A/N- In case you missed it somehow, this story contains major spoilers for the storyline of Nightwing: The New Order. It mentions characters and events from that storyline, and if you have not read Nightwing: The New Order, it might not make much sense. That said, here is a brief summary of the events in that story which affect the events in this story, for those who decided to read this anyway, having not read New Order. I commend you.
So, in 2028, there was a three day war in Metropolis, resulting in thousands of deaths. The superheroes and super villains pretty much destroyed the city. The war only ended because Nightwing made the decision to betray the entire super community and use a weapon Bruce had from a past fight with Apokolips, which removed ninety percent of the world's superpowers, most notably including those of Superman and Koriand'r (Starfire). (Point of interest- Wally West maintained his powers but not his friendship with Dick. This tidbit is irrelevant except for the general angst you'll see in this fic at Dick's betraying/abandoning his hero family for the sake of his son.) Dick then went through a series of events that led to him becoming the face of an organization dedicated to regulating those with powers (after having made superpowers illegal), which is all well and good, until his son Jake demonstrates having the same powers his mother- Kori- had. Jake runs away, gets caught, a whole bunch of stuff goes down but there's a minor reveal or two I won't spoil, and powers are returned to the world. After that (and with Jake's help), Dick dedicates his life to teaching children how to control and use their powers. Another notable thing you need to know! At some point before New Order, Batman is killed. His killer? None other than Superman, via a hot glare. (Laser vision. Yikes.) You know what they say about if looks could kill... At any rate, Clark was under some sort of mind control or other when it happened, so he's got something of a defense, but that doesn't change the fact that Bruce is dead. Oh, also, in 2028 Dick has just learned that he's going to be a father, but that becomes obvious in the story.
I apologize for the general messiness of that summary, but it gets the job done.
Please note! This story contains a lot of death. Some of it is major character death. There are both death tolls and descriptions of various methods of dying that can be assumed to have happened, either in such a cataclysmic event as this war, the murder of a young boy's parents via sabotaged ropes, or a certain evil speedster's preferred mention of killing (temporarily including certain engineers) in a certain hit CW TV show. Also in this story, Dick has a dim worldview in which he perceives the world as broken. If you're in a bad place with the world, you might want to hold off on this fic until you're having a better day. (I am confident that better days are ahead for you, friend.)
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters, I didn't write Nightwing: The New Order, and pretty much all that belongs to me are Dick's thoughts in this story, so let's not break out the law books, alright? Thanks.
If you like the story, leave a review and make my day. If you've read New Order, let me know so we can talk about it. I'm so down to talk about it. Enjoy!
On the first night, the death toll was estimated at 2,700.
Two thousand and seven hundred people, innocent people. Civilians. Fathers. Mothers. Children.
Dead.
(Like his mother, his father, Bruce, like Jason had been, like so many people he knew, so many he didn't know. People who hadn't deserved it.)
Apparently, two thousand and seven hundred deaths were not enough to stop the war that raged through the city of Metropolis. It was supposed to be a better place, a happier place, with Superman there to save them.
Ha. Right. No, Superman was the one who was causing most of the damage. Buildings levelled, fires started, the list went on.
(Bruce, torn through by the sheer force of a look from the man Dick had once considered family, the way an ordinary man might tear through a rope with a gunshot, or a vial of acid, or a knife.)
The second day, there was no casualty count, but they would later come to find that the tolls had risen to somewhere in the seven thousands.
And not one of them stopped. None of them, none of the 'heroes' stopped after so much destruction. They, who could have ended this fight in seconds if only they truly desired to.
On the second day, when the streets of the shining city were thick with rubble and bodies and stained red with senselessly spilled blood, he began to think that these so-called superheroes did not want the fight to end. Not the way Bruce had, the way he himself did. He began to think of an old weapon, hidden away, something that had once been feared. But these were the people he'd known most of his life, people he trusted with his life.
Had trusted.
On the second night, it stopped being a matter of trust and started being arithmetic. On one side, there were the supers. Over-powered and under-aware, it seemed, after so many hours of endless fighting. They did not care what happened to the people. Gods rarely did. Against the supers, who made life better and made it worse, were the thousands of deaths- just in the last two days- that had only happened because of them. This was the world now. A place where the heroes of the world could tear through human beings with the literal blink of an eye, where thousands of bystanders were a fair price to pay for the glory of the fight.
This was the world he was bringing a child into. The world his child would have to live in. Watching 'super-heroes' destroy, again and again, as if unaware of the true force of the consequences of their actions. The agony, the pain and suffering they left in their wake. This was not how things were supposed to be. Everything was broken, everything was wrong. The wrongness of it all filled him to the brim, it spilled out of every part of him like so many drops of blood, a torrent, a tidal wave that swept him away with it. There was a war raging in Metropolis, and there was a war waging in Dick Grayson, because these people were three-fourths of his life, and these people were breaking the world. Had broken the world.
When the third day came, fifteen thousand people were dead. Incinerated, or drowned, or punctured by a billion pieces of shrapnel, or crushed between cars or under fallen buildings or bridges, or any of a thousand ways the deaths had been happening. Nobody seemed to even notice. Nobody was trying to rescue these people, the civilians, human and helpless against the power and the anger and the fight that had been thrown into their midst. He watched the chaos fester and grow, and it became clear, what he needed to do. His decision had been made for him, a long time ago. And it killed him, what he was about to do. He was throwing away everything, his entire life. His friends, his family. He was going to do what he had stopped Bruce from doing, what now seemed like so long ago. He had to, or else the world would continue to rot and burn and die and his son would know the pain that tore through him right now, like heat-vision or a vibrating hand through the heart, so great and terrible that it could only have been caused by such great, terrible beings as these that fought and killed and let die before him.
He knew that he wouldn't be able to do it if that feeling persisted. So he thought of his child, and he threw the rest of it into a box in his head, the connections he'd made, the friends and family, the world he'd fought so hard for, all of it, right up to the breaking of his heart, and he hid it away. He locked it down and convinced himself that this was the only way to right the wrongness, to fix the broken world, to make it a place he could raise his child in. A place where parents lived to see their children graduate, where nobody knew the pain of laser-eyes searing through flesh or any similar thing. He buried the parts of himself that spoke out against his decision, and he retrieved the weapon that he'd convinced Bruce to put down, what seemed now like eons ago. How naïve he had been, to think that powers made the world safer. He'd been proven wrong fifteen thousand and one times, since then.
On the fourth day, he saved the world. He used the damnable weapon, a relic from Apokolips, and he took away the world's powers. Most of them, anyway. The fighting stopped in that instant. The heroes felt some fraction of the pain that they had put the city of Metropolis through in the last three days.
Not counting the heroes who died, the death toll was eventually pronounced to be nineteen thousand, nine hundred and twenty-three.
Dick knew that he'd betrayed everyone, but they'd left him no choice. It had been clear that they would keep going until the whole city was gone, and they might not even have stopped then. That was why he kept working at it, despite the hatred he faced from those who had helped raise him, grown up with him, learned from him. He needed the world to be a better place for his child, his son. He needed it like a drowning man needed solid land, like the whole world would collapse beneath him in a matter of heartbeats if he ever stopped. Maybe it would, if anything ever happened to his son.
He never mourned for the loss of those friends and family, he couldn't. If he had, he might have begun to doubt, to regret what he'd done. Instead, he mourned for the nineteen thousand, nine hundred and twenty-three people who had died in Metropolis, seven thousand, six hundred and fifty-five of whom had been children, like his own son, who had never deserved to be murdered by the ones who were supposed to protect them. He mourned for Bruce. And with that, he persisted. He raised his son, and he kept the world safe. And it was enough for him. He ignored the space in his past, his head, his heart, where Kori had been. Where all the heroes had been. He forced the emptiness and regret away, because he couldn't afford to keep them. He couldn't afford to see the pain in Wally's eyes, he couldn't afford to recognize what he had done to the world from the view of those from whom he had taken.
In the end, it was the hardest thing he'd ever done, and it would later prove to be his greatest mistake. But with the world of supers against his son, the choice had been easy. As easy as it could have been, anyway. And for twelve years, he accepted what he had done and that was the end of it. He wasn't at peace with himself, for all his pretending, but he was as close as he could ever be. And then, in 2040, everything changed.
He spent the rest of his life trying to redeem himself for what he had done, in his single moment of infinite weakness and strength, for a son who he'd nearly lost to the very beast he'd created to protect Jake from the brokenness of it all. In the end, it wasn't the world that was broken. It was Dick Grayson who was broken. And he stayed that way, unable to mend, pretending for all, for himself, until what had been done could be undone and the world- Dick Grayson- could begin to heal.