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< COMMLINE 4.13 DORMANT - LEAVE MESSAGE? INBOX 48/56 >
“Harbor should stay quiet for a while, I’ll be dark a couple days, don’t freak out if I’m not pinging. I’ll contact you when it’s clear. Alright?”
Dick kicks a lonesome piece of gravel down the empty two-lane road. The night has grown tall around him, anonymous and vast. With his thumb stopped against the shell of his ear, he hesitates. “Hey, Alfred, if you’re taking his memos. This earpiece fits perfectly it’s—hasn’t slipped out once. . . . You know it’s nothing personal. I’ll come by for a refit once I’m back. If-If I need one. Sorry.”
< MESSAGE LOGGED, CALL TERMin%%^*%*%*(&$($
The earpiece crushes like a seed under his heel. Dick stares at the miniscule white bones of it smashed apart, as if he’s plucked out his own inner mechanism, dizzied; one could get fucking twisties from true silence like this. A quick, invisible bolt of June wind rips past heavy with the smells of dust and narrow nothing.
Cord-cut, Dick turns up his collar and heads back to the only source of light for miles that isn’t the ugly gibbous staining out most of the stars overhead. He beelines the quarter-mile back to the passenger side of the single car at its fuel pump beneath the sagging carport roof otherwise left empty in such small hours.
He vaults easily over the door into the bucket seat of a red ‘02 Thunderbird with its top down and hunkers low into his jacket. The pump is done running up. Dick stares at the numbers, grand total stuck halfway along its old analog ticker between one cent and the next.
Boots on concrete grit approach from the storefront blinking hot neon against the dark. Dick looks to the rearview and finds the edge of Slade’s reflection approaching, pausing to unrack the fuel nozzle and shut the cap before, tangible and right-way around again, he deposits with little ceremony a cellophane bag full of gas station sundries into Dick’s lap.
Slade opens and shuts the driver’s side door with pointed civility. He starts the engine. “Who do you think it says more about that you still have the taste of a teenager with too much allowance,” he muses with casual derision, setting the roof to close up over them given the cold drawn out past sunset, “you, or Wayne Enterprises?”
Dick deftly unwraps and puts two of the lollypops from the spoils into his mouth at once. “I think it says more about you, overeager to pander to it.”
The roof latches down over the windshield. Slade motors up the windows with a faraway leer playing the upturned corner of his mouth. “Fuck you. ‘Overeager’.”
“Some of us just have good taste.”
With the seatbelt signals pinging as the car idles, the roof lights dim. Slade reaches over and tugs one of the candies from Dick’s mouth with a sticky click along his bottom teeth.
“This, is good taste?” He wags it in the air by its stick between them before popping it in his own mouth. The harping of sour green apple fades from Dick’s tongue, overtaken by a faintly chemical strawberry hue. Slade puts the car into Drive.
“Well, you said it yourself.” Dick watches with a lazy weight in his gaze as the last gas station for the next seventy miles fades into the emptying mirror, only part of himself visible in the left-side half of it beside the ink black attenuated from wrist to shoulder leaned up against the window. “I’m an amateur.”
“You’re perfectly capable.” And Slade sounds almost tender past the mockery lacing the small, hard ball of sugar and citric already crushed to dust along his back teeth.
//
Absolutely Fuck-Ass Nowhere, Pennsylvania. Dick gets intel, Slade gets a good return on two contracts once, and neither owes the other for a while—at least until one of them decides to be the petty one, and start counting small unevennesses again.
Smooth in, smooth out. No obvious snags, all close to plan. Nobody goes to places like this unless they’re bent on disappearing anyhow.
That’s what Dick tells himself at least, in long ribbons at the back of his mind. Past the convenient blindness of circumstance it provides, most of the plan feels a little too honeypot to be as easy as it seems. Two against anywhere between four and twelve, allegedly. Outnumbered. They often are. It’s rarely much of an issue.
“All you have to do is what you’re told.” Slade frets at the lay of his turtleneck and re-counts his bundle of throwing blades. The bisected mask watches them from the top of the particleboard dresser, mute and hollow-eyed. “Think you can handle that?”
“I’ll manage.” His pulse won’t quiet. Dick makes each exhale a beat longer than the drawing-in before it, triple-checking the fastenings at his wrists.
“Good. We’ll keep it quick, then.”
You’re not breaking any codes coming along with me, Slade bothered asking once after their strange tête-à-tête started up, are you?
Only thing taking a hit is my pride. I can handle it.
I can tell when people are lying, Grayson.
What Dick never finds the first-place courage to make words to even say, is that it isn’t so much the breaking which scares him but the slow approach of change like incoming clouds—too large for Dick alone to hide and fix and handle himself, not a rupture but a full wave-shift, cosmic and unstoppable . . . The fall he never took stares him down from his lowest depths, so far off for so long that he knows a belated impact would be all kinds of nuclear.
I’ll never make you kill anyone. Not unless you want to.
The handshake, offered with his right hand no matter how thick with irony, was bare of its glove tugged indifferently and with utility from each finger.
“I’m an amateur,” Dick says, relenting as he stands from the wobble-footed settee, “not an idiot. I want to get out of this shithole just as quickly as you do.” He fits the domino over his eyes and quits challenging his reflection in the cheap vanity ringed by only three functional bulbs to blink first.
“Don’t you keep a place by the docks?”
“No.”
Slade snorts. “Sure you don’t. Bold, calling this a shithole.” He gestures vaguely at the walls with the tip of one of the meaner blades before slipping it into an unseen hip sheathe past his utility belt. The rest of his suit is done up to the gorget. “You’re smart, but you are absolutely an idiot.”
He straps the sword across his back, takes up the mask, and pauses to size up the measure of Dick-become-Nightwing across the room; far more worthy of a man called Deathstroke’s attention for longer than a glance at a time across the center console the whole way west into this hollow middle of such a godforsaken state. Dick got himself dressed with the bathroom door shut.
“You drive.”
Despite himself, Dick catches easily the keyfob lobbed imperfectly on purpose across the stiff-sheeted bed between them. “Bullshit, it’s your car. And you just insulted me, how would you—”
“You want us to be late?”
Slade affixes the mask like he knows what it does to the chill in Dick’s spine, and likely sees the whole of his flushed endocrine in technicolor.
Dick pulls on a black windbreaker and puts up his shoulders. He peers out the back window to the even deader side of the parking lot where they drove in with the headlights off, tuck-tailed by oversweetened shame. “No, sir.”
//
There’s anger, mostly.
Often it’s a known quantity. Occupational hazard.
Sometimes it’s worse.
//
The rain starts up halfway back to the motel, furiously and in sheets. Dick has someone else’s blood streaked across the lower half of his face.
“Drink that.”
He blinks. He breathes in, and then out. Slade is driving. Okay. “Already did.”
Okay.
Breathe.
Slade frees one hand from their hateful vise on the steering wheel, wipers at full sway, and rattles the empty bottle of electrolyte in the cupholder. He shoves it back with unnecessary force. Dick wishes he could feel his own hands, clenching and unclenching them at his sides as if grabbing through numbing sand. The rain on the roof above and around them is one interrupted roar.
“There’s more,” Slade insists, “I have more at the—”
“I’m fine.”
“You didn’t e—”
“What I need is a hot shower,” Dick snaps without thinking, staring out past the absolute darkness, the road melting into more and more and more forest soaked by the maelstrom—good cover, good for muddying evidence, good for them, won’t get caught, never do, lucky and right and almost—“at least three double-shots, and you on top of me in the next ninety minutes, or I’m going to fucking lose it.”
Slade shuts his mouth and speeds up.
They slice through the rain, reckless and terrible at sick-making speed. Job done. In and out. Their plan
plan said he’d only have six on him max, six people, and then he moved and there were five: One on the ground, one with an awful black puddle sprinting wide beneath him, and there were five and then four and
And finally the motel, a beacon through wet midnight—Slade’s hands are on him, on his seatbelt release and hauling Dick into the storm, huddled under the edge of a coat and hurried up under the awning. Jangling key, key in the lock, then relative warmth; dry with the faint smell of mildew and countless other people crossing the carpet. The door shuts, locks tight with deadbolt and chain.
“Drink.”
Bottle in his hand by the neck, Dick swigs automatically; it burns, rye, and he goes readily for a second, third, four
four people on him, two underfoot and bleeding, smells like iron and his own sweat and it’s awful in there, too-close, too many bends in the hall but they got the chip and Dick can go wait in the car, shouldn’t have been caught like this, shouldn’t have been alone and guard-down and there
There’s a quick tap to his ankle. He’s still standing. “Foot up. Boot off. Out of the suit.”
He’s shivering, breathing audibly. Dick leans on Slade’s knelt shoulder with one hand, leg up to let him free the catches along Dick’s leg poured out down that blue stripe, and empties another draught into his mouth with the other
others ran off, FALL BACK FALL BACK FALL BACK, faces twisted up in the crackling escrima light: Fear and disgust, a terror Dick has only felt in his own body few enough times that the memories to which it belongs are still locked tight in the black box which tells him Do Not Handle and
And the bathroom is too small for both of them at once, comfortably. Slade opens the shower stream to its hottest and lets it run. Dick stares through where Slade’s hand closes almost entirely around the breadth of his elbow in the medicine cabinet mirror.
“In.” Slade jerks his head at the shower, now clouding a valiant steam. Time is taffied and makes no sense.
Still half-clothed himself, Slade follows and pulls the curtain mostly shut. His jaw is set with fretting and he scours at Dick’s limbs like one of his tools; delicately but with intention, a habitual doting shot through with reverence for a well-made weapon, but lightly frantic and
and it was Slade who found him there doing chest compressions on autopilot, fists interlocked and more than one rib cracked beneath them—‘I don’t think it works like that,’ he’d teased before drawing near enough to realize Dick was absent behind his eyes with the domino shed like it was burning him, ‘not if his head’s been
Where his neck meets his skull, the interrupting scent of anise; old castile soap. Better than nothing. Slade scrubs neatly at matted-down gore tacked in Dick’s dark, tangled hair.
The inside of his mind is noise. “How can you stand to touch me?” Dick pities through chattering teeth.
“You did the job it needed. Don’t dredge it back up, it’s already over.”
A sob hiccups ugly out of his chest. Soap streams away down his shoulders, his heaving diaphragm, the ridge of his narrow hips, “I couldn—”
“And you didn’t, Dick. It’s over.”
FALL BACK
“I’m a fucking monster—!”
Slade steers him sharply by the sudsy forelock to look Dick straight in the eye, big and wet and blue pinned down by one sighted stare, is that . . . Slade looks afraid—“You’re a man. Stay in the now. Time doesn’t move in reverse.”
Blearily, woozy and desperate to please, Dick wilts and makes laughter so pale it’s mostly a cough. “You ever meet Superman?”
Released from Slade’s grip continuing on to rinse him off, Dick’s head tuks backward to loll softly against the wall. “What’s already happened is dead. Don’t go after it. You’re better than that.”
Slade uses a washcloth which turns pink, then rust, then clean. He eyes Dick’s thundering jugular, trailing down with a frown between his brows to the adrenal stiffness of his heavy pink erection between them.
“Blood’s as busy in there as your mouth,” he mutters.
Awareness, some shelved thought, tries to fight its way up aha-sudden. Dick holds onto his balance with both hands. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, I-I was—it’s my—”
Slade crowds him until the water covers them both. Thoughts fly. With one broad hand steadying Dick’s waist against the tiles nipping slippery along his bare spine, the other cleaves the inevitable between them, that membrane which they always tear so readily after stretching and stretching and stretching it across all their flimsy maybe’s: Slade closes a firm, heuristic grip around Dick’s flushed cock.
“You stay right where I put you, don’t you,” he bids just above the rushing water, mouth at Dick’s ear and breath hot with black coffee and cloves. “You did what you were told.”
Dick nods blindly. He clings to slippery shoulders and opens his mouth, but only silence leaps out past the shape of him pleading Yes, Yes, Yes.
Sensation creeps back in on pins and needles through Dick’s knuckles. He turns his face away from the water, tipped back and up to the ceiling all plaster-cracked, and loses speech entirely.
If it comes to it—
It won’t, Grayson.
Well if it does, if you slip up, I’m just saying. I’ll be fine. Alright? I don’t need you worrying about me.
. . . I never worry about you.
He comes swiftly and with a yelp, streaking the silvery surface of Slade’s soaked-through undershirt clinging to him like a second skin, and quits seeing corpses behind his eyelids for one fleeting, precious burst.
//
Slade drapes a towel over Dick’s shoulders as he peels off his own sodden layers. He towels them both off with brisk efficiency, and hauls Dick with fresh bonelessness out into the room and onto the bed.
With a possessive effleurage that never leaves him without grounding, two guiding palms warm and worn as good leather arrange Dick onto his knees with his shoulders bowed low and vulnerable. He wraps his jellied arms around and buries his cheek into the flat side of a throw pillow made from faded crochet squares.
“Don’t make it hurt,” Dick says to the cotton. “Not after all this, not—”
Slade pets him softly along the flank, calming, despite the spiteful clip in his voice; “Who do you think I am, your old man?”
Dick shuts his eyes. “Don’t be an asshole, either.”
“Tall order.”
“Shut up.” It has no heat.
Slade chuckles to himself. He’s so near the thrum of it almost resonates in Dick’s own chest cavity. He begins to work open the soft notch between Dick’s fawning legs with the slow confidence of knowing he alone could make this take the whole rest of the night.
Dick melts open like iron to the molten touch. The storm rages outside paper-thin walls housing few but them and long-flown ghosts. Slade tends him as a spooked animal, winning him over, chasing the bright, stinging allure of them each needing to burn lethal steam just as badly as the other.
Delayed, terminal panic overwhelms. Dick locks down and bores his way through wall after wall melting instead to the alchemizing rush of that tender, more-present pain, and he barely registers Slade sliding full, hard, soundly home into his hole until his weight is draped over Dick’s back and the sound of his breath is the engine of life itself.
He pets the damp black hair at Dick’s temple over and over the crest of his ear, “Shhhh-sh-sh, birdie. Calm. Ca-lm.”
Dick swims up through a misty swivet, wet-mouthed against the sheets, and tries to beg. “I can’t, I haven’t felt like myself in months, I—”
“Shh.” Slade curls in close, growls a pleased sound at the shift, and kisses Dick at the high point of one red cheek.
He starts moving again at a calculated, inborn pace. Where most other meetings of theirs have pained just left of punishing, the burn of this time is a strange sweetness Slade has never offered before. Dick doesn’t think about the why, or how, or whether and closes his jaw. Yarn squeaks between his bite and he tells himself that he is good, surrounded by too much sensation not to believe it.
//
Come morning, they find a twenty-four-hour diner still standing in the flagged aftermath of the rain. From its parking lot, a glorious and washed-clean sunrise announces itself to nobody but the dirt in its puddling and a few stray branches on the asphalt.
The menus are laminated in thick plastic and distantly sticky. “You know what you want?”
Dick is too thoroughly wrung-out to draw words before coffee. He shrugs and sets the menu aside before resting his chin in his hands. Slade goes to the counter to order for both of them without ceremony.
A payphone beside a carrel of magazines across the dining room rings twice, and then stops. Dick pauses his fiddling with the toothpick dispenser beside the salt and pepper and a half-empty mustard jar.
He listens. The buzz of fluorescent booth lights, clatter from the kitchen, one other table with an old man listening to baseball on a portable radio . . . and the payphone, ringing again with no caller.
“‘Scuse me,” Dick mutters, standing abruptly and sidestepping Slade returned with a pair of diner mugs, and makes for the jangling handset.
He rips it from the cradle and hunches low, hiding himself behind summer travel issues and a few bland bikini covers. “I said I would call you.”
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know, you tell me.”
A heavy sigh crackles down the line. Dick tries not to let more useless rage boil up and suppresses the borders of a caustic hatred pushing at his instincts.
“You’ve been dark since Thursday, it—”
“Like I told you I would be.”
“I know what you’re doing, Robin. You aren’t a child anymore, it’s awfully—”
Dick cracks a dry laugh, ignoring the twist in his belly at the name; worse to hear it now, from here, bald of the heated intent Slade had laid last night onto the quick one-two of each syllable, oh Robin, Robin, Robin. “Take your own medicine, then, I’m not a child. I know what I’m doing, too, if you can believe it. Stay off my back.”
His hackles are up like Bruce is there in person, more than just his voice in hacked facsimile. The telecom hiss between them counts the silence.
“Did something happen?”
The backs of Dick’s eyes sting. “Like you’d give a shit.”
Obvious alarm in him, good: “Robin—”
“Did you put tracking substrate in the last transfusion I got from you?”
“What?!”
He’s caught and self-conscious and less than half his age again, looking for a way to let the fear from his system that won’t kill him first. Dick crosses the arm not holding the phone to his face tight across his chest and feels his lip curl into a snarl. “Over the summer, that thigh wound from the fire escape? I was on your table, you barely had enough A-B-pos, did-did you put—”
“You were delirious, it—”
“Did you put bots in my fucking veins or not, Bruce?!”
“Protocol.”
It comes out like the lash of a belt. Dick flinches.
Each collects himself in a stoney silence. Neither hangs up, nor speaks. Dick peers over the edge of the magazine rack to find Slade, who seems not to be watching but is almost certainly listening, smiling with proprietary charm at the waitress delivering their plates to the table.
He doesn’t touch his, waiting to start.
Dick takes a slow breath, and makes sure the mouthpiece catches it. “I have reason to believe you’ve got sight on me,” he hisses, “with all other relays otherwise accounted for. I swear, B, if—”
“Look.”
The pause makes Dick’s stomach plummet.
“You aren’t . . . like the others, you—”
“Jesus.” Dick presses a hand to his forehead and shakes his head. “I ca—I mean, I can believe you, but this is a new low.”
“Dick, it isn’t—”
“Protocol.” All acid, Dick savors the dumb silence it wins him. Last word, then. All his. He feels like he’s going to vomit. “Ask Tim how to clean out your inbox, prick.”
He hangs up with a slam.
Dick stalks back to the table and sits with a heavy squeak on vinyl. Slade watches him unroll his flatware with a vengeance.
“You look like your girlfriend kicked you out.”
Dick jabs under the table with one foot and nails him right in the shin. Slade’s gaze flashes.
“Food looks good,” Dick mutters, filthy and utterly beheld.
“You think so?”
Dick catches his look and hovers his fork just shy of digging into the breakfast platter. “. . . Thank you, sir.”
Slade nods his chin at the omelette. “Don’t let it get cold.”
Hot food brings a measure of focus back into Dick’s general awareness. A heaviness sits in him like sludge, a deep stain, but there’s no fight in him left to squeeze at it. For now.
“Taste as good as it looks?”
Dick swallows a sip of coffee made more bearable with three sugars. “Uh-huh.”
“You’re still on for the rest of the job, I’d hope.”
“Course I am.”
“You sure about that?”
Dick glares at him. “Scout’s honor.”
Leaning back in the booth seat, one arm slung up over the back of the empty beside him, Slade draws up and holds Dick’s gaze firm as a fist on reticent hackles. Itching with the feeling of being made a specimen, Dick slowly chews the last of a mouthful.
He sets down his fork with a louder clatter than he means to. “What, Slade.”
Slade looks amused. “What?”
“Looking at me like . . .” He gives up, too many words fighting at the gate once, and tosses his head. “Do you trust me or not?”
“Starting gun’s in your hand, kid. That’s all.” Slade smiles with a soft, fatherly earnestness which makes it ten times worse to want so badly in all this muddy context. “Trigger won’t bite. Fun part begins whenever you want it to.”
The frayed edges of an old memory make a brief, sun-stained picture: Learning how to flush and hunt jackrabbits from the woods behind the Manor; bow only, never the rifle above the mantelpiece.
Dick studies Slade like a pack dog offered first go at the good carrion after a long pursuit, and keeps on eating.