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It isn't supposed to happen this way. Or…it is. Until it isn’t.
It’s easy enough to set the lure and lay in wait for Nightwing at the warehouse.
Nightwing swoops in, Jason starts in on one of the speeches he practiced, he swings up onto the catwalk while dodging the escrima sticks.
Up to there—around Step F-4D of The Plan, the grand goal to make Batman understand, to solve Gotham's real problems, to make Jason feel better—it all goes smoothly.
Then…
He's foggy on exactly how it happens, because the sick crunch digs into his brain and wipes out a few seconds on either side. He can't even remember if he was aiming for the headstrike, or if he was going for his ribs at the same time as Nightwing went into a crouch and the difference split with Jason's boot catching the side of Dick's head.
Either way, Dick goes through a gap in the railing and down, and in the moment, Jason isn't even thinking about him actually being hurt. This is Dick Grayson: he was practically born in the air, so of course he'll land on his feet. Jason knew he could rely on that when he set up the Plan.
And he does land, the fall turning into a jackknife dive and ending in a perfect crouch on the concrete. One of the escrima sticks is still in his grip: the other flew over the far side of the catwalk when he went over. Jason watches it land on the floor and roll back, coming silently to a stop about two feet from Dick's other hand.
He doesn't pick it up.
That's the first thing that feels—off.
Jason walks to the far end of the catwalk and jumps off, landing heavily about twelve feet behind Dick. Dick's head whips around, the lenses of the mask fixing on him as he turns gracefully, still in his crouch.
Jason braces for a beat, waiting for Dick to spring up and launch for him, but he doesn't get up. Doesn't move at all, really, only shifting enough to track Jason's path across the warehouse.
Maybe I hit him harder than I thought, Jason thinks for a moment, as if hurting him wasn't the point of this, but Dick looks perfectly fine. Infuriatingly fine, really. Mockingly fine, like he's rubbing it in Jason's face.
He always was the perfect Robin, and then as Nightwing he was even better, always trying to be the mentor while casually proving to Jason how he could never measure up, until the one time Jason actually needed him around and he abandoned his fucking post.
Jason's quarrel is with Bruce, mainly. It's not like he's here to beat Nightwing to death with a crowbar or anything because who would do that, right, only a maniac would do that, but making sure Nightwing can't interfere with what comes next is part of The Plan. And maybe, as a bonus, proving to Dick that he's not so perfect in the process will help quell some of the sick raging bile swirling inside him, the metallic taste like blood with every breath…
Nightwing looks fine. Why isn't he getting up? Is he that smug about facing the Red Hood, that overconfident?
All this planning and Jason still hasn't made himself into a credible enough threat for the great Grayson. Time to fix that.
"Have it your way," Jason mutters, and Nightwing's head snaps up, but he still doesn't fucking move.
If he's going to give him a free shot, Jason isn't going to not take it.
Dick finally starts to flip to his feet as Jason runs towards him, but it's too slow, the escrima stick bracing between his hands at the wrong angle to turn Jason's punch properly—it does stop it, just barely, but from Dick's wince under the mask the shock must have put hairline fractures in his right arm.
Jason grabs the stick and kicks under it toward's Dick's ribs, hard, so that even when Dick sees it coming and blocks he'll feel something.
And Dick doesn't block it.
At all.
All the air goes out of Dick in a strangled gasp as the kick makes full contact, and at the sound the rage sweeps up in Jason and for a few green-crystal moments everything in his world is bright and powerful and beautiful.
Three ribs go instantly. Jason can feel them pop like harpstrings under his boot, sharp gracenotes above the surging waves in his mind. He shoves off as Dick buckles around the impact, letting go of the escrima stick, and watches Dick stumble backwards, pinwheeling in an attempt to stay upright.
He’s almost successful. Then his foot comes down on the other escrima stick, the one he never picked up. His foot slides out from under him, knee twisting at an unnatural angle and he rolls, grabbing for the stick with his free hand.
All Jason can see is downed prey.
His boot comes down on Dick’s wrist and his mind echoes with strange harsh joy as he feels another snap. Dick spasms on the ground, keening sharp and ragged in the back of his throat, and for a moment Jason keeps the boot there and watches him struggle, fascinated.
Then, because this is still Dick Grayson he’s dealing with, the escrima stick Dick is holding in his other hand hits the back of Jason’s knee and he has to flip away. Dick rolls up and staggers towards the wall as Jason slides to a stop.
Jason stands slowly, trying to look casual even though Dick really did get his knee hard, fucking ouch, because intimidation is one of the substeps of this part of The Plan and no-selling injury is part of that. He brushes some rust and concrete powder off his hands and smirks behind the mask. Not that Dick will see it, but maybe he’ll hear it in his voice.
“How’s it feel, Nightwing? How does it feel to not be so perfect?”
Dick doesn’t reply, just takes in a harsh breath and winces as his chest expands under the suit. Several broken ribs do tend to make someone a bit less talkative. Ask Jason, he would know, and whose fault is that again?
Okay, so Nightwing isn’t one of the main culprits, but he’s on the list.
Jason looks again, looks at the tense way Dick is standing, the way his head tilts when Jason's boot scrapes on the concrete floor, the way he trails the end of the escrima stick along the crumbling brick wall as he takes a step back.
It almost looks like…
But that couldn't be happening, Jason insists to himself past the sick feeling settling somewhere under his bullet-proof vest.
Dick's too good to let that happen. I’ll prove it, Jason tells himself. You can't trick me, perfect boy, watch this.
Jason reaches behind his back and silently takes two empty clips out of his pockets. He bounces the matte black tactical steel for a moment, judges the distance, then tosses one lightly at a pile of crates about fifteen feet to Nightwing's left.
Dick's head turns at the clattering sound at the same time as Jason tosses the other, an easy slow underhand lob, the most visible thing in the world, Dick's peripheral reflexes are too well trained to possibly…
The empty clip hits the bird chevron on Dick's chest and bounces off as he turns back and looks down. Then his head snaps up, white lenses looking—or, looking as if he is looking—squarely at where Jason's boots last made a noise.
A spot that is now about eight feet off from where Jason is actually standing.
No way, Jason tells himself one more time, even though the attempt to convince himself is useless now. It's a trick—he's putting Jason off his guard so he can split.
Dick can't be—
He can't actually—
I can't have—
Jason remembers the sound it made when his boot hit Dick's head.
Everything stutters to a halt as the bright heat fades, the flaring green light filling the building sinks away, and Jason stares at the man he once thought of as a brother and begins to realize what he's done.
Dick Grayson is blind.
('Dick! Dick, look at me, I'm doing it!'
'I'm looking, Little Wing, I’m looking, great handstand! Watch your wrists so you don't twist on your dismount—'
'I'm gonna…I'm gonna do a flip, just watch—'
'Looking good, looking good…great flip, kiddo, incredible airtime, now let's go find the post-training otter pops…')
Jason takes a rough breath and stumbles back a step, still staring at the blank lenses of Nightwing's mask. The blank lenses with nothing behind them.
It was a fucking terrible flip, is the thing. Jason can still remember the way his foot slipped on the way down, how he had to practically play hopscotch halfway across the vault mat to stay upright on the dismount.
It barely deserved for Nightwing—fucking second star to the right and straight on till morning fucking prince of the skies Nightwing—to cast half a glance up from his laptop. But of course Dick decided to perch on the parallel bars and watch his whole practice, cheering Jason on like he was an Olympic goddamn commentator.
Having Dick watch him was the greatest feeling in the world. Even the illicit post-bedtime frozen dessert couldn't drown out the warmth he felt the rest of the night.
That was the first time he wondered if this was what it was like to have a brother.
And now all that is gone, and Jason took it, and he has to—
—bury this before he starts thinking too hard about it, because there's a plan and he has to carry it through.
Putting Nightwing out of commission was part of The Plan. It was part of the plan, Jason reminds himself, and he succeeded.
Check off Step F.
Wow, you got in a lucky shot and then beat up a blind man. Gold star for the big bad Red Hood. Christ.
Now fucking what?
Dick rotates as Jason walks around him, jolting a little with the sound of each footfall. His mouth is tight below the mask, the escrima stick braced in his good hand (his slightly less fucked hand, Jason corrects himself, remembering the fractures), shoulders curled a little as if to guard his broken ribs and shattered wrist. Each step is careful, favoring the leg that twisted when he went down.
Jason tries to concentrate on remembering the plan, because he can feel cracks starting underneath and if he starts dwelling on what's going on he's going to fall through one of them and plunge through into the green, and he doesn't want to find out what's at the bottom of that pool right now.
It would be one thing if it was the new one—the Replacement—standing there taught and strained, empty mask tilted his way with no lights on. Jason wouldn't care…
(Still, the plan isn't to leave him blind, then what's the point of taking off the mask—at least Jason got to see the end coming—)
…as much. Probably. Maybe.
But this is Dick Grayson, the first person who ever took forgotten street kid Jason Todd to a drive in movie, the person who helped him set off Mentos and Diet Coke in Br…in the office and then took the blame when it came time to clean up, the person who helped him with his homework and kept doodling little circus tents in the corners.
The plan was…
Dick deserved a lesson for forgetting, for letting it all happen on his watch, but—nothing permanent was supposed to happen. He was only supposed to be out of the way, so he couldn't try to stop Jason later. Since if he got between Jason and his goals, Jason might not be able to stop himself.
And look how that turned out.
It still might not be that bad, Jason tells himself. Retinal detachment, bone fragment pressing on the optic nerve, minor brain bleed…
Okay, so 'not that bad', for bats, is really fucking bad. But it might be treatable, if he gets medical care in time. And then Nightwing will be out of the picture for a while, just like Jason planned in the first place, and Jason can pick up from Step G-1A and keep going with The Plan.
This is all…salvageable.
All Jason needs to do is leave and let Dick feel his way back to the bike right outside, where he can activate the emergency beacon or the homing navigation and—
Ah. Shit. Fuck.
Jason glances through the open loading doors at the smoking remains of the bike Nightwing rode in on and remembers that Step F-3A was blowing up the bike to prevent Dick from doing exactly that.
And step F-3C was the taser pulse that knocked out Dick's suit radio.
And step F-3G (which came before all the others, but he thought of it later and there wasn't any more space at the top of the paper) was cutting the cords of four nearby payphones.
So now there's just Jason and Dick, and Dick is badly injured and blind, who knows if he'll ever see anything again—and if Jason can't take off his mask and have the sight mean something, what was the point of any of this?— and there are no means of communication within a quarter-mile.
It begins to occur to Jason that he may have over-planned here somewhat.
Even if he manages to move long enough to get out of the warehouse, Jason's as good as left Dick helpless and unable to call for backup in the absolute worst part of Gotham. As soon as the Red Hood is seen leaving the warehouse curious two-bit rogues and gangsters will start wandering over to get a look at the aftermath, and they'll see Nightwing in the open, and he won't see them, but he'll know they're hunting him, and he might be able to fight off one or two but then someone will snipe him from a roof and he won’t hear the bullet coming only the darkness and then the nothing—
Jason takes a deep shuddering breath, trying to feel the confidence the rough hiss of the helmet's respirator usually gives. Dick hesitates for a moment, blank lenses turning towards the sound, then takes another cautious pace back.
He can't just…walk up and offer Dick help. Not without ruining all of his plans, and Dick won't take it, anyway, all he'll see—well. He'd be stupid to take it as anything but a trap. What is Jason supposed to do to reassure him, take off the mask? What good would that do now?
But he can't just…leave.
I can't leave him to die in a warehouse.
He can't leave, and he can't take Nightwing to Br—to Batman, not yet, not while he's still putting everything in place, and he can't take Dick to a normal doctor because they'll have to take the mask off to check his eyes.
There's one fallback option, one that lets Dick keep his identity and doesn’t interrupt Jason’s plans completely.
He can handle this. It’s just a brief side tangent of The Plan. He can fit it in and still stay on his target schedule, it’s fine.
Step F-5A. Make sure Nightwing is—transportable.
Jason has to force his mind to shut down during this part, because if he thinks about what he’s doing, if he risks letting that brutal clarity rise again, it would be all too easy to go too far, and then he’d be carrying a corpse. and the point here is to spare Dick, not that Dick is helping with that at all with the way he struggles once Jason tackles him.
Of course since Jason’s current attempt to spare him involves putting his hands around Dick’s neck and squeezing until he passes out, it probably seems like, you know, not sparing him. Jason gets that. It’s an understandable conclusion. But a little cooperation would be helpful, okay, is he asking that much?
Step F-5A takes about four minutes. And then another minute for Jason to stop shaking after Dick finally goes slack.
(He isn't supposed to be bigger than Dick. He isn’t supposed to be able to pin him down and half-strangle him, even if he’s injured. When did that happen? It’s not right.)
Step F-5B. Drag Nightwing to the bike and drive him to Leslie Thompkin’s clinic.
This step goes smoothly, even if Jason does feel a little sick slinging Dick’s limp form over his shoulders and hauling him outside.
He’s almost starting to think things are looking up as he navigates the narrow side streets to dodge security cameras. It’s late, but she should still be inside, at least, even if the clinic isn’t technically open. He’ll drop Dick in the dumpster out back, pound on the door until he hears her coming out, then drive off and pick up at the next stage of The Plan.
Easy. Nothing to it.
He can still chase down Batman without having to feel any guilt, because Nightwing will be out of the picture but he won’t be—
He has to read the note on the door twice before he can make sense of it.
An ordinary, slightly dirty, wind-crumpled and dew-dampened piece of paper with three ordinary words on it.
CLOSED THROUGH MONDAY
Because—of course this would happen, of course he would maim his older brother the one weekend the only doctor who could safely check his eyes went out of town.
Things could only get worse if it started raining, he thinks.
So of course it promptly does, because Jason's un-life is a cosmic joke or some shit.
(Joke, ha. Hahaha—)
He stops the motorcycle for a few minutes and puts his head down on the handlebars, letting the patter of the rain on the helmet drown out the lau—
The laugh—
…All the other sounds in his head.
Then Dick shifts against his back and moans and God, why did choking him out sound like such a good and reasonable idea five minutes ago? What does he do with him now?
He didn’t mean for it to come to this.
He didn't mean to wrench his idol out of the air and crush him, he didn't mean to discover what sound it makes when an industrial boot hits your older brother's head at just the wrong angle, he didn't mean to enjoy the brief flash when he could tell Dick was at his mercy and not why.
This whole thing, his whole plan, wasn't about Dick.
Nightwing was only supposed to be out of the way for a while.
Contained.
Not…destroyed.
He has to do something.
When Dick starts to wake up, everything is dark, it's raining, and his head hurts like a…
His mental narration stutters, then he remembers Alfred is both a) not present and b) can't actually read minds, no matter what Dick thought when he was nine.
His head hurts like a motherfucker.
He's taken bad hits before. Blacked out, grayed out, lost hearing, lost time—par for the course when you fly with the Bat. He's even lost his vision before, when he was about fourteen and still learning how to duck.
But that time it lasted about two minutes, and there were still colors. He just couldn't see past them. And Bruce was there to have his back, shielding him in a corner while he recovered enough to dive into the fight again and make it out of the building.
This time…
The sound of the boot hitting his head is still ringing in his ears. The kick, the crunch, just enough time to think shit, that sounds awfully permanent, and then he was falling into pitch dark without a net.
That was something he's done before, or close to it, so with the general memory of how far up the catwalk was he was able to land, even if he lost one of the escrima sticks in the process. He even made it look good, like he planned it that way.
He was hoping, vaguely, that if he still carried himself like a threat the Hood might hesitate long enough that he could find his way out of the building, or dodge past him once he could see again.
This, as shown by subsequent events, did not work out. Neither the escape, or the—the not being blind. Something inside him wrenches, panics, and he quickly shoves it back down. Time to deal with that later.
If there is a later.
What Dick can't figure out is why he's still alive.
None of the possible explanations are good.
The rain seems to make the darkness worse. In the echoing warehouse, he could navigate a little by hearing, at least up until the Hood was close enough that there was no time to calculate and react between the sound and the strike.
The rain wipes out the rest of the world—apart from everything he's immediately touching, he might as well be in a void. He can't even tell right now if he's moving or not.
Everything is gone except the trickle of rain through his hair and along the lines of the mask, the vibrating rumble of the bike under him, the vague warmth of the body he's draped across…
For a split second of woozy illogical hope, he thinks it's Bruce he's resting on. It takes him back to his Robin days, riding back to the cave when things got too rough and Bruce called the night off early. It always made him feel safe, closing his eyes and listening to his heartbeat through the cape, feeling the wind on his face.
Dick even carried Jason that way once during the too-brief time they ran together, after he was thrown into a windshield and got up slow enough Dick decided he wouldn't be taking any more hits that night. Jason was never one to talk about emotions much, but Dick hoped, as he felt the slim arms around his waist, that maybe the same feeling of safety he had with Bruce was passed down to Jason in turn.
Though that was before they learned so permanently that no vigilante was ever really safe, no matter how much they tried to pretend. And of course it's not Bruce who Dick is resting on, and he's not safe at all.
Right now, Dick is blind, injured, and the prisoner of the Red Hood.
The biker jacket under him smells faintly like cigarette smoke under the scent of wet leather. Some fancy European brand. Bruce doesn't smoke any more, never had a real habit, but on society trips to the Continent he used to do it to keep up appearances…
He stopped sometime after Jason came along, Dick remembers. Read some articles about secondhand smoke and lung cancer rates, and decided not to be a 'bad example'.
Which was such a wild success, of course.
Dick really needs to stop thinking about Jason and get his head in the game, or there's going to be another dead sidekick on Bruce's hands. And that's the last thing he needs right now, when they're all under attack with no idea of the motive or the end goal.
He just doesn't get why the Hood didn't kill him on the spot, once he realized he wasn't going to be able to fight him off. When the gloved hands went around his neck he was certain—certain it would all be over, certain there was going to be another empty suit on display in the Cave, another grave on the grounds of the Manor…
But the Hood wants to toy with him first, apparently. Or maybe this was part of his plan from the start, and Dick's condition just made it easier.
Dick's hands are tied loosely—his broken wrist is roughly splinted, but still throbs steadily. The fabric knotted around his wrists is clearly more to keep him from falling off the bike than to actually restrain him, so either the Hood assumes he’s going to stay unconscious for a while or thinks he’s no longer a threat.
In front of him, the Hood swears faintly under the patter of the rain. There's a faint, metallic sound as if he's resting his helmet on the handlebars.
"The one…one fucking week, what the fuck…"
Dick's wrist jars as the Hood straightens up and he gasps, shuddering.
“New plan,” Hood mutters, and then the bike starts moving and everything fades.
When Dick wakes up, he’s tied to a chair and the Red Hood is pacing somewhere nearby, rambling about a Plan. Dick decides that he definitely doesn’t want to stick around for whatever the plan is, because usually when a Bat ally ends up tied to a chair there are around two standard options: becoming the unwilling protagonist of an amateur snuff film, or having the rights to strip the mask auctioned off. (Which will reliably turn into the other thing afterwards.)
He examines his new situation as much as he can while blind and tied up, and tries to consider his options.
Bright side:
Dick is tied to a really crappy chair.
Dark side:
Hood's heavy footsteps stop in front of the chair. "Okay, so the mask is coming off."
Yeah, that.
"Fuck that noise," Dick says defiantly (and hopefully in the right direction), and flips the chair.
The second his head hits the tile everything's gone again.
In a movie, the second head injury would magically reverse everything the first one did, like canceling out fractions. Which is of course all kinds of bullshit, and it only took about two hours-long lectures on the subject for it to be added to the list of Things We Do Not Discuss On Movie Night Because Some Of Us Are Trying To Enjoy Ourselves Tim.
Here in real life, Dick wakes up in darkness with the mask gone and Red Hood sitting on his chest. His hands are tied behind his back, now, and his broken wrist is screaming at the weight.
One of Hood's gloved hands is holding Dick's chin. Dick considers biting, then decides that while it would feel very satisfying he probably doesn't need the broken jaw that would most likely result at the moment. Hood's other hand seems to be hovering somewhere over Dick's face.
He blinks.
"Hm. Yeah. Those are for sure definitely not working."
Dick vaguely begins to distinguish a warm spot in his face. Hood must be holding a flashlight. Shining it right in his eyes and nothing's happening and he's still in the dark—
He's strangely glad for the weight on his chest, even though it makes his ribs throb with pain. At least it steadies him enough that he doesn't start hyperventilating.
Dick is always the one helping everyone else hold themselves together. He can't be—he can't be helpless, there has to be a way out of this, there has to be something. People need him. Even if his identity is made…at least he can warn Bruce and Tim.
He can't fall apart right now, and he definitely can't stay the Hood's hostage.
Or—whatever Hood wants him for.
The weird thing is that, apart from messing around near his eyes with the flashlight, Hood doesn't seem all that interested in his face. Someone this obsessed with Batman can't be so clueless about Gotham that he doesn't recognize one of the most famous members of its high society. If he expressed any surprise, it was while Dick was still out.
Hood sighs and leans back, no longer a dead weight on his chest. "This would be so much easier if you stopped giving yourself more head injuries Jesus Christ—"
The moment the Hood isn't completely pinning Dick down, he crunches up far enough to bring his hands out from behind his back, then hooks the fabric holding his wrists around the back of the Hood's neck.
He can't fight him and hope to win. But in this brief moment of surprise—the Hood freezes up as Dick's fingers brush his skin—he can and does throw him off.
The one bit of information that he got when he flipped the chair and hit his head was that the wall behind him stopped there. He hit the corner: if he'd angled the chair onto its left leg and gone down that way he would have been clear.
He isn't sure where the gap in the wall leads to, but he heads to where he thinks it is, vaulting a table in his way and diving through the opening.
Linoleum under his feet. A kitchen. He flips for where the counter should be in a normal sized shithole apartment kitchen and finds nothing. He lands on bare boards and turns just as Hood's boots stop on the linoleum.
Dick crouches and gets ready to jump him again. "I don't know what you want, but—"
At least, he thinks this is what he says, because at this point his arm feels like it's on fire, and the words are sticking somewhere between his brain and his mouth.
A gun goes off, the blast almost deafening in the small kitchen. Dick freezes as he feels the slight tremor in the air, the impact shiver in the wall about two feet to his right.
"I am trying to help!" Hood shouts. There's a soft pop, as if he opened a jar, and then his voice is suddenly much clearer and a little higher-pitched, the slight electric buzz gone. The mask, Dick realizes. "Will you stop fucking moving before you fucking kill yourself!"
"That's…really convincing," Dick says slowly, still pressed against the peeling wallpaper left behind when the counter was stripped out. But the ludicrous thing is that, after everything Hood has done that night, after every injury, after taking his eyes, he finds that he almost believes him.
Because otherwise, the only explanation is that the Red Hood is a complete idiot.
From every one of Batman and his allies' prior encounters with the Hood, he's clearly one of their most intelligent opponents. He must know that Dick would be far more portable with a bullet in his head, and if he wanted to torture him for information there wouldn't have been much point in trying to check his eyes. Of course, his trying to help doesn't make a lot of sense either, after what he did in the warehouse.
Dick remembers, suddenly, that the gloved hands around his neck were shaking. Maybe the Hood is having second thoughts about his one-man reign of terror.
Or...This might be more of whatever plan he keeps mumbling about, just another mind game. That's probably more realistic, but Dick's always tried to have hope. And besides, right now, he's run out of options besides playing along.
What's the worst that could happen if he gives in? That he dies? That his identity is made? Both of those are pretty much assured now anyway, unless he can keep the Hood interested in whatever crisis of conscience he seems to be having.
He took the mask off. Even if Dick's blind that has to mean something. A mask for a mask…
"Fine," Dick mutters. It's so much harder to tell when he's about to pass out when he already can't see, but the next moment he's pitching forward, prepared for the wrenching agony when his head and bad arm hit the floor since after fighting so long he doesn't even have the energy left to fall right.
"What did I literally just say about the head injuries Jesus fuck how did you see twenty-eight."
In the moment, nothing about the phrase strikes him as strange.
When he comes to, he's locked in a pitch-dark room with no sound apart from his own heartbeat and no idea how he got there.
No, Dick amends after waving a hand in front of his face and feeling around for a light switch that he flips on and off a few dozen times, feeling the lightbulb to make sure it heats up, he's the one who can't see. When did that happen?
His head hurts. It must have been whatever did that. But who did it, and who dragged him in here?
The last thing he remembers is pulling up to a warehouse on his bike, preparing to knock over a dog fighting stable, then pushing open a door to find that the snarling and barking sounds were coming from a large speaker in the center of the space.
After that everything is blank.
So: someone laid a trap for Nightwing and fucked him up good. Not a lot of Gotham rogues would be able to do that, and the ones that could aren't very likely to leave him alive. Dick finds the door and presses an ear against it. Whoever it was, they're not there now. He has time to find a way to escape. First things first, figure out what kind of a room he's stuck in.
The space is about five feet square, not quite big enough for Dick to stretch out and too big for him to climb by bracing himself on the walls. But there's a shelf, so that will work.
A small window in what must be the outer wall, too narrow to climb through. But if he could break it, he might at least be able to see where he is…
Right. Keep forgetting.
He tries to concentrate on being annoyed at the inconvenience, because if he thinks too hard about that right now—about everything that was taken from him when he was attacked—
His face feels strangely…airy?
Dick puts a hand to the bridge of his nose and hisses.
His mask is gone.
Whoever it is who captured him, they took that, too.
Dick takes a deep ragged breath. He just needs to focus. Focus and work through the pain.
He can break down later, when he knows he isn't going to be a display case. If his identity is gone, that's…there are worse things. But compared to what it would do to Bruce if Dick died too, he'll take it.
If he only knew anything about where he is and how he got here. He strains to remember anything at all—for some reason all he can think of is the scent of Bruce's fancy European cigarettes, the ones he used so nobody thought he was a square when he turned up at a yacht party.
Well thanks for that ever so helpful bit of information, brain. See when you get wheat bran from me again…
Whoever put him in here, they patched him up a bit first: one wrist (broken, he decides when he presses on it) is splinted, with the strange muted tingle Dick knows to associate with a localized anesthetic. Dick assesses the rest of his injuries: pressure bandages on his knee and ribs, a large gauze pad taped over one temple as if that's going to fix anything right now.
One cautious step comes down on something wet and warm that gives a little and he yelps in brief horror before reaching down and finding a warm damp towel that must have been over his eyes while he was unconscious.
All of this adds up to the conclusion that whoever threw Dick in here was clearly making some attempt to ensure his well-being beyond the kind of brutal triage Dick knows to expect from the standard variety of captor. Which makes…no sense. Giving him painkillers and bandages just means he’ll have an easier time if he tries to run—nobody who had a clue what they were doing would handle a Bat so carefully. Yet if they were able to take Nightwing out they can’t have been an amateur.
So either they’re just stupid, or there’s something else going on here.
Dick starts searching the room again, but there’s nothing else to find beyond the bare shelves. The door is barricaded—something rocks a little when Dick throws his weight against it, but it doesn't move. The sound is muted, like the door is hitting a padded wall. A couch, maybe.
The stairs creak somewhere below.
Almost before he has a chance to think about what he’s doing, Dick is climbing the shelves. It’s not that he really thinks this will get him anywhere, but…it’s something to do. Lock Dick Grayson in a room with something climbable and he’s just going to climb it. Maybe this person took his mask, but they clearly don’t know him.
“Of all the fucking weeks to come back to this…fucking city…”
The voice is somehow lighter than Dick expected, young but rough as if with exhaustion (and possibly cigarettes, Dick thinks, remembering the flickering memory). Something stirs in his aching head.
“Can’t believe I’m fucking doing this…how did I even—”
The couch moves to the side with a heavy scrape, a tearing noise and more swearing. Then the pantry door opens.
Heavy boots step through the doorway, scraping on the floor of the tiny pantry, and everything floods back in. Dick winces as his head flares again, feeling like he should be seeing stars right now and swallowing down the sense of wrongness as he doesn’t.
“Alright, I have a plan so if you will just behave—oh Jesus Christ.”
The Red Hood is standing in front of the shelves.
The Red Hood, who blinded him and dragged him here.
The Red Hood, who claimed to be trying to help while pointing a gun at him.
The Red Hood, who is probably Dick’s only hope of making it home alive—if he isn’t the one who’s going to kill him.
“Do you want to explain how you thought this was a good idea?” Hood growls.
“Same to you,” Dick retorts, and winces as his throat burns. He must look awful under the bruises, he realizes absently. Not that he's going to be looking in a mirror anytime soon.
“Okay, I’ll give you that one.”
All the adrenaline Dick rode to get to the top of the shelves is dropping away and he can feel himself about to crash. “I’m going to pass out,” he says.
“Um, yeah, no shit.”
“Just…so you know I’m not ambushing you.”
And Dick has taken nosedives from bigger heights into worse surfaces but somehow this is what scares him, because he can’t see and he can’t catch himself, and he doesn’t want to die breaking his neck on a tile floor in an abandoned apartment because that’s just…that would make a really lame placard on the display case.
The floor is warmer and smells more like leather than he expected.
Dick lets everything fade.
He isn’t sure how long it’s been when he surfaces again. When he stirs cautiously he realizes his gloves are gone now—the whole suit is gone—and he can feel knit sweatshirt fabric under his bare fingers. He sits up sharply and catches on a seatbelt across his chest.
A car. The Hood is trading up from the bike, apparently.
“A heart attack,” Hood is muttering. Dick can hear something rubbery squeezing in his hands, his leather gloves creaking a little. Steering wheel, and from the sound he’s white-knuckling it. “A fucking heart attack is what you’re going to give me. How did he do this for so long, what the fuck? I’m never going to fight Batman because you keep trying to murder yourself every time I take my eyes off you.” A car horn blares behind and to the left and Hood snarls. “I am using my fucking blinker, let me merge already you goddamn son of a bitch!”
“Like…like eighty percent of this is on you,” Dick says fuzzily. He pops the seatbelt as quietly as he can, hoping his voice covers the click.
“Thank you I am aware.” The frustration in the Red Hood’s voice is beginning to pitch up into something very close to a highly un-villainous whine.
Leaving the seatbelt sitting loosely across his chest, Dick moves his arms and legs enough to confirm he’s not restrained apart from the seatbelt (his arm is decidedly unhappy about the moving, so the local anesthetic must be starting to wear off), then feels around on the door for the window controls.
Dick finds the window button, notes the familiar shape, then cracks the window and listens to the sound of the engine for half a minute. The wind whips at his hair and a few droplets of rain slide through the gap to hit his eyes. He jumps at the sudden cold and the strange sensation, and hears Hood take a sharp breath from the driver’s seat. “Why are we in a 2004 Toyota Corolla?”
The Hood’s hands clench on the steering wheel again. “It was the first car I found, okay, you wanted a Mercedes? Not exactly lying around in Crime Alley. And will you stop talking, your throat is a wreck right now.”
Dick stops talking, mainly because he knows exactly where the door latch is in a 2004 Toyota Corolla.
“Jesus fucking—”
The car screeches to a halt, drowning out Dick’s choked cry of pain as the Hood grabs his broken arm and slams him back into his seat.
Hood shouts for a while, but Dick doesn’t make out any of it because his arm is too busy being on fire and his throat feels like it’s collapsing and everything is spinning and fading in and out.
“—no point trying to kill you because you’re—”
“—can’t even fucking see, what was the goddamn plan here—”
“—high dive off Metro Bridge—”
“...th’hurts,” Dick slurs pointlessly, because admitting someone holding you captive is causing you pain never really helps anything, but to his surprise the grip on his arm releases instantly.
“Sorry,” Hood says. It almost even sounds like he means it. “I never meant to…”
“So what did you ‘mean to’?” Dick demands, clutching his arm to his chest and panting. “Because all I know is you sure seemed awfully dedicated to kicking my head in and breaking every bone in reach, so I just…”
He’s so tired. Dick rolls the window back up and slumps down in the seat to lean against it. The vibration of the car grounds him a little, less like he’s floating through a void again, and the rain-chilled window doesn’t actually help the pain in his head but he can at least pretend it does.
Neither of them speak. The only sound inside the car is the turn signal clicking as Hood pulls away from the shoulder and back into traffic.
Reflex from too many years in the passenger seat of the Batmobile kicks in, and Dick reaches for the seatbelt again, wincing as his wrist flares with pain. He lets out a hiss between his teeth and hears the Hood shift in the driver’s seat.
“Are you okay? Not…I mean I know the answer to that, I just…”
Dick interrupts. “Why are you doing this? Where are you taking me?” Somehow he can barely find the energy to care about what happens to him anymore: he just wants to know why.
Hood takes a deep breath, his gloves creaking on the steering wheel again. “Because I’m driving you to Metro Memorial, okay, they have an ocular surgery and a 24-hour urgent care. That’s why I had to change your clothes. Nowhere in Gotham that has what you need—for fuck’s sake, let me pass, of course someone with Star City bumper stickers drives like absolute shit—Nowhere in Gotham that has what you need is going to take an anonymous patient this late. And nowhere in Metro is going to airlift someone out of Gotham at night, so this is the best I’ve got if you will please stop trying to kill yourself.”
Dick turns towards his voice and raises an eyebrow.
“I get it, this looks…” Hood draws in a hissed breath. “You’d be stupid to trust me. I wouldn’t either. I'm still going after Batman once we get done here. But I’m—I didn’t mean—I—” He shrugs—Dick can hear the seams of the leather jacket dragging on the upholstery. "Jesus, why am I doing this…'
“Okay,” Dick scrapes out through his aching throat. He isn’t sure if he actually believes it, but…he wants to believe it. There’s something about the Hood that isn’t like the other enemies of the Bat…Dick wants to believe there might be some honor left in him. He doesn’t like the idea that someone so young could be unsalvageable. But mostly, he’s just tired. “You win. Hospital sounds great.”
“Oh.” The Hood sounds baffled that he’s won. “Uh…Alright. One hospital, coming right up.”
They both sit in silence after that, apart from Hood occasionally snarling towards the window at other drivers. After the pressure of the situation becomes unbearable, Hood presses a button on the radio, and Dick jumps at the noise as the voice of the Metro Stadium announcer fills the car.
“...Gotham now down 7-3, two outs as they come to the bottom of the lineup in the eighth inning…”
Hood laughs softly. “Knights still suck, huh? Some things never change.”
“They’re doing their best,” Dick mumbles, half drowsing.
“Knew you’d say that.”
Strange, Dick thinks, but his head hurts too much to focus on that and the voice from the radio at the same time. He lets everything blur into vague noise around him and cracks the window so he can hear the rain.
The car stops during the top of the ninth. Dick is still too tired to move.
Hood opens the driver door, then slams it again. Dick feels the slight shift in the car’s suspension as Hood leans over towards the passenger side. “Just…sit tight, okay,” he says, and Dick realizes suddenly that he sounds utterly exhausted. “I’m going to go in there and win an Oscar, and then you’ll be—they’ll get you help. I promise it’s the hospital. Please don’t run.”
Dick shrugs and Hood sighs, with a soft thump that Dick assumes is him resting his head on the steering wheel for a moment. “Okay. Plan step…fucking whatever.”
Distantly, as everything inside the car fades, Dick hears the Hood’s heavy boots sprinting up a gravel walk and throwing a door open. “Please, you’ve got to help—” The roughness is gone from his voice and suddenly he sounds young and innocent and desperate.
“We need a doctor, it’s my brother, I think he was hit by a truck…”
Something stirs in Dick’s mind again, but he’s too tired to hold on to it.
He really did mean it, is the last thing he thinks.
Dick wakes up.
He opens his eyes slowly, not wanting to be reminded just yet…and sees Bruce sitting next to a medical cot in the Cave, slumped in a hard plastic chair with the cowl pulled back and the cape pooling under his feet.
He blinks a few times, convinced he’s about to wake up again and discover everything is still dark. Nothing changes: the faintly blue light of the fluorescents lighting the space, the dark rings under Bruce's eyes, the red sweatshirt and track pants Hood put him in, the soft gleam of the Batmobile's dark polish.
He can see all of it.
“Bruce…?” he tries, and almost before the word is out of his still-aching throat Bruce is moving, leaning over the bed and wrapping a cautious arm around him as Dick pushes himself off the pillows. “...we’re being very parental today,” Dick says awkwardly, because if he doesn’t joke he’s going to cry, and with the way his throat hurts crying would be a real bitch right now.
“You were out for a week,” Bruce says. There’s a strange crack in his voice, like he’s trying not to cry either. “It was three days before we tracked you down. I thought…I was afraid you…”
“I’m okay.” Dick carefully brings up his less-broken arm to wrap it around Bruce’s neck. “I’m not going to be another display case. It’s—I’m okay.”
“A lot has…has happened.” Bruce clings tighter, until it stings Dick’s throat enough for him to let out a faint ‘ow.’ “The Red Hood—the Red Hood is Jason Todd.”
“Huh.” Dick can tell vaguely that he’s going to be shocked about this later but somehow, right now, everything seems to fit. He sinks back onto the pillows, drifting fuzzily. “There you have it. I knew he wasn’t a complete idiot…”