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The US-Canada border crossing at Pigeon River is, to put it mildly, quite small. Straight up highway 61 from Grand Portage, Minnesota, the water serves as a natural borderline. There’s a state park on the Minnesota side - Grand Portage - and a provincial park on the Ontario side - Pigeon River. Both aptly named, though not very creatively. Neither encompasses more than a handful of hiking trails, and certainly not enough wilderness to get lost in. There’s a viewing platform overlooking High Falls on either side, hardly the most impressive waterfall in the area with Kakabeka so close. That’s the second highest waterfall in Ontario, beaten only by Niagara. All of this information is given to him freely in the Ontario Tourism pamphlet he’s scanning to pass the time. The map unfolded across his knees tells him that they’re just under forty miles from Thunder Bay, Ontario. It’d probably be an hour, maybe an hour and a half drive with the weather. This time of year, everything is blanketed in thick snow. Driving has been perilous in Slade’s ancient Jeep, even with winter tires and four wheel drive.
Pigeon River is frozen over. It’s actually quite pretty. The brochure tells him that there’s a couple nice trails for hiking here, though this is probably not the season to do it. A three mile out-and-back hike to the Finger Point lookout. Another mile and a half to hike to the High Falls lookout and back. It’s probably cool to see it frozen over. Does it freeze over? Niagara doesn’t. He read that somewhere, once. Does Kakabeka? How big, exactly, does a waterfall have to be before it can’t freeze over anymore? If he had a phone, he’d look it up. His fingers trace the route from Pigeon River to Kakabeka falls: up highway 61 until 130, and then off of 130 to 11. The tourism brochure tells him that the provincial park is open year-round. It’s cold out today, minus sixteen, but he’s got a parka folded up in the backseat and a warm hat and mittens. He shifts his socked feet, curling and uncurling his toes to get his circulation going. The heater in the Jeep isn’t fantastic, and his boots are in the trunk. He’ll get them back when they get where they’re going.
Also in the tourism brochure: the Terry Fox memorial just outside of Thunder Bay. Sleeping Giant Provincial Park. A few museums. A handful of local restaurants. Some hotels, some tour guides, advertisements for local cabin rentals. There’s a few amethyst mines in this area that still do tours of their operations.
“Anything interesting?” Slightly amused, like this is just a fun vacation.
“Sure. Do you think High Falls freezes?”
“It does.”
“What about Kakabeka?”
“It does, too.”
Infuriating, that he has an answer for everything. The car in front of them finally pulls forward and starts trundling down highway 61. Their Jeep slides into the empty space, stopping beside the window. A kind-faced border agent, cheeks pinkened with the cold, peeks out.
“Hello, bonjour,” she says. “Anything to declare?”
Two passports change hands. One for Samuel Williamson, and one for Robert Williamson. Just a father and son going on a trip up north for the Christmas holidays. Nothing to look twice at.
“No.” Curt, but not rude. The border agent inspects the passports. She does some typing. Her hair is in a thick black braid over her shoulder, and there’s a warm winter hat pulled over her ears.
“And what is the purpose of your visit?” Professional, disinterested.
“Pleasure. I own a cabin up by Windigo Lake. We spend the Christmas break there.”
She looks down into the car. Makes eye contact. He holds it rather than averting his gaze. Come on, you’ve got to know something isn’t right here.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” she says. “Robert, you must be looking forward to it.”
Her eyes dart back down to the passports. Back up. Eye contact again. He glances at the driver’s seat, just a beat too long, and says, “yeah. Sure.”
Here’s the funny thing: if Damian and Tim hadn’t worked so hard to keep his face out of the national news when Bruce disappeared, this whole thing might’ve fallen apart on the first day. How many borders has he crossed over the past three months, just like this, pleading with his eyes for somebody to notice that something isn’t right? Nobody in Canada is reading Gotham’s high society pages. He is, maybe for the first time in his life, unrecognizable.
“Psh. Teenagers. Can’t stand to be away from their friends or their phone for ten minutes to enjoy the great outdoors. You got kids, ma’am?”
A clear threat. He rolls his eyes, makes a distinctly teenage sound, and grumps, “I don’t see why I can’t just bring my phone.” Like that is the great injustice here.
The tension dissipates. “Oh, mine are the same,” she says sweetly. “Windigo Lake? That’s quite the drive in this weather, Mister Williamson. And there’s no cell service along some of those roads. You got a satellite phone?”
“Of course. Safety first.”
“How long are you planning on staying?”
“Just a couple of weeks. Back in time for school.”
“Alright, Mister Williamson. Everything seems to be in order.”
Two stamps. The passports are handed back.
“Welcome to Canada. Enjoy your vacation!”
Their car trundles forward, across the border. There’s not much except for a small visitor center, already closed for the season, and a lot to park in should they want to hike up to the falls. If he were here under any other circumstances, it might be neat to go and see them.
Slade does not stop the car in the parking lot. They drive past the visitor center, along highway 61, the border crossing shrinking in the rearview mirror as they slowly gain distance. This road must be plowed at least semi-regularly, but snow has accumulated quite heavily since it was last done. Ice-covered trees line the sides of the road, serenely beautiful in the way that winter always is in a place like this. There aren’t any other cars on the road this early in the day, save for whoever was ahead of them at the border crossing, but they’re long gone. Maybe they’ve turned off onto one of the side roads, or maybe onto highway 593 which branches off of 61 not far from here, but either way, they’re truly alone.
It’s just Dick, Slade, and the vast Canadian wilderness.
Well, wilderness might be a bit dramatic. They’re not in the Canadian wilderness yet. In ten hours or so they will be, road conditions depending, of course, far enough away that cell service can’t reach them and their only neighbours will be whatever wildlife doesn’t hibernate. Slade had said, in a relatively threatening way, that the cabin was truly remote. Dick isn’t looking forward to finding out what that means.
He had also said that he used to take his sons to the cabin, which Dick doesn’t particularly feel like examining. There are a lot of things about Slade that Dick doesn’t really want to look too deeply at: his odd desire to make Dick want to work with him, his rapid oscillation between acting like a poor caricature of Dick’s father to suddenly acting as his jailor, his acquiescence to Dick’s ongoing refusal to kill.
Laying low is the point. The League is up his ass, and Slade wants to shake them off. It’s not that Slade thinks he’s going to try to escape, after all this time. Not after…
Well. It’s just not a concern. No empty threats, and all that.
Having soured his own mood far enough, Dick resorts to staring at the map. There’s a black sharpie-mark marking their destination, far enough north that there aren’t any cities big enough nearby to warrant labelling. Windigo Lake is as far as highway 599 goes, and Dick suspects there’ll be some off-roading to get to the cabin itself. Slade wouldn’t risk having property that could be considered accessible.
The road gets a little clearer as they get closer to Thunder Bay. There isn’t heavy traffic, but there are other cars on the road now, mostly large SUVs and trucks built for the Canadian winters. Dick tells Slade to turn off of highway 61 and get onto 130, and the car fishtails a bit before correcting. Ice on the roads beneath the snow.
Left off of 130. Right onto River Road, and then right again onto 588, left again onto the Trans Canada Highway.
Slade says, apropos of nothing, “do you want to see Kakabeka?”
“Sure.” Not entirely clear, even to himself, why he agrees to the proposition. Maybe as an appeasement. Maybe hoping that Slade has forgotten the tension with the border patrol agent. Maybe thinking that if he plays into the son role, Slade will forget to use him as a whipping boy.
They pull into the provincial park, pay the fee to stay for an hour, and slide into a spot in the otherwise almost empty lot. Slade gets out of the car first, pops the trunk, and walks around to the passenger side with Dick’s winter boots in hand. He waits patiently while Dick laces them up and slides his parka on. Frigid winter air immediately greets him when he steps out of the vehicle, pinkening his cheeks and the tip of his nose. Snow, in heavy flakes, drifts down to coat his hat and shoulders.
As promised, Kakabeka Falls is frozen over. Instead of the sound of rushing water, a peaceful silence has descended upon the park. Other than him and Slade, there’s only a couple of particularly brave photographers leaning over the rail to get a better shot. Large ice formations have formed at the bottom of the falls, seemingly defying gravity.
He risks a glance at Slade. Like always, the mercenary looks impassive. Content, maybe, or just bored. His eye is fixed on the frozen waterfall.
A familiar thought strikes him. He could, in theory, yell for help right now. Those three photographers might run to his aid. He’s not my dad, please help me, I’ve been kidnapped! And then they’d rush in, and Slade would kill them, and he’d be exactly in the same place he started except Slade would take it out on Donna or Roy or Garth or Wally. And on Dick, of course. But he’s gotten kind of used to Slade’s personal brand of discipline.
No. Better to just take the good day for what it is and accept what he already accepted three months ago: there’s really no getting out of this. Slade had laid it out for him in simple terms, that first day. He had been handed a passport with his new name and his own face on it, and he had realized that this whole thing had been more planned out than he initially thought. Those years spent chasing Slade across rooftops? Slade had spent them making contingencies. Knowing that there was no way Tim and Bruce and Jason wouldn’t investigate, he had planted just enough seeds of League involvement to send them chasing their own tails, which serves the dual purpose of keeping Ra’s too busy to truly retaliate. Knowing that Damian might’ve been able to unravel that plan, he had killed him. Knowing that the Titans would go after him, and might be able to trace the whole thing back to Slade, he blew up Mount Justice to make everyone nervous enough to bench the teenage sidekicks for the time being. Knowing that Dick would eventually be able to escape, no matter how he was restrained, Slade made sure to let him know that his threats to kill people important to Dick weren’t bluffs.
So: no escape. Just… this. Whatever it is. Better to enjoy the good days, few and far between as they are, rather than making it worse for himself by getting civilians killed.
There’s going to be hell to pay for the border patrol agent later. Slade won’t let that slide. The thought sours Dick’s mood, but he’s careful not to let it show on his face. Slade doesn’t like it when he appears ungrateful, as if this past three months has been a fun and exciting summer camp rather than a long-term abduction.
A heavy hand lands on the nape of Dick’s neck, warm and grounding. He hates it. He leans into it all the same.
“You know, I’ve never seen it unfrozen,” Slade says.
“Really?” Better to engage. Better to keep him talking, keep him in good spirits. Behave, behave, behave. It can always be worse, but it cannot be better than it is now.
“I always took my boys here over the winter. Never bothered to come up this way during the summer. Too many bugs.”
Thinking of Slade being plagued by something as simple as mosquito bites makes Dick snort. A barely-there flash of a smile crosses Slade’s face, and his grip tightens on the back of Dick’s neck for a second, something that might be a comforting squeeze coming from anyone else.
Another funny thing: if he had just owned up to his obsession with Slade and told Tim where all the bruises were from, Tim probably would’ve found him before Slade even got him to that first airport. Instead he had lied and said they were from patrol with Damian.
Damian had opted for back surgery not long after that. A week, maybe? Two weeks? Flamebird had been benched, and then Damian had talked to the surgeon, and then-
Well. Doesn’t really matter that his back got fixed if he’s dead, does it?
They don’t spend very long at the falls. Dick uses the public restroom, which Slade stands right outside of the whole time, and then goes back into the jeep. He unlaces his boots. He hands them back to Slade. They go back into the trunk. He shucks off his parka and places it in the backseat.
No way to run through the northern Canadian winter if he doesn’t have a jacket or boots on.
Dick curls and uncurls his toes to keep them warm while the car heats up again. Slade navigates back onto highway 11, which then turns into 17. Traffic thins out again, even though they’re on the Trans Canada Highway. Dick kind of thought it’d be busier. Highway 17 and 11 split off again at Shabaqua Corners, and they stay on 17. Their only conversation is Dick’s quiet navigation, until:
“We’ll stop for groceries in Ignace.”
“Sure. That’s where we turn off of 17 onto 599.”
“Yep.”
He wonders, for a moment, if Slade even needs him to navigate, or if he’s playing a character right now; one of Slade’s sons, his age or maybe younger, sitting in the passenger seat and navigating the first time he ever went up to this goddamn cabin. Slade has never forgotten anything in his life, as far as Dick knows. His mind, and therefore memory, is sharpened by the same serum that enhanced his body.
There isn’t a chain grocery store in Ignace, just a local place called Shoprite. The cashier is entirely disinterested when she scans two weeks worth of groceries and bags them. That, at least, will make Slade happy. He hates getting second glances. With his prosthetic eye in, there’s no real reason for either of them to be attracting undue attention. Most people seem to not give a shit that Dick doesn’t look anything like the guy posing as his father. Nobody notices that anything is wrong at all. It’s infuriating. It’s also for the best. God only knows what Slade would do to a bunch of unsuspecting cops if some well-intentioned bystander called about a missing kid.
Back in the car again. Dick surrenders his boots and puts his parka in the backseat.
Silence. Again. Hours and hours of it, until they pass the last town along highway 599 and head out into the real wilderness.
In all fairness, Dick is a city boy; there’s probably places in Canada more remote than this, up in the territories where they’re living in igloos or whatever, but after Trapper’s Landing, when it becomes clear that nobody has bothered to plow the road after the past three snowstorms, he really does feel isolated. There’s nobody up here. No kind-eyed border agents, no photographers trying to get a shot of Kakabeka falls, no bored grocery store cashiers. Just him and Slade with no neighbours for as long as he feels like staying at the cabin.
For the past three months, Dick has operated with the relative safety of knowing that Slade won’t bruise him anywhere that’s visible. They’ve been on the move: Chicago, New York, Arizona, Texas. Bouncing from safehouse to safehouse, never spending more than a week or two. Sometimes out of the country, even, like Slade has been bragging about being able to sneak Dick across borders without so much as a second glance from the TSA. But to facilitate all of that, Dick has had to appear relatively unharmed. Training has been gentle, at least gentle enough to leave only pale bruises, and never anywhere that might be seen while he’s wearing a sweater and jeans. Being on the move has kept Slade under the radar, acting as if everything is normal, completing regular contracts, but it has also protected Dick.
That protection is gone.
Trapper’s Landing is thirty minutes behind them when the highway gets really bad. There are deep ditches on either side of the road, and then sprawling forests, and Dick imagines for a brief moment jerking the steering wheel out of Slade’s hands, sending them sprawling into a ditch and making a break for it. It wouldn’t work, of course, but… but it’s nice to think about.
And then Slade says, in a dark tone, “don’t think I didn’t miss your stunt with the border patrol agent.”
His heart sinks like lead. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles, though Slade has never had much use for his apologies.
“I have been endlessly patient with you,” Slade snaps. “I’ve trained you, I’ve ignored your… attitudes, I’ve-” he sighs, theatric. “You ought to be grateful, you know.”
“I am.” He’s not. He hates Slade. He hates him and he wishes he had the stomach to kill him, sometimes, for what he did to Damian.
“No, you’re not. You’re lucky I don’t make a habit of beating on kids, Grayson.” As if that’s not exactly what he’s been doing for the past three months. “I want an apprentice. Not a whipping boy. If all I wanted was to smack someone around, I wouldn’t have bothered with you.”
Silence. Dick isn’t sure how to respond. The car fishtails around a curve in the highway, Slade’s speed picking up even as the road conditions worsen.
He’s been smacked around plenty by Slade. He chooses not to mention that. Mentioning any of Slade’s transgressions against him is the surest way to make him angry. Especially mentioning Damian. Dick has learned to avoid the topic.
“So we’re going to go up to my cabin, and we’re going to stay there until you start to make some progress. I can’t afford to go soft on you anymore, Grayson. In the spring, we need to be ready to move against the League.”
Soft. As if anything, anything that Slade has done to him has ever been soft. The idea is so incredulous that he almost snorts. Being stuck in the Canadian wilderness with Slade until he caves in and agrees to kill people is… a horrifying prospect.
Like all of a sudden it’s real. Like it wasn’t before. Like the fog that has descended upon him, the dissociative haze of his grief, has finally lifted from his mind to allow him one single independent thought:
He’s not going to that cabin.
He waits until the next bend in the road. Slade is going the speed limit, eighty kilometres an hour, but there’s snow and ice beneath their tires. They should really be doing forty or less.
Dick doesn’t think. Fuck thinking. Fuck everything. He grabs the wheel. He jerks it away from himself - better to have Slade make impact first - and sends them fishtailing off the road into the ditch on the left side.
There’s no time to consider his actions or next steps. Not even enough time to brace for impact. One second they’re driving, and then they’re skidding, and then there’s the stomach-swooping nausea of being airborne in a vehicle that is not designed for that function, and then-
CRUNCH.
He doesn’t so much register the impact as he does its aftereffects. Only some of the airbags have deployed, which isn’t overly surprising considering that the Jeep is an ancient piece of shit. They’re… upside down. Yeah. That’s… not great. What he thought was a medium-sized ditch off the side of the highway actually seems to have been a goddamn canyon, if their flight path was anything to go by.
Aches and pains demand his attention all at once, but he ignores them. Ignores everything, except for the urgent mission of getting out of the vehicle before Slade wakes up. One of his airbags didn’t deploy, and he seems to have brained himself on the wheel. Good. Dick almost hopes he’s dead.
“Hurry. You don’t have much time.”
“Right. Yeah.” He undoes the seatbelt one-handed, holding the other above him to brace for the inevitable fall, and-
CRACK.
Ignores whatever that was. Rides the adrenaline. Crawls through the cracked windshield, using only his right hand and some awkward shuffling from his feet. Glass digs into his skin. He hasn’t got winter boots on. He hasn’t got a coat on. The snow is bitterly cold when he crawls into it, immediately chilling him to the bone.
“You need to run, Richard. Now.”
“M’going.”
“Now.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dick says. There’s a flash of black and red in his periphery, a beacon. Go this way, it says. “M’comin, dad.”
“You don’t have any time. You must run.”
From behind him: “what the-”
Getting up is a rushed affair. His socked feet slip in the snow. Climbing back up onto the highway will be impossible, and so he does the opposite: takes off running toward the forest, scrambling with his left arm clutched close to his chest, ignoring the throbbing there and in his head and in his right ankle when he puts too much weight on it. With limping, hobbling steps he runs up the slope of the ditch and into the woods.
Footsteps beside him, always just out of his eyeline. Flashes of black and red. “You have to keep running, Richard. You just have to keep running.”
Slade doesn’t bother muffling his shout of frustration. Dick has barely hit the treeline when he hears the squealing protest of metal being ripped apart, followed by heavier footsteps through the snow and more cursing.
There aren’t any other people for miles. Trapper’s Landing is too far away. No other cars were on the highway. Dick is alone out here, and he is going to die out here, and there is nothing he can-
“You will not give up on me.”
Damian steps into his eyeline. He looks just as Dick remembers him: strong, tall, with impossibly straight posture and an air of regal authority about him. Dick’s knees nearly buckle with relief.
“Dad.”
“You must keep running.”
His feet are burning with the cold, well on their way to numbness. His face is tingling. His entire front is soaked through with snow melted by his rapidly dwindling body heat. A distant, faraway part of him knows that his left arm is broken, that he hit his head in the crash, that his ankle is badly sprained and won’t hold weight much longer.
Dick runs anyway.
Damian flits in and out of his vision, sometimes with words of encouragement, sometimes just a presence between the trees. Slade is catching up rapidly; there’s no way to conceal his footprints in the snow, and whatever injuries the mercenary sustained in the crash will be well on their way to healed by now. Terror spurs him to go faster; his ankle refuses.
It gives out.
He stumbles face-first back onto the ground, forehead cracking against a tree root. His vision whites out for a minute, either from the impact or the faceful of snow, and by the time he’s struggling back to his feet, Slade is within view again.
To say that he looks furious would be an understatement. His lip is curled upward in a snarl, brow furrowed, chest heaving with exertion. The entire right side of his face is covered in blood, his skin still knitting back together, and his gait is unbalanced on the right side, perhaps from a sprained or broken ankle already well on their way to healing. Whatever headstart Dick had is gone. Whatever chance Dick had is gone.
“You ungrateful little brat.”
“I’m not going to that cabin,” Dick says shakily. He glances around, searching for another glimpse of Damian. Damian will protect him. He’ll-
He squeezes his eyes shut. His head must’ve been rattled pretty good in that car accident if he thinks that the hallucination of his dead dad is going to help him now. Jeez.
“You are going to do whatever the fuck I say you’re going to do unless you want your friends to-”
No thoughts. Only action. Dick’s frigid hands find a large branch on the forest floor beneath the snow and he throws it with unerring precision. It cracks against Slade’s face with enough force to knock him backward on his ass.
Back up to his feet. Running again.
A hand around that bad ankle.
CRACK.
Feeling, more than the wrist, the way that his bone gives way under impossibly strong grip. Realizing without a shadow of a doubt that he is either going to die here or be broken here.
Damian, again. Laying in the snow with him. Extending a hand. “Death is not so bad, Richard.”
Kicking back with the good foot, catching Slade in the face, the shoulders, the arms. Kicking and kicking and kicking until he finally breaks free of his grasp, and then crawling with only one hand and one foot. His teeth stopped chattering a while ago, now. Numbness has set in. He is so, so tired.
Damian flickers. There is a puddle of blood beneath him, spreading through the snow. “You can rest now, Richard.”
But he can’t. This Damian isn’t real.
Dick yells: “DAD!” without thinking, and Slade pounces on him. He thrashes against superhuman grip, bucking his hips and trying to dislodge Slade, throwing wild hits with his one good hand and hoping to god that he’ll finally land one.
Right. Someone who can actually help him: “JON!”
Slade sneers. “Nobody is coming for you, little bird. Timmy is chasing his own tail in Nanda Parbat. Bruce is putting Gotham criminals in the ICU. Nobody has seen or heard from the Red Hood since you went missing.”
“UNCLE JON! PLEASE!”
Heart jackrabbiting in his chest. Terror, real and visceral, making a home in his stomach, his lungs, his mouth. Slade deflects each of Dick’s wild punches like he’s nothing more than an annoying mosquito. He is impossible to dislodge.
Dick is going to die here. He is going to die here. He is going to-
“SUPERMAN!” Fuck it. If either of them are on the planet right now, they’ll come.
Slade’s hand claps over his mouth. “That’s enough of that,” he snaps.
Just enough, as it turns out. Only a second later, there’s a flash of blueyellowred, and Slade’s weight disappears off of Dick’s hips.
“You can rest now,” not-Damian tells him. He’s still laying in that same puddle of blood. His left temple is caved in around a bullet wound.
Dick says, “okay, dad,” and closes his eyes.
Waking is a slow process.
A pleasant fog has settled over his brain. Through the haze he can hear a soft voice, feel a gentle hand clutching his, thumb rubbing over his knuckles. Slow, steady, repetitive. You’re going to be okay, kid, I’m here, you’re safe now. Over and over and over again, until the words take shape in his mind and he gains some semblance of awareness.
Without opening his eyes, he can tell that he’s in a hospital room, or something equivalent. The sheets beneath him are soft but a bit scratchy, he’s wearing a gown rather than his snow-soaked clothes, and the pillow beneath his head is thin. His head is a bit elevated, maybe thirty degrees. If he focuses he can feel the ECG leads on his chest and the oxygen saturation probe on his finger. His fingers twitch, a barely-there admission of wakefulness, and then he slowly peels his eyes open.
Even the dimmed lights are too bright, at first. Dick squeezes his eyes shut again, then opens them halfway, squinting until the shape of Oliver Queen becomes clear.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says, warm and soft and kind as he always is. “You’re alright. Jon brought you up to the Watchtower.”
In all of his years of being friends with Roy, he’s spent quite a bit of time with the green-clad archer. Ollie is a sight for sore eyes right now, and he’ll blame it on the pain medication later, but he finds his vision glazing over with tears. If he’s here, if Jon got him, then that means-
That means it’s over. This three month nightmare is over. It worked, against all odds. Putting the car in the ditch and making a break for it worked.
“I was on monitor duty when Jon brought you up,” Ollie continues, still in that soothing voice. “We got you patched up. We sent out the all-call letting everybody know we found you.”
“Slade?” His voice is hoarse and scratchy.
Ollie holds out some water and Dick sips it. “He’s in custody. It’ll be dealt with.”
It’s over. It’s really, truly over. A few of those tears slip over his cheeks, and Ollie wipes them away without fanfare.
“Batman is on his way up, and we’re working on getting a hold of Cardinal,” Ollie says.
Dick’s throat locks up. The thought of seeing them, facing them… it’s too much. How can he ever, ever look them in the eyes again, when this is all his fault? Ollie mistakes his fresh wave of tears for relief, pats his hand, and says, “we can wait for the full debrief until they’ve seen you, kiddo. But if there’s anything, anything you can think of that’d help us find Damian-”
The words hit him like a gunshot. He hates, for a minute, how quickly his mind puts the pieces together. There’s no way Slade would just leave his body there. There would’ve been forensic evidence, and it would’ve exposed Flamebird’s identity if the cops found him first, and then that would’ve exposed Dick’s identity, and then it would’ve been really hard to fly under the radar once his picture was on the news. So he must’ve dealt with it. Somehow. Dick is choosing not to think of the specifics. What it means, though, is that they don’t know. That Dick has spent the past three months grieving Damian, and everyone else has spent the past three months looking for him.
In any other circumstance, he would feel pathetic for the way his face scrunches up and he cries, except he can hear in the back of his mind Damian saying, “sometimes you just have to let it out, I think,” and it’s been three months of not. Three months of being silent in his grief so as to not trigger Slade’s temper. Three months of seeing Damian from his peripheral vision, haunting him, his eyes full of accusation and betrayal. Three months that Tim spent chasing his own tail in Nanda Parbat. Of course he was - Tim has been fixated on the League since Damian’s back first started getting bad. Of course that’s where they looked. Three months searching for Damian, and now-
“Oh,” Ollie says, quiet and sorrowful, “oh, Dick, fuck, I’m sorry.”
Between his tears, Dick manages to whimper, “please don’t make me tell them. Please. I can’t, I can’t do it, I-”
“No, kiddo, you don’t have to.” Ollie pulls him into a hug that’s almost too tight, the grip bruising and grounding, maybe the only thing that’s keeping him from floating away. A tidal wave of pent-up grief is finally, finally washing over him after being repressed for too long. Dick sobs, and he screams, and he fists his hands into the back of Oliver’s shirt so tightly that he fears he’ll rip it, and he tells him in no uncertain terms all of the ways in which it is his fault.
Through it all, Ollie rubs his back and rocks him like a child, and Dick hates him for the affection but he can’t let go of it all the same. He doesn’t deserve the sympathy, not now, not after everything.
“Okay,” he says, when Dick’s sobs have turned into hiccups and his words have trailed off into nothing more than sparse apologies, “okay, kiddo, you’re okay, I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”
Eventually, he pulls back only far enough to look Dick in the eyes - and what a sight he must be, with snot covering his upper lip and his eyes crusted over with dried tears - and says, with all the conviction he seems capable of mustering, “it is not your fault, alright kiddo?”
And Dick says, “sure. Whatever,” because he knows that an affirmative is the right answer, and Ollie won’t leave him alone if he doesn’t agree.
He wants, very much, to be alone.
“Batman and Cardinal are going to be here any minute. I’m going to go tell them, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to be okay for five minutes? Or do you want me to call Jon back in here?”
“I’m going to be okay.”
“Or Donna? I can call Diana to bring Donna. Or Roy, or-”
“I just want to be alone,” Dick says quietly.
Ollie looks unconvinced, but he says, “okay,” and pats Dick’s uninjured hand before leaving the room.
Exhaustion surges over him, and he finds he does not have the strength to fend it off.