Work Text:
THIS FANFICTION IS HOSTED ON ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN, WHERE YOU CAN READ IT FOR FREE. IF YOU’RE READING THIS ON A DIFFERENT WEBSITE, IT WAS POSTED THERE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S CONSENT.
Dick hated being a kid. He hated how his body was younger than his mind, the way it was prone to feeling certain things when, logically, he could see it differently. Certain things triggered memories that had been lost to him, by the natural passage of time; muscle memory would take over maturity and he would race to hug someone.
Being small had its perks – of course it did. Heightened flexibility, lower weight that the chandelier could hold, being able to fit into his old hiding spots again. That little dumbwaiter that he’d used as a kid when he’d only had Alfred and Bruce around to play hide and seek with, now coming in handy with this whole army of siblings expert in hiding.
But right now, this body was the biggest inconvenience, because for some reason, Bruce and the others didn’t believe he was still fit to come with them on patrol, though he’d told them on countless occasions that his mind was still that of his grown self.
So of course he’d snuck out.
Things had gone wrong almost immediately – his old costume was different to Damian’s, but not only was Damian a few years older than Dick right now, but he was a lot bulkier, and his body type was just bigger. So now there were two Robins in Gotham - and one of them was in a version of the costume almost a decade ago.
The next issue was that, while Dick had grabbed one of the earpieces, he couldn’t tune into the main channel without alerting Batman, Alfred, and Oracle of his presence. Right now they thought he was sleeping – and hadn’t that been a strange sense of déjà vu, stuffing pillows and clothes under the covers to imitate the sleeping form of his child body. So now Dick was flying around Gotham, doing patrol the old-fashioned way and trying to find Jason, the one person least likely to tattle on him and still hopefully let him get in on the action.
It’d been weeks since he’d been let out to just swing from the rooftops. Dick had missed it, being confined to the Manor grounds with nothing to do but get used to this new body again. And according to every magic user Bruce had consulted, he’d be stuck like this for another month. Dick was going stir crazy.
It was weird being in this uniform again. Dick wished he’d trained with a cape, because it was only half like getting back on a bike. There were just things that he no longer accounted for, in his Nightwing costume.
The cape had been the first item to go for a reason.
He saved a cat from a tree, and remembered with a renewed sense of resignation just why sleeves were good. All in all, the night was rather quiet. Dick tried to stop a bar brawl, but other patrons of the establishment stepped in when they saw a child trying to break it up. A mugging or two were the only real pieces of excitement during the night.
Dick was about to head back to the Manor, hopefully get there before the rest of them did, when he saw two men loading a white van with a suspicious looking crate. Or rather, the two men looked suspicious were loading perfectly ordinary crates.
Dick was onto them in a second.
He dropped down atop the crate, hands on his hips and cape flowing in the non-existent breeze.
“Whatchu fine gentlemen up to?” Dick said in the most upbeat voice he had. He’d missed this part of being Robin.
They’d dropped the crate when Dick had landed on it, his additional weight crashing atop making it impossible to maintain grip. Now, one of them brandished a gun at him.
“Get lost, brat,” he growled. “You ain’t the real deal. We know there’s no Batman with you.”
Dick sighed. “Now, why would you think that?” he asked, somersaulting forward.
He landed a kick to the man’s arm, knocking the gun right out of his hands. The man let out a muffled noise, scrabbling to pick it up. The second guy tried to grab Dick around the waist, and for a moment, Dick let him.
The man had Dick’s arms trapped in his grip. Dick waited until he’d brought Dick tight against his torso, and then twisted upwards. He kicked off the crate, and curled his body so his knees hit the man’s face.
The grip around his waist disappeared instantly, and Dick landed in a crouch, facing his remaining opponent.
What he hadn’t counted on was the hit to his skull as a third and fourth pair of footsteps emerged.
Dick woke tied up in a bag. There was enough space that he wasn’t entirely contained – he could move into a hunched seating position, with his legs bent at the knees. That made it both easier and harder for him to get free of whatever weird material this bag was made up of.
He could feel his heart beating away in his chest, to the same beat as the pounding in his head, and a thin strum of panic was rippling through his veins. His hands were clammy. They were the reactions of the body he was currently in, he knew, and yet there was nothing he could tell himself that would stop prevent them entirely.
There were loud voices around him. Dick tried to pay attention to them as best as he could, but the noises of the van were loud.
“…dump the brat,” one of them was saying.
“He’s a fucking kid!”
“So?... playing at being… deserves what’s... for him… my kid, teach ‘im a…”
The van did a sharp turn to the right, wheels screeching. Dick went flying, slamming into the opposing wall and hitting it with his side. He bit his lip as his headache skyrocketed at the jerking movement.
The van stopped with the same finesse as it had manoeuvred the turns, and this time, Dick was sent rolling backwards, hitting the doors. It was dark in the bag, and being tossed around did nothing to stem the panic that was rising in this tiny body of his. Dick had never been afraid of the dark, but being trapped here, with musty air that smelled a little like onions, it would be easy to give into it.
Someone grabbed him like a sack of potatoes, and Dick thrashed as well as he could, getting dropped onto concrete for his troubles. Try as he might, he couldn’t break through the bag. He had no idea what the fabric was, or how it was knotted at the top. His hands weren’t even tied!
He was picked up again, this time from two sides, with no hands on his body. And the bag still didn’t give. Dick reached for his utility belt – stupid, stupid, for not remembering that earlier – and got out a batarang. He positioned it for the bottom of the sack, where the fabric was pulled taut, and tried to pierce it slowly, to avoid landing in an awkward position and being captured once more.
There was no cut. The batarang didn’t pierce the material in the slightest. It was like trying to slice open concrete, if concrete were soft and pliable. Dick stared, and then scraped harder, but it was no use. The batarang was getting blunt from the continuous pressure.
And then there was the sensation of weightlessness that Dick was so familiar with, and he felt himself, in the bag, being tossed through the air. He curled into a ball, bracing himself for the landing, but even with preparation, it knocked the wind right out of him.
Dick lay there gasping a little as he tried to get air back into his lungs. His fingers scrabbled around on the surface he’d been tossed onto. It was hard beneath him, creaking with every movement Dick made. There were little gaps… planks?
There could’ve been a number of places that Dick could’ve been taken that had wooden planks. All of the walkways in the botanic gardens were made of wood, but so were the docks at Gotham’s pier.
Dick sniffed, trying to work out whether he could smell the water, straining his ears for the sound of water splashing.
There was silence. He couldn’t even tell whether he was outdoors or indoors – wind didn’t penetrate the fabric of the sack.
Dick could feel his breaths coming in short pants now, the panic beginning to set in. He couldn’t see anything, he hadn’t brought a phone out because his Robin outfit hadn’t used to include a pocket for a phone – that had come later, when he’d been much older and phones were less clunky than they’d used to be.
His weapons were useless against this, and he had no idea where he was. His limbs hurt from landing on the ground, and, quite frankly, he wanted Batman. It was weird, to be feeling that need for an adult when Dick had been the adult for so long, but there it was.
That was when Dick remembered the earpiece he’d shoved into his utility belt. He twisted to get it out from beneath him, rolling over, and that was when the ground gave way beneath him.
Dick shrieked a little as he fell, automatically curling up into a ball, a lesson that’d been ingrained in him. It didn’t account for the feeling of sheer terror that engulfed him as he travelled through nothingness, still stuck in the bag.
The water hit him with a loud splash, and Dick plummeted into its depths like a rock. He desperately sucked in air as much as he could, the logical, adult side of his brain working overtime to try and stop him from drowning.
The one good thing about this godforsaken sack was that the water was entering it at a much slower rate, giving Dick a tiny pocket of air and the ability to get the comms unit out from his belt and activated.
His hands were twitchy with urgency as he switched it on, a tiny burst of static before a growling voice sounded.
“Where are you.”
Dick had never been more relieved to hear Batman’s voice.
“I don’t know,” he said, and his voice was that of a lost child. He’d never hated magic more. “These guys caught me and put me in a bag and I can’t get out and I don’t know where I am and I fell off the docks and into water and—”
“Hey, hey, breathe.” Batman’s voice had changed from a growl that promised punishment to pure analytical detective work. “You fell into water?”
Dick tried to calm himself down, digging his nails into his palms and focusing on the slight sting. He did his best to yank his mind away from the way the sack was now half filled with water. It soaked through his boots and the bottom part of his uniform, absolutely freezing.
At least Dick would drown long before hypothermia had the chance to set in.
“They drove me somewhere,” he said through shivers. “Threw me onto something wooden. Had planks. I rolled off and into the water.”
“You have oxygen?”
Dick nodded, though Bruce couldn’t see him. He squeezed his eyes shut, not that it made any difference to what he could see.
“Bag’s a weird material. Can’t cut it with anything. Water’s only about half in.”
“I have your location. I’m almost there. Stay awake, okay? How long do you estimate you have?”
Dick didn’t want to answer, but he knew he had to. “Less than a minute till the bag fills up,” he said.
“I’ll be there.” Batman’s voice was grim. “Jason’s got your location.”
“Everything okay?” Those were going to be the last words Dick could get out – the water covered his mouth now.
“It’s been a relatively quiet night,” Bruce was saying. “I sent Damian home early, and you’re lucky I did, because he went to check on you.”
Dick grimaced at that. He’d definitely have to emphasise the importance of not sneaking out. It wouldn’t do for Damian to use this against him.
“Jason’s almost there. One of us will reach you soon,” Bruce said. Then he paused for a moment, as though realising that Dick hadn’t spoken in a while. “Dick?”
Dick knew Bruce wouldn’t appreciate him wasting oxygen just to reassure him. He said nothing, and his lungs burned. He wouldn’t be able to hold out for long. Dick tried not to think about that.
Through his earpiece, he thought he heard the Batmobile’s engine revving, but it may have just been wishful thinking. Dick tried to fight the desperate need to suck in air, the inbuilt mechanism that stopped him from just holding his breath until he blacked out.
It was painful to take in a breath, the relief of the action entirely trumped by the feeling of water entering through his airways. Dick could barely tell when the blackness swamped him, so used to the dark of the sack.
Jason couldn’t figure out how the fuck to crack open this sack. The only reason he knew it was Dick was because it was the first thing he’d seen when he’d arrived at the port, diving into the water with only a glance at the blinking dot on his phone, showing where Dick’s earpiece was.
It had felt vaguely like a human body in there, and if it wasn’t Dick, then…
Well, Jason didn’t want to think about that. He took out a knife and tried to saw through it, but it did nothing.
“B,” he said, fingers scrambling to try and work at the knot. “It’s not fucking coming off.”
“You have him?”
“Yeah, but this sack. It’s…” Jason tugged and pulled with his nails, using the knife to try and saw through the thin rope.
The knot gave way.
Jason’s heart hammered away in his chest as he yanked open the opening of the bag. Water rushed out and flooded out over the deck, but Jason didn’t care. He reached inside and pulled out the tiny little frame, and his breath caught in his throat at the sight of the Robin costume.
He laid Dick out on the deck, checked his airways. He still had a pulse, faint but present. Jason hated how cold and clammy Dick’s skin felt under his hands as he began to perform CPR.
“C’mon, you idiot,” he muttered, grunting with each push. He was humming beneath his breath, knowing that if he didn’t mouth along to some sort of tune, he would lose it to fear.
Water gurgled out of Dick’s mouth, and then Dick was jerking upright. More and more liquid was expelled from his tiny body. Jason helped him turn to the side and stay upright, a hand rubbing his shoulder.
Dick slumped back into Jason’s hold with wearily, chest heaving for breath. His gasping intakes of air turned into hacking coughs. This time Jason made him sit upright.
“Jay?” Dick wheezed through the coughing fit. “How’d… the bag…”
“The rope wasn’t the same material,” Jason said grimly. “Once I got through that, it opened up.”
And then Jason’s lap was full of a tiny child, soaking wet and only just recovering from almost drowning. His arms went around him automatically, clutching back just as tight because it was going to take a lot for him to forget how he’d felt when Bruce had told him to go to the tracker location, the way Dick’s tiny figure hadn’t even taken up all of the tiny sack it’d been stuffed into.
Dick was shivering in his arms, hands now going limp as he tried to fight the tiredness. Jason grabbed his jacket from where he’d tossed it as he was running into th
“You have any injuries?” Jason asked, standing up while still holding onto this tiny form of Dick.
“Hit my head,” Dick said. “Also, I think I half drowned.”
“Brat,” Jason said, with no heat behind the word. “Stay awake, then.”
Dick had been smaller than him ever since Jason had come back. But when he remembered back to the Robin of his childhood, he always thought of a larger than life person, someone who glowed with more life than Jason had thought one individual could hold inside of them.
While the latter was somewhat accurate, Dick was a tiny little insect compared to how Jason remembered Robin being. And his costume was much less insulated than Jason recalled his own.
“Where’d you even find the outfit?” he asked.
“Like right at the back of Alfred’s sewing room,” Dick said. His teeth were chattering like crazy.
Jason blinked, slightly appalled. He was just about to tell Dick about how the costumes in that room were clearly not meant for practical wear, but at that moment, his earpiece pinged.
“Jay?” Bruce’s voice was tight.
“Fuck,” Jason whispered, realising he’d forgotten to let Bruce know that he had Dick. “B, I have him. He’s fine.”
There was a moment of silence from the other end, and then Bruce responded, “I’m here. Get him to the car.”
Jason didn’t bother responding. He nudged the little ball cradled against his wet body. “Hey, ‘Robin’?” he said. “Can you check the GPS to make sure we’re heading the right way?”
He knew where Bruce would be, because there was really only one place for Bruce to park the Batmobile when they were at the docks, especially if he’d also been following Dick’s signal. But Dick had been silent for a little too long, and he needed to keep the kid awake.
Maybe it was everything catching up to Dick, or the fact that Jason had called him Robin, but he burst into tears. Had this been a month or so ago, Jason might’ve dropped him in shock. But over the course of the de-aging, they’d all gotten used to spikes in Dick’s emotions.
Heightened happiness, absolute lows when he was sad, terrifying panic attacks when he got nervous. And crying. Tim said it was something to do with the merging of Dick’s younger body with his adult brain, like his body was unable to handle the changes in brain chemicals and this was how it dealt with it.
Dick hated it, hated the crying, but in Jason’s – and just about everyone’s – opinions, that was the least of their concerns, not with the depressive episodes and panic attacks.
Jason gently shushed him, rubbing a hand down his back like one would on an infant. He started jogging slightly, seeing the dim glint of light falling on the roof of the Batmobile in the distance. Dick burrowed deep into his chest, almost engulfed entirely by Jason’s jacket. The backdoor of the Batmobile opened, and Jason slid inside, holding onto Dick.
The car started moving immediately, but Bruce slipped into the back along with them, the chairs spinning around to accommodate for their positioning.
“How is he?” Bruce asked, pulling out a shock blanket from one of the compartments.
“Possibility of developing hypothermia and water in lungs, and maybe a concussion,” Jason recited instantly. It was second nature by this point, even more instinctive than fighting was.
The moment Bruce went to check Dick’s eyes, Dick wrapped himself around him, helpless sobs intermingling with tears of anger at the fact that he was crying in the first place. Bruce’s arms went around him instantly, and Jason shivered as cold air hit where Dick’s tiny figure used to be.
Part of Jason was glad that Bruce was now having to deal with the brunt of Dick’s tears, because while they were all rather used to crying kids, it was different when it was one of their own – when it was Jason’s older brother. Any childhood idolisation that had remained, any of those illusions about the first Robin, they had all vanished after the tenth temper tantrum Dick had had, and over not being allowed to skip a meal, of all things.
“Dick, can I take off your outf—uniform?” Jason quickly changed words when Bruce shot him a look.
Dick shook his head. “I can do it,” he said. He still had Jason’s jacket wrapped around him beneath the blanket, but he somehow managed to wriggle out of his soaked costume without dislodging anything.
Bruce had pried himself away and sank back into the driver’s seat, the chair spinning back around. Jason went to grab the passenger seat, but before he could get there, Dick grabbed him by the wrist.
“You gotta change too,” he said, a stubborn tilt to his chin. “You’re just as wet as I am.”
Jason sighed. It didn’t matter how cute Dick at this age was, how anxious he’d been for him – he hated this phase of childhood. “I’m too big to change in the car,” he said.
“Bruce can change in here,” Dick countered. His teeth were still chattering. “You’ll catch hypothermia if you don’t.”
“Dick’s right, Jay,” Bruce said from the front. “And I’ve changed in this car.”
Jason crossed his arms. At this point, he was arguing for argument’s sake, knowing he was going to give in eventually anyway. “I’m definitely bigger than you, old man,” he said.
Dick snorted. “Only ‘cause you keep your hair gelled up.” Jason flicked his ear, resulting in a kick to his shins. “There’s literally a puddle where you’re sitting, Jay.”
It was weird to hear Dick calling him that, in such a tiny voice. Jason shook off the memory of training videos and pulled off his shirt, placing it in one of the bags that were kept in the car for this exact purpose.
And afterwards, when he was wearing one of Bruce’s sweatpants and had his own shock blanket wrapped around him, it made it worth the teasing to see the child that was Dick’s body curled up beside him, rasping slightly as he drifted in and out of sleep.