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When Deathstroke says to come alone, Dick doesn’t think twice.
Just a few hours ago Gar had come barreling into the tower, halfway through his transformation from panther to human—desperately conserving his speed. He’d growled for help, before finally finding his voice—babbling, and pointing, dragging Dick and Rachel, and the others to follow as he’d raced back to Jason’s last known location.
But the tunnels had no trace of anything save for a bloody smear that soon faded into nothing. It was a message, that much was clear, and later when the computer had confirmed that the blood belonged to Jason, Dick had responded by slamming his fist into the wall.
And now this; a simple message aimed at Dick, sent through an encrypted server. A set of coordinates just outside the city along with a video clip of Deathstroke’s awful mask filling the screen.
He says, come alone or else, followed by a scream off-camera—and it doesn’t take a genius to work out who it belongs to.
“Why’s he doing this?” Rachel asks distraught, and she can no doubt feel the growing tension in the room. No one gives her an answer, but Dawn, Hank, and Donna are practically vibrating with rage.
Dick finally breaks the silence. “Tell Batman—” only to be shot down almost instantly.
“You can’t be serious!” Hank yells, as he surges to his feet.
“He’ll kill you, and what good is that to Jason?” Dawn asks, one hand on Hank’s arm, urging him to sit back down to keep the weight off his injured leg.
“He could already be dead—” Donna reasons quietly with a far-off look that betrays her grief.
“Don’t say that.” Dick interrupts suddenly, while Gar rests his head on his knees as he sits slumped against the wall with Rachel knelt beside him.
“She’s right.” Hank agrees. “Deathstroke doesn’t take prisoners.”
“Dick, he kills, that’s what he does. That’s what he’s paid to do.” Donna adds, as a dark undertone seeps into her voice as she speaks. “You know that. We all know that.”
“It’s a trap. You can’t just walk into it.” Rachel adds simply without looking up, as she focuses on pulling Gar’s fingers away from where he’s tearing at his own hair in guilt and frustration.
“We’re a team, right?” Dawn says, with the same voice she uses to reassure bystanders, or coax jumpers back from the ledge. She steps forward, reaching out to hold Dick’s hand as though the feeling might ground him into listening for once. “Let us come up with a plan. We’ll call the whole Justice League in if we have to, just give us some time.”
“Fine.” He says.
Fine, he lies.
...
It’s Gar that catches him trying to sneak out. It’s late, and the others are strategising in the other room, but Dick can’t wait any longer. He thinks of Slade’s voice over and over again, telling him to come alone, and then Jason’s awful scream filling the speakers like some kind of death knell echoing through the tower.
“Don’t,” is all Gar says, his hand outstretched as though ready to pull Dick back from the brink. His eyes are bloodshot, and Dick worries that the kid’s guilt is gonna eat him alive—he clearly isn’t sleeping—and Dick knows the feeling all too well.
But he can’t spare a second to ease Gar’s suffering, not now. He has to save Jason, he has a job to do.
“I have to.” Dick responds, as he shakes his head and looks away. “I can’t just let him…” his sentence trails off, and he shudders at what his imagination conjures to fill in the blanks.
“We’ve got Slade’s daughter in the other room,” Gar says desperately. “You’ve got Kori and Rachel and the rest of the old Titans working on a plan. And Batman’s coming, the cavalry is literally on its way, just wait until he gets here—”
“You heard Deathstroke, you heard Jay scream—”
“Yeah and that’s the second time I’ve had to hear it, okay? So stop playing the martyr already!” Gar hisses angrily, and it’s so uncharacteristic that it actually makes Dick stop. He turns around to see the younger man running a hand through his hair and his eyes shine green in the dim light. He’s pissed, and he’s hurting, but right now he’s doing a hell of a lot better than Jason, Dick can guarantee that much.
“Don’t you see what you’re doing?” Gar asks, sounding as strung-out as he looks.
Dick knows exactly what he’s doing.
He thinks about Bruce’s voice on the comms, how clipped it had sounded when he’d said he was on his way—and to anyone else, to everyone else, it must have sounded cold and unfeeling, but to Dick’s trained ears? Jeezus the guy might as well have been screaming his head off.
Dick made a promise to Bruce. He made a deal to train Jason, to look after him, to keep him on track, to keep him safe. And he’s tired of failing.
“You’re being just as stubborn as Jason.” Gar says when he doesn’t get a response, and Dick smiles at that, albeit a little self-deprecatingly.
“He is my little brother, after all,” he responds with a smirk. He’s trying to be flippant, he’s trying to goad a smile out of Gar, or some semblance of levity, but it’s not working, and Dick’s surprised by how much he actually likes the sound of the moniker.
Little brother. Little wing.
Come alone.
He takes off running.
...
The first thing Dick sees when he gets to the coordinates Slade provided, is an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. It’s more like a shack than a house, and when he creeps closer and peers through a grimy window he can see a flickering light bulb swinging backwards and forwards, as though recently hit.
He scans the surrounding area, before resolving to just use the front door. It’s not as if Slade isn’t expecting him, and the assassin doesn’t tend to play well with others. He makes his way towards the only room not shrouded in darkness, and feels his stomach bottom out at the sight when he gets there.
Jason is crumpled on the ground. His legs are bent awkwardly underneath him, as though he’d collapsed that way—in a heap—and had made no effort to move since. His hands are held awkwardly behind his back, no doubt bound, and his cape looks like it’s been scorched. The left side of his face is red with dried blood that’s pooled ghoulishly around the edges of his domino mask, and even going so far as to drip into the collar of his Robin suit.
His eyes are open, but he’s blinking sluggishly, and his body is shivering far more than it ought to be for the temperature they’re in.
Dick takes a step forward but suddenly there’s a sword at his neck, with a point so sharp that it glistens, and he has no choice but to stand stock-still.
“Not so fast, little bird.” Deathstroke says menacingly as he steps out of the shadows. “On your knees.” He commands.
In the corner of his eye Dick sees Jason try to sit up, but his leg can’t seem to hold his weight. There’s a dark wet stain on his thigh next to a tear in his pant-leg, and he ends up even more slumped over than before. He looks frustrated, and in pain, and so Dick has no choice for now than to comply.
“Let him go,” he says as his knees hit the ground and he puts his hands up behind his head. He’s trying hard not to sound as desperate as he feels, but Slade ignores him, choosing instead to circle him with his sword outstretched to emphasise the vulnerability of his prey.
“I’m the one you’re mad at, leave the kid out of it.”
“You brought him into it, Grayson.” Deathstroke says simply, dropping Dick’s surname into the conversation as though secret-identities mean nothing to either of them. “What happens next is on you.”
Before Dick can even blink, Slade swings his sword around to stab it into Jason’s shoulder, practically pinning him to the wall behind him, before removing the blade once more and letting Jason’s blood drip off of its tip and onto the ground below. Jason lets out a cry, almost matched by that of Dick’s horror.
“Bastard!” He shouts, channelling his rage into an attack as he lunges forward to tackle Deathstroke round his knees, somehow managing to make the assassin at least stumble an inch off course. The older man doesn’t hesitate to grab Dick by the scruff of his neck, and throw him into the wall. He lands with a crash, but in less than a second he’s back on his feet and he’s grabbing at a piece of plywood to swing around and parry against the downward arc of Slade’s sword. The weapon cuts through the wood with ease, but Dick had expected as much and he throws both pieces high towards Slade’s face, while his body ducks to slam a hard kick into the side of the man’s knee where two pieces of armour meet at its weakest point.
There’s an awful crack, and stumble, followed by an angry growl. Slade hits him twice in the gut, until Dick’s doubled over in pain. Even when he manages to return a punch of his own, it barely makes a dent and once more Dick finds himself bracing for a hard fall as he’s kicked through the air. But Dick’s precise, and methodical, and he was trained by the Bat, so he knows exactly where he’s going to land, and he ends up exactly where he wants to be—by Jason’s side.
He takes the precious seconds allotted to him by Slade’s now broken knee-cap, to give his sort-of-brother the once over.
“...y’u came…” Jason mumbles. He sounds impressed, but more than that, he sounds surprised, and the thought of Jason not even expecting a save cuts Dick to his core.
“It’s gonna be okay, Jay,” he promises as he assesses the worst of the teenager’s injuries. The cut on Jason’s leg looks deep, but the blood doesn’t look fresh, so Dick focuses on shirking off his jacket and pressing it into the stab wound on the kid’s left shoulder. He gently moves Jason’s right hand, putting it in place to keep pressure there while Dick moves his triage along.
The head wound looks bad, and it would explain the slurred speech, except… Jason’s pupils are like pin-pricks. Gently, he tilts Jason’s head to the side, trying not to focus on how pliable the younger man’s being right now, despite how much pain he must be in. He finds the puncture mark on his neck, and curses under his breath.
“What did you give him?” Dick asks, moving to put Jason behind him as Slade approaches slowly, until he’s looming over the two of them and wiping the blood off of his sword onto the armour on his bicep, smearing it with red.
“Nothing he didn’t deserve.”
“He hasn’t done anything —”
“He’s here because of you . Because of what you did. Because of the choices you made.” Slade responds viciously, as he puts the sword back into the sheath on his back, and takes out a pistol instead.
The musty air catches in his throat, and everything slows as Dick watches the gun being raised, its muzzle now pointed squarely at Jason. Another of Deathstroke’s punishments—another way to make Dick Grayson suffer for his sins.
From his position on the ground, he knows he has nowhere to go. There’s no way he can get himself and Jason out of the way in time, and even if he did manage to lunge forward before Slade pulled the trigger, there’s no way of guaranteeing that Batman’s youngest son wouldn’t still get hit in the process.
“I told you what would happen if you came back,” Slade says, but his words are lost to the ringing in Dick’s ears.
For a crazed second he thinks he can hear the sounds of the circus—the fanfare, the crowds, the drumroll as the ringmaster bellows, ladies and gentlemen, the Flying Graysons—
Dick makes up his mind.
He won’t break his promise to Bruce. He won’t bury another Titan.
You need to set the tone, I’m not Robin anymore, you are.
Dick spins around and leaps on top of Jason with all of the grace that his parents taught him. He can practically smell the talc on his hands as he reaches out for the bar, his mother’s voice saying you can do this —as he shoves Jason down and uses his own body as a shield in a last ditch attempt to keep anyone else from paying for his own mistakes.
And out of the corner of his eye he sees a familiar black silhouette barreling towards them from out of the shadows of the doorway, and the last thing he hears is Batman’s voice shouting, “Robin, no!” as the shot rings out, and the chorus of the Big-Top in his head comes crashing down around them.