on 78.”
“78? You want us to get on 78? Willingly?”
“Yes.” Slade was fiddling with the slats on the A/C vents, frowning. “Damn thing’s not working.”
“Do you want to actually get to our destination or just get stuck in traffic for five years? What if you just tell me where we’re going? Maybe I know a way we can avoid the highway from hell.”
“Careful, kid. It almost sounds like you don’t trust me.” Slade didn’t look up from the vent. Dick wrestled down another scowl and resisted glancing back at Rose, who was sitting crosslegged behind them, pulsing radioactive gamma rays from her face.
You are here for her, he reminded himself, left fist tightening on the wheel. You are here to make sure he holds up his end of the deal. For her.
Two days ago, Dick had stared Deathstroke down from the business end of his sword and spoken in the only language Slade understood: I’m going to make you a deal.
Get the kryptonite eye out of Rose’s head, and Dick would stay. Fix her, and Dick would stop pretending. Would do this for real. Tie himself to a leash and put the end in Slade’s hand. Renegade, without safety nets this time.
And Slade had said, then we leave. Got another base in the south, we three head out and I’ll do it there. And we need to drive—no planes, no trains with what Rose was packing. At each mounting step, Dick should have said no, no, no. Not my problem anymore. Not ever my problem, really.
Okay, Dick had said. So here they were.
“I trust you,” he said, “about as far as I can throw you.”
Slade gave up on the A/C, rolled the window down two inches. A furious wind whipped in off the road, tugging the hair off Dick’s forehead and ruffling Slade’s collar. Slade tilted his head, squinted his eye, like he was evaluating. “Get on 78,” he said again, and Dick thumbed on the blinker.
Behind them Rose tore open a bag of chips. “Can someone put the radio on,” she said.
…
They drove for three hours before Rose demanded a bathroom stop, for which Dick was also privately grateful, his knees popping and his back twinging as he climbed out of the car. Long car rides always made him feel like a shaken can of soda about to explode.
The rest stop was a modest little shack housing a gift shop and a vending machine, with a motley arrangement of wooden picnic tables on a mangy patch of grass. As they headed for the bathrooms, Dick picked up a jog and vaulted over one of the picnic tables, stretching his legs.
“Show off,” Rose called. Which was followed by a patter of footsteps and a heavy thud. Dick grinned, glancing over his shoulder to catch her rising up from a crouch on this side of the table, and Slade staring woodenly at both of them over the lowered rims of his black sunglasses.
“Cool it,” he said.
Dick sighed. “You’re no fun.”
When Dick came back out of the bathroom, Slade was waiting, arms crossed, by the trash can outside the building. He held out his hand, and Dick slowed to a stop before him. “Keys.” After Dick passed them over, he pointed at the trash. “Your phone, wallet, other identifying or traceable paraphernalia.”
Dick almost laughed, startled. “Don’t have any of those.”
Slade’s eyebrow twitched. “You don’t have a phone?”
“It got blown up. When my apartment building got blown up. With all the rest of my stuff.”
Slade said, “Jesus.”
“Yeah, I’ve had an,” Dick waved his hands like you might shoo away a particularly persistent fly, “interesting few weeks. You could say.”
He headed back towards the car, and Slade’s heavier footsteps hounded after him. “So that’s it, then. Nothing left to lose?”
Dick shrugged, hoping it came off more casual to Slade than it felt to him.
“And you came running to me instead of Daddy? Trouble at home?”
Dick yanked the handle of the passenger seat. The door didn’t budge. He inhaled deeply, aimed a glare at Slade and the glint of the keyring in his fist. “Do you have a point?”
“Several.” Slade stopped a few steps from him, the keys upheld in his hand, thumb hovering over the red button. “Why are you here, Grayson?”
Dick let his breath out through his nose, deflating against the car door with one hand still wrapped optimistically around the doorhandle. “I told you why,” he said. Over Slade’s shoulder, Rose was making her way down from the shack, a pair of black sunglasses holding the cloud of her white hair back, one eye that pinprick of green light.
Slade took a step closer. Dick’s memory crosshatched the orange-and-blue carapace of Deathstroke’s armor over his body, hardening the languid lines of his flannel shirt and obscuring the open intensity of his bared face. Dick’s body went tense against the car as every atavistic instinct in him screamed danger, danger, danger.
“And I told you,” said Slade, “it’s for real this time or this deal isn’t anything. You get that, right? You know what that means?”
It meant: no staying in the tri-state area. And it meant: no warning anyone, no heads up. The last anyone would see of him would be Clark, leaving the devastation at the carnival behind with no more clues than the hijacked gauntlet he’d slipped off Dick’s arm. It meant: Slade could ask him to do anything and he had already undersigned his express consent. It meant: there was, probably, no going back this time—if there was anything left for him to go back to.
But it also meant: Rose would be saved.
“I know,” said Dick. “And I told you, Slade. I’m in.”
…
He hadn’t realized he’d dozed off until he was jerking awake, slamming his forehead into the thick pane of windowglass. The seatbelt dug into his neck and he wriggled his wrist under it to free his esophagus. The black highway rolled endlessly underneath the car. He had woken up because something heavy had been tossed into his lap.
It was a Mark II. Dick stared at the undeniable foreign shape of the pistol like it would explain itself to him. He glanced in the rearview mirror. Rose was a single parenthesis curved against the window in the back, the sun glare that ricocheted off the car in front of them cutting her shape into pale ribbons.
Next to him, Slade said, “Show me.”
Dick said, “Huh?”
Slade stretched a hand between them and tapped the gun in his lap. “Unload it. Reload it.”
Dick shifted until he was more upright. “Slade, I know how to load a gun.”
“Congratulations. So do it.”
“This is a twenty two gauge.” Dick picked it up, turned it in his hand. Irritation was rising quickly in him, borne upwards by a different, thornier emotion. “I’m not, like, five.” Slade cast him a look. Dick said, “Yeah? How old was Grant when you put a gun in his hands for the first time?”
A crackling silence stretched between them. Dick was, for once, glad he was the one holding the gun.
“I’m honoring,” said Slade, “this deal. I’m letting you teach Rose. I’m not pulling over and putting a hole between your eyes and leaving you on the curb, because I appreciate.” His voice went halting and slow. “What you did. For. My boy.”
The last two words were nearly breathless. Dick turned his face sharply away to hide his wince.
“So I’m abiding by this,” Slade went on, steadier now. “But don’t think for a second that I’ll be so nice if you do anything to jeopardize my relationship with my daughter.”
“I’m not trying—” He pulled himself up short. Arguing with Slade was not a route to a satisfactory destination. He didn’t want to be holding this gun, but he was afraid to let go of it. “I wasn’t—Jesus.” He spun the gun in his hand and unloaded it, the cartridges falling like clots of hail onto his legs, then scooped up the bullets, slotted them back into place, and slammed the magazine shut.
Slade’s knuckles were a miniscule mountain ridge on the steering wheel. “Too slow,” he said. “Again.”
…
The car blew a flat near Richmond. The air was shimmering with heat, the sky stretched pale and cloudless. Slade was kneeling on the hot asphalt, cranking the scissor jack under the body of the car. Dick stood behind him, holding the little emergency sack of tools, squinting as the sun burned his face. Rose was watching through the opaque shield of her sunglasses, her arms crossed and her face impassive—a Slade Wilson in miniature.
“Yeah,” said Dick, rooting through the toolbag. “I’m not seeing it.”
Slade released the jack and sat back on his heels, wiping his palms on his thighs. “Shit.” Now that Dick was looking for it he could see the geometric shape of the gun strapped to Slade’s side under his shirt. One of likely several, given that a .22 caliber was certainly not Slade’s chamber of choice. He briefly wondered if Slade had a permit for concealed carry and then scrunched his nose to keep himself from laughing at the image of Slade in a bureaucratic waiting room, copying down his information onto a permission form.
“We passed a repair garage about a mile back,” Slade said.
Rose perked up. “I’ll go, Daddy.”
“You’ll both go. I’ll wait with the car. No dilly-dallying.”
“There go all my plans for dilly-dallying,” Dick said, dropping the toolbag. “Can we take your wallet or something? I don’t have anything and I don’t know how much a wrench costs.”
“A lug wrench,” said Slade. “And you’ll take this.” He unhooked the pistol from his belt and held it out to Dick.
The shadow cast by their car sheltered them from view of the road and the cars whizzing by like fast-moving insects. Dick stared at the gun, then up at Slade. “I’m not killing anyone over a wrench.” He was somewhat surprised by how hard his voice was. He had worried, after Blockbuster, that he might soon meet a part of him that had shed that moral chrysalis of right and wrong and no longer particularly cared. At least that day was not today.
Slade said, “From now on, anytime you go out on a job for me, you’re taking a gun.” He stepped forward and pressed the muzzle in its holster into Dick’s stomach. A half-smile hooked the corner of his mouth, and all of the sudden Dick had to wrestle down a nearly overwhelming surge of rage. He was enjoying this. This was fun for him. Funny. Dick was trying to save his child and all Slade could see was his own sadistic pleasure in testing how far he could push Dick before Dick pushed back. Just like every time before—he couldn’t see his kids being trampled under the size of own sadistic ego.
Dick snatched the gun and strapped the holster to himself, tugging his shirt down over it. He was not going to touch that gun, no matter what happened. If Slade wanted them to steal the wrench, fine. He’d done far more worse things in his life than a little petty theft.
“I’ll be keeping an eye on the time,” said Slade, tapping his wristwatch. “I mean it.” And he turned to look at Rose, and his expression was so paternalistically stern it made Dick’s mouth flood with bile. “No dilly-dallying, kitten. Listen to Grayson, and do what he tells you. He’s Renegade, now.”
Rose smiled, her eyes thinning into crescents. “That’s what I’ve been telling you, Daddy.”
…
Late afternoon made the horizon plum-purple by the time Dick and Rose trekked back to the lonely shape of the car huddled on the side of the road, Slade upright like a signpost beside it. His eye scoured over both of them with a quiet intensity, but he didn’t say anything as they approached.
Dick tossed the wrench to him, a little harder than strictly necessary. Slade caught it easily. “One wrench, no dilly-dallying. You’re welcome.”
“It’s,” said Slade, “a lug wrench. Didn’t anyone ever teach you the importance of precise language? Or how to change a tire?”
Dick ground his teeth on a knee-jerk answer, which was, of course, yes on both accounts, who-do-you-think on both accounts. “I know how to change a tire.”
“I don’t know how to change a tire,” Rose said. She’d been sullen the entire walk back. Dick had done his best to ignore her, because the moodiness had started to make his throat prickle with irritation, and he was afraid of what he’d snap at her if he let himself open his mouth.
Slade raised his eyebrow at Dick and gestured grandly at the propped up car. Mustering up a perfunctory glare, Dick snatched the wrench back and knelt down. He didn’t actually mind doing Slade’s grunt work. He liked working on cars. There was a pure simplicity to making easy fixes that felt like solving a math problem, or slotting the last clue into a case. And it reminded him, well. It reminded him of Bruce, when they would fix up their cars or mod the bikes and work in tandem, in companionable silence. Communicating in a language without words, the only kind of language they were ever any good to each other in. He liked the base satisfaction of emerging from the hood of a car greased up to the elbows in oil. And like most things that got his hands dirty, Bruce had been the one who taught him to like it.
“Rose,” he called. “Come here.”
Rose crouched beside him, her elbows tucked over her kneecaps. In a better world, this wasn’t how this happened. It was Slade teaching her. There wasn’t a gun digging into Dick’s ribs. Actually, Dick wasn’t here at all. They were like any other father and daughter in the world. Slade would say something like, you have to learn how to change your own tires. What are you going to do if this happens to you when you’re not with me?
Dick pushed his knuckles into the gravel and shifted over. “Okay,” he said to her. “The good thing is, it’s really easy.”
…
Once night fell they pulled into an inn that sat on the side of the road like a squashed parabola. Dick eyed the slanting roof warily as Slade stalked into the office to sign for a room, or, more likely, intimidate the poor hospitality worker into giving it to them without payment or legal accountability. Dick decided not to think about it—no trails, Slade had said before they left. Even when they stopped for gas Slade paid with cash.
He’s kidnapping me, Dick thought, and jammed his fist against his mouth to stop from letting out a laugh. Rose gave him an indecipherable look, and hoisted her bag to her other arm. “You didn’t let me fight those guys,” she said. “Like, at all.”
Dick lowered his hand and leaned his hip against the car. “We didn’t need to. That mission was about stealth, and we did it just fine, minor hiccups aside.”
“But you stopped me. He saw us.”
“We didn’t need to,” interrupted Dick. He glanced over his shoulder. The large silhouette of Slade was still in the office. Insects chirped and clicked in the overgrown grassy lot. Two other cars sat in parallel lines before the inn, one of them with the grill half-hanging off. “He’s not going to remember us, okay? He’s just going to think it was some teens being reckless and stealing shit for fun. He’s not going to think about it any longer than today. Your dad jumps the gun, sometimes. He assumes the worst case scenario will happen before it’s even on the table. Killing or hurting those guys would have cast more suspicion on us.” Rose watched him stoically. Dick faced her, giving her his full attention. “We did the right thing,” he said.
Rose scratched the thick braid of her bag’s straps on her shoulders. The anemic streetlight over them exacerbated the contrast between her face and her eyepatch, which she had, with slow, careful hands, slid back on as they were pulling into the inn’s parking lot. So much of her face was, presumably, her mother’s, the lines of her features drawn by a different hand than had made Slade. But her most striking features were his—her colorless hair, her misused eye. Without those, would she have looked like him at all?
She shrugged. Behind Dick, the office door squeaked open and thwacked closed. Footsteps crunched closer. “If you say so,” she said quietly, and a smile grew onto her face as she cast her gaze over his shoulder.
Slade stopped at his elbow and held up two yellow keys. “Two rooms. Double beds. Everything else is,” he raised his other hand to make air quotes, “not of acceptable quality for use.”
Dick made a face. At the hotel they’d stayed in after skipping Bludhaven, there had at least been a modest pullout couch for Dick to sleep on.
Rose, however, clamped onto his arm. “Me and Dick will share,” she said.
“No,” said Slade.
“But Dad—”
“Not in this or any world,” said Slade. Dick carefully extricated himself from Rose’s grip before it turned murderous and withheld the urge to defend his own honor. Rose being several years younger than him was not, he understood, a deterrent to her by any means.
First priority lesson, stop killing people, he thought to himself. Second priority lesson, get healthier relationships.
“Alright, big guy,” he said, shouldering his bag. “Do you like to sleep on the left side or the right?”
Slade stared at him evenly and said, “I’ll take the floor.”
The beige paint on the inn’s facade was peeling and pockmarked by long scratches, scuffs, and the blooming irises of cigarette burns. Slade deposited Rose and her things in her room before she promptly slammed the door in their faces. The other room was one over. It was tiny, barely a foot of space on either side of the bed. The bathroom door wouldn’t close all the way, grinding to a stop about an inch from the doorframe. It smelled like lemon cleaner and polyurethane. The covers on the bed looked a little suspiciously rumpled.
“If this is the quality acceptable for use,” said Dick, “I can’t possibly imagine what the other shindigs look like.”
Slade grunted, throwing his bag on the bed and rifling through it.
“You know Rose doesn’t actually like me, right?” he said to Slade’s back. “She’s just trying to rile you up.” Slade didn’t say anything. And it’s working, Dick added in his mind. Like she was a normal teenage girl and he was a normal dad and not a superpowered murderer who had put a radioactive meltdown waiting to happen in his only daughter’s head.
Dick pushed it out of his mind before he had a chance to get angry again and let his own backpack thump to the floor. The only things in it were his suit, his red-variant suit—which was now, he supposed, his Renegade suit—a tightly rolled bundle of extra clothes, a half-drunk water bottle, and a pack of fruit snacks.
His inner elbow brushed against something hard. “Oh,” he said, “Here.” He tugged his shirt up to unhook the pistol, when Slade’s hand on his wrist stopped him. Slade tightened his grip, and Dick let his fingers uncurl.
“Keep it,” said Slade. “It’s yours now.”
The lightbulb in the panel of overhead light stuttered, buzzing. Shadows spasmed over Slade’s face. “I don’t want it,” Dick said.
Slade released Dick’s wrist, but he didn’t withdraw. Instead he lifted his hand to clasp the nape of Dick’s neck. “You did good today,” he said, which was so out of left field Dick’s throat seized around his next breath.
Like before, all the chemical pulses in Dick’s spine screamed danger, danger, danger. But there was something inside him that had long since lost the ability to untie the tightly wound braid of fear and gratification. And he felt that part now, in the heavy iron bottom of his gut. He shifted his weight back onto his heels. Leaning away from Slade standing before him. Leaning into his callused hand.
“I don’t kill,” he said.
“I know,” Slade replied immediately. “Still.” He squeezed, just enough that Dick felt his pulse stumble and then gallop back up. “You will,” he said.
…
His dreams were strange and gauzy. The inn room door, hanging half-off the hinges like a dislocated jaw, a caliginous shape squeezing through the doorway and growing larger, eight eyes and countless teeth. The heavy hot groove of a just-used gun in his hand, curling rosettes of smoke, his wet eyes and stinging nose and someone’s frantic footsteps running up behind him but he couldn’t get his head to turn from the vortex of shadows, locked in place, rigid, unbowed, heavy, hot hand padlocked on the back of his neck and he jerked awake and snagged his teeth on his bottom lip and winced into the thin pillow and rolled over and felt his boxers shift, all wet and sticking to his thighs and thought, shit.
He sat up. Slade was a rolled up log of comforter and pillows on the floor between the bed and the bathroom, outlined in a pale square of moonlight.
“Shit,” he said.
…
In the morning, he took a cold shower and swiped the meager selection of complimentary toiletries into his bag. By the time he came out of the bathroom, Slade was gone. Dick flicked the curtains back. Slade was in the lot tossing his bags into the open trunk of the car.
Dick reconsidered his backpack, encompassing now the tiniest stick of deodorant ever made, two thimbles of shampoo and conditioner, a plain white toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste, and the gun, holstered and unloaded. He traced the line of its nose with a fingertip. The thing was, Dick knew guns. And Slade knew that he knew guns. And a .22 was child’s play. A beginner gun. A gun for teenage boys in camo learning how to shoot at deer-shaped hunks of foam with their dads’ hands on their shoulders. A gun for the kind of person Dick was not and never would be.
A knock on the door startled him out of his thoughts. “Dick, come on!” Rose called from the other side. “Dad said if we’re in the car in the next two minutes we can stop at McDonalds for breakfast!”
…
The next few hours of driving were interrupted by several bathroom breaks, mandated by the large McCafe coffees Dick and Rose had consumed in the early hours of the morning. As such, they were only somewhere around Wilmington when Slade directed him into the parking lot of another hotel.
Dick whistled as he put the car in park. “Nice digs.” This was significantly better than the last place: a hotel several stories high with neon-bright signage hanging in cursive curls over the automatic glass doors. The lobby was dimly lit by yellow sconces studding the deep green walls. A thick carpet swallowed the sound of their footsteps as they walked up to the semi-circle of mahogany that made the front desk, where an all-smiles receptionist handed them their keys. Two keys to two rooms.
In the elevator up, Dick said, “You don’t have a hundred more bucks to get a third room? Is the mercenary business really drying up that bad?”
“You’ll get your own room when you earn it,” said Slade, handing one of the keys to Rose. “There’s an adjoining door if you need anything.”
The rooms were nice, with mini kitchenettes and armchairs and a desk. Only the one bed. Dick eyed the armchair appraisingly. Probably not too uncomfortable to sleep there tonight, as long as he had enough pillows. Better than the floor.
Dick dumped his backpack on the chair. Slade opened the adjoining door and said, “I’m going out.”
“What?” said Rose, leaning through the doorway. “Where? Can I come?”
“No, kitten. You’ll stay here with Grayson. In fact, you could do to work on your hand-to-hand combat. Both of you.”
Dick scoffed. “You want us to spar in a hotel room?”
“There’s a gym.”
“Won’t I learn better with practical experience?” Rose tried again.
“Clearly,” Slade said, though he was looking at Dick, “that hasn’t been working as well as I’d hoped.”
An acerbic silence descended on them. Slade slid his bag on his arm, pocketed the hotel keys, and gave them both lingering looks. “I’ll be back later tonight. Don’t get into too much trouble.”
…
“Rose,” Dick said as he eased the minifridge door shut, “do you want to go out?”
Rose peeled herself off the duvet, the red slash of an M&M wrapper fluttering to her side. “Go out where?”
Dick cast his memory back along the road they’d taken to get here. “There was a strip mall a little ways back. We could go there. Get some real food. I think I saw a sandwich place?”
“I don’t have money. You don’t have money.”
“I have some money,” he admitted, which was a little bit underselling the fat wad of cash taped to the sole of his shoe. For emergencies. He eyed Rose. Her face was turned towards the window so all he could see of her brow was her eyepatch. “Listen. I know your dad said—”
“Let’s go,” she said abruptly.
They walked along the side of the road towards the shopping center. A thick line of orange and pick stretched across the edge of the horizon. It was unbearably muggy, and mosquitoes danced around their arms and heads. Dick slithered out of his sweatshirt and tied it around his waist. Rose kept pushing her sunglasses up to wipe the back of her hand across her forehead, and every time she did it Dick had to bite back an admonishment. There was no one, really, out and about but them. He was just getting paranoid. He was starting to think, he realized, that he didn’t want anyone to find them.
“Dick?” Rose said as they walked through a gas station. It still startled him a little when she said his real name, not Nightwing or Renegade.
“Rose?” he replied.
She clamped her sunglasses onto the bridge of her nose. “Why did Batman make you his partner?”
Of course she chose to say that the one moment they were actually walking by someone. Dick twisted around to make sure the people filling their cars were more focused on their gas tanks than them. “Keep it down,” he said.
She made a face. “Relax. These people don’t even know who that is.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m just wondering.”
“But you must know a little bit already, right?” It was hard to believe Slade hadn’t shared at least some of the extensive knowledge he had accrued on Dick with his protege. She shrugged. “Okay. Well, it was right after my parents died. I wanted to bring the man who was responsible for it to justice. Just knowing it wouldn’t cut it; I wanted to do it. I wanted to be there. A part of it. He, uh, made that avenue available to me.” He shrugged, tucked his hands into his pockets. “And then I guess it just kind of stuck.”
“Did he ask you?”
“Ask me . . . what?” A car rolled by, blaring a techno song with a heavy bass beat.
“If you wanted to do it?”
Dick stopped walking. Rose kept on for a few steps and then paused, too. Her shoulder blades were visible through the back of her t-shirt, two thin slanted lines. She peered back, expressionless.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I guess I don’t really remember. I’m sure he did.”
“Yeah,” said Rose. “Me too.”
…
He had not made a conscious decision to ditch Rose. He’d just stood up from their plastic red seats at the sandwich shop, said he was going to the bathroom, and cut out through the back exit to walk down to the convenience store. He bought a red Gatorade and the cheapest phone available in its plastic cage behind the register. Then he wandered over to the dollar store, told them his phone was dead and asked if he could charge it there. He kicked around the aisles until it was usable, and then he leaned against the corner of the counter, kept by the short leash the charger made.
If he’d had his own phone, maybe he could have done this days ago. Just, calmed down anyone’s spiked nerves and made things simpler, smoother. By now, he could expect that they had figured out the mystery of his tampered gauntlet. Which meant they would be getting suspicious about the circumstances around his abrupt departure. Maybe even suspicious enough for someone, maybe Clark again, to come after him.
Even if they weren’t, if they had no suspicions and no plans, he at least owed it to Tim, after everything he’d just gone through, to let him know that he was fine.
He typed in Tim’s number before he could think harder about it. Drafted: It’s me. I’m safe. Don’t worry about anything. It’s all under control. He added a thumbs up emoji and sent it.
Barely a minute later, the phone started ringing.
“Shit,” he muttered. The employee at the cash register cast him a sidelong glance. He unhooked the charger with a thanks and scurried away into the aisles before answering the call.
“Nightwing?” Tim’s voice thundered in his ear. “Are you crazy? Have you actually lost your mind?”
“Well, hello to you, too.” Dick couldn’t keep the stupid smile off his face. It hit him like a semi-truck all of the sudden, how badly he missed Tim. And Babs, even though he’d pretty much messed that up forever. And Alfred, who he’d been always sort of painfully missing since he’d moved out. And Bruce, even though . . . even though.
“I’m serious.” Tim’s voice jumped up several octaves. “Superman said—and then Arsenal said—and everyone was—”
Dick scrunched his nose. He had almost forgotten about that disastrous encounter. “Roy’s okay, though?” he cut in quickly.
“Yes, he’s fine.” Tim’s voice softened incrementally. “I knew it. I knew you didn’t actually defect to the dark side.”
“Tim—”
“Is Superman right? He saw you with Ravager? Are you with Deathstroke? Are you compromised?”
“Tim—”
“I can come get you,” Tim went on. “Just tell me where you are. Shit, I should go—”
“No, wait,” Dick said. He pressed the heel of his hand into his temple. “Don’t do that. Don’t do anything. I didn’t reach out to you for—this. Rescue, or anything. I just know you were probably getting worried about me, and I wanted to tell you that you don’t need to be. It’s okay. I’m here because I want to be here.”
There was a long silence disturbed by crackling static.
“It’s complicated,” he added. “But it’s fine.”
“It is not fine,” said Tim. “I shouldn’t need to tell you how not fine it is. You need to come home.”
“I can’t do that, Tim. But I promise—”
“I don’t care what you promise. You have to come home. I want you to come home, Dick.”
Dick leaned into a rack of toilet bowl cleaner and took a long, deep breath. He should have thought this through. What the hell did he think he was doing? Of course Tim would tell Dick to come back. And of course Dick would have to say no. To say, I am not the person you think I am. I am not even the person I thought I was.
For one moment, more than anything, Dick wanted to give in. Slade wasn’t here. He could go. Hitchhike, sneak on a bus, hotwire a car, and get out of here. Go home. Go back, even, to Gotham.
But where would that leave Rose? As soon as he pictured himself walking out of the convenience store and not looking back, he saw her waiting in the red chair at the sandwich shop, sitting on her hands. Slade clearly wasn’t going to fix her if Dick didn’t make him, and she had no one else. Dick had so many people in his life who would help him if he ever needed it. Rose had him.
Tim was still talking. Sometimes, when he was nervous, he went on and on. Dick broke in, quietly: “Tim?”
Tim fell silent. “Yeah?”
Dick said, “Okay.”
“What?”
“Okay. I’ll come back. I just need to—to take care of something real quick. So I need to hang up. But I’m coming back, okay? You can tell everyone that it’s okay. That I’m coming back.”
He could hear the rapid succession of Tim’s breaths on the other side of the line. Tim said, his voice flayed thin, “Dick.”
“Do something for me, Tim,” Dick interrupted. His fist clenched around the edge of the shelf in front of him. “Believe me, okay? Just believe me when I say I’m going to come back.”
“Dick,” Tim said again, but it was directionless this time.
“Okay?” Dick breathed into the phone.
“Okay,” said Tim.
Dick hung up.
…
Rose wore a pinched expression when Dick slunk back into the sandwich shop, but she followed him out when he beckoned for her. They started walking back towards the hotel, Rose scuffing her sneakers along the concrete like she was trying to make as much noise as possible.
“So,” Dick said once he couldn’t take it anymore, which was about halfway to the gas station. “You’re mad at me.”
“Oh, he’s a detective,” Rose sneered.
“I’m sorry I left you,” he said slowly, watching her out of the corner of his eye. She pressed her lips together. “I had to run an errand.”
“What errand?”
Dick hesitated. He’d removed the phone’s SIM card and thrown them both in the trash as soon as he’d exited the store. The Gatorade bottle was stuffed in his sweatshirt pocket, so he could say it was just for that. The last time he’d been forthcoming with Rose, she’d gotten Sophia Tevis kidnapped.
But when he thought about lying to her it made some part of him curl up in disgust. It made him feel dirty, and angry in a nebulous and targetless way, which was never a good way to be angry. And he was trying to help her. Which meant he had to show her that he could trust her. So he said, “I got a phone. I wanted to call my little brother.”
Rose stared at him. “Where is it?”
“Hm?”
“The phone?”
“Oh, I got rid of it. It was . . . a stupid idea, anyway. I wanted to tell him not to worry about me. Just made myself feel worse.”
She frowned. “Why do you feel bad?”
“I don’t know, Rose. Because I’m not really cut from the same moral cloth as your dad? Because he’s just waiting for me to make another mistake so he can kill me for it?”
“You won’t,” she said fiercely.
Dick held up his hands. “It’s just, you know. I’ve spent my whole life training under people who think their way is the only way.” He felt a passing shiver of guilt at comparing Bruce to Slade. No matter their qualms and Bruce’s several nesting dolls of pathological issues, he was certainly no Deathstroke. But it was something Rose could understand. “And it can be hard, sometimes. To live up to that. Whatever it is.”
They traipsed along past the gas station, rounding the corner onto the block where the hotel parking lot bookended the sidewalk and the grey block of the hotel building punched into the sky.
“Is Batman going to come after you?” Rose asked. “To take you back?”
Dick nearly tripped. “Uh,” he said. His hand compulsively found the neck of the Gatorade bottle and squeezed. “Well. I don’t think so, Rose. But that’s more my fault than anything else.”
She frowned at him. The purple logo on her sweatshirt had long since faded to an indecipherable patchy half-moon which scraped off sliver by sliver under her restless thumbnail. She seemed, for a brief moment that passed quickly, like a normal kid. “Was it really all that bad?”
They passed under a streetlight, its pale scope illuminating a cloud of gnats swirling over their heads. At eight-years-old, Dick had known the spotlight better than anything else. How it burned your skin like a microcosmic sun, how it lit you up from the inside and shuttered everything outside its fist in pitchblack shadow. Besides the image of his parents plummeting to the ground, there was another memory from the circus that he kept tucked in his pocket like a secret, close to his heart. His mom, the first time he’d watched from the ground as she climbed up the long thin ladder to the platform. How she’d straightened up to her full height, lifting her arms as the spotlight found her. Her bright dazzling skin, like the spotlight was calling forth a sunbeam that must have lived inside her, filling her limbs with air. He had looked at her and knew as soon as she stepped off that platform, she would fly. He knew how it felt when you were in it; he’d never before seen what it was like from outside. It was magic. It was incomparable to anything else in the world. It was something he knew he would never experience again.
But sometimes, he had come close.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t all bad. It was really good, actually. Um. The best.” He unhanded the Gatorade bottle and held his palm out to Rose. “Keys?”
She passed him the plastic card, and they crept silently back into the hotel. We should have just trained, Dick thought as the elevator doors suctioned closed around them.
…
Rose’s good mood returned as they lazed around the hotel room, and gradually Dick’s did, too. They were on their second raid of the minifridge when Rose muted the TV and said, “You know, there’s a bar downstairs.”
“You can’t drink.”
“I’m seventeen.”
“Which means you can’t drink.”
“I thought you’re supposed to be fun when you’re in your twenties.”
Dick snorted. “You’ll feel differently when you’re in your twenties.”
“Well, anyway. I have a fake ID. Several, actually.”
Dick frowned, and capped his salted peanuts. “I don’t drink.”
“You can get a coke,” she said more than a little viciously, toeing into her sneakers.
Ten minutes later and they were seated downstairs, both nursing cokes. The bar actually had a charming vibe. Lots of mirrored walls and crystal glasses and jazz music playing faintly from speakers perched high in the ceiling. The bartender was wearing a crisp white dress-shirt and a vest.
Rose had informed Dick that he would be paying with a few snide comments about his secret money stash, and he’d said that since he was paying he was ordering the drinks. So, two sodas, Rose glowering at him even as she tongued the straw between her teeth. She could be quite mercurial. A few minutes later they were scratching Xs and Os into the tic-tac-toe board they’d inked on a napkin.
“By the way,” she said, passing him the pen, “I won’t tell.”
“Tell what?”
“I won’t tell Dad about what we did today.” At Dick’s expression, she lowered her eyebrows. “I mean it. I promise. I never promised I wouldn’t say anything when I told him about that girl. So you have to believe me this time.”
“Okay. That’s my game, by the way.”
Rose tore the napkin away. “I’m going first.”
Dick let her yank the pen from his fingers. “Thanks,” he said, and she just rolled her eyes.
After the next game, Dick rose to use the bathroom—Now I mean it this time, I promise—and checked his watch. It was past nine. Slade was still out. What was he doing?
An ice cub slid down Dick’s gut. Until right now, he hadn’t considered that Slade could be out for his own separate purposes. Like on a job. And someone, somewhere, was dying, while Dick stayed in with Rose and played house.
When he came out of the bathroom, it was pushed from his mind, because there were three guys standing around Rose at the bar.
Dick hurried towards her. They were young, with patchy beards and baseball caps, fists around the necks of beers. But not younger than him. Rose was saying something to one of them. Her fingertip flew to the edge of her eyepatch and then away again.
“Hey,” he called as he reached them. All three men turned to look at him with sour expressions. He aimed a tight-lipped smile at Rose and resisted the urge to shoulder in between them and her. “I should’ve asked you to save my seat.” One of the guys was sitting beside Rose. He was ignoring Dick, taking a swig of his beer.
“We were just seeing if your friend wanted to play some pool.” The way he said friend was carefully emphatic. They’d probably already asked Rose if he was her boyfriend, her brother, and when she’d said no, evidently, they’d jumped on it.
Dick looked around. “There a pool table I’m missing?”
The youngest looking guy laughed. “Not here. At a place down the road.”
“Down the road,” Dick echoed. “Nice.” He slid his gaze to Rose. “We’re not really in the mood for company, but thanks.”
“Wasn’t asking you,” the man in his seat said. A dark pulse of rage nearly unseamed Dick, surprising him with its depth. Rose was sitting still in her chair, her eyes shifting between him and the other guys. Not nervously, but appraisingly. He realized he didn’t know what she was thinking. What she had said to them, before he came over here. If she wanted to go with them.
Turning to the guys, he let his facade drop. “She’s seventeen,” he said flatly. “Move on.”
“You’re not the boss of her, bro,” said the guy in his seat. Dick was so briefly repulsed at the ignominy of being called bro by this man that he didn’t respond. “And chill. We’re just talking about pool.”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Dick,” said Rose, and he was about to tell her to let him handle it when he saw where she was looking. Striding through the double-doors of the hotel bar was Slade. A cold fury had transfixed his face. His hands, at his sides, were huge fists.
“Jesus Christ,” said Dick. “Okay, trust me, you want to leave now. Not just the bar, the entire hotel.”
The guys were looking around, their heads swinging back and forth. “Who’s that?” one of them asked.
Rose dropped her forehead into her hand. The bartender was looking at them, a question in his face. Dick stepped into Slade’s path as he approached them and grabbed a handful of his shirt. “Don’t,” he said. “They’re moving on. They didn’t do anything. She’s fine.”
“Let,” said Slade, “go.”
“What the hell?” one of the guys said on the tailend of a nervous laugh. Dick squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to scream at them to shut up. He’d seen Slade this angry before, and it never ended well.
“Shit,” said another, “is that your fucking dad?”
Slade’s hand moved, with intent, towards his back. Dick grabbed his forearm and clung, digging his nails in. Whatever he had, a gun or a knife or who knows what, Slade would have no qualms about using it with prejudice regardless of who else was around. If Dick didn’t want anyone to die he had to do something now.
“You don’t need that,” he said quietly. “You have me. I’m your gun, okay? You don’t need to use that. You can use me. Just point me at someone and say shoot. And I’ll do it.”
Slade’s other hand wrapped around his wrist, so hard that Dick felt the wire of tendons shift under Slade’s thumb. The tight fist of Dick’s heart was coming up his throat. His whole body was beating with a hummingbird pulse.
“I’ll do it,” he promised.
“Go on,” Slade said, dropping his wrist, and Dick spun, his arm already rising for its avenging downswing, and his fist hit the seated guy’s jaw so hard his teak-white teeth cut through Dick’s knuckles straight down to the bone.
…
Slade administered first aid in the moving car, his knees holding the steering wheel steady as he pinched Dick’s arm in place and poured whiskey over his bleeding fist. “Ow,” Dick said, because it really did hurt, and Slade grabbed the side of his head and shoved, and Dick narrowly avoided bouncing his skull off the window.
“Shut up,” he said, and they drove in silence for a while, Dick holding his own hand so it didn’t shake, Rose hunched over in the backseat.
“I’m sorry,” she said after several long minutes.
“Good,” said Slade at the same time as Dick’s noise of protest. They both looked at each other. “You could have beat every single one of those guys without even standing up. Or are you not the Ravager?”
Dick glimpsed Rose in the rearview mirror. He had seen her take down way more guys with way more bloodlust than some creeps at a bar. He had seen her face off against Superman without a shiver of trepidation. But he had also seen her play the doting, devoted daughter. The helpless little girl.
He remembered the look she had cast between the guys and him before Slade had barged in, and wondered if this, Dick’s bleeding fist, hadn’t been the outcome she wanted—just with some unintended consequences.
The low-hanging moon draining the blood from Rose’s face. “I am,” she said. “I know. I’ll . . . be better.”
Slade watched her in the mirror for a long moment. “You will,” he said.
Dick looked down at the thin crescents of white metacarpal he could see through the pink tissue of his skin. “I think,” he said, “I need stitches.”
In the parking lot of the significantly shabbier hotel they fled to, Slade stitched his fist. He stood outside and bent over Dick in the passenger seat, the door hanging open beside them. It was just four, and Slade had a brutal but quick hand. When he finished, he grabbed Dick by the shoulders and threw him out of the car.
Instinct had Dick rolling, tucking his hand to his chest, and landing in a crouch. “Slade,” he started.
Slade kicked his knee out and he collapsed, staggered. The hot pavement bit into his cheek. His kneecap vibrated with pain. If Slade’s boot had connected any harder it probably would have shattered his bone.
He wriggled his elbows underneath him. Slade caught him by the collar and reeled him up so they were nose to nose. The parking lot folded end over end until it was just the space between Dick and Slade’s cold eye.
Slade said, “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“We were just hanging out.” He hated it as soon as he said it. It sounded so petulant and stupid. Slade’s eyebrow twitched.
“Hanging,” he said, “out.”
“I was gone for one minute.” His anger from earlier was rushing back into him. “I didn’t think anything would happen, Jesus.”
Slade sucker-punched him. Because he was still holding onto him Dick’s body had nowhere to flinch away from it, so he felt it in every inch of his torso. He coughed. His lungs quaked. He thought, distantly: finally.
“I should kill you,” Slade said quietly. Dick didn’t reply. His fist and his knee were throbbing. He asked his brain to figure out a way out of this and it gave him nothing. You chose to be here, it reminded him.
Instead, he said, “So those guys aren’t allowed to bother Rose, but you’re allowed to put kryptonite in her skull? Wow. Excellent parenting, good on you.”
A tidal wave of anger rolled down Slade’s face. Its glacial pace gave Dick at least enough time to brace himself before Slade hooked his hand around Dick’s neck and slammed him into the side of the car.
“Daddy,” said Rose. The pressure on Dick’s throat was immense. His eyes burned and pulsed black. His elbows fought the cage of Slade’s arms. “He has some money he’s been hiding. It’s in his shoe.”
Dick barely even felt Slade yank his sneaker off and dig out the money clip. Then he abruptly released Dick, and Dick slumped forward, dizzy, gasping, fire licking up the sides of his throat.
“You did one thing right tonight,” Slade said quietly. “Do you know what it was?”
Dick’s heart was pounding in his fingertips. He stared back at Slade, as even as he could be with his chest rising and falling so fast and each breath shuddering its way out of his throat.
“Think about it,” said Slade, standing up. The trunk opened and then slammed, rocking the body of the car against Dick’s back. Slade stepped back, his body eclipsing Rose’s, and then stalked away, the two of them separating into the curled halves of a parentheses, Rose left standing there with her sunglasses on over her eyepatch and her sweatshirt zipped up to the throat and something like a tiny curl of satisfaction at the corner of her mouth, which she quickly flattened down. And wordless, she held out her hand.