Archive of Our Own ^beta

Slade brings home the new girl after a period of prolonged radio silence.

He always leaves them with food, when he goes off on some business or another, but he doesn’t always have the strongest grasp of how much two growing teenagers, one a metahuman with an overactive metabolism and the other a restless gymnast, need to eat from day to day. Dick learns to start rationing anything Slade leaves out for him the first time he went out on a long job, and he makes sure to impart that lesson on Tara when, only a few days after she arrived, Slade drags him out to a mission of his own. He locks her in, even though she is here of her own free will. He always locks them in, like he hasn’t taught both of them that it’s pointless to try to run or resist him in any way.

Maybe the new girl is another test. They’re hungry and tired, and this isn’t supposed to be allowed. He’d told Dick that if he stayed, then it wouldn’t be anyone else. Then, he said Tara was a charity case. He had to. It was a public service, really, she’d hurt people if nobody taught her how to control her powers. It’d stop with her. If anything else came up, he’d find a hero or something. He wouldn’t drag anyone into this, if they were good.

“Say hi, princess,” he tells the little kid. And she is a little kid. Can’t be a day older than thirteen at the most. She wears a leather jacket that’s way too big for her, and her fists are wrapped up in bandages like she’s a boxer. Her expression is dark. He’s holding her hand, massive gauntlet enveloping her tiny fingers. It’d be sweet, if it wasn’t him.

“Hi,” she says, scowling. Her hair is long and dark, but it’s clearly turning white at the roots. There’s no way that’s natural, not at her age. She coughs, though she tries to hide it.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” Tara says what Dick is thinking but doesn’t have the voice to verbalize. “What’s your excuse this time?”

“Now, now,” Slade says, his voice way too sweet. It’s like he’s pretending to be a kindergarten teacher or something, a mental image that would be funny if Dick had eaten more recently than six hours ago. He leans against Tara’s shoulder, half because he doesn’t have the energy to do anything else and half to stop her from getting to her feet to do anything stupid. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t talk that way in front of my daughter.”

He can feel Tara move to say something, then change her mind. He processes the claim. Examines Rose’s features, once again notes the hair, and compares the two figures. In most ways, there’s nothing alike about the two. She clearly takes after her mother, whoever that is. But there are some things there, some things he can’t deny.

“You have a kid,” she says.

“Dick remembers Grant, doesn’t he?” Dick nods, uncomfortably reminded of how Grant’s hair had only started growing out silver once he’d taken whatever that experimental treatment was. The treatment that had consumed him. Slade wouldn’t. Not on his own child, not on purpose, not knowing what it did to Grant. “Not my first. Though I only learned of Rosie here recently.”

“It’s Rose,” she corrects, somewhat impertinently. Dick expects Slade to hit her for daring to speak back. He doesn’t, at leash not yet. “Rose Worth.”

“Rose Wilson,” he acquiesces, more for Tara and Dick’s sake than hers. She clearly doesn’t care. It’s all about proving a point. She’s so small. Dick wonders if he looked like that when he just started out. Maybe Bruce was right to try to stop him from going out on his own. Hah. As if these past two years haven’t taught him just how right Bruce was. Then again, Gotham’s not much safer. Maybe everything’s a mess. “These are your new colleagues. Dick Grayson and Tara Markov. But you should call them Renegade and Terra, to get into the habit of it.“ She predictably giggles to hear Dick’s name, which Tara smirks at too. “Go on in, I’ll get you a cot set up.”

“I don’t want a cot. I want mommy,” Rose pouts.

“Well, mommy isn’t here right now,” Slade says, impatience creeping into his voice. Dick tenses. He really doesn’t want to see the kid get hit. It’s bad enough when Slade does it to Tara— she’s been through the ringer so much that most days she honestly forgets to react, in a similar but opposite way to Dick — but she’s just so little. “She’s very far away.”

“She’s home.“

“This is your new home.” He pulls away from her hand, actually struggling with her grip for a second. Dick narrows his eyes to see that, suspicious. There’s no way this kid should be strong enough to challenge even a normal human built like Slade. Still, he shoes her into the cell, and she follows, coughing again. He calls it their room, but it’s a polite fiction. It locks from the outside. There are hidden cameras everywhere, which Dick used to destroy but then Slade would just add more. And he’d actually look at the footage, making sure to drop references the next few days. As is, if he ignores them, he’s pretty sure Slade doesn’t look too much. That might be wishful thinking. “Be a big girl now.”

She crosses the room to where the two of them are sitting on the floor. She plops herself down, right next to Dick. Slade goes to close the door, but Dick holds his hand up.

“Wait!”

“What?”

“Food— we need something to eat.” Slade stares at Dick, and he feels shame hot in his face. Really? In front of your kid? And he was complaining about Tara swearing. “Please, master.”

“Alright,” he says, softening as he looks the three of them up and down. “I’ll make it something special. Family reunion, after all.”

Great.

He still slams the door shut behind him, and Dick can hear the telltale lock of the heavy door. Rose starts crying pretty much instantly, the quiet kind of crying that a kid that doesn’t want to be noticed but doesn’t know how to hide it properly yet does. She breathes awkwardly, not entirely hyperventilating but definitely not normal. Neither Tara nor Dick are prepared to deal with a crying child right now, not after another long stretch with nothing but each other’s company. It’s not like Slade’s presence would’ve made things easier on that front, but at least they’re more social when they have someone else to bounce off of.

They switch to their strange modified version of ASL, stripped down to as small movements as possible to keep anyone but each other from understanding, without needing to say it out loud.

“What the fuck?” Tara signs.

“Thought he only had two. Grant Wilson dead, Joey Wilson has a restraining order enforced by his wife. She’s the one who shot out his eye, so he doesn’t mess with her.” He makes the second path of the name sign they have for Slade after spelling out the first names, hoping she gets the idea it’s supposed to be Wilson. It’s not exactly what Tara was asking, but it’s the answer he has, so it’s the answer he gives. Tara glances at the kid, spells out Joey and makes the sign for estrogen and a question. “No, they were only two years apart. She’s, what? In middle school? And Adeline’s white. Definitely from a different mom.”

“Mommy always said Daddy ran off and left her cuz he was a big and important hero,” Rose says, and Dick nearly jumps out of his own skin.

“You know ASL?” he signs at her. She gives him the most intense withering glare he’s every gotten from a middle schooler, and Dick remembers the way Jason would glare when Bruce tried to enforce curfew, so that’s saying something. She doesn’t need to sign to communicate the duh. She clarifies with her hands.

“That’s CBDSL to you. Only a little. But,” and she makes a name sign Dick doesn’t recognize , “isn’t good at talking with her voice. So she talks with her hands instead. And my mommy is good with languages.” Her word order is a little strange— CBDSL is Cambodian, Dick thinks, though he doesn’t remember for sure— and her hands are shaking badly, but other than that, her signs are clear.

“Where is your mommy?” Tara asks, out loud, and Dick bites his lip, worried that the answer is going to be dead. Terrified, really.

“Home, I think. She’s smart and good at hiding. The guys that took me said they wanted to grab both of us, but they couldn’t find her. But just me was enough to get Deathstroke out of hiding. He’d killed some important people or something and they were so mad. They wanted to make him upset. Which they did but then he killed them also and said he would make sure I was safe. Forever.”

Her mom’s alive, then. Probably. Fuck. He knew Joey got kidnapped when he was younger and that Slade picked his reputation over his own child, but he’d never wondered if that was anything other than an isolated incident. People should know better than to try and pull on that man’s heart strings by now, it should be obvious he doesn’t have any.

“So he brought you here,” Tara says, voice tight. She swears with her hands, trying to tilt her body away from Rose so she can’t see. She’s moving so fast that even Dick can barely process. If he was a bit less out of it, he’d might even join her. As is, his head is spinning. Slade has more than enough money to hire bodyguards for his family, top of the line and everything. Instead, he solves one kidnapping with another. He wonders if Slade’s even told Rose’s mom she’s okay, or if the mom thinks she’s dead.

“Yeah. He says he’s going to show me how to be strong like him.“

“Do you want to be strong?” Rose doesn’t answer, instead pulling her knees into her chest. Dick feels sick. She’s so small. It’s Tara all over again. Tara would probably hate him for making the comparison, saying shit like that she was a grown ass adult and capable of making her own choices, but she had only been sixteen, half starved to death, and terrified she was one bad day away from causing an earthquake so far up the Richter scale that nothing would be left. She would’ve followed anyone that said they could help, no matter what caveats there were. Rose looks the same.

“Daddy says bad guys will keep coming after me. Because of him. If I’m not strong and I can’t stop them, then the bad guys will hurt mommy. And I don’t want that, right?” Tara nods, desperately trying to send Dick an SOS with her eyes. He really wants to give her the backup she’s asking for, but he just can’t. If Rose is his kid, he’ll go easy on her, right? And she’s young… he has to know she won’t be able to take what he dishes out to him and Tara. He’s already wondering if she has any allergies. Dick’s allergic to peanuts, but only bad enough to give him hives, so he eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when Slade leaves him no other choice. “I’ve gotta be a big girl now. He’s gonna make me strong just like him, so I’ve gotta be a— gotta be good.”

“How— how old are you?” Dick gets out.

“I’m fourteen in May.” She sticks her tongue out at him. “I’m not going to slow you guys down. I’m not gonna be a liability.” She pronounces liability wrong, like she’s only ever heard it once or twice, but she says it with such confidence that Dick . Dick doesn’t know how far off May is— he doesn’t even know what season it is now —but even if she was already fourteen, that’s way too young. She should be in school. She should be with her mom. He remembers hearing from someone, probably Babs, that most kidnappings are related to custody battles, but he’s pretty sure not like this. Hopefully not like this. Rose coughs, then slumps even further in a drop of energy that alarms Dick. “‘m tired.”

“You can take my bed until Sl— until your dad gets back,” Tara offers. “I don’t use it that much anyway.”

“No, not like that,” Rose says, exasperated. She rolls her eyes, even as she’s barely keeping them open. “‘m tired.” Maybe tired means something different to her?

Dick’s good with kids, or he used to be, but there’s only so far talent can take him when he’s caught this badly off guard. Tara’s trying, and he knows he needs to back her up. He’s trying. But he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know how to deal with this, not without any warnings. Not without an instruction manual. Rose yawns.

“Can I check your temperature?” Dick asks, defaulting to nurse mode in lieu of any ideas for the emotional side of things. She nods sleepily, closing her eyes, and he puts a hand to her forehead. Definitely a fever. He could’ve sworn she was cool only a few moments ago. It’s not exactly confirmation of what he suspects, but it’s more evidence. He looks at Tara and signs, “She’s burning up.”

“Fucking fantastic,” Tara signs back. “You think the big boss is going to have antibiotics on hand?”

“I don’t think it’s a cold. Did you see her hair?”

“No.” Tara looks, then narrows her eyes when she notices. “Something weird about that?”

“Do you know how Slade got his powers?” She shakes her head. “It was a government experiment. Adeline said it made him sick at first.”

“One of these days you’re going to have to explain how you know this shit,” she signs, and he puts a finger to his mouth while glaring at her in the universal sign for shut up.

“She said it made him sick. Alternating between tired and hyper. Sometimes he was unnaturally strong, other times really weak. And his hair grayed unusually fast.”

“You think she’s inherited what he has?”

“No,” he shakes his head. “Joey inherited some of it, and his hair was always gray, he was always a little stronger, even before his unique power manifested—“ Tara quirks an eyebrow. “He can possess people with eye contact, okay?”

“Wow, that’s. Different.” She glances at the kid, then deliberately looks away. “So do you think the tyke can do something weird?”

“I have no idea, but I don’t think she inherited it. I think he recreated whatever they did to him. And what the HIVE tried to do to Grant.”

“The dead one.” Then she combines dead and the second part of Slade’s name sign, proposing one for Grant. Dick nods, accepting it. She thinks on that, the idea clearly making her as uncomfortable as it makes Dick, before stating the obvious. “Dick, she’s just a kid.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” He moves his arms so fast that he jostles Rose, who makes a noise. He bites his lip, hard. Tara swallows. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“He listens to you, sometimes.”

“No, he doesn’t.” The only thing keeping Dick stable right now is knowing the kid they’re fighting about is right there. “He listens to me when it’s convenient to listen to me or when I convince him something is his own idea. If he listened to me, you wouldn’t be here.”

Dick means to say we wouldn’t be here. He means to include himself. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t. The signs aren’t so similar. Maybe it’s because after all this time, he can’t imagine a world without Slade. As he’s told Dick a thousand times over, as they’ve told each other a thousand times over, there’s no where else to go. Bruce would hate Dick. The Titans would be embarrassed by what he’s let happen. If he did get away, Slade would just drag him back.

Tara isn’t as tied to Slade as Dick is. A powerful metahuman like her? There are dozens of teams that’d be dying to have her, more than enough to not ask too many questions about her background, excluding all the disaster relief organizations or companies that’d pay by the bucket for her services. But well trained humans are dime a dozen. People would be pickier.

People would ask questions. They’d find out what he let happen, what he did for Slade.

Tara takes it as an insult, getting up and crossing the room to her cot. He wants to call out and apologize, but she’s turned away so she can’t see him and shouting at her or getting up to follow her would shake Rose. It’s not like they haven’t had fights like this before— it’s a semiregular occurrence when Slade isn’t literally right there to force them into a unified front and even then, sometimes they’ll throw each other under the bus. But it feels worse this time, knowing there’s this little girl right here next to him.

Dick’s wanted kids of his own one day, but that was always a long time in the future, when he’d hung up his cape for good. He hadn’t wanted to have to worry about splitting his responsibilities between his city and his team and a potential child, especially not seeing how torn Roy was when Cheshire showed up with that positive pregnancy test. He tries not to wonder how that went. Roy was older than Dick but really not by that much. They were all kids. If Cheshire kept the baby after all, she’d have long since given birth by now.

Rose obviously has actual parents. But one of worlds away and the other is Slade fucking Wilson, who apparently has only decided to get involved in her life now he can use her as part of whatever scheme he’s got cooked up now. She needs someone, at least until he can get her back to her real family. And she looks just like Jason did, last time Dick saw his younger brother. Admittedly, he’s got to be older now— it’s been ages. But that doesn’t change the older brother instincts stirring helplessly in him. He looks back over at Tara, who’s not looking back at him, and he wonders if she’s thinking the same thing.

He’s gone too far this time. He has to be stopped. No matter what.