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Chapter Text

Bruce Wayne had his hands on the perfect specimen, and he wasted the opportunity. Wayne managed to get his hands on Richard Grayson before the rest of the world, and he had taken the child’s potential and squandered it.

Slade considers the man an idiot.

The child had been undeniably talented. Flexible. Strong. Intelligent. One of the best athletes in the world, by the age of eight. Then, his parents had died in a tragic accident while the world watched. And in the shadows, several parties awaited the opportunity to grab hold of the child with potential—

And yet, it was the Batman who had been the first to reach him.

That in itself was another tragedy for the child.

It had only been mere months after the death of the youngest Wayne, Jason Todd, when Richard Grayson was taken in by the Batman.

Slade knows the story. Everyone who worked in this industry knew the story. It involved the clown, and a crowbar, and a death in the family. He had been glad to see Batman suffer the consequences of his actions. If you take in a child, you needed to train them to survive. Batman did not understand this, it seemed.

His first child had been a meta made of sturdier stuff. His second, his biological son, trained by the League of Assassins for sixteen years. Brutal and efficient, that child had not needed training. The third was trained by Slade’s associate David Cain. She was effective as well, and Batman had not needed to do anything.

The fourth had merely been lucky. Her father was a small villain Slade had hardly heard of, but she was not trained or well equipped. Batman did not train her. Not well enough. Slade recalls hearing she had nearly been killed herself— beaten so badly, she had spent a year in a coma.

Jason Todd had been like her. Human.

And while the youngest child had never been on the scene himself (yes, the teen was instead trained by Oracle to serve as a behind the scene operator like him, because neither Jason Todd or Tim Drake had any real reason to become vigilantes themselves, especially when Batman did not train children) he still managed to catch the Joker’s attention.

The boy was an easy target.

He died painfully.

It was a pleasant experience for the mercenary.

Like the professional he is, Slade kept close tabs on the family of vigilantes. He himself wouldn’t care to go after them, not unless it was needed, not because he was afraid, but because Batman tended to be more trouble than he was worth. He steered clear of Gotham, but always paid for information.

When he had heard of the passing of Jason Todd, Slade had thought: Good. It was due time someone hurt Batman.

He hadn’t kept too close of a watch on the Waynes in the months after the death. Instead, something else had caught his attention: A child prodigy that had apparently caught the attention of the darker shadows beneath Gotham. Whatever interested the court, interested Slade, as a way to figure out which stocks were worth assessing.

Then, the child’s parents had died, and it was the perfect opportunity to strike—

And somehow, Batman had striked first.

The funny part was, Slade knew that the man didn’t have a clue about the child. No. He had merely been at the circus with his family when the boy’s parents had died, and decided to act out of a bleeding heart. How disgusting. Shadows had slunk back into Gotham’s sewers, content to sit back and wait.

Slade had watched, as Wayne wasted the perfect specimen.

The family hadn’t been prepared for another child. Two months after Jason Todd’s death. None of them were prepared for a new addition. And the other children were all grown, adults out of the house who couldn’t be spared to welcome another kid so soon after losing their brother. They didn’t even try. Wayne sent Grayson to boarding schools. Rich international schools abroad, where strangers raised the child he had stolen. The boy never even came home for holiday breaks, according to the rumor mill. Winter, spring, and summer breaks spent abroad and alone.

Slade kept tabs on Richard Grayson. Waiting for an opportunity to strike.

The boy switched schools relatively often. At first he considered Wayne doing it to protect the boy— Slade had broken into several school records to discover the boy being suspended and expelled at his schools for records of delinquency. Reports stated he was quite a troublemaker. An aggressive boy who started fights with his classmates. Too stupid to pay attention in class, fidgety and dense. Antisocial, spending too much time alone, etc., and etc. The switch in schools was not for protection, but a necessary change for the boy.

The boy was thirteen, before Slade had his chance to intervene on Wayne’s mistake. He kept closer tabs on Richard Grayson than his own children. He wondered what Adeline would say to that.

Nonetheless, five years after Batman had foolishly taken the boy in, Slade had an opportunity to right that wrong.

In a boarding school in Madeira, Portugal, the boy had gotten the idea to run away.

Slade had coincidentally been working on a contract not too far— Valencia, Spain, under three hours by plane—- when the computer tracking system he had trained on the boy’s name and face, alerted him to news. An email chain from the boarding school to the boy’s guardian, Bruce Wayne, after the billionaire had declined the school’s calls enough times. We are so sorry, but Richard Grayson has tried to run away. We have footage of him breaking out from the dorms last night, with a packed bag. Do you have any idea where he could be or where he would go?

It took Bruce Wayne nine hours to reply to the school.

In those nine hours, Slade had crossed borders and tracked the boy down. He found Richard after the boy had foolishly tried buying a train ticket under his father’s name, John Grayson. The thirteen year old had been sitting alone in the train station, a packed duffle by his feet. He was easy to spot.

It hadn’t been hard to steal the child. Slade waited until the boy went to go use the restroom, and used chloroform to put the boy to sleep. By hour five, Richard Grayson was unconscious in the back of a car Slade had rented under one of his European identities, on the way to Slade’s safe house just outside Lisbon. By hour seven, Slade had erased all evidence one could use to track them— the fake identity he used for the car, the surveillance camera from the train platforms. All except the train ticket, purchased by John Grayson, heading in the direction of France. He left the paper trail of the train behind as a red herring, dare Batman try to find Richard.

By hour nine, when Bruce Wayne finally responded to the email about his ward missing, Richard Grayson was already waking up with Deathstroke in his safe house.

Chapter Text

The mission was supposed to be relatively simple.

After years of training and working with Deathstroke, there was an established harmony between the two of them. Routine. It had been rough at first. Dick didn’t really understand why Deathstroke had targeted him at first. But he did know why, now: he was an easy target. A runaway alone in a foreign train station. No living relatives. Easy pickings, Dick had been trained to assess. Deathstroke told him he was needing a successor. Dick had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the beginning, Dick was extremely adverse to the nastier aspects of their work, murder and violence.

Slade had to trick Dick into his first murder. One afternoon, Dick had stepped into the training room to find two other humans sitting there, blindfolded and gagged. A grown man sat on the right. Slade informed him that was a convicted rapist serving a life sentence after heinous crimes against multiple women. Next to him was a young child. A toddler, hardly old enough to know his own name. He had done absolutely nothing wrong.

You have a choice, Slade had told him. You can either choose to kill one of them, or I can kill the both of them.

Dick had chosen, although there really wasn’t much of a choice to begin with. He couldn’t let the child die. He had to save him.

One bullet later, and the man was dead, and the toddler was alive, and that was that.

Slade kept pulling tricks like that, to get him to cooperate, in the beginning. This or that. Criminal or child? One innocent victim or a dozen hostages? It kept going like that, until Dick was horrified to realize he had become desensitized and indifferent to it. Work became work, as much as Dick tried to fight against it.

Aside from their rocky beginnings, Dick would admit to himself now that he did not hate Slade. How could he? The mercenary was the only person in his life that cared for Dick. He became a begrudging mentor to him through the years. In some ways, the man had raised him.

The mission they were currently on was supposed to be simple: Kill the Titans.

They had flown into New York City with the intent on tracking down the new team of heroes. They were around Dick’s age, ranging a couple years. He himself was set to turn eighteen in a few days. The oldest of the Titans had turned twenty last month, and the youngest was only a few months older than Dick.

They received a vague contract from a company named H.I.V.E., asking them to take out the heroes for a very agreeable sum of money. Deathstroke agreed easily.

It really hadn’t been hard for Slade and him to find the heroes.

Wally West had been the easiest to track. He had no need to hide his identity when he went places. Aside from wearing a mask as Kid Flash to keep his hero persona private, the guy didn’t do much to keep his life secret. There was a traceable paper trail documenting Wally West’s life everywhere he went. And Slade, who pretty much knew all of the Justice League’s identities, was able to find the dorm room in City College Wally West lived in.

Although, as they followed his trail, it turned out he hardly spent any time there. He always put down a different address on his Amazon Packages. He wrote down an apartment.

Roy Harper was relatively easy to find, as well. Green Arrow seemed to be a little more paranoid than the Flash, when it came to secret identities. Occasionally, they would come up to dead ends where it became clear someone had scrubbed any evidence of a Roy Harper to the general public. But Roy Harper was still a real human who used his real name when he went most places. Finding emails and subscriptions and mailing lists with his name was not impossible.

And Roy Harper had an apartment under his name, in the East Village.

Donna Troy and Garth are harder to track down, but only because they aren’t humans with the likes of birth certificates and school records and medical histories. But, when looking at the names residing in the same apartment as Roy Harper, the names Donna Troy and Garth Shayeris are written down as the other tenants. The same apartment Wally ships his packages to.

Very easy to find, indeed.

Oliver Queen had afforded the Titans a very lofty apartment in the East Village, close to the river and Stuytown. The billionaire had rented out a penthouse for the heroes to operate and live out of. Large skyline windows enveloped the apartment in a golden glow. There was a private elevator that took the resident straight up to the living room.

It took Dick five minutes to hack the mechanics asking for the password— and it only took another two minutes before he and Deathstroke were stepping through into the Titans home.

This was where things become complicated

Because the apartment was not empty like they suspected. They made sure the Titans were currently fighting some minor villains all the way in East Harlem. It’d be some time before they defeat the guy, and make it back here.

But, standing in the middle of the Titans apartment was a guy. An unknown.

He wore a black, grey and orange suit incredibly similar to the one Deathstroke wore, and in turn Dick wore. Too similar to be anything but intentional. There were slight differences to the pattern, and the overall quality looked much cheaper than the quality of their suits. But from a distance, it would be clear to people that they were all matching.

Deathstroke reached for his gun and had it pointed at the guy in seconds. His eye-patch narrowed. “Who are you?”

“Ravager.”

Dick squinted his eyes. Ravager. He’d never heard of him before. He would’ve remembered if he had.

“What’re you doing here?” Deathstroke asked.

“The H.I.V.E. asked me to kill the Titans.” Ravager explained. He notices that the man doesn’t have a voice modular, not the way Dick and Slade do. He must be a novice at this, to leave out such a crucial detail as his voice open. This guy has to be new, and inexperienced to this line of work.

Deathstroke scoffs. “The H.I.V.E. should’ve known better than hiring two contracts at once. Tell them I refuse to work with them.”

“Coward,” Ravager spits out.

Dick fully expects Deathstroke to shoot the guy for the insult. But Slade just looks at Ravager with a curious expression. He sees gears churning in his mentors brain.

There’s something there that Dick isn’t following.

Deathstroke pauses for only a moment before turning to press the button on the elevator, ready to leave. “Renegade. We’re leaving.”

“Right.” Dick agrees. He hears an odd sound, suddenly, and then—

In a single moment, a blur of yellow and red comes crashing into the apartment, and at the same time Dick takes his gun out and instinctively shoots at it.

Kid Flash. Dick identifies, as his bullet hits marble flooring where he had just been. The speedster immediately goes towards Deathstroke, the most notable threat in the room, but Slade throws a right hook a second too fast for the hero to react. He takes a nasty hit to the jaw, and falters for a second, falling back towards the floor.

Dick reaches for the meta-cuffs he has on his person, but an arrow stops him from reaching Kid Flash in time. Speedy, he realizes, and Dick sees the rest of the Titans reaching them in time too. Clearly, the hired distraction wasn’t enough of a threat to occupy the heroes’ time long enough like they had asked for.

Wondergirl comes running towards Dick with an elbow. He ducks down, and retaliates with an uppercut, which she bounces back from. She tries to knee him. He flips out the way.

(Slade had tried training that out of him. The flippiness and circus tricks. But when Dick had been stuck in boarding school for years and years, lonelier than he had ever been in his life, he trained himself everyday with the ghosts of his parents for teachers. Sneaking into gymnasiums after class, and breaking out of his dorm in the middle of the night to run drills on the front lawn. It was the only thing that kept him going. He always told himself as soon as he turned eighteen he’d run away and join the circus again, and he had to make sure he didn’t lose the only thing that made him good. Slade couldn’t train that out of him. It was what made Dick, Dick.)

Wondergirl gives a frustrated huff. Dick grins, and tries to catch her off guard with a roundhouse kick. She catches his leg with her arm, and goes to put him into a leg bar, but while she does so he uses his arms to grab a knife, and stab her shoulder, in the gap behind her collar bone.

“Damnit!” Wondergirl drops the grip on his leg, and stumbles back. She clutches wildly at the wound, hand pressing into the open wound. She catches the attention of the other Titans, who falter for a moment in fear. Aqualad is fighting Ravager, and winning by the looks of it, and Speedy and Kid Flash are barely managing to keep pace with Deathstroke.

Without letting her regain control, Dick immediately grabs his longsword. He can’t use a gun in this situation. Too close quarters. He could just as easily hit Deathstroke or Ravager, as he would the Titans. It was too risky to use bullets right now. But his sword, he can use.

He tries to swipe Wondergirl with his blade, but she ducks down and swipes a kick right back at him. She seems to have gotten over the stab wound relatively quickly.

Suddenly, a noise catches them all off guard— a loud crash. The windows have been broken, and a body is falling through.

Ravager, Dick realizes. Ravager has fallen through the window.

Aqualad stumbles back in confusion, and the other titans look between him and the enemy in confusion and horror.

The fight freezes, for all of a moment.

Then, Deathstroke has a hurricane of bullets airing the apartment out, and the elevator finally arrives in that moment. Dick realizes Deathstroke has already pushed him in the elevator, and the two of them are already halfway down to the lobby.

They make it downstairs before any of the Titans catch up, the heroes too surprised and horrified to react.

And they’re gone.

Deathstroke doesn’t search for a body, but they can hear the commotion outside. Pedestrians scream for help and Oh my god!, as a corpse lines the streets of Manhattan.

Dick follows Deathstroke on his motorcycle as the two of them escape.

Deathstroke becomes obsessed after that.

Dick can’t really recall a time the man has ever been so obsessed with a case, prior to this. He’s been interested, sure. He’s played the long game several times before. They had a case they let linger over a month before striking, in cold patience. They can wait, and track, and watch.

But obsess?

No, Deathstroke has never been quite so obsessed.

Dick knows something is different to this situation when, for the first time, Slade calls Adeline.

(Dick only knows the name of the man’s ex-wife through his own snooping. It was a year after he began training with Slade, after he had begun to get used to killing, but not quite accepting it yet. He was determined to find something about the man who had changed his life. Some type of personal tidbit, besides from a first name with no last name, and an acquaintance who occasionally helped them named Wintergreen.

He waited until the man left him alone, because he had finally began trusting Dick enough to not try and escape whenever he had a chance to. Slade left him alone to run some so-disguised errands, and Dick immediately began tearing the safe house apart for something, anything.

He had found a photo. A polaroid. A man that looked like Slade, happier than he had ever seen the man, with a woman, and two babies between them. On the bottom were the names Slade, Adeline, Grant, and Joseph written in his handwriting.

Slade had found him minutes after.

Dick spent weeks healing from the brutal training that had been his punishment for snooping around. Calluses on his hands and feet bleeding for hours straights. Bruises that hurt everytime he breathed. Ribs that felt tender to the touch. Punishments with Slade typically left Dick in similar types of pain.)

Deathstroke didn’t even really try to hide the phone call from Dick. He simply went one room over and dialed up the old ex-wife. He heard the voices through the thin wall of Deathstroke’s safe house, a rental unit he had in Brooklyn.

He heard the name Grant, a few times.

There was a long, long silence once Slade finished his call. He didn’t come back into the room for fifteen whole minutes. When he did, he looked Dick in the eye and simply said, “We are going to kill every one of those Titans.”

They had to wait a full month, to do it.

The only reason they wait is because the Justice League swarms New York City quickly after the incident. They investigate, and question the Titans on the causality. They search for Deathstroke and Renegade, who had already proved to be a thorn to the heroes.

It seems like some of the heroes are hesitant to leave the Titans alone. Dick finds it a little silly— they’re all legal adults. Why are the Justice League breathing down their necks?

But he finds himself answering his own question: because they love them.

He knows the Titans are related to the Justice League. And he knows no parent or mentor would ever be able to abandon their kid like that, even if they’re grown.

He’s sure his own parents, John and Mary, would react quite similarly. He isn’t sure if anyone else would react like that for him— He doesn’t think about the Waynes very often. He chooses not to, for his own sanity.

That period of his life was clouded with loneliness and depression. The other Wayne children were all grown, in their twenties and thirties with their own adult lives to live. They never visited Dick, when he had arrived. Never made time for him in the years after either.

Alfred, the butler, the only person Dick ever spoke more than a few words to, had explained You see, we’ve only just lost Jason a few months ago, They’re not quite ready yet to accept a new addition, but that excuse had quickly became worn as the years passed. Dick was shipped off to boarding schools, and he never returned home for breaks, and spent the summers in exclusive camps or programs. He spent maybe a few weeks in the whole year in Gotham. And no one ever tried to reach out to him.

No. The Waynes were not his family, despite the legal status declaring them so. They had never cared for him. He is quite sure that when he disappeared, not one of them had cared about his life.

And while his life now was hardly rainbows and sunshine— it was undeniably better, in the fact that Dick was at the very least no longer alone.

He had Slade, now.

And, Dick dares to think, Slade would protect him if his life was in danger.

Slade was not kind or gentle, and far from perfect, but over the last five years he had raised Dick more than Bruce Wayne had ever attempted to. Slade had trained him and beat him and made him do horrible things to people. But. Slade had also taught him. He cooked for him. He kept him comfortable. After the first year or so when Dick had rebelled against the man at every turn, their bond had turned into something sincere. They stopped arguing, and began talking, even joking around at times.

Nearly five years, Slade had raised him.

He may not admire the man, but he trusted him with his life, and Dick could admit to himself: he considered the man family. Perhaps, the only family he had left.

A month, as the Justice League swarmed New York City and tried to sniff out the mercenaries. At first, they do it too obviously: Green Arrow seen on Canal Street, WonderWoman spotted near the Flatiron building.

Then, they try to hide what they’re doing. They try to take an investigative route, and Batman and his associated lot even make the commute over from Jersey to help a bit. Dick watches from surveillance cameras as The Signal investigates the Meat District in the middle of the night. He manages to track down an old, abandoned safe house Deathstroke abandoned about a decade ago. Impressive. But not enough to find them.

In the end, the heroes seem to settle on the fact that Deathstroke and Renegade have clearly fled the crime scene already. The Justice League members slowly retreat from New York, and return to their original cities, feeling secure enough in that assumption.

In that time, Slade obsesses over a surveillance camera outside of the Titans apartment when Ravager died. He watches the tapes over, and over, and over again. He is a little more than brutal when training with Dick. Not out of cruelty, but out of anger. His hits are heavy, and Dick quietly takes the brunt of Slade’s grief.

Dick is a detective. He pieces it together quick enough to have a theory. Ravager was Grant. Slade’s oldest son.

And the Titans killed him.

Slade chooses not to kill the Titans out of contract, not anymore, but out of revenge. He obsesses over camera tapes, and waits for the moment to strike.

During their wait, in the safety of Slade’s Williamsburg hideout— Dick turns eighteen.

Eighteen had always been important to him. Back when he was with the Waynes, miserable and lonely, he affirmed to himself every single day that the second he was eighteen and able to do what he wished, he would pack his bags and go back to Haly’s circus. Survive to eighteen. That was all he had to do. Then he would be happy again.

Slade isn’t a big birthday person, and never had been. In previous years, Dick’s birthday has gone by without even the smallest acknowledge that the day was special.

But something’s changed in Slade, with Grant dying.

Slade leaves that morning and tells him to stay put. Dick’s confused at first. He wonders if the man is restocking some of their weapons, and he resorts to an anxious sort of energy. He spends an hour stretching around, and pacing the floorboards before Slade returns to the house.

He has a grocery bag with him. He tells Dick to close his eyes. He listens, as there’s rustling sounds, something being placed down in front of him, and a lighter being flicked on.

Seconds later, he opens his eyes to a birthday cake with candles on it.

“Happy Birthday, kid.”

“I knew you had a heart!” Dick says. He’s smiling for the first time in a long, long time. He knew it.

Slade rolls his eyes, “Just blow the candles out.”

Dick does. He thinks about making a wish before, but he tells himself not to be childish. Slade lets him eat the cake all to himself, and he is pleasantly surprised to find out the cake is strawberry, his favorite. Slade knew.

This birthday was a special one indeed. Dick hasn’t been so happy in such a long time.

Since the age of eight, a decade ago, no one has ever celebrated him. Under the Waynes, Dick was left to the care of boarding schools, who were very indifferent to him, if not outright antagonistic. No one in any of his schools had ever celebrated his birthday. No, the last time someone had bothered to was when his parents were still alive, and all was good in the world.

Days continue to go by, and they return to their surveillance and monitoring in a quiet peace. They barely leave the safehouse, wishing to avoid giving away their location by any means, and hunker down until the time is right.

It is only a month later, do they have a chance.

They don’t do it at the Titans apartment. They’ve changed places, first of all, renting out a new unit down in SoHo now. The Titans would’ve most definitely updated their security, after the prior incident.

They choose to do something more public. Slade does not usually go for that route, tending to prefer quick assassinations from the shadow, but this is different. This is vengeance. Slade plants a trap in Central Park and waits for them to show up.

He hires some criminals eager for a quick buck to act out a hostage situation. They grab a random victim from the park, and put a gun to her head. They make demands to a phone broadcasting the situation on social media for the Titans to show up or else the girl gets it, and the heroes fall for it. Not even a full twenty minutes pass before Wondergirl is throwing out a golden lasso at the criminals and Speedy is hitching arrows.

As soon as they get there, Deathstroke is firing bullets at Aqualad.

The hero barely manages to survive— Kid Flash pushes him out the way at the last second.

Dick stands to the side, and jumps in, immediately catching the speedster with a knee to the gut. The guy folds over in pain, and Dick uses the moment to slap meta-cuffs on his wrists before he can run away.

“Renegade!” Wondergirl shouts at him, clearly angry about the stab wound he left her with the last time they fought.

“Wondergirl.” Dick says.

Kid Flash tries to kick him, but he misses. Dick lets him hit the floor with his hands cuffed. Without his speed, he isn’t much of a threat.

The minor criminals they hired to attract the Titans have fled the scene at this point. Aqualad managed to dodge Deathstroke’s blade, barely— a thin line of blood drips down his cheek. Speedy tries to help out the Atlantean in his fight, but his arrows miss Deathstroke at every turn.

Wondergirl rushes over to help them, but Dick manages to intervene before she can. He throws a knife in her direction, and she pauses before throwing her lasso out towards him. He flips out the way, knees tucked to his chest, and when his feet hit the floor he uses the momentum to lunge back towards her with his blade. She barely manages to dodge out of the way, ducking down quickly.

It is clear to all of them that this fight won’t continue for long: Deathstroke and Renegade will win, the longer this continues. The Titans are strong, but not as ruthless as the mercenaries.

Deathstroke is out for blood, and he will get it.

Then, suddenly and unexpectedly: Deathstroke drops to the ground.

The source of this takes a moment to process. A beam of light, magic in its origin, clearly, strikes him in the chest mid movement as he was hurling his knife towards Speedy.

Slade’s healing abilities try to fight back, but a second beam comes as quick as the first one had.

Deathstroke falls to ground, and all of them stare in shock.

“Is he…” Kid Flash asks, from his own spot on the ground.

“No.” Dick says. He stares at Slade’s body, a pit beginning to form in him. His body doesn’t so much as twitch with life. But Deathstroke had always seemed immortal to him. Never in the five years that the man had raised him did he ever seem human-enough to die.

This situation is impossible. It violates the laws of physics.

“No.” Dick says. The Titans are staring at him. They don’t attack. Aqualad and Wondergirl are rushing off in the direction of the light beam that struck him, trying to find the source.

Speedy has an arrow aimed at him, but he does not release it. Kid Flash watches him with uneasy eyes. Someone has already taken the cuffs off him.

“No…” Dick is thinking to himself, or maybe he is speaking aloud. He isn’t sure. Time seems to become a hazy thing. “Not again…”

Kid Flash clears his throat like he’s going to say something, but Dick comes to his senses suddenly. Fuck.

He shoots a few bullets towards the heroes, not really aiming to injure, more so as a distraction. He turns around and flees. The bike he took to the park is stashed behind a bush nearby, and he finds it easily enough.

He starts the engine and flees the crime scene.

He can’t return to the safe house in Brooklyn. Not the one they had just been staying at. It’s too… fresh. Slade did have others in New York, up in Jackson Heights and Fort George. But New York City suddenly seems suffocating right now.

And, he knows the Justice League is probably going to come back and investigate again.

He can't stay in this city. They’re going to find him. Without Slade to help him, he knows he is going to slip up. And everything he’s worked for will disappear.

So, he drives down, heading south, before ditching his bike in the bus lane of Park Avenue, and ducks into a Subway station. He takes the train the rest of the way to Penn Station, and buys an NJ Transit ticket to Bludhaven, where he knows he will find another safehouse Slade has hidden in a nearby city.

He doesn’t look back once, scared what he will find.

Donna kicks the wall in frustration.

“Try not to break the molding, will you?” Roy asks dryly.

“I’m so frustrated!” Donna says. She folds her arms over her chest, and wrinkles her eyebrows as she once again plays out the day's events in her mind. Damnit. Twice, Renegade has bested her. Her pride stings. She is an Amazonian. She should not be bested by petty criminals. And aside from the Renegade fact, there was the glaring issue at hand. “Someone’s trying to make us look like murderers!”

“Yeah.” Garth says glumly. He sits at the kitchen counter, a large bucket of water in front of him, that he occasionally drenches his face in, before returning to air. He pouts a bit, disappointment on his face. The first incident a few weeks ago, with the criminal falling out the window, had really affected Garth, who everyone briefly thought had pushed him out. He ducks his head back into the bucket of water.

“We have to get to the bottom of this,” Wally says. “Like, yesterday.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” Roy rolls his eyes. He taps his finger against the table. “But how?”

A pause hangs in the air. This has been what they’ve been trying to figure out for the last hour.

“Renegade.” Donna says, suddenly. “We do it through Renegade.”

Chapter Text

Dick had never been to Bludhaven, but he immediately finds the city comforting, if not just because he finds here a sanctuary from the heroes of New York.

There are no heroes in Bludhaven. The city is a wasteland, abandoned.

Slade’s safehouse is an apartment the man owned, in a rundown looking building on the south side of the city. The apartment has two bedrooms, and a small kitchen, bathroom, and a living room connected to a fire escape. The kitchen is stocked, like Slade made sure every safehouse is. Canned food that never goes bad lines every shelf, enough food to last for years. The furniture is bare and essential— just enough to survive on. A wooden kitchen table he plans on converting to his workspace. A simple queen sized mattress on the floor of the bedroom. A simple wardrobe is in the room, with plain, ambiguous clothing that is generally too large for him, but fits alright when he ties the pants up with a belt and rolls up the hems. Basic hygienic products line the bathroom cabinet.

He doesn’t need more. He isn’t used to having more, to be frank.

The building is located near an old train station the city had abandoned after the state changed the transit tracks, which had been left by the city to become an overgrown, condemned site. Within the abandoned station, where a toll booth had once been long ago, Dick knows Slade has hidden an artillery weapons closet, with a door added to protect it from trespassers. The mercenary doesn’t typically hide his goods in public areas like this, but in hotspots, like the hero-infested cities like Gotham and New York, Slade made sure to have a few weapons easy to access nearby. Bludhaven was perfect for him to hide as many weapons as he wanted, with its lack of heroes and close proximity to the others.

Slade made sure he knew all the security codes the man used, just in case something happened. There was a pattern to them, the area code of a house, plus two other entirely random numbers Slade used and alternated. A code Dick had long memorized would dictate if the random numbers went before, middle, or after the area code. It was easy to figure once you knew the pattern.

The man truly began to trust him, after the trial and error of Dick’s former years. Slade had been good to him. A mentor.

It makes the loss hurt him, more than he would’ve ever thought possible.

Dick approaches the abandoned toll booth. The heavy industrial machinery surrounding it looks out of place in the otherwise entirely abandoned train station. He finds the keypad near the bottom of the door, hidden behind a pile of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. He enters the code with careful fingers— there were only two attempted entries allowed, before the keypad would incinerate itself. The keypad beeps a pleasant green, and the heavy machine door begins to slide up.

He opens it, and finds assault rifles and carbines and hand grenades. He finds a fucking bomb. He finds ten fucking bombs.

Dick decides to leave them there, for the time being. But he takes mental stock of what there is, in case he has to come back in a hurry. It’s good to know his options. He finds a few swords and throwing knives, which he does grab. He also finds, hidden in a corner, a few bo-staffs that Dick recalls using in training in his early days of being Renegade. Before he had worked up the nerve for bloodshed, Slade drilled him endlessly in the harmless weapon. Dick decides to take the bo-staff as well, an impulsive decision.

He shoves everything into a duffel bag, and retreats to the apartment.

He needs to come up with a plan, fire and foremost. He has no clue what happens from here on out. Does he track down who killed Slade? Does he seek vengeance? Does he change his name and flee the country? Become a civilian?

Freshly eighteen, new to being an adult, Dick is not used to deciding things for himself. He doesn’t think there had ever been a time in his life where he was allowed to think and choose for himself. As a young child, it had been his parents giving him bedtime and making him eat his vegetables and dictating everyday routine, like all parents do for young children. Then, it was Bruce Wayne, sending him to boarding schools without a second thought. His curriculum planned for him, meals picked out from the cafeteria, and a closet full of uniforms he had no say on. And then, it was Deathstroke who entered his life, and the man’s questions of this or that were there for the illusion of choice.

No. Dick never had much of a choice of anything in his life thus far.

As soon as you turn eighteen, you can join the circus. Just survive until then. Dick suddenly remembered his old mantra to himself. Everyday, like it was a prayer.

Yes. He decides, suddenly. He can finally join the circus again!

It’s a manic sort of mood, as he decides. But, with no one in the world to look out for him, after losing the only mentor he has had, Dick clings to the idea of joining the circus. If he goes back, he won’t have to be on his own, again.

The next day, Dick goes to the Public Library to use their computer. The more frequented safehouses sometimes have computers in them, but they hadn’t visited Bludhaven in some years, so the base is entirely exempt of luxuries.

The Librarian lets him use the computer without so much as a cursory glance, scanning her own library card when Dick informs her he doesn’t have one. Dick cautiously scans the area for a bit, checking for any wandering eyes before ‘Haly’s Circus’ typing into the search bar.

The circus burned down years ago, he finds, and no longer exists.

This is perhaps a greater pain than the death of Slade.

It hits him like a truck. It hurts more than seeing the limp corpse of his mentor in front of his eyes. Perhaps, it’s the fact that the idea of Haly’s Circus had been the only thing keeping him going for so long. An oasis for him to chase, when his life was its bleakest. Perhaps, it’s the last remnant of his life with his parents being destroyed that hurts so bad. Perhaps it is the joint grief, of losing a mentor, and realizing he truly doesn’t have anyone else in the world, anymore. The pain hurts Dick so bad, he puts his head down on the keyboard and closes his eyes and cries, quietly, for the first time in years.

He grieves, on his own.

He leaves the library an hour later, feeling extraordinarily tired. He goes to bed early that night, and he sleeps in the next morning. He barely eats anything, a few bites of canned peaches before his stomach gets full and he leaves food alone for the rest of the day.

Life has suddenly gotten very, very lonely.

He has the realization that he has no one in the world to care for him. It is a sad thing, being entirely and unequivocally on your own.

Days pass, without him speaking to anybody. He sleeps the entirety of the next day away. And the day after that. And the next day.

He contemplates suicide, briefly. There is nothing worth living for, after all. He has no reason to function anymore. But he goes to church instead.

His mother had been a devout Christian. She wore a rosary around her neck at all times, and recited the prayers at bedtimes. So, he goes to church and tries to remember the sound of her voice as she recites the prayers to him. Hail Mary…

He doesn’t kill himself. It’s in the empty pews of the night service, staring up at the crucified body of God, that the idea of repentance comes to him.

He cannot kill himself, because he has to repent.

He has spent years committing horrible acts of murder, theft, robbery, assault, and dozens of other crimes. His parents had raised him to be good, to be kind and generous and charitable, and he had failed them.

He prays that the dead cannot see into the land of the living, because his parents would be heartbroken in the disappointment he has become.

He had to, needed to, make up for what he had done.

The next day, he returns to the library, and uses Google one more time to search up The Flying Graysons. It takes a bit of scrolling and clicking for him to find a photo. Someone had uploaded a photo they took, years ago, at the circus right before his parents died. There’s a couple in their twenties posing with Dick and his family. A guy, with dark hair and a scrawny look about him, and a blonde girl that’s laughing loudly as their photo is taken, like someone had made a joke the moment before the camera’s click.

They look vaguely familiar, as if he’s seen them before, but he can’t place names to faces, so Dick ignores them completely.

Dick looks at the younger version of himself. He had been so happy, once. His younger face stares at him through the screen like a ghost. He looks naive. His parents look younger than he remembers, but that was the fallacy of memory. His parents grin, young faces in their early thirties, smile wrinkles barely beginning to form. Grey hair hadn’t even begun forming yet. They died young, life lines ended too early.

Their costumes were exactly how he remembered it, all bright colors and sequin. Red, yellow, green. He misses the wardrobe of circus life. The spandex shining bright under the circus lights. He felt invisible, in those days, in his uniform.

An idea begins to form in his mind, and he can only pray that it is a good one.

He hits print on the photo and leaves the library. He finds a thrift store only a couple blocks away. He roams the aisles of the store, debating his idea. There are plenty of heroes and vigilantes in this world— (but there are no heroes in Bludhaven) is there even a way for him to make up for all the harm he has caused? Is it possible? He doesn’t know. But he has to try, for his parents, and for himself.

He finds a thick green button down. A Rutgers college shirt (a telltale sign he is truly in New Jersey) that is a deep red color with a bold R printed on top of it. A set of yellow curtains that is made of a nice heavy material. Green pants made of a corduroy material. Along with that, he picks up a few extra pieces, plain nondescript items, for everyday wear, since he is running out of clothing.

He buys them all, and takes them back to the apartment.

He has decided to keep the boots and utility belt of his Renegade costume for practicality. But he finds a sewing kit in the bathroom of the apartment and begins to tear up and build up a new costume from what he has bought. He uses the image of his parents for reference. He spends hours carefully putting together his new outfit.

When he is finished, Dick finds himself able to look himself in the mirror and not flinch from what he sees, for the first time in several years. He looks more like his father than he ever has.

He preps his utility belt. Most of it is fine, having only been restocked a week ago, when he was still with Slade. But he does it anyway, to calm his nerves. It’s something familiar. Throwing knives, check. First-aid kit, check. Gas mask, check. Ammo, check.

He sneaks out of the apartment through the fire escape a little after the microwave clock reads midnight.

He knows the coast is clear— Slade would not choose a safehouse that wasn’t safe and he was very particular about his requirements. No nosy neighbors. No security cameras within fifty feet. Things like that. But still, Deathstroke and Renegade didn’t always have time to check on the houses, so Dick snooped around before deciding it was good.

He is wearing a new costume, and he has decided on a new name for himself.

Looking at the photos of his parents, young and happy and hopeful, and remembers what his mother had whispered to him the night she died. When I see you out there, you make me think of a little robin.

Robin, he has decided. He will be Robin, now that he cannot be Renegade anymore.

Dick isn’t too sure how this whole patrol thing works. As a mercenary, they always received contracts with specific details. Nothing was ever a coincidence, instead of meticulous planning. But heroes, as far as he is aware, simply go out at night and hope to prevent some type of crime? He isn’t sure if the idea is all there.

But he does so anyway. He isn’t too familiar with this city. He had never been to Bludhaven prior to this incident, and he spent days inside instead of familiarizing himself with the area. So he explores the city from an aerial view. He takes rooftops instead of sidewalks, walking with the ease of a professional acrobat. He figures out where the downtown area is, where the industrial zones are, where the school areas are.

An hour into exploring, he hears a scream cut through the night air.

He turns on his heel suddenly, and moves in the direction of the sound. He finds a woman, alone, surrounded by two men who move to grab at her with greedy hands.

He drops down into the alleyway suddenly, and jabs sharp hands at their solar plexuses. His instinct is to grab a blade or gun, but he is trying to do good, so he smothers his murderous muscle memory. The men jolt at his sudden appearance, but they’re on the ground before they can even think of doing something in retaliation.

Then, it is just the woman and Robin in the dark alleyway.

She doesn’t say anything, staring at him with wide eyes. Her breath is heavy, fearful.

“You’re okay, now.” Dick attempts to comfort. He hasn’t ever done something like this before, so he can only hope that he is being comforting. “You’re okay.”

The woman continues staring with wide eyes. “…Who are you?”

“I’m Robin.” Dick says, like that explains it.

She acknowledges him with a small, confused nod, and Dick asks if she’d like help getting home. She declines and runs away quite suddenly. He gets back on the rooftop and follows her from a distance, making sure she is truly safe, before he continues on with his patrol.

Before the night finishes, Dick manages to stop the robbery of a watch store downtown, prevent a case of domestic abuse after hearing a husband returns home drunkenly through an open window, and stops a man from driving under the influence when he spots a car behaving oddly near the main road.

The sun is beginning to rise, when he calls it quits. For the first time in years, Dick feels something like pride blooming in his chest. It is not enough. Not yet. But he feels like he is finally stepping into the right direction.

He creeps into his apartment through the fire escape he left out of, as sunrise creeps alongside the horizon.

He is suddenly aware that there is someone in his apartment, waiting for him.

Was someone here to kill Dick, like Deathstroke and Ravager?

He has a knife out sooner than he can think, acting purely on muscle memory, and he immediately lunges at the person. He didn’t plan on going down without a fight. An instinctive, animalistic urge to fight for survival raised in his chest.

He leans forward his knife at the man’s neck, as he questions him. “Who are you?”

The guy dodges him quickly, barely. He has curly blonde hair, and the hippie-est clothes Dick has ever seen a person wear.

He does not reply. His mouth stays glued shut, and stares at him with wide, green eyes.

Dick asks again, angrily, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

He wonders how the stranger has even found this location. This address should’ve been impossible to find, without some insider information. Was there a leak in his intel?

The guy begins to move his hands in reply. Sign language, it takes Dick a moment too long to realize. Slade had taught him years ago, alongside a dozen other skills and tricks. They didn’t use sign language often, but Slade made sure he knew it anyway. He tracks the hand movements carefully, forcing himself to remember the meaning of the motions he hasn’t seen in a while.

My name is J-O-E-Y W-I-L-S-O-N. He moves his hands clearly, slowly, for Dick to understand. He is helpfully mouthing the letters and words to him as well, and Dick finds himself keeping a steady eye on his hands.

Death-stroke was my dad. I came here looking for you.

Chapter Text

Bruce has noted that in the past five or so years, crime fighting has become duller. Lifeless.

When he had first become Batman, decades upon decades ago, when he himself had been a teenager— the crime underbelly of Gotham had been at an all-time high. Every day, dozens of murders were being reported. Theft and robbery were simply parts of everyday life in the city.

It was disgusting. He had become Batman to do something about that.

His very existence seemed to stir something up, and suddenly fanatics were appearing, with flashy costumes and villain names and grand declarations of motives. It had gotten a little worse, before it had gotten better.

Duke had come into his life twenty years ago, and everything had changed. The boy’s parents had been victims to the Joker, and while they weren’t murdered, they were victims of crime in a way that reminded Bruce so starkly of his childhood. He had taken the boy in at once. He was a teenager, older than Bruce was when his parents had died, which made it both harder and easier in some ways, to grieve.

He had slipped up, one day, and creeped through the house in costume thinking the boy was asleep. He was not. Duke had realized just who his guardian was.

Of course, that was when Duke revealed to him that he was a meta. That he sometimes went around helping his neighborhood with a few other kids from his block. He did not want to let Duke help him fight crime. That had never been the plan. It just sort of happened that way.

Slowly, but surely, Duke had become the Signal. A beacon of light, and hope, for Gotham.

In the end, Duke may be his only accomplishment, amongst his dozen of other failures, when it comes down to it.

There was Damian. Roughly the same age as Duke, it was a year after when he had entered their lives. The boy had been seventeen when he arrived in Gotham. Damn near fully grown and trained under the League of Assassins. There was no way to undo that amount of training. Somehow, the childish affair he had with Talia at nineteen had fathered a son, that she kept in secret and raised amongst assassins. He shuddered at the thought.

Damian was violent. Aggressive. Deadly. He bickered with Bruce and Duke, and attempted to kill common criminals, and nearly sabotaged everything they were working on.

Prickly, and so close to being an adult, there was no way of getting to him.

Bruce did not know what to do with him. Even now, years later, he did not know what to do with his son. He admits he should’ve tried harder, in hindsight, but it was too far late now to build any type of relationship with his son.

They weren’t close. Damian spent more time with his friend Jon, and in turn Superman, than he did with Bruce. He found out weeks after it happened, his son had become some type of hero named Respawn. And Respawn was considered more of a Metropolis hero, than a Gotham vigilante.

Cassandra entered his life, a few years after that.

She stumbled into his life by accident. He gave her a home because he saw she had none.

She was also trained to be a killer, but she knew right from wrong, and she did not test the waters like Damian had. She was effective without being deadly. She made for a great crime fighter, and he sensed her need for his approval, but he found it hard to give it. He could not entrust her with detective work. She could not read, lacked any education, and Bruce commonly had to restrain himself from getting frustrated when she couldn’t properly relay thoughts or clues. No. She worked best when very simple following orders. Bruce didn’t trust her with anything beyond that.

Then, the Spoiler entered the crime fighting ring, with her acquaintance (partner? friend?) Oracle appearing a few weeks later. Stephanie Brown and Tim Drake, he uncovered when he dug into their identities. Stephanie and Tim didn’t concern him in the slightest. They were hardly heroes, just some college kids pretending to be something greater. He did not care for them much, but he kept track of them, as a precaution.

And then there was Jason.

He had loved Jason in a way he did not love anyone else. He had opened his heart up in a way he never expected. The others— Duke, Damian, Cassandra, they had all been nearly grown when he took them in. Between sixteen and seventeen years old, they didn’t need someone to raise them, as much as they needed someone to show them the right paths to take in life. They were grown, and already steadfast in their ways. It’d been too late to change them.

But, Jason?

Jason was a child. Twelve, and attempting to steal the tires off the batmobile to afford food. Bruce took him in. Raised him, in a way he wasn’t able to raise the others. Jason took to Bruce like a duck to water. The boy was incredibly easy to care for.

Jason was desperate to help him, somehow. He worried for Bruce. He couldn’t let him get involved with crime fighting in a hands-on manner. So, he had asked Oracle to show Jason how to do what he did, as a favor to him and the boy. And Oracle did, with only a few negotiations (trading weapons and gear for training the young boy).

Jason couldn’t help him on the streets, with the villains, but the boy enjoyed giving him directions through traffic and searching through their databases for names. It made him feel useful, and Bruce was happy to let him do so if it made the boy feel secure. There was no harm in sitting behind a computer.

But, then, the Joker had seen a way to hurt Batman.

He targeted the young boy on his communications line. He found out who Jason was, and he baited the boy with a perfectly laid out trap. He was fifteen, when he died.

He had adopted Dick out of pity, and nothing more.

He did not have it in him to love another child, not so soon after Jason. But he was sitting in the circus stands and saw what happened, and he suddenly felt himself transported to decades prior, when he himself watched his parents die. Bruce had been the same age as Dick was. Both of their parents were murdered because of petty crime. Both forced to witness the tragedy. When he looked at the corpses of the Flying Graysons, he saw Thomas and Martha Wayne laying there, heads bashed in on the ground.

Bruce could not undo what has already happened, but he could at the very least keep the boy safe from the cruel foster system.

(Batman, and orphans.)

He took Dick into his home. But he could not love another child. Just as quick as he took him in, he sent him away to boarding schools, where he wasn’t forced to acknowledge the boy’s painful existence. He chose good schools and summer programs, where he knew the staff would do their jobs. He’d be safe. Over the years, he only saw the child a handful of times, during the gaps between school and summer camps, or the mandatory home visit. He didn’t have much of a relationship with him. He was quiet and calm, but Bruce knew it was only a farce, because the schools had always reported him as a violent troublemaker. Dick reminded him of Damian. Perhaps he was another lost cause.

Nonetheless, Bruce would continue keeping the child safe, and kept funding his education.

In that time, crime began to slow. He had been Batman for decades, which meant many of the other heroes and villains had been doing it for an equally long time. It is hard to have as much energy about things twenty years later. Bruce was content to focus on work, and content to leave Dick alone. Things seemed to be improving in the world.

Bruce never really considered Dick, until the boy went missing.

Regret hit him, and he suddenly wished he had taken the effort to get to know the boy. Horrible, horrible self deprecating thoughts as he was forced to realize how terribly he had treated the boy throughout the years. He wished so badly for the chance to redeem his actions. But what has been done cannot be undone.

So, Bruce focuses on the work he can do. He focuses on being Batman.

In recent years, there’s been a new generation of heroes popping up, and with the creation of the Titans (the only superhero team aside from the Justice League to ever exist), there has been an explosion of supervillains and criminals. Like a chain reaction, his workload has doubled in the past few months.

Currently, Bruce is trying to figure out Gotham’s newest villain, a crime lord by the name of Red Hood. The man has appeared one day out of the cold air, with not one trail or scrap of evidence providing a clue to who he is, or what he wants. Bruce had been working overtime trying to figure it out. The man needs to be taken down.

An alert suddenly interrupts his work— Deathstroke is dead, from a fight with the Titans. That is surprising.

That is the other thing Bruce had been trying to figure out. The Justice League is very protective of the Titans, the younger protogees of his colleagues and associates. He finds it a bit silly. You never saw him breathing down the necks of the Signal, Respawn, or Orphan. He couldn’t care less about the Spoiler or Oracle. But his colleagues were much more… naive, than him, and so they asked Bruce to help them with the situation. He had been asked to help figure out why Deathstroke and Renegade, and some mysterious third party who had died shortly after, attempted to target the Titans specifically.

He is a detective, and so he agreed begrudgingly to help investigate a bit behind the scenes.

And now, Deathstroke seems to have suddenly died.

The man was thorn in Bruce’s side for several years. He cannot say he is grieved. But, it is mysterious. Deathstroke was a tough man, a violent soldier who on the few times Batman fought him (not in recent years, but roughly a decade or so ago), he struggled to keep pace. Deathstroke dying was indeed quite curious.

Bruce pauses his research on Redhood— he supposes he can focus on Renegade, for a moment.

My name is J-O-E-Y W-I-L-S-O-N. Death-stroke was my dad. I came here looking for you.

Dick stares at the stranger, brain buffering between thoughts.

His mind suddenly recalls a photo he had accidentally found, years ago. A polaroid. With Slade, looking happier than Dick had ever been allowed to see him. Beside him was a woman, his wife, holding two chubby babies in her arms. Adeline, Grant, and Joseph, the words under the polaroid helpfully labeled.

“Oh.” Dick says. His brain catches up to the situation. This was that baby, that child, he had seen in the old photo he found years ago.

Then, he smacks himself and goes to sign it instead, but Joey shakes his head and waves his hands at Dick, signaling to him that it’s alright.

My ears are fine. Joey tells him. His curly hair bounces with every subtle movement. He gestures to his neck, where a thin scar trails the entirety of the limb. Someone slit my throat when I was younger, because of my father. So I can’t talk. But I can still hear well.

“Right…” Dick says. He isn’t sure what to do in this scenario, how he should be replying or reacting. His voice sounds unfamiliar to him after a week of living in pure lonely silence. “I’m sorry for your, uh, losses.”

Joey shrugs, an attempt at indifference, but his eyes harden just the slightest. My father and brother were not good people.

Dick doesn’t know how to reply to that, for he isn’t a good person either.

But. I know someone killed them on purpose. Joey continues to telegraph. His eyes are a shade of green Dick had never seen before. They were unnatural. He stared at Dick with determination. I want to go after them. I want you to help me.

“Me?” Dick asks. “Why me? How did you even find me?”

Joey looks at him. He gives Dick a long look, like he knows exactly who Dick is down to his very soul. It was equal parts reassuring, frightening, and peaceful.

“Um… okay.” Dick says after a moment. “Yeah. I can help you.”

Joey nods like he already knew that would be the case. He has a kind look to his features, as he peers at Dick. He has to be the same age as Dick, and Dick wonders what the other boy thinks of him— his father had essentially abandoned his own family, his own children, to train a protegee the same age as him. But Joey didn’t look at him with hatred or anger. He held no ill will in his eyes.

“Where do we start?” Dick asks aloud, but mostly to himself. He doesn’t expect Joey to actually reply to him, so he’s surprised when the guy begins to respond, hand spelling out an acronym.

H-I-V-E.

“Hive?” Dick says. He’s seen the name before, on the contracts Deathstroke had him read regarding their mission to kill the Titans. That was the name of their employer. He had almost forgotten.

Joey nods at him enthusiastically, a small smile creeping on his face.

“Okay.” Dick says. “Okay. Let’s start going back through Sla-Deathstroke’s databases, and see what we can find.”

There isn’t a computer in this safehouse. They’re going to have to go to New York City again, to the house he had left in Brooklyn, to grab all the technology they needed. Damn it.

“We have to go to Brooklyn.” Dick sighs. “That’s where all our tech is, and the contracts from the H.I.V.E.”

Joey nods, then looks at Dick, and asks Sleep? with a curious tilt to his head.

Dick has slept far too much this past week, he isn’t necessarily tired. But Joey continues to stare at him with his too-green eyes, and Dick finds himself crumbling under the pressure.

“Uh, yeah.” Dick says. “Let’s sleep for a few hours, then we can take the bus to New York City, after.”

Joey stands up, and gestures to the second bedroom, a question to his movement.

Dick nods, “All yours.”

Joey flashes him a smile, then enters the room and shuts the door behind him. He is very, very odd, Dick decides. He had never met anybody as contradictory as Joey.

Dick retreats to the other bedroom, feeling off-kilter, and collapses into a few hours of restless sleep.

Chapter Text

After the incident with Deathstroke, the mercenary’s mysterious death in the middle of Central Park, the Titans began to search for any sign of Renegade, the sole loose end.

Apprentice to Deathstroke, that much the Titans and the League knew. But no one really knew for how long, or why, or where the boy came from. When the boy first appeared, almost four years ago, it was clear he was young to those who saw him. A teenager, but how old, no one knew. A voice modulator hid his voice. If his build and mannerisms didn’t invoke the energy of the young, there would be no clues to his identity. Nothing else could be dug up.

Roy thinks the guy is probably around the same age as him and the Titans, but that’s more of a feeling than a fact.

He keeps an eye out for any guys in an 18 to 22 age range, with dark hair, and a stature around Renegade’s. New York City is the biggest city in the country, and an infinite amount of people could fit that description. He went further and tried to limit his search to people with that description in areas he thought Renegade would be— near the Titans old apartment, where that first attack took place, near their current apartment, near dodgy neighborhoods that would’ve been easy to hide in, and so forth. He watched everyone with that vague description closely, but no one behaved oddly.

Renegade seemed to have truly vacated the city this time, or was much better at keeping under the radar than they expected, because nothing happened.

They search and search for any sign of Renegade, and come up with absolutely nothing.

It was only after Roy was snooping around the Meatpacking District at night, hiding in the rafts of an old warehouse, did he finally overhear some criminals talking about the incident.

The other Titans aren’t quite familiar with the tedious parts of crime fighting, the stakeouts and detective work. The team tends to be given motives and missions from both the Justice League and local government, and go straight towards the action without much paperwork to be done. But, Green Arrow taught him well enough to operate his own missions, so Roy had no issue spending nights on rooftops, investigating rumors and waiting to hear something, anything. They had no traces. He was desperate for anything.

Then, the name HIVE came up a few times in the mouths of criminals.

Two men were smuggling cocaine in through the abandoned butcher’s warehouse. Bricks of white powder got passed around from van to duffel bag, as the two spoke about this new organization called HIVE looking for work.

Intrigued, Roy launched a few arrows in quick succession. The first arrow flew through the bag of coke in the man’s hand, spraying white powder everywhere and making the air thick. As the two men blink and sneeze through the cocaine filled air, a few more arrows follow shortly, hitching their shirts and pants onto the walls and crates beside them, hooking them to immobility.

Roy drops down from the fire escape window he was watching from. “What is HIVE?”

“Who are you?” The first guy asks between sneezes.

The second guy, much more cowardly, immediately answers, “It’s this company trying to hire people, all the sudden! They’re the ones who hired Deathstroke. We heard they have a huge base in Gotham. That’s where they’re asking everyone to report to, if they wanna get paid. I swear, that’s all we know.”

Roy relays that information to the Titans, and they resolve themselves to a trip across the Hudson, towards Gotham city, where the H.I.V.E. waited.

The so-called “base” is an abandoned warehouse of an old windowsill company, located outside of Crime Alley and in the docks of Gotham.

Donna doesn't know what she was expecting— well, no, actually she does. She was picturing the cultish Scientology and Freemasonry buildings that populated New York City’s streets. Old concrete buildings with beautiful designs on their doors to lure people in. H.I.V.E.'s base was very far from that. An ugly abandoned warehouse that must have been converted for their purposes. If she were a criminal approaching for work, she’d wonder if she was getting played.

The Titans debated whether or not to enter Gotham. They all heard from their mentors how prickly Batman was, with heroes entering his city. Even the Justice League had never entered the city, without strict permission.

But the H.I.V.E. was up to no good, and they were targeting the Titans specifically. It was personal.

Batman would have to put up with them, this one time.

Donna waits with Wally on a nearby rooftop, as Roy and Garth scope the place out. They can’t get a good look into the warehouse before entering, since all the windows seem to have been painted over with black. She waits very patiently as Roy, paranoid Roy, spends nearly an hour checking every nook and corner of the exterior before saying, “Move in.”

Donna and Wally rush in. They enter from the Western side fire escape, as Roy and Garth move in from the Eastern side of the building.

What they find inside is a little unexpected. She had been expecting to find people, and maybe some weapons. Instead, the warehouse is nondescript and empty. Flickering lightbulbs barely illuminate the place.

“What is this?” Donna asks in frustration. “I thought this was supposed to be their base.”

“Let’s look for something,” Roy says. “They could be hiding.”

Wally instantly runs around, in a hurricane of speed, searching the warehouse in seconds when he suddenly shouts, “Over here!”

The other Titans move towards him, where he stands near some empty crates. Underneath the pile of wood, they see a trapdoor etched into the ground, barely visible.

“Two of us should go in, and the other two should stay up here.” Roy announces.

“I can stay up here.” Garth says, looking around the warehouse with skepticism.

“I want to look.” Donna crosses her arms and says.

“I’ll go down there, too. I can search it in seconds.” Wally says.

Roy nods in agreement. “Alright. Call for help if you guys find anything.”

Donna rolls her eyes, because duh. Between her and Roy, they sometimes fought for the Leader position. Roy tended to take charge in the more logistical settings, but when it came to a battlefield, Donna knew exactly how to lead and command the team. It worked most of the time, sharing the role of leadership. But sometimes it felt like the two of them stepped on each other's toes.

Donna heads down into the trap door, carefully stepping down a ladder that leads them into dark oblivion, until Roy throws down a flare for them to see. She thanks him quietly, and heads down. Red sparks illuminate the scene.

Wally is behind her in seconds, and the two of them stand in the middle of a tiny, underground bunker filled with manila folders of paperwork.

“Ugh,” Donna groans. She really hates paperwork. “Okay. Let’s look for anything important.”

She takes a file of paperwork, as Wally quickly begins scanning through folders. She skims the paperwork for anything eye-catching, like seeing Renegade or Deathstroke written down. A lot of the paperwork is censored, black lines crossing out what she assumes is very important information. She can barely make anything out.

She grabs another folder, and skims it over quickly. Even with some of the words blacked out, she can tell that this may be important. She can’t quite make it out yet, but with some time she is sure they could figure it out.

Suddenly, she hears loud noises coming from above— the sound of Garth’s magic, like a rushing wave, and Roy’s arrows hitting a heavy target.

“Fuck,” Donna says. She looks at Wally, who is already staring at her with wide eyes, and she gestures to the ladder, “You go first!”

She lets him leave, and grabs the folder she was holding, as well as a few others that she takes blindly, praying to the Gods that they might be useful. She folds them quickly, and shoves them into the opening of her boots, hoping the ink won’t get too damaged from sweat or tension, and rushes over to the ladder.

She enters the scene, and sees the rest of the Titans fighting an unknown villain with a gleaming red helmet over his face and an AK-47 in his hands.

She doesn’t ask questions before grabbing her lasso, and attempting to rope the villain. He seems to see her coming, and barely manages to dodge at the last second. His reflexes aren’t great. His training was rushed, she can tell.

Wally is behind him, delivering a sharp kick to his ribs.

“Who are you?” Donna asks. She braces her fists.

Red-helmet man laughs. “What makes you think I’m going to answer that?”

She rolls his eyes, and throws another punch in his direction, and he steps back quickly but falls into the direction of an arrow from Roy.

The man tries shooting them, (He relies too heavily on his weapons, Donna assesses. He isn’t comfortable with combat) but they all manage to dodge quickly enough. Garth’s waterstream swallows most of the stray bullets before it even hits the walls of the warehouse.

“This is getting annoying.” The man says, after Wally catches him with an elbow to his ribcage, that makes the man frantically back up. He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a remote of sorts. He presses a button, and then laughs. “Right. I’m going to get going now.”

He throws something into the air, after— a smoke bomb. The air becomes thick and hazy in seconds, and takes a few more moments before Donna is able to squint past the fog and see silhouettes of her surrounding.

A ticking sound comes from all around them. Donna realizes suddenly that this guy has rigged the place to explode. “Fuck!”

Donna, Roy, and Garth immediately flee the scene, squinting past the smoke to find the exit.

Wally debates for a moment between following the criminal, or trying to save some of the files— he decides quickly and manages to run downstairs, grab an armful of paperwork, before he runs out the warehouse to the rest of the Titans, who manage to make it a block down the road.

Tick, tick, and boom. The warehouse explodes behind them. All remaining traces of evidence, gone.

Dick and Joey manage to make it to Brooklyn in around three and a half hours. A bus from Bludhaven to Penn station, and a subway ride with only two transfers, until they make it to the safehouse.

Joey follows him through the streets with a quiet energy. Dick is unused to another person’s presence that isn’t Slade. And Joey is nothing like his father. If it wasn’t for the polaroid he had seen with his own two eyes after snooping around years ago, he wouldn’t believe they were related. Whereas Slade was demanding and loud, Joey was quiet and understanding. He looked at Dick like he knew him for years, like he automatically understood what he was. Dick was equally unnerved and calmed by the fact.

They make it to the safehouse Dick had been in only some time ago. He wonders if there’s still some birthday cake left in the fridge. He doesn’t want to check.

He enters the security code, and leads Joey inside.

The space looks more lived in than the safehouses typically do. They spent over a month here, Slade and Dick, before the man died. There were small remnants of human life, like the dirty spoon in the sink, or the kitchen chair untucked in.

Dick avoided looking around too much. He went towards the main bedroom, where Slade had stored his technology in the closet. There was a large safe there, where Dick pressed the code in with muscle memory. He used different codes for the safes that stored ammo and tech, than he did for the houses, but Dick had all the code patterns memorized. He found a large Macbook that he knew was jailbroken to Slade’s needs, as well as a few tablets, a dozen throwaway phones, and miscellaneous wires, devices, and other bits of technology.

Joey stands behind him, watching, and helps Dick shoved all the technology into a Trader Joe’s bag they snagged on the way over.

Dick searches the rest of the safe house for anything else he should take. He finds a few files from their contract to kill the Titans, in a kitchen drawer with a padlock on it, that he takes to read over later. Aside from that, he finds nothing of interest he needs.

“I think that’s it,” Dick says, looking around.

Joey nods and gives him a smile.

The two of them leave, and Dick locks up the unit behind him. He isn’t sure if he’ll ever be back, but it’s better to keep it secure just in case. He isn’t sure how long Slade’s systems will stay in place without the man alive to keep it running. He’ll need to figure that out, as soon as he gets back to Bludhaven. He’ll probably need to find a way to contact Wintergreen, the illusive man that helped run Slade’s business. He’s never met him before, but Dick knew vaguely of his existence. The man helped run a lot of the logistical support— from weapons dealing to paying the rent of various safehouses. He’d like to contact Wintergreen as soon as possible. It wouldn’t do for a landlord to come storming into their apartment, because the rent hasn’t been paid.

Dick makes himself a mental checklist of things to do as he and Joey head back towards the subway. Many, many things for him to do. But he isn’t mad. For the first time in a long time, he feels alive.

Batman ascends upon them in a shadow.

Donna doesn’t spot him at first. She thinks he might be a trick of the light. Then she sees the cowl, and realizes that Batman has found them, conducting business in Gotham without permission

Shit. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also had a warehouse on fire behind them.

“What are you doing?” Batman demands. His voice is deep, and heavy, and angry. He has a dark energy to him that reminds Donna of angry vengeful Gods.

Wally takes a big step back, and barely squashes down a gasp of surprise. Garth openly gapes. Roy seems stressed, as he runs through dialogue options.

Donna forces herself to stand upright and look the man in the eye. She is an Amazonian, and she does not bend her head. “We were conducting a covert mission that went wrong.”

“You are not allowed in Gotham.”

“Right.” She says. She swallows down a gulp. “But we had evidence that led us to this warehouse. We needed to check it out, for our mission.”

Batman looks at her like she is below him, which only serves to agitate her more. Wonder Woman told her about Batman. He is a great hero, she said, but he is not a great man. He could’ve been, in another life. But in this, he is not. Rumors about the Bat spread across the hero community like wildfire. Vengeful. Violent. Unpleasant. There’s a list of opinions about the vigilante, casting him in an intimidating shadow. People fear him. What kind of hero is feared?

“Everything was going fine, until a villain came in and set the warehouse on fire.” Donna says. She won’t let herself be intimidated by the vigilante.

“Who?” Batman questions.

“He had a red helmet.” Roy interjects. “He told us he had control over Crime Alley.”

“Redhood.” Batman says. He straightens up, and checks something on his wrist tablet. “Go home. Now. You aren’t welcome in Gotham. If I see you here again, I’ll be forced to act.”

With that, the vigilante departs, shooting a grappling hook off towards the night sky. A motion blur of darkness.

Wally lets out a breath, and swipes a bead of sweat from his forehead. “Jesus christ.”

“That was….” Garth begins to say.

“That wasn’t bad.” A new voice says, from above.

Donna turns her head suddenly, hand on her lasso—

It’s the Signal.

It’s the Signal.

“Oh my god.” Wally says. “It’s you!”

The Signal drops down from the rooftop above them, his suit a golden color emitting a comforting light against the darkness of the night. The man gives them a kind smile. “It is. You know, I applaud you guys for how you handled him.”

He tilts his head in Donna’s direction, and she responds with a nod of her own. The Signal is a legend amongst the hero community. He’s on the roster of the Justice League, but he doesn’t show his face very often, preferring to stay in Gotham and do the work needed in this city. Everyone has good things to say about him. He’s been around for a very long time, since he was a teenager on the scene, and everybody knows about The Signal. He has become a bit of a legend.

“So,” Signal says, eyeing them, and the files of paperwork Wally is still hugging to his body. “What’re you guys working on?”

Duke leads the Titans to his apartment, so they can go over the paperwork.

When he was doing his patrol that night, he certainly hadn’t expected an explosion in Crime Alley to happen out of nowhere. And he expected even less to find Batman grilling the Titans on what they were doing.

He has to give them credits, especially Wondergirl, for not backing down to Bruce.

Bruce… is a difficult person to deal with. For a brief amount of time, when Duke was younger and Bruce first took him in, the man had been kind. But the years of stress got to him. As much as Duke tried to be a support system for the man… it didn’t quite work. He simply wasn’t enough. None of them was enough to tame Batman. He stayed a solitary figure, a shadow of the night, working alone.

And by the time Jason died, there was simply no going back. Bruce warped into somebody cold and unforgiving. Batman works alone, and Bruce makes damn sure it stays that way by pushing everyone else away.

Duke tries to keep Gotham’s heroes working together, when he can. He stays in contact with his sister Cassandra, Orphan, and the vigilantes Spoiler and Oracle who she works with.

Gotham’s network of heroes function more as individual figures than a web of vigilantes.

He tries to reach out to Damian, often enough, but it takes a lot for the man to leave Metropolis. Or to respond to Duke’s texts. He avoids Gotham like the plague, and avoids anyone that reminds him of Bruce Wayne. There was a very brief period when they were both young that they had been friendly, but Damian left the city before they ever became good friends. Superman practically raised Damian, in lieu of Batman. The guy spent all his time in Metropolis, nowadays.

Duke never had any issue working with others, outside of Gotham. He tries his best, and he is a member of the Justice League.

He leads the Titans to his apartment, a neat loft apartment in the heart of the city. It’s a sixth floor walkup with no elevator, and by the time they get to the top, he hears groaning behind him. He hides a smirk and lets them in.

“So, what have you guys got so far?”

“Have you heard about the incidents in New York?” Roy asks cautiously.

“Yeah. Deathstroke and Renegade, right?” Duke says. He only heard briefly about the situation, and doesn’t know any specifics. He gestures towards his kitchen island slash dining table, where four stools are in place, and grabs an extra chair from the office for himself.

“Yeah. First, it was them and this other new guy, waiting to attack us in our apartment.” Donna takes control again and explains. “The other guy died. He fell backwards like something was pulling him out the window.”

“Huh. Odd.” Duke says. He grabs snacks from his cabinet, Alfred’s manner lessons making him play the part of a host. He sets out some crackers, fruit, and some candy he had hiding in his cupboards. “Help yourselves, by the way. What was the second incident?”

Wally sets upon the snacks instantly, eating a full sleeve of crackers on his own. Garth retreats to the kitchen sink, letting the water run over his hands, and bringing his wet hands to his face, and repeating the process. Water droplets soak his counter.

“Deathstroke planted a trap for us in central park.” Roy explains before Donna can. “In the middle of fighting him and Renegade, some light-beam hit in the chest and bam, the guy was dead. Renegade left before we could track him.”

“Alright.” Duke says. He pulls out a notepad and a few pens from his junk drawer, and begins to write down bullet points of the key facts. “So someone’s trying to, what, paint you guys as murderers?”

“That’s what I think.” Donna says, shooting a pointed look at Roy.

The archer rolls his eyes and points his chin out at her. “Well, I’m beginning to think it’s something more complicated.”

“How come?” Duke asks.

“If they were trying to make us look like murderers, they’d probably choose easier targets. I mean, why go out of the way to get Deathstroke, of all people?”

“Good point.” Duke says. He writes it down. “That is weird.”

“We heard the name HIVE, a few times.” Donna says. “Some criminals we questioned told us about the warehouse we were at yesterday, saying it was some type of base for them. But all we found was paperwork.”

“Can I see it?”

“Yeah,” Donna says. He reaches a hand into her boot and brings out a few slightly damp folders of paper.

“God. Gross, Donna!” Roy groans.

“Where else should I have put it?” Donna asks sarcastically.

“You could’ve just held it.” Wally says, as he sets the folders he had been carrying on the table as well.

“We were fighting a villain, if you recall? I needed my hands to be free.” Donna rolls her eyes.

“Who?” Duke asks.

“Red Hood.” Wally says. “That’s what Batman called him.”

Duke is familiar. A month and a half ago, the guy appeared with a duffel full of the heads of other crime bosses in Gotham, and declared himself the new boss in town. Since then, Duke’s been trying to track him down. He knows Batman, and the others, must be as well, but they don’t exactly share notes, so he doesn’t know how much they know regarding the villain.

“I guess the warehouse would’ve been in his territory, but I doubt he would’ve had the place pre-rigged to blow, if it was just a random warehouse.” Duke says. “Red Hood must’ve been protecting whatever was inside.”

“So,” Roy says. “This Red Hood guy is part of HIVE?”

“I’d say. At the very least, he’s helping them.” Duke says.

Helping a larger organization doesn’t really fit Red Hood’s MO. He had previously always acted fiercely independent, even going so far as to ruin other criminal organizations in Gotham. But why else would the guy just happen to have the HIVE’s base rigged in case someone tried to find it? If he wanted to destroy it for himself, he wouldn’t have waited for a fight. It didn’t make sense.

Duke sighs, and scrubs a hand across his face. “Okay. Let’s go through the files you guys managed to salvage, and see what we find.”

For the next ten minutes, they all sit around Duke’s kitchen island in silence, save for the occasional crunch as someone grabs a snack. They flip through various pages of paperwork, trying to make sense of the blacked out information.

Then, Garth makes a sound of confusion.

“What is it?” Donna asks him.

The Atlantean squints at the piece of paper, before offering it up for the others to look at. “A correspondence between the HIVE, and Talia AlGhul.”

“Let me see,” Duke says, and Garth hands him the paper easily enough. He scans it over. It seems like someone at the HIVE was asking Talia for a favor, to which she declined. It read as very secretive, like the person writing the letter didn’t want other members of H.I.V.E. to know what was happening.

Duke frowns, and hands the paper to Donna, and the girl reads it with Roy standing over her shoulder.

“I wonder what this means.” Roy says.

“I don’t know.” Duke says. “But I know someone who could help us.”

“Hey, look at this.”

Stephanie flips her computer screen over to Cassandra, her roommate and best friend. She’d met Cass as their vigilante personas, on the streets of Gotham. She remembers being intrigued by a girl her age doing the same things she did. They became friends quickly, Cass helping her with her combat skills, and Steph helping Cass with her life skills. Their friendship became a genuine thing fast, and when one day the girl appeared at her doorstep with a bag full of belongings, Steph didn’t say no to her moving in.

On her screen, a pixelated screen shows a surveillance camera as Red Hood enters a warehouse. For a few minutes, nothing happens, from the perspective of the camera, then Red Hood is running out. They see the Titans leave the same warehouse, right before it explodes.

Cass tilts her head, as she watches. She hums lightly.

“Yeah,” Steph agrees. “I think we have a lead on the Red Hood case.”