Chapter Text
There are things you never forget.
You never forget how to ride a bike or how to soar through the air between rooftops.
You never forget the strong emotions, the horrible ones like finding out for posterity that you missed your little brother's funeral or the feeling of fingers in your throat, forcing you to swallow a pill that will kill you.
But you never forget the beautiful ones either, like when your pseudo-son/brother (who's now the only one who's spoken to you in months) calls you "baba" for the first time.
And then there are the things you never forget, but they change while you're not doing them.
This is one of the few things Dick is grateful for: when he was Robin and in his early days as Nightwing, he was an excellent hacker, equal to Batman and far superior to Barbara...
By God, he was the one in charge of hacking on a team that had a fucking cyborg!
But then Barbara was paralyzed and had to reinvent her whole life, and he wanted to support her, giving her responsibilities helps and Dick had blüdhaven, taking care of an entire city alone is devastating, and there was a greater need for his version who knew how to keep the team glued to battle rather than him who fiddled with the internet, not that it matters anymore... They don't need him in general...
However, this doesn't mean he's forgotten how to do it, far from it, but in about ten years technology has progressed at a frightening speed, for which he is grateful to Spyral: Agent 37 had to be skilled in everything and a refresher is exactly what he needed to succeed in what he was about to do.
It was all planned: he'd warned Alfred he'd be disappearing for a while and left a last gift for Dami.
The others wouldn't care.
He hadn't seen his brothers without their masks in almost three months, and when he did, they'd tell him to leave.
Hell, he hadn't seen them at all, he'd dialed into the internal communications and listened (because Oracle had obviously made sure to mute him the first time he tried to talk to them) to his brothers being happy without him, listening to them joke or talk about the next movie night he wasn't going to, or what Bruce said at the last family dinner he missed.
That had to be enough for him, he should have been happy for them, but the pain of not being there consumed him.
So when a crime was reported near him, he took care of it, he wanted to be useful, he wanted to take even just a punch in his brothers' place, lighten the patrol a bit, make them understand that maybe he wasn't needed as a brother anymore but that he could still be useful as a vigilante.
That was until nine days ago when Killer Croc started causing trouble in Tim's patrol area, and Croc can hit hard and Tim doesn't have a spleen and Dick simply didn't want his brother to get hurt.
So he went, stopped Croc and walked away, happy he did because he had at least three broken ribs and a dislocated knee and was one of the best physical combatants in the Bat-family while Tim has other strengths.
So he sat in pain in an alley, thinking about how to get to his nearest refuge.
He probably fell asleep at some point—not to mention passed out—and when he woke up, he heard them.
Usually, they tend to gloss over him as a topic of conversation, but for some reason, when he woke up, they were talking about him.
Hearing his little brother say that "if Dick wanted to pretend to be dead, he might as well stay that way" hurt. Hearing the approval of the people he loved, hearing them complain because he tried to contact them and spend time with them even though they ignored him. Hearing Damian's silence (who he at least hoped would take his side)—it all hurt.
So Dick followed their advice, dragged himself into the still-destroyed building in Blüdhaven that he had begun to call home, made sure to fix his knee and take some painkillers for his ribs, and spent a week doing as they asked: acting dead.
He didn't patrol, he didn't contact anyone, he didn't text Jason to ask if he wanted to go with him to the Gotham Knights game, he didn't update Cass on the ballets at the theater so they could go together in case she wanted to come back from Singapore. He didn't even send Tim yet another delivery man with his favorite coffee along with a post-it asking him to pick it up in person next time. He hadn't been to movie nights or family dinners in months, but this time he didn't even show interest like he usually did "in case they change their minds and invite him."
They didn't notice, they didn't even care enough to notice that he'd stopped trying.
So on the eighth day, Dick texted Alfred with a little note for Damian, found out where Haley's next circus show was, packed up his sleeping bag, the few clothes he had, and his laptop, flew under a false name, making sure he couldn't be found, and went to see the show.
The plan was simple: see one last time the world he loved but couldn't have, erase all his documents from the batcomputer and replace them with his last will and testament, and then shoot himself in the head.
He originally wanted to die by falling, just like his parents, but among the nasty things he'd heard that night was Steph, who said that "by saying he'd died by taking a pill, Dick had disappointed her, that she'd expected him to die by falling, that it would have been his style," and—as right as she was—Dick didn't want to give her that satisfaction. Furthermore, the bat family doesn't use guns out of respect for the deaths of Marta and Thomas Wayne, but everyone made it clear that Dick wasn't family, so he could at least tell Bruce to go fuck himself by shooting himself.
But what's the problem? Why wasn't he just hacking the batcomputer now? Why the plan WAS simple?
Because there were no trapeze artists in the show: because the strongman had told him that the only ones who would ever defy gravity under that big top were the Flying Graysons, and that if they wanted, they would wait for him. Even now, twenty years later—after Haley retired and left the circus to her son—they were waiting for him.
So he had to find a new way to kill whoever he was (after all, they had been waiting for him, he couldn't disappoint them), and for that, he's grateful that B insisted he learn hacking and that Spyral updated his knowledge.
It took him an extra day, but he manually bypassed the security measures of the Justice League, Wayne Enterprises, the remnants of the Crime Committee, Star Industries, Lex Corp, and the Batcave.
He even hacked into Slade's personal devices and cyborgs' cervical recordings, while a specially programmed artificial intelligence tracked down every photo or recording, government data, newspaper article, even every single tabloid quote...
Every date traceable to his existence.
Now all he had to do was press a button and everyone would be happy, ~his~ Wayne family would never have to worry again, and the circus would have its trapeze artist.
One more button and Dick Grayson, Renegade, Red X, Nightwing, the first Robin, the Gray Son of Ghosts, and Agent 37 would all disappear from the world.
He even made sure the old Flying Grayson posters and family photos were either deleted or altered so as not to retire him.
One button and the world would have forgotten about him because there are things you never forget and Dick Grayson is not one of them.